Reaching the $5 Million Club Takes an Open Mind - <AUTHOR> http://finance.yahoo.com/banking-budgeting/article/103017/joining-the-5-million-club-takes-an-open-mind

<comment><USER2> I don't think that the 80% extends past this guy's sample group of 3000. In fact if you do some "fermi calculations" it doesn't appear to be the case that 80% of pentamillionaires in America come from startups.

The article claims there are 930,000 pentamillionaires in the united states. 80% of that is 744,000.

There are about 1.1 million lawyers in the USA. Let's say the top 10% have a net worth of 5 million. Thus 110,000 of those pentamillionaires are lawyers. So we've got 634,000 left.

There are about 700,000 doctors in the USA. 15% of those doctors are surgeons and anesthetists, specialties where you can make $500K/yr. So, 105,000 pentamillionaire doctors...

529,000 pentamillionaires left.

750 MLB players + 460 NBA Players + 1700 NFL players = 2910. Let's multiply that by the past 10 years = 29,000 current or former pro sports players who are pentamillionaires

500,000 pentamillionaires left

I'm getting a bit tired to do this math, but it seems like there must be 100,000 guys in the financial sector who have a net worth of 5 million dollars. So - 400,000 left.

Add in movie and TV stars, rock and pop music stars, guys who manage movie/TV/rock/pop stars, executives in the entertainment industry, the handful of other sport stars and entertainers who make a lot of money... that's probably another 100K. Down to 300,000.

Now think about all the guys who rose up the ranks of fortune 500 companies. There's probably 100 guys at each fortune 500 company who make a mil a year? Now we're down to 250,000.

Someone please correct me if I'm padding the numbers too much. I could be dead wrong on the number of rich finance sector guys, or totally wrong about how much money the top lawyers and doctors save. But, I also totally left out other rich people, like presidents of universities, university coaches, directors of rich nonprofit organizations, and so forth. Even if my math is off it really doesn't seem likely that 80% of the pentamillionaires in the USA came from startups. It seems closer to 10-20%, if that. Not trying to be a debbie downer but 80% seems way off the mark.

<comment><USER3> "750 MLB players + 460 NBA Players + 1700 NFL players = 2910. Let's multiply that by the past 10 years = 29,000 current or former pro sports players who are pentamillionaires"

It is not that completely different players play each season. I don't have any numbers but I would say that 10% new players each year seems more likely.

Also, I don't know exact salaries but I would say that it is winner takes it all. Most players don't have so huge payoff.

"There are about 700,000 doctors in the USA. 15% of those doctors are surgeons and anesthetists, specialties where you can make $500K/yr. So, 105,000 pentamillionaire doctors..."

You don't know their savings habits. If you make such money and have guarantee of similar earnings in the future, it is hard to resist spending more.

EDIT: The problem with entertainment sector is that some of them actually have huge salaries, but they are also forced to spend a lot of money. If you're a celebrity, you're forced by society to rent a jet, wear Dior, own a mansion etc.

<comment><USER4> Robert Maxwell was an avowed socialist. He was once a rival to Rupert Murdoch in the news business. He was also called a "champagne socialist." I remember on 60 Minutes, he was asked how he could be a socialist and yet have the private jet and the yacht. He replied that he was forced by his position in our society as a captain of industry to have all the trappings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Not to say that getting rich is simply a matter of having a swell attitude. The path to riches usually involves the kind of risk that would make most people feel a little queasy. Harrison Group head Jim Taylor recently persuaded more than 3,000 pentamillionaires to discuss their path to success. Perhaps not surprisingly, none of them had a cushy union job down at the DMV. _The vast majority — 80% — either started their own business or worked for a small company that saw explosive growth._ And almost all of them made their fortune in a big lump sum after many years of effort."

The article mentions the other 20% is made up of heirs (10%) and fortunes from passive income / stock picking. The other 80% made it from startups. Of course, this leaves out the career ladder; don't MBAs get rich too? I don't envy them, but I know they exist, and I know they have money, as do MDs and JDs. Where do they fit in?

Also:

"Getting rich also requires a certain amount of stubbornness and clarity of purpose. Consultant Joel Kurtzman, who evaluated 350 startups for his book Startups That Work, found that _successful outlets usually have a team of two or three founders who share a common vision; the success rate for this model was a remarkable 50%. The odds for solo founders were more like the oft-quoted one in 10, in part because they often found themselves working at cross- purposes with hired guns who see things differently._ That's what 34-year-old Justin Jarvinen learned the hard way. The entrepreneur saw two promising business ventures go down the tubes after he took on partners who tweaked his ideas beyond recognition. But three years ago he started VerveLife, a service that helps companies promote online marketing efforts with free music downloads. Knowing that his success depended on his enthusiasm for bringing the idea to market, he carefully chose partners who supported his vision."

So, according to this article: 80% of people who get rich do so w/ a startup 50% of good teams succeed 10% of solo founders succeed

<comment><USER6> I would say that in general, for an MBA to reach the $5M point, they have to be part of a startup. For an MD to reach that point, he has to start a very successful practice or make some good investments to go along with his income. So I think those two positions already fit into the mentioned data.

<comment><USER7> Except for those MBA's that go into the higher tiers of banking/finance/trading. Those guys can get bonuses that, if saved over a few years, could easily reach $5M.

<comment><USER8> In my understanding an MBA isn't considered much of a qualification in finance, banking or trading. Quants have quantitative degrees, while traders... well, they just seem to be some kind of trained gorilla as far as I can figure out.

<comment><AUTHOR> Quants and traders aren't the only people on wall street. I think most ibankers, besides the first and second years, have mbas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Surprisingly, today's very rich say that money itself wasn't much of a motivator. Once you've got food in your belly and a big-screen TV, the mere prospect of more Benjamins isn't enough to get you leaping out of bed at 5 a.m. Rather, rich folks often make their fortunes after they make up their minds to solve a problem or do something better than it's been done before.

Very true for me and I'm sure a lot of the HN community. Once you get past a certain point with money it becomes an after thought, then you have the freedom to think of other things (like big ideas) that will make you more money. The rich get richer for a reason...

<comment><USER10> _Paradoxically, the road to riches often means acting as if you already have that freedom._

I think the only true freedom comes from within. Money can't give you this freedom; but this freedom can give you money.

<comment><USER11> What's the Warren Buffet quote? The one where he said that he's not happy because he's made so much money, but he's made so much money because he's happy?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Anybody here read The Black Swan or Fooled by Randomness by Nasim Taleb? He so eloquently describes all the fallacies which this article is full of.

<comment><USER13> Can you spot some?

<comment><USER12> Yep sure.

For example, "3,000 pentamillionaires to discuss their path to success. Perhaps not surprisingly, none of them had a cushy union job down at the DMV. The vast majority — 80% — either started their own business or worked for a small company that saw explosive growth. And almost all of them made their fortune in a big lump sum after many years of effort."

I'm sure Nasim would have laughed at this. Firstly, selecting a group of successful people and asking what made them successful makes u fall into a trap of believing that these factors led them to success and hence whoever adopts these factors will be as successful as them. Secondly, for each millionaire there would be many other normal people who did what the millionaire did but didn't see their bank account swelling. For a study to be insightful, the participants should have as many losers (if not more) as winners.

Moreover, article confuses correlation with causality.

The article is like: Google, Yahoo, Amazon, etc. have one thing in common: Silicon Valley hence being in Silicon Valley will get you to that status. Tell me how many startups actually become Google-like?

<comment><USER14> Your response does not address the passage you quoted. First of all, the author didn't ask them what made them successful. The quote has facts about their lives, not their thoughts on what made them successful. Second of all, the author doesn't claim that these traits are a sufficient condition for becoming rich; only that they'll help.

And what the article says is closer to: "Google and Yahoo and most other successful internet companies have being in Silicon Valley in common, hence if you want to be a successful internet company, being in SV will help." Which is absolutely true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I started to doubt the wisdom of the article when I read:

"To enter the nation's top 1%, you need more than $5 million."

I know 'more than' isn't the same as 'greater than or equal to' but doesn't this indicate 1 in 100 Americans are multimillionaires?

<comment><USER16> The article is pretty sloppy with numbers and definitions. There's no indication their survey of 3000 is representative of all pentamillionaires, for example.

But, there were about 106 million 'households' in the US in the 2000 census. Perhaps there are 110-115 million households today. If 930,000 of those households have a net worth over $5 million, that's very roughly in the 1% range.

Wikipedia's article on {Millionaire} suggests about 9 million households have a million-dollar net worth, so 930,000 at the 5-million level seems plausible.

So it's not that 1-in-100 Americans are pentamillionaires as individuals, but almost 1-in-100 live in a pentamillionaire household.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> (930,000 / 300,000,000) != 1%

This guy has his own special brand of math.

</comment><comment><USER18> This was somewhat surprising to me: "The vast majority — 80% — either started their own business or worked for a small company that saw explosive growth. And almost all of them made their fortune in a big lump sum after many years of effort."

I guess it just reaffirms the pg/yc philosophy.

<comment><USER19> It also decimates the "rich get richer", "us vs them" lines of BS politicians maniacally shovel our way in order to extract our votes.

Good news folks. Its possible to get rich through hard work and a little cleverness. That's also the bad news.

<comment><USER20> 5M is a good retirement but it's not _rich_. When your assets are passively generating 5M a year then your _rich_.

<comment><USER20> With a good investment stratagy you can live off of ~4% of your capital per year and keep up with inflation. 4% of 5M is 200k/year. But if your retiring early you should aim for a 50% cushion which works out to 133k/year which far from amazing when you need to pay for your own heathcare etc.

PS: Rich means "Possessing great material wealth" which I think it stands for more than just the ability to support an upper middle class lifestyle without working.

<comment><USER4> By the standards of most of the world, "comfortably middle class" in the US is rich.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > ... Takes an Open Mind

... or massive inflation.</comment>


Eugene Transcripts (2008) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/2008_Contest/Eugene.pdf

<comment><USER2> This confirms earlier results reported by people trying out the bot:

      [2008-10-12 08:41:03.468] local sent: I'm feeling well thanks, have you had
        breakfast this morning?
      [2008-10-12 08:41:11.890] remote sent: Nice to hear that! Do you like the
        weather?
      ...
      [2008-10-12 08:42:43.078] local sent: what is your native town
      [2008-10-12 08:42:51.593] remote sent: The weather is always as bad as you
        think it is. I do believe that the world just a mare reflection of our
        thoughts...

It's just context-free, tone-deaf exchanges like that the entire time. I'm having trouble distinguishing this from a run-of-the-mill chat bot. Is the only difference here PR? Or was bad grammar and spelling actually enough to fool someone even though the bot clearly didn't know how to react to simple questions?

<comment><AUTHOR> Same thoughts here. People were complaining that it's not fair to judge the bot available on the web[1] because it's an older version, but it seems like more or less the same version used in this Loebner contest. I don't know for the most recent one, but I can't imagine it's changed an awful lot.

[1]: [http://princetonai.com/bot/bot.jsp](http://princetonai.com/bot/bot.jsp)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> So, this is dated 2008.

That gives about 5 years to create and tune the most amazing AIML ever, and create a brilliant engine. Or maybe the recent results have just been PR'd a bit too hard.

The fact that for some situations we don't know wherher we're talking to a bot or a human really just tells us how awful online communication is. That help script the human is following? It sucks. The script the salesperson is following? That sucks too. Most people's use of online communities to communicate? Urgh.

I'd be interested to see what the results would be if very smart people collaborated / competed to create a Dr-bot. Tell it your symptoms and it knows enough to send you to a pharmacist, a doctor, the ER, or call an ambulance. Because in the UK we uave telephone lines that are supposed to be able to do that. They were created to stop people going to A&E if they didn't need to go. The phone lines end up sending more people to A&E.</comment>


Most US states do not plan to use Apple and Google's COVID19 contact-tracing API - <AUTHOR> https://9to5mac.com/2020/06/05/covid-19-exposure-notification-api-states/ <comment><AUTHOR> I genuinely don't understand why this is.

There's a protocol running on almost every smartphone in the world right now, locally recording the necessary anonymized proximity data with BTLE[0]. All states need to to is produce an authoritative way to declare you have COVID, and release an app that provides notifications if a new case is broadcast that matches your history.

The fact that this protocol allows reporting your recent data _even if you 've installed nothing before realizing you have COVID_ is critical for success. The fact that the data doesn't include GPS or any long-time persistent key is critical for privacy (and, thus, adoption).

The upside is potentially significantly lowering the reproduction rate of COVID while businesses reopen. The downside is... what exactly? Why has almost every state (not to mention the federal government) not committed to implementing these apps?

[0] [https://covid19-static.cdn- apple.com/applications/covid19/cu...](https://covid19-static.cdn- apple.com/applications/covid19/current/static/contact- tracing/pdf/ContactTracing-BluetoothSpecification.pdf)</comment>


Ask HN: In Trouble for using company database structure for a graduate project? - <AUTHOR>

Eventually, I would like to pitch it to the senior developers who can then pitch it to my manager. Don't worry I will use sample data.<p>You might say to ask my manager but he/she doesn't support my graduate degree. Said "it will not benefit the department". Dead end there. However, I do believe this project WILL add tremendous value. Let me know what you guys think. <comment><USER2> I would be very careful and obviously refer to any Employment Agreement you may be under, specifically sections outlining work assignment and disclosure terms.

If your boss is not supportive of your graduate program, I would take that as a sign to not use anything (schemas, data, code, logic, research) in your graduate project for fear of legal repercussions.

If you still want to pursue the idea, I would develop something similar to what you want to pitch at work, but don't directly copy/use anything from your current job.</comment>


Antibiotics failing, scientists are using killer viruses to fight superbugs - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610066/faced-with-failing-antibiotics-scientists-are-using-killer-viruses-to-fight-superbugs/ <comment><USER2> > If the new approaches work, phage therapy could eventually become a > mainstream option for treating bacterial infections.

Phages _were_ the mainstream option for treating serious antibiotic infections in the USSR prior to 1990, but this was never commercialized in the west (AIUI it couldn't be patented because of the glaringly obvious prior art so nobody bothered) and disappeared after 1991 — collateral damage due to the end of communism (you could make more profits selling antibiotics to Russian hospitals).

It's kind of ironic that this technique is now being rediscovered, although the synergy with the arrival of cheap nanopore RNA/DNA sequencers should be noted (these devices make it much easier to rapidly identify the precise strain of pathogen causing an infection, and thereby choose the correct phage).</comment>


Real People Are Turning Their Accounts into Bots on Instagram – And Cashing In - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexkantrowitz/people-are-turning-their-accounts-into-bots-on-instagram <comment><USER2> You have to wonder if Instagram turns a purposeful blind eye on this behavior, as it makes small-time creators feel like there is at least some opportunity to game the system and grow a following. Otherwise, they'd be totally locked out of the elite, already established accounts and give up.</comment>


Advice on entering the Freelance/Consulting World - <AUTHOR>

I'm strongly considering entering the freelance or consulting world for a period of time. Anyone who's done it have any tips or advice? <comment><USER2> Few things I've learned in just 3 weeks of freelance:

1\. It's easy to feel guilty charging a client high rates while you tackle an unfamiliar project, which requires you spend more time learning than producing. For me, consulting has been a constant tradeoff between taking jobs at high prices where I don't learn new things vs. lower prices when entering unfamiliar territory. I don't know if pricing services according to your ability to execute is best though. At the end of the day, you don't want to find your saying to your client: "I did not execute as promised for whatever reason, but hey I didn't charge much!" This situation shouldn't arise often if you are honest about your skills from the beginning.

2\. Under promise and Over delivery

3\. Spec out a project as well as possible beforehand. But agree upfront to a mid-way spec because projects change so fast that you may find yourself conducting tasks you should charge a lot more to do.

4\. Build camaraderie with your client but hold your ground if they take advantage. Working with a variety of clients and building a network are advantages of the freelance world. Do you best to build quality relationships with your clients, so they tell your future clients that you are not only a great (insert job function), but also a great person. But I wouldn't go as far as to become so friendly that you feel bad charging them what you'd be making on another project.

Hope this helps</comment>


Show HN: I built a handful of Bootstrap 4 themes with an interactive code picker - <AUTHOR> https://hackerthemes.com/ <comment><USER2> I am tired of including jquery just because I use bootstrap when I have no use of jquery at all.

Is there something that can be done about this ?

<comment><USER3> Afaik using javascript at all with bootstrap is optional, It just means stuff like modals won't work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a great idea - lots of sites can make great use of Bootstrap and having ways to reskin it easily greatly increases the available looks and feels.

Something I'd personally pay for is an in-depth guide for how to go about reskinning Bootstrap myself, as my current approach is just to add one-off styles as needed or customize a few of the Sass variables but nothing fancier.

</comment><comment><USER5> This looks great. Two things that got me though...

The "picker" tool does not do what I thought it would. And for the modifier classes I'd rather see the word than the color if I had to choose one of the other. I.e. "danger" instead of a red square.

One of my favorite things about bootstrap is the way class naming is semantic -- it denotes purpose not color. So using a color picker looking square to change the modifier seems non-intuitive to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> What did you except of the Picker if I may ask?

<comment><USER5> Given the icon I expected it to do something with color. I don't know what given the context but the only time I have ever seen that icon is for color picking and usually not in a way that modifies my clipboard.

<comment><AUTHOR> Okay I get your point. I noted it for improvement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I like the Neon glow theme but overall all are good, nice work!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! That one is my own favorite as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I can't wait to try out the Neon glow hacker theme! Thank you for open sourcing! Sincerely, backend dev who still sucks at frontend

</comment><comment><USER8> What interactive code picker did you use? I don't see you talking about it anywhere. Useful site though.

<comment><AUTHOR> I built the code picker. It's sidebar on the right side that lets you switch colors, copy elements and inspect their code.

In retrospect I could have worded the title better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is Bootstrap 4 ready for use?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's currently in beta. According to the developers there will be no more breaking changes, so that's something. It's also the default download version on getbootstrap.com now. For early adopters I think it's a good pick. If you need more stability, Bootstrap 3 will be maintained for some time as well.

Bootstrap 4 has some really good new features so I use it for my own projects.

<comment><USER10> That's not accurate on breaking changes, there will be additional ones in the future:

> We've done our best to prevent breaking changes, but we had to sneak some > in. Regrettably, we'll also have a few more coming in Beta 3, too. However, > we're clearly outlining all of them for you to make the upgrade and testing > process as easy as possible.

Source: [https://blog.getbootstrap.com/2017/10/19/bootstrap-4-beta-2/](https://blog.getbootstrap.com/2017/10/19/bootstrap-4-beta-2/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah yes, you're correct.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Do the English Use More Words Than the French? - <AUTHOR> http://filipwolanski.com/french-english-vocabulary/ <comment><USER3> I'm a native French speaker and fluent in English (and of course, as luck would have it, I'm going to stick grammar mistakes in this post)

Some have pointed out that French is almost always longer. It's a bit more complicated than that. French uses a wider vocabulary than English, and uses many different words to convey different connotations. Words, as a result, tend to be longer, because they carry more information.

English tends to be much more modular and flexible. Nouns can be made into adjectives, adverbs and verbs rather easily, and "prepositions" drastically alter the meaning of verbs.

The end result is that English can be much shorter than French _when trying to be concise_. A short UI message will always be much shorter in English than in French. However, when conveying nuanced ideas, I believe they will be much closer in length, with perhaps a small advantage for French.

<comment><USER4> >> French uses a wider vocabulary than English

This seems an extraordinary claim, given that English is generally considered to have the largest number of words of any modern language (mostly because we just steal them).

<comment><USER5> Word-use is roughly Zipf-distributed [0] in most all modern languages, so there's not much difference in the number of commonly used words (as long as you ignore basic differences like the existence of articles and the richness of word inflection).

An analysis of English and French texts on Project Gutenburg shows that 93 words account for half of English usage, versus 89 for French [1]. English has fewer words in the middle of the distribution (696 versus 795 at 70%) and in the near tail (6,428 versus 9,050 at 90%, and 14,736 versus 21,231 at 95%), but more in the extreme tail.

0\. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law)

1\. [http://1.1o1.in/en/webtools/semantic- depth](http://1.1o1.in/en/webtools/semantic-depth)

<comment><USER3> > 14,736 versus 21,231 at 95%

So about 50% more words for French. The very extreme tail is less interesting because it captures the size of the dictionary, and words very rarely used.

I think the exponent of the tail would be the most relevant metric, but I can't open those pdf. Can someone plot the inverse CDF and make a log-log plot?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I notice that four of the seven authors with the smallest vocabulary are writing theater (Moliere, Shakespeare, Racine, Corneille). I think it's not a coincidence, because writing in rhymes must be a hard constraint in the choice of words one can use.

<comment><USER5> A keen observation, and Wilde really makes it four and a half.

But Shakespeare wrote mostly blank verse, and rhyming is not as much of a constraint on vocabulary in French due to the high commonality of word endings. If it's true that works for the stage tend to use fewer words, it might be because dialogue dominates; I imagine narrative, which consists more of description, naturally draws on a bigger vocabulary than even very stylized dialogue.

<comment><USER7> How is french easier to rhyme than english? Do you have empirical evidence?

Since I'm a french canadian who is lucky enough to speak the two languages, I find it difficult to believe.

Remember that rap (rhyme and poetry) was popularized by poor english speaking people.

<comment><USER5> For a discussion of the ease of rhyming in French versus English, see, e.g., this book [0]. Rhymes are widely considered to be easier to form in French; partly as a result, however, classical French poetry developed several additional stylistic constraints related to rhyming, such as the distinction between "feminine" and "masculine" rhymes of words with and without a final devoiced "e".

I wonder what you would accept as "empirical evidence" of the relative ease of rhyming in different languages. The demand strikes me as typifying one of the obnoxious impulses of the Hacker News community (another of them on display elsewhere in this thread) to dress up a vapid criticism as scientific skepticism.

You could, I suppose, try to do a combinatorial analysis of the ease of rhyming by writing a program to find rhyming pairs in a phonetic dictionary; just make sure your blog post about the results properly acknowledges the shortcomings of your analysis in its title.

0\. [https://books.google.com/books?id=ByVoAgAAQBAJ&lpg=PA60&ots=...](https://books.google.com/books?id=ByVoAgAAQBAJ&lpg=PA60&ots=5MIVrQ- Dtw&dq=ease%20of%20rhyming%20in%20french%20and%20english&pg=PA60#v=onepage&q&f=false)

<comment><USER7> So basically you make a claim that french is easier to rhyme than english, then I ask you if you have any evidence and you retorqued with a condescending answer adding a link to a book you took 5 second to google and that you didn't read.

You didn't read it because I just read it and while the first sentence would make it appear to back your point, it doesn't. First because he doesn't compare french to english but merely explain how the main accent is put on the suffix of words and that, in turn, makes it easy in french to build rhyme.

And if you continue to the next page, he explains how french rhyme are not on the same level as their english counterpart "because most English rhymes involve the root rather than the inflectional ending or suffix [...]"

Bottom line, you are wrong, and you try to pass as knowledgeable. You are a fraud.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The findings of this study are unrelated to the title of this post.

First, the authors and books were not chosen randomly and the sample size is tiny, so the results are meaningless, although I do respect the effort that was put into this. The author is up-front and honest about this in the beginning, but unfortunately proceeds to draw unwarranted generalizations based on his study.

Second, even if a similar, but much larger, study were conducted on randomly selected authors and books, the results would still conflate the vocabulary size in common usage with the vocabulary size of single authors. Hence, what the article is attempting to study is not the same thing as the title of this post.

<comment><USER5> I think the most unwarranted generalization is yours. The author clearly did not mean to do what you criticize him for failing to do.

But I suppose we could ask the mods to change the submission title. How about this?—"One blogger's analysis of the size of the vocabularies employed by some of his favorite French- and English-language writers, neither claiming nor achieving statistically significant insights into the question of whether French- (on the one hand) or English-speaking peoples (on the other) use more words in common usage."

<comment><USER9> Or maybe:

"Do the English Use More Words Than the French? I don't know, and what I did to test it doesn't tell me anything concrete"

<comment><USER5> Or: "Once again, the intent of this blog post is clear from its opening paragraphs (some readers' abiding dissatisfaction with its title notwithstanding), aforementioned intent being not to analyze patterns of general usage of the French and English languages in a statistically rigorous way but to offer an entertaining and well presented disquisition on some really quite insignificant but nonetheless amusing points related to the vocabularies of selected French and English writers of the author's own choosing (aforementioned dissatisfied readers nevertheless succeeding in cluttering up the comments on Hacker News with their whinging)"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wouldn't analysis of top 3 contemporary newspapers / magazines in each language yield a more accurate result?

Ie if Dickens or Melville used certain words in their writing - if modern speakers don't know them, we can't really use them to gauge how many words English speakers use _today_.

I, for one, simply can't read Shakespeare - most of his vocabulary (anybody knows what a 'bodkin' is?) sounds foreign to me. And I scored 99 percentile on the verbal SAT.

<comment><USER11> Most of Shakespeare's language is accessible to English speakers in England, Ireland, Australia, etc. There might be a few word here or there that are not widely understood ("bodkin" is not one of these, its meaning is generally known in the UK).

However, American English, especially as is daily spoken in the more ethnically diverse areas of the US has a much reduced vocabulary due to the need to accommodate non-native speakers.

For an example of where Shakespeare's language become confusing consider

"Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo."

Modern speakers of English most often interpret "wherefore to mean "where", when it means "why".

<comment><USER10> Seriously? What % of the English do you think will understand this (random start of first Shakespeare play that popped into my head):

If music be the food of love, play on;

Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,

The appetite may sicken, and so die.

That strain again! it had a dying fall:

O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound,

That breathes upon a bank of violets,

Stealing and giving odour! Enough; no more:

'Tis not so sweet now as it was before.

O spirit of love! how quick and fresh art thou,

That, notwithstanding thy capacity

Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there,

Of what validity and pitch soe'er,

But falls into abatement and low price,

Even in a minute: so full of shapes is fancy

That it alone is high fantastical.

<comment><USER11> Which _words_ in that passage are not easily understandable? The most "obscure" one that I can identify is "notwithstanding" (Google gives 48,000,000 results for "notwithstanding", so it is not exactly an obscure word).

A failure to understand that passage is a failure of comprehension, not of vocabulary.

<comment><USER10> You're talking about something else - individual words (at least in this passage) are certainly known to everybody.

But what % of English speakers do you think can understand the passage?

<comment><USER11> To clarify: what is it that _you_ do not understand about the posted passage?

<comment><USER10> Honestly - I don't understand anything. Imagine you had an English text with half the words substituted with Dutch ones (that look similar but make no sense).

So you might think you understand 2-3 words in a row only to come across the fourth word that seems key for the line but means nothing to you in the given context.

<comment><USER11> What makes it harder to understand is not the vocabulary, but the grammar, as well as Shakespeare's sometimes idiosyncratic use of word meaning. For example, "strain" here means a portion of music, which while not its most common meaning, is certainly within the abilities of most educated native speakers of English to understand, at least from context.

<comment><USER10> That's exactly what I mean - words that we otherwise know are used with completely different meaning, which renders the text unintelligible.

I disagree with you completely that 'most educated native speakers' can understand this. By the same token one can say that most native English speakers can solve differential equations :)

The definition of strain you mention is #30 in the dictionary - [http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/strain](http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/strain). Can you cite its use in that meaning in a contemporary newspaper or magazine?

<comment><USER11> As to usage of "strain" in music, a quick search lead me to this article from the US dated 16 Feb 2015 [1] "When the trumpets blare and the snares rattle during the opening strain of John Phillip Souza's The Washington Post March..."

I not proposing that Shakespeare is the easiest thing to read, but merely suggesting that it is not as inaccessible as it might first appear.

[1][http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami- dade/h...](http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami- dade/homestead/article10468706.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If anyone is interested in anecdotal data [0][1] regarding sentence length for equivalent meaning, I have to use both French and English every day, alternating between them (spoken and written) all the time. English is almost always shorter than French, which is more verbose. I am used to "thinking" in whatever language I'm using to talk/write and have noticed many times that I'm a bit slower in French, even if it's technically my native language. It might also be that French seems to have more alternatives to say the same thing in different ways, but that could just be just me.

[0] C'est presque toujours plus long en français qu'en anglais. [1] It's almost always shorter in English than in French.

<comment><USER13> I think French spelling plays a part here, though. If I were to write your example phrase in French written as pronounced using Finnish language spelling rules, it would look like this:

"Se preskö tuzuur ply lon on franse kon angle."

This "phonetic compression" made the printed sentence about 25% shorter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Being a french that always do EN and FR multi locale websites, I'm quite surprise of this question :) The french text is almost always longer than english one. Not sure if it's about word count, though.

Also, something very common for french people when learning english is to try to translate their french sentence exactly. It always seems over-complicated in english, and quite pedantic. With time, we learn to stop trying using the same words and try to express it directly in english. We realize at this point english sentences are always way more simple. But here again, vocabulary complexity says nothing about word count.

</comment><comment><USER11> That's a surprising result.

My previous view was that English vocabulary is based on Germanic as well as Latin roots, and so there there are often two terms with the same meaning, one which is subtly different in usage than the other. In contrast, French vocabulary is mostly Latin in origin.

<comment><USER15> Just because more words exist, does not mean the authors make use of these words. I think the author would agree that English has more words - he cites the dictionary sizes skewing heavily in favor of English.

With that said, I am also surprised. I would like to see a similar analysis using more modern works, as well as a discussion around how texts are selected. It seems like the selection of authors and their novels will significantly impact the results.

FWIW - Both English and French stem from the same original language (Proto- Indo-European). You are correct that English is a Germanic language (this does not mean it stems from German), and the French is a Romance language - <USER2> Romance being used in the sense of "came from Rome," not "sounds sexy." If you are interested in more details here, I highly recommend "The History of English" podcast: [http://historyofenglishpodcast.com/](http://historyofenglishpodcast.com/) I'm still working my way through it, but it does a great job explaining the history of the English language, how it evolved, how it relates to other languages, etc.

English contains words from many other languages. It is not just Latin words, but many more recent languages (such as French) as well.

<comment><USER16> Wow! That podcast seems awesome. Thanks a lot. This will be my bed time listening for a while.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm just going to assume Betteridge's law of headlines is in effect. If the answer to this was "yes", it would be phrased in a declarative rather than interrogative manner.

</comment><comment><USER18> A model of presentation of data. Its clarity belies the variety of techniques used. Perfect use of word clouds. Thank you.

<comment><USER19> I have to strongly, _strongly_ disagree. There is no "perfect use" of word clouds in the context of proper data visualization. The arrangement and colorization of the words are virtually on account of randomization (and the sizing of words based on frequency is of dubious value, given how difficult it is for the human eye to evaluate the size comparison)...this randomness is anathema to the proper presentation of data... the variability in interpretation is vast, and depends on each viewer's ability to see colors and read vertically.

<comment><USER11> Generally, I find word clouds be be pretty useless anyway. They visually highlight the top few words (4 or 5 at most), but beyond that are obscure and uninformative.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Oui.</comment>


A Brave New World in China? - <AUTHOR> http://geniusblog.davidshenk.com/2009/08/a-brave-new-world-in-china.html

<comment><USER2> Brave New World is a great dystopian novel by Aldous Huxley in which eugenics plays a central role. I think that reading it will greatly alter your view of such governmental interventions.

<comment><USER3> Huxley shows China's genetic experiment being successful, contra linked article.

<comment><USER4> Brave New World doesn't suggest that this kind of engineering was successful in terms of making people better, only that it led to a controllable world in which happiness took precedence over truth.

A country that achieves what is described in the book will almost certainly fail to compete with countries that reward creative endeavours and free thought.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hyperventilate all you want. If China actually creates an effective eugenics program (which is what I assume the end-goal of this is), the rest of the world is curtains.

Look at the title of this guy's book:

 _The Genius In All Of Us: Why Everything You've Been Told about Genetics, Talent and IQ is Wrong_

Well, what I've been told is that everybody who discusses Genetics and IQ honestly are effectively Nazis and should be driven from public life. Will his book disabuse the world of this notion...or, does it merely repeat it?

[http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=978038...](http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780385523653)

 _DNA does not make us who we are_

Well, I guess that explains why humans so frequently give birth to squirrels.

<comment><USER6> But identical twins are very different people despite the same DNA.

<comment> daniel-cussen The identical twins I know are very similar to each other. Just my two cents of a data point.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have nieces who are identical twins (they were tested for monozygosity after being born). But they are not even identical in appearance--I'm decent at telling them apart, and their mom does that very well. Professional geneticists are aware of cases of monozygotic twins being quite discordant in height, IQ, or various other phenotypical characteristics of interest. Some of those cases are reported in detail in the better textbooks on human genetics.

<comment><USER7> _Professional geneticists are aware of cases_

They are also aware of statistics, and confirmation bias, right?

<comment><AUTHOR> How would confirmation bias tend to run on this issue?

<comment><USER7> Depends on how many people grew up watching Sesame Street and listening to NPR, compared to how many people grew up watching... uh... all those mainstream media sources that take the yes-there-is-human-biodiversity side of the human biodiversity debate.

<comment><AUTHOR> I referred to professional geneticists, persons who enter a graduate program of study of genetics and gain a Ph.D. and academic position in that discipline.

From above:

 _Professional geneticists are aware of cases of monozygotic twins being quite discordant in height, IQ, or various other phenotypical characteristics of interest. Some of those cases are reported in detail in the better textbooks on human genetics._

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I really like this comment in the submitted article by Professor Mark Blumberg on experimental design:

"What we will never see are two groups of subjects, chosen randomly or chosen based on the possession of certain genes, who are then afforded the greatest enrichment and training programs available. The question would then be: Are there significant differences in accomplishment and excellence between the two groups?"

He has good insight into how organizations respond to incentives, including incentives to junk proper science

<http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html>

while pretending to do science for commercial gain.</comment>


Workona – Workspaces for Chrome Tabs - <AUTHOR> https://workona.com <comment><USER2> I use this extension everyday. Its been a life saver. Stopped bookmarking stuff since the extension takes care of saving stuff.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just found put about it. Made me switch back from Firefox to Chrome. I love this extension. I feel like it has the potential to really solve my tab- clutter problem when working on various projects in parallel.</comment></comment>


Ode to the "Older" Entrepreneur - <AUTHOR> http://blog.eladgil.com/2011/02/ode-to-older-entrepreneur.html

<comment><USER4> I'm an outlier in a few different ways in life, and in my 40's, I am with startups as well. I didn't discover how satisfying being an entrepreneur could be until I really started _trying_ it in my late 30's and now I can't get enough.

I also think it's a slightly different environment for tech now than it was just 10 years ago. There seem to be more resources available for people who want to get started. But I think a stronger factor may be that these days people my age actually _had_ the internet when they were younger, especially those of us who had technical training and internet connections in college. This isn't some new fad for me. It's life and potentially life-changing and industry disrupting if we do it right.

I guess many my age are content just writing enterprise Java code with one eye on their 401(k), but I'm much more interested in new technologies, languages and see so many possibilities out there.

</comment><comment><USER5> The only reason it's skewed towards young people is because software is a VERY young industry! People who did not grow up with software just have less experience with software and are less likely to start successful companies around it.

In a hundred years the market will normalise to whatever the normal age for business owners is.

We've gone through periods of rapid change recently, and older entrepreneurs are just less familiar with the workings of the new stuff to be able to successfully compete. That will change as the current generations grow.

<comment><USER6> Also, people become far more risk-averse as their careers progress. This is particularly true in high-paying jobs like software development; its hard to walk away from $100k+ job to start your own project, especially with a wife and kids depending on you. The younger you are the more risks you can take.

Also, as you said, software evolves quickly. So its completely reasonable for a 25 year old to have mastery of a new and exploitable technology... makes for an interesting entrepreneurial dynamic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Think there is a pretty significant component missing in analysis - more young people start companies. It could be that the success rate for older entrepreneurs is 3x of 4x that of younger - not assuming it is, but if young entrepreneurs are starting companies at 3x or 4x the rate of older, it might explain some of the anecdotal observations.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, good point. BTW, I am not arguing that "older" entrepreneurs can't start huge wins, but rather, the very very big wins are anecdotally started by younger people (for SW, and in particular internet cos).

Another analysis I would love to see (if I have time will do it myself) - <USER2> the 20 largest SW or Internet companies started in the last 20 years. Graph age of founders vs. company outcome.

<comment><USER7> yes that would be interesting. thanks for article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Adobe founders were in their early 40's. (born 1939 and 1940, founded 1982.)

Also, I really do think that people are aging more slowly, 40 is the new 30 etc. Adolescence is extended; old-age is longer and healthier.

But, whether you have an advantage by being older is a question of the _value_ of experience... although each new generation of tech seems to reinvent all the old stuff (so experience helps there), mastery of detailed workarounds is lost. Experience seems to have most enduring value in people and business- related skills, more than in programming. Other things that don't change much are laws and mathematics. Although this doesn't help mathematicians, who need to be creating new mathematics, my guess is that applied mathematicians would get better over time.

</comment><comment><USER9> My take on this applies to just about any field with regards to entrepreneurship. A successful entrepreneur doesn't emerge until the person 'gets it'. What I mean by 'gets it' is an esoteric combination of these factors:

-realization that life is not a dress rehearsal

-determination to be successful in their own right, and to not spend the rest of their lives asking other people for permission to trade their precious time for wages

-awakening that most barriers to success are mental

-development of absolute belief that they alone are responsible for how they feel, how they act, and their success or failure at anything.

The big difference between this and other fields is the lower physical barriers to entry for young people. There are no licences required, no physical assets to acquire, no permission needed to build software. On top of that there is a positive feedback loop where other people are willing to listen to a young software entrepreneur, because young software entrepreneurs have had success in the past. If other industries had these low barriers to entry, I would expect to find young successful people across other industries.

The age distribution I think is just the varying age at which people 'get it'. For some young people, they come out of the gates with this belief system, either innate or cultivated by their parents. For others, it requires maybe starting a family and accepting the responsibility of the same, maybe getting fired from a job, maybe a mid-life crisis or a health scare. The reasons are varied but the outcome is similar - a shifting of focus onto what is important. Once the shift of focus happens and clear thinking emerges, the entrepreneur can emerge - at any age.

</comment><comment><USER10> I think it's probably because to take that plunge and go all-out with a venture (which is how most tech startups work) you can't really have kids and a wife and a mortgage and the need for health insurance weighing you down and dividing your attention.

Now that it's becoming more practical to bootstrap yourself into existence on the side - primarily because of cloud resources, but also just because it's getting easier in terms of support structure - I think we're going to see more older entrepreneurs.

I mean, I'm 44 and I'm only now starting to get interested in startups.

[I tell my wife similar things about physics when she gets despondent about not getting ahead in the field fast enough. There, I really think that the daily grind of academia, plus the terrible burden of having a professional reputation, is what makes it impossible for older folks to contribute the big stuff.]

</comment><comment><USER11> As an "older" entrepreneur (I'm 43), I can say a few things:

A) Its harder to put all of my eggs in one basket. When I was younger i could afford the time to do that (and had several successes doing that). Now, its more important for me to diversify my "entrepreneurship"

B) the way I do that is by finding the qualities that I had (in other young entrepreneurs) and investing in them at low valuations (so I feel as if I have the equity of a founder).

Most entrepreneurs I know in their 40s tend to do the same thing. Its a little bit easier (less late nights programming when I have two kids) and almost as fun and just as lucrative. Ultimately, my "business" now is my investments.

</comment><comment><USER12> _If you look at a variety of fields, you see that people within certain age groups tend to do better. Most productive ages for: Gymnasts: teens, Mathematicians: teens to late-20s, Physicists: early 20s-early 30s, Biologists: late 30s-40s, Literary authors: 40s to 60s._

I prefer a binary distillation:

"Physical" - best from 18 to 40, peaking around 30 (with some exceptions)

"Mental" - best from 13 to 90, peaking almost anytime.

Almost every field is a combination, but I consider programming and business more "mental" than "physical". So as long as you take care of yourself, there's no reason why anyone's best work can't be ahead of them.

I'd be very surprised to find the best basketball player peaking at 40, but not surprised at all to find a programmer who did the same thing.

<comment><USER13> The data suggests to me that "mental" has at least two, narrower peaks - <USER3> Mathematician/Physicist peak (maths are theroetical physics are quite similar in practice) is quite distinct from the Novelist's peak, and that therefor they exercise different mental abilities.</comment></comment>


Mkcast – GIF terminal screencasts with key presses overlaid - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/KeyboardFire/mkcast <comment><USER2> This is great...now I'll have to find a spare laptop to load Ubuntu on. I'm on OS X and have been attempting to write Unix tutorials...I don't like doing videos, so I use Quicktime to do a window recording, save it, and then send the file to the "gifify" utility ([https://github.com/vvo/gifify](https://github.com/vvo/gifify)), which besides wrapping around ffmpeg to do the conversion, uses the giflossy fork of gifsicle to optimize the image:

           gifify screen.mov -o screen.gif --resize 800:-1

example GIF:

[http://www.compciv.org/files/images/cli/echo- redirect.gif](http://www.compciv.org/files/images/cli/echo-redirect.gif)

It's better than embedding video clips for such short snippets, but being able to show keystrokes would be even better (Quicktime does record mouse button presses)

<comment><USER3> Eh... Admittedly, this is one scenario where GIFs might be acceptable if kept to small little (not long) screencasts for the terminal (simple, solid colors).

Still, movies win out in (1) _smaller file size_ and (2) _control for easy pausing, reversing, and skipping forward_.

I hate it when I can't pause, go back, or go forward on instructional examples. Often I want to skip ahead to the relevant part, or pause so I can examine and play around more.

I want to be able to pause it easily so I can type on the computer keyboard I'm working on. I want to be able to scrub the timeline back and forth to easily replay something I might have missed instead of having to watch the whole thing over again. All too often a part might go by too fast, and with the GIF you need to wait for the whole thing to cycle again in order to catch that spot in the instruction that went too quickly. And then that spot goes by too quickly again, and you just want to pause the bloody thing, but you can't because it's a GIF. And so someone tacks on a bunch of extra JavaScript to create a player for the GIF in order to add that control. At this point in the story, file size and simplicity have both been thrown out the window. But, I digress...

The GIFs only serve a very limited purpose for VERY short screencasts so that it isn't an annoyance replay the whole thing again and again to catch something that was missed, etc.

Even with that example as small as it is, [https://gfycat.com/AcidicTangibleChupacabra](https://gfycat.com/AcidicTangibleChupacabra) reduced it:

      GIF:  408,744 bytes.
      WebM: 344,978 bytes.
      MP4:  151,047 bytes.

That's a 2.7 to 1 compression ratio from the GIF to the MP4. And if you were specifically targeting "terminal recording" as a targeted scenario, you might be able to tailor the video compression settings for better quality and frame usage than GyfCat does.

I'd rather get the 147.5 kibibyte MP4 over the 399.2 kibibyte GIF on my mobile. Especially when I'm looking up something on my phone in concrete and metal building with poor signal and non-accessible Wi-Fi.

Using the HTML5 video tag, it serves WebM and MP4, so everybody should be happy.

There seems to be an abuse of GIFs when most people's browsers support MP4 or WebM just fine nowadays. If your browser doesn't support that, then you probably want to stick to simple text instructions for the terminal instructional example anyway.

<comment><USER4> Dont mean to be rude, but comparison of file sizes of different video containers is pointless. You need to see what audio or video format each of the container files store. Then there could be changes in framerate (fps), frame size (like 640x480), compression quality (or inversely video bit rate), audio bit rate, image encoding (rgb for gif vs yuv420 ). Just changing the audio bit rate from 128kbps to 32kbps for a voice only video (i mean no music, like they have for tutorials) can reduce file size by 50%!

<comment><USER3> Yes, I agree with you in essence. I don't agree that it's pointless, though; I believe there exists some merit to it. The point of the comparison was more about a quick and dirty quick example with the compression implementation and settings used by GyfCat, which was a quick way to convert the GIF. There are obvious flaws in this approach. Many flaws, in fact. However, even with those flaws, it demonstrated my point (that the GIF sucks) as far as I'm concerned. More optimal settings and all sorts of possibilities for alternatives should be explored. But, I will leave that to someone else because that is outside of the intended scope of my intent for this comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It is mostly a bash script wrapper around Byzanz, the later existing since at least 2008:

[http://linuxpoison.blogspot.co.at/2008/11/desktop- recording-...](http://linuxpoison.blogspot.co.at/2008/11/desktop-recording- tool-byzanz.html)

Still, interesting.

</comment><comment><USER6> Why gif, and not webm or mp4? Using gifs makes it only a bit more portable, but makes it consume significantly more bandwidth.

<comment><USER7> It's not like we are using a dial-up modem anymore. We have plenty of bandwidth.

<comment><USER8> > We have plenty of bandwidth.

Smartphone users might not have lots of bandwidth and GIFs are incredibly inefficient compared to H.264 and WebM videos. Why waste bandwidth when you don't have to?

For example, the following GIF of a CD in a microwave is 8 MB, but when converted to a WebM by Gfycat is just 369 KB.

[http://gfycat.com/GrimOpenDutchsmoushond](http://gfycat.com/GrimOpenDutchsmoushond)

<comment><USER9> Off-topic: Strangely enough, it reported the same size for the MP4, but downloading it [0] shows that it's 1.1 MB. Inspecting it with `mediainfo` shows that it was encoded with the Baseline Profile, so that might explain the counterintuitively large size. (This profile is used for supporting low- powered devices, like phones, and results in a higher bitrate being used; 757 vs 252 Kbps in this case.) It seems that Gfycat just reports the WebM size either out of technical constraints, and/or for the sake of boasting higher amounts of bandwidth saved.

[0] [http://fat.gfycat.com/GrimOpenDutchsmoushond.mp4](http://fat.gfycat.com/GrimOpenDutchsmoushond.mp4)

<comment><USER3> GyfCat reports the smallest file size between the both WebM and MP4. If the MP4 is smaller (or the WebM is smaller), it shows that in the textual information, regardless of video file presently playing. What's shown in the textual info is purely about the boasting in this case.

Still, that's definitely a file-size improvement over the GIF.

      GrimOpenDutchsmoushond.GIF:  8,714,192 bytes.
      GrimOpenDutchsmoushond.MP4:  1,137,305 bytes.
      GrimOpenDutchsmoushond.WebM:   378,363 bytes.

<comment><USER9> Ah, I see. Thanks for the explanation. That does make sense. And of course. I was just digressing. Your original point still stands.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Looks nice. I was going to perform a shameless plug by mentioning my simple Linux OSD nanoproject (for those wanting to use some other recording matters, but still see the keystrokes on the screen):

[https://github.com/przemoc/kaos/](https://github.com/przemoc/kaos/)

but I just remembered that I still haven't fixed a bug I noticed on my computer at work, where I had Gnome back then. Nowadays I have awesome there too (just like on my laptop), so I'll possibly won't reproduce it, but notes I left should be enough to do the fix one day. ;)

</comment><comment><USER11> The Sublime Text dev has an interesting take on this idea, using a single packed PNG and canvas rendering to avoid GIFs 256-colour limitation while remaining lossless:

[http://www.sublimetext.com/~jps/animated_gifs_the_hard_way.h...](http://www.sublimetext.com/~jps/animated_gifs_the_hard_way.html)

<comment><USER12> I'm hoping someone takes the ball and maintains that project, I think it's pretty awesome. Whenever I think of great landing page animations for software tools, I think of ST.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Similar available on Windows - [http://carnackeys.com/](http://carnackeys.com/) with source available at [https://github.com/Code52/carnac](https://github.com/Code52/carnac)

</comment><comment><USER14> This is awesome! I'll definitely try to use it and make some Vim tutorials.

</comment><comment><USER15> For Windows, use the Open Source [http://www.carnackeys.com](http://www.carnackeys.com) and either CamStudio or Camtasia. Works great.

<comment><USER16> windows also comes with the well-hidden "Problem Steps Recorder" that takes a sequence of screen shots whenever you click something. Doesn't do the text overlay but it's already installed with Windows which makes some things easier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Smart and useful! And if there are issues with the GIF format, surely others could easily be added. Nice work.</comment>


New Service Blocks EU Users so Companies Can Save Thousands on GDPR Compliance - <AUTHOR> https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/new-service-blocks-eu-users-so-companies-can-save-thousands-on-gdpr-compliance/ <comment><USER2> Disclaimer: This is not legal advice.

Blocking EU visitors by IP doesn't eliminate the need to comply with GDPR, because GDPR jurisdiction isn't based on where the service thinks think the user is (whether from IP geocoding or another source).

If an EU resident is using a VPN, or using an IP that incorrectly geocodes to a non-EU country, or behind a private corporate network and NAT that egresses traffic in a non-EU country, GDPR still applies. Any site with more than trivial traffic will have some users with those characteristics.

Experts debate whether explicitly requiring users to confirm that they aren't in the EU - say, a country dropdown - is even a solution. If an EU resident visitor lies, they may well still be protected by GDPR (and the EU is large enough for enforcement to matter even if a site doesn't have an EU presence).

<comment><USER3> It is much easier and better mandate a physical address during a forced registration.

At that point, it's quite easy to inform EU residents that they are unable to continue do to regulations rather than rely on some type of spoofed IP or VPN</comment></comment>


As a business, what do you hide from your customers? - <AUTHOR> Example: We are offering unlimited storage or data transfer.<p>But we don't tell customers that we are throttling them. <comment><USER2> Ohhh sad, that this post dosen't get any upvotes.

Personally, my company is build on trust and I don't have to lie to my customers.

But what fuck me up the most recently:

To register an ASN in the RIPE Region, you have to be a member (LIR) or find a LIE that sponsor your one.

The costs as LIR are near 0. You only have to verify your customer and get a signed contract. Let's say you value the time at 10€.

Then you send the stuff to the RIPE via API, Mail or Ticket System.

Then your customer gets the ASN from RIPE and you, as Sponsoring LIR, are done.

Some company's charge you 200€/yr for this (the industry median is about 90€ and 50% only want it one time.)</comment>


Worst Pivot Ever? WTF happened to Greplin? - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/dcancel/status/215083145719070720 <comment><AUTHOR> Crazy to me as a loyal Greplin user that they would pivot from being a personal data search engine to a Calendar app overnight with no heads-up to their users.

I gave Greplin access to all of my personal data-email, calendar, dropbox, etc, etc. What happened to all my PII now?

The new website no longer lets me access my account. It just says "get notified when the new web app launches". WTF?

</comment><comment><USER2> Search is here:

<https://www.cueup.com/login>

More info in this post:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4132603></comment>


Sun's Six Biggest Mistakes - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/2009/04/06/sun-microsystems-enterprise-technology-enterprise-tech-sun.html

<comment><USER2> The one thing Sun could do right now is whatever it takes to make Oracle support Solaris x86 as a tier-one platform. Right now Sun isn't even an option in a lot of projects because of this, and Red Hat is _only_ an option for the same reason.</comment>


Decoding Floats - <AUTHOR> http://raysohn.com/posts/decoding-floats.html <comment><USER2> When dealing with floats, it should be noted that unlike a 32-bit `int` which is a signed 2's complement representation; a 32-bit `float` follows single precision floating point representation which is 1 sign bit, 8 exponent bits and 23 mantissa bits. Not that there's anything wrong with the article, i just wanted to put it here.

</comment><comment><USER3> In college, I remember we had to manually encode / decode a binary float to a decimal float as exercises. While it was rather fun to understand how machines store a float it could get messy with 64 bits. Also, completely ridiculous tasks.

[Wrong!] Nitpick from the article: the main is declared as returning an int and there is nothing returned.

<comment><USER4> Not return-ing but just falling through to the closing } is perfectly fine and defined as returning 0.

<comment><USER5> To clarify: this is _only_ for main(), in C++: (see c3.6.1p5 of the standard)

"A return statement in main has the effect of leaving the main function (destroying any objects with auto- matic storage duration) and calling exit with the return value as the argument. If control reaches the end of main without encountering a return statement, the effect is that of executing return 0"

It's really best not to get in the habit of not returning from a function though, as in the vast majority of cases, you'll get a random value (well, whatever's in the appropriate register) as the return result, and unless you specifically configure it, most compilers won't even warn you!</comment></comment></comment>