NYC Homicides Drop Sharply, Again - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/29/nyregion/city-homicides-drop-sharply-again-police-cite-new-antigang-strategy.html?hp <comment><USER2> To provide a little bit of historical perspective on NYC's murders:

      1990: 2,262
      1993: 1,927
      1998:   629
      2001:   649
      2012:   417
      2013:   145 YTD

[http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/crime_statistics/...](http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/crime_statistics/cscity.pdf)

<comment><USER3> You need to consider all improvements in trauma care since 1990. Some victims that would have died in 1990 would make it today.

<comment><USER4> Does anyone have the #'s for say, shootings?

<comment><USER5> From the linked PDF:

Shooting Incidents YTD 2012: 581, 2013: 423

Shooting victims YTD 2012: 685, 2013: 486

<comment><USER6> perhaps aiming abilities decreased? due to drugs?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There was a very interesting article[1] recently about the epidemiological link between leaded gasoline and crime.

[1] - [http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime- li...](http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-link- gasoline)

<comment><USER8> There's also the link between abortion legalization and the subsequent drop in crime, mentioned in Freakonomics.

<comment><USER9> The leaded gasoline theory better explains observations (gathered data). The abortion rights theory is still _very interesting_ , and worth discussion, but leaded gasoline is currently more right, to be amended and supplanted as we learn more.

Science!

<comment><USER10> Steven Pinker argues that since the separation between the cause (lead exposure in childhood) and effect (criminal behavior in adulthood) is so wide, there are almost certainly big confounding variables that we haven't considered.

> There are reasons to be skeptical of any claim based on correlations between > such widely separated variables as lead exposure (the cause) and crime (the > effect). Consuming lead does not instantly turn someone i nto a criminal in > the way that consuming vitamin C cures scurvy. It affects the child's > developing brain, which makes the child duller and more impulsive, which, in > some children, and under the right circumstances, leads them to grow up to > make short \- sight ed and risky choices, which, in some children and under > the right circumstances, leads them to commit crimes, which, if enough young > people act in the same way and at the same time, affects the crime rate. The > lead hypothesis correlates the first and last link in this chain, but it > would be more convincing if there were evidence about the intervening links.

source - [http://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/pinker_comments_o...](http://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/pinker_comments_on_lead_removal_and_declining_crime.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wonder how much of the drop in crime rates can be attributed to Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn increasingly becoming a haven for the superrich and poorer people being priced out. An "outsize share" of the violence is in East New York, Brooklyn, and South Jamaica, Queen.

<comment><USER12> Probably some of it, but probably not a lot. The very poor are not actually priced out of NYC. NYC heavily taxes the middle class and rich in order to pay certain poor people to remain in the city (including very desirable areas).

The main people being priced out are the middle class, not the poor.

<comment><USER13> To be fair, you don't just apply and you're in. You have to be in an industry the city wants to grow, and even then it's a bit of a lottery, highly dependent on how long you've lived in the City.

The absurdity of it though is that you can stay in the subsidized housing program long after you switch industries and make bank.

<comment><USER14> >The absurdity of it though is that you can stay in the subsidized housing program long after you switch industries and make bank.

My guess is that that is a side effect of the fact that you can stay _in your subsidized apartment_ long after you switch industries and make bank. That does not seem that absurd to me: in general, Americans are too rootless, so a policy that incentivizes some people to continue to have the same neighbors seems worth some amount of divergence from "perfect economic justice" or whatever you want to call it.

<comment><USER12> Why is it beneficial to subsidize people having the same neighbors?

Roots cause unemployment, since they make people less likely to move to a new job. If anything, we should be taxing the stationary rather than subsidizing them.

<comment><USER15> Roots also cause community, and make people more likely to organize to protect and improve the conditions of the place where they live.

edit: As a simple illustration, I am a typical single, firmly middle class professional who lives in a neighborhood that I have no connection to, is nowhere near any of my family, and I know maybe one or two of my neighbors by name. If the city decided that it wanted to dump all of its garbage in the middle of my street, end rodent control, fire, and police protection in my neighborhood, and add heavy metals to the water, I would just move to a place where they weren't doing that, and leave the people who couldn't afford to to rot.

As one of the members of the top 10% in household incomes, I could conceivably keep doing that until 90% of the populace was mutating in a nuclear wasteland, and I was reduced to a shitty studio apartment for $6000/mo in the outskirts of a walled community guarded by our private paramilitary massacre-rape squad, which periodically makes incursions into the wasteland to seize kitschy furniture to sell to us on the inside.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Apparently at least some of the crime statistics have been fudged.

The Crime Numbers Game: Management by Manipulation [http://www.amazon.com/The- Crime-Numbers-Game-Manipulation/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Crime- Numbers-Game-Manipulation/dp/1439810311)

So now I don't know what to believe. My guess is that violent crime has gone down, but not as fast as the police depts have reported.

<comment><USER16> My friend was hit by a car the other night crossing the street in Brooklyn (just bruised thankfully). It was a hit and run and when the NYPD came, they did everything possible to try and dissuade him from making a report. To the point where we had a mini confrontation with the cop in order to just get him to file the paperwork. It really seemed like he had outside pressure put on him to not file.

So I wouldn't be surprised if the NYPD is fudging the numbers somehow, though homicide is a tough thing to hide in crime stats I'd imagine...

<comment><USER17> In most places a physician has to sign a death certificate for every death. The physician can either be the attending physician when the patient died during care or a medical examiner otherwise. The death certificate often has a place for "cause of death", and it's the medical examiner who officially designates a homicide. So it's hard (though certainly not impossible) for homicides to disappear from the records entirely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Everyone is so quick to try to assign cause to any phenomenon. I'm going to remind everyone that correlation is a necessary but not sufficient condition for causation, and there is often a significant time difference between the cause and the effect. I'm not saying that the stop and frisk tactics did or didn't work, but saying that stop and frisk wasn't the cause because stop and frisks were lower in this time period isn't valid. Maybe the increased stop and frisks in 2012 got the criminals off the street that were going to commit murders in 2013. Again, I'm not saying that stop and frisk is a good or legal idea, but the argument that some people are using to dismiss it is a flawed argument and needs some more work.

</comment><comment><USER19> Buried in the 2nd to last paragraph:

"The program relies heavily on tracking the online activities of neighborhood gangs, in effect, trying to prevent shootings before they happen."

</comment><comment><USER20> "Police officials also credited their efforts at identifying and monitoring abusive husbands whose behavior seemed poised to turn lethal."

I found that interesting. I always felt that for domestics there wasn't a lot you could do, but I guess that's not the case.

</comment><comment><USER4> What's the drug scene like in New York these days? First you had heroin, then the rise of crack cocaine, but since then the murder rate has gone lower and lower (early 90's)

There's a very close link between the drug trade and inner-city murders.

<comment><USER21> This is an insightful post. The numbers posted above start at 1990 which was the tail-end of the decades of heroin, cocaine and crack epidemics in NYC. It looks like crime is back down towards a rate similar to 1965:

[http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/nycrime.htm](http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/nycrime.htm)

Not sure about the exactness of these statistics, just a quick google result that seems legit.

<comment><USER21> What the hell was this zeroed for? There is absolutely nothing in this post that is factually incorrect or presented in an offensive manner.

HN really should show who's voting on posts.

<comment><USER22> I'm with you on that. Or it should force someone to comment if your down voting, but that has notable drawbacks when a comment is just plain inflammatory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> One word...gentrification.

</comment><comment><USER24> 419 murders in 2012 in NYC, 154 in 2013 already.

London had 99 murders in 2012.

<comment><USER2> When did this become a contest?

<comment><USER25> NYC's extremely low murder rate for a big city in the USA is really nothing special compared to other major cities world wide.

I think the context is useful in comparison.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> While the reduction is indeed something to be pleased about, remember that in criminology, it's not unusual to see blips like this. It might be a blip, or it might be the start of a new trend. Too early to tell.

<comment><USER27> This has been a very long running trend here. Since 1990, crime in US cities in general has been dropping like a rock.

<comment><USER26> Absolutely, but they haven't been dropping 25% every year. You still get short-term rises and falls on long-term trends.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Runs faster in memory, allegedly.</comment>


A Lens into the Future of Enterprise Software - <AUTHOR> http://avc.com/2015/01/a-lens-into-the-future-of-enterprise-software/ <comment><USER2> > Enterprise applications must also be platforms if they want to scale into > the largest enterprises...every SAAS application should have APIs that allow > their users to plug enterprise software together

An API does not a platform make.

The author makes some rather uncontroversial assertions about the "future of the enterprise" but doesn't talk about how the architecture of enterprise software is going to change. This strikes me as the more interesting question since the developer's choice of technology hinges on this. The three points made apply equally to Rails as they do to Java EE.

</comment><comment><USER3> This isn't directly related to the article, but I cannot imagine wanting to plug into this kind of infrastructure.

All it does is commodify your work. Commodities have their price driven down, because they are, by definition, substitutable.

So, if you want to have your labor driven down to the global minimum for the work you do, sign up for an platform like this.

<comment><USER4> Yes, if you can get a good deal flow from your own network and sales efforts, it doesn't make sense to sign up for a marketplace. But for many small companies and freelancers, efficient customer acquisition is a big problem and marketplaces can solve that. Steady deal flow is more important to many people than maximizing revenue from a single deal.</comment></comment>


China boasts breakthrough in nuclear technology - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE7020DB20110103 <comment><USER2> You need more than a new reprocessing plant to significantly extend uranium supplies, you also need a new kind of reactor.

The Light Water Reactor (currently in use worldwide) produces a small amount of Plutonium while it operates. With reprocessing of both the U235 and Pu in Uranium fuel, you can get 30% more energy per pound. That's nice, but it's nothing like a fast reactor which can produce more Plutonium than it consumes... With fast reactors, it's possible to burn not only U235, but U238, which gives the 60x fold increase in energy mentioned in the articles.

Note that the nuclear waste that we've currently got cooling in dry cast storage is mostly U238 with a little Pu and U235 in it. Reprocessed, the current stock of spent fuel in the U.S. could power the country for at least a century before we'd need to start mining Uranium again.

Yes, the technology isn't mature, but the price is enormous -- essentially unlimited energy, since uranium can be extracted from seawater at a reasonable price if we can burn the U238.

<comment><USER3> True. China did build a new fast test reactor last year:

[http://www.neimagazine.com/story.asp?sectionCode=132&sto...](http://www.neimagazine.com/story.asp?sectionCode=132&storyCode=2056921)

<comment><USER2> I'd love to see some more details about that.

I get the impression that sodium cooled reactors with water as a working fluid in the turbines are a non-starter today. There's not only the reactivity problem, but also the fact that the steam turbines are H-U-G-E. I think commercially workable sodium cooled reactors will use something like supercritical CO2 as the working fluid, which can produce something that's simultaneously safer and much much cheaper.

<comment><USER3> Not an engineer, but I don't think the sodium/water heat exchangers are a fatal setback -- for one thing, there's an intermediate sodium loop between the core sodium coolant and the turbine loop, so any sodium/water interaction* isn't near the reactor core. I'm pretty sure all SFRs to date have had steam turbines.

* euphemism

> _but also the fact that the steam turbines are H-U-G-E._

That's not enough of a setback to stop most power plants in the world from using the Rankine cycle. You should ask an engineer why this is, I am not one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The complete lack of any details may fly on Chinese Central Television and Reuters.com, but I want more when I come to hacker news. What's next? "North Korea boasts development of time machine!"

<comment><USER5> This kind of claims has been heard in France as far as I can remember it. I don't know how technologies differ between French technology (super-phenix) and chinese ones, but I would be warry about the claims before seeing concrete results: fast breeder super phenix was supposed to solve most issues with civil nuclear usage, and it cost a fortune without producing electricity anywhere near reasonable cost.

Thorium-based designs seem more realistic and useful, I wonder why this is not investigated more: it is more common than uranium and produces less nuclear waste than uranium-based designs. The US has a lot of it, Europe has a lot of it so it makes sense for countries like France to look at it, etc...

<comment><USER3> I'd be wary of calling sodium fast reactors inferior on the basis of their past performance. All SFRs ever built were essentially prototypes; all their operating experience combined is less than what LWRs had in the 1960's. If thorium reactors had fewer spectacular commercial failures (e.g. [1]), it's largely because they had fewer commercial attempts.

(That's not to concede that SFR failures were entirely commercial -- political obstruction was a large factor too. Both anti-nuclear opposition in general (post-Three Mile Island and post-Chernobyl) as well as specific, extremely misguided opposition to plutonium breeding. Argonne's IFR project was killed for this second reason [2]).

> _Thorium-based designs seem more realistic and useful, I wonder why this is > not investigated more: it is more common than uranium and produces less > nuclear waste than uranium-based designs._

There's no meaningful distinction between FBRs and thorium reactors in fuel supply -- both have theoretically thousands of years of potential, so that it's silly to call this a factor. Nor is there a significant difference in waste production. (Though if I remember right, some minor actinides can only be efficiently destroyed by fast neutrons. This isn't an important difference; MAs are a small component, so you can augment a thermal-reactor fuel cycle with dedicated "waste burners" (e.g. [3] [4]) and still have a mostly-thorium fuel cycle).

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300>

[2] [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/inter...](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interviews/oleary.html)

[3] [http://energyfromthorium.com/2009/11/11/lftr-and-msrs- achiev...](http://energyfromthorium.com/2009/11/11/lftr-and-msrs-achieve-the- doe-nes-goals/)

[4] <http://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/reports/2002/nea3109.html>

<comment><USER5> I did not call anything inferior - I don't know anything about nuclear technologies, so I could not make any judgement of that nature. My argument was that fast breeder is nothing new in principle, and the claims as stated in the article are the same as the ones we heard in france when speaking about super phenix.

I don't think super phenix can be considered as a prototype: as a target production power of > 1000 MW, it is closer to conventional, commercial reactors (those are theoretical numbers, which were never reached, let alone sustained).

Thorium-based reactors are more mature than FBR as far as I understand, and my argument about thorium was against conventional reactors as stated, not fast breeders. As for supply, besides amount, the location also matters a lot. There is thorium in Europe, but little uranium as far I understand, which matters quite a bit.

<comment><USER3> It's not the size, it's the maturity. As you correctly criticize, Superphenix was non-functional much of the time: there were major engineering issues which hadn't been solved beforehand. This is the character of a prototype.

> _Thorium-based reactors are more mature than FBR as far as I understand_

Thorium reactors are even less mature than FBRs. Although that's a very loose category, you should distinguish between the extremely different reactor types which burn thorium, such as high temperature gas-cooled reactors (including pebble beds), which were the only commercial thorium reactors (for a short time); and the theoretical molten salt reactors, which unlike HTGRs are breeder reactors. For added confusion, some commercial (both LWR and HWR) reactors can run _partially_ on thorium, but are not self-sufficient without uranium or plutonium fuel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "the re-use of irradiated fuel and is able to boost the usage rate of uranium materials at nuclear plants by 60 folds."

Say again? That means you use _more_ uranium...

<comment><USER7> They're trying to use more of the uranium in the fuel, by extracting left-over U-235 and bred Pu-239 to use as fuel again. The U-238 can also be used in breeder reactors, once we get those going. It's recycling! Sort of.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, but that better _lower_ the usage rate, otherwise it won't last longer...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > "With the new technology, China's existing detected uranium resources can be > used for 3,000 years,"

Another failure to consider that energy demands grow pretty much exponentially.

<comment><USER9> It really doesn't...

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_Energy_consumption.p...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_Energy_consumption.png)

And that's ignoring the fact that there were less than 3 billion people in the world in 1965.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Olympics Ranking Adjusted by Population (Evening Project) - <AUTHOR> http://moshayedi.net/london2012/

<comment><USER2> This is not an entirely fair comparison. Each nation has a quota of the number of athletes for each sport it can send to the Olympics.

For example, in swimming, only two participants per nation are allowed. Some of the swimmers who got the 3rd place in US National Trials could even win bronze, but they cannot participate.

More often the case, there is only one national team allowed for a relay or team event. So even if China has 300 times the population of New Zealand, it can send the same number of teams and is limited to a maximum of one medal per event.

The methodology is biased against larger nations with a good pool of athletes.

<comment><USER3> > _For example, in swimming, only two participants per nation are allowed._

Really? [http://www.usaswimming.org/ViewNewsArticle.aspx?TabId=0&...](http://www.usaswimming.org/ViewNewsArticle.aspx?TabId=0&itemid=4537&mid=8712)

<comment><USER4> Yes, really.

I'm from Australia, and we have the same issue. The Jamacians have a similar issue in the sprints (I think you can enter 3 per event there).

I'm not sure what you think that shows - perhaps you are missing that there are many different swimming events?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For me India is the biggest disappointment of them all. They promoted the hell out of Indian athletes in Olympics before the games. They also consider China to be their biggest competition in every level (economy/military/living standard).

Whenever I try to get in to discussion with my Indian friends in the most respectful manner and try to tell them China is several orders of magnitude ahead of India in most things; I get ridiculed or brushed aside.

I have found that there are two things you can never reason with, religion and nationalism.

<comment><USER6> May be you have met wrong sort of Indians (nationalistic) ? I along with nearly everyone I know - understands that India is far behind China. We truly suck as society. Rate badly on corruption, infrastructure, women, minority rights.

There is nothing to defend.

<comment><USER7> Largest democracy? Governments can change without wars/madness.

Forward drive? At least the Indian nationals I meet in UK. Bags of self confidence and focus.

<comment><USER5> India has a lot of things to be proud of. There is no doubt about that. But I am not a fan of "largest democracy" as something of an accomplishment. I always interpret it as "a democratic country with a serious population problem".

<comment><USER8> The population density (according to duckduckgo) of India is about the same as the English one. England is doing fine, though perhaps getting a bit too old.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In India - it is just not possible to make a living out of athletics. It is largely true and partly just a perception problem. The only sport where you can make a comfortable living is basically Cricket and thats about it.

I know few of my friends who were state/national level table tennis and Badminton players but decided to let that thing go and opted for engineering degree because of pressure from parents etc.

Heck, I along with my friend are running a startup and one of the things my friend's dad asked is - "who will marry their daughter to you?". And this was for a brilliant embedded programmer who quit his regular to do this thing.

I can't imagine hardship (and hilarity) involved in finding prospective bride/groom for someone who "runs" for living. This thing is a no go clearly in Indian society.

<comment><USER9> It seems to me as an outsider as well that any kind of physical activity is generally looked down. Not absolutely but more in a 'if you don't have to, why would you' way.

Plus, it's so hot most of the time that any serious aerobic activity is difficult to maintain.

<comment><USER6> It is not about climate or heat. More :

[http://blogs.wsj.com/india-chief-mentor/2010/02/16/indian- en...](http://blogs.wsj.com/india-chief-mentor/2010/02/16/indian- entrepreneurs-need-a-hug-google%E2%80%99s-gandhi/)

I believe deep down Indians being bad in athletics is similar to being a entrepreneur is hard in India. The reason is - individual freedom or individual decision making has never been our strong point. So, the one who walks off the beaten path is always unfairly judged by the society. Sure, those who succeed on this path are worshipped like gods here, but when you are starting small, you are up against huge odds. And it starts from your family. It is hard work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The Guardian have one of these too, with a link to download the data: [http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/datablog/interactive/2012/au...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/datablog/interactive/2012/aug/07/olympics-2012-alternative- medal-table-visualised)

<comment><USER10> The NYTimes have something similar too: [http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/08/07/sports/olympic...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/08/07/sports/olympics/the- best-and-worst-countries-in-the-medal-count.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> How about a weighing based on how many people play that sport (weekly, say)? And if one sport has many types of race, just divide up the new medal weight by how many events there are.

So if 50 million people play basketball per week and 1 million people swim, and if there is 1 basketball medal and 10 swimming medals, then a basketball medal would be valued at 50*10 of a swimming medal.

This way, new events & sports could be added easily, without changing things much. This would also reduce the bickering that happens whenever someone proposes adding or removing an event.

<comment><USER8> But then you have bickering over what you classify together as types. E.g. does diving belong to swimming? Hurdling together with marathons?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Nitpick: the official name for "Holland" is (The) Netherlands.

Holland actually denotes only a part of the country and a lot of dutchmen do not take kindly to being called a "Hollander".

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

<comment><USER13> Nitpick++: the Netherlands is/are not taking part in the olympics; the kingdom of the Netherlands is (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_the_Netherlands>)

Also: even London2012.com calls the home nation Great Britain, not the United Kingdom.

<comment><USER8> If you are nitpicking about the names of states, you'd probably also have to call Germany the Federal Republic of Germany. And lots of other countries have more formal names, too.

<comment><USER13> Firstly, it wasn't clear, but I intended to nitpick the nitpicker.

Secondly, there is a difference. Nowadays, there is only one Germany, so there is no need for clarification. However, people would be offended if someone called it Bayern or Saxony. It surprises me that the team is called GB, given the well-known and IMO better alternative "UK".

Also, the announcers at the Olympics say "the kingdom of the Netherlands". I do not think they do that for e.g. Belgium.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Would be interesting to see it adjusted for GDP and/or sport budgets per capita. In Australia we invest a lot of money in our sporting programs relative to our population size.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the idea, here it is: <http://moshayedi.net/london2012/ranking- gdp.html>

<comment><USER15> You need units on that there table. Is GDP '000,000s of USD?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Here's a site with more information and better presentation: <http://www.medalspercapita.com/>

</comment><comment><USER17> Already done here: <http://www.medalspercapita.com/#weighted-per-capita:2012>

and has more options too:

* per GDP

* per year (Beijing, etc.)

* per total medals

* per GOLD medal

* per weighted medal (4=gold, 2=silver, 1=bronze)

</comment><comment><USER18> You should have google'd it, this link has been spreading on Twitter and the UK websites like mad:

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

it has also spread in Australia because, well, check the results and you will see why.

</comment><comment><USER19> One thing I never see considered in these types of rankings is the fact that in America, all the best athletes are tied up playing one of the four professional sports that make athletes a _lot_ more money than the olympics ever will. For instance, Robert Griffen III, the new stud QB for the Redskins, was a world class hurdler in addition to being an all-star football player. Imagine how dominant the US would be in the Olympics if all its most athletically gifted professional athletes focused on an olympic event rather than their respective sports.

</comment><comment><USER20> The Telegraph page that this is pulling data from is itself out of date by a couple of days. The official website might be a better source:

<http://www.london2012.com/medals/medal-count/>

<comment><AUTHOR> I tried using that page, but they were resisting about automated bots by giving "Forbidden Request" reponses. I'll try to find a better source though.

<comment><USER21> Scraping 101: Set you user-agent to mimic a browser, for example: _curl -A "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/535.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/14.0.835.186 Safari/535.1"<http://www.london2012.com/medals/medal- count/> _

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Needs to be at least (reverse) adjusted by number of athletes per country ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Summer_Olympics#Sorted_by_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Summer_Olympics#Sorted_by_number_of_athletes)).

This would reduce anomalies like Great Britain submitting approx. same number of atheletes as US, yet being less than a 6th in population size.

I doubt there is a way to adjust for submissions per sport and not sure it would be wise anyway since specialism can be viewed as a fair competitive advantage even if it suits the industralized or countries with older Olympic history more.

</comment><comment><USER23> anyway you look at it, GB is doing fantastically well :)

</comment><comment><USER24> How about adjusting by the number of Olympians per country?

<comment><USER8> There's an upper limit, and the bigger countries send all they can. (Unless with Olympian you mean something other than number of entrants?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Why not adjusted the ranking by GDP? Sport investment has more to do with money than population.

</comment><comment><USER26> Pretty cool.

One thing is that it's hard to anchor the figures to actual medal counts. I think normalising the data would be awesome. The normalisation should be such that sum(actual medals won) = sum(adjusted medals won).

</comment><comment><USER27> Isn't the general consensus relevant predictor/measure the ability to fund full-time athletes? A much more interesting (and perhaps fairer) list of adjusted medal total would adjust for an economic measure (likely GNP or GDP).

</comment><comment><USER28> The present ranking for golds is...

continental Europe 71

native English speakers 66

East Asia 56

Islamic nations 11

central & south America 10

Sub-Sahara 6

</comment><comment><USER29> I'd be interested in seeing a time series representation of this data, similar to <http://www.gapminder.org>

</comment><comment><USER30> I would also like to see the ranking "By national pride sentiments" , as i'm pretty sure olympics performance is just a meaningless show.

</comment><comment><USER31> How about this:

China only sent 621 athletes out of 1.3 billion people, and Brit has 1361 with a population of merely 62 million.

<comment><USER32> 1361? Team GB is about 541 strong.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Britain_at_the_2012_Summe...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Britain_at_the_2012_Summer_Olympics)

<comment><USER13> I guess the difference is the inclusion of the non-competing members of the team. [http://totallympics.com/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=231...](http://totallympics.com/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=2312) claims 542 for GB, and 386 for China.

GB has a larger team because it a) made an enormous extra effort and b) automatically qualifies for every sport it enters. Sports such as waterpolo, volleyball, football, and hockey typically admit only the world's top 12 or so of countries. GB probably has an entry in all of them. Being team sports, that adds up.

The interesting thing to see for GB is how far they will fall back in ten years time. They were abysmal in 1996 (one gold), but grew since.

<comment><USER4> Based on the Australian experience Great Britain will start dropping back in 12 years time (assuming funding for elite sports falls off somewhat like it has in Australia).

You'll get plenty of silver though...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Adjusting by amount of money spent would be neat too.

</comment><comment><USER34> Needs error bars.</comment>


Same guy? - <AUTHOR>

Both Brandon's:
1) http://www.stremor.com/technology.html
2) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1e1zzna-dNw <comment><USER2> Definitely _looks_ like the same guy.

But then again, I used to think Paul Newman and Steve McQueen were the same guy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope, definitely the same guy. Same name: Brandon Wirtz.

[http://www.xyhd.tv/2013/04/industry-news/things-i-learned- bu...](http://www.xyhd.tv/2013/04/industry-news/things-i-learned-building-the- most-powerful-language-processing-engine-on-the-planet/)

I guess he's both very very smart, and very very dumb at the same time, in different areas.</comment></comment>


Why it's hard to kill the Bloomberg terminal (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://marker.medium.com/why-its-hard-to-kill-the-bloomberg-terminal-61073482e496 <comment><USER3> A lot of people misunderstand the uses of a Bloomberg Terminal. I'm a former terminal user. Bloomberg introduced one of the first, and certainly the longest-lasting, social networks when it debuted in 1981. It is a social network whose average user earns more than $400k per year. There's not as many of those as there are Facebook users, but they have very specific needs, they are likely to know and need to communicate with many of their peers, and _they consider having a Bloomberg Terminal a mark of status._ Bloomberg benefits from the ultimate network lockin. If you work in a financial firm and you don't merit a Bloomberg Terminal, no matter how high up you are in HR, then you're not that important to the company. All those folks are messaging each other with their Bloomberg IDs, so they know with each message who's in and who's out.

For those who dislike Bloomberg's UI, guess what, many people within Bloomberg do, too. But over the decades, their users have learned how to get to their favorite screens by navigating through a pseudo-CLI, and those users do not want to learn something new. Anyone who has ever tried to build a tooling company of any sort knows how hard it is to ask people to swap out one set of tools for another. Your ideal UI for Bloomberg runs directly counter to the deepest desires of their historical clients. Mastering the useless difficulty of that UI, too, means you are part of the in group.

Finally, Bloomberg has set peoples' expectations across work spaces, and it offers many financial firms a standard tooling. Trader X used a Bloomberg Terminal at Firm Y, well, she'll get up to speed quickly with us because we also use it.

[edited to recognize the author understands the social network side of Bloomberg terminals, in line with comment below.]

<comment><USER4> What if Bloomberg made a "new UI", which you could easily toggle to/from, for the benefit of the people who don't like the current UI? Over time the number of people who use the current UI would become a smaller and smaller share of their customer base, and in like, 30 years, they could turn the old UI off.

<comment><USER5> Why would they though? If their customer retention is already super high, the only reason to make an onboarding curve more shallow would be to acquire new users.

Given there's already a social appeal to getting a Bloomberg Terminal, why would they invest the development time/dollars? What's their ROI?

<comment><USER4> Success hides problems though. If through some unforeseen means a competitor were to arise in 5-10 years who happened to have a better UI that works for a wider range of people, then spending 35 years saying "They can't choose anyone but us! Let them eat CLI arguments!" is going to look pretty silly.

If it would cost a tiny, tiny fraction of their revenue to shore up their UI to make it harder for a future competitor to disrupt them, that seems like a worthy use of money.

<comment><USER6> They tried it - nobody used it.

One thing people fail to realise is while not initially intuitive once you get used to it the Bloomberg UX becomes muscle memory to instantly load (they force all but the smallest customers onto leased lines) exactly the data you wanted in a dense consistent (UX on any remotely popular function is reviewed and guidelines enforced) easy to read form.

<comment><USER7> this. bloomberg terminal is an expert friendly system. it's not optimized for high conversion rates and casual stickiness, it's optimized for the productivity of people who are willing to spend the time building the muscle memory.

<comment><USER8> it is the Emacs of finance.

<comment><USER9> You mean vi right? (I prefer emacs myself partially because I feel it's more noob friendly)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > but the customer service is incredible. If it breaks or doesn't do something > you need, the company is willing to fix it or build it.

At $20k+ per annum cost I wouldn't expect anything less. That said we Europeans have been asking for non American date format support for years but it's a won't fix. So I guess the fee still isn't large enough.

A big complaint I have is why can't I keep the data I download off the terminal for an exchange if I'm already paying the exchange fees in addition to bloomberg's annual fee? It's like renting data. Also it makes it difficult to switch to a competing product.

Another mild annoyance is the left field approach their reps have about the tech that is visible when they make their regular visits to your office. Your company might have invested in developing data screens ,(outside of Bloomberg) and some months later those views mysteriously become available as new functionality for all users. It's even worse if you use their API; eg, you might write a private back-testing indicator specific to your market and within a day or two it appears in their public indicator list.

<comment><USER11> European here, American date format is better.

<comment><USER12> American here, and ISO is better than the common American format, though US _military_ date style is also better than the more common American format, and maybe better than ISO for some uses.

<comment><USER11> I mean ISO. It's lexicographically ordered. And gets more detailed / fine- grained reading left to right. (Year-month-day). I like those features.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The article doesn't mention what I think is the terminals greatest strengths.

1) Emsx, this is a network that every sell side client is on that allows you to trade equities. This means that once 2 guys have a terminal they can trade through anyone that will talk to them.

2) Research tools, every broker has their research setup to be received through the terminal. Research providers can perms ion entire firms or single individuals for their research so no in house tools are needed.

3) user profiles. When you leave your current firm for another one you can keep your bloomberg profile(models, settings, research entitlements, etc). Given how often people move around between firms this makes the terminal very sticky. Without being able to keep your profile and data people would be far less likely to invest in using the terminal

4) They have "compliance tools" that every financial firm is required to have by law.

Need email,IB conversation, even slack archived? They have BVault.

Need real time monitoring of employee chats? They can do that

MIFD 2 regulations? They can help you manage your research to stay compliant.

Need basic portfolio risk reports run? They have PORT<GO> to make compliance happy.

</comment><comment><USER14> Around 1990 I worked for a company called equinet that was basically the "Bloomberg of Australia".

At the time, the Australian stock exchange (ASX) ran its own sharemarket information service called "Jecnet". It was serial dumb terminals connected over phone lines back to an HP minicomputer/mainframe in Sydney. It was extremely popular amongst professional trading houses and institutional investors.

And the stock exchange decided to get out of the market providing information services, so they announced they were shutting down Jecnet.

So all the stockbrokers and institutional investors around Australia who used Jecnet - and there were alot - were going to lose their service. They would all be forced to move to a new system, away from the one they knew well.

And this guy turned up at equinet - I think he had previously worked for the ASX.

What he had done, is written a DOS Modula2 application which was:

\-- a little server application which ran on an 80486DX2

\-- it listened on a serial port to the ASX price feed which came in at 9600BPS

\-- it had a serial controller card installed with 16 serial ports attached

\-- it cached the ASX price feed

And here's the kicker - it pretty much exactly replicated the Jecnet functionality and user interface. (that's my recollection anyway)

So what this guy had done is effectively replace the HP minicomputer with a drop in distributed async server that cloned Jecnet.

So equinet bought/licensed this from him and went to all those Jecnet terminal subscribers and said "you don't need to lose Jecnet, we'll just switch the serial connection from the ASX to us". Brilliant success.

And in time many of those terminal users were transitioned to the much more powerful equinet Windows sharemarket information system.

But it was incredible at the time to see this guy essentially replace the entire functionality of the HP minicomputer system with this thing written to run on a 486.

<comment><USER15> That almost sounds like a domain-specific variant of QDOS->MS-DOS ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/86-DOS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/86-DOS)).

Is there anything more out there I can read about the history?

<comment><USER14> >> Is there anything more out there I can read about the history?

What history are you interested in? I don't think anyone would have written anything about equinet - it was alot of fun to work at - a true technology startup before startups were called startups. Founded by a visionary genius called Peter Dunai. equinet wrote what must have been some of the very first Windows applications. I joined the company in 1987 and they had already written equinet for Windows then so it must have been Windows 1 or Windows 2. Peter Dunai backed Windows when the rest of the industry was still thinking the future was OS/2\. Some of the smartest programmers I've ever met worked there.

equinet eventually merged with Bridge Information Systems - an American company. Or maybe it was Knight Ridder. Can't quite remember. The founder of equinet went on to found Iress which became the largest sharemarket information systems company in Australia and spread internationally.

The guy who wrote the software described above was John Cameron - a really nice guy who appears to have gone on to be extremely successful in financial trading software. [http://www.marketswiki.com/wiki/John_Cameron](http://www.marketswiki.com/wiki/John_Cameron)

>>That almost sounds like a domain-specific variant of QDOS->MS-DOS ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/86-DOS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/86-DOS)).

It was just a straight MSDOS application. I can't recall which flavor of Modula2 he wrote it with.

It must have been some pretty tight coding though because it had to run its end user application code and service the serial terminals and not miss inbound characters on a serial port.

<comment><USER15> Thanks for replying, and for the overview!

It sounds like the early environment had that developer/engineer-driven quality to it that makes building awesome tech rewarding, and that the operations were managed by competence that was able to sustain that virtuous cycle. Both incredibly rare finds (particularly nowadays....)

 _Wow_ , Googling Equinet returns 92 results (hehe probably 94 in a day or so ;) ). I thought I'd heard of them before. IRESS is very interesting, TIL about that.

I get the impression Mr Cameron knew what was happening with Jecnet, knew he could replace it, knew that the result would very successfully be bought/licensed, and went to down... very nice. (Just turned up [https://www.afr.com/politics/replacement-for-troubled- jecnet...](https://www.afr.com/politics/replacement-for-troubled-jecnet-in- sight-19890908-k3kiw), possibly not directly relevant)

Regarding QDOS->MS-DOS, apologies for the unclarified obscurity: QDOS, or 86-DOS, was sold for $50k to Microsoft, which turned the product into MS-DOS and made the company. The Equinet situation sounded similar to the MS- DOS/Microsoft success. (Until two paragraphs ago I thought Equinet was still a still-extant major company; I think my brain might've been conflating "Equifax" and something else ending in "-net", or maybe my brain just filed the name away a very long time ago)

I do agree that not dropping characters from 16 users (plus a firehose) was pretty impressive on a... 25MHz? 33MHz? 486DX2. (Haha, how much RAM did it have...) I'm not too familiar with Modula-2 but poking around a couple of PDFs of different Modula-2 systems suggested they supported ISRs (interrupt service routines), so perhaps those were used for character buffering. (Or, likely, _had_ to be used.) Now I'm idly curious: sure, the serial link was 9600 baud, but how fast did the feed run? 500b/s? 1KB/s? 100 lines/sec? (It would be interesting to know the average data rate of a major stock ticker in 1990!) Chances are this is a bit tricky to answer nowadays.

As an aside, it would be very neat if those early pre-Win3.x versions of Equinet for Windows were to ever fall off the back of a truck. They'd probably be as unusable as CompuServe clients, but still interesting from a historical standpoint, especially if they launch at all (there are people digging Win1.x/2.x-era apps off of floppy disks (and frequenting sites like winworldpc.com and vogons.org), and while I only poke around occasionally I've never seen any discussion of anything like this, ever, and I presume there is no knowledge it existed. Hence the historical interest perspective). Quite likely it's one of those "...uhhhhhh..." sorts of things though; and maybe others have been similarly curious before me as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I have a slightly broader perspective on BBG than most, I think. Firstly, I traded across a load of asset classes. Secondly, I used the APIs to both stream live data and download historical data.

What I seem to see in the comments is that "X is their killer app". But actually you'll find they have loads of X, Y and Z apps. You just think that it's X because most people are in a particular product.

The breadth is quite amazing. No matter what I was trading, BBG had a foot in the door. Want equity analyst data? Check. Want to look at OTC bonds from various banks? Check. CDS indices? Yep. CDS single name? Yep. Want a swaption calculator? Yep, even got vol surfaces for that. What about FX exotics? Sure. Just about anything I touched, BBG would have data or calculators for. Sometimes you found the data might be a bit sparse, but they'd have some upsell for you if you liked.

As for the APIs, there is a lot of digging if you're going to use the data for anything. Finding out exactly how some data column is collected is hard work, they don't make it easy to ask. You do have the upside that almost all data is collected the same way, so you don't spend a lot of time writing several download APIs.

There's also a lot of settings that affect the data that aren't obvious. Well perhaps it's in the documentation somewhere but it definitely helps to have someone around who has seen the quirks.

<comment><USER17> Speaking of this breadth, a few years ago I looked at Bloomberg's PORT suite of portfolio performance attribution and risk management functions to see what they offered and how programmable it was. On top of the usual extensive help docs, they had 56 white papers totaling ~1400 pages (as of June 2017) explaining the calculations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> > what they often miss is that Bloomberg is a great business because it has > low churn, and it has low churn because its IM function is basically an > exclusive club of approximately 325,000 people whose employers think they > are worth at least $25,000 per year above their base salary.

This is the key insight. They create exclusivity through their high price.

<comment><USER19> And Facebook was once Literally Harvard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The article misses two major points.

The social network is not nearly as valuable as the article makes out. It is only valuable insofar as the big banks are willing to trust you. If Societe Generale, UBS, Merus Capital, BNP Paribas, Bank of America, BlackRock, Citibank, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, and JP Morgan all are a little skittish about Bloomberg controlling the platform, they can go somewhere else and tell the traders they have to use it.

[https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/12/symphony-a-messaging- app-t...](https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/12/symphony-a-messaging-app-thats- been-a-hit-with-wall-street-raises-165m-at-a-1-4b-valuation/)

The real killer app for Bloomberg is mortgage backed securities. It is data intensive, it is analytically complex and the second largest asset class, with 9 trillion outstanding, and you simply cannot trade them without a Bloomberg terminal.

<comment><USER21> Mortgage-backed securities seem like a bad bet right now. Unless you're betting against them, anyway.

<comment><USER20> There are no bad securities; only bad prices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > Bloomberg is one of the best software companies in history

If you were a developer working with their API based feeds you wouldn't be saying that

<comment><USER23> > the user interface on the Bloomberg Terminal isn't great, but the customer > service is incredible. If it breaks or doesn't do something you need, the > company is willing to fix it or build it.

In other words the best from the customer's perspective.

<comment><USER24> So far as UI quality goes, I put stability (rarely changes) and consistency/predictability (clicking this may take a bit without feedback that anything's happening, which isn't great, but it _always_ gives a result, even if it's just an error, so long as the button made its little "I've been clicked" animation, and if it didn't do that, the click 100% for sure did not register) over everything else. IDK if this product has those qualities, but I'd take those over something the devs/UX/designers are always fiddling with in the name of "usability" any day.

<comment><USER25> It's largely keyboard driven. There is very little fluff. The keybindings and UI haven't changed for decades.

I loved it, and I'm on the younger side of finance workers. It looks serious and feels serious and is blazing fast.

If someone "modernised" the UI, they'd likely lose their multi-millionaire customers who appear just to have it for vanity's sake. The UX is a gating mechanism that enhances the network's value.

<comment><USER26> So vim but for finance?

<comment><USER27> I love this

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I think this is only surprising for some people because the tech growth- adoption mentality of the last couple of decades needed and benefited from UI that became increasingly optimized for 'ease of use', for 'everyone', for universality.

But bloomberg terminals do not need to be massively adopted. You don't need more (less specialized) terminal operators. That market/user-base didn't need to grow as much as excel users, browser user or CRM users.

As we reach peak digital tools/process adoptions I expect more and more specialized tools that don't try to be 'easy to use' first.

</comment><comment><USER29> In looking for more screenshots I found this amusingly blunt article:

[https://uxmag.com/articles/the-impossible-bloomberg- makeover](https://uxmag.com/articles/the-impossible-bloomberg-makeover)

> Simplifying the interface of the terminal would not be accepted by most > users because, as ethnographic studies show, they take pride on manipulating > Bloomberg's current "complex" interface. The pain inflicted by blatant UI > flaws such as black background color and yellow and orange text is strangely > transformed into the rewarding experience of feeling and looking like a > hard-core professional.

</comment><comment><USER30> Relevant to the conversation here are all the old comments on Hacker News about prior articles on the Bloomberg terminal, like "Ask HN: What's so great about the Bloomberg Terminal" [1]

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13736009](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13736009)

</comment><comment><USER31> My company effectively (yet loosely) competes with BBG in a small insignificant corner of the fixed income universe (asset backed securities).

My observations:

1- BBG is now part of a banks (and most large trading firms) infrastructure. BBG vCons are the standard way to confirm trades, its chat is one of three tools approved by banks, it has all the APIs to monitor every piece of communication, etc

2- BBG has proprietary data sets no one can get or on terms no one else will ever receive (Eg CUSIP).

3- I think that if the CUSIP license were more open and affordable, we would see many more competitive products. Instead S&P effectively has a monopoly. CUSIPS are the foundation of any alternative. The reality is you need many millions to get that feed and must charge hundreds to each customer. Few can do that

4- I think the idea of BBG as a social network is way over valued. It's convenient yes but if you have inventory other people want in fixed income you'll get the look. Every trader I know uses telephone and Outlook. It's a moat but not the biggest in my opinion.

5- BBG does A LOT. I believe that a given user typically uses some small fraction of a % of functionality (like 2-3%), eg Chat + news + 2-3 pages. I think if one were to compete against Bloomberg, one would have to focus on not being everything (like Money.net or Eikon which isn't working) but isolating key verticals and building a comprehensive alternative for that space. Going up against all tools everywhere globally feels like a fools errand.

For example, there is a site called Artemis for catastrophe bonds. Everyone serious in that market I'm sure has a BBG terminal and yet everyone also actively visits the site which is run by one guy.

<comment> asdfk-12 regarding 3:

Do you think that there is a possibility to transition across to ISIN, SEDOL, VALOR, etc.? Or will we be locked into CUSIPs for the forseeable future?

regarding 5:

Would you be more specific about how Eikon 'isn't working?'

Thank you for the informative post : )

<comment><USER31> Re: #3 Doubtful IMO. I personally believe that ISINs are the most viable alternative (and far less expensive to license). The issue is that you will have to get the industry (or perhaps just JPM/BOA/CITI in the US) to stop quoting and executing everything with CUSIPS... I think the best fix here is a legislative one personally. CUSIPS along with all corresponding identifying data on a security should be public domain in my opinion.

#5 I probably shouldn't have said that, at this point my anecdotal observation on it is too dated. At the time I worked in banking and evaluated it for our team it did a lot but not enough, was pretty but challenging to figure out and everything was being "worked on". Everyone I knew either had BBG or FactSet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> > Dating sites, for example, are unstable because the most attractive > prospects pair off, lowering the quality of the remaining user base until > the site can't recruit new users.

I chuckled at this line.

<comment><USER33> Why? The reasoning seems fine to me.

<comment><USER32> Exactly. The accuracy made me laugh.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Bloomberg is successful because they are a monopoly supplier of valuable information, and that's the whole story.

Their software is a shitshow, for developers and end users. Their data curation is often lacklustre. But none of that matters.

<comment><USER35> The article made it fairly clear this is not the case (i.e. a status symbol, an exclusive social network)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> If designers tried to design Bloomberg Terminal today, it would be a bloated javascript app that takes way too fucking long, the information density would be 1/10th of what you can fit on a screen, giant fonts, unnecessary animations and stripe-like-polish, large buttons, scroll jacking and hiding most important controls unless you hover the mouse over a region (read: undiscoverable), and it would have gradients somewhere with a sticky top menu.

We've totally regressed. We've lost it. We've become enamored with aesthetics.

Btw, it would also be available as an electron app on Mac, Windows and Linux platforms. And it will automatically update behind the scenes, who gives a fuck about your ability to control updates for a $25k/year business critical software.

</comment><comment><USER37> There's an app called Symphony which is trying (with some success) to take over the chat aspect from Bloomberg. Their killer feature is privacy - <USER2> from your institution's compliance dept, but from Bloomberg. Bloomberg's journalists could snoop traders activity on the platform. Understandably banks and traders hate that and so have funded and pushed Symphony instead.

<comment><USER38> Not only that, but banks would no longer have to get BBG accounts for their middle office to be able to communicate with clients (cutting out a huge cost - basically a 25k/person cost for a chat app).

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Another reason is it takes months of negotiations and 5 figure $$ sums per month to get leased lines in to the various exchange networks across the globe. Every exchange also has its own protocol, or variation of a common protocol, connectivity quirks, market model, data quality and normalisation issues etc. etc. Maintaining all this is expensive.

Market data is an expensive game to get in to.

<comment><USER40> I worked for Bloomberg for five years and Twilio for four. They're very similar in that regard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> A missing piece of this article is a discussion of Bloomberg's more or less successful competitors today: Refinitiv, Factset, Alphasense, CapIQ, Tradeweb, MarketAxxess, Enverus

</comment><comment><USER42> What is a Bloomberg terminal made of? A windows exe and a keyboard? I thought it was the whole machine?

<comment><USER43> Bloomberg terminal is no longer a physical thing (except for a custom keyboard with integrated fingerprint reader and function keys) and runs on generic Windows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Worked with Bloomberg for years. Its not a software company. That is like calling the DTC or NYSE a software company. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depository_Trust_%26_Clearing_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depository_Trust_%26_Clearing_Corporation)

1) Its a bit of a cult with its crazy NYC main office

2) Culture is very sales driven (a bit like Oracle) and up or out hiring policies. Smart pricing - like MS Office. They know who and how to charge (for example giving free FIX connections etc). I once had a rep break down crying asking for another terminal subscription otherwise she was going to be fired.

3) The terminal is a bit like vim. Once you memorize the keystrokes you can do anything.

4) Cool biometric 2FA technology with the card

5) A lot of what they have is done better by other companies except the sales and the bundling.

</comment><comment><USER45> Bloomberg moats: chat, media (breaking news, economic announcements with low latency), Excel and API integrations, UI buy-in (whereby a terrible interface with a moderately steep learning curve becomes the reason people enjoy it)

</comment><comment><USER46> So I once interviewed at Bloomberg for a frontend engineer role that I believe would have involved working with the BB terminal UI.

During the interview, I was told that the modern UI development was done in JavaScript using a proprietary framework. Found that interesting to say the least.

I got rejected because I couldn't do some fancy binary tree algorithm trick, but I walked out of the interview thinking I didn't want the job anyways as I am not fond of proprietary frameworks (short of working at a FAANG level company anyways... I would consider BB highly prestigious, but still not at that level...)

<comment><USER47> Bloomberg did a milkround at my university about 10 years ago - showing off their new terminal. I noticed it looked like it was running on Windows with their terminal GUI implemented using standard Win32 hWnds and GDI painting (you can tell by how text and shapes are rendered - and how it couldn't seem to smoothly animate above 30fps) - and the built-in newsviewer was playing a video using the Windows Media Player ActiveX control.

So if they have switched to Electron - at least that will hopefully deliver a better UX - it's not like users are meant to run other programs on those things (I think?) so they don't care about Chromium's memory usage.

<comment><USER46> I don't think it was Electron or even anything based on Chromium - I could be wrong, my memory is fuzzy. But I think they said it was a custom implementation that predated Electron. Don't quote me on that though. Obviously someone that actually works there would know best.

Another financial firm I interviewed at - Tradeweb, also had something similar. Custom implementation, not Electron, but in their case, yes Chromium.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> This thread talks about their implementation: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10197197](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10197197)

</comment><comment><USER43> For equities an Interactive brokers setup with a few hundred dollars for additional feeds replicates 90 percent of Bloomberg functionality at 2% of the annual expense. For fixed income you are SOL without a Bloomberg. Among other things, good luck getting basic bond runs. And while you can build out tooling to do fixed income analytics on your own it is cumbersome and will require a lot of manual data gathering/input making it hard to rapidly compare securities.

<comment><USER44> For Equities I am not sure IB supports multiple prime brokers or has as good borrow and lend capabilities as the big brokers do. Also it doesn't have access to institutional algos offered by the big brokers.

The big Prime desks support BB as well as Fidessa and other systems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I'm curious, do those terminal actually plug on regular internet?

<comment><USER50> Yes, it is just a regular computer running Bloomberg software. It is tightly locked down, you can't set it up to remote desktop into one.

<comment><USER51> Why not? How can it tell if you're remoteing? I though I've seen people use Bloomberg software over RDP and AWS Workspaces on Windows.

<comment><USER50> Bloomberg did regularly audit our Open Terminal. If you fall foul of their license agreement, you will have to pay up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> One thing I didn't see anyone mention is availability of data. We used Bloomberg terminal subscriptions and eventually paid of B-Pipe to integrate into our real-time pricing despite the api being absolutely horrendous and costing nearly $100k/month it was still our cheapest option given we would have to integrate with multiple other providers at lower but really high rates that added up to cost greater than b-pipe.

Financial data is kind of a racket.

</comment><comment><USER53> Have their been any open source attempts to make a Bloomberg Terminal-like tool using freely available APIs (such as [https://iexcloud.io](https://iexcloud.io)) and/or scraped data sources? It wouldn't have to be "real-time", but I think it could be interesting to have a similarly-styled, keyboard-centric "Finance & News" dashboard.

</comment><comment><USER54> There is a lot of trading chatter on Discord. Predominantly the younger and more tech savvy investors (or should I call them traders?).

<comment><USER55> They are also much lower in quality than conversations in Bloomberg.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> How is Eikon doing?

<comment><USER57> It's just so slow, and things that I was able to figure out using Bloomberg's autocomplete I'm regularly at a loss for using Eikon.

The transition of the fundamental data towards being refinitiv branded is also very uncomfortable.

<comment><USER58> It is amazing how slow the data item browser in Eikon is as compared to FLDS. Also, something as simple as HP is hidden in the chart view in Eikon...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Back in the days I wish I could afford one, just to read news for fun, but alas it is too expensive for personal enjoyment.

<comment><USER60> My local public library has one, you might be able to find access through a community college.

<comment><USER61> Which municipality?

New York Public Library provides access at their Business Center [1] curious if other public libraries have something similar.

[1]: [https://www.nypl.org/collections/articles- databases/bloomber...](https://www.nypl.org/collections/articles- databases/bloomberg)

<comment><USER60> The Boston Public Library does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> What does a decentralized Bloomberg terminal look like?

</comment><comment><USER63> I was hoping this would be by Byrne Hobart! If you haven't checked it out, he writes daily at diff.substack.com and is up there with Ben Thompson and Matt Levine in terms of quality.

</comment><comment><USER64> A Bloomberg for crypto would make a killing.

<comment><USER13> They have the command CRYP<GO>.

You can query real time feeds for instruments like BTC, ETH and LTC.

They have consolidated data feeds from about 8 exchanges.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> I never ever even heard of this one :) The article doesn't really explain what it is, but it sounds like a super expensive IM for financial elites?

But I don't work in the financial sector. I'd never want to either. But interesting to know it exists.

PS: A CLI/Curses interface sounds amazing to me though! :D

<comment><USER66> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LE8HiHZcgEE&t=1478s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LE8HiHZcgEE&t=1478s).

It's a terminal for access to market data and also has chat integrated into it. You can also trade on it if you want.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> $25k/year to be among an elite community of traders and investors even though the experts struggle to beat the market. Does not sound so good. You can get all the other stuff for free using thinkorswim and other services. Anything Bloomberg provides can be done for free or with much cheaper services. Reddit's Wallstreetbets is free to join and it seems people there have a knack for beating the market and knowing what to buy before it becomes really big. They have been bullish on tesla and amazon for a long time. Like any community, part of the challenge is filtering out the noise from the signal.

<comment><USER68> People on r/wallstreetbets don't have a knack for it, that's just what they want you to think. If you took gave 1000 monkeys RobinHood and let them trade whatever they wanted, a few would be incredibly successful for a few days.

On r/wallstreetbets, you're only seeing the few who are randomly successful for short amounts of time because they are upvoted and the rest are lost in the crowd.

<comment><USER67> Whether or not skill exists in the context of investing and trading is a hotly debated topic in economics and finance. Some say it does not exist after adjusting for various factors. I think there are some individuals (such as Jim Simons) who demonstrate skill that cannot be explained-away by chance alone. By following such individuals, you can possibly gain an edge.

>On r/wallstreetbets, you're only seeing the few who are randomly successful for short amounts of time because they are upvoted and the rest are lost in the crowd.

That may be true but that does not mean there isn't a pattern. if they are all making fortunes with Tesla and Amazon, maybe that is an indication to be long Tesla and Amazon, although not necessarily with risky options though. Just buying the stock is fine. The monkey analogy implies no pattern.</comment></comment></comment>


The Dilbert Blog: How to Be Creative - <AUTHOR> http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/how-to-be-creat.html <comment><USER2> I think sometimes this creative process of reversing conventional wisdom can lead to useful ideas. More often the way people hit upon such ideas is when the conventional wisdom isn't working for them personally.</comment>


Disney++ - <AUTHOR> https://500ish.com/disney-6e453e65f471 <comment><USER2> Ultimately, the article is a look at Disney's plan to offer the new live action Mulan via Disney+ for an additional $30 premium over your current subscription price.

My kids loved the original Mulan and they don't recognize nor understand what this new one is? No songs? No Dragon? My kids are completely uninterested in this live action version and we would likely not watch it even if it was "free" on Disney+. We certainly would never pay $30 to watch it. For what it is worth, they did like the live action Beauty and the Beast, but that had all the songs and all the characters.

That is my feedback specifically with respect to the live action Mulan. On the flip side, Disney+ is a ridiculously good deal for my family and we love it.</comment>


Twitter: Setting the record straight on shadow banning - <AUTHOR> https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/company/2018/Setting-the-record-straight-on-shadow-banning.html <comment><AUTHOR> > We do not shadow ban. You are always able to see the tweets from accounts > you follow (although you may have to do more work to find them, like go > directly to their profile).

I have no words.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, this was a pretty bizarre post. In effect saying "We don't _technically_ shadowban, but we do suppress content in other ways!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> > Tweets from bad-faith actors who intend to manipulate or divide the > conversation should be ranked lower

So, people who disagree with Twitter could easily fall into this policy.

I am really starting to wonder about who is feeding data into Twitter's censorship system.

<comment><USER4> I'm curious too, not sure if this list has changed but this is what I could find: [https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/a/2016/announcing- th...](https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/a/2016/announcing-the-twitter- trust-safety-council.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Tweets from bad-faith actors who intend to manipulate or divide the > conversation should be ranked lower

So, donald trump? Or does he get a free pass to be abusive and divisive but all other users are held to a TOS?

</comment><comment><USER6> Yeah they don't shadow ban. Sure, sometimes they will flat out suspend your account from 2009 (without warning) that's been doing the same job for years. @shareU :(

</comment><comment> j-c-hewitt What if social media services started offering different versions of reality depending on your political position? So you would pick a faction and you would not see the same suggestions and have completely different search results from if you were in the other faction.

Instead of pointlessly sending traffic to outside websites, you could just offer completely fictional news articles geared towards whichever faction you were a part of. Granted, this isn't that different from the situation that exists now but why not just take it all the way? If anything, the news would become more compelling and competitive vis-a-vis other more imaginative content without the need for any grounding whatsoever in fact.

</comment><comment><USER7> Anecdata: I don't use Twitter much, but people do send links to me occasionally. Ones from my conservative friends often go to "You are rate limited, please try again" or fail to load. Ones from my liberal friends almost never do.

</comment><comment><USER8> Is it just me? Did I just read a blog post that said "We don't do this thing I'm going to explain how we do the thing we don't do."

</comment><comment><USER9> It's time for us tech people move to Mastodon platform, the others will follow eventually.

</comment><comment><USER10> Time to roll out a decentralized alternative.

</comment><comment><USER11> That PR reads like a Monty Python skit.

"That's a dead bird!"

"No it's not, it's just having a little sleep!"

etc. etc. etc.</comment>


Coreboot Blocked from Recent Thinkpads by Intel Boot Guard - <AUTHOR> http://patrick.georgi-clan.de/2015/02/17/intel-boot-guard/ <comment><USER2> First it was "secure boot", now it's "boot guard"? It seems that the PC, which was once a _very_ open platform (IBM published schematics and the source code of the BIOS up to the PC/AT), is gradually becoming another locked-down walled-garden ecosystem.

The worst part is that the masses are going to think these anti-user measures are _helping_ them, "because security". They'll see only the "prevents hackers" part being advertised and agree wholeheartedly, or even if they realise that it means they won't be able to choose the firmware they run, they'll shrug it off as "I'm basically never going to do that, so why should it matter to me?" The majority have spoken for security over freedom, and lead us down this path, where eventually almost no one will own the computers they use, or be allowed to do anything with them (including write software) except as permitted by the organisations that control them.

This is really, _really_ scary. It's quite reminiscent of the dystopia in Stallman's "The Right to Read":

[https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to- read.html](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html)

It won't be easy to turn the situation around, but if anything I believe it will have to start with education - to reverse the brainwashing that companies and governments have propagated, and show people the power they can have when they control their computing devices. It is particularly hard when the majority are barely computer-literate, and there is vested interest in keeping them that way.

I don't think the situation has gotten to the point where it's necessary to stockpile older and freer computers, but that could be an option in the future. However, I'm certainly not going to be replacing my Thinkpad X60 with anything else for as long as possible.

I think this famous quote really needs to be made more aware of among those preparing to fight against the war on general-purpose computing: "Those who give up freedom for security deserve neither."

<comment><USER3> Secure Boot doesn't build a walled garden if implemented the way it generally is on x86: anyone physically present at boot time can add and remove keys or just disable it (unless someone's set a firmware password). The way it's typically implemented on ARM is a walled garden, but that's not inherent to the technology, nor is it required for the security benefits.

Boot Guard, evidently, doesn't require building a walled garden, either, according to this article. You can use it to securely _attest_ to the signature on the firmware, and seal your hard drive's encryption key to that attestation. That way an unauthorized modification to the firmware won't result in your private data being stolen, but the computer remains usable with an intentional modification to the firmware, whether it's Coreboot or a manual binary patch or whatever.

Freedom and security shouldn't be a tradeoff. Security includes making sure authorized use of the system is permitted. Freedom involves making sure that my computer isn't acting against my interests. We need to stop portraying this as a tradeoff, and we should make it clear that we'll accept (and maybe even demand) security when it is done in the service of computing freedom.

(x86) Secure Boot was a big step forward here for both freedom and security: it lets me make sure that only an OS I choose runs on my machine, and that no nonfree OS, not even the one that came with the computer, will boot up unless I want it to. It also (obviously) played well into the security demands of the wider market. We should be demanding more things like Secure Boot, alongside fewer things like Boot Guard.

<comment><USER4> I don't know why people are portraying measured boot (i.e., allowing the TPM to prove that your system is running some particular set of code) as unilaterally good. Remote attestation was one of the key parts features of trusted computing that people got up in arms about back in the way[1]. After all, in theory, it could be used to enable DRM that is very difficult to crack, making it more difficult to make fair use[2] of videos and other files one has access to. I admit that it doesn't seem terribly dangerous in practice; the portability problems that have prevented remote attestation from being used for DRM in practice on existing hardware are not affected by the TPM chain of trust getting shored up, and the Windows kernel is never going to be anywhere near unhackable. (Instead, DRM on PCs is probably eventually going to use Intel SGX, which allows protecting a userspace process without having to trust the rest of the system, making trusted boot unnecessary; but a harm is not well justified by the existence of a greater harm.) And on the flip side, using TPMs to secure user data against attackers sounds like a very nice feature, especially given the level of sophistication of the threats some people face these days. So I agree that in a cost-benefit analysis, having measured boot is better than not, and it may as well be properly secured. But there _is_ a cost-benefit analysis to having it; it's not pure good.

[1] [https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you- trust.html](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.html)

[2] I don't mean fair use in a strictly legal sense, because I live in the US where the DMCA forbids breaking DRM even for what would otherwise be fair use under copyright law; but I think it should be fairly uncontroversial that doing so is moral.

<comment><USER3> Something that occurred to me recently about the cost-benefit analysis:

Historically, hackers have been very good at taking software that was meant to be secure, and breaking it. As you point out, the Windows kernel was never going to be unhackable. iOS (iPad/iPhone), which is arguably the state of the art in walled-garden verified boot with hardware support, has been reliably jailbroken.

Historically, hackers have been very _bad_ at writing software that was meant to be secure, and keeping it secure.

I'm a lot more confident in our ability, as the hacker movement, to destroy any DRM scheme that wants to use a TPM than to successfully make a general- purpose OS that keeps someone's files secure. And that worries me. If these two were somehow a direct tradeoff (which they're not), I'm pretty sure I'd prefer a world where DRM worked but security breaches and malware weren't an everyday occurrence.

<comment><USER4> As someone who's spent a good amount of time hacking various devices, I have an odd split mind on security. I detest activities such as those of the NSA and more traditional malware authors and think it would be great if people could trust their computers (never mind that I like sci-fi and wonder whether we will sort this out by the time computers store people's brains and whatnot). But then there are cases like iOS where compromising the system really can be for the benefit of users... but iOS vulnerabilities can be and are used for nefarious purposes (in fact, one of the recently leaked documents mentions that the NSA once used one of my jailbreaks), and jailbreaking has become necessary for fewer and fewer use cases over the years - if I want an open system so much why don't I switch to an Android phone that I can unlock legitimately, without depending on vulnerabilities? It doesn't seem like there will be a scarcity of those in the near future... Should I feel proud of having gotten vulnerabilities fixed by using them in jailbreaks, or guilty that I attempted to maximize rather than minimize the exposure window? And then emotionally, there's a big part of me that always roots for things to be insecure, since hacking is fun and represents a fairly big part of my life. I think I should take joy in the prospect that I might become obsolete (especially since that won't happen for a long time no matter what I do :p), but it's hard to actually feel that way.

Anyway, there are a few recent developments which make me feel somewhat anxious, which I guess means they're good. Among them are Rust and seL4.

Rust, which I'm quite enthusiastic about when not in a hacking mindset, could be one of a few languages that can get rid of the assumption that fast/small/light tools have to be written in C or C++ and thus memory unsafe. To name a particularly egregious case, it strikes me as ridiculous that OpenBSD's ntpd feels the need to include a privilege separation feature, despite being a low-thousands-of-lines implementation of a tiny protocol; I mean, there are probably no vulnerabilities in that particular codebase anyway, and given a danger, being paranoid is a good thing - but in the context of the complexity of something like NTP, we have so many CPU cycles to spare that programs simply should not be a typo away from magically turning malformed input into arbitrary code execution. (To be fair, high-level languages have their own vulnerability classes which might allow the same, but at least you're not constantly teetering on the edge of the cliff. Well, unless the language is bash :) And of course Rust is aimed at far more performance critical scenarios - they aim to build a whole browser which is competitive with existing ones performance-wise while being mostly safe code.

seL4 as a product is overhyped: the kernel they verified is tiny, and the proof enormous. It will be a long, long time before a significant fraction of the code running on a production system will be formally verified. _However_ , whereas before there was always a hope of finding a critical bug in even the innermost low level bits of every system... well, now there is one system where that's theoretically impossible. That's a step. Perhaps, slowly but surely, there will be more steps, more places created where bugs (even logic errors, panics, and other types not caught by languages like Rust) cannot lurk. In the long run, that's certainly the type of software I want running my brain!

<comment><USER5> Fully agreed about Rust; getting rid of _fundamental issues_ rather than perpetuating the cat-and-mouse problem of chasing classes of vulnerabilities, which sometimes are even intentional backdoors is fantastic. I hope we see more languages like Rust.

But every time I hear about it, people are disappointed by the language. So how is that going?

<comment><USER4> I think it goes something like this:

\- For some reason, Rust posts constantly make the front page of HN. Either the Rust community includes a lot of HN users, or there are just a lot of people who like to hear about it.

\- Rust is highly imperfect (as you would expect it to be). There's the constant breakage, which is supposed to end in like 2 or 3 months with 1.0; as a complex language it has more warts than, say, Go, and requires a deeper understanding to use well (i.e. you really benefit from experience with C++); the borrow checker takes some getting used to, I've heard, before you don't feel like you're fighting with it (haven't written enough code myself to get to that point); builds are slow; it doesn't have everyone's favorite pet feature; etc. Especially since people don't seem to feel the need to spend very much time getting to know Rust before writing blog posts and especially HN comments about it, that leads to a lot of complaints, which due to the previous point show up disproportionately on HN. (Actually, anecdotally I think most of the posts are positive, but every post about Rust is used to some extent as a "general Rust discussion" comment thread, just like every other topic. :)

\- With all these complaints, the simple but critical point gets drowned out that the language _works_ , pretty much - satisfies to a good extent if not perfectly its performance, safety, and readability goals. (For proof that it works in the large, consider that Servo is over 400k lines of Rust code and implements an already quite featureful HTML renderer[1].)

But I think there will be a good amount of positive hype once 1.0 gets out the door. Can't wait.

[1] [http://kmcallister.github.io/papers/2015-servo-experience- re...](http://kmcallister.github.io/papers/2015-servo-experience-report- draft1.pdf)

<comment><USER5> Thank you for the perspective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Lenovo Broadwell devices are attempting to dig themselves out of the hole caused by Haswell trackpads. Probably not a good time to cripple them.

How would Lenovo react if Broadwell devices began receiving many service calls under warranty? Presumably the lock could be changed by a motherboard replacement.

Related article, [http://www.pcworld.com/article/2883903/how-intel-and-pc- make...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/2883903/how-intel-and-pc-makers- prevent-you-from-modifying-your-pcs-firmware.html), _".. New thinkpad's can't be used anymore for coreboot. Especially the U and Y Intel CPU Series. They come with Intel Boot Guard and you are won't be able to boot anything which is unsigned and not approved by OEM. This means the OEM are fusing SHA256 public key hashes into the southbridge.

... to their credit, Intel does allow PC manufacturers to configure the hardware in a different way. The real way to get that open hardware seems to be to build it from scratch and make the right decisions along the way, as Purism is trying to do. If you want this sort of open hardware, be prepared to vote with your wallet."_

Purism: [https://www.crowdsupply.com/purism/librem- laptop](https://www.crowdsupply.com/purism/librem-laptop)

<comment><USER7> Unfortunately it looks like Purism also has some problems in this regard.

[http://blogs.coreboot.org/blog/2015/02/23/the-truth-about- pu...](http://blogs.coreboot.org/blog/2015/02/23/the-truth-about-purism-why- librem-is-not-the-same-as-libre/)

<comment><USER8> Side question: "...Coupled with their desire to include an Nvidia GPU..." that's the first I've heard this. I know Nvidia was hoping to get an x86 license from their lawsuit vs Intel.

<comment><USER6> Nvidia setted their lawsuit without an x86 license, [http://www.anandtech.com/show/4122/intel-settles-with- nvidia...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/4122/intel-settles-with-nvidia-more- money-fewer-problems-no-x86/2)

<comment><USER8> alright, I thought for a moment it was about something else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> That's why I always emphasize that TPM (UEFI/SecureBoot/Boot Guard etc.) are not the right way for open source systems (Linux etc.).

The Linux community should stop to fiddle with locked-down boot systems. They actually should boycott locked-down systems and only support hardware vendors who officially support Linux. Many of them are presented at LinuxGizmos. I believe that such hardware vendors are much more open to the demands of the Opensource Community than vendors who produce locked-down systems.

[http://linuxgizmos.com](http://linuxgizmos.com)

<comment><USER3> > TPM (UEFI/SecureBoot/Boot Guard etc.)

These are four different technologies. Some of them help your freedom. Some of them hurt it. Some of them have nothing to do with your freedom at all. It doesn't really do anyone any favors to lump them all in the same category; it certainly doesn't make hardware vendors inclined to think you're making cogent arguments.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I have no problem with a cryptographically verified boot process, so long as I control the key or verification step.

Unfortunately, Intel stripped this freedom from CPU owners by allowing OEMs to lock down the boot process in a manner that cannot be bypassed. Soon Coreboot will be all but dead for machines with Intel processors -- other than Chromebooks which ship with Coreboot. Owners will have to accept the bios that vendors give us.

The UEFI legacy boot option also seems to be on its way out, so I expect there will be fewer OS choices in our future too.

<comment><USER10> I don't think the option to disable Secure Boot is going anywhere at this point though.

<comment><AUTHOR> "Secure Boot" is a farcical misnomer when it prevents you from replacing Windows with OpenBSD.

<comment><USER3> Why can't you boot it from GRUB?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> When this came up on Phoronix, I suggested a jumper to disable it.

<comment> micro-ram Second this. Put a switch under the memory door. Problem solved.

<comment><USER11> While we're at it, we need something similarly physical for IPMI BMCs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I recently purchase a Dell Inspiron Laptop which gave me a nightmare to install Windows 7 on it.

The "secure Boot" isn't to secure the boot against rootkit, but secure from "unauthorized" or "unsupported" install your favorite operate system. In this case, I cannot install windows 7 on my brand new laptop.

I still remember the SIM card lock from carriers years ago, so if i am the vigilant, I am going to ask users to pay upfront to unlock "Secure Lock" so that they can install another operate system.

</comment><comment><USER13> Original mailing list thread: [http://www.coreboot.org/pipermail/coreboot/2015-February/thr...](http://www.coreboot.org/pipermail/coreboot/2015-February/thread.html#79207)

Scary times indeed.

<comment><USER14> [http://www.coreboot.org/pipermail/coreboot/2015-February/079...](http://www.coreboot.org/pipermail/coreboot/2015-February/079208.html)

>This means the OEM are fusing SHA256 public key hashes into the southbridge.

SHA256 public keys, scary indeed.

<comment><USER15> SHA256 public key hashes

<comment><USER14> Maybe they meant "HMAC" or "Fingerprint".

<comment><USER16> Intel likes to use SHA256(pubkey) for their verification schemes. I guess that reduces the amount of storage while sufficiently secure.

Details are in [http://apress.com/9781430265719](http://apress.com/9781430265719)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Ladies and gentleman lenovo.</comment>