The Anatomy of a Thousand Typefaces - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@getflourish/the-anatomy-of-a-thousand-typefaces-f7b9088eed1 <comment><USER2> Hey, this is awesome! One major issue/annoyance with design and typography is organizing, sorting and sifting through an ever-expanding font collection. For the longest time I wanted a font manager that organized fonts by various tags/classifications. FontExplorer X added that somewhat recently, but this takes it a bit further. The ability to sort by ranges of x-height, width, etc can really help with find good good font-pairing options. Obviously, this could become much so much more useful with a larger library of fonts. It would be interesting if there was a central database where everyone could anonymously upload the results of their own library. Such a database could be helpful for people trying to find similar fonts, better pairings or just a better way for font managers to organize fonts.

<comment><USER3> I've started to implement a way to parse local fonts via drag & drop (no actual upload required). This will enable to create a personal database and eventually be a foundation for a shared, larger database. But before getting into this, I want to improve the measurements first and I'm happy about some suggestions that have been made here already!

<comment><USER2> That is all good to hear! I look forward to seeing how the project evolves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very interesting work. I'm thinking it would be nice to add measures like this to FontConfig so that open source font libraries and widgets (on systems which use FontConfig [Linux {including Android I think}, and GTK apps on Windows and Mac such as Inkscape]) can help users make more principled selections.

Also, since FontConfig does indexing a) in native code and b) only at install time, more robustness could be built into these measures without runtime cost, including having a detector for fiercely unconventional fonts (like Libre Barcode or Wingdings) which would present basically garbage results with these metrics.

I would make an adjustment to the measurement of _weight_ , to make it the shaded proportion of the area within the outermost convex hull of the outline, rather than the shaded proportion of the bounding box. A way to accomplish this with _o_ (without changing your technique completely) is to flood fill the outside with a third color, then measure the ratio of white to black.

Then the next enhancement would of course be to figure out the logical mapping of these metrics to other scripts. Cyrillic (with Kha height instead of x-height, and о instead of o) is straightforward, Hangeul is harder, communist and republican Chinese characters readily break rules for text color when juxtaposed, Japanese has three writing systems to assess.

As for the application, it would be nice to see the histograms update in relation to eachother (maybe with two toplines, one for the overall histogram, and one for the intersection of the other selected ranges), so I can see the clustering of the histogram when I select a certain weight range.

Also, there seems to be a bug in the range filtering, since all of the results are outside the selected range for me.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for your detailed feedback. Your suggestion for measuring the weight more precisely is what I'd been thinking but didn't figure out how to do it. Introducing a third color is such a simple way to do it! I'll look into this.

I will reconsider updating the histograms to reflect the current filtered subset. I tried this in the past but ended up with cases with very little results and thus small visible areas in the histograms that often required to reset filters. But I agree that this would better reflect the filtered data.

Thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would be inclined to tackle this problem 'starting from scratch' rather than trying to make sense of existing ways to sort/choose fonts. So principle component analysis might be one way to go, maybe identifying new 'principle components' to better sort/arrange fonts by.

I also wonder if the work done in OCR could be useful. To be able to recognise a font takes you half way there to categorising a font.

Another thing with font choosers is that sometimes you need a font sympathetic with existing material, perhaps a licensed font that you just don't want to run on a website. Maybe that font has an opentail 'g' and you really need to restrict your choice to fonts with an opentail 'g'. Or you find your best match font and then a little while later find that it has the wrong style of 'a' that you ended up with. There is no easy way other than typing in a better 'Quick brown fox...' and sifting through previews, ideally you would want to refine by things like opentail 'g' \- something a layman can understand and not a typo term.

<comment><USER3> Very good points. Especially the glyph-specific features you mention (a, g, …) are definitely of my interest and the origin of the project. I think I'm only at a point where I arrived at a basic foundation that hopefully will enable me to do the things you mention. Thanks for your insights!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is awesome, it is all that I wanted from Google fonts but did not get. Definitely bookmarked. I can see this saving hours and hours of rummaging for fonts on Google and blog posts suggesting purportedly good font combinations.

Given this, here are a few things I would like that I find useful in google fonts

1\. Info on how many weights are available (though the app gives the number of styles, it does not name them)

2\. The ability to test with your own text. This is most useful when you are trying out fonts for headings. To be able to decide that in the app itself without having to iterate combinations by implementing in sites being developed will be a godsend.

3\. This might be a bit too farfetched. The size of the font files for latin character sets. It can give you an idea of how much bloated your website is going to be. (This could be a filter maybe?) Typically now, I download each font file to inspect it's size.

Kudos!

<comment><USER3> 1\. Adding previews for the weights/styles is already on my list :) 2\. I initially starting the project when trying to pair fonts and stress test them with my own content. Using the tool to find and save fonts for real projects hasn't been the focus, but the data will surely end up in something you're looking for. 3\. File size, yes, that's something I can add. Large file size might even be a hint for very large character set?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> [https://getflourish.github.io/anatomy-of- typefaces/app/](https://getflourish.github.io/anatomy-of-typefaces/app/) Here's the data itself!

</comment><comment><USER8> Amazing work, and presentation. Thanks for writing.

<comment><USER3> I'm glad you enjoyed reading.</comment></comment>


Psychology vs. the Graphics Pipeline (2017) - <AUTHOR> http://scattered-thoughts.net/blog/2017/12/11/psychology-vs-the-graphics-pipeline/ <comment><USER2> Just a reminder. If you are doing these experiments on an external display, make sure you are doing so with your laptop lid closed (its screen off). Mac OS (and maybe other operating systems) do not properly operate its vsync synchronization from a laptop when using an external display while the laptop's screen is also active. I have run into this problem multiple times.

</comment><comment><USER3> Author should have tried CRTs. They can run at a plethora of refresh rates.

<comment> GuB-42 Some gaming monitors have adaptive framerates (g-sync / freesync).

This, I suppose, could be used to create very accurate timings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very interesting. I wonder if researchers take the time to make sure they have hardware that can handle such things</comment>


Stypi (YC S11) Is Etherpad Reborn - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/09/yc-funded-stypi-is-etherpad-reborn/

<comment><USER2> Not to be a dick, but who cares? This just seems like a lame proprietary rip- off.

Etherpad is alive and well, and it's totally F/OSS - Etherpad Lite was just released and it's SUPER easy to embed in your own apps: <https://github.com/Pita/etherpad-lite>

<comment><USER3> From the install docs for etherpad-lite on Github, step one:

 _As root:_

Okay, two words and we've just lost 98% of the computer users in the world.

 _Install all dependencies. We need the sqlite develob libraries, gzip, git, curl, wget, libssl develop libraries and python:_

... and now we've lost most of the remaining 2%.

"SUPER easy" for you, "SUPER easy" for me, but the other 99.98% of the potential customers would also love to use the product.

<comment><USER4> Seems to happen to a lot of products that are 'simple'. It happened to Dropbox ("Why would I use this when I can do these other twelve steps to do nowhere near the same thing") and the Ipod ("Why would I need this when I have a CD Burner and a Discman" (srsly)). I think it's safe to ignore claims like it :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> To beat Etherpad and Google Docs:

Let me hit ctrl-I while typing, type something and have it appear in italics, and then hit ctrl-I again to turn off italics. Likewise for bolding, though I use less of that.

Let me apply URLs.

Do this (while keeping it fast and without introducing any bugs worse than Google Docs sometimes crashing and IEtherpad sometimes going unresponsive) and I will switch.

<comment><USER6> I wouldn't even need ^i and ^b. I wish they added a Markdown "syntax" mode. And it could be interesting if you could download the history as a git repo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Just used this for a phone interview. I knew it was a bit risky to do that on launch day, but decent support for syntax highlighting, indentation, and showing the other user's cursor made me think this was a use case this app was built for.

It was great for 30 mins but after that we started to get connectivity issues and had to move to TitanPad. Once it's more stable I'll switch for sure though.

</comment><comment><USER8> Does YC invest in innovation? If so, why am I not seeing innovative startups?

If not, is it because iterative 'also ran' stuff is a safer investment?

<comment><USER9> Innovation in the form of incrementally improving existing ideas, or providing a better implementation of a current idea, is still valuable to society and to investors. Google was an "also ran," as was the iPod. Both products (search and MP3 players) had been done before.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Cool. I was looking into Cloud9 yesterday, but Stypi really does the rick, due to the syntax highlight and collaboration (cloud9 did not work for me), non signup required and ease of sharing (simple url).

Great job guys!

<comment><USER11> Looks like they're using Ace underneath too. (<http://ace.ajax.org/>)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> where is the vim plugin?

<comment><USER6> I was wondering about the same thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Feature request: please add Objective-C to the list of supported languages. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm _super_ psyched about these guys - what they're working on has all kinds of potential that ether pad never had. It's one of the missing kinks in the modern development toolkit. I hope we'll get a chance to look into the API soon - I know they're working hard, but I don't want to be patient :) we have visions to fulfill!

<comment><USER15> Yes! I want an API!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Looking forward to trying this! There's a lot left to do in collaboration, and a commercially-backed piece of software will be able to achieve some remarkable things.

Collaborative code editing, in particular, is really an unsolved problem, so I can't wait to see where this goes.

</comment><comment><USER17> Feel the collaboration! stypi.com/pi2o36wr

</comment><comment><USER18> Congrats on the launch Stypi team. Just curious about the underlying tech. Are you using operational transformation (OT) like google docs does OR are you using an alternative such as causal trees (CT)?

</comment><comment><USER19> The article notes they didn't use any of EtherPad code. Why not?

<comment><USER20> Probably to avoid the GPL?

<comment><USER21> EtherPad is under the Apache License (non-viral, like BSD)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Looks like node + socket.io for the push updates. Very snappy.

</comment><comment><USER23> Looks like a cool web app, although I fail to see this as a commercial product. I would use this only as a free product, and I'm sure as hell that my friends won't pay for this either.

Maybe I just lack vision, but I don't see how this app can possibly pull in big revenue. Can someone please prove me wrong?

<comment><USER24> Businesses definitely need apps like this. Beats the hell out of emails and MS Word.

<comment><USER25> I'm not sure you understand what businesses actually use email and Word for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Im surprised they don't have markdown or textile in their list of languages.

</comment><comment><USER27> Suggestion: The style should stay user-independent, but the text syntax should be shared. I mean... it would be bizarre if one person thinks that they're editing Python and another is editing Java

</comment><comment><USER28> This is great. I'd love to see pair programming accomplished somehow with this (on the web, not via screen or buffer sharing). Can we integrate a compiler or static type checker into it?

</comment><comment><USER29> I loved Etherpad and am excited to read this. Are you guys using Ace for the editor?

</comment><comment><USER30> So their competitors are just

        Google docs
        PiratePad
        collabedit.com
        primarypad.com
        TypeWith.me
        Sync.in
        EtherPad Foundation
        iEtherPad.com
        titanpad.com
        etherpad.tugraz.at
        etherpad.mozilla.org:9000
        sketchpad.cc
        okfnpad.org
        pad.telecomix.org
        twiddla.com
        ...

Now the real question that I'd love to be be answered is - why would anybody fund this?

<comment><USER31> Because if Stypi can become one of the top 4 companies on that list, the VC firm gets a stake in whatever Stypi decides to build with the huge number of users that implies?

Not to put too fine a point on it, but, it's easy to see why _you_ wouldn't invest in it: because you can't afford to put that much money behind a 1:10 or 1:15 risk. But that's exactly the problem every VC firm in the world has: finding the right set of 1:10 bets to put their money behind.

I feel like, if you're going to complain about people funding stuff like this, you're really complaining about the whole VC model. And sure, I don't like it either. So go build a company without it. Plenty of us here have or are doing exactly that.

<comment><USER30> That's a bold claim. Even if it becomes one of the top 4 companies, what's the business model? Most of the sites I listed are non-commercial, absolutely free. It's a bitch to compete with free services, and pretty much identical functionality.

You must also realize that the sites I listed is just a small percentage, something I googled in 2 minutes. There are many many players in the collaborative editing "market".

<comment><USER32> One of my coworkers here at Google wrote a webcrawler and search engine - probably _the first_ webcrawler, according to Wikipedia - back in 1993. It was an academic project, deployed completely for free, with no possible way to make money.

That didn't stop Google from making hundreds of billions of dollars off search 15 years later.

When investors look at a company, they look at what it could become, not what it is now. Most gigantic megacorps started as tiny niches that nobody ever believed they could make money from.

<comment><USER30> Google didn't succeed because of a crawler. They succeeded because of pagerank algorithm, a new invention (plus hiring the smartest people they could find).

And I'll ask again - what's so groundbreaking about this project?

<comment><USER33> You're missing the point which is: when Google was funded, it wasn't Google, the king of search, as we know it today, but yet another search engine in a saturated market, started by 2 academics with no business background.

The reason they were founded was that they convinced the investors that their plans and ambitions go beyond what they've built so far.

It's a remarkable lack of imagination to not see a potential in a good, collaborative web editor. Sure, if they don't ever write a single line of code, it's not going to be anything special. But they probably will and they probably have many ideas on how to move this project forward.

An obvious evolution would be to turn it into a web-based IDE, competing with the likes of cloud9.

Or they could make it an embeddable editor widget usable by others (it's surprisingly difficult to build a decent web-based editor and a lot of web- based software (a forum, a commenting system, q/a sites) needs a good editor).

Or many, many other possibilities. Stop thinking of it as a finished product. Think of it as a first step in a thousand-step journey and try to imagine what the other 999 steps could be.

<comment><USER30> It's you who is missing the point. Google was not "yet another search engine", they invented something new, which gave them the edge.

You keep talking about the future possibilities, but you fail to point out what gives this particular project that edge. What is it?

<comment><USER32> FWIW, PageRank is a relatively minor component of the ranking algorithm (I dunno why people latch onto it...maybe because it's a public, patented, easy soundbite), and the core Google ranking algorithm was entirely rewritten by Amit Singhal in 2001. The ranking edge that most people associate with Google wasn't even written when Google got its funding, and its inventor hadn't yet been hired.

<comment><USER34> I don't follow. Wasn't Larry Page the inventor of PageRank? And didn't he make it while still at Stanford?

<comment><USER32> I'm saying that PageRank isn't the ranking edge that Google is famous for, and that if you applied the ranking algorithm as invented by Larry and Sergey to the web (even the web at the time, before everyone started to game Google), it would suck. It might suck a bit less than AltaVista, which was why they got funded, but it's not at all the quality that people have come to associate with Google.

<comment><USER34> Ah. When you say 'the edge Google is famous for' I think of PageRank.

<comment><USER32> Exactly.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Unsubscribe: The $0-budget movie that 'topped the US box office' - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-53099283 <comment><USER2> This is the same strategy as getting on the NY Times best seller list by literally buying lots of copies of your own book[1].

The key innovation is realizing how cheap it would be to make it to the top with nearly every theater in the USA closed.

[1]: [https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/02/22/heres-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/02/22/heres- how-you-buy-your-way-onto-the-new-york-times-bestsellers-list/)

<comment><USER3> I "participated" in a less nefarious strategy. In 2010, when the collection of short stories "Machine of Death" was about to be released, the editor Ryan North asked us not to pre-order. Instead, he suggested that we all wait and purchase the book on the same day from Amazon.

The strategy worked -- the book was #1 in its category that day, which certainly led to increased sales over time. Probably didn't hurt that it's a superb book.

(Ryan North is also the author of the popular webcomic "Dinosaur Comic".)

<comment><USER4> > Instead, he suggested that we all wait and purchase the book on the same day > from Amazon. The strategy worked -- the book was #1 in its category that > day.

In my instagram marketing last decade thats what we did.

While others were imagining that people "buy likes", or actually were dealing with bots, we were doing this for our clients.

Basically you get meme accounts to do a promotion of a profile that is currently private, and all the followers to a private profile get queued up, you can queue them up in the thousands or hundreds of thousands. when you unprivate the account, only like 100 of them get approved to follow you at once, so it adds up like a currency you can spend whenever you want. to mass approve you have to toggle private and unprivate over and over again, or approve the requests yourself or via API. either way you can only pull a list of 100 or so at a time, but you can keep them in the "requested" pool forever until convenient.

So you can grow an account with like a few hundred followers to a hundred thousand+ real followers very quickly.

But engagement is more important for the utility value of the account, and so you can also post an image with all the hashtags and location tags while the account is private, and let your new followers begin engaging with it. And then unprivate the account and even more new followers begin engaging with it, and then it becomes the TOP image in the hashtag.

In prior versions of instagram it would also be in the activity section in a large web of followers of followers.

For myself I have used one of the popular quickly and cheaply grown accounts to slide into the DMs of local women. In general on dating apps, women are funneling people to their instagram profile to ignore them. If you have a popular account its a night and day difference. I don't even attempt to match with them on the dating app, I just message them on IG straight away from the popular account (30K+ followers). Real dates and intimacy off of that, even in San Francisco. Skips the queue.

<comment><USER5> So this is a strategy to meet women who value popularity first and foremost? Sounds like a lot of work to "skip the queue".

<comment><USER6> not to mention that you get what you deserve wrt. the outcomes / kind of people this attracts. honestly, seems like good matchmaking to me-- shallow meets shallow.

<comment><USER7> If it works for him, that's his business.

No one asked for your judgements.

<comment><USER5> Well, by posting on HN I suspect he's seeking more social currency via upvotes. That is judgment in a sense.

EDIT: Forgot 'posting'

<comment><USER8> I'm glad the culture of Instagram has finally trickled up into HN

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> While reading this I wondered how they ended up at a box office of $25,488. Did they really spent $25,488 and consider it as a "small fee" to be the first in box office?!

If I interpret the information about "four-walling" correctly, they actually paid the Cinema a much smaller fee to get all seats, but can then report all money they make of these seats as Box Office earnings.

The Westhampton Beach Theater has 425 seats [1]. 425 Seats * 5 viewings * $12 a ticket actually ends up at $25,500 or $25,488 if they did not report 1 ticket for whatever reason. As "any money they make off seats goes straight into their pockets", I suspect they simply sold the tickets of the 425*5 seats they rented for a flat fee for $12 a seat to themselves and reported that as Box Office.

[1] [https://whbpac.org/general-information/](https://whbpac.org/general- information/)

<comment><USER10> _Did they really spent $25,488 and consider it as a "small fee" to be the first in box office?!_

According to the TV news this morning, yes, they did buy all of the tickets themselves.

Which kinda makes the "$0 Budget" headline a little iffy. $0 to make the film. But $26k to achieve their goal.

<comment><USER11> It seems more like $0 to make the movie and $26k for distribution. Do traditional movies count distribution costs in their budgets? Hollywood accounting is weird....

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

<comment><USER12> Read the article, the GP is wrong.

They paid to rent the cinema (small fee), then "sold" themselves the tickets. So their expenditure might have been $26k, but their income would have been $26k. In reality, I assume no money changed hands. It's almost more fun to imagine they sold each other one ticket at time handing the same ten dollars back and forth between themselves.

They held 5 viewings, making roughly $5k per viewing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I spoke with Eric a few months ago to help give a few pointers when he was considering the idea for this movie. He saw some of the media surrounding "Monero Means Money," our film that we put together from idea to theaters in a week. I explained how I cold called theaters who were very willing to show unusual movies at this time while they have essentially no revenue.

[https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/jgewky/how-a-random- guy-m...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/jgewky/how-a-random-guy-made- the-2-movie-in-america-for-dollar1000)

For us, getting a movie on the charts was more of a logistics challenge than anything, and I assume it was the same for him. Congrats to Eric and everyone else involved for topping the charts!

</comment><comment><USER14> I find it amusing that Zoom's user experience allowed it to capture the market to such degree that is now making waves in pop culture.

How did Google, Microsoft, Cisco, etc get it so wrong all of these years?

<comment><USER15> I would say the most important part, and where every company has shot themselves in the foot is the need for an account. With Zoom you can join meetings with just a link/code, and while it may seem trivial to us thats a huge plus for nontechnical people.

That and the fact Zoom had seamless integration with large meetings with relatively little-to-no performance/quality costs is a huge benefit. The luck of timing & advertising is what pulled it all together.

<comment><USER16> This is exactly it.

In March, when everyone suddenly wanted to do group video calls with their friends and family, most of whom are nontechnical, we settled quickly on Zoom for ease-of-access. Of all the options, it was the easiest one for me to get my parents into a family call.

You message someone a link, and they click the big buttons until they are in a call. No account, no confusion. We had 100% success rate on getting people in.

Also, it's asynchronous unlike something like FB messenger or Facetime (ie it doesn't push you the meeting, you can pull it at your convenience).

<comment><USER17> This was another annoying feature of Meet. The meeting organizer is special and needs to be connected to let people in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> One vaguely related thing is the 1953 jukebox hit, "Three Minutes of Silence" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3OSg2ehHbs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3OSg2ehHbs) which delivered on its promise. (It doesn't seem to have a WP page yet. Does anyone know of a WP-friendly source of information on it?)

Here's a Spotify playlist of various (apparently) silent tracks, useful for inserting pauses/silent intervals into Spotify playlists as (AFAICT) there isn't any other way to do so. [https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4fN5YP4n8aGCSS4j3MQoeo?si=...](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4fN5YP4n8aGCSS4j3MQoeo?si=EKLr6Wl6Q5283j3btyMt-A) .

</comment><comment><USER19> Movies with similar concepts, which were surprisingly good:

\- Searching (2018, [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7668870/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7668870/))

\- Unfriended (2014, [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3713166/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3713166/))

<comment><USER20> \- Unfriended - Dark web (2018, [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4761916/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4761916/)) aren't you thinking of this one instead? I've seen it and it was pretty good. When I saw your comment I was like, no way it was from 2014.

<comment><USER21> I think that is a sequel to the one from 2014.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> "So they pay a flat fee to the theatre..." "In that sense, "we made a slight loss" on the movie, Mr Tabach said." Oh, so it's _not_ a $0-budget movie.

I suppose they probably get at least that much value in free publicity from articles like these and us talking about them online. Now they can pitch their next project as coming from the brilliant minds of chart-topping filmmakers. Bravo to some guys that figured out how to game the system a little. I hope enough people rent the movie to get their fee back.

<comment><USER23> > Oh, so it's not a $0-budget movie.

Note that the movie's actual production cost / budget was indeed $0.

In order to then get to the top of this particular list on IMDB - by showing the movie in an actual cinema - that bit cost some small number of $'s, according to TFA.

<comment><USER22> In strange Hollywood accounting you're right. But it's a fact of real life accounting that you can't take a loss on something that cost $0.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It seems like it would be possible to hack the charts during normal times. It may involve renting a stadium, designating it a movie theatre and playing the movie 24h straight (then every 10K seats could create 10k seats * 10$/seat * 10 showings per day = 1 Million $ in revenue).

</comment><comment><USER25> Demonstrating Goodhart's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

</comment><comment><USER26> The only thing worse than a Zoom meeting would be paying to watch other people in a Zoom meeting.

<comment><USER27> There's nothing wrong with Zoom meetings. It's a great product, if not the best. Their politics is a different story.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Reminds me of the great "Nathan for You" episode where Nathan creates his own film festival so that he can award his own movie a judge's prize.

</comment><comment><USER29> This is quite brilliant, and also instructive. They saw a corner case and took advantage of it.*

But when you're starting a company this is a danger: you might get some initial traction but is your growth all in a corner case? This is almost a restatement of the "early adopter" cohort in "Crossing the Chasm".

Dominating a niche isn't alway bad BTW -- FB's niche was college students, who could evangelize and grow the overall market.... though notice that FB is pretty much nonexistent in that niche today.

* I mean this in a good sense: "exploit" and "take advantage of" often imply something shady.

</comment><comment><USER30> To take to the next level, get some VC welfare. Buy the tickets with MoviePass, and order the popcorn on Grubhub, and catch an Uber home.

</comment><comment><USER31> Anyone dream about a Zoom meeting yet? Since I have seen a hundred zooms since the lockdown, I recall seeing one while dreaming.

</comment><comment><USER32> A couple of German film Students recently made an Instagram web series [0] based on video calls in Corona times (subtitled).

[0] [https://www.instagram.com/curfew_calls/](https://www.instagram.com/curfew_calls/)

</comment><comment><USER33> Spoiler alert, they talk about significant plot points in the article.

</comment><comment><USER34> Not on the same level but this is semi-Blair Witch genius

</comment><comment><USER35> does anyone hav a link to see the movie? thanks in advance

</comment><comment><USER36> TL;DR Two filmakers paid $25,488 to buy all seats for 5 screenings of their $0 production budget movie at a local movie theater on June 10th.

Which turned out to be more money 'earned' than any other movie in the US that day, allowing them to top the charts as the highest grossing movie.

Edit: whoops, looks like I may have misunderstood and they probably didn't pay that much, as replies to this comment are pointing out

<comment><USER37> Did it cost them that much? I think it wasn't clear on that point. It looks like they rented the theater out for a fixed fee (since they have connections to the theater let's say it was $100). Then they can sell tickets and they get to keep the money for selling said tickets. So they sell tickets to themselves for $25,488. According to the theater that's the profit for the movie, and they're only out of pocket $100.

I suspect the $25,488 was so low to keep it believeable.

<comment><USER38> either that, or the "ticket revenue" from selling out a full theater was ~$5100. Average theater seats about 2-300 people, so ~$20 a ticket (not sure of the per-ticket price, but it was the premiere after all) works out at 250 seats.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I thought four-walling was a conspiracy theory invented by racists, incels, and Russian bots that is supposedly what Disney did in order to boost the box- office figures for that totally amazing, legitimately groundbreaking movie about Captain Marvel.</comment>


Ask HN: List of open-source business models? - johnx123-up Apart from donations, what are the other viable business models around open source software? <comment> open-source-ux The licensing and distribution model for open source make it impossible to simply sell your open source product (i.e. you don't want to sell support, charge for documentation, create a SaaS, or create tiers of closed source and open source - you just want to sell your open source product direct to customers).

An alternative option is 'source available' \- give your customers access to your product source code and permission to modify the code to meet their needs but without right to distribute the product. Lots of open source developers dislike this model, but it's up to you to make up your own mind.

I wrote a bit a bit more on this topic in the following recent discussion on HN about on how to make a living with open source. There lots of comments and differences in opinions. Worth a read:

 _Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself:_

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23218943](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23218943)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Training or writing books about the software you wrote. For example Wes McKinney is the creator of the Pandas library ([https://pandas.pydata.org/](https://pandas.pydata.org/)) and wrote the "Python for Data Analysis" book.

While the [https://tailwindcss.com/](https://tailwindcss.com/) CSS library is open source, the authors make money by selling access to a component library [https://tailwindui.com/](https://tailwindui.com/)

<comment> johnx123-up Thank you! Will it generate _enough_ income?

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> I don't know all of them, but I can list a few. There are some possibilities:

\- Binaries: Some users will pay for precompiled software, so that they do not have to compile it by themself. You might find this sometimes in some "app stores".

\- Physical components: You might sell hardware, printed manuals, DVDs, etc.

\- Paid support: You can sell support to customers who want priority support and/or professional support. SQLite also has paid support, and in the case of SQLite, this paid support also includes testing.

\- Hosting: If you do not want to install and host it by yourself, the company that makes that software may do it for you, if you pay them to do so.

\- Dual licensing: Some software has dual licensing, such as Ghostscript and Swiss Ephemeris. SQLite also kind of does; you can pay for a license, even though you won't really need it (since it is already public domain), but it is there in case your company's legal department requires you to have a license.

\- Customization: If you do not want to make the changes by yourself, you may be able to pay them to customize the software for your use profesionally.

\- Proprietary components: I do not really recommend this for must cases, but it is sometimes a possibility.

\- Installation: Payment for the company that produces the software to install it properly, where the customer requires it.

</comment><comment><USER3> People pay for Value. And usually what they buy is not software. [1]

So how you monetise depends on what you are making, and who the target customer is. B2B software is more about services and support - B2C is more about instant gratification and convenience.[2]

Making money just selling software is hard now because the market is saturated. All word processors do the same task, but I use MS Word over LibreOffice because of network effects.

So the answer to your question is to figure out where your value offering really lies, and focus on that. The software license is not the critical factor.

[1] Google does not sell software, it sells search results. Facebook sells community and so on. Oracle /Red hat doesn't sell software, it sells backup, services, reputation and so on.

[2] every so often there will be a thread here complaining about someone selling open source. But compiling and shipping updated binaries adds a value and saves me time, so I'm happy to pay for that. (and of course it's completely within the bounds of most open source licenses)

</comment><comment><USER4> There's also the "open-core model"[^1]. From the Wikipedia description:

> _The open-core model is a business model for the monetization of > commercially produced open-source software. Coined by Andrew Lampitt in > 2008,[1] the open-core model primarily involves offering a "core" or > feature-limited version of a software product as free and open-source > software, while offering "commercial" versions or add-ons as proprietary > software.[2][3]_

Here's GitLab's CEO[^2] talking about _" Offering an on-prem / self-managed version of your software"_[^3]

Here's a timestamped video titled _" E05 Pioneering version control for data science with Pachyderm co-founder and CEO Joe Doliner"_[^4], where Pachyderm's CEO[^5] addresses the business model.

Here's a timestamped video, titled _" How to Find Product Market Fit"_, of Peter Reinhardt[^6], where he answers the question of "why would someone pay anything for an open source library that's 580 lines of code.."[^7]. There's a blog post detailing this, too[^8].

There are several degrees of what is open-source and what is not, and different ways to build a business around that.

[^1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open- core_model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-core_model)

[^2]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=sytse](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=sytse)

[^3]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lo0bejtOnQc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lo0bejtOnQc)

[^4]: [https://youtu.be/YG8VFOZBb2A?t=1288](https://youtu.be/YG8VFOZBb2A?t=1288)

[^5]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jdoliner](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jdoliner)

[^6]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pkrein](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pkrein)

[^7]: [https://youtu.be/_6pl5GG8RQ4?t=1871](https://youtu.be/_6pl5GG8RQ4?t=1871)

[^8]: [https://segment.com/blog/show-hn-to- series-d/](https://segment.com/blog/show-hn-to-series-d/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Hosting: Wordpress, Github

Support: RedHat

Dual License: Qt/Nokia, BerkeleyDB/Oracle, MongoDB

Trojans/Spyware: Android, Chromium

<comment><USER6> GitHub is not open source.

<comment><USER5> It is a hosted server for a piece of free software (git) although obviously with a huge amount of proprietary software bolted on top.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> johnx123-up Can someone please explain 'Magento' business model?

</comment><comment><USER7> Premium add ons like themes and plugins for Wordpress</comment>


Forbes 30 under 30 2016 - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/30-under-30-2016/ <comment><USER2> A whole new generation of ageists...

I don't have a problem saluting young and talented people... I feel that calling people out based partly on age (especially as adults) is just as bad as calling them out on gender, race and sexuality.</comment>


Docker vs. binary packages - <AUTHOR> http://www.khebbie.dk/docker-vs-binary-packages/ <comment><USER2> Yeah, container image is like a binary package that specifies whole operating system as its dependency, and as such it's not really "you have consistency on all servers", as you have a dozen of different versions of different distributions, it's just you don't see them while deploying stuff.

And yes, with a binary packages you don't get to use all the orchestration around Docker et al., just as you don't get with containers to use all the orchestration and configuration management built around packages. It gets pretty much the same, with the difference of introducing dozen layers of abstraction.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you are willing to follow all the rules that a well defined container needs to fulfill all the promises, you might as well follow the rules your sysadmins had defined, and let them use the tools they had been using for ages.</comment>


KDevelop – A cross-platform IDE for C, C++, Python, QML/JavaScript and PHP - <AUTHOR> https://www.kdevelop.org/ <comment><USER2> KDevelop at one point had the most amazing built-in C++ parser and AST outside of visual studio. It blew my mind how good the autocomplete, contextual highlights, and error highlights were. This is right around the early kdevelop 4 days. I'm sure things have changed, with LSP and clang now especially.

<comment><USER3> It still works great and provides built-in analyzer support for clang tidy, heaptrack, clazy, and cppcheck. Supports the usual gamut of tooling as well with GDB/LLDB, CMake/Meson, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I love KDE applications and Qt based applications, they are usually way more polished compared to GTK counterparts.

However, it's hard for me to choose KDevelop for serious development. As long as it doesn't have feature parity with JetBrains products, I cannot recommend it. Hard to get there since JetBrains R&D budget most likely exceeds KDevelop by a great margin.

</comment><comment><USER5> Archive link: [https://web.archive.org/web/20200821100727/https://www.kdeve...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200821100727/https://www.kdevelop.org/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Someone using KDevelop for PHP development? Is it good? Is it bad?

<comment><USER7> > Someone using KDevelop for PHP development? Is it good? Is it bad?

I'm using it. It's ok, but missing xdebug support. I prefer it because don't like Java and browsers based IDEs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Over the years I always come back and try KDevelop, but for some reason it always feels juuuuuust foreign enough that I walk away.

Maybe it's time for me to try it again, but for C++ work I currently use clion. KDevelop is a beautiful app and I really wish it hit the right notes for me, but it always just barely misses.</comment>


Why Startups Are Sporting Increasingly Quirky Names - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324263404578611772689785466.html?mod=WSJ_GoogleNews&mod=igoogle_wsj_gadgv1

<comment><USER2> .. Lack of taste & imagination, primarily. And, as per recent discussion, lack of domain names.

I noticed myself instantly responding to a good company / startup name. It does the job to get me interested. If there's also a good logo - i'm more likely to like it. I realize i'm a picky designer though :)</comment>


SproutCore Book Project Proposal - <AUTHOR> http://erichocean.com/book/index.html

<comment><USER2> I signed up to help write, and I hope others do as well. It's a shame that the poor documentation is such a barrier preventing Sproutcore's adoption. I was hoping that with the formation of Strobe that things would get better, but they really haven't. Hopefully this effort will be able to bridge that gap.

<comment><USER3> I wholeheartedly agree that SproutCore's documentation is poor. There have been plenty of reasons (and excuses) provided, but regardless, that still doesn't cut it. We're beginning to rectify the situation with Guides (<http://guides.sproutcore.com>) which was announced on Friday. There is already one written (<http://guides.sproutcore.com/fixtures.html>) and there are more in the pipeline, being written by both core team members and developers from the community. Given we're a startup, sometimes things need to take a backseat but Strobe is definitely committed to making developing web apps as easy as possible and documentation is high on the priority list.

Side note: I work for Strobe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So glad to see this getting tackled at last. SproutCore's lack of decent documentation has been my single biggest difficulty in adopting it.

</comment><comment><USER5> Out of curiosity, were none of the major tech publishers interested in a book on SproutCore?

I hope it goes as smoothly as they hope, farming out the writing tasks in parallel. I've found it tough to work with just one distributed co-author on a tech book, much less 60.

I'm working with the Three20 framework for the iPhone, and it suffers from similar documentation problems, though it's gotten better in the last few months.

<comment><USER6> I think its just 1-3 developers, unless I'm misreading. Still, I'm sure it'll be a challenge to get good content from them as they are not going to be compensated directly for their work.

<comment><USER7> It's 1-3 developers _per chapter_. Last I heard, 50 developers had already signed up to write.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm very much hungry for more screencasts, more books, and more Sproutcore tutorials. It's an amazingly powerful framework, but its not easy to learn without some frustration.

I love this idea, and hope it goes through. I'll definitely be contributing

</comment><comment><USER8> I signed up as an individual sponsor. I really want to read this book. Anyone else?</comment>


Instructables is joining Autodesk  - <AUTHOR> http://blog.instructables.com/2011/08/instructables-is-joining-autodesk/ <comment><USER3> I hope this leads to some positive changes at instructables.

I've found it a harder and harder to navigate the site, with advertisements and "sign up for premium" type messages everywhere. The amount of advertising, when you are not logged in as a pro member, is insane. Also, the interfaces for posting content feel quite old school, and the last time I posted an instructables I was so frustrated I swore it would be my last. I love the goal and mission of the site but for the last few years it's almost unusable. I wonder if this purchase will breath new life to the site.

<comment><USER4> I agree completely -- are there any other platforms out there similar in function to instructables?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Good news for the Instructables team (I hope), but an odd choice for Autodesk - maybe they're trying to get a little hip and edgy?

<comment><USER6> CAD today is like video editing 10 years ago: lots of legacy high-end pro level tools, faced with increasing consumer-friendly competition.

I used to cut on Avid, for instance. They made a push into consumer tools too- little, too-late.

I'm sure Autocad wants to put together an end-to-end toolchain for making things. Design, instruct, print, assemble. The HP of things.

<comment><USER7> There has always been consumer level competition for Autodesk products. The reasons they have not been successful are:

1\. When you are designing things like bridges, little software bugs have big consequences and among the things Autodesk does well is software testing.

2\. Autodesk started out with really stinking good software engineers and they have always kept up that tradition. It's no accident that they chose LISP as their first programming interface - the founders knew how to code and how to architect a piece of software.

3\. They made an incredibly bold move almost twenty years ago when they rewrote the entire AutoCAD code base to be object oriented - and they took the heat then never looked back. It's what has allowed them to extend their flagship product to stay cutting edge.

I'll point out that CAD is significantly more mature than video editing was 10 years ago - actually it was more mature ten years ago than video editing is today. It's a market with no real consumer space - people will make and edit many videos, they will only draw up their dream house once or maybe twice - and if they are serious about it they will be using a bootleg version of AutoCad any way.

<comment><USER6> The difference now is that we are entering a period where it's not just houses. 3d printing is suddenly a real thing. That's the play here.

<comment><USER7> Most people who are interested in making objects as a hobby have machine tools so that they can be hands on - the idea of sitting in front of the computer rather than a table saw just isn't attractive. It's analogous to artists not running out to purchase HP Designjets and other large format printers - it's the craft which brings most people joy. Abstracting the process onto the computer only attracts a certain segment of the population as a hobby - <USER2> of course is another matter.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Women in Tech need to stop whining - <AUTHOR>

I'm a woman in tech. A PhD student, working in crisis informatics, and startup founder. And I'm sick of hearing all about the Women in Tech issues when the truth is there are many fantastic opportunities out there. Everyone has issues, not just women. So I finally spat it out. Would love your thoughts too. http://www.mediamum.net/2010/11/10/why-women-in-tech-need-to-stop-whining-and-start-to-nurture-our-own/ <comment><USER2> I'm not going to disagree with you that there are tons of fantastic opportunities — I'm working on my own startup as well and haven't (yet) run into any problems because I'm a woman.

However, think of the startup world: a guy who's new to it, a bit unsure, etc, might attend some meetups, and see a room full of guys — a situation he's probably comfortable with. But a take woman who wants to break into the startup world — in the same situation, is more likely to be discouraged by this because they're entering a room full of "others" and not people like her.

Yeah, if she feels uncomfortable you can tell her to just get over it, and a few will. But it stands that it's a lot harder to just jump into a new man- dominated field for a woman than a man. So those women-only events are still doing good — providing a more comfortable environment for those women and giving them confidence to then jump wholeheartedly into the regular 99% men world of startups.

<comment><AUTHOR> You raise a very good point, and it does sometimes feel like sheep being invited to a wolf party. ;) However, I think it prepares us well for the realities of startup life. Sure we have that male-dominated thing to get over, but if we're prepared to do it, we stand out even more than any male will. Don't you think? But then I guess some women will say you need to do that much better a job as a woman to get the same recognition as a man - but I don't know if that's actually true in startups simply because there are so few women willing to fully commit and go the distance.

<comment><USER2> Good points as well. :) Myself, I used to be painfully shy. I was meeting someone for the first time the other day and they said that they take me to be super outgoing and confident, but this was a transformation over about 4 years — 2 years of avoiding "scary" situations, then realizing the problem and then two years of actively trying to change my demeanor. I'd like to say that those programs would have sped up this process of feeling confident and comfortable — just because someone is shy right now, doesn't mean they can't cut it as a startup founder, just means they might need help to get to that point.

Those that get over that hump of being awkward and feeling like sheep in a wolf party phase definitely will stand out more to men, and I think in a good way — more recognition from blogs and the such (since they love profiling someone who's "different"), and people might be more interested in meeting with a woman founder than a man (again, the "different" thing leading to curiosity). I think guys notice this and get rather annoyed too, since it looks like preferencial treatment, but for those women who are intimidated by the male startup culture, those people are great role models.

<comment><AUTHOR> And that's really interesting - do you think you need to be 'outgoing' or at least appear that way, to be a good startup founder? Every single person I know, including my PhD advisor and my startup co-founders, thinks I'm extremely outgoing. But I hate cocktail parties and so on. I force myself to go and connect with people. I'm far more comfortable behind a screen unless I know people already. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I am sure that there are many women that would disagree, but I, male, agree.

I am active in both computer science and astronomy and have connections to many other science fields. I agree there are not enough women in technology, but I dont think that has to do with the lack of opportunity, there are just as many as for males. I would even go as far as saying that many places would prefer a female over a male addition to their teams, because most of our teams are 90-100% male. I believe women can bring a different view point to the table as well as fresh energy. I can see the issue of women feeling uncomfortable entering a male-dominated field, but that does not mean that there are no/less opportunities.</comment>


Chemirocha: How an American Country Singer Became a Kenyan Star - <AUTHOR> http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/chemirocha-how-an-american-country-singer-became-a-kenyan-star <comment><USER2> > Half-man, half-beast "chemirochas." Far from the popular conception of the > myth is the deliciously ironic truth: the Kipsigis villagers are the ones > who actually thought the white Europeans were savages.

Hah, wonderful. Chemirocha. This has to be the best submission I've seen on HN ever. Thanks for posting!

I'm really curious to hear the songs that were recorded by Hugh - are they available to listen anywhere?

<comment><USER3> They've got 30-second MP3 clips of the ones they've digitized online here: [http://greenstone.ilam.ru.ac.za/cgi- bin/library?p=about&c=il...](http://greenstone.ilam.ru.ac.za/cgi- bin/library?p=about&c=ilam)</comment></comment>


How Effective Is Economic Theory? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/how-effective-is-economic-theory <comment><USER2> Discussions like this always seem a little strange. Sure, they're important, but taken out of context they're counterproductive and even harmful.

This is the problem: what is the alternative? The pet theory of a madman or sociopath?

The difficult truth is that everyone has an economic theory, whether they admit it or not. The question is, whose theories do we want to pay attention to? People who spend their lives arguing and thinking about it, and trying to find some evidence in support? But who might be a bit isolated from reality? People who work close to the phenomena being explained, but who don't really rigorously explicate or defend any of their ideas, who haven't had to put them on the table, so to speak? Or have massive, critical financial conflicts of interest?

There's also the difficult problem of identifying when any theories have really been tested well. It's not like we can just run randomized controlled designs on whole civilizations--at least, not most of the time for major policies.

I guess I really don't see the alternative to encouraging the standard academic approach to economics, opening it up to public criticism and discussion, and maybe trying them out when it's ethical and feasible.

Sure, lots about classical economic theory is really ridiculous, and the source of a lot of problems, but then you change those things and then move on. It's not any different from physics theory or chemistry theory in that regard.

<comment><USER3> > Sure, lots about classical economic theory is really ridiculous, and the > source of a lot of problems, but then you change those things and then move > on.

That's the thing, it has proven really, really hard to "change those things". I'm looking at the latest (still current?) economic/financial crisis. Lots of "economic theory tells us this should never happen"-things did in fact happen, and consistently so (there was not just a random event that you could blame in the theory not being 100% there). It matters because policy decisions are still taken based on theories that have proved themselves wrong, or at least those theories were not able to "explain" (for a lack of a better word) how our present-day economy works. Those policy decisions affect (some of them negatively) the lives of millions, even hundreds of millions.

At least when a theoretical physicist is wrong in his/her assessment nothing that bad can happen to the outside world, in the great scheme of things. But when an economist is wrong, but his theory is nevertheless taken into consideration and acted upon, then the damage can be quite substantial, its effect measurable in decades.

I don't know what needs to be done. I'm not ditching economic theory entirely. For example the Chinese authorities' current push to stop Chinese billionaires' money moving outside the country reminded me of Jean-Baptiste Say's explanation of how no Government can put a stop to the flow of currency that wants to escape a certain jurisdiction, a phenomenon that he wrote about ~200 years ago and which still seems to be in effect, almost like a "law" of economics. And there are still other "basic" economic truths/laws that have seemed to keep their relevance over the centuries. But, AFAIK, almost all of those "laws" were common sense, so to speak, they didn't involve mathematiac equations with second derivatives and the like (for example there's no "second derivative" equation with which to model the "lack of trust" in financial transactions, which once it sets in you can bet will bring any financial market down pretty fast).

So what I'm trying to say in a convoluted way is that economics should return to basics, ditch most of the mathematics with which it has become enamored and try to be a little more on the "social science"-side of things: more observation of humans and their acts, less abstract computations.

<comment><USER4> I think you're overestimating the power of economists and putting too much blame on them. The 2008 crisis was not cased by economists; rather, it was caused by MBAs who approved mortgages that should have never been approved in the first place. This generated short-term gains for these financial institutions that paid the price years later.

<comment><USER5> >it was caused by MBAs who approved mortgages that should have never been approved in the first place.

But the point is the economists should have seen that was happening, so we could think about the government stopping it, or at least to put the public on guard. Instead the economics profession, with a few exceptions like Dean Baker, told the world that things were going just fine.

I mean, what is the point of even having an economics profession if it can't help us make intelligent decisions on economic matters?

<comment><USER6> > But the point is the economists should have seen that was happening

A large number of economists (in academia, public institutions, and private finance firms), all across the ideological spectrum (Austrians, Keynesians, and every other flavor) did see it happening.

People didn't respond to then, probably because the existence of a bubble isn't a problem, as long as you can delude yourself to thinking you'll be able to time the market so you won't be holding the ball when it pops.

> Instead the economics profession, with a few exceptions like Dean Baker, > told the world that things were going just fine.

Baker was far from the only prominent economist pointing to a bubble. In fact, economists were warning about the housing bubble and the fact that it would have to burst before the first dot-com bubble burst (or even expanded) back as far as the mid-1990s. That may actually be the real problem: the warnings had been around for so long no one took them seriously any more; as controversial as identifying a bubble can be, it's a lot easier to identify it than time when it will pop ,and the longer it is pointed to without popping, the more likely people are to convince themselves it's just a permanent feature of the market and not a bubble that will pop.

<comment><USER7> > A large number of economists [...] all across the ideological spectrum [...] > did see it happening.

In a strange way, that's almost step down: A _strong_ correlation between what economists say and what happens -- even a _negative_ correlation -- suggests that theory is somehow catching up to reality.

In contrast, a weaker correlation -- even if positive -- implies that there's still a lot more problems to shake out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Effective at what?

A rather savvy economic-statistician once told me that economic theory is a very effective way to determine who has been able to get their theory published.

<comment><USER9> Not only that, but the current economic climate necessarily tells us where the effectiveness of economic theory lies.

<comment><USER10> Not Economic Theory, but Economic Practice as implemented by politicians and bureaucrats.

That's not to say that economic theory is all sound, but that even the soundest of theories doesn't stand a chance against the incompetence of government.

<comment><USER9> The "incompetent" economic behavior you speak of is also based upon theory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> When it comes to macro, it is pretty useless. See for example the polemic caused by this paper by Paul Romer, chief economist of the World Bank: [https://paulromer.net/trouble-with-macroeconomics- update/](https://paulromer.net/trouble-with-macroeconomics-update/)

<comment><USER12> If that's what you took from his paper, you didn't understand it. He is specifically arguing against DSGE models, a popular methodology for studying business cycles, but one that has been unsuccessful. That is not the same as arguing that all of macro is useless. It's not different from saying that criticism of imperative programming means all of computer programming is useless.

<comment><USER13> If the community does not take status and funding away from failed models, it ceases doing science. As a group, economists aren't letting DSGE go.

There are many economists trying to do the right thing, but overall the area has a deep problem.

<comment><USER14> Do you feel the same way about climate research?

<comment><USER13> Climate researchers abandon models all the time.

<comment><USER14> Necessarily, as none of their models work, which is a natural consequence of how complicated the system is, just like macroecon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Reminds me of a quote by Steven Landsburg: > Most of economics can be summarized in four words: "People respond to incentives." The rest is commentary.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is a great article although the stuff about Austrian economics and how economics will move left should be tossed. Mr. Kling should save those opinions for Cato.

Aside from that, I always wonder why we have never had a "Great Economic Project." In WWII we united scientists of all stripes to come together to build the atom bomb and more recently Obama launched the BRAIN initiative. Understanding how our economy works is, I'd say, as important as either one of those. Some project where the government can assemble the best minds in sociology, psychology, business, math, history and then use economists to help glue all of this together. Perhaps our way forward is not in coming across some new beautiful model but in building the ugliest, most glued-together piece of crap that happens to be (relatively) accurate and then simplifying it later.

<comment><USER17> 'Aside from that, I always wonder why we have never had a "Great Economic Project."'

The nature of politics is such that if the government funded such a thing, the only acceptable outcome for it to come to is that the people funding it already had the correct model. The alternative is that the politicians funding it would have spent a lot of political capital to get that funding only to be told that they're wrong, probably wrong about everything.

On one level or another, even politicians realize that they might as well just cut out the middleman here and operate on the vigorous and loud assumption that they are already correct about economics and anyone who disagrees is the literal embodiment of evil.

</comment></comment><comment> noir-york It is pretty effective as long as you ignore the economic theories espoused by the Cato institute (the institution the author forms part of) and other pseudo think-tanks.

Interesting to note that the author tries to discredit Keynesian economics, but makes no mention of the Reinhart / Rogoff debacle that completely undermined their paper which purported to show a link between debt and growth - a paper much referenced by people like the author of the article who are primarily interested in using economics as a fig leaf for their ideology.

For the record, I trained in politics and economics.

<comment><USER18> I also trained in politics and economics, and worked for a think-tank doing economic impact analysis for a short period. And I will tell you that Cato has a lot of good economists, that are well respected in their field; so do -most- think tanks, and Federal Reserve branches. Every economist has a political view, largely because economic policy is largely political. Krugman is a political hack, but that doesn't mean his papers are trade can be discounted, that would be absurd.

The reason economic theory is so hard is because it's very hard to observe and experiment. You can run a test and verify in physics, math, etc, but in economics this is generally impossible. Even the boom in behavioral economics that happened in the mid-2000s has come under question after more and more data has emerged. There are a LOT of things economists agree on, but there's also nuances on how a policy can achieve a result...because there are so many actors in an economy and we can't test our theory until maybe 10 years from now, and that's even if the policy is ever implemented to begin with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I know the economy is much more complex than let's say physics. But at least I would like economists to backtest things that happened. For example, the large tax cuts that happened during the Reagan, Bush and probably Trump years could be tested and it could be determined if the promised increase in investment and whatever really happened. At least the economists that make it to the media don't seem to have interest in checking whether their theories actually worked out.

<comment><USER20> Backtesting is a poor substitute for experimentation. We can't run back history and check what happens if the Bush tax cuts never happened. We certainly can't create a thousand parallel economies, implement the tax cuts in half the sample and not in the other.

Economists use historical data to calibrate models. Of course data from the Reagan years was used to are for the Bush tax cuts. But simple backtesting can never tell you with certainty wherever your theories worked out or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'd be interested in hearing someone with knowledge talk about how these models get used in practice. From an engineering perspective it seems like actually applying them would be very hard.

For example, how good are parameter estimates and how do we know if they are good? If I was designing a controller for a plane, I can spend a lot of time getting good parameters for the plane model and design a controller that looks good in simulation. However, when I take the plane out, it might not be stable (or doesn't meet some other metric I designed for) because the parameters changed due to a variety of physical factors and/or the model is a model and thus doesn't account for anything. So I go back and forth tweaking the controller design until I get something that works. That process isn't really feasible when it comes to economies, though.

<comment><USER20> Economic models usually aren't used for precise, high-frequency decision- making. When you estimate an economic model, simply getting the right sign on your estimates is often enough to inform your decision. Choosing what to take as exogenous is a matter of judgment.

Would building high speed rail from NYC to Chicago be a net positive for consumer welfare? Well we can use estimates of how much people pay for various modes of transportation throughout the country, and how often they're used. We can also come up with an estimate of the cost of building the rail. The analogous effects to your feedback loop are equilibrium effects - for example if people start taking the new high speed rail then plane ticket prices will fall a bit. But it adds more uncertainty to the model, and we know that plenty of flights from NYC to Chicago are connecting flights, so probably the effects are pretty small, and we can just assume those prices stay fixed for the sake of tractability.

If you do this kind of calculation and find the rail project is a massive multi billion dollar money pit, you can confidently recommend against it despite the fact you've ignored some of the feedback effects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> While in graduate school for biology, I gained a limited exposure to the economics department through some of the students. I saw very little actual "tracking on money" and a whole lot of conjecturing and mathematics. It seemed like lots of theory and not very many facts

</comment><comment><USER23> People most often overlook two things when it comes to economics.

First one is that it is based on drawing conclusions from models that attempt to simplify extremely complex interactions of billions of agents.

Second one is that although these models are imperfect (otherwise they would be unsolvable and bring no meaningful intuition), they are getting better over time.

Stop dismissing economics because 'it doesn't work.' The subject of the science simply doesn't have any determinism to it whatsoever, and things aren't reasoned through discovery as it is the case with natural sciences.

<comment><USER24> How can you be sure the models are getting better (more accurate) over time?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> An interesting article ... but not sure it's that accurate to compare economics to physics ... the closest situation comes to mind would be the phenomenon of turbulence ... which still is more manageable than economics since the controlling principles are known and controlled experiments can be performed ... on the other hand, an economic system involves many many agents of different scales, most of time seemingly rational but certainly emotional, interacting nonlinearly at all scales, without much chance of controlled experiments ...

</comment><comment><USER26> >This notion of effective theory sets a useful standard for considering economics. Economists are not without knowledge. We know that restrictions on trade tend to help narrow interests at the expense of broader prosperity.

We know that there aren't any countries which rose to first world status _without_ judicious application of tariffs, subsidies or currency manipulation.

<comment><USER27> Is that causation, or only correlation?

<comment><USER26> Causation: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_industry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_industry)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> "There is a very real possibility that over the next 20 years academic economics will congeal into a discipline, like sociology today, which is definitively shaped by an ideologically driven point of view."

That does not bode well for the future of the economy...

</comment><comment><USER29> No respectable author would dare ask such a question about the effectiveness of, say, theoretical Physics, Computer Science, or the Theory of Evolution -- to name other bodies of theory familiar to general audiences.

The fact that the question is being asked about Economic Theory in a respectable, prominent magazine like National Affairs provides the answer.

<comment><USER30> Provides _what_ answer? Is _National Affairs_ a _respectable, prominent magazine_? I'd never heard of it. Founded in 2009, it has a circulation of about 10,000 [1]. At $27.99/yr, it clearly doesn't pay for itself. It looks like a small media outlet, a sinecure for right wing writers and editors, and financially supported by Irving Kristol [2].

[1] [https://newrepublic.com/article/112745/yuval-levin-rights- ne...](https://newrepublic.com/article/112745/yuval-levin-rights-new-irving- kristol)

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> A flaw with current economics is that they expect the economy to grow exponentially while resources including energy are linear. That for me is a flaw can someone explain how that works?[https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets- physicist...](https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/)

Then there is central banks which I think is a form of central planning. Most central planned system lack information that why they do not work. I argue production of goods and services are free market but money creation is centralized by banks and central banks. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem)

Then there is the whole thing of peels bank act where the bank loans your bank account assets to others no matter how risky but still guarantees it to you. Is banks doing a form of double book keeping? [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_Charter_Act_1844](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_Charter_Act_1844)

<comment><USER32> > _A flaw with current economics is that they expect the economy to grow > exponentially while resources including energy are linear_

The amount of energy the world consumes to produce 1 unit of GDP declined by 32% between 1990 and 2015 [1]. Measuring macroeconomic material intensity is more complicated [2], but the core of your misconception derives from the subjectivity of value.

One way to make a car more valuable might be to make it twice as heavy. But another could be to make it a nicer color. Or give it better software. (Better being defined solely by price.) As our world becomes immaterial, the decoupling of material inputs and economic output makes sense. It also lays the ground for theoretically infinite economic growth. As long as peoples' utility is being increased the economy will grow.

[1] [https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=27032](https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=27032)

[2] [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/03014207859...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0301420785900455)</comment></comment>


A Trick For Caching And Expiring Static Web Resources - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mdemare.info/2008/07/27/a-trick-for-caching-and-expiring-static-web-resources/

<comment><USER2> Might be easier to do something like:

yourFileName.jpg?lastUpdated=12345

where 12345 would be the unix time of last file change.</comment>


Design for Assembly in KiCad - <AUTHOR> http://rheingoldheavy.com/design-assembly-kicad/

<comment><USER2> This is a great article. Just this year I've become partially involved in hardware design again after some years now doing mostly just software - it's amazing how cheap fab options are these days!

I recently got a few quotes for contract assembly of some small boards, ~100 SMT parts each and the prices ranged from $12 to $200 per board. Hand- assembled, because the quantities weren't sufficient for pick & place.

I didn't see any mention of KiCad's DRC rules, how does this compare with EAGLE? Specifying solder vs paste mask clearances is something I briefly agonized over but it seems Eagle has sane defaults there that worked out okay in the end.

<comment><USER3> Back when I decided to pick an economical design tool, I had a four layer board to design and the price was right with KiCad, so I never got into using EAGLE. The clearance issue is one that I do have to wrap my brain around each time I do it, just like pin spacing on custom footprints. I put that down to my own personal issues with keeping three digit numbers straight in my head though, rather than any particular problem with KiCad in general. That's why I consider doing the Gerber visual diff so vital, because it's very easy to tell when you've screwed up the solder vs. paste clearance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great article. It has been a few years since I last laid out a board in KiCad, the biggest thing I remember is that importing parts and footprints took a lot of work and it wasn't a very straight forward process.

Does anyone have a good workflow for managing and exporting parts so that people can go and download your cad files and libraries to reproduce your board?

<comment><USER5> Have you checked out the KiCad library on github[1]? That library is installed with the install script that is included with KiCad I believe when you downloaded the bzr repo. The library maintainers seem to work pretty closely with the KiCad developers. I have started using KiCad for personal projects and have been following the KiCad development for about 6 months now and from what I have gathered there has been a lot of changes in the last year. I would definitely suggest giving it another try in the near future. It also seems that the way footprints and 3d models are handled has changed in the last year.

As for specific help for KiCad, they have a very helpful irc channel on freenode, there is a KiCad yahoo users group, and I just found this website with videos: KiCad.info

There hasn't been a stable release in a while but the developers seem to be serious about making a new stable release in the near future.

[1] [https://github.com/KiCad/kicad-library](https://github.com/KiCad/kicad- library)

<comment><USER4> This is the first time I have seen the KiCad library on github, that would presumably make sharing generated footprints and parts easier. For the board I produced of in 2011, I shared my library on sourceforge as a zip with no clear installation directions. I mostly learned KiCad from David Jones nice tutorial[1].

I'll check out KiCad in a few days to see how easy it is to share a design with someone else, to see with the latest version if library parts can be easily shared. Thanks for the links and helpful suggestions of consulting the IRC channel for support, I wouldn't have considered the IRC channel.

[1] [http://www.alternatezone.com/electronics/files/PCBDesignTuto...](http://www.alternatezone.com/electronics/files/PCBDesignTutorialRevA.pdf)

<comment><USER3> That's a brilliant document! Very thorough!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> great introduction, and impressive depth. thanks for sharing! I wonder what you think of e.g. online tools for PCB design like upvertert.com

<comment><USER3> I like the idea of an online-for-the-masses EDA tool, but I've actually done layout on a laptop in my father's house with no internet connection. There's no way I could cobble together a schematic without being able to look at datasheets, but the PCB layout and routing doesn't necessarily need to be always-connected.

I tried using Upverter either earlier this year or late last year, can't remember when, and I just remember that I struggled with the interface. That's not a smack on Upverter though, just an incompatibility between the tool and the idiot trying to use it :)

<comment><USER6> Thanks! Good point, the web supports interaction with datasheets and conceptual work, less with the implementation of a PCB. On a sidenote, I was working on a small (open-source) project the last days to support rendering pin layouts of boards, and maybe address problems with datasheet interaction. A first sneak preview is here: [http://pinboardjs.divshot.io/](http://pinboardjs.divshot.io/) \- I need to document it, but it would be great to hear what you think, if it speaks to you, or not at all.</comment></comment></comment>


Gaping Face Time security hole - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/21/psa-facetime-beta-endangers-your-apple-id-password-and-security/

<comment><USER2> Uh. Was Engadget under the impression that it would be hard for someone physical access to your _logged-in unlocked machine_ to get your password anyways?

I see the bug here and all, but it's not like any other non-Keychain- integrated app is better. Don't let people you don't trust use your computer.

<comment><USER3> Usually you're not allowed to change a password without showing again, even if you're logged on, that you know the current one.

<comment><USER2> Like I said, I get the bug. But it's not like Mac apps do that good of a job protecting secrets outside Facetime.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you have READMEs or docs in your company? - <AUTHOR>

Hi guys, I've been recently thinking about documentation process in a mega software company I'm working at.
Our team mostly does not write documentation and other teams rarely do. Since our team is writing internal-use-only code, I couldn't convince anyone to write documentation for projects.
We don't have a good documentation system (e.g a MediaWiki). SO, how do you guys manage documentation process at your company? Is it a wiki, or README.txts or something else? <comment><USER3> LaTeX and git. Granted, we're a small company with five people in the tech department, all working the terminal most of the time, so we can choose pretty freely. We're a B2B company. Having solid, continuously improved, and useful documentation to put on the table at the first meeting is a huge win in trust and efficiency.

In my experience, the critical success factor is having someone in the team that truly cares about it. In our case, we had a guy whose peace of mind depended on having everything in order, including well-structured, complete, and correct documentation. He left us a couple of months ago, and already the documentation is starting to deteriorate.

<comment><USER4> > the critical success factor is having someone in the team that truly cares > about it.

Entirely true. In my last job, I was that person. In my current job, I care about it, but in a sort of different manner. My personal documentation is great (or so I'd like to think), but I don't push for other people to post their documentation unless it's something they're trying to ask me to do by following the documentation.

As a result, documentation is sparse, even though they lament the lack of documentation for services.

You need someone who takes ownership for documentation. Whether it's a self- appointed task or a dedicated employee, if you're missing that you'll be missing documentation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> A downside of using a wiki for documenting software is that it can easily get out of sync with code. If your readme files and/or inline docs* are under version control, each commit can include both code and doc changes.

* If your software is exposing an API to others in your company, you might want to look at Javadoc and other languages' equivalents: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javadoc>

</comment><comment><USER6> Wikis are great for intra-company documentation, although they do have a tendency to "rot" over time. If you're documenting code, a VCS that lets you check in documentation/wiki pages along with the code is a good idea (e.g. <http://www.fossil-scm.org/>)

</comment><comment><USER7> We are using Github Enterprise so we have README.md files all over the codebase. They are pretty easy, if needed we can create wiki pages for each project.

</comment><comment><USER8> Templated requirements and test plans. Fill in/extend the template to the needs of the project. In source,use project tag/ID for lines of interest.

Sometimes requirements documents explain more than the code or comments. IE: 12345_r.doc User needed X for 2012 tax reporting because of leap year due to the extra day in the year vs accounting's actual 30 day per month business rule.

Comments/code would say something along the lines of '/* Project 12345 - <USER2> for leap year */ if tax report and year eq mod4, bit shift left topic 2'

It is outdated, but it works. Documents add accountability. Link in emails, project team, sign-offs, etc.

</comment><comment><USER9> We use a combination of an internal wiki and formal documentation (our software is used to collect data during clinical drug trials for new drug applications, so certain FDA rules apply to our processes). Currently, the formal documentation is made up of Word documents (no, really) that are managed via projects in Team Foundation Server.

We are currently moving in the direction of using JSDoc on our latest project (since it is entirely written in JavaScript), and we will likely have our internal auditors sign off on the format for use as our software design docs.

</comment><comment><USER10> We use DokuWiki (<https://www.dokuwiki.org>) and it's great, but as any tool, you have to be disciplined and keep the contents up to date, otherwise "wikis are where documentation goes to die."

Most comments tend to cover only code comments or API documentation, but a company has way more documentation than just that: there are policies, procedures, minutes, tutorials and documentation which relates to code but does not live within it.

</comment><comment><USER11> tl;dr: Yes we _try_ to document through READMEs, wikis etc.

Documentation is hard. not because there aren't enough good tools. there are plenty actually. Problem is: how to keep them updated with frequent changes in code, enhancements, business process changes etc. At very large companies with distributed teams across the globe (I work for these kind of companies), maintaining an updated documentation/readme is the challenge. Do you want to spend the time to update the doc. on every release, every ehnahcement, every production fix, short term/long term projects etc OR you want to deliver the product on tight deadlines. Now once a project is delivered, do you want to go back and updated READMEs ? Wait, I had a piece of code that I delivered in release x.y in New YOrk and wrote a nice README. A developer in London made some changes to it 6 months later but he never updated the documentation on that specific change or perhaps did not know where my README was or perhaps did not care enough. Now my README is outdated and pretty much useless. Very tough.

<comment><USER12> Its not tough, you work with douchbags. I'm not trying to be rude here, I'm giving you some advice, change the habbits or leave, that kind of environment is toxic. "tight deadlines" when it takes 30 minutes to rewrite even a multiple page readme from scratch is a very poor excuse to not keep even the simplest form of documentation up to date.

I know its much harder than that to just leave so I would suggest at the least: not accepting code changes from some out of town baddie who obviously doesn't respect you or your work. Trust me if your boss asks why you didn't merge and you say "he didn't spend 30 minutes to update the docs to reflect the changes" they will take your side, bosses care about future proofing and best practices being followed believe it or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Internal use only code should be documented as well as any external facing code. It's easier to read through a readme or wiki than track down the person who owns or knows something about the code you want to use.

We use: internal wiki (confluence), readme's, rdoc - javadoc - etc., PR's on github enterprise

This works pretty well. For reference we have hundreds of devs. Most of the time you can find _some_ sort of documentation in at least one of the above locations.

</comment><comment><USER14> We had a folder on the network called 'developer stuff'. I put up a DokuWiki a few weeks ago, and at the last developer meeting we gave each developer the task of creating one wiki article. It didn't matter what it was on, it was basically a catalyst to get them started using it.

It's started to grow pretty fast so I hope it works out for us. We're probably going to have an intern or junior developer move documents from the old folder to the new system.

<comment><USER15> > We're probably going to have an intern or junior developer move documents > from the old folder to the new system.

Just be careful not to give them _all_ of the shit jobs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> We successfully adopted MediaWiki in our company and it was a really nice choice we made in early stage. We can easily search, tag pages, detect broken links etc.

<comment><USER17> I'll add another recommendation for MediaWiki. It is a good low-friction way to establish documentation for internal services and libraries. The markup syntax is rather idiosyncratic, but powerful enough for most of our needs. "Does it have a wiki page" is now a standard question for any new service or library in our shop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> On the biggest company I worked for (~200-250 people), we had a wiki. I think it was TRAC.

Fortunately, most developers were responsible enough to update the pages when they did something relevant (i.e., if you created a script to automate certain process, you'd put it on that process's page). I suspect that this is not very common...

</comment><comment><USER19> We use doxygen + markdown for high-level documentation. This way you can edit the documentation in a text editor and put the markdown files in version control. And with graphviz and mscgen you can even create some standard graphs. The doxygen-generated html documentation is then put inside a wiki automatically.

</comment><comment><USER20> We use MediaWiki, SharePoint Online, special repository for API documentation (private repo on github - it's convenient way to share with outsourcers), and sometimes we have readme in internal repositories also. I share opinion of our CEO, that 0 information should be stored just in somebody's memory.

</comment><comment><USER21> Internal wiki is a great option.

<comment><USER22> And if you have the cash and freedom, hosted wiki's are also excellent. It is nice to delegate hardware admin for a wiki.</comment></comment>


Hacked in Translation – From Subtitles to Complete Takeover - <AUTHOR> http://blog.checkpoint.com/2017/05/23/hacked-in-translation/ <comment><USER2> More info, since the article is light on actual information on the vulnerability: [http://cve.mitre.org/cgi- bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2017-8314](http://cve.mitre.org/cgi- bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2017-8314) (points to [https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/12024/commits/35cfe35608b1...](https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/12024/commits/35cfe35608b15335ef21d798947fceab3f47c8d7))</comment>


[1612.09375] Basic Category Theory [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.09375 <comment><USER2> How is that id in the title constructed?

<comment><USER3> 16 - 2016. 12 - december. So 1612.00001 should have been the first doc submitted on Dec., but it turns out the first Dec. 1, 2016 (submission date) article is [https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.00083](https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.00083)

Guessing the date cutover is tripping over timezones.</comment></comment>


Facebook bug is telling people they're dead - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-death-bug-tells-people-they-died-2016-11 <comment><USER2> I wonder how many people are thinking they've died and gone to hell where Trump was elected president...

</comment><comment><USER3> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12934247](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12934247)</comment>


A Googleplex for $1000 by 2040? - <AUTHOR>

The Wikipedia donation page says: "Google might have close to a million servers."
Assuming as Kurzweil suggests that the limits of computing hardware are really far out, i.e., we can expect Moore's "Law" to continue unabated until we hit computoronium, today's Googleplex should be available for $1000 in 2040 (2011 + 1.5 [years per doubling] * log2(1e6)). Somehow it sounds too good to be true. <comment><USER2> I don't think it's inconceivable for today's computing performance to seem very trivial 30 years from now. But just like now, when we get there we'll take it for granted that whatever service is available then uses 1 million times more computational power than today's Google.

People don't seem to think that much of the fact that a simple smartphone that you keep in your pocket today is more powerful than a computer powering a rocket 50 years ago.

<comment><USER3> Not even a smartphone; your cellphone is a lot more powerful as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think moores law is a given until 2020, according to a couple of articles I've read linked here. That gives us 7nm chips, I guess about 16x the density of today. So your dual core laptop will have 32 cores. I think that might be enough for most people, until we figure out some uses for that kind of power for the everyday person. Moores law is bound to be an S curve, and I think we'll start to get diminishing returns economically, as well as demand dropping off for more power sometime in the 20's.

</comment><comment><USER5> A Googleplex at any price in 2010 probably seemed too good to be true in 1980, no?

<comment><AUTHOR> As Tyler Cowen points out in "The Great Stagnation", maybe these first 20 doublings or so were the low hanging fruit.

Kurzweil keeps saying that people underestimate exponential processes (its also the topic of "The most important video on math" [1]), but I think it cuts both ways. It is by no means clear that the next 20 doublings will proceed at the same rate as the last 20.

People might just say, "Siri via the cloud is good enough for me, I don't need Siri running directly on my phone".

[1] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Presumably, with quantum computers this isn't, exactly, far out.</comment>


Fae – CMS for Rails - <AUTHOR> https://www.faecms.com/ <comment><USER2> Very interesting..

I briefly looked over the features and didn't notice any ecommerce features, yet FINE's examples show ecommerce sites. One thing I think is thoroughly lacking is a solid open source ecommerce gem.

Will have to play around with it.</comment>


ArXiv: Astroinformatics: A 21st Century Approach to Astronomy - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/0909.3892 I would like to see some interesting links to where AI and astronomy/physics combined <comment><AUTHOR> I would like to see some interesting links to where AI and astronomy/physics combined</comment>