Uber will not re-apply for self-driving car permit in California - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/27/uber-will-not-reapply-for-self-driving-car-permit-in-california/ <comment><USER2> I enjoy hating on Uber as much as the next person, but this honestly just sounds like shrewd focusing of effort in light of recent events on Uber's part. Their permit was expiring, and there was going to be a load of paperwork along with probably lengthy boardroom meetings with authorities explaining what went wrong and why it won't happen again, if Uber wanted to renew.

I see no reason (in this article, at least) to suspect that Uber won't re- apply at a later date when they have a better handle on what went wrong in Tempe.

<comment><USER3> Well it's not like they made a booboo, and some bugs caused some inconvenience to a few or many people. Someone died.

<comment><USER4> If Uber is not found legally at fault which seems likely given the circumstances and based on opinions from people with legal expertise in these cases, I highly doubt they will let themselves got derailed completely by this. Too much money is at stake.

Further, we don't stop using trains, or buses when a pedestrian makes an error and gets killed because they "could have not been hit, maybe". For those who have paid attention to those other accidents(even though the local transit isn't as sexy to hate on as Uber, and they didn't involve AI), it can actually be quite shocking how little of a blip it causes in the transportation system.

<comment><USER5> Self-driving cars have to be _at least_ as safe as human-driven ones for them to ever become accepted and thus widespread. Realistically, they need to be many times safer than human-driven cars for acceptance. It doesn't matter who's technically at fault; they cannot cause more deaths than human drivers. Everyone makes mistakes and they don't deserve to be killed by an algorithm for it.

<comment><USER6> I'm going to say something that I suspect many will quietly agree with but may not be willing to say out loud.

I'm confident that self-driving cars will eventually be safer than human driven ones. I'm not confident that this can be realistically achieved without killing some unfortunate bystanders in the process of getting to that point. That doesn't mean we should accept these cars running amok killing people all over the place. It doesn't mean I think this specific case involving Uber is "reasonable" either. I just think, in a general sense, a realist has to be able to try to find some balance between short term lives lost and long term lives saved.

<comment><USER7> The thing is that any other industry that works like this(we have to accept some people will be hurt/die to achieve progress) - like the medical testing industry - is extremely heavily regulated and most crucially, all participants in testing are consenting to being tested. Letting autonomous cars on public roads is testing it on people who have not consented being tested on. If I get hit by an autonomous car I really don't care that thanks to this Uber/Google/Waymo/Whoever gets to improve their algorithm. I don't care how they want to do it - but I don't want them testing this stuff on public roads.

<comment><USER8> Can you give an example of an industry that began with regulation?

Medical industry is heavily regulated now, but regulations appeared _after_ it has grown in size. Similarly transport, construction, and anything else I could think of.

The reason it happens this way is that it's hard to set up standards and practices for something that is entirely new - when you set them up too soon, they may end up impossible to achieve, and block innovation altogether.

<comment><USER9> Funnily enough, the automobile industry is one of them. The Locomotives on Highways Act predated the car by decades in the UK, and its regulations were _extremely_ onerous. The relaxation of speed limits from 4mph to 14mph and removing of the need for a human escort on foot helped, but we had functioning automobile manufacturing in the UK before then. The speed limit on UK roads was 20mph or lower until the 1930s, and Britons built a thriving domestic car manufacturing industry and even broke land speed records several times in that period.

(Similarly, and less comically in retrospect, crash testing regimes resulted in a lot of safety improvements that would have been unlikely as a result of purely commercial considerations)

<comment><USER10> The horse and railway industries lobbied for that act of course.

The 14mph and no red flag escort was only for machines <3 tonnes, in 1896, probably only a few 100 machines on the road then anyway

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> for those who haven't seen it, the manufacturer of the lidar system believes their hardware was functioning normally, and the problem is in uber's software: [https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2018/03/23/lidar- ma...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2018/03/23/lidar-maker- velodyne-baffled-by-self-driving-ubers-failure-to-avoid- pedestrian/#56a42cec5cc2)

</comment><comment><USER12> Just because they will not re-apply in California now doesn't mean their efforts are stopping - and it doesn't mean they won't apply for permits in different states or just re-apply in California at a later date.

HN seems to be jumping to radical conclusions on the level of Reddit these days but I get that everyone is a bit emotional around Facebook / Uber during this news cycle...

<comment><AUTHOR> My guess is that they don't want to be seen asking for something they'll publically fail to get. At this point, outside of the world of tech, people who were downright alarmed by SDV's now have a place to hang their hat. Politicians follow the direction of popular sentiment, and they're not going to risk the next Uber fatality having their stamp on it. They'll be thinking the next corpse might be a child's as well, and how that would hurt their prospects for re-election.

On HN there are a lot of Vulcans who have stats ready to go about human driver fatalities, but that's far out of touch with the average voter. Fear = Dread/Sense of Control, and most people think they have a high degree of control as the driver of a car. I'm not arguing that they're right, but they're the majority.

<comment><USER13> If I wanted to put Uber, Waymo, and other self driving companies out of business, I'd run on the platform of not allowing Silicon Valley technocrats deciding which kids in the street ate going to die the next time their reckless attempt at disruption goes astray.

It doesn't matter if you're being intellectually disingenuous if you think you can win on the platform.

<comment><USER14> But you'd be out-voted by elderly people who are afraid of losing their mobility when they lose the ability to drive a car.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ever been to FL or AZ? The oldest people you've ever seen are still driving, slowly, dangerously, and happily. No one is taking their licenses with the AARP, around. Meanwhile you may be overestimating the love very old people have for automation, the prospect of being killed by an SDV, or being driven around town by a machine.

<comment><USER15> I'm from AZ and there are plenty of people there who don't drive because they're too old to.

<comment><USER13> My grandmother is 86, lives in Florida, and the state renews her license annually with no qualms.

<comment><USER15> I wasn't talking about whether the law forbids it. There are plenty of people who get too old and frail to drive, and stop driving of their own accord, without the government forcing them to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Something is real fishy with Uber and the Arizona fatality. If you believe Uber's dashcam footage it was dark and hard to see the woman. Several people in the area posted comparison dashcam footage showing it just wasn't that dark [1].

This raises a bunch of questions:

\- Was this the unprocessed footage from a dashcam in the Uber car?

\- How bright were the headlights?

\- What other sensors could've and should've detected an object to be avoided on the road?

I honestly don't know why this view seems to be so unpopular here (probably because of the optimism for self-driving cars, which I share) but why isn't criminal negligence for Uber a possibility here? Apparently they also disabled one of the safety systems in the Volvo XC90 designed to avoid this sort of thing.

If it does come to light that Uber misrepresented the conditions of the crash, tampered with the evidence in any way or even tampered with other safety measures then shouldn't a criminal case be a consideration?

[1]: [https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/03/police-chief-said- uber-...](https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/03/police-chief-said-uber-victim- came-from-the-shadows-dont-believe-it/)

<comment><USER17> At this point we really don't have enough information to know what happened other than the car hit and killed the pedestrian. We don't know how or if this dash cam video played into the control systems of the car. The accident is tragic and of course should be looked into. The NTSB is investigating[0] and I assume will have access to a lot better information than we have at this point, including all of that you're interested in. Lots of arm-chair quarterbacking at this point, given the paucity of information available right now.

As for "I honestly don't know why this view seems to be so unpopular here", there are opinions _all over the map_ , including those very similar to yours. This discussion has been going on for days in multiple submissions, and again, based on very little information.

[0]: [https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press- releases/Pages/NR20180320.as...](https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press- releases/Pages/NR20180320.aspx)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> There should be a way of increasing safety driver attentiveness.

E.g. make drivers labelers. E.g. driver have to label any pedestrians they see on a special HUD. Add financial incentives for labeling pedestrians quickly.

Some variation of this idea may reduce data acquisition costs and improve safety drivers.

<comment><USER19> Munroe, R., [https://xkcd.com/1897/](https://xkcd.com/1897/) [XKCD]

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm thinking about this simple trick to keep the safety driver focused: at random intervals, the software would provide a stimulus (such as a red LED light projected on windshield), and the person would need to react as quickly as possible by pushing a button. Thus the person would know she has to expect the need to react quickly, and the software can measure the level of attentiveness.

<comment><USER21> there are deep learning solutions that classify super well wether the driver is paying attention or not.

you could just play a buzzer when that happens, and tell them they will get fired if it happens too often (after human review of the tapes ofc)

<comment><USER22> This seems like a misunderstanding of the problem. The problem is that it's very difficult paying attention to something you have no control over or interaction with. To stick in a prod to punish people isn't going to make it easier. You'll end up just firing a lot of drivers. What would be better is to give the human something to do. For example you could put a set of input devices in the car for the human: Tell them to record their 'level of confidence' so you can check that against the cars confidence levels, or input suggesting steering adjustments to gauge where the car is differing from normal human behaviour.

That way when your driver has become an active participant (albeit probably useless) in the driving.

<comment><USER23> Train drivers are expected do just that. Driving a train has way less interaction than a car. They managed to setup a system (at least in Netherlands) where they do pay attention. Specifically hiring people based on personality/skill, various things in the train, checks, suspension when you miss a red sign, etc.

It seems Uber did none of that. It's super obvious the safety driver isn't paying attention. Why wasn't this noticed? Why wasn't a system setup to handle this? It feels like they cut corners.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The self driving car program seems like reaching for immortality. Just because your company identifies something that will eventually kill it on a long enough timeline doesn't mean you need to develop that product yourself. Wonder how much better off they could have been if they had focused on tweaking aspects of their current service.

<comment><USER25> Their business model would be destroyed by the first company to do self driving. The costs of paying drivers is a big part of the fee paid by riders. It was the natural progression for Uber.

It just seems like Waymo is doing a much better job. The internal problems at Uber are going to have lasting effects even if the problems have already ended.

<comment><USER26> Yes, but there's a big difference between perfecting the tech and implementing it for a use case. Uber would have the logistics and infrastrcuture to implement it, that's an easy call to license the tech from someone that has the tech down pat but no interest in being a taxi company. Heck they could probably have partnered with Google as a testing partner.

<comment><USER27> Well, but leverage matters. Whoever owns self driving patents will take close to 100% of the profit margins involved in taxis for the life of the patents.

For example, Apple gets most of the margin out of an iPhone. Apple could switch hardware vendors. The hardware vendors can't find anyone else who sells the iPhone OS.

Same thing here. If you have the self driving tech, the logistics and a shiny app and the dumb car hardware are the easy part you can buy for the lowest price available from many competing vendors (or conversely, license your technology exclusively to whoever pays the highest price -- either way, you have total leverage here and they have none, because without self driving tech there is no business)

Anyway, Waymo does not seem at all disinterested in the taxi business, probably because they realize that's the easy part. Alphabet engineers can put out a decent dispatch app in a fiscal quarter easily, and it markets itself. Or they could create a bidding war between Uber, Lyft, Via, etc.... Even with massive investor subsidies, nobody will be able to beat the rock bottom prices of a true driverless taxi service.

Uber investors know this, which is why Uber was forced to pretend to develop driverless tech, because if they don't, then Uber stock should be selling at earnings multiples more appropriate for a steel mill, not a software company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I think this might be the bursting of the Silicon Valley's self driving car bubble. People are starting to realise tech is nowhere near to make self driving cars feasible on scale. We still might be decade or more away from tech being advanced enough to consider going in this direction.

<comment><USER29> _> "tech is nowhere near to make self driving cars feasible on scale"_

To be more specific, _Uber 's_ tech is the one that's nowhere near feasible. According to recently leaked data, Uber's self driving system is literally orders of magnitude more failure prone than Waymo's[1].

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/technology/uber-self- driv...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/technology/uber-self-driving-cars- arizona.html)

<comment><USER23> From what I understood elsewhere, the numbers in that article are about different measures (apples vs oranges comparison).

Article states:

> 5,600 miles before the driver had to take control from the computer to steer > out of trouble

Apparently they have a number for a) number of miles per intervention and b) number of miles per intervention to prevent an accident. Waymo's number is measure b, Uber's number if measure a.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> In related news Nvidia has also suspended its self-driving car tests in the wake of the Uber crash. Uber uses Nvidia's self-driving technology in their cars.

</comment><comment><USER31> Uber could actually be a viable business if they gave up on being a unicorn. Right now, you can step out of an airport in a new country, pull out your phone, type in an address, and someone will drive you there. They're a universal ride-hailing service, and they could probably even charge a premium for that versus local taxis. Unfortunately, they're probably in too deep to become a medium-sized business.

Also, building their own fleet of robo-taxis is insane when their current business model relies on (underpaying for using) people's personal cars.

</comment><comment><USER32> Has anyone asked how many hours or miles that self-driving car drove autonomously before the fatality? It could very well be that the accident proves that, while horrible, self-driving cars are much less susceptible to fatal accidents. To date, I have not seen this data anywhere...

<comment><USER33> I think those statistics are difficult to get a complete picture on.

In california at least the manufacturers have to log miles driven in autonomous mode and the number of disengagement events over those miles.

That can be misleading though, since a car could log thousands of miles on a nice smooth stretch of interstate over and over, then spend significant amount of time disengaged in areas with pedestrians, cross walks, and stop signs.

The same pinch of salt should be applied to stats that someone like Uber themselves makes claims on, about how many miles they have driven autonomously with no incidents.

We could probably draw conclusions about safety per mile travelled on highways but probably not in trickier surface street scenarios without a lot more detail from the manufacturers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> > "We proactively suspended our self-driving operations, including in > California, immediately following the Tempe incident,"

They mean "reactively", not "proactively". Pathetic.

</comment><comment><USER35> Uber is a dying company that is bleeding out.

 _Uber 's current business model:[1]_

Uber is the middleman in a two-sided marketplace. It connects drivers with passengers, and takes a cut for this service.

Uber's competitive advantage is that it had the capital to attract drivers - with lots of drivers on its network, costs & wait times are lower for passengers, so passengers use Uber. Cue flywheel metaphor.

BUT Uber is still not profitable.[2] Unlike Amazon, there are no economies of scale in this business. Cities are local markets - Uber's dominance in A doesn't help it in B. And, as Uber acquires more customers, its cost of driver acquisition increases. Uber is so big that in many cities, it is churning through drivers and needs to incentivize the current drivers to stay on the platform.

Counterpoint: This is all a short-term concern! Once drivers are eliminated from the equation, Uber will be insanely profitable!

Wrong.

 _Once self-driving cars go mainstream:_

Uber's competitive advantage completely disappears. As a passenger, all I care about is getting from point A to point B safely, quickly, and cheaply.

As a manufacturer of self-driving cars, why would I sell or lease them to a middleman (or if we're getting extreme, even to consumers!) to take the profits in this space? As Tesla, GM, etc. I am going to pump out a fleet of self-driving cars and have consumers pay for a subscription plan (X number of minutes / miles per month on my fleet). Because this is a very capital- intensive business, the government will then grant local monopolies to different providers and regulate them as utilities, much as it does today with telecoms.

Uber provides no value in this scenario. The winners in this space are going to be car manufacturers and the developers (licensers) of the self-driving software that get legal approval (and it seems extremely unlikely that this will be Uber).

[1] Full disclosure, half of this is a repost of what I wrote on another thread earlier today.

[2] [http://www.businessinsider.com/ubers-losses-narrowed- in-q4-b...](http://www.businessinsider.com/ubers-losses-narrowed-in-q4-but- theres-still-work-to-do-2018-2)

<comment><USER36> > no economies of scale

Brand is scalable. Company processes are scalable. There are many reasons to be a large company serving many cities.

<comment><USER35> Fair points. Perhaps I should have specified that the unit economics don't scale with expansion to new cities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Which state/area is next on the list?

</comment><comment><USER38> Is this the death of Uber?

<comment><USER39> I personally don't believe they can survive with human drivers (unit economics) and I personally don't believe they will catch up in engineering and technology of self driving cars, especially after this (but I never thought they would, too far behind from the start). So I would say maybe yes.

But there are probably ways out of this for them. They will probably chug along for at least a decade and in that time anything can happen.

<comment><USER40> Curious why you don't think they can survive with human drivers? Every financial report I've been able to get hard data out of seems to show them very close to operational profitability. Somewhere within 10-20%.

I personally don't feel there is that much price sensitivity in the market to make a 15% price increase cause volumes to dip substantially. I could of course be wrong, but it seems to me Uber is at a point they could be "instantly" profitable if they simply decided to be and decided to stop expanding.

<comment><USER41> Uber is already doing pretty well with price segmentation in the US (the Uber Express POOL comes with a forced 2 minute wait); they can certainly:

\- raise prices of uberX, price sensitive riders can still use POOL or Express POOL \- reduce marketing and growth expenses; reframe KPIs and targets in term of "dollar ROI" instead of new rider/driver targets

Uber absolutely works from a unit economics perspective. How do you think taxis exist?

<comment><USER42> Taxis are usually a bit pricier and also don't subsidize a large team of software engineers at Silicon Valley salaries.

<comment><USER5> Here in NYC, the mortgage on a taxi medallion costs a lot more than the total salary of all Uber developers divided by the number of Uber drivers.

There are other costs that go into taxis that Ubers don't have. Taxis have back-office support staff too (the people you call up to order one to you).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Good.</comment>


Infographics About Taxes - <AUTHOR> http://pulse2.com/2010/04/14/15-infographics-about-taxes/

<comment><USER2> Non-shitty, blogspam with a dozen moving, flash-based ads links:

 _The Complexity of the U.S. Tax System_ [http://www.quicksprout.com/2010/02/18/the-complexity-of- the-...](http://www.quicksprout.com/2010/02/18/the-complexity-of-the-us-tax- system/)

 _Who Is Paying Taxes?_ <http://www.mint.com/blog/trends/who-is-paying-taxes/>

_How Wealthy Countries Tax Their Citizens_ [http://www.visualeconomics.com/how-do-wealthy-countries- tax-...](http://www.visualeconomics.com/how-do-wealthy-countries-tax- citizens/)

 _Turbo Tax Infographic: Who Files Income Taxes Early_ [http://www.columnfivemedia.com/turbo-tax-infographic-who- fil...](http://www.columnfivemedia.com/turbo-tax-infographic-who-files-income- taxes-early/)

 _Turbo Tax Infographic: Filing Your Taxes Online_ [http://blog.turbotax.intuit.com/announcements/infographic- fi...](http://blog.turbotax.intuit.com/announcements/infographic-filing-your- taxes-online/)

 _Wasted Potential: A Cost/Benefit Analysis_ [http://reason.com/blog/2009/11/17/infographic-on-pot-tax- rev...](http://reason.com/blog/2009/11/17/infographic-on-pot-tax-revenue)

 _Death & Taxes 2010_ <http://www.mint.com/blog/trends/death-taxes-2010/>

_Charity: Who Cares?_ <http://www.mint.com/blog/trends/charity-who-cares/>

_State Taxes in America_ <http://www.loansandcredit.com/state-taxes-in- america/>

_Locations of Offshore Tax Jurisdictions_ [http://www.grant- thornton.co.uk/thinking/bespoke/index.php/l...](http://www.grant- thornton.co.uk/thinking/bespoke/index.php/locations_of_offshore_tax_jurisdictions_infographic/)

 _United States Federal Tax Dollars Per State_ [http://www.visualeconomics.com/united-states-federal-tax- dol...](http://www.visualeconomics.com/united-states-federal-tax-dollars/)

 _2010 Guide To Home Buying Tax Credits_ [http://www.fixr.com/infographics/home-buying-tax- credits.htm...](http://www.fixr.com/infographics/home-buying-tax-credits.html)

 _The Onion: Celebrity Tax Deductions (Content scraper didn't realize this was from The Onion?!)_ [http://www.theonion.com/articles/celebrity-tax- deductions,85...](http://www.theonion.com/articles/celebrity-tax- deductions,8547/)

 _Wasteful U.S. Government Earmarks in 2008_ [http://www.visualeconomics.com/wasteful-us-government- earmar...](http://www.visualeconomics.com/wasteful-us-government-earmarks- in-2008/)

 _2009 Tax Rates on Salaries & Wages_ [http://www.visualizingeconomics.com/2010/03/15/federal- tax-r...](http://www.visualizingeconomics.com/2010/03/15/federal-tax-rates-by- income-for-single-filers-2009/)

</comment><comment><USER3> What absolutely horrible infographics. The graphics part did more to obscure the data than to give it any meaning.

<comment><USER4> [http://mrgan.tumblr.com/post/508462349/infographics-are- the-...](http://mrgan.tumblr.com/post/508462349/infographics-are-the-new- animated-gifs)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Direct tax that the IRS monitors is almost misleading. I would like to see VAT added to the equation.</comment>


Sharedy.com: Create Facebook's Status Timeline with Embedly, jQuery and GAE - <AUTHOR> http://blog.embed.ly/how-to-create-facebooks-status-messages-timel

<comment><USER2> I had no idea embed.ly existed, that's really cool looking service. Also didn't know about the oembed standard...

<comment><USER3> oEmbed is notable for its part in Facebook's share/status update features...from just a URL for a given page, the correct content can be extracted and displayed directly. Probably tumblr, et al use it as well, though I am not certain.

<comment><USER4> I don't know if it's oEmbed (though it might be) but yes tumblr does this with images and video.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Async previewing of the detected links before sending would be nice (which is, imho, the nice thing about Facebook status form) Good work nonetheless, I'm looking forward to using oEmbed through embed.ly soon.</comment>


What webhooks are and why you should care - <AUTHOR> http://timothyfitz.wordpress.com/2009/02/09/what-webhooks-are-and-why-you-should-care/ <comment><USER2> This is one of those things that I didn't realize had a name until now.

I've been wanting to get banks to implement this kind of thing forever. For instance, it'd be nice if I could log into my bank and set a url that they post to every time a transaction happens. Then I could set up a service at that url to take their message and do something with it (email myself, send an sms, automatically enter the transaction in buxfer, etc).

Same for statements. Instead of sending me an email, just let me specify a url. When my statement is ready, it's posted (in json or xml format) to a url I specify. Then I can slice and dice my own financial data and update my long term cashflow graph, or something.

Since the url is specified by me, while logged into my account (which should be secure), I have total control over who has my data (assuming DNS is secure and I provide an https url). If I wanted to use a service like Mint or Buxfer, I could add their callback urls to my account. When I decided to stop using their service, I simply remove the urls from the account. There is no need for Mint/Buxfer to know my login credentials or even what bank I use.

<comment><USER3> Couldn't an RSS feed also work in this situation?

<comment><USER2> With a feed, the bank has to go to the trouble of controlling who can view it (requiring a login and hiding the feed url or something).

Instead of providing the data via rss for anyone to read it, the bank actively sends information to a url I approve of, like a callback function.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm wondering how long it will take until we see the first DOS attacks, triggered by 2 or more webhooks in a feedback loop (e.g. A triggers B triggers C triggers A triggers B ...).

Nice :)

<comment><USER5> Good thinking! I guess we'll have to devise some way to avoid these kinds of cycles, or limit them by setting some type of maximum number of bounces on a webhook message.

<comment><USER6> How would you do that? The point here is, the webhook call can't really know what it's POST'ing to; all it takes to set up a loop is another web app that will itself formulate an arbitrary POST.

<comment><USER2> Just keep track of a 'url stack' in the POST message (assuming the post body is structured with something like JSON or XML). If a service detects a cycle it can drop the message or give back a 50x error or something.

<comment><USER6> The problem here is that you can aim a "web hook" at any other HTTP endpoint, which may or may not honor any "web hook loop avoidance" protocol you come up with, and if that endpoint re-triggers the activity that generated the hook update, you have a loop.

HTTP is stateless, so the "url stack" idea is going to be tricky to implement.

<comment><USER2> Yeah I suppose keeping a trail of breadcrumbs only helps you prevent accidental loops. A malicious service in the chain could just clear the stack and create a loop, and no one would be any the wiser.

<comment><USER7> A malicious machine that wants to DoS a server doesn't need web hooks in order to make a bunch of requests to the server. It can just run _ab_ , the Apache Benchmark program.

<comment><USER2> Presumably DoSing wouldn't be the objective here. If some of your services in the loop send SMS messages or modify your checkbook register, that would be much more annoying than a simple DoS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Isn't it just a bit naive to just assume that every HTTP-based API call is going to work together?

What fields does it return? Do they post XML? JSON? These things are both important and hard to get right. Even if you settle on a technical format, you'd still need to agree on fields for every single different kind of content (otherwise it's "headline" and "body" on my blog system and "title" and "contents" on yours). _That's_ why this hasn't happened yet.

I've dealt with some truly awful HTTP-based APIs before. The kind that use some homegrown XML that doesn't validate. It's not nearly enough to say "I've got an API, here's the URL, POST some data to it"

<comment><USER9> I'm curious, what's your point, exactly? That we shouldn't do this at all because it might not be perfect out of the gate?

If it doesn't work, then it doesn't work, and you'll just whine at the person who broke it until its fixed, or use a different implementation that does work. Yay, loose coupling.

<comment><USER8> No, certainly the world would be better if everything had an API.

But without standards, things are never going to "just work" together. We may as well just encourage people to use semantic HTML and microformat and scrape data off the pages when we want it.

<comment><USER9> There are plenty of standards right now, why doesn't everything "just work together" yet?

Ad-hoc apis can be frustrating, but at least they don't make you suffer under the illusion that there's some magical perfection you're missing out on if only that wrinkle in how they implemented the standard got ironed out.

Loose coupling, tolerance of fucked-uppedness, etc., are why the web works at all. The web standards movement is dead, long live the web.

<comment><USER8> Things like what? My web server works with a phenomenal number of browsers and clients because they all more-or-less follow the HTTP spec. It just works.

And it's more than just frustrating, it makes the idea presented by the OP basically impossible. If you have to add your own processing layer on top of the API, then it loses the magic of having one site ping another.

The web works because browsers and such are tolerant of deviations _from the standard_. The web works because it has standards, not in spite of them.

You couldn't say "just connect to my server on port 80 and, uh, we'll figure out how to exchange data"

<comment><USER9> Of course there has to be some kind of minimal agreement, I didn't mean to imply otherwise. This idea, "POST to some url on some action", that's pretty minimal. You were arguing it was too little and wouldn't work, I was arguing it was just enough to build on without collapsing under the weight of expectations of miracles.

HTTP is a remarkably simple and straightforward spec compared to some others, and HTTP servers are amazingly tolerant. As a client, you can get a lot of work done knowing only GET and POST and ignoring all the different kinds of errors and redirects. I would hold up HTTP as evidence supporting what I'm saying.

Same with html. Yes, we all want our beautiful and perfect html, and we curse browsers that don't implement the specs, but honestly, renderers are so forgiving. As long as you're in the ballpark, you're going to get something something useful.

SOAP, otoh. The WS-* specs. What utter misery to work with, with their outright lies about out-of-the-box complex interoperability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wanted to build this forever for delicious - we served literally billions of hits per month just to sites polling RSS feeds for changes.

It's unreal how inefficient this is.

I also think XMPP feeds (as suggested by others) as another way to solve this problem is a weak way to go. Here's what I wrote at the time: <http://joshua.schachter.org/2008/07/beyond-rest.html>

</comment><comment><USER11>
      There is no simpler way to allow open ended integration with arbitrary web services.

Providing an email address is simpler, and it's already provided to these specs by a zillion times more web services. Email also provides for better reliability (receive a message sent even when your service is unreachable) and queueing.. all outside of the code and often infrastructure you'd need to do yourself.

The main reason it may be worse are that we've got a ton of programmers, frameworks, and virtual hosts that seem to live in a limited little world called "the web." (Sorry - personal rant - this mindset is annoying for me when trying to hire programmers these days. It's even annoying when I talk to somebody about a new business involving a lot of programming, and they assume it's a website.)

Sure, spam is also an issue, but that only reinforces my point. Spam is an issue because email is in common use.. it's not for arbitrary HTTP POST because it isn't. If it ever is in common use, spammers would have no trouble using that too. They're doing plenty of arbitrary HTTP POSTs to web comment systems including cracking some CAPTCHAs in the process.

If he changed his stance to saying there'll be an arbitrary body provided at setup time, or given no body, it'd HTTP GET it, perhaps allowing some keyword substitution for a few standard things like the address that changed.. That'd be something different. You really wouldn't have to write or deploy any "code" for many integrations - for the sender or receiver. You could instead just provide the appropriate info to call an existing web service with its existing parameters.

On the other side, the email address callback also allows you to contact humans more easily, and if you did the same arbitrary response with keyword substitution thing.. You could make websites do form letters for you. I'm not sure that's a good thing or not.

<comment><USER12> It's much easier for Joe Developer to write endpoints for webhooks (PHP, etc) than endpoints for email hooks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's interesting that this has come up because I've been thinking along these lines recently. Specifically, I'd like to build a service (probably using RoR) that acts as an aggregator for these webhooks.

Imagine that I sign up as jgrahamc on <http://somethingmoved.org/> (that was my idea for the name) and a look at <http://somethingmoved.org/jgrahamc> would give me a 'twitter' style feed of posts that have been made to me.

Then I'd be able to assign endpoints that I could use for specific services, so suppose I decide to use github I might define <http://somethingmoved.org/jgrahamc/github> and give that URL to github for the post-receive URL.

On my page I can define how that gets added to my feed (perhaps part of the XML document is extracted and added as a simple line of text, and of course for common services there could be ready made templates of what to do).

If standard service endpoints were done right then you can imagine going to a FedEx tracking page and finding a 'SomethingMoved' button where you are asked to enter just the main part of your URL (e.g. <http://somethingmoved.org/jgrahamc>) and FedEx could automatically tack on /fedex which would then have a standard handling.

Then I also say that this github message should be passed on to other services (perhaps many, perhaps just RunCodeRun). Clearly I could do some transformation before passing things on. For example, I might pass on to RunCodeRun unchanged, but extract part and pass to Twitter.

Anyone got time to work on hacking this together with me in RoR? (I really need someone who's good with web UI hacking since I'm an application guts kind of guy).

<comment><USER14> May I suggest sinatra? It's built to provide web services with way less complexity than rails.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'd suggest that if someone loves this concept -- a meta-service that works between service and client might be very useful. Similar to FeedBurner.

Users would have a central location they could add their hook urls to. (Drop- down: service/method to hook/account credentials.) They could establish preferred formats, like XML or JSON and this service could translate from the primary service.

Services could talk to the meta-service via a queueing system, so scaling would be simple.

The meta-service could go free and make money by offering to do SMS messaging or email messaging for clients with a subscription.

<comment><USER13> See this post: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=475313> Want to help build it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I must say I really like this idea. I don't know why it took so long to kick in, though, it's quite simple. Finally sites don't work just as servers, but also as clients, information reflectors, mirrors or whatever.

</comment><comment><USER16> Here's an idea, a firefox extension that let's you turn on a 'broadcast' feature that causes your browser actions to be posted to a remote server; where subscribers can 'follow' your clickstream in near real-time.

Web as television.

<comment><USER17> I'm not sure I see what this has to do with the topic of the article.

<comment><USER15> Hey -- let the guy be creative! I think it would be a fun idea!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Isn't this the same ideal as SOA and similar? Decentralized services hanging out on the internet? Except we have gone from SOAP -> REST -> Super Simple REST as transport mechanisms.

<comment><USER18> Basically, but that's not a bad thing. The easier your transport is to implement, the more likely it is for somebody to support it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> > Note that nowhere in this future am I writing any code. I don't have to.

This is where I get confused.</comment>


Pi and the collapse of peer review - <AUTHOR> http://mathscholar.org/pi-and-the-collapse-of-peer-review <comment><USER2> Well, The thing about "the collapse of peer review" (or the rise of predatory journals) is that it involves something like the collapse of the "scientific community". For a device like peer review to work, you need to have a pool of individuals who are trustworthy - who care more about the truth more than they care about one or another sources of immediate benefit.

The institution of tenure is intended to facilitate this - the ideal is a professor receives tenure and then can pursue their ideals rather than constantly looking over their shoulder wondering if they are going to survive.

Of course, tenure is subject to abuse and tenure isn't the only way to get a pool of people who are significantly interested in "what is true" rather than "will this benefit me". But elimination of tenure and the reworking of the university on a "neo-liberal" basis of pay-for-immediate-performance does seems to be gradually destroying the community part of the scientific community (if a given authority just wants money, why shouldn't any of their peer reviews be up for the highest bid or why should they endorse predatory journal or etc). That's not as much of a problem with technical fields where it's known that truth can be nearly mechanically verified (math is approaching that level but sociology seems unlikely to get there soon, for example).

We may get to a point where our society has immense technical know-how but has abandoned science as such. Goes along with "post-truth" I suppose.

<comment><USER3> I'm sorry, I didn't follow that development - what is the relationship between the abolishment of tenure and neo-liberalism?

<comment><USER4> i think a shift from tenured chairs to lots of low-paid, precarious adjuncts can be identified with a broader rise of neoliberal, corporate attitudes in the university. that and evaluating professors solely based on how much money they bring in, or on supposedly objective citation metrics. bringing "market forces" where they hadn't been previously.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think it should be called "Pi and the rise of pay-for publication" or perhaps "Predatory journals and miscomputing pi". If a predatory 'journal' is more interested in taking submissions' money than presenting science, then the thought of peer review doesn't enter into the picture.

The journals that are mentioned are present on Beal's list of predatory journals [1], and so are even widely acknowledged to be crap journals.

[1]: [http://beallslist.weebly.com/](http://beallslist.weebly.com/)

<comment><USER6> Thank you for the list. It is way longer then I expected. It's also interesting to take a look at the criteria used for the creation of the list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_open_access_publishi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_open_access_publishing)

It looks like the best place to verify reputable open access journals is through the Directory of Open Access Journals: [https://doaj.org/oainfo](https://doaj.org/oainfo). I don't see any of the journals mentioned in the article listed.

</comment><comment><USER8> It used to be "if you have to pay, then it's not worth publishing in it", but plos requires $1500 so that rules out of the window.

</comment><comment> photon-torpedo My favorite wrong value for pi is 355/113, as it is surprisingly accurate for its simplicity.

<comment><USER9> It requires remembering 6 digits and it is just a little bit more accurate than directly remembering 6 digits of pi.

Here is a long article on other pi approximations: [http://mathworld.wolfram.com/PiApproximations.html](http://mathworld.wolfram.com/PiApproximations.html) It turns out that 355/113 does a great job compared to most of the expressions given there! But none seem to be better than just remembering 3.14159.

<comment><USER10> We should be taught in high school to remember 314-159, it's actually easier to remember than 3-point-14159.

<comment><USER11> it's the same row of numerals, where's the difference?

<comment><USER10> Do you prefer to remember your phone number as 378-2739, or as 3-782739?

<comment><USER11> Break that down for me, do you prefer to remember 0003 or just 3? 1 in 7-adic or 7 in dekadic? I count 1, 2, many; so don't ask me; also I asked first.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As a side note:

> and by the third century Chinese mathematician Liu Hui and the fifth century > Indian mathematician Aryabhata, both of whom found pi to at least four digit > accuracy.

Zu Chongzhi should also be mentioned:

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

The simple fraction 355/113, or Milü:

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

which is very easy to rememember (the first three odd numbers repeated twice) and gives in its simplicity an excellent approximation.

On Windows Calc:

355/113-pi=2,6676418906242231236893288649633e-7

</comment><comment><USER13> The article links to 11 papers, but they have only two authors: one claming π = 17 – 8√3, and another one claming π = (14 – √2)/4.

</comment><comment><USER14> Reading his little paper, I was amazed at how many formula there are for calculating pi. Math is fun.

<comment><USER15> You can find many more on Wikipedia

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_formulae_involving_%CF...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_formulae_involving_%CF%80#Formulae_yielding_.CF.80)</comment></comment>


Livestream of Gaza Battle - <AUTHOR> http://www.ustream.tv/occupiedair

<comment><AUTHOR> The humming noise in the background is drones flying overhead.</comment>


BufferBloat - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bufferbloat

<comment><USER2> It's things like this that make me think the router should be able to turn packets into UDP.</comment>


Information Fiduciaries in the Digital Age - <AUTHOR> https://balkin.blogspot.com/2014/03/information-fiduciaries-in-digital-age.html <comment><AUTHOR> Jack Balkan suggests that information holders be legally tasked with acting in the interest of those whose information they hold:

 _The idea of an information fiduciary matters when the fiduciary discloses or uses sensitive information about the beneficiary to the beneficiary 's disadvantage without permission. First, in some cases, the government may impose a duty of disclosure in some cases, but it generally requires a very good reason to breach the confidence. Second, the fiduciary may not disclose sensitive information to third parties or use the information against the client's interest, and if this duty is breached, the client has a cause of action in tort. Note, moreover, that this cause of action is not barred by the First Amendment. A lawyer, doctor or accountant generally does not have a First Amendment right to disclose sensitive information about their clients or use that information in self-dealing even though a perfect stranger with no professional relationship might have a First Amendment right to do so. The fiduciary relationship creates a duty that, in this particular context, trumps the interest in freedom of expression._

I'd run across the notion in Jonathan Zittrain's recent _New York Times_ OpEd:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/07/opinion/sunday/zuckerberg...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/07/opinion/sunday/zuckerberg- facebook-privacy-congress.html)

He's previously developed the idea with Balkan in an item previously submitted to HN in 2016, though without generating discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12647720](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12647720)

At _The Atlantic_ , "A Grand Bargain to Make Tech Companies Trustworthy":

[https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/10/infor...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/10/information- fiduciary/502346/?single_page=true)</comment>


With Android Oreo, Google is introducing Linux kernel requirements - <AUTHOR> https://betanews.com/2017/09/03/android-oreo-linux-kernel/ <comment><USER2> Describing Linux as "horrendously difficult to use" is disingenuous at best. There are so many different variations between distros and what people mean when they say "Linux" that to categorize them all in this tone is hardly professional. I'm not familiar with betanews.com, but it does claim to be a tech site.

<comment><USER3> That's part of the problem. You face a problem, look online for a solution, and find answers that pertain only to different distros than what you're using. It hasn't gotten much better as far as I can tell. I used Linux as my primary desktop for a few years around 2002-2005 (Red Hat, Fedora, and Ubuntu). Back then, configuration was mostly automatic, though you had to do stuff like install the NVIDIA kernel blob manually. When things broke, it was at least possible to fix it by dropping into the CLI.

I recently tried to set up Fedora running a VNC or RDP server, and after a couple of days of futzing I gave up. I guess Wayland has managed to regress on that from where X was a decade ago? Systemd also made startup issues impossible to debug, and also apparently f--ked up with how log files are stored? It's a mess.

<comment><USER4> First of all, I disagree flatly that Linux is hard to use and troubleshoot. Google "blah ubuntu" or "blah fedora" and you get an answer. This isn't 2002.

Second, systemd troubleshooting and RDP servers are not common uses for Grandma, so even if valid points were made, most users aren't affected.

<comment><USER5> We had Google in 2002 and the answer would probably have been easier to find at that time since there wouldn't be hundreds of different Ubuntu versions and sub-distros to clutter up the results. I can't count the number of times I've found an answer that applies to "Ubuntu" where the alleged solution didn't apply to the version that I'm running.

Also, systemd can cause anyone problems - I'm not sure it can distinguish between you or Grandma.

<comment><USER6> And this situation doesn't apply to windows or macos how, exactly?

<comment><USER7> _since there wouldn 't be hundreds of different Ubuntu versions and sub- distros_

There are no macOS or Windows subdistros. So, the only difference may be between different versions. Adding to that, Apple generally does not have the tendency to replace/rewrite macOS subsystems every few years, so it is much more likely that thing still work after a couple of years.

<comment><USER8> > There are no ... Windows subdistros

That's a pretty naive trust in Microsoft's _branding_ / _marketing_ team. Of course there are heaps of different Windows distributions. They don't necessarily differ as much as, say, Ubuntu vs Gentoo, but they do differ.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This appears to be the source: [https://source.android.com/devices/architecture/kernel/modul...](https://source.android.com/devices/architecture/kernel/modular- kernels#core-kernel-requirements)

Device tree is mandatory and vendors are encouraged to upstream the code. It sounds like Google has an eventual goal of building a single kernel that can boot on most devices which is a great thing for everyone.

<comment><USER10> I do not think it can be done. I am mantaining a kernel for ARM a family of SBCs. Device trees are great compared to old platform files, however they are not enough. We have a lot of commits to fix other things that DT cannot access.

<comment><USER11> I'm curious as to what things DT cannot access. Is this a general issue (and if so have you spoken to the DT maintainers?), or is this because the systems you are working on are doing something unexpected?

<comment><USER12> I've had situations where we had to add a small functionality to a driver. For instance a secondary functionality that wasn't supported in the upstream version. It's very rare for drivers of complex components to support 100% of the functionality.

An example that comes to mind was a video chip that also had a GPIO pin that we needed to control. The chip had a driver in the kernel but it didn't have support for the GPIO (it is after all a very secondary function). That required a small patch.

It would of course have been possible to upstream it but then that meant implementing a "clean" patch (using the kernel GPIO API etc... instead of a one liner to toggle the PIN high on dereset) then submitting it upstream, maybe doing a couple of back and forth... Some will bother to do it, many won't.

<comment><USER13> Drivers can be built as modules most of the time. Google could still ship a single kernel binary and any vendor that had a weird quirk could load their own module. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if Google requires every driver to be built as a module and they ship a minimal core kernel.

<comment><USER10> Unfortunately there is no binary compatibility between modules and different kernels. Moreover Google recommends CONFIG_MODVERSIONS=y, which prevents to load even practically compatible modules.

<comment><AUTHOR> The vendor would need to recompile their modules for every kernel Google releases, but that's not a huge issue - how many times does Google update the kernel?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> AIUI, the situation until now has been that essentially, every Android device released has its own fork of Android. Which is absurd, and explains why the Android security update situation is such a mess. Glad Google are trying to fix this.

<comment><USER15> > AIUI, the situation until now has been that essentially, every Android > device released has its own fork of Android. Which is absurd, and explains > why the Android security update situation is such a mess.

The situation is the same for all embedded Linux devices. All have non- mainlined (and non-sidelined) changes to device tree, startup code, pin muxing code, special kernel parameters, special drivers, specially adjusted drivers, special vendor drivers that are C wrappers around binary blobs etc..

Out-of-tree maintenance is possible, but this still often needs to build against the kernel sources, not some more generic kernel library (or ABI, if you want). Other embedded platforms are worse (eCos), some are better (QNX, MQX) in separating device driver code into units that do not depend on the whole world.

Kernel maintainers are very vocal in saying "it's not me, it's you" and laughing in your face, but if every vendor has the same issues with managing in a sane way customization of your operating system since a decade and a half, it becomes a bit of a running joke.

<comment><USER16> > if every vendor has the same issues

Except every vendor _doesn 't_. By some magic voodoo witchcraft, x86 remains consistently capable of producing a single kernel that can run on anything from Intel or AMD.

Because they upstream their platform support.

That is literally it. No, it is not a technical impossibility of the ARM world to support common hardware abstractions like IBM-PC platforms. They choose not to.

<comment><USER17> > _Except every vendor doesn 't. By some magic voodoo witchcraft, x86 remains > consistently capable of producing a single kernel that can run on anything > from Intel or AMD._

The "magic voodoo witchcraft" is Microsoft's "Hardware Compatibility Specifications for Windows".

[https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows- hardware/design/com...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows- hardware/design/compatibility/1703/)

Linux and the other free OSes run on commodity x86 hardware by targeting the same Microsoft-issued specification. There is no standards body or other neutral organization that defines what an x86 PC is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Some have speculated that Fuchsia will eventually replace Android. I remember back in May that some prototype UI was introduced by Google. Anyone know of any recent developments on this front?

<comment><USER19> Magenta (their new microkernel) is being renamed Zircon as they reorganize the OS into layers named on gemstones.

As for the UI, their new compositor requires a GPU with Vulkan support to make it run. Unfortunately QEMU doesn't support Vulkan at the moment, so I wasn't able to test it.

<comment><USER20> Interesting, so they are ruling out everyone that has computers older than two years.

And given that Android 7 (where Vulkan is anyway optional), is about 13%, I wonder what the target users would be, if this ever gets out of the lab.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The only kernel requirement that they should mandate is that the kernel should remain blob free. Checkout/build/boot.

<comment><USER22> And when the (often device-specific) kernel you're checking out has known vulnerabilities that have long since been fixed in mainline?

Yeah, no, I'm glad they're doing this.

<comment><USER23> If the device-specific kernel doesn't require blobs, it is easier to upstream the changes. If the device-specific kernel requires blobs on top of mainline, you're screwed either way.

<comment><USER22> Well, true - though in most cases I'd imagine the blobs are firmware that would otherwise be burned onto the peripheral ROM and aren't too closely tied to the kernel itself. IANAL, but you'd have a heck of a time arguing that a blob shipped with a device's kernel wasn't a derivative work if it linked with kernel sources.

On the other hand, it's _possible_ to upstream the changes, but if you're dealing with anything like Qualcomm's 1.7 million line kernel fork[0] it's exceedingly unlikely if you're not the SoC manufacturer. And if you're not able to upstream them, you're stuck backporting security patches til the end of time/you throw the device out.

[0] [https://events.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides...](https://events.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/stephen- boyd-elc.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Why and what kernel requirements does Treble have ? What's wrong with kexec or similar non proprietary solutions ? I'm not a kernel hacker but human enough to turn suspicious when something receives nothing but good news. Can anyone please shed some light ?

</comment><comment><USER25> Looks like they want to have certain security features enabled so Android can maybe catch up to where iOS was a year ago.

<comment><USER26> What security features would those be?

<comment><USER25> I don't know, but my guess would be process namespaces, cgroups, and TPM support.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why is my submission getting deleted? - <AUTHOR>

I just wrote up a quick article here: http://maxmackie.com/2013/04/23/Getting-into-Node.js-is-easy,-now-its-your-turn/<p>I've submitted it twice now and every time is shows up as [dead] on the "new" page instantly. Am I getting stuck in a spam filter? <comment><USER2> I don't know why the post is auto-dead. I saw it and I think it's too personal (You tried node.js. It worked. You are happy.) It has very few technical/original/strange results.

I saw your former submissions. I liked (and upvoted): "How to cool your home server (the wrong way)" <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3578240> (the original link no longer works, direct link: [http://maxmackie.com/2012/02/10/How-to-cool-your-home- server...](http://maxmackie.com/2012/02/10/How-to-cool-your-home-server-\(the- wrong-way\)/) ) It has technical/original/strange results and photos!

(Note: A few months ago I had a misconfigured computer with a overclocked cpu, and the only way to keep it cool and quiet was using and external 2' fan, (no photos avaiable).)

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha thanks. I forgot about that ... fun times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think self promotion is frowned upon. Maybe if you framed it as a Tell HN it might be better received.

<comment><AUTHOR> Really? I've been submitting my blog posts (infrequent as they may be) here since the beginning. I didn't know it was frowned upon, my bad.

<comment><USER4> I've only ever submitted one of my own posts. It got killed instantly. I had no track record of doing this, but I guess russel is right. The moderators don't like you doing it.

EDIT : I checked, you use a pseudonym I don't suppose it identifies you as the writer of the posts.</comment></comment></comment>


Fan TV will now let Time Warner subscribers ditch their crappy cable boxes - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2014/04/22/fan-tv-will-now-let-time-warner-subscribers-ditch-their-crappy-cable-boxes/

<comment><USER2> Interesting. I hate my TWC box and in my building TWC is my only option.

Will this work with premium channels? HD?

<comment><USER3> Absolutely, you can get your Game of Thrones in HD every sunday.</comment></comment>


Plasma MVP Implementation in Vyper – LayerX - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/layerx/plasma-mvp-implementation-in-vyper-5a3850e5b1b <comment><USER2> an interesting project written in Vyper (a language for smart contracts)</comment>


Startup Idea: How about a Priority Inbox for Twitter? - <AUTHOR>

Your thoughts? <comment><USER2> Solves a problem most people don't have with a product people won't pay for on a platform you don't own.

<comment><USER3> you wouldn't prefer to have your incoming tweets organized by relevance? i certainly would. but it's tricky because sometimes really insightful people produce meaningless tweets, so it can't just be based on people, it also has to be based on tweet content.

<comment><USER4> You missed his point. You aren't normal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ideally, something like annotations (if/when it launches) could provide the necessary metadata for further filters. Agree that a small subset of Twitter users actually have a need for something like this.

In the meantime, check out an interesting startup that helps you curate time- boxed tweets: <http://curated.by>

</comment><comment><USER6> Tweets are often valuable due to their up-to-date quality, something that would be lost in a priority-filtered inbox.</comment>


Ask HN: Web development with just a laptop? (no external monitors) - <AUTHOR> I've seen a number of web developers out there mention they write entire web apps (front end and back end) using just their laptop and no external monitors.
The ability to do that is attractive to me, as it means you can quickly change your setting and still be productive.
Are there specific features (even 3rd party tools) that have helped you become really proficient at doing laptop-only development?
I feel like there should be some Mavis Beacon style training to help you get better at using just your laptop screen for development! <comment><USER2> I use a tiling window manager all the time, my X1 Carbon has a 2k screen so it's totally doable

</comment><comment><USER3> Multiple virtual desktops</comment>


The morality of matchmaking - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ibluebottle.com

<comment><AUTHOR> iBluebottle.com is a new matchmaking website for Indian professionals.</comment>


The natural evolution from side project to full-time business - <AUTHOR> http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1764-the-natural-evolution-from-side-project-to-full-time-business <comment><USER2> The best statement on this topic that I've seen was a comment on HN, which unfortunately I don't have a link to. It said: if you spend half your time on a startup (e.g. because you have a job), realize that you won't be half as productive, you'll be an order of magnitude less productive. As soon as I read that, it made sense of my experience.

Keeping it in mind helps to manage the process if you're on that path: it prevents your expectations from being continually thwarted. But it also provides a powerful reason to get off that path.

<comment><USER3> totally. at least for designing and implementing the core technology, i've found that i need large chunks of focus time. i also need time to mentally shift from one set of problems to another...kind of like writing things to disk and then loading up the next set.

it doesn't have to be an order of magnitude less productive, though. i find that if my brain is too cluttered to change problem solving paths for the night, then i'll go to bed early and wake up between 3 and 7am for a productive morning.

i also find myself taking off work days around weekends. i split my weeks between solid days of work and solid days of side-project. these large chunks are so awesome for getting "real" work done, which is more than useful, it's also motivating and satisfying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My favorite analogy: Raising kids. Quit your day job and raise your kid, putting all your energy into them. When you're out of money 6 months later, you still have a 6 month old kid. Maybe they can walk a little sooner than their peers, but you can't artificially grow them into a teenager. The same is true with growing a user/customer base. Some things just take time.

I wish I could quit my job for 1 month while I build the core technology, then get my job back while I build the userbase. Since that's usually not an option, I'll spend 3-4 months of spare time building the technology while I keep my job, then grow it organically over time.

<comment><USER5> You'd be amazed at the number of places that are willing to grant people a month long _unpaid_ leave of absence for a wide variety of reasons.

<comment><USER4> True. I'm just worried that requesting leave to _start my own business_ would raise too many eyebrows. It's not exactly something a love-my-job employee asks for. And I do really like my job.

<comment><USER5> If you were going to try to do this, I'd recommend not mentioning that part of it. Say you've got a big project you're working on, or whatever. Of course, it all kind of depends on what your relationship is with the people you work for. Maybe they already know you have the entrepreneur bug.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, my manager reads my dev blog and knows about all my side projects.

<comment><USER5> In my (limited) experience with this sort of thing, that's the type of manager who is far more likely to be understanding of what you're trying to do.

I was able to get my consulting company off the ground by going from full-time employment down to 3 days a week, and I used the other 2 days a week to pick up clients and freelance. I did that for about 9 months before I went to consult full-time. After that, I kept my old company as a client, and when they needed help, they had the benefit of dealing with someone who already knew all their systems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I find that doing a side project along with your day job is more of a psychological problem. You lose motivation knowing you can just stop your project with no real consequences. I think you need to make some sacrifices (maybe not quit your day job) in order force yourself to put in a lot of effort.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, that is pretty hard, the fact that there's nothing to lose. I think it all comes down to motivation.

This quote from pj is possibly the best advice I've seen, although he was probably talking about full-time startups: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=625644>

<comment><USER6> Ah, I read that before and it also stuck in my mind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The thing I've been thinking about recently is that when you're working on a very large project like the game I'm developing, I'm not sure I have the patience to work on a single project as a sideline for several years. I wonder if it's a case of blitzing it full time and finishing in a few months or not finishing it at all because you're so fed up you've moved on to something else.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it depends on your project. Some projects require huge bursts of energy in a short span and others can be developed incrementally over a longer period of time.

<comment><USER9> I agree with that. I have a few small side projects in mind as well as a bigger one, and the only thing that keeps me focused on them is when I'm done working for the day, I put together a list of all of the stuff I want to add the next time. That way, I have a clearly defined list of milestones waiting for me the next time I get to the app, rather than having to rejuice my brain when I have some more time to work.

Also, I've been spending time thinking about how to create small, focused, monetized, short-term development apps that can bring in some revenue so I can start cutting back on my daytime work hours. That way I can get some more dev time each day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For me the best combo is consulting and side project as opposed to day job. With contracts I can keep them to 20-30 hrs per week and then have substantial time and focus to work on my baby. And if I need 2 weeks or pure focus, I usually can get that too. All the while, keeping some decent income coming in. It works ideally for me - but f course it depends on many factors.

</comment><comment><USER11> > _You box yourself into a position where you have to profit immediately or > the whole thing goes under. You've got to make it work now or give up > forever._

That's a feature, not a bug! Procrastination kills more businesses than anything else. With a day job it's too easy to put off building a new business. Without one it's easier to succeed, than to fail.

<comment><USER4> Got any stats on that procrastination claim? I thought the conventional wisdom was that projecting profits too early and running out of startup capital kills most new businesses.

<comment><USER11> I think procrastination (caused by day jobs) usually kill startups in their infancy, before anyone except the founder(s) would even notice. Maybe the founder(s) launch a version 1.0, over the course of months. They work on it for a while, but it's not profitable and sucks up all their free time. When something important (like a high priority project at their day job) comes along they neglect it, and it eventually dies.

I personally have met dozens of people who have this kind of story. Probably quite a few people on HN do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ah, the classic debate of part time vs full time again. Sigh..

I think it's depend on people to people. I personally know that i'm not the "part-time-and-do-it-safely" kind of person. I get too comfortable.

I function much better as soon as i burn off my ship and jump off the cliff. Somehow, that's how my survival instinct works. That's how i signed up for 1/2 marathon and full marathon while i haven't been able to run one (and, of course, after that i became much more discipline in training and eventually finished).

Again, it depends on your personality.

</comment><comment><USER13> A large part of this decision depends on the type of product and market segment that it is targeting. Time to get to market can be very important. If you spend a year working part time you may be trumped by someone else. I have been involved in more than one project where we missed the market time window.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is exactly the opposite of what pg has said in some of his essays, but like a lot of things, it's possible for both of them to be right.

For some people, quitting their job is not an option because of things over which they have little control (family, health issues, etc.) Even though it's not ideal, for them, OP provides great encouragement.

<comment><USER11> Knowing that you're doing something that's not optimal is important, so that you can compensate. Pretending it's _better_ to have a day job is harmful.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to mitigate Layer 7 attacks? - <AUTHOR> Hi HN,
I was recently a victim of Layer 7 DDoS attacks, and use Cloudflare. Cloudflare was able to migrate them off, but I'm in the mix of changing from Cloudflare to my own system for most of my websites and my wifes (blogged about it here: https://thegeekbin.com/ddos-protection-my-experience/).
What's a reliable way to mitigate most layer 7 attacks? I've added into nginx filters for slow connections (eg, HEAD and wait X time to clog server resource, slowloris) and other things like bad user agents, R-U-DEAD-YET, etc. but I'm not sure that's going to be enough.
What's your take on this HN? Any pointers to provide good enough protection against most common attacks?
Thanks <comment><USER2> What is your website?! is it just a content website or you have some sort of services serving your requests in backend. Application DDos attacked can hugely impact your website if they can put load on your backend and eventually trash your servers. Some useful solutions for those scenarios: -proper authentication/authorization mechanism -keep stats per user or session and set quota on the number of requests per user or session -add captcha to your registration pages to prevent them from scripting your signup.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm assuming you also want a simple way to mitigate layer 7 attacks, which is the hard part. You can try something like gathering statistics of /24 IP subnets that make connections to your server and once you detect increase in unseen subnets that goes over some threshold you think your server can't handle - nullroute unseen subnets that go over that threshold for some short period of time. And on a web server side configure rate limiting for everything.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've done some basic filtering against some slowloris etc type attacks, I've got lots of open proxy and relays blocked from the web. I've also got rate limiting in place now, and I'm offloading assets to a proper CDN. In the end my server should only serve a few hundred KB at absolute max, the rest handled by a CDN. My thought is with that it probably would hold up to the attacks. Thoughts?

<comment><USER3> Imagine something like a pingback attack [1], it can hit you from at least tens of thousands of IPs you don't yet filter, because they are not proxies or relays and will likely exhaust various resources: file descriptor, socket limits, CPU. And this is one of the most primitive layer 7 attacks not even attempting to look like a real user agent.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingback#Exploits](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingback#Exploits)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Cloudflare is a good way to mitigate those attacks. They have a pipe much bigger than what most attackers can get together.

You don't stand a chance against a DDoS and you have to work with your upstream ISP to mitigate some of it. They might not have the tools to help you though.

<comment><USER3> > You don't stand a chance against a DDoS and you have to work with your > upstream ISP to mitigate some of it.

You do. Plenty of hosting companies provide layer 3 and layer 4 DDoS protection and layer 7 is best handled in your software anyway to avoid false positives.

<comment><USER4> How would you respond to these: [https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ddos/famous-ddos- attacks...](https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ddos/famous-ddos-attacks/)</comment></comment></comment>


NY Fed rescues overnight lending market with $53B - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/17/business/overnight-lending-rate-spike-ny-fed/index.html <comment><USER2> Matt Levine's explanation of what happened is considerably less sensationalized. Take a look at the second item of his column today [0]. It's too long to quote and doesn't lend itself to an easy excerpt, but here are the facts that he quotes, from Bloomberg [1]:

> A sudden surge in the overnight rate on Treasury repurchase agreements that > began on Monday continued Tuesday -- with the rate opening at 7%, according > to ICAP. …

> What happened was an unfortunate coincidence -- just as companies were > withdrawing cash from money markets to pay corporate tax, a glut of new > bonds appeared on the market as the U.S. government sold some $78 billion of > 10- and 30-year debt last week.

> With just $24 billion of bonds maturing in the period, this became one of > three occasions this year when the imbalance between debt redemption and > cash needed to buy new Treasuries exceeded $50 billion.

Again, if those paragraphs don't obviously relate to the overnight lending market, read his column for context.

[0]: [https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-09-17/wework...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-09-17/wework- s-ipo-doesn-t-work-yet)

[1]: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-17/it- starts...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-17/it-starts-as-a- repo-squeeze-before-spilling-into-funding-markets)

<comment><USER3> I just think it's funny that rich people can get billions of dollars to stay solvent in a sudden crisis, and I can't get a dime when I can't pay for lunch.

Am I reading this wrong? Is this a bad analogy? Is it not exemplary of how creditworthiness seems to rise at a higher rate than the means used to justify that creditworthiness? I'm a layman, but I'd like to know more.

<comment><USER4> Aside from the fact that you can easily borrow money for lunch in a variety of ways, the main difference is that banks almost never default, compared to individuals.

Only one bank has failed in the US in the last two years.

[https://www.fdic.gov/bank/individual/failed/banklist.html](https://www.fdic.gov/bank/individual/failed/banklist.html)

The real risks are systematic (many banks failing), not that an individual bank will fail.

<comment><USER5> This feels like a circular argument: Banks get bailed out, because banks always repay their loans, because banks can't go broke, because banks get bailed out.

<comment><USER4> Whether or not bank bailouts were prudent is a matter of debate, but unlike individuals, default is rare and overall bailouts were repaid quickly.

[https://www.politifact.com/new- hampshire/statements/2012/oct...](https://www.politifact.com/new- hampshire/statements/2012/oct/25/barack-obama/barack-obama-says-banks-paid- back-all-federal-bail/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a better publicly available recount of events:

[https://www.ft.com/content/345da16e-d967-11e9-8f9b-77216ebe1...](https://www.ft.com/content/345da16e-d967-11e9-8f9b-77216ebe1f17)

This is a pretty technical subject with a lot of moving parts so it's hard to really have a full understanding of things. This is not a one-off event and can easily happen in the future under similar or different circumstances unless the Fed makes some changes (that they've been seen behind the curve on). This is easily dismissed right now but this happened under relatively calm market conditions. When stuff like this happens under more volatile markets stuff breaks really quickly.

<comment><USER7> The Fed is not behind the curve. The Fed's role is to keep the inflation at target rates. Not finance structural budgetary deficits through quantitative easing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Isn't this working as intended? Where else does the FED actually "enforce" its short term fed funds rate? I mean how else the current 2.00-2.25% rate is forced onto the financial system? Why else would anyone even care about what the FED funds rate is?

In my home country the central bank rate is enforced by providing central bank deposits and central bank loans, available in unlimited quantity for commercial banks. When the market gets cash congested (like here) banks just start tapping the infinite central bank credit line, at central bank rate. Similarly if the market gets flush with cash banks just deposit it at the central bank. Ergo the market interbank lending rate is always between the central bank deposit and credit rates.

The fact that it doesn't normally happen is like when most purchased options are not exercised but sold back. Yeah, sure, but if there was no possibility of exercising them then options would have no value. So it has to be there, then we can safely almost never use it.

<comment><USER9> > I mean how else the current 2.00-2.25% rate is forced onto the financial > system?

Traditionally, Fed used open market operations to target the fed funds rate. This entailed either buying/selling treasuries or conducting repo operations (as was done here). This was a _corridor_ system, as banks could earn no less than 0% interest keeping reserves on the Fed's balance sheet (no negative interest) and could finance at a cost no higher than the _discount rate_ in which banks borrowed directly from the Fed's discount window (this, however, sent a very negative signal to the market).

For the past decade, the Fed has relied on interest on excess reserves (IOER) to target the fed funds rate, a policy known as a _floor_ system. Here, banks earn a given interest rate on reserves kept on the fed's balance sheet. The floor system theoretically ensures short term rates do not drop below the IOER rate (although it is not always the case). This does not entail engaging in open market operations.

> Why else would anyone even care about what the FED rate is?

All dollar interest rates are impacted in one way or another by the fed funds rate. The strength of the dollar is also impacted by the fed funds rate, as it may become more or less attractive to keep balances in the US. The floor system currently employed makes it less attractive for banks to use excess reserves to make loans, as the risk free rate (on the fed balance sheet) is greater. This diminishes the money multiplier effect that banks have.

Additionally, some foreign institutions are able to keep money on the fed's balance sheet, helping them avoid negative interest rates. Again, this disincentivizes them from making loans and also undermines monetary policy implemented by their local central banks. Finally, some currencies have a USD peg (e.g. HKD). These pegs effectively import Federal Reserve monetary policy (to help mitigate the risk of currency crises) which affects the local economies.

<comment><USER8> It sounds like you agree that this is the mechanism of choice used to push down overnight interbank interest rates to keep them in line with the federal funds rate. IOER, by design, provides just a floor. Discount rate is, by design, quite a bit higher than the fed funds rate, and is only tapped for credit in emergencies.

Also this is what Wikipedia says on the topic:

 _> The (effective) federal funds rate is achieved through open market operations at the Domestic Trading Desk at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York which deals primarily in domestic securities (U.S. Treasury and federal agencies' securities)._

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_funds_rate#Comparison_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_funds_rate#Comparison_with_LIBOR)

So, WAI. We just haven't seen cash injection through this mechanism in a while.

<comment><USER9> > Discount rate is, by design, quite a bit higher than the fed funds rate, and > is only tapped for credit in emergencies.

That's right. Open market operations were traditionally used to target the fed funds rate. The discount window does serve as the upper bound though _in extreme cases_. Typically, reserves would be loaned overnight between banks on the fed funds market. This market has been decimated by the floor system.

> IOER, by design, provides just a floor.

In theory, yes. It has also acted as a ceiling. Not all institutions with access to Fed's balance sheet are able to receive IOER (e.g. GSE's). These entities loan the money to banks overnight at a rate below IOER. The banks then earn IOER on that money. This arbitrage can lead to an effective fed funds rate below IOER.

<comment><USER8> _> This market has been decimated by the floor system._

You mean there has been so much cash around that nobody really needed to get cash via the fed funds market, for quite a while? It does seem like the spread between fed funds and IOER is generally just a few bp, maybe even 1bp sometimes, which I guess is where the "ceiling" you were talking about comes from:

[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IOER](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IOER)

[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS)

<comment><USER9> > You mean there has been so much cash around that nobody really needed to get > cash via the fed funds market, for quite a while?

Prior to IOER, banks needed to lend money on the fed funds market to earn interest on any excess reserves. Doing so exposed them to the credit risk of their counterparty. Once it became possible to earn IOER risk free, banks had no incentive to expose themselves to the credit risk. Since banks (of all sizes) could not then rely on being able to access the fed funds market for liquidity, it became necessary for them to keep more reserves at the Fed. Perversely, as the quantity of reserves held at the Fed increased, interbank lending decreased (for more detail, see [0] pages 33-39).

> It does seem like the spread between fed funds and IOER is generally just a > few bp

Until recently, it looks like the spread has been roughly 5-17bps [1]. For a floor system, it seems rather odd that this would exist at all, especially for a period of a decade (see [0] pages 18-19).

[0] [https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/working-p...](https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/working- paper-50-updated-3.pdf)

[1] [https://imgur.com/n3R366c](https://imgur.com/n3R366c)

<comment><USER8> All makes sense.

Thank you for many details, you've greatly increased my (and hopefully other people's too) knowledge of the United States money markets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > "The Fed won't admit this," Cabana said, "but it looks and smells an awful > lot like the monetary authority is financing the fiscal authority."

Frightening... if true. I hope Matt Levine's explanation (cited by mrosett) is the correct one.

But also, if short-term rates are spiking (even if it's a rather different type of shrt-term rate), does that mean that the Fed was incorrect to drop the rate at its last meeting?

<comment><USER11> This has almost always been the case. The government is a huge part of the economy and risk-free debt is a huge part of liquidity. It is boring but stuff like the timing of payments matters. Paying taxes is a big, lumpy issue...and the reason the Fed came into existence was because of big, lump payments relating to the crop cycle (i.e. money becoming tight every year as banks lent to farmers...iirc). And before the 1980s (maybe the 70s), liquidity was the primary concern of policy-makers (you can go through FED minutes in the 1960s from ALFRED, the main policy tool was free funds).

What happened is nothing to do with the level of rates. It is to do with the volume (and often the location) of liquidity (location because tax payments just go on deposit somewhere else, but it still causes a dislocation).

<comment><USER12> People just don't like how resources are appropriated as they are subject to a different work mechanism in exchange for resources and not everyone else is. These headlines are mainly to trigger that sentiment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Another $75B injection planned for tomorrow: [https://www.ft.com/content/2c11a972-d941-11e9-8f9b-77216ebe1...](https://www.ft.com/content/2c11a972-d941-11e9-8f9b-77216ebe1f17)

<comment><USER14> I guess this is a dumb question but can they just keep "injecting" indefinitely? Do they have a magical Money Tree or something?

<comment><USER15> Look at a US dollar bill and what kind of note it is.

Yeah, the Federal Reserve has a "magical money tree": the whole reason they exist is to manage the money supply.

<comment><USER16> >the whole reason they exist is to manage the money supply.

That's a lot like saying the whole reason google exists is to help people find information. There are greedier reasons for these organizations to exist.

<comment><USER15> > That's a lot like saying the whole reason google exists is to help people > find information.

No it's not.

> There are greedier reasons for these organizations to exist.

Any "greedier reason" for the Fed is a particular application of managing the money supply; it to exists to manage the money supply, independently of whether it exists to do that for the public interest or "greedier reasons".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Something I've always wondered about overnight lending. All the money is basically repayable at one point in time, the start of business in the morning. What happens if theres a problem? What happens if a banks systems crash and that money can't be repaid, presumably having knock on impacts on the next days overnight lending.

I'm not suggesting it would be an end of days scenario, just curious.

<comment><USER18> Failing a rescue from a central bank, you could have a bank run.

I still don't know why the ordinary payments system has to be coupled with hedge funds and derivatives and whatnot. It should be completely separate. It's like having your car explode because a cup holder got a crack.

<comment><USER19> The system is coupled with hedge funds and etc. because the money they use come from banks. Goldman Sachs and others don't have the money to maintain all their obligations, it all comes from other banks that loan the required funds. When there are problems in money part of the banking system, everything goes down.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, that's the problem. They should be separated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is there a simple model of this - a script, spreadsheet or something - or in fact is there a open government set of figures showing the situation

I know it's probably well known but i am looking for a modern version of the old coloured liquids in tubes

</comment><comment><USER21> > On Tuesday morning, the NY Fed launched what's called an "overnight repo > operation," during which the central bank attempts to ease pressure in > markets by purchasing Treasuries and other securities.

It was my (perhaps mistaken?) understanding that the Fed operates an overnight repo facility regularly - like, every night. It reads like CNN is reporting this like an exceptional emergency maneuver. Is the newsworthiness in fact just the size of the liquidity injection, and CNN is a little confused about what the ON repo does? Or am I mistaken about the Fed making overnight repo agreements regularly?

</comment><comment><USER22> So much for unwinding the fed ballance sheet.

<comment><USER23> It's an overnight transaction, it should go away very quickly.

The Fed has been surprisingly consistent in its reduction of QE [1]. There is no way QE will be drained by the next recession but what is interesting is that they keep draining even though they are considering lowering rates. I am surprised it doesn't have a bigger impact on the market given how large of an impact QE had on the way up.

[1] [https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttren...](https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttrends.htm)

<comment><USER24> I suppose it's not something that the Fed would want trumpeted in every paper, but thanks for informing me that they were reversing QE. I agree, you would think that the effects of selling off a half trillion in assets per year since the beginning of last year would be much more substantial. Didn't they buy up a whole bunch of mortgages?

<comment><USER23> I believe their balance sheet is about 50/50 between treasuries and mortgages, and that they are selling both.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Originally read this headline as "NYFD rescues overnight lending market with $53B" and momentarily thought the calendar photoshoots were more than just a joke.

</comment><comment><USER26> Hey, fiat money. Press a button, money appears. I just hope we can stop the attempts at politicizing the Fed, else we are doomed shortly.

</comment><comment><USER27> When someone asks how does inflation increase with increasing deficit?

This is the answer. Money printed out of thin air to buy bonds.

Bye bye affordability if this continues.

</comment><comment><USER28> Any source that is more neutral reported on this?

<comment><USER29> [https://monday-morning-macro.com/2019/09/17/far-too- little-f...](https://monday-morning-macro.com/2019/09/17/far-too-little-far- too-late/)

This is the best technical write-up. Most mainstream financial reporting will focus on explaining repo so hard to get into the details, and the truth is that 95%+ of those who work in financial services have no idea what the repo market is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> QE4?

</comment><comment><USER31> Loud autoplaying video.

</comment><comment><USER12> Just a couple of underestimations, it did its job expediently.</comment>