On a New Road : James Gosling on Apple and Java - <AUTHOR> http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/steve_jobs_comments_on_apple <comment><USER2> They just don't get it ... Java sucks so badly for desktop development, it's not even funny.

         It also didn't help that the early ports that they did were heavily
         customized - far more than they needed to be.

This also reminds me of what Gosling said about Eclipse ...

         [Talking about Netbeans] To us, Eclipse feels like something very "me
         too" and derivative, backed up by a really strange marketing campaign

Also on Eclipse's SWT:

         The SWT thing was just...it pissed me off beyond words.
         ...
         It has all the AWT problems: it's way simple, it doesn't port very well.

Also on .NET's support for C++:

         [This] has left open a security hole large enough to drive many, many
         large trucks through

<comment><USER3> I would say that, now though Netbeans has surpassed Eclipse. In my personal opinion as of 6.5 and on it has become the best Java IDE available. While SWT was clearly superior at the time Eclipse was originally built, Swing has caught up. I made the switch to Netbeans on the recommendation of someone I respect a great deal, I used it a long time ago because it was the only IDE Blackberry buit is dev tools on and it was one of the most painful development experiences I have had to endure. I was hesitant when 6.5 came out and my friend urged me to give it a second change. I am glad I did now, they really got their act together. I hate that Oracle bought Sun as it seemed in the last few years they where really getting their technical act together. Netbeans became a superior IDE, Glassfish is a great simple to use app server, Their identity server was a great product, Virtual Box was a great desktop virtualization product. They where making strides but they just waited too long to turn the ship.

<comment><USER4> I couldn't disagree more. I think netbeans is the worst Java IDE out there and has a LONG way to go.

It depends on ant for everything. The build files are very difficult to read, so it's like a black box. They are also cruel enough to name the root file "build.xml" so it interferes with you trying to make a convenient IDE agnostic build script. It depends on netbeans specific libraries for copying files (WHY?!). It's very difficult to get it to build from the command line. If you check out the hudson tutorial on how to get a netbeans project building in their CI server, you have to run a headless version of netbeans on the box to do it.

Not only that, the build scripts do some really crazy black magic. You can edit parts of them and your changes get ignored. It's like netbeans generates them every time you try to run. This allows you to do things like put echo statements in the build scripts that don't get printed out even though the target runs. It's really confusing.

It is not very organized. If you go into the "Options", it has 5 big buttons at the top. Most things are in the "Miscellaneous" section.

The debugger and profiler are really slow. When I remote debug, I have to click "step over" two times for one line of code. Expanding objects in the variables tab takes an annoying amount of time. My app is apparently too big to even start with the profiler. I've waited over 25 minutes before giving up. In intellij, the jprofiler plugin lets me start the same project without any noticeable slowdown.

Many many UI problems. You can't work with multiple "run" configurations like you can in the other IDEs. EG: If you want to run a certain unit test, you have to find it, go into it, and then run it. In the other IDEs, you could save that unit test as something to run and run it while you're looking at another file.

Speaking of unit tests, there's no way to run an individual unit test. The finest granularity is the entire file.

It crashes all the time. You're going to have to accept my anecdotal evidence here, but everyone else in the office complains about this, too.

The list goes on and on. I'm extremely skeptical of anyone that claims netbeans is good. I suspect you're using it as a glorified text editor instead of an IDE.

It's not 100% terrible though. One thing that netbeans is good at is generating code. I haven't tried in Eclipse, but netbeans' webservice generation support is better than intellij's. It also has a good Swing WYSIWYG.

<comment><USER3> _I suspect you're using it as a glorified text editor instead of an IDE_

Your suspicions are unfounded, I have never had an issue with Netbeans builds or it rewriting my files. It is a pluggable build systems where the build.xml is a templated file that pulls in the files that you are supposed to edit such as build-imp.xml and project.properties. These files do not get overwritten. I suspect you are using the build system wrong.

Further I like that Ant is used for the build because it gives me a head start on something I would end up having to write anyways. The build file is generated when you create a project, it saves a lot of time and is standardized. As for the org-netbeans-modules-java-j2seproject- copylibstask.jar it is a jar, I don't find it to be a big deal to install it on the build machine given the amount of time saves having the default build and deploy script generated for me.

The build script gives you a starting point not and end solution for testing, custom build instruction and other build related stuff you have to put in your own files and plug them into the build not edit the build directly. I don't find it that difficult and I think it is offset by what netbeans does for you. Further, on the remote occasion that Netbeans wants to rebuild the build.xml file it always prompts you before it does so, but even with that, you should not be modifying the build.xml you should be creating your own build files and importing them into the build system. Netbeans does this so when you add stuff like web services, JAX-B generated classes, JPA change from Glassfish to WebSphere it can auto generate all of the build and deployment instruction for those items. For me having all of that boilerplate stuff generated is a huge time saver for only having to make the trade off of keeping my custom Ant instruction in a separate file and copying a jar to the build server.

As for Hudson I cannot comment, we use Cruise Control,

 _It is not very organized. If you go into the "Options", it has 5 big buttons at the top. Most things are in the "Miscellaneous" section._

Not a show stopper for me, I spend all of 45 minutes in there when I do a fresh install and then I never touch it again. It does not affect my day to day work. This is also a preference thing not an issue with how Netbeans performs as a development environment.

 _The debugger and profiler are really slow._

I have never had an issue with the debugger being slow on my machine. I will give you that my Machine is top of the line so it may not be exemplary of the standard, but still no issue. In fact Netbeans has a feature that I have not seen in any other IDE, that is a must have for me now. And that is the fact that I can trace and debug from the execution of the Javascript in the browser, through the REST services, into the app logic and down into the DB. For me being able to step through the code from the JavaScript in the browser to the DB and back again is an amazing feature that I cannot live without now. It was the reason I switched to Netbeans on my friend recommending it to me based on that feature. Further the DTrace hooks are amazing, being able to see what is going on at every level provides another level of insight that I have not seen in other IDE's.

 _It crashes all the time._

We have never had this problem. We use Netbeans on OSX this may be a platform thing. I work with 10 to 15 freelancer at a time. We all use Netbeans and crashing has never been an issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _It also didn't help that the early ports that they did were heavily customized - far more than they needed to be_

I respectfully submit that the man who thought AWT was an acceptable GUI toolkit doesn't have a leg to stand on here.

<comment><USER6> > I respectfully submit that the man who thought AWT was an acceptable GUI > toolkit doesn't have a leg to stand on here.

Where did Gosling say that? I remember reading that AWT was a botched job because they had very little time to ship out a UI toolkit. They replaced it with Swing later.

And if you think Swing also sucks, then try developing swing apps in groovy. Java language sucks even in SWT UIs.

<comment><USER5> Right, but if even he was unsatisfied with AWT how can he criticize Apple for doing the work for a native look & feel?

<comment><USER7> From "far more than they needed to be" I read that he thinks they changed "far more than they needed" to change in order for the native look & feel. So, he doesn't criticize their work, he criticizes the way they did the work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sun to developers: "With Java you can write once and run anywhere!"

Sun to OS vendors: "Hey, we just promised developers they can run Java on your platforms. Now you go make it happen!"

Apple to Sun: "... you!"

<comment><USER9> NeXT to developers: With OpenStep you can write once and run anywhere!

Sun to NeXT: yeah, let's do this!

Sun to developers: "With Java you can write once and run anywhere!"

Sun to Lighthouse Design: Come to daddy!

Sun to NeXT: buh-BYE!

Sun to OS vendors: "Hey, we just promised developers they can run Java on your platforms. Now you go make it happen!"

Apple to NeXT: come to daddy!

NeXT to Apple: Avast ye swabbies - prepare to be boarded, arrrr!

(...time passes...)

Oracle to Sun: Come to daddy!

Apple to Snoracle: "... you!"

<comment><USER10> Someone should do a Flash corporate history timeline, with one of those Animation programs and animate your comments as the timeline plays.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think he is saying that Oracle caused a lot of headaches for Apple in the past so Apple is returning the favor by trying to force them to support Java on their platform.Who knows how this will play out, but it will be interesting since many Java developers use Macs.

<comment><USER12> Yeah. Another way to look at this is that traditionally Java ports fell into two categories:

a.) The platform was important enough that Sun would lose credibility if there wasn't a good JVM available (Windows, Linux), so Sun (now Oracle) did the port.

b.) The platform was minor enough that the platform would lose credibility if there wasn't a good JVM available (MacOS, AIX, HP-UX), so the platform vendor did the port.

I see this as Apple indicating that with recent growth in market share and cachet, they've now moved from category b.) to category a.).

<comment><USER13> The a) category is not so clear-cut. Originally, it was up to OS vendors to support Java port, period. So Sun did it for Solaris, MS did it for Windows and nobody did it for Linux. Then MS tried to hijack Java and Blackdown did the Linux port. The current status is result of what happened in the past, not some master plan to support only tier A platforms.

<comment><USER14> I'm pretty sure Sun handled the Windows Java port, not Microsoft. Java was available on Windows pretty early on, and I can't see Microsoft rushing to make that happen.

<comment><USER15> > Java was available on Windows pretty early on, and I can't see Microsoft > rushing to make that happen.

You're wrong. Microsoft did their own Java VM implementation, got sued by Sun as early as in 1997 and had to stop distributing it:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Java_Virtual_Machine>

<comment><USER14> Microsoft's wasn't first. I assure you. The Sun JDK VM was first. After Microsoft licensed it, and had Sun's code, it wouldn't have taken terribly long to make their changes and put out J++.

Wikipedia isn't good on this, because they don't have the relevant release dates.

A Usenet post from December of 1995 says:

" I been using the JDK 1.0 Beta 1.0 with Netscape 2.03 on Windows 95 for about 3 weeks now. I just upgrade to the JDK 1.0 Beta 2 and guess what I can not run any local applets. "

<comment><USER15> They weren't first to implement it, but they were the ones who made it a part of their browser and their OS very, very fast ("support Java for the platform" was the start of this thread). Sun's Java 1.0 was shipped on January 23, 1996, and Microsoft was sued in October 1997. There was indeed "a rush" by Microsoft. Note that I referred to your "I can't see Microsoft rushing to make that happen" so I apologize if missed that you wanted to discuss only "the initial implementation." Note that you replied to the parent which wrote "it was up to OS vendors to support Java port, period. So Sun did it for Solaris, MS did it for Windows and nobody did it for Linux." Note "support" not "initial implementation." MS really did and wanted to do it for Windows and rushed to it. Of course, it was not in the form that Sun liked.

<comment><USER14> Microsoft wouldn't have bothered if Sun hadn't done the Windows jdk and jvm in the first place. If there were no Java on Windows, it wouldn't be perceived as a threat that needed to be co-opted. Nor would there have been as much hype about Java if it hadn't been on Windows.

Before Java 1.0 shipped in early 1996 (for Windows and Solaris), there were a number of publicly available betas on Windows, which is how the hype was generated.

Also, my recollection is that it was _never_ the case that Microsoft's was the only JVM on Windows, or that Sun stopped work on their Windows JVM. The two coexisted. There was no point at which Microsoft was the only source of a JVM on Windows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Until we know what Oracle is gonna do about this, all the talk is useless right now.

The fact that they split the feature-set for JDK7 due to time restrictions (aka plan b for jdk8) does not make me feel confident about them being able to throw out another VM for a different platform so quickly.

</comment><comment><USER17> It's "Gosling". Seems to have some sour grapes, but that doesn't make him wrong.

<comment><USER18> It doesn't make him right either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Gruber, very interesting, point of view:

"Here's my question, though: If Mac OS X 10.7 ships without a working Java JVM, will you be able to write Android apps using a Mac?"

[http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/10/22/gosling-java- mac...](http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/10/22/gosling-java-mac-os-x)

<comment><USER15> I don't see why not? Java is GPL-ed, and also see:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1820418>

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Please forgive my ignorance, but wasn't Google sued by Oracle over issues regarding Google's implementation of the Java VM? It just sounds natural that other companies would be less motivated to maintain their implementations...

<comment><USER21> No, Google is being sued because it _doesn't implement the JVM_. Instead Google created a completely independent VM for Android called Dalvik, and, crucially, a JVM to Dalvik bytecode compiler. Thus Google can leverage all the standard Java programming tools, but at the final stage of deployment they convert it to Dalvik which they claim is "not Java".

Very clever and very sneaky, which is why Oracle/Sun is annoyed.

<comment><USER22> Isn't that similar to GCJ (<http://gcc.gnu.org/java/>) which can compile Java bytecode down to native machine code?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Not sure I get the point.

</comment><comment><USER24> J. Gosling's point isn't entirely clear to me, either. I came away with the impression that Oracle is a difficult company to deal with. Perhaps he's trying to draw a line between Oracle being difficult and Apple deciding they no longer want to do their own port. I supposes that's possible.

Still, it seems more likely that Apple decided that the cost of maintaining the Java port on OS X simply wasn't worth it. In the same manner that they decided that nobody wanted to use Flash on their smart-phones, they've decided that nobody wants to use Java on their laptops or workstations.

<comment><USER14> I think they've decided that, at this point, Java is within a few years of being a floppy disk drive in the iMac era.

Okay, that's a little harsh. But apart from Android, Java doesn't seem to have much buzz these days. And Android gets into the whole lawsuit mess.

Also, there seems to be a lot of disruption in the Java space due to the Oracle acquisition. IBM ditching Harmony for OpenJDK, the Oracle/Google lawsuit, etc.

This seems like an opportune time to step away. Since the whole Java ecosystem is stirred up and reconfiguring, it makes sense for Apple to pull back before a new configuration has solidified. While things are fluid, let the Java organizations figure out what they want to do with OS X.

<comment><USER25> Java the language may not have much buzz, but other languages running on the JVM sure do. And they will be equally effected, whatever happens.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I haven't used WebObjects for years, but I'm curious how this whole Java kerfuffle is going to affect that. Do people still use it?

<comment><USER27> In theory, it should have minor (if any) effect.

The existing version of Java 6 will still run (and Apple has said it will have support for the normal cycle, whatever that means).

Potentially other versions could appear.

WebObjects use of java is primarily server side, and as such has less (possibly little) GUI usage.

It may even be possible to run WebObjects on other platforms. That becomes an interesting situation if the license stipulates Apple hardware, but Apple no longer provides the proper runtime environment to use it.

<comment><USER28> _Apple has said it will have support for the normal cycle_

It means deprecated for one rev and dropped the next. Just like they handled PowerPC supported in 10.4 deprecated in 10.5 gone in 10.6. So Java will be gone in 10.8.

<comment><USER27> > So Java will be gone in 10.8.

Apple's implementation of the JVM _may_ be gone in 10.8. That's not the same thing as saying there will be no JVM (and conversely no java of any kind). I suspect someone will step up to the plate, either openJDK or Sun/Oracle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> It does sound like from reading Gosling that Apple did this as a way to poke Oracle in the eye. The Mac has potentially become a large enough platform now that it seems Apple thinks they can leverage it against others. There is such a thing as overplaying a hand which I think Apple is dangerously close to doing (i.e. read their new mac app store rules).

What did strike me about the announcement though was how nonchalantly it was made. I have to think this was on purpose given how masterful Apple normally is with their marketing. So that leads to the question of why? Was Apple in talks with Oracle that broke down so they simply called Oracles bluff?

By the way, all of the knee jerk reactions have been very amusing. Reading comments and stories about it yesterday made me think Apple came down and removed Java from every Mac in existence :)

<comment><USER30> _Reading comments and stories about it yesterday made me think Apple came down and removed Java from every Mac in existence_

Right. Don't those people know that even if you're running Linux, you still have to download and install a JVM?

<comment><USER31> True, but there is a JVM for them to download and install. At some point, when there are new Java/JVM updates, there won't be an Apple to get them from, and there likely won't be anyone else to get them from either, unless Oracle steps up and starts providing it.

I've said it before - Sun was stupid for focusing so publicly on "JAVA" (ticker symbol, etc) yet leaving the implementations up to other vendors. But now there's not even a Sun to complain to, so... :/

<comment><USER15> > At some point, when there are new Java/JVM updates, there won't be an Apple > to get them from, and there likely won't be anyone else to get them from > either

I don't know what you mean under "new Java/JVM updates" but anything that's GPL of Sun's Java can be used by everybody:

<http://www.fsf.org/news/fsf-welcomes-gpl-java.html>

as long as they also respect GPL, of course.

<comment><USER32> How much tweaking (of the source code and the build process) does it take to get it to work on OS X?

<comment><USER33> Not a lot. To assuage my fears, I just built OpenJDK's BSD port and ran Eclipse 3.6.1 on it without X11 (This from Snow Leopard 10.6.4). It wasn't hard, and could easily be packaged for general consumption.

The maintainer of the OpenJDK binary packages for OS X, SoyLatte, recently tweeted that "A community supported Java implementation for Mac OS X (including native AWT/Swing) is a totally tractable problem." (<http://twitter.com/landonfuller>). Even if Oracle doesn't step up, it seems the OS X Java community will probably handle it. Moreover, since Java has been languishing at Cupertino for years now (the length of time till Java 5 shipped, Java 6 32 bit), it's likely the community will handle it in a better way, with more frequent updates, than Apple ever did.

<comment><USER31> Until it's something that's a DMG file that anyone can grab and is indicated to work on 10.6, it won't be a real solution for most people.

The soy latte stuff makes you type in a 'iam not a crook' license code to download, and only mentioned 10.4 and 10.5. It gives every indication of being a garage-hack-only thing for bleeding edge BSD grey beards, not something that is a drop-in replacement for current OSX users.

I want to use it - I tried soylatte last year - didn't work well enough for my purposes on 10.5.

<comment><USER33> I agree - it's not, at the moment, an ideal end user situation. Even though the build process was reasonably easy, a fair few GUI programs won't run (though mostly every command line app seems to work fine). Most importantly for my test, Eclipse was OK.

The main point of the test was to see how close the system was to being even usable. Considering Apple have maintained the OS X Java for a decade, I expected there to be no alternative that was even vaguely close to running "Hello World", let alone running something as complex as Eclipse. Instead, it worked pretty damn well, and (modulo licensing), I suspect even I could package up the results into a DMG that 95% of people could use to, i.e., build Android apps. More than that, consider the worst case scenario for OS X Java...

1) Apple don't ship anything with 10.7; 2) Oracle don't ship anything, nor do IBM; 3) Getting old versions of Apple Java running is impossible

Then, the real community experts have a nearly whole year of lead time (until Summer 2011, the earliest Lion ships) to convert what already limps along quite well into a decent Java SE SDK and runtime experience. This seems well within the grasp of them. Of course, if the community doesn't step up because it's not interested, then that rather makes the point that Java on OS X just isn't relevant any more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> The time is certainly ripe for a better language to step in and make cross- platform desktop application development easier. Seems like most anything you use (barring C++) necessitates shipping 20mb of dependencies.

I miss the pay for what you use model.

<comment><USER21> Longer term JavaScript + HTML5 will get you most of the way there.

<comment><USER34> What if I want to burn a CD? Or make something like Cover Flow?

<comment><USER21> WebGL w/ HTML5 canvas will let you build Cover Flow.

As to burning CD's, I did say that it would only get you "most of the way" there!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> "[...] Microsoft violated their contract and made Java code written on Windows unable to run on other systems."

More precisely, Microsoft violated their contract when they added classes and methods in the "java" top-level package (namespace) and failed to implemented some mandatory parts of the specification (mandatory as per the contract), such as RMI.

Source: [http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-10-1997/jw-10-lawsuit....](http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-10-1997/jw-10-lawsuit.html)

</comment><comment><USER36> sad to see that all these years I've been bragging around, and happy to do so, with my macbook doing java dev. Finally I had a nice machine, cute os to work. Sad that some day a big corp will tell me that now it's windows or nothing. Sad to feel like apple is letting us down.

<comment><USER15> > it's windows or nothing

Far from it. First, Apple's version will stay for a while. For further future, Java is GPL-ed, and also see:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1820418></comment></comment>


Who Will Be Hurt Most When the Tech Bubble Bursts? - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/24/who-will-be-hurt-most-when-the-tech-bubble-burst-not-vcs/?ncid=rss <comment><USER2> > But not Mark Cuban, one of the renowned moguls in the VC world.

Mark Cuban is certainly a renowned Angel investor, but not a VC.

> For instance, Uber moved from $17 billion to $40 billion between the two > funding rounds within six months.

Amazon, a public company worth ~200B billion dollars, is up 40% in value in 5 months this year. Valuations can change very quickly in technology companies, whether public or private.

> This bubble is bound to burst.

Ok, well I guess that settles it!

> Take Uber and Airbnb for example. Both co-founders ... wealth was calculated > on the basis of notional post-money valuations, figures far in excess of > what these companies could actually be sold at in the market right now.

Uh, says who? Both of these companies make tons and tons of money and have business models that make sense. Whether or not they are good for the world, they are certainly good businesses. What makes you so sure the valuations are wrong? All of the late-stage investments in Facebook worked out pretty well.

> VCs will most likely walk away with their invested money, if not more.

A VC who returns the initial fund amount (or even a small gain), over 10 years, is losing their LPs tons of money to fees and inflation. LPs will not invest in that fund again, and one bad fund has ended a lot of VC careers. Granted this is probably good for the world, but not for that VC. Saying a VC has liquidation preferences and thus they are immune from any negative consequences to a bad investment is ridiculous.

<comment><USER3> I don't disagree with anything you said, but I have a question. If liquidation preferences have such little value, why is it so common?

Is it because founders for the most part accept whatever the VCs dictate, even things that benefit the VCs only slightly but still get thrown in because the VCs pretty much get their way no matter what?

<comment><USER2> Liquidation preferences have value, and a lot of value, I'm saying that they just don't make VCs immune from bad consequences. I'm sure the reason they are so common is that a VC wants it, and it seems fair to the founder and is easy to toss in.

Founders certainly don't accept anything the VCs dictate, and terms like this are on the table during negotiations. This is especially why as an founder you want competition from multiple VCs so you a little bit of leverage. But at the end of the day the VCs are going to want some sort of preferences over the common stock, and this is a fairly easy one to toss in.

As to why the preference might not be so great for a VC, let's imagine a hypothetical scenario. I make a 20k personal angel investment in a company with a 1x liquidation preference. A year later the company is tanking and sells for less than the valuation, but enough that I get all my money back. Great. I lost the opportunity cost of that 20k for one year, but nothing else.

But imagine the same scenario with a VC, but let's say it was 20 million of their 100 million dollar fund. A year after they make the investment, they get the money back. But they now _must_ return that to the LPs. The fact they got the money back quickly makes no difference to them, because they can't re- invest it. And now they now have only 80% of their fund left to try and generate a big return. Yes, getting the money back is better than not getting it back, but is wasted ammo they cannot re-use in their quest to generate a big return.

And also lost in this is that many times when a company is tanking they will either go completely bankrupt or not return all the money that investors put in (see: Fab).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's a pretty simple situation. Zero and negative interest rates are causing enormous sums of capital to chase yield through non-traditional sources. Sand Hill Road VC's have a good pitch and connections, so they wind up with a significant portion of that capital. That capital has to go somewhere, so the VC's basically use the Stanford admissions process as a proxy for screening, and they give anyone that has been admitted and can get an app written huge amounts of this money. VC's haven't suddenly gone crazy; they simply find themselves drowning in money that they have to deploy.

Some of these companies will undoubtedly be successful, as the ability to spread virally and scale the IT infrastructure to meet demand these days is absolutely unprecedented. That is the primary difference between the first "bubble" and now. It looks the same in terms of frothiness, but anything that delivers real value to people these days will spread very fast, largely for free, and may actually become profitable.

Whether or not the value of the successful companies that emerge from this era will make up for the massive losses of those that fail remains to be seen. I think it's actually possible. The real losers will be the engineers, because when interest rates rise and people pull money out of these funds, all but the most promising companies (in terms of actual traction) will see their funding vanish, and millions of people (thousands of top engineers among them) will be out of work.

</comment><comment><USER5> Question from a new-comer: after the first bubble burst, was it difficult for a solid developer to find work in the valley? How much did salaries drop?

<comment><USER6> As someone that was 10 years old when the first bubble burst I second this question. Who should be nervous? All tech companies or just those in the Valley with no business model aside from selling ads?

<comment><USER7> I graduated with a Bachelors in CS from Cornell in 2001. The previous summer, I was freelancing as a Java programmer for $70/hr. By December 2002, rates had fallen to $10/hr for Java programming (at my skill level.)

A couple of things:

1\. The first dot com crash also co-incided with the telecom crash (Lucent, Global Crossing, etc) so you had a lot of VERY skilled technologists suddenly hit the market

2\. The first doc com crash also co-incided with Americans' ill-fated experiment with whole-sale outsourcing development projects to India which is what caused the huge crash in rates. As we all know, this was not sustainable as most off-shoring projects at those bottom rates failed. Rates eventually stabilized once companies realized those rates were too good to be true.

3\. A lot of developers from Big5 firms also flooded the streets. I was at Accenture -- we went from 60k employees to 28k. Rather Andersen went bankrupt entirely. So you had not only the telecom talent out of work, but also Big5 integrators.

Overall, for entry-level employees, it was fine since you weren't competing for high salaries. It was more difficult for pthose set in their career who couldn't move around etc.

-Saif

<comment><USER8> I've never seen rates that low, but again, you may have been at the lower end. I knew lots of developers who were at that end of the spectrum who were deceived by the rates being paid in 1999 into believing they had "made it".

I think it's a positioning thing. If you're at a big consulting firm, it'll be tough. Companies that used to pay $200+/hr for projects will find it's better to bring in some generalists and pay them $80k/yr.

During this time I was a developer in HR in travel, 9/11 hit, and I went to building web apps for health care. No issues whatsoever with work. During this time I also did some smaller projects, again, in mainstream industries: transportation/logistics, telecom, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I found the fundamental point pretty insightful, that its going to be weird if you are a founder of some company that is saying its worth a couple of billion and you've got a few percent of the common stock equity, that "feels" like you are rich[1] as your "projected" net worth is millions. And then the bubble bursts and you aren't anymore. If you have your self identity wrapped up in that then having the bubble burst will be really hard to handle.

[1] Been there done that :-)

</comment><comment><USER10> Great article. Curious if the tech bubble is gonna burst say sometime in the future, what do you think the best options would be to weather the storm?

Obviously, VC-funded startup's with no cash-flow and only one or two years of funding will be the first to go (dot-com comparison: pets.com, WebVan), then next will probably be any relatively new consultancies (dot-com: Razorfish, coding schools of the late 90's that taught people for MCSE/CNAA certificates).

Next in line to fall is unclear, all the hardware and network infrastructure companies suffered in dot-com (e.g., Sun, Cisco) with layoff's due to no demand anymore to buy expensive high-end servers and routers. But today with the cloud infrastructure, would AWS division, Azure or IBM be able to weather the storm?

On the other hand, peeps I knew who were able to weather the storm were people who had critical domain knowledge in a stable or booming industry at the time (e.g., HPC specialists for defense contractors, Bioinformaticians working for the Human Genome Project, system developers for high frequency trading right after RegNMS). Unfortunately, cycles have also turned for these fields too and demand has matured or waned.

Curious what you guys think are the next "unsexy" but potentially lucrative fields that has demand for IT workers and should yield fruit in the next 10 years that you'd angle for, if you were starting anew? Farm tech, AdTech, FinTech, personal genetics therapy, or even plain old but reliable fields like oil & gas, healthcare or e-discovery?

<comment><USER11> My preference generally tends towards medical - it's generally a "good" thing to be working on and we're around retirement age for the baby boomers. All the low-cost high-impact opportunities in aggregating data and personalizing treatment based on that information make it seem attractive to me for the next decade or so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Can't believe I'm wading into a "bubble" thread:/

Here are my thoughts. Disclaimer: I'm just some guy. epistemological confidence: low.

There may be a bubble in consumer tech. There isn't a bubble in tech in general.

Consumer tech is weird right now because consumers are so weak. Bob the plumber has a laptop (good!), he's using a WIMP interface (not good!), but he knows a little Excel (great!). All in all he's a reasonably empowered internet citizen with a real internet presence.

He closes the lid. BLAMMO! He now has has zero internet presence under his control. Not a single thread, not a single cron job, nothing. He's lost the most basic information organization functions: "share", "receive", "do at this time", "do repeatedly", etc.

Instead he has to rely on others for all those functions. These are really basic functions. Like "baby food" level. If he's so helpless his computers can't handle something as simple as "do something at 5:00 tomorrow" reliably, of course he's going to get taken advantage of.

Pinterest, Dropbox, AirBNB, Slack, Evernote, Facebook, LinkedIN ... all exist because users don't have servers. If personal servers take off, consumer tech will pop. Of course, normal people aren't going own UNIX servers ever. Sandstorm though . . . that's a lot easier to set up than a Linux box.

(I don't think tech in general is a bubble though. "Software is eating the world" seems entirely accurate to me.)

<comment><USER13> Although a bit tangential to the article, you make a really good point. There has to be some room in the market for plug-n-play servers with 0-maintenance web apps that are present in the home instead of a public cloud.

It'd be really tough to compete without the massive consolidation benefits of the big players. Moreover, it'd be tough to position the product because it's essentially the same service, but with privacy benefits.

<comment><USER12> > Tangential to the article

You got me. Hopefully my point is interesting regardless though -- basically that some companies like Pinterest are vulnerable in ways that others like Square aren't.

> Moreover, it'd be tough to position the product because it's essentially the > same service, but with privacy benefits.

Oh man, I'm glad you brought this up. I think one of the only interesting insights I have here is that _the personal server stuff is totally tangential to privacy_. Personal servers are cool because they're useful and technically sweet -- I can move from querying my friend's review of a software product, to looking at his code using that software, to reading his blog posts about it, all without leaving the same datastore (on his side) or the same UI (on mine). Right now that would involve searching Acme Software Co's website, then GitHub, then Blogger, which is a plain worse process.

EDIT: spelling

<comment><USER14> Have you looked at the Synology NAS+mobile app ecosystem or the OSS clone XPenology?

<comment><USER12> Not very much, know of a good "beginner's guide to NASes"?

Honestly though, while I'm sure they're cool, I'm not sure NASes will do much good here. Most people need something as simple to use and set up as Evernote or Gmail.

<comment><USER14> This review claims the setup is reasonable and even mobile app acccess works, [http://9to5mac.com/2014/03/10/synology-gets-even-better-w- ve...](http://9to5mac.com/2014/03/10/synology-gets-even-better-w- version-5-0-why-every-mac-ios-user-should-have-a-diskstation/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The article does not separate VCs themselves from the investors in VC funds. The picture is even better for VCs than the actual investors. Whatever happens, they are currently collecting their 2 to 2.5% management fees. Huge valuations are advantageous to them as they allow much more capital to be invested and more fees to be collected.

<comment><USER2> If all startups are over-priced, and we are in a bubble, that would mean it is a _terrible_ time to be a VC. Talk to a VC, and they'll tell you they hate the world right now. More competition for deals and inflated valuations help companies, not VCs. It means VCs get less of their "top" deals and they have to pay more money from them, both bad things from a VCs perspective.

And consider a VC that makes most of their money from management fees. This means LPs are literally paying the VC to lose their money. The LPs will figure it out eventually and stop investing, at which point the VC needs to find a new career. Maybe the cycle takes 5 years, but it will happen. VCs want to make good investments as much as LPs want them to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> More specifically, it's departed employees.

Current employees have had it drummed into them enough times that the EV of their equity stake isn't likely to be significant and they should negotiate for cash over equity. Worst comes to worst, their options go underwater but they're still highly compensated professionals with in demand talents.

Founders knew the risks when they negotiated the terms of the funding round and they have nobody to blame but themselves if they got too greedy with spending.

Departed employees though, have to face the choice of whether to exercise options before they expire or forego them and potentially lose out on a huge payday. They're the ones who have to put up real cash into the system for paper gains.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is a very lazy article. It makes a lot of broad and sweeping claims, but doesn't have any evidence to back it up.

Most importantly: why is this bubble worse than the last one for employees? Employees all had stock in the dot-com bubble as well, and were equally wiped out when it burst.

Personally, I think this argument is much less feverish than the last one. Unicorns might not be profitable, but they're generating substantial revenue. Uber has a crazy valuation, yes, but they're also making $10 billion a year in revenue. [1]

[1] [http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-revenue-rides-drivers- an...](http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-revenue-rides-drivers-and- fares-2014-11)

<comment><USER8> I think (unsubstantiated as well) that less parachutes are being given out to employees this time around, and VCs have gotten smarter. Many VCs were around then, whereas I'd bet that better than 50% of those reading this thread weren't of working age when the last bubble burst.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Glad to see articles like this, I've had the same point of view for awhile now.

At least uber has revenue though. Lots of companies are getting funded with zero revenue (nevermind _profit_ for now) and no clear revenue model. Crazy in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER19> There's been a lot of talk lately about a possible tech bubble. Does the HN community think we're in one? I wanted to create a poll but keep receiving error 504. Maybe someone else could create one. I think the results would be interesting. - Update: Fixed that.

</comment><comment><USER20> It's probably technically wrong, but still, I can't escape from the thought that someone selling a zero revenue idea to an investor for a few million dollars is no different than someone selling a stock short. When a bubble bursts, the short sellers make out.

</comment><comment><USER19> Update: Please vote on this poll if you think we're in a tech bubble: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9597656](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9597656)

</comment><comment><USER21> Shouldn't that be 'bursts'?

And does this mean that TC feels that we are in a bubble?

And if so why?

<comment><USER22> "Uber moved from $17 billion to $40 billion between the two funding rounds within six months"

That's about as open and shut as it gets as to why we're in a bubble.

<comment><USER23> I take that to mean you are arguing that we are not in a bubble? your wording is ambiguous and your example is equally (not at all) compelling either way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I notice the "Not VCs" portion of the original title has been removed here.

</comment><comment><USER25> the appalling grammar in this article displays zero editorial effort</comment>


Cokeheads slip AI onto Yahoo front page - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/10/yahoo_front_page_ai/

<comment><USER3> _And when the speech was over, McCarthy spoke up from the auditorium's front row. "I'm a little puzzled," he said. "What does this have to do with AI?"_

I love you, John!

<comment><USER4> Anyone know what the reply was?

<comment><USER5> The article didn't give the direct response but quoted another speaker at the conference who said "Over the past 50 years, we've lowered the bar for what we consider AI," -Stephan Nusser, senior manager of the User-Focused Systems research group.

<comment><USER6> Which is long for "not much, but it sounds good".

Maybe they can tack an '-omics' on to the end of it somehow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Tom may like to read about Paris Hilton and Harry may like reading about what President Bush had for dinner. I am not interested in both, but I do bother if some company gets funded, if some website gets bought or if someone writes a 'hello world' app in a hundred languages. I don't have the same interests as Tom or Harry. And featuring their likes on my headlines just because they clicked doesn't make an uber-cool feature or a handy tool. To me, it just sounds like a bad automated-Digg clone.

This is totally a commercial idea. They seem to be interested in the clicks and henceforth the dollars. The idea would have been a runaway hit if they tried to personalize news as per personal interests.

Well, this system cannot personalize news until they ask me to specify my interests and tweak the news personally for me. It can be done with a Yahoo Pipes app ofcourse. But its still like using a calculator for 3+4. How about a direct feature - "personalize ur news".

One way to read such news is to use the Google News Search RSS feeds. It works for me.

I mentioned just a few days back, that I was working on a news engine - <USER2> news analysis and news search (it's for a contest and I'm working on it since I am a news buff). The idea is currently half complete since I have my exams on(will be over by 15th of this month). I found a simple way to personalize news :) I just gave the idea a try and it does seem to be crappy, but its an easier way because that's the simplest data I have access to as a developer. Will post it here soon. I have to convert the app from php to python (going to run it on Google App Engine)

John McCarthy; that name reminds me of something... "No one has yet buit a monument so high that a bird can't fly over it and shit on it" --John McCarthy

That's my favorite quote.

A bit of info if you don't know who John McCarthy is: the man who coined the term "Artificial Intelligence"

(-edited to add more-)

<comment><USER8> | This is totally a commercial idea. They seem to be interested in the clicks and henceforth the dollars. The idea would have been a runaway hit if they tried to personalize news as per personal interests.

There was a great magazine article sometime back -- that I can't find now -- that featured a guy who'd been in the radio business for a long time complaining that the ratings and rankings system that he'd developed effectively killed radio, causing so many stations to all play the same homogeneous crap. Yahoo's system, and news in general reflect the same problem: following the money leads to this steaming pile of crap that a lot of people seem to hate.

But there's another edge to this too. People who claim to be interested in specific subjects, or in meatier or niche news, are still drawn in to some of the vacuous material. So, nobody actually really wants a completely personalized news service; I'm convinced that that's one reason why jaanix hasn't made it big, while Reddit continues to steam along. People will tune Jaanix for the news feeds that they think they ought to like, and then they quit following it after a while because they'd actually rather click on all of the [pic]s on Reddit's front page.

<comment><USER7> Hey! I had never heard of Jaanix. Thanks for mentioning that. It's interesting. Its like some twitter for news, minus the phone syncing(I summed it up like this when I saw the follow button for news keywords).

But I couldn't figure out what the "follow [keyword]" button does. I clicked it. AndChecked the FAQs but found nothing. Even their FAQ page has voting system. A bit weird. They should have had a normal FAQ page.

The sliding bars on the homepage to customise the news you want is good. But I am able to notice a bug in it. I am using Firefox-3 on windowsXP and when I click on a sliding bar, the marker moves to the position, but the green shade seems to be somewhere else. I had to do around 10 clicks to get the green shade and the marker to coincide (surely had some fun with it).

And whenever I changed the slider the news gets optimised by Ajax. That's cool again.

I noticed they allow public voting on their news items. They are easily exposed to 'click' spam. Not requiring users to signup to vote actually seems like wanting to be spammed.

And I also found out that they don't requires users to signup to comment. Seems like some sort of Open Digg or Open Reddit.

But one thing I found nice on Jaanix was that their youtube channel(not sure what they call it) at <http://www.jaanix.com/youtube> they have this 'quick review' kind of feature for the videos. Just place your cursor on the video thumbnail and you will see more thumbnails of the video.

Well, Jaanix or Digg or Reddit, they are all cool for user submitted news. Maybe all the other mainstream news might also be subbmitted. But you don't see all mainstream news there. You might surely find out the Release date for iPhone 10G on Digg, but there are surely some news items that don't reach the top stories even in the section news. Those are covered by mainstream news fellas. In simple words, you can make a pizza at home. It'll surely be tasty. But still you will like McDonald's Pizza. It's like... two different good tastes, so you like both :)

And still I haven't found any source except Google News Search feeds for personalized mainstream news.

What I mean by mainstream news is - news by news agencies like Associated Press etc (I don't know what these agencies are called).

But your point is right. People will surely find that they are interested is more stuff when they follow something randomly. Again: all that's going to be featured on the front page of Y! is celeb gossip for sure. Not everyone likes celeb gossip. So its going to be forcing people to read celeb gossip. I would rather read news on any other source like Digg or Google News or Jaanix (as you said random news is good).

I have a Q and also and A: Why did Yahoo choose celeb news over any other topic? Because they found that they would get more news news in the celeb news category than any other. Which translates to more links, which in turn translates to more clicks and then more money.

On one hand they have a really cool thing like BOSS and the other they have a plain stupid idea of dollars from celeb gossip.

<comment><USER8> I've been following (and rooting for) jaanix for a long time now -- pretty much since their debut -- and it's strange: I really really like their idea, and I really really like that they've put a _ton_ of work into improving it. Yet, I have a really hard time sticking with it myself; I find myself gravitating instead towards Reddit, which frankly I have come to loathe. I don't understand it, and I wish I did.

| Why did Yahoo choose celeb news over any other topic? Because they found that they would get more news news in the celeb news category than any other.

That's an interesting angle. I have to chew on that for a while. I always just figured that it went that way for the same reason that all the cheap glittery celebrity gossip mags line the supermarket aisles: it's everyone's guilty pleasure. They sell more copies of "People" in a week than they'd sell of "Discover" in a month.

But, it could still come back to the news always being new, that people are drawn to junk like Britney's latest embarrassment because it's always new, even when it's really still the same old thing.

Or, maybe they're just barely literate gossip hounds that get some kind of psychological positive feedback from finding out that there are other people even more screwed up than they are. ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Decades ago we used Kalman filtering in naval navigation systems - it was well-established engineering then (Rudolf E. Kalman developed his filter in 1960). The original article's title is somewhat misleading in that Kalman filtering isn't usually considered to be AI.

But it's very nice to see this article anyway, if only to know that those old boat filters are creating Yahoo's home pages. Hey, it might even be the same code!8-)) [Tip to Yahoo: Speed 'er up to 23 knots and, if you start getting significant outliers, you've got a rounding problem in your matrix routines.]

</comment><comment><USER10> I've had a yahoo mail account since before the internet. It's my spam and bacon account. And my habit is to go through yahoo.com to get to mail. So I see all the stories and I've never clicked on a celebrity gossip story. Once in a blue moon there will be a science story and I've clicked on a few of those. So what do I keep seeing over 99% of time?

Celebrity gossip.

Thanks AI!

</comment><comment><USER9> Decades ago we used Kalman filtering in naval navigation systems - it was well-established engineering then (Rudolf E. Kalman developed his filter in 1960). The original article's title is somewhat misleading in that Kalman filtering isn't usually considered to be AI.

But it's very nice to see this article anyway, if only to know that those old boat filters are creating Yahoo's home pages. Hey, it might even be the same code!8-)) [Tip to Yahoo: Speed 'er up to 23 knots and, if you start getting significant outliers, you've got a rounding problem in your matrix routines.]

<comment><USER11> One of my favorite stories from my grandfather was how he used Fourier transforms to calculate the weight of cotton on the fly as it was being processed in the machines he developed. This was high technology in the 60s!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Poorly titled and misrepresented

<comment><USER13> Exactly -- Nick, you've already won the karma game, no need to linkbait.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am not linkbaiting. If you check the article's title, you will see that it is unchanged. The title comes from this part:

"Agarwal calls it Coke for short, and his fellow researchers are affectionately known as Cokeheads."

Also, I don't like editorializing and injecting my opinion and pg doesn't as well (I'm guessing he's the one who reverts headlines to their original state when they're editorialized). I've changed few headlines in the past but only when they were grossly misrepresentative of the article or just plain crappy and didn't convey the content of the article.

So, if you have a problem with the headline, complain to The Register please :).

<comment><USER13> I don't go to the Register for news, so their linkbait headlines aren't a problem for me until someone submits them here, even if it's unchanged. So I will complain here.

Changing a "curiosity" headline to make it clear what the article is about is not editorializing (except in the most literal sense, so let me preempt any pedants on that point) or injecting opinion.

Example: "Yahoo! Researchers develop algorithms to select stories for front page"

Is that less intriguing? Yes. Will it get less karma? Yes. Will the people who are genuinely interested in the topic covered still click on it? Yes.

<comment><AUTHOR> pg has reduced the length of headlines few times now. It now stands at 90 chars. Also, pg has changed few of my headlines that I amended with some more info from the article and has reverted them back to the original. What do I think? I think pg is right on this issue. Rewriting headlines is a slippery slope since we all have our biases. I'd rather read the original headline and make up my own mind on the issue than to read what nickb or jraines thinks this article is about.

What you're asking for would be better served with a blog and not a link aggregation site.

Finally, I'm not getting paid for this work and I don't have much free time. Personally, I don't wanna waste my time trying to think up headlines since that's not my job.

<comment><USER7> Peace! Peace! All of us...

Let's stop here with a smile.

Anyway... Back to the topic. The news thing...

Just a couple of days back I read about SocialBrowse here. The idea was cool(it did sound to me like a live and interactive version of Hacker News). It would be interesting if Yahoo tries to deliver headlines that way... like a popup on my taskbar whenever a 'friend' of mine likes a news headline. I mentioned friend in quotes because I mean in terms of the 'followers', like in twitter. I can then follow the person if I like the news he/she reads.

<comment><USER13> I thought it was a pretty civil exchange. All of nickb's points are fair and valid. Just wanted to put in my 2 cents.

I guess 'linkbait' is kind of an inflammatory term, especially on a site with karma points, but it ought not to be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _In other words, Yahoo! is making more money than ever from shameless celebrity gossip._

My thoughts exactly. Rather sad though.</comment>


HSE: Heterogeneous-memory storage engine designed for SSDs - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/hse-project/hse <comment><USER2> Looks pretty cool when you make it to the GitHub ([https://github.com/hse- project](https://github.com/hse-project)). Order of magnitude performance gains! I imagine most of that come from skipping the Filesystem layer and just hitting the raw Block layer directly.

I am curious about the durability and how well tested all of that is though. On the one hand, filesystems put a lot of work towards ensuring that bytes written to disk and synced are most likely durable, but OTOH Micron is a native SSD vendor so they've probably thought of that.

I'm also curious whether RAIDing multiple SSDs together at the block layer and then running HSE on top of that will be faster or whether running multiple HSE instances (not the right word, it's a library, but you get what I mean) with one per drive and then executing redundantly across instances would be faster. Argument for the former is that each instance would have to redo the management work, argument for the latter is that there's probably synchronization overhead within the library so running more in parallel should allow for concurrency and parallelism gains.

<comment><USER3> > I am curious about the durability and how well tested all of that is though. > On the one hand, filesystems put a lot of work towards ensuring that bytes > written to disk and synced are most likely durable,

All of the SSDs that this software might be deployed to have power loss protection capacitors to ensure the drive can flush its write caches when necessary. So this software only needs to make sure that the OS actually sends data to the drive instead of holding it back in an IO scheduler queue (as you point out, they're already bypassing the FS layer). Since this software should be pretty good at structuring its writes in an SSD-friendly pattern, the operating system's IO scheduler should probably just be disabled.

<comment><USER4> > _...the operating system 's IO scheduler should probably just be disabled._

The default on RHEL/Fedora has long been the _noop_ scheduler. I'd be surprised if other distributions haven't followed suit, given the prevalence of SSDs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > [https://github.com/hse-project/hse](https://github.com/hse-project/hse)

Their benchmarks show significant gains compared to RocksDB.

> [https://github.com/spdk/rocksdb](https://github.com/spdk/rocksdb)

But what I'd really like to see is a comparison against RocksDB using SPDK

> > [https://dqtibwqq6s6ux.cloudfront.net/download/papers/Hitachi...](https://dqtibwqq6s6ux.cloudfront.net/download/papers/Hitachi_SPDK_NVMe_oF_Performance_Report.pdf) > Based on these results, SPDK performs significantly better than the kernel > requiring only 1-2 cores to saturate IOPS on an NVMe SSD (compared to the > kernel requiring 16)

<comment><USER4> SPDK has had its share of detractors here on news.yc [0], especially with _io_uring_ around the block [1]. It'd be interesting to see the improvements to these io-centric applications once they move to _io_uring_ [2], which, in a way, like RocksDB, is sponsored by Facebook [3].

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10511960](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10511960)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22266503](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22266503)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19843464](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19843464)

[3] [https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/1/24/252](https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/1/24/252)

<comment><USER6> io_uring is a fantastic development for the kernel, and I really can't praise it enough.

However, there's still lots of reasons to use SPDK. Performance is still significantly better[0], and you can directly access all the of the NVMe features on the device without going through any abstraction layers.

[0] [https://spdk.io/news/2019/05/06/nvme/](https://spdk.io/news/2019/05/06/nvme/)

<comment><USER7> Woah, just realizing that 10.39M 4k IOPS is 42GB/s. Doing 40GB/s of sequential IO was difficult not that many years ago, let alone random IO. That's faster than my memory bandwidth. [https://www.microway.com/knowledge-center- articles/performan...](https://www.microway.com/knowledge-center- articles/performance-characteristics-of-common-transports-buses/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Many techniques already used by Aerospike on their KV database, which also bypass the OS file system/cache.

I'm a long time Aerospike user with no connection to Aerospike.

Edit: I would love to see a benchmark with Aerospike.

</comment><comment><USER9> PR copy aside, the claimed performance differences relative to RocksDB and WiredTiger are typical of many storage engines, the performance doesn't stand out. I don't think either RocksDB or WT has made a serious claim to prioritizing performance in their designs in any case.

Also, I have to wonder how narrowly "open-source storage engine for SSDs" is being defined here such that it excludes so many earlier storage engines in claiming the title of "first".

<comment><USER10> All storage engines prioritize performance? Back in the day, way before WiredTiger got acquired by MongoDB they also had very similar graphs showing perf differences with RocksDB and InnoDB: [https://github.com/wiredtiger/wiredtiger/wiki/Read- scalabili...](https://github.com/wiredtiger/wiredtiger/wiki/Read-scalability) [https://github.com/wiredtiger/wiredtiger/wiki/iiBench- result...](https://github.com/wiredtiger/wiredtiger/wiki/iiBench-results) [https://github.com/wiredtiger/wiredtiger/wiki/YCSB- Mapkeeper...](https://github.com/wiredtiger/wiredtiger/wiki/YCSB-Mapkeeper- benchmark)

And of course RocksDB has had similar graphs to showing perf against other systems.

Every system manages to find a benchmark that fits their narrative :)

Reality is both RocksDB and WiredTiger are high performance storage engines, and they are both optimized for SSDs too. These type of benchmarks rarely tell real story.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> "World's first" Open-Source storage engine for SSDs? I believe Aerospike has advertised itself as that for years, and certainly most MongoDB instances are backed by SSD these days. Heck, conceptually etcd is a key-value storage engine built for SSDs.

> HSE optimizes performance and endurance by orchestrating data placement > across DRAM and multiple classes of SSDs or other solid-state storage.

Orchestrating data placement? Isn't that what all storage engines do?

What am I missing here? Is this a block level rather than file-system level driver?

<comment><USER12> Isn't this 'HSE' conceptually a HSM? How does it compares to existing field- proven 'storage engines', some of them shock-full of features (because they are filesystems), such as Lustre or ZFS?

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

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS#Caching_mechanisms:_ARC,_L...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS#Caching_mechanisms:_ARC,_L2ARC,_Transaction_groups,_ZIL,_SLOG,_Special_VDEV)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Much better link: [https://github.com/hse-project/hse](https://github.com/hse- project/hse)

PR is insane hot air referring to another hot air product (can you even buy their 3D Xpoint devices yet?)

<comment><USER3> > can you even buy their 3D Xpoint devices yet?

Nope. The only product they've announced so far using 3D XPoint is the Micron X100 SSD, which they're only selling to a limited number of major customers; you won't find it for sale on CDW. Intel's Optane products do use 3D XPoint memory, and at the moment I believe that's all manufactured in a Micron-owned fab. (Intel used to co-own it, and I don't think Intel will have their own production line up and running until next year.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Someone needs to write a book about breaking into writing software like RocksDB, HSE, etc. Years ago I found myself wanting to learn more however going from 0 to 1 felt impossible. Graduated from a T3 school in CS so understanding the concepts wasn't the issue, I just didn't know how to build a good foundation in low latency persistence. Years later I ended up contributing to low latency java which was really interesting, but what an opportunity missed.

<comment> sahil-kang I just finished reading the OSTEP book[1] and it has a nice chapter on SSDs[2]. The entire last portion of the book is about filesystems/disks so you might find it interesting.

[1] [http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/](http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/)

[2] [http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/file- ssd.pdf](http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/file-ssd.pdf)

<comment><USER3> That chapter on SSDs looks pretty good to me. Their numbers for NAND page and especially erase block sizes are very outdated; more modern values are 4kB to 16kB for NAND pages and 16-24MB for erase blocks on TLC NAND. Section 44.9 on mapping table sizes is a little bit odd, because most SSDs really do have 1GB of RAM per 1TB of flash, and that expense is widely seen as worthwhile even for multi-TB SSDs. The exceptions are low-end consumer SSDs that cache only part of the mapping table in a smaller amount of DRAM or SRAM, and a few enterprise/datacenter models that use 32kB block sizes for their FTL instead of the typical 4kB and thus reduce the DRAM requirement by a factor of 8 at the expense of greatly lowered performance and increased write amplification when writing in units smaller than 32kB.

Aside from the two above issues, everything looks correct and relevant, and I can't think of any missing details that deserve to be added to an introduction of that length.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is unbelievably cool. It is a multi segmented key prefix Key Value store. Can someone just strap paxos or raft to this and call it a day please? Pretty please?

<comment><USER16> I wonder how close of an API this provides compared to RocksDB... If close, CockroachDB might be a good trial candidate

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> GitHub repo: [https://github.com/hse-project](https://github.com/hse-project)

</comment><comment><USER18> So, is this open-source firmware that runs directly on Micron SSDs, or is it an upper-layer thing that runs on the host system?

<comment><USER19> I thought it was firmware too, but it appears to be more of a key value store block level access engine, and improves mongo performance.

I got really excited thinking it was an open source nvme fpga core.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> HSE not to be confused with HSE: [https://www.hse.gov.uk/](https://www.hse.gov.uk/)

</comment><comment><USER21> Will it perform well on all SSD's, or is it optimized to give top performance only on Micron devices?

</comment><comment> ha-shine What does heterogeneous mean here?

<comment><USER22> Multiple types of storage at the same time. For example, two different types of SSD, or combinations of SSD and DRAM.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Why is this press release getting massively upvoted?

<comment><USER13> It claims to fix MongoDB

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Sounds kinda like a ZFS.

</comment><comment><USER25> Will this be a replacement for something like the overpriced and under performing proprietary products from Pure Storage?

<comment><USER26> You're comparing apples to oranges, plus that's unduly harsh.

1\. This is a KV store optimized (or claimed to be) for a combo of SSD and PMEM. Not a packaged, supported, appliance storage system.

2\. People who pay for enterprise storage do so for reasons beyond being too bone-headed to appreciate the joys of cobbling together production systems from the white box low-bidder and open source software.</comment></comment>


Full Text of ACTA Leaked [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.infowarrior.org/users/rforno/mirror/201001_acta.pdf

<comment><USER2> Where is the public outrage over this? When a government cannot pass a bill due to overwhelming public opposition, using an alternate means such as a treaty like this is policy laundering. It's disgusting and I can't wait to see ACTA covered on the Nightly News. This genuinely frightens me.

<comment><USER3> What reasons do print, TV or radio news have to cover this? I can't think of any. It takes more than a single sound bite to explain what ACTA is, and there are plenty of easier and well-tested ways of getting people worked up when consuming newsproduct.

The people who know what this is and what it means speak up against it constantly: internet users with a clue. The people left who routinely watch TV and read template-generated newspapers are by definition not going to care. You don't watch TV to get real information, you watch TV to watch TV.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The free software foundation has a campaign, their view is it limits free software and perhaps freedom in general: <http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/acta/>

</comment><comment><USER5> Thanks, didnt have the time.</comment>


Google Earth Engine - Platform for environmental data & analysis - <AUTHOR> http://earthengine.google.org/#intro/

<comment><AUTHOR> Also, animated gifs of some regions over time -> [https://plus.google.com/photos/+GoogleEarth/albums/587582297...](https://plus.google.com/photos/+GoogleEarth/albums/5875822979804092129)</comment>


Good books for hackers interested in quant finance? - <AUTHOR> What are some good books/papers to read for someone who knows little about quantitative finance but would like to know more.  More specifically, what are good books for those who have a solid math and cs background. <comment><USER2> You need to be a little more specific regarding your interests and background. If you are interested in theory, there are plenty of books discussing specific models. However, most practical or buzzword (e.g. HFT) books are rubbish (think about it: if you have a profitable operation, why would you write a book? Unless, like me, you have a screw loose :P )

If you want some practical discussions, "Trading and Exchanges" by Larry Harris is a bit dated, but nothing comes close. Most of the descriptions are still valid today (even if some of the mechanics have changed)

If you want something more along the lines of what a financial engineer would know:

\- "Options, Futures, and other Derivatives" by John Hull (goes over basic models without delving too deeply into theoretical math aspects)

\- "Stochastic Calculus for Finance II" by Steve Shreve (goes over the basic stuff but has enough stats to keep a grad student happy)

\- "Monte Carlo Methods in Financial Engineering" by Paul Glasserman (much more practical, and goes over subtleties of monte carlo simulation and other stuff like low discrepancy sampling)

\- "Modelling Fixed Income Securities and Interest Rate Options" by Robert Jarrow (walks through how to perform certain simulations, covers lots of little details most theoretical books skip)

If you want something more theoretical:

\- "Introduction to Stochastic Calculus Applied to Finance" by Lamberton and Lapeyre (Nice little intro)

\- "Arbitrage Theory in Continuous Time" by Tomas Bjork (Slower discussion, larger breadth)

\- "Brownian Motion and Stochastic Calculus" and "Methods of Mathematical Finance" by Karatzas and Shreve (Solid theoretical foundation, for the more mathematically inclined)

There was a good non-measure theoretic discussion of financial models but the name escapes me ATM.

<comment><USER3> John Hull is canon. Read it, live it, love it, keep it under your pillow. It is truly superb.

Nassim Taleb's "Dynamic Hedging" is the finest book I'm aware of on the subject of actually trading/managing vol portfolios. It's REALLY good. And dense.

"Paul Wilmott on Quantitative Finance" vol 1-3 are worth having as a reference, perhaps.

<comment><USER3> Let me add also:

"Analysis and Use of Financial Statements" by White, Sondhi and Fried.

It has nothing to do with computational finance but knowing more than nothing about financial statements and how to think about what a company actually IS can only help you in the long run. Also, it's quite interesting.

<comment><USER2> If you are going to go that route, I'd point to Brealey and Myers "Principles of Corporate Finance".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Trading and Exchanges: Market Microstructure for Practitioners.

[http://www.amazon.com/Trading-Exchanges-Market- Microstructur...](http://www.amazon.com/Trading-Exchanges-Market- Microstructure- Practitioners/dp/0195144708/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1320079747&sr=8-1)

I'm finding this a more interesting and detailed read than _Capital Markets for Quantitative Professionals_. For instance, the book traces through everything that happens when placing, executing, and settling typical trades.

On the other hand, I've taken the Canadian Securities Course, so perhaps Capital Markets is a better introduction for total beginners.

<comment><USER5> Trading and Exchanges was my detailed introduction to what really happens in the markets. I wish I could find a similarly detailed and coherent book on corporate actions.

It's a few years out of date, but not painfully so. Madoff was still a huge market maker, not a scandal, and it makes no mention liquidity rebates.

Edit: I should add that I had no trading background before reading the book, I was just an engineer at a finance startup who still thought "order" and "trade" were synonyms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It really depends on which angle you're coming from, when you mean "hacker".

Quantitative finance is all math, so in order to really understand it, you need a solid background in probability and statistics. Even the most basic concepts make heavy use of probability, so without strong fundamentals you won't get very far.

There are other concepts, such as risk-free returns, etc that also play a big part in quant finance. A book that I really enjoyed that gave a good background in a lot of these concepts was "Trading Strategies for Capital Markets".

One of the basic concepts of quantitative finance revolves around the Black- Scholes equation, which calculates a price for an option. I would suggest first looking this up as well as how it was derived, to see if you want to pursue this further. If you're having a hard time with this, then quant finance may not be what you're looking for.

A video tutorial website that seems decent for quant finance is Nathan's Lessons:

<http://nathanslessons.com/?paged=3>

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

If what you REALLY mean is you want to program trading algorithms, that's a bit of a different beast. For that you really need to understand how algorithmic trading works, how the market microstructure works, how to place trades, etc. For this there are a bunch of books but the best introductory book is definitely "Trading and Exchanges: Market Microstructure for Practitioners". It's a bit old, but still largely relevant and gives you a lot of the history. I really wish they would update this book, because I would buy it again. Another decent book is "Algorithmic Trading and DMA".

</comment><comment><USER7> Are you really interested in learning quant finance (learning how to mathematically model various parts of financial markets, pricing/measuring risk of specific instruments, etc.) or are you interested in programming systems for the financial industry (trading/risk/compliance/banking/etc)?

This book, "Algorithmic Trading and DMA: An introduction to direct access trading strategies" ([http://www.amazon.com/Algorithmic-Trading-DMA- introduction-s...](http://www.amazon.com/Algorithmic-Trading-DMA-introduction- strategies/dp/0956399207/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1320082050&sr=8-6)) is pretty darn good if you are a programmer. However, if you really meant "quant finance," then others can give you better suggestions :)

edit: I just remembered, Paul Wilmott and Hull have several introductory books if you are interested in what is usually called "quantitative finance." This means how to price options, futures, etc. From what I recall, this does NOT mean using statistical correlations to trade two similar stocks, making market-making models, etc.

</comment><comment><USER8> I am a quant. I work at a bank. We do a fair amount of portfolio optimization & price-analytics, in Scala, Matlab,C++, CPLEX. Its not hard to get your feet wet with financial modeling, though reasoning about the models does take an MFE or comparable education.

For example, here's a tiny scala pricer I coded up in 5 minutes to spit out the price of a google at-the-money call expiring 47 days from now, on Dec 17 using a 10k Monte-Carlo simulation.

\--

val risk = 0.28 // google has a 28% implied vol

val T = 47.0/365 // 47 days annualized

println((1 to 10000).toList.map(_=>Random.nextGaussian).map(x=>595 * exp((-risk * risk/2) * T + risk * sqrt(T) * x)).map(x=>max(0,(x-595))).sum/10000)

\--

Output: $23 & change ( its selling at about $23 right now )

To veyron's excellent list, I'd add Brandimarte's "Numerical Methods in Finance".

</comment><comment><USER9> People think all quant finance is the same as HFT. It's not.

A big part of algorithmic trading and stat arb is portfolio management, including deriving alpha, building risk models, etc.

The bible is: [http://www.amazon.com/Active-Portfolio-Management- Quantitati...](http://www.amazon.com/Active-Portfolio-Management-Quantitative- Controlling/dp/0070248826)

<comment><USER10> Exactly. Where I used to work, anyone without a quant background would be urged to buy a copy of Grinold and Kahn the bible you suggested above or "Quantitative Equity Portfolio Management" by Chincarini and Kim.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Any of Paul Wilmott's books. Either his single _Introduction to Quantitative Finance_ , or his three volume set. His focus is on knowing where models work and where they break down, and how to avoid using them naively. <http://wilmott.com/>

</comment><comment><USER12> Check out the quant.stackexchange.com site. There's a bunch of similar questions there with good answers: <http://quant.stackexchange.com/search?q=books>

Also, <http://quant.ly/> is essentially Hacker News for quants and often has interesting articles.

<comment><USER13> So is HN forum software? or did they just make a lookalike?

<comment><USER2> The arc <http://arclanguage.org/> source code for the site is available.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1390689>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There is a great list here:

[http://blog.hiremebecauseimsmart.com/post/2860511335/design-...](http://blog.hiremebecauseimsmart.com/post/2860511335/design- your-own-mfe)

Note, scroll way down to see the content, the formatting is screwy. Note 2, I'm not a quant but the math I do overlaps tremendously.

edit: previous HN discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2130508>

<comment><USER15> or hit <F11> to see the content

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Books I would recommend for beginners:

Evidence Based Technical Analysis: [http://www.amazon.com/Evidence-Based- Technical-Analysis-Scie...](http://www.amazon.com/Evidence-Based-Technical- Analysis-Scientific-Statistical/dp/0470008741)

Pairs Trading: [http://www.amazon.com/Pairs-Trading-Quantitative-Methods- Ana...](http://www.amazon.com/Pairs-Trading-Quantitative-Methods- Analysis/dp/0471460672)

Quantitative Trading: [http://www.amazon.com/Quantitative-Trading-Build- Algorithmic...](http://www.amazon.com/Quantitative-Trading-Build-Algorithmic- Business/dp/0470284889)

An Introduction to High Frequency Finance: [http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-High-Frequency-Finance- Ra...](http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-High-Frequency-Finance-Ramazan- Dacorogna/dp/0122796713)

Trading and Exchanges: Market Microstructure for Practitioners: [http://www.amazon.com/Trading-Exchanges-Market- Microstructur...](http://www.amazon.com/Trading-Exchanges-Market- Microstructure-Practitioners/dp/0195144708)

I also wrote a couple of very introductory articles, sadly I never got past part #2: [http://www.bitcortex.com/2008/12/28/pragmatic-automated- trad...](http://www.bitcortex.com/2008/12/28/pragmatic-automated-trading- part-1/) [http://www.bitcortex.com/2009/01/04/pragmatic-automated- trad...](http://www.bitcortex.com/2009/01/04/pragmatic-automated-trading- part-2/)

I am could mentor 1-2 HN readers that are serious about getting into quant trading. Just let me know you are interested :)

</comment><comment><USER17> Mark Joshi's (markjoshi.com) site has a pretty good set of information for aspiring quants (in particular, see the "advice for aspiring quants" bit).

The "careers" forum on nuclearphynance.com is also pretty good, and might also shatter some preconceptions about how easy it is to waltz into the industry. (note: nuclearphynance seems to be down at the time of writing)

<comment><USER15> Here is a reddit link that collects a few quants (from nuclear phynance mostly) saying that the labour market, especially the junior labour market, is tight and not likely to expand any time soon:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/quantfinance/comments/jl5ea/there_ar...](http://www.reddit.com/r/quantfinance/comments/jl5ea/there_are_and_will_be_no_more_junior_hiring_in/)

If there's a SE, discussions on HN, thousands of MFE's being minted, and so many books on quant finance topics, you really have to wonder if the quant labour market isn't saturated.

<comment><USER18> If this is true (and I agree with you somewhat) what are the new MFE graduates from Asia and here in the USA doing with their expensive degrees if they can't find a job as quant?

<comment><USER17> I'm sure the idea that there are _no_ jobs out there is exaggerated. A MFE graduate can still find a position somewhere in a bank doing something vaguely related to finance. But the days when anyone vaguely familiar with PDEs could waltz into a bank and quickly start earning $300K may be drawing to a close.

There will, however, always be lucrative jobs for those who are _truly_ brilliant _and_ willing to work on stuff which is kinda boring.

<comment><USER15> The NP posts don't say there are _no_ jobs -- just that junior quant has 1000+ applicants per position.

Jane Street still jingles its bells up at MIT, but for those who are less than six stdev's IQ or don't live in NYC / London, I would say focus on petroengineering instead of quant finance. (Petroengineering is the highest paying college major.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Ernie Chan's book, "Quantitative Trading: How to Build Your Own Algorithmic Trading Business ", is a good starting point. It's a nice blend of theory and pragmatic practice. Chan provides example implementations in Matlab to help readers get started.

[http://www.amazon.com/Quantitative-Trading-Build- Algorithmic...](http://www.amazon.com/Quantitative-Trading-Build-Algorithmic- Business/dp/0470284889)

Chan's blog is informative as well,

<http://epchan.blogspot.com/>

</comment><comment><USER20> The Complete Guide to Capital Markets for Quantitative Professionals

[http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Quantitative-Professionals- Mc...](http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Quantitative-Professionals-McGraw-Hill- Investment/dp/0071468293)

Great book. It's what I recommend to my new developers when we hire them without previous financial services experience.

</comment><comment><USER21> The best resource for mastering probability, and financial mathematics are Yufeng Guo's guides to passing actuarial exams. He takes the hacker approach to teaching fairly difficult concepts so you can focus on solving problems quickly. Most of the books recommended here are too traditional in their approach,(boring) this is a true hacker guide to learning how to frame problems correctly and then the math needed to solve them. If you are a decent programmer you can figure out the application afterward. I used them to pass the introductory actuarial exams and they are awesome.

Here is his page on actex, take a look at some of the previews and I think you will be sold. [http://www.actexmadriver.com/contributorinfo.cfm?ContribID=8...](http://www.actexmadriver.com/contributorinfo.cfm?ContribID=858)

</comment><comment><USER22> Two recommendations: "Options, Futures, and Other Derivatives" by John Hull and "Dynamic Hedging" by Taleb.

</comment><comment><USER23> The Origin of Wealth:

Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics [http://www.amazon.com/Origin-Wealth-Evolution-Complexity- Eco...](http://www.amazon.com/Origin-Wealth-Evolution-Complexity- Economics/dp/1422121038/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1320081538&sr=8-1)

don't let the false prophets of equilibrium theory and efficient market theory bend your ear too far ;)

if you get into looking for a job, there are a few books that list common questions for quant jobs also...

</comment><comment><USER24> Hull is always the first recommendation. After that, it depends what area you're interested in. You could move on to Shreve for more hard core quantity material, or go to Tsay (Analysis of Financial Time Series) for a time series primer. You could try Natenberg for options material or Grinld and Khan for portfolio management. Not too much useful material on HFT out there. Agreed that Harris is useful but out of date.

</comment><comment><USER25> If by 'quantitative finance' you mean option pricing then check out the books by Mark Joshi:

\- 'The Concepts and Practice of Mathematical Finance' \- 'C++ Design Patterns and Derivatives Pricing'

Also of note is Baxter & Rennie:

\- 'Financial Calculus: An Introduction to Derivative Pricing'

Once you've studied those and have a good grasp of Measure Theory, you'll want to tackle Shreve, Vol II.

And a brief plug of my (slightly out of date!) quant finance website, Quantstart.com.

</comment><comment><USER26> The Triumph of Contrarian Investing : Crowds, Manias, and Beating the Market by Going Against the Grain

[http://www.amazon.com/Triumph-Contrarian-Investing- Beating-A...](http://www.amazon.com/Triumph-Contrarian-Investing-Beating- Against/dp/007143240X/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1320093736&sr=1-3)

</comment><comment><USER18> See this thread with the same question for reference: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1447438>

also this one: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1238906> with a comment by pg there

</comment><comment><USER27> Isn't veyron a quant (or someone who works in finance)? I'm hoping to see a response from him/her.

<comment><USER2> I probably should have replied to this post, but I gave some recommendations in a post to the parent

<comment><USER27> Thanks for the detailed response. Do you mind if I email you a couple of questions?

<comment><USER2> go ahead. my email is firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Being Right or Making Money

[http://www.amazon.com/Being-Right-Making-Money- Davis/dp/0970...](http://www.amazon.com/Being-Right-Making-Money- Davis/dp/0970265107/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1320093736&sr=1-1)

</comment><comment><USER28> Create something of value instead...

</comment><comment><USER29> Causality by Judea Pearl, Probability by Jaynes & Elements of Information Theory by Cover.

The above will help you design trading strategies. For modelling derivatives and such, you'll have to check out books on stochastic calculus (not my thing, so can't help there).

<comment><USER30> I own and have read Pearl's book "Causality", and it does not relate to finance at all. It's a good book otherwise, though.

<comment><USER29> It doesn't relate to finance directly. But can be very useful for designing trading strategies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the answers everybody. I'll do a little bit of reading now. Nicely surprised about how much info got compiled here. Cheers!

</comment><comment><USER31> <http://www.quantnet.com/quantnet-best-selling-books-2010/>

</comment><comment><USER32> I thought the last crash basically trashed Quants and the idea you can model financial system :)

If you are looking into getting into high frequency trading take note that the world's exchanges are changing to crack down on some of the practices.

<comment><USER33> Disclaimer: I'm not a quant and don't know where to source data on this topic.

But from what I'e read, the size of the derivatives market was approximately 5-6X global GDP in the mid 00's. Now, it's over 20X global GDP. If that market ever crashed, we'd be looking back at the crash of '08 as 'good times'.

<comment><USER34> those numbers are really bad measures of risk. those are probably notionals on derivatives. if you're trading a swap, the notional may be 100B, but the amount actually at risk may be something like 10 bps, which is just 100MM.

Also, its not like if the market crashed, all of the value of the derivatives go to zero. Derivative holdings always have counterparties. If you make 100MM, someone else loses 100MM and vice versa. this isn't foolproof, as there is counterparty risk, but it makes the system a lot more stable than your statistics make it seem.

TLDR: The total risk of the derivative market is nowhere near 20X GDP.

<comment><USER33> I'm not challenging you on this, but I still remember Buffet's comment from years ago that they were weapons of mass destruction. What is the risk and how do regulators ensure that any untoward risk is mitigated?

<comment><USER6> Buffett makes a great deal of cash flow from writing options, so take what he says with a grain of salt.

"The brilliance behind Buffett's investment in Berkshire is astounding. He effectively used (and uses) Berkshire as the world's largest option writing house. The premiums and cash flow from his insurance business created dividends that he could invest in other businesses. But Buffett wasn't just buying Coca-Cola and Geico as many have been led to believe. Buffett was placing some (short-term AND long-term) complex bets in derivatives markets, options markets, and bond markets."

<http://pragcap.com/the-many-myths-of-warren-buffett></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


MacBook Air - <AUTHOR> http://www.apple.com/macbookair/

<comment><USER2> It is a fine machine, but very high-end consumer oriented. I use my mac laptops for programming, video editing, and running music applications. I actually DO have multiple batteries, maxed-out ram and use multiple firewire and USB accessories. I was quite disappointed that there were no updates to the "pro" laptop line. Perhaps this market (the "creative mobile professional market") is a loser for apple and they want to get out of that business.

Also, I purchased a MacBook when they first came out, and had numerous problems with the battery and power supply. Thus, the lack of replaceable battery makes me nervous.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's been said to death various places on the internet, but the lack of inputs, and the lack of a easily replaceable battery (it's "integrated") are a huge loss. It may be wireless and have few wires to deal with, but you'll have to deal with USB hubs and other cables when it's in "desktop" mode. Traveling usage (for anyone other than those who carry spare batteries) will probably be OK though slightly inconvienenced. I wonder if Apple will come out with a USB "dock" for desktop mode.

<comment><USER4> Why use a laptop in 'desktop' mode at all? Last time I used a desktop was... well... years ago.

<comment><USER5> I have a 24'' external display attached to a 2lb notebook. I like my small and lightweight notebook for traveling, but for longer stretches of work I like to have the big screen, too.

<comment><USER6> It has a DVI port...

[edit]: oh gocha.

<comment><USER5> I know, I was replying to the "why desktop mode" post. But perhaps I misunderstood it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Grrr. I've been waiting to replace my 12" PowerBook. I mean, waiting and waiting. I bought a black MacBook, but it has no soul. Oh well... looks like I'm going to have to buy one

</comment><comment><USER8> That's a pretty machine, alright. The "aesthetic" factor almost makes me want to preorder one (I really like the look of the mac, even with the aforementioned design flaws). I won't, though, because my 2005 toshiba satellite is still ticking and all my current development tools run without a problem on it, so I can't justify it as a necessity.

</comment><comment><USER9> There's a lot to like about this computer, but a lot to dislike as well, even for those who favor a minimalist aesthetic.

For example, designing the "Remote Disc" feature was great; telling the world with a straight face that "you can just wireless rent movies from Apple instead of playing DVDs" was just lame.

<comment><USER4> no, discs, DVDs, blueray, HD-DVD... they are all dead. My MacBooks superdrive is barely of use anyway since it has stupid region coding on it so I can't play half the DVDs I own.

I think it's great Apple have 'got it' as regards the future. In 5 years people are unlikely to be shoving discs into things.

<comment><USER9> Blu-Ray, DVDs, and HD-DVD are dead? Not so fast there. :)

As tempting as it is, I won't get baited into that particular discussion. My point was that the idea of eschewing viewing the DVDs I already own in favor of renting from Apple is preposterous. As they say in Propaganda, Jobs was "passing from the acceptable to the dubious" with product placement thinly veiled as cool minimalism.

<comment><USER6> Just look at what the college down to the first grade kids are doing these days.... disks are dead.

<comment><USER10> Letting people rent movies on USB sticks may work. They could rent out several movies at a time, and you wouldn't need to keep track of them separately. They could also throw in a few random free movies, too. And since the sticks are ordered en masse, they'd probably pay for themselves within a short amount of time. It's something Blockbuster could try to stay in the game, at least.

<comment><USER11> Why? The internet is a much better and cheaper alternative, and it offers the enormous upside of instant gratification.

Software might come on USB sticks for a while in the future, I think, but eventually even that will be delivered digitally. Valve has done this insanely well with Steam.

<comment><USER10> Heh. I didn't say it was the best way, just that it was a way. And I was only referring to movie rentals. (It doesn't make sense to deliver software via USB, since it seems like CDs and DVDs will always remain cheaper than USB sticks. The dynamic USB drive isn't an advantage for software.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Does anyone have a good guess as to where we are in the Macbook Pro upgrade cycle?

<comment><USER13> <http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#MacBook_Pro>

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This one seems perfect to me. Just what I need.

</comment><comment><USER15> Biggest concern: 2GB RAM.

No configurator option for more, and wording about RAM "onboard" and tight design makes me wonder if more is even possible.

<comment><USER16> i get along fine in xubuntu with 512.. _ducks_

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's the Sony Vaio as an Apple.

Seriously, I think I liked the whole "Something's in the air" thing when FSJ suggested it was a reference to Woz's flatulance back in the garage days. "You could barely work with the guy."

<comment><USER9> Kathy Griffin seems to be surviving.

<comment><USER18> Wozzzz Noooo!!!

Ha. That's the first I'd heard of that. To each their own, I suppose. Maybe she'll feel rich enough to not do comedy.

Oh horrid thought. What if she uses the Woz's cash to make more reality tv?!</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Command Line Power User - <AUTHOR> http://commandlinepoweruser.com/ <comment><USER2> Mmmm I was going to put my email, then I thought...

1) If it's no spam and free why aren't the videos directly accessible and you need to put your email??

2) He mentions sublimetextpoweruser.com but the page doesn't exist and a dnslookup shows there is no such dns record...

<comment><AUTHOR> It's SublimeTextBook.com - I've corrected it.

I'll use the list to let you know when new videos come out. The videos are free via email - unsubscribe at any time or use a burner email if you are really that concerned.

<comment><USER2> Ok now it seems more legit... Yeah, the content interests me but you know, there's so many shady websites out there that you have to keep your eyes open... There's a typo USING Z TO JUMP TO "FRECENT" FOLDERS

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha - no Frecent is a word :)

       Frecency:
           Frecency is a portmanteau of 'recent' and 'frequency'. It is a weighted
           rank  that depends on how often and how recently something occurred. As
           far as I know, Mozilla came up with the term.

           To z, a directory that has low ranking but has been  accessed  recently
           will  quickly  have  higher rank than a directory accessed frequently a
           long time ago.

           Frecency is determined at runtime.

[https://github.com/rupa/z](https://github.com/rupa/z)

<comment><USER2> Didn't know that one!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How Many Miles Would It Take to Demonstrate Autonomous Vehicle Reliability? - <AUTHOR> https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1478.html <comment><USER2> The findings were more pessimistic than I expected, such as how even testing existing fleets for "hundreds of years" won't provide enough evidence that they meet safety standards.

There is some potential for "accelerated learning", right? Intelligence/lessons/data experienced by AVs can be distributed and shared relatively instantaneously.

Also, I wonder if there will be an inflection point in which autonomous driving becomes popular enough, and human driving deprecated enough, that most of our infrastructure will be overhauled to be safety-optimized for AVs?

</comment><comment><USER3> It's not a question of miles, it's a question of scenarios. A car that takes on the entire interstate highways system but suffers no "close-calls" is practically untested, IMO. Also, that car never "experienced" rush hour in crazy places like downtown Cairo or the old&narrow streets of older Italy.</comment>