26% of violent crime convicts account for 63% of violent crime conviction (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3969807/ <comment><USER2> Humans consistently make the same mistake about understand the motivations, the inhibiting and promoting pressures of other people. We assume that everyone else is exactly like us. Therefore, when we build systems and institutions that attempt to alter behavior, we encode our own motivations and desires as the impetus.

I.E. why we have UX researchers, do user testing, A/B testing etc when we develop products. Our instincts about what other folks will pay for/want/value/use are rarely totally accurate.

"I don't want to go to jail, therefore, jail will be a globally effective crime deterrent" is demonstrably false for this subset of the population.

From a purely behavioral science perspective, we know that humans deeply discount uncertain future downsides compared to short term certain upsides.

If you are interested in this sort of stuff, I strongly suggest reading Mark Kleinman, particularly his work on "swift, certain, fair" as an effective means to address this population and challenge.

<comment><USER2> Let me put it this way: the current "standard" criminal justice system is exceedingly effective at dissuading the sort of people who designed and operate the system from committing crime, but those folks are not the population that in fact commit crimes.

<comment><USER3> Tautology - People who are effectively deterred from committing crimes do not commit crimes.

The system may be very effective at deterring many would-be criminals. Any system will be ineffective against some subset and so this statement would still apply.

Under any system, most crime will be committed by those whom that system does not effectively deter.

<comment><USER2> Yes, true.

So, in order to improve the system and reduce crime, you need to understand those who are currently not effectively deterred.

More of the same is not going to work if you hope to improve outcomes.

<comment><USER4> But you don't want people who currently aren't committing crimes to begin doing so. Who's to say that the current deterred subset of the population won't begin to commit crimes if our style of punishment is changed?

<comment><USER5> That seems to start from the assumption that everyone would commit crime if they could.

<comment><USER6> They specifically referred to the "deterred subset" ... which is much smaller then "everyone".

In any case, the parent's point seemed pretty empty.

> Who's to say that the current deterred subset of the population won't begin > to commit crimes if our style of punishment is changed?

This is what research is for. We may never know what is optimal in an absolute sense, but we can figure out some relative costs/benefits of different approaches to problems and choose our tradeoffs appropriately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Studies like this are hard, because they're usually labeled 'racist', or it turns into an ad hominem attack on the authors, or struck down in the media for singling out some minority group. I love the wording as it has a focus on the positive; summed up it basically says: we can't help those who we can't identity.

<comment><USER8> I guess it's easier in Sweden which is not especially diverse. Also it's worth noting that these are _convictions_ so will be missing any unreported violence, or that police didn't follow up on, or that got off on technicalities

<comment><USER9> Sweden is as diverse as the US, or more so.

<comment><USER10> Not even close. The vast majority of Sweden is ethnic Swedes. The big minority group is ethnic Finns. 87% of the country is Lutheran (as of 2012). In the US, probably no ethnic group (e.g. Irish or English) has more than 20%.

<comment><USER9> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_ranked_by_...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_ranked_by_ethnic_and_cultural_diversity_level)

Check out the list based on Alesina's analysis.

Or go to Sweden. In the younger population groups, muslims are now are huge minority.

<comment><USER10> That index lists Canada as more diverse than the US, which is definitely false having been to both.

Online sources suggest about 30% of Stockholm is non-Swedish, and most of those people are European. New York and Chicago are only about 30-35% European descent, and that's mixed between Irish, German, Swedish, English, etc.

<comment><USER9> English, German, Irish, swedish descent = Christian, white population, all speaking English as a first language, all from similar cultures.

It's way more diverse in Sweden. I lived in NYC, and have travelled a lot in Sweden. Nowadays, large Swedish cities are much more diverse.

<comment><USER10> Even if you lump all the european people together, the fact remains that Stockholm is probably 80% European and New York City is less than 30% European.

<comment><USER9> But NYC' black or latino population is (mainly) Christian and mainly speaks Englsh

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A better title would be: 26% of violent crime convicts accountable for 63% of violent crime convictions.

In terms of the entire population, probably:

* 96% never convicted

* 3% convicted once

* 1% convicted as many times as the justice system allows until well into middle age (average of five times)

An interesting question is: How many of the 3% are released and take up normal life, and how many are not convicted again because their first offense was severe enough to warrant a long sentence? Edit: Unfortunately, the paper can't answer this question.

<comment><USER12> That was my thought on reading the headline - it's somewhat skewed because you'd expect a similarly small percentage of the population to be responsible for _all_ violent crime convictions (as most people aren't violent offenders; the study notes 3.9% had at least one violent conviction).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> At least among the Swedish population, but Id guess likely to similar in other places:

>The majority of violent crimes are perpetrated by a small number of persistent violent offenders, typically males, characterized by early onset of violent criminality, substance abuse, personality disorders, and nonviolent criminality.

Very interesting, so if you get past your teens without criminality you seem to not become a criminal.

<comment><USER14> '...so if you get past your teens without criminality you seem to not become a criminal'

'Give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the man'

There is a lot of truth in this. When I think back to my childhood there were always a few kids who were just bad.

They came from the same background, had the same advantages, and so on but there was still something evil about them.

Typical behaviours included stuff like sadistic cruelty to animals, bullying , random violence and vandalism with no real logic or reason to why they would act in such a manner?

It could be explained away by saying something would be going on behind the scenes at home but (in these few cases) I really don't believe it.

Of course, from as far as I can remember, all these people went on to be criminals of one sort or another in adulthood.

<comment><USER15> >They came from the same background, had the same advantages, and so on

Did they really though?

Thinking back to my childhood recently, I've come to almost exactly the opposite conclusion. There were some kids who I thought were just naturally shitty until I experienced enough of life to realize that they were the ones getting beaten up by their angry or alcoholic parents or being emotionally abused by a narcissistic family member.

These were all things that I saw the signs of going to their houses or at sports games, etc. as a kid, but it was so far outside of my frame of reference that I didn't understand the context for what was happening. That angry arm grab and wrench just because dad didn't like the choice of font on a book report? Not a sign of a healthy home life, especially if that was the way he behaved with an "outside observer" in the house.

It's all still anecdotal of course, with my small sample size and situation, but after going to a small school with the same ~25 kids (all from similar middle class households) for 9 years I can say that later success in life was strongly correlated to the ones that had supportive and non-traumatic home lives.

<comment><USER14> I think you make a good point, a lot of kids do grow up in dysfunctional households and this is bound to have an impact. I knew kids like this too.

In the cases I described before though, I honestly don't think this explains it. If it does their parents were doing a good job of hiding it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Before anyone espouses their favorite theory, you should note this study covers Sweden from 1973-2004 which is a very ethnically and relatively- economically homogeneous country with a population of < 10M people.

<comment><USER2> What does ethnic homogeneity have to do with this?

<comment><USER17> Studies like these that take place in the USA are labeled racist because they disproportionately include minorities.

<comment><USER2> Studies that don't take into account socio-economics are, in fact, racist.

When you control for income and wealth, particularly intergeneraltional, racial differences disappear.

<comment><USER18> Accept that isn't true. Racial differences rarely disappear even when you take those factors into account.

There is evidence that economic inequality has little to no effect whatsoever (1, 2).

There is also evidence that inequality is predictive for blacks but no whites (3).

There is also data that does support your latter conclusion, but my point is that this issue isn't as clear cut as you're framing it as.

(1) [https://academic.oup.com/sf/article- abstract/70/4/1035/22326...](https://academic.oup.com/sf/article- abstract/70/4/1035/2232609?redirectedFrom=fulltext)

(2) [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6742630](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6742630)

(3) [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1745-9125.1999....](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1745-9125.1999.tb00493.x/abstract)

<comment><USER19> Until you can account for multi century generational subjugation its going to be hard to say anything interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Having lived poor places across the US for the last 15 years, I have come up with two root causes for the violence I have seen.

1\. Drug prohibition related. 2\. Keeping it Real going wrong.

The Drug War and inter-generational poverty are two tough nuts to crack. The American mythology of Bootstraps and Individualism that's so baked into our culture gives us limited toolsets for dealing with these problems because they helped create the problems in the first place.

<comment><USER21> "Rugged Individualism" is a campaign slogan of Herbert Hoover from 1928.

[https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=rugged%20indiv...](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=rugged%20individualism&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2Crugged%20individualism%3B%2Cc0)

[https://www.google.com/search?q=%22rugged+individualism%22&l...](https://www.google.com/search?q=%22rugged+individualism%22&lr=lang_en&source=lnt&tbs=lr%3Alang_1en%2Ccdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A1%2F1%2F1900%2Ccd_max%3A12%2F31%2F1934&tbm=bks)

See particularly:

[https://books.google.com/books?id=85cGAQAAIAAJ&q=%22rugged+i...](https://books.google.com/books?id=85cGAQAAIAAJ&q=%22rugged+individualism%22&dq=%22rugged+individualism%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjynrbTjZ3ZAhUW12MKHWa1DMkQ6AEIUDAK)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Maybe we should stop seeing people who are violent as people that we need to punish and start seeing them as people who need help.

I'm not a specialist, but I'd think that giving someone a job, a place to live, and a weekly therapy session would do a lot more to prevent future crime than locking him up with a bunch of other violent offenders that have nothing to do all day long.

Sometimes restricting someones freedom is necessary to protect others. But right now we are doing it backward: we lock people up _after_ they committed a crime, but there's very little that we can do to protect potential victims before it is too late.

</comment><comment><USER23> >Persistence in violence was associated with male sex (OR 2.5), personality disorder (OR 2.3), violent crime conviction before age 19 (OR 2.0), drug- related offenses (OR 1.9), nonviolent criminality (OR 1.9), substance use disorder (OR 1.9), and major mental disorder (OR 1.3).

It sounds like we need to invest more in mental health.

<comment><USER2> And perhaps divest ourselves of the idea that putting one time violent offenders in a building full of other violent offenders will somehow reduce the likelihood of future offense.

<comment><USER24> Yea but we don't put them in a building full of other violent offenders to rehabilitate them. We do that to get rid of them with zero care for whatever they will do once they serve their sentence because, yet again, we can get rid of them and whatever damage they do while they are outside of the prison is considered unimportant in the grand scheme of things.

Siderant: I find it funny how humans work. On a very personal level, we love each other (you <> your parents or significant other), but the further the connection goes to other people the less we care. Whereas if we cared about everyone in a very loving way, we would probably not get rid of people we don't like.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I think a the title, while absolutely true, is written in a way to highlight a distribution that seems abnormal, but is pretty much what you would expect in any similar distribution.

A very low number of people are ever convicted of a violent crime (they could have also written "3.9% of population accountable for 100% of violent crime convictions"). I think a better way of saying the same thing as the title is "26% of violent criminals commit 63% of violent crimes."

</comment><comment><USER26> People interested in solutions should look to studies of different types of interventions. My usual example is the extremely effective Violence Reduction Unit:

[http://www.actiononviolence.org.uk/](http://www.actiononviolence.org.uk/)

[https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/apr/06/glasgow- murd...](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/apr/06/glasgow-murder-rate- knife-gang-crime-police)

"The results were remarkable. Among the 200 gang members who became directly involved with CIRV, violent offending fell by almost half, according to a 2011 study. Weapon possession was down 85%. Even among gang members who had not attended a call-in, violence had fallen by almost a quarter."

</comment><comment><USER27> 1.) Violent crime is a rare event (in post-WW2 European societies), so the proportion of offenders is rather small. 2.) One time offenders have a hard time getting their feet on the ground after being released from prison. Without appropriate support & back in their old networks, they often have few alternatives than going down that road again. IMHO that's not exactly news. I personally find it slightly surprising that only about one quarter of people committing violent crimes become repeat offenders. This rate is actually lower than what I would have estimated. I thought the number would be about one half. Maybe we should reconsider the effectiveness of our penal system and think of other ways to deal with violent crime that helps offenders not to become repeat offenders.

<comment><USER18> Maybe in Europe? Not in the USA it isn't. We've seen drops in homicides and the like in some cities (NYC), but disturbing trends in homicides places like Baltimore and Chicago.

<comment><USER26> Even in the US it's declining. It's just much higher. [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey- cage/wp/2017/10/0...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey- cage/wp/2017/10/03/america-is-a-violent-country/?utm_term=.b5c9007eb741)

(I suspect from the places named that the more corrupt the police are the more violence is present, but have no evidence for that).

<comment><USER18> It has nothing to do with police corruption, and everything to do with the pull back in policing due to anti-police media/BLM narrative. But don't take my word for it, just ask the people that live there and who are the victims of such crime:

[https://www.npr.org/2017/12/31/574824963/baltimore- residents...](https://www.npr.org/2017/12/31/574824963/baltimore-residents- blame-record-high-murder-rate-on-lower-police-presence)

A particularly powerful quote from the article:

On whether the community wanted police to back off after the death of Freddie Gray

"No. That represented our progressives, our activists, our liberal journalists, our politicians, but it did not represent the overall community. Because we know for a fact that around the time Freddie Gray was killed, we start to see homicides increase. We had five homicides in that neighborhood while we were protesting."

I wonder if the media provocateurs and the liberal journalists will look into this, or perhaps even consider the idea that their narrative has directly lead to the deaths of minorities?

<comment><USER26> I thought I'd researched Baltimore recently, and found my comment: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16281512](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16281512)

Higher death rate than a tanks-and-carbombs national emergency? Police routinely planting toy guns on kids they've murderd? Something is deeply, deeply wrong there and the rest of the US should stage an intervention.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Power law is everywhere in the world. It's gonna be 1% of scientists producing vast majority of worthwhile discoveries, 1% of founders building the biggest companies, and 1% of those companies owning most of their markets...

We may like equality but Nature likes the power law.

</comment><comment><USER29> Apparently these results confirm Price' square root law. A small fraction of the population does most things, regardless of the subject in question.

Search youtube for Jordan Peterson on this topic.

<comment><USER28> "Jordan Peterson on creative productivity and the One Percent" perhaps?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoPlMU4KiGI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoPlMU4KiGI)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> They didn't analyze IQ?

</comment><comment><USER31> An interesting 20/80 rule going on here. The good news is if we can fix whatever issues affect this 1%, we solve 63% of violent crimes. Or maybe I'm naive.

<comment><USER32> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confusion_matrix](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confusion_matrix)

The challenge is to fix that 1%, without terrorizing the N% who look vaguely similar.

<comment><USER33> Yeah. Looking at the data, we could prevent 90% of violent crimes by locking up all men. Somehow, I don't think most people here would go for that.

<comment><USER28> That's because it's half of the population. Also, the stronger and more aggressive half which presents a very serious practical obstacle: who would lock them up?

<comment><USER34> Also the minor ethical quandary of incarcerating 3.5 billion innocent people. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Interesting how similar the distribution of criminality is to the distribution of wealth, in which the top 1% own a bit over half.

[https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2017/nov/14/worlds- ri...](https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2017/nov/14/worlds-richest- wealth-credit-suisse)

<comment><USER21> Zipf Function / Power Distribution.

 _Exceedingly_ common in population distributions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Ofc smarter criminals don't primarily do violent crime, yet sometimes do the greater damage to society.

</comment><comment><USER37> I'd love to hear whether 1% account for all white collar crime.

But Willie Horton terrifies people in a way that Bernie Madoff does not, so I expect that "tough on crime" will continue to exclude white collar crime.

 _

<comment><USER38> Not sure why you got downvoted. You make an interesting point.

How would you measure? Dollar value? Number of crimes? Number of victims of crime?

<comment><USER37> Mmm, I'd say number of crimes. The recidivism rate would would be very interesting to study because it is so typical for white collar criminals to receive absurdly light sentences.

There's a sentiment here in this discussion that we should lock violent criminals away with extreme prejudice, even at the cost of false positives. (Which is the at odds with the idea of having criminal conviction require proof "beyond a reasonable doubt".) I wonder if people are similarly enthusiastic about such harsh treatment of white-collar criminals.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Amazing. This deserves serious political discussion, it seems to hold potential for massive increases in quality of life.

</comment><comment><USER40> The ORs for various factors are all lower than the OR for Y chromosomes. I take this to mean we don't really have a good model of what causes persistent criminality, but we do have good evidence that it exists. A frustrating situation.

<comment><USER41> Testosterone

<comment><USER32> It's always interesting to see that there's a segment of the public discourse that consistently hammers on "melanin" as a predictor of crime, but ignores "testosterone"....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> IMHO the title should include "In Sweden..."

</comment><comment><USER19> in other words, 99% of people are mostly peaceful.

<comment><USER43> 99% of swedes from <2004 aka 99% of white people

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> The utilitarian approach would be to identify the worst n% of the population and pre-emptively kill or imprison them. There would be mistakes for sure though.

<comment><USER45> Better choose your utility metric carefully, because I'll bet 90% of the world's population aren't necessary to achieving most people's ideas of goals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Now do one for financial crimes

</comment><comment><USER47> So %1 becomes new kind of Pareto rule. The %1 owns half of the world's wealth and this.

<comment><USER48> Well, I was thinking of all these people who are getting away with their crimes. I mean, "smart" criminals don't get caught, right? Specifically, I was thinking about the very rich who are offshoring their money to tax havens (see Panama Papers) but of course, they are not criminals. After all, they're not convicted, and innocent until proven guilty, and hey its tax avoidance not tax evasion.

Which is a double standard; if I'd steal an iPhone from the tax avoiding Apple then that's theft. Heck they even mention that the price includes all kind of levies such as environmental and taxes. Yet when they steal from my government (who represent me) then that's totally fine? Or, if someone would operate a client computer from a country where piracy is illegal, but the server would be hosted in a country where piracy is legal, then suddenly the whole act is illegal even though the computer who executes the commands is allowed to.

I don't have the numbers, so I'm very curious what's more damaging: tax avoidance or piracy. I've even seen criminal acts like mass selling pirated DVDs being also tax _evasion_. Yet all the crap within the Panama Papers is not? How that does rhyme?

Furthermore it doesn't appear like anyone in power cares enough about tax avoidance in order for it to be solved (we, as in civilians of governments from all over the world, are missing out on a massive amount of tax dollars).

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> indeed, it would be horrible if it were more evenly distributed</comment>


Ask HN: Why is it called an "on-line" man page - <AUTHOR> Running

  $ man man
 brings up the manual page for "man", which refers to itself as "on-line" manual pages. What does on-line mean in this context?

  man(1)                                           man(1)

  NAME
         man - format and display the on-line manual pages
 <comment><USER2> In the old days, when I first started using Unix (around 1979), the Unix documentation was also available in printed manuals. I'd guess that the paper version was the "off-line" version and the one output by "man" on the terminal was the "on-line" version. (I still have a set of Version 7 Unix manuals in my basement.)

</comment><comment><USER3> It means you read it on your computer. You don't need to go find the hardcopy.</comment>


Marrying ClojureScript and JS Frameworks – Knockout Edition - <AUTHOR> http://squirrel.pl/blog/2012/11/17/marrying-clojurescript-and-js-frameworks-knockout-edition/

<comment><USER2> I work on ClojureScript - so I'm obviously biased.

I think there are very deep seated assumptions in even the best designed JavaScript libraries. Because of this I think there will tend be impedance an mismatch between Clojure and the API that JS libs present. If you're willing to spend a little bit of time upfront - I believe macros & protocols can likely eliminate at least the tedium you'll find at the interop barrier.

Still, I'm hopeful for pure ClojureScript libs that show how expressive Clojure can be for client side development if you approach the problem without the usual JS assumptions.

One example, I recently returned from the Clojure Conj where I saw Conrad Barski's (Land of Lisp) presentation on functional DOM programming - impressive stuff and worth checking out if people are curious what an idiomatic client side ClojureScript library might look like - <http://github.com/drcode/webfui>

EDIT: I don't mean JS libs in general (simple functional libs integrate great!) but the various MVC frameworks mentioned in the post.

<comment><USER3> I don't understand this. We use Clojure for our startup - we occasionally drop down to Java for some libraries (EC2 comes to mind). If I were to use clojurescript, I'd want to drop down to JS too. So why is clojurescript being designed without taking that - the thing that allowed clojure be so successful - into account?

<comment><USER2> The post was mostly about challenges around integrating with popular JS MVC frameworks. I think the overall ClojureScript JS integration story is as about as good as Clojure and Java.

<comment><USER3> I was responding to this line "Still, I'm hopeful for pure ClojureScript libs that show how expressive Clojure can be for client side development if you approach the problem without the usual JS assumptions.", which is what I don't understand.

I havent used coffeescript, but from the article and your comment, it doesn't sounds like the integration is as good - the Java/Clojure integration is really very very good in practice.

<comment><USER3> Typo, too late to edit: s/coffeescript/clojurescript/

<comment><USER4> I wrapped/integrated handlebars templates last weekend, and after understanding how the google Closure library/compiler does things, it took ~15 minutes to have it working beautifully (using basically the same technique as jayq). For a lot of the libraries, it's not a big deal.

For others, I assume that the imperative style that's so pervasive in JS makes it more difficult to use in cljs without lots of tedious macros. I'm slightly optimistic that the google Closure library, as much as I dislike the style of it, may actually end up imposing just enough structure and reasonable common practices that cljs and other languages can really interop nicely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I know nothing about ClojureScript except that which I know from Clojure (mostly syntax and whatever semantics carry over). I'm not that familiar with JS framworks either. Caveats out of the way...

It doesn't seem like frameworks necessarily solve anything that needs to be solved in ClojureScript. I mean, my impression of KO/backbone/spine/etc. ad nauseum, is that they're code organization & maintenance enablers. That doesn't fit into my mental model of a problem that needs to be solved in ClojureScript (that mental model being "ClojureScript is basically Clojure").

<comment><USER3> I don't think you have a good idea of what those frameworks do. KO - and this is visible in the example - binds values to DOM elements so you can update the DOM in real-time. How is that auto-solved in ClojureScript. (FYI: our backend is entirely clojure, our front-end is entirely JS using coffeescript, hamlcoffee, backbone and sammy.js).

<comment><USER5> Ok but that's kind of my point. You don't need Knockout to bind values to DOM elements so you can update the DOM in "real time" _, do you? There's nothing inherently special about KO or backbone or whatever, is there? It's just javascript.

_ Unless you mean something besides what I understand "real-time" to be, I don't think this actually happens.

<comment><USER3> Of course KO and backbone are just javascript. They are mature(ish), popular, well-known libraries that do very useful things. They aren't "code organization & maintenance enablers" (based on what I believe you mean by that).

You could of course update the DOM in real-time without KO, but KO basically provides a lovely declarative DSL for how to do that. Why throw that away?

I don't know what your last comment meant. KO binds values to DOM elements, so when you update the value, the DOM element instantly changes. If you saw the Meteor video, its just like that.

<comment><USER5> I don't know why part of my comment is in italics, I didn't surround it in asterisks or whatever. Sorry about the implied strenuousness of that part of my comment, it was unintentional.

Anyway, of course they're code organization and maintenance tools. You and I apparently have very different definitions for various phrases such as "real time", "DSL", and "code organization".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I agree that using it with existing frameworks is not that useful and probably a bad move.

I'm using it a bit with jQuery.

The real benefit I see are with some of the new ClojureScript libraries.

My feeling is that we wont see many ClojureScript frameworks as thats not really the Clojure way.

I'm struggling myself with finding the right way of using ClojureScript, but it's early days yet and whatever experimentation we do now will probably guide the way.

There are interesting patterns happening now though such as the use of atoms for data binding as is used in Reflex/C2

<https://github.com/lynaghk/reflex> <https://github.com/lynaghk/c2>

I'm still looking for good ways of doing routing in single page apps.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've only recently started using ClojureScript with any intensity, but at the moment I agree with the author that the experience has been neither fun nor productive.

I don't necessarily feel that this is a problem with the language (though the current macro system doesn't seem simple or easy) but rather that this is a problem with the youth of the language.

The Closure compiler seems like a wonderful thing, but you really want to be able to use advanced compilation and that makes interop with other libraries... confusing (at least while you're getting started). This makes it a lot harder to just jump in and get started by calling on host (Javascript) libraries to get stuff done. Combine this with the fact that there aren't so many pure ClojureScript libraries and wrapper-libraries available (relatively speaking), and productivity is a bit stunted.

All of that said, I think ClojureScript has as much potential as Clojure on the JVM and I look forward to things improving as the ecosystem matures. It is wonderful to write Clojure and control the client, and I think that those people who can fight their way through (what I found to be) the unfortunately steep getting-started curve will have a hard time going back to vanilla JS.

</comment><comment><USER8> While I like Clojure, and I think ClojureScript represents some (at least theoretical) benefits, like being able to reuse same logic client-side and server-side, I think I'm leaning towards the same conclusion the author does:

 _Contrary to plain Clojure, "fun" and "productive" aren't the words that come to mind when I think of my adventures in CLJS ... All that only to bridge the gaps and make ClojureScript look more like… JavaScript._

It may be a matter of habit, but as both languages are dynamic and untyped, I just feel it's more natural hacking at the web using plain JavaScript. I don't see ClojureScript providing me with enough unique capabilities I cannot have in JavaScript to be worth the trouble.

If I want to reuse Clojure-based logic, to me at least, it is starting to look as if it is easier to write your main client-side code in JS and just include CLJS-compiled JS when you want to reuse stuff.

That is, if you are willing to accept the overheard that involves. And in these times of "yslow", you may not. I probably am, but you may not.

</comment><comment><USER9> My gut feeling is that integrating with js components (<http://www.github.com/component>) is going to yield much better results than full blown "opinionated" frameworks.

</comment><comment><USER10> All these frameworks are for people who do OO because they don't know better. If you are working with Clojure(script), you usually do.

Just saying.</comment>


We need a new word for "Open" - <AUTHOR> http://www.eflorenzano.com/blog/post/we-need-new-word-open/

<comment><USER2> I agree open has become newspeak and we have to be more precise:

\- _published_ : you can use it to get some data and it is documented

\- _transparent_ or _reversible_ : you can get your data back

\- _interoperable_ : you can implement the API on your own and interoperate with other users/servers

</comment><comment><USER3> You don't need a word, you need a phrase with a complex published definition like _Open Source_ or _Free Range Egg_ , and you need a social movement to back it up, or else people will muddy the waters with phrases like _Shared Source_ or _Barn Fresh Egg_.

You can see this failure clearly with the attempt in 2003 to define "Open Standard" as a standard with no royalty payments. Many governments adopted this definition but they all wrote their own definition and there was no single definition for people to point to and now Apple fans and others with a vested interest have corrupted it to the point that it is meaningless.

Note this applies to made up words like REST web services too.

</comment><comment><USER4> I think an acronym (in the true sense, ie something pronounceable) would be best.

As a start, how about FADES?

* Full API Data - all data is available over the API, with no restriction on what you can do with it.

* Equal Status - the companies own servers use the same API as their partners, with no hidden APIs. It is possible to host the API yourself.

And RADES:

* Reversable API Data - everything you've submitted but no more. No restriction on what you can do with it.

* Equal Status - as above.

(further ideas or enhancements welcome)

</comment><comment><USER5> English is not a _regulated_ language. It is very fluid; words change meaning over time via cultural shifts, or more deceptively for political reasons. We can also ascribe a particular defined meaning to a word within the context of a specific discussion to get everyone on the same page.

</comment><comment><USER6> Like any other word or phrase, 'open' or 'open API' is going to have a meaning based on the context in which it is used. Open has a certain marketing cachet that generally says anyone can use it and they can use it just about everywhere (usually for free or at nominal cost). To give it meaning, you must further qualify it by what it does. That gives it context. Without context it's just hype.

</comment><comment><USER7> English is very context sensitive. That's probably a good thing. If we had to come up with a distinct word for every distinct idea, our language would be even more bloated and obtuse than it already is. I'll grant that the author has a point, but if you accept the idea, then we also need to come up with new words for "freedom", "justice", and I'm sure hundreds if not thousands of others.

</comment><comment><USER8> Good to hear this being said by more people. That word has been stretched and pulled in every direction people can think of, and I'm sure there are other companies out there working to redefine the word as well. It almost seems like the word 'open' is being used like the word 'free' (in the sense that you don't spend your money to use it).

</comment><comment><USER9> An Open API means what it is. A programming interface that is open. What the API does or does not is a separate matter.</comment>


Android crypto blunder exposes users to highly privileged malware - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/07/android-crypto-blunder-exposes-users-to-highly-privileged-malware/

<comment><USER2> the bluebox security scanner app has been updated to verify if your version of android is exploitable.

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bluebox.la...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bluebox.labs.onerootscanner)</comment>


Android AOSP Platform Linux Init.rc Startup Code Trace - <AUTHOR> http://www.srcmap.org/sd_share/7/f772faae/Android_ASOP_Startup_Code_Trace.html <comment><AUTHOR> If you like to see the code trace of any other Android AOSP related code/topic/features, let me know by leave a note here.</comment>


Carbs kill cells that regulate appetite - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/08/080821110113.htm

<comment><USER2> This actually correlates a lot to the Paleo diet that was on the Hacker News frontpage a few weeks back.

The modern diet is a lot different to the traditional hunter gather diet of people with which we share a almost all of our genetics.

The Paleo diet however doesn't advocate swapping carbs for meat, but rather mostly low carb vegetables with a lot more protein and a medium amount of fat. They certainly aren't advocating Atkins.

</comment><comment><USER3> Does anyone know if this research is funded by the Meat Marketing Board?

I don't know if it is and I am not trying to undermine the article but it's really difficult to know who to trust when it comes to science relating to diet. It's such a lucrative area.

<comment><USER4> > Does anyone know if this research is funded by the Meat Marketing Board?

Funding corruption is a relatively minor cause of bogus research. Politics and culture are far bigger problems because hired guns aren't nearly as effective as true believers. (Which is a shame because hired guns are often the only obstacle to true believers.)

Note that there's no reason to expect that true believers will be right more often than hired guns.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Do'h</comment>


Tipjoy Makes A Useful Premium Twitter App To Test Its Payments API - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/19/tipjoy-makes-a-useful-premium-twitter-app-to-test-its-payments-api/ <comment><USER2> Open sourced, and written with Django.

<comment><USER3> So the $0.99/month is if you want a hosted version? Or a voluntary tip in appreciation for the open source?

<comment><AUTHOR> The fee is mandated for Tatatweet the app to work. It isn't voluntary. The code is completely free.

<comment><USER3> Your answer only increases my confusion. How is the fee mandated if the code is "completely free" and "open source" and can be run using peoples' own hardware and twitter accounts?

(Neither "free software" nor "open source" in the common definitions include a company charging for the right to run software. You can charge for delivering a copy, but you can't prevent others from also sharing and running the code without charge.)

It would help clarify things if there were a license in the GitHub source other than "todo: insert business friendly license here :)". (Do you mean friendly to other businesses, or friendly to TipJoy?)

<comment><AUTHOR> If you want to use <http://tatatweet.com>, it costs around $1 per group per month. If you want to clone the whole site, feel free. Maybe start moc.teewtat.at

I do need to insert something better in the license. I want others businesses to copy the code. I'll get on that today.

Note that just because everything is open source doesn't mean it is free to clone the site. Most people don't know how.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Good idea, congrats on the launch.</comment>


Show HN: Hello - <AUTHOR> https://www.hurtak.cc/hello-extension/ <comment><USER2> The most useful extension regarding new tabs is (in my case) this one: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/empty-new-tab- page...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/empty-new-tab- page/dpjamkmjmigaoobjbekmfgabipmfilij)

<comment><USER3> What makes it the most useful to you?

<comment><USER2> There are so many useful use-cases. Like... imagine you want to try out a html snippet, without creating an html-file. "Clearing" the default new-tab-page takes some seconds before you can insert your own stuff via the dev tools.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> In the same vein, I use [https://tabliss.io/](https://tabliss.io/) for the simple fact it requires minimal permissions and works on firefox.

The reason I started using something like this is because the "top sites" I visit is not something I want on my screen if I'm showing it to other people.

<comment><USER5> What are your top sites? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I switched to setting newtab to chrome://history/ a few months ago and couldn't believe this didn't occur to me earlier. It's faster than any of the extensions and you get a timeline of a big chunk of your life

</comment><comment><USER7> I've been using Google's Arts and Culture "New Tab" extension for years, showing me paintings I'd never look at otherwise. It's pretty nice, and sometimes you discover interesting artists. [https://artsandculture.google.com/](https://artsandculture.google.com/)

<comment><USER8> i cannot seem to find the extension. do you mind linking it.

<comment><USER9> I've got you: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-arts- cultur...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-arts- culture/akimgimeeoiognljlfchpbkpfbmeapkh)

It will change the artwork daily by default, but you can change the settings to change on each new tab.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There is another similar extension called Momentum [https://momentumdash.com/](https://momentumdash.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I also like Embark [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/embark-new-tab- pag...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/embark-new-tab- page/aeajehgeohhgjbhhbicilpenjfcbfnpg?hl=en)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Always interesting to see examples of web extensions on HN. Given that these new tab extensions are a dime a dozen, I recommend adding some sort of differentiating feature to yours to make it stand out a bit.

One that I love: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/githunt/khpcnaokfe...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/githunt/khpcnaokfebphakjgdgpinmglconplhp?hl=en)

</comment><comment><USER12> I really love Markdown New Tab. Its very helpful having a little Markdown page to quickly take notes, have links to frequently visited pages, or whatever else I want to see what I open a new tab. I think its probably the best extension I have in Chrome. [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/markdown-new- tab/d...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/markdown-new- tab/demppioeofcekpjcnlkmdjbabifjnokj)

<comment><USER13> Concept is nice but I would afraid of new tab becoming cluttered like my bookmarks relatively quickly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> One of my co-workers made this astronomy-themed one and I'm really fond of it: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/telescope/mcbkdemj...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/telescope/mcbkdemjpfgkelnhcnbkoafaljnblcjd)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is cool, I could add Nasa as another image provider, alongside of Bing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> i am suprised that nobody mentioned `unsplash` (eg: [https://instant.unsplash.com](https://instant.unsplash.com)) or its chrome extension yet. :/

</comment><comment><USER16> I use my own app to form new habits as the new tab... [https://everyday.app](https://everyday.app) :D

</comment><comment><USER17> I've been using this one [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/new-tab- art/oldcmm...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/new-tab- art/oldcmmikbakmkmikgikndeekekdihgnf) Open a new tab and see a piece of art from the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Cleveland Museum of Art.

</comment><comment><USER13> I use Earth View from Google, mainly because of i dont want to see (or show someone) "top sites" like rest of the HN [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/earth-view-from- go...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/earth-view-from-google- ea/bhloflhklmhfpedakmangadcdofhnnoh)

</comment><comment><USER18> Here's something similar for Firefox (just the pretty image part): [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pretty-new- ta...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pretty-new-tab-image/)

</comment><comment><USER19> What benefit is there to have this as an extension, as opposed to a lightweight page being served up?

<comment><USER20> It probably needs to keep state for some of the widgets. Although on a web page there is is localstorage but that's more like a cache than a guaranteed storage.

OP does have a regular page you can use though: [https://hello- extension.netlify.com/](https://hello-extension.netlify.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Honestly chrome has become so heavy that I cannot imagine new tab opening with hq image.

Not commenting on your plugin.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think this should be fine.

I did not notice any typing / suggest box lagging or performance problems and I do not have the strongest laptop. The same thing for some extensions that I used before and rendered background image.

AFAIK these things should also run in separate thread, so lag in the web page should not freeze omnibox.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's pretty. Somehow Momentum, which is similar, didn't catch up to me. Is there any way to show the same favorites as with the default Chrome setup, only over the image of the day? :)

<comment><USER23> Chrome has the option to display an image background on your default new tab page, if you want to keep chrome's favourites.

<comment><USER22> Correct, I use that. However, it is jus one image and without anything else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> 13:37, nice touch.

<comment><USER25> Elite o'clock!

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is pretty great. I use Momentum but it has become bloated with paid features.

</comment><comment><USER27> You got a new user. I love it. Great work!

</comment><comment><USER28> I use the one fetching from flickr.</comment>


The complexity of user experience - <AUTHOR> http://martin.kleppmann.com/2012/10/08/complexity-of-user-experience.html

<comment><USER2> The biggest problem I see that has plagued software design and the neverending quest for features as a means of recruiting users is...

Large, monolithic do-it-all programs.

Users too often have no choice over what functionality they can acquire or reject. If they want one feature, then in order to acquire it they are often required to accept numerous other features they don't need and maybe don't even want (because it makes the software more complex).

Whether intentional or not, UNIX design addressed this problem by separating functions into small, discrete, and often trivial programs.

But there is still a very strong general idea among developers that to acquire one thing, you must accept everything. It's an interesting psychology. This goes beyond features in programs and applies even more generally to how working materials (code, docs, etc.) are made available. Packaging eveything together is good when you want everything and do not want to have to acquire each part and assemble them yourself. But it can be counterproductive when you want only one or a few parts and not everything.

Examples of this are everywhere.

Frameworks. Combined source trees. Huge tarballs of many disparate programs form various sources packaged as a "system".

It is possible to separate the parts but not always easy. There is often an implied expectation that you will not try to separate them. This type of kitchen sink packaging often makes extra work for anyone wanting to just obtain one part and not the whole enchilada.

One of my favorite examples is multi-GB Microsoft downloads in order to obtain a few commandline utilities of several KB, e.g., WAIK.

I have seen one person attempt to solve this by mounting the ISO over HTTP and then extracting the desired given KB-sized program. This is slightly less than "convenient".

When things are packaged this way, it can make the job of tackling complexity just a wee bit more challenging.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd also like to add: way too many people think they're good at UX. I know enough about it to know I'm mediocre at it. It takes a tremendous amount of experience/skill to get a ux for something that has any amount of complexity to be easy to use.

Same problem with design/creative. Lots of people think they're good at it. Once you learn a little you'll find out that you don't know anything and you're pretty bad.</comment>


Bitcoin Bubble Burst will warn you if Bitcoin is about to crash - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/03/bitcoin-bubble-burst-will-warn-you-if-the-bitcoin-dream-is-about-to-crash-down <comment><USER3> Sounds like a classic case of overfitting training data. Bitcoin and cryptocurrency as an asset class is so nascent that I wouldn't be making any significant bets on what the algorithm outputs even if the cross validation is good.

As with all investing claims, the pertinent question to ask is "if this works so well, why are you spending time marketing your method instead of making boatloads of money using this system you developed?"

<comment><USER4> I went to a tech conference this past year, one of the talks was regarding machine learning and investing. I remember the speaker being distinctly negative on the ability of machine learning to predict prices accurately such that his firm could make money. He was much more optimistic about using machine learning to understand the forces that driving prices

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It not only predicts a "bubble burst," but also the price of Bitcoin in the near future. If such a system were actually accurate, what would compel anyone to share it publicly?

<comment><USER6> If everybody uses that software and follows trading advice, the price could get more predictable. Creators could then make lots of money. /s

<comment><AUTHOR> Knowing the future is much more valuable than any monetization model.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If Bitcoin continued its 2017 growth rate for 5 more years, the market cap of Bitcoin would be about 140 quadrillion dollars, which is about 300x the value of all public and privately owned assets in the entire world.

<comment><USER8> This is a good point. A lot of people are investing expecting 1000x returns based on historical data, but that ship has long sailed.

I wonder if it's possible to use power and cpu manufacturing capacity to work out a maximum price the network could support.

<comment><USER9> > A lot of people are investing expecting 1000x returns based on historical > data, but that ship has long sailed.

You are right. A more reasonable expectation is a 5x return. Analysis below.

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

There have been approximately 187,200 tonnes of gold ever mined (+/\- 20%, I know I know), which at current spot prices of $41.56 / gram means that the value of all gold ever mined -- almost all of which is held in circulation, or ownership -- is $7.7 trillion.

Bitcoin is a similar store of value in that its worldwide existence increases slowly. It is expensive and a pain to transfer bitcoin, but so is gold when used for monetary purposes.

Likely a good estimate for the "proper" market cap of bitcoin is $7.7 trillion, matching the market cap of all gold ever mined. While many bitcoins were lost, the bitcoins still in circulation are substantial in quantity and have a higher velocity than gold.

Bitcoin is susceptible to technical problems, but the price of gold is predicated on the difficulty of transmogrifying any other element (aluminum, say) into gold. But I include this paragraph just to say that in no way is there some metaphysical guarantee that gold will be equally scarce forever, just as there are issues that could happen to the bitcoin network.

For the next 3-4 years, a decent target for an "appropriate" price of bitcoin is parity with gold - $7.7 trillion, say, or about 40 times its current price.

In my personal opinion you should consider the fundamental price of bitcoin to be around 40 times its current price, which you should then discount by certain systemic risk.

If you have gold it cannot just disappear (without being stolen), but bitcoin can disappear if its network has some kind of systemic problem.

An extremely safe way to generate 5x return on any amount of money (up to about fifty billion dollars) in the next five years, is to buy bitcoin after finding an credible insurer who will sell a policy against a systemic problem that causes it to go to 0, or against your personal bitcoins being stolen.

The risk of the bitcoin network having some unforeseen problems is vastly undervalued today - nobody seems to consider that possibly it will not be a functional network in five years, at all.

Bitcoin is essentially distributed (peer2peer). I searched Google to see if 5 year old p2p networks typically still are up and healthy - you can read the author's findings here: [https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/vdqepm/illegal- downloadin...](https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/vdqepm/illegal-downloading- sites-of-my-youth-p2p-limewire-kazaa)

In terms of technology few p2p networks survive 5 years. I would take a 5-year position on bitcoin only if I could adequately protect against this risk.

Bitcoin is certainly not a bubble and there is next to no risk of an adjustment of losing, say, 98% of its value, while containing to remain healthy at 2% of its current value by its legitimate users. It is not a ponzi scheme. It is not subject to sudden hyperinflation.

You do not have to worry about this eventuality if you are considering a long position in bitcoin. You don't have to watch its price day to day. You do have to have a very active policy against its going to zero for technical reasons. If you don't have a signed contract with a traditional, brick-and-mortar insurer, you should not have any position in bitcoin, period.

Nobody is giving technical network problems the correct probability of surfacing. They're idiots.

Let me put it in these terms for you:

-> I would bet better than even money that the price of bitcoin on December 3rd, 2021 will be more than 5x its current price, if it is at least 10% of its current price.

-> I would not bet even money that the price of bitcoin will be >= 10% of its current price.

Do you understand these two constraints? You can get a 5x return, easily - <USER2> long as you ensure against a total loss, which is very, very likely.

<comment><USER7> I get it, I just don't know who would sell such insurance? It'd probably be extremely expensive to purchase, extremely expensive to write the contract, extremely expensive to litigate when they want to claim the losses weren't caused by systemic tech failure, etc.

Those costs would take so much off the top that you'd probably need to make this play with tens of millions just to offset those costs and make the potential returns worthwhile.

Also, by your argument, if bitcoin is going to be treated as a stable deflationary value store like gold, then that should put downward pressure on the price of gold (because they would be competing asset classes). It should also mean that bitcoin will eventually stabilize and merely reflect inflation.

But the appeal of gold is that it's a hard asset and it's stable. Bitcoin is the opposite of that. Why would its price be based on it being treated like gold when it isn't and will never be anything like gold?

<comment><USER9> No real comment on anything you've written (which seems a good reply to me). Right, I think it could be quite expensive to insure. My point is that if you are investing $10 million into bitcoin today you will likely make a great return by Dec' 2021 if you actually spend literally $6 million of that (60%) on insurance that pays out only if it goes to less than 10% of its current price or gets stolen from you. So out of $10 million invested, only $4 million makes it into your position * 5x = $20 million, or 2x return over 4 years for an 18.9% year over year return. (1.189^4 = 2, i.e. the left side is the compound interest formula.)

I also have perhaps these two quite minor points,

\- Why do you say gold is stable? (You write "the appeal of gold is that it's a hard asset and it's stable"). Here is its real price over just the past 10 years: [https://www.kitco.com/charts/popup/au3650nyb.html](https://www.kitco.com/charts/popup/au3650nyb.html) \- doesn't seem particularly stable to me. It seems more likely that the appeal of gold is 1) its historical use, and general acceptance as value, and 2) its inherent scarcity, i.e. its value reflects its scarcity.

\- Also you say bitcoin would "reflect inflation" \- but where do you think inflation comes from? Wikipedia says it's just a direct effect of an increase in the money supply, but bitcoin doesn't have such a mechanism.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> <conspiracy>

To all those who claim that it can't predict the bubble burst accurately, you are probably right, but it may not matter at all to the author.

If this software gets seeded to many people - and presumably the target market is Bitcoin investors - the author may have a simple way to trigger a selloff. All you have to do is send a push to your app users saying "Burst About to Happen!" and watch the selloff happen from your panicky users.

If you can trigger a selloff at will, you can start playing the market (short).

The nice thing about it is that it's a self fulfilling prophecy at that point. You can trigger the sell off manually, and those receiving the notification will say "man, this app is really good, it really predicted it!", and will be conditioned to sell off the next time they get another notification.

</conspiracy>

<comment><USER11> Given the volatility of the market, this isn't as wild a theory as it sounds, especially when you account for not only the app's direct impact but also the following chain reaction of news stories.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Hard to believe that any one who could credibly predict this would give it away, instead of making money with shorting Bitcoin.

Seems more plausible that this is itself something that's supposed to crash Bitcoin, so that the owner can make money selling it short. If it isn't, someone will hack it and ...

</comment><comment><USER13> There is a difference between the naive sample size (just your raw n value), and the information content of your sample size.

How many crashes has bitcoin had? Depending on how you measure it, somewhere between 3-10? And even then, these crashes varied in magnitude, and some occurred at times when bitcoin was fundamentally different than it is now.

The point is, you can have the richest data sources you want, at any time granularity, but you can't solve a hard information problem, which is that you only have a small small handful of true points to train on.

The rest of the training data is going to be extrapolating or learning from small movements, which should have different dynamics from crashes.

</comment><comment><USER14> It crashed $1200 yesterday ($11868 -> $10600) when it approached $11868 which seems arbitrary until you realize that 10000€ = $11868, which triggered a round of sell orders.

<comment><USER15> That tells me people are just wildly speculating

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This sounds like a great way to manipulate the price of Bitcoin

</comment><comment><USER17> If a system is good at predicting prices and makes you money, why sell it to others. It would be worth millions.

The quant hedgefunds spend millions developing "black boxes" to carry out trades and guard the secrets within like it was their own life. And yet here we have these people giving it away or selling it for 2.99 on the Play store.

</comment><comment><USER18> > _Using Artificial Intelligence_ to predict Crypto currency value.

The AI thing had me rolling on the floor with laughter. Some shitty TA stuff used to "predict" cryptocurrency value. The lengths people are going to incorporate the words - AI/ML into their products.

</comment><comment><USER19> Even AWS can't get their status pages right, how about people don't put their faith in something like this.

</comment><comment><USER20> What could possibly go wrong?</comment>


Ptpython – better than ipython or bpython? - <AUTHOR> http://terriblecode.com/why-ptpython-is-the-only-repl-you-will-ever-need-2/ <comment><USER2> Recent versions of ipython do tab complete like you show. Not sure about the other features. But given enough time, everything becomes the same.</comment>


How Plus Will Become The Next Google Reader - <AUTHOR> http://technorati.com/social-media/article/how-plus-will-become-the-next/

<comment><USER2> If that's the case, then they're idiots for getting rid of Reader without helping their users move to Plus.

</comment><comment><USER3> Google Reader was a busy user's tool for reading through several blogs quickly. Asking Google Plus users to visit the blog makes it as useful as, say Twitter without any of the productivity benefits. It is a typical social platform with all the distractions for people who would like to be distracted. A different set of users, in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER4> There's no way google plus is fit for consuming hundreds of articles every day. How do I keep track of what I've already read?

<comment><USER5> That's a great point. All the existing SNS services are designed for chronological, "optional" consumption of posts.

This is very different from the way we interacted with posts in reader. They _could_ give us a mode to let us look at posts in reader fashion though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Lego Duplo will become the Next Lego Technic. Quantity will become the Next Quality. The Public will become the Next Elite. Let Google Reader users tremble at the Google+ revolution. Working Men of All Countries Unite!

</comment><comment><USER7> I really do not see how one can infer this, seeing there was no move, no migration!

So, Google is supposed to add everything to Plus without asking users or later ask users "hey guys, just add whatever was there in your Reader account to your G+ and we are sure you had backups or just work your memory - it will be fun".

Or they are going to subscribe users to all tom-dick-harry G+ profiles and tell users "Read on, this is your new Reader".

Well, in either case it's not going to be the Next GR.

The one who wrote this post has either absolutely no idea what GR was and what it meant or is just playing a Scoble.</comment>


Univision is buying Gawker Media for $135M - <AUTHOR> http://www.recode.net/2016/8/16/12504008/univision-is-buying-gawker-media-for-135-million <comment><USER2> It is fitting considering they just bought The Onion too.</comment>


Two shot dead because they unfriended woman on Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://www.nettechblog.com/two-people-are-dead-because-they-unfriended-woman-on-facebook

<comment><USER2> Man, I thought Knife Party's "Internet Friend" song was a joke.</comment>


Ask HN: What is the market for developer tools like? - <AUTHOR> How big of a market do you feel developer tools are - IDEs, IDE plugins, build tools, monitoring tools etc? Is there space for small companies to build something and survive profitably here?<p>How about if we extend the market to include programming frameworks, libraries and database systems? <comment><USER2> To answer your first question, _very big_.

From a qualitative standpoint, think of this way ... all companies are now tech companies and developer jobs are always in any recent "hottest job" list you can find. So, it stands to reason that tools for those companies and jobs will be a big market.

If you want real numbers, here's 2 examples: (1) Atlassian is now a public company and pretty much only makes developer tools. They started with one product (Jira) in 2002. They now have a market cap of $11B and annual revenues of $620M [0]. (2) If you read Indie Hackers, you'll find people like Mike Perham who makes Sidekiq. Sidekiq is an open-source tool for background processing in Ruby on Rails apps. Mike makes $80K/month on premium licenses/support. Think about that, it _does just one thing for just one developer framework_ and he makes close to $1M per year with no employees.[1]

So, yes, I think there's a big market (in the billions) and plenty of room for small companies. Off the top of my head I can probably think of a dozen developer tool ideas that I'd consider paying for.

[0] [https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TEAM](https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TEAM)

[1] [https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/sidekiq](https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/sidekiq)

<comment><USER3> > Off the top of my head I can probably think of a dozen developer tool ideas > that I'd consider paying for.

Would you care to share and discuss those? There are quite a few categories of developer tools, a non-comprehensive list of which could include:

\- generic, one-size-fits-all tools that reach a very wide audience: IDEs, issue trackers, CI and code quality tools

\- frameworks and libraries, which also are fairly generic

\- one-off / niche tools and scripts for very specific purpose: Those are usually developed in-house to solve a specific problem and out-of-the-box they often don't have a lot of reproducible value outside of a particular organization.

Most of those don't real lend themselves to being realised as commercial products, in part because of existing tools, particularly open source ones and also because the target audience is more likely to implement a tool they need than any other audience ([http://threevirtues.com](http://threevirtues.com) ...).

<comment><USER2> I'd be happy to discuss in an email (too lazy to list them out here right now).

Regarding open source, I agree that's tricky. But its been proven it can be done one way or another. I think ansible and docker have shown that in the ops space.

Regarding one-off/niche tools, that's where glue tools like zapier become commercially viable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have personally discussed this issue with a couple of people who worked for the big dev-tool vendors in the 1990s. The consensus is that open-source has almost completely destroyed the commercial viability of the dev-tool market. Eclipse is an example of open-source tooling that now has support from former commercial tool vendors.

There still is a small market (in terms of volumes) for dev-tools sold to enterprise clients. But AFAIK enterprise clients prefer to buy from "enterprise strength" vendors. Which makes it very difficult for a smaller developer to compete.

The biggest stumbling block to being a tool vendor is the demand for support. Even if you can make money on selling the tools in the first place, the on- going support is likely to cost you more than you can charge in on-going fees.

<comment><USER5> Agreed. Developers are hard bunch to sell to. We go out of our way to find free tools and almost look down on people who use decent IDEs or other tools. One example, when I finally got legit license for Sublime Text, all of my friends made fun of me for paying for a free software.

<comment><USER6> I think it depends on your market. I would imagine it would be easier to sell to developers on Windows rather than Linux (possibly macOS). I can think of a few tools that we pay for to make our lives easier to develop on Windows: Visual Studio, Resharper (Ultimate, which comes with a few other JetBrains tools) and Artifactory. On the flip side, when I'm on my personal laptop I run Linux and have no tools that cost me money. It isn't that I'm opposed to it, I just haven't found anything worthwhile to pay for that is definitely better than the open-source/free versions.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is a good way to think about the market cap of a cryptocurrency? - <AUTHOR> Since Bitcoin forked into Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash, I have been thinking about cryptocurrencies again.
Bitcoin Cash has a market cap of about 9 billion meanwhile. That's in the same ballpark as for example Porsche.
But what does that mean?
The market cap of a company is pretty easy to explain. It is the expected sum of all future earnings discounted for inflation.
What would be an equivalent way to explain the market cap of a currency? <comment><USER2> I'd think you need to take into account a few other items such as:

Network Usage (What business segment is using it?) Upcoming Deliverables (Are current issues being resolved, active development?) Features Awareness (Is it in the press? Is press good/bad?)

</comment><comment><USER3> It's just the total number of coins times the current price per coin.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, that's like saying the market cap of a company is just the number of shares times the price per share.

But then how would you judge if the price is too high or too low?

I'm pretty sure that currencies have a value in a deeper sense then just "What people pay for it".

<comment><USER4> Actually, very often they don't... Porsche shares, if you wish, are the representation of the public perception of value of their cars, service network, brand, cash in the bank, etc. They are the quantifiable proxy of those values. Cryptocurrencies do not proxy anything. So, the only way to measure their value is by "what people are willing to pay". And that doesn't have to be bad, a-priroi. Its just different thing. So, the cap of crypto _is_ nr of coins time price per coin, where ppc changes heavilly over time. So the "market cap" of crypto is not constant - it changes very rapidly over time. <crypto_name_here> could have a cap in billions today and zero next Thursday. Hence, there isn't much sense in trying to define/measure it.</comment></comment></comment>


OpenAI Scholars Class of '18: Final Projects - <AUTHOR> https://blog.openai.com/openai-scholars-2018-final-projects/ <comment><USER2> This is actually pretty cool, wonder why it didn't get more upvotes :(</comment>


Lua-quick-try-out : A simple, low-barrier Lua IDE - <AUTHOR> http://www.brischalle.de/Lua-Quick-Try-Out/Lua-Quick-Try-Out_en.html

<comment><AUTHOR> The description:

A Lua IDE to quickly try out algorithms

Many years ago when i wrote my first programs on a Atari 800XL you only had to turn on your computer wait some seconds and after that you could start to draw lines our print some strings on the screen. Today computers are much faster und programming is much more complex. Before you can draw lines, diagrams or tables you have to build a GUI and you have to do a lot of other things that have nothing to do with your problem that you want to be solved.

Sometimes I only want to check if an algorithm works as expected or I would like to see the result of the computation of an intersection of lines or circles by drawing a vector grafic. I would like to start to program my algorithms without wasting time to build a GUI. Thats the reason why I started to develop this tiny Lua IDE.

<comment><USER2> today, you start a computer (possibly running chromeos or android), open a browser and start writing multimedia documents, share with people, search others' work, integrate with yours, remix... etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Not to diminish this work, since Lua is cool and all, but: _Before you can draw lines, diagrams or tables you have to build a GUI and you have to do a lot of other things that have nothing to do with your problem that you want to be solved._ .. isn't quite true.

Even forgetting things like Processing, various projects exist for other languages for visualization IDEs or to add graphics support to their REPLs. A few: <http://ipython.org/> <http://kidsruby.com/> <http://hackety.com/> <http://nodebox.net/> <http://docs.python.org/library/turtle.html> or even my own <https://github.com/peterc/trtl>

<comment><USER4> I think you might be missing the point that he's trying to make, which is that having the Lua VM is one thing, and great and everything, but you do still need some interface to the raw devices - input/output - to make use of it in any sense.

You can't build a user-application with the basic Lua VM in any fashion other than as a command line tool. If you want more sophisticated GUI, you _do have to wrap it_ somehow to get this working in the context of the Lua VM.

(Disclaimer: I'm currently developing professionally using the MOAI toolkit..)

There are plenty of solutions to the problem of not having a GUI/user- interaction built-in, of course - you can emit .png files, or you could get raw framebuffer support somehow, or you could even interface to the native GUI .. but all of this has to be done extra, its not something that works, out of the box, with the basic Lua VM ..

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks cool.

One thing I was wondering is if there was anyway to read the table cells? And read them interactively? (perhaps have the option of "on changed" event callbacks) It would be really nice if the table can be used to control the graphics output.

A suggestion - an option to swap the tabs (source code, table, diagram, etc) between tabs and dock windows would be really really awesome, that way I could, for example, view the source code and the graph side-by-side.

I haven't got the time to check out the source code right now, but maybe over the weekend or early next week I will, so I may try and add these features myself, so don't worry about it if you don't want to add them just now.

In any case, good job! I've been meaning to brush up on my Lua skills for a while now and this seems like a great tool to use to play around with the language.

</comment><comment><USER6> Most of the download links are broken on the English site - looks like they're pointing to the previous version. [http://www.brischalle.de/Lua-Quick-Try- Out/Lua-Quick-Try-Out...](http://www.brischalle.de/Lua-Quick-Try-Out/Lua- Quick-Try-Out.html) has the correct URLs.

</comment><comment><USER7> This looks really nice, I'm a big fan of lua as it's really quick to develop in and still minimal. It also seems to be relatively simple to integrate into other programs.

I've been playing around a little with a lua based game framework called LÖVE and that was a really pleasant experience. Perhaps you could integrate love into Lua-quick-try. That would be a fantastic way to introduce people to programming since you can get pretty results quickly. Most tutorials I've seen starts with printing texts and calculating Fibonacci numbers which is good to know but I'm sure that starting with writing a pong clone would be more rewarding.

</comment><comment><USER4> Along similar lines, antirez' LOAD81:

<http://github.com/antirez/load81>

Lua sure is a lovely language for this sort of thing!

</comment><comment><USER8> A great idea - it looks similar to the excellent NodeBox for Python (<http://nodebox.net>). I'm very much in favor tools that make experimentation faster and easier, for all the reasons that Bret Victor explains so well in Inventing on Principle (<http://vimeo.com/36579366>).

<comment><USER9> Wow. Didn't know about nodebox. I wrote a similar tool named info-beamer (<http://info-beamer.org>). Its focus is livecoding for interactive OpenGL visualizations. Think about digital signage controlled by Lua. It was inspired by Inventing on Principle: I'm using inotify to reload the Lua code each time you save. Documentation is at <http://info-beamer.org/doc/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wow, yet another proof of the "live coding" concept, this gives me yet more confidence feeling about my live html/css/js code editor (<http://liveditor.com>) ;)

</comment><comment><USER11> "Linux Mint" version? It should be "Debian" version. Mint is based off Ubuntu which is based off Debian. ".deb" are for Debian-based distros, not for Linux Mint.

<comment><USER12> If they depend on something specific to Mint, or on Mint-specific versions of packages, then these are Mint packages. I'm not sure if they do, but it's a possibility.

Practically it may depend on where they were produced / tested. If Mint is all the developers use, then it would be tricky for them to decide if the packages are compatible with previous distros (Ubuntu, Debian)

<comment><USER13> There is no such thing as 'mint-specific' packages.

It's just the Ubuntu repository, with a different default installation and some 'out-of-repository' settings, script and GUI applications.

Mint is not a build target in any way shape or form. Ubuntu however, deviates enough from Debian (patched kernel, patched/out-of-sync glibc, as well as patched core libraries) that one would have to explicitely test on Debian proper.

To call these packages Mint specific is like calling the windows executable HP-Windows-Executable, because you had HP crapware preinstalled.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Excellent tool; does exactly what it's advertised to do.

</comment><comment><USER15> i could not find license information on this site, any clue?

<comment><USER16> The source package contains the license: GPL version 3.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Anything for Ubuntu?

<comment><USER4> I tried to use the Mint .debs on my system (Ubuntu 12.04-amd64) but there was a dependency to libc6-amd64, which I didn't feel like fixing, so I downloaded the sources, opened the project in QT Maker, built the project and ran it. Works fantastically, and its nice to have a look at the sources too ..</comment></comment>


Murder detectives sought Amazon Echo data - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-38450658 <comment><USER2> This is a dupe. This story was posted like 20 times in the last few days. Here are the most popular discussions...

* Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case | Hacker News || [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13263894](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13263894)

* Amazon refuses to let police access US murder suspect's Echo recordings | Hacker News || [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13269930](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13269930)</comment>