21% of Android devices are now running ICS - <AUTHOR> http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html <comment><USER2> So one year after ICS came out and about three months after ICS' successor came out, there's finally 21% of the devices running a now outdated version of Android?

And we are celebrating that?

Google really needs to find a solution to get these devices updated independently from the manufacturers which are only interested in selling new devices.

It's very frustrating for developers to see more and more features being added to the platform that are out of reach for years or require a lot of work to implement in a backwards compatible way (which then also isn't worth the effort because nobody is running the newer versions)

<comment><USER3> "Google really needs to find a solution to get these devices updated independently from the manufacturers which are only interested in selling new devices."

Why? I mean I'm sure Google would love faster updates from their partners and I think going forward they've decided to share their roadmaps with more then the current nexus partner which should help but:

(1) At the end of the day Android is doing gangbusters even with slow updates.

(2) There's a distinct line of devices that should get fast updates if that's a killer feature for you.

(3) The whole point of Android is they don't all have to do anything.

<comment><USER4> Why ? Because most Android users don't like the fact that their devices are basically abandoned the minute they are purchased.

It is by far the number one problem with the platform at the moment. And frankly the idea that Google should do nothing about addressing Android's biggest flaw is pretty dumb.

<comment><USER5> Actually, most Android users (scratch that, most cellphone users) do not care about updates at all. I've seen "normal users" with notification icon about update available and what they do? Ignore it. (To add, in Sony Ericsson's case, the notification is non-dismissable. Their biggest concern was, how to make it disappear. They didn't want to run the update; "the current software is fine").

<comment><USER4> Your argument is simply not true. iOS users regularly update as we've seen time and time again. Windows users regularly update. OSX users regularly update.

What makes Android users so different ?

<comment><USER5> Only iOS users regularly update. Windows Phone was also sold only to enthusiasts, who had to update to Mango, as the platform matured. Other cellphone platforms users do not update, even if they can. In some cases, they cannot and they are used to that (e.g. Symbian).

Windows and OSX are desktop systems, and not all of their owners update. Witness the prevalence of XP and 10.5 in the wild.

<comment><USER3> If memory serves me correctly there's a decent sized pool of iOS users that never hooked up their phone to the computer and so haven't gotten any updates since they bought pre-OTA.

Going by wikipedia's usage share of web browsers maybe I'll say 15%+?

<comment><USER5> You are right, when taking anectodes into account, I have such users around me.

Even those, who are capable of OTA updates, they often don't (if your monthly limit is 1GB of data, you are not going to burn it on update).

It may be difficult to accept on HN, but really, mainstream users do not care about firmware updates. It is actually net negative for them. They have a device they are using and the update changes the behavior, that they are used to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm only buying nexus devices from now on unless a manufacturer gives a guarantee on update delay and life of phone (or at least establishes a good track record)

As much as I love my Samsung devices, really got burned by those updates

<comment><USER7> Virtually all the Galaxy S/2/III phones are supported by cyanogenmod. Reflashing a phone is scary and weird when you do it the first time, but it's really not hard and the community support is quite good.

If you're at the point, as a technical user, where OS flexibility is more important to you than the device choice, then it's probably worth your time to puzzle out the process.

<comment><USER8> If he's getting a nexus only (like me) I suppose that means he always wants the latest version of the OS. Cyanogenmod doesn't solve the problem because they're always behind. By the time CM has stable builds for J, my phone will be on K.

If you want a phone with the latest version of the OS, then CM is a bandage, not a solution. The only solution is buying only nexuses.

<comment><USER9> > Cyanogenmod doesn't solve the problem because they're always behind. By the > time CM has stable builds for J, my phone will be on K.

That depends on how you look at it. It's only an issue for me if the phone is _never_ updated. It's fine if I'm lagging behind by a version, as long as I receive an update before I end up 2 versions behind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm an Android advocate, but I'm also a glass-half-empty-you're-going-to-die- of-thirst kinda guy at times. For example at times like this, when I read that 21% have ICS, I want to shit all over Google's Android team for not having the sense to know this was going to be a problem. I mean ICS is still a release behind state of the art. I know Google has business PhDs, can't they lend them to the Android team for a bit. "Root and load your own rom" is not an acceptable answer for the user who has to be explained both what a rom is and what rooting is.

<comment><USER11> What would you suggest as a solution? This isn't to suggest it isn't a problem, just that not all problems have viable solutions.

<comment><USER4> Simple. Look at Linux. Look at Windows.

You centralize updates of the core OS and build ABIs/APIs for all of the parts of the system that are needed to be extensible e.g. drivers, libraries, shells etc. This model is proven to work and work well. It just needs Google to show some leadership.

<comment><USER12> I'm sorry, but that's just bullshit.

The Linux / Windows update situation that is most analogous to the carrier- gated smartphone updates is updating OSes inside large companies. It's the same update process - a third party has to certify your update and then the update is incrementally rolled out to a large number of computers.

So how do corporations do with their Windows and Linux updates? Well, I'm using XP and RHEL 5 these days and I don't think my experience is at all atypical...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm also an Android-lover, but this sample is all kinds of skewed -

"based on the number of Android devices that have accessed Google Play within a 14-day period ending on the data collection date " (September 4, 2012)

14-day period? That's a pretty decent way of making sure that the people who have had their phones for a long time (like this guy here with the Droid X) are underrepresented.

<comment><USER8> Why exactly? Maybe you misread it? It's data from people who accessed the store in 14 days, not people who have bought devices in 14 days. If you have an old device but is actively updating apps, then you'll be represented.

They're getting data from devices which accessed the play store, because that's all the data that google has.

<comment><USER14> And even then, I'm pretty sure it's accessing the store in the background without the user opening it up.

Otherwise, how would it know to pop up a notification that app updates are available?

<comment><USER15> then it's still skewed. i have froyo and turn off background stuff to conserve battery. i'm pretty sure many people do this for the same reason.

<comment><USER11> Do you update your apps once a month? Once every few months?

This statistic is published for _developers_ to get an idea of which OS versions they should be supporting based off market share. If you aren't opening the play store to buy apps in the 14-day period, then these developers probably _aren't_ looking to sell to you.

Besides, I doubt most people know how to turn off background activities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm actually quite amazed by the adoption rate of iOS. Before iOS 5.0, it was very very hard for users to upgrade their OS. Android on the other hand is supposed to be easier to upgrade.

There was some statistics last year that shows only 50% of iOS users sync their iOS devices regularly, which means those people went out of their way to go and get the OS update. I still can't believe this fact.

Now that iOS does update over the air, of course more iOS users will update quicker. Especially when the update comes straight from Apple, but the fact that iOS users upgrade their OS very quickly before 5.0 still impressed me.

<comment><USER17> For reference, iOS 5 adoption was 80% at WWDC

<comment><USER18> What percentage was iOS6? Between iOS 5/iOS 6 I would hope that it would be north of 90% at WWDC.

<comment><USER16> iOS 6 is still in beta, it will probably be out to general public sometime this month.

<comment><USER18> Right - I recall reading an article/blog/comment/pundit (Gruber? Marco?) that suggested that their were was a greater percentage of people using IOS 6 than there were Jellybean in the general population, right around the time of WWDC. At WWDC proper - I would expect a sizable percentage of developers were running IOS 6 on their devices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Some Android device owners simply have not choice. Their devices aren't support/capable of running ICS.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm jealous of all the non-verizon Jelly Bean Galaxy Nexuses out there. I had the first official ICS phone in the USA but Verizon has really hindered its potential.

</comment><comment><USER21> You can read this stat in two ways: 1. wow how tech savvy android users are OR 2. totally skewed stat, user never upgraded, they maynot even know.

<comment><USER12> Given that yesterday Google said Android had reached 480 million devices, we have the following (overestimates because some devices are no longer in service, but still):

Cupcake: ~ 1 million

Donut: ~ 2 million

Eclair: ~ 18 million

Froyo: ~ 67 million

Gingerbread: ~ 276 million

Honeycomb: ~ 10 million

Ice Cream Sandwich: ~ 100 million

Jelly Bean: ~ 6 million

<comment><AUTHOR> So we have 100 million ICS devices out there? Suddenly, it doesn't sound so bad.

<comment><USER12> Yeah. AFAIK, ICS + Jelly Bean by themselves are bigger than every mobile platform out there except for:

\- Symbian

\- Gingerbread by itself

\- iOS as a whole

\- Android as a whole</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to Overcome Patent Rejections Based on the Alice Decision - <AUTHOR> http://www.greyb.com/rejections-based-on-the-alice-decision/ <comment><USER2> This is the evil side talking.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah you can say so. But you know the way USPTO is rejecting patents on the basis of Examiner's subjective examination is even more evil.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How does Google select text for header/subheader of search results? - <AUTHOR>

I can't think of a better way to word this. When you search google and results appear, where does google get the text for the header and subheader? Is it just the first text from the page? <comment><USER2> It used to be the case that the header and sub-header's were created from <h1> and <h2> tags on your website. That is why it is advised to only have one <h1> per page. I'm unsure whether or not that is still the case. Google are constantly changing how they display and rank results.

I would advise doing some research into search engine optimisation(SEO).

</comment><comment><USER3> The link text is usually from the page's <title> element. The text in black following is sometimes taken from the page's <meta name=description>, and sometimes from text on the page Google feels is relevant.

I think that is what you mean by "header" and "subheader"; if not, please clarify.</comment>


Take the Work Can Wait Pledge - <AUTHOR> https://basecamp.com/3/work-can-wait/pledge <comment><USER2> I can't get this through to my own _brother._

First-off, a work/life balance is important for work. Overworked people make bad decisions (most recently, brother in question _copied_ a git repository instead of asking me how to approach it). I see it all the time with others who overwork themselves - a bad night of sleep and I'm as bewildered as everyone around me. A good night's sleep and I wonder why everyone else is so slow.

I think it's a vicious cycle. A few days of overworking and you no longer have the mental capacity to realize what it is that you are doing to yourself. I've talked to people about this, all are belligerent about being completely fine. They're _not._ A coworker came back from leave today and pulled off a presentation with one day's notice of calibre that I do not expect of him - like others he burns both ends of the candle.

Off my chest: all the while I'm looking like the slacker, the guy who's not a team player - but the truth is that I've read far further into the situation and have solved more than 50% of the problems that my team faces. I have no idea what to do.

<comment><USER3> I'm an hourly employee. Whenever the prospect of OT comes up for me I shoot it right down. People can't fathom why I don't want "more money". My life's worth more to me than their overtime. I don think that makes me a bad person nor bad worker. I work as hard as I do (and I do a great job) precisely because I honor the line between work and personal time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Vanilla Basecamp 2 emails me every sunday night, and every morning before I get into the office. I changed email settings.. but maybe your product offering should walk the walk too.</comment>


Help Us Avoid .COM Price Increases - <AUTHOR> https://links.namecheap.com/e/evib?_t=9a766a4fa5294d089b01463bac20344b&_m=7e71025bc7b244e580c390a88144b465&_e=nhkV1gghlm1LvemqeTRfT5go4sTZc2G08tqcysYaTAZ_tn8DJsPtJ2AN0UyKmuaeMGrNuIqV842bIjS8_PJng5tuxO3uEs1u6dZ8DHvbslDuyRxJXfhdNoNLd7871cGr <comment><USER2> It's about time for the US Government to intervene and dissolve ICANN and transfer the domain business to Mozilla! Instead of backing a buck of patchwork requests for comments, we should start a Whitehouse petition and ask the government to end this legalized scam!

Everything regarding domains is designed to scam the regular folk and pour money into registrars and domainers!

Imagine you forgot to pay your phone bill, and then all your competitors start bidding, and they get your number in 30 days. This cannot happen in the real world, because it's wrong, but it happens with much more valuable ones (yet cheap in terms of annual cost) - the domains.

All this is designed to steal money from all of us and pour it into the greedy bellies of some of the sketchiest folks in the digital domain - the domainers. I'd say that even the SEO scammers are much more sophisticated and nice than the domainers! Yet, ICANN allows them to exist, and guarantees heir profits!

</comment><comment><USER3> Slightly older thread:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22292348](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22292348)</comment>


Should you be a Specialist or Generalist? Devs, designers, and PMs weigh in - <AUTHOR> http://www.atroundtable.com/designdevelop

<comment><USER2> I've ended up a generalist (mostly by accident) and recently noticed a fairly serious downside: because I tend to move from project to project, technology to technology, I often forget what I've learned, due to lack of re- enforcement. Furthermore, when I have to use an unfamiliar technology, I sometimes find myself doing things in ways are sub-optimal or unidiomatic. ("You mean I could have used a library for that? Damn!") A related problem is that, because technology advances so rapidly, it's difficult to keep up with a number of different fronts simultaneously. So when you go back to a previously used technology after a hiatus, you might now overlook recent advances.

To help with the first problem, I've started using Anki. For the last one I read HN. ;) But these are imperfect, and short of "become a specialist," I have no good answers.</comment>


3 things Microsoft has to prove at its Windows 10 event - <AUTHOR> http://www.itworld.com/article/2872015/3-things-microsoft-has-to-prove-at-its-windows-10-event.html

<comment><USER2> Right now Windows 8.1 has some serious issues.

Got a USB 3.0 issue were unpluging certain devices forces a reset or shutdown. It seems to happen with VIA and Intel USB 3.0 drivers.

Amazon.com sold more Chromebooks than Windows 8.1 devices during Christmas.

I think people are considering buying iPads instead of Microsoft Surface 3 tablets as well.

I've been using the Windows 10 system in a virtual machine for a while now. It changes the way the Start menu works from the way it worked in Windows 7. It runs Modern Apps in a Window instead of the Modern UI screen.

I run Windows 8.1 and the Classic Start Menu software that puts back in the Classic Start Menu, so it looks like the one from Windows 7. So this FOSS software can do what Microsoft refuses to do.

I don't really see Windows 10 doing these three things. I predict another flop as corporations still cling to Windows XP even if Microsoft doesn't support it anymore. I think corporations would rather stick to XP and under and face the security issues of no more patches than buy the modern Windows that changes the way things work and force employees to be retrained.

If I had money, I'd short Microsoft stock, this is going to hurt them a lot.

Still if the Windows 10 Pro upgrade is only $40 like the Windows 8 Pro upgrade was, I'd buy it just to have it so when 10.1 comes out that fixes issues I can upgrade.</comment>


Why Prediction Is the Essence of Intelligence - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/inventing-intelligent-machines/prediction-is-the-essence-of-intelligence-42c786c3e5a9 <comment><USER2> "If your roadmap is rooted in prediction as the essence, the law of the hammer dictates that it's a prediction problem. And when cast in prescriptive terms to an adoring industry, the question is no longer questioned. It becomes truth. Prediction is the essence of intelligence. And it will remain so until a more dominant technology teaches us otherwise."

This was an excellent morning read. Thank you. I especially liked the quote above. What is interesting/ironic is that while we have these incredibly sophisticated machines (human brains) at our constant disposal, we just can't seem to get as excited about innovative learning models for them. We are more intrigued by the shiny, so we put nearly all our resources there, even though overdue revelation there could drive better AI research, or at least create better researchers! Even though we already have the kind of data in Actual Human Intelligence we seek in AI to advance AI further, we ignore this data and turn toward a new machine instead. (hey, I'm fascinated by it too, no disrespect meant-- just observation) So we stick to our old ways, even as those models (for example, our public education systems) show themselves to be costly, resistant to scale, and largely ineffective and underperforming. The other aspect that AI could give us if looked at from a slightly different angle, is the surprising interconnection of idea- I mean ideas that reach through and across domain or subject to reveal stronger, more influential types of knowledge-- a more "poetic" type of understanding that could give rise to novel understanding. It is almost as if we have plateaued, like a young student learning tennis or something, but are addicted to the rapid early states of visible progress, so we change sports so we can get that "high' again. It is as if we are not psychologically ready to pass that plateau and move into a more connection-robust model of education. So, we are now enthralled with machines, because they are (we wrongly surmise) controllable children for now. Thanks for posting this!</comment>


This project won China 2014 State Science and Technology Prize - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/iiordanov/remote-desktop-clients/issues/39 <comment><USER2> Here's the response from the developer: [https://github.com/iiordanov/remote- desktop-clients/issues/3...](https://github.com/iiordanov/remote-desktop- clients/issues/39#issuecomment-72410748)

> I would like to say a great big thanks to all of you for finding this out, > for following this issue, for spreading the word, and for making me aware of > it. It is a great honor my project has won such a prestigious prise > regardless of the circumstances.

> I have written this software for the betterment of everyone and it gives me > great joy that people all over the world are finding out about it and > finding it useful. I am following this discussion with great interest and > once again thank you all!

Everyone else is going nuts with memes and witch hunts, while the developer sits back and is just happy that his software is being used. Unbelievably admirable.

</comment><comment><USER3> This award was given out by the Chinese government...and many Chinese researchers don't think this project deserves the prize and consider it is a shame.

A statement from China Computer Fed (CCF), released a few days after the award was announced, has asked the government to withdraw from the award reviewing process...The original statement has already been censored from CCF's site; and this is what I found in google's cache, which is in Chinese but you could have it translated with google translate...

[http://goo.gl/Jrks9j](http://goo.gl/Jrks9j)

I personally feel the innovation in this state award winning project is nothing fancy...but note in its architecture it requires no hard drive installed on end user's computing devices as one of its highlighted features (although most of the computing are still done at those end points). Anything from kernel image to application data are all stored in and provided by remote data center(s) (which could be, of course, state controlled), and they call it cloud storage...So I feel the act of giving award to this particular project by the Chinese government might be a sign that Chinese government is thinking about bringing up censorship, personal behavior and identity tracking to another level -- if so, then FUCK the Chinese government

<comment><USER4> It reminds me Ma Boyong's novel Silent City, all computers does not have local storage, the network is fast enough to support all users.

<comment><USER5> for those looking for it, it's "The city of silence"

archive.org has a copy [https://web.archive.org/web/20120221185906/http://worldsf.wo...](https://web.archive.org/web/20120221185906/http://worldsf.wordpress.com/2011/11/29/tuesday- fiction-the-city-of-silence-by-ma-boyong/)

and you can buy it here: [http://www.apexbookcompany.com/collections/all- books/product...](http://www.apexbookcompany.com/collections/all- books/products/the-apex-book-of-world-sf-3/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> And a Chinese startup cracked NewRelic to raise over $10m [http://www.v2ex.com/t/125736](http://www.v2ex.com/t/125736) It is in Chinese. Code diff is in the comments. It seems they cracks New Relic's Node.js, Python and Java agents, and raised RMB 70m ($10m+) from Matrix and Chengwei (sounds like a Chinese fund): [http://source.chinaventure.com.cn/show_2_0_19158.html](http://source.chinaventure.com.cn/show_2_0_19158.html).

<comment><USER7> According to the comments from their developer, Python code is written to follow NewsRelic and Java, Ruby, PHP and others are totally written on their own. Apparently they know NewsRelic developers, but they don't have their source code.

<comment><USER6> The screenshots show that at least python, node, and java version looks suspicious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Comments look like a mob lynch. I don't know what commenters expect the author would do, or why he would care.

We've seen stories of chinese corporations blatantly stealing western company technologies and the chinese government doing nothing about it. And here some dude won a national competition on top of OSS and they expect somebody would care?

<comment><USER9> "We've seen stories of chinese corporations blatantly stealing western company technologies and the chinese government doing nothing about it."

Hahaha! The Chinese Government is not "doing nothing about it". The Government is the main supporter of this.

To get their country to the technology level of Western society is their main objective, like it should be natural, politicians looking for the interest of the people they represent. What do you expect? Chinese following the interest of foreigners?

We were working on China and they offered us to pay us double for the detailed plans of the (Western) machine we were building. Of course we said no, so they offered us 5 times. We again said no and they offered us 10 times. Obviously if you accept the offer it will be the last time you sell a machine to them.

If you give them the plans, like you could do with less valuable things, now they will offer you money for a detailed explanation of the plans, as Chinese education is very lacking today.

<comment><USER10> I wonder if their policy on this will discourage innovation from within their country and ultimately harm their progress. I'm not sure that "cheating" is sustainable.

<comment><USER9> On the contrary, I believe it is making their progress extremely fast.

You don't have to wait 20 years in order to use something, like patents force you to do.

You don't need to ask for permission to anyone. You don't need to be rich.

For example if you can read a patent on making a chemical vapor deposition system for making semiconductors and implement it, you just can do it and start making semiconductors right now. They will be very bad quality, but you will improve over time because you are actually doing it, and being so cheap you will sell lots of them.

Of course, when a significant Chinese status quo has been created on all areas of technology, they will start respecting their own Chinese patents.

<comment><USER11> I agree that's the aim. the difficulty is that the country, academics and 'innovators' have been raised on shortcuts, cheating, stealing technology, reverse engineering and generally making functional but often poor quality copies of foreign products. There shouldn't be a great gap between this state of affairs and true innovation, but conceptually it's a million miles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't understand why there are so many spamlike comments, both in Chinese and English (好!支持!有希望了! translates to Good! Support! There is hope!)

And there are so many "Follow this post" comments. What is the context?

<comment><USER13> They are being sarcastic.

In China's media, if some news is defined as "good news", then only comments like "好!支持!有希望了!" are displayed while doubting or opposing views are all deleted.

<comment><USER7> not really. We like to use sarcasm for fun, it doesn't mean the non-sarcastic views will be deleted. ask yourself before giving false information

<comment><USER13> I don't mean "non-sarcastic views will be deleted" at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I thought it was going to be some awesome neural-network based censorship engine.

<comment><USER3> they already have a few (not neural-network though), that can classify encrypted data, such as described in the following paper...

[http://goo.gl/wmSrkw](http://goo.gl/wmSrkw)

And last month they they just integrated the techniques into their state- operated firewall, and then, bingo! it works! as a result many VPN services across the country are down (as reported in a NYT article linked below)

[http://goo.gl/HyvXgF](http://goo.gl/HyvXgF)

Perhaps a white list approach is being used now which would only allow those service providers that are willing to cooperate with the Chinese government to pass the filter...

<comment><USER15> Unshortened links below for reference

[http://security.riit.tsinghua.edu.cn/share/classify_encrypte...](http://security.riit.tsinghua.edu.cn/share/classify_encrypted.pdf)

[http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/30/world/asia/china-clamps- do...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/30/world/asia/china-clamps-down-still- harder-on-internet-access.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The bigest joke in China Internet now.

</comment><comment><USER17> Only in China

</comment><comment><USER18> this is China after all.

<comment><USER19> politically correct consternation in 3.. 2.. 1..

this is the US after all.

<comment><USER20> this is the <\-- insert your country name here --> after all.</comment></comment></comment>


How Toy Story 2 Got Deleted Twice, Once on Accident, Again on Purpose - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/media/2012/05/21/how-pixars-toy-story-2-was-deleted-twice-once-by-technology-and-again-for-its-own-good/ <comment><USER2> I was surprised not to see this mentioned in the front page discussion about the guy who supposedly rm rf'ed his web hosting service [1]

The (amusing and animated) YouTube video link has since been changed: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dhp_20j0Ys](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dhp_20j0Ys)

I like using the Pixar incident when working with students who are programming at the command-line for the first time, as an illustration of how powerful the command-line is (or rather, how much modern systems wrap things in safety layers). The disaster that befell the web-hosting guy was not just one line of code, but other errors and bugs (variables not being set) and overall badly designed systems for automation.

But this Pixar incident, if it happened the way described, is the result of someone with total control and agency who typed in that one line of code and ran it. And they did it to something that is immediately tangible (and beloved) to the average non-programmer. If a professional at Pixar could do something so tragically destructive to something like Toy Story...imagine what you [the novice] could accidentally do.

(thus, please remember to use Tab as much as possible to autocomplete)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11496947](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11496947)</comment>


Show HN: GradeSquare.com - Find and Track your Online Courses - <AUTHOR> http://gradesquare.com/home

<comment><AUTHOR> There has been an explosion of educational resources in the last few months (think MITx, Stanford, Khan Academy etc).

GradeSquare provides the tools to help you find courses and plan your studies more effectively.

Check us out and let us know what you think!

<comment><USER2> I think one of the big missing pieces is the social aspect. One of the big benefits of attending classes in person, is that you get to meet and network with other people with similar interests. It's much more difficult to get a study group, or that same level of social interaction when studying at home. There's room there for innovation and for someone to bring all the independent studiers together.

<comment><AUTHOR> What kind of social interaction were you thinking? Some ideas we have been kicking around are the following:

\- Integration with Twitter/Facebook/Linked In

\- Comments/Tagging/Social Bookmarking on Course pages

\- Chat/Video Chat

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure how much benefit Twitter/Facebook/Linked integration is. For most people, those are already channels they're familiar with and are able to easily reach out to, to find people to learn/study with.

You'll have a big list of people who are taking classes. A feature that suggests people to learn with would be helpful. The big challenge is bringing people together. If I'm studying the same course at the same time as someone I don't know, that doesn't do me much good, but if you can connect us, then you've filled in a big missing piece. I don't know that you need to build tools for that (I can chat, skype, email, etc on my own easy enough, but what I can't do easily is find others taking the same course at the same time).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Ah - it's working now.

Some feedback points (just my feedback - this all could be wrong):

-the "what do you want to learn" input box should be at the top of every page. It drives your core value add more than any of the other stuff.

-The black/white contrast at the top of every page is very distracting and it's difficult to read. The color contrast aside, the header text on your content pages is unnecessarily too big and bold.

The copy needs some work - here are a few suggestions.

-browse by source: "browse by school" would be much more clear way of saying this (I know - some of these places aren't schools, but it drives the point home more clearly for non-technical people who think of source as an obscure reference to a credit in an annotated bibliography).

-clicking "Create a Plan" takes you to the login page, clicking "Start Sharing" takes you to the public plans page. There are disconnects in the language for both of these that might lead to a confusing user experience. You'll want to fix the language/messaging on the homepage buttons or the resulting page to make sure navigation is more consistent.

-I think the "share" section would be better off as "Add" - especially on the web, share has the connotation of somehow being connected to facebook/twitter/social networking. What you mean here by share (correct me if I'm wrong), is "add your own content to our database".

-I'd also rename "plan" to "schedule". Plan also has a connotation of being associated with payments (pricing plans, payment plans, etc). Which is the opposite of what your site is trying to do. Class Schedule is the more consistent term for what you're doing. Your "public plans" page looks like a pricing template at first glance.

Hope that helps - aggregating and organizing free content is an awesome idea that I've been waiting for someone to execute on for a while!

<comment><AUTHOR> Very helpful - thanks for the ideas. We are planning a round of changes in the near future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very cool idea.

Will you be offering a forum or board so people who are taking the same course (or have taken the course) can talk to each other / ask questions?

Also, sign up seems to be down.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm - we have had some signups earlier tonight - Could you try this link directly:

<http://gradesquare.com/signup>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> An internal server error occurred. Please try again later.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup - saw that as well....bit of a jump in traffic overwhelmed the server momentarily. Apologies.

<comment><USER5> > ActiveRecord::StatementInvalid at /home SQLite3::BusyException: database is > locked: select * from plans where published='T' order by created_at limit 6 > file: statement.rb location: step line: 108

You shouldn't be using SQLite for a prod site, it doesn't handle concurrency well, if at all.

Edit: it also seems like you're using WEBrick as web server, again this is not meant for prod. There's plenty of literature on how to serve rails apps in prod. Look it up.

<http://i.imgur.com/cVzAC.png>

<comment><USER6> Don't forget that that stack trace shouldn't be visible! In production you should show a standard 500 error w/o the stack trace. Now people can see your codez. Is the server running in development mode or something?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is this all Khan Academy courses? What would be the point then? I browsed Algebra and 9 pages are only KA courses.

<comment><AUTHOR> No others sources are available - see: <http://gradesquare.com/by_source>

<comment><USER8> I think you mean

"No, others sources are available."

<comment><USER9> "No, money down!"</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why is software created using taxpayers' money not released as Free Software? - <AUTHOR> https://publiccode.eu/ <comment><USER2> So the avionics software used by your fighter jets, the navigation software used by your navies, missile systems and your spy satellites should all be Free Software?

What about software produced as part of a contract with a 3rd party - must the 3rd party surrender all intellectual property rights as part of their contract so that the government is able to release the software as Free Software?

These are just a couple of issues that immediately come to mind, I'm sure there are others but overall I agree with the sentiment: software created using taxpayer's money should be released as Free Software unless doing so would be a threat to national security or initiatives. Even with those exceptions it could eventually be made Free Software once an appropriate time has elapsed.

<comment><USER3> "We want legislation requiring that publicly financed software developed for the __public sector __be made publicly available under a Free and Open Source Software licence "</comment></comment>


Questions to ask before taking a job - <AUTHOR> http://shiyankoh.com/2010/07/12/5qns_before_taking_job/

<comment><USER2> What happened to the person that had this job before me?

It doesn't apply to all positions, but I've asked that a couple of times. When I've asked, it usually flusters the interviewer and they can't give a good answer. That's a bad sign. If it's a quick "his wife took a new job in <city> and he needed to move," that's batter. Today with LinkedIn, there's a good chance that you can find that person and ask them directly.

<comment><USER3> When I interviewed in Microsoft I asked this question. The person who interviewed me honestly said that he was interviewing a replacement for himself: he was leaving because he hated it there.

So yeah, go ahead and ask! You may get surprisingly honest answer :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This site is blocked in China. Anyone want to help with a synopsis? Maybe just a list of the questions.

Mine would be: 1\. Is there healthcare? Which provider? Plan? 2\. If you wanted to change something at the company, how would you go about it? Is there an established process? How are decisions made?

<comment><USER5> They're questions about the people you'll be working with and for - can you learn from them, can you work with them, can you trust them, is the team focussed on 'creating value' (instead of just marking time or playing politics), are they going to take an interest in your growth and development?</comment></comment>


How to Import SQL Server Database - <AUTHOR> http://mrbool.com/how-to-import-sql-server-database/29251

<comment><USER2> Pretty interesting reading, but (hopefully not unhelpfully) quite a few grammatical errors. I know you have access to word because you are importing excel files, so run it through a quick spell check!</comment>


The McRib Effect - <AUTHOR> https://ofdollarsanddata.com/the-mcrib-effect/ <comment><USER2> When I think about how volatile our biggest systems ( finance, politics etc) and how complex they are I first get too confused to understand them, then frustrated, then I lose hope.

Do we just throw stuff at the wall and hope something sticks? Or is it all just a big gamble?

Between all the pollsters, financial forecasts, weather forecasts or even project planning, is it just a game of chance if you are correct in your assumptions and calculations?

</comment><comment><USER3> "One week later you receive another letter from the same firm, but this time they claim a different stock is about to _drop_ in price. You go back to the first letter, and, lo and behold, they were _right_. The stock went _up_ ".

This is a definition of "right" with which I was previously unfamiliar.

<comment><USER4> I don't follow. They said they received:

\- letter A in week one saying stock $A is going up \- letter B in week two that stock $B is going down; OP checks stock $A and it did indeed go up

Etc.

It was a little complex in the wording, but the point was clear IMO.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Whois Privacy for .in Domains - <AUTHOR> I did a lot of searing for a domain registrar and finally finalised on Porkbun and Namecheap. But I found out that Porkbun does not sell .in domains and Namecheap WhoisGuard is not available for .in domains(https://www.namecheap.com/security/whoisguard/).<p>Any alternatives that provide free WHOIS Privacy and SSL for .in domains? <comment><USER2> I don't have a direct source at hand, but I think .in doesn't allow WhoisGuard-type services, so it'll be hard to find a reputable registrar offering it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I did find some domains with no owner info by searching at [https://www.registry.in/whois](https://www.registry.in/whois). Most of them use Godaddy.</comment></comment>


Show HN: One Click Feedback - Simple surveys for email newsletters - <AUTHOR> https://oneclickfeedback.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> I started my own weekly newsletter some months ago. As I was iterating on the newsletter, changing structure, content, design, etc... I felt a lack of feedback from the readers. I encouraged emailing me back, filling a minimal survey, etc. Nevertheless, rates of feedback were extremely low. I did notice that most people who opened my survey, even if it was barebones, did not submit it. I reasoned that any feedback is better than no feedback and a lot of readers are glad to voice their opinion IF it just takes a moment. So I made One Click Feedback.

Although the sample size for my newsletter is small (n≈35 responders), I have noticed that readers from North-America tend to give more positive feedback than the European counterparts. Using more emojis and positive words seems to increase the feedback rate and the average sentiment of the feedback (same content, except that one had a few extra adjectives and positive emojis). I have also seen a bump in CTR and open rates. It might be that readers are curious if their feedback changes something (I think that is unlikely as the feedback is so minimal) or that some bias is in play. (NB I am working with a very small amount of data and these are just my speculations)</comment>


Ask HN: How to create a remote development environment? - <AUTHOR> I have a lot of laptops and desktops that I want to be able program from, and I have found using a repository like Github to be super frustrating. I have a couple of desktops that sit unused at my house that I could install Linux on to make as the development environment, but I have no idea how to make them accessible to the internet, so I can remote into them from anywhere. <comment><USER2> Once you have an SSH server installed, you will need to first disable password-based authentication (this is very important—even if you think you have a strong password, there are bots all over the internet just waiting for the chance).

Then set up port forwarding on your router. To do this, go to your router settings and:

1\. Set up a DHCP reservation for the server. This should be easy enough, but depending on your router you might have to look up the server's MAC address and set it manually.

2\. Set up a port forwarding connection from the router settings. The internal IP should be the one you just reserved, port 22, and the external port should be pretty much anything but 22; I recommend choosing a random number from 10000 to 65535.

3\. Now you can use it anywhere! Look up your public IP ([https://duckduckgo.com/?q=what+is+my+ip&ia=answer](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=what+is+my+ip&ia=answer)) from your home network, and SSH into it like this:

        ssh <username>@<public ip> -p <external port>

Last thing you need to do is set up the server with whatever stuff you want—gitlab or gogs for a github replacement, or anything really.

You can then access port 80 of the server securely with

        ssh <username>@<public ip> -p <external port> -L <some port>:localhost:80

and go to localhost:<some port>/ in your browser while that session is open. Don't forward port 80 to another external port on your router because it will all go over the internet (not just your home network) in plain text.

<comment><USER3> You should also look in your router config to see if it supports any dynamic DNS services. If it does, then you can register a domain name with most any domain registrar, get an account with the dynamic DNS service, and configure the domain registrar to use the dynamic DNS service's NameServers for your domain.

I've glossed over the details quite a bit; the dynamic DNS service will probably have more detailed documentation. But basically what you're setting up is:

1\. Your router will determine its public IP regularly, and tell the dynamic DNS service what it is.

2\. The dynamic DNS service will update the mapping from your domain name to the correct IP address.

3\. You'll be able to use your domain name instead of the IP address in the ssh command. Very handy if your IP changes when you're not at home, and can't look up your public IP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [https://burrow.io/](https://burrow.io/)

</comment><comment><USER5> openssh-server will allow you to connect to the computers from anywhere. This will give you command line access, from there you can do anything.

</comment><comment><USER6> Use docker.</comment>


Show HN: My first solo business, Order Happy, buy and sell online - <AUTHOR> https://orderhappy.uk/ <comment><USER2> Seems like a cool concept. Hope that everything goes well for you, looking forward to seeing more places local to me

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you means a lot!! Hopefully soon there will be more places in your area</comment></comment>


Meltdown, aka "Dear Intel, you suck" - <AUTHOR> https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=151521435721902&w=2 <comment><USER2> Is it the right time to call out the fundamental wrongness of Intel(/Apple/Microsoft/etc) outrage narratives?

I mean I get it: large corporations (1) don't necessarily have my interests at heart; (2) are not able to perfectly execute (on extremely large and complicated) products and systems.

um. This is as radical as taking a stand that the sun sets in the west.

I like HN because of the _promise_ that people think _just a little bit_ before just typing something that strokes their feelz-good neurons. Yet, here we are on the front page with "In tel suxxx!" (and "Apple suxxx! in the htop thread, etc., etc. etc.)

 _sigh_ I guess it's inevitable.

People just don't like paying for intangible things, so the only way to pay for the internet is clickz/eyeballz. And OUTRGE! clickz/eyeballz are the cheapest and easiest.

I know, I know. There was a bug from vendor X that really irked/irks you and it feelz good to express your outrage.

I just wish there was just some corner of the internet where this wasn't the dominant trend and I had hoped it was here on HN. Well, at least reddit has extremely cute dog and kitten videos, and some chuckle-memes.

<comment><USER3> The three big BSDs aren't exactly obscure, they might not have the highest server market share compared to windows and linux but they are the next on the list and often a primary choice for a variety of companies critical infrastructure, the most commonly sighted example these days is netflix.

I think the outrage is justified.

<comment> hah-muh-rabbi Don't mistake this as OpenBSD's concern for all BSD's. This is just OpenBSD rant because they isolated themselves by not respecting embargoes in the past. Some ARM CPU's are also vulnerable by the way.

<comment><USER3> That's an interesting point RE OpenBSD, especially if FreeBSD and NetBSD were included (which I do not know), I suspect this was just down to plain irresponsible incompetence though.

...I've no idea what your ARM comment has to do with it though. Meltdown is Intel specific.

A relevant question however might be who coordinated the work between june 2017 and now for Meltdown mitigations? Project zero at google discovered it, but did they hand over the responsibility to Intel or decide who else to inform themselves?

<comment><USER4> Has FreedBSD/NetBSD made a statement. I know DragonFly has a patch on master.

It's an odd world where Linux is in the "big three" and the BSD counterparts are more on the fringe. It's a far cry from the early world of the 2000s.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't understand the Intel hate. It's not like their engineers are dumb or lazy. This exploit is very hard to imagine before now. And it's there because chip makers were trying to wring out more performance. It's unfortunate if anythig.

<comment><USER6> From my perspective: I've been singing Intel's praises for the last decade as they regularly (for my own tests/usage) beat out AMD in performance, clock for clock if not dollar for dollar.

With this recent news, I feel like part of the reason that Intel has been doing so well is that they have been _cheating_.

<comment><USER7> Clock speed has been an awful metric for 2 decades now (except for within a single CPU model series).

All processors (including AMD/ARM) since the early 90's have been using instruction pipelining. It's a universal performance improvement, not Intel cheating.

<comment><USER8> Intel get drastically more _instructions per clock cycle_ than anyone else, which is a very useful metric. Intel processors still dominate in single- threaded workflows. Meltdown makes that performance advantage look slightly suspect - Intel might be cutting corners to squeeze out extra IPC at the expense of security, reliability or accuracy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hi I'm a mostly average Linux user just now learning about these hardware vulnerabilities as I'm planning on building a new computer. What new processor should I buy that has the best chance of being safe when all this dust clears? I first posted this question on a thread about Intel ME. Have processors always been this tricky security-wise or are these low level exploits we're finding a recent phenomena?

<comment> m-p-3 You could go with AMD which is seemingly immune to Meltdown, but apparently someone already found a security flaw with their PSP (aka their own Intel ME).

<comment><USER10> If you need security and it doesn't need to be fast, use a raspberry pi.

No ME, no PSP, no meltdown, and no spectre.

<comment><USER11> The firmware driving the VC4 on an RPi is non-free and closed, and the VC4 runs with greater privilege than the ARM core, with access to all the RAM. This firmware may not have security bugs like the ME and the PSP have had, and it may not contain a backdoor that we know of, but technically there's nothing stopping it from having one without anyone in the public knowing it.

Still, no Meltdown and no Spectre on any RPi

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Personally, I do find it....amusing? that public announcements were moved up > after the issue was deduced from development discussions and commits to a > different open source OS project. Aren't we all glad that this was under > embargo and strongly believe in the future value of embargoes?

This is a bogus criticism. The issue was successfully embargoed for something like six months(!) before being published a week early.

</comment><comment><USER13> Meanwhile I have seen nothing from QNX or Integrity...

<comment><USER14> I wonder to what extent QNX would be affected. It all depends on whether or not they map their micro kernel into the same address space as the application, for a micro kernel there is absolutely no reason to do that, the only things you might want to re-map are the message buffers and that can be done with some page table trickery.

<comment><USER15> QNX does map it's kernel onto high end of user VM space.

Due to how i386 TLB works (ie. no ASID) doing that is essentially required to get reasonable performance, micro kernel or not.

<comment><USER16> If the kernel has no sensitive state (believable for a microkernel), what matters is whether it maps the physical memory in its kernel space.

<comment><USER15> QNX 6.5 apparently maps first 256MB of physical memory into kernel space at fixed location. Also I believe that QNX's kernel memory contains region that maps to pages of user space memory of other processes (as part of the message passing mechanism, but I'm not exactly sure that I understand correctly how it actually works).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> google cache: [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jqSuv7...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jqSuv7U6AjAJ:https://marc.info/%3Fl%3Dopenbsd- tech%26m%3D151521435721902%26w%3D2+&cd=1&hl=de&ct=clnk&gl=de)

<comment><USER18> Cleaner IPFS link: [https://www.eternum.io/ipfs/QmQU1bCPsg7VY5puKqH6wZfAv1ZWBteK...](https://www.eternum.io/ipfs/QmQU1bCPsg7VY5puKqH6wZfAv1ZWBteKTCgHRKzmVGodBV/)

By the way, here's a short script that will download a (full) page with wget, add it to IPFS (if you have a running daemon) and copy the Eternum link to clipboard:

[https://www.pastery.net/zxkzkc/](https://www.pastery.net/zxkzkc/)

<comment><USER19> I love how that link just completely times out.

<comment><USER18> Works just fine for me? Which link?

<comment><USER20> The link [1] that you posted does not load for me either. I get Cloudflare's Error 504 Gateway time-out.

[1]: [https://www.eternum.io/ipfs/QmQU1bCPsg7VY5puKqH6wZfAv1ZWBteK...](https://www.eternum.io/ipfs/QmQU1bCPsg7VY5puKqH6wZfAv1ZWBteKTCgHRKzmVGodBV/)

<comment><USER18> Hmm yeah, it's doing that for me now too. I'm afraid the IPFS node is a bit unstable, I've restarted it and hopefully it'll work better, thanks.

Any other IPFS node will work just as well, such as [https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmQU1bCPsg7VY5puKqH6wZfAv1ZWBteKTCgHRKz...](https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmQU1bCPsg7VY5puKqH6wZfAv1ZWBteKTCgHRKzmVGodBV/).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> May be time for OpenBSD people ( if they have the resources ) to build a CPU from ground up with RISC-V?

<comment><USER22> OpenBSD has struggled at times to pay their power bills. They don't have the resources to branch off into building new hardware from first principles.

<comment><USER23> Hopefully there are some tech savvy new crypto millionaires that are willing to help contribute to worthy projects such as this.

<comment><USER24> Yea, why don't you start?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Is there not some sort of OS embargo consortium that could be created to resolve this?

<comment><USER26> they previously broke the KRACK embargo (among others): [https://lobste.rs/s/dwzplh/krack_attacks_breaking_wpa2#c_pbh...](https://lobste.rs/s/dwzplh/krack_attacks_breaking_wpa2#c_pbhnfz)

it's no surprise they're not high up on the list of important people to tell

<comment><USER27> He told them they could go ahead, he then regretted it but that's not OpenBSD's fault.

From [https://www.krackattacks.com/#openbsd](https://www.krackattacks.com/#openbsd) :

 _> As a compromise, I allowed them to silently patch the vulnerability._

Receiving permission to patch is the opposite of breaking an embargo.

<comment><USER28> And it continues:

> As a compromise, I allowed them to silently patch the vulnerability. In > hindsight this was a bad decision, since others might rediscover the > vulnerability by inspecting their silent patch. To avoid this problem in the > future, OpenBSD will now receive vulnerability notifications closer to the > end of an embargo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Duplicate at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16084670](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16084670)

<comment><USER30> This one has already more upvotes

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Why you single intel on this, ARM and POWER also affected

[https://www.ibm.com/blogs/psirt/potential-impact- processors-...](https://www.ibm.com/blogs/psirt/potential-impact-processors- power-family/)

<comment><USER32> Everyone is affected by Spectre, but my understanding is that Meltdown is a particularly powerful "version" of Spectre that only affects Intel CPUs ?

<comment><USER33> My ELI5 attempt:

There are 3 vulnerabilities.

Meltdown is 1 of the 3. Meltdown is pretty much Intel only. Some ARM SoCs are also affected, but these are relatively rare. AMD64 is unaffected by Meltdown.

Spectre are the other 2 vulnerabilities. Spectre affects pretty much everyone.

Meltdown is more severe, and more of a blunder.

For a technical explanation, see [1]. Was recently referred to at HN as well.

[1] [https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/why-raspberry-pi-isnt- vulne...](https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/why-raspberry-pi-isnt-vulnerable- to-spectre-or-meltdown/)

<comment><USER34> Do you have any source on why AMD64 is unaffected? The paper only mentions that they couldn't make their current approach work on AMD, but it doesn't rule out that it could be improved and made work

<comment><USER35> AMD's microarchitecture does not perform speculative loads that would cause a segfault, according to this AMD engineer:

[https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/12/27/2](https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/12/27/2)

<comment><USER34> > We also tried to reproduce the Meltdown bug on several ARM and AMD CPUs. > However, we did not manage to successfully leak kernel memory with the > attack de- scribed in Section 5, neither on ARM nor on AMD. The reasons for > this can be manifold. First of all, our im- plementation might simply be too > slow and a more opti- mized version might succeed. For instance, a more > shal- low out-of-order execution pipeline could tip the race condition > towards against the data leakage. Similarly, if the processor lacks certain > features, e.g., no re-order buffer, our current implementation might not be > able to leak data. However, for both ARM and AMD, the toy example as > described in Section 3 works reliably, indi- cating that out-of-order > execution generally occurs and instructions past illegal memory accesses are > also per- formed.

From the Meltdown paper[0] section 6.4 it would seem that out of order execution referencing illegal memory locations still occurs unless of course I'm misunderstanding something.

0: [https://meltdownattack.com/meltdown.pdf](https://meltdownattack.com/meltdown.pdf)

<comment><USER36> The section 3 toy example is demonstrating that OOO execution can cause instructions after a faulting instruction to be speculatively executed, but in that example the subsequent instructions do not depend on the result of the faulting instruction.

AMD's claim is that the result of the faulting instruction can never end up affecting a later speculated instruction - ie, for Intel the bad access says "here's the value you asked for" and later says "actually you don't have permission, forget you saw that". For AMD the bad access says "you don't have permission, so no result available"

<comment><USER34> Thanks for the explanation. So it's down to when the access check is performed. I wonder why Intel did it the way they did, performance maybe?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A new beta of Google Chrome for Mac - with extensions and more - <AUTHOR> http://chrome.blogspot.com/2010/02/new-beta-of-google-chrome-for-mac-with.html <comment><USER2> Finally I should be able to install a Flash blocker and try using it as my main browser!</comment>


Machinery: An asynchronous task/job queue for Golang - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/RichardKnop/machinery <comment><USER2> Looks like a good start, but from a quick glance it is missing some Go idioms. Some cursory recommendations:

\- No Makefile please, this project's build process isn't yet complicated enough to warrant one.

\- Rename the App type something more descriptive like Server

\- Rename InitApp to NewApp (NewXXX is an idiomatic Go constructor). Likewise with InitWorker

\- Make NewWorker a method of an App

\- Isolate the AMQPConnection into another library and use the design pattern in database/sql to allow users to create their own implementations of brokers

\- Do whatever you can to avoid empty interfaces (aka interface{}). You may have to be clever, but really avoid these at all costs. Using them basically mentions you'll have to sprinkle type assertions everywhere in the code rather than maybe having one place where you unmarshal values.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much for advice. Yes, I agree empty interfaces{} are a bad way of approaching this.

I am thinking of using reflection in order to achieve this. I will need to think of some clever way to describe the types in the message so I can then use reflection to unpack JSON into proper types and pass them to a task (without making the API too overcomplicated). I will try to do this over next couple of weekends. Hopefully I can come up with some clever and clean API.

Isolating AMQPConnection is also a great idea, I am planning to support multiple brokers (Redis, database etc) in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Great ! I was just starting today to think about how something like that could be done in golang.

I think a full example should involve the client part as well ( in order to remain typed along the chain, and have the json format describing the task an implementation detail).

Edit : i didn't read properly, the readme also describes how a task is created. I didn't expect it to use a low level format though. Why not relying directly on the type of the task ( "AddTask") rather than asking for a "add" string parameter ?

<comment><AUTHOR> There is a very basic client implementation of client in examples/send/send.go.

This is a very early stage project though. I agree that some parts of the API might need to be rethought and other approaches considered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This looks pretty interesting! We use a library we've built called relay ([https://github.com/armon/relay](https://github.com/armon/relay)) to do something similar also in Go.

I like the higher level task based approach of this library, since this is a pretty common pattern when using task brokers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks very interesting. I will look over the code in next couple of days :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> How is this different from a simple async processing queue with Kafka?

</comment><comment><USER6> Badly titled. This is not an official library.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sorry. I changed the title.</comment></comment>


The simplest C++ Tic Tac Toe (x and 0) game ever - <AUTHOR> http://www.codingmix.com/2010/07/simples-cplusplus-tic-tac-toe-game-ever_24.html

<comment><USER2> This is interesting for its definition of "simple". While it is built from only simple building blocks, it is written in a way that I find very hard to read. It's easy to follow with the comments, but without them, would you be able to quickly find out what the code does and whether it is correct? I think actually using abstractions (like functions, arrays (which are used in v2)) would make this even simpler, or at least easier to understand. Nobody would argue that a Tic Tac Toe game made only from NAND gates would be simple (to make or to understand).</comment>


Medieval fantasy city generator - <AUTHOR> https://watabou.itch.io/medieval-fantasy-city-generator <comment><USER2> Interesting, but the shapes are weird. Shouldn't most houses be rectangular ?

<comment><USER3> I agree. Perhaps not enforce that all houses are perfectly rectangular, but try to avoid very pointy triangular houses.

Also, some houses are completely inside blocks, they are not connected to streets or alleys. Is this realistic?</comment></comment>


The Best Investment Advice You'll Never Get (2008) - <AUTHOR> http://www.modernluxury.com/san-francisco/story/the-best-investment-advice-youll-never-get <comment><USER2> Of course, choosing stocks/index funds/mutual funds/hedge funds/asset allocation/tilt/tax-minimization/etc all only come into play after everything else is in order.

I refer most people who ask to Dilbert's 9-Point Plan, which Scott Adams originally published in 2002 but has been reproduced many times all over the Internet eg

[https://retirementplans.vanguard.com/VGApp/pe/PubVgiNews?Art...](https://retirementplans.vanguard.com/VGApp/pe/PubVgiNews?ArticleName=DilbertGuidetoPersonalFinance)

If you can't click through, here's the list:

Everything you need to know about financial planning

1\. Make a will.

2\. Pay off your credit cards.

3\. Get term life insurance if you have a family to support.

4\. Fund your 401(k) to the maximum.

5\. Fund your IRA to the maximum.

6\. Buy a house if you want to live in a house and you can afford it.

7\. Put six months' expenses in a money market fund.

8\. Take whatever money is left over and invest 70% in a stock index fund and 30% in a bond fund through any discount broker and never touch it until retirement.

9\. If any of this confuses you, or you have something special going on (retirement, college planning, tax issues) hire a fee-based financial planner, not one who charges a percentage of your portfolio.

"What to invest in" is only answered in #8, which you shouldn't even think about until you've worked through the previous 7 steps. Yes, write that damn will already!

<comment><USER3> Naive question: why is a will so important?

<comment><USER2> If you have kids then you get to specify somewhat how you want them to be raised.

Regardless, it is believed that you owe it to the people you leave behind to be clear with your intentions. People dying intestate is a massive drain on society, and it often brings out the worst in people.

Of course, the opposing argument is "yeah but I'll be dead so what do I care?" and to be honest it's hard to argue with this.

If I may give a couple of my own personal reasons:

1) It's not that hard. My first one was written at a "Will Writing Party" where no-one had kids, so we all just either left everything to our partner or to be divided up among our siblings. One guy had neither so his estate was bequeathed to his parents, and if they were no longer alive to everyone in attendance at the party (except one poor person who was to be the witness and therefore excluded from being recipient to the estate). For most of us the will we wrote at that party served us until we married.

2) It forces you to think about "the end." Stephen Covey first highlighted the importance of "beginning with the end in mind," and it's something that everyone just puts out of their mind as long as they are able.

Also in my case, I married someone for their child-raising skills rather than their ability to climb the corporate ladder (not that these are mutually exclusive), and sitting down to rewrite a will forced me to think about the added cost of term life insurance because I was taking her prime marrying years from her, and I don't want to leave her unable to remarry and only suited for unskilled labor with no cushion. My wife is also a basket case with investments so you can have some say in that regard too.

3) It forms evidence if you have to show proof of your commitment to someone. In my case our respective wills formed part of the evidence when applying for my wife's visa.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Assuming you believe the underlying assumptions (and they very well may not be true), modern portfolio theory allows you to build a mathematically ideal portfolio for a given amount of risk.

The math behind MPT might be hand waved as followed: goal seek a maximum portfolio return by combining assets with minimal correlation under a fixed risk scenario. In the end, you will have portfolio that will give you the maximum theoretical return for your selected amount of risk.

In practice, outside of running a hedge fund, or a mutual fund with explicit investment guidelines (e.g. we invest in emerging market energy companies), a responsible asset manager has no choice but to follow MPT. In other words, if you are not a specialized fund, there is no mathematical justification for deviating from an MPT constructed portfolio. By definition, _any_ deviation from a MPT balanced portfolio means you have either a) taken on more risk than necessary or b) reduced your potential return or c) do not believe in the underlying assumptions of MPT.

So what is the amateur person worth $25M to do today? As with all things, you should seek professional advice. There are many nuances of tax efficiency, estate efficiency, asset protection, personal needs, etc. that a professional advisor should guide you through.

Apparently the folks at WealthFront and FutureAdvisor are selling MPT driven portfolios to employees of SF bay area tech firms.

edit: As a couple of users point out below, there is controversy over the effectiveness of MPT including: whether the models effectively capture the distribution of risk vs return and whether the values desired by the models can be calculated with proper accuracy. PMPT (post-modern portfolio theory) builds upon MPT. Lastly there are critics such as Nassim Taleb (of Black Swan fame) who find some of the core assumptions flawed.

<comment><USER5> _> So what is the amateur person worth $25M to do today? As with all things, you should seek professional advice. There are many nuances of tax efficiency, estate efficiency, asset protection, personal needs, etc. that a professional advisor should guide you through._

While this is true, the problem that most advisors that a $25MM net worth individual has access to are mostly duds and/or salesmen.

Identifying true value add advisors is easier said than done, imo.

<comment><USER6> Personally, i think that's more of a problem for the guy with the $500k retirement account. You will have no shortage of white gloved managers eager to help you invest your $25M. But anything short of $1MM you're solidly in Edward Jones territory. At that point you're probably better off keeping it stuffed under your mattress.

If you're not a multi millionare, IMO it's worth the time to learn how to manage your own money. Because nobody will ever care as much about your money as you will. A good place to start IMO is by subscribing to the TastyTrade podcast. It's the only investing infotainment I've found that treats the listener like an adult and an equal.

<comment><USER5> IMHO, the quality of people you will find at your local retail branch of an ibank (think BoAML, JPMChase, WF/Wachovia, etc.) is still very shoddy and suspect. These are the channels that people have immediate access to and think of visiting, even if you have $25MM. For these retail operations, iirc the threshold is $50MM before you are shipped off to a proper PWM team at HQ.

>You will have no shortage of white gloved managers eager to help you invest your $25M.

How do you know which while gloved manager is actually any good though, assuming that the $25MM guy is quite naive about investment management? I believe that the small time millionaire must be up to speed on investing basics just as much as the $500k guy, in order to be able to discern the competence of his managers.

I generally agree with jhulla's advice of going through a good estate planning attorney or accountant to find decent people. If you have a network of rich friends (which you can probably make in a few years after making your $25MM by plugging yourself into the right circles), but barring this (or even if you do manage this), I insist that even the rich guy needs to know at least the basics.

<comment><USER7> At a minimum you should get a "fee only" adviser who has a fiduciary duty to you. You can still get bad advice, but at least you won't get corrupt advice.

<comment><USER5> I have seen very corrupt fee only estate planning advisors. This is unfortunately still not fool proof.

<comment><USER8> Can you please explain how one of the corrupt fee only advisors situations worked?

<comment><USER9> Perhaps kickbacks?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Regarding "Don't beat the market", Warren Buffet says "The game is really easy when your opponent decides not to play".

Unfortunately, giving up has a lot of appeal: It means it's not your fault you didn't beat the market. It lets people say the game is rigged and take comfort.

How many times have you seen buying company stock compared to gambling? Even though, on its face this comparison is ludicrous. (Especially here on HN where so many of you are giving up $40k a year for 0.0004% of a company that is %98 likely to be worthless.)

It becomes like a religion, where anyone saying "Hey, it's easy to beat the market" becomes a "bad guy" who is advising "risky strategies".

The reality is, the tools available to the individual investor are such that you can control the level of risk you want. You can take a stock of high risk and make it low risk with option hedges. You can take a stock of low risk and make it high risk with different options.

"%90 of options expire worthless, the real money is in selling them!" \-- Abraham Lincoln

Of course, that's true-- if you have the ability to borrow from the Fed at the overnight rate. Most options are bought as they are intended- as a hedge to minimize risk. IF the underlying asset goes the expected direction, then the option will expire worthless.

My point is really that you have to read books, and hear many points of view, and figure out what's right for you.

Almost every professional and every ideologue is going to lead you down a bad path for you, because there is no one-size-fits all. There is no "best" advice.

<comment><USER11> The reality is that the professionals have better tools. It's not just gambling, it's gambling against someone that can see the cards.

If there is some method to turn $1 into $2 then there is a whole sea of people who are better and smarter than me who will keep doing it till that method no longer works.

<comment><USER12> > The reality is that the professionals have better tools. It's not just > gambling, it's gambling against someone that can see the cards.

They may have better tools, but small investors have the advantage of being nimble.

If you're trading say, 10K per trade on large-cap stocks, you can have your entire trade executed within 10 seconds without moving the stock price (thanks to HFT, but that's another story). This makes trading on swings much easier for the small investor.

And there are plenty of tools available for the small investor, most brokers will give you access to them when you sign up for an account. Sure, you may not get streaming L2 quotes on a basic account, but you'll get all the company information you need and access to basic real-time quotes. If you want to get a little more sophisticated, you can use something like R to automate some of the information-gathering process, run models against historic data, or simply use it for very fancy charts (with every technical indicator known to mankind).

And, as has been mentioned, hedge funds, mutual funds, etc..., have different motives for trading. Sometimes they are hedging, sometimes diversifying, often they're very long term, etc... They're not always trading. Even HFT is mostly arbitrage. There's still plenty of room for small to medium traders to make money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I loved the first bit of this; that Google invested the time in their employee's education of what was about to happen with sudden riches.

I know it's starting to happen, but professional sports needs this same educational process. Recently watched the 30 for 30 documentary 'Broke' and it was so heartbreaking to see what happens to these athletes who have come from nothing, get a ton of cash all the sudden, and find themselves back where they started after the paycheck stops.

<comment><USER14> The NBA passed a law a bit ago with this motivation. [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-12/nba-players- forced-...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-12/nba-players-forced-to- save-toward-retirement-for-first-time.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think the key to picking individual stocks is the ability to evaluate companies in both a financial/quantitative and qualitative manner. This is easier said than done. But by no means impossible.

Even Warren Buffett has said multiple times that if one has the skill to evaluate companies than they should pick individual companies and not choose an index fund because they will do far better with picking individual stocks. The problem is the vast majority of people are not skilled in evaluating companies and that's why Warren Buffett suggests them to choose a low-cost index fund.

I've chosen the path of picking individual stocks and I've done very well with it. But I have a deep background in the many skills required to analyze companies. And also it takes a great deal of time to keep updated on the companies I follow.

<comment><USER16> I have a very bright friend who works for a hedge fund. He's a Stanford engineering grad with an MBA from a top 10 school, and he had considerable success in his engineering career before shifting to finance several years ago.

He spends most of his waking life analyzing about six medtech companies. That's right, only six. One might assume that he knows a few things about each company.

And yet, whenever he recommends buying or selling one of their stocks, he's wrong almost exactly 50% of the time. (I actually track his predictions.)

You might be good at picking individual stocks, but I don't think he is. And if he isn't, I don't think most people would be either--myself included. I'll stick to the index funds.

<comment><USER15> I don't know your friend so I can't say why he's right/wrong 50% of the time. But I'd say that's pretty typical with analysts in the financial industry. It's really tough to blend quantitative and qualitative analysis together, but IMO this is a requirement to make consistently good investment choices. I think this is the secret behind Warren Buffett. Most of Wall Street though tends to focus on the quantitative (and only a few quarters out) and they tend to be highly influenced by each other, trends and sentiment.

Again, I generally agree with the advice of going with low-cost index funds for the vast majority of people. However, I do think that there are some people (albeit not many) with the right background, skills, training and commitment who can consistently beat the markets (ie., this was the thesis of Peter Lynch's book Beating the Street).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's really hard to do MPT on your own. I got really into finding a collection of 10-12 mutual funds that are in a collection of sectors. I also mixed it with a strategy of selling each fund when it went below its 12-month moving average, and buying back in when it went above. I backtested it a bit and read some studies and it seemed reasonable. Sacrifice a little upside to protect against more downside. It sure would have saved me had I followed those strategies during the last two mega crashes; the dotcom bomb and the finsys crash.

Of course, since doing that, the S&P has been on a sustained climb that I've only partially benefitted from since I've had some bond funds, etc. The selling/buying has worked ok - it's whipsawed me in some cases and saved me in others, but given that I'm not spending more than a day a month on it, and that I only have a surface level understanding of sector-balancing, and that while it _seems_ my funds are cheap, who really knows for sure... I'm regularly tempted to just dump the whole thing and get back into one fund, just in time for the next crash the other part of my brain says.

Also, it's worth pointing out that a lot of the "beat the market" talk is rubbish for entirely different reasons. People tend to get more cash to invest when times are good, and less when times are bad. That means that the average person is going to buy more when the market is high, and less when the market is low. I don't ever see this accounted for in studies. Even if you were to drop your money in an S&P-500 index fund whenever that money becomes available to you, you're _still_ going to underperform the S&P-500 long-term by a moderate amount.

<comment><USER18> Actually, it has been accounted for in the studies. See: [http://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/the-cost-of- chasing...](http://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/the-cost-of-chasing- returns/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is great advice and what I have been doing for the last 3-4 years for our retirement portfolio. Prior to that we were using an 'investment guy' who had us in a bunch of high-cost funds.

I sent the guy and email and ended the relationship and took a couple months to read and learn about this. I recommend the "investor's manifesto" by William Bernstein for anyone interested.

</comment><comment><USER20> It would be hard to debate someone about paying management fees for mutual funds vs no fees on index funds like NASDAQ. This graph should say it all (10 year graph): [https://www.google.com/finance?cid=13756934](https://www.google.com/finance?cid=13756934)

While I do invest in index funds, I have the majority of my money invested in Google, Apple and LinkedIn. I truly just believe in these companies and ignore short term speculation. I am no investment expert, but these stocks combined have by far beaten all the index funds by a significant multiple. Go for the long term, ignore stock tips and earnings reports and you can be successful at investing too.

</comment><comment><USER21> Buying the index is the orthodoxy. There isn't a strategy that I've heard more often from non-industry friends.

It's so orthodox even relatively straightforward ways of beating the index are largely ignored. Look up Falkenblog. He's got a thesis about it.

If I didn't run a hedge fund, I don't know what I'd do differently though. Costs are pretty high on individual accounts. One thing you can do is invest via spread betting, which is tax free in the uk. Also the sheer a mount of infrastructure, both in terms of financial data, modelling, and the systems used to execute strategies, makes it a bigger job than one person can do.

</comment><comment><USER22> tldr If you're suddenly rich, pay $10 and buy $1 Million of Vanguard Total Stock Market Index. Giving your money to anybody else over the last 10 years would have yielded same or worse performance at a higher cost.

<comment><USER19> You may need to pay that $10 if you are investing through some other brokerage account. However, do yourself a favor, open an account with Vanguard directly and you can make that purchase without any fees.

Additionally, I'd recommend se percentage be invested in the Vanguard total bond market fund as well. Holding se percentage there will reduce overall portfolio volatility, and can actually increase returns slightly.

<comment><USER4> Asset diversification is more complicated than that. To a first order, yes stocks and bonds are inversely correlated. But it is not enough to hold just stocks and bonds.

In order to maximize return over your preferred time frame (while minimizing risk), you have to examine the whole universe of investable assets, examine their volatility as well as correlations amongst themselves.

From there, your goal is to assemble an ideal basket of assets maximizes your return for your personal level of risk. Running these filters and choosing when to rerun/rebalance is the basis of modern portfolio theory.

Managing your money using MPT is the service that many investment houses sell. Rolling your own is absolutely possible, but it is not as simple as stocks vs bonds.

<comment><USER23> True, but for most people without 25M (ie most of us), is the arginal improvement in return on a 500k investment worth the extra complexity over a straight stock/bond mix?

Unrelatedly, what are you thoughts on the permanent portfolio (if you've heard of it).

<comment><USER2> Not sure if this was directed at jhulla (and actually I was about to ask it to svachalek).

25% in physical PMs is hard to justify but generally speaking I think Browne's Permanent Portfolio is a good base. Perhaps 20% each of domestic equities, international equities, PMs, cash and long term bonds would be more realistic, with rebalance bands at 17/23.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> In my opinion, there are probably some persistent quirks and patterns in human minds and computer programs (also written by humans) which may not be fully exploited by most market participants in some markets (esp. Emerging and Frontier markets). One well-known pattern is Momentum trading, which is also a basis of Market Crash prediction model by Prof. Sornette, with a history of several accurate predictions. [1]

> "a few funds that at any given moment outperform the indexes." But over the > years, he explains, their performances invariably decline..

There are a few hedge funds that, over decades, still beat the market. Medallion Fund, according to public knowledge, consistently generates above- market returns, never had a down year, and even returned 80% in 2008, when stock markets all over the world crashed. Its trading model is a highly guarded secret. It does not even let outsiders invest (with exceptions for a few).

The fund belongs to Renaissance Technologies, founded by a renowned Mathematical Physics professor, Jim Simons, and employs many PhDs in Physics and Math. (This book writes about it in fair detail. [2])

[1] How we can predict the next financial crisis: [http://www.ted.com/talks/didier_sornette_how_we_can_predict_...](http://www.ted.com/talks/didier_sornette_how_we_can_predict_the_next_financial_crisis)

[2] The Physics of Wall Street: [http://www.amazon.com/The-Physics-Wall- Street-Unpredictable/...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Physics-Wall-Street- Unpredictable/dp/0544112431)

<comment><USER25> If results were randomly distributed, you'd expect a very few funds to perform that way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I don't think you should try to become a 'professional full time investor' and put everything in index funds until you reach the ratio of funds that would significantly beat your current salary, compared to the average returns of an index market portfolio.

Lets assume the average return is %5, so if you make $200k/yr annually in your engineering craft, then you would need $4 million minimum to match the market for your salary, and probably at least $6 million before you would consider switching your career to 'managing your own money'.

<comment><USER27> Your numbers are off:

\- average long-term return on the stock market is 8-12%

\- full-time wealth management means no more tech job, means no need to live in the bay area, means $100k p.a. nets you a comfortable lifestyle

You're looking at $1-1.5MM before retiring to the quiet life.

<comment><USER28> I agree with these guys, the real return is lower, and the years that are negative to 4% will be diminish your nest egg unless you eat raman in those years. A millionaire eatinv raman? Maybe.

<comment><USER27> The quiet life does not include Maseratis and penthouses. That nest egg should support you for 40-50 years, and then you'll be dead so leaving a remainder would be suboptimal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I've been following (or, trying to follow) the index investing strategy for years on my own, and the final culmination of that was switching to betterment.com for my small savings and retirement accounts (no affiliation). They use MPT and a host of other things to take the decision making control out of the hands of the investor (except for risk tolerance) and provide a really great modern product to do that. And the best part is that it's probably cheaper than just setting up your own online brokerage account and paying fees for transactions. They charge a percentage fee for assets under management like a normal advisor might. Anyway, I just feel strongly that the robo advisor category is major win for average people trying to invest and I wish more people looked into it rather than getting killed in the market or paying high fees to managers. Lets you just put your money in and just focus on your own life and achieving your goals, which is often the point of investing for an average person. Wealthfront is also good, but from what I understand betterment has better returns (and I prefer their interface)

<comment><USER2> The overwhelming opinion of the bogleheads crowd is that even these robo- advisers are ridiculously overpriced for what you get. And the fact that Wealthfront started as a sales portal for actively-managed (ie high-fee, high kickback) funds has tarred their image for a lot of people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Also, pretty much guaranteed to improve outcomes for almost investor: 1) pay off your credit cards before investing 2) max out your IRA/401(k)

<comment><USER31> I agree. But I think then there is still some question of which funds to invest in of those available through your 401K.

<comment><USER30> Index funds, broader, the better. S&P 500 is a good start.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Did anybody stop to notice the date of the article? I'm confused by the conversation herein. I thought this was posted as a sort of mockery of the author. After-all, if you put your money into an index right when this guy told you to, you would have lost your shirt.

If you had a while until retirement, that wouldn't be a big deal, since it would now be back along with more, but what about the folks moving their IRA out of balanced bond and commodity based funds with some growth stocks, etc. (i.e., hedged) and essentially into the S&P 500, at 60 years old... like my parents did.

The best advice to anyone is to buy indexes after a major market crash; only then will you reap rewards without nearly as great a risk. Here's the catch: most of you will disagree; that's why 10% play and the other 90% pay.

<comment><USER33> The S&P 500 is up 36% since the article was written.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> General question about index funds: if a market is about to go into a steep correction or even a recession, wouldn't it be more advantageous to invest in specific stable stocks, rather than an index fund that tracks the entire market?

<comment><USER35> Sure, if you are sure the market is about to go into a steep correction or even a recession. But how do you know that? Why not go even further - If you knew for sure the market was going to drop, you could make a lot of money in options. Why aren't you doing that instead?

You shouldn't be trying to time the market. Lots of people try, they tend to fail. Come up with an allocation plan, and stick to it.

<comment><USER36> > _Lots of people try, they tend to fail._

And with enough people constantly trying to predict the market, inevitably some get it right. They make a lot of money, they're heralded as geniuses, and we hear about them in the news. We don't hear about everyone else who failed, or when the market-timing winners turn out to be repeat failures in subsequent years.

Put a bunch of people in a room and have them start flipping coins. If there are enough people playing the game, chances are somebody will end up tossing many heads in a row. If they keep flipping long enough, chances are they'll revert back to the mean. This is a pretty good model of market prognostication.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The main point of the article - that most mutual funds underperform the index funds is so widely known by now that I'm surprised to see it reposted here in 2014.

"The high failure rate should come as no surprise, given how hedge funds operate. There's no working model, so they vary widely, but the basic idea is that they rely on risky, untraditional investment strategies—ranging from arbitrage to taking over floundering companies, as Lampert did—to make big money fast. "

No, that's not the basic idea at all. And untraditional doesn't have to mean risky (a market-neutral strategy is an example).

</comment><comment><USER37> I feel like I get this advice all the time. "Invest in Indexes" is ridiculously popular advice. I've also been exposed to portfolio theory in lots of academic literature.

It's not obscure within finance or without.

<comment><USER22> These guys didn't know about it: [http://www.hypun.com/gallery/1298/Top_10_NBA_Players_that_we...](http://www.hypun.com/gallery/1298/Top_10_NBA_Players_that_went_Broke)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> bogleheads.org

Also, the Frontline episode, "The Retirement Gamble"

</comment><comment><USER39> Schwab Intelligent Portfolios are launching next year, and will offer balanced portfolios with tax-loss harvesting for a low, low price of 0% of assets under management.

[https://intelligent.schwab.com/](https://intelligent.schwab.com/)

</comment><comment><USER35> Decent article, but awfully linkbait-y headline. You'll get that advice at many places around the internet - I recommend those curious to read the wiki at bogleheads.org

</comment><comment><USER40> Work with an advisor who has access to DFA. Invest for the long term. Pull funds out when you want to use them.

</comment><comment><USER41> And what if you live outside USA?</comment>


Improving the Ethereum Developer Ecosystem with Libraries - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cryptofin.io/improving-the-ethereum-developer-ecosystem-with-libraries-5a95ffaf632d <comment><AUTHOR> Daniel here, had fun implementing these library functions over the last few months, and think some of them are really cool! It's helped me write more concise contracts and I hope it can help some of you out there too.

Let me know if you have any feedback.</comment>


Add a Bit of Soviet-Era Super-Computing to Your FPGA - <AUTHOR> https://hackaday.com/2019/05/03/add-a-bit-of-soviet-era-super-computing-to-your-fpga/ <comment><USER2> For those who balk at the mentioned 192kB of memory - the _addressable_ memory was 32 kilo-words (each 48 bit), and the ma vc one was equipped with virtual memory so actual physical memory was larger.

</comment><comment><USER3> Titles where every non-particle word is capitalised are really weird. I thought it was talking about one Bit, but instead it was talking about "a bit of".</comment>


Huawei floats an agreement that "promises a no-backdoor and no-spying" for 5G - <AUTHOR> https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-morning-update-huawei-canada-draws-up-no-backdoor-no-spying-legal/ <comment><USER2> Canada should accept that, but with the caveat that if anyone ever finds any backdoors/spying/whatever-it's-called-this-week, Canada gets to instantly disable ALL Huawei tech (5G towers as well as phones, tablets, etc.), and Huawei (and successors/subsidiaries, etc.) never get to to do business in Canada again.

<comment><USER3> Reading this might change your mind

[https://www.asiatimesfinancial.com/ccp-announces-plan-to- tak...](https://www.asiatimesfinancial.com/ccp-announces-plan-to-take-control- of-chinas-private-sector)

Empty promises are being made</comment></comment>


Apple Announces Extended Warranty for MacBook Pros Affected by "Staingate" [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://files.www.wbmllp.com/Apple_Staingate/Redacted_Retina_MacBook_Pro_CLRA_Letter.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> This link is the original intent to pursue class action. The below is Apple's reply:

[http://www.droidreport.com/apple-fanboys-fangirls-rejoice- ap...](http://www.droidreport.com/apple-fanboys-fangirls-rejoice-apple-will- replace-retina-macbook-pros-displays-free-11552)</comment>