Reflections on Stress and Long Hours on Wall Street - <AUTHOR> http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/06/02/business/dealbook/reflections-on-stress-and-long-hours-on-wall-street.html <comment><USER2> The part that I totally don't grok about big name consulting companies, or Wall Street, is how people there are able to get any work done while sleeping 3-4 hours a night for months at a time.

Most will agree that you need a continuous stream of good nights of sleep if you're doing any kind of work that requires creative thought, ability to associate concepts from different domains, thinking about problems from different angles etc. Sure, you can miss sleep once or twice here and there, and you can still get away with doing menial repetitive tasks, but even those are going to be a bit of a struggle.

In software, we clearly understand that people who continuously work 14 hour days are not actually producing 14 hours worth of clear-headed work. In fact, once you factor in the damage generated by the low quality of deliverables, they might be producing far less than even 8 hours of work. As an industry we've done decades of deathmarches, and we mostly know that those things don't really work. Has this realization not hit the rest of the work world, or are we as developers simply wimpier than other professions?

How does this work in the Wall Street world? Is the idea that it doesn't matter how good your work is, as long as you show martyr-level dedication to the company? Or, are these people superhuman, and are they able to do 14 hours worth of quality work every day for ever? In which case, can I have whatever they're having?

I'd really love to understand this.

<comment><USER3> Anecdotal evidence of course:

It's mindless work, mostly. There's little creative work. And you're pumped up on adrenalin.

I spent 2 months in consulting. Here's a sample.

We slept on average 2-4 hours a night. We traded off eating in the morning vs an extra half hour's sleep - after about two weeks, I yielded and did like everybody else (no breakfast, even though the buffet was sumptuous including home pickled herrings I still dream about). The partners/EMs would meet with the client and then tell us the 400 slides that needed to be produced for next week's board meeting, and sometimes fleshed them out. We then put together the slides, and did whatever BS research needed to be done to justify the numbers (quick Google, hit a database, or - before my time - systematic interviewing of 300 people to create the data necessary, yes, the consultants did the interviewing!). An EM put it to me like this: "Are we 20x as expensive as their in-house talent, certainly; but we'll get it done 10x faster, and without any visual mistakes, and that's all they care about."

I took a weekend (yes, "took" a weekend, because we were supposed to work every day, although we could come in at 10am on Sunday to catch up on sleep) to see an opera in Italy. The train did not have mobile reception. I discovered upon arriving in Verona that I had to produce 50 slides - each with 4 graphs I had to calculate - in 6 hours. I did them, emailed them, went to the opera, had an excellent roast beef with Amarone, got drunk on negronis, came to the hotel to find more work. I passed out on the bed from exhaustion and set about doing it on the train back to Zurich (unrelated factoid: on the train to Italy, Italian customs walked through the train and interrogated the only black guy in the wagon).

One of the team members cracked and overslept by one hour one day instead of turning up for the morning cab to the client. She was mocked about it for a month. We ate sandwiches from a vending machine in the client's corridor. Our EM threw a fit once because McKinsey had booked out one of the 5* hotels in town, BCG the other (both working for the same client as us, funnily enough) and we were stuck with the Ibis Hotel. I didn't understand the swearing in German but I still remember the sound of "Ibis Hotel" fired in anger. I thought it was funny, personally I didn't care, Ibis hotel or luxury palace, it's still a bed and a warm powershower, and I can't have breakfast anyway.

Everybody got extremely depressed once when one of the partners went home at 7pm right after posting a Facebook status update along the lines of "Damn, still at work :( :(". Our return taxi (S-class of course) was booked for something like 2-3am...

I made around 2k/month from my food allowance alone because I ate sandwiches and it was no questions asked cash. We had steak delivery to change us from the vending machine sandwiches, but couldn't enjoy it. Ate the steak in front of the laptop. The hotels and limos were awesome, but what is the point of a balcony the size of a small swimming pool if you never see the sun, and what is the point of a 2m long jacuzzi if you don't have time to take a bath? Some people stopped ironing their shirts to get more sleep, I tried to use room service or my own iron and starch because I foolishly thought I had a career to manage (the EMs didn't care, it's not like us junior folks were client facing).

The lack of sleep was physically painful. By the third night all your body would ache, your eyes would ache from behind, headaches were constant, you were in zombie mode. It sucked but you just saddled up and kept going because everybody else did. Visual perfectionism was constant - I was told off for being 5 minutes late to a cab pickup, and for misaligning an object on a slide by a millimetre. After this, you just stress yourself into double checking your work, all the time, sometimes triple checking, even though it's just as painful. You also eat more from stress, so put on weight. One EM put on enough weight in a month to crack his suit trousers, and went to the supermarket during lunch to buy a couple new pairs.

So yeah, productivity takes a hit, but the sheer amount of hours and generally, the type of people who get into these firms (overachieving, slightly hyperactive, energetic, driven) are more productive per hour on this type of work.

At the end of the case, about half the team quit. Aforementioned lady went to the Kennedy School in Harvard and works for the Brasilian government or something. I joined a trading company. The EM moved to Australia to work on miners' strategy, the other EM to Saudi doing more consulting, but with different working conditions (apparently they get weekend business class flights to anywhere in the world no questions asked in that office).

A few months later, I read in the paper that the client had been acquired by a large foreign group. I thought back about what we were actually doing, and I realized there had been three groups: the management, the board and the shareholders. We worked for the management since they had the power to hire us for more cases. We justified their bad decisions to the board, who themselves had to cover their own behinds enough to be able to pretend they did their work to the shareholders. The company's loss in value over two years was a direct result of a bad strategic decision by management which handed over the market to the one direct competitor. The board was also at fault for not thinking about the stupidity of the one decision in question. In my mind at least.

I'm told it's not always like this, that sometimes you're sent to Sydney with a $40k/month expense account and 9-5 "strategy level" work, that after the financial crisis belts were tightened etc. Hell I had drinks in the Sydney Sheraton spa with a McKinsey buddy recently who was doing just that. Nevertheless I'm not going back to this industry any time soon, it's just not worth it when it's not your equity.

Trading was a different type of intensity. After a particularly active day, even though I had worked only from 9am til around 4.30pm (no lunch, no time), I passed out on the train home. Here, a mistake didn't cost you just a bollocking, it cost the company thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars (millions were usually gains, after the other side made a mistake, we were careful). I was a lot more conscientious than my predecessor and only made three mistake in thousands of trades, saving the company a lot of money just by doing my job properly on the execution side; I think my biggest execution mistake lost us $30,000 on $10m so not too bad. Initially, I took the habit from consulting over and had dinner at the office, reheating supermarket dishes in the microwave; but the office was empty after 6pm which was a big realization, that these people made a lot more money and were a lot happier than "us consultants" whilst working less. I guess that's when what you say above about quality vs quantity hit me.

What was motivation? Well, consulting firms sell you the idea that you'll be at the top of the world if only you stick it out long enough, part of the elite that you presumably aren't yet (even if born there). I think banks are similar. (I later read Richistan, linked it with observations, and realized this "elite" was really just the lowest rung, the "employee" layer in the multi layered world of wealth; that these employees, if unable to ignore it, generally get pretty depressed about being in contact with the upper layers all the time; that wealth is really a relative, not absolute thing, above having enough to eat and sleep and send your kids to school.)

Ego is a big thing. A lot of consultants/bankers think themselves more hardcore, smarter, better somehow than the plebs (a lot of them are mercenaries, understand the game and go through the motion for the paycheck). You'd hear people introducing others as "it's so and so, he's from GS IBD" and a wave of relief would go over your body as you would think "ok, that's one of us, I can trust he understands, I can really talk to him". Even today, when I tell finance people I was in finance and talk about markets, they relax and get a lot more open. It's funny because that's rarely the case with developers.

Money is another, not the money right now but the promise of big bucks if only (again) you stick it out for a few more years. The high drop out rate is a function of realizing that either you won't make it, or that no money is worth it, or - in fewer cases - that someone with the level of talent/intelligence/drive these companies select for can actually make a lot more money/achievement/impact somewhere where you're not working for someone else. Or you realize that you're living someone else's dream (perhaps one fabricated by careful PR from the firms in question, and peer pressure) and you go on to live your own life.

The funny thing is that entrepreneurs are very respected amongst consultants and bankers despite making - on average - a lot less money and having a lower net worth. Stick it out til private equity or hedge funds and you'll have a shot at billions which is much rarer in startup land. Yes, but those billions have someone else's name on them, and that ultimately makes all the difference in the status pissing contest. YMMV.

I have a feeling this comment is going to come bite me back some time in the future :P

<comment><USER4> Very interesting writeup, I appreciate you taking the time!

Can I ask what exactly got you into this life? Was it just the drive to make big money and be one of the "elites"? Family pressure?

<comment><USER5> I went to Oxford as well. There's a sort of soft sell there at recruitment season: It's heavily implied that the most successful people go into Banking and Consulting. They don't say it out loud, it's just what everyone concludes after seeing all the PR.

I caught up with a friend who did the same engineering course. He's in private equity, like many of our classmates. We talked about this one girl who decided to actually go into engineering. She joined a company called SpaceX as an early employee back in the days after uni. How we wish we'd done that.

<comment><USER3> I don't know if it's the same for you Oxonians but my colleagues who headed for consulting/banking straight after graduation are often retraining to go into engineering, and many of the engineers are now heading towards consulting! I guess the grass is always greener on the other side. The engineers want money and status, the consultants want meaning and a healthier life.

Although SpaceX is pretty awesome. I wanted to apply to Lockheed, Northrop and anybody else involved in aviation and space (reading about the X-37B these days, I still get that pulse of excitement), but unfortunately, they needed US citizens. Many of my neighbours ended up working for the various F1 teams. I worked briefly for Schlumberger's research centre in Cambridge which was, in hindsight, awesome. A massive, airy site, loads of expensive toys, really cool fun "engineer types" complete with thick beard, and an awesome French-run canteen including traditional Thursday leg roasts. What academia should be like! I got to chop stuff and make high tech toys and test them with not an MBA in sight.

edit - and the most academically successful people almost all went on to MIT to do a PhD. No idea why. Something about that place.

<comment><USER5> Well, funnily enough I seem to be going that way. I know an awful lot about the financial side of things (Options, derivatives, etc), but I'm more and more drawn towards technological things such as latency minimization and smart execution.

I think the real problem is pay. I got offered £11K/pa for an internship in engineering out in the middle of nowhere. I ended up taking an internship in marketing for 15. My friend at Goldman got 37.

<comment><USER3> To be fair unskilled new grads - in any subject, from any university - aren't worth much. Even the banks basically take a bet on which 20 of the 200 of the intake will survive and absorb enough knowledge to produce value (basically a bunch of cheap OTM calls). The first few years of experience determine a lot of things because they allow you to gain the competency and experience you can then sell as useful work (and thus decent coin).

The prof that sent me to India called me to his office on my last week, and showed me Legionnaire by Murray which he was reading. Told me it was an interesting read and I should check it out, so I did. The gist of Murray's advice was that you don't need to follow the tracks of the set career path to do well in life; in his case, he went soldiering aged 17 in Algeria at the worst period of the bloodiest colonial war the French ever waged, in the unit specifically set up to do the dirty work, and that was his "higher education". He then went off to Hong Kong and somehow rose to run a bank there, and through a bunch of international adventures is now chairman of Glencore. I don't know what the standard is for saying someone led an interesting life but he certainly qualifies.

I think the prof's point was to go and take some risks and go east young man and live a richer life, which I more or less ended up doing, but I'm not chairman of Glencore, not even a Hong Kong bank director, so don't know whether my judgement that it was worth it really is worth much.

<comment><USER5> And how many top managers these days don't have an MBA? There's a sense that jobs used to be somewhat open-skilled, in that everyone could just sit down and learn them. That's still the case, but nowadays you need paper to prove it.

The exception is in new business areas, which is why they are probably also the most interesting for career travellers. Anything that has shortages needs to entertain applications from people without credentials.

The economy is also not growing at a fantastic rate compared to earlier times, and the job market even less so.

<comment><USER3> Almost none of the trading heads had an MBA. Even within the traditional management, few of the ex-consultants had one. And yet the business is one of the oldest ones in the world. The key is that the main requirement for moving up was the value created for the firm (which was and still is privately held, mostly between the founding family and the head traders); this did not seem to correlate with having an MBA, but the firm culture was to grow talent rather than hire outsiders.

I've seen businesses where MBAs hire more of themselves "at competitive salaries" and nobody actually has any hard skills. Those have very negative cash flow, but also are very good at raising more money to match it. Not a fan of the degree, but maybe I just saw the bottom of the barrel.

<comment><USER5> Actually where I started the partners were mostly school leavers who'd worked their way up from (literally) running around with bits of paper. Some of those guys are roughly in their late 40s-50s, running some big desks around the City.

But they don't seem to hire anyone without a degree anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> And the pressure is more intense on middle class Indians (most of whom come here for a Bachelors or Masters) and are on a H1-B. The H1-B is basically corporate enslavement and add to that the sadistic societal structure of Indian culture, you have a perfect recipe where young professionals are caught in-between the devil and the deep blue sea: Either work your ass off (I used to work 80+ hrs) to please your manager (most of the time without any recognition) or say FU and head back to India to face the shameful wrath of both your parents and relatives (you're a failure now. You couldn't make it unlike Mr. Rahul's son who is now a manager).

<comment><USER7> I am kind of conflicted by this message.

So I sympathize with the situation you were in, I was on an H1B for three months during which my company went through layoffs. It was kind of ridiculous in that the layoffs were on a Monday and my Green Card interview as on the following Friday. The amount of stress I went through was intense. Despite now knowing that I would probably have gotten atleast 2 weeks of a paid holiday which would have ensured that the green card would have gone through.

And I can see some unethical managers exploiting that situation. However, I have worked around people of all different origins, immigrant, Indian born and culturally Indian, I want to say that it really is a function of your personality and the job situation you are in. My current company has quite a few Indians (born and bred) who work normal 9-5 hours while being on an H1B.

Ironically enough I work more insane hours these days. Not cause I particularly am in fear of my job. Because I have finally found that niche that I am good at. And I am in a hurry to achieve some life goals.

I am of Indian origin, born and grew up in Africa. I have gone to India and witnessed first hand all the bullshit rigmarole that goes around in enforcing a cult-like structure. I also refused to accept that as my choice in life and left. I do understand how that choice might be harder for someone whose ties are much stronger.

I guess where I am conflicted is this implied message in your comment that it is totally about the societal structure and the corporate enslavement. You always have a choice. i.e. if your individuality matters to you.

<comment><USER6> > I am of Indian origin, born and grew up in Africa.

That makes two of us :-)!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think a lot of these suicides are not actual suicides, but accidents resulting from exhaustion. I used to have a job where I pulled all nighters and worked 48 hours straight some times, and let me tell ya the exhaustion sometimes makes you act like you are drunk. You do not have very good motor control, all of your muscles hurt and you tend to forget obvious things.

I think it is quite possible that the subject of this article simply collapsed and fell over a parapet rather than jump intentionally.

</comment><comment><USER9> >> "But as long as young analysts are expected to work 80 to 100 hours a week, invariably some run the risk of finding themselves in a situation they cannot handle."

Doubly true for medical residents. And far, far more dangerous.

</comment><comment><USER10> I don't really have that much sympathy. All these Wall Street types knew what they were signing up for: obscene hours and tons of pressure in return for obscene compensation.

If we're going to worry about overworked, stressed out people, let's start by caring about poor people stringing together three or four part-time jobs trying to make ends meet with no benefits.

<comment><USER11> I can assure you Mr. Gupta would not have taken the job if he knew it would lead to his suicide. Your comment is obscenely callous, and there is no need for a false dichotomy of which problems we can concern ourselves with. No suicide is unimportant. We can discuss more than one problem at a time.

<comment><USER10> But this article isn't talking about providing better funding for mental health services in the US, or lessing the stigma on seeking help for mental health problems, or changing America's success-at-all-costs culture. Instead, this article is narrowly focused on the question of improving working conditions for some of the wealthiest, most privileged workers anywhere in world.

<comment><USER12> I'm not sure its ok to abuse anyone, not even wealth-seekers. The stories are horrific.

<comment><USER10> They should quit, then. It sounds like this poor guy did quit, but then inexplicably went back. At any rate, these are highly educated, competitive people. They would easily be employable in any number of other industries, anywhere in the world.

I'd give the same advice to software engineers. If you're being taken advantage of, leave.

<comment><USER13> I think that he inexplicably went back shows how hard it is to quit. They are facing immense pressure from family and management to not quit, and working long hours like that drains them of the mental resources they need to resist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> When I was a young stock analyst (a more senior role than described here, in a different department) in the 1980s, I was regarded as weird because I pulled the occasional all-nighter. But that was a different role in a different era.

The lives of investment banking analyst types indeed sound pretty awful. It's one of those careers that nobody would possibly pursue except in the hope of making money. I'd say that's a bad characteristic for a job to have, but of course the large majority of the working population does just that, albeit for less money and in most cases fewer hours as well.

</comment><comment><USER15> _> Mr. Gupta, who was universally liked by his colleagues and whom several said was so good at his job that he had become one of the "go-to" analysts._

A friend who is an associate at a big law firm in SV has a similar problem where she is so good at her job that the partners give her the toughest tasks they have on their plates.

It's pretty crappy that your life suffers because you are excellent at your work.

<comment><USER16> If you want something done, give it to a busy person. Or in a slightly longer form, the classic "Letter to Garcia":

[http://www.birdsnest.com/garcia.htm](http://www.birdsnest.com/garcia.htm)

<comment><USER12> Unfortunately, today, he'd probably be laid off in favor of more predictable employees. Perhaps Agile employees doing Pair Programming.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Non-mobile link: [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/02/business/dealbook/reflecti...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/02/business/dealbook/reflections- on-stress-and-long-hours-on-wall-street.html?_r=0)</comment>


Primality Testing Under Adversarial Conditions - <AUTHOR> https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/749 <comment><USER2> The underlying weakness of the Miller-Rabin test has been known for a long time, and yet "just do N rounds of Miller-Rabin" keeps being perpetuated as the folklore solution to probabilistic primality testing. The BPSW test is basically superior in every way: there are no known counterexamples (and there's currently no feasible strategy to construct counterexamples, if any exist), it's as fast as a single Miller-Rabin test for discarding composites, and if I'm not mistaken, it's about as fast as N = 3 Miller-Rabin tests for primes. In other words, doing N = 50 Miller-Rabin rounds instead of just doing a single BPSW test really makes no sense. I'm happy that the authors advocate the BPSW test as a replacement. BPSW is the default pseudoprime test used in Mathematica, Maple and Pari/GP so it's definitely battle-tested too. Perhaps this work will finally prompt widespread change.

<comment><USER3> "Perhaps this work will finally prompt widespread change."

I sure hope so. I've argued this to various languages and libraries for a few years, and mostly they don't really care, other than they've heard of M-R and not of anything else.

One bottleneck I ran into are the "Prove that the probability is smaller" argument. The probability bound for BPSW is actually not very good, but empirically we see that bound is grotesquely conservative. One can always add more random-base M-R tests if desired.

There is also the problem that statistical thinking is hard for people. This comes up with using fixed bases and not grasping that this ruins the "2^-80 probability!" (for example) claim. That only applies to a random input.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If the attacker has access to your prime number generator, how does a recommendation to change anything (like the primality test) in your system help? While interesting this seems like a thin layer of protection. OTOH every small thing is a step in the right direction right?

<comment><USER5> This is primarily for when the other party in a transaction provides you a number that is putatively prime. It was not generated by "your" generator.

<comment><USER4> The other party has access to our communications. Why would they want to use weak encryption?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My favouritely titled paper comes to mind: [https://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/users/manindra/algebra/primality_...](https://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/users/manindra/algebra/primality_v6.pdf)

<comment><USER7> To save everyone a click: "PRIMES is in P"

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Or you could just use ECC instead of RSA and not have to worry about generating primes at all.</comment>


Is there such a thing as Tivo for the internet? - <AUTHOR>

I took 10 screenshots of news websites moments after the failed bailout to see how they reacted.  I wanted to go back get more from other sites but as time went on, they updated and the point was lost.  So, is there anything to rewind the internet like I can do on my Tivo or DVR? <comment><USER2> You could try the Internet Archive (<http://www.archive.org>), but I don't think they take snapshots of websites as frequently as you're looking for.

<comment><USER3> For specific articles, the Google cache is a good place to turn to, to see historical information that might have been removed/changed. Not quite what you're looking for, though.

There are screenshot capturing services out there, too, but again, more intended for one-time use only as opposed to frequently capturing state.</comment></comment>


Apple Plans to Buy $75B More of Its Own Stock - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/30/technology/apple-stock-buyback-quarterly-results.html <comment><USER2> Such a mind-boggling figure. Maybe spend some of that cash on better laptop keyboards, eh?

<comment><USER3> Nah. Think different.</comment></comment>


Now You Can Watch All of the Ray Bradbury Theater Anthology Series Online - <AUTHOR> http://www.tor.com/2016/08/23/watch-the-ray-bradbury-theater-episodes-online/ <comment><AUTHOR> Youtube playlist at [1]

[1] "The Ray Bradbury Theater (Complete In HD)" [ [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZ-I2mQwNX770oKuqj7KN...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZ-I2mQwNX770oKuqj7KNOwuXdGQjJgaM) ]</comment>


Reading On Paper Is Faster Than iBooks on the iPad - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcworld.com/article/200491/reading_on_paper_is_faster_than_ibooks_on_the_ipad.html <comment><USER2> The study was interesting, yet by the author's own words incomplete with only something like 24 participants. Even then, I wasn't clear if each of the 24 read three different stories, one per device, or how the breakdown went.

Also, a sensationalist headline to attract hits, the comparison was among paper, the Kindle and the iPad. Why not "Reading on paper is faster than reading on iPad or Kindle"?

Finally, while the whole study was pretty pointless, reading on the iPad was slightly better than reading on the Kindle but within the margin or error.

</comment><comment><USER3> On the odd occasion I've tried reading a Nook or Kindle I've found myself reading faster and more comfortably than I would on paper -- I think this is just because of the larger print in the eBook.

<comment><USER4> I've found that I read a lot more on my iPhone/iPad/Kindle because they're all more convenient than lugging around paper books and I have one or more of them on me all the time.

I don't find myself reading slower than with paper, but I definitely do find myself reading more in general. That is a _huge_ plus for ebooks in my book.</comment></comment>


Proposal for 4 new HTTP status codes made 'Proposed Standard' by IETF - <AUTHOR> http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-nottingham-http-new-status/?include_text=1

<comment><AUTHOR> For the TLDR crowd, here are the four:

428 Precondition Required; 429 Too Many Requests; 431 Request Header Fields Too Large; 511 Network Authentication Required</comment>


Ransomware at Colorado IT Provider Affects 100 Dental Offices - <AUTHOR> https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/12/ransomware-at-colorado-it-provider-affects-100-dental-offices/ <comment><USER2> What's to say? I mean where to begin? Curious to hear more, maybe about how they get back online after such an incident. 100 offices could be rebuilt in a weekend if you have someone capable at each site.

</comment><comment><USER3> My dentist's firm is still running XP in the clinical rooms. Dunno about the scheduling side.

Hopefully it's all isolated from the internet. Might be.</comment>


How to acoustically snoop typed keystrokes - <AUTHOR> http://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/acoustic-snooping-typed-information

<comment><USER2> Instead of using that technique why not ignore the sound of the keystrokes all together and instead use timing techniques such as those used for snooping passwords for SSH?

You can derive the keys by timing the small differences in the time it takes a finger to reach each key. At least using this data should improve the accuracy of the audio only method.

I wonder if you used two microphones whether you could triangulate the keys?

<comment><USER3> As a fun exercise for the reader, given two microphones X distance apart and a sampling rate of each mic of 8khz, how far apart do the keys need to be to be distinguishable from oneanother in STP.

<comment><USER2> @ 8 Khz ~4 cm, however at 192Khz they'd only need ~1mm. Working backwards from standard key spacing of 19.05 mm you'd need a sampling resolution of ~18Khz.

Because the mics are unidirectional you're looking at two constraints one that the keys all fall within the union of two circles circumcribed on the points defined by the mics (any key outside of that union has infinite solutions) and the sample rate must be greater than speed of sound / keyspace distance.

I think using two mics would actually produce two solutions for each key, so you'd need three mics. You could probably easily eliminate this using a hidden markov model of english character usage.

<comment><USER3> I'm not so sure about the latter part. Could you expound upon that? I'm vagualy familiar with a similar "infinite number of solutions" property with regard to two cameras; however, assuming:

* the keyboard is on a flat plane and,

* all keys are on the same side of the plane that is defined by the line connecting the two microphones and tangent to the plane that the keyboard is on,

shouldn't a well placed couple of microphones have a single solution (within the understood circle of uncertainty from sampling an analog signal)

[edit: clarified my question]

Actually, I think I know why it's not "that simple." All of my mental diagrams assumed you knew the time from key impact to the sound being heard by the first mic. This isn't the case. You only know the time between the first mic's experience of the sound, and the second mic's experience of the sound. Given that, you have a different set of constraints.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Cool. I can't read the paper but I wonder how quiet does the environment has to be for this to work. Does ac noise interfere with this?

Guess that's another reason to use an iPad...

<comment><USER3> Much of that can be filtered out, I'm sure.</comment></comment>


Facebook Re-enables Tag Suggestions Facial-Recognition On By Default - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2013/02/01/facebook-re-enables-tag-suggestions-facial-recognition-feature-in-the-us-on-by-default-for-all/ <comment><USER2> Some people will just NEVER learn.</comment>


Walkaround: Wave on App Engine & New Apache Wave based Collaboration Layer - <AUTHOR> https://code.google.com/p/walkaround/

<comment><AUTHOR> The announcement: [http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-wave- dev/...](http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-wave- dev/201110.mbox/%3CCAJ3PKjm_G4rWUtr6Mfa3hgqbNKYc7+84cR- email@example.com%3E)</comment>


Zoom sued by shareholder after security issues tanked its stock price - <AUTHOR> https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2020/04/08/zoom-sued-by-shareholder-after-security-issues-tanked-its-stock-price/ <comment><USER2> This is really puzzling to me. How did they not see this coming? I watched Zoom's CEO on Jim Cramer's Mad Money. He was not convincing.</comment>


Eager Comprehensions (2003) - <AUTHOR> https://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-42/srfi-42.html <comment><USER2> It is well worth a mention that srfi-42 inspired racket's loops. It is actually a pretty neat looping protocol, and I ended up looking at it quite a lot for inspiration when implementing my own loop facilities.

The reference implementation is pretty cool since it is implemented only using syntax-rules (the standardised high level, strictly hygienic macro facility of scheme). That is a special level of masochism right there, but it is probably also why the reference implementation has to use set! instead of generating pure tail-recursive (and thus continuation safe) code.

I ended up implementing something not unlike racket's for guile scheme [0] using syntax-case. I find that syntax easier to work with and understand, and the code generated is better than srfi-42. In fact it is almost always zero overhead, just like racket's loops.

[0]:[https://bitbucket.org/bjoli/guile-for- loops](https://bitbucket.org/bjoli/guile-for-loops) the readme is not really correct. I now support both pre-checks and lazy loops, but I am cleaning some things up for a first release. The docs are here: [https://koketteriet.se/software/guile-for- loops/docs.html](https://koketteriet.se/software/guile-for-loops/docs.html)

<comment><USER3> Note that it is possible to implement SRFI-42 using `syntax-rules` - the only available macro system in R5RS.

<comment><USER2> That's what I said :)

Come to think of it, a large subset of racket's for loops is possible to implement using syntax rules, but I wouldn't recommend it.</comment></comment></comment>


Differentiable Programming - <AUTHOR> http://edge.org/response-detail/26794 <comment><USER2> This seems to be heavily influenced by (if not outright plagiarized from) this[0], which, needless to say, does a much more thorough job of explaining things.

[0]: [http://colah.github.io/posts/2015-09-NN-Types- FP/](http://colah.github.io/posts/2015-09-NN-Types-FP/)

<comment><USER3> yeah, I got angry halfway reading OP since I remember colah's article.

upvote for visibility and making sure colah gets credit for coming up with the idea first.

colah goes deeper and talks about how it relates to algebraic types from functional programming.

<comment><USER4> I submitted the OP essay with an attribution ("see Chris Olah's blog for a fuller treatment") but it was removed by the editors of Edge before publication (apparently their policy is never to send readers away from Edge). I have asked them to at least re-insert Chris' name and I hope they do so soon.

<comment><USER5> > apparently their policy is never to send readers away from Edge

Holy fucking wow. Do they know what an Internet is?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I previously made a toy VM where a program consisted of a matrix, rows corresponded to instruction slot, and then the values in that row were probabilities for different instructions. This means probability of emitting a specific output is differentiable in the probabilities, which can then be learned.

Didn't get very good results though.

<comment><USER7> There's also [0], which I found to be almost eerie, where someone has tried to use evolutionary programming for an FPGA, with the result that the winning generation exploited the analogue characteristics of the concrete FPGA chip being used (i.e. it did not work on another FPGA chip of identical type).

Maybe I'm a bit peculiar, but this article sent chills down my spine.

[0] [http://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of- circuits/](http://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> So what's up with that differentiable stack? Is that similar to what the Facebook people were doing on learning addition?

<comment><USER4> Here's the differentiable stack/queue/deque paper: [http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.02516](http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.02516)

It is indeed similar to some work from FAIR, where one of the tasks was binary addition: [http://arxiv.org/abs/1503.01007](http://arxiv.org/abs/1503.01007)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Some code on the subject:

[https://github.com/zenna/Arrows.jl](https://github.com/zenna/Arrows.jl) [https://github.com/wojzaremba/algorithm- learning](https://github.com/wojzaremba/algorithm-learning)

</comment><comment><USER10> > This newly dominant approach, originally known as "neural networks," is now > branded "deep learning,"

Is this true? My impression is that "deep learning" is a series of mathematical tricks and design and implementation concepts that get you to solve neural networks of depth greater than 3-4, which becomes mathematically challenging.

<comment><USER11> One other reason machine learning has acquired the "Deep" label was the rise of the computing power. It's not just a bunch of tricks, it's also plain old hardware speed that is driving the revolution.

Also, we now have access to huge datasets to try our algorithms on. Progress in ML depends a lot on the training data that is available.</comment></comment>


How Alaska fixed its earthquake-shattered roads in just days - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/8/18128983/alaska-earthquake-roads-fixed-anchorage-damage <comment><USER2> > "Our asphalt plants were all shut down for the winter," McCarthy says

> But Alaska in late fall is bitterly cold, and frozen asphalt can take a week > or longer to melt into a sticky, pliable material.

> Soon after the earthquake struck, owners of asphalt plants switched on their > heaters. "We were fortunate that they did that." McCarthy says. "By the time > we'd finished the earthworks, the asphalt plants were ready to go."

I wonder if they were called to do so, had instructions that in the case of an earthquake they should, or just did it of their own volition. Either way, it is heartwarming to see the response of Alaska to this issue and the speed at which they acted.</comment>


Tech's Alcohol-Soaked Culture Isn't a Party for Everybody - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/2016/12/techs-alcohol-soaked-culture-isnt-party-everybody/ <comment><USER2> My amateur psychologist take is that start up 'nerds' like the alcohol heavy culture because they were probably excluded from drinking with popular peers at school, and this is their chance to show they really are 'cool'.</comment>


Working in Oxford university - <AUTHOR> Hello,
I am a Sys admin/Devops with over 10 years experience.  At my current job, i am getting good pay and savings, though career wise , it is a hole with no career/professional growth.
I had applied to oxford university and am in final stages of hiring process. Though salary is way less and savings is also less.
With a family of 2 kids , what would you folks suggest? Jump to oxford  or stay put where i am currently and make savings ? <comment><USER2> You only live once. Go to Oxford. It's not like you're going to quit your job and move to an island in the Indian Ocean.</comment>


Social experiment Tjetter, created in 48 hours. - <AUTHOR> http://www.tjetter.com We built this site using off-the-shelf technology in under a day (because we thought it would be fun). Spent another day to add some weird/strange/uncanny features. Now it needs some people to take it for a spin! Comments appreciated. <comment><USER2> I recently went here. It is amusing. Everyone I tried to speak to spoke Dutch. Ik sprek een kliene beetje nederlands, but every conversation went the same: <translated from dutch> S1: hai me: hello S1: A/S/L ? me: 32, male, US <this stranger has left the chatroom>

It reminds me of IRC back in 96. Strangely addicting though, because even though I didnt get any meaningful conversation, I couldnt stop attempting to initiate conversations.</comment>


You don't need to be an asshole to be a great CEO - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/you-dont-need-asshole-great-ceo-andrew-maguire?trk=hp-feed-article-title-publish <comment><USER2> _Leaders often characterized as assholes dominate the headlines: Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Travis Kalanick, the list goes on and on._

He is basing the article on his personal example. Is he saying that he is more successful as a CEO than above-listed people?</comment>


Bank of America trying to load up on patents for the technology behind Bitcoin - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/578974/bank-of-america-is-trying-to-load-up-on-patents-for-the-technology-behind-bitcoin/ <comment><USER2> Fuck Bank of America. $12.00 maintenance fee every month for holding my money? $35.00 overdraft fees? </rant>

I don't understand why they are patenting this stuff, It will never hold up and they will never sue anyone

<comment><USER3> Because 99% of patent litigation never goes to court. An entity like Bank of America can wield an army of lawyers to sue anyone they do not like for bogus patent infringement, and that alone will kill most competition because they do not have the resources to even meet BoA in court for a day. Its what patents are for in the modern economy after all - you get big, you make tons of them that cover everything, and then you sue anyone you don't like until they implode from spending too much time in court and not enough time innovating.

<comment><USER4> I always here about stuff like this going on. What do people mean when they say stuff like "they do not have the resources to even meet BoA in court for a day"? How is spending too much time in court taking away innovating time?

If BofA has 100 lawyers on a case, and you have one lawyer, what kind of advantages does BofA have?

What kind of trouble can they cause that company? How does not having a lot of lawyers make it dangerous?

Seems like in a court room only one lawyers runs the show mostly anyway.

<comment><USER5> >What kind of trouble can they cause that company? How does not having a lot of lawyers make it dangerous?

Big companies have virtually unlimited legal resources. Small companies don't -- lawyer time is very expensive for them. Anecdotally, it seems to cost around $5 million to mount a defense against a big public company in court.

BigCo's lawyers will file every type of complaint, motion, appeal, request, notice, stay and postponement possible in hopes of starving you out. You have to pay your lawyers for all the hours they spend just responding to frivolous and/or repetitious crap, which will end up being in the man-weeks before your first court date. You have to pay your lawyers to do all the pre-trial research, negotiation and strategizing, which costs will end up being in the man-months by the time you get to an actual court.

Once you finally _do_ get to court, BigCo's $1000/hr law firm will mount very aggressive and convoluted legal arguments and attempt to mint new legal theories, because a) it greatly increases the complexity of the case, which means you're more likely to run out of money and concede to their client; b) their client doesn't care how much money the law firm is going to bill them, so the law firm is going to have a heyday and squeeze out every billable hour possible; and c) if the new legal theory _actually works_ by some fluke of luck, both the firm and the attorneys directly involved in the case will get a big boost to their industry starpower. What does all this mean for the little guy that's being brought to court? It means your defense is going to cost you _a lot_ of money.

There's also the possibility that the court will grant an injunction against your behavior while the issue pends, and if that affects the wrong thing, it's possible that your entire revenue stream will be destroyed and you'll either have to pivot on a moment's notice or just give up. Since these cases usually take years to see all the way through, you'll be out of business for quite a while, even if the court ultimately vindicates your position. Small companies can't afford to go without their revenue for years at a time.

For an example, refer to the case of Uzi Nissan, an IT technician who operated a computer repair business under his own name before Datsun rebranded to Nissan Motor. Nissan Motor drug him through an unsuccessful 9 year, $3 million saga to attempt to wrest the domain name from him. At the end of it, Nissan Motor was ordered to reimburse Mr. Nissan only $52k in legal fees, of the over $3 million Mr. Nissan was forced to spend, and Nissan Motor began pursuing a frivolous trademark filing so they could make a second attempt to steal the domain by use of legal force. [0]

Anyway, businesses can't be represented by an entrepreneur in court, they have to be represented by a member of the bar. If you can't afford to regularly refresh a 6-figure retainer as your lawyers fend off the vultures, you're basically SOL. You have to comply, or be sued. If you get sued and proceed without retaining good counsel, it's likely that you'll end up more FUBAR'd than you would've been if you had just complied with whatever the demand was in the first place. Compare _Facebook, Inc. v. Power Ventures, Inc._ , where the entrepreneur had issues keeping counsel on board and ended up being held personally liable for $3 million in damages.

As such, if any big corp is able to identify things they don't like before those things have begun to generate dozens of millions in annual revenues (enough to semi-comfortably fork over $500k-$1m/yr for legal defense), they can pretty successfully sue them out of existence. This happens regularly, you just don't hear about it that often.

[0] [http://www.digest.com/Big_Story.php](http://www.digest.com/Big_Story.php)

<comment><USER6> I agree with all of the above.

Another detail is the 'loser pays' principle[1], which (barely) exist in the US, but is prevalent in almost all other civilized countries.

It's solve purpose is to dampen the effect of frivolous lawsuits, by making the instigator pay for the whole carouse (wasting other peoples time and wasting the legal system's time).

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_rule_(attorney%27s_f...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_rule_\(attorney%27s_fees\))

<comment><USER7> But does it really solve the problem of bullying?

I mean, BigCo sues you. They threaten you they have 100 attorneys they can get off the leash. Even if they're most obviously in the wrongs, you'll have to get somewhat matching manpower to thwart the pressure. And even if you win and BigCo pays for all of the mess, you need a very large sum of money while this isn't over. So, a barrier for justice is still there. (Not to say the only real winning side here are attorneys, because they're practically fed a giant amount of money.)

And then there's a fear of "and what if I lose"...

<comment><USER5> >But does it really solve the problem of bullying?

I think it's a hard problem to reorganize the system to prevent big corporate bullying. I think any potential solution would be pretty sweeping.

One idea would be to require MegaCorp (defined maybe as $100m+ annual revenue) to pay the legal fees of the small defendant (defined maybe as <= $20m annual revenue). MegaCorp would have to bear this cost even if they won, meaning they could only sue little guys if it was _really worth it_. MegaCorp would pay the same amount they pay their attorneys into a trust managed by the court, which would allow the small defendant to select his own lawyers. This would ensure that both sides have equally-adequate representation.

A second solution is to lower the cost of litigation in general, which would be accomplished by de-formalization of the system and greater local sovereignty. Why does it have to take 10 years and $5 million to have a dispute settled? Companies are already trying to make something like this the _de facto_ legal system by forcing arbitration against their helpless victims; arbitration might not be bad in theory, but under the current practice, it's an unnerving prospect, since you're going into a black hole.

<comment><USER8> I was thinking it would be effective to have a variation of your first solution. But rather than having special rules for big vs small cases, just have a rule that the instigator has to set aside money for the defendant, equal to it's own court and legal costs. Then, if they win, the defendant has to repay it (although if you are suing a tiny company, they may cease to exist after, leaving no means of collection). So, if MegaCorp sues Little Guy, Inc, and puts 5 mil into it's case, it has to stick another 5 mil into a trust account for Little Guy to use for defense. So, it better be willing to lose that much or be very certain about it's case, and Little Guy has nothing to worry about or any reason to cave unless there's a significant chance of losing, even with equal resources. Seems to me the defender should have an advantage in most cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Looking forward to reading these patents to learn their cutting-edge blockchain implementation for making a $1 overdraft accrue $35 in fees.

<comment><USER10> That's a different form of "mining."

<comment><USER11> "to mine" =def (trans.) the act of declaring exclusive ownership rights of an object for the speaker of the sentence.

<comment><USER12> why downvote? it is funny.

<comment><USER11> Because they're Old Guards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Someone smarter than me, please explain: are they seriously just trying to patent bitcoin, which already exists? Or are they inventing new ideas that can be done with blockchain technology?

<comment><USER14> These are the patents they are applying for:

[http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph- Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=H...](http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph- Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch- adv.html&r=0&p=1&f=S&l=50&Query=%22bank+of+america%22+AND+cryptocurrency&d=PG01)

Some of them seem remarkably frivolous:

>System and Method for Wire Transfers Using Cryptocurrency

>[...] The processor can transfer the first quantity of the cryptocurrency to a second cryptocurrency exchange and initiate the sale of the first quantity of the cryptocurrency at the second cryptocurrency exchange. The processor is further able to initiate the transfer of at least a portion of the resulting currency to a recipient.

<comment><USER15> >Some of them seem remarkably frivolous:

As are most patent filings (including some of my own)

<comment><USER16> >As are most patent filings (including some of my own)

Why file them, then? (The fact that you admitted to it suggests you have a valid and ethical reason to do so.)

<comment><USER17> > Why file them, then?

"Don't hate the player, hate the game."

<comment><USER18> That's the modern day equivalent of "I was just following orders".

<comment><USER19> Yes, having your employer file a patent on your work (whether you want them to or not) is very much like taking part in the killing of humans through starvation, experimentation, and gas chambers.

<comment><USER20> While his comparison was clumsily drawn from Nazi participants, I think we can agree that the idea of blind participation is something worth criticizing. The reason corporations wield so much power is because everyone is willing to undercut everyone else.

<comment><USER19> Fair enough (enough to click the up arrow for a point well made), though I don't think participation in the patent system is _quite_ as clear-cut. Gassing Jews? The vast majority would agree that this goes to the far end of the "evil" scale, if not defining the maximum of that scale. Having your employer patent your work? Meh, I'm pretty sure opinions will fail all over the scale, including the "good" end or at least the "still better than kicking puppies" part of the scale. For instance, I personally find software patents to be pointless and perhaps suppressing of innovation, but I don't get terribly rabid about it. But you're right, blind participation is certainly worthy of criticism, even if I don't necessarily agree that _any_ participation is wrong.

<comment><USER21> How about drug patents, resulting in thousands of deaths because people in the developing world can't make and afford cheap alternatives?

And no, those patents (and the inflated prices) don't happen just to overcompensate for the "cost of research/FDA approval". The drug company often still has healthy, or rather ridiculously large, profit margins, on top of these costs.

<comment><USER19> _How about drug patents_

I believe the context was software patents.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> How someone is allowed to patent something that already exists is beyond me? What is the patent office doing over there? I don't think they are doing their jobs properly if Bank of America was allowed to patent technology they didn't create.

<comment><USER21> > _How someone is allowed to patent something that already exists is beyond > me_

Obviously because the patent process is just a timestamp thing that says "I've registered this idea at this time".

It's then up to the court to rule on a any clashes, e.g. when somebody else has a similar registration from an earlier time.

<comment><USER23> Patents are supposed to be rejected _before_ they are granted if they don't meet the requirements for patentability, though. To do otherwise destroys the value of patents for anyone but the wealthiest corporations.

<comment><USER24> > To do otherwise destroys the value of patents for anyone but the wealthiest > corporations.

You may be on to something there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Don't get me wrong, I think Bitcoin is an amazing technical (and economic) wonder.

But after starting (and quitting) a BTC business with a guy, and getting a BTC-related patent with another guy, I've come to the conclusion that blockchain technologies are a solution looking for a problem, and the only current problem being solved is how to illegally move money.

This is of course a standard thing to say for someone who's just come across BTC (like a savvy old businessman friend of mine) but I've actually looked at the code, talked to people who wanted BTC (a couple of nerds and an army of drug dealers / drug customers), and so on for a long while.

All the blockchain uses I've come across have seemed to be bolt-on hype motivated rather than genuine uses of the technology. I'm even doing a standard web project for a guy who thinks it will be useful to keep track of stuff in containers. I come from the finance industry, so I think I also know a bit about the requirements there, and they don't need it.

So let's look at what blockchain technology lets you do:

1) You get an indelible wall that grows every 10 minutes. You can write whatever you like on it. Well, that's great but you can do that with a normal database. It's well known how to do it, there's backup processes, security, various consistency measures, scaling, and so on that are established.

2) You don't need to run your own database. This is great if you don't want the network to be closed due to malfunction or police intervention. But banks already know how to run a database, they have hordes of people doing that. And they have to comply with information requests from the authorities. And someone, somewhere needs to have all the records, which they will want compensation for. I suggest AWS and the likes (in house), running an old fashioned DB would require orders of magnitude less compensation for similar amounts of traffic.

3) The network automates the ledger system so we don't need as many back office staff. Well, there's no magic here. If you write a blockchain for securities operations, the logic still needs to be written by someone. There's existing protocols for this kind of stuff, and there's existing automation at the banks for processing this stuff. Even if you decide to go blockchain, you will have to meet with the other banks to make sure everyone agrees so they'll want to be on the same chain. You're still going to need back office staff to make sure the inputs and outputs make sense.

Anyway, I've yet to see a blockchain use that both requires and is improved by using the blockchain.

<comment><USER26> For some business needs, the Blockchain makes no sense.

That being said, here's my devils advocate for your 3 complaints:

1.) Yes, you can make your servers redundant, and keep them up 24/7, or you can use the pay as you go model with the Blockchain. The difference is like keeping a car idling vs. using an electric car.

2.) Writing things to the Blockchain can be very beneficial compared to your own database. Ownership of offline things like bikes can be done with a Bluetooth/NFC chip and a bitcoin address. Also for online transactions, it provides a tamper-free source of truth.

3.) You argue that someone would still have to write the logic for the Blockchain apps. That's definitely true but the impact of a Blockchain startup might replace a higher ratio of jobs than you expect. (Like Kodak vs. Instagram numbers)

Give it time, it's still early to call it a bust just yet.

<comment><USER25> 1) Servers costs barely anything to run these days. Heck I've got several just for messing about with code.

2) My patent is about something like this. Sure, it works, I actually did this with NFCs and an Andriod app. But it's a heck of a lot easier just to ask a REST API who owns this NFC. Tamper proofing can be done using pieces of bitcoin (like ECDSA) without using the blockchain. Then you're just back to using a PKI.

3) The question is whether there's anything actually new here. Computers came to wall street a long, long time ago. You'd think most of the gains have already been made. Back office has been decimated over recent decades. It might continue, sure, I'm open to that suggestion.

I'm not declaring a bust; I think something will come of it. But the things I've seen up to now don't seem to need it. Something like that DNS idea, that wasn't bad. But I do see a lot of business types hyping the blockchain, and I don't think it's entirely thought through.

<comment><USER27> currently creating a smart contracts application on a private blockchain and came to a similar thought as your #2

> using pieces of Bitcoin

ECDSA is great, have you run across any db's using it? Seems like a great component to extract from the blockchain craze

<comment><USER25> Well, you can just glue a signature to a row of data manually. As long as you know how to concat/Merkle/hash the info together it provides the same guarantees.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Many big companies file patents for defensive reasons and do not pursue offensive activities. If BoA thought they might use a block chain in the future for example, having a patent can neutralize the threat of a competitor limiting their ability to use that method to support business activities. It's sort of a mutually assured distruction approach.

<comment><USER29> At least some use publications like [http://www.researchdisclosure.com/](http://www.researchdisclosure.com/) instead. I know the print edition at least used to exist and have subscribers because there were some shelves of it in the local university library.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I expect this is an insurance move: iterate through the cross-product of bitcoin concepts and current banking tech, eliminate the nonsensical pairings, and make plausible applications for the remainder. That way they cover their bases in case there's something game-changing lurking within.

</comment><comment><USER31> It is going to be hard to monitize blockchain just like torrents.I think it is best developed by a non for profit that is funded by some major players to keep it unbias and trustworthy to the benifit of market participants.

</comment><comment><USER32> Interesting tangential thought experiment: what happens when, in the near future, some AI created software violates a patent? For example a hypothetical UI optimiser algo creates a slider which happens to be patented? :)

<comment><USER33> We let that AI out of the box and point it at patent trolls.

<comment><USER34> What's a little apocalypse, so long as we take the patent trolls down with us? (And civilization, and the species...)

<comment><USER35> Just dont call it SKYNET, you be sued by Hollywood then for copyright infringement or something...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Bank of America is the Comcast of banking.

</comment><comment><USER37> I think people should be able to vote for patent acceptance, if more than 60% of voters consider that idea is great, let company own this patent. Patent office should do research before publishing to vote. Otherwise people can patent everything.

\- Technology the Sun uses to shine, technology and methods for light which creates light space in dark space.

\- Internal structure of fingers to click mouse/keyboard

\- State of the mind before buying something ...

<comment><USER38> Doesn't sound realistic. Have you seen text of any patent? It is completely unreadable to normal people. I always thought that ToS or legislations look bad, but usually they put all definitions in one place. In patents all of that is inlined, 20 words phrase instead of just "computer". Having some domain knowledge before voting could also take few months or years ... BTW why do we even award patents? Seriously - if many people, in many places had the same idea, on their own, why should we grant a monopoly to one of them? That would probably require some replacement system for drugs, we don't want the ingredients to be secret but I don't how exactly should it work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Following is my unsubstantiated theory about recent bank involvement in bitcoin: The banks won't go down without a fight. They're setting up a legal minefield for bitcoin entrepreneurs. I doubt they'll use these patents other than to protect the status quo. If the patent minefield doesn't work, they'll capture the market by investing in their own ringfenced version of the blockchain (see "the open ledger project") and PR the hell out of it to ensure that it gets adopted rather than someone else's.

Granted, their strategy won't work if they can't influence adoption or sue the pants off of startup competitors.

Again, this is just a theory. Maybe they really do all of a sudden want to spend millions on something that does basically what their existing services do except they can't control. /sarcasm

<comment><USER40> I think you're heading in the wrong direction. First, I think they are buying these for protection, so they can experiment with blockchain tech and no get sued.

Second, I think they want this for inter-bank commerce, not for end users. It makes more sense to implement for banks as a way for them to exchange monies between themselves, at least, at first.

<comment><USER41> Protection against whom, Satoshi Nakamoto? And why should they use it for interbank transactions? Isn't there already a working interbank transactions system?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> It's not surprising that banks are interested in blockchain technology, if not necessarily Bitcoin itself. Patenting technology is very common by these companies and it is almost always a protection measure against them being sued for using it.

</comment><comment><USER43> It brings me great joy to watch as the world's banking institutions become the atavisms of our time. What is so innovative or patentable about a distributed database? Bitcoin is the only real innovation and it needs not said institutions.

</comment><comment><USER44> Great ammo for suing future competitors in the financial space.

<comment><USER45> That generally not how corporations use patents. Patent trolls - yes, but patents are almost always a defense.

<comment><USER44> Depends on the corporation. The tech industry tends to be pretty good about using patents defensively, but there are notable exceptions. For example, Akamai has built a reputation of suing every new startup that enters the CDN space for patent infringement (Limelight, Speedera, Cotendo, etc). Ask any VC in the valley to fund your CDN biz and they'll ask you what your patent portfolio looks like and how big of a war chest you're building to fight the inevitable lawsuits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> This is exactly why I posted in a previous thread that OSS projects and even public domain stuff need to patent their ass off. They should collect it into nonprofits that defend OSS institutions. Aside from self-defense, the main reason to patent all this stuff is so the big companies can't. This example shows they will do it any opportunity they can for anti-competitive purposes.

<comment><USER47> Is the bitcoin community large enough to support a nonprofit like that? How many patent lawyers would they need and how much would that cost?

<comment><USER46> I have no idea. I'd start with organizations like FSF and Apache plus companies that benefit from OSS like Red Hat. Any key, differentiating innovations in their projects or dependencies would be up for patenting. Then, reviewers would look at the strategic importance of the techs to prioritize them. Then, they'd patent as many as their budget allows.

That's a start.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> But Bank of America did not invent Bitcoin so there has to be prior art. I think the banks realise that with bitcoin tech consumers do not need banks anymore. You do not need a bank to trade stocks, to change currency.

Basically how can you get patents for someone else invention?

<comment><USER49> The article didn't say that they are trying to file patents for blockchain.

The article says that they are trying to file patents _related_ to blockchain.

Surely, if they actually invent something new on top of existing technology, they can file a patent for that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Maybe they want to win time against competitors with "patent pending" products (regardless if they ll be granted the patent). Does that mean they are working on bitcoin products? Have they announced anything?

</comment><comment><USER51> Is there a way for the public to challenge a patent application during the process? If there isn't, what would be the most expedient way of getting such a step added to the application process?

<comment><USER52> You can try [http://patents.stackexchange.com/](http://patents.stackexchange.com/) Background info can be located at [https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/09/askpatents-com-a- stac...](https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/09/askpatents-com-a-stack- exchange-to-prevent-bad-patents/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> That's sick. They clearly abuse the patent system to ban competition threat here. It's another clear demonstration that software patents shouldn't exist.

</comment><comment><USER54> Doesn't Warren Buffett own a large percentage of BOA? This is the Buffett strategy, use the public sphere to allow private entities to acquire monopoly power. He did this with his opposition to the Keystone Pipeline so that his trains would benefit from the need to move oil in that corridor.

<comment><USER55> I've been thinking recently that powerful people treating the real world like a game is possibly one of the most destructive forces in society.

<comment><USER56> It depends entirely what their end goal is.

To make money with no regards to anything else? Yes, they are dangerous to the human race and should be treated as the absolute worst terrorists possible.

However, if their end goal is to actually leave the world a better place than when it was when they were born, and it just happens it takes being one of the richest people ever to do that? More power to them, and I hope they succeed.

Not all rich and powerful people are assholes, some just want to make the world less shitty, and some actually succeed at it.

<comment><USER55> By "treat like a game" I mean, play to win, with winning defined as beating the other guy.

I arrived at this line of though when I started wondering why would the head decision makers of (for example) trafigura decide to horribly pollute the Ivory coast just so they can squeeze out a bit of extra profit, when they are all already super-rich. You can only enjoy so many yachts and so on. I arrived at the conclusion that their motivation is not to get more money per se, its to beat the other guys.

<comment><USER55> ps. Above is just the product of my idle musings. One thing that _is_ very interesting and related and certainly worth mentioning is one of the elements of Jared Diamonds framework for societal collapse: Decision makers being insulated from the negative consequences of their decisions.

<comment><USER57> duh power > money

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Article text: patents are RELATED to blockchain

Headline: patents for TECHNOLOGY BEHIND bitcoin

Comments on HN: OMG THEY ARE PATENTING SOMETHING ALREADY INVENTED, EVIL STUPID BANKS, EVIL STUPID PATENTS, EVIL STUPID LAWS

Yes, their patents include descriptions of already known tech, but at first glance, these two actually look like new and interesting stuff:

[http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph- Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=H...](http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph- Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch- adv.html&r=3&p=1&f=G&l=50&d=PG01&S1=\(%22bank+of+america%22+AND+cryptocurrency\)&OS=%22bank+of+america%22+AND+cryptocurrency&RS=\(%22bank+of+america%22+AND+cryptocurrency\))

[http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph- Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=H...](http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph- Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch- adv.html&r=6&p=1&f=G&l=50&d=PG01&S1=\(%22bank+of+america%22+AND+cryptocurrency\)&OS=%22bank+of+america%22+AND+cryptocurrency&RS=\(%22bank+of+america%22+AND+cryptocurrency\))

<comment><USER33> None of that shit looks new _or_ interesting.

<comment><USER49> May be I'm not aware of all that blockchain does, but does it really provide risk scores based on transaction histories?

<comment><USER58> > [The] claims must meet relevant patentability requirements, such as novelty, > usefulness, and non-obviousness. (wikipedia)

Novelty may be fulfilled, but like in many software patents, the "non- oblivious" part is really questionable here.

<comment><USER49> Questionable — agreed. This doesn't make it something that was already implemented.

<comment><USER58> > This doesn't make it something that was already implemented.

That's exactly my point : because it's already implemented doesn't mean you can register a patent on it. You cannot register "obvious" things, even if nobody uses it already.

<comment><USER49> I never said that they should be granted these patents. I'm not an expert. It _seemed_ to me that it was new and interesting; now I see how I was wrong about that, yes.

But my main point was that these patents are not obvious bullshit of patenting the blockchain principle itself.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>