Request for Startup: Codecademy for Stocks - <AUTHOR> http://www.vuru.co/blog/2012/02/06/request-for-startup-codecademy-for-stocks/ <comment><USER2> This reads like a request for a startup to teach people how to pick stocks. I am not sure this would be particularly useful, and I fear it could be dangerous. There is plenty of evidence that the average investor, instead of obsessing over the return on investment, would be better off putting their money in index funds and focusing on things that are in their control, like their savings rate, (tax-efficient) asset allocation, or minimizing investment fees. There is no shortage of accessible material on the subject.

Also:

"The old model of financial advisors, mutual fund managers and brokers is dying fast."

Is there any evidence to support this? I.e., are mutual fund managers making less money? And if formally trained investment professionals, as an aggregate, are not good at managing money, is it reasonable to think that individuals will do better with a code academy for stocks?

<comment><USER3> Do you have any evidence to supper your assertion that it is dangerous to train people in investing? I know its popular for people to throw up their hands and give up and claim that index funds are the way to go. I also know that many people who have done so, would prefer to think that they are doing the smart thing, and so they claim that this is the smart thing, despite the fact that it is really easy for anyone who thinks about it for a few minutes to beat those returns. Take an index- say the Dow Jones[1]. The companies in the index don't change very often at all. It would be very easy to buy a few shares of each company and simply hold them. You have the commission fees in the first year, but with discount brokers, that's pretty small, and then there would be no more fees. Meanwhile the people who gave up and just handed their money over to be "managed" in an index mutual fund are paying %1-%2 a year in fees. Spending an hour making a spreadsheet and you can keep your replica of the Dow Jones balanced by adjusting where you put new money in.

Why pay %2 of your investment, every year, to managers for something that would take you an hour to do once?

Over 10 years that's %20 of your investment, not even counting the effects of compounding.

Over 40 years that's %80 of your investment, not counting the effects of compounding which will be much more significant.

[1] IF you don't have the funds to buy the whole index, you can buy just the heaviest weighted ones. Further, when companies do leave or get added to the index, you can trade this when its announced, rather than have to wait like the index fund does, which means you get a better return because the index has to buy them after they've appreciated due to being announced as being added to the index.

<comment><USER2> I never said that it is dangerous to teach people about investing. I am saying that investing is about a lot more than stock picking. Since passive investors beat active investors after costs [1], I think it is better for the average investor to focus on things that they can control to a large extent, like savings rate, fees, tax efficient asset allocation, diversification, investment horizon, etc.

Also, I do not advocate buying just any index fund, just those that are a good proxy for the market as a whole. The S&P 500 is much more representative of the US stock market than the Dow 30, and the Wilshire 5000 even more so. It is may be easy to replicate the Dow 30, it is much harder to replicate the S&P 500. And this assumes that one is only invested in US stocks, and is not diversified across other asset classes, such as international equities or emerging markets.

There are plenty of index funds that charge much less 1% in fees. Many charge 0.25% or lower. The following page has a spreadsheet that calculates the impact of fees on mutual fund investors:

[http://wheredoesallmymoneygo.com/detailed-breakdown-of- the-r...](http://wheredoesallmymoneygo.com/detailed-breakdown-of-the-real- impact-of-mers-on-an-investment-portfolio-over-time/)

(Canadian, but the idea is the same for any stock market)

Using the spreadsheet, let's assume an initial contribution of 100K, an annual contribution of 5K, a 5% growth rate, no trailer commission and no advisor payout.

After 25 years, an investor who put the money in a fund charging an MER of 2% would have lost 33.72% to compounding costs versus a 0% fee portfolio.

An investor who put the money in a fund charging an MER of 0.25% would have lost _5.07%_ to compounding costs versus a 0% portfolio. I don't think that's a bad deal for the average investor at all.

[1] Cf.: The Quest for Alpha, by Larry Swedroe; The Power of Passive Investing, by Richard Ferri

<comment><USER3> Actually, you did. The RFS was to teach people about investing, not stock picking. You've got an axe to grind and you're lying about what other people have said in order to grind your axe. The idea that passive investors beat active investors is nonsense. You cannot prove it, nor does your reference even address the issue. It is a claim wholly unsupported, and if you will think about it objectively, you'll find you cannot prove it without getting all investor to give up their entire trading history, and then evaluating them over the course of that history. Nobody has access to that information so they publish spurious nonsense in order to talk people into investing in their funds.

Your statements about the fees charged by mutual funds is inaccurate. %2 is appropriate, and in some cases it is %2.50 or %2.75. Which, according to your own link, means that over some period of time %90 of the money goes into fees.

You have heard a little bit about investing and think you know what you're talking about, but you're repeating the propaganda of people who were trying to sell you something.

I suggest that if you will go out and educate yourself, you will find that these people were trying to rip you off. In fact, your statements in this thread are proof positive that the RFS was right-- so many people are completely ignorant of investing-- even what investing "is". (you keep calling it "stock picking" as if that phrase was relevant.)

But I know you won't, I know you're emotionally invested in this ideology, because it likely dovetails with your political ideology (liberal, right? think people should be forced to invest in social security, which will never return even %1 of the money they give up, because its "dangerous" to let them invest that money themselves, right? If you're not a liberal, at least this shows the motivation for people spreading the idea that stocks are complicated and that teaching people about investment is dangerous.)

But, at the end of the day, having so many people completely giving up on investing simply means there's less competition for the outstanding deals out there, and the market is even more inefficient, which leaves me with more opportunities to profit.

So, for that, I thank you.

I've learned that, you cannot talk to people about investing-- for many of them it is like a religion. So you are free to have the last word. If people are foolish enough to believe you, then its their responsibility, not mine. I've proven you wrong, that you won't accept it is on you, not me. So, go to town.

<comment><USER2> I did not lie, you seem to be the one with an axe to grind and you haven't proven anything.

What I wrote about fees charged by _index_ funds is perfectly accurate. For instance:

\- the Vanguard Total stock Market Index Fund charges 0.07%;

\- the Vanguard Total World Stock Index Fund charges 0.45%;

\- the Schwab S&P 500 Index Fund charges 0.09%;

\- the Fidelity Spartan 500 Index Fund charges 0.10%.

Of course most mutual funds charge much more, _precisely because they are actively managed_. Index funds _are_ passively managed, involve very little trading, and as a result charge much less.

I never, ever advocated that people give up on investing, and I think you're the one in need of an education.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The real problem is that the biggest lessons you have to learn (e.g. self control, ability to tolerate a small draw-down, discipline to act on winners and losers if your theory doesnt pan out) require a real-money test. You can learn modeling etc from a book, but the experiential knowledge requires you to play with cash.

<comment><USER2> This is a great point. Most people I know largely overestimate their risk tolerance, and go from aggressive to conservative at the first hint of a market crash.

<comment><USER3> Just because you are unable to be disciplined, does not mean you should project it onto everyone else. You may have jumped in and done stupid things- that's not uncommon- but deciding to give up afterwards, and then claiming that nobody else is capable of being rational-- is an error. You went so far as to say the idea of teaching people about investing was "dangerous".

That's quite a bit of overcompensation on your part!

<comment><USER4> The 'danger' of teaching people to invest is that the people who generally teach have some sort of ulterior motive that isn't about people's economic welfare, and that generally skews the discussion.

For example, sell-side analysts push trading ideas that the banks don't want to hold, research analysts push ideas that favor their respective funds and clients, and then you have blubbering idiots like Dick Bove (he is particularly memorable for calling citi undervalued when it was $300 [30 before the reverse split] and for calling BAC overvalued when it dipped below 5 recently) showing their faces on CNBC. Stewart had a brilliant segment (~ 9 minutes) walking through the disservice that CNBC performs, wish I had a link.

Most people's exposure to investing involves contributing to a 401K, and lots of people lost boatloads of money when the markets crashed. In fact, lots of people are still suffering losses.

ETA: so I'm 24, and my financial advisor has been pushing for me to put all of my money in the stock market. If I did that, I would have missed out on the great bond rally last year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Its usually a bad idea for individuals to hold specific stocks.

Its never a bad idea for individuals to learn some basic code.

<comment><USER6> While I don't agree with your first point, it's certainly up do personal opinion. However, it's never a bad idea for people to understand how to invest and manage their money. From my understanding, that was what the author was talking about.

<comment><USER4> managing money != trading stocks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I sort of tried doing this for the PennApps Hackathon in January: <http://unstock.me/>

It turned into a silly little linear game. We realized that intelligent investment in the stock market requires setting up advanced models that require math beyond what most people can manage. If you're not working with such a model, you're probably losing money to the people who have one. There are some general concepts to learn about the stock market that don't have to do with math, but they're mostly pretty obvious and hard to make into a fun, game-like format.

<comment><USER7> Also, it's not just the math -- it's the data. Successful investors spend large amounts of time every day poring over financial reports to find companies whose stated value is different than their actual value. That's not something really teachable; you just have to want to sit there for hours doing it.

<comment><USER3> Its really easy. You find companies with trustworthy management and sound businesses, look at their growth, find a reasonable discounted expected future growth, then calculate the net present value of discounted future growth. If the stock is trading for that amount, then you pass. If the stock is trading at a discount to that, then you buy.

Those who think the market is efficient are saying that there are no stocks like that... but if you look around, its not hard to find them.

When I was a buy and hold investor, I made %50-%100 returns each year spending about 5 hours a year in investigation (and most of that was just because I liked checking out possibilities. Most of it was fun. Once I'd found the keepers, it took me an hour each year - about 15 minutes each quarter- to update the numbers in the spreadsheet.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Like <http://volcube.com> ?

<comment><USER3> That's interesting. It seems very focused on specifically training traders, and in options, for market makers, and the like. Something like that targeted at a broad audience might be really useful.

<comment><USER8> I can make an intro to one of the founders for a chat...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Except Codeacademy you are learning a skill which can be used to create.

Stock picking is essentially staking your money on something which you have no control over. I'm not against people learning about it. But yeah tons of better things to learn about, don't think it would take off. Seems like something to cover this would need to be more like an ongoing game and a lot less like code academy lessons.

Why do stock analysts, market experts etc even exist when they can hardly predicate things better than the average investor? Because there is a demand for them.

</comment><comment><USER10> There is a generally-accepted way to write software that works, even if there are alternative approaches.

With finance, there is not one generally proven way to make money. Once you get your feet wet in a financial market, there are no rules on how to make money or value stocks and other investment instruments. Experienced finance types lose money all the time. Someone that only completed an interactive learning game is bound to lose their savings.

</comment><comment><USER3> The difficulty in this is that there's a much more cohesive perception of how you program javascript than there is on how you invest in stocks. In fact, for much of javascript there's little debate, yet for stocks there are large numbers of people who have been sold falsehoods and have become emotionally invested in believing them. Even the people who haven't fallen for snake oil are rather diverse in their investing strategies. For instance, my preferred vehicle, stock option spreads, are considered "too risky" by many people, and for others they just have trouble wrapping their heads around them.

So, I think the first thing that you'd need to do for such a startup, is to limit your audience to people who are independant thinkers, people who want to invest themselves and want to take control over their financial lives and haven't given up on the idea that they can be successful doing so.

This may have been obvious when you were writing the RFS, but I'm not sure what percentage of the market that is.. and if you want to address the whole market, you've got a lot of myths to deal with. (like the idea that the market is efficient, or that individuals can't pick stocks, or that mutual fund managers are better at managing money.)

Or, put another way, maybe the first module in such a system would be disproving these myths.

</comment><comment><USER3> Think Or Swim, is an options trading platform, that has some very good software for analysis. You can get a free paper trading account from them. Probably some of the best training you can get would be to take that paper trading account, reduce the amount of cash (it starts with $1M) to the amount you really have to invest, and then start investing.

It lets you go back in time and buy or sell on specific dates in the past. This allows you to back test mechanical strategies. But for working with real time events, paper trading lets you make your trades with no knowledge of the future, see how you do as time goes on and have no money at risk.

Always a good idea if you're going to do anything with increased leverage (like shorting or options).</comment>


Don't use that open API — it could be a trap - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/mobile/10-google-chromebook-tips-tricks-and-tweaks/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OmMalik+%28GigaOM%3A+Tech%29

<comment><USER2> The link is incorrect. Here is the correct link:

[http://gigaom.com/2012/07/09/dont-use-that-open-api-it- could...](http://gigaom.com/2012/07/09/dont-use-that-open-api-it-could-be-a- trap/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> sorry guys, the link posted is for _10 Google Chromebook tips, tricks and tweaks_

</comment><comment><USER3> Wrong link.</comment>


What subterfuges did your startup have to resort to in the early days? - <AUTHOR>

What was your secret sauce to get those early users to sign up? Fake accounts talking to each other? Deep discounts for those early adopters? Giveaways? <comment><USER2> A friend of mine adopted a persona at gaming conferences to promote his blog, including a big metal robot head.

At a satellite ISP I worked at a long time ago, we used the transponder during offpeak hours to stream porn and bootlegs for extra cash.

Other stuff... well if you care to poke around, a lot of sites have poor data security. Further deponent sayeth not.

</comment><comment><USER3> I heard though word of mouth (i.e., kind of unreliable, so I won't mention any names) that a certain company I had respected "almost died a few months after launching, because craigslist figured out how to stop us from spamming them for a couple of weeks, until we got around it".</comment>


Electricity Grid in U.S. Penetrated by Spies  - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123914805204099085.html

<comment><USER2> A long, rambling cold-war type of article with all the boogeymen you'd expect: Russia, China, _and other nations_.

And of course, it's a bit strange that critical resources are accessible from outside their internal networks, but I suppose there is a set of rather compelling reasons for it.

I'd be surprised if all the nations with sufficient resources didn't have similar access networks setup. That includes the US. It's a distracting waste of time and resources for all involved - billions of dollars and plenty of scare.</comment>


Ex-Googlers Raise Funding To Stop Google, Facebook & More - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/22/disconnect-me-raise/ <comment><USER2> This seems similar to Ghostery [1] for Firefox. It currently blocks 852 3rd part elements (371 advertising and 207 analytics) and 434 specific cookies. It also allows you to delete flash and silverlight cookies on exit.

[1] <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ghostery/>

<comment><USER3> I use Ghostery as well for both FF and chromium. For instance, it blocked 14 tracking scripts from that techcrunch article. I love it.

Edit: Also see <http://www.ghostery.com/>

<comment><USER2> I always use the FF site so I was completely unaware they have an extension for Opera and IE as well as FF and Chrome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> So I have now added Ghostry and disconnect.me to my single must have add-on (Adblock). I'd still prefer one add-on over three, but going to give this a try (disconnect.me has no options whatsoever and I can't tell what's it doing in the background).

<comment><USER5> See my other reply to you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I can't figure out what disconnect.me does in the background. I installed it and that's about it (doesn't show me any activity after a restart).

<comment><USER5> On Firefox? We've been working on more obvious UI for Firefox, which isn't in Disconnect yet but you can get in our newer add-ons (Facebook Disconnect, Google Disconnect, and Twitter Disconnect) now:

      https://disconnect.me/tools

<comment><USER4> Yes, I'm on Firefox. I have installed the all-inclusive add-on. I now see Disconnect drop down icon next to my address bar, but when I login to Faccebook, it doesn't show me anything that is blocked. When I login to Gmail, the dropdown doesn't even work (I keep on clicking and it doesn't drop).

<comment><USER5> When you're on first-party sites like Facebook and Google, the add-on isn't meant to block anything. The blocking kicks in when you're on third-party sites that otherwise send your browsing history to Facebook, Google, et al.

Give our new Firefox add-ons a try <[https://disconnect.me/tools>](https://disconnect.me/tools>); — I think they have our best extension UI, but I'd love to know what you think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What to do man, what to do? Bomz... Opah!

</comment><comment><USER7> Sometimes, I feel like these websites should probably just have a "do not track" setting. That should appease all these pitchforks. In the end, I'm pretty convinced that tracking is really to make your life better since Google offers to delete all your data if you wanted anyway.

Heck, now people are making a profit out of this whole misunderstood privacy fiasco.

<comment><USER5> Google stores your search history for 18 months (<http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/faq/>) and your browsing history indefinitely (using ad cookies).

They _do not_ offer to delete either (though they do give you some controls, which is way more than most other tracking services). Prove me wrong.

<comment><USER8> Google does allow you to delete some stored data. They don't offer easy options to delete everything (though they do give advice on how to remove information from third-party sites), but it's better than nothing.

<https://www.google.com/dashboard>

They also tell you what cannot be removed through the dashboard, and give a list of things that are not deletable (but also not tied to your account).

[https://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...](https://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=162743)

<comment><USER5> Again, Google doesn't let you delete your search or browsing history. I'd argue this is, by far, the most personal info they collect about you.

Google doesn't even mention either in the two links you gave.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google now shows "35 posts, 20 authors, last post Dec 3" for forum pages - <AUTHOR> http://poorbuthappy.com/ease/archives/2008/11/02/4369/google-now-tracks-comments-and-authors-on-forum-pages-and-shows-them-in-the-search-results So it's recognizing and specifically tracking forum pages (pages that have regular additions to it)? <comment><USER2> That's a few months old. I love it. It's really an excellent feature that humanizes forum pages, makes them more accessible to people. It works for a lot of things, too. It supports Drupal, which is always a surprise. So I wonder: is it custom for each application, or did they come up with a holy grail of forum analysis?</comment>


This German invention puts an actual mini farm at the end of your supermarket - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencealert.com/this-german-invention-puts-an-actual-mini-farm-at-the-end-of-your-supermarket-aisle?utm_content=buffer32d47&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer <comment><USER2> This stuff is amazing and I love the initiative - but can these farms produce the amount a store needs?

I always think about how cool it would be to have a salad restaurant where the walls were all vertical farming walls and all the seating had little vertical farms around them.

Much like when you go to five-guys you see bags of potatoes everywhere.

I figured the reason it didn't exist yet was the fact that vertical farms couldn't support a restaurant's needs.</comment>


"Invisible Electrostatic Wall" at 3M adhesive tape plant (1996) - <AUTHOR> http://amasci.com/weird/unusual/e-wall.html?utm=email <comment><USER2> Bill Beaty's site was and still is amazing. It sparked my interest (and lifelong hobby) in high voltage back in the late 90s. Some of his essays (and ascii) art explaining concepts like coherence ([http://amasci.com/miscon/coherenc.html](http://amasci.com/miscon/coherenc.html)) still stick with me today.

As for the electrostatic wall story... it's fun but I don't believe it.

<comment><USER3> I ate that site up when I was young. I was 12 in 1996, and by that time had already decided on a career in robotics. All the little tech projects there kept me engaged. I built a Tesla Coil after the site inspired me, and today I work in robotics in Silicon Valley.

I'm struck now with how much power one site has to engage and help so many people. I hope that I can share enough of my own goofy hobbies [1] to help a new generation learn what inspires them.

[1] [http://reboot.love](http://reboot.love)

<comment><USER4> I feel like the pre-monetization Internet had a lot more of these sites. Or at least they weren't drowned out by the noise of a-b test optimized attention grabbing time sinks as much.

<comment><USER5> I've often wondered what'd happen if one were to make a search engine, and site catalogue (similar to early yahoo) that'd only take sites that do not match easylist.

You'd have a set of sites without any tracking or ads, and you might have it much easier to find high-quality sites like these.

<comment><USER4> Sounds like a brilliant idea. I'd use it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Heh, I read this 20 years ago when I wanted to try to make as much tech from Star Trek a reality as possible. Being 10 years old the closest thing I could get my hands on was a megaroll of plastic wrap from Costco that I basically pulled around some rollers as fast as I could. Suffice it to say it didn't quite cut it.

I had also tried to make a dermal regenerator after reading an article in PopSci about infrared radiation speeding up ulcer healing in cancer patients. Didn't have a good way to test it but I liked to think it worked. :)

<comment><USER7> Infrared is the new health craze for the super-wealthy. Companies sell beds with IR lights that shine on you to "heal" you.

The funny thing is the beds glow red I guess the word literally meaning beyond red (i.e. can't see it) won't sell if there isn't any red to be see.

<comment><USER8> Don't know anything about IR beds, but near IR (shorter than 800nm) is just visible as a dull deep red color.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> We've called bullshit on this before, and little satisfactory response resulted. "But he's a professional, with published work!" is not sufficient; The effect claimed is extraordinarily unlike our understanding of electrostatics, and no proof has been furnished.

<comment><USER10> Without any validity claims there, we don't really seem to have that tremendous an understanding of these sorts of things. Isn't the exact mechanics of lightning formation still an unsolved problem? And then there's all sorts of other mysterious electrical phenomena like ball lightning

> It is well understood that during a thunderstorm there is charge separation > and aggregation in certain regions of the cloud; however the exact processes > by which this occurs are not fully understood [0]

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning#Necessary_conditions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning#Necessary_conditions)

<comment><USER11> But there is hope. The Langmuir guys seem to think it'll get there

[https://www.abqjournal.com/814666/lab-sparks-advances-in- lig...](https://www.abqjournal.com/814666/lab-sparks-advances-in-lightning- research.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As pointed out, this has been discussed before. The effect is explainable with electrostatics. As in "If you assume a net charge on a human of X and a equal polarity charge of Y being generated by the motion of the tape, a force F would be felt by a person approaching that went up with the inverse square of the distance." Simon Field has a great demo where he throws around pie plates using this effect.

The challenge arises with explaining how the charge is contained such that the opposing charge that is being attracted does not break down the insulator between it and this charge. One thought experiment that I heard at the Boston Science museum was to imagine you are inside the ball of a very large Van De Graff type generator. If you were charged to the same polarity of the outer sphere, you would be repelled by the sphere toward the center. The harder you tried to go to the edge, the more you would be repelled. And, assuming you were insulated from the sphere. By clothing or some other apparatus, there would be a point where the electrostatic repulsion would keep you from being able to touch the sphere and effectively discharge your charge into the sphere.

This only works as an explanation if the manufacturing facility was acting as the sphere, and on entering it you found your self inside that sphere _and_ with a net charge of the same polarity.

What is most remarkable about the story, and causes many (myself included) to doubt it, is that 3M is/was a company that was famous for its core competency of taking unexpected effects and turning them into products (the post-it note story is a great example of that). Because of that competence, it is challenging to imagine that they had accidentally created something, which if understood better could potentially be the foundation of a multi-billion dollar product industry (force fields are widely sought out by people wishing to exclude access). And yet they left it as a "wow, that's funny" sort of moment? A more expected outcome would be for 3M to build an identical plant to see if they could replicate the effect and if they did, begin to instrument and remove components until they understood (and probably patented) all of the ways the field could be generated. And then decided if it was possible to make as a product or not.

<comment><USER13> When you are in a sphere you feel zero net forces from the sphere.

Here is an example using gravity but electrostatic forces should operate the same way. [https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/Numbers/Math/Mathematical_...](https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/Numbers/Math/Mathematical_Thinking/grvtysp.htm)

You can only feel forces if it's some other shape.

<comment><USER12> Charge doesn't work the same way. All of the charge is on the surface of the sphere (that is how a Van deGraff generator works). Unlike gravity, like charged things inside the sphere are repulsed by the surface just as things outside the sphere are.

<comment><USER14> The shell theorem holds true for spherically symmetric distributions and inverse-square laws. The electrostatic force within a spherically-symmetric charged object is exactly 0.

(cf. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_theorem) for some proofs)

<comment><USER15> As you mention, this assumes a spherically symmetric distribution.

In the case of a charged conductive sphere, the charges are free to move. With no charge present other than that on the sphere they will arrange themselves spherically symmetrically.

But if there is other charge near the sphere (outside or in), shouldn't that cause some rearrangement of the charges on the sphere, breaking in most cases the spherical symmetry?

<comment><USER16> That's an interesting question! I think the effect would be the opposite of what ChuckMcM imagines: as a (say) positively charged particle inside a positively charged conductive sphere moves from the center toward one side of the sphere, it repels the charges on that side more than it does on the opposite side. It does seem like that would cause those charges to spread out slightly, making that part of the sphere negative relative to the other side, accelerating the particle in the direction it was already going, until it hits the sphere. The minimum energy is thus where all charges within the sphere are on its surface; none are inside. I believe this is consistent with observation.

<comment><USER12> It has been an interesting conversation so far. Since I have been going through Jackson's text it makes a useful problem to work. I'm working up the field equations for inside the sphere, inside a charged concave surface, and inside a concave depression in a sphere. I suspect that this thread will be dead before I'm done but the next time around I'll be able to post a link to a paper :-).

<comment><USER16> Coming up with a closed-form solution would be beyond my mathematical abilities at this point, having not done any calculus to speak of in 40 years, but I'll be interested to see if you can.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Optical physicists and chemists need a laser with a knob on it to tune the laser to an exact desired color. In the 70s and 80s, the preferred method was the use of liquid dyes as the laser medium, typically dissolved in alcohol. The dye was pumped at high speed through quartz cells, and was gotten to lase by striking it with a fixed wavelength green or ultraviolet laser. Now the best practice was to use Teflon tubing. It cleans up better, and that's important because when changing colors, the new dye's wavelength might be absorbed by the previous dye residue, if any. Man, the triboelectric shock you can get from high speed flow of alcohol through Teflon! The Livermore Lab was worried about this during the laser isotope separation program, as a fire hazard. The problem is solved by installing stainless steel ground wires in the Teflon tubes.

</comment><comment><USER18> They built a Van de Graaff generator[1] by accident.

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

<comment><USER19> A very big one at that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Interesting to see this on HN.

I've seen this link being passed around in the paranormal/conspiracy circles as a possible Earthly explanation for those UFOs the NYT reported a while back:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon- prog...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-program-ufo- harry-reid.html)

One theory is these "tic tacs" are yet another example of test aircraft being mistaken for extraterrestrial aircraft and this paper's findings were noted and expanded on, in secret, to create some novel form of propulsion by either the US or China.

There's precedent for human test craft being mistaken for "alien" technology. The best example being a rash of "triangle shaped UFOs" in the early/mid 80s was eventually revealed in 1988 to have been the F117.

</comment><comment><USER7> Electrostatic force is incredibly powerful. I read a great bit of info that said just two Coulombs concentrated in the equivalent area of two electrons repel with the force of one million tons.

All matter has a charge too so I could see with the right conditions a large electrostatic force being formidable.

</comment><comment><USER21> There are all kinds of crazy energies released by adhesive tape: [https://www.technologyreview.com/s/411085/x-rays-made- with-s...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/411085/x-rays-made-with-scotch- tape/)

</comment><comment><USER22> "didn't know whether to fix it or sell tickets." Pretty sure that any fan of Star Trek would pay a pretty penny to touch a real force field ;)

<comment><USER23> Only Star trek fans? I'd say anyone interested in science and then some.

<comment><USER24> Or like, a Navy contracted weapons developer...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Does anyone know how dangerous this actually is? Could an esd be big enough (basically lightning) to hurt or kill you?

<comment><USER26> > An Australian man built up a 40,000-volt charge of static electricity in his > clothes as he walked, leaving a trail of scorched carpet and molten plastic > and forcing firefighters to evacuate a building.

[https://forums.firehouse.com/forum/firefighting/firefighters...](https://forums.firehouse.com/forum/firefighting/firefighters- forum/59086-man-sets-fire-to-carpet-with-40-000-volt-static-charge-that-built- up-in-his-clothes)

<comment><USER27> 1\. In winter, take any decent house anywhere with a severe winter climate.

2\. Wait until it's -30F outside, open the doors to let that dry air in. Close the doors.

3\. Heat the interior to +70F to make --extremely-- dry air.

4\. Shuffle across the plastic carpet in leather-soled shoes.

5\. Do NOT touch the metal door knobs.

<comment><USER28> Without meaning to, and without any of that I still managed to destroy a set of dimmer switches with a static shock from my finger, in winter. Boy did I feel stupid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I would not play with this until I knew exactly why it was happening. You could easily be killed by an electrostatic phenomenon that is poorly understood. Remember in the old days when ball lightning would just straight up kill people by passing into them? Still does, but I think most people know better now than to touch such a ball.

<comment><USER30> When were these old days?

<comment><USER29> 1800s.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This has been discussed a while ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5387052](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5387052)

<comment><USER32> Even further ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3274335](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3274335)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Did people try to go through an imaginary plane and felt a force? Or did people try to go through an actual cling film?

>> When he attempted to walk through the corridor formed by the moving film, he was stopped about half way through by an "invisible wall."

A corridor formed by the moving film?

I have a hard time understanding the situation.

<comment><USER34> According to the next few sentences in the article:

> _The film was taken off the main roll at high speed, flowed upwards 20ft to > overhead rollers, passed horizontally 20ft and then downwards to the > slitting device, where it was spooled onto shorter rolls. The whole > operation formed a cubical shaped tent, with two walls and a ceiling > approximately 20ft square._

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Any videos of it?

<comment><USER36> August 1980, they coulda used a Betamax camera! Of course megavolt-scale voltages would tend to fry any device not protected by a screen cage.

"Why didn't they take pictures" is a minor question, compared to "WHY DIDN'T THEY THROW STUFF AT IT?!!" Did the invisible wall block flying objects? Or was it really just caused by shocks, by tazed human muscles locking up?

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Giving the amount x-rays released, surprised they don't have cancer!

</comment><comment><USER38> There's a lot we don't understand about electro statics.

<comment><USER39> So you're saying that Maxwell's equations are not enough?

<comment><USER40> Not really, especially for nonlinear systems. It's like how just knowing the rules of chess doesn't mean you're a good player.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Could this be used to trap a net neutral plasma?

</comment><comment><USER42> could this have application for VR?

<comment><USER19> Invisible walls? Yes, if it were controllable. The only problem I see would be the prohibitive costs.

<comment><USER43> And size, and noise, and power consumption

<comment><USER44> And some minor irradiation

<comment><USER45> And sudden electrocution. Seriously we've all been zapped after walking across the wrong type of carpet and touching something/someone, why does no one in these stories think "Oh I hope this doesn't have the potential (hehe) to suddenly discharge through me." They're all like - COOL!!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Dupe of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5387052](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5387052)

<comment><USER47> It's not a dupe if the last submission was five years ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Could we put this on the blockchain?

<comment><USER49> The real question is... Will there be an ICO??

<comment><USER48> WAL Coin is a token that represents fractional ownership of a static generated wall.</comment></comment></comment>


SF's appalling street life repels residents – now it's driven away a convention - <AUTHOR> https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/matier-ross/article/SF-s-appalling-street-life-repels-residents-13038748.php?t=0c15a3045e&f? <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17443550](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17443550)</comment>


What is Dart? - <AUTHOR> http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/03/what-is-dart.html <comment><USER2> A decent language that will never make it into explorer and probably not firefox.</comment>


Show HN: I created this: T-shirt design at just $99/month - <AUTHOR> I am a college lad trying out new things with my design works. WOuld you pay/subsrcibe for this? Samples are there. Thankyou! https://gunshirt.landen.co/ looking for positive feedbacks :) <comment><USER2> I would make one-off orders, even company orders, but not subscribe. But someone running a restaurant chain or similar (wwhere they provide shirts) I can see that this could make sense.</comment>


Update on HTML5 Video for Netflix - <AUTHOR> http://techblog.netflix.com/2017/03/update-on-html5-video-for-netflix.html <comment><USER2> FYI if you have HTTPS-Everywhere enabled the site won't load.

That said, there isn't a whole lot to this article. They added support for Firefox on Linux. They talk a bit about their work with MPEG-DASH, WebCrypto, MSE, and EME.

They don't talk about supporting 4k and HDR video on anything except Edge however, which is annoying old-media thinking. I really hate when companies say "more bits means more onerous DRM, we know you liked the old system, but we can make it look marginally better if you're willing to give up most of the advantages".

It's pure cash grab thinking. The sort of thing that made SVHS stillborn and has kept Blu-ray sales lukewarm.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've noticed before that running Netflix in a browser causes it to lose all bass. But if I run it through my WD-TV media player then the bass is there.

Is this still the case? Is this problem across all browsers?

<comment><USER4> Could you be more precise about the setup? I don't think this is a known issue, but someone might be able to replicate this if you gave details.

<comment><USER3> There is the same issue with youtube in the browser, where the sub-woofer is not used. When I went from netflix in browser to the wd-tv I was very surprised when the sub-woofer kicked in.

Both HTPC/WD-TV connect to 7.1 amp with sub.</comment></comment></comment>


A competitor emailed me moments after I signed up to Stripe - <AUTHOR> http://ashdavies.net/blog/2014/3/11/a-competitor-emailed-me-moments-after-i-signed-up-to-stripe <comment><USER2> For those that aren't aware, there is a growing class of lead-generation startups which scrape websites and determine what services you're using.

My guess is that the company that contacted you is using one of these (Stripe requires your public key in the head of your site and linking to their JS). BuiltWith is one such service: [http://builtwith.com](http://builtwith.com) ... NerdyData & Datanyze also: [http://nerdydata.com](http://nerdydata.com), [http://www.datanyze.com](http://www.datanyze.com)

Subscribers use these tools to find people who are trying out competing services (they are not cheap, BTW). Often, if a site only recently added JS code–for example, say, KissMetrics–you can assume they are still in the trial period. That gives you a window of time to try and sell them on your competing product. Or, if you sell a special WordPress plugin, you can use these services to find WordPress sites.

Stripe doesn't have a trial period per se, but its pretty easy to switch between the modern payment providers and if it was only recently installed, its safe to assume you don't have a lot of customers yet.

<comment><USER3> Based on the fact that he got the email 40 minutes after his query to Stripe I doubt any of these companies were involved.

To do a crawl across a meaningful percentage of the Internet and refresh this every 24 hours is hard enough even if you only capture the front page. Very few sites include stripe.js in the source on the front page. So you would need to crawl deep enough into a site to hit the checkout page and capture stripe.js in the head section which is exponentially more difficult.

Indexing your crawl and passing this off to a team to extract contact details and send it to a client so they can reach out all within 40 minutes I would say is nearly impossible. It is possible they already had his details but I cannot see anything on his site that would trigger a "likely to switch payment gateways" alert.

My guess is this was completely random. A good sales rep will make 60-100 outbound calls per day along with a bunch of emails. Multiply this by the number of outbound sales reps in the payments market and you have a lot of sales activity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can this be explained with a birthday paradox? If there is a large number of people signing up to Stripe and a large number of people receiving spam emails from Stripe competitors, probability that some people will receive a spam email just after signing up to Stripe may be non-negligible.

<comment><USER5> I'd guess it's more to do with the OP is in a job that gets targeted with these types of ads. (Correctly it seems)

Combined with, there probably has been other emails previously but they were ignored since OP at that time had their head on different issues.

As a human a pattern was looked for and a pattern was found.

As above companies are tracking this sort of stuff and some sites get the email addresses of user who visit (from tracking data). So the 'coincidence' might be more contrived with a bit more targeting than just low level job data. Would need more info.

But I wouldn't call it a birthday paradox, it's not totally random.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I confess I've been trying a similar kind of thing attempting to promote a website of mine. I find people who've written about competitors and email them inviting them to try my site and asking for their thoughts. Is this scummy or is it acceptable? I'm hoping it's different because the pertinent material is public, rather than private like in the OP's case.

\---

Edit: I think in retrospect watty has a point, I've removed the links. I also didn't expect this comment to rise to the top, and it is kind of off-topic. Apologies.

<comment><USER7> This is completely different. I think you knew that but saw this as an opportunity to (further) promote asoftmurmer.

<comment><USER6> I suppose the problem with this sort of thing is that it's turtles all the way down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A competitor didn't e-mail me moments after I signed up for Stripe. It's coincidence.

<comment><USER9> not necessarily. there's not enough context as to how they got to stripe.

Did they write the url in the address bar of the browser without any other context, or did they do something that signalled what they were going to do.

I bet #2.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Ironically, I found this on BlueSnap's website...

[http://www.bluesnap.com/ecommerce/legal/prohibitions-and- dmc...](http://www.bluesnap.com/ecommerce/legal/prohibitions-and-dmca/spam- notification)

BlueSnap does not allow the use of any BlueSnap links and products in any type of spam activity. If you believe that a BlueSnap link was used in spam activity please submit a report to firstname.lastname@example.com and include the relevant link/s and message/s.

Merchants and Affiliates are requested to review our guidelines on avoiding spam to help stay on the right side of the relevant legislation.

<comment><USER11> It seems clear that Stripe emailed the OP to undermine the competitor. They are the only ones to have his e-mail adress.

<comment><USER12> Or someone within Stripe, with access to the user-sign up list, is an affiliate with BlueSnap and is trying to make some extra money on the side.

An evil thought, and I'm fairly sure it isn't the case, but totally possible.

<comment><USER13> Sounds like a good way to end up in jail.

<comment><USER14> Jail? For what? Currently I have access to personal information for thousands of customers for the company I work for. I've never signed an employment contract regarding this data.

There's nothing legally stopping me from publishing all of that data, or selling it on the side. At least not to my knowledge.

Just think... there's at least one of someone like me at every service you use on the Internet.

<comment><USER15> I would hope that is not true in the USA, but maybe you are right (depending on what you mean - I doubt you can publish SSNs and claim you had the right to do so).

I seriously doubt that publishing people's private info you got from your company would be legal based on European privacy laws (regardless what your company chose to have you personally sign).

I imagine going to jail is unlikely in any case. And I doubt it would be connected to your employment contract in any case: jail would likely be the result of some criminal offense you committed against the state, not against your employer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I too suspect it is coincidence but two questions to add to my database, one are you using the Chrome browser, and regardless of browser do you have any extensions that help you 'fill in forms' ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes to Chrome, no to form fillers.

<comment><USER16> Thanks, the reason I ask is that there have been a couple of articles lately on how much form data Chrome stores. (a somewhat rabid piece is here: [http://www.usatoday.com/story/cybertruth/2013/10/10/google-c...](http://www.usatoday.com/story/cybertruth/2013/10/10/google- chromes-cache-makes-data-easy-to-steal/2961739/)) I keep wondering if that is an actual threat or not and if so how we could detect it.

<comment><USER17> See callmeed's comment above. Most likely that's the source.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> As sanswork said have you asked them where they got your details from? It could just be a coincidence.

Or, when you said you 'played around with the [stripe] service' did you put any stripe code on public sites?

<comment><AUTHOR> Waiting for their answer now. Haven't posted any stripe code publicly. Could be a very good coincidence.

<comment><USER19> > Could be a very good coincidence

Literally the last two times I have text my wife suggesting pizza for dinner I have had an advertisement SMS from Dominos moments later. If it wasn't for the shocking state of Dominos tech (website and mobile app) I would think they had some crazy surveillance going on!

<comment><USER20> Some kind of pavlov's dog response? IE Dominos sends SMS marketing on a roughly predictable timetable, and on a couple of days those messages arrived late, causing you to subconsciously anticipate pizza news and suggest getting pizza?

Probably not, I'm talking out of my ass.

<comment><USER21> Seems possible actually. Wasn't there just something yesterday on Dominos using pizza-smelling ink on DVDs? The DVD would heat up in the player and produce a pizza smell, inspiring hunger and hopefully a trip to Dominos. That's pretty dastardly. Timing advertisements seems to be much more in the realm of possibility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I bought medicine online one time. Moments later I received an email to purchase Viagra. Coincidence?

</comment><comment><USER23> I had a similar experience with spotify/rdio. I personally don't think these emails are a coincidence

[http://creativaldo.tumblr.com/post/73662726109/is-spotify- sp...](http://creativaldo.tumblr.com/post/73662726109/is-spotify-spying-on-my- rdio-activity)

</comment><comment><USER24> I think this is a clever marketing scheme by Stripe. Now hundreds of HN readers will sign up just to check if they get an email from BlueSnap. I know I did.

<comment><USER25> We'd never betray the trust of our users by doing something crazy like that. We're as puzzled as the OP.

<comment><USER26> Hmm, I know that when we bought an email list for our target demo we ended up with a couple of honeypot addresses and an e-mail from the source asking who got the list from, complete with legal threats if we didn't assist in their investigation. This is cheap enough that if you have concerns about insiders you might want to set something like that up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Did you put any of the code on a site? There are services that will scan sites for snippets of competitors code and alert a company when someone is trying their service.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope, just signed up and left.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> this title is misleading. 40 minutes is a very long time, hardly "moments after."

Considering the fact that I get about 3 postcards a week pushing merchant services and credit card processing, I think this is just a coincidence.

As a marketer, especially in the fast paced online world, if I had the ability to pull this strategy off, I wouldn't wait 40 minutes. I would pull the trigger instantly, and since it is spammy as it is, I would use a much more aggressive sell. (not that I would ever do this... I wouldn't!)

I see Blue Snap is running marketo on their site, so they clearly are doing marketing automation, and if they are at all sophisticated, they probably have some pretty advanced ways of deciding who to email, when.

</comment><comment><USER28> For what it's worth that marketing message assumes you are already in production with someone else and transacting actively: "I do understand you may feel as though you are all set in this area" Rather than win your entire business away they want you to start using them for _some_ payments. If they thought you were actively looking to add a PG for the first time (ie somehow knew you'd just signed up for Stripe) it would be different messaging. So I think you may have signed up with them in the past a ways back and they think of you as an already processing site with a gateway.

</comment><comment><USER29> I've seen a startup here on HN that was doing exactly this thing. Would warn you when a client signed up on a competitor site. I think the data was leaked from some kind of analytics app.

<comment><USER30> I remember that too... do you remember the name?

EDIT: Found it here: [http://venturebeat.com/2014/01/20/this-startup-tells- you-whe...](http://venturebeat.com/2014/01/20/this-startup-tells-you-when- companies-try-your-competitors-software-and-is-growing-25-a-month/)

It's [http://www.datanyze.com/](http://www.datanyze.com/)

<comment><USER31> That would require that the OP put some code related to stripe on his site. He's said had not done that when he got the email.

"Every day, the company crawls millions of websites with its custom spider technology, searching for hints about what software each company is using..."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The lack of "Me too!" responses leads me to believe this is just a coincidence.

</comment><comment><USER33> Curious how an article like this makes it to the #1 spot.

<comment><USER34> Probably a lot of people who watched The Good Wife last night and/or privacy conspiracy theorists.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity)

<comment><USER36> _A lot of people don 't realize what's really going on. They view life as a bunch of unconnected incidents and things. They don't realize that there's this, like, lattice of coincidence that lays on top of everything. Give you an example, show you what I mean: suppose you're thinkin' about a plate of shrimp. Suddenly someone'll say, like, "plate," or "shrimp," or "plate of shrimp" out of the blue, no explanation. No point in lookin' for one, either. It's all part of a cosmic unconsciousness._

\- Repo Man

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I've not experienced this myself. But have you asked them where they got your contact info from? I'd be curious to know because any possibility I can think of (outside of you posting on twitter or your blog, etc) would be extremely questionable.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've asked them, the person emailing has said they received it from a marketing department. Pushing for more info now.

I'm thinking really hard about this and I can't find anything I've shared that suggests I'm looking for a new payment gateway. Hence the post :)

<comment><USER38> you might have put your email address into a banner for some reason and when you started searching for payment gateways it passed your details on?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> That is creepy. I'm not sure whether the publicity from the blog post is going to generate more or fewer customers for the Stripe competitor, though.

</comment><comment><USER40> I've had this happen to me on different topics (IIRC it did happen with Stripe a month or two ago) way too often to attribute it to coincidence. My working assumption is that online privacy does not exist anymore.

With all these microphones and cameras attached to all the net enabled devices we use, it's a matter of time before offline privacy stops existing as well.

Email in 1985 must have felt weird too. Cheers, F

</comment><comment><USER41> Without any other evidence you can't conclude that this is anything other than a coincidence.

</comment><comment><USER42> Personally I would want to see some kind of smoking gun like "A competitor emailed me AT THE UNIQUE EMAIL ADDRESS THAT I JUST SIGNED UP TO STRIPE WITH" \- otherwise the mail could have just been a coincidence and could have come from anywhere.

</comment><comment><USER43> It is possible that Stripe divulges your contact info to some affiliate that has been, well, infiltrated by the competition. I would be surprised if you got any concrete info from the competitor, either way.

</comment><comment><USER44> If I search for JSP hosting, I see ads for it all over after. Not surprising if his searches and browsing triggered some marketing system that managed to email him.

<comment><USER45> It's called re-marketing - the site you look at allows the ad network to track your visit to your site, then they show you ads for that site as you navigate the web. It's horrible but incredibly effective.

<comment><USER46> Retargeting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Oddly enough, this happened with me and Mixpanel the other day. I signed up for Mixpanel, and just a few hours later got a cold email from someone at RJ Metrics

</comment><comment><USER48> without further info I would guess this is remarketing in effect......if this person visited that competitor previously and they have remarketing system in place with google adwords or whatever...and have it set to track you to stripe then they know you're actively in the market and send a cold email..... this kind of adwords remarketing has only started to get mainstream more recently I'd say...

<comment><USER49> Remarketing works by adding a snippet of code to your own site to put a cookie on the visitor's browser, then the display network checking for that cookie and displaying your ad if it's present. It's not possible to remarket to another site's users, even underhandedly with the assistance of the company that drops these cookies, as stripe.com hasn't tagged their own site with any of those companies' code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> ad retargeting, or "stalker advertising". Cookie or whatever tracks movements, monitors for specific urls. When tagged client visits urls, system recognizes paying customers and sends "friendly heads up" email.

</comment><comment><USER51> Off-topic: which blog engine is this ?

(I tried ctrl-s :)

(Because nice typo)

<comment><USER52> [http://www.squarespace.com/](http://www.squarespace.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> this is possible through datanyze, if I'm not wrong</comment>


OSS Bounty project: todo list / collaborative outliner, to be open sourced - <AUTHOR> http://jacquesmattheij.com/Bounty+project%3A+todo+list+/+collaborative+outliner%2C+to+be+open+sourced

<comment><USER2> At the risk of leaving a 'negative' comment:

This is dangerously close (for lack of a better word) to spec work. You might get paid, based on a vague specification (I want something like x.com! Features? Just look at x.com!)

The author wants it all but offers very little. It HAS to be completed FAST (first team gets the cash!), and it has to be polished ("This is not to be a 'botch' job, I want something that's production grade"). ANY HN'r should know that FAST and POLISH do not go together.

To add insult to injury, you have to hand over all your copyright. Yeah right!

For the reasons above (low budget, no formal specifications, handing over all copyright, and risk of not being paid whatsoever), I really think that if you participate you ARE being taken advantage of.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nobody said it would have to be done fast, but if there are multiple people that will go and do this then there is a chance that if you move too slow that you'll miss out. That is also why I thought it fair to offer the possibility of listing those that plan on working on this so that people could collaborate rather then compete. I thought it would be fair to mention that in case someone thought they would be able to go and do this and come back in 12 months time. By then most likely someone will have solved it. But I don't impose a time limit.

Polished as in: if you think that presenting a pile of junk tomorrow morning is going to pass muster then no, that's not the intention.

The copyright is as far as the transaction is concerned the moment at which payment takes place. I'm not paying this as a private individual, I'm paying it through a corporation and if I want to make a payment there has to be something on the the balance sheet to cover for that. Because the final product is to be open sourced that should not matter, correct me if I am wrong here why there is a practical reason why that is bad. Another good reason is to make sure the code actually does get released under the GPL, and that there will not be suddenly double licensing tricks or other nasty gotchas.

If you feel that you are or might being taken advantage of, then _please_ do not do this, that's not the intention and that's definitely not where I want to take this.

Rather the opposite, I have some money - not a whole lot - and a whole pile of ideas that I would like to see come to life as open source projects. If you feel that you do not want to get paid but you want to make this project come to life as an open source offering then _of course_ that would be an even bigger advantage to me, I figured that by offering a reasonable bounty on this the chances of seeing it becoming a reality would increase.

I take it you are not interested ;)

If instead of just negative stuff you would like to contribute ways in which I could make the offer better then I would be most grateful.

<comment><USER3> I do not think his posting should be considered negative. It pointed out very valid concerns.

One way you might make your offer more attractive without paying more or compromising quality might be lifting the restriction to PHP 4.

<comment><USER4> PHP4 end of life was at the end of 2007. I don't think you'd lose many users for requiring php5. (sorry couldn't reply to the correct nested comment)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good argument, I thought it was still a supported version. Thank you, I will amend the article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I find this part objectionable:

When the job is completed and tested it will be open sourced, GPLV2, copyright will be assigned to 'The Modular Company BV' in the Netherlands.

If this is GPLed, then it shouldn't matter much who holds the copyright. If you want the copyright, then it's not much of a sign of your belief in open source.

Ideally you'd accept MIT licensed code.

<comment><AUTHOR> See above for an explanation of why the transfer of copyright was added, if you have an alternative to that that will pass with my bookkeeper I'm open to it.

As for MIT vs GPL, I chose the GPL because it is the license that I believe best represents the spirit of what I want to achieve. If you wish you can make a similar offer using the MIT license.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Typically, someone wants work done, finds someone to do it, and they agree on what's getting done and how much is going to be paid. In this case, 100% of the risk is with the developer. Maybe someone else builds it first; maybe you don't like what the finished product looks like; etc. There is no risk to you here. It seems like a very one-sided approach to getting something done.

As an aside, doesn't this belong on a job board or contractor site?

</comment><comment><USER4> Are you opposed to a lightweight framework? Or a templating tool like Smarty? Ideally, a good framework would make a cleaner, more coherent codebase. If you restrict frameworks, I have a feeling most devs will just roll their own.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think that plenty of people are going to 'drop' this in to their existing site as a nice to have module in the back-office or intranet. That means they'll have to do customization, any kind of dependency is going to make that much harder.

So even a 'lightweight' framework will likely complicate things, for instance it is possible that another framework is already present.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> And another great offer to the HN community!

This is the inverse of kickstarter. Is there a site where you can post these sort of things?

<comment><USER8> I have been dreaming for a long time of a site where groups could form around issues, put together a bounty, and administer it collaboratively. I think it was tried once, called bigcarrot.com, and hasn't really taken off.

Sad to read at the bottom of the page that they have a patent pending on this. How ridiculous.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can't patent a business method. So they can stick 'patent pending' on anything it just won't fly.

Also, I've been 'dreaming' along with you for a long long time, mail me please, let's compare notes. I'm not quite ready to go publick with my dream just yet, but if you read the list of ideas linked above you might find the right one.</comment></comment></comment>


Graal Autovectorization - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/oracle/graal/pull/1692 <comment><USER2> Very good move indeed. This is what a smart JIT should be able to do so that the programmer does not have to worry about various hardware-specific optimizations.

Now since they are able to loop unroll it by analysing AST and converting into SIMD, it must also be possible to forward instructions to GPU/GPGPU in the future with little more effort.

Similar efforts on JVM in the past - [https://astojanov.github.io/blog/2017/12/20/scala- simd.html](https://astojanov.github.io/blog/2017/12/20/scala-simd.html)

LLVM - [https://llvm.org/docs/Vectorizers.html](https://llvm.org/docs/Vectorizers.html)

GCC - [https://www.gnu.org/software/gcc/projects/tree- ssa/vectoriza...](https://www.gnu.org/software/gcc/projects/tree- ssa/vectorization.html)

<comment><USER3> Note that of course the JVM's top-tier JIT compilers (C2, Graal EE) have already done this autovectorisation for many years - this is just the first time code has been contributed for the open source version of Graal, because previously it was an Enterprise-only feature in that compiler.

For example open source code in C2 [https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/blob/497cb3f4f4ae7f86c1731396...](https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/blob/497cb3f4f4ae7f86c173139643adf8ec8401921e/src/hotspot/share/opto/superword.cpp).

> Now since they are able to loop unroll it by analysing AST

There's no AST analysis going on here - it operates at the graph level.

> it must also be possible to forward instructions to GPU/GPGPU in the future > with little more effort

Hah. People have been trying general GPU offload for a decade and haven't really got anywhere yet. The blocking issue is finding work that is coarse- grained enough to make the context-switch worth it.

<comment><USER4> > this is just the first time code has been contributed for the open source > version of Graal, because previously it was an Enterprise-only feature in > that compiler.

Is the Enterprise-only implementation different from what has been contributed to the open source version?

<comment><USER5> Yes. This is Twitter's own implementation of the idea.

It may not get accepted. The maintainer of Graal asked Twitter some tough questions about whether they'd really be maintaining it over the long run and how much it really helped when they first proposed the patch and didn't seem to get any answers.

This seems like a continuation of the problem that has made Java a money hole for first Sun and then Oracle. Any attempt to stabilise its losses by making a better Java with proprietary extensions causes companies like Twitter or Red Hat to duplicate those features and submit competing implementations themselves, rather than simply pay the original team. Those duplicates then have to either both be maintained or one has to be rejected.

Given this sort of behaviour it's not clear that there's any sustainable way to fund core Java development, other than indefinite cross-subsidisation by other revenue lines.

<comment><USER4> > Given this sort of behaviour it's not clear that there's any sustainable way > to fund core Java development, other than indefinite cross-subsidisation by > other revenue lines.

Wouldn't it move to a model similar to that of C++? Perhaps have a committee that agree to what features get committed and maintained? There are obviously many large companies with deep pockets who heavily rely on the JVM for their core business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does Graal being an Oracle project make anyone else nervous? I mean from a software license or patent perspective.

On the technical side there's much to like. However I worry that once Graal becomes popular, Oracle will announce something that makes it risky to use without paying for a per-seat license or support package. I'm probably just showing my bias, but they have form in this area.

<comment><USER7> It's an open source project. If Oracle does something disliked by the community, the community can fork and do whatever they like. This is something that has happened repeatedly with open source projects when the community has disliked the government of it, e.g. think Jenkins/Hudson situation. Or going way back Mambo/Joomla.

Disclaimer: I work for Oracle, but nothing to do with Graal etc.

<comment><USER8> Looking at the license [1], it appears to be GPL v2 with a classpath exception. This means it doesn't directly deal with the issue of patents, only copyright. There have been cases in the past of companies going after users for patents on otherwise open source projects. The worst part is, Oracle reserves those right so they can decide retroactively to go after those users (unless Oracle decides to modify/replace the license).

[1]: [https://github.com/oracle/graal/blob/master/LICENSE](https://github.com/oracle/graal/blob/master/LICENSE)

<comment><USER5> Actually large parts are under the Universal Permissive License these days, which explicitly deals with patent grants.

e.g.

[https://github.com/graalvm/graaljs/blob/master/LICENSE](https://github.com/graalvm/graaljs/blob/master/LICENSE)

[https://opensource.org/licenses/UPL](https://opensource.org/licenses/UPL)

I think Graal itself is GPL2+Classpath because it's derived from a codebase that was itself licensed that way, not because Oracle actually want ambiguity. If they wanted that, their new from-fresh codebases wouldn't be under a more precise open source license.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can someone explain what is new here? Does OpenJDK have autovectorization or is it just getting added to GraalVM now?

<comment><USER10> It is getting added to Graal now. Disabled by default. OpenJDK has it for some architecture, I think Intel contributed it for x86 and there is this for aarch64.

[https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/linaroorg/auto- vectorizati...](https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/linaroorg/auto- vectorization-support-in-openjdk9-hotspot-c2-compiler-bud1711)

Update: This is about the FOSS edition not the EE one. See comment below.

<comment><USER11> So for Graal we have the situation that Graal EE (Enterprise Edition) has auto-vectorization. However, its not in the open-source version as Oracle holds it back. The implementation in this issue is however provided by Twitter.

<comment><USER12> One should also note that if it wasn't for Oracle, MaximeVM would have been yet another cool dead technology out of Sun Research Labs.

So quite the opposite of holding it back.

<comment><USER13> I think Graal and Graal EE on Oracle Cloud is one of the smartest product moves out of Oracle in .... idk ... forever?

However, it seems like a knifes edge to walk on. If Graal CE gets uptake, are there enough compiler folks at Redhat, Azul, Google, et. al. to shrink (or overtake) the Graal EE performance edge.

Graal CE must be "good enough" to get people hooked that they then want to hold their nose enough to engage with Oracle (through Cloud or license).

Maybe the management and visualization advantages are enough? I don't think so though.

I also don't think it will pay off (despite the incredible technical achievement that Graal is).

I was just talking with an ex-Oracle SMB sales rep, and they left because they would persuade businesses off SQL Server on technical merits, only to see their clients steamrolled by the Compliance Department a year later.

Larry is, 75 years old or so? I think recent Microsoft history can show goodwill can be created quickly, but it must be done from the top down.

<comment><USER12> Commercial JDKs do pay off, so much that many of the commercial AOT compilers (since around 2000) are still in business, although with the ongoing support on OpenJDK that might change a bit (ExcelsiorJET just gave up).

JIT and GC algorithms to the level done by JVM implementations don't come up with all nighters and weekend programming scratching an itch, and those software engineers need to be payed accordingly.

So if others have a problem with Oracle, maybe they could compensate for the fact that Oracle employees still do 90% of Java development and OpenJDK related work.

<comment><USER13> The niche JDK vendors are an order of magnitude off what Oracle needs to fund JDK development. I suppose the closest example is Azul, which is using the same "pay for performance" model of Graal EE.

I have absolutely nothing against some kind of commercial model for funding the JDK. My comments were that in my opinion, the model is unfortunately doomed:

\- Lack of goodwill for Oracle - Enterprises who are not yet Oracle customers really really want to stay away from entering into a commercial agreement. True or not, the perception is that a license agreement with Oracle comes with aggressive and intrusive compliance audits.

\- Worse is better syndrome - Indeed Oracle is the primary developer on the JDK, but the others entering this space are not hobbyists working on the side. Plenty of serious vendors with serious compiler chops have skin in keeping "free JRE" as the "fast enough" JRE. Redhat natch IBM, Google, Azul, Amazon, apparently Twitter (see pull request). Graal EE is supposedly 30-40% faster on some numeric workloads. But what if these players get that down to 20% or 10% .. or suddenly there might be workloads where CE is faster. Much harder to pitch that license agreement without compelling and unambiguous benefit.

I don't have a "problem" with Oracle, I'm just commenting on where I think the industry is right now. Maybe Oracle will prove me wrong - Microsoft sure did.

<comment><USER12> The others entering on this space are mostly repacking Oracle's work, in what concerns Java language and JVM specification.

From those listed by you, IBM and Azul have their own JVM implementations, and just like Oracle require enterprise contracts for the cool features.

Finally, everyone complains about Oracle, yet no one else bothered to make a counter offer to buy Sun.

<comment><USER5> Doesn't matter though. Azul is probably doomed. Does anyone pay IBM for a commercially enhanced JVM? I never heard of it.

IBM might have some enterprise JVM, but they just bought Red Hat. Red Hat hired a bunch of former Sun/Oracle devs and then developed an open source pauseless GC, thus chopping the knees out from underneath Azul and Oracle's ZGC work.

What have Azul and IBM got now? They've gone down the path of trying to use LLVM as a JIT compiler, but they're now in competition with Graal and GraalVM+ZGC or Shenandoah would appear to match their capabilities. They had a good run with edge whilst it lasted, but ultimately there are only so many ways to make Java go faster and the world is apparently not short of companies willing to do JVM heavy lifting for free. But of course, only on the parts that other firms are trying to sell. I don't see Twitter implementing a Project Valhalla anytime soon.

Oracle have developed some great tech in GraalVM and are now trying to turn it into a real business. It's a remarkably long term strategy, but in the end there are lots of people who don't want to see Java go back to being a commercial product again and will happily 'burn' money to ensure it. And I'm sure some would love to just spite Oracle too.

I suspect eventually Oracle will let most of the Java and Graal developers go, probably reallocating them to a non-profit foundation that it slowly winds back commercial support for until its investment in Java is more evenly balanced with other large industry players. The existing OpenJDK people don't seem to be under any commercial pressure or urgency already so it wouldn't be a big shift for them.

<comment><USER12> Ever heard of Websphere, IBM i, IBM z/OS?

<comment><USER5> Yes but I imagine a lot of developers haven't. How many new projects are being started on a mainframe?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I had no idea Graal VM was open source! That's awesome.</comment>


Ask HN: Most useful things to memorize using spaced repetition? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Pimsleur teaches languages this way. It is surprisingly effective.</comment>