Ask HN: First time investor - How do I not get screwed? - <AUTHOR>

Hi,  I'm looking to invest $50k in a new startup at a 20% share.  I have no experience in investing previously.  It's a hands-off investment, and I'd like to avoid getting screwed on the deal when it comes time to exit/bring in new investment.<p>Any advice?  What to look for in the deal? What to avoid? How to not get screwed out? <comment><USER2> The biggest piece of advice I have is to not invest any money in a startup if 100% loss of capital would meaningfully affect your life. (n.b. This is the same advice I would give would-be founders and early employees. If your kids can't afford juice boxes unless the startup succeeds, take the offer from AmaGooBook instead.)

Otherwise, pg has an article which better articulates pieces of advice I wanted to give like "start being a source of dumb money attached to someone you trust who did this before." See here: <http://www.paulgraham.com/angelinvesting.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not money I need to eat, so not to worry there, but good catch.

Do you know if it's possible to have a clause that says something along the lines of "If you guys decide to up and quit I get your site and tech?"

<comment><USER2> Yes, but I wouldn't really spend my time optimizing for the case where I end up with 100% of nothing if I were you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Early stage startups are typically built to fail and although $50k isn't a lot in the modern sense of the word, you should really be careful in this situation.

You seem to be providing a small seed round so if they are successful, prepare to be diluted significantly (or forced to pay more to maintain equity portion). There are many rounds to come (Best case scenario).

The worst case scenario is that the money evaporates along with the startup. 20% of nothing is still nothing, unfortunately.

With regard to your acquisition of the site and technology - consult a lawyer. If the startup is incorporated already, then you will have to do some paperwork and you can ask for clauses that grant you I.P. rights if the company goes under.

A hands off approach would be nice, but you have to be careful. On the one hand meddling too much will interfere, but on the other hand doing nothing is typically a fast way to lose your money.

Best of luck if you decide to invest. If you have any other questions shoot me an email (in my profile)

</comment><comment><USER4> > hands-off investment

> I'd like to avoid getting screwed

Those are two mutually-exclusive desires. If someone else is running the show and you aren't in the loop, then they will almost certainly be able to screw you if they choose to. At the very least, to avoid being screwed you'll need to be able to make a credible threat of suing them if they choose to screw you. The more hands-off you are the less credible that threat will be.

Investing is like any other job. There's no free lunch, no easy way out, and the more work you do the more likely you and the company are to succeed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wouldn't a contract solve this? In terms of being able and willing to sue if they start taking liberties, I'm more than willing to do this, although knowing the two founder personalities I don't see this being that big an issue.

I note your point about being hand-off. It's something I didn't consider earlier. The question of "what if they decide to quit/change direction to one that sucks?" is something I missed and will consdier further.

The main issue I have is with me taking 20% of the current company, what are the methods I need to look out for that future investors can screw me down to 0% equity?

<comment><USER5> Shares generally don't vaporize once issued, although you'll certainly experience dilution as new shares are issued unless you keep putting money in to preserve your stake. You'll also always be behind the new money in the preferences stack - newer investors get paid back first.

You shouldn't be angel investing, though - not if you'd actually consider suing founders because they might change the direction of their company to one you disagree with, or because they might decide to wind down the company should they fail and be unable to raise more capital. Both of those things are pretty normal, and the way angel investors deal with them isn't to come up with non-standard contractual terms, it's to have a portfolio of many angel investments, so their risk is distributed. If you're only going to be investing in one, you've just got to accept that you've got a very high chance of losing 100% of your investment. Founder malfeasance is the least of your worries - you'll lose it because most companies fail despite their founders' best efforts.

All you're going to do here is end up introducing non-standard terms into your investment paperwork which are going to scare away future investors and make the company you're investing in less likely to succeed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Apologies for the misunderstanding, I meant I would not hesitate to sue if an appropriate situation arised. Suing because of a pivot is not something I would consider.

That last sentence is an eye opener and I will now avoid non-standard terms. Is there a list/source of some expected standard terms for startup investment?

Lastly, do you know of any good sources (other than the PG article mentioned by Patio1 above) on the subject of angel investing? Any good books/sites?

<comment><USER5> Hmmm. I'd just go through all the links here, since Gabe did a great job curating the best stuff online:

[http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/06/how-to-learn- abo...](http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/06/how-to-learn-about- angelvc-term-sheets.html)

I should probably step back from what I said earlier and stress that there's not one canonical set of 'standard terms' - there's just terms that are typical and terms that are rarely or never seen. Unless there's a compelling reason, I'd keep things typical.

I'd also Google and read up on convertible debt, which might be a good option. There are pros and cons to convertible debt, but the associated legal costs of doing convertible debt are generally lower, so a big chunk of the money you're investing won't immediately get eaten up by lawyers. You can't avoid legal bills - whatever route you take, the company will need a lawyer with relevant experience. But you can minimize the cost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm not an angel investor but got a couple of questions:

What stops founders from theoretically taking the money and run (shut down company, keep the money left)?

<comment><USER7> Of course if you're talking 50K and a hands off investor, nothing.

But most larger investors might insist on baord appointments and a reputable CFO, and that's without the legal stuff.</comment></comment>


The Case for Eliminating Fines on Overdue Library Books - <AUTHOR> https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/10/public-library-late-fees-chicago-san-francisco-equity-access/599194/ <comment><USER3> It seems to me like the _symbolic_ value of children's book late fees vastly outweighs any actual monetary incentives or benefits to the library. They're a lesson to kids that, yes, it's bad to break rules, but you don't have to feel anxious and guilty about it forever--if you make up for what you did by paying the fine, you're forgiven.

For this to work, though, the library has to walk a very thin line. The fines have to be large enough to feel significant to a child (setting them at $.01 would send the wrong message for sure), but also small enough that they'd never actually cause problems for a family trying to pay them. I don't know if it's possible to achieve this, especially in places with high income inequality.

<comment><USER4> They can do this by adding a cap. Say max $0.50 fine per book, and max $10 per account.

Then you are motivated to return the book, but if you mess up the fine is not so high as to be ruinous.

<comment><USER5> How does this work for a 7 year old, with no income of their own and no means of transportation?

Also, some folks are poor and simply could not afford the $10 without taking away from vital things, like food and electricity.

<comment><USER6> Yes, but with no means of transportation, how does the seven-year-old get the library book in the first place?

Not that I think we should impose punitive fines on those who would have to scrimp to pay them.

<comment><USER5> I was able to walk to the library as a child, actually - plus some places have Bookmobiles. There were also libraries at schools.

A kid's experience might vary with all of these, though: I also lived a 5-minute drive from a place with no free public libraries with the exception of a school.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sometimes I put off reading a book I've checked out—but also don't want to return it until I _have_ read it—and so I am _quite likely_ to end up accruing a late fee on any books I check out.

Given this, _and_ given that I also know the price of just buying the book to begin with, I usually feel a "prediction of regret" that I'll wish I'd have just bought the book, instead of spending so much on just "renting" a used copy. This stops me from using the library, most of the time.

That's probably for the best, I guess?

There's probably some optimum stopping-point where a book that I've taken out from the library should be returned (although I'm not "done" with it yet—sometimes that's even true!), and replaced with a purchased copy, to sit there in my reading queue in the borrowed copy's stead.

Maybe you could make a service out of recognizing that optimum stopping-point. Rent-to-own books, where you hold onto the old one for three weeks and then, if you liked it, you can pay the difference to trade it in for a fresh new copy to keep?

<comment><USER8> Many libraries will let you renew checked out books online, without cost, as long as nobody has placed a hold on it in the meantime. For me, that would work ok --- if I had put off reading it, but someone else wanted to, I'd get it back right away; but if I could renew it, then I'd be ok putting it off a little more.

<comment><USER4> Even those that don't will usually allow you to return it at the desk, and check it right back out, to reset the renewal cap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I like schemes where positive behaviour is directly linked to counter negative behaviour.

Let's first introduce a soft cap and hard cap. If you have fines accrued it doesn't prevent you from borrowing books but the fines are still kept in record, and you owe to the library. You can pay the fines, or keep them on the record but if the total fines reach, say $10, then also borrowing will eventually be denied. Maybe the number of books you could borrow would be limited earlier: if you have unpaid fines pending, you can only have one or two books out for loan at any given time.

Now, here's the idea: what if upon returning a book a small amount would be subtracted from the accrued fine?

If you racked up a few dollars of fines for a good reason or a bad reason, you could pay those off merely by using the library properly, i.e. borrowing books and returning them. Kids could easily afford this sort of "payment".

There could be a limit that by returning books you can only subtract a certain amount off the fine during one week or one month, but basically the scheme would be designed so that anyone who kept using the library regularly would be bound to clear out their fines in some definite time. It's like club card discounts but only applied to late return fines.

What if someone just borrows a lot of books and returns them only to erase their fines? If that's what gets these people to come back to a library repeatedly, if for nothing else than to return books they've borrowed to get their fines erased then that's not a bad outcome either.

</comment><comment><USER10> The problem with charging a fine is that by providing a mechanism for penance it reduces the pressure for those people who are prepared to pay fines to actually return the books on time.

The more affluent therefore work under different rules than the less well off, and can be "justified" in keeping books longer than they otherwise should. This probably explains why in the article they found a reduction in late returns when they abolished the fines.

<comment><USER11> It sure seems to me that wealthy people would be smart enough with their money to never pay a fine for a late library book. Unless they really are the type of wealthy people that always pay more for convenience, but then, why would those types be slumming around the library? They'd surely just buy books on Amazon.

<comment><USER12> Libraries can sometimes be much better for book discovery than the web.

You can pick up books and skim through as much as you want on the spot. You can go to a shelf and see many of an author's books next to each-other, or see many books about the same topic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> But how do you keep people from abusing the service? When there are no consequences people tend to abuse it.

I used to buy books with the idea that eventually I would read them. I have a bookcase of books that I've yet to read but every time I borrow a book from the library I read it within the allotted time. To me fines and deadlines are a nice nudge to read the book.

<comment><USER14> The article says there can be consequences.

> Under Chicago Public Library's new policy, a checked out item will > automatically be renewed 15 times as long as there are no holds on it. > Afterwards, the item will be marked lost, and the library will charge the > borrower its market value, though charges will be cleared as long as the > borrower returns it.

<comment><USER15> This is all well and good if nobody else wants the book.

But if I check out a book, and you place a hold on it, and I fail to return it, that's not OK.

Now you don't know whether to wait for the book to be returned, or to just go buy it because I can't get around to returning it.

<comment><USER16> I'm guessing once it is marked as lost the library may re-buy it.

<comment><USER17> A lot of books in libraries can't be repurchased easily. Personally, I've had two books I've placed on hold turn up lost recently and they're both out of print. Considering both books are over $300 on used book sites, I rather doubt that they were lost.

<comment><USER14> I used ILL to read a copy of Neal Stephenson's "The Big U" before it was reprinted, when used copies were going for $100s on eBay.

Bear in mind though that most library books _can_ be repurchased easily, and sales like this are independent of late fines, so doesn't affect the issue at hand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I was pleasantly surprised when the Dallas public library didn't have late fees I was used to as a kid.

They allow 99 auto-renewals which seems absurd. Unfortunately you don't get an alert when a hold is in place you get an alert letting you know the book is due.

We did lose a book. And there is a restocking fee UNLESS you provide a new mint condition book, ANY book, to replace it.

The librarian was thoroughly confused when I insisted on paying the fee so I could check out.

Only "con" is I no longer have a real excuse for my kids to return their books so I instead just have to be honest that I don't want to read the same Curious George story for the 100th time.

</comment><comment><USER19> One thing i was very surprised coming from Korea is that you had to pay fines if your book is overdue. I've never experienced or heard of such things in Korea. What we do instead is not allowing you to borrow books for the amount of days it has been overdue.

</comment><comment><USER20> Our library system doesn't have fines for any children's materials. As far as I know there haven't been any issues with this policy.

</comment><comment><USER21> Libraries in Ireland eliminated late fees for overdue books early this year[1]. I wouldn't say it has made any significant difference to me, since the borrowing periods are already very generous. But if it does encourage more reading in this day and age of audio visual content, why not?

Times are changing, just a couple of years ago, most new acquaintances and colleagues would ask me for book recommendations, these days most people ask me for podcast recommendations, and I don't listen to that many podcasts.

[1]: [https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2019/0102/1019973-library- fi...](https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2019/0102/1019973-library-fines/)

</comment><comment><USER22> A nice side effect of this policy is that the library's storage capacity is expanded to include the homes of people with late books that don't have holds on them. I don't know whether storage capacity is scarce these days.

</comment><comment><USER23> This is why I'm a big fan of Overdrive/Libby. I check out a lot of audiobooks and they get automatically returned after 21 days, so I don't have to worry about any late fees.

<comment><USER24> Surely I can't be the only one irked by the fact that they're bringing the concept of "copies" and "borrowing" to what are just bytes sitting on hard drives that can be copied and transmitted at 0 marginal cost?

I agree that it's a better user experience than the non-digital alternative, but I'd like to see digital books at libraries be available for free to anyone who wants it at any time, without any arbitrary restrictions whatsoever.

<comment><USER25> It's even worse as publishers sell digital lending copies to libraries that cap out at fewer lends than a physical book would be good for, forcing repurchases! Most libraries are small and this policy prevents them from building up large digital collections over time.

<comment><USER26> > that cap out at fewer lends than a physical book would be good for

Oh yes - my favourite local library branch [1] is mostly volunteer-run and as such was the last one to get computerised lending, so any books older than ten years or so still have that paper slip in the back onto which the due date used to be stamped. Looking at those, quite a number of books (and not just the ultra-popular ones) would have already expired if they had been subject to the same lending caps as digital books, but in practice are mostly still in an okay (or even a bit better than just okay) condition that still looks good for quite some more lends.

On top of that, it seems that some publishers now use licenses that simply expire after a fixed term (two years or so!) regardless of the number of lends (compare [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20982315](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20982315)).

[1] A former US Army library in Germany that was donated to the city when that particular Army base was closed in the mid-90s and now effectively functions as a dedicated English language section of the regular city library.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> How will I force them to break a 20 for the vending machine without fines?

</comment><comment><USER28> This is a bad idea. A library is supposed to be stocked with books so that patrons can indulge their curiosity browsing. People can't browse library books that are sitting in the homes of other people for months.

<comment><USER29> There is a sense of responsibility that goes away when you can keep books indefinitely. The example here is that the books will be automatically renewed up to 15 times and then the borrower is charged (until they return the book). I get that these small fines can be a burden to lower income folks. I suspect that there will be a ton of books that are never returned and borrowers will be charged and they will feel that same burden. Yes, this is contrary to what the 1983 study in the article states. I'd like to see a recent study - <USER2> a follow up in a year in Chicago.</comment></comment>


Yelp Makes Changes in Response to Small-Business Owners - NYTimes - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/06/yelp-makes-changes-to-appease-small-business-owners/ <comment><USER2> Earlier discussion here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1243815></comment>


Upcycle Windows 7 - <AUTHOR> https://www.fsf.org/windows/upcycle-windows-7 <comment><USER2> Not even Adobe released Flash in OSS despite they don't have any comparable product (where they get money from) to offer, do they?

<comment><USER3> More like a joke the FSF's request. What's the point to use an outdated OS (no security updates) even for "free"? Better support the ReactOS project if you want "free" windoze on the desktop.</comment></comment>


Tencent takes a 10% stake in Snapchat parent Snap - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/08/chinas-tencent-takes-a-10-percent-stake-in-snapchat-parent-snap.html <comment><AUTHOR> the timinig is interesting. the stock price was down >15% after yesterdays earnings call, now it's in the green again.</comment>


S2n Is Now Handling 100 Percent of SSL Traffic for Amazon S3 - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/s2n-is-now-handling-100-percent-of-of-ssl-traffic-for-amazon-s3/ <comment><USER2> One thing they don't mention is that it's built against libcrypto. They make it seem like this replaces OpenSSL, but it really only replaces half of it (libssl).

Still an exciting project, especially since the API looks dirt simple to use, but it doesn't live up to the awe I felt when I, at first glance, thought they had given a big middle finger and left OpenSSL behind entirely.

<comment><USER3> It only replaced half of OpenSSL, but it replaces the half which has been responsible for almost all of the worst vulnerabilities.

<comment><USER4> Erlang has the `ssl` application which is built on top of `crypto`. The latter uses OpenSSLs libcrypto, but ssl is written in Erlang.

Historically, whenever there is an OpenSSL vulnerability, it doesn't affect the ssl application, and so Erlang isn't vulnerable. In short, corroboration.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is there a FIPS 140-2 validated version of "s2n" somewhere ? I couldn't find anything close to it on the FIPS 140-2 validated products list.

If not, how does Amazon get away with using S3 as part of GovCloud, which purports itself to be NIST SP 800-53 compliant, one requirement of which is NIST SP 800-53 Control SC-13 ( [https://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/800-53/Rev4/control?controlNam...](https://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/800-53/Rev4/control?controlName=SC-13) ), which says, while it does not mandate cryptography, if you do use cryptography to satisfy any of the other controls the cryptography must be certified to the appropriate level (classified data must use NSA-approved cryptography, digital signatures must use FIPS-validated cryptography).

This is a base control for NIST SP 800-53, which is a requirement for FedRAMP.

<comment><USER6> The body text is a bit more qualified than the headline:

> we have replaced OpenSSL with s2n for all internal and external SSL traffic > in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) commercial regions

I suspect that "commercial regions" excludes govcloud.

<comment><USER5> Darn. I should have read the fine article, but I was really hopefully that there would be a migration path off OpenSSL... RedHat has FIPS validated most of their software, but it is expensive and slow work that someone building from source cannot leverage, unlike OpenSSL.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm surprised there are no comments yet... I haven't heard of S2n until reading this post, but it sounds like it could potentially replace OpenSSL usage?

<comment><USER8> I think it's relying on libcrypto from openssl, at least that was the case when it came out. E.g. it implements TLS/SSL protocols only, no crypto. Not sure if that's changed and they implemented crypto as well.

<comment><USER9> From a brief perusal of the source code[0], it still does. It makes this claim on the `README.md` seem rather disingenuous:

> One of the key benefits to s2n is far less code surface, with approximately > 6,000 lines of code (compared to OpenSSL's approximately 500,000 lines).

0: [https://github.com/awslabs/s2n/blob/master/crypto/s2n_dhe.h#...](https://github.com/awslabs/s2n/blob/master/crypto/s2n_dhe.h#L18)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's two orders of magnitude less code, but I would be hesitant to say it's more than a linear decrease in vulnerability. Rust (or OCaml in the past) seem like a match made in heaven for solving Heartbleed and Cloudbleed type of problems.

<comment><USER11> It's been done:

[https://github.com/mirleft/ocaml-tls](https://github.com/mirleft/ocaml-tls)

[https://usenix15.nqsb.io/](https://usenix15.nqsb.io/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > identifying memory leaks through fuzz testing.

Do you think that was in the original draft of the release?</comment>


Verifying Multi-threaded Software with Spin - <AUTHOR> http://spinroot.com/spin/whatispin.html <comment><USER2> When I was a TA for my undergrad operating systems class, I gave a lecture once on using SPIN for basic verification of a handful of mutex implementations, and proving a handful of properties about them. If you want a basic conceptual primer for Spin, I recommend checking it out -- here's a PDF of the slide deck:

[http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~410-s11/lectures/L38_SPIN.pdf](http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~410-s11/lectures/L38_SPIN.pdf)

And here's a set of resources:

[http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~410-s09/lectures/L40_SPIN/spinfiles/](http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~410-s09/lectures/L40_SPIN/spinfiles/)

Linked to from the above is another good resource from people who have used Spin -- a formal verification of Linux's RCU design, using Spin:

[http://lwn.net/Articles/243851/](http://lwn.net/Articles/243851/)

</comment><comment><USER3> This (or some other tool like it) is a great skill to have if you deal with concurrent datastructures. I used it to deal with a lock-free multithreaded ringbuffer at a previous job and it made my life much easier. The Spin Book is a good read.

</comment><comment><USER4> More on Dr. Holzmann's (author of SPIN) work and his setup here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6950440](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6950440)

</comment><comment><USER5> Is there a good reason to use this over clang's thread sanitizer?

<comment><USER3> Thread sanitizer is a tool which can detect races. Spin is a tool which can prove an algorithm (or a simplified specification of it) is race-free.

You start with an algorithm involving concurrent operations. Spin searches across all possible interleavings of those operations -- basically like running your program while simulating every possible ordering of execution. Over all those simulations, it verify invariants (that you choose). So it's like a proof agent -- if your proof succeeds you get a much stronger guarantee that your algorithm behaves as you believe it does.</comment></comment>


Computer Scientists Create Algorithm That Measures Human Pecking Order - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27437/?p1=blogs <comment><USER2> No empirical data - which anybody reading such an article would be looking for. They didn't rank Wikipedia editors by 'power', though they claim they could. Why not?

<comment><USER3> That'll get published when the grant proposal gets accepted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow this is really clever. Kleinberg does seem to be all over the place; I read recently a paper about gossip algorithms from him.</comment>


Kindle Fire Usability Findings - <AUTHOR> http://www.useit.com/alertbox/kindle-fire-usability.html

<comment><USER2> > Websites should sniff the user-agent code and automatically serve up the > mobile version when accessed from a 7-inch tablet.

I take issue with this as a hard and fast rule. During my time with the Acer A100 7 inch Honeycomb tablet, I always preferred desktop sites over awkwardly oversized mobile sites (which are always designed to match iOS and not Android, adding to the annoyance).

TBH, I don't remember touch targets being an issue. I probably zoomed & panned more than I do on my iPad and less than I do on my iPhone, but I wasn't constantly hitting the wrong UI element. This sounds like it's more of an issue with the Fire's overall rushed execution and cut rate hardware choices rather than a systemic problem with 7 inch tablets regardless of power.

Noting that fact, I would take all general recommendations (In other words, not specific to the Fire) with a huge grain of salt. There are other 7 inch tablets out there. It's a little irresponsible of the author to insist that this is how all 7 inch tablets should be treated after using just the underpowered Fire. At least test your assumption a 7 inch Tab or A100 before giving it as advice.</comment>


Ask HN: How do I get started with version control? - <AUTHOR>

I do mostly wordpress dev and design. Most php, css, xhtml, jquery but I am looking to advance and work on some web apps in the near future.<p>I have grown to appreciate version control and I know most people here think very highly of Github. However, I have no idea how to even get started with taking advantage of github or any form of version control. I would appreciate your input. FYI: I do my work with Coda on a Mac. <comment><USER3> I myself prefer Git, but Joel Spolsky wrote a really slick tutorial for Mercurial: <http://hginit.com/>

Once you learn about how VCS works, and have used something for a while, you'll be able to make an educated decision about switching to something else.

<comment><USER4> The Subversion re-education bit is great to understand the differences between Mercurial and SVN, thanks for the link :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Github has some good resources.

<http://help.github.com/>

If you want to understand how git works -- and therefore know what it can do -- see: <http://ftp.newartisans.com/pub/git.from.bottom.up.pdf>

</comment><comment><USER6> If you go ahead with trying out git, then check out Pro Git: <http://progit.org/book/>

Read the first 2 chapters, sign up for an account on GitHub and mess around with a public repo for a bit. Once you become familiar with adding, staging, commiting, etc. then you can either try out another VCS like Mercurial or SVN, or move onto Chapter 3 and get comfortable with branching and merging in Git.

There's also a very nice GUI for Git on OSX called GitX. It won't let you do push/pull on remotes but it's great to understanding what's happening to your repos outside of a CLI: <http://gitx.frim.nl/>

<comment><USER7> There's also an experimental fork of GitX that adds basic support for pulling/pushing, etc. See here: <http://github.com/brotherbard/gitx>

<comment><USER8> I know it's experimental but how stable is it in practice?

<comment><USER7> Have been using it for over a month now, no problems yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There ya go mate: [http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/other/getting-the-hang- of-...](http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/other/getting-the-hang-of-github/).

Then try this: [http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/tools-and-tips/terminal- gi...](http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/tools-and-tips/terminal-git-and- github-for-the-rest-of-us-screencast/).

</comment><comment><USER10> Subversion would also work just fine. Some hosts already have Subversion installed, so setting things up is quite easy. Here are some examples:

Dreamhost: <http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Subversion>

MediaTemple: <http://kb.mediatemple.net/questions/143/Using+Subversion>

I use Subversion for projects that I don't release open source. For me, that works better than paying github a monthly fee. Anyway, the point is that you shouldn't feel like git is the only option.

<comment><USER11> I have been using bzr for quite some time. While my host didn't provide bzr (but did support Python), it was just a matter of untaring it and adding it to the path on the server. It worked out quite well as one fine day the server crashed and lost all the data. Luckily I had a bzr repo locally so it was just a matter of pushing it to the server.

For private hosting I basically use bzr+ssh smart server on my host and launchpad for my hobby projects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It seems you're getting a lot of advice to choose Git or Mercurial over Subversion. I haven't used Mercurial, but I have used Git and Subversion for years.

I think Git (or maybe Mercurial) is actually the answer to a different question: "What's the best version control system to use?" Starting with Git, particularly if you're not using OS X, which has better GUI tools for Git, seems to me to be a quick trip to insanity. To get started with version control, I think Subversion is substantially easier.

But it's not too hard to try both. Make an account on Github, create a repository, and try it out. If, by tomorrow night, you want to gouge your eyes out with a spoon, try Subversion.

(Subversion will definitely make you want to gouge your eyes out too, but not for a few months. Then you can switch to Git!)

<comment><USER13> Git would actually be easier, I think, for most people to learn if they didn't already have Subversion experience and hence Subversion ways of doing things coloring their preconceptions. It's a beast of a system though--you have to actually learn how to use it, rather than depend on your intuition and hope that it's usable--but it's worth learning and probably easier than learning 1 or 2 other version control systems and having to unlearn them along the way.

<comment><USER12> As someone who has been slowly unlearning SVN, I agree. Still, learning Subversion was trivial compared to Git, regardless of which I learned first.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> My vote goes to Git. The way you get started is to just do it. Everyone has there preference, but I highly recommend any DVCS.

<http://whygitisbetterthanx.com/>

</comment><comment><USER15> I would suggest trying out bzr as its easy to use and has good integration with launchpad.

The 5-minute tutorial[1] is a good start. You can also look at the quick reference[2], its quite self explanatory.

[1] [http://doc.bazaar.canonical.com/bzr.2.1/en/mini- tutorial/ind...](http://doc.bazaar.canonical.com/bzr.2.1/en/mini- tutorial/index.html)

[2] [http://doc.bazaar.canonical.com/bzr.2.1/en/quick- reference/i...](http://doc.bazaar.canonical.com/bzr.2.1/en/quick- reference/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> I really enjoy The Git Parable ([http://tom.preston-werner.com/2009/05/19/the- git-parable.htm...](http://tom.preston-werner.com/2009/05/19/the-git- parable.html)).

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm facing a similar situation, but my coworker is suggesting SVN. Should I go along or is there any good reason to start right away with git/mercurial?

<comment><USER18> If your organization is using SVN stick to SVN because your learning curve will be easier (rather than trying to learn two differen VCS systems).

Otherwise, I _highly_ suggest Mercurial; it "just works", has a powerful feature set, and I like bitbucket.org better than github :)

The debate between bzr, hg (Mercurial), and git can become religious because all the tools are good.

<comment><USER19> I use Mercurial for my personal one-person projects, too. It does its job well and is very easy to use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> There are a few reasons why you might want to start out with SVN rather than git:

* It's simpler (though admittedly the complex and confusing features of git really only become relevant when there are multiple developers).

* If you're going to work for corporate clients with their own repositories, chances are very high it's going to be SVN (it's possible to use both via the git-svn tool, but that adds more complexity)

That being said, git does have a number of very nice features that are useful to lone developers as well.

<comment><USER21> If you're eventually going to move to something like Git or Hg, you really ought to skip SVN all together. The concepts you learn in SVN will make Git or Hg seem counter intuitive, and the Git / Hg model is a better way to work once you start using teams.

<comment><USER20> My (second) point was that there's a good chance you won't be able to skip SVN anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Git is neat. This is the first time I use a VCS.

Git community book: <http://book.git-scm.com>

</comment><comment><USER23> The best way to get started is using one, pick one and use it, generally when I am learning a new tool I try to get the basics emulating my workflow, i.e. I edit, create, move, rename and remove a couple of text files in the case of a VCS, this also serves when I need to learn the commands and the concepts of a new VCS (I'm a git user, but often I need to work with mercurial or subversion).

</comment><comment><USER24> Since Coda uses SVN, I would start by learning Subversion and then, when I feel comfortable with it, make the jump to Git.

</comment><comment><USER25> I found a really easy way to setup a local version control.

1\. Install VisualSVN Server 2\. Install TortoiseSVN

Use VisualSVN Server to create a repository and set permissions and TortoiseSVN to manage your files and commits.

For someone that hasn't use version control before, I think it's a really simple solution.

<comment><USER26> Why do you even need to install the server if it's a personal project - <USER2> svn works just fine accessing repos on a local file system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I like the Git tutorial embedded within <http://railstutorial.org>. You learn Git, complete with best practices, while developing a webapp with Rails.

After that, read Pro Git: <http://progit.org>

</comment><comment><USER28> Project Locker is a good free svn/git provider with private repositories. It also has trac for bug tracking, but I didn't use that much. The site isn't too pretty but you can't beat free!

<http://www.projectlocker.com>

</comment><comment><USER29> The best resource is a person at your side. Pair-program a simple project together and have them show you how to use github or git. If you're in the Boston area I'll help you out.</comment>


How the Black Death made the rich richer - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200701-how-the-black-death-make-the-rich-richer <comment><USER2> The wikipedia page points to the exact opposite conclusion: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequences_of_the_Black_Deat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequences_of_the_Black_Death#Social,_environmental,_and_economic_effects)

<comment><USER3> Noteworthy considering that both BBC and Wikipedia are treated as relatively reliable sources of information. If even they can't agree, then it is a measurement of either our own ignorance, or those source being less reliable than we thought. For example, I wouldn't recommend going to Wikipedia for everything (applied) math related. A lot of pages on the advanced stuff are sparse and obscure, and there are also plenty of cases where equations or explanations have been wrong.

<comment><USER4> I studied economic history. I am not an expert on medieval economic history but the take in the article is definitely bad (unf, this is becoming more and more common).

I am not going to speculate as to why but as an example:

The article talks about government funding...this makes no sense, literally none...it is generally accepted that nation states didn't exist until about 3 or 4 centuries after the period in question, and govt finance as it exists today came half a century after that.

The article talks about companies...again, companies didn't exist for another 4 centuries.

These are basic elements of economic history in the period. If you study history, day one of a research course would be...don't read the present into history. This is one of the worst examples I have ever seen (and part of the research course I did was literally looking at the worst examples...this is worse...no historical article should include comments supporting a current political proposal, as this article does...it is just totally inappropriate).

And yes, the Wikipedia article linked is correct (in the sense that this is the generally accepted account). The dynamics of this are well understood: famines, plagues, wars, etc. triggered huge prosperity (and the poorest generally benefit most as always) because the main limit on growth was the number of people growing beyond what productivity/resources could support (this happened again in the 17th century and is why America was populated...so these periods are significant). When lots of people died, there was room for growth.

No, the BBC is not a reliable source of information and hasn't been for a number of years. The article is (unfortunately) quite typical: people have a preconceived notion about what is true, and then gather information that confirms that conclusion. At best, this is an example of an editor who has hijacked the original article...at best (the university attended by one of the authors is, however, not surprising to me). It is important not to confuse information that you want to believe is true with actual reality. I don't think it is particularly controversial to point out that 95% of the population (journalists closer to 99%) have gone off the deep end when it comes to this.

(It is maybe worth adding, the narrative in the article is one of those subjects where some news organisations will just pump endless stories about how the rich are exploiting X or Y. These articles do very well on social media but the fact that they draw the same conclusion about every single event should lead you to ask whether they don't have an "angle". Eliciting jealousy and rage is money in the pocket for journalists, jealousy is a very predictable and bankable emotion.)

<comment><USER5> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stora_Enso](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stora_Enso) so it's looks like perhaps there _technically_ were some proto-joint-stock companies by the bubonic plague, but yes the article is quite bad, rather shockingly given the authors' academic credentials.

I dunno what corner of academy they are from, but in every one I'm aware of, using historically-specific terminology like this in a different period is a major faux-pas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> GuB-42 This article is all over the place. The author tried to fit the current COVID-19 pandemic to the Black Death, even though they have very little in common.

Obviously, a pandemic is a major event, many changes happen after major events, and out of many changes, by chance alone, you are bound to find similarities with other events. Making some (not all) rich people richer is also bound to happen. When wealth is shuffled around, there are winners and losers, and among the winners, some are rich to begin with, and therefore, some rich get richer.

In order to make parallels like the article did, you can't escape statistical analysis, like proper scientific papers. Here, it just looks like cherry picking a few bits to draw a picture that is not even consistent.

</comment><comment><USER6> Demography of England:

      1348 4,810,000 +16.7%

      1351 2,600,000 −45.9%

      1650 5,310,000 +29.2%

300 years to recover

</comment><comment><USER7> It's interesting to consider how many corporations will weather this pandemic and how many small businesses will not.

<comment><USER8> I agree. I think we're going to see a lot more wealth concentration because of all the business shutdowns. And, soon, landlords may be going bankrupt because tenants aren't able to pay and some (how many?) states have eviction moratoriums. Even if they could evict non-paying tenants, the rental market is softening to an extent that could certainly take down some smaller or overleveraged players.

<comment><USER9> The $600 week is preventing mass defaults by tenants.

<comment><USER8> Then why were 30% of Americans not able to pay their rent on time last month, along with a similar percentage in April and May?

[https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/16/30percent-of-americans- misse...](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/16/30percent-of-americans-missed-their- housing-payments-in-june.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> it didn't. In fact it gave rise to the middle class, caused the coming in to being of inheritance and real estate laws, and empowered workers. Why? A wealthy land owner was only as rich as what the owned land produced. With all the deaths the workers who remained became valued. Similarly, who inherited what became very important as literally whole families died. And with the laws came fairer treatment for everyone.

</comment><comment><USER11> In pretty much any major negative event, the rich will get richer. As the negative event starts to impact non-rich people financially to the point they have to sell off things of value (stocks, property, etc) it is the wealthy that can buy it from them.

<comment><USER2> Not if the event is fundamentally disruptive enough for existing business. War, disease and famine tend to redistribute wealth.</comment></comment>


Bing trying to get exclusive on Fox is smart (Mark Cuban) - <AUTHOR> http://blogmaverick.com/2009/11/22/bing-trying-to-get-exclusive-on-fox-smart/

<comment><USER2> Will someone please inform Mr. Cuban that Google's opt-out procedure is entirely voluntary on their part and there's nothing that says they have to continue to offer it or abide by it?

I'm really getting sick of reading about this harebrained idea on HN. There is nothing about it that is smart and I don't understand why anyone cares what this person who doesn't seem to understand any of the basic concepts involved thinks about it.

<comment><USER3> Google has no legal right to publish materials it doesn't own the copyright to, and that includes almost everything in its index. Their "opt-out" blah blah blah is meaningless. News Corp, the AP, Reuters, the NYTs, McClatchy, will all take microsoft's money and/or sue google for its infractions long before going out of business. If google likewise has to actually pay for material, it will be time to short sell GOOG very hard.

<comment><USER2> It certainly doesn't have a right to publish those materials. It has every right to index them.

I agree that Google News will need to die if the publishers don't want them to list their news there, but the actual search engine itself?

Indexing is not publishing. How many times do we have to fight this battle?</comment></comment></comment>


Europe v Google: Nothing to stand on - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/business-and-finance/21648606-google

<comment><USER2> Seriously? The whole story is about search and ads, and thus the Economist concludes with:

> _But rather than trying to rein in American firms, European politicians > should focus on fixing what is holding back the old world's most promising > platforms: the lack of a common digital market. Today only 15% of consumers > shop online across borders within the EU._

So to fix a monopolist in search abusing its position, the EU needs to make it easier for me to buy shoes from Poland with simpler VAT laws. How are those related at all? There's probably plenty of reasons why no European PhD dropouts started a successful search company, but cross border e-commerce isn't one of them.

<comment><USER3> Lacklustre cross border commerce is among the reasons why successful companies in one European country have trouble scaling up and competing with American giants who by default start in a market with over 300M people.

Google's internal response[1] covers it inadvertently. They show stats for various European markets with competition in the shopping category, mostly with other American companies.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9377951](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9377951)

<comment><USER4> > Lacklustre cross border commerce is among the reasons why successful > companies in one European country have trouble scaling up and competing with > American giants who by default start in a market with over 300M people.

While it would be nice to get the VAT problems sorted out, this is second to the problem of there being a couple dozen different languages being used in the EU. People shop domestically because they can use websites in their native language and when they have problems, can talk to customer service representatives in a language they understand.

It is really, really hard to get your service localized in couple dozen different languages (let alone provide actual customer service in all of them).

Even Amazon handles only a part of Europe, and if Amazon can't do that, what companies can? There are a few, but not all that many, and for many it isn't worth it, because your economies of scale quickly disappear when you have to build and maintain a separate presence in up to 28 different countries that mostly speak different languages. (That includes American companies, too, by the way, many of which simply choose to ignore Estonia or even Sweden and Portugal.)

<comment><USER5> If the problem was the need to maintain a specific presence, then they would let me use the english language version of the website. But they don't. I'm tired of "This content isn't available in your country" and "we can't ship x item to your country" messages...

<comment><USER6> localization has to deal with differing laws, too. Differing customs in general.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why do Americans insist on generalising the many countries and cultures of Europe into one big amorphous blob and then generalising about Blob Europe? Just because the EU exists, doesn't mean that Europe is suddenly an equivalent to the 52 states of the US.

Different countries within the EU have different laws, different markets, different cultures, different ways of doing business, and most obviously, different languages. Germany is different to France is different to the UK is different to the Czech Republic is different to Turkey.

This is why there's no single "European search engine" \- and this is why America is the most attractive (and competed in) market for digital products - it's huge, well-off, and it's a lot more homogenous (at least in language and general culture) than Europe.

<comment><USER2> > _Why do Americans insist on generalising the many countries and cultures of > Europe into one big amorphous blob and then generalising about Blob Europe?_

I'm not entirely sure what you're responding to, but the Economist is a European publication.

<comment><USER7> Ah, you're right. (I was reading this earlier submission on the same matter: [http://www.eweek.com/cloud/why-europes-regulatory-war- agains...](http://www.eweek.com/cloud/why-europes-regulatory-war-against- silicon-valley-will-backfire-3.html) and lumped the two together).

Although I would probably expand that out to ask why people from the UK also like to reason about (continental) Europe as a singular entity also, when they should certainly know better.

<comment><USER8> There's so often fog in the Channel, and the continent is cut off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've worked outside EU in an awesome startup. The VP of engineering went for a worldwide tour of hype IT capacities, to learn how the like of Twitter, Facebook, Volkswagen or Barcklays perform top-of-the-class software development nowadays. He made a blogpost of about 700 lines about worldwide companies. Europe was at the bottom, in 5 lines: "Europe: Nothing interesting. These guys haven't even moved to Agile after 13 years". I felt insulted but I have to reckon he summarized it well.

I'm a sole trader with a "product" strat-up in France. I spend about 10% of my time on paperwork. I've have a police inspection yesterday "because I'm flatsharing". We have mandatory taxes and charges of about 70% [1]. There's no way we can become big.

[1] Income tax: 20%, Mandatory unemployment/state/health benefits 46%, VAT 20%, land tax $300 for using my own flat for professional purpose, corporate tax, mandatory non-computerized accountant $2800, bank $300, and unclear legislation compared to, say, UK, requiring hours and hours of reading and tax dodging.

<comment><USER8> You have to pay tax if you run a company at home? Wow.

That's not all of Europe, though, this must be a French peculiarity.

<comment><USER10> Not only France, same in Poland.

<comment><USER8> The taxman cannot in reality come and check your home to see whether you actually work there or not. Can you rent a brass plate address somewhere which has a nominal working place, on a cheap rent? A room in a warehouse in an industrial area could be shared by several (let's say thousands) or people who actually work at home but claim a company residence there. Yes, criminal, but not immoral...

<comment><USER11> I think you under estimate European bureaucracy. While they don't visit every home they do visit some. As you say tax evasion is criminal; it's a really bad idea to lie to tax authorities.

Here's the UK government talking about visiting your home to check your business accounts if you run a business from that home and they want to check your compliance.

[https://www.gov.uk/tax-compliance-checks](https://www.gov.uk/tax-compliance- checks)

<comment><USER8> Of course you must not lie to tax authorities, but matters are often up to an interpretation and it is not unreasonable that there's a business address even if in reality a person does not want to incur every day the expense, emissions and enmity of traffic in order to travel to that place of business.

In Helsinki, we did have this silly "let's chase the home offices" bureaucracy in 1970's and 1980's but that hunt went to grave at the same time with the Soviet Union, deservedly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> >Google (whose executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, sits on the board of The Economist's parent company) told staff in an internal memo that it has a "very strong case" to make against all the allegations.

I'm glad to see disclosures like these.

</comment><comment><USER13> Is no one going to address the validitiy of their arguments against Google? If you've followed HN / Reddit the past few days, you would've thought that the EU is some crazy entity of whack-jobs. But I can't find much in the way of analysis of why this might seem actually be a worthy debate.

<comment><USER14> The problem is that the Statement of Objections is private and will apparently remain that way for some time (this article says "many months"), so no one really knows what the arguments are (except the European Commission, Google, and presumably folks like "Fair Search").

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> With opinions like these, no wonder they're looking to tax Google for its success:

      "Our online businesses are today dependent on a few non-
      EU players," said Mr Oettinger. "This must not be the
      case again in the future."

So, just to be clear, if Google were based in an EU country, then everything they are doing would be fine?

<comment><USER16> > So, just to be clear, if Google were based in an EU country, then everything > they are doing would be fine?

No, it would be exactly the same

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> > But rather than trying to rein in American firms

Taking into account that the most fined companies regarding anti trust proceedings are European, I don't know how this claim is not BS

</comment><comment><USER17> Probably because the EU was "unnaturally" pushed into doing this without fully understanding what they're doing:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/16/technology/microsoft- once-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/16/technology/microsoft-once-an- antitrust-target-is-now-googles-regulatory-scold.html)

<comment><USER18> Microsoft is just the evil empire that keeps on giving. The Windows monopoly is weaker than ever, but the scam patents and the PR machine to drive out competition are still moving politics to keep Microsoft's fading monopolies powerful enough to slow progress in the industry.</comment></comment>


Performance Tuning Apache Storm at KeenIO - <AUTHOR> http://highscalability.com/blog/2016/3/8/performance-tuning-apache-storm-at-keen-io.html?second_pass <comment><USER2> Great post! Makes a lot of sense to move I/O to a thread pool. Do you control max topology I/O with the thread pool size now, in addition to Storm settings like # of executors? Another q - do you monitor how long each bolt blocks waiting for a thread to become available? (as a measure of pool saturation)?

<comment><USER3> Hi

The max thread pool size definitely affects the maximum I/O we can do and we've tuned that based on perf testing the memcache/cassandra clients in isolation.

However the bottom line is that we are still limited by the max spout pending or the max number of queries we can run concurrently. There will be short spikes that might use up all the I/O threads but they are short lived because there are other CPU intensive operations that the topology is doing at the same time.

In terms of blocking for each bolt, we don't block, the bolt tries to execute the operation in the current thread if the I/O thread pool is saturated. This way if there are pending tuples they queue up in storm's receive queues and it creates a back pressure when we have too much work outstanding.

Hope this helps! Manu

<comment><USER2> Cool idea for how to still let Storm apply its own backpressure, thanks for sharing!</comment></comment></comment>


RIP Palm: it's over, and here's why - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/03/rip-palm-its-over-and-heres-why.ars/ <comment><USER2> Yesterday: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1209748>

(submitted link differs by a trailing slash)</comment>


Wind Turbines Leave Clouds and Energy Inefficiency in Their Wake - <AUTHOR> http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-01/wind-turbines-leave-clouds-and-energy-inefficiency-their-wake

<comment><USER2> Another place where random strategies can help. If the turbines are placed effectively randomly rather than rigidly in a grid, any direction will be as good as any other (within a small margin).

<comment><USER3> You don't want random, since that will may place things too close to each other. You want something area filling and which minimizes alignments, with weights based on the prevailing winds.

<comment><USER2> Agreed - standard principle: random processes clump.

You want something pseudo-random with good spacing, something like a Golden Ratio Spiral. It's suggested that plants use the golden ratio so that leaves shade each other less, because each revolution the leaves still don't line up. This is because the golden ratio is the irrational that is hardest to approximate with rationals, and that's because it's the solution/value of the Continued Fraction 1/(1+1/(1+1/(1+...))).</comment></comment></comment>


DNA indicates humans in N. America 14,300 years ago - <AUTHOR> http://www.boston.com/news/science/articles/2008/09/21/dna_indicates_humans_in_n_america_14300_years_ago/

<comment><USER2> "The findings kill the suggestion some of the earliest Americans came from Europe."

How exactly do they do that?</comment>


Blockchain governance: the system is not immune to capture by interest groups - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2019/06/04/blockchain-governance-the-system-is-not-immune-to-capture-by-interest-groups/ <comment><AUTHOR> "When a single large firm captures the governance of a blockchain, it is not clear how a decentralised blockchain differs from a traditional financial intermediary as a provider of trust"</comment>


Quantum setback for warp drives - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/23292/ <comment><USER2> So, previously, if you applied an impossible amount of impossibly-stable negative mass in an impossible configuration that was impossible to maintain due to impossible-to-predict interactions with the interstellar medium and goosed it in an impossible manner you might have been able to move faster than light.

Now some guys have revealed that it's also impossible due to quantum effects. Frankly, that's just one more "impossible" in a rich sea of impossible assumptions to make this style of warp drive work.

As I like to say, once you accept one impossibility into your theory, the fact that impossible results occur is not fundamentally interesting.

People who babble about how people thought that traveling faster than sound was impossible and who are we to say this is actually impossible need to spend more time with real relativity and not Star Trek "wishing is an acceptable substitute for engineering" relativity. People who think that the Alcubierre drive was ever actually possible betray a _profound_ misunderstanding of both the drive and relativity, in their zeal to get to the results they want instead of the reality they have. If FTL is possible, it won't be as a result of QM or relativity. It might come from the eventual fusion, but a deeper understanding of relativity shows that you're still facing a steep uphill battle.

The thing that you come to understand if you actually understand relativity is that it is not merely that FTL travel is "impossible" because c is some "cosmic speed limit". c is not the cosmic speed limit. c is the number that indicates the relationship between space and time in the Minkowsky metric. c comes from the literal shape of the universe, which is not the Euclidean one you think it is. Travelling "faster than c" is not merely breaking the 55mph speed limit on your local road, it is fundamentally a undefined, gibberish statement in relativity. Everything outside of your lightcone is profoundly indistinguishable from anything else outside of your lightcone.

The deepest discussion of relativity I know of that is freely online: <http://www.mathpages.com/rr/rrtoc.htm>

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't understand how Hawking radiation is significant. It's far less than the cosmic background radiation everywhere in the universe. (This is why we can't "see" black holes.)

<comment><USER2> This is something like standing on Pluto and saying you don't see what's so bright about the sun. Why not come stand on the surface of the sun and then make up your own mind?

Hawking radiation is not intrinsically weak. Hawking radiation _as generated by a large blackhole_ is weak. Flashlights are not weak; flashlights as powered by my nearly dead batteries are weak.

With a different spacetime configuration you can get arbitrarily strong Hawking radiation, just like you can get arbitrarily strong light using more power. Hawking radiation around a very small black hole tears it apart relatively quickly.

The Universe does not seem to like playing games like this and it tends to wipe out any structure that permits causality violation (as any FTL drive would) in an unsurvivable blaze of either Hawking-radiation or in an explosion of the vacuum energy (see Hawking's work on what would happen if you towed a wormhole around enough at relativistic speeds to cause a causality violation).

And by "unsurvivable", I don't mean "probably fatal to life but we might be able to engineer around it". I mean, "unsurvivable to the space-time structure in question"; whatever mass or energy happens to get in the way is orders of magnitude away from even affecting the outcome, let alone standing a chance of survival.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the great reply! I guess I'd only read about Hawking radiation with respect to black holes, and never considered its implications on a larger scale. Sounds like it has larger implications than I thought.

Were you citing a specific paper by Hawking (towing a wormhole)? I'd like to read more.

<comment><USER4> I haven't read the Hawking paper in question specifically, but the idea of towing a worm hole around is that you move one end of a worm hole for some period of time at relativistic speeds. Since as you approach c, time slows down, so the stationary end of the worm hole is further in the future than the one that was moved around. It's a pretty stock layman's example of how time travel _could be_ possible and I'm sure Hawking has torn a, er, hole in it some how.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If the bubble is unstable then it probably just needs constant modulation, meaning the FTL ship is flown more like a helicopter than a rocket ship. That makes it more maneuverable.

</comment><comment><USER6> This just in: Quantum mechanics and relativity don't get along.

Film at 11

<<yawn>>

</comment><comment><USER7> Yeah let's get to the point where it's technically possible to build one. This is exactly like preminent scientists in 1903 publishing papers about how powered flight was impossible.</comment>


Preliminary Fact-Finding about MIT and Jeffrey Epstein - <AUTHOR> https://president.mit.edu/speeches-writing/preliminary-fact-finding-about-mit-and-jeffrey-epstein <comment><USER2> Folks should remember that Rafael Reif was the provost under Susan Hockfield who orchestrated the whitewashing of research misconduct allegations that MIT Professor Ted Postol launched against MIT Lincoln Laboratory for using fabricated data to report results of a critical ballistic missile defense test to the Pentagon. MIT was found "guiltless" by Provost Reif after an "internal investigation" was conducted over the course of almost a decade. Steve Weiner (a highly respected former director of ballistic defense research at Lincoln for almost 20 years) has since accused MIT of engaging in a "kickback scheme" whereby Lincoln would tell the MDA whatever it needed to hear about the viability of a Starwars-inspired missile defense shield in order for executives at Raytheon to receive multi-billion dollar contracts to build it. The phony missile defense tests that Postol challenged intensely for almost a decade were one small but critical piece of the massive fraud that MIT has perpetrated against the United States taxpayer here. President Reif needs to be incarcerated, not just fired!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It appears that the claims about a disqualified donor list were substantially false, and that donations from Epstein were accepted with the knowledge and approval of MIT administration.

Additionally, the administration directed that the donations be kept anonymous to avoid using the institution to enhance Epstein's reputation.

This supports some of the position's taken by Lessig that many posters on HN took issue with, and reveals that Ito's role was substantially different than many were making it out to be.</comment>


The FAQ of comp.lang.prolog is maintained as a Prolog source file - <AUTHOR> https://www.metalevel.at/prolog/faq/ <comment><USER2> Story of my life. In my opinion the best tool for basically all jobs is usually the main programming language of your project / team / company. Everyone can read it, change it and run it. It can do everything. It has the best tooling support. The best IDE, which everyone has installed, licensed and knows how to operate. It is hopefully compile- and type safe. It is hopefully under source control. And hopefully a mainstream language, so you can find tons of help and resources online.

But for some reason, every f* new task is always first solved with some interpreted weakly typed scripting language, shell script or batch file, config file, xml programming, open source tool or web service. Unversioned, and with the weakest tool and team support imaginable. Probably a separate git repository with separate login credentials is created somewhere along the way as well.

<comment><USER3> I feel your pain. For me the worse case of this is web dev, where there's a different language for every task: html, CSS, javascript, SQL, your back-end language, XML, JSON, and so on.

But, Swi has my back on that, too:

[https://www.swi-prolog.org/FAQ/PrologLAMP.txt](https://www.swi- prolog.org/FAQ/PrologLAMP.txt)

      Can I replace a LAMP stack with SWI-Prolog?

      Yes, you can, and you'll be happier for it.

      LAMP is short for the following open source components to realise a web
      server:

          Linux
          Apache
          MySQL
          PHP

      In this picture, Linux provides the OS, Apache the web server, MySQL the
      database and PHP server-side scripting facilities. In fact, most of these
      components can be replaced. One can replace Linux with almost any other OS,
      Apache with Nginx, MySQL with PostgreSQL. PHP is similar to ASP.

      There are also larger replacements of this stack, such as Tomcat, which
      replaces both Apache and PHP. Similar architectures are available for Python
      (django), Ruby (Ruby on Rails) etc. As we will see below, this is the picture
      into which SWI-Prolog fits.

      The SWI-Prolog web framework

      The SWI-Prolog web framework (obviously) does not replace the OS. It does
      replace Apache, PHP and to some extent MySQL. We could refer to the stack as
      LP (Linux Prolog). Below, we point at the various libraries that make up the
      stack and relate them to the LAMP components they replace.

You can't quite replace html/css/js of course, since the browsers depend on them- but they can be embedded in Prolog easily. I believe the http library in my other comment here has facilities to do this.

Also- if you ever need to write a parser for some topsy-turvy ad-hoc markup language some third-party is using that you are forced to process, Prolog is probably the best language to do this, thanks to its Definite Clause Grammars notation that's basically BNF, except that it's not restricted to context-free grammars:

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

<comment><USER4> Please don't format your comments like this. Nobody is going to read it on mobile.

<comment><USER5> What's the problem, exactly? He's quoting a paragraph out of a document, and appropriately used a blockquote...

Maybe it's a bug on your phone or the HN codebase?

<comment><USER6> Hn doesn't support block quotes

<comment><USER7> I've always wondered why support wasn't added. It's a very simple change to add them; and everyone continuously tries-and-fails to use them. @dang et al, is there nobody on your side who can make little patches like this to "pave the well-trod path"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Swi-Prolog includes an http client/server library:

[https://www.swi- prolog.org/pldoc/doc_for?object=section(%27p...](https://www.swi- prolog.org/pldoc/doc_for?object=section\(%27packages/http.html%27\))

And of course, a lot of support for the semantic web:

[https://www.swi-prolog.org/web/index.txt](https://www.swi- prolog.org/web/index.txt)

The entire Swi-Prolog website at [https://www.swi- prolog.org/](https://www.swi-prolog.org/) runs on the Swi-Prolog web libraries - they call it "eating your own dog food":

[https://www.swi-prolog.org/dogfood.txt](https://www.swi- prolog.org/dogfood.txt)

<comment><USER8> The Perl6 (now Raku) language implementors use that phrase a lot as well. I wonder where it originated.

<comment><USER9> There's a decent Wikipedia article about it:

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

The first alternative phrase is hilarious to my German ears.

<comment><USER3> I'm... not sure I should ask you to explain ~.-

<comment><USER10> They might be referring to this: [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Natursekt](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Natursekt)

<comment><USER9> I was. But thanks for the link, it made me check out the etymology of "Sekt" (sparkling wine) and that was quite surprising.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't know if he browses this site, but wanted to give a quick thank you to Markus Triska - the posted website and his YouTube channel are both simple but informative Prolog resources. He's also made many contributions to SWI-Prolog and a new experimental flavor called Scryer. Would encourage everyone to give it a quick look, especially the fantastic reif and ediprolog tools. Thanks Markus!

</comment><comment><USER12> I was really hoping this would be structured as a set of assertions which would then be used to generate answers in response to queries.

</comment><comment><USER13> This reminds me of the C++ coding standard used at game company Splash Damage which is maintained as a compilable source file (+ header)[1].

[1] [https://github.com/splash-damage/coding- standards](https://github.com/splash-damage/coding-standards)

</comment><comment><USER14> My teacher talked about prolog in college in my programming languages course at UIC. It was really cool to see him talk about his thesis.

[https://cs.uic.edu/profiles/joe-hummel/](https://cs.uic.edu/profiles/joe- hummel/)

<comment><USER15> I think the last time I touched prolog was in University. Looking back through my class assignments, I think we discussed prolog but didn't actually write anything in it. The only assignment I see from that era was writing our own First-Order-Inference engine (really basic implementation; lots of limitations):

[https://github.com/sumdog/assignments/tree/master/csc4240-pr...](https://github.com/sumdog/assignments/tree/master/csc4240-program2)</comment></comment>


An interview with antenna designer Pete Bevelacqua [audio] - <AUTHOR> https://theamphour.com/446-an-interview-with-pete-bevelacqua/ <comment><USER2> Woaw, nice subject ! Always wanted to digg into signals and antenas, but not being from electrical background it was always kind of difficult to follow along. Can't wait to hear from your cast ^_^

</comment><comment><USER3> Thanks. Good to see some RF interviews. Been listening to your pod casts a lot lately, admittedly at bedtime, but it's good stuff.</comment>


Art and the Web: Line - <AUTHOR> http://thinkvitamin.com/art-and-the-web/line/

<comment><USER2> Do you think web designers need an understanding of the fundamentals of art?

<comment><USER3> As a web programmer with a degree in Fine Arts... YES. They do.

When you really get down to it, the web is about using visual media to communicate ideas. So is Art. Likewise, both disciplines have a heavy technical component. Both have mixed audiences... most people care about the tech side, some just want to experience the final product. Both disciplines also start with a blank page, and build it into the final product. The final products of both disciplines are greatly improved when the audience is engaged, and can be revolutionary when the audience collaborates.

So do web designers need to understand art? Yes!

<comment><USER2> I agree - I think it's super important. It also helps you be more creative as you have more tools for 'seeing'.</comment></comment></comment>


Rails on Rubinius - <AUTHOR> http://blog.fallingsnow.net/2008/05/17/rails-on-rubinius/ <comment><USER2> Haven't tried Rubinius yet myself, but being able to run rails on it is a huge milestone.

Some of the benefits of Rubinius, from what I've heard so far:

\- uses modern techniques to decrease memory usage and increase throughput

\- less memory change per additional mongrel instance

\- capability for precompiled code (similar to java .jar files)

\- better performance

\- better error reporting

\- profiling has less impact on performance

I think it could totally change the rails landscape as we know it.

<http://rubyconf2007.confreaks.com/d2t1p3_rubinius.html>

[http://www.slideshare.net/evanphx/rubinius-improving-the- rai...](http://www.slideshare.net/evanphx/rubinius-improving-the-rails- ecosystem/)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is exciting. The #1 thing holding back Ruby right now is its aging and leaky implementation. I'd say half my debugging time spent on ruby ends with, "Oh, the implementation of ruby has a bug."

This is not to say the Ruby guys aren't smart and don't work hard, but you can't squeeze blood from a stone.

<comment><USER4> Have you looked at Ruby 1.9?

Or JRuby?

I'm stoked about Rubinious, but for day-to-day, you-can-use-it now excitement my money's on JRuby.

<comment><USER3> I have, and I have. I just want there to be more competition amongst these alternative implementations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The blog post doesn't make it clear: Is ActiveRecord running under Rubinious?

</comment><comment><USER5> Could someone explain what this is to a Rails guy?

<comment><USER6> So, you know how like Rails runs on Ruby, which is kinda slow. As you may or may not know, Ruby isn't compiled into any sort of machine code, or even bytecode. It is compiled down into a tree-representation (like all languages i think), but instead of taking this tree representation into bytecode or native machine code, they just leave it. This makes ruby extra slow and hard to optimize. Rubinus (as far as I know) takes the tree and makes bytecode which is then executed on a VM. This should make it _much_ faster.

<comment><USER7> Although this is what should happen, it doesn't quite seem to be the case. Pretty much every other ruby implementation destroys Rubinius in terms of performance. It's also worthwhile to note that 1.9/YARV, which is bytecoded, destroys every other ruby implementation and should actually be a major boost to Rails once the compatibility issues are worked out (Matz released 1.9 during Christmas of 2007, but it's just the developer version). You can see benchmarks here:

[http://antoniocangiano.com/2007/02/19/ruby- implementations-s...](http://antoniocangiano.com/2007/02/19/ruby- implementations-shootout-ruby-vs-yarv-vs-jruby-vs-gardens-point-ruby-net-vs- rubinius-vs-cardinal/)

You can also see how 1.9 fares against 1.86 directly in the code shootout:

[http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4sandbox/benchmark.php?t...](http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4sandbox/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=yarv)

Rubinius seems to offer some nice support in terms of running reliable ruby (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubinius>), but in terms of performance and actual usability, it has a long way to go.

<comment><USER8> Parrot ftw. Why should there be so much redundant effort on so many dynamic language VMs? They will all run best on Parrot soon enough. The languages will easily share libraries, too.

<comment><USER4> Or Ruby 1.9 for FTW.sooner, if you are mainly concerned with Ruby.

Or JRuby, FTW.now, as amazing progress is made daily, and I expect that interaction of libraries from other J* languages will be all part of the JVM wonderland.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bulletproof blanket seeks to shield kids during school shootings - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnet.com/news/bulletproof-bodyguard-blanket-designed-to-shield-schoolkids/

<comment><USER2> At $1000 a pop and given the rarity of school shootings, I'm pretty sure there are more cost-effective ways to save lives.

<comment><USER3> More cost effective, I'm sure - and I'd probably approve of those more than this. That being said, decisions are often made with a lot of "gut" feeling. I could see this going in a few very strange directions.</comment></comment>


Yahoo approaches Hulu about possible acquisition - <AUTHOR> http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/2011/06/hulu-receives-unsolicited-acquisition-offer.html <comment><USER2> This is really quite sad. In 1999, Yahoo bought the streaming media company (not just video, but radio/sports/original content/etc) I worked for, broadcast.com. They then proceeded to slowly drive the property into the ground, to where now, there's so little of it left it's pathetic.

If they had really grasped on to what we were doing back then, and ran with it, Yahoo would have come out ahead of YouTube, Google Video, and, I could imagine, many of the current streaming radio players out there now (lastfm, rdio, etc).

But that didn't happen. They silently killed off what they spent so much on to buy.

<comment><USER3> No, they would not have. Nothing Broadcast.com did offered any advantage in creating something like YouTube.

Broadcast.com was almost 10 years ahead of its time and probably would not have survived on its own. Yahoo made one of the worst acquisitions in history and then did the smart thing by cutting their losses.

Until around 2005 (when Flash Player 7 implemented progressive streaming) there was no good way to stream video on the internet and not enough users with broadband to build a big business around it.

YouTube was created at exactly the right moment, by a startup, which is how it would have happened regardless of what Yahoo did.

<comment><USER4> 4 paragraphs:

1a) i dont know, but I'm sure some of these other points aren't right

1b) true, in the official product offering, but scaffolding was there

2a) false and true (thanks to burn rate and earlier assertion being false)

2b) true (price required plan not supported after purchase) and true

3a) false (multibitrate Windows Media was fantastic with a great video and audio codec, while Flash was plain bad till H.264), and in the years you say there wasn't demand, we built a similar business that routinely helped customers reach hundreds of thousands or even millions of viewers at a profit for them and a profit for us.

4a) YouTube (non-essential/comedy/ugc content being perfect for a ubiquitous animation player supporting a crappy codec via pseudostreaming) isn't Hulu, and isn't Broadcast.com. Hulu secured content users want to pay for.

Yahoo needs users' attention.

<comment><USER3> You could browse the web on a mobile phone before the iPhone too...

Windows Media was horrible from a end-user UX perspective (not well integrated into browsers, differences across OSes/browsers, version/codec issues) and required special server software.

RTMP streaming over Flash Communication Server was great on end-user UX but still required special server software.

Real Video/QuickTime sucked on both sides.

There's a world of difference between something being technically possible and being good enough to cause widespread adoption.

There were many streaming businesses that saw small scale success (like Broadcast.com) before Flash 7 was released. Just like there were some fairly successful business built selling Java games on flip phones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is Hulu even an acquisition target at _any_ reasonable price? I always felt the media co backers of Hulu(Viacom, Time Warner etc.) want to keep it independent and use it more to progress their corporate cause than make a return by selling Hulu.

I'd put Hulu as one of the least likely companies to be acquired.

</comment><comment><USER6> I haven't really loved Hulu, in fact just today I canceled my premium free trial with them... but they don't deserve _that!_ Nobody deserves death-by- acquisition-by-Yahoo.

</comment><comment><USER7> I read the title and half expected an article about Yahoo! asking Hulu to save them.

<comment><USER8> That was the first thing that crossed my mind when I saw the article. Yahoo. . . buying something huge? Is the world ending?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This can only end badly with AOL acquiring Hulu and running 10+ minutes of ads per 23 min show.

Yes I realize this is about Yahoo but I don't think they can afford it.

</comment><comment><USER10> Does anyone else think Hulu would be a good acquisition for Google, especially now that they have Google TV? It would've been better if they bought Netflix a while ago, but Hulu seems to be like the next best thing. Plus, it's based on ads and everything.

<comment><USER11> The second Google purchases Hulu, the site's content licenses will be revoked by All the providers and they'll demand a renegotiation of far more favorible deal.

Hulu was only able to stay afloat because it was backed by FOX NBC and Disney, and got all those shows at a heavily discounted price. The networks were very cautious to not create an iTunes for TV that would grow to be too big to control, they use very restrictive and short term content license to ensure that.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It seems like Yahoo has decided to bet on their Connected TV brand, with this bid for hulu and recent acquisition of IntoNow makes it pretty clear. This may be a better direction for their display ad business instead of generic internet services.

</comment><comment><USER12> Yahoo simply isn't going to be able to buy themselves out of the hole they've made. Honestly, I'd be surprised if they could muster an offer that Hulu would find appealing.

</comment><comment><USER13> Well, Hulu comes pre-neglected, so it will fit right in to Yahoo's portfolio management.

</comment><comment><USER14> I personally think Yahoo is Corporate greed at its highest. Nothing good has come from Yahoo management and higher ups. The only good that has come have been from developers. To me personally, I think Yahoo is all about money now. Hulu would make another target to rake in profits and then dismiss or run into the ground like other commentors.

</comment><comment><USER15> As a talent acquisition to get a hold of Jason Kilar, CEO of Hulu, I'd love to see this happen.

Kilar gets online media, gets working with the content providers, gets ad driven content businesses.

<comment><USER4> What did Yahoo do with Stewart Butterfield?

Look back through "talent" buys... They tend to leave Yahoo more quickly than other buyers like Microsoft or Google.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Am I the only one who doesn't understand why Yahoo is even still around? Since at least three years I have only heard about Yahoo products because they were canceled.

</comment><comment><USER17> Can we have it the other way around?

</comment><comment><USER18> Hulu to buy Yahoo? Impressive.

</comment><comment><USER19> If Yahoo acquires Hulu, does that mean it will come to Canada? Pleasee!!!

<comment><USER20> I'm in Toronto and watch Hulu/Netflix US all the time. You need a VPN service. StrongVPN is $7/month. Worth it if you're exploring cutting the cable from Rogers/Bell/Telus.

<comment><USER21> If you have a server in the US (any very cheap hosting--I think even shared hosting--should work), you can also just do SSH tunneling.</comment></comment></comment>


Google says Chrome isn't killing ad blockers - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnet.com/news/google-says-chrome-isnt-killing-ad-blockers-its-making-them-safer/ <comment><USER2> After a lot of heat was applied, Google backed off and acted like the world misunderstood their intent. But they sure tried. Meanwhile, Mozilla increased the default privacy level of Firefox.

Which sounds more trustworthy?

<comment><USER3> Google initially claimed that thus was to remove the need for add blockers to have to see the web request in order to operate.

They proposed an API that was like safari where the block lists are handled by a pattern match inside the browser rather then running a js script.

They made this announcement increasing the number of patterns that can be matched however the API remains the same.

Now it could be that google is trying to undermine add blockers in order cement its power. However this argues agaist it. Since the list is limited and google is the largest provider of adds if there are insufficent patterns then blocking google ads would result in googles rivels not being blocked.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I will believe on that when they allow extensions on Chrome for Android ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)</comment>


Unreal Engine 4.20 Released - <AUTHOR> https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/unreal-engine-4-20-released <comment><USER2> I don't understand how they ship this many new features in one patch. Amazing work.

<comment><USER3> It looks like Epics work on Fortnite is paying dividends with Unreal Engine - access to 1st-party data from running one of the most successful multiplayer games in history is a gold mine of optimization opportunity. Fantastic that everyone else (developers that license the engine + all the gamers) get to benefit from all of this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Lots of fixes built for Fortnite and none (that I can tell) built for PUBG...

<comment><USER5> Fixes and improvements may be implemented because of a particular game, but they are not exclusive to that game.

The fixes and improvements made because of FNBR are available to be used by any Unreal licensee.

<comment><USER4> I didn't make my point... Fortnite is driving the engine at this point, PUBG was there first and was massive but has, at this point, ceded to Fortnite.

PUBG should be a cautionary tale not just for gaming but for first movers, in general.

<comment><USER6> How so? PUBG has made billions of dollars, and sold 50 million copies[1]. Seems like they did pretty well to me...

EDIT: and the reason fortnite is doing (comparatively) better is that it's free.

1: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best- selling_video_gam...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best- selling_video_games)

<comment><USER3> Fortnite isn't doing so bad - it made $300MM in April alone.

[https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/24/17390004/fortnite- battle-...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/24/17390004/fortnite-battle- royale-money-made-revenue-300-million-april-2018)

<comment><USER6> As I mentioned, fortnite is doing _comparatively_ better. But that's because of a different business model (paid vs f2p+microtransactions).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This version is _blazing_ fast!</comment>