"Banclist.com is probably the most lucrative direct messaging platform" - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1141937787442098176 <comment><USER2> It actually was a little difficult to figure out what this business is about from their website, but their LinkedIn is comprehensive enough:

"Overview

Non-publicly held banks are facing increasing risks when they maintain a private list of their shareholders. Sharing unpublished information about the bank's stock with a few shareholders exposes the bank, its management and directors to potentially serious liability. Simply answering one shareholder's question without notifying every shareholder with the same information puts the bank at risk. The threat and penalty of litigation can affect the bank's reputation and financial performance. In some cases banks can face civil and criminal penalties.

One of the fastest growing bank services companies today, BancList (BL) provides privately held financial institutions and their shareholders (and other authorized users) with an easy-to-use web-based posting service that replaces the list. BL lets shareholders post notices of their intent to buy or sell their bank stock and keeps the bank out of the negotiation process – the way transactions are supposed to occur.

Not only does BL provide a risk mitigation service for banks by replacing the list, it helps banks enhance shareholder value and provides banks with even more information about what is happening with their shares. BL bank clients receive automatic email alerts every time someone posts a notice, which keeps them aware of active negotiations.

BL is not a broker dealer and does not ask for a list of your shareholders. BL never interferes with the relationship between bank clients and their shareholders. BL does not collect broker fees for its services. BL clients pay an annual subscription fee based on the asset size of the financial institution."

Very cool something of this scope operates with only a handful of employees.

[0][https://www.linkedin.com/company/communitybanklist](https://www.linkedin.com/company/communitybanklist)

<comment><USER3> To me the scope seems rather narrow, and the technical requirements about on par with a mailing list.

<comment><USER4> Their sole innovation over that is that they realized neutrality and being a third party is valuable because of regulation. Haha, this is pretty clever.

<comment><USER5> Similarly, there is a business computing custom indices that a bank uses in products. The bank is perfectly capable of computing the index itself, but it needs to be handled by a third party that is paid handsomely to just re- calculate what the bank already calculated.

<comment><USER6> One example of that is Markit Group, which had revenue of _$1.5bn /yr_ when it merged with IHS in 2016 at an implied valuation of roughly $5.5bn. Best London startup of the last 25 years, including DeepMind, not close.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markit)

Being a trusted third party is frequently an amazing business, if you can earn or negotiate your way there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Thus BancList (spelling absolutely intentional, because even the K is > regulated and I am absolutely not joking about that fact).

No, he's not joking. Even the font size is regulated. I ran into that as an employee of a commodities trader. I'm not sure if the choice of font is regulated but it wouldn't be surprising.

<comment><USER8> A bit of a tangent, but in Canada "financial advisers" are regulated and required to act in the customers interests. So naturally banks will connect you to "financial advisors" (unregulated) to buy products.

[https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/marketplace-watchdog- advise...](https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/marketplace-watchdog-adviser- advisor-1.4049326)

<comment><USER9> FYI financial advisers having a fiduciary duty to their clients is standard in most of the western world EXCEPT America.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > In "Goodness that is a great, great software business", I present > [http://banclist.com](http://banclist.com) , which is probably the most > lucrative direct messaging platform in the world on a per user basis. (I'm > exempting e.g. Bloomberg which does a lot more than DMs.)

That's some hyperbole from Patrick. The website is not a direct messaging platform by any stretch. It's a listing website with a very specific audience. Lots of that stuff happen over email, regular DM, phone calls or regular in- persons meetups.

> BancList.com does not participate in any way in the execution of trades. Any > trades that may occur must take place offline independent of BancList.com or > any of its affiliates.

They only risk getting their data compromised but no money is at risk. Trades happen discretely and they might not be aware of them or not care.

</comment><comment><USER11> > Apache/2.4.6 (CentOS) OpenSSL/1.0.1e-fips mod_fcgid/2.3.9 PHP/5.4.16 > mod_python/3.5.0- Python/2.7.5

Eek! I wouldn't trust them with my data if I was a bank. They haven't updated their server since 2013. All of the versions listed in that header have major vulns. This is a disaster waiting to happen.

<comment><USER12> It seems dir listing is not properly disabled [https://banclist.com/app/webroot/img/](https://banclist.com/app/webroot/img/)

<comment><USER13> It it now, by the look of it.

<comment><USER12> Not an expert but I don't think it's considered good practice to expose your directory structure like that. It should have been 404 or redirection to /home.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > I imagine there was very little knocking on doors; founding team just called > up everyone in their Rolodex, and after that point it's viral since the > population of people who want to buy or sell one of 100 local banks > definitely are interested in the 101st.

Ah, another company I could never ever have founded because its success explicitly depends on who you know.

</comment><comment><USER15> Seems like we're missing a "StocList" for buying/selling shares in private companies. There are some "secondary market" services. But (IIRC) they all take a hefty cut from both parties, have zero transparency, act as an intermediary, have high minimum transactions, etc.

Seems like accredited investors and private company stock owners should be able to make deals directly. Someone get on it!

<comment><USER16> > There are some "secondary market" services. But (IIRC) they all take a hefty > cut from both parties, have zero transparency, act as an intermediary, have > high minimum transactions, etc.

Does anyone know of any such services that are reputable and worth using? Even if it's expensive. Kind of to be expected in that field.

<comment><USER17> A few are mentioned here: [https://www.holloway.com/g/equity- compensation/sections/can-...](https://www.holloway.com/g/equity- compensation/sections/can-you-sell-private-stock).

<comment><USER16> Cool!

<comment><USER17> There is also [https://carta.com/](https://carta.com/) which eventually thrives to become a private market: [https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/06/carta- was-just-valued-at-1...](https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/06/carta-was-just- valued-at-1-7-billion-by-andreessen-horowitz-in-a-deal-some-see-as-rich/).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Are there any effective strategies for searching out profitable parasitic niches like this? Looking around the corners of big heavily regulated industries? Healthcare, real estate, finance?

<comment><USER19> Immersion. Work in the industry at a position where you're likely to encounter inefficiencies. In healthcare, for example, you can't spit without hitting an optimization opportunity. Working midlevel can mean you get to see low-level workers hacking around bureaucracy _and_ management wringing their hands about money and budgets and such.

Taking a job in an industry to get access to its seedy underbelly isn't super appealing to most founders, but for some ossified industries there's really no other way to find those golden opportunities.

Oh, and be patient. Practice being a mouthless set of ears.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> More info - [http://www.venturenashville.com/fintech-seed-stage- banclist-...](http://www.venturenashville.com/fintech-seed-stage-banclist- pops-up-in-nashville-eyes-capital-raise-cms-1050)

</comment><comment><USER21> How would one even know this? Do they run billing through stripe, and if so did he see the numbers? How would you know how lucrative this is?

</comment><comment><USER22> This hyperbolic introduction is like saying Ford sells the most expensive tires on the planet.

</comment><comment><USER23> I would say that SWIFT international financial messaging platform most likely beats it, in terms of lucrativeness, and - amusingly - it is also in the same industrial sector.

</comment><comment><USER24> That website looks like an affiliate marketing cash grab site from the early 2000s. I know that I should probably do some proper research but it was so off-putting that I'm just going to give up right away and call it a waste of time and/or a scam.

<comment><USER25> > That website looks like an affiliate marketing cash grab site from the early > 2000s

it also doesn't matter when a user engagement ponzi scheme isn't how you plan to cash out of your company

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is an example of what happens when a field is over-regulated.

You have these obtuse solutions working around a problem that is only hard because of lawyers and 500 regulations to "protect investors".

People were able to hack together exchanges for crypto-coins. The only thing that stands in the way of doing this for private stock/tiny companies is excessive regulation. I'm not saying we want the whole crypto experience of exchanges blowing up overnight, but what we have now is clearly not right either.

<comment><USER27> What about BancList indicates that the field is over-regulated

<comment><USER28> The fact that it's called "BancList"?

<comment><USER27> That just indicates that it's regulated. Where's the "over" part?

Personally, it sounds like a rather good idea to have regulation over who's allowed to use the word "bank", given the assumptions that the general public will make about anything with "bank" in the name.

<comment><USER29> What stops the general public from making the same assumptions about anything with "banc" in the name?

<comment><USER27> Probably the same thing that stops them from assuming that anything with "spank" in the name is a reputable financial institution.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


GNU Screen and Zmodem - <AUTHOR> http://adammonsen.com/post/256

<comment><USER2> Not horribly efficient, but you could enable screen's session log (C-a H), base64 encode the remote file to stdout, tidy up the local capture file, then decode it.</comment>


Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Enduring San Francisco - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/11/travel/lawrence-ferlinghettis-enduring-san-francisco.html <comment><USER2> Unfortunately, Ferlinghetti's San Francisco is long-gone; the artists have moved on. Tech rules the City now.

<comment><USER3> are there any pockets of artists left? I don't mean famous ones, there's probably someone who can pay enough to compete with tech-workers

<comment><AUTHOR> What about on the East Bay? Isn't there a more lively artist community in places like Berkeley, Oakland, or El Cerrito?

<comment><USER4> My impression is that there was recently a "golden age" for art in the east bay which is now waning, in large part because it's not seen as an affordable destination for young artists.

During my pit-stop in SF last November, I made a point of attending the famous monthly underground art variety show (Tourettes without Regrets) in the east bay, because I happened to be there that day. I was shocked to see the audience and performers were much older demographically than I remembered when I lived in the area 5 years ago; most attendees seemed to be over 30 rather than under 30.

So, anecdotally, it seems to me that the artists who established there years ago may still be there, but the east bay's not attracting new artists as much as it once was.

<comment><USER5> I have been in Oakland for about ten years and the only young people I know who still go to the art/variety shows have been enabled by family wealth. The culture is still here because people are drawn to this area specifically for it, but it feels hollow at this point, none of it is coming from an organic place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What a delightful article. On my first visit to City Lights I bought a copy of Ferlinghetti's "A Coney Island if the Mind" and a copy of Dharma Bums (Kerouac's best book). I didn't really know what Lawrence looked like (pre- internet days). I asked how often he came into the book store, the clerk said: "He is upstairs now". I walked up that narrow wooden staircase, looked at him, he looked at me. I said "hi", he smiled, I left. Really,really wish I had been brave enough to say more. Hadn't realized it was him when I went up there before and picked out one of his books.

<comment><AUTHOR> City Lights is one of my favorite bookstores anywhere, and I feel its fiction collection is second to none.

There are a handful of novels I use to judge how broad (and good) a bookstore's fiction collection is. Hermann Broch's Sleepwalkers, Robert Musil's A Man Without Qualities, and Witold Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke. I would say 90 percent of the bookstores out there would not have any of these three books in stock, and certainly not Barnes & Noble. The last time I checked, City Lights had all three in stock.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I had no idea the history behind City Lights. But I loved it for very obvious reasons.

1\. it's open late. almost nothing else is in SF. 2\. it has a wonderful basement where the shelves are almost haphazardly placed.

<comment><USER8> Why is NOTHING in this city open late? Including restaurants. Who wants to eat at 6:30?!

<comment><USER9> SF is a party city. There's a shitload going on every night all night, it's just a bit underground.

The CA 2AM last-call is at least partly responsible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I loved this article because it totally avoids the "SF has changed so much because of techies" cliche</comment>


Xerox scanners/photocopiers randomly alter numbers (no OCR involved) - <AUTHOR> http://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres_are_switching_written_numbers_when_scanning

<comment><USER2> Looks like a poorly implemented compression algorithm, or something. It's scary to think what this could cause, though.</comment>


The fanless heatsink: Silent, dust-immune, and almost ready for prime time - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/computing/131656-the-fanless-heatsink-silent-dust-immune-and-almost-ready-for-prime-time <comment><USER3> "fanless" seems like unnecessary hyperbole. The heatsink is a fan, which is cool enough that it doesn't need to be oversold.

<comment><USER4> It's also not "silent", but rather "quiet". Marketing overload.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Many of the questions in this comments thread (e.g. safety, e.g. vertical mounting, e.g. cost associated with the bearings, e.g. the basis of the 7% figure) are already answered directly or indirectly in a year-old Q&A article that was linked from TFA.

[http://www.extremetech.com/computing/90272-the-fanless- spinn...](http://www.extremetech.com/computing/90272-the-fanless-spinning- heatsink-your-questions-answered-by-the-inventor?print)

Not very good-HN-citizen-ish to post questions without putting any work at all into looking for the answers, is it?

</comment><comment><USER6> Does this heatsink work when it's mounted vertically? The "hydroplaning"/floating effect seems to suggest the heatsink must be resting on the base instead of suspended sideways.

<comment><USER7> From the slides at [https://ip.sandia.gov/techpdfs/Sandia%20Cooler%20presentatio...](https://ip.sandia.gov/techpdfs/Sandia%20Cooler%20presentation.pdf)

>Q: Can the device be mounted in any orientation?

>A: Yes—the air bearing assembly is held together by magnetic attraction (between the stator and permanent-magnet rotor).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I remember seeing this a year ago. It's a bit worrying that in that time they still haven't gotten around to building a prototype that will be as quiet as the claimed final product. While that doesn't mean it can't be done, it may point to deeper issues in the project such as yet unaddressed technical challenges or lack of funding (which might in turn suggest lack of investor conviction).

Personally I'm curious what the failure rate will look like with these things. Given it will probably be higher than existing PC cooling fans which are moving lighter loads, this may indeed be a problem.

<comment><USER9> Most larger manufacturing companies move at a glacier pace. I could see Apple making a quick decision to use these and then having them in models within a year, but few other manufacturing companies are willing to move like that.

<comment><USER10> My impression was that Apple intentionally lagged the cutting edge curve to error on stability and sound user experience. I would be very surprised to see them go in the direction of moving parts - instead I would expect them to continue in the direction of all solid state (no moving parts) as much as possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> From the article: "This centrifugal force is what gives the Sandia Cooler such massive efficiency, too."

That is not correct. The efficiency boost comes from the very efficient transfer of heat from the CPU to the spinning fan/heat exchanger by, effectively, using the very thin air-gap under the impeller. The rotation of the impeller breaks the boundary layer in the airgap and you get good heat transfer across a very thin gap.

The airflow over the machined aluminum blades and, in general, the rotation of the entire impeller assembly, serve to keep the heat exchanger free from dust accumulation (which restricts heat flow).

Of course, as many have pointed out, it remains to be seen how easily this concept translates to a mass-manufactured low-cost solution in terms of performance and reliability under varying conditions.

I've done a ton of heat flow FEA work when working on various approaches to cool a custom high-power LED array (1,500W power-in). We could get reasonable results with complex forced-air solutions and relatively expensive custom machined heatsinks as well as carefully modeled airflow controls. In these cases the solutions were always very large (volume).

When we switched to fluid-based cooling things changed dramatically. One of the design challenges was to maintain a narrow delta-T across the LED array. This is because thermal uniformity was required in order to have uniform performance across the array. The fluid solution, with some tricks, could easily achieve ten times better thermal uniformity than the air-cooled approach. And, in addition to this, cool the entire array to a much lower final temperature.

A fluid cooling system was constructed using only a small fluid pump and no air-moving fans at all. A passive natural convection radiator could easily handle the heat-load in a normal air-conditioned office environment.

While I have not looked at the specific case of cooling a CPU, based on my experience I have to say that far greater gains can be had by rapidly moving heat from the CPU surface using fluid-based cooling. This, effectively, creates the opportunity for much greater surface extension than can reasonably be applied to the small surface area of a CPU.

Again, I have never studied CPU cooling, but I am not sure that this 150W cooling limit applies to fluid-based cooling. I can see building a systems that can very easily move 150W, or even double that, using a relatively simple fluidic cooler. At some level it is a matter of how many molecules of the fluid you can move across the CPU-side heat exchanger per unit time. The answer to that is "a lot".

I can't see the Sandia or any other pure air-based cooling system used for CPU cooling at the extremes. The assembly would have to be very precisely manufactured and lots of work would have to be done in order to ensure that vibrations and harmonics of the motor drive system itself don't cause damage to the circuit board. If the system needs to have an impeller spinning at 2K RPM or more, lots of work needs to go into making it safe for servicing as a metal impeller like that can shred fingers in an instant.

Finally, there's the question of the mass of the spinning impeller. In order to transfer heat into the impeller blades you are limited to certain geometry. If the spinning base and/or the blades get too thin you simply won't be able to move the heat out no matter how well it can move from the stationary plate up to the revolving disk. This is critical and it means that there are certain minimum geometry constraints that are likely to make the impeller somewhat massive. From my FEA work on heat transfer I know that you can only go so thin on blades before they become useless past a few millimeters above the heatsink base-plate. The same is the case here.

What I can see is the use of this concept to create a fluid based solution that uses a liquid to quickly move heat from a CPU to a much larger heat exchanger that uses the Sandia heatsink to move heat into the surrounding air, and, thereby, cool the CPU. Even at that, I'd like to see data comparing conventional forced-air convection cooling of the external heat exchanger and even a comparison to a natural convection solution.

<comment><USER12> It sounds like you were using liquid cooling, did you ever try phase change cooling? Something like this ([http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_X_hgtlJpA&t=36](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_X_hgtlJpA&t=36))? I saw a demo of it a couple years ago, really cool stuff.

<comment><USER11> No. Not flexible enough for what we needed to do and, in some ways, limited in performance. For the right applications phase change heat transfer is fantastic.

EDIT: My comment has to do with phase change cooling of the type implemented with sealed copper tubes moving heat from one end to the other using a phase change fluid inside. This full-immersion phase change cooling setup is a something entirely different. I don't know anything about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The video mentions that transferring heat to the impeller is a challenge, but it wasn't clear to me how they overcame this. Is the space between the CPU and the impeller so small that heat can be transferred efficiently?

If that is the case, I wonder how cheaply these could be produced given the incredibly tight clearance.

<comment><USER7> There's a whitepaper available here [http://prod.sandia.gov/techlib/access- control.cgi/2010/10025...](http://prod.sandia.gov/techlib/access- control.cgi/2010/100258.pdf)

Their data suggests that the air gap provides minimal resistance to the flow of heat. As for the clearance, they've stated that unusually high-precision manufacturing is not required for the two surfaces.

<comment><USER14> Re: clearance, while .001" clearance isn't something I'd want in a design particularly, modern machine tools are good enough that you get flatness and surface finish good enough to not have problems at .001" clearance basically free on any machined surface.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm somewhat confused; do demonstrate how quiet it is, they turn off the loud motor that keeps it running?

<comment><USER16> Because it's a prototype without noise filters or any other attempt to reduce motor noise. His point in turning off the motor was to show that there's little noise caused by the blades chopping through the air - which is where fan noise actually comes from.

<comment><USER17> You are probably right.

Still, why didn't they just attach a normal fan-motor and then compare that side-by-side to a standard-fan?

It always seems a little fishy when a marketing-video does anything but the obvious.

<comment><USER16> If I had to guess I'd say it's because the video is targeted at people for which this will be obvious. They aren't looking to sell this directly to consumers. They want to license the cooling technology. As far as they are concerned, the noise of the motor is probably as irrelevant as the bracket's color.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm not sure what problem this is trying to solve. I have a truly fanless heatsink [1] that is ducted to a 120mm case fan at 1000RPM, which is guaranteed to produce less noise than a 2000RPM rotating metal disaster. A plus is that there is no air gap necessitating such a high rotation speed.

[1] [http://www.thermalright.com/new_a_page/product_page/cpu/hr01...](http://www.thermalright.com/new_a_page/product_page/cpu/hr01plus/product_cpu_cooler_hr01plus.htm)

<comment><USER19> You won't be able to fit that fanless heatsink inside a laptop. It's just way too big.

<comment><USER20> The demo unit is presumably rated for about 150 watts. A unit rated for the ~40 watts that a laptop creates would be smaller and shorter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> _if every conventional heatsink in the US was replaced with a Sandia Cooler, the country would use 7% less electricity. For the most part, these savings would come from air conditioning and refrigeration systems_

How does that work? Is the same amount of heat not being expelled from the chip into the room? Does transferring the heat with a smaller fan somehow make it smaller heat?

<comment><USER22> Transferring heat with a smaller fan requires less power to run the fan. For a given amount of electricity, the Sandia Cooler can extract more heat from the processor, so it requires less electricity to keep the processor cool.

<comment><USER21> 7% of the electricity in a data center goes to spinning CPU fans? I do not believe that.

<comment><USER23> Not _just_ CPU fans. FTFA, and the latter part of which was included in the GP's quote:

 _"an ideal replacement for just about every fan-and-heatsink installation in the world... For the most part, these savings would come from air conditioning and refrigeration systems..."_

<comment><USER21> I know, I read that. The impression I got from the article was that these new heatsinks were going to be used on the CPUs and that somehow that would generate less heat. e.g, if Intel makes a lower power chip, a lot of savings will come from AC, even though Intel isn't making AC systems. It was not obvious to me (and I still have my doubts) that "every fan-and-heatsink" was referring to AC systems as well as CPU heatsinks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The fanless heatsink is a fan. Duh. YMMV but I'd not call it fanless.

<comment><USER25> "Fanless" might be a bit of a stretch, but it doesn't need _another_ fan.

<comment><USER24> A bit of a stretch, but I'd not call a car "engineless" just because it does not need _another_ engine ;-)

<comment><USER25> If every car before it needed both an engine and a car, and now there's a car that is its own engine, I would give them some leeway to call it an engineless car. The big draw here is that the heat sink is the same as the fan, instead of needing to buy both a heatsink _and_ a heatsink fan.

"Fanless" is still weird, I'd prefer to call it integrated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is a very interesting heatsink design. That said, having a finned heatsink spinning at 2000+ RPM seems potentially dangerous, especially if someone were to touch it with their bare fingers while it's operating.

<comment><USER27> Given that it sucks the air in through the central part, it must be spinning counter clockwise, with external fin ends pointing away from the direction of spinning. Not 100% safe, but not a finger chopper either.

<comment><USER28> It'd suck to have it grind against any cables.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Last time this was one hacker news someone suggested mounting the chip onto the heatsink and spin the whole thing, without any thermally conductive bearing. Still an awesome idea imo.

<comment><USER30> How do you connect the chip to the motherboard though?

<comment><USER31> The motherboard spins, too...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> That part looks really expensive to manufacture. It's machined. Can they make it out of molded plastic (like fans) or sheet metal (like CPU heatsinks)?

<comment><USER33> Most of the original (boxed) CPU fans are machined. The sheet metal fans are 3rd party and they need costly heatpipes to move the heat away from the (machined) CPU base. It will be costly because the machined metal fan will need great balance and a good polish to stay quietly floating above the base and not jump and rip through the computer's case.

You cannot use plastic as it has a lousy thermal conductivity. You cannot use copper because great thermal conductivity (2x better than Al) comes with greater weight (3 times the density of Al).

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> If this ever makes it to mass market, there will be some bloody knuckles on people who are trying to make small adjustments to the inside of their computer case while it is running. It's basically 100 butter knives spinning at 2000 rpm.

</comment><comment><USER35> I was hoping to see something like a peltier heat pump which has no mechanical parts.

<comment><USER33> A Peltier element only moves the heat from one side to the other. If you don't have some device to cool the hot side, the element will overheat and burn - <USER2> you still need a big heat exchanger to dissipate the heat into the air.

Also, Peltiers are not really energy efficient.

<comment><USER35> I said 'like' - I'm aware of the problems :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Previous thread: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2754725>

</comment><comment><USER37> This is a year old. Why did slashdot move here?

</comment><comment><USER38> Simple idea, seems obvious when you think about it. Glad this wasn't just a Peltier device

</comment><comment><USER39> I'm hoping Apple is waiting for this to be ready before they update the Mac Pro hardware.

<comment><USER40> unlikely. if you look inside a macpro, you'd see that they have 2 giant fans that cool the cpu & ram. They pipe the air so that it flows over the cpu heatsink & ram, but no other components. There's another fan for cooling the rest of the system. Apple would have to re-engineer the entire case if they wanted to use the impeller design.

</comment></comment><comment> excuse-me I wonder how cheap and reliable are the bearings needed to run a 2000rpm 'fan' 1/1000" above a heat pipe, while being vibrated by hard drives and PSU fans, shaken around in laptops.

Generally you can have bearings that are small/fast/precise or cheap - generally not all 4.

<comment><USER41> I was under the impression that this used a similar principle to the one that keeps hard drive heads in place. So some reasonable amount of vibration should not be an issue. On the other hand, assuming a reliability similiar to hard drives, failures will happen. and in worst case, will send a weighty heatsink spinning at 2krpm flying inside your computer case. Given how collision- unfriendly that baby looks, its not something i would want to happen inside my desktop box.

<comment> excuse-me Hard drive bearings are big and expensive!

But the heads are mostly kept above the surface by aerodynamic effects - effectively they are held in a thin air film which stops them touching the platter.

<comment><USER42> This new heat sink / fan is like the heads in the hard drive: it floats on a thin film of air. Consequently, it does not need any conventional bearings. The video describes it as "using an air bearing".

<comment> excuse-me It isn't an air-bearing by any normal use of the term.

It still needs a radial bearing to attach it to the motor - especially if you aren't mounting this perfectly flat and level. It can use an air cushion effect to reduce the planarity demands of the bearing to keep the heat transfer surfaces parallel - but this is very different to 'floating' a 10mg sprung drive head

<comment><USER43> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4157104></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Profit Hunt - Get inspired by profitable online projects - <AUTHOR> http://profithunt.co <comment><USER3> Or with more products and Stripe verified revenue:

[https://www.indiehackers.com/products?revenueVerification=st...](https://www.indiehackers.com/products?revenueVerification=stripe&sorting=highest- revenue)

<comment><USER4> I wish there was a way to connect both PayPal and Stripe revenue, as we make about half our revenue through each of these payments processors. I can imagine a lot of other companies are in similar situations.

<comment><USER5> Stripe bought IndieHackers so I don't think this feature is in the roadmap.

<comment><USER6> I'll probably add PayPal eventually. Just a matter of finding the time! There's nobody at Stripe telling me not to, nor did anyone at Stripe suggest I add Stripe-verified revenue in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm at a stage where I have a side project that works well for me. I'd like to open it up and allow other people to start using it, but I'm not really sure how to take it from fun project to side business. Do I need to hire a lawyer to draft a Privacy Policy and ToS? Do I need to incorporate an actual business in order to open an account with stripe to accept payments? Anyone have resources on the legal/operational part of this process?

<comment><USER8> Hiya, I've written some stuff about this. Hope it's helpful.

Don't Form a Company [https://blog.nugget.one/upstart/dont-form-a- company/](https://blog.nugget.one/upstart/dont-form-a-company/)

Debunking Some Conventional Startup Wisdom [https://blog.nugget.one/upstart/thanks-for-the-advice- grandp...](https://blog.nugget.one/upstart/thanks-for-the-advice-grandpa- debunking-conventional-startup-wisdom/)

<comment><USER9> "Don't form a company" means you are personally legally exposed. I'm not a lawyer, I may be wrong, but this seems risky.

<comment><USER10> I think it's more up to a person's accepted risk and the nature of their business concept. One thing mentioned in the linked article is the advice that you use an existing entity if you've previously formed one for consulting or some other business. I'm 100% in favor of that since the early stages of a startup are often full of non-starts.

<comment><USER9> Sure. I can agree with that part. One doesn't have to form corporations for each idea, but if you are taking payments and offering a service or product that may impact another person or business then being protected is important.

<comment><USER11> Agreed - the risk/reward seems off here. It will probably be fine, but you could potentially end up in legal hell and risk your family assets.

Why not a "parent" company you keep going indefinitely, spin off other entities as needed?

This all varies by jurisdiction of course, but last time I did something like this I filled out the paperwork myself and it cost a couple hundred only. Gets more complicated with more structure, etc. and any legal work you need - <USER2> you don't need to pay for that before it's justified.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Good god, is this real? [https://karmabot.chat/](https://karmabot.chat/)

Am I wearing enough pieces of flair?

<comment><USER13> So basically, companies are supposed to reward people for being gregarious/outgoing/funny/popular on Slack, rather than for getting their work done?

Some of the most valuable team members just quietly get things done, without making a song and dance about it and drawing everyone's attention. Sucks to be them, I guess.

<comment><USER14> My former employer did this until the most popular person and post was the one who complained about the lack of COLA raises after the CEO received a ten million dollar bonus. They tried hard to squash the whole discussion without being heavy handed but that failed miserably so they eventually told everyone to shut up and deleted the post. They've since changed the social media platform to something that allows them to approve all posts before they're seen by anyone else. I'm told now no one bothers to use it except HR and senior management for making announcement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The mobile UI is horrible. It's impossible to tell when one starts and another begins. You could solve this very easily by wrapping the list items in a card component and using different font weights and sizes for different pieces of information. Hint: business name should be the largest. Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Really appreciate the suggestions and pointers. Will improve the mobile layout within the next 2 days

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I love this. In literally less than five minutes it's already given me some really valuable insights and inspiration.

Feedback: make the table sortable and filterable, everyone's going to want to sort by revenue and people might want to filter by source.

</comment><comment><USER17> On mobile the list items are really hard to differentiate

</comment><comment><USER18> Favorited this post. Wow this was really eye-opening for me. I think this is proof I've been thinking about implementing ideas that are too complicated in the tech space. Thank you for posting.

</comment><comment><USER19> I guess this is the time for a friendly reminder to read your employment contracts and agreements carefully and exercise caution before launching an online side project business whilst being employed.

Failure to do can have serious consequences and the laws/enforceability vary greatly depending on your country of residence and the company.

That being said, great website OP!

<comment><USER20> > serious consequences

Any citations? If you're not launching a competitor, using your employers IP or doing some nefarious, why would they care?

How many employers would want some side project generating 20k/year, what would they do with it? Would they sue the employee? What for?

Genuine question.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> First row entry has the link to the second row entry.

</comment><comment><USER22> Do you have a threshold for how much a project should make each month?

My project has $30 in profit a month, but hey, that's more successful than most! (And more successful than any other project I've launched!)

</comment><comment><USER23> The Makerpad data is incorrect. The source: [https://www.makerpad.co/blog/building-without-code-and- reach...](https://www.makerpad.co/blog/building-without-code-and- reaching-55k-mo-in-revenue) is referring to a different company generating 55k/mo revenue, not Makerpad.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Corrected.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I just submitted mine -> [https://remoteleaf.com](https://remoteleaf.com)

<comment><USER25> Great UI / UX of getting visitors to pick & choose a paid plan right on the homepage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I m just in love with the simplicity of the website ! Good Job !

<comment><USER27> It's very difficult to read on mobile..

<comment><USER28> In Firefox / Chrome, tick "view desktop site" from three dot menu, and view in landscape mode.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Interesting...is this a Notion page?

</comment><comment><USER30> Link to Eastros is missing.

<comment><USER31> [http://c2x.eastros.com](http://c2x.eastros.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> awesome job, a real great resource for bootstrapped companies

</comment><comment><USER33> Nothing about capitalism is "inspiring". I'm inspired by projects that lift humanity, not ones that worship money.

<comment><USER23> What are some good examples of that?

<comment><USER34> I'm personally a fan of MusicBrainz (and related projects). It takes a lot of work to build a completely free and open database like that. I wish it could be expanded to other areas, but that would require more people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> this is cool

</comment><comment><USER36> Honestly I think the IndieHackers website looks nice. I need to get Webase [1] added to IndieHackers!

I get a strong "spartan" vibe from Profit Hunt ... or maybe just sparse! :-)

[1] [https://www.webase.com](https://www.webase.com)

<comment><USER37> It looks ok, but for me the loading times are awful, sometimes it takes 10s+ to load a page.

<comment><USER3> If you look at the network tab and the web sockets you know why. It's crazy what they are doing in the background to get this simple interface to load.

<comment><USER36> Maybe we need an indie hacker to help them understand caching over at IndieHackers. :-)

<comment><USER38> JS files served by IndieHackers do have caching headers. But there's _4MB_ of JS.

Compare to HN, a single 2KB script for submitting votes without page reload, and that's it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


DuckDB: SQLite for Analytics - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/cwida/duckdb <comment><USER2> When I was developing my pet project for Web analytics ([https://github.com/dustalov/ballcone](https://github.com/dustalov/ballcone)), I aimed at using an embedded columnar database for fast analytic queries with zero maintenance, so literally, I wanted 'OLAP SQLite'. There are essentially two options, DuckDB and MonetDBLite, developed by the same research group. I tried both of them.

DuckDB is a relatively new project and I generally enjoyed its design and code quality. However, I found that its current implementation of storage works better for dense data, which is not my case: [https://github.com/cwida/duckdb/issues/632](https://github.com/cwida/duckdb/issues/632). I think it would be pretty cool to have data compression and more careful NULL handling needed for storing HTTP access logs.

MonetDBLite seems to be more mature in terms of functionality, but it seems to be lagging significantly behind the non-embedded client-server version, MonetDB: [https://github.com/monetdb/monetdb](https://github.com/monetdb/monetdb). I experienced unexpected segfaults when using the DATE type on any platform and window functions on aarch64. Nevertheless, I am still using MonetDBLite primarily due to the more efficient disk usage. I will be happy to switch to a more lightweight and actively maintained solution.

<comment><USER3> Hannes and me developed both MonetDBLite and DuckDB, precisely for the need that you described :) We noticed that there was no easy RDBMS aimed at single- machine analytical workloads, whereas these kind of workloads are very common (e.g. R/Python data science workloads).

MonetDBLite was our initial approach, and is essentially an embedded version of MonetDB. We wrote a paper about it ([https://arxiv.org/pdf/1805.08520.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1805.08520.pdf)). While it works, the system was not built with embeddability in mind, and we had to rewrite a lot of code to get it to work. Because of that we ended up with a fork, as the rewrite was too big to be merged back upstream. This caused a lot of problems with the fork becoming outdated, and a lot of headaches with constantly merging changes.

MonetDBLite had a number of issues stemming from the fact that the original system was made as a stand-alone system. For example, the database system once started in-process could not be shut down, as the regular database system would rely on the process shutting down to clean up certain parts of the system.

In total, the features we wanted that would not be possible to implement in MonetDB without huge rewrites are as follows:

* Multiple active databases in the same process (reading different database files)

* Multiple processes reading the same database file

* In-database shutdown/restart

* Single-file database format

* Dependency free system

* Single compilation file (similar to the SQLite amalgamation [https://www.sqlite.org/amalgamation.html](https://www.sqlite.org/amalgamation.html))

* Control over resource/memory usage of the database system

* Vectorized execution engine

* Compressed storage and compressed execution

Because of that (and increasing frustration with constantly merging changes) we opted to develop a new system instead of sticking with MonetDB, as rewriting the entire system to get those features would likely be more work than just starting from scratch (and not politically feasible as well ;)).

The result of this is DuckDB. While it is still early in the process, it is relatively stable and we hope to ship a v1.0 sometime this year, along with an updated website :)

<comment><USER2> You are doing a fantastic job and I am wishing you the best of luck!

I used only Python API of both DBs and what confused me is the mandatory requirement of NumPy and Pandas. I think ndarray/DataFrame retrieval and conversion should surely be optional. Some applications do not require all these features and can go ahead with the built-in types (mine just uses _fetchall()_ ).

<comment><USER3> Good point, we will make it optional :) Thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As someone that uses SQLite a bit for analytics, I feel like the elevator pitch on the github and the website ( [https://www.duckdb.org/](https://www.duckdb.org/) ) is missing something.

I'm sure there's some great reason, but I don't see it: Why would I want to use this over SQLite? Is it considerably faster? Does it handle large scale better? I suppose I could try and throw it some use cases I could come up with, but I'd worry I'm missing the best use case for this tool.

<comment><USER5> Here's a YT video of one of the implementers giving a talk to CMU students about what DuckDB is, why they made it, and how it works: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFUZlNQIndo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFUZlNQIndo)

In a nutshell, it's a file-per-database embedded DB like SQLite, and it's installable as a Python or R package from PyPI or CRAN, but unlike SQLite, it's a column store with vectorized operations so it's more performant for analytical queries.

<comment><USER6> I usually just extend SQLite with virtual columns and try to do the filtering/aggregate before sending tuples to the engine. This does the trick most of the time and it's relatively straightforward to implement.

<comment><USER7> I'm need to move an excel sheet to something like SQLite, hadn't heard of virtual columns, fixes most of the issues I have, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> CMU database group videos recently had the duckdb lead on

[https://youtu.be/PFUZlNQIndo](https://youtu.be/PFUZlNQIndo)

<comment><USER9> Thanks! Loved the presentation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I was looking for this exact type of project to back some of my ML projects datasets. These datasets

\- Are less than 1 TB at maximum, and are typically less than 50GB

\- Written once and read many times

\- Require heavy and variable post-processing prior to training

\- Usually run on an ephemeral large instance which reads from s3, does it's thing, and then shuts down.

This last task is incredibly slow in python, and limited on a standard sqllite/postgres DB to a single thread. Having access to an embeddable columnar sql engine could greatly simplify and accelerate this final transformation stage before training.

<comment><USER11> Instead of using python for data transformation, just move over to data.table.

[https://h2oai.github.io/db-benchmark/](https://h2oai.github.io/db-benchmark/)

Cut your time AND your costs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've been using clickhouse with our 100gb click log data per day. It just works, before that we were using bigquery and bigquery was cheaper than our home brewed solution :(

So now we use two together, only recent data that's available for fast querying for user dashboard is served from clickhouse cluster.

And old data were customer is willing to be more tolerant to slow responses upto 2seconds is served by bigquery.

</comment><comment><USER13> I know this isn't a support forum but as someone who works analytics I tend to use the same SQL editor to connect to different databases. At the moment it is DBeaver[0]. Maybe I am missing it but I cannot see how to connect to DuckDB using a regular SQL editor.

[0][https://dbeaver.io](https://dbeaver.io)

<comment><USER14> Try connecting to it as if it's sqlite? Not sure if they match any existing wire protocol but that would be my guess if they do.

<comment><USER15> SQLite is an in-process database, so it doesn't really have a wire format.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Can this be made into a back end for sqlite?

edit example like this: [https://github.com/LMDB/sqlightning](https://github.com/LMDB/sqlightning)

<comment><USER17> SQLIte v4 supposed to be built on top of LMDB as I remember. For some reason the project was closed, they even have note about it on the official site somewhere.

<comment><USER18> SQLite v4 was supposed to have modular, pluggable backends, of which LMDB was only the first (of hopefully many). They were also working on their own from- scratch implementation of an LSM backend, which was also abandoned.

As I recall, they decided that the mmap-related performance tricks they learned from working with LMDB could just be plugged into their own SQLite v3 Btree engine. (Indeed, recent SQLitev3 is a bit faster than when the SQLitev4 project began. But still doesn't match LMDB.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I just installed this and looking at the dependencies it includes both numpy and pandas.

Could anyone advise how these relate to DuckDB? i.e. Is a DuckDB accessible as a Pandas dataframe?

<comment><USER20> Yes, the Python bindings include functions to deal with Pandas dataframes. Look at the examples: [https://github.com/cwida/duckdb/blob/master/examples/python/...](https://github.com/cwida/duckdb/blob/master/examples/python/duckdb- python.py)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> tried the online version [1] this simple request does not seem to work for me: SELECT * FROM lineitem where l_discount < 1

any reason why?

[1] [https://duckdbdemo.project.cwi.nl/select.html](https://duckdbdemo.project.cwi.nl/select.html)</comment>


Mining for Antibiotics, Right Under Our Noses - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/11/health/mining-for-antibiotics-right-under-our-noses.html

<comment><USER2> Everything that is old is new again. Natural product research was the big thing before the 1990s. It fell out of favor for other techniques (target design), but now it's coming back!

<comment><USER3> Machine learning will go a long way to improving it, I think.</comment></comment>


8chan Is Back from the Internet Grave – and It Has a New Name - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/j5yb44/8chan-is-back-from-the-internet-grave-and-it-has-a-new-name <comment><USER2> from the article:

"The new website is offline, but it has been registered with Tucows, the same company that banned 8chan in August. Tucows told VICE News that it was unaware of the situation and was looking into it."

</comment><comment><USER3> Pretty easy to get access to the 'secrets' this way.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> What can we do to stop this?

<comment><USER4> This article is so loaded with innuendo and written by someone who doesn't know much about the topic. The QAnon part is comically inaccurate. What you can do is more research if you really care.

Better yet, start with the reading the constitution and then progress to why free speech is so important. Because the alt-left is trying to kill the first amendment in the exact same way and for the exact same reason they're trying to kill the second amendment - to control people. That's far more dangerous than any silly image board as evidenced by all the wars and innocents killed for nothing by these people.

Words and weapons don't hurt or kill - it's the people who wield them. And the ones who try to restrict these inherent rights are the worst offenders.

<comment><USER5> > Because the alt-left

There is no such thing; it's a moniker created to distract from the alt-right, to which actions or ideas of unrelated segments of the left (or sometimes merely paranoid fantasies) are ascribed.</comment></comment></comment>


Dogs are sensitive to small variations of the Earth's magnetic field - <AUTHOR> http://www.frontiersinzoology.com/content/10/1/80/abstract <comment><USER2> On methods, quoting from the paper:

Alignment of the body (along the thoracic spine) in direction towards the head (heading) was measured in freely moving dogs (i.e., not on the leash) in "open field" (on meadows, fields, in the wood etc., i.e., unconstrained, and uninfluenced by linear structures, such as walls and fences) away from the road traffic, high voltage power lines, and conspicuous steel constructions during defecation and urination by a hand-held compass.

So it was not as simple as directional preference in sidewalks or roads.

<comment><USER3> have a dog and can say for sure that it is definitely nor random nor "simple preference" (and magnetic alignment falls under "simple" category)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The research seems credible, and they've convincingly excluded obvious things like that they're actually aligning with the sun.

The striking thing is that they only align N-S when the declination of the magnetic field is stable, but when the declination is changing they don't align. The differences in magnetic field direction is only a few degrees, so it's amazing that a dog whose head is flopping around can detect such small changes.

<comment><USER5> >they've convincingly excluded obvious things like that they're actually aligning with the sun.

I don't know - for my taste, to exclude alignment to the sun they would have had to keep the dogs in a closed environment with an artificial light source. After all, even with clouds present you know where the sun is (and you can still get sunburned etc.)

It also rings my "skeptical" alarm bells when they cite the "original" evidence that cattle aligns along the N-S axis, but they don't cite the paper that fails to replicate the "original" findings in cattle: [http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00359-011-0628-7](http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00359-011-0628-7)

<comment><USER6> They've excluded it by showing that dogs line up with local magnetic fields even when the sun is in various positions.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, but does the sun's position have any effect on the magnetic field?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Apparently Foxes are also sensitive to the magnetic field: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2SoGHFM18I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2SoGHFM18I)

<comment><USER9> Seems so awesome! Here's an article describing the research and proposed mechanism: [http://phys.org/news/2011-01-predation-foxes-aided-earth- mag...](http://phys.org/news/2011-01-predation-foxes-aided-earth- magnetic.html)

<comment><USER8> Thanks for that! The last paragraph makes it seem like every animal except humans can sense the magnetic field. I'm slightly jealous.

<comment><USER10> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetoception#In_humans](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetoception#In_humans)

It also is unlikely that humans would be an exception here. However, my money still is on "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". Animals may be capable of magnetoception, but I don't think that has been proven yet.

For example, those foxes could try and minimize their shadows or changes in their shadows. They might do that using an internal clock. Alternatively, they might be able to perceive the polarization of the sky, and use that to guess where the sun is (note the high variation in successful angles)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I remember seeing a show remarking on similar sensitivity being observed in foxes when hunting mice in the snow. Apparently, the fox is much more accurate when diving when facing north.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2SoGHFM18I&feature=youtu.be&...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2SoGHFM18I&feature=youtu.be&t=1m35s)

</comment><comment><USER12> They don't want the sun in their eyes?

<comment><USER13> This, is the right question.

<comment><USER14> Could be substantiated if dogs in the southern hemisphere preferred to face south.

<comment><USER15> Well, I'm in that hemisphere. My dog prefers to do it facing away from owner if no reference points, otherwise always likes to go parallell to the nearest path/ building/ fence. I would say virtually never randomly chooses south.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I was just about to buy a hall effect sensor, but now I just need a dog! That's for saving me $20 OP.

<comment><USER17> Unless you already have a dog, I don't think that will be a net cost savings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Something similar happens with cows and deer as well: [http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/08/google-earth- re/](http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/08/google-earth-re/)

</comment><comment><USER19> Someone is trying to win the Ig Nobel prize.

</comment><comment><USER20> Should be easy enough to falsify. Overpower the Earth's field with magnets and change the N-S orientation. See if they still shit along the new axis.

</comment><comment><USER21> This might explain why the Australian Aboriginals didn't use left/right for directions[0], but instead used cardinal directions.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_direction#Cultures_no...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_direction#Cultures_not_using_relative_directions)

</comment><comment><USER22> It explains those stories that make the news now and again of dogs traveling thousands of miles home.

</comment><comment><USER23> "Frontiers in Scatology"?

</comment><comment><USER24> no shit?

<comment><USER25> Nope. Dogs definitely get their shit straight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> My bullshit detector is off the charts.

<comment><USER27> Why?

<comment><USER26> Why is this phenomenon limited to dogs?

Why has this never been noticed previously?

Also, why have I never observed this behavior with my dogs?

And to the comedian who replied as well: dogshit and bullshit are not the same thing.

<comment><USER28> I don't think they're saying it is limited to dogs. It's just proven in dogs. Dogs behave really oddly when a natural disaster is about to occur, would it be that surprising that they had an unique sense that us humans don't have such as what this study is suggesting?

<comment><USER29> Maybe I can hire an augur to read my dogs poops then play the stock market with the findings?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: CraigTrend - graph job data over the last year - <AUTHOR>

http://www.craigtrend.com/
I've been accumulating Craigslist data for the last ~1.3 years and decided to do something with it. What you see is two days of work over Thanksgiving.
Note: I'm using JQuery's $.each() for regex matching the words on the page -- which is expensive and seems to crash chrome+safari (firefox works just fine). If anyone has any insight, or can suggest something quicker let me know. <comment><USER2> I like underscore.js although I'm not sure if _.each will be faster than jquery or not. <http://documentcloud.github.com/underscore/#each>

I've also heard that the coffeescript implementation of forEach is pretty fast since it uses the old c-style for-loop under the hood.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome! Thanks. I'll check these out tonight. It might be quicker to have mysql just return matching search results, but I wouldn't want to use LIKE on 1.6M text phrases, so I was hoping to just parse them in the browser, but anything over ~2k entries for regex seems to choke chrome and safari.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Ok. It now works in chrome+safari. I stripped out the client-side processing and now keyword filtering is handled via the back-end. I didn't realize that webkit would choke on what I had intended. Live. Learn.

</comment><comment><USER3> For some reason searching keeps on freezing on Chrome 15.0.874.121

<comment><USER3> Works great in Firefox

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I don't understand why firefox handles $.each() + regex and chrome+safari choke so badly. The same command in ff takes under a second, meanwhile in chrome+safari it grinds to a halt. I'm puzzled because I thought chrome would be the fastest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What's the most interesting thing you've found with this data?

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely the graph of "php" "python", it seems python is gaining in popularity. Also the graph of "php" "ruby" -- there are a TON more php jobs than ruby jobs at the moment. "android" "ios" is cool, it seems android is losing market interest, while ios demand is climbing -- although there are more android related jobs at the moment.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable: <http://craigtrend.com/> Also, please let me know if you run across any bugs. Thanks. :)</comment>


Write If You Want Work - <AUTHOR> http://www.infomarketingblog.com/write/

<comment><AUTHOR> Incidentally, the company I work for is hiring, and if someone wants to tackle the JWT challenge, I'd be really happy to see a resume, too. Email address is in the profile.</comment>


Scientists find six additional radio bursts in space - <AUTHOR> http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/833/2/177/meta <comment><USER2> Now if they can just pull out the SSID from the 2Ghz ones perhaps they can try '12345' as the password for the network :-)

More seriously, one of the things I'm grateful for is that it has become so much more economical to monitor both near space and deep space that we can actually get information like this.</comment>


Stuck in negotiations? Try Hootsuite's steak dinner clause - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@invoker/how-to-use-the-steak-clause-to-win-your-next-negotiation-55b4dafbea94#.209lnhyg8 <comment><USER3> I highly recommend _against_ doing this if you work at any sort of real company. Negotiating trips/dinners/tickets in a contract means there was extra wiggle room and you chose free stuff over getting the best deal for the company. There's a fine line between a business courtesy and a kickback, and you don't want to end up in a situation where someone is questioning if you crossed that line.

The benefit they listed - building the relationship with the vendor - can be valid, but should/could exist as a regularly scheduled dinner that is expensed through normal policies.

<comment><USER4> Neither side was willing to shoulder the fees. Eventually one side did, but threw this in to mitigate any ill feelings as a result of the negotiation and contract terms. This isn't instead of a fee split, this is Hootsuite blinking first but throwing in an additional term meant to be fun and healthy to the relationship. A $450 dinner every $100k in revenue is de minimis (or whatever is below that, I slept through law school latin) and to me was a great solution to the relationship aspect.

This is neither a business courtesy nor a kickback. It's a negotiated term in the contract.

<comment><USER3> Hootsuite could have used taking on the CC fees as leverage for obtaining a concession on a different point. Instead they negotiated a clause that benefits individuals, and not the company.

If I were an investor in a company and they accepted suboptimal contract terms because of terms that benefited individuals and not the company, I'd be unhappy. If they promoted it as a best practice, I'd be livid.

<comment><USER4> We can only go by what's written in the article, but it sounds like the CC fee was the only item at issue. Hootsuite was willing to budge on it and essentially had the vendor put business development activities into the contract. I agree that it does start to look like personal services, and I'd not be happy about it if it were something larger. But the vendor was buying dinner every once in a while anyway - why do you think they agreed to it? And while Hootsuite maybe could have leveraged that term for something else in the contract, it sounds like they're very happy with their end of this. It'd be one thing if the Vendor was promoting this, but it's the party that conceded the larger term thinking it beneficial. It's certainly a YMMV situation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The thing that unstuck the negotiation was _conceding_ to the disputed term (agreeing to pay the credit card fees). The "steak dinner" trick seems to have little to do with it.

Basically this boils down to "if you're stuck in negotiations but really want to wrap up the deal, consider just conceding on the final, minor points in contention. Maybe try to get something small in exchange for your larger concession(s)."

Not exactly earth-shattering and the hubris in even glancingly comparing this to the brilliance of Nash's work is astounding.

On top of that, this counter-concession doesn't even scale up with increasing revenue. But Hootsuite's fees do increase as revenue increases.

I think it'd be more interesting to read a negotiation tip from the vendor in this situation. Something like "if you've already worked out the major terms in a deal and you are fairly confident the counterparty wants the deal done, but you are stuck on a final point that affects you more than them... consider standing firm, even to the point of obstinance. Test the limits and see if you can get them to concede. If they're holding out, see if you can offer something trivial in exchange for their concession or if you can get them to make an offer to concede in exchange for some trivial ancillary benefit. Sometimes this works as people are irrational and just want to feel they 'gotcha', even if what they're conceding is of greater value -- and has the potential to be of _far_ greater value-- than the exchange. All the better if you can make them feel like they're oh-so-clever in the proposal. We once had a partner we were negotiating with agree to cover credit card fees which would've hurt our net revenue share substantially, simply in exchange for agreeing to buy them a steak dinner once a quarter, which we likely would've done anyway to keep this important partner relationship moving forward and growing over time. Ha! We made sure to cap the price of the steak dinner and merrily signed, having won the business concession we needed."

Besides not even being a great or meaningful technique in practice and certainly not defining any new theoretical work of import (unlike Nash), this is also mildly unethical and would reflect poorly and/or get the practitioner in trouble in many, if not most, situations.

It is sad to see the comments on Medium cheering "brilliant, man!" and "love this."

<comment><USER6> > The thing that unstuck the negotiation was conceding to the disputed term > (agreeing to pay the credit card fees). The "steak dinner" trick seems to > have little to do with it.

No, a concession would be if they just ate the credit card fees. The "steak dinner" was the fair value trade for the credit card fees.

<comment><USER5> It is enjoyable to negotiate with people who view "concession" in this sense. You can get them to agree to terms of greater business value in exchange for terms of smaller business value, and they don't even think they "conceded" a thing!

It's a concession. Hootsuite didn't want to cover the credit card fees. But they ended up doing so. There wasn't even a proportional split (eg "let's each cover our portion of the credit card fees, according to our revenue share split") or a split of any kind. There was a separate concession by the vendor to cover steak dinners (of lesser value, and only a _fixed_ cost) in exchange for Hootsuite's credit card fee concession... but that does not somehow make Hootsuite's concession a non-concession.

In any case, no point in debating terminology. Hootsuite gave up more value than they gained, but both parties got the deal done and are happy with it, so they made the right call in the end (conceding vs blowing the deal up). It's just not an amazing or widely applicable negotiation technique and, if anything, the vendor likely employed the better technique here.

<comment><USER7> Maybe in a couple months we'll see the reciprocal article: "How we saved thousands of dollars of credit card fees by paying for a couple steaks"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is not an acceptable practice and it's surprising a deal desk or CFO would sign off on this.

Credit Card fee negotiation results in a benefit or cost to a company. Steak dinner is a benefit to an individual. "Relationship building" activities are important, but should be treated separately and unrelated to contract negotiations and deal terms.

<comment><USER9> _Credit Card fee negotiation results in a benefit or cost to a company. Steak dinner is a benefit to an individual._

But it wasn't a specific named individual in the contract... it was "Two Hootsuite representatives" (presumably to be chosen by someone with decision making authority at Hootsuite). I would say that changes the dynamic, as it's not like the person negotiating the contract negotiated a steak dinner for _themselves_.

<comment><USER8> It doesn't matter meaningfully. While you're right that it changes the dynamic in the consecration of the terms, it doesn't change the deal drivers and the benefit shift in the execution of the contract.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The comments here demonstrate one way in which larger companies are not as nimble as smaller companies. I feel like no one read the part where Hootsuite got a substantial amount of additional business from the client as a result of regularly scheduled meetings in a semi-informal context.

The gamble here is exactly what seems to be getting missed -- paying the opportunity cost of additional gains during negotiation, and in return receiving more face time with a current client, who might offer additional partnership chances later.

This isn't suggesting you trade your services for dinners, it's suggesting you gamble on yourself by embedding semi-informal regular meetings with your clients into your contracts. It doesn't have to be a steak dinner, your client doesn't have to be the one paying, what matters is the social bonding with current clients to expand your relationship with them.

<comment><USER11> I think some readers might have been confused by the fact that TFA called the other party a "vendor", when they might be more properly called a sales channel. HS is like a tiny little Chinese manufacturer that has somehow gotten Wal-Mart to pay for a regular steak dinner, at which the diners discuss how the manufacturer might get more stuff on Wal-Mart's shelves. So this clause is definitely a win for HS.

<comment><USER10> I like to imagine Hootsuite's contracts are comprised entirely of what they'd buy with their money, rather than for the money itself.

"And on the 4th day of each month, you agree to send us six rolls of toilet paper, double ply. In addition, you will send six boxes of napkins, as well as four boxes of tissues."

It... kind of cuts out the middleman, right? I guess?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As a tech guy turned lawyer turned tech guy, I loved this. It's a really creative solution to mitigate hurt feelings over contract terms.

Yeah it's a small term when conceding a big one, but it goes beyond dollars to something that's really important to smaller companies building relationships. I wouldn't expect to see it at a Fortune 500, but I don't have a problem with it at a smaller company.

* Disclaimer: I'm not your lawyer, this is not legal advice, I reserve the right to be a dog masquerading as a lawyer online.

EDIT: I've read some of the other comments and I don't think I love it - <USER2> still like it though. I'm just not in love with it :)

</comment><comment><USER12> Every year at my company we are required to take a business conduct standards course that says, in no uncertain terms, that you will be fired if you do this.

<comment><USER13> It's interesting how these well intentioned ethics regulations can impede relationship building. Because you can't do this you don't get the regular updates with the client and potentially more business.

<comment><USER5> I doubt the business policy is that you can't take partners out for meals and/or invest in relationship building via meals and entertainment expenditures. Nor is the policy likely that you cannot participate in such activities when offered by the partner.

The key is that you should not _exchange company resources_ for what may be _perceived as or actually be personal benefit_. Outside a contractual term, set up a quarterly dinner to strategize, synchronize, assess, etc where the vendor pays? Sure! But, explicitly concede a material business term in a contract in direct exchange for a term that personally enriches you? No!

<comment><USER14> There is something to be said about this dinner being a part of the contract which makes it impossible for the vendor to weasel out of it. Not sure what's so special about this particular vendor, but a guaranteed recurring facetime with an important partner seems worth a few thousand bucks paid in fees.

<comment><USER15> I think it accomplishes a few things: recurring facetime, but also physical awareness of the magnitude of the point. If the vendor suddenly starts doing $500,000/month, both parties notice "Gee, we're going out to dinner a lot more than we used to." That seems an important fact to highlight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I expected this to be a way to end constant changing of the contract: the last party to modify a contract treats the other party to a steak dinner immediately after closing.

<comment><USER17> That would actually be relevant to the game theory stuff that got referred to at the start of the article, too. It changes what the alternative to the status quo is, which will materially affect negotiations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Wow, it seems nobody from the comments actually got what this is about. It is about thinking outside the box to finding something else. This is a very reasonable and common bargaining tactic. Yes there are situations where this doesn't apply, like when you make a deal about card fees as representative of a company you don't own. But this can be applied in so many other situations. E.g. you or a colleague discuss who should debug that one ugly thing you both didn't want to touch. And in exchange for submitting to the bad task you ask your colleague to not go to the sports bar on saturday but to the cinema.

TL;DR it's valid practice. Please read the article again if you don't think so. (not the author)

</comment><comment><USER19> I can think of few things more unbearable than dinner with a vendor.

But the real question is, who is so bad at negotiation that the two sides dig in on a silly issue like this? If anything, this is a sign the deal should be dropped.

> For some reason, neither side was willing to budge on this small detail. We > wouldn't pay; they wouldn't pay; and no one was willing to split the > difference

</comment><comment><USER20> Wow, every single comment here misses the fact this advice is coming from the CEO and founder and is for other CEO/founders. I don't think he is telling some Jr. Marketing Associate to do this, but rather as a founder you have to think outside of the box sometimes and giving up money for a stronger long- term partnership is one of doing that.

</comment><comment><USER21> Don't try this with a government contract.

<comment><USER22> Many government arrangements that work exactly like this.

<comment><USER23> Yes, mainly in countries with massive corruption or in general, illegally.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Working for some large corporations, my guess is some compliance officers would not like this.

<comment><USER25> I suppose this is one of the advantages of running your own non-large corporation: you can do pretty much what you like.

<comment><USER26> It's an advantage only as long as you solely want to make business with other small businesses.

All large corporations I ever dealt with pass down their full suit of compliance regulations down to the last company in the chain - regardless if it's small shops or even single person shops.

Besides the business conduct and compliance papers (no bribery like steak dinners) you quickly end up needing a code of conduct, an environmental policy and a social sustainability policy. You will need a policy that you respect human rights, a policy against forced or compulsory labour, a policy against child labour, etc. And you'll need to designate an officer for every topic, and you'll need to prove that you train your employees in every topic.

<comment><USER27> The fact that some of those things are needed is insane to me but you are correct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is somewhat risky as it can look like a form of bribery. I'm wondering why they were making large purchases with a credit card in the first place?

<comment><USER28> I don't think this constitutes bribery. The credit card fees would have to be paid by either the author's company or the vendor. They reached a deal where the vendor would "refund" a portion of the credit card fees based on revenue milestones in the form of dinner.

The author's company's product is social media education. To get their product out, the author's company used vendors to sell the product. The credit card purchase would come from the customer as a transaction to the vendor. Since the vendor was the seller, they would normally be responsible for the credit card fees.

The vendor didn't want to pay the credit card fees, but the author's company didn't either. That's where the impasse came in.

<comment><USER23> Gotcha. The credit card fees are related to the customer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This shows the problems that can be caused when an overlooked issue is dropped into a negotiation late in the day. Both parties may have invested emotionally into the negotiation and consider they have conceded on a range of issues already and so are extremely hesitant to concede again.

As mentioned, the rational way to approach would be to assess the potential profitability of the deal from both sides, and come to an agreement on that basis.

Of course, negotiations do not take place in a vacuum and rational solutions to an impasse are not always taken up (partly because of the above emotional investment and the fact that you are negotiating with humans, not robots).

It's not as simple as saying this constituted a failure to act in the best interests of the company. Negotiation shouldn't solely involve a cold, hard calculation of the costs and revenue that may stem from a specific deal because there are other factors to take into account: goodwill, chance of repeat business, the general relationship with the other party.

Certainly I've felt that negotiators on the other side from me have deliberately looked to dig in their heels because they know that one result could be that the other side will simply concede out of frustration and a desire just to get the damn contract signed. The downside to that approach is that leaving one side frustrated at the outset of an agreement is not always a good recipe for a solid working relationship!

In HootSuite's case, conceding is sometimes a necessary evil to get the deal done. In my shoes, I would say getting the other side to agree to a steak dinner is a nice way to deflate any perceived frustration. Expenses are frequently covered off in agreements and this would be absolutely fine under UK bribery laws at least.

<comment><USER30> Most humans aren't rational though. Even those of us that try to be more often can still be sabotaged by our emotions working against us, instead of for us. I suspect 'gut' emotional feelings are an good side channel for reaching desirable outcomes usually more quickly or in more cases than logic; which would explain why we evolved to have them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Not that unusual. It's extremely common for vendors to wine and dine clients/prospectives. And even in contracts you often have quarterly reviews, etc which are at least half as much about getting together for dinner/entertainment as they are about the actual review. It's basic relationship building stuff

</comment><comment><USER32> The most hilarious thing about hootsuite is that it is sometimes touted by technology press as the biggest/best/most prominent technology firm in Vancouver. Compared to the companies in Seattle or SF it is a joke. And so is the Vancouver job market.

</comment><comment><USER33> I hoped this was going to be about internal projects. A few times the proponent of a change at PD has bet that the metrics would prove them right -- if not, they'd buy the other side of the impasse dinner.

</comment><comment><USER34> If you're frequently stuck in negotiations, I would also recommend reading "The Art of the Deal" by Donald Trump.

</comment><comment><USER35> I forget the source, but I read an article I liked once-upon-a-time about how startups should focus their innovations on their core products, not trying to revolutionize every business practice they come across.

Maybe more time spent innovating on software, less time on contracts.

p.s. HootSuite is no CoSchedule. We tried both and wow is CoSchedule better at all the things.</comment>


One Million Dollars in Huawei Mobile Services App Innovation Contest - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/08/26/huawei-pledges-one-million-dollars-in-huawei-mobile-services-app-innovation-contest/ <comment><USER3> It's interesting that even the Chinese contest region has prizes denominated in US dollars: [https://developer.huawei.com/consumer/cn/activity/detail/007...](https://developer.huawei.com/consumer/cn/activity/detail/007?previewUrl=digixhmsChina)

</comment><comment><USER4> The T&C's are interesting [i]. I wonder why Canada and USA are even listed under "Governing Law and Jurisdiction" since they're not invited to the party?

Finally, I find it quite ironic that Huawei - who stole a great deal of tech from Canada's Nortel [ii] - will disqualify entrants if: _You plagiarize the work of others._

[i] [https://developer.huawei.com/consumer/en/devservice/hmsterm](https://developer.huawei.com/consumer/en/devservice/hmsterm)

[ii] [https://nationalpost.com/news/exclusive-did-huawei-bring- dow...](https://nationalpost.com/news/exclusive-did-huawei-bring-down-nortel- corporate-espionage-theft-and-the-parallel-rise-and-fall-of-two-telecom- giants)

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm a little surprised they're excluding all developers from the US/Canada - <USER2> would have figured they'd still try to build up alternative economic connections in those places so they have more firepower/support from the local business communities to fight against future bans and actions from the US and Canadian governments.

<comment><USER3> How would they legally pay out the prize money in countries where Huawei is sanctioned?

<comment><USER6> Canada has not officially banned or sanctioned Huawei.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think this is a solid way to incentivize people to develop for a new platform (it's an app store as far as I can understand?) A $5k cash award for most popular app seems token when the most popular apps on competing platforms make literally billions of dollars, though.

</comment><comment><USER8> _" Developers who register for the contest will get a $200 voucher for Huawei Cloud, and a $4,000 voucher after app submissions."_

That's pretty impressive.</comment>