Apple Under Siege - <AUTHOR> http://www.mondaynote.com/2013/10/06/apple-under-siege/ <comment><USER2> Apple has experienced periods of decline before. In the mid to late nineties, before Jobs returned, Apple stuck to polishing OS9, which was simply too archaic to compete with Windows 95, NT, and subsequent MS OS's of the nineties. They flip flopped on clones and ultimately maintained a losing status quo. This era also brought such blunders as the puck mouse, but towards the end Apple got a bit of a lift from the candy colored iMac. Still, had Apple not started branching out as they did, the dire predictions were probably true.

Is Apple in decline today? Their profits don't appear to be. Today's Apple also has a truly gargantuan nest-egg that could see the company through a protracted period of difficulty. It's too soon to tell if the company has become less innovative, but they are in a far superior position now than at any point in the past. The Apple brand isn't going anywhere for decades.

<comment><USER3> _In the mid to late nineties, before Jobs returned, Apple stuck to polishing OS9_

Correction: Apple didn't release OS 9 -- or even OS 8 -- until _after_ Jobs returned.

Perhaps you mean System 7? Actually, Apple barely made any progress on System 7 because nearly all their OS engineers were working on the ill-fated Copland.

 _This era also brought such blunders as the puck mouse, but towards the end Apple got a bit of a lift from the candy colored iMac_

The hockey puck mouse was also a Jobsism -- part of the iMac release.

<comment><USER4> I heard someone the other day saying that now that Jobs is gone they're bringing back the hokey colors to the product lines. I told them that it wasn't until Jobs was back that the colors were introduced and they didn't believe me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've recently watched this documentary called 'Jiro Dreams of Sushi'. It is about this legendary 85-year-old sushi master in Japan and his two sons who will succeed him in the business. At some point there was an interesting quote that went along the lines: when Jiro dies, his son will need to be twice as good as him, if he is "only" just as good, people will think he is worse.

I think this is quite true in the Apple case, there was a "genius" aura around the Steve Jobs personality that helped inflate the perception of his already impressive achievements. Without that aura, Apple might be doing just as good a job as he would do, but people will think worse of them.

Personally, I think that as long as they keep putting out the excellent quality products they've been releasing lately, pushing into new areas now and then, they will be just fine for quite some time.

</comment><comment><USER6> Apple had a few 'first' moments and make some decent hardware. The problem is that they're much too hung up on making their stuff only work with other Apple products. They cripple their protocols by tying exclusively to Apple products. Things like iMessage and FaceTime would be decent products if they opened the protocols and let others complete. We've come as far as we have because of open protocols and competition and Apple seems to be afraid to compete on a level playing field. Most 'geeks' I know recommend that people not buy Apple because of the lock-in.

<comment><USER7> > Things like iMessage and FaceTime would be decent products if they opened > the protocols and let others complete [sic]

And because they do not, they are _excellent_ products.

I met a fellow once who thought I was a fool for using a Macbook Pro. He had an excellent list of reasons why, complete with multiple hyperlinked references for each. But I never got to see it; when he woke up his Thinkpad to show me, all it said was

      kernel panic - not syncing: for safety

and by the time he got it all sorted out, I'd had to leave for a client meeting. I'm sure he was right, though.

<comment><USER8> Meanwhile my Macbook Pro freezes on me regularly (a "hard" freeze requiring a power cycle). Neither my linux laptop nor my windows (7, home premium) desktop freeze on me often enough for it to be remarkable (but they both do crash occasionally). It happens.

Apple's product isn't technology. It's culture. Technology is a marketing tool they invest heavily in and use to sell their real product. That's one of the more brilliant things Jobs ever did (and it is remarkably brilliant; the man can't be admired enough for it, in my opinion, at least from a business perspective).

Apple's technology works well enough, and the appearance aesthetics are bleeding edge (usually, for a while, at least), but the zeal with which those in the culture defend the technology is simply amusing to behold. No technology is worth such zealous defense.

<comment><USER7> > No technology is worth such zealous defense.

Tell that to the Linux community.

<comment><USER8> I'm part of that community. We aren't all trying to be High Priests of the One True Technology. I don't think users of Apple products are all part of a Hive Mind, either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This amuses me to no end: [http://www.cringely.com/2012/01/02/prediction-1-a-new-ceo- fo...](http://www.cringely.com/2012/01/02/prediction-1-a-new-ceo-for-apple/)

That guy (who is pretty consistently wrong on ~everything) predicted Apple, Facebook, etc. would lose their CEOs in 2012; instead, Tim Cook has done an amazing job. Steve Jobs even called Cringely to tell him he was wrong on Tim Cook.

</comment><comment><USER10> This may hurt my popularity here but our family actually just bought a Win8 touchscreen for my wife to replace her Win7 laptop.

She had kind of wanted Apple kit, but the Price was Wrong, and the Metro^W "Windows 8 Modern U/I" interface was actually more appealing to her than the checkerboard-of-apps approach.

Although I think the thing that drove her decision in the end was the educational and other Windows-only apps, which is kind of ironic... educational apps are the reason we have an iPad in the first place.

<comment><USER11> Was she considering an Apple laptop, or an iPad?

Are the educational apps ones for her to use herself, or ones she'll use for teaching kids?

Also, are they apps she already has and wants to keep running, or ones she will buy now that she has the new machine? Finally are they Metro Apps, or traditional windows apps?

<comment><USER10> She was considering a "real" computer, yes.

Ones she'll use for her own kids, but not for teaching per se.

Yes, Maybe, None Yet, Yes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There will always be pundits on both sides of these sorts of arguments. In the early 90's, there were lots of people predicting IBM's imminent break-up. In 2011, Tomi Ahonen was claiming that despite everyone claiming that Nokia was under siege, it was still the world's largest seller of Smartphones (since he considered Symbian a Smartphone OS), while others were claiming that Nokia was doomed.

Time is the only way we can tell which of the pundits were right, and which (in retrospect) sounded like idiots.

<comment><USER13> I think this is exactly the right way to put the whole debate to rest! Who knows what Apple has up its sleeves - they still got Jony Ive, they still got a ton of money to just keep going at things. That may result in greater products, or they may become like Microsoft - perpetually trying. Really, only time will tell, but I just don't think they'll fail spectacularly in the near future.

BTW, good to see you posting somewhat frequently on HN Ted!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> According to the people after Jobs' death was that Apple will ride the wave, then decline. just like Dell after Michael Dell left. Larry Ellison said the same thing the other day in an interview (but not sure whether to believe him or not, Ellison being Ellison and all).

Although Apple was never perfect even with Jobs (remember Antenna gate) and other issues but he was a visionary, he saw things which a lot of people didn't. But although people always thought of him as the brains you also have to see that he has a great team behind him.

Apple might be in decline now from the $800 per share at their peak but is this how a company is measured? I believe that even though they have not produced anything revolutionary in the past few years does not mean they are in decline. One cannot simply create revolutionary ideas every year. It's all incremental.

iPod touch was the testing platform for the iPhone and in turn it was the platform for the iPad.

What's next? I think I'll sit here and wait for it. I still think that they are still capable of something great based on the current team of executives at the head of Apple. They aren't sitting on their laurels with a sales person as their CEO. When the day comes that Apple does that I might change my tune, but for now I will still be as excited for an Apple event as I used to be.

</comment><comment><USER15> There is significant press attention given to the appearance of the Apple's products and market share stats, but Apple's real focus is on the software inside the devices, and on the developer base and applications available.

The most important weapon in the battle for the approaching mobile device world will be to get the best quality applications on your platform. Apple is winning this battle, application quantity and quality, and the press does not seem to give much attention to this most critical aspect. Something like three of every four dollars spent on mobile applications now goes to iOS apps, and head to head comparisons of the most popular mobile applications show the iOS versions are clearly of higher quality.

Apple has a monopoly on selling devices that run the huge iOS base of applications, and this should continue to allow them to sell their hardware at nice margins. They've stayed focused on building the developer community and APIs, with the goal of building a library of applications of the highest quality, and raining cash on their developer community. Apple goes for the win while most everyone is distracted by insignificant stats like market share.

</comment><comment><USER16> >I consider him the greatest creator and editor of products this industry has ever known,

are you effing serious? Greatest creator my ass. He took already built products and refined the hell out of them. Shit, he practically built the company on top of Wozniak's back.

<comment><USER17> could you give examples of the claimed existing products and how the apple products are "just refinements" of those ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Using Philip Elmer-DeWitt and Daniel Eran Dilger as source of arguments say a lot of the author, not worth reading.

<comment><USER11> Founding and running a company that made highly respected computers _and_ a highly respected OS is an extremely rare achievement that makes him highly qualified to comment on the industry. Perhaps his opinion of these reporters should be taken as an indication that they should be listened to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The arguments for Apple's failure seem to focus on what Apple isn't doing, rather than what it is doing.

E.g.

\- they aren't establishing or milking a monopoly \- they aren't making commodity hardware \- they aren't engaging in predatory pricing

What these things have in common is that they are easy to understand.

The general negative commentary seems to be of the form "We can understand what everyone else is doing, but we don't understand what Apple is doing, therefore Apple must be doing nothing."

There's nothing new about this. The only difference when Steve Jobs was alive was that they could say 'We don't understand what Apple is doing, but Steve Jobs is a genius so that explains their success."

<comment><USER19> > \- they aren't establishing or milking a monopoly - they aren't making > commodity hardware - they aren't engaging in predatory pricing

Huh? Yes, they are! A patent is a monopoly [1]. They did not invent this rotten system, but they sure are milking it for all it's worth. Not engaging in predatory pricing? Do you know how much Microsoft and Apple demand of Android manufacturers to let them keep their features?

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government- granted_monopoly](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government-granted_monopoly)

<comment><USER20> Predatory pricing occurs when you sell a product at such low prices that it deters other companies from entering the market. Apple has many flaws but that isn't one of them.

You are correct that patents are considered a form of monopoly, but that is a different sense of the word than what the OP refers to, that is, holding a monopoly over a particular good or market. Apple doesn't have a monopoly in any of the markets it participates in and there are plenty of substitute goods and competitive corporations within the same markets.

<comment><USER19> > Predatory pricing occurs when you sell a product at such low prices ...

Thanks for correcting me on that. I was mistaken.

> but that is a different sense of the word than what the OP refers to ...

I am aware of that.

> Apple doesn't have a monopoly in any of the markets it participates in ...

The market is broader than just the end-users of phones. Share markets, patents, deals with collaborators (such as network operators, music companies), and bribes (mostly in less developed countries) are just as much a part of the market as end-users.

<comment><USER11> > The market is broader than just the end-users of phones. Share markets, > patents, deals with collaborators (such as network operators, music > companies), and bribes (mostly in less developed countries) are just as much > a part of the market as end-users.

Please explain how any of this applies to Apple's business. At it stands it sounds like innuendo.

<comment><USER19> I wasn't talking specifically of Apple here. I was talking about the ways in which markets may have nothing to do with end-users.

> Apple are doing nothing different from their competitors with regard to > patents.

This is absolutely wrong. Some companies are more aggressive than others when it comes to abusing patent, trade dress, and copyright laws. How many trade dress lawsuits have you seen Samsung, LG, HTC, etc. initiate against Apple? In the recent past, a handful of Apple's patents were invalidated because of prior art. How many companies filed lawsuits against Apple when iPhone implemented these features?

<comment><USER21> Many: Samsung, Motorola, Nokia, etc...

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-14/nokia-apple- payment...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-14/nokia-apple-payments-to- nokia-settle-all-litigation.html)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc._litigation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc._litigation)

<comment><USER19> I guess you haven't seen [http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/02/if- android-is-a-s...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/02/if-android-is-a- stolen-product-then-so-was-the-iphone/) or [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada#iPhone_controversy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada#iPhone_controversy)

Like I said, some companies are more aggressive than others. Odd that you mentioned Samsung.

<comment><USER11> You claimed that other companies don't litigate the things that Apple does, and he proved you wrong.

<comment><USER19> Evidently, you both need to work on your reading comprehension.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > Scan Philip Ellmer-DeWitt's Apple 2.0 or John Gruber's Daring Fireball and > treat yourself to intelligent repudiations

The minute that I saw "Gruber" and "intelligent" in the same sentence was the minute I knew that this post was full of shit. If someone is so blinded by the reality distortion field that they can't see that Gruber is nothing more than a 3rd party PR person who trades insider info on Apple for pushing out propaganda on a regular basis, then I just can't take them seriously.

<comment><USER11> Do you know anything about the author?

<comment><USER22> Nope, just looked him up. Apparently he was an Apple exec in the 80s. Your point is?

<comment><USER11> He also later founded and ran an Apple competitor that built highly respected computers _and_ a highly respected OS.

Dismissing this person's opinion simply because they don't agree with an unsubstantiated attack on Gruber makes no sense.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


TV business kisses HDMI goodbye - <AUTHOR> http://www.thinq.co.uk/2010/7/1/tv-business-kisses-hdmi-goodbye/ <comment><USER2> 100 watts is also enough to power a Laptop or a Mac Mini. I can't wait for the day when you just plug one cable into your laptop for power, video, and everything else. (Provided your external monitor has a USB hub.) Docks will be obsolete.

</comment><comment><USER3> I sure hope power provision is part of a negotiation protocol; using existing form factors to provide power has been disastrous in times past (e.g. Amiga 1000).</comment>


Star Wars ASCII - <AUTHOR> http://www.asciimation.co.nz/# <comment><USER2> The FAQ describes the work that went into making the (ASCII) original: [http://www.asciimation.co.nz/asciimation/ascii_faq.html](http://www.asciimation.co.nz/asciimation/ascii_faq.html)

How to watch it in the terminal (as it (ASCII) was originally released): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6344185](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6344185)</comment>


Let's parse - <AUTHOR> http://briancarper.net/blog/lets-parse <comment><USER2> Has nothing to do with "parsing", but otherwise an OK personal sentiment.

I have seen this abuse of the word "parsing" yesterday as well. Seth Godin released a new ebook of motivational posters for the distraught marketer, and in it they called the act of distilling insight from data: "parsing". That's almost like calling surgery "internal haircut".

<comment><USER3> Parsing _is_ deriving semantic (I.e. Higher meta level) meaning from basic data. Just because there is a more technical and focused definition of the term does not mean this definition is more correct (though admittedly it is more important in a technical forum). Consider such terms as "rational", "cache" and "cookie".

<comment><USER2> Marketers, specially Godin, are hardly technology laymen. I know, because I am one. Marketing is a quantitative discipline now; they have enough vocabulary to describe the various stages and strategies for data processing that "parsing" is hardly an excusable synonym for "mining".

Hell, they even have a rich terminology for _parsing_ itself; ask any marketer what "scraping" is and they will know exactly what you're talking about.</comment></comment></comment>


SEO Tactics - <AUTHOR> http://hughbien.com/journal/seo-tactics/

<comment><USER2> Aparajayah is a professional SEO Service company with High performance-based SEO with Latest Techniques gives guaranteed result in google.

<http://www.aparajayah.com/internet_marketing></comment>


Sonny – Fast single page app engine - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/felixmaier/sonnyJS

<comment><USER2> You know how to make an incredibly fast single page app? Pre-render it on the server. I'm tired of waiting several seconds while the JS framework gets initialized.

<comment><USER3> You are right, [http://huu.la](http://huu.la) is using server rendering and prefetching technique, which makes the ux x00% better than this one.

<comment><USER4> Yes, huu.la is smooth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Went to [http://www.sonnyjs.org/](http://www.sonnyjs.org/) (latest Chrome, Windows 7) - there doesn't seem to be any way to scroll the left-hand menu (it cuts off at "StorageManager" sub-heading for me at default zoom level, I can see there are more by zooming out though) and of the ones I can see, the menu items "render" and "kill" don't seem to do anything.

</comment><comment><USER6> similar to meteor, page needs second or two to load, presenting user a blank screen.

<comment><USER7> Just over 7s here, and /demo takes 12s and ends up with a blank page.

Not ready for prime time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can anyone get the docs page at [http://www.sonnyjs.org/?home](http://www.sonnyjs.org/?home) to scroll correctly? I have to zoom it way out to see everything. OSX 10.10.2/Safari on a 13" Retina display.

</comment><comment><USER9> Not sure if the config file is intended to contain any sensitive info or not? If so it should probably be protected: [http://www.sonnyjs.org/demo/config.json](http://www.sonnyjs.org/demo/config.json)

</comment><comment><USER10> It's trying to load a public.html that isn't there?

</comment><comment><USER11> [http://www.sonnyjs.org/demo/](http://www.sonnyjs.org/demo/) is a blank page :/

</comment><comment><USER12> Why are people upvoting this broken trash? Because the author put "Incredibly fast" in the title? Is that all it takes?

<comment><USER13> Why is it trash?

<comment><USER7> Because it's a slow, broken reimplementation of things which Angular already does better and which only work well in any case when you're on a blazing-fast low-latency Internet connection, or better yet browsing localhost -- did I mention those times I posted earlier were on _desktop_? I shudder to think what'd happen if I tried loading it on my phone.

And it also appears to be implemented entirely in a single 1300-line-long Javascript file, which, okay, I guess? There are no tests -- yes, there are examples in a directory called "tests", but there are no _tests_ , which is to say there's no way to get any confidence that modifications in that 1300-line Javascript blob haven't produced regressions or new bugs.

Presumably the author has learned something in the process of writing it, although I can't imagine what that may be. I don't know why he'd spend his time on this, though; from the looks of his Github account, he's also written an in-browser Pokemon game engine which looks pretty cool, so I don't know what value he sees in hacking up a half-baked me-too web framework.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> [http://www.sonnyjs.org/demo/](http://www.sonnyjs.org/demo/) appears to be down?

<comment><USER15> I'm able to load it in Chrome and Opera but not in IE or Firefox

<comment><USER16> And it's a pretty unfortunate failure mode. IMHO, it should at least render a basic failure message that is removed by a working site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Demo site looks to be down? At least not rendering for me, FF nightly on android

</comment><comment><USER18> Only on WebKit/Blink. I disapprove. :)

<comment><USER19> I approve you.</comment></comment>


Gryphon: An open-source framework for algorithmic trading in cryptocurrency - <AUTHOR> http://www.gryphonframework.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey folks, I'm the primary maintainer of Gryphon. The backstory here is: I was one of the founders of Tinker, the trading company that built Gryphon as our in-house trading infrastructure. We operated 2014-18, starting with just a simple arbitrage bot, and slowly grew the operation until our trades were peaking above 20% of daily trading volume on the big exchanges.

The company has since wound down (founders moved on to other projects), but I always thought the code deserved to be shared, so we've open sourced it. Someone trying to do what we did will probably save 1.5 years of engineering effort if they build on Gryphon vs. make their own. As far as I know there isn't anything out there like this, in any market (not just cryptocurrencies).

Hope you guys like it!

<comment><USER2> Well documented. Looks like a nice way to learn about market making in a real life situations with small fractions of bitcoin. Curious to know if someone takes it for a real drive in a production environment.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I hope they do.

I had considered adding a 'reading list' to the docs for people who are new to trading, so this could be used as a teaching tool (or just to make using it easier). I'll bump that up the priority list.

<comment><USER3> I would love that, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is there something like that, but with more predictable languages like Rust[1], or OCaml? I wouldn't trust my money for dynamic typing. I recently asked the same question[2] to the Futu broker[3]. Sadly no answer. I wish more quant companies would pay attention to the predictability of their own code and external APIs. For example using Imandra[4] to reason about their own code. Using their own protocol language specification[5] they created verified FIX library[6].

P.S. Also you might want to add that framework in Awesome Quant list[7].

[1] [https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/proposal-business- applicat...](https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/proposal-business-applications- working-group/10400)

[2] [https://github.com/FutunnOpen/futu-api- doc/issues/2](https://github.com/FutunnOpen/futu-api-doc/issues/2)

[3] [https://www.futu5.com/en/](https://www.futu5.com/en/)

[4] [https://imandra.ai/](https://imandra.ai/)

[5] [https://docs.imandra.ai/ipl/](https://docs.imandra.ai/ipl/)

[6] [https://docs.imandra.ai/fix-engine/](https://docs.imandra.ai/fix-engine/)

[7] [https://github.com/wilsonfreitas/awesome- quant](https://github.com/wilsonfreitas/awesome-quant)

<comment><USER5> You'd probably derive more benefit from typing this with mypy, instead of rewriting in a statically-typed language

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "trade billions" \+ `pip install` -- all the rope to hang yourself with!

In all seriousness this looks like a pretty comprehensive offering for open source, looks cool.

<comment><USER7> worth noting its common clause.. so doesn't qualify under osi ([https://opensource.org](https://opensource.org)) definitions as open source.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> A couple of years ago I made a bit of cash by arbitraging within an exchange. It had both BTC and fiat pairs for all other cryptos, and in some cases buying one, converting to the other and then selling back could net a profit even with fees.

They'd occasionally ban my IP (but not API key, for some reason) I assume due to lots of order book info requests, even though my bot traded enough volume to certainly more than make up for them in fees.

Eventually it stopped earning anything. I assume the exchange started doing it internally themselves and the profit was had before the orders hit the books.

<comment><USER9> Could also just be competition. The thing about arbitrage opportunities is that they're usually arbitraged out of existence once enough people become aware of them. All it takes is one faster arbitrage bot front-running you and you won't see any more arbitrage opportunities.

<comment><USER10> And the exchanges.

This aint regulated securities or commodities markets and there is serious front running happening

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I guess the original author 'moved on to other projects' because they couldn't make a stable income.

We've all tried it, I personally couldn't make money after thousands of nodejs lines against Binance's API and many 'clever' ideas.

Anyone out there making a living from crypto-algo-trading?

</comment><comment><USER12> Why did you choose python 2.7?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's holdover for when the project was started years ago. It's a focus for this year to migrate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wow. That's pretty cool.

Been toying with the idea of algo trading on stock market. Nice to have a reference work

<comment><USER14> I've been playing around with using lstm recurrent nets to find patterns in forex trades, with no real expectation of anything other than learning about recurrent nets (and td convolutional nets). I was able to access 15 years of historical tick data. I would imagine lack of historical pricing data would be an issue for any machine learning approach to crypto trading. Even with 15 years of daily prices I only have ~5500 samples per major currency pair. I've toyed with learning off hourly prices rather than daily, and I've also thought about creating more samples by shifting prices up or down, since perhaps the general patterns would be the same.

<comment><USER15> Ouch. Out of all the possible subjects to learn NNs on, you have picked by far the most difficult possible. Seriously. If you think of an analogue to rocketry, with the easiest being launching fireworks from a bottle and the other being a mission to Mars, you have picked a Moon landing.

I don't even know where to begin. Financial data has an extremely low signal to noise ratio and it is fraught with pitfalls. It is highly non-normal, heteroscedastic, non-stationary and frequently changes behavioural regimes. It is irregular, the information content is itself irregular and the prices sold by vendors often have difficult to detect issues that will taint your results until you actually start trading and realise that a fundamental assumption was wrong. You may train a model on one period, and find that the market behaviour has changed and your model is rubbish. Cross validation and backtesting on black box algorithms with heavy parameter tuning is a field of study on it's own with so many issues that endless papers have been written on each specific nuance.

Successfully building ML models for trading is an extremely difficult discipline that requires a deep understanding of the markets, the idiosyncrasies of market data, statistics and programming. Most quant shops who run successful ML Algos (they are quite rare) have dedicated data teams whose entire remit is to source and clean data. The saying of rubbish in, rubbish out is very true. Even data providers like Reuter's or Bloomberg frequently have crap data. We pay nearly 500k a year to Reuters, and find errors in their tick data every week. Data like spot forex is a special beast because the market is decentralized. There is no exchange which could provide an authoritative price feed. Trades have been rolled back in the past and if your data feed does not reflect this, you are effectively analysing junk data.

I don't even want to get started about the fact that trying to train an RNN on 5500 observations is folly. Did you treat the data in any way? The common way to regularise market data for ML is to resample it to information bars. This is not going to work on a daily basis, so you should start off with actual tick data.

Nearly every starry eyed junior quant goes in with the notion that you can just run some fancy ML models on some market data and you'll get a star trading algo. That a small handful of statistical tests will tell you whether your results are meaningful, whether your data has autocorrelation or mean reverting properties. In reality, ML models are very difficult to train on financial data. Most statistical forecasting tools fail to find relationships and blindly training models on past data very rarely results in more than spurious performance in a back test.

I don't want to discourage you by any means, but I'd start off with something easier than what you are proposing. Finance firms have entire teams dedicated to what you are trying to do and even they often fail to find anything.

<comment><USER14> Thanks for the great feedback. I have no expectations for this other than the learning, and it's already been successful on that front. Just seemed like a fun thing to poke at when most other hobbyists seem to be doing image analysis and language modeling. I've crawled a couple of forums and I get that there are a lot of people out there who think they can readily use these techniques to make money. I doubt very much that this will be the outcome in my case :).

Where I am now I am just trying to figure out how to treat the data, whether to normalize or stationarize and how to encode inputs, etc. The reason that I am working with daily prices is that the fantasy output of this would be a model that can inform a one day grid trading strategy. It may very well be that daily prices won't work for this.

<comment><USER16> Whether there's anything like an equilibrium in cryptoasset markets where there are no underlying fundamentals is debatable. While there's no book price, PoW coin prices might be rationally describable in terms of (average_estimated cost of energy + cost per GH/s + 'speculative value')

A proxy for energy costs, chip costs, and speculative information

Are there standard symbols for this?

Can cryptoasset market returns be predicted with quantum harmonic oscillators as well? What NN topology can learn a quantum harmonic model? [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19214650](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19214650)

<comment><USER16> "The Carbon Footprint of Bitcoin" (2019) defines a number of symbols that could be standard in [crypto]economics texts. Figure 2 shows the "profitable efficiency" (which says nothing of investor confidence and speculative information and how we maybe overvalue teh security (in 2007-2009)). Figure 5 lists upper and lower estimates for the BTC network's electricity use. [https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30255-7](https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351\(19\)30255-7)

Here's a cautionary dialogue about correlative and causal models that may also be relevant to a cryptoasset price NN learning experiment: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20163734](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20163734)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is the thing I've searched for many days. Thank guy!

</comment><comment><USER18> Nice to see fellow market makers! New code releases are always a good thing; perhaps I'll do something too in the near future.

</comment><comment><USER19> 1\. implement a real algo that depends on known behaviour of some players.

2\. release public algo that implements that known behaviour your main algo expects

3\. ???

4\. Profit!

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally fair to wonder that, all I can say is we make it clear the built-in algos are just for demo/inspiration purposes, shouldn't be run live with any expectation of profit. The point of Gryphon is to use the framework to build/run your own strats much faster than if you had to build everything yourself.

<comment><USER10> > all I can say is we make it clear the built-in algos are just for > demo/inspiration purposes, shouldn't be run live with any expectation of > profit

Boilerplate CYA that counterintuitive undermines confidence in the code while you expect some people to see through it and use it anyway

Thats all the experience I need, cloned</comment></comment></comment>


FasterWeb Wants To Make The Entire Web Up To Ten Times Faster In 2010 - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/19/fasterweb-aims-to-make-the-web-up-to-ten-times-faster-and-gets-money-to-do-so/ <comment><USER2> "Here's a company we heard about, trying to do something that sounds ridiculous. They won't tell us how they're going to do it, nor will they name any of their clients. They have funding, though, and since no funded startup ever failed, we (TC) will breathlessly report on their existence."

Here's a litmus test for TC to use: if a) a startup makes a wild claim and the only corroboration you can find is from their funders or b) your article requires the use of the phrase, "so we'll just have to take their word for it," rest assured you can skip this story.

<comment><USER3> It is indeed a terrible story, but the VC has a decent-looking track record: <http://videolectures.net/yoav_andrew_leitersdorf/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What an absurd claim. Went to read the story to find either the meat, or spot a grammatical error or missing specifics:

 _One VC firm, YL Ventures, believes that it can. And they've seen it in action, so we'll just have to take their word for it, for now._

<comment><USER5> Yet another post that proves that TC is as respectable a news source as CNN and other American news organizations that do not ask the hard questions and do not criticize bullshit.

TC is an entertainment tabloid and it's messed up because you can also see that they want to be respectable and report useful information. They have a pretty good company database, they've collected some info into an quarterly analysis package, etc. but they still perpetuate the Web 2.0 celebrity gossip.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> My previous company built technology in this space, based on Squid, and some custom tools. I vividly recall competitors making bold, outlandish, claims like these on a monthly basis back then. None of them ever came to pass. They required too much infrastructure build out, too much cooperation from ISPs and website owners, and the companies behind them demanded too much involvement and too much money from all parties in the chain. There was a CDN rush back then, too, and only a few managed to raise enough money and build out fast enough to be successful at it. This kind of technology requires a build out similar to a CDN, but with far more involvement of parties that are very unlikely to have an interest in being involved.

I've had long conversations with folks at Akamai, Red Swoosh, and many others, in this particular area...and it's astonishing how much money it takes to build this stuff out, and finding profitable ways to build out small (making it useful enough to make money on _without_ first spending millions and signing on dozens of ISPs) is very difficult. I just don't think there is that much VC money floating around right now, even if (big giant if) they've actually figured out technology that works on the scale they're promising.

</comment><comment><USER7> Someone here probably knows this: How much latency would you cut if your average page request to msn.com, yahoo.com, etc resulted in a single instantly-full-speed download of an archive of all the content the browser requires to show the page?

Actually, hitting msn.com and yahoo.com now, it looks like each takes <2 seconds on this computer on a normal-ish broadband connection without any cache. NYTimes and Bing took about 5, but they had all the useful stuff up in <2.

I suppose it'd be desirable for all of those to be <0.1 seconds, but that'd be darned hard considering normal ping latencies. Between 2 seconds and 0.1 seconds, I'm not sure how much I care.. I still see the delay, but it don't think it makes much difference to me in normal surfing.

<comment><USER8> I saw something the other day where Firefox will allow you to browse a website that is zipped up and you can use urls like this:

<http://somewebsite.com/somezip.zip?/index.html> <http://somewebsite.com/somezip.zip?/images/logo.png>

Then the browser only downloads the zip file once and everything else is cached. I can't seem to find the link anymore though because everything in the search engines is so frickin SEO'd that all i can find with zip in the search terms is winzip or winrar or something about putting a link to a zip on your website...

This is the closest I can find: [http://www.aburad.com/blog/2008/05/view- contents-of-zipjar-f...](http://www.aburad.com/blog/2008/05/view-contents-of- zipjar-files-using-firefox.html)

<comment><USER9> You're probably thinking of a combination of this:

<http://kaioa.com/node/99>

Which explains how to use JAR archives in Firefox instead of CSS sprites to optimize page loads, and this:

<http://limi.net/articles/resource-packages>

Which is a proposal for a universal standard of packaging resources like this.

<comment><USER8> Yep, that's it. I think that'd be a really cool way to speed up the web.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> making a website 2 to 10 times fast is not that hard, put them on a CDN. The usual suspects in increasing performance are:

\- compression

\- caching (origin, edge, browser)

\- persistent connections

\- tcp-optimizations

<comment><USER11> Caching is easy. The hard part is knowing when to expire an object in cache.

<comment><USER6> That's only the hard part if the site doesn't tell you when to expire it. Squid (and many others) have excellent cache expiry and replacement heuristics; but Squid can only cache 20-35% of the web, because it's simply not safe to cache the rest of it, either because it's session-based and could be different for every user, or because it is SSL-encrypted and can't be seen by the proxy, or because it explicitly disallows caching with Cache-Control or Expires headers, etc. And, even if the site doesn't tell you how long you can cache something, it's reasonably safe to guess based on the age of the object (a five year old object is probably not going to change in the three days it takes to run through a full replacement in your cache; while one that is 30 minutes old could possibly change dozens of times, so Squid will send an If- Modified-Since a few minutes later, with gradually lengthening periods between checks as the age of the object increases).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> woo! caching and compression! I feel like it's 1998 again!</comment>


Ask HN: What's the best private budgeting app? - <AUTHOR> Is there a budgeting app that respects user's privacy? (Doesn't store data, track transactions, etc)<p>For example, Mint is a popular budgeting tool, but they explicitly state that they share your information [0].<p>[0]: https://security.intuit.com/index.php/privacy <comment><USER2> I have been using firefly. [https://firefly-iii.org/](https://firefly- iii.org/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Working on one right now, will be subscription based, but won't share your data with anyone.</comment>


Show HN: Nowy Friends – Know when your friends are nearby, e.g. same subway car - <AUTHOR> https://nowyfriends.com/

<comment><USER2> Works using Bluetooth LE for privacy, nice. And you received some TC coverage [1], congrats! My issue would be, how to give my position only to a subgroup of my FB friends, since I would only want to advertise availability during certain times to certain people.

[1] [http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/17/nowy-friends- app/](http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/17/nowy-friends-app/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the compliment!

Nowy Friends is not a friend-tracking app: you don't see friends on a map, the app doesn't track where you or your friends are.

If you're asking how to restrict who of your friends can know when you're nearby (e.g., Jack and Jill, but not John), then, in its current form, you cannot do this. We have ideas on how to build such a feature, but our current ideas make discovering your nearby friends slower.

Regarding advertising availability only at certain times, the app enables you to go in stealth mode, where basically advertising and friend discovery are turned off, it's as if you turned bluetooth off for the app.

Finally, when you talk about sharing your position with a friend, do you imagine this happens when they're nearby? For example, you're in an underground pub, and Nowy Friends tells you that Jack is nearby, but you can't see him, so you'd like to send him your GPS coordinates? If so, we think GPS coordinates is not the best option as it may not be precise enough. You could, instead, text them to set up a meeting point or the 2 phones could coordinate to show the same color, and then you'd raise your phone and look around for a phone showing the same color as yours.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Do you ever wonder who of your friends are nearby? For example, in the same subway car, festival, or street.

Nowy Friends tells you when your friends are actually nearby, not that they were 1 km away 10 minutes ago! Nowy Friends transforms a boring subway ride into something fun.

Nowy Friends works anywhere (no GPS, no Internet), protects your privacy, and is battery friendly.

<comment><USER3> Big whoop!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!</comment></comment></comment>


Steam needs to stop asking its customers to fix its problems - <AUTHOR> https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/02/14/steam-curation-user-reviews-fixes/ <comment><USER2> I'm an applied researcher in search science. This is a very typical domain specialized search problem. These days it uses Big Data, Machine Learning, constant experimenting / prototyping, A/B testing. I get to geek out each and every day. It is my dream job :)

I consider it one of the main reasons Apple lost so much content market share to Amazon despite Apples first mover advantage - Amazon has better search and you can actually find the stuff you want. AFAIK Apple tried to start up an applied research group to fix the problem but they refused to pay enough and ended up with the dregs. They tried to hire me 3 years ago for $130K. It highlighted that they didn't understand the importance of the problem and we're likely to fail. I typically make ~$240 as FTE and more as a contractor. Apple also has a culture of secrecy where as search science is pretty open.

Anyway; I checked out Steam. The search there is clearly very poor and can easily be improved. The overreliance on tags is usually a good indication that they are not digging into their usage data for their recommendations.

<comment><USER3> Can you recommend some readings for developers who aren't familiar with search science?

<comment><USER2> It's basically the union of Information Retreival, Big Data, and Machine Learning. There is a lot of good and bad info out there.

It's best to tailor your learning around a problem so you can get feedback on what works. Building bespoke search engines is expensive and often not worth it until the problem is big enough. Machine Learned optimization is even more expensive.

So in the likely instance that your problem is small; I'd stick to an off the shelf Lucene. If you need more specialization write plugins for it. If you need more speed then DIY OkapiBM25 in native (maybe Rust these days). If you need Big Data I'd use Spark. If you need ML then GDBT in R. If you need advanced NLP then Deep Learning. At each stage it's usually diminishing returns. So quit once you start losing money on the additional effort.

Edit: As a fun aside. Page Rank doesn't work very well and AFAIK Googles major advance was from creating 'meta documents' using anchor text and search queries. Google has a habit of sending out red herrings to guard their important ideas. So if some blogger is waxing lyrical about Page Rank you know they're full of it.

<comment><USER4> Page rank was very useful when they started, 19 years ago. It was killed by their own success as normal people stopped posting link sites, and bad actors added their own.

<comment><USER2> The people that I know at MS and Yahoo told me that Page Rank was never as good as meta-documents. And meta-documents was more than sufficient to explain the improvement in relevance.

Of course this is anecdotal and I would be happy to see evidence to the contrary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Core complaints of article (please add any that I missed):

1\. Steam receives dozens of releases a day and it's difficult for developers/publishers to make their title stand-out without performing marketing.

2\. Author perceives that Steam's display algorithm results in display of outliers (very good/bad).

3\. Very low quality titles are released/being sold by Steam.

4\. Reviews are a very poor metric as reviewers can be shills or rate content poorly out of pettiness or malice.

5\. Author thinks that staff-curated titles are the solution.

My responses:

RockPaperShotgun is a game review site. _Reviewing games_ is how they manage to make ad revenue (well, besides click-bait articles). If the defense is that more content comes out than RockPaperShotgun can review, then RockPaperShotgun should hire more people. If that's cost prohibitive, and there's market demand for it, then why are they asking Steam to do it?

1\. Welcome to selling anything.

2\. I don't know if this is true; I'm not rejecting this claim, but I'd love to see the data.

3\. Quantifying "good enough to sell" is a risky game. I'm okay with spending $5 (most of a beer at a bar) on something kind of buggy if it's amusing for 30 minutes. For someone else, that amount may be double or $0 on principle.

4\. If this subproblem gets solved without background checks on reviewers, you have a serious business that Amazon/Yelp/etc would love to buy from you.

5\. Beyond catching content that simply _does not do what it says on the box_, this is all personal taste.

And as an aside, there's a "curious" market that exists in low-quality games that have DLC/content that ends up on the Steam Community Market (Steam gets a % of each transaction), so the "how did a broken game end up on Steam?" question has more depth than a casual observer would guess.

<comment><USER6> Asking review sites to sift through the dredges in the spirit of "more business is better!" is naive. Jimquisition comments regularly on this and it has turned into a longstanding and ever constant critique of Valve and its "Whatever goes" attitude to getting on their Steam platform. At 20 or 30 new games _a day_ consumers don't have time to go on review websites and see what's on the "do not touch list". What a monumental task for consumers! If steam would block games that, out of the gate, did not work, that would be great. As the author stated:

      This morning in half an hour I got through three interesting-looking games that didn't have functioning controls.

You can't even play them! How are unplayable games on Steam!? Additionally they should make sure that the min spec IS an actually min spec that run the game in a playable state. No studio should be immune to such a level of scrutiny (see Rocksteady's Batman Arkham Knight).

<comment><USER4> Paying someone 10$ an hour to do a quick look at a game for 2 hours * 30 new games a day ~= 220k/year, double that to pay for games and your looking at ~450k/year which is not free, but that expensive either.

Really this could stand on it's own as a product either as a review site or an industry group that supports several review sites.

PS: An yes that seems like a high estimate the average is less than 20$/game and most of this junk does not need 2 hours.

<comment><USER6> You argument is that its cheap to review. Sure, but why should all review sites duplicate the work? Why can't valve do the review, stop the crap at the source.

Stop apologizing for shitty content making it to the store shelves.

<comment><USER4> > _or an industry group that supports several review sites._

So, no I don't think any one site needs to take on this cost rather anyone can get it off the ground for a few months and then sell a feed to other people thus defraying the costs.

Sure, steam could have higher standards, but IMO there is value in letting poor games into their ecosystem that may be improved with time. UnReal World for example been in development by one guy for 26 years and right now it's a solid game though dated game. But, 20 years ago it was a buggy mess that would only really interest a tiny group of people even though he had been working on it for 6 years.

<comment><USER6> There's "Early Access" (which wasn't even touched upon!) for titles like those.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been using Steam for many years and I play 5-10 hours a week. I simply find it great, to purchase games and play them (unlike EA origin and all it's clones out there, last time I checked)

The way I decide to purchase a game is simple: 1) I see/read a review about a game 2) If it piques my interest I go check out some videos and read a few more reviews 3) Add it to my wishlist 4) Purchase it when it's on 'special'

Finally, I almost never buy games unless they are at least 1 year old (save a few exceptions). This article seems mostly to have a contention about new releases and the 'suggestions' made by Steam (which I almost never look at anyways).

Hope this can help others with their Steam purchases.

<comment><USER8> try Gog.com

<comment><USER7> Cool, but how is it different\better than Steam? Thanks for your suggestion.

<comment><USER8> No login needed to play games once downloaded

All games DRM free

Games are tested before being listed

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I understand that the reviews and discoverability are legit problems for smaller developers trying to sell their games, but I have to wonder what percentage of people using Steam are simply "in and out" customers who are looking for the known titles anyways. Those people (like me) don't care so much about user reviews or discoverability.

I'm an "in and out" customer - I love games but I basically only buy big name titles (old behaviour from my console days). I know I'm missing out on some other great titles, but I only have a limited number of hours to put into games.

The only time I might get a lesser known game is when it got a lot of buzz outside of Steam, but the most likely scenario is via a heavily discounted bundle that contains a big name title that interested me.

Of the ~100 games in my Steam library, only about 20% are games I specifically wanted the buy. The rest were basically freebies that came along for the ride.

</comment><comment><USER10> Uhhhh... Steam needs a decent startup time. I only play computer games about once a month. When I click on the link on my desktop, Steam always takes 5-10 minutes to update itself.

This is ridiculous. I never have this problem with games on my Nvidea Shield.

<comment><USER11> I just wish to understand why they need an application update so often to what should be a simple distribution product. Do they hard code item availability or such?

<comment><USER12> There have been 12 updates in the last 12 months - do you really consider that to be "so often"?

Anyway, there's a detailed changelog[1] for all the updates, so you can have a look at the kinds of things they change.

[1] [http://www.steampowered.com/platform/update_history/index.ph...](http://www.steampowered.com/platform/update_history/index.php)

<comment><USER13> A fair number of those updates go out 2 or 3 times with little fixes but the same "release notes," so that's not a particularly accurate count of the number of times Steam will want to update.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'd rather Steam get back to the core business of selling games, rather than trying to be some sort of oddball social network.

Drop the achievements (do a large number of players actually pay attention to that?), drop the trading cards (I still don't know WTF those are for). Drop everything that isn't about selling a game to a player. Then hire some competent UI people to simplify and clean up that abhorrent interface that tries to do too much.

In fact, separate Steam from Valve entirely. Let Valve focus on producing games and let Steam focus on selling them, but put a wall between them.

<comment><USER15> The trading cards are part of the Steam economy. It's a money-making ploy. I don't know if it works or not, but it probably does.

If they dropped everything that isn't about selling games to players (Steam Matchmaking, social features, the Steam economy especially wrt CS:GO and Dota) I don't think Valve would be able to sell and host games as cheaply as it does, and I think more people would pirate games rather than getting them on Steam.

<comment><USER16> Ding ding ding! Each one of those trading cards facilitates trade. When there is more trade, there are more transactions for valve to skim. It's simple broker economics, and it works great for everyone involved.

<comment><USER17> Except for the people who get annoyed by a message in Steam for every new achievement for jumping from platform a to b (like me).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The problem with Steam is Valve.

Valve is famously organized as a place where everybody gets to pick the problems they want to work on ([https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-04-27/why- there...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-04-27/why-there-are-no- bosses-at-valve)). Manually reviewing dozens of (mostly crappy) games every day in the hope of finding a few that are worth recommending is the kind of dull, grinding work that nobody would ever pick for themselves to work on.

</comment><comment><USER18> I don't get what the ask is. Steam should be even more heavy handed? They should hire people to playtest other people's games? I don't see any alternative reality where they have already taken these actions and are less hated for them.

<comment><USER19> I think the author wants to suggest a solution where anyone can submit a game, but there is still some sort of quality check before it goes on sale.

Currently, we have floods of garbage hitting Steam, with no curation at all. Pre-Greenlight, Steam was a closed shop that was hard to get into.

What is needed is a healthy balance, that doesn't have zero chances for an indie game to be seen because it's buried under all the AAA titles, yet doesn't allow trash like Slaughtering Grounds to be sold.

The article suggests getting Valve employees to playtest any submission - however, I feel this still wouldn't work due to Valve's 2 main issues. Their flat structure, where people work on what they want - who wants to look after content curation? Secondly, they take a cut of every game sold - regardless of how awful it is. They are financially incentivised to keep subpar (or even scammy) games on the store.

I'm not going to pretend I have a solution, but I feel all the issues with the Steam store currently are issues of Valve's own making - the problem is, they don't (seem to, at the very least) care.

<comment><USER20> _Their flat structure, where people work on what they want - who wants to look after content curation?_

Are you asking, who wants to play video games for pay?

One expects that someone could be found...

<comment><USER21> Personal Anecdote from a former videogame QA tester and min-spec discoverer: Playing video games as a job is not playing video games. It's software testing a GUI.

Basic "does it run on X platform" is even more boring (but more automatable).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think you could use Steam Achivements and playtime to recommend games to people.

If I've played a game to completion on the highest difficulty presumably I like it. Find me other games that people with the achievement also play and have the equivalent achievement on and you've got something basic.

<comment><USER23> Max or close-to-max achievements for a game also is an indicator of skill, could be used to weight a games scores more towards "recommended by skilled players" vs. "recommended by casual players" ?

<comment><USER21> I would have a hard time equating achievement coimpletionism as skill, to me they are more of a measure of time spent in a game. Yes, some achievements in some games do require a mediocrum of skill, but most of them do not; they're used primarily as a form of feedback for the developer on how people play their game, and secondarily as a lure for completionists who want the points on their profile.

<comment><USER24> I agree. See for example achievement 'Astronomically Low Odds' from Faster Than Light: [http://ftl.wikia.com/wiki/Achievements](http://ftl.wikia.com/wiki/Achievements)

"Fail to evade 5 shots in a row with a full powered and upgraded engine."

It's almost pure luck. Wiki mentions ways that you can increase odds for you but still it's mainly luck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Honestly I have been thinking more and more about the problem with steam, and I realized that even as a foss, anti-drm proponent, steam is one of the few things I have bended for on those positions because of the quality of the marketplace. If they continue to fail, I truly hope something like Lutris or Desura or GoG steps up to the plate and open sources a game store (bonus if DRM free like GoG is). I mean, does anyone remember the days of hating games that required you to have a CD in the tray so you would get a noCD warez just to play? Steam solved those issues, which is what propelled it to it's current state. I don't think that's a problem with modern games though, so perhaps steam is weaker than Valve realizes if people ever actually thought about it. Now it's main function is as a game library stored in a cloud.

That makes me really sad to realize too, because I feel like Valve is one of the only companies that has the resources to really push linux gaming into a new zone, but this hasn't been delivered on yet. I highly suspect they are waiting for Vulkan, but the time can't come soon enough to offer many people the last reason they need to switch to linux from windows: gaming.

I have also noticed this sort of let the customers do the work for us attitude far too often lately. For example, I am loving working in Unreal Engine 4, but they promised a native linux editor and then ingored it for a long time, only once linux native users submitted enough patches to their own fork(s) before Epic finally spent some time to push those changes to the official repo. I think sometimes open source users who want things do work to get them but some companies abuse this process. In Epic's case, we still don't have a marketplace launcher on linux, and there are tons of editor bugs, such as I can't even edit skeletal animations/rigging without crashing the client.

There is a balance to be had between user help and the companies that need it, but that pendulum seems to have swung far too far over to the user lately, and it needs to readjust.

</comment><comment><USER26> People love to demand that Valve or Google hire lots of people to do manual curation or phone support. Yet that costs money, and people would buy their games elsewhere it it's two cents cheaper.

<comment><USER27> I don't know. There might well be websites or apps where $game_that_i_buy is 2 cents cheaper, but I don't even bother with anything else than Steam. I've just decided to buy into the ecosystem. The question then is: How common is my behavior among Steam users (or gamers in general)?</comment></comment>


Managing Overachievers - <AUTHOR> http://www.bnet.com/2403-13059_23-177540.html

<comment><USER2> While a bit cheesy, the article was a useful read. Reminded me of the climate we have at hackathons: lead by inspiration, check back on everybody's self- assigned project regularly.</comment>


Python Scripts for Downloading files via SFTP - <AUTHOR> http://engineering.monetate.com/python-scripts-for-downloading-files-via-sftp

<comment><USER2> Um, instead of using Python and the pexpect module, just use /usr/bin/expect by itself. The Expect language is very simple [1] and could cut this script down to less than 10 lines, if all you need to do is automate a couple transfers.

The paramiko module is the "right" way of doing this in Python, and probably only appropriate if you need to integrate SFTP transactions into a larger, longer-running application.

Edit: I might add the use of a password in a command line argument is not advisable because it will get logged everywhere and show up in things like top, etc. Probably better to hardcode it or put it in a 0600 file.

[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expect> (In fact, there is a complete example for automating SFTP right in the article).

</comment><comment><USER3> Just use key-based auth, for fuck's sake.

If you're going to keep credentials in plaintext on disk, at least make them keys and stop dicking about with expect.

<comment><USER4> From what I remember, paramiko is pretty straight forward when you're doing keys or password, but you need to hack in a little something if you're trying to connect to a server which insists on both.

<comment><USER5> pysftp [1] is a great wrapper around paramiko and pycrpyto. Simple to use whether you're using a password, ssh key, or passphrase-protected ssh key. I've never worked with a server that required both a password and a key, but it looks like it could probably handle that as well.

From the code in the link it looks like for basic sftp tasks paramiko is simple enough that you really don't need a wrapper for it, but I'll take the single-page google code README for pysftp over paramiko's docs [2] any day

[1] <http://code.google.com/p/pysftp/> [2] <http://www.lag.net/paramiko/docs/>

<comment><USER4> Pysftp looks cool, though at it's core it's a really simple wrapper. Ive been using paramiko long enough that I probably have the equivalent of it for my environment.

It does provide another arguments for the requests style simple, sensible interface over whatever it is that you need to make the underlying connections work. If paramiko had a high level 1 or 2 line way to retrieve a file, pysftp wouldn't have been someone's itch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow I previously searched for such emulation, for sharing files over sftp/ssh. But I had done using ssh keys. Here is the HN Submission <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3554318></comment>


Google+ Gets 10 Million Users In First 2 Days Of Being Public - <AUTHOR> http://searchengineland.com/google-gains-nearly-10-million-users-in-first-2-days-of-being-open-to-the-public-94224

<comment><USER2> How is this news? crap reblog from weeks ago?</comment>


A tour of V8: object representation (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://www.jayconrod.com/posts/52/a-tour-of-v8-object-representation <comment><USER2> > if you assign to an index that's way past the end of your the elements > array, V8 may downgrade the elements to dictionary mode... avoid copying > from the back

Sublime I think still has the snippet for "optimized for loop" that runs in reverse. I have never seen that improve performance, and I didn't know that it could actually be harmful if used to initialize an array.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yesterday I had to store integers as keys in a map. It's good to learn today that they are implicitly converted to strings. Yes I could have used an array, but that would of required me to know the max index I would suppose. Maybe in JavaScript I insert into the array at any index, but that doesn't seem usual to me, coming from a C background I'd allocate the max index + 1.

<comment><USER4> I'm not a JavaScript expert but I believe most serious JavaScript implementations can represent sparse arrays, or arrays with holes in the range of indices, for this reason.

<comment><USER5> Vaguely relevant/example: [http://imgur.com/7Bf3hLZ](http://imgur.com/7Bf3hLZ)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> var a = new Array();

a[-0] = "foo";

console.log(a.length);

console.log(a[-0]);

and people complain it's not fun.

On edit - should probably have done this instead

var a = new Array();

a[-0] = "foo";

a[-1] = "foo+";

console.log(a.length);

for(var b = 0; b < a.length; b++){

      console.log(a[b]);

    }

<comment><USER7> Both parts have very clear and unsurprising explanations if you understand how IEEE 754 doubles work (same type as C double). For example, section 15.4 of ES5:

[http://ecma-international.org/ecma-262/5.1/#sec-15.4](http://ecma- international.org/ecma-262/5.1/#sec-15.4)

> A property name P (in the form of a String value) is an array index if and > only if ToString(ToUint32(P)) is equal to P and ToUint32(P) is not equal to > 232−1.

.

-1 is the easier case to understand: ToUint32(-1) is 2^32 - 1 and ToString(ToUint32(-1)) is "4294967295", which is very clearly not -1.

Needless to say, the C equivalent is an out-of-bounds dereference.

.

While -0 is technically a different value from 0 (it's called negative zero in IEEE 754), the ToUint32 operation specifically carves out a case:

[http://ecma-international.org/ecma-262/5.1/#sec-9.6](http://ecma- international.org/ecma-262/5.1/#sec-9.6)

> If number is NaN, +0, −0, +∞, or −∞, return +0.

The "same thing" happens in C:

A) The literal `-0` is interpreted as an integer. The actual value it uses is zero:

        char ** foo = (char **)malloc(3 * sizeof(char *));
        foo[0] = foo[1] = foo[2] = "foo";
        foo[-0]="bar"; /* this sets foo[0] since the compiler treats -0 as the unary negation of the integer 0 and integers have no signed zero */
        printf("%d|%s|%s|%s\n", -0, foo[0], foo[1], foo[2]); /* "0|bar|foo|foo" since the -0 is understood by the compiler to be the actual value 0 */

B) Since JS interprets `-0` as an IEEE754 double, the value can be recreated by going through negative infinity:

        double ninf = (-1.0/0.0); /* should be -Infinity */
        printf("%g\n", ninf); /* "-inf" just to be sure */
        double nzero = (1.0 / ninf); /* should be IEEE 754 negative zero */
        printf("%g %d %zu\n", nzero, (int)nzero, (size_t)nzero); /* "-0 0 0" -0 behaves like 0 when casted to integer types */

.

The arguably surprising part is that JS doesn't have integer literals, but that isn't surprising when you think about the fact that JS only has one number type which maps to IEEE 754 double.

<comment><USER6> I didn't say it was unclear or surprising, it's very obvious since an array is an object with the special length property.

this is also obvious:

var a = new Array();

a["hello world"] = "foo";

console.log(a.length);

console.log(a["hello world"]);

Now, I don't think anyone would ever do this, but it does seem to me show weirdness in the conceptual model.

although I guess you could have someone on accident setting the value of an item in array and using a key that was NaN, example

var a = new Array();

var f = f + 3;

a[f] = "foo";

console.log(a.length);

console.log(a[f]);

I guess though it's weirdness that is easy to understand and doubtful to ever come around to bite you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The more I read about the internals of Javascript, the more terrified I get. It seems to be constructed haphazardly and held together with lots of duct tape.

<comment><USER9> You have no idea.

/v8 hacker

<comment><USER10> i got a taste after reading this...

[https://ia601208.us.archive.org/16/items/vmss16/titzer.pdf](https://ia601208.us.archive.org/16/items/vmss16/titzer.pdf)</comment></comment></comment>


Making of Centriphone (Open Source hardware for "bullet time" video capture) - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d45oGNv8H98 <comment><USER2> the challenge of your method is you have to be extra careful so you won't smash your phone</comment>


Flightcaster (YC S09) and the Future of Asymmetric Intelligence as a Product - <AUTHOR> http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2010/03/02/flightcaster-and-the-future-of-asymmetric-intelligence-as-a-product/

<comment><USER2> All of the points in this article can be applied to SeatGeek, as well.

<comment><USER3> Disclosure: I wrote the piece.

But yes, I agree. SeatGeek fits the model perfectly, in terms of applying analytics to publicly available data in search of non-obvious or otherwise difficult to intuit insights. Good mention.

<comment><USER4> i wish that there were a clearer way for people to profit from this kind of stuff. people generally won't buy information.

<comment><USER5> Tell that to Bloomberg.

<comment><USER4> You ever used a Bloomberg?

It's not just that they have some data. It's that they have:

\- strong completeness of data

\- often they have data you cannot get elsewhere (bond trading data)

\- there's a built-in messaging system that traders often think they need

\- it is itself a development platform

I've been in the position of being a trader and considering data to purchase. Everything seems too expensive very quickly.

My trading desk had ONE terminal in the corner. And that's at $1500/year.

And that's for something as essential as a Bloomberg.

Do you see what I mean?

<comment><USER3> No argument here that the market for data is woefully underdeveloped. What we have now is a market in which there are very few visible sellers and fewer visible buyers, with extreme inefficiencies in connecting one to another and processing the transaction.

My hope and expectation, obviously, is that that will change.

I think Bloomberg is both an excellent and a poor example. On the one hand, @joshu is exactly right that it can be a difficult sell. On the other, they've clearly built a very sizable business complementing data with the additional pieces described.

More to the point, Bloomberg is - in my opinion - selling data with a.) very little value add and b.) a perceived transience in value. Not that this is necessarily bad, particularly when you're selling to a volume audience, but it is different from retailing specialized, derived datasets.

But we shall see.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> both network and finance analytics are near the top for projected job growth. with inelastic graduation rates this means increased salaries. it makes sense that entrepreneurs that can come into this space and automate some of it will kill.</comment>


Eurozone Finance Ministers Contemplate 'Plan B' for Greece - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/eurozone-finance-ministers-contemplate-plan-b-for-greece-1429963682

<comment><USER2> Personally I've always read the Greek ministers statements as those who are already planning to leave the Euro. It's the only way they can live up to their promises both to their debtors and to their countrymen.

I imagined this winter a printing press has been running in secret to ensure if the tipping point did come then they would be ready: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_La_Rue](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_La_Rue)

Plus I agree with the suggestion from years ago that German should be the one to leave. Technically its the odd one out in the Eurozone.

</comment><comment><USER3> requires subscription to wsj to read

<comment><USER4> Unless you come in through Google:

[http://lmgtfy.com/?q=%09Eurozone+Finance+Ministers+Contempla...](http://lmgtfy.com/?q=%09Eurozone+Finance+Ministers+Contemplate+%E2%80%98Plan+B%E2%80%99+for+Greece)</comment></comment>


VCfeeds : Alltop meets Venture Capital. - <AUTHOR> http://www.vcfeeds.com/ <comment><USER2> Looks like a good start, though there are a bunch of potential feeds to add.

<comment><USER3> There has to be some editorial control over which feeds get added to which category.

Would a "Suggest a Feed" page be enough do you think?

<comment><USER2> I think "Suggest a Feed" would be fine. I took a quick look on the Twitter page, for example, and I know there are a lot more VC's using it than what are shown.

But agree that you do need editorial control. :)

<comment><USER3> Yeah, that category is kind of experimental with potential to generate a lot of noise if we added most VCs.

<comment><USER2> Very true, but I just took a look at the blogs section and think there's some room to add a number of VC's there, too. Most of them have very interesting posts, so there's some good potential value, there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great site. Clean.</comment>


Scientists find 3.7B-year-old fossil, oldest yet - <AUTHOR> http://phys.org/news/2016-08-scientists-billion-year-old-fossil-oldest.html <comment><USER2> In a related bit of paleogeology, a large share of iron ore, particularly banded iron formations (BIF) date from about this time -- they're typically about 1.2 - 3.7 billion years old, and date to the periods of early life, a large amount of free molecular (unoxidised) iron, a methane atmosphere, and early cyanobacteria whose metabolic waste product was oxygen. This combined with free dissolved iron in early oceans, precipitated out as iron oxides, and left the deposits now mined for ores. Exhaustion of the dissolved iron resource lead to a rise in atmospheric oxygen (poisonous to the cyanobacteria), a depletion of the methane which served to warm the Earth under the light of a much cooler sun, and resulted in a half-billion year "Snowball Earth" period -- an earlier form of overzealous biological organisms triggering catastrophic environmental pollution and climate change.

I find it fascinating to think about how and where minerals came from (iron originates in stellar fusion, it's the low point of the atomic potential curve, and hence you cannot fuse nor fission iron nuclei to release energy), and how they came to be organised in deposits. Many minerals are concentrated through prior biological activity -- iron, limestone, and of course, coal and petroleum.

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

(Edit: Corrected erronious initial explanation of iron deposition -- precipitation, not biological binding.)

</comment><comment><USER3> The discoverer of the previous oldest fossil (3.48B years) suggests that this find may not be organic in origin. Would be nice if other experts had been interviewed on that possibility, since there could potentially be some bias there.

Edit: perhaps "organic" was a poor choice of words. My meaning was that she disputed the claim that the artifact is in fact a fossil created by life, and suggested that it might be a geological formation of some sort instead.

<comment><USER4> I am not sure what the relevance would be. Are you using the term "organic" as in biological, or as in carbon-based?

In either case, what would it mean if it wasn't organic?

<comment><USER5> I believe tempestn is referring to the end of the article, where the scientist who found the previously oldest fossil says it may not actually be a fossil:

 _The dating seems about right, said Abigail Allwood, a NASA astrobiologist who found the previous oldest fossil, from 3.48 billion years ago, in Australia. But Allwood said she is not completely convinced that what VanKranendonk 's team found once was alive. She said the evidence wasn't conclusive enough that it was life and not a geologic quirk.

"It would be nice to have more evidence, but in these rocks that's a lot to ask," Allwood said in an email._

<comment><USER3> Right, yes. I don't know anything about this person, but certainly there are people out there who would be biased against having their little place in history overshadowed by a new discovery, perhaps even unconsciously. Not saying she is biased, just that it would be nice to see the opinions of some other experts, not involved in the discovery.

In fact, even if it were a completely unbiased third-party opinion it would still be nice to have more than one, since as a lay-person I'm currently left with no idea how likely it is that this is in fact evidence of early life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As a little context, the oldest known minerals on Earth are a 4.4 billion- year-old and Earth itself is 4.543 billion years-old.

</comment><comment><USER7> Can someone explain me how do they determine the age?

<comment><USER8> Carbon dating

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

[https://www.boundless.com/biology/textbooks/boundless- biolog...](https://www.boundless.com/biology/textbooks/boundless-biology- textbook/evolution-and-the-origin-of-species-18/evidence-of- evolution-129/carbon-dating-and-estimating-fossil-age-520-13098/)

<comment><USER9> According to that boundless.com link, "The half-life of carbon-14 is 5,730 years, so carbon dating is only relevant for dating fossils less than 60,000 years old."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Side note: Interesting paper on mathematical model often used in analyzing the patterns in stromatolites and other growing interfaces: the Kardar–Parisi–Zhang equation.

"Pattern formation in stromatolites: insights from mathematical modeling" [http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/9/70/1051](http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/9/70/1051)

</comment><comment><USER11> FWIW, Ed Yong:

      The newly discovered rocks suggest that life arose very
      quickly after the Earth was formed.

[http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/08/the- world...](http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/08/the-worlds- oldest-fossils-are-37-billion-years-old/498056/)

</comment><comment><USER12> 3.5 billion years ago the skies were orange, the oceans were green and the land was black.

<comment><USER2> It was a true iron age.

Do you have any refs on the Earth's appearance at the time?

<comment><USER13> It's at the bottom of TFA. First I've seen it, too.

<comment><USER2> Ah, missed that, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> hail helix

</comment><comment><USER15> They measured a foot and the head of a mammoth to magnitudes of difference already.

You can't measure stuff that old. They almost decide how old they want it to be.</comment>


Tell HN: App Harbour, Heroku-like hosting for .NET apps, is in beta - <AUTHOR> http://www.appharbour.com/

<comment><USER2> Nice idea, would be interested in becoming a customer but you really need a better landing page than that. take a look at unbounce.com as will convert better than the page you have there. plus if you work on the copy a little it will give you a head start from an seo point of view.

<comment><USER3> Looking into Unbounce right away. We've been so busy calibrating the engine, that we hadn't had time to do a proper paint job...

<comment><USER3> Perhaps I should mention that we really need a good designer. If anyone is or knows somebody, feel free to write me (my email address is my username at Gmail).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Idea: great, execution: no idea?

I'm just directed to a Google Docs form asking why you must host me? It kind of implies that you'd rather not host me, but if I have to strong arm you then it might happen..

What is the pricing? The details of the hosting? What's going on here?

Fair enough you're in beta, but at least give me an idea about why I should invest time in the beta i.e. how is this easier than standard hosting, and what kind of hardware will my app have access to etc.

<comment><USER5> Appreciate the suggestions, we'll change the text to make it clear you sign up to be notified once the beta is ready.

Having said that, we are working hard on the platform and expect to have a beta ready shortly, along with more details on pricing and features.

<comment><USER4> Great to hear - look forward to it

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Beta sounds like you have something going, the form looks like something to gauge interest though, what stage is this at? I would love to have Heroku for .Net and have prototyped bits of automation myself.

I don't believe pushing source code up for .Net is going to work as well though as there are too many quirks in the compilation process. An example would be a site I run which uses PostSharp to post process the .dlls.

Keen to hear more details about what you're doing.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the feedback. We're hammering away at the platform right now and plan to have the beta ready shortly. We'll change the text to make it clear that you sign up to be notified when the beta is ready.</comment></comment>


AWS RoboMaker – Develop, Test, Deploy, and Manage Intelligent Robotics Apps - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-robomaker-develop-test-deploy-and-manage-intelligent-robotics-apps/ <comment><AUTHOR> Go to the AWS console, 1-click sample applications get a simulation up and running within a few minutes. Start with HelloWorld and move up from there.

Huge disclaimer: I work on the RoboMaker team.</comment>


The roof of new college oxford: how to run a civilization - <AUTHOR> https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/oak-beams-new-college-oxford <comment><USER2> Here's what New College had to say about the story - [https://web.archive.org/web/20000817213605/http://www.new.ox...](https://web.archive.org/web/20000817213605/http://www.new.ox.ac.uk:80/NC/Trivia/Oaks/) (the rest of this comment is a complete copy of that text. NB: it looks like "JCB" = Junior Common Room = undergraduates; "SCR" = Senior Common Room = faculty/fellows):

This story regards the replacement of the oak beams in the college dining hall, and is occasionally given as an example of admirable forward planning. In its mythical form the story is often attributed to the anthropologist Gregory Bateson and may be found in a number of places:

      * Brand, Stewart "How Buildings Learn" Viking, 1994
      * McDonough, William "A Centennial Sermon: Design
            Ecology Ethics and The Making of Things"

To summarise, the story relates that at some point in the 19th century the oak beams in New College's dining hall needed replacing. Since these beams are (it is claimed) approximately 2 feet square and 45 feet long the purchase of new timber was prohibitively expensive. When the college forester was asked for suggestions it transpired that a grove of oaks had been planted when the hall was built (some 500 years previously) with the specific intention that they would be used for rennovation.

When the college archivist was asked about this story she came back with the following information.

In 1859, the JCR told the SCR that the roof in Hall needed repairing, which was true. (As an aside, at this time, there were few enough people that Hall contained a grand piano; this can be seen in the Joseph Nash watercolour of the hall illustrating the Introduction to the Treasures pages.)

In 1862, the senior fellow was visiting College estates on `progress', i.e., an annual review of College property, which goes on to this day (performed by the Warden). Visiting forests in Akeley and Great Horwood, Buckinghamshire (forests which the College had owned since 1441), he had the largest oaks cut down and used to make new beams for the ceiling.

It is not the case that these oaks were kept for the express purpose of replacing the Hall ceiling. It is standard woodland management to grow stands of mixed broadleaf trees e.g., oaks, interplanted with hazel and ash. The hazel and ash are coppiced approximately every 20-25 years to yield poles. The oaks, however, are left to grow on and eventally, after 150 years or more, they yield large pieces for major construction work such as beams, knees etc.</comment>


Ask HN: What is the future of jvm as a platform? - <AUTHOR>

Are there any competitors? If there are no (Don't take mono) competitors, is the future of jvm locked? Will I see Java being used when I am grandfather? (I am 17 right now.) <comment><USER2> Fogus wrote recently[1] about hosted languages, and how going forward it makes more sense to build a language on top of an existing runtime rather than creating one from scratch.

[1] <http://blog.fogus.me/2012/10/09/hostiness/>

<comment><USER3> of course if everyone chose existing runtimes, there would be no new ones ;)

From the blog

"So if I were insane enough to create a programming language for use by others, I would, without hesitation pick one of the following hosts:

        Factor: the concatenative programming language has a stunning compiler and runtime
        GHC: the Haskell compiler and extensions with the appropriate runtime libraries
        Java Virtual Machine: world-beating megatech
        JavaScript itself or a specific JavaScript targets like Node.js or V8
        Erlang's virtual machine
        A Common Lisp implementation
        Racket via its #lang feature

"

Fair enough, but...

      if all those "hosts" had also made the decision to 'build on top of existing runtimes' they wouldn't be potential " plug and play" hosts today for others to target ;)

We these choices today, only because _some_ people who ignored the 'build on an existing language's runtime vs creating your own' idea.

V8 is (relatively) very new but they didn't choose to build on top of the JVM, say. As a result we have new and exciting technology vs being locked into an aging, sorry, "mature" JVM.

"Moving into the future I believe one would need to be gutsy, ill-informed or insane (or a mix of the three) to create a language runtime from scratch."

You _always_ needed to be gutsy, well informed and knowledgable, and yes just a little insane, to build a language runtime from scratch.I hope we get _more_ and not less of these types of people. There is a lot of research that hasn't made it into runtimes yet.

The Factor runtime for e.g is quite different from the GHC runtime and both teach different lessons and embody different design decisions. We need more of these, not less, till there is some solid math/theory on what makes a good runtime.

In any case, if a language is good enough on its native runtime, it will probably get ported to the JVM or whatever the latest 'mature' runtime is.

<comment><USER2> Aren't language design and runtime design different skills though? I think one of the reasons we've had an explosion in languages in the last few years is that it is very easy to take your ideas and staple it onto the JVM or transpile to JavaScript. I contribute to a to-JS language myself and I wouldn't know where to begin with writing a runtime/vm. And I have no interest in doing so.

<comment><USER3> They aren't unrelated or orthoganal skills, just different points on a spectrum.

fwiw nobody is asking _you_ to learn runtime design if you don't want to. If you want only to compile new 'language designs' down to existing VMs,bytecode etc, then sure, you have that option (and you always had this option once the first 'host runtime' was in existence).

All I am saying is that one needs to be careful not to paint with too broad a brush, and reccomend that no one explore runtime design because we have all these platforms already and it is 'too hard' (so don't go there).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> "Will I see Java being used when I am grandfather? (I am 17 right now.)"

We can still "see" (if we try hard enough) COBOL being used. Have no fear, Java (and even the JVM, but to a lesser extent) will be safely oboloscent by the time your grandchildren are programming. We are still very much in the Bronze Age of programming languages and environments. We have a very long way to go.

<comment><AUTHOR> I do think that, Java may be another COBOL, but I am specifically talking about the JVM (I think, they should change its name.) I am concerned about the likes of Clojure (I am especially waiting for a Clojure-on-Clojure), Scala (Tweet it!) and Ceylon (Hey, I am new Java-Boy).

So specifically talking about the CVM (um, Clojure Virtual Machine :)) will do some good to me.

<comment><USER3> The JVM will last longer than Java to be sure, but by the time today's 17 year old is a grandfather (say in his 50's) the JVM will be a museum piece. I wouldn't worry too much about the JVM somehow shambling into the distant future (technology has very short horizons) killing new lifeforms and assimilating all flesh.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The JVM will be around for decades to come.

Java as a language is still dominant in the enterprise and the growth of Scala/Groovy will see it branch into new areas. Oracle has been a fantastic steward of the platform to date so overall there are lots of positives ahead.

</comment><comment><USER5> Well, on the plus side, all the modern JVMs do just-in-time recompilation, and have a had fair amount of optimization work done on them.

On the minus side, JVMs take a long time to start up and don't really interface very well with native code (JNI sucks). The JVM also tends to be pretty poor at using memory effectively. All objects need to contain class and lock pointers, for example. On a 64-bit machine, this generally means that the minimum size of an object is around 16 bytes (may vary by JVM).

Will Java still be used decades from now? Of course. I mean people are still using FORTRAN, COBOL, and Lisp, some of the first compiled languages ever to be developed in the 1950s and 1960. (Yes, Lisp is that old-- and FORTRAN came first.)

How popular will it still be in X years? Who knows. Consult a fortune teller-- sorry, "analyst."</comment>