Scala: The Static Language that Feels Dynamic (Bruce Eckel) - <AUTHOR> http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=328540 <comment><USER2> Scala definitely needs more people like Bruce Eckel to start explaining it. I understood several concepts from this article that have eluded me so far because every other article I found descended in to abstract concepts of language or type theory without explaining what the practical uses of things were.

Unfortunately I think it may have missed it's peak opportunity to catch on because of this kind of problem - and a chronically buggy and unstable Eclipse plugin - but we'll see.

</comment><comment><USER3> This post may garner some down-vote for being non-rigorous, but I will offer my opinion on Scala so far. I accept it's good points readily enough when they are presented in list form, but when I read the language and try to reason in it, I just don't like it. Scala just doesn't feel like where I want to go. I do not want to embrace endless complexity in the form of hard-coded language features layered onto the language. XML literals instead of macros???? Please, I say. I have decided that Clojure will take the place in my dev life that Java and C# have occupied for the last 12 years. I hope that is the right decision.

<comment><USER4> I only have one complaint about Clojure. It is very unfortunately named. Closures, the programming construct, and Clojure are too similar sounding.

If I could rename Clojure and GIMP I'd do so in a heartbeat.

<comment><USER5> I actually like that both Clojure and Scala have names that otherwise don't mean something else. This unambiguity means you can more easily search for related pages and get more meaningful data out of Google Trends. Java will bring up some coffee references and the island in Indonesia. Python is, well, obvious. Just as two examples.

I'd much rather everything not also be something else.

GIMP is actually appropriate because AFAIC the program is completely crippled.

<comment><USER6> Scala is actually a really bad name for trying to google it. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scala>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Maybe I missed something, but there is nothing in there that gives me the feel of a dynamically typed language. What he describes feels more like Haskell than Python.

<comment><USER8> Perhaps by "feels like a dynamic language" he means "is succinct".

<comment><USER9> Reminds me of this classic comment by Frank Atanassow on Lambda the Ultimate: <http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/1562#comment-18623>

> "Dynamic" is technical jargon used by programmers, meaning "good". It > derives from the Latin dyno mite, meaning "I am extremely pleased", and is > first recorded in the historical work Bona Aetas of noted Roman sage and > pundit J.J. Walker. Its meaning evolved in the 4th century after monks > copying an obscure manuscript on programming linguistics in their ignorance > tried to deduce its meaning from context. [...]

(the comment continues at the link; read the whole thing, it's pretty funny whether or not you agree with the sentiment)

<comment><USER8> Thank you sir. That is hilarious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The biggest thing that is still in the language that they should have removed early on is the native XML syntax support. If I were them I would take it out in 3.0 and break from that bad decision.

<comment><USER11> See my answer on Quora to "Will Scala ever remove XML literals?" <http://www.quora.com/Will-Scala-ever-remove-XML-literals>

Summary: No. At the time that Scala was started, built-in support for XML showcased one area were object-oriented decomposition failed and functional programming proved quite useful. Today the benefits of FP are more well known, and it's generally agreed that if Scala were starting from scratch it would not include XML literals. However, given that XML literals are in the language already, that large code bases have come to rely on them, and that they generally don't get in the way if you don't use them, it's unlikely that they will be removed.

<comment><USER12> Solution: move it to a library, like perl did with it's format syntax, and take it out of core.

<comment><USER11> This is hard because Scala's XML support affects the parser. At the lexical level. Scala does have compiler plugins, but it doesn't have parser plugins.

<comment><USER13> Agreed.

Macros and reader macros ;-)

<comment><USER11> Let me know when you figure out how to statically type check those. You could publish a paper or two, I'm sure.

<comment><USER13> Nemerle already does it: <http://nemerle.org/macros.html>, so does Template Haskell: <http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Template_Haskell>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I believe JVM now supports some restricted form of class re-definition at run time in debug mode. But it is quite limited. This is probably old hat for JVM hackers, I do not keep myself updated on the Java/JVM side of things.

I came across Sun's (now Oracle's?) open-source(GPL) fork of the JVM that allows for changing class internals on the fly. The following analogy comes to mind DCE VM : JVM :: DLR : CLR

I quote:

      The class data structures of the Java HotSpot virtual
      machine are immutable during the execution of a program.
      While new classes can be loaded, it is not possible to
      change existing classes (e.g. add/remove methods or
      fields). This projects tries to relax this condition to
      allow arbitrary changes to existing Java classes
      (including changes to the class hierarchy) while running
      a Java program.

This looks interesting <http://ssw.jku.at/dcevm/> and wonder if runtimes of dynamic languages could make use of this.

<comment><USER9> I'm not familiar with the DCE VM, but DLR is a library on top of the CLR, not a different version of the CLR.

<comment><USER15> It is a library on top of the CLR, but it cannot function without CLR-specific capabilities.

For example DynamicMethod, which represents a method reference that can be created at runtime and garbage-collected when no longer in use; similar to the lightweight method handlers in JSR 292.

That said, modifying existing classes on top of the CLR is not possible, unless it inherits from something like ExpandoObject, but you can pull the same trick in Java (though not as easily until JSR 292 comes out).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> one of the better written articles out there for some one new to the language. Also like the fact that some of the funamentals of functional programming are also briefly introduced in context.

</comment><comment><USER17> > I find it one of the most promising things about Scala -- it is not > determined to become an instant boat anchor by committing to early decisions > that are later revealed to be suboptimal, or outright mistakes.

The fact that Scala uses the JVM, with a hacky workaround for type erasure, is suboptimal.

<comment><USER18> The Scala team have plans afoot to target LLVM and .NET too.

<comment><USER19> Do they have actual plans though? There has been talk of .NET support since the beginning. Basically I wouldn't hold my breath.

<comment><USER20> Scala already compiles to the CLR, but support for it is nowhere near that for the JVM.

<comment><USER21> Last time I looked (early 2009), Scala compilation to the CLR was a bit of a joke. It targeted version 1.1 of the CLR, which had been superseded nearly 4 years earlier. I think the problem was with the predefined libraries. Supposedly you could get it to work with v2 but I never did.

They also did themselves no favours by having the Scala compiler dump out MSIL assembler code rather than a .NET assembly. You had to separately run the ilasm tool to get an executable. Obviously for a production environment you'd package this up in a build file, but for experimenting with the language it was a bit of a speed bump.

This is without even looking at the language features and libraries that were supported on the JVM but not on the CLR (e.g. structural types, parser combinators).

My experience may be out of date here, but the scala-lang page on .NET support is still datestamped July 2008, so I'm not too optimistic. A great pity, as Scala always seemed a great fit for the CLR and would provide some nice competition to C# and F#.

<comment><USER9> This looks pretty active: <http://lamp.epfl.ch/~magarcia/ScalaNET/>

I'm not sure what relation his work has to the core Scala project or team, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Gosu has the same dynamic feel in a statically typed JVM language, with much less complexity. (I should mention Fantom too, although I'm much less familiar with it.)

Artima appears to have gone all-scala-all-the-time at some point in 2010. Weird.

<comment><USER23> Scala looks complex on paper, but my experience has been that in practice it's not that bad. If you're designing a library you need to think hard about types but you can put together an app very quickly in Scala and with a lot fewer initial bugs than in a dynamically typed language.

<comment><USER24> I wonder if there is value in making it easy to make library? I feel like the ruby eco system gains a lot for the rate at which people can try out ideas for libraries.

<comment><USER23> Scala forces you to consider your library interface more carefully. This makes it more work to build a library but I think it pays off in a cleaner, more consistent and self-documenting library. Scala makes you think a little harder in general but, in my experience, you also write better code.

All that painful refactoring and modularization that went into Rails 3 would have been a lot easier and, I suspect, less necessary if Rails had been written in Scala.

<comment><USER24> I think of it more in terms of natural selection. If, and this is a big if, diversity is greater in language x than in language y due to ease of trying ideas, then there is more opportunity to hit on good ideas.

<comment><USER23> The barrier to entry in Scala is definitely higher, and I do think this has limited its growth. To be honest, I don't think Scala is going to be the FP lang that really goes big, although I wish it were.

I just hope Scala gets enough traction that I can find real work in the language. After using it for a while languages like Ruby and Python just feel primitive.

<comment><USER24> I hope any of them get enough traction that I don't have to fight to code in something other than java :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Somehow I missed parallel collections in 2.9. I'm in love.

</comment><comment><USER26> So we'll be waiting for "Thinking in Scala" book...</comment>


Can an AI Write a Novel? - - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/10/automated-on-the-road/571345/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> I trained an ai to write like Lovecraft but my work was ignored because I'm from LA lol. It's not the first aid novel but it may be the first backed by a major publisher. Given how little people read with machines generating ai novels there is even more material for people to not read lol.</comment>


IAB Statement on IPv6 - <AUTHOR> https://www.iab.org/documents/correspondence-reports-documents/2016-2/iab-statement-on-ipv6/ <comment><USER2> IMO the major thing holding back IPv6 on the web is amazon. A huge proportion of services are hosted on AWS, and the lack of IPv6 addressing of instances cannot be forgiven.

<comment><USER3> I'd say ISPs to start with. In the UK, BT still hasn't rolled out IPv6. Neither has vodafone.

Also I have servers in colocation with two datacenters, and for both I had to ask to the support to get an IPv6 range. We are very far from IPv6 becoming a standard feature.

<comment><USER4> > I'd say ISPs to start with. In the UK, BT still hasn't rolled out IPv6.

BT have at least partially rolled out support, as I have a v6 allocation on a BT broadband service.

<comment><USER3> I have read I can get it by upgrading to the very latest version of BT Home Hub (I am using 5). I ordered it yesterday. But my current Home Hub 5 is compatible, and I still don't have IPv6.

<comment><USER5> It looks like you would have got support on your existing device soon. A recent BT presentation says:

"[IPv6 support] Home Hubs 4 and 5 support from early 2017"

[http://www.ipv6.org.uk/wp- content/uploads/2016/11/UKIPv6Coun...](http://www.ipv6.org.uk/wp- content/uploads/2016/11/UKIPv6Council-2016-BT-Update-Mcrae.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Actually I just received my new router and I now have IPv6!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I noticed the other day that IPv6 growth is slowing down, as Google measures it. Its access share used to double every ten or eleven months, now it doubles more slowly, and seems likely to reach 20% only in 2017 instead of this year, and if it goes on as in the recent months, 30% in 2018 instead of in 2017.

At a guess, many of most competent ISPs have done their thing and now we're seeing the more sluggish middle. Or? Comments?

<comment><USER7> If I remember well at least 2-3 years ago it was complicated to measure IPv6 usage on a high-end router, and that was tied to billing.

Every vendor (Cisco/Juniper/Alcatel/Huawei) had a different way to do it and since B2B billing depended on it IPv6 adoption was not as easy as expected.

<comment><USER8> What was complicated about it?

<comment><USER7> Every vendor had a different way to measure how much octets went through an interface on IPv6 using SNMP.

And the standard MIB (management information base) for SNMP only gave you IPv4 traffic.

So, if you wanted to measure the traffic you interchange with a third party on IPv6 you had to be tied to a _specific_ way of doing in (some had private or experimental MIBs for that, in other cases you had to move the data through a tunnel and measure traffic inside the tunnel minus overhead.).

Very easy to make mistakes specially if there is a problem with the traffic late at night and somebody forgets to put you in the loop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I check the google stats[0] on ipv6 adoption every few months. Last time I checked it was barely 9% an now it's on 15% !

I would have never thought we'd get this far this fast. Looks like the switchover is actually going to happen.

[0][https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html](https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html)

<comment><USER10> Really interesting how it spikes on weekends! I wonder if this is because more home broadband connections are ipv6-enabled compared to businesses?

<comment><USER9> I guess it's hobbyists who's normal internet connection is ipv4, but on the weekend they have time to dick around with ipv6 devices and connections.

<comment><USER11> Comcast and Verizon Wireless rolled out IPv6 years ago, and resolves IPv6 addresses first by default. Nobody is dicking around, it's just transparent.

<comment><USER9> How does that explain the massive spikes on weekends?

<comment><USER11> People do more internet at home on weekends than they do on weekdays.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> We have a product that uses ipv6 for inter-server communications. We've since learned that most major corporations routinely disable ipv6 on every computer.

Not helping.

<comment><USER13> Heard a "funny" story about Facebook switching over to pure IPv6 and their issues dealing with largely untested IPv6 implementations. For example, switches which, when presented with an IPv6 BGP route while they don't have IPv6 configured, crash. Apparently they took down an entire data centre full of rack switches finding that out.

My second-favorite problem, after that was solved, was developers constantly using IPv4-only code. Their eventual solution was to just disable IPv4 entirely so that anyone committing IPv4-only code was committing broken code.

It's amazing how much work it takes to bring people into the future.

<comment><USER7> Very "funny", but that kind of crashes happened more than you imagine.. in telcos.

Usually the problem is memory. A machine with full routing enabled needs much more memory for IPv6 than for IPv4 and when routers run out of memory they just crash, reboot, and start again...

<comment><USER14> _Usually the problem is memory. A machine with full routing enabled needs much more memory for IPv6 than for IPv4_

Interesting - why? I would have thought that routing tables for ipv6 would be a fraction of the size of their ipv4 equivalents. Am I wrong? Or is this just sloppy programming on the part of those switch programmers?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Topically, here are the minutes from the latest UK IPV6 Council meeting: [http://www.ipv6.org.uk/2016/08/31/ipv6-council-meeting- octob...](http://www.ipv6.org.uk/2016/08/31/ipv6-council-meeting- october-2016/)

Sky and BT both looking good, sadly Virgin didn't present this year.

</comment><comment><USER16> I've not run into a problem solved by IPv6. There's no incentive for ISPs to provide good service, so they can just follow the mobile carrier route and nat/proxy when exhaustion becomes an issue.

As other countries go IPv6, more IPv4 addresses become available for the big cloud providers.

<comment><USER17> I run into NAT almost every single day. It wastes time, breaks things, consumes router resources, rules out certain technologies/products/services and duplicates so much work it's just unreal.

<comment><USER16> IPv6 != No NATing.

Example: Verizon Wireless.

<comment><USER3> You mean IPv6 != No Firewall. Firewall are going to cause pretty much the same problems as NAT.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> and yet news.ycombinator.com is still not IPv6 enabled...

</comment><comment><USER19> Better late than never I guess, but come on... IPv6 is nearly 20 years old in 2 years...

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm wondering what will happen when ISPs start doling out IPv6 addresses, will every customer get a unique, static IPv6 address?

Right now my ISP (BT) gives you an IPv4 address, but it's dynamic. They charge extra for a static IP

<comment><USER5> I don't have an answer to your question but the latest news from BT is:

"All BT broadband lines support IPv6 with a compatible router, except IPstream connections"

[http://www.ipv6.org.uk/wp- content/uploads/2016/11/UKIPv6Coun...](http://www.ipv6.org.uk/wp- content/uploads/2016/11/UKIPv6Council-2016-BT-Update-Mcrae.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I hope we don't have IPv6 only protocols and sites anytime soon. My cable company still is not supporting IPv6... It seems like something a major American ISP would of done by now.

<comment><USER22> Which one?

<comment><USER21> I used [http://test-ipv6.com/](http://test-ipv6.com/) to run the test.

Your Internet Service Provider (ISP) appears to be SCRR-10796 - Time Warner Cable Internet LLC, US

I'm in Ohio.

<comment><USER23> Time Warner Cable provides IPv6: [https://www.timewarnercable.com/en/support/faqs/faqs- interne...](https://www.timewarnercable.com/en/support/faqs/faqs- internet/ipv6/why-don_t-i-have-ipv6-yet-.html)

Your issue is site-specific; most likely your modem is outdated, but your router may also be configured to not try to acquire a block of IPv6 addresses.

<comment><USER21> Interesting. No communication from them. I figured this is the sorta thing they'd mass contact people about to update.

I remember asking the installer about 3 years ago about it. He said I'd have it as soon as they turn it on at the central office...

I'm not really too worried about it yet as it's not a problem really yet. I hate talking to support people.

I went to the IPv6 page and it's not showing a V6 IP Address [http://screencast.com/t/Xuq4VOfnS](http://screencast.com/t/Xuq4VOfnS) but the Dynamic page for IPv4 displays it in those text boxes(editing is disabled on them even though they look like inputs. A bit confusing UX if just looking at the image)

So it appears my firmware has it... strange. This is on the modem itself, not the router as it's a all in one.

Just found this: [http://forums.timewarnercable.com/t5/IPv6/Not-getting- IPv6-A...](http://forums.timewarnercable.com/t5/IPv6/Not-getting- IPv6-Address/td-p/113119/page/2) from two months ago "I got someone from Tier 3 on the phone and he told me it was not available yet in my area." so hmm, sounds like some areas might be last to get it then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is telling organizations developing standards to basically pretend IPv4 doesn't exist and is no longer in use. At least that's how I read it. Seems a bit premature.

</comment><comment><USER25> When will Verizon FiOS enable IPv6?</comment>


A user study for AI-generated fashion models. (answers after taken) - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfQFDeWcEhRL-6ACoMCG1bB3FNVpGPLdV3fVBDX7m1a-PEQWA/viewform?vc=0&c=0&w=1 <comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for taking it! Sorry that it's a bit long(50 questions). Should be doable within 8 minutes, if you're not struggling too hard.

</comment><comment><USER2> Shit, I got 26/50\. Can't believe my eye. What method did you use?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's about average performance among random population.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The test seems a bit long. But, amazed by the generated result.

</comment><comment><USER4> Yo, this test is so hard!

</comment><comment><USER5> Is this GAN?

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, didn't use adversarial loss.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Arxiv link?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not yet up. Will soon!</comment></comment>


Startup Quote: Omar Hamoui, founder, AdMob - <AUTHOR> http://startupquote.com/post/2447295970

<comment><USER2> I don't like these quick one-line quotes, especially when they're bold statements without explanation.

Why is this quote true? Isn't building an identity in the mind of the consumers one of the basic marketing rules, and doesn't that imply that you need to focus on what you're good at, on how you're different than your competition?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> If you define yourself by how you differ from the competition, you're probably in trouble.

\- Omar Hamoui (@omarh)

<http://startupquote.com/post/2447295970></comment>


Ask HN: Inheriting a large ASP.NET app, what would you do. - <AUTHOR>

tl;dr:New CTO, dump asp.net for bootstrap + RESTful API? I'm a consultant, and I'm charged with completing development on a large asp.net web application. It's about 25-50% of the way to being complete thanks to the previous devs who abandoned the project.  I have full creative control of the project, so I am faced with a conundrum: If I stick with asp.net, I'll likely end up rewriting the app in place.  The developers abondoned the project for a reason. They followed OO to the point of making a huge and hard to manage code base with hundreds of classes that need to be finished. Should I trudge on and finish this? I ask because I gave the client a substantial discount on my services for an equity stake in the company, and we have already made plans for extensions to my contract to deliver peripheral apps and additional features once the web app is delivered.  My instincts are: Put all the functionalities into an API, Call the api from a new web app, possibly using bootstrap. When phase 2 comes around, call API from native apps.<p>Or I could just stick with asp.net and have no jumpstart come phase 2, but it just seems so inefficient.  Can I get some feedback as to what you would do in this situation? <comment><USER2> If you're estimating it's 25-50% done, then it's almost certainly 25% done or less, counting the rewriting/restructuring. Just pick how you would write it if you were doing it from scratch. Honestly. Really. Whenever I've been wrong about this kind of thing, it's been on the side of hating to throw away work already done. Anything good in the existing code, you can look at it and take. But really, just begin from scratch.

I wish I would stress this more. Do it right, the way you know how.

<comment><AUTHOR> The right way in my mind is to start over with bootstrap and make this something I can grok. 100's of aspx files are not the way to make this app. Too much premature complexity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If I were you I would see what could be salvaged. Can you rescue a bunch of business objects, data access code, etc.?

If the code was written in a half-way competent manner, it shouldn't be too tightly coupled to ASP.NET.

If there is a substantial amount of boilerplate code already written that you don't have to rewrite, I would suggest not rewriting it.

I too would like to know what you are considering for the server-side end of things.

The nice thing about ASP.NET is you can strip it down to the absolute basics. Remember that you have complete access to the request/response model. You don't have to render HTML at all. You can deal entirely in JSON if you are looking to build this into an API.

You don't necessarily need to rewrite all the components. If it's possible, hammer and chisel the existing code into something that's not so dependent on ASP.NET (e.g. move code out of .aspx/.ascx components). You can build a web app and an API at the same time, especially if you treat ASP.NET simply as a presentation layer.

<comment><AUTHOR> Server Side: I plan to copy those that scaled before me, a mixmash of: pinterest [http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/5/21/pinterest- architec...](http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/5/21/pinterest-architecture- update-18-million-visitors-10x-growth.html) , reddit: [http://kev.inburke.com/kevin/reddits-database-has-two- tables...](http://kev.inburke.com/kevin/reddits-database-has-two-tables/) , and instagram: [http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/4/16/instagram- architec...](http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/4/16/instagram-architecture- update-whats-new-with-instagram.html) architectures.

The previous devs managed to get everything tightly coupled at the design stage, which is why I think their implementation efforts failed.

The plan for now is to seperate the existing code into layers and decide what to do from there.

<comment><USER3> You might want to have a look at the new .NET Web API if you're planning on leveraging existing code: <http://www.asp.net/web-api>

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Unless the 25% that's done is exactly what needs to be done(bug free, tested, and you don't need to change it) I would rewrite that. Sooner or later changes will have to be made to that part and you'll hate every minute of it :) .

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, that's my instinct as well and I'm going for it, looking foward to unveiling it for critique when I have an mvp.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> So much of this depends on context, some of which you provided. What is your comfort level with these technologies? What would your effective rate be for each of the scenarios? Are there components or databases (sql server) that make particular tech choices more sensible? How much time to tear down and start anew? What pressures or deadlines are you facing from the business?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have a lot of flexibility. I am equally comfortable finishing up in c#/asp.net or starting over with bootstrap. I have a contract for a certain amount of money+equity to deliver a working web app, and then we are back to the negotions table where my next proposal will be for the mobile apps. As for sql server, i think cassandra, mongo, redis, will work just as well. I'm considering using the c# to js compiler currently mentioned on the front page to serve my api to reuse some of the work that has been done. Time constraints aren't anything to worry about, and it would take me an equal amount of time to restart or flesh out the asp.net app.

<comment><USER5> I don't see anything in your explanation that would push my opinion one way or another, which means that you should probably take the long term view and do the rewrite.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You might want to look into Backbone.js (or Ember.js or Angular.js) rather than Bootstrap for talking to APIs.

Also, you haven't said if the existing code is WebForms or MVC (and the fact that you haven't makes it seem like you may struggle to finish the server side code using ASP.NET).

Which platform were you thinking you would develop the REST API on if not ASP.NET?

<comment><AUTHOR> Asp.net webforms, I ought to have clarified that. The REST API i'll create with javascript, perhaps using this c# to javascript compiler: [http://www.erik-kallen.se/blog/saltarelle-open-source-c- to-j...](http://www.erik-kallen.se/blog/saltarelle-open-source-c-to- javascript-compiler) to reuse some of the c# once I decouple the objects from the user interface/data. The problem with the code right now is application logic is mixed with the data and display logic. I feel like I can add more value by removing dependencies for asp.net/mssql and trading them for free/open source software. My concerns are: Build it to scale as cheaply as possible. Make it so I can add functionality to the web/native apps by adding new services to the api, to stay dry. Stay flexible for future iterations/pivots. At some point windows/ios versions will come up, so I'm just trying to excersize some economy of motion here. If I create wcf services, we will have to purchase visual studio licenses when we start hiring developers to maintain them.</comment></comment>


Secushare: A decentralized, secure social network built on GNUnet - <AUTHOR> https://secushare.org/ <comment><USER2> I'm quite annoyed by the superficial critics that are currently overflowing the comments. Of course this is an ambitious project that is driven by (of course slow paced) academic research. This is very serious and is of course actively not giving a fuck about current mainstream trends in software engineering.

It is technically ambitious: no-bullshit distributed systems are hard with the current Xcoin trends. GNUnet strives to imagine and implement a networking stack that is mostly friend-to-friend, eg a network where the topology is dictated by the real life trust relationships (just as most old low-level protocol did, think bgp). It wants to support delay-tolerant and low bandwidth networks that exist outside of our privileged western world, have privacy protections on the routing level, etc etc.

It is politically ambitious since much of it is deeply anti-commercial, striving for local self-management (and that on several stacked levels). In particular it strives to have an architecture that defuses the network effect that comes with walled gardens. Applications built on top will probably do the exact opposite of the neuropsychology-based methods of drawing attention that is being used in almos every single mainstream private _and free software_ web application. Imho there is limited value in reimplementing all these mechanisms like suggestions, notifications, infinite stream based information architecture (think mastodon) that have negative aspects on the content (superficial and intellectually aggressive content) and negative aspects as a tool (no decent archiving or information retrieval).

So yeah, this is very much in progress, but GNUnet as a whole is currently federating a lot of academic (and non-academic but still very much based on experimental science methods) work, it's already a gold mine of papers, thesis, experimental protocols, foundations for radically different applications, etc. Please take the time to go deeper than just the front page, it is really worth the time (this is a website, not a marketing page, you have to actually explore it to understand what it's about).

<comment><USER3> _> I'm quite annoyed by the superficial critics that are currently overflowing the comments. Of course this is [...] academic research_

I'm guessing there would be less readers' irritation if the following text that's at the bottom was moved to the very top so it's the 1st thing people see:

 _> secushare is a research project that hasn't reached prototype status, yet. [...] So if you truly want to get started with secushare, please read how you can help on the introduction page._

Many readers would prefer that above text to be shown before the following paragraph which is structured as a "teaser":

 _> Imagine Facebook, Whatsapp, Gmail and Skype rolled into one, without the centralized surveillance and control. Crazy? Well, it hasn't been tried before, at least not our way. So let's give it a try._

The "let's give it a try" is actually a request for more "researchers" instead of "users". Instead of a beta or even alpha system to experiment with, the current status is that they need programmers to help build it from nothing to a prototype.

There's nothing wrong with asking for help but it takes a whole page worth of text to get to that point. Even if a software project has moral goals, it doesn't mean readers will not be annoyed at the way the presentation's text is ordered from _least important_ ("imagine if...") to _most important_ ("not even a prototype").

The HN demographic is probably overwhelmingly _working programmers_ instead of academics so they're already predisposed to prefer something concrete they can try out.

<comment><USER4> The front page currently has articles about Finnish babies sleeping in cardboard boxes, and the benefits of sleeping with a weighted blanket. Just because there isn't something you can try, doesn't mean it's not interesting.

<comment><USER3> _> Just because there isn't something you can try, doesn't mean it's not interesting._

Please don't misrepresent what I actually wrote. I did not dismiss the project as not interesting.

I made a very specific point in my reply to OP (lapinot) and the complaint of _" superficial criticism"_:

If one structures the project's landing page text so that it makes something _sound promising_ at the top but then later reveal that the status is actually _" not even prototype"_ at the bottom (after ~10+ minutes of reading), that "teaser" style of slow reveal is going to invite hostile criticism from some readers. (E.g. see this thread's other comments of _" vaporware"_, _" generic introduction on something that doesn't exist"_, and _" this page uses a lot of words to explain almost nothing."_) Yes, maybe those comments are unfair but consider if the text's _obfuscated style of exposition_ triggered those responses.

The lesson for project authors is: Yes, your project can have moral ethics, pursue ideals of privacy & decentralization, be "interesting", and other laudable goals, etc -- but you'll _throw all that good will away_ if the project's text describing it disrespects your readers.

There's nothing wrong with an interesting project that's looking for contributors to build something real.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have seen a lot of their presentations at 33C3. Its quite interesting ideas that I was quite interested in.

The problem with GNUnet in general that it seem very inaccessible to those outside of the university context. In their presentation they show that they did all these great test, but very little how I can run them, or achieve things with GNUnet. GNUnet is academic and has not yet found any real-world use case that I know off and thus suffers the problem of academic projects.

Overall they have a very interesting vision of what you can do, but its pretty far in the future and the website is a bit of nonsense. It took me a couple hours of listing to the craters to understand what they were really trying to do.

<comment><USER6> Have you gotten in touch with the developers? They recently redesigned their website, and are trying to make the project more approachable in general. If you have any remarks or suggestions for improvement, I'm sure they would be appreciated! (There's a contact page: [https://gnunet.org/en/engage.html](https://gnunet.org/en/engage.html))

But yes, most of the sub-projects seem experimental, or on a low level and lacking a pleasant way for people to make use of them. It seems possible to integrate the GNU Name System into a web browser, though, and re:claimID ([https://reclaim-identity.io/](https://reclaim-identity.io/)) has an add-on in development. GNUnet news list some 'major design issues' they're aware of, so hopefully stuff like filesharing will work well enough once those are fixed.

<comment><USER5> I have seen an looked at some of these efforts, and its very nice. I don't really have usecase, or time to work on a project like that.

I'm sure if you get into it, you can lots of information but I have observed with multiple people that they start reading are interested and then drop out quickly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This sounds a lot like my own side project's goals, but I've made it work inside the browser using web-rtc. There's a (somewhat) usable prototype online.

[https://www.hyperhyperspace.org](https://www.hyperhyperspace.org)

</comment><comment><USER8> Oh wow! I thought I disliked GNU but after all this... damn. This project made me dig deep into other GNU projects. I have to say I am extremely impressed. GNUnet, their featured and upcoming applications are intriguing. There is even GNU Taler, a privacy-preserving payment system. These projects are remarkable. I hope that they will continue working on them. They must! This is the direction I would like the future to take. I love the Secushare website, too, it is utterly informative and the design is pleasing my eyes. The content is stimulating my mind. Their goals are restoring my faith. Please make this a reality! I am so excited about this!

Thank you so much! If someone can afford to help them (Secushare, GNUnet) financially, please do! I will dig even deeper and try to contribute as much as I can as I have some knowledge in C and cryptography.

For anyone who is interested in contributing to _Secushare_ : [https://secushare.org/introduction](https://secushare.org/introduction) (especially the "How can you help?" section)

For anyone who is interested in contributing to _GNUnet_ : [https://gnunet.org/en/engage.html](https://gnunet.org/en/engage.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> Clicked expecting to see a social network. Instead got a generic introduction on something that doesn't exist.

<comment><USER10> Seems like vaporware. The "built on GNUnet" in the subject line really should be "planned to be built on GNUnet" or maybe "imagined on GNUnet".

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Last commit to [https://gnunet.org/git/secushare.git](https://gnunet.org/git/secushare.git) is from 2017:

        commit 4fbc224f25d71c30b16a2f5aa45cb1f2954d2d38 (HEAD ->
        master, origin/master, origin/HEAD)
        Author: t3sserakt <firstname.lastname@example.com>
        Date:   Wed Sep 20 22:15:53 2017 +0200

            deleted test

Is development still going?

<comment><USER6> Yeah, probably just moved to other repositories for the time being. (E.g. I think [https://git.gnunet.org/groupchat.git/](https://git.gnunet.org/groupchat.git/) is from secushare.) The PSYC chatrooms are pretty active, and they have recently opened some issues in GNUnet's bug tracking system, too ([https://bugs.gnunet.org/](https://bugs.gnunet.org/)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Decentralized social network: a customized phpBB with a good OpenID module would be enough. Host your own, authenticate yourself to other instances, use RSS feeds to create your own composite timelines.

<comment><USER13> Your idea breaks down immediately when you realize that hosting your own phpBB instance is far outside the capabilities of most users. This means that you're at least centralized into groups around phpBB hosts, i.e. this is a federated system.

In practice, federated systems become centralized. Email, for example, is now mostly centralized in a few providers: GMail, Yahoo, Outlook, etc. Even if you don't use one of these providers, they have a significant percentage of your emails.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This page uses a lot of words to explain almost nothing, the linked "introduction" page is similar.

Is this a thing I can sign up to? How does it make my life better? All I can tell so far is that it's secure and some kind of social network

Compare this to the WhatsApp landing page: [https://www.whatsapp.com/](https://www.whatsapp.com/)

Edit: looks like it's a framework for building apps, still unclear to me if it's usable or any apps exist for it yet

<comment><USER15> This is true about anything GNUnet related, really.

<comment><USER16> I still find this image of GNUnet-GTK hilarious: [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/it/0/0a/Gnunet- gtk_0....](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/it/0/0a/Gnunet- gtk_0.10_under_arch-gnulinux.png)

<comment><USER17> I like how the availability of each file is 0%. "Yeah, we focused on the amazing UI first - we'll handle downloading later".

<comment><USER18> I wonder if they considered simply shipping with hashes for each byte of data of common files users may want to download.

Then users could "download" by brute-forcing each byte of data. This would not only keep the content private but also the metadata.

It might also speed up adoption.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Cool idea: Looks more like building blocks than a complete application.

I'm curious how a system like this is resilient to SPAM.

Specifically: The (cough) power of centralized systems is that they have an economic incentive to police themselves. (Although we can disagree about how well they do it.)

Example: I don't get a lot of SPAM on Facebook, but I get a ton of SPAM emails and phone calls. Likewise, LinkedIn is mostly SPAM, so I don't use it very much.

<comment><USER20> Couldn't a micropayments option (built on bitcoin's Lightning network) where friends send the same micropayments back and forth keep SPAM at bay, since one wouldn't return the micropayments to spammers by way of return comments?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> It sounds cutting edge to me but the last time I tried to install GnuNet on Windows and Ubuntu I gave up after awhile because it seemed like, if I recall correctly, it wouldn't run on Windows anymore and something was broken with the Ubuntu build/install I was trying to do.\

It seemed like I would need to debug a broken build in order to use any of it for anything.

</comment><comment><USER22> That's the solution we need, to replace Facebook and Twitter! :) I'm in.

</comment><comment><USER23> Anyone knows the relationships (if any) between this project and RetroShare?

<comment><USER6> I don't think they're associated, but they seem to have a similar function. secushare has a comparison page where they compare their project to others (including RetroShare) for various use cases, so you might want to take a look at that. ([https://secushare.org/comparison](https://secushare.org/comparison))

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Who are some people who will use this and what does one get for taking the risk to associate with them? It seems superficial, but for a social network, it's the only question that matters.

<comment><USER24> Following this up:

Their statement on how it will not disrupt society: [https://secushare.org/society](https://secushare.org/society)

And statement on their threat model: [https://secushare.org/threats](https://secushare.org/threats)

The language is a bit passive, but charitably, their intent is to push surveillance stakeholders into either a) using social means to infiltrate group membership, or b) targeting user endpoints with malware. The tool will do this while frustrating passive interception.

Presumably we can use ML bots on accounts to infiltrate communities by now and then hand the reins to an investigator as a cover identity when it becomes useful.

Just not sure how this is all desirable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Lots of good ideas. Continue working on it.

</comment><comment><USER26> for those wondering if there are more tangible alternatives, check out the "social" apps on Blockstack (sadly there's no way to filter/sort).

[https://app.co/blockstack](https://app.co/blockstack)

EDITED: fixed to use a public URL.

<comment><USER2> Being "more tangible" is an opinion, so i could just counter "non-argue" that i think these things are actually less tangible, we would now have ended-up nowhere since there is nothing more to add (tbh i actually have that opinion, which might be explained by what follows).

To add something which is not an opinion, i would say that these blockstack or actually Xcoin based whatever "dapp" (seriously, what is this vocabulary, these are brandings, marketing terms) have nothing to do with gnunet or secushare on the moral level, they are really different beasts with different goals, different contexts. Marketing vs science, social vs commercial, private vs libre... Really, if you're not seeing the objective difference here then you're not trying.

<comment><USER18> To steelman the argument: I think by "more tangible" OP means, "software in a working state."

Secushare clearly isn't in that category of software yet.</comment></comment></comment>


Morpheus Venture Partners Announce 10 New Portfolio Companies - <AUTHOR> http://www.watblog.com/2009/08/17/morpheus-venture-partners-announces-10-new-portfolio-companies/ A dissimilar batch from the original YCombinator program has been announced by Morphues Venture Partners (MVP). The YCombinator program focused largely on web-technology startups. WATBlog has stressed before how a YCombinator type of venture firm was a necessity in India given the low startup costs and high need for guidance and adding value. <comment><USER2> Interesting model.</comment>


Shakespeare in the Bush (1966) - <AUTHOR> http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/picks-from-the-past/12476/shakespeare-in-the-bush <comment> guard-of-terra I don't think you have to force rights, wrongs and emotions down on your audience. You don't have to prove that what Hamlet did or thought was right or convenient. It's enough to tell the story - and then listeners will have their own interpretation.

Indeed, this makes any story much more believable.

Tolkien knew it in his Silmarillion; you don't have to agree with e.g. Túrin Turambar on everything he does.

</comment><comment><USER2> Beautiful little essay. Read it some time ago, happy to see it here on HN.

</comment><comment><USER3> Usually this article is used to demonstrate cultural relativity, but I also think that it highlights the plasticity of genre conventions.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is hard to summarize into a TLDR, but I'll try. The general summary: an anthropologist gets mired in a village during a timeframe where there is nothing to do but drink beer and talk; she therefore tries to tell the story of Hamlet. This is complicated by the fact that their culture has a different social structure, and a different model of the supernatural. In their model of the supernatural there are just witches, who are always male, who can create purely-visual hallucinations (called "omens", they cannot "walk" or "speak"), animate dead corpses ("zombies"), afflict people with temporary insanity ("madness"), and drown people. (Yes, nobody drowns unless cursed to do so by a witch.) The rest of this comment is a synopsis of the Hamlet variant they create, arranged into play order.

Much like we view technology, for these people witchcraft is not necessarily negative but can also be done for the good of others. King Hamlet (Hamlet's dead father) thus becomes the Omen, a (veridical and therefore good!) vision sent by some witch-elder who understood the truth of his death at the hands of his brother Claudius, but was afraid of Claudius' new power. (There is a brief confusion because in the original story he walks and talks, suggesting a zombie, but they settle on him being an omen and the original story was simply wrong about him walking or talking.) Claudius's two big sins are his sin of fratricide in the past and later a sin of afflicting Hamlet with madness. Notably when he marries Hamlet's mom the tribe basically yawns "yeah, and?" \-- this is so obviously the right thing to do that they don't make any further comment; of course your brother marries your wife if you die, for who else is going to support her?

The tribe is okay with the nameless elder sending the Omen to soldiers and then to Horatio, and because Horatio is a "scholar" he is therefore automatically a witch, so it makes some sense that he can interact with the Omen. However the tribe is surprised that he does not refer the problem to an elder of the tribe as they need someone more wise to the dangers of witchcraft, instead referring it straight to Hamlet. But they go along with this, Hamlet sees the Omen which tells him that his father died from poisoning. However Hamlet is wise enough to know that false omens exist from evil witches, so he resolves to determine the truth of the Omen.

Now either events have to be reordered or somewhere before the storytelling, chief Claudius bewitches Hamlet with madness. Certainly he is mad when he interacts with his beloved Ophelia, and then he talks with his schoolmates and comes up with the idea for the storyteller friend they've brought with them to do a storytelling for Claudius which will determine the truth of the Omen. In response to this story, chief Claudius in his outrage and fear apparently continues to bewitch Hamlet with madness, but also sends Hamlet's mother to find out what he knows -- and of course he sends Polonius the elder (still Ophelia's father) to listen in, not trusting her to be totally honest with him. Hamlet's criminal audacity in scolding his mother is chalked up to madness. Then Polonius stirs and Hamlet claims that he sees a rat, but when he says "a rat?!" it is understood as a hunter's ritual warning to potential human victims standing in the way of the arrow, kind of like a demolitioner's "fire in the hole!", where if you hear a response you should almost certainly abort whatever you're doing. To save Polonius's reputation the narrator therefore explains that he responds "It's Polonius!" after Hamlet's "It's a rat!" but Hamlet kills him anyway because he's been afflicted with madness and thinks it's his chance to kill Claudius.

With Polonius gone you'll remember that his daughter Ophelia drowns. But since drowning requires witchcraft, the explanation given is that this was a treacherous act by Laertes (Polonius's son, Ophelia's brother), who was of course sent off to France where he boozed and gambled away his money irresponsibly. The explanation was that when he came back home, broke and in massive debt, he saw that his dad couldn't give him more money because he's dead, and he couldn't sell his sister for a handsome bride price because she's being actively courted by a chief's son and nobody wants to potentially piss off a future chief. So Laertes did the only thing he could do to raise a lot of money on short notice, afflicting her with the curse of drowning so as to sell her innocent body to malevolent witches to zombify as they willed. This is why he jumps into Ophelia's grave (to get her body out for the selling) and Hamlet jumps in afterwards because he senses the foul witchcraft afoot. Laertes therefore is pissed at Hamlet for robbing him of any benefit of killing his sister.

Claudius sees that Laertes is powerful enough in witchcraft to kill his own sister, and that is why he sets up this duel where both Hamlet and Laertes will kill each other, one by sword, the other by the poisoned cup of victory beer. The finale remains otherwise untouched and everyone dies, although again Hamlet's presumably killing Claudius out of madness instilled by Claudius, and we're never told how they reacted to a rival chief (Fortinbras) taking over everything afterwards.</comment>


New York Launches Public School Curriculum Based on Playing Games - <AUTHOR> http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-09/first-public-school-based-games-set-nyc-debut <comment><USER2> Initiatives like this make me smile. Good to see people taking things forward and trying to innovate in the name of good.

</comment><comment><USER3> hahaha, now ull have even more dropouts and a graduate degree on the ps3.</comment>


Tech startups are taking on the oil business - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2015/07/24/tech-startups-are-taking-on-the-oil-business/ <comment><USER2> Anybody from Tachyus here? I've always been intrigued by the company but never really understood what form of analytics they are doing, and the descriptions are always really vague. Is it OR modeling? Data mining? Do you have any use case examples?

</comment><comment><USER3> I hope to see intersting discussion around this article and these companies. I live in Calgary and I've always been intrigued by the gigantic oil and gas industry in my backyard. The problem is that when I look at those companies, despite their obvious inefficiencies, they are the antithesis to a typical startup. Oil and gas companies typically:

\- Are run by people with no appreciation for technology (this might change in 10-30 years when these people die - I wish I was kidding in my language about death but that's exactly how people around here describe it: just waiting for the "Blue Chippers" to die off.)

\- Are enterprises so deals will take forever to close

\- Typically only buy software from software companies that look like them (Oracle, Microsoft, Cisco, etc.)

\- Toss all cost saving measures out the window as soon as the barrel price shoots back up

I think it's an interesting industry with tons of data and tons of problems that need solving but a very hard one to crack.

<comment><USER4> Devon is in your back yard. They are significantly invested in technology. Living in Oklahoma all the oil & gas companies here are in my experience.

Perhaps you're just ignorant to what it is they actually do in their IT departments or are only considering small companies. A field worker or landman might not know what goes on either.

<comment><USER3> I'm aware of Devon but isn't that a recent thing? And I'm guessing you're referring to their use of OpenStack and buying RHEL licenses/support? What's interesting is that several people up here have used Devon as the poster child for reserved technology practices. Encana/Cenovus tend to have the recognition of being technology forward. Maybe Devon has changed since they sold off half of their Canadian assets.

I agree my ignorance/attitude towards the industry isn't the best. I've always felt as a software startup the service companies would be your best bet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> woo hoo! use those brightest minds to dig up more fossil fuels & inject that carbon into the atmosphere for 8 more generations to come! brilliant.

<comment><USER6> Not sure if it's different than using the brightest minds of our generation to sell ads and contribute to build a panopticon society.

<comment><USER7> I think we've concluded in this thread that bright minds used in any significant capacity can be a dangerous threat to society at large.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> how do you approach oil businesses to try out your analytics or enterprise software if you haven't built one yet?</comment>


FiOS vs. Cable During a Windstorm - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdziarski.com/blog/?p=639 <comment><USER2> I work in the industry. This is an accurate representation of the two technologies for the most part except both technologies rely on batteries when commercial power is lost. With cable the power supply (might be more than one per node) is located on a pole or ground enclosure. With FIOS/FTTH the battery is located in the ONT powered at the customer's home in most cases that also includes a built in battery. Either way you'll have to bring your own power past the 8-12 hour mark of a major outage. Everything else comes down to staffing and good emergency planning. Keeping tree's trimmed away from overhead utilities is also essential. Towns or communities that mandate more underground utilities almost always fair better in large wind/storm outages.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Made mention of the battery or other power source needed in the home.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Not sure if the anyone knows it or not but in the last picture is one of Comcast's cable amps laying on the ground. (The grey bit with the heat sink)

Note, I don't work for Comcast, but I used to work for the local cable provider. I didn't spend much time in the field but from what I recall that grey box is either, a cable amp, or the fibre to cable converter. Most cable plants now have fibre from within 1 km of your house.

One of the other really crappy things about cable is that squirrels will chew the cable until they hit the sheath of the cable, once that happens when it rains the water will eventually suck all the way to the amp as the cables heat and cool. It massively degrades the signal quality while this happens and if left long enough will eventually kill the amp. The water travels both directions and if your connections are tight enough will actually go all the way to your house. It usually doesn't penetrate the house as the temperature fluctuations aren't great enough inside.

<comment><USER4> Re: Squirrels (and other rodents) and communications cable. This is what is typically used to deter the rodents, and prevent water damage: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icky-pick>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> How was the cellular network? I assume that's what most people use these days to call 911? I haven't ever had a landline in my adult life. (OK, I have a twisted pair, but it is data-only.)

</comment><comment><USER6> What about regular phone lines? If those telephone poles were down doesn't that mean they also had no service?

<comment><AUTHOR> Neither Comcast nor Verizon use POTS lines around here. Everything is routed across their cable/fiber network. While the poles themselves were down, a majority of the wiring was still intact. The power went out as a result of over 400 transformers blowing, and a manual shutdown of most circuits for safety. Enough of the lines were connected in order for Verizon's fiber to remain connected (most of which is not underground here), and the same was true of Comcast's coax... it just didn't have the signal strength to make it back to the CO without power.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Verizon FIOS vs Comcast might be a better title, no?

<comment><AUTHOR> Technologically, this could be anybody's FiOS, or anybody's Cable.. I realize FiOS is more of a trade name, but the general design of 'fiber to the last mile' is being adopted by others too. Fairpoint I believe is also using the FiOS moniker due to deals w/Verizon. So IMO it's more about the two technologies and why one's superior in this situation.

<comment><USER8> FiOS isn't fiber to the last mile, it's fiber to the home, which is a huge difference. AT&T U-verse is fiber to the last mile and copper the rest of the way and it has nowhere near the same speed.</comment></comment></comment>


Intel looses it's Dignity - <AUTHOR> https://www.techpowerup.com/235092/intel-says-amd-epyc-processors-glued-together-in-official-slide-deck <comment><USER2> That title needs someone to clean it up. the spellig and grammar need halp.</comment>


Google's automated system wrongly removed our app. A human would have stopped it - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@yeoyaowei/google-screwed-our-startup-because-of-the-faceless-systems-they-use-to-deal-with-app-developers-94ca199faaca <comment><USER2>
        We concluded we were not going to be able to get through
        to a human decision maker without spending a bucket load
        of money on lawyers

Google is not a court. If you want to argue about whether somebody's trademark is or isn't being infringed on, you'll need to take them to court. Barring that, current IP law requires companies to take a maximalist enforcement position like Google has here, or face liability for infringement themselves.

If this name was that critical to your business, consider why _you_ hadn't sought trademark protection.

<comment><AUTHOR> The issue being highlighted is that Google is not deploying humans to review these decisions and instead leaving them to automated systems.

There is a difference between being an responsible enforcer of IP rights and automatically removing apps when they receive a complaint.

If you read the article in more detail, the complaint's only request was that the offending app's name be changed. The offending app complied with the request, but upon appeal Google did not take this into account and offered a boilerplate rejection without considering the facts of the particular case.</comment></comment>


trustedplaces -  raising $1 Million in 83 days - <AUTHOR> http://trustedplaces.com/blog/2007/05/13/keeping-you-posted/ <comment><USER2> 83 days of trying to raise money + the 9 previous months they spent building the site, now that is more accurate number.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> due diligance is loooooong, almost makes you not want to get funding unless you really really need it (a good thing).</comment>


Zooming in on Neuronal Behavior, using DART to treat Parkinson's Disease - <AUTHOR> https://pratt.duke.edu/about/news/zooming-neuronal-behavior <comment><AUTHOR> DART is described in the article as a "A Molecular GPS to Target Neurons", one of the points mentioned in selectively treating the neurons for a Parkinson's mouse model is:

> Rather than treat the disorder by increasing dopamine (the standard > treatment), they used DART to stop the D2 type of neuron from compensating > by delivering a glutamate antagonist specifically to these cells in the > striatum. The animal's movement dramaticallyimproved. Remarkably, this > improvement was only seen when the drug was targeted exclusively to D2 > cells; delivering the drug to both D1 and D2 cells had no benefit.</comment>


Why Trello Failed to Build a $1B+ Business - <AUTHOR> https://producthabits.com/why-trello-failed-to-build-a-1-billion-business/ <comment><USER2> Good analysis. As a counterexample, Slack quickly moved upmarket, transformed their product from a tool for small teams into a platform with enterprise- level features, and reached a multi-billion dollar valuation commensurate with the growth opportunity.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agree it's a good analysis. What I wonder is why the fog creek people didn't pursue that path(building Trello into more of a platform) as opposed to taking the exit. I mean it appears that it was quite a good exit for them, but there not "starving artists" and they definitely have the chops to build the product out, so why not?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Career Decisions - throwaway-moron

My situation is basically this:
X Months:
The company I work was acquired and we were promised autonomy, nothing would change, etc. verbally.
X+6 Months:
About YY people were laid off as part of a cost cutting/restructuring measure. They are being replaced with cheaper people on the opposite coast in "small town" america. I don't want to live there. I know that already.
I read this as the accountants at the acquirer are squeezing our budgets and decided I'd send out resumes. I wrote a quick code sample in Python/Flask because I was curious if I'd like Flask and tossed it on a completely uncurated Github [its jut random stuff I've reported issues on/messed with].
X+7 Months: My boss, the CTO, is a good guy and I think he is trustworthy.
There is a critical part of the infrastructure I "own". He brought up hiring someone to work on it awhile back and I asked him whatever happened with that and he said he had put it off because he was busy. I hinted he might want to look.
He asked me why. Being the honest idiot I am, I told him I had a couple interviews and the whole lay off thing makes me uncomfortable.
He told me he valued having me around and he'd find the budget to match whatever offer I got on the interviews I'd scheduled if I didn't send out any more resumes.
I think if I took the offer...it is too much like using your ex girlfriend to make your current girlfriend jealous and more pliable. I think it'd damage the relationship enough that it would be a short term win for me but ultimately I'd end up unemployed [at least temporarily] whenever the first budget cut hit the IT department.
So what does HN think I should do in this situation?
Thanks :) <comment><AUTHOR> Money isn't the reason you're looking to leave, so don't make money the reason you stay.

<comment> throwaway-moron You are right. I think it is just I feel guilty.

Thanks.</comment></comment>


Wired Interviews Bill Gates (1996) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VFFlO7yBIBM <comment><USER2> My main takeaway here was that Gates thought that the cost of distribution on the internet would be so low that there would be no large business that could form. However one of the interviewers pushes back by saying that because the cost of distribution would be so low, aggregators would naturally form a monopoly on this business. Incredibly prescient point in a world of Facebooks and Googles. Anyone know who she is, the Wired interviewer who makes this point?

<comment><USER3> Neither FB nor GOOG have become such monopolies in that type of business they were talking about. What Gates said hold true today.

Think for example about a one person business like daringfireball.net, that was the type of business Gates was envisioning. Or Drudge report.

<comment><USER4> This ISPs have, or will become the true monopolies that will be the gatekeepers of all access to the internet.

They are entrenched and are not expanding their services, instead, they are digging in and keeping their foothold within their regions, limiting/eliminating competition, both from a rules/laws (like preventing municipal ISPs from forming) and limiting their service footprint to maximize their "profits" within their regions. Next expanding, but always increasing the amount they charge to poor service and access to the "internet."

If anything, it appears that ISP behavior is similar to the original Ma-Bell (USA) telephone Corp. It looks like somebody needs to break them up. But that's wishful thinking this day & age, just like having a nation wide (USA) fiber deploy to all states, cities and towns. Imagine, a Renaissance would develop.

Peace

<comment><USER5> ISP have so far been pretty neutral and have not been acting as gatekeepers. I'm more worried about Google's Youtube, Facebook, Twitter and Apple who've been acting as gatekeepers, banning people they do not like from entering their de facto monopolies. If ISPs start acting this way one day, I will start worrying about them too but so far, it's these social networks that are the real gatekeepers.

<comment><USER6> That's only because nobody's gone after an ISP for the same kinds of things that they go after Google for, with respect to the stupid Section 230 changes. When the outrage mob discovers it can bully an ISP into shutting off political opponents, then the ISPs will be exactly like Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. You already see echoes of this for example with Jeff Atwood's misfire on Twitter recently, going after Azure because he thought Gab was still being hosted there (it wasn't)[0]. Incidentally this is one reason why Section 230 was so important. The change is new, so it's probably just a matter of time before the outrage mob starts going after the T-Mobile and Comcast accounts of its enemies.

[0] [https://twitter.com/codinghorror/status/1056426165274009600](https://twitter.com/codinghorror/status/1056426165274009600)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wow, is this the original source? Such a low view count for what I feel is a very interesting look into a more casual Bill Gates. This seems much more spontaneous than the usual videos we see of him, and it's pretty cool to see the kind of thoughts he has before being filtered into prepared statements for the public.

<comment><USER8> Well if the interview was in 1996 and YouTube was created in 2005 I would say it was available elsewhere first

Also the YouTube video itself was just uploaded a couple of weeks ago.

<comment><USER9> From the video description:

> I don't think we ever did anything with the interview. I had completely > forgotten I had video'ed it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've just watched the first 10 mins, but it's amazing how he's incredibly aware all of the technical details, and combines a strategy perspective ("unified email client") with all the technical details (low level networking details) to make those strat decisions a reality.

<comment><USER11> Yeah and he demonstrates both a complete and precise knowledge of everything his company is doing in nearly every arm of the business (not to mention his encyclopedic knowledge of business Microsoft is _not_ in). It's easy to forget why Microsoft was so dominant in this era of computing, but listening to him it begins to make more sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I always find it fascinating to compare just how large the tech industry has become since this era, when Microsoft was already regarded as something close to a giant in the industry.

Microsoft sales 1995: $6.1 billion ($10b today)

Google is about 12x larger. AWS by itself is about 3x larger. Facebook is 5x larger. Salesforce is similar in size. Oracle is 4x larger. SAP is 2x larger. VMWare is closing in on 1x that size, as is Adobe. And Microsoft today is 12x larger.

If people back then understood how large technology companies would become today, I wonder what would be different (if anything).

<comment><USER13> It was considered more than something close to a giant. If anything, it was considered scarier than anything we have now.

Back then there was nobody else. We've gone from a monopoly to an oligopoly (ish) which in some ways feels less scary.

It's hard to overestimate Microsoft dominance in the 90s. If there was a wiff of them entering a category, the players in that space would be in trouble (similar to Amazon today, though Microsoft followed through more in decimating their rivals).

<comment><USER12> > If anything, it was considered scarier than anything we have now.

Yes, I recall those days intimately. It was hysteria and laughable even then. Breathless magazine articles claiming Microsoft was going to dominate everything, set up toll roads on the Internet, dominate e-commerce, publishing, media, and so on. None of it was even remotely feasible or credible.

The fear that briefly surrounded Microsoft's reign was almost entirely baseless hysteria. Its preeminence and monopoly abuse era lasted for six or seven years. Facebook has been abusing US consumers with its social monopoly for longer than that already, as has Google with its search monopoly (they're at least a decade plus in now). Both Facebook and Google are not only drastically more powerful and wealthy (greater financial resources by at least a factor of 10) than Microsoft in 1995-96, their reach is far beyond anything Microsoft had at that time. World-wide PC sales in 1995 were a whopping 70 million.

Google and Facebook touch nearly all corners of the globe, in real-time, at all times. Billions upon billions of people. Microsoft's reach in 1995-96? Extremely slow in nature, and less than ~150 million people globally.

Ability to throw or bias elections and control global commerce? Microsoft had almost none of that type of power with their operating system, or IE. Extraordinary amounts of commercial activity and referral flow directly through Google and Facebook products/platforms each day. Google's algorithm changes have dramatic effects on businesses. Android is a far larger gatekeeper and toll road than Microsoft could have dreamed of in 1995. YouTube by itself is roughly worth as much as all of Microsoft was in March 1995 (and has dramatically greater influence and reach, along with a monopoly position in what it does), Instagram is worth even more.

And Netscape, Microsoft's most famous 'victim'? (although not the thing that really got them in anti-trust trouble) The notion of building a large business around charging for a consumer browser was a dead-end. Nothing that Chrome or any other free browser wouldn't have put an end to later. Netscape was always going to die, short of pulling off a magic in-flight engine change to enterprise software (which they tried and failed at).

There's no chance Microsoft killed off more competitors in those days than Amazon has. How many small and mid size retailers has Amazon put under as it has added $100+ billion to its retail sales? Given the very low consumer & economic growth of the past decade, the tally would have to be thousands of businesses across the US. There are radically more retail stores of all sizes across the US than software companies. It's impossible for Microsoft to ever compete with the business rival destruction that Amazon must inherently cause as it grows ever larger. How many physical stores will Amazon destroy as it adds its next $100 billion in retail sales? It's not detracting from Walmart's sales, that's not shrinking, so it's coming from everybody else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Something to keep in mind: the DoJ consent decree was 1994, and the lawsuit was filed in 1998.

This was right around the time that Microsoft's monopoly power was under intense scrutiny.

In that environment, it makes sense for BG to push back against the notion that they could use their desktop OS market share into some kind of content market share.

If you notice he gets particularly vehement whenever someone asks if they can use their control of the OS (or tools or the browser) into control of the content.

He emphasizes that the distribution platform has to be neutral.

</comment><comment><USER15> "There will be no content club in my life time with $4 billion revenue...you are on drugs if you think that".

Netflix revenue last year was $11.6 billion.

Fascinating interview.

<comment><USER16> I suspect there was a little rope-a-dope going on on his part. Microsoft was less than a year in to turning their ship around ([https://www.wired.com/2010/05/0526bill-gates-internet- memo/](https://www.wired.com/2010/05/0526bill-gates-internet-memo/)) to ride the Internet wave. So he wouldn't have wanted to telegraph to other large competitors that this was going to be huge. (hopefully, given their investments) They already had their hands full with all the tiny startups who had been there years earlier.

<comment><USER17> Yep. Also, he had to be careful not to say anything that would suggest that having a monopoly in the OS market would somehow benefit the dominance of the content busniess, it seems like the interviews were trying him on that. I think the antitrust accusations started to simmer around then?

Interesting to note, Microsoft bought Hotmail for $400 million the following year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> For whatever he gets right or wrong, this is a fascinating look back into the past. Thanks for sharing!

</comment><comment><USER19> Funny to hear him talk about Encarta. I had totally forgotten that that used to exist.

<comment><USER20> It's funny, at around the 32 minute mark Gates even touches on 'free information publishing', which seems to surprise the journalists. This 'free information publishing' would later replace his Encarta, which was costing ~$30m alone to translate.

What a great video! It's fascinating to see the perspectives on the media, content, advertising, etc, in contrast to our current ad-driven world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Msft has always missed a bing or two.

</comment><comment><USER22> He looks sort of overweight and unhealthy. That surprised me.

<comment><USER23> He was 41 years old in 1996. Here's the magazine cover: [https://media.wired.com/photos/5bbbd018b1d78f2d74578369/mast...](https://media.wired.com/photos/5bbbd018b1d78f2d74578369/master/w_2000,c_limit/04.06_g-w.jpg)

Certainly not any sort of athlete, but doesn't look unusually overweight or unhealthy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> At ~25-30 min they talk about "content club" as a business. The Wired guys propose this could be a +4$ billion biz. Gates laughs them off. Now, today we have the numbers:

\- As of May 2018, Apple Music had 50 million paying subscribers worldwide. [https://www.statista.com/statistics/604959/number-of- apple-m...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/604959/number-of-apple-music- subscribers/)

\- Apple Hits $10B in Revenue From Services Like iTunes [https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/apple- hits-10-billion...](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/apple- hits-10-billion-revenue-services-like-itunes-1157173)

<comment><USER24> This seems like a questionable comparison.

Apple Music, et al. _license_ content and there are few companies that are able to do this. This creates a barrier to entry that wasn't present for the "content clubs" Gates discusses. In fact, his primary point is that due to the lack of a barrier to entry in the market and no accumulating advantage of any kind, there wouldn't be a single dominant player.

<comment><USER25> > _In fact, his primary point is that due to the lack of a barrier to entry in > the market and no accumulating advantage of any kind, there wouldn 't be a > single dominant player._

Well, we have at best 2-3 "dominant players" in each field, so not much better. And doesn't already Kindle dominate in eBooks? Surely iBooks is not that much of competition.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is option trading as bad as gambling? - Max-20 I guess many people here would have expected the Boeing stock to drop in value after the news emerged that a second one of their brand new plane models fell out of the sky.<p>Would it have been an irresponsible financial decision to buy Put options on the day of the second crash with an expiry of 3 months hoping that at some point in the next 3 months the stock would drop a little to sell with a profit? <comment><AUTHOR> It is always possible to think of a scenario in which you would have made a fortune doing things at the right times.

These scenarios are daydreams. Picking the winners in the past is much easier than picking winners in the future.

</comment><comment><USER2> Depends on the strategy.

Buying out of the money options is a lottery ticket, where you pay a relatively small premium with the chance of a large payout if the underlying moves favorably or volatility increases. Your potential loss is limited to the premium you paid for the contract.

In the case of Boeing, you're not guaranteed to profit when owning puts even if the stock drops if time decay (theta) saps your premium at a rate faster than the change in underlying price relative to the strike of your option (delta), or if volatility decreased rapidly after the initial reaction to the news (vega).

Selling naked options allows you to collect the premium up front but exposes you to the risk of huge losses, in fact unlimited losses when selling calls.

Credit spread trading [0] also allows you to collect premium up front, but your risk is defined as you buy a cheaper option to hedge the naked position you created by selling the short option. The compromise is that your maximum profit is capped. This is akin to selling someone an insurance policy, with the stock as the underlying asset being insured. If you were bearish on Boeing and didn't expect it to rebound anytime soon, selling a call credit spread would be a good strategy to profit from your sentiment without taking on too much risk.

[0] [https://omnieq.com](https://omnieq.com) (Disclaimer: This is my product)

<comment><USER3> It is a good strategy (and an interesting product). The execution side might be complex for retail traders. Execution is particularly important because although you get a cheap structure (selling one leg, buying the other), you end up crossing the spread twice.

This sort of trade is usually done OTC or alternatively using a contingent algorithm (wait passively on one side for one leg, and fire the second leg automatically as the first leg is filled) which allows going from paying 2X spread to 0 - but the latter has the tradeoff of taking longer and potentially missing the opportunity.

I know they are sometimes called like this, but I find the naming "credit spread trading" confusing. Are these strategies different from collars? I traded credit in the past, and my immediate understanding of "credit spread trading" in this context is shorting bonds of Boeing and buying treasuries (or trading US rates) for example. It would also be a valid strategy in this case that would use credit and rates instrument as a vehicle rather than equity instruments, but not accessible to retail traders.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As a retail trader I'd lean towards yes. You have to remember that you're competing against professionals, who have (most of the time) considered all the information you are seeing and more. Markets often don't move as one would intuitively expect. Often major events get "priced in" earlier than one would intuitively expect. Be very careful.

</comment><comment><USER5> A very recent example of things not happening the way I expected them: the Dow Jones plummeted about 1,000 points last week due in large part to the effect, or perceived effect, of coronavirus on the markets. No shocker that it went down. But then just yesterday there was a huge rally because the Fed reduced interest rates. That's the unexpected part for me. Maybe others saw that coming but I would've lost my pants on that gamble.

</comment><comment><USER6> It depends. Many techniques are very risky, but some are safe and useful, and can have significantly less financial risk than owning stock directly.

E.g. basic call options: [https://www.optiontradingtips.com/options101/payoff- diagrams...](https://www.optiontradingtips.com/options101/payoff- diagrams.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> Last year, I made about $4,000 using about 5k account selling credit put spreads. Mostly weeklies around earnings.

I stopped because it was too stressful. And I was risking only 5k, cannot imagine risking more money to make it worth the stress.

</comment><comment><USER8> I would say yes as well. Especially if are not an expert and have really solid reasoning for the "bets" you are making!

</comment><comment><USER3> Comments about events "priced in" are absolutely right. With a little work, you can make it transparent and use it to your advantage.

In simple terms, the price of an option at a given time is equal to the product of what you can expect to gain from it (its payout) and the likelihood of each payout (the implied distribution of the asset at maturity). The interesting consequence is that you can reverse-engineer option quotes to derive the "market-implied probability distribution of a given asset at expiry". You can then compare this to your expectations to enter positions (for example if you think the market overpriced/underpriced a given event, trade against it with options).

You first need to calculate the implied volatility of options quotes (both calls/puts on both bid/ask) which requires you to correctly adjust your forward, i.e divs and rates to obtain put-call parity. If your forward is wrong, your implied volatility curves will look off (for example put bids above call asks) which means you have the wrong rates or dividends expectations. Once you computed the implied volatilities and are happy with your forward, you can fit a curve between your 4 series (call ask, call bid, put ask, put bit). This is your implied volatility mark. You can then use this volatility mark to derive an implied probability density. There is a simple example of how this is done here:

[https://www.mathworks.com/company/newsletters/articles/estim...](https://www.mathworks.com/company/newsletters/articles/estimating- option-implied-probability-distributions-for-asset-pricing.html)

This is actually really useful when you are trying to manage your risk for a given event. It also has interesting dynamics. Back in 2014 for example, we were worried about our risk on PBR US (a massive petro company with strong political links) ahead of Brazilian elections. By using this method, we found out that the implied distribution of the stock was bimodal, each mode corresponding to one outcome of the election. This gave us an idea of how much the stock could move either way and helped us cover the risk.

If you would like to see whether a given event is indeed priced in as you would expect, you can use this method, bearing in mind there is a timing element and you should seek the option expiry just after the event or horizon you are considering.

One last point that is important to consider is that this is "market-implied distribution" and does not imply a future behavior for the asset in question. It merely gives you an idea of the expectations of actors at this moment. Moreover, it is highly dependent on your inputs (dividends, rates and how you fit your volatility curve between bid/ask options quotes, particularly on the wings).

</comment><comment><USER9> In general, by gathering enough information, you can make your expectation for an options trading positive.

In general, this isn't true of games of chance, except somewhat for games like poker.

That said, I think I recall that pros refer to amateur traders as "stupid flow".

<comment><USER3> Former options trader here. The reason its called stupid flow is that 99.999% of retail traders use them wrongly and don't understand them. That said, you can educate yourself and use options properly. But don't let any broker or retail educator "educate" you, they don't want you good and have huge conflicts of interests. Get education from technical articles and by learning the underlying maths and pricing dynamics, particularly the relationships between implied volatility smile and price distribution.

One of the main reasons they are dumbly traded by retail has to do with the ban of CFDs in the US. As retail investors want leverage (attracted by a quick buck rather than making money on the long term), options provide an alternative, and retail brokers push them to customers.

But there is a massively misunderstood dynamic: time. You don't only have to be right. You have to be right by a certain time. Another misunderstood dynamic is risk management. Options are useful as part of a portfolio, but if you use them only as a means to get more leverage on your directional portfolio, you will end up like all traders losing money that don't understand why. Yet the reason is simple: you took too much risk.

<comment><USER9> Good stuff. IMO, no one worth less than $1M should even be trading symbols, much less options. The "poor" should pour their money into low-fee Target Retirement 20XX funds and let them sit.</comment></comment></comment>