Ask HN: What's the best way to get 5% on a million dollars? - <AUTHOR> What do you think is the best way to get the lowest risk, 5% annual return on a million dollars?<p>I'm also interested in how you could get 8% or 10%, though I know that would likely include more risk. <comment><USER3> I think you're looking at this the wrong way. Decide the level of risk first. That dictates your stock/bond mix. After that, you get whatever the market gives you.

If you're looking for a guaranteed 5%, it doesn't exist right now, and it won't be back unless inflation spikes close to 5%.

<comment><USER4> AT&T pays a 5.3% dividend. Given they're still effectively splitting a monopoly with Verizon, that's pretty close to guaranteed. You'd want to track the company's quarterlies, the competition (risk of a combined Spring + T-Mobile hurting them), and any big business moves, but otherwise it's predictable. The stock itself - and your principle - would get compressed in any market down turn though. The nice thing about holding T, is that you can liquidate your entire principle at any time easily.

<comment><USER5> The last big bond issue by AT&T paid 1.4%

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-20/at-t-said-to- plan-o...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-20/at-t-said-to-plan- offering-of-2-billion-in-five-year-bonds-1-.html)

I'd not call the NPV of any tech stock predictable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > What do you think is the best way to get the lowest risk, 5% annual return > on a million dollars?

You won't find a zero-risk 5% return; those don't exist. Bank accounts pay approximately zero interest these days.

The lowest-risk return would be to buy an index fund based on the entire stock market, balanced with a fund that buys low-risk bonds; choose a stock-to-bond ratio based on your desired level of risk.

Vanguard has the best index funds in the industry, due to their minimal administrative overhead (0.05% to 0.1% of return). VBIAX is a nice balanced fund that's 60:40 stocks:bonds, which is quite risk-averse. If you want to choose a different ratio, go with a balance of VTSAX for stocks and VBILX or similar for bonds. You could choose anything from 100% stocks (if you don't mind riding out market crashes like 2008's) to 100% bonds (if you're extremely risk-averse and don't mind low returns).

If you're trying to use this as an income, Vanguard has the option to automatically send returns to a bank account rather than reinvesting them.

If you're talking about investing a million dollars all at once, you probably don't need to worry about dollar-cost averaging; if you're saving up a million over time, you should invest a fixed amount every paycheck no matter what the price is. No matter what, don't try to beat the market; you will lose.

> I'm also interested in how you could get 8% or 10%, though I know that would > likely include more risk.

Same way, just change the ratio. If you have a high tolerance for risk, such as if you're a long way from retirement or you're otherwise flexible in how much return you get each year, buy 100% stocks (VTSAX); the return was 33% this year, 18% average over the last 5, and 8% average over the last 10 (which _includes_ the 2008 crash).

<comment><USER7> Yes, thank you. This is the only sane answer.

Putting money in the stock market in anything other than an index fund is just folly. Over any significant amount of time, any other stock investment will do worse than the index fund. It must, by definition (plus or minus a little bit for imperfect efficiency... but the stock market is pretty damn efficient)... plus index fund fees are just so much lower than anything else, which just increases the lead they already have.

And yes, then bonds to smooth out the ups and downs if you can't afford to ride out some big swings (like 2008) without some insurance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Disclaimer: I'm not a financial advisor, I don't play one on TV, and I don't have a million dollars or equivalent.

Take $10,000 (1%), and accept it as money worth spending. Network well, contact friends, family and ideally successful professionals and discover a financial advisor you can trust. Get empirical proof of this, as many may just be out to fleece clients - and worse, think they're actually doing a good job.

In terms of getting good advice, accept that money will have to be on the table. People have to make a living, and if there's nothing to gain, then why should a good professional waste their time? My hunch is that a good financial advisor will be happy to take a lump sum consultancy fee, rather than a percentage management fee, just to give you general advice - especially one that knows their clients are your friends and will react to any stupidity the financial advisor says.

With that money set aside and taken as ceded to the task of figuring out how to manage your money, take some time out and learn enough to make reasoned decisions. Research, study, understand the basics and importantly - <USER2> the absolutely stupid and worst options, and the worst that sound like the best. It won't get you that much time, but it gets you more than nothing.

Given you're making 5% minimum, a 1% loss can be fixed in a year and regain you access to any of the funds that you fell below the minimum for. But the time and effort spent now is better than finding out in ten years that the risk-free 5% growth option was actually highly risky indeed....

<comment><USER9> While I agree with the general concept, investing 10k comes with a substantially different cost/risk/benefit profile to investing 1,000k. The 1% rule is a great general rule for a single investment, but to invest 99% of your porfolios gain on 1% risk seems like asking for 1995 google stock.

My personal investment in this profile is about 10k per position [equity] and up to 15k per position [option risk] - where a position is defined by the total risk as affected by the underlying stock - you still could end up with 100 positions with a 1mm portfolio, but usually by 20-30, you find ones that you understand well and have reason to believe are undervalued -- those are when you break the 1% rule, and you do it a couple of times. Some will become worth less than 1%, some more than 10%. Re-balance judiciously, hold if it produces income greater than its risk, and sell anything not nailed down when someone offers you a gold-laying goose for it -- you can always by short-term risk with options if you're that confident, and cash is infinantly more exchangeable to immediate needs than paper stocks held at the DTC are to your grocer.

Depending on your age, if you have little to no investment experience, i'd check out the professional lists at fool.com (rule your retirement, etc) - those are the profiles I put my family in. If you're bored and looking to day- trade, there are similar lists for options, but those are for play money or experienced readers, not retirement money.

<comment><USER8> Great comment, although I think I didn't make the intended use of the 10k quite clear enough. Whilst one way of spending it is in live experimentation, yes, and that can be a very good option, I meant it more in a "be prepared to pay for help, with the only return being knowledge" sense

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> After rewriting my response 3 times I decided to lay out some basics.

basics

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

a. The most common fallacy in investing is that higher risk equates to higher returns.

b. Any half decent investment strategy should have a solid risk management strategy, should account for (and discount) inflation and should have a strategy in place to emulate dollar cost averaging (most commonly by scaling into investments from a cash position or using a re-balancing strategy). Risk management (and discipline to follow it, being the most important).

c. Different sources of returns are taxed very differently, for example: most non-govt interest income is taxed at the marginal tax rate, so if you're at 30% tax rate, 5% interest is actually 3.5%.

Then to be safe deduct the inflation, if the inflation is 2%, the real rate of return is 1.5%.

d. The next thing to consider is the goal of return. Is it geared towards income or growth(compounding).

e. If you are looking at percentage return it implies that you want growth. But that may not be the case. If you instead want an income of $50000 the whole situation changes, even though the value is the same. Simply because, if your investment loses 10% value now your 900k requires a 5.555% return to net the same $50000. I have seen and know a lot of people who went bankrupt for not understanding this, the bigger problem is I know more financial professionals who don't understand the distinction.

example scenarios

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

1\. If the goal is income, the strategy should be funneled to account for recessionary periods, market corrections etc. I can explain a funnel in more details on request.

2\. If its for growth and you want to get a higher return with lesser risk a leveraged risk reduction strategy can be employed. Can explain further on request.

3\. For people older than 45 (preferably older that 55) an Insured Annuity is also an nice option when Income is the goal. Even better if they are not healthy (higher mortality risk, higher return).

Before doing anything a good amount of reading(books) would be ideal, start of with:

a. The richest man in Babylon(fiction) - read first, no particular order after this

b. The Ivy Portfolio

c. The intelligent asset allocator

d. The permanent portfolio

e. The Investor's Manifesto: Preparing for Prosperity, Armageddon, and Everything in Between

f. Value Averaging

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for all the information! I may contact you for more info soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The best and only way is to educate yourself, so that you won't be at the mercy of financial advisors (who are just salesmen) or flawed financial products.

<comment><USER12> Yes. Increase your financial IQ, as it were. My wife and I run a service business to keep bread (organic) on the table, hired our first coach, researched, and are now purchasing investment properties that realize >= 9% on investment, and since they cash flow, continue providing returns. In addition to all of the tax advantages (we live in the US, so US tax law, but similar elsewhere).

Now we just hired our second coach, and will be learning paper asset strategies for cash flow and for capital generation to continue purchasing real estate.

FWIW: I think that we are successful so far because we believe in ourselves and put in the hours and sweat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'd buy a small newer (post 1979 construction so no rent control) rental property in San Francisco. With that much down you should be able to get it cash flow positive plus increase your equity at the same time if you needed to liquidate.

<comment><USER14> I realize this is San Francisco we are talking about but the idea that $1,000,000 is merely a down payment for a small living space is mind boggling to me (yes, I live somewhere much less desirable and much cheaper).

<comment><USER15> I think what he means is that with $1MM you'd be able to pay off a large chunk of the house which would reduce the amount of interest owed. It doesn't necessarily equate to just being a 20% down payment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Buy a flat in Battersea, London, get some letting agency to manage it for you and reap the rewards:

[http://www.londonpropertywatch.co.uk/average_rental_yield.ht...](http://www.londonpropertywatch.co.uk/average_rental_yield.html)

Who cares if you are pricing someone else out of a place to live in London? Seemingly nobody cares. The government love it that there is rampant house price inflation. The ride should be good for a while. Wherever you put your money it will not be immune to the next big crisis of capitalism, in London property you will be well insulated.

As well as the return in rental, you will also have a property that will appreciate in value over time. Sure you might have to sit things out when the property market is depressed, but I would be surprised if your $1M flat is worth less than that in 5+ years time even if the whole housing market goes 2008-style again.

</comment><comment><USER17> Just buy the S&P and make 30% a year. The Fed's got your back! If that's not good enough, buy the Nasdaq or Russell.

</comment><comment><USER18> Municipal bonds will yield 5-7%, very safe, all will be state tax free, some are also federal tax free.

LendingClub can yield 10%+. You have to be pretty engaged, since you'll need to loan a small amount to a lot of people. At $1M, probably $2,500 to each of 400 people so the risk of default (there will be defaults) is diversified. You'll have to actively re-invest the principle/interest. But it pays back monthly and is kind of like paying yourself a salary in some respects.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you have personal experience with LendingClub? I'm curious as to how reliable their returns are and how much work it takes.

<comment><USER18> Yes. I've been experimenting for about 8 months. You need to attend to it at least on a monthly basis. The payments start to add up and you either want to take them out for spending, or reinvest them to keep the interest coming.

The key metric for LendingClub is the predicted default rate. If they are accurate, you can have good predictability of results and good returns. If not, then it's a long term problem for them. One might assume that their algorithm should improve as they get more data, and I'd love to hear from their modeling statisticians how that works, though it seems pretty close to their core IP. So I am taking it on faith a bit that they will get that part right.

My experiment was to lend $25 to 100 people. I loaned to the same rated borrowers so I did not have to deal with too much tracking. All pay 17.6% and there was a 5% predicted default rate and about 0.65% fees. Net yeild to me was predicted to be 11.95%. Fees are only paid on what is actually paid back to me.

At this time, 8 months in, I have 99 current 3 more than 31 days late 0 defaulted 0 charged off 2 repaid in full 11 sold at full price

The reason there are 115 total is that I loaned to more borrowers as payments came in.

I also put 15 up for sale on LendingClub's sister site to see how one might exit. 11 sold in a couple of days. The other 4 are still offered. Not sure why they have not sold yet, I put them up for sale last Friday.

The actual 'Net Annualized Return' as calculated by LendingCLub on my notes is 18.07%. That is expected to drop each time there is a charge-off.

I do expect some of the >31 day late to fall into charge off, but you can review the contact history between LendingClub and the borrower when LendingClub is trying to collect late payments. Checking one right now, I see that a payment is processing, so it looks like they are back on track.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'll preface this with a disclaimer: I don't have a million dollars and I am not an investment professional. That said, as an amateur investor, my gut says that with the fed keeping interest rates low for the short term, you won't see 5% without taking on some risk. With the 10 year treasury at about 3% [1], that's about the best you will see for the time being as far as low-risk investments go. Slightly more risky but still pretty safe would be AAA corporate bonds, which are currently 4.6% [2]. To get to 8 or 10%, you'd have to get pretty risky, and go with junk bonds, or high yield dividend stocks like REITs (I've gotten 11% returns over the past 3 years with these). If you want anything higher, then you'd have to take on more risk than I have the appetite for, like angel investing.

1\. [http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart- center/in...](http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart- center/interest-rates/Pages/TextView.aspx?data=yield) 2\. [http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/AAA](http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/AAA)

<comment><USER20> Can you recommend some good REITs for high dividends? Is there anything special you do when researching them?

<comment><USER19> Like I said, I'm just an amateur, so I wouldn't be qualified to recommend any stock in particular. I signed up for a an account at dividend.com and looked at their ratings to see what to invest in. Anything above 20% seemed too good to be true, so I focused on a few with yields between 10 and 15% that had long histories of paying out.

<comment><USER20> I always assumed anything that pays over 5 or 6% these days has some fundamental problem and I should stay away.

Is that not necessarily the case? Why aren't more people buying good high dividend stocks and pushing the yields down?

<comment><USER19> REITs are different from normal stocks in that they get a tax break if they distribute at least 90% of their taxable income to shareholders each year, so their yields are much higher. REIT yeilds (and stock prices) should continue to rise now that housing prices are rising, and the overall improvement in the economy is creating growth in commercial real estate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've been pretty lucky with Canadian bank stock.

In Canada, there's pretty much zero competition in the banking industry because of how it's regulated. The risk is generally minimal (not factoring macro economic risks) and the returns somewhat steady.

These stocks typically will return a 3% dividend plus some minimal growth. Add it all up and it's fairly easy to get a 5% return if you diversify a bit. I personally own BMO and RY. It has worked well.

<comment><USER9> go back 5 years; I have some IBOC that's just breaking even =)

<comment><USER21> 5 year on BMO and RY:

[http://www.google.com/finance?q=bmo&ei=FjDOUqiwMZGQqwHDJQ](http://www.google.com/finance?q=bmo&ei=FjDOUqiwMZGQqwHDJQ) [http://www.google.com/finance?q=ry&ei=GzDOUtiwAoGEqgHvUA](http://www.google.com/finance?q=ry&ei=GzDOUtiwAoGEqgHvUA)

Plus 3.77% and 4.34% yield, it's not a bad deal at all!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If you are looking for the lowest risk, you could look into some sort of annuity - you should be able to get something close to the percentage you're looking for. These things are complex and varied so you'd probably be wise to consult one or more certified financial professionals before doing anything rash. (I'd carefully factor in inflation for your returns for example.)

My personal approach to investing has been to get acquainted w/ the basics of Modern Portfolio Theory (see: A Random Walk Down Wall Street) and then do a couple things:

* Set a sane asset classes allocation. Indexes are good where applicable. The less correlation the better: [http://www.indexuniverse.com/publications/journalofindexes/j...](http://www.indexuniverse.com/publications/journalofindexes/joi-articles/3220.html?fullart=1&start=7)

* Rebalance regularly - once a year is fine

* Take advantage of tax efficiency where possible (tax loss harvesting, tax-deferred investing)

If that's too much work, you could do worse than parking your money in a Vanguard LifeCycle fund, which rebalances for you: [https://investor.vanguard.com/mutual- funds/lifestrategy/](https://investor.vanguard.com/mutual-funds/lifestrategy/)

BTW, if you're talking about real and not hypothetical money, $1M net investable makes you a "high net worth individual" \- while I wouldn't necessary recommend going w/ a financial advisor (if you do, be sure to get personal/professional recommendations), you should at least avail yourself to some pitches to get an idea of what's out there. Initial consultations are typically free and you can ask them your exact question yourself. I'm sure they'll be more interesting answers than "buy a house in X."

</comment><comment><USER23> I just searched on [http://www.infochoice.com.au/banking/savings-account/term- de...](http://www.infochoice.com.au/banking/savings-account/term-deposit- interest-rates.aspx)

and it returned a 5% p.a. term deposit with RaboDirect for a 5 year term on amounts from $1000 to $2,000,000.

[http://www.infochoice.com.au/banking/term- deposits/rabodirec...](http://www.infochoice.com.au/banking/term- deposits/rabodirect/rabodirect-term-deposit/9102)

<comment><USER24> I suspect the OP has USD, and that the RaboDirect account will be in AUD. Investing in AUD would be a bold investment approach, and certainly not risk free.

<comment><USER23> Probably!

Interestingly, if I had $1m to invest and split it with my wife, with Australia's tax cutting in at 19c for each $1 over $18,200 up to $37,000, we would pay $2584. Since we have children, we qualify for a tax break called the family tax benefit [1], which would pay $13,773 per year. Total post-tax return would be $61,189. A yield of 6.12%, risk free! Now where did I put my million dollars?

[1] [http://www.humanservices.gov.au/customer/enablers/online- est...](http://www.humanservices.gov.au/customer/enablers/online-estimators)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Pretty simple. Buy an index fund. Average return of 10%.

<comment><USER4> Unless you happen to be buying near the top of another stock market bubble. Then you might easily see a negative 50% return over the next 10 or 15 years inflation adjusted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Move to India. 9% annual return, 0 risk.

<comment><USER27> India's inflation is around 11%. Plus after taxes you're down to 6-7%. (Indian here)

<comment><USER28> how did u arrive with the 6-7% number, just curious

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Use it all to buy shares of DNP. At today's closing price of 9.34, the monthly dividend of 6.5cents will net you 8.35% per year (not counting compounding, higher if you have a divident reinvestment plan). After taxes you should still be above 5%.

<comment><USER30> Please be careful and understand what type of fund this is before choosing this investment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> There are going to be a lot of appropriately downvoted Bitcoin comments, but consider what effects the true believers being correct might have on traditionally safe investments, like bonds.

<comment><USER32> None?

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Contact a commercial real estate agent, invest in a NNN property in most major cities. Getting 5% unleveraged is extremely easy, if you leverage you should be making over 10% per year.

</comment><comment><USER34> 5% won't be enough to outpace inflation in the next 10 years. Invest 100% now in 20 different companies at $50,000 each, with the expectation that one will go 30, 40 or 50 to one.

</comment><comment><USER35> If you use Wealthfront (www.wealthfront.com), a risk score of 6.5/10 supposedly has a median return of 5%/year.

Pretty risky, though. Over 70% stocks.

<comment><USER36> How does that compare to Betterment?

<comment><USER35> Wealthfront is very rigid on its asset allocation. You pick a risk score, and that's it.

Thus, they can do some pretty interesting things that Betterment can't. Such as, if your assets are more than 500k, they replace the S&P 500 index with all 500 stocks, which increases the amount of tax loss harvesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> There are a few startups that are letting investors fund student loans. People pay 7% to sallie Mae, so I think these investors get about 5%.

<comment><USER38> one of them is prodigy

[https://prodigyfinance.com/investor_home](https://prodigyfinance.com/investor_home)

</comment></comment><comment> tyler-codenvy Here is an unusual one. I have followed this similar strategy for the past 4 years on a more aggressive plan, and have returned 36%, 28%, 33%, and 6% for the past four years. The strategy heavily shorts the market, and goes partially long in a way that 99% of the time generates reliable, steady returns, and in the 1% extreme cases offers adjustment techniques to handle what the market is giving you. The aggressive nature of my approach causes the high volatility in the returns, but a much safer approach can be taken which would have nearly a 99.9% assurance of the 5%.

Sell calls and puts on the SPX index on a weekly basis. You need to generate $1K of income each week. On an account that uses Portfolio Margin at a broker like IB, $1M would allow you to open nearly 100 contracts on both the call and put side.

To appropriately manage risk, at the SPX trading at $1840, you could open up 50 calls at $1935 with 1 week to expiration for $.05. This will generate $250 of income as long as the stock market doesn't climb >6% in a single week. This has happened in the past, but only after the market has crashed the day before. 3% climb in a single week on a broad based index would be a once in a generation blue bird event, so the risk on this money is incredibly low. And even if the market did climb up steeply suddenly, there are many options adjustment techniques where you give yourself more time, generate more income, and create additional buffer to stay away from the market.

By selling 50 calls for $.05, you still need to generate $750. You do this by selling puts on the offsetting side. Markets have a tendency to crash downward, so you want to sell far fewer contracts and buy some insurance for the rare case of a market crater situation. You could sell 15 puts at $1730, again 6% below where the market is currently. A 6% drop in a single week is a rather rare event. And to hedge against a flash crash event, you buy $.10 puts at $1515. In the rare event that the market crashed or the market did drop >5% in a single week, then the same sort of adjustment techniques available in the call scenario exist here. There would be a side benefit of while you have to adjust the trades to wait for the profit, the market's volatility would have skyrocketed and the potential to gain more money is really high. Essentially, you could make your $1,000 of income by being 10-15% away from the market with high volatility instead of being 6%.

This technique requires weekly trades to be opened, which is a bear. And you have to learn the adjustment techniques, but once understood and accounted for, things are pretty regular and consistent. There is a side benefit of these options being 1256 contracts in the US, so there is beneficial tax treatment. Even though your trades are 1 week long, 60% of the gains are long term cap gains treatment.

So this isn't entirely low risk, but in all of the scenarios where is a bond / stock mix, there is inherent market risk as well. Even bonds that payout 5% can drop in value, so the principal isn't $1M anymore. So finding a great balance is a lot of work.

Selling strangles on broad indexes is a type of diversification, just of a completely different nature.

I have a fairly involved white paper that I have drafted that outlines the strategy for anyone that wants to review it.

<comment><USER39> I'd like to have a read of that with paper. can you post a link?

<comment> tyler-codenvy Hi: I placed a link in my public Dropbox.

[https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9657839/Investment%20Fun...](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9657839/Investment%20Fund%20Approach.docx)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Clearly not a good question to ask on HN... surprised bitcoin hasn't been mentioned yet :-)

edit: it has now. I rest my case.

</comment><comment><USER41> You could invest in my startup.

<comment><USER16> Why?

<comment><USER42> It's a time machine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> [http://www.dogsoftheseason.com/](http://www.dogsoftheseason.com/)

Is this true?

If not, please explain why not?

<comment><USER44> He doesn't say how to choose the right stocks. And I assume he's choosing them after the fact for his graph.

I'd be curious to see a random sampling of S&P 500 in autumn vs. spring. That would give a better idea of if it works.

<comment><USER43> > And I assume he's choosing them after the fact for his graph.

So it's possible to edit tweets or change their timestamps?

[https://twitter.com/DogsOfTheSeason](https://twitter.com/DogsOfTheSeason)

<comment><USER45> Hi, I'm Tomo - the owner of the DogsOfTheSeason site.

I don't know about the timestamps, but I guess it's possible to write several stock recommendations and delete the ones that do not make profits. Also, it is possible to build dozens of sites like DOTS and promote only those who consistently earn money.

I can assure you that I don't do any manipulations with my performance. I don't do almost any marketing for DOTS. The number of my subscribers is very small and if it starts to grow significantly, I'll limit the maximum number of subscribers or raise the subscription price.

I guess there are sites that do manipulate with the performance, so you have to decide for yourself whether you're going to believe me or not.

I noticed that links on my page [http://dogsoftheseason.com/subscribe](http://dogsoftheseason.com/subscribe) (actual emails) were not working due to a missing script. Now this is fixed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> How did this just get bumped to the third page of HN? It was on the front page just 1 minute ago.

</comment><comment><USER46> Buy a house in Australia.

</comment><comment><USER47> But not 9% that would just be weird...

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm specifying those numbers because I expect they will each come with different risk levels. 9% is fine too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> BitCoin

<comment><USER48> I wouldn't disagree, except I'd only recommend putting a small percentage, like 1%, into it, unless the OP is a big believer. In that case, maybe 5% max. And in all cases, only put in what you can (really) afford to lose without losing too much sleep.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> ETFs: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchange- traded_fund](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchange-traded_fund) and REITs: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_estate_investment_trust](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_estate_investment_trust)

Are other investments you can look into. A mix of some blue chips that pay out dividends in combination with some ETFs which trade in commodities or specific growth markets might be a good idea. Balance out that risk with bonds or other instruments.

</comment><comment><USER50> I would buy property in Marin County if I had a million dollars. One house. A neighbor moved next to me. I scared him away--I think? (another story). He was in his house for 5 months and made 90 grand on on a $650,000 investment. It's a weird market here.

I'm thoroughly convinced 90% of stock gains are made through inside information. I thought the Internet would level out the playing field, but it seems like the wealthy "connected" types are always in a bull market? (This year was an exception--everyone seemed to make money if they bought stocks?)

As to leveling out the winners in the stock market; I hope some young dude makes an app--a app that would help investors who don't have wealthy friends. And Stocktwits in not that app.

(I see a lot of posters advising on making money off renters. Personally, I couldn't live with myself making a huge profit on Renters. A nice family moves in and can just afford the rent, and the Landlord continually raises the rent. It's not moral. Sorry, but a place to stay, especially if the family has kids, is more than just a Revenue Stream. )</comment>


NeXT Computer - <AUTHOR> http://www.johnmirandaphoto.com/next.htm <comment><USER3> > _with a Motorola 68030 CPU running at a screaming 25Mhz, [...] this was the > "Ferrari" of desktop systems!_

Um, no. The NeXT cube competed mostly directly in price and market against MIPS and SPARC boxes which ran rings around it (quite literally 4x faster on typical CPU benchmarks in many cases). It was never a performance platform, and would only fall farther behind as the 68k architecture failed.

There were many things to like about the platform, but really NeXT was a very flawed system. It lacked the speed and features to compete with machines in its price range, yet was priced out of the PC and Mac world where it's UI and integration would otherwise have been attractive.

<comment><USER4> > It lacked the speed and features to compete with machines in its price > range,

Having used a lot of SPARCs and NeXT boxes side by side during that period, I'm scratching my head as to what features you're referring to, at least among machines which directly competed with, say, the NeXTstation Color Turbo. Looking back I'm really amazed at how ahead of its time that machine was.

But the critical item, I think, was the OS. NeXT had NeXTSTEP. Sun had heaven help us all) SunOS and later Solaris. SGI had IRIX. There was absolutely no comparison. I think this is why NeXTSTEP still lives on in OS X, and Solaris, um...

<comment><USER5> They picked the wrong horse (680x0) at the wrong time (late 80s/early 90s) in a market that no longer exists, that niche between high end personal computers and low end workstations.

This was about the time both MIPS and SPARC were finding their legs and Intel started to get its act together with the 486. In addition, this was the time the first wave of commodity graphics accelerators were on the market and NeXT couldn't scale up the way SGI could.

If they had managed to exploit the ND boards, it may have been a different story and SGI may have failed to secure the graphics workstation market, but they really didn't have much of a chance against Windows and SPARC on technology or HP and IBM on financials.

<comment><USER6> > In addition, this was the time the first wave of commodity graphics > accelerators were on the market

NeXT was already out of the hardware business for three years when 3dfx introduced Voodoo in 1996, same year NeXT bought Apple for negative $400M.

<comment><USER5> I was referring to the workstation market, where Sun and SGI were stitching up that market. GX, LX, and Élan were arriving on the market when NeXT only had ND.

3dfx was, for obvious economic reasons, not a slice of the solid, high, or extreme IMPACT graphics that were available on the desktop at the time of its release. It was more competitive with the options for Ultra, but Sun had already conceded the high end graphics market to SGI.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Some things to take note of:

Scroll bars are on the left, and the scroll buttons are at the same end of the scroll bar.

NeXTSTEP GUI programs adhered to a well-defined concept of an _application_ : they're stored on-disk as self-contained app bundles that appear in the file manager as a single file, there's one Dock tile per application, one menu per application, and zero or more windows per running application. OS X has somewhat weakened this.

Menus are vertically arranged, and can be re-positioned. Sub-menus can also be torn off and re-positioned.

Unlike OS X's Dock, when you fire up an application that isn't already in the Dock, the app icon goes in the bottom-left corner of the screen (which is also where minimized windows go). The app icons in the Dock are only the ones that you have selected to stay in the Dock even when the application isn't running.

The window close and minimize buttons are in different corners, and the close button provides visual indication of a window containing an unsaved document.

The display is grayscale, but the software supports color.

<comment><USER8> >the scroll buttons are at the same end of the scroll bar.

Which was also the case in OS X, up through 10.3.

<comment><USER9> Unless I'm misunderstanding what's being described here, I believe they were kept up through 10.6. I'm running 10.6.8 currently, and there are two scroll buttons at the same end of the scroll bars, as in NeXT. But from 10.7 the scroll buttons were scrapped entirely.

<comment><USER7> Whether to put the buttons together or at opposite ends has been an option for as long as I have been using OS X, but I don't recall the history of the default setting.

The other scrollbar-related behavior is what happens when you click on an empty part of the scroll bar. On NeXTSTEP, the scroll thumb jumps to where you clicked. On Windows, it scrolls down one page/screenfull. OS X has defaulted to the Windows behavior for at least the past several major releases.

<comment><USER10> What you're referring to as "Windows" behavior is actually Mac behavior.

Smalltalk scroll bars were hidden entirely when the mouse pointer was outside a scrollable view. When shown they were on the left, they were proportional and went up/down with a left/right button mouse press. The code for this is probably still in Squeak somewhere - it's certainly how old versions of VisualWorks Smalltalk worked.

Lisa made scroll bars always visible, moved them to the right, made the thumb/elevator non-proportional (users didn't get why it changed size), and added arrows to the ends - and then added page-scroll buttons too. Lisa also came up with the resize corner, rather than resize-by-any-edge or resize-by- explicit-command.

The Mac streamlined this further by getting rid of the page-scroll buttons and making it what happened when clicking in the bar background. Later the Mac also came up with zooming a window to a proper size to fit its contents. (Which isn't the same as maximizing it to fill the screen.)

NeXT moved scroll bars back to the left, put the arrows together at the bottom, made them proportional again, and made clicking in the the bar background scroll to a point.

Mac OS X kept the arrows together and proportionality but matched the positioning of the Lisa and Mac. Scroll-to-point instead of scroll-by-page remained an option in System Preferences though, and holding the option key inverts the behavior.

OS X Lion hid the scroll bars once more, at least for users with touch- scrolling devices like trackpads and the Magic Mouse, and got rid of the arrows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There was a lot of awesome things about NeXT machines and NeXTStep but there were also crappy things. The endless list of nested menus for example was nice in that it was standard and you knew what to expect in every application, but also could be less than ideal in some applications.

Nostalgia favors remembering the good things and forgets the frustrations of daily usage.

In the end NeXT failed not because the machines were too expensive (it was competing against Sun, DEC and SGI workstations which were also very expensive, so the price was not really out of line in that context -- only if you compare it to PCs, which you shouldn't.) It lost for a variety of other reasons, and I'm sure if you talk to 20 different people who placed the PO's for workstations in the early 90's you'd get 20 different reasons.

A lot of the times it just came down to "Our guys are used to SunOS/Irix/etc. and don't want to adjust." Or "Our software works best on X." or only works on X. etc.

<comment><USER12> Or, in the end, NeXT succeeded in being bought by Apple, morphing into XNU, Darwin, and thus OSX and iOS, and doing quite well?

<comment><USER11> Well, NeXT got bailed out by being bought by Apple. I don't think you can really call it success. I mean you can call it that but it's not by any yardstick I'd use. It's like you're in last place in the race and your Mom hands you a trophy.

<comment><USER13> Subsequent disclosures suggest that Apple had screwed the pooch over Taligent/Pink, and was desperately shopping for a next-generation OS. The contest was down to NeXTStep, with Steve Jobs, or BeOS, with Jean-Louis Gassee. As I understand it, the BeOS folks held out for too much money (Apple was much closer to broke than they realized) while Jobs settled for power. All else is history.

If Apple's successive post-Jobs CEOs (Sculley and Amelio) hadn't maneuvered the behemoth into a blind alley, NeXT would indeed have faded eventually. But with full access to Apple's resources, the NeXT team were able to turn things around. Sitting on the top shelf in my office, gathering dust (I turn it on every couple of years) there's a cube. A nice shiny _silver_ cube that runs something that looks eerily like NeXTStep, if you squint at it, with a classic MacOS emulation bag on the side. If that's not a statement by Steve Jobs (and a trophy of success, to have the elbow-room to _make_ such a statement) I don't know what is!

<comment><USER14> Another interesting "What if" is if they had decided to go BeOS way, Mac OS X wouldn't be a UNIX system.

Not sure how that would have gone with all the geeks that went for Mac OS X without an Apple background, just because it is UNIX.

<comment><USER5> BeOS had every geek salivating madly with the BeBox. Two processors, man! And it could play two mpegs at the same time!

It was also "unixy" enough without having all the Unix baggage.

<comment><USER15> and the geekport!

<comment><USER5> OMFG, the Geekport!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> John Romero's blog has a nice write-up about how id Software developed Doom on Next Step back in 1993. Complete with a screenshot of the level editor: <http://planetromero.com/2006/12/apple-next-merger-birthday>

</comment><comment><USER17> Those who want to experience NeXTSTEP without the hurdle of installing a VM should try GNUstep. This project aims to faithfully recreate the NeXT's software environment, with the omission of Mach and its IPC mechanisms.

<http://www.gnustep.org/>

You can easily install it in major GNU/Linux distributions through the package manager, look for wmaker and gworkspace.app packages.

<comment><USER14> The problem is that their development is almost stalled.

I hardly see any difference since 2004, the last time I used WindowMaker as my desktop.

As for GNUStep the web site wiki is very confusing, as it is not easy to find out how close they are for Objective-C language version and NeXTSTEP/Cocoa libraries.

Again, many of the pages look the same as back in 2004.

<comment><USER18> WindowMaker split off from the GNUstep project quite some time ago, IIRC. They don't even use Objective-C, they use their own framework for widgets built on WM called "WINGs."

There's still activity on the GNUstep front. Just a few things I can think of,

\- Their runtime, libobjc2, has done a great job keeping pace with Clang and modern Objective-C. It now has a Cmake based build system and doesn't require any bootstrapping with GNUstep-make.

\- GNUstep-base (the Foundation alternative) is solid, though some parts go back as far as OS X 10.6 and others OS X 10.4. You'll have to check the headers to see what's up to date. They do have an extremely capable implementation of distributed objects, last I heard they were planning to make it integrate with Apple's distributed objects implementation, but that project still seems to be pending.

\- GNUstep-gui (AppKit alternative) just added support for 10.6's NSCollectionView very recently. Most activity there has been in the form of refinements. As I recall, drag and drop is still on their todo list... they really could use some manpower there.

\- GNUstep-back (the backend renderer) still uses an API that's largely based on Display Postscript. They are planning to pitch a GSoC project to replace the Display Postscript API with one based on GNUstep-Opal (a Core Graphics alternative), and they already have a largely proof of concept Core Animation alternative running on it (GNUstep-QuartzCore.)

The project's current vision is to focus on making it easier to port Objective-C to other platforms, rather than to be a desktop environment. But like most small, mature open source projects, there's a lack of manpower keeping them from easily achieving those goals. Would be nice to see more activity there, in the future.

You can check out all of the projects I've named in the Github mirror at <https://github.com/gnustep> , but don't expect them to be responsive to pull requests. The mailing lists at <http://gnustep.org/information/gethelp.html> are strongly preferred.

As for the current website, I think Scott Stevenson designed it a decade ago long before he joined Apple. I like the design, personally, but I do understand that it's a bit difficult to navigate... and several of the docs haven't been updated in some time.

<comment><USER14> Thanks for the update.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I owned a NeXT Cube (since sold) and a NeXTStation Turbo Color, which I still have and which still powers up nicely. Monitor and NeXT laser printer still work as well. Pretty impressive for 20-year-old hardware. And still a beautiful, sleek design, if you can get past the 100-pound color monitor. Owning a NeXT in the early 1990s and the first days of the Web was like having super powers.

<comment><USER5> I still credit the NeXTlaser's 400dpi, clay-coated paper, and FrameMaker with half a grade point on every paper I wrote.

<comment><USER20> I'm still mad that FrameMaker was never ported to OS X.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Ah, the memories, the memories. Yes kids I was there and it was beautiful. My company built systems for financial traders. There was always a battle between the techs in the banks who wanted something architecturally elegant e.g. object oriented and the traders who wanted a UX that worked in an incredibly high pressure environment. In some deals the techies won and in some deals the traders won and in both cases the bank lost. NeXT was the only thing that was equally good at both. We ported to NeXT and sold a few. The rest as they say is history (i.e. NeXT disappeared into the dustbin of history and remerged in Jobs's brilliant second act. Today in our real time social mobile web we are all like traders, so that is why we have NeXT 3.o aka the iPhone.

</comment><comment><USER22> For those who'd like to get a sense of what the NeXT desktop was like, there's the WindowMaker window manager for X11.

I've actually been using it for a decade and a half (trying others from time to time as well). It's very light and fast on modern hardware, the codebase is remarkably stable (development has just re-started after stagnating for 6-7 years), and it's configurable (I've got numerous hotkey shortcuts defined which I miss terribly when I'm in another environment).

In a world where I'm coming to appreciate calming interfaces, WindowMaker is very much one such. I've only recently discovered Readability (similar to InstaPaper or Pocket / Read It Later), and there's a certain similarity of spirit between the two.

Also, as others have noted, Cocoa for OS X contains a _lot_ of NeXTstep-isms under the hood.

</comment><comment><USER20> I have a copy of the original NeXT product information and IDC bulletin which I scanned a while back for posterity.

Posting here for those interested.

[http://yummymelon.com/devnull/next-is-the-reason-why-you- hav...](http://yummymelon.com/devnull/next-is-the-reason-why-you-have-your- iphone.html)

<comment><USER23> I have been searching for, and failing to find a quote by Steve Jobs - <USER2> remember reading it in the late 80s. It was to the effect "UNIX is going to be the operating system for the 90's". I'd love to track down the original source for this...

<comment><USER24> I wouldn't be surprised at all if he'd said that; but you might be thinking of Gates who once said that OS/2 would be the operating system of the '90s. (He was wrong but he… still did all right in the end.)

<comment><USER25> I'm willing to give his prediction some credit. Windows and OS/2 are pretty closely related.

<comment><USER24> Excellent point. Ignoring marketing labels, his statement was as true as can be.

<comment><USER7> The Windows that is related to OS/2 is NT, which was very much _not_ the operating system of the 90's, since it didn't go mainstream until NT5.x: Windows 2000 and Windows XP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Aside from the beauty of this restore, I thought it was cool to see the UI influences the NeXT's OS had on Mac OS. I've never seen screenshots until now, but you can definitely see aspects carried through to its successor.

</comment><comment><USER27> When looking at the terminal screen shot, I can't help but think of the classic "csh considered harmful" (<http://www.perl.com/doc/FMTEYEWTK/versus/csh.whynot>) (Which is itself a classic "meme" before "memes" were a misused "meme").

</comment><comment><USER28> > All the NeXT components are displayed here, showing a clean and well > engineered assembly, demonstrating a design asthetic that extended to the > inside of the NeXT cube computer.

Some machines are really nice inside. IBM (and some Lenovo); some HPUX machines; etc; have really nice well laid out insides.

It's a shame that this approach is dying, even though most people don't need it and benefit more from semi-disposable hardware.

<comment><USER29> I'm not a mac fan, nor a mac apologist, but I have to say the current Mac Pro beats all of them ... that is an extremely well designed desktop computer. Really a joy to work with.

For runner-up I would say the SGI Octane2, and for a non-desktop machine, the Sun E4500 was an extremely well designed, well manufactured system. Also a real joy to work with (although weighs something like 100 lbs fully loaded)

<comment><USER30> An Octane2 is still my home workstation. Irix remains a joy to use.

<comment><USER31> And a great hardware, with the sliding boards and the pressure connectors. Its only culprit was the missing 5.25'' slot. I still have a dual R12K MXE Octane too :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> At first glance, I thought MazeWar looks a lot like MIDI-Maze [1].

And, sure enough on looking it up, MazeWar [2] is cited as inspiration for MIDI-Maze.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI_Maze>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maze_War>

</comment><comment><USER33> Does anyone remember this NeXTStep game? Apple still has it for the Mac.

[http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#samplecode/BlastApp/...](http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#samplecode/BlastApp/Introduction/Intro.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/DTS40012297-Intro- DontLinkElementID_2)

I did some NeXTStep programming 20 years ago. I converted the Tetris game to color when they finally shipped the NeXTstation Color. If someone has the Tetris source, I'd like to look at again and see how close it is to the iOS stuff I'm doing these days.

<comment><USER18> Is this the one?

[http://nextstuff.info/mirrors/ftp.peak.org/next/apps/games/m...](http://nextstuff.info/mirrors/ftp.peak.org/next/apps/games/m68k_only/Tetris1.3.N.bs.tar.gz) (tar.gz file)

<comment><USER33> Yes! I'm the 'melling' from the README2:

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

If you are using a monochrome system, you should copy the Tetris blocks from MonoBlocks to this directory. You can design blocks of your own by using Icon and saving them as Block1, Block2, Block3 and Block4. Be sure to save you images as 16x16 files. NOTE: Icon will open(and save) the Block images as 48x48 so you will have to change the image size back to 16x16.

Also, if you would like to design a color icon for Tetris, please NeXTmail me the TIFF at the following address.

email@example.com

Also, I'm interested in hearing about any features that you would like added.

-Mike

</comment><comment><USER34> "Your printer is out of paper" <http://web.figure1.net/next/printer/english/nopaper.snd>

</comment><comment><USER35> If this whets the appetite of anyone in the Seattle area, I have a couple of pizza boxes (one turbo color) with soundboxes, a mouse, keyboard and monitor all looking for a new home.

All this is most likely non-functioning, but anyone who wants it is welcome to it. I can be contacted at gmail.com

</comment><comment><USER36> I have one box like this under my desk, nobody knew what it is. [https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-iliZcxPMKgY/UYQcH1pKKvI/A...](https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-iliZcxPMKgY/UYQcH1pKKvI/AAAAAAAADKM/ZuNIV_RAET4/w994-h1325/IMG_20130503_161810.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER37> NeXT was way out of my own price range in the early 90's (I only had an Atari ST). At our university there were mostly DECstations and Sun workstations, apparently due to huge discounts (50%+) these vendors gave to academic institutions and because they were also used as servers (with NCD X-Terminals as clients).

The amazing design and focus on graphics power may have hurt sales in these circles because it would have been hard to justify a high price for eyecandy over raw cpu power and most universities outside the US were probably not adequately funded at that time (perhaps Jobs overestimated that market?).

</comment><comment><USER38> I bought my first Mac a TiBook when OSX was still in beta because I knew it was based on the OS that the world wide web was invented on. I've got the NeXT Bible at home on a shelf. I've been looking to buy a cube for years and have only found them for $5k+ on ebay. I know they're rare but does anyone have one they want to sell for a reasonable amount or know of a place selling them?

<comment><USER5> The NeXT Bible, 1/3 of which was an ls -R from /, right? I recall the interview with Brad Cox being particularly cringeworthy as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I had always assumed osx's aqua interface was behind the dock, very cool to get a chance to see what their predecessor looked like in action.

<comment><USER40> There are torrents out there of NeXTSTEP and OpenStep images that you can boot right into using VirtualBox.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Lots to love about NeXT. I got a kick out of the display PostScript screen. Very few other computers or workstations ever took that route. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_PostScript> tells a bit more about how it evolved into PDFish displays in Mac OSX.

</comment><comment><USER42> Since there are Mathematica screenshots on NeXT computers, here is a trivia: Mathematica owes its name to Steve Jobs. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematica#Trivia>

</comment><comment><USER43> Not to be needlessly pedantic, but MazeWars was originally on Macs circa ...1985? I know we played it in the dorms at Virginia Tech over phone-net (some homemade!) connectors in 1986-7. Pretty sure I had seen it long before then.

</comment><comment><USER44> All I could think about as I was looking through the pictures and reading was, "Wow that is a good looking computer." Perhaps it's the designer in me, but it just has a completely different feel to it.

</comment><comment><USER45> I remember going to their store on university avenue (palo alto) which is think today is the location of an apple store. I used Apollo workstations at the time, but the NeXT boxes looked really cool.

</comment><comment><USER46> On this picture:

<http://www.johnmirandaphoto.com/next/_DSC6359.jpg>

there is something under the cube. What is it? A hard drive maybe...?

<comment><USER20> That's a NeXTstation, a later version in a "pizzabox" form. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTstation>

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Steve Jobs demoing the NeXT in 1990: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cx684Eta4KA>

</comment><comment><USER48> Steve Jobs blah blah blah UNIX blah blah blah Apple blah blah UX nerdery blah blah blah blah blah.

OK - now the important stuff about the Cube:

<https://www.google.com/search?q=next+magnesium+case+burn></comment>


Chain, the Blockchain API for developers - <AUTHOR> https://chain.com/? <comment><USER2> Bitcoin was created to reduce the level of trust required for the operation of monetary systems.

Everytime I see another centralized interface to Bitcoin it depresses me. Centralized interfaces on top of Bitcoin are sort of a worst of all worlds, gaining all of the disadvantages of both centralized and decentralized approaches.

<comment><USER3> Exactly. Why can't people release packages for examining local copies of the blockchain? The blockchain isn't exactly hard to acquire.

<comment><USER4> _Why can 't people release packages for examining local copies of the blockchain?_

"People." Why don't you write one instead of just criticizing theirs from the sideline?

<comment><USER5> It takes a lot more skill and capability to be a creator than a consumer. I would like someone to make a movie about two time travelers who chase each other through time like a car chase. However I have zero filmmaking skill and I don't really know how to even start such a thing. My skills are best applied elsewhere, that doesn't mean I can't cross my fingers and hope that a talented filmmaker makes that movie.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Having worked with the Blockchain.info API, I am quite disappointed that Chain.com (great domain name!) haven't put much effort into building a better, more developer-friendly API. I mean returning variables named "n" and some awkwardly abbreviated to "reqSigs" ?

C'mon we need better than this. You can do better than this!

For inspiriation: \- [https://www.parse.com/docs/rest](https://www.parse.com/docs/rest) \- [https://stripe.com/docs/api](https://stripe.com/docs/api)

<comment><USER7> We are just getting started (day 2!), so stay tuned, and hopefully we will turn you into a fan! And thank you for sharing those links, we love those as role models as well.

<comment><USER8> These are the kinds of details you have to get right at day 0 as you can't just randomly change the API later.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you're serious about building a Bitcoin service, you don't need an extra layer between you and bitcoind (or bitcoinj). If you find it too hard to deal with the blockchain on your own via those apis, you probably should think twice about developing a Bitcoin service.

<comment><USER10> I put together balancebadge.com, a simple bitcoind related app. If I didn't use the chain.com API I would have had to run a server with bitcoind (~20GB of data), a server that indexes data from bitcoind (recall that a simple address balance is not exposed in bitcoind), and stores the data in an alternate database (~200GB). There is no way that I would have built balancebadge if I had to setup and maintain 3 servers with 100s of gigabytes of data.

Also, should developers who don't want to run a PostgreSQL server think twice about building web apps? I believe that general purpose software that requires server maintenance and state management should be run as a service. App developers should be focusing on the details of their product –not how to keep general purpose infrastructure alive and well.

 _edit_ Full disclosure: I am one of the creators of chain.com

<comment><USER11> Does one really need to keep the whole blockchain to perform basic things like tracking account balance?

I'm not really savvy on the details, but from the overall understanding of how Bitcoin works I believe one should receive data, keep it until consensus is confirmed (blocks had matured for good, so unless the network went into really weird split-brain situation no "valid" branches would grow out from those blocks), then aggregate and throw data away.

Keeping the whole transaction history up to genesis block seems nearly pointless to me.

Not sure whenever bitcoind can do those, though. Seems that it keeps the whole blockchain, at least for seeding purposes.

And, indeed, one would still need a database and running daemon that'd leech data from Bitcoin network. So, no way to have a badge on static HTML site. That's valid use case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Anybody working with Bitcoin should really avoid services like this just for their own sanity. You've a wealth of freely accessible data in the form of the 20GB blockchain, why rely on trusting a third party for their uptime, privacy and security?

It sort of already shows in the Bitcoin ecosystem, every time Blockchain.info (the biggest API provider) glitches up, all of the services relying on it die as well. Last time it went down there were people complaining that their _ATMS_ could no longer work without Blockchain.info functioning.

<comment><USER13> > You've a wealth of freely accessible data in the form of the 20GB > blockchain, why rely on trusting a third party for their uptime, privacy and > security?

Except an address index, which is the added value that most of these types of services provide (balance of an address, transactions associated with a particular address, etc.).

<comment><USER12> Nobody except for people running block explorers really needs this information. If you think you need it then you're probably using Bitcoin completely wrong. Address based indexes don't scale, which is why it doesn't create or even need one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm more interested in how they got chain.com

<comment><USER8> Playing around on archive.org, this domain name seems to have never been used for anything, so it was probably just a matter of obtaining enough money to purchase it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I also found [http://blockcypher.com](http://blockcypher.com) to be quite nice. In addition to the blockchain API, they also have APIs for creating transactions and even provide web sockets and web hooks. They do not host the wallet so you do not have to share your private key with them. They will create a transaction for you and you can then sign it with your private key. This is a good gateway for developers into the bitcoin system. The alternative is running bitcoind to download the 17 gig blockchain and then start coding. This provides instant gratification for developers to get started.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm am extremely excited about Chain.com, and the other tools being build up around the Bitcoin ecosystem. The power of giving developers simple tools and building blocks is often underestimated - but it often results in radical innovations.

A case in point is Stripe's API, and the ecosystem that has been subsequently built around it. Yes, it's possible to send CC auths/settlements and ACH transactions yourself - but the barrier to entry stifles innovation. Often the most interesting innovations in tech occur when there's an innovation in tooling.

I'm particularly interesting in Chain.com though, because I think currency is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Blockchains. I wouldn't be surprised if we see a number of other use-cases for Blockchains soon. [1]

[1] - [https://www.igvita.com/2014/05/05/minimum-viable-block- chain...](https://www.igvita.com/2014/05/05/minimum-viable-block-chain/)

</comment><comment><USER17> To be honest I do not understand why this made it to the HN top posts when there are already other more complete APIs out there such as the Biteasy.com API. Good domain name though. Maybe that's why it made it up here?

</comment><comment><USER18> I was just looking at the Blockchain.info transaction API yesterday, and I'm in love with its simplicity. It doesn't even require an account, and it's one endpoint.

You just call it with a destination address and a URL, and it returns a source address. Whenever any funds reach the source address, it forwards them to the destination and calls your webhook once for every confirmation it sees.

So simple, and so brilliant. I'm trying to brainstorm things to build with it, but so far I've come up short.

</comment><comment><USER19> What we need is a bitcoin sdk, not another 3rd-party rest api that will go down if business does not profit. Open source this!

<comment><USER7> It will be open source, and will have SDKs, soon.

<comment><USER20> Twice on Sundays.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Why is it not open source? I smell lock in.

<comment><USER8> Would it really be that hard to reimplement this yourself if you needed to? The idea seems to be that this is a service: it isn't doing anything that difficult to accomplish, it is just doing something that happens to be resource intensive.

<comment><USER12> CPU resources or human ones? This package by Bitpay solves the latter.

[https://github.com/bitpay/insight](https://github.com/bitpay/insight)

<comment><USER8> That's the wrong repository: that's a front-end (a UI written using angular); the backend repository (which could be said to be an open-source implementation of chain.com) is the one I link below. All this package does is provide a node.js wrapper for the bitcoind API. Almost all of the code (in both repositories) is project boilerplate or data marshaling: everything even remotely difficult is just "run bitcoind". I maintain it would be difficult to get locked in to a service like this just because it isn't open source: it isn't that difficult to rewrite.

[https://github.com/bitpay/insight-api](https://github.com/bitpay/insight-api)

As for "resource intensive", I was thinking memory, disk space, and network connectivity: the reason these services are valuable is because the blockchain is 18GB at this point, so downloading it to clients or even storing it at all on some clients, is at minimum "egregiously painful" and sometimes "pretty much impossible". If you want to be able to answer tons of different kinds of questions about transactions with low latency you are likely going to be storing this information with a number of specialized indexes, further increasing the database size requirement.

However, "people" is also a valuable point, but no: having an open source project doesn't solve that; if you make a program that uses bitcoin, you either have to download and manipulate the blockchain locally (which sounds awesome, and is arguably half the point of bitcoin to many reasonable people, but in practice is not realistic or even possible in many if not most interesting situations) or use a service. You can either run your own service or use someone else's. I enjoy running services: I accept that most people do not ;P. Instead, they would rather use a hosted API such as this one (or any of the numerous existing alternatives to this one) so they don't have to have people maintaining servers.

<comment><USER12> The reality though is that most people will never, ever need this sort of information. Unless you have a particular desire to run a block explorer or other lookup service, you are only going to be interested in addresses that you own and not those of the rest of the network. You don't need to store extended lookup tables and indexes for an ever increasing amount of information, doing so is foolish as it doesn't scale at all with the size of the network.

If a service needs to have a wallet connected to the network without the resources for storing the entire blockchain, they can just use a SPV [0] client like BitcoinJ to set bloom filters on their peers. They then get a stream of trustless information that's only relevant to the wallet at hand. You end up with a local service that's faster, completely under your control, and has a tiny resource footprint. You could happily run that a device like an iPhone, no problem.

[0]: [https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability#Simplified_payment_ve...](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability#Simplified_payment_verification)

<comment><USER8> So, this is the first I'd heard of the bloom filter feature: the descriptions I've seen of SPV allowed the client to only store a subset of the data, but still needed to download everything at least once in order to have any semblance of trust in the data it was seeing. The web page you link you also has a "See Also" to a page that makes bitcoinj sound horribly insecure, but maybe that's no longer the case with the bloom filter extension? This was all written before this bloom filter feature existed (which was late October of 2012); despite that being a little over a year and a half ago, there is almost no mention anywhere of it... I will have to spend more time learning about this feature and see how it changes things. (Maybe you are then correct: having a service like this is totally useless. However, I would then argue that it should be a really big priority to make people understand that this feature exists, is deployed, is practical, and is secure, as otherwise people are going to keep going about their lives as I have assuming this is all impossible with the current implementation of Bitcoin.)

<comment><USER12> Ugh, yeah the documentation for anything related to Bitcoin is terrible. Originally it didn't use bloom filters, they're a new thing as of Bitcoin client version 0.8 and above.

> _the descriptions I 've seen of SPV allowed the client to only store a > subset of the data, but still needed to download everything at least once in > order to have any semblance of trust in the data it was seeing._

With bloom filters you don't need to bother with all of that. The headers of the blocks are separate from the transaction data itself (that's in the merkle tree), so the SPV client can download all of the headers up to the current date and verify their difficulty in a few seconds. As the wallet gains addresses it sets bloom filters with it's peers, when they announce a new block on the network they send the SPV client the block header and also a trimmed merkle tree with only the transactions relevant to the client left in it. The SPV client can verify that the transaction is in the block by following up the tree to the block header, without ever needing to download the entire thing.

Privacy is gained by setting false positives in the filter, the more junk results the less likely it in the peer can discover what the SPV client is really interested in and what is being discarded. The SPV client ultimately doesn't need to store anything but the outputs that are unspent, and transaction history if this is required. There's no trust in the peers as at worst they can withhold blocks from us that contain transactional data, to counter this we can connect to multiple peers with the same filters set and compare the difference.

> _However, I would then argue that it should be a really big priority to make > people understand that this feature exists, is deployed, is practical, and > is secure, as otherwise people are going to keep going about their lives as > I have assuming this is all impossible with the current implementation of > Bitcoin_

This is a problem really, we have lots of awesome crypto features but everybody just insists on using solutions that don't scale like blockchain.info. The original whitepaper describes some of the scaling features but doesn't mention bloom filters specifically I don't think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Would love if you guys added Nxt to this, it's completely different from bitcoind (it's based on java and a completely new codebase). If we had an API that would work across completely different systems, it would add great value.

[http://nxt.org](http://nxt.org)

</comment><comment><USER23> How much do you plan on charging for the API once it exits beta?

<comment><USER7> We're still working that out. What do you think is fair?

<comment><USER23> I am wanting to use it for my site's difficulty predictor.

I would be making about 3 API calls per chain every 10 minutes to suffice for my needs.

That's about 12,960 api requests in a 30 day month.

I wouldn't be willing to spend any more than $5 on those 12,960 requests... because if that's what it cost, I could just setup a digital ocean vps and run the namecoin blockchain for $5/mo.

So somewhere in the order of $5/13,000 requests or about $0.40 per 1,000 requests sounds fair to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Why has nobody mentioned Obelisk?

[https://github.com/libbitcoin/obelisk](https://github.com/libbitcoin/obelisk)

</comment><comment><USER25> Decentralized systems always centralize in time.</comment>


Browser extensions: hide g+ notifications on www.google.com - <AUTHOR> http://batkin.tumblr.com/post/7454469160/browser-extensions-hide-g-notifications-on

<comment><AUTHOR> If I knew how easy it was to develop browser extensions that behave well I would have started much sooner. All I have to do is make sure the CSS gets injected before the DOM is loaded, and there won't be any flickering. Chrome and Safari both provide a mechanism for injecting CSS before the DOM is loaded with metadata.</comment>


Hacking LinkedIn to find out who visits your site - <AUTHOR> http://euri.ca/2012/11/hacking-linkedin-to-find-out-who-visits-your-site/

<comment><USER2> Really cool hack... wonder how long it will take them to patch it up though</comment>


Offline is the New Luxury - <AUTHOR> https://vimeo.com/169224545 <comment><AUTHOR> Description:

 _Offline is The New Luxury Digital networks are forever expanding. Places without cell phone reception or a Wi-Fi connection are increasingly hard to find. If tech companies have their way, the remaining 'white spots' on the digital map will soon disappear, leaving no place on earth unconnected. But what is happening off the grid? White Spots is a collaborative multimedia project by documentary filmmaker Bregtje van der Haak, visual artist Jacqueline Hassink, and information designer Richard Vijgen. Working in various media, they travel beyond the frontiers of the networked world to explore unwired landscapes, communities and lifestyles, questioning the need to be constantly plugged into a single, seamless planetary tech-topia. Will offline become the new luxury?

This television documentary takes viewers on a tour of the offline world and includes interviews with internet critic Evgeny Morozov, psychologist Sherry Turkle (MIT), Amish minister Norman Yoder (Shipshewana, Indiana), poet and writer Aram Pachyan (Armenia), and Minister of Telecommunications Harin Fernando of Sri Lanka. The documentary is directed by Bregtje van der Haak and produced by VPRO Backlight. It comes with the free White Spots App (for android and iPhone, design Richard Vijgen)._

Coincidentally, I fell while running today and smashed my iPhone. I'm strongly considering _not_ replacing it.

</comment><comment><USER2> Great movie. I watched it all. Thanks for sharing. The social media addiction problem is an epidemic. I do not see almost no one talking about this problem.</comment>


Making an Endpoint 50x Faster - <AUTHOR> https://bilbof.com/2019/09/18/improving-api-endpoint-performance.html <comment><USER2> The whole "...we don't want duplicated subscriber lists" is a very arbitrary requirement.

What's more, all this could have been avoided if a proper relational database structure (not even denormalized, GordonS) was there in the first place.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. This is a poor schema made worse.

Querying the json is why this is slow. Pull that garbage out of the json and into a couple of tables and you'd be much faster.

<comment><USER4> > Pull that garbage out of the json and into a couple of tables and you'd be > much faster.

It looks to me like a user-generated search query, not normalized data. A blob column makes perfect sense if this is the case, and pulling it out into other tables/columns would significantly overcomplicate everything else.

<comment><USER3> More complicated than a custom hashing scheme and required ordering?

I don't buy that. Tables aren't complex.

<comment><USER4> Tables aren't complex, but this particular use can get there. Off the top of my head:

1) Complexity inherent in search criteria: Multiple values per field and whether it's AND or OR. (This can go much much further, as ours does, but I'm limiting it here to what's in the blog post)

2) Centralization of criteria: Multiple tables pretty much means a table per field, which are only related by foreign keys back to the central table.

3) Following on from 2, since there's no central location to identify all the relevant tables, it's much easier to miss one in a JOIN.

4) Following on from 1: Serialization/deserialization, for creating new entries and populating the submission form for an "edit" mode. (At minimum you'll have to reconstruct the multiple-values-per-field situation from the tables)

5) Following on from 3 and 4, alternate uses such as adding a search description derived from the criteria.

There's easy ways around some of this, such as in (4) forcing all the app code to go through the same serialization/deserialization (which sidesteps most of the others), but that's no guarantee that there won't be stray code accessing the tables directly for another reason (hitting on (3)), and almost completely erases the benefit of fitting the criteria into a table relation. It's essentially the same as just using a blob field, except a lot more complicated.

Sometimes blob fields really are the right choice, even in a relational database.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why not use a materialized view?

[https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/sql- creatematerializedvi...](https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/sql- creatematerializedview.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> "Because order should not matter, both arrays are sorted before they are compared."

I do not understand this line very well. If order does not matter, why sort anything?

<comment><USER7> Consider character sequences: _[n, e, t]_ and _[t, e, n]_. If you'd want to know if the lists are equivalent (have the same characters, same number of times), then sorting them would make the comparison straight-forward since order doesn't matter.

See: [https://leetcode.com/problems/valid- anagram/solution](https://leetcode.com/problems/valid-anagram/solution)

<comment><USER6> ah yes but of course, probably did not have enough coffee yet when I read it :) thank you

But then perhaps it is worth storing it sorted ( or as well if original value is important) and making it even faster?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I applaud the effort put in for performance, but why not just enqueue the change notification and do the sends on the back end? This sort of fiddly process is exactly why deferred action is appropriate.

<comment><USER9> You're not wrong, but I think starting with structuring data to be reasonably performant is always the best first step. You can always make it deferred later if you want or need. This way you don't hammer your DB and leave weird structural issues in your model.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> TL;DR: a short article describing a normalised schema, with big performance gains when denormalising data.

Article is very application-specific, but is perhaps a reminder that denormalisation can be useful when working with relational databases.

<comment><USER11> I wouldn't describe anything with a JSON kitchen sink field as "normalized".</comment></comment>


Identifying Music Genres from Spotify Using Clarifai's API and Google Prediction - <AUTHOR> http://apassant.net/2015/05/14/album-covers-music-deep-learning/ <comment><USER2> Well I thought it was parsing actual music, but in fact it's

1\. grab an artist's top-10 albums

2\. generate genre-tags from artist-tags

3\. Cloud-based classification with Google Prediction

4\. Guessing an artist genre based on their album covers</comment>


Ask HN: Good non-fiction books without filler? - <AUTHOR> As probably many of you, I notice my attention span being diminished by the usage of internet and social media.
I set a goal for myself to focus on reading more books and long-form articles, but I'm finding it harder to find those which don't spend a lot of words on filler. (as discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17803873)
What are some books/authors which are straight to the point and the reader doesn't have to wade through pages of personal stories to illustrate a simple point? <comment><USER2> It sounds like maybe you would like the genre of aphorisms. By definition, there's no filler at all.

My favourites (which are also mostly those with the highest reputation, don't just take my word for it) are:

La Rochefoucauld's _Maxims_ \- scathing about _your_ character and it's fabric of vanity and self-love. I find it very funny, for all the terrible things he's always saying about me. It was all polished in the 17th french salons to say the most with the fewest words.

La Bruyere - _Characters_ \- slightly longer average length, mostly less savage than La R, still he knows how to sink the boot into humanity, men, women. An example:

 _Children are haughty, disdainful, quick to anger, envious, curious, self- seeking, lazy, fickle, timid, intemperate, untruthful, secretive; they laugh and weep readily; the most trivial subjects give them immoderate delight or bitter distress; they wish not to be hurt, but they like hurting others: they are men already._

Didn't see that coming, did you. :-)

Lichtenberg - _Aphorisms_ \- He was a scientist, thinker, wondering about everything, questioning everything.

All these were favourites of Nietzsche, whose work contains a lot of aphorisms, although it's mostly written in self-contained paragraphs. (except _Zarathustra_ and _Untimely Essays_ )

Gracian's _Art of Worldly Wisdom_ also is written in short paragraphs, and I'd say filler-free. It's a guide to living, maybe the best one I know.

There are a lot of wonderful aphorisms in Emerson, Boswell's Johnson, Kierkegaard, Oscar Wilde etc although I guess they "spend a lot of words on filler", but I thought I'd mention them.

</comment><comment><USER3> Best-selling authors seem to be aware of this trend, because I keep coming across excellent but very, very short non-fiction books. Among those I can remember reading and would recommend, these are published in the past <5 years and are <150 pages (or <5 hour audiobook):

\- Discrimination and Disparities By: Thomas Sowell

\- A Colony in a Nation: Chris Hayes

\- Between the World and Me: Ta-Nehisi Coates

(three very different takes on race relations in America)

\- Astrophysics for People in a Hurry: Neil deGrasse Tyson

\- Seven Brief Lessons on Physics: Carlo Rovelli

\- When Breath Becomes Air: Paul Kalanithi

\- On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century: Timothy Snyder

\- Requiem for the American Dream: The Principles of Concentrated Wealth and Power: Noam Chomsky

\- Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now: Jaron Lanier

[edit: linebreaks]

<comment><USER4> That's a big advantage of ebooks: a book that would have been padded to fit a certain length/size slot can now be the size that the subject requires, and no more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Read The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. It is available for free online. It's straight to the point. Each line of this book can be used as a quote.

Other books I found without filler is 48 laws of power. It is a also a good read.

<comment><USER6> I would actually suggest buying the Hays translation of Meditations instead of reading the free versions. The language in every other version is overly verbose and archaic.

<comment><USER7> Indeed, I agree. I'm ~70% through the translation by Gregory Hays. FWIW I've picked up this translation after some research; there are several of them. Hays' translation also as a nice reference on related reading in the book's introduction chapter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The Victorian Internet By Tom Standage, solid read on the history and progression of communication tech up through the dropping of the transatlantic cable. To the point with lots of history I did not know before reading it.

Forever Young by John W. Young; haven't quite finished it yet but its great so far. He is perhaps one of the most prolific astronauts to have served at NASA and has lots of great stories.

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions By Edwin A. Abbott; Its short but its a solid read (especially considering its age) great thought piece on multidimensional space.

</comment><comment><USER9> How to lie with statistics. Oldie but goodie, very short.

</comment><comment><USER10> The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

</comment><comment><USER11> Im not affiliated, but I think www.blinkist.com is excellent. The summaries are very, very short, and if you like the message, you can buy the book. It has both audio and text as well.

</comment><comment><USER12> The Master Switch by Tim Wu. Absolutely phenomenal, and only more impressive because he covers > 100 years in communications tech in < 400 pages.

</comment><comment><USER13> _The Elements of Style_ by William Strunk and E. B. White

 _The Language Instinct_ by Steven Pinker

 _The Problem of Pain_ by C. S. Lewis

</comment><comment><USER14> A Brief History of Time, by Hawking</comment>


Over 200GB of Traffic a day? Hacked? Try this. - <AUTHOR>

Check ProxyRequests On in your apache configuration files. Turn that ProxyRequest Off<p>Apparently I had this setting to On and someone was using my server as a Forward Proxy!!! OUCH. <comment><USER2> Any idea if this is on by default?

Thanks for the heads-up! I'd vote it up, but I'm not really sure this is the right place for this. Useful information, to be sure, but eehhhh....

</comment><comment><USER3> According to proxy.conf:

            #turning ProxyRequests on and allowing proxying from all may allow
            #spammers to use your proxy to send email.</comment>