DIY Retinal Projection - <AUTHOR> http://eclecti.cc/hardware/blinded-by-the-light-diy-retinal-projection

<comment><USER2> I generally don't tackle projects that have the words "DIY", "retinal", and "laser" in the description.

Granted, the author addresses safety issues.

</comment><comment><USER3> Awesome stuff!

The cool thing about a laser projector is that unlike with a lens-based projector, there is infinite depth of field: <http://www.amazon.com/review/R1S9P57VXN5LSH/>

But I think there should be some regulation on legal maximum instantaneous brightness. Per the review I linked, the projector used in this project has a 848 x 480 pixel framebuffer. But the laser bounces off a scanning mirror, so at any given time, only one pixel is bright as day and the rest of the pixels are black. This means that the actual power being zapped into your retina is about 400 thousand times brighter than what you perceive. Have there been experiments over the long term to make sure these don't cause retinal sunburn?

<comment><USER4> As long as that mirror is moving there is no problem, but if it should ever stop you're in immediate trouble.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Seen on the outside of the casing of a laser projector: "Do not look into laser with remaining eye". That one was a bit more powerful than this one but the point is still valid.

The problem with a setup like this is that in case of deflection failure if you're not projecting into someone's eye that results in an annoyingly bright line but not much else. If you are projecting into the eye then you could quite possibly do a lot of damage, in an eyeblink (to use a bad pun) at that.

So it's not just enough to deal with reducing the amount of light put out on average to be safe. You also need to deal with failure modes to get the laser to shut down _immediately_ if anything puts the actuators out of order.

</comment><comment> daniel-cussen I'm surprised how useful 3D printing turns out to be for this kind of application.

<comment><USER5> It's turning up everywhere now for the DIY crowd. Might be stating the obvious but really seems like personal 3d printing is hitting a high saturation amongst those serious enough to blog.

The upside for me - So many interesting projects to read about!</comment></comment>


New Hubble data suggests an ingredient missing from current dark matter theories - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2020-09-hubble-ingredient-current-dark-theories.html <comment><USER2> Here's the arXiv preprint: [https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.04471](https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.04471)

As I understand, they see a discrepancy between simulation and observation of some lensing observables. Could be something wrong with the calculation of the observables, something wrong with the implementation of the simulations, or (the exciting bit) with the physics put into the simulations. As a complete non-expert on lensing observables and cosmological simulations, I'd guess it's one of the first two. As mentioned in the text, there are many other discrepancies between observations and simulations that are still unresolved. This adds to that list.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not sure I understand the difference between "additional ingredient" and "a higher concentration of"

<comment> T-A Dark matter models predict how the stuff is supposed to be distributed.

<comment><USER4> Not all, LCDM does or can at least predict distribution, primordial/micro black holes, MACHO's CBM etc. don't but then most of them rely on the same distribution as normal matter (because for the most part they are just that, as anything that falls within the existing standard model is well normal matter).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Will the James Webb telescope help detail such phenomenon better than the hubble?

<comment><USER6> If you can do it with infrared then yes is the JWT rule of thumb.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The current top-level comments are infuriating. You demand that scientists be honest, then accuse them of all-out fraud when they admit they have questions, secure in your ignorance of the things they actually have figured out and tried to tell you over and over again. You are more concerned with feeling smart and skeptical than actually learning. You are the reason we can't have nice things.

<comment><USER8> For some reason, dark matter brings out the crazies. It was true when I worked in physics, and it's still true now.

People need to understand that physicists do NOT consider dark matter to be settled, in any sense! The experiments are not done to polish up any theory... they're done because all of the theories are awful, and guidance from observations is _necessary_ for further progress.

I also still fully stand by my previous comment on this subject: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23666620](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23666620)

<comment><USER7> I suspect the fact that you can't observe dark matter directly, but physicists all seem to promote it, enables a combination of (at least superficially) reasonable empirical skepticism and conspiracy-minded contrarianism to work together. You have to expend a little bit of actual effort to see through the logic, and if you have any inclination to believe Big Physics is lying to you, then it's easy to just not bother. People forget that the universe does not owe us comprehensibility.

Contrary to your linked comment, to this non-physicist, nearly all physicists in public seem to say that, while the details are unknown, dark matter is pretty much definitely a thing. AFAICT they're not wrong about there being multiple lines of evidence for it. But if you mean "no one worth listening to" says even that much, then I don't know any physicists worth listening to.

<comment><USER9> > but physicists all seem to promote it

It does not seem like it to me (non physicist with some physicist friends from other fields who try to dumb down stuff to me).

In my world (SE) it seems like a proprietary binary that must be included for the rest of an open source product describing the observable universe to work very well. Everyone seems to hate it, but nobody wrote something better, yet. Every competing implementation fails to work in other areas that we already are using in production, extensively.

And when some professional, who read and understood the source code, starts talking about it, a lot of people voice stupid ideas that they would not have if they passed some lectures on the subject.

Edit to add: I envy physicists a little - the best thing for "them" to happen seems to be if something does _not_ work in a very peculiar way.

<comment><USER7> Ok, but do any of them take seriously the idea that it doesn't exist at all? It was my impression that even theories that try to modify gravity in ways that also explain stuff like the CMB spectrum sort of end up inventing dark matter anyway (IIRC TeVeS was the big one like that).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm waiting for the missing ingredient to be STRIIIINGS!!! Dark matter is carried on strings that pop in and out, but only when you observe them. As soon as you stop observing, it pops back in to keep things in equilibrium. Next theory?

<comment><USER11> I have a pet theory that repulsive and attractive forces exist at infinity at ever increasing scales.

<comment><USER12> I think the physicists are touchy about our layman's thoughts on this, and they are correct in that there is little to no evidence to support claims like this. However, I too, look at incompleteness, entropy, things like prime number distribution, and chaos, and I can't help but think: it (everything) really does seem to be destroying things only to bring them back again in a novel form.

It's intuitive, it's not suggested by evidence, it's based in imagination rather than reason, but I imagine the universe as a matter / energy creation machine in which the forces that tear everything apart seem to be generative. I think perhaps over time we will observe a correlation between the entropic forces at the edge of the universe and the gravitational forces of dark matter in the center of galaxies. I think dark matter is dark because its light hasn't reached us as its trapped by gravity, yet its gravity is there. It's new matter, and we don't know how it got there. I think we'll find the bridge by looking into quantum mechanics, and how particles behave in relation to one another when they're in conditions similar to those described at the point of heat death of the universe, everything broken down, even time. When that happens, what's the difference between any one thing and another? I'm not entirely convinced: "well, nothing at all" is the answer. Do we know nothing at all is stable? The big bang seems to suggest that nothing at all is extremely unstable.

I think the physicists are touchy because imagination has replaced reasoning in key areas. Whereas you and I would probably love to be told exactly why we might be wrong about our crackpot musings in a field we upfront claim to know little about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Honestly, I'm a little tired of the whole dark matter thing. There's no evidence for it, and physicists keep coming up with more and more complex models to fit the data when they don't actually understand what's going on there.

Why haven't MOND or other theories become more popular?

Edit: MOND isn't great either - it just has a parameter that they tune until it matches the observation.

Edit 2: I am not a physicist, I am simply a concerned citizen.

<comment><USER14> Honestly I'm not sure why some people oppose "dark matter" so much. We know there's something out of ordinary, it behaves like matter, and it doesn't interact with light (hence "dark"). Given that, "dark matter" is as inoffensive a name as possible. People are acting like we named it "quasiflavored eleven-dimensional supersymmetry carriers."

<comment><USER15> I think it's a natural reaction after Einstein. The whole physics world was certain about this Aether thing, and it turned out to be wrong and much more beautifully solved by plain geometry. "Dark matter", taken at surface level, sounds like going down the exact same rabbit hole.

There's a fundamental difference though. With dark matter, the evidence of the stuff is much more direct and precise. We can determine the shape and concentration of it. Aether on the other hand was a hand-wavy metaphysical concept from the beginning. There was never any experimental evidence that aether was a real thing; it was just a concept invented to patch up the inherent inconsistencies in electromagnetic theory near the speed of light.

<comment><USER16> Or spacetime is that aether. This is like some dusty books have been claiming that there's an invisible fluid substance around us that supports life, then when science discovers oxygen, it says "See? There is no invisible ether or anything like that around us, only atoms."</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Update on scikit-learn: recent developments for machine learning in Python - <AUTHOR> http://gael-varoquaux.info/blog/?p=165

<comment><USER2> Since it isn't likely going to be said otherwise, I really think this is the best library for doing Machine Learning out there right now.

This assessment isn't based on breadth of algorithms supported, since R beats it here. It has nothing to do with documentation, even though it has the best. Scikits.learn is fantastic because it has consistent interfaces. The creators of this library have thought very hard about what interfaces classifiers should have. This greatly reduces the learning curve and makes it cake to compare classifiers.

The clean interfaces make it easier to perform cross-validation and leads to less surprises. The largest problem with most machine learning code out there is while it works, it never gets this kind of software engineering attention.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for this great feedback :)

What algorithms do you think scikit-learn is still missing compared to R?

<comment><USER2> Largely, what I need is integration with JAGS <http://mcmc- jags.sourceforge.net/> which is a niche that pymc fills. I am working on a PR to get in the other stuff I need.

I bring up R more as a point that there is more to a library than supporting lots of algorithms. R wins by that metric [http://www.cran.r-project.org/web/packages/available_package...](http://www.cran.r-project.org/web/packages/available_packages_by_date.html)

<comment><USER4> The comparison doesn't really make sense: R is a language (and environment), scikit-learn is a library.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bill Gates commits $750M to help Oxford vaccinate the world against Covid-19 - <AUTHOR> https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2020/06/05/bill-gates-covid-coronavirus-vaccine-750-million-oxford-azd1222/ <comment><USER2> I didn't expect covid vaccine research to be so ahead. They expect to deliver batches by the end of this year.

> Gates' millions will support the delivery of 300 million doses of the > vaccine, confusingly dubbed AZD1222, with the first shipments expected to > begin by the end of 2020.

<comment><USER3> This one is one of the furthest ahead. Its the UK Oxford's ChAdOx1 vector for SARS-CoV-2. They partnered with AstraZeneca and I guess its now AZD1222. It was very quickly far along because it was under development for years and years and was going through trials for MERS already when SARS2 hit.

So they were almost instantly able to start trials on it with the pandemic. And unlike other vaccines they've been wanting to do, money poured in.

<comment><USER4> The big problem with the Oxford ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine that I haven't seen discussed much is that it doesn't seem to work very well.

 _Viral gRNA was detected in nose swabs from all animals and no difference in viral load in nose swabs was found on any days between vaccinated and control animals_

[https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.13.093195v1](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.13.093195v1)

For a less technical write-up: [https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhaseltine/2020/05/16/did...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhaseltine/2020/05/16/did- the-oxford-covid-vaccine-work-in-monkeys-not-really/#2d2d53b83c71)</comment></comment></comment>


Pay Mothers and Tie Increases to Child's Math Skills - <AUTHOR> https://joelx.com/pay-mothers-and-tie-increases-to-childs-math-skills/15561/ <comment><USER2> I can only hope that this is some poor attempt at satire? This is some of the most obscenely technocratic nonsense I have ever seen in my life.

There are so many things wrong here I don't even know where to start.

> Math is the most valuable tool we have as humans for understanding the world > around us and for improving life for all of us. It was math that brought us > out of the Dark Ages

This is ahistoric rubbish; the dark ages didn't exist, and even if they did, I have never seen anyone try to claim that mathematics was the beacon of enlightenment that dragged humanity out of the darkness.

> We want to strongly incentivize mothers to train their children in math. No > one – not schools, not other relatives, nor the government – is better > placed to start training a child in math than their own mother who > understands them best and can do it from the youngest possible age.

Being a mother in no way qualifies you as a teacher ready to "train their children in math"; what does this even mean anyway? Teach them arithmetic? We're reasonably good at that as a society already. Bring them up on a diet of ZFC and category theory? This is unlikely to work out well, ask the French.

These are of course minor points compared to the huge, glaring issue that the author clearly has no knowledge of child development whatsoever; "lack of mathematical talent" at the age of 5 in no way determines ability, at all.

The notion of giving some kind of "performance bonus" to mothers for the mathematical talent of their children is absurd, since they have no impact on any innate talent whatsoever; I dread to think what kind of an impact this would have when the proposed bonus is high enough to put them in the 99th centile of income.

<comment><USER3> Watching the video at the end of the article, I'm pretty sure it is satire. His wife just shakes her head and saying "no" the entire time he says his idea, so then he just plays with his kids and calls them mathematicians for the last minute.

<comment><USER4> If it's not satire, it's at least sad. That video made me feel sorry for the mother.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ah yes. The goal is to cover every square inch of every known planet with pulsing human flesh, and if it means we wipe out everything else and just harvest vats of yeast to eat, hey God told some of us to do it a long time ago (apparently). Thank goodness people don't care that you once could see animals and stars in the outdoors, or hear birds sing. We'll pack in more tightly with Netflix to keep us on the couch.

Pay is already tied somewhat to math skills in life anyway. The math that leads to allocating resources optimally and growing them when possible is only useful when combined with impulse control. Otherwise you blow your income on cigarettes and Doordash.

</comment><comment><USER6> Weird and vaguely eugenic.

<comment><USER7> Vaguely? That's polite.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can't happen. It would instantly be racist--it turns out the people with kids who can do math are the kinds of people who did not need the money. An instant wealth transfer to the well-off.

It is interesting as a thought experiment only.

</comment><comment><USER9> > Math is the most valuable tool we have as humans for understanding the world > around us and for improving life for all of us. It was math that brought us > out of the Dark Ages

Wouldn't literacy be what brought us out of the dark ages, by definition?

I would strongly support living wages being paid to stay at home parents. Or even working parents. Restricting it to mothers seems stupidly short sighted.

We have tax cuts for this but it's not nearly enough.

Tying it to math is... dumb.</comment>


Learning to Execute and Neural Turing Machines - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/app/basic/stream/z12iitmzryy5g3slc23ehf2qdruyv1zjy04

<comment><USER2> The Turing Machine idea makes a lot of sense... the machine is simply a state machine graph that interacts with the memory --- sensible that it could be "learned" similar to any genetic algorithm approach. Pretty cool trick regarding the differentiability of the system however.

That said, the biggest challenge here, I imagine, is evaluating the learned system. It may give right answers, but how often does it give wrong answers? How can the learned "machine" be tested for correctness? How does overfitting come into the picture? For instance, halting cannot be proved nor guaranteed. This strikes me as a fundamental advantage of a more functional "feed forward" approach of most learning systems.

<comment><USER3> The paper discusses putting the NTM through several tasks, and tests for "overfitting" or how well it has generalised the task by giving it a slightly longer task than it has seen during training. For example, in the copy task, they trained it on sequences of length 20, but tested the it on a sequence of length 100.

Of course, this doesn't guarantee anything, but they also take a look at some of the internals of the learnt system which are more easily interpreted, and found that it does some pretty consistent things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would like to add for those of you not familiar: The Neural Turing Machine method uses a neural network called a recurrent neural net. Recurrent neural nets are used in modeling time series data and have a neat concept of training called back propagation through time.

Here's a neat tutorial with an RBM (typically a feed forward net) as a recurrent net for those who want to just see what a recurrent net "looks like"

[http://deeplearning.net/tutorial/rnnrbm.html](http://deeplearning.net/tutorial/rnnrbm.html)

<comment><USER3> Nitpicking here, but while the authors do use a recurrent neural net (RNN), they do not use it exclusively.

The system consists of a memory element, and a controller element. In their evaluation of the system, they use both a standard feed-forward network, as well as an RNN with long short-term memory (LSTM) units as the controller element. In certain tasks, the feed-forward network works better.

+1 on the deeplearning.net tutorials, and theano. I've learnt a lot from there.

<comment><USER4> Right. Mainly just low hanging fruit for those who aren't in this stuff day to day.

In a lot of my talks and day to day conversations, I've found people don't know the difference between a feed forward architecture vs, recurrent, vs recursive vs,...you get the point :P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The neural Turing machines article has had significant recent attention here: [https://hn.algolia.com/?q=neural+turing+machines#!/story/for...](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=neural+turing+machines#!/story/forever/0/neural%20turing%20machines). If someone wants to post the "Learning to Execute" article, that would be great.

Originally I thought we could just change the present url to that one, but since the comments are only about the other paper, it seems better to just treat this as a dupe.

<comment><USER6> [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.4615v1.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.4615v1.pdf)

<comment><USER5> I meant that someone should submit it as a story.</comment></comment></comment>


Medical Students Better At Surgery After Hours Of Nintendo Each Week - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/3006490/fast-feed/medical-students-better-surgery-after-hours-nintendo-each-week

<comment><USER2> This is the original article: [http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...](http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0057372#s4).

Laparoscopic surgery is a type of minimally invasive surgery done by sticking a camera inside the abdomen through a small incision, along with two handles [[http://iahcsmm.org/Recertification/LessonPlans/images/CIS210...](http://iahcsmm.org/Recertification/LessonPlans/images/CIS210pics/figure2-2.gif)] which can be equipped with various tools in order to perform the surgery.

The findings make sense because people who play video games are likely better at navigating a 3D world on a 2D screen.

Here's what the surgeon sees: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7nZaKrDQDo>.

Surgeons train for laparoscopic surgery by performing exercises on haptic feedback enabled machines, which is quite similar to the experience of playing a video game: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSSpz3S01tQ>.

</comment><comment><USER3> These are medical _residents_ , not students.

Residents have already graduated medical school and are training in their medical specialty.

/pedant</comment>


How to evaluate your next database - <AUTHOR> https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2019/03/20/how-to-evaluate-your-database/ <comment><USER3> Just use PostgreSQL and don't evaluate anything. PostgreSQL can handle an enormous number of use cases, scales very well and can be made redundant with read-only nodes too.

If you outgrow PostgreSQL, you have an excellent problem and are probably making tons of money. Don't waste mental power on this; just use it and focus on your business/product's core value proposition.

Or, read the article, which reaches the same conclusion with way more words. :)

<comment><USER4> For RDBMSes, this.

For write-intensive time series, or highly distributed, or graph databases you might consider other options.

<comment><USER3> As the sibling pointed out, there are extensions for that, that may be useful in PostgreSQL.

It also is a good KVS, a document store, a queuing system, a pub/sub system, etc. While I usually add a message bus and a memory cache to a larger system, PostgreSQL can do all these things for you if you want to keep things simple.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> michal-franc I think the default should be some RDBMS. Unless you already know your domain - which is unlikely. Get to know your product, problem space, domain - <USER2> with more information you can start optimising by adding more specialised db engines (if this optimisation provides benefits of course).

</comment><comment><USER5> PG 11 + Citus + cstore_fdw + PipelineDB is my preffered Database (OLAP + OLTP + Streaming middleware + HA) stack choice

</comment><comment><USER6> TLDR: Database vendor for Postgres makes Postgres look good.

My startup uses Postgres though and we like it.

</comment><comment><USER7> Postgre is also my go-to relational database.</comment>


How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-08-19/how-women-got-crowded-out-of-the-computing-revolution <comment><USER3> I don't understand this whole thing.

Until recent years all developers I met were socially awkward men, me included.

These are not the kind of people I would attribute any power to "crowd out" anyone.

To me it seemed that they started doing computer stuff, because no one, including women, wanted to have anything to do with them.

The "cool", way more aggressive, kids wanted to do sales, law, finance, management and stuff.

Computers were new and complicated, a unsafe bet for people who were so good included into society.

<comment><USER4> The "socially awkward" archetype of a computer programmer I think is mostly a western (probably American) cultural artifact. For instance I have worked with a lot of Indian immigrants who are programmers and I don't find the correlation between social awkwardness and the people doing programming.

While programming might be appealing to socially awkward western/American men , I don't think one should go from that to concluding that they're the only people innately drawn to it.

<comment><USER5> _The "socially awkward" archetype of a computer programmer I think is mostly a western (probably American) cultural artifact_

It was around that time in the 80s that "the nerd" or "the geek" became a staple movie character. Computers up 'til then had just been a piece of industrial machinery like a lathe or a microscope. Now they were associated with "losers". Richard Pryor in Superman III. Revenge Of The Nerds. Etc etc.

And by and large society was perfectly happy to relegate computing to these losers and shun them. Noone cared about the demographics of these losers, either, it was not "problematic". It's only recently when the geeks have built something that took over the world, that people are saying, hey, I didn't do the work or make the sacrifices but I deserve the rewards. That's where we get "brogrammers" et al.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am well aware that the climate is well against this position, but you cannot just dismiss the 'Damore' view out of hand. He is not just 'wrong'. The Damore view is at the very least plausible and tarring a whole industry filled with many thoughtful and introverted (i.e. not messing with others, often taken advantage of themselves) individuals to support some view of gender economics is morally wrong.

We now live in a time where we are increasingly told what we should believe. In my view morality shouldn't extend to belief. For one it leaves certain individuals (like myself) out in the cold. Sorry, I cannot be told what to believe.

Maybe this is just the current hot topic and many people want to read it, but to me it reads as a form of propaganda (by definition media created to determine what people believe) or at least journalistic activism, and who is this guy (apparently some business journalist) to write authoratively on the subject, based on one fact (the predominance of women in early programming jobs). The fact of the matter is that programming has changed beyond recognition, particularly between 1950 and 1980 or so and that is more than enough to at the very least plausibly explain the change in programmer demographic. Anyone who is in the industry knows these eras cannot be compared (surely?).

<comment><USER7> James Damore's arguments are only plausible in the weakest sense of the word. The only way someone would find his arguments convincing is if one's priors already favor his conclusion.

If one weighs the evidence for social factors against biological factors, the question is how should a critical person weigh one against the other? It turns out if one ignores all the evidence for social factors and squint really hard at the biological ones, one can, I guess, scam oneself into thinking there's a strong argument there.

<comment><USER8> His claim was that biological factors "could" explain the gap, at least in part, in that you can't rule out that possibility categorically.

I don't recall him claiming that biological factors were the more important factors, never mind the only ones.

<comment><USER7> If you don't consider evidence you are aware of in an argument, it means you don't think that evidence is necessary to consider. He wants his argument to be considered rigorously in which case it is appropriate to make inferences about what he didn't consider as well as what he did.

It's a quiet truth that most disagreements between people have a crucial basis in the implicit nature of how we weigh and consider information.

A great deal of defense of Damore's arguments are to only consider what is explicitly said and not how it fits into the broader discussion, which is implicit by definition.

So Damore can claim he isn't saying that he thinks some female engineers currently at Google are there because the bar has been lowered (explicit) and this is accepted uncritically by some defenders, but it's not hard to draw the inference from his arguments and his policy suggestions that he thinks Google's current practices have a negative impact on the quality of engineers it recruits (implicit).

Likewise we are told to evaluate the information he gave (explicit) but not consider why he omitted discussing the mountains of evidence that suggest alternative positions and how his arguments should be evaluated in light of it (implicit).

My position is that there is the evidence of negative social feedback is significant enough that companies should experiment with changing their demographic compositions and empirically measuring performance.

Because software engineering requires a great diversity of skills, including people skills, empathy and whole-systems thinking, I think it's very plausible that making the gender balance less skewed will lead to more productive teams.

<comment><USER8> Wow. Just wow.

So basically, you are saying that you can judge him and what he writes not by what he writes, but whatever you want to arbitrarily insert into his writing.

Even the inquisition had higher standards than that.

<comment><USER7> Honest question in good faith: have you ever read a serious, rigorous exchange of criticism in any field like philosophy or politics? Because what I described is literally par for the course in critical thinking. If Damore and his ilk want to participate in an honest critical debate then their arguments are sure as fuck going to be analyzed the same way everyone's arguments are analyzed in every serious intellectually rigorous setting.

Your refusal to take this idea seriously is a microcosm of what's rotten in this whole discourse (or am I not allowed to draw a connection between what you wrote and literally anything else?).

<comment><USER8> He wasn't participating in a rigorous exchange of criticism in philosophy or politics.

>Because what I described is literally par for the course in critical thinking.

No, what you described is completely arbitrary.

> his ilk

Right, "rigorous" and "critical" debate. No pure ad-hominems to see here. Move along.

> every serious intellectually rigorous setting.

Er, no.

Just making shit up and attributing it to your opponent is the opposite of "intellectually" rigorous. It maybe _ideologically_ rigorous, but that's about it.

<comment><USER7> > He wasn't participating in a rigorous exchange of criticism in philosophy or > politics.

Um, his memo was intrinsically political. The matters of policy of a company are political matters. Therefore it is completely valid to scrutinize it politically and of course at a serious level which integrates it into the surrounding context.

> No, what you described is completely arbitrary.

No, not really. If it was completely arbitrary then I would be considering things like "Well James Damore didn't mention the ongoing debate on ham and pineapple pizza and clearly shows his bias in doing so". There is an inherent context to his memo that is completely obvious to everyone involved as evidenced by the fact that literally every side in the discussion involving it makes some sort of connection to that context.

On the side defending him, usually calling people who condemn his memo as irrational or the intolerant left, or some-such hostile dismissal.

> Right, "rigorous" and "critical" debate. No pure ad-hominems to see here. > Move along.

Ad hominem is "James Damore is a doofus, therefore he's wrong". "James Damore is wrong, and because he is wrong in this way, he's a doofus", on the other hand, is not ad hominem. The only thing more odious than whipping out the latin is doing it incorrectly. From all the digital ink spilled on the topic, I have concluded that there are only a very small group of people defending him that earnestly consider the idea that he fucked up. The most common discourse is to simply presume that he didn't and then demand that everyone engage with him and his memo on their terms. Yawn.

> Just making shit up and attributing it to your opponent is the opposite of > "intellectually" rigorous. It maybe ideologically rigorous, but that's about > it.

James Damore's arguments are neither novel nor exemplary. The fact that he A) insists that he's being shut out of conversation and B) proceeds to make the same exact argument that has been discussed ad nauseum without bringing anything new to the table is telling. Everyone has already met a James Damore; they don't need another.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Ugh. So basically when programming was unskilled and considered one step up from being a secretary, women did that and men built the machines themselves.

As software became a larger and larger component of the machines, and more and more complex, it became dominated by men. This, we learn, is because men made it more rigorous and scientific as part of some bizarre sexist plot.

Or maybe the nature of programming today is pretty different to how it was in the immediate post-war years, and the kinds of jobs women can get changed too.

<comment><USER10> I'd bet that as the field grew, they eventually had a surplus of engineers working on new hardware and a deficit of people working to write new software. Once there were men willing to do the work, they were seen as a better bet than the women already in the field.

The same thing happened after WW2, this isn't a new pattern.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Even if the author's premise that women were "crowded out" of programming 40 years ago is true, that does not imply that "innate dispositional differences" between sexes don't influence one's tendency towards pursuing certain fields.

The author suggests that the current stereotypical portrait of a geeky socially awkward neckbearded male engineer was socially engineered, causing a self-fulfilling prophecy. That's idiotic conspiracy nonsense. Geeky reclusive men tend to pursue computer programming because dealing with a machine doesn't involve dealing with a human, not due to society's marketing of computer engineers as geeks.

The author is clearly not a computer programmer (professor of history apparently), nor someone capable of basic logic. If you're going to cash in on the diversity scandal for views, at least make a coherent argument.

(Also this post is a dupe, I submitted the same post before this and this is a copy and paste of my comment on the original thread)

</comment><comment><USER12> > They found some predictable ones: a love of solving puzzles, for example. > But the only "striking characteristic" that defined successful male > programmers was "their disinterest in people." A subsequent study -- one > that was overlooked in subsequent years -- found this to be true of female > programmers as well.

Isn't this trait much more prevalent among males though? Could explain why we saw women flock to more social fields when the barriers were removed.

</comment><comment><USER13> When do we start looking at articles like this as misandry? The author is seriously implying there was some sort of conspiracy that all men partook in, with the intent to exclude women from software development. Are you fucking kidding me? This shit has gone too far.

<comment><USER10> There's no conspiracy, there's only satisfaction with the status quo that leads to those with the upper hand working to preserve the status quo. This dynamic is discussed all the time on this forum.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Notice how they make the claim that males used underhanded tactics to force women out of the software industry, but they never provide a single bit of evidence for that.

The entire article is basically about the software industry evolved into more male positions and things like altitude tests and requirements of advanced degrees which are apparently part of some coordinated conspiracy to be sexist against women.

I agree that aptitude tests and degrees are stupid , but for totally different reasons. This is just incredible mental gymnastics to push an agenda.

</comment><comment><USER15> If this is at all accurate, then all it is saying is that programming started as a pink collar ghetto. The article itself indicates it was dominated by women as long as it was considered "glorified clerical work." This is actually really normal stuff, not peculiar to the computer industry. "Serious jobs" tend to get dominated by men. This may be related to "the second shift" \-- that women seek jobs that don't take an excess of their energy so they can go home and cook, clean, etc. Men are much more often in a position to say "Woman, get me a beer" and just collapse after giving their all to their job.

I don't know a solution. But, I think we aren't going to find one if we don't first recognize that one of the roots of such problems is not that women are predisposed to certain kinds of labor, but that society as a whole expects women to do "women's work" at home and this is rooted in the reality that women can get pregnant, men cannot. A lot of traditional gender roles grow out of that and a lot of societal expectations grow out of that and it wasn't intended to oppress women. It evolved organically as a way for both adults in a household to contribute meaningfully to making ends meet, raising the kids, etc at a time when birth control was not readily available and yadda.

</comment><comment><USER16> > Sexist stereotypes are used today to justify not hiring women programmers,

[Citation Needed]

Only once (recently) have I ever had the chance to interview a woman for a job. She was fine. I gave my approval. We didn't end up hiring her. Why? Because someone else had more of the _specific skills_ we were looking for. She was just unlucky.

5-6 other people were also turned down for the same reason. The guy that was hired just happened to have experience in some of the products we were working with.

</comment><comment><USER17> "More women should be coding"

I see an article with some variation of this argument here every week. I'm starting to believe that society has become obsessed with getting more women to open up Visual Studio every morning.

But this isn't like recycling, saving the rainforest, stopping ozone depletion or global warming. All of humanity benefits from doing those things. I couldn't care less if the person who develops the next hot phone app is a man or a woman. I don't think any end user cares.

Because the fact is it doesn't matter. A Git repository doesn't treat code any differently depending on the gender of the person who pushed it.

And yet I see a new article about getting women to code every week.

Are women themselves fighting for the right to hit F10 and step through code every day? Is it akin to another woman suffrage movement?

I don't think so. In fact, I think the majority of women just don't seem to be interested in coding.

It's as if this is someone else's agenda. An agenda to get more women to code, whether they want to or not.

So who's pushing this agenda? If corporations are pushing it, then the end goal is probably to save money, because that's why corporations will push any agenda.

</comment><comment><USER14> It's hilarious that they criticize the stereotype of nerdy outcast male. If you're a girl, 9/10 you will never get flak for being nerdy (yes, exceptions exist, i know, but in my experience), on the other hand, emasculating the male nerd is practically a national pastime.

To add to the irony, a surprisingly large proportion of the anti - <USER2> tweets were criticizing his appearance and/or calling him a virgin.

</comment><comment><USER18> Luckily programming or computing hasn't changed at all since the 50s and 60s, so we can effortlessly assume that what people said about it then still applies perfectly to today's distributed, abstract, always-on landscape.

Even more, we can use the view from the 50s and 60s, a time which was not sexist at all, to explain why today is more sexist than ever.

Women outnumber men in colleges. Women have an easier time getting jobs. Single, childless women outearn men in that category.

Women just aren't choosing STEM. And apparently the solution is to tell them loudly how horrible the people they'd get to work with are. Who are some bizarre amalgam of a Goldman Sachs elevator and the cast of Big Bang Theory. Which you can effortlessly get a flood of coverage about, even though you're supposedly oppressed and are fighting the status quo.

Go away old media, go away tech feminists, go away white knights. If people stopped seeing women as victims, you'd lose your meal ticket, your power fetish and your moral superiority.

</comment><comment><USER19> Why is the obsession with this topic? I have never been to the US but is there a problem for a female to be a software developer in the US? Is this problem just in the US?

By the way, there are countries where over 50% of CS Students are female.

</comment><comment><USER20> It's sad the article starts with the use of the Ada Lovelace trope, she is not widely considered to be the first computer programmer, or maybe on a pop culture way, not in a scholarly way.

</comment><comment><USER21> Slatestarcodex in the article cited here multiple times made a point that men didn't push out women out of other high paying fields like law or medicine. If the theory is right, why did it only happen in IT?

</comment><comment><USER22> SlateStarCodex did an in depth cover of this issue at: [http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on- exagger...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated- differences/)

</comment><comment><USER23> I have always wondered: People often point to graphs showing a massive decline in the percentage of women in CS in the 80's. But has anyone seen a graph of the absolute number, not percentages?

If 1 million women were coding, then 100 billion men started coding, those 1M women would still be coders. So there wasn't necessarily a decline. Or maybe there was, and the numbers will reflect that.

I am interested in the actual numbers, not graphs or interpretations. But I've never found a data source, so hopefully someone knows of one.

The whole debate is interesting because there are at least four separate sides: men who don't believe it exists, men who recognize it as a systemic problem, women who believe it's the most important aspect, and women who wish the debate would go away so they can focus on doing good work instead of on doing good work as a woman.

Me, I don't know enough about it. I'm just curious about the numbers over time. And if I have a daughter hopefully I'll think of some crafty way to make programming seem interesting. The one badass female dev I know said she regretted not getting into it from a younger age, so it seems worth fixing.

<comment><USER24> This may be what you're looking for: [https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_349.asp](https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_349.asp)

According to that table, women's bachelor's degrees in computer science:

* were low in the 1970's, about 15% average

* were higher in the 1980's, about 35% average

* declined in the 1990's to about 25-30%

* steadily declined from 27 to 17% in the 2000's

<comment><USER23> Thank you. Perfect. Now I feel like we're in a position to have a productive debate. For example, there was a sharp decline in the rate of bachelor's degrees for women, but not master's degrees. Those remained nearly the same, then declined at the same rate as men's.

It's interesting to see the actual numbers because it clearly shows there is/was a problem. Now, how best to solve it?

One issue with quotas is that the rate of women graduates can't necessarily keep up. It seems like we could use an influx of new students (in addition to the current efforts).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> One of the stars of comptuing, Grace Hopper, rarely mentions her sex.

She talks of inspiring young people, her talks are technical.

I think we are too quick to get wrapped up in identity politics.

</comment><comment><USER26> Just once, I would like to read in one of these articles about an actual non- anonymous woman who could plausibly demonstrate that a.) she had a strong desire to be a software developer, b.) she had developed sufficient skills in a marketable language to be employed as one, and c.) she had made a prolonged effort to find employment as one, and d.) she was unable land a job as a software developer.

Instead, it's always about something that a magazine ad said in 1969, or a teacher who told them that woman couldn't be programmers, or the boys in their school computer club ignored, them, etc. etc.

And the prescriptions, as usual, are that in order to get more woman into software development, that changes must be imposed on men, not woman.

This crap got old a long time ago.

<comment><USER26> The parent of this post has been getting about an equal number of upvotes as downvotes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Such bunk. I spent thousands of hours fighting with computers due to obsession, certainly not because I had some notion that it was important or that it would be considered a good occupation 20 years in the future. I was practically living a double life as a computer bodybuilder, _despite_ the reaction society gave me about it. When I look back over how I got good at computers and programming, I see no reason women could not have done the same thing. Yet most didn't. Why they didn't, I don't know. Sexism could probably stop a woman from being in construction, but not so much programming. Let's stop with these persecution myths.

</comment><comment><USER7> There's a strong correlation between women entering a field and it having low prestige, and men entering a field and it having higher prestige.

Guess which field of ours was considered busywork for women to do until men realized it was going to transform society as we know it.

<comment><USER28> Perhaps, but even if the article is correct, and male programmers in the 1960s did intentionally crowd out women, doesn't that demonstrate what Damore posited when he said women are less assertive and less aggressive, in general? It seems disingenuous for the author of the article to declare Damore "wrong," when studies back up what Damore said, and this article itself suggests those tendencies to be accurate, at least to some degree.

<comment><USER7> James Damore asserted that women are less aggressive than men because of mostly biological factors which is ridiculous if one has ever at all paid attention to the social signals given to women.

Also, why the fuck would we ever stand for our industry to be organized along hierarchies of dominance and aggression? What exactly is the argument here?

<comment><USER28> Had he said psychological differences instead, would you then agree with him? There are differences, which is obvious. So I am curious what you think the root cause of those differences is, and why you're willing to throw out the whole premise, based solely on Damore's understanding of the root cause? Isn't that a bit like denying the sunrise, simply because someone says the sun moves in the sky because it revolves around the Earth?

Please read the links I offered in another response in this thread for more information.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> How advertising of computers was made had an important accelerating effect towards the exclusion of women from the industry.

[https://qz.com/911737/silicon-valleys-gender-gap-is-the- resu...](https://qz.com/911737/silicon-valleys-gender-gap-is-the-result-of- computer-game-marketing-20-years-ago/)

<comment><USER29> Thanks for the down-vote.

More on this, computer were expensive toys, and traditionally boys get more expensive toys than girls. It's quite understandable the marketing decision there.

[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/dec/06/gender.christm...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/dec/06/gender.christmas)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is an important and well-written article that succinctly exposes the history and mechanisms of sexism in the industry. How once software became a valued profession a complex of obstacles at the cultural and professional level were put in place to change its composition from primarily women to men.

It is also a damning indictment of the HN community. It is clear this post has suffered a campaign of down voting. Every comment that is positive toward the article, even just summarizing its content, has been downvoted. By the time I finished reading it it had disappeared off the front page entirely.

Meanwhile, many of the comments merely state anecdotal experiences and armchair theories reinforcing why men end up dominating the field, while entirely ignoring the content of the article.

There are clearly some high-karma men aggressively censoring this topic. I hope this article makes it back onto the front page because it's really worth a read by our whole community -- even if you disagree.

<comment><USER26> _> It is also a damning indictment of the HN community. It is clear this post has suffered a campaign of down voting. Every comment that is positive toward the article, even just summarizing its content, has been downvoted. By the time I finished reading it it had disappeared off the front page entirely._

I don't know for sure, obviously, but based on the patterns I've casually observed on HN in the past, I suspect this article was flagged not because it promotes a male-blaming POV, but because the anti-male-blaming types seem to be winning the arguments in the comments.

And on topics as polarizing as this one, I suspect that every comment, on either side, gets some number of downvotes and upvotes. It's the countering effect of the upvotes that keep them from getting killed.

Personally, I upvote a lot more than I downvote, and I routinely upvote posts I disagree with if it appears they were made in good faith and some thought was put into them, but are nonetheless suffering a lot of downvotes.</comment></comment>


A Professor Who Was Right About Index Funds All Along - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-22/the-professor-who-was-right-about-index-funds-all-along <comment><USER2> I'm a big believer in index funds and have been putting my money into them for a long time. But... you have to wonder where this is all ending up as more and more people move to passive index funds. The power of the market is based on millions of individual opinions on the price of a company's stock. On average, over time, these collective opinions will be correct. But say in the extreme case, it got to the point where _all_ funds were invested passively, we'd lose this pricing mechanism. Individual stock prices would not reflect the true value of a company. Instead, the price of each company's stock, healthy and sick alike, would just rise and fall in synch with the market as a whole. But then perhaps this would be self-correcting as sophisticated investors would notice the pricing errors, create managed funds and the cycle would start anew...

<comment><USER3> Warren Buffett says it's OK, and has an excellent explanation for this. If I recall correctly: imagine you take all the investors in the US economy and put them in a room. Divide the room in halves. One side contains all the active investors, the other side contains all the passive investors. If each side owns roughly half of the economy, their returns will be equal. In that case, it's better to sit on the side with the lower fees... so one should naturally sit on the passive side.

Setting Warren Buffett aside, what you neglect to mention is that the stock market is both a primary and secondary capital market. We can speculate about how to speculate... whether to be passive or active... but this concerns only the functionality of the secondary market. There's still primary market functionality: companies issue stock to raise capital, buyback stock, and issue dividends. Thus, even if all the investors are passive, there's still always one active agent in the game: the company itself. And a capitalization- weighted index is ideally suited for this activity: it automatically shifts capital away from companies buying back stock (essentially, companies returning money to investors) to those issuing new stock (essentially, companies seeking to raise capital).

<comment><USER4> Buffett is close to winning a $1 million, 10-year bet he made with the head of the hedge fund Protege Partners.

The bet was simple. Buffett would invest in a Vanguard S&P 500 index fund, and the hedge fund could do anything they wanted.

[http://fortune.com/2016/05/11/warren-buffett-hedge-fund- bet/](http://fortune.com/2016/05/11/warren-buffett-hedge-fund-bet/)

[http://www.npr.org/2016/03/10/469897691/armed-with-an- index-...](http://www.npr.org/2016/03/10/469897691/armed-with-an-index-fund- warren-buffett-is-on-track-to-win-hedge-fund-bet)

<comment><USER5> The irony of course is that Buffett became one of the world's richest people by being an active investor.

<comment><USER6> Precisely by being an investor in the old sense, the sense of being a _businessman_ who allocates capital. He buys entire companies based on his analysis of their financials and management, and then operates them as businesses. He tries to take stakes in companies in deals where he holds an advantage, such as his Goldman Sachs investment. I don't consider him a stock picker, he's a very shrewd businessman.

<comment><USER7> He's absolutely a stock picker, not a businessman. That's the definition of value investing, which is his self proclaimed mode of investment. He looks for undervalued (by the stockmarket) companies with good cash flow, competent management, room to grow, etc. and waits until the market price catches up to his expectations. Meanwhile, he leaves the management alone to do their best work while reinvesting the cash flow (from dividends) into other undervalued companies. Most financial institutions were probably undervalued after the 2008 collapse so if Buffet saw an undervalued cash flow positive business, that's why he invested.

<comment><USER8> Berkshire Hathaway is more involved and hands on than mutual funds. They don't really micromanage, but they do at least a little bit of basic management.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Being lucky doesn't explain the existence of Renaissance Technologies[1], one of the very first quant fund companies, which has averaged a 71.8% annual return from 1994 through mid-2014. In fact, "the fund's worst year was a 21 percent gain, after subtracting fees". Of course, it's very much of an outlier — just like Facebook / Google / Uber, if we retrospectively see startup funding and hedge fund investing.

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

<comment><USER10> Luck can be the actual explanation.

By the law of the large numbers, some funds will be a success for quite some time. Just as some people do win the lottery.

I don't think it's surprising that a couple of funds have a great track history even if the game is just pure luck.

<comment><USER11> How do you distinguish between pure luck and actual skills?

<comment><USER12> I believe his point is that you can't, because "actual skills" need not exist. It might ALL be luck, and outliers will exist. And, their existence doesn't prove anything about luck or the lack of it.

<comment><USER13> Conversely, if the difference between luck and skill is unknowable, everyone who wins might be skillful. As you said, the existence of winners is not revelatory about the existence of skill.

Related: one can be highly skilled and still lose to someone who is highly lucky.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> As someone who's been at hedge funds for over a decade, I often wonder what I'd do if I just had ordinary access to the markets.

First of all, I have to ask why the equity market should be your benchmark. And if it's because you think the market generally goes up (not obvious) why don't you just get leverage on your ETF, so that you basically always beat the market?

There's another way to beat the market. Smart beta products do variations of it, but here's a concrete one. Basically my brother had some class about markets and needed something fast, so I just told him to take the S&P 500, lop off the top 25% of stocks measured by beta, and scale up the rest. Ta-da. You'll probably find costs are high, and there's a bunch of admin, but I suspect there's now a bunch of smart beta ETFs that do the same thing.

As for the EMH, I doubt that it's true. The problem for ordinary people is you won't be allowed to invest in strategies that are very good.

It makes sense for people on the inside: suppose I have a strategy, with a Sharpe > 5, that uses very little capital. What am I going to do with that? Get investors? No, I'll borrow money and take the profits myself.

What does that leave? A bunch of strategies with much less attractive risk profiles. If I have a Sharpe of around 1, I'm expecting long flat periods. I'll have to get investors for that. But investors are fickle. One bad year and they flee, even though you should have one every few years. You could easily have a couple of losing years with that kind of Sharpe. So what do we find with that type of shop? They're made of marketing. Box-checker salespeople who know what to say to institutional investors. IIs who buy IBM. Or are quick to jump the gun. /rant

</comment><comment><USER15> Disclaimer (since it's buried in the middle): Burton Malkiel is CIO at Wealthfront, one of the most popular robo-advisors.

</comment><comment><USER16> It would be interesting to have a fund which was mostly an index fund, but avoided "losers" based on simple criteria. Picking overpriced losers is easier than picking winners. (I did that for the first dot-com boom, at "downside.com".) That's a concept worth testing against historical data.

<comment><USER14> That's what smart beta does. You take an index and rejig it slightly to eke out a somewhat better return.

<comment><USER17> It doesn't work though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I recommend Weathfront and Betterment to all my less mathematically inclined friends. However, if you spend only a few hours getting acquainted with asset allocation and rebalancing principles, you can do pretty everything that these services do without their fees.

<comment><USER19> And what do you recommend for your mathematically inclined friends? Any books you recommend for asset allocation and rebalancing principles?

<comment><USER20> None, just put your money in an S&P 500 fund. I doubt you will be able to beat that in the long run anywhere else (Even though there are flaws w/ how the S&P 500 is run now [1]).

[1] [http://www.joshuakennon.com/sp-500s-dirty-little- secret/](http://www.joshuakennon.com/sp-500s-dirty-little-secret/)

<comment><USER18> You can do better by diversifying more. By picking asset classes with a low correlation, you can reduce risk while increasing return. Hence, you can eek our more from a simple mix of say:

60% US 30% Int'l 6% REITs 4% Gold

All of this can be bought with low cost mutual funds.

[http://thismatter.com/money/investments/portfolios.htm](http://thismatter.com/money/investments/portfolios.htm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Yeah, that is all fine a few decades back. But today we are experiencing huge bubbles caused by central banks.

Stocks are hyper-inflated by QE and near-zero rates. When all that stops it will pop violently. And sooner or later, they will have to stop. This affects bonds even more, of course.

</comment><comment><USER22> For Canadians interested in learning about index-based investing I recommend the Canadian Couch Potato site[0]. If you don't want to put a lot of thought into it he has some sample portfolios, but also has a lot of resources for learning more. He's also very good about answering questions in the comments on his posts.

[0] [http://canadiancouchpotato.com/](http://canadiancouchpotato.com/)

</comment><comment><USER23> Me, I don't even believe in funds. If managers are not better than blindfolded monkeys, why should we even pay them? Just buy diversified stocks, and never sell unless you need cash.

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

<comment><USER18> As some of those stocks grow and some shrink, you'll end up overweighted in certain categories and no longer diversified.

<comment><USER23> That's negligible, imho.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is good advice. Despite the financial crisis of 2008, the S&P 500 is still up 80% since 2005 after dividends

</comment><comment><USER25> I love articles like this. I get so frustrated when I see colleagues hire a financial advisor that sells them a "managed portfolio" that is on-par with it's market comparable index and/or sell them on products like annuities that make no financial sense whatsoever. And they charge 1%-1.5% of assets under management which can be 10x what something like Vanguard would charge you.

Personally, I use Betterment (a competitor to WealthFront) simply becasue I can set a target asset allocation, and they will balance my portfolio accordingly. The tax loss harvesting capabilities that both companies offer are really interesting, theoretically, but there is no empirical evidence either way as to whether it actually will save you money in the long-run. Before betterment, I invested in mid-large cap index funds from Vanguard.

</comment><comment><USER26> One you decide to invest in an index fund, what "advice" needs to be automated ?

<comment><USER27> Risk management and asset allocation that matches changes in your personal life and your risk profile.

For example: If you know you need to use $200,000 within next two years, you might want to start moving part of that sum slowly from stock index fund into other less volatile assets (like bonds etc).

You can do that for yourself approximately without knowing about theory, but if there is cheap automated system that can provide personal solution based on portfolio management theory with few bucks, it's can be worth of the small sum they ask.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> > "I can't believe that the great mass of investors are going to be satisfied > with an ultimate goal of just achieving average returns."

Ah, instead he believes he can talk "the vast majority of investors" into believing that they can significantly beat "average returns"? Hmm. Maybe in Lake Wobegon.

IIRC the index fund idea, W. Sharpe's work, etc. DOES need stock pickers also doing their best. Or, for anything with any promise in public a stock market, there has to be some smarts in there someplace. The reason throwing darts works so well is because of the stock pickers with the smarts working hard to buy the winners and sell the losers.

</comment><comment><USER29> A discussion between the father of modern finance, Nobel prize winner Gene Fama, known for the Efficient Markets Hypthesis and his colleague and father of behavioral economics, Richard Thaler, of Chicago Booth, dissecting this question. [http://review.chicagobooth.edu/economics/2016/video/are- mark...](http://review.chicagobooth.edu/economics/2016/video/are-markets- efficient)

</comment><comment><USER30> Returns are used to quantify results, but you can't compare returns between a hedge fund or trading or market making operation - and a retail customer putting away their retirement money. Two entirely different operations at work that result in an overall annual return for each.

In buying a stock, you're buying exposure to a number of factors that affect the stock price: the company, the money flows into/out of that company's industry, and the flows in/out for stock market as a whole. In buying an index you get a more pure exposure to the stock market as a whole. When indexes do well, its only because money is flowing into it from other asset classes (or "money printing" by central banks).

Whether we should accept Efficient market hyposisis as explanation of Indexes beating pros, is a little more complicated. Yes, its true everyone has access to the same information. In fact, it's illegal to trade on insider information.

However, when Indexes beat pros, people are quick to say, 'yep.. Efficient market..', but Indexes have support that the _individual_ stocks or baskets don't have. A pledged support by the Fed to print money to prop it up.

Take Wells Fargo. Maligned in the news, down stock price, but still a powerful bank. Buying the stock - not a irrational decision. But, will the Federal Govt let them go down? They didn't AIG, but who knows. Now imagine the Index crashes, the Fed steps in. Indexes have the advantage here.

<comment><USER31> Why do you say that we can't compare the results of each? Aren't individual stock and index's competing within the same environment (same systemic and unsystemic risk factors)? Difference being that the unsystemic risk is non- existent.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> What surprised me the most about the article was that Mr. Malkiel could still hold an executive position in such a competitive industry (sixth paragraph). I hope at least _some_ of us here are chief-of-something at the age of _84_. :)

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm going to use this as an opportunity to yet again rail against the idea of indexing. It's a good thing in theory, but like most things, when it's taken to extremes, it's horrible.

Passive investments wherein the investor takes zero interest in these investments are and have always been a terrible idea, and nothing in modern history has facilitated this more than index funds. When you give a friend of a friend $10,000 to start a company, do you just hand it over no questions asked and with no follow-up? Or do you try to get engaged with your investment? Make sure the CEO isn't sitting on his ass collecting a paycheck? Scrutinize it for potential frauds?

Well, that's what you do in an index fund. Except it's not even a friend of a friend that you're trusting. It's some group of people who likely live thousands of miles away who may or may not have an opiate or alcohol addiction or are complete sociopaths or are just regular humans who know how to legally take advantage of you when you aren't paying attention.

You want to know why CEO pay is so high? It's because CEOs have no accountability for raising their pay when investors aren't paying attention to what they're doing. You want to know why CEOs are taking short-term action to boost stock prices at the expense of long-term viability? It's because they care about the short, you care about the long, and you have no voice when you're in an index fund. You want to know why CEOs are issuing debt to do stock buybacks? To empire build by paying too much for their competitors? To play accounting games to boost short-term earnings?

Index funds are the tail that's wagging the dog, and they are going to be a disaster. And unlike derivatives, which can mess with stock prices but largely leave the fundamental structure of the company untouched, the dog that's being wagged here is the viability of globally important corporations that we depend on.

They were fine when 5% of the market just piggy backed onto the other passive (though attentive) investors. But now passive and inattentive investors are a massive proportion of the market.

<comment><USER33> I disagree.

For one thing, there are still _plenty_ of active investors around. The fact that the less active investors around, the easier it is for them to make returns, will help the market stable and full of "enough" investors.

It is absurd to worry right now about _not_ having enough finance professionals, considering just how many people are in the market.

In terms of what's best for a single person deciding where to invest money right now, indexing seems to provide the best opportunity. It's clear that most investors will _not_ spend the requisite time tracking companies, nor should they considering the benefit of specialization.

<comment><USER32> I appreciate your opinion, but when I see that companies like JNJ are 67% owned by Mutual Funds and Institutional Investors[1], most of whom are low- cost and inactive, it tells me we've gone too far.

An I am not advocating for more finance professionals. Paying active managers to invest for you can cause the same problems I'm talking about. I'm advocating for personal responsibility and attentiveness.

[1] [http://finance.yahoo.com/quote/JNJ/holders?p=JNJ](http://finance.yahoo.com/quote/JNJ/holders?p=JNJ)

<comment><USER33> Do you really think the average stock owner has the ability or training to asses companies, in their spare time?

Honest question. I'd answer no, considering that even trained professionals aren't so amazing at it.

<comment><USER34> I think we as hackers can use our abilities to analyze certain companies better than the professionals.

Example 1: track the Google rankings of companies that rely a lot on search engine traffic. see if any have dropped a lot from a major algorithm change (i.e. Demand Media)

Example 2: use the Facebook graph API to do the same for companies that rely a lot on Facebook for traffic.

Example 3: at the end of every month create a profile on weightwatchers.com. Note the user id number. Use this to extrapolate the number of users that signed up every month.

Example 4: track the number of websites that installed a JS script for vendors like Hubspot.

Example 5: every month scrape Ecommerce sites and track the increase % of reviews for major brands.

<comment><USER35> These hacks sound like a full time job. How much will I get paid for that?

<comment><USER34> You can always turn it into a business and sell it to hedge funds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Here is a graph of my personal account which I manage myself vs the S&P 500 index. I am currently beating it with gains on the year of 7.3%, but only thanks to the last couple of strong months. I was deep in the red early on.

[http://imgur.com/a/XHNTZ](http://imgur.com/a/XHNTZ)

<comment><USER37> It's not even a year old.

I'm not sure I get your point. _Many_ active funds beat the S&P 500 over 5 or even 10 years.

</comment></comment><comment> mark-r There's an aspect of self-fulfilling prophecy to this. Higher demand leads to higher prices, and as more money flows into indexes the stocks in those indexes are going to rise relative to the rest of the market. Thus their earnings become harder to beat.

<comment><USER38> Wouldn't that knowledge be accounted for in the individual stock prices?

<comment><USER39> Only if people (and funds) continue to not invest solely in index funds, to which there would be economic incentive, because in the short term, those might perform better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Index fund tracking has become successful because one of the goals of US Government policy is to maintain that things like the S&P 500 continue to go up over time. If they go down people get voted out of office.

So the index funds have the full force of the US Government watching over them. This is why economics is not just some math puzzle but often more about politics and sociology.

<comment><USER41> The goals of the Federal Reserve are "maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates." The real goal, though, is economic growth, and we just happen to believe that those intermediate goals are good at serving long-term economic growth.

The prices of stocks are one of the most forward-looking macroeconomic measures that we have available to us. The better we get at improving long- term economic growth, the higher stock prices will go, other things being equal. So basically, if you have good policy, stock prices should always go up (in real terms). If the Federal Reserve were perfect at preventing recessions and everyone knew it, stock prices would be higher.

While you would probably not want to make stock index growth the target of monetary policy because of Goodhart's Law, it is very reasonable to take it into account as a part of a forecast of how well your policy is working.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Can you put in the title what they were right about? Otherwise it's a clickbait title.

</comment><comment><USER43> Brazilian banks have been offering these for decades. It's astonishing that this could be a novelty in the US.

<comment><USER44> The article mentions the Vanguard 500 Index fund and states that it launched 3 years after 1973. So it's hard to understand what you mean when you call it a novelty in the US.

(without being deeply familiar with the history, I think the Vanguard 500 fund must have been one of the earliest index funds anywhere, if not the very first)

<comment><USER45> It was the first index fund, yep</comment></comment></comment>


Drug dealer: Cops leaned me over 18th floor balcony to get my password - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/04/22/drug-dealer-cops-leaned-me-over-18th-floor-balcony-to-get-my-password/

<comment><AUTHOR> I first caught this on Bruce Schneier's blog:

[https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/04/shaking_someo...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/04/shaking_someone.html)

He points to a great xkcd cartoon:

[https://xkcd.com/538/](https://xkcd.com/538/)

<comment><USER2> I first caught this on Hacker News ;)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9420449](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9420449)

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, boy... :-)</comment></comment></comment>


Homepage redesign of timetracking.im - <AUTHOR> http://timetrackingim.posterous.com/homepage-redesign <comment><USER2> First impression:

\- I think the font choice is unique but a little too distracting.

\- I have no idea why I'd want to give you my IM address, because there's no demo or screenshot of what it provides.

\- TimeTracking.im is way too large.

\- You have unnecessary visual element of the blue background box, which is distracting.

\- .im being red is distracting.

\- Time tracking and timesheets shouldn't be in red unless they are links. I actually tried clicking on them.

\- Since there is no apparent business model, as a technical user (whom you'd be trying to attract), I think you are going to take my IM and start spamming me.</comment>


$300,000 lost salary to start up - would you do it? - <AUTHOR> So I'm a doctor (not just playing one on TV) with the start-up itch that I gotta scratch. As much as I love my job and my patients, I've had this desire to build something, watch it grow, call it my own, and hopefully retire off it!
I have no interest in finding someone to hack for me. I'm in this to challenge myself, learn a ton, and make something great (hopefully).
I majored in EE at a great engineering school, but obviously that was a while back. I can program in C, but don't know the new web-app languages. All of my friends are doctors who majored in biology or some such and have zero programming experience or interest. So I can't talk to anyone I know about this and get a reasonable answer, so I ask you(very smart) people this:
1) A years lost salary is 300k. If you were in my shoes, would you dabble with a start up in your off time and see where it goes, or would you go balls to the wall-take a year off and work full time on it?
2) What language(s) must I master in order to be proficient at web design? What are the best books to start off with? I recently read Getting Real and re-read Knuth's book. I'm reading the SEIA right now, it's a pretty nice easy read. Any other reccs?
Before someone reams me, I didn't just watch the Social Network and develop aspirations of becoming a billionaire at 30! I've been thinking about this for a few months now.
Look forward to hearing your thoughts. <comment><USER2> I would scale down your medical operation bit by bit while spending more time building the skills necessary to launch your start up. Only once you are confident enough of pulling it off, would I work full time on it. Basically, not only you have the risk of your start up being a complete failure but also that you might not be able to pull it off technically. The latter risk can be completely hedged away by my first piece of advice.

<comment><USER3> Yes. Once you've built a few web apps and are confident you can build the one you want to be for your startup you're ready. At that time you should definitely go full-time if you want to maximize your chances of success.

Just don't go full-time until you're not going to be spending the first 6 months learning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Live very simply for a few years while working as a doctor, learning in your free time, and building up a bankroll of funds. If you find that you don't have the motivation to learn, fail, and pivot in your free time, then you probably won't have the motivation to do it full time.

Edit: You could replace 'motivation' with 'ambition' if that reads better to you personally, but they are nearly the same.

<comment><USER4> Also, you could probably learn a lot from Patric (HN user: patio11) about the process of building your own startup while remaining employed. You'll find his blog posts very useful, particularly the way he _thinks_ about identifying problems, and how to solve them.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11>

<http://www.kalzumeus.com>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The chances of you making more money with your startup are pretty low. The chances of you being very stressed out are pretty high.

It makes little sense, what you're planning. You have a steady income now and a good skillset, and you want to throw that away and start something where you have no skills at all? You'll probably fail.

The OBVIOUS choice is simply to spend an hour everyday designing your product. Then hire people to build it for you. You are under no time pressure, as you have already a lot of money.

Think of it like writing a book - would you quit your job to write a book? Just do this in the evenings, if it will work, you will know the right time to quit your job. It will be obvious. But leaving a highly paid job to do something that has a > 90% chance of failing is silly.

Even with > 1 million users a month, it's difficult to make $300.000 a year on the web.

<comment><USER6> Max, I pretty much disagree with everything you said.

1) If he keeps his high paying job he won't have the motivation to work on his startup. That's more likely to lead to failure than jumping in with both feet.

2) Why does he have >90% chance of failure? Who calculated that statistic?

3) Who cares about 1 million users? He doesn't need that. He needs paying customers. He can do very well with 500 customers or less.

4) Why does he have to make $300,000+ to be considered successful? Clearly he isn't happy and isn't driven by money. What's the exchange rate for taking pleasure in your work?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Design it yourself and then outsource the development. You could even hire a full-time developer and keep your job, then give him direction in the evening or on the weekends. Its basic economics problem, do what you're best at and hire out the rest.

With cash you shouldn't have a problem (depending where you are) finding 1 or 2 people with the needed skill set.

I outsourced quite a lot of my development work because I'm better at certain things then others and I wanted to spend my time wisely. Since I've done it before and have a medical background, feel free to email me if you have questions. It's in my profile.

</comment><comment><USER6> I heard a great quote from someone once that said "I don't care how much you make, tell me how much you saved". That's really the key question here. If I made 300k/yr I'd probably have 270k in the bank after a year(neglecting taxes) because I don't have a wife and kids, a big house, or a fancy car to pay off. I could live off that for a while.

What's your situation like?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm still paying off my medical school loans (30k remaining). No kids, Corolla (paid off), rental apt (split with girlfriend). I have savings ~100k liquid and available to me now (much more is invested) and my girlfriend would support me. My annual expenditure (outside loan payments) is ~40k. Without vacations 30k.

<comment><USER8> Seems like you've solved the hardest problem up front. If you had a lifestyle close to your income, and close, committed relations to people who were comfortable with that (and only that) then you'd have some serious negotiating and/or losing to do. But since you're already living economically, and have given yourself plenty of room to maneuver, I'd say you've done well.

If your startup were in the medical field (i.e. one you know well, and in which your background gives your insights the halo of serious credibility) then your positioning is even better.

And if you can get to Working Prototype before quitting your current practice entirely, you should be able to make a very solid decision.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I agree with the others who talk about keeping the day job while developing some ideas.

Are you dead set on a Web startup? I do embedded c in the medical industry. The company I work for now( ~250 Million in sales) was started by a surgeon in 1978.

It might be worth staying in your field, and keeping your eyes open. Then when you find the problem you can fix, leap!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi. Thanks very much for your input. I have indeed fiddled with the idea of working with medical devices. The main problem with starting a medical device firm is the herculean regulations that you have to overcome. Unless you have someone with deep pockets backing you up, it's hard to become the next MedTronic. At least that's my concern - correct me if I'm wrong. I'm still fiddling with my Arduino and coming up with good device ideas, though!

Either way, I feel like doing a web startup would be a good way to learn firsthand bootstrapping entrepreneurship. And the skill sets (programming, rapid iteration, etc.) would be very beneficial in working on a medical device startup down the line. You're right about one thing - problems that need fixing abound in my field. I have a Moleskine with page after page of things that need fixing in the system!

You're in a good industry. Devices, especially non-invasive things, are the new new thing. I wish you well.

<comment><USER9> Well, in that case, my own intuition (and about 99.9 % of pundits) says shoot for the handhelds Get an imac and learn how to program for ipads, in your other set of spare time learn android. Set up a linux server with the database of your choice. After you have all that set up and mastered....at least a few weeks :) start spitting out services for your doctor friends.

As an aside, I have friends in the embedded arena who get backed by doctors looking to invest some spare pocket cash. I think once you get hacking, your friends will bug you to let them in on it.

Most important, Have fun!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This really comes down to two things: 1) How much income do you need to cover your yearly living expenses? and 2) How easy would it be for you to go back to earning 300K/year if you were to take the time off for your startup?

I'm sure you've seen all of the figures about compound interest. Were you to invest even $30,000/year for the next 10 years, you could easily retire a multi-millionaire without hardly noticing the reduction in your standard of living.

Retirement aside, I would suggest that you pay off all of the bills you possibly can first. That way, you won't have the same sort of pressure on you to produce from your startup you otherwise would face. Good luck with this venture!

</comment><comment><USER11> Scale back your practice, and dabble in web programming. You may realize you don't enjoy it, and would rather hire someone to do it.

Give yourself 6 months of dabbling, then reevaluate market conditions, & lifestyle conditions before jummping in.

Keep in mind that Ben Bernanke is turning off the taps in June, and the markets may drop. And who knows how the global economy will react once its fix of cheap USD is gone.

Web 2.0 is in a bubble. The fact that a doctor wants to get in on it is a signal that the bubble may have reached its apex. So wait 6 months, and see if it pops. If it does, and you still want to proceed, you can hire developers on the cheap.

</comment><comment><USER12> I agree with what most other people have said here about doing it in your spare time and then going in full time when you know what you're doing. Give full time effort when the business requires your full time effort, there's no point in doing it full time when you have no users and no application to support.

Books I recommend: Rework, Lucky or Smart, The Art of the Start

Languages: HTML, CSS, and Javascript are a must (jQuery is a great JS library to use). I recommend Python and Django for the server side, though what ever language you choose you should use an MVC framework (Django, Rails, CakePHP).

</comment><comment><USER13> a) how much do you have saved?

b) what knowledge do you have outside C i.e. Database? Can you model an app?

c) How many years are you willing to put aside for this? At least 2 would be typical, before you give up, but quite often it's more - say 4? Doctors often have loans to pay off, but after that I find they live very comfortable lifestyles - are you ready to go back to living on beans on toast, pot noodles, and other crap?

d) have you shown your idea to someone else?

e) have you tried to get a prototype built (think £20k, USD 40K) for 2 devs couple of months in RoR.

f) learn Ruby on Rails....make the prototype yourself.

/end of random thoughts.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thank you all so very much for your comments! You're giving me a lot of insight into the process and the many positive/negative factors I should be thinking about - this is absolutely perfect!

</comment><comment><USER14> A member states in this post (linked below) that he is a former nephrologist. You might check his posting history. Somewhere here, he talks about how and why he left medicine to be a full-time hacker (or at least run a website and make money from it). And, actually, a reply to a reply to that post has a link to where he talks about it. :-)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1925983>

Good luck with this.

</comment><comment><USER15> First you should come up with a good idea, from looking at your initial post it looks like you don't have an actual idea. Than hire programmers or outsource your development work. Without completely quitting your practice.

Just curious, how many years did you spend completing your education? A medical doctor with an electrical engineering degree is quite rare.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm toying around with a few ideas, but you're intuition is mostly right. The problem is that I don't know which of them are realistic in terms of programmability (hence my desire to really learn web-dev languages). I've only discovered this site 2 days ago, but I've already read a few posts saying you can't find strong programmers who'll just implement your idea and let you take the credit/bacon, which I can understand.

I went through 4 years of college (majoring in EE), worked 1 year as an EE, switched tracks and went to medical school(4 years), then finished 4 years of residency. I've been out practicing for a bit more than 1 year now. Everyone who wants to go to medical school has to have a college degree in something - mine happens to be in EE! Thanks for your input, much appreciated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Just start when you feel ready. As for web-app languages, either pick Ruby and use Rails or Python and used Django. There are pros and cons to each, I just happen to use Django because I like Python better. You could also use the Google App Engine with Java or Python and you could eliminate you need for a Sysadmin.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi. Thanks for your input. I've heard great things about Ruby. It's next on my list, for sure. I'm working my way through SEIA right now and learning Perl (re-learning? It's so similar to C!) I'll look into Python as well. I've heard of more web apps being built on Ruby/rails, but you guys know better than I do. Thanks again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm looking for just 4,500 Euro to finish / launch this. It's got some impressive technology running underneath.. Any ideas where do I look for the money? These are really just to finish off the prototype and launch. (jparicka(at)gmail.com) Thanks!!

<comment><USER17> Of course, the link <http://alpha.beepl.com:8889>

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Only if I have 100x that amount saved. Do doctors have part time status?

</comment><comment><USER19> it is very unlikely that you will be able to successfully start something that is outside of your area of expertise and the opportunity cost of failure is quite high for you. Instead, I would recommend thinking about what tools and/or applications would help you a lot in what you are doing now and if you think you came up with a good idea, either try to mock it up yourself or look for a partner/co-founder who can create a working prototype for you, or just hire a contractor to do it. None of this requires quitting your job, just the opposite

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, thanks for your input. This is definitely one of my fears...there are a lot of very talented programmers who do this for a living, who're ahead of me in every respect. You're correct that I'm outside of my area of expertise - it's one of the things I'll need to address honestly before I do somethign like this.</comment></comment>


KLEKTD: Super Simple Social Bookmarking - <AUTHOR> http://klektd.com

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been working on this in my spare time for a while now. I built it to scratch an itch I was having with keeping track of things I'd come across online. I wanted something that could; track links in one click, give me visual references of all the stuff I had collected, archive the page as it was when I viewed it and give me ranked full text search across all my stuff. It's pretty beta at the moment so I'm very open to constructive feedback.</comment>


The Palm Pre syncs with iTunes - <AUTHOR> http://apple20.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/05/28/scooplet-the-palm-pre-syncs-with-itunes/ <comment><USER2> A lot of mp3 players sync with iTunes. There are a lot of exciting things about the Pre, this isn't one.

<comment><USER3> Which ones? This is the first I've heard of iTunes being used with anything but an iPod or iPhone.</comment></comment>


What to Expect When Curiosity Starts Snapping Pictures - <AUTHOR> http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/news/msl20120803.html

<comment><USER2> They should put a terabyte of solid storage on the orbiter(s) and just have it send stuff from the surface non-stop and then stream back to earth so there's zero downtime in the signals...

But I guess once you've seen a mars rock in highdef, for the untrained they are all mostly the same... interest will be sadly waining after a month.

</comment><comment><USER3> So...only the Hazard Cameras are active, the rest are closed until Curiosity is finished with self-tests?

<comment><USER4> There is a picture from the MAHLI:

<http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/images/?ImageID=4282>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> the best camera is the one you have with you</comment>