Our Solar System Is Even Stranger Than We Thought - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/our-solar-system-is-even-stranger-than-we-thought/ <comment><USER2> > _To test whether the peas-in-a-pod pattern was real, I concocted (on my > laptop) imaginary planetary systems in which the sizes of planets orbiting a > given star were random. Could some sort of bias in Kepler's method of > finding planets—which favors the detection of large planets close to their > stars—contrive to make the planets in each of my imaginary systems appear to > fit the pattern?_

> _The answer was no: in more 1000 trials with randomly assigned planet sizes > put through a virtual Kepler's detection scheme, a pattern of similarly- > sized planets in the same systems never emerged. This computational > experiment did not reproduce what we observe in the Kepler planetary > systems. Thus, the regular sizes of planets is a real astrophysical > pattern._

This is actually a really cool use of computer simulations that I haven't noticed before (but I'm sure has been done in the past): simulating expected output for a known bias.

I wonder if it would be feasible to do the reverse too for a kind of parameter fitting to fix our model:

1\. Create a reasonable approximate model for both Kepler's expected detection bias and for planet size distribution.

2\. Constrain parameter space for these models as much as possible, to minimize the search space.

3\. Using these models, generate a set different planetary sets for different parameters.

4\. Find the outputs with the closest match in statistical "shape" of the actually measured data.

5\. generate new input parameters based on these output that lead to set outputs to refine shape until certain level of matching has been found

If done naively this would probably take a lot of computation and result in large a solution space: the more parameters, the higher the conditionality of this space. So the models should be approximations with as few parameters to produce reasonable results, and with constraints on said parameter values based on known physics. This would narrow down both the parameter space to search the possibly valid outputs of this space.

Based on these parameters differ from the output we had expected before, we might then get a direction of where to look for the physics that _does_ explain the distribution.

<comment><USER3> This kind of stuff is regularly done at LHC - they simulate the detectors and the collisions, and then compare real data against that, to both confirm that the detectors are working properly, and for searching of new physics.

<comment><USER4> Also in the LIGO project, it's a branch of astrophysics called numeric relativity. The gravity wave signatures predicted by the simulations was what helped confirm the LIGO detections of black hole and neutron star mergers.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So, the Kepler method of detecting planets only works if the orbital plane (maybe not the right term) of the star we are looking at is such that the planets are between us and the star, right? So if we are looking down at the "top" of the star then no planets will obscure the star, right? Also the planets need to be passing in front of the star at precisely the right time that the planet and star and our telescope are all lined up more or less. Someone looking at our solar system would need to wait quite awhile to see Pluto pass by. If all of that is correct, how are we able to see any exoplanets? My layman's guess would be that it would be incredibly unlikely that everything would line up so that we could see anything. What am I missing in this picture?

<comment><USER6> There are several methods of detecting exoplanets[1], the method you're referring to is the easiest and is called "transiting". Since it's the easiest, most exoplanets have been discovered with this technique. As you've guessed, it is highly unlikely for the stars and planets to align this way, and the general hypothesis as to why we've discovered so many is that there's a lot of planets out there[2].

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

[2] [https://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2013/feb/HQ_13-057_Kepler_T...](https://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2013/feb/HQ_13-057_Kepler_Tiny_Planet.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't stay up on the latest developments in this field day to day, but my understanding is that most of the extrasolar systems that we can observe are a little on the wonky side to begin with, otherwise we wouldn't be able to detect that there are planets in them at all. Super-Jupiters orbiting close enough to make their stars wobble, binary star systems, all kinds of stuff. I'm not sure I'd hazard a guess at any kind of definite conclusion at the makeup of the universe and our overall specialness in it, with tools of observation as crude and limited as we've still got; there's a long way to go just to survey what is out there.

<comment><USER8> I believe the article attempts to account for your concern.

<comment><USER9> Humanity has only been searching for exoplanets for a very short time. That's why there are relatively few candidates farther than 1 AU out. It's somewhat like arguing that all lattes are comprised of milk only because we've only taken the first sip.

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure why you were downvoted, that's a beautiful analogy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> That's pretty comforting. As the solar system we live in seems more unusual it seems more credible that planets with advanced life might be rare. In which case the emptiness of the galaxy seems more explicable.

<comment><USER12> Putting the Great Filter not merely behind us, but _way_ behind us, would be a pretty cool scientific result.

<comment><USER13> There may be more than one Great Filter. We could have passed one of them, but we might not survive the next one.

<comment><USER12> The point of the Great Filter argument is that something seems to be preventing widespread intelligent life. If the Filter is behind us, then while that is not _proof_ that there are no impassible obstacles in front of is, we have _no particular reason_ to believe that there are impassible obstacles in front of us. That is in stark contrast to what has been the scientific dogma for the past several decades, which is that there is nothing special about us whatsoever, which _does_ give us reason to believe there are impassible obstacles in front of us. To be able to put the filter way behind us is still a real change.

<comment><USER8> It depends on how fully the initial Great Filter explains the lack of observed exolife. It may not be a binary thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> So to test for unknown bias and sensor anomalies, they put raw modelled data through the statistical machinery looking for homogenized outputs.

This strikes me as wrong. If you want to know if your filter is bad, you plug in ground truth and add known noise models. If you want to know if your noise models are wrong, you cant do the same thing, you need to point your sensor at a known object (e.g. calibrate).

They seemed to have done a cursory analysis of the former type, which is not the same as saying "our pea-pod hyoothesis is correct".

<comment><USER15> I don't believe this was an attempt to find bias or noise from the physical sensors, but rather was looking at the method itself.

The method has some known biases that they were ensuring wouldn't explain the given pattern in the data. Depending on the depth of the simulation, it may have also been able to account for some unknown biases in the method.

Now even under your interpretation, I'm curious about which known object you'd suggest they use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> As a side note, the drawing attached to this article is of Edward Tufte's quality, so much information condensed into a simple-looking drawing and it's so easy to get the idea from a single glance.

<comment><USER17> I'm actually pretty confused by that chart because the bigger planets of SOL are off the side.

<comment><USER18> The planets detected by Kepler will tend to be unusually close to their star due to its detection method. I believe that's why Sol looks like an outlier in that regard — it's really that the other systems are the outliers.

<comment><USER17> Could be. Detecting smaller planets further out is less and less likely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> My first thought is this should call into question the method(s) we are using to measure and observe planets in other solar systems.

Think on this, the one solar system we can empirically confirm with multiple observation techniques, i.e. we've sent satellites to other planets in, is way different than solar systems we are observing by measuring light differences from light years away.

<comment> 0-_-0 Yes but the solar system is a biased sample: life evolved in it. Maybe it was helped by Jupiter shielding us from asteroids that could wipe out life on the planet? If it's statistically more likely that intelligent life evolves in a system with large planets then we would expect to see a difference between our solar system and others that we observe.

<comment><USER20> All asteroid crashes aren't equal. Earth got most of its water from an asteroid crash.

Basically a huge of range of things have to work on large timescales for intelligent life to evolve on a planet.

Which is why intelligent life apart from us could just be absent or very very rare and far away.

<comment> 0-_-0 My point is that a large planet in the system reduces the probability of large asteroid impacts later in a star system's history. I didn't mean that it immediately removes all asteroids from a star system after forming.

<comment><USER21> The "Jupiter as a shield" hypothesis has been questioned recently: [https://phys.org/news/2016-02-jupiter-role-planetary- shield-...](https://phys.org/news/2016-02-jupiter-role-planetary-shield- earth.html)

<comment> 0-_-0 That's fair enough, the point I tried to make is: Statistically, we would expect our solar system to be average among solar systems that can support intelligent life, not among all solar systems (following the Anthropic Principle). Therefore, the difference we see between our solar system and the average star system might imply something about what kind of conditions make intelligent life more probable in a star system.

If we see that in all star systems we know that evolved intelligent life (even if there's only 1 we know of) there is a large Jupiter-like planet, and that's very atypical among star systems, that suggests that Jupiter might have increased the probability that intelligent life evolved here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > The answer was no: in more 1000 trials with randomly assigned planet sizes > put through a virtual Kepler's detection scheme, a pattern of similarly- > sized planets in the same systems never emerged. This computational > experiment did not reproduce what we observe in the Kepler planetary > systems. Thus, the regular sizes of planets is a real astrophysical pattern.

Any explanation to this? I'd assume small planets are just harder to detect. Large planets could be gas giants that react differently to our observation technique. Also they tend to form further away from the star, leading to a longer orbital period and fewer observations. Could these contribute to an observation bias and does the simulation include these factors?

<comment><USER23> Yeah I don't like the finality of the statement the `answer was no`. Couldn't the simulation (virtual Kepler's detection scheme) simply be incorrect?

<comment><USER24> Anything is possible. You can never prove anything. In science/real life true means very likely and false means very unlikely. So yes the simulation could be wrong, but I guess with everything we know and the error bars the answer was clearly no.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Fascinating stuff. ..and all deduced from the slightest dimming of starlight hundreds of light years away. Badass.

</comment><comment><USER26> The thought of we may be the only species in the Universe scares me. And, we don't have a great insurance policy.

<comment><USER27> Why?

All of us living now will be long dead before our species die out, so what difference does it really make?

<comment><USER28> Because if we're the only one's actually capable of appreciating the beauty of the universe, if we are in actuality the only mindful expression of the universe, we are more incomparably valuable than any other element existing as part of that universe, and an irretrievable loss once gone.

<comment><USER29> Why is perceiving beauty so valuable? It does exactly nothing except for the one perceiving.

<comment><USER30> That's why it's valuable. _To us._

<comment><USER31> When this species becomes capable of observing our feelings objectively and not simply saying "I feel it, it's mine so it must be truth" people like you are going to feel something very different.

<comment><USER30> Truth != value. Of course my feelings are valuable to me; I don't need them to be true (and I don't even think being true or false _applies_ to judgement values).

 _" I once heard a wise man say that if anyone were to know the whole answer, he would cease to exist."_

[https://books.google.es/books?id=KuFwDwAAQBAJ&lpg=PT181&ots=...](https://books.google.es/books?id=KuFwDwAAQBAJ&lpg=PT181&ots=z2ut_ZFt-o&dq=%22I%20once%20heard%20a%20wise%20man%20say%20that%20if%20anyone%20were%20to%20know%20the%20whole%20answer%2C%20he%20would%20cease%20to%20exist.%22&pg=PT181#v=onepage&q=%22I%20once%20heard%20a%20wise%20man%20say%20that%20if%20anyone%20were%20to%20know%20the%20whole%20answer,%20he%20would%20cease%20to%20exist.%22&f=false)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Random question.. If they are looking for transits, doesn't that presuppose the data will find close in planets? I believe that's not the only method, but wouldn't that push more close planets than distant ones? Would it find transits of things like Neptune or Uranus that take hundreds of years?

</comment><comment><USER33> apologies if this is a stupid question, but I always wondered can there be multiple objects/planets in an orbit?

<comment><USER34> Not a stupid question at all. The answer is: yes. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_(celestial_body)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_\(celestial_body\))

Theories for the formation of our moon suggest a Mars-sized Trojan collided with earth before it was earth: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theia_(planet)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theia_\(planet\))

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Can anybody explain why the chart stops at 3 AU? All our bigger planets are off the chart.

<comment><USER35> Seems likely that the planets with larger orbits have not yet been detected since they will take longer to reach a point in orbit when they are transiting their respective stars. It seems premature for the paper to reach it's conclusion when Kepler has been in operation for less than ten years, but hey... publish or perish.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> This result says that random sizes and orbits are not consistent with observations. But there is a huge gap between "random" and "uniform", even ignoring all the possible different distributions.

We know that our solar system is not random -- e.g., we have the "platonic solids" spacing, for our inner planets. So, our solar system is also not described by the disallowed model.

It's great that some subset of random distributions are ruled out for systems that happen to have planets packed close to their star, but that says nothing at all about how we compare to the the overwhelming majority of other systems systematically excluded from the sample.

As with most results that hit the popular press, any actual significance is garbled to the point of meaninglessness.

But a good graphic can be worth a lot if you ignore the headline.

</comment><comment><USER37> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axis_of_evil_(cosmology)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axis_of_evil_\(cosmology\))

</comment><comment><USER38> Stranger? We already knew our solar system was strange. At least compared to the other solar systems we observed ( admittedly a tiny fraction - a couple hundred out of 200 billion solar systems ).

We already knew gas giants ( a major cause of our peculiarity ) are rare. And we knew that most solar systems had uniform sized planets ( within a particular range ) orbiting very close to their suns.

The article doesn't offer anything new that would make us think the solar system is stranger. It just reaffirms everything we knew and why we thought it was strange to begin with.

</comment><comment><USER39> I am fascinated about how less we know overall about the earth, and the solar system. I would not be surprised if we found life in the solar system. May not be advanced, but multi cellular life. I mean life as it was on earth some 10,000 years ago, with early humans and all.

Edit: Sorry I shared my fictitious fascination. It would probably make a good movie, humans finding pre-historic humans on Titan or Europa.

<comment><USER40> I would be surprised if even our concept of cells translates that easily.

Unless of course both forms of life share the same origin, but that just raises more questions.

<comment><USER41> This is the thing I also always wonder about. Consider that about 60% of a banana's DNA is shared with us. And for cats it's 90%. That's just really stupefying to think about. But the more important point here is that I think it is literally impossible for us to even imagine what life that had no genetic similarity to us would even begin to be like. We just have no basis for comparison whatsoever since we are all so closely related.

Though yeah, genetic similarity implying exogenesis would also be an equally interesting result. Would that similarity be organic/natural in nature, or might we just be some species' lab experiment? Perhaps they seeded us with their same genetic origins to discover more about their own evolution and development. This is an experiment I'm certain we'll eventually carry out ourselves. So many interesting possibilities.

<comment><USER42> So there's two high-confidence bets we can make about alien life:

(1) They will probably share huge swaths of the basic chemistry and machinery: proteins, sugars, starches, fats, and even more surprising things like cell walls and digestive acid and (something like) DNA. The building blocks of life are basic chemistry, and are some combination of "the simplest possible molecule that can do a thing" and "things that arise naturally from inorganic processes".

(2) There will almost certainly be 0% overlap in terrestrial and alien DNA, even assuming aliens use DNA and use the same four amino acids to encode their DNA and even assuming they have identical proteins and cellular structures. This is because the encoding from DNA to proteins is more-or-less arbitrary, and determined by both the exact cellular machinery used to turn DNA into proteins and by our genetic history. Even in our own cellular machinery, different DNA sequences can code for the same protein, so you can encode any individual protein in a bajillion different ways. The _only_ real reason for to different organisms to share any common DNA sequences is because they both derive from a common ancestor. If our DNA and alien DNA overlap in _any_ meaningful way, even with the tiniest of percent, it's basically conclusive proof of exogenesis of some sort.

So basically, it is very likely we'll be able to eat aliens (probably no more or less likely than how likely it is you can eat any particular plant or animal on Earth, to be honest), and almost impossible that we could ever hybridize alien and terrestrial plants and animals.

<comment><USER43> I think it goes further than that, that alien and native lifeforms will probably be toxic to one another. All life on this planet evolved in tandem, and have some of the same basic compounds for life, so there are few toxic interactions between life forms, excluding those evolved for defense (and even then there are exceptions, plenty of plants contain. And even then there are plenty of exceptions. But lifeforms from a completely different evolutionary line may use completely different proteins for basic functions. Even using the same proteins but of the opposite chirality could result in toxic reactions.

I think that even if we found alien life that evolved and developed on a planet much like ours, and used the same amino acids, metabolic processes, and cellular structures, the odds are high that contact with them would result in toxic interactions.

<comment><USER42> You've got to weigh "we didn't evolve to specifically eat it" against "it didn't specifically evolve to prevent us from eating it". I'm not sure we'll get an answer to which is a bigger factor unless we find some xenobiology and take a bite.

A lot of digestion is pretty elementary, and built upon our stomachs' acid bath -- proteins go in and are unwound and broken down. Most foods that cause problems later down the line contain a protein that both (a) is resistant to the stomach acid, and doesn't break down before hitting the intestines and (b) causes a problem when it hits the intestines.

Barring that - or incorporating elemental poisons like arsenic at levels we can't cope with - I'd personally bet that if you charred a random alien critter over a fire and wolfed it down, it's not crazy that your stomach acids would break down anything that survived the fire and would otherwise harm you, and you'd be able to extract a reasonable mix of sugars, fats and proteins from what you'd ate.

It's not impossible that an entire planet would have some proteins common to all of their lifeforms that both (a) didn't break down easily when cooked or digested and (b) were incredibly lethal to terrestrial life, but there's no ab initio reason to think they would or wouldn't, one way or the other.

<comment><USER43> The stomach isn't a perfect barrier, there's always something that gets through. If it didn't we wouldn't be able to take drugs orally. Our bodies have an entire subsystem devoted to processing compounds that made it through the main digestive system into the blood stream. The liver is dedicated to metabolizing these substances, in a process literally called "xenobiotic metabolism".

Sure, the odds of a particular compound found in some alien lifeform having a toxic interaction with our bodies is small, but I consider the odds of one of the hundreds of thousands of different types of compounds in that lifeform having a toxic interaction is on the higher side.

Oh, and to be clear, by toxic interaction I don't necessarily mean a poison, per se. It could also have a carcinogenic effect, or if the compound is common enough in the creature and undigestable through the stomach and intestines it could overload the liver, etc.

<comment><USER42> Yeah, not a perfect barrier, but if it's good enough that I'm not poisoned, do I care? I eat lots of delicious food that doesn't digest optimally.

As for carcinogenic effects, well, depends on what the timelines and cancer- rates you're talking about look like. We eat lots of things on Earth that are mildly carcinogenic over a lifetime, and the fact they are doesn't really stop us.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Not convincing.

We know Kepler results are heavily biased for (1) systems edge-on to us (2) with big planets (3) very close to their star.

The only conclusion to draw is that planets that are all clustered close to their star tend to similar sizes. Then only Mercury is unusual. Even there, it's not unique.

Stars with planets distributed more widely, like ours, have been systematically filtered out of the results. We have no idea how common they are. It might be that they are rare, and that would make us unusual. In that case, distribution would be interesting and relative sizes would be unremarkable.

If in fact they are common, there is no reason to expect sizes in those cases to be uniform.

A system that condensed from a cloud with less intrinsic rotation seems more likely to have its planets clustered close. Less intrinsic rotation could also result in more uniformity.

<comment><USER2> > _We know Kepler results are heavily biased for (1) systems edge-on to us (2) > with big planets (3) very close to their star._

This article was written by an astronomer working with Kepler, and I wonder why you apparently seem to believe that they are so naive that they forget about the bias in their own research tools.

Furthermore, the article explicitly mentions this issue, and provides an explanation for why they believe it does not apply, making me wonder if you read it at all:

> _I concocted (on my laptop) imaginary planetary systems in which the sizes > of planets orbiting a given star were random. Could some sort of bias in > Kepler's method of finding planets—which favors the detection of large > planets close to their stars—contrive to make the planets in each of my > imaginary systems appear to fit the pattern? The answer was no: in more 1000 > trials with randomly assigned planet sizes put through a virtual Kepler's > detection scheme, a pattern of similarly-sized planets in the same systems > never emerged._

Unless you have a reason to dispute this method of verification of course, but then you should share that.

I personally see no problem: the claim is implicitly that since the measured data does not match the predictions of the model, the model is wrong. The model + known bias of Kepler is used in simulation to generate expected statistical output of measured data sets. The generated data does not match the measured data. Hence, either the model of Kepler's bias is wrong, or the model of what planetary systems to expect.

Since we based the planetary system model on our own solar system, if that model is wrong then that makes our own solar system special.

<comment><USER44> >This article was written by an astronomer working with Kepler, and I wonder why you apparently seem to believe that they are so naive that they forget about the bias in their own research tools.

Exactly. I actually did some research on Weiss.

So she studied astronomy at Harvard where she got her BS, then went on to Cambridge for her masters, and then a PhD from Berkeley. Now she works with NASA.

Odd that all these people who clearly didn't even read the article seem to find supposedly obvious bias and flaws in the research of someone who is clearly among the top young researchers/experts in this field.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Girlfriend hacked by this script. What does it do? - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/person666/3027738764ce31fdc761074c078a4a36<p>My girlfriend's email sent out spam when she clicked on a link that ran this script on android? What exploit is it using? What is it doing? <comment><USER2> I didn't see the actual exploit, but I'm laughing that the script kiddies are now using webpack+Npm and creating multi megabyte files with hundreds of dependencies. I saw react in there, as well as quite a few crypto libraries and primaries.</comment>


IBM layoffs strike first in India; workers describe as 'slaughter' and 'massive' - <AUTHOR> http://wraltechwire.com/ibm-layoffs-strike-first-in-india-workers-describe-cuts-as-slaughter-and-massive-/13379415/ <comment><USER2> I don't want to seem insensitive but ...

The quote at the beginning of the article describes pretty much every layoff I've ever seen (or been through). The person quoted describes it as inhuman, but HR and managers are told to keep it impersonal (don't induce more crying than there is). You don't get notice (on purpose), you have to turn in company-owned property and they want you out the door (it affects the morale of the remaining employees).

On the other hand, the severance and extended benefits are far more generous than any layoff I've been through here in the states. I'm not sure why employees in struggling business units don't recognize that THEY'RE PART OF A BUSINESS. If no one was laid off, the whole business would close when there was no money left to pay expenses.

<comment><USER3> You do seem insensitive. Fuck their missed projections. Let all the managers quit for their failure. Did you look at the financials? Why are you pretending that you have the slightest clue what's going on in their business? If the employees were in charge like they ought to be, they could deal with their business properly and almost certainly avoid this fucking travesty. Tens of thousands of people losing their jobs is fucking bullshit.

<comment><USER4> Maybe you should read the article

> "Announced today including managers"

This is the failing X86 based server business (STG) which IBM has sold off to Lenovo, most likely duplicate test/support staff which Lenovo already have. They aren't just trimming - the departments are closing down.

<comment><USER5> IBM has sold the XSeries division, STG is a different division (storages and systems), and is not up for sale AFAIK.

<comment><USER4> Systems and Technology Group is the hardware wing and within contains X-Series Division. IBM is keeping the other power, storage and Z (mainframe) IIRC.

<comment><USER6> You're forgetting about networking and the STG software divisions (e.g. firmware, some cloud software, the products that they acquired when they bought Platform Computing..)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Um, what is happening in Syria is a slaughter, literally.

What is happening in India is mass layoffs, sad and unfortunate but "slaughter" ?

When AOL and other US corporations outsourced all the call centers to India in 2000-2010 , there were mass layoffs here too.

<comment><USER8> Do you feel a sense of justice now?

<comment><USER7> No it is never a good thing when corporations discard people, anywhere. It is like they are throwing out an old sponge they have squeezed every drop out of.

<comment><USER9> Respect

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This article massively overstates what is occurring here, these people are members of staff involved with the part of the business which has been sold to Lenovo and surprise surprise Lenovo already has their own departments handling most of this stuff.

</comment><comment><USER10> I have perhaps a unique perspective on this, as I was part of IBM in Asia and left in November 2013. I witnessed the 2013 layoff action and witnessed many good people in Australia and Singapore laid off in the name of cost-cutting. It is mentioned in the article that for this 2014 round, people with even PBC 1 and 2 were fired, which would have been the top performing people on their teams. I worked as a project manager doing datacenter/infrastructure work for IBM and was based in China. On my most recent PBC before I left, my manager gave me a 1, and I was managing a program for innovation projects in the Asia Pacific, as well as in charge of quality control work as part of IBM's global quality program called Global Delivery Framework (GDF). Project team members under me came from Australia, China, India, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, and Japan.

Firstly, it is not surprising that this is happening. The technology in the IT industry has changed, and IBM was late to the cloud party. We were still manually building servers for projects as of the end of 2013. I myself was put in charge of a large project to virtualize hundreds of internal IBM application servers. Let's say that again: as of 2013, there were still hundreds of mission-critical IBM internal applications running on physical hardware until I was given the project to transition them to virtual servers. They now have the ability to run stuff virtually thanks to some new hardware they've installed, but processes are still very manual. As I was leaving, I told all of my teammates to be careful and get out while they could, because as soon as IBM went full-steam into cloud, all of their jobs would get automated. It takes anyone a few minutes to get a server with applications running on a cloud service. At IBM, it took me a month because everything had to be installed and configured manually, and the teams were always so busy that you had to wait until someone was available to do their part, whether it was installing AIX, installing DB2, configuring monitoring agents, configuring backup agents, doing BAU handover checks, whatever. If you were IBM's execs, which would you choose? The writing was on the wall for a long time. And while elephants can take a while to get moving, it is true that they can eventually dance, though they can cause a lot of damage when they finally do get going (and need to dance more frenetically to make up for lost time).

Secondly and more importantly, it's sad that India was hit first in such a massive way, but it's not unexpected. I have nothing against Indian people and I think the situation is unfortunately more to do with IBM than it does with India. IBM was truly scraping the bottom of the barrel for their hiring, and in India, they went below the barrel in order to cut costs. It wasn't enough, as they went too far and hired too many people who were not capable of actually doing their jobs. I have plenty of examples, but we had sysadmins with senior in their titles that rather deserved to be labeled junior. My colleague beside me, a program manager of another program, turned to me exasperated when one of the Indian project managers in her program couldn't figure out how to fill out a project change request template. So the project manager wanted my colleague the program manager to fill out the form instead. Templates are there to make it clear what you're supposed to write. This level of incompetence was a trend, but I want to make it clear again, this is not the fault of the Indian people. This is the fault of IBM deciding to not have high standards. When the entire Domino team in Australia was let go (Domino is IBM's mail server) and replaced with a new, inexperienced, and untrained team in China, yet another colleague was again exasperated. Maintenance work that required only 6-hour change windows in her project became such that they needed 2 entire days because the new Domino team didn't know what they were doing. Again, it's not that the Chinese people were the problem. It's that IBM wasn't willing to pay to hire high-quality people, nor invest into training the people they did hire. As for why I think the issue of high/low standards is a bigger issue than technological change, I point you to an anonymous posting I made on Quora once. Being anonymous doesn't seem so important now. [http://www.quora.com/IBM/What-are-the-weaknesses-of- IBM](http://www.quora.com/IBM/What-are-the-weaknesses-of-IBM)

I tried copy-pasting the Quora post here, but then HN told me that my comment was too long. :D

edit: clarification

<comment><USER11> "Let's say that again: as of 2013, there were still hundreds of mission- critical IBM internal applications running on physical hardware until I was given the project to transition them to virtual servers."

Is this so shocking or even _wrong_? I would expect a company with the history and size of IBM to have tons of "old" hardware/processes. In fact it's that history, perceived wisdom and entrenchment that I would assume many in the enterprise world would would see as an _asset_ for IBM. Am I the only one who doesn't think a business should jump on a new tech bandwagon at the expense of a solid and working business model? I'm not saying virtualization or cloud computing is a fad by any measure, but how does a company rationalize rebuilding old tech with the risk that it may be the wrong path/choice or jeopardize a working model?

I know little of IBM and cant say I'm part of the corporate/enterprise market but that fact that IBM has "old iron" in their portfolio seems to be less concerning for their customers and more of a perception issue among the media.

<comment><USER12> Exactly.

Cloud is not the silver bullet. But at the same time, there is not much merit in choosing to be a luddite and not use the capabilities of cloud where there's a genuine need. I feel IBM, to an extent is guilty of not pursuing things on the cloud front and is now paying for it.

<comment><USER13> "Cloud is not the silver bullet."

You can say that again. And it depends on where you are. In South Florida the cloud - well - sucks. Due to the carriers not being able to keep their networks up. I know companies who moved their PBX into the cloud (I'm going to name carriers) with Earthlink, Windstream, Comcast and ATT - misdirected, noisy (like talking in a wind tunnel), dropped calls; all classic signs of over extended networks. Latency. And you feel helpless cause all you can do is call your carrier and wait on hold for 45 mins.

I know another company, a local gym, which (the owner is a SOB so he deserved everything he got) got talked into moving his cash register into the cloud. I warned him against it. But he accused be of not being "up-scale". His way of telling me I didn't know what I was talking about. Of course, a couple of weeks later his Comcast goes down. He calls me, begging for help. I was like, "Nothing I can do. You have to call Comcast".

In South Florida, the only reliable service is fiber. Even T1's are fragile. And fiber isn't cheap.

<comment><USER14> You're using a very, very basic definition of cloud- one that really shouldn't exist anymore.

You're talking about moving a physical service into a hosted service; IAAS/SAAS. We're talking about actually developing and coding the IAAS/SAAS solutions to be cloud ready and performant. This infers automation, utilizing version control systems, scaling, stateless servers etc.

What those companies did was move their servers onto the web. It's like me telling you that I'm moving my wordpress blog from my desktop to linode. Just because I'm using linode does not mean I'm utilizing the infrastructure in any sort of "cloud" manner. If the server goes down and I've not designed my stack to be resilient I'm not "cloud." We expected IBM to be designing underlying cloud infrastructure years ago. Instead they bought Softlayer. I'm not sure if they've even done anything remotely interesting since that.

Next year they'll probably start trying to massively hire Openstack developers just like Cisco/etc are doing now (also late to the party).

Semantics, but vastly different.

<comment><USER13> "You're using a very, very basic definition of cloud- one that really shouldn't exist anymore."

Really? This is exactly what the "cloud" service are selling. Ok there's a middle-guy in there. The actual service provider. But from a customer point of view - this is the cloud.

IBM, Microsoft, Google sales guys are all over the place "selling" the cloud. "Move your infrastructure to our cloud - cheaper and access everywhere on everything. No need to maintain a server, or even a PC. Run your business from your iPad".

Sounds great. And would be great, if we had the communication infrastructure in place to support it. Look, it doesn't matter what's running the cloud if no one buys the "cloud".

Back to your topic.. I agree. But we've seen this story before from IBM (and Cisco and MS). They are late to every party these days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Outsourcing jobs. Outsourcing layoffs. Checks out, what did India expect?

<comment><USER16> Yes, not really a lay-off. More like winding down the scale of outsourcing. I hope jobs will re-emerge onshore later on.

<comment><USER17> _I hope jobs will re-emerge onshore later on._

If by "onshore" you mean China, then you'll probably get your wish. Otherwise, probably not.

<comment><USER18> I've worked with 10 Indian employees that could easily be replaced with a single competent westerner (of any descent whatsoever) for 1/3 the price.

I suspect I'm not alone.

<comment><USER19> And I have worked with 10 westerners who also can be easily replaced by 1 Indian who will do the work in a much better manner.

Just because you might have had exposure to some idiots does not mean you label the whole bunch as incompetent.

<comment><USER18> It's certainly not a rule, just an observable phenomena, working in IBM with colleagues in Hyderabad and at Google partnering with Intuit in, IIRC, Bangalore.

It's a cultural difference: in India, people become engineers because it carries prestige. They don't code because they love computing (this is measurable: ask how many outsourced engineers have GitHub accounts). The lack of actual interest in their profession demonstrates itself in their work.

The best Indian programmers I've met have either left India or weren't born there in the first place, in either case I'd consider them westerners.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> | STG Bangalore literally turned into a slaughter house today

obligatory: [http://xkcd.com/725](http://xkcd.com/725)

<comment><USER21> There's also an obligatory xkcd to that obligatory xkcd: [http://xkcd.com/1108/](http://xkcd.com/1108/).

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> low social oversight and regulations result in easily attracting jobs and fewer protection when jobs need to be cut. On a downhill slope, it's much simpler and cheaper to cut jobs in developing economies, precisely for the same reasons it's cheaper to create jobs there when things go uphill.

</comment><comment><USER23> If I had start-up capital , today I would have jumped on a plane to Banagalore. Regardless of the negative stories about Indian programmers, IBM does have some very talented and skilled people with a lot of experience and excellent work ethics. This being a massive lay-off and not a firing, the good and bad programmers alike have been let go. The interview process would have to be extra stringent and long and tedious, but you would end up with high quality people , who otherwise would never interview with a new start up. And after being let go from a blue-chip company, they would be more receptive of offers from early stage start ups.

</comment><comment><USER24> The 3 months of compensation mentioned here - is equivalent only to 1.5 months in any other country. So not overtly generous.

I'm sure their employment contracts mention 1-2 months of salary in event of termination (or a similar notice period in case the employee wants to leave) - so this is not more than committed.

(In India the "Base Salary" component is often 50% of FIXED compensation, not including bonuses. This is done to reduce the statutory requirements on the company, especially in times like this.)

<comment><USER18> > The 3 months of compensation mentioned here - is equivalent only to 1.5 > months in any other country.

Why?

3 months of salary, to spend in India where things are relatively cheaper, seems like 3 months of Salary to me.

<comment><USER25> It's 3 months of 'basic pay', which would be half or less than half of the total salary. The rest is divided into so-called perks such as house rent allowance, travel allowance, education allowance, etc., which are partially tax-deductible for employees to various extents.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is completely normal business for IBM. I saw it too many times during my tenure there and it was obviously well overdue for the India branches.

There are regular cuts across the board, and there is actually very little attention paid to the internal ratings of the employees or keeping well- functioning groups together. Everyone left behind is expected to take up the slack, and additional hires are only made when things break badly enough for upper level management to be aware of it.

</comment><comment><USER27> What else you expect in country with poor labor laws? Layoffs is fine I think almost every company need to go through this phase one day or other for cost cutting. But there should be a procedure , a short 2 hours notice as seen in this article is shocking.

<comment><USER28> Yes on sites like [http://workplace.stackexchange.com/](http://workplace.stackexchange.com/) the questions about some of the labor practices in India are shocking almost pre Victorian in their harshness.

And I suspect that getting a job in a MNC is seen a bit like the civil service is ie a job for life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> IBM has spent an astonishing US$100K, per IBM employee!, on stock buybacks in the last 3yrs alone, and they are committed to more than half of that additionally in the next couple of years. They are only interested in increasing equity value among executives. IBM executives have stopped investing in their people, instead focusing on their personal bank accounts. IBM has given up on the idea of organic growth with the talent that they have -- they would rather chop off what they don't know how to manage and acquire new skills through acquisitions. Innovation is dying on the vine at IBM.

</comment><comment><USER6> For what it's worth, a colleague asked a coworker (in Austin) who works regularly with India STG staff. To the coworker in Austin, they aren't aware of any of their Indian STG contacts, nor their teams, being affected. At least not as per the article.

</comment><comment><USER30> Unlike Capitalism, Globalization is Zero-Sum.

</comment><comment><USER31> How many workers were actually cut?

<comment><USER32> According to article 'One analyst has estimated that IBM will cut 13,000 of its more than 434,000 workers'.

Not sure how many (what percentage) is in India and how many are affected.

<comment><USER33> IBM is no longer a USA company and has not been for some time, logic would dictate that if they've only got ten thousand or so employees left in the USA, if they plan to downsize 13K, at least some citizens of India are going to have to go. They'll (probably) never get rid of the local USA sales force and some service techs, so by definition layoffs will now start to happen in India.

GE is the same way, as are some other former USA companies, when all the Americans are fired you have to begin firing in India and China, which is new to those areas.

Now if they really wanted inhumane, they'd make the Indian workers train their replacements, then fire them.

<comment><USER34> The unofficial IBM union ([http://www.endicottalliance.org/](http://www.endicottalliance.org/)) estimates there to be ~66,000 FTE in the USA.

<comment><USER33> That's interesting, I was linear extrapolating from continuous losses around the last time an employer was a customer of IBM, leading me to think they're down to almost zero by now. The loss rate isn't as linear as expected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Fire everyone. Keep the coders.</comment>


Investing Can Prevent Climate Change - <AUTHOR> https://www.worth.com/contributor/how-your-investing-can-prevent-climate-change/ <comment><USER2> Sure it can, in principle.

But (massive) empirical evidence demonstrates that, by and large - the private sector won't do the right thing (or even "the common sense thing"), in this regard -- at least not at adequate scale -- unless it is very tightly regulated.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I have a long-range plan (similar to what's suggested by Jack Bogle), but this sounds like a good alternative for those that have room for climate protection in their investing scheme.

<comment><AUTHOR> "The report also found that sea levels are at the highest ever recorded."

That one really confuses me. I know parts of the US were under water at some point-- surely they would have been higher then?

Some of the other claims seem a bit far, also.

Am I wrong?</comment></comment>


Revisiting the Home Theater PC - <AUTHOR> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/03/revisiting-the-home-theater-pc.html <comment><USER2> Having been around the block many times on the HTPC front since 2000 from Mplayer through XBMC, Freevo, MythTV and countless others.

Of the non-live TV playing type, XBMC on the original Xbox was the best I'd ever used. It just worked, and some of the scripts were amazing. Sadly, 1080p HD wasn't quite doable on the little feller, so it was binned.

My best live experience was without a doubt with MythTV. But despite it being awesome, the loose coupling of the code to the OS to the hardware meant that I'd routinely get crashes and problems, and an inevitable degradation of the platform which just wasn't wife friendly.

I thought the original Apple TV was quite good, but it didn't handle flash or 720p mkv's well and was too underpowered for Boxee.

Boxee was great until the 1.0 release.

Currently I'm using a Mac Mini with EyeTV. No 10,000 foot view (as I don't use front row), just a dock with what I need on it. It's great. For non-live TV I have VLC, for live TV Eye-TV and anything I want for everything else. Stellarium and Google Earth are both incredible on a TV screen, I even do the occasional bit of photo processing in Aperture.

<comment><USER3> I haven't paid much attention to Boxee - what's your complaint with the current model?

<comment><USER2> 1.0 brought around some significant UI changes that I didn't really like at the time. Having said that, the thing that stopped me from using Boxee was that it was quicker to use VLC or Eye-TV to access my media. In the end, my workflow removed the need for it.

I'm not saying Boxee isn't great (it's pretty good) but it's no longer for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > "This is just the basic level of hardware to get a functional home theater > PC"

Really? I use an Atom CPU, half the RAM, and offload decoding to the GPU for an average draw at the wall of ~15W while decoding 1080p, and a pre-built device with all that in costs less than his parts.

Slap Ubuntu on, add the NVidia and XBMC PPAs, install VDPAU and XBMC and you are good to go!

<comment><USER5> What happens if rtorrent is running in the background with a few dozen torrents and you try to decode 1080p?

<comment><USER6> Nothing.

rtorrent is starving your network bandwidth and disk i/o; video is decoded by gpu. The atom cpu is enough to handle both at once. If you get choppy playback, it will be due disk i/o.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> HTPC is still the way to go. The problem with simple all-in-one solutions like Apple TV, Google TV, and others is there's too many codecs for video and audio. The only way to guarantee support for all of them is using an HTPC with either VLC or upgrading the codecs in the operating system.

Media Portal is much better than Windows Media Center. Media Portal is also better than XBMC if you need TV tuner support. <http://www.team- mediaportal.com/>

<comment><USER8> Apple TV is designed around playing content downloaded from iTMS. Google TV....they'll figure out something eventually. Neither one is really made for live TV.

* I've settled on the AppleTV because it's $99, so not much of a loss if it doesn't work out.

* Most of my videos are already in an MP4 compatible format already DVD->Handbrake->Apple Universal preset.

* It's dead quiet, no moving parts, no fans, and 6W of power.

My problem with the HTPC is it was a full Windows stack so it included all the headaches of antivirus, updates, configuration, and UAC prompts required a keyboard be nearby.

I can certainly see why some people have the inclination to go with a HTPC but I don't have the time nor the space to keep PC in the living room. And now, XBMC has been ported to the AppleTV so you get most of the functionality of the Windows application on an inexpensive device.

<comment><USER7> Found this demo video of XBMC On Apple TV: [http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/20/xbmc-comes-to-the-new- app...](http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/20/xbmc-comes-to-the-new-apple-tv/)

Apple TV with XBMC for $99 is damn difficult to beat. I might need to visit the Apple Store soon.

<comment><USER9> The reason the original post gave for getting rid of his old machine was that it couldn't handle 1080p content. The AppleTV can't do more than 720p (with XBMC it can decode at least some 1080p, but downscales it to 720p for output to your TV).

<comment><USER8> I'm less concerned about the resolution where absolute bandwidth is your limiting factor. ATV has an absolute bandwidth of 6MBps. OTA has an absolute bandwidth of 18MBps in the US. Even if it could use 1080p, outside of still images, its going to look like crap during complex scenes. Its the balance between bandwidth and quality. If I want high-quality (like Avatar or any Pixar movie) I'll get it on bluray, for everything else ATV DVD-quality is fine.

But as I said before, some people will have the need for a HTPC. I have a moderately small apartment and don't watch that much TV. I realized, a while ago, that keeping a dedicated PC, recording shows I'll probably never watch, running 24 hours a day was futile. If there is something interesting I can watch it live, download it through iTunes, or pull the occasional torrent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> XBMC, which is my HTPC frontend of choice since early XBOX 1 days, recently released a Apple TV 2 Version, which still has a few flaws but is very actively developed and improved. This is not XBMC Lite, it is the full package you know from the desktop. Add a NAS for movies, music and TV Shows and you have a very good solution. It's impressive that the underpowered Apple TV is able to play 1080p content flawlessly, however while being able to play 1080p the Apple TV scales everything down to 720p - this seems to be a hardware design decision which can't be changed, the XBMC team is looking into it. Given that I use a 720p beamer it isn't a problem for me though. Apart from that you get a full featured HTPC software which has been around for years on a power efficient instant-on box that costs you a hundred bucks.

</comment><comment><USER9> I second the comment on there suggesting a 2 year old Acer Revo + Ubuntu + Boxee/XBMC does all this and more with little fuss.

<comment> mike-cardwell Same here. My Acer Revo hangs off the back off my monitor in the Vesa mount with Ubuntu+Boxee. I don't see it, and I don't hear it. It's my only permanently on machine at home, and because it's a full Linux box, I also use it for performing nightly rsyncs of my off-site server. It also runs Vuze for downloading video.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The HTPC is the caviar solution. I messed around with "dedicated units" such as an ASUS O!play (highly recommended if you just need to stream media in your network). Also tried streaming media with the Blu-ray drive that came free with my TV. Even tried the pre-built Dell Zino HD with it's tiny atom like intel processor.

In the end, an HTPC is what _I_ needed (wanted). I can stream from netflix, play a blu-ray, watch youtube without a wonky interface (like the blu-ray players/tv have), stream media from my WHS (Windows Home Server), etc. It plays everything I throw at it.

Is it perfect? No way. Too complicated for my wife/family/mere mortals to run and it has the downsides of a full Winders stack (constant updates, etc).

But, at this point I don't see a true alternative. Codecs are king. I can download (almost) any software/codec combo and play the media.

I run and i3 and find it to be a perfect combination of speed/power consumption for an almost silent media pc.

Btw, the little Dell handles everything fine. The major complaint is that the tiny fan spins up when watching blu-ray/high-def/flash content. That's one of the major downsides to a prebuilt PC. Usually one area sucks. I love the tiny Dell form factor but the whine of the fan is a negative.

<comment><USER11> With proper sleep/hibernate, the power useage issue would be (mostly) moot. However, just when I get my sleep/hybrid sleep/hibernate working correctly, MSFT patches Windows and I'm suddenly back to square one.

I'd love to see a version of Windows where sleep "just works". From my research though, this appears to be as much a hardware + driver issue as an OS issue. Apparently that's why Mac's sleep so well. Hardware/OS all under one company's control.

<comment><USER12> That's interesting - the only machine I've had which couldn't sleep under Windows is my Mac Air, whose drivers are supplied by Apple. The Mac Air Windows drivers also don't provide a way of turning off the wifi on flights, amongst other things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I used to have this affliction as well. At one point I had a dual processor (not dual core) giant tower with turbo-jet-sounding fans running MythTV. I had a ton of other solutions since, but eventually just settled on Roku. Netflix and Hulu is plenty for most purposes and I no longer have to spend the time to transcode video.

For my legacy stuff, I just an NSLU2 (SlugOS) + ushare + XBox 360. Everything just works.

</comment><comment><USER14> I went from a HTPC to a WDTV and was pretty happy for awhile but decided to go back and build a HTPC/NAS box that runs 24/7.

XBMC, Sabnzbd, Sickbeard, Torrents, Hulu, Transcoding/Stream with AirVideo, on Iphone/IPad.

If your sole purpose is watching video, I think for most people a all in one device that's $70-150 is better suited.

<comment><USER15> Seeing a comment on Jeff's blog, I was jut looking up the WDTV ( [http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Network-ready-Media- Pl...](http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Network-ready-Media- Player/dp/B002KKFP9Y) ) and tempted to try it out. I currently have XBMC on a classic Xbox and was wondering how this compares to XBMC (video formats, updates).

<comment><USER16> I've bought three of Viewsonic's VMP75s ([http://www.amazon.com/Viewsonic- NexTV-VMP75-Network-Player/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Viewsonic-NexTV- VMP75-Network-Player/dp/B003JQLI9O)) and couldn't be happier. There are a few complaints in the reviews, especially regarding the UI, but most of these have been fixed by the latest firmware. The support for various container formats and codecs is excellent; the one feature it lacks that the WDTV supports is Pandora.

<comment><USER15> Interesting, thanks! This box looks so much slicker than the WDTV too. Since I watch quite a few foreign movies, one of the useful features with XBMC is the ability to adjust the subtitle display (add delay or speed it up by a couple of seconds) and also the ability to browse and pick a subtitle. I am curious if either WD or VMP has any additional options with subtitles. It is not a game-stopper by any means but I am still trying to decide whether to go with an XBMC capable box or these options which are also much cheaper.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Except a kill-a-watt cannot give accurate readings off a powersupply with PFC (also kill-a-watt are calibrated poorly, no 2 units will give quite the same measurement).

I am sure it's very low, my dual-core i3 is significantly more efficient than my old AMD X2 but the 22watts might not be exactly right.

<comment><USER8> They do have a floor below which the sensors can't get a good reading. I read that below 100W it's +/-10W. So Jeffs actual wattage could be 32 or 12W really.</comment></comment>


Chris Dodd's Email Reveals What MPAA Really Thinks of Fair Use - <AUTHOR> https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150416/17252230680/chris-dodds-email-reveals-what-mpaa-really-thinks-fair-use-extremely-controversal.shtml

<comment><USER2> I think for real creative community it should be insulting that he speaks for it, presenting MPAA's perverted views as "views of the creative community". Lexi Alexander is quite outspoken about how interests of MPAA are at odds with interests of actual creators.

</comment><comment><USER3> Well, given some of the past actions of the MPAA[1][2], I suppose this attitude is altogether unsurprising. The sooner the MPAA fades away and is replaced with something less archaic, the better.

[1]: [https://torrentfreak.com/google-mpaa- censorship-150303/](https://torrentfreak.com/google-mpaa-censorship-150303/)

[2]: [http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-mpaas- att...](http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-mpaas-attempt-to- revive-sopa.html)

<comment><USER4> The MPAA is not going to fade away, because motion picture publishers have economic interests, same as any other industrial sector. I could cite a bunch of things I don't care for about it, such as the ratings policy, but it's going to keep existing in some form.

I think what the MPAA is worried about here is that if US fair use standards are exported to all TPP countries, then decisions in US courts come to cover a much larger part of the world, with potentially unpredictable economic effects. In this case, they're arguing for _not_ changing the copyright laws of the other countries.

<comment><USER2> Catch is, MPAA don't serve interests of the publishers anymore. They serve their own Lysenkoist interests. It takes some guts for publishers to ditch them though.

 _> In this case, they're arguing for not changing the copyright laws of the other countries._

They are perfectly fine with changing those laws, as long as they make them worse (lengthen the copyright term, more DRM anti-circumvention idiocy and etc.). They obviously don't want to change them when it goes in the different direction. However it has nothing to do with economic unpredictability.

It's pretty simple. They support what gives them (MPAA) more control, and they oppose what reduces their power. However their control has no positive effects on economic benefits of the creative community. If anything, it hurts it, since they stifle innovation, lock up culture and are acting in backwards thinking and crooked manner in general. MPAA are parasitic, but always try to come up with new ways to justify their existence in the eyes of the actual creative community (because more and more people there understand that their existence isn't justified).

<comment><USER4> That's complete nonsense dude. There are big fish and little fish and the MPAA largely represents the interests of teh big fish, ie the majors and to some extent the mini-majors to use the industry nomenclature. If you think the MPAA has gone rogue and that Disney, Universal, Sony and the others are clutching their pearls in horror then you're detached from reality.

As an indie producer, do I think my interests are coincident with those of the major studios, no. But they're not entirely orthogonal to them either. If you're going to come back with the line that nothing really original or creative comes out of the major studios, that's a tired old 'No True Scotsman' fallacy and the conversation isn't going to go anywhere. The fact that the industry is lopsided and dominated by a small number of big economic interests who wield disproportionate influence isn't inherently bad, taht's actually a pretty normal and expected outcome of any given system.

 _If anything, it hurts it, since they stifle innovation, lock up culture and are acting in backwards thinking and crooked manner in general._

Yeah yeah, wake me when the revolution comes. It's going to be a while, because nobody has come up with a good way to monetize content at scale yet outside of the regular distribution channels (even companies like Amazon and Netflix basically operate within the traditional model in terms fo content acquisition and so forth). The reality of film production is that the manufacture of a good quality product still requires a lot of capital up front, ie in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and up.

Ultimately, it is the distributors that write the checks. And considering the total film industry involves ~$100 billion in revenues, with the US being by far the biggest producer (capturing more than a third of that), I don't think that's going to change all that quick.

<comment><USER2> Disney, Sony and etc. aren't the creative community. They are legacy publishers who are stuck in DRM obsessed mentality. Yeah, MPAA is their pawn. But such mentality doesn't actually help the creative community. You know, actual authors. That's what I was talking about.

 _> The fact that the industry is lopsided and dominated by a small number of big economic interests who wield disproportionate influence isn't inherently bad, taht's actually a pretty normal and expected outcome of any given system._

It is pretty bad, since they weild too much power to screw up the legal system, and this has negative effect on everyone, way beyond their own industry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You know, after the "Blurred Lines" incident[1], it wouldn't surprise me if the music industry started pushing for more limits on copyright enforcement.

[1] [http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/mar/10/blurred- lines-p...](http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/mar/10/blurred-lines- pharrell-robin-thicke-copied-marvin-gaye)

<comment><USER6> I doubt it. As with patents, sometimes they burn the people wielding them, but those wielding them as a weapon still see more value in excluding smaller players and those who don't cross-license than in stopping damage to themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Appearance of 'concern' throughout the email:

1st paragraph: 1 time

2nd paragraph: 1 time

3rd paragraph: 2 times

4th paragraph: 3 times

Total: 7 times

<comment><USER2> Control freaks (aka DRM proponents) are commonly paranoid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Former Academic Librarian:

Fair Use doesn't even get used in Colleges and Universities since there is such fear of litigation. How about we secure the fair use in our school first and than we can start talking about Fair Use for International Treaties.

<comment><USER9> I don't understand your position. TPP/TTIP create new major litigation risks, so without rejecting these treaties it may not even be possible to achieve the goal of risk-free Fair Use at schools in the first place.

<comment><USER8> My psoition is we have never had fair use in the first place. The dear of lossing your job because your orginization gets sued is intense.

So can we have fair use in education? The treaties cut down what even counts for fair use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Of course they love fair use, i.e. it's fair for them to charge for every single use.

</comment><comment><USER11> "P.S. The rest of the TPP, however, is just hunky dory to my member companies. Sony's consumer electronics division can not wait to sue the living shit out of the next country that tries to institute an environmental impact assessment on one of its devices. Woot!"

<comment><USER12> Please don't use quotation marks that make it look like you're quoting when you're not. It's too misleading. The satirical intent of your comment is clear enough without the quotes.

<comment><USER11> The satirical intent is clear enough to not warrant quotes, but the existence of quotes is enough to make it misleading?

<comment><USER12> Correct.

<comment><USER11> "Brilliant"</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Difference Between SQL's JOIN .. ON Clause and the Where Clause - <AUTHOR> https://blog.jooq.org/2019/04/09/the-difference-between-sqls-join-on-clause-and-the-where-clause/ <comment><USER2> The syntax for joins is unnecessarily complex. The difference in behaviour is determined by the operator used for comparison between the two tables. If there existed modifiers for the operators to be sensitive to nulls, no need for special syntax would be needed.

If we define /<op> to make the operator include nulls on the left side and <op>\ to include nulls on the right side, we can do joins of all kinds without the JOIN ON syntax.

Example.

inner join

select * from a,b where a.id=b.id

left join

select * from a,b where a.id=\b.id

right join

select * from a,b where a.id/=b.id

outer join

select * from a,b where a.id/=\b.id

<comment><USER3> That's the old join syntax before ANSI SQL was designed. Except your operators look like "* =" and "= *" (without whitespace of course, blame HN's markdown parser). Sybase supported this syntax well into its version 15.x (maybe still in version 16?). And Sybase did not (does not?) support full outer joins.

It may seem simple on the surface, but once you get into complex queries, it's a horrible syntax, and it's easy to forget the relations between the tables, particularly with several tables (4+) involved.

As someone who has converted an old and large SQL code base from non-ANSI JOINs to ANSI JOINs, I am happy to see this style of syntax abandoned.

<comment><USER4> IIRC, Oracle also supports this "* =" and "= *" syntax. I started with that and then learned ANSI JOINs; was difficult initially because I was used to the former syntax but I would agree that ANSI JOINs are more clearer/cleaner. That and the "with" clause makes queries so much more readable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Contrary to articles conclusion, there are databases (i.e. Oracle) where it doesn't matter how you write joins, but oracle also has support for left/right/full outer joins in the where clause

Left join ... is the same as leftcol=rightcol(+) (oracle has special syntax for this with that + sign).

In summary, depending on database, it may not matter how you write these joins, but it's best to stick to SQL standard using JOIN if you'd like cross database support.

<comment><USER6> I have noticed that many authors of SQL articles don't seem to be aware of Oracles quirks. For example, recently I read an article about NULLs in SQL. The author didn't specify any particular database, but wrote as if what he was saying applied to all relational databases. But Oracle treats empty strings and NULLs as the same thing, which I don't think the article's author was aware of.

<comment><USER7> "this may not continue to be true in future releases, and Oracle recommends that you do not treat empty strings the same as nulls"

[https://docs.oracle.com/database/121/SQLRF/sql_elements005.h...](https://docs.oracle.com/database/121/SQLRF/sql_elements005.htm#SQLRF30037)

<comment><USER8> How are we supposed to treat them differently? Oracle's the one putting the damn nulls in the db.

(Recently tripped over this one.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As soon as you filter on the table you're joining with in the where clause it becomes an inner join.

        FROM foo
        LEFT JOIN bar ON ...
        /* Makes it an inner join: */
        WHERE bar.baz ...

<comment><USER10> Only if you're resting for a non null value. If you test for a null value, you'll be looking for all values in one table that don't have a match in the other table.

<comment><USER3> Indeed, a faster way to check if a table does _not_ have a comparable row is a LEFT JOIN with a WHERE NULL clause:

SELECT t1.* FROM t1 LEFT JOIN t2 ON t2.id = t1.foreign_id WHERE t2.id IS NULL

Is a lot faster than the naïve alternative:

SELECT t1.* FROM t1 WHERE NOT EXISTS (SELECT * FROM t2 WHERE id = t1.foreign_id)

<comment><USER11> Unless the query is optimized?

<comment><USER3> For a simple query like this, then yes, it will be optimised. But once your queries get more complicated, the optimiser might not be able to make that deduction on its own.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Two Large Chinese Borrowers Miss Bond Payments, Sources Say - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-11/two-large-chinese-borrowers-are-said-to-miss-bond-payments <comment><USER2> Uh oh. Wintime, which is a coal mining operation, owes about US$46 billion. They did a financial restructuring last year, and now they can't make the payments on that. "Wintime's original plan was to borrow to fund acquisitions and expand into areas including finance and logistics." That didn't end well.

China has "modernized" their bankruptcy system since 2007, with a more pro- creditor legal system and new bankruptcy courts. China now allows defaults, creditor-in-possession operation ("Chapter 11" in the US), and most of the other creative stuff seen in US debt finance. Now companies in China can try all the stupid debt side stuff we see in the US. But without enough people who've seen it before on the lending side to evaluate credit risk.

In 2016, President Xi Jinping began putting emphasis on reining in financial risks. The tolerance for creative financing was reduced. Wintime's expansion plans may have been caught by this.[1]

[1] [https://www.smh.com.au/business/markets/looks-like-a- ponzi-s...](https://www.smh.com.au/business/markets/looks-like-a-ponzi-scheme- china-s-debt-mountain-is-growing-20180719-p4zsdh.html)

<comment> shaki-dora There is nothing stupid with Chapter 11. The owners get nothing until all creditors are made full, so the incentives work just as well as under alternative regimes. The difference is simply that there is a chance for the business to continue. Which is really better for all involved, creditors, employees, customers, and vendors.

The alternative alternative, i. e. starting from the assumption that business must shut down, is really a legacy of the times when a business and its owners were hard to separate. There may also be some sort of misplaced morality at play, where "Radio Shack must die" to atone for the sin of running out of money.

<comment><USER3> What about the contractors that get regularly screwed over from this? "Sorry, I know we agreed to pay for your time and work, but we declared bankruptcy and paid off most of the bank's debt and nothing is left for you small fry! Good luck sueing us with your non-existant legal team! I just got a bonus for fucking you over and saving the company the money!"

<comment><USER4> I worked for a small design agency that got stiffed on a six figure invoice this way. There was absolutely nothing they could do about it and the bankrupt founder didn't even bother apologizing. It almost killed a 10 person company that the studio head had spent a decade building up from a sole proprietorship.

<comment><USER5> The design agency shouldn't have extended so much credit in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> IMO, not all that informed, This is the Chinese government picking winners and losers as it tries to deleverage itself from what it did in 2008.

(As a side note, China doesn't get enough credit for what it did in 2008 to stabilize the global markets. It and the US literally spent their way out of what could have been a very brutal global recession)

Last year they bailed out HNA. Lots of chatter that HNA was bailed out because it had done some very high profile deals in the first world and China wanted to protect its reputation.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-01-24/hna- sh...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-01-24/hna-shuffle- heralds-start-of-the-great-china-bailout)

The good news for the world is that Chinese corporate debt isn't held that much outside of China, due to tge double whammy of

1) investors valuing their chance of payback on a default like sovereign debt(large haircuts, very little leverage to get any say in the proceedings)

2) investors valuing the chance of a default like a corporate bond( much higher than sovereign defaults).

This means it has the worst of both worlds from a risk perspective but does pay a larger coupon. And if you are a distressed credit investor you have the same problem that is now an issue in most markets. You can be right about the default chances but the government could still swoop in and bail out the company making your fundamental analysis worthless.

The Chinese debt market tanking isn't going to hurt markets in a first order way. What could cause grief would be a scenario like the mid =80's where Japan almost on a dime stopped spending money around the world and brought it all back home to help fight their recession.

If China starts selling global assets, like housing in major cities around the world, and starts to decline their treasury holding rather than rolling them, then look out.

<comment><USER7> Chinese corporate debt isn't held much outside of China because of Chinese capital controls, too - domestic investors looking for returns are often constrained to domestic markets, thus bidding up prices and lowering returns. The same phenomenon explains in part the excessive real estate construction in China: there's often little other good places for domestic investors to park their money.

<comment><USER8> Is real estate still a "great investment" in China when you can't own property but merely buy 75 year leases? (this is my understanding of how real estate works at least in Shanghai)

<comment><USER9> Is real estate in America a great investment[1], when despite owning property, you have to pay 2% of its value in taxes/year? In a mere 50 years, the government will own your entire property!

China's property is leased... But as a converse, it doesn't have any property taxes.

At the end of the day, the difference between a fixed-term lease, and a property tax are largely academic. (With a bit of economic weirdness, close to the roll-over period of the lease.)

[1] Which also begs the question - _should_ real estate be a great investment? Nobody cheers when the price of staples and groceries goes up...

<comment><USER10> _pay 2% of its value in taxes /year? In a mere 50 years_

<pedantic> More like 36 years. </pedantic>

There's a quick trick to a good approximation for this. The rule of 72 says that you can estimate the time it takes a compounded investment to double by dividing the interest rate by 72. 2% for 36 years will double the investment (or, since your actual statement was going the other way, strip it to nothing)

See, for example, [https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/what-is-the- rule-72...](https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/what-is-the-rule-72/)

<comment><USER11> There's no compounding here, since the property tax is a fee and not a reduction in the value of the asset, so I don't think that's applicable.

<comment><USER12> It's not a direct reduction in value, but I would think if the fee went away the value would still increase.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> On the one hand, talk about Chinese bond market blowing up are at least 8 years old at this point. On the other hand, combined with slowing growth, this might be a catalyst for some broader debt crisis [0]. US corporate borrowing is also ATH [1] and even for consumer debt we are currently at the highest autoloan delinquency rate ever [2].

[0] [https://chinapower.csis.org/china-face-looming-debt- crisis/](https://chinapower.csis.org/china-face-looming-debt-crisis/)

[1] [https://www.wsj.com/articles/corporate-debt-is-reaching- reco...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/corporate-debt-is-reaching-record- levels-11546099201)

[2] [http://fortune.com/2019/02/12/americans-late-on-car- payments...](http://fortune.com/2019/02/12/americans-late-on-car-payments/)

<comment><USER14> Why is it an alarm bell if China is still growing at basically the fastest rate in the world? Is China's inflation super high that it needs a faster growth rate than other countries for some reason? China's population growth is quite low, so I don't see why it would need a faster rate of growth.

I'm always confused why people make such a big deal of China growing at ONLY 5% a year. If the US grew at 5% this year, we'd be dancing in the streets!

Edit: Thanks for the comments, you guys are amazing!

<comment><USER15> Because China has a few long-term problems it's trying to grow its way out of:

* A baby bust left over from the introduction of the one-child policy, at which point its dependency ratio will skyrocket to levels unmatched in any other industrialized country. One phrasing I've heard is that China needs to get rich before it gets old

* Environmental damage that takes money to reverse (that is, to reverse while maintaining living standards). Environmental damage in the sense of damage to the urban environment that industrial workers live in, not just to wilderness areas - unbreathable air, toxic rivers, etc.

* A large rural population whose urbanization is unstoppable, and whose urbanization needs to be supported by jobs and housing to avoid the kind of slums you see in e.g. Brazil or Nigeria and attendant civil disorder. Which brings us to:

* An autocratic political system whose popular legitimacy is built on economic growth, and whose popularity will (in the eyes of the people running it) collapse if it can't deliver truly spectacular economic results.

<comment><USER16> _Environmental damage that takes money to reverse (that is, to reverse while maintaining living standards). Environmental damage in the sense of damage to the urban environment that industrial workers live in, not just to wilderness areas - unbreathable air, toxic rivers, etc._

It's also a matter of being able to grow enough food for 1.3 billion people, and in the absence of that, experience extreme dependency on foreign sources of food. Part of that is down to local pollution and mismanagement, but part of it also a matter of global climate change and desertification. It's hard to be a superpower if you depend on your geopolitical opponents to feed you.

<comment><USER17> Reminds me of how the Soviet Union having to import simple _wheat_

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Yup, the investors are going to lose their money. So what. This won't start cascading bank failures though because the PBOC can print as much money as they want to recapitalize the banks without burdening the taxpayer. This is a fundamental difference between the western and european systems and is why China hasn't had a Japanese style deflation, even though it has been predicted every year since the early 90s.

Analysts have been getting it wrong for almost 30 years, yet they refuse to question their models because credit cycles are believed to be physical laws of the universe, when really they are artifacts of western financial policy. Namely, fractional reserve banking and all money as debt which the Chinese government doesn't follow.

I know what you're thinking now. "Fractional reserve banking" and "all money is debt" is a dog whistle for libertarians. Thus, this guy must be a gold bug, etc. No. I am saying that this is fiat currency, and that's ok. It's just not managed in the screwy boom-bust way that we have in the west that's specifically made to separate people from their assets every 8 or 9 years. Not everything China does is a good thing, but their financial system hasn't crashed in decades, so empirically it is a lot more stable.

<comment><USER19> This must indeed be first comment ever using the terms "fractional reserve bank", "printing money", "fiat", "gold", and "debt", but not "inflation".

Which is really a shame because it's the obvious result. And also a very good way to specifically separate people from their assets. And also pensions.

<comment><USER20> Inflation issues are also down to another western belief - venerating 'price competition' as the only pure way to resolve resource conflicts.

The Chinese don't work that way. If there is a conflict for resources, those with the power just take them. If there is compensation offered for that, those without the power just get given it - and probably consider themselves lucky.

The Chinese show you can have a system where you set a price, even one as low as zero, and then use coercive power to force people to take that price.

Those with power don't need to get into price competition. And if they don't get into price competition, then prices won't go up. Inflation is killed at source.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is actually a positive development in the long run. A few years ago my father, who lives and invests in China, boiled down the basic investment strategy in China to: invest in big companies because the government will always bail them out. If that's what everyone believed then you can see how some very poor decisions can be made and debts can balloon without end. Disasters like these will remind Chinese investors that there are risks. There are no free lunches and be prudent about your investments. This is part of the process of modernizing the Chinese economy.

</comment><comment><USER22> Wow. Wonder if this is the canary in the coal mine for the Chinese economy slowing down.

<comment><USER23> s/China/Global

Everything is connected and this level of debt has never been seen before. Next decade should be an interesting ride

<comment><USER24> Because of Chinese capital controls they're connected less than one might expect.

<comment><USER25> Well, unless you are into Vancouver real estate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The S&P 500 is up 40pts today, although unrelated, is evidence that the market is not concerned. Missed bond payments happen all the time. In 2014-2015 many oil and drilling companies missed payments when oil prices fell. This sector is very volatile. .

<comment><USER27> I think the US markets aren't concerned because Chinese corporate bonds are basically internal to China. In otherwords, USA exposure to Chinese credit problems isn't that great?

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> How much of this is legit missing, and how much of it is a ploy (?) to restructure payments? That is, is a temporary hit to reputation / confidence acceptable if the longer term benefit to the bottom line is significant enough?

<comment><USER19> Good luck trying to get cheaper financing after missing a few payments.

<comment><USER28> Yes and no. In the case of China and the Chinese gov, well that's not Wall Street.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Why is this link keep getting posted repeatedly?

16 hours ago it was already submitted here : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19140804](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19140804)

Strangely, it was quickly hidden and one of the comments pointed to this explanation of how shadow banking works in China and the potential risk.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auiGFRmD0tg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auiGFRmD0tg)

Essentially, these two large borrowers missing bond payment is a signal of worst to come.

It's not a question of if or when such crash will come but who will go down first and the big question: Can Chinese leadership be able to survive this time around? Deng Xiaopeng's remedy to deteriorating grip on the country was market capitalism, but now that it has proven to be largely a failure with half a billion Chinese living in poverty or barely what is considered Standard living in the west, with no political free will and expression protected, how long can the people bare it?

There are already signs of simmering tensions between the state and people. Much like leading up to the Tianmen Square incident 40 years ago in 1989, we are seeing similar themes - the rise of student activists with little to nothing to lose, a deteriorating economy now on the verge of misnky effect, now with a KGB puppet applying pressure via trade sanctions....

I estimate some major event taking place after the North Korea-America summit, the outcomes of that meeting will determine what chips China will use to get America off it's back.....

yup, you guessed right, another nuclear test this year along with ICBM/SLBM tests, launching skirmishes in NLL zone....

OR

another tianmen square unfortunately...as Chinese leadership realizes America's not about to go easy, it will have no choice but to kill it's own citizens who will riot when they los their jobs and savings.

The domino chips are all set in place, and it's just waiting for that final push.

<comment><USER30> "now that it has proven to be largely a failure with half a billion Chinese living in poverty"

What?

China has risen to superpower status, and become one of the biggest economies in the world in the space of a generation.

Are they as rich as the US per capita? No, but they're on the right trajectory, and getting there quicker than most other nations did.

Don't forget nearly all these city dwellers are first generation, if they don't remember living in a wood hut, without electricity, running water or toilet, their parents do.

<comment><USER29> > superpower status

says who?

> Are they as rich as the US per capita? No, but they're on the right > trajectory, and getting there quicker than most other nations did.

Japan thought the same thing up until 1989

<comment><USER31> China was a complete shambles in 1949. If you're implying China is now on par with Japan of 1989, they're doing _great_.</comment></comment></comment></comment>