MIDI 2.0 Prototyping announced - <AUTHOR> https://www.midi.org/articles-old/the-midi-manufacturers-association-mma-and-the-association-of-music-electronics-industry-amei-announce-midi-2-0tm-prototyping <comment><USER2> Only semi related, but I still have to share.

The guys at Roland are genius. I have a somewhat old Roland RD-150 digital keyboard. While searching online for the user manual, I found a 'firmware update' on the official site.

I was curious. My keyboard is pretty old school, it doesn't have USB or anything like that. I downloaded the firmware update and opened the zip file.

It contained a readme... and a .midi file. It sort of blew my mind. They were sending firmware updates over MIDI! You had to press a certain key combination on the keyboard and play back the MIDI file into the MIDI in, and the firmware update would be complete.

True hackers.

<comment><USER3> That's not Roland being genius, though. That's kind of literally one of the things sysex messages were added to the MIDI 1.0 spec. It's also why it's taking so effing long for webmidi to become a standard, because allowing sysex would mean your browser could in theory tell your midi device to brick itself.

<comment><USER4> In fairness, Roland founded the MMA and wrote most of the MIDI spec. The odds are fairly good that Roland did invent SysEx.

<comment><USER5> I thought Dave Smith was primarily responsible? Just to put another notch in Silicon Valley's belt, I guess.

<comment><USER4> Dave Smith was the first to get on board with the project and made substantial contributions to the design of MIDI, but it was Ikutaro Kakehashi who started the whole endeavour. MIDI was heavily influenced by DCB, a proprietary interface developed by Roland in 1981.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I think it's quite astonishing how solid the MIDI standard feels -- it's embraced by the entire industry and even though it's nearly 40 years old, it has worked very well for many types of instruments and software that couldn't even have been imagined at the time.

<comment><USER4> We tolerate MIDI, but it's really pretty terrible. It's ubiquitous, but it's _just barely good enough_ to have avoided being replaced.

The first major issue is simply the lack of bandwidth. The physical layer operates at 3125 bytes per second, which just isn't enough for anything more than a single instrument with relatively sparse control data. MIDI devices can ostensibly be daisy-chained, but that's a really dumb thing to do because you get horrible timing problems. Back when we still used a lot of hardware synthesisers, it was the norm to have a large multi-port MIDI interface connected to your computer, providing one interface per instrument. That still doesn't solve your problems if you have a multitimbral module with lots of polyphony - if you start sending control channel messages, the timing of your note on/off messages will fall apart.

The second major issue is the lack of resolution. MIDI is an 8-bit standard, which is generally acceptable for velocity but grossly inadequate for most control channel messages. There are some pretty nasty workarounds being used to avoid zipper noise when you adjust a control parameter; this is most commonly an issue when sweeping a resonant filter. There are various hacks to send 14-bit control change messages, but they're non-standard aside from velocity and pitch bend.

MIDI is also built around the western scale, with no real accommodation for other tuning systems. We're forced to use the crude bodge of sending a note on message immediately followed by a pitch bend message; MIDI doesn't support per-note pitch bend, so you can't have polyphony and microtimbrality on the same channel. This is a fairly niche issue in the west, but it's a showstopper in a lot of other musical traditions.

OpenSoundControl addressed these issues and more besides, but it lacks widespread support because it was developed unilaterally rather than as an industry-wide collaboration. The spec is very powerful, but it just isn't very nice to work with. It's exciting to see that the MMA have a number of big players involved with the development of MIDI 2.0. We've been talking about fixing MIDI for a long time, but it seems like there's finally the traction to get a new standard widely adopted.

<comment><USER6> > We tolerate MIDI, but it's really pretty terrible. It's ubiquitous, but it's > just barely good enough to have avoided being replaced.

OK, what I'm going to say is not constructive, but, boy, how I hate this type of comments. Where were you 40 years ago? Why did you not prevent it from being terrible? What did you do to replace it with something better?

Yes, it may be "suboptimal" by the 2019 "standards", but back then, I'm pretty sure, people put a lot of thought in to it and tried to make it as good as possible. Just because it looks childish on the current hardware does not make it "pretty terrible".

EDIT: It's almost like complaining that 555 is absolute rubbish comparing to 8266 that can do sooo much more, and why just did they not come up with something better back then.

<comment><USER4> _> OK, what I'm going to say is not constructive, but, boy, how I hate this type of comments. Where were you 40 years ago? Why did you not prevent it from being terrible? What did you do to replace it with something better?_

I'm not saying that they should have come up with something better. MIDI was an incredible breakthrough in 1983, but it was designed in 1983. That's a very, very long time in technology. We've known about and dealt with the shortcomings of MIDI for decades, but it's difficult to replace a deeply- entrenched standard. MIDI has been pushed as far as possible without breaking backwards-compatibility, but it is now long overdue for the industry to move in unison and create something fit for the 21st century.

Imagine if you dealt with lots of devices on a daily basis that had a 33kbaud serial interface. Would that kind of annoy you? Would you say "this archaic serial format is just great!". No, you'd be kind of cheesed off that you were stuck with it.

MIDI 2.0 looks great. It's a really big deal for the electronic music industry. You can only usefully say _why_ it's a big deal if you acknowledge all of the crummy, annoying parts of MIDI 1.0.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why it is important in one paragraph:

"The MIDI 2.0 initiative updates MIDI with auto-configuration, new DAW/web integrations, extended resolution, increased expressiveness, and tighter timing -- all while maintaining a high priority on backward compatibility. This major update of MIDI paves the way for a new generation of advanced interconnected MIDI devices, while still preserving interoperability with the millions of existing MIDI 1.0 devices. One of the core goals of the MIDI 2.0 initiative is to also enhance the MIDI 1.0 feature set whenever possible."

<comment><USER8> This is fantastic news, I can't wait to have CC parameters with more than 128 levels. Does anyone know what the new resolution for CCs will be?

<comment><USER9> Open Sound Control has that, but support for the format is very selective.

<comment><USER8> Good point, OSC is pretty good I should invest some time looking into it

<comment><USER10> If you're looking for information on OSC, I'm currently in a computer music class and we have a section on it: [http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~music/cmsip/slides/06-networks.pdf](http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~music/cmsip/slides/06-networks.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I recently read the biography (for lack of a better term) of sequential circuits. Dave Smith(the founder who still makes awesome synthesizers today) was a primary stakeholder in pushing the standard though. What essentially happened was All companies had a data/sync standard for electronic instruments. Then Oberheim released a system that many manufacturers saw as a threat to their business. Dave Smith convinced Roland to just adopt something and that momentum of sequential and Roland would turn adoption in their favor. That pretty much worked. Iirc the midi association then made Tom Oberheim president.

<comment><USER12> Mind sharing which book/article you're referencing? Sounds interesting.

<comment><USER13> I'm not OP, but I suspect it was "The Prophet from Silicon Valley: The Complete Story of Sequential Circuits," for which Dave Smith wrote the foreword.

<comment><USER11> Thats it- thanks. [https://www.amazon.com/Prophet-Silicon-Valley-Complete- Seque...](https://www.amazon.com/Prophet-Silicon-Valley-Complete- Sequential/dp/1512198323)

link to the book.

<comment><USER14> interesting how there is a new version of $40 and two used for >$1000 ! out- of-control algorithm ?!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> MIDI is great, and I am so thankful that they had the foresight to require a mandatory opto-coupler in the input to avoid ground loops of interconnected gear. Even today, very few devices have a comparable insulation in their USB connection.

<comment><USER16> On my guitar pedalboard, I tried to be clever once and I hooked all of my digital pedals with a usb hub to a main connector. Horrible ground loops and digital noise was introduced. Does anyone make an electrically isolated usb hub?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Will it allow me to poll the state of the knobs on my keyboard? Many instruments have MIDI extensions to allow you to check the state of the controls, but having one built in to the language would be great, especially for WebMIDI.

<comment><USER18> nope.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is the midi connector the oldest one still in active use? It is my prime example of getting things right at the first (or at least first-ish) try.

<comment><USER20> Depending on what you'd consider a 'connector,' the headphone jack has quite a long lineage. I believe the 3.5mm headphone jack was originally created in the '50s. Of course, on the _very_ distant planet that phone vendors live in, the headphone jack is not in active use, because people there were apparently absolutely begging for phones that were fractions of a millimeter thinner. In any case, if you count the larger variants, it's been around for a fair bit longer than that, even.

<comment><USER3> Interesting that you went with the 3.5mm jack, and not the 1/4" jack, which predate the 20th century and will be in use until analog electric signals become impossible, rather than being tied to whether or not "cabled portable audio devices" stay a thing or whether we give up on those.

<comment><USER20> I mentioned them, but ordinary people don't use 1/4" jacks. In fact, I don't know who still uses 1/4" jacks. Audio professionals seem to use XLR, though I am not one myself. I know 3.5mm connectors are still in active use by the general public.

<comment><USER21> > In fact, I don't know who still uses 1/4" jacks.

People with electric guitars, at least.

<comment><USER20> TIL.

Looks like there is at least a bit more variance on the 1/4" jack, with multiple types that are in use. Meanwhile, virtually any consumer 3.5mm jack is going to be TRS or TRRS, though admittedly there are definitely some less- standard things there too.

So the 1/4" jack has been around a lot longer, but may be less 'standard' in that sense. Of course, I also have no idea whether 3.5mm jacks have always been as 'standard' as they are today.

<comment><USER22> They _are_ standardized, though: EIA RS-453/IEC 60603-11

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I want to believe this will get decent adoption in my lifetime. MIDI has so many historical limitations that have become ridiculous in a modern context, like only having 16 channels per bus or the very low control precision. These have lead to hacky solutions and compromises that often end up creating a poor experience for users.

I've worked on plugins that require per-note tuning and pitch bend, and the current best solution, MPE, is limiting. You're forced to use an entire MIDI bus to control a single instrument. This is a huge hack, and it means you can't create a MIDI plugin that controls multiple instruments.

Vendors are slow to adopt new standards in the audio world (as in many domains), and I hope this will be followed up with good diplomacy. We can learn from the non-adoption of Steinberg's VST3 standard as a path to avoid.

<comment><USER24> Steinberg is no longer granting licenses for VST2, so legally there can be no more new VST2 developers. But not all the hosts support VST3 yet and VST3 is over 10 years old. It's a giant pain in the ass.

They are trying to force it, but people just don't want it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> MPE (Multi Polyphonic Expression) would be nice to have.

<comment><USER26> Considering MPE is in MIDI 1.0 as an extension, you can bet it will be in MIDI 2.0

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> There is better than MIDI for a long time; it's called OSC. It's a shame the industry did never embrace it. I had some contact with Roland and the MMA, and they explained to me that the industry did invest so much into MIDI in term of hardware development that it will be tough to replace it.

</comment><comment><USER28> why aren't all input devices, including mice, (text) keyboards, gamepads etc MIDI devices ?

<comment><USER29> I'm not an expert so I might be wrong but probably because one solution that fits for all can be a bad idea. Driver complexity is one of the reasons most devices are not compatible with all existing OSs by default.

<comment><USER30> MIDI is - and should be with future standards - simple, slow and reliable: Musical Instruments don't need much/many volume/types of information, so writing the drivers should be fairly simple.

Having said that, some midi to usb converters are still not up to full compliance with the 80s MIDI 1 standard

<comment><USER31> Does that mean that the converters implement the protocol themselves? I expected them to be roughly FTDI USB UART chips, tied to the MIDI baudrate.

<comment><USER30> I'm not entirely sure, but the fact that there are compatibility/compliance issues leads me to believe it's a mixture of both.

Either way, the drivers may be the issue: Parsing the serial correctly etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Curious, what's the best method currently for automatically mapping or discovering controls of a connected midi instrument?

Especially if you don't have a predefined midi map/template.

Or is manually activating controls and defining your map still the best way?

<comment><USER33> There's stuff like NI's NKS [0], but it's highly vendor specific and very inflexible. I assume this will remain the case, given the relative variability of MIDI controllers - the position and amount of control elements, not to mention their implicit relationships (knobs that are directly above or below a fader for instance); and their near-universal non-responsiveness - there is no way to say, label a control for you to see physically.

Interesting issue to solve though, I'd bet my money on modular MIDI controllers becoming more prominent in the future.

0 - [https://www.native- instruments.com/en/specials/komplete/this...](https://www.native- instruments.com/en/specials/komplete/this-is-nks/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> > All companies that develop MIDI products are encouraged to join the MMA to > participate in the future development of the specification

The good news: a new enhanced MIDI spec is in the works!

The bad news: you're gonna have to fight for it.

</comment><comment><USER35> Good news!

Hopefully it will be as solid as the current version.

</comment><comment><USER36> Good news for those of us with steppy filters.

</comment><comment><USER16> Please make the connector smaller!

<comment><USER37> I'd have to disagree with this - I've had quite a few devices that have used mini-dins, and they aren't anywhere near as robust. Maybe have options for different sized connectors, but they should all be equal in terms of functionality (a bit like USB-B connectors), and need to be as robust as the current ones. I can think of many times where the simplicity and size of the DIN connectors on MIDI gear has been the difference between 'no worries, I can just about get my arm down the back of this rack and get the plug in' and 'no chance, can't feel where this needs to go'. And DINs are strong enough that you can rotate them to get them to the correct orientation without causing damage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I wonder if they will also support USB-C just like Thunderbolt 3 got tacked onto the USB-C connector?

<comment><USER3> MIDI is just a protocol, it doesn't care which cable it gets sent over, as long as both ends of the cable know which message transport system if being used.

As such, pretty much every modern MIDI device can already do MIDI over USB (including the ones that have dedicated MIDI ports on the back).

<comment><USER39> _> MIDI is just a protocol, it doesn't care which cable it gets sent over, as long as both ends of the cable know which message transport system if being used._

Strictly speaking, no. MIDI also specifies the mechanical and electrical connections. There is a MIDI USB device class specification, but that's not an implementation of the MIDI 1.0 standard and just roughly corresponds to its packet protocol.

<comment><USER3> Ah, I did not know this. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> when is the article from?

<comment><USER41> Friday, 18 January 2019</comment></comment>


Remember InviteShare?  Sold for $25,000! - <AUTHOR> http://www.sitepoint.com/marketplace/auction/10358?

<comment><USER2> If I was a potential buyer I'd see someone selling a site just 4 days after launch as a big red flag. Was the developer's confidence in it's potential so low that they chose to take a sum equivalent to 4 months' salaray (assuming they're not 16) rather than ride the wave?

On the other hand, maybe they're on to something - repeatedly build sites with cool design, get a mention on Tech Crunch, and flip.

<comment><USER3> _cool design_

I beg to differ.

<comment><USER4> Well, if you don't think much of their design, you could try it with a cool design, and see if you can double their take. ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> While I think InviteShare provides a useful service and could gather a community, I think it would be difficult for someone to easily make a full- time business out of it on its own.

$25,000 for what likely could have been a handful of days work is an excellent payout, and possibly a great way to fund their next startup ;]

<comment><USER6> Unless I'm badly mistaken, that site's much more than just a handful of days work.

<comment><USER7> "Could be done in a handful of days" is the stock response to web applications these days. On one hand its mostly true (its easy to get the majority of functionality working), but its also a bit of bravado: raw functionality and a polished product are not really equivalent.

<comment><USER2> Well said. I was just pondering this the other day - how did did I manage to get really cool/hard coding projects (AI, systems, etc.) done in school in just under a week while it takes many months to get a decent web application built. I realized that it's because the things you build in school are prototypes that deal with very specific use cases, while web apps require you take care of lots and lots of details so that ordinary people could use them.

Please don't reply saying "maybe you should consider Ruby on Rails" because that's not the point of my comment :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm interested in who bought it. Was it an SEO/domainer/spammer guy?

<comment><USER5> That's an excellent question. I was also just wondering who the new owner was since it's listed as 'Private' on the auction site.

<comment><USER9> That is actually pretty common for the sitepoint marketplace, so it is not necessarily an indication that the buyer is blackhat/spammy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Come to think, this "scenario" seems like a good idea rather than going through YCombinator.

Think about it. Find something easy to implement (shouldn't be more than 1.5 months effort) and target it to TechCrunch audience. Flip the site for $25k - $30k and embark to your ultimate goal.

Now you don't have to share 6% - 10% of your company to YCombinator (or other similar companies)

<comment><USER4> We had $16,000 in the bank when we accepted YC funding and were already selling product.

Nonetheless, it was 5% of equity well-spent. I couldn't hire pg, tlb, or Jessica for any amount of money. But when I let them give me $15k, they became part-time employees for three months. Pretty cool deal, I think. But, hey, if you already know where you're going and how to get there...and you just need a few thousand dollars to do it, skip YC. It's not right for you.

<comment><USER11> Having a bit of reserves in the bank before applying / getting into YC seems like it'd be a major help.

Although it appears that many YC startups haven't had any trouble getting angel funding after their initial funding runs out. Just traditionally it can take many months to raise funding (while being distracted from making the product better), no?</comment></comment></comment>


Chrome OS Looks to Refresh Standard Fonts - <AUTHOR> http://www.thechromesource.com/chrome-os-looks-to-refresh-standard-fonts/ <comment><USER3> What's hilarious is that RedHat already commissioned Ascender to make freely- available metric-compatible fonts, resulting in the Liberation family:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_fonts>

Given that Ascender is the official vendor for Microsoft's core fonts including the original Times, Arial and Courier, one wonders if they're utterly sick of those particular sets of metrics yet.

<comment><USER4> Actually these new Chrome fonts (Tinos, Arimo and Cousine) _are_ the Liberation fonts. Exact same design, but a larger glyph set.

<comment><USER3> Ah, I guess Google just didn't like the GPLv2 licence attached to the Liberation fonts, and paid for them to be re-licensed.

That's a bit of a shame, I'd been looking forward to having a wider set of Free fonts but the Liberation family is not a thing anyone would choose to use if it weren't for the metrics-compatibility.

<comment><USER5> Nah, we didn't pay just to relicense/extend Liberation. This pickup of fonts is a snapshot of a work in progress.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The person who wrote this article asserts that these fonts are "very much similar" to Times, Arial, and Courier, respectively. However, Times and Tino would never be categorized together (except that they are both serif fonts, but hey, there's about a 50-50 chance of that). Cousine is also quite different from the typewriter-esque Courier.

Edit: As lambda points out, they have compatible metrics, so there shouldn't be cases where layouts meant for one of {Times New Roman, Arial, Courier New} "break" by having content overflows on Chrome OS. (The team has also set up aliases for these relationships, besides setting the default "serif", "sans- serif", and "monospace" fonts.) Cool!

Direct links follow:

Issue & related commits on Chrome OS: [http://code.google.com/p/chromium- os/issues/detail?id=5287&#...
Download the fonts: http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/09/download- and-use-the-new-...

<comment><USER7> They are "very much similar" only in that they have compatible metrics. Thus, text typeset in Times, Arial, and Courier won't have to re-flow when using Tino, Arimo, and Cousine. You're absolutely right; the style of the fonts is quite different than the style of the one's they are intended to replace.

From the font info for Arimo:

        Unique name	Ascender - <USER2>
        Copyright	Digitized data copyright (c) 2010 Google Corporation.
        Trademark	Arimo is a trademark of Google and may be registered in certain jurisdictions.
        Description	Arimo was designed by Steve Matteson as an innovative, refreshing sans serif design that is metrically compatible with Arial™. Arimo offers improved on-screen readability characteristics and the pan-European WGL character set and solves the needs of developers looking for width-compatible fonts to address document portability across platforms.
        License	Licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The biggest difference I see is in the monospace font. Courier is serif and Cousine is not. Serif fonts are good for coding but my guess is that anybody coding has a better font than Courier.

<comment><USER9> Keep in mind it's meant for low-resolution devices, where the serifs of Courier would feel lost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I understand that "why?" will probably be responded with "why not?" but I'm going to ask it anyway. What benefit does bringing in more fonts do? What is the advantage of using these fonts over the current free/open fonts, like Nimbus, Arial, Courier New, etc?

<comment><USER11> Arial and Courier New are proprietary fonts. Arimo, Tinos, and Cousine use SIL Open Font License.

Not sure why not other open fonts, but hey, we now have three more, how's this not a good thing?

(Designed by Steve Matesson <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Matteson>)

<comment><USER10> Ah, I see. I was going off memory that Arial existed in Open Office. After double-checking my sources (OpenOffice.org 3.2 running on Ubuntu 10.04.1) I see that I was incorrect in that. Nevermind, then.

<comment><USER12> Ubuntu doesn't ship it by default because of FOSS-wankery in the style of _debian-legal_ — the Microsoft Core Fonts are perfectly free to redistribute in their original compressed form.

 _apt-get install msttcorefonts_

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Thank goodness the monospace font is sans-serif.

</comment><comment><USER13> So, they're making an imitation of an imitation of Helvetica?...

I'm so glad I use a system that includes the real thing.

<comment><USER6> It does look a little nicer, from what I've seen so far; the cutoff on the lowercase "r", for example, is vertical instead of horizontal, bringing it closer in line with Helvetica.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> What's so fucked up is that there's no intellectual property protection for typefaces — in the eyes of the law they're just goddamn shapes. You hold copyright over the exact contents of the distributed file, and you can trademark the name, but you can't stop someone from making an exact clone independently.

Microsoft licensed the original "Core Fonts" from Monotype, who had already made Arial as a metrically equivalent clone of Linotype's Helvetica, but slightly different because they would otherwise get yelled at by their dork friends, and it was just one more in a large pool of other very similar fonts. Then later generations of dorks curse them for making it slightly different. Now Google has commissioned a new set of pointlessly-different fonts, which they will be yelled at for. It would have been better if they'd just made direct clones — they'd still get yelled at by the same people, but at least shit wouldn't look fucked up. The only problem would be finding someone willing to make them.

Pretty much all of the bullshit surrounding fonts on the web stems from FUD from the handful of type foundries and their fanboys. Maybe Google should buy Monotype to free fonts the way they bought On2 to free video codecs: <http://www.google.com/finance?q=TYPE> (as an added bonus they'd get Helvetica since Monotype now owns Linotype)

<comment><USER14> _What's so fucked up is that there's no intellectual property protection for typefaces_

Isn't that the way it should be _in general_? Nobody is allowed to copy specifically your program or font but they can copy the idea, invest in the effort, and come up with a similar one, often worse but sometimes better, themselves.

With the following paragraphs of your post I agree fully. As soon as something becomes so ubiquitous as Helvetica, it should fall in public domain. (Or someone should pay for it and give it to everyone else.) Helvetica is so beautiful, timeless, that it would deserve to be free.

<comment><USER15> > Isn't that the way it should be in general? Nobody is allowed to copy > specifically your program or font but they can copy the idea, invest in the > effort, and come up with a similar one, often worse but sometimes better, > themselves.

Yes, but they aren't allowed to distribute your program just by grepping your name out. You can basically do that with a font AFAIK.

<comment><USER12> But that's only because you can say you got the same resulting serialization of vectors from creating it yourself from scratch.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


MicroTimes: Interview with John Walker (1992) - <AUTHOR> https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/e5/chapter2_101.html <comment><USER2> Note: _MicroTimes_ was a free tabloid newspaper issued monthly, distributed in newsracks and at various retail stores throughout the Bay Area (and maybe elsewhere).</comment>


Fed-up locals are setting electric scooters on fire and burying them at sea - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-bird-scooter-vandalism-20180809-story.html <comment><USER2> _While most tech entrepreneurs expect some criticism and calls for regulation when they introduce new and potentially disruptive products, they don't necessarily anticipate the outright destruction of their property. They also don't expect to see such carnage celebrated and encouraged on social media._

it's a whole new world</comment>


The Apple 'Kill List': What Your iPhone Doesn't Want You to Type - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/07/16/the-apple-kill-list-what-your-iphone-doesn-t-want-you-to-type.html

<comment><USER2> It makes sense to me. I know I wouldn't want to autocorrect my users' messages to something potentially offensive to either them or the recipient. You see the same done in Android with Google's default keyboard (and most others).

<comment><USER3> I don't agree. How far do you take this? Would it be okay for the spell checker in LibreOffice and Microsoft Word to not bother correcting mistakes because they're deemed to be too 'sensitive'?

<comment><USER4> I think what he is saying is, that on a mobile device where A: the correction is automatic, and B: the user rarely checks to see that the auto correction is proper then it makes sense to ensure the device isn't primed to change a misspelling of an innocuous word to one that may not be.</comment></comment></comment>


Pirating the Olympics, Then and Now - <AUTHOR> http://waxy.org/2008/08/pirating_the_olympics_then_and_now/ <comment><USER2> Unfortunately Andy's analysis is fairly off (to me). The videos on both Usenet and torrent sites are likely to be derivatives from scene releases, excluding the obvious personal rips of various quality. So they might as well be bunched up and discussed together if they're from the same sources.

I don't think bittorrent availability is that sporadic, I took a peek at some of the available Olympics videos and see a longer list than Andy's provided without even starting on the public sites that probably have different quality rips and maybe some other less popular (so to speak) events as well.

Shrug. I'm not that interested in most of them. The only one I downloaded to rewatch was the mens 4x100m freestyle final just because I couldn't believe it ;)

</comment><comment><USER3> andy always has the best stuff</comment>


The Benefits of Arbitrary Questions - <AUTHOR> http://jackg.org/screening-with-an-arbitrary-test

<comment><USER2> Well dang it, what was the Excel challenge? Of course we all want to try it :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Would love your thoughts! I linked to it in the post, but here's a direct link: <http://smooth-mist-1423.heroku.com/>

<comment><USER3> Interesting. I use Excel pretty often am and good with it but there's nothing compelling enough for me to upgrade from my several-year-old license. The linked .xlsx file isn't readable in the Excel I own.

So you are having a hard time finding qualified people, and you say that using Excel is not an important part of the job description, but you chose to arbitrarily filter out everyone who doesn't own a recent version of Excel.

Does this really ensure only the best and the brightest will apply?

(Spoiler: <http://www.zamzar.com/> is an online tool which allows conversion from xlsx to xls; and the 6 questions are not hard, the hardest part is dealing with xlsx.)

<comment><AUTHOR> My fault: When I was actually hiring I used an XLS, but this evening when I was writing the post I made a trivial change to the file and accidentally saved it as an XLSX. I just pushed an updated version. Mea Culpa.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4>
      I tried to mitigate this by telling people not to
      bother writing a cover letter.

Aren't cover letters a dying art anyway?

</comment><comment><USER5> I got all of them except the last one. Does anyone know how to apply a formula to a range of cells and get back a range of results? (i.e. map)

<comment><USER2>
        =STDEV('Raw Data'!C2:C252/(1*MID('Raw Data'!A2:A252,LEN("Customer "),LEN('Raw Data'!A2:A252)-LEN("Customer ")+1)))

It's an array formula which means instead of pressing ENTER, press CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> So what happens if they don't have Excel?

<comment><USER7> OpenOffice.org</comment></comment>


Show HN: UnderExpress – A free, ready to use website UI kit for hustlers - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ankythshukla/underexpress <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN, presenting UnderExpress - A completely free UI Kit, based on bootstrap 4 for people who want to create beautiful websites quickly. It also comes with 8 ready-made templates. Please give your valuable feedback.</comment>


Numeronym - <AUTHOR> http://nikcub.appspot.com/numeronym

<comment><USER2> Seems to me this has a bug on Len<3 strings. This isn't a convention I've seen before, but I don't think anyone would shorten "in" to "i0n" or "I" to "I0I".

<comment><AUTHOR> Ye I ended up putting a if len() in the function. No idea what I am using this for anyway, just a bit of fun.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Node.js devs - What apps are you building? What tools are you using? - <AUTHOR>

Hey everyone! I'm Sara, one of the devs on the Node.js Tools for Visual Studio team @ Microsoft
What?! msft + node.js?! Crazy talk.
Crazy indeed...
Anyways, now that you're over that shock... Can I ask you a favor? We want to improve the Node.js experience in Visual Studio (and Windows), and we'd love to hear you brag and/or complain about your Node.js dev environment. What are you building? What tools are you using? What tools do you want to be using?  Full survey here:
http://www.instant.ly/s/v9aha
WHOA THERE... SURVEYS ARE LAME! Yes, yes they are... they're one-sided, and don't spark conversation... that's why we'll share the results back with you all once we compile them, remove potentially sensitive info about peoples's projects, email addresses, etc. So please please please fill it out (npm install _sugar-on-top-and-icecream-in-the-middle). This data helps us build a better product and collaborate with mgmt and other teams to improve the Node.js experience.
And obviously let's all have a great discussion below... that was implicit, wasn't it? :-)
[P.S. random 50 survey participants will get $5 towards caffeine or whatever else you like at Starbucks] <comment><USER2> I don't really HN want to be a place that companies think they can reach developers, whether for surveys or advertising. It's an extremely slippery slope to being a marketing channel, and then the gaming of the system begins.

<comment><USER3> >What?! msft + node.js?! Crazy talk. >Crazy indeed...

the worst.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > [P.S. random 50 survey participants will get $5 towards caffeine or whatever > else you like at Starbucks]

Your submission and responses read as if you already consumed the $250 of caffeine yourself. Can we tone it down a bit? It's 9am. :-)

Submitted my response.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the response. <\- no exclamation point, just for you

My manager always jokes that I have caffeine running through my veins, so you're not too far off the mark ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wasnt aware that AngularJS is considered a nodejs technology.

for that matter, why is NPM on that list? who uses node without using NPM?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a fun question :-). Technically it's not, but we're interested in supporting the entire node.js dev experience. One of the advantages of node.js is the ability to move between client side and server side code without switching contexts, so we want to ensure we properly support people working on both.

I also personally get the sense that the lines are being blurred between node and JavaScript (especially now that Npm brands itself as the JavaScript package manager). Curious if anyone else feels that way?

And yeah... You're right... Id be pretty surprised if anyone used node without Npm... Well at least it might serve as an indicator that someone read the question and wasn't just checking random boxes :-)

<comment><USER6> Using npm to manage package dependencies, and browserify to bundle those dependencies for the browser, is such a good client-side development experience that I use it even if I have no other use for node. I guess sometimes I'm using npm "without" node (which is to say, I'm not always running a server).

<comment><USER7> Amen to that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I can't fill out the survey right now but I like ClojureScript. I'd love a ParEdit mode in VS for ClojureScript.

Disappointed edit: Your account has given answers on a range of Microsoft- related topics with different writing styles (rather decaf at first). Have multiple people at Microsoft used this account?

<comment><AUTHOR> mousetraps?! This account - the one I'm posting on now? Haha! Nope, I'm just weird. Sorry to axe the conspiracy theory :-).

Now watch this: My HN account? Nope... sorry to inform you, but I'm just weird. Anyone who knows me will attest to that. I'm generally far too full of energy, but depending on the occasion oscillate between a playful and pensive writing style. Here's my quora page, and a blog post I did earlier this year if you want to cross-check. You'll notice there's a healthy mix of both "caffeinated" and "decaffeinated" Sara. Let me know if you'd like to see any more writing samples :). \- [https://www.quora.com/Sara- Itani](https://www.quora.com/Sara-Itani) \- [http://blogs.msdn.com/b/lightswitch/archive/2014/04/17/scala...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/lightswitch/archive/2014/04/17/scalar- properties-and-collection-properties-and-screens-oh-my-an-overview-of-screen- property-actions-sara-itani.aspx)

Waitaminute... What just happened?!! CAN'T RESOLVE... COGNITIVE... DISSONANCE... MIND... IMPLODING!!!!

It's not so hard, actually. Both writing styles are pretty similar - one is simply more staccato and contains over-the-top faux-dialog with the reader. Usually if I'm trying to construct a convincing argument or reason about an idea while I'm writing it, my writing will turn out more pensive. If I'm super excited (as I was when people were posting awesome feedback,) or trying to get/keep someone's attention - it'll be more energetic/playful. If I want to do both, I'll combine the two.

Make sense? Awesome.

Apologies for the confusion :-). You may now return to your regularly scheduled HN thread.

EDIT: oops - got distracted trying to prove I'm me, and forgot to address the more important part of your message. Thanks so much for the feedback, even if you couldn't take the survey :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm happy to take the survey, it will be interesting to see what MSFT works out over the coming months.

Small pet peeve: It'd be nice if you didn't require input on all forms of the survey, especially the open response text fields. I understand if instant.ly doesn't give you an option.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, we'll keep that in mind for the next survey. That's something we went back and forth on - those are always some of the most interesting fields, and we didn't want people to consider the field as unimportant and skip it because they were optional. On the other hand, I can see that it would be annoying for it not to tell you you're missing fields until you submit. Maybe we can try editing it tomorrow to do a quick a/b test and see if it has an effect on % (good) responses for those questions...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't like surveys, but I can tell you this. ES6 all the way down. ES7 async stuff looks great. facebook flow looks promising

take a look at 6to5 project

<comment><AUTHOR> awesome, thx for the pointers!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Unfortunate typo there calling Linux "Linus".

<comment><AUTHOR> fixed!</comment></comment>


Get Rich Quick by Mining Ether with AWS Spot - <AUTHOR> https://firstname.lastname@example.com/get-rich-quick-by-mining-ether-with-aws-spot-c7b7a3bdc149 <comment><USER2> I'm skeptical that this would actually be profitable... would like to see some metrics on AWS costs vs. mining rewards.

<comment><USER3> Since spot instances raise and lower their prices if it is profitable it soon won't be also.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does anyone know if AWS F1 instances (with FPGAs)[1] have been used for mining, and how they compare to GPUs?

1 - [https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance- types/f1/](https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/f1/)

</comment><comment><USER5> It took me three minutes to set this up and after 10 minutes there were the first eth in my wallet. And I am a crypto currency newb and only have litte AWS experience. I am impressed. I don't expect this to be profitable, actually I would be surprised if I get more then 50% of my AWS costs back, but still an impressive application of AWS cloud formation.

<comment><USER6> My high end home GPU averages 25MH/s and nets me $30 per month.

At $0.2/h/gpu it would cost you $144 per month. Assuming the GPUs have the same efficiency, you're making 20% of the cost back.

My brief testing (30 mins run) makes it even worse, a 8 GPU instance ($1.6/hour) was going at about 90-100MH/s, which means they're even less efficient than my home gpu. 100MH/s is around $130 a month, for the cost of $1150/month or 11% returns.

The price of eth will go up, but if you don't have a GPU already, it's more profitable to buy it directly. If you're investing in mining and expecting the price of eth to go up to recoup costs, you would be making much more money just by buying eth directly.

<comment><USER7> Do you leave your GPU mining all month long? What does that cost in electricity?

<comment><USER6> It's mining whenever I don't need to use it for games, about 3/4 of the day. Electricity costs are hard to calculate because the computer would've been on if I wasn't mining anyway (it acts as a home server). My whole system is mining atm and kill-a-watt reports 190 watts, about $17/month at my local rate if it was in use 24h.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Any idea how much H/s a typical GPU will produce?

I saw 94 MH/s how many GPUs was that?

<comment><USER9> [http://whattomine.com](http://whattomine.com)

<comment><USER8> 94MH/s is about $86K per day of ethereum. So, something isn't adding up right.

<comment><USER10> Nope, that's not right. Probably have a number wrong somewhere.

94MH/s is about 17 cents ($0.17) an hour. So based on the $0.2 cost you would lose 3 cents ($0.03) an hour.

<comment><USER8> was plugging into equihash not ethash.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I looked into this for normal instances, definitely not profitable. Spot instance may profitable until more than a few people start doing it. Ideally this could run on a decentralized cloud, like Golem for instance</comment>


The 'Final' Frontier of Algorithmic Trading - <AUTHOR> http://www.vccafe.com/2009/06/11/the-final-frontier-of-algorithmic-trading/ <comment><USER2> 20% of the DAX, and only 100M in profits? I call total bullshit.

"Financial Algorithms that aparently are able to 'beat the market'." Right. Until it blows up.

To use my English vernacular, what a load of bollocks.

</comment><comment><USER3> There's many firms with similar stories and profits. There's a few with far more. They don't have a nearly perfect solution, nor is there one.

</comment><comment><USER4> This would be a much less interesting story if it began, "Last year 1000 new algorithmic trading firms began trading; the statistical distribution of their profits follows what you'd expect from a random process. We're picking one of those with the highest profit and profiling it in a story."

</comment><comment><USER5> It doesn't really say much, does it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately it does not. It does leave a couple of hints but that's about it. Perhaps someone speaking Hebrew can unearth a paper or two from the time these Maths graduates were doing research or even a thesis :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Where can I learn more about the mathematics behind this and similar companies?

<comment><USER7> Start with Stochastic Calculus for Finance I & II by Shreve. It starts of with a binomial, discrete time, model and builds up to the BSM model in continuous time and more, but really what you need is the math it teaches, not necessarily any specific model. This is the first book you would study in mathematical finance. Here's a free textbook pdf on stochastic calculus/ SDEs, just to give you an example of what you're looking at <http://math.berkeley.edu/~evans/SDE.course.pdf> . I can give more recs if interested as I'm currently getting a masters in math, concentrating on mathematical finance.

<comment><AUTHOR> From Buffon's needles to $1 million per day. Fascinating thought! Thanks for the link. Can we take you up on your offer for a few more recommendations?

<comment><USER7> Sure thing! Here are some I've used in addition to the above:

Lecture notes from Dr Kohn at NYU: [http://www.math.nyu.edu/faculty/kohn/math- finance-lecture-no...](http://www.math.nyu.edu/faculty/kohn/math-finance- lecture-notes.html)

Options, Futures, and Other Derivatives by Hull (considered one of the best books in this field, but I like the next one better)

An Introduction to the Mathematics of Financial Derivatives by Neftci

Numerical Methods in Finance and Economics: A MATLAB-Based Introduction (Statistics in Practice) by Brandimarte

Also, we take a general C++ course. Coming into the program they wanted us to have completed math through calc 3, differential equations (first course), and linear algebra (first course). I was a finance undergrad not math, so from experience I can say I wish I would have also studied some real analysis (just the basics), and a high level undergrad course in probability (although we took a grad level intro course first semester). Also, the better you are at proofs, the easier time you will have (I had no training in this and have picked it up as we go along).

Also, some schools make a distinction between computational finance and mathematical finance, so that's something to think about too.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> so is finance still really going to be the place to be if you're good at statistical analysis? or is there a selection effect of not seeing all the losers?

<comment><USER9> I would also look at natural language processing (better domain-specific and realtime search engines being a prominent subset) and computer vision/image processing as areas with huge upside.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Final makes $1M a day, and are extremely secretive about their investments or technology. CEO is Gideon Bar Sinai and they have 80 employees...

</comment><comment><USER10> Just posted on Twitter: Final Algorithms is also operating Quantis, Stock Tech and medical devices company BSP</comment>


PHP has reached its limit - <AUTHOR> http://sloblog.io/~zynisch/qI3DyGJd0yo/php-is-dead-jim

<comment><USER2> I'm sorry but it's hard to really take someone seriously when they start out by comparing a language (PHP) against a framework (Rails), and then make this claim:

> Metaprogramming and reflection have to be implemented by the framework as > they're not part of the language.

Every example there seems to relate to a framework called "Flow", and the author sums this up quite succinctly:

> It took them five years to experiment and find something that works for them

The key words are the last three. WORKS. FOR. THEM. I've never heard of Flow before, and from what I've seen in this blog alone, it looks like more PHP developers who want to be Java developers.

I agree completely that the examples shown are fucking horrific, but thats not a fault of the language.

Let's take the "Fetch a record" example. It's perfectly possible to have a php model that works like so:

      BlogPost::findByPK($foo);

As for the templates, yes the Flow templates are fucking stupid. That's still not a fault against PHP - I've given up trying to understand why people feel the need in PHP - which is itself an excellent templating language - to create new, more complex and yet limited template languages.

<comment><USER3> A limited templating language forces you to behave. More importantly, it also forces other people to behave. It stops people from creating ugly hacks in the middle of templates that become impossible to track bugs. It stops Joe Random Designer from being able to break your database when he works on a new header design.

<comment><USER2> If you need a templating language to force _you_ to behave, you are not likely to understand why you need to "behave".

If others "misbehave" fucking tell them not to - why does everyone look for a technical solution to a human problem?

<comment><USER4> I totally agree with this. To many times developers of frameworks or other reusable components seem to try to protect developers from themselves.

I understand that there is a good argument for this but in the end it's making everything more complex and limited for developers who do understand what they're doing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't think PHP will die off for a long, long time. The low barrier to entry and ease of deployment means that beginners will be able to hack together solutions to their problems and even experienced programmers are able to use it for short and simple tasks.

The article makes a rather poor case for PHP being dead. It focuses on some syntax issues and doesn't touch on the strong business case for using PHP for many types of smaller projects.

If you're a small business that needs a couple of forms setup, say an order form and a contact form, PHP is a very reasonable choice. A small business that sells something online isn't making money by producing the most elegant possible code - they make money by setting something up to solve their problem, using cheap shared hosting they don't have to worry about setting up or maintaining, and focusing on selling their product. PHP is a great choice for that - and really that's what most small businesses actually need.

My suggestion would be to use the right tool for the job. For a simple small business website with a couple of forms, PHP might be the best choice. For a complex web application, Rails is a much better choice.

</comment><comment><USER6> PHP is not Java. PHP is not Ruby. PHP is not Python. PHP is definitely not Perl.

Developers need to stop trying to force it to look and act like the languages they would rather be using. It doesn't _have_ to be as ugly as Flow appears to be, at all, and in some PHP frameworks, it isn't. Because as has been mentioned already, comparing a framework with a framework is only valid when you pick the best framework, and as the Rubyists are fond of pointing out that Ruby Is Not Rails, well, PHP Is Not Flow. Nor is it Symfony or Yii or Laravel or Zend or the framework I'm building in my spare time which is still not quite as ugly as Flow. This article's argument is as arbitrary as it its conclusion is irrelevant.

The reasons PHP is not, and will not soon be, dead have to do with its ubiquity and utility in its one and only purpose -- preprocessing html. It does this perfectly adequately for many many use cases, provided you approach it like a donkey and not a horse. It is the animal that it is. Otherwise, you wind up with a swift kick in the shins. It's ugly, and ornery, and it stinks but it does its job and it's cheap and simple and it's not going away anytime soon.

</comment><comment><USER7> What is this... comparing a framework with a language? Compare Laravel with Rails, or PHP with RUBY... not RAILS.

<comment><USER8> While the use of terms rails and ruby is confused in the article, the actual content is using two frameworks with similar goals and similar sounding philosophies to compare what what the languages can offer for a framework developer.

That to me sounds like a fair way to approach it. Having said that, my experience of the PHP framework is this post, and while the goals sound similar, the teams behind them could be interpreting them in very different ways, which wooild lead to the differences seen.

<comment><USER2> The homepage for the Flow framework has this in the title:

      TYPO3 Flow Enterprise PHP Framework

It's "We want to be java but not be java" all over again. Which means it's Zend framework all over again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > I'm getting paid to post here

That says it all.

<comment><USER3> Presumably by the word.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> So i just had a quick look at the Flow Doco and found [http://docs.typo3.org/flow/TYPO3FlowDocumentation/Quickstart...](http://docs.typo3.org/flow/TYPO3FlowDocumentation/Quickstart/Index.html#testing- the-installation) \- then I found [http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html#hello- rai...](http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html#hello-rails)

Seriously, what the fuck is this? Why would you need or want a "welcome" screen for a FRAMEWORK?

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm perfectly happy with PHP. I'd rather concentrate on what I'm actually shipping instead of worrying about how efficient my language is.

</comment><comment><USER11> Good article, I guess PHP certainly isn't the most elegant language but it serves it's purpose; an easy to understand tool to add some dynamic features to html. The huge amount of resources available do make it kinda easy to hack something together. For larger more complex applications it would certainly not be my first choice either.

</comment><comment><USER3> All this article demonstrates is that PHP is more verbose than than Ruby with a good DSL. This exact same logic could be used to argue against Java.

There's plenty wrong with PHP. Verbosity is the least of its sins.

</comment><comment><USER12> Sorry but even myself that don't like PHP that much turn to it for my own web site.

It is just good enough for what it was conceived to do, plus all ISPs offer cheap PHP plans, what cannot be said for other languages.

</comment><comment><USER13> I don't see how comparing Flow vs. Rails proves PHP as a language has reached its limit relative to Ruby as a language. Most of the examples seem to be syntactic vs. anything "limit" related.

</comment><comment><USER14> [http://sloblog.io/~ujovlado/MIJExiD2mfE/php-hasn-t- reached-i...](http://sloblog.io/~ujovlado/MIJExiD2mfE/php-hasn-t-reached-its- limit-yet)

</comment><comment><USER15> It's not about what instruments to use, it's about how to use them. PHP is definitely not dead and won't die soon.

</comment><comment><USER16> There should be a Coffee PHP like CoffeeScript for Javascript. PHP will overcome its limit ;)</comment>


Amazon Posts Another Blockbuster Profit - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-posts-another-blockbuster-profit-1469736704 <comment><USER2> Just 5 years ago, as a freshman in college, I was alternating between Amazon and eBay to find the cheapest price for textbooks. This was the first time I ordered anything off of Amazon, and it was their bread and butter; a book. Fast-forward to present day and I order almost everything off of Amazon, even if I can get it at a store nearby. Why? Because products reviews have grown to be essential in my psychology for buying, and it's very easy to wait just two days for the product to arrive at your doorstep. And I haven't used eBay in years.

<comment><USER3> Online reviews were a revelation for me, but they're increasingly being gamed on Amazon (fake reviews, people getting free products in exchange for positive reviews, etc.). I've bought some really mediocre products lately that had amazing reviews.

I've also noticed the quality control has gone down the tubes, with 3rd party sellers shipping counterfeit goods. Amazon doesn't seem to be interested in regulating this.

If there was a company with Amazon's shipping speed but without all the shady 3rd party sellers, I don't think I'd use Amazon again.

<comment><USER4> Generally speaking I only read 3 star reviews.

5 star and 1 star reviews are usually garbage - either fluffed fake reviews, or reviews outraged about something unrelated with the quality of the product itself.

<comment><USER5> I find 1 star reviews quite useful. If all the reviews are shipping complaints, the lemon rate of the product is probably low.

<comment><USER6> There's a lot of gaming on those low star ratings by competitors. The trustability of reviews on Amazon has sunk so low over the years that for many products, reading many (tens or several tens of) reviews across star ratings is what may help have some idea about the product's quality and the seller.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Quick article summary

"For the second quarter, Amazon recorded an $857 million profit, or $1.78 a share, compared with $92 million, or 19 cents, a year earlier, as sales rose to $30.4 billion from $23.19 billion. Analysts were expecting a profit of $1.11 a share, according to the average estimate compiled by Thomson Reuters.

Amazon had forecast sales of between $28 billion and $30.5 billion.

Helping prop up results was the Amazon Web Services cloud computing division, which rents computing power to other companies. AWS increased revenue to $2.89 billion, up from $1.82 billion a year earlier. The unit appears on track to exceed Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos's goal of reaching $10 billion in sales this year."

<comment><USER7> That last part shouldn't be hard with the overpriced bandwidth costs AWS charges.

<comment><USER3> If it's overpriced, presumably customers will shop elsewhere or avoid cloud services altogether?

<comment><USER8> It's significantly overpriced, though most services don't demand enough bandwidth to make it a big enough cost disadvantage to turn them away from eg AWS. That isn't the case for all services, but it is the case for most. If you're big enough to run up a large bandwidth bill on AWS, more often than not you can afford it; if you're not big, you won't typically be running up that kind of bandwidth bill. There are cases that are the exception of course (high traffic services with poor business models, video heavy sites with weak monetization, etc).

I've seen good arguments that the cloud services keep bandwidth costs high on purpose to restrict the types of services that attempt to use (or abuse) their networks. I haven't seen any other great arguments that explain the massive gap between a typical large dedicated host and eg Azure / Google / AWS (all of which can command far cheaper bandwidth costs).

<comment><USER9> I can speak for Google, not AWS or Azure. Google's network is smart in several ways:

\- If you are trying to send a packet from one Google AZ to another, it will traverse Google network only, never hitting the public web.. without a VPN/VPC setup

\- If you are trying to reach a service on Google Network, you hit the Google frontend at one of the many Points of Presence around the world, from which point it's a straight path to nearest DC

\- If you are trying to reach a customer from your VMs on Google, your packet will be taken as close to your customer as possible on Google backbone

For "cheaper egress" there are CDN providers, and both AWS and Google have their own CDNs as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is the point where things begin to look really scary for every retail company not named Amazon. Amazon's previous two decades of tiny profits have all been in service of building a massive logistics infrastructure (and locked-in customer base, via Prime) that no one else can touch, and now it's paying off. It's going to be very difficult to catch up to them - even if someone was willing to spend a lot of money to do it, Amazon could easily go back to the old regime of just reinvesting more into its operations; with these last three quarters, they've shown the naysayers that it can be made to pay dividends, and so I think Wall Street would be patient if they returned to that route.

<comment><USER11> They still have tiny profits in the retail side from North America and actually lose money in rest for the world.

Taking all those orders in North America and shipping all that stuff made less money last quarter - $708 Million; than they made running AWS - $718 Million.

Time to spin off that loser business of shipping stuff to people's houses.

[http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=97664&p=irol- new...](http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=97664&p=irol- newsArticle&ID=2189731)

<comment><USER12> >Time to spin off that loser business of shipping stuff to people's houses.

or start doing it by drones, flying or crawling, doesn't matter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> So much for all those failed predictions in 2014 of amazon never being profitable, being a bubble, etc. Amazon's cash flows are very strong, they have huge growth, and market dominance..whats what matters.

Amazon is the online version of Walmart but much bigger and much more potential...they are taking over retail, both online and offline...just amazing

<comment><USER14> Their PE ratio is 300. That's not profit that's wishful thinking. I will be amazed if they ever get to 100. Today prices are based entirely on dreams. Sure someday they might make lots of money. Apple makes more profit every few days. With AWS they would have nothing.

<comment><USER15> >With[out] AWS

This is such a moot point.

That Amazon a "retail" company was able to roll out Kindle and popularise E readers (while handling distribution)...

That Amazon were able to roll out AWS, a highly profitable cloud platform...

That Amazon are in the process of launching automated drone delivery...

These facts are not coincidence, they are inextricable from Amazon being what it is - a tech company that happened to start with Retail as its cash cow. It's an innovative company that is not content sitting around getting fat the second it reaches some sort of comfort zone, and until running a company like this becomes the norm, they can afford to command higher PE ratios while people anticipate their next big blockbuster product.

To compare Amazon to Walmart, a company whose be all and end all is Retail, is missing the bigger picture.

(nb that's not to say that their current trading ratio isn't overinflated)

<comment><USER16> Except Walmart has Walmart labs so they are at least a tiny bit tech :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If you look at their accounting statements. They made more money from AWS than their entire selling operation.

<comment><USER18> Can you elaborate / share the numbers?

<comment><USER17> Net Income From

North America Retail Sales = $702 Million

International Retail Sales = $-135 Million

AWS = $718

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Q2 2016 earnings press release from Amazon: [http://phx.corporate- ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=97664&p=irol-new...](http://phx.corporate- ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=97664&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=2189731)

</comment><comment><USER20> Got $99 from us with a Prime membrship.

NetFlix raising it's monthly price to $10.99 and we only get a sub par library of content..

With Prime we pay less and get much more

<comment><USER21> > sub par library of content

In the past year, they've produced 600 hours of new original content that earned 54 Emmy nominations, and you get it for less than the price of one premium cable channel.

Nobody, neither Netflix nor Amazon, is going to continue to have the kind of library Netflix did during its peak as a catalog of old movies. The lax and low-priced licensing deals they got back then are never coming back, not with the rise of online streaming as a mainstream channel for media: everyone's building their own content silos, everyone's aiming for exclusive control of something so you pick theirs, and everyone's asking an arm and a leg for their streaming rights since there's multiple bidders with big budgets involved now.

Netflix will have everything Disney puts out for the next few years; Amazon won't. Amazon will have all of HBO's back catalog for a while; Netflix won't. CBS All Access will have the new Star Trek TV series, nobody else will. Etc etc. That's the short-term future, and it's already locked up in contracts.

<comment><USER20> apparently netflix's offerings is not strong enough for ppl to stay on or attract new customers at an ever increasing pace.

My experience is obviously not anecdotal

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Based on my understanding of Amazon's strategy, this is bad news and it raises a lot of questions. The most charitable explanation is that they planned their spending poorly and were not able to match profits - an error which may be a fire-able offence since it could costs hundreds of millions of dollars.

Have they run out of ideas to invest in? Why are they suddenly changing strategy and forcing their investors to eat massive taxes on retained earnings?

Alternatively, are they saving up for some massive investment in the second half of the year?

<comment><USER23> I've worked at Amazon. Let me tell you, this is all part of the strategy. At an all hands sometime ago bezos took questions from employees regarding the worry around profitability. He basically said Amazon has to lose a lot of money to reach a massive scale and only then will they become profitable. However every once in a while they'll show a profit to check in with reality and Wall Street.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Isn't the war between AWS, Google, and Azure etc just a race to the bottom? Won't these businesses just be complete commodities in the near future?

<comment><USER8> That would have been true if AWS had remained a simplistic hardware-focused server renting type business.

It's a software services business. Those rarely become commodities as a basic server business might. And once you have scale, your ability to sell your customers on an endless variety of new services becomes the real value, and that prevents the classic race to the bottom and it boosts customer lock-in dramatically.

AWS, Azure, Google are not primarily competing on compute / ram / bandwidth cost any longer, that's increasingly a meaningless sideshow (which is why AWS is no longer aggressively price cutting / matching). They're competing on what software services they offer, how easy they are to use and scale, etc.

<comment><USER25> This. There are other comments on this thread griping about the cost of bandwidth, and comparing it to competitors for EC2 (Linode and the like)...and that misses the point. If that's all you want, yeah, there are probably cheaper alternatives that might do. But for a one stop shop that offers the best selection of services from which to compose software solutions, mature and tested, with an aggressive roadmap for adding more...you're left with those three. And of them, AWS leads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Amazon suppressed/hid profits for so long.. not hard for them to show strong quarterly earnings. It was accounting then and it's accounting now.

<comment><USER27> I've never heard someone saying that a company reinvesting profits into itself as "suppressing/hiding" profits. I guess all Warren Buffet companies are also suppressing an hiding profits. Are you calling those companies out too?

<comment><USER26> All I'm saying is "monster profit" doesnt mean the company is doing any better than it was before. It's generating the same cash, they just aren't spending it the same way

<comment><USER28> Except revenue continues to increase 20-30% yoy</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Help me hack college education cost - <AUTHOR>

Subject: Help me hack college education cost!
Greetings all,
I'd like to start this post of my little introduction of myself.
I'm 19 a student (High-school pass-out),developer and entrepreneur from India.
I have an ambition to study CS in abroad but i do not have the financial capacity pay fees nor do i want my family to me for it or take up a loan/ debt.
I'm just an avg student with around 70% percentile in high school so meritorious scholarships are hard to me.
I'd like all of you to give the best possible suggestion how i can pay for my college education.
Also interested in opportunities where i can work as developer and your start-up pays for college :P <comment><USER2> Well, I heard a story once of a student who brought in his entire year's tuition to the payments office of his school in pennies...in a large barrel on a trolley.

The office refused his pennies and said they wouldn't spend their entire week counting them and that he should pay in a different fashion. Well... apparently according to some law, if you refuse payment in legal tender, the person is not obliged to pay you...not sure if this is true or not but may be worth researching. You could see if your school wants to count all those pennies.

</comment><comment><USER3> Some large companies in the US have tuition reimbursement programs where they will pay for you to go to college while you work there, full-time. There are frequently strings attached to these programs (e.g. you have to remain there for some period after you stop getting reimbursed), but that might work.

Your problem will be getting hired as a developer at one of these companies. Either you have the programming chops to get hired or you don't. If you can get a development job, your ? should not be "how to pay for college" but "why go to college". If you can't, then you might have to do tech-support or QA work for a while as a means to an end. This sucks, but it's a better option than not going and not getting paid.

<comment><AUTHOR> But isn't it required to have H1B visa to work full-time for the and as far as i can think of it requires a bachelors degree for H1B.</comment></comment>


NewLisp - <AUTHOR> http://www.newlisp.org/ <comment><USER2> (Somehow) a competitor of NewLisp is Janet ([https://janet- lang.org/](https://janet-lang.org/)). Syntax inspired in Clojure.

<comment><USER3> I quite like Janet. That and Joker (which is a Clojure linter/interpreter).

<comment><USER4> The latter was new to me.

[https://github.com/candid82/joker](https://github.com/candid82/joker)

As a tentative but enthusiastic Lisper interested in Clojure but not Java, I like that Joker is implemented in Go, and its pragmatic approach (such as feature parity with Clojure being a non-goal).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There is also [https://github.com/borkdude/babashka](https://github.com/borkdude/babashka) which uses Clojure to create scripts

</comment><comment><USER6> Small, fast and seems to gave great interop with C libs. This has some real potential for smaller scripts/utils I think.

Did anyone make anything interesting with this yet?

<comment><USER7> It's been out a long time. I was playing with it in 2012 and I think it'd already been out a long time at that point. I think there is a blog post somewhere about a university student programming candy crush (or some other game) the night before it was due in NewLisp. Racket might also be worth a look again at some point. It's certainly heavier, but has a much larger community.

Picolisp is also really awesome and weird like NewLisp, but is really only for Unix. It is also small, but has plenty of features, and has been in development and supported since the late 80's. It is all written in C or Assembly (can't remember which one it is currently written in) and has built- in support for logic programming and all sorts of other things. It uses web browser for GUI, and can interop with Java and C.

Michael Fogus (blogger, Closure book author, and all around language nerd) wrote a fascinating article called "fleunpunkt lisps" (forgive spelling) that covers four really bizzare lisps (NewLisp, Pico Lisp, Wasp Lisp, and Arc). The summary is that they're neat and tried to do something revolutionary, but ended up just being odd.

<comment><USER8> > Michael Fogus (blogger, Closure book author, and all around language nerd) > wrote a fascinating article called "fleunpunkt lisps" (forgive spelling)

Was it "Fluchtpunkt Lisp" ([https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45838440-fluchtpunkt- lis...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45838440-fluchtpunkt-lisp))? I tried searching for it, but this is probably the closest I've seen.

<comment><USER9> Here it is. You'll see that phrase a bit lower in the page. [https://leanpub.com/readevalprintlove001/read](https://leanpub.com/readevalprintlove001/read)

it was issue number 1 of the newsletter.

[http://readevalprintlove.fogus.me/](http://readevalprintlove.fogus.me/)

Read-Eval-Print-λove is an N-monthly newsletter of original content and curation about the Lisp family of programming languages and little-languages in general.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> phoe-krk Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10279266](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10279266)

</comment><comment><USER10> Has the fun ever left the Lisp languages?

</comment><comment><USER11> Somewhat OT, but can anyone remember a language that was posted around here a while (maybe a few months ago?) I seem to recall it was a quite nice, modest- looking little language, I think a lisp (but I'm not even sure about that), but not a scheme or a common lisp, with inline C interop. I meant to have another look at it but I've completely forgotten what it's called.

</comment><comment><USER3> Another one for my list at [https://taoofmac.com/space/dev/LISP](https://taoofmac.com/space/dev/LISP)

(Feel free to suggest others, I'll be updating this in a couple of hours)

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm not convinced about the choice for the behaviour of `cons` in NewLisp.

<comment><USER13> Or the forced pass by value, or the lack of closures, or the namespaces kluge...

Or the choice of dynamic scoping - although judging from your username I suspect you might not mind that one as much ;)

<comment><USER12> > Or the choice of dynamic scoping - although judging from your username I > suspect you might not mind that one as much ;)

         ;; -*- lexical-binding: t; -*-

<comment><USER14> I don't understand the motivation for this comment kludge; why can't there be a proper top-level form for this:

       (lexical-binding t) ;; or whatever

Lisps should not be ferreting out code generation semantics from comments; that idea should have died with Turbo Pascal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Newlisp is to Lisp what the New Monkees are to the Monkees.

<comment><USER16> Newlisp is to Lisp what New York is to York.

<comment><USER17> Larger and with more features, but ultimately lacking the simplicity and elegance of the much older version?

<comment><USER18> A lot of things can be said about CL, but elegant is not one of them. Battle tested and practical, but also full of warts when you look under the shining armour.

<comment><USER19> Just do what everyone else does and write your own language on top of it to solve your problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is the new Coke of programming languages

</comment><comment><USER21> Last update 5/19\. Is it really new?</comment>


Show HN: A Twitter account to increase the HN SNR. - <AUTHOR>

I recently noticed that the HN front page has increasingly more uninteresting articles (I know, get off my lawn, etc), so I decided to create a Twitter account with the most interesting articles.
The articles are hand-picked, and obviously can't be completely objective, but the aim is to have articles which are interesting to the userbase without the endless amount of cliche "how to be a better entrepreneur: execute" we get lately.
It's at https://twitter.com/AbridgedHN, and I'd love some feedback, or just if it's of some use to people. <comment><USER2> There's nothing wrong with curation but what's the focus? The stories you've picked don't seem to share anything other than they appeal to your taste.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, it's really hard to objectively say which stories are good and which aren't, so I'm trying to weed out the chaff.

I think it's doomed to feel like it's a lot of what appeals to my taste, as I'm the one doing the curation, but I do try to include articles I might not find interesting but understand how other people might.

<comment><USER2> It's a tricky problem you're trying to solve, I'll give you that. My suggestion is to focus on a specific topic, say programming, AI or hardware hacks. You won't get as many followers but the SNR should become much higher for those who do follow you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, but that's just dividing the area of stories vertically and picking one, it will just keep the SNR constant by including the bad articles in that specific topic along with the good. What I'm trying to do is cover everything, but exclude the noise...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable: <https://twitter.com/AbridgedHN></comment>


How to Identify a Narcissist on Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://www.rosshudgens.com/how-to-identify-a-narcissist-on-twitter/

<comment><USER2> Implied social norms like these are the worst thing about Twitter, which is a "community" in only the most incidental and half-assed sense. I don't want to "push it forward" or spread the love or whatever else it is this guy wants me to do.

The issue here is exactly the same as the issue with posting your own content to social news sites. If what you have to say has value, posting it adds value to the service. There's nothing more to it than that.

Not following hundreds of people, not "retweeting" other people's comments, not replying to people, and sending mundane messages (by who's definition?) doesn't make you a narcissist. It makes you someone who is using Twitter primarily to publish and not so much to listen. Sorry, drama queens, there's not much more meaning you can layer on to it than that.

</comment><comment><USER3> > Basically, they make Twitter Facebook. Twitter is not Facebook. Facebook is > Facebook.

I highly disagree with the author here. I don't use Facebook for data portability and privacy reasons. I also have limitations to what I can stand on Twitter. I want to follow tweets throughout the day and not feel overwhelmed each time I update.

Therefore, I follow close friends and some hackers I respect. I don't follow Lady Gaga or Ashton Kutcher or Starbucks just because "Twitter isn't Facebook."

In other words, why does the author think that your social network should affect your standards?

EDIT: But I still dig the article for pointing out what a tool Ryan Seacrest is.

</comment><comment><USER4> The ultimate narcissist is the fool who thinks that twitter "should" be used how he wants to use it, rather than how the user wants to use it.

</comment><comment><USER5> Easy - they have a twitter account.

<comment><USER2> Presumably the same psychological force that compels you to write comments like this, Aaron?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm a real narcissist. I follow just myself: <http://twitter.com/binaryage>

poor article, IHMO it is up to each user how will he/she use the service</comment>


3 million page views help - <AUTHOR>

I have 3M per month mobile page views in a BlackBerry App. Is it worthing anything? Thank you for your help. <comment><USER2> How "integrated" as in "how many users" are these pageviews? What is the target audience of your app? What is the type of the app? Game, business app?

How long did you need to acquire these 3M page views? What is the ad/sales revenue (if applicable) resulting from these pageviews?

How long does a unique user stay on your app (i.e. how long and how does he use the app)?</comment>


Applying for the first job as a web developer - <AUTHOR> https://rodrigohgpontes.github.io/#applying-for-the-first-job-as-a-web-developer <comment><USER2> I do not agree with sending out less applications improving your odds. The author said that she sent out 10 applications over several months. I was in a different position than the author being a cs undergrad student, but i was sending out 10 apps a day during my final semester. For the companies that reached out for an interview, i read their glassdoor reviews for interview styles. I ussually spent 30 minutes at most on their website to learn a little about the company. Once offers started coming in is when i really tried to evaluate if the company was somewhere i wanted to work. The whole process took around a month (from sending out apps to accepting an offer)

<comment><USER3> The difference between your situations is probably meaningful because industry perceives CS students and self-taught web developers differently when it comes to entry level jobs. For example entry level jobs at places with Glass Door reviews are far more open to the CS student than a self taught web developer. A self taught web developer is more likely to land an opportunity in a local web-shop than at a big company or a startup. For the self taught web developer, applying for a first entry level job at Google or Apple or Uber or Github is a waste of time.

CS students tend to get a pass when it comes to the problem of finding great developers. [1] Self taught web developers tend not to.

[1]: [https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/06/finding-great- deve...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/06/finding-great- developers-2/)</comment></comment>


A fair, mathematical approach to equity programs for pre-IPO companies - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/12ddebcc63ef

<comment><USER2> I'm not a lawyer; this is not legal advice.

I like the fundamental idea. However:

1) This risks pricing the common, which is bad. It certainly isn't the same as preferred, due to superior rights (liquidation preference most seriously)

2) In general, you should discount equity vs. cash because equity, even granted today, is illiquid. Even if you claim you're willing to buy it back at any given time for the then-current market price, you're better off motivating employees by giving them equity than cash, all things being equal -- the employee can improve the value of the equity through work, but can only in the most absurdly indirect way increase the value of cash itself (by tearing up other cash...)

In practice, I love what Palantir does (or did; I know about this from Ari Geller on Quora, not directly). You basically get 3 discrete offers e.g. -- $130k/500 shares, $100k/1k shares, $85k/3k shares. It's essentially a way to reveal your preference and beliefs about the company (although, Palantir is now so big that an individual's contributions don't materially move the price.) (I'd personally be WTF at someone who picked the $100k/1k; either extreme would be defensible, but I'd generally prefer to hire the 85k/3k person, unless I knew he had high cash expenses like kids in school).

<comment><USER3> > __ _unless I knew he had high cash expenses like kids in school)._ __

Thats the rub for us older startup joiners... I had two options at my current company, and while the spread was very small as compared to your Palantir example - because I have high kid expenses I chose less stock but higher wage...

Although, I'd prefer if they looked at the discussion going on over employee equity, with only 20 employees thus far, their option package are nowhere near even what people have been throwing out for discussion :(

<comment><USER2> I actually think investors put enough of a premium on equity vs many employees that a reasonable case can be made for very tight equity distribution, using something like this proposed model, and periodic cash bonuses.

I actually have an even weirder idea for equity in big companies -- each class of incoming employees gets founder shares in a company comprised of hires. (Per month, per team, not sure); essentially like a PEO. Company buys that entity giving employees a capital gain related to their group's contribution at purchase time. Standard 4/1 repurchase on the founder shares within that group.

<comment><USER3> That is an incredibly interesting idea... It would be really interesting to attempt to model and see how it could play out in various forms.

You could grant some sets of options to the older employee-groups too....

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is probably the best equity compensation plan for pre-IPO companies I've seen so far. Vesting schedules for a fixed quantity of equity have always irked me for the same reason Max explains: they assume a constant value over the life of the vesting, which is almost never the case in a pre-IPO startup.

If I was choosing between multiple offers from startups, the ones using this model would have a huge advantage in my book.

The one (big) issue I can think of is that it does not provide a way to value the common stock. The valuation events in a startup will very often be investors purchasing preferred shares. Preferred shares tend to be worth quite a lot more than common shares (and the gap tends to be larger the younger the company is), so assuming a 1:1 value between them will severely undervalue the common stock grants.

</comment><comment><USER5> Using the pre-money valuation of a venture capital round to price common stock is a bad idea that is not supported by economics. The rights granted to the VC's preferred shares are REALLY, REALLY valuable, but the pre-money valuation values all shares as if they have the same package of rights. With things like participating preferred, dividend rights, not to mention the base liquidation preference, the value of common stock bears no relationship to the value of the preferred shares. They are only remotely similar in the event of a billion dollar IPO, when all the downside protection gets lost in the wash. This is a fundamentally low-probability scenario.

<comment><USER6> While prefs and commons certainly differ in value, I don't think it's matters much given that the goal here is to give employees a fairer, more transparent way to allocate between cash and equity compensation.

The valuation differences are more stark in mid- and late-stage startups; at the same time, only a small amount of the overall equity is being granted to employees.

Where I think this model has a real impact are to help the first few employees figure out compensation, which is a complete unknown right now. Pref vs common valuation matters much less at that point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like this approach, but this sentence gives me pause: "Interpolated Equity requires just one assumption about pre-IPO startups: the value of the equity grows at a constant rate between valuation events."

What about cases where the value drops between valuation events? If I was considering an offer, and the equity portion of the offer was valued based on a model that didn't consider the possibility of a drop in valuation, I would discount that equity severely.

Furthermore, how realistic is it to have a constant rate of growth? Perhaps I'm misreading it, but I think it is likely that the rate of growth between Event n and Event n+1 won't be well correlated with the rate of growth between Event n+1 and Event n+2.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're absolutely right. The problem is that there are no market mechanisms at play in between valuations.

The goal of IE is to base equity pricing on market mechanisms as much as possible. In the absence of market signals, we essentially choose the simplest, most economically justifiable assumption. The alternative is to simply let the board or management massage the intraperiod valuations as they see fit which is less transparent and yields values that don't necessarily have a market basis.

I guess the "real" assumption of IE is that market mechanisms are the fairest, most efficient pricing system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What I liked about the article was simply the maxim: "Companies should minimize the impact of the inevitable information asymmetry between prospective hires and founders and management."

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Many people have raised preferred/common pricing issues and it is a valid criticism. I don't have a complete answer but have added a partial answer to the original document and have reposted it here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7625099](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7625099)

</comment><comment><USER9> Mad brings up a lot of interesting points. I esp agree with having more transparency around equity.

<comment><USER9> *Max

<comment><USER10> "edit" link is right up there ^^

<comment><USER11> thanks but super weird, i dont have an "edit" anywhere

<comment><USER10> It's only there for a couple hours after the comment is posted. Not sure if green accounts behave differently, I don't create new accounts willy nilly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This model doesn't seem to handle down rounds well, unless I missed something.

<comment><AUTHOR> It "handles" them in the sense that the math doesn't call apart. What happens is that the implied rate of return is negative and purchases towards the end of the period get more shares than those at the beginning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The only problem with such "justified" models is that it always comes down to what everyone thinks of everyone else's value to the company. For example -

1) A first employee might feel he should have been a founder

2) Two co-founders who might feel the 3rd one has not contributed enough to justify their share

3) Employee/contractor #20 (or whatever it is) at Facebook who painted graffiti on the walls ended up with a package worth $100M while it is hard for anyone to say with a straight face they actually created that much value (i.e. what is the reason for granting equity by job role)

4) Sizing of equity grants to engineers vs. sales staff, given that salesforce's primary motivation should be based on hitting their quotas with all incentives built around that

5) Someone fired a few months before the vesting cliff might think they are being cheated, while the company might believe they have been toxic to the culture (I won't name any examples here)

6) Employees "resting-and-vesting" at pretty much every level of the equity grant cohort

7) Later employees who end up carrying the weight of the earlier ones without comparable rewards

In every deal it all comes down to a willing buyer meeting a willing seller. Compensation packages are no exception.

<comment><USER4> I think you misunderstood the article. It's not about choosing how much to compensate someone. It's about how to allocate equity given a known compensation total.</comment></comment>


Guy in Charge of EU Copyright Directive, Evasive About His Own Use of Images - <AUTHOR> https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180713/09343640236/guy-charge-pushing-draconian-eu-copyright-directive-evasive-about-his-own-use-copyright-protected-images.shtml <comment><USER2> The more stringent copyright seems to get, the more I seem to support piracy.

<comment><USER3> I started to embrace the lack of control in the media I created years ago, I accept the fact that by using the internet to share media I lose ownership when I allow people to make copies (even temporary). It will be pirated, evasive actions only slow it down.

I remember when picture websites used to disable right click and we either used to screenshot images or get them from the source. I remember when Youtube went to tonnes of effort to prevent people ripping videos from their site, only to be defeated by screen recording software. People listening to their favourite songs on the radio used to just record them on their phone's microphone.

When people start thinking of the internet as the Wild West it is, they might start actually appreciating how dangerous it is to be interacting with. I have bots smashing my website 24/7 crawling data for various search engines, I have people mass downloading content, bots trying to spam my site, bots trying to hack my site (mainly PHP), using proxies, VPNs, Tor, etc. And that's just on port 80. Port 22...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Legislators not understanding tech and doing the same thing they seek to control...par for the course.

</comment><comment><USER5> Not that I want to defend the guy, but doesn't posting images on Twitter typically fall under fair use?

<comment><USER6> No.

> You retain your rights to any Content you submit, post or display on or > through the Services.

> ...

> By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you > grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to > sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, > transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or > distribution methods (now known or later developed). [0]

This grant doesn't apply to unaffiliated third parties.

[0] [https://twitter.com/en/tos](https://twitter.com/en/tos)

<comment><USER5> Well, then, Twitter is a morass of copyright violation ;)

Edit: But wait. Can't using images on personal websites be fair use? Is it just the Twitter ToS that makes it illegal?

<comment><USER7> Atleast in Europe there is no fair use per-se (though it's complex and various stuff is exempted).

The Twitter ToS merely says that if you upload something, it's still yours and that Twitter gets a license to show others what you posted (otherwise it would be silly to upload)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Please review my startup "SolidOpinion" - <AUTHOR>

solidopinion.com Thanks! <comment><USER2> The site looks great. However, I think you need to incorporate a demo of the commenting system somewhere on the site. The interactive image doesn't do it for me, I want to see the real thing.

How you plan to monetize is definitely interesting. Since points are reputation, and points can be sold between users, reputation can be purchased? If so, I'm not a fan. You mention advertising templates, what is that?

The only way points would be valuable $$ wise, for me, would be if I could spend them on advertising. The more I use your service and commit to the community, the more I get to advertise to the community.

How do you plan to get developers to incorporate your services in their site? As a developer, I would only use your service if it provided: A) A great and easy to use API that can let me do interesting things. or B) An addition revenue model.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi! Thank you for your feedback!

We had a real demo on the main website but later I've decided to replace it with screenshots. Now I am working on the video which should show all advantages of our widget for commentors.

Also, I probably should mention on the main website that there is a way to test widget and commenting process on our demo website soliddemoonline.com

Now about monetization. First of all each our website has own number or active/passive actions aka game rules with customizable price. So for example you can set price for embed image effect = -10 points and say that for each added comment user will get like +20 points. Totally we have around 20 interesting effects and around 20 more in mind)

This way user who actively participate in conversation can earn enough points to have fun commenting. But on the other side it is possible for website owner to enable "Buy points" feature. It is our first monetization idea.

In addition to this, we can show advertisement blocks on some predefined ad spots if publisher wants it.

Also, one of ways how user can earn points is to share comments to social networks, and if someone clicks on that sharing link, he will get some points. So you as a website owner can attract more users to your website (high quality traffic).

At this moment, we are working on Rewards system. Website owner can create specific rewards (it can be dissent code or event some promotional products) which you can buy using reputation points, so in this case user who actively participate in conversation will be rewarded.

Btw. there is also "Revenue share" feature. You can specify some amount of revenue in % which you would like to share between active users in your community. So for active users it can be a way to earn real money.

Ok and finally, about developers. We have API, at this moment it is not public because we are only in beta stagem but I think that in the feature it will be open to the community. Our API allows to do everything what can be done on the widget or in the configuration panel, so potentially it is powerful enough to create any UI/Plugins even mobile apps etc..

Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> \- Clickable Link ~> [http://solidopinion.com/](http://solidopinion.com/) .Site is pretty nice. Seems like a facebook design theme, but it still nice.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!</comment></comment>


Benford's Law - <AUTHOR> http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/march52012/index.html

<comment><USER2> Nice explanation of the log, nice graphics. I did this for lulz on some data at work once with a python script and (pearson's also) and I got 'oh dear these are not the results you were looking for' lol</comment>


Who's going to Trump's tech summit next week? - <AUTHOR> http://www.recode.net/2016/12/10/13908492/trump-tech-summit-tim-cook-apple-larry-page-google-sheryl-sandberg-facebook-nadella-microsoft <comment><AUTHOR> FYI for people considering flagging this: the "political detox" experiment is over.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13131251](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13131251)</comment>