One in five American men don't work: Where's the outrage? - <AUTHOR> http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2011/07/25/unemployment-job-skills-training/ <comment><USER2> I have experienced this first hand. I have applied for a LOT of jobs in the last 2 years and one of two things happens: They don't talk to me, or they do, and I sail past the preliminary interviews only to get rejected after the background check. I am not a felon, a terrorist, or a scourge of society. I have bad credit.(Funny/sad aside, I once went to Best Buy to see if I could get a card to finance something with the idea of improving my credit score. I was rejected summarily. I was trying to buy a toaster. I literally can't finance a toaster.) This scarlet letter had precluded me from any job paying a living wage. And that's why I'm retraining myself. No one cares what the FICO score of a talented software engineer is. At least, that's what I desperately hope the case is. For recruiters out there: Do you care about the credit of a potential coder?

<comment><USER3> I've always wondered why an _employer_ would demand good credit. Even if the person is a spendthrift, what does it matter so long as they perform their job?

My employee could be living in a shack having had every single item of worth repossessed... but if they can do their job well, why wouldn't I hire them?

In any case, I know what you mean - I'm from Canada, and arrived in the US after the financial meltdown and subsequent tightening of the credit belt. I _still_ don't have a credit rating since I couldn't convince _any major bank_ in the USA to give me a credit card. Yes, this includes secured credit cards (i.e., you leave a month's credit limit with the bank in cash, if you miss your bill at all, they take the entire sum... aka _zero risk for the bank_ ) And yes, my credit in Canada is stellar - but that counts for absolutely _zip_ in this country.

It's not until _very_ recently that I was able to flash about an employer's name and convince one of them to cut me some slack. It'll be months still before my credit score populates - this has made renting apartments, and just about _everything_ a nightmare.

The only way I've been able to skate by is by flashing an offer letter and pay stubs showing I make >3x the US median income... imagine if my pay was dead average... I'd be fucked.

<comment><USER4> At a guess, it probably indicates that the employee is a higher than an average risk of engaging in fraud (to pay off debts), and it probably does, again on average, speak to their discipline, maturity, life skills, etc.

The trouble with that thinking is of course the multitude of reasons that someone can get into debt through no fault of their own - especially in the US with health care - the fact that people often mature faster than their credit score recovers, not to mention situations like your own where there's no credit score to begin with.

I'm glad that in my native Australia, as another poster pointed out, it's illegal to discriminate based on credit score for hiring purposes. It seems that the small amount of good businesses may get from this discrimination is way out balanced by the harm it causes society in general - though obviously I'm preaching to the choir here :)

<comment><USER5> Agreed. Also the less you're paid, and the less responsibility you have, the more you're scrutinized. Maybe because they can, maybe because at that level there are things you can physically steal, or break. Also _maybe_ (please, I'm speculating) at that level there are likely to be more irresponsible people, and the time and expense of credit, drug and security checks becomes worthwhile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think the article does a pretty good job. I've figured several times that there is no "talent shortage" but a "training shortage": companies want people with skills they learn on the job but are unwilling to actually train anyone.

So you've got a bunch of companies sitting around waiting for a miracle to happen. Maybe HR imagines that a Google product exec will fall from the sky and accept $40k a year.

<comment><USER7> Even traditionally 'entry level' jobs that historically don't need a four-year degree are like this these days - secretary/receptionist jobs are almost always looking for people with two or three years of prior experience.

I wonder how much of this is due to the job market. Is it a supply and demand issue, where there are simply so many applicants that HR can sit back and wait for the perfect candidate? Or is the reluctance to hire less-experienced workers a long-term behavior shift that will stick around even if the worker supply dries up?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Uh, the outrage is over on reddit. Let's leave it to them, please. There are plenty of things to be outraged about to the point we could innondate the site with them.

Down the path of "outrage!" lies discussions about abortion, gay rights, appropriate levels of taxation, health care systems and any number of other topics that people feel VERY STRONGLY about.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm surprised the figure quoted in the opening paragraph would include incarcerated men along with those on disability and unemployed.

According to wikipedia, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_Sta...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States) 2.3 million people were incarcerated in the US, and 93% are male, so that's 2.1 million men.

The article also says 4.3 Americans have been jobless for months if not years. If this number includes those who are in prison, that means that nearly half of what is counted as unemployment is actually within the prison system.

Part of me says there are way too many people in prison, but the other side says, what if these people weren't in prison? Would the actual number of people competing for jobs be higher?

<comment><USER10> Simple arithmetic says yes, there would be more competition for jobs.

But you're talking about a dramatic change in US public policy. A first-order approximation is not sufficient, and higher-order approximations depend heavily on what guesses you want to make about the social outcomes.

<comment><USER11> > Simple arithmetic says yes, there would be more competition for jobs.

But there would also be more demand since those same people would also be buying things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'd wager close to another 1 in 5 works for the government directly or indirectly. And I assume we're not including retirees in any of this.

The ratio of retirees to workers continues to get worse. In the 1940s, there were 42 workers per retiree. Today there are 3.3 workers per retiree.

So you have a shrinking group of people who are actually producing (total workforce minus unemployed, minus goverment workers, minus workers who exist due to government purchasing) and a growing number of people who get a chunk of that production.

This does not end well.

<comment><USER13> I am curious as to why you state that government employees are not producing?

<comment><USER14> _Some_ of them produce useful goods and services, but at a drastically lower efficiency than the private sector due to lack of competition and economic incentives (spending other people´s money). Still it´s good that _someone_ is planning out the roads and running fire departments, even if they´re bad at it. On the other hand, the government also produces a lot of counterproductive ´services´ like war, financial meltdowns, and software patents. It´s in no way obvious that government employees as a whole do less harm than good.

<comment><USER15> I think that your position is ideological and not correct. The government provides institutions that lower risk to the rest of the economy and enable more stability and growth.

Is regulatory capture a problem at some agencies? Sure. Are some departments outdated or ineffective? Sure. But it is irresponsible to look at a few cases and claim that the entire government is a problem.

You want to see less government? Visit Yemen or gangster Russia

<comment><USER14> "You want to see less government? Visit Yemen or gangster Russia"

Quite a strange statement given that the governments of both those countries are central to their problems and deeply involved in crime and corruption themselves. In Yemen the government employees shoot innocent people in broad daylight with impunity. Real libertarian haven they've got there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "or _getting by_ on the paychecks of wives"

This is pretty rampant sexism for 2011. Don't want it to go unnoticed.

<comment><USER17> In what way? Not that I disagree, but please expand on your statement?

<comment><USER16> Sure.

It's been more than a generation since women started making more money than men in some households due to increases in equality between the sexes. The phrasing and positioning used implies that a stay-at-home dad is something that we should be reacting to as an economic problem.

In other words, it required the assumption that men are the proper breadwinners in heterosexual households.

<comment><USER17> Perhaps the article writer was making the assumption you imply, but there's potentially more to it than that.

Members of households all need to contribute, and while I am neither female nor married, I have heard from many married females that unemployed men do not generally tend to assume the duties of housekeeping. That is to say, the wife winds up both breadwinning and housekeeping, and the man does not contribute. This _is_ broken.

It's sexist of me to generalize (and certainly I hope if I wind up married and unemployed, I won't let my partner take all the burden), and it may well not be what the author was thinking of, but if we take feminine anecdotes at face value there are more reasons to encourage men to be breadwinners than simply because it's their role.

<comment><USER18> Hear hear. Also, besides that, there is still a fairly widespread (if minor) stigma to making less than one's wife. It's not necessarily the writer making that judgement.

<comment><USER19> The stigma isn't that minor, among other things it is a significant cause of divorce.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> So if a tool made in China cost $20 and the same kind made in USA cost $100, which one do you think people are going to buy at the hardware store (even if the one made in China lasts 1/4th as long).

What if there was a tax that made the one made in China cost $70 - you think the one made in USA would have a fighting chance? I think so. It would create a whole bunch of jobs because there would be less impulse to move jobs overseas.

What if that $50 was used for single payer health care so that "job providers" didn't have pay for health insurance or play that game and compete with the international market.

<comment><USER12> You know what happens if we tax the hell out of cheap overseas goods? Everything gets more expensive. Cost of living skyrockets and wages would have to go up commensurately if people were going to survive/thrive. Businesses who raised wages would have to curtail hiring because more of their revenues were going to wages.

Any they'd keep shipping jobs overseas because of the healthy margins selling in overseas markets. Start taxing that stuff too and see how many corporations decide that being a US company isn't so awesome anymore...

<comment><USER21> Right, and you're not even discussing the subsequent tariff war. Other countries would tax the hell out of American goods, global demand for our goods will fall, we'd produce less, companies would make less money, and people would lose their jobs.

<comment><USER20> We barely sell anything overseas as it is - what exactly are they going to "tax the hell out of" ?

Have you seen the mountain of shipping containers in our ports from inbounds with no outbounds? They are stacked a dozen high over HUNDREDS of acres of land. No exaggeration.

We are the only potential consumers of our own products - because every other job has been shipped overseas that can easily shipped. Most of what is left is services and assembling components made elsewhere (auto industry).

<comment><USER21> I'm tired of hearing this from people. The US exported more than every country except China and Germany last year.[0] We're the leading producer of airplane components and engines, and we still produce a high volume of heavy equipment that goes overseas.

[0] <http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/eco_exp-economy-exports>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> On top of that 20%, there are people that are working part time to make ends meet. So in reality, the number of people that need full time jobs is much higher.

</comment><comment><USER23> What's really interesting here is that companies are reporting awesome earnings[1], yet they're still resting on their laurels when it comes to hiring.

And, I think everyone _is_ outraged when it comes to what's going on in Washington right now.

[1] <http://www.cnbc.com/id/18038403/>

<comment><USER24> Or, to put it another way, companies just don't need as many unskilled workers as they did a decade ago.

<comment><USER6> All companies need unskilled people: you train them so your business can expand. That's where global supply chain managers and database programmers came from originally--and in many cases still do--they don't fall from the clouds.

The issue is that a lot of these companies are only expanding overseas, so they're not really ready to hire and train people. Much of their profits come from cutting back on their junior staff, from laying off the next generation of skilled workers.

<comment><USER11> > you train them so your business can expand

That only worked when people stayed with a single employer for years. These days they would take the training and get a better job somewhere else.

<comment><USER6> Most businesses take about 6 months to train people, it seems, from informal polling of acquaintances.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The Growing Divide Between Silicon Valley And Unemployed America [http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/16/tale-of-two-countries- silic...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/16/tale-of-two-countries-silicon- valley-unemployed/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Okay, it sucks. What do you want me to do about it?

There are not many obvious sustainable solutions that don't involve the government suddenly deciding to reallocate pork funding to major public works or otherwise taking unlikely actions which would dramatically alter the current climate.

Meanwhile, it's a good time to start a business. It probably won't create many jobs and it might not take off, but at a minimum it will be good experience and it will look better than a few blank years on the resume.

<comment><USER26> Hmm, just had a thought - wouldnt it make sense, based on what you are saying, for people to just lie and say that they started a business which failed during the time they were unemployed?

<comment><USER10> Most likely, that will just end up wasting everyone's time when it turns out that you do not, in fact, have any experience whatsoever with business development or product design.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> There's lots of outrage - it's called the Tea Party.

<comment><USER28> and it's summarily laughed at.

edit: not that it doesn't deserve to be.

<comment><USER29> From the little I know about the Tea Party it seems to be a dumping ground for anyone who ever thought that the government didn't listen to them. From people that think we should ban gay people from 'merica, to people that think that socializing health care is an Obama 'Nazi policy.'</comment></comment></comment>


About $250K is needed for a company get to sustainability - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@jproco/you-need-250-000-to-start-a-company-886298e8cf7e <comment><USER2> This is a silly and myopic article. That sounds harsh but I can't think of a nicer description. Moreover, the author himself describes doing it for far less ($10k). I don't mean to be a curmudgeon here, but IMO, I think articles like this hurt more than help. Tossing out a not low but semi-attainable number is just clickbait.

In reality the amount of money varies by many orders of magnitude. It can be as low as $1k (your basic legal costs and some cheap hosting) to as high as $100mil (you need facilities, manufacturing, warehousing, retail channels, etc, etc). Each business is different and how much you will need to "get to sustainability" will vary based on the market niche, strategy, competition, positioning, market landscape, timing, regulatory burdens, etc, etc.

Hell, even for something fairly well defined business concept like "start a bar in a medium-sized midwestern US city" the costs can vary by an order of magnitude depending on the specifics.

Better advice: research your market and plan out what you think you'll need. Estimate the various expenses that lead to revenues, including the time-delays between when you spend and when you receive funds. Then do it again for a less-than-rosy scenario. Finally accept that your guesstimate is probably wrong and go for it anyway!

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually I didn't say I did it for $10K, I said I'd DO it for 10 dollars.

I get you. I'm talking about the difference between calling something a company and building a sustainable company from zero. $250K is arbitrary because any number would be arbitrary, as you note, but it's also a good minimum baseline to shoot for.

Any one of the caveats I discuss in the article could change the number or how that money is aggregated or how long it takes to spend it.

<comment><USER2> _In between Automated Insights and my current startup Spiffy, I built Teaching Startup with $10,000 out of my own pocket, 60 hours a week of sweat equity [...]_

Past tense implies that you did it (and it's awesome that you did)...

More to the point, if "$250k is arbitrary because any number would be arbitrary" then it's not a good minimum baseline to shoot for, it's just a random number. Better to actually think through how the business will work, what resources you can draw upon, what your expenses will be, how your revenues will come in, etc. And then estimate your financing requirements based on the specifics of the business.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah. I see the distinction now. That company failed though, so $10K was not enough, that was stuck in my mind. Thanks for the tip.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I feel like this is focused on companies that are designed to scale quickly and eventually get huge. There are a wide array of companies that don't want to scale that quickly (e.g. lifestyle businesses, like a service business). OP basically said it's what's necessary to get to series A funding, but if you don't particularly care about getting venture capital, then that figure is irrelevant.

I think a better title would be "$250k is needed to get to series A funding", since that's basically what the article it about, and many (most?) startups will never seek funding outside bank loans and whatnot.

<comment><USER4> So much this. I envy companies like Fog Creek Software that were bootstrapped and he can run the company however he wants - profitably.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The price has gone down it seems. A few years ago I'd estimated it at a million, but acknowledged that technology could be a multiplier. So maybe a quarter million isn't that far off my estimate. But $250K adjusted for individual wizardry does lay bare just how daunting that climb is.

Information technology is wizardry, but it's the upstart in a land where finance has basically been Sauron for hundreds of years. Engineers believe they can beat finance by working smarter, by learning more powerful spells and correspondences. It fails more often than not.

When it does work, watching successful startups slowly sell their soul to the devil by incorporating finance strategies is a bit of a hobby of mine. Invariably they take their competitive advantage, the goodwill they've built up with their customers / workers, and commoditize it, making it as close to a negotiable financial instrument as possible.

Uber drivers are no longer people, they are financial resources with dollar values. Uber sold them the vision of a life bounded only by your ambition to enable it to reach for the brass ring, then clawed it back once it had it out of sheer, pure greed.

People who freely gave their time and attention to make Facebook something more interesting and mainstream than existing social networks which at the time seemed to be trending inexorably towards ever more niche audiences found that time and attention farmed, commoditized, and sold.

Watching new money slowly morph into old money, the moral adventures of the new demigods, as well as the public's unholy fascination with them, better than any Marvel movie could possibly be. Better, because I can participate in the morality play just by opening up my phone and calling an Uber.

These truly are interesting times.

<comment><USER6> > People who freely gave their time and attention to make Facebook something > more interesting and mainstream than existing social networks which at the > time seemed to be trending inexorably towards ever more niche audiences > found that time and attention farmed, commoditized, and sold.

I assume you're talking about the users. If so you could argue that they were given a service free of charge. That service enabled them to fulfill some need/whim. They're weren't necessarily interested in making Facebook better. They just wanted to use it for what it could do for them. In return Facebook users their data.

You're right though. These are interesting times.

<comment><USER5> > If so you could argue that they were given a service free of charge.

Sure. And so are Uber drivers. But the only real way the service continues to be of value is if the value proposition remains the same. Facebook and Uber made a promise, maybe not explicitly, but implicitly, that the service would continue to offer the same value on Year 10 as it did on Year 1.

And those early adopters, those without which the companies could not have gotten as rich as they have gotten, bought that promise, hook, line, and sinker. They probably didn't realize that the platform they were building, the devil whose promises they bought, would turn into the monster that it has. Heck, some probably still busy themselves defending that monster as we speak.

To make this clearer, the trade for the early adopters isn't just for what those early adopters immediately got for it, but also for a promise. Without the promise, nobody would bother. This is what makes a startup so hard to get off the ground in the first place. I have to either not care about the money or really buy into the promise in order to fund a Kickstarter. I have to trust your company's SaaS offering before I'll add it as a dependency to my own business or my own life. Without a promise of future value, no company would ever get off the ground.

Everybody is complicit, some more than others. That's what makes a morality play so riveting, you are participating just by watching it. When I call an Uber, I sell a little bit of my soul to make my life a little bit more convenient. The nature of technology and modernity is such that you cannot avoid making such choices. All you can do is make them anyway and hope you don't get screwed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is definitely a low-end estimate. To build a good product takes a team of four senior people (2 back-end, 1 front-end, 1 UX) 6-12 months including the iteration and modifications. Let's say the average salary for a senior person is $120k / year + health insurance and benefits, office, etc. We're already at $240k for 6 months or $480k for 12 months NOT INCLUDING health insurance and benefits.

Don't tell me that a dev shop can do it much faster/cheaper. I've worked with a few of the TOP dev shops out there and you always get more bang for your buck with FTE who have a vested interest in what you are building.

We haven't even discussed sales and marketing yet.

This is just the cost of shipping something that works, not the cost of getting to Product/Market Fit.

All-in I would say getting to Product/Market Fit can be anywhere from $1M - $6M for SOFTWARE depending on the complexity of the new market.

<comment><USER4> I would never say that having less people can do it _faster_ but probably _cheaper_. Spit balling here, but say four people could do it in 6 months (the aggressive end of your range), what if two people - one UX and one full stack developer took 12 months worse case. I would think:

\- While I don't know many "full stack developers" who are good at UX, I know plenty that can do front end _development_ and back end _development_ pretty well. I know a few that can go all the way down and create a decent cloud infrastructure with databases and do devops (raises hand).

\- By combining tasks, you don't have to double pay health insurance and benefits for four people.

\- Once you pay over the Social Security maximum, you don't have to pay the 6.2% employer side of Social Security, saving a little more money if you pay one or two superstars.

\- The whole "Mythical Man Month" thing starts to work in your favor the less communication overhead you have between developers.

\- Do most sites have a front end UX complicated enough that you need a full time UX guy at first? Can you outsource that?

<comment><USER8> A recurring theme on HN is how difficult it is for experienced technical people to identify talent and hire them. If you unlock the secret for identifying even a mildly competent UX/full stack dev combo and then convincing them to work on a startup idea we're all ears.

<comment><USER4> I can go through my LinkedIn connections and find a couple dozen full stack developers with years of experience that also know how to optimize the data tier for a small to medium size business.

I know fewer that have dev ops experience, they might have developed it over the years.

I know only one who is a full stack developer who has all of the qualities above and have a deep understanding of cloud architecture - that's me.

Most developers I know haven't focused on cloud architecture the way that I have. They became team leads after a few years. They moved up in salary by becoming leads. I'm on my way to being an overpriced consultant.

I don't know but a few UX people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It depends on the type of company.

For software, 250k won't get you much in terms of engineering resources on either of the US coasts: maybe 2 people for a year, plus cloud costs and overhead... _maybe._

If you're outsourcing everything, possibly this could work... Though probably not if it's your first try: you really need to know how to manage your outside folks to avoid getting fleeced.

Then once you build the product, you have to market and sell it. The resources and time required is often underestimated.

I'm not convinced.

</comment><comment><USER10> You need two piles of money to start a business (and let's look generally outside the box of a tech startup):

1: the money needed for initial purchase of equipment, licensing, real estate, etc.

2: three-years worth of operating expenses.

I have experience starting a brewery and two Montessori schools, and Number 2 is definitely the hard one.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. A lot of people miss #2 and that's my point. Like I said, my first answer was I can start a company for ten bucks. Great. I've started a company. To truly stand it up and make it last, whether it's technology or gardening, takes time and money, all of it equivalent to about $250K. Whether that comes from investment, sweat, or out of pocket is what I'm elaborating on. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have a tiny marketplace start up in the EV space and a family member wants to invest $60k. I don't need the money BUT i am at a point where i need to build v2 and add more features to make more sales with different offers. After reading this article i am not sure if it applies to my situation. I don't know if the family member's $60k investment will be enough and not sure what his expectations are in terms of ROI and if i should just wait and ask for $250k to build v2. I have a friend who can build it at a reduced rate. Kinda confused on what direction to take. The comments are very useful.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you can plan on how you're going to spend that $60K and those plans will get you to a new level of revenue that will provide a good return on the $60K and you're not giving up more of the company than you're comfortable with, then consider the investment.

What I'm saying here is that deciding to take investment should be weighed on the merits of the investment itself. It's part of the equation, not the whole equation.

<comment><USER11> Thank you. I will take any advice i can get. I have to make a decision like this week. ;-) merit of his investment is he expects an ROI or a piece of sales OR both. I'm not sure i understand the part of the equation vs the whole equation. :-(

<comment><AUTHOR> So if you think of $250K as the cost to get the business to sustainable, then $60K is part of it, a bunch of your own money is part of it, and your sweat and and anyone who works for you for equity is another part. Think about time too. It could be $250K up front sourced by investors, or $250K over 3 years combining all the sources. Or somewhere in between. There is nuance. Good luck!

<comment><USER11> Thank you! I really appreciate it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It depends entirely on the founding team the product you're trying to achieve, but $250K seems about right. I started a SaaS company last year and have grown it to a mid six-figure run rate. Even though it worked out, it wasn't the right way to do it. If I could go back in time and pick a dollar amount of raised day one, it's probably $350K.

Startup outcomes are fairly binary, so just raise the money you need to operate correctly as soon as you can.

</comment><comment><USER13> I don't think this number is reasonable if you are going for a tech solution, especially if you trying to build something fairly complex. Less then a half of what strong SWE is paid in Silicon Valley... or almost total of one who works in a wrong place, or waits for stocks.

That is why startups can't afford strong engineers, unless they want to invest their time for a chance.

</comment><comment><USER14> With that amount of money, I can live 100 years. Housing, insurance, food, every basic need covered (and I ll own my house for goods, no loan).

Why the hell would I start a company ?

<comment><USER9> You're saying you can live for $200 USD/month. Where are you located?

<comment><USER14> I did the math "a bit" quickly, but my point is that you can live on that money for a long time if you save it well.

I m from Belgium. If you own your house here, 700€ is enough for a month, and with 100.000€ you can have a little house if you can afford to live far from the big cities. I wont do much with 700€, but I will not starve. You can even save money if you have a garden and get free food from it.

It isn't sustainable I know that. But if you have that amount of money, why the hell start a company with the stress and the I don't know, 90% chance of losing your money ? Get a part time job and enjoy your life...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> YC invests about 120k at a minimum, doesn't it?

</comment><comment><USER16> Non-paywalled link: [https://outline.com/2b9gJa](https://outline.com/2b9gJa)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is important to me because I'm pretty sure I did include the non- paywalled link and I always do.

[https://medium.com/@jproco/you-need-250-000-to-start-a- compa...](https://medium.com/@jproco/you-need-250-000-to-start-a- company-886298e8cf7e?source=friends_link&sk=9fbcc16a6994db38cf8ddfc99c31111b)

This is what Medium calls a "friend link" and it should work for anyone whether a Medium member or not.

<comment><USER16> I definitely receive this message:

"You've reached the end of your free member preview for this month. Become a member now for $5/month to read this story and get unlimited access to all of the best stories on Medium."

<comment><AUTHOR> So support came up empty on why that happened:

"I can confirm this is the correct friend link. If your readers access the story via this link, they will always be able to view it, even if they are out of their free monthly previews. There aren't really any limits on this."</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What would it take for you to take action? - <AUTHOR>

In the light of the PRISM 'scandal', what specific events would it take for you to significantly change your life and actions?
It's easy to change the goal post. Answers to this question could be enlightening both for oneself as well as for future generations. <comment><USER2> I'd like to know my action is leveraged, or helps provide leverage to others. I send emails to my elected officials (personalized like a boss) when I see an effort that starts to gain traction and I can see the power of numbers. If one of the big companies, or a couple of them, came together to say "we're going to make a stand, we need you behind us" I would be there loud and proud, I would email and share and talk about it in person. I want to be part of a movement, and I want to know that my effort isn't wasted or worthless. Give me that and you'll have my energy and voice.

<comment><USER3> That's pretty much my plan. Email is too easily ignored. I'm going to start sending letters to Feinstein (Her unapolegetic stance has me particularly annoyed at her. [http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/06/06/18796204-nsa- snoo...](http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/06/06/18796204-nsa-snooping-has- foiled-multiple-terror-plots-feinstein?lite)) and my other local reps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hardest part is figuring out what's going on. Second hardest is figuring out what to do about it.

My path has been:

concerned bystander, protester, activist, lobbyist, and now reformer (aspirational thus far).

My advice to everyone is

#1 - Find your tribe. Working alone is too hard.

#2 - Learn how to organize, message, lobby.

<comment><USER5> I think asking powerful organizations to give you privacy is a lost cause. If you want something, you have to take it. I think making cryptographic tools more widespread and easier to use will have a more practical impact.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Another way to ask this is - what would cause you to take advantage of your 2nd Amendment rights and refresh the tree of liberty?

<comment><USER3> I don't think this is a binary choice: a. do nothing b. take up arms and revolt

But now may be the time that we need to actively take action so we don't have to exercise said rights at some point in the future. Frankly if they are eavesdropping on everything it would be incredibly difficult to organize at some point in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Complete proof that the government is using things like PRISM in a big brother sort of way, even though I dislike what they're doing now, I don't know what they're using it for - just yet.

<comment><AUTHOR> What would a concrete example of a "big brother sort of way" be?

<comment><USER7> Using the information as a basis for arrest or prosecution is what I'd call 'big brother'. But I'm not 100% confident in that definition

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Being a pleb is a mindset established over time. I think I'd have had to be raised differently to be drawn to high stakes action.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> As for myself: I don't know. That's part of the problem and the reason I asked this question. I'm very curious to see where people's threshold is.</comment>


The best American colleges are still filled with students from rich families - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/592646/the-best-american-colleges-are-still-overwhelmingly-filled-with-students-from-rich-families/ <comment><USER2> I'm a well off parent with a kid about to head to college. I don't find these numbers surprising in the least. Here's why.

My kid, while bright enough, has a lot of advantages:

\- good schools

\- parents who care and are involved in his education

\- tutoring

\- ADHD medication

\- We're seeing if we can get him more time for tests, he processes slowly but gets good results given enough time (I was similar)

Contrast that with some poor kid, no ADHD drugs, no tutoring, parents are too busy trying to put food on the table, they are almost certainly in a crappy school district, the kid is probably working to help put food on the table.

If my kid was poor there isn't a chance in hell that Harvard would look at him. It would take a super human to live as a poor kid and somehow be noticed by an elite university. Any poor kid who makes it into a place like that has my utmost respect.

<comment><USER3> It is awful that activist parents can get their kids higher test scores by requesting accommodations. The tests are (inappropriatelty) designed to measure speed, but a minority of in-group families get that aspect of the test waived to give their kids an edge, instead of making the tests loosely timed for all students.

Not to mention the performance enhancing drug aspect, behavior that is banned in sports but encouraged in academic games.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "America's elite is producing children who not only get ahead, but deserve to do so: they meet the standards of meritocracy better than their peers, and are thus worthy of the status they inherit."

From: [http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21640316-children- ric...](http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21640316-children-rich-and- powerful-are-increasingly-well-suited-earning-wealth-and-power)

HN discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8933562](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8933562)

</comment><comment><USER5> I have heard Harvard's student body composition strategy described as "wealth and high achievers", which makes a certain amount of sense if you're hoping to be a business catalyst that gets donations down the line.

Slightly downscale, public flagships deeply rely on rich students paying full price to subsidize everyone else. If you wanted more poor kids to have a chance, you might have to pay higher taxes.

<comment><USER6> Also, a big problem with public universities is that because they are so big and inefficient with money, and that they do not have enough money to begin with, to make up for it they accept foreigners who (with their parents factory money) are easily willing to pay DOUBLE the regular out of state tuition to have their children go to a good American school. On top of that, these children then fly back and don't continue to the country that established these schools in the first place - thus sapping our overall academic levels.

<comment><USER7> There's a lot to this, but a university like UC Berkeley does educate far, far more undergraduates than a very elite private like Stanford or Harvard, and enrolls more low income students than the entire ivy league combined, something you can say about several different UC campuses. Although UC gets support from the state, the massive endowments and favored tax status of the very elite privates may be more valuable than direct state support, with fewer strings attached.

The UCs are inefficient with money, but think about how much places like Stanford and Harvard are able to spend on an undergraduate class size that might be a quarter to a fifth the size of a UC, with a lower percentage of low income students as well.

If you consider scale an important factor, measuring a university by how many students it can educate in addition to how well they do after graduation… you know, I think the UCs may be a far more "efficient" model than the ivies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't know where I heard this but if these elite schools are really that good, why haven't we commercialized them and made them even more accessible? ... Food for thought - I don't know what I think of that statement myself to be fair.

<comment><USER8> Increasing admission means they need more professors. Assuming an elite university has the best professors around, any addition ones are going to be of lesser quality. Now the school is putting out worse students because their professors aren't as good as they used to be. Their quality of research drops because the students and professors suck and their reputation as an elite school goes away. Additionally, if you open the admissions more, you will effectively get students with lower grades. The more easy it is to get into a school, the less people think of it. You are catering to the lowest denominator.

<comment><USER3> An Ivy league education owes very little to professors. Professors are hired for research skills, not undergraduate teaching. Teaching is famously poor, except in the small minority of research assistantship cases.</comment></comment></comment>


FAQs Regarding Filing of Bankruptcy Claims by MTGOX Bitcoin Exchange Users [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.mtgox.com/img/pdf/201504_faq_en.pdf

<comment><AUTHOR> This document is also interesting: [https://www.mtgox.com/img/pdf/20150422_report.pdf](https://www.mtgox.com/img/pdf/20150422_report.pdf) (scroll to the second half for English translation).</comment>


Fully automatic freighter to dock with ISS - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12554470

<comment><USER2> Wow! I had no idea the technology was there. It really seems like science fiction.

<comment><USER3> Of course, _they_ wouldn't tell you about it, but Russians have been doing automatic docking for the past 20 years:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurs_%28docking_system%29></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Any hackers from the UK (or Europe)? - <AUTHOR>

I've been wondering what the startup scene is like in the UK, or Europe in general. I'm a college student in Seattle and was thinking of moving to the Valley after I finish (for grad school possibly). But now I'm thinking about going to Europe, mainly the UK.
This is to anyone outside of the US really. What is it like as a hacker outside of the US? How is the startup scene or tech scene like where you live? What are the advantages and disadvantages of starting a startup, from your experience, in your area? And if you had the choice, would you move to the Valley?
Also, this is my firs post, so I apologies in advance if something is not right. <comment><USER2> Europe is great, but I wouldn't recommend it for startups. It's fine for tech (especially open source), but the marriage of tech and business that exists in the US in certain spots (like SV) just hasn't gelled here yet.

<comment><USER3> Hi David, can you please say more about why you don't recommend Europe? How's your own company's experience been?

No doubt Silicon valley is ahead as far as startup hubs go, but I don't think we are helping the business community in Europe by just accepting that as an unchangeable situation.

<comment><USER2> Well, first of all, there's the standard "Europe is not one country" disclaimer, let's get that out of the way. The UK and Ireland are probably better than continental Europe in terms of startup costs.

My point is basically that, all other things being equal, for an American (such as the guy who posted this), you're going to have an easier time of it staying home, since 'home' is a pretty good place to do a startup.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm just starting up in London. I only know one startup here, but that's just because I haven't bothered to look yet. My guess is that in Europe, London is one of the big startup hubs. Last.fm was based here. Cambridge also has a decent startup scene. HN user pclark's startup www.broadersheet.com is based there.

Personally I think London's an awesome city to live in. Given it's not Silicon Valley, but it's a vibrant exciting city. I love working here. I'm not looking for funding but from what I hear there's a ton of venture capital too here.

Drop me a line if you come to London.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks.

Yeah, I heard the UK was an awesome place to live. And personally, I am a firm believer in bootstrapping startups, so venture capital isn't the first thing on my mind. It's good to know that London is not far behind. And good luck with your startup!

<comment><USER4> there is an american startup in Cambridge that are considering moving here permanently for their startup. They moved here because of the Red Gate Springboard programme.

Let me know if you wanna pick their brains about USA vs UK, and I'll intro you.

<comment><AUTHOR> That would be great. I'd love to hear their opinion on the UK vs US.

<comment><USER4> send me an email. in my profile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> comparing SV and the UK (where I live atm), it's very different.

in SV you will be meeting people working on a startup idea of some kind literally everywhere, people are focused on maximizing potential upside rather than minimizing downside, employees are willing to take some risk, and you have an actual market for investment (i.e. there is a sizable number of equity investors who will compete). i also think that UK people lack the level of passion and greed I have seen in SV.

while there are other good reasons to be in the UK i would choose SV over the UK for a startup anytime, especially if you are US based at the moment.</comment>


Ask HN: How to find consultants? - <AUTHOR>

I run a startup called udproducts.in, we develop ecommerce solutions in ruby-on-rails, nodejs, andriod and IOS apps. We had a consultant who gave regular projects which lasted for 4 to 5 months with good finance also. He is no more.
We badly need projects, so looking for such consultants. Where and How can I find them?
Thanks for the pointers. <comment><USER2> It sounds like what you really need is sales person rather than a consultant, no? One thing you may want to do is to show examples of the work you have done on your website with links to the actual sites and the apps.</comment>


Groupon for College Students - <AUTHOR>

That's right. We've created a Groupon for college students. On top of that, we've added gaming elements from Foursquare. Our platform is going to re-define your college spending habits. And the best part is..we're looking for more team members. Think you can add value to our team? Drop us a note at firstname.lastname@example.com. "I Love College..." <comment><USER2> What sort of positions are you look to add to the team? Anything that makes it's case?

</comment><comment><USER3> How is this going to differ from campusdibs.com?</comment>


Light-field videos: Part I - <AUTHOR> https://roblesnotes.com/blog/light-fields-project-i/ <comment><USER2> I built a functional light field video and photo camera* a few years back and the results were absolutely stunning in VR. That was before the LLFF paper was released, so it was relying on simple depth-maps to generate a geometric proxy, and having enough viewpoints to brute-force non-lambertian surfaces. Still, it allowed for a completely photorealistic reproduction of most scenes with full 6-degrees of freedom within the capture volume.

However I've been surprised at how there's hardly been any commercial applications of light-field technology. Lytro unfortunately folded despite having large amounts of capital, and the only company left is Raytrix, which uses light fields largely only for single-camera depth map generation. Google has released very nice tech demos, but that's about it.

*See here for a few test videos: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Buj8WWhGrA&list=PLzhX-LcIzx...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Buj8WWhGrA&list=PLzhX-LcIzxKFyD_E6wPt2sl32q1ZUO9lg&index=14)

</comment><comment><USER3> The author counts years from the founding of Rome (ab urbe condita or AUC), so subtract 753 to get the AD year.

Or: yes, this is a recent blog post.

<comment><USER4> obnoxious

<comment><USER5> I can see how the author thinks this is quirky but actually it's just a mental obstacle that tripped me up while reading.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, and he really didn't need to mention year dates 5 times in two paragraphs either. You can tell he's making excuses to flex his new quirk.

<comment><USER7> If I wanted to write a blog post that I could be sure no one would ever finish reading, I would do just this. (Or maybe just to screen out randoms from Hacker News. Genius!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I believe the author is referring to the year MMDCCLXXII. I have no idea where this 2772 comes from.

</comment><comment><USER9> The author mentions the annoyance of having to pull 16 sd cards from his camera array and extracting the files one by one.

Maybe a wifi enabled sd card is what's needed?

Edit: cool, there's even a hack that adds auto ftp uploading of new files to a specific brand of wifi enabled sd cards

[https://bitbucket.org/harbortronics/flashair-ftp- upload/src/...](https://bitbucket.org/harbortronics/flashair-ftp- upload/src/master/)

<comment><USER10> I've had this pain myself back in 2015-ish or so when live action VR exploded. The GoPro was the camera of choice with it being readily available and small form factor. First versions were 6 cameras (6 microSD cards), then 12 for 3D (6 L/R pairs), and then Google released their Odyssey camera (a 16 camera rig). Even that wasn't enough as it left holes at the zenith and nadir points, so we customized more cameras to fill in the gaps bringing the total count to 22 cameras.

As painful as all of that was, there's no way I would have risked losing data by using wifi enabled cards. If you lose the image from one card, the entire take is lost. Trying to push that much data at the required throughput for 16-22 cameras is just not something that's going to work out in the field.

<comment><USER2> The most reliable and cost-effective method I found was an array of USB cameras, recording on a host PC with PCI-E expansion cards and an SSD array. You avoid the hassle of file transfers, h264 compression artefacts and frame synchronisation issues.

<comment><USER11> I'm really curious, because I tried something similar maybe 5-10 years ago with a moderately powerful Linux system, and it couldn't support more than 2 USB cameras recording simultaneously.

What were the hardware specs on the PC like? How many cameras could you record from simultaneously? Which OS were you using, and did you have to do anything special to make it work?

<comment><USER2> The PC was nothing special, just a middle-of-the-road i5 4000-series running plain Ubuntu. The compute requirements were practically nil, so the CPU was actually overkill for the application.

The main considerations are having enough USB bandwidth (hence the need for PCI-E expansion cards), dumping the USB camera data straight to the SSD (no re-encoding, use a proper Gstreamer pipeline or ffmpeg command), and ensuring you can sustain the write speeds (through RAID array). There was some bug in the USB drivers that caused the cameras to reserve more bandwidth than they actually used, limiting their numbers, but that was easy to fix.

My guess is that you probably re-encoded the stream, which would indeed drastically limit the number of cameras if their resolution was high enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is really neat!

I am looking at the footage from the A77 on Youtube. The resolution doesn't seem to be 4K. Apeman seems to do a lot of software upscaling. Their highest- end model, the A100, claims 20MP resolution, 4K video, and an Panasonic MN34120 sensor.

Panasonic claims 16MP resolution -- so 4MP less than Apeman claims, and a maximum of 22fps at 4k. This isn't a linear slide, and I think the best Apeman could do is grab 1080p at 30fps and upscale.

[https://industrial.panasonic.com/content/data/SC/ds/ds4/MN34...](https://industrial.panasonic.com/content/data/SC/ds/ds4/MN34120PA_E.pdf)

The A77 doesn't say what chip it uses, but it's a model down. And looking at two Youtube videos, I'd say it's grabbing at best 720p and upscaling, likely less, but most of the video has enough action that I could be wrong (compression relics do things as well when scenes change quickly).

OP: Can you post some video frames and see if this setup works as claimed? If it does, it'd be really neat to play with. I'd even be happy with true 1080.

I'd consider this setup more for photos. Lightfield video will be hard without frame-synchronized videos. But once you get photos, one can think about how to invest in videos next.

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here. Synchronization is an issue I forgot to mention, I guess that's because it's the first problem I addressed. Right now I'm shooting indoors so I just switch lights on/off at some point in the video and then synchronize the videos over the average between the maximum changes of luminance with a simple python script. It's not a generic solution and the accuracy you get is not very high, but it's simple and it works well enough for a first test.

Resolution at 30fps is 3840x2160 pixels for the A77, but yes it's probably upscaled. Again at this point I am not too concerned about resolution at this point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is great! Computational photography is a really neat field. I've been slowly learning computer vision for a different project, but I must have a lot in common with the author of this post. Many late nights doing video conversion with the nvidia hardware decoders, photo registration with COLMAP, and fiddling with cameras.

I recently got a spherical camera and I am trying to use it for photogrammetry. I also have an array of four 4k cameras with hardware synchronized shutters hooked up to an NVIDIA Jetson Xavier[1]. That system can record four 4k streams at once to the SSD. I wonder how many 4k streams a Jetson Nano could record, because then you could use 16 of these [2] and four to eight Jetson Nanos to make a camera system with all hardware synchronized shutters that could easily record the data and export it via the network. It would cost around $2500 though. These projects get expensive and I keep thinking I want a sponsor, but the slow pace using what hardware I can buy is probably fine for now.

I'm trying to do a complete photorealistic photogrammetry capture of hiking trails, so I can run my robot in simulation on virtual hiking trails and train real computer vision networks. Lately I've been wondering if there is a GAN in my future...

The frustrating thing about my project is the sheer amount of computation required. I really don't need a direct photogrammetry capture of a trail, an approximation would be fine to some degree. But I take like ten gigabytes of video data and then process each frame to find keypoints, run correlation on all these points, and all this (using COLMAP). This stuff can take days to process on my desktop.

Meanwhile there are neural networks that can compute depth from video in real time, and I wonder what it would take to stitch sequential depth estimations in to one 3D model with RGB textures in one continuous calculation. There's so much research to do!

By the way I found the work in this paper pretty fascinating. [3] Facebook is working on 6dof video recording and playback, which is quite the challenge on many levels!

[1] [https://reboot.love/t/new-cameras-on-rover/](https://reboot.love/t/new- cameras-on-rover/) [2] [https://www.e-consystems.com/4k-usb- camera.asp](https://www.e-consystems.com/4k-usb-camera.asp) [3] [https://research.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/An- Integr...](https://research.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/An- Integrated-6DoF-Video-Camera-and-System-Design.pdf)

<comment><USER14> > The frustrating thing about my project is the sheer amount of computation > required. I really don't need a direct photogrammetry capture of a trail, an > approximation would be fine to some degree. But I take like ten gigabytes of > video data and then process each frame to find keypoints, run correlation on > all these points, and all this (using COLMAP). This stuff can take days to > process on my desktop.

If the hiking trails are accessible enough, you should have a look at SLAM technique. SLAM allows you to create smooth and rough approximate map of the environment through which you navigate your camera. Colorization of this map could be done by a GAN(might be an interesting side project).

I am adding some pointers below :

1\. [https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~ajd/](https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~ajd/) \- Prof. Davison and his group's work is impressive in this area. 2\. [https://vision.in.tum.de/research/vslam](https://vision.in.tum.de/research/vslam) \- Prof. Cremers group have some SOTA algorithms in this area.

P.S: You don't need a heavy setup for this. A single or a stereo camera should do the job.

<comment><USER13> Thank you very much! It has been a long time since I've looked at visual slam actually. That Omnidirectional LSD-SLAM looks really nice. Their code repo has been untouched for six years, but this still makes me realize I need to use vslam! I just found this recent work which seems really useful.

[https://github.com/ivalab/gf_orb_slam2](https://github.com/ivalab/gf_orb_slam2)

I feel like vslam could be the the first step in a post-processing pipeline that would reduce a lot of the computational complexity of solving large maps. Once I can easily make large maps I can build simulated environments and use those for training an agent.

Thanks again for the tips!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> the classic: [http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/lfcamera/](http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/lfcamera/) (good lord can someone upload that video to youtube)

<comment><USER16> This one? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciqhoFr9940](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciqhoFr9940)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> There are few things the entire planet has standardized on, one of them being time (with minor exceptions like DST). Regardless of your opinion of religion, to revert to debating the epoch again would be net negative. Could you imagine if we had to debate time like we debate the metric vs imperial system? That has been the result of several very expensive technical failures.</comment>


Some photos of PayPal in its early days - <AUTHOR> http://www.levchin.com/paypal-slideshow/1.html <comment><USER2> """Early 2000. Our first official offsite. Every single person in our 20-person-ish crew went to this place, which had no cellphone or pager reception. The site went down and was dead for an hour."""

Hah

</comment><comment><USER3> The copy of Schneier's Cryptography book is a nice touch.

In _The Paypal Wars_ , the author claims that everyone at the company was obsessed with Neal Stephenson's _Cryptonomicon_.

<comment><USER4> That book is gold. And so are his other books. Who's up for a little Van Eck Phreaking? (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Eck_Phreaking)>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Dang look at Steve Chen:) <http://www.levchin.com/paypal-slideshow/3.html></comment>


The T2D3 Path to SaaS Growth and $1B Valuation - <AUTHOR> https://blog.fusebill.com/t2d3-path-to-saas-growth-1b-valuation <comment><USER2> It looks like Step 2, but it actually doesn't say anything useful at all about what to do in Step 2.

Step 1. Collect underpants. Step 2: Over five years: Triple, triple, double, double, double. Step 3: Billion dollar valuation!

<comment><USER3> Is "T2D3" right for you!?

Isn't that kinda like asking if you want to run a Billion dollar company? No shit, yes it is right for me! Sign me up, I'll T2D3 whatever ya got, worst case scenario I end up in a drinking group with Travis Kalanick and Adam Neumann.

<comment><USER4> Worst case scenario is you wind up with T2D3 in losses, year after year, and get diluted to almost nothing.

<comment><USER5> which is not so bad. your company was going to get eaten alive by the others that did pull it off, anyway.

for the same reason that an otherwise viable bootstrapped company gets sent to a miserable death by VC-funded competitors, your VC company that doesn't perform at T2D3 will be outspent and eventually destroyed by the ones that do. If you're in a competitive space, you need to spend enough to achieve T2D3 ... or else</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How we sacrificed our youth to build a company - <AUTHOR> http://evolve.lupamail.com/2011-09-10/how-we-sacrificed-our-youth-to-build-a-company

<comment><USER2> This is the most depressing thing I've ever read. Life requires balance.

<comment><AUTHOR> lol</comment></comment>


Hacker News Munich Meetup - <AUTHOR>

It's time for the second Munich Hacker News meetup. The last meetup went really well and it was nice to meet everyone. Yeah, even including Mr. Trojan developer ;)
Once again, we plan on drinking a beer or two, talking about what we are working on and sharing interesting ideas about the future that could be...
If you would like to attend drop a comment below.
Venue: Cafe Ringlnatz (http://goo.gl/maps/xr3l) Haimhauserstr. 8 U-Bahn: Münchner Freiheit (we have reserved the back room where it's quiet and easy to talk)
Time: Tue., January 26th, 19:30 onwards. <comment><USER2> Sounds great, I'll try to be there again

</comment><comment><USER3> Cool, I will be there again, too.</comment>


Convert Twitter Boostrap to a "flat" design - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/nodesocket/5843712

<comment><USER2> How long until this flat fad fades?

It seems (to me at least) like very little thought goes into these designs apart from 'it must be flat.'

There also seems to be very little variation in the final products. The examples linked in the OP are indistinguishable from say, Microsoft's Technet : [http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki](http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki)

...I dont want everything to look the same. It's confusing and boring... Am I alone in this?

<comment><USER3> It's not a fad. The reason we are moving towards flat design is high resolution displays. Flat design emphasizes typography which isn't ugly anymore.

<comment><USER4> Hmm. Interesting.

I've heard a lot of reasons for this trend, but that's a new one to me.

<comment><USER3> Typography is now beautiful and something to show off. There is no need for glossy UI elements or textures to hide it. If you look at iOS and early Android, everything they did was to hide the ugliness resulting from low-res screen.

Today, the content itself is beautiful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think the next iteration of Bootstrap (3.0) is largely flat. I could be mistaken though.

<comment><USER6> The previews were all flat but I seem to recall that it was a temporary thing: [https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/pull/6342#issuecomment-...](https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/pull/6342#issuecomment-12332378)

<comment><USER7> may be permanent: [https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/issues/8199#issuecommen...](https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/issues/8199#issuecomment-19630149)

<comment><USER5> Oh, cool.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This doesn't really make bootstrap "flat". Removing rounded corners doesn't make it flat. Removing shadows (and depth) is the main issue. You should be removing borders too, right?

Even still, "flat" design isn't right for everything. Design should be evaluated for the specific application. The design of bootstrap now is safer than a "flat"-er option, IMO.

</comment><comment><USER9> "Sometimes a new project doesn't need rounded corners or gradients. So we decided to get rid of them. We <3 Bootstrap." [http://www.littlesparkvt.com/flatstrap/](http://www.littlesparkvt.com/flatstrap/)

<comment><USER10> Flatstrap doesn't work for me (mainly, "download flatstrap" just.... downloads the website... with standard Bootstrap.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Already exists: [http://bootswatch.com/cosmo/](http://bootswatch.com/cosmo/).

I really like the theme for mobile devices, especially if it's very button- based.

<comment><USER12> and another: [http://bootswatch.com/flatly/](http://bootswatch.com/flatly/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Isn't this what bootstrap 3 is trying to achieve? I haven't visited the bootstrap 3 release candidate docs in a while but the last time I did it seemed like it's going towards the flat direction.

</comment><comment><USER14> I stumbled up on this while looking for Bootstrap 3.0 demo. [http://bs3.codersgrid.com/](http://bs3.codersgrid.com/) And the design does follow flat design principles

</comment><comment><USER15> This is what something i was waiting for. Flat UI is completely into trends this days.

</comment><comment><USER16> !important, bad !dea

</comment><comment><USER17> Advanced.</comment>


Ask HN: VoteOther - <AUTHOR>

So, I was thinking I - or somebody should build an app to encourage people to vote for Congressmen/Senators that are NOT entrenched in their ways - - e.g. vote the other party, independent, or something --find some way to FIRE everybody in Washington and get a WHOLE new class of people in there - people who aren't bought and paid for by lobbyists..
Would this work?
Features : Signup - and everyone in a locale picks who they will vote for who has never been in Congress before. The person w/ most votes is the collective choice for the area and everyone is asked to vote for that person - anyone new is good especially if independent. <comment><USER2> Bottom line is that you need a _world-changing secret-sauce_ , not just an app.

On one hand you're dealing with people that have infrastructure like [http://awsofa.info/](http://awsofa.info/), world-class poker players, and child-savant-data scientists working for them,

On the other hand you have excellent (legal) gerrymandering done that makes some believe it will be very difficult to significantly change the House until 2022 (first election after the Census) The people in those locales are going to pick the same type of people and that was the plan.</comment>


AdBlock Plus wins in court - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-32903235 <comment><USER2> To the pro-advertisers reading this, I feel your pain. I have long standing clients who depend on ad revenue, such as print publications that early on successfully transition to the web, who are now really struggling.

However, I aggressively use ad blockers. Here is why:

* the majority of the ads I see on the Internet are of the sort that I use to find in the back of magazines. Crap I would never read is now force feed to me front and center

* nearly every single web page is OVERLOADED with ads. Take a look at a print copy of the New Yorker, Sports Illustrated, etc. Feature articles often have few or even NO ads. In fact, feature articles often start with two pages of JUST content.

* the way the ads work often kills my battery life. NOT COOL. You have no right to kill my battery life.

* You track us with no way to really opt out with out using ad blockers.

* You use the tracking info to target people. Including targeting children and at-risk (mentally impaired) adults. It is very different to have a scam artist with a small ad in the back of a magazine, compared to a phishing web ad that is trying to take advantage of an elderly grandma whose bank account is a click away.

* you burn my bandwidth. this is bad on WiFi, evil on cell data. You have no right to rack up cellular charges on my behalf.

* I don't trust the Kirby vacuum sales person in my home, I don't trust your javascript laden ads on my computer.

While I blanket block ads on the Internet, I do allow ads on sites that only use simple graphics and text for ads. And who demonstrate that they respect me as a reader and potential client.

edit: clarified I was referring to the "print" editions of the New Yorker & SI

<comment><USER3> The worst for me is when I open something on my phone and start reading and a huge ad appears and takes up my whole screen telling me to put in my email to subscribe to the website. Then I have to scroll around to find the little X to close it. It's maddening.

Only slightly less worse is the same thing happening on my laptop after I have had a few seconds to start reading the first paragraph, then the whole page dims and a full-page ad appears.

Adblock gets rid of this stuff and it's why I use it and will continue to do so in the future, but I do leave the whitelist on for unobtrusive advertising.

I just wish AdBlocker could get rid of that awful Forbes "Thought of the Day" page that always opens. Unfortunately the best it can do it get rid of the ad on that page, but still annoying.

<comment><USER4> Any page that pops a modal or interstitial on landing is an instant-close for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Good. Although I prefer Ghostery.

The main thing for me isn't even blocking ads as such. The main thing is blocking the absurd amount of crappy javascript that clogs up my browser, in which I have no interest.

I find the unfiltered web insufferable these days.

<comment><USER6> I used to love Ghostery, until I learned that their business model is to resell your browsing habits and profile back to advertisers.

If you want a suggestion for an alternative, I really don't have one. I'm currently using µBlock, which isn't bad, but requires a bit more setup than Ghostery. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock)

<comment><USER7> >until I learned that their business model is to resell your browsing habits and profile back to advertisers.

...If you voluntarily opt into that program (Ghostrank), after reading the straight-forward description.

I don't understand why people find their business model so abhorrent when its entirely opt-in and they don't weasel around what ghostrank does. Surely you must find every service on the internet that you use for free, particularly Google, to be horrible as well?

<comment><USER5> Yes. I have no problem with their model. They are completely open about it and it does me no harm. Ghostery does exactly what I need.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't read German, but I believe the main complaint in the case was AdBlock Plus charging money as part of its ad "whitelisting" service. ABP said it was to cover the cost of verifying the ads are safe and responsible. Publishers called it extortion (e.g. pay us this money if you want your ad impressions back).

<comment><USER9> IMO, if I downloaded something that is supposed to block the ads, I don't want the damn ads. I've not used ABP in a while but I'd be pretty pissed if it started loading ads again just because the people had paid for it. They had to figure out some way to make money, though, I guess.

<comment><USER3> You can uncheck the "Allow some non-intrusive advertising" line on AdBlock. I don't mind some ads as I know people need to make money and I'll click if it's compelling. Just hate the large gif ads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I read a lot on a screen.

This is tiring.

 _Adverts make it impossible to read the web_ \- they are designed to catch the eye - even when still they are eye catching.

 __To concentrate on text near an advert takes extra mental resources and I tire very much quicker. __

Not to mention loading hangs as pages wait for badly overloaded ad-servers before they show the page.

So I am getting exhausted so websites can get $0.003 - this model is a lame duck.

 __My attention is worth a lot more than $0.003 __so figure out a better way because I cannot afford look at that dross.

Text Ads in a similar font - that attract my interest because they are relevant - no problem - your site is unblocked.

Subtly Sponsor content I want then I will look favorably on your brand.

</comment><comment><USER11> Personally I don't use Ad Blockers just due to the fact my own personal ethics feels I am stealing when I do use it.

When I am teaching I have ad blocker installed because I don't want to get in trouble for what advertisement will be shown, especially YouTube.

AdBlock Plus and their paid white list is the worst and I don't know why people use them.

<comment><USER12> I don't use AdBlock Plus but i do use AdBlock. I think its my decision to choose which ads i watch and which i don't. It's not stealing, Webmasters can detect if someone is using AdBlock or not.

<comment><USER13> > It's not stealing, Webmasters can detect if someone is using AdBlock or not.

So what's your view on sites blocking people with AdBlock?

<comment><USER14> Perfectly acceptable. I believe it's within everyone's right to filter what hits their browser (and what their browser gets in the first place) as much as it is the website's right to serve whomever they want.

They should attempt to use technical means, though, as it's unlikely that a simple 'Do you use adblock?' prompt is going to work very well.

<comment><USER15> As I noted elsewhere in this thread, I whitelisted Reddit when they noticed my ad blocker and they politely asked me to think about it. It can be done. One solution among probably many.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> TIL: Firefox has configurable tracking protection! [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection- fir...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection-firefox)

<comment><USER17> I enabled it and I still see social buttons. :(

<comment><USER18> It's fairly spartan compared to other anti-tracking services. I haven't been able to find a policy regarding what is included in the list.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Adblockers are not that popular yet, but each time I show adblock and co to someone, that persons just doesn't go back and recommends adblock and co to his family,friends and coworkers. The rise of adblocking solutions WILL be exponential, the heck now some businesses make all their browsers block ads.. It's today that advertisers or sites relying on ad revenue need to find solutions.

One could bare people using adblockers from seeing content("free" pornsites are starting doing that). but then it will just be an escalation in technology. Adblockers will become smarter and ultimately defeat detection techniques.

One can appeal to user's "conscience" by displaying a message stating one relies on ad revenue. I think it's a good compromise if one promises that his ads are discrete like simple pictures or text.

Frankly, years of ad abuse, loud auto-play video ads and flash ads that take over the whole window have made users weary of online advertising.

<comment><USER18> >heck now some businesses make all their browsers block ads

As one such business (a school) which blocks ads on company computers, I can say it has drastically reduced our malware-related incidents from teachers/staff. My gut feeling is that search result ads and false download buttons were the source of many of our infections. Users do not think before they click, and it seems like most of them that expect to be able to find useful software behind an advertisement often pay a price.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Maybe OT, but does anyone have decent estimates for what percentage of users are blocking ads? Would also be interesting to know percentage vs browser.

</comment><comment><USER21> Interestingly enough, AdBlock (different from the one the article refers to) blocks 7 ads on that page.

<comment><USER22> The BBC is weird. In the UK (bbc.co.uk) there are no ads as it's paid for by the license fee but abroad (bbc.com) there are ads as it's a different (commercial) entity.

<comment><USER23> It's also worth noting that, you can't view BBC worldwide content from within the UK either due to regional restrictions. I've heard this is due to the BBC policy forbidding them showing adverts to UK users, yet it's content regularly not freely accessible (without adverts) to UK users either, as its a separate entity.

There's been several occasions that BBC worldwide has had articles that I've been unable to read, or find on the standard BBC news website.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is sad day for content creators. If the site is full of ads you are not comfortable to view do NOT VISIT such sites again. It's stealing, it's manipulating the statistics.

We can't get good content because corporations taught people to not pay for content and now we will not get good content because people will slice the income of those who use ads.

<comment><USER25> Do you switch channels on your TV when the commercials start and switch back when the show resumes? Blocking online ads is basically the same. i.e. perfectly legitimate.

Only you hurt the creator more online, since the advertisers can now measure the views+clicks. Which is also perfectly fair - They should not have to pay for ads nobody sees. This would also be fair on TV - But there it's impossible to measure.

<comment><USER24> First of all I do not watch TV. I assume that's why netflix is so popular. Please pardon me i am not sure if it has an ads in it or not but i assumed since it's a content on demand it does not.

Also simply blocking something because you can but you should not is cheating.

<comment><USER26> Cheating? How is it that controlling what my software, running in my hardware, running on my power does or does not do is cheating? Should I not have control over what's mine?

If a website finds that their business model became unsuited for modern times, it's their responsibility to change it, not mine.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Can you code while in a dream? - <AUTHOR> http://russell.ballestrini.net/response-to-l-theanine-a-4000-year-old-mind-hack/

<comment><USER2> I've proven theorems in my sleep before. It seems to be a generally accepted thing.

John Cleese gave a related talk which I found very interesting: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGt3-fxOvug>

<comment><USER3> That was interesting, thanks</comment></comment>


London's Boris bikes cycle hire scheme has cost UK taxpayers nearly £200M - <AUTHOR> https://www.verdict.co.uk/londons-boris-bikes-scheme-has-cost-taxpayers-nearly-200m-foi-disclosure-reveals/ <comment><USER2> I used an analogous system in another city. I think it's a mistake to be reductionist about the sunk costs when this represents an investment in infrastructure with a longmlife, and boosts tourism. All public transport systems have subsidies.

The competition is frankly a huge mistake. It's messy, it's wasteful, it's competitors for the sake of market forces. Every benefit of the no dock model has a counterweight downside.

I worked out that my decision to buy a home bike will take six years to pay back with a daily commute. The new docking station within 100m of my home turned on two months ago and is well patronized.

So yea, it's a huge dollar sum. I think it was a good investment and I do not see dockless as a benefit.</comment>


A virtual reality website from the time before Oculus - <AUTHOR> https://virtuality.com/ <comment><USER2> The recent advances in VR are only partly about the tech - reducing latency and weight. Most of the R&D gains, I would argue, have gone to getting the price point down to $400.

<comment><USER3> Agreed, I've been somewhat interested in VR since Oculus took off but I've sat back and waited for the price to drop, the Rift S at 399 is really really good, it was worth the price just for Project Cars 2 (which with a good logitech force feedback wheel is a joy to play).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Also this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzwPuJklv4w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzwPuJklv4w)</comment>


A journey through a land of extreme poverty: welcome to America - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/dec/15/america-extreme-poverty-un-special-rapporteur <comment><USER2> Good for them highlighting the issue of poverty, but the ideology is palpable and too adversarial for what could solved collaboratively.

Too much social welfare is driven by 'good intentions' rather than emphasis on changing people's lives. I'd be more inclined to support larger budgets if I knew they were spent better.

Bezos, Gates, and Buffets aren't the reason that healthcare and housing can be cripplingly expensive. My neighborhood has houses that cost about 20-40x the city's median earnings, I can't throw a stone without hitting an "all are welcome here" / "we're glad you're our neighbor" sign - it's a nice sentiment. But these same people would freak out if a developer tried to build a 400 unit apartment down the block. IF we don't allow housing stock to grow, spending our way out of homelessness won't be feasible.

When it gets cold here, indigents show up at the hospital complaining of "chest pain". they get monitored for a while, some respite from the cold, and meals but in the most expensive way imaginable. If we could just exchange a right to emergency healthcare for a living stipend and a place to live, both parties would be better off. That deal should be on the table.</comment>


An open source snow plow robot - <AUTHOR> http://www.open-electronics.org/here-comes-the-open-source-snow-plow-robot <comment><AUTHOR> With six inches of snow headed our way in Michigan this weekend here's a tech project to get excited about.

<comment><USER2> Ai, that's bad, especially if it is the first snow to be that much. Drive safe!

I think they're going to regret using threaded rods for shaft (much too soft, unstable and abrasive, especially in an aluminum block) if you really are going to build this I'd suggest a cast iron bearing block and a solid shaft from 1" technical steel or whatever the local name is (precision ground shaft). That has a much higher chance of living for a while.

<comment><USER3> It's "seasonal". People do drive like they have never seen snow or a wet road before though.</comment></comment></comment>


Stumbling on success - <AUTHOR> http://dirtsimple.org/2009/03/stumbling-on-success.html

<comment><USER2> I've observed the same things. Articulated very well, not sure who this person is, but very insightful.</comment>


Gaming the Reddit Voting System? - <AUTHOR> http://i.imgur.com/xzabl.png

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm, something wrong. I thought I had submitted the reddit page: [http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/djxhq/gaming_the...](http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/djxhq/gaming_the_reddit_voting_system_twitter_is_just/)

I did submit a different title - I meant to emphasize the various comments by 'sanitybit' (<http://www.reddit.com/user/sanitybit>) on his tests and other research.

</comment><comment><USER2> <http://www.eikasoft.com/redditvotepro/buy_form.php>

50 votes for 20 bucks.</comment>


Higher Search Engine Rankings Without A Home Page - <AUTHOR> http://www.bpwrap.com/2010/04/higher-search-engine-rankings-without-a-home-page/ <comment><USER2> The method the author proposes is to redirect example.com to example.com/latest-post/

For many blogs, I don't feel this is the best user experience. I feel like a blog homepage should include some content that introduces the visitor to the site. This isn't always appropriate for individual post pages, which should primarily be about the topic the post is about - and any content within the blog that relates to this topic. This depends upon the degree of topical focus of the whole blog, though.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is interesting. It seems dangerous, but I can see how it might be effective in the short-term.

Actually, you just inspired me to rethink my entire site structure. Thanks!</comment>


Matt Smith announces he is to leave Doctor Who - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/doctorwho/articles/Matt-Smith-to-leave-Doctor-Who

<comment><USER2> I love Matt Smith's portrayal of The Doctor, but it feels like good timing for a new Doctor. I'd like them to go older with someone like Hugh Laurie, or the one everyone wants - Benedict Cumberbatch, and see The Doctor get a bit darker perhaps.</comment>


New ransomware, old techniques: Petya adds worm capabilities - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/mmpc/2017/06/27/new-ransomware-old-techniques-petya-adds-worm-capabilities/ <comment><USER2> The article should be more precise about when the actual encryption is happening. To my knowledge it is performed only after rebooting. Am I right to assume, that if for some reason the machine is powered off before booting up again, or if it is unable to boot up due to drive encryption, raid or other circumstances (i.e. the checkdisk and ransomware screens are not displayed), the drive is fully restorable by recovering the MBR/VBR?</comment>


Nectar: A Native JavaScript Compiler Inspired by Crystal Lang and Nim Lang - <AUTHOR> http://blog.seraum.com/nectar-a-native-cross-platform-javascript-ecmascript-compiler-inspired-by-crystal-lang-and-nim-lang <comment><USER2> I wrote a PhD on this topic ([https://paulbiggar.com/research/#phd- dissertation;](https://paulbiggar.com/research/#phd-dissertation;) for PHP, though solving different challenged than you'd have to for JS). I also worked on Firefox's JS engine.

I'd be extremely (and pleasantly!) surprised if this turns out to be real. It is very common for people to compile a subset of the language and achieve great speedups, only to discover it doesn't scale to the full generality of the language. That would be my guess for what's happening here.

Best of luck to the Nectar team, looking forward to seeing what you've got. If this works as you say it does, you'll have built something incredible!

<comment><USER3> I'm having a hard time understanding what your PhD is about. Could you clarify in layman's terms?

<comment><USER2> Sure. Basically, a bunch of scripting languages (Ruby, PHP, Python, a few others) share the same properties, that make them hard to compile:

\- they're not really specified anywhere

\- they use `eval` and similar dynamic constructs

\- they allow you to mutate your data in weird ways (in particular, you can change variables dynamically by knowing the name of the variable, aka "variable variables").

I looked at how to solve these problems in PHP by embedding the PHP interpreter into the compiler as well as into the compiled program. Then I looked at how to do alias analysis in PHP - alias analysis is a type of static analysis to figure out which names in the program point to the same value. This had been done before for a subset of PHP but not for the full generality of the language, in particular dealing with variable variables.

<comment><USER4> FYI, both PHP and JavaScript do have a specification.

PHP Specification: [https://github.com/php/php- langspec/blob/master/spec/00-spec...](https://github.com/php/php- langspec/blob/master/spec/00-specification-for-php.md)

JavaScript Specification: [http://www.ecma- international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST...](http://www.ecma- international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST/Ecma-262.pdf)

<comment><USER2> JS does - I didnt focus on JS.

PHP has an unofficial spec now but didn't then. Here's what I wrote about it when it came out: [https://circleci.com/blog/critiquing-facebooks-new-php- spec/](https://circleci.com/blog/critiquing-facebooks-new-php-spec/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Some of the world's greatest minds have been spending decades making JavaScript go fast inside VMs where the JIT can take advantage of profile information gathered at runtime.

Getting even remotely comparable performance in an ahead-of-time compiler—without spending eons waiting for complex whole program analysis—is, as far as I know, an unsolved problem for real-world programs. I'd like to see what "really, really fast" means for this compiler.

<comment><USER6> Seconded. An "offline" compiler can't use things like the type information gathered at runtime. So I'd expect this to actually be slower than JITs. Benchmarks should be provided before making performance claims!

<comment><USER7> Why then don't people write in Java for performance? HotSpot has this runtime information. It runs OK (GCCish) for code that gets past the JIT threshold and dog slow otherwise. Hell, Java 9 is offering AOT.

JITs have been around for 30+ years and they're umm OK. As in not magical.

<comment><USER8> The things that make Java slow compared to C++ aren't in the compiler so much as in the language. In a sentence, Java made tradeoffs for productivity and simplicity that in C++ went in favor of performance and power.

<comment><USER7> Well, back in the day, the Sun people were crowing that HotSpot would be faster than C++.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Something is fishy. Author claims 10x "faster" than Node, which seems to imply that they are beating V8. I find this highly unlikely given how fantastically resistant JS is to AOT optimisation and how many talented engineer-years have been put into the development of V8. I am very interested in seeing some numbers and hearing about the techniques employed.

</comment><comment><USER10> Great project, let's see a repository sooner rather than later. Also, at least basic benchmarking and information on the compiler backend would be great, LLVM or something else? How does the compilation work commandline wise (personally like the Crystal approach, i.e. easy fast compile & run as if interpreted and then allow extra compiler flags to facilitate optimized compilation for distribution). Also, what about I/O file system access and parallelization of tasks CPU wise?

<comment><AUTHOR> We will write a post with benchmarks, specs etc soon.

<comment><USER11> how about an executable that others can independently test?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'd be more interested in seeing them start from fully annotated TypeScript and working backward. It'll almost certainly be the case that native compilation of plain old JS is going to be slower than interpreted and JITed code, just because you have to hardwire in all of the type checks in places where you're not certain of what might get passed in. All of the fun fiddly things that modern JS engines do, like creating hidden classes, are somewhat impossible. You can't deopt unsuccessful optimizations, so everything has to be provably safe at compilation time. JIT compilers have the benefit of being able to run type checks and rewrite their generated code to be less optimized (at runtime). You can't really do that with a static binary. At least with TS, you can (probably) generate some fairly clean native code from the get-go without having to worry about things falling apart in an edge case.

<comment><USER13> That's been done already: it's called C#.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> How is this inspired by Crystal and Nim? I don't see anything in the post indicating their influence.

<comment><USER15> I'm guessing it is the compilation of dynamic languages to machine code.

<comment><AUTHOR> To machine code, and more : llvm, wasm, asm.js ...

<comment><USER16> > _and more : llvm, wasm, asm.js ..._

Neat for sure, but not a lot of stuff you can "usefully" do in asm.js in terms of end-user-facing "RIA", you have numbers, byte arrays, function calls, numeric operators, primops keywords. (Hell of a way to go type-safe: eliminate all types but numbers and byte-arrays! ;) No JS-native/runtime-own strings, no DOM, no built-in objects (window etc), hard to impractical to try to do other record/object handling. Wrap all interaction with stuff you don't get in asm.js in exports and "foreign"s. (OK fair game for code generation but still what a mess and constant switches between the asmjs context and the normal interpreted context aren't free either --- the bulk of "RIA" logic seems to be string/list ops, DOM/window interop, basic cheap control flow.) All the funky emscripten stuff that works in asm.js just also-compiles-and-then-uses the original memory/byte-based logic for these (records, lists, strings, objects etc) of the source's native runtime/compiler/libs.

As for wasm, seems to aim to mostly follow in the above footsteps "at first" (read, the next half decade at best, realistically...)

(But yeah, asm.js is of course still neat for overwhelmingly-numerical high load computations (game-playing / media-editing stuff etc comes to mind) as well as showcasing/proof-of-concepting both older C / OpenGL games and newer 3D engine demos..)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> About V8 JavaScript: "Slow, because compared to C, Crystal or Go, it's slow."

In my experience writing real world server programs, Node.js is faster than Go in many cases. Part of this is a lack of Go library maturity, but it's also due to the fact that V8 optimizes code at runtime based on how it's being used. This project seems to come from a naive, "interpreted slow, compiled fast" view of the world, leading to false assumptions like Go is going to be automatically faster than Node.js because Go is AOT compiled and Node is JIT compiled.

<comment><USER18> I can't speak to Go or Crystal. V8 performs well on microbenchmarks, but very poorly with a sustained high volume of input due to GC pressure. I've used node.js in such an application and "version 2" was written in another language because of the GC pauses.

<comment><USER17> So what was the language C, C++, Rust?

<comment><USER18> KDB, although I'm experimenting with Erlang for some things and it seems sufficient.

<comment><USER19> Odd. Erlang uses GC.

<comment><USER18> Yes, but many small heaps means small GC pauses. It's not as deterministically/fast as reference counting (KDB) but it's close.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'd be interested in knowing what parts of the language it doesn't support and the estimated timeline for implementing them (as in soon, not soon, probably never). In any case it looks very interesting and should make quite a splash if it can deliver. Gotta love HN - always a new and interesting surprise :-)

</comment><comment><USER21> Fair warning: I don't know much about compilers.

Maybe it's an idea to make this a native Typescript compiler as it will profit much more from being compiled than pure JavaScript will?

This way it would probably still be possible to compile pure JavaScript but providing type information would allow the compiler to apply many more optimisations.

If I'm not mistaken V8 already does something similar to this with WASM (and I think asm.js).

<comment><USER22> Here's a TypeScript to C89 transpiler:

[https://github.com/andrei-markeev/ts2c](https://github.com/andrei- markeev/ts2c)

Very early, but the author seems to be actively working on it.

<comment><USER23> thank you

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I finally understand what 'hand wavy' means after reading this post. Not much of substance here.

If you want to take advantage of Go's speed alongside JS, check out [https://github.com/ry/v8worker](https://github.com/ry/v8worker)

<comment><USER25> > I finally understand what 'hand wavy' means after reading this post. Not > much of substance here.

Indeed, this blog post is very vague and offers no solid evidence that this project even exists. I was very sceptical of it from the beginning and I'm surprised it was voted up so much. I guess generating hype is easy when JavaScript is involved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> given the effort put into compiling other languages to javascript, i wonder if this could be the basis for easy cross-compilation of those languages. (i'm thinking mostly of ocaml, but lots of other languages could potentially benefit from the native compilation too, clojurescript-to-native, for instance.)

<comment><USER27> Clojurescript-to-native was my first thought too. I think where it will break down is the threading model though. Crystal, for example, threw Ruby's threading model out the window, went with channels, and is now working on an implementation of parallelism. Native JS is a great idea, but we've got to get these languages leveraging the CPUs they're on if we really want fast native code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'd love to see the output of the compiler. What assembly it generates with some standard functions (Fib, fac, tree generation, tree traversal, etc). I've wanted something like this for some time.

If anyone knows how and can make this happen I'd like to see this on some godbolt-esq site.

<comment><AUTHOR> We are making a godbolt-esq site for Nectar, coming soon :)

<comment><USER3> If the output comes out nice and the argument passing semantics is sensable I'll try and rewrite my OS kernel in this. I want to do it in JS or something similar as it would be a great teaching tool to students as the language is very simple and they need no other testing utilites then their web browser.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Link to the actual project?

<comment><AUTHOR> The website project is in active development, coming soon

<comment><USER3> Source code? Is it on github? Can you provide some example binaries?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I would like to hear comments on SoundScript. Heard Google was trying to speed up JavaScript by creating a high performace subset of it, and it's very related to type inference. But no more updates.

[http://www.2ality.com/2015/02/soundscript.html](http://www.2ality.com/2015/02/soundscript.html)

[https://github.com/v8/v8/wiki/Experiments%20with%20Strengthe...](https://github.com/v8/v8/wiki/Experiments%20with%20Strengthening%20JavaScript)

</comment><comment><USER30> I think the definitively typed [0] can be leveraged here for AOT compilation.

Looking forward to more details.

[https://github.com/DefinitelyTyped/DefinitelyTyped](https://github.com/DefinitelyTyped/DefinitelyTyped)

</comment><comment><USER31> This is really neat. I can see JS compiling to WASM as a gret way to get early adopters.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it's one of our goals

<comment><USER32> Just to double check, when you or anyone else involved initiated this project, were you aware that JavaScript IS in fact now compiled to optimized native code at runtime (i.e. JIT compiled)? I am asking because several years ago that wasn't the case, and many people still to this day refer to JavaScript as an interpreted language, when that generally isn't so anymore.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Super exciting.

How does it compare to EncloseJS and nexe (which grab V8's unoptimized compiled machine code)?

What does it target (ES3 CP, ES 5, ES 6)?

Does it require/support async server-side apps?

Does it have http, http/2 or other IP protocols?

Can it compile regexpes to native code like V8?

</comment><comment><USER34> The only way I can imagine this is faster than Node is on run-once code, where you are comparing against interpreter or baseline JIT.

</comment><comment><USER35> Cool!</comment>