Atlas Winced - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/04/atlas-winced/237405/

<comment><USER2> If you are looking for other reviews, Metacritic (27%):

<http://www.metacritic.com/movie/atlas-shrugged-part-i>

Rotten Tomatoes (10%):

<http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/atlas_shrugged_part_i/>

</comment><comment><USER3> Oh come on, the movie wasn't _that_ terrible. I saw it yesterday morning in a completely sold out theater (every showing has been sold out so far, with a line around the theater of people trying to get in).

My "exit polls" (overhearing people talk about it as we all shuffle out) indicate that most people enjoyed it.

Sure it wasn't transformers, it was slow (but somehow not slow enough), and not very nuanced (the dialog the article is talking about), but it was an alright way to spend 105 minutes.

If you're a fan of film, I think you should go see it, if for no reason other than to try and see how the producers are trying to translate the story to film. It's also pretty culturally significant.

Hopefully with enough interest (and money) the second one will be done properly.

</comment><comment><USER4> There are several things to consider before seeing this movie. First and foremost, it's an ashcan project. The film had to be rushed into production to retain the film rights, so the writers didn't have the time to prune out lines like the one mentioned. Also, Atlas Shrugged and The Lord of the Rings are nearly the same length, yet this film is just over half the run time of The Fellowship. Finally, the budget of this film is not nearly what it needed to be, so don't go in expecting to see a visual masterpiece. It's a shame but maybe someday a Peter Jackson level director will give this story the proper treatment it deserves.

</comment><comment><USER5> Does anyone here actually _like_ Ayn Rand and her writings?

<comment><USER6> I love Ayn Rand! Atlas Shrugged had a huge, positive impact on my life, and it's still my favorite novel over a decade after I first read it. I love the way that Rand stylizes her characters because it makes for very clear mental images while reading. It also it creates the framework for all kinds of subtle things that you _don't_ notice the first time through.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is really too bad. I loved the book (in spite of it's heavy-handed preaching) and was always afraid this would happen in transition to the big screen.

</comment><comment><USER8> I hope the OP isn't posting this simply because it's fun to bash Rand.

I'm a huge fan of the book (though I prefer the Fountainhead), but didn't expect much more from this movie. I haven't seen it yet, but with that cast, and a production team that can't even hire a logo designer (check the stock vector used for the signage logo), I'd expect nothing short of a disappointment.

<comment><USER9> I didn't get the sense that the article was critical of Rand. It seemed more like it was bashing the movie.

An Atlas Shrugged movie could be awesome. The book conjures such vivid images of grandeur and destruction. It's a shame this trilogy seems like it should be missed.

<comment><USER8> I agree with you, but I've seen so many reviews use this bad movie as a chance to bash Rand that I was hoping to avoid that here.

This one has had a lot of troubles getting off the ground, and I'm guessing that the film reflects that, which as you say, is sad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Ayn Rand was an admirer of child killer William Hickman, who dismembered a little girl.

<http://michaelprescott.net/hickman.htm>

<comment><USER11> Ad hominem fallacy this early in the morning?

I don't have to remind you one lapse of judgment doesn't invalidate all of one's ideas.

(and, to be fair, I think Ayn Rand's "wisdom" is highly overrated)

<comment><USER10> It's not an ad hominem, since I wasn't trying to refute Rand's arguments (such as they are).

It's quite telling, however, that that was the sort of man she idolized.

<comment><USER12> The author of that article did not really give an honest interpretation of what was written in her diaries (about Hickman).

<comment><USER10> Care to elaborate?

<comment><USER12> The author ignores that Rand would have quite limited access to information on the whole story, for a start. But more importantly he deliberately downplays the fiction/adaptation angle. Rand was fascinated by _what she glimpsed_ in the news story (namely the 'I am like the state; what's good for me is right' quote, and the mob-mentality of the public reaction), because _it gave her some ideas for a work of fiction,_ regardless of the _facts_ of this particular case. Writers don't have to be accountable for what strange things inspire them, just what they actually publish. Prescott leaves the exhonerating quote to the very end (padding the rest of the article out with random references to Neitsche and snippets of unrelated dialogue grabbed without context):

\</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment> "I am afraid that I idealize Hickman and that he might not be this at all. In fact, he probably isn't. But it does not make any difference. If he isn't, he could be, and that's enough. There is a lot that is purposely, senselessly horrible about him. But that does not interest me..." \</comment><comment></comment><comment>

She freely admits that her _impressions_ of the case are probably wrong, but it rightfully doesn't matter to her because she's just planning how to create a work of fiction based on some ideas it brought to mind, not publish an editorial on the Hickman trial. When you untangle the whole business, that's all you're left with: a novelist who privately took inspiration from a strange/shocking event, but did nothing to sanction or glorify it in the resulting fiction. Not particularly unusual: look at all the characters, tyrants etc., that Shakespeare put in his plays while finding profound truths about humanity. I'd say the whole thing would be analogous to me turning on the news, listening to something Col. Gidaffi was saying in defiance of the hypocritical NATO alliance, and then (without having the luxury or desire to research Gidaffi's own integrity), being inspired to write a story about a benign dictator who brought prosperity to the land, loosely basing him on Gidaffi's mannerisms.

So really there's nothing to it, and that article would have died a quiet death, EXCEPT for this passage:

"The first thing that impresses me about the case is the ferocious rage of a whole society against one man. No matter what the man did, there is always something loathsome in the 'virtuous' indignation and mass-hatred of the 'majority.'... _It is repulsive to see all these beings with worse sins and crimes in their own lives, virtuously condemning a criminal..._ "

Now that is a horrible thing for Rand to say - most people have worse sins than child murder?? But this is where Michael Prescott has 'done the dirty' - the sentence I italicized was, if you read the whole passage from the diary, not referring specifically to this murder case, but to the general instances of mob indignation (eg. could be tax evasion cases, MP expense fiddling, bankers bonuses, Monica Lewinsky, Fred Goodwin, the BP ceo, public figures making un-PC remarks, etc). Which is not an altogether unfair observation, in my experience. Mass self-righteousness is seldom pretty.

<comment><USER10> _"The author ignores that Rand would have quite limited access to information on the whole story, for a start."_

She may not have had the _whole_ story, but how much of the story did she need?

Hickman's entire claim to fame was the cold blooded murder of a little girl. What nuances could Rand have been missing that could have mislead her on that point?

Here's what the author of the original article had to say about Rand's knowledge of the case:

       The gory details of Hickman's crime were indeed reported in the newspapers
       of the day. (They didn't call 'em the Roaring Twenties for nothin'.) Nearly
       all the info I presented was taken from contemporaneous newspaper accounts.
       Rand followed the case closely enough to know the day-by-day events of the
       trial, so she surely knew what Hickman had done. She just didn't care. She
       mentions not one word about Hickman's 12-year-old victim in all the hundreds
       of words she penned about the case.

       If you've read Rand's journals, you know that she did present her ethical
       positions in detail, even when writing for herself.

       Objectivists typically bend themselves into pretzel-like shapes to avoid
       acknowledging Rand's obvious psychological problems. The facts are, Rand
       knew exactly what Hickman had done and admired him anyway. Make of this what
       you will.

(The above quote is from one of the comments to this article:

[http://michaelprescott.typepad.com/michael_prescotts_blog/20...](http://michaelprescott.typepad.com/michael_prescotts_blog/2005/06/ad_hominem_ad_n.html) )

 _"Rand was fascinated by what she glimpsed in the news story (namely the 'I am like the state; what's good for me is right' quote, and the mob-mentality of the public reaction), because it gave her some ideas for a work of fiction, regardless of the facts of this particular case."_

Even if that was all that fascinated her about Hickman (doubtful), it's quite interesting what conclusions she drew from his words: not that that kind of attitude could lead egomaniacs like Hickman to senseless murder but rather that they are ideals to be emulated and praised.

 _"But this is where Michael Prescott has 'done the dirty' - the sentence I italicized was, if you read the whole passage from the diary, not referring specifically to this murder case"_

Are you kidding me? The section she wrote it in is titled "The Hickman Case", and it's clear she is talking about that case in particular from beginning to end. The entire section reinforces what she said in that quote. She said it and meant it about the Hickman case. There's no doubt about that.

Read for yourself:

<http://books.google.com/books?id=2Gkx0STfl5kC>

Just search for the phrase "Hickman Case" (including the quotes).

<comment><USER12> We still do not know what information Rand had when she wrote what. The whole point is something made an _impression_ on her and then she explored that emotional response to come up with ideas for a story. If you want to judge her on her emotional response, you at least need to be sure what she was responding to: for instance, I might have an emotional response to Saddam Hussein grandstanding in the crimes against humanity trial if I saw that on television, one quite different if the tv spot had simply featured images of his chemical attacks or torture victims.

" _Even if that was all that fascinated her about Hickman (doubtful), it's quite interesting what conclusions she drew from his words: not that that kind of attitude could lead egomaniacs like Hickman to senseless murder but rather that they are ideals to be emulated and praised._ "

It's less interesting when you consider that other parts of her philosophy include a total rejection of violence.

 _"Are you kidding me? The section she wrote it in is titled "The Hickman Case", and it's clear she is talking about that case in particular from beginning to end. The entire section reinforces what she said in that quote. She said it and meant it about the Hickman case. There's no doubt about that."_

Maybe you misunderstood what I wrote... but I strongly disagree. Here's the whole paragraph:

      The first thing that impresses me about the case

^ so she starts off addressing a specific event

      is the ferocious rage of the whole society against one man.

^ and then picks out a more general phenomenon present in this case

      No matter what the man did, there is always something loathsome in the "virtuous"

      indignation and mass-hatred of the "majority." One always feels the stuffy,

      bloodthirsty emotion of a mob in any great public feeling of a large

      number of humans. It is repulsive to see all those beings with worse sins and

      crimes in their own lives, virtuously condemning a criminal, proud

      and secure in their number, yelling furiously in defense of society.

^ And then describes the _general phenomenon_ as she has observed from other instances. _Then_ she goes back to talking about Hickman. Prescott omitted the middle sentence of the last section above to make it sound worse, which I think is very dishonest

<comment><USER10> _"It's less interesting when you consider that other parts of her philosophy include a total rejection of violence._ "

That's kind of ironic, if not outright hypocritical considering that outrage against violence is exactly what she's railing against in this journal entry.

She certainly didn't waste much time rejecting Hickman's violence there.

 _"And then describes the general phenomenon as she has observed from other instances."_

First, it's not clear whether the last sentence you quote (the one you agree is dispicable were Rand referring to the Hickman case) is _directly_ referring to the Hickman case or to the subject of the previous sentence, the "mob in any great public feeling". She doesn't mention the Hickman case by name in that sentence, nor does she explicitly mention she's talking about subject of the previous sentence.

But even were we to grant that she wasn't talking about the Hickman case directly, but was only talking about "a mob", she'd still be talking about the Hickman case _indirectly_ ; since it's obvious the mob she mentions is a general phenomena of which she saw the Hickman case as a particular example of.

So either way, she's talking about the Hickman case. Directly or indirectly.

In fact, the rest of the journal entry makes it crystal clear what Rand says in that sentence is indeed what she feels towards the spectators and prosecutors of the Hickman: _"It is repulsive to see all those beings with worse sins and crimes in their own lives, virtuously condemning a criminal, proud and secure in their number, yelling furiously in defense of society."_

Read the rest of the "Hickman Case" section from her journal and you'll see that very sentiment expressed by Rand towards the spectators and prosectors of the Hickman case. You can virtually see the scorn and contempt dripping from Rand's lips, not at some abstract and general example of "a mob", but precisely at those people who were outraged by what Hickman had done.

<comment><USER12> _She certainly didn't waste much time rejecting Hickman's violence there._

This is getting a bit silly, I mean, why would she? It's her private diary which she's using to plan works of fiction. She doesn't need to explain to _herself_ that she doesn't condone violence.

Secondly, the contention is that Rand thought most people had 'worse sins' than child murder. One could conceivably interpret her sentence to mean that, but I think the only reason anyone _has_ is because Michael Prescott ellipted the quotation in his article. It is vastly more likey that Rand was still speaking generally, and it reads that way more naturally.

Thirdly, she does indeed have many (other) negative things to say about the mob in this specific instance, but they are reasonable criticisms. For instance the enthusiasm of the newstand boys crying 'they're going to hang him!' It's when mass-approval crosses the line into unhealthy mass- _relishment_ of a situation. And people coming out of the woodwork to associate themselves with the moral highground.

Basically she saw this case, saw the public reaction, and detected something in that reaction which wasn't motivated merely by the crime itself, but the criminal's open defiance of the social order. It inspired her to write a story about someone who also cared nothing for the social order, who wanted his own success above all alse, but was not a phoney or a hypocrit in any way, _or a danger to others_ , and committed a crime for which he was widely hated: not because of the crime itself, but because he refused to acknowledge its wrongfulness. The initial story was never written but you can see the same pattern in The Fountainhead when Roark blows up the housing complex then goes on trial. Rand was not interested in Hickman, but in a parallel to the Hickman story that shared _some_ of the same elements.

There were, of course, many, many other murders which Rand wasn't interested in whatsoever.

<comment><USER10> _"She doesn't need to explain to herself that she doesn't condone violence."_

Then why did she explain to herself that she condemned the "mob" who was outraged by Hickman's murder?

 _"Secondly, the contention is that Rand thought most people had 'worse sins' than child murder. One could conceivably interpret her sentence to mean that, but I think the only reason anyone has is because Michael Prescott ellipted the quotation in his article. It is vastly more likey that Rand was still speaking generally, and it reads that way more naturally."_

Even if we take her statement to apply more generally towards _"a mob in any great public feeling of a large number of humans"_ is it really any more excusable? She'd presumably feel the same contempt not only towards those people who expressed outrage at Hickman's murder, but at similar outrage expressed against any murder.

 _"It's when mass-approval crosses the line into unhealthy mass-relishment of a situation. And people coming out of the woodwork to associate themselves with the moral highground."_

And that "unhealthy mass-relishment" is more worthy of contempt and reproach than Hickman's own crime?

<comment><USER12> _Then why did she explain to herself that she condemned the "mob" who was outraged by Hickman's murder?_

The outrage of the mob was what she was studying to write her fiction. She is detailing the characteristics and behaviours which she wants to portray - violence/murder was not going to be a part of her story, so she didn't write about it.

 _She'd presumably feel the same contempt not only towards those people who expressed outrage at Hickman's murder, but at similar outrage expressed against any murder._

She's not alluding to other murders, but to lesser 'crimes' that provoke a more _hypocritical_ mass-response. Here the public response to Hickman wasn't hypocritical (except for his wife-murdering cellmate), but there were other things she didn't like about it. Let's note that most murders actually _don't_ provoke a mass outrage - people are just quietly glad when the murderer is caught/sentenced. Mind you, Rand's early years probably weren't that far removed from the groutesque spectacle of public executions in front of actual mobs, which I suspect most people now find despicable.

 _And that "unhealthy mass-relishment" is more worthy of contempt and reproach than Hickman's own crime?_

Again you are forgetting this is a private diary for planning fiction, not an newspaper editorial on a public affair. 'Worthy' has got nothing to do with it. Murders happen all the time. Many books are written about them already. It's not like this would be the first murder ever and _that_ was Rand's response to it. This was a murder case with a difference, and Rand wanted to explore that difference. The question is not 'what is just and fair in this story,' but 'what is interesting in this story?'

<comment><USER10> _"The outrage of the mob was what she was studying to write her fiction. She is detailing the characteristics and behaviours which she wants to portray - violence/murder was not going to be a part of her story, so she didn't write about it."_

True. But you can see she had a strong emotional response to the circumstances of the Hickman case. She was really outraged, and ranted about her outrage for pages upon pages upon pages.

But her outrage was focused not on Hickman or on the murder he committed, but on those people who were outraged at what Hickman had done.

That's what's strange about her reaction. She doesn't seem to be concerned in the least by what Hickman had done. In fact, she idolizes him, and even writes a story in which she turns him in to a hero.

And it's not like there weren't plenty of cases of miscarriages of justice in the 20's that she could have been outraged at. Plenty of cases where she could have chosen to idolize and emulate someone who really was heroic.

Instead in her journal entry she writes of a child murderer being a hero. You don't find her choice of heroes to be even a bit strange?

 _"She's not alluding to other murders, but to lesser 'crimes' that provoke a more hypocritical mass-response."_

What makes you think that? By her own words, she's referring to: "a mob in _any_ great public feeling of a large number of humans" That includes public outrage at murders, mass murders, torture, etc.

The fact that she alluded to such mobs in relation to the Hickman case proves that she wasn't talking about mobs that form only in response to "lesser" crimes, but rather those of which the public outrage caused by the Hickman case is an example (ie. murder cases).

 _"Rand's early years probably weren't that far removed from the groutesque spectacle of public executions in front of actual mobs, which I suspect most people now find despicable."_

If she had written about her outrage at the lynching of an innocent black man, I think most people today would agree with her and indeed find such an event despicable.

But Hickman was not lynched by a mob (he even got what appears to be a pretty fair trial, especially by the standards of the day), he was not innocent, and he wasn't a member of any persecuted minority. Furthermore, his crime was itself of a particularly despicable sort.

The only way Rand could have chosen a worse person to idolize was if she'd chosen a mass murderer or serial killer. In fact, Hickman wasn't really all that far from a serial killer, as there are some indications he'd killed before.

 _"It's not like this would be the first murder ever and that was Rand's response to it."_

But it was a particularly gruesome murder of a child. You'd think that Rand herself would have been outraged by it. Instead she idolized the perpetrator and had nothing but contempt for those that would dare disparage him.

<comment><USER12> Why do you keep saying she 'idolized' him? She didn't, she _idealized_ him, which is different. She's drawn to the case because she really liked his statement, 'I'm like the state, what's good for me is right.' From there she plans a story about a character based on his positive traits, but free from his negative ones, his 'degeneracy.'

She writes about the mob because the mob will be the antagonist in her story. She doesn't think the member of the mob in this case had 'worse sins' than murder in their own lives (I mean you could interpret it that way, but it's a stretch, plus is uncharacteristically stupid, plus is something Rand would have actually explained if that's what she meant - she's always crystal clear about explaining her beliefs), but nevertheless it's the same 'mob-mentality' at work as found elsewhere. A lynch mob is different, I'm talking about the crowds of people who turned up to see public executions, basically making justice a form of entertainment masquerading as moral superiority. The worst cases would be witch-trials or execution for 'treason', or counterfeiters, or show-trials in Russia. The modern instances would probably be the Enron or Royal Bank of Scotland inquiries, where although there was guilt, one has to say 'give me a fucking break' when all these former-colleagues or regulators line up to wash their hands and denounce the scapegoat. Then you have the 'celebrity speaks out of turn' stories, where people act like nothing they ever say in private is just as bad. All cases have different details, but the argument is that the mob-mentality is somewhat consistent throughout.

Once again this is a private diary for planning fiction. It's not 'Ayn Rand's Memoirs, Chapter 6: What I thought of William Hickman.' Or 'Ayn Rand: My Heroes.' Rand is in the process of forumulating a philosophy that eschews collectivism and along comes a prominent news story where she gets a chance to study the mob-mentality in reaction to someone who is not a collectivist whatsoever. Murders are very common, but ones which become huge public spectacles are not. It is not sufficient to ask 'why is the public so outraged?' The question becomes 'why is the public so outraged about _this_ instance, but not others?'</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Technique for Getting Unstuck When Working Alone - <AUTHOR> http://blog.davidtate.org/2017/01/a-technique-for-getting-unstuck-when-working-alone/ <comment><USER2> Actually, when stuck, I start a completly different and new project. This is why I have 30 of them remaining to complete ;) Good luck dev brothers.</comment>


Help me find tech people with a mental illness willing to talk about it - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Unk6GPys2KlWYzPsGbRh7s-fvE0r_OHpFhOtii7tX4k/viewform

<comment><USER2> There is very little information on that page. Some people will be unwilling to pass the link on to their friends with MH problems because of that.

Good Luck though!

</comment><comment><USER3> How do you define mental illness?</comment>


Isambard Kingdom Brunel - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isambard_Kingdom_Brunel <comment><USER2> Dude even tried his own hyperloop:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isambard_Kingdom_Brunel#Brunel...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isambard_Kingdom_Brunel#Brunel.27s_.22atmospheric_caper.22)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm reading Voice Across The Sea now and Arthur C. Clarke called Brunel, "the greatest engineering genius of the Victorian era - perhaps, indeed, the only man in the last five hundred years to come within hailing distance of Leonardo da Vinci."

He was also a fan of L.T.C Rolt's biography: [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1828514.Isambard_Kingdom...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1828514.Isambard_Kingdom_Brunel)

</comment><comment><USER4> His dad was remarkable as well. Brunel cut his teeth on his father's Thames tunnel project ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_Tunnel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_Tunnel)). There is a little Brunel museum on the site of the project's steam engine. Well worth a visit if you are in the area.

</comment><comment><USER5> Brunel makes occasional appearances along side Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage in Sydney Padua's alternative-history web comic "2D Goggles", which is worth your time...

[http://sydneypadua.com/2dgoggles/cast/](http://sydneypadua.com/2dgoggles/cast/)

</comment><comment><USER6> #2 on BBC's list of 100 Greatest Britons [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_Greatest_Britons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_Greatest_Britons)

The only one in the top 10 I had never heard of before.

</comment><comment><USER7> For those who watched the London Olympics, this was the figure portrayed by Kenneth Branaugh in the beginning when the Olympic rings were "forged."

</comment><comment><USER8> I first heard about him from the mini bio in _Railroad Tycoon II_ of all things. Very interesting guy.

<comment><USER9> That was my thought as well. Railroad Tycoon was an interesting way to learn about that particular slice of early industrial history.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Now there was an engineer.

The musical version.[1]

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21QqXumEWFU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21QqXumEWFU)

<comment><USER11> I love such songs. Thanks for linking!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I hadn't heard of him before I came across him in a novel ([http://www.amazon.com/Strange-Affair-Spring-Swinburne- Advent...](http://www.amazon.com/Strange-Affair-Spring-Swinburne- Adventure/dp/1616142405)), and after that I had to read up on him. Quite a remarkable fellow.

</comment><comment><USER13> Darn, too bad I already named my kids.

<comment><USER14> My father wanted to name me Isambard, but was overruled by my mother.

<comment><USER15> So, what's your middle name?

<comment><USER14> Dad missed out there too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I first heard about him from Jeremy Clarkson [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwHnVH9jWmU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwHnVH9jWmU)

(punchy or not, clarkson makes great documentaries)

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm of Bristolian origin, and here's the local hero.</comment>


Ask HN: Where can I find objective news? - <AUTHOR>

I am looking for an online on on-TV source to get world, US, and economic news which is as unbiased as possible.
Obviously I acknowledge the impossibility of being totally "unbiased".
Nevertheless, there surely must exist a service or website which strives to present information as objectively and factually as possible, right?
Perhaps I'm looking for a digital Walter Cronkite? <comment><USER2> The best approximation of unbiased news you can get is to get news from multiple sources, understand as best as you can the biases that influence them, and do some of your own digging on items of interest.

</comment><comment><USER3> From you. You need to make your news objective by staying out of filter bubbles and referencing multiple sources.</comment>


Put a billion dollars on red - <AUTHOR> https://justinjackson.ca/is-the-money-still-bored/ <comment><USER2> > my guess is that in the next 5 years, the money is going to have to go from > bored to smart.

I think we're going to start seeing this when the law changes about crowd- investing. Sure, Tumblr could've done a kickstarter, but even better if all the users could own a little bit of the company.</comment>


Web scraping at scale – a conversation with Pablo Hoffman from ScrapingHub - <AUTHOR> https://talkpython.fm/episodes/show/50/web-scraping-at-scale-with-scrapy-and-scrapinghub <comment><USER2> Hey folks, I'm the one interviewed, happy to answer any follow up question here.</comment>


How This Teenager Turned a $500 Ad into $7M Overnight - <AUTHOR> http://www.inc.com/heather-wilde/how-this-teenager-turned-a-500-ad-into-7-million-overnight.html <comment><USER2> Any recommendation based on "went viral" is almost entirely useless. You might as well recommend buying lottery tickets.</comment>


A polyglot's guide to multiple dispatch – part 2 - <AUTHOR> http://eli.thegreenplace.net/2016/a-polyglots-guide-to-multiple-dispatch-part-2/ <comment><USER2> It a bit funny that the article doesn't mention Julia, which has native multimethods with all kinds of bells and whistles. It could be a nice addition to a "polyglot" flavored discussion. There is also Clojure, although its mechanism for multiple dispatch is a bit overpowered (you dispatch on values returned from a function of the arguments).

<comment><USER3> Part 3 will talk about Common Lisp / CLOS which had multiple dispatch 20 years before Julia was conceived :-)

Part 4 will talk about Clojure.

I just couldn't put it all in one piece - even broken to chunks it's of formidable length

<comment><USER4> Common Lisp has certainly had multiple dispatch for a long time. One important distinction, however, is that in CL generic functions are opt-in rather than the default. This means that most operations are not generic, limiting the extent to which you can extend things – basically only when some library author decided that you should be allowed to. Dylan and Julia both have functions which are generic by default, meaning that almost all functions can be extended.

Another distinction is that while Common Lisp and Julia both have parametric types, in CL you cannot use multiple dispatch on parametric types. Since parametric types are a very useful for writing generic, reusable libraries, not being able to dispatch on them is a significant limitation.

There's also the issue of performance. In Julia even something as basic as mixed-type addition – e.g. `1 + 2.5` – is defined in terms of layers of generic functions, but the compiler is clever enough to boil it down to a couple of machine instructions. This allows multiple dispatch to be used everywhere, which is really transformative. I'm not aware of any CL implementation which can eliminate the abstraction overhead of multimethods so completely.

It seems a bit remiss to have a series on multiple dispatch and never mention the two languages – Dylan and Julia – that take the paradigm the furthest and most seriously.

<comment><USER5> > Dylan and Julia both have functions which are generic by default

And Perl 6.

> in CL you cannot use multiple dispatch on parametric types.

You can in Perl 6.

> In Julia even something as basic as mixed-type addition – e.g. `1 + 2.5` – > is defined in terms of layers of generic functions, but the compiler is > clever enough to boil it down to a couple of machine instructions. This > allows multiple dispatch to be used everywhere, which is really > transformative.

MD has been used everywhere in Perl 6.

Perl 6 has maturity issues, including performance. But I see these as temporary issues.

> It seems a bit remiss to have a series on multiple dispatch and never > mention the two languages – Dylan and Julia – that take the paradigm the > furthest and most seriously.

Are you omitting Perl 6 because you don't think it's ready for prime time or you don't know enough about it's MD features?

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

I note that the OP series is about "runtime subtype-based polymorphism". I'm surprised at the exclusion of compile-time MD in a series which purports to be a general guide.

<comment><USER4> > Are you omitting Perl 6 because you don't think it's ready for prime time or > you don't know enough about it's MD features?

Both. Are basic operations like `+` generic in Perl 6?

<comment><USER5> > Are basic operations like `+` generic in Perl 6?

Yes.

<comment><USER4> Well, that's cool. Maybe Perl 6 will be the next good example of a multiple dispatch language.

<comment><USER5> I think I misunderstood your comment about CL vs Julia/Dylan in regard to generic "by default".

In Perl 6 this function definition implies a generic function:

        multi concatenate (\foo, \bar) { foo ~ bar }

This function definition does not:

        sub concatenate (\foo, \bar) { foo ~ bar }

If one views the latter as the "default" (because it's two characters shorter and might be learned first) then Perl 6 has the same weakness, or at least the same default, as CL, compared to Julia and Dylan.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ooh Python! Check out [https://github.com/mrocklin/multipledispatch](https://github.com/mrocklin/multipledispatch) which is a little more fleshed out than Guido's implementation. From the author of toolz and dask so you know it's good ;)

I also find that multiple dispatch is something that's occasionally handy, but single dispatch is truly everywhere. I think if you broke down multipledispatch uses in languages which embrace it (e.g. CLOS), the mix is like 95% single, 5% >single. For single dispatch in python, check out [https://docs.python.org/3/library/functools.html#functools.s...](https://docs.python.org/3/library/functools.html#functools.singledispatch) which was added in to the Python 3.4 stdlib. The alternative is the OOP subclassing style, which works but IMHO isn't very readable.

<comment><USER5> MD in Perl 6 is beyond "occasionally handy". A glance at the Perl 6 setting modules[1] revealed something like a 50/50 break down of SD vs MD.

Operators in Perl 6 are all MD, so that's likely a significant factor.

Additionally it is well designed. While the functionality starting point was CLOS, the UX has the benefit of hindsight and a decade of non-stop language evolution.

[1] [https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/tree/nom/src/core](https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/tree/nom/src/core)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Although a bit less interesting than part 1 IMO, I think it's still a really good read, especially the point:

        However, as we've seen here there are several variations
        on the multiple dispatch scheme, and each requires
        slightly different implementation considerations.

This is interesting, and probably pretty important, especially if you're considering using Multiple Dispatch (MD) in a code base yourself. One of the advantages of CLOS-style MD is that it is built in, and usually covers your MD needs for 99%+ of cases (from what I've seen, at least). Looking forward to part 3 next week Eli!

</comment><comment><USER4> part 1: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11526923](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11526923)

</comment><comment><USER8> Is this an example of what Mr. Bendersky is talking about? I believe so:

[https://github.com/perl6/book/blob/master/src/multi- dispatch...](https://github.com/perl6/book/blob/master/src/multi-dispatch.pod)

<comment><USER9> No. That is overloading with single dispatch. You need multiple arguments for multiple dispatch (they can be implicit, as with the 'this' argument in C++, but they rarely, if ever, are because making one argument implicit makes it look as if the situation is asymmetric in the arguments, and that is exactly something multiple dispatch is not)

Edit: oops. I didn't notice that the discussion went beyond the _to-json_ example, which definitely is _not_ multiple dispatch. The discussion starting at the header _Multiple arguments_ is about multiple dispatch.

<comment><USER10> Perl 6 dispatches on multiple arguments based on runtime types, so it's full multiple dispatch.

<comment><USER5> I thought that, while Perl 6 _can_ dispatch based on runtime types, it does candidate resolution at compile-time for functions (and thus operators) and private methods. It only adds in run-time overhead for these cases if the code uses a run-time type construct. Am I wrong?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Beware Bitdefender MIMT SSL Traffic - <AUTHOR> can anyone using Bitdefender Total Plus can confirm this?
The CA
Subject      : C=US, O=Bitdefender, OU=IDS, CN=Bitdefender Personal CA.Net-Defender Issuer       : C=US, O=Bitdefender, OU=IDS, CN=Bitdefender Personal CA.Net-Defender Thumbprint   : 647AEEAD9C828817D6CA53AD4A9028777DF52B09 FriendlyName : NotBefore    : 1/1/2010 12:00:00 AM NotAfter     : 10/20/2025 1:58:43 PM Extensions   : {System.Security.Cryptography.Oid, System.Security.Cryptography.Oid} <comment><USER2> This is apparently called "Scan SSL" by BitDefender. Their recommendation, once you find out about it, is to turn it off. [http://www.bitdefender.com/support/what-to-do-when- security-...](http://www.bitdefender.com/support/what-to-do-when-security- certificates-cannot-be-verified-installed-1090.html)

This (mis/)feature has been disclosed at least since 2013 [http://web.archive.org/web/20130115023957/http://www.bitdefe...](http://web.archive.org/web/20130115023957/http://www.bitdefender.com/support/what- to-do-when-security-certificates-cannot-be-verified-installed-1090.html)</comment>


Debunking a viral blog post on the nuke threat - <AUTHOR> http://www.salon.com/news/japan_earthquake/index.html?story=/politics/war_room/2011/03/15/josef_oehmen_nuclear_not_worried_viral <comment><USER2> Thanks so much for posting this. After HN users upvoted the original (and obviously discredited) post into the stratosphere, it is very sad to see posts like this one being ignored. In frustration, I posted this yesterday: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2325730> .</comment>


The next operating system: building an OS for hundreds, thousands of cores - <AUTHOR> http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/multicore-series-2-0224.html

<comment><USER2> Color me skeptical. The project will fail, of course, because it is too ambitious. There are too many required new developments for it all to come together: new chip, new OS, new forms of scheduling, a lot more bookkeeping, not to mention new programming paradigms and compiler technology. I would not be surprised that bookkeeping and bandwidth would eat up 90% of the processing cycles. (Obviously, I'm pulling this out of my nether end.)

It feels to me that is the next iteration of refinements of technology that is 40 - 50 years old. Caches are what, from 1970? Interconnect issues date from the same time. I think machine cycles are in abundance, the scarce resource is interconnections for data flow. So one of the first things you want to do is organize your data flow so that processing is local. Think simulations like vision processing, weather prediction, rendering, where a processor can work locally and pass on a reduced amount information to its neighbors. The interesting problems arise when the results have to be delivered non-locally. If you store them in main memory for the recipient to pick them up, you run into bandwidth problems.

So what I see as needed is gazillions of low level worker bees with modest bandwidth requirements that have semi-permanent connections to the consumers of their output. Think the human brain, Google search, image rendering.

Apologies for the rambling, lack of citations, etc. etc, but I am interested in HNer's views on these issues.

<comment><USER3> I think you're seeing this project too much from the perspective of whether it will succeed/fail in the marketplace. That is not the point of research. This should be viewed as an exploratory search for new paradigms in multicore computing. Some components might work out to something usable, most won't.

<comment><USER2> I agree with you completely. It is worth doing for what we learn, but what I was trying to say is that the real breakthroughs are going to come from other directions. The people who will get rich are probably the generation after that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think there's some confusion about this project, since the article doesn't go into to much detail about what it actually is, apart from some high-level technical highlights. My understanding (which is potentially outdated) is that Angstrom is a collaboration effort between different groups who are trying to combine their separate research into a larger project.

For the criticism that the project will "fail", I think there's some merit. Will this produce the next computation system that the world uses? Probably not. Will this push the boundaries of engineering and improve on the state of the art? Almost certainly. And due to its scale, and the fact that Angstrom was created by combining multiple separate projects, there's also room for individual projects or ideas to succeed even if others don't.

My background is that I worked on the FOS project, which is the part that is most related to the title of this post. If you were looking for more technical meat, I encourage you to check out the project page: <http://groups.csail.mit.edu/carbon/?page_id=39>

</comment><comment><USER5> Since starting to learn Erlang, I've been wondering if there's been any effort to build an operating system on top of the Erlang VM to exploit its concurrency... seems like it might be a good fit for this project.

<comment><USER4> The problem is that parallelism, and performance at this level in general, is not the kind of problem that you can solve by adding additional layers of abstraction. I can only speak to FOS, and not the other projects, but the idea behind it is to optimize the stack all the way down. My guess is that if you tried to run the Erlang VM on a 1000-core cpu, it would run into Linux scalability issues, regardless of how parallel Erlang is. Instead, we need to think about the base primitives of how we interact with the hardware, and potentially redesign them in a way that let us fully utilize the hardware.

<comment><USER6> [http://groups.google.com/group/erlang- programming/msg/75cbea...](http://groups.google.com/group/erlang- programming/msg/75cbeab74644dc0a)

[http://www.tilera.com/about_tilera/press-releases/linux- appl...](http://www.tilera.com/about_tilera/press-releases/linux-applications- are-scaling-better-ever)

( June 2009, Erlang (BEAM) on Tilera 64-core )

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Too much overview, not enough meat. Are there any whitepapers available for the Angstrom Project? The publication page of their website just says "coming soon."

<http://projects.csail.mit.edu/angstrom/Publications.html>

</comment><comment><USER8> As long as they don't write the thing in C ...

<comment><USER9> What would you write it in?

<comment><USER8> The problem with C is that it's not memory safe. Therefore you need hardware hacks (MMU) to separate processes. If you use a memory safe language you lose the ability to do pointer arithmetic (and the speed hacks that come with it), but you don't need to remap the page table every time you switch between processes. This makes threads and processes pretty much the same thing. Code injection is impossible in a memory-safe language, which helps with security (I'm talking about buffer overflows here, not SQL injecion, XSS etc).

Using a higher-level language can also help with many other things, for example integrated garbage collection, built-in serialization and process migration, intelligent message passing (pass objects around rather than bytes), etc.

A good example of an implementation of these ideas is Singularity (<http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/singularity/>), which is written in a superset of C#.

<comment><USER10> _Therefore you need hardware hacks (MMU) to separate processes_

I cannot apprehend the confusion of ideas that would lead you to believe this is caused by C. It's assembly, not C, that runs on your machine, and assembly is not memory safe. Microsoft's Singularity runs managed code, so there's a software layer providing memory protection.

An operating system is not defined by its preferred programming language.

<comment><USER8> "I cannot apprehend the confusion of ideas that would lead you to believe this is caused by C. It's assembly, not C, that runs on your machine, and assembly is not memory safe"

There is no confusion of ideas, but I like the Babbage reference :)

In Singularity the code is compiled first to CIL, then to x86, x64, or ARM by an AOT (ahead-of-time) compiler. Now here's the thing: the OS loader does not load Assembly code, it loads CIL code, which it then compiles further down to Assembly. Since CIL is verifiably memory safe (like Java bytecode), and assuming the AOT compiler is not buggy, the OS is memory safe. Hence no need for MMU/MPU to do memory protection.

So even though you're right that Assembly is not memory safe, the final compiler stage (in this case CIL can be seen as an intermediary language) is implemented in the OS (the loader), and the OS will reject any non-memory safe code. No code that can write outside array boundaries, violates type safety, and attempts pointer arithmetic will be allowed to execute.

So no, Singularity does not provide a software layer for memory protection, it's purely an (intermediary) language feature.

<comment><USER11> The software layer for memory protection here is the AOT compiler. As you alluded to yourself, if Mark Dowd finds one of the bugs in your AOT compiler, then you are toast.

The nice thing is that these protections can be applied ahead-of-time rather than at runtime, as the MMU does.

It has been shown (see Native Client) that even a slightly restricted subset of x86 assembler can be made verifiably-safe. In principle, you could do the same thing with C - in fact, you likely wouldn't even have to change the language definition, since the egregious abuses in C mostly result in "undefined behaviour", which allows the implementation to detect and trap them rather than hose the machine. (It is a curious fact that C itself isn't inherently "memory unsafe" - merely almost every implementation of C ever written is).

<comment><USER8> People have attempted to make C memory safe (i.e. bitc, cyclone), so you could write an OS in that, I guess. My original point however was that C itself is not, and that supporting C means supporting non-memory safe drivers, services, and programs.

If you can come up with a program that verifies whether a C program is memory safe or not (without constraining the language spec), well, hats off to you sir, I think I know a couple of security experts who might want to have a word with you :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Azul's systems seem to be doing fine with hundreds of cores, and I'm pretty sure it's just modified linux.

</comment><comment><USER13> _an OS for hundreds, thousands of cores_

That's exactly what Microsoft Azure claims to be in their marketing literature.

<comment><USER4> This is an unfortunate case of people adopting technical terms for PR purposes. When we (FOS) say "OS", we mean that when you write a program for FOS, you think about it as if you are writing it for a single computer. It doesn't matter if that computer has multiple processors in it, or even if those processors are in different boxes and are only connected by ethernet.

<comment><USER13> By reporting what Microsoft is saying in their marketing literature, I'm neither advocating what they say is true, nor am I saying the work referred to in the article is a copy of their efforts. Evidently, you jumped to some conclusion like this. I am merely commenting on the behavior of their marketers. As a long time observer of the tech industry, I always find the behavior of marketers interesting, though not always in pleasant ways.

(I think it's wise to pay attention to how such forces change language.)</comment></comment></comment>


Hundreds of Spotify credentials appear online – accounts hacked, emails changed - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/25/hundreds-of-spotify-credentials-appear-online-users-report-accounts-hacked-emails-changed/ <comment><USER2> First of all, this is extremely commonplace. You can go on Pastebin and find dumps like these easily at any given time.

Secondly, the way these leaks work is that attackers take a large list of leaked credentials from a generic dump from a hacked database. They then try each set of credentials against popular services like Netflix and Spotify. Usually, lots of attackers get the same accounts because they all use similar dumps and therefore get similar results. A lot of these lists of valid credentials end up on sites like Pastebin, and many are sold online as well. You can get cheap Netflix accounts for $1 or less easily on many hacker forums. Often, these accounts come with a warranty because many people who have obtained similar lists of accounts will change the credentials so they can keep individual accounts for themselves.

In conclusion, use unique passwords for every site, otherwise this could easily happen to you.

</comment><comment><USER3> > given that they are specific to Spotify, rather than a set of generic > credentials that just happen to work on Spotify.

Actually, it looks like output from a popular tool (Sentry MBA) specifically designed to test if "generic credentials" from other password leaks "just happen to work" on popular services like Spotify.

</comment><comment><USER4> Just had an idea: Publish claims of a massive leak of banking credentials and then provide a tool to check whether your account was hacked. Allow (suggest) readers to search affected accounts by searching their account name, password, or other information.

Toss me a bitcoin when you use it.

<comment><USER2> Can't tell if you are suggesting this satirically but [https://haveibeenpwned.com](https://haveibeenpwned.com) is a thing.</comment></comment>


New Samsung SSDs for servers double in speed and can 'never die' - <AUTHOR> https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/new-samsung-ssds-for-servers-double-in-speed-and-can-never-die <comment><USER2> So SSDs are getting the "bad block map" that HDs have? Honestly, I thought they already had that...</comment>


Discovering Sketch - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/design-ux/25545f6cb161

<comment><USER2> This looks _very_ much like Fireworks. The author mentioned that he won't discuss it since Adobe discontinued it, but the resemblance is uncanny. I never understood why Fireworks wasn't more widely used/praised; I found it to be absolutely perfect for designing web graphics.

<comment><USER3> I love Sketch, but I don't like Fireworks. I find Fireworks awkward and clunky.

<comment><USER4> yeah, the UI is not sexy. But the feature set that is being boasted in the article is THE SAME from firewoks around 1999.

It was the only place i could get some vector work and still be pixel perfect.

Last used photoshop in 2006 and it wasn't even close.

...sadly gimp tries too hard to be a photoshop clone even copying the lame export dialog instead of save as...

<comment><USER5> Sketch has much better support for layer and stroke styles than Fireworks did, particularly older versions of Fireworks. For example, you can apply multiple gradient layer styles to both the stroke and the fill of a rectangle in Sketch, with alpha. In Fireworks, you often had to make two or three rectangles to get the appropriate effect of a photorealistic button.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice post - Sketch is revolutionising UI design workflow. Really well thought out product — we've standardised on it for all our products at work, and I haven't even installed and Adobe products on my newest laptop, 8 months in.

I'll admit that I was initially frustrated at the constant crashes etc, but there's a very responsive team, constant releases, and I haven't had a problem in months.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've been using Inkscape on my Mac for quite a while, but the team doesn't seem to be willing or able to support the platform well. The download page still has 0.48.2 which is pretty ancient; I'm not too optimistic 0.49 will see good mac support either.

I like inkscape, and if I migrate to Windows / Linux I can continue to use my assets there.

But this app looks very nice; I wonder if anyone can briefly mention the areas where one app is stronger than the other.

<comment><USER8> Have you tried using the Fink installation? It seems to have a more recent build, 0.48.4-5.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> My design workflow has moved from Illustrator for design structure and Photoshop for high-fidelity design, to strictly Sketch from conception all the way to exporting assets, with the rare Photoshop for some assets (like to-the- pixel ones).

It's totally changed my design process, and it's made me wonder why there wasn't a really good app that was built from the ground up for UI design before—and why we have been 'hacking' Illustrator and Photoshop to do UI design. Vector objects on a pixel grid, @2x exporting, non-destructive properties on items. Still buggy as hell, but despite having to restart it multiple times a day, it's still worth it.

</comment><comment><USER10> It would have been great to point out at the beginning of the article that this sketch software is for Mac only. Serious web development is not only done in Mac, did you know?

<comment><USER11> How times change

<comment><USER12> I remember in 2001 a friend of mine brought his black Apple laptop at work because he wanted to work with it to do a web application in Java. Everyone laughed at him. Now if I see someone with a thick Dell or IBM laptop it's the exception.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Sketch is absolutely amazing. I moved from Illustrator to Sketch last year, as I was getting frustrated with cruft Adobe were adding, and things they weren't fixing. It took a little longer for me to get used to Sketch at around 3 months of casual use, but I find it much faster, simpler, and easier to use than Illustrator.

<comment><USER14> With Adobe now forcing a subscription to their Creative Cloud service for future updates, I'd expect programs like Sketch to become more and more attractive as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Sketch is on it's way to being what Illustrator should be. It's still a little buggy at times, for instance, you can't export things at high resolution and the workaround, resizing a group of objects, rarely works correctly.

<comment><USER16> Yep, there are lots of bugs, but they release fixes for them and its always been getting better.

I've completely ditched the entire Adobe Suite for Sketch and Pixelmator.

<comment><USER17> I went for Pixelmator instead of Sketch, but I'm with you with ditching Adobes suit. Not necessary these days for interface design.

Pixelmator lacks the full layer styles, but it's slowly getting some of them.

Though I can appreciate what Sketch is trying to do, I feel like Pixelmators performance and layout is better suited for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Sketch is better than anything else on the market simply because it's actually made for user interface design. Everything else that's existed for years was made for image processing.

Get Sketch. Seriously.

<comment><USER19> If with "everything" you mean Photohop, then you're right. For everyone else there was Fireworks which initially was a promising screen design tool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Sketch literally gave me the push I needed to go from a non-designing developer to a halfway decent designer. It's really that good.

The major negative right now is performance. I used Sketch to design a full iOS app with 7 or 8 screens on a fast mbp and things were seriously crawling. I had to break up separate screens into separate sketch files and even then it was laggy.

Sketch team, your product is amazing, but performance is a big issue. It should imho be your top priority.

<comment><USER5> Agreed. Seriously picking up UI design in a post-Sketch world is basically the same as picking up web programming in a post-J2EE world. You dodged a bullet.

(I am pretty proficient in Photoshop, but never had to design a photorealistic mobile UI in it. What a nightmare.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is there any comparable program to use for windows or linux users?

<comment> chestnut-tree For Windows, take at look at Xara Photo and Graphic Designer. It's principally a vector Illustration program but includes some photo manipulation capabilities too (cropping images, adjusting brightness and contrast etc).

The interface is far superior to Illustrator and it's extremely fast in performance.

I have used this program for many years and recommend you give it a try to see if you like it.

There is a free trial version of the software on the Xara website

[http://www.xara.com/uk/photo-graphic-designer/](http://www.xara.com/uk/photo- graphic-designer/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I discovered Sketch about a year ago, and I should say it keeps getting better comparing to Illustrator. There are still some operations I can't do in Sketch, but it is the fastest and the lightest app to design UI such as [http://dribbble.com/shots/1111784-iOS-7-icons- redesign/attac...](http://dribbble.com/shots/1111784-iOS-7-icons- redesign/attachments/140689). It took me few hours to redesign a whole iOS7 icon set in Sketch. Last months I use Illustrator to convert files to SVG to work on them in Sketch. The sad thing is that it works on Mac only and is not adopted by the designer community yet.

</comment><comment><USER19> Sketch looks promising. But I would expect a couple of more features from an efficient screen design tool:

Reusable elements (FW symbols), multiple pages, something like Fireworks' "Master page", (basic) bitmap editing.

<comment><USER23> is there no form of bitmap editing at all?

<comment><USER24> Very basic so far, deleting pixels by double-clicking the bitmap image and use the marquee tool + backspace.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Sometimes things don't vertically center properly when I use the "Align Vertically" button. I haven't seen anyone else complain about this, so am I doing something wrong?

Here's an example: [http://imgur.com/kgbMwJ2](http://imgur.com/kgbMwJ2)

Ninja edit: After looking at the screenshot I posted above again, it looks like the entire textbox is being vertically centered (the blue outline is centered), but not the text inside of it. Why does it a function this way and can I change it so that it vertically centers the text? Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER25> I love Sketch, it's a great Fireworks replacement. A few tips:

⌘ + cursor right or down: nudge width/height

in preferences you can set it to zoom into selection, which I prefer

when elements are grouped, hold ⌘ to select elements in the group directly

right click a layer and select mask - this will mask any layers above it. If it's in a group it will only affect the elements in the group

</comment><comment><USER26> I've been using Sketch exclusively for the better part of a year, and it's not just a better tool for designing web and mobile UIs, it's a real pleasure to use.

There are still quite a few bugs, but even with those, the Sketch workflow trumps Photoshop, Illustrator and Fireworks. Version 3 should also address most of these, and is supposed to include support for symbols as well.

</comment><comment><USER27> I still use DrawIt from BohemianCoding (the same company / people) and it's really good for smallish UI work. The CoreImage based text rendering sucks and it leaks memory like anything but it's a nice piece of software. I hope sketch has all of what they created in DrawIt and more. Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER28> Usable smart guides as a feature have been in the shitty freeware vector tools I used 7 years ago. I don't quite understand why the author is wetting his pants because of them, but maybe the Apple ecosystem has been so far behind that this is somehow new and cool.

</comment><comment><USER29> I tried it a few weeks ago and after working for about 2 hours on something I realized that Sketch doesn't have any support for color management (switching color profiles etc.). This is a showstopper for me.

<comment><USER11> Does it need them… as a screen design tool?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Seems to me that this app could implement HTML exporting better than Photoshop does, since it can export CSS already.

Is this implemented or on the roadmap?

<comment><USER3> I hope not. Sketch should stay lean and be easy to make plugins for. Also, typically auto generated HTML sucks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> A UI designer I know has been using Sketch for months now, and he's very happy about it.

</comment><comment><USER32> Err... Not available for Windows -> FAIL. You should reflect this in subj to avoid peoples' frustration.</comment>


Ask HN: Has anyone been hired by the big 4 companies from outside the US? - <AUTHOR> I wanted to know if anyone has been hired by the big 4 from outside the US. How did it happen? what was your experience with the interview and most importantly what role? I want to know if this is possible or I should just forget the idea.
A little about me:
I am a front-end dev, with strong front-end skills currently taking courses in Data structures and Algorithms and bought the book Cracking The Coding Interview, been doing one question every day since. I have worked for a number of European startups as a remote front-end dev, but I've always dreamt of going to the valley. I live in Africa. <comment><USER2> I have interviewed with two _" Big Corp"_ companies and during the interviews I asked about the possibility of an immigration sponsorship considering that I live in a South American country, and they have always assured that once the interviews are done and the company extends a job offer they can help during the immigration and relocation, not only to North America but also Germany, Scotland, Japan, Canada or any city where they have an office.

I wouldn't worry about that, just be sure to study a lot to improve your profile as much as you can, every skill counts considering the fact that they receive tons of resumes all the time, you have to differentiate yourself from the others.

PS: Since you mentioned being a front-end developer, I want to give you some advice with respect of your current learning strategy. A couple of days ago I interviewed for a position in the web development team of one of the _" Big 4"_, my background is mostly on back-end development. After reading several articles from people who interviewed with the same company I realized that most of the questions they were asked were related to algorithms and data structures, so I decided to refresh those skills, bought the latest edition of the CtCI book. The day of the interview I was surprised to find that all the questions were regarding the DOM, basic CSS concepts, and new features introduced in the latest specification of JavaScript. During the ~40 mins of the interview I was never asked one single algorithm question.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting, thanks for sharing this. Actually, I've been reading up a lot on front-end technologies and I'm pretty vast with them. I made it a habit to read one JS book every two weeks, and later moved to CSS. I only recently added data structure and algorithm to the list because of similar reasons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Probably at least 20-30% of big 4 employees are or were on H1Bs. Getting a job is very simple, but not very easy:

1\. Get a good resume. They're not very picky here, if you have a couple of years experience programming professionally, it should be enough.

2\. Apply online.

3\. Get an interview.

4\. Pass the interview (hard).

5\. If you get an offer, you'll need to get an H1B visa to go to the US. It's ok, if you're unlucky they'll probably offer you a position in a different country, and you can transfer to the US after 1-2 years.

<comment><USER4> For the last step, if what you truly want is just coming to the US, please don't do it for your own sanity. Waiting 1-2 years working outside the US and then come to the US on H1B/L1 is something potentially quite stressful (not to mention the follow up is anything but pleasant).

Of course, if you just want to work for a big 4 co. anywhere on the world, then it's different.

<comment><USER3> I have several friends who are doing the Microsoft Vancouver -> Seattle visa dance, and they're ok with it. I also have a friend who got a green card while working at Microsoft.

I think you don't realise how much better the US is for a software engineer than any other country in the world.

<comment><USER4> Actually I do, I left the US just a couple of months ago after living there for 6 years. And my advice is the same: know your odds, play your lottery, but don't bet/delay your life on that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can't help with your question, but I was wondering how did you get in touch with the European startups you worked for?

<comment><AUTHOR> I checked out remote job boards, found a couple of listings and applied. Did the interview (most of them took up to a month) and got the offer. You have to know that I have about 4 years experience coding, started while in college and have worked for a firm in my country that contracts out software devs to work as remote devs for startups abroad. So I have a lot of experience working remotely.

<comment><USER5> Thank you.

I actually have 6 years of experience working remotely, but I guess I've been doing something wrong recently when applying.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh well, one thing I try to do is study a lot. I realised even if you could program well, it pays to know the buzzwords and how things under the hood really work, and that's what normally asked during interviews. I made it a goal to read a lot of books on Javascript, HTML5 and CSS3. I recently started learning data structures and algorithms, turns out this knowledge is useful not just as a programmer(sometimes, depending on what you do) it helps you when interviewing at big companies, especially if you want to get into one of the big 4 like I do :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What makes a great entrepreneur? - <AUTHOR> http://www.quicksprout.com/2009/09/03/ask-the-readers-what-makes-a-great-entrepreneur/

<comment><USER2> Isn't this an example of a halo effect? Because they made successful companies, we attribute to them traits that support the conclusion.

</comment><comment><USER3> I feel like writing today!

It seems that there is actually no way to get around the halo effect or winner's bias etc. We all look at the winners, we say "how have they _done_ it" and we think "well we can do that too". The problem is in the details. They _have done_ it, we have yet to do it. What worked in the past may not be true in the future. Most of us just slap the LUCK sticker on their series of events and call it a day.

I actually fell in love with "Good To Great" (Jim Collins) because the book tried to make a science out of success. However, reading the Amazon reviews enlightened me to the very real statistics flaw in the entire book's analysis. Something about how there will always be top ranked companies by the simple fact that they are ranked. You have 10 companies. They will fall in rank. Does that really mean anything?

So I think there is indeed a problem in soliciting "how to succeed advice" on the general plane. What works for one person may not work for you, simple as that.

However, rather than get depressed and attribute our happenings to the stars, I think its smarter to believe in and invest in _principles_.

The richest Man in Babylon is a book of principles. Think and Grow Rich is a book of principles.

I am not saying we should read these books as the gospel, rather acknowledge that there is a real difference between the principle of "saving 10% of your income" and "use google adwords to grow your fb app 1million percent"

So, here's a change: some advice on how to be successful from a guy that is not yet successful:

1\. Be a scientist.

Science does not lie.

Sure, things change, sure people get lucky, but all you have to do is _test things_ and keep on _testing_ things. And learn from your tests.

All this advice is just icing on the cake of science.

Be disciplined, be agile, be scrappy, network, manage risk, evolve, blah - what is the actual _method_ you'd use to acquire and optimize these things...?

TEST IT.

Being a part of HN over the last year has been very beneficial for me. If any group of people can understand and embrace the idea of being a scientist relative to EVERYTHING we do, it's HN.

</comment><comment><USER4> Almost all of these examples go back to one major attribute: persistence.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've written extensively about this topic on my blog under title "What Makes Them Entrepreneurial?" - [http://adityakothadiya.com/category/what-makes-them- entrepre...](http://adityakothadiya.com/category/what-makes-them- entrepreneurial/)

Sorry for the shameless plug, but thought this is a relevant discussion.

I've almost covered 35 different traits of entrepreneurial people. I hope you will find them useful.

</comment><comment><USER6> Drive. Persistence. Focus.

Knowing what needs to be done now and what can be put off (or never done).

Analyzing and knowing what the user wants - and then building something to meet that want.

Knowing one's own limits; if you can develop the best product ever but have no idea how to market it - then finding someone (and trusting them) who can do it for you.

Finding solutions where other people only see problems.

</comment><comment><USER7> Same thing that makes a great lottery winner - luck.

<comment><USER8> Successful entrepreneurs believe that they make their own luck

<comment><USER9> Not true. Wenceslao Casares a very successful entrepreneur, says luck is essential in being successful. He is also known for having said that whenever he interviews people for a job, he asks them if they think they've been lucky in their lives, if they say no, he doesn't hire them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> loving the examples

</comment><comment><USER11> Large profits, duh.</comment>


Mirah on Android: Implementing a Lazy-load Image Gallery - <AUTHOR> http://threebrothers.org/brendan/blog/implementing-a-lazy-loading-android-gallery-with-mirah/

<comment><USER2> This is really, really interesting to me. I like the syntax so much better than standard Java syntax, and it apparently compiles down to JVM bytecode just as efficient as Java would produce. Hard to go wrong with that combination!</comment>


Why Is Less Than 99.999% Uptime Acceptable? - <AUTHOR> http://ask.slashdot.org/askslashdot/08/03/02/1847213.shtml

<comment><USER2> The original article contains a few more arguments: [http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/02/28/communications- wh...](http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/02/28/communications-why-do-we- accept-less-99-999)

The comments at slashdot point out the underlying economic trade-off: cost of reliability vs. cost of downtime.</comment>


How to create a digg/reddit popularity algorithm - <AUTHOR> http://www.igglo.co.uk/4/writing-a-digg-style-popularity-algorithm/ <comment><USER2> We have had some late night white boarding sessions formulating both incredibly simplistic and overly complex algorithms. The middle of those two is the hard thing to get to.

The most recent white board session ended in me deciding I need to write a letter to my 9th grade math teacher. I think i gave her crap about how algorithm homework was a big waste of time, but she made me do it anyway.

The idea of considering replies is interesting. On digg however, I find the comments tend to be 98% worthless. I miss /. comments.

Probably the best/easiest thing to do is plan to be adaptive to how the community uses your site. Your algorithm will likely need to change over time.

</comment><comment><USER3> I would also include the number of replies, although I must admit that I've never implemented such a system myself. Typically, the best articles have the most replies, and quite often, the most interesting content is the replies themselves.

<comment><AUTHOR> True. I never knew the way these news sites actually worked. There was this post on reddit that made me search out this article. He was an upset new user who kept submitting stories and they immediately were knocked down.

<http://reddit.com/info/1dk74/comments>

My concern is when Karma has an impact in your ability to contribute.

<comment><USER4> Gut feeling says it does have an impact. I recall reading that reddit takes into account how long a user has been registered.

The karma system is pretty interesting... there are definitely many variables to play with in calculating "karma," but the end goal should be largely the same -- measure a user's contribution to a community and also how trustworthy the user.

While I am not familiar with current systems, it does look possible to accumulate the same number of karma points by say, submitting a few very popular articles, or by submitting many less-popular articles. So are these two users treated equally when their scores are the same? If yes, then the system is ignoring some valuable information! If no, then karma becomes a rather meaningless measure.</comment></comment></comment>


If this is not the correct way to use a 64-Core Processor, I don't know what is - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/hbx72t/if_this_is_not_the_correct_way_to_use_a_64core/ <comment><USER2> \- What is your level of multi processing programming skills? \- Unparalleled!

</comment><comment><USER3> The "Bad Apple!!" music video, with its monochrome silhouette aesthetic, has been the subject of many other creative rendering hack demonstrations using esoteric means.

Laser art: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2P8Hg6LsPn0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2P8Hg6LsPn0)

Oscilloscope: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSkUX1g4oJM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSkUX1g4oJM)

Microsoft Excel: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7lUngqOn2w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7lUngqOn2w)

Stop motion animation via carved apples (literally): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSz00lTjeyU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSz00lTjeyU)

<comment><USER4> On an eink display: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KS8M_MV3Xhw&app=desktop](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KS8M_MV3Xhw&app=desktop)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> You could get this effect naturally for a Mandelbrot zoom calculation where each thread iterates the orbit until it escapes, then pauses for a second and repeats

</comment><comment><USER6> I did something like this once upon a time, drawing letters using the CPU graph: [https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/a/33226](https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/a/33226)

Of course, using a super multi core processor as a _display_ is significantly more sophisticated and just _funnier_. Props to the developer for their creativity!

</comment><comment><USER7> This is an amusing piece of performance art, but, clearly, a better use of this display would be to play Pong. ;)

<comment><USER8> If you're going for a videogame then it could still be Touhou :)

<comment><USER9> I don't think you have enough pixels to work with.

<comment><USER10> The video shows 14x9 pixels, with 2 left over. There are 128 threads.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Bad Apple!! is such a nicely animated video.

</comment><comment><USER12> Add more cores and you'd increase the resolution that you can play your video at.

</comment><comment><USER13> Okay, who has another idea to burn an equivalent amount of energy :) ?

<comment><USER14> When power-saving states for CPUs were still new and Windows support was still lacking, there was a 3rd party tool that would decrease the idle temperature of my Athlon XP by creating artificial load with a low process priority. It would basically replace the System Idle Process and put the CPU in some new P-state.

Is there some standard way in *nix/Windows to create artificial CPU load while actually not increasing the energy consumption at all?

<comment><USER15> I remember using Rain too.

<comment><USER14> Thanks for the name! Apparently, there were a bunch of tools with the same purpose: [http://coolingsoftware.homepage.t-online.de/index.htm](http://coolingsoftware.homepage.t-online.de/index.htm)

<comment><USER16> Oooh i used cpuidle! That brought me memories.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wish reddit didn't intentionally ruin their mobile version to force people onto the app. Video constantly buffers and only plays or pauses when it wants to even though my internet is fine.

<comment><USER18> i.reddit.com still works. I'm sure there is some way to auto convert links to that format.

<comment><USER17> Videos will only play in desktop or the new mobile

<comment><USER19> RIF is Fun app (Android) works much, much better than the new mobile, and is somewhat less creepy than the official Reddit app.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to get our app to market? - <AUTHOR>

We've built a real-time CRM system for our company's internal use, product-ized it, and have several markets to sell it to.  We don't want to be in the software biz, but we can't seem to find a partner to sell and support it.  How do you find an entity with LAMP know-how and marketing muscle to get a hot product into a market you've already got access to? <comment><USER2> What's a real-time CRM, exactly? Our startup has some synergies with CRM, so perhaps there's some opportunity for us to work together. Email me at ryan at mightybrand dot com.</comment>


Elon Musk Has Delivery Issues - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/elon-musk-has-delivery-issues <comment><USER2> There is undue criticism and there is undue praise. Somewhere in the middle is a degree of balance and this author should try and find that.

He is right to some extent. People will step in and defend Musk with the obvious counterpoints so I won't bother. SpaceX is his most ambitious company, which is saying something. They have issues. They are transparent, and they handle them the right way, but they exist. Tesla does too, but missing projections at that level is a much different story.

The article basically compared Tesla missing financial guidance to SpaceX. Thats like saying that when Tesla misses a production goal, a cargo ship sinks with all their cars on it for the quarter.

Space X successfully recaptured that rocket, thats amazing. Missing a benchmark can be 1/12 of the companies revenue (more since they were grounded). Tesla is actually executing well and they have less consolidation risk

<comment><USER3> > Tesla is actually executing well and they have less consolidation risk

I agree. Tesla is executing very well in fact, just not nearly at the rate Musk has claimed they will.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Musk is trying to undercut delays by aiming for July production while only promising December deliveries, and by proactively cutting delayed suppliers.

They claim that delays are also less likely to a design tailored for ease of manufacturing.

You'd think these plans would be at least worth mentioning. In the end the essay comes across to me as just another "ok he can do X, but can he do Y?" sliding of goalposts.

<comment><USER3> fair enough, but Elon Musk does have a credibility problem when it comes to what he says his companies are going to do and when they are going to do it by. To be flip, I can't remember a production target that he has hit (and without redefining what the word "produces" means).</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Anyone designs financial engineering tools as a hobby? - <AUTHOR> I enjoy doing this stuff but it's tough to find others with similar interests since I moved to the boondocks many years ago although it's super easy to find people looking for financial engineering jobs. <comment><USER2> A bit different from what most financial engineers are interested in, but I'm in the process of developing a linear programming model for the US tax code so you can do long term tax optimizations based on your financial profile and goals. It was a lot harder than I anticipated but got a PoC working recently. Ugly landing page at [https://smarterpath.co](https://smarterpath.co)

<comment><USER3> Signed up! Your site doesn't look that bad - I actually like the layout. If you don't mind sharing, what did you use to create the landing page?

<comment><USER2> Yup good ol' wordpress with the Contact Form 7 addon for the early access sign-up. Would like to do a redesign at some point to make the value prop more obvious, but getting a public beta out has been the priority recently.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> We created a tool used in niche fixed income asset-backed securities (which are heavily engineered). We crawl EDGAR for ABS-EE filings which are posted in XML, clean and standardize them, drop them into a data base and then allow users to create instant stratifications of the portfolio (rather than having to download the 80k row loan file and run pivot tables).

This allows someone buying the B tranche of FORDO 2017-B to see how many people in Florida are 30-60 days delinquent, what model car they drive, the LTV, etc.

100% free: [https://finsight.com/product/us/abs/ee](https://finsight.com/product/us/abs/ee)

Note: this is not exactly a "hobby" but we offer all of these services 100% for free without restriction so thought I would share regardless.

<comment><USER5> which tool are you using to parse the xml? a long time ago i used arelle but it didn't work really well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm the odd one out. I've been writing automated trading software since 2007 as a hobby. However, I'm not looking for a job doing that. 1) It's profitable enough to do it on my own. 2) I have a gig right now doing time series analysis for a company that isn't financial, which imho is just as fun (if not more), but has a bit more potential to benefit the world. 3) When I get a job doing a hobby it has the potential to burn that hobby out. It's not about making money, but enjoying life, and being a bit competitive is fun.

<comment><USER7> PhD in signal processing, amateur algo trader & economist and software engineer by day (not in the finance field unfortunately). I want to live your life!

<comment><USER6> Then go do it!

For me, I like doing the impossible. If no one has done it before, I don't need to get bogged down by books or stackoverflow. (And, you don't need a degree.) I have to figure out new ways to solve a problem. That's what makes programming fun and that is what makes this sort of stuff fun.

Like just the other day I figured out how to compress arm movement down to, so far, 4 variables (all floats atm), for every reasonably large change of movement. (Though, for small tremors while walking and other kinds of movements I'll need to output some more data.) My goal is to increase the accuracy of the signal beyond the initial noisy accelerometer data. The pain is going to be proving it through a high speed video camera or something else (Got any ideas? lol) because I'm designing this to be accurate to real life arm movement, not accurate to initial data. (If you're curious, an ellipsoid, plus an axis for like looking at a watch, and possibly a magic number or a large radius for a straight line.)

Does HN do PMs? If you want to hang out we probably have a lot in common. Though, I'm untrained and just kind of unusual.

Oh btw, I'm not sure if it is obvious, and not like I've read a book on the subject, but as far as economics goes I would think meta macro economics would help day trading. But what do I know? I'm just a rabbit.

<comment><USER8> Could you list your email address in the "About" section of your profile? I'd like to contact you. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I made some resource management tools that helped me in MMORPG's (ex EVE, WOW) and they had potential for real-life usage. There was also a episode in my life where i tried to predict random using simple neural nets in roulette, lottery and some stock markets. Fun thing to do but time-consuming.

<comment><USER10> Both of these sound incredible cool, is there a Git repo to check out or something?

<comment><USER9> Actually You made me think about going back to it. Thanks!

<comment><USER10> Well, you motivated me to actually get started with something like this - doesn't mean I can actually beat my procrastination, but if, you definetely played a big part in it. So thank you!

And if you go back and modernise it, I'm still interested in Github links :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> At one on the previous jobs I wrote a tool which takes a list of bonds/equities trades and ties buys and sells in order to count PnL. The idea was any sell should be connected with one or several buys/repos. Like, I sell 100 bonds , so I should take them from 5 buys in correct order (FIFO).

It seems easy to do this but there are tricky operations like REPOs when you have to 'borrow' papers from a reversal REPO to perform a sell or REPO operation. Then you should close this hole with a next papers arrival. I wanted to attach some web interface to visualize these crazy buys-sells-repos chains but at some moment I left that company.

I want to rewrite that tool as a side project but not sure if it would be helpful for anybody.

<comment><USER12> I also had a previous job doing exactly that... but it was an billing / accounting system at a print company.

Certain large customers (a bank, an airline) had contracts where they would order large batches of printed forms, luggage tickets, sick bags, etc, at some negotiated quantity / price (taking into account the size of the print run, our capacity at the time, etc.). We (the print company) would then print it and warehouse it, and ship it directly to their individual locations in smaller batches as they ordered it.

The billing was done on some cost + shipping basis, so at the end of the month you'd have to look at everything that was shipped, work out which original batches going into inventory that came from on a FIFO basis, and then use that as a basis for the cost plus billing.

It was a horrible messy old codebase, and it was sometimes difficult to explain the results.

Anyway, I just thought I'd share this as an example use-case for a sufficiently generic / flexible / reliable implementation of your potential side project.

<comment><USER11> It is the interesting idea to make this tool as generic as possible! Like a framework for matching different types of events based on some rules + a visual explanation for any chain of matched events. Perhaps I should think about this idea. Thanks!

<comment><USER12> Yeah, and the visual explaination part is actually just as important as getting the right results. For any complex system with financial impact there will always be people claiming that the output is wrong, so you need to be able to quickly and easily justify everything.

<comment><USER11> Yes, I agree. Sometimes there were so tricky cases that it was impossible to explain why that tool matched those deals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> kiril-me I am developing Crypto analytic tool. It's like the fund, analyze your portfolio, show potential gaps and currency there you can invest. So you need to make an investment decision, the platform only shows information and analytics.

</comment><comment><USER13> I am not sure if it matches what you are looking for, but backtrader [1] is a nice tool for trading strategies, worth a try.

[1] [https://www.backtrader.com/](https://www.backtrader.com/)

</comment><comment><USER14> It's more a portfolio tracker than a financial engineering tool but I have been thinking about adding some correlation / variance measurement to optimize portfolios, see the blog:

[https://www.cryptoport.net](https://www.cryptoport.net)

</comment><comment><USER15> I've been writing algorithmic trading software and back testers as a hobby for a couple years now, and what surprises me most is how it is possible to have decent profits without mad financial skills. The trick is good quality data and a couple spare hours a week! A rooky mistake I have made is losing too many days trying to hack myself a good source of data, so I can only recommend paying a few bucks for a reliable one. You can definitely have a good time (while making money) with basic swing trading algorithms and a bunch of historical end of day data like [https://www.gourgane.io](https://www.gourgane.io)

<comment><USER16> I've had a similar problem to find proper data for cryptocurrencies while I was writing my trading tool. It was quite some work to set up a proper infrastructure to get the data. Though eventually I turned that into a full service. You can check it out on [https://coinograph.io](https://coinograph.io)

<comment><USER15> Oh nice! I will give this a try

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I don't generally, but I've been hacking away at the infrastructure for high frequency trading crypto currencies for a while.

I originally just wanted to do arbitrage trading, so I built a simple tool to find opportunities using pre-existing services.

But as I slowly learned more about it, I had to expand it into monitoring the exchanges in real time with orderbooks and past trades to get around annoying false positives in my original system.

It's pretty interesting, but I haven't had the time to work on it recently. Plus the increased efficiency of the markets has made arbitrage trading a lot less desirable in 2018.

I would be happy to discuss it with like minded people.

<comment><USER18> Count me in, would love to get on a discord server or IRC channel.

edit: sorry, should point out I've been doing the same for a while and have hit some challenges I'd love to discuss.

<comment><USER19> Me too! I would like to chat

<comment><USER18> Reach out to me. Contact info in profile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I just made a visualization tool recently.

scatterstocks.com

<comment><USER21> Loading failed for the <script> with source "[https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=UA-119337219-1"](https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=UA-119337219-1"). index.html:6 ReferenceError: can't access lexical declaration `NEWS_ITEM_TEMPLATE' before initialization init-templates.js:15:32

Firefox on windows 7 IE does not work either

<comment><USER20> Clearly, I didn't test on Firefox :( thanks for bringing that to my attention.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm currently developing a python wrapper for the IEX API:

[https://github.com/danielecook/iex-api- python](https://github.com/danielecook/iex-api-python)

(work in progress)

I plan to integrate it into a larger project.

I'm coming from a biology/bioinformatics background - so I don't know too much about finance but this is my effort to learn about it.

</comment><comment><USER23> [https://coinpush.app](https://coinpush.app)

[https://github.com/DutchKevv/TradeJS](https://github.com/DutchKevv/TradeJS)

Under heavy development and simplified. Removed the trading bots part and focusing on realising 'social overview + price alarms' for now.

Only check on chrome svp

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm working on a (h)ledger replacement and have already a working version. Hope to release it in a few weeks.

<comment><USER25> Interesting, doing the same in OCaml right now

</comment></comment><comment> bra-ket Quantlib api as a hobby: [https://quantra.io](https://quantra.io)

Backtester by author of quantstart: [https://github.com/mhallsmoore/qstrader](https://github.com/mhallsmoore/qstrader)

<comment><USER26> Looks good. If you don't mind me asking, what did you use to build you web application (at [https://terminal.quantra.io/](https://terminal.quantra.io/))?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I guess it's a hobby right now but I hope it's not eventually.

Can i just say that I wish there was some kind of repository of information for drawing charts. And there are so many different kinds of financial charts that's it's a bit intimidating.

</comment><comment><USER28> As someone completely oblivious to this world, is it possible to get an outline of what strategies are being refined by the tools mentioned in this thread?

</comment><comment> Jian-Yang This sounds interesting, do you have any examples of your projects?

</comment><comment><USER29> I develop some algo-arb tools for trading

</comment><comment><USER30> No, but I appreciate people who do.

</comment><comment><USER31> I used to.</comment>


Rules That Warren Buffett Lives By - <AUTHOR> http://finance.yahoo.com/banking-budgeting/article/108903/rules-that-warren-buffett-lives-by

<comment><USER2> _"Rule No. 1: Never Lose Money. Rule No. 2: Never Forget Rule No. 1."_

I wish he'd state this more clearly. It's not "Don't invest in anything that fluctuates in price," but "Only invest when you know you're buying something at less than 100 cents on the dollar, and you also know it's going to be worth more than that dollar in the future."

<comment><USER3> What makes or breaks on invester is being willing to sell a stock that went up 30% a year for the last 5 years, and being willing to buy a stock that lost 50% of it's value last year.

<comment><USER2> That may have been true in the past, but there's a lot of money invested in data mining past returns to find patterns like that. If stock prices are predictive, who's going to make the better prediction--you, or a team of MIT CS and Physics PhDs with an unlimited budget and years of experience?

<comment><USER4> The problem with the data mining approach is that it works spectacularly until it doesn't, and when it fails, it also fails spectacularly.

<comment><USER2> That's true of any strategy in any situation in which your strategy affects the behavior of whatever system you're interacting with.

i.e. value investing works, but if everyone does it then people will undervalue intangibles. If everyone chooses to be honest, the first fibber will rule the world. If everyone is violent, the first non-violent _group_ will waste fewer resources. Etc.

<comment><USER3> There is actually a lot of research into this area (game theory). And for a surprising number of situations the best and most stable strategy is somewhat random. EX: Throwing a fastball vs curve ball where the odds of hitting each depend on which was expected.

While it's clearly not a stable strategy if everyone did the same thing it's actually fairly hard to consistently beat a basket of randomly chosen stocks. Which is why I think rating stocks based on their relative value for your goals and then randomly picking a basket of them is probably the best and most stable strategy. (Excluding inside information.)

<comment><USER2> As long as you're smart enough to abstract out of your valuation system, you can survive. Buffett made his early money buying at a discount to assets: the company had a $5 million in the bank and their total market value was $3 million. Those opportunities mostly disappeared in the 1960's--conglomerates bought them out. But Buffett's meta-strategy of buying things at a discount still worked; it just worked better applied to businesses with a sustainable competitive advantage.

But if you're not exceptionally good at what you do, yes, some randomness would help. Though wouldn't the closest analogy to the fastball / curveball thing be to randomly alternate among asset-management paradigms, instead? Have some of your portfolio passively indexed, some invested for catastrophe, some in pie-in-the-sky growth, some in inflation-resistant consumer goods, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> ugh, this again. Warren Buffet is an outlier. Never model your behavior on outliers. If you want to know how to get rich look at the average rich person (small business owner).

<comment><USER6> While I agree with the advice about outliers, I'm not sure I'd describe the average small business owner as rich...

Is your personal experience simply different to mine?

<comment><USER5> goes the other way. most rich people are small business owners even if most small business owners aren't rich.

also depends on what level of liquid vs total net worth we're talking.</comment></comment></comment>


Yahoo Acquires Actionality : Mobile Advertising Company - <AUTHOR> http://www.searchenginejournal.com/yahoo-acquires-actionality-mobile-advertising-company/5525/ <comment><USER2> Does anyone know the price?</comment>