Ask HN: What the heck is going on with the stock market? - <AUTHOR> There are so many smart and well-informed individuals on HN.
I would love to hear their -- your -- thoughts on this:

  EVERY ECONOMIC INDICATOR          STOCK MARKET
  +<comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----+    +</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----+
  | \                    |    |                   _/ |
  |  |/\                 |    |                 _/   |
  |     \                |    |               _/     |
  |      |  /\/\         |    |              /       |
  |       \/    \        |    |             /        |
  |              \/\_    |    |      /\/\  /         |
  |                  \   |    |     /    \/          |
  |                   \  |    |  /\/                 |
  |                    | |    | /                    |
  +</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----+    +</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----+

 Sample economic indicators in the US:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WEI
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ICSA
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCEC96
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DFII10
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE/
Stock market cap to GDP in the US:
https://www.longtermtrends.net/market-cap-to-gdp/ </comment><comment><USER2> This depends on which stock index you're looking at. If it's the S&P 500, it's a cap-weighted index. 20% is made up of 5 companies: Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet and Facebook [0].

These 5 companies are doing, by and large, incredibly well right now. Even if ad revenue is down, the lock-in is sticky at least to some extend beyond the very near term. So now if you look at the Dow Jones (which is not weighted- cap), it's up 2.2% in the past month, compared with the 4.8% of the S&P.

That said, the market is not rational, and I'd be wary of thoughtful statements like "investors think...". With the Fed pumping so much money into corporates (via banks), the cost of capital falls. If the government tells you, you can borrow up to your eyeballs at near zero rates, and we'll probably find a way to bail you out if you're big enough (=too big to fail), that's exactly what you'll do.

Once you've borrowed, you're not just sitting on these piles of cash, you'll invest some in operations, but ultimately what your board of directors wants to see is your stock, so you're going to use the money to buy back your shares. Your company is not materially better in any way, it operates pretty much as before but with lots of debt, but its stock price has gone up-up-up: execs get their bonuses, the board is happy, shareholders are happy.

This can go on for a long time. We've had the longest bull run in history - over a decade long - propped up this way.

[0] [https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/sp500-concen...](https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/sp500-concentration- large-cap-bad-sign-future-returns-effect-market-2020-4-1029133505?op=1)

<comment><USER3> > This depends on which stock index you're looking at. If it's the S&P 500, > it's a cap-weighted index. 50% - not a typo - is made up of 5 companies: > Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet and Facebook.

I think you need to check your math on that. It's way off. I haven't read the rest of your post but if anything else in there is based on this error, it's also wrong.

[https://www.ssga.com/us/en/individual/etfs/funds/spdr- sp-500...](https://www.ssga.com/us/en/individual/etfs/funds/spdr-sp-500-etf- trust-spy)

<comment><USER2> You're right, was looking at a different dataset. The correct number is 20%

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't think anyone knows for sure, but imo these are 3 possible reasons (all of which are flawed and can't explain it entirely):

1\. All of these declines were "priced in" (which frankly is a bit of a meme now) and they ended up not being as bad as expected. If there's there's a record new unemployment claims of 6m but the expected number was 10m then the market will love it and go up even though it's the worst in history.

Counterargument: The economy is still fundamentally weaker, so while we can go up when things aren't as bad as expected, we shouldn't be recovering as much as we have.

2\. Technically the stock market is a predictor of future returns, and I guess many investors are confident that most of the major companies will survive and continue making big bucks in the future. People don't feel the same way about, for example, the airlines, which is why they have not made nearly as much of a recovery as the rest of the market. If the long-term impact for most companies is just -2 years of revenue and then everything is back to normal, it's almost negligible in the long run.

Counterargument: Well-run big corps can probably survive a 2-year loss of revenue (and it'll probably be less than that in reality), but many SMBs can't and will close. Waves of SMB customers closing would obviously have long-term implications for all corporations.

3\. Governments worldwide are going all out to prevent a collapse of the economy. If the government will literally just pump out money to save the economy, then why should the market bother going down at all when it can just keep going up and take all those free government bucks?

Counterargument: A huge amount of money being injected into the economy for free doesn't seem healthy for the economy. Right now there's deflation because of reduced demand, but we could see major inflation since those dollars are out and in circulation now. And actually, the rise in stock prices maybe already reflect incoming inflation.

</comment><comment><USER5> Two reasons:

First:

The S&P crashed from ~3300 in Feb to ~2200 in Mar.

Now it's at ~2900.

But 2900 is less than 3300.

So why do people keep acting like it's gone up? It hasn't.

Second:

The stock market is all about what (people think) tomorrow/next month/next year will be like. So it should crash on bad news ABOUT THE FUTURE and go up on good news ABOUT THE FUTURE.

But economic indicators are all ABOUT THE PAST.

It's generally best to BUY stocks when a recession is declared because a recession isn't declared until the economy has shrunk for 2 quarters. Since it takes time to get those numbers ready, that means when a recession is declared, you've been in a recession for 8+ months already (2m for the figures plus 6 months of shrinking GDP). So you're most of the way through it.

When a commentator says "we're in a recession", the market says "yeah, we know, we knew 7.95months ago, but we're going to return to normal in ~3months so either buy now or be priced out later".

This is pretty much it.

</comment><comment><USER6> My opinion is that this is principally a chronic FOMO market.

People can speculate on levels, relative rises, falls, performance over the last years....I don't think there's much right or wrong with that....but it doesnt explain why there's soo much money around for equities.

i think is a combination of :

\- fed promised unlimited money from the money printer. (Anncounced by the fed on 23rd March.

\- it is election year, with a siting pres who hangs everything on the markets, a couple of tweets from Pres, Musk, Tim Apple etc...can add 10% to market overnight. No one wants to miss that.

\- there are few other attractive places for peoples money. People want them big gains, which are perceived as being still on the table.

i'd speculate the mass lay offs will protect company results for a couple of quarters, maybe more, but the buck stops when there are no consumers left to buy shit - and that's what's down the line IMHO.

<comment><USER7> I agree, you combine that with memories of March 2009. Everybody is hoping that we have hit bottom already and there is nowhere to go but up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not a huge fan of twitter threads unless they are extremely concise and interesting. This person has a very interesting, short story to tell about stocks.

[https://twitter.com/calvinfo/status/1254635755671969793?s=21](https://twitter.com/calvinfo/status/1254635755671969793?s=21)

</comment><comment><USER9> The stock market doesn't, and never has, represented the entirety of the economy. This was already obvious if you think about it: black markets and the illegal economy (including tax evasion, drugs, cash-only payments in the food service industry, etc.) aren't reflected in the stock market either, yet make up a gigantic proportion of economic transactions.

</comment><comment><USER10> As a few people have said, the stock market isn't necessarily the indicator of the entire economy. One other thing to keep in mind is that the Dow Jones Industrial Average has 30 companies in it. And the S&P 500 has, well, 500 companies. The point is that you are looking at composite indexes of companies on the market, not the entire market. And those companies have access to, what many consider, the largest weapon to help them rise over the next few year. Very very very inexpensive debt through a near 0% interest rate from the Federal Reserve (and other international reserves). Many of the large companies in the world will come out of this stronger than ever. Cheap debt is one of their favorite things to have.

Small business will go under. Keep in mind that a lot of those small businesses were going to go under anyway, this is just speeding up the process and potentially keeping them from getting more debt before they go under.

As for unemployment, many economists believed that our unemployment rate for the last few years was actually too low. Now, it is probably too high. Though we only have a few weeks of that unemployment to measure and this isn't the time for predictions. We need to stabilize the economy then look at the stability of unemployment. An economy this large takes some time to predict. Economists generally don't start making trends with only a few weeks of data.

I have lived through a few of these downturns. This is not the first by any means (2008/2009, 2000, 1987, the 1970's). My historical guess is in 18 months you are going to see unemployment much lower, the stock market will hit new highs, and people will be generally extremely afraid of what happens when the Fed starts to itch to raise the interest rate above 0%. Whichever party is in office in the US will take a lot of credit for "fixing everything" and blame any negative effects (like raising the interest rate, homelessness, income gaps and disparity) on the other party. And a lot of people will think things are wonderful.

The question really is, are they wonderful at that point?

</comment><comment><USER11> Krugman addressed this a few days ago: [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/30/opinion/economy-stock- mar...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/30/opinion/economy-stock-market- coronavirus.html)

He basically says the economy is not the stock market and there aren't a lot of better places to put cash to grow it.

</comment><comment><USER12> The economy ≠ the stock market

Investors are expecting things to get better in the future and pricing stocks based on that.

</comment><comment><USER13> from 2 weeks ago [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ECqDaPjjV0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ECqDaPjjV0) a video to explain this

</comment><comment><USER14> The reality of the situation hasn't been acknowledged in a lot of arenas.</comment>


How I got the chess.com domain name - <AUTHOR> https://www.chess.com/blog/erik/how-i-got-the-chess-com-domain-name <comment><USER2> The thing is, he got more than just the domain name, but all the assets. Was the domain name the most valuable asset?</comment>


Belgian advertising agencies go on strike over "spec" work - <AUTHOR> http://www.vvl.bbdo.be/

<comment><USER2> Belgian advertising agencies: using multi-page flash applets to deliver black and white, 16pt text in Verdana.

They could have done the same editing the stock "It works!" page in Apache.

</comment><comment><USER3> Site down?</comment>


The Empty Promise of Data Moats - <AUTHOR> https://a16z.com/2019/05/09/data-network-effects-moats/ <comment><USER2> Most of the leverage is in the _efficiency_ at exploiting data, and not just in technical terms but also operational economics. This is far more important than the data itself for a fundamental reason that has not been broadly internalized by the industry at large, and which makes it difficult to build a data moat.

Almost any proprietary data model based on proprietary data can be reconstructed with sufficient fidelity from unrelated external data sources to be competitive with that proprietary data model, at the cost of being somewhat more expensive to engineer all things being equal. I've demonstrated this many times in practice. As a corollary, a company with sufficiently efficient end- to-end data infrastructure could, in principle, commoditize all proprietary data model companies. This company does not exist, yet, and it would require some very specialized talent but every necessary ingredient exists.

This is a realizable endgame due to the reality that virtually all data companies, for good and practical reasons, are strongly incentivized to build on infrastructures that are literally orders of magnitude less efficient than is possible in principle. A company that was purpose-built on exceptional end- to-end data infrastructure engineering could capture much of the revenue in these markets in a surprisingly short time by commoditizing the data model and arbitraging efficiency.

<comment><USER3> I was with you at the beginning. Can you ELI5?

<comment><USER2> I can give it a try. :)

There is an assumption that unique data enables unique insights, which can presumably can be monetized in some fashion. As long as no one else has access to your unique data, you have pricing power for the unique insights. There are _loads_ of companies, big and small, trying to execute this business model.

A problem with this model is that for practical purposes there are no such things as "unique insights". The only thing unique data grants you is a cheap path to a specific set of insights. For every set of "unique" insights, there is almost always many sets of unrelated data sources that can be analytically combined to deliver the same insights. In the slightly seedy underworld of data model brokers, I've seen some very impressive examples of this. The way these alternative data models make money, despite the creation process being more expensive, is that they are positioned as a cheaper alternative to companies that think "unique data" means they can extract monopoly rent. The explosion in data source availability has slowly made these clever alternatives more prevalent.

Currently, the alternative to having access to the unique data is to do significantly more expensive computations on what are typically larger and more diverse data sets. This keeps it from becoming a runaway race to the bottom due to the higher cost. Note that in both cases, the parties are using conventional data infrastructure stacks with their implied limitations.

In recent years I've done extensive studies of the cost structures of these types of businesses. It turns out that if you can reduce the end-to-end data infrastructure costs by an order of magnitude for the reconstructive approach then your total costs will be _far_ below the break even point for the conventional "unique data" approach. Furthermore, the computational work required to replicate one high-value data model is substantially reusable for other data models, so the more data models you reconstruct, the lower the marginal cost of reconstructing additional data models this way. Done at scale across enough data models, the amortized cost of reconstructing unique data can be less than using the unique data! People have been idly thinking about what it would take to do this for a few years. Collecting the rare skillsets required to pull it off is a major hurdle for any company.

The notion that it is possible to reduce end-to-end data infrastructure costs by (at least) an order of magnitude relative to conventional data infrastructures is well-supported but it raises another question: why can't the "unique data" companies do the advanced engineering required to have such an infrastructure themselves (it isn't something you can do with open source currently)? The simplest answer is that it is difficult to justify extremely expensive engineering efforts outside of an organization's core expertise solely to prevent erosion of the market value of their unique data. Fundamentally, it is a shift to competing on infrastructure instead of data, which is an improbable transition for companies.

<comment><USER4> > For every set of "unique" insights, there is almost always many sets of > unrelated data sources that can be analytically combined to deliver the same > insights. In the slightly seedy underworld of data model brokers, I've seen > some very impressive examples of this.

If you could share a couple of examples it would help a lot to get your point across.

FWIW, I agree with the thesis that data intensive computation could be one or two orders of magnitude more efficient than it currently is, with sufficient engineering. Probably Cassandra vs ScyllaDB is a good public example, and ScyllaDB is likely not close to the theoretical optimum at all. But I'm not sure about deriving data from alternative sources. How do you derive movement data for everyone with an Android phone if you're not Google?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The best analogy from "data is the new oil" is that a data breach or privacy event is like the Exxon Valdez.

<comment><USER6> Working daily with clients who expect a lot from data. Especially when they quote that sentence, I tend to ask them what their car uses as fuel. Do they really fill their cars with raw oil or a product that was refined and turned into usable gasoline.

Data might be the new oil (I doubt it). But you can't use it. You need to work with this raw material and turn it into an endproduct - depending on the use case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Most discussions around data defensibility actually boil down to scale effects, a dynamic that fits a looser definition of network effects in which there is no direct interaction between nodes."

Good distinction between scale vs network effects, not every company with scale has a network effect...

</comment><comment><USER8> _> Generating synthetic data is another approach to catch up with incumbents housing large tracks of data. We know of a startup that produced synthetic data to train their systems in the enterprise automation space; as a result, a team with only a handful of engineers was able to bootstrap their minimum viable corpus. That team ultimately beat two massive incumbents relying on their existing data corpuses collected over decades at global scale, neither of which was well-suited for the problem at hand._

Generated data is being reverse-engineered by machine learning? With both the generation and ML written by the same team?

<comment><USER9> Generated data can be used to increase variety as a way to avoid overfitting. A simple example might be translating or rotating images.

Not an expert, but I'm guessing it must be easier to do this than to improve how the machine learning generalizes from less data.

<comment><USER10> Usually when someone says "synthetic data" they mean CGI, not simply transformations of existing data. Using synthetic data is fraught (and presumptuous), as you are assuming you understand the problem domain 100% and are also extremely good at reproducing it. There's a chance the model is using something specific to the CGI (and not the general reality) to produce its results.

For winning a computer vision competition it's probably ok but I'd be very careful about using synthetic data for systems I cared about.

<comment><USER11> I thought "synthetic data" it's something that rarely shows in training image recognition, and is more like randomly generated user data (name, surname, etc.) or data generated from simulations of some processes?

<comment><USER12> >I thought "synthetic data" it's something that rarely shows in training image recognition

On the contrary, it is used to train models but it cannot adequately capture the long tail of _weird_ events in the real world. Hence, it cannot be relied upon, as alluded to by the parent commenter. With reference to using data collected from a simulated environment vs real world ─ this subject was discussed at some length by Elon Musk and Andrej Karpathy, at the Tesla Autonomy Day event a few weeks ago.

<comment><USER9> I generally agree that there is no substitute for experience running in production and more data is better - or at least should be, if you can figure out how to take advantage of it.

The thing is, when it comes to weird events, historical data can't be relied on either. The next weird thing may never have happened before.

Predicting the future is hard no matter what you do. Gathering more data and learning more efficiently from what you have are both important. Training on artificial challenges can also be useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm really glad a16z put this issue to rest because it's the kind of problem that causes insane wheel spin at a certain kind of company. The "Data Acquisition Cost", and "Incremental data value," made me laugh because I had to solve that problem before.

The most interesting related work on this is a paper covered on HN at some point ([http://blog.mldb.ai/blog/posts/2016/01/ml-meets- economics/](http://blog.mldb.ai/blog/posts/2016/01/ml-meets-economics/)) about economics' indifference curves and ML's ROC curves.

The big mistake I've seen data companies make is they approach their market based on customer vertical, assuming that say a Bank will be like other banks, and a health care provider will be like other health care providers, and this is the fatal error. The bank with the same sensitivity to fp/fn/tp/tn rates will have more in common with the health care company with that same sensitivity than it will with other banks.

Basic problem with any data product is the customer's ROC curve, or where they economically benefit from using your data service. Different customers have different sensitivities to false positive/negative, true postive/negative rates - and the customer categories themselves are defined by this sensitivity. e.g. What they have in common is not their vertical but their risk appetite. I have a blog post 3/4 written on this specific topic.

That sensitivity is specifically an artifact of the customers growth stage as a company, which determines their risk appetite and the economics of the asymmetrical value that the effective ROC curve of your data product describes. (see above link).

This is the fundamental problem for an ML/AI company, where they will go bankrupt trying to find their 2nd or 3rd insurance company customer because they think the value of their product is because their next customer is in the same vertical - not because they have the same sensitivity to fp/fn/tp/tn.

Slight aside, it's so important that an investor like these can weigh on in these issues and other technical economic factors, because IMO when I listen to every technical person I know, the #1 cause of internal suffering at companies is caused by people trying to bullshit their investors, and blog posts like these just wipe away a big source of that temptation.

</comment><comment><USER14> The good thing is there are infinite functions, not just infinite data. So even if you limit yourself to finite data, you can do interesting things.

</comment><comment><USER15> Amen to this. Enterprises are aware their data is valuable and increasingly have top of the line devops and pipeline tools to manage it. Pendulum is swinging towards data living with vertically integrated brands rather than horizontal services.

</comment><comment><USER16> how does this reconcile with stuff like this ? [https://factordaily.com/indian-data-labellers-powering- the-g...](https://factordaily.com/indian-data-labellers-powering-the-global- ai-race/)

is this very contextual to business space (like enterprise startups) which A16z clearly mentions ?

</comment><comment><USER14> the nice thing is that computer power is outpacing the growth in human population finally. An enterprise data startup can actually collect, store, and process some finite amount of data on all 7.5 billion people on the planet. Just find an interesting angle and be better at processing that data then your competitors.

<comment><USER17> I would call this very scary. Soon a single entity can do full surveillance of the whole planet at reasonable cost. what could go wrong?

<comment><USER18> Yes, but we should also acknowledge the upside. Soon (or now) a single entity can benefit/innovate for the entire planet at a reasonable cost. What could go right?

<comment><USER19> As the saying goes, power makes people benevolent, absolutely power makes people absolutely benevolent, right?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A4 vs US Letter - <AUTHOR> http://betweenborders.com/wordsmithing/a4-vs-us-letter/

<comment><USER3> It's too bad that the US didn't switch to the metric system and A4 paper. It isn't so much about imperial vs. metric (though the metric system's design feels more natural); but it would be nice to have a worldwide standard format.

<comment><USER4> precisely, its pretty asinine, everyone else in the world uses the metric system, and USA is stuck using obsolete weights and measures

<comment><USER5> Not at all. There's nothing obsolete about it. There's a social aspect to switching because others have done so but that's all. Except for that it's change for change's sake. An inch, a foot, a yard are all very intuitive measures that have good rough ways of being measured without any tools. I'm not sure what I get from metric that beats this. It's just convention. If anything metric is more arbitrary. Metric is design by committee, as hacker's we should consider that a mark against it.

<comment><USER6> Tell us how much a cubic mile of water weighs in ounces. Then get back to us re: the "arbitrary" Metric system.

<comment><USER5> This is exactly the issue. Making it easier to solve some problems that are very rare in the day to day lives of most of the world is not a good reason to force people to switch measurement systems.

<comment><USER6> Converting between differently sized units of measurement is an everyday problem if anything is. I enjoy being able to do so by shifting a decimal point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _Moreover, I understand A-series paper — especially A4 — is slowly becoming the norm in US colleges and universities, if for no other reason than making it easier for students and staff to photocopy articles from (inevitably A4-sized) journals._

Has anyone actually seen this? I can't say that I've ever seen people at any of the US universities I've been to using A4, with the exception of some Europeans preparing some paperwork to send to the EU.

<comment><USER8> A4 paper doesn't fit well into typical folders and binders sold in America, and I didn't see A4 paper at all until I went to another country for a while. US universities tend to just have the printer set to scale pages to fit the paper by default. You end up with wider margins when printing A4 journal articles to Letter paper, but those can be handy for notes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I realize this is, at best, tangentially related to this topic, but a few weeks ago I thought about formatting and printing my resume on A4 for a job fair. My thought was that if I wanted it to stick out from the rest of them, why not have it literally stick out? I decided against it, but I do wonder what sort of impression that would give an employer; as a US employer, how would you react to a resume from someone, also in the US, but printed on A4?

<comment><USER10> I think my reaction would be the same as if I got a resume from someone printed on 8.5 x 11 paper -- I'd ask the candidate to send me an electronic copy via email. :)

Seriously, though, I've been the hiring manager for a number of positions at various jobs over the past ten years, and the main way of collecting resumes has always been electronic. This is for jobs in both the technical and editorial fields. On the rare occasion that someone mailed me a hard copy of his or her resume, I'd almost always question the person's technical literacy. Worse yet for the candidate, the resume was likely not to get looked at as closely as the others nor re-reviewed because it wasn't in the same email folder.

That's not to say there's no use for hard copies of resumes. During the interviews themselves, of course, it's helpful to be able to look at a piece of paper. But I would usually print out the resume ahead of time and take it with me when I met with a candidate. After that, if I didn't make any important notes on the resume itself, it'd go in the recycling bin.

<comment><USER9> I guess I should have said that I was at a job fair. I realize that I could have emailed my resume to the company before or after the fair, but I wanted to leave the recruiter with something tangible to both indicate my interest in their company and to display my relevant skills.

However, your comment has prompted me to send an additional, electronic version of my resume to all the companies I gave hard copies to. It can't hurt, and it might give it additional visibility.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _don't send or distribute documents that depend on external factors to display and print properly. So, no Word documents, no Quark XPress documents, no PageMaker files, no AppleWorks files and so on._

Isn't quite right. Sure, that'll be a problem if you're distributing your document for print, but otherwise of that list it's only Word that insists on reformatting the display for the currently selected printer. The other apps will honour the page setup the document was created with, and only give problems at print time.

It's surprising that .doc became the standard for resumes when the display for the recipient can vary so extravagantly from the display for the creator. Oh wait, it's not surprising; it's depressing.

</comment><comment><USER12> You can still get A4 sized paper here in the states, although not at OfficeMax (I don't think). Most paper stores would have it though. The trouble is all of our file cabinets, folders, and whatnot are designed for letter size.

</comment><comment><USER13> It's nice to see the rationales, such as they are, behind each of these, but in the end we are left with a religious argument. There are good points to each, and they have been mentioned over and over and over again.

Very little will change, and arguing the merits of each system is pretty pointless. Better is to be aware of the advantages, the disadvantages, the conversions and the differences.

It's only units. Be aware, and work with them. There's no point in arguing.

</comment><comment><USER14> I almost got into Hollywood by getting paper, tags, washers, from LA, and printing/binding my script, and sending it from the UK to the screenwriting agent in Los Angeles. They only read properly bound US Letter scripts (with the right WEIGHT of paper). However, I fudged up by saying I had an updated version, he said send a PDF, and he probably binned the old one and forgot about the PDF.

</comment><comment><USER15> "PC Load Letter"

<comment><USER16> If you watch the movie with French subtitles, it says "CP Charge A4".

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm in the UK and I deliberately buy US Letter paper and print on that. It's a nicer shape.

</comment><comment><USER18>
        Can anyone explain the relationship between 4:3 and 16:9?  I know 16:9 is each number in 4:3 squared, but is there a geometric reason/interpretation for this choice?

<comment><USER19> The squared relationship is actually pure coincidence. The dude who proposed the next popular ratio took all of the common presentation ratios (like 4:3 for TV, 1.85:1 for film, etc.) and laid them all on top of each other. The overlapping sweet spot was just about 16:9.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspect_ratio_(image)#Why_16:9.3...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspect_ratio_\(image\)#Why_16:9.3F)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> "The file-format [PDF] is only semi-open and Acrobat files are larger than I'd like them to be, when compared to the amount of information encoded within them. There's also the small point of cost."

I would like to point out that this was written in 2002 when it was still valid. PDF is now an ISO approved standard (ISO 32000) and therefore quite open. Also, making PDF files at least for viewing is a breeze. If you use latex (and why wouldn't you?), pdflatex works great and can even handle edge cases like PDF forms using hyperref. If not, PDF printers are still a dime a dozen (quite a few are actually free) which can produce PDFs without any hassle.

In conclusion: PDF owns all.

<comment><USER21> That's right but it's a pity that PDFs by default don't even include their unicode text content nor the correct sequence of words. They're good for document fidelity viewing and printing but horrible for further processing and even for interactive tasks like copy and paste. We urgently need a PDF successor.

<comment><USER22> What do you mean by 'unicode text contents'? Of course, text in PDF could not be pasted, but it's not a format intended for "editing', we have plain text for this. PDF was created to distribute text documents, drawings, and so on in a way that it will look exactly the same everywhere. But unlike postscript, it includes some high-level features like word indexes, protection and so on, so you can search inside PDFs, add notes, place interactive elements - <USER2> impossible in other formats at all.

Thus I don't really understand where the problem with format itself is? If you have suggestions regarding features needed, take a part in ISO comittee.

<comment><USER21> I didn't mean pasting into the PDF but copying parts of a PDF in order to paste them elsewhere. This is not deterministically possible because (most) PDF documents do not contain a sequence of letters or words but rather a sequence of painting instructions, which can be different from the order in which the document is read.

Also, the codes used to represent letters refer to fonts not to unicode code points (or other character sets for that matter). So my problem is that extracting text from PDF has to use a heuristic approach that always fails at some point. That's why copy and paste out of PDF documents leads to such strange results sometimes.

The use case I'm talking about is to distribute documents for viewing, printing AND further processing.

The issues I have with the PDF format are not solvable by adding features because the features are already there. PDF documents can contain unicode text and a very large number of other structural information as you have pointed out. I know because I have written PDF software and I have read the spec very carefully top to bottom.

There are two major problems:

* The PDF format is incredibly bloated, difficult to process, and it allows documents to be distributed without deterministically extractable text. (And I don't mean the case where the author deliberately restricts text extraction)

* The widely used tools to create PDF files, by default, do not use the PDF features that would allow deterministic text extraction.

The PDF format is older than the web. Data integration and search were not important tasks when PDF was created in 1992. It was meant for printing and viewing only.

The only way to solve these problems would be to remove features from the PDF spec or to mandate the use of other features. Both would be incompatible with previous versions in a way that is completely unacceptable. That's why I think there has to be a new much simpler format that leaves all the old arcane baggage behind and facilitates reliable processing in addition to viewing and printing.

<comment><USER23> I have a question that maybe you can answer, having really perused the PDF spec. Is it true that PDF removed the turing-completeness of PostScript?

I had heard something that the main reason for creating PDF was that you couldn't render a single PS page without rendering all the ones preceding it.

<comment><USER21> Yes that's true. There are no loops or gotos and functions have no side effects. PostScript has all of that. But I think it would have been sufficient to remove the possibility of global side effects to support out of order rendering of pages. A purely functional language without global state could've done the trick.

So I suspect there were other reasons as well for removing so many features. Maybe the complexity of interpreters. I don't know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> If its US, its BAD!

If its European, its GOOD!

If it has been decided by some unaccountable academic pin head committee to be forced down the throat of others, its GOOD!

If its been around for the better part of a 1000 years and used by common folk in their daily lives, its BAD!

Hmmm.... I see a pattern here. If its used by people who think they have a RIGHT to be free from being FORCED by others to do what they would not otherwise do, its BAD. If its the consequence of arbitrary Governmental decree and enforced at the point of a gun, its GOOD.

In my opinion, there is no amount of rationalization that will make this good.

<comment><USER25> I don't recall any judgement call like this in the article. The Good/Bad dichotomy is something you are inventing in your own mind.

<comment><USER26> He sees a pattern _here_, not in the article. He's talking about the people _here_:

"It's too bad that the US didn't..."

"...its[sic] pretty asinine, ... and USA is stuck using obsolete..."

This has nothing to do with the metric system: You could define a hypothetical Z0 paper size as 42.81" x 30.27", a square yard, and then define paper sizes Z1, Z2, and so forth. Each would be half the area of the previous by performing the same operation. It's not as if 210 or 297 are particularly easy numbers to deal with, or that having precisely a square meter of material is all that important. Is it important that a sheet of A4 paper is about one eighth of a square meter?

And in defense of US Letter, its proportions are closer to the golden ratio than A4, which looks too skinny for me. But they're both too wide for letter writing; I think either octavo-sized or A5 paper is a more natural width for printing or hand-writing a single column of text. Bringhurst's Elements of Typographic Style – to mention one of a potential dozen or so authorities – recommends text columns be a maximum of about two alphabets of lowercase characters.

<comment><USER25> I like A4 better than US Letter. Perhaps because it is "different".

<comment><USER26> Back when I liked A4 more than US Letter, it was pretty much because I had a deep need to appear sophisticated by making conscious decisions to adopt exotic, European things. See also self-hating Americans who are against GMO and anything the US or any US company does because some Europeans are against it for political or economic – not aesthetic or scientific or otherwise relevant – reasons.

On another note, the original article writer spends a lot of time on paper sizing issues when resizing a PDF to fit on a different paper size is easy.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: feedback on our startup project - <AUTHOR>

Hi everyone, I'd love to get some feedback on our startup idea, we just launched it for limited preview.
For many of us it's hard to find good and fresh content on the web, especially for something that's new and upcoming. This is a common problem with many popularity based recommendation websites such as Digg, StumbleUpon, or Youtube. The problem stems from the fact that they rank content in a single global bucket, where it's hard for new comers to compete with established ones.
We came up with the idea to allow viral web content to spread like real viruses, by real people across real locations.
Benefit number one is that by associating content with locations, each point on earth has its own virtual bucket, in which we only expose content that is spread to, or created at the location. With this breakdown, new content has a better chance to be noticed.
Then because users on our system picks (Facebook "like") and facilitates the movement of content across locations, we create a crowd-sourced filtering system like the natural selection process. So you can trust what reached your location is good.
With these, we hope to bring excellent content to consumers, and at the same time democratize content promotion.
Our blog has more details in case you are interested: http://blog.infactio.us.
Our question is, would you give it a try? Does our app (infactio.us) live up to its promise? Your feedback would be really valuable for a young startup!
Thanks HN community!
Loyd <comment><USER2> I'm not entirely convinced that the problem you're solving is a serious one, but I still think that your results could be fun and the locality aspect might well result in neat things bubbling up that's particularly relevant to a specific audience (I'm thinking the NASCAR crowd in middle America, or anarchists in Oregon). I am interested to see how it works out, and would participate.

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly, some content might not be globally popular, but will be very viral locally - and good examples!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Seen the demo video, and I'm a little skeptical about content spread having to depend on real-life location. I like the current global bucket model, because it guarantees best content (even if it hides other potentially good submissions).

virus originated from Redmond, WA? I'm going to guess you are or used to be a Product Manager at Msoft.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right on with your guess :) And I agree with "it guarantees good content" part. However, one point we didn't mention is the staleness of the global bucket. For a generic search "funny" on Youtube, most results are 4-5 years old.

We want to focus on upcoming talents, which means we want to bring in new content to the mix, to some people, "fresh + good" is better than "best", and I believe that's why StumbleUpon model is successful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm rather skeptical that there are many interesting classes of information for which geography is a good filter. I don't read my local community newspaper because it's boring. On a larger scale reddit/r/australia is more interesting to me.

For most types of content I just want the best in the world and location is irrelevant. If you took the best from just my area I can imagine the quality being way below that and I live in a good area!

The best thing about the internet is how we now instantly have access to the best content and people that exist on earth. It's no longer based on who you happen to be lucky enough to live near, bump into etc...

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, internet made information instantly available, but it also creates overflow. We need information to be curated (news or portal), or automatically filtered (recommendation sites, Digg, StumbleUpon). I hope our filtering does not stop the best in the world content to reach your location; we need to tweak our algorithm if it does :)

By the way, we also implemented some "facebook wall", so you can see what your friends are "infected". This helps break the barrier of needing people to travel to, say, a remote location.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I _really_ like the idea of modeling viral content after real epidemics.

Some questions:

What's the advantage of a limited preview? Do you plan to gain critical mass, say in Washington, then open it up only there? Similar to a facebook style growth pattern.

Why did you decide no downvote? Every social bookmarking site I can think of has the option.

I don't like the fact that I can't see stuff for my area without logging in. I usually lurk for a long time at a site before I decide to join and contribute.

Why don't you just grab my location from my IP address? Why do I have to turn it on in FireFox?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, good questions, I will try my best to answer them:

Preview? To gain critical mass around an area was our initial intention. By the way, we are not very restrictive at the moment, as long as you request, we will give you a preview invitation!

Downvote? To stay truthful to the real-world model, we hope to let things die down quietly. In the next version we will be implementing flagging, and maybe consider downvote as needed. This is a good point!

See more before joining? This is a chicken-egg problem for us now: without large adoption, our content is suboptimal so we are reluctant to open up the experience to everyone; but most people want to see more before contributing...

So at the current stage, we are hoping to target the early-adopter crowd (for example, who would wait 6 hours in the line to get the first iPad), then open it up! I would love to get some discussion around this if others would like to chime in!

Get location from IP? Good idea, we should give it a try! However, we probably will stick to browser's native support - I think this is cool and might be the future, no? :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think that it has some real possibilities especially in keeping local items relevant. Where the previous poster's argument comes to play though is in content that has no specific geographic tie but rather a conceptual tie (e.g. Linux) etc. However if that is not the type of content you want then maybe it is not a big deal.

I would suggest having someone edit your About page though to clean up some grammatical issues.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestions and support!</comment></comment>


Volocopter 2x – Safer Alternative to a Personal Helicopter - <AUTHOR> http://www.volocopter.com/index.php/en/ <comment><USER3> I've been following e-volo for several years. I think they have a winning design here, unless there is an obvious design flaw I am not seeing.

<comment><USER4> Obvious design flaws:

1\. it's really ugly

2\. can't glide if the power fails

<comment><USER5> Helicopter glide property is important because most are single engine. You could easily put several independent motor + battery partitions in this one.

<comment><USER6> but then, wouldn't fuel efficiency go down?

<comment><USER5> This is electric, the batteries are already just big bunches of small cells. Partitioning those won't appreciably affect battery performance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I really like these. There is something to these kind of inventions that always puts them "just around the corner" category. This has been going on since [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moller_M400_Skycar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moller_M400_Skycar) in the 90's.

There is probably a combination of a tendency of people to dream about flying, and how much fun it would be, combined with the ignorance of all possible hurdles, not just physical and engineering ones, but also legal and regulatory.

<comment><USER8> There's a self-flying taxi drone supposed to start operating in Dubai this summer.

> The Ehang is electric-powered and can travel for about 31 miles with a > person and bag that weigh up to 100kg. It can go at speeds of up to 63 miles > an hour and takes two hours to charge fully.

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/02/14/self- flying...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/02/14/self-flying-taxi- transport-passengers-dubai/)

<comment><USER9> I'm a bit skeptical of the eHang 184, built by a Chinese company that's built toys and commercial 10-kg-drones - it has 8 props, namely 1 coaxial twin prop (presumably counter-rotating) at every corner. Does not look hugely redundant to me, plus they're conveniently located to break legs while on the ground (or heads during take-off/landing).

The Volocopter has had manned and unmanned test flights since last year, has 18 rotors in a rotor plane well above your head, can fly with 4 rotors inoperative, has a ballistic rescue chute, and apparently good initial feedback from the regulator.

(Disclaimer: I've invested 1000 EUR in the Volocopter via crowdfunding, so I might be hopelessly biased.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What I would love on these kind of announcements is a short overview of the specs (just like they make them for cars and motorcycles!)

\- range [km]

\- battery capacity [kWh]

\- flight time [h]

\- maximum load [kg]

\- weight [kg]

\- price [€]

\- permissions needed to fly it

...

Instead of a very strange and convoluted website with titles like "jump in and take off" (what else am I gonna do with a personal helicopter?) I would love to have some hard facts.

<comment><USER11> range: ~30km

battery: ?

flight time: ~20min

max. load: 2 persons... 150kg?

weight: under 450kg fully loaded

price: ~300k EUR

permission needed: difficult... no airclass yet for those things except. "ultra light"

Those figures are from a presentation of the VC200 and might not be exactly right for the 2X.

<comment><USER12> The current specifications are 15 min max theoretical flight time with one passenger, that never as been proved on real life scenario. Considering that rotorcopter regulation requires 20 min reserve time unless there is an exception the vehicle can even takeoff battery technology will have to double for a 10 min flight time with 20 min reserve one passenger.

Volocopter is a great project and on electrical VTOL is the current "state of the art" but it's very dependent on a massive battery weight to power improvement.

How I know all this, I run a startup targeting the some problem but with a very different approach.

<comment><USER9> Fully agreed.

Two huge bottlenecks for PEVA (personal electric VTOL aircraft) remain, in my view:

* specific energy of the battery. I hope progress is being made there.

* regulation, as you allude to. A VTOL aircraft in VFR with fairly short total flight time could probably reasonably be allowed to fly with lower reserves. Airmen licensing is another huge area - it would be absurd to require a helicopter CPL or even ATPL for shuttling a pax around in this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> While this is not a car replacement for everyone - the Volocopter will require a full pilot license to be flown, it should have a significant impact on small commercial and especially non-commerical flying. Helicopters are very expensive to operate and the Volocopter should bring down operation costs down to the levels of fixed-wing aircrafts, if not even below that, as it lacks any maintenance-intensive combustion engine.

<comment><USER9> > Volocopter will require a full pilot license to be flown

My understanding is that it'll require a sport pilot license, and the regulator might well introduce an entirely new category (as it is not comparable to a heli or even fixed wing in complexity).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Simply foolproof" aka unsinkable.

"Safety first" ... if safety was the primary concern one wouldn't ever step into a helicopter. Speed and convenience come first.

I would enjoy reading the market studies for these micro helicopters. Weight is a huge issue. Exactly how fat can the passengers be?

<comment><USER15> If safety was the primary concern I'd lever leave home. I think if rigorous safety goals are set and meeting those goals comes before meeting any other performance or cost criteria, then I think it's reasonable to say that safety came first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> 1\. Helicopters (multi or single rotor) are significantly less fuel efficient than planes per distance and per time

2\. Electric planes are just barely approaching the flying time that is anything beyond being a joke

3\. These guys do not state their flying time

My guess? It is so bad that it is not worth mentioning.

<comment><USER17> For urban moblity, let's take a use case of flying someone from central london to heathrow airport i.e. 20miles or 30km.

Assuming this thing could fly at 60km/h then a flight time of 30 minutes would be required.

I'm not aware of any electric VTOL vehicle with this capability at the moment. But we live in hope.

<comment><USER11> The 2X predecessor is called VC200 and reaches 70km/h and had a flying time of around 20 minutes.

<comment><USER16> In EU and USA, flying a passenger aircraft requires reserves of 30 minutes minimum (more in some cases, never less)

if your flight time is 20 min, you cannot legally take off

if your flight time is 31 minutes, your flight cannot legally be planned to be over a minute long

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Height control seems to be directly on the cyclic, without the combined height/throttle handle. I do not see yaw pedals, either.

Controls of this aircraft seem to be different enough from conventional helicopter (that at least license hours were flown in) to be a serious disadvantage for potential buyers. Another consideration could be how this thing reacts to wind gusts and how different that handles compared to conventional heli. These things could be important factors for potential customers.

<comment><USER19> It seems like a big motivation behind this is to appeal to non aviation folk and make it a mainstream offering.

<comment><USER9> Indeed, the volocopter breaks with traditional heli modus operandi, but that's a good thing. It is _much_ simpler to operate, with one control stick:

* rotate to rotate the craft (replacing rudder)

* move forward/backwards/sideways to move (translate) the craft (replacing cyclic)

* operate simple switch on top to ascent/descent (replacing collective and throttle)

(Disclaimer: 1. As far as I know, 2. I have crowdfund-invested 1000 EUR in it, so im biased :-)

<comment><USER20> Out of curiosity, is there a button that's held while rotating the stick to rotate? The stick looks directional, so it wouldn't make sense to just rotate it and keep it rotated...

Anyway, sounds like a cool setup.

<comment><USER9> My understanding is that when you rotate the stick, the angle controls the rotational (yaw) speed of the Volcopter (in other words, you hold the stick straight, it'll keep looking in a fixed direction, say north. Now if you twist the stick a few degrees, it'll slowly rotate in that direction (and keep rotating as long as you hold it twisted). If you twist it more, it'll rotate faster. If you let go (untwist), it'll stop rotating and maintain that heading.)

You can see this in this video of the first manned flight a year ago, at around 2:26.

You can also nicely see the thumb controlled ascent/descent switch at the beginning. Controls look super intuitive.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OazFiIhwAEs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OazFiIhwAEs)

<comment><USER20> Ah, right, of course. That makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Are multiple rotor blades more or less efficient than a single large rotor? Also, could a normal helicopter be adapted to use these control systems to make them easier to fly?

<comment><USER22> Yeah they are less efficient. The reason to use them is that they can be fixed pitch and you get control by controlling their speed, which is very simple to do (it's basically a huge quadcopter). Normal helicopters keep the speed roughly fixed and get control using variable pitch, which is obviously far more complicated mechanically.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think the big issue with this sort of scheme would be noise. Small, heavily loaded props will be super loud. There are a lot of them in this case. The noise wouldn't linearly increase with the number of propellers but it would increase with the addition of each one.

<comment><USER9> From the Volocopter FAQ [1] (in somewhat charming Denglish):

> DOES A VOLOCOPTER MAKE LESS NOISE THAN A HELICOPTER?

> Yes, the Volocopter is much more pleasant in terms of its acoustics due to > its design and above all much quieter than conventional helicopters.

Listening to the video [2], this doesn't seem altogether implausible - <USER2> sound seems ok, like a fan more than a chopper.

[1] [http://www.volocopter.com/index.php/en/kontakt-en/faq- en](http://www.volocopter.com/index.php/en/kontakt-en/faq-en)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OazFiIhwAEs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OazFiIhwAEs)

<comment><USER23> In comparing the Volocopter noise to helicopters it would be something with no main rotor noise and 18 heavily loaded open tail rotors:

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter_noise_reduction#Tai...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter_noise_reduction#Tail_rotor_noise)

My guess would be that the noise wouldn't carry as far due to the higher frequency but would be very loud closer in, again due to the higher frequency.

<comment><USER9> Interesting, could well be. So not a problem for people on the ground, but you'd want to have a good noise-cancelling headset while on board.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The site is not mobile friendly - images weren't scaled on mobile, could not be seen, only their left side, and site could not be aide scrolled. Imho a marketing site should be completely mobile friendly.

I recommend fixing this.

</comment><comment><USER25> Considering how people drive cars, this is very scary.

I do believe we'll see things like this flying around in the near future, but I've always thought they'd be self-driving.

Very cool, though (besides the vaporware).

</comment><comment><USER26> Test flight video from last year: [https://youtu.be/OazFiIhwAEs](https://youtu.be/OazFiIhwAEs)

</comment><comment><USER27> I would have assumed 12 motors is 11x more chances of failure than a helicopter.

<comment><USER9> It has 18 rotors (basically 3 on each of the corners of a hexagon, 6 in an inner circle, and 12 in an outer circle), each driven by its own engine.

Pairs of rotors on opposite sides are driven by 9 independent powertrains and batteries, so failure of one battery/powertrain induces not much asymmetry and poses no problem.

At least 4 rotors can fail and the aircraft still remains fully controllable.

Beyond that, there is a ballistic rescue chute (as in the Cirrus SR20/SR22 fixed wing aircraft), which you can't really have, by construction, in a traditional helicopter.</comment></comment>


Twitter Just did Something Great - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@jimmyjacobson/twitter-just-did-something-great-49179ac99d6a

<comment><USER2> Hey! I wrote this. Thanks for posting to HN. Glad to discuss here.

</comment><comment><USER3> not sure if its something great; its a silly ux bug that should have been caught earlier or accounted for in advance.</comment>


Google against OWS: song on Youtube with views strangely stuck at 31,616 - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xq3BYw4xjxE&feature=email&email=comment_reply_received

<comment><USER2> The idea that google would bother to manually fix the views on a youtube video is an almost hilarious conspiracy.

The view counters on videos on youtube regularly get stuck for various reasons, for various amounts of time. Reasons vary (and often aren't clear), but often kick in when youtube automatically thinks someone is trying to inflate the number of votes a video gets.

I am genuinely curious. Is this just a way of getting publicity for a video, or do you really think evil google did this on purpose, specifically targeting OWS videos?</comment>


Sawfish, a window manager scriptable in Lisp - <AUTHOR> http://sawfish.tuxfamily.org/ <comment><USER2> Thinking back to sawfish and the last time I saw it, it reminds me of jwz's classic "Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers"¹ statement. It clearly isn't the kindest description of the problem, but it does feel valid IMO.

It feels like we've been through so many different "default" window managers with gnome I had to actually look up whether sawfish was just a common replacement or one of the many at-one-time-blessed components of the environment. FWIW, it was the default up to 2.2².

[This message was brought to you by Team Enlightenment Fan Club ;)]

1\. Google it or open the link in a tab without the HN referrer - [https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html](https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html)

2\. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sawfish_(window_manager)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sawfish_\(window_manager\))</comment>


America's raisin regime - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21574522-supreme-court-grapples-tiny-fruit-de-minimis-curat-lex

<comment><USER3> This isn't a particularly nuanced or balanced presentation of the outcomes of such a policy.

Any agricultural product with a long lag between planting and harvest ends up getting sucked into cycles of boom and bust, which are terribly destructive for all involved. The cycle goes like this:

      Insufficient supply one year results in very high prices
      Everyone and his grandmother decides to plant raisins
      5 years pass
      There's a giant glut, and prices drop through the floor
      All the raisin farmers decide to ditch such a shitty product
      Repeat

This cycle absolutely wrecks agricultural economies which are dependent on one or a handful of key exports.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is why we have agricultural derivatives, e.g. forwards and options: to transfer food price volatility from lightly capitalised farmers to investors better able to absorb the risk. In fact, farming is the original raison d'être (raisin d'être? :D) for these derivatives.

" _the notion that the government's raisin-administrators ward off chaotic gyrations in prices far-fetched: walnut and citrus farmers, after all, have abandoned similar systems in recent years without any ill effects"_

This issue has been studied extensively - "agricultural central banks" are a bad way to deal with a perishable commodity because they shift demand volatility onto the government's balance sheet and so dull the incentive for supply to adjust, or find ways to become more versatile.

<comment><USER4> Good argument. Fails in reality.

Derivatives began as insurance contracts that worked fairly well between interested parties that actually wanted to move physical product and reduce risk (say farmers and supermarkets).

However, most of these markets have mutated and are mostly used for speculation by agents who have little to no interest in the actual delivery of said commodities (Glencore) - and are in fact more interested in pricing manipulation and monopolistic/oligopolistic market control than acting as a volatility store. Derivatives work well when the agents in the contract actually care about locking in the price of the commodity (say oil miners and airlines) - but when the people on either side don't care about reducing risk (say speculators and speculators) - things fall apart.

In turn, pricing volatility and rents accrued to speculating market participants increase, harming both supply/demand parts of the physical commodity curve, and doing the exact opposite of what was intended.

A more humorous take on this: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Q...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=QPf- D_r3Ni4)

<comment><AUTHOR> Glencore owns farms, mines, and production facilities around the world. It also has direct supply relationships to manufacturers, power generators, and food processors. It is not the example you were looking for.

If you want an example of someone who has "little to no interest in [accepting] delivery of said commodities", pick me. I'm a trader. What I do is analogous to the person at the Department of Agriculture who decides how much supply at a given price should be produced. Central planning has an aesthetic appeal, but especially when it comes to consumer discretionary products like raisins, it is a messy way of shifting the burden of forecasting from those unable (the farmers) to those with little incentive to get it right and an even lower chance of being displaced.

<comment><USER4> _> Glencore owns farms, mines, and production facilities around the world_

How is this evidence against my point? De Beers does the same with diamonds. Looks like they can manipulate prices easily enough.

My argument against yours cannot be taken as me stating that central planning is good - but merely that derivative markets can become bad. Just because I hold a critical a position on a thing, it does not necessarily mean that I'm advocating for the use of an opposing thing. If I criticise capitalism for doing such and such - it does not follow that I advocate replacing capitalism with communism/socialism to fix such and such.

I like derivatives and financial markets just as much as the next guy - <USER2> only when they are used properly - to reduce, and not to increase risk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was vaguely aware of some of this but had no idea of the extent of it and which products are affected. A bit of searching turns up the Agricultural Marketing Service website [1] and some of the markets affected:

Fruit and Vegetables

Almonds Apricots Avocados Cherries [Sweet] [Tart] Citrus [Florida] [Texas] Cranberries Dates Grapes Hazelnuts Kiwifruit Nectarines Olives Onions [Idaho-E. Oregon] [S. Texas] [Vidalia] [Walla Walla] Peaches Pears [Oregon- Washington] Pistachios Plums/Prunes [California] [Washington] Potatoes [Idaho-E. Oregon] [Washington] [Oregon-California] [Colorado] [Virginia-North Carolina] Raisins Spearmint Oil Tomatoes Walnuts

Dairy - a cursory search didn't turn up a comprehensive list but market reports include milk, butter and cheese.

Livestock Poultry and Seed Program Rulemaking includes the following:

Beef Lamb Pork Poultry and Eggs Sorghum Soybean

Other sections include tobacco, cotton, and even organic products.

Note that at least some of these programs are involved in grading food products, standardizing marketing claims, and food safety instead of purely market stabilization.

One article [2] paints a fairly positive view of these practices and points out how cherry growers decided to go without the regulation and reserve provided and within 10 years prices had plummeted to the point where they decided to reinstate the Cherry Industry Administrative Board.

The National Agricultural Law Center has quite a bit more if you're interested in case law, Congressional research, and a number of other resources.

[1] <http://www.ams.usda.gov/AMSv1.0/> [2] [http://fruitgrowersnews.com/index.php/50th- anniversary/entry...](http://fruitgrowersnews.com/index.php/50th- anniversary/entry/marketing-orders-agreements-perform-different-functions) [3] <http://nationalaglawcenter.org/readingrooms/marketing/>

</comment><comment><USER6> "Absolutely no monopolies or cartels, unless, you know, we think its fun or directly benefit from it." - Politicians worldwide

It's interesting that people readily recognize the absurdity of this truth when it comes from some places, but insist that it's not only acceptable, but actually required, when it comes from other places. Note that this has become widespread in many parts of modern capitalist societies, and, by definition, ubiquitous in every single experiment we've had with communism and socialism.

<comment><AUTHOR> To be fair, these are Depression-era programmes which predate modern economics. We did not know, in 1937, why a government-backed authority who guaranteed to buy the overproduction of a discretionary consumer item is a market-distorting waste of resources.

<comment><USER6> This isn't really accurate. Bastiat, even Adam Smith, explored these concepts in fair depth well before 1937. On top of that, trade simply isn't that complicated. We've been doing it for thousands and thousands of years. I think it has been pretty clear to any ancient Egyptian or Greek farmer, medieval peasant, or Bedouin trader that if the king guaranteed to give some people gold for as much product as they could produce, no matter what, that those people would begin producing as much product as they could, regardless of whether that product was needed or useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I am amazed these laws have survived as long as they have. I met a gal on an airplane once whose "job" was being the taxpayer representative an outdated agricultural committee for the US DoA. She was making 6 figures, for attending four meetings a year (transportation costs included). I was stunned at the waste of it all, but as waste go it was minor.

<comment><USER8> "Woman" is the technical term for the female of the species. ;-)

<comment><USER9> Gal is the analog of guy, nothing demeaning in that.

<comment><USER10> Yet some women feel demeaned by being referred to by a corruption of the word "girl", perhaps in the same way many men would take offence if you called them "boy". Not to worry, though; next time I encounter any such complaints, I'll tell them that you said it's not demeaning, so their feeling are an illusion.

<comment><USER9> It's context, isn't it? I wouldn't appreciate you calling me "dude" in a business setting, but I wouldn't mind in general. Likewise, I can imagine scenarios in which "gal" would be offensive, but this just isn't one.

<comment><USER11> It's partly context, but it's also that you don't get to choose whether a particular word in a particular context is offensive to another person.

<comment><USER9> What is socially acceptable is decided by society, not by any particular individual. Mind you, that doesn't prevent us from being more careful around people we know to sensitive to certain forms of address, but in a public forum that's not really possible because you don't know who you're talking to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It always amuses me that in Australia primary producers identify themselves as conservative and align with the conservative party but have historically been a bunch of agrarian socialists. We even had some towns founded as agricultural communes in my area back in the late 19th century and when I was a kid there were still farmers co-ops running lots of local businesses. The patrons at the local hotel will tell you how much they hate unions and socialists while the pub they are drinking in is community owned and actively fights independent competition. Farmers are a strange bunch, they hate government intervention but love a handout. We used to have similar things like a single authority handling grain exports here. The justification was that it allowed us to compete with countries which distorted the market due to subsidies and barriers like the socialist USA :-) That has all gone as far as I know. Now large corporations (still community owned in a sense via the stock market) pretty much perform the same functions but there is the illusion of choice where in fact little exists as dominant players in the market distort things just as much as statutory ones. In fact that is their job.

<comment><USER13> >Farmers are a strange bunch, they hate government intervention but love a handout.

How is that at all strange? Hypocritical, certainly, but not strange. People want the government to take money from others and give it to them but not the other way around. That is basically the entire basis of politics on the question of government spending.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> "He who controls the raisins controls Fresno"

\- Tyler Cane (Dabney Coleman)

</comment><comment><USER15> It's funny, apparently two of the most major agricultural markets are not governed by capitalist principles at all. The EU is infamous for spending half of its many billion budget each year on subsidizing and aggressively controlling agriculture.

The "right thing" with agriculture seems to be a mix between socialist tight control and capitalist principles. Lenin had a lot of success with the New Economic Policy [1], until Stalin crushed it all.

[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Economic_Policy>

<comment><USER16> Saying that NEP was a success is like saying replacing daily savage beatings with moderate floggings on weekends only is a success. Of course, the latter is better, but you're still beaten pretty bad. NEP was better than what preceded and followed it, but was very far from the "right thing" - and was never intended as anything but temporary measure to allow the economy to recover a bit after the savage years of the war and "war communism", and the centrally planned economy always was and remained the ultimate goal of socialism. What Stalin did was inevitable.

<comment><USER17> Total state = total war. It becomes a fight for resources between nations that don't know what trade is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> And of course there are the cotton subsidies that cost West African cotton farmers millions of dollars every year.

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/nov/15/cotton- sub...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/nov/15/cotton-subsidies- west-africa)

</comment><comment><USER19> This may explain why many of the raisins sold in Sweden are grown in California. I was wondering why, when there are plenty of grape farms in Europe. It's unlikely that growing in California + shipping + import tariffs is cheaper than growing in Spain. Turns of the export price of American raisins is artificially depressed.

</comment><comment><USER20> Anybody know what the other 29 products would be? I haven't had much luck with Google.

</comment><comment><USER21> Please tell me this is an April Fools article. Please.

<comment><USER22> Unfortunately it is not. New Deal era laws such as this one existed to help prevent a flood of excess food ruin the market for farmers during the Great Depression in the United States. Unfortunately, nobody is keen to revisit any laws from the New Deal, no matter how outdated, because of the kind of scrutiny it might bring on programs like Social Security.

<comment><USER23> Yes, the Great Depression, when our foremost leaders reasoned that we could become more prosperous as a nation by destroying crops and making food more expensive to a population facing an unemployment rate of 20% (and devoting a far greater portion of their budget to food than you or I do).

FDR came up with the most toxic economic policy ever experienced in this nation, bar none, and easily added seven years onto the Great Depression. And no, it's wasn't the fault of Social Security: it was the fault of nonsense like this.

They say in high school history classes World War II led the US out of the Great Depression. It's only true because that's what finally convinced the idiots in charge that they needed to get their act together if they actually wanted to muster enough industrial output to fight a war.

If there is a God, Mr. Roosevelt, may he have mercy on your soul.

<comment><USER24> Not all is fault of the Great Depression legislation, take for example one that came to the forefront during the "Fiscal Cliff" negotiations. Read about the 1949 Agricultural Act on Wikipedia, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_Act_of_1949>

Remember that seven or eight dollar a gallon milk scare? That is the source of that mess. Follow the links at the bottom of the article for all sorts of farm bills.

Its pretty damn scary how much the government meddles in the industry because we have 400 plus experts.

<comment><USER25> What's good about that Act?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Every time you see someone inveigh against a particular system that has been in place for a long time, you should ask: "I wonder why that system was put there? Maybe there was a reason."

Netscape decided to throw away all their code and do a complete rewrite, and then realized that just about all of it was there for a reason. The Economist is happy to do a drive-by on agricultural price stabilization, but if they were successful there would be years where your frigging Raisin Bran was priced at $200/box, and the Economist wouldn't have anything to say then, except perhaps "not our problem if you idiots listened to us".

Agricultural price stabilization schemes exist for a reason.

<comment><USER27> When you say things like "$200 a box" that are clearly exaggerations, readers of your comment are unable to tell whether your other statements are similarly exaggerated -- in this case, your claim that most of the original Netscape code was actually discovered to be non-cruft.

I know Joel Spolsky famously wrote about the Netscape rewrite, but a solid citation would be really helpful here.</comment></comment>


Lua Devirtualizer which deobfuscates Lua obfuscator used by hackers - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/TheGreatSageEqualToHeaven/LuraphDeobfuscator <comment><AUTHOR> This project was created for intellectual purposes as a way to explore code deobfuscation techniques on Lua scripts obfuscated by Luraph, which is a tool used to obfuscate Lua scripts. This Lua obfuscator has been used by cybercriminals as a way of protecting malicious exploits they sell for Robolox or bots for World of Warcraft. This project may be of interest to game security developers to prevent cheating in their games by discovering how hackers are breaking their code.</comment>


A less lonely elderly - <AUTHOR> http://www.wwtid.com/2013/04/07/a-less-lonely-elderly/

<comment><USER2> Our society is deviant if not sick in the way that we push old people to the side and avoid them instead of honoring them. It seems related to our worship of youth and fear of death.

I remember hearing an interview with a Canadian researcher who went to Cuba to study how they did something (I forget what, perhaps health care). While visiting a seniors' centre, she saw a bunch of 10-12 year old kids playing checkers with the old people in a common room. Later, she asked the director how they had come up with so successful a program to pair kids with seniors. "What program?" was the reply. "They just come in off the street."

Such a thing is unthinkable where I live. That says a lot.

<comment><USER3> Cuba has more then a few things going for it - namely relative cultural and linguistic homogeneity. My Spanish-speaking Mexican grandfather has a home in a historically German suburban neighborhood full of English-speaking Polish people.

There's just not a whole lot of context for community building. Interactions happen only when they're necessary, meaning mostly to resolve some kind of conflict, so there's rarely a positive context. People are just sort of _averse_ to talking to each other and building any kind of neighborly relationship.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm fortunate that I'm able to email and skype with my 90 year old grandmother.

I do think it's interesting to see how this will play out with people who are used to being online. My grandmother is probably able to function online at the level she does because started on AOL 15+ years ago. Of course she still uses an AOL email address. So in someways she's ahead of the tech curve, but in others, she's quite behind. I'm sure this will be much the same story when we are that age.

</comment><comment><USER5> Well that was a bit depressing to read.

I wonder how expensive it would be to make simple games that can be shown on the "community" TV in old-folks homes with a hardware component that fosters some discussions / interactions.

For example, a simple multiple-choice trivia program ("Which famous movie started with the word 'Rosebud'" etc.) with simple remotes with 4 buttons that they can use to play, like you find on airplane entertainment systems sometimes.

Thinking about it the Wii would make the perfect platform for an "old folks home" entertainment system, just needs the software.

<comment><USER6> It's called Tuesday Night Bingo.

<comment><USER5> Tuesday night bingo:

* Requires preparation and organisation each time.

* Requires people to actually run it.

* Is not done often (Once per week if we take your naming of it into account).

* Cannot be done whenever the residents feel like it

* Is one thing (Bingo)

To be blunt, your comment added nothing to the discussion so why bother posting it.

<comment><USER6> The question at hand is addressing loneliness: creating a computerized gaming method for the elderly may be a nice thing to do, but Tuesday Night Bingo creates a community event that can be looked forward to. So to add to your comment, I can see some kind of computerized gaming method being made quite interesting by adding in remote collaboration and guest MCs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Our society is deviant if not sick in the way that we push old people to the > side and avoid them instead of honoring them.

The way the US treats old people isn't exemplary, but reading Jared Diamond's "The world until yesterday" has kinda opened my eyes a bit - in some societies old people are abandoned, or just killed outright

</comment><comment><USER8> Imagine how much less lonely many elderly today could be with a cheap laptop, skype and social networks. Is the pain of learning new technology really so much greater than the pain of loneliness? Is there something else at work?

</comment><comment><USER9> Not only that but there must be ways to monetize the upcoming baby boomer generation that will be retiring en mass</comment>


China launches ambitious Tianwen-1 Mars rover mission - <AUTHOR> https://www.space.com/china-tianwen-1-mars-mission-launch.html <comment><USER2> WARNING: modal anti ad-blocker wall.</comment>


Ask HN: Grad Students: How much of your time is spent building datasets? - <AUTHOR>

I'm running a pilot project with my former university faculty as a client. Datasets I've been told are a huge problem with regards to man hours.
Disregarding data that comes from sensors and the like, how much time is spent collecting data from other sources?
My current test case are patent applications. I want to get out of the echo chamber a bit and get some external feedback.
I know how to automate data collection to answer questions like that and was wondering what other pains might be out there.
Thanks! <comment><AUTHOR> I'd appreciate any feedback possible. I know dataset building can be a pain that would be best left to software (obviously accuracy plays a huge factor here, but done right: could be huge)</comment>


Amazon in talks to offer event ticketing in U.S - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-ticketing-idUSKBN1AQ2DB <comment><USER2> This was something I had mentioned on Twitter and Reddit off and on over the past couple of years. Too many times Ticketmaster's website craps out when tickets for a high demand concert go on sale. The way Amazon handles Black Friday with waitlists seems like a huge upgrade over hitting refresh 50 times on different computers in hopes of getting tickets (sometimes not even getting the page to load).

</comment><comment><USER3> Considering how much Ticket Master sucks, it's a good call.

Aside: I'd really like to see blind auctions for seating... You name a price, when the round completes, seats are offered in best-worst order, then another round... After two, remaining seats are priced out at the average to min price paid in the auction rounds.

</comment><comment><USER4> Related story about how a guy made millions by gaming Ticketmaster, 130+ points:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13643045](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13643045)</comment>


Possible Pentagon destruction of evidence in NSA leak case probed - <AUTHOR> http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2015/06/15/269866/possible-pentagon-destruction.html <comment><USER2> _The group accuses senior officials within the inspector general's office – including those with the general counsel's office – of attempting to water down or change findings in whistleblower investigations because of fear of political controversy._

It's a little hard to tell without a close reading of the article, but the _alleged_ destruction of evidence was done by the Office of Special Counsel and unspecified inspectors general offices, not Thomas Drake or his lawyers. That is, the people in charge of whistleblowing cases did the evidence destruction, probably in response to bad PR.

This is infuriating on several levels. It seems like if Drake hadn't gotten sympathetic press coverage and public support, the DoJ would have tried to railroad him on espionage charges. Future leakers take note: be photogenic and sympathetic! Second, it's the damn prosecutors (I think). If you've got a case, make it in court, fair and square. It's the American Way. Anything else is just cowardly. Third, if any ordinary person (non-Lawyer or Judge or Law Enforcement Officer) had destroyed evidence, there'd be hell to pay. I can't see this as anything more than law enforcement taking care of their own.</comment>


My brother's team released their first game and is now ranked #3 on IndieDB - <AUTHOR> http://sleepystudios.com

<comment><AUTHOR> My brother and his team are a bunch of 16-17 year olds who found each other on a forum a couple years back. Over the past couple months they have built this game from scratch with their own engine and graphics. A few are in the US and a few in the UK and many have never met aside from Skype calls.

It's really exciting to see what these guys are doing and I wish them the best of luck!</comment>


Is Twitter the New SPAM? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.hotnamelist.com/2009/06/is-twitter-new-spam.html

<comment><USER2> It doesn't really matter what you build on the net, if you're successful the scammers and spammers will follow.</comment>


The Vanishing Of Ashlar: 4kb demo using GPU for sound and pathtracing - <AUTHOR> https://demozoo.org/productions/278629/ <comment><USER2> I know that a huge part of the demoscene culture is keeping your trade secrets close, but I'd love to see a YouTube playlist where authors or people with significant graphics experience do in-depth teardowns. Those of us like myself who only take a passing interest from afar are still blown away by how amazing results of demos like "elevated" from 2009 [1]. I've heard Iñigo Quílez, but I am curious if there are people interested in doing teardowns of winners moreso than elementary concepts (although of course the latter is much more applciable outside of the demo scene).

1= [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YWMGuh15nE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YWMGuh15nE)

<comment><USER3> Do demosceners keep secrets like that? I only know of the ones who publish super detailed blogs about techniques, because... those are the ones I read. E.g. [https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break- al...](https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-all-your- emulators/) And a much more recent one, video here (I recommend watching the chat replay! Should start ~ 7h02m40s) [https://www.twitch.tv/videos/589179638?t=7h02m40s](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/589179638?t=7h02m40s) and blog post [http://www.sizecoding.org/wiki/Memories](http://www.sizecoding.org/wiki/Memories)

<comment><USER4> Yes, the demoscene and gamedev culture is the antithesis of the FOSS one.

That was always the best thing about old days demoscene, specially at the parties, having one group proving that something deemed impossible on platform X was actually possible, and then having other discovering how they might have done it, and topping it with something even better.

The game dev culture evolved from the demoscene.

Nowadays due to the FOSS influence, there are some people sharing, but they are mostly the exception to the rule.

<comment><USER5> > The game dev culture evolved from the demoscene.

I'm not sure that's the case. The demoscene really started with the Amiga in the mid 80s while game development was already its own thing. Maybe they influenced each-other but I wouldn't say one evolved from the other.

<comment><USER6> It actually started on the C64, as a by-product of game cracking. People would first add their "handles" into cracked games, then some small intros before the game. These intros soon became competetive, and were made stand-alone, known as demos. There was some overlap of game and demo-scene, but not much until around 1992 or so, on the Amiga.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> NuSan ([https://twitter.com/NuSan_fx](https://twitter.com/NuSan_fx)) does regular livestreams where he writes a shader from scratch in a couple of hours. They're always impressive and you can learn a lot from seeing his process. He also puts the code for his work up on Shadertoy which is really helpful.

<comment><USER8> evvvvil_ and Flopine also

[https://twitch.tv/evvvvil_](https://twitch.tv/evvvvil_)

[https://twitch.tv/flopine](https://twitch.tv/flopine)

<comment><USER9> I do wonder how much my dislike of and inability to learn from video tutorials shuts me off from some wonderful content.

But try as I might I just can't focus for more than 30 seconds and I can feel my irritation rising and my desire to find some non-spoken version of the same material increasing.

<comment><USER10> Especially agree when it's a ten minutes of talking and fumbling around on what really should've been maybe three photos and three sentences in a blog post. Go and watch almost any video on building or fixing electronics and you'll see what I mean.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> How much functionality does a demo like this get for free in addition to its own 4KB of code? For example, do modern GPUs have rich functions like createAmazingFractalGeometry() which these demos then piece together?

<comment><USER12> It's usually quite small--fractal geometry can be very succinctly described in a parametric way. The mandelbrot set can be described with just a small equation and a range of values to display.

They're not getting much from the GPU at all. Procedural modelling Houdini style is very common and you will find that algorithms to describe models/textures are often quite small, especially when compressed.

These days we do a lot of procedural generation of content, but then we don't make the user re-generate it because it does have a performance penalty--GPUs have plenty of RAM and tons of bandwidth, so it usually doesn't make sense.

source: Did some dev work on Houdini

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> These demos are some of the last arenas in software development where real skills can be displayed. Elsewhere it's mostly shuttling data from one field to another with some business logic, API glue and other cruft and to hell with the RAM footprint. Awesome stuff, thank you for posting.

<comment><USER14> I agree that demos like this are a wonder of "real skill". But it's bizarre to assert it's the only place it's possible. Yes, most software development is boring business stuff built on unstable towers of boring frameworks and infrastructure.

But there's plenty of room for art in your code. Either straight out art like this; generative computer art is a very exciting aesthetic area. Or just building elegant systems. There's no reason a network caching layer or a machine learning library can't be beautiful and skillful the same way a demo is. (The one exception is terseness; the tricks necessary to shoehorn a beautiful demo into 4k often make code unmaintainable.)

Aesthetics matter.

<comment><USER3> jaquesm said it's where skills can be "displayed". I think the latest update I made to a CRUD app is pretty slick, but I can't really show it off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Now imagine how the demo would look like if they were allowed to use Electron size for the executable/shader code.

<comment><USER15> There are actually unlimited size demo competitions as well where people can just go crazy and some of the results are really incredible.

<comment><USER4> I know, that was a tongue-in-cheek remark. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Anyone able to run it from wine?

<comment><USER17> No idea but here's WebGL version: [https://www.shadertoy.com/view/3sBBRK](https://www.shadertoy.com/view/3sBBRK)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> What's the system requirements?

<comment><USER16> At least you need a Windows OS I guess

<comment><USER19> Not true, also runs via shadertoy: [https://www.shadertoy.com/view/3sBBRK](https://www.shadertoy.com/view/3sBBRK)

But it's missing the GPU Synthesizer

<comment><USER18> Ok thought it might need like a powerful nvidia GPU or something. Not the case.

<comment><USER19> In the "Buffer A" tab there is a SAMPLE_COUNT variable. Turning that to 1 will probably enable you to run it on your potato of choice, as long as it has a browser.

<comment><USER20> How do you apply the code change? Nothing I do seems to have any effect, including removing all the code.

<comment><USER19> On the bottom-left edge of the text area/editor, there is a tiny black play/triangle icon. Clicking that applies the changes.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>