The Investor Class Hates Pensions - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/05/opinion/investor-class-pensions.html <comment><USER2> I feel like the author is mixing together some important differences between 401ks and pensions.

\</comment><comment> Pensions:

\- "Your" money and everyone else's money is lumped into a single pool. If previous retirees were given too much money because of poor planning, "your" money will evaporate

\- Your future benefits are fixed, regardless of market conditions. Unless the pension can't afford to do so because of a market crash, and declares bankruptcy. In which case, anyone left holding the bag will be screwed

\- Zero financial literacy/discipline required. Your contributions are pre- determined, and the pension managers will take care of all investment decisions

\</comment><comment> 401ks:

\- Your 401k is 100% yours. There is no risk of your 401k account "going bankrupt" because too much of it was given to others.

\- Your future benefits are dependent on market conditions - unless you choose to buy an annuity.

\- Financial literacy and discipline is required. If you don't contribute enough, or make bad investment choices, you're screwed

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

The article completely ignores the 1st and 2nd differences, which is why many people like myself are uneasy with pensions. The 3rd point is what the article mostly focuses on, and that's a valid point. I'd love to see "full-service" 401k plans, where employees are forced to contribute at least X% of their income, and all of it is managed by the equivalent of a pension-fund-manager (ideally, invested into low-cost diversified index funds)

Too many people lack the financial discipline to make sufficient contributions, and the financial literacy to make good investment decisions. So full-service 401ks as described above, could be a net positive for society, without all the baggage that come with pension funds.

<comment><USER3> The 401k being 100% yours is a somewhat significant downside, too. It means that the funds get transferred to your heirs on death, diverting funds from supporting retirement in general. This can be counteracted by purchasing an annuity, but that usually isn't the route taken by retirees. Overall, it means that saving for retirement is more expensive than it needs to be, since you're also effectively saving for an inheritance too.

The pension, on the other hand, effectively collects mortality credits as beneficiaries die and distributes them to survivors.

The ideal retirement system would be effectively some sort of actuarially adjusted tontine. Nothing gets left behind when you die - instead, it gets split among surviving retirement savers in an actuarially fair manner.

<comment><USER4> Except for the fact that psychologically, those who think, expect, or worry that their money might outlive them may take significant comfort in that money being passed to their heirs. This may make them more likely to save for retirement, even at the risk of over-saving, because the benefit of that money is not fully "lost" on death.

You don't want to (IMO) design a retirement system where the well-to-do have every incentive to opt-out.

<comment><USER3> Erm, what? Yeah, you want to structure a retirement system where the well-to- do want to opt out. Otherwise, we're giving tax advantages for "retirement saving" that really goes to heirs. How it's currently structured in the US, we do so through contribution limits.

If all the retirement system change is make rich people opt out and have poor people who die early pay for the retirement of poor people who die late, it's a smashing success.

<comment><USER4> I see your point, but in any private system where only the poor participate, only the poor pay the fees that allow the system to exist, so you either further disproportionately disadvantage them financially and/or you provide them with notably worse service and support than the well-to-do enjoy for their investments.

<comment><USER3> We might have different definitions of "well to do". I was thinking of households making over $500k per year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The author just kind of brushes by this, but my main problem with pensions in general is their tendency to be underfunded. It's just one more way for current voters to externalize the costs of their benefits onto future generations.

401(k)s by design can't extract funding as future liabilities. Are there proposals for ways to do this for pensions? I know there are pushes to "fully- fund" them, but the temptation to use overly optimistic projections seems like it will never really go away.

<comment><USER6> Indeed nothing was written about city/state pensions that do not make projected returns year after year and require significant funding which most cities can't afford.

<comment><USER7> It's in the second paragraph, and the collective shareholders voice isn't really part of the underfunding issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > We let ourselves be charged high fees that we do not understand, we accept > poor returns quarter after quarter, we never sue to enforce our rights, we > never vote as shareholders and we never tell our investment managers how we > think they ought to vote.

Is this satire? How is a pension better than a 401k in any of these dimensions? If my retirement is invested in overpriced, underperforming funds it's 100% my own fault. If my pension is chronically mismanaged (as they tend to be) there is literally nothing I can do about it.

<comment><USER9> Although I agree with you that many pension funds have been mismanaged, it's not 100% your fault if your 401k plan only offers poorly-performing, high fee funds as many do. I'm not sure either model is a good solution going forward.

<comment><USER10> Are there plans that actually only offer actively managed funds? Even the bare bones bottom tier Fidelity plan I had years ago from a notoriously tight pursed startup gave me a few index tracking funds.

<comment><USER4> Have a look at the total fees for your account/index funds. My experience is that they are not always competitive with the lowest fees in the free financial markets. (3 basis points for Schwab S&P 500 index).

If your company is small or your benefits person clueless, you may have worse funds available to you than in the taxable brokerage world.

<comment><USER11> I think there are better things to worry about than a couple basis points. If I'm charged 1% for a basic index fund, sure that's a problem. But given the minute fees for most, the inefficiencies from trading strategies could dwarf the explicit fees - if you really care about every penny, you need to look at the actual tracking error. You may be surprised to find it's substantially larger than the fees.[1]

My attitude in practice is that if I'm getting an employer match, then why complain about fees? It's their problem to minimize them - I'm still doing better than I would on my own. The efficiency is their problem, and because they have an incentive to minimize their costs, there shouldn't be a systemic problem.

[1] Average ETF tracking error is said to be as high as 50 basis points: [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/business/mutfund/exchange-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/business/mutfund/exchange- traded-funds-tracking-error-is-often-overlooked.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> When a state puts matching funds in workers 401(k) plans each year, that is an easily quantified expense. A state that makes pension promises can minimize the stated expense by using unrealistic investment assumptions. Government workers' unions and politicians have collaborated to make promises that are ruinous in the long run. If politicians had been more honest and unions less greedy, I would be ok with public pensions. But both groups have shown that they are not to be trusted.

</comment><comment><USER13> Pension funds are some the biggest investors in underperforming asset classes like VC, and have been epically fleeced in recent years by professional asset managers (pension bond debacles). Pension funds are desperate and easily manipulated because many of the big ones, especially public ones, are basically insolvent. Governments overpromised and under saved and now pension funds are counting on 8% returns that they're not going to get.

</comment><comment><USER14> With respect to the activism/pushing for improved corporate governance near the end of the article, I like to think it is happening on the 401K and individual side and that the reason it is behind the curve is because 401Ks are a more recent invention than pensions.

Here's an example of it happening on the 401K front.

[https://www.morganstanley.com/articles/audrey-choi-ted- talk-...](https://www.morganstanley.com/articles/audrey-choi-ted-talk- sustainability)

"Today we have more choices and more opportunity to make our voices heard than ever before," says Audrey Choi, head of Morgan Stanley's Institute for Sustainable Investing. And collectively, we have the power to change the way companies and other institutions approach environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues. Finance, she says, "can be one of the most powerful forces for positive social change at our disposal – if we ask it to be. We have the power to make sustainable investing the new normal," says Choi.

Choi calls out the fable that many of us carry in our heads that if you care about environmental or social issues when you invest, you probably aren't going to make as much money. To bust those myths, she cites studies showing that investing in companies with strong sustainability strategies can result in the same if not better returns than investing in those that don't.

<comment><USER14> Another example is Larry Fink's letter to CEOs: [https://www.blackrock.com/corporate/investor- relations/larry...](https://www.blackrock.com/corporate/investor- relations/larry-fink-ceo-letter)

As we enter 2018, BlackRock is eager to participate in discussions about long- term value creation and work to build a better framework for serving all your stakeholders. Today, our clients – who are your company's owners – are asking you to demonstrate the leadership and clarity that will drive not only their own investment returns, but also the prosperity and security of their fellow citizens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I feel like private annuities should be more popular than they currently are. Like a pension, an annuity pays a defined benefit until the day you die. They can also afford to pay out a slightly higher annual benefit than you could safely take from your own 401(k), because it's a statistical certainty that X% of the risk pool will die early, whereas with your own savings you can never be sure how long you'll have to make it last.

Unlike a pension, an annuity isn't tied to a specific employer, so it doesn't have career-immobilizing vesting requirements or weird payout rules tied to how much money you make in the last N years of your career. And you can select an annuity provider based on its fees and how solid its financials are, factors that aren't necessarily high on the list while selecting an employer.

So, why aren't annuities more popular as a retirement savings vehicle?

<comment><USER16> It's too easy to write an annuity as a scam, and there's huge counterparty risk of insolvency over 10-40 years. So we only see annuities where's there's no meaningful choice whether to opt in (Social Security and pensions)

<comment><USER15> So maybe we just need to invent the Vanguard of annuities? An annuity provider with a governance model designed to work in the interest of its customers that can build trust as a reliable player?

EDIT: it appears that Vanguard itself offers annuities, but they're not particularly transparent so I'm unsure if they're "good enough" for general- purpose retirement savings.

<comment><USER17> Social security is an annuity, and a damn good one--it's guaranteed by the US Government. What we need is for supplemental annuities (above SS amounts) to be offered by the federal government at cost, or to guarantee annuities sold by insurance companies (a la FDIC).

<comment><USER18> It is much easier to create a mandatory annuity than an optional one because you don't have to worry about people who have a lower than average expected payout opting out. If the annuity is optional you need to have a much more sophisticated way of determining how much people should pay.

<comment><USER17> Good point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've never quite understood how pensions are supposed to work when one changes jobs every 1-5 years. With 401(k) I can roll my account into a Vanguard IRA and keep all the control. I'd hate for my retirement to be beholden to 5-10 different sets of pension fund managers.

<comment><USER20> Correct, it's a huge pain to juggle pensions if you job-hop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Stream-of-consciousness - The Investor Class hates pensions? Really? I know a lot of investors. None of them hate pensions. Quite the opposite, actually. And since when did they become a class of people?

I have some friends who are politically-involved in California and quite concerned about public sector unions and the fiscal sustainability of the pension promises that were made. This couldn't be about that, could it? On HN?

 _"...his relentless, well-funded attack has taken every form of political advocacy available. It ranges from campaign contributions to ballot initiatives to model legislation to lobbying to lawsuits to financing academic and judicial conferences...The justification is that these pensions are in crisis. The familiar claim is that states and municipalities face unsustainable pension obligations that will crowd out other government spending and lead to higher taxes. Therefore, traditional pensions, which guarantee retirement payments to workers — leaving states and cities on the hook — must be replaced by 401(k)s, which offer no such guarantee...Though the mainstream media has mostly taken the crisis claim at face value, economists and actuaries debate its extent and even its existence..."_

Well fuck me. There it is. This isn't an analysis of pension funding. It's not a survey of financial managers. It's political cover-your-ass. Some folks think pension funds are in trouble. We're going to attack and say their claims are politically-motivated.

Everything is politics now, including, it seems, figuring out whether you have enough to retire on or not. I know plenty of people who are serious investors who are concerned about public pensions, but it's got jack squat to do with politics. All of the folks I know are huge union supporters. It has to do with the numbers not adding up.

We gotta stop this thing we do where we form up into teams and throw crap at one another. It's certainly possible that these two things are unrelated. It's also certainly possible, highly-likely even, that this essay is a desire to politicize something for the purpose of obfuscating the real issues involved. That's a shame, especially for both the citizens and workers who are not expecting a crisis.

<comment><USER22> > economists and actuaries debate its extent and even its existence

I mean... I'd ask for a citation right here. Maybe it's due to my "bubble" but I've never once heard an actuary state that most public pensions are perfectly fine. The opposite is almost universally true with a few notable exceptions. Heck, a high schooler with a napkin and basic math skills can figure out how utterly unsustainable so many of these plans are - and how they've only sustained so far by being what amounts to a pyramid scheme.

Illinois in no way is even a sustainable state long-term at this point, almost solely due to insane unfunded pension debt coming due. You can be pro-pension or anti-pension, but either way the math is pretty clear.

<comment><USER21> Agreed.

I think a much more productive discussion is over the models and standards used to judge the worthiness of pensions, a discussion that has roots going back a long time before the current stuff. None of this has to be political. This is common stuff people have been doing for decades. I am quite curious who these people are and how they defend the statements they make.

When friends of your cause tell you that you have a problem and your response is creating villains and presupposing the dangers of various unacceptable solutions that may or may never actually come to pass, you've got two really bad problems instead of just one: the original problem and denial.

This type of essay is identifying bad guys and pre-planting rhetorical defenses to be used if anybody gets close to the problem. Attack the messenger! It's much easier to just discredit people than engage with them on the merits. And it's simple enough that anybody can do it.

Hell, I'd be interested in a discussion of the various pension models and just the history of how each has fared over the years. You could take all the political fearmongering stuff out and just go with that. I think it'd be fascinating. There are several fact-based, dispassionate essays that could be written on this topic that would be both interesting and informative.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This doesn't seem to even try to explain by what measure 401(k)'s have failed (if the problem is low contributions, that is not the fault of the 401(k)), or back up the suggestion that pensions are _not_ bankrupting municipalities.

It seems to mostly invoke the Koch brothers and paint a target on The Investor Class, and hope that is proof enough.

 _If the Koch brothers favor pension reform, then by definition pensions are not failing!_

(I'm sure it is for some)

<comment><USER24> You assert "if the problem is low contributions, that is not the fault of the 401(k)", but that conjunction doesn't hold.

To wit: is it possible that the requirements for participation in a 401(k) are such that fewer and fewer people can actually contribute to one for a significant period of time? In that case, low contributions would be a result of the 401(k)'s structure, and your conjunction's consequent would be false.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This op-ed is a dog's breakfast of Big Labor talking points, and pretty much what one would expect from a law professor flogging his latest book, entitled, "The Rise of the Working-Class Shareholder: Labor's Last Best Weapon" (see author bio at bottom of piece).

TLDR: The Kochs are trying to kill pensions because they don't like Calpers' political activism. The author doesn't get into specifics, preferring to make sweeping accusations such as, "This relentless, well-funded attack has taken every form of political advocacy available. It ranges from campaign contributions to ballot initiatives to model legislation to lobbying to lawsuits to financing academic and judicial conferences."

Sounds pretty scary. And as a former investment banker I can confirm that, in fact, F500 CEOs and boards are afraid of Calpers and Ontario Teachers and a few others who have gone the activist route. So maybe there is something to the thesis that all these fat cats want to stymie the ability of the working class to effect meaningful change through its collective ability to influence corporate governance.

But as someone currently involved in the government of a small town, I can also tell you that pensions are, legitimately, a major problem. Especially when they pertain to unionized public employees whose unions are allowed to force _every member_ of that group of public servants (cops, teachers, garbage collectors, etc) to pay union dues _regardless of whether they want to be part of the union_.

The tenacity of union leaders, coupled with the universally bad optics of management not giving labor the future financial security that labor wants, often results in management making pension promises that they won't be able to deliver in a decade's time -- especially if the discussions happen during a good market run when modeling a perennial 7% YoY return on the pension portfolio seems reasonable.

This is ultimately much more of a public sector problem than a private sector one. Unfunded pension liabilities can kill companies, giving union leadership a strong incentive to compromise in cases where the pension is going to bankrupt the company.

On the public sector side, what you see instead is hiring freezes that benefit tenured union members, tax hikes that prompt wealthy residents to move to Florida, and cutbacks in other areas (e.g., paving roads).

It's not a pretty picture, and this op-ed is a good example of the rhetoric that can be deployed against people trying to make sources of funds equal uses of funds. Please DO NOT take that as an implicit defense of anything the Kochs are doing, btw.

<comment><USER4> > especially if the discussions happen during a good market run when modeling > a perennial 7% YoY return on the pension portfolio seems reasonable.

That's a pretty reasonable, even conservative, assumption for the long-run nominal total return of the stock market.

I wish I could find the version that had figures in it (rather than simply 3% wide buckets, but all of the 25 and 30-year long periods in the heatmap have real returns in excess of 6% (meaning the nominal would be over 7%) [https://portfoliocharts.com/portfolio/total-stock- market/](https://portfoliocharts.com/portfolio/total-stock-market/)

I think 7% nominal over a long period (such as a pension fund could expect) is quite reasonable and would expect a pension so funded to be quite stable.

<comment><USER25> > I think 7% nominal over a long period (such as a pension fund could expect) > is quite reasonable and would expect a pension so funded to be quite stable.

Pension funds aren't retirement accounts; you don't care about a total 30-year return, you care about ongoing cash flow, and if you have fixed obligations in a bad year then you eat into principal. This obviously creates problems down the road, especially when you have decreased contributions over time due to a shrinking population in the municipality in question -- or a shrinking tax base (e.g., the downward spiral of rich people leaving because they don't like tax hikes, which results in tax hikes to cover the revenue shortfall....repeat).

Also, they're usually diverse portfolios with a fair amount of lower- risk/lower-return assets (mostly T-bills and investment grade F500 debt), so 7% is actually pretty ambitious.

<comment><USER4> As a permanent pension fund (rather than an individual retirement account), the fund has the advantage of a timeline of "forever" with a greater portion of assets than a 401K could. This allows them to hold a smaller percentage of cash/cash equivalents.

To your excellent point about shrinking base making things fall apart, this is only a problem for underfunded pensions and Ponzi schemes. I leave it to the reader to determine whether those are two different things or not.

<comment><USER25> Right -- the problem is underfunding, but the driver of the underfunding of public pensions isn't just that nobody can predict the future; it's that politicians and union leaders both have morally hazardous incentives to agree to something that both parties know might not hold up in the future, because they (the individual politician and the union leader, specifically) will have moved on from their current roles by the time the wheels fall off in a couple decades.

I'm not sure I understand your point about cash and cash equivalents....securities are fungible to cash....the issue is that there's a defined payout every year in $USD, and if the contributions to the fund from which it were paid were modeled in an overly optimistic way, then the fund runs out of money.

<comment><USER4> > your point about cash and cash equivalents.

Individuals need to hold a certain amount of their 401K/IRA in cash to pay expenses, to prevent having to sell a lot of stock in a bear market. Individuals will not have the time to recover from a sharp bear market just as they begin retirement. This causes them to miss out on the higher upside in normal and bull markets. (see "sequence risk")

Permanent funds, adequately funded, could leave a greater percentage of their money in equities, which has (historically had) higher overall returns despite larger short-term drawdowns.

<comment><USER25> > Permanent funds, adequately funded, could leave a greater percentage of > their money in equities, which has (historically had) higher overall returns > despite larger short-term drawdowns.

Agree, but they don't. Every pension portfolio I've seen has a lot of fixed income in it.

<comment><USER4> How many of those pension funds are adequately funded? (defined as "could pay out the already earned benefits for all current benefit holders without any future cash infusion")

I think you see them holding fixed income and cash equivalents because they need current cash and future cash deposits. (They're pretty damn close to Ponzi schemes in a lot of cases.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> There are a few problems with pensions -- all basically forms of underfunding:

1) Underfunding due to shrinking business or region -- it's a lot easier to make your pension numbers work if people who retired 20 years ago are a tiny fraction of your current workforce.

2) Underfunding due to overly-generous plans (the retirement pay a lot of public sector employees get is disproportionately generous vs. their pay while working. Especially when contracts do "highest 3 years" or "last 3 years" and employees collude to give lots of overtime or other special pay to let people about to retire juice the pension

3) Underfunding due to bad math -- really easy to just make the "expected investment return" the dependent variable

<comment><USER4> > the retirement pay a lot of public sector employees get is > disproportionately generous vs. their pay while working

Perhaps the other way to look at it is "these government workers sacrificed current income throughout their career in exchange for a secure retirement via their pension agreement".

<comment><USER27> Yet another way to look at it is lower expectations for work performance along with more security of employment along with lower pay and guaranteed pensions.

Seriously, many public pension schemes are absolutely ridiculous. People shouldn't retire after 20-25 years of work and be defacto millionaires with lifetime pensions on the backs of tax payers. The system really can't support that scheme as is becoming painfully clear.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> > turning retirement savers into passive investors

I.e. stealing money from pension accounts so you can satisfy your urge to gamble with money you don't have for money you'll inevitably lose in the next bubble or blow on unnecessarily expensive shit noone needs?

Cool, so when I rob someone on the street, I could tell the judge I just turned the victim into a passive investor for that new phone I want to buy...

</comment><comment><USER29> Many comments blame 'politicians'. I agree that some particular politicians exacerbate the problem of underfunded pensions.

But it's easy to blame someone else. The problem is the people posting here, including me, and the people posting on every other forum on the Internet and people who don't use the Internet. People don't vote, they don't hold politicians accountable, they create perverse incentives for politicians to kick the can down the road by voting against those who are fiscally responsible, and people oppose paying their share to fund the pensions.

I know it's more complicated than blaming the voter, but on the other hand, it's also much more complicated than blaming the politician. There's also a systemic problem, but that's also on the voter IMHO.

Trivia question: Name your local elected representatives (e.g., state legislators, or the equivalent wherever you live. Can you? Those are the people dealing with the pension issue to a large extent.

<comment><USER30> This is an underappreciated point when people see voting as just a way to keep the evil enemy party out of power and forget to use it for what it's really powerful at - getting the government to do what you want.

I think it would be a great idea if when people on the internet complain about the government, they also identify who they voted for. Then they're forced to face responsibility for whatever that guy does when the next blame-the- politicians new story comes up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> > _We 401(k) holders are the world's ideal source of capital. ... alone and > devoid of leverage to negotiate._

It's really best if leverage goes all the way through from me to the end, though.

With a 401(k), if a fund is being managed poorly, I can "fire" the manager by selling it and buying another fund in the plan. (And at next job change, I can roll over to a new 401(k) plan or an IRA.)

If my pension is being managed poorly, as far as I know, I'm just out of luck. I have a pension from an old job, and to my knowledge, I cannot touch it until I'm 65. Of course there is no choice of pension "funds" to switch between within the plan like mutual funds in a 401(k). Even though I've changed jobs, I can't roll it over to anything.

So as far as I can tell, _the pension trustees (managers) may have leverage over whatever they invest in, but I have no useful leverage over the pension trustees_.

And it's not like pensions are never mismanaged. For example, in recent years there has been a scandal where the Dallas Police and Fire Pension System (DPFP) had a high guaranteed payout that their investment returns couldn't match, and instead of trying to fix it properly (whatever that means), they just kept it a secret and went wild with risky investments. See [https://interactives.dallasnews.com/2017/dallas-police- fire-...](https://interactives.dallasnews.com/2017/dallas-police-fire-pension- fund-explainer/) . Thankfully my own pension is better managed. At least, I assume so, but it's hard to research since it's a private fund thing.

</comment><comment><USER32> It's disgusting to me that something like this could even be published in the NYT. Pensions are absurd financial instruments. Paying someone a percentage of their salary in perpetuity is financial nonsense, and creates all kinds of perverse incentives for the recipients. The only reason these things ever got popular in the first place is because they were a way of borrowing from the future to pay the present. Creating a massive latent risk that allows you to get cheap labor in the short term and exposes you to catastrophic failure on the backend. Corporations realized this decades ago and stopped using them.

If the problem is that 401k fees are too high, let's make 401k's more mobile. Let's create a liquid market in 401k managers so that fees get pushed towards zero - as they should be.

<comment><USER33> Why? Pensions exist to serve retirees, not those retirees' former corporate masters. One of the only truly _kind_ things an organization can do for an individual that serves them over a lifetime, and you would shit on it?

401(k) is a poor solution that requires individual initiative to deploy successfully. Those who don't contribute eventually burden those who do (even if that burden can potentially be paid for in advance, if you have the account type that taxes on deposit), and that's only if they withstood the lifetime of temptations that press people into early withdrawal.

<comment><USER34> You're absolutely right! Pensions exist to serve retirees, not their former overlords. Looking after the needs of the retired is the kind, decent, _humane_ thing to do.

It's not about whose interests they serve so much as it is how sustainable and practical they actually are. Is it _kind_ to make a commitment to someone around which they will organize their life at the cost of crippling the lives of their successors? What if that organization isn't a company, but a government, and the resulting costs cripple its ability to perform other functions? Is it kind to cripple a city's services or a school's ability to teach in order to meet pension obligations that were poorly planned for decades? Who will pay a company's pension bill if the pensions push it into insolvency?

These aren't trivial questions with easy, pre-baked answers. They also are real, pressing questions that face us today. Your heart is unquestionably in the right place - it's not about the investor class! It's about the retirees who have given their lives! But there might be some room for subtlety.

<comment><USER33> You conflate mismanagement with the act itself...

I agree with you that increased lifespans throw a wrench in the works, but that is not enough of a problem to justify throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Pensions represent a HUGE portion of market actors' institutional conservatism and that is a necessary counterweight to the sort of irrational exuberance that is endemic to tech and other forward-thinking sectors

You want to talk about skyrocketing costs? Why not focus that energy on sorting out the mountains of institutional waste found elsewhere in the economy? Like, why the fuck does infrastructure here cost 10x other industrialized countries? Lots more money to be freed up that way

<comment><USER34> In the US, public sector pensions have been mismanaged so frequently that no conflation is required.

EDIT:

Further, there's a basic accountability problem. It was - is - easy to gain politically in the short term by making promises about pensions. Promise bigger pensions, smaller contributions, and so on. The gains can be realized almost immediately. The price is paid much later, often decades later, and the people who made those unwise promises cannot be held to account so long after the fact.

For many states and cities, pensions act as a counterweight to the ability to do anything other than pay pension costs.

As before, you are absolutely right that there are _mountains_ of waste to be investigated and addressed. You're completely right that there's a lot of money to be freed up there. Those issues are real, and they are pressing. Yet it is perhaps no more real or more pressing than the burden imposed by decades of financial mismanagement around pensions.

<comment><USER33> Out of curiosity I checked my admittedly-boring hometown's financials for 2017, and found their pension spend to be less than 10% of overall budget for the year (though they note a pending crisis and potential doubling of pension expenses over the next few years).

Not knowing what other entities' books look like, and also knowing that one town is hardly representative, pension spend looks large (large enough that I'd guess many different types would like to optimize out of the equation) but not _that_ large. How big of a crisis are we looking at -- 50% of total budgets? 30%? 20%?

You're right- mismanagement needs to be addressed. And I have no idea how to bring these firms to heel -- I just think that a market-based solution ("let them have 401(k)s!") is not the right answer here.

<comment><USER34> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pensions_crisis#U.S._State- lev...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pensions_crisis#U.S._State-level_issues)

In general, underfunded pensions and large increases in expenses are a looming threat to many state and local governments. In California, many cities are expecting their pension costs to increase by 50% or more. Few have much in the way of spare cash to begin with.

It's not just the mismanagement of professional pension management funds, though you are of course right that that is a major concern. Broadly, the crisis is the result of applying unreasonable discount rates (8% or more) and making unrealistic promises about contributions and payouts. This is very, very easy to do when you're negotiating a union contract, as a state generally has little choice but to pay up when the time comes. It's also easy to do when you can bump up the assumed discount rate a bit and use the cash this frees up for goodies for your voters.

These weren't just poor management decisions made by self-interested private companies. Indeed, private pensions often assumed much less rosy discount rates and fared much better. These poor financial management decisions were quite often made by union leadership and local officials, some of them elected.

Sad to say, shifting from a defined-benefit system to a defined-contribution system seems to be the only way to guarantee that this particular form of politically expedient mismanagement will not recur. This doesn't have to be 401(k)s, 403(b)s, or other market-oriented system. But whatever the eventual system is, it clearly cannot look anything like the pensions of yesteryear. That system has failed, and the kindness and compassion and pure intentions at its heart has gone to waste.

Let there be no doubt - this is tragedy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> It seems like the "investor class" should love pensions. I'm not expert on accounting or law, but pensions sound a lot like a free loan and a borderline scam:

A young company wants to hire 100 people, but from the market rate of salaries, they can only afford to pay hire 80 people. They also don't want to dilute their stock holdings so they opt for pensions instead. The extra 20 employees increase company profits and stock prices explode. The company's balance sheet looks good because they don't have to pay any pensions yet. The original investors can sell their stock long before pensions get paid out, and don't suffer any negative consequences.

<comment><USER36> >The company's balance sheet looks good because they don't have to pay any pensions yet.

Companies under GAAP accounting actually do have to carry their pension liabilities/assets on their balance sheet and have to report on the status of their pension fund. So investors _can_ see if the pension is underfunded.

Edit: for example, check GM's last 10-K, note 16. [0]

[0] [http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=231169&p=irol- se...](http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=231169&p=irol- secTextTest&TEXT=aHR0cDovL2FwaS50ZW5rd2l6YXJkLmNvbS9maWxpbmcueG1sP2lwYWdlPTEyMDI2NTgwJkRTRVE9MCZTRVE9MCZTUURFU0M9U0VDVElPTl9FTlRJUkUmc3Vic2lkPTU3)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Suppose someone effectively pools together investors' money and makes outsize returns due to actively managing away the complacency the author purports. Well, then, any 401k holder is free to share in those superior returns by purchasing the security while the pensioner cannot.

Caveat emptor, because ain't nobody looking out for you but you.

</comment><comment><USER38> these failing pensions are largely due to mismanagement, properly managed these retirement vehicles work as intended. unfortunately in the current climate a large company or even a state government can't resist the temptation to use a massive pension fund for something other than it's intended purpose. One lean quarter and they start eyeing up the 7 billion sitting in the pension fund. I read a book a couple years back that changed my thinking on pensions, before I was of the mind that they never worked, were a massive Ponzi scheme, stealing from young workers, etc... no, pensions work provided they are left alone. [http://www.retirementheist.com/](http://www.retirementheist.com/)

<comment><USER39> "in the current climate"

One of the reasons I'm not a big fan of pensions is precisely that it's _not_ "in the current climate", but a persistent problem over the span of decades. Many of the bills that are now compounding to an unignorable size are trainwrecks decades in the making. It isn't just that they were mismanaged today; they were mismanaged in the 200xs, and the 1990s (much harder to see because the stock market was doing _really well_ up until it wasn't), and the 1980s... it's not hard to think that maybe the fact they worked at all was simply another historical accident of the bizarre just-after-WW2 period, rather than any sort of good idea. We seem to lack angels virtuous enough to be honest about the numbers and to resist dipping into the Honkin' Big Pile o' Money.

<comment><USER38> I'm convinced it's the changes in the tax laws at the root cause of this. When income over $400k/yr (5 mil in todays money) was taxed at 90% there wasn't the incentive to screw over retirees. The "bizarre just-after-WW2 period" wasn't some fluke it was the result of purposely crafted policies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> We should have a portable national pension scheme. That's the only way to make this work. If that means expanding social security then so be it.

</comment><comment><USER41> Would pensions be needed in a world with Universal Basic Income?

<comment><USER42> Do you mean would "saving for your retirement" be needed? Or were you specifically asking about pensions?

In any case I don't think any basic income plan works if you imagine that everyone stops saving their earnings and relies on the basic income for their working years and retirement. It is called universal _basic_ income after all and not universal "luxurious" income.</comment></comment>


Yahoo Acquires Polyvore - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/31/yahoo-acquires-polyvore/ <comment><USER2> I may be the only person on HN who is bullish on Marissa Mayer's strategy.

Basically purchase aspiring start-ups that hit some troubled time scaling (Polyvore seemed to be running into some monetization issues). By putting the digital properties into Yahoo's network, the acquired company get lots of free traffic + better monetization (Yahoo already has a great brand sales department + the data Yahoo might have on people could make more engaging ad programmes).

<comment><USER3> I think this is a bit flawed: it assumes the products were great but simply lacked a distribution strategy. In many cases, it's more likely the products were just ok and still lacked a distribution strategy - causing a sale.

My bet is Marissa is trying to build more driven, savvy, smarter leadership by buying it and promising influence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I remember commenting several months ago that the only time you ever hear about Yahoo is when they buy someone out.

Nice to see nothing has changed.

<comment><USER5> Yahoo Livetext app looks interesting.

[http://www.producthunt.com/tech/yahoo- livetext](http://www.producthunt.com/tech/yahoo-livetext)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Who is Yahoo trying to target with all of these acquisitions? The only person I know who interfaces with the yahoo brand is my mom, because she doesn't know how to change her homepage.

I don't use tumblr so I'm not sure if they've found a way to get those users flowing to yahoo, but it seems like they would be completely contradictory demographics anyways. Same deal with with polyvore.

Any opinions?

<comment><USER7> Lots of opinions, but I'd start by inverting your question. Clearly Yahoo! gets a lot of traffic, and there are literally billions of people on the net, and unless you are an extreme extrovert the number of people you "know" is probably less than a couple hundred. Conversely if everyone you knew thought Yahoo! was the stupidest thing on the planet, statistically that would be representative of less than .1% of the available population. Which is why, starting from that position in terms of understanding something, will often lead you astray.

Wikipedia, citing Alexa's numbers, put Yahoo! at the #5 most popular web sites. Way higher than places like Reddit or Stack Overflow (sites which correlate strongly with hn readership). So that tells us that a lot of people (including people who can change their home page) voluntarily visit Yahoo! on a regular basis.

So clearly Yahoo! knows something about the people who are visiting their site that you and I don't. And I'm guessing they decided a lot of them liked Polyvore too and so adding that into the mix is a good thing. That said, I continue to find Yahoo! strategy hard to figure out, especially with respect to what kind of site they think they are.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Smart acquisition by Yahoo!

</comment><comment><USER9> But for _how much_?

</comment><comment><USER10> This seems like a great deal for Yahoo.

</comment><comment><USER11> Yahoo is making me sad, they just can't seem to make progress.

<comment><USER12> who goes out and buy the underdog in a market? why?

so there are a dozen shopping sites. let's buy the least know one!

<comment><USER13> You may not be their target demographic, but Polyvore is certainly far from that. At 20M uniques per month, 2.4M new sets per month, $22M raised, 150 employees, highest AOV of all social media sites (ahead of Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter), Polyvore is literally the highest converting social platform of them all. They're a pillar of the fashion community.

<comment><USER14> And I heard they were profitable, which when combined with all those #s, makes the low acquisition price really fishy. $60m for all that is way too cheap. Maybe Polyvore's CEO panic sold or had terrible bankers, but with $22M raised you would expect a professional board to have control and to be much more experienced. Growth could have totally stalled, or worse, started to reverse. I'd bet there's more to this story.

<comment><USER13> [http://recode.net/2015/08/03/yahoo-paid- around-200-million-f...](http://recode.net/2015/08/03/yahoo-paid- around-200-million-for-polyvore-a-search-engine-for-fashion/)

Apparently it was 200M, not 60M. I have to stick to my original hypothesis, Polyvore is more valuable than some realize.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Yahoo! simply boggles my mind. I have no idea what they do well as a tech company anymore or why they're still around. Their homepage spams with news about Kardashians and other celebrities along with horribly written articles by Yahoo! journalists. Every once in a great while you'll read a great but rare REPOST from AP, NPR and other major news sources. Otherwise, they're squeezing every drop of any kind of mediocre news about a cat getting stuck on a tree with a 10 minute video description performed by some Yahoo! bubblehead.

They've shutdown any interesting projects like pipes, maps, search or any other area of innovation. Anything that's still around is just rotting on the outskirts of internet. When was the last time anyone heard of YUI? The Yahoo! email experience is quite terrible and buggy with frequent service outages. They're purchasing these random startups and generally show lack of any direction. It just seems like their execs get in the room together and go "What the fuck are we gonna do today, boys? Let's buy a fashion startup! Do we need it? No, but who gives a shit. Our users sure don't." And I genuinely think that most users don't. They're just stuck on Yahoo! because they don't know how to change their default homepage.

I don't know... I'm just glad they haven't killed Flickr yet and I have a place to follow some great photographers.

<comment><USER16> I really wish I had enough karma to downvote this opinion. It just reeks of ignorance and short-sightedness.

Polyvore is far from a "fashion startup". It has a very substantial user base and their whole proposal allows for very natural (and kinda cool) monetization strategies. Also, we don't know how much Yahoo paid for it, it could've been a real bargain; apparently around 60M, kind of cheap if you consider they've been pulling profit from years now.

You want examples of real companies that seem to be adrift? Try looking at Twitter. Or Google (although they have some real good products that keep the ship floating).

<comment><USER15> I can see that with Twitter, but Google? How is Google adrift?

<comment><USER16> I see Google a little adrift in many of their new ventures, from Google+ to date. But, however, they maintain a pretty solid strategy in the fundamental products that generate most of it revenue, which is pretty much the ad market.

I think that the urge to diversify their money, coupled with, "well, we have a lot of money" is causing Google to invest in many things that eventually turn to dead-ends. That makes Google seem a little adrift, from my perspective, but nothing that would put their business at risk.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Problems with Lisp - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jrock.us/articles/Problems%20with%20Lisp.pod <comment><USER2> nickb posted this article a couple of hours earlier:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=449240>

The duplicate wasn't detected even though the urls, after submission, are identical. It turns out there's a bug (a corner case, really) in how duplicates are detected. Probably nickb put this in the Submit field:

      http://blog.jrock.us/articles/Problems with Lisp.pod

while jawngee used this:

      http://blog.jrock.us/articles/Problems%20with%20Lisp.pod

If you resubmit with the first string you get taken to nickb's submission, while the second takes you to jawngee's.

On another note, how many μStallmans of insensitivity would it take to notify pg of this triviality the day after the birth of his first child?

<comment><USER3> μStallmans? I love it. Your concept, or did you steal it?

<comment><USER2> Alan Kay famously said "Arrogance in computer science is measured in nanodijkstras." (<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7ROTJKkhuI>). To which someone wittily answered, "And microkays".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's worth noting that Clojure has native support for hashes via the {} syntax. (<http://clojure.org>)

<comment><USER5> And hashtable lookups are possible by just function-calling the table itself with the key:

      => ({ :foo 1  :bar 2 } :foo)
      1

the common pattern of defaulting to a value if the key isn't found is easy too:

      => ({ :foo 1  :bar 2 } :baz 4)
      4

The above is a hash map, #{ ... } creates a hash set which otherwise has similar semantics. Sets, being function-callable, can be used directly for checking if something is one of a bunch of values:

      (if (#{301 302 303 307} response-code)
        ; we've been redirected

Maps and sets (you also have sorted maps and sets and a compact struct-map, all of which have identical semantics as the hash variants where appropriate) can additionally be used with most functions accepting a seq (list) or can be converted to a list explicitly using the _seq_ function.

Basically, maps and sets really are first-class citizens in clojure. Some of the flexibility is down to the fact that Clojure is a Lisp-1: these features are therefore hard to replicate in CL. (and yes, hash tables also bothered me somewhat in CL, altough other things probably bothered me more)

<comment><USER6> Something I find strange about hashes in Clojure, is that you can access them using the key as a function. So instead of

        ({ :foo 1  :bar 2 } :foo) ;; => 1

You get the equivalent by doing

        (:foo { :foo 1  :bar 2 }) ;; => 1

For default values:

        (:baz { :foo 1  :bar 2 } 3) ;; => 3

I vaguely remember this is because keys act as functions, and hashes act as functions as well. Out of habit and similarity to other languages, I never use the key-first notation, nor can I see where it is better to use it.

<comment><USER7> it's likely for usage in higher-order functions. i haven't used clojure but i assume you can do something like this:

      (map :foo hashofhashes)

which would get the element :foo of every hash in hashofhashes

<comment><USER5> That's another good point, although the alternative isn't much longer:

      (map #(% :foo) hashofhashes)

or if % has a chance of being nil:

      (map #(get % :foo) hashofhashes)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Title should be "Perceived problems with hash-tables in Common Lisp"...

It's true that it would be interesting to have native syntax for hash-tables so you could read and dump them like you can lists and arrays and other stuff. Surprisingly the article doesn't even mention that which is the only real problem with CL's hashtables, aside from the inability to define arbitrary lookup mechanisms beyond eq, eql, equal and equalp...

<comment><USER9> Having such a cumbersome syntax for hash tables is just as real a problem as the verbosity some Lisp programmers hold against e.g. Java.

One solution could be a read macro that translates into the (setf (gethash ...)) form. Lisp read macros are usually prefix, though, and [key]hash is awkward. OTOH, adding suffix read macros (maybe only of the form symbol[... values], e.g. hash[# key] or hash[: key], with brackets and char(s) at the beginning to represent which suffix read macro.

Or, making the hash a function: (hashname key) to get, (hashname key newval) to set.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Lisp has support for {} syntax for hashes. It's just not built in. Use a reader macro.

</comment><comment><USER11> The problem is not the complexity of the api but how verbose it is. Having to type

        (setf (gethash "foo" *hash*) "OH HAI")

just for something as trivial as " _hash_ ['foo'] = "OH HAI"" is really too much work and a significant disincentive to using hash tables.

<comment><USER12> Setf is the generic form (and it's pretty cool how setf works). There are more succinct ways of putting it.

But you need to remember that functional languages discourage that kind of mutable state. It should be no surprise that some things (like assignment) are more awkward in that environment. It's a tradeoff.

<comment><USER11> Yes but lisp is not a functional language and (to my incomplete knowledge of CL) setf is the only way to modify the hash table. Thus, people have to use that form if they want to use hash tables.

<comment><USER5> In fairness you could define a function that did it for you:

      (defun assoc (table key val)
        (setf (gethash key table) val)
        table)

or something like that. (this is from memory, hope it's right) You can then let it take a variable number of arguments to make it even more concise. (yes, I've stolen the _assoc_ semantics from Clojure, minus the pure functional aspect)

<comment><USER11> Well, a macro but yes. Still, if you have to write a macro for something as trivial as that, that in itself is a problem. Especially when other people start reading your code.

<comment><USER10> Last project I worked on had 9154 lines of lisp code out of which 4800 lines are utilities, that I've accumulated and written.

The utilities cover everything from hash, list, string, files, function, a simple version of prolog, some algorithms like bloomfilter, suffix-tree, a simple bayesian filter implementation and a lot of stuff makes writing code easier.

So it's pretty normal to have a large set of utilities that you prefer. It sort of ensures that the code doesn't become to large.

I use (hput hash key value) and (hget hash key) a couple of functions, which I have. So it's a bit verbose than hash[key] = value or hash[key]. But it lets me write stuff like...

(defexample cineworld-cinema-page

      (:record :cinema-listing

        (:name "ENFIELD")

        (:record-loop :film

         (:name "BEVERLY HILLS CHIHUAHUA" "BRIDE WARS")

         (:director "Raja Gosnell" "Gary Winick")

         (:starring "Andy Garcia, Drew Barrymore, Piper Perabo, George Lopez, Jamie Lee Curtis"
    		"Anne Hathaway, Kate Hudson, Candice Bergen")

         (:record-loop :date

          (:day "Mon 26 Jan" "Tue 27 Jan")

          (:record-loop :time

    		    (:listing "11:10" "13:30")))))

      "http://www.cineworld.co.uk/cinemas/22")

I wrote the code that reads that defexample macro and generates the data from it in 2 days. When I started I had no idea what the grammar was going to look like and how I was going to accomplish any of the details.

<comment><USER13> "Last project I worked on had 9154 lines of lisp code out of which 4800 lines are utilities, that I've accumulated and written."

"The utilities cover everything from hash, list, string, files, function, a simple version of prolog, some algorithms like bloomfilter, suffix-tree, a simple bayesian filter implementation and a lot of stuff makes writing code easier."

It is wonderful that you can write all that in 4800 lines in CL, and I know that's not hyperbole or exaggeration.

The problem is the parts covering hashes, lists, strings, files etc. are also being implemented by every other CL programmer, slightly differently. This makes it just that little bit harder to share and understand other people's code, which in turn makes it that little bit harder to build commonly agreed upon libraries for common things, and that little bit harder for people new to the language to get started.

This is all cumulative, and adds up to an actual shortcoming in my opinion. Clojure does a little better job here. For example, by having a common Seq interface shared by lists, arrays, sets, and hashes.

<comment><USER10> I didn't write a lot of the libraries. Maybe 50% of the code is mine, most the algorithm implementations, the rest of the stuff is picked up from previous projects or existing utilities that lisp programmer's have written.

The reason one uses lisp is because the team is small. Very small like 1 person. So sharing isn't really that much of a concern.

I agree that it makes it harder to start. Which means that very few people stick with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The issue is that there is no one solution for all problems and all contexts. ANY given language was written in response to a given set of problems in a given set of contexts. Change one thing to be outside that domain and the fit is less good. Change almost everything and the fit is a misfit.

For example: a 5 lb slege hammer is a very good tool for breaking rocks. Now fix a Rolex Watch with it. Its not so good of a tool, is it?

The answer is understand the problem and its context. Then select the tool that fits good enough (YMMV). Otherwise you will soon find yourself in a world of hurt and still not have a good solution to your problem.

I am sure Lisp has a problem set and a context set for which its a good match. Though I haven't found it yet but then I really haven't looked. The tools I use are good enough for the problems and contexts I have encountered in over 40 years of software development. Thus I have no reason to hammer my head against the rubber wall of Lisp as well as approximately 900 other languages.

<comment><USER15> Lisp is the best language for generating HTML, XML, writing compilers, or parsers.

PS: Lisp is more a family of languages that share features than it is a specific language.

<comment><USER16> > , writing compilers, or parsers.

I think the OCaml guys and the Haskell guys(Parsec) might take exception to this.

See: <http://flint.cs.yale.edu/cs421/case-for-ml.html> <http://www.ffconsultancy.com/ocaml/benefits/parsing.html>

It's not that CL is bad for writing compilers or parsers (I've written a few parsers using it), its just that blanket statements like "Lisp is the best language for ..." isn't always going to be true.

<comment><USER17> Anything coming from Jon Harrop is questionable (ffconsultancy.com)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The curious case of Google removing over 77% of all our positive reviews - <AUTHOR> http://www.greenheartgames.com/2018/02/13/curious-case-google-removing-77-positive-reviews/ <comment><USER2> I wonder if there's some missing puzzle piece here, some post or in-game prompt that incentivizes the users to rate it 5-stars, which is why Google stuck to their guns after "triple-checking" the removals.

But I wouldn't be surprised if this is just Google's usual "opaque algorithm inside and human drones outside" type customer service.</comment>


Changing Defaults and Removing Options - <AUTHOR> https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/changing-defaults-and-removing-options <comment><USER2> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyLBGkS5ICk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyLBGkS5ICk)</comment>


Show HN: Turn-O-Phrase - Word Puzzles for Culture Buffs - <AUTHOR>

This has been the latest side project of mine. I've tried to make something that (1) has a chance of being completed by myself working on weekends, and (2) is engaging, entertaining, and fun. I suppose it turned out a bit geeky.
I have a number of ideas for future improvements, but before I get to them it would be helpful to know what you think.
I welcome your feedback. Thank you. <comment><AUTHOR> <http://turn-o-phrase.appspot.com></comment>


Show HN: A CRM built on Google Drive - <AUTHOR> http://spreadsheetcrm.com

<comment><USER2> Looks intriguing. One website note, though: I think the animated slides are transitioning too quickly as I was unable to read them in time before they switched to the next slide.</comment>


Approved Textbooks of the American Institute of Mathematics - <AUTHOR> http://aimath.org/textbooks/approved-textbooks/ <comment><USER2> _We do not require any particular form of license, although the Gnu Free Documentation License and the Creative Common licenses (in its many varieties) are what we recommend. These licenses allow the book user the greatest flexibility in making use of the material. We will approve a book with copyright restrictions as long as the book is available at little or no cost. Generally, books must be available in a format like PDF that can be printed by each user or in bulk by a campus bookstore or copy shop. It is not necessary that printed copies be available from a print on demand service like Lulu, but many students and faculty are willing to spend $25 to get a paperbound or spiral bound copy of a 500 page text._ \-- [http://aimath.org/textbooks/evaluation- criteria](http://aimath.org/textbooks/evaluation-criteria)</comment>


Ideal Glass Would Explain Why Glass Exists at All - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/ideal-glass-would-explain-why-glass-exists-at-all-20200311/ <comment><USER2> I read Quanta (via RSS) and often can only make it 1/2 to 2/3 the way through an article before giving up. Today I figured out why: the punchline is absolutely buried.

> Another property of ultra-stable glass would eventually reveal the most > promising road map to ideal glass.

> { + 4 intermediate paragraphs }

> [the property] ...Sure enough, they found that both glasses had far lower > heat capacity than usual near absolute zero, in line with a crystal's. This > suggested that ultra-stable glass has fewer two-level systems to tunnel > between.

> { + 3 intermediate paragraphs }

> [the solution] ...His algorithm picks two particles at random and swaps > their positions. These shake-ups help the simulated liquid stay unstuck, > allowing molecules to settle into snugger fits — just as the ability to swap > two ill-fitting shapes would help in Tetris.

Alternatively, that could've been written as:

> Another property of ultra-stable glass - it's far lower heat capacity - > would eventually reveal the most promising road map to ideal glass: randomly > swapping particles of cooling glass to allow for snugger fits.

\-- And that's it! --

But my brain either can't, or refuses to, follow 8 paragraphs to arrive at the Aha moment.

Now, I don't read these sorts of articles for the pleasure of reading. And, I think the writing style suggests this is a primary goal. So why do I read it? I dunno, maybe it's a better version of me that clicks "subscribe" than the one who's presented with the article to read?

Or, I prefer to read selectively rather than comprehensively. A trait I think is of merit, but my SAT and ACTs surely didn't.</comment>


Does CloudFlare's Railgun really work? (Metrics) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.cloudflare.com/railgun-gives-our-ecommerce-sites-the-edge <comment><USER2> Railgun's an interesting idea but unfortunately the post doesn't really give us enough information to really judge it's effectiveness.

For example we don't know enough about the 'test' environment such as how much the pages vary from user to user, or from page to page which will have a large impact on deltas.

There's also no detail on how other optimisations might perform e.g. serving all dynamic content through CDN so reusing CDN to origin connections, whether it might be possible to specify cache lifetimes for the dynamic pages etc.

There's a short mention of some performance numbers at the start but then the article focuses on the reduction in outbound traffic (which is probably a good thing) so we've no idea whether Railgun, the other optimisation services that CloudFlare offer of just using a CDN is making these differences.

</comment><comment><USER3> I can answer some of these questions:

1) outbound traffic reductions are 100% driven by railgun. If you use cloudflare with railgun disabled, you're using it much like a traditional dynamic acceleration product by Akamai or EdgeCast, and it does not reduce your outbound traffic, because the entire response payload is proxied out of your data center to the CDN's edge. With railgun, the response body is crunched down to a diff. My post goes in good details into the figures we've seen with regards to off-peak organic long tail browsing and peak traffic driven by campaigns. Off-peak I'm down to about 1/3rd to 1/5th of my previous outbound consumption, and on-peak gets down to 1/10th.

2) you can browse the site to see the various compositions of our page types: [http://www.luxurylink.com/](http://www.luxurylink.com/)

Performance-wise:

3) I cannot apply any "full-uri" caching rules to any of my pages for various reasons: for one, any URI might send a completely different payload based on your device. You can bookmark a uri on your phone and open it up on your laptop after bookmark synchronization, and it always looks as beautiful as it should look for that device. Second, we've started to introduce dynamic merchandising tailored to every single user at every page load. Third, this is tied to our BI framework which does need every single request to fully go- through such that every page view continues to feed our learning algorithms.

2) with railgun disabled, performance-wise, I've measured an average 25% reduction in overall time to download a dynamic HTML document from new york and it speaks to the traditional WAN optimizations you've mentioned, which is on-par in features _and_ performance gains with similar products I've used from Akamai and EdgeCast, for, you know, several grand a month base platform fee plus bandwidth metering. Except that cloudflare before railgun was only setting me back $20/month plus $10/month for 2 more sites (familygetaway and vacationist)

3) with railgun enabled the figure is now closer to a 35% reduction in download time from New York and 45% from London.

4) But as I alluded to at the end of the post, as far as what is felt by the end user, no railgun vs with railgun means perhaps a 100-200ms difference on the base HTML document total load time. And if you look at overall page load time, you're going to spend several whole seconds downloading and rendering scripts, CSS, images. So perceived end-user benefit is likely limited. If they baked their compression into browsers I could imagine a performance improvement on-par with compression achieved, because the "diff" would travel all the way down to the client, instead of stopping at the CF proxy nearest to the client.

Still there are strong correlations between reduced HTML load time and increased Google crawl-rate on your site, which is a generally good thing.

Overall: Railgun has allowed me to insta-drop one whole bandwidth tier at my ISP, which is financially _material_. By the time our growth gets me back into the higher tier, i'll be serving 5 times the audience I used to serve for that same amount of outbound consumption. We're not cloud-hosted, but if we were, these bandwidth cost benefits would of course be a lot more linear.</comment>


Gov't: iPhone users are only licensees, and Apple owns all iOS installations - <AUTHOR> https://www.justsecurity.org/27109/writs-act-software-licenses-judges-questions/ <comment><AUTHOR> For those that want to go down the rabbit hole of this lawsuit (which covers many more issues than the one raised here), here are related posts:

1) [https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2015/10/federal-judge- shi...](https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2015/10/federal-judge-shines- spotlight-%E2%80%9Cgoing-dark%E2%80%9D-debate)

2) [https://www.justsecurity.org/26964/update-apples- compelled-d...](https://www.justsecurity.org/26964/update-apples-compelled- decryption-case/)

3) [https://www.justsecurity.org/27109/writs-act-software- licens...](https://www.justsecurity.org/27109/writs-act-software-licenses- judges-questions/)

4) [https://www.justsecurity.org/27214/quick-update-apple- privac...](https://www.justsecurity.org/27214/quick-update-apple-privacy- writs-act-1789/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> tl;dr: The U.S. government is trying to compel Apple to unlock an iPhone. In the lawsuit, the government is arguing that, because Apple licenses and does not sell iOS, Apple and not the user is the legal, responsible owner.

It obviously could have wide implications, and it's karma for the companies that try to deny end-users control and ownership.

<comment><USER2> Which in the end will only hurt users as the U.S. government is just interested in compelling Apple to hand them user information.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Which in the end will only hurt users as the U.S. government is just > interested in ...

How do we know what they are interested in or will be interested in in the future? The U.S. government is many people with many interests, both of which change over time. When the All Writs Act was passed in 1789, certainly the government was not interested in compelling decryption of smartphones.</comment></comment></comment>


Tesla Autopilot has driven over 1.2B estimated miles - <AUTHOR> https://hcai.mit.edu/tesla-autopilot-miles/ <comment><USER2> Its really not autopilot. Its adaptive cruise control and lane keeping. Why don't we compare it to other cars lane keeping and adaptive cruise control.

<comment><USER3> As an owner of a car with ACC and lane keeping, I frequently get to experience the always fun sensation of my car accelerating full bore at a turn. My understanding is that Tesla actually made the two systems talk to each other, which is definitely not the case in my Honda. Calling it "just" ACC and lane keeping is disingenuous.

<comment><USER4> I have an Audi and they actually include gps data in the ACC so it slows down before curves. It is a setting that can be turned off.

<comment><USER5> Audi ACC is great, but the lane keep assist is quite "bouncy" and will ping- pong between left and right lane barriers and will self-disable after a few of these.

<comment><USER6> I think this is by design. My Subaru does this too. My feeling is that it's an emergency feature meant to keep you on the road, not something you should rely on to steer the car completely, so they don't want it to be too good. The quicker jerk back into lane is also enough to grab your attention, and bring it back to the wheel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This metric is at best misleading. It's presented as a proxy for safety, but that should only apply to a single hardware/software combination.

I want to know how many miles are driven (both IRL and in simulation) per software release?

If you accept that the Autopilot software improves over time, then you accept that it changes over time. If it's changing, then there will be situations that will behave differently in the future. The implicit assumption is "the software will only make _better_ driving decisions with each point release", but that doesn't follow! There's no proof that a situation that was driven safely by version 1.1 will also be driven safely by version 1.2 (unless it was tested in simulation).

If this means the pace of self-driving development would slow down, then so be it. I wouldn't let a driver turn on Autopilot with me in it.

</comment><comment><USER8> The more the better, I find. For all the hate that Autopilot gets, it really is a game changer, and I can see consumers demanding this and similar technology in all cars from now on. A majority of the driving that I do, both per mile and per minute, are spent on Autopilot, and the sheer convenience is night and day. Being able to open a bottle of water, to tweak the navigation or change the song, or to be able to just have a second set of eyes in case you're not paying attention really has a huge benefit.

At the moment, there remains some bugs to work out, as last night Autopilot decided to slam on the brakes at 150 km/h on the autobahn for no reason, but given how close it is to perfection on freeways, and how many improvements I see in the updates, I'll go so far as to say we should be requiring this technology in all cars like we now require emergency braking and backup cameras.

<comment><USER9> "as last night Autopilot decided to slam on the brakes at 150 km/h on the autobahn for no reason"

Holy shit! That's a hell of a caveat!

<comment><USER8> > Holy shit! That's a hell of a caveat!

Indeed it is. To make it clear, it slams on the brakes bringing me down from 150 to 120 km/h, it doesn't come to a dead stop, so unless someone is seriously tailgating, then it's not creating any danger, it's just uncomfortable.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, what could go wrong going suddenly from 150 to 120 on the Autobahn...

<comment><USER11> Better than not hitting the brakes when there is a legitimate danger in the travel path (which is why emergency braking is activated).

Remember, it's the responsibility of the driver behind you to keep a safe following distance. If they rear end you, they were following too closely.

<comment><USER10> > _Better than not hitting the brakes when there is a legitimate danger in the > travel path (which is why emergency braking is activated)._

In this case we've established it was activated at random by the autopilot.

> _Remember, it's the responsibility of the driver behind you to keep a safe > following distance. If they rear end you, they were following too closely._

That wont be on much comfort during a pile-up...

<comment><USER11> Is it random? In my experience with Autopilot 2, it's typically when the front radar is attempting to discern between a metal sign on an overpass and a large object in the travel path, and Tesla hasn't seen that object enough yet to code it as a known false positive in the Autopilot data corpus.

[https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/psa-careful- autopilo...](https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/psa-careful-autopilot- sudden-braking.114810/)

"But as I recall, the understanding then was that Tesla had a database of things like bridges, and the braking meant that the database was incomplete. So folks were told to file a bug report ASAP after the incident so that Tesla could fix the data."

So! If this happens while on Autopilot, press the voice command button, and then say "Bug Report <speak bug report here>"

<comment><USER12> Does the Tesla driver assistance package often confuse highway signs with large trucks? From parent comment's link:

> _Situation: When autopilot is engaged, it somehow sees some shadows /images, > and it brakes pretty hard even though no car is in front of you. It does not > come to complete stop, but it will go from 65-70 to 45 pretty quickly.

Conditions: Typically for me it has been driving in the dark (evening or early morning) and going under an underpass. I am not sure if others have seen this during the daytime or other conditions._

Another driver's description sounds like Google Maps getting confused by overpasses:

> _It just happened to me today when I went under an overpass. The GPS based > speed thought I was suddenly off the freeway and on the surface street > overpass and said limited autosteer speed to 45. Luckily I had my foot on > the accelerator so I could override it but it just jolt me a bit trying to > slow down._

<comment><USER11> That's exactly the problem. It's a radar discrimination/GPS resolution/mapping data fusion issue.

They're pushing hard on the front facing radar to avoid accidents like the fatality of the Floridian driver who wasn't paying attention when the tractor trailer crossed the road, and false positives are the side effect. Better to rapidly decelerate then be dead.

<comment><USER10> > _Better to rapidly decelerate then be dead._

Even better to non-rapidly decelerate when it's not needed, since that can also have one killed.

<comment><USER12> What if cars had rear adaptive cruise sensors? They could modify their follow distance by averaging the follow distance of the car behind them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't understand how reports like these make sense. A mile driven by a Waymo/Cruise car on route/conditions carefully chosen to test an update, or gather data on a new type of route/conditions is way more valuable than another mile driven on the same freeway stretch/conditions that already works perfectly. Just totaling up the number of miles driven seems to be the vanity metric of the Self-Driving Car industry.

<comment><USER14> It's the same thing Apple did with the app store. They touted the number of apps they hosted, even though tons of them were things like a trip guide per every city on the planet. Not a useful metric, but then every other app store used the metric and then it became a competition about who had the most apps.

This is what happens when people enter a new market: They look for metrics, any metrics, and then optimize on those (because that is how business usually makes money in well understood fields) even if they are not really representative.

<comment><USER15> Pretty much every business will use different numbers in marketing themselves than they should be using to measure the health of their business. The purpose of marketing numbers is different, because they have to sound impressive to a broad audience rather than the most critical thinkers within that audience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> At ~1.2 deaths per 100 million miles in the US you would expect approximately ~10-20 deaths over that distance. Adjusted for type of car and driving conditions.

Autopilot seems to be around those numbers which is promising assuming continued improvements. Though it's not currently dramatically safer their is reasonable expectation it will improve over time.

<comment><USER17> you forgot that auto pilot likely is only used or only works under certain conditions. So that 1.2B miles is selective. You can't extrapolate that to the 10-20 deaths, which I assume you calculated from ALL miles driven

<comment><USER18> But are the parts that are easy for machines also what is easy for humans? Human attention decreases when things get more simpler and more monotonous while an autopilot can deliver constant attention.

<comment><USER19> The problem with systems like autopilot is that the human _still_ needs to pay attention. The driver needs to take over in a matter of seconds when the system encounters a situation in can't handle. Autopilot makes things simpler and more monotonous while still requiring perfect attention from the human.

<comment><USER16> In theory that's a huge problem. In practice we have 1.X billion miles of data and it does not seem to be such a huge deal. Either the systems are already fairly good, or people mostly pay attention.

Granted, I am approaching this from the perspective of a more relaxing driving experience not necessarily from a pure safety standpoint. People spend 20,000+ hours driving in a lifetime making that less stressful is a huge benefit even if they are still stuck in their cars and can't get work done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've followed this groups research over the past year or so. Their approach to understanding the (human) issues behind semi-automated driving are quite intriguing, yet they haven't produced much research on the topic. Waiting to see where this goes.

</comment><comment><USER21> How many unique miles is driven? And unique lighting and traffic conditions were they driven in? (day/night/season/location) Do those miles have sensor in/out recordings that can be used for training autopilot or building simulators?

</comment><comment><USER22> When your source is a Elon Musk Tweet, the credibility of the report goes down the drain.

</comment><comment> cup-of-tea What's an "estimated mile"?</comment>