Newspaper Industry Is Running Out of Time to Adapt to Digital Future - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/09/business/media/newspapers-are-running-out-of-time-to-adapt-to-digital-future.html?pagewanted=all

<comment><USER2> Newspapers are finally accounting for their assumptions of necessity throughout the last 15 years. My family was involved in what at one time was the second largest paper in CA (the OC Register). My mom was the CFO and I started there at 15 as their first webmaster.

My mom would always bring home things for me to test as "threats" to the paper rather than opportunities. Delphi, Prodigy, Aol, compuserve, eworld, Microsoft blackbird, cd-I and finally a BRI ISDN PPP account.

Threats. Not opportunities. When they finally put the entire newspaper online it was in PDF. I left in 2001.

And then went into the music business in 2005. Hah.

<comment><USER2> To be clear my mom was on the right side. The publisher was on the "threat" side.

<comment><USER3> The publisher was right. It's 2012 and we still don't know how to make newsgathering profitable online. It's easy to say that news organizations should have been on the forefront of adopting new technologies, but even today in the internet's adolescence, print journalism is significantly more profitable. Convincing people to stick with print as long as possible while staving off "threats" was the right strategy as far as I can tell.

<comment><USER2> Right? I don't think so. I didn't mention the Craigslist "We will never sell classified space online!" diatribe either.

The point was: THEY WERE on the forefront of new technologies. OCR was the 5th newspaper online (after Mercury News, SF Chronicle, NY Times, Detroit Free Press).

And I don't think you understand the cost of print journalism. Print journalism might be more profitable if you have an economy of scale to support is infrastructure, but even in 1999 the display ad and classified business was waning to the point where it didn't break even on a single property. Only in aggregate for OCR's parent (Freedom Communications).

And lets not even talk daily subscription numbers, which were on the decline starting around the same time.

Newspapers followed a similar, albeit slower arc that the music business has, especially the recorded music business. A lot of the same hubris included.

<comment><USER3> Classifieds were a huge oversight that the industry deserves to be excoriated for.

The print newspaper I worked for is still limping along on its print revenues. If the OCR wasn't making money on print ads, how did it stay in business?

<comment><USER2> Freedom Communications was making money in aggregate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> To survive, newspapers need to create significantly more value for readers and advertisers to drive demand and revenue, and lower their cost structures to about 10% of their historical levels. Any incremental steps, from pay walls to moderate layoffs, are totally inadequate to turn their fortunes around.

Let me explain.

The value proposition of most newspapers for both readers and advertisers pales in comparison to many new media options. For instance, who here gets their technology or sports news from a national or local newspaper? Who looks to newspapers for the latest stock market performance, restaurant reviews, or movie showtimes?

Since their value proposition is depressed, newspapers are attracting fewer readers (and subscription dollars) and, in turn, fewer advertising dollars.

And then you have typical newspapers' unwieldy cost structures. Many newspapers are still operating with staff levels that are multiples greater than their new media counterparts. I don't have any current examples, but during the 2008 elections the Huffington Post was driving as much online traffic as the Washington Post, with a headcount of about 6.25% (50 employees versus 800).

In short, lower value begets lower revenue, and if we assume a high cost structure, it's a downward spiral to oblivion.

<comment><USER5> The Washington Post also does actual reporting, unlike the Huffington Post; they actually produce something of value, even if they don't monetize it as successfully.

<comment><USER4> > The Washington Post also does actual reporting...

So does the Huffington Post, but many of the writers are unpaid contributors.

> they actually produce something of value...

Tell this to readers and advertisers, who are voting with their time and $.

<comment><USER6> Nate Silver made a pretty good case that HuffPo bloggers don't contribute much to site traffic.

[http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/the- econ...](http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/the-economics-of- blogging-and-the-huffington-post/)

The implication is that the aggregated content lifted from other sites and the original content created by HuffPo writers gets 100x the traffic and eyeballs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've known a few old newspapermen in my various jobs, and they have all been fascinated by the speed of information in this new order. They see the opportunity and the power.

But they also like to wax about the old times... and make no mistake, the old times was just a big boys club. Alcoholism was rampant, misogyny was par. A big story or scoop would take weeks if not months to develop and it might get buried on some fucked up principle (see Caro's excerpt in the New Yorker this year on LBJ's impending downfall until JFK and Dallas... a scoop, if not buried, alters the history of a million young American men and American foreign policy in profound ways), and then, once ready for the presses, after the editor trimmed it down, they'd all go celebrate their Pulitzer chances at a pub. It was a culture of exclusion and entitlement; your entree was "J-School" pedigree, or worse, your ability to kowtow to as a junior to an established writer until you got your chance, because that was your only path to being heard.

It was a time where accountability was proportional to distribution, which is to say, tightly controlled at all levels and, for better or for worse, self regulated. It was also a culture of self-congratulation. The only redeeming quality of the old school is that self-control over distribution gave them stupendous levels of access and leverage, something that doesn't seemingly exist anymore.

<comment><USER6> Every profession out there has had periods that could be described this way from the last century.

<comment><USER7> This is fundamentally not true. The massive disruption of this industry isn't from Japan/Germany or banana republics or China, this is pure change in distribution. It's analogous to music or movies or tv, only none of those industries fancied themselves as the "fourth estate" while the getting was good.

The ground moved beneath the feet of this industry and as much as they like to sit around and acknowledge that with self-loathing NYT pieces, I'm not sure they've accepted it. Seems like there's still a lot of sitting about and grumbling about how bad it is and how much better it was when back when. Or worse, how relevant they really, really, really still are _cough_ David Carr _cough_.

See The Newsroom on HBO for example of this version of onanistic self flagellation.

<comment><USER6> What does an HBO-produced show about TV news, written by someone who majored in musical theater and never practiced journalism, have to do with the newspaper industry's self-image?

My point was that every profession has times when it's full of elitists that think they've got some special dispensation to carry out their work. That comes with the mindset of being a professional. And eventually walls come down as the output of a profession becomes commoditized.

<comment><USER7> Why does the elitism inherent to "every profession" of the "last century" have more relevance than a piece of socially critical art by a writer who has made a career of cultural criticism (however flawed). Is the critique of news in The Newsroom irrelevant to this conversation because of the platform or because the guy had a theatre degree? Both?

Regardless, I don't get your point. All things fail? Everything comes to an end? Great. Write an existential letter to NYT.

My point is there is a generational myopia that is pervasive in journalism still. There is an unwillingness to acknowledge, fully, that it's over. Donezo. It's never coming back. You can call out NYT in an NYT column and you can call out Newhouse and you can point out how fucked AOL Patch is and yet you are just writing for all the readers and writers who are terrified that things are changing.

It's probably the same point you are making, but I find your approach annoyingly pithy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "The unthinkable scenario unfolded something like this: The ability to share content wouldn't shrink, it would grow. Walled gardens would prove unpopular. Digital advertising would reduce inefficiencies, and therefore profits. Dislike of micropayments would prevent widespread use. People would resist being educated to act against their own desires. Old habits of advertisers and readers would not transfer online. Even ferocious litigation would be inadequate to constrain massive, sustained law-breaking...

Journalism has always been subsidized."

From Clay Shirky's essay, "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable"

[http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and- thinking...](http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the- unthinkable/)

</comment><comment><USER9> > ...newspapers are being clobbered by paltry returns on underfunded pension > plans.

So that would be "defined benefit" pension plans then. The markets have no obligation to meet absurdly optimistic forecasts of returns on investment.

If you're looking for someone to blame, consider that 10-year Treasury yields are under 2%, of which the single biggest buyer is the Federal Reserve.

> The bread and butter for most of the [newspaper] industry is local > information.

No, the bread and butter of the newspaper industry is celebrity gossip, which is the very opposite of local information, and is a commodity product, which is why people are unwilling to pay for local newspapers.

<comment><USER10> > the bread and butter of the newspaper industry is celebrity gossip, which is > the very opposite of local information, and is a commodity product, which is > why people are unwilling to pay for local newspapers.

This directly contradicts itself, which is probably your point.

Focusing on local news is a _necessary_ but perhaps not a _sufficient_ condition for local newspapers to survive: They don't have a monopoly on any _other_ product, but there's no guarantee they'll be able to survive on that one.

Or maybe they can create local celebrities to follow around and gossip about. (They might run up against tougher defamation laws that way, though.)

<comment><USER11> >Focusing on local news is a necessary but perhaps not a sufficient condition for local newspapers to survive: They don't have a monopoly on any other product, but there's no guarantee they'll be able to survive on that one.

I disagree. I think we'll still have local coverage. I just don't think it'll be very in depth for a long time, and it will be very understaffed. (And in case there's any doubt, I mean these statements from a personal, moral standpoint, not an economics one.)

My city (Albany, Georgia,)has one supremely dominating TV station, one tiny one, one dominating newspaper, and one that puts out 50 issues a year. The neighboring, largely rural, Worth County, has a news site called WorthIt2U.net

Sure, that's an infuriatingly bad name to me, but to the people of the community there, who kinda new AOL, and got faster Internet when it came bundled with their TV and came with their phones? It's where they go. And often times, they beat the larger places to stories that get hits (wrecks, arrests,) because they're local. People have responded.

People that stereotypically would be considered as "not online" have a new primary source of local information, it's just ran by a much smaller crowd. What's not able to survive is an old model, and I don't think anyone on HN has a problem leaving behind old models. The only thing missing is this same thing targeting the prime demographic.

<comment><USER12> Local news seems more and more that it's being served by ad-supported local/hyper local blogs and blog aggregators. What used to be the province of ultra thin printed dailies (when I was a kid, many neighborhoods seemed to have one in Brooklyn) is now handled by one and two person operations. Take a look at the blogroll covering neighborhoods in Brooklyn:

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

You've also got aggregatorish/news sites like Nearsay and regionals like Gothamist. They may need local, but it remains to be seen how much local needs them anymore.

Certainly, in-depth local reporting is in trouble in this new world, but it's hard to see right now how we'd fund such things. So far, that seems like it'll be covered by large regionals (or bigger), and only when it crosses over with bigger national/regional issues or is sufficiently dramatic/quirky.

<comment><USER6> And all those sites are struggling and barely making money. It's a tough, tough scene. That's why Gawker pivoted into national news and celeb gossip a few years back. The only way to make lots of money from blog advertising (i.e. enough to support a full-time staff) is to snag national brand dollars. Indi hyperlocals are beloved and do great stuff, but they're replacing companies that used to make millions providing similar services.

<comment><USER12> Agree completely. The hyperlocals seem like they'll be cost-covering only operations run by what amount to dedicated, self-motivated volunteers. Big wads of cash do not seem to be in their futures anytime soon.

<comment><USER11> I agree the money isn't flowing in yet, but I have no doubt it will. That's where my last line about demographics comes into play. It's hilarious/depressing that a generation with the demand for more information than ever before, and the technology to make it happen, is written off.

"That group doesn't read news." Sure they do. Just on Twitter or Facebook, or in texts.

Also, I wonder if a tv station will ever attempt to contract these sites directly as bureaus. Pay them as a reporter, but let them work for themselves as well. Just demand copyright save a non-transferable license to the reporter. That would give more money, and thus more resources, to a reporter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I often see an article appear in a newspaper a good 2 or 3 days after I first found out about it on HN or twitter. For me, that's the main reason they are losing customers - they are not doing the job they used to be good at, i.e. coming up with news or in-depth reporting you can't find anywhere else.

<comment><USER14> On the other hand, good storytelling and in depth radio journalism in the form of podcasts seems to be going from strength to strength.

<comment><USER15> Exactly. I'd like to see this issue from the perspective of Vice Magazine or The Atlantic, who seem to be finding a way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Seems to me that too often news sources make the decision to consolidate when general offerings mean they'll face more competition and leave them with a very broad, poorly-defined userbase.

Target a specific area, get local readers and you're an advertising option for local businesses.

My local paper (in Australia) has cut back its basketball reporting (for example) over the years and instead covered some pretty generic stories. e.g., instead of covering a domestic league, the writer has instead covered the US college Final Four. A few points:

      - their contacts and history are in covering local sport
      - why would I read this generic coverage over ESPN and American sources who have writers in the thick of the action?
      - in covering domestic basketball, the audience might be smaller, but the paper would have virtually no competition in covering it
      - cover local teams and you at least have a shot of building suburb-level audiences and hit up small businesses as a result

In print, I understand that newspapers will generally include content such that its level meets a ratio with the advertising at hand. e.g., they might not print an extra four pages because they don't have the ads for it.

But online is a different case. If your writer is getting paid a fixed rate, why wouldn't you have them at capacity whenever possible, generating unique, local content for your online version? They could be creating the Final Four fluff-piece for the print version, plus writing up online-only previews and quick opinion pieces on the domestic league. Categorise them by area (North, South, etc) and then find sponsors and advertisers for each. Small-fry ads maybe, but it wouldn't be shotgun advertising.

<comment><USER6> Shotgun advertising paid the bills for 60 years. Small-fry ads never have and it's very hard to make money from them. Newspaper sales reps that came into the industry more than 10 years ago came into it when they basically just processed incoming orders from chains, franchises, and ad agencies. That money is largely gone.

"Small-fry ads" means asking those same people to now go out and hunt down money from local businesses being courted by performance-based ad companies like Google, Groupon, Living Social, Twitter, Facebook, Constant Contact, Yelp...you name it.

That's a hard job. You need a superb sales staff to take business from those people.

If you were a superb sales person, you'd want to make a lot of money and sell a great product everyone wants to buy.

Would newspaper sales be your first choice?

<comment><USER16> Besides their own blindness/fear, what's stopped newspapers from creating those new ventures themselves? Becoming the performance-based ad spin-off, recruiting the superb sales people? In the same way that a web celeb can bring a huge boost to anything they start, so can a newspaper drive instant publicity to a new venture of their own. Took the major networks here years before they started buying up each of a site re: cars, dating, travel, parenting, etc.

Is it a concern of driving away potential advertisers in those fields? Anti- competitive behaviour?

In Australia, fantasy comps (based around Australian Rules Football) are very popular and a huge boost to the big newspapers. I've been told that recent newspaper strategy meetings often boil down to "Wish we could come up with another thing like (insert fantasy comp name here)." Give me a meeting and eventual minimal shareholding and I'll give you five ideas straight up.

\---

One example of the newspaper approach is in restaurant reviews. Before and after the success of sites like Yelp, newspapers here have continued with their review-a-restaurant-a-week approach. No categorised index of local restaurants. No repository of reviews beyond those that hit print. No crowdsourcing.

For a long time online, I turned repeatedly to a restaurant index (Miettas) with a crappy design, weak search and dated content just because it had remotely reliable and professional reviews that a Yelp-type site didn't have. Newspapers could have seen, and could still see, success in this space, IMO.

<comment><USER6> It comes down to people, like I said before. What you're suggesting is that newspapers have all these great people who should be able to cook up product ideas that generate great revenue for them.

If you were one of those people, would you do that for your newspaper, or would you apply to YCombinator?

Let's take Jack Dorsey as a recent example. He came up with Twitter while working at Odeo. He shared the idea with the rest of Odeo and eventually Odeo was shuttered and all resources were put into growing Twitter.

Now, let's imagine Jack Dorsey working at a beleaguered newspaper in Oregon, for example. First of all, it's hard to imagine, isn't it? Why would Jack Dorsey be at a newspaper instead of an SF startup? But assuming he was there and came up with Twitter the following things would likely happen:

1\. Company would spend too much time evaluating the idea before deciding whether to put resources into it. 2\. Company would assign a team to work on it, led by Jack. Abilities of team would vary wildly. 3\. Jack's team would have to run everything through company I.T. which means hosted servers and more paperwork. 4\. Jack's project would be expected to show results immediately and be commercialized swiftly, not 5 years after launch like with Twitter. 5\. Newspaper company would eventually lose patience with project and pull the plug.

This happens at any big company. Newspapers are no different. No sense of ownership means its hard to focus and get great things done.

<comment><USER16> Hard to find sympathy when the options have been there.

Sadly, your 5 steps sound awfully realistic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I work for a digital agency that is owned by a very large newspaper company having been bought to help them adapt to a "digital future". The newspaper company is becoming increasingly desperate - the latest product they've launched is a Groupon clone, which they are pushing pretty hard.

Whilst digging around on one of their servers, I've found a few sites which are "virtual shopping malls" with multiple levels and numerous "shops" that you can "buy" (i.e. advertise your site on). I think that they're not too sure what to make of this "Internet thing" so are just trying to port concepts from offline to online and it's not working too well.

<comment><USER18> I worked for a small local radio station and was asked to implement something similar to the "virtual mall" last year on the station website. I was only asked to do it as a neighbouring station had one.

It was laid out like a simple street map, in a grid formation, and companies could "rent" a "shop," or more accurately, place their logo in one of the spaces in the grid.

I did it, then left the station, and it still sits there online, the "streets" filled with For Rent signs. It's like a failed SimCity, or a 2D version of Second Life...

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The time is fast approaching where there will be few local newspapers, just regional ones. For quite some time the newspaper business has been a game of musical chairs for employees and the music just sped up.

<comment><USER6> Things may shift in the future, but at the moment, it's the regional guys who are going under. The local guys are getting bought by Warren Buffet. This is because the local guys still have their "effective monopoly" over local advertising in their communities.

[http://www.fool.co.uk/news/investing/2012/05/28/why- buffett-...](http://www.fool.co.uk/news/investing/2012/05/28/why-buffett-is- buying-newspapers.aspx)

The regional guys and the guys covering large cities are the ones getting hammered hardest right now because they're being exposed as not being "essential reading" for any one thing.

In Chicago, for instance, the Chicago Tribune covers Illinois state politics, but the real wonks turn to insider blogs like Capitol Fax for that news. So Tribune's not needed for that.

Sports? ESPNChicago.com and all the Chicago-focused sports blogs have them beat there for resources and depth.

City Hall news? They're untouchable there...but who wants to buy ads against that content? And who really wants to read it other than local wonks and older people who own homes.

Entertainment? People find out what's going on from massive sites like FB, Twitter, Yelp, you name it.

And on and on. So a paper like the Tribune is left with a great brand, lots of exclusive content, and the ability to out-execute just about any of their competitors at anything it wants in terms of quality. But none of that matters so much to consumers who have tons of more convenient options.

Meanwhile, the internet hasn't really figured out hyper local yet, with the exception of Topix.com, which is huge in small towns. Everyblock might get there, and even Reddit eventually as geographic subreddits continue to grow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I used to work at a medium sized regional paper...by the time I started, around '05, veterans were already complaining about how the good times had passed. In the 90s, a senior writer could get a project approved that involved going to Russia over the course of the year, ostensibly to write something relevant for our somewhat large Russian immigrant population. When I started, things still seemed good in that I could spend a week on a local story, even driving out to a city several hours away just to talk to people. Today, they don't even have the resources to cover huge events, like earthquakes that hit nearby, and instead rely on AP copy.

Last time I visited, nearly everyone I knew was gone, usually for a job working in PR. And even the young idealistic reporters who were my age were all secretly interviewing for PR jobs. There really is little hope of turning things around. It's not just the lack of technical innovation...it's the constant downhill slide...it's hard enough to do good work on an average reporters pay...but to do it as your pay gets constantly cut and your hours constantly extended because other colleagues are let go is psychologically draining.

And newspapers need more than just good work, or even Pulitzer level work...they need groundbreaking innovation that changes/streamlines the very core of what they do...from the reporters to the editors to the ad people. But there's no capacity or motivation for such entrepreneurship

</comment><comment><USER21> Idea : make newspapers more like collaborative blogs with some extra payment options.

<http://wsetchell.blogspot.com/2012/07/local-newspapers.html>

<comment><USER6> Hey, Will,

Good post.

I think consumers have this already in Facebook and Twitter. The news guys already post all their news there, for free, to try to generate ad revenues. People don't click through because often the entire story is there in the headlines and that's all they really cared about anyways.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Adapting means firing 95% of your staff it's really that simple.

</comment><comment><USER23> But isn't it more like a medium that has changed? What stops those newspapers from running online versions? In fact, most or all already have an online presence. Wouldn't it be cheaper to run a website, versus running a printing press? In addition, the $ spent on ads in newspapers will surely shrink, but $ spent on online advertise continue to rise without signs of stopping.

To me this whole rant about running out of newspaper business is like a rant of messenger going out of business. No, you don't have to ride your bicycle through entire city to deliver message from Mr. X to Mr. Y; we have email and internet now. At the end of the day, the consumption of news will not change -- people will still want to know whats going on in the wild world, whether it is economy, politics, science or celeb gossips. Sure the medium will change, but lets stop crying over the fact that 99.999% of population is not using an electrical telegraph anymore (if most never did).

<comment><USER24> Ken Auletta of _The New Yorker_ spoke about this on Charlie Rose a few years ago. He explained that while the operating costs for online news is lower than printing press / hard copy distribution, the advertising revenues are even lower still. If a newspaper went to an all online format, the differential would be negative.

<comment><USER16> Did any newspaper try maintaining budgets across the transition? e.g., advertiser goes from paying $500 for their print advertising, to paying $500 for their print and web advertising, to (in the future) paying $500 for their web advertising?

The first stage was already active with every publication. The second stage could've been a reasonable upsell (same price, but get online coverage too!). By the third you're pushing better tracking/metrics, interactive ads, colour- by-default, animation, etc.

I get the impression that many papers treated it all very separately. In fact, for some time, one of the biggest entities in Australia maintained separate print and digital writing units (which strikes me as bizarre).

<comment><USER6> Once a newspaper sales rep starts talking "web ads" with an advertiser, the client has a host of other options. These options have more reach, are closer to people with purchasing intent, are performance based, self-service, and generate much higher ROI than banner ads on a newspaper site.

So the newspaper guys had to offer competitive pricing, or at least pricing in the same galaxy as the other web guys. So instead of a $50 or $100 CPM for inclusion in the print paper, they're getting a $5-10 CPM for includion on the web site.

<comment><USER16> See my mention of stage two - they're essentially getting web ads for free as an effort to maintain budget during a transition. How would the marketplace apply in that case?

<comment><USER6> Newspapers gave the web ads for free for a long time. Then when they tried selling them by themselves, the clients refused to pay for them because they'd received them for free for so long....and seen no real benefits or results from them during that time.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Pilotless Black Hawk Will Soon Take Flight - <AUTHOR> https://www.military.com/daily-news/2019/10/10/first-pilotless-black-hawk-will-soon-take-flight.html <comment><USER2> The best part of course being is that what they learn will eventually make it to public uses and improve air safety for all. Plus this of course applies to drones which are pilot-less from day one, let alone the fantasy of flying cars

<comment><USER3> There are some planes out there for GA that do already use fly by wire, they're mostly relegated to the highest end though because of expense and weight so iirc they're mostly on the small private jet size of planes not the Cessna size single engine 4 passenger planes.

Even looking at helicopters it looks like Bell has made a fly by wire chopper as far back as 2015. [0]

[0] [https://www.mathworks.com/company/user_stories/bell- helicopt...](https://www.mathworks.com/company/user_stories/bell-helicopter- develops-worlds-first-commercial-fly-by-wire-helicopter.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> FWIW, China's direct copy of S-70 has ingenuously developed fly-by-wire.

[https://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/china-s-z-20-helicopter- lo...](https://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/china-s-z-20-helicopter-looks- awfully-familiar-1839076626)

<comment><USER5> Are you saying the development of fly-by-wire in the helicopter is ingenious or the implementation of the fly-by-wire system?

If it's later I'm left wondering what's ingenious about it.

<comment><USER6> The engine available was less powerful that what is used in the UH-60, so a fly-by-wire system was devised to drop weight from the aircraft. That's clever enough of a solution I think.

<comment><USER5> Fly-by-wire reduces overall weight which compensates for the anemic engine but why is that clever? That just strikes me as a design choice out of necessity.

<comment><USER6> Sorry for the delay. In the real world sometimes that's your only option?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Checkup – OSS tool for simple, self-hosted health checks - <AUTHOR> https://text.sourcegraph.com/announcing-checkup-simple-self-hosted-health-checks-c5707cf729ab <comment><USER4> Most notably, this isn't _just_ health checks; it also ships with a purely static status page to which you can publish updates.

I'm the author of Checkup; hope others find it useful!

<comment><USER5> It's still a bit fuzzy for me, but according to the README at [https://github.com/sourcegraph/checkup](https://github.com/sourcegraph/checkup), this is how I understand how it works:

* You launch the checkup command manually or every X minutes

* Each run stores a report inside a file

* The caddy server serves the same resource to the browser...

* ... that fetches the last Y reports and computes a dashboard to be displayed

The 2 last steps seem not static to me. Is it how checkup works, or is the dashboard display part a bit different ?

Regardless of that, this is something that is going to be extremely useful to me. Thanks a lot for for it !

<comment><USER4> The status page is static, in that there is no server-side rendering/processing other than just serving static files. You need only host the resources for the status page, but the files with the check results are typically stored somewhere else like S3. The status page downloads those check files with JavaScript and renders the results client-side. Hope that answers your question!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> When I read the title, I was thinking of dashboard for (my) personal health instead.

<comment><USER4> Sorry. Yeah, the title is missing half of the story: status pages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why would you default to S3 storage? You create a stand-alone product for self-hosting, complain about cloud providers going down, but then use a cloud provider for your collection?

<comment> jorge-fundido S3 differs considerably from most SaaS offerings in terms of:

      - data access / control
      - availability & stability
      - <USER2>
      - <USER3>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ah I didn't realize what S3 was for at first -- it hosts it to S3 for "off- network" reliability. Nice. Will definitely look into this soon.

</comment><comment><USER9> Kind of unrelated, but this page doesn't scroll for me on iOS with Safari: [https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/sourcegraph/checkup/-/blo...](https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/sourcegraph/checkup/-/blob/checkup.go#L7:2-7:8)

<comment><USER10> Thanks for the report! We've fixed the bug now.

That definitely earns a sticker, check out [https://sourcegraph.com/about](https://sourcegraph.com/about) if you want to redeem it :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is interesting. Can we use custom headers/auth when setting up the APIs for health checkups?

<comment><USER4> I put your request in here: [https://github.com/sourcegraph/checkup/issues/8](https://github.com/sourcegraph/checkup/issues/8)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Feature request: PagerDuty integration

<comment><USER13> Filed here! [https://github.com/sourcegraph/checkup/issues/4](https://github.com/sourcegraph/checkup/issues/4)

Pull requests also welcome :) The code is very well-documented and easy to navigate.</comment></comment>


BBC: France asks: Can you solve the riddle of the rock? - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-48212442 <comment><AUTHOR> For more detailed photos you can check out this website [1]

[0]: [https://www.proz.com/forum/linguistic_diversity/334586-myste...](https://www.proz.com/forum/linguistic_diversity/334586-mysterious_inscriptions_on_a_rock_in_brittany_france.html)</comment>


Mozilla's Plan to Reinvent the Browser [video]  - <AUTHOR> http://on.mash.to/gputMB

<comment><USER2> Non-shortened link it should probably be changed to: <http://mashable.com/2010/12/13/mozilla-foundation-leweb/>

</comment><comment><USER3> The interviewer was rather bad. She held it together though. Good job!</comment>


What would be the biggest reason one would fail a coding interview? - <AUTHOR> Would it be thr lack of technical knowledge or preparation thereof? Being terrible at explaining your code? Bad coding? Or maybe just pure statistics? I just want to know thoughts from HN reader <comment><USER2> It depends on the interviewee.

In any kind of interview you can blow it by saying something insensitive, touching somebody's equipment without permission or otherwise offending people. Don't be that guy!

So far as technical knowledge goes I would say take the tests here:

[https://www.pluralsight.com/product/skill- iq](https://www.pluralsight.com/product/skill-iq)

There is also the backstop of what you do when you don't know the answer. I succeeded in quite a few technical interviews with "look it up in the hashtable" or "look it up in the literature".</comment>


Hackathon #1: Who's side are you on? - <AUTHOR> http://www.collegemogul.com/College%20Mogul-Hackathon1-Whos-side-are-you-on

<comment><AUTHOR> Top finalist will be introduced (alongside his or her idea) to a Venture Capitalist in New York City, provided that a business model is attached.</comment>


Microsoft, RedHat, IBM, Docker, Mesosphere, CoreOS and SaltStack join Kubernetes - <AUTHOR> http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2014/07/welcome-microsoft-redhat-ibm-docker-and-more-to-the-kubernetes-community.html <comment><USER2> The cool thing that is that we have a number of companies contributing significant technologies to the open source ecosystem that build a stack of software that gets us closer to running distributed systems in a reasonable reproducible manner:

\- Google is bringing kubernetes (k8s) which represents their experience in deploying cluster wide applications

\- CoreOS is bringing etcd to the table for the cluster wide decisions in k8s

\- Docker is bringing a format that makes getting your applications isolated and running quickly

<comment><USER3> \- Mesosphere is bringing Kubernetes on Mesos, which will give you a top-to- bottom stack that approximates Google's Omega/Borg at scale.

[http://mesosphere.io/2014/07/10/mesosphere-announces- kuberne...](http://mesosphere.io/2014/07/10/mesosphere-announces-kubernetes- on-mesos/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> crickets from VMWare/EMC. Docker/containers will eat their lunch if they don't jump in and get involved.

<comment><USER5> If KVM didn't eat their lunch already, why would Docker be different?

<comment><USER6> Because it's a new paradigm, not just a competing virtual-machine implementation.

<comment><USER7> It's not a paradigm which even remotely threatens VMware's use case, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> TLDR; Kubernetes is basically like a local copy of a specific-configuration cloud provider that uses docker. It's also Google Cloud Platform's basis, so developing against it lets you deploy your code there. As far as software goes, it's very immature/early days. Some of the pertinent architectural limitations that Kubernetes appears to have are: limited range of target OS platforms for services to target, non-standard mechanism of service relationship abstraction (read: lock-in warning), immature security model, limited support for complex network topologies (eg. hardware switch management), fixed approach to cluster scheduling/consensus.

PS. Corrections welcome, I'm just trying to help people get a grasp without bothering with the background reading.

</comment><comment><USER9> Interesting. No Canonical/Ubuntu.

<comment><USER10> They're Python-fans, I believe.

EDIT: This used to be their recommended way of making apps: [http://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2009/08/quickl...](http://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2009/08/quickly-new-rails-like-rapid-development-tools-for-ubuntu/)

<comment><USER11> They use go to build juju.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's great so see tech giants going along well for technical growth.

</comment><comment><USER13> Google's open source investment hugely astonishes me but as far as desktop is concerned they are also hugely oblivious and ignorant (Yes, I am talking about Drive for Linux).

</comment><comment><USER14> These are massive names using Go now. This is an exciting time for Gophers.

<comment><USER15> I'm curious how a vague cheerleading-your-favourite-technology comment became the most upvoted in this discussion.

<comment><USER16> I think "This is an exciting time for Gophers." is the reason.

<comment><USER17> Gophers? Thats what developers who use the Go language call themselves?

What's with the ridiculously bad naming/branding in the tech world?

* Gophers (the animal) are considered by many to be a pest.

* The Docker logo is a whale carrying shipping containers on its back. Shipping containers that go into the ocean are basically unrecoverable/not worth recovering, and whales spend very little of their time on the surface (meaning all the containers will go into the ocean)

This is as ridiculous as having an airline named after an animal that cannot fly and kills people.

<comment><USER18> That would be Tiger Airways [https://tigerair.com](https://tigerair.com)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Am I the only one to notice that if you subtract the k-es from the name, kubernetes becomes UBERNET.</comment>


"Reversible Concrete" May Revolutionize Temporary Architecture - <AUTHOR> http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog/mits-reversible-concrete-is-ready-to-revolutionize-temporary-architecture <comment><USER2> That's a deadly mass of material. In the video, when they're taking the mold off, the trajectory from the top of any falling chunks is super sketchy, too.

Would be interesting to see destructive tests. They obviously have digital designs, but could those be accurately used for simulation?

I'm sure they know what they're doing, they've wearing matching overalls. Those are just some concerns I'd have about constructing and exhibiting such a thing.

<comment><USER3> I've held those rocks - the material is porous and super light, almost like styrofoam.

<comment><USER2> You're right. It's not gneiss as the article says, either.

[http://www.misapor.ch/EN/Home.html](http://www.misapor.ch/EN/Home.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> When I saw the title, my immediate question was "Reversible _by who_?" The answer seems to be: everybody. With such a structure, _anybody_ could come along and knock it over by simply pulling out the loose string. I'm not sure I'd want to use this for anything important.

<comment><USER5> Or giving it a solid shove, by the looks of it. It seems stable against only its own weight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> A similar effect can already be done by entirely conventional means.

[http://www.stone-ideas.com/2015/01/11/gabions-product- area-g...](http://www.stone-ideas.com/2015/01/11/gabions-product-area-great- potential-artists-designers-alike/)

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

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't know how useful this will be. I think being made from crushed gneiss in a jammed configuration, it should be fairly strong in pure compression. Bending stress would probably cause failure quite rapidly, and I think it would steadily weaken with vibrations of sufficient amplitude, especially if it wasn't loaded.

That said, I really don't care just how useful or practical this is because it's already so damn cool. That trick with the string is very clever and I would love to see the mathematical model they use for planning its path.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm not a materials scientist, but I bet this has a good deal of vertical strength, but almost no lateral strength. Probably limits its utility quite a bit.

But, still really interesting.

</comment><comment><USER9> Concrete is awesome because you just pour it into a mold and it dries. With this technology it appears that you still need a mold and you have to take the time to layer it.

<comment><USER10> Expanding on what x3n0ph3n3 said, concrete doesn't harden because the water in it evaporates away. Rather, the water is consumed in a chemical reaction. In fact, you have to be careful that the water doesn't evaporate too much during the curing process. It's very common to hose down a curing sidewalk and keep it covered for 30 days.

Incidentally, the chemical reaction is exothermic. That's one of the reasons why you can't pour a concrete dam all at once: the heat generated would be enormous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Impressive, they use a 3d printer but it seems like it could be done by hand. Which would make for a fun craft project. "Today we will knit an scarf, tomorrow a wall!"

Still, it does seem like it would erode quickly and the article doesn't says if it could withstand a platform on top.

<comment><USER12> I bet it could support a great deal of weight. Right by my coffee shop one year the side of a creek collapsed, they built a huge retaining wall with exactly this kind of gravel. They would dump it in 10x8x8 wire crates and stack the crates on top of each other. The article said it was gneiss gravel, that stuff takes awhile to erode. It's not like concrete at all, much much stronger.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is interesting, and the technique is certainly surprising to me, but I don't think "reversible concrete" is a reasonable way to describe what has been produced. Perhaps it is a lot more stable than it looks, but what about compression loads?

<comment><USER14> What about a good rainstorm and an overnight freeze?</comment></comment>


A dirty secret: you can only be a writer if you can afford it - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/feb/27/a-dirty-secret-you-can-only-be-a-writer-if-you-can-afford-it <comment><USER2> > According to a 2018 Author's Guild Study the median income of all published > authors for all writing related activity was $6,080 in 2017, down from > $10,500 in 2009; while the median income for all published authors based > solely on book-related activities went from $3,900 to $3,100, down 21%. > Roughly 25% of authors earned $0 in income in 2017.

I feel like the author is smuggling in an ill-defined notion of what makes someone a "writer". I've played the piano since I was three, but don't get paid for it: am I "a pianist who got paid $0"? I also took a one-off front-end engineering contract once: should I be shifting the statistics of what the median front-end engineer makes for every year that I don't work in frontend?

Fundamentally, the author is describing a fulfilling hobby that pays a partial income, and bemoaning the fact that it doesn't guarantee a full career. I'm not unsympathetic to where she's coming from; the reason I'm a longtime supporter of UBI is because I think that things like the ability to engage in arts and hobbies should be supported at a baseline for every citizen. But this article somehow casts writers as uniquely poorly off, ignoring all the people who would love to do any of a number of hobbies full-time but have career paths that are far more limited.

<comment><USER3> The title should be changed to:

"You can only be a [mediocre, full-time] writer if you can afford it"</comment></comment>


DeepTAM: Deep Tracking and Mapping - <AUTHOR> https://lmb.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/people/zhouh/deeptam/ <comment><USER2> I started reading this thinking "oh not another deep learning / SLAM paper with no code or data". Ironically they reference and build on the concepts from DTAM:

[https://github.com/magican/OpenDTAM.git](https://github.com/magican/OpenDTAM.git)

If you don't publish code your paper will have less impact. We want to test your algorithm on different data, not painstakingly reimplement it from incomplete descriptions.

There are literally thousands of papers in the field every year, you want to be accessible not baroque.

<comment><USER3> The same authors did publish code for another recent paper [1]. So it doesn't look like they are adverse to publishing their code in general.

[1]: [https://lmb.informatik.uni- freiburg.de/people/ummenhof/depth...](https://lmb.informatik.uni- freiburg.de/people/ummenhof/depthmotionnet/)

<comment><USER2> That is positive. It just needs to become the norm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> SLAM is one of the few computer vision problems not conquered by deep learning yet... guess that's changing.

<comment><USER5> How about reconstruction a high-resolution mesh from pictures/video? The best I know yet is to use patch-based reconstruction of a depth map and feed them to floating-scale surface reconstruction, or a similar patch-size-aware poisson-style mesh generator. Is there any code handling the depth-map reconstruction using deep learning which you know of? Feeding it precise camera parameters/un-distorted views as well as precise locations of these views with some known-matching points (artifacts of previous processing steps) is not a problem. Even pre-selecting only somewhat well-matching views is not a problem, as that is likely better done out-of-core anyway, due to the size of datasets where nice things become possible (e.g., capturing a small part (100 * 100 m, 5 stories, or equivalent surface area) of a neighborhood in sufficient precision to max out the resolution of likely all VR headsets you can get for this year's Christmas).

The current outlook from what I found to reconstruct such depth maps is bleak as far as speed goes, with the alternative being a drop in density/resolution too low to be useful (capturing is cheap but not free). If there is some magic based on deep learning I'd like to forgo having to split part of these algorithms to e.g. an FPGA or so (the parts that sort and arrange the patches that should be hit with brute-force number crunching), as it seems from what I understand about them that it's near-impossible to decide these arrangements efficiently on a CPU or even GPU, seeing how sparse the math and how dense/wide the branching is. (I'm considering feeding lists of to-be-compared patches to a GPU and the results back, the technique is somewhat similar to Dijkstra's algorithm for deciding in what order to compare and what starting values to use in the iterative optimization of depth and surface normals, and that branching currently takes 80% of CPU time without the actual number crunching even using vectorization, combined with GPU speed I expect two magnitudes of improvement as a minimum, and hope for closer to three)

<comment><USER4> there are lots of papers that attempt to reconstruct depth maps from monocular RGB images. It's not really my field but here is google scholar search for recent papers that cite a seminal older paper on the topic: [https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_ylo=2017&hl=en&as_sdt=...](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_ylo=2017&hl=en&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&cites=4052327659070755452&scipsc=) that should be a decent start.

If you know the depth of a few pixels in the image, e.g. from a sparse keypoint-based SLAM / visual-inertial odometry system, then you can do better: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1709.07492.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1709.07492.pdf)

If you already have accurate camera positions, you can use something like occupancy grid mapping or poisson reconstruction to build the mesh.</comment></comment></comment>


Banks Look Safer with Deposits - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-05-06/banks-look-safer-with-deposits <comment><USER2> I work in finance and there has been a lot of interest recently in creating financial products that are eerily like mortgage backed securities, but for other types of loans. A lot of these are (yikes) unsecured loans. A person loses their job and needs a personal loan from a bank or credit union to cover their expenses until they find a job. A person buys a car, an RV, etc.

In order to offload the risk of these loans, the original lender is packaging them up together. Then they can sell ownership of the consolidated loans to other financial institutions. The original lender is only required to retain around 10% of the consolidated loans.

Needless to say, the institution originating the loan ends up disconnected from the risk once it is sold to other financial institutions. At least they're insured, right?

<comment><USER3> "The original lender is only required to retain around 10% of the consolidated loans."

That part may be the only redeemable part of this process.

Because, hey...let's package these into collateral debt obligations, and then hey...let's engineer these CDOs with tranches of various credit quality as rated by rating organizations not understanding what they are rating and afraid of asking for more information because their profit is based on volume of these ratings and not quality, and hey...let's create a second CDO based on the lowest rated tranche of the first CDO, and boom, that low credit score is magically now a AAA, and why not create tranches of this second CDO too. Then, let's create a market out of this with a way to short the CDOs, and let's call this new instrument something ridiculous as Credit Default Swap. No one is ever going to need those, because everybody in the financial industry believes the underlying assumptions that 1) the real-estate prices will forever go up, 2) and there is no chance that more than 4% of sub-prime mortgages are going to default. Seeing that this makes a lot of sense, let's make a trillion dollars worth of these and we don't have to put them on the balance sheet because they are AAA rated, safe as the US Treasury bonds, and so why not get leveraged 40 to 1 on these. Oh wait, that's already been tried.

<comment><USER4> This is actually one of the most succinct (ever so slightly hyperbolic) write- ups of the 2008 financial crisis I've seen.

<comment><USER5> That's because OP ripped it off word for word from Wolf of Wall Street

<comment><USER6> Reads like that, but, if you've seen it (or haven't) how else would you describe the concept?

<comment><USER5> Not sure what you mean.

What OP copypastaed is word-for-word from a monologue in the movie.

<comment><USER3> That is impossible. I've never seen the movie.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > "Regulation is a playground for smart people," said Oliver Ireland, a former > Federal Reserve lawyer now in private practice, where he counsels banks on > complying with Dodd-Frank. "It was inevitable that this set of rules was > going to start to influence how people structure transactions."

Regulators need a way to run some sort of "bug bounty" program for loopholes. If the government could crowdsource their limited resources in the right direction maybe they wouldn't be perpetually 5+ years behind.

<comment><USER8> Just stop subsidizing the risks they take. Don't insure them.

Because of depositor insurance and pension fund insurance, risks are not treated as real risks. People know their lack of consideration of risk will be bailed out.

Make two kinds of banks. One very simple and safe with no incentives for risk taking. Another that is unregulated and you are risking your money. Those who don't want to deal with risk can put their money in the former and earn a safe return.

And that could be achieved by limiting a bank to writing mortgages, only loaning the first 60% of the 5-year moving average of a house's price. Require 20% down and let higher risk lender's lend the rest. Such a bank should also get paid back first.

This safe bank would not resell its mortgages and managers would never earn bonuses for a higher rate of return. Don't even offer checking accounts, just savings accounts. Don't have branches.

Keep the books completely open to the depositors 24/7.

<comment><USER9> Insurance has nothing to do with this. The financial regulatory changes of the 1990s recreated this problem that we have today.

<comment><USER8> Of course it does. Depositors currently don't think about the risks to their money at all, because they know they will always be made whole.

Would you bother with your seat belt if the doctor would completely heal you, regardless of the cost, without any direct cost to you?

Of course, the reality is we do have to pay for every bailout. As taxpayers.

Or, rather, some day our children will.

Unless, of course, where you put your money is on you. Then there'd be real interest in banking with low risk.

<comment><USER7> I'm curious why you think the solution is to have everyday consumers "police" the risk to the financial system instead of giving regulators more resources/teeth?

<comment><USER8> Because it will save a lot of money for them in the long and we'll have fewer disasters that risk the world economy.

Human intelligence is distributed and responsibility should be as well. Concentrate the power and people take advantage and then weasel out of responsibility, leaving others to suffer the consequences.

The well connected get their risks socialized, because they are "too big to fail". The same story is repeated over and over again.

People who take the risks should get both the losses and the benefits. It's called "skin in the game".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I would caution people to not have a false sense of security ("generals tend to fight the last war" and all that). Two important places where banks, particularly central banks, currently do NOT look safer:

A. Bond market liquidity, especially in places where negative interest rates have been adopted [1][2].

B. In times of crisis, bail-ins can still happen [3].

These two issues go hand-in-hand and will probably cause a lot of trouble in the financial system going forward.

[1] [https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/world-news/central- banks/...](https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/world-news/central-banks/bank- of-japan-the-bond-crisis/)

[2] [https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/products_services/socrate...](https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/products_services/socrates/liquidity- crisis/)

[3] [https://www.bloomberg.com/quicktake/bail- in](https://www.bloomberg.com/quicktake/bail-in)

<comment><USER11> in what sense?

bail-in's don't burden public coffers and would target disdain at the 1 company that was overlevered, instead of politicians

are you referring to the safety of your deposits? because that is different than causing trouble for the financial system

<comment><USER10> In the sense that Main Street may end up paying for Wall Street's mistakes again. It happened in southern Europe already this decade. If bond market liquidity dries up, the average consumer's uninsured deposits will take a hit. People start to horde cash and the economy suffers.

<comment><USER12> Does the average consumer have uninsured deposits?

<comment><USER13> On paper, no. We're all insured by the FDIC/NCUA up to $250k per institution (or account? I forget). In reality, I think the systemic risk means everyone has deposits on the line as the FDIC can't cover multiple bank failures.

<comment><USER14> If there were multiple bank failures the treasury would loan the FDIC as much money as needed to cover it.

<comment><USER11> under what provision? pure discretion? has this ever been tested?

in 2008-2010 the FDIC got on the phone and brokered sales of smaller banks to large banks, specifically because they needed to do their part to stave off disaster with their thin credit line. Congress didn't ask them to do this, they just got on the phone because they had live capitalization ratio data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> That's the crazy thing about 2008, when big banks were funding their operations with overnight loans from each other (and then lending to hedge funds at insane leverage ratios), all it took for a bank run to happen was to stop lending for a single day. It's not like you needed a panic, just, "nope, not today."

<comment><USER2> What if I told you that some financial institutions could move money off to some temporary location where it sits for a few hours, then move it back. Since this money sits elsewhere for this time, it doesn't count towards their regulatory ratios.

<comment><USER16> In theory you are supposed to comply with your regulatory ratios at all time. The excess over these regulatory minimums can fluctuate, but if you are in breach, you need to notify the regulator.

<comment><USER2> This is a service provided by the regulator...

[https://www.frbservices.org/resources/central- bank/faq/exces...](https://www.frbservices.org/resources/central- bank/faq/excess-balance-account.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Auto loans seem to be the next crisis. One link for the argument and one against below:

For: [https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business- news/more-7-millio...](https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business- news/more-7-million-americans-are-seriously-behind-their-car-payments-n971016)

Against: [https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-02-20/subpri...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-02-20/subprime- auto-loans-are-not-like-subprime-mortgages)

<comment><USER18> I agree that auto loans are an increasing risk these days. At least cars are much easier and legally more straightforward to repossess than houses, not to mention they cost a whole hell of a lot less.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Could you make a perfectly safe bank if it ONLY wrote mortgages and only loaned the first 60% of the 5-year moving average of a house's price? If it require 20% down and let higher risk lender's lend the rest. Arrange it so your bank always gets paid back first.

Don't allow reselling mortgages and managers never earn bonuses for a higher rate of return. Don't even offer checking accounts, just savings accounts. Don't have branches.

Would we even need deposit insurance for such a bank?

<comment><USER19> As described it is an inferior product on both sides of the transaction to ones which are extremely available in the status quo, unless you propose simultaneously making the interest rate the best one in the country, and so you wouldn't be able to get it off the ground.

If you did make the interest rate attractive enough to get folks whose job is shopping for the best interest rate, you're in for serious bad news any time the bank falls behind competitively risked interest rates. It will see massive outflow of deposits, be unable to pay them, and have to liquidate its mortgages, potentially at a severe discount (they're illiquid by nature, right, and may have declined in fundamental value due to e.g. interest rate changes in the interim).

Now your bank is failing and, as soon as you do the responsible think and report insolvency or inability to satisfy withdraws, instant bank run.

<comment><USER8> Well, you could change how banks fail too.

When a bank fails, the owners would lose their investment. But the assets of the bank, its loans, could be put into a public corporation and shares distributed to the depositors in proportion to their deposit.

Then depositors could sell and get 80 cents on the dollar or whatever. Or the depositors can wait awhile and sell when the markets recover. They might even make more than the interest they were promised.

Such mortgages are fundamentally sound, so for most people the sensible thing is to wait. They can also sell some and keep most to get through their own short term cash flow needs.

<comment><USER16> If the deposits are insured I don't see why they should get any upside. If the creditors are uninsured, this is effectively how bail in works. You are either written down or converted into equity, and existing shareholders are wiped out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> consumer deposits would probably be less sticky if consumers were required to confirm every single day that they would like the banks to carry their deposits over to the next day, which is what an overnight repo is in essence.

the nature of consumer banking is that the nitty-gritty grindy bits of _real finance_ \- overnight and term repos, daily settlements, credit risk and value adjustments - are abstracted away (for a fee) from the typical user who doesn't really want to care about these things, even if it will do them a lot of good to at least consider these effects.

</comment><comment><USER21> If the financial system were a software system, it would be in dire need of a refactoring.

Complexity makes systems brittle and exploitable. Also, most of the complexity adds no value. For example, do we still need debt? Wouldn't it be better for a company to just create and sell shares if they wanted to raise funding?

In a healthy economic environment, loaning money doesn't make any sense. When you make a loan, you limit your upside potential but you're still exposed to the full downside risk (e.g. if the debtor goes bankrupt). The only real use case for debt is to create speculative bubbles... You manipulate markets to inflate asset prices so that people need to borrow more money so that the interest payment on the loan taken for that asset is more profitable than any real investment return that the asset could have generated organically.

<comment><USER22> >In a healthy economic environment, loaning money doesn't make any sense.

Given how healthy the economy is right now, and how low interest rates are right now, the market clearly disagrees

<comment><USER23> How healthy is it? Not healthy enough for the Fed to increase rates.

<comment><USER22> Oh I agree that current rates are totally artificial, but it's silly to say that in a healthy economy, people just won't want to loan money.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What modern, high level programming language should I use? - <AUTHOR> Hello,
I'm a C/C++ programmer with 15-20 years in C/C++. I've been looking for a new language for my new project idea (a custom language, because no language seems to work lol, a VM for that language and a multi language development platform). I've considered Crystal, Haskell, Smalltalk, Go and Elixir, but feel free to suggest any language (I want to try something new, so nothing low level, please). What's the best language if performance is critical (high performance is critical, realtime is not), minimalism is required(in terms of standard library, runtime required and syntax) that is fun to program in and has bragging rights? I didn't flat out reject any of them (they're all good), but here are the reasons for me being a little indecisive:
Crystal - too web oriented - it's not for the web, but everyone uses it for it. It's weird.
Haskell - good, but it feels like you're learning the standard library, not the language
Smalltalk - truly minimalistic, but it feels like BASIC and is a little slow
Elixir - once again, good, but focused for web servers and telecommunications (it's not specialized, just the community).
Go - seems like an insult created by google to the intelligence of developers.
I'm really torn between Crystal and Haskell, so compare and address the others, but could you offer an in depth comparison? <comment><USER2> Lisp (common lisp or scheme. Clojure running on the jvm precludes writing your own reasonable-speed vm, and there are no other mainstream lisps.)

<comment><USER2> You could use clojure, though, if you're willing to make your language compile down to jvm bytecode instead of implementing your own vm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> [http://www.scala-native.org/en/latest/](http://www.scala- native.org/en/latest/)

Have a look at Scala native?

</comment><comment><USER4> Are you aware of Rust?

<comment><AUTHOR> There appears to be lots of enthusiasm about Rust - I'll probably learn it, but I'm trying to learn a higher level language (believe it or not, I don't know any "high level" "modern" languages, because I figuratively spent my last 10 years in a hole).</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why is my Show HN post not on ask page? - <AUTHOR>

I recently submitted a Show HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6320373. I don't understand why it is still not on the 'ask' page whereas there are older Show HN posts with less points on that page.<p>Are the links that are on the ask page managed by the moderators or did I do something wrong while posting? <comment><USER2> It's automatic. To be in the ask page, you must left the url field empty.

(And if you fill both the url and text fields, then only the url is shown and the text is ignored.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Didn't know that.</comment></comment>


Felt compelled to write a blog post, decided to use Medium.com and - <AUTHOR> https://i.imgur.com/SPPM4Qs.png <comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for letting me spend time typing it up before telling me you think I'm a bot, I guess.

Oh, and kudos for the feature when my browser tabs ran out of memory on the edit page.

</comment><comment><USER2> I had a similar experience when I randomly felt like trying Instagram after a long time of decidedly not ever needing to use it, and it was automatically blocked when I tried to sign in for the first time. Same with Twitter actually, which forces you to verify with a phone number.</comment>


Understanding Tail Recursion - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/chrsmith/archive/2008/08/07/understanding-tail-recursion.aspx <comment><USER2> A useful term when understanding tail recursion is "trampoline"[1], even though most compilers don't use this, it is a very useful way of visualising tail recursive calls.

[1] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tail_call#Through_trampolining](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tail_call#Through_trampolining)

<comment><USER3> If anybody is interested in trampolines, I just wrote an introduction to them that uses Python examples and includes a runtime visualization so you can see what's happening with the stack:

[http://blog.moertel.com/posts/2013-06-12-recursion-to- iterat...](http://blog.moertel.com/posts/2013-06-12-recursion-to- iteration-4-trampolines.html)

<comment><USER4> You can trampoline in JavaScript too. I showed how the performance may not be as you expect: [http://taylodl.wordpress.com/2013/06/07/functional- javascrip...](http://taylodl.wordpress.com/2013/06/07/functional-javascript- tail-call-optimization-and-trampolines/)</comment></comment></comment>


Who Are the Top 1 Percent in America? - <AUTHOR> https://promarket.org/top-1-percent-america-answer-new-research-might-surprise/ <comment><USER2> This looks like it's talking about 1% in terms of income, or perhaps more specifically, earned income ("wages"). It's not talking about the 1% with respect to accumulated wealth. I would suspect there's some overlap, but the two aren't the same. Much of the "1% wrt accumulated wealth" group wouldn't have "wages" (if I'm understanding this correctly).

<comment><USER3> Does it really matter? I challenge the notion that the 1% in terms of "income" is earned through working more or harder.

Rather that "earned income" is either extracted from the work of employees who have no choice but to work for less given the supply of labor vs demand, or it is extracted from one's unearned advantages (genes, better childhood, one's skillset happening to be in short supply, etc).

While the free market may be a good mechanism for allocation of resources and labor for production, I challenge the notion that it is a good mechanism for determining what individuals deserve to keep for themselves.

<comment><USER4> > one's unearned advantages (genes, better childhood, one's skillset happening > to be in short supply, etc).

So what would you consider to be "earned advantages", given that things like "work ethic" and "moral behaviour" are direct consequences of the above?

<comment><USER5> Do there have to be any? That may be an American myth.

<comment><USER4> Well, if you don't have any then it becomes somewhat awkward to define any reasonable meaning for "fair".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Two things:

> "They find that a significant chunk of the income accruing to the top 1 > percent of earners in the United States today goes to the owners of mid- > market firms in a broad range of non-financial industries around the > country. In other words, it's not Wall Street..."

It depends. How are these mid-market firms financed? How are their customers finance? Who/what ultimately drives the decisions and actions of these firms?

\- While inequality is one measurement, the other is poverty, lack of opportunity, etc. The issue I see time and again (read: pattern) is once the discussion is tied to the 1% (via inequality) the push back is "there's nothing wrong with being rich (and greedy)" and immediately the war (for change) is lost.

On the other hand, if we focus on the marginalized, their day to day plight, etc. then we are less likely to get distracted. The point being, sure go ahead hoard all the money you want...but in the 21st century do so many _have to be left out_? How advanced are we when such history, a preventable pattern of history keeps repeating?

<comment><USER7> I appreciate this suggestion. When reading this I thought "Why do I care if the 1% are working or rentiers?" The outcome, being a growing class of marginalized people who lack equality of income, opportunity, and meaning is the same whether these people are rentiers or not.

I'm reminded of this excerpt from a recent article on Dollar General stores that was posted to HN.

"Essentially what the dollar stores are betting on in a large way is that we are going to have a permanent underclass in America. It's based on the concept that the jobs went away, and the jobs are never coming back, and that things aren't going to get better in any of these places."

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-10-11/dollar- ge...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-10-11/dollar-general-hits- a-gold-mine-in-rural-america)

<comment><USER8> I care because landlords are a type of business that can be passed on whole to children and allows for the creation of hereditary wealth and hereditary wealth maintenance without risk.

If the profitability of a business is mostly because of a single person working there who takes most of the profit, when that person dies their children will not be able to easily maintain that income and so are more likely not to be hereditary members of an upper class.

<comment><USER9> What data do you have to support your concern about creation of hereditary wealth? Why do you believe that property management is somehow special as compared with other businesses whose profitability is tied to a single person?

<comment><USER8> >What data do you have to support your concern about creation of hereditary wealth?

The history of Ireland, France, and the UK to start.

>Why do you believe that property management is somehow special as compared with other businesses whose profitability is tied to a single person?

It's quite simple. If you own land and other people manage it, you just collect a paycheck from the land without any impact on its profitability. You can die and pass it to your kids and the profit stays the same and goes to the same place.

If you own a company that is completely dependent on you for profit, when you die the company stops being profitable. If you pass it to your kids and they are incompetent, they eventually lose the business.

<comment><USER10> > It's quite simple. If you own land and other people manage it, you just > collect a paycheck from the land without any impact on its profitability.

In many places in the US, due to property taxes and other things, land is a burden that you will spend your paycheck on, not collect it from (until you sell). Granted if you are using the land for something profitable you might collect on it, but rarely is that use passive (often only if you have mineral rights, even e.g. landlords in the multifamily industry have to work to maintain livability conditions). Using others to manage the land rarely maintains an inherent value to keep you wealthy, at least in the US.

<comment><USER11> > Using others to manage the land rarely maintains an inherent value to keep > you wealthy, at least in the US.

Property maintenance contracts aren't nearly as expensive as you might think they are.

Even with a mortgage, property taxes, maintenance cost and equipment upgrades, one can still come out on top with a profit margin.

*This experience is based off of single-family units, though I may have misunderstood your "land".

<comment><USER10> > one can still come out on top with a profit margin

Agreed, but that's rarely extreme wealth. The GP seems to point towards a more feudal situation which, at least on this side of the pond, doesn't seem to exist. And while land may be a primary inheritance mechanism, most significant gains are realized only after sale.

<comment><USER8> That's not accurate in my experience. I know about a dozen families that have multi-generational wealth maintained in large part through physical property holding and rent/leasing. They are all in cities, though; Cincinnati, Miami, NYC and LA - perhaps that's the difference?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As someone who fits into the top 1% of income, I find these analyses as inherently discriminatory against individuals in market positions that generate high incomes, a la Obama's "you didn't build that" statement.

In other words, is it morally wrong for the secretary in a medical office to be paid less than what the physician owner takes home in salary/dividends? The analysis intuits this position, and pessimistically states at the end that nothing will change for the secretary, attributed earlier to a political economy working against their interests.

Individuals make decisions throughout their life, especially early on, that determine the course of their futures. Do they have teenage pregnancy? Do they study hard in high school or trade school or professional school or engineering school? Do they have business intuition to start their own business?

I think the indictment should be against the University-government complex which tricks young people into taking substantial debt to chase degrees in fields with no long term potential for high earnings.

<comment><USER3> > is it morally wrong for the secretary in a medical office to be paid less > than what the physician owner takes home in salary/dividends?

To the extent that their differing roles are circumstances of birth and life, and that fairness is part of your morality, yes, it is.

> Do they have teenage pregnancy? Do they study hard in high school or trade > school or professional school or engineering school? Do they have business > intuition to start their own business?

Those are all circumstances of birth, be it nature or nurture.

We have a strange notion of "deserve" in our society, that someone deserves more simply because they have a skill or circumstances that are in lower supply compared to demand. So physician skills are in shorter supply than secretary skills. But if they were shipwrecked on a desert island, and the secretary knows how to fish and keep them alive, suddenly he can command a greater share of income on that island. Arbitrary no?

<comment><USER12> >We have a strange notion of "deserve" in our society, that someone deserves more simply because they have a skill or circumstances that are in lower supply compared to demand. So physician skills are in shorter supply than secretary skills. But if they were shipwrecked on a desert island, and the secretary knows how to fish and keep them alive, suddenly he can command a greater share of income on that island. Arbitrary no?

Does being a physician require a higher level of emotional intelligence, memory, reasoning, spatial intelligence, determination, stamina, moral conscientiousness, compassion, and a lower amount of mental illness, physical illness?

Not everyone can become a physician. Those who lack in any particular dimension have to compensate in other ways to succeed in medicine. It's why medical school admission is so competitive and multifactorial, to weed out those who can't make it, and shouldn't make it in the case of lack of compassion.

What do physicians deserve for an income? What do basketball and football players deserve? What do CEOs deserve? It's all from the same mindset: someone else has something I do not have.

<comment><USER13> One the reasons "not everyone can become a physician" is because physicians have one of the strongest protectionist unions in America, limiting access to the field and driving customers to fake doctors (chiropractic, naturopath, homeopath), hurting health outcomes.

<comment><USER14> Do you have some research/information you can share about this? It's a fascinating concept to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Any time I see an article focusing on _income_ inequality instead of _wealth_ inequality, I know I'm about to get my dose of invisible hand worship for the day. NYT statistic was that wealthiest 1% holds more than the bottom 90% combined.

Top 1% wealth (roughly $10M and up) [https://dqydj.com/net-worth-brackets- wealth-brackets-one-per...](https://dqydj.com/net-worth-brackets-wealth- brackets-one-percent/)

Top 1% income (roughly $400K and up) [https://dqydj.com/united-states- household-income-brackets-pe...](https://dqydj.com/united-states-household- income-brackets-percentiles/)

Per Wikipedia, top 0.12% for household income is around $1.6M. Nothing to sneeze at, but we all know many people make _much_ more.

The distribution in the tail is so extreme that singling out top 1% to top 0.1% of incomes seems like cherry-picking to focus on groups that provide services and exclude groups that make money with money.

</comment><comment><USER16> If I'm reading this properly I've seen this dynamic countless times in middle market firms - founder/owner/CEO's paying themselves $150k/year salary at companys doing $5m-$30m EBITDA. I.e. they pay themselves way below market because six vs half a dozen and optically having a lower salary is better.

<comment><USER17> Not to mention that "salary" is taxed higher than "capital gains." Paying oneself a "reasonable salary" (according to the IRS; and such that one is paying full tax on that salary) and taking other distributions at lower capital gains tax rates legally reduces the tax bill and lets one keep more money in one's own pocket.

You, too, can benefit from this scheme. Set up your S-Corp, stop being someone else's employee, and play along in the tax reduction shell game!

<comment><USER18> Prior to 2018 at the federal level, this strategy only saves on payroll taxes, which is effectively just the medicare portion: ~2.9% - 3.8% of tax savings.

In 2018 however pass-through income gets to take a very significant 20% deduction off the top. Whatever findings they uncovered in that study are going to accelerate very rapidly under the new tax plan.

<comment><USER19> Not true. The new tax law excludes businesses that are labor-based (eg law firms, doctors, tax advisors). Precisely the folks described in the paper as the working 1%.

It's really only a benefit to people who earn income from passive real estate investments — like Trump and Sen. Corker in a coincidence that will shock precisely no one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> >Secondly—and relatedly—S-corp owners are getting rich because so much of the revenue being generated by their enterprises is going into their own, rather than their staffs', pockets. This may be occurring even in the absence of any nefarious Dickensian scraping of value out of exploited workers

If owners are pocketing more revenue, in lieu of distributing it as profit sharing or employee salary increases, that would seem to indicate the salary bargaining position of current and new employees is not strong.

<comment><USER9> Buyers compete against buyers, but sellers also compete against sellers. Employees are sellers of labor.

<comment><USER21> Employers can manipulate the market politically much more easily than employees can. The result looks like this:

[http://econintersect.com/images/2013/10/67888593productivity...](http://econintersect.com/images/2013/10/67888593productivity- wages-1948-2011.JPG)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is why we need estate tax. It should also apply to trusts and the like.

If you're in the 1%, most likely you did nothing to earn it.

This is one of the reasons people left for America from the UK. You couldn't own land.

<comment><USER23> The article states that a large portion of the 1% (at least in America) is comprised of the working rich.

Whether an estate tax is needed or not is irrelevant to the material of the article.

<comment><USER24> 1% of income earners, not 1% of wealthy individuals. That's a very important distinction

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Misleading. Likely intentionally so. Top 1% mostly comes from artificially scarce markets and pyramid schemes: lawyers (with intentional bottlenecks on supply at the associate level and a pyramid scheme to make partner), doctors (with intentional barriers in both requiring unrelated undergrad study and the hazing style apprentice model), elite university professors (pyramid scheme with grad students and post docs; salaries are now typically above $200k, reaching a million), executives (pyramid scheme based on connections and kickbacks), finance, etc.

The only domain requiring unique productive skills is doctors... The rest is all market manipulation.

<comment><USER9> Where did you find your stats on distribution ("mostly")?

The article mentions other professions without the supply limiting that physicians and attorneys enjoy.

 _"Typical firms owned by the top 1-0.1 percent are single-establishment firms in professional services (e.g., consultants, lawyers, specialty tradespeople) or health services (e.g., physicians, dentists)," Smith et al. write. "A typical firm owned by the top 0.1 percent might be a regional business with $30M in sales and 150 employees, such as an auto dealer, beverage distributor, or a large law firm."_

Engineering-services firms also fit this description. Specialty tradespeople include plumbers, electricians, and lawn care and to belong to this cohort, they are running more substantial operations than solo self-employed: at least $3-10M top line and twenty or more employees.

<comment><USER26> Don't forget the franchise systems.

<comment><USER9> Excellent point. Some franchise terms require significant net worth and have six-figure fees, but that is not the case across the board. I have heard that Chick-fil-A's franchise fee is only $5,000 but also that they are very selective. Subway's initial fee is in the $10-15k range[0] with the cost to open between $100-300k, and the company will provide and help with financing.

[0]: [http://www.subway.com/en- us/ownafranchise/franchisingfaqs](http://www.subway.com/en- us/ownafranchise/franchisingfaqs)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: GitFront – Share private git repositories - <AUTHOR> https://gitfront.io/ <comment><USER2> What's the advantage over just giving someone access to the repo?

<comment><AUTHOR> You don't need to ask for their username. You don't let them see what code looked like earlier in history. You don't give write access to the repo. It is much quicker to send a link.

The most useful scenario is when you want to give access to a potential employer. If you are talking to an HR, it might be awkward to ask for a username of the developer who is going to take a look at your code.

Also some people don't have an account on the platform you are using.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Do you have a public example of the online repository viewer?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, here it is:

[https://gitfront.io/r/codecyanic/e85d279fff64e5e88981fe0acca...](https://gitfront.io/r/codecyanic/e85d279fff64e5e88981fe0accae77df0a58f901/dwas- manager/)</comment></comment>


Instagram Stories at Two: What Price Have We Paid for Recording Everything? - <AUTHOR> https://www.esquire.com/uk/culture/a22588567/how-two-years-of-instagram-stories-has-altered-the-way-we-love-act-and-play/ <comment><USER2> Social media and specifically Instagram stories has simply enabled a new mode of living. Living used to be 1:1, now it can be 1:many. People who have embraced this new way of living may seem incomprehensible to those who still choose to live 1:1. As it has been, and will continue to be forever, people who choose a new mode of living will be judged, ostracized and scrutinized but those who don't agree with their way of living.

I would argue this same judgement and confusion has persisted through history. "Oh now women are showing their ankles how terrible" "oh now people don't wear dinner jackets to dinner, how horrible" "oh now teenagers are having sex, how horrible" "oh now people have sex before marriage how horrible" "oh now people watch tv instead of read how horrible" and on and on and on. Change is inevitable. Before you start to judge how others choose to live, perhaps examine your own viewpoints and biases.

Are these downsides to change? Yes. Can you ever stop it? No. I think it's easy to say "oh kids These days do _blank_ how horrible". And articles like this come along and selectively interview people to prove how horrible it is, so we can all run around with our panties in a collective bunch about how horrible everything is.

<comment><USER3> I am 34. My fiance is 27. She has a handful of friends that are a few years younger in their ealry 20s. In my generation (born ~1990 and earlier), social media can be good entertainment and potentially help your career or business.

In later generations (~1995 and younger), being on social media is not just a "nice thing", it's mandatory. If you're not active, with friends, posting envy-inducing photos, you just don't exist. Many teenagers and early 20 year olds face huge anxiety over their online presence.

So in response to your point, I don't blame their "generation" for this behavior, of being a rotten generation. To be clear, it was our generation that did it to them, extolling the virtues of technology and communication with no limits, always assuming that being connected was a purely positive gain, turning objects like the iPhone into religious relics.

My generation started with rotary phones and got handheld mobiles and were happy with that. But if you're born with that, instant access to everyone any anyone, it's bound to change the way you interact with others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I went to soul cycle yesterday. A girl in the front of class starts filming the instructor. He asks her to stop. She laughs. She films again. He asks her to leave. She doesn't. Films again.</comment>