Ben Bernake: Monetary policy and inequality - <AUTHOR> http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/ben-bernanke/posts/2015/06/01-monetary-policy-and-inequality <comment><USER2> I liked Ben Bernake but he essentially admits that even though the purpose of Quantitative Easing (QE) was to help the little guy on main street it really only trickled down to corporations on Wall St.

Instead of buying back bonds and bailing out banks, what if the Fed would have paid the monthly mortgages of home owning citizens for a year-or-two or paid them as much as they have put into purchasing bonds via QE?

Benefitting the little guy by paying the banks their respective mortgage payments would have kept both parties afloat (The banks and the home owner) and would have been a better trickle down policy?

Then again, this is hindsight. YMMV.

<comment><USER3> The Fed's policy options are, by design, constrained. Paying citizen's mortgages I don't think is within them.

Most things outside the realm of the Fed's usual mechanisms require Congress to act (either to directly create the policy or to expand the Fed's mandate so that the Fed can execute the policy.)

It's not QE by the Fed that should have been replaced by consumer bailouts, but the congressionally authorized bank bailouts from the Treasury; that fiscal action might have relieved the pressure for the Fed pushing hard on its monetary policy levers for so long.

<comment><AUTHOR> That was one of the main take aways of the article I found, that such powers (fiscal policy and tax policy and spending) lie with law makers, not the fed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> QE was meant to work in tandem with the stimulus bill put forward by President Obama. The stimulus bill would create jobs to help fuel demand, and interest rates would stay low so that loans could be made more easily to companies that contracted with the government, thus helping them to expand and creating more demand in the economy.

Unfortunately the stimulus bill wasn't large enough (even though it was 787 billion dollars). This was the largest recession ever. The Great Depression needed a stimulus bill called World War II. What followed were over 2 decades of prosperity. The most recent stimulus plan simply wasn't big enough to allow companies to grab Wall Street's attention, so Wall Street parked its money elsewhere.

TL;DR: not enough jobs were created so people got poorer while Wall Street got richer.

Edit: phrasing

<comment><USER5> Maybe the reason for increasing prosperity was also the nature of economic expansion after WW2. Most of Europe in ashes needing to rebuild everything...same for Japan and Korea. The only country with the capacity to provide supplies was the US, so we had the massive expansion in US industries.

Once other countries caught up though, the world started getting a lot tougher for America. Luckily, it kept moving into other sectors via innovation. Unfortunately, most of these new sectors (Computers, BioTech, Finance, Robotics etc.) are just not as labor intensive so the benefits of economic growth are then limited to a few instead of many.

<comment><USER4> This is an excellent point. I think this definitely had a lot to do with it. Global demand was at an all time high and America certainly was one of a few nations who could provide the goods necessary for rebuilding.

However I think we cannot ignore the fact that America itself was expanding. Demand within America was increasingly fueling GDP as our war-time infrastructure was converted to build materials for homes, highways and specifically cars. These industries are now mostly being reimagined off of American shores. The world is certainly getting tougher for American industries but I believe there is enough demand that exists within America that we could support ourselves more with "Made In America" goods than what we currently do.

I have read adding tariffs to some goods made offshore by companies incorporated in America could help out our economy, thus preventing the flight of corporations and capital outside of American soil. America still throws a lot of weight around regarding global demand so if we can force American corporations to stay in America by tariffing goods they make offshore, I think we could effectively keep jobs here, thus generating stronger demand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _...widening inequality is a very long-term trend, one that has been decades in the making...the effects of monetary policy on inequality are almost certainly modest and transient._

This is totally self-serving historical revisionism. The Federal Reserve played a significant role in the Dot Com bubble, in the Housing Bubble, and in bailing out Too Big To Fail banks when there was a genuine chance for a much- needed reckoning. To think such a powerful "monetary policy" figure such as Greenspan or Bernanke would deny that their actions had anything but positive outcomes is utterly preposterous. Both did extensive damage to the middle- class, and Yellen is simply continuing the abhorrent tradition set by her predecessors.</comment>


Array is slow in python? - <AUTHOR> http://80steve.com/post/array-is-slow-in-python

<comment><USER2> The python code does much more than the supposedly equivalent C code. Why use an array for caching in C but a defaultdict in python? Especially when not even using the defaultdict functionality? Strange choice.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why is this piece titled "Array is slow in python?" when it uses defaultdict (a key/value mapping) instead of an array? Yes, if what you need is an array, defaultdict is a slow and cumbersome replacement, sort of like using NASA's giant crawler-transporters for your daily commute.

When you need something array-like, Python lists or arrays (the latter from the standard library array module) would be a more sensible choice. (Arrays are unidimensional, but its pretty trivial to emulate a multidimensional array with a unidimensional one.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. Have given list a try actually, the speed is better, but still not efficient enough.

<comment><USER3> Python lists are dynamically resizable, unlike normal C arrays, and can hold arbitrary objects. They aren't going to ever be as efficient as C arrays -- while they aren't as "big" as defaultdict, they are a lot more than simple C arrays.

Python arrays should be more efficient for homogenous arrays of one of the types they are specialized for (including ints), and if the performance of the list/array is really a bottleneck in your application, there are more specialized tools available (including moving that bit off into a C extension).

There are certainly places where every bit of performance out of a collection matters, but there are more places where being able to quickly put together code that works correctly matters (for one thing, being able to quickly put together correct code makes it possible to correctly identify the bottlenecks where you need to optimize performance.)

<comment><AUTHOR> True, and I like python list alot as it offer the ability to hold heterogenous objects and it's really flexible & simple. Just happened to using list the other day to cache a large 2d array, which turned out to be slow. Certainly, my implementation has room for improvement, and my comparison isn't straightly an apple to apple. Taken down the post n modifying. Thanks for the comment btw.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Have you tried that code in pypy? <http://pypy.org/>

<comment><AUTHOR> yup, the code run significantly faster than before. tho it's still relatively slower than C.</comment></comment>


IRC – Why It Failed (2018) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://christine.website/static/talks/irc-why-it-failed.pdf <comment><USER2> Is IRC really a failed endeavor? I would consider something to be a failure if it never took off the ground, instead we have a protocol that is over 30 years old being finally supplanted with newer technologies. There is no inherent reason why IRC failed, except that it was designed with the sensibilities of 1989 in mind, but the requirements of the modern day are not what they used to be. I enjoy the simplicity of IRC as much as the next guy, but when you have things such as a lack of chat history availability being something you have to work around, I understand why it has been supplanted by newer products, as has a vast majority of things from those days.

<comment><USER3> > Is IRC really a failed endeavor

AIM not pivoting its social graph to be Facebook. _That 's_ a failure.

<comment><USER4> Even to be a sms replacement. But I wholeheartedly agree, AOL and AIM failing to become Facebook is an all time failure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> To be sure, IRC is alive. I just know I've stopped using it a lot less. I make the point that I (and perhaps many of us) used to use tools everyday that were standards based, now they're not, and that's a shame. Especially true with chat clients. It's like it's 1999 again, when you needed to be on MSN IM, AOL, and Yahoo chat to reach all your friends. Then pidgin came along. What a glorious standards based time that was. It was also the time I got into IRC. Then slack came. All of a sudden the people I needed to reach were more likely on slack then IRC. I also got on mobile around that time much later than everyone else. That's when I really started using XMPP and IRC less. That's all well and good, but now where are we? GroupMe, Slack and Teams open on my laptop 24/7\. Multiple chat clients. Hello, 1999. It's been a while.

My point isn't "yeah it really is dead" but "man we need to get back to those pidgin days somehow"

<comment><USER6> 100% true. I use IRC for work and I have that feeling every single day.

I would say this 1999 vibe is caused by smartphone and the "issues" that XMPP and IRC have with multiple clients for the same account. But it's a pity that, instead of improving those protocols, now we have to deal with multiple clients for multiple services.

Why people understand that you can use email with whatsoever client you want, but no with chats?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It totally did not fail. It is the most useful realtime chat for many topics I am interested in:

        #python for the python language
        #php for the php language
        #javascript for the javascript language
        #django for the django framework
        #laravel for the laravel framework
        #symfony for the symfony framework
        #startups for startup stuff
        #css and #webdev for web development
        #mysql for mysql and mariadb
        #math for math related topics

And many more.

Show me _any_ other chat system where you can go online, ask a question and get answers from professionals in the field instantly. I would immediately use it. But there is none.

<comment><USER8> Isn't the speed and usefulness of Q&A a function of the community itself and not IRC though? For example, the Matrix devs hang out on many matrix channels and are fast to reply to any questions. Experts over at the hackintosh discord are also very fast to reply and extremely helpful to help troubleshoot issues.

<comment><USER7> You give two examples of specialized communities.

But only on IRC you can instantly talk about any technology that you are interested in and meet someone with knowledge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Makes you question what failure is. IRC played an extremely important role in spreading computer science knowledge, bootstrapping what we take today as a granted IT world. It helped build communities for the introverts, with various clients introducing basic scripting and programming technique to the curious minded. For me IRC played an irreplaceable role in my life as a developer and I would never be where I am if it wasn't for the networks built on that protocol. I think that IRC never failed, it was just outgrown.

<comment><USER10> Also it had an enormous impact on early online gaming. IRC was the default way many clans assembled, communicated, recruited, and coordinated match play and scrimmages between each other. Channels like findscrim allowed CS teams to match with other parties of equivalent skill looking for scrimmages in real time all over the world, 24 hours per day.

<comment><USER11> Indeed, I remember when we wrote an IRC bot for organizing scrims, and it would also keep a history of the results and so forth. Fun times. I miss it. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> IMHO it didn't fail. The internet "failed", becoming something much more centralized and oligopoly-like.

In my area, IRC servers were maintained by local ISP administrators plus some help of local volunteers. As local, dial-up ISPs consolidated and ended up absorbed or put out of business by telecoms, IRC networks become orphans.

<comment><USER13> I'm still connected to ircnet via my ISP's server.

Not that it makes much of a difference from user perspective. Freenode works just fine and I don't need ISP's server for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> * An actual example session as experienced on gui clients is simply filled with people talking on various channels that the user has selected on prior sessions.

* Clients like hexchat are plain but functional. I'm sure if a designer was hired they could figure out a way to make it prettier and harder to use.

* I don't generally worry about mobile support because I prefer in depth discussion with a real keyboard on a real computer.

* It "failed" because most of the dumb people who don't have anything useful or informative to say prefer to say their nothings via the mobiles and you can't sell people IRC hosting at 10 usd per user per month.

* The only thing it really needs is trivial persistence via a cheap bouncer integrated into clients with fewer steps. As in add credit card number click go.

<comment><USER11> > I'm sure if a designer was hired they could figure out a way to make it > prettier and harder to use.

I hate the UI/UX today. It is unbelievable how much information fits into my 80x24 terminal running irssi, whereas for example Discord takes up an entire workspace and you cannot customize it to your liking, there is just too much unnecessary spacing, and you cannot make the list of friends disappear and so forth without using an extension. Discord started adding unnecessary crap which made me resort to using uBlock to hide them. I cannot do this with Electron apps, so I am using whatever I can (and have to) from the browser, but I wish I did not have to use them in the first place.

In any case: IRC will never die for me. Xterm + irssi will never die for me. :) I will continue growing old with my buddies on Freenode! :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> ends with "Join us on Discord" ?!?

today, I get a notice in email from Slack when Y-ImportantPerson speaks directly to me, which means a record is entered in a graph database somewhere that says "mistrial9 spoke to Y-ImportantPerson" \--meta-data-- .. I am impressed by the addition of constant logging of all communications activity on Slack, as a solution to hacking activity ??

Is this the same social promise that brought us directly into the F*Book era? "people don't care" is not a real answer...

</comment><comment><USER16> IRC failed because your parents don't know how to use it.*

*Or, given that this is 2020, your parents probably do know how to use it, but your children can't be bothered to figure it out because the walled garden alternatives already have all of their friends online.

</comment><comment><USER5> tl; dr it was a standard and so could not improve fast enough with the improvements being discovered around distributed systems and mobile needs. I get the author's point, and we're seeing a lot of standards being outstripped by entrepreneurs these days, but I hope things slow down and standards become useful again. They are really important to maintain the open source world.

<comment><USER17> Why are you talking in the past tense? IRC is alive and well and many people use it every day. In what absurd sense this means "failure"?

<comment><USER18> Probably in that while internet usage exploded by 100000x, yet IRC is less popular than ever with barely any new users.

<comment><USER14> If you go to a nice restaurant that makes more than enough money to support itself and you enjoy the service and the food and then someone builds 100 McDonald's all over the state this doesn't instantly transform the restaurant into a failure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > _All clients look terrible_

And that's the most useful statement in the document.

<comment><USER20> I'm not sure if you're agreeing or not, but the visual aspect of irc is probably due to it not always having multi Gb of RAM.

One thing ive never read is "why is my irc client using GB of RAM".

Food for thought.

<comment><USER21> When Slack still had the IRC bridge, I participated in my company's team slack using Irssi. There were a few things that didn't work great, but it was so snappy compared to the official client and I could run it in a tmux alongside everything else I was doing (I was in a devOPS role; light on dev, heavy on ops). Plus it didn't fill my screen with animated gifs all the time... that was nice.

There's still a community I hang out with on IRC, and I started thinking about finding an IRC client for my new Macbook Pro (have been using X-Chat on Linux for months). Just the other day on HN I learned about Erc, which is an IRC client that's built right into Emacs. Tried it out last night and it's working awesome so far! Now if only the 8 Slack teams I'm a part of would switch over...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It didn't fail. Not a perfect analogy, but saying "why IRC failed" is like saying "why horse and buggy failed". IRC was quite successful. Still is really, just is used a LOT less now.

</comment><comment><USER23> Let me guess: next week we're gonna learn how e-mail died and nobody uses it anymore?

</comment><comment><USER24> Author of the talk here, ask me anything!

<comment><USER25> I'm not sure I understand this:

> Clients joining and parting channels and servers didn't have much state

State and state management is the main design problem at the heart of IRC. There's actually a _lot_ of state considering that this is state that has to be replicated across all servers. (All servers have to know about all users currently connected)

Servers are connected in a spanning tree. All servers need to have the same state. State changes are initiated locally at each server and propagated through the spanning tree (which simplifies state propagation a lot). State changes take time to propagate, which means that servers will not have the same view of the world at any given time. Network partitions means the servers on each side of the partition have to forget all the state that belongs to the other side of the partition. When networks join conflicting state has to be resolved and there aren't really any good ways to do this.

Perhaps we have different views on "state". Perhaps you are talking more about the user experience and not the design challenges inherent in the low level design?

One thing that makes me very sad is that XMPP was such a pig's breakfast. It would have been really nice to have a messaging system backed by an IETF standard that wasn't infested with whatever technology was popular at the time of its creation.

<comment><USER21> > Perhaps we have different views on "state".

One of the common complaints I have heard about IRC is that there's no history if you're not connected (contrast to, say, Slack). In most cases I consider that to be a feature; one of my biggest complaints about the way many teams use Slack is that it becomes both a real-time chat system _and_ the canonical state of truth about decisions and how they were made.

It's a little more work, but I would personally prefer if chat was used to discuss things, and then someone took the time to actually summarize the discussion and conclusion into a document somewhere. Maybe it's Markdown that goes into Git, maybe it goes onto a wiki, maybe it's just a long-form email that people can review at their leisure. But there's got to be some kind of better record than a disjointed Slack chat.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: A time tracker to track and manage your personal overtime - <AUTHOR> https://www.weeksandhours.com/ <comment><USER2> Oh cool. I could have used this a couple of years ago when $Company was launching a new $product and I was working a lot of overtime and weekends. Not so much this year though with chroma virus there's not much work to do. Definitely not reaching overtime. Hope the future improves and overtime tracking becomes a thing again.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, this was my exact goal with this.

Though after dogfooding myself this for a month or two, I've found it useful during stay-at-home orders, since work time can blend into personal time so much more easily.</comment></comment>


Challenger.js – Pop-up JavaScript challenges in your browser - <AUTHOR> http://rileyjshaw.com/challenger/

<comment> n-gauge Needs more error checking - it allows me to pass the fizzbuzz test even though output is wrong when input = 0</comment>


Native Client: A Technology for Running Native Code on the Web - <AUTHOR> http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2008/12/native-client-technology-for-running.html

<comment><USER2> A coworker: "Yay! Google is re-imlementing ActiveX!"

<comment><USER3> Your coworker doesn't really understand ActiveX; ActiveX controls execute _unchecked_ native x86 code with _full access_ to the system call table. NaCL falls somewhere in between VMWare and the Java Bytecode Verifier.

<comment><USER4> I like your abbreviation for it, but that's not an official name, right? Are you just hoping it will catch on?

I'll join you in calling it NaCl.

<comment><USER3> They used it in the paper.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yahoo! has already released a very similar "BrowserPlus" ... <http://browserplus.yahoo.com/>

<comment><USER6> They don't look that similar, since BrowserPlus doesn't appear to run arbitrary untrusted native code.

<comment><USER3> NaCL doesn't run "arbitrary" native code; it runs a strictly controlled subset of x86, with all bblock edges verified, in a per-process environment that uses segment access controls to prevent code from overwriting code, and without access to the full system call table. It is basically a faster version of the Java applet sandbox.

<comment><USER6> Maybe "arbitrary" wasn't the right word; my point is that it looks like BrowserPlus lets you run a small selection of native things approved by Yahoo, while NaCl lets you run whatever you want in a sandbox. Most of the restrictions of NaCl are inconsequential since they only block things that well-behaved code doesn't do anyway.

<comment><USER4> I believe BrowserPlus will allow 3rd party plugins, though I'm not sure if they will require Yahoo approval.

Also, there's already a "RubyInterpreter" plugin, though assuming it's sandboxed there's not much advantage over JavaScript, unless you prefer Ruby (JS appears to be faster than Ruby, in most cases: [http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/debian/benchmark.php?test=...](http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/debian/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=javascript&lang2=ruby))

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's game over for Microsoft. The OS will become even more irrelvant. Adobe should be really worried too - they both just might disappear into a silvery lit air :)

Let's just hope Google doesn't mess this opportunity up. This is the silver bullet and they get to shoot it only once and they must not miss. No beta tags.

<comment><USER3> It was game over long before NaCL, which is why I'm not bullish on this particular browser plugin: very, very few information problems people need solved require native code, and those few problems are already pretty well represented. If this was a killer problem, the JVM applet plugin would have evolved faster.

<comment><USER8> This could be a huge boon to casual multiplayer gaming. You may be able to implement games that are as fast as desktop clients, but which require zero installation. (Once the plugin is installed the first time, of course.)

The same benefits would also be a huge boon to browser office apps.

Actually, _this_ is the architecture that should be used to distribute plugins, period.

<comment><USER3> You say that as if you knew it to be true. But we don't really even know if it's going to work; it's a new x86 verification scheme, and if it's somehow broken, it won't work _at all_.

I see how a near-native-performance plugin interface is valuable, but it's still just not clear to me why, if this was that important, it wouldn't be in the Java applet plugin's bailiwick. The same CS disciplines that make NaCL possible can also drastically accelerate the JVM.

It's also not totally clear that, when NaCL is actually fielded, the end user experience will be that much better than the applet plugin. NaCL forks off a seperate process and sets up a special runtime with a sidecar debug monitor; once it's up in steady state, I'm sure it's faster than Java, but the big issue with Java is setup time.

<comment><USER8> Your referents are a bit vague: "You say that as if you knew it to be true."

Are you referring to my first paragraph, where I say _could_?

Are you referring to my second, where I say _would_? (Would if it works like it's supposed to.)

As for my last paragraph, this is an opinion based on personal experience with the "security" of ActiveX and other plugins I've run into in my professional life. Web plugins and other downloaded executables should be sandboxed for security.

Also, the fact that it's not a virtual machine, but virtualized machine code will help with setup: the X86 ISA seems to change much less often than the JRE.

<comment><USER3> When I said "that", I think I meant, "all of it". ;)

ActiveX vs. NaCL is a false comparison, obviously. You can't do worse than ActiveX, and nobody promotes it.

I don't understand your last paragraph; setup time isn't going to be based on the X86 ISA, but rather the time it takes to fork a process, monitor it in a debugger, set up the system call interface, and then do whatever UI goop NaCL wants to do to give native code a window context. It could be faster than the Java applet plugin. It could be slower. And applets could get faster.

<comment><USER8> So your "that" referent consisted of two hypothetical parts and a 3rd statement that you agree is trivially true.

I meant setup from a user standpoint. I suspect that once such sandbox software was stable, updates would be less frequent than updates to the Java plugin. You meant setup time in terms of getting code JITed and actual execution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> History will judge this to be our day's version of VBA.

</comment><comment><USER10> Could you run a Python interpreter in this, or Perl?

<comment><USER11> Better yet, you can run a JavaScript interpreter in there. Firefox, even.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It seems like NaCl should be part of Gears, no?

</comment><comment><USER11> I guess metaprogramming is out of the question.

<comment><USER6> Not necessarily, although you won't be doing any JIT.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is it wise to use a 'meta' VC?  - <AUTHOR>

My startup fabfabbers.com has been approached a few times now by people that appear to be VCs, but are actually agents that claim to have access to many VCs, and will charge some kind of fee upon successful funding.<p>Question is, has anyone used such a 'meta' VC (if that's the right term). If so, what is a reasonable charge/charging structure? I do need funding, but worry this might not be the way to go. <comment><USER2> Don't touch it.

VCs are super-connected people, if you're at all connected with the startup world you should be able to get organic introductions through your network. If you're not at all connected then one option might be to go through an accelerator (YC, Techstars, Seedcamp) which can give you a leg up.

Most VCs will also attend a wide range of events which can be a good place to meet them.

(disclaimer: while I work for a VC I'm speaking in a personal capacity, although I believe my views are aligned with both my colleagues at my firm and at all the other major VC firms)

</comment><comment><USER3> The people approaching you are crooks. Just delete their emails.

</comment><comment><USER4> By meta VC's are you referring to Accelerator funds?

</comment><comment><USER5> I have no direct experience of the market but my first impression is to use a large cattle prod on such people, and wash it afterwards.

There are _plenty_ of real VCs out there, and the good ones do have a network of folks whose recommendations they would trust. Those recommendations do not come on a commission basis (unless a good lunch at an expensive restaurant is commission). I strongly suspect that trying to convert membership of that network into cash is the the fastest, surest way of leaving the network.

If you want an introduction to a VC, try this:

* look up their list of funded companies

* find the companies that are in your field, or work OSS projects close to yours

* do some work with them, say hello, contribute patches.

* be upfront about your status - a founder who one day might look at funding.

* When you have customer traction, ask for advice and help on getting funding. Your linkedin network now contains a dozen people who know your work _and_ know a VC.

disclaimer: I have no idea if this will work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh dear, you mean the 'meta' VCs, or just any VCs at all?

<comment><USER5> Definitely the "meta" VCs get the cattle prod. (I mean, a "meta" VC is just as ethically challenged as the real VC, plus no money!)

The real VCs, I suspect that depends, there are many ethical professional people in the VC world - but do take into account the day you have had and the battery charge left :0

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll keep mine charged up then :) Thanks for the advice by the way.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


European leaders call for open access to all scientific papers by 2020 (2016) - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/05/dramatic-statement-european-leaders-call-immediate-open-access-all-scientific-papers <comment><USER3> Now this is an interesting development! We shall observe what comes of it, though.

Meanwhile, a group of Finnish researchers are organizing a review boycott [1] against Elsevier, one of the reasons being Elsevier's unyielding opposition to the Finnish libraries' OA requests [2].

[1] [http://www.nodealnoreview.org/](http://www.nodealnoreview.org/)

[2] [https://www.kiwi.fi/display/finelib/Scholarly+publications+-...](https://www.kiwi.fi/display/finelib/Scholarly+publications+-+FinELib+negotiations)

</comment><comment><USER4> This probably comes up all the time in these discussions, but any change in this area has to be top down. i.e., People with influence and job security like tenured faculty need to signal a change and move to open access. A grad student or an assistant professor isn't going to put his/her career on the line for ideals. I'm not too familiar with the journal culture, but at least in CS with conferences, all the critical work (program committee, reviews etc.) is done for free by everyone involved. That it can end up behind a paywall is quite sad.

<comment><USER5> Correct. These stories always make it sound like it's the big bad private journals that are trying to steal all the taxpayer-funded research which should belong to the people. But the scientists are the ones that are (still) sending their results to private journals for publications. They could instead chose to send it to OA journals, and some do.

<comment><USER6> > But the scientists are the ones that are (still) sending their results to > private journals for publications

Most importantly, from the parent comment, senior scientists are the ones that are still volunteering their reviewing efforts to private, closed-access journals, for free. Given that the career penalty for doing less reviews is very small (it might even be negative), to me this is even more puzzling.

<comment><USER7> Systematically refusing to do reviews really doesn't help your changes of getting your own papers (and those of your grad students) accepted in the future. Editors have a lot of freedom in deciding what's on topic for their journal.

<comment><USER6> In my field (theoretical CS), I have never heard about a journal refusing papers from authors that have declined to review for the journal. In fact I would consider this extremely shady: journals shouldn't handle papers differently depending on the identity of the authors, no matter the reason.

<comment><USER8> Well they wouldn't make it obvious. It would be rejected for other reasons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I am ambivalent about this. "Open Access" would definitely mean more access to articles but at what costs? The costs for OA in Elsevier (for example) could easily go beyond 1000$ [0]. Open Access does not mean access to articles at a higher costs. OA is to access articles for which you already paid for. Here, I see a sort of double payment - tax payer research funds + article access. Why should we pay exorbitant article access fees for research already funded by tax payers?

[0[ [https://www.elsevier.com/__data/promis_misc/j.custom97.pdf](https://www.elsevier.com/__data/promis_misc/j.custom97.pdf)

<comment><USER6> > "Open Access" would definitely mean more access to articles but at what > costs?

This is only for what private publishers like Elsevier call "open access". Reputable publishers like LIPIcs (in computer science) charge 60 EUR per article. Besides, they charge this for all articles (i.e., there is no option to publish closed-access), so they do not sell subscriptions, hence there is no double payment.

<comment><USER10> I thought the 'double payment' refers to people paying for the research through the tax system, and then paying again to look at the resulting paper?

<comment><USER6> Oops, right. I thought the parent comment referred to "double dipping" for hybrid journals (those that have both open-access and closed-access articles): where research institutes pay once for "open-access article processing charges" (to publish) and once more for subscriptions (to read the articles that are closed-access).

Of course, all of this is in addition to the intrinsic cost of doing the research.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is limited to public-funded research results, I think.

[https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/may/28/eu- ministers...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/may/28/eu- ministers-2020-target-free-access-scientific-papers)

<comment><USER12> Which is the vast majority of published research results.

<comment><USER11> That's true. But still, it seems odd that most of the coverage doesn't mention that limitation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Open Access (and better user interface/experience to be honest) - [http://sci- hub.cc](http://sci-hub.cc)

<comment><USER14> [http://libgen.io](http://libgen.io) not bad either

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Getting papers refereed and distributed does cost. I think many journals are now charging more than £1k for accepting papers for open access, conferences charge fees ~£.5k or more (+ travel). Of course you can submit to arXiv, but that's moderated - not refereed and is sponsored by wonderful people - <USER2> what if one day the people paying for it stop being so wonderful.

In the past the cost of papers was paid on the demand side and borne communally, now the cost is paid on the supply side. Science still values paper counts and citation counts - but it seems to me that folks who can afford publication now have an unhealthy advantage that they didn't used to!

<comment><USER16> In most fields, referees are volunteers, and the editors who coordinate them are volunteers or get some trivially tiny recompensation. Distribution costs of a paper should be about as high as those of a blog post.

<comment><USER17> There's more to running a journal than that - you have formatting editors who make the PDF look good and give it a thorough last read (finding for me several errors that peer review never found - missing or switched references, for example). The actual per-paper costs seem to be a few hundred dollars, as written in this article:

[http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of- scie...](http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-science- publishing-1.12676)

Profit margins are amazing though, it really pays to get into publishing. Elsevier (not all open access, and rather dodgy to many) is one of the most profitable businesses in the world: [https://medium.com/@jasonschmitt/can-t- disrupt-this-elsevier...](https://medium.com/@jasonschmitt/can-t-disrupt-this- elsevier-and-the-25-2-billion-dollar-a-year-academic-publishing-business- aa3b9618d40a)

<comment><USER6> > you have formatting editors who make the PDF look good and give it a > thorough last read (finding for me several errors that peer review never > found - missing or switched references, for example).

This may depend on the field, but in CS I have never seen this. There is essentially no change made by the publisher to papers, and when they do make changes, more often than not it is to introduce errors.

In any case, the huge profit margins of publishers indicate that the cost of this dubious service is much lower than the charge.

But the most important point is this: doing minor copyediting shouldn't be grounds to own the journal and own copyright on the published articles. The journals should be owned by scientists, or by a nonprofit scientific society. Even assuming that research needs to pay for copyediting services, these should be contractors of the nonprofit (with competition among them), not owners of the journal and articles.

<comment><USER18> In the biomedical fields, many articles have to be deposited on PubMed Central, which requires them to be reformatted in their archival JATS XML format. Since articles are typically written in Word in those fields, this process involves a lot of manual tagging of references and figures and such, only partially aided by scripts. The process must incur a fairly hefty cost in maintaining warehouses full of people to do the tagging.

In principle it's great that articles are uniformly in XML -- you could easily write reader software for tablets or phones, data-mine the text, extract references, whatever -- but I haven't seen much software taking advantage of it.

<comment><USER19> So... require that the scientists submit the articles in JATS instead of Word files or PDFs? LaTeX already knows about the stuff you mentioned, so it shouldn't be too hard to make it output JATS directly. In fact, that already seems to exist[1].

[1]: [https://github.com/mfenner/pandoc- jats](https://github.com/mfenner/pandoc-jats)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The UK is already (getting) there. UK Universities are assessed by the "Research Excellence Framework" (REF). In order for work output (i.e. papers) to be considered by REF, final peer reviewed papers must be deposited into an open access repository within 3 months of acceptance.

Source: [http://openaccess.ox.ac.uk/next- ref/](http://openaccess.ox.ac.uk/next-ref/)

</comment><comment><USER21> Awesome. I do think all publicly funded research papers should be available. Research done by private companies using their own funds however shouldn't be.

Maybe if America had open access, things would of turned out a lot better for Aaron Swartz :(

<comment><USER22> When I did my master's, I explicitly chose 2-clause BSD as the license for all the code I had produced as part of the thesis. My thesis project was done with, and paid for, by the university I attended. Since my work was being funded with public money, I felt it only fair to release everything with a liberal license.

The review board expressly noted two things that were out of the norm with my thesis. One: I chose to include source code with my thesis. Every copy came with a CD-ROM. (I even made sure to upload the same archive to the digital library so access to print copies was not required.)

And two: the review board made a point of mentioning that I released the sources for my thesis project with a very liberal license. What I had considered only fair, the board considered out of the ordinary.

Footnote - I didn't include just the sources. I included the entire .svn/ __hierarchy to provide complete editing history.

Footnote 2 - I picked up git in 2007. Thesis was done in 2006.

<comment><USER23> I think that the history should be mandatory also for the comments (i.e. from your adviser or reviewer). That could apply for other scientific disciplines as well and give a very good indication on the quality of the process that the thesis went trough, sadly academics are the worst people to agree on anything.

<comment><USER22> Now this would be a novel approach. A proper review and comment history attached...

I like it. I'm actually going to toss this idea to the people I still know at my university.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> No mention of it but I wonder if scihub has influenced this.

</comment><comment><USER25> How can a government force a researcher to make their results public?

Isn't that reaching too far?

I feel there is a reasonable, decent case for private, for-profit scientific research, is there not?

</comment><comment><USER26> Sounds like a good goal, though it also sounds ripe for abuse. Will "fake scientific papers" be a new version of fake news? A surge of industry or agenda funded junk or cherry picked science?

</comment><comment><USER27> Anybody have an update? This is from a year ago.

</comment><comment><USER28> China can't steal all of that IP if we release it to the public first!

Just kidding of course, this is great news. The EU should still be the main beneficiary of open access science following this policy.

</comment><comment><USER29> Aaron Swartz would be proud of this progress.

</comment><comment><USER30> -> (2016)

      May. 27, 2016

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't understand how governments have the authority to make private companies (journal publishers) give-away their product for free. The fact that much of the research is funded by taxpayers is not relevant -- scientists have voluntarily submitted their work to private publishers for publication. Going forward, perhaps they should stop doing that. But for work that was previously published? It's rightly owned by the publishers.

Note, that here the "product" I'm referring to is the final formatted article. If governments want to mandate that universities release internal versions of their published works that seems fine, but that work should be for the universities or governments to undertake. They should not be allowed to release Nature's formatted/published version. This is how Pubmed Central works currently in the US (unformatted manuscripts are released, not the journals' version). When Nature releases an article, they put a lot of work into formatting it for publication so it looks nice. That final product does and should belong to them.

It's fine if people think that publicly-funded research should be freely available. But the fact remains that scientists have been voluntarily publishing their work in private for-profit journals for 100+ years. You can't just "undo" that. And they're still doing it today. If scientists truly felt strongly about these issues they'd only publish in OA journals, but most of them don't care (source: I'm a scientist).

<comment><USER4> >most of them don't care (source: I'm a scientist).

This is sort of the gist of the problem. For one, the researches themselves are shielded from the lack of open access because all major universities have institutional access. Secondly, no one wants to take up the auxiliary work that would be required to publish a journal, even if it's only publishing on the web. And finally, it's hard to replace history and prestige of existing journals. Younger researchers will continue submitting to these journals since they care more about their careers than ideals. Any change in public perception would have to be driven top down by people already established in their fields.

<comment><USER31> Let's say that you suddely start caring once your library drops subscriptions to journals that you need.

<comment><USER6> Then you just use Sci-Hub, like you do when working from home.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Quick.as - Better Than Google - <AUTHOR> http://beepinteractive.com/blog/2008/05/06/better-than-google/ Quick.as allows you to put a "command" (a keyboard shortcut of sorts) in front of you search term and you will go directly to the search results of a particular site (e.g. w Boston Celtics searches Wikipedia). Quick.as allows access to the search results from other sites in the one convenient location. The post explains how Quick.as provides you with better information than Google (or at very least the same); and after the commands become second nature, it allows you to access to the information you want quicker and with less mental processing. <comment><USER2> This is really cool if a little buggy. The most annoying part right now is that the java script seems to be eating the space after a command when you type quickly. The amazon searching is really nice, but the craigs list searching gave me a lot of trouble.</comment>


Grsecurity – FAQ about RAP - <AUTHOR> https://grsecurity.net/rap_faq.php <comment><USER2> Missing there:

\- What the #@$% is RAP:

[https://grsecurity.net/rap_announce.php](https://grsecurity.net/rap_announce.php)

"a _patent pending defense mechanism against code reuse attacks_. RAP was announced (...) in October 2015 (...). RAP is the result of our (..) development (...) by PaX. (...) minimal performance impact."

"For a technical deep-dive into RAP, please read the PaX Team's (...) 2015 presentation:"

[https://pax.grsecurity.net/docs/PaXTeam-H2HC15-RAP-RIP- ROP.p...](https://pax.grsecurity.net/docs/PaXTeam-H2HC15-RAP-RIP-ROP.pdf)

\- What is PaX and who is PaX team:

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

"PaX is a _patch for the Linux kernel_ that implements least privilege protections for memory pages."

"PaX is maintained by The PaX Team, whose _principal coder is anonymous._ "

<comment><USER3> >patent pending

How is this a good thing? Any more info? Will it be under a copyleft-style patent license?

<comment><USER4> It is an effort against Intel and other "big players" who stole/make-big money on efforts of small PaX/grsecurity team, not only did Intel though make money on grsecurity, they actively broke copyright of grsecurity patches.

<comment><USER5> If true, this would be concerning. Do you have an example or other evidence?

<comment><USER6> I believe he's referring to a situation where Wind River Systems, an Intel subsidiary, was found distributing the grsecurity patches with Wind River Linux. On its own, that would be fine, but they _also_ stated their Linux disto was "using grsecurity" throughout its brochures, etc.[1] This was taken as a misuse of the grsecurity trademark, since they were not paying for it, and I believe the grsec/Pax developers were at one point willing to go to court with Intel over this. But it's currently up in the air. Trademark/copyright claims in this area are a bit weird (it all depends on how WR's use of the trademark is interpreted), and Intel also has more money than God, so there you go.

The situation with Wind River is one of the reasons why the grsecurity stable patch is no longer publicly available, though, TBF, Wind River wasn't the only violator. They were more like the last straw, after they (grsecurity) had dealt with a bunch of other people using their work in the same way. And regardless of how the court claim would have gone -- honestly it's all a bit sad to me, given the only thing they've asked is you just don't call it grsecurity or whatever if you're not paying. Distros like Alpine and CopperheadOS have been doing just fine for a long time this way, it doesn't seem hard at all to play nice...

[1] I believe one of the Wind River employees was even ballsy enough to go onto the grsecurity forums and ask for technical help with part of the patches, and debugging them. As you can imagine, this did not go over very well, at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > "The second defense is more complicated. On entry to a function, it > essentially "encrypts" the address being returned to by the function, prior > to any code that could possibly corrupt the return address. The key used to > encrypt the return address is stored in a reserved CPU register, generally > ensuring that the key itself should not leak. The resulting value of > encrypting the return address gets saved in a register, but the actual > return address in memory is not modified. On return from the function, the > instrumented code will compare whatever return address exists at that point > (either legitimate or attacker-modified) to that obtained from decrypting > the encrypted return address saved in the other register. If the two do not > match, execution is terminated."

There's probably a very good reason I'm missing, but could the return address be hashed and then on return hash the address that is being returned to and compare it with the previously hashed address? This would prevent the issues around the encryption key leaking, but probably raises its own issues.

<comment><USER8> The problem I think is that at some point the register containing the encrypted address needs to be written to the stack, where it could be overwritten. So if it was just hashed, an attacker could overwrite both the hash and the plaintext return address, and return wherever they want. Although hashing with a secret salt would solve that. I don't seen any benefit over encrypting though.

One attack I can see is in their model of "the attacker can read all memory" the attacker reads the memory at a time when system() is legitimately called, then the attacker can know the encrypted version of the system() address, and use that to overwrite some other return address with system() and the encrypted version. But I think it would be very unlikely an attacker would be able to do that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> What does RAP mean for a regular Android user using the grsecurity ROM ? what types of malware does it protects against ? what types it doesn't ?

</comment><comment><USER10> The abuse of GCC GPLv3 license here is great. (The eligible compilation process is interpreted very tight. ) FSF getting hamstrung by themselves.

The profit motive is obvious due to a lack of yet easier implementation of the idea for Clang and LLVM.

<comment><USER11> I wouldn't say it's that great (both technically and in spirit).

> As sole copyright holder on the RAP plugin itself, the PaX Team is only > licensing the full version under a GPLv3 license to commercial customers to > permit legal compilation of userland binaries.

So technically nothing stops commercial customers to redistribute the sources in GPLv3. You can't just give out _exclusive_ GPLv3 licenses, it doesn't make any sense.

Also where can I download the "public RAP demo"?

edit: IANAL

<comment><USER12> My guess is that there could be some contractual agreement to forbid sharing of the GPLv3 source?

It is an interesting "hack" though and I would also like to know the answer (for no reason other than curiosity - I have no use for this software).

<comment><USER13> > My guess is that there could be some contractual agreement to forbid sharing > of the GPLv3 source?

That would negate the GPLv3 itself. What they (the PaX team) can do is provide an exception (like GCC does) to let the client use it while not having their (the client's) own code infected by the GPLv3.

The client would still be entitled to distribute the software they got from the PaX team to another party, which would receive it under the same terms.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


When hacker news resurrects the dead - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-innovations/the-internet-and-immortality/2012/05/23/gJQA7wEBlU_story.html

<comment><USER2> Better headline: Cmdrtaco Says Hacker News Best News For Nerds</comment>


"Ruby isn't slow. If anyone tells you PHP is faster than Ruby, tell them: 'Benchmark it.'" - <AUTHOR> http://skitch.com/leinweber/2qju/merbcamp <comment><USER2> Maybe I'm slow but it seems to me that the language is never the bottleneck for web applications. It seems to me that the bottleneck is in the db which is language agnostic for all general purposes.

And anything that is slow with just Ruby can be solved by throwing money at it.

<comment><USER3> Thoughtful and correct IMO. Caching is much more important to get right than backend-speed. Number crunching capability does not matter that much for web applications. And you can always outsource the tough calculations to languages better suited for it: ML, Common Lisp, C++, C, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Oh, god. How many times does this point need to be made? Yeah, cool. The compiler is fast.

Probably 1% of all websites on the internet ever manage to get enough traffic to make the language matter, right?

<comment><USER5> To be frank, at this point in time when I'm developing for the web, just about the only thing I care about when it comes to what language I'm using is that it's not PHP.

I understand why people use PHP, but as someone who has a decent amount of experience with a variety of languages, I really want a language that's designed _sanely_ , especially for things like web-(sites|apps). I'll _gladly_ take a hit on the language-speed side, or on the ease-of-finding-hosting side for the sake of not having to put up with PHPs craziness.

Why? For just the reason you pointed out - the vast majority of websites don't get enough traffic to make the language matter. I'd imagine that things like _learning how to configure apache and/or a caching tool like memcached_ would handle most of the performance bottleneck on a site that _did_ get that level of traffic.

Seriously - if a language is "fast" enough to allow the creation of responsive GUI apps, it's "fast" enough for web-apps.

<comment><USER6> PHP might not be the most elegant in the world, but for a small- to mid-size web application, using a solid PHP5 framework (like KohanaPHP) along with a PHP accelerator and you have an easy-to-use and easy-to-deploy application.

<comment><USER5> I agree in general, it's just not for me.

For small to mid-size web apps, I far prefer python and cherrypy (<http://www.cherrypy.org>). Easier to use, and easier to deploy assuming you have hosting that gives you control over your hosted machine (here's looking at you, slicehost).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> quite a few newcomers come to rails and think it's slow, because they're 'doin it wrong'. every framework's speed is really about your deployment setup. running mongrel can be slow, especially if you're load-testing a single mongrel instance. multiple instances can be slow if they're connecting to a slow database and serving static files.

put nginx in front of thin, start caching frequently used objects, and slice up your database and suddenly speed isn't a problem. php has the (perceived) advantage of running compiled in an apache module, typically. but it's a perception -- you have to do a little more tuning with your rails deployment to make it scream, but make no mistake, it can scream, even under heavy load, and without a huge server farm, at least up to 500K pages/day. i know that number because i've served it. quickly.

in radiant. (gasp! yes, with some caching.)

with one database.

it's a lesson i learned working with tomcat back in the day: defaults suck. learn your framework, learn your app server, pick the Right Thing. it's all about application tuning and app-server choice, and that goes for every language and platform in existence.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The headline is a quotation from Yehuda Katz's MerbCamp closing keynote. See the summary of the keynote here at the bottom of this link:

<http://rubypond.com/articles/2008/10/12/merbcamp---day-2/>

</comment><comment><USER8> Translate please -

[http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all...](http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=ruby&lang2=php)

<comment><USER9> The white bars are time, the black bars are memory usage. Ergo, in _most_ cases, PHP is running 2-5x faster than Ruby, but using about 3x as much memory.

<comment><USER3> Memory usage can probably be attributed to how PHP manages memory (hint: It /almost/ doesn't).

<comment><USER9> Right.

Outlying results have to do with that whatever that specific benchmark concerns, e.g. thread startup cost.

<comment><USER10> > e.g. thread startup cost

There are 2 which require threads, there's no PHP program for either of those so why do you think "thread startup cost" has any relevance?

<comment><USER9> I wasn't stating which the outliers test, I was saying how to read the graph.

<comment><USER10> If that was your intention it's strange that as an example you suggested something that is not shown on the graph.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you're comparing something to PHP's speed, you've already lost.

</comment><comment><USER12> ...and Python is still 3x faster than PHP and Ruby without psyco..

</comment><comment><USER13> You can also say "Smalltalk isn't slow" or "Lisp isn't slow", but you won't see anyone run towards either of them...

<comment><USER14> Unlike Ruby.

<comment><USER13> Worse is better as they say.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Stats for Rails?

<comment><AUTHOR> "Next was comparing Merb against other ruby options. Returning directly from the Merb router kills everything, but there aren't many scenarios you could use that. _Sinatra is just slightly faster than returning from the Merb controller, which both outperform Rails by a 3-4x. Rails itself still kills CakePHP._ "

<comment><USER15> oh, crap.</comment></comment></comment>


Google+ should and will succeed as Information discovery Platform  - <AUTHOR> http://www.nainomics.in/2011/12/google-should-and-will-succeed-as.html

<comment><USER2> here is an article from Computer which also talks about How Google products become Google+ features

[http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9222547/Why_Google_wi...](http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9222547/Why_Google_will_become_Google_s_only_product)</comment>


LimeWire settles: are Google and Amazon next on RIAA's docket? - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/05/limewire-settles-are-google-and-amazon-next-on-riaas-docket.ars

<comment><USER2> Google, almost definitely, because the RIAA wants us to pay for every possible slightly different way to use music, while Google would just help you make your music conveniently available everywhere.

Given that, I wonder if Google couldn't hit them where it hurts and start giving some artists non-exploitative contracts. You know, not playing the game where they refuse to release your last album until you sign up for a contract extension, or all those other little tricks they have that are practically industry standards.

If they started threatening the RIAA in terms of music production & marketing as well as distribution, the big RIAA labels could be made irrelevant.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not super impressed by Amazon's cloud drive so far, but I immediately signed up for the 50GB/$50 a year plan and am now using it at work.

So far my experience is mixed, but I hope there will be enough early adopters to encourage them (and Google) to take a stand against the RIAA insistence on new payoffs whenever users wish to do something with items they already own.

When Apple's offering appears I'll have to see what it offers, but if it involves licensees or smallprint (only songs purchased via iTunes etc) there's virtually zero chance that I'll sign up, for exactly the same reason.

<comment><USER4> $50 a year? I pay $36 a year for Grooveshark and I've yet to not be able to find a song I wanted to listen to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "But the 10,000-pound gorilla in the room is the unclear legality of these storage services playing host to pirated music. And that's where the labels might have some legal muscle." What a horribly written article.

<comment><USER2> To be fair, the RIAA & co. is working night and day to weaken the DMCA Safe Harbor provisions and to extend the MGM v. Grokster case's ruling about inducement as far as possible.

I'm sure that Google did a proper legal analysis to stay within the bounds of the law, but there are people out there working hard to change the law.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is it really a good idea for the RIAA to sue companies which have the cash reserves to purchase their clients outright?

</comment><comment><USER7> And history would set a new speed record for repeating itself.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMG_v._MP3.com>

</comment><comment><USER8> Does Limewire have $100 million? Does it have _any_ money? Is anyone going to get paid? Is the founder guy really going to cut a $100 million check at this point?

<comment><USER9> The limewire ceo has a lot of assets. Houses, cars, huge annuity accounts that were setup to try to keep the money from being taken, they have a lot to go after. Enough to cover the costs and get rid of Limewire.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I really hope the RIAA goes after companies like Google, Amazon, and Apple. The RIAA will run out of money long before those companies do.

</comment><comment><USER4> Here's what I don't understand...

Piracy is always going to be around. It's just easy for me to hop on my friendly neighborhood torrenting site and download a copy of a movie or album I want to watch/hear. I used to torrent like no other, until something happened. Netflix came along. I signed up for Netflix and you know what, I can honestly say I've never torrented a movie since. Why? Because I'm content paying my Netflix monthly fee to legally obtain movies without jumping through hoops and having to install adware infested DRM software and whatnot. I also subscribe to Hulu for TV shows that I can't get on Netflix or aren't all available to instant stream (yet?)

Now we have Music..... I have an iPhone so you know what, I still torrent music. Why? Well I have Grooveshark, but Apple is too stuck-up to approve their app for the app store. What's that mean? It means while I could listen to the music legally (which is still arguable when it comes to Grooveshark) Apple isn't going to let me. I'll be damned if I'm going to be forced to pay for something I already have a subscription for. I could jailbreak and get the Grooveshark app, which I'm thinking about, but we'll see.

tl;dr Music subscription site like Netflix is for Movies that works on iOS devices = dramatic decline in piracy. Of course, it will be a cold day in hell before Apple allows another company to cut into their iTunes Music Store profits.</comment>


Joyent and Cloud9 partner to self-provision their SmartMachines from Cloud9 IDE - <AUTHOR> http://www.joyent.com/2011/07/joyent-and-cloud9-partner-to-provide-ready-to-deploy-node-js-ide/

<comment><USER2> This will be very interesting to watch. I remember when other IDE tried to setup this up (Visual Studio had a "hosting" feature for a while). Because the tech stack was so "config" heavy it was very difficult to get right in a lot of cases.

NodeJS doesn't suffer that problem. In fact it's one of it's major advantages in my opinion.</comment>


Dancing your way into EffortLess Web Development with Perl and Dancer - <AUTHOR> http://airodig.com/2010/05/26/dancing-your-way-into-effortless-web-development-with-dancer-and-perl/

<comment><USER2> The host seems to be down. Here is Dancer up on CPAN <http://search.cpan.org/~xsawyerx/Dancer-1.1803/lib/Dancer.pm>

<comment><USER3> Might be something to do with the site redesign: [http://www.sukria.net/fr/archives/2010/05/20/redesign- contes...](http://www.sukria.net/fr/archives/2010/05/20/redesign-contest-for- perldancer-org/)

Site (original design) is up now. Also a more canonical CPAN link is: <http://search.cpan.org/dist/Dancer/></comment></comment>


Blind Mathematicians - <AUTHOR> http://onionesquereality.wordpress.com/2011/07/31/blind-geometers/

<comment><USER2> Excellent post! The fact that blindness can actually be an asset in modeling higher dimensional objects (or complex ones in 3D) in mathematics is interesting. It reminded me of reading that the name "swallowtail" was coined by a blind mathematician (name escapes me now) for a certain kind of bifurcation in catastrophe theory ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catastrophe_theory#Swallowtail_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catastrophe_theory#Swallowtail_catastrophe)).

On a different but related note: Some people in the deaf community has long argued that deafness is not an handicap and in fact can be considered as "a difference in perception", akin to having a different native language or coming from a different country. Although the more radical aspects of such a position is untenable (some deaf parents declare they would rather have deaf child rather than a gearing one) the fact that having constraints put on perception will lead to increases in other aspects of it is quite interesting, I think. Should we call it "the conservation of perception"?

</comment><comment><USER3> > The following anecdote illustrates the hazards of being editorial assistant > of the _Annals_ in the early thirties. A manuscript was submitted by the > brilliant Soviet mathematician, Lev Pontryagin. Since paper was then > exceptionally scarce in the Soviet Union, Pontryagin had taken wrapping > paper, torn it into appropriate-sized pieces, and gone to work on his > typewriter. Unfortunately, Pontryagin was blind. The wrapping paper was torn > unevenly, and a good portion of the words and symbols in the margins were > missing. No matter. The Annals editorial assistant retyped the paper, > supplying all the missing symbols. What a hero!

Edgar R. Lorch, _Szeged in 1934_ , American Mathematical Monthly, vol. 100, #3, pp.220–221

</comment><comment><USER4> As someone who's been slowly going deaf since infancy, these sorts of stories can be really inspiring.</comment>


Buy A Girl Her Life Back - <AUTHOR> http://www.the-girl-store.org/shop

<comment><USER2> Why is this so gender specific?</comment>


The Curse of the Network Effect - <AUTHOR> http://www.nirandfar.com/2013/06/the-curse-of-the-network-effect.html

<comment><USER2> I think it's commendable that Ethan is okay with being on record saying his company Zvents only achieved "mediocrity" and further sharing his honest post mortem thoughts. The lessons here could apply to a lot of aspiring companies.

<comment><USER3> Thanks Alex, agreed, I think it was great of Ethan to share his lessons learned</comment></comment>


Dosemu2: a re-incarnation of Dosemu - <AUTHOR> http://stsp.github.io/dosemu2/

<comment><USER2> I'm not familiar with dosemu. How does it compare to dosbox, or just installing dos on VirtualBox / etc?

Also, it appears to be 6 months since the last release of dosemu2. Is it already abandoned?

<comment><USER3> Dosbox does CPU emulation and all full-machine virtualization solutions have to do the same for real mode code. Original dosemu on the other hand works in mostly same way as DOS window/NTVDM in Windows/Windows NT.

i386 has support for essentially transparent switches between 16/32bit protected modes and special mode in which it runs plain real mode code but paging is active and privileged operations cause traps into kernel/hypervisor (then usually called "VM manager" or such) these two features are designed to support exactly this kind of backward-compatibility layers and were used both for multitasking of DOS software (Windows, OS/2, DESQview, ...) as well as to extend capabilities of DOS itself (various mechanisms for accessing more than 640KB RAM from real mode, DOS extenders, DPMI servers, hardware compatibility layers (which did not work so well)). Most DOS software does not do anything that cannot be emulated by combination of these two mechanisms and programs that do such things are almost universally DOS based loaders for another operating systems.

Problem with this whole thing is that this does not work on x86_64 with 64bit kernel. (another thing is that any implementation of this mechanism is invariably one big colossal mess of edge cases and ugly hacks, but it does work and surprisingly reliably)

<comment><USER4> Well, yes it does, at least on Ubuntu x64. (I'm using it now).

See:

[https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1328965](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1328965)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I remember using dosemu for some gamesabout 15 years ago on a slow computer. It was much faster than dosbox. Nowadays it doesn't seem to matter. It was also really easy to setup.

</comment><comment><USER6> Was development of the original dosemu stopped?</comment>


What Startups Can Learn From Billy "Moneyball" Beane - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2008/08/23/what-startups-can-learn-from-billy-beane-and-moneyball/ <comment><USER2> #3 is strange-- it claims that there's no such thing as a wrong metric, and then provides an example of a wrong metric (which they suggest no longer tracking).

<comment><USER3> I think the point is there are no harmful metrics to collect, but there are useless ones. However you don't know which ones are useless until you've collected them for while, so just collect them now and worry about their utility later.</comment></comment>


Are airline pilots forgetting how to fly? - <AUTHOR> http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44324527/ns/business/

<comment> bulte-rs Perhaps it is true that pilot's who fly commercially too long (i.e. > 10yrs?) "forget" some basic flying skills. But based on the examples mentioned in the msnbc article I personally think the problem lies more in the fact that pilot's forget how to communicate. Crew coordination is a big part in pilot training (which as most of you will know goes on forever); but nevertheless I've heard of many examples of communication gone wrong (the Turkish Airlines crash being the closest to home for me).</comment>


Is it possible to quit Google? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18777671 <comment><USER2> Must be a slow news day as it isn't that hard to use the internet without using any google products. How the article failed to list alternative search engines is somewhat supprising and seemed to be more a privacy min-rant if anything.

Simple answear yes you can avoid google whilst using the internet. Just as you can read the news from other sources instead of the BBC, all things being equal.

Still suppose it highlights that consumers have a choice, even if those alternative choices are not listed or highlighted - they are out there if you so wish.

</comment><comment><USER3> I swore off most of Google about 6 months ago or so. Contrary to apparently popular opinion, there's a whole big Internet out there that isn't part of Google.

I still use Search at work, solely because the project I'm currently working on (last 12 months or so) requires a lot of searching for information, and my browser history with google is helpful in determining places I have/have not already searched when altering search terms. Other than that, I can count on my fingers the number of times I hit a Google product each week, and usually have fingers left over.</comment>


OS X emulation layer for Linux - <AUTHOR> http://darling.dolezel.info/en/Darling <comment><USER2> A) This was discussed by a bunch of people already two weeks ago.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893022>

B) Apparently this is a better-marketed expansion of the long-established maloader, which already works for many of the use cases that people bring up when they hear about this project (such as running parts of Xcode).

</comment><comment><USER3> This is of great interest to me because I've always wanted to run this...

<http://cycling74.com/whatismax/>

On one of these:

<http://www.museresearch.com/products/receptor-vip.php>

Designing live performance environments in Max is awesome, but laptops just are not designed for the rigors of the road. They are delicate creatures that stand in awkwardly, at best, for musical instruments. Max running on the Receptor would be incredible, and hopefully not too challenging considering the environment is largely self-contained with very few external dependencies.

<comment><USER4> Isn't PureData (<http://puredata.info/>) the open source equivalent, available to run native on Linux, and fairly feature compatible?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Oh BTW DAE remember ARDI's Executor?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executor_%28software%29>

It is not OS X, but the Classic Macintosh System translated on the fly to native code. Because it didn't get enough funding, and lack of interest, and very few buyers it sort of went DOA. I am sure if they had enough funding they could have modified it to OS X translation. Maybe someone should help them do a Kickstarter project?

<comment><USER6> Having worked on a translation layer for a large API (my project Alky converted Windows games to run on Linux and OS X), building something like this solo is just asking for pain. An open source project with solid direction is much more likely to end well. Also, Executor really couldn't be changed to support OS X; totally different architecture, no processor emulation, etc.

At the end of the day, it's really just API translation; not a technically difficult project, just an incredibly intensive one.

<comment><USER5> How does ARDI Executor compare to the Mac OS X emulation in this linked article? Are they on the right path, or does Executor do things differently?

<comment><USER6> They're really not comparable at all. Executor is a 68k emulator + APIs for OS7; the tough part there is doing the emulation properly, and then just implementing all the APIs. Darling is just a binary loader + APIs; the loader is trivial but there are a bajillion APIs. Probably 3-4 orders of magnitude more complexity in Darling, simply due to how much is in OS X.

I do think they're on the right track, though. Hoping to lend a hand when I get some free time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Well this OS X emulation layer is not ready for prime time yet. Don't expect it to run 100% of your Mac OS X apps.

I'd really rather see more projects that focus on cross compiling XCode source code on Linux, so that companies can take their OS X software apps and cross compile them for Linux with little to no changes in the source code. I'd much rather trust native Linux code than OS X emulated code.

I'd also like to see some 'byteswap' projects that take the machine language of OS X apps and convert them to Linux format by converting each API or system interrupt, etc from OS X to Linux for apps that don't have the source code anymore.

Also anyone remember the Apple Darwin Project? I guess it stopped releasing binary install ISOS and instead releases the source code. You got the core of OS X right there, and it would be a good place to start to see the migration from Darwin to Linux right there.

<comment><USER7> It would be certainly amazing to be able to develop iOS apps on Linux, but I doubt Apple will entertain the idea.

<comment><USER5> Develop iOS apps on Linux, run iOS apps on Linux, or both?

I think Apple would restrict development requirements in the App Store to ban iOS apps created with a Non-Apple compiler on a Non-Apple platform just like they banned Adobe Flash and iOS apps made with Flash.

Not only that but Apple would sue anyone who made an environment to run iOS apps on a non-Apple operating system.

I kind of have a Love-Hate relationship with Apple because of that. I feel that iOS apps should be made on any platform and be allowed to run on any platform. Android is the complete opposite of iOS/Apple, any platform and any language can develop Android apps, you can choose more than just one store to buy apps from, and there is this Bluestack app <http://bluestacks.com/> that runs Android apps on Windows and there is a beta for Mac OS X IIRC. Not only that but there is an Android for PC OS: <http://www.android-x86.org/download>

<comment><USER7> I'm talking specifically about developing. I have to continuously switch between Ubuntu and Mac (and very rarely Windows) and I would prefer to do all of my work on my perfectly capable linux box instead of purchasing expensive Apple equipment just to run XCode. I definitely appreciate Android not forcing you to develop on any specific platform, but at $2k a MacBook Pro, I don't see Apple changing their policy anytime soon.

For now people want to develop for the App Store and they pay for the expensive machinery to get a piece of the action. If the Google Play Store ever becomes the trendy target market and Apple's position is threatened, I imagine they might consider opening up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can someone with a better understanding of this project Summarize it's goals? For example, would I be able to run Xcode on a Linux machine using this project when it is mature?

<comment><USER9> I think it's the same idea that Wine has for win32 applications, but for OS X applications instead: Provide a binary executable loader and an implementation of all the standard frameworks and libraries, so you can run unmodified mac apps on x86/x64-based Linux.

Edit:

For your Xcode example, in short, yes. (Although - that's probably one of the most difficult apps of them all to bring up, since it integrates and depends on iTunes, mobiledevice/mobilesupport libraries, debugger tools etc.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Would be interesting to see if this could be used to integrate XCode Unit Testing into Arcanist/Phabricator running on a Linux machine.

<comment><USER11> Today you can run hackintosh osx in a vm, ssh to it, and use xcodebuild.

Obviously it's more overhead but it functions today.

<comment><USER12> Except that you violate the EULA. I wouldn't recommend this in a commercial environment.

<comment><USER11> Not if the VM host is on Apple-branded HW.

Also, you'd have to get caught. It's not customer-facing.

<comment><USER13> "You'd have to get caught" isn't a way to do business. Plus it won't fly for those of us who work in giant megacorps with license audits.

<comment><USER11> If you're running xcode CI at a giant megacorp, you might want to rethink your life decisions.

<comment><USER12> Thats unfair to say. Release Engineering is super critical to running great software companies and is a strict technical discipline of its own.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What is the purpose of this, other than just to see if it can be done? I can't think of any software that would be worthwhile emulating that doesn't already have a Linux or Windows version (which is covered by Wine), other than xcode.

<comment><USER15> Does Linux have something like Alfred?

I run a Linux desktop and a Mac laptop. Alfred is the biggest reason I enjoy my OS X computer more. Huge thanks to anyone who can suggest a Linux alternative.

<comment><USER16> Yes we do. It's called Synapse and it's actually pretty similar.

<https://launchpad.net/~synapse-core/+archive/ppa>

<comment><USER17> And synapse-core adds what functionality, exactly? I gave up trying to figure that out from the ppa site and Googled it instead: [https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&tbo=d&...](https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&tbo=d&tbs=qdr:y&q=synapse+linux&oq=synapse+linux)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The only thing I'm really missing on linux is xcode.

</comment><comment><USER19> "No offense intended", but how is this different from any of the <n> different other OSX emulators?

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you know of any?

<comment><USER5> PearPC?

<http://pearpc.sourceforge.net/about.html>

Mac OS X PowerPC emulation is spotty at best.

Mac On Linux? <http://mac-on-linux.sourceforge.net/>

Runs the PowerPC Mac OS X on PowerPC Linux systems.

Most that I know of aren't emulators but virtual machines for the PowerMac/CHRP platform that happen to run the PowerPC Mac OS X on them.

There would be more I am sure, and for Intel Macs, but Apple can just threaten lawsuits to discourage more of it. If the ability to run Mac OS X apps on other platforms exists, Apple stands to lose a lot of money on hardware sales. The Hackintosh market, for example uses cheap PC hardware to run Mac OS X on a non-Apple branded computer.

<comment><USER20> I don't think we'll see more simply because once Apple made the transition to Intel, it became somewhat "easy" to install an Intel supported version of OSX on vanilla hardware. I don't think it's the lawsuits keeping the emu guys at bay, I think it's just the "why bother" factor. If it's nostalgia, I completely understand.

I did install OSX 10.2 Jaguar a couple of weeks ago on PearPC because my son is obsessed with the different releases that came out before he was born. I wanted to show him all that pin-stripey goodness.

<comment><USER5> I heard to fight the Hackintosh crowd that Apple is considering migrating Mac OS X to ARM based devices for their next Macintosh evolution. That way they can control what devices run Mac OS X better, and since iOS is Mac OS X based and runs on ARM chips it would be easier to port Mac OS X to ARM based Macintosh systems and possibly have a virtual machine on ARM Mac OS X to run iOS apps as well.

They of course would have to buy a chip maker that can make 64 bit ARM CPUs with at least quad core to save on costs. I think Apple wants to get rid of buying chips from Samsung because of the iOS vs. Android lawsuits.

<comment><USER21> I guess they can do it at their leisure, according to WSJ their contract is until 2014. Source: [http://www.marketwatch.com/story/samsung-hits-apple- with-20-...](http://www.marketwatch.com/story/samsung-hits-apple- with-20-price-hike-report-2012-11-11)

<comment><USER22> nit: in the manufacturing and business worlds, two years (let's give benefit of the doubt and presume to assume that "until 2014" is "until 31 Dec 2014") is not enough time to be leisurely. I do suspect, however, with their PA Semi purchase, that Apple is in a good position to know who to buy and how to buy them and it wouldn't be a strenuous search.

All assuming, of course, that Apple is interested in such a purchase.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Crawly – Never write another web scraper - <AUTHOR> http://crawly.diffbot.com/ <comment><USER2> 0\. Arrived at site

1\. Entered HN URL

2\. Entered email reluctantly

3\. Checked email, nothing received

4\. Started writing comment on HN, frustrated

5\. Checked email again, still nothing

6\. Posted comment, disappointed

<comment><USER3> I think you just got harvested!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Link to more of an overview / documentation without having to fork over an email address? Silly.

<comment><USER5> Sure: [http://www.diffbot.com/](http://www.diffbot.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I got a reply within 3 minutes.

The email said, "We set our crawler loose on <site>, and WOW did we find some interesting results."

The resulting CSV file? 0 bytes. I guess that's "interesting" in its own way.

<comment><USER5> Sorry about that! If you let me know the result id, I can take a look at what happened.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This won't work when I need to scrape 100,000 pages in an hour.

<comment> cat-dev-null AWS FTW

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> CloudScrape works

</comment><comment> cat-dev-null www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov };)</comment>


Qik is now Skype is now Microsoft. Where can we broadcast #copwatch video? - <AUTHOR>

Qik sent out an email tonight, due to their purchase by Skype, use of Qik is now governed by Skype/Microsoft terms.
Qik was pretty cool, Skype we are now aware has been downgraded to pure evil.
The killer feature of Qik for me, was its simple and instantaneous internet broadcasting. Start recording, hit public, and you're broadcasting live on the net.  And it was a service easy to use and targeting the consumer who wants to use it occasionally.
"Officer, I am not recording you, I am broadcasting you, would you like the URL?"
Tweet your Qik broadcast with #copwatch or #tsawatch.  I thought Qik could serve a vital role in protecting democracy.  And cynical as I might be, I think it still will.  But maybe not.
What other instant internet broadcasting services are there? <comment><USER2> Ustream <https://market.android.com/details?id=tv.ustream.ustream>

</comment><comment><USER3> justin.tv - the delay between recording on my phone and watching on the desktop is about 30s for me.</comment>


A city with almost no economic inequality, 100 BC: Teotihuacán - <AUTHOR> https://slate.com/technology/2018/04/teotihuacn-the-ancient-city-upending-archaeologists-assumptions-about-wealth-inequality.html <comment><USER2> The article is oddly silent regarding thus "exceptionally egalitarian" society's frequent human sacrifices.</comment>


Ask HN: Please review our UI - Feedback is greatly appreciated! - <AUTHOR>

Hi Guys,
I'm currently working on my first startup. We're bootstrapped and prepping to launch into private beta.
Our web application generates simple, easy-to-read reports on stocks by applying value investing formulas & benchmarks. It provides the equivalent of two hours worth of analysis in the time it takes to load your page.
The report focuses on three key aspects: How much a stock is worth, Management performance & Key performance indicators.
This is the first phase of our product plan. We've also built a tool that provides an overview of your portfolio, from a value investing perspective.
HERE'S THE PROBLEM: The current design of our site isn't the greatest.
I've come up with a new look and feel and would really appreciate it if the HN community could give me some feedback.
Page users see when they first sign up: http://img801.imageshack.us/img801/9710/vuruanalysispagesignupf.png
Sample Analysis (Please note this is just a mock-up not an actual report generated by our tool): http://img718.imageshack.us/img718/9440/vuruanalysispage.png
Portfolio Page: http://img697.imageshack.us/img697/803/vuruhomepagev1small.png
So, what do you think? Where can they be improved?
I'll provide clickable links below and if you're interested, sign up to be notified when we launch into private beta (www.vuru.co). <comment><USER2> I think the spin of applying a specific investment philosophy to stock portfolios is pretty neat.

In the portfolio view (last link): (1) Every company name is elided (ends in ...). That says to me that the column is too small, or needs to be presented differently. (2) Why tempt us with "Show Performance Graph"? Just show it, in miniature, on the page. (3) "Overall" column seems to be useless, it's always "-".

Analysis View: I buy and sell stocks and funds but not too often. So I took up your challenge of "easy to read reports". What does a grade of "A" mean in your system? How many stocks get this grade compared to the total population? I'm not a financial analyst, so some of the jargon on this page was indecipherable to me. DCF, etc. I like the explanation "For every $100 spent, $137.50 of cash is created" (except for the word "create": they are not creating money, only the Fed can do that). When you say: "No earnings power value margin of safety"... I have no idea what that means. Maybe you need to have callouts which explain these things in greater depth, and "show the math". That would be cool. Finally, the stock is "Grade A" but you've given me only 3 reasons to like it, and 4 reasons to dislike it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Dude, great feedback!

We'll work on the portfolio view. I think we'll probably just get rid of the Overall column to fix the elided issue. Also, we'll definitely show the graph, just in miniature, as you suggested.

Re the analysis view, a grade of "A" means that you should buy it.. not Apple tho, it's overvalued. This was just a mockup, not an actual report.

But yeah, we should clarify this sort of information. I was thinking of putting in a "Glossary" link and then explain all that info there. Would that do the trick?

We'll work on the wording.

What's a callout? I really like the idea of "show the math". That's solid. It really fits with our philosophy of transparency for individual investors.

And to the last point, it's a mock-up. Apple is actually hugely overvalued. Don't buy it.

Again, thanks for the feedback! If you'd like to help us make this product awesome as we move forward, please shoot me an email - yoseph dot west at gmail . We're big believers in the idea that the key to a startup's success is listening to its users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Have you tested the page with actual users? You'd probably only need 3 or 4 to get a good feel for how people are using the pages and what users want to know.

On the Analysis page I'd put some interesting example stocks below the ticker so people that don't know ticker symbols can just click on one. Or just put that box on the frontpage so people don't have to use the extra click to find a box. Or ask people to import OFX data from Google Finance, Yahoo Finance etc.

On the Sample Analysis how about some charts? How's the formula performed over time? What do all of the ratios and analysis mean?

Generally when I'm thinking about a page/design I try to make a list of everything users would want to do from that page, group like items and work backwards.

Yoseph I'm working on a (somewhat) similar project for my senior thesis - usability testing balance sheets. Get in touch with me - my email's email@example.com.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, interesting. I just shot you an email. Let's talk about this further.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable:

Page users see when first sign up: [http://img801.imageshack.us/img801/9710/vuruanalysispagesign...](http://img801.imageshack.us/img801/9710/vuruanalysispagesignupf.png)

Sample Analysis (Please note this is just a mock-up not an actual report generated by our tool): <http://img718.imageshack.us/img718/9440/vuruanalysispage.png>

Portfolio Page: [http://img697.imageshack.us/img697/803/vuruhomepagev1small.p...](http://img697.imageshack.us/img697/803/vuruhomepagev1small.png)

Our actual website: <http://www.vuru.co>

</comment><comment><USER4> The front page could have some more sample data to help the user understand what they are getting into. Maybe a recent gainers/losers of stocks that are defined as "value". Or, since there is a good amount of research/literature/blogs that focus solely on value investing, it might be useful to add these as a supplement to the statistics you are planning on showing. I feel like people want to have as much information at there disposal when making investment decisions, and the mockups seem a little sparse to me as an individual investor.

</comment><comment><USER5> i like how clean the site is, but it could use a little more content... i think you could probably do something better with the links at the top, they feel too spaced apart and the arrow box thing feels really disconnected. maybe if you added a little color to accent certain parts of the information... here is an example of what i mean.

<http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1529856/vuruanalysispage.jpg>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the great ideas! We're definitely going to implement them.

Did you get a chance to look at the Portfolio page?

If you'd like to help us make this product awesome as we move forward, please shoot me an email - yoseph dot west at gmail . We're big believers in the idea that the key to a startup's success is listening to its users.</comment></comment>


Greater than 3mg caffiene per kg of body weight can increase anxiety [2000][pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.foodstandards.gov.au/publications/Documents/safety%20aspects%20of%20dietary%20caffeine.pdf <comment><USER2> Greater than 3mg caffiene per kg of body weight ___PER DAY_ __can increase anxiety.</comment>


First coins with QR codes will start circulating next week - <AUTHOR> http://dvice.com/archives/2011/06/first-coins-wit.php

<comment><USER2> The QR code in the image contains <http://www.q5g.nl> \- which throws a 404.

<comment><USER3> It's working now.

<comment><USER2> Not for me ...

        HTTP Status 404 -
        type Status report
        message
        description The requested resource () is not available.

        JBoss Web/2.1.4.GA</comment></comment></comment>


What can we learn from British Airways and Google GDPR failure? - <AUTHOR> https://tide.org/blog/british-airways-google-gdpr <comment><USER2> From Google we can learn that no matter how bad you screw, money can get you out of any problem

</comment><comment><USER3> "A survey compiled by Trustarc incredibly reveals that only 20% of companies believe they met regulations in time for the deadline.

"There were no hard and fast rules so the biggest challenge was working out how to interpret the guidelines." explains one small business owner."

That's the problem with the GDPR

Adapting to the infrastructure is expensive for small businesses</comment>


WebCmd: Command line done in AJAX - <AUTHOR> http://a-i-studio.com/cmd/cmd.html <comment><USER2> That is cool, I like it. Now just use Web app apis as commands. Google is grep, gmail is pine, stuff like that. You could finally take the web all the way back around to the command line. ;)

</comment><comment><USER3> cool. what's it good for?</comment>


Obesity Was Rising as Ghana Embraced Fast Food. Then Came KFC - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/02/health/ghana-kfc-obesity.html <comment> e-sushi LOL… when first reading the headline, my brain went "which proves KFC doesn't serve real food". ;)</comment>


How Cognician uses Onyx - <AUTHOR> http://www.stuttaford.me/2016/01/15/how-cognician-uses-onyx/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'm one of the lead developers of Onyx, if anyone has any questions they'd like answered.</comment>