CS for All - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.hmc.edu/csforall/ <comment><USER2> >At Mudd, this course is taken by almost every first-year student—irrespective of the student's ultimate major—as part of our core curriculum. Thus, it serves as a first computing course for future CS majors and a first and last computing course for many other students.

This is a great thing to offer students and I wish my University had made this a part of the curriculum. Somehow I managed to have practically zero exposure to computer science or programming until after graduation--only to discover that I find it immensely challenging, interesting, and rewarding. I probably would have switched majors if I'd taken this class Freshman year.

<comment><USER3> I think it's a good idea, but fwiw it's not CS-specific. Harvey Mudd's idea isn't that CS is so uniquely important that everyone should take it, but rather than everyone should take a _lot_ of things, regardless of major, and CS is one of those things. The curriculum is designed with a philosophy of fairly broad education, kind of in line with a liberal-arts college ideal, but with more of a STEM flavor. I was a CS major there, and only maybe 1/3 of my total course hours were CS: the split is roughly 1/3 in your major, 1/3 Common Core, and 1/3 "HSA" (humanities, social-science, and the arts). [1]

The technical part of the Common Core is currently: 1 course biology, 1 course CS, 1 course engineering, 1.5 courses chemistry (0.5 is a lab), 2.5 courses physics, 0.5 course elective lab, 3 courses mathematics.

[1] There's even a hokey triangle illustrating that philosophy in the course catalogue (p.26): [https://www.hmc.edu/academics/wp- content/uploads/sites/7/201...](https://www.hmc.edu/academics/wp- content/uploads/sites/7/2013/11/hmc-catalogue-13-14.pdf#28)

<comment><USER4> What do they cover in the basic general engineering course?

<comment><USER5> When I took it ~25 years ago it was called Intro to Systems Engineering, and covered the foundational principles of control systems design and analysis of linear dynamic systems. A lot of Laplace transforms, first- and second-order differential equations, relationships between time-domain and frequency-domain behavior, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As a former student of CS5 (the class), I must say it was spectacularly well- run, fun, and educational. Zach Dodds, one of the authors of this book, was a particularly brilliant and inspiring professor.

While I'm an advocate for practical eduction, I'm equally an advocate for understanding the principles of your field. This book will much less vocational than your typical code-school/academy/etc and instead focus on building a foundation with which you can build upon.

I highly recommend this as a great primer to computer science.

</comment><comment><USER7> Beautifully written text. I also really like the idea of an intro course but am, probably like many others, struggling with how to present the topics in an interesting (and practical) way without missing the theoretical beauty of computer science.

This course reminds me a lot of the Berkeley course posted a month ago, if anyone wants to see the discussion there: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9838196](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9838196). From what I can tell, the coverage is almost the same, except that the Berkeley course pretty much trades computer architecture for declarative programming and some other briefly-covered topics like machine learning, map reduce, concurrency, etc.

</comment><comment><USER8> The prime sieve algorithm in chapter 3 is not the real sieve of Eratosthenes. Which is kind of funny because the person who pointed this out to the FP community is also a professor at Harvey Mudd.

[http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~oneill/papers/Sieve- JFP.pdf](http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~oneill/papers/Sieve-JFP.pdf)

<comment><USER9> Thank you! We took a liberty here but have just updated the online book to clarify this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Ran Libeskind-Hadas is an amazing teacher. He really got us exicted about stuff in theoretical computer science. I was actually dissapointed in my advanced algorithms class in grad school because Prof Ran already taught us everything except for skip lists during his enrichment sessions in the summer of 2006.

</comment><comment><USER11> Mudd Alumni here. I had the pleasure of being a student of Professor Ran Libeskind-Hadas and Zach Dodds (who are two of the authors of this book). Amazing group of professors!

</comment><comment><USER12> Before we move to CS for all, can we at least solve the problem of Computer Literacy for all!?

There's a huge population of people who simply cannot effectively use a computer. Can we fix that first? Otherwise we're leaving them behind and that's not right.

<comment><USER13> This. I believe very strongly in the importance of touch-typing. I went to an inner city school for elementary and high school. And when I arrived at university computer science I felt like I was light years behind my peers. A lot of that stemmed from not being able to type as fast as them. Hunting and pecking typing while trying to wrap your head around making abstractions and recursion is enough to make anyone frustrated.

Teach touch-typing!

<comment><USER14> You learn touch typing by having something to type, not by having it drilled into at school. There are better things to teach.

<comment><USER15> I completely disagree with this. Despite being a fast typist when I first started high school from years of computer use, I still consider my typing class to be one of the best bang-for-the-buck classes I took in terms of what I have gotten out of it since graduating.

My form was not perfect before taking the class. I would often do something slightly weird with my right hand where my it would "walk" to slightly incorrect positions to reach keys that my other hand should be hitting.

My typing teacher put covers over the keyboard so we couldn't see our hands and then had us do typing drills. She would strictly enforce that we maintain our hands on the correct home-row position, wrist positioning, etc.

After a semester of this class, despite an initial drop in my speed, I can now touch type correctly and my speed is now faster than ever.

I work with professional programmers who hunt and peck and it drives me crazy. For something that you interact with daily and is the instrument of your profession, taking an hour a day for a few months is a no brainer to perfect your form.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Great--I think every student should take a CS class!

That said, this course suffers from so many CS courses.

1\. It's too wordy!

2\. As usual, I don't like the layout.

3\. Funnel your subjects. (I'll give that a B.)

4\. Funnel your paragraphs, or eliminate most of them?

5\. Most people(students) find this material extremely dry. Introductory books should be "tight"! They should go through numerous edits? Take out every non- essential word?

6\. I haven't yet read an introductory CS text that gets it right?

7\. As to exercises? Try to use excercises that the student might have some immediate interest in, or can use in their daily life? For example, instead of some cute game example, show the student how a simple reminder application is programmed? How Google works?(just the basics). Or, how their spellcheck program works?

8\. If I was going to write a introductory computer course, after explaining the hardware(that's usually sitting in front of them), I would explain an how operating systems stores their information--"The use, and location of Folders."

I would want my students competent in the Command Line before we did any Programming. I would want them to know they can have two folders named the same, but located in different sections of the hard-drive. I would want them competent in finding them, and manipulating them.

<comment><USER16> I was too hard with my review--sorry! I was doing some yard work and felt really quilty. I know getting across computer science concepts/theories is terribly difficult.

Part of my anger is I don't have a good grasp of CS theory, or why we do someting a particular way? I can get things done, but I'm missing the bigger picture--in many instances?

My education into CS has just been following many steps, and listening to videos. I will go back to this free book, and give it a full read. Sorry to the Authors. I was in a bad mood?

<comment><USER17> I think it's probably solid feedback if you include more tangible action items. What's an example of wordiness in the text? What would be a better phrasing? What don't you like about the layout? Why?

Don't feel back about feedback :) Suggestions for improvement are always helpful, especially if you also include the stuff you _do_ like.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is there any way to download it in pdf format?

<comment><USER19> [https://github.com/emhill/117-S15/commits/master/src/morea/m...](https://github.com/emhill/117-S15/commits/master/src/morea/materials/cs5book.pdf)

Might be out of date. Looks like the book was built with Sphinx (documentation tool), so maybe you could find the source and build a fresh copy.

</comment></comment><comment> rebekah-aimee What if colleges started offering this as an alternative to the basic MS Word class most schools make everyone take? Then people who didn't know how to use a computer would be too intimidated by it, but students who already knew the basics could move on to this more interesting course.

You should still be able to test out, though. That way, if you're totally uninterested, you can test out of the MS Word class and move on.

I think there are enough students sufficiently interested in computers that they'd check out the harder course if its name didn't sound too obscure.

<comment><USER20> Do schools really make people take an MS Word class? I've never seen anyone have the courage to put that on a resume or transcript.

<comment><USER21> I've had people show up with Word and Excel on their resumes when I was advertising hiring C# programmers...

<comment><USER20> Are these long resumes playing Keyword Bingo, or shorter resumes?

I've kept my resume to 1 page and avoid the table stakes skills.

<comment><USER21> One, two pages at most. They just had no clue about programming and had to put _something_ in there. Ours is a strange field :)

<comment><USER20> Indeed. In this instance a negative keyword filter would be appropriate. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm a current UC San Diego student. It's awesome to see our faculty featured here, particularly Christine Alvarado. She has a fantastic reputation within our CS department and I'm really glad to see she's doing great things and getting recognition outside UCSD as well!

</comment><comment><USER23> This looks like it would make for a very nice course -- a good middle ground between the hardcore practical course ("let's learn C") and the hardcore theoretical course ("let's do denotational semantics with Scheme" \-- or whatever).

</comment><comment><USER24> This course is a great idea. Since so much of what we do each day is impacted by computers a basic understanding is important for everyone

</comment><comment><USER25> i would rename the second chapter from "functional programming " to "programming with functions"</comment>


Ask HN: JS library for highlighting web app features - <AUTHOR>

I think there was a link to one a while ago, possibly around March or February, but I can't seem to find it. Does anyone know of a JS library that allows you to highlight features of a web app before users start using it? Thanks. <comment><USER2> Your question is formulated awkwardly, but I think I could extract the original question:

"What's the name of the Javascript library that adds introduction to a website?"

Answer: It's <http://usablica.github.io/intro.js/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! That's the one I was looking for.</comment></comment>


Millions Use Gabapentin. But There's Little Evidence It Works - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/j5y4py/millions-use-gabapentin-for-anxiety-and-pain-but-little-evidence-it-works#click=https://t.co/MeIoaYIjlL <comment><USER2> Define "works." My mother had an intracerebral hemorrhagic stroke about 5 years ago, leaving her with severe trigeminal neuropathic pain and hemiplegia. If she doesn't have 900 mg (3x 300 mg) of gabapentin 3x a day, she experiences unbearable pain. If she inadvertently skips a dose, about 4-6 hours later it becomes apparent because her pain level goes up considerably, so it doesn't seem to be just a placebo effect alone. I can't say it helps her post-stroke syndrome improve, but it is the only medication that seems to be able to manage the pain. She's also tried Lyrica (Pregabalin) and Ambien (Zolpidem), but they weren't helpful. At the moment, she's in consultations about having a gamma knife procedure that would decompress the trigeminal nerve in the cheekbone/ear area to ease what might be a large trigeminal demyelinated nerve bundle causing excruciating pain.

</comment><comment><USER3> My dog is on it. Seems to help her random onset lameness.</comment>


Building a Cloud Benchmarking System - <AUTHOR> http://www.scalescale.com/building-cloud-benchmarking-system/ <comment><USER2> Cloud harmony is indeed a great tool that makes comparison of different services easy as reading a story.

Beyond performance benchmarks, you get clear view of features and capabilities of different vendors.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> the marketshare reports are good to see. I wonder how google cloud's announcements today are going to change market share.

</comment><comment><USER3> I plan to try this or build something similar.</comment>


Ask HN: Is there discrimination towards new users here on HN? - <AUTHOR>

I don't mean to offend anyone with this question, but I've definitely seen cases where a user's creation date is brought up in the conversation - an event that is prone to lead to some form of discrimination. Many users have claimed that the newcomers, in general, are bringing down the site's quality. I'm almost positive that this is true to some extent, but obviously it doesn't apply to every new user.
What do you think we should do about it?
For those that respond, please keep your answers civil as to avoid this thread removed by the moderators. <comment><USER2> Look at it this way; your account is 10 days old and my account is over 1000 days old, so by this metric I'm 100 times "better" than you. In contrast, your account has a karma over 600 and my account has a karma of a bit over 100, so by this metric you are 5 times "better" than me.

The real answer is, the metrics are flawed.

One of the more interesting ironies is the people claiming the quality is declining due to new users are actually new users. Ask PG what he thinks, and you might be surprised.

The dynamics of open groups necessitates a group will change over time as its membership changes. It is unavoidable. But change can be for the better.

<comment><AUTHOR> > _The real answer is, the metrics are flawed._

Not sure what you're saying here. The metrics of karma, whether you like it or not, is what Hacker News is based off. It would be hard to say that we are discriminating against posts with less karma by not letting them be on the front page. However, the other metric system of the account's age is unrelated for the most part and therefore should not be a factor in most things.

> _One of the more interesting ironies is the people claiming the quality is > declining due to new users are actually new users_

I'm not sure if this is entirely true. PG is an exception, but he doesn't speak for all of the early-adopter users.

<comment><USER2> What I meant by "the metrics are flawed" is, how you personally evaluate the reputation of another user is a personal choice based on very limited and potentially deceptive input. Additionally, how the system itself evaluates reputation of a particular user, article or post is also imperfect.

Only part of the algorithms for evaluating reputation are revealed in the HN source code [1] but other parts are not public. PG has stated HN runs with some of his own personal, unpublished modifications for the sake of preventing people from gaming an imperfect system.

The up/down vote and 'flagging' feedback from users is important input, and does help the system more fairly evaluate things. Since the vote/flag input is from human beings basing their decisions on incomplete information and personal preferences, you can see how the system will remain imperfect.

A good example is below I cracked a joke about divulging PG's secret to success being talking to himself in a soundproof closet... --the downvote I got tells me someone didn't find it funny. Such is life.

On the bright side, if you can think of a way to avoid the imperfections in a reputation evaluation system, you could make millions, and you would certainly have PG's attention. It's a painfully difficult problem to crack, potentially undecidable, so even a better imperfect solution would be extremely valuable.

[1] <http://www.arclanguage.org/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> If you have enough karma to vote a negative post down, then do so. I don't see how bringing up anyone's account creation date adds anything positive to a discussion, and I'm sure it occurs as a blatant ad hominem more frequently than not. Upvotes are the primary mechanism for ensuring the cream rises to the top here, but downvotes also exist to actively suppress something that is distracting or even detrimental to the community, and I think these sort of cases count.

I understand and agree with the reasoning behind granting increased privilege to older members, but any community has to toe a fine line between inclusivity (leading to an Eternal September) and exclusivity (leading to pg talking to himself in a soundproof closet).

<comment><USER2> SHHHHHHHH!!!!111oneoneone

You're not supposed to reveal PG's secret to success!

Next you were probably going to reveal that all of the old accounts are really an AI that PG wrote.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> PG's take on the decline of HN: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2073513>

</comment><comment><USER5> The fact that HN gets over 80k unique visits a day means _you_ can hardly do anything about it. It's a community and you gotta accept it how it is. Even PG can't do much, as far as 'attitude' towards newcomers goes.

Think of this: You have the same rights as everybody on this forum. You can comment and submit stories, but what you cannot control is how the HN crowd will react to your submissions/comments. I guess that's where one needs self- introspection.

Also, I don't want to sound like I'm accusing you, but in the 11 days you've been on HN, you've submitted 66 items. Now, I am no one to judge, but that's a tad bit on the higher side. You may want to recount what you said about bringing down the site's quality.

Edit: Grammar

</comment><comment><USER6> In my experience, this has been the case on every discussion site. Slashdot is another prime example of a site where people hit each other over the head with the size of their UINs.

It's a bit childish because being around on the site longer doesn't magically make posts better, I think it's best to be wary of discrimination of new users, otherwise only the morons will stick around. Which is exactly the quality drop people are tring to avoid :)

</comment><comment><USER7> Newcomers to any social setting have the disadvantage that you don't know them as well as people who have been there longer. You have less context for trying to interpret their remarks, so a joke or humorous remark can be badly misinterpreted. Also, as a site like this grows, you get more diversity and that makes it harder to figure out how to properly place people in pecking order and all that. I'm not a fan of pecking order, so I don't much care. I continue to struggle with my own questions, which greatly precede my discovery of this site, concerning social reputation/influence. On the one hand, it seems you can't get anywhere without some positive reputation of some sort. On the other hand, I am extremely leery of the tendency for people to abuse their influence and make "proof" about who said it more than about what was said. I don't have any good answers yet. Maybe I never will.

Peace.

</comment><comment><USER8> I am no authority to talk about it, but usually I do not require an authority to talk about most of the things. The point is that I evaluate a comment on the basis of the content and not the author. This is why I learned that many of my favourite comments are written by patio11 only after some article were written about him. And even now I usually have no idea who I answered to. If someone is providing a nice line of logic and some good proof who cares who said it.</comment>


ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/jeremyphoward/status/1219365213201264640 <comment><USER2> I wrote this tweet. Wasn't sure anyone would read it - glad it's got noticed, because I do think it's an important issue!

I'd love to know where that money at IEEE and ACM is going. The annual reports don't make it at all clear, unfortunately. Obviously, there are for-profit publishers where the money is simply going to huge profit margins. But that's not the case for professional societies.

One thing I noticed when I had to sign up to ACM for a conference a few years ago was that I got harangued by sales-people from ACM for months afterwards, trying to get me on a call to have me buy more expensive memberships. It wasn't an automated system - it was an actual person, trying to get me onto an actual phone call with them. It occurred to me at the time that that must be very expensive, yet it's still a profitable thing for them to do - so there's clearly a lot of money changing hands...

I don't think this is a good sign. Perhaps the professional societies can openly publish a full breakdown of what they're spending money on?

<comment><USER3> Thank you for tweeting this.

I'm making my way through the IEEE annual report to which you linked[a], and am dumbfounded too. Not only does the IEEE spend $193.4M/year operating "periodicals and media," they also spend $103.5M/year on "membership and public imperatives" (!?) and $38.5M/year on "standards" (!?). Note that these figures do _not_ include the amounts spent on conferences, which are at least tangible.

Moreover, it looks like the organization has $523.8M in investments at fair value (p. 43) -- an endowment greater than that of the vast majority of US colleges and universities. Am I imagining things, or does the IEEE look a lot like "a small hedge fund attached to a professional organization?"

To put that last figure in perspective, if income and gains from the IEEE's investment portfolio are, say, at least 5%/year, they could fund all of arXiv.org's annual expenses _20 times over_ in perpetuity without dipping into capital.

Something smells rotten indeed.

[a] [https://www.ieee.org/content/dam/ieee- org/ieee/web/org/corpo...](https://www.ieee.org/content/dam/ieee- org/ieee/web/org/corporate-communications/annual-report/2018-ieee-annual- report-final.pdf)

<comment><USER2> Another asset they have (and monetize) is a vast library of old papers. For instance, if you want to read Kildall's 1973 classic "A unified approach to global program optimization" then ACM will gladly let you do so... after you pay them $15.00 for the 8 page paper. [https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/512927.512945](https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/512927.512945)

It's hard to see how this is compatible with their claim to be "Advancing Computing as a Science & Profession".

<comment><USER4> I just clicked it and downloaded the paper?

(I agree with you just possibly a poor example)

<comment><USER5> Clicked at home and got the paywall. Pretty sure you're on a network with access.

<comment><USER4> Spooky! That makes sense.

Wouldn't have known because I've been (ummm...) "Acquiring" (libgen) them elsewhere

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's a lot to critique in publishing and associated costs, but this tweet is unfortunately factually wrong.

From the linked article, ACM's publication costs are $10.9M, not $33.7M.

One of the ACM's major publication initiatives over the last 3-5 years has been an overhaul of their publication templates and publication workflow, to ensure greater consistency in publication formatting, improve accessibility, and archive publications in more future-proof formats. There are also the ongoing costs of creating and indexing metadata (ACM tracks more metadata than arXiv, including resolved citations), preservation (ACM buys failsafe perpetual access services from Portico, arXiv has mirrors at other university libraries).

Should it cost $10.9M? I am not sure. Does it cost a lot more than what arXiv does? Yes.

For a costing exercise: the service ACM buys from Portico is archival and republication. If ACM goes insolvent, Portico flips on their archive and the content remains available. How would you price this service, knowing that when it is actually needed, it's because your customer can no longer pay bills, and you now need to take up their hosting (and all related costs) for approximately forever with no further revenue? I think a network of university libraries would be a more cost-effective way to provide this service, but it's the kind of thing that people working on publication and archival professionally think about, and that factors into the cost of professional archival-level publication.

(I cannot speak to IEEE.)

<comment><USER7> > their publication templates and publication workflow, to ensure greater > consistency in publication formatting, improve accessibility, and archive > publications in more future-proof formats

Publication workflow, formatting and accessibility? For every paper I've done I just send the ACM a final PDF produced myself from a LaTeX template that hasn't changed in years. What's the workflow for taking an already final PDF from authors and uploading it to a file server?

<comment><USER6> That workflow has changed in the last few years.

\- Brand new templates (introduced about 5 years ago, the LaTeX template has had multiple updates per year since then)

\- Workflow that makes use of the source (or possibly codes the source embeds in the PDF, but you have to provide LaTeX source to ACM these days)

\- Papers now render in both PDF and HTML (and the HTML looks quite good), this started showing up within the last 1-2 years

\- Papers are archived in an XML-based format (something called JITS, I do not know details) to facilitate rendering to PDF, HTML, ePub, and other formats not yet devised

<comment><USER8> That doesn't seem too impressive. It's essentially a workflow that a few universities could band together and replicate via an open source project relatively easily IMHO.

As an example, Pandoc can already handle 90% of this type of workflow by itself (converting Latex to various XML formats). An open source project shared among a few universities or developed by single body like the ACM and used among dozen's of publications and fields. Even two or three full time people working on this would cost much less than $1M per year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> One great thing about a $99/year ACM membership is that it includes full access to the O'Reilly service formerly known as Safari Books, normally $499/year. I have no idea what the volume pricing on Safari subscriptions is, so can only say there's a possibility that ACM article sales subsidize Safari books; I do know that, as an individual who has to learn new things and look old things up constantly, the inclusion of O'Reilly/Safari makes an individual ACM subscription a fantastic deal.

Additionally, having seen someone organize an academic conference once, I do know that IEEE provides a conference with things like bank accounts, insurance, and purchasing departments that can meet the creditworthiness requirements of major hotels. It also ends up covering the shortfall if the conference winds up losing money.

I'm all for improving efficiencies where possible, and there are definitely some problems with these organizations, don't get me wrong; but I did want to emphasize that both organizations are definitely providing real value to parts of the computing community.

Disclaimer: I haven't read the link as twitter is (intentionally) inaccessible from my machine.

<comment><USER10> I'm curious why twitter is inaccessible from your machine.

<comment><USER11> From "intentionally" I would guess a social network DNS blocklist that he self-configured, although it could also be a workplace policy.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, self-configured DNS blocklist. Some of the reasons I'm not a fan of twitter apply to hacker news as well; for example, both can be distracting and contribute to procrastination.

Compared to hacker news, my main issues with twitter are a much lower signal- to-noise ratio, lack of prioritization over time windows—if I take a day/week/month away from hacker news, it's easy to catch up on the top things I missed at [https://hn.algolia.com](https://hn.algolia.com) —lack of depth in content, and pervasive tracking across other sites including through t.co.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Isn't this a typical case of Parkinson's law?

See e.g. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law) (didn't find a free version of the book unfortunately).

There is even a fitting example in the book where Parkinson describes how the administration of the British Navy became bigger and bigger although there were fewer and fewer ships to manage. In the present case, one would have to assume analogously that with the introduction of the Internet and the advancing automation, considerable costs were eliminated.

So the question is: have ACM and the other mentioned organizations already reached the tertiary and last stage of INJELITITIS?

<comment><USER13> > have ACM and the other mentioned organizations already reached the tertiary > and last stage of INJELITITIS?

Frankly, ACM membership and publication is a good deal compared to many other societies. For $200 annual dues, you get unlimited access to all journals.

Contrast to the American Chemical Society. For $175, you get:

1) Access to 50 articles for 48 hours 2) The right to purchase access to additional articles at $12 a pop for 48 hour access.

You want to look at the article again after 48 hours? Pay up again.

[0] [https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/membership/member- benefit...](https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/membership/member- benefits/publications-discounts.html)

<comment><USER12> Well, that was not the argument. I agree, there are much greedier organizations around. However, this does not answer the question why the operation of these organisations is so expensive compared to their services. Parkinson has a good explanation though ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This post makes no sense. ArXiv is a site to which papers are posted. ACM and IEEE are technical societies with a range of publications professionally managed, peer reviewed, and edited. They serve different needs and have-- surprise surprise--different costs.

<comment><USER2> They don't pay for peer review. I'm not sure you mean by "professionally managed" or "edited" exactly - or why that would cost over $100m.

(Disclaimer: I wrote the tweet. Although I didn't expect it to appear on HN...)

<comment><USER15> Thanks Jeremy for highlighting this issue.

A lot of scientific publishers have hijacked "Open Access" to charge high fees for the same publication as before and pocket more money. For example, "Springer Blood Cancer Journal" charges $ 4,580 as OA fees. I can't imagine how one can rationalize that cost.

<comment><USER16> PLOS ONE's fee is $1,595. A factor of 3 doesn't seem inexplainable to me. That's "Springer _Nature_ Blood Cancer Journal", so factors of 1½ in "better editing", "older, less efficient systems" and "fewer publications/year, so lower efficiency of scale" could already do it.

Also, is Nature working on digitizing old content? That can be costly (I remember reading somewhere that it could involve a) finding a library that has a copy and b) flying there to photograph it) and that's a cost PLOS won't ever have.

<comment><USER15> > PLOS ONE's fee is $1,595. A factor of 3 doesn't seem inexplainable to me.

You need to first explain why PLOS ONE is an appropriate baseline. A world class Open Access journal costs roughly $10 per submission [0]. Most arguments I have seen using PLOS ONE as a baseline, talk about the "non profit" part of PLOS. It has to be stressed here at that "non profit" doesn't mean PLOS works on a "non profit" business model. It just means that they generate profit AND the profit isn't distributed to its members, directors or officers [1].

[0] [https://gowers.wordpress.com/2016/03/01/discrete-analysis- la...](https://gowers.wordpress.com/2016/03/01/discrete-analysis-launched/)

[1] [https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/non- profit_organizations](https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/non- profit_organizations)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Usually when the budget is opaque there's a reason for it.

Money really seems to be wasted for the most part, and the digital library has always been an embarrassment. Years later, it still has no API, and last I checked the terms of service forbid you from accessing it with software! Completely braindead.

The only reason to join ACM besides accessing the crappy digital library is to save money on conference registration fees, which are outrageous because of what the venues usually charge and get away with.

Usenix seems (to me at least) to be better run and had open access policies years before ACM. But the IEEE is largely a cesspool as well, charging absurd fees for digital library access, and sponsoring a number of spamferences.

<comment><USER17> Actually I might stand corrected somewhat; if you want a Safari/O'Reilly subscription, ACM might be the way to do it?

However... I'd probably be in favor of unbundling this and other commercial services from ACM memberships.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> If its hosting costs the ACM is worried about, they could offer torrents as a free download option to lighten the load.

<comment><USER19> I imagine the vast majority of the digital library is included here:

[http://libgen.is/scimag/repository_torrent/](http://libgen.is/scimag/repository_torrent/)

80,700,000 articles as of today. These torrents contain every single article that's ever been accessed through sci-hub. Database dumps at [http://gen.lib.rus.ec/dbdumps/](http://gen.lib.rus.ec/dbdumps/) provide an index.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> For those who are trying to follow the money, often organizations like these have expensive old-school benefits like defined-benefit pension plans.

<comment><USER2> Following the money is an excellent plan!

I haven't heard anything about defined-benefit pension plans, or their use in professional societies. Could you say a bit more? Or provide a link to learn more?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> What are the costs here... 25M downloads per month doesn't seem like it should cost $100k per month. Must be total archive size I imagine?

<comment><USER22> This isn't insanely high given its traffic and that it's attached to an educational (not for profit) institution. They need developers, infrastructure, support, people to process the papers, etc...

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Is arxiv.org mirrored on archive.org? The latter has its Wayback Machine of course, but that might not necessarily follow .ps and .pdf links.

<comment><USER24> ArXiv has historically been extremely hostile to crawlers, which is one of the reasons for its low costs.

<comment><USER25> Bah. If they average thousands of downloads per file, there's plenty of room in there for some crawlers.

And the total data set is less than a terabyte; seed a torrent somewhere for $20.

The user-pays S3 bucket also exists as a good thing but S3 is much more expensive than data needs to be.

<comment><USER24> They started in 1991, when a terabyte was an unimaginably huge quantity of data and it was common for anonymous FTP servers like xxx.lanl.gov to request that you not connect until after business hours to avoid interfering with the main purpose of the machines. When I joined the internet in 1992, our 7.5-MHz VAX had a 56-kbps frame-relay link to New Mexico Technet (TECNET on our DECNET), which I think may also have provided LANL's rather beefier internet connection. They started providing WWW access in 1993, before Apache added preforking to NCSA HTTPD, and in fact I think before NCSA HTTPD itself. This means that initially every new HTTP request involved forking a new child process from the HTTP server, which took a few hundred milliseconds. This is the context in which the arXiv's hostile stance toward spidering was established.

I agree that it would be an extremely valuable course of action to seed a _series_ of torrents, since a single torrent wouldn't work; it would have to be replaced every time a new paper was uploaded, fragmenting the swarm enough to render it useless. Also, they could surely use Fastly and permit spidering.

<comment><USER25> > They started in 1991, when a terabyte was an unimaginably huge quantity of > data

The collection was a lot smaller then. The whole thing has fit on one hard drive for a long time. And as far as interpreting my post as criticism goes, apply it to the last ten years only.

> This is the context in which the arXiv's hostile stance toward spidering was > established.

They should have reconsidered it at some point.

> series of torrents

Sure. A torrent for each 500MB chunk they already collate, or yearly, or both.

<comment><USER26> arXiv has bulk dumps that anyone can S3. They aren't updated every day, not even every month, but still they have it. I used it myself.

<comment><USER25> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22115894](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22115894)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Something seems weird. 25000000 downloads per month, lets assume that the average pdf size is 1MB, that would be only 776 GB of data uploaded per day, I do not think that this can justify the $1.3m/year figure.

<comment><USER28> For the sake of the argument, let's assume the following:

\- If you factor all the man-hours required to keep the site up and running (ignoring the setup costs), then you'd have about one engineer for a whole year.

\- If we go for a simple S3 based download and accompaniying infrastructure, it would be safe to assume that it would cost AT LEAST about $700k per year (AWS is not cheap).

I'd say it's about right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Can anyone speak to if ACM and/or IEEE memberships are worth it for a professional developer? I loved reading stuff like the History of Programming Languages papers back when I had student access in college.

</comment><comment><USER30> Taking someone's money to fund research and then not giving them access to that research is theft. If that money is tax money, I'd call it treason.

<comment><USER31> The big bucks are in patents, not in The Proceedings of the Fifth Annual ACM Intergalactic Conference on Subsubsubsfied.

Doing something about [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act) seems way more important than fixing publishing...

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> and except for simple formalities, Arxiv isn't reviewed, typeset or anything else, which a normal journal usually entails (and typesetting costs... hands up, who is doing all the integral d-s in mathrm...). And yet people cite Arxiv often blindly...

<comment><USER33> \renewcommand{\d}{\mathrm d}

<comment><USER34> I prefer \newcommand{\intd}{\,\mathrm{d}} to separate it a little.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> (arxiv.org is not archive.org if someone wants to fix the title. both are absurd creations that can't possibly exist, though.)

<comment><USER36> > _both are absurd creations that can 't possibly exist, though._

How so?

<comment><USER37> It was an endearing comment.</comment></comment></comment>


OfficeFetish - <AUTHOR> http://www.officefetish.co

<comment><AUTHOR> Take a peek behind the scenes of your favourite startups.</comment>


Another Alleged Tesla Autopilot Failure Raises Questions - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2019/08/12/another-alleged-tesla-autopilot-failure-raises-questions-on-tesla-training-system/ <comment><USER2> Author Brad Templeton was the creator and moderator of rec.humor.funny ages ago, among numerous other exploits.</comment>


Ask HN: What do you use for cloud based storage? - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking for a good way to move common resources online.  Things such as templates, books, toolkits, etc.  Anything I might use at home, at work, and maybe a coffeeshop?<p>Just curious what people use and the tools (plugins?) they use for them.  Examples I've heard of/used are Dropbox, Amazon S3, Google Docs. <comment><USER2> I mainly use Dropbox, it syncs my eclipse workspaces as well as my other toolkits. If something hasn't been updated on my laptop you can always pull it from the web site.</comment>


Isao Takahata, Studio Ghibli Co-Founder and Director, Dies at 82 - <AUTHOR> https://www.yahoo.com/news/isao-takahata-studio-ghibli-co-205327080.html <comment><USER2> My daughters have been consuming Miyazaki's movies with delight -- and I have as well (we still have a few to go). Although I knew it was all produced by Studio Ghibli I confess to not having explored any of Takahata's works. Does anyone have a wider experience and specific recommendations?

<comment><AUTHOR> Grave of the Fireflies is a legitimate classic, but might not be recommended for your daughters due to high risk of emotional trauma. Pom Poko and Princess Kaguya are more family friendly, but Takahashi's films are generally less accessible than Miyazaki's.

<comment><USER3> Grave of the Fireflies destroyed me in college. I was ~20 at the time and cried like a baby for a solid 10 minutes. I'm now a grown man and I'm not sure rewatching would yield different results.

<comment><USER2> Ok, got it, definitely not for the kids.

<comment><USER4> I saw it as a teenager/kid (~16 years old) and it made me deeply sad but also more connected to people who have to experiment the atrocities of the war. I don't think it's bad for kids if they are not too young, it's not an easy movie but you can learn a lot from it.

edit: typo</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


WorkinTech – Find a Tech Job - <AUTHOR> http://workintech.io/ <comment><USER2> Facebook has also been surprisingly a good place to find a job: [https://www.facebook.com/groups/sftechjobs/](https://www.facebook.com/groups/sftechjobs/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Amen. Anything to break the big sites (& recruitment agencies) stranglehold on hiring.

One request: can there be a DevOps/infrastructure type section?

</comment><comment><USER4> >> "A CURATED COLLECTION OF TECH JOBS AND JOB BOARDS"

What sources are being used and what is the curation process?

</comment><comment><USER5> "WorkInTech" would be clearer, I initially misread this as "Workin' Tech", which sounds like a consulting company or something.

</comment><comment><USER6> [http://workintech.io/review/](http://workintech.io/review/) maybe post some positive review? Writing only negative looks like you're trying to lie away reputation of your competition.

<comment><USER7> They are mostly negative, but all the reviews for Hired are very positive. Also, this is a listing of job boards themselves, so individual boards are not really competition. All this site does is link to them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> A suggestion:

html { display: flex; justify-content: center; }

[http://imgur.com/a/gnul5](http://imgur.com/a/gnul5)

Other than that, it's a wonderful site. It has exactly what it should, nothing seems out of place, the name is great, and the styling is eerily close to my ideal for minimalist websites.

</comment><comment><USER9> Interesting work. Would be better as a pure aggregator of individual postings rather than just boards as a whole but I think this is a valuable resource as is.

</comment><comment><USER10> Love this

</comment><comment><USER11> This probably needs a "Show HN:" tag</comment>


Ask HN: What is the best way to enter VC? - <AUTHOR> I've been interested in the VC world for a long time, and would love to jump into the industry.<p>Would you recommend the best way to get into VC & the VC world is to work for a VC fund, or is the best method limited to having a successful startup? <comment><USER2> It's pretty straightforward to get an entry-level position at a firm. Analysts usually have a finance/business background with some tech industry exposure; these days, many firms also hire social media intern types. So if that's your situation, you have a fairly well-trod path.

Intermediate level positions (which are fairly uncommon) are often filled by promotion of analysts, the return of analysts after stints in MBA school, or the like.

For actual investment decision-making roles, the path isn't so obvious. The tricky part here is that VC (as with boutique investment firms in general) is a very "unique mix" driven industry. There are very few partners, whose "unique mix" of biographies are a critical part of the pitch that VCs make to their investors (LPs). Those LPs will be looking for firms made of a few amazingly accomplished, complementary individuals - and putting in 10 years of analyst/associate/principal work at boutique firms will generally not cut it for "partner" level.

If you want to be a partner at a firm, your honest best bet is to: 1\. start a tech company, raise VC, and achieve a successful exit; 2\. make a few angel investments of your own and achieve a solid track record; and 3\. get recruited on the basis of 1. and 2.

(Also - These days some firms, notably a16z, are hiring subject-matter experts to serve in unique advisory roles. Your trajectory to get one of these roles is to ignore VC for most of your life and become a noted subject matter expert.)

</comment><comment><USER3> A secretary working for a VC firm and a GP are both part of the VC world.

Please make clear which part of the VC world you're targeting. The path to become a clerk at a VC firm is way different tha the path to become a GP there.</comment>


Goldman Sachs Is Setting Up a Cryptocurrency Trading Desk - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-21/goldman-is-setting-up-a-cryptocurrency-trading-desk <comment><USER2> When it comes to Bitcoin, I think of Linux as an analogy. When it first emerged, many people questioned it's basic premise: "why is there a new operating system? Everyone uses Windows, or Mac". People didn't know or understand the idea of open source: "Doesn't that just mean people will find bugs and ways to hack it?" "Without a company behind it, how do I know I can trust it in the long term?" At first it's usability sucked. It took forever to get it up and running. It was confusing and hard to learn. It had a small, rabid fan base who kept obsessing about desktop adoption rates and wondering when it would take over. That is all kind of the same vibe as Bitcoin. But just as Linux showed, you don't need a monolithic, centralized entity to back it, it can start slowly and improve over time. "linux on the desktop" basically failed (cue all the linux desktop heads on HH....!) but it completely took over the whole back end of the Internet. Every server runs it. And it then morphed and took over almost all mobile/tablet/smartTV/etc/etc devices. I think something similar could easily happen with Bitcoin. It has securely held Billions of USD equivalents in value for years. The software continues to evolve. Its core technology has morphed into many other formats. And like Linux on the Desktop, maybe the early idea of digital cash will change into another idea, like a settlement layer. who knows? But I remain pretty optimistic about it.

<comment><USER3> That's one of the more convincing arguments I've seen.

I still hold though that Bitcoin was an early prototype and its value will sooner or later approach zero.

I do however think that blockchains and cryptocurrencies are a good idea and here to stay.

To build on your example:

Linux is here to stay but a number of the old companies, distros and packages are either gone or on life support and newer companies, distros and packages are making our wishes reality.

<comment><USER4> I can't help but agree with this. People can only mine so many coins. Users will prefer blockchains which have lower fees and transaction times, so miners will give priority to those coins. At some point the selling point of Bitcoin will become less and less true. I have rewatched several promotional videos for Bitcoin pre-2015, and most of their claims are false as of late 2017.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What's with all the extreme negativity with Bitcoin and its trading price on HN? I've been noticing that in all the BTC related threads recently.

Yes, this is possibly getting too large too fast. Yes there is a chance this is a bubble because the barbers and shoeshine boys are talking about it. But there is also a chance that we genuinely are at the beginning of the transition from Fiat currencies to crypto (beginning of the S-curve mass adoption). And given that we live in the digital connected age dealing with a virtual concept, it takes a lot less time for things to catch on and spread like wild fire, as opposed to other transitions in history like snail mail -> Email (which also was not that slow).

And if at all that crypto vision does come true, the value of BTC and some of these other top cryptos would be worth a _lot_ more than it is right now.

Again, this could go the other way and it could all come crashing down soon and maybe the hype dies down. But I feel a majority of the HN community is just waiting for that to happen which I did not expect.

<comment><USER6> for me at least it is an opportunity to keep my own wealth. If I can keep my own record of wealth why would I entrust a third party that doesn't care anything about me? Perfect example is Wells Fargo opening accounts and charging people.

<comment><USER7> > for me at least it is an opportunity to keep my own wealth.

As long as you don't mind the value of that wealth fluctuating by very large amounts. Today that wealth might be worth $10k, but in a month it very well could be $100...

<comment><USER8> Or being unable to access it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> They typically do this for a few reasons:

1\. High net worth clients demanding such products. 2\. Obvious FOMO. 3\. In case this crypto thing becomes big they don't want to be criticized. 4\. All companies are seeing a nice bump in their share prices with any association to crypto

<comment><USER10> Mostly I think it's 1.

A lot of people jump on guys like Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein for calling Bitcoin massively volatile / a bubble / whatever, like they _hate_ cryptocurrencies.

They don't care, and they aren't supposed to. Their business is to sell whatever the customer wants to buy, cheaper or easier than they can get it elsewhere - and right now the customer wants to buy Bitcoin. Who cares if the backside falls out of it later?

<comment><USER11> They got burned by doing the same with subprimes, selling securities to clients who requested them but in which they did not believe themselves (and were shorting at the same time). This sort of move carries a significant reputation risk. I am sure not everyone at GS believes in crypto-currencies, there must be a lot of internal emails in the style "this is a pyramid scheme", "this thing will crash", etc... Reminds me a lot of 2007.

<comment><USER12> That's not quite correct.

The problem with subprimes was that banks were issuing questionable loans, and then selling them to investors (Without telling them that the loans weren't worth the paper they were printed on.)

This carries a significant reputation risk because they were, quite literally, defrauding their customers.

A crypto trading desk, on the other hand, just lets them buy or sell crypto on a customer's behalf, and charge them a fee for it - much like Coinbase does for retail customers. They won't have any insider knowledge about crypto, and they probably won't even care if BTC goes to $100,000 tomorrow, or to $0. The customer asks the bank to sell them BTC, the bank gives them a quote, and the customer accepts or rejects it. The bank doesn't know if its a good price, nor does it care - and the customer knows that the bank doesn't know, or care.

There's still ways to defraud customers in this arrangement, but there are far fewer incentives to do so... Compared to offloading toxic, shitty mortgages off your books, after having bribed ratings agencies to rate them AAA.

If you really care about crypto, this is a Good Thing (tm). Currently, the counterparty risk with Bitcoin exchanges is through the roof. Some of them allow illegal wash trades, some of them don't follow KYC, some of them go belly-up and steal all your bitcoin and dollars, some of them may be front- running their users, some of them don't allow half their users to withdraw USD, some of them are down for minutes a day... For anyone trading in an extremely volatile environment (Like Bitcoin), this practically screams: "RUN, DON'T WALK AWAY."

The counterparty risk with a Goldman Sachs trading desk is... Much lower.

<comment><USER11> Investors buying subprimes were professional investors. Most of them didn't like subprimes but were buying them because that was the only way to pick up a little bit of yield in a market where credit spreads were massively compressed. It's after they lost their shirt that they suddenly pretended having never realized that subprime stood for loans to riskier borrowers.

This is not very dissimilar. I am certain the majority of investors who will buy bitcoin did not do their due diligence in term of how the currency works (in fact I see a lot of pretty financially switched on people around me who seem quite confused on how it works). They buy now because they want the return and will complain that they weren't aware of the risks when they lost their shirt.

<comment><USER12> > Investors buying subprimes were professional investors. Most of them didn't > like subprimes but were buying them because that was the only way to pick up > a little bit of yield in a market where credit spreads were massively > compressed. It's after they lost their shirt that they suddenly pretended > having never realized that subprime stood for loans to riskier borrowers.

There's certainly more due diligence that they could have done, but that's a red herring. There was plenty of outright fraud on the part of the ratings agencies. No subprime mortgage should have been rated triple-A. Yes, you could blame investors and pension funds for not realizing that they were systemically duped, and buyer beware and all that, but the ecosystem expected that CRAs were not flat-out lying to them.

Also, some of those investors were legally obligated to invest portions of their portfolio into AAA instruments. Their hands were, quite literally, tied.

> Investors losing money = investors suing. Selling products that you don't > believe in yourself = testifying in front of a bunch of angry senators > waiving internals emails about "shitty securities" at you.

When I buy a shitty penny stock from my stock broker, and the stock tanks, I can send as many nasty e-mails to him, and my senator as I want. Unfortunately for me, nobody will care one whit.

When Charles Schwab sells me a share of MSFT stock, it's not because they believe, or don't believe in MSFT. Their opinion of MSFT is completely irrelevant to this transaction. They do it because I asked them to sell me a share, and because someone else asked them to buy a share.

When some crook sells me a mortgage that _they_ underwrote, that they then bribed a credit rating agency to rate highly, that I'm legally obligated to buy... That is an _entirely_ different situation. Do that enough, and you bet some state senator is going to be gunning for them.

<comment><USER11> Credit ratings are merely an opinion. You can't call fraud if someone is wrong on an opinion on whether some securities will go up or down (otherwise you would jail 90% of research analysts). In this case their rating was based on the assumption that there wouldn't be a US-wide real estate downturn. That was backed by a long history and turned out to be dead wrong.

I am sure there was fraud as well. But fraud doesn't explain the financial crisis. Investor complacency, untested new product, excess leverage and reliance on short term funding, too much liquidity in the system, interest rates too low for too long, these were the fundamental reasons.

<comment><USER12> An engineer signing off on a bridge design is also 'merely' an opinion. It's an opinion that will put that engineer in jail, if the bridge collapses, and it turns out that he took a bribe to sign off on the design.

There's a world of difference between "We misjudged the long-tail risk of the instrument we rated" and "We straight up lied so that we could keep getting business from the banks."

Half the mortgages in some of those AAA instruments were issued to people with income at minimum wage, or with credit rating in the 500s, or to people buying homes that were never even looked at by underwriters. This isn't a "Whoops, our math was a bit off, we didn't expect the collateral to drop in value for a bit."

This is straight-up fraud, and the people carrying it out should have been taken out back, and had their shirts taken away from them. We need more, not less personal responsibility from our professional sectors.

<comment><USER11> If you think that the future of a business or an economy is as predictable as whether a bridge will hold, my advice to you is to stay away from any financial product.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> At the barbers today they were all talking about having bought bitcoin recently. When barbers start trading in bitcoin its probably the peak. In 1929 some people started getting out when the shoeshine boys started giving tips.

<comment><USER14> the reason for that saying is because by the time the lowest class of service workers is buying then there is nobody else to buy from them

Stocks and commodities spread through society that way, from the most well connected VCs down to the lower class when the price rise makes them feel like they have a chance to get rich after it is shown in their nonfinancial choices of entertainment

Bitcoin hasnt gone through society in this route

Existing hedge funds, VCs, University endowments and pension funds are legally incapable of buying cryptocurrency

They are all forming new LPs with new operating agreements to do so

There is no institutional leverage or credit in the cryptocurrency ecosystem

There are no derivatives to manage risk yet

The lower class will be selling to the institutions soon

<comment><USER15> Most of the institutional 'slow money' like endowments and pension funds will never touch cryptocurrencies, no matter how they are structured. They can't even take positions on FIAT currencies, or even bonds below AA rating. No way are they ever touching cryptos.

<comment><USER14> > No way are they ever touching cryptos.

Not what I'm hearing in legal circles

Everyone wants exposure, and if they require a new legal structure or a financial derivative they are doing what needs to be done.

The pensions will just go through the next hedge fund that buys for them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> In gold rush, you want to be person providing services to people chasing gold, instead of being person chasing the gold.

<comment><USER17> Today, an 80-year old client of a friend's financial services firm wrote: .

"Hi. Thank you for your excellent stewardship of my retirement savings all these years. You have helped us change a lot of things, and weather some pretty terrific storms like the Fall of 2008. I am now focused on a higher risk-reward trade off, and will be entrusting my son to invest my assets into the brave new world of crypto currencies. With thanks, please kindly close all of my accounts and begin the process of moving my funds to my son so that he can purchase Bitcoin."

I am not kidding. This, folks, is how the world ends.

<comment><USER18> Can you transfer money to your son in the US? That should be tax evasion.

Where I am from, that order would be totally illegal. ain't happening.

<comment><USER19> I don't think that is illegal or tax evasion anywhere in the world. Depending on the amount and the jurisdiction and whether the son gains ownership of the funds (rather than just the power to invest them), the firm might have to report this transaction and the son might have to pay for taxes.

<comment><USER18> It is illegal and it is tax evasion in some jurisdictions.

1) Transferring your money directly would allow to avoid inheritance tax.

2) Some jurisdictions have hard limits on what you can "donate" to your children. It can be "low" like 100k per 10 years.

<comment><USER19> No, it becomes tax evasion if you do this and then fail to pay the applicable tax on it.

In the same way, it's not tax evasion to have a successful business, say, making a million dollars selling shoes, even though there are limits on how much money you can make selling shoes before you have to pay tax on it. It is tax evasion if you make a million dollars of taxable income and only pay enough tax for half a million.

Do you have a specific jurisdiction in mind where this transfer would be tax evasion?

<comment><USER18> It looks like we're both in agreement that there are legal requirements beyond "just transfer all the money to my son".

Point being. When the client ask "transfer the money to my son and close my account", he usually doesn't mean "take 30% off, transfer what's left to my son and close the account".

You can have a look at France. I am not sure what paperwork is needed to make it legitimately, it's non trivial.

<comment><USER20> In the context provided it sounds like the client meant his son would be taking over as the steward of investvesting his money and was going to put it into BTC. This is not illegal in any way. It's not any different than having an investment manager in the first place, other than it sounds like an objectively terrible idea.

It's pretty common to move around retirement accounts in the US, the most popular type are tied with your job and frequently move when you change employers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Great. Now we're on the path to making this a systemic risk.

<comment><USER22> Oh good, I was worried that the BC bubble bursting wouldn't have enough negative effects on the economy at large.

(/s)

<comment><USER23> Why do you think it would have any effect? It's still a comparatively tiny market.

<comment><USER24> > half a trillion USD is a tiny market What?

<comment><USER8> BTC market size is the $$/Yen/GBP/Euros _exchanged_ into BTC a day and backwards, not Max(SomeOnePaidForBtc) * BTCs outstanding.

<comment><USER25> Interesting. Why is it this and not daily volume?

<comment><USER12> I trade you my dog for your cat. We both say that they are worth a million dollars.

What is the market cap of our two-animal store-of-value ecosystem?

(Unless you're an economist, the answer is not "Two million dollars.")

On the other hand, if I then went ahead and sold your cat to some outside party for $600, and you sold my dog for $400, we could reasonably say that the market cap is ~$1000.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> My best guess is that the "store-of-value that can't be manipulated by banks" is effectively over. Big banks it seems will take over the trading volume of the big crypto coins and develop their own exchanges.

<comment><USER27> They may be able to partially manipulate the price, but they can't influence the currency or money supply. That's the beauty of crypto.

<comment><USER28> Doesn't matter one single bit. Goldman Sachs can't mine gold and control its physical supply, but they sure can play with its market price. So they can drive down the futures price and then hoard physical bullion on the cheap if they have a large institution or country wanting to accumulate gold reserves. Rinse, repeat. Finance 101.

<comment><USER29> Also, bitcoin as it stands right now is pretty useless compared to other cryptocurrencies. The value of bitcoin long-term is tied to the core team's ability to make the necessary changes to the protocol and to do it fast before another currency overtakes the lead of the cryptosphere. This is not gold, this is a world of software that changes and evolves constantly. The bubble for bitcoin might burst soon, but other coins that provide actual value will take its place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm sort of surprised there's going to be a regulated secondary market for this, where the newest version of the GOP Tax plan will place a fee on this form of arbitrage[1]. Then again, I did learn today that a hot wallet I had on a crypto-trading website had folded and didn't send me any notice of shutdown; along with the time period of filing a claim having been long passed. Since there's a lot of theft and lack of accountability with these closures, maybe regulation could incentivize better data protection practices and pro-consumer behavior.

[1] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-21/tax- free-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-21/tax-free-bitcoin- to-ether-trading-in-u-s-to-end-under-gop-plan)

<comment><USER31> > maybe regulation could incentivize better data protection practices and pro- > consumer behavior.

Perhaps I am too cynical but given Equifax is still fresh on my mind I really have doubts the US government will do anything but pass laws to make sure they are getting taxes from cryptocurrencies.

<comment><USER30> While Equifax is a quasi-governmental company that's privately traded; fully private companies that are regulated in the space are required under the umbrella watch of FINRA/SEC regulations. In the past[1], they have not had any problem with levying 7 figure fines against organizations that are outside of data compliance.

Taxing cryptocurrencies will likely push traders who want a greater margin to foreign countries' exchanges; but I see it as a step in the right direction for institutionalizing the practice. I've seen a posts across multiple subreddits where people want to start trading these purely as investment vehicles rather than use the underlying technology. With an influx of ideologies working both with and against one another, a lot of ordinary people can get harmed from the wild-west environment and volatility associated with it.

[1][https://www.sec.gov/news/pressrelease/2016-112.html](https://www.sec.gov/news/pressrelease/2016-112.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Can someone explain this collective mania to me? This is all 100% pure speculative frenzy, right?

<comment> etr-strike Most of us Bitcoiners are skeptical of modern monetary policy and want a risk- free store of value for our wealth. Today Bitcoin is very risky, however, we believe its fundamental properties will ultimately lead to a stable place to put our savings. Sure, it won't gain interest or dividends but it also won't be subject to inflation or central banker manipulation.

The above is purely my opinion and is frequently the subject of disagreement. It is, however, why I got into bitcoin.

<comment><USER33> So why bitcoin rather than another cryptocurrency?

If another becomes more popular, everyone shifts to it, and the price crashes, what use was bitcoin as a store of value?

The difference with other assets like cash or gold is that they have value that is supported by a clear rationale based on a central bank's economic policies.

<comment> etr-strike I chose bitcoin because for several reasons:

1\. I believe in the technology approach bitcoin is taking over any other coin (I believe functionality like smart contracts should be a side chain to the main bitcoin chain).

2\. It has had a firm 21m supply cap since the beginning

3\. It is the most decentralized

4\. It has the largest userbase -- it's a more widely adopted currency

5\. It has the most proof of work behind it (most of the mining power in the world targets the bitcoin blockchain). Proof of work is what keeps the chain secure from malicious actors.

6\. The ledger is public

Something like gold can't be audited. If I bought gold, I wouldn't want to store that in my house. I'd need to trust a third party to store it for me. Who's auditing that third party? Is my gold only mine on paper? Bitcoin is auditable, gold is not (for the average person).

Cash is a depreciating asset -- at best, it loses 2% per year (likely much more).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I've seen a few well know prop trading firms that are trading cryptocurrencies as well (Jump, DRW, probably others) and there doesn't seem to be too much talk of that. Goldman lends credibility and pretty much everyone has heard of them, so I get this is bigger news, but to me the more interesting news is in the trading firms.

Prop trading firms have no reason not to manipulate the cryptomarkets (it seems legal) and have the capital and knowledge to do so. Or am I missing something and manipulating these markets is illegal?

<comment><USER35> It is not illegal as the market is not regulated right now. You can actually see manipulation in BTC right now.

<comment><USER36> I think it might be more accurate to say the laws are not enforced now as the markets are not regulated. That's not the same as legal. I'm not sure market manipulation / insider trading laws are that specific as to which asset you are manipulating as to make crypto ok. There's some talk now about Coinbase insiders trading ahead on bitcoin cash and some debate as to whether they could be done for that. I'd be curious how that plays out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Going to need some rules and regulations. Last thing we need are big banks overleveraging on crypto currencies for the excess return. When, not if, this bubble bursts hopefully it doesn't take the whole economy down with it. The whole financial market wants exposure to crypto at this point.

<comment><USER27> You can't regulate cyptocurrencies. That's the beauty of the whole thing.

<comment><USER38> Hell you can. For example, you can make exchanges illegal. Done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Guess the end of the run isn't in sight yet.

<comment><USER39> Oops: since writing this post bitcoin has fallen by 25%. This is why I've not gone anywhere near investing in it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I am also thinking about building a cryptocurrency trading desk inside my company, any thoughts about how to recruit in this field? I am mainly finding it difficult to get the right personality traits since there are a lot of shady and non-professional people.

<comment><USER41> I honestly can't tell if this is a serious comment.

<comment><USER40> This is a very serious comment. I am wondering how to recruit professionals to build a trading desk inside my company where we specialize in secure cryptocurrency applications and are part of some venture funds but just don't do day trading.

I am also wondering if your comment is serious of not because it doesn't add anything to the discussion.

<comment><USER36> Maybe people who have traded currencies/stocks in bank jobs and done a bit of crypto trading as a hobby? Or who have a CFA and have traded crypto. I'm not sure there have been many/any professional crypto trading jobs as the thing is so new but other trading experience would carry over to an extent. I've got some stock experience and have recently started trading crypto a bit and there are lots of oddities with how to do transactions and the like with crypto so you'd want someone with some experience there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> 1\. Goldman Sachs going to open trading desk 2. CBOE launches futures 3. CME launches futures 4. Fed sells seized crypto coins from silk road 5. ...

The list of things that makes this as genuine as it can be goes on and on.

It's a repeat of the 2008-09 crash from subprime loans. Everyone knew what was happening. But they just wanted to make as much money from the situation before getting out. Of course Lehman Brothers didn't get out in time.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is going to be an end of the current generation of exchanges, and, most likely, future generation of exchanges:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15973721](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15973721)

</comment><comment><USER43> In [http://alternativlos.org/41/](http://alternativlos.org/41/) they say that GS got big on front running and how all the old tricks work on this new, unregulated market.

</comment><comment><USER44> Welp pretty much knew this would happen all along. I was hoping crypto would remain independent of banks, but nope. Not long before big banks take over crypto exchanges, develop dark pools, and manipulate it. Not much we can do now

<comment><USER45> Isn't Coinbase a dark pool? Off-chain transactions seem like order internalization to me...

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> It's interesting that nobody was screaming bubble and denigrating the price of gold after it kept rising after the GFC. [https://goldprice.org/gold-price- chart.html](https://goldprice.org/gold-price-chart.html)

<comment><USER47> Gold 2008 - 2017: ~100% increase

Gold 2016 - 2017: almost no change

BTC 2010 - 2017: ~22499899% increase

BTC 2016 - 2017: ~1700% increase

One seems a bit more bubbly than the other don't you think?

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> The guys who run these trading desks make like $5m-$10m per year. I wonder how Goldman plans to compensate the guys running the crypto desk.

</comment><comment><USER49> Of course they are, and why wouldn't they be? Goldman's entire business model is based on raking dumb investment strategies.

</comment><comment><USER50> haha. Excellent.

Previous crashes = bankers dunking on retail investor rubes

Coming cryptoocurrency crash = nerdboi investor rubes dunking on bankers

Buy my pretties! Buy!

</comment><comment><USER51> If Goldman is doing it... maybe I should finally buy some BitCoin...

<comment><USER52> If Goldman is doing it publicly, then you are already too late to the party.

<comment><USER53> To be fair, people have been saying that you're too late to the bitcoin party since around 2013.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> There's a cryptocurrency called RaiBlocks that is working to be the best at transfer of value. The protocol uses new cryptocurrency concepts evolved over the years and I believe it can be quite revolutionary. In my opinion, bitcoin is one of the worst cryptocurrencies at the moment, and to be honest I hope to see it die soon.

Create a wallet using this site [https://raiwallet.com/](https://raiwallet.com/), paste your address here and I'll send you some raiblocks. The transaction time is about ~5 seconds and there are no fees, so it's almost on par with a credit card, except you don't depend on a bank or a credit card company.

Also, check out this link to google trends: [https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=raiblocks](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=raiblocks). You'll see that the country with the most interest in raiblocks is Venezuela, which coincidentally is going through hyperinflation. Bitcoins used to be quite big there as a way of avoiding the loss in value of the national currency, but as the country became poorer and the cryptocurrency networks more congested, the fees became prohibitively expensive. Raiblocks could be a good alternative to cash, or at least help some of the most technically savvy people.

What I'm aiming at is, give the technology a chance. As the top poster says, it might be a big bubble, but it might also be a revolutionary technology (or both, just like the internet).

EDIT: Sorry folks I have to go so you'll have to wait until I check my account again. Still I'll do my best to keep sending as long as people keep asking.

<comment><USER54> Thanks, I'll give it a go as well if you don't mind. :) xrb_1sy8ewzsee7zxu4bz1ka7pqjt7uwdmd5ng5xu33ghzxts5fxyt3hzcgjqryu

> Raiblocks could be a good alternative to cash, or at least help some of the > most technically savvy people.

Do you see any downsides? The only technical one I'm seeing is that the protocol isn't battle tested (e.g. can it cope with being spammed like crazy given it has zero fees?).

<comment><USER29> Yup, the protocol isn't battle tested. Some stress tests have been performed, but that's nothing compared to actual real-world use. As in any experimental technology there are several premises that are assumed, hopefully, with good reason, and if any of these fail it might be fatal. For raiblocks, it might be vulnerable to certain types of sophisticated attacks (check the paper for more info), and more info must be gathered. Also, the cryptocurrency isn't anonymous, packets are sent unencrypted via UDP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> BTC to $100k followed a drop to $80 and a public bailout

happy trading

<comment><USER56> And SEC goes after shady figures, not Goldman

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Ok, look, it's a pyramid scheme no different than the stock market.... coke heads at Goldman love this sh_t

</comment><comment><USER28> So much for the promised currency / store-of-value that can't be manipulated by banks / governments.

<comment><USER32> Isn't it mostly being manipulated by drug traffickers and money launderers right now?

<comment><USER27> Wow, you're behind the curve, aren't you.

<comment><USER57> Hm, what are bitcoins used for today ? I was still seriously under the impression that there still wasn't any serious use, except for illegal activities... ( i'm not talking about eth which found an interesting usages with ICOs, just bitcoins).

Edit : i'm also not asking for the list of legal shops that accept bitcoins, i'm wondering about the percentage of officialy legal bitcoin transactions vs the rest.

<comment><USER58> Why do you think a _public_ ledger will be the medium for illegal transactions?

How exactly do you plan on converting fiat to btc and then paying for transactions? Every step of the way is going to be on the. public. ledger. Forever. Linked to each step along the way. C'mon.

BTC is for people who don't want to be at the whim of banks or paypal. Or it was anyways, until the fees became too high and the transaction times became too long.

The serious use is with other coins like ETH (powering smart contracts, dApps) and BCH (hard fork of bitcoin from August that doesn't have BTC's current issues). Or altcoins. Raiblocks and XRP have extremely quick confirmation times.

All of which have a _public_ ledger by the way. If you want to do illegal activities, you'd probably want to use Monero or NAV, but first you'd have to prove either are truly private.

<comment><USER57> Aren't there any way to hide your transaction by funneling them through exchange platforms ?

Plus, if everything was public an easily traceable to a person then why are exchange platforms hacked ? You could easily identify the authors of the hack and sue them... i guess there isn't enough regulation to make tracing the bitcoin a big enough legal threat. Or that tracing to the wallet without being able to identify the owner is useless. Which means it's still good for other illegal activities.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Let us pay for the TextMate 2.0 upgrade - <AUTHOR> http://twitition.com/re34f

<comment><USER2> If you want to pay for the upgrade, just go buy another copy: macromates won't stop you.</comment>