The Real Story of the Dutch Tulip Bubble? - <AUTHOR> https://www.barrons.com/articles/the-real-story-of-the-dutch-tulip-bubble-is-even-more-fascinating-than-the-myth-youve-heard-51557666037 <comment><USER2> All: could you please not take this thread into Bitcoinland?

Exercise: find the site guideline that is broken by doing so. [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> The 1841 Book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds has this amusing anecdote about Tulipomania:

People who had been absent from Holland, and whose chance it was to return when this folly was at its maximum, were sometimes led into awkward dilemmas by their ignorance. There is an amusing instance of the kind related in Blainville's Travels. A wealthy merchant, who prided himself not a little on his rare tulips, received upon one occasion a very valuable consignment of merchandise from the Levant. Intelligence of its arrival was brought him by a sailor, who presented himself for that purpose at the counting-house, among bales of goods of every description. The merchant, to reward him for his news, munificently made him a present of a fine red herring for his breakfast. The sailor had, it appears, a great partiality for onions, and seeing a bulb very like an onion lying upon the counter of this liberal trader, and thinking it, no doubt, very much out of its place among silks and velvets, he slily seized an opportunity and slipped it into his pocket, as a relish for his herring. He got clear off with his prize, and proceeded to the quay to eat his breakfast. Hardly was his back turned when the merchant missed his valuable Semper Augustus, worth three thousand florins, or about 280 pounds sterling. The whole establishment was instantly in an uproar; search was everywhere made for the precious root, but it was not to be found. Great was the merchant's distress of mind. The search was renewed, but again without success. At last some one thought of the sailor. The unhappy merchant sprang into the street at the bare suggestion. His alarmed household followed him. The sailor, simple soul! had not thought of concealment. He was found quietly sitting on a coil of ropes, masticating the last morsel of his "onion." Little did he dream that he had been eating a breakfast whose cost might have regaled a whole ship's crew for a twelvemonth; or, as the plundered merchant himself expressed it, "might have sumptuously feasted the Prince of Orange and the whole court of the Stadtholder."

</comment><comment><USER2> This same research was discussed in 2018: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16399756](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16399756)

<comment><USER4> And my favorite comment from there:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16399944](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16399944)

And a part from Wikipedia:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania#Modern_views](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania#Modern_views)

"Research into tulip mania since then, especially by proponents of the efficient-market hypothesis,[17] suggests that his story was incomplete and inaccurate."

So there is an actual agenda ("the efficient-market hypothesis" and obviously also the political forces with anti-regulatory ideologies) behind many of the claims that the bubbles aren't anything to worry about, or that some specific even hasn't happened.

In the case of Anne Goldgar's work, claiming that she found only 37 people who paid for a bulb more than "quite good yearly wage" of that time doesn't disprove that many poorer people could have spent less and were actually bankrupt, but that their fate wasn't recorded the way it was for the highest transactions and their initiators. It should not be surprising that the 37 richest people involved (which is obvious because the poorer couldn't have even invested that much) weren't hit too hard with a single speculation.

<comment> spaced-out >disprove that many poorer people could have spent less and were actually bankrupt, but that their fate wasn't recorded the way it was for the highest transactions and their initiators.

Sure, we can spend all day speculating about records may have existed but were lost. I mean, there are no evidence of alien involvement, maybe those records were lost too?

It's also possible that the Tulip bubble was both short-lived and not very widespread and is just one of those stories that keeps getting bigger the more it gets re-told.

<comment><USER4> > just one of those stories that keeps getting bigger

There are apparently still records of 37 transactions paying more than a what was then " _good yearly_ wage" for _a bulb_.

Moreover, from another history book, after the "crash" "in Haarlem, the city with the biggest volume of tulip bulb trading and thus the city with the most problems" ... "the local court there refused to hear disputes relating to the tulip trade." That obviously lowered the chance of having the records about the direct effects of the crash.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _In 1637, one gilder was worth about $10 in today's money. 300 gilders would be about $3,000. That amounts to quite good yearly wage at the time._

How does that work? $3k is not "quite good yearly wage" in most places these days.

<comment><USER6> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power)

Purchasing power has increased along with inflation

<comment><USER5> That makes saying how many current dollars a guilder is pointless. Candles have gotten way cheaper, but land around Amsterdam much more expensive. IMO the only sensible comparison is how much time it took for an average tradesman to make X amount of money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> >"And in 2019, when you hear people complaining about Bitcoin and warning about it, what you are hearing are the voices of people in 1637 saying: you shouldn't be involved in this trade. You're the wrong person, you don't know enough."

Why would you torpedo a good article at the very end with such a stupid paragraph?

<comment><USER8> I had a similar qualm, but this summarizes it better: "The story of the tulip bubble boils down to a story of fools and greed, Goldgar says. And that's why it sticks with us." There's something about reducing this to just greed. What I personally want, is a story that can contextualize that greed better, explore it more, and not just end with "that's greed for you" (paraphrasing).

<comment><USER9> Exactly. It's a complete mischaracterization to call every stock market boom and bust cycle a result of "greed," and yet people refuse to stop doing so. I guess it creates a sense of moral outrage, and makes readers feel righteously justified.

<comment><USER8> I was having trouble putting this into words, but now after having a think, I liked when Goldgar got into the historical context of the crisis. To heavily paraphrase, in that stratified society, speculation appeared to be a way to climb the social ladder. The article's author, the one quoting Goldgar, obviously didn't interpret it this way.

I'm not saying Goldgar sees the tulip bubble that way, or that it's a historically accurate narrative, but it's miles better than saying it was caused by "fools and greed", which is similar to saying that something was caused by evil. I guess my principal point is that stupidity, greed and evil are fundamentally socioeconomic symptoms, in that they are not explanations of themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > And in 2019, when you hear people complaining about Bitcoin and warning > about it, what you are hearing are the voices of people in 1637 saying: you > shouldn't be involved in this trade. You're the wrong person, you don't know > enough.

Only this exact analogy is trotted out every time the Bitcoin exchange rate swings up or down very quickly. It's happened about a half dozen times now over the last 10 years.

You see this on the way up and down. The line comes mostly from people don't understand the underlying technology or economics.

Nor do those sage finger-waggers point out that the tulip mania was over within less than one year between 1636 and 1637.

Whatever Bitcoin is, it's not like Tulip Mania, nor is it much like anything that's come before.

<comment><USER11> so you're claiming... "It's different this time" ?

<comment><USER12> He's claiming that Bitcoin is sophisticated technology and network effects not easily replicated. Dot com era was a bubble too but valuable companies and services survived through that crash. It's not enough to observe that there's been a run up in prices and a subsequent sell off. That happens all the time in all markets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> That was _less_ fascinating than the myth, to me.

<comment><USER2> Alright, we'll take that bit out of the title above.

<comment><USER14> "All: could you please not take this thread into Bitcoinland?"

Is that what all are saying? Or is it an instruction to us all?

<comment><USER2> The latter. It's a device I use to address everybody reading the thread.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> HN in 2010: don't touch bitcoin.

HN in 2019: it's Dutch Tulip Bubble! (in the midst of the next bull run)

Meanwhile, those who followed contrarian advice did great.

It feels like Slashdot calling the iPod lame.

Sometimes, it's not irrationality, but a true change.

<comment><USER16> > Meanwhile, those who followed contrarian advice did great.

...except everyone who did not.

"Bitcoin crash: This man lost his savings when cryptocurrencies plunged"

[https://money.cnn.com/2018/09/11/investing/bitcoin-crash- vic...](https://money.cnn.com/2018/09/11/investing/bitcoin-crash- victim/index.html)

Some people do great in pump-and-dump schemes, and they keep pumping even when everyone got fleeced.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Ah, bitcoin has moved. There already was the usual crypto-bubble-will-burst article on the frontpage, and here comes the inevitable dutch tulip mania post.

</comment><comment><USER18> The best reference of the Tulip bubble I heard on business news was a guy saying, "Bitcoin is giving tulips a bad name"

Just goes to show how crazy a ride bitcoin has had in historic terms. [https://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-bitcoin-is-now-the- big...](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-bitcoin-is-now-the-biggest- bubble-in-history-in-one-chart-2017-12-13)

<comment><USER2> "Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents." The interesting thing here is the history of the tulip bubble, not another Bitcoin war.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER18> Wasn't trying to flame up anything. The article mentions "And in 2019, when you hear people complaining about Bitcoin and warning about it, what you are hearing are the voices of people in 1637 saying: you shouldn't be involved in this trade. You're the wrong person, you don't know enough."

Was just adding other similar references I had heard before. I'm new to HN, are there a list of flamewar topics I can look up for next time?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The tulip bubble is the worst poster child of asset bubbles and irrational exuberance

But at this point, I don't think it matters. Colloquially, saying 'tulips' gets the point across. People know that you are criticizing the exuberance or volatility of an ephemeral asset. People know what asset price distortion you are comparing it to.

<comment><USER20> I think the south sea bubble which even caught Isaac Newton out might be the worst.

<comment><USER21> For some reason a tale of a governmental debt instrument being overvalued isn't quite as popular as one about tulips ;)

The South Sea Company is a remarkable example of people ignoring the fundamentals of a stock in order to speculate, though. Or perhaps a story of people knowing _just enough_ about the fundamentals to get themselves into trouble... (Many comparisons were made to the East India Company, which had a similar trade monopoly, and that comparison made some sense - until you consider the fact that a trade monopoly with land your country owns is much more profitable than one where you're frequently at war with the owners)

<comment><USER22> I think the fashion for similarly marketed investments (including the infamous "an undertaking of great advantage but nobody to know what it is") is probably the biggest lesson.

That people in the seventeenth century didn't really understand how to value the fundamentals of a new government trade monopoly is unsurprising and its subsequent overvaluation perhaps not that great an indictment of seventeenth century investors; a more widely applicable lesson is that price movement in this stock spilled over into newfound speculator enthusiasm for absolutely ridiculous ventures and companies pretending to be raising money for one purpose and actually spending it on something else.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Whitespace (Programming Language) - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_language) <comment><USER2> [http://daly.axiom-developer.org/hello.w](http://daly.axiom- developer.org/hello.w)

is a program in "whitespace". The original text is the standard C helloworld program.

Characters are converted to morse code. A morse 'dih' is converted to 'space' and 'dah' is converted to 'tab'</comment>


Five Languages That Won't Ever Die - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/swlh/five-languages-that-wont-ever-die-107dc6712a4e <comment><USER2> How did JS not make it? It's the most ubiquitous programming language on earth and runs on more devices and environments than any other. JS will always be here.

<comment><USER3> Once the first browser ships a TypeScript implementation JS will be gone in a matter of months.

<comment><USER2> I don't think so, since TS by definition compiles to JS. Too many embedded systems rely on JS. And many programmers, like me, prefer non-strongly-typed systems and/or runtime typing rather than compile-time.</comment></comment></comment>


ICANN Approves Domain Names We Can't Type - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/181094/icann_approves_domain_names_we_cant_type.html

<comment><USER2> These PC World articles seem completely inaccurate to me. (The other one was posted here. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=913169> )

First, most of the domain name has already been open to Unicode encoding via an ASCII encoded transform:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name>

Also, the newly approved encoding for TLDs appears to be the same technique as already used for the rest of the domain name. From the same wikipedia article:

In October 2009, ICANN approved a Fast Track[4] for the encoding of Unicode/ISO 10646 Top Level Domain names in ASCII text.[5]

These articles that talk about suddenly not being able to type URLs are absurd. The Unicode transforms have already been there, just not in the TLD. And that's not to mention the rest of the URL, and every other place we all use Unicode.</comment>


Motivational Health Messaging LLC Gets a Patent on Sending Uplifting Texts - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/12/stupid-patent-month-motivational-health-messaging-llc-gets-patent-sending <comment> King-Aaron This 100% sounds like a company trying to patent troll everyone who has an app that sends any kind of utility message to encourage a user action - I can see it being applied to 'shopping cart reminder' emails/texts and so forth, because you could vaguely say it's a 'motivational message'...

</comment><comment><USER2> Great job!</comment>


The evolution of eyes - <AUTHOR> https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2016/02/evolution-of-eyes/ <comment><USER2> I'm surprised they didn't mention jumping spiders (Salticidae), which are notable because they are inverts, have the ability to see an unusual number of colors, and unlike the mantis shrimp can be _trained_ on them. Also another advantage is they can be rewarded with sugar water. Evolutionarily, their eyesight is a marvel. No other spiders really have anything approaching it.

[https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/05/150518-jumping-s...](https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/05/150518-jumping- spider-color-vision-mating-animals-science/)

I have a couple as pets ([https://medium.com/@melissamcewen/how-i-ended-up- with-pet-ju...](https://medium.com/@melissamcewen/how-i-ended-up-with-pet- jumping-spiders-187d70a3e296)) and sometimes have managed to get them interested in videos of other bugs but I'd like to develop something geared just towards them. There are a couple of things like this used in the lab, but nothing open sourced that I know of.

<comment><USER3> _unlike the mantis shrimp can be trained on them_

Interesting, IIRC mantis shrimp are considered one of the more intelligent forms of arthropod. Perhaps it's just not the correct sensory system to communicate with them through. Evolution is certainly capable of honing an organ system's acuity independently from the organism's brain/CNS.

On a related note, it's amazing how many times eyes have seemed to independently evolve. And once they do occur in a species, it takes a lot of evolutionary pressure to get rid of them. Troglobites or stygobites generally still have atrophied vestigial eyes, despite being adapted to a purely subterranean environment. It would seem with the relatively stable ecosystem a cave would provide, stabilizing selection over a long while would select for no eyes. However vestigial eyes are still common, which I suspect implies the metabolic cost to fitness ratio of eyes must be strongly in favor of having eyes, even if barely functional.

<comment><USER2> Yeah I wouldn't be surprised if they were a bit more intelligent than jumping spiders through it's hard to judge relative intelligence in animals like these. For mantis shrimp color training probably doesn't resemble anything they encounter in the wild. For jumping spiders, they use colors for sexual selection in most species and also color is a major signal for "poisonous" in their prey — i'm not sure that's the case with mantis shrimp.

<comment><USER3> You are right, it is difficult to compare intelligence here, because it's predicated on some objective measure of intelligence. It's also difficult because the ways intelligence can manifest can look very different depending on the instance. Perhaps a more general term like "sophisticated" would be appropriate, seeing as they've adapted highly complex responses to a very dynamic and complex environment.

Biology as a field is riddled with these definition based problems, because the phenomena it's used to describe are just so intricate. Another similar problem is the "species problem," where we find countless attempts at an objective and universal definition for differentiating species, but little consensus.

In the case of mantis shrimp it's probably the stimulus being too foreign to the organism for it to have a meaningful response, like you said. So it's probably just ignoring the stimulus until it to goes away.

It may also be the organism's adaptation to an environment with many diverse predators (like a shallow water reef would have). So any unusual stimulus is automatically interpreted as threatening. If they have a tendency to freeze when exposed to acute stress, it may just be their manifestation of the fight- or-flight response. This could probably be measured by comparing nervous system arousal between threatening and foreign stimulus.

<comment><USER2> This is one of my fav papers: How (not) to train your spider: successful and unsuccessful methods for studying learning [http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03014223.2015.112...](http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03014223.2015.1127263?journalCode=tnzz20)

Because it has all the failed methods for training them that never got published. Some of them are unintentionally hilarious too. > In our laboratory, we also used sprays of water as an aversive stimulus—spiders that moved into one side of an arena received a spray of water. In pilot trials, there was no evidence of learning: spiders ran wildly when sprayed and then stopped to groom themselves. If accidentally sprayed too heavily, they became trapped by the water droplet.

I think more papers like this should exist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> One of my favorite eye related articles talks about The Hobbit and why 48FPS looks so bad to some people: [http://accidentalscientist.com/2014/12/why- movies-look-weird...](http://accidentalscientist.com/2014/12/why-movies-look- weird-at-48fps-and-games-are-better-at-60fps-and-the-uncanny-valley.html)

It turns out our eyes vibrate a bit(~80HZ) to get a higher information density by injecting noise, increasing sampling above the discrete quantization[1]. His theory is that 48FPS ends up being really close to the nyquist limit and wreaks all sorts of havok on how we process the film.

[1] [https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/69748/using-...](https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/69748/using- noise-to-increase-effective-resolution-of-adc)

<comment><USER5> Oh my god that uncanny valley graph from Wired :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've always wondered what having eyes in the back (or side) of your head would be _like_. Two eyes in the front is kind of like a cockpit, you see forward and have to turn. Would having an eye in the back of your head be... Behind you? Would you be aware of the blind spots around the side of your head?

We are very ingrained in having forward facing sight, I think the mere idea of having eyes in a different position is pretty incomprehensible to us

<comment><USER7> Lots of birds and fish have eyes on the side ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_vision#Extraocular_anatom...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_vision#Extraocular_anatomy)), and they seem to be doing okay. Presumably you lose depth perception, so you can't hunt things, only run away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Richard Dawkins has talked about this fascinating subject several times in interviews (and in his books). It is a beautiful demonstration of how complexity and seemingly magical things can emerge from small changes over large periods of time. e.g: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzERmg4PU3c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzERmg4PU3c)

</comment><comment><USER9> Although this is rather dated, if you liked that article you may also like Richard Dawkins' talk on the evolution of the eye: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2X1iwLqM2t0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2X1iwLqM2t0)

It's pretty cool seeing a much younger energetic Richard Dawkins talk about how the eye evolved multiple times.

</comment><comment><USER10> Maybe human eyes will evolve to better read smaller characters over a bigger area like the ever expanding phone screens</comment>


Ask HN: Good curriculum/guideline to teach your employees how to code? - <AUTHOR> I am looking for a good curriculum/guideline to follow when teaching the non-technical teams of an organization how to code. It should focus on web technologies, so start with HTML + CSS, then some light JavaScript, then a backend language or (maybe more practical) JS as the backend language as well. Ideally it should have a bigger scope and potentially also include challenges or projects so the class can run over several months and/or employees have some guidance after the class how to keep going. <comment><USER2> I believe [https://www.freecodecamp.com/](https://www.freecodecamp.com/) is perfect for that!

I used myself to learn to code and it was great. I went to complete the first certificate (front-end). After that, I decided to go for more personal projects that I would choose by myself using technologies I wanted to learn. But I am glad I started with freeCodeCamp.

It has a standard path (people can compare evolution, share tips, help each other, even have some healthy friendly competition). It has projects where each student can use creativity.

Include a mentor to help and encourage people who are struggling (watching some outliers doing amazing stuff in short time might be very discouraging for people who are stuck, you can witness that in the forums) and you can have the perfect environment.

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-programming- nanodegr...](https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-programming-nanodegree-- nd000)

Very affordable price and great content. P.S. I don't work for Udacity.

<comment><USER4> I do (work for Udacity) and willing to answer any questions. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is probably a good place to start: [https://stripe.com/blog/teaching- employees-to-code](https://stripe.com/blog/teaching-employees-to-code)

Blog was posted early enough to have a high likelihood of response if you ping the author with follow up questions

</comment><comment><USER6> Sounds like a job for "learn enough to be dangerous" [https://www.learnenough.com](https://www.learnenough.com)

</comment><comment><USER7> [https://www.udacity.com/courses/web- development](https://www.udacity.com/courses/web-development)</comment>


Ask HN: Recommendation for time serie database for ML? - <AUTHOR> Hello,
We have a system with a lot of telemetry: logs of "device use" with many log fields (positions, speeds...).
We want to make them available easily for read / write, but also for machine learning. Specifically it should be possible to extract easily some parts of logs that correspond to some specific events, a bit like "np.where(field1 = 3 and field2 = 5)".
Another challenge is that logs are messy: some values are present in some old logs and not anymore or the contrary... Or some values sometimes are constant for a whole log and it would be nice to be able to use such structure to lower the disk size.
Which database system could be both flexible enough in terms of field values / queries ? PostgreSQL / Influxdb / HAdoop / Elastic ? I have seen good reviews of all of them and I am not yet convinced of any advantage of one over the other because I guess the devil is in the details.
Thanks ! <comment><USER2> You're going to need a data transformation step to turn your data into a consistent format that your ML can read. AWS's ML, for example, can read CSV files from S3, among other choices.

Logs are messy. To extract clean data from them, you'll need some messy logic/code. You'll want to pull that out into one unit that can be reasoned about in isolation.</comment>


jQuery Chart Plugins For Your App - <AUTHOR> http://www.reynoldsftw.com/2009/02/6-jquery-chart-plugins-reviewed/ <comment><USER3> Also check out Raphaël <http://raphaeljs.com/> \- looks easy enough to build quite advanced charts.

</comment><comment><USER4> You'll laugh at me, but I think that one of the most critical aspects of a graphing library is whether it can anti-alias or not.

I interned with a company a few years ago and we tested graphing packages; we found that although A was superior technically to B, B was preferred by the users because it anti-aliased the graphs that it rendered. Technically it made things much more complicated, but looking better goes a very long way.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've been using Flot a while after getting the hump about JS charting SDKs last week. A clever person I work with has ported Flot to YUI (<http://github.com/bluesmoon/flot/tree/master>).

I have to say I particularly like it, and I think we will be offering back some improvements to the jQuery version, such as the ability to have many more graphs on the page with destroying your browser.

I do really like the idea of Tufte graphs though. As a Tufte devotee I think I'm going to look at getting that look and feel out of flot as well.

</comment><comment><USER6> One of the biggest problems with using Canvas to render graphs is the lack of exporting functionality. I built a reporting tool over the summer that used Flot, but ended up having to switch it with Google Charts because users couldn't copy/paste results into Word.

Image rendering may not be as dynamic as Canvas rendering, but the ability to export images and the widespread browser support still make it a very viable solution

<comment><USER7> Rendering images of Canvas data is what the toDataURL() method is for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Flot looks good but I'm concerned about its use of a Canvas emulator in IE (as opposed to writing natively to VML). Such things often don't work well, and we can't afford to have second-class behavior in IE.

Can anyone here speak to whether that is a problem or not?

Alternatively, does anybody have a different favorite charting library they'd care to mention?

<comment><USER9> I maintain a fork of flot on github. The graphs function correctly in IE (barring some here-and-there bugs which you can report). The only issue is speed (always an issue with IE), and as a result I wouldn't try too much of the interactivity... But on the whole it works great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've had some javascript graphing pages open in the background for ages - <USER2> what data do we have that's going to be useful to graph?

Perhaps instead of "what data can I graph?" I should ask "What do we want to improve?" and find a way to measure it, then graph that.

<comment><USER11> That's an excellent way to put it. Although sometimes you'll want to graph things that are not necessarily candidates for improvement, just to make sure the graphs stay in the acceptable range.

One of my few non-public graphs is refund rates. Normally, that is in the 2 ~ 3% range, and reducing that is not a major priority of mine. However, spikes in the graph almost always mean "You just screwed something up", so THAT information I want to see in a hurry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think using Google Chart API is much better than using these plugins. Lots of chart types, easy to make, gives high-quality result, and support all browsers that can display images.

<comment><USER9> If you ask me (I maintain a fork of flot on github) there is no reason to use a client-side library for graphing unless the graphs are dynamic. Requesting/rendering/etc tons of images is painful, flot can add and remove data on the fly and re-render -- and that's not even getting into the potential for hovering effects and the like (flash-style).

Flot also supports all reasonable browsers (including some unreasonable ones, like IE6). If you find a bug in either the 'official' flot or my fork (or any of the forks of my fork :)) then you should be able to report it and have it fixed quickly enough (or, fix it yourself, the code isn't especially complicated).

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Well, MediaTemple have screwed my site. I'm sorry all...

<comment><AUTHOR> This is obviously fixed now... MT FTW! :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's not jQuery, but I've been working on moving LangPop.com to Flotr:

<http://solutoire.com/flotr/></comment>


Trying to remember the name of a website - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
I don't know if it's the right place for my question (sorry if not: an admin can delete it) but most of the people here are aware about startups and new services so maybe you could help me. I'm trying to remember the name of a startup/website.
It allows to create automatic "tasks" to make things happen between several services you have (Dropbox, sendgrid, etc.) For example, a use case was: send automatically an email using sendgrid when a new file is put in my dropbox.
And you can define several combinations like that.
Any idea of what this startup is?
Thanks. <comment><USER2> <https://ifttt.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks,that was one of them I was looking for.</comment></comment>


Fairphone 3 review: ethical smartphone gets camera upgrades - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/aug/31/fairphone-3-review-ethical-smartphone-gets-camera-upgrades <comment><USER2> That obsession with plastic recycling is not right. Saving one plastic bottle on a 450gbp phone which is meant to be used for a couple years is nothing.

I mean recycling is good, but if it is a major selling point, bad for them.

<comment> m-p-3 That still one less bottle in the environment, baby steps I suppose.

<comment><USER3> There are much more cost effective ways to stop plastic bottles from ending up in the environment than turning them into smartphones. This has hallmarks of an ineffective virtue signaling scam.

<comment> m-p-3 Definitely more cost effective ways, but how many of those can be done by the FairPhone manufacturers while achieving production?

And it's not like FairPhone is creating a negative impact here, it's just adding to the global effort. What would you want them to do exactly while still achieving the production of a phone?

<comment><USER2> Maybe fairphone should focus on phones, and leave all other world problems (garbage, poverty, hunger, oil spills etc) to others - governments and non- government orgs.

Or just ask extra 50 pounds per phone and give it to these orgs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's a laudable approach, but I'd rather have ethical software. Something like what the Librem 5 or Pinephone is doing.

<comment><USER5> it's nice to have different groups working on both, it hopefully paves the way for a phone which will have both.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I once bought a Fairphone 2 while living in Europe, moved to NZ.

That was the end of the phone for me as the microphone broke and the parts were very expensive to get shipped.

Disclaimer, make sure if you buy one, you live in a place where it's economical to get fixed.

</comment><comment><USER7> Does anyone here have experience buying from 'clove UK'? They seem reputable. The official Fairphone website ships only within Europe. Clove UK ships worldwide.

[https://www.clove.co.uk/collections/smartphones- fairphone/pr...](https://www.clove.co.uk/collections/smartphones- fairphone/products/fairphone-4)</comment>


Top 5 irritating things in programming tutorials - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@pistacchio/top-5-irritating-things-in-programming-tutorials-2f6ba4f2184e#.f6b8k6c56 <comment><USER2> +1 for the conference slides that you can't see. The other along that line is the cut back and forth between the speaker and the interactive session they are showing things in. Unless the speaker is doing a wardrobe change, I don't need to see them again.

And finally, if you are going to live demo, please, please learn to type. Mavis Beacon should be your best friend. Nothing like watching people stumble around on the keyboard for 5 mins to get printf("Hello World\n"); on the screen</comment>


Answering PG's Arc Challenge: On the Road to a DSL - <AUTHOR> http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2010/02/answering-pg-on.php

<comment><USER2> tl;dr - Arc comes with a DSL designed for just the sort of problem described in the Arc Challenge. What really matters is the ability to create DSLs.

<comment><USER3> I worry that the challenge will eventually be dominated by over-specialized DSL's. Arc may have libraries that are particularly beneficial to accomplishing this challenge, but the functions and macros used to do so are not of a wholy different "language" from those used in everyday arc prgramming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hi Daniel, can you give us some examples of the sorts of DSLs you're playing with? The title ("Answering the arc challenge") led me to expect code snippets.</comment>


DNS: Basic Concepts (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://www.petekeen.net/dns-the-good-parts <comment><USER2> If you want a startup/side-project idea, here it is. I can tell you from 10+ years in website hosting and maintenance that most laypeople, designers, marketers, and even some technical people will _never_ understand DNS. (and they shouldn't have to)

A small business wants a website at SquareSpace, cloudflare CDN, email at Google Apps, landing pages on a subdomain with Unbounce, their blog on yet another subdomain, and DKIM/SPF records for the email newsletter system.

Setting this up is not easy for most people. Most people aren't even sure _where_ to do it–let alone _how_ to do it. (is your registrar handling your DNS? sometimes ...)

If you had a 1 or 2-click tool that setup these for people, maybe wrapped it around some domain search/affiliate tools, I think you could make some money.

My 2¢

<comment><USER3> I agree that domain registrars should make it easier for people to simply specify what services they are signed up for and provide the option of one- click auto configuration/population of DNS records. Some registrars do this to the extent that they will fill in Google's MX and other CNAME records if you specify you are a Google apps user.

I disagree that _technical_ people should not have to understand DNS. DNS isn't that complicated in most scenarios, and having a basic understanding of it can help alleviate many of the headaches that are introduced when people don't understand the relationship between the ownership of their domain, their domain registrar and DNS records that point to various services, basic concepts around TTLs and caching, etc.

<comment><USER4> >> I disagree that technical people should not have to understand DNS

I think that any _good_ technical developer/sysadmin has at some point set up their own BIND server or similar, if only to play with it for a few hours before uninstalling. This is something that is often missing from developers who went through a CS program just to get a degree in an industry that pays well, without really having an interest in the field.

Good developers/sysadmins, who actually have an interest in the work they do, have an innate curiosity that leads them to try their hand at things like a DNS server. For no reason other than to learn something new and understand a topic they didn't knowing anything about before the experimentation.

Of course, you can learn about DNS without actually configuring a DNS server from scratch - but the real "aha" moments come from working with the server itself rather than only understanding the difference between A/CNAME/MX et al. Learning about FQDN syntax, how DNS master syncs to slaves, SOA serial numbers, etc. - so many interesting things to discover.

<comment><USER5> Although I have repeatedly in my life set up and configured BIND servers, and manage DNS zones monthly if not weekly, I disagree that a could developer should have to know these things very well if at all.

As a developer you should know the basics of networking and the protocols you will be using to communicate, as well as their drawbacks but DNS as far as a developer is concerned, generally is a means to an end. They just need to know where to send a message to. I feel like you could be a great developer and not have a freaking clue how to configure a BIND server or manage a zone file- they're fairly unrelated to creating, maintaining, or deploying code (unless you're getting into containers and auto-provisioning).

<comment><USER6> > they're fairly unrelated to creating, maintaining, or deploying code

Actually it's _very_ useful to know and understand potential misconfigurations.

e.g. if your 3rd party integration starts failing, it's useful to know the signals that imply their sysadmin messed up a zone transfer.

This sort of 'hands-on' knowledge that you only really get from messing around with the daemons yourself reduces downtime and emergency maintenance from hours to minutes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _" Email is so important to the functioning of the Internet that it gets its own record type."_

Well that is one way of looking at it. Probably the appropriate way if you're teaching, but if you want to be critical then it reeks of poor design for a particular service to get special treatment by a fundamental part of the internet. It isn't that MX records aren't needed. They just shouldn't only be useful for email.

<comment><USER8> MX records were designed and implemented waay back when it was assumed that every new service would implement it's own super-specific (and probably binary) layer 4 protocol rather than just defaulting to JSON over HTTP(S). In Internet time, SMTP is _ancient_.

<comment><USER9> SMTP is ancient and we've been piling crap on top of it for 20 years to keep it working (and all the OSI layer 5, 6 and 7 things that depend on mail continuing to flow). SPF, DKIM, DMARC, IMAP daemons that present email over TLS1.2, clamAV and realtime malware scanning/filtering, spamassassin, bayesian filtering and analysis of mail body contents, email-to-SMS gateway, SMS-to- email gateways, I could probably make this list 4x as long.

But it doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon.

<comment><USER10> I've added a new acronym to my personal mail servers over the weekend: SRS (fixes SPF when doing basic forwarding to another email address, e.g.: to gmail).

And now I'm not even sure that was a correct move, since Gmail explicitly states[1] that you shouldn't change the envelope sender (which SRS does).

[1] - [https://support.google.com/mail/answer/175365?hl=en](https://support.google.com/mail/answer/175365?hl=en)

<comment><USER9> Anything that breaks DKIM so the signature coming from your SMTPd is no longer valid, not matching the public key published in your DNS records, will make your mail MUCH more likely to be flagged as spam.

<comment><USER10> SRS[1] doesn't break DKIM, because the sender rewrite happens on my server, before DKIM.

That's the thing, in theory I went from:

      spf:  fail
      dkim: pass

for forwarded mails, before SRS, to:

      spf:  pass
      dkim: pass

so it should be better, right?

But as I said, they explicitly mention NOT changing the envelope sender (maybe they have an exception for SRS cases, but it's not documented anywhere).

Oh yeah, and now I'm also responsible for any real spam forwarded to Gmail, since the From is @mydomain.

[1] - [http://www.openspf.org/SRS](http://www.openspf.org/SRS)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> 'This is why you can't have a CNAME on a root domain like petekeen.net, because you generally have to have other records for that domain like MX'

While in theory that's common, the primary reason is because of the SOA record that must exist.

<comment><USER12> Also, you can (sometimes/mostly) have a CNAME on a root domain and it even works (sometimes/mostly)

<comment><USER13> It goes against RFCs and you shouldn't but non-compliant resolvers will do it.

rfc1034 is vague but rfc2181 clears it up. [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1034](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1034) [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2181](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2181)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A very short, beginner-level intro to DNS.

<comment><USER15> yeah exactly what I need. I need a refresher on DNS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Learning networking/tcp/dns has been a pain for me for years. I can never wrap my head around it properly despite many attempts.

I blame it on not having easy access to throwaway playgrounds.

I recently found this project [http://mininet.org/](http://mininet.org/) which promises throwaway network playgrounds. Hopefully it will help me finally learn networks for good.

<comment><USER17> Although I appreciate that you're sharing something interesting, I can't believe you when you say the problem to tinker with networking, TCP and DNS was the lack of playgrounds.

Any home LAN is a playground. Internet is a playground. GNS3 for Cisco stuff. Linux itself is a playground (I have been playing today with StrongSwan, Quagga and SoftEther!). If you just want a network simulator, there's Packet Tracer. Of course you could also just fire up tcpdump and/or Wireshark and have a look. Many of the things I've mentioned are free :-)

<comment><USER18> Absolutely. Within that playground you can have a distributed wonderland, running VirtualBox, KVM or XEN where you spin up Linux hosts rapidly. Now your playground can start to imitate real life.

It sounds like the poster you're replying to need to solidify the fundamentals, before the playground under his/her feet can be experienced. TCP/IP Illustrated, one of many introductory guides to DNS, etc. can be read through. TCP/IP Illustrated Vol 1 is great because of how simple it makes networking feel, and it does so while showing you packet captures (another skill to pick up).

Add to that GNS3, which I've seen people use to design and sketch out company networks (just need a Cisco account to download the IOS images).

We could go on. The point is that your (free) playground is right under your nose.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> _Almost always you 'll want to redirect a bare domain like iskettlemanstillopen.com to www.iskettlemanstillopen.com. Registrars like Namecheap and DNSimple call this a URL Redirect. In Namecheap you would set up a URL Redirect like this..._

I prefer my domains to be naked (as opposed to www.), but I typically redirect all www-traffic in my web server (NGINX). Is this the wrong approach?

<comment><USER20> I prefer naked domains, but the problem I always have is that you can only use A records which makes using them with a bunch of things a pain in the butt. I host my personal website as just a tumblr blog (yes, go ahead and laugh, but I find it less of a chore to deal with than wordpress) so I need a CNAME to make that work, so I just have a very basic redirect on the naked domain to my blog subdomain.

<comment><USER21> Cloudflare offers something called CNAME flattening which will let you define a CNAME record for the naked domain.

[https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-cname-flattening- rfc...](https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-cname-flattening-rfc- compliant-cnames-at-a-domains-root/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> OpenNIC is a user controlled Network Information Center offering a democratic and non-national alternative to the traditional Top-Level Domain registries. [http://wiki.opennicproject.org/HomePage](http://wiki.opennicproject.org/HomePage)

<comment><USER23> I used OpenNIC for a while and it mostly worked. I started to notice some problems resolving .today URLs and had to ask for help in their IRC, and the response was not reassuring. At least one operator do not regularly update or even monitor their servers - I saw down time lasting weeks for one server (fortunately I had configured my router to use two and the second kept working throughout). The .today TLD had existed for several years but had not been added to the DNS servers I used. This isn't a complaint, just an observation after a year of regular use.

I like the idea behind the project, but from personal experience I decided that I had to switch to another provider that had more robust infrastructure and regularly patched their machines. DNS is too critical and I felt the risk of having my DNS requests hijacked by a compromised machine was too great.

 _(Also, who down-voted the parent comment? Bizarre, maybe that was accidental?)_

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is also a nice overview from the dnsimple guys:

[https://howdns.works/ep1/](https://howdns.works/ep1/)

</comment><comment><USER25> Anyone tried the "new" namecheap custom dns settings? Like glueing nameservers?

Its one of the poorest interfaces ever created in the history of mankind.

</comment><comment><USER26> Anyone old enough to remember movie.edu and the grasshopper O'Reilly 1st Edition DNS&Bind book?

<comment><USER27> What a great book! I wish they'd publish a new edition (the latest was ten years ago).

Has anything as good been released since? What is the current "standard reference" on DNS and BIND?

<comment><USER26> I haven't needed that type of reference since I read that in the mid 90's. And now with simply doing a search don't really need to buy books at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I thought they were going to get into the binary protocol.

<comment><USER29> The binary protocol is a good part? :)

<comment><USER30> I actually think the DNS binary protocol is a rather well-designed one, but others might disagree.

<comment> X-Istence DNS result "compression" is crap though...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> So, which are the good parts?

<comment><USER32> We replaced that with the phrase "basic concepts" from the intro, in the title above.

<comment><USER29> Why? Nobody changed the title the first time this was on HN and subsequently made it into Hacker Weekly.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6075330](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6075330)

<comment><USER32> Because "the good parts" is (a little) misleading and baity, to judge by the response it evoked in this thread. Please see [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

You're never going to get perfect consistency of moderation here because it's impossible for us to see every post, and also because we're human.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Alternative to Facebook events? - <AUTHOR> The only thing that keeps me active on Facebook is the amount of small local events that are posted only there.<p>Is there any alternative to promote, ideally one that can copy an event to FB automatically? <comment><USER2> If you get your friends to use Scuttlebutt [https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/](https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/) , then it has an events UI [https://github.com/pietgeursen/ssb-gathering- ui](https://github.com/pietgeursen/ssb-gathering-ui)

<comment><AUTHOR> To be honest, it looks too hard to use. Not sure if somebody like a yoga teacher would be able to manage it.

I'm probably looking for a Meetup.com alternative but not so buggy and mismanaged.

<comment><USER3> For information sake, what do you think would be easier?

Web hosted I imagine?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it would be nice to have some simple hosted event board. Probably with participant accounts tied to phones, so it's easy to join.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks like there isn't one. Who wants to build an open source alternative? :)

<comment><USER4> Alright, I might start given I got 3 (!) upvotes :D

Any marketing tips?

Edit: [https://github.com/noncototient/local-events- manager](https://github.com/noncototient/local-events-manager)

<comment><USER5> You should Show HN when you're ready. Looking forward to it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a FOSS alternative that looks decent for public events [https://www.attendize.com/](https://www.attendize.com/) but I feel like anything focused around "ticketing" will feel odd for small events. "Did you get a ticket for my birthday party next week?"

</comment><comment><USER7> We pick up facebook events (also Eventbright and lots more) and show them on our app. Its not perfect yet but we are working on it. oh also i'ts free let us know what you think.

[http://www.justgo.do/](http://www.justgo.do/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks good but I haven't chance to test it yet. But what I'm looking for is an alternative place to _publish_ events.

<comment><USER7> Sorry my misunderstanding. We are focusing on aggregating events from as many sources as we can but have no way to publish them yet. As mentioned Eventbright is good for free ticketed activities(and we show all of those as well).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> [https://www.constantcontact.com/features/event- marketing/eve...](https://www.constantcontact.com/features/event- marketing/event-management)

Not free, and maybe overkill for a "small" event....

</comment><comment><USER9> Not sure if this is what you are looking for, but try Eventbrite?

<comment><AUTHOR> Isn't it ticket-centered? Most of FB events are free for all or paid on-site with cash.

<comment><USER10> Yes it uses tickets for attendance but sites like eventbrite are free to use when issuing free tickets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> meetup.com

<comment><AUTHOR> The Mess at Meetup:

[https://gizmodo.com/the-mess-at-meetup-1822243738](https://gizmodo.com/the- mess-at-meetup-1822243738)

Discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16401042](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16401042)

Other complaints:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5086819](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5086819)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15793754](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15793754)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16299755](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16299755)</comment></comment>


H3: Uber's Hexagonal Hierarchical Spatial Index - <AUTHOR> https://eng.uber.com/h3/ <comment><USER2> For comparison, Google uses S2 cells in their maps, which is a tiling of quadrilaterals formed by projecting a cube onto a sphere, with a clever addressing system. Here's a good summary of how those work: [http://s2geometry.io/devguide/s2cell_hierarchy.html](http://s2geometry.io/devguide/s2cell_hierarchy.html)

I'm not an expert on this, but off the top of my head I can see a couple obvious tradeoffs. I'd love to hear some feedback from someone who's worked with H3 and S2 about the differences.

\- S2 cells end up being sort of diamond shaped and all oriented in the same direction after being projected onto a sphere, so their radius varies a lot more than an H3 cell. I wouldn't be surprised if H3 cells are on average more useful for doing local data analysis, since they're closer to a circle. For example, a collection of events are probably clustered together more in an H3 cell than an equivalently sized S2 cell.

\- S2 cells tile perfectly - each one is comprised of 4 smaller S2 cells. An H3 cell is approximated by 7 smaller H3 cells.

\- Related to above, S2 cell addresses are in some sense "strict" \- you can cut off the lowest significant bit to get the address of the parent S2 cell, which will fully contain the child cell. An H3 cell is not necessarily fully contained by its parent cell - judging by the pictures, the center cell is, but the 6 edge cells will overlap a bit. Probably the H3 cells are more annoying to work with for certain cases requiring exact numbers.

\- As mentioned in the writeup, H3 needs to include a few pentagons in their tiling. They mention that they're oriented the grid so that the pentagons are over water, so it's probably not a big deal in day to day work.

<comment><USER3> That's the jist of it.

h3 cells have the benefit of no boundary conditions as all neighbor edges are the same shape and you can only cross boundaries. With s2, the problem is that four edges are long and then there are four vertices you can cross to get into the adjacent diamonds at each corner. The tradeoff is what you described, s2 cells nest perfectly at different resolutions, but h3 cells are only approximate.

They are both great tools useful in different circumstances. It you have to move between resolutions and don't care about movement between cells, s2 is a better choice. If you care only about one resolution for your work or care about movement/flow between neighboring cells, h3 is a better choice.

s2 I believe also goes down to a smaller resolution (like 1 cm or so) and h3 goes down to like 1 meter. That said, there aren't many use cases that need greater than 1-meter resolution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why hexagons?

* Neighbor traversal

simplicity of neighbors; triangles 3 classes of neighbors, squares 2 classes of neighbors, hexagons only one class of neighbor!

* Subdivisions

Squares obviously do this pretty well but by alternating cw, cww rotations and allowing not quite perfect coverage they get to shard with different resolutions/hex sizes.

* Distortion

"most important" Basically the use case here is visualizations that maintain basic unit appearance. They even pick the location of their vertices to be over water minimizing land distortions.

source: [https://youtu.be/ay2uwtRO3QE?t=11m53s](https://youtu.be/ay2uwtRO3QE?t=11m53s)

p.s. as `contravariant` said you can't tessellate a sphere with hexagons so they project onto a icosohedron with pentagons at each of the twelve vertices (positioned over water) [https://youtu.be/ay2uwtRO3QE?t=23m00s](https://youtu.be/ay2uwtRO3QE?t=23m00s)

</comment><comment><USER5> Very interesting. At a glance, the binding libs seem to transform from lat/lon to a hex index. For storage then, conceivably you would just index by hex and transform lat / loc queries to hex on the fly.

Also, it seems there is no map data attribution for Australia. I doubt Uber built their own maps.

<comment><USER3> It says at the bottom that for this blog post, they used MapBox. That said, yes, Uber is building their own maps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is very interesting. The video does a good job at motivating it. I'm puzzled though that they include some demos on the page (I presume emscripten could compile it) as this figuratively begs for interactive demos.

</comment><comment><USER7> Is there an equivalent index where the icosahedron vertices are over land and not sea (at least for the most part)? I presume for marine requirements, such an index would reduce distortion over sea?

</comment><comment><USER8> I wonder how does the math of this stack up against using space-filling curves in Google's S2?

<comment><USER9> Well other than the fact that it's impossible to tesselate a sphere with hexagons it really depends what you're interested in. Space filling curves would necessarily behave badly in some areas, but could be simpler.

Not sure why they didn't use squares.

<comment><USER10> They go into it a bit in the article.

A lot of the reasons seem reminiscent of why hexagons are awesome in video games: [https://www.redblobgames.com/grids/hexagons/](https://www.redblobgames.com/grids/hexagons/)

<comment><USER11> I'm a bit curious about this, I am a video game developer (3d console games) and hexagon coordinate systems don't strike me as being awesome. Reading through the article you linked to confirmed my suspicion that there would be a great many possible parameterizations, and it seems like the kind of thing that wound cause a lot of confusion amongst developers, much like Euler angles do. I had hoped that the article would start with some kind of motivation section describing why one would be willing to suffer such horrible inconveniences, but the article got too far into the not gritty before explaining the benefits (I stopped reading half way through so maybe it was buried in there somewhere?)

I know that they are associated with rpg board games and therefore have found their way in to 2D RPG video games as well. I can see a slight advantage to using them on a board game situation where it would make it more accurate to estimate diagonal distances by counting tiles, but in a computational situation where your box can compute the Pythagorean theorem a few million times a second, the benefit of using hex systems in games eludes me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Papa bless uber!</comment>


Show HN: I built an abstraction layer on top of Stripe - <AUTHOR> http://tillypay.com/ <comment><USER2> I was waiting for someone to do this. Heck of an idea. Any chance you could do custom domains/links as a mid tier ? Working on a way to let people monetize things they work on together.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot. I needed exactly this tool for another project, so I built it.

Custom domains is what we'll be working on soon. Send me a message here: [https://tillypay.com/contact/](https://tillypay.com/contact/) and I'll add you to the beta group.

One person could collect the recurring payment or distribute it among those apart of the project? I'd love to hear more about the use case, send me a message.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The design is slick. Do you have any tips, or is it pure handbuilt?

<comment><AUTHOR> All hand-built, well send along your comment to our designer.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just wanted to make Stripe more accessible to the normal folk.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm already signed up with Stripe. If I sign up with you, can I use my existing Stripe account?

I have 2 SaaS products that need a simple payment flow like this.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can!

You'll get redirected to Stripe, just login & you'll have full access to TillyPay.

<comment><USER4> Sweet. Doing this right now. Thanks!

<comment><USER4> ...and 2 minutes later I'm signed up to Tilly with my existing Stripe account. Well done on the signup/signin process!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Really slick! How do you think this is different from Stripe express? Usability?

<comment><AUTHOR> We use Stripe Standard over Stripe Express, only because it was only available in the USA at the time.

We'll switch over at some point, make the sign-up a little easier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is great. And it's basically exactly what Stripe 1.0 was :-P

</comment><comment><USER7> Very minor thing: there was a flash of unstyled content on safari iOS.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh yes, first paint uses some weird font. I'll fix that soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> o/t: How did you get your logo to look so sharp in HelpScout? No matter what format/dimensions/size I upload mine in it comes out blurry.

<comment><AUTHOR> I had the same problem, I gave the loader a very large PNG file.

Exported at 10X PNG.

<comment><USER8> Thank you, I will give that a shot!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Minor, but typo on your website : Recieve Payment

<comment><AUTHOR> Changed! Well spotted

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This seems very cool. Nice work!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, a lot!</comment></comment>


Is it better to buy or rent? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/06/17/upshot/100000002894612.app.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0 <comment><USER3> 16 hours ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9741374](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9741374)

20 hours ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9739544](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9739544)

393 days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7783201](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7783201)

1775 days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1586757](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1586757)

1884 days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1283190](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1283190)

<comment><USER4> Important comment from an earlier thread: don't ignore the human factor. Buying instead of renting forces you to live more frugal, which is a reason why people who buy are often better off financially when they retire.

<comment><USER5> > Buying instead of renting forces you to live more frugal

As a home owner, I'm going to ask someone to elucidate on this sentiment.

<comment><USER6> Here is my take....

1\. People think they can afford to buy a place at $X

2\. People find a place at $X+Y and say "it'll be tough, but I love this place"

3\. People find out actually owning a house costs $X+$Y+$Z and they can barely make their house payments and supporting costs

4\. Eventually (after enough mortgage payments) your principal payments become large enough to take on the form of "forced savings"

I think this might work for some, but there are plenty of examples where people lose their homes because they underestimated the costs. Someone get sicks and goes on LT disability at 60% of their salary and end up missing mortgage payments.

<comment><USER7> This is just nuts.

<comment><USER8> Agreed, this is an insane (and insanely stressful) way of saving.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There is an important oversimplification that these formulas/programs/spreadsheets often make, and I see it happening here. Consider two alternatives where everything is the same except the amount of money used for the mortgage down payment. The formula assume that money not used for the down payment is invested at a certain rate of return. If the mortgage interest rate is greater than the investment return, then the formula always indicate that the largest down payment possible should be made and if the rate of return for investments is assumed to be greater than the mortgage interest rate then the smallest possible down payment should be made.

Its easiest to understand the problem with specific numbers. Assume a home buyer has $120,000 that could be put into a down payment, but that the minimum required is only $20,000. What should the buyer do? Assume that the investment rate of return is 5% and the mortgage rate is 4%. Investing the $100,000 instead of using it for the down payment is essentially borrowing $100,000 at 4% and investing it at 5%. All the formulas/worksheets/programs like this one and even professional investment advisors will end up showing that is better to put down the minimum down payment and investing the $100,000. This ignores the risk between alternatives. Putting the $100,000 into the down payment produces a guaranteed, riskless, return the buyer of 4% per year (by saving him or her the mortgage interest payments on the $100,000). The 5% potential return from investing the money isn't a fair comparison. The comparison needs to be made to a riskless investment (e.g. US Treasury Bills). Currently the riskless rate of return available to investors is approximately 0%. This means that in the current environment the correct alternative is to put the $100,000 extra into the down payment (absent any liquidity concerns).

One may say that they are willing to take some risks to obtain a higher rate of return. Modern Portfolio Theory has its detractors, but as far as home buyers are concerned, its implications are still apropos. Having one component of your overall portfolio earning the equivalent of a riskless 4% (by making the larger mortgage down payment) is likely to produce better aggregate returns (on the home and additional equities etc.) at whatever risk tolerance one designs for their overall finances.

I have no formal training in finance or investing so none of what I've described here should be interpreted as advice, instead it is intended to spur discussion.

<comment><USER10> There is risk in the mortgage as well though. The value of the house could drop.

<comment><USER11> Isn't that only a risk if you need to sell the house at a time when the value is below what you paid?

Buying houses for shorter terms is just more risky, period. The housing market can crap out in catastrophic ways. Just like the stock market. The risk aversi

It would be an unrealized loss if you were living in a house with a mortgage bigger than the value of the house, so long as you pay though, you've still got a house to live your life in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> We rented for the first ten years of our married life, and then purchased. All of the financial arguments aside, don't discount the value of having a place with your name on the deed. We had been forced to move out of two previous townhouses when the leases expired and the owners decided to sell. Knowing that your place is your place (yes, the bank's really, but they can't easily take it from you) is maybe an undervalued benefit.

</comment><comment><USER13> Does this take into account the risk of a housing market crash? For me, the biggest reason for renting rather than buying is to avoid putting all my bags in one basket; I wouldn't buy $500k worth of shares of one company, so spending $500k on a single house seems similarly risky.

<comment><USER6> You're looking at it the exact right way. Risk is a two sided-coin. If the local housing market does well, you can make out like a bandit. If it doesn't, you can lose a lot of money.

No different than owning $500K worth of share in a public company.

Nothing wrong with buying a house, but people should be careful not to have their net worth all tied up in a single asset (house or not). The one rule I've heard is 90 minus your age. When you're young is OK to have a high percentage of your net worth in a house, but not when you're getting close to retirement. Too risky.

<comment><USER14> I disagree, this view is too simplistic.

It's very different to owning shares in a company. You have to either buy a house or rent. You cant opt out entirely, whereas you can with shares.

By choosing to rent, you are betting on the housing market being stagnant or falling, if house prices shoot up and you opted to rent, you will need to now pay higher rents or a bigger mortgage.

So there is risk in renting too

If you decided to rent in london instead of buying 3 years ago, you'd be tens of thousands down

<comment><USER15> Why will rents go up, when they could have gone up already?

<comment><USER16> If house prices cross a threshold where first time buyers can't afford to get onto the property ladder, they're forced to rent - driving up competition for stock & thus rental prices. (This appears to be affecting more & more people in the UK).

<comment><USER15> These people pulling the ladder up behind them might be in for a rude surprise.

A sketch of my argument: as we are sometimes reminded to bear in mind, prices are driven by market conditions and affordability, not costs. If prices shoot up, why will the rent increase? Is it not already set to the highest value the market can bear, or something very close to that? We'll assume it must be, because it would be silly to do anything else (and the tenancy market is liquid enough). But then, if prices are at the right level already, how will people pay for increased rent?

If salaries increase as well, then this is just ordinary inflation. House prices go up, rents have go up, salaries go up - well, people have been warning about this for years! On the other hand, if prices increase, and rents go up, and salaries don't, how are people going to be able to afford to pay for any of this? The obvious answer, of course, is that they won't.

<comment><USER17> Prices are what the market will bear. If everybody's costs go up, or supply is limited, then rent can sure go up. Renting is an inflexible demand - <USER2> you want to go homeless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's good to get people thinking about all the things included in the calculator. Most people are totally clueless when it comes to the real cost/value of owning. They only see what someone bought a property for and what it sold for some time later.

A home you live in is almost always a net cost. It's not really an investment so much as its a cost avoidance (vs renting). Buying more house than you need "because this is an investment" is almost always a bad idea if you live in the home and thus are the one footing the bigger tax bill, interest, maintenance, utilities, improvements...

<comment><USER19> > A home you live in is almost always a net cost.

Plus it "prevents" you from moving somewhere else. Or let's say, it increases the friction of moving somewhere else. Most home owners stay at the same place for the rest of their lives.

<comment><USER20> There are a whole lot of other factors that increase friction more than owning your domicile, and those factors tend to be stronger with people who are motivated to buy:

\- Deep networks of friends \- Strong community ties \- Strong local family ties \- Children with their attendant social networks \- General aversion to moving frequently

Also, the idea that "most" homeowners never leave is antiquated. Nearly everyone I know who has bought a property has bought more than one before 40.

<comment><USER19> > Also, the idea that "most" homeowners never leave is antiquated. Nearly > everyone I know who has bought a property has bought more than one before > 40.

I'm guessing you live in the US ? Outside people are way less mobile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The money is certainly important. But buying is better than renting in many ways. Want to rip out your kitchen and have a new one? Want to pave part of the garden? Want to move a wall? Want to paint it all, or fit blinds?

If you own it you can do all that. If you rent you have to ask permission which you might not get. Plus why spend money on somewhere you don't own?

<comment><USER22> It's a trade off.

I live in London, UK in a flat I rent for £950 pcm. This would cost me £379,000 to buy, at the very least as it's a relatively nice area.

I could scrape the deposit and get a £379,000 mortgage but the insurance, maintenance and other costs on top would result in zero disposable income.

Currently I have £1750 left over every month which is nothing but bags of freedom to do whatever I want.

If I was to drop dead on Monday, the last great event wouldn't be getting Magnet in to do my kitchen, painting the living room ceiling and sitting in all weekend eating Tesco Value food. It would be chilling next to Lake Geneva in Lausanne with my other half which is exactly what I'm doing.

Live life now before it's over.

Edit: This is based on the advice of my wife's grandparents who are just about hanging on at the age of 84 and 86 respectively. They had to cancel their cruise this year due to poor health and openly admit that they worked way too hard for a house. They have a nice £1m house in London and a pile of savings but it's worth nothing to them now because their health is gone. It's empty as the children have left and they realised the memories were more important than the bricks.

So, sod buying a house. I'll live an irresponsible yet fulfilling life now.

<comment><USER23> Not sure if it's a difference in location but where I live it would cost me more per month to rent a similar property than what I own. If I wanted to save, I'd have to rent a smaller place instead.

<comment><USER22> You're probably right but will it in 5 years is the question you need to ask?

You always pay over the odds to rent initially but due to inflation and relative property prices it becomes good value rather quickly.

<comment><USER23> It wasn't before the market crashed but it's been much cheaper to buy than to rent where I live at least.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> One thing to consider -- avoid the 30-year fixed mortgage if you can. If you are buying, then buy a cheaper property that you can pay off in 5 years or so. Then in 5 years, you can sell that and take out another loan for the next property. Example: I bought my house for 180,000 on a 30-year mortgage, and 20% down payment (36,000). 15 years into it I've barely made a dent. I would have been better off buying a $100,000 smaller house or town house/condo, and I could have paid that off in 5 years with what I'm currently putting out per month (counting lower taxes and insurance on the smaller property). Then I could have sold it, and bought a $160,000 house, and 5 years or so later owned that one outright.

This is also a market proof strategy -- if the market goes down, the your current house may lose value (but you're not upside down on your mortgage, because you don't have one after 5 years). But the next house will also be proportionally cheaper too. And if the market goes up, the house you just paid off has gained in value, making for a bigger down payment on the next house.

</comment><comment><USER25> One factor that's never discussed is the availability of rental inventory. In some cities it's very hard to find a single family home (instead of an apartment) for rent - hence buying becomes the only path to getting the type of home you want.

</comment><comment><USER26> I've always wanted a model like this to point people to. I don't have a dog in the buy/rent column, but I feel like most of these decisions are made without a regard for many pertinent considerations. The main one that bugs me is how long you will likely stay in a place. Completely disregarding market effects, if you're not going to hold onto it long then it's probably not going to work out.

</comment><comment><USER27> Some people don't buy to, in their words, avoid being exposed to the property market or some variation thereof. This a fallacy. As long as you need somewhere to live you are exposed to the property market.

A good way of looking at this is: not owning is equivalent to having a large short position in the property market. If prices go down, you "win" by not losing money and/or your rent going down. If prices go up, you "lose" because your rent goes up and what you can buy now is less than what you could've before.

That's a fine position to take but my point is that it IS a position.

You don't necessarily need to own where you live but you should own _something_. It could be in the area you plan to retire to (to hedge against rising prices), an investment property to generate income or whatever.

IMHO REITs aren't the answer here. Residential and commercial real estate are different beasts. Commercial real estate is generally a means of generating income. Residential is far more speculative.

Some people compare long term returns on property vs equities. These compare reasonably favourably.

In all those cases borrowing to buy property is far more favourable. In the US at least you can get 30 year fixed mortgages that are currently hovering about 4% for 80%+ of the purchase price. You just can't get those terms on anything else.

Even on day 1 your mortgage payment is ~30% principal at these interest rates.

Property tends to be a great hedge against inflation too and higher interest rates and higher inflation seems to be a risk with the amount of quantitative easing occurring in the developed world.

Lastly, the ability to essentially fix your housing costs is (IMHO) huge, particularly in major urban centers.

</comment><comment><USER28> For me, it's better to buy. And that's not a financial decision either. I've just always wanted to restore an old house.

</comment><comment><USER29> This model doesn't seem to consider risk. If you finance 75% of your home value, your equity is 4x as volatile as the market.

</comment><comment><USER30> Very nice calculator. It is missing a PMI option for loans with a downpayment under 20%. That is a significant expense.

</comment><comment><USER31> It totally depends on the area and timing. I've bought and sold a number of places for a decent profit (all in cities) AND I managed to hold onto my last one and rent it for a good deal more than the mortgage payment. Renting IS throwing money away, plus none of my friends who rent live in as nice of a place as I do for the same monthly payment. Sure they can move to another city faster than I can, but the longest I've taken to sell a place it 4 months, not a big deal.

</comment><comment><USER32> It heavily depends on the area. In very urban areas, property is a lot more expensive, and renting is probably the way to go. In my area, it's almost the same cost to buy as to rent. The difference being, you can get some of the money back on your purchase by selling your property, whereas your rent just entered a black hole.

</comment><comment><USER33> So I pretended that "$" meant "£", and entered some plausible UK figures, including recent house price growth of 8% and rental growth of 10%, and it told me I should buy unless I could rent for -£391 a month.

Taking out a mortgage is clearly the best investment I ever made.

</comment><comment><USER34> Any github link to the actual visualisation would be handy .. looks like crossfilter types [http://square.github.io/crossfilter/](http://square.github.io/crossfilter/)

</comment><comment><USER35> I think this has been mentioned a couple of times when it has come up, but it would be nice to be able to add / remove local taxes e.g stamp duty here in the UK.

</comment><comment><USER36> I would buy, but Manhattan is expensive as hell and I don't want to live in the Bronx.

</comment><comment><USER37> Yes.

(It was obligatory.)</comment>


The US Military Funded a Study on Climate Change, and Got Unnerving Results - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencealert.com/sea-level-rise-climate-change-pacific-islands-drowning <comment><USER2> Actual paper: [http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/4/eaap9741](http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/4/eaap9741)

Title: "Most atolls will be uninhabitable by the mid-21st century because of sea-level rise exacerbating wave-driven flooding"</comment>


Freenapkin Claims Ownership Over Idea Of Giving Junk Away - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/06/freenapkin-claims-ownership-over-idea-of-giving-junk-away/

<comment><USER2> "Matter of fact Gee Chaung has and is a member of freenapkin and registered in December of 2008. His idea is not spur of the moment and this post about 'ebay of free' for free auctions needs more attention."

So he signed up for the site and saw an opportunity that free auctions can be done better. What's the crime in that? The listia site looks a whole lot better and their execution is different (too early to tell if it's the right one).

Just another clear example that execution is more important than the idea.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ideas aren't worthless, but they can only take you so far. Odds are someone is trying to do what you want to do. Unless they've taken valuable market and brand share they haven't "done" it. I'd bet a lot of money that listia overtakes freenapkins' traffic within the next 90 days. They should stop crying and hire a new designer.

</comment><comment><USER4> Nobody remembers the free auction site Qool.com?

I still have some t-shirts I got from them back in the days of the internet ad bubble ten years ago.

Users earned auction points by visiting pay-per-click links and buying through referral links back then, naturally. But it was fun.

</comment><comment><USER5> wow that site looks horrible</comment>


New England's Dark Day - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_England%27s_Dark_Day <comment><USER2> Man-made climate change makes for easy storytelling and easier self- flagellation, but the more earth history I read, the less massive climatic events surprise me. Australia was the smoke-filled continent long before Europeans arrived. California fires are nothing new: Pre-1800, about 1.8 million ha burned each year.

[https://www.sierraforestlegacy.org/Resources/Conservation/Fi...](https://www.sierraforestlegacy.org/Resources/Conservation/FireForestEcology/FireScienceResearch/FireHistory/FireHistory- Stephens07.pdf)

> Approximately 1.8 million ha burned annually in California prehistorically > (pre 1800). Our estimate of prehistoric annual area burned in California is > 88% of the total annual wildfire area in the entire US during a decade > (1994–2004) characterized as ''extreme'' regarding wildfires. The idea that > US wildfire area of approximately two million ha annually is extreme is > certainly a 20th or 21st century perspective. Skies were likely smoky much > of the summer and fall in California during the prehistoric period.

And: [https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.201...](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.2015.0345)

> Many consider wildfire as an accelerating problem [...] however, important > exceptions aside, the quantitative evidence available does not support these > perceived overall trends.

For that matter California can go into drought for _hundreds of years at a time_ which lead to the downfall and forced migration, understandably, of peoples in the area.

That's not to minimize man-made impacts, which certainly change the game! But I worry the focus on man-made change leads people to fail to appreciate just how much living on earth, on the geological scale, is riding a wild horse. If we can barely stomach a single weather anomaly without thinking it _must_ be the result of man-made climate change (and would not be there otherwise), rather than a part of a planet with a big history of anomalies, it will lead us to thinking less clearly. (Of course all kinds of denialists aren't helping there, either.)

Our job is to steward the earth so we can stave off things like mass death, famines, etc. California should be thinking about the engineering needed to live in a biome that genuinely wants to be on fire, sometimes, and we should be routing around this possibility. It's somewhat frustrating to see the governor jump to climate change if only for its convenient exculpatory power, as if when we are not sequestering carbon, we humans are _otherwise_ helpless.

<comment> munk-a > It's somewhat frustrating to see the governor jump to climate change if only > for its convenient exculpatory power

Eeeeeh.

Sure, fair I suppose. Except that the US political arena is currently composed of people that want to address climate change and environmental stewardship responsibly and those that deny it's existence while toting snow balls onto the senate floor.

It's fine to reasonably say that California & the feds are underfunding efforts to maintain fire breaks and forest management in the state. It's not fine to say that carbon sequestration will solve everything magically one day - we need to be doing both, addressing excessive carbon generation and looking into carbon sequestration.

Also, as far as I've seen, carbon sequestration isn't really a renewable process - the idea is to lock that carbon outside of the natural cycles, that's a great way to reset things, but it doesn't effect the velocity with which we continue to make the problem worse.

Lastly, we're a pretty rich society - if we can do something about this why don't we. I think most people would be happy to go without the next generation of iPhone if it means solving climate change - maybe we can just slightly slow down the economic engine and produce a more sustainable existence.

<comment><USER3> >I think most people would be happy to go without the next generation of iPhone if it means solving climate change

Don't you also have to go vegan, stop flying, switch to an EV car, stop using disposable plastic, switch to green electricity, avoid businesses that aren't carbon neutral, consider the environment before you print that email, and so on ... ?

The scale of change required is seriously overwhelming and I fear without a solution to that, we aren't going to fix this problem anytime soon :(

<comment><USER4> Actually you mainly have to just go at the rich and regulatory capture. Carbon and plastic taxes/cap/trade to capture those externalities and most of the problems go away on their own. But then someone might not get another yacht.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This description matches almost exactly with what I personally observed on the San Francisco peninsula on September 9. I even wrote about it at the time:

[http://blog.rongarret.info/2020/09/this-is-what- apocalypse-l...](http://blog.rongarret.info/2020/09/this-is-what-apocalypse- looks-like.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> I personally lived a situation very much similar, although just a few minutes of full darkness. It was in the north of Spain in the middle of a huge storm. The day went to fully black and it was terribly scary.

<comment><USER7> We had a big storm here in Iowa last month that was very similar. I looked outside at 11am and it looked exactly like midnight.

That was a "This can't be good" sort of feeling.

<comment><USER6> I know what you mean. It gave me a deep, primitive dread and fear.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm waiting for some History channel show to drill some core samples and have experts point to the thin layer of soot that they use as proof of the cause for this Dark Day. You'll have to wait for all of the commercial breaks and seasonal cliff hangers with goofy repetitive announcer comments trying to puff up the drama.

<comment><USER9> Has the history channel gone off a cliff? Or has it always been this way, and I just never noticed as a wide-eyed youth?

I haven't watched it in years, but nowadays it'd be better described as "The Conspiracy Channel", with generous sides of American Pickers and Pawn Stars.

<comment><USER8> Go watch a couple of episodes of one of their flagpole show called "Mystery Of Oak Island". It's produced in such a formulaic fashion that it's mind numbing. 7 seasons later, the people still haven't gotten any closer to their goals.

<comment><USER9> I just spent 10 minutes trying to squeeze some some sense out of the episode summaries on wikipedia. (like squeezing water out of stone)

It reminded me of how I feel after programming for 12 hours straight -- nothing makes sense any more and everything is connected... I can't believe they've made 7 seasons out of this.

An example synopsis:

> With only two weeks left in the season Rick, Marty and Craig debate what > they will do while the crane operators are on strike. They decide to conduct > seismic testing in the swamp. At Smith's Cove, another wooden structure is > found and excavation of that begins. A rust coloured patch of packed rocks > with water flowing out is found. In the war room, members of the team meet > with researcher Chris Donah who contacted them about the swamp and its > relationship with the constellation Virgo. Eagle Canada returns to the > island to conduct seismic testing in the swamp using 2,025 charges and 4,000 > geophones. On Lot 27, Gary and Marty metal detect the spoils from a previous > excavation of the swamp. They find a button, a coin or token with a square > hole in it. In the war room, the dendrochronology results are revealed. The > samples date to around 1770 with a 99.99% confidence.

This episode had 3.16 __million __viewers. What.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, those numbers don't surprise me. It is one of their more popular shows, and they are milking it for everything it is worth. Websites of fans discussing their own theories and what not. It has a huge hook because of that. It's a modern day Indiana Jones search for the grail and/or ark. Essentially, the History Of Oak Island would be a pretty interesting 2 hour documentary. As a weekly reality tv show, they have to fluff it to fill the time slots so the style of it gets very old very fast. I had never heard of it until Prime recommended it to me, and then it just became one of those COVID shows playing in the background while I continued to bang out code. Every now and then it would catch me, and I'd actually pay attention to some of the historical research stuff they would go into.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Please review my book: Running Lean (roughcut) - <AUTHOR> http://www.runningleanhq.com/downloads/running_lean_rc.pdf

<comment><USER2> please read my comments while wearing a teflon jacket. these are not personal attacks, just my personal thoughts about a book about how to make a web startup. i'm trying to build a new startup and reading all these blogs, and at times it seems like the authors of these blogs are pontificating their thoughts and trying to sell their own book, or speaking engagements, or whatever. So I start the discussion as a jaded a-hole. It's just where I am at right now. sorry.

I don't like the title. sounds like a book about running to lose weight. maybe it'll change by the time the final comes out. i quickly paged-down through 39 pages of the pdf, and most everything seems to be a rehash of stuff I've read on blogs. is the value of the book come from having all these concepts in one place? can a book have value anymore because once it is written it is basically obsolete? and do entreprenuers have time to read a book, especially a 141 page book? in your about the author section you say you've been doing start-ups for 7 years, but you don't explain if the startups became successful, so can we trust what you wrote as a valid recipe for success, or is it just adnecdotal musings of personal ideas, etc. the book is written in the tone of preaching, i.e. this is how to do it, but so far it lacks the exact how to do it steps. I think that is what programmers are most fond of, a book of recipes that show you how to make something work, and they can do it and it works. yes I know, this is a lot trickier. there is no right or wrong, no compiler to validate that you're doing it the right way. maybe this book is more for a business person who will just hire or subcontract a programmer and drive them crazy with pivots every hour :)

that's all the time i have for right now, i'll try to stay up even later tonight (after my coding work has burned out my brain) to read some more and make more comments. thanks for sharing it.

<comment><USER3> Having read about the same amount thus far, I can safely say that I see value in the reconciliation of these various processes and ideas, especially with the increased emphasis on web-based startups. After all, as the author pointed out, many of Steve Blank's processes were constructed with enterprise in mind.

I'll be making another, and much more in-depth, post about the book once I finish reading it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just wanted to mention that Articles/comments posted on Hacker News tend to end up on popular search engines fairly quickly. The ramifications in this isntance is that you may find this public document being exposed to a much wider audience than just HN.

Good luck and all the best!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Shamiq. This is still a roughcut and I am anticipating additional refinement. At this point, quality feedback trumps tighter control.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> crocodoc link for in-document commenting: <https://crocodoc.com/g30tgl>

<comment><AUTHOR> cool - thx!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> nice one, I'll read this this week and get back to you.</comment>


New Functional Language for JVM (Lux) Builds on Haskell, Clojure, ML - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoworld.com/article/3155704/java/new-functional-language-for-jvm-builds-on-haskell-clojure-ml.html <comment><USER2> From the Gitbook: [0]

        (;module: {#;doc "This will be our program's main module."}
            lux
            (lux (codata io)
                [cli #+ program:]))

        (program: args
            (io (log! "Hello, world!")))

I know syntax is subjective, and a common source of bikeshedding. But I'm puzzled by this choice for defining a module and its imports. It requires much more cognitive load to remember that "(lux (codata io) [cli #+ program:]))" means a combination of "import lux/codata/io", "import lux/cli as cli" and "import program: from lux" than, well, something more straightforward.

Especially for a new language in the modern programming world where there exist many dozens of languages, it's important that your "learning curve" be smoothed out where possible. Not to say that advanced concepts shouldn't exist -- a beginner's not likely to easily handle learning monad transformer stacks when picking up Haskell -- but rather that "simple" things should be kept simple. Show me a codebase where there are no imports, and I'll show you a codebase that's so trivial that its utility is minute. Importing other code is something 99% of all source code files will need -- so why make it complex and overwrought?

User Experience (UX) has gained proper or closer-to-proper attention over the past decade or so, Developer Experience (DX) is something that's still not thought of often enough sometimes.

[0] [https://luxlang.gitbooks.io/the-lux-programming- language/](https://luxlang.gitbooks.io/the-lux-programming-language/)

</comment><comment><USER3> "Like Lisp, Lux runs on the Java Virtual Machine but promises more power and flexibility than its predecessors"

Literally the first sentence. I think the author meant "Like Clojure, Lux runs on the ..."

</comment><comment><USER4> I love it when new languages come out like this. I'm always interested to see what new ideas they bring, and what justifications they have for creating a new language. I'm not really one to chase the new and shiny, but I have a soft spot for functional languages, despite being a longtime C++ developer.

</comment><comment><USER5> A link to the GitHub repo would have been better.

<comment><USER3> Definitely. Nothing more frustrating than presenting a language without showing a single line of code.

<comment><USER6> In fairness the first link in the article is to the github repo ([https://github.com/LuxLang/lux](https://github.com/LuxLang/lux)) but info world was certainly a weird choice.

<comment><USER7> The 0.5 release got posted here yesterday [0], but didn't get much love.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13356065](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13356065)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Has "The Bug Nobody Is Allowed to Understand" ever happened to you? - <AUTHOR> Description of the bug: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bug-nobody-allowed-to-understand.en.html <comment><USER2> clickable: [https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bug-nobody-allowed-to- underst...](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bug-nobody-allowed-to- understand.en.html)

"When a problem occurs in the interaction of multiple proprietary software packages with different developers, none of them is allowed to study the source code of all the pertinent programs." \- RMS</comment>