Student Suspended for Calling Teacher Fat on Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2011/02/01/facebook-free-speech-high-school/ <comment><USER2> "stated that the boy's teacher was a "fat ass who should stop eating fast food, and is a douche bag." "

Nothing wrong with feedback. :-P

It's a bit over the top though. Kid said it on his on Wall, that is -not- the same as going up to a person and saying the same thing.

He should have just got detention, as a lesson about "not to say mean things".</comment>


How to GET a Cup of Coffee - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoq.com/articles/webber-rest-workflow <comment><USER2> As should be obvious from the spec, the only system capable of handling the extremely complicated coffee request chain would be a eight-core Oracle 10i Server backed by a cluster of 10 high end Sun Servers running Bea Weblogic. Estimated costs to get started: 10 Million $$$.

</comment><comment><USER3> RFC 2324 is a lot simpler.</comment>


If This Then That - <AUTHOR> https://ifttt.com/wtf

<comment><USER2> Love this app guys. Keep up the good work.</comment>


Elon Musk just took charge of Model 3 production - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/02/elon-musk-just-took-charge-of-model-3-production-saying-its-his-most-critical-job-right-now/ <comment><USER2> Model 3 production is absolutely critical and Tesla's future is in real danger.

The future of Tesla is completely tied to the high production volumes of Model 3 at this point. The debt is piling up and rated as junk.

The low production goal 2500 was missed by 20 percent and it's not even certain if they can keep it up for a week at this point. Their November 2017 target was 5000 per week at this point.

The production will face new problems that are more expensive to fix when they ramp up the volume more. Producing 5000/week six months from now is in jeopardy. If they miss that, Model 3 will be the last car Tesla produces with Musk in charge.</comment>


Metallic hydrogen, once theory, becomes reality – EurekAlert Science News - <AUTHOR> https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-01/hu-mho012517.php <comment><USER2> Here's another HN thread going on at the same time on the same subject:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13494358](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13494358)

...it currently has more comments, but a worse title.</comment>


Python Black Magic - <AUTHOR> http://jeffbail.com/python-black-magic

<comment><USER2> This is not exactly "black magic", it's fairly well-known and explained directly in the official documentation: [http://docs.python.org/tutorial/classes.html#private- variabl...](http://docs.python.org/tutorial/classes.html#private-variables).

<comment><AUTHOR> I think developers coming to Python from other languages (like I am from a heavy Java background) find the auto-creation of "shadow variables" pretty interesting. To someone used to Java, being able to access a private member via its shadow variable is a lot like black magic.

Discovering this for the first time in Python seemed pretty cool to me. I really hope this feeling of magic in working with Python never leaves me. I want to remain amazed.

<comment><USER3> Coming from C++, this is very similar to what all C++ compilers do internally (i.e. name mangling). Python just opens a possibility to access that "mangled" names directly, which should never be necessary unless you are doing some metaprogramming and need full access to class internals.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I learned these kinds of tricks when I started using python 12 years ago, but I have basically never had a need for them. Perhaps my needs are simple, though.

<comment><USER5> I learned this trick when I first picked up Python, too. I came from Java and, naturally, started writing Python code in the style I had learned to write Java: Heavily object-oriented, with getters and setters everywhere.

Eventually, though, I stopped trying to program in Java in Python. Once you relax and stop trying to hide your precious instance variables from all of the potentially pernicious or incompetent programmers who might be using your code (usually, in my case, just me), you no longer need tricks like this. And you realize that you never really needed them to begin with.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not advocating using getters/setters in Python. Just pointing out that you can access "private" members. I don't typically use getters and setters in JavaScript either.

Java, on the other hand, kind of forces you into using getters and setters because the POJO is so ingrained into the ecosystem. That said, if you write Android apps in Java, you should avoid getters and setters because they aren't really necessary and they create extra overhead.

<comment><USER6> One of the first textbooks on PL/1 also stated: "you should avoid using subroutines because they they create extra overhead" ;)

40 years later and we still there ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> While we are on the black magic thread, are there other meta-programming tricks that people find useful/clever?

I'll share one: _import inspect_. It's handy to use during debugging.

</comment><comment><USER8> Forgive my incompetence, but I have never gotten the point of private methods/variables. Could someone please explain why they exist?

Edit: I know it's slightly off-topic.

<comment><USER9> Access specifiers (like "private") are language features used to implement the OOP notion of encapsulation: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encapsulation_(object- oriented_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encapsulation_\(object- oriented_programming\)). Encapsulation is generally cited as one of the defining features of object oriented programming.

<comment><USER10> Which is weird, because it's actually a defining feature of _modular_ programming.

Public/private access are used to specify an interface to arbitrary functionality. Other modules can call a public interface, but all private internals can be removed / modified freely.

<comment><USER11> Yep, plenty of C modules do hacks to block access except through the defined API. Most are content simply to use void pointers in public header files, but some do nasty things like generating a random integer at library initialisation time and xor'ing all returned pointers by that number before returning it. (Eww.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> You can access private data in C++ too quite trivially, especially since there's no compile-time encapsulation...

Guido van Rossum on the lack of private members: "We're all consenting adults here."

(And a discussion: [http://mail.python.org/pipermail/tutor/2003-October/025932.h...](http://mail.python.org/pipermail/tutor/2003-October/025932.html) )

</comment><comment><USER13> Also, Ruby lets you call private/protected methods with Object#send.</comment>


Time to terminate termination charges? - <AUTHOR> http://insightsblog.oecdcode.org/?p=6762

<comment><USER2> I've refused to do business with businesses that have termination charges because it is basically their admission that they WILL screw up so badly you need to cancel to change providers for whatever service they provide.

<comment><USER3> Wrong kind of termination charge. The article is talking about the charges phone companies charge for calls from other phone companies that terminate on their network. More information: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Termination_rates](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Termination_rates)</comment></comment>


Siemens Sees a Future for Electric Trucks Powered by Overhead Lines - <AUTHOR> https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/siemens-sees-a-future-for-electric-trucks-powered-by-overhead-lines <comment><USER2> Sorta like trams, heh. But this solves one of the biggest issues with current electric vehicles: the long wait times for batteries to charge.

> The overhead line powers the electric motor and charges onboard batteries > when the truck is connected to the line. When the truck leaves the overhead > line, it can operate on battery power or with its diesel engine.

<comment><USER3> And yet those oversize loads will RIP the power lines to pieces.

<comment><USER4> I'm fairly sure a truck charging takes less power than a train accelerating. The overhead lines will be fine.

<comment><USER3> Umm, I haul big buildings down the highway that are 14.5 feet tall. How high do those overhead lines need to be to allow the OVERSIZE loads to go under?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> No it doesnt, its a corporate giveaway program. Illegal in EU to directly give money to national businesses, so why not run a "eco development effort" and BAM 84 million euros transferred to Siemens.</comment>


AM (1976): first math AI system to automate conjectures & concepts, not proofs - <AUTHOR> http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=ADA155378

<comment><USER2> AM is an amazing piece of artificial intelligence history that too few people know about. In my own dissertation reseearch in AI at UC Santa Cruz I'm trying to make a "discovery system" that works in the context of game design and AM has been a fantastic inspiration. Well, EURISKO is even more amazing, but AM started it all.

</comment><comment><USER3> Was AM named after the Ellison story "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream"?</comment>


Dust, and the microbes on it, influence rain and climate - <AUTHOR> http://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/pressroom/newsreleases/2014/august/dust-and-the-microbes-hitching-rides-on-it-influences-rain-climate.html <comment><USER2> A while back I had this short story I was working on that was a sort of conspiracy-fiction; the premise was that through efforts of the cold war, weather weapons were being actively developed by both sides. However, these efforts inadvertantly broke the natural weather cycle.

As a result - the use of weather creation/manipulation had to be brought up in earnest. This being the reason for chem-trails that people see: The weather system has lost its natural balance, and chem-trails are used to keep as close to regular weather as possible, else catastrophe would ensue.

</comment><comment><USER3> Some bacteria evolved the ability to induce ice-formation, in order to break up plant tissues so they can invade. The climate effects seem be just a by- product, but there's some really interesting research being done into the biological mechanisms. [http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131023141119.ht...](http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131023141119.htm)</comment>


Value of Body Parts – Workers' Comp Data - <AUTHOR> https://projects.propublica.org/graphics/workcomp-company <comment><USER2> Not unheard of in other eras as well:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyfraith_Hywel#Compensation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyfraith_Hywel#Compensation)

</comment><comment><USER3> Home Depot - "Let's Skew This!"

</comment><comment><USER4> I built a new PC, it cost me an arm and a leg [$223K].</comment>


That Didn't Need to Take an Hour - <AUTHOR> http://www.feld.com/archives/2015/01/didnt-need-take-hour.html <comment><USER2> A common thread:

 _When someone starts this way, I break in and say as politely as I can, "What's on your mind?"_

From the Comments:

 _Question: do you in any way prepare people before they meet with you for the first time, with guidelines for how you like meetings to go?_

Answer: _It varies. I used to send out a "how to meet with me" note but there's now so much on the web that it should be easy for the person to prepare by just doing a quick search on Brad Feld Meeting"_

This is pretty haughty and I see this type of junk a lot with the VC/Angel investors out there. They are implicitly saying, "clearly my time it too valuable to waste it with courtesy or respect." Yes, I see that he said "as politely as I can" however the whole idea that I need to google how to meet with someone ahead of time is insane. These people aren't holy figures.

Maybe a better option is to not schedule time with people that you don't plan on being courteous to.

<comment><USER3> I dunno, I think Postel's law ( _" Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others."_) is about as relevant to interpersonal relationships as software design.

Maybe it's the Brit in me speaking, but I think it's fair to recognize and accept when someone is higher up the totem pole than you and to handle the etiquette properly, even if they're being brusque. A personalized "how to meet with me" rider sounds pretty ridiculous to me, but having an idea of the etiquette around _how to meet with an investor_ in general sounds reasonable.

<comment><USER4> "How to meet with me" could be less pretentious phrased as something like "the meeting style I try to aim for". It's more "let's try to do it like this" and less "here's how you have to act with me", IMO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _I'm always experimenting with new things. What do you do to keep meetings manageable and sane?_

1\. No phone calls. Use email. I'll respond when I can, almost always the same or next day.

2\. No texts. Use email. See #1.

3\. No status meetings. Email me your status report. I'll email you mine. Column titles should include: Item#, Project#, Title, Beneficiary, Responsible, Phase, Promise Date, Status, Disposition, Questions.

4\. No "standing meetings". If you need regular (as in weekly) meetings, just send me an email with status, problems, questions, etc. the same time every week. I will answer you. My answer may include a meeting request.

5\. No "all hands" meetings. Send us all an email.

6\. Schedule any meetings that really require 1 hour over lunch. I hate to eat alone. Two birds, one stone.

7\. 15 minutes is a waste of time to stop, meet, restart.

8\. 30 minutes is usually good. (OP was right)

9\. Meet in my office. I'm too busy to travel.

10\. If our meeting is scheduled for 10:00 and you're not there by 10:01, I lock the door. No meeting. If it's with several people, I will only meet with those on time.

11\. Every meeting requires some form of written agenda, with appropriate content and length, that must be emailed ahead of time. Agenda topics: Date, Time, Length, Required Attendees, Business Problem, Topics to Cover, Expected Result, Expected Next Steps (if possible). There is no such thing as "Optional Attendees". There is no such thing as a meeting to determine the agenda for the meeting.

12\. Your best bet: my regular happy hours double as "open office hours", usually from 5 to 7: Tuesday: Bar Louie, Wednesday, B.J.s, Thursday, Tony Romo's. These "meetings" have always been the best.

<comment><USER6> I am the worlds biggest flake when it comes to email.

If you send me a chat, I'm liable to just tap you on your shoulder and talk to you in person instead of chat back.

<comment><USER7> Are you the person who calls someone after a text message? Cause that's how you end up with a silent ring tone.

<comment><USER8> I don't use text messages much (typing on a phone is too low bandwidth); and about 25% of my work-related instant messages will turn into a phone conversation (at least 50% of those calls will add VNC to look at code). Both parties can talk with much lower latency and higher bandwidth than they can type.

<comment><USER9> It's about more than "I can save the most of my time by arbitrarily interrupting people because my talking is faster than my typing".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I cannot imagine accepting arbitrary inbound phone calls without scheduling, unless your whole task is being phone support.

A few years ago, I worked at company which somehow felt because my salary was a sunk cost, it was fine to have me do phone support for customers all day (as front line support too, since we didn't have a good triage system, although our customers were all pretty high end), while also nominally developing. There were fairly reliably several calls per day, ranging from 5 minute small issues to 2-3 hour serious problems.

Needless to say that in addition to being 10% as productive as usual, I left as soon as I could.

<comment><USER11> I don't, and it's something I try to teach people by example. I just don't accept inbound calls unless I feel in the mood for them. When I'm busy or tired, I just mute calls unless I really care about them (e.g. family & SO). When someone really wants something from me, they will text / mail me, and I will reply on my own schedule. I try to actively fight this idea that communication means random people triggering interrupts in your life.

I especially avoid answering random calls when I'm in a face-to-face conversation with someone; I used to date a girl that was glued to her phone (back before smartphones, or social media, were a thing), and I know how incredibly annoying it feels when your interlocutor keeps texting or receiving calls during a conversation. I find it very disrespectful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It seems like he's mentioning Parkinson's law to a T! ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law))

I have noticed the same thing, but being an Entrepreneur, I don't really find that I have his luxury.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is awesome, if you work in that environment. I'd love to be able to work in a career where I could schedule my day instead of being thrown into indeterminable madness.

<comment><USER14> When I was an entrepreneur, the only thing I scheduled was meetings with investors (and potential investors) and meetings with customers (and potential customers.) When I went over to the investing side I had to change that: everything is scheduled (except the entrepreneurs whose companies I've invested in can call me on the phone any time they want.)

The difference is just volume. When my company was 40 people, whoever needed my attention could just walk up to my desk and talk to me, or I could walk over and talk to them. Now I get 50-60 inbound emails a week asking for a meeting. I'm not well-known like Brad Feld, I can only imagine how many he gets.

The question becomes quantity or quality? Do you have more, shorter meetings or fewer, longer meetings? Neither strategy is optimal. Brad wants more, shorter meetings (and has changed how he meets to accommodate that.) I went for fewer, longer meeting (because I invest in people and it takes me a little while to get a feel for a person.)

It's definitely a different world. There's no getting around that as an investor you're dependent on sorting through inbound and so you're necessarily somewhat reactive. As an entrepreneur, everything was proactive (because nothing happened unless we made it happen.) It seems backwards, but to be effective when you're reactive, you need more rigorous structure and process than you do when you're proactive. When you're proactive, you can make madness work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This post is really surprising to me. I've always thought of Mr. Feld as the giving, caring mentor type -- the near-lone exception to the rule in VC land. I've even heard him speak twice (in Nowheresville, USA) and he was very polite when I shook his hand and introduced myself.

To hear him write in such a holier-than-thou manner... It doesn't compute. Yes, he's important. Yes, he is busy. But I think it's proper courtesy to assume people understand this fact when they come to meet. If they don't then you handle it on the fly and, what's more, you've learned something about that person's interpersonal judgement. Was this a pitch meeting that went awry? Well maybe you've learned not to invest with them.

Regardless, having people Google how to meet with you is absurd on a level that only someone in a yes-man bubble would think is an OK policy to have and then _write a blog poat about it_.

</comment><comment><USER16> I agree with gist of the article, but the following passage is unclear and could use elaboration:

"Phone calls: I schedule almost all phone calls, except for ones with high priority people. This high priority ones interrupt whatever I'm doing or get done on a drive to and from the office."

Does this mean that if he does a phone call, he's usually the one who schedules it? And how does he determine who is a high/low priority person? Is his assistant a control point in this regard? Does he generally refuse inbound phone call invitations? Do people in his company know not to send him phone meeting requests?

<comment><USER17> I know people much less wealthy and busy than Feld, whose secretaries screen all their calls. Admin help isn't that expensive for someone like this. Presumably an assistant would have a list of potential interrupters...

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Throughout my career I have met more than a few semi-professional meeting attenders. They are usually the worst type of people to be in a meeting with. And like a lot of people with stuff to do, I find most meetings a waste of time and generally avoid them.

However, I make an exception for meetings with especially interesting or sexy people. Those meetings can't go on long enough. Work (which is very important) takes second place to being in the company of very interesting people. What is life about anyway?

</comment><comment><USER19> for project management:

* 15-30 minute ticket calls every day at 8am. very quick run-through of who is assigned what and are there any blockers? very occasionally this call will extend to 45 minutes because of some exceptional issue but usually is significantly less than 30 mins. 8am and 8pm pacific time are a global scheduling 'anchor' slots we use for us/europe and us/asia.

* long term projects get 30 minutes per week at the same time and day, usually monday or tuesday. as deadlines approach, we add thursday or fridays so twice a week.

* at the beginning of every meeting i state the agenda, usually broken into 3 phases: timeline review, action items review and preview, and Q&A.

* 'visionary' or 'general discussion' meetings take an hour or more and are planned as such. it's not uncommon for architects and executives to block out 2 hours for such discussions (we have a remote team).

for business development:

* never schedule anything on a monday or friday unless specifically requested for a good reason. these are 'catch up' days for sales and marketing people to get busy-work done or organize their data or send emails.

* lunch meetings are fine but it's not any more likely to result in anything positive. we usually use these only when we can't fit it in elsewhere and the person is local and the team wants to eat somewhere nice.

* sales review / strategy meetings can take 2-3 hours and we usually plan these at the very end of the day on Tue or Thurs when customer calls are finished. everyone goes home afterwards and there's at least one day left in the week to actually start executing.

</comment><comment><USER20> I do think people tend to just default to "an hour" for meetings and it is really kind of crazy when many meetings are able to be resolved in a 5 minute chat and 30 minutes is usually sufficient for many things. So, I think this would be a good trend. However, all the stuff about googling to figure out how to meet with him .... I mean, OK, whatever.

</comment><comment><USER21> I like the 30 minute rule, it is a good one. I would rather not have the meeting at all so I shoot for short 5 minute calls or emails over meetings. I ask people to email me the agenda about the meeting before I except. 95% of the time I can just respond with emails. Though I am a programmer not a VC, one day maybe :)

</comment><comment><USER22> There is something terribly manic about this post. It seems like the present moment is never good enough for him. There must be something better to do somewhere else.

I was like this once. It ruined my marriage.</comment>


The U.S. Yield Curve Has Inverted - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-12-03/u-s-yield-curve-just-inverted-that-s-huge <comment><USER2> A quick explanation in layman's terms:

I have money on hand and I want to put it into something safe. The US government is constitutionally bound to pay its debts, and is generally considered to be very safe (if not the _safest_ investment around).

The US government sells bonds with different terms. I can buy 1 year bonds, 3 year bonds, 5 year bonds, 10 year bonds, etc. The treasury sets a fixed interest rate and face value on treasury notes and then whoever pays the most gets the note.

Right now, (annualized) rates [1] are approximately as follows:

1 month - 2.30% 6 month - 2.56% 1 year - 2.72% 3 year - 2.84% 5 year - 2.83% 7 year - 2.90% 10 year - 2.98%

Notice that the 3 year rates are higher than the 5 year rates. Generally speaking, if I'm going to lock up my money for more time, I expect a higher return. However, today, the 3 year notes are getting a higher rate of return than the 5 year notes. Why?

Interest rates generally tend to follow the economy at large. When the economy is doing well, people will invest in stocks and other investments and are less willing to pay for the safety of treasuries, so effective rates go up when people bid less at treasury auctions (additionally, the government will take steps via the Federal Reserve to make rates higher). By the same token, when the economy isn't doing well, people want the safety of treasuries, even if they pay less, so effective rates on treasuries tend to go down.

In rare cases, the yield curve will invert. What this means is that investors think that rates of return on government bonds are going to go down in the future. In order to lock in a better rate now, they're willing to pay more for longer term bonds (in this case, 5 year bonds vs. 3 year bonds) in order to "lock-in" the good rates. The assumption is that they won't be able to get the same good rates if they don't act now.

Note that only the 3 and 5 years have inverted. If people were really panicked, you would probably see a more significant inversion, where for example, the 1 year was higher than the 2 year and the 2 higher than the 3, etc.

[1] these rates are actual rates of return calculated based on the auction price paid

<comment><USER3> As far as insight for how this looks for the US economy, one of the few people I respect when it comes to predictions is Ray Dalio, he says the US debt will start becoming an issue soon. Within 10 years the majority of the US federal budget will go to paying INTEREST on our debt, requiring us to borrow more to pay for the rest which will result in exponentially rising debt and inflation as the government prints money.

Dalio also talks about Thucydides Trap and Paul Kennedy's book on the decline of great powers. He doesn't say it but he seems fairly confident in China surpassing the US as the dominant global power in the near future. The only issue I have is that he seems to think China's high debt is fine compared to the US based on vague reasoning.

The US and the West in general need to wake the fuck up or we're going to be under China's thumb. We've become complacent and assume our status on top of the global hierarchy is guaranteed. China is playing to win and doesn't care about breaking the rules to win

<comment><USER4> > Within 10 years the majority of the US federal budget will go to paying > INTEREST on our debt

All the Federal Reserve has to do is buy US treasures on the open market at higher and higher prices. A premium on a bond pushes the yield lower. Yields at 0% means that the US will not be paying interest on its [new] debt. Yields at negative means that investors will be paying the US.

People and entities buying US treasury bonds is why they yield 2-ish percent right now at all, instead of say 5%.

Regarding 0% rates, the Bank of Japan has already done this with Japanese government treasuries, for a very long time

Regarding negative rates, the European Central Bank has already done this with its constituent country's government bonds, for several years. Primarily German bonds.

The US can do this with more efficacy than those economies, whenever it chooses to do so. Right now, the US Central Bank chooses to raise rates and the US Treasury continues to issue more debt at the higher rates for reasons unrelated to its budget, to be honest just because the market can bear it. The Federal Reserve chooses to have less dubious assets on its balance sheet.

Everything is done in a form of moderation, but the US has a lot of tools to deal with its debt.

<comment><USER5> > All the Federal Reserve has to do is buy US treasures on the open market at > higher and higher prices.

Doesn't that lead to inflation?

<comment><USER6> The one big gotcha in international finance is the petrodollar. Going back to the 70s we made an incredibly prescient deal with Saudi Arabia. They agree to sell their oil only in USD and then to invest annual surpluses back into US securities. In exchange we agree to ensure protection of their kingdom and guarantee weapon sells. This arrangement continues to this day in grand fashion. For instance even though Saudi Arabia only has some 30 million people, it's the third largest defense spender in the world spending some $70 billion a year on weapons, with most of that going straight [back] to us. Our influence in turn led to the expansion of the petrodollar beyond just Saudi Arabia to nearly all oil sales.

This doesn't seem like a particularly big deal, until you realize what it does. Imagine the US pumps a bunch of funny money ( _I 'm using a sardonic term just to clearly distinguish between organic/'real' growth_) into our economy. This would naturally cause inflation. But here's where the fun kicks in. Oil is still by far the most in demand resource in the world. And now when countries go to buy oil they need to accumulate USD. But now due to inflation a country that wants to buy the same amount of oil needs to keep an even larger reserve of USD on hand. And that's exactly what happens. The USD becomes worth less and countries are obligated to hoover up more USD to ensure access to oil. As that USD starts getting removed from circulation, the effects of the inflation start to abate. Like magic, we can 'print' (not how many is made, but that's another topic) a practically unlimited amount of funny money with minimal economic consequences.

This also explains much of otherwise inexplicable actions in the Mideast and related places. We don't want their oil, we want them to sell their oil in USD only. This [1] is an article from Time in 2000: " _Europe 's dream of promoting the euro as a competitor to the U.S. dollar may get a boost from SADDAM HUSSEIN. Iraq says that from now on, it wants payments for its oil in euros, despite the fact that the battered European currency unit, which used to be worth quite a bit more than $1, has dropped to about 82[cents]. Iraq says it will no longer accept dollars for oil because it does not want to deal "in the currency of the enemy."_" By 2003 we had destroyed the Iraq government and killed Saddam in a kangaroo court. Similarly with Libya, Gaddafi was aiming to create a gold backed 'Afro-currency' which is what he wanted to start selling his oil in. Two other nations which have moved against the petrodollar are Iran and Venezuela.

On the other side of things, this also explains Saudi Arabia. One of the most backwards and repressive nations in existence today, we're still BFF since they act like a loyal lapdog when it comes to the petrodollar. In exchange we let them do just about anything. The CIA has recently stated that Khashoggi's murder was likely ordered all the way from the top. I can tell you how this story will end. Do you remember in 2015 when Saudi Prince Majed Abdulaziz Al Saud had a rape and assault filled 'party' at a rented mansion in Beverley Hills? The 'party' was only stopped once a neighbor called the police after seeing a bleeding woman screaming for help as she tried to scale the fence of his mansion to get away. He was arrested and that's where most media reporting ended. The epilogue is that he was rapidly granted bail, got on a plane and simply flew back to Saudi Arabia with no consequences whatsoever.

\</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment>---

This is already getting long enough, but something very important now a days is that the petrodollar is dying. It's a mixture of a perfect storm of a large number different of factors, but it's definitely a dead system walking. And this has major implications for the future of the US economy. To date we've had 'economy armor' on. In the not so distant future, that armor is coming off and our economy will stand or fall under its own weight. And this is when being massively in debt suddenly does start to matter because if you just try to print your way out of it, you would not be able to rely on the petrodollar to protect the economy anymore.

[1] - [https://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,998512...](https://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,998512,00.html)

[2] - [https://www.cbsnews.com/news/saudi-prince-majed-abdulaziz- al...](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/saudi-prince-majed-abdulaziz-al-saud- forced-oral-sex-beverly-glen-california/)

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the interesting insight.

While I agree the petrodollar is a big deal, and it does afford us a lot of extra leeway in monetary policy, we can't forget that the US is still an economic powerhouse in many, many different industries. And the power of singularly focused economies like Saudi Arabia is waning.

The shallow reporting is that manufacturing is gone, but the reality is, we have higher manufacturing output than ever. (The fewer jobs needed for higher output is a different story.) We have an enormous lead in software. Intel and Qualcomm are the two biggest semiconductor companies. We have the largest oil and natural gas reserves, much of which is still untapped. A large share of world media entertainment is here. The US pharmaceutical industry accounts for almost half of the world output. World banking and finance is huge. Real estate market is enormous and highly desirable to outside investment. And this is for a country with less than 5% of the world's population.

And that's just some of the big stuff that the US leads the way in. There are so many other industries that the US is still a global player in. What I'm getting at is the the breadth and depth of the U.S. economy is so large that it is hard to comprehend and I don't think the failure of any one industry will be enough to produce significant hardship for the US. Nor does the economy need to rely on the petrodollar for protection in the long term.

<comment><USER8> What the fall of the petrodollar will change though, is that the US will lose some of its "friends" it could rely on by default. The US will have to work on its diplomacy again. I hope it will not be too much of the gunboat kind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There is a 1 bps spread between the 3-year and 5-year US Treasury (2.84 vs 2.83) as of close of market today.

While somewhat noteworthy, it's not huge (yet). When people talk about yield curve inversion and it being an indicator of recessions, it's much more common to compare the 2-year with the 10-year. Currently that sits at 2.83 (2yr) vs 2.98 (10yr). While the shorter spreads do often invert first, there is no requirement for the longer spreads to follow.

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's a graph plotting the 10 vs 2 year spread:

[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T10Y2Y](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T10Y2Y)

<comment><USER10> Going off of that graph, we could 'bounce' and remain at non-inverted levels for a few more years as in 1995. But once the rates truly are inverted to a substantial degree, a recession generally follows within a couple years.

<comment><USER11> 1995 was special, though, since that was the start of the Dotcom boom. Every year after 1995 and before 2000, the Dotcom bubble got bigger and bigger. To bounce like 1995, we'd need an economy like 1995.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _Banks borrow short and lend long_.

Meaning they take short-term deposits (e.g. current account balances) and make long-term loans (e.g. mortgages). They normally make a profit, because they borrow short paying low rates, and lend long receiving high rates. Easy. Head to the golf course.

If the yield curve inverts, banks lose money ... their capital ratios and share prices fall ... they become more risky and less creditworthy ... people withdraw their money ... bank runs, ATMs stop working, bail-ins ... your current account is _permanently unavailable_ (see Cyprus, Greece).

Note that many banks, especially European banks, are starting from an existing almost-bankrupt state, with plummeting share prices (DB, UniCredit, BBVA, BNP). If the EUR yield curve inverts, they all crash faster than an anvil without a parachute (DB is already giving the anvil a good race).

</comment><comment><USER13> Can someone explain this in dumb person language? All I get is that the yield that bonds give is below zero, meaning you lose money holding them? And bonds are buying debt on faith the issuer will pay, and as the issuer pays, you get dividends.

And I think the interest rate is inversely proportional to the amount the bonds pay or something like that?

Just explain in simple language. :)

<comment><USER14> Not quite that. The yield for a 5-year note is less than the yield for a 3-year note.

More generally, a yield curve inversion is when the interest rate you earn on short-term debt ends up higher than that of long-term debt of the same quality.

I don't think the issue is that the inversion causes the recession. It's more an indicator of pessimism in the market. It implies that investors think that interest rates are going to get worse, so they look to buy more longer-term bonds in order to try and lock in current yields for a longer period of time. That increases demand for those assets, which drives down their price^H^H^H^H^H yields.

<comment><USER15> > That increases demand for those assets, which drives down their price.

I'm not an economist but this seems wrong

<comment><USER16> That commenter should've said the yield is driven down. The US government wants to borrow at the cheapest rate of interest. If more people want to lend to them, they have more options and can pick the cheapest option.

<comment><USER17> > The US government wants to borrow at the cheapest rate of interest

This is categorically not true. If it were then Congress would pass legislation ordering the Fed to buy securities from the Treasury at whatever rate it liked (or abolish the Fed altogether and just directly spend money into existence). Congress in fact wants to provide savings vehicles, it's not actually necessary for Congress to borrow to fund the federal government. Sure it's necessary under _current_ law but Congress by definition can change that law. That it chooses not to is an expression of a preference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> So I read the article but I don't quite get it.

A 5-year bond now has a lower yield than a 3-year bond? How is that even possible? Wouldn't anyone who wants a 5-year bond just buy a 3-year bond and then put the cash under their mattress after 3 years?

Is the idea that in 3 years' time, negative interest rates will be widespread, physical cash will be abolished, and figuratively keeping the cash under your mattress isn't even possible?

EDIT: And why don't arbitrageurs buy up 3-year bonds and sell 5-year bonds?

<comment><USER19> Thats not how it works. If 5-year bond has yield x, for principal P you receive P _x for 5 years. With 3-year bond with yield y, you get P_ y for 3 years. If y > x => after 3 years rates will be lower than y. So you will get lower than P*y for the last 2 years (of 5 years).

<comment><USER18> Ahh, got it.

So the overall yield is not lower, just the annualised yield.

That doesn't sound like nearly as much cause for alarm.

<comment><USER20> The alarm is that bond yields are more or less `yield = (k / economic confidence)` - if people are confident then they don't buy bonds, so the price of bonds falls, so the yield (which is annualized return) rises. (Thus recessions lead to falling interest rates as people seek safe harbors for money, making credit cheaper.)

What this means is that the bond market thinks available bond yields for cash- on-hand will be lower in three years than five, so they're willing to take a hit now to lock in the longer-term payout. That reflects serious economic pessimism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> If anyone is curious how this has compared over time for more context, this is a great visual tool to graph/animate the yield curve:

[https://stockcharts.com/freecharts/yieldcurve.php](https://stockcharts.com/freecharts/yieldcurve.php)

</comment><comment><USER22> Worth noting that unlike previous business cycles the Fed is manipulating both the long and short end of the curve. Quantitative Tightening (QT) is the Fed's program to sell and/or let expire the long-term Treasuries it bought during QE 1/2/3.

As the same time, the Fed is raising short term interest rates using its tried-and true headline short-term interest rate target.

This is not just unusual - it's unprecedented. QT has the effect of suppressing the yield curve inversion signal (by artificially increasing long- term rates). As a result, the gap between the next yield curve inversion (the one mentioned in the article hardly qualifies) and the next recession could be surprisingly short.

Backing off now on QT and short term raising, with unemployment at a very low point and inflation ramping up, would be lethal to the Fed's credibility. Whatever Powell says to try to talk the stock market up, he's locked and loaded and can't do much beyond stick with the program: triggering the next recession.

<comment><USER23> Why can't he slow QT?

<comment><USER24> > QT has the effect of suppressing the yield curve inversion signal (by > artificially increasing long-term rates)

i.e they could, but the long end yields will drop below where they are now, on top of signaling to the market that things are worse than what is admitted if they have to stop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Fans of Planet Money's "The Indicator" are no doubt imagining Cardiff prepping new yield curve material.

<comment><USER26> Yup, I love that he's so enthusiastic about the yield curve that I was immediately reminded of him when I read the title.

</comment></comment><comment> jf- Question: Are there any other recession signals which have also recently presented themselves? I know very low unemployment, which we have, is one. Are there others?

<comment><USER27> NPR's "Planet Money: The Indicator" Just did two episodes on this: [https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/11/16/668745229/rece...](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/11/16/668745229/recession- indicators-pt-1) [https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/11/19/669368782/rece...](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/11/19/669368782/recession- indicators-pt-2)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> a better way to understand the causality between yield curves and recessions is to look at it from the perspective of the banking sector ... banks/lenders primarily borrow short-term and lend long-term. They pay depositors short-term rates and earn the long term rates on loans. If this carry trade turns negative, it makes it difficult to make money lending, they get more conservative and collectively they tighten credit conditions on the economy as whole.

</comment><comment><USER29> > All it means is that the central bank will probably leave interest rates > steady, or even cut a bit, in 2022 or 2023.

This event reflects the relative preference of the markets for the 5 yrs compared to 3 yrs, producing lower effective yields. This is probably done to secure a certain rate for a longer period of time.

</comment><comment><USER24> One thing I'm interested to see if anyone can discuss what's different this time (i.e, Fed has ~4x more assets on it's balance sheet [and the roll-offs], corporate have ~2x more debt, labor force participation rate is at levels not seen since the 60's, 4 eurodollar "events" since, US gov debt levels since) and how it could theoretically affect the yield gymnastics?

Some banks keep saying 2020 is the big one since that's when most of the corporate debt will be need to rolled over onto higher rates, but I'm of the mind we don't even make it that far because of even shorter term liabilities (think corporate buybacks with debt at higher rates that will increasingly put pressure on balance sheets m/m, liquidity pressure risk assets, devaluation on collateral) in this environment.

<comment><USER30> Good questions. Two differences to consider vis a vis past late cycle moments: US corporate profits haven't peaked, and the politicians could have a better claim on being part of the problem than on being part of the solution. I was tempted to add "leverage" but that's too slippery for a concise discussion.

Profits: it took about two years peak-to-trough for profits/GDP to correct during the past two recessions. Unless you see sudden stop risk, this suggests the US corprorate sector isn't staring down the barrel of a massive deleveraging...yet.

Politics: public support for legislative non-compromise does not speak to the kinds of policy fixes applied in 2008-9. Executive belligerence toward the Fed doesn't seem helpful either. As much as markets may have appeared to ignore US political risks while momentum was positive, it seems credulous to think this more of a divorce than a separation.

There are other quantitative arguments that the turn in the cycle is not here yet (e.g. employment, notwithstanding participation rate). But the prospect of a return to political gridlock is, to me, the most important risk contrast with recent past cycles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> It doesn't have to be this way. The curve was unnaturally flat to start with due to Operation Twist. As the Fed unwinds its balance sheet, it seems only naturally to also unwind the effects of Operation Twist at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER32> Can someone concisely explain what yield curve inversion could indicate?

I can think of a few explanations for why long term yields are going lower:

1\. Long term yields going lower because there are far fewer places for capital to go to besides US treasuries, indicating slower business activity

2\. Short term yields going higher because no one wants to buy short-term treasuries because there's something else to invest in or expect higher return for short term investment?

Are these the only two reasons? Why are people so fearful of inverted yield curves?

<comment><USER33> Inverted yield curves mean that interest rates are expected to fall. Interest rates falling mean that (a) demand for money is falling and/or (b) supply of money is rising. In economic recessions, the demand for money often falls and the supply of money often grows. Therefore, an inverted yield curve indicates an increased forecast of recession chances over the next few years.

(I am not an expert and could be wrong.)

<comment><USER32> Good explanation. Thank you.

But isn't the demand for money going to go up because the US is running ginormous deficits? I would expect the demand for money to be through the roof.

<comment><USER33> [Edited] As described by the IS-LM model, government deficits tend to do three things:

-Increase output (more people working/getting paid)

-Decrease economic investment (investors put dollars in treasuries instead of private sector projects)

-Increase interest rates (fewer investor dollars to go toward private sector projects, since some have been diverted to government debt/production)

However, the Fed usually tries to account for this force in their monetary policy (see monetary offset):[https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-07-20/fed- im...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-07-20/fed-impact-on- deficit-has-nothing-to-do-with-trump)

<comment><USER32> Doesn't debt issued by US treasury have to be funded by private holders of US dollars? Or does the Fed simply buy out the debt issued by treasury?

I thought the Fed simply buys only a small portion of US treasury debt (thus printing money) but the vast majority of that treasury debt is purchased by holders of US dollars (banks, funds, China, Japan etc.)

<comment><USER33> Yes, debt issued by the US treasury is funded by private holders of US dollars.

Here's how I think it works:

-In theory, the Federal Reserve targets average inflation of 2% (along with its unemployment mandate)

-When the US government runs a deficit, the government sells bonds and uses the dollars to pay whatever it's paying for

-This process soaks up dollars from investors and gives out dollars to people, which on net lowers investment, increases interest rates, and increases GDP (see IS/LM model: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IS–LM_model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IS–LM_model))

-The Fed, which aims to stabilize inflation, accommodates the rise in interest rates by setting higher target rates for its open market operations (if they fought the movement in interest rates by buying assets, inflation would rise, which is against their mandate)

<comment><USER34> How selling bonds soaks dollars from investors?

If you go to a bank and ask for a credit for starting a business, if the bank approve of your project, they will credit your bank account with new money. That money is new created money.

How is that related to more or less bonds sales?

<comment><USER33> If investors spend their dollars on government bonds, they have fewer dollars to spend on other investments. The lower supply of investor dollars for these investments causes interest rates to rise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> All those Princeton and Harvard economists travelling the world telling foreign governments how to run their economy lol. Does any politician in the US even read the emails the Fed sends them? Must be the most thankless job ever.

</comment><comment><USER36> Interesting use of the Smiler RollerCoaster in the lead photo. It was involved in a serious crash a few years ago.

</comment><comment><USER37> Is this a result (in part or more) of setting a schedule for fed funds rate increases and sticking to it?

</comment><comment><USER38> Based on past patterns, we now have about 15 months before a formal recession is declared. This is rough and imperfect, but many other metrics are pointing to both the end of the bull market and a coming recession. I've been monitoring the econ because I plan to invest in real-estate and stocks during the next slump. [Corrected "bear" typo.]

<comment><USER39> >"I've been monitoring the econ because I plan to invest in real-estate and stocks during the next slump."

Which raises the question of "isn't every other investor?" And if that's the case, how much of that has the market already factored into pricing?

For example, I hear a lot of people in the Bay Area talking about saving up for when the next crash occurs so they can buy real estate cheap. But if there's sufficient pent up demand and capital, that can dampen the impact like what appears to have happened with the 2008 recession[1], only perhaps magnified after this bull run.

[1] [https://www.bayareamarketreports.com/trend/3-recessions-2-bu...](https://www.bayareamarketreports.com/trend/3-recessions-2-bubbles- and-a-baby)

<comment><USER38> Going back roughly 4 decades, the best time to buy real-estate for investment has been during or just after recessions. Have investors changed after those four decades? If by chance real-estate doesn't go down during the next slump, then perhaps stocks will; I got choice. It's unlikely that _neither_ will shift downward, and I might skip investing if both stay high.

Interest rates on constructed real-estate is also lower during slumps. Of course investors could be wrong, it happens. But buy-low-sell-high has on average worked best. It's one of Warren Buffett's key strategies (although arguable he is buy-low-and-keep).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> This is not the typical yield spread a practitioner or the fed would look at.

<comment><USER41> Would they look at 7 and 10 year yield spreads?

<comment><USER42> I believe the 10- and 2-year yields are most often compared.

[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T10Y2Y](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T10Y2Y)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Inverted yield curve has predicted 10 of the last 3 recessions

<comment><USER28> on a 2 year window its pretty accurate. [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T10Y2Y](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T10Y2Y) Max view

also true that 2 years a very long time for an economic/investment hypothesis to play out

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Is it Good or Bad? And in what way?

<comment><USER45> "Good" and "bad" aren't nuanced enough terms for the discussion. What has happened is a classical indicator of a recession has emerged, because investors are demonstrating pessimism about long term bond yields compared to near term bond yields. This does _not_ mean we are presently in a recession, nor does it mean we are necessarily entering one soon. But the indicator has historically correlated with recessions (consistently since 1970 if I recall correctly).

A better question for you to ask is this: what does my investment portfolio look like and when do I expect to withdraw from it? It's healthy for economies to go through credit/debt prosperity cycles, but this will be concerning for you if you (among other things) plan to withdraw a nontrivial amount of your investment fund(s) in the near future. If your employment situation is stable and you're not planning any large withdrawals, this is probably not something to immediately worry about. If you work in an industry which benefits from greater volatility, this might actually be beneficial for you.

<comment><USER39> >"If your employment situation is stable and you're not planning any large withdrawals, this is probably not something to immediately worry about."

This is an important note. If we do face another Black Swan event like the housing crisis, it may not be directly related to housing in the same way. As such, it signals a general "be on alert" from a risk standpoint. If you would be in serious trouble financially if you lost your job tomorrow, you may want to shore up your cash position to ensure you have a way to ride things out. If you feel relatively secure, you may want to free up some liquidity for opportunities that might present themselves. If you're about to buy a house, now might be a good time to move those funds out of the market, or consider the timing of your purchase altogether. These are just a few considerations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> so there is starting to begin some panic but its not in full swing yet.</comment>


How long should my resume be? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.alinelerner.com/should-experienced-software-engineers-resumes-be-one-page-or-spread-over-multiple-pages-given-that-it-gets-harder-to-keep-things-short/ <comment><USER2> As short as possible as to not to bore the reader, and as long as possible as to include the relevant information.</comment>


Pyro from Team Fortress 2 raytraced in your browser - <AUTHOR> http://jsfiddle.net/bhouston/98X3G/embedded/result/

<comment><USER2> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abqAanC2NZs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abqAanC2NZs)

Apparently requires 2 Titan's to render. I wonder what you'd be able to pull off if money was no object

<comment><USER3> This is like a worst-case scenario for YouTube's compression algorithms, so it's hard to say how this would actually look on your screen. Rather than seeing the noise you just see the macroblocks even at highest resolution.

<comment><USER4> There's a better quality video on their site here:

[http://brigade3.com/brigade-3-0-preview-at- gtc-2014](http://brigade3.com/brigade-3-0-preview-at-gtc-2014)

I've been playing with OctaneRender and LuxRender but hadn't heard of this one before. Looks good, possibly faster than Octane judging by the video, but it's impossible to know what they are running it on.

I'm very hopeful that incremental improvements to path tracing algorithms over the next couple of years will reduce the amount of noise in real-time, as the render quality is amazing. However even on a high end machine, with a complex scene you end up with a lot of black areas, which makes everything look darker. LuxRender partially solves this by rendering over the top of the last frame by default, but that sometimes creates some nasty ghosting effects that can be worse than always painting over black like Octane does.

If you want to try this stuff out there's a free demo version of Octane you can download and LuxRender is entirely free. However Octane requires a CUDA card with a fair bit of VRAM as it does everything in GPU and the size of the scene is limited by the amount of VRAM you have.

LuxRender is currently only stable in CPU-only mode and doesn't come with any UI to speak of; it's more of a rendering toolkit. You can't just open it up and move a scene around in real-time. You can do that with Octane though and I thoroughly recommend giving it a try.

There seem to be a fairly significant diminishing returns over rendering time with path tracing, so the results you get in real-time will probably be about the same on a wide variety of cards, i.e., full of noise and black areas, but still impressive. The difference between a render running for 4 hours vs one running for 8 hours is far less significant than the difference between 10 seconds compared to a minute.

Edit: I just noticed that Brigade is from Otoy, who own Octane Render. The site's not particularly clear about it, but it looks like this is their cloud- based render farm solution based on Octane. There's an earlier video somewhere showing real-time movie-quality rendering over something like 144 GPUs (instead of the 2-4 in this video). However the cost for renting that much GPU power was pretty astronomical.

<comment><USER5> I would buy 4 of whatever replaces the Titan Z if I could play a game that uses this tech at 3x 4k 120hz.

That is absolutely beautiful for realtime.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Couldn't it be much faster considering it runs 'in the cloud'? I'd expect it to be faster than when rendering on the client. You should probably try Octane instead of VRAY: [https://twitter.com/CapeTownC4D/status/451785257289666560](https://twitter.com/CapeTownC4D/status/451785257289666560)

<comment><AUTHOR> It can always get faster and it will. :) Everyone is moving to GPU-based renders right now, even V-Ray.

I do notice that sometimes this render doesn't respond immediately to mouse movement. Must be some bug. This cloud render of a Porche Cayman is much more responsive:

[http://jsfiddle.net/bhouston/ED5NK/embedded/result/](http://jsfiddle.net/bhouston/ED5NK/embedded/result/)

[http://Clara.io](http://Clara.io) is actually a web-based modeling and rendering tool that also allows you to seamless embed your work in web pages like this as either render embeds or as WebGL embeds.

PS. I also think some of our infrastructure is straining a bit with +100 concurrent renders streams.

<comment><USER6> Yup, both of them take at least 1-2 seconds to respond to mouse movements. Could you do WebGL and blend into ray-traced? Have you seen what Octane/Brigade (not exactly same tech, but close) can do in realtime? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpT6MkCeP7Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpT6MkCeP7Y) (you probably have)

Anyways, Brigade is coming to cloud as well on AWS GPU instances, so it would probably be easy for you to just use their solution integrated within your modeling tool then.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is possible to integrate Octane/Brigade into our offering. The renderer, be it ThreeJS or V-Ray or Octane, is already a separable model from our tool.

Here is the same scene using our ThreeJS renderer (e.i. WebGL) integration:

[http://clara.io/embed/25bdae43-fba0-4473-af47-3425d36b4eab](http://clara.io/embed/25bdae43-fba0-4473-af47-3425d36b4eab)

We could likely blend the two together.

In fact, we & Klaas Nienhuis have done something like that with this interactive demo. The lighting is done via V-Ray but it is baked into the WebGL textures:

[http://exocortex.github.io/klaas/](http://exocortex.github.io/klaas/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's not the official Pyro model from TF2 though.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is a higher resolution custom model with higher resolution textures. The game model is a bit too simple I find. I give credits for the model in the link. :)</comment></comment>


Python Helped Me Write Again - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/62q2sm/python_helped_me_write_again/ <comment><USER2> I'm not surprised that Python performs miracles (the title is a bit biblical). I've not done much with Python, only made a couple of small hobby scripts, but both of them were programs I would never have _wanted_ to make if python didn't exist - too much effort and code spread and loss of focus.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is one of the best things I've ever read! Coding that with no hindrance would be totally beyond me. Doing it by voice is astonishing.

</comment><comment><USER4> Learning Python really gave me a few "oh wow so nice! so elegant!" Moments. Even just the syntax, and indentation..

Yes, I'm looking at you, javascripts. ;} }} }</comment>


So you were thinking of using adsense to generate income? Think again - <AUTHOR> http://www.jacquesmattheij.com/So+you+were+thinking+of+using+adsense+to+generate+income+-+Think+again <comment><USER2> Google has historically not been very open about this, but they're _very_ gradually becoming more transparent on ad pricing: their cut is 32% for ads on the content network, so the advertiser is getting charged $1.47 for every $1 you see in your stats.

See: [http://adsense.blogspot.com/2010/05/adsense-revenue- share.ht...](http://adsense.blogspot.com/2010/05/adsense-revenue-share.html)

Their customer service is abyssmal. This is intentional. Everyone doing business with Google needs to go into that relationship with eyes wide open in that respect.

reocities.com probably got banned because -- and this is a pretty important concept -- there is no incentive for their Indian quality rater to think "Hmm, although in five seconds that sure _sounds_ like it is a typosquatting spam site which is infringing on the Geocities trademark and built on industrial strength copyright violation, I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and investigate this thoroughly."

Typically, AdSense pays much, much more poorly than individually negotiated advertising buys, which is why most major sites use it only for placing remnant inventory. (It isn't called "webmaster welfare" for nothing.) You also get the best results of it if your page is essentially an extension of someone's Google search, which is why eHow gets $2.50 CPMs from just one of the thirteen ads on their bingo-related pages: their traffic is overwhelmingly (60%) direct from Google for queries with demonstrable intent in commercial areas. (This is better than quadruple the performance of most sites I advertise on. _sigh_ I'm giving aid and comfort to the enemy.) Demand Media _gets_ the psychology of advertising. Other people wanting to do it should study and study well.

<comment><USER3> "Typically, AdSense pays much, much more poorly than individually negotiated advertising buys"

What you are saying is true in some but not all cases... It's a bit more complicated than that and depends on how targeted your app/site is, as well as how much traffic you are getting.

Small startups with a lot of possible advertising topics can't solicit every possible niche. You would have to have a sales person selling bingo ads one minute, then the other niche, then the other niche etc. and then manage all those relationships.

What Adsense does is manage all that for you. No salesperson investment, no ad software investment, no prospecting etc. Also, Adsense does some other things like customizes the ad to the user's behavior (across sites), not just the page content.

Maybe what you are saying makes sense in the case of Demand Media because they have a lot of sales people.

But it's not practical for a small startup if they cover more than a few topics. They will end up with less-targeted run of site ads with lower CPM and more ad management headaches.

<comment><USER4> If you're a startup with lots of possible advertising topics, and monetizing with advertising, you're probably a UGC/social media site. Advertisers will see you as not much more than a glorified general discussion forum, and pay accordingly.

Forum traffic, unless it's very targeted to a specific niche, does NOT convert well. You won't get a good CPM no matter what. The exception to this rule is for social networks, who know enough about their users to allow demographic targeting. Even then, the CPM isn't great(I pay less than 20 cents CPM on Facebook for example). Social networks make up for this on volume, because social apps tend to generate a lot of pageviews.

That said, you will still do better with ad sales people even if you're selling general, untargeted inventory, especially if you're selling to brand advertisers.

Every couple weeks I get pestered by ad sales people from some second-tier social network who are willing to do almost anything to get an IO and commitment for a large number of impressions. Sometimes this works, even for low-quality traffic. It's possible to sell almost any kind of traffic as long as the numbers are right, and the benefit of having ad sales people, at least good ones, is that they can sell large blocks of inventory to big advertisers at once and hopefully maintain a relationship if the traffic backs out.

As for Demand Media, you're wrong about how banner buys work. If I go to cracked.com, which has lots of diverse content(and low-quality traffic), I don't see ads that are targeted to the categories or specific niches. I see banner ads from big CPG advertisers doing branding sitewide.

<comment><USER3> "Forum traffic, unless it's very targeted to a specific niche, does NOT convert well. You won't get a good CPM no matter what."

No, I'm talking about informational and news/blog sites that have hundreds or thousands of subtopics. They can get excellent CPMs with Adsense.

"That said, you will still do better with ad sales people even if you're selling general, untargeted inventory, especially if you're selling to brand advertisers."

No that's not true, unless you have a big enough company to support a lot of salespeople and really high untargeted traffic -- which is not most startups. (That's why I mentioned in my original reply that it partly depends on your traffic.)

"you're wrong about how banner buys work"

No I'm not wrong. First, I'm not interested in developing an app to sell low CPM banners. Low CPM means you are untargeted--I'm targeted. Second, the vast majorty of people on this site and doing startup do not have boatloads (100s of thousands of pageviews per day) to justify the type of ad buying your are recommending. They don't have the time nor overhead capacity to hire a staff of salespeople. Nor, do they need the headache of managing them.

They would be better of with Adsense.

"As for Demand Media, you're wrong about how banner buys work."

Actually Demand Media does both -- they _are_ using Google Adsense, its lower on the page often integrated into the articles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've said it before and I'll say it again - Adsense is remnant advertising, it's what you do to fill up the crap space that you can't sell yourself. In every other medium, network advertising is considered an option of last resort.

In the traditional media, advertising sales is a crucial function. A publisher lives or dies on the competence of their ad sales department and their ability to convince advertisers that space in their publication is worth more than just eyeballs.

It's obvious to all of us that a click isn't just a click. There are quality clicks and bad clicks. There is clear value in advertising even with no direct response. It's up to you as a publisher to convince advertisers that your readers are richer or more spendy or more enthusiastic or more easily persuaded than Joe Random.

Print publishers laugh at us for our naïveté. As online publishers, we just don't have the cultural sense that our job is to match up advertisers with people who want to be advertised to. That's the real value-add of ad-supported media, the content itself is just a hook to attract and retain the right demographic.

Ad sales is an active pursuit. If you're waiting for people to find you, you're doing it wrong. If you're expecting advertisers to know what space to buy, you're doing it wrong. If you're not thinking in terms of campaigns and strategy, you're doing it wrong. If you're not pursuing ongoing relationships with agencies, you're doing it wrong.

If you were an advertiser, would you buy advertising from you?

<comment><USER6> > Ad sales is an active pursuit. If you're waiting for people to find you, > you're doing it wrong. If you're expecting advertisers to know what space to > buy, you're doing it wrong. If you're not thinking in terms of campaigns and > strategy, you're doing it wrong. If you're not pursuing ongoing > relationships with agencies, you're doing it wrong.

Ok, sounds fair. How do you go about doing that? I have a site, <http://langpop.com> that could use some better advertising than AdSense, but I don't have a very good idea about how to track someone down that would pay to advertise on it.

I have some other sites where there's a more direct connection that I could make between who might want to advertise, and thus chase those deals a little bit more easily, but with that, and others that I've done, selling ads just isn't in my repertoir of skills. You've convinced me that either it should be or I should find someone who is good at it... any ideas how? AdSense is very easy to get started with.

<comment> mkr-hn Go find companies that sell programming related products like IDEs and libraries, go to their corporate site, find the person most like a marketing representative, and pitch your ad space to them.

<comment><USER6> Hrm. Are there any steps in between that and AdSense? I'm not sure it's a terribly efficient solution:

* I'm not a great sales guy, and the opportunity costs (consulting money) are not insignificant.

* I don't have a good idea of how much to sell space for.

* Other people have to have a better handle on this stuff than I do. If they can make me more money than I would alone, why not split it? Or at the very least, make me more money than AdSense and not make me waste my time trying to track down companies ("Hi, uh, IBM, want to buy some ads?")

<comment><USER5> The first and last step is to start thinking about the 'true' purpose of your website - as a lead generation tool, a system that converts interest into sales prospects. You're the very top of the sales funnel.

The essential purpose of langpop.com is to establish which languages are most popular. Implicitly, most people coming to your site are trying to work out which language is 'best'. The obvious strategy is to work your website towards answering that question and in the process gaining more information about your visitors and their purchasing intent.

As it stands, the only thing we know about anyone on your site is that they have some vague interest in programming languages. The more concrete our picture of your visitors, the more precisely we can target advertising, the better it will convert and so the more you can charge for it. The Adsense algorithm tries to do this implicitly, but it does it relatively poorly.

For example, the "about the languages" section could be expanded massively, with a (keyword-dense) review of each language and (affiliate) links to books, tutorial material, IDEs, code review tools and so on. Adsense links on these pages should see better bids and better clickthrough, but that's entirely secondary.

<comment><USER7> Spot on. For an example of a site that takes broad interest in tech and tries its best to funnel it, look at <http://builtwith.com> , particularly the "build" tab.

They provide a list of affilaite linkbait for each technology you might be interested in. It's not that bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> the problem with adsense is 3 fold:

a) ad blindness...people have learned to ignore those text links just like they've ignored the banner ads. The only way to actually profit off adsense is to design your entire site around the ad.

b) adblock - more and more people are blocking ads, so you get less and less revenue

c) ad efficiency - more and more advertisers are starting to recognize that the quality of traffic on the display network are crap so they pay MUCH less for it. The CPC on the keyword tool may be $2 per click...but in reality you'll only get 15-20 cents for adsense

So once you pair all of that up...you realize that it takes 30,000 visitors to make $50 a month on adsense.

And yes at scale you can still make a buck...but why would you bother if there are many better options out there?

Sell a single ad space for $100/mo and you double your profit. Sell 3 ad spaces, and you increase it 6 fold.

Or forget ads altogether and go premium. If you get conversions down to 1:200 after you optimize the sales page/price...that 30,000 people turns into 150 sales. So even if you go with a cheap $5/mo subscription option, that turns into $750/mo...recurring. Or if you decide to charge $19.99, you end up with $3K.

The only reason to use adsense is to have something generating revenue until you decide to get serious with your site.

<comment><AUTHOR> > The only reason to use adsense is to have something generating revenue until > you decide to get serious with your site.

I see styleguidance.com still has google ads ;)

<comment><USER8> and auto-conversion to affiliate links, and some ad sales.

but yeah I could do more with it

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> AdSense was designed to help Google offload their abundance of keyword inventory. They have millions of people bidding on keywords. Web pages have keywords. So AdSense is a great tool to help them sell what they already have.

Adsense wasn't designed with increasing publisher revenue in mind. Google doesn't operate it as a primary business and the revenue ig make pales in comparison to search advertising. That's why they don't act like any sane business when it comes to customer service. Ads might stop working. They certainly won't give you answers as to why. You may make a lot of money or only a little this month. On the whole, they don't care.

Google has actually changed the name to "Google Display" and a lot of the ads that I see are retargeted. I don't know if this is actually increasing publisher revenues, but I would love to hear first hand about that from the HN community.

By and large, AdSense will work well for you if a high percentage (>60%) of the traffic to your site is based on search queries. It works best as an extension of the search advertising process. If you have a community or user generated content, then you'll need to find another solution.

</comment><comment><USER10> While adsense was my main route of raman profit, I'm considering to converting to something like fiverr. Creating domains and websites every 2 weeks for a niche is fun/mind numbing/building {research|programming} skills, but if I can just score two gigs a day on fiverr I can typically match/overcome my adsense on 2 sites. Without the hassle of updating, maintaining, and worrying about my {linode|sites|keywords}. There's also the fact that domains go stale after a niche dies off, so, domain renewals etc.

Now if I have the opportunity to snag a domain about the bp oil spill before it gets in mainstream media and snag in $30+ a day... adsense might be my piece of cake again.

You can't completely knock adsense... its basically nonsense advertising. You never contact google, they never contact you (unless you violate the 1 page, 10 sentence ToS). My girlfriend and my uncle both use it and had a harder time setting up a facebook account.

</comment><comment><USER11> daz.com looks like a f __ing spam site to me; I've got Markov Chains that make sites that look more honest than that. If you want to make a living making sites like that you've got to spam the f __k out of them so you get a lot of money fast, and be careful to make up phony identities so you can keep getting new adsense accounts and not get your new domains burned.

Once you've got a good content gen system, the really interesting question becomes: "how do I create protective coloration so that I can pass site reviews?"

daz.com obviously answers that one poorly

<comment><AUTHOR> > daz.com looks like a fing spam site to me; I've got Markov Chains that make > sites that look more honest than that.

I'm sure the 60,000+ users that put it together over the last couple of years will be appreciative of that comment.

> If you want to make a living making sites like that you've got to spam the > fk out of them so you get a lot of money fast, and be careful to make up > phony identities so you can keep getting new adsense accounts and not get > your new domains burned.

That was not the plan.

> Once you've got a good content gen system, the really interesting question > becomes: "how do I create protective coloration so that I can pass site > reviews?" > daz.com obviously answers that one poorly

Well, for some reason it passed those 'site reviews' for the first couple of years with flying colours, and then overnight the ads stopped working and there is no way to get an answer out of google _why_ that happened, given a multi-year business relationship that wasn't too much to ask for.

It's their right to disable those ads based on whatever the terms-of-service are, but the least they could do is:

       (1) tell me about it

       (2) do that without being asked

       (3) point out which part of their terms-of-service was violated

Rumour has it that the site was blocked because it contains the word 'hard- core', which refers to a music genre, not to porn, but we've not been able to get that substantiated either.

<comment><USER11> Well, when I look at the site I see a random jumble of one-liners, non- sequitors and meaningless links. If you got 60,000 people to make that site, you really wasted their time (and yours.)

Just take a look at a page like:

<http://daz.com/artists/Glenn%20Miller.html>

I mean, the top of that page repeats "trombone 0000 - 0000 delete" hundreds of times... That page just screams "this is trash"

there's no human voice obvious there, no attempt to contextualize or organized anything. I could scrape that stuff off some other sites and make something better looking in a week. Then I'd drop a few million spam links on it, expect to collect adsense for 2 months, then close the bank account.

<comment><AUTHOR> > I mean, the top of that page repeats "trombone 0000 - 0000 delete" hundreds > of times...

It does that 6 times, once for each member of the band. The '0000 - 0000' texts are placeholders for unknown dates, the delete links allow you to remove that entry in case it is mistaken.

All the edits are then piped in to a holding tank where they're verified before being made part of the page. This results in very little attempts to spam the site, on the 'no broken windows' theory, nobody ever made it through.

> there's no human voice obvious there, no attempt to contextualize or > organized anything. I could scrape that stuff off some other sites and make > something better looking in a week.

I believe you. But it has to start somewhere. Maybe you'd be scraping this one...

> Then I'd drop a few million spam links on it, expect to collect adsense for > 2 months, then close the bank account.

I see.

I'm beginning to understand why adsense is the way it is, thank you for enlightening me.

<comment><USER12> As trollish as the guy you were responding to is, his criticism about the site's design doesn't strike me as totally inaccurate. I would encourage you to tweak it to, as he said, make the 'human voice' more obvious.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's tricky because the whole idea behind daz is to register the 'graph', so the majority of the data consists of artists, bands, song and album titles, dates and connections between those.

It's like a giant network of musical collaboration, hard to give that a 'voice'. It's major use is to find music by bands that are related through one or more members.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This article is a misguided gross oversimplificaton of the issue.

I agree that you shouldn't _only_ rely on adsense the rest of your life. But if you are starting with either solid CPM targeted traffic or a lot of traffic or both, then it's a good way to get begin booking some revenue.

Why? If you are a developer you probably don't want to spend your initial days soliciting people for advertising instead of developing your product.

Plus, Adsense can more effectively target customers than the few companies you solicit with your meager resources.

</comment><comment><USER13> All I know is this: I'm making $50 / day from adsense. That pays my rent in San Francisco.

I'm currently in the process of acquiring direct advertiers, but I'd have to disagree with the author about using adsense as direct income.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'd like to know more about what other ad networks were appraised, and why they were no good. I'm going to have to rely on ad networks for my own web app, at least for a while, and it would be pretty helpful if there was was decent customer service on the inventory side.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've looked at: adbrite, adroll, tribalfusion and a bunch of others after asking HN if I should go and make an inventory of advertising networks and how well they perform relative to each other.

None of them comes close to adsense in terms of performance (and adsense absolutely sucks, if you can get $1.00 ECPM out of adsense for a large volume website then you're very very lucky), so even if they would handle customer service better than google (most of them don't) they would still be pretty bad income wise.

<comment><USER15> You should try to find vertical ad networks, these are the ones getting the higher ECPMs ($5-$20). I run a couple programmer focused networks, but there are networks out there for just about anything. Here are some off the top of my head:

<http://www.sportgenic.com/> \- sports focused

<http://www.glammedia.com> \- Gender based

<http://www.halogennetwork.com> \- Influentials

<http://www.longboardmedia.com/> \- Consumers/Shopping

<comment><USER16> Kudos for not pumping your own stuff, but...what are these programmer focused networks?

<comment><USER15> The Lounge (.NET developers) - <http://theloungenet.com>

Ruby Row (Ruby developers) - <http://rubyrow.net>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The author's point about Google's support is the key one. Even if your site is generating Google thousands of dollars, it's impossible to get a human if something goes wrong. As an AdSense publisher (and purchaser) I'd gladly pay some monthly premium to be able to contact Google support.

</comment><comment><USER18> I used to get a £0.20 ($0.31 US) eCPM for 0.33% CTR (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1136710>), however, after getting a call from a Google account manager who had some extra inventory to shift for June, we've since been seeing (£0.39) $0.61 eCPM.

Tip: if you have some UK or German traffic, consider Adjug (<http://www.adjug.com/>) you can set a CPM floor (we set £0.40) and your own backfill. We are setup like this:

Premium Ads (via our agent) > £1 guaranteed backfill > £0.40 backfill (Adjug) > Adsense & House Ads

The only problem is slight delay in tags loading is one of the servers is slow.

</comment><comment><USER19> Ultimately you should be looking at selling your own adverts anyway (or at least using a genuine advertising agency who can pull in decent targetted adverts), then you won't have problems with Analytics, and you'll also make a hell of a lot more money.

<comment><USER20> I'm looking at selling my own adverts and I have advertisers wanting to give me their money and copy.

Does anyone know of a system to automate that stuff?

What I'm looking for needs to have:

* Allow advertisers to upload copy and request an advert slot.

* Allow an advert slot to be time-based regardless of number of impressions (1 month in a slot that rotates 10 adverts).

* Send me an email when a slot has been booked so that I review the advert against the end user agreement (that it's not abusive, totally inappropriate).

* That I can approve an advert and then it sends a message to the advertiser with an invoice and requesting payment.

* That the advertiser then pays via Google Checkout, PayPal, etc.

* That after all of that the advert goes live for a scheduled period of time.

* That the advertiser can see impressions, stats and reports letting them know the success of their campaign.

* It should look professional and ideally be themeable/skinnable or self-hosted so that I can make it seamless (the advertisers want to deal with me... I want to reduce my work).

Basically... aside from me approving the content I want a system that hand- holds the advertiser through the whole process and shoves the advert on the site and just gives me the money at the end.

I have 4.5 million page views per month, on a very strong community website.

What I've seen out there that does part of the above doesn't do the whole story... I'm quite willing to pay to get the above.

I'm probably just not googling for the right terms, what should I be looking for?

At the moment I'm leaving money on the table because my time and sanity is more important to me than the money. I realise that this isn't the best business sense and so either I find some tool to help me, or find the time to build one myself.

<comment><USER21> The self serve ad market has been grossly ignored. A good startup opportunity.

<http://buysellads.com> does some of it, but is very limited in the options (30 day buy only).

<https://www.isocket.com/> promises to do more, and seems like a very promising option. it's in private beta now. So, I haven't tried it.

<comment><USER22> One thing that is very important to understand when selling ads on your own is how those ads are actually sold. Depending on your site, the niche, and how much time and effort you put into the ad sales process, results can vary greatly. At the end of the day, the only thing that REALLY matters is if ads are sold or not sold. Software alone, in my opinion, won't get the job done. With roughly 2 and a half years of data from running BSA, less than 20% of ad sales come from a publishers website directly - sure, some sites are higher and some are lower, but 20% is the average (and we're in a tech savvy space).

One of Arn's sites, for example, came into BSA with a handful of ad sales. And, once we worked with him and his team on pricing and marketed the site to our existing advertiser base in the iphone niche, his sales soared. I don't know the exact numbers, and I doubt Arn would appreciate me sharing these here - but it's safe to say that his ad sales at least tripled once he joined BSA. In this case, it wasn't the software, it was our ability to sell ads for his site.

The point I'm trying to make: there are a billion ad networks out there. Do some research on them before using them, try some out, and find the ones that sell for YOUR site the best. And, if you can sell ads on your own, do it - hard code them into the site, have people pay you via PayPal, and use a network to supplement those sales.

Full disclosure: I run BuySellAds.com

<comment><USER23> Would be interested in exploring opportunities to work with you guys on ipodtouchfans.com (site in same space as arn's). My email is username at gmail.

<comment><USER22> sent you an email a couple days ago, maybe I got the address wrong? :)

if you didn't get anything, can you ping me at email@example.com so that I make sure I have the right email address?

we would kick ass for ipodtouchfans.com, very nice fit with our existing inventory and advertiser base.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Couple of things I've noticed about adsense - have no idea if they apply here, but maybe it hasn't been considered.

If the colour of the links and whatnot are two similar to what you are using on the site (particularly if they are positioned to look much like links) the ads can fail to appear. This has happened to me a few times and I've changed the colour to have them up and working again within a few minutes.

Another thing - I've also had pages fail to display adsense where the content is exactly the same as another page serving adsense (botched url structure in my case).

I assume you've tested these things - but figured it may be worth mentioning anyway. You never know.

</comment><comment><USER25> "And today, it happened again. This time on reocities.com, my rescue attempt for geocities where it helped to pay for the hosting. After serving up the ads for a while suddenly I'm shown a nice blank rectangle where the ads were before. No explanation"

Uh... maybe the fact that it's a bunch of stolen content?

To the OP, I realise you're trying to do a noble thing, but that content is not public domain. Trying to preserve it is cool. Trying to profit off it is not so cool. Bit of a grey area and it's easy to just turn you off than get into some heated, obviously biased discussion with the site owner.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Trying to profit off it is not so cool.

I don't think that 'profit' means the same to you as it does to me. At adsense income levels reocities will _never_ be profitable, and I have a couple of _thousand_ thank you notes collected by now that prove that on the whole people are pretty happy that I did what I did.

People that request removal of their pages have it backed up now (I do that for whoever asks to create a zip file of all their content), and those that don't want their old stuff online any more because it is either inaccurate or because they can't update it (reocities is 'read only').

In some cases they want it removed because they put private info online back when everybody did that or because they are now professional designers and don't want their geocities stuff to haunt them.

And, of course, whoever asks has their content removed, once every month or so I filter my inbox on 'reocities' and 'geocities' to process the removal requests.

It's still a manual process, that's how little it gets requested, but I probably should automate it somehow.

If in the long run reocities contains no pages and all the stuff has been moved to the proper owners again then I'll be more than happy, that would be the best outcome.

Having some adsense ads in there was a way to offset some (but not all by a long shot) of the hosting costs.

<comment><USER26> Why don't you spend an hour or two and make it read/write ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Because I'd be flooded with spam.

<comment><USER26> That's not necessarily true. I agree with the other guy that you are really just scraping content and trying to profit off it. If people really wanted to save their content, they could have done that. Most of what you have is probably abandoned.

<comment><AUTHOR> > I agree with the other guy that you are really just scraping content and > trying to profit off it.

You can agree with him as much as you want, it just isn't true.

> If people really wanted to save their content, they could have done that.

Part of the problem here was that yahoo did a pretty bad job at communicating their intention to the people that had their sites there. Essentially Yahoo tried to convert the 'holdouts' from the free portion of the site to paid hosting accounts 'or else'. When they pulled the plug it left 10's of millions of accounts up in the air.

There were several attempts at rescuing as much of geocities as could be done, the fact that you don't know any of this isn't really your fault, after all your account is all of 40 minutes old, but when it happened it was fairly widely publicised both here on HN and in the regular media.

> Most of what you have is probably abandoned.

You'd be surprised.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Adsense was amazing for the first year, but after it became mainstream, the rates fell drastically.

If your website has a strong brand and design (i.e. isn't a blog) then there's lots of alternatives that pay better.

<comment><AUTHOR> > there's lots of alternatives that pay better.

Such as ?

<comment><USER27> It depends on the topic that your website specialises in. Determine that, then search for ad networks and rep firms that represent those areas. If you find the right service and you are well know enough within the niche, they will personally pitch your website to their clients.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> (BTW, copyright statement still says 2009 on daz.com)

<comment><AUTHOR> Good catch, thank you! (fixed)

<comment><USER28> Why put a date on the copyright at all?

<comment><USER6> A few minutes of Googling:

[http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=48127#post53...](http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=48127#post539251)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> My father makes about $400.00 a month from adsense. He's been working with it for at least a year, and he'll probably be making five as much as that in another year.</comment>


How can poetry that doesn't rhyme be so pleasing to the ear? - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/id/2271417/

<comment><USER2> Without form, meter or plot, Dylan Thomas' _Under Milk Wood_ , a 'play for voices,' is my favorite work of epic poetry.

Richard Burton leads the first, and best, recorded performance: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xy0srtmv3og&feature=&...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xy0srtmv3og&feature=&p=508876142E8E83DB&index=0&playnext=1) \- but at two hours, you may want to wait rather than interrupt it once begun.

</comment><comment><USER3> I would argue that the lyrical quality of poetry comes from the meter and cadence of the words, and not from rhyming. Personally, rhyming poetry sounds goofy to me. Without meter, it's just flat prose. Although I'm sure a good speaker (e.g., Morgan Freeman) can make flat prose sound "poetic"

</comment><comment><USER4> Answer: Have Morgan Freeman read it.

</comment><comment><USER5> Rhyme is but an ornament, hung from the branch of a greater, elemental thing.</comment>


Oracle accepts $0 in damages from Google, moves toward appeal - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/06/oracle-accepts-0-in-damages-from-google-moves-toward-appeal/

<comment><USER2> Does that mean Google accepted they infringed by paying the $0? I'm not joking.

<comment><USER3> The judge and jury found that Google infringed in a few cases. Now Google can either appeal or not but I don't think they've said whether they plan to.

<comment><USER4> Google has nothing to appeal. They were found to infringe on 7 lines of code and a small set of test files. Both parties agreed during trial that this infringement has no monetary value.

Oracle can appeal the judges ruling on API copyright. If they succeed then Google will likely push for a new trial because the jury didn't return a decision on fair use.

<comment><USER5> The ruling was pretty airtight, though, from all accounts.

Why would Oracle pursue what ultimately will be a tremendous waste of resources for them and for everybody else? (This is a bit of a rhetorical question.)

<comment><USER6> Honest question:

Is the ruling really 'pretty airtight' ? ie: does Oracle really have no chance at winning on an appeal?

<comment><USER7> The ruling that the APIs were not copyrightable was directly tied to the details of the specific APIs in this case. Among other things, this is because existing Ninth Circuit caselaw was unfavorable to an absolute bar on API copyrights, so Judge Alsup couldn't easily rule on the law independently of the case in front of him. To make an analogy, he could have found a phone number or address uncopyrightable as a general rule, but to decide if a copied portion of a book is copyrightable he has to look at what's in it (both the portion and the book as a whole).

Appeals courts aren't supposed to overturn factual findings unless they are "clearly erroneous". Judge Alsup was careful with his findings and he has experience with programming that the selected appeals-court judges are unlikely to have. While it is theoretically possible they'd second-guess his factual findings, it would be a very big stretch. And if you take his factual findings as-is, it becomes pretty hard to challenge his legal interpretation of those facts (especially since none of the coverage I've read suggests that his legal reasoning was unusual or controversial).

It isn't impossible for Oracle to win on appeal, but their changes are slim. Beyond that, if they win on appeal all they get is a do-over on the API copyright question (and it is unclear what the parameters of that do-over would be). Given that we know that the jury deadlocked at 9-3 in favor of Google on fair use (and was 11-1 in Google's favor earlier in the deliberations), even if Oracle got their do-over the odds are against them winning anything meaningful from it.

<comment><USER8> Also, it's important that the Judge instructed the jury to assume APIs were copyrightable. So even if the API copyright judgement is reversed the jury's decisions still stand.

<comment><USER9> The jury made no decision on fair use, and the judge declared a mistrial on that portion of the case. His subsequent ruling moots the whole issue (no copyright, no infringement) --- but if that ruling were reversed, there would be a new trial on at least fair use. And IIRC, Google has indicated that they'd want a new trial on all copyright matters at that point.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>