The stock market is controlled by algorithms that are fighting with each other - <AUTHOR> http://io9.com/5800577/the-stock-market-depends-on-how-algorithms-are-interacting-with-each-other?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=pulsenews <comment><USER2> Something that I've never understood.

We have markets that are based on allowing trades to happen at any agreed on price, as fast as people's minds can meet. Which can therefore result in very high volatility.

Why hasn't anyone tried building a market that goes the opposite way? Prices drift at a fixed rate (eg min(1 cent, 0.05% of price)/minute) in a direction determined by whether there is an excess of buy or sell orders, and trades execute as soon as both a buy and a sell are available at the right price. This would give greatly reduced instant volatility in return for uncertainty about how quickly orders will complete.

The advantage of the latter strategy being that it is very resistant to attempts to compromise it via high frequency trading techniques. That 1/100th of a second time margin doesn't matter because the price changes too slowly. Therefore a long-term investor knows that they aren't getting charged "rent" via the automated algorithms.

It might be objected that lack of trading volume would make such a market initially useless. But arbitrage would keep its price close to the mainstream market. Hmmm..I guess it initially comes down to whether you're paying more in rent on arbitrage or on HFT...

<comment><USER3> This reminds me of my idea for a compiler that guarantees performance but not correctness, instead of the other way round.

<comment><USER4> 3D rendering and media compression are almost entirely based on the idea that "close enough" is vastly cheaper than "do it right". At the code level, though... You'd have to be fairly careful about what you allowed, and you'd probably have to be able to enforce correctness to some degree to get any meaningful use out of it.

I like the idea of a compiler making lossy simplifications to mathematical formulas for speed - "You told me to divide by seven. This (faster) machine code divides by 8 most of the time, and divides by 4 every now and then." Blindly trusting the branch-predictor could be fun, too, as long as it took into account the correct answer in its subsequent predictions.

Were you thinking along similar lines, or did you have something completely different in mind?

<comment><USER3> I like those ideas a lot. I hadn't thought about it in enough detail to come up with similar ones, but that's exactly what I was hoping for.

The problem, of course, is that it's hard to find a metric for "close enough" that works for every program. Perhaps it's easier if you're compiling from a high-level language than from C.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Artificial Intelligences warring with each other on stock markets?

Witness the birth of Skynet, it's not going to be a military machine but a predatory corporate AI. Originally designed to devour competing AIs on the capital markets only to turn on its masters when the funds run out.

Woah. Spooky. Someone tell WIlliam Gibson and Vernor Vinge. Hell, I'd write that story if I had the time!

 __EDIT __

oh no! It's a predatory Corporate AI that has built in new monitoring functions. The news monitoring subprocess has discovered that there's a predictable correlation between WAR and stock market fluctuation.

What does it do, suddenly places a whole stack of extremem long shot PUTS and SHORTS then hacks into the military computers to instigate a war between two nations.

We've got a grizzled reporter or plucky young cop (maybe an SEC investigator?) who's doing routine investigations into this and that and uncovers a series of small time conflicts in bananna republics. (these were A/B split testing 'dry runs' the damned AI was reading the visual website optimizer's blog posts!)

Just as he (or she's) connecting the dots on the small time stuff there's a major tunabout and the AI has put a bunch of shorts ON US SOIL.... !!! (oh noes! all of america is at risk!)

Boom! Race around trying to uncover the source... but now the AI is on to him (or her) and has started hacking public records to declare him (or her) as public enemy number one.

Then ... ROBOT ATTACK!! Just as he or she is on the final sprint to disconnect the AI's network cables - military robots spring out of their boxes and start shooting. PEW PEW PEW.

ALso - after the cable gets unplugged of course we learn that it's already made it out into the CLOUD!

I love this story :) Just the right balance of total cheese and hard Sci Fi.

<comment><USER6> "Woah. Spooky. Someone tell William Gibson and Vernor Vinge."

cstross, actually: [http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog- static/fiction/accelera...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog- static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando-intro.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sigh. VWAP isn't an algorithm, it's a benchmark. Volume-weighted Average Price. An algorithm that is attempting to trade VWAP is trying to get the day's average price, whatever it is. And a good algorithm is quite hard to detect.

<comment><USER8> Most shops call their VWAP-benched algo "VWAP".

<http://www.thetradenews.com/algorithmic-trading>

VWAP algos try to beat VWAP over the order's timeframe, which is almost never the entire day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Brutal title (Not OP's fault).

The article basically suggests that algos are reducing market volatility.

Algos don't try really hard to get VWAP. VWAP is REALLY easy to achieve, _beating_ VWAP is what most banks are trying to do when they trade large blocks.

A lot of the stories about warring algos and detecting each other are just that: stories. Yes, it has happened, but by and large thats not the game thats going on.

<comment><USER10> Citation needed for your assertion that VWAP is "REALLY easy to achieve".

<comment><USER11> In the extreme case, consider you were on the other side of every other trade that happened in the market. You would by definition have achieved VWAP over some time period.

Trading randomly during any given time period probably comes close to achieving VWAP. I'm sure something a little more intelligent could probably achieve it in expectation.

<comment><USER12> VWAP is "volume-weighted average price," not "average price". Therefore, to replicate it, you need to participate in line with volume-at-time, not 1/N per time bucket. This requires you to estimate the volume envelope over the time period of interest. (Often a day, or in the case of hedging certain new issue convertible bonds, up to several days.)

<comment><USER11> Yeah, that's why I said in the extreme case you have to participate in all the volume. Of course randomly trading doesn't prove that you achieve VWAP, but I'm just saying that it's probably not terribly far off.

<comment><USER10> And how far is "not terribly far"? Pennies? Nickles? Dimes? Dollars?

I can say with a great deal of confidence that a "random" VWAP algorithm would, on average, suck.

<comment><USER12> For context:

Many brokers will guarantee an execution at VWAP. It's a competitive business. The last time I put in such an order, I traded a double-digit percentage of the day's volume and paid 10bp commission (0.10%).

<comment><USER10> Brokers guarantee VWAP only if they also are paid a very healthy commission. They generally lose to VWAP, but makeup for it in premiums.

Plus, if you are dealing with a large broker they may just cross your order with an offsetting order (or their own position, execute nothing in the market and keep the entire premium.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Source article:

[http://www.lrb.co.uk/2011/05/19/donald-mackenzie/how-to- make...](http://www.lrb.co.uk/2011/05/19/donald-mackenzie/how-to-make-money- in-microseconds)

Not set to be published until the 19th of this month.

</comment><comment><USER14> If you've done any daytrading, you've seen these algorithms in action. I know a few folks who could make a small fortune daily just by "fooling" the algorithms by setting extraordinarily high or low order prices, and rarely actually filling one of those orders. There is lots of money to be had (and lost) by mathematicians in the stock market, and there is a lot to be said for technical analysis... but it's a jungle out there.

<comment><USER7> there's nothing to be said for technical analysis. it doesn't work.

<comment><USER15> PBS documentary on Paul Tudor Jones from 1986:

<http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/XH5W4vffBbY>

Sorry that the first 10 seconds are shady japanese yogurt commercials, last time I looked the videos were $300 on ebay reportedly because PTJ had gone around buying up all the tapes (maybe the glasses?)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> For those curious, here's a link to the full text of the Isaac Asimov short story that was mentioned in the text, The Evitable Conflict: [http://members.multimania.co.uk/shortstories/asimovconflict....](http://members.multimania.co.uk/shortstories/asimovconflict.html)

</comment><comment><USER17> For people who speak dutch, there's a great interactive documentary for the iPad called "Money & Speed" that examines the flash crash and high-frequency trading:

[http://itunes.apple.com/nl/app/money-speed-inside-black- box/...](http://itunes.apple.com/nl/app/money-speed-inside-black- box/id411884445)

</comment><comment><USER18> The Core Wars, on a huge canvas.

</comment><comment><USER19> HFT is the legalized way of insider trading and front running

<comment><USER20> Absolutely! If the computer 'decided' on these illegal strategies theres impunity!

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Shouldn't we be hoping that more and more bots enter the markets? Sure, there will be a period when hackers will be able to exploit their weaknesses, but in the due time they will evolve and market will equilibrate, making today's speculative traders' job much harder.</comment>


Request Now: Need feedback Allows DJ to receive SMS song requests  - <AUTHOR> http://request-now.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Right, it's not really for the club or bar scene where they would have their own set list. It's more for birthdays, Sweet 16, high school dances, weddings or bar mitzvahs. These types of events the DJ's actually take requests.

</comment><comment><USER2> You have an interesting concept, but realistically, many DJs do not take requests.

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7mr8KxF_4U></comment>


F-1 Thrust Chamber - <AUTHOR> http://heroicrelics.org/info/f-1/f-1-thrust-chamber.html <comment><USER2> A similar design (the space shuttle main engine) brought me some peace of mind at work one day.

Nowadays, I do deep learning for a living, before that I was doing computer vision. One day I am really pissed off at some compiling issue, with a parallel code and I am like "fuck this, this is a plumbing issue! I should spend my time on algorithms and shit. Not on ordering the damn bytes of the raw pixels. I have done that for years, that should be a solved problem by now."

I go on reddit for some well-deserved outrage-slacking and stumble on the shuttle engine. "Yeah, that's what I am talking about. Now that is engineering." Then I realized it is basically a maze of pipes and pumps.

Uh, yeah, 95% of plumbing (and some metallurgy feats as well). Ok, back to coding my data pipelines then...

<comment><USER3> _" Aerospace is plumbing with the volume turned up"_ \-- John Carmack

<comment><USER4> "All engineering is plumbing - some fields just manage to avoid working on broken sinks & toilets" -anonymous

<comment><USER3> Even the arts aren't necessarily safe. A story told by the composer Philip Glass in 2011:

> _While working, I suddenly heard a noise and looked up to find Robert > Hughes, the art critic of Time magazine, staring at me in disbelief. 'But > you're Philip Glass! What are you doing here?' It was obvious that I was > installing his dishwasher and I told him I would soon be finished. 'But you > are an artist,' he protested. I explained that I was an artist but that I > was sometimes a plumber as well and that he should go away and let me > finish._

<comment><USER5> My day job is plumbing. I really very badly want to be able to make a decent living through the skills I've been practicing outside of my job, and this quote is motivating to me. Thank you! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here is 500 fps film of the Saturn V launch for Apollo 11, narrated by Mark Gray. It explains the sequence of events over the course of 8+ minutes (30 seconds real time).

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKtVpvzUF1Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKtVpvzUF1Y)

<comment><USER7> Thanks for that, great video that led me to this, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImoQqNyRL8Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImoQqNyRL8Y), sound recording organised by Dustin from SmarterEveryDay of the latest SpaceX launch, the sonic booms of the boosters coming into land are amazing, listen with headphones!

<comment><USER8> Just as a Side-note: that video is from the Falcon Heavy demo launch last year.

The recent launch was the first commercial Falcon Heavy launch (Arabsat 6a)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I had a chance to see an F-1 at the Destination Moon exhibit which just opened at the Museum of Flight in Seattle. It is astonishingly large. If you're in the area, or near one of the other (few) locations where they are on display, I would definitely recommend going.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocketdyne_F-1#Locations_of_F-...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocketdyne_F-1#Locations_of_F-1_engines)

(The Apollo 11 command module is there, too!)

<comment><USER8> > The Apollo 11 command module is there, too

Temporarily though. Normally it's exhibited at the Smithsonian in Washington DC (Which is also absolutely worth a visit).

<comment><USER10> This is excellent information. I'm headed to Seattle from Norway in May, and will definitely take the opportunity to check this out :D

<comment><USER11> If anyone's near Huntsville, AL, the Space and Rocket Center has stacks of stuff for your gawking pleasure. Although I think the only F-1 you can go up and rub on is outside the MSFC main building, which you wouldn't get to unless you take a MSFC tour.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Using the fuel to both cool the nozzle and pre-heat the fuel is just genius. (The method first appeared on the V2.)

<comment><USER13> Concorde used fuel as a coolant also, not to cool the jet nozzle, but ancillary things.

[http://www.concordesst.com/fuelsys.html](http://www.concordesst.com/fuelsys.html)

<comment><USER14> The SR-71 used it to cool its skin and keep it around 300°C during Mach-3 flight. It also used it to cool its engines.

<comment><USER13> Isn't it also the SR-71 that has to expand to become fuel tight, and so leaks fuel all over the runway at takeoff.

<comment><USER15> I wonder how do this kind of crazy engineering ideas happen. What is gained by _not_ making the thing fuel tight unconditionally? Leaking fuel at takeoff sounds extremely dangerous!

<comment><USER16> It also helps that the SR-71 fuel was almost impossible to ignite. It couldn't be spark ignited, instead they used triethylborane, an pyrophoric liquid that burns in contact with air. It's also used to ignite rocket engines as its reactive enough to burn on contact with liquid oxygen.

<comment><USER13> "almost impossible to ignite" .... "pyrophoric liquid that burns in contact with air"

Those seem mutually exclusive?

Do you mean that triethylborane ignites the fuel?

<comment><USER13> I don't know why I'm getting down votes for this, its a reasonable question.

To answer my own question triethylborane is indeed used to ignite the main fuel.

[https://www.quora.com/Why-was-Triethylborane-used-as-a- start...](https://www.quora.com/Why-was-Triethylborane-used-as-a-starter-fuel- for-the-SR-71-Blackbirds)

<comment><USER17> You're getting downvoted because you're calling out an inconsistency that doesn't exist. The fuel that doesn't burn is separate from the pyrophoroc stuff used to start it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I am finding it astonishing that they could construct them at all, never mind get them to work and not explode.

There is a great deal of this in modern life that we successfully ignore until management failure makes it unmaintainable any more.

<comment><USER19> I don't have any data for the F-1, but the typical high power rocket engines of these days had an explosive temperament that needed to be tamed on the test stands. I recall that the SSME had a tendency to self-disassemble vilently on its test stand due to turbo pump failures that took a long time to solve. Other rocket engines probably were very similar in that regard.

<comment><USER20> IIRC, the injector plate on the F1 had to go through quite a few iterations to keep the engine from exploding.

<comment><USER21> and according to a documentary I watched, they never knew WHY it stopped exploding, just that they found a plate that made it not explode anymore.

Von Braun: "So what was the problem?" Engineer: "dunno"

<comment><USER11> _Ignition!_ by John Clark mentions it, although I don't think he tells that anecdote. Just that they were going to look at fancier designs, but the showerhead (with baffles) worked just fine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> What I find most amazing about these engines isn't the complexity but rather that they operated successfully despite multiple errors. We are often told that a single failure will destroy the craft, but that really wasn't the case. Shuttle make it to orbit with multiple cracked tubes in one engine. Some bits from the recovered F-1s show clear manufacturing errors. Building something that will work at these energy levels is hard, but creating something that can survive multiple random failures and still keep ticking is spectacular.

</comment><comment><USER23> The performance and track record of these engines is even more impressive when you realize that all of the design and modeling work was largely done by hand!

This is perhaps apocryphal, but I briefly worked with a guy who'd worked on the F-1 engine, and he said they'd use surplus WW2 grenades to simulate distortions/aberrations in the combustion chamber.

</comment><comment><USER11> Wrapping the turbine exhaust around the fuel return manifold would seem to be counter-productive---exhaust gasses would heat the fuel, reducing its cooling efficiency as it returns to the top of the engine.

...Unless the fuel at that point was already hotter than the turbine exhaust...

Rocket engines are weird.

<comment><USER24> The turbine exhaust forms a barrier between the uncooled portion of the nozzle and the chamber exhaust, which is significantly hotter. It's not colder than the unburned fuel being used for regenerative cooling, but the bottom of the nozzle isn't regeneratively cooled anyways.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This engine is still outstanding - after all these years - for the thrust per single chamber it achieves. May be only the RD-270 approached similar value for the parameter. Which is not the most important parameter, but not an insignificant one as well.</comment>


Ask HN: review my app whereslunch.org - <AUTHOR>

I've been working on whereslunch.org as a side project and I'd love good feedback on it.  It's designed to help you find new restaurants to try for lunch.<p>If you create an account you can rate restaurants and get suggestions about restaurants you might like.  (and you can sign in with OpenID!) <comment><USER2> when buying a domain make sure the ______.com of your __ __ __.org isn't porn

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about that! Good, clear domain names are a little hard to come by. I probably should have thought of a more clever name...

<comment><USER3> Hahaha....who would have guessed a name like that would be a porn site though?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I really like the concept. A few suggestions for the UI:

1\. Why make me choose a city at all? Start me at the US and let me enter an address and show all places on the map.

2\. The map is very small. At the minimum it should take up the available area. Keep the same height / width ratio if that looks better.

3\. The color codes should be visible from the start so I know what I'm looking at. I'd suggest moving it above the map and out of the tabbed part.

4\. Make the Top Rated part into a table with columns and alternate colored rows. It looks messy.

5\. The tags section is messy too. Give me a list of tags and the number of restaurants in each tag and let me click. And definitely don't show me tags that don't have restaurants.

6\. Actually, dump the tags and categorize the restaurants. There's too much potential for an overabundance of tags.

7\. The text in locality filter overlaps.

8\. I'm not a fan of popups in general because it covers too much of the map and makes it very difficult to click another restaurant. Consider moving all of the info on the popup to the area below the map.

In general, figure out why people are coming to your website and engineer the UI to fit that purpose. I would think people are looking for where to go out to lunch because of your domain name (which looks it may change). So let them zoom into their office and see all of the places within a few miles. Colored pins are good but your customers have to know what they're looking at.

</comment><comment><USER5> comments:

Hurrah, email optional & no verification & having a delete my account button!

I think you need to prettyfy your UI! Little bit of CSS and curves goes a long way :)

</comment><comment><USER6> You default to Austin, Texas. Why not detect the user's location from their IP address? Even if it isn't perfect, it's better than always guessing Texas.

Also, it would be nice to see more about a restaurant than just a name and a rating. I can't really trust the ratings when there's only one or two per restaurant, so give me something more to base my decision on.

</comment><comment><USER7> I tried to add a restaurant in my city, and I could either (a) add a new restaurant or (b) add a new location. It took me a while to come to the conclusion that adding a new location meant adding a new instance of a chain of restaurants, adding a new restaurant meant adding a new chain. (I think.)

So okay, I'll start by adding the nearby Chick-Fil-A, because that chain is already in the system. I add a new location, including the street address and zip code, and... nothing. My city isn't in the drop-down menu. I guess it didn't get added?

Hmm, well, wait a minute, when I click on Chick-fil-A from the rating listing on the right, there are two locations, one in Austin, and one in... Cedar Rapids! There we go! So my entry did get added, but Cedar Rapids wasn't added to the drop-down menu of locations.

I found the whole experience fairly confusing.

</comment><comment><USER8> I like it.

However, my personal primary issue with your app is that when I go to it to find lunch, it's just too much information. When I'm looking for lunch I don't want to spend 10 minutes browsing around and researching. I want something quick.

Suggest me a few places that might fit a criteria. Have a quick-access menu (e.g tag cloud) or search so I can quickly type in what I feel like and get the results filtered.

I know this is all available in your app, but in my opinion it's to hard to find to engage the user.

</comment><comment><USER9> At first I have to question how this can compete with places like Yelp, etc. (we have a dumber app here in NYC called menupages.com) but your use of Google Maps totally sold me.

I would suggest changing the language regarding accounts, specifically instead of 'login with openid' which some people may not have heard of, just have a register button. Also, definitely have an option for users to submit restaurant menu links to the restaurants they've reviewed.

Great job!

</comment><comment><USER10> I don't get why this is getting good reviews. How is it different from the already-established sites? Even google does it itself on google maps.

<comment><AUTHOR> I tried to distinguish by adding good tag and filtering capabilities, eg. looking for a place that serves asian food that takes less than 10 minutes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I assumed you were choosing location based on IP, but I guess I'm just lucky to live in North Austin.

It wasn't clear to me what I could do once I created an account until I read deep into the site; some text on the homepage like "Create an account to add restaurants and ratings" would help.

I'll definitely start using this, good work!

</comment><comment><USER12> Create an account:

"Internal Server Error"

Boo :(

<comment><AUTHOR> That's weird - are you still seeing this?

<comment><USER12> I saw it if I selected Cambridge _then_ tried to sign up. If I selected somewhere else and clicked on sign up, it worked.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the info. I'll take a look at it sometime soon...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Would love to have this populated for the NYC area.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, the big problem is where to pull data from legally. I'm definitely open to suggestions!

Went ahead and added NYC as a city.

<comment><USER14> I've been thinking of building something along the lines of this, but the data required was always the limiting factor for me.

Where do you get your data? Do you use Yelp's API, do a little data scraping, or are there sources with this stuff?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's the problem - all the restaurants on the site were entered manually by me (and my friends).

Taking a quick look at the Yelp API TOS, it looks like you might be able to use their data. (but of course I'm not a lawyer)

<comment><USER15> I have something vaguely similar -- <http://lunchmapr.com/>

Though it's more focused on private/smallgroup sharing.

I've been considering a refactor lately to enable more lightweight list sharing, and having some kind of collaborative database of restaurants, ratings, etc.

Was considering scraping the NYC Health Inspection database to seed the data... citysearch and menupages don't license, yelp doesn't permit you to show any reviews but theirs...

There's also this: <http://www.freebase.com/view/dining/restaurant>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> awesome, wish there was a UK equivalent.

How about you make a Cambridge, UK version and I'll try to get some people to use it?

<comment><AUTHOR> I went ahead and added a location for Cambridge - let me know if you're able to add locations or not, since I haven't tested the geocoding in the UK...

<comment><USER12> Have to change things like ZIP... Not enough characters permitted for UK postcodes.

<comment><AUTHOR> OK - now zip should function as a postcode as well. (characters permitted, up to length 10)

<comment><USER5> awesome! my girlfriend would love to make you a logo if you're interested?

drop me an email and I'll put you in contact. peter [\at] omgponi.es</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How Heroku works  - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/Scalability/How-does-Heroku-work

<comment><USER2> neat, some great links in there, too. some neat projects i hadn't seen before (e.g. doozer).</comment>


The Greatist Launches to Take on Health & Fitness Content Farms - <AUTHOR> http://www.greatist.com/

<comment><USER2> How is this taking on content farms??

I'm sorry to say, but this is one of the ugliest sites I've seen in a quite a while. If you're going to call yourself 'greatist' and yes, i read your about page so I almost get it, you really need to have a stand-out great design.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yeah, uh, good luck with that.</comment>


Grade levels could be a thing of the past in schools focused on competency - <AUTHOR> http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/say-goodbye-fifth-grade-k-12-schools-test-competency-based-learning/

<comment><USER2> In a PC world that we live in, with gems such as "everyone needs to get a trophy so they don't feel left out" that created the cultural problem we are now having with Millennials, I seriously doubt this will ever take hold in our public school systems.

I wish we could allow smarter kids to excel, but to many, this will be seen as 'unfair' and an 'inequality that needs to be solved' by bringing everybody down to the lowest level.

It seems to be the answer to every other 'inequality' these days...</comment>


pnpm – disk space efficient package manager - <AUTHOR> http://pnpm.js.org <comment><USER2> yarn save the network bandwidth and download time via local caching; pnpm does that all as well as saving the disk space via using symbolic link over copying.

In additional, pnpm doesn't hoist the indirect dependencies into node_modules.

yarn seems to be more popular but pnpm desire same/higher amount of adoption.</comment>


NuCypher KMS: Decentralized key management system - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@NuCypher/nucypher-kms-decentralized-key-management-system-7783cdaad39e <comment><USER2> sounds interesting. Similar to CloudHSM, I'm assuming this will also ensure vendors/app developers meet regulatory compliance when storing corporate data?

<comment><USER3> I think so. It is similar to CloudHSM, but you don't have to trust Amazon!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What is key re-encryption exactly?

<comment><USER3> It basically allows some untrusted party to convert ciphertext which you can decrypt to a ciphertext which someone you granted access to can decrypt.

It's like "instead of decrypting my data and encrypting with Bob's public key I want Charlie to do this operation without showing my secrets to Charlie". Charlie is a miner in our case :-)</comment></comment>


The Best VPN For Android In 2013 - <AUTHOR> http://greycoder.com/the-best-vpns-for-android/

<comment><USER2> _On most devices, you'll be using the PPTP or the L2TP protocol (the more secure option). However, the most secure option is to run OpenVPN on Android_

Oh really? OpenVPN is more secure than L2TP? Since when?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, L2TP falls slightly short of OpenVPN's performance stability, but it can be made secure as OpenVPN if AES encryption is used.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Telize - JSON IP address geolocation REST API built on Nginx and Lua - <AUTHOR> http://www.telize.com

<comment><AUTHOR> The code powering the Telize API is open source and available on GitHub : [https://github.com/fcambus/telize](https://github.com/fcambus/telize)

</comment><comment><USER2> _no repeated automated queries_

Can you define "repeated automated query"? Since an API is for automated queries by definition, this is confusing.

<comment><AUTHOR> What I mean by repeated automated queries is actions such as whole IP ranges scanning.

But you are right, it can lead to confusion so I removed this mention.</comment></comment>


How I lost access to my Google account today - <AUTHOR> http://ehsanakhgari.org/blog/2012-04-14/how-i-lost-access-my-google-account-today <comment><USER3> Somewhat of a sidenote, but this is why I refuse to use google+: my gmail account is too important to me to risk of linking it to another google service. Especially considering the stories of people's entire google accounts getting shutdown randomly because of an "algorithm" or whatever.

I like the products google makes, but their complete refusal to have any sort of customer service makes me hesitant to rely on them for anything beyond what I trust them with now.

<comment><USER4> "The stories" are sort of an exaggeration. My memory is that Google did that (disabling a gmail account while freezing a google+ account) once, apparently by mistake, and corrected it within something like 48 hours. Are there other examples I've forgotten?

<comment><USER5> It is not an exaggeration.

It has happened to me - I lost everything, calendar, email, g+ (which I had not ever updated and had no ToS violations on), absolutely everything.

In the next two days I googled (yes, I did) for answers while receiving automated messages that seemed to indicate I was never getting my accounts back (submitted the form they asked me to, but nothing came of it).

I lost my appointments, contacts, and had business people doubt my veracity, as I'd just given my gmail to several new contacts and their initial emails all bounced.

If I hadn't had multiple friends inside of google I might never have gotten my accounts back, and I heard they weren't even sure what exactly happened other than a confluence of events. I then learned how very very common it is to lose a google account and never know why, and never be able get back anything on them (family pictures, phone numbers stored in contact lists...)

I'm now mostly divested from google and the things I still have there I now have backups and redundancies for.

<comment><USER6> My mother had her account hacked.. she never got it back, despite trying repeatedly.

And she had all of her digital life in there.

She made for herself another Gmail account which she has safeguarded a lot more, but it's still chilling to know that you have no recourse.

Gmail is so convenient, that it's hard not to use it, but I'd pay for customer service.

<comment><USER7> > but I'd pay for customer service.

So pay for it? I'm not saying that it's right for Google to do this, but they do offer that option. With a Google Apps subscription, you get support.

<comment><USER8> Many, many times we've heard these stories from even _paying customers of Google_.

Generally, if it can't be implemented by an algorithm, Google's not going to do it, ever.

<comment><USER9> With paying customers? That will continue until they face their first lawsuit...

<comment><USER8> Lawsuit for what? Google's terms are set up such that "we algorithmically decide to provide you with nothing whatsoever in exchange for your money" is perfectly within their rights.

<comment><USER10> Not in many countries, there are consumer protection laws.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What I don't get is why the very first step in Google's automated process is to lock down the entire account. The debate is around the scalability of support, but that doesn't explain why the automated first response is so radical and so radically stupid.

The anger and rage Google provokes by not letting people log in and access their own data is totally unnecessary. They could just as well let people log in, view their data and receive email but prevent them from sending mail, publishing content, uploading more stuff, etc.

This is not simply about automation or no automation. It's about smarter automation and an intelligently staged response to any suspected issues. If algorithms are to be accepted as decision makers, they have to be gentle and not treat everyone like a criminal as soon as there is some suspicion.

<comment><USER12> I suspect it's for the same reason as they never reveal any details about their search ranking techniques or why some SEO or suspected fraud got your AS/AW account banned - it's an information leak which people will abuse.

The downside to running such a heavily automated ship is that without countermeasures, a sophisticated attacker could map out the thresholds of your fraud/misuse detection system, and then keep just below triggering point.

On top of that, there are actually situations in which you might want your account to be suspending quickly - ideally before an intruder can cause too much damage or access any valuable information.

Some sort of graduated response is clearly necessary, but the real issue is the complete lack of timely dispute investigation/resolution. And it's probably a hard enough problem to resist automation for quite a while yet.

Edit: This obviously only applies to situations where they might reasonably expect you to be malicious, or someone else to be in control of your account. Immediate irrevocable suspension over some tiny ToS violation is pure madness

<comment><USER11> So we have two cases:

1) A suspected TOS violation by the legitimate owner of the account.

Trying to prevent this via obscurity is crazy and counter-productive as people cannot learn from honest mistakes. It also antagonizes people who become victims of bad algorithms. There is no reason why the kind of staged response I outlined couldn't work in this case.

2) A suspected security breach that puts ownership in doubt.

This should be handled by resetting the password and contacting the legitimate owner using contact information on file before the breach. It's really simple.

<comment><USER13> I imagine it goes like this:

1) attacker guesses your password or obtains it via phising.

2) attacker changes password, starts sending spam

3) google locks account

When you have arrived at 2), you have already lost the account for good, and 3) is only for damage control.

You should know that Google has no way to verify whether your account has been hacked, or whether you yourself are a spammer; therefore the best thing for them to do is just to lock the account.

<comment><USER11> That's not the best thing to do, that's the most unimaginative thing to do.

I would do it this way:

1) Make sure that only the legitimate owner has access to the account by using previously entered contact data to ask him/her change the password.

2) Check if the suspicious behavior stops, which it will in most cases.

3) If it doesn't stop, put the account in read-only mode. If the kind of behavior may be an honest mistake, explain to the user what happened. Just take that risk, it's going to be worth it.

4) If it's a statistically active user with lots of regular looking data, let a human sort things out.

5) If the issue remains unclear, tell the user to download any data he wants to keep and notify him/her that the account will be closed.

<comment><USER13> Yes, that would be better for the user, but this is a free service, and Google has not much too gain from making the process more complicated (imaginative) and thus more error-prone. As a user you have the responsibility of keeping your password absolutely safe, if you do that (and better yet use 2-factor auth), nothing should go wrong.

Your option 1) boils down to adding more "passwords" by which the user can authenticate itself, so it's not a fundamentally better protection as they can be guessed by an attacker as well. Requiring a text message confirmation for password changes might be a better idea.

<comment><USER11> All steps on my list are either fully automated or optional, so it doesn't cost them more.

Google has a lot to gain from people entrusting them with their data, that's why they provide a free email service in the first place.

It would be a mistake to think that trust is linear. You can't just treat a few people very badly without risking a major backlash against your business model.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> OP says >> _We've all (yours truly included) heard about the importance of owning your digital data, the downsides of vendor lock-in, and how if you're being provided a free service, you're the product, not the customer. But I honestly never understood how deep this problem is, and how severe the consequences can be ("surely this cannot happen to me", right?!)._

Excellent point.

Btw one easy way to maintain a local copy of all your gmail-emails is to use a mail client (like Outlook or Apple Mail) with gmail. With Outlook, for example, you can easily download and move emails into a PST/OST file on your PC.

<comment><USER15> Backing up is fine, but the problem is you still don't own your identity. If your email address is firstname.lastname@example.com you've lost that forever and that could be a big problem.

<comment><USER16> Set up your own domain name for $5/year or less and use the free email aliasing that comes with it,

e.g. email@example.com would be aliased to email@example.com at your DNS provider.

Then you only ever pass around wvenable.me addresses. If you get a good provider, they will give you unlimited free aliasing (though they may not allow catch-all address for free, which redirect anything@ to some default address, due to spam potential).

Combined with monthly backups via IMAP or export from your actual email providers, you will never be dependent in either identity, contacts or content with any single provider.

Needless to say, all of the above is trivial to setup for a typical HN'er.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Just out of curiosity, did you use two factor authentication on the account? I understand that a common reason for accounts becoming disabled is because someone guessed the password, logged in, and then sent a bunch of spam (or something similarly evil). Two-step authentication makes this attack significantly more difficult. (But, of course, it makes your email harder to use. And malware can still steal your "remember this computer for 30 days" cookie.)

<comment><AUTHOR> No, I was not using the two factor authentication feature. I still don't know what caused this, but yeah, my account might have been hacked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This happened to me once and it took a while until they reinstated my account. To date I have no idea why it happened. I thought about moving to another service, but unless you setup your own SMTP server (probably not a good idea), you never really have full control.

Here is what I recommend you do (before getting locked out):

1\. Use your own domain for email and host it on gmail (free) - do not use firstname.lastname@example.com, but email@example.com.

2\. Create a secondary email account and have your primary account forward all emails to it.

If you get locked out, your account still accepts emails. I believe that forwarding still works as well, though I haven't been able to verify it (need to get locked out again...).

Then either respond from your secondary account, or change your mx records to point to another service, or even to your own temporary SMTP server.

It's not a complete / ideal solution. You still don't have access to emails you sent (could be done using IMAP, but I didn't bother) and to other Google services. But it might be OK as a temporary solution until you get your account back.

<comment><USER4> Why is setting up your own mail server a bad idea? I've been running my own for 13 years now (plain old postfix and dovecot on whatever linux distro I favor at the time). It works great.

<comment><USER19> 1) Spam filtering. The Google spam filters are likely going to be orders of magnitude better than anything you run in-house.

2) You value your time. Some people don't, it's not really worth arguing this point. But it is a reason running a mail server is a bad idea for most people.

<comment><USER4> Orders of magnitude is an exaggeration. My account is very visible and very old, and gets 6-700 spam deliveries a day. Plain vanilla spamassassin catches 93% of those, and a little perl filter I wrote gets me to 98-99%. I get a handful of unwanted messages each day. That's just one order of magnitude from perfect; and I know for a fact gmail isn't perfect.

And #2 is just wrong, sorry. I spend minutes a week doing anything at all related to maintenance on that box (I use it far more regularly for productive purposes, though). If you can handle running a linux box from a console, you can learn to do it too. Or don't, it's up to you. But telling me I don't value my time is just out of line.

<comment><USER19> Re #2: Sorry, I wan't directing that at you and meant no offense. Per your post:

>> I've been running my own for 13 years now (plain old postfix and dovecot on whatever linux distro I favor at the time).

For those of us without the experience of 13 years running postfix and dovecot (and spamassassin and writing perl filters), there will certainly be at least some time investment. That's what I was talking about: the price in hours to go from zero to competent. You may be too competent by now at email hosting to realize that it would not be a minutes per week affair for most people to do well.

Obviously if it works for you, great. Interesting to note that you started running your own long before GMail; the calculus of starting to self-host is different now.

Re #1, you should lend your spam filtering tools to Yahoo! In all seriousness, a handful of unwanted messages per day would be a dramatic improvement to my Yahoo! inbox. Whatever they are doing over there is not as good as what you're running.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I had my google account suspended for a few hours a few months back. Why? Because, I was sending myself a set of icons, and I carelessly dragged the folder in, which caused each one to upload separately (30 altogether). I noticed it quickly enough, and closed the tab. When I went back in, my account was suspended. No recourse. Nobody to talk to. Nobody to complain to.

Honestly, I'd rather just pay a monthly fee for the damn thing if it meant a unilateral action such as an account suspension wouldn't happen without prior warning. I'm serious Google. It's a good service. Take my money.

<comment><USER21> Forgive my ignorance, what would uploading 30 icons have to do with being suspended?

<comment><USER4> Ditto. I find it hard to believe that receiving 30 attachments in quick succession would trigger an IDS. People do that sort of thing all the time (try playing with "git send-email" sometime).

My guess is that it was more like 300, and cc'd to a bunch of external addresses such that it looked like spam.

So macspoofing: what did you have to do to get the account reenabled?

<comment><USER20> >I find it hard to believe that receiving 30 attachments in quick succession would trigger an IDS.

Believe it. It happened.

>what did you have to do to get the account reenabled?

Waited a few hours, and it was reenabled automagically.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is one of the things that makes me worry about using Google for email. When it works, which is almost all of the time, it works great, but when there are problems, it is difficult to get assistance.

<comment><USER23> Shouldn't this worry you about ANY email service; even those that you are 100% in control? Backup important data to separate services; have separate services to read this data; do it often, including the read -- make sure your backups work.

<comment><USER24> Yes, but the specific problem with Google is they have practically zero customer support. There is no one you can call to get help, and they apparently feel no obligation to respond to problems in a timely fashion.

<comment><USER25> If a 100K people, an insanely huge number, experienced crippling Gmail failure, that is roughly a 0.1% chance that it would affect you on your lifetime. Avoiding Gmail for this is like avoiding planes and cars and houses because you saw on the news that one blew up somewhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> For a post titled "How I Lost Access to my Google Account today" this article does a terrible job explaining _how_ he lost access to his account. Was it just a totally random alorithmic error? The guy doesn't even have a theory about what he might of done?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is the main thing which sucks about all this. I still don't have any clue on why this happened. The "how" is exactly how I explained it: I woke up this morning, and my account was disabled.

<comment><USER27> Here's a link that might be helpful:

[http://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&a...](http://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1752770)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Some thoughts:

\- If you pay $50/year for Google Apps, you can use your own domain name, so you can change your mail server without changing your email address, and you also get access to customer service from Google. I have Google Apps and the one time I contacted them, they got back to me right away.

\- Just like it's a good idea to backup your local computer, it's a good idea to backup the data in your cloud services. There are numerous options. Backupify, CloudPull, and ThinkUp (thinkupapp.com) are some which come to mind.

<comment><USER29> You don't even have to pay to use gmail with your own domain. I find it difficult to find the relevant links, though.

<comment><USER11> It's here: <http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html>

I use Apple Mail for backup. The only issue is the TTL setting for the DNS MX record. Some domain hosts set this to 24 hours, which means it may take up to 48 hours for all mails to get through after you switch to a different mail server.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> You never said "how" you lost your account...

On a side note, it's sh*t like this that make law makers create crazy laws that would stop poor support like this.

I for one would almost want government intervention to make sure when cloud services cut you off, they don't take hostage of your data and history too. I recognize it's a terrible/horrible solution, but if the companies themselves can't do the right thing, government mandate would have to be next. Cause in this case, it's not like we can vote with our wallets to make it go away when the stuff is free.

Also, imagine the number of jobs Google could create if they hired and trained a support staff for all their products? There's a lot of stuff that would still benefit from a human touch.

<comment><USER31> Yes that's the danger for Google all it takes for one case to go very high profile and they will be living with the court/government sanctioned remedy - that is why banks and other organizations have independent ombudsman - <USER2> want to avoid the government stepping in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> > I have been a Gmail user probably since 2004, and I have tens of thousands > of work-related and personal emails stored in my account, some of which > being extremely important to me.

We tell people they need backups. With a TOS like "we can shut you down at any time for any reason", you definitely need backups for Gmail too if it's important.

</comment><comment><USER33> <https://www.backupify.com/>

GApps backup 36 bucks a user a year.

</comment><comment><USER34> Isn't the question of why the account was locked just as pertinent as how?

What would be racing through my mind was my account hacked, as if so maybe other services I use be hacked.

Or did I possibly break the terms of service? If so, what may have been the justified reasons for me doing so, or Google's reason for preventing me so?

That's where full communication with Google would be so essential to remove the ambiguity and resolve what may be a bigger question at hand.

</comment><comment><USER35> Im glad this happened, because while painful, it makes people think about their total dependence on a corporation being nice to them.

You can take back your power by using smaller corporations for essential services such as email, making sure they are NOT located in the USA (should be obvious, but I feel I should reinforce that you cant get privacy in the USA).

Then again, if you use Google, perhaps you dont care about privacy in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER36> This is a little scary, a lot of people rely on Gmail. Im sensing a fundamental shift from "Free" to "Pay for it" for exactly this reason. When you are a free customer, no one has to care about you. When you are a paying customer, you suddenly have a voice.

And no, having ads does not mean that you are paying. Someone else is paying for those ads, if anything they are sponsoring your ability to enjoy a free service devoid of customer support.

<comment><USER37> Except he was paying, and still got no voice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I wonder why gmail can't suspend people by giving them readonly access. It could be time bounded, say 30 days, to allow people to migrate data off.

</comment><comment><USER39> For the record, if you just read this and you can't/won't switch off, make sure you have recovery options set to recover your account. You can setup: \- An alternate email \- A phone number \- Alternate email addresses \- A recovery question

Note, however, that the latter will only work if your account hasn't been accessed in 24 hours. If you have 2factor enabled, make sure you have backup codes printed as well.

</comment><comment><USER40> Cloud-based services are great, but I think it is wise to store a local backup of your data. I wrote an app called CloudPull (<http://www.goldenhillsoftware.com/>) to do exactly that for your Google account. Whether you use my app or an alternative, you need local backups.

</comment><comment><USER41> The site went down. Cached: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?client=safari&#...</a>

</comment><comment><USER42> That sucks. Reading your tragedy I am about to set up a new main identity with local mail storage:

\- getting a dedicated domain

\- getting either google apps or another web mailer

\- setting up new email address for 50+ services

\- finding some local client, doing backups and what ever

mail account migration is a lot of work ...

</comment><comment><USER43> Thanks for such an eye opener!!

Good luck gettings yours back, I'm going to back up mine this weekend!

</comment><comment><USER44> I mean no disrespect, but if you have no backups for something it's your fault when it's gone.

Google's support sucks and they desperately need to improve it. But people also need to back things up, dammit.

</comment><comment><USER45> Google's lack of customer service never ceases to amaze.

</comment><comment><USER46> Don't put your stuff in there, because they are not going to treat it with the same importance that you do.

</comment><comment><USER47> Are there any good alternatives to gmail that include tools for migrating an existing gmail account?

</comment><comment><USER48> I avoid using Google services, but for the ones I do use, I have a separate account for each.

</comment><comment><USER49> So is there anything he did that caused this? Or did it just happen completely random?

<comment><USER50> Considering the post is titled "How I lost access to my Google account today," there is a lack of how.

It's well known that your data should be redundant, this is one of those 'I didn't make a backup' posts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> User since 2004. Wow. Is there a way to export tens of thousands of emails from Gmail?

<comment><USER52> This guide show you how: <http://helpdeskgeek.com/how-to/export-all-email- from-gmail/>

<comment><USER53> I tried this, but Thunderbird simply locked up due to the sheer volume of emails (I subscribe to LKML and other high-volume mailing lists). I haven't been able to find any good backup solution anywhere, and articles like this really scare me.

<comment><USER54> Thunderbird 11 is much better than Thunderbird 3.x was at handling a GMail backup. I've just finished backing up ~120,000 messages using Thunderbird 11 (archiving them into monthly folders about once an hour during the backup), and it's doing fine. (I tried the same thing a year ago with Thunderbird and gave up after 45 minutes.)

<comment><USER55> good to hear. I had tried THunderbird in the past but it would just crash. Just started today for first time in a year and just upgraded from V7 to v11. Working good so far.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> is there not a business opportunity here? to make something as reliable as Gmail, but with better care and attention to Users, that a person could roll their own mail service from it?

</comment><comment><USER57> if things are important, set up a google apps for domain, people.

</comment><comment><USER58> www.backupify.com lets you backup your gmail to another location

</comment><comment><USER59> Congrats on making it to page one, your account will be restored within hours.

Many have their adsense and Adwords linked to suspended Gmail accounts too. It can cripple their business.

<comment><USER60> Yea, unfortunately not everybody has the good fortune of making it to the top of HN. I had a personal Gmail account wrongfully disabled over a year ago, and after filling out every form I could find and not receiving any helpful feedback for a year, I just gave up and decided to cut my losses. However, after reading this article I checked to see if it was still disabled and, lo and behold, I was _logged in_! I still don't know whether to be happy or pissed, but at least it works for now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> My advice for those that have other Google services tied to an email account: do not use that account to send email. You minimize the odds of getting banned and frozen out of a lot of things</comment>


Ask HN: Filter family pics from 10k pics on Android - <AUTHOR> My wife's Android phone has 10k pics in whatsapp media folder. Some of them are family pics (which we want to keep), the others I'll delete. How can I separate the two, hopefully without uploading the data to any online service. Any open-source solution (either on Android, or my mac) would be a great option! <comment><USER2> How do you define a family pic? One option would be to use OpenCV and detect images with multiple faces in them.</comment>


Red Hat to support .NET - <AUTHOR> http://developers.redhat.com/webinars/net-on-rhel-sneak-peek/ <comment><USER2> I know that this might sound a tad of topic but I love it.

As much as I like JVM and how performant it is, the .Net platform feels less prone to stagnation and feature decay.

Add to that F# which I honestly don't know how I missed for so many years.

Exciting! .Net on Linux!

(yes I know about Mono, but so far it wasn't widely adopted due what I understand is commercial support and performance issues)

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow I wonder what has driven this? Anybody know?

<comment><USER4> There's a large base of C# code, and there's a market to get it moved from Windows to Linux.

<comment><USER5> And a large base of C# developers who can now easily deploy to RHEL servers. Which will increase the need for support services for it all.</comment></comment></comment>


How I Got Barred from Posting on Twitter - <AUTHOR> https://www.popehat.com/2017/08/03/how-i-got-barred-from-posting-on-twitter/ <comment><USER2> I started reading this and two paragraphs in I thought it was crazy and a total waste of time to read. Then I seemed to keep reading bewildered by the lengths the people on both sides went in their flame war. The hours spent uncovering all this info on Van Dyke seems over the top but Mr. Van Dyke's responses, especially the email which states "the bottom line is I will not forget you.....if it takes 20 years....I may get you on my first try. I may get you on my seventeenth. But I will never stop" is definitely over the top. Just goes to show how emboldened people are when behind a computer screen.

I will have to say I had my fair share of laughs off the unfolding story and the subsequent links to "The Proud Boy and the Sockpuppet."

Three points from this and "The Proud Boy and the Sockpuppet."

1\. If he "gets him" on his first or 17th try, why would he never stop? 2\. Mr. guns and ammo seems to be a bit coo-coo-ca-choo. 3\. The shock that Mr. van Dyke is unmarried and that he has never really had luck with women.......really?

If you have 10 minutes to spare, give this train wreck a read. You should at least get a few good chuckles out of it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Aren't lawyers required to adhere to some sort of code of ethics?

I guess not? Why isn't Van Dyke disbarred for making threats of that sort? How is that behavior allowed?</comment>


$100k/year still might not be enough to buy a home - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/so-you-make-100-000-it-still-might-not-be-enough-to-buy-a-home-11571149819?mod=rsswn <comment><USER2> I am 34 years old working remotely as data scientist, making $107k TC. My wife who I've been married to for 13 years is a stay-at-home mother as we have two children in grade school. Since they are in the school she is turning in our half-acre into a sustainable garden with chickens. We own our home, are financially comfortable while saving $1500 a month, and travel. We were planning a 2-month trip to Japan this upcoming summer until we realized the Olympics are held there in 2020. In the end we will shift dates around to make it work.

Aside from being active duty for 11 years which allowed me to complete through two graduate degrees without any student debt, was taking my first role after the military in a small town one and half hours from the nearest city; a small city at that. I stayed there for four years to get comfortable enough to work on my own without any oversight; soaked up all possible learning opportunities. When switching roles to my current job, I negotiated to work remotely, now I live 2500 miles from my employer. Cost of living is the same, but now I don't have to purchase airline tickets to see family.

The number one advantage I see compared to others comes from the military. I complete all tasks asigned without complaining, and get them down without bothering those above me. Doesn't matter the task, if it is assigned and needs to be completed, I do it. Sometimes these are trivial, others would say beneath them, others are writing patent paperwork with the co-founder. This mindset has worked two-fold, I touch numerous areas of the business so my skill-set is well rounded, and my bosses are happy; work gets done without their involvement.

Live below your means, take advantage of where you live, and maintain a simple life. Good things come to those who wait.

<comment><USER3> How much did you pay for your home?

$100k/yr gross household income would make it rough to own a 3/2 single family home in South Florida.

<comment><USER2> Our home was $348k - 4 bedrooms, 2 baths in Louisiana.

<comment><USER3> 20% down on $348k is $70k

At $1,500/mo savings rate, it would take 46 months (3.83 years) to save up for your down payment (before closing costs/lending fees, but I'm not sure if those are rolled into your mortgage)

This would leave you with a rough monthly payment (mortgage + interest + takes + insurance + HOA fees) of $1.8k-$2k (assuming 30 year mortgage at 4% interest rate)

$100k gross is roughly $76k net (before any 401k/IRA contributions)

$1.8k/mo for your mortgage * 12 months = $21.6k before any cable/water/electric/lawn/pool bills/repairs

$4.5k/mo net income remaining after your house for food, cars, insurance, etc.

You said $1.5k/mo savings which means $3k/mo for food, cars, insurance, travel, 401k contributions, repairs, going out, etc.

I guess it is do-able. $3k/mo for 2 people does not sound terrible in the slightest.

<comment><USER2> As one of the posters mentioned I have a VA loan.

0% down with a 3.5% interest rate - you don't pay PMI with a VA loan and $0 down ($8k total in closing costs which were mainly taxes). This is the biggest aid in building wealth as we were able to save everything (minus moving costs) from the sale of our previous home.

Right now NFCU estimated our property taxes high so our mortgage is $2100. Next year our property taxes will drop due to LA exemptions that will drop our mortgage down to $1800 - 1900 range.

I have well water so no costs there, electric and gas are $150 combined a month, this is the highest we will pay due to A/C in the summer. Also no pool - lawn is being transformed into a functional space, garden of vegetables and fruits with chickens.

Plenty of places to locally travel; Japan is a little stretch for us so we will see. Walking distance from my house is local jazz/blues hall, been here since 1885. Every other Saturday from 6 - 9pm you can sit and listen to live music, get a plate of fried chicken/catfish with jambalya, greens, potato salad/colslaw, cornbread, and cake for $20 a person ($10 entry, $10 for food). Plenty of festivals which are free offering a range from Festival Acadiens et Creoles 2 hours away to Blues and BBQ in downtown New Orleans next weekend. So our costs here are around $150 for weekend family fun, some weekends we stay at home as we need a break.

All in all $3k a month is spot on which in Lousiana goes far. Plenty of culture, arts, food, and outdoor activities.

<comment><USER3> > Right now NFCU estimated our property taxes high so our mortgage is $2100. > Next year our property taxes will drop due to LA exemptions that will drop > our mortgage down to $1800 - 1900 range.

What do you pay in homeowner's insurance?

<comment><USER2> ~$1400 a year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> $100,000 still a lot of money. You can buy a beer in Vietnam for 20 cents. The problem in the Bay Area, where I live, is we artificially limit the amount of housing. So prices move to infinity.

<comment><USER5> I would say that is a problem in any place where it is desirable to live these days. Locations I've experienced first hand: London, Sydney, Bay area, Los Angeles, Vancouver... and I'm sure there are many more where you can't buy on that salary.

<comment><USER6> Not in all desirable players. Only ones that limit construction. Meanwhile in desirable places which allow more construction, like Tokyo, housing prices have stabilized [1].

[1] [https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottbeyer/2016/08/12/tokyos- af...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottbeyer/2016/08/12/tokyos-affordable- housing-strategy-build-build-build/#76e93ff548d5)

<comment><USER7> > _Not in all desirable players. Only ones that limit construction._

Toronto has more construction (120) cranes than anyone else in North America (Seattle & LA second at 50), and prices are still crazy even with a building boom.

* [https://www.on-sitemag.com/heavy-equipment/toronto-remains-u...](https://www.on-sitemag.com/heavy-equipment/toronto-remains-unrivalled-in-north-american-construction-crane-count/1003964481/)

* [https://canada.constructconnect.com/dcn/news/economic/2019/0...](https://canada.constructconnect.com/dcn/news/economic/2019/08/toronto-tops-crane-count-list)

And that 120 is just in the city proper, the suburbs have more towers as well:

* [https://www.livabl.com/2019/07/246-cranes-toronto-suburban-c...](https://www.livabl.com/2019/07/246-cranes-toronto-suburban-condos.html)

<comment><USER8> Cranes suggest there is demand, not that it has yet been met.

<comment><USER9> Three points. 1) The condos being built in Toronto are "luxury" apartments .. apart from space (perhaps to justify the lack thereof), many trimmings are opulent (granite counters seem standard now). 2) Toronto does restrict houses (not condos) because of the greenbelt put in place about a decade ago. 3) The transit system in Ontario and the highways are quite horrible for people living far away (e.g. above the green built).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I live in London. I'm not on 100K, however my salary is higher than 90% of the UK's population.If I'd compare our family income,we are better off than 75% of the country's households.These are just the stats. All 3 of us live in a one bedroom,rented flat in a decent area. We wouldn't even get a mortgage for the flat we live in (£300K)...The neighbors bought a house next door for £1M. Only pensioners and businessmen own properties on my street,the rest are renting. So realistically,unless I start making 50% more than I do now, there's no way this will ever change. I guess I should start looking at those remote Salesforce jobs in Bay area...

<comment><USER11> 90th percentile puts you on around £55k, for which you could absolutely get a mortgage on a £300k property (assuming you have a 10% deposit and your partner earns an average salary).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> There's very few places where there is an overlap of "jobs that pay $100k" and "homes that can be afforded at $100k salary".

<comment><USER13> Remote work is becoming more "real" by the day, so it's certainly possible in the age of the internet to work remotely in a low cost location while making a salary competitive with a higher cost of living city like SF/NY/LA.

<comment><USER5> Problem is a lot of companies get smart and "pay by location". I've seen big cos from the Bay offering half the salary (before currency exchange) for workers in Vancouver.

<comment><USER14> Gitlab, for example. You can see the multiples in the json used for the salary calculator (eg. Vancouver 57.367 % of a SF salary): [https://about.gitlab.com/salary/data.json](https://about.gitlab.com/salary/data.json)

<comment><USER15> Angola 120.056?!

<comment><USER5> Meanwhile if you live at the Bermuda you can get more than if you lived in LA... I think they are just messing with us! lol

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm in a mini-retirement right now and living in SF. It was surprising to learn that below like $50k you basically pay 0 in income tax in California. As a single person I can very comfortably live off $40k/year in investment income and pay no taxes right now.

<comment><USER16> >It was surprising to learn that below like $50k you basically pay 0 in income tax in California.

Not if you're a contractor without a full-time employer. In college I did freelance work, and I lost nearly 30% to taxes despite making less than $5k a year from my work. Having your social security responsibility doubled is brutal.

<comment><USER17> The original post was talking about income tax. There are plenty of other taxes on making money _by working_.

But, if you're living solely off investments you don't pay those. I was surprised to see that capital gains tax is zero below a certain income. It seems rather unfair, since you can choose when to sell.

<comment><USER13> Yeah...seems to incentivize day trading.

<comment><USER18> Not really. It's only zero on _long term_ capital gains if total income is below a certain threshold.

<comment><USER13> Isn't short term cap gains taxed like earned income, which below $50k a year is 0 in CA? For federal if you make <$52k (w/ standard deduction) you only pay like a 11% tax rate.

<comment><USER19> No it has it's own tax bracket and there is no 0% bracket

<comment><USER13> Ok got it - yeah looks like it's around 4% with a $4k standard deduction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> While housing is an issue (particularly in more prosperous coastal cities), if I made over $100k per year but couldn't afford a house in the $400k range, I don't think my response would be to rent a single-family house in Stapleton. There are more affordable apartments in the Denver area that are still in a good school district.

Articles like this are starting to annoy me because I see the working poor and lower-middle class, who have very serious financial issues today lumped in with young professionals with 2010 levels of student debt trying to live the lifestyle of young professionals in the 1980s (who were largely free of student debt) to their own financial detriment.

If you have a household income of $110k and both work in SF, you are screwed. If you have a household income of $110k and live almost anywhere else in the country, you have options.

<comment> non-entity > trying to live the lifestyle of young professionals in the 1980s

I've been interested in the subject for while, but do you know of any recommended reading material about what being a YP in the 80s was like (socially, career wise, etc) and the economics of how it was possible?

<comment><USER20> I do not have any recommended reading. I had relatives that came of age in the late 70s and early 80s, so this was personal experience.

[http://www.paulgraham.com/re.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/re.html) suggests that young professionals being paid more was new around this time. I don't know if this is true or not. If it is true, then this would suggest that there was a sudden increase in disposable income among young professionals. Professionals were already a small fraction of workers, and social change is usually uneven, so it seems likely that in addition not all professional jobs experienced this shift at the same time.

If you suddenly give a small fraction of the population more money then they are likely to live it up because there aren't enough of them to drive the costs up in lock-step.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The issue is less about the dollar cost of housing in most places, than the opportunity cost and closing of flexibility in getting into a long term mortgage. In all but the most obnoxiously over-priced areas, if you make $100k, you should be able to buy something on a low down-payment FHA loan, and your total mortgage payment should be less than you'd pay in rent. PMI sucks, but it's not terribly difficult to refinance out of it after a handful of years.

The problem is you're tied down to a location. The market is hot now, but even so, it is not trivial to list a house, get an offer, close, and decamp from it, and it's rare that that goes quickly. If you envision moving around from job to job, rather than settling in for the long haul, a 30-year mortgage is a ball and chain.

<comment><USER22> Struggling with rent vs buy right now for this very reason. I know financially it would be better to buy, but then you lose the flexibility to go after a great opportunity in even another part of a major city.

<comment><USER23> You know that you can sell houses before you pay off your mortgage, right?

If you aren't in an area with very high housing costs (which, obviously, very many readers of this site are), it's not even that big a deal to sell your house when you need to. If your house constitutes 40% of your net worth, and you take a 5% hit on your sale price, then your net worth has declined... 2%. A good job is worth that.

Admittedly, it's different when your house is 90% of your net worth and you're barely able to afford your mortgage.

<comment><USER24> Closing costs will kill you if you are doing this too often. If you are pretty certain you will stay at least 5 years, you should be ok.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's been a long time since $100k was a lot of money

<comment><USER26> Median household income in USA is $59,039.

That's both the mother AND father working to bring home $59,039 on the average (before taxes and other costs).

Its clear you live in a rich area where $100k isn't much. But that's also why a large chunk of Americans think that "city-folk" are disconnected from reality. $100k is a lot for many people.

My sister lives in an area (in USA) where a 2-bedroom apartment is just $500/month, low crime good living conditions.

<comment><USER27> Over 80% of Americans live in an urban area[1] so it's pretty absurd to claim "city-folk" represents some elite minority. Median household income in NYC is $57,782 [2]. The idea that America is split into some wealth urban minority vs a near majority of lower income rural population that understands "reality" is complete fantasy.

It doesn't change the fact that $100k is still a lot of money, but the people for whom that a lot a money aren't on some farm in the middle of the country, they're driving your uber, greeting you at the entrance to your apartment and delivering your instacart.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_Sta...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_States)

[2] [https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/newyorkcitynewy...](https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/newyorkcitynewyork/PST040218)

<comment><USER28> The US definition of "urban" is basically anything that is not rural. Includes suburbs and small towns. People who don't consider themselves city folk and have never used Uber or heard of instacart.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> We rented while making good money because it's easier to rent. We're now buying a house. I genuinely like fixing and maintaining houses, so it makes sense for us. However, most people don't. For them, it makes a lot more sense to rent. If you're rich and have a stable source of large income, it's almost always better to rent all your stuff. Not only is rented stuff of higher quality (because you can always have new stuff), someone else takes care of it for you. This is good. My wife and I will soon sell one of our cars, and rent a car if we need it, because a rental car is certainly going to be newer than any car we own, and if it breaks, someone else will fix it. Renting is superior from a user experience perspective. If you can afford it, it is the best.

And yes, we're planning on renting out a unit in our home. It will be a very nice unit and the renter there quite lucky (as are all renters) because someone else -- me -- will take on all the risk if anything breaks.

<comment><USER30> You don't have to take on any of the risk if anything breaks by forcing them to have renter's insurance. It's something that a lot of newer apartment buildings are doing these days.

<comment><USER29> You seem to be confused as to the purpose of renter's insurance. Renter's insurance does not cover the cost to repair broken appliances or problems with the apartment that reduce habitability. Not sure where you got that idea from. Renter's insurance covers the renter's property if something in the apartment damages it. For example, if there is a fire that damages your computer, renter's insurance will pay a replacement cost, but will not pay for the repair to the apartment. That is up to the homeowner's policy the landlord pays for.

Source: have rented solely in buildings requiring renter's insurance, and have _never_ filed a claim for things breaking in the apartment. The landlord always fixes it.

More information here: [https://www.ipsagency.com/blog/does-renters-insurance- cover-...](https://www.ipsagency.com/blog/does-renters-insurance-cover- appliances.aspx)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I know millennials with combined household incomes in excess of $200k who can't afford to buy, because huge student loans are required to get that kind of income if mommy and daddy aren't rich in the first place.

<comment><USER32> You certainly don't need to be drowning in student loan debt to reach that. You could go to a state school and get an excellent job. That's just poor financial decision making. Where I live you could go to UVa, VT, or maybe VCU.

<comment><USER33> You also have to factor consumerism and entitlement into the issue. I make white collar money, but live in a blue collar neighborhood. This makes housing more affordable and there is no temptation for "Keeping up with the Joneses".

<comment><USER34> It's easy to finger wag at supposed entitlement and consumerism when you completely ignore all the other factors that lead someone to decide where to live and work. As the breadwinner in my family I made the decision to live closer to where I work and pay a larger share of my income towards housing so I can spend more time with my kids and less in my car. There are plenty of other considerations far beyond your cynical take that would lead a family to live in an expensive ares: schools, services, healthcare, ability/desire to drive, child care, the list goes on. It is difficult to avoid getting rankled at this kind of imperious mindset, particularly because if you actually took the time to meet any of these so called materialists you would likely find that they just want to have a nice life with their families like everyone else. Calling it consumerism or entitlement is a cheap shot, reductionist, and in most cases doesn't reflect reality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> 120 range in KS, 15 year mortgage on a 2,600ft^2 house is $2k on the nose. Commute is 15 minutes. KS isn't all that bad folks :)

<comment><USER36> I lived in Little Rock for high school and Norman, OK for college. How does KS compare? Shit you could not pay me enough to go back to Oklahoma or Arkansas.

<comment><USER35> I would say those are not comparable cities. Way more to do in KC (but not as much as like Chicago).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> This is mostly a west coast problem, where housing is hugely inflated in every west coast state and city. And NYC too of course, but that's less surprising given its NYC.

Sometimes I think these articles are written as clickbait for people in the midwest, southeast, northeast, where housing is still very cheap and jobs pay well.

<comment><USER25> every major metro has seen an increase in housing costs. West coast may be extreme, but this hits every metro across the country.

<comment><USER37> Sure ok, but over 6 years a starter house going from $19,000 to $30,000 in Dayton is a lot different on the affordability spectrum than an equivalent house going from $300,000 to $900,000 in Seattle.

<comment><USER25> you're not getting a starter home for 30k in Dayton unless it comes without walls and was a former meth lab.

<comment><USER38> Indeed - even cities like Nashville have seen dramatic increases in home prices in recent years: [https://www.nashvillepublicradio.org/post/after- years-surgin...](https://www.nashvillepublicradio.org/post/after-years- surging-nashville-homes-prices-start-plateau#stream/0)

<comment><USER19> From looking at job markets vs cost recently, Nashville came out near the top for me on the list of worst job markets with most expensive housing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I'm behind a paywall, so I'm sure they pick up on this, but the biggest problem I ran into when I thought I could afford a house was the down payment. You can make $100k (or less!) and quite easily afford a monthly mortgage payment, but that doesn't necessarily mean you have enough saved up for a down payment.

<comment><USER40> You only need 3.5% down with an FHA loan. To put that in perspective, a $300,000 home would only require $10,500 down.

<comment><USER41> Sort of. You'd be left paying the difference of 3.5% to 20% (16.5% or $49,500) in a FHA Mortgage Insurance Premium (MIP). This means another loan that you need a 1.75% down payment for (making your downpayment ≈ 3.8% or $11,400) that adds another payment (≈ $400) in addition to the mortgage. MIPs last the entire life of the FHA loan, too.

<comment><USER40> Yes, it's effectively a higher interest rate on the entire loan, but my point was that you don't need a massive amount of cash up front to close the deal.

<comment><USER41> And it's still a valid point. It's good to mention that a <20% down payment has caveats, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> A more accurate summary would be "People with $100K/yr may be able to rent homes in sufficiently more desirable neighborhoods than they could buy as to choose the former over the latter while being able to do either", but it's too long and not hyperbolic enough for a headline.

</comment><comment><USER43> Inflation and the obsession with powers of 10. Back when I was starting out in 1990 a $100K job would have to be a $200K job today. Yes, housing has inflated as well but what I'm trying to say is that our perception of using $100K as some kind of benchmark hasn't.

</comment><comment><USER44> I think there is still a big issue with pegging home ownership as the quintessential "American dream". In a lot of ways home ownership actually leads to worse outcomes than renting, but so many people think it's the one thing everyone should do.

</comment><comment><USER45> I'm behind the paywall but I'm wondering if this is because, just maybe, younger people understand finances better. When I wanted to buy a house, I waited until I save up the 20%. I know plenty of friends in their late 20s and early 30s who have the same attitude. Me and my wife also paid for our wedding in cash, we waited until we could afford it. You have the millennial generation looking at their parents still working and we're desperately trying to achieve financial independence so we don't suffer the same fate. I see so many articles about how bad millennials are burdened with student loan debt, but that's made us more concerned about finances than any other generation before us.

So maybe it's less than we can't afford houses with high incomes. It's that we're less willing than our parents to take on financial risk instead of renting.

<comment><USER46> The downside of saving a lot before you buy is that you still have to pay the rent while trying to save that money. Putting 20% down has advantages when making the loan (better rates mostly) so it makes sense, but saving beyond that is making your life more difficult.

I think Student Loan debt is a huge factor in buying houses later. It's really hard to save if you're paying down debt as well as paying rent. It could easily delay their entry into the housing market for a decade.

<comment><USER47> Yeah in my area I'm paying probably $200+/month more for my small apartment than I would for a house that's 2-3 times the sqft. It's frustrating to know that I'd actually be saving money + building equity of I could just buy a house today. But saving up is hard when you're also paying off student debt.

My family has told me that you should always save up the 20%, but it seems like like the FHA 3.5% is the winners choice. If I wait until I have 20% down it's going to take ages and all that money spent on apartments is going to waste.

<comment><USER45> One thing I keep telling people is that buying a house really won't save you money in the long run. I only bought a house for the space, me and my wife both work from home in the midwest and need the office space.

You'll spend more than you realize on upkeep, furnishings and the increase cost of utilities. My opinion is If you really want to save money, find a cheap cost of living area and rent. Only buy a house if you need the space and know that you'll be staying in that area for 10ish years.

<comment><USER47> I get where you are coming from, and the cost of upkeep can certainly be high, especially on older homes.

But surely the cost of (apartment rent + other associated costs) * however many months is going to be higher than (cost of house + interest from mortgage + upkeep + increased utilities) - (eventual price you sell it for)

The apartment situation you will always be negative, whereas even if you only end up selling your house for the same price you bought it at, you've only paid for interest + upkeep + utilities. The interest + upkeep are certainly not insignificant, but when your rent is as high as the mortgage cost, surely buying has got to be the better option over the longterm.

But maybe I'm just fooling myself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> In major US west coast cities, definitely yes. 100k is not enough.

</comment><comment><USER49> [Laughs In Bay Area]

</comment><comment><USER50> Should be plenty for a house in Miami.

</comment><comment> La-ang This definitely applies to nyc xD

</comment><comment><USER51> Welcome to 10 years ago, WSJ.

</comment><comment><USER52> live somewhere else.

<comment><USER53> In a van down by the river?

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> If only the FED actually measured this in inflation numbers.

<comment><USER55> too lazy to go around the paywall, but I also wondered how inflation factors into this. seems normal that "a record number of six figure earners" would rent

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> > "I can't think of anyone we've rented to recently who didn't make $100,000," > said Bruce McNeilage, who owns 148 rental homes around the Southeast and is > building 118 more.

Well there's your problem. Quit building unaffordable housing.

<comment><USER57> In most 'unaffordable' locations, land is way more expensive than housing.

My house, to build new, would cost 250k. The land it sits on is another 750k.

The right answer would be to demo my somewhat old house and rebuild 6 units on it. But you can't; setbacks, height restrictions, parking spot requirements etc. make that impossible. Why? Because everyone in the neighborhood already 'got theirs'.

But from a usage standpoint, my million dollar/ property neighborhood is at that price point because of the land use, not because builders don't build 'affordable housing'

<comment><USER46> You can't build cheap housing, it would drop property values!

That's not too far from the truth either. Comparing "comps" is a lazy man's game. They don't look that closely at the houses they are comparing.

<comment><USER57> Ugh.. this is so true. When I bought my house I used a rudimentary linear regression to decouple land price from home price. My realtor thought of that as unworkable black magic. I was like well, if I know the build quality and know the cost of construction, why wouldn't this work?

I think the answer was "pride of ownership, location, location, location!"</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Dark Arts of Advanced and Unsafe Rust Programming - <AUTHOR> https://doc.rust-lang.org/nomicon/ <comment><USER2> IMO title should at least contain "The Rustonomicon"; "The Dark Arts of Advanced and Unsafe Rust Programming" is the subtitle. I wouldn't have clicked through if I had known that the link was to this document.

</comment><comment><USER3> I recently had to write a lot of unsafe code in C# to interoperate with a driver.

As advanced as modern languages are, the excellent memory models only work within the language. Interoperability requires that you can work with memory directly when needed. (And only when needed.) I don't have a lot of Rust experience, but C# has plenty of tricks to avoid unsafe code but get close enough to working with real memory.

One thing that would help is if there was some kind of a tool that could take C header files, figure out how the structs and functions compile, and generate the Rust / C# structs and fuction signatures. This is such a time consuming task to do manually in C#, and novices screw it up all the time.

(I wish I had the time to do more work in Rust. It's a great concept!)

<comment><USER4> There are a couple of projects that do this for Rust, depending on what your inputs and outputs are:

* [https://github.com/rust-lang-nursery/rust-bindgen](https://github.com/rust-lang-nursery/rust-bindgen) \- Inputs are C/C++ headers, outputs are Rust type definitions and extern functions to interoperate with the type and functions in the headers

* [https://github.com/immunant/c2rust](https://github.com/immunant/c2rust) \- Inputs are C headers and source, outputs Rust code that is semantically equivalent to the C (modulo bugs, etc.)

* [https://github.com/eqrion/cbindgen/](https://github.com/eqrion/cbindgen/) \- Inputs are Rust source, outputs C/C++ headers that can be used to interoperate with the types and functions exposed by Rust

<comment><USER5> None of these are able to handle dynamic header templating properly, e.g. try embedding Guile Scheme in a non-C/C++ language through FFI alone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is not meant as criticism of this book as it is of my own reading and comprehension abilities (English is not my mother tongue), but when I attempted to read the book, I found the writing style employed very off- putting and distracting. In contrast, I usually find documentation written in a formal technical style like standards and references to be clear and concise; I don't have to exert mental effort trying to decipher inconsequential verbiage, idioms, and cultural references beyond what I need to understand the material at hand.

Is there a resource like The Rustonomicon, but written in a concise and formal style?

<comment><USER7> Best bet is probably the API docs? For instance: [https://doc.rust- lang.org/std/mem/fn.transmute.html](https://doc.rust- lang.org/std/mem/fn.transmute.html)

Not sure how to search to get a collection of the unsafe related functions though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's a shame they didn't ever resume work on this. Apparently the guy who wrote it can't work on it any more

<comment><USER9> Thankfully, Gankro is now a colleague of mine and can work on it as much as they want again :)

<comment><USER10> omg does that mean Learning Rust With Entirely Too Many Linked Lists is going to get finished up at some point?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Ada does, and has better and more clear conventions for "unsafe" programming (pointer arithmetic, conversions, etc) but does it naturally without special keywords and esoteric conventions through its package system. Too bad no one will ever give it a chance due to is syntax :(

Rust is nothing but a slapdash C style copy of its semantics.

<comment><USER8> > Rust is nothing but a slapdash C style copy of its semantics.

Rust is a copy of Ada's semantics for dealing with memory unsafe code? Could you provide an example of what you mean?

> Ada does, and has better and more clear conventions for "unsafe" programming > (pointer arithmetic, conversions, etc)

Can you give some examples here of what you mean? I found Interfaces.C.Pointers, but I don't know enough about the language to know if that's what you were talking about

<comment><USER11> I meant Rust is a copy of Ada in general - it does not deal with unsafe programming in the same way. Instead, you do things like instantiate generic packages/procedure like Ada.Unchecked_Deallocation and Ada.Unchecked_Conversion with the specific conversion or heap deallocation procedure you need. So you are forced to be explicit about every unsafe operation by including such procedures and calling such things - but you are not prone to accidents because you got in the habit of wrapping things in perverse "unsafe" blocks every time you meet a well-thought-out restriction of the language.

<comment> Tuna-Fish > I meant Rust is a copy of Ada in general

Have you ever actually looked at rust? The headline feature of Rust is linear types with checked borrowing, something that Ada does not provide.

<comment><USER12> Plus Ada has a complicated runtime system that Rust doesn't.

<comment><USER11> Example?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>