25,000 Dead Bees Found In Car Park Amid Probe - <AUTHOR> http://news.sky.com/story/1106549/dead-bees-25000-found-in-car-park-amid-probe <comment><USER2> Can anyone recommend a good source for background information about bees? 25,000 sounds like a huge number, but some quick googling (no idea how reliable the sources are) seems to indicate that's about the number of bees in a hive.

I'd like to have a better idea of whether this story is closer to, "Exterminators spray beehive, all the bees die" or "Colony collapse disorder threatens the existence of all life on earth"

<comment><USER3> A dead deer found on the side of the road in Pennsylvania has more biomass.

<comment><USER4> Deer don't pollinate flowers.

<comment><USER3> 25000 bees are a minute fraction of the worldwide total. One deer is a minute fraction of the worldwide total, I'd assert their impact is on the same order of magnitude. Can we all stop examining local news and panicking globally?

If you started finding lots of deer dead in the woods, I might be concerned; on the side of the road, not so much.

If you started finding bees dead in their hive (which does happen, but not in this case), I might be concerned; finding them dead by bee toxic trees that have been recently sprayed with insecticide, not so much.

<comment><USER4> _Can we all stop examining local news and panicking globally?_

Am I coming across as panicky? I don't really see that... I'm just pointing out that deer don't have the same keystone role in large ecosystems as major pollinators.

<comment><USER3> My point has been and continues to be that the 25000 bees of the referenced story are not indicative of a major catastrophe, they are indicative of a local anomaly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> 2001: Planted Linden Trees. (hmmm. maybe toxic to bees)

2002: no dead bees.

2003: no dead bees.

...

2012: no dead bees.

2013:6/17 Sprayed Lindren trees with insecticides toxic to bees

2013:6/20 25,000 dead fucking bees

Conclusion: "It could be because Linden Trees are toxic to bees."

<comment><USER6> The insecticide was Safari (Dinotefuran) which is toxic to bees, and it has been confirmed that it killed them.

[http://www.opb.org/news/blog/ecotrope/state-confirms- pestici...](http://www.opb.org/news/blog/ecotrope/state-confirms-pesticide- killed-thousands-of-bees-in-wilsonville/)

This was also concluded a few days ago: [http://www.opb.org/news/blog/ecotrope/xerces-society- wilsonv...](http://www.opb.org/news/blog/ecotrope/xerces-society-wilsonville- bees-died-from-pesticide-poisoning/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Insecticides might be killing insects? This must be studied for a few decades, we wouldn't want to jump to conclusions.

<comment><AUTHOR> It should be no surprise that bees (as pollinators) and chemical companies are multimillion dollar/billion dollar industries within the larger agricultural industry.

It should also be no surprise the chemical companies are paying millions of dollars a year to special interest groups, lobbyists, PR, and "independent" research studies - all of which suggest Colony Collapse Disorder is not definitively linked with "insecticides", as you call them.

CCD is analogous to almost every other scientific theory that runs counter to powerful interests and money, backed by observation, research studies, empirical data, and plain common sense - think evolution or global warming - science and common sense goes out the window in favor of the status quo.

<comment><USER8> It's a real bummer. Most of the fertilizer/insecticide companies are focused on the corn and a few other cash crop or subsidized markets. The problem is that most of those crops self-pollinate or are pollinated by wind (like corn).

This leaves the industry at odds with the beekeeping industry which is absolutely necessary to keep pollinating quite a few of the other crops we actually want to EAT.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is there a movement in the US yet to ban neocotinoids? I would like to donate if so. I saw a few bees dying on the ground last year, but this year it seems much worse. I've probably seen five bees dying on the ground in the last week, and I don't even spend that much time outside! (This is in the East Bay near San Francisco by the way.)

</comment><comment><USER10> "Workers plan to wrap bee-proof netting around the trees in an attempt to prevent the deaths of more bees."

Gee whiz, how about NOT SPRAYING POISON ON THE TREES in the first place?!

<comment><USER7> The netting is a stop-gap measure until the experts can definitively prove whether the insecticide sprayed on the trees kills insects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Temporary ban on neocotinoids?

</comment><comment><USER12> Please HN, let's be sensible about the bees. This is maybe the tenth story about bees I've seen hit the front page in the last couple of months. People seem to be absorbing the alarmist and unfounded opinion that we know what's causing CCD.

Truth is, we simply don't know what's causing it. There are many possibilities, and there are hundreds of research groups working on it. It has been shown that some pesticides do affect bees. But it has also been shown that various diseases as well as beekeeping practices have large effects.

CCD is complex, and a sky news story about a single incident of a bunch of bees dying is no reason to start jumping to conclusions. It's interesting, sure, but don't assume it tells us anything about CCD.

<comment><AUTHOR> >It has been shown that some pesticides do affect bees. But it has also been shown that various diseases as well as beekeeping practices have large effects.

There is no direct link demonstrated between neonicotinoids and the honey bee syndrome known as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). However, as the most likely candidate, that is why a story like this is important, because it is a case study likely to link the two. Is this story determinative? Absolutely not, otherwise that would be the headline, "Neonicotinoids Proved to be the Smoking Gun in CCD."

However, as to the diseases you refer to, recent research suggests that neonicotinoids may make honey bees more susceptible to parasites and pathogens, including the intestinal parasite Nosema, which has been implicated as one causative factor in CCD. ([http://www.xerces.org/wp- content/uploads/2012/03/Are-Neonico...](http://www.xerces.org/wp- content/uploads/2012/03/Are-Neonicotinoids-Killing-Bees_Xerces-Society1.pdf))

As to the keepers theory, sure transport and handling may be blamed, but bee keepers have been around since at least the time of the building of the pyramids - in fact many tombs were uncovered with 2,000+ year old honey that was eaten by the discoverers (not a bad shelf life). Nevertheless, significantly well traveled bees tend to die at greater rates, of course this can not account for CCD in wild colonies.

I imagine neonicotinoids will prove to be the smoking gun, but more along the lines of nicotine and "third hand smoke" (see: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third- hand_smoke](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-hand_smoke)). To complicate matters even further, the neonicotinoids are likely to not directly cause death, but to make bees more susceptible to diseases or parasites (as referenced in the study above), making the diseases and parasites more palatable candidates for the cause rather than an effect of the cause.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Without bees, humans wouldn't survive much more than 6 months on this planet.

<comment><USER14> That's really not true. Plenty of food self pollinates. However, I wouldn't really want to go on living without all the wonderful foods that bees provide us with. Think matrix-meals and you're feeling it.

<comment><USER13> "The fact is that of the 100 crop species that provide 90 per cent of the world's food, over 70 are pollinated by bees."- UN report.

<comment><USER12> That is a fact, but it's misleading in this context. Most human staple foods are cereals (grass seeds), none of which are bee pollinated. If you took only the top 10 crop species which account for ~80% of human calorie provision, 0% are bee pollinated.

We could very easily survive without bees, but there would be a lot less fruit and many fewer wildflower species.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Just shocked they took the time to count all those dead bees.

<comment><USER16> You use counting scales.

<comment><USER12> Or just normal scales: count out 200 bees and weigh them collectively. Divide by 200 to get the average bee weight. Now weigh all the bees collected and divide by average bee weight to get estimated number.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Pesticides wipe out beehives all the time.

One of my hives was destroyed last year.

<comment><USER18> If you are in the business, perhaps you can provide some perspective on this. According to news reports for the last few months, there has been an epidemic of bees dying off. Can't recall for sure, but figures of 40%-75% loss have been floating around.

If true, this seems very significant. If we leave out the obvious emotional negatives, the economic fall out could be monstrous in the form of much higher prices and severe supply constraint on everything from fruit/pollinator- dependent food, to honey and products made from honey/beeswax. Not to mention farms going out of business due to poor harvest.

<comment><USER19> This has been going on for more than a few months -- at least since 2006. Some countries are starting to ban the insecticides suspected to be responsible.

More info: [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_collapse_disorder](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_collapse_disorder)

<comment><USER18> Fascinating... and I'm guessing there isn't any immediate action to limit the use of the suspected substance?

<comment><USER19> Well, like I said... there are some countries (EU) that are starting to regulate these pesticides, at least on a trial basis.

But over here in the US, not really. Partly this is because we've only relatively recently started to get good insight into the problem. And it's still controversial.

For a long time, we thought it might be caused by a disease or parasite; these are a big concern for beekeepers and an easy way to lose a hive under normal circumstances.

There's even some theories that claim it's caused by feeding the bees high- fructose corn syrup. This is a common practice to support hives during the winter, to make up for the honey reserves removed during the summer.

These pesticides are strongly suspected to interfere with bees, but we're still not sure they're _the_ cause of CCD. It will be worth watching what happens in the EU.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Why is this on the front page?

<comment><USER14> Because for some pathetic reason, we're apparently still on the cusp of accepting that we are probably almost sure why the bees are dying, but a huge swath of us are turning a blind eye out of scientific ignorance or out of bribery. And our job as literate, scientific folk is to get outraged about this and use our cute metaphorical clout to make these other people, the majority, understand that the world is GOING TO SUCK someday if we kill the bees off enough to stop pollinating all the crazy delicious things we like to eat. Even if we have our heads up our asses over the supposed cause of this, we as an entire planet should still be completely paying attention, livid, and figuring out what the actual cause is. Because odds are good it's something humans did. If you're not upset about the bees dying, you are not thinking it through enough.

<comment><USER12> This is mostly hyperbolic and wrong. You're right that bees are great, we should all care, and it would suck if they all died. You are wrong that we know what's causing it or that it's some nefarious scheme.

Firstly, nobody is turning a blind eye out of scientific ignorance, and to suggest bribery is involved is just ridiculous. Every time an industry has a problem that's being investigated by scientists, people start making bribery claims. It's absolute nonsense, especially in this case where there is a very active debate in the literature and many hundreds of labs working independently. Newsflash: agricultural corporations have almost no impact on research outputs. They fund a small amount of research, and often the results that get published are not what they wanted. They have _no_ say on what gets published, except in perhaps a handful of cases where they _illegally_ exert pressure, but I've never seen such a case. As a plant scientist, I find the idea of any company using money to influence the results of academic research completely laughable. They might use money to influence the research question, but not the answer.

Secondly, we really are _not_ almost sure why the bees are dying. The evidence is very strong that there are many causes contributing to CCD, and it keeps getting more complex with time. What's clear is that it's not a single cause, and will not be simple to fix, and is not just about the insecticides.

<comment><USER21> I don't think the issue is that scientists are being lobbied or directly influenced by the chemical or agricultural industries. They don't need to do that since politicians (and farmers and the public) are quite happy to ignore published science.

>nobody is turning a blind eye out of scientific ignorance

Well the UK government demonstrated scientific incompetence, if I'm begin charitable[1]. I find it hard to believe that the highly experienced senior government scientists involved in promoting this study didn't recognise how flawed it was. Of course we have an Environment minister who denies climate change so it's hard to say what his crazy motivations are on this issue; it may just be personal bias due to his background as an extremely wealthy land owner and farmer.

>Secondly, we really are not almost sure why the bees are dying. The evidence is very strong that there are many causes contributing to CCD, and it keeps getting more complex with time. What's clear is that it's not a single cause, and will not be simple to fix, and is not just about the insecticides.

This is all true, but it's not a reason to ignore the effects of pesticides that have been measured. It also needs to be remembered that this isn't just about honey bees and CCD or even just bees. Pollinators of all types are in huge decline. The media and campaigners seem to concentrate on bees a lot because they have a group of humans (bee keepers) that will lobby for them.

[1] [http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/damian-carrington- blog...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/damian-carrington- blog/2013/jun/05/bees-neonicotinoids-pesticides)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Social Search by GrowSumo - Find influencers in your space - <AUTHOR> https://social.growsumo.com <comment><USER2> Pretty clean interface. Can I export this list or check other social networks soon?

<comment><AUTHOR> You can export the list, and Twitter, Youtube and Twitch are searchable. Will be adding more networks moving forward.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Really well designed!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!</comment></comment>


Python usage survey – now with pretty graphs and statistics - <AUTHOR> http://www.randalolson.com/2015/01/30/python-usage-survey-2014/

<comment><USER2> I would have liked this a lot more with a non-trucated y-axis.

([http://dramsch.net/uploads/Axes-and- baseline-620x620.png](http://dramsch.net/uploads/Axes-and- baseline-620x620.png))

<comment><AUTHOR> Response: [https://twitter.com/randal_olson/status/561539109014241281](https://twitter.com/randal_olson/status/561539109014241281)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Otto Jukebox – A multi-user streaming anti-cloud music player - <AUTHOR> http://ottojukebox.com/ <comment><USER2> I'm curious to see how this might stack up against Subsonic, which has some similar features (multiple players/streams, chat rooms) but doesn't -- to my limited knowledge -- have the never ending stream, requests or multiple collections. Subsonic also has Android and iOS apps, which is a major plus for me.

Or even how it compares to Nicecast or Github play ([https://github.com/play/play](https://github.com/play/play)) neither of which I've used, but have read about and seem closer to this particular application.

<comment><USER3> Never ending play can be implemented by subsonic clients. For example, DSub on Android has this function. It's plain shuffle, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm reminded of the excellent ScreenInvader, of Metalab:

[http://metalab.github.io/ScreenInvader/](http://metalab.github.io/ScreenInvader/)

Nothing says "we've arrived at the future" more than having killed the DJ. Anyone can play anything = Awesome parties. I've learned of a much more diverse set of artists and new music by chilling in the lounge for an evening and screencap'ing the ScreenInvader playlist ..

</comment><comment><USER5> This looks great! Any plans to port this to Windows?

I am not a massive fan of the background colour of the landing page, it makes the text slightly hard to read. The rest of the page design looks good though.

> any device that supports a web browser, no dedicated client software needed!

The demo seems to be down at the moment so I can't see, why would you need to download anything if that is the case?

(Shameless plug: I made [http://playlistful.com/about](http://playlistful.com/about) which is similar to this, but you can't listen to the music on more than device at the same time. That's a feature I really want to add, but I can't get my head around keeping the songs in sync.)

</comment><comment><USER6> Brilliant, absolutely going to try this! Thanks for building it and for sharing it :)

</comment><comment><USER7> Is OSX the only supported operating system?

<comment><USER8> There are Linux installation instructions at Github: [https://github.com/ferguson/otto](https://github.com/ferguson/otto)

With this warning:

Otto is not yet packaged together as a singular application or installation package for Linux like it is on OSX. Therefore Linux installation is fraught with peril, especially when it comes to getting a correctly compiled version of MPD installed.</comment></comment>


HNSummaries.com - algorithmically summarized HN articles to your inbox - <AUTHOR> http://hnsummaries.com <comment><AUTHOR> Would love to get people's feedback - built this for myself over the weekend as a way to accelerate and limit my reading of HN (and being inspired by the NLP course from Stanford).

The NLP is pretty basic and takes a ratio of the original article, so you do get some longer listings.

Big thanks to Wayne Larsen of hckrnews.com for providing me with some insight on tracking top stories and letting me use his ranking data. Also, I recommend <http://www.hackernewsletter.com/> for a human-curated version.

<comment><USER2> Is the code online? If not, any chance you would consider it? I'm into NLP (I wrote <http://bookshrink.com>) and would love to see how you did this!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi peter_l_downs - the summarizer is based on Open Text Summarizer (<http://libots.sourceforge.net/>) which works very similarly to your page at bookshrink (TF-IDF sentence scoring). I made some minor edits that accommodate article structure.

Bookshrink has some pretty amusing summaries... it reminded me of this meme a while back where people would paste books into Microsoft Word and AutoSummarize it down to 6 words :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Here is a simple recipe to do similar that works decently well as a start off point:

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--

Count how many times each word appears in the document into a dictionary or map structure

Also make sure you track the total words.

document |> splitBySpace |> if dictionary has word then +1 else 1; totalwords++

Then split the document into sentences.

Okay, now for each sentence

</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

score = 0.

split sentence by space and

for each word score+= -(dictionary[word]/sum) * log(dictionary[word]/sum)

dictionaryScore.Add(sentence, score)

</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

So now each sentence has a score. You can sort by best and lose order. Or if you want to limit (0 - 1) based on score:

findbestScore and filter each sentence by if limit < docscore / bestscore.

As I said this is only a start off point and is susceptible to list of random words (guess why) there are many ways to make it better. Here is a portion of code I dug up from a while ago:

      let inline sumMap m = m |> Map.fold (curryfst (+)) 0.

      let inline internal countsAndSum n doc =
        let counts = splitstr [|" "|] doc |> filterStop n |> Array.fold mapAdd Map.empty
        counts, sumMap counts

      let ent m sum k =
        let p = (mapGet m k 0.)/sum
        if p = 0. then 0. else -p * log2 (p)

      let eScore doc =
        let counts , sum = countsAndSum 0 doc
        splitSentenceRegEx doc |> Array.map (fun str -> str, splitstr [|" "|] str |> Array.fold (flip ((+) << (ent counts sum))) 0.)

<comment><USER4> This is the approach used in the Python NLTK. That algorithm was adapted from a Java library called Classifier4J that I wrote in the early 2000's[1].

I'd never seen that technique before, but (like a lot of algorithms) it is quite obvious once you've seen it.

Edit: actually, it's slightly different to my technique because I just used liner scoring (ie, counting popular words). I'm not sure which technique would work best.

[1] [https://groups.google.com/d/topic/nltk- dev/qV9e5TsCBHg/discu...](https://groups.google.com/d/topic/nltk- dev/qV9e5TsCBHg/discussion)

<comment><USER3> Hey I hadn't seen the technique above either. But I've certainly heard of your work. Unfortunately I am not able to share in the bounty that is NLTK.

Anyways, it is really hard to judge these things (statistical recommenders) since the metric is inherently subjective and there really is no wrong or right answer. But the way I like to defend it is: if you are going to just skim you should at least use a statistical based approach. Better than just jumping about randomly.

These days I'm more interested in abstract summarization without cheating (no templates).

<comment><USER4> _Unfortunately I am not able to share in the bounty that is NLTK_

Why is that?

<comment><USER3> I am much stronger in F# than Python and have already invested time in building a decent codebase in it. Also I personally think better in statically typed functional languages.

I did not write the SO post which also is based on just word frequencies. I have found at least that in terms of picking the most relevant words with respect to the topic, the method I wrote which was inspired by ideas of entropy gives what I deem to be better results. Its robust against stop words and commonly repeated words that are not part of the topic. The summaries though, I cannot say are better or worse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I personally don't want algorithmically summarized content, I want manually summarized content by knowledgeable HN users. It's half the reason I click into the comments 99% of the time before clicking into the linked article. I want interesting insight along with a good summary of what the main points were being communicated. There's just no way automatically generated summaries can compete with that.

<comment><USER6> I'd love to see the best of both worlds. I too love it when someone takes the time to summarize an article -- great community service. I'd love to establish a convention for doing so (I vote for prepending "Summary:" -- I find "tl;dr" irksome).

Then HNsummaries.com could fetch those when available instead of or in addition to the auto-summaries.

<comment><USER5> Funny, I created exactly that few years ago, got some traction and a story on readwriteweb.com, and then let the app stagnate and die. Maybe I should pursue it again :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Just got my first newsletter. Looking good for an initial release. Some feedback:

Would love to get an index of headlines on top of the email with anchors to actual stories below.

Would love to see shorter summaries and maybe some of the top comments for each story (summarized, if possible).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. I'll add the list of headlines and I'm thinking about the summaries of the comments... it gets harder to understand them because they can be very context specific.

I'll take a crack and maybe add it as an option.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Bear in mind that comments here are self selecting for people who like HN's comments section ;-) But I know plenty of people and speak to people on Twitter who _deliberately_ avoid these comments pages due to a perception (fair or not) of "drama" and what not. For those folks, an email like this could be just the ticket. For me though, I'm staying here ;-)

</comment><comment><USER9> Thanks for sharing this, I'm curious to see how well it works out over time. It'd be nice to be able to choose the compression level.

Quality feels at least as good as an open source summarizer I played around with a while back; good work!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Mark for the comments and feedback! I appreciate it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> One thing I commend you for is to ask when I want to receive the email. It's surprising that barely any mailing-list or newsletter lets you pick that…

<comment><USER11> This.

I spend most of my time in Asia-Pacific timezones, so most of my automated emails arrive at awkward times. I'm glad that this one won't be staring at me from my inbox first thing in the morning -- helping me to produce first, consume second.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Great execution, but I'm uncertain of the idea. My personal perspective: I read wikipedia for information -- I read HN for critical insight. Not always present, but a higher signal/noise ratio than other websites. I don't want a summary of information - I want critical thought.

</comment><comment><USER13> Why only 20 stories? I usually scan the first three pages once a day, a snapshot of the top 90 articles. Only about 10% are relevant so I'd rather have more summaries to sift thru to find the ~10 relevant articles for the day.

</comment><comment><USER6> I actually thought algorithmic summaries would be worse than useless but they seem surprisingly good. Here's the one from Caine's Arcade:

"9 year old Caine sets up an arcade in his father's used car parts store in East L.A., using only cardboard boxes his dad had lying around and a ton of ingenuity. Watch his dreams come true when this filmmaker sets up a flash mob to come and play. Just watching this may make you a better person. $82,000 has already been raised for Caine's scholarship fund! little behind on the bandwagon, but...film just had me in tears."

<comment><AUTHOR> This is reductive summarization so it's selecting key sentences and phrases from the text (rather than generating any new phrasing) so occasionally it will seem brilliant, and other times...

<comment><USER14> In particular, this approach works best with journalism-style writing. Journalists typically write in a style with fairly short sentences that stand alone, and paragraphs of only 1-3 sentences. They even pay deliberate attention to quotability, for either pull quotes or chance of being quoted elsewhere, so everything is well suited to pulling sentences out. Tends not to work as well when applied to other styles of writing.

For more general text, the first problem that comes up is that out of context sentences with pronouns that point nowhere end up being unintelligible. The second sentence above only worked because the "he" was completely unambiguous in this summary.

<comment><USER8> I've done some work in this area (specifically in developer related news) and you're right. The tricky ones are where you end up with links to GitHub repos or project pages that assume visitors know what they're looking for. Automated summaries then become less than useless :-( My dream solution? Developers learn to write nice summaries on their pages ;-)

<comment><USER15> might be worthwhile to automatically fetch and parse text from some well-known urls (github, for example) to grab content from there to use as an adjunct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I plan on adding this to my <http://newspaper23.com> site. It's just way on the back burner.

Ideally I think you would do it client-side, so readers could adjust the shrinkage to the amount of time they have to peruse. I was also thinking about a scenario where you could browse at say 100-words and then dive-deep if you found anything that interests you. A more interactive approach. You might want to consider this.

But I really like the idea. Would love to hear how the project goes!

</comment><comment><USER17> I got my first email, here's some feedback.

You should make sure that the summaries don't scale linearly with the size of the content--just because an article is 10x as long, doesn't mean I want a summary to be 10x longer. Maybe scale logarithmically?

I didn't find any of the summaries to be high quality or any better than I could get from briefly skimming HN myself.

I've unsubscribed.

</comment><comment><USER18> I am taking an alternative approach to make sense of HN stories for Chinese readers. As a regular HN reader, I manually summarize the topic of top stories and translate them into Chinese. The motivation is to lower the startup/tech news sharing barriers. Link - <http://geektell.com/>

</comment><comment><USER19> Really like it!

One small suggestion...could you make the "76 comments" under the title clickable through to the HN comments?

One other option (maybe a user preference), include some noteworthy excerpts from the HN comments in the email as well?

</comment><comment><USER17> Feature Request:

It would be great to get a weekly or monthly summary.

Nice work.

</comment><comment><USER20> why email? I'd like to see the summaries in a web page too.

</comment><comment><USER21> How about giving writers the respect they deserve and not algorithmically rewriting their work? Has our attention span really gotten so short that we cannot read articles of substance any longer?

<comment><USER6> Well, it's like having an abstract of a paper. Which is a good point -- ideally the authors themselves would provide the summary. Still, you certainly need summaries!

I'd say the only time summaries could be a bad thing is for fiction, where you don't want to give things away.

For non-fiction giving things away is whole point. :)</comment></comment>


MobiPart - Octopart on the iPhone  - <AUTHOR> http://octopart.com/blog/archives/2011/11/mobipart-%252D-octopart-on-the-iphone?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+octopart+%28Octopart%29

<comment><USER2> so what happens if Google decides to penalize OctoPart accidentally and your rankings plummet? Keep thinking about that.</comment>


Ask HN: How to track my own personal data as detailed as Google? - <AUTHOR> It is no surprise that google and other big co's are tracking us. A snippet in this video[1] posted yesterday where (looked like JSON data) was being pushed to googles servers on when someone was walking vs. running etc.<p>How can I track my own data as detailed as google? I want to know when i'm walking vs driving, heatmap of where I walk everyday, and a breakdown of websites I visit/how much time I spend on youtube etc. Again, I only want this info for myself for personal growth and better tracking of my time. I also know that a lot of different apps could do this, but I want to have everything under one hood, built by me. What would be the best way to go about this?<p>*Advanced beginner in python if that helps<p>[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0G6mUyIgyg <comment><USER2> Unfortunately I haven't found a way of detecting activities, but I started recording all my locations with GPSLogger[1] to GPX and store them on my server. So now I need to either find or create a way of navigating/searching/visualizing/analyzing all my history. I haven't found how to do that yet but at least I have the raw data to do it.

[1] [https://gpslogger.app/](https://gpslogger.app/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome, I will check it out and report back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> With [https://owntracks.org/](https://owntracks.org/) (open source) you can send the location data to your own server.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome, thank you!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What ERP / CRM Have Decent UX? - <AUTHOR>

I am looking at SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, etc.. All the big names ERP / CRM have UX that sucks.<p>Are there any other solutions i should take a look? <comment><USER2> I recently committed to a CRM after trying Insightly, Capsule and some lesser known apps. I settled on RelateIQ. It's a Salesforce company. I have found it really good particularly for integrations but it's expensive. $1000+ for a single User or what they call a Seat. I also have a subscription to Triggerapp which is a CRM for small Creative firms. It does everything and is by the far the best UX and much more affordable than RelateIQ.

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://erpnext.com/](https://erpnext.com/)</comment>


Maryam Mirzakhani, first woman to win maths' Fields Medal, dies - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/40617094 <comment><USER2> Primary discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14776357](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14776357)</comment>


Harley-Davidson to Shift Production Overseas to Offset EU Tariffs - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/harley-davidson-to-shift-production-overseas-to-offset-eu-tariffs-1529927301 <comment><USER2> That this is newsworthy is kind of preposterous If you look at the factory closings in the late 80's and 90's, it is like reading a list of World War I battlefields. 20k here, 8k there, 40k over in the this town, another 10k lost here...it is tragic.

This wasn't globalization. It was the "deindustrialization" of America. Meanwhile all the jobs shifted to Mexico, which would be sort of okay (they need jobs too obviously) but instead it resulted in Mexico getting 0% better. 9 months after NAFTA the Peso collapsed during the "Tequila" crisis, the south of Mexico rose up in revolt, and then a few years later brought the rise of the cartels.

<comment><USER3> > That this is newsworthy is kind of preposterous

I'm not so sure.

Harley is an iconic American brand, that trades heavily on its "Made in the USA by good 'ol boys down Milwaukee way" folklore.

I think this is an interesting unintended side effect of government tariffs and trade policies. Without wanting to get too much into politics of a country where I have no dog in the fight - I suspect this is going to disproportionately effect MAGA hat wearers. (Whether its a response to Trump's recent trade policies and changes or a longer term response to trade policies older than the current administration, I don't know... And the article _may_ cover that, but I can't see past the WSJ paywall...)</comment></comment>


Another Look at Provable Security - <AUTHOR> http://cacr.uwaterloo.ca/~ajmeneze/anotherlook/ <comment><USER2> Some things that are important to remember:

(a) "Proof of security" is a term of art that doesn't mean what it sounds like. In cryptography, you "prove" specific things about an algorithm, often in the context of a "game" with one or more adversaries. You need to know more than that an algorithm has a proof; you also need to know which proofs those are, and how they apply to your application.

(b) Proofs generally apply to algorithms and low-level constructions. Once you start composing proven primitives into whole cryptosystems, typically, all bets are off. Proofs of entire protocols are an active research area.

(c) A proof will almost always apply to the abstract, mathematical notion of an algorithm or construction, _not to the code that might implement it_.

I apologize in advance at how little this has to do with the actual resource linked here; I'm just sort of predicting what the thread on HN, if any, would look like.

<comment><USER3> Regarding (c), if your program is written say Agda[1], the code can come with a proof that it has the mathematical properties you want. Or rather, your implementation might simply be the proof.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agda_(programming_language)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agda_\(programming_language\))

<comment><USER4> The folks at Galois have a language called Cryptol that can be used for similar things with hardware.

[https://galois.com/project/cryptol/](https://galois.com/project/cryptol/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is what's known as "searching under the lamppost". Mathematicians would sometimes seek to prove only that which they suspect would be rather easy to prove, so they construct the problem in such a way that the perceived difficulty is exactly that which is easily provable, thereby solving the problem. They then shove everything else (that is hard to prove) under their assumptions (which are sometimes very well-hidden), and say the problem is now mathematically solved!

Figuring out whether the research is applicable in practice then becomes a game not of validating the proof, but of uncovering all the assumptions.

I see it in the PL community, too, where, rather than starting by analyzing where software bugs actually lie and how expensive each kind of bug turns out to be, and _then_ see how most expensive bugs can be prevented, they start with a programming model which is very easy to prove, construct programs that are easily expressed by the model, and then claim they've found a provably bug-free way to program.

The question of how many real-world programs can be easily transformed into the model, at what costs, and whether it is the expensive bugs that are actually prevented by the proof or rather the trivial ones is left as an exercise to the reader.

Of course, I don't blame them. If you don't start with what you strongly suspect you'll be able to prove, you might not get any publishable results at all.

<comment><USER6> Your description sounds like intent, but it's important to keep in mind there is a selection force here.

Ten earnest mathematicians try. 9 fail. The tenth structures the problem in such a way that the solution is meaningless but not obviously so-- his work gets published. But he doesn't know and certantly never intended to produce a meaningless proof.

When useful proofs are harder to construct than difficult to detect as not useful trivial proofs, we should expect lots of the latter, even just by chance.

<comment><USER5> Right. It's not a conspiracy -- it's just what happens :)

Also, I don't think that such work is meaningless in any way. Any discovery in math is meaningful in itself. It just isn't as applicable in real life as advertised (or the application is much more difficult than advertised).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's better to read the papers where they attempt provable security and then those published years later reviewing that work or those methods. Certain methods worked well, some failed over time, and so on. The lessons learned and looking back papers are where I find the most wisdom in this field. Naturally.

The papers on Orange Book-era B3 and A1 class systems along with the Common Criteria EAL6/EAL7 works taught me the most. They all required a clear, security policy and a strong argument the design/implementation embody it. The systems are modular, layered, internally simple, use structured programming style, use safer subsets of programming languages, often are state-machines, account for failure modes for everything, and trace each potential execution flow of the system. They also add, where possible, static analysis and covert channel analysis. Some did formal proofs but the above gets you 90-99% of the way.

So, the idea is that you design the system or algorithm in such a way that you can easily demonstrate it has certain properties. It was hard work. However, LOCK project even with proofs only cost around 30-40% extra on top of solid, development process. Another lesson is the specs, implementation, and proofs/arguments should always evolve side-by-side with plenty of communication between team members. This spots problems early. Analysis of various phases showed above methods caught all kinds of reliability and security flaws in actual systems with many doing excellent during years of pentesting. Proof themselves, on other hand, should only be used if the property is easy to model mathematically. Otherwise, you use a lot of effort with little gained. Final lesson came from TCB concept: focus all your provable security on mechanisms that are flexible and simple so the cost is spread over all projects benefiting from it. Security & separation kernels did this to a degree but I think CompCert compiler is best, modern example of ROI on high-assurance development.

<comment><USER8> Do you have any links/references to the papers you mention?

<comment><USER7> Most of the best papers are behind paywalls, unfortunately. I do have a small sampling on-hand from there and now that illustrate some of the high-assurance methods.

[http://www.iwia.org/2005/Schell2005.PDF](http://www.iwia.org/2005/Schell2005.PDF) Describes GEMSOS security kernel (A1 class) with nice graphics to illustrate the approach.

[http://www.cse.psu.edu/~trj1/cse543-f06/papers/vax_vmm.pdf](http://www.cse.psu.edu/~trj1/cse543-f06/papers/vax_vmm.pdf) VAX Security Kernel (A1 class). Pay special attention to the layering of the kernel, coding strategy, and assurance section.

[http://cisr.nps.edu/downloads/sdm/SEKE08-Shaffer.pdf](http://cisr.nps.edu/downloads/sdm/SEKE08-Shaffer.pdf) Shaffer's Alloy technique elaborates a bit on how state machines are useful in security arguments, even without full formal.

[http://cryptosmith.org/docs/Lock-eff- acm.pdf](http://cryptosmith.org/docs/Lock-eff-acm.pdf) Costs and effectiveness of assurance activities for LOCK system (A1 class).

[http://www.sigops.org/sosp/sosp09/papers/klein- sosp09.pdf](http://www.sigops.org/sosp/sosp09/papers/klein-sosp09.pdf) Modern effort (seL4) to exceed EAL7 by bringing verification to code itself. Note that some A1 projects had close to 1-to-1 spec to implementation mapping. So, full formal might be replaced by low-level, verified specs and matching code verified by inspection, etc.

[http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/pete/acl206/slides/hardin.pdf](http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/pete/acl206/slides/hardin.pdf) Rockwell Collin's EAL7 framework for AAMP7G processor and CRYPTOL integration

[http://www.crash-safe.org/assets/verified-ifc-long- draft-201...](http://www.crash-safe.org/assets/verified-ifc-long- draft-2013-11-10.pdf) Previous work proved kernels supported MLS or MILS models. This is better given it's proving a hardware mechanism both enforces a security requirement and meets functional requirements. Significant given SAFE (see crash-safe.org) makes inherently secure apps easier to write.

[http://goto.ucsd.edu/quark/usenix12.pdf](http://goto.ucsd.edu/quark/usenix12.pdf) Proving security properties of a web browser. Typically, you know the work is legit if it spends time talking about the flaws formal verification caught. I don't see so much of that in this but they might have omitted that to publish what worked instead.

[http://www.cse.chalmers.se/~andrei/jsac.pdf](http://www.cse.chalmers.se/~andrei/jsac.pdf) A significant amount of recent work builds it in the language itself.

[http://web.archive.org/web/20130718103347/http://cygnacom.co...](http://web.archive.org/web/20130718103347/http://cygnacom.com/labs/cc_assurance_index/CCinHTML/PART3/PART36.HTM) Cygnacom's breakdown of Evaluation Assurance Level's is pretty nice. Shows the extra efforts put in and what you get.

[http://pastebin.com/y3PufJ0V](http://pastebin.com/y3PufJ0V) My framework compliments that and reminds that it must be applied to every layer down to the gates.

So, although my sharing is limited by paywalls, I hope you find these interesting and can see the different perspectives of highly assured security. There have been numerous successes in independent testing, pen-testing, and field use. Also remember that this is _only_ provable security rather than verification of properties in general. The field of verification and correctness assurance has progressed quite a bit (see CompCert, SPARK, Esterel, etc). Have fun.

<comment><USER8> Very interesting reading. The whole notion of the AAMP7G processor is fascinating. Made solely for government in tiny quantities, in tightly controlled facilities, probably rad hard, resistant to power analysis, etc.

In this ppt [http://usacac.army.mil/cac2/cew/repository/presentations/3_H...](http://usacac.army.mil/cac2/cew/repository/presentations/3_Hatcliff- SAnToS-Ft-Leavenworth-2008-07-09.pdf)

there is mention of an interesting tool/language called Spark Ada: [http://www.spark-2014.org/](http://www.spark-2014.org/)

It makes me think that maybe my next study topic should be Spark or Esterel instead of Rust/Golang/some JS thing.

<comment><USER7> Fine to learn for personal use but other stuff is better if you're job hunting. If you want to learn, then skip Esterel (big $$$) to learn Ada with AdaCore's free GNAT IDE. Helps to understand why it does certain things (eg foundations). Get that here:

[http://www.adacore.com/knowledge/technical-papers/safe- secur...](http://www.adacore.com/knowledge/technical-papers/safe-secure/)

AdaCore's "Gems" and other resources will help you plenty. SPARK is a variant of Ada designed to be easy to analyze with mathematical techniques with goal of automatically proving absence of certain bugs in over 95% of code. The article below has links to many resources and demonstrations. Tokeneer further demo's Praxis's Correct by Construction process, which is also cool.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARK_%28programming_language%...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARK_%28programming_language%29)

Here's a nice example of applying it to a DNS server to prove absence of single-packet vulnerabilities leveraging common, coding issues:

[http://ironsides.martincarlisle.com/](http://ironsides.martincarlisle.com/)

I'll end with a few other goodies. Adam Chlipala does great work in teaching and making formal methods lightweight. His book below describes such methods. More links in comments.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9862127](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9862127)

Another high assurance processor below. Verified for correctness rather than security although one helps the other a bit.

[http://scidok.sulb.uni- saarland.de/volltexte/2006/633/pdf/Di...](http://scidok.sulb.uni- saarland.de/volltexte/2006/633/pdf/Dissertation_9032_Dali_Iako_2006.pdf)

Sandia's Secure Processor (SSP), also called Score, utilizes a highly assured design and implementation that results in a Java processor immune to obvious code injection techniques or radiation-related issues. Their SEED architecture is really nice. Modern stuff is paywalled but this old paper tells plenty. Thing it leaves out, IIRC, is they use an ML-based hardware model to do equivalence checking between executable specification, hardware spec (in ML), and actual hardware HDL. Already in ASIC's on rad-hard processes. Availability of ASSET tools or SSP/Score unknown.

ftp://ftp.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/phw/.old-1999/tmp2/443-cpa2007-wickstrom.pdf

Happy reading and bug hunting. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Very interesting. How does one get comfortable relying on cryptography that uses a method which lacks provable security? Simulating proof based on actual use?

<comment><USER10> Two questions that I find myself asking:

1\. Are proofs effective at judging the security of a protocol? For example many proofs rely on the random oracle model, yet the random oracle model is problematic. How can we construct convincing proofs?

2\. Are there better measures of security? For example crypto-contests in which people try to break other peoples algorithms. Very little systems security relies on proofs (systems security is also almost always the weakest link).

My personal belief is: 1=yes, 2=maybe and it is worth it to develop alternative methods since they can be used in tandem with proofs.

<comment><USER2> What's an example of a protocol that has been well-served by formal methods _prior to 2015_?

Contests have fared well at selecting algorithms, but (prepared to be smacked back for this), ad hoc methods have done OK with algorithms as well --- you might say MD5 is an exception, but MD5 didn't have much competition when it was "selected". You might also say RC4, but RC4's history is very complicated.

<comment><USER10> Not sure what you mean by "well-served"? In terms of design, I've seen attempts at proofs discover attacks that likely would not have been otherwise found during development. In that case the proof served the designers in building a more secure protocol. Some of the early kerberos work could have benefited from making the designers prove or at very least justify their claims (say the use of xor fan-folding as a one-way function).

Does a proof increase your confidence in an algorithm? As someone that worked on MD6's proof of differential resistance it certainly increased my confidence in the protocols ability to resist certain types of attack.

By ad-hoc do you mean people selecting algorithms without a contest? If so I would counter with the following incomplete list of broken ad-hoc standards: DTD-1, FEAL, WEP, A5/1, A5/2, KASUMI, GOST 28147-89, Cryptomeria cipher, CCS, SHA-0.

The crypto that has held up, has generally held up and most of the other ones that haven't we don't use, so we may be biased toward remembering good ad-hoc crypto and forgetting the bad.

<comment><USER2> People have used formal methods to find flaws in protocols, but I'm unaware of a protocol that is assured formally in any meaningful way. Certainly not TLS or IPSEC. I guess I'm asking, is there a protocol you feel more comfortable working with due to formal assurance?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There is a short discussion and links to their papers toward the bottom of the second section of this Wikipedia entry [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provable_security](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provable_security)

</comment><comment><USER12> I would like to note that the chapter "Another Look At Automated Theorem- proving II" seems quite ill informed, and very hostile, to me.

For instance, to my knowledge the Hashed El Gamal proof in Easycrypt checkes the whole proof, not just the hops. (If I understood Remark 2 correctly)

</comment><comment><USER13> I tend to see Menezes and Koblitz as having three different arguments against the common focus on provable security. In roughly increasing order of importance.

1) "Provable security" is a misleading term. Those well versed in the field understand that it is a computational proof of a mathematical object, not in anyway a statement of the practical security of an algorithm when implemented in computer code. However, many people misunderstand this to mean "unbreakable" or "perfect". Menezes and Koblitz see it as too frequently acting as a marketing gimmick, something that allows vendors trying to sell security software to say "it's based on provably secure algorithms" without anyone understanding what that means. To them, the misleading quality of the term outweighs its value. I generally disagree with them on this point, not because the point isn't well taken, but because it is far too common for phrases from academic discourse to be misunderstood outside the specific field (e.g., teleportation in quantum mechanics) for such a semantic argument to carry any weight with the specific case of provable security.

(2) Provable security proofs have frequent gaps/the authors do not recognize important assumptions they are operating under. Their "Another look..." papers focus on these cases, and it is somewhat widespread. Most of the concerns tend to be completely academic, and don't open any practical attack vectors, however their point tends to be that computational proofs are dependent on assumptions that allow a positive proof of a negative, and if the methods of the proofs sufficiently obfuscate those assumptions to where their practitioners frequently miss them, it calls the validity of the arguments into suspect. The best example of this is probably their discussion in the original 'Another look at "provable security"' article linked to on the right of the proof of Optimal Asymmetric Encryption Padding (OAEP, required since textbook RSA and other asymmetric encryption algorithms leak information about the plaintext, in RSA's case, the Jacobi symbol). It's hard to argue with their evidence, and their work has definitely led to a much more critical eye of the proof justifications and assumption discussions given in newer articles.

(3) "Provable security" misses the point. To Menezes and Koblitz, the goals of cryptography mean it shouldn't be treated as a discipline of mathematics, and while academic cryptographers chase the abstract goal of provable security and debate the philosophical strengths of computational vs. information theoretic arguments, "real-world" cryptographers, including those working for the intelligence establishments, focus on useful goals like efficiency and ease of implementation in software and hardware. To them, building cryptosystems using primitives with strong heuristic arguments for their security which are easy to implement is far more beneficial for security than the most perfectly crafted mathematical algorithm will be. In addition, although the academic field of cryptography can easily adapt to any new result which challenges basic assumptions (say, a result attacking the hardness of the DLP or factoring), all the systems relying on those assumptions in practice will be broken or greatly damaged, so holding those assumptions as central to total security is problematic. As someone particularly interested in how cryptographic systems delegate and understand trust, this argument carries a lot of weight with me, and is part of the reason that although I consider having a solid understanding of the theory and practice of provable security to be a necessary piece to greater understanding of the field, my short and longer term interests in cryptography are focusing around secondary qualities cryptosystems and their primitives.</comment>


Yes it's a bubble, so what? - <AUTHOR> https://www.researchaffiliates.com/en_us/publications/articles/668-yes-its-a-bubble-so-what.html <comment><USER2> > At the end of January 2018, the seven largest-cap stocks in the world were > all tech fliers: Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Tencent, and > Alibaba.

Arguably we're just bucketing companies poorly. "Tech" isn't a commodity, clientele, or business model.

We don't group companies based on the fact that they notably have physical storefronts. Otherwise H&M, Ford, H&R Block, and McDonald's would all be in the "brick and mortar" sector.

If the trend is "software is eating the world", it stands to reason that the market will be more and more "tech" over time.

<comment><USER3> "Tech" is a colloquial term that I wouldn't think needs much explanation on HN.

As far as I've ever heard, "Brick and Mortar" has never referred to an industry. It's just an adjective for business that has a store front on a street. And we actually do group them in this regard, it simply isn't relevant all of the time.

<comment><USER4> The point is that Facebook and Amazon are not really in the same industry either.

<comment><USER3> They're not all within the "Technology Sector"?

I understand the nuance, and Amazon is a black swan that we could debate endlessly.

Isn't the more relevant consideration here how they're categorized in market/investment terms?

<comment><USER5> One sells products to consumers and has a massive cloud platform.

One is a social networking application that makes its money selling ads.

They both employ a lot of software engineers and have big datacenters but it becomes increasingly less meaningful to bucket them together.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Tesla has been an excellent example of a micro-bubble. Tesla's current price is arguably fair if most cars are powered by electricity in 10 years, if most of these cars are made by Tesla, if Tesla can make those cars with sufficient margin and quality control and can service the cars properly, and if Tesla can raise additional capital sufficient to cover a $3 billion annual cash drain and another billion to service its debt."

<comment><USER7> Financial projections will undervalue Tesla because they are very different from other car companies - they are a monopoly with gigantic barriers to entry on many fronts. Other carmakers could copy some features of Tesla's cars, but they can't easily copy the multi-billion-dollar factories that make other features possible. They have better engineers than other car companies and a culture that works them harder. They avoided the dealership system and built their own stores. Elon Musk's PR stunts and Twitter feed are a much more effective method of advertising than the TV and Internet ads other car companies use.

<comment><USER8> > They have better engineers than other car companies

Huh... Quality of Teslas by most accounts is terrible. Not to mention the recent scandals over autopilot safety. Not sure where you got that idea.

<comment><USER9> I have never been in any Teslas car. But I am so curious about this:

>Quality of Teslas by most accounts is terrible

Can you elaborate a little bit about this?

<comment><USER8> Peruse Tesla owner forums and reddit. The model 3 in particular has quality issues on brand new cars. Compare it to buying a Honda or Toyota - you're not going to have the kinds of problems described.

<comment><USER10> Well of course you're going to see people post about issues they're having if you look on forums. Nobody goes out of their way to look on forums and make posts sharing their frustration over the lack of problems they have with their car.

<comment><USER8> I've been on Honda and Toyota forums in the past, and there was nothing like "my car panels are misaligned fresh out of the factory".

<comment><USER10> Come on, I'm trying to be scientific about this and you're just going to swing in with a rude, ad hominem argument about "Tesla fanboys"? Claiming that Tesla having bad QC is "common knowledge" doesn't somehow insulate you and your friends from stuff like confirmation bias.

And to address your other point, if you search the web for panel alignment issues on Honda or Toyota cars there seem to be plenty of those out there as well.

<comment><USER8> Fair enough! My main point was it's not clear that engineers at Tesla are better than those elsewhere. Even if all car companies are terrible. The other biases are my own, and are purely anecdotal based on my own experience and what others tell me. I'll leave it to other people with more time to do a scientific comparison.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> One of the best thinkers on bubbles I've come across is Jeremy Grantham [https://qz.com/111094/this-fund-tracks-36-bubbles- and-33-hav...](https://qz.com/111094/this-fund-tracks-36-bubbles-and-33-have- completely-popped/)

He's ambivalent at the moment - thinks it'll go up more but probably fall in the future. [http://www.cityam.com/278218/jeremy-grantham-predicted- last-...](http://www.cityam.com/278218/jeremy-grantham-predicted-last-two- bubbles-warns-stock)

<comment><USER12> > He's ambivalent at the moment - thinks it'll go up more but probably fall in > the future.

He'll always be right with this assessment.

<comment><USER13> Exactly. I'm going to make a brave prediction that "the market will drop, then go up again and drop again."

It's called a business cycle!

<comment><USER14> Too specific, you've ordered your predictions. Best to keep it to "The market will fluctuate"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What are the problems with bubbles if investors can be cushioned from their worst effects when they occur?

The two main problems are mis-allocation of resources and maldistribution of wealth (investors don't worry where their capital goes and investment becomes a more significant source of wealth than work). Both of these problems are very much in evidence today.

<comment><USER16> > What are the problems with bubbles if investors can be cushioned from their > worst effects when they occur?

I don't think both can be mutually exclusive. For a bubble to occur investors have to be irrationally exuberant. If they are more prudent and cushion themselves from the worst effects then we might not have a bubble, ever.

<comment><USER17> >I don't think both can be mutually exclusive. For a bubble to occur investors have to be irrationally exuberant.

Not necessarily. They could just be thinking that everybody else is irrationally exuberant.

c.f. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Interesting article I found in FT Alphaville's Further Reading section from yesterday [0]. The narrative around the likes of Tesla and cryptocurrencies is likely a tired one to many HN readers, but the broader narrative and arguments made by the authors make up for it.

I did not contribute to this article and am not affiliated with the authors in any way.

[0] Registration required: [https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2018/04/24/1524552922000/Further...](https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2018/04/24/1524552922000/Further- reading/)

</comment><comment><USER18> Suppose the article is correct, and all but one or two of the top tech companies will underperform over the next decade. What about the companies that fail? Some will be bought out, others will liquidate. Business entities will cease to exist.

Code I write is protected by an Intellectual Property clause in my contract. The company owns everything. If the company is gone, can I release my code?

Everyone is using git, and many companies use private Github repos. In the same way that copyright expires after a length of time, could Github automatically release code as open-source when companies go bankrupt? I just wish the progress won't all be lost when the bubble bursts.

<comment><USER19> > Code I write is protected by an Intellectual Property clause in my contract. > The company owns everything. If the company is gone, can I release my code?

Generally, the company or it's assets will be sold. Unless your contract specified that such a transfer releases your code (and it probably doesn't), the new owner will have the same rights as the firm that actually employed you had. Even if the firm is liquidated, that is likely to involving auctioning of assets, including IP portfolios.

<comment><USER20> What if nobody buys anything at the auction?

<comment><USER21> This is an interesting question because it's what has happened to a lot of old software. It's especially problematic for old games that people want to play on emulators - at the point where these companies went bust it didn't seem as if the game "IP" had any value.

Anyway what definitely _doesn 't_ happen (at least in any western country) is that the software becomes "abandonware" or copyright somehow disappears. The copyright will be owned by someone for many more years, even if that person or entity is impossible to trace.

<comment><USER22> "Anyway what definitely doesn't happen (at least in any western country) is that the software becomes "abandonware" or copyright somehow disappears. The copyright will be owned by someone for many more years, even if that person or entity is impossible to trace."

I actually wrote my bachelor's thesis for my law degree on this exact topic (it was titled, roughly translated from Dutch, 'Intellectual property in bankrupcty'). What you're saying is not correct (well, depends a bit on how you define 'correct').

Under Dutch law (and I have reasons to believe it's very similar in many other civil law jurisdictions), what happens is that in bankruptcy (of a corporation, it's different when a natural person dies or goes into bankruptcy) the liquidator will take over and try to sell any assets, the proceeds of which will be used to pay out the creditors. Often software (and other intellectual property rights) is either forgotten about or no buyer can be found for it. When the liquidator thinks he has sold everything worthwhile and after a judge's OK, the corporation ceases to exist. When the IP wasn't sold, it essentially becomes 'owned' by nobody.

However, if it turns out that that remnant IP is worth something, a creditor can ask a judge to re-open the bankruptcy proceedings so that the IP can still be transferred. The exact grounds for this are a bit complicated and refined by case law, but for current purposes it's sufficient to say that this can only happen as long as any material claim be made by a creditor; most claims would expire after 5 years (there are nuances in when this period is 'reset' and so on).

So essentially, after this period, there is nobody owning this IP. Whether that constitutes 'abandonware' depends on how one defines that term because it's not a legal concept, but after that period there is nobody who can make any claims on anyone using such IP.

Of course in practice it will seldom be so clear cut; for example if (in the highly hypothetical case that) you build a $100mm company out of the orphan IP from a company that had part of its assets bought by another company, someone at some point will probably try to claim that they bought the IP as part of those assets.

Then there is another quirk in Dutch law, which might have been 'fixed' a few years ago (there was talk about it when I wrote the thesis but haven't kept up with whether it actually made it into law). IP, as long as it was created and not bought by the entity going into bankruptcy, was not part of the assets a liquidator could sell to pay creditors with. So there was some part of the IP the liquidator couldn't sell, nor even transfer if he wanted to! This essentially meant that any such IP became 'open' in the sense that nobody could lay claim to it in a court of law. For software, this basically boiled down to the fact that whoever was in the position to copy the source code and destroy any backups, could become the effective 'owner' of it! (There are many pitfalls and traps, I think it would require a programmer with extensive knowledge of the history of the company and the software, and with a law degree or at least deep knowledge of the law beyond reading up for a weekend, to pull this off; but the first part is more common than you'd think, and for the second part one could work with a lawyer).

In my research, I have found several cases where the lawyers, liquidators, banks and judges involved clearly didn't know the details of the law and parties could have made 100's of thousands or millions (of Euros or guilders - cases like this have been going back for a long time) had they known. I even looked into a few cases to see if there was any money to be made there by buying any 'dormant' IP and/or claims, and there might have been - but it would take significant investments to check, so I didn't/don't think it would be a viable business, certainly not for a risk-averse software/law nerd like myself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Don't you find these sliders "Your continued use of this site acts as your consent to the use of these cookies pursuant to the Research Affiliates Cookie Policy. " annoying as hell? Am I going to read it and close the page before reading the article? Or will I read the article, memorize the domain name and then never come back because they use cookies? Is that what GDPR will be in practice: good intentions but absurd results?

</comment><comment><USER24> A company's "value" is different these days. People use Facebook (FB) because others are using it, and they know others are using it. Consumers go there because either everyone else goes there, or they THINK everyone else goes there. If the collective "know" shifts for whatever reason, the value can drop quick, regardless of how many buildings FB owns or how many employees FB has.

The market "value" of a company is less tied to physical stuff and tangible property. It's more tied to collective perceptions, and these perceptions can shift like the wind for real or fake reasons (misperceptions), including sheer fads. Too many economic models count physical or tangible property to "value" a company. Instead, the "value" is virtual: in people's heads.

And it's circular: if an AI company convinces investors they are great, investors put more money in, allowing them to do better things than AI co's who can't dazzle the crowd. And that could swap if this year's loser happens upon a better dazzle story.

</comment><comment><USER25> It's important to note that stock markets provide some shielding from inflation in countries experiencing hyperinflation. If you look at places like Argentina, or Venezuela, you'll see that those with the means to do so use the stock market to shield value or even extract it (i.e., evade capital controls) via ADRs traded locally _and_ on the NYSE. I don't know if Zimbabwe had companies listed on the NYSE, so I don't know if this scheme was used there.

The government always allows this for a simple reason: most of the people doing this are its friends and family.

</comment><comment><USER26> US corporate earnings are set to plausibly increase by 45% for 2018-2020.

So whether this market should be very concerning in regards to being a bubble, much depends on if it keeps going up as earnings rise so quickly. If the market goes sideways or generally produces a mediocre return instead, the market's PE ratio will fall dramatically in just three years. The S&P 500 PE will drop from 25 today, to something closer to 14-16. We're now six months into a sideways market despite a massive increase in earnings (which was likely priced in ahead of time).

</comment><comment><USER27> It's quite funny to just search "nasdaq index" on google, then switch to "Max" and see the graph.

You see a quite step growth starting February/March 2016 that doesn't seem completely rational.

Also lately, you have a kind of plateau with some hiccups.

I've the feeling that the bubble will burst withing a year, and next year or two, most tech companies valuations will be halved. But it's only a feeling, I've no deep rational behind it.

</comment><comment><USER11> I was a bit torn on crypto as someone from a value investing background.

My conclusion was to punt on the stuff - where else can you buy something and sell it for 10x within the year? - but to cash out a good chunk of the winnings so if they go to zero I'll have the cash. So far so good.

I regard the nuttiness as a bit of a make hay while the sun shines situation.

<comment><USER28> Where else? I can think of several places. Vegas is the first that comes to mind. But I'm guessing that like most "punters" and participants in a bubble, you perceive the downside risks to not be equivalent...

<comment><USER11> I think the odds are more in your favour with crypto.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> "7\. One aspect of bitcoin-related energy consumption that won't disappear so easily is the residual carbon footprint left by bitcoin mining, which is currently dispensing as much CO2 a year as 1,000,000 transatlantic flights."

</comment><comment><USER30> This is a great, well-written piece, worth reading in its entirety. Here are a few passages that will be of interest to the HN community:

 _...Let's begin by offering a definition of the word "bubble." We all hear the word thrown around carelessly and often, but it lacks a formal definition. Let's try. Ockham's Razor guides us: Keep it simple. We define a bubble as a circumstance in which asset prices 1) offer little chance of any positive risk premium relative to bonds or cash, using any reasonable projection of expected cash flows, and 2) are sustained because investors believe they can sell the asset to someone else for a higher price tomorrow, with little regard for the underlying fundamentals._

 _At the beginning of 2000, the 10 largest market-cap tech stocks in the United States, collectively representing a 25% share of the S &P 500 Index—Microsoft, Cisco, Intel, IBM, AOL, Oracle, Dell, Sun, Qualcomm, and HP—did not live up to the excessively optimistic expectations. Over the next 18 years, not a single one beat the market: five produced positive returns, averaging 3.2% a year compounded, far lower than the market return, and two failed outright. Of the five that produced negative returns, the average outcome was a loss of 7.2% a year, or 12.6% a year less than the S&P 500._

 _Reasonable observers can disagree, but we believe we are experiencing a tech bubble, based on our relatively rigorous definition of the term. At the end of January 2018, the seven largest-cap stocks in the world were all tech fliers: Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Tencent, and Alibaba. Never before has any sector so dominated the global roster of largest market-cap companies. At the peak of the tech boom, four of the top seven companies by market cap were in the tech sector, and at the peak of the oil bubble, five of the top seven were in the energy sector. Only the Japanese stock market's bubble at yearend 1989 has matched today's tech sector dominance of the global market-capitalization league tables.9 Not only do we have the FANGs, we have FANG+ futures, affording investors a chance to buy the world's trendiest tech stocks with almost no collateral, and the list is amended quarterly to make sure only the trendiest are on the list._

 _Can all of the seven tech highfliers [Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Tencent, and Alibaba] collectively succeed to sufficiently justify their $4.3 trillion combined market capitalization at yearend 2017? Nothing is impossible, but this outcome is implausible. Sure, some of the new tech giants are at valuation multiples that are not extravagant, but several sport startling multiples—and all trade at levels that require robust continued growth. These companies are at war—in some cases directly with one another—for market share, competing for the same eyeballs, and are facing a growing risk of regulatory constraints._

 _Our purpose in this article is not to prove that current conditions represent a bubble. Reasonable people may reach the opposite conclusion. After all, some level of cash flow expectations can justify any price. It's a matter of subjective judgment as to whether such lofty cash flow expectations are sensible, implausible, or preposterous. Considering all the caveats required to support current prices, we think tech stocks are at the implausible stage in their collective market value, with some individual stocks (and most cryptocurrencies) at the preposterous level. We believe tech stocks are in another bubble, with the potential to impact investable asset classes far beyond the tech sector, albeit not as extreme as the 1999–2000 bubble, labeled by many "the mother of all bubbles."_

Highly recommended if you're interested in the subject.

</comment><comment><USER31> cryptocurrencies are not another asset class but a potential new financial and social system.

</comment><comment><USER32> Did someone pay to have this written? Seems sketchy IMHO.

<comment><USER33> The section on "companies in the top 10 decade to decade" seemed to be a very weak argument to me. Reminded me of reasoning sometimes used by cryptocurrency investors "it crash 3 times and recovered, therefore it's guaranteed to do the same in the future".

But other than that, what seems sketchy?

<comment><USER34> What to you seems wrong with that extrapolation? As there's no real precedent to look at for cryptocurrencies, all we have at the moment is their short history to adjust our beliefs with. Is there some other view on the fundamentals of cryptos that you're incorporating in your thought process?

For a more pragmatic look on Bitcoin which i've been using see www.alfaquotes.com, they calculate fundamental value by dividing total cost of hardware and power needed to mine 6 months worth of bitcoin by the amount mined, so just the cost basis for miners.

I agree that Bitcoin has been superseded feature-wise by other cryptos, but seems to be a functioning e-gold right now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Reads like a hit job on Tesla, to me.

<comment><USER36> There is one single paragraph on Tesla, less than 5% of the article. And it's just an example where several others could have been used instead.

<comment><USER35> It's the only company mentioned by name in their Key Points at the top, and then it's one of the first things they talk about, and is the only company they talk about in detail.

To you, that's by chance and doesn't mean anything.

To me, it's because the piece was written with Tesla in mind-- the piece was designed as a vehicle for an opinion on Tesla, disguised as an article about bubbles.

<comment><USER37> tesla is the poster child for a bubble, so I do not think this alone is evidence as a hit article on tesla.

To me, best case scenario is Tesla sells more cars than Ford. What does that mean for the stock? as the case with all stocks with this kind of hyper PE ratio, the stock has to go into no growth territory for like a decade as its earnings grow to match its stock price.

that means the best possible case for tesla stock is that it will stop growing for about 10 years, bouncing around the same price.

<comment><USER35> guess we'll see.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I have a suspicion that bubbles can only exist when media is centralized. Today's media is too decentralized to create the wave of panic that is necessary to burst a bubble. There will always be some people somewhere who didn't get the news and who still believe that x has value and will be happy to buy when they see a price drop...

Also, the fear of missing out among millenials is stronger than their fear of losing everything.

<comment><USER37> Media can create a bubble, but more often then not they are just chasing it.

As far as bubbles cant pop now, well we just had the crypto pop.

<comment><USER39> Lol it has not truly popped yet, it will climb higher and crash even harder for the next five years until the tech matures and people have a better idea of what's achievable.</comment></comment></comment>


The Breakdown of Modern Web Design - <AUTHOR> http://humor.beecy.net/geeks/web-design/web-design.gif

<comment><USER2> Pretty much bang on, I don't swear too much, but replace that with banging my head off the wall and the pie chart is bang on.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd get rid of the table slice and add that chunk to the death-to-IE section. It would be interesting to see how many person-hours have been spent in the U.S. since, say, 2003 solely on fixing sites' IE bugs.</comment>