Shumway: a SWF interpreter entirely in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://benjamin.smedbergs.us/blog/2012-11-12/shumway-a-swf-interpreter-entirely-in-javascript/ <comment><USER2> I have good hopes for this (Mozilla's HTML5-based PDF reader is my favourite PDF browser plugin), but I'm a little worried - there have been a _lot_ of Open Source Flash reimplementations, and so far as I can tell they all have early success and pretty demos of older Flash content, but are completely useless on most real-world Flash usage, like nearly any site that shows a video.

I'll note that Gnash does actually work on YouTube.com, but only because YouTube seems to deliberately serve an ancient version of their Flash player, rather than the latest version with the closed-captions and text overlays and all that stuff.

<comment><USER3> that's the point , you cant keep up with the latest flash version = fail . You cant get good performances = fail , you cant run it on old browsers that dont have flash = fail . Nobody needs that. This has already been done , all the projects have failed. If i had skills i would not waste my time trying to fit a triangle in a star , i would develop tools to make perfect fitting stars. That's what people want.

<comment><USER4> Interestingly this has been my opinion of all the projects that attempt to create a bridge between native mobile APIS and javascript like phonegap and trigger.io. Don't get me know, they've been noble useful effects, but a lot of that effort should have going into projects like WebKit and Firefox to bring those native APIs to the browsers themselves.

<comment><USER4> Doh!

"Don't get me wrong, they've been noble useful efforts" not "Don't get me know, they've been noble useful effects"

Stupid autocorrect. TBH I prefer typos than autocorrect. At least with typos it looks like a typo instead of making you look like an idiot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Being more of a designer than a developer, I've got to admit that the thought of second wind for Flash kind of scares me. I've never liked Flash, mainly because historically it wasn't as "open" as HTML, Macromedia Flash (I know, right) crashed a lot, as well as the general abuse of Flash found all around the web in the late 90's/early 2k.

Anyone willing/able to take my (probably irrational) fear away and tell me why this SWF interpreter is a good thing?

<comment><USER6> Even though I think this is a cool project, I agree 100% with your fears.

I used to do Flash/Flex/Air extensively, and often preached it to my fellow developers, despite considerable resistance. I argued that SWF was fulfilling the cross-platform promise of applets.

And when Adobe managed to mishandle Macromedia's legacy, I was left with much egg on the face. I don't want to go through that again.

That said, good for Mozilla. They really are running with a ton of impressive open source projects.

<comment><USER7> No second wind here. Think instead of pdf.js and how it relieves you of the bloated security hole called Reader. PDF is a large format (extensions include SWF!) but pdf.js need not handle all of it to be useful in minimizing Reader activations.

Similarly, Flash is going down, never to come back (thanks, SJ). So Shumway need handle only the tall head, possibly as a previewer if not a full Flash replacement. The long tail is not too fat, but it will require a plugin for the foreseeable future.

In the far future, archeologists will pore over archive contents at the edge of the Beyond, decoding ancient languages including JS and SWF, leery of evil transcendant malware ;-).

/be

<comment><USER6> Very well explained, you seem to know a lot about Javascript.

<comment><USER8> Yes, I would say Brendan Eich probably knows a lot about JavaScript. Probably more than he wants to know :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting to see tobeytailor (of Gordon[1]) working on this. Is this built on the same code Gordon uses?

[1]: <https://github.com/tobeytailor/gordon/>

<comment><USER10> I don't know, but I would guess it is, if only because "Gordon Shumway" is the alias of ALF from the 80s tv show.

<comment><USER11> I actually don't think we're sharing any code with Gordon. But yes, the name is this obscure transitive-closure reference: (Adobe) Flash -> (Flash) Gordon -> (Gordon) Shumway.

<comment><USER9> wow. as someone born in the late '80s, thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Preface: this is pretty cool.

That said, is the payoff of implementing this enormously involved solution really worth it? I don't know why I feel like this, but something deep down pains me when I think of the man hours and frustration that had to have gone into something like this. Does anyone else know what I mean?

<comment><USER13> I agree, brilliant job but kinda depressing if no one really ends up using the results of his hard work.

.. definitely skating to where the puck used to be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Pretty nice. The madness of interpreters on top of interpreters is not lost on my but still fun.

<comment><USER11> To be more precise, JITs on top of JITs. :)

We have both an interpreter for ActionScript bytecode as well as a compiler that compiles that bytecode method-at-a-time to JavaScript using a restructuring approach like emscripten's relooper.

Disclaimer: I work on Shumway.

<comment><USER14> I could give you the old guy's rant, "Back in my day we were happy to have only one 'core' and if it ran at 8Mhz it was in _turbo_ mode!" :-) Its an amazing piece of work.

<comment><USER15> Bah! Back in my day, we counted ourselves lucky if we had an 8 MHz crystal clock. I had to make do with an uncomfortably temperature-dependent RC oscillator running at what I lightheartedly hoped was about 4 MHz.

(I'm actually pretty young, but I've done work with microcontrollers, which feels like stepping into the past. I know a guy in his late 20s who steadfastly refuses to switch from assembly to C, for reasons that come straight out of the 70s. It's a strange world we live in.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The main advantage to Flash is that you get a much more mature language (Actionscript 3) to work with over JS and you also get a whole host of great APIs that are easy to use. (From ByteArrays, to the Camera class, to different blend modes and filters, easy Bitmap manipulations, etc.). Now, JS is starting to implement some of these things which is good, but they still vary across browser, only work on the most modern browsers, etc.

So the advantages of Flash over JS (in my opinion) in short are: better language, better APIs, no tweaking for different platforms.

Anyway, if Shumway was fully featured, it would definitely be a big benefit. But if it doesn't work cross-browser and doesn't support all the features of Flash/Actionscript 3, then you're losing some of the main advantages Actionscript 3 gives you, and you're almost just as well off righting things in JS.

<comment><USER7> You seem up-to-date on AS3 but not on JS. JS has typedarrays (even in IE10) now.

/be

<comment><USER17> First of all, there are more things than typed arrays (vectors) in AS3, the main thing being a consistent runtime. Also the way you structure an AS3 project is different since the language supports packages/classes etc while in JS you (for better or worse) don't have these concepts so you end up with many different code styles. Even though browsers implement the some of the features, there are subtle differences in the implementations. This results, in real world scenarios, that this stuff are being abstracted away, layers and layers of abstractions, libraries for everything. I have my doubts that this SWF interpreter can be efficient.

<comment><USER7> There are too many layers in all doomed software, whether written in JS or AS3.

Subtle differences in implementations, you say? That is called the open web. Come on in, the water's fine. Pay no attention to the drowning plugins over in that cold corner...

/be

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> While I understand that they want something that doesn't require installation, I think it's kind of sad that they felt they couldn't pick up on Gnash or LightSpark or some of the other good open-source Flash work out there. This is a nice concept demo; maybe they will choose to work on a grown-up Flash player instead now. Performance is bad enough without putting the JavaScript intermediary in there, and LightSpark is super promising.

A worthy goal, but I hope they don't let NIH set them years behind the curve.

<comment><USER19> > it's kind of sad that they felt they couldn't pick up on Gnash or LightSpark > or some of the other good open-source Flash work out there

The whole point is that doing it in JS avoids the need for a native code plug- in, which cuts off an entire avenue of security problems. Same story as PDF.js.

<comment><USER18> There's a big difference between displaying a PDF file in JavaScript and compiling and displaying an active, real-time Flash game in JavaScript. A PDF file is just words and pictures on a page, same thing browsers have always done. They don't include animations, they don't accept user input, they don't connect to servers and stream files and send updates, and they definitely don't run real-time graphics code or path finding and collision detection algorithms.

The applications of Flash make it a better candidate for native code instead of the performance wreck of a from-scratch JIT-on-JIT solution. I think it's a great demo and probably a useful experiment that can improve the quality of Firefox's JavaScript compilers, but I don't think it's a very serious candidate to replace Flash Player for its most common strongholds (for instance: that simple little car demo runs at 20fps on my machine, which I built last month and has an i7 3770K). And that's really what we need right now.

The excuses to write this in JavaScript are pretty flat. You don't think they can figure out how to make an NSAPI plugin reasonably secure? You don't think they can get the code portable enough to work on multiple platforms? The biggest issue is probably mobile since many machines there use ARM, but Lightspark uses LLVM as its backend, which already supports ARM. I'm confident Mozilla's engineers can figure that out and give us a real replacement for the Flash player.

I don't mean to imply that this project isn't impressive -- it is. But I hate to see them duplicate so much effort for a solution that is, by nature, performantly disadvantaged. We need a serious challenger to Flash Player (we've had enough toys) and Mozilla is in a good position to provide that, so I hope they choose to do so.

<comment><USER20> >A PDF file is just words and pictures on a page

>They don't include animations, they don't accept user input, they don't connect to servers and stream files and send updates

A PDF file is much more than just words and pictures. There are forms which accept user input, weird embedded content, and other strange things. Although I am not familiar with the spec, I have seen the features that Adobe Acrobat lets you do with PDFs and it seems pretty monstrous.

To clarify, there are several security issues that arise from all of this [0], and as others on this page have pointed out, that is a good reason to make use of the existing infrastructure around browser sandboxing.

[0] - <http://duckduckgo.com/?q=adobe+pdf+vulnerabilities>

<comment><USER18> Right, but what percentage of the esoteric features technically supported by PDFs are actually in use? With the exception of forms, the huge, overwhelming majority of PDFs never use things like embedded objects (which, funnily enough, can sometimes be Flash files). And forms are definitely doable in a JavaScript PDF reader; they are, in fact, probably easier than in a native PDF reader since you'll be able to use HTML. So in JS, they can display almost any PDF in the world with no trouble at all. How many Flash programs are more complex than that little car demo, which runs slowly on my top-of-the-line hardware?

Why are we so afraid of native code these days? Firefox already runs plugins in a sandbox, and has done so since 3.6. There is more complexity and opportunity for screwups in unmanaged code, yes, and for a PDF JavaScript is just fine, but for something that requires a powerful, fast VM capable of real-time graphics and real-time user input without lag or freezes, it is silly to write off the benefit of performant native code just because Adobe's plugins are rife with security holes, which I believe is what is happening here.

<comment><USER21> We already have a thing that's capable of real-time graphics and real-time user input, it's called a web browser. This is simply leveraging that to run a different set of input.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is pretty exciting. Flash player has never been my favourite piece of software, so having a reasonable alternative would be fantastic.

I know there's also Gnash, but I haven't tried it in a long time, and I'm led to believe it is far from feature complete. Hopefully this project can push further.

<comment><USER23> If you're interested in Gnash you might be interested in

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

"Lightspark is a free and open source SWF player"

Still in beta.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The demo errors out in Safari, apparently due to some weird issue with defineProperty and read-only properties. As big as a HTML5 fan as I am, considering Flash's cross-platform consistency, it's a bit ironic...

</comment><comment><USER25> So that means I now have to disable JS as well as Flash?

</comment><comment><USER3> this project is a waste of time. The problem is not the player , but how flash can output content that use standard browser apis.

This kind of emulation is a good demo , but doesnt work in the real world. Why whould i use that ? old browser will never support that tech ( < IE9 ) but they support flash , recent browsers dont need flash , what's the point ?

It makes more sense to build tools similar to flash IDE that can export to HTML5 than wasting time trying to make legacy code run slow and blow up to the user's face ...

been there , done that ...

<comment><USER7> Platforms where Flash is not supported by Adobe, or not allowed by the OS vendor:

\- Linux

\- Win8 Metro, depending on the whitelist contents

\- iPad

\- iPhone

\- FirefoxOS (neé B2G)

As Stan the Man says, 'nuff said!

/be

<comment><USER26> I think we pretty much all agree that flash is dead on mobile. That includes iPad, iPhone, Android, and so forth.

On the desktop, it's a bit of a different story. Chrome supports Flash on Linux quite well. Internet Explorer also has Flash baked in. There is some whitelisting if you are in "tablet mode"-- or so I am told. It seems like for a normal computer you should be able to turn off tablet mode, though.

I wish Mozilla had put some effort into contributing to Gnash or swfdec. There really wasn't, and isn't, a good flash decoder that isn't derived from Adobe's codebase. All the ones that exist now are toys. I have a feeling that this effort will be no different. I hope I'm wrong.

<comment><USER7> I wish I had a dollar for every time someone wished that Mozilla did more anti-leveraged work in the past.

@supercoder's point about skating where the puck used to be has truth in it, and we do not aim to over-invest in Flash via Shumway now (and we avoided it before; perhaps we should have done more, but the only temporarily-winning effort I know of was Chrome's, which required a business deal with Adobe and a tremendous amount of engineering effort on Google's side).

On the other hand, as Jet Villegas's blog post points out, we also uplift the web and smooth out uneven APIs and performance curves by researching Shumway. If Flash requires some greater JS performance, or some API gap to be filled, Shumway is the most direct way to find out. It's well within Mozilla Research's ambit, and not backward-looking, to explore this space.

Finally, if we can deploy Shumway as a previewer and reduce actual Flashplayer plugin instantiations greatly, with as good or better user experience in terms of jank, CPU utilization, battery life, etc. -- and with some black-video- frame-of-death saves on my iPad, should Shumway be supported there -- that helps in the coming years as Flash lingers on in the "desktop web".

But make no mistake: the growth curve for mobile devices and the lack of Flash there will kill Flash. All those restaurant sites that sunk their discretionary web content development budgets in Flash years ago? They are re- investing rapidly to work on iOS devices. I don't see Flash rallying on desktop, or even via Air on Android.

Add this all up and I believe Shumway can avoid the forever-a-toy status. Flash is proprietary tech, in spite of SWF being opened up in recent years. Its single main implementation code is its spec. This hurts when the single implementation is evolving rapidly, but as that implementation slows down and (outside of Air and games, let's say) declines, the 90%-coverage "toys" become real tools, with the right integration.

This could have applied to Gnash or swfdec in the past, but at significantly higher cost, not only in direct engineering costs and opportunity costs to web-perf/API-uplift, but also in securing yet more piles of native VM code.

/be

<comment><USER27> I seriously believe that Shumway is a very cool research project to demonstrate what is possible in modern browsers. But I just want to highlight a few things:

1\. You mention that this can help in terms of CPU utilization, battery life, etc. Would be great, still today, the very simple (non AS3/vector based) Racing game (<http://mozilla.github.com/shumway/examples/racing/>) you are running through Shumway requires around 70% of CPU usage on my MacBook Pro against 11% with Flash Player. A game which would consume even less in Flash Player if it used AS3 and simple bitmap blitting techniques. Yes, JS performance will improve, and efforts like River Trail are promising, but we are still far from that, I am a little worried we are setting the wrong expectations here.

2\. The restaurant websites. Yes, there are a lot of these restaurant websites using Flash. And to be fair, they should never have used Flash for that. But you are right most of them are porting these to HTML and it works nicely. But fortunately Flash on the web is not used for restaurant websites only, especially games. Today Flash Player is used to power 9 of the top 10 Facebook games with content like FarmVille 2, CityVille, Kings Road, Ruby Blast, Angry Birds targeting around 30 million daily users are powered with Flash Player using Stage3D and without Flash, we would all be playing Racing games like the one mentioned earlier. Or maybe faster games, but with NaCl in Chrome only? ;)

3\. You don't see Flash rallying on desktop, or even via Air on Android. Thanks to Stage3D, AIR is actually becoming more and more serious for game developers. Most developers wanting to develop games on desktop, iOS and Android are facing big issues when it comes to fragmentation and AIR solves that. All the mobiles games here <http://gaming.adobe.com/showcase/> are using AIR.

Thibault

<comment><USER7> 1\. We're not done yet, rather at an early stage.

2&3\. I did write "(outside of Air and games, let's say)". Did you miss that?

See also Emscripten, which produces GC-free well-typed JS. We're also working in Mozilla Research to show Emscripten + JS can competes on performance, and excel on reach, with alternative single-browser and proprietary approaches.

/be

<comment><USER27> 1\. Ok, thanks for the info. Just tell people, cause people will get defensive otherwise.

2/3. Yep, I missed that. Fair ;)

Yes, I have been following Emscripten and it is promising. No doubt clearly on the excel on reach just some remaining doubts on the performance and CPU/battery usage.

If you guys truly want to have this valuable, also make sure the entire system is consistent, like Flash, and not just in Firefox.

As I said, it is a neat research project, I will keep watching Shumway grow :)

Thibault</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: any experience with literate programming? - <AUTHOR>

The concept of literate programming was invented in the 1970's by DEK with WEB [1] during the rise of structured programming. In my understanding, the goal of literate programming is to implement concepts in programs by following one's own approach, and make it understandable to other human beings.
WEB and its relatives rely on a programming language (eg. C) and a document formatting language (eg. TeX). The program and its documentation are written at the same time, in an unique source file.  At anytime, one can extract the whole source files (aka 'tangling') or the documentation explaining its implementation (aka 'weaving').
Have you ever used literate programming? What is you experience with it?
[1] http://www.literateprogramming.com/knuthweb.pdf <comment><USER2> I tried to do "true" literate programming but found the tools inadequate. Specifically, for some snippets of code I wanted to show them in more than one place in the document but that lead to all kinds of trouble. I found other things cumbersome as well. Some of that may be my inexperience, or failures of the _specific_ tool set I chose.

Currently I use a bastardized form of literate programming that would not qualify as "real" literate programming. I put the code in the order the code belongs and I embed the document within comments in the code. This leaves the source executable for scripting languages, or directly compilable for compiled languages. We made a tool to flip the source "inside out" to produce a document (TeX/PDF,HTML).

According to LP people I am doing it wrong and not really getting the benefits. That's pretty harsh, but I've managed to live with myself somehow. What we end up with reads like a document, looks great as a web page or printed, and provides encouragement to write meaningful text descriptions. The biggest part to stress is the very last bit: writing meaningful text. Since you produce a document you expect it to read like one. This discourages stupid comments stating the obvious and encourages you to talk about reasons why and other meaningful things.

Please keep in mind that this is just my opinion, coming at LP without the benefit of working with someone who already knew it well.</comment>


Measuring spam conversion rates by infiltrating the Storm botnet - <AUTHOR> http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/pubs/networking/2008-ccs-spamalytics.pdf

<comment><USER2> For the lazy: "After 26 days, and almost 350 million e-mail messages, only 28 sales resulted — a conversion rate of well under 0.00001%. Of these, all but one were for male-enhancement products and the average purchase price was close to $100. Taken together, these conversions would have resulted in revenues of $2,731.88—a bit over $100 a day for the measurement period or $140 per day for periods when the campaign was active. However, our study interposed on only a small fraction of the overall Storm network — we estimate roughly 1.5 percent based on the fraction of worker bots we proxy. Thus, the total daily revenue attributable to Storm's pharmacy campaign is likely closer to $7000 (or $9500 during periods of campaign activity). By the same logic, we estimate that Storm self-propagation campaigns can produce between 3500 and 8500 new bots per day.

The next obvious question is, "How much of this revenue is profit"? Here things are even murkier. First, we must consider how much of the gross revenue is actually recovered on a sale. Assuming the pharmacy campaign drives traffic to an affiliate program (and there are very strong anecdotal reasons to believe this is so) then the gross revenue is likely split between the affiliate and the program (a annual net revenue of $1.75M using our previous estimate). Next, we must subtract business costs. These include a number of incidental expenses (domain registration, bullet-proof hosting fees, etc) that are basically fixed sunk costs, and the cost to distribute the spam itself."

<comment><USER3> Yes. That's about right but I am afraid that the lazy's are gonna miss out on the intricate command & control hierarchy of a botnet and how the researchers injected their machines within the command & control channel to effectively control a portion of the botnet. I am quite surprised about the level of sophistication these botnets are - well ... I guess that programmers in Russia are smarter than their U.S counterparts.

The only thing that we should be weary of (or some of us happy about) is the fact that with this paper, somebody could go ahead and employ the botnet to do their evil bidding instead of the botnet's owner's original evil bidding. Talk about what comes around goes around!

<comment><USER4> Russian programmers are not smarter, they're just willing to do things like this without feeling like they're the scum-of-the-earth like most Americans would.

In Russia they don't believe in black/white, right/wrong like we do here in America, there's about an 80% gray area in between which means things like SPAM, Botnets and taking money from suckers is acceptable (notice I didn't say right or wrong)

<comment><USER5> Actually, they believe strongly in black/white and right/wrong in Russia, but within a tighter social circle. This difference between Russia and the West is of degree, not of kind. Most Americans care little about how their actions affect people in the third world, for example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder how this jolly industry settled on its limited range of products.

The spammers are infinitely creative in creating new ways to say 'penis enlargement,' but they can't think past selling one of about three products?.

<comment><USER7> Penis enlargement products are ideal for spam because they are embarrassing to buy elsewhere, they are very cheap to manufacture (e.g. sugar pill) and they don't work. The last part is important, if they did work there would be a non- spam market for them.

For this reason, I believe that we do not see hair loss products marketed extensively through spam. There are good hair loss products (minoxidil and propecia) that have clinically shown effects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Cool findings:

\- Hotmail didn't let any spam through \- one campaign had 347,590,389 emails, 10,522 visits and 28 conversions (paper: "However, a very low conversion rate does not necessary imply low revenue or profitability.")

<comment><USER9> Hotmail also doesn't let a lot of legitimate email through...</comment></comment>


Woody Allen Interview on His Life and Movies - <AUTHOR> https://deadline.com/2015/05/woody-allen-cannes-interview-irrational-man-1201427066/

<comment><USER2> I love Woody Allen's work and I am happy to read this article. However, its inclusion on HN somewhat dilutes HN's raison d'etre.</comment>


Show HN: Vertexshaderart.com - <AUTHOR> http://www.vertexshaderart.com <comment><USER2> Wow, really dig this. Love how the music fits as well. How long has this been up for?

<comment><AUTHOR> it's been up about 4 days</comment></comment>


Guide to Music Crowdfunding – Part 1: Fans with Benefits - <AUTHOR> http://bryank.im/fanswbenefits

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey all, I wrote this thing. And since Svbtle doesn't have a commenting feature, I'll probably be hanging here all day if you have any questions, feedback, or violent disagreements about the post. I could talk about this topic all day, so shoot!

<comment><USER2> Really enjoyed the article and looking forward to more in the series. Would be interested to hear your thoughts on the Patreon.com model (funding ongoing creative work vs kickstarter where it builds up to a big final product like an album release). Also, are there any other crowdfunding models which you feel have big potential that no one has done well yet?

<comment><AUTHOR> what's up G! Long time no see. I love Patreon, it turns crowdfunding on it's head. They're more about a subscription model and delivering on an on-going, digitally delivered relationship, as opposed to the big blowout, whale-heavy model of traditional crowdfunding. Flip side of the same coin, I think artists need to basically do both in the future. I'm not sure what format is next for artists. Honestly I care less about the format as much as I do about the underlying principles, which is finding a way to inject humanity and genuine intimacy into the "sales" process. That's always going to be important in a patronage model. I suppose some sort of CRM element would help with that?</comment></comment></comment>


UK GCHQ Challenge – Just got to part 3 - <AUTHOR> http://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/puzzleinabucket/bb1f263f70e45b3d.html <comment><AUTHOR> Now, there are two approaches: A) I'll try to answer the question or B) I'll try to crack the link to the next step.

Let's go for B, and have some fun! Have a look at the source code.

The answer validator works in this way.

1) convert the 4 answer to lowercase (thank you, the space is reduced to 26 character, not bad).

2) call val() and concatenate, now we have something like a\0b\0c\0d

3) the validation function. in that function there are 2 things happening. resultA is summed with the ASHII code of each character concatenated in the string.

resultA += dat.toLowerCase().charCodeAt(j);

and resultB is for each step resultA * 31 XOR with the previous version of resultB.

resultB = (resultA * 31) ^ resultB;

fancy. Couple of other And. tmp = resultA & resultA; resultA = resultB & resultB; resultB = tmp;

and finally a XOR.

                        resultA = resultA ^ initA;
                        resultB = resultB ^ initB;

Now, luckily enough, this transformation are reversible. It does remind me and encoding system. A variation of a famose one.

So, anyone up for a challenge ?</comment>


Nietzsche, the middle period - <AUTHOR> http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/nietzsche-middle-period/ <comment><USER2> Strains of Nietzsche's thought seems to underlie the political extremes of both left and right, particularly right now:

\- The death of Christian tradition and morality, which (despite its de facto shortcomings) provided a common moral framework and language that let people talk to one another

\- The loss of meaning and one possible responsible response, which is to generate your _own_ meaning independent of the morality of others. Note that this thinking helps justify both revolutionaries and reactionaries, since you are heroic for rejecting societal norms.

Jordan Peterson discusses Nietzsche in many of his videos, e.g. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgBuOQL1VYY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgBuOQL1VYY)

<comment><USER3> cut out the middle man [https://www.amazon.com/s/?field- keywords=nietzche](https://www.amazon.com/s/?field-keywords=nietzche)</comment></comment>


Google Acts Like Privatized NSA - <AUTHOR> http://rinf.com/alt-news/surveillance-big-brother/google-acts-like-privatized-nsa/

<comment><USER2> Why do you need the NSA when you have Google?</comment>


The Many Minds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics and Thought Experiment - <AUTHOR> https://thoughtexperiments.net/many-minds/ <comment><AUTHOR> The Many Minds interpretation of Quantum Mechanics examines the consequences of the Everett Many-Worlds interpretation from the perspective of the mind. I bet the scientists in the room are going to have a hard time with this one. Here's a link to a discussion about the role consciousness in QM form an earlier post: [https://thoughtexperiments.net/quantum- suicide/#consciousnes...](https://thoughtexperiments.net/quantum- suicide/#consciousness).</comment>


Scoble's "Building a Company" community on G+ has 3K join in first week - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/+Scobleizer/posts/VavXYJnWJXW

<comment><AUTHOR> Link above is to the announcement. Here's the link to the community:

<https://plus.google.com/communities/111285810442781953487></comment>


How We Increased Our Twitter Following Over 5000% In 30 Days and Why It Matters - <AUTHOR> http://www.distil.it/how-we-increased-our-twitter-following-by-over-5000-in-30-days-and-why-it-actually-matters/

<comment><USER2> Using tweetadder is a great way to get your account suspended. Also, it's not about the quantity of followers you have, but the quality. People who follow back based on a keyword search are probably going to be pretty worthless... If all you want is a big number on your profile page you may as well just buy followers from Fiverr.

<comment><AUTHOR> At first we thought they would be worthless too but they aren't. If you are diligent and specific on who you try and connect to, then you get quality followers as a result. We have gotten sales signups and made several business connections through this campaign.

<comment><USER2> Well if you have signups then I stand corrected, apologies for assuming you didn't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I still can't get myself to embrace Twitter, but this was a good set of thoughts around it. Maybe someday I'll get it together, re-read decent articles like this, and get myself out there. In any case I appreciate the poster's point of view.

</comment><comment><USER4> Couple of solid pointers on expanding a twitter base.</comment>


Real life "Constructicon" quadcopter robots being developed - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/107217-real-life-constructicon-quadcopter-robots-being-developed <comment><USER3> I think I recall something like this posted some time ago. It is an interesting idea, with a few caveats :

* At least in the video at the bottom of the article, it is not actually a swarm - there is never more than one robot doing each task (pickup, place), and one can see them waiting to get a 'workzone' cleared before moving in. In a swarm I'd imagine each flier working independently, with interaction limited to collision avoidance and occasional cooperation when needed(lift heavier block, etc).

* I hardly see such bots battling even moderate windspeeds in a real-life construction project, while carying any kind of real-life construction material block - assuming they can even lift one.

* Intuitively, I'd say this way of building is very energy-inefficient (in terms of power used by the drones) - but I'd love to see some actual figures.

<comment><USER4> If you are referring to the University of Pennsylvania quadrotor construction video, they _were_ doing pipelining, basically for collision avoidance. They also have some cooperative lifting videos.

Edit: this article has that video at the end.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If making a building involved stacking blocks then it would be pretty easy for humans to make buildings too. I don't see how these robots would be capable of installing an electrical socket, or applying caulk, or any number of important tasks. Not to say a robot couldn't accomplish these things, and maybe a quadcopter could deliver supplies in some limited circumstances, though a robotic crane could deliver things as well. One robotic crane could actually assemble the entire described structure, only with concrete blocks instead of polystyrene. It's the eclectic nature of buildings that makes them hard to build, not just piling materials into place.

</comment><comment><USER6> I can imagine something like this being very useful in situations that are complicated by the environment. For instance, in a setting like Chernobyl or Fukushima. Or in a war-zone.

I picture a Google Chauffeur (self-driving) truck, bringing supplies to the site (if possible), and quadcopters doing the final assembly. Push a button here, and a structure is assembled there, with no human intervention.

And don't limit yourself to picturing these dog-sized toys. Picture giant, military-style helicopters, but quadcopters. I don't think there's anything in the physics that doesn't scale. A Chinook CH-47D can carry 26,000 pounds of payload externally.

<comment><USER7> I think you are absolutely right that this is only going to be used when other means fail. Why would anyone lift standard materials for a sky scraper with an aircraft when they can use a crane?

But once you start doing construction the advantages of quadcopters (mainly control) starts to get outweighed by their inefficiency. Regular helicopters are far more efficient - large rotors are exactly what you want for heavy lifting. The strongest helicopter I know of is the CH-53E Super Stallion, and that is a single rotor aircraft (even though it has multiple engines).

<comment><USER6> I think 10,000 quadcopters might be able to do something really amazing. I'm back down to "dog-sized," and I'm back to small payloads. It's a design challenge to come up with useful atomic units that such a robot could lift, but the number of them that can operate independently is a serious factor.

I'll recast this in terms I'm more familiar with: we used to scale software by getting faster CPUs with more powerful instructions. Now we're all being told to scale by numbers of CPUs. Can building construction be similarly recast?

Your CH-53E Super Stallion is effectively scaling up. Can we instead use quadcopters to scale out?

<comment><USER8> Like in Batteries Not Included?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _The team has developed an algorithm that in their words is "limited only by the battery life of the quadcopters and the number of parts available."_

Wow, what an understatement. This is in fact the main problem.

Motors consume a lot of energy - in fact electric motors consume more than 2/3 of produced electricity - this is manufacturing, transportation, even most of the electricity consumed by computers goes to power cooling ventilators.

Electric Quadrocopters usually have flight times measured in minutes - <USER2> they carry a heavy accumulator, maybe a third or half their weight. And the picture of that quadrocopter lifting that block of concrete is actually funny if you have ever thought seriously about flying robots - where can I find those motors and propellers?

<comment><USER10> Do you have a citation for "in fact electric motors consume more than 2/3 of produced electricity". I would be interested in reading more about total energy consumption.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I very much doubt that these bots will ever replace humans -- and certainly not near term.

What they will properly do is become what computers are to us -- a tool which helps humans.

While most technical obstacles will be overcome the limitation of these robots are their use of energy -- lifting something up in the air is so much less efficient that almost any other method of transportation.

</comment><comment><USER12> Anyone on HN a quadcopter aficionado? I would like to get into this hobby, and am eager to learn more.

<comment><USER9> I'm not really an aficionado, but I've done some basic feasibility research as part of school work in university (I'm studying Automation and Control Engineering, and we are tasked at presenting a possible quadrotor/quatrocopter solution for scrutiny).

So you will need to know a lot of stuff, but it depends on what you want to do. What you need to know: \- Electric drives. (Or internal combustion engines, but I think they are way more complex, while undeniably more powerful, also more control problems) \- Control Theory, mostly state-space. \- basic electronics \- Microcontroller programming. \- you will probably need to know at least some digital signal processing. \- AI \- Radio communications (you have to communicate with the robot, even if its autonomous)

<comment><USER12> Shit, that sounds hard. There's no gentler way in then? I was hoping for ready-made kits running Linux :)

<comment><USER9> This? <http://aeroquad.com/>

I'm not sure how much effort it will replace thought. I doubt everything can be abstracted away in a software.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Don't they already use quad-copter (human pilots) for logging in remote areas?</comment>


Werner's Nomenclature of Colours - <AUTHOR> https://www.c82.net/werner/ <comment><USER2> The descriptions are nice but unfortunately the sRGB gamut won't do a book like this justice.

Hopefully monitors will improve - I'm sure if you got used to a full gamut screen, it would be as hard to go back as it is to go back to a 640x480 resolution screen today. Maybe people will make retro sRGB games! ;)

[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cie_Chart_with_sRGB_...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cie_Chart_with_sRGB_gamut_by_spigget.png)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is beautiful. Thanks for posting.

Can I ask a question? I'm not sure I have the words to ask it, but my best attempt is: inside the colors it is speckled; what are the speckles?

For instance, #36 is described as a mix of Berlin Blue and Carmine Red. But if I look closely, that I can see, none of the speckles are reddish. Are they greys?

Obviously I'm looking to reproduce for my own stuff. I'd be glad for any pointers.

<comment><USER4> Thank you. Creator here. The speckles you see are from the scans of the original swatches and them aging over time.

<comment><USER3> Thanks. I find they give a character and complexity that adds to the visual interest.

Could I get a very high-res picture of one or two chips? I'd like a better idea of what I am admiring.

<comment><USER5> The original item at archive.org was scanned at 300 DPI and doesn't seem to have high-rez samples. [https://archive.org/details/gri_c00033125012743312](https://archive.org/details/gri_c00033125012743312)

Edit: I downloaded the whole item using this torrent [https://archive.org/download/gri_c00033125012743312/gri_c000...](https://archive.org/download/gri_c00033125012743312/gri_c00033125012743312_archive.torrent) and the original TIFF images do look better than the JPEGs in the book browser. [https://i.imgur.com/LOMiXUU.png](https://i.imgur.com/LOMiXUU.png)

<comment><USER3> Thanks; I'll have a look.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The animal (mostly bird)/vegetable/mineral life references are brilliant, and I wonder how familiar they are to the readers of today.</comment>


Agile is just best practices - <AUTHOR> http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Posted in response to comments in: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1669075></comment>


Wikispeed: How a 100 Mpg Car Was Developed in 3 Months - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2012/05/10/wikispeed-how-a-100-mpg-car-was-developed-in-3-months/

<comment><AUTHOR> A friend and I were discussing the use of Agile development and TDD at our workplace. He made a comment that some times it may not fit because what you want to make is a car. A tire, steering column, or drive shaft won't be that useful on there own. The comparison continued for a little longer. It made me want to google for making a car using Agile and here we are.</comment>


Ask HN: What books should I read to forward my career as a engineer? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Clean Code by Robert Martin. You'll see it mentioned frequently on HN and online in general. Changed the way I wrote code almost immediately. I kind of wish it had been a part of my university curriculum. I'm sure we HNers can pick on the book for this and for that (can't any book?) but overall I think it's excellent.

For other books, this page is also a good start: [https://hackernewsbooks.com/top-books-on-hacker- news](https://hackernewsbooks.com/top-books-on-hacker-news)

</comment><comment><USER3> Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann. If you ever plan on working on systems with high availability, high throughput or high data volume requirements, this is the book to read. Great balance between practical and theoretical, best book on distributed systems IMO.

</comment><comment><USER4> Speaking from a software engineering perspective, here are a few that I found really valuable. I've seen them recommended by people I respect on many occasions.

Code Complete by Steve McConnell [https://www.amazon.com/Code-Complete- Practical-Handbook-Cons...](https://www.amazon.com/Code-Complete-Practical- Handbook- Construction/dp/0735619670/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_t_0?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=QJM78ERQ7QGZW743V30B)

The Mythical Man Month by Frederick Brooks [https://www.amazon.com/Mythical- Man-Month-Software-Engineeri...](https://www.amazon.com/Mythical-Man-Month- Software-Engineering-Anniversary-ebook/dp/B000OZ0N6M)

</comment><comment><USER5> No matter you want to become a manager or architect, you need to know how to run a project.

The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win [https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping- Busine...](https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping- Business/dp/1942788290/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1547182833&sr=1-2&keywords=project+phoenix)

<comment><USER6> I would recommend _The Goal_ (E. Goldratt) over _The Phoenix Project_. Although The Goal is not about IT, I feel it's much more didactic on how to identify problems and deal with them. In The Phoenix Project, things kinda fall into place without any deeper reasoning about why they should.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> A must: Code Simplicity by Max Kanat-Alexander [https://www.amazon.com/Code- Simplicity-Fundamentals-Max-Kana...](https://www.amazon.com/Code-Simplicity- Fundamentals-Max-Kanat-Alexander/dp/1449313892)

</comment><comment><USER8> How to win friends and influence people.

This is a must read. It will give you a lot of insight on how to deal with people.

</comment><comment><USER9> * Hackers and painters * Deep work * The Code</comment>


Richmond's rules: Why one California town is keeping Wall Street up at night - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/05/richmonds-rules-why-one-california-town-is-keeping-wall-street-up-at-night/ <comment><USER2> They say using Eminent domain as if thats the solution, take the banks property away.

I am thinking the fallout from this move will be disastrous. These are the ideas that fundamentally change the fabric of a society. Now the Government will use Eminent domain whenever a private entity is acting against the social interests of the citizens, whilst many will applaud such a move I fear it gives the Government and elected officials far too much power.

Also why bother obtaining property and wealth when the Government positions itself as the taker of all things whenever it suits them best?

<comment><USER3> _Now the Government will use Eminent domain whenever a private entity is acting against the social interests of the citizens, whilst many will applaud such a move I fear it gives the Government and elected officials far too much power._

Isn't the purpose of government to protect its citizens when a more powerful entity acts against them?

 _Also why bother obtaining property and wealth when the Government positions itself as the taker of all things whenever it suits them best?_

I agree. That's clearly _not_ what is happening here, though.

For one thing, the people who have taken the mortgage out own at least some of the property, and secondly the banks that hold the mortgages are profiting form fraud (ie, the deliberate strategy of selling sub-prime mortgages to people who couldn't afford them). Finally, this isn't _what suits [the government] best_. It would suit the local government if the problem could be ignored, which is what other jurisdictions (including at the Federal level) are doing.

<comment><USER4> " _the people who have taken the mortgage out own at least some of the property_ "

By definition of being underwater they own no equity of value. When a company goes bankrupt, i.e. when a company's equity value hits zero, i.e. when a company's assets are worth less than its liabilities, shareholders are wiped out. At that point they have no residual claim to the assets.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, but that's an outcome of the way US mortgage system works (ie, the mortgage holder is preferred over other equity holders).

It doesn't have to be this way; for example in the event of a liquidation _all_ parties with an equity interest could have money distributed to them in proportion to the interest the hold.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> They're making the fundamental mistake of fixing a problem now in a way that will cause huge problems in the future.

Mortgage lenders will put huge premiums on mortgages in the town in the future because of "default by eminent domain" risk, if the government pulls freddie/fannie mae it'll be even more expensive. Basically they're robbing future mortgage owners in order to pay current ones.

Worse yet, other towns with similar profiles might have their risk profile increased too, so they'll get extra premiums because of Richmond's behaviour without getting any of the benefits.

So while it might seem like they're just taking the money from pension funds and other investors, in the longer term they'll be taking far more from future mortgage owners.

<comment><USER6> If this system becomes routine, mortgage rates will go up, though I'm not sure about "huge premiums."

Is that a bad thing? The investment becomes risker and more expensive, so less money is available, so fewer mortgages are made. More people rent instead of buy their own homes. I would submit that fewer owner-occupied homes would be a positive thing for the national economy.

<comment> different-opini Fewer mortgages = lower property prices.

No mortgages = 10x lower property prices.

<comment><USER7> No mortgages = Detroit. The end result of this idea is not pretty.

<comment><USER8> > _No mortgages = Detroit. The end result of this idea is not pretty._

The lack of mortgages did not cause the collapse of Detroit. The causation runs the other way.

The collapse of the auto industry led to the collapse of housing prices in Detroit, which in turn led to the collapse of the mortgage market. Who wants to issue mortgages for houses that are dropping in value?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Richmond has decided to tear up a private contract to one side's advantage based on no pre-existing law. This is, generally, contrary to the principles of rule of law. The upside will be a short-term bump in Richmond's residents' balance sheets.

Courts are likely to strike this down. This will trash Richmond's public balance sheet. If courts allow this one would eventually expect private sector credit availability, to anyone in a low income neighbourhood, to dramatically re-price or freeze. It could also trigger a national housing credit, and price, pull-back.

Ironically either outcome will further impair Richmond property values, pushing more borrowers underwater and the city's tax income lower.

<comment><USER9> You're right. You know what would be easier? For all of Richmond to default on their mortgages.

Sidetrack: I put $50K into a townhouse in 2007 (my mistake!). I lost it all when the real estate market flopped. I walked away from the property because I wasn't willing to work for several years just to pay the principle down.

End result: No matter what, the real estate lost value. Either write it down now, or enjoy the pain as you write it off later (ie "extend and pretend": [http://www.americanbanker.com/bankthink/megabanks-extend- and...](http://www.americanbanker.com/bankthink/megabanks-extend-and-pretend- they-will-never-pay-for-foreclosure-fouls-1052937-1.html)).

What's that? Default judgement? Oh no. Bankruptcy. I still get to keep $1MM plus in retirement accounts, and I just can't buy another house for ~7 years. How horrible.

<comment><USER4> Couldn't agree more - default is the proper way to do this. Others include Richmond (a) buying underwater mortgages off investors and tearing them up or (b) making mortgage payments for its residents (an ersatz bail-out to investors).

<comment><USER9> Agree. But! You're going to need to find a way to untangle which investor owns which mortgage (these are derivatives after all). I'd say you get 90 days as an investor to respond; after that, the city gets to take unilateral action.

<comment><USER4> " _But! You 're going to need to find a way to untangle which investor owns which mortgage (these are derivatives after all)._"

Mortgages are not derivatives, they are debts. Tracing the owner of a mortgage should not be challenging. In the event that it is, that becomes the mortgage servicer's fault, an issue between the investor and the servicer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The US constitution says:

"No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility."

<comment><USER11> And since when Richmond is a state? You can read the constitution by spirit or by the letter. You cannot have both.

<comment><USER8> > _And since when Richmond is a state? You can read the constitution by spirit > or by the letter. You cannot have both._

There is no local sovereignty in the United States, except for whatever a state chooses to delegate to its municipalities. (This is why you hear about states that take over failing cities' schools and finances. The city possesses no sovereignty.)

All of Richmond's powers derive from the State of California. If California is prohibited from doing something, then so is Richmond.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If a mortgage is underwater and the debtor cannot (or will not) pay, then it hardly matters to the investors whether the owner is foreclosed on, or the city forces principal reduction. Either way, the investor takes a loss. But seizing _current_ underwater mortgages would be terribly shortsighted.

What intrigued me is the idea that investors would be willing to accept a principal reduction, but cannot because the logistics are too difficult. FTA:

 _Although it was in the banks ' interest to write down the principal on loans to avoid an outright default... ...so many different investors would have to sign off on the change. Because of that, these "private label securitized" loans are much more likely to default than the banks' portfolio loans._

So maybe a deal could be crafted that is in the interests of both investors and homeowners. Home buyers might get the short end, with fewer foreclosed homes coming on the market, but I've heard that banks tend to sit on foreclosed properties for a long time anyways, so it may not affect the market supply much.

<comment><USER4> " _If a mortgage is underwater and the debtor cannot (or will not) pay, then it hardly matters to the investors whether the owner is foreclosed on, or the city forces principal reduction. Either way, the investor takes a loss._ "

Mortgage markets are not terribly liquid. The "market value" the City of Richmond picks may not be favorable to the investor. The extra-contractual origin of this market-value-by-fiat makes it doubly uncomfortable.

Further, collateral can improve in value. The housing market is presently appreciating. A defaulting debtor's prospects are less certain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The reporting is frankly terrible.

Let me put it in simple terms. An idea has been floating around for a while now that, in theory, you could use eminent domain to seize not just the houses, but the mortgages _on_ the houses. Let's say that someone had borrowed $200k, but the house was now worth $100k. If you were a local government, you could seize the mortgage from the mortgage holder paying them compensation of, oh, $80k, tear it up, then the home owner gets a new mortgage for $90k, and gives you the proceeds, which would pay you back for the compensation you had to give the mortgage holder, _and_ leave you with $10k to cover your overheads, fees, court costs, and maybe even leave something over for the group of highly altruistic bankers pushing this scheme.

This is normally where I would say "but there's just one problem", but that would be a lie, because there's at least three.

1) The constitution, post _Kelo_ , is pretty lax about needing a good reason to deploy eminent domain, but it's still quite strict about the compensation needing to be fair (ie, the market value). The market value of a $200k mortgage for a $100k house is __NOT __$80k, or even $100k. Even if the mortgage is currently in default, it still represents ownership of a house worth $100k; by definition that makes it worth $100k, no $80k...and many mortgages won 't default at all; even the ones who will eventually will be making payments in the meantime. So right off the bat, legal analysts are confident it's unconstitutional. (But the city can't offer the actual market value of the loan; they're broke.)

2) Banks are going to be very displeased. Except that's a lie; in the US banks don't actually make mortgages. The Federal government does (more than 90%, in point of fact), through the FHA. And they have already stated that they think this is the worst idea since forever, and they will take whatever steps necessary to shut it down, including just not making any more loans for houses in the region. Which in context is basically the nuclear option; the value of a house which can't get a mortgage is pretty much $0. The scheme absolutely relies on being able to get a new mortgage on the houses.

3) Just as if that wasn't enough, the IRS has a lot of very strict rules involving gifts. And buying someone's loan and tearing it up counts as a gift, and you have to pay tax on it. Quite a _lot_ of tax, as it happens. And the homeowners in question don't have the cash, nor would they be thrilled at their massive tax bills even if they did. Which, again, kills the scheme.

4) It's also not entirely clear that this would be good policy even if it worked. This isn't the first attempt at trying to "fix" the problem of underwater mortgages, but results so far have been mixed at best. Then there's the broader policy implications of a bailout. Once you crunch through the likely results of the program, it's not exactly "take from the banks and give to the poor". The banks don't actually _own_ mortgages, and the poor don't actually own houses. It actually ends up being "take from the pension funds and split the results between the middle class and some bankers". Makes for great soundbites, but it's not exactly Robin Hood and Sherwood Forest here. More like the Sheriff of Nottingham.

TL;DR: The plan is illegal, the federal government has already announced that they're putting a stop to it (and they hold _all_ the cards in the mortgage market), it wouldn't work anyhow, and it's probably bad policy even if it did. It's been called a "scam", and frankly, that's pretty accurate.

Edit: From the article: "He's actually the guy responsible for it all: Steven Gluckstern, a former insurance executive who had teamed up with Vlahoplus to co-found Mortgage Resolution Partners, the firm that's lining up the capital -- from hedge funds, for instance -- to buy any mortgages that Richmond might seize. After that happens, Mortgage Resolution Partners would help the homeowner refinance through a Federal Housing Administration loan, and earns a $4,500 fee per successful transaction." Keep in mind that the FHA has said they won't make the loans. The scheme, at its core, is for some bankers to use hedge fund money to grab assets from pension funds, then refinance it using super-cheap loans from the FHA to turn a quick buck. But the FHA has stated it won't make the loans, so the scheme is D-E-A-D dead.

<comment><USER14> I don't think the plan will work either (for many of the reasons you've given), but I'm not as sure about this one:

 _The market value of a $200k mortgage for a $100k house is NOT $80k, or even $100k. Even if the mortgage is currently in default, it still represents ownership of a house worth $100k; by definition that makes it worth $100k, no $80k..._

The market value of the mortgage is whatever it would actually sell for on the open market. I don't see a strong reason to believe it would always be equal to the price the underlying asset would sell for. Sometimes owning the mortgage is more valuable than the underlying property, because you've locked in a good interest rate and cash stream. Other times it's less valuable, because you have potential hassles over eviction, damage, etc., or because you've locked in a bad interest rate (the latter being the same reason bonds can be worth less than their face value).

In a situation like Richmond's housing market, with high default rates, it wouldn't be too surprising that an unencumbered property could sell for more than a mortgage on the same property would sell for. If _I_ were buying, I would certainly demand a discount on the property to compensate for the risks of taking over the mortgage and a house with a resident in it, versus the situation of buying the property completely free and clear. That's not even specific to mortgages; any asset with a contract attached to it will be valued by taking into account the contract.

<comment><USER15> It's an interesting hypothetical, but presumably there is data about how much mortgages are worth along all these axes, since they are traded fairly heavily. We don't need to guess about it.

<comment><USER16> The challenge here is that the mortgage has a different valuing scheme than the property. The mortgage is valued against the rate of return and the risk of default. The property is valued against comparable properties.

The whole problem here is that you might have a $200K mortgage which is written to a very credit worthy borrower who is paying on time, against a house with a market value of $100K (probably not in the Bay Area but this is just an example).

So the fair market value of a $200K mortgage, that matures in 2033 might be $100k (this is essentially a zero coupon bond at this point and we're assuming a 3.5% rate of return) could be "destroyed" (which is to say seized by eminent domain) and replaced with a $100K mortgage that matures in 2043 (assuming a 30 yr mortgage). That is worth something like $35,000 (again assuming an annual rate of 3.5%) which quite a bit less than $100K,

So looking at it as an investor you've had $100K worth of "principal" stolen from your retirement account by the City of Richmond, and sold to someone else for basically 1/3 the price, because the underlying basis for this particular investment vehicle was someones home, which is now underwater value wise.

The saddest part of the mortgage mess is that it is so freakishly complicated to figure out what or who owns a mortgage in the world of derivatives. If Richmond is successful (and I hope they are) the next story will be people who have this sudden drop in their 401k investment value with a note "Funds taken by City of Richmond" ) and those folks are going to go "WTF?" and the next round of scare stories will be "Richmond just yanked nearly a billion dollars out of people 401k funds and gave them to a Hedge fund, could you be next?" And nobody will be calling for the real reform which is some level of regulation on what you can and cannot do with a home mortgage security.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Good luck to anyone ever getting a mortgage in that town ever again.

<comment><USER18> Moreover, the property values there will go even lower because of dried up financing.

This could become a textbook case of government power abuse backfiring at the people the politicians claim to be "helping"

There is a better description of what this city did: Theft

<comment><USER19> While I agree with railing about bad decisions, it is almost willfully ignorant to continue to argue against settled law. This is as much theft as it was in Connecticut.

As much as I hate it, "Wickard vs Fillburn", and "Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission", "Gonzales v. Raich", and lastly "Kelo v. City of New London" ARE the laws of the land.

If the investment classes are going to be leveraging laws against homeowner to take property at 'current market prices'; how is it wrong for cities to force investor classes to do the same?

Change the laws, but don't decry the victims of fraud and systemic false market inflation turning the current laws against those who perpetuated the pump and dump scheme on them in the first place.

I think it will cost some financing issues/property costs, but then it will lead to the rise of a Community Trust bank or Credit Union. These are things that truly change communities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Hacker News cognitive dissonance week:

      1) Creating technical arguments against court-ordered search warrants: heroic civil disobedience.
      2) Creating technical workarounds for mortgage debt paralysis: craven violation of sacred property rights.

<comment><USER21> Can you elaborate as to exactly why a person who does not have the same opinion on both 1 and 2 must be suffering from "cognitive dissonance"? I don't see much of a relation between them.

<comment><USER22> Because he's still offended by the massive downvotes on his illogical comments:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6485956](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6485956)

<comment><USER20> Yes, because I personally give a shit about your stupid downvotes. I am devastated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The reporting of the so-called "Wonkblog"'s reporting is particularly un- wonkish, describing the plan as 'complex' and talking about it in one of those artificial newspaper pseudo-neutral points of view, affecting to be balanced while dropping loaded language like such as

 _A courtroom victory for Richmond, a town of about 100,000, could give cities around the country the courage to act -- and potentially help keep millions of people in their homes._

The plan doesn't target distressed mortgages, so it's not just a problem of loaded language designed to appeal to certain kinds of readers--it's also a bald lie. As for the other side:

 _But even a win could spell defeat for Richmond if the financial industry cuts off lending to make an example of the city._

Make an _example_ of the city. Hmm. It's not that private industry is not obligated to do money-losing business with eminent domain thieves, it's that they want to make an _example_ of people who cross them. Well, you can see what the writer actually believes, or at least what he pretends to believe in order to appeal to readers.

The plan is not 'complex' but fairly straightforward and very obviously illegal and not in the best interests of the public. I'm not aware of any informed opinion to the effect that this is a good idea. I discussed this in an earlier post([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6273836](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6273836)), which I think is worth reposting, because as far as I can tell little has changed since then.

Repost below:

====

The blog Naked Capitalism--hardly a friend of big finance--points out that this is a scam here: [http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/08/beware-of- private-equ...](http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/08/beware-of-private- equ..).

Some key points:

* The profits are being split among Richmond and a private investment firm named "Mortgage Resolution Partners, LLC".

* Seizing a mortgage for less than its fair market value is blatantly unconstitutional. The argument that the value of an underwater mortgage in repayment is worth less than the house is so obviously wrong, I have a hard time believing Richmond officials honestly buy it. A mortgage that is on track to be repaid is undoubtedly worth close to the future value of repayment, even if the house is worth $0.

* Big banks do not actually own most mortgages in general. So this is not a scheme to rob big banks, although Mortgage Resolution Partners, LLC certainly wants to spin it that way.

* Almost all housing mortgages are merely serviced by banks but owned predominantly by entites such as "state and local governments, hospitals, Fannie, Freddie, and to a lesser degree, foundations and endowments". The banks have a legal obligation to protect these mortgages, of course.

* Many of these loans are current--they're not distressed mortgages at all! They also plan to steer clear of houses with liens. Naked Capitalism comments that the plan only works financially if they go after the mortgages of those that need help the least.

In short, this is a transfer of wealth from a diverse array of investors to the city of Richmond and a bunch of investment banker types--theft under the cover of populist outrage. It would also severely damage the market for future homeowners in Richmond, anyone who wants to sell their home, anyone who wants to refinance... Oh, it's also a threat to fundemental notions of private property, rule of law, and market capitalism, but distressingly few people still care about that. The bit I want to emphasize is that it's Prince John pretending to be Robin Hood.

<comment><USER19> Factually you are absolutely correct. But bad outcomes like this are the result of bad decisions by the Supreme Court. We all have to live in a land run by "Kelo v. City of New London"

Maybe this can help get the laws under that decision changed.

<comment><USER23> The eminent domain plan simply lies about the value of a mortgage, saying it's worth less than not only best accounting practice but the market value required for their plan to work. _Kelo_ doesn't apply because using a clearly unfair valuation in eminent domain is directly against the Constitution.

<comment><USER24> I don't disagree, but the definition of "clearly unfair" floats on the whims of Justice Kennedy.

<comment><USER23> Only a small fraction of constitutional disputes end in a 5-4 decision, and the ideological divides in those opinions are narrower than op-ed writers would have you believe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> While I am pretty sympathetic to the anti-TPP cause, the video is _awful_. It started off with ridiculous scaremongering about "frankenfoods", ie GMO foods, which have the potential for incredible benefits for mankind. It even specifically calls out food grown in a lab - do these people not realise the environmental damage we could prevent if we could grow meat? The nutritional benefits? The cruelty averted?

And that's the very first thing they said! I couldn't tell you the second thing, because I closed the video.

What is it about these activist organisations that compel them to so consistently throw the baby out with the bathwater?

<comment><USER26> Thats a different story!

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> It's not necessarily a fraud. The key is it only works in cases where the fair market value of the house is below the value of the mortgage. In that case, the city only has to pay the FMV. Now, there is always going to be some question about what is actually the FMV of a property. But this is true regardless of whether the city is in cahoots with a property developer who wants to put up some expensive shopping mall where single family homes once stood, or in this case where Richmond is proposing to seize by eminent domain houses which are underwater.

Why are the banks against this? (1) they believe they could get more at auction than the FMV determined by the eminent domain process, and (2) the seizure happens at a time outside of their control, where as the bank might be holding off on the foreclosure process since if they were to actually foreclose on the property, and discover from the auction that they could recover significantly less than the mortgage, they would then realize a loss which would screw up their capital holdings.

Either way, as far as the homeowners are concerned, they are effectively going to be foreclosed against. The only difference is that they will be offered a chance to continue to live in the house, and pay rent (which might or might not be at FMV; it's not clear from the description). Maybe it might be a rent with an option to buy, but basically the main goal of the city is to preserve the neighborhood instead of letting speculators buy the house at foreclosure.

So I wouldn't necessarily call it a scam. Will the banks lose out? Probably. But I don't know that they would necessarily lose out that badly --- that is, unless you don't believe that people who lose their houses due to eminent domain when a city is enriching some real estate developer isn't paying FMV to people who are turned out of their homes to build a shopping mall or a new stadium....

</comment><comment><USER28> It's the money of other citizens. People don't realize it but money doesn't always gets invested from wealthy individuals. It could very well be from pension funds, mutual funds etc. So it's not that banks are getting hurt but other normal citizens. Also, stop painting banks as evil.

<comment><USER3> _It 's the money of other citizens. People don't realize it but money doesn't always gets invested from wealthy individuals. It could very well be from pension funds, mutual funds etc._

Pension & mutual funds are big enough to force banks to act differently, and haven't. They should bear the risks associated with that behaviour.

 _stop painting banks as evil_

Why? Their behaviour in the lead up to the 2008 financial crisis was unethical (to say the least), and their behaviour after 2008 has shown a complete lack of regret.</comment></comment>


Feature-itis!  How to avoid. - <AUTHOR> http://blog.crowdstorm.com/?p=35 <comment><USER2> As far as implementing basic features go, my rule of thumb is this:

If someone is using your site and he feels he should be able to intuitively accomplish something, it should be there. These features should feel as little as "features" as possible. They should be so ingrained as for the user to feel that it just naturally exists.</comment>


Links Opening In The Same Window Is Crap - oscar-the-horse http://www.horsesaysinternet.com/web-medium/links-opening-in-the-same-window-is-crap/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'd say rather that they both have their place. There are 2 idioms at play. "What's next" and "what else". "What's next" -> opens in same window. "What else" -> opens new tab.

Lucky we have both. Use target=_blank when appropriate. Making _everything_ open a new tab would be as big a nuisance as nothing. In the end, its a style thing; a personal matter of taste.

<comment> oscar-the-horse i disagree, noonespecia. "what's next" is linear. that's called a book, not the web, imo.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Go Remote Jobs – Jobs to Go - <AUTHOR> https://goremotejobs.com?=2 <comment><USER2> Before I can even view the site, a pop up prompts me for my email!

Until you provide me some value (or I can at least see the site), then I'm a lot less inclined to give out my email. Are you trying to optimize for email sign ups or people actually using the site? If it's the second one, get rid of the email modal or delay it until I've read at least one part of your site.

</comment><comment><USER3> Rendering broken on windows phone... Hardly matters I suppose but I couldn't use it on my first attempt

</comment><comment><USER4> How is this any different from the million other remote job websites like weworkremotely?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi! What makes Go Remote Jobs better than the other remote job websites, is that the focus is on making it easy on the user. We've put a lot of extra work into ensuring there are no fees to search for jobs, the searching is as easy as possible, and that we have an expressive site search with more to come! Some future updates (because Go Remote Jobs is only about a month old) that are going to be coming, are going to include an email "matchmaker" to pair you with the best jobs and advanced search filtering to do things such as narrowing the listings you see to only jobs with 6 digits. I hope you enjoy!</comment></comment>


Paralysed patient makes natural movements using robotics and thought - <AUTHOR> https://theconversation.com/paralysed-patient-makes-natural-movements-using-robotics-and-the-power-of-thought-42272

<comment><USER2> Url changed from [http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/05/new-neural-implant- re...](http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/05/new-neural-implant-reads-a- persons-intentions-to-control-robotic-arm/), which points to this.</comment>


Social Skydiving Days 18-20: Winners are Made of Fail - <AUTHOR> http://socialskydivingwithjustin.posterous.com/social-skydiving-days-18-20-winners-are-made

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad to see this is getting a good response. This is a rough draft of a personal experience essay I wrote for my English class. It's got plenty of flaws and was scary to publish in such an imperfect form but in my mind it's the most important post I've written.

Thanks again for reading guys.

<comment><USER2> Thanks. And no excuses! :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha touché!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I love the "Winners are made of fail, losers of excuses" point. It really is true that if you don't fail and always come up with excuses, you'll never win.

Really great to see you honestly blogging about your life.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've never been too socially anxious, so I wouldn't have felt this article — while inspiring — was very pertinent to me. It has a more general message though: if you feel anxious, the only route to recovery is by passing through it.

I'm currently living in a foreign country making due with limited language skills and my experiences learning to use the language in a real situation mirror this Social Skydiving experiment. You have to find the fun in failure.

<comment><USER2> "You have to find the fun in failure." -- Yes, that helps! And, on the contrary, it is too easy to enjoy excuses and pet grudges. Let's grow good habits and grow out of bad ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a very nice story around on very important point: being nice and friendly creates tremendous positive externalities, and if people don't react well, that's their own problem, not yours

</comment><comment><USER6> Hey there Justin,

That's some of the best personal history stuff I've ever read on the internet.

You should seriously consider a writing career, you've got talent to spare. Thank you for all the insights in your life. My gf who has serious anxieties about meeting strangers is eating up your writings as soon as a new episode is posted, and thank you again on her behalf.

j

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow! So even a woman enjoys reading this stuff? I'm glad to hear that. I was afraid my male orientation would make that harder.

<comment><USER6> No, she now alerts me to the new episodes :)

Seriously, you have no idea how much effect your writing has had.

The simple fact that you've been so open about this makes it discussable for other people, and that in turn can help them to help themselves.

The funny thing is that the day before I found your 10th day installment I actually had a little 'assignment' worked out where I wanted her to go out and have a conversation with some random stranger. Then the next day - the day it was supposed to happen - I found your writings and instead of asking her to go out and connect with someone I let her read your writing.

I'm quite sure that that was much more effective than one more of my 'harebrained' plans :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This reminds me of the book "The Game" By Strauss. Setting aside the obvious objectionable intentions (getting laid) of the pick up artists in that book, alot of what those guys do is about turning social stituations into hacking projects. That may sound creepy, but for a lot of people, learning how to socialise successfully is an important thing. Check it out.

</comment><comment><USER8> "She mentioned that she still wanted to go over and watch the band but she stayed put. I took a stab at failure and left her alone with the other guy at the bar"

The author did a good job and it worked out well! But in this scenario (where it is likely she's interested), be confident, stand up from your barstool, nod your head toward the band, and ask her to join you with a smile!

Otherwise you run the risk of letting her think that you aren't interested. And, confidence is kinda sexy ;-)

</comment><comment><USER9> Without failure, there is no success.

Thanks for the insightful story and sharing your experiences. I'm hoping it provides me the fuel to take a few more risks in social settings than I typically do.

</comment><comment><USER10> This was a really good read. I had (thankfully!) almost forgotten how crippling social anxiety can be.</comment>


Ask HN: How to find iOS apps statistics? - <AUTHOR> Hi everyone, I know Apptopia service but is there better alternative? How can one find if they are trustworthy? <comment><AUTHOR> Can any one explain apptopia idea or algorithm for computing downloads and revenue of apps?

</comment><comment><USER2> if you talk about revenue , there is none . just estimation sites</comment>


Ask HN: Any success story on selling software as AWS AMI? - <AUTHOR> Hi folks,
I am trying to find new distribution channels for my software.
One idea is to create a set of AMI and sell them into the AWS marketplace.
Are there any success stories for this business model? Did any of you successfully made money out of it? Any cautionary tales? Something to whatch out for?
In the AWS marketplace you can decide how much your AMI will cost in $/hours, just like a normal instance.
So my plan was to sell the AMY at 5% the cost of the machine.
Are there some other approaches? <comment><USER2> Bitnami is one example. I have used them when I needed a quickstart with a piece of open source software.

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed! But I was interested from the point of view of Bitnami</comment></comment>


Why Are CPU-designers so obsessed (and proud) of their patents? - <AUTHOR> This is a small sample since I haven't come across many CPU designers, but those who I have come across seem to be obsessed with getting patents. Much more so than any software engineers I've known.
For example if you read about Chuck Moore's Green Array or Ivan Godard's Mill architecture they quickly point out that their designs are protected by patents. And the other day while taking out the trash I had a conversation with my next-door neighbor in Menlo Park who was some early Intel employee and he was talking my ear off about finally getting some lawsuit through some hurdle to get some small company to stop using some obscure design he had long after leaving Intel. I just nodding and smiled and went back into my house.
I don't understand this way of thinking. I can't imagine chatting with a programming and having them quickly start talking about their awesome patents. Is there something about the hardware world that I just don't understand? <comment><USER3> There's a long-standing patent detente between the big CPU companies - <USER2> out some of the coverage of the Intel / AMD cross-licensing situation. Those agreements date back to the 70s and have been renewed & expanded as both companies continued building new things.

<comment><USER4> Specifically AMD and Intel have cross-licensed everything connected with the x86 because way back in the day IBM did not want to run the risk that some tiny company like Intel would go out of business so they insisted on having multiple sources.

Since AMD and Intel have both made major contributions to the x86 platform, this situation continues. This duopoly has also worked to the detriment of Cyrix, VIA, Transmeta and everyone else who has tried to break into the x86 space.

Patents are a mainstay of anything that involves physical manufacturing because they let you contract out to a manufacturer without the fear that the manufacturer will produce the product on their own account and cut you out.

For instance, this patent

[https://www.google.com/patents/US4560358](https://www.google.com/patents/US4560358)

let the inventor (a "non-practicing entity") outsource manufacturing and marketing to third parties without a fear of getting ripped off and offering those third parties a chance to have a unique product.</comment></comment>


Startup News Becomes Hacker News (2007) - <AUTHOR> http://ycombinator.com/hackernews.html It occurred to me tonight that apart from the many other things YC gets right, what really makes them shine is HackerNews. I'd even say, YC couldn't have been what it is now without it. In my eyes, their biggest accomplishment is has been the wealth of information aggregated in their news portal. <comment><USER2> _don't say anything in a comment thread that you wouldn't say in person._

This one simple rule should keep comment quality high, but it's so hard to remember and follow. Maybe PG should always display it when someone's typing a comment.

<comment><USER3> It's followed here much more often than in other "known" discussion sites, other than perhaps metafilter.

I haven't been incredibly active for a while, and I remember one distinct downturn in the quality of discussion, likely due to a surge in popularity, but it was responded to, and from what I can tell the popularity surge didn't have the same accretion of annoyance as it could have.

Sure, it's easy to get caught up in the moment, but honestly it's not that hard to do that in real life either. As such, I think "don't say anything in a comment thread you wouldn't say in person" should be followed by "if you do, or someone else does, resolve it like you would in person". That is, in a community that cares about itself and is comprised of people with strong opinions, admission of being rash and apologies go a long way.

I personally prefer occasional taps on the shoulder to individuals in a community by members of the community than a constant reminder-banner. The banner just becomes noise, the "hey, stop that" is not so much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The curiosity point is a good one. I often find at the end of a day that I've read most of the posts on the front page here, even on sites that I probably wouldn't have browsed to of my own volition.

What HN brings in addition to that though is real social validation. If the HN crowd have voted up a story, I usually know its worth being curious about.

<comment><USER5> Social validation goes further than the site. HN for me is not only a filter for quality news but also for quality _people_. I'll gladly meet up IRL with a HN user I haven't met before, Reddit & other niche interest sites not so much. Also, "Are you on HN?" makes a great job interview question.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> YC couldn't be what it is without Hacker News. It's amazing what a pivotal role it's played in their success, yet its importance goes unnoticed. In my eyes, their greatest achievement to date has been the wealth of information accumulated in this news portal and community behind it.</comment>


Ask HN: Vesting? Really? - <AUTHOR>

My partner and I have a company that has attracted the interest of some investors and we are going to meet with them next week.  We've been bootstrapping this for about 4 years and have reached a point that makes us attractive for a few reasons - some established customers, revenue and the interest in our company by potential acquirers.
So... we are thinking ahead to what kinds of terms to expect should we end up getting financing offers - and I was wondering if vesting is something we would have to agree to or not.  I find the idea kind of makes me light-headed, and was wondering under what scenarios vesting, or other shady terms, we could end up losing everything we've worked for.
thx <comment><USER2> If you've been going for 4 years then vesting is not in the picture. At least, with a reputable VC it would not be.

The VC should end up with a minority (<49%) block of shares, in that situation your biggest worry is a minority share holders lawsuit that you settle by giving them shares, they then control the company.

Such tactics are great for movies (they do happen in real life but very rarely).

Go with a VC with a good reputation and none of this should be your worry. The smaller the company you deal with and the shorter it's been in business the bigger the risk of trickery.

Good luck!

edit: if _after_ the investment with the money from the investors you decide to bring on board more people that you want to become share holders in the long run vesting would be normal for the new hires. If they put money on the table to buy in then those shares (the ones being paid for) would not be vesting either.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your sharing your insight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If the VC wants vesting, put in terms. If you are removed by the investor, all stock is immediately vested. Basically, vesting is a way to make sure you're not going to walk away from the deal.

<comment><USER4> Agree. Sounds like you have leverage. Put in weird clauses that protect _you_ if/when you get fired/replaced.</comment></comment>