Coinbase (YC S12) seeks to bring Bitcoin to the masses - <AUTHOR> https://coinbase.com/ <comment><USER2> A while ago I wrote that perhaps the greatest contribution the Bitcoin experiment will make to humankind is to teach you and me and our neighbors more about the realities of economics. And now I will add that the Bitcoin experiment will also contribute to greater understanding of attack surfaces and online crime. Many of the ideas about how to mine Bitcoins, store Bitcoins, and trade with Bitcoins as a medium of exchange illustrate both the strengths and weaknesses of any other medium of exchange in a world full of human beings. Seeing the discussion of Bitcoins here on Hacker News reminds me of early discussions in the 1990s of online payment systems such as PayPal, and the arguments beforehand that PayPal wouldn't have to invest a lot of time and effort (as it eventually did) building defenses against theft and fraud. If a weakness in a system is attached to a lot of money, the way to bet is to bet that someone will go looking for that weakness, even if you haven't thought of it.

<comment><USER3> I'd start from the other direction.

The newness of this stuff is overrated. The bitcoin phenomenon isn't ultimately different from phenomena described by Mackey: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusions...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusions_and_the_Madness_of_Crowds)

As we know, each new version of speculative excess has the slogan "it's different this time". And each one _is_ different, in some way. And you can extract various interesting particular lessons from all these newnesses - I'm sure after 2008, someone's written a deep, interesting article on the failure of the Gaussian copula but really, you didn't need to understand the heat equation and Ito's Formula to know that synthetic bonds were a problem in 2006 (I'd recommend the enlightening discussions of Doug Noland of Prudent.com from that time).

But it is important to not allow ourselves to let the details of these situations distract us from the psychological dynamics which ultimately has carried all these phenomena. This psychological dynamic allows a slightly stretching of numerous points to add up to the concrete mistakes one point can point out later as "what went wrong". And these "what went wrong then" arguments are themselves dangerous since they general are coupled with "so this time, the different thing we are doing is..." and so forth.

Essentially, understanding magician's tricks are great. But never let yourself be fooled by the belief that you know all the tricks.

And I writing with the assumption that bitcoins aren't a "medium of exchange" in any meaningful way - for example, I could directly my car for something else valuablle far more easily than I could directly trade bitcoins and cars aren't a very meaningful medium of exchange today. This is the position that I believe most serious economists take, Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman being on record here (not that I think this is really a left-right question).

<comment><USER4> > for example, I could directly my car for something else valuable far more > easily than I could directly trade bitcoins and cars aren't a very > meaningful medium of exchange today.

Are you sure about that? Bitcoins are easily divisible, a car isn't. Yes, you can take your car apart but the sum of the parts is worth much less than the whole car. Bitcoins can be easily transported and even transferred internationally. Exporting a car incurs a lot of overhead in transport fees and taxes. Even selling a car to someone on the other side of a large country might end up being too expensive.

No matter what you think of bitcoin, it should be compared to existing national currencies, gold, etc. I like the concept of bitcoin, but I believe that even risky currencies like those of (say) Mexico, Turkey, etc are a better bet than bitcoin.

<comment><USER5> >Yes, you can take your car apart but the sum of the parts is worth much less than the whole car

The opposite, actually, is true. It's not very intuitive, but yeah; I've got a '96 Nissan maxima with unrepaired body damage and what sounds like a suspension problem that I've gotta get rid of. If I wanted to sell it fast? I think I'd have a hard time getting four hundred bucks for it. (I mean, if I drove it into a car buying business and wanted to walk away with cash) But, the salvage yard where it would end up? I bet they'd make that much back selling all the windows and tires... then what they'd get for the other parts would be gravy.

I think the key to understanding this is that selling a car all at once is way less effort than selling each part individually. Sales takes effort and we're only measuring value within the context of a sale.

(nothing to do with bitcoin; I just think that this is an interesting way to point out that the way we measure value ends up giving us some non-intuitive answers to how much a thing is worth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6>
      1. Start centralized bitcoin depository.
      2. Fail to provide any loss protection.
      3. "get hacked"
      4. Profit.

<comment><USER7> While I'm not a big fan of BitCoin, I don't think this is a very good argument. You could use the same argument for banks and "get robbed". Why doesn't this happen to banks?

<comment><USER8> I going to pretend you are actually serious about this. Let's make a strawman that actually makes it easier to suggest that this is "the same as banks".

Let's pretend for a minute that we're dealing with a non-FDIC insured bank (like some of the original online banks), with none of the regulatory controls that obviously provide a lot of protections.

Let's pretend for a minute that the bank stupidly keeps all of its holdings as cash that are held on site at the bank. It doesn't use notes or other securities for transactions, only cash. Let's pretend that the bank also self- insures those holdings (which basically means no insurance).

Okay, so I compromise the bank's security, take every bit of cash. I disappear to some island in the Pacific with every last cent.

How badly is the bank screwed? How badly are the customers of the bank screwed?

Actually, not that badly. I only wiped out the bank's reserves. That means both the bank and its customers have a short term liquidity problem, but not necessarily a significant asset problem.

A regulated bank would have 10% of all deposits in its reserves. Unregulated banks often have far less, but let's pretend it is 10%. The bank loses 10% of its value. If it can stay solvent, then nobody loses any money, but it might take a few days before people can make withdrawals (which could cause a bank run, but that's a whole different problem). If the bank _can't_ stay solvent, it goes bankrupt, and depositors become creditors. It'll take a while to resolve the legal process, so liquidity is killed, but when it all ends, depositors are going to get back something close to 90% of their money back.

The key thing is that the bank lends out most of the money it takes in. Even if you rob the bank of all its cash, the bulk of the "assets" of the bank are all the IOU's from lendees, which is value that is really hard to "steal", because lendees tend to only pay their lender, and then tend to do so in installments over a great deal of time.

THIS IS WRONG: Hacking Coinbase would be more akin to hacking say Visa, and redirecting all payments to you instead of the intended merchant.... if Visa's transactions were all cash based, instead of credit based... and Visa was unregulated... and even then it is kind of different because Visa is a middle man between two banks...

 _UPDATED_ : Okay, I just read they are actually storing the bitcoins in the cloud, rather than just exchange the coins between the two parties.... So actually, it's not like hacking Visa, unless Visa didn't reconcile their transactions with its customers for extended periods of time and held all of the float as cash.

<comment><USER7> So what you're saying is that banks are more stable because only a small portion of their assets are kept as reserve? In that case, what's stopping bitcoin "depositories" such as this converting the bulk of their assets to something else as well?

<comment><USER9> They can't do that because there is nowhere really safe to put the BTC. They cannot loan it out because nobody needs that much BTC, and it's unwise to invest it in USD or anything else because the currency's fickleness compared to USD(you could lose a lot of money, or possibly make some).

The problem is that the current Bitcoin "banks" aren't really banks. They're more akin to socks under a mattress than a bank.

At a very basic macro economist level, banks have two functions:

1\. They are a place for clients to place their money. To incentiveize this behavior, they pay those clients interest on the money in their accounts to keep it there.

2\. They take that money and give out loans to people, and charge interest over the time it takes to repay the loan.

In a healthy economy, the two feed each other. Broadly speaking, the circulation of currency works like this: People/businesses take out loans. That money is used to buy things (houses, cars, short term equipment expenses, etc.). The businesses that are paid for the goods/services pay their employees, who put the money into the bank. Note that even in this situation, banks aren't entirely necessary, because people could just buy stuff, which goes to employers, who pay employees, who buy stuff...

Bitcoin does not have either economy yet. Right now, it's used just to buy things, with BTC being converted to a "real" currency(USD, Euro, etc.) on both ends. So it's really just a single directional currency. So, right now, if I wanted to operate a Bitcoin bank, I'd have to convert it to USD or some other currency, and keep it totally separate from my liquid BTC wallets to mitigate the risk of getting hacked and the wallets getting stolen. Unfortunately, that's incredibly risky, because I would then have to deal with the exchange rate between BTC and USD.

<comment><USER10> That isn't necessarily the fault of BTC banks though. Let us be honest here - if we (the viewing public of HN) collectively wanted to put in every effort to supplant flat currencies for BTC so nobody can print it anymore, all of us combined would not have the financial assets required to sway the supermassive giants of the world like Walmart, Amazon, Google, Apple, the big 3 car manufacturers, realtors, and more importantly than anything else, the stock markets to start trading in BTC would take the financial efforts of pretty much the entirety of the top 400 wealthiest Americans.

The markets are more resistant to currency shift than enterprises are to getting off XP and IE6. BTC will always fail because everyone is to lazy to get rid of the dollar as the reserve currency.

<comment><USER11> > BTC will always fail because everyone is to lazy to get rid of the dollar as > the reserve currency.

All it takes is enough _people_ using it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It looks nice, but I don't see anything addressing safety and security. How does this service guarantee that any money you transfer to them will be kept safe? Also, do they guarantee that if a break-in occurs like the Bitcoinica disaster, that users' monies will be returned?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep - sorry we should really add a page on that. We're storing wallets in the cloud so this is an important concern. Private keys are encrypted in the database. bcrypted passwords. We also offer two factor authentication for your logins: [http://blog.coinbase.com/post/25677574019/coinbase-now- offer...](http://blog.coinbase.com/post/25677574019/coinbase-now-offers-two- factor-authentication)

We'll start keeping a majority of funds in cold storage as deposits grow (we're still in beta at the moment). And I think you're right a firm policy on this would be needed about loss of funds and what is covered. I'm interested in the idea of getting insurance through Lloyds of London or something along those lines, but haven't pursued it yet (we've just been building the prototype).

I worked on fraud prevention at Airbnb previously and we had lots of money flowing through the site and stored with us, so I'm familiar with best practices around this. I also have a healthy respect for what can go wrong, and I think as we grow we'll go through regular security audits (and much more scrutiny as we pursue licensing as a money transmitter). You certainly shouldn't trust us on face value though, it's something we'll have to earn over many years.

<comment><USER13> _"Private keys are encrypted in the database"_

Please encrypt the private keys with a key K derived from the users' passwords. When a user logs in, your server-side code can compute K and access the bitcoins. When a user logs out, the server should forget K, erase it from RAM, thus leaving the bitcoins securely encrypted on-disk. Not even an attacker getting access to your infrastructure, not even you(!), could steal the bitcoins when the user is not logged in.

Not a single online wallet service actually does it this way, the right way, _sigh_... This mechanism could have prevented numerous thefts: MtGox, MyBitcoin, Bitcoinica, etc.

<comment><USER14> How do you deal with the user forgetting their password in this case?

<comment><USER13> Two possibilities:

For power users, if they forget their pw, they lose their coins. Period. That's the option I would use, as someone who never lost an important pw thanks to my use of redundant password safes.

For other users, when creating an account, coinbase.com could email them a "key recovery" file (or mail them a physical QR code), with instructions to keep it permanently stored in a safe place. This key recovery file would be K encrypted with a unique IV and a key known by coinbase.com, who would not keep a copy of the key recovery file. This would satisfy all my requirements: coinbase.com would be unable to steal/access the users coins, and an attacker merely getting access to the key recovery file would be unable to do anything with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> First rule of financial apps: if you're going to deal with money you should own your servers. The cloud is not an option.

Second rule: Hire a security expert and a thief. The former to keep you safe and the latter to break in before the real ones so the expert can fix the holes.

Btw, I like the service.

<comment><USER16> I hear AWS is certified for credit card processing. Is that not the case?

<comment><USER17> [http://aws.amazon.com/security/pci-dss-level-1-compliance- fa...](http://aws.amazon.com/security/pci-dss-level-1-compliance-faqs/)

Apparently they are now, yes. Last I checked they weren't and were saying their cloud services were inherently uncertifiable, due to the architecture.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, they changed PCI DSS 2.0 to allow virtual servers, specifically to let Amazon Web Services pass. PCI DSS 1.0 wouldn't work. (level 1 compliance PCI DSS 2.0 from the most trusting/forgiving QSA available, i.e. a pretty fucking low bar)

The PCI firms I know probably would not have passed them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> _"Widespread Adoption"_ _About $2 million a day (USD) is already being transacted in bitcoin. It's quickly becoming an international currency of the world._

Er... bit of a stretch

<comment><USER20> Exactly what I thought. I wonder how much money is transacted in WoW, Second Life and other large mmorpgs.

<comment><USER21> WoW gold is a multi bullion dollar economy with daily transactions worth around around 10-100 times what BitCoin is currently doing depending on how and what you count.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> So, this is essentially yet another cloud-based bitcoin wallet?

Also, how will you comfort your customers when you get hacked and their funds are gone? That is not a hypothetical thing to ask, but very real and has happened before in the cloud-wallet bussiness.

Anyone who wants to get started with bitcoin, I suggest using the client Electrum. Written in python, light, quick and secure.

</comment><comment><USER23> It's very cool to see that after posting looking for a co-founder to get into YC, it looks like Brian has gotten into YC as a solo founder and by the looks of it, is doing great.

I sent his previous post looking for a co-founder to friends because Brian looked seriously formidable. Best of luck to him.

</comment><comment><USER24> Any technical details on how wallets are protected? I think we've seen how previous bitcoin websites have fared on HN, it would be cool to know some of the details on how the BTC are going to be protected so that the problems of the past don't happen again.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep - sorry we should really add a page on that. We're storing wallets in the cloud so this is an important concern. Private keys are encrypted in the database. bcrypted passwords. We also offer two factor authentication for your logins: [http://blog.coinbase.com/post/25677574019/coinbase-now- offer...](http://blog.coinbase.com/post/25677574019/coinbase-now-offers-two- factor-authentication)

We'll start keeping a majority of funds in cold storage as deposits grow (we're still in beta at the moment). I worked on fraud prevention at Airbnb previously and we had lots of money flowing through the site and stored with us, so I'm familiar with best practices around this. I also have a healthy respect for what can go wrong, and I think as we grow we'll go through regular security audits (and much more scrutiny as we pursue licensing as a money transmitter). You certainly shouldn't trust us on face value though, it's something we'll have to earn over many years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Since you auto-focus on the email address input field... it erases the default text that reads "Your Email" so it is initially quite confusing to know what you should enter.

I had to click on the page to de-select the input, see that it said "Your Email", and then enter my email.

The way it is now, it looks like you might simply want two passwords.

<comment><USER26> Looks like Mozilla clears placeholders on focus, while Chrome and Safari clear on the first input. In Internet Explorer they don't show up at all...

<comment><AUTHOR> Good to know - you can guess which browsers we've been testing with. Sounds like a we'll need to do a js placeholder solution or change the page.

<comment><USER27> Barmstrong,

I asked the following downthread but I'm afraid its going to get buried in the muck:

 _"Zero Transaction Fees"_???

Are you refunding the bitcoin transaction fees that are builtin to the protocol[1]? If you are going to eat that cost you should say so, it seems like a good marketing point.

[1] <https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_fees>

<comment><AUTHOR> Good question, and sorry I just saw this.

So we aren't including any bitcoin transaction fees by default. If you try to send a transaction below 0.01 it will never get confirmed without the fee, so we added this user interface improvement a few days ago which gives the option of including the fee if people want to:

[http://blog.coinbase.com/post/26452774981/confirming- small-t...](http://blog.coinbase.com/post/26452774981/confirming-small- transactions)

Coinbase will make money more like an exchange down the road, 0.5% to convert money into our out of bitcoin, but once you have your money in bitcoin there are no transaction fees (it mentions this on the homepage, but admittedly it's still a bit confusing). I wish there was a better way to distinguish between an exchange fee and transaction fee (to the average consumer these may be the same thing, I'm not sure).

In general, I would like to abstract out the idea of btc fees to the average user (I think it's an unnecessary complication for someone new to bitcoin). It would be much easier to just say "no fees" - this is simple and shows a clear benefit of using bitcoin. If you have to explain to people that "sometimes there are fees, but they are a lot lower, etc" it loses some of it's punch. Right now we can do zero fees and transactions still get confirmed. In the future we may be able to do it by eating the cost and have this be a cost of doing business, but that is a decision for later.

Hope it helps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I think that this could be the hero that Bitcoin needs. If they make it super simple / super clean they could revolutionize Bitcoin.

To the creators, have you considered adding a USD (or other currency) funding option? Since getting the Bitcoins is probably the biggest obstacle for most everyday consumers.

<comment><USER29> If that's true it could be a good time to speculate/gamble a bit. I'm tempted to throw $500 or so at it, for the chance of another bubble.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I like the idea, kind of a PayPal for Bitcoin. My issues would be the usual: I don't trust a new service with my bitcoins, don't know anything about their policy for data loss, etc. The about page and support pages don't really instill any confidence. If I knew I could trust them it would seem like a great service.

</comment><comment><USER27> _"Zero Transaction Fees"_???

Are you refunding the bitcoin transaction fees that are builtin to the protocol[1]? If you are going to eat that cost you should say so, it seems like a good marketing point.

[1] <https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_fees>

<comment><USER31> Transaction fees are optional.

Currently, if you do not include a transaction fee, your transaction will get confirmed, but the first confirmation could take longer for a miner to pick it up - but it is very likely to still get confirmed.

As transactions per second increase and load is placed on the memory pool, those fee-less transactions may get lost and need to be resubmitted.

<comment><USER27> _"As of 10 June 2012, minimum transaction fees on the original Bitcoin client are:

Accept a transaction for inclusion in a block: 0.0005 BTC

Relay a transaction to other Bitcoin hosts: 0.0001 BTC

A transaction can be sent without fees if both of these conditions are met:

It is smaller than 10 (SI) kilobytes (10.000 bytes).

All outputs are 0.01 BTC or larger."_[1]

Put another way as bitcoin grows fee-less transactions will become rare...

[1] <https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_fees>

<comment><USER32> At the current exchange rate then any transaction below ~$0.06 might have a transaction fee of a fraction of a cent. Simple fix? Don't support incredibly small transactions, (or at least don't support large numbers of very small transactions).

[Assuming that point to point transactions that aren't doing complicated contract logic are always less than 10kB.]

<comment><USER27> I'm not trying to find fault in theoir business model; it was a genuine question...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> 1) How do you make a profit? 2) How do I convert to "real money"? If I can't, why should the average joe be interested in this at all? Power users can use mtgox already. 3) How do you plan to keep it legal? As I understand, there is no legal precedent about new currencies and the law is not favorable.

</comment><comment><USER34> Lots of startups have tried to popularize Bitcoin. What's different about this one?

<comment><USER35> This is a Ycombinator startup founded by a former AirBnB employee.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> What advantages does this service provide over bitcoin itself? My suggestion would be to make this very clear, and definitely make sure it is explained on the About page.

<comment><USER37> My guess is that you can send bitcoins to people who don't give a shit about it or know how to use the client and they can in turn pay for things with the coins you sent. I'm thinking of sending my dad a couple just to see if he can figure it out. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Is this a YCombinator start-up? I see PG's name there.

<comment><USER39> According to the About page (<https://coinbase.com/about#>), yes.

The AllThingsD article linked from the page mentions that the company is part of the current Y Combinator class.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Have they been hacked yet? It's a rite of passage.

</comment><comment><USER41> If I want to sell something, how can I get my Bitcoins converted to cash, safely and reliably? I don't trust MtGox, and I don't want to long-term forex risk exposure. Is there someone who could settle Bitcoin to USD, daily in San Francisco?

<comment><USER42> A _reliable_ BTC<->USD exchange is going to be a key requirement for any meaningfully large BTC adoption.

A year ago, when I was looking around, there was none. I have no real qualms about dropping a few bucks into BTC, but I have to be confident that I can exchange it for the ability to pay my bills.

<comment><USER40> And yet such an exchange will inevitably charge fees that are higher than credit cards, which hinders adoption.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> The best way to find out if bitcoin is a viable platform is for someone to forge ahead with mainstream oriented services like this. We'll all learn a ton from what happens.

Payments is a great starting point for a mainstream bitcoin serice. The user isn't going out too far on a limb to use the service because it's just a payment. This could increase the chance of adoption, and lessen the impact of something going wrong in the early days.

I'm really impressed with folks trying to make a service like this work. I find any opinionated naysaying to be really boring. Can't wait to see how it turns out. Hope there is enough traction to put it all to a real test.

</comment><comment><USER44> Will there be an API? It looks neat!

It's one of those ambitious projects, that, even if failure is in the future, it's still a worthwhile project.

</comment><comment><USER45> I've toyed with the idea of a Bitcoin bank for a while now. Since I don't seem to be making much progress here's the final piece that I think this is missing and would really let this take off. Offer a way for your customers to spend their Bitcoins using plastic through a payment processor. The cheap startup version way of offering this would be to partner with a bank to offer your customers prepaid debit cards. On your website they would have two accounts, one with the funds avaible on the card and the other with your Bitcoin wallet. When they want to transfer funds make a market trade on behalf of them and put the money on their cards. Obviously in the long run the ideal setup would be to become a licensed money transmitter which can be ridiculously expensive in some states, and yes you need the license in each state you do business in. This is what Paypal has. As a licensed financial institution you now have the ability to offer your own debit/credit cards and you could theoretically make market trades from your customers bitcoin wallets as soon as you receive transaction requests.

Obviously this doesn't flow with the spirit of Bitcoin and why it was designed but I think it's what will be necessary for it to start gaining wide spread use.

</comment><comment><USER46> What's the pitch to the masses? "We make Bitcoin easy to use... and all you lose is anonymity and decentralization?"

<comment><USER47> You can't lose what you never had; the "masses" won't use the Bitcoin client and manage keys themselves anyway.

<comment><USER46> icebraining: decentralization and optional anonymity are key selling points of Bitcoin; without these two features, it looks _a lot_ like existing payment systems.

<comment><USER47> I know, my point is that those selling points are irrelevant to the masses, because to take advantage of them you need to run the Bitcoin client and manage your own keys, which most people won't do. So they can't "lose" anything.

Now, as for why would you use a system like this instead of one based on conventional currencies, well, don't ask me!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I'm not sure why, but I find the term "for the masses" horribly insulting and elitist. It instantly turns me off on whatever it is you're talking about and tells me absolutely nothing about the product other than you think your target market is a mass of people that aren't as smart as you.

</comment><comment><USER49> How is a user protected from a transaction history subpoena?

<comment><USER50> BTC transactions are all public in the blockchain so they're not as anonymous as many think.

But as for preventing your identity from being linked to your BTC wallet? There's probably no way to prevent that if the service provider is under US jurisdiction.

<comment><USER31> You can certainly be fully anonymous with bitcoin but care must be taken... Mainly, you need to isolate your change to an identity wallet - a wallet used for specific purpose under a dedicated pseudonym. Identity of the pseudonym is protected by plausible deniability - "I bought those coins on MTGOX, but I sold some of them to some guy for cash on the street corner, that purchase wasn't me"

The more hops through a wallet (which can be created dozens of times), adds more plausible deniability and separation to any purchase.

<comment><USER50> Good point. And if you sign up to Coinbase anonymously and acquire BTC reasonably anonymously any data that gets subpoenaed is worthless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> This looks great - I can't wait until you can start ordering from eBay and Amazon with bitcoin.

<comment><USER52> You can already redeem bitcoins for Amazon giftcards through various services, for example: <http://coincard.ndrix.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> So the profit mechanism is through taking a percentage of bank transfers. So not going after banks.

Also did you mean shopping card or shopping cart? I can't resolve either from context and shopping card is not commonly used.

</comment><comment><USER54> Storing individual wallets in the cloud is better than have a single institution-wide account that holds everyone's money like MtGox did/does. With the latter, you need to roll your own secure transaction system to keep track of balances. The former uses bitcoins existing transaction record keeping, allowing the devs to focus on the already hard problem of secure authentication.

Still, centralizing a decentralized system is like trying to tame a wild animal. I can be done, but expect to get bit.

</comment><comment><USER55> Any bitcoin related website that has you "choose a password" and not a Passphrase, and perhaps mandatory 2 stage authentication, is just asking for it.

</comment><comment><USER56> Does Bitcoin solve <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma>

<comment><USER11> Is Bitcoin a national currency (or an international reserve currency for that matter)?

<comment><USER11> (To whoever downvoted this, the questions were meant to be rhetorical)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Is it that Bootstrap makes every website look amazing or is it that people who build amazing looking websites tend to use Bootstrap?

<comment><USER58> It's that they all look similar and you like the look. You also might be looking at websites built more by hackers than by web designers. Bootstrap is great for visually clean rapid development, but that comes at the cost of individuality.

Props to Coinbase for changing the looming black top bar anyway.

<comment><USER59> It's a theme from <http://bootswatch.com/>. I wish more sites used one of those, completely agree with you on the black top bar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> The 2-minute video on their home page takes the right approach. It does _not_ try to explain the lofty ideals of Bitcoin. It never mentions scary concepts like free banking, lack of government regulation, and crypto. It uses the word "anonymous" only once. That's the way to convince the public: a cheery talk about tangible benefits!

</comment><comment><USER61> I think Brian dated my sister back at Rice.. haha. So strange to stumble upon him here. Anyway, impressive startup resume. I'm familiar with a lot of his projects, but never connected the dots.

Too bad my comment contributes nothing to the post and it's gonna go to the bottom. Oh well..

</comment><comment><USER62> Is coinbase using aws or heroku and down right now? Seeing an application error on coinbase.com...

</comment><comment><USER63> Currently getting a 500 error when trying to create a password with special characters.

With all the password hash leaks going on these days, am I the only one paranoid enough to create a long, random password?

</comment><comment><USER64> Congrats Brian! I remember when you told me about your idea at startup school. Heard you had left Airbnb and I suspected it was for this.

</comment><comment><USER65> ... and their site looks just like Github.

</comment><comment> UK-AlasGou Is bitcoin still deflationary?

<comment><USER31> It will experience an inflation rate for the next 140 years or so. It is currently expanding at 50 BTC per 10 minutes. In december it will cut to 25 BTC per 10 minutes, half each 4 years after that.

Bitcoins have already been destroyed to the tune of about 80,000 BTC from disk failures, lack of backups, and forgotten keys. We will already never reach 21 million bitcoins in circulation.

<comment> UK-AlasGou I think a digital currency is a lost opportunity, you could make the system self adjusting to a set target, very accurately.

<comment> w-ll That's what Bitcoin does. The protocol can't know if funds are destroyed... because they cant be. They are actually just sitting in unreachable wallets.

<comment><USER66> Right, though all wallets are reachable/stealable with sufficient compute power. This is partially why it's always a good idea to split up your holdings into many wallets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> I decided to see what they had to say to a question I had. This is the responses they gave! :3 How do you see yourself combating the rapid fluctuation of price vs value when dealing with merchants?

Brian Armstrong: good question

Brian Armstrong: two thoughts on that

Brian Armstrong: one would be an automatic withdrawal rule they could setup

Brian Armstrong: so it just gets converted automatically when it arrives and deposits once a day or something

Brian Armstrong: the other is that i think the exchange rate volatility is largely a short term problem, volatility decreases as volume of transactions increases

Brian Armstrong: so if you believe btc volume of transactions will be much higher in 5 years, then exchange rate volatility will be much lower

→Makes sense, Saw the site mentioned on hacker news, so that means you'll probally mentioned on slashdot at some point

→^.^

Brian Armstrong: at least that is my guess :)

Brian Armstrong: hope so

Brian Armstrong: maybe I should submit it?

Brian Armstrong: haven't slashdotted in a few years

→heh, you could try, though slashdot seems to be consolidated to a few power submitters lately, might try reddit?

→<http://www.reddit.com/r/bitcoin> would be a start?

→<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4177605> that's the article mentioning you btw

Brian Armstrong: already submitted :)

Brian Armstrong: [http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/vswkw/silicon_valle...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/vswkw/silicon_valley_investors_back_coinbasecom_seeking/)

→Where bitcoin could REALLY take off is CPU usage cycles

→Since bitcoin is fractional

Brian Armstrong: oh yeah, tiny amounts

→Instead of charging pennies per cycle, you could specify exact amounts per clock

→so instead of 1 penny per second

→.00001 per clock or whatever is the better value

→It'd be alot more precise

→It must be interesting to start a company like this. Are you / your company registered in the united states? And if so, How do you feel about their reaction to bitcoin?

Brian Armstrong: yep that'd be interesting for sure

Brian Armstrong: we're incorporated in delaware (U.S.)

Brian Armstrong: based in california

Brian Armstrong: we have the backing of really good investors who want to see innovation happen

Brian Armstrong: as long as we pursue licensing as a money transmitter (same as facebook credits, paypal, etc) i think we'll be ok

Brian Armstrong: it will def be controversial though

→I wonder how mt.gox handles it

Brian Armstrong: they are incorporated outside the U.S. (Japan I believe)

→ _nods_

→Well, If it's ok with you, i'll post this to the hacker news article and see what kind of discussions it generates? Only with your permission of course! =^.^=

Brian Armstrong: sure, that'd be fine with us!

</comment><comment><USER68> Twitter Bootstrap is homogenizing the entire web! This place used to be cool, man. What happened?!

<comment><USER69> Well, at least they've made some modifications to it so that it looks good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> are you a single founder?

</comment><comment><USER71> Congrats!

</comment><comment><USER72> How is this different than MtGox? I don't trust MtGox, but at least they've made mistakes and have spoken publicly about how they've fixed those mistakes.

On the other hand, are these guys storing my wallet safely? How about my balance (please god, don't store it as a float)? How about my password? If they're not launching with two-factor auth I won't even give it a chance (and likely ever, honestly).

I've gotten progressively more and more pessimistic about these sorts of sites even though I like the idea of BitCoin as a currency. If security isn't heavily discussed and visible (2FA, do it!) at the launch, it will be hard for me to take this seriously.

<comment><USER73> What's wrong with storing it as a float? I'm not saying you're wrong, I just genuinely don't know. If you could explain/point me to relevant literature I'd be grateful.

<comment><USER72> Quick Google, sorry it's easier than me offering an incomplete explanation: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3730019/why-not-use- doubl...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3730019/why-not-use-double-or- float-to-represent-currency)

And I really don't mean to pick on you, but that this isn't better known is why I worry when I see random sites popup offering financial services.

<comment><USER73> That's okay. I don't think I'm really representative anyway, as I'm not a professional/schooled programmer. Thanks for the link, I did try googling it myself but I didn't think to use the word "currency" so I just got a bunch of irrelevant results.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Commitment  - <AUTHOR> http://icylicious.herokuapp.com/commitment

<comment><USER2> I am 17 and had a lot of problems because of programming.I studied at this prestigious school got kicked out because of my grades.I was learning python and didn't care about school but I never regretted it</comment>


Aerospike on ContainerShip - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/containership-articles/aerospike-on-containership-a0a8f45c890b

<comment><USER2> Founders here if there are any questions!</comment>


Dynamic Languages Jobs Barometer - <AUTHOR> http://www.presicient.com/langjobs.html

<comment><USER2> What's the brown bar at the end for? Is that "all other languages"?

Also, I would say that they have missed off the other prime dynamic language, ASP, and in fact all the .NET languages.

<comment><USER3> I think the last one is "Ruby (mix)" but the X axis label "Language" took its place. Instead of adding the MS languages he could just prefix the title with "Open Source" :-)</comment></comment>


Google Cloud Storage Has New API, Lower Price - <AUTHOR> http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2011/10/google-cloud-storage-is-out-of-code.html

<comment><USER2> Huh. I had it in my head that the Google Cloud storage was significantly cheaper than S3. Looking at the pricing here, it's pretty much the same.

Was there an announcement for a similar Google product recently, or am I just a victim of wishful thinking?

</comment><comment><USER3> It'd be great if you could have App Engine routes that just directly serve files from Cloud Storage.</comment>


What biking has taught me about business - <AUTHOR> http://blog.aparicio.org/2009/12/16/what-biking-has-taught-me-about-business/

<comment><USER2> Sometimes people laugh when I say that I attribute much of my success in the workplace to my participation in running and cycling competitions. There are very few other factors I can point to that have had such a dramatic affect on my attitude towards not just work, but all of my pursuits.

At the most basic level, training and competing promote intense focus, dedication, perseverance, and hard work in general. Running my first marathon, I hit an enormous wall around the 20 mile mark, and all you can do is put your head down and keep grinding. Although it's not from physical strain, I get that same feeling during those super long days of work, when you're just totally exhausted and feel like you can't go any farther...and then you do.

Running or cycling are great for their health benefits alone, but if you get serious about either (or anything related), I think you'll start seeing a surprising number of parallels with your professional life as well. Even if you don't get serious about it, and dedicate only a handful of hours a week, it's still an amazing way to clear your mind.

</comment><comment><USER3> Although not totally related to the article, I wonder if the writer sees a direct benefit of biking on his business. I started a fitness program a few years back and I've noticed several benefits: increased energy, clear thinking and team building.

While developing my first company physical fitness was a low priority. I told myself there wasn't time, I had to devote every minute to the startup. Worse I ate convenient foods (pizza, subs, fast food) to help save time. I put on body fat so fast that I got stretch marks on the side of my stomach. I'm not sure what my body fat percentage was back then but my body weight was 215lbs and I'm 6'0"/180cm tall.

To loose some weight, I started to get active, and I noticed benefits in my work. My mood was better, I could think clearer, and I had more energy. I began a weight program and started playing Ultimate Frisbee regularly.

My friend and I are in the midst of starting another company (<http://igeejo.com>) and I hope to build the cardio and weights right into our schedules. Getting the group out for a game of Ultimate, assuming there are no pressing needs for the startup of course, has a lot of upsides. It's great for team building, a great cardio workout, and a chance to socialize a bit with other friends and significant others.

Like anything in life, I think it has to be sustainable. I think setting aside 3 hours per week will pay huge dividends in the future.</comment>


The best way to learn is by doing - <AUTHOR> http://techbyproducts.com/the-best-way-to-learn-is-by-doing/

<comment><USER2> Have to agree with you that online tutorials followed by hands-on is a more practical way to learn than try and follow books. Finding the right tutorial is tricky though. Have you noticed that most Java tutorials assume that you know C?

<comment><AUTHOR> The biggest problem with books is that they cover things exhaustively. What tutorials do is teach you a few interesting things, that cause you to become more interested, and then you want to learn more. If books started off with an interesting tutorial up front, more people would want to read them, but they typically start with very elementary things that bore the readers before they get to the "good stuff." That's been my experience anyway, not sure if everyone shares that same view.

I'll be writing more about the benefits of learning by doing, because in my experience there is a LOT that you DON'T learn when you just buy hosting and use CPanel to manage your servers. It pays to just setup a server yourself at least once, you'd have a new found appreciation for what many developers take for granted =D</comment></comment>


MIT AGI: Conversation with Yoshua Bengio [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azOmzumh0vQ <comment><USER2> Some of his points I want to emphasize and ones I'd like to discuss further.

1\. The method of training in current use won't lead to general systems.

It doesn't matter how large your image set is you'll never learn all of language and motor behavior from it. (In realistic terms)

Multi-modal learning where an agent is interacting with an environment will be critical for general systems due to a common expectation that general systems will be able to explore and problem solve. The requirement to explore and problem solve needs to be built into training.

I go a bit further and believe that you need a fairly high-fidelity world in which physically modeled agents are given progressively more difficult tasks if you want to achieve this generalization.

As he notes at the end of the talk some variant of reinforcement learning will be key for this.

2\. Disentangling representations will be useful for both generality and preventing catastrophic forgetting.

Current algorithms update all parameters by default which means that all knowledge is vulnerable to loss. If you can disentangle representations (and I disagree that this can't be done in pixel space) then you can selectively prevent updates to some parameters and better prevent accidental forgetting.

Concretely, mimicking the sparsity of activation seen in the brain through implementing lateral inhibition (and further exploring top-down attentional sparsification mechanisms) should be useful in this area. (some good papers on this in 2018!)

3\. The ability for agents to learn from teachers and the ability to teach agents interactively will improve generality and learning speed.

Agents today are largely trained from scratch. Some are fine-tuned from other agents, but relatively few are instructed in the way you would a dog or a child. Cultural transmission of information underlies a lot of what we think of as modern human intelligence so it's likely that systems that can benefit from this method of skill acquisition will have an advantage.

A point not mentioned was the crucial distinction between knowledge and abilities which are innate to biological creatures (developed over evolutionary timescales) and knowledge gained during a single lifetime.

Right now we try to teach agents everything and don't give them the benefit of starting with evolved bodies, reflexes, and adapted perceptive abilities. So even before we get to the cultural transmission of knowledge through teaching I think we need to (in parallel) be developing base agents which are "evolved" with solutions to lower level problems built in so that the networks don't have to re-learn how to catch yourself when falling every single time.

<comment><USER3> Could u give your opinion on Starcraft2 mastery as the next level?

So this includes opponents, long term goals, short term combinatoric optimizations, etc. But it is still a very simple, discrete, well-defined world with clear rewards.

The consensus is that brute-force DRL is insufficient.

My question is, if we add some currently known modules such as relational reasoning, memory, attention, hierarchical attention (maybe even human demonstrations), plus deepmind-scale computing, can we expect to see a super- human SC2 agent soon ?

Or are we really waiting for a more radical mechanism ?

<comment><USER2> Given the performance of the DOTA2 bots I don't see any reason why PPO + fancy network architecture won't solve this as well. I expect OpenAI to publish on this in 2019 if not sooner.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> So my impression of the way that Face recognition works is that the neural-net part of the system recognizes the faces in a photo, recognizes the features on the faces and provides a map of the features to the system. The system takes these parameters and stores and recovers a given face with them. The ability to recognize individual faces comes because conveniently these parameters don't change much (but clearly it hinges on this). Of course, there are a lot of small enhancements to this process and these evolve but this is still basic outline.

Which is to say that convolutional neural networks, the most common and successful neural networks, fundamentally only operate by recognizing a broad category (face, nose-on-face, mouth-on-face). This limitation seems as inherent in NNs operating with a black-box/training-set/testing-set cycle as it is in any architecture consideration. If all you can "tell" the NN is "this is X, this is not X", then it's plausible that's all it will give back. Moreover, "X/not-X" testing allows a LOT of training to happen in an unambiguous fashion, which seems necessary when what you're doing gradually pushing a giant bunch of semi-arbitrary detectors into place.

Machine learning theorists can do a lot with nothing but this category- recognition tool - like having a go program recognize "good moves" and "good positions". Note, that the more elaborate "neural net within neural net" approaches involve _vast_ levels of computing power - you're brute-forcing brute-force. AlphaGoZero probably involved the largest level of computing power ever harnessed for a single-use app. AlphaGoZero involve megaflop levels close to those estimated for the human brain though such estimates are always debatable (perhaps why we didn't see many games by it).

The thing is there are plenty of ordinary computing algorithms do "more" than neural nets - perform logical operations or sort and search by vague similarity or classify on spectrum of multiple qualities (rather than the binary X or not-X of a neural network). It is just that these break down at an "industrial scale", whereas neural nets are shine at this scale.

However, despite these virtues, it seems likely we'll see neural nets approaching their particular limits reasonably soon, if they haven't (in at least a sense) done so already.

And it seems like any "real" extension/alternative will have to be able to use big data but use it in a more sophisticated fashion than neural nets.

Oh, this relates to the video most in that when Bengio talks about how to extend neural networks, he's mostly just mentioning extension in terms of how to add abstract qualities like "causation", where one can certainly see crude, simplistic things in computation that could be called "working with causation" but you don't have that yet when you go to the level of a large-scale neural network.

<comment><USER5> NNs are not binary -- they're fundamentally analog, so for classification problems, they produce probabilities that a test case is in each possible class. A binary "X/not-X" test often comes from applying a threshold to the NN's output.

Quoting from the Universal approximation theory's Wikipedia, "neural networks can represent a wide variety of interesting functions." While they may be much better at pattern recognition, it's possible to produce almost anything with one, including Go moves, if you can devise a method to interpret the outputs.

<comment><USER2> >> NNs are not binary -- they're fundamentally analog

That's incorrect. [https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.02830](https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.02830)

<comment><USER6> You could say they're "probabilistically binary", that would at least be intuitively accurate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great talk! What's my best option for getting / making a transcript of this talk?

<comment><USER8> does this work for you ? [https://ccm.net/faq/40644-how-to-get-the-transcript- of-a-you...](https://ccm.net/faq/40644-how-to-get-the-transcript-of-a-youtube- video)

<comment><USER7> That does! Did not know one could do that. This is super useful for my learning, thanks!</comment></comment></comment>


How Big of a Company are You Building? - <AUTHOR> http://betashop.com/post/5595589017/how-big-of-a-company-are-you-building

<comment><AUTHOR> Curious to hear peoples' thoughts on this one.</comment>


Qt 5.8 Alpha released - <AUTHOR> http://blog.qt.io/blog/2016/09/05/qt-5-8-alpha-released <comment><USER2> > To accommodate this, we have over the last 6 months done significant work on > our build infrastructure to give our users much more fine grained control > over the way how Qt is being built. This is what we called the Qt Lite > Project.

> [...]

> From initial measurements, we expect that you will be able to reduce the > size of a statically linked Qt Quick application by up to 70% compared to Qt > 5.6.

Does this mean they fixed static linking in 5.8? It stopped working in 5.7 for some reason in most projects. With 5.6 it was easy to use cmake scripts to create statically linked applications when your Qt installation was build statically. This still worked with qmake projects in 5.7 but not cmake.

I kinda wish I could build a Qt installation that has dynamic libs and static archives, but it's not possible to select that at configure time.

Stuff either doesn't build or it builds and then still looks for dynamic bits since 5.7. This was fine in 5.6 AFAIR.

<comment><USER3> With the static linking in 5.6, did that also include the image format plugins (eg jpg, bmp, etc)?

<comment><USER2> I'm not exactly sure what you mean, but I think so, since the apps it worked with did load and save images.

<comment><USER3> No worries. :)

Putting time into a project recently, and we're going through the process of migrating from Qt4/Qt5 to Qt5-only. (this is so we can start using Qt5 only features)

One of the differences between Qt4 and Qt5, is that while Qt4 has all of its supported image formats inbuilt Qt5 doesn't. It keeps them in separate shared libraries, which (for non-static applications) need packaging with the rest of the application. I haven't looked into whether they get compiled in with static ones though.

It sounds like they might be, which would be useful for us, as people do request static builds occasionally. :)

<comment><USER2> I'm just a user of Qt applications, so please don't take my comment to be authoritative. Experiment and conclude.

<comment><USER3> No worries at all. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It looks like QML/Qt Quick Controls 2 are moving becoming mobile/embedded first, and they are recommending desktop apps stick to QtWidgets for native looking UIs.

<comment><USER5> What language bindings can I use to develop QtWidgets applications without having to write C++? When I look around it seems that lots of languages only have bindings for Qt <= 4 or QtQuick.

<comment><USER6> You can use pyside2. It isn't considered stable yet though, but I think it might be soon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The docs for it don't seem to be on docs.qt.io. :(

Created a request to add them ([https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-55744](https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-55744)), to make reading through details of the new modules easier for people.

</comment><comment><USER7> > I think we need more libraries/widgets in order for us to design native > looking Android/iOS apps.

So still the same "do your own QML mimic of native widgets"?

<comment><USER8> They are working on providing a set with Qt Quick Controls 2 - the Android part looks more ready than iOS.

[https://blog.qt.io/blog/2016/06/10/qt-quick- controls-2-0-a-n...](https://blog.qt.io/blog/2016/06/10/qt-quick- controls-2-0-a-new-beginning/)

<comment><USER7> I know that, but when I used 5.4 the experience was quite bad and I was quicker to just write the frontend in Java and glue it myself to standard C++11 than make use of Qt.

So from 5.4. up to 5.8 little seems to have changed from that comment.

Nowadays I just use Native OS UI language + C++ or Xamarin, both are easier for me to write portable native apps with direct support for native widgets than using QML.

<comment><USER8> I think it's improved from 5.4 but yeah if you want native widgets then QML isn't the solution</comment></comment></comment></comment>


In Texas, a man who didn't kill anybody is about to be executed for murder - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/08/12/in-texas-a-man-who-didnt-kill-anybody-is-about-to-be-executed-for-murder/?utm_term=.8a947c26d6c5 <comment><USER2> IMO, the real apparent injustice in this case is the prosecutor's use of a forensic psychiatrist who apparently has a cottage industry in testifying against defendants:

> _Wood was committed to a mental health hospital after he was found > incompetent. A neuropsychologist had testified that Wood was delusional, > unable to grasp the issues about his case and the reality facing him..._

> _The writ of habeas corpus, filed in July, spotlights something else the > jury did not know: the troubled history of a forensic psychiatrist whose > testimony resulted in Wood's death sentence._

> _James Grigson was no stranger to capital murder cases: By the time Wood > went on trial, in 1998, Grigson said he had testified in 163 such cases. > Prosecutors often sought his testimony to secure the ultimate punishment for > defendants. Often, they were successful, earning Grigson a nickname: "Dr. > Death."_

> _In 1995, three years before Wood's trial, Grigson was expelled from the > American Psychiatric Association and its Texas branch at that time, the > Texas Society of Psychiatric Physicians, for predicting a defendant's > potential threat to society based solely on a hypothetical. The expulsions > followed an investigation by the Texas association's ethics committee, which > cited Grigson's "willfully narrow rendition of psychiatric knowledge."_

<comment><USER3> Obviously I don't know all the details of the case but I find it troublesome that a psychiatrist would render an opinion without examining the individual who is the object of the opinion. On its face this is unethical particularly in a situation where there's so much at stake.

I'm aware that "assessment at a distance" is frequently sought, for example, reviewing clinical info in the medical record to determine if services were consistent with billing for reimbursement. This is often a question arising with Medicare and other 3rd party payers. However that's not unethical since it's quite different from providing a diagnosis or determining the qualities of a person's functioning without examining the individual.

I have no idea if the doctor's conduct had come before the state licensing board, but it appears there would be substantial reason to consider that conduct "unprofessional" given the actions of the professional societies declaring the behavior as unethical. Normally such disciplinary action carries consider weight with licensing bodies. Most likely this avenue of doing something to keep the situation from recurring has already been explored, it would be a shame if it was overlooked.

<comment><USER4> It's troubling that his input is still considered sufficient to render a judgement. That one person was of poor moral character and has been appropriately expelled from his profession by his more reputable peers is just, proper, and generally how things are supposed to work. (My use of "supposed to work" no way implies belief in a world where "supposed to work" is equals "is how it actually works")

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm a native Texan, which I point out solely to rebut the assertion that all-- or even many--Texans are in favor of the death penalty, and I very much oppose the death penalty for reasons exactly such as this. Maybe this man committed a crime; it sure seems like he did. But maybe he didn't. Or maybe he didn't in the way that the state, or the psychiatrist, or the eyewitnesses claim he did.

That's the problem with the death penalty: There are vanishingly few situations where we can be 100%, absolutely clear on whether a person did something that warrants permanently removing that person from existence.

We are a nation of laws and we are also a nation of fallible human beings. If we could be completely certain, then _perhaps_ I would be OK with the permanence of death. But we can't, so we shouldn't be killing criminals in the name of the people or the state. Because what happens if we are wrong? What happens if we are wrong 138 times[0]?

Why have we forgotten that "[i]t is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer?"

0 - [http://tcadp.org/wp- content/uploads/2011/01/TXDPFactSheet01-...](http://tcadp.org/wp- content/uploads/2011/01/TXDPFactSheet01-11.pdf)

<comment><USER6> > There are vanishingly few situations where we can be 100%, absolutely clear > on whether a person did something that warrants permanently removing that > person from existence.

So would you say that the vast majority of murder convictions leave at least a little room for doubt?

<comment><USER5> Yes. "Beyond all reasonable doubt" is fine for throwing someone in jail and putting the key all but permanently out of reach. But I think that, as a society, we must retain the ability to say "oh shit we fucked up very much here is the door we are very sorry please take this huge sack of cash along with our sincere apologies" if or when we discover that our legal system made a massive error.

In this day and age, were an exoneration to happen, I would also mandate that the state put up billboards in the person's home town and where the crime allegedly took place and run Internet ads and do lots of press interviews to get it out as widely as possible that someone has been exonerated.

<comment><USER7> > "Beyond all reasonable doubt" is fine for throwing someone in jail and > putting the key all but permanently out of reach. But I think that, as a > society, we must retain the ability to say "oh shit we fucked up very much > here is the door we are very sorry please take this huge sack of cash along > with our sincere apologies" if or when we discover that our legal system > made a massive error.

You'll still never return lost years and decades of someone's life any more than you could return life to a dead man. You can't restore the fractured relationships, undo the pain of imprisonment.

Honestly, I think a quick death (not the insane decades-of-imprisonment- followed-by-ritualistic-execution we have now) is far more humane than life in prison.

<comment><USER8> Then stop treating prisoners so poorly. What I read of US prisons sounds inhumane, so your last sentence comes across to me as comparing two different NaNs.

Also, many countries have banned life imprisonment. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_imprisonment#Reform_or_ab...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_imprisonment#Reform_or_abolition) .

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I am neither Texan nor American, so this is an outsiders perspective:

What I do not get is how the EU can just blatantly ignore this. When one of our politicians travels to an Arab country or to China and does not address the human rights situation clear enough, he or she will be bashed. When Turkey starts _talking_ about reintroducing capital punishment the instant reactions are that this will end the negotiations about EU membership. Capital punishment is a hard line for the EU, if your country has it, it is not considered to value human rights and is out, no further questions asked.

The only people really criticizing the US here (in Germany) are usually haters, who glorify Russia.

It cannot be about the money either, because China is an important partner, too. They have to put up with our obligatory human rights talk every time, while the US has not.

<comment><USER10> They can't. The EU requires its members not to extradite anyone to the US if there's any possibility that a death sentence might be applied. On the other hand, China has a whole lot more human rights issues than the US.

<comment><USER9> The US holds itself to higher standards. It tries to get Europe to fight wars together in the name of these standards, so it should be held accountable. China is corrupt to the core, they do not claim anything else and nobody expects anything different.

I am not saying that we can or should do anything about it, just that we have to point these things out if do not want to lose our face.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> >Legal experts say his case is rare, even in Texas, the execution capital of America — and a state that allows capital punishment for people who did not kill anyone or did not intend to kill.

Forty six US states have Felony Murder statutes. I don't think this is all that rare for states with capital punishment. According to the wiki "...the death penalty may be imposed if the defendant is a major participant in the underlying felony and 'exhibits extreme indifference to human life'."

<comment><USER12> Correct! I'm not sure why Texas is being singled out here. California has this statue as well.

If you participate in the commission of a felony crime and someone dies, then you are guilty of felony murder. They have something similar in the EU (e.g. Germany has "with deadly outcomes") where you receive an extended sentence even if you never intended for that person to die.

<comment><USER13> California has executed 13 people in 40 years, and none in the last ten. Texas has executed 500 people in the same time.

<comment><USER11> On the other hand, there are more than 750 people on death row in California. It's not that we don't sentence them to death; it's just that we've created a system where we can't carry out the execution before they die of natural causes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think if he's found not guilty he deserves some kind of compensation. You can't just keep somebody in limbo like that, knowing they will "die soon" for years. It is mental torture. What he's going through now is arguably worse than being found guilty. You can't justify that. They're punishing him and his family repeatedly.

I think this is a perfect example of the US completely getting it wrong. If states can't get it right, I think the ability to arbitrarily punish serious crimes should be dissolved to upper government. Why it makes a difference what state you're in is beyond me. I thought it was something they were phasing out of.

<comment><USER15> _I think this is a perfect example of the US completely getting it wrong. If states can 't get it right, I think the ability to arbitrarily punish serious crimes should be dissolved to upper government. Why it makes a difference what state you're in is beyond me. I thought it was something they were phasing out of._

Because if it were all handled at a higher level, there is a very good chance these types of policies would be in place for more people. Also, it would take more effort to change them. Concentration of power is not good, didn't you see star wars?

<comment><USER14> The reason it takes such effort to change things at the top is a problem that needs sorting in it's own right. There's a lot of corruption.

Why do you think these policies would be in place for more? I this rubbish would be gone, weed legalised and it would make it easier to change the political system. In the UK the decentralised part of government is the worst bit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Another case in point for why "Texas" is Norwegian slang for "Crazy".

</comment><comment><USER17> This seems like an odd article to be posted here. The author has stopped posting comments and around the same time started just posting links to articles.

Also he isn't posting any comments to any of the articles he is posting....

His twitter feed isn't mentioning anything like this...

I wonder if his account is still under his control?

</comment><comment><USER18> It seems to me that such laws punish people for associating with certain individuals who go on to commit crimes, requiring everyone to essentially be psychic or predict others' actions correctly 100% of the time to stay on the right side of the law. Either that or avoid associating with anyone.

It's insane--and certainly unjust--that a law that makes such impossible and ridiculous demands of people is considered just.

<comment><USER19> Setting aside the death penalty aspect, this case is not about association - it's about explicit participation in a felony that resulted in the death of an innocent victim.

Doesn't require a psychic to determine that committing a robbery with someone whom you know to own and carry a firearm could result in a death.

<comment><USER20> > _with someone whom you know to own and carry a firearm could result in a > death_

In modern Texas with its 'carry' laws, this could be anyone.

Besides, given the gun lobby rhetoric, 'guns don't kill people', so a death is 'just as likely' with a knife or any other tool to hand - even stuff already in the shop. After all, if someone is intent on killing you, 'they're going to do it whether or not they have a gun'.</comment></comment></comment>


Dynamic Route53 records for AWS auto scaling groups with Terraform - <AUTHOR> https://underthehood.meltwater.com/blog/2020/02/07/dynamic-route53-records-for-aws-auto-scaling-groups-with-terraform/ <comment><USER2> You can attach an ELB to the ASG. Then DNS name to ELB. That's how AWS expects you to use it.

<comment> X-Istence That doesn't solve the problem of the hostname on the EC2 instance itself being the same across all instances thereby making it harder to see what logs came from what hosts.

It doesn't solve the problem of allowing you to look at logs and then quickly SSH'ing to a single machine in the ASG.

<comment><USER3> Is this not already a solved issue?

Install a log agent on the machine like fluentd. Have it inject the host ip and other contextual meta data in to the logs then forward to your central log system?

When you see the error message in your logs, you get the internal ip and can ssh in.

Persistent internal ip's/hostnames also means you are not treating hosts as ephemeral. It's always good in the cloud to get things to a point you can just blow away instances and they auto recreate. It's even possible with traditional services requiring persistent storage. Put the storage on a seperate volume and have the instance startup scripts discover available volumes and attach as required.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a pretty sweet Terraform module that I will personally be testing out soon.

I was curious what they are using for the Lambda function, and it turns out is a framework-less Python script[0].

One thing I'm not clear on yet is if using this will imply one such lambda for every autoscaling group or not.

[0] [https://github.com/meltwater/terraform-aws-asg-dns- handler/b...](https://github.com/meltwater/terraform-aws-asg-dns- handler/blob/master/lambda/autoscale/autoscale.py)

<comment><USER5> I just checked with the Jim, the author of the blog post, and module (we both work for Meltwater).

He confirmed "You only need one instance per account, we have always been fine with just one".

I will let him fill in further details here but I figured you would be interested in a short update on this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Can't this be solved by using IP addresses for hostnames? This can be a part of bootstrap script(which ASG/Launch Configuration already supports via UserData[1])

What I can't understand is -

If your logs are in ELK and metrics in prometheus/grafana - why do you need _SSH access_? Sounds like thats a good problem to solve

[1] - [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/user- dat...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/user-data.html)

<comment><USER7> Post author here.

SSH access is a last resort, but it can be necessary in certain cases. For example, if our log forwarding breaks. SSH is also just one example, it can also be helpful to curl endpoints on the host directly without hitting the ELB/ALB.

The post actually provides the user_data script we use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I do this already but from my configuration management system on my instances, but one thing I don't have that I'd love if Route53 would help support is being able to run route53 to handle in-addr.arpa zones for my IP addresses so I can get reverse IP looking for my VPC networks without having to run my own resolver.

<comment><USER9> We run our reverse zones on route53. It is just a little bit cumbersome but overall works relatively well with vpc private hosted zones.

<comment><USER8> Are you using RFC1918 networks or are you using public subnets you have actual delegation for?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wrote and use this regularly, docker app that adds and removes instances from route53, similar to their terraform solution. Similar idea, different implementation.

[https://github.com/discobean/route53-sidecar](https://github.com/discobean/route53-sidecar)

</comment><comment><USER11> Why are ASGs 'outdated' in a world with Kubernetes?

Our nodes are in ASGs.

<comment><USER7> Post author here.

I brought up that point since I think most developers prefer the user experience of Lambda/Kubernetes where they don't have to manage individual instances in Auto Scaling Groups. They certainly are not 'outdated' for our use cases, and especially not for those responsible for running the underlying infrastructure (when running Kubernetes nodes).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think AWS not having automatic hostnames for ASG instances is a way to lure you into Lambda's, at least that's how I got hooked.

<comment><USER13> Why should an instance created by an ASG have a host name? These are cattle not pets. I use Serilog for logging with an EC2 enricher that automatically adds the instance Id and the IP address.

Since Serilog does structured logging, I can use either an ElasticSearch or Mongo sink and do complex queries.

If I routinely need to log into an instance to troubleshoot, I need to be capturing data and sending it to a central logging system.

<comment><USER14> > Why should an instance created by an ASG have a host name?

It means you can connect to it by just knowing its instance ID.

Adding the IP address everywhere also works.

There can be some nice SSH config options though, like using a particular key for everything *.prod.myaws.com

<comment><USER13> That's the second part. If I'm troubleshooting by logging into EC2 instances, there is something wrong with my logging infrastructure. That's actually the larger issue.

<comment><USER14> > If I'm troubleshooting by logging into EC2 instances, there is something > wrong with my logging infrastructure.

I suppose it's possible to build enough logging to account for an interactive SSH session for debugging problems...but that would be massive.

I ran out of disk space. Why?

<comment><USER13> If you're logging to a local disk on ephemeral VMs, that doesn't make the situation any better.

That's why you need a central logging facility. If you're using AWS, you could store your structured JSON logs in S3 and query them with Athena. ([https://medium.com/quiq-blog/store-json-logs-on-s3-for- searc...](https://medium.com/quiq-blog/store-json-logs-on-s3-for-search-and- analytics-using-amazon-athena-b5bb7dbe377f))

Of course there are other ways both using AWS and third party services. Centralized logging is a solved problem.

AWS isn't going to run out of disk space any time soon. You could also use a lifecycle policy to delete old logs or move them to a lower cost storage depending on your retention policy.

I'm not saying that I have never had to log on to a VM to troubleshoot, but that's a sign of the need of better logging.

And if my logging infrastructure isn't good, how pray tell will I troubleshoot my programs running on Lambda or Fargate?

<comment><USER14> I never said your disk was full with logs.

> how pray tell will I troubleshoot my programs running on Lambda or Fargate?

That is indeed a big problem running on Lambda and Fargate.

In my experience, Fargate isn't very commonly used and Lambda is used for only relatively simple things.

<comment><USER13> It's not a problem at all with lambda or Fargate. Logging can be as simple as printing to the console and they go to CloudWatch.

It's the same concept. If you're troubleshooting at any point involves needing to log in to an EC2 instance, you might as well have a few bespoke servers called "Web01" and "Web02". You're just using ASG to create pets at scale. We run an ASG in production that scales from 2 to 30 instances based on the number of messages in a queue, lambdas running all of the time, some a Fargate tasks etc. it would be a nightmare to troubleshoot all of those processes without centralized, queryable logs.

 _In my experience, Fargate isn 't very commonly used and Lambda is used for only relatively simple things._

And that experience is representative of the entire AWS ecosystem?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Difficult Month - Post Mortem - <AUTHOR> http://blog.iron.io/2013/06/a-difficult-month-post-mortem.html <comment><USER2> But how did they shard a queue on multiple servers?

<comment><USER3> They say that the problem was the number of items in one queue. If this is the issue, and they have a way to handle a large number of small full queues but not a single huge one, what comes to mind is linking some "virtual queues" so that a queue is stored in many small queues, stored on different servers. Instering an item would put it in the first queue until that reaches the limit, then switch to a new one, on another server.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Honesty goes a long way.

</comment><comment><USER5> I saw iron.io, I thought immediately it was another Ruby bashing article.

<comment><USER6> Fair enough. :) For the record, we actually use a lot of Ruby in our frontend systems as well as organize the SFRails meetup group in San Francisco. We just -- love GoLang for everything else.</comment></comment>


The Artists and Their Alley, in Postwar France - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/22/t-magazine/art/impasse-ronsin-artists-montparnasse-constantin-brancusi.html <comment><USER3> Low rent spaces: artists and musicians need them (although the ones near here have toilets now). In cities where the rents are too high, the artists - <USER2> _new_ artists - leave.</comment>


Show HN: Hackendo::Integrate - A wearables + externals expo and hackathon - <AUTHOR> http://hackendo.techendo.co/

<comment><AUTHOR> SF event for hackers by hackers thinking and developing for the future of the world around us. Let me know if you have some ideas you might want us to host. dan at techendo dot co

[edit]

Here is the official press release: [http://www.techendo.co/posts/hackendo- san-francisco-wearable...](http://www.techendo.co/posts/hackendo-san- francisco-wearables-externals-expo-and-hackathon)</comment>


Visualise the structure of a spreadsheet - <AUTHOR> http://www.slateforexcel.com <comment><USER2> From the video, this looks like a graphical spreadsheet debugger. That is a fucking fantastic idea. It's been a while sine I used a lot of excel, but this would have been great.

I think you'd want to target non-programmers who use a lot of excel (so people in "business") and just bring them more debugging features. An excel IDE would be an ambitious potential next step.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure I agree with the second point. Excel has tons of debugging features, too many. It means most people don't know about all the tools and they're all really badly designed. This is about getting rid of all that and creating one new feature, the tree view. Which offers way more functionality on it's own.

<comment><USER3> While Excel has SOME debugging features, they really don't work well at ALL for large formulas. I don't need something to help me debug some multiplication.

But when I'm offsetting to an array upon which I'm selecting and summing a subset of these cells with an if-driven sumproduct, and maybe dynamically looking up all of the ranges with more index/matches.... its impossible to look at in the little formula tracing box.

I can't wait to try this out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I've been working on this myself and would really love to get some feedback. Would this be useful for the problems you have with Excel?

<comment><USER4> it's a great idea - much better than the old built-in formula dependency tracker. definitely loving your idea! I've been in the Excel _business_ myself for years (having worked in finance) and always love when someone comes up with a fresh tool for the mighty Excel (yeah, I know most developer's views on Excel...). I've recently started www.spreadgit.com which is a GitHub-like service for spreadsheets. looking forward to playing around with your service!

<comment><AUTHOR> It looks really cool, I think the two tools kind of go hand in hand. Sharing sheets and understanding them.

<comment><USER4> yup. feel free to drop me an email if you want to touch base (i've just done the sign-up)

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool. I'm firstname.lastname@example.com btw

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love the way you've presented the underlying structure so much, I found myself wishing you would replace the spreadsheet itself!

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, maybe one day...

<comment><USER6> You are just a small step away from the concepts in Subtext:

[http://www.subtext-lang.org](http://www.subtext-lang.org)

I highly recommend watching the screencasts, especially the demo:

[http://www.subtext-lang.org/demo1.html](http://www.subtext- lang.org/demo1.html)

I have wanted a graphical interface for functional programming in environments like Excel for a long time. In my experience, most of the pseudo-programming that has dominated software engineering (object-oriented/MVC/message-based, patterns, best practices) goes away when you can model something directly.

Nobody has been able to successfully apply proven engineering concepts from, say, electrical engineering or VLSI to software engineering. I think it's because the leap from imperative code is too long.

But nobody has successfully made functional code approachable either, because too often it's contaminated by syntactic sugar that's too symbolic, various handcuffs that make even the simplest tasks arduous (poor handling of global state), or learning curves that can't be scaled when it comes to interacting with real-world time-based data (monads etc).

For the most part Excel has none of these issues. You can stick an imperative macro in the middle of your functional code and it works just fine, as it should in any other functional language (as long as you follow certain rules like, no globals). Then you can write another macro to load CSV data into your spreadsheet, or even spit it out to a folder that has a shell script watching it to transform the data again. I think it's more productive to work in that unix-like manner (of a bunch of small tools that do one thing well, pipelined together), than it would be to try to integrate notions like dynamic data into Excel. But the achilles heal of Excel was always obfuscation.

We need to get away from language when we're thinking about functional programming, and focus more on data and transformations. Slate looks like a great start, kudos!

<comment><USER7>
      ...nobody has successfully made functional code approachable

I'm not totally sure what to make of this statement. I think of functional programming as an extension of the expression-based computation almost everyone (in the first world anyway) learns in pre-algebra. What could be more approachable?

Yet I always have trouble recommending a specific functional language to someone who's curious. I'd say scheme if sexprs weren't so intimidating, ocaml if the syntax weren't so annoying, Haskell if it weren't, well, Haskell (not that I've really used Haskell myself). So for now I just tell people to learn Python and show them map() and closures.

Is there a semi-practical functional language with C-ish call syntax, especially with dynamic typing? And don't tell me Javascript, that's still mostly imperative. Rust seems close (closer than Python at least). I might start recommending that when it stabilizes.

<comment><USER8> I use Haskell, but for many data manipulation problems it is still clearer to do them in Excel, mostly because of the bigger emphasis on the data itself, easier visualisation and eyeball-verification intermediate results, and simpler data-garbage-fixing in case a data point "raises an exception".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Oh good. An autoplaying YouTube video with audio.

 _closes tab_

<comment><AUTHOR> OK I've disabled the autoplay again. I was just trying to get people to watch the video.

<comment><USER10> Oh don't you dare! Run an a/b test first, before you disable autoplay. If autoplay gets more signups then keep it. You're not here to be our friend and drink tea, you're running a business.

From a design point of view, I LOVE your desaturated forest look with the logo. It's all very memorable

<comment><USER9> Fair point. My miserableness may not be typical.

<comment><USER10> I know what you mean though. I have chrome plugins installed that prevent autoplay, flash, widgets, facebook, and a whole lot of other things. It's awesome I can have 40+ tabs open and not have to worry about lag.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is this an Excel plugin or an independent/standalone software?

</comment><comment><USER12> Interesting. As I understand it, you use a spreadsheet as input and then create the data flow diagram. I certainly see how seeing the data flow diagram means better clarity and error-finding. So here is a question for you? What if we take it a step further and have users actually entered their complex spreadsheets in a tidy graphical data flow diagram which mapped back?

<comment><USER13> Like Livesheets, you mean?

<comment><USER12> Yep. Livesheets more or less.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> WARNING: CONTAINS AUTOPLAY SOUND.

</comment><comment><USER15> > try to look at the prezi thing

> id: 1100 the reason is: Event [Event type="fontLoadError" bubbles=false > cancelable=false eventPhase=2]

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll look into it, thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> We would certainly use this at our company...In the real estate finance world we exclusively use Excel for financial underwriting, and at times, cells and formulas get lost in the fray. As the analyst around here, I know how to audit a spreadsheet just looking at the formula (if I built it...), but the guys in the field using our models have no clue how cell A links to cell B. I vote for online solution, as us corporate types have no ability to download or add software (even as Excel add-ins...) Ugh.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you not have any issues with uploading proprietary information?

<comment><USER16> I don't personally, but I could imagine our company might. That being said, we use Box and other "insecure" places to upload files. I argue that as long as you have a policy in place that what is uploaded isn't shared without permissions given, I'm sure we wouldn't have problem uploading.

Thinking about it more though, keeping it integrated into excel or offline has its merits. We have 20mb+ financial models that would take forever for your software to churn through.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This looks awesome! I quite often stumble upon the task of automating or porting spreadsheets into code. This is always a pain as it might in some ways be hard to visualize the flow in a chart. This tool would greatly simplify the task. Looks really sweet!

</comment><comment><USER18> The problem with Excel spreadsheets is that the overwhelming majority of users are not programmers or engineers, they are clerical workers with no real understanding of what they are doing. Knowledge, such as it is, is passed on in a monkey see, monkey do, fashion, producing imitation without insight.

This proposed tool is for engineers, not clerks. You download it and use it locally right? Because if it requires the spreadsheet to be uploaded then that is another technical hurdle and one which breaches most people's security requirements.

Excel already does most of this, the problem is that people can't comprehend what it is telling them, your tool is no different.

<comment><AUTHOR> Almost all Excel users are not programmers, you're definitely right. If by clerical workers you mean people who are just entering data into the sheet or reading an output then, yes, they don't need to understand what the sheet is doing.

However there are loads of people who build there own sheets: analysts, consultants, managers, marketing, accountants and yes engineers. These are the people who spend the most time using excel. Excel let's you build a very complex model formula by formula. It's often a model more complex than you might be able to map out initially. Whilst they are not programmers they are still smart enough to understand the sheets they've built. The issue is Excel right now is so opaque about what its doing and where the numbers come from. It makes this task much harder than it needs to be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I do financial modelling at a Big4 and can easily see the value of this type of visualization tool.

I wonder if/how you are able to visualize INDEX/MATCH type lookups, SUMPRODUCT and array formulas? Obviously, these types of formulas are not in every model, but for my usecase it would be pretty important.

Also, since others have asked but the answer watn't too clear: is any data uploaded?

You mention that you have plans to move to a model where things happen in reverse: models would be defined as flows and the spreadsheet could be generated. What progress (if any) have you made on that front?

<comment><AUTHOR> -A formula such as INDEX or MATCH is shown as a box with an arrow coming in for each parameter of the function. Hovering over the box gives a breakdown of which cell is being looked up for each row.

-None of the content of the spreadsheet is uploaded.

-We're not looking at building the model as a tree right now but it's a cool area to explore.

<comment><USER19> We have some pretty powerful in-hourse tools for visualizing information flow within a given worksheet. It will overlay borders around contiguous blocks of identical (R1C1) formulas and color code based on whether the cell has a value, a formula an off-sheet formula and cross-file formula, etc...

However, where our tools fail, and where your tool really shines is transforming the spreadsheet visual paradigm into something that more closely resembles the intent of the model. Very cool! (I signed up)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I was JUST thinking about something like this a week ago. I termed it "formula explorer" and was going to ask some people if something like it was in Excel 2013 (at work we're on 2003). This would be great for my mechanical engineering work. We often have formulas that reference many sheets with many constituent formulas. To check them I usually have to create another sheet that shows the flow of values concisely on one sheet, basically a manual version of what Slate does. This tool would automate that, looks fantastic.

</comment><comment><USER21> An Excel to LabVIEW converter. ;-)

It seems like a really cool idea. For better or worse, Excel has emerged as the de facto "programming" tool for small scale computation and database tasks. It's an annoyance that you can't see your entire program at once, especially for checking correctness, finding bugs, and understanding someone else's work.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I can be contacted on firstname.lastname@example.com if anyone wants to get in touch btw

</comment><comment><USER22> Very cool! I've got two bloated excel spreadsheets that need to be ported to a web app and this looks like it would be really helpful. Is this available yet to use or still in the early stages?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah it's still quite early stage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This doesn't seem worlds away from LiveSheets.

[http://livesheets.com/](http://livesheets.com/)

</comment><comment><USER24> Great! I hope one day someone will make a similar plugin for LibreOffice Calc.

</comment><comment><USER25> Any idea of the price ?

<comment><AUTHOR> We haven't really decided yet. What would businesses be willing to spend?

<comment><USER26> mmm they wouldn't unless many individuals push for it. This wouldn't be used by management, so people below would have to push for it. I would recommend some type of freemium model.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Wow! Microsoft needs to buy this. Great addition to excel.

</comment><comment><USER28> This looks great!</comment>


Show HN: My weekend project: Twtspire - <AUTHOR> http://www.twtspire.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Twtspire uses the twitter search api to find tweets with key phrases like "I wish there was a site that..."

Hopefully it'll help give an idea of some of the things that people actually want, and inspire a weekend project or two.

I would love to hear some feedback.

<comment><USER2> Had you seen <http://twistori.com> ?

<comment><USER3> That's really nice, I like it better than the OP's page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Feature idea: Add a "This is a good idea" button so users can vote up uncommon and plausible ones.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok. I just implemented a quick and dirty voting mechanism that'll due for now.

It uses the reddit algorithm for calculating how "hot" a story is.

That was fun!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great job! This could definitely be useful to find something people already want, especially if you could keep a tally of the most wished for ideas. What did you develop it in?

I also like the logo of the two birds talking. Did you make it yourself, or did you get it from somewhere?

One thing that I see could use a little improvement is the "next" and "previous" links. Right now they just blend in to the background. You should try making them stand out, and maybe make them look a bit more button-like. It would also be worth testing "next" and "previous" links on the top of the content.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wish I had the design chops to create a graphic of that quality...

I got it from <http://iconfinder.com/>. You can find lots of great graphics there for free (don't forget to check the licenses).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I love this. They seem to fall into a few categories: Silly and impossible, "I want a website to take my boredom away," and the mildly disturbing. Oh, and some not horrible ideas. _thumbs up_

</comment><comment><USER7> Nice project. What language did you use? Python, Php, Ruby? and what framework? I'm just curious :)

</comment><comment><USER8> Good idea + looks great. I found a slight glitch and couldn't find a better way to contact you so here goes:

When I clicked like it went from a nice looking FB Like button to <http://imgur.com/f5AID>

</comment><comment><USER9> Something I'd be very interested to see are the ideas that _multiple people_ are asking for.

And then the next thing I would want is a fast way to throw up an ad for the app in question, just to see how many clicks it gets.

</comment><comment><USER10> Cool idea!

If nothing else, some of the posts will make you laugh: "someone should make a site called wetpussies.org and upload nothing but videos/pictures of people giving their cat a bath. "

Great job, btw.

</comment><comment><USER3> I read this as "twat spire" in en-GB: twat is a word somewhere between "pussy" and "cunt" in British English. Just FWIW. I guess you're not British?

<comment><USER11> Me too. I don't know if that means I have a dirty mind, or if I try to guess missing vowels in alphabetical order.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> See also: <http://twiteye.com/>

That one is more scrolly, and searches for a bit more than just 'app' ideas.

</comment><comment><USER12> Great idea! I like it a lot... sorry I can't be more helpful/critical but it's working nicely for me and it looks good! Well done.

<comment><USER12> I decided to build one of these ideas - check out <http://firstfan.me>! (@wendyhk wished there was a site where you could record the time & date you discovered a certain band. I am in the middle of mid-terms and couldn't crank out the site just yet so I made a landing page and I'll put the site together in the coming week.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> That's a great idea, I'm sure you can get quite a few good ideas if you watch it for long enough. Good job!

</comment><comment><USER14> Awesome. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER15> nicely done hombre

</comment><comment><USER16> this is an excellent idea!

</comment><comment><USER17> Very cool idea

</comment><comment><USER18> This is great! Good job!</comment>


This girl just got fired? BlackBerry parts ways with Alicia Keys - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57616476-71/this-girl-just-got-fired-blackberry-parts-ways-with-alicia-keys/

<comment><AUTHOR> She shouldn't be a "directors" post from the beginning anyway. Why would a tech company bring a on "creative directors" that have no practical experience? She is a terrific singer - no doubt about that. I love Alicia Keys and her music. This is no one else's fault but BB's. On the other hand, Blackberry: who? do they still around?</comment>


How is TJ Holowaychuk so insanely productive? - <AUTHOR> https://www.quora.com/How-is-TJ-Holowaychuk-so-insanely-productive?share=1

<comment><USER2> TL;DR TJ isn't one person, but many.

Who knows how many of those virtual persons "exist" and if they are the 10x programmers, which the recruiters are referring too? ;)</comment>