Reframing the Debate about Payday Lending - <AUTHOR> http://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2015/10/reframing-the-debate-about-payday-lending.html#.ViebXhCrTUq <comment><USER2> > Payday lenders do not charge refinancing/rollover fees, as with mortgages, > and the interest doesn't compound (unless of course she takes out a new loan > to pay interest on the first loan)

Yes, they absolutely do charge refinancing and rollover fees. They don't call them that, of course, so they can skirt state consumer protection regulations, but that's what they are. And oh yes, they get their users to take out new loans to pay off the interests on the first loans. That's actually their entire business model. You know what proportion of payday lender's business comes from this exact thing? 76%! ([http://www.responsiblelending.org/payday- lending/research-an...](http://www.responsiblelending.org/payday- lending/research-analysis/finalpaydaymayday_defaults.pdf))

Their business model is wholly and fundamentally based on the inability of non-creditworthy people to keep their obligations. If their customers paid back everything on time, they would go out of business instantly. That is what I call unethical. At best.

<comment><USER3> > _Their business model is wholly and fundamentally based on the inability of > non-creditworthy people to keep their obligations. If their customers paid > back everything on time, they would go out of business instantly. That is > what I call unethical. At best._

The exact same criticism can be leveled at the credit card industry. Or _any_ business based on unsecured credit, really.

Payday lending just takes a well-entrenched business model to its extremes.

<comment><USER4> Would that actually be true for credit cards? With the sheer volume of global electronic card transactions nowadays (168 Billion transactions in 2013 [1]) it seems they'd be multi-billion-dollar businesses just on card transaction processing fees alone. On top of that, many cards charge an annual fee as well. Seems they could survive even if everyone paid their card off every month.

[1] [http://www.nilsonreport.com/publication_special_feature_arti...](http://www.nilsonreport.com/publication_special_feature_article.php)

<comment><USER5> Nope, because of fraud expenses, new customer acquisition and customer rewards, the fees from transactions alone aren't nearly enough to make them profitable.

Discover is right now giving me 10% cash back on Apple Pay purchases made in person ... :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Their point about competition is an interesting one. Usually where you find one payday lender, you find many. If there were a lot of profit in it, wouldn't someone arbitrage the interest rates and win all the business for themselves?

Then again, that's a bit of a straw man argument. We don't let people buy and sell organs, regardless of whether we could ensure that they were paid a fair price in an efficient market. Maybe the answer is, if the true break-even interest rate to lend to this market is 300%, then perhaps the moral answer is to not participate.

<comment><USER6> _> wouldn't someone arbitrage the interest rates and win all the business for themselves?_

Who would be taking the other side of the trade in order to allow you to arbitrage? {Payday Lender, "You", ???}

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Payday loans are a necessary evil. That is the best rate that poor people can get, thanks to society totally failing to provide a better safety net.

While I am a huge defender of the payday loan industry, I should note that it does deserve scrutiny: I have worked in the industry and it is a magnet for scammers who prey on poor and uneducated people because doing so is easy and low-risk.

Here's an example: [http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/12/payday-loan-network- sold-...](http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/12/payday-loan-network-sold-info-to- scammers/)

This details the operations of a guy who simply bought loan application data/leads (which included bank account and routing numbers) and then processed $30 echecks to each account with no consent or contact and without rendering a product or service. He amassed 25 million dollars over several years before catching any heat.

</comment><comment><USER8> If you research the names listed in the byline, 2 are businessmen, one is a legislator, and the other is a corporate attorney.

Those people wouldn't be biased AT ALL /sarcasm

So much hand-waivy unsound logic too.

          this blog post showed that blacks and Hispanics
          were no more likely to use payday loans than whites
          who were experiencing the same financial problems

Yeah, okay, the comparison should be demographic overall, meaning black/hispanic vs white, not "white people experiencing financial problems". Suggesting that they all have "financial problems" in common doesn't wipe away the racial issues.</comment>


Show HN: PWGen – Create strong passwords easy to remember but hard to break - <AUTHOR> https://www.lucasepe.it/downloads/pwgen/ <comment><USER2> You might want to rename it :)

[https://www.freshports.org/sysutils/pwgen/](https://www.freshports.org/sysutils/pwgen/)

<comment><USER3> yeah got confused when the _pwgen -h_ I got here did not output the same as the OP's :)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do Anonymous and Lulz hack so many sites? - <AUTHOR>

I'd like to ask how does Anonymous and Lulz gain access to so many systems? Obviously this could be due to unpatched systems, weak passwords, poor security, etc but are they really doing anything advanced to gain access?
I have to wonder with proper security practice would as many of these hacks occur?
Are these places running proper firewalling?
Are they running vulnerable services like SSH on an obscure port?
Are their database servers more exposed than they should be?
Are they using horrible passwords?
Do they not review logs?
Get what I am asking? I mean for even my home internet circuit I run a dedicated firewall, dont run ssh on 22, deny everything except what I need.
Can anyone provide any thoughts? <comment><USER2> All of the above, and more. For example, in the HBGary hack, they used a combination of SQL injection to expose passwords, got lucky when some of these passwords could be re-used for SSH access, then had to resort to good ol' social engineering for full control of the system. This article provides some good insights:

[http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/anonymous- sp...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/anonymous-speaks-the- inside-story-of-the-hbgary-hack.ars/1)

There is no magic bullet to stop these types of hackers. It's important that you practice good security culture, since some of these guys do use very advanced techniques.

Your home internet security could be defeated by a cunning hacker with a multimeter claiming he/she is there from Comcast to 'upgrade' your router.

<comment><USER3> Yes, this exactly, I think this was just on Reddit the other day as I remember reading about this

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> From what I know of Anon and Lulzsec a lot of what they do isn't actually 'hacking.' The sheer amount of boxes they have lets them DDOS any site pretty easily. If not DDOS they usually do SQL injections.

</comment><comment><USER3> Honestly, the question I'm more interested in is how they hide their tracks. From my knowledge, this can be done with a lot of "geographical" effort by going to public locations that are random and far enough from a person's normal routine, and using hardware that can't be traced to you but I wonder if they actually do this or if they normally do their activities from the comfort of their home.

</comment><comment><USER5> Most of what I've seen has been via SQL injections in badly coded sites.

</comment><comment><USER6> most intrusions these days seem to start with a vulnerable web app, then passwords for that are tried on db's, ssh, etc

good luck, flamoot

</comment><comment><USER7> they are a group of very educated hackers with alot of time to gdb widely used applications running suid root. They do not publish their remote exploit Intel... aka blackhats, and their ambitious. That in itself with motives to prove a point is dangerous, these guys are not careless, very organized and strike all at once.

</comment><comment><USER7> doubt doj and government sites ignore SQL issues, I could be wrong but I'd find that odd

</comment><comment><USER8> Some attacks are by government agents claiming to be "Anonymous" in order to justify passing draconian laws like SOPA.</comment>


Prettied up my Digital Shadow with a CSS Animation - <AUTHOR> http://www.victusspiritus.com/2011/03/05/prettied-up-my-digital-shadow-with-a-css-animation/ <comment><USER2> that gradient blue background is horrible. why don't you go back to ZURB and copy their wood floor motif? Also I know that font is sometimes one of those things that is a 'personal choice' but again, I personally hate the choice you've made.

I'm not trying to insult you, but if you're looking for a job, these are the types of criticisms that can help improve your chances.

Fluorescent-Light-blue with a text stroke on a gradient blue background, is again, horrible. Copy ZURBS.

Finally, again maybe it's my personal reaction... but "Digital Shadow" isn't really a wide-spread term yet is it? I had to google it to find out what the heck you were on about. Maybe I'm a bit of a rube but in terms of design KIS4S (keep it simple for stupid).

If I'm too stupid to know what Digital Shadow is, maybe call it "Portfolio" or "Find me on the Web"

I think the first comes off as a bit more professional, the second as more personable, both are preferable to pretentious. (No insult intended, but I think it might help).

Good luck with the job hunt.</comment>


According to YC the online coding education market is too crowded - <AUTHOR> http://benplesser.wordpress.com/2013/12/18/yc-claims-the-online-coding-education-market-is-too-competitive/

<comment><USER2> I don't think it's really possible for a market to be "too crowded" or "too competitive" if you can create a unique and superior product.

Joining a commodity market with a me-too clone, however, would be ill advised. But it doesn't seem like that is the case here.

I do think that the education market is tough. There's so much out there that's free.

</comment><comment><USER3> The nice thing about the passion projects in this space is that competitors openly share ideas and implement new findings very quickly. Maybe they won't all be profitable, but they will all add constructively to the industry.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very true.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Congratulations on your launch, and your approach looks unique enough to have place in face of the many online coding shops.

Just don't get complacent with your revenue, it really isn't much.</comment>


The Magic of Engineered Serendipity - <AUTHOR> https://www.beondeck.com/post/the-magic-of-engineered-serendipity <comment><USER2> Seems like another one of those, pay 2,000 for _access_ groups that entirely expects to rent seek on what is essentially a really good irc group (which are FREE to start and join). Essentially like paying a match maker to set you up on dates instead of finding them organically

<comment><USER3> Any help on finding these irc rooms?

<comment><USER2> I mean, any you find/shared on HN will be instantly filled with recruiters and tech grifters, so you'd be better off searching more specialized sites

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I applied and had one brief interview with someone over video. Maybe it's just me, but I think it's reasonable to expect a follow up, possibly with some feedback, after an interview. But that didn't happen. Not the end of the world for me, but a detail I think that should matter to a company that touts a strong community horn.

<comment><USER5> I'm the co-founder of the company building On Deck and our Head of Candidates. You should have just received a follow up email from me.

<comment><USER4> In the name of transparency, this did happen :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I cannot emphasize enough that the real-value of On Deck is not just the events and investors you are going to get access to, or those fireside chats, but the community.

On Deck hand picked highly ambitious people with positive attitudes, who are in similar stages of their lives and have shared goals.

It is like being in a room with a ton of sharp, likeminded people such as yourself, and everyone is looking to help one another to build the next big thing.

Truly inspiring and accelerating experience.

Happy to answer any questions about my experience in On Deck.

<comment><USER6> Thank you for offering to share you experiences -- I wanted to apply but i'm curious - how does this work for those who are currently employed (traditionally)...but planning to co-found their own company and go-full time with their venture soon?

What is the right time to apply, now as they are contemplating their business or later when they go-full time on their venture?

<comment><AUTHOR> About half the people in my cohort were full-time employees in other companies. I was dedicated to start a startup, and I already had some prototypes that were gaining traction (gitspo.com), but wasn't set on a specific direction.

Whether it makes more sense for you to do it now or later depends on your personality and what you want to get out of the community. You will definitely have plenty of opportunities to network with potential cofounders by joining now. However, you should dedicate at least an hour (more like two) every day to attend fireside talks, dinners, etc. I feel like I bonded the most with people who participated semi regularly in all events, and it seems like the same group of people benefited the most from On Deck.

In terms of privacy, On Deck has pretty strict guidance about not publicly disclosing who are the members, unless they explicitly opt-in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Usually these sorts of posts are some sort of interesting content that wraps around an ad - like maybe steps you can take to engineer luck leading to more serendipity and bg the way check out this service - but this just literally seems to be an ad for some 2000 dollar rent seeking program? Am I missing something?

</comment><comment><USER8> There is a time and a place for spontaneity.</comment>


Fractal Tic-Tac-Toe - <AUTHOR> http://ted.mielczarek.org/code/ticfractoe.html

<comment><USER2> I showed this to my math-major friend, who pointed out that if X plays first in the center, X will be able to force a win or a draw. Note that in the first iteration, all of the corners and all of the sides are symmetrically identical.

</comment><comment> daniel-cussen Interesting. I wonder how much time it takes for people to go from loving to hating a startup. My guess is that there's a press release (love), news of growth (love), news of funding (love), news of more growth (love, high expectations), news of significant market share (trite two-sides-of-the-story- but-ends-on-a-cautionary-note article), report of a glitch (hate). The rest of the cycle is on its way for Facebook. On that note, I wonder when a major newspaper will do a trite, two-sided, cautionary-note style article on YCombinator. YC will probably have to score a few more homeruns first (or do something akin to gaining a lot of market share), but it'd be interesting to guess what that article will say.

As a pros and cons rundown made less unacceptable by its hackneyed turns of phrases, it'll probably start by mentioning the same pros it's talking about now. The cons might be...I don't know, male/female ratio, underrepresenting minorities, ageism, discrimination in general as an advantage of being an entrepreneur, expectations placed on entrepreneurs, something like that. I'd like to point out that I don't know what the demographics of YC look like, and don't really care. As far as I can tell, they look like Caltech's.

But newspapers do, and they get pissed off very easily about this sort of thing.

It'd be cool to measure the time elapsed between the first confirmation of a billion-dollar acquisition of a YC startup (measured by the opening of champagne bottles) and the first hater article. This timeframe could be measured to track to gauge the stage of the newspaper industry's decomposition. That is, the degree to which journalists are upset about the amount money founders made reflects how badly paid these journalists are, and the extent to which good journalists have been driven away to other industries.

I'd also venture to guess that the first hate article will appear in the New York Times Style section.

<comment> daniel-cussen Edit: this wound up on the wrong article.</comment></comment>


Socrates Was Against Writing (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://apt46.net/2011/05/18/socrates-was-against-writing/ <comment><USER2> He was against writing... in 370 BC. Although, having seen the blank faces of students in lecture halls mindlessly taking notes, I know there's some truth to it. When a good professor lectures, there's a lot of information expressed as pace, stress, and so on. It's like when I read Shakespeare's plays for the first time and thought the world was really crazy to put such high value on seemingly nonsensical words, but then I saw an actor speak them and the performance added the additional emotional overtones which decoded how the words were meant to be understood. That extra layer on top of words is surprisingly neglected.

<comment><USER3> The central dynamic when someone is lecturing is that there is some sort of audience learning from the lecture. Hopefully willingly :)

Listening to a lecturer is very helpful if the listener already has a fair grasp of a topic and uses it as an opportunity to critique and refine their own opinions. I've been to lots of lectures in my time and I found it very counterintuitive that I got more out of lectures when I already had a deep understanding of the topic. They are much better used to figure out what a smart person's perspective is rather than for picking up facts (better done from a reference manual or other book).

I might have a bias towards technical lectures with a few equations on the board, but most students in a lecture hall that I've seen don't understand the subject well enough to get much out of the lecture. It becomes more a process of reading the slides to them rather than anything that a lecturer is needed for. There will be three types of students in the hall, in order of best to worst performance; not taking notes because they already understand the topic; taking notes to aid them in private study, and not taking notes because although they don't understand the lecture they also don't know how to use notes in private study later on.

<comment><USER4> I take notes because it's part of my process. It's like thinking out loud without bothering the people around me. If I'm new to the topic it helps me absorb it (even if I've come having already read up on the topic). If I'm not it helps me absorb the lecturers ideas/opinions. I'm writing down my points of agreement/disagreement or things to research or things I want to prove or disprove, or a wild tangent, or a possible connection to another topic... etc

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What annoys me about the whole "Socrates was against writing" is the follows:

1) Even within the narrative, Socrates isn't "speaking". He is creating a fictional narrative set in Ancient Egypt where he believed writing originated (wrongly, but that isn't the point). 2) On a second level, Socrates didn't even write this. This is part of Plato's work. Plato was a student of Socrates, and maybe is describing something Socrates really said. Or maybe not. He may be simply giving his _own_ opinion and attributing it to Socrates, who had a higher reputation.

<comment><USER6> > He may be simply giving his own opinion and attributing it to Socrates, who > had a higher reputation.

We'll never really know how much the human Socrates matches Plato's literary character. But the reason for that is that Socrates never _did_ write down his teachings, whereas Plato did.

It would be a funny old world in which Socrates had no objection to writing, but never wrote anything, but Plato did have a an objection to writing, but wrote lots of stuff, including lies about Socrates objecting to writing.

But then again, this _is_ a funny old world.

<comment><USER7> There was another dude who was writing about Socrates at the time. It was Xenophon.

<comment><USER6> Yes.

And there's also _The Clouds_ by Aristophanes ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clouds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clouds)). And in my sometimes I suspect it might be the most accurate portrayal. But we'll never know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Pythagoras, a hundred years earlier -- and Plato's biggest philosophical influence next to Socrates -- was also against writing. Now, we don't know why he or his followers were against writing, but here is a possibility:

Pythagorean mathematics and science were developing rapidly, alongside spiritual doctrines about harmony in numbers and the cosmos. Even today, Pythagorean ideas are incredibly predictive (e.g., small integer ratios constituting consonance and dissonance). However, even then, there were limits to the ideas. For instance, a triangle with the side of 1 has a hypotenuse of the square root of 2. They may have thought there was more to learn and committing the ideas (which had spiritual meanings) to words may have created non-empirical doctrines. For instance, Pythagoras was familiar with many religious traditions and saw the role of books in creating unbreakable doctrines.

If Pythagoras had committed his ideas to writing, he could have been wrong or incomplete about his knowledge. Since he didn't do this, all of his influential concepts remain completely commensurable with modern science and mathematics. That's huge. As a result, those who wish to can still take spiritual inspiration from Pythagorean ideas about cosmic harmony without violating empirical reality.

</comment><comment><USER9> OP quotes Socrates in Phaed _rus_ talking about the evils of writing. But in Phaed _o_ (yes, a totally different dialog with almost the exact same name), we hear quite the opposite. Phaedo takes place on Socrates' deathbed so might be considered more representative of the philosopher's final opinions.

"'Tell him the truth, then, Cebes,' he [Socrates] said: 'I made them [poems and a hymn], not because I wanted to compete with him [Aesop] or his verses! I knew that wouldn't be easy-but because I was trying to find out the meaning of certain dreams and fulfil a sacred duty, in case perhaps it was that kind of art they were ordering me to make. They were like this, you see: often in my past life the same dream had visited me, now in one guise, now in another, but always saying the same thing: "Socrates," it said, "make art and practise it." Now in earlier times I used to assume that the dream was urging and telling me to do exactly what I was doing: as people shout encouragement to runners, so the dream was telling me to do the very thing that I was doing, to make art, since philosophy is a very high art form, and that was what I was making. But now that the trial was over and the festival of the god was preventing my death, I thought that in case it was art in the popular sense that the dream was commanding me to make, I ought not to disobey it, but should make it; as it was safer not to go off before I'd fulfilled a sacred duty, by making verses and thus obeying the dream.'"

<comment><USER10> > Phaedo takes place on Socrates' deathbed so might be considered more > representative of the philosopher's final opinions.

One distinction that I do want to make (that was made to me as an undergrad studying both Classics and Philosophy) is that we do want to remember that Phaedo is essentially third-hand information. It is written by Plato based on his understanding and editing of conversations he had with students of Socrates.

My professors always made this very clear and stressed that while it is common to consider things in the Platonic dialogues as Socratic canon, they were not, in fact, written by Socrates at all or in his immediate time period; as I recall, they were written a few decades after his death.

<comment><USER11> It's not really relevant what Socrate's actual cannon was.

The philosophic Socrates is what Plato made.

A few others (Xenophon etc) also wrote of Socrates, but the philosopher Socrates is 99% Plato's writings.

It's like the question of whether X or Y was the real Shakespeare.

Even if so, the only thing we care about Shakespeare is his plays, and those don't change if the real name of the person who wrote them was another (Borges makes that point somewhere, iirc -- actually Shakespeare himself makes it too: "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet").

"Socrates" people read / care about for 2 millennia -> what Plato wrote.

"Shakespeare" people read / watch / care about for several centuries -> the plays and poems themselves

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Before writing was commonplace, students would memorise works like the Odyssey and Iliad.

Before calculators, students would memorise times tables.

Before Google, students would need to learn about the world.

Before Siri, students would need to learn how to write well enough for Google to interpret their questions.

A few more iterations and no-one will need to think, we can just be shipped around in mobility scooters like in Wall-E. If a machine can make better decisions, why should we even have the right to decide anything?

Sure, that's an extreme position, but this is partly where the concern over writing came from - as new ways of processing, storing, and exchanging information arise we lose some of the old (and more human) ways.

<comment><USER13> \- "A few more iterations and no-one will need to think"

I disagree. A few more iterations people would think more about how to think and improve thinking, and focus more on the root problem rather than nitty- gritty problems along the way.

<comment><USER9> I used to think that way until I actually read The Odyssey. I used to suffer under the delusion that all things advance like technology. Thus, I thought, surely a work like The Odyssey must be extremely primitive, as compared to novels written in the 21st century. But in actuality, The Odyssey is jam- packed with narrative twists and turns. It has recursive unreliable narrators, it presents stories out of chronological order, it's full of deep meaning in almost every line. We have NOT improved since the days when bards memorized stories. We have gotten worse.

"Sons are seldom as good men as their fathers; they are generally worse, not better"\--Homer, The Odyssey

<comment><USER14> You do realize that the version you read isn't by any means the original, and is going to be the result of millennia of narrative drift? I'm not saying that it couldn't have been complex, but whatever you read isn't going to be how Homer told it.

<comment><USER9> Makes me wonder if the original was even more better :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> No surprise he thought mere book-learning was inferior.

"Real knowledge, Socrates said, can only be gathered via dialog: a give and take of questions and answers where ideas are interrogated until the knowledge is truly understood. But with a book, that cannot be done unless one has access to the author."

What I have finally been able to articulate for myself is that education is not information, it is the effect of a relationship and practice.

When you isolate information in the dynamic, it describes how ostensibly educated people can be starkly ignorant of facts, and how autodidacts aren't reliable no matter what truths they might be in possession of. The internet gives us unlimited information, with only some means to practice it if you code, and it simulates relationships that do not materially exist. It is making us stupid in a way we can't readily appreciate, which is perhaps what being stupid itself means.

The perspective doesn't matter much other than to give some mental respite from the nonsense of echo chambers and social hall of mirrors most people seem to be preoccupied with, but then again, that is the comfort philosophy was meant to provide, so YMMV.

</comment><comment><USER16> I absolutely see the primary effect. As a modern example, people who use GPS all the time don't seem to know where anything is.

Unfortunately, I almost never see the secondary effect. With all the time people save from using computers, we're not doing all the things we complained we didn't have time for. We're just able to waste more of it, in new ways.

</comment><comment><USER17> We don't know what Socrates said because it wasn't written down.

He relied on his followers to improve on his ideas and transmit those improved versions, and perhaps they did. However knowledge _does_ get lost (e.g. how to read Cretan Hieroglyphics). It's good to insure against that.

There are advantages to live discussion but it doesn't preclude making occasional records in the form of books. Why not do both?

Contra the article, books do contain knowledge. It's knowledge in the form of 'know that' rather than 'know how to'. Yet if we could somehow obtain science textbooks from the future, we could use those books to _recreate_ advances in knowledge in a much shorter space of time, i.e. we could bridge the gap to _know-how_. So books do have value beyond entertainment and recording historical facts.

</comment><comment><USER16> > In other words, if a child grew up alone with a Kindle containing all of the > books in the Library of Congress, could he gain the same kind of knowledge > which a normal person gains via social interaction? Or more pragmatically, > could you understand the true, intended and complete meaning of the words > you are now reading if we didn't share the same knowledge?

Even if you understand the words completely, in every field there's a distinction between "yeah that's the proper way the book says to do it" and "this is what we do in real life".

For example, my car's owner manual says you should let the engine idle for 5 minutes after driving to let it cool down, and my state driver's manual says I need to do an inspection (all lights, etc) before each drive -- but come on.

</comment><comment><USER18> He wasn't completely wrong. When we read what others have written we give them our own interpretation —which of course is unavoidable, but it lacks context and the "here and now" of the speech or conversation. The simplest example is the need for emoticons and tags to express figurative and emotional aspects in the writing. But there is no give and take or asides, exploration and further explanation, etc as happens in face-to-face discourse.

However, those are small drawbacks and are overwhelmed by the benefits.

<comment><USER19> Reasonably well-written dialog needs neither emoticons nor tags -- really! ;)

<comment><USER20> It is still missing context. And even if you are given some context with it, it is very likely that some of it being missing or got lost.

<comment><USER19> To the extent that is an issue, it is an issue with language, not the medium. Verbal communication is more likely to be misunderstood, which is one of the reasons why, when it matters, we want to "get it in writing." Anyone finding it "very likely" that whatever they write will be substantively misunderstood could improve their style.

Furthermore, the existence of the problem does not mean emoticons and tags are necessary for its solution. The existence of a rich literature prior to their introduction strongly suggests they are not.

<comment><USER18> Wanting things in writing is tangential. It has to do with proof. We still argue over legislation, so "in writing" isn't more illuminating. What writing (basically time shifting) can't do is be in the moment and give you the ability to diverge and learn on the fly.

Now conversations aren't perfect either, it's up to us to direct and ask questions when we seek better understanding. However writing doesn't give us that ability. On the other hand with writing, given our laziness in forming thought, we can ponder and distill thoughts till they are worthy of committing to record. Speech can also be well thought out and meticulous though (ex. Vidal vs Buckley), so it's not confined to writing, but we are more used to it in writing because debating is not prominent whereas writing is.

<comment><USER19> This has moved on quite a bit from the proposition that emoticons and tags are necessary.

Just because written language can be argued over, that does not make spoken and written communication equivalent in that regard.

Writing does far more than just time-shifting. Handling complexity is one important benefit. Disseminating information accurately is another.

Debating is not prominent partly because it is not efficient (even in law, the amount of verbal debate is dwarfed by the amount of written communication, which is necessary in its own right as well as necessary to support what verbal debate does happen.)

The modern world is inconceivable without near-universal literacy, and it seems very odd to have to defend that point on HN.

<comment><USER18> Emoticons were never a position. They served as support of a claim.

More importantly the claim wasn't that Socrates was absolutely right, it was that he had a legit point when he argued that there are inferior aspects. I however acknowledge these drawbacks are dwarfed by the benefits conferred by writing. So yes writing is great, no doubt, but it does lose something while gaining us a lot more in return.

Never the less, I admire his steadfast refusal to write even while acknowledging we are poorer for not having his thoughts first hand. Yet, he nor anyone else owed or owes it to us.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm against writing too when the first sentence includes an affectation like "wait for it":

> _... an excerpt from The Phaedrus, a dialog between Socrates and someone > named — wait for it — Phaedrus..._

</comment><comment><USER22> This is straight out of _The Seventh Function of Language_ , by Laurent Binet.

The only reason we know that Socrates was against writing is because Plato (et al.) wrote those thoughts down.

</comment><comment><USER23> Alternatively, given Plato knew damn well what he was writing down, it is one of the earliest surviving examples of a postmodern joke.

Also, the dialog is not against writing, it merely states that dialog is superior for presenting and exploring ideas or knowing what someone is about.

It also says that writing is something you can do as a pastime in later years, but it is not the serious pursuit of one's life, which I also suspect is Plato commenting upon himself from the text.

</comment><comment><USER24> Like any tool, it is all in how you use it.

The map is not the territory.

Even Socrates was recognizing this, that you couldn't really know the topic of a writing without having been there, done that, yet writing could help recall.

And there are plenty of examples of 'book knowlege' being essentially ignorance, e.g., passing a certification exam is a far cry from being able to reliably sort out the issues in the field. So, we must not expect to rely on writing (& other media) exclusively.

That said, (good & valid) writing and other forms of stored information can of course both before encountering a situation to truly learn it more quickly, and afterwards to help recall detail.

Similarly, GPS can be used as a crutch to allow people to get anywhere without developing even so much as a clue as which direction is North, or can be used to enhance the precision and speed of expert navigators.

So, even though the Map is not the Territory, that does not mean that maps are useless, only that they need to be used properly, and with mindfulness of how you curate your own knowledge and skills.

</comment><comment><USER25> There is an interesting question to ask here. Do you learn more effectively by reading or by interacting?

My bias is towards the latter.

Real-time communication offers an opportunity for error detection/error correction in transmission, thus - better understanding. This mechanism is lost with written text.

</comment><comment><USER26> >"they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality."

What a fantastically prescient depiction of social media.

</comment><comment><USER27> Just like in every generation, we are skeptical about the latest technology destroying the old ways, and haven't yet come to appreciate the new possibilities.

"Don't quote from Wikipedia"

"The telephone is going to destroy face to face communication"

And now, in my generation, kids hardly know how to read cursive, write and spell (by hand). The art of 19th and 20th century rhetoric and wordplay is dead. But, maybe we didn't really need it? Many people are typing more than ever and debating economics and stuff, with SMH and TLDR and their emoji game is strong.

<comment><USER28> >> The art of 19th and 20th century rhetoric and wordplay is dead.

What are you on about? With YouTube/Instagram/Snapchat the rhetoric is even more valuable because whatever you say on record is going to be multiplied another million times.

In the 19th and 20th century the chance was that whatever you said would never reach anybody past you closest friends and family.

<comment><USER27> That's completely different. People didn't joke around to make it available for millions of people on replay. They did it for fun!

Today we get fun from watching porn and speaking in quick bursts amid our increasingly hectic lives. The apps you mentioned just feed us entertainment like the TV did back in the day, and send endless notifications. Most people's speech isn't like it was 100 years ago because back then that's how they entertained themselves back then. For the same reason people don't play piano as much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Julian Jaynes didn't even think that Socrates had a unicameral mind, so it's not as if he was operating with the same psychology as modern man:

[http://hv.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch- msg.tcl?msg_id=...](http://hv.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch- msg.tcl?msg_id=00C0TF)

[https://www.julianjaynes.org/jjsforum/viewtopic.php?t=346](https://www.julianjaynes.org/jjsforum/viewtopic.php?t=346)

<comment><USER30> It's far more likely that Socrates operated with a psychology that would be recognizable to modern man (inasmuch as human psychology can differ wildly across societies and eras) than it is that Julian Jaynes's theory of bicameralism was anywhere close to correct.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Reminds me of a friend of mine who's a lot into horses. She once told me "We say that books about horses and riding can only teach you the things that you already know."

</comment><comment><USER32> What is it that is so special about dialog? I understand its interactive value, in that you can ask enough clarifying questions to fully understand someone else's point of view or argument. And that having questions asked of you can lead you to further challenge and refine your own point of view and argument. But that can all also be done with other communication modalities. Is there something else about dialog that is uniquely valuable with respect to developing knowledge and wisdom?

<comment><USER33> What is the sound of one hand clapping?

<comment><USER32> On the one hand, that's a response given to indicate there is no valuable answer to be found. On the other hand, there is no sound of one hand clapping, which could indicate you believe there is no value to dialog. I'm afraid I have no idea what your point is.

<comment><USER34> Learning is a social process. It requires more than one person.

What you are doing alone is maybe "silently pondering" but it is just, at best, a tidying up of what you have gained socially.

The kind of thinking we manage to internalise and perform individually is an impoverished kind, and lacks the ability to do a lot for us.

All psychological growth is therapeutic, requiring a therapist (educator, coach, peer, friend, ...) to serve as a foil to push you past the cycles of your current safe state.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'm pretty sure Einstein didn't agree with quantum physics either.

Clearly you can do foundational work in a field & still go on to misunderstand its basic principles! :)

<comment><USER36> Funny thing that he helped creating it. His early career fame was nearly all due to saying "the evidence says X is true, therefore, let's make X true in our theories" on the face of older, important people.

Then, after becoming older and important people he throws something like "God doesn't play dice" into the world. Fortunately, he had very few of those moments, but makes one wonder if that kind of thing is inevitable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> This seems facetious. So, write down a dialog. Then distill that into what was learned from the dialog. Now you have written down a thorough understanding of the material.

No? Then the dialog wasn't enough either. One way or the other, a written account can be the best representation of an idea. Because it has all the dialog has. Even better: it can be organized and sensible, not a random walk thru the idea as a dialog often is.

</comment><comment><USER38> This essay is revived for every new technology which might seem to weaken our mental faculties. In Socrates time writing might weaken memory and rhetoric. In my lifetime it was movies, television, video games, cellphones and social media doing the same.

On the contrary, if used properly and moderately, new technology can strengthen our mental abilities.

<comment><USER39> It's not just traditionalism. It has some merit.

Let's use a computation metaphor. All external but easily accessible information is in the HDD. Nowadays it contains almost all human knowledge.

But the things that are in your mind to be retrieved instantaneously are in cache. A bigger and more utilized cache is better, but for humans it takes a lot of effort to move things into cache, and our HDDs are expanding ever larger, so now people keep their cache empty and unused.

Reading a poem will give you some joy and perhaps insight, but memorizing the poem will make it a part of you. It's only function is not just reciting and recalling. It makes your mind more beautiful because it has beautiful things in it. It's not about the poem. It's about you as a person.

Which take me to the memory palace or method of loci. It's a mnemonic device described by the Romans where you memorize information by visualizing it as a walk through a palace with many rooms and locations. I think it was more than just a mnemonic device because embedded in that metaphor is the implication that what you memorize exists physically in your mind.

If the ancient peoples tried to beautify and decorate their minds with beautiful knowledge, then the modern people have industrialized their minds and kept them brutally empty.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Really what Socrates is saying here is that the Socratic method is superior to book-learning. So even if he did say it, his reason wasn't totally unbiased.

There are many ways we learn things and they all have pros and cons. I can't believe someone as intelligent as Socrates would genuinely believe one shouldn't write or read to learn.

</comment><comment><USER41> The excerpt on Miami U's website, linked early in the article, is worth reading. A tale of Egyptian Gods and Kings...but if not for Plato's writing, we wouldn't know these days that Socrates was with King Thamus on this one back then. Or do we really know any of that? Thanks for the paradox, philosophers.

</comment><comment><USER42> Best quote: "And if alive today, Socrates would probably be a prolific email, IM, forum, Facebook, and Twitter user."

<comment><USER43> I disagree with this conclusion pretty strongly (not sure if it's satire or not). Though social media could be considered dialog, I think Socrates was likely talking about face to face interaction being the pinnacle of knowledge sharing: nonverbal signals, back and forth, tone, etc all being key parts of this.

<comment><USER44> When Socrates and other ancient philosophers criticize writing, it's not because of the lack of in-person, non-verbal signals--at least, not directly. It's because they had peculiar beliefs about the origin and nature of knowledge. As alluded to in the post, in their epistemologies memory isn't just a way to recall facts, but often considered the very _seat_ of knowledge and even reality itself. Plato takes this to an extreme with his Platonic forms, which exist and are slowly revealed as _memories_. Suffice it to say the contention of the anti-writing crowd was that writing as a medium conflicted with the nature and/or embodiment of knowledge. This conflation of knowledge and memory persisted up to at least Augustine.

Note that not all these philosophers were anti-writing, just that you can't understand the debate without understanding the premises. Would Socrates be cool with electronic Socratic dialogue? I know enough to know that I don't know enough to be able to say one way or another. As far as I understand, Plato had different theories about knowledge and memory than Socrates, though both (in keeping with the era) emphasized their interrelationship. So we should be skeptical that Plato accurately conveys the essence of Socrates' epistemic theories.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Socrates was probably also rumbling about the millennials of his time.

Ah, those kids...

And he was right, it is close to impossible to preserve knowledge between generations, there is always huge losses, unfortunately, but still he was wrong, obviously, because books scales much better than talk.

<comment><USER46> >because books scales much better than talk

What scales is exactly superficial knowledge but not the wisdom, to me he was right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> All we are is dust in the wind, dude

</comment><comment><USER19> you can't beat a good teacher for teaching, but only a fraction of what I know has come from classes -- there are whole fields that I know something about without ever having taken a class in them, and I imagine the same is for you.

What happened was that good authors learned to effectively have a dialog with their readers, anticipating their readers' expanding knowledge, what they have probably overlooked, and the questions that would be puzzling them.

I doubt Socrates -- or Plato, for that matter -- ever imagined an almost entirely literate society, let alone what powers that would unleash.

</comment><comment><USER48> Maybe he didn't know how to write well? Writing could have been really dogmatic back in the day? Maybe he thought writing took away the beauty of argumentative logic?

</comment><comment><USER49> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zgk8UdV7GQ0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zgk8UdV7GQ0)</comment>


Show HN: I made 10 open-source Bootstrap 4 themes - <AUTHOR> https://hackerthemes.com/new-bootstrap-themes/ <comment><USER2> I like the themes but they all aim at websites that don't really present any content. Those huge headers look nice but are not really suitable if you want to present users with information that doesn't require them to scroll down the page. The lack of any sidebars also reduces the amount of content you can show on desktop.

It appears to be a common trend though, I guess because most content is now on apps and those websites only advertise apps or services.

<comment><AUTHOR> These are simply customized versions of Bootstrap 4.1. They're meant to spice up your Bootstrap project by modifying the colors and looks of the existing components and typography.

The layout is really up to you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Is this all there is in terms of code to create the Bubblegum theme?

[https://github.com/HackerThemes/theme- machine/blob/master/th...](https://github.com/HackerThemes/theme- machine/blob/master/themes/bubblegum/css/bootstrap4-bubblegum.scss)

<comment><AUTHOR> There's also this

[https://github.com/HackerThemes/theme- machine/blob/master/sc...](https://github.com/HackerThemes/theme- machine/blob/master/scss/_common-utils.scss)

which is imported in the file that you linked. That's all in terms of SCSS. Then the gulp task runs the SCSS build and the autoprefixer.

<comment><USER3> Awesome. Thanks. Good work.

It's surprising always how little you need to tweak Bootstrap to make it look completely different.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm really impressed. It's good work. Bootstrap buffet is excellent too!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, that's great to hear. You might like the cheat sheet then. It's similar to the buffet, just a different approach: [https://hackerthemes.com/bootstrap- cheatsheet/](https://hackerthemes.com/bootstrap-cheatsheet/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I liked the pleasant theme quite a bit.

</comment><comment><USER6> They seem kinda cookie cutter...

<comment><USER7> They're bootstrap themes - basically customisations to the colour, spacing, font, borders etc.

I dont use bootstrap themes like this myself directly but they can have a very useful purpose (which I intend to take advantage of)

Suppose you release an application, it doesn't matter if it's OSS, Commercial, or even hosted SaaS. It's a business web-app, so you use Bootstrap as your "UI Kit". Ok, Bootstrap has some basic default styles, and you maybe have a designer create a custom theme for your app.

But the user/customer wants to customise the appearance, perhaps it's exposed to their clients somehow, perhaps it's visible on a physical terminal in a shop.

Either way - _this_ is where bootstrap themes (and I mean themes, like these - not so much those "Bootstrap Dashboard" which use a whole whack of extra JS libraries, markup and css) like the linked ones, or those found on [https://bootswatch.com](https://bootswatch.com) can be very effective.

If you build _several_ applications, the effect is magnified, as the customer/user can now use multiple apps with the same custom theme, with almost no work at all from you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Very cool! Thanks for sharing!</comment>


Developers, don't mock people for being amazed by game dev techniques - <AUTHOR> http://www.polygon.com/2017/4/18/15340296/horizon-zero-dawn-kotaku-developer-backlash <comment><USER2> I'm not sure about this article's core assumption that sharing this type of knowledge in clear and understandable forms is a good thing.

Just as magicians often agree not to share how a trick is done, because doing so kills the joy of the magic for many viewers, I wonder if doing so for game design weakens the power of video games as a medium.

This kind of article will change perceptions of "a hugely expansive, beautiful world" for many laymen into "well optimized frustrum culling".

In the end, I'm not sure we should assume that just because someone can learn about these things, that we should go out of our way to show people how they're done. Something is lost.

<comment><USER3> I disagree. As a child, I first thought video games contained pictures of everything that could possibly be drawn on the screen. And I don't mean sprites--I mean that there must be a separate picture for every possible position the frog could be in and every possible car in every possible spot on the road.

My mother was a programmer, but she didn't make video games, so she had a hard time answering my questions about how video games worked. The only reference materials I had were manuals for the C64 and similar machines, where they talked vaguely about PEEK and POKE and sprites. The technical details of video games were impenetrable to me.

In middle school, I played DOOM for the first time. I got a shareware CD with the DOOM FAQ, which talked about editing the game. I understood intellectually what a file was and that the files contained the images, sounds, and levels for the game, but I didn't know how editing the game worked, exactly.

I told my mother that the game could be "edited" but that I didn't know how to do it. She sat down with me and showed me how to launch the only "editor" she could think of on our home PC: edit doom1.wad

Of course, the data was meaningless to me, but the possibilities made me even more determined to understand. As I learned more about how that game worked, I learned more about how all games work. As I learned more about how all games work, I learned more about...everything, really.

The thing about learning the trick is that it usually makes people appreciate magic more. Knowing that the coin only "disappears" because the magician distracted you is useful and interesting, and the "trick" of it doesn't detract from the showmanship. Games are the same. Knowing something about how an effect is achieved doesn't diminish its power if it's expressed well.

As a programmer, it frustrates me when people perceive what I do as somehow magical or impossible for them to understand. It isn't, and it doesn't help any of us to perpetuate that misconception. If I hadn't learned how something as prosaic as DOOM's demo recording & playback worked, I don't know what I'd even be like today. I certainly wouldn't be a programmer, and I imagine I wouldn't be as happy and curious. I don't care what you think is lost in explanation--what's gained is so much more important.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: About 2 weeks post launch, what is the opinion around Stadia? - <AUTHOR> I'll leave mine:
240mb internet and 30mb upload, bought the premiere edition. Gaming background: when I was a teenager I was a heavy pc gamer, always with latest pc builds and playing stuff maxed out but moved to consoles for life related reasons.
It's been working great for me. I've been playing very much hassle free. Experience in the browser is suboptimal compared to chromecast but I see this as being solvable my google (and sadly no iOS yet). I'm very much looking forward for the next few months and thinking about selling my ps4 and keep switch + stadia for long term <comment><USER2> i'd like to invite you to write your reports of how stadia works for you at a site i created: [https://www.cloudgamingdb.com](https://www.cloudgamingdb.com)</comment>


Gawker Media shuts Valleywag, offers Consumerist for sale - <AUTHOR> http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/11/12/briefly-gawker-media-shuts-valleywag-offers-consumerist-sale <comment><USER2> Nooo..... I actually like valleywag :( Sure it was nasty, and it was gossipy, and not journalism at all, but it was a lot more frank and honest than a bunch of other tech. blogs out there.

<comment><USER3> I loved valleywag and will miss it. My few appearances there have nothing to do with it. I just love the tabloid mentality, and my experiences living in Norcal screamed at me that it was ripe for that kind of approach. Oh well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Valleywag I was never fond of: it, along with Gawker, always seemed too deliberately nasty, without ever really being interesting.

It's a shame about the Consumerist, though. It had some excellent articles. Still does, on occasion.

<comment><USER5> >> too deliberately nasty

Well said. I have nothing against tabloids per se, but I always felt that they just didn't know how to do it properly, or that the tabloid practice applied to tech scene didn't work that well. I don't miss them...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> But. But. But. Where am I going to hear about what Justin's up to?

<comment><USER7> Come back once in a while? You know when the poker games are...

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not surprised given the quality of content on Valleywag, after all it was banned from HN.

</comment><comment><USER9> Valleywag occasionally had some interesting stuff... key word: "occasionally".

Most of the time they were just picking really petty things to complain about, trying to turn it into a controversy.

Maybe now that it's just a column on Gawker the signal-noise ratio will increase (hopefully they'll offer a Valleywag-only RSS feed... I don't care much for the rest of Gawker)

</comment><comment><USER10> I think startups are the wrong place for a gossip rag to be hanging out. Keep that garbage in Hollywood please.

<comment><USER3> You've obviously not spent much time hanging around with the "Web 2.0" crowd in SF. Ripe for ridicule.

<comment><USER10> I've seen my share of gossip-worthy stories, but I'd rather hear about them in the dead pool.

<comment><USER3> Except "buzz" is part of what produces growth. And it's almost guaranteed that "buzz" is generally empty, shallow people interacting with other empty, shallow people (because that's 90% of the world's population). That produces gossip, and buzz, and more buzz, and tabloid journalism, and billions of dollars. "Hollywood" is the perfect paradigm for that.

<comment><USER11> The kind of "buzz" that creates growth for tech companies is "gee whiz, check out this young/new/innovative/life-changing/giant-killing company/technology." Not cynical mockery.

And the culture of vapid celebrity that sells magazines/TV/movies doesn't sell tech. Even the Facebook/MySpace masses could hardly care less about gossip of those companies' founders and executives. At best, such gossip is industry 'inside baseball'... and so it should be judged for accuracy and relevance, not snark and salaciousness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What happened here is that a few blogs like The Consumerist were profitable enough to support a few people, Gawker bought them to try to make something much bigger out of them.

Now that the economy is turning sour they will try to sell them.

But if you're efficient enough you might still be able to eek out a living from a blog like the consumerist. It's not a business with a capitol B, but it's a living.

</comment><comment><USER13> Meh.

<comment><USER7> Are you being transferred?

<comment><USER13> Maybe Giz, but it eats up a lot of time though. I should just finish out my web apps. Already hearing some sites that need writers to establish themselves as the next VW.

<comment><USER4> Wait, meaning other sites are _trying,_ or other sites are writing you asking for you on their staff?

<comment><USER13> Both.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Seems like an opportunity for some budding writer to take its place.

<comment><USER15> A writer with a backer / publisher, maybe. It'd be hard for an independent writer to do it for fear of crossing the lines and getting sued ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Crap! I liked Valleywag. :(

</comment><comment><USER17> Valleywag was good entertainment. Tabloids for geeks. Gonna miss it.

</comment><comment><USER18> Damn, now how am I going to find out what Kevin Rose is up to?

<comment><USER19> I believe he'll keep you covered. Afterall, he does have @kevinscold (found via valleywag).

<comment><USER4> Not to mention a blog, and formerly a tumblelog as well. The guy's connected.

<comment><USER18> I guess the sarcasm wasn't evident.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> the first post on the new consumerist will write itself if they ripoff someone on the sale

</comment><comment><USER21> ding dong the witch is dead!

</comment><comment><USER22> the startup party is over. i really doubt HN will take off. but then again, most people here don't want that anyway.

<comment><USER23> I don't think the startup party is over: I think the tourists have gone home. HN has taken off as an extremely useful community for serious entrepreneurs. And based on the vast majority of submissions and comments that I read, "most people here" want serious conversation.

<comment><USER22> i don't think the tourists have gone home: i think they ran out of money.

you say tomato, i say potato.

did i say the community was not useful or that it didn't want serious conversation?

<comment><USER23> When tourists run of out money they go home. That's why they are called tourists and not homeless.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: IT careers for those who hate people - <AUTHOR> Over my 20+-year carrer it seems that there's same pattern for me, - enthusiastic hiring, 2-3 years, and I'm fired over issues management has with me (nothing atrocious like stealing, being late, hygiene etc -- just not a team player and not corporate friedly). I'm not a people person, and I can only hypothesize that people sense that and distance away, and finally have enough. Remotely too.
So now I feel that here's coming another round, and I find it somehow pointless to go for another job hunting, because the cycle will most probably repeat itself. I wonder if there exists anything IT-related so the human contact is minimal?
Am programmer by trade
Thank you <comment><USER2> Any IT/Software job where human contact is minimal is on the chopping block, ripe for automation... I think interacting with people is unavoidable.

</comment><comment><USER3> I guess you'll be looking for a remote position. Sounds like a pity IMO, usually the quiet ones are the best! Good luck</comment>


Airbnb has become its own worst enemy - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfexaminer.com/airbnb-has-become-its-own-worst-enemy/ <comment><AUTHOR> So is the issue here one of investors wanting to maximise their returns?

</comment><comment><USER2> Enabling people to share their property is going to continue to get easier. The problems with housing are related primarily to a supply that is greatly lower than demand. AirBnB isn't the problem so much as a lack of available residential units.</comment>


Google/Apple where is the catch? - <AUTHOR> Browsers look more and more capable as an application deployment platform. They give developers a chance to bypass those pesky issues of being at a mercy of Apple/Google/Whatever app stores.
For example since browser currently exposes Bluetooth LE and WebGL I am thinking of moving one of my products (namely virtual bike training platform) to a browser.
If I do this, then how Google/Apple will control me then? Or they will at some point require web apps to be certified (practically turning it to another app store) to run on their browsers? <comment><USER2> I genuinely think that unless your app requires significant power, i.e. graphics or such. Web-Assembly and PWAs will take over. The app stores will fight tooth and nail to keep revenue coming from their stores though.</comment>


Comments in Node.js can slow you down - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@c2c/nodejs-a-quick-optimization-advice-7353b820c92e <comment><USER2> Very interesting that this decision is made at the text level and not later...

</comment><comment><USER3> I guess it's probably a good case for minifying all production code.</comment>


JP Morgan: Bitcoin is "vastly inferior" to traditional, fiat currency  - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/02/jp-morgan-bitcoin-is-vastly-inferior-to-traditional-fiat-currency/ <comment><USER3> JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America owns the federal reserve which is a private owned central bank. They most likely also somehow influence the FED chairman selection. The FED sets the price of new money the interest rate. The interest rate in the banks favor is now close to zero. Low interest rate creates more new debt. Low interest rate eventually will create inflation as new money are put in the system, new money benefit those who get it first the banks and the one who are most at disadvantage is fixed income earners such as retired people.

If you want to know more about how JP Morgan and senator Aldrich who's daughter was married to a banker created the FED you can read more about it here. [http://www.bigeye.com/griffin.htm](http://www.bigeye.com/griffin.htm)

Bitcoin may be a bubble, but crypto currencies are here to stay, banks fear alternative currencies because they can no longer control the prize of new money which is the source of the banks wealth. Current banks create money out of thin air by new debt creation.

</comment><comment><USER4> If anything Bitcoin is inferior because no one can create additional bitcoins to lend them to the banks when they get themselves in trouble.

<comment><USER5> This has suddenly sparked my interest in it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> jpmorgan has an aggressive stance against bitcoin for a while now. I wonder what is behind their continuous negative statements about bitcoin, if you don't like it just don't use it, it's not like we are pushing bitcoins down their throats or stg :)

<comment><USER7> The document ref'd in the OP is not a press release, or an arsey comment on HN, but an investor's note. JPM are telling their clients not to invest in bitcoin, because they do not rate it as an investment.

That is what is 'behind' the negative statements. They are not engaging in personal vendettas, but trying to make money, and have decided that - <USER2> compared to the absurd pre-08 financial instruments - a deflationary pseudo- currency based on fantasy randroid economics is not a great idea from the old 'get money' angle.

How incomprehensibly mean spirited of them!</comment></comment>


Beyond Ruby: Mirah, Reia, Rite - <AUTHOR> http://www.igvita.com/2010/12/14/beyond-ruby-mirah-reia-rite/

<comment><USER2> I think Mirah (previously named Duby) really has some potential.

For the curious, I mixed JRuby + Duby to create (realtime) audio processing (VST) plugins.

[https://github.com/thbar/opaz- plugdk/blob/master/plugins/Dub...](https://github.com/thbar/opaz- plugdk/blob/master/plugins/DubyFreeComp/DubyFreeComp.rb)

[https://github.com/thbar/opaz- plugdk/blob/master/plugins/Dub...](https://github.com/thbar/opaz- plugdk/blob/master/plugins/DubyFreeComp/DubyFreeCompTools.duby)

In this example JRuby provides the "declarativeness" and ease of use of Ruby, while Duby makes the "heavy computation".

Duby in this case is just as fast as Java used on floats (it's actually translated into Java).

Of course, to get to write VST plugins with this, you already have a C++ <=> Java wrapper (jVSTWrapper), then a Java <=> JRuby wrapper I wrote.

[https://github.com/thbar/opaz- plugdk/blob/master/src/JRubyVS...](https://github.com/thbar/opaz- plugdk/blob/master/src/JRubyVSTPluginProxy.java)

</comment><comment><USER3> I think mirah is an interesting implementation of ruby like syntax on the jvm. I like the flow of ruby and to compile down to jvm bytecode should theoretically yield the performance of java. I think as with any language its growth is down to a few key factors like some interesting public projects, big names using it, library support and then a community forming behind it. Its all about use cases right?

Ruby for me was a web language that I took to scripting and then tried some server side work in, but I'm starting to see its limitations and overheads.

Rite while being an embeddable language and having a specific use case will most likely be this light weight barebones ruby that can be run in place of our existing web software, scaling up nicely. However thats just speculation.

</comment><comment><USER4> So the trend here is... Ruby syntax, compiled to other languages' semantics?

This would excite me more if Ruby's syntax were better. I want _metaprogramming_ on top of everything and its brother, not Ruby syntax. Even though I love Ruby.

<comment><USER5> The win with Mirah has more to do with adding other modern features like type inference and closures to Java without introducing a foreign runtime. It also has metaprogramming in the form of pluggable compiler macros, but I haven't really tried those out yet.

It's my impression that the Ruby syntax was chosen simply because it was the closest thing at hand.

<comment><USER6> I think Mirah could be a serious competitor to Scala.

<comment><USER5> I'm skeptical. Mirah can't really do much to support functional programming without adding a runtime, since the JDK's built-in classes don't provide data structures amenable to FP. But the point of Mirah is to be lightweight without its own standard library.

You could use Mirah with Clojure or Scala to get access to the necessary libs, but then you lose the lightweight advantage and could fragment the community.

<comment><USER7> Are you talking about higher order functions or something else.

<comment><USER5> Of course, it all depends on definitions; in this case things are fuzzy. Functional programming means a lot of things to a lot of people. "Supports higher-order functions" is necessary for pretty much any definition of FP, but it sets a very low bar.

My definition would have to include "supports pure functions idiomatically", which means it must be practical to write the bulk of your programs without side-effects. This is really only possible if you have persistent data structures that can efficiently share structure internally; otherwise avoiding side-effects involves lots of wasteful copying. (See <http://technomancy.us/132> for an explanation of persistent data structures.)

Of course, if you asked a Haskell programmer, they would be mortified that you would leave monadic computation out of your definition, so no single definition is going to please everyone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Rite: an embeddable Ruby. Think Lua, but better

For some reason, this really came off as fan talk, and it really annoyed me.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a fair statement - it was a joke at RubyConf.. Quoting Matz actually. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't know why more people aren't excited about Reia. ErlangVM w/ more approachable syntax? Awesome. Not that I don't like Erlang syntax, I just think more people would be willing to use it if it has more familiar syntax.</comment>


Ask HN: What happened to CoralCDN? - <AUTHOR>

CoralCDN[1] seems to be doing fine, no downtime announcement, no report of problems on their website, nothing on their Wiki.
Yet, since at least a few days, none of the *.nyud.net URLs seem to work, not even the one on their own frontpage[2].
I understand that this is/was a research project but if it has finally come to an end at least a farewell message would have been nice.
[1] http://www.coralcdn.org/ [2] http://www.coralcdn.org.nyud.net/ <comment><USER2> For those who may have not have heard of this: CoralCDN was to websites what CloudFlare is today, but in a more decentralized ways.

In the early 2000s, it was quite common for a website to be actually Slashdotted - featured on the Slashdot.org website - and the website would get registered on CoralCDN and Slashdot would post a CoralCDN link when the original website could no longer handle the traffic.

Haven't seen it been that popular recently, but I can imagine there are still quite a few people using CoralCDN. But I have no idea what caused the downtime.

</comment><comment><USER3> Last Updated: Jan 29, 2015[0]

[0][https://duckduckgo.com/?q=whois+nyud.net&t=ffsb&ia=whois](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=whois+nyud.net&t=ffsb&ia=whois)</comment>