The Higher Education Bubble: It's About to Burst - <AUTHOR> http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2010/06/higher-education-bubble-its-about-to.html

<comment><USER2> Because higher education is so very strongly tied to government funding, much more so than housing, I think the end of the higher education bubble (the existence of which I do recognize) will look very different from the end of the housing bubble. We're not talking about a salable asset, here: I can't sell you my degree, after all.

So we can generally agree _that_ the higher ed bubble will burst, but I don't see exactly _how_ , or what repercussions that will have.

<comment><USER3> > I can't sell you my degree, after all.

There is an interesting option. The degree should come with some option to force the university to buy it back at a discount. Say a person couldn't find that promised job after they got their degree, so they can force the university to buy back his diploma for 80% of the price he go it for.

All that student's course credits would be expunged. If they claim they have a degree from that university from then on, they would be charged with fraud.

I wonder how many people would sell back the diploma in return for the money back.

<comment><USER4> >Say a person couldn't find that promised job after they got their degree,

I attended a state school. I just checked the website and found no promises of a job. In fact the only pages that include the word "career" are the career services which is a free service to help students and recent graduates find work. I checked a few other area schools and they make no such promises either. Hardly a comprehensive poll but,

Where did you get the idea that colleges ever promised jobs after earning a degree?

<comment><USER3> Their advertisement. It's an implicit promise.

Yes, some people go because they want to expand their horizons, learn more about the world, network, make friends. However most people go to be able to eventually get a job.

<comment><USER5> Exactly, which is very interesting. The number of schools that call themselves "Liberal Arts" schools is fascinating, especially considering that their focus is very opposite in that it is very much vocation/job preparation related, rather than liberal. The goals of liberal arts education is to create "free" people - educating people to become more introspective and understand the complexities of the world we live in, understand their role and responsibilities in society, and have clear understanding of ethics and morality in everything.

I attended a supposed liberal arts school and was NEVER informed of such goals or anything in the proximity. In addition, never did I feel that my schooling was geared towards or assisted in much of that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The thing he is missing is that the tuition bubble (as he should more accurately call it) was directly caused by the housing bubble. Need to pay $200K for your kid's tuition to an ivy league? Take a second mortgage on your house. Universities were only able to charge these outrageous prices because people were willing to pay it. Now that nobody has equity in their homes any more you can expect it to change.

There are economic rules about supply and demand that come into play here. The supply of available seats in an ivy league are limited, and when credit or money is virtually unlimited, the pricing gets ridiculous.

We can expect this to adjust itself in the next few years provided not enough people are willing or able to pay these outrageous tuitions.

<comment><USER7> Look at that second chart more closely; the education cost bubble started about a dozen years earlier than the housing bubble. And home equity wasn't and isn't the only source of funding, especially for the less wealthy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> How this post gets written without mentioning federal student loans and grants, I have no idea. It's not a coincidence that every tuition inflation graph you see starts around 1980.

<comment><USER9> I wonder if the US Gov funding model changed to one where the universities were given money to one where the students were given/loaned money to give to the university of their choice. The difference could be compared to inner-city school choice voucher programs.

<comment><USER8> You can certainly look at it that way, if you choose to. The thing is, this is a Pandora's Box situation. The noble goal of using federal grants/loans to make higher education more accessible results in institutions being able to charge more for it. Same number of schools (supply) + more potential students (demand) with more money in their pockets (ability to pay) = higher prices; if each student is charged more money, they need more federal aid to make up the difference. This goes on in a circle, up and up and up. But closing the box now would be too politically unpalatable for any politician to try it. The solution, if there is one, must be highly creative.

<comment><USER9> I agree and should have been much less implicit in my argument. Perhaps state universities once (< 80's) charged very little because they (1) got lots of money from the government with the mandate of providing affordable education and (2) students didn't have access to grants/loans to pay more anyway.

Now, the "price" is higher (which is used to create the graphs in the linked article), but the effective cost for the student hasn't increased quite as proportionally because he has a government voucher to use.

Greatly oversimplified, I know. We understand what someone means when he talks about the average price of a gallon of gas at a gas station, but we don't have a common definition for the "price" of education. Out of pocket not counting grants/scholarships? Do we discount the cost if the loans are at a below- market rate because of government guarantees?

Heck, even the gallon of gas "price" is hard to define. Marathon gives me back 5% on gas purchased with my Marathon card. What's my average price per gallon?

<comment><USER8> Word to all that.

Come to think of it, I've never personally seen a graph of tuition inflation with out-of-pocket payment, private loan payment, and federal aid payment all on top of each other, mapped over time. THAT would be a telling graph.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I fully agree that the cost of higher education is a little out of control, but it seems to me that you have to look at its historical value as well as its current value in order to determine whether there is a bubble. It seems to me that university educations were highly under-valued in the past, and so part of the price pressure is just coming from the realization that a university education is much more valuable than what it used to cost (and K-12 is even more valuable than that, but thankfully it's publicly supported).

There is also little reason to think that higher education should be bound to CPI in any linear way - there are lots of other quasi-economic influences that are perfectly valid, although greed does seem to play its part.

<comment><USER11> There's two ways to look at the issue. One is the question of value generated by the degree. If the degree adds a million dollars to your total income, it is natural for the education industry to try to capture more of that value. By that metric it all looks peachy.

In a free market, the relevant metric is something more like at how low a price you can bring the service vs. your competitors. It beggars the imagination to believe that the current price charged is the actual minimum price for the services that people are actually looking for. The question of the intangibles of the college experience is incidental, first because even those intangibles can almost certainly be had for much cheaper, and secondly because it isn't necessarily the case that people want them, regardless of how much you want people to want the same intangibles you do. In addition to the fact the intangibles could probably be had for cheaper, we have this Internet thing slowly but very, very surely eroding away the physical constraints of the old system.

They've been really shielded from the free market by easy subsidies and loans and the fact that the unaccredited competition was neither socially accepted nor able to be quite cheap enough to break through, but all of these things are suddenly changing. The costs to a startup or something of providing a college-quality education continues to drop, and the business scales fairly well. We're getting over the idea that college = good with the increasing evidence that it's not true, which will continue to open the door to non- traditional-college alternatives, some of which will begin to exceed their college breathren. The subsidies are likely to become harder to get and increasingly scary, as word of things like the non-dischargability of student debt in bankruptcy are increasingly well known. Every pillar propping up the current system is collapsing over the next few years at once.

As the college education market gets forcibly introduced to the free market, I expect the blood of the incumbents to flow freely. Like all bubble pops I can't predict exactly when it'll happen ("the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent"), but I'm pretty confident about the outcome, based on the fundamentals.

(How confident? I am not planning my finances for my kids on the assumption that college is going to cost them each $50,000/yr in 2010 dollars. I computed it once and at current rates of tuition growth that's a reasonable projection for a 2-year-old and a not-yet-born. It's just physically impossible for a college-equivalent education to cost that much. So you might say I'm betting quite a lot on this analysis.)

<comment><USER10> I remember reading a number of years ago about how much it costs CalTech to educate one of its graduates, and it was something on the order of $300k/year. Granted, engineering and particularly of the intensity and small scale of CalTech makes for expensive students, but it's not true that tuition fees at many of these schools are wildly disproportionate to the amount they spend offering what they offer. Sure, many/most universities are heavy on luxury and have spending priorities that are not well-aligned to pure education, but the fact is they do offer something that cannot be had for less money - they rely on many many funding sources besides tuition in order to break even.

Here's an article about Florida universities - the costs are much more reasonable, at about $40k per graduate (all four years), but it's using 2005-ish figures, and that's an average, with degrees ranging from ~$21k to $250k+.

<http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/05/19/degree>

Of course, we're talking about a lot of 'intangibles' of the experience that are not directly related to the 'education', but for many/most applicants, the experience is a huge part of the decision about which school to go to, and so I feel it's reasonable to factor that in as a cost/expense that is not going away any time soon.

I fully agree that the free market and particularly alternatives to university will be a great influence over the next few decades - it will be a great advance once more people realize that a university education is not the best life decision.

<comment><USER11> "I remember reading a number of years ago about how much it costs CalTech to educate one of its graduates, and it was something on the order of $300k/year."

But that's not the question. With all due respect, it's not even all that interesting. If they had a million dollars to spend per student, by golly, they'd spend a million dollars.

The question is, how much _would_ it cost in a competitive market? And given that engineers are the minority, how much _should_ an English degree cost in a competitive market?

How much can you save by not even being on campus? By not using professors, which rhetoric aside you simply do not need for most courses? (I'd much rather see more professors doing more research and teaching grad-level courses.) How many teachers do you even need? Why are we paying people to do the moral equivalent of going to the front of the class and reading their notes? (With varying degrees of literalness.) And then paying them again to do it next year? And then paying hordes of such people to deliver the same classes to hundreds of institutions? To put it in HN terms, just how disruptive could you get while delivering the same basic product, or possibly even a better one?

"and so I feel it's reasonable to factor that in as a cost/expense that is not going away any time soon."

People say this a lot. I think people are culturally conditioned to say it. God forbid we radically rethink anything about education. But I think that you gave someone a choice of spending 20K/semester and living on campus, or spending 2K/semester and living where they chose and getting a degree just as good in the vast majority of ways, that not only would quite a lot of people made that choice ten years ago, but in the coming years, when money is going to be a lot tighter for the middle class, the 20K option is likely to just collapse. Just about the only thing holding it up right now is a whole lot of people like you who aren't willing to concede the possibility that quite a lot of the accouterments of college as we now know it are incidental to the the actual product.

Don't think with your standard cultural conditioning; think like a disruptive startup founder. The fundamentals of this industry are all wrong and it's going to burn. For better and for worse; disruptions are rarely all for the better. I'm not saying I celebrate every aspect of the change, but the fact that I think it's a mixed bag isn't going to change the absolute economic inevitability of the changes ahead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's surprising that a professor of economics would state that the "The college tuition bubble makes the housing price bubble seem pretty lame by comparison". If you're looking at the numbers alone yes the graph looks pretty scary. There are explanations outside of a speculative bubble for why a degree has gone up in value so quickly. Over the time of his graph the percentage of those seeking degrees has doubled (15%-30%), while home ownership has remained relatively flat (62%-68%). Prior to 1978 a good union job meant you were solidly middle class, in the 80s that changed you had to get a degree to be middle class. In the 90s it accelerates again as even non-union manufacturing jobs were shipped overseas (and foreign students shipped in).

The housing bubble was entirely speculative. It was stoked by the fed keeping rates low, later fear took over as people didn't want to be either 'priced out forever' or miss out on easy money.

As others have mentioned it's apples and oranges, you can not sell nor live in a degree; defaulting on your student loan will not render you homeless. The bubble and collapse in house prices is far more signigicant to the larger economy. The housing market is measured in trillions, student loans in billions.

Don't get me wrong tuition is way overpriced for what you get. A drop in tuition and house prices would do everyone good.

</comment><comment><USER13> There is no bubble. The return on investment for a college education may be less than what it once was, but the net present value of a bachelor's degree is still positive. That's an economic argument predicated on the proposition that an education's function is solely to develop human capital, thereby increasing productive capacity of the person and enabling that person to earn more for their services relative to what they would have earned without a degree.

This, of course, ignores another significant component of economic behavior regarding education. Specifically, in addition to it's vocational value, education is a service purchased to meet the human need for self- actualization. When you see a human-interest article in the local news about a 70 year old grandmother who has just completed her bachelor's degree, you are seeing evidence of economic demand for education that has no vocational basis.

I am not saying that the existing trend of the cost of tuition outpacing CPI can continue indefinitely. Clearly it can't. However, it is a mistake to label the present circumstance as a bubble.

<comment><USER14> You mention that the net value of a bachelor degree is positive. I'm writing this on my phone so I don't have access to any numbers but I wonder what the spread (statistical dispersion) is. More specifically, it would be interesting to know whether a large proportion of graduates enjoy some net positive gains due to their degree or only a small minority enjoys out of proportion gains while the rest is losing somewhat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> [http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/Sunday_Ref...](http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/Sunday_Reflections/Higher- education_s-bubble-is-about-to-burst-95639354.html)

Great non-linkable comment on the Examiner article discussed: "if you want a degree - go to the University. If you want an education - go to the library"

<comment><USER16> So odd. Even when I found the permalink to that comment ( [http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/Sunday_Ref...](http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/Sunday_Reflections/Higher- education_s-bubble-is-about-to-burst-95639354.html#comment-55003614) ) it still didn't take me (in Chrome dev build, at least) directly to the comment.

<comment><USER17> Technical explanation: The Disqus comments don't load until a second or two after the permalink's anchor jump (#comment-55003614) is attempted by the browser. So when the browser tries to jump to the comment, the comment isn't there yet.

<comment><USER16> It's an unfortunate side-effect. I wonder if Disqus could circumvent this by using a hashchange-type trick (referencing Ben Alman's BBQ jQuery addon).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "besides, for a generation, the value of what they're buying has gone up steadily." From a purely financial perspective, has the value of higher education ever risen as fast as its costs?

<comment><USER7> Not as I recall; the really big gains where in the post-WWII GI Bill era, which began the really big shift on the supply side. I think by sometime in the '70s or '80s a substantial degree of saturation was reached ... and of course the '80s is when the costs suddenly detached from the rest of the economy (of course, you should check this against a more reliable inflation metric than what the necessarily biased US government puts out).

One would also want to look at when the 4 year college bachelor's degree replaced a high school degree. _Why Johnny Can't Read_ was published in 1955; not too many years/decades after that it was widely recognized that a high school degree no longer signaled much of anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> As a foreigner who never had to pay for his education (provided for free by the government), I find it disheartening to see that no one (even here) brings up the issue that everyone should have access to education. Some kid whose only fault was to be born in a poor family should have access to the same opportunities as another one born in a richer family. This is destroying the fabric of society if you ask me: poor people don't get educated and are getting poorer. Maybe you'll call my point of view 'socialist', who cares. It just makes me sad that everyone takes the fact that college tuitions cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for granted.

<comment><USER7> That's not really how it works. The more poor, the more financial aid is available. And one of the things we're implicitly calling into question is how many people need or even can benefit from a $200K college degree.

If you're just getting the new replacement for a high school degree, say the generic business degree, you can go to lower tier state colleges for quite reasonable sums of money.

<comment><USER19> "The more poor, the more financial aid is available". Why isn't everyone able to go to an ivy league school then? Your statement implies that by being poor, you get lots of free money, which is basically saying there's nothing below the middle class. I think _that_ is not how it works.

Also, what if you don't want just "the new replacement for a high school degree"? My point exactly: why should you have to shoot for a lower degree because you're poor?

<comment><USER16> Hga is right about the vast sums of financial aid being given to those with low family income by top schools. Everyone isn't going to an Ivy league school because (1) clearly there aren't enough spaces, and (2) everyone isn't admitted. We could discuss the structural features that contribute to 1 and 2 (mostly 2). But where I think we should be able to find agreement is that those who are admitted are cared for quite well. You might be surprised at how many of them did indeed qualify for, and receive, need-based aid.

<comment><USER19> I don't doubt a lot of money goes into allowing some people into ivy league schools. But why should that counterbalance the fact that if you're born poor then chances are you won't go to college, especially a good one? In the end, some especially gifted, smart or hard-working kids will make it, sure. But they'll be competing for the same financial aid. Why should those have to work any harder than the rest?

<comment><USER16> They're competing for the same financial aid, which is based on need. Admissions aren't tied to need, but aid is. Therefore, if you ignore the structural forces making it difficult for poor people in general, they get a big bonus:

(1) Ability to pay is ignored during admissions...

(2) ... but ability to pay totally determines what you'll be asked to pay.

For those who get admitted and are poor, it's an extraordinarily good deal. I'm still not seeing where (or if) we're disagreeing.

<comment><USER20> It's true that college admissions in the USA are extremely generous, but this is only to make up for the wild variations in the quality of primary and secondary education. Depending on your choice of parents (and where they live), you could be doing AP calculus with your own laptop, or not be able to read your high school diploma.

In many European countries, there is an aggressive policy of equalizing all education opportunity, from kindergarten to the Ph.D. level.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Let student loans be dischargeable in bankruptcy and watch prices "adjust".

What other asset-backed-security is tied to someone's life until they die or become physically incapacitated?

<comment><USER7> The problem here is that these are _not_ asset backed, at least in the collateral sense. A house can be foreclosed on, a car repossessed. You can't take away the education someone's gained, although I suppose you could force schools' registrars to not confirm the granting of a degree, but that could still be proven in a variety of ways.

The concern is that too many would immediately declare bankruptcy after finishing their education, wait out the 7? years it takes to for that to fall off their credit report and then get on with their lives. Since few new graduates need serious credit for anything beyond cars....

<comment><USER21> The loan is the asset, both in cases of student loans and mortgages.

<comment><USER7> Are you talking about derivative securities built on top of loans?

<comment><USER21> A pool of loans.

[https://www.salliemae.com/about/investors/debtasset/slmsltru...](https://www.salliemae.com/about/investors/debtasset/slmsltrusts/)

<comment><USER7> Well, I've been talking about the loans themselves, which by definition are not "assets": " _Anything tangible or intangible that is capable of being owned or controlled to produce value and that is held to have positive economic value is considered an asset. Simply stated, assets represent ownership of value that can be converted into cash..._ " (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset>).

Therefore securities built on top of these loans, such as the pools you refer to in your link, are by definition not "asset-backed-securit[ies]". They are instead backed by e.g. the laws and regulations that make them non- dischargeable ... and I contend that's a major reason why they are non- dischargeable.

<comment><USER21> I don't mean to spam you with Sallie Mae links, but clearly you can see the heading of this page...

<https://www.salliemae.com/about/investors/debtasset/>

<comment><USER7> From one of the links: " _... financial characteristics and servicing information related to the underlying student loan assets...._ "

The student loans themselves are assets (the fit the above definition), my point is that they themselves are not asset based like a house or car loan.

Sallie Mae's use of the term "asset" here might be _slightly_ misleading, but being essentially part of the government they can get away with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Comment on story: "Government schools are very expensive and normal people can't bear their expenses. I suggest that government should give some relief to the students" I'm no economist, but isn't that similar to being able to get easy credit? If the government is giving out more federal aid, the schools can keep (or even raise) these high prices. I don't know the solution for this bubble, but just throwing money at it doesn't seem like the solution to me.

<comment><USER21> No, you've identified the problem and its symptoms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think there's a fallacy here. The housing market is not a monopoly, but higher education largely is. Universities do compete with one another for top talent, but as a group they also have a firm grip on the number of degrees granted. Technically this may actually be an oligopoly.

Until there is a viable alternative with the same reputation, how can students win the debate over prices?

<comment><USER24> Are you saying the 1000's of universities in the US, not to mention the 10's of thousands worldwide, are successfully colluding to drive up prices? That's a hard position to maintain. Universities _do_ compete on price heavily, even if it's in the form of grants.

<comment><USER7> A large group of top-tier universities and colleges _were_ caught colluding on financial aid packages. Their thesis was they didn't want the cost to the student and his family to bias the decision of which to accept, but one can also surmise that eliminating financial competition had additional motives.

<comment><USER25> Are you implying that need-blind admissions allows universities to increase tuition? The only two ways I could see raising tuitions as justified because of this is:

1\. It costs more to provide grants to poorer students. 2\. More competition (demand) and fixed supply increases the price of the good.

I'm unqualified to talk on the first point, and it seems kind of a stretch.

On the second point, I don't see how having more poor students lets you earn more. I suppose one possibility is that the government subsidy plays a huge role and the university is trying to tap into those funds. If not, I don't see how the increased demand would drive the price up. If you're admitting richer kids, they'd have the money to fork over anyway.

But I could just be missing something.

<comment><USER7> Well, here's just one example: not getting into financial aid bidding wars for particularly desirable students.

I'm not particularly interested in their justifications, more their real reasons. The biggest one for raising tuition per se is that it's entirely unrestricted money, they can spend it any way they want. The Federal government is pretty strict about where research overhead goes, and pesky alumni don't trust schools to do the right thing and restrict a lot of their donations (see this for why their concerns are entirely reasonable: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodrow_Wilson_School_of_Public...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodrow_Wilson_School_of_Public_and_International_Affairs#Robertson_Lawsuit))

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> What is college, really? It's some combination of access to three things: information, feedback, and certification.

The internet totally took care of the information problem. It's no longer the role of a university to provide access, but to create new knowledge through research.

The internet helps take care of the feedback problem, and I think web-apps will keep coming that match people with each other to give feedback on their efforts. So colleges are in danger there.

The internet can also take care of the certification problem, because the value of the certificate (diploma) is pretty much completely tied to the brand value of the certificate-giver. I can see an online university establishing a name for themselves in the future.

Colleges should focus on things that the internet can't do, like providing spaces for people to meet up and learn together.

<comment><USER27> Regarding information, not quite. One of the few things I really missed immediately upon graduation was access to expensive databases like LexisNexis, JSTOR, ACM Digital Library. You'll be at a great disadvantage trying to conduct real research without such access.

I sometimes must ask a friend still in academia to download a PDF of some slightly older CS paper for me.

I also miss the wonderful university libraries. The public libraries are not nearly as good especially for more specialized matters.

<comment><USER26> Definitely true - I didn't think about access to proprietary databases or the excellent libraries.

I wonder if universities will have to go even deeper than they currently are to compete with the internet, or if the proprietary databases and large libraries will inevitably be made irrelevant by the internet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I totally agree and wrote a similar piece a few months ago, calling it "Wallowing in Education", <http://www.melonakos.com/2010/07/25/wallowing_in_education/>

</comment><comment><USER29> I feel this tuition bubble is one of the primary drivers behind the healthcare mess. The still exploding cost of healthcare is so driven by the very high cost of healthcare services (office visits in the US are typically 5 to 10 times more expensive than in Europe for instance). Regardless of the role of insurance, this cost has two primary drivers: providers malpractice insurance and highly indebted doctors, nurses and other healthcare personnel who require salaries that are out of this world to stay afloat because of their student loans.

</comment><comment><USER21> Housing bubble was caused by mortgages, not houses.

Higher Ed bubble is caused by student loans, not degrees.

So this whole argument about "you can't sell your degree" is BS.

These educational loans are pooled together and sold as asset backed securities.

So, yes, if you have student loans, your degree can be sold, but probably not by you.

</comment><comment><USER30> You can't sell your degree, so the price won't crash like it would after a normal bubble. But I expect we'll see an accelerating decline the number of people starting college over the next 10-20 years, during which time the price may drop on real terms and some schools will probably have to close.

</comment><comment><USER31> If you want in-depth analysis of why this is a completely mad bubble (hopefully with an imminent prick coming from the legislature or government rolling back the lobby-led liberalisation of the Bush years) you could do far worse than a fantastic hedge fund analyst's view; here's the summary [http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-05-27/eisman-of-big- sh...](http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-05-27/eisman-of-big-short-says- sell-education-stocks-update2-.html) and here's the SUPERB presentation (on scribd) about the reasoning behind shorting certain for-profit ed stocks: [http://www.marketfolly.com/2010/06/response-to-steve- eismans...](http://www.marketfolly.com/2010/06/response-to-steve-eismans- short-thesis.html)

</comment><comment><USER32> I agree this is a bubble, and is likely headed for a crash. It's hard not to be worried about what may happen then. In the best case, higher ed. would largely be replaced by something cheaper, but maybe just as effective. In the worst case it would herald the end of the middle class, as a generation gave up on the idea of maintaining the lifestyle their parents had. Only the rich (and a lucky few talented or favored poorer students) would be able to afford college.

Depending on the prevailing political situation, there might be government intervention to shore up the availability of higher ed., or not. Depends whether the Dems or Repubs are in charge when it blows.</comment>


How I hacked my home - <AUTHOR> https://securelist.com/analysis/publications/66207/iot-how-i-hacked-my-home/

<comment><USER2> Note that these seem to be all _local_ attacks - on a home network these devices will almost certainly all be behind a NAT, so they would not be remotely exploitable. A remote exploit i.e. over the Internet is far more worrying; these are not quite as bad in comparison.

 _Both compromised devices where running a Linux 2.6.x kernel, and a lot of interpreters such as perl and python. One of them also had the GNU C compiler installed, which would make the attackers ' life much easier._

This is probably a side-effect of cheap Linux systems becoming available, and the general attitude of laziness and waste here really annoys me - having to download a firmware update that's tens or even hundreds of MB for a device whose featureset doesn't need even one tenth that amount of code to accomplish is absolutely insane. I miss the days when devices had just enough computing resources to do what they needed to, didn't need any updates because the firmware was pretty much perfect, and as a result were less likely to contain exploits. Now it seems "take an ARM devboard, connect something to the GPIO and ship the whole mess complete with the bloated Linux distro it came with" is the norm. I certainly won't be replacing the devices in my home with anything "smart" anytime soon.

<comment><USER3> They are not all local attacks. The TV MITM attack can be launched remotely. If he can find a flaw in the content rendering code, then that's a remote attack.

Also, his NAT router itself is a security time bomb, via its remote update mechanism. I would never run an ISP router in router mode; that's such an obviously bad idea from a security standpoint.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "At this point I asked myself, 'is it really that easy?' I then thought about the two newly discovered vulnerabilities and realized both were in the administrative interface after authenticating as the administrative user. I needed to have the same preconditions as the attacker. So I tried to find vulnerabilities without using any of my access credentials."</comment>


How democracy died in Hungary - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/9/13/17823488/hungary-democracy-authoritarianism-trump <comment><USER2> Why is this on HN?

<comment><USER3> Out of interest, you submitted[0]:

        Climate change denial among
        conservative Norwegian men

Why did you feel that was appropriate for HN?

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17817078](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17817078)</comment></comment>


N165, the rock Curiosity is analyzing on Mars, has its own Twitter account - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/N165Mars <comment><USER2> This is strangely adorable. I'm looking forward to seeing how it reacts when its new robotic friend tickles it with an intense laser pulse in order to observe the emission spectra of the elements inside it.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser- induced_breakdown_spectro...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser- induced_breakdown_spectroscopy)</comment>


What's the best motivational quote that you have seen? - <AUTHOR> After a unsuccessful interview on google a friend told me this quote.<p>"Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm"
-Churchill<p>It help me a lot, so I was wondering if you had another similar that can inspire people. <comment><USER2> one i like is... "to begin, begin" it is not inspirational, haha, but helps me to start something, so is a kind of motivation, right?</comment>


Plundervolt: Software-Based Fault Injection Attacks Against Intel SGX [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://regmedia.co.uk/2019/12/10/plundervolt_paper.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> This seems to be the original paper that a lot of news reports are based on. I found it at:

* [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/12/10/intel_sgx_youve_bee...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/12/10/intel_sgx_youve_been_plunderstruck/)

See also today's announced vulnerabilities:

* [https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/security-center/defa...](https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/security-center/default.html)

"Plundervolt" is under CVE-2019-11157 and INTEL-SA-00289:

* [https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/security-center/advi...](https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/security-center/advisory/intel-sa-00289.html)</comment>


Steam Linux Usage Comes in at 0.59% for August - <AUTHOR> https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Steam-August-2018-Survey-Result <comment><USER2> If more big titles were there.. e.g. Fallout, it would have exploded over 3%</comment>


GE develops ultra-thin, almost-silent cooler for next-gen laptops and tablets - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/computing/143102-ge-develops-ultra-thin-almost-silent-cooler-for-next-gen-laptops-and-tablets

<comment><USER2> Looks cool, but how does it differ from this - <http://www.murata.com/products/micromechatronics/index.html> ?

<comment><USER3> The inlet and outlet direction, and it's size. The GE ones are roughly 6cm x 6 cm. These murata ones are 2cm by 2cm.

[http://www.digikey.ca/product- search/en?FV=fff40012,fff80051...](http://www.digikey.ca/product- search/en?FV=fff40012,fff80051,fffc01ea&chp=0)

Damn, I think I found myself a christmas present. Pity it's so small though. I'll have to look at some numbers and see if it's good enough to cool a desktop's cpu heat sink.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I assume though that this doesn't help with the issue of exchanging the air inside the chassis. For that you still would need fans, else these new component coolers would just suck back in the hot air they expelled.

<comment><USER5> Maybe they need to install multiple coolers in a sequence to the entry of the exhaust and intake? So its like you have a guided air flow with these coolers as boosters to push air in 4 possible directions to the exhaust port.

Manufacturers will probably have to make sure the chassis of the gadget is air tight to increase efficiency.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm (still) hoping that next-gen laptops and tablets won't need any fans (or "almost silent" coolers). My tablet is already completely fanless and quiet, and so is my Dell Mini 9 ...

<comment><USER7> Exactly. We already have silent and fanless tablets so I'm not sure why GE would be so troubled to get "almost silent" coolers.

How can the Dell Mini 9 be fanless, though? I don't think any Atom processor besides the smartphone-only Medfield is fanless. My old EeePC is also quite noisy when loading stuff, and it gets quite hot, too.

<comment><USER8> Some of us want the highest performance CPU and GPU possible in our laptop, but that requires a fan, but a silent fan would be a real value add over the current ones. Personally I'm happy to hear this, hope it makes it way into production laptops soon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder how the vibration will work out. I'm sure they have it figured out on new installations, but what happens after a crumb or dust bunny gets wedged up against one side of this thing; or after it gets a bit off-balance.

</comment><comment><USER10> Does this still work when it has a few pieces of dust stuck inside? They take up space and make noise, but fans seem like they'd be a lot safer unless you're filtering air on the way in.

</comment><comment><USER11> Thank you GE, wait for the Chinese version to come out, who knows they would be already shipping them on mainstream products.</comment>


Can Desktop Linux Stay Relevant in the Era of Cloud and Mobile? - <AUTHOR> http://servicesangle.com/blog/2011/11/23/as-ubuntu-declines-can-desktop-linux-stay-relevant-in-the-era-of-cloud-and-mobile/

<comment><USER2> I don't think desktop Linux was ever relevant outside a small software- development centered ecosystem.

Now... Mint being the most popular Linux with more share than all others combined? Fedora overtaking Ubuntu? I wonder where their data comes from.

<comment><USER3> As someone's who has exclusively used Linux since early 2000s, I never saw the aspiration for Linux to ascend to mainstream popularity on the desktop as something I favoured. I wanted feature parity - browsers, plugins, sdks etc. - and for several years these have all been released near simultaneously. The 'mainstream' ambition required stripping out the fragmentation/customization which has always been one of the biggest draws for me. Unity is the eventual conclusion of this goal - the pursuit of generic, supportable 'usability'.

As for the premise of the article, the massive skew in Distrowatch's stats are deeply misleading. It's not downloads or active installs, it's hits to an informational page. DW is #3 on Google for 'Linux Mint' so it's a barometer of general interest, but the only conclusion you can draw is 'the negative reception of Unity as default was capitalized on by Mint to drive interest'.

Not to say it won't result in an upswing in Mint installs (I was considering it myself until I discovered the baked-in search engine capture), but DW stats make Alexa look like a paragon of accurate reporting.

<comment><AUTHOR> "The negative reception of Unity as default was capitalized on by Mint to drive interest."

That's a good hypothesis, though in that case I would assume the surge in interest in Mint would be accompanied by at least steady interest in Ubuntu instead of a drop. Also, the interest in Mint has been rising for quite some time and interest in Ubuntu has been decreasing steadily. This could just be that by now everyone who's interested in Linux knows all they want to know about Ubuntu, but interest in alternatives is starting to increase.

My premise has less to do with the particulars of the exact numbers of Ubuntu vs. Mint users, and more to do with the fact that there's not really a go-to distro for new users anymore. Ubuntu, Mint and Peppermint are all contenders for this role, and openSUSE and Fedora are still options as well. I think this lends to an uncertainty about which to choose and which will have continued support. The problem is compounded by the fact that a lot of applications are being accessed from browsers and/or mobile devices, so that even as Ubuntu could be gaining power users its pushing power users away in an attempt to gain mainstream users that they may never get.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Any chance Linux had in overtaking Windows on the Desktop was ended by Apple.

UI on mobile is even more difficult to get right than on the desktop. This is where Linux has always struggled. Even Ubuntu (Linux's best attempt to date) is several years behind everyone else.

I love that they're putting forth a serious effort but I don't see it making a meaningful dent.

<comment><USER5> Does Android count as Linux?

<comment><USER6> Android isn't a desktop os.

<comment><USER7> The OP referenced 'UI on mobile'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Yes it is still relevant.

The only thing stopping my non-programmer flatmates from using Ubuntu is _only_ MS Office.

They are envious of the interface and the ease at which I get all sorts of packages without worrying about malware.

<comment><USER9> Star Office is awfully good.

Office productivity isn't the only issue. The issue is they already have Windows, and Office on their computer so there is no real advantage after switching to a free alternative, and there are some REALLY HUGE disadvantages like having to edit bash scripts to manage your computer.

Linux desktop failed. The sooner the Linux community gets over it and starts to focus on cloud stuff (virtualization, management) the better.

<comment><USER10> The best brains in *nux should be focusing on the next generation FOSS/GNU tools to 'power the web'. If desktop OS itself is at risk of extinction , this is one fight which the Linux community has taken on for too far and too long.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The DistroWatch numbers don't measure installs, active users or downloads. They only measure hits to informational pages about each distribution on DistroWatch. So anyone quoting them and calling them trends of actual Linux usage, doesn't know what they're talking about. It's like quoting the W3schools browser numbers and saying the represent actual browser share (they, too, only measure visitors to their website).

</comment><comment><USER12> Well on one hand linux is free apart from support and the cloud would offset this support for a fee on usage. I think desktop linux will still stay prevalent for high-end computing. For example the London Stock exchange runs on linux starting from this year. Research projects in universities and institutions prefer linux over other OS's.

</comment><comment><USER13> I think they've got it backward. 'Cloud computing' makes all desktop OS irrelevant. Which means it's easier than ever for me, working in a Debian ecosystem with Fluxbox/Emacs/Firefox as my main apps, to collaborate with peers using OSX or Windows, without them knowing or caring.

Besides which, whether Ubuntu is the top Linux distro is completely orthogonal to the capacity of Linux in general to serve as a desktop.

</comment><comment><USER14> ""It's disappointing when an old friend releases such a terrible interface," Lucas Charles, a linguistics major at Portland State University who has been using Ubuntu since 2001, told me. "It's not inherently bad, just buggy.""

Considering Ubuntu had its first release in 2004, this article should probably be taken with a grain of salt.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for pointing that out, I meant to write Linux, not Ubuntu. I've corrected it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The entire "desktop computing" paradigm is coming to an end. Overlapping windows, buttons, icons, cascading menus... it's over. We're entering the next phase of computing, touchscreen, voice, hand gestures, AI.

No, Linux desktop is no longer relevant.

<comment><USER7> I take it you don't work in an office of any kind. Do you really think all office workers are going to switch to tablets for the daily grind?

<comment><USER9> I'm betting my startup idea on it.</comment></comment></comment>


How to Cold Call: A Guide for Founders - <AUTHOR> https://www.starterstory.com/blog/how-to-cold-call-a-guide-for-founders <comment><USER2> I thought this was useful, so I'll subscribe for a while.</comment>


Alpine Linux 3.6.0 Released - <AUTHOR> https://alpinelinux.org/posts/Alpine-3.6.0-released.html <comment><AUTHOR> NEW FEATURES AND NOTEWORTHY NEW PACKAGES

* Support for 64-bit little-endian POWER machines (ppc64le)

* Support for 64-bit IBM z Systems (s390x)

* Rust 1.17.0 and Cargo 0.18.0

* GHC 8.0.2

* Julia 0.5.2

SIGNIFICANT UPDATES

* GCC 6.3

* LLVM 4.0

* PHP 7.1

* Go 1.8

* Python 3.6

* LuaJIT 2.1beta3

* nginx 1.12

* Ruby 2.4

NOTEWORTHY CHANGES

* The llvm package has been changed to be provided by a versioned llvm<X> package, which is presently llvm4;

* The -grsec kernel-related packages have been renamed to -hardened;

DEVELOPMENT-RELATED CHANGES

* MD5 and SHA-1 hashes have been removed from APKBUILDs, being obsoleted by SHA-512;

* set -e is now implied in APKBUILDs, automatically failing the build upon unhandled failing commands;

* A check() function has been added to APKBUILDs that allows packages to run test suites after build(), ensuring no regressions have occurred. This has been implemented for a number of packages, and policy onward will be to have them either be present or explicitly opted-out of with good reasoning;</comment>


DNI Clapper: We can't stop another Snowden - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/23/spy-chief-we-can-t-stop-another-snowden.html

<comment><USER2> This really shouldn't be a surprise ... the attack surface is too large, there are too many privileged people, not enough silos and ... it's the government. If they were more careful to get their money's worth, they'd find that they had to develop more stringent specifications, which would also lead to a more careful analysis of the problem.

</comment><comment><USER3> When you hack all day, train people to hack all day, hire companies like Booz who admitted they didn't check out their employees and reward them with billions more in work - yea your not going to stop anything. I just hope more people do it.</comment>


Stroke - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/some-days-change-everything/3f1ac119ec7e

<comment><USER2> Something very similar happened to me a couple of months ago. My hands started shaking all day, my heart was beating really strong (so strong I could hear it). After wasting tons of money by visiting multiple doctors, the diagnosis always came back the same: anxiety.

I never understood what anxiety was exactly until it happened to me. It's definitely an easy trap to fall into if you're a sedentary, overworked programmer. Taking walks in the middle of the day really helped me a lot. Also taking a step back and looking at what you're putting yourself through puts things into a good perspective, and the symptoms tend to naturally fade away after that.

<comment><AUTHOR> The worst thing is never knowing if it is anxiety or something else. Over time you can just assume it is anxiety...but the problem is what if _this time_ it's different. Seems the noise of anxiety could cause you to ignore what could be real symptoms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> > You might be thinking now that I'm full of shit, that I didn't really have a > stroke. The thing is, it felt real to me, as real, as they say, as a heart > attack.

People don't appreciate just how strong panic attacks can be, nor how fierce anxiety disorders are.

Luckily, these disorders usually respond well to CBT and similar talking therapies.

> Anxiety is often caused by too much work, too much pressure. And often, not > enough exercise.

That's not a definition I'd use. That sounds more like stress. To be clear here are the definitions I use (which may not be correct): "pressure" is the good feeling that motivates people, the deadlines and the rush of adrenaline. "Stress" is pressure gone too far, pressure that is uncomfortable. Or stress is caused by lack of control over something. You want to get something done and keep getting interrupted by the phone - that's stress. "Anxiety" is a feeling of uneasiness caused by an event (whether the event actually happened or not; or if it's about a future event whether it could happen or not.) "Did I leave the gas ring on?" "Did I lock my car?" "Are his hands clean?" etc.</comment>


First Bitcoin ASIC, Delivered to Core Bitcoin Developer - <AUTHOR> https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=140099.0

<comment><AUTHOR> Picture of the inside: [http://garzikrants.blogspot.com/2013/01/avalon- modular-room-...](http://garzikrants.blogspot.com/2013/01/avalon-modular-room- to-expand.html?m=1)

I hope this will put a stop to most of the non-believers constantly trolling on bitcointalk.org

<comment><USER2> I prefer the term skeptic, and I think it's quite reasonable to be skeptical of a $1300 device capable of generating $210/day with still no proof. I think the skeptics will be much calmer once he plugs it in and verifies that it does what it says it does.

EDIT: Now confirmed on Jeff's blog: [http://garzikrants.blogspot.com/2013/01/avalon-its- alive.htm...](http://garzikrants.blogspot.com/2013/01/avalon-its-alive.html)

<comment><USER3> _> capable of generating $210/day_

and for a limited amount of time. Bitcoins are a finite resource, once they are all mined, this hardware will be pretty much useless, as far as I understand.

<comment><USER4> No, not worthless because of transaction fees.

Miner reward = Transaction fees + block reward Currently the the former accounts for only 1%. This will likely change in the future (a decade or so). See here <https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_Commons>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What are the specs for someone who doesn't really follow the whole BitCoin thing?

<comment><AUTHOR> 66 GHash/sec. Or about the same as a cluster of 110 AMD Radeon HD 7970 cards!

Right now, 66 GHash/sec generates about $210/day (11 bitcoins/day).

<comment><USER6> If you have a machine that generates $210 a day, why would you sell it for $1,300? Wondering why they wouldn't plug them all in and not start selling any until they've dropped the value of bitcoin below their profit margin...?

<comment><AUTHOR> Very simple: they did NOT have the funds to develop these ASICs by themselves. They HAD to pre-sell them via pre-orders to bootstrap their business.

Avalon is literally the work of 2 chinese guys (ngzhang and yifu). They are not a big company with lots of money.

<comment><USER7> If they had enough to build one, they could bootstrap themselves up from that. (It takes about 6 days for an ASIC to generate enough money to make a new one.)

<comment><USER8> You can't build one ASIC; you have to order a batch of thousands and you have to pay over $100K for the masks weeks before you receive the chips.

<comment><USER9> $100K is nothing for the kinds of profit numbers I'm seeing here.

<comment><AUTHOR> Firstly, their true NRE costs are closer to $200-300k IMHO.

Secondly, $200-300k is not "nothing". I bet they tried to raise investor money, but didn't find any. $210/day/unit is a lot, but Bitcoin still remains relatively a risky investment.

<comment><USER9> If these things can print money, then they're worth $200-300k.

If they can't, then they're not worth $1.k/ea.

<comment><USER8> The problem is that they can print money _if they are released before their competition_ , but we don't know when the competition will ship. (In retrospect we can see that Avalon batch 1 shipped before BFL, but there was no way to know that ahead of time and batch 2 is still unknown.) So I can understand why outside investors would refuse to touch it and why the Avalon developers might have decided to reduce their risk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I hope someone somewhere is documenting all the Bitcoin farming hardware.

The future people would probably like a nice list of things that people are trying. Bitcoin mining (and to a lesser extent Folding@home) are entry level clustering for hobbyists.

<comment><USER11> >I hope someone somewhere is documenting all the Bitcoin farming hardware.

>The future people would probably like a nice list of things that people are trying.

I can imagine future "coin" collectors gathering the ancient application- specific hardware that was used to mine bitcoins. "And here we have a 2013-era bitcoin ASIC...quite quaint really. I'd imagine she might be worth around...600 pounds?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Reports of it going live:

[http://www.thebitcointrader.com/2013/01/the-first-bitcoin- as...](http://www.thebitcointrader.com/2013/01/the-first-bitcoin-asics-are- hashing-away.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> 66 GH/s... damn...

</comment><comment><USER14> but ... does it blend ?</comment>


Why Is Flu Common in Winter? - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324235104578241632319689490.html <comment><USER2> Some believe lower natural production of immune-system-important Vitamin D (through less sun exposure) is a factor, though studies have been mixed:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_D_and_influenza>

(I'd guess higher levels of sunlight might also help sterilize viruses on surfaces and suspended in the air, but have no handy references supporting that theory.)

There's also the unlikely-but-fun fringe theory that fresh flu viruses regularly fall to Earth from space:

<http://www.panspermia.org/panfluenza.htm>

Perhaps either a certain part of Earth's orbit, or colder hemispheric temperatures, mean more falling space flu? :)

</comment><comment><USER3> "Consider wearing a good-fitting mask, with no gaps around the nose or mouth, in public."

This can probably be abstracted. Any activity that makes people not want to hang out with you or be near you will reduce your odds of getting the flu.

<comment><USER4> Worth noting that the porous, "paper", type masks that you sometimes see people wearing (being in Tokyo right now I'm understating their prevalence), are entirely worthless for defending against viruses. They're too small for those masks to be effective.

They're good for blocking particulate matter though, so if you're trying to prevent blood spatter to the mouth, thumbs up.

<comment><USER5> The irony is that they're excellent for preventing aerosol droplets filled with virus from the wearer. Wearing one when infected is therefore responsible.

<comment><USER6> no, staying home and not getting your co-workers sick by bringing your sick to the office is responsible. Coming to work sick, even with a mask, is irresponsible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This isn't a question that already doesn't have an answer. Researchers showed at the Common Cold Centre in London that body temperature has an impact on the likelihood of catching flu. The reasoning is that during the cold, less blood flows to the extremities to maintain core body temperature. This includes less blood flow to the nose.

Flu lives in the nose, and white blood cells are what attacks flu, so having less blood in the nose means less white blood cells which means less chance of killing the virus off before it takes hold.

<comment><USER8> > _This isn't a question that already doesn't have an answer. Researchers > showed at the Common Cold Centre in London that body temperature has an > impact on the likelihood of catching flu._

That research was far from conclusive or scientific.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I always thought it was a simple matter of contagion being partly a function of proximity between people. Since proximity is more common in bad weather, with people staying indoors, the flu spreads more easily in winter.

</comment><comment><USER10> Isn't it just that viruses survive longer at lower temperatures? As per wikipedia:

"Flu viruses can remain infectious for about one week at human body temperature, over 30 days at 0 °C (32 °F), and indefinitely at very low temperatures (such as lakes in northeast Siberia)."

<comment><USER11> That has always been my hypothesis. When you cough in the winter, germs are cooled and conserved on the ground. Then when someone brings in water or snow from their shoes, they are basically bringing in refrigerated puddles of germs.

Someone must have tried to verify this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> So what I've never been able to understand is how it works in areas which don't have cold winters.

For example, when I lived in Brazil (Rio de Janeiro), where the temperature never really goes below 65 F, I was surprised that everyone would tell me that people get colds/the flu not in the winter, but in the _summer_ \-- supposedly because the constant shifts between hot summer air and cold A/C indoor air made you more susceptible.

But it seems to be common "scientific" knowledge that flu is a wintertime thing. Is that not always the case, though? Are there places where it actually is a summertime thing? Or in places without much change in the seasons, is there no yearly variation?

<comment><USER13> From TFA: "It's also fine in humidities above 98%, which you find in the rainy season in the tropics," she says, where the conditions outside resemble the environment the virus finds in the body.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_D_and_influenza>

</comment><comment><USER15> I wonder if the drought and dryness is causing the Flu Epidemic in the USA this year.

A lot of time and money is lost in dealing with the flu each year. So if the owners of big buildings, public spaces, & mass transit installed humidifiers to combat the flu, I wonder how much of a difference would it make...

<comment><USER16> Something that has never quite made sense to me is, the flu virus is apparently very delicate.. drying out very quickly. However, it seems to thrive more in cold, dry conditions. How can this be? And to your point, would humidifiers help or hurt?

<comment><USER17> > would humidifiers help or hurt?

I'd imagine in humid conditions the pathogens bind with the fine water droplets in the air to form an aerosol, which (I assume) sticks to surfaces more readily whereas in dry conditions the contaminants would remain airborne far longer and stick to the mucosa once inhaled.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I wonder if in the future, government regulation will require central heating systems to come with built-in humidifiers. Seems like a heater without a humidifier has serious negative externalities.

</comment><comment><USER19> That's awesome! Now if I could find a humidifier that is silent and that I don't have to fill every day.

<comment><USER20> and that is not a breeding ground for germs...

<comment><USER21> or for mold.

<comment><USER22> Put salt in the water, it will inhibit many microorganisms, and if some salt gets in the air it won't hurt you - and may even help see: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_therapy>

(But only once, since the salt will stay behind as the water evaporates. Unless you change the water, in which case add some more.)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A fuck-you money attitude - <AUTHOR> https://m.signalvnoise.com/a-fuck-you-money-attitude-67b49d6c69b7?source=rss----668e14b18fb1---4 <comment><USER2> Do people actually say "fuck you" when they get FU money? Not really. They are usually saying something like:

I'm going to spend more time with family. I'm going to travel. I just quit.

Once someone has passed the point where they aren't having fun, if they have FU money, they will just stop caring so much, why bother getting angry?

<comment><USER3> This clip from the Gambler summed it up pretty well: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdfeXqHFmPI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdfeXqHFmPI) (NSFW language)

It's more about personal independence than anything and being able to take risks.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the clip. I want to see that movie now. Would you recommend it?

<comment><USER3> I would, but it's definitely not a universally appealing film. It's very similar to something like the Weather Man[1] where there is a plot, but the real point of the film is to witness a character going through a particular point in their life.

\---

[1] [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0384680/?ref_=nv_sr_1](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0384680/?ref_=nv_sr_1)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I vaguely agree with the premise of this post, which I would summarize is "The fear that paying individuals too much is empowering them to leave your organization is unfounded."

My perspective is that if the main force tying people to your company is money, then that's is the root of your problem. If people see it as just a money source that'll affect their quality of work in many other ways.

<comment><USER6> What possible 'main force' could there be other than money?

<comment><USER7> Please forgive me if I'm incorrect but are you implying that the only reason to work is for the money?

Whilst I can understand that most people walk through the door to be able to pay the bills, I would suggest that for most people the greasiest value of work has nothing to do with the money.

It is possible that cultural differences and the existence of social safety nets influence my perspective.

<comment><USER8> > Please forgive me if I'm incorrect but are you implying that the only reason > to work is for the money?

Of course it is. I like my job but if I suddenly won the lottery I would quit in a heartbeat and spend my time reading books, playing video games and just enjoying myself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Taking a few month to find a job, risking to start a startup, having the funds to buy a new laptop when yours fails, buying from the slightly more expensive electronics store with the good customer support. That's all fuck-you money already.

</comment><comment><USER10> RMS(Richard Stallman) comes to mind after reading the title. Probably because he was really capable and had this attitude for real and not faking it.

</comment><comment><USER11> This makes me think of Notch, or Pewdiepie.

<comment><USER12> I think PewDiePie just exempted himself though. His "fuck-you money" didn't prevent a "fuck off, you did a dumb thing"</comment></comment>


Intel introduces 3-GHz desktop chip (2002) - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/75878/Brief_Intel_introduces_3_GHz_desktop_chip <comment><USER2> Instructions per cycle has been getting somewhat better, and it is that number multiplied by the clock speed that is a better indicator of actual performance [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_cycle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_cycle)

Everything else needs to keep up to - it is pointless having a fast processor if it has to keep waiting on memory, storage and the network. Those are very slowly catching up and also lead to overall improved performance.

I've been hoping that asynchronous implementations would take over. In theory parts of the chip can run at whatever speeds are best for them at that time, and not have to be synchronised with other parts. And when not in use they easily power down. There were some async ARM chips made, but no progress since 2000 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMULET_microprocessor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMULET_microprocessor)

<comment><USER3> This was in Intel's dark days of P4 / "Netburst" microarchitecture. They goosed lots of GHz out of the chip by going with a very deep pipeline, but performance in real-world applications was terrible. (deep processor pipelines kill you when you mispredict a branch).

I sat in on a few sales calls from Intel about their new Pentium M / "Centrino" mobile architecture in 2003. What was amazing was that their performance graphs showed that Centrino had all the performance of P4, but with much lower power.

Basically, the terrible P4 microarchitecture, plus Intel's incompatible 64-bit approach (Itanium, aka "the Itanic"), left a big hole in the market where AMD stepped in and mopped up for 3-4 years with Opterons, the first 64-bit x86 processors.

Even today, x64 architecture is called "AMD64" for this reason -- AMD defined the instruction set, and Intel had to follow (for once).

IPC is undoubtedly much higher today, plus now similar machines would have 4 cores or more.

<comment><USER4> I wonder why it took until later in 2006 before a version of Pentium M showed up with 64-bit support.

<comment><USER3> Intel didn't release _any_ 64-bit x86 processors until 2005. They bet so heavily on the alternative, Itanium, that it took them a few years to recover.

EDIT: it was actually mid-2004, as noted below.

<comment><USER4> They release the first 64-bit Xeon in mid 2004.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Light has been stuck at c for the last decade, too. When will it break this barrier?

<comment><USER6> This is the most awesome comment in this post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Clock speed is an unfortunate marketing gimmick anymore. I dare compare it to peak horsepower. A 3ghz chip from today will run circles around a chip from 2002, and with less power to boot. AMD is ahead in the clock speed race, but gets beat handily by "slower" Intel processors, while using twice the power. The focus going forward is going to be on power efficiency and using more cores, not clock speed.

<comment><USER8> This is true, but it's missing the point. A modern CPU gets probably 50% more work out of a median clock cycle and runs 33% faster for single threaded (turbo) workloads. So it's twice as fast. And sure, there are four of them on the die.

But back up another decade to 1992, where a top of the line PC was a 50MHz 486 with well under half the IPC of the linked Northwood running 60x slower.

For those of us who remember the 80's and 90's, it's a very different world we live in.

<comment><USER9> The (single threaded) performance improvement is significantly larger. Anandtech has 2005 vintage Pentium in their benchmarks: [http://anandtech.com/bench/product/92?vs=836](http://anandtech.com/bench/product/92?vs=836) and there is probably a significant perf difference between 2002 and 2005.

And you can't really ignore the massive improvements gained via GPUs. There are your 100x differences

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The problem is physics. We can't get to higher clock speeds with current materials, due to heat. It's kind of like how fighter jets haven't got any faster (top speed anyway) since the 60's...

<comment><USER11> The MIG-25 is rated at Mach 2.8 GHz, but can be overclocked to 3.2.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mig-25](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mig-25)

<comment><USER12> Indeed, and first flew in 1964. Note that the follow-on MiG-31 was considerably slower despite sharing the general aerodynamic platform.

Since then Vmax has been declining, as the aerodynamics and mechanical complications ( e.g variable intake ramps ) of higher-Mach flight were determined to be less useful than transonic manouevrability and sustained supercruising.

The exception to this trend has been the superfighter category ( F-111, F-14, F-15, F-22, Su-27 ) which have maintained the same ~ M2.5 Vmax due to their specific role. Yes, even the F-111 was meant to be a fleet fighter.

But none have pushed up past the heady M3.0 level that was routinely broken by a series of prototypes in the 1960s.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Low power and multicore are cute and all, but imagine the type of machine learning we could do on 384GHz cores.

<comment><USER13> Imagine the type of machine learning we could do on low power 384GHz multi- cores

<comment><USER14> Imagine the type of machine learning we could do on 384 low power 1GHz cores.

<comment><USER15> Not everything parallelizes nicely. Given enough processors, serial computation eventually becomes the bottleneck:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law)

<comment><USER14> Many machine learning methods parallelize _extremely_ nicely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Cool. Back then there still were articles about a new faster desktop CPU! Today, whenever there's news about a CPU, it's about some other low power mobile whatever thing that is not faster. Yawn.

<comment><USER17> I wonder: what ratio of FLOPs would you get, between this chip, and an array of "low power mobile whatever thing"s adding up to an equivalent power-draw?

<comment><USER18> Surely DSPs or GPUs achieve the best FLOPs per watt.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If we can't make the clock speed faster what about massively increasing the size of the on chip cache? I think they call them like l2 and l3 or something. If I had 1gb of cache then maybe my whole program could run without doing much main memory access. That would be fast right?

<comment><USER20> Check out Haswell GT3e with 128 MB of L4 cache. It helps, but probably not enough to justify what they're charging for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> We've made _some_ progress with GHz :). [http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9239098/Desktop_chips...](http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9239098/Desktop_chips_zip_past_4GHz_next_stop_5GHz_)

<comment><USER22> Indeed, AMD announced their first 5ghz CPU in June at E3.

[http://www.amd.com/us/press-releases/Pages/amd- unleashes-201...](http://www.amd.com/us/press-releases/Pages/amd- unleashes-2013jun11.aspx)

It is for sale now at Newegg for $699. 4.7ghz with 5ghz turbo.

[http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113...](http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113347)

<comment><USER23> Though speed bumps aren't exactly as crazy as the old days. I remember my next upgrade from a 50Mhz 486 ended up being a 266Mhz Pentium 2. This was over a span of about 3 years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Power consumption is much better.

<comment><USER25> x86 & x86-64 cores still create heat like incandescent lightbulbs.</comment></comment>


Nava, a Startup That Wants to Fix the Government's Crappy Design - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcodesign.com/3047856/innovation-by-design/meet-nava-a-startup-that-wants-to-fix-the-governments-crappy-design

<comment><USER2> I'm a (non-US) federal public servant who worked for a small, and now defunct, agency with the mandate to embed 'user-centric' design principles in the creation of public services. At the time we were wound up, I concluded we had failed. Now I'm less sure. I still occasionally see instances where our work has influenced other public servants, so perhaps we've had some measure of longer-term success. You should carefully think about and define your metrics for 'success', both in the short and long term.

All that aside, the key reason for poor design in government is this: lack of incentive. And no, the ballot box is not an effective incentive; very few voters will punish a government because their tax return form was poorly designed. Private companies possess this incentive: if your product is hard to use, people won't buy it and you'll go out of business. Government doesn't have this incentive: if people find your products hard to use, they'll use them or they'll (eventually) go to jail, won't get their welfare payment, won't receive a driver's licence etc.

Outsourcing or privatising these kinds of services is not the answer: you're just substituting a public monopoly for a private one, which arguably leads to worse outcomes for citizens (and great ones for the private monopolist). This kind of action only makes sense if a competitive market will form after government gets out of the way. It's helpful to think of government services in this fashion: a service market that is dominated by a monopolist.

So that's the problem you are attempting to solve: how do you get a monopolist with no profit incentive to design better products and services?

<comment><USER3> Could a setup help with this unfortunate incentive situation, wherein independent frontend providers would get a small, fixed fee from the state for each case handled through their systems? They would invariably compete for users on the usability front. And if those fees (oh no, fixed! Where is that sacred free market?) turn out too big it would not be as catastrophic as one may think, because they would not just get filthy rich/reinvest in shady lobbying (like traditional government contractors, e.g. military technology), but would put much of the excess money into advertisement, keeping the bullshit-job flywheel spinning that our postindustrial societies are relying on to keep an acceptable number of people employed.

I see a few potential pitfalls, but it should be doable and cheap. The meta- system would have to be balanced between two failure modes. One would be to allow frontend providers to optimize their revenue by case-inflation, like making their users run to that virtual tax office more often than strictly necessary, e.g. by shoddy implementation of corner cases. The other would be discount providers specializing only on the easy cases, making it unnecessarily hard for more complete providers to make their living.

<comment><USER2> I've often wondered about similar things, but admittedly haven't done any formal analysis.

I suspect it's situation specific: there are probably situations where a model like this would work very well, and others where it would be a terrible idea. I'm also a little wary of government created 'pseudo-markets', as these often become bureaucratic nightmares that cost more to administer than if the government had just done the thing itself. 'Pseudo-markets' are kinda like machine-learning algorithms: they'll optimise towards your success metric, but sometimes in unexpected and undesirable ways (i.e. game the system).

Also, for certain services, you'd need to ensure equity of access (i.e. cover all use cases). Tax returns are a good example. There's some pretty esoteric stuff in tax returns that are only relevant to a handful of people (e.g. reporting franked dividends distributed from closely-held unit trusts via an interposed corporate entity, or whatever). It might never be profitable for a private market to cover this case, meaning the government would have to further 'pseudo-regulate' its 'pseudo-market', offer further subsidies, or cover this use-case itself.

Interestingly, on your second 'failure mode', you could flip it around and view it as a desirable outcome. Sticking with income tax reporting, most reporters have pretty simple tax affairs. They just report their annual income (which the government already knows), maybe claim a deduction or two, and that's it. But because the government must cover every possible use case, people are forced to wade through a 40 page form instead of a 1 page form. There might be more gain to society from doing this:

1) Government offers the fixed subsidy, but makes clear it is only guaranteed for, say, 2 years. 2) After 2 years, offers a lower (or no) fixed subsidy for the 'cherry-pickers' (who will still be profit positive) 3) Reallocate the savings as higher fixed subsidies for the remainder of the market

By iterating this process a few times, the market would naturally segment according to complexity, allowing the government to accurately 'price discriminate' on the basis of complexity. I dunno, I'm just spit-balling here, no clue if this is actually a good or bad idea. What are your thoughts?

Of course, all of this is only possible if the government publishes a 'tax return' API that's easy to use (i.e. does not create high implementation costs for private providers). Even though publishing an API sounds (and, frankly, is) simple, you'd be astounded at how often the government screws this kind of this up (often by contracting out to IBM, Fujitsu and their ilk). Or not publish one at all, even though the potential benefits are blindingly obvious...

<comment><USER3> I see two differences hidden between much overlap: expert/layman and embrace constant retuning/embrace creeping detuning. Since we are only taking about allowing investors to tap into possible efficiency gains in the execution of bureaucratic processes (and not into actual resource allocation, as it happens for example in highly regulated but not fully state-run healthcare systems or in renewable energy programmes), there is a natural upper limit for disoptimization. So in a way this problem is much easier than other, very similar regulation/gaming the system scenarios and a loose reins approach should be less risky.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > For example, the Department of Defense and Department of Veterans Affairs > spent $1.3 billion on a program to build an electronic health-records > database and abruptly stopped the project in 2013 after it failed to > progress as planned. More staggering? In the past 10 years, about 96 % of > all government IT programs that cost over $10 million were deemed failures, > meaning they didn't meet their budget, timeline, or user expectations.

If this startup (and ones like it) is successful in getting traction taking over some of these projects, there are going to be _a lot_ of very unhappy IT companies that were riding the gravy train for decades.

> A lot of the work we did last year for retooling the Healthcare.gov > application process was figuring out which questions were necessary to ask > of everyone and which ones were only necessary for certain people. Instead > of having one online form with dozens of entry fields on a single page, the > new Healthcare.gov application process asks a few general questions—like > income and household size—then directs you to more specific questions based > on your replies.

Jesus. You'd like to think there'd be some minimum baseline of common sense required to design an application of this level of importance.

> The newfound optimism about the government's technical future is inspiring, > but can a 10-person startup really make a difference?

Obviously. You'd almost have to be _trying_ to screw it up as bad as the original team did, unless this story isn't an accurate portrayal.

<comment><USER5> > If this startup (and ones like it) is successful in getting traction taking > over some of these projects, there are going to be a lot of very unhappy IT > companies that were riding the gravy train for decades.

While $1.3 billion is a massive amount of money to spend on a project, the article summarizing that effort as being "an electronic health-records database" is incredibly trite. This characterization implies "some RDBMS someplace that holds the information." The scope of trying to bring all parties involved into a set of computer systems collaborating in workflows which would make Descartes[1] blush is immense.

Stating that the tens of thousands of people working on that effort are "riding the gravy train for decades" is naive at best.

1 - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_product](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_product)

<comment><USER4> Sorry but as someone with many decades of experience with various levels of self-interest and corruption, I don't buy your casual "it's a hard problem" excuse.

> In the past 10 years, about 96 % of all government IT programs that cost > over $10 million were deemed failures

Would you have us believe these were _all_ hard problems?

<comment><USER5> > > In the past 10 years, about 96 % of all government IT programs that cost > over $10 million were deemed failures

> Would you have us believe these were all hard problems?

First, the statistic the article references appear to be from a Computerworld article[1] which uses "The Standish Group" analysis. This analysis indicates a 96% failure rate for _all IT programs_ costing more than $10 million and is not limited to "government IT programs." In other words, the article failed to meet _their_ user expectations of due diligence in representing a pivotal metric such as this.

Second, as the size of an effort increases in personnel, of course there will be inefficiencies. Waste, self-interest, and possibly corruption as well. But you specifically used the phrase "unhappy IT companies that were riding the gravy train", implying ulterior motives of those organizations and discounting the difficulty involved in a healthcare records project involved two huge organizations.

1 - [http://www.computerworld.com/article/2486426/healthcare- it/h...](http://www.computerworld.com/article/2486426/healthcare- it/healthcare-gov-website--didn-t-have-a-chance-in-hell-.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hi! We don't have a jobs page up yet, so I'll leave this here in case anyone's interested in working with us (Nava)

Nava | Washington DC* | Experienced full-stack developers/devops/product manager/operations | On-site - Full Time

We're a small team of engineers from Silicon Valley that came out to DC last year to help fix Healthcare.gov. It turns out there's a lot more to fix. And it's surprising how much can be fixed by a small group of resourceful people with a Silicon Valley mindset, deep technical experience, and the willingness to work closely with dedicated civil servants in government.

Our revamped Healthcare.gov application has been used by millions, converts 35% better, and halves the completion time. The login system we rebuilt is about two orders of magnitude more reliable and two orders of magnitude less expensive; for example, it's about $70M less per year to operate. We're just getting started, and we've started Nava to help fix everything else. [0]

People die because the Veteran's Administration is months behind in processing claims. The Social Security Administration pays benefits to millions of deceased Americans. $80 billion is spent every year on federal IT contracting, and 96% of projects are deemed failures [1].

That's not because there's some conspiracy or because government is inherently incapable of doing it right. These are complicated legacy systems and processes, and there are very few people with modern tech industry experience who are aware of these problems and willing to help fix them. You can help change that.

Our team is 10 people (Stanford, Google, YC alums), and we plan to bring on a few people every month through 2015.

We're looking for: \- experienced full-stack engineers \- experienced devops engineers \- a product manager with a technical background \- a hyper- resourceful operations person

We have a social mission (we just incorporated as a public benefit corporation (PBC) this week), but we pay market compensation (above market, for DC) and equity (above market).

If you'd like to build software and infrastructure that radically improves how our government serves people, we'd love to hear from you at firstname.lastname@example.com.

*Not in DC / able to relocate, but intrigued and in SF? Talk to us.

[1] [http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/22/t...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/22/t..).

<comment><USER2> I think what you're doing is admirable and just wanted to wish you good luck! I've been fighting similar battles within government (non-US) and it can be both very frustrating and very rewarding. Frustrating because 'being right' is almost never the way to win the argument.

Although I'm terrible at this myself, I've observed that opposition to change is best overcome by persistence. The best change agent I've worked with used a particular (and highly effective) technique that I've since termed 'objection exhaustion'.

He'd hold a meeting of all the 'major stakeholders' (read: people who's stuff we were messing with, but who's co-operation we needed) once a week/fortnight to update them on our progress (read: grind them down into submission).

When someone raised an objection to our ideas, he'd listen carefully, take their concerns seriously and commit to examining the issue and bringing findings back to the next meeting. We'd then do that, and most of the time present evidence at the next meeting that showed the objection was baseless (in a nice, 'give them an out', kind of way). Tedious as it was, by doing this over and over we'd exhaust all their objections and they'd be forced to agree with us (or continue to object for no apparent reason and look like a mindless fool in front of their senior colleagues).

Depressingly, the true but hidden objection is usually "don't touch my stuff" or "don't reduce my budget". Objection exhaustion works great here: few public servants are shameless enough to admit, perhaps even to themselves, that these are the reasons for their opposition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Fixing it too well may be incompatible with some personal liberties and privacy. A big problem is that the Government has no really solid way to authenticate you online. If it did, you'd need to provide far less info when signing up for something. Some of the Scandinavian countries work that way.

Should the US? Should Government web sites work on the policy that you should never have to tell the Government something it already knows?

<comment><USER5> > Should the US? Should Government web sites work on the policy that you > should never have to tell the Government something it already knows?

Should is a form of judgement, so I'll weigh mine in if you don't mind :-).

As I am certain you know, while it is technically possible to have government sites pull up everything known about the citizen given a modicum of uniquely identifiable information, the US culture would likely produce a tremendous "big brother is watching us" paranoid kickback. If this is warranted or not is moot.

For a smaller scale example, some years back the Home Shopping Network (HSN) made available caller-ID to CSR's for people calling to purchase product. They still have it now, of course, but at the time it was initially made available, CSR personnel would greet the caller "by name" when answering. Something akin to, "Hello Mr. Smith, how may I help you?"

This freaked out a lot of people. Especially the elderly. In any event, as those of us reading/posting in this forum know, the information is most certainly still there. Its presence is just not revealed to the HSN consumer.

Put that same type of convenience onto a US government web site and tech- trolls will light up the web with NSA conspiracy articles ad nauseam.

<comment><USER7> Right. Suppose the Obamacare web site had been _really_ good. You go there, and it checks your IP address with your ISP, identifies your account, and greets you with "Hello. It looks like you're Mr Smith of 1234 Scott St, Raleigh, North Carolina. Is that correct?" The user answers yes, and gets back "You're qualified to sign up for Obamacare. We've checked your tax records, and your income qualifies you to get extra assistance. You don't have any other medical coverage right now. If you sign up, your premium of $42.00 a month will be deducted from your paycheck from Walmart Inc, along with your taxes. Do you want to sign up for medical coverage?

Yes, thanks for signing up. You now have medical coverage. Here's your certificate of coverage. Print this page and you're done.

The screams that would have produced...

<comment><USER5> > The screams that would have produced...

From most, not a one I agree.

But from the 24x7 headline-starved troglodytes looking to whip the populace into a frenzy? Loud and heard from every corner. And what would those which slavishly follow their pundits-of-choice do? Would they remember the ease with which they received health coverage or would they incorporate whatever mantra was beaten into them?

Or am I being too cynical here?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I spoke to one of them on the phone recently and was very impressed! If I didn't have a couple of other compelling things occupying me right now I'd seriously consider joining their team in DC pronto. They are preparing to introduce more government clients to speedy iterations in clean modular application development and I'm eager to see them continue to impress.

</comment><comment><USER9> I think the startup has good intentions, but I think is focusing on the wrong end of things. With good reason, though, as I don't imagine there's much money to be made in the areas that really require attention.

My hypothesis is if we had competent (I mean most, not just some) elected officials in the first place, almost none of the chronic issues would exist to begin with. Voters need to be far more critical of who we put in office (all offices at national, state, and local levels).

But how do we educate ourselves on them? We need people working to make raw, unfiltered data readily available to voters BEFORE they vote so we end up with a far more productive / capable government to begin with.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'd tolerate the terrible design if the core functionality just worked. Apparently, you're not allowed to make EDGAR filings on the SEC's website if it's a federal holiday. Go figure.

</comment><comment><USER11> Poor government website design is due to every reason regarding the the demand side, not supply.

See "IDIQ" contracts for more.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm a bit confused. Are agencies startups too now?

<comment><USER8> The team who was recruited had to work as typical government contractors but are now forming their own company which they want to operate differently from all the other companies that build stuff for the government. One of the team members told me a while ago they were interested in organizing into a public benefit corporation or something like that (I had never heard of such a thing).

<comment><USER6> Hi Stephen! Which one of us did you talk to? We did just incorporate as a public benefit corporation. It's basically a for-profit corporation that also has a social mission baked into the charter.

<comment><USER8> It was Rohan!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How Ikea took over the world - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/ikea-world-domination/ <comment><USER2> And the whole thing saves on taxes by being a Dutch 'charitable foundation'!

"IKEA: Flat-pack Accounting [2006]" – [http://www.economist.com/node/6919139](http://www.economist.com/node/6919139)

<comment><USER3> And exploiting cheap, non-union labor in the US.

<comment><USER4> I assume you're referring to the customers who spend hours assembling this stuff?

<comment><USER3> No. they produce much of the flat pack furniture for their US stores in a domestic factory.

<comment><USER5> That changed in 2011, afaik.

[http://www.labornotes.org/2011/08/furniture-workers-win- ikea...](http://www.labornotes.org/2011/08/furniture-workers-win-ikea-union- drive-help-abroad)

"After scathing articles about conditions in the Swedwood plant appeared overseas, union woodworkers in Europe and Asia pressured the iconic Swedish brand."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Design-driven furniture development at its finest.

On a related note, looks like Ikea Hackers had a recent redesign: [http://www.ikeahackers.net/](http://www.ikeahackers.net/)

<comment><USER7> Not really recent. They've had that design since Oct. 2013.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20131004002539/http://www.ikeaha...](https://web.archive.org/web/20131004002539/http://www.ikeahackers.net/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Said Korean IKEA

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cM3de1ETvks](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cM3de1ETvks)

Doesn't look whole lot different than other IKEA I've seen.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrSnTCaENhk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrSnTCaENhk)

In my opinion, IKEA is successful largely because they have huge breadth of products in terms of variety, design, quality, and price points.

It also helps that Koreans have been overpaying for furniture for decades.

</comment><comment><USER9> No Ikeas in South America, afaik.</comment>


One Woman Tries to Create Google Earth Murals - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/03/satellite-art-one-woman-tries-to-create-google-earth-murals/72910/ <comment><USER2> I wonder if she had any trouble getting permission from the building owners to do this.</comment>


Windows 8 to include new PDF reader - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2011/04/04/windows-8-to-include-new-appx-pdf-reader/ <comment><USER2> If it's half as good as Mac OS X Preview, that would be awesome.

Even better would be if this lifts PDF to first-class-citizen status as an image format in Windows.

</comment><comment><USER3> Well, considering adobe provides two of the most vulnerable pieces of software in existence, i can see why microsoft wants to replace it.

</comment><comment><USER4> > clean, light...open?</comment>


Show HN: I made a Best 9 on Instagram t-shirt generator - <AUTHOR> https://fabristic.com <comment><USER2> Neat idea. Anything to share about how you launched this? Is it on Shopify or another ecommerce engine?

I've heard that Instagram oauth access can be difficult to get approved for production use, were they giving you a tough time when you went through the approval process.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Answering your questions this is a custom implementation entirely based on AWS serverless stack + Braintree payment. Although in retrospective I would probably go with Shopify + custom plugin. Regarding Instagram approval I had no problems with getting approved. I may change now after Facebook replaced Instagram API with their own. However, we had a lot of problems getting prod approval from Braintree Payments. It took me over 1 month to finally be able to process payments.</comment></comment>


Why is pipenv the recommended packaging tool by the community and PyPA?: Python - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/8jd6aq/why_is_pipenv_the_recommended_packaging_tool_by/ <comment><USER2> Somewhat related, I built this over the weekend:

[https://pypi.org/project/simplepkg/](https://pypi.org/project/simplepkg/)

[https://gitlab.com/b5n/simplepkg](https://gitlab.com/b5n/simplepkg)

Obviously not a full featured solution, but easy enough utilizing venv, sdist, bdist_wheel, and twine.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is an old thread, why is it being rehashed?

Pipenv was a shitshow, I've said as much in that thread and elsewhere, but there is probably no need to stir this pot again.</comment>