It's Time to Hold American Elites Accountable for Their Abuses - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/05/middle-class-americans-are-sick-elite-privilege/589849/ <comment><USER2> For a guy that did little to make Chicago a better place during his 2 terms as mayor, he may want to spend more time on self-reflection rather than pointing his finger at others.

[https://theintercept.com/2019/05/20/chicago-mayor-rahm- emanu...](https://theintercept.com/2019/05/20/chicago-mayor-rahm-emanuel- failures/)

<comment><USER3> Eh, given the absolute shitshow he was handed, he didn't do an awful job. No mayor could fix all of Chicago's long-term structural problems in two terms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As European, which only discovered aboug legacy preferences [0] recently, I am still not sure how to reconcile it with my belief that meritocracy was a cornerstone American value, and how this case is fundamentally different.

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

<comment><USER5> Meritocracy is a spoken value, but it's never been a reality. I'm sure that's true in every country.

In fact, upward mobility is much better in places like France and the UK[1].

Most people like me, who pay attention to history and current social issues, see the American dream and the myth of meritocracy as a way to keep the poor from seeing that the system is rigged against them and becoming restless.

1\. [https://www.economist.com/graphic- detail/2018/02/14/american...](https://www.economist.com/graphic- detail/2018/02/14/americans-overestimate-social-mobility-in-their-country)

<comment><USER6> Despite the citation, I remain skeptical. How is it possible that countries with such high tax rates would have that level of upward mobility? Just when you're getting going, the rug is getting pulled out from under you. Not that it isn't the case in the states, too, mind you. Just to a slightly lesser degree.

Meritocracy? GTFO! Companies do nothing but virtue signal these days.

<comment><USER7> > How is it possible that countries with such high tax rates would have that > level of upward mobility?

They have such high upward mobility _because_ of high tax rates since high tax rates allow funding more public institutions (health care, education, housing, child care) that make upward mobility possible. By the time you're wealthy enough to "have the rug pulled our from under you" you're already in the top 10% - top 1%. Getting the rug pulled at that point just means you make a little less money.

<comment><USER8> >Getting the rug pulled at that point just means you make a little less money.

It also means you have a much harder time saving for a house, funding a company etc. The top 10% are also the most important part of a society from an economic perspective.

So basically its easier to get into the top 10% in Europe while its easier to get into the very top in America.

The are much more selfmade Billionaires in America , i suspect its the same for Millionaires

[https://www.citylab.com/life/2016/05/world-billionaire- wealt...](https://www.citylab.com/life/2016/05/world-billionaire-wealth- global-one-percent/482802/)

<comment><USER9> There are many more people who would like to enter the 'Tonnaires' than there are who consider Millionaire or Billionaire status a worthwhile goal. And as far as I can tell anything beyond a few ton doesn't significantly increase happiness.

From my perspective there's no reason to value the ability to become a 'self- made' billionaire if it leaves more of the 'precariat', and I prefer a society that reduces the number of people that are part of it.

<comment><USER8> I agree with you that this would be a more pleasant society for the majority, which would be a good thing.

Unfortunately i think that the more "unfair" society would be more dominant and will outcompete it over time, thereby making it worse.

So i think in the end some unfairness will isnecessary, but maybe less then we have today

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Rahm Emanuel oversaw with Obama the largest upward transfer of wealth in human history. And now he's chiding elites.

<comment><USER11> If by upward transfer, you mean elites gained the larger percentage, then also include that immediately previous to Obama the same elites saw the largest percentage losses under the Bush financial collapse. The gains as the economy improved restored some of those losses.

Also under Obama the middle class gained significant wealth, through reduction in unemployment, restoring of stock values (i.e., pensions and 401ks), and wage increases (the largest year over year median wage increase on record was under the Obama admin).

<comment><USER12> >under Obama the middle class gained significant wealth

[https://www.huffpost.com/entry/middle-class- charts_n_6507506](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/middle-class- charts_n_6507506)

Check out these charts and tell me you're not full of shit.

Edit: it took me 30 seconds of googling to find this, next time research your position before you make a fool of yourself.

<comment><USER11> Your article is dated 2015. You're ignoring a decent amount of historical growth. Here's a pretty decent chart to let you know how good your news sources are

[https://www.adfontesmedia.com/the-chart-version-3-0-what- exa...](https://www.adfontesmedia.com/the-chart-version-3-0-what-exactly-are- we-reading/#iLightbox\[gallery138\]/0)

Here's historical wage growth reports from BLS. [https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/earnings-and- wages.htm](https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/earnings-and-wages.htm)

Here's 75 consecutive months of growth under Obama, a record: [https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/01/decembe...](https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/01/december- jobs-report/512366/)

Here's wage growth charts [https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/wage- growth](https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/wage-growth)

Here's median householdincome from FRED [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N)

Here's income data from Census, which you can download in Excel and analyze yourself. Again same conclusions. [https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time- series/demo/income-p...](https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time- series/demo/income-poverty/historical-income-households.html)

As you can see, all of these paint a much rosier picture than HuffPo. And places like BLS and FRED and Census are vastly more trustworthy for data, since you remove opinion piece writers trying to get eyeballs.

>Edit: it took me 30 seconds of googling to find this, next time research your position before you make a fool of yourself.

Indeed.

<comment><USER12> You just sprayed links all over, expecting me to fish through that data? From what I can tell, your data shows mediocre growth that has _barely_ kept pace with inflation. Half the links you show are for "median" values, which will always increase in an economy that is growing (as it did under the Obama years). It's fact that the middle class as stagnated as the ultra-wealth have gained immensely over the past decades, no amount of FUD will make your argument factual. I'm not arguing any further with someone who argues in bad faith.

<comment><USER11> >Half the links you show are for "median" values, which will always increase in an economy that is growing (as it did under the Obama years). It's fact that the middle class as stagnated as the ultra-wealth have gained immensely over the past decades,

You're confusing median with mean. Median is the middlemost income, which represents the middle class well. Mean is the average including tops and bottoms.

>I'm not arguing any further with someone who argues in bad faith.

You presented worse sourced, out of date data, misuse or don't understand basic terms, and don't look at evidence from well respected sources when presented. How am I the one not arguing in good faith?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> >But $1 trillion and 5,000 lives and 16 years later, the public had been told that those WMDs had not existed after all.

5,000? More like 500,000...

</comment><comment><USER14> America has an unbalanced system which rewards a small group exponentially (regardless of what that is), this is a feature built into the core of the system and the american psyche. Changing this requires a fundamental revolution to the system. Most of american life follows the Pareto principle on crack. E.g small number of people capture absurd amounts of value generated, small number of colleges create most of the elites... presidents, businessmen, scientists etc...

</comment><comment><USER11> >a bailout of bankers issuing entirely toxic debt, and a massive public effort to prop up auto executives who were building cars that weren't selling.

The bailouts were loans to banks, with stable banks forced to take them to avoid signalling, and the loans were paid off with interest to the benefit of the taxpayer. The toxic debt was debt the middle class treating their houses like casinos, taking on debt, then defaulting. If we hold the elites accountable, do we also hold those lying on loan forms (mostly middle class) accountable?

The auto bailouts were designed to save middle class jobs, and these were a financial loss to taxpayers when these were defaulted. So here taxpayers did pay to keep middle class jobs.

Note that taxpayers did not pay for either bailout, but the did pay or benefit on the gains or losses. The money was from the Fed, with the taxpayer on the hook for the deltas, not the initial amount.

Actual accounting on the bailouts [1]

Maybe the middle class should hold themselves accountable.

[1] [https://projects.propublica.org/bailout/](https://projects.propublica.org/bailout/)

<comment><USER15> Taxpayers still pay for fed expenditures, albeit indirectly. Expansionary fiscal policy -> inflation, and inflation is probably the biggest single tax on any one.

<comment><USER3> Inflation is a macro benefit to taxpayers.

<comment><USER15> Not necessarily. That has been the traditional economic opinion, but it has been challaneged as of late. Employers don't always raise wages, harder to save for retirement (unless you want to take higher risk in the stock market, your money shrinks in real value).

<comment><USER11> You don't need much risk in the stock market. Index funds have outpaced inflation since forever.

It's easier to save for retirement since most people spend a lot of their life with fixed payment debt (mortgage, car, school, etc), and all of these become cheaper to service due to inflation.

Thus the majority of the middle class has access to and uses debt, and has access to assets that outplace inflation.

The counter to inflation is deflation, which has, due to deflationary spirals, been devastating to economies. There is not an inflationary spiral. This is why all central banks target small inflation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Ignoring his terrible record and taking his argument at face value, I think he's right on some counts, but misses three important points:

* "The Elite" includes not just bankers and B-list actresses. It also includes most of Hollywood and many athletes, many media pundits, the Clintons, himself, and other politicians who make millions in "speaking engagements", book deals, etc., get cush healthcare and retirement, advocate and legislate wasteful policy, then lecture us on how evil we are for wanting to keep our hard-earned money to invest, share and spend as we see fit.

* Disagreeing with someone is not automatically racist or sexist. Sure, those evils exist today and should be confronted, but having nuanced, principled opposition to "Elite" talking points should not get you banned from social media or doxed. We throw around ___ist words and hyperbole way too much in an effort to bypass rational debate.

* A person having money or status is not a problem in itself. When those people start looking down their noses at me (a middle class libertarian), insinuating I am ___ist because I don't like a healthcare program they made, and creating a culture where people are maligned for their beliefs, it does begin to raise concerns.

I think much of the nationalism we see is a reaction to those points. He's correct in the broader problem, but shortsighted in his application.

</comment><comment><USER17> American Elites should be held accountable?

Oh yes, you got that right. But I'd like to change it around a bit.

 _ALL_ elites in the world are responsible for the shit happening right now. And yes, WE WILL hold each and every one of you accountable for the futures you are currently destroying.

No matter what your political beliefs are, or how "good" you pretend to be. All of you.

Like winter, justice will be coming. I don't know when and I don't know how -- but it will be coming. COUNT ON IT.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Kind of surprising, an attack on Hollywood from The Atlantic. (They tend to be sympathetic to left-side politics.)

I guess it's mostly just the picture that depicts Hollywood. The text is as expected.

<comment><USER18> This is an article by a Democrat, in a left leaning publication, about things Democrats have got wrong politically recently and what they need to do to correct on to the right track. Seen that way, Illustrating it with a fallen Hollywood icon seems particularly thematically appropriate.</comment></comment>


Why I won't be closing down BetaPunch: A formal apology - <AUTHOR> http://betapunch.tumblr.com/post/40293076534/why-i-wont-be-closing-down-betapunch-even-though-you

<comment><USER2> "I won't make any excuses for my actions even though it's very challenging doing a startup and all I can say is I am still learning and it makes me hungry to try and do better."

Couldn't even make it a full sentence without contradicting himself. This is definitely not how to do an apology either.

<comment><USER3> Exactly what I was thinking. This is a classic foot-in-mouth case where he didn't understand the implications of his actions. Isn't pretty obvious that acting like a brat was going to blow up in his face? To a fairly regular YC member at that? Additionally, didn't this same guy say he wasn't going to apologize? Contradictions everywhere...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ouch, Ross, you're getting a well deserved flogging. In case your apology was just a step in the direction of understanding that you are probably kind of an ass, I think you owe it to yourself to make more steps in that direction and then changing. I can only imagine what it must feel like to deal with such a public flogging among your peers, so I am even somewhat sympathetic, but I hope you take this experience as a humbling experience that makes you accept and internalize that it might just be that so many people might just not be wrong.

I look forward to you emerging as only having an asshole, and not you being it.

</comment><comment><USER5> It is interesting to note how even the apology is more directed at discussing BetaPunch and learning rather than apologizing.

How does "Why I won't be closing down BetaPunch" have anything to do with the apology? Seems out of place and still shows a lack of understanding.

Leave off all discussion of why you won't be closing BetaPunch and just focus on admitting you screwed up (which was done) and detailing how you will make it right.

<comment><USER6> It's clearly a reference to Danielle's original blog post. He wanted to format his title "Why i won't be..." and "closing down betapunch" must have been the first thing that came to mind. I'm sure such an overwhelmingly negative (and popular) blog post calling out your company as kind of shitty makes you consider shutting down when you're a small operation.

<comment><USER7> It's possible there's some SEO strategery going on here, too. </conspiracy>

<comment><USER8> It's worth noting that this article is now #4 when Googling "betapunch". Danielle's article is now #5.

It's progress!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't get why do small startups screw up small apologies. Here is a simple guide.

1\. Understand the problem. What/why/how/who/when did you do wrong ?

2.Contact said person and try to make things right by fixing the issue. Key word is try, but do it genuinely.

3\. Write a good press release in the form of a blog post. Title it: Our apology for $problem.

4\. In the press release include:

\- We are sorry this happened.

\- This is how we are fixing/going to fix it.

\- If you have been wronged by this get in touch at $email.

\- Thank everyone for their feedback.

5\. Publish a second press release as a blog post stating what you are doing to prevent $problem.

6\. With the gained attention, market a new product/service/special to show people you are focused on doing good busines. Call it the "We are sorry special pack" or whatever.

Make sure to post it on every social media site out there so that people know you are taking care of your customers.

<comment><USER10> You were doing well up until:

> With the gained attention, market a new product

<comment><USER9> What's wrong with that? This is a _business_ we are talking about, not a charity. Anytime a business finds itself in a good position to profit it should. A blunder is a great way to get new customers if you handle it well. For one, people will have seen your customer service in action. Nothing says trust me like _showing_ people that you can make up for stupid mistakes. After all, customers just want to be done right. Two, you will get a ton of attention, mostly being free! Its like a second launch for crying out loud. Now its the time to show people what you offer. But dont just show them a catalog. Do it in a manner that is parallel to the issue at hand. Did you send a Darth Vader figure to someone who ordered a Luke Skywalker one? Apologize and make a special sale on _both_ figures. Three, I believe you think that all of this should happen in a short time-frame. Not at all. You should let some bit of time pass by (but not too much) in order to let anger calm down. On week #1 you fuck up and apologize. On week #2 you make the sale. Rinse and repeat. That's how a _lot_ of PR strategies work (ahem, _AirBnB_ ). They make shit up, stir it, calm people down, and then grow like stink.

I know this will make people here angry, because some of you think the business world is all pink unicorns. Nope. Its a make it or die environment. Thats why most startup people never want to go out and make a sale. Its so much easier to just talk about _traction_ than to hit the pavement to get some money in your pocket. Send all insults and hate to my inbox (address on profile).

<comment><USER10> Thank you for your post, which again starts off sounding reasonable and only later loses the plot completely.

> On week #1 you fuck up and apologize. On week #2 you make the sale.

Have you considered developing this into an ebook?

> Send all insults and hate to my inbox (address on profile).

What?

\---

[Edit before seeing reply:] With apologies in business, you want the reader to believe what happened was a mistake, an error, and that it doesn't reflect on your internal ethical code (corporate or personal). In order for that to happen, people need to know that you recognise that you did the wrong thing, but that's only half of it. They also need to figure out whether you're likely to do more bad shit in the future. And your ability to transmit that information to them by talking about it is extremely limited. So: don't fuck up! Because it's really not a marketing opportunity.

<comment><USER9> Yes, you are right. My tone is off. Sorry about that.

May you explain where I lose the plot? I'd like to clear it up in a manner that is beneficial to all.

I'm constantly getting hate mail for being a marketing/sales/copywriting consultant. Every post here usually gathers me some nice hate mail from other members. Not meant to you personally. I apologize if that came out wrong.

\---

Thank you for the edited response. That is actually my point. Though you write it in a better manner. Sorry for the miscommunication. I'm tired from coding all day (its almost 1AM and Im not done), and do get stupidly cranky. Apologies.

\---

The stir it part refers to how _some_ marketers hack growth. I personally don't use such techniques because it can easily backfire. My personal opinion is that some big startups that have enjoyed quick growth have used such manner. But I think that is another thread altogether.

Experience has taught me that even when we make business mistakes we can still profit. In fact, a lot of growth can come out of such situation if it is handled correctly. My example above is not so good. Let me usea better another one.

Startup A manages to get into some hot water by wronging a customer. The issue is that a credit card charge was improperly handled, and they did not take care of the customer as they should have. The customer writes a blog post venting about how frustrated he/she is. The blog post goes viral. Startup A contacts the customer, fixes the issue by calming the person with gifts and apologies. Then they go and make the press release explaining what happened. They scold their stupidty publicly, and show how they fixed it. Then they have the customer give faith that all is now good. Some days pass, and Startup A makes a new blog post explaining the new measures they are using against improperly handled credit card charges. In the blog post, they include a comprehensive tutorial on how to properly handle credit card charges for other startups. It goes viral, because it is showing the human side of the company. After that, the startup creates a special offer and markets it to its new audience. People make notice of how "well" all was handled and say "let's give them a chance" and order.

Startup A managed to turn a blunder into a marketing opportunity. I have personally seen businesses go from broke to gold mine by using such tactic.

<comment><USER10> > May you explain where I lose the plot?

I guess, if I were to pinpoint, it would be with the words 'stir it'.

BTW, I neither deserve nor need an apology from you. Don't be sorry! We're just disagreeing. And I really do think we have a fundamental disagreement about priorities here. Apologising doesn't resolve that (though I acknowledge I haven't articulated my side of it very well).

I don't know why someone would send you hatemail over you expressing an opinion. That doesn't sound right at all.

\---

> People make notice of how "well" all was handled and say "let's give them a > chance" and order.

I think that's fine in cases where the 'mistake' clearly (or with reasonable doubt) was an actual mistake. This applies to outages, billing issues, product quality issues... Hounding on Twitter, not so much.

> I personally don't use such techniques because it can easily backfire.

I think if the reasons why they backfire were more important to businesses than the fact that they backfire, everyone would be a lot happier.

<comment><USER9> I hate to bring this point out like that but:

Everytime you face a disagreement apologizing humanizes you in the mind of the other person. Their approach will usually soften and will show sympathy. It allows your point to be driven further into the exchange, make the other side friendly, and reduce the amount of potential loss.

Though I did do it in a genuine manner. Its that I have been in marketing for so lonf that things just become second nature. I hope to one day meet you and buy you a cup of coffee (water for me, due to past heart issues).

It is like the roboticist who one day wakes up and realizes that his body is now made out of metal. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> No part of this addresses what he did wrong or what he will do differently in the future. The title alone tells me he's just trying to get the last word in, even if it's that he's sorry.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm not sure what I would need to see to believe that someone who was such an asshole isn't anymore, but this ain't it.

<comment><USER7> Hear, hear, Justice Stewart. [0]

[0] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it>

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Now might be a good time to recall the School of Apology by Joel Spolsky. It's rather succinct:

 _Apologize unreservedly, or not at all._

<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/customerservice.html> from chapter 4 and further on.

</comment><comment><USER14> It would be better if he had specifically promised not to share user tests with the general public in future. This almost feels like, "now I know I have to apologize when I share my users' private data, and in future I will apologize when I do that".

</comment><comment> shawn-butler This whole thing seems pretty fishy. Like scripted melodrama to be honest. Whatever works, I guess.

<comment><USER15> If it's scripted, the blogger who originally publicized this should have something to say for themselves.

<comment><USER16> I would not do that. I know you've all seen that I will do a lot of things for growth, but I won't be dishonest.

<comment><USER15> It's nothing personal, the sheer thinness of this apology calls the whole incident into question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I can't imagine what he was originally thinking.

<comment><USER18> Perhaps "any publicity is good publicity" - at the end of the day, he's had two posts about Betapunch on the front page of HN as a result of all this, and I doubt people will remember this whole episode in a few weeks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Today I learned: "publically" is apparently a valid spelling of "publicly".

<http://www.thefreedictionary.com/publically>

</comment><comment><USER20> This is a really odd post. Has anyone called for BetaPunch to be closed down? This seems like a straw man.

If you want to apologize, just apologize. It's not the time for more self- marketing.

<comment><USER15> Not if he doesn't think he has anything to apologize for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm not sure whether this was a marketing stunt or the betapunch guys didn't know how to act professionally. Honestly, someone at betapunch should have stepped in and indicated the problem. I'm not even sure why it took two days for a formal apology, it should have been done much sooner than that.

Betapunch guys need to hire the right employees to handle PR and interact with people because this post shows those interactive skills are not his strengths.

<comment><USER22> There's no betapunch "guys" - It's just him. There's no one to step in and there's no one to hire - this an app run by a single person. He doesn't have income to be able to hire people to take care of this for him. He got himself into this mess and he's trying to get himself out of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> can some one be kind enough to give TL DR version of what this guy did ? i read the post nut wasnt clear what exactly happened with the customer !

<comment><USER24> He publicly posted private info from "customers" who used his software and berated those who complained or used competitors.

<comment><USER23> thanks for that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Danielle accepted his apologies and commented on his blog. Hopefully that gesture made him learn something - because by reading his apologies I feel he didn't fully understand what happened.

"I completely understand and respect your reasoning."

There are many things that I respect and understand but don't agree. I just hope this is not the case.

</comment><comment><USER26> Give it up people. Put down your rocks and go home. You are a mob. A bunch of bullies.</comment>


Ask HN: Would you use an 'AirBnB'-type service for high speed (100M+) uploading? - <AUTHOR> Before I had Verizon FIOS' 100/100 speed I remember wanting to upload a large dataset to AWS S3, & couldn't find any public WiFi hotspots that offered fast upload speed. I've since moved & again find myself with relatively slow upload bandwidth (5M).
Sometimes I want to borrow someone's connection who has Verizon FIOS' 100/100 package (or higher) to get something like an initial backup done quicker than I could on my current connection. And I was wondering if someone were to build a thing like AirBnB, to connect those with high upload speed with people who could benefit from using it temporarily, if it would become a success.
What do you think? <comment><USER2> It's sounds like a cool idea, however I think if it took off ISPs would rush to change their terms of service to block you.

Thing is why not just use an IaaS to do the same thing?

Since you're borrowing someone's connection, I'm imagining you want to be able to ssh into an OS on their network, download, process and then upload some files.

Have a look at the cost of ec2 instances here: [http://www.ec2instances.info/](http://www.ec2instances.info/) The ones with high network speed aren't all that expensive to use for an hour or two.

That's not to say there isn't a demand around a service that packages it up nicely.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have a friend who works for a college in Serbia and has access to 1Gbps upload. My home connection is 10/1Mbps ADSL2+. I often mail him DVDs and even hard drives with data to upload to the Internet. I'd totally use such a service if not for the friend.

<comment><USER4> I think the target market of people doing an initial upload of their harddrive will have 200GB or more easily and burning 40 DVD and shipping them is quite a hassle.

Amazon AWS offers to mail you a network attached device containing harddrives and you mail it back. I haven't seen that as a third-party service yet.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Alternatives to Crunchbase.  - <AUTHOR>

I have been using Crunchbase for some time and feel there is a high noise-to-signal ratio. There are too many companies that qualify neither as a startup nor as a product company. There are many dead companies and also there are many duplicate entries.<p>I was wondering if there are good alternatives to Crunchbase. <comment><USER2> A quick search turns up a few promising sites:

<http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard>

<http://www.chubbybrain.com>

<http://www.linksv.com/>

from: [http://www.quora.com/CrunchBase/Are-there-any-other-sites- li...](http://www.quora.com/CrunchBase/Are-there-any-other-sites-like- Crunchbase-com)

They also list Mashable's Blippr but that appears to be dead. Hope this helps!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Alpha. That is great info. However, I tried all these tools and none of them are quite good. Blackboard has very few startups (most in their list are publicly traded cos) LinkSV is very hard to navigate. Also, these companies are focused on SV startups alone. I wish they had more data of non-US startups too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> ANGEL.CO</comment>


Michael Stonebraker wins Turing Award - <AUTHOR> http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2015/michael-stonebraker-wins-turing-award-0325 <comment><USER2> His creativity is amazing: founder of a number of database companies, including Ingres, Illustra, Cohera, StreamBase Systems, Vertica, VoltDB, and Paradigm4...at MIT, where he has been involved in the development of the Aurora, C-Store, H-Store, Morpheus, and SciDB systems [1]

And his students:

-Daniel Abadi (co-founder and Chief Scientist of Hadapt)

-Michael J. Carey (faculty at UC Irvine, formerly at U. Wisconsin Madison, NAE Member and ACM Fellow)

-Robert Epstein (founder and former VP of Engineering of Sybase)

-Diane Greene (co-founder and former CEO of VMWare)

-Paula Hawthorn (founder of Britton-Lee, formerly VP of Engineering of Informix)

-Marti Hearst (Professor at UC Berkeley)

-Gerald Held (former VP of Engineering of Oracle)

-Joseph M. Hellerstein (faculty at UC Berkeley)

-Anant Jhingran (VP and CTO for IBM's Information Management Division)

-Curt Kolovson (Sr. Staff Research Scientist at VMware)

-Clifford A. Lynch (executive director of the Coalition for Networked Information)

-Mike Olson (former CEO of Sleepycat Software and founding CEO of Cloudera)

-Margo Seltzer (Professor of Computer Science at Harvard, founder and former CTO of Sleepycat Software)

-Dale Skeen (founder of Tibco, founder and CEO of Vitria)

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Stonebraker](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Stonebraker)

<comment><USER3> Don't forget his newest company - Tamr! [http://www.tamr.com/](http://www.tamr.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For those who are unfamiliar with his work, he worked on ingres, and postgres, which are now the bases for postgresql.

He worked on Aurora ([http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~magda/aurora- medusa.pdf](http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~magda/aurora-medusa.pdf)), which I don't think ever got a lot of commercial success, but was one of the earlier stream databases.

He also has some amazing work on non-traditional databases, for example he worked on H-store ([http://hstore.cs.brown.edu/](http://hstore.cs.brown.edu/)) which is now voltdb, which is an in-memory distributed database.

And then C-Store was the basis for Vertica: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-Store](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-Store)

I'm pretty sure Margo Seltzer (of BerkeleyDB fame) was his student at some point too.

Truly amazing researcher - and I think an example to those who focus on a teeny tiny minor niche their entire career and never explore anything else.

<comment><USER5> Also his YouTube videos are highly worth watching:

[https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=michael+stonebr...](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=michael+stonebraker)

<comment><AUTHOR> Fun Fact: Stonebraker used to party with Michael Jackson in the early 1980s when Thriller came out:

[https://youtu.be/LCXWF-OEIkc?t=6m17s](https://youtu.be/LCXWF-OEIkc?t=6m17s)

<comment><USER6> Fun fact, it's Pete Carter as Michael Jackson [https://youtu.be/LCXWF- OEIkc?t=639](https://youtu.be/LCXWF-OEIkc?t=639)

<comment><USER7> He got me there for a moment. Pete Carter also says that Stonebraker wrote lyrics for "Beat It".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I became fascinated with what Stonebraker was saying back when I got into the biotech industry. We were dealing with huge amounts of data and the more I read from him the more it made sense to me, particularly when he talks about the lack of ACID in NoSQL stuff being a bad thing. I have a couple of projects involving VoltDB and SciDB on the backburner, and any future projects I plan on using VoltDB in if possible and applicable, and so far I am pretty convinced that they are much more useful than people understand.

If you haven't read up on either VoltDB or SciDB or Stonebraker himself, I highly suggest you do, as it might make you think twice about some of your current setups. Here's a few quotes for the fun of it:

"I think the biggest NoSQL proponent of non-ACID has been historically a guy named Jeff Dean at Google, who's responsible for, essentially, most to all of their database offerings. And he recently … wrote a system called Spanner," Stonebraker explained. "Spanner is a pure ACID system. So Google is moving to ACID and I think the NoSQL market will move away from eventual consistency and toward ACID."

"My prediction is that NoSQL will come to mean not yet SQL,"

"You saw that they went for Cassandra for inbox search and HBase for messaging. The reason they're not doing that on MySQL is that sharding MySQL is a lot of effort and you have to apply that effort to each new project."

That should be enough to get your curiosity piqued.

<comment><USER9> A lot of that seems like anecdotal at a best. Now, I'm not one to argue with someone who has as much experience as Stonebreaker, but it seems like he's looking at a few specific use cases, and formulating a broad opinion on NoSQL from them.

There are plenty of use cases where ACID compliance truly isn't needed.

Also, just because Google has one new database that features ACID compliance, does not mean that "Google is moving to ACID", it simply means that Google has identified a need for a portion of their data to be stored in an ACID compliant way.

<comment><USER8> I don't disagree, but I think what he is trying to convey is that there are a lot of place where ACID _is_ needed but isn't being put into place. He's not arguing against non-ACID, he's saying people are using non-ACID systems where they shouldn't. It's a small but important distinction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Very well deserved. I've looked over dozens of papers for relational db's and every single one of them cites down to his foundational work. Congratulations Professor Stonebraker!

<comment><USER11> And yet:

> An adjunct professor of computer science and engineering at MIT

Adjunct? Does this mean something different at MIT? Or is it some form of convenience for Stonebraker?

<comment><USER12> This is what adjuncting is _supposed_ to be for - folks with industry experience moonlight as professors. The benefit is not primarily salary but networking, knowledge sharing, and helping the next generation of industry professionals.

Now it's more of a way to have 2/3 or more of the department work for unliveable wages which allows for an ever-growing administrative overhead in colleges while tuitions double every decade.

<comment><USER13> Management in all organizations should be automated by AI, with copious amounts of override buttons sprinkled throughout.

Education administration is a like a thorn stuck in my mind, they make _more_ than everyone else and for the most part only act as a gas to support their own structure.

<comment><USER11> This is how every bureaucracy works, whether government, commercial or academic. Once the institution has enough income/cash flow for momentum, then it attract people who are expert at operating the machine itself, rather than expert in what the machine is supposed to be accomplishing. After the first one lands, they continue to accrete.

It's hard to recognize when it starts, but you'll know it's happened once you see a lot of people who are not connected with the apparent goal of the machine, and there are posters all over the place touting whatever programs the administrators have created to justify their existence, as well as packaged training programs from motivational/educational consultants (think Franklin Covey).

<comment><USER13> Ha, A fork bomb of Agent Smith crossed with Nancy in Program Outreach.

The accretion or calcification model of bureaucratic formation is compelling, something like how a coral reef grows. The randomized surface provides eddies and pockets of protection for other life to flourish, RFPs and SBIRs can nestle in a protected arena with low local competition.

I just realized that large, messy codebases also follow the reef model of bureaucracy. Hadoop is like that coral reef, providing nooks and crannies for optimizations and integrations to take hold. I used to imagine Hadoop as Whale fall [0], but it is more of a mandlebulb. Had Hadoop not provided such a rich environment the secondary ecosystem wouldn't be as vibrant. Fail to Win?

I find management structures fascinating. Whenever I interact with one I probe it to see how much autonomy each individual in it has, what rules they can bend or not follow. Once the agents participating in the bureaucracy cannot bend the rules I think it will tend towards dystopia. Maybe 1984 isn't a warning against fascism, but the natural tendency of all bureaucracies to only support them selves.

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_fall](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_fall)

note: I might sound like the stereo type of a hackernews-bitcoin-libertarian, but I assure you my politics are much more nuanced than that. I don't think that bureaucracy as a structure is bad, but it needs to be managed with something akin to the voting logic in a triple redundant control circuit [1] [2]. Most bureaucracies exist within a positive feedback loop, which rewards them for growth instead of efficiency. It is like getting paid by LOC instead of 1/LOC or 1/runtime.

[1] ftp://ftp.unicauca.edu.co/Facultades/FIET/DEIC/Materias/Instrumentacion%20Industrial/Instrument_Engineers__Handbook_- _Process_Measurement_and_Analysis/Instrument%20Engineers'%20Handbook%20-%20Process%20Measurement%20and%20Analysis/1083ch1_10.pdf

[2] [http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/1985002...](http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19850021660.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> To know more about Professor Stonebraker I cant recommend this excellent interview[0] by se-radio enough. Its easily one of the best interviews that I've heard on a podcast. Do check it out.

[0] - [http://www.se-radio.net/2013/12/episode-199-michael- stonebra...](http://www.se-radio.net/2013/12/episode-199-michael-stonebraker/)

</comment><comment><USER15> Of course, I've been writing about Mike for a while. :)

[http://www.softwarememories.com/2007/01/21/why-michael- stone...](http://www.softwarememories.com/2007/01/21/why-michael-stonebraker- matters/) [http://www.dbms2.com/category/michael- stonebraker/](http://www.dbms2.com/category/michael-stonebraker/)

Also [http://www.monash.com/test- consult.html#stone](http://www.monash.com/test-consult.html#stone) :)

</comment><comment><USER16> His newest venture Tamr, is also really interesting. Unifying data with Machine Learning and Human input. I recommend keeping an eye on this one.

www.tamr.com

</comment><comment><USER17> [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:SijAcDv...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:SijAcDvflDMJ:https://newsoffice.mit.edu/2015/michael- stonebraker-wins-turing-award-0325+&cd=1)

Google cache in case you have trouble reaching the website (apparently under some understandably heavy load).

</comment><comment><USER18> Stonebraker was tech advisor starting in 2001 for Addamark/Sensage, which developed a column-oriented/columnar DB for log aggregation/analysis for security/operations. Stonebraker's own C-Store and Vertica came later and were more fully featured. While Sensage's product was integrated into some HP offerings, HP unfortunately (my perspective) chose to buy rival Arcsight and then Vertica.

See discussion and comment from Adam Sah at [http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/11/the-commoditization-of- mass...](http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/11/the-commoditization-of-massive.html) for more context for column-storage and log analysis.

edit: link to article.

<comment><USER19> Thx for the mention.

Mike was my thesis advisor at Cal, and had enormous influence on all sorts of things beyond databases, including (I believe) the founding of the CS department and the negotiation of how Ingres technology spin off from Cal (which owns the IP), which became the prototype for how others would create companies like Inktomi and many more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> newsoffice.mit.edu is not enjoying all this traffic.

Article text: [http://pastebin.com/MTdagueN](http://pastebin.com/MTdagueN)

</comment><comment><USER21> For those who want to know about the various projects he has worked on:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingres_%28database%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingres_%28database%29)

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

[http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/analysis/1943302/disparate- databas...](http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/analysis/1943302/disparate-databases- rounded-cohera)

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

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

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

[http://www.paradigm4.com/](http://www.paradigm4.com/)

[http://cs.brown.edu/research/aurora/](http://cs.brown.edu/research/aurora/)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-Store](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-Store)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-Store](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-Store)

[http://publications.csail.mit.edu/abstracts/abstracts07/ston...](http://publications.csail.mit.edu/abstracts/abstracts07/stonebraker- abstract1/stonebraker-abstract1.html)

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

</comment><comment><USER22> That's the first Turing winner I've met. Thanks to philg for bringing Professor Stonebraker in for his 3-day database course.

[http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/rdbms- iap-2015](http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/rdbms-iap-2015)

</comment><comment><USER23> His book "Readings in Database Systems" 4th edition [http://www.amazon.com/Readings-Database-Systems-Joseph- Helle...](http://www.amazon.com/Readings-Database-Systems-Joseph- Hellerstein/dp/0262693143)

<comment><USER10> Keep in mind this book is really just a large collection of core papers. If you are looking for something more structured as a how-to of developing DBs this is useful as a reference but not the best introduction.

<comment><USER24> Could you recommend something more appropriate for someone who would like to explore the world of database implementations?

<comment><USER25> For an overview of basic concepts in DB implementation, I quite like Database Systems: The Complete Book (By Widom I think...). You could do a lot worse than An Introduction to Database Systems (CJ Date), although many dislike his opinionated style :-).

If you're talking about actually implementing a full transactional database system, strong foundational books are:

Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques (Gray and Reuter)

Transactional Information Systems: Theory, Algorithms, and the Practice of Concurrency Control and Recovery (Vossen and Weikum)

Neither are exactly easy reading, but the concepts therein are really important.

<comment><USER26> +1 on all of those books. If you are interested in multi-dimensional indices (R-Trees, M-Trees, and many more exotic ones). You should checkout "Foundations of Multidimensional and Metric Data Structures" by Hanan Samet. Very comprehensive! "Database Systems: The Complete Book" is fantastic (pick up the previous version it is cheaper!) but it only touches on multidimensional indexing.

Also if you are interested in B-Trees start with "The Ubiquitous B-Tree" by Comer. [ [http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/356770.356776](http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/356770.356776) ].

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Official Press Release from ACM.

[http://www.acm.org/press-room/news-releases/2015/turing- awar...](http://www.acm.org/press-room/news-releases/2015/turing-award-14/)

</comment><comment><USER27> He also contributed 2 modules to the recent "Tackling the Challenges of Big Data" online course from MITx. Among other things, he did a very lucid roundup of legacy vs modern db systems.

</comment><comment><USER28> Though most articles says his open source contributions, Wikipedia page says "PostgreSQL evolved from the Ingres project at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1982 the leader of the Ingres team, Michael Stonebraker, left Berkeley to make a proprietary version of Ingres"

</comment><comment><USER29> I think I watched a talk by Michael a few years back about the basics of columnar databases but now I can't find it. I recognized the names of the companies he founded from the article. At least I think it was him that gave the talk! Does anyone know what I'm talking about?

</comment><comment><USER30> Cached version: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://newsoffice.mit.edu/2015/michael- stonebraker-wins-turing-award-0325)

</comment><comment><USER31> He is very very good. I had his undergrad database class long time ago. His class was one of my favorites. What he taught I can still use today. I've just done a merge-join thing recently based on what I remembered from his class.

</comment><comment><USER32> Question about the Turing Award, something I wonder about whenever this comes up: how did Claude Shannon never win it?

<comment><USER33> Perhaps information theory was viewed as more EE than CS?

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> If he's only an adjunct, I wonder what you need to do to get full professorship at MIT.

<comment><USER35> The desire to put in that sort of work to the exclusion of building things and companies, it would appear in his case. He was a full professor at Berkeley. He's also getting old, past the normal age for a MIT professor to become Emeritus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> well deserved. congratulations to Mr. Stonebraker

(among other things I was part of one of the first early adopter teams that used his Streambase product, while at Orbitz.)

</comment><comment><USER37> He's the creator of postgres. Enough said!

</comment><comment><USER38> The link is broken, change https to http.

<comment><USER39> Thanks. Fixed.</comment></comment>


Ask YC: Good laptop mouse? - <AUTHOR>

Anyone have a recommendation for a good, lightweight mouse?<p>I got a free one as swag a few years ago, and one of the buttons is starting to act up, so I need a replacement. <comment><USER2> I use the MoGo bluetooth mouse because it is easy to carry and works fairly well... I would not recommend it if you plan on spending a lot of time on it however.</comment>


Google Duo is now available on the web - <AUTHOR> https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/02/26/google-duo-is-now-available-on-the-web/ <comment><USER2> It looks like Google's still investing heavily on Duo, which is confusing considering all the other chatting apps from this same company. Which app does it want me to use to chat with my friends after all?

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes</comment>


The Connection Between Color and the Existence of Life - <AUTHOR> http://mitchkirby.com/2015/05/04/color-and-existence-of-life/ <comment><USER2> The article underscore the point that the complexities of our planet are intricate, and particular.

Nowadays people seem to think that life must be common throughout the universe, given the number of stars and planets, and etc. It seems to me that the opposite could be the case, that life is extraordinarily rare.

As far as I know, we don't really know the likelihood of life emerging in our own planetary conditions: given a billion earth like planets with roughly equivalent atomic makeup, distance from sun, etc (assuming these are common, which fact we don't know either), how often will life emerge? We can guess and say "all the time!", but it could be an infinitesimal small amount.

Even moreso for different conditions than earth. Commonly people say "given a liquid like water, and certain other factors", but we don't know if life will emerge in any other conditions except our own. We have no proof whatsoever.

We also don't know how likely it is that life reaches our own point, of being capable of pondering life around other stars, or capable of imagining travel to them. There may be many, many extremely low probability events that must occur, in the billions of years between life's genesis and our own existence.

In fact, there's a good likelihood that our own dreams of interstellar travel will end in our extinction prior to our ever making the attempt. If that happens, it will prove my point.

To me this general optimism towards life on other planets is vaguely anthrocentric, like the belief that god is an old man, or that the universe revolves around the sun.

As such it results in a tendency to underestimate our own fragility, and to pay appropriate attention to the challenges of maintaining our own continued existence on earth.

<comment><USER3> I saw an interesting talk by Professor Richard Wrangham (disclosure: a personal friend) of the Harvard Human Evolutionary Biology department that addressed part of this once. He pointed out the open question of whether substantial intelligence was an expected likely fallout of life evolving or a rare occurrence that happened via a bunch of low probability events. He concluded that it was more likely to be a reasonably common occurrence, based on claiming that the intelligence of the most intelligent creature on Earth through the fossil record has increased monotonically, even though they have not shared a common evolutionary line. Meaning that at any given time the most intelligent organism might be a primate or fish or whatever on distinct evolutionary paths, but that the peak intelligence across the planet keeps increasing.

<comment><USER4> Ehh, intelligence/nervous systems aren't the hard part. It's development of the eukaryotic cell that's extremely chance.

Microbial life in no way entails higher life. It's only by the insanely chance event of the eurkaryotic cell emerging that sophisticated multicellular life became possible on earth. Even if life is common in the universe, sophisticated multicellular life is extremely rare.

The selective pressures on bacterial life favors small size and rapid reproduction, jettisoning any unnecessary genetic material.

Mitochondrial ancestors relieved those pressures in a couple ways. Once the eukaryotic cell developed, multicellularity has evolved several times. All the cool things (multicellularity, eyes, flight) have evolved independently a bunch of times, and the eukaryote has happened only fucking once. Here's a longer explanation:

[http://ronbarak.tumblr.com/post/25996121029/life-is-it- inevi...](http://ronbarak.tumblr.com/post/25996121029/life-is-it-inevitable- or-just-a-fluke-by-nick)

<comment><USER5> Interesting! Another argument is that less complex life evolves more slowly - and the eukaryotic cell developed at about the expected time. [massive speculation of course but interesting]

[http://www.technologyreview.com/view/513781/moores-law- and-t...](http://www.technologyreview.com/view/513781/moores-law-and-the- origin-of-life/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I love the writing, it's very direct.

He may have just killed life on other planets. Or at least a fair proportion of it, if you have to have a star that outputs mainly in the water- transparent, ideal-for-photosynthesis spectrum.

Of course these evolutionary things seem to somehow fix themselves. Some other chemical might be a more suited to light from a different star, or something in the water may change its spectrum. Or simply a brighter/dimmer star might jiggle things.

<comment><USER7> > He may have just killed life on other planets

Not so much. Here's a different article posted to HN recently: "Can life exist on a planet without a star?", [http://aeon.co/magazine/science/can-life-exist- on-a-planet-w...](http://aeon.co/magazine/science/can-life-exist-on-a-planet- without-a-star/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's really just one pair of coincidences: the wavelength of light most able to pass through water is that emitted by our sun. All the other statements are effected by that. And if the sun emitted another wavelength of light, perhaps another stable liquid would have emerged as the building block for life. I think what this really infers is that life on other planets could look more different from ours than we'd ever expect.

<comment><USER9> I was thinking the exact same thing. I would add that there is one more coincidence which is that the Earth is covered in water.

<comment><USER10> One more coincidence: Unlike most substances, solid water (ice) floats rather than sinking. If this were not true, many bodies of water would be solid through most of their depth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> These types of article always lead me to start pondering the strong and weak anthropic principles again. At which point I have to give up on getting any more work done as my mind goes chasing itself down the rabbit hole.

<comment><USER12> Which raises another interesting question - how does brain deal with infinite loops?

<comment><USER13> You either quit from boredom, something more important comes along, someone intervenes, or you die from not eating or sleeping.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I read somewhere, that at some point long in the past, the cosmic background radiation was at a point where all points in the universe were 70 degrees (F). And this is when life would have had the most likely chance to get started.

What do you guys think of this idea?

Edit: I meant to post this as a response to tehchromic's comment: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9493736](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9493736) (sorry)

</comment><comment><USER15> So I hate to whine, but how is it that somebody writing about color puts out gray-on-white text that's so hard to read? I'd expect them to know better...?</comment>


Jamie Dimon blows up at DC's dysfunction - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/14/jpms-jamie-dimon-blows-up-at-washington-on-earnings-call.html <comment><USER2> It's hard to disagree about the beuracracy and litigiousness of the country.

But that doesn't mean that he's correct that the core issue are the restrictions put on banks 5 years ago. That is so self-serving. Remember the banks got bailed out after the recession; but the people lost their homes. More money has flowed to the top during this time period, making lives harder for average Americans.

It's hard to be sympathetic to Mr. Dimon.

<comment><USER3> Who used price control mechanisms to hold interest rates low while the housing boom spiraled out of control? (The Fed.) Who provided a loan buyback program incentivizing bad loans? (Fannie and Freddie, pseudo government agencies.)

The 'popular wisdom' that the banks all simultaneously started acting differently, and against everyone's best interests, including their own, is foolish at best.

This is a nice write-up of the real estate crash, which underlies the recession as a whole: [https://admin.fee.org/files/doclib/houseunclesambuiltbooklet...](https://admin.fee.org/files/doclib/houseunclesambuiltbooklet.pdf)

<comment><USER4> We had a housing crash that somehow led to _hundreds of trillions_ of dollars missing.

Add up the value of every house in the USA. They're not hundreds of trillions of dollars.

The banks got really creative, a bunch of people made nice bonuses, then when their fancy leveraged mechanisms went bad, we all had to bail them out.

<comment><USER3> > The banks got really creative, a bunch of people made nice bonuses, then > when their fancy leveraged mechanisms went bad, we all had to bail them out.

You will have to be a little more specific to discredit the economic mal- incentives created by the government and to spin that simple narrative.

And the amount of paper wealth lost in '07-08 was actually about 10 trillion, not "hundreds of trillions."

<comment><USER4> The point stands at 10 trillion, thanks for the correction.

I'm not sure what you want with more specificity. You're familiar with the situation, right? You want a book report on what happened?

Yes, the government exists, and no, a few extra loans for black people didn't crash the housing market. This was a problem between ratings agencies, salespeople, and financial instrument inventors.

<comment><USER3> There's no reason a person that does not work in finance should have a deep understanding of the US financial system, but don't try to spin a narrative without knowing what you're talking about. You should read the article I initially posted before replying to it.

<comment><USER4> The article you linked is way, way out of the mainstream on the topic.

That's fine and all but turning around and accusing the conventional wisdom of 'lacking a deep understanding' is a bit much.

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately, you are correct about that -- it isn't a mainstream view at all, which is why I share it during relevant discussions.

However, the fact that a narrative with political implications is "mainstream" does nothing for its credibility. I try to understand how these things work and while it's a pretty nebulous domain, the factors I presented are what seem to be the most significant I've seen in explaining the behavior of the real estate market, and further, the market at large, in '01-'08.

We are both rightfully upset that the crisis " _somehow_ led to trillions of dollars missing" \-- while paper wealth and market cycles are inevitable, the magnitude and 'unfairness' of this event is clearly a problem. However, when you then confidently assert the cause: "banks got really creative, a bunch of people made nice bonuses, then when their fancy leveraged mechanisms went bad, we all had to bail them out" without any details or refutation of the explanation I posted, to which you were responding...

Well, what I read was "I'm not sure what happened but I don't like it [rightfully so], and this narrative gives me an easy scapegoat -- an evil, shadowy figure, of sorts -- to blame, which seems to absolve me of needing to understand any of the mechanics involved, and which also happens to validate my pre-existing political beliefs."

<comment><USER4> Funny, I think the same thing about evil, shadowy scapegoats.

When we have a market crash caused by private actors trading and someone says "OBVIOUSLY the problem is GOVERNMENT" I think they're arguing backwards from ideology rather than working forwards from observation.

<comment><USER3> Indeed, which is why I made sure to include something different: the technical analysis and mechanics of the issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is transparently self-serving.

1\. The US remains one of the least bureaucratic, least regulated countries in the west to do business. We have at-will employment, low unionization, relatively minimal mandatory benefits, trivial incorporation, and reliable and well-understood corporate and civil law. The idea that Jamie Dimon wanders the Earth and finds every other country more congenial to to business is laughable.

2\. Dimon, a Trump ally, would sorely like the US tax code tilted further in the favor of corporate ownership and financialization. He's happy to leave out the part about how his industry nearly blew up the world economy, and was supported for years during the Obama administration by bailouts.

It's possible that there's good policy behind lowering the corporate tax, which is distortive and inefficient. On the other hand: DC is "dysfunctional" for a reason. The system was designed specifically to keep public policy from whipsawing between extremes every time a new party took office. If he's embarrassed to be a citizen of a country like that, he has more than enough means to secure citizenship somewhere else. Don't hold your breath on that happening.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's always hilarious to listen to a Harvard billionaire banker tell us what he thinks would be good for "average Americans". Let me go find some cake to eat.

<comment><USER7> But it's ok to dismiss someone's ideas without consideration because of the size of their bank account?

<comment><USER6> OK, then let's see what his brilliant new ideas are. "Competitive taxes are important for business and business growth, which is important for jobs and wage growth." Oh, what do we have here? Bog-standard trickle-down economics.

<comment><USER7> So debate that then, instead of engaging in sophomoric ad hominem. Why would a less litigious society, a more constrained regulatory regime, and corporate tax rates designed to incentivize capital repatriation not help the economy grow more rapidly? And then, why would a more rapidly growing economy not benefit ordinary Americans?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder if he's aware that it's the government that keeps him from being hung by his ankles at the earliest opportunity by the world's poor and hungry as they reclaim their fair share of the obscene level of wealth he has accumulated.

<comment><USER9> Except that without government, the "obscenely rich" would be the ones with all the guns and guards and such; the poor and hungry would be still more poor and more hungry.

<comment><USER8> It's not like we haven't tried the whole no-government thing. Guys like Jamie don't tend to do so well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Jamie's right. Imagine how much benefit the US could get if Apple was able to repatriate its hundreds billions in overseas profits without losing over half to taxes.

<comment><USER11> Would the repatriation mean more US jobs as a result? Doubtful. Apple, et al. would not suddenly do on a hiring binge. They would also not suddenly start paying their employees more or provide better benefits.

This is a red herring that politicians love to try and justify huge tax rate cuts for businesses that are unnecessary but provide a good sound bite. Tax rate cuts that they already enjoy because the US government allows them to stash the cash overseas already to avoid the taxes.

A US citizen is forced to pay income tax on all income worldwide. Live in France, pay French taxes and US income tax on income over $72,000. And you only get the $72k break if you are in the country less than 30 days in a calendar year.

US corporations, on the other hand, can stash all overseas earning overseas to reduce their tax liability. Most US corporations already pay a lower effective tax rate than most US citizens.

<comment><USER10> Apple would dividend most of the profits to hundreds of thousands of investors. Those investors will often reinvest those dividends to or leave them in the bank, both of which drive capital investment in the US, higher productivity and creates better jobs.

The US corporate tax rate is one of the highest in the world, making the US one of the most costly places to invest. Taxing investment instead of consumption is directly lowering our standard of living.

The fact that our taxe rates on individuals working overseas is stupid too doesn't mean we should fix the corporate tax rates. In fact corporate tax rates should be zero, as you don't want to tax reinvested capital, and if profits aren't reinvested they are paid as dividends, and you can tax dividends at ordinary income rates to restore progressively to our tax system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> He's probably sick of his new commute given the subway delays and transit breakdowns.

</comment><comment><USER13> No kidding. If DC were operating correctly a bunch of his buddies would be in prison.</comment>


Damn Excel – How the 'most important application' is ruining the world - <AUTHOR> http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2013/04/17/rogoff-reinhart-excel-errors <comment><USER2> It's easy to call Excel the cause, but it's not, any more than the existence of memory management is the cause of memory leaks.

Putting a very powerful (if archaic) tool in the hands of people without the experience or understanding to use it effectively and then passing around the results for editing by other people with similarly (or differently) deficient ability with the program is the problem.

The tool is simply too flexible to be used for many of the things it's doing by many of the people who are using it. This is one of the _good_ reasons that we (application developers) do our best to gather requirements: Excel is usually good at what it does, but it does so many things that understanding what it does that you _don't_ need it to do, or how and why it does things you've accidentally done or need to watch out for, has become as -- if not more -- important as/than understanding what it was you wanted to do in the first place.

So yes... Excel plays a role in some very bad things. But no, it's not Excel's fault.

<comment><USER3> Excel is part of the cause. It simply mangles and hides programming. So it creates just the atmosphere were people think they can "avoid" programming and use Excel. Not realising that they are programming but in a very bad way.

So don't try to hide and dumb down the programming part. This of course doesn't mean that mistakes wouldn't happen with better tools.

<http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~bdm25/excel2007.pdf>

<comment><USER4> > It simply mangles and hides programming. So it creates just the atmosphere > were people think they can "avoid" programming and use Excel.

This attitude bothers me somewhat. I'll certainly agree that the combination of Excel's power and ease of use allowing people to model really quite complex calculations and scenarios quickly and easily, and the ease of which they can do it leads to a inappropriate level of "respect" for the gravity of what they are calculating, insufficient testing, double checks, etc, leading to some massive blunders.

But many people seem to go beyond this, asserting that one _cannot_ do such things properly in Excel. I've actually heard one person with an absolutely straight face say that Excel should literally be taken away from engineers and finance folks, and any calculations they need to do should be custom implemented by "professional" developers who will do it "properly".

Thoughts?

<comment><USER5> People who make that suggestion don`t know that there are tools like ResolverONE. It is a spreadsheet that your finance people can use as usual. But when it comes time to validate assumptions and check the calculations, a professional developer can take the generated Python code, write unit tests and other kind of tests to make sure that it does what is intended. Creating spreadsheets could become a collaboration between professionals in finance and professionals in software development. The tools exist to allow this, but where is the will?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The problem with Reinhardt-Rogoff has nothing to do with Excel. It was a programing error that could have happened anywhere. The problem is that it took them years to reluctantly share their spreadsheet. Open data research and computation is the solution to that problem.

<comment><USER7> Exactly. A bad workman always blames his tools.

<comment><USER8> Partly because a bad workman chooses poor tools to begin with. Tools do matter. It's easier to find a mistake in say, an SQL query or some R code than it is to find a mistake in an Excel spreadsheet, where you are trying to catch the difference between SUM(A3:A12) and SUM(A3:A10) in a thousand different cells.

<comment><USER9> > where you are trying to catch the difference between SUM(A3:A12) and > SUM(A3:A10) in a thousand different cells.

Excel does a pretty good job in highlighting which cells are selected when you edit a formula, and it does a pretty good job of maintaining the meaning of the formula under sheet transformations. For example, if you inserted a row between rows 8 and 9 then the two formulae would be =SUM(A3:A13) and =SUM(A3:A11) respectively.

This may have been a genuine error, but the two researchers definitely started the process with a goal in mind, and when the results agreed with their goals they didn't bother to check.

<comment><USER8> Yes, it does highlight the cells. But if a mistake does somehow make it in, it is still exceptionally tedious to find the error. It is easy enough to expand a formula for additional cells but accidentally miss a cell, leaving it with the old formula. If you were using SQL, R, or Python, this class of error would never happen.

<comment><USER10> I guess it is just that to do a proper audit you need to have your logic on one page. Otherwise it is extreemly hard to follow the code. In excel every formula is sitting essentially on it's own page. It is easy to code this way but hard to audit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Once again: this business with Excel mistakes seems like a red herring. The bigger problem is that the Reinhart-Rogoff result never made much sense to begin with. Correlation isn't causation; in fact, there's a strong intuitive case that it's the reverse with debt and growth.

<comment><USER12> Both situations are intuitive. High debt causes high servicing of debt causes inefficient use of private market resources paid in taxes.

Additionally, slow growth causes lower govt revenue causes less incurring of debt to make up the shortfall in tax base.

Debt and growth are both inputs and outputs that are codependent. The degree to which they impact the overall financial picture depends HEAVILY upon the opportunity cost of the servicing of the incurred debt.

For bonus, consider what will happen to heavily indebted countries when interest rates begin to rise. Servicing of debt will become more difficult leading to a decrease in our ability to grow the economy, leading to more difficulty in servicing the debt, and on and on.

<comment><USER13> While both are possible, this article performs an interesting analysis to show why the paper likely had the causation wrong:

[http://www.nextnewdeal.net/rortybomb/guest-post- reinhartrogo...](http://www.nextnewdeal.net/rortybomb/guest-post- reinhartrogoff-and-growth-time-debt)

<comment><USER14> The original paper doesn't make any claims about causation at all, does it? I haven't read every single word, but the Abstract certainly doesn't say that. The closest the paper says is that high debt and low growth are "associated."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Obviously, Excel isn't exactly at fault -- it's the people using it, as echoed by many comments here.

HOWEVER, spreadsheets are rather unique in the fact that they _hide_ the very formulas used to generate everything, unless you have a specific cell selected.

So, opposite of computer programs, they're almost impossible to "read through" and verify that everything makes sense. If 99 cells have identical formulas, and 1 in the middle has a slight typo, how on earth are you ever going to see that?

I wonder if there are other similar spreadsheet-like tools that one might use, that make a point of _showing_ everything going on in the spreadsheet, rather than trying to hide it?

<comment><USER16> The software should have pattern hints.

If you've got 99 cells with identical formulas, and one without, it's not far fetched for Excel to speculate that there may be a mistake (particularly if they're within X% of being identical). At which point it can provide a simple, non-intrusive hint.

And going further up the wishful thinking tree, into more difficult territory, Excel should be able to grasp what you're attempting to do by understanding, say, the top 10,000 (arbitrary number) tasks commonly performed by people using spreadsheets. That 'understanding' could then tip Excel toward deciding whether there's a problem, and whether it should leave you a nice little illuminated icon at the top right of the program with an exclamation mark.

Microsoft should have insane amounts of data on everything people do with spreadsheets, and they should be able to make it radically more intelligent (without being obnoxious or intrusive - it should be optional and highly passive).

<comment><USER17> _If you've got 99 cells with identical formulas, and one without, it's not far fetched for Excel to speculate that there may be a mistake (particularly if they're within X% of being identical). At which point it can provide a simple, non-intrusive hint._

It already does this, actually. Enter some data in two columns, like:

        4	1
        2	3
        5	6
        3	2
        4	2
        2	1

Then enter a sum formula in the next column like =SUM(A1:B1) and drag it all the way down. Change one in the middle to something else, like =SUM(B3:B3) instead of =SUM(A3:B3) and a little green arrow appears in the corner. Hover above it an it explains there is an "inconsistent formula".

<comment><USER18> Spot that triangle among the million cells in a 1000 by 1000 table.

<comment><USER19> Click the "take me to possible formula errors" button.

[http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/UploadFile/7e39ca/error- check-f...](http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/UploadFile/7e39ca/error-check- function-in/Images/Error-Checking-Excel2013.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I got screwed again by my damn notepad. I needed a quart of buttermilk for a recipe, but wrote a pint instead on the memo pad.

If only I had used a recipe management package that would have automatically told me that I wouldn't have enough buttermilk to make waffles for 5 kids.

<comment><USER21> It would actually be pretty nice if this:

        26.5 meters + 56.3 dollars

failed to compile.

In Scala one can certainly build this. You could certainly do it in Haskell, though it wouldn't be as nice syntactically.

<comment><USER22> There are a couple of packages in Haskell that let you do this, including unittyped[1]. It lets you write code like:

        *Main> 2 meter + (1 meter / second) * 5 second
        7.0 m

A really cute feature is that prefixes like centi and deci are functions:

        *Main> gallon `as` (cubic (deci meter))
        4.546089999999999 dm⋅dm⋅dm⋅#

It gives you an error if the dimensions don't match, but unfortunately the error messages are _hideous_.

Anybody can define new units just by giving a conversion factor and a string to display. These new units immediately work with other units. You can probably define new "dimensions" as well, but that's bound to be more involved.

All the units are represented as empty types, so it should have no overhead at runtime.

So it _is_ very nice syntactically, with the only real problem being the error messages and the fact that it uses a whole bunch of extensions and only supports _very_ new versions of GHC. I think it's pretty cool.

<comment><USER23> According to Google, 1 gallon is 3.78541178 cubic decimeters[1].

[1] <https://www.google.com/search?q=1+gallon+in+cubic+decimeters>

<comment><USER22> It's an _imperial_ gallon[1].

As to _why_ it's an imperial gallon, or what an imperial gallon really is, or who uses it--don't ask me. I'm a very metric sort of person :P.

[1]: [https://www.google.com/search?q=imperial+gallon+in+cubic+dec...](https://www.google.com/search?q=imperial+gallon+in+cubic+decimeter)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Excel is an incredibly powerful environment to code. I learned it many years ago; I started thinking it was some arcane tool that accountants used and ended being able to deliver amazingly powerful tools to users orders of magnitude faster than systems developers. Yes they had bugs, but... so did the industrial systems!

Excel's real limitations came around scalability of developers (beyond one developer you are in a bad place) and performance that can drop of a cliff beyond a certain size. But it is an astonishingly powerful tool.

</comment><comment><USER25> Let us all stop pretending that people were pursuing austerity because of some paper by Reinhart and Rogoff. Cutting government services to citizens for the sake of repaying foreign debt has been going on as long as there has been foreign debt. And that is longer than three years.

Reinhart and Rogoff were important because their idea supported an existing financial theory. If their paper had reached an opposite conclusion, there still would have been austerity.

Now that their paper has been shown to be in error, there will still be austerity. And that will be because the people who benefit from it have the power to impose it. Where they don't have the power, it will not be imposed.

</comment><comment><USER26> In bioinformatics work, Excel auto-formatting can screw up genomic data [http://nsaunders.wordpress.com/2012/10/22/gene-name- errors-a...](http://nsaunders.wordpress.com/2012/10/22/gene-name-errors-and- excel-lessons-not-learned/) . The problem with it is that formatting will modify entered text by default, and the user has to be actively aware of this behavior to undo it. Regardless, spreadsheets are invaluable for visualizing and processing tabular data -- but default behavior and user-end awareness are the lessons here.

</comment><comment><USER27> When I started my thesis there was a graph passed around essentially outlining the difference between Latex and traditional word processing, and it essentially looked like <http://bit.ly/ZAtwNi>, with word processing packages starting off easier but exponentially getting more difficult to use and Latex being harder to start with, but easier in the long run.

I feel like the same thing applies to Excel. Essentially what gets built with Excel are small programs where all the variables are unnamed, everything passed around is a numerical value and there's almost no capacity to see the entire 'program'.

These always get built because Excel is easier to start with (and you can always pass an Excel spreadsheet around and let other people 'run' it), but it means in the long run with the bigger programs you hit exponential complexity pretty quickly and by then you're invested in Excel, even though R or Pandas would have been more appropriate for the size of the program. Just my two cents (coming from businesses that LOVE excel for completely insane purposes).

</comment><comment><USER28> From a recent Nassim Taleb facebook posting: "Rejecting a macroeconomic idea (Rogoff and Reinhard) over an excel error is exactly like falsifying astrology over a computer glitch."

</comment><comment><USER29> Yeah, whatever. The only thing worse than Excel is the typical corporate- developed big Java application produced by a bloated team of mediocre programmers grown to further some middle manager's empire-building desire rather than to produce quality software. I'm not surprised that people doing organizationally key work give up on interfacing with little wannabe-CIOs counting subordinates and just get the work done with a spreadsheet.

Not to mention Excel often ends up having better performance than most home- grown solutions, especially now its core functions are properly multithreaded.

<comment><USER30> Well, one thing the big Java apps have going for them is that they _might_ have unit tests :)

<comment><USER31> And more importantly it is an actual programming language unlike spreadsheet formulas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The problem is people being satisfied with a free application for doing mission critical calculations. Yes, you buy an MS Office licence and Excel comes free. That is fine for run of the mill everyday calculations, but it is not OK for mission critical work and it is NOT ok for the CFO or anyone who advises the CFO on his decisions. Those important financial people should use a spreadsheet like this <http://www.resolversystems.com/products/resolver- one/> backed up by a team of software developers who write unit tests for the spreadsheets and validate the calculations.

TLDR is that the ResolverONE spreadsheet writes Python code as you manipulate the spreadsheet. A software developer can then organize that Python code, write unit tests for the code and validate that the calculations do what the CFO intended. Once this extra work is done, then the business can have confidence in the results of the calculations. But the user interface, i.e. the spreadsheet that end users see, is the same as it was originally.

This allows mission critical software development discipline to be applied to the development of spreadsheets. I suspect that the existence of a tool like ResolverONE is one of the factors that led the SEC in the USA to require Python source code for new derivatives that are created, so that there is a standard way to express the calculations of the derivative.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm always amazed at people for whom Excel is the hammer with which they bang on all problems.

Bug tracking with Jira, Bugzilla, Mantis, or Trac? Heck no, Excel is the tool for the job!

<comment><USER8> I'd say Excel is superior to those systems for any one-person project. Especially monsters like Bugzilla, which shine for huge projects but impose a lot of overhead on tiny projects.

<comment><USER12> _Especially monsters like Bugzilla_

I just choked on my soda. Bugzilla packages install in a command line and you can be up and running with a product, a couple of components for categorization, and user accounts 15 minutes later.

The only time I don't take that 15 minutes is if I'm working on a project where I'll NEVER be working directly with anyone else. Even then, it's often nice "just in case" someone else comes along later and wants to collaborate, you need to keep up with issues fixed in various releases, etc.

<comment><USER8> Please update the instructions if they are wrong then: <http://www.bugzilla.org/docs/4.4/en/html/installation.html>

In particular, any piece of software that needs an MTA in order to run is not going to be pleasant when you are running a one-person project. What, are you going to want to receive email updates from yourself whenever you update a bug that you created on the computer you are using right now?

I wasn't even talking about installation, however. Go to the Landfill if you don't believe me (<http://landfill.bugzilla.org/>). You want to create a new bug? You first have to create a product, then you have to create components. You have to fill out the entire form when filing a bug, even if you only have one product, one component, and only target one operating system.

Then look at a bug report. Log in to Landfill and look at a bug. Here's one: [https://landfill.bugzilla.org/bugzilla-4.4-branch/show_bug.c...](https://landfill.bugzilla.org/bugzilla-4.4-branch/show_bug.cgi?id=3058)

Then think about the cost of running Bugzilla. You are now running a web server. What if you don't have a server? What if you just have a laptop for the road and a desktop at home? How are you going to do database backups?

Tell me: does this beat an Excel spreadsheet for a one-person project?

Edit: I'm not saying Bugzilla is bad software. I'm saying it's like a stick shift. If you put an automatic transmission in a car, you alienate users who prefer manual. If you put a manual transmission in a car, you alienate users who don't know how to use it.

<comment><USER12> _any piece of software that needs an MTA in order to run_

What distro doesn't already have an MTA installed?

Create product: Click the "new product" link then type in "My New Software Project" enter.

Create components: Under your new product, click the "new component" linke then type in "Miscellaneous", press enter. There, you have your product and a catch-all component for all your new issues. Divide into more meaningful components as time goes on.

 _What if you don't have a server?_

Now I see the misunderstanding here. I was referring to professional software projects where I've had to work with other people, some of whom here and there wished to track bugs in spreadsheets. Any such project that I work on has at least one server available. Hell, for small consulting projects I just use one of the servers running in my house to bootstrap things.

You know, you can get a RaspberryPi and plenty of flash storage space for running as a server (with Bugzilla, an MTA, and everything) for projects for less than $50.

If you're referring to small personal projects then sure. Use a text file or a spreadsheet or strings tied to your fingers to remind you of things.

<comment><USER8> > I'd say Excel is superior to those systems for any one-person project.

> I was referring to professional software projects where I've had to work > with other people

We're having different discussions. It happens. I was pretty careful about choice of words: I said "tiny" and "one-person" rather than "small". For a "small" project I'd use Bugzilla or Trac or whatever makes the grass greener with the least fertilizer.

Not every developer wants to be a sysadmin. Some developers are hobbyists with a single Windows machine—for those developers, Bugzilla administration might be an arduous task which requires skills they don't want to waste graymatter on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I look at excel like a car. What's happening is that most people who use don't have a license. What's worse they've mainly learned to drive on the farm.

Now rather than hire a professional or take performance driving courses they try and do the same in high end usage and things go wrong.

It's not the sports car that's at fault by someone driving it at the edge of its performance without the proper skill. If the just drove it around town they'd be fine, but taking a high performance car to the track with no experience, well bad things happen. We've all seen youtube clips of high performance crashes from inexperience ;)

</comment><comment><USER33> I wondered if there might be a market for an Excel correctness checker. If billions are on the line, it might be worth a few bucks. But apparently Excel can advise you of common problems like these already.

[http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/correct- common-...](http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/correct-common- errors-in-formulas-HA010066323.aspx)

Probably that means such an add-on would not be sellable? However it wouldn't be the first time someone paid lots of money for something that software they owned already did just fine.

<comment><USER34> There is probably not much you could check. You could probably do some type checking but beyond that I see - ad hoc - not much one could do. Excel does already catch syntax errors and a few other errors mentioned in the link. Maybe you could make these errors more prominent. But should we really encourage more development using office software? Shouldn't we solve the actual problem?

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Use a hammer. Hit your thumb instead of the nail. Blame the hammer.

Use a table saw. Cut off three fingers instead of wood. Blame the table saw.

Go scuba diving. Return to the surface too fast. Get the bends. Blame the equipment.

Drive a car. Have an accident while texting. Blame the phone.

Go fishing. Be careless. Put a hook through your hand. Blame the fishing rod, the reel and the hook.

Use Excel. Don't make an effort to learn what you are doing. Mindlessly copy and paste. Do not seek out peer review. Cause massive financial losses. Blame Excel.

Boy, do I like the sound of the word "moron".

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm reminded of a similar situation involving treasury secretary Timothy Geithner and TurboTax. He initially blamed the software for underpayment of tax (or at least he said he used turbotax) and later admitted that he fudged the numbers.

Excel is sometimes the culprit (Excel 97 bug: [http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft- excel/archive/2007/09/25...](http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft- excel/archive/2007/09/25/calculation-issue-update.aspx) ), but usually manual error is to blame.

</comment><comment><USER12> Huh, a second ago there was a comment here asking how this article was on the front page... then it was disappeared. Call Alex Jones.

I wanted to voice my thought anyway... this article prominently features the information that the mainly cited study showing that national debt is bad is no longer valid. Those wanting to fight for higher debt levels are absolutely ecstatic and will up-vote any article that even tangentially mentions the Reinhart/Rogoff failure.

</comment><comment><USER36> So stupid. This is like blaming math because you made an error in your arithmetic.

</comment><comment><USER37> Oh yeah, if the Reinhardt-Rogoff spreadsheet had been correct all of our economic problems would be non-existent. Damn you, Excel!

</comment><comment><USER38> People could use R or python and do similar mistakes. I am creating a small algorithm to analyze stock prices and I am just realizing how easy is to mess up in these things.

Unfortunately, these things are treated like earthquakes in some countries: it's rare, we don't care. However, bad quality of reports is not rare. But the problem is: companies do not have other ways. They are stuck with the big players (SAP, Oracle, etc.) and they can't understand why their IT stack is crap.

I wish from all this Excel bashing we could have a serious talk about these tools. BEFORE writing any line of code, we must first understand deeply why professionals use Excel in this way and what we can do about it.

Finally, realize that the "cloud" is not considered always "safe". People put in Excel all kind of "secret" data and they are scared of having them on a third party server. Please, consider this too when thinking about a possible solution.

</comment><comment><USER39> There is an error in their reporting. The paper calling Reinhart-Rogoff into question came out of UMass Amherst, not Amherst (which implies Amherst College). Very different.

One is a large state school, the other an elite liberal arts school. UMass Amherst has a notoriously leftist econ program, Amherst College your typical neo-liberal.

</comment><comment><USER40> A bad mechanic will always blame his tools. Having extensively used Excel once upon a time there is nothing like it out there, period. If you want a powerful spreadsheet, Excel is your goto guy. Just because people are misusing Excel does not make it bad.

</comment><comment><USER41> Excel do not seem to be the cause - poor knowledge of using the tool is. You can argue that excel needs to be simpler than it is to learn - but then until something better for ubiquitous use (not forgetting SPSS and other tools which are way more complex) comes along - excel literacy is what is needed. Excel has its own quirks, but it also is capable of doing powerful modelling if you are ready to get out of the novice levels - but you also need advanced levels mathematics and statistics knowledge to be able to use them. Programming is not a panacea - financial and statistical modelling is beyond average programmer's level of proficiency.

</comment><comment><USER13> People have raised some great issues with Excel. For me, the biggest problem that I dealt with all the time when I worked on Wall Street was just the lack of one, central place for all Excel "code" - to me, it makes it exceedingly difficult to understand a spreadsheet or debug it. The "smartest" use I've seen is essentially just using Excel to store the data and then converting the "code" to VB script. Of course, one can argue at that point you might as well have the data in SQL or other database as well.

</comment><comment><USER42> An earlier discussion of role of Excel models in the financial sector: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5198187>

One interesting thing that came out of that thread was a link to this review article on spreadsheet errors: [http://mba.tuck.dartmouth.edu/spreadsheet/product_pubs_files...](http://mba.tuck.dartmouth.edu/spreadsheet/product_pubs_files/Literature.pdf)

<comment><USER5> There is a whole organization with an annual conference for the past 10 years, that is dedicated to analyzing spreadsheet errors. <http://www.eusprig.org/index.htm>

This is a big deal. In fact, the ResolverONE spreadsheet was created as a way to reduce the risk of the kind of errors that are discussed at the EUSPRIG conferences.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Blame the tool. Yeah, very mature. Garbage in garbage out. What do you expect?

</comment><comment><USER10> "A tribe of Native Americans entered the wrong row into the cell of the Excel ... Just kidding. The error was made in Lotus." - I wonder if Afrika is not making a big mistake with Ubuntu now :-)

</comment><comment><USER44>
      The popular Microsoft program has been implicated in the financial crisis

In additional breaking news, oxygen has been implicated in the fincial crisis.

</comment><comment><USER45> And before Excel, the pencil was the root of all miscalculation evil. Damn you, pencils!

</comment><comment><USER46> Sounds more like human errors. It's just silly to blame the tool instead.

</comment><comment><USER47> Garbage in, garbage out...

</comment><comment><USER48> Excel isn't the problem. _Mediocrity_ is. Or, I should say, mediocrity _when you need something more_ (like reliability, because you're making major decisions based on the data furnished).

Excel is _great_ at providing a mediocre database, presentation template, calculation engine, and model builder, all-in-one. It's even Turing complete (although it makes it hard to write decent code, since that's not the point.) It does a large number of things, and a mediocre job of all. Often, this is enough. It gets the job done for small toy problems, and often that's a start. However, basing billion-dollar decisions based on Excel code? Are you kidding me?

This is exactly _why_ I rail so hard (and without giving, ever) against Corporate injections into software. Corporate America is founded on mediocrity being good enough. Sometimes it is. Sometimes, it's fucking not. When it's not, stop using Excel as a database (it's not one) and fire all your CommodityJavaDevelopers writing SingletonVisitorFactories and start doing things right. Since you don't know how, you have to hire someone like me and give that person _lots_ of autonomy, but it can be done.

<comment><USER49> Excuse me, but given your history of writing overly verbose, self-important Grand Proclamations: I imagine the only reason someone would _have_ to hire you is if they wanted tomes written about how they could Do Things Right while probably not getting much actual work product done in return.

<comment><USER50> Church's writing is consistently insightful and interesting. This is a silly attack.

<comment><USER49> When someone spouts big talk like "start doing things right. Since you don't know how, you have to hire someone like me and give that person lots of autonomy, but it can be done" and all they're known for (please correct me if I'm wrong here) is writing a lot of text on HN, I don't think a little snark is out of line.

I get that railing against unsympathetic targets like big corporations makes for entertaining reading, but I don't think that actually qualifies anyone for the job he was describing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> The program is only as good as the input it gets. Garbage in, Garbage out. Lazy and incompetent people would misuse any tool no matter how good it was.</comment>