Bootstrapping: Revenues & Momentum is Everything - <AUTHOR> http://adii.me/2012/01/bootstrapping-revenues-momentum-is-everything/

<comment><USER2> Great piece. I agree that revenue brings momentum, without it it's hard to know where you're going or if you're doing things right.

I'd say especially as a technical single founder (me), it's all too easy to focus on building features and having the mindset of "If I build 1 more feature, then they will come (and buy)."

The real hard thing (for us) is to convince other people to buy. And that's probably something you should spend most of your time on: Figure out who your customers are. Figure out why they would buy. I know we have a tendency to spend time with what we're comfortable with (for me that would be coding and SEO).

It takes real determination to do things that are hard to do and for which we have no clue. For me it would be cold calling and convincing businesses to buy my solution, since people arriving on my website seem to have other intentions in mind, for a reason I have yet to discover.

<comment><USER3> I'm in a similar boat to toumhi and the OP: semi-technical (basic PHP + CMS + outsourcing) with slight feature-creep and sales-sweats issues.

Besides that, I'm a WooThemes customer[1] and have been amazed at how well their model has worked. I often mention this to my HTML-template/Dreamweaver 'website designer' friends, but I think WooThemes have nothing to worry about - they're too far ahead of the curve with too polished a product to need to worry about competition. The 37signals bootstrapped article is a great overview of their progress.

So I try to emulate, only my users are not as web-savvy as WooThemes' users. It seems that more traditional sales channels must be used to overcome the chicken/egg userbase issues. But, I have time on my side, so I will persevere and hopefully manage to generate initial revenues one o' these days.

[1] Highly recommended as a quick way to get family + friends set up with a very presentable web presence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd suggest one thing if anyone reads this and gets down heartened about their lack of ability to generate early revenue. Whilst looking for revenue as soon as possible certainly makes sense I think you can get momentum to sustain you through the highs/lows in other ways. Certainly looking at usage metrics can help convince you you're moving in the right direction. But most important to me has been trying to move things forward every day. There are days where that's not possible, but the default evening activity is to do even just 30 mins or and hour on my project. Even if things seem a struggle, there's usually something interesting to work on which will make at least a small improvement.

To counter the obvious criticism here, I am aware that this could lead to maintaining optimism working on something which will never generate revenues. You still need to have a plan to generate cash and to test your assumptions about how that will work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nah, I think you raise a very valid point. The are definitely other things that are not revenue-related that would give you similar momentum.

Revenue is just the "nice" one, because it pays the bills as well... :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just a little bug report: Your fancy "position:fixed-when-scrolled-down" social tool thingy is broken and overlays the comments below your post, because they don't have the same margin-right value that your post has.

(Did I mention that I really dislike these position:fixed things? They are what the flash intro was back in the days)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm aware of it. Classified as: things to fix when I get around to it. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I could be wrong, but I've come to believe that grit (<http://bradt.ca/grit- scale.html>) is everything. Because if you don't have revenues or momentum to start, it is grit that will get you there. Those without high grit will quit prematurely.

<comment><USER3> Just coming back to this thread because I grabbed my Grit Scale score (4/5) and watched the TED talk, which turned out to be one of the first to hold my interest in a long while - I've seen most of the 'TED classics'.

I seem to be in the upper quartile that is statistically likely to have _what it takes_ to stick it out, but it feels far from certain. Perhaps it provided a slight boost in self-confidence.

In any case, thanks for bringing this up. It ties in nicely with the 'Drunkard's Walk' (cf. Mlodinov) randomness/perseverance traits that seem to increase the probability of achieving one's goals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> So what you're saying is that if you don't take outside money your business needs to... Make money?

Fascinating.</comment>


Why Lisp is a Big Hack and Haskell is Doomed to Succeed (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://axisofeval.blogspot.ca/2011/01/why-lisp-is-big-hack-and-haskell-is.html <comment><USER3> For a language that prioritizes "safety" above all things, there is an awful lot of flying blind and dangerously in Haskell. It's so, so easy to write Haskell code that's safe until you change something distant in the system, which changes when things get lazily-evaluated, and now you have a very serious resource leak. And because of the IO restrictions, you aren't likely to put logging in your code - and if you _do_ , the logs will themselves change the lazy evaluation behavior of your code. I've seen Haskell programs that stop crashing when you pass in --debug !

If the Haskell environment was more like a virtual machine - like in Java - where you could connect into a side-channel and see what types of data were persisting in memory as the program ran - you'd at least have a chance of debugging this sort of thing. But instead it compiles to machine binaries.

There doesn't seem to be any interest in the Haskell community in making tools to deal with this sort of thing - they say "you should learn not to make resource-leaking code". Which is the same thing the Lisp hackers say - "just learn not to make type errors".

<comment><USER4> And that's why the 'war' has just moved to the JVM: Closure is a Lisp, Scala steals a whole lot of things for Haskell, trying to make it actually practical.

I think Haskell's ultimate role is a bit like Ruby's: It can't really win, but it's destined to be influential. That's a much harder road for Lisp, as its greatest strengths are also its greatest flaws.

<comment><USER5> Doesn't scala suffer from the JVM constraints, like no tail call recursion, everything is an object, such that the compile times become enormous to work around them?

Haskell is indeed influencing, but it is not remaining stagnant.

<comment><USER6> The way I understand it, is that Scala does support tail-call recursion by way of compiling to a loop. Compilation was definitely a pain when I experimented with Sit.

<comment><USER5> I recall that scala uses "trampolines" by compiling to what is more like a state machine.

<comment><USER7> I thought Actors does that, but not Scala in general.(?)

<comment><USER5> Rúnar Bjarnason talked about it in his presentation "FP Programming is Terrible" [0] (he makes up for that title in the end)

I asked him about it on twitter since it reminded me of thunks, he said " a trampoline executes a sequence of thunks, yeah" [1]

[0]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzf3hTUKk8U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzf3hTUKk8U) [1]: [https://twitter.com/runarorama/status/449070763421618176](https://twitter.com/runarorama/status/449070763421618176)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I cannot speak for Lisp, but I am in the throes of writing a compiler from scratch in Haskell (while concurrently learning Haskell). I feel/felt very much as this article described—constrained. And then I learned ETA-reduces. Then I learned monads. And then I learned … The list just keeps going.

As I slowly learned the language the proper way, I am now able to do anything I did in a imperative/OOP/whatever language, but now I have that foundation of type safety. Like many will say, if it compiles, it most likely just works. Coupling this with automatic checking via GHC-mod and I am just as performant (in terms of writing code) and encounter half as many bugs as any other language I've ever used. Haskell isn't a panacea, but it's a very good language.

<comment><USER9> > if it compiles, it most likely just works

I believe the more you learn, the more this becomes true as well. To begin with, you'll write a lot of code that has potential bugs (like missing cases when pattern matching, using types that you really shouldn't, using error when something like Maybe or Either would be more flexible etc.). eventually you realise how to write code that can avoid a lot of these problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> An interesting, to me, capacity of Lisp is to be represented uniformly - <USER2> called homoiconicity. For example, having a Lisp program, you can relatively easily add - statically - a debug statement after each statement, and then use that resulting program instead. That would be harder to do in Haskell - because the Haskell syntax is much richer.

Another doubt to "eating all languages lunches" comes from having multiple different paradigms in programming languages. I can imagine Haskell eating, say, Prolog's lunch - for example, Norvig has shown how Prolog could be implemented as embedded in Lisp. But I suspect it's going to be harder to repeat in Haskell the strong points of Forth (stack computations), Tcl (strings as universal media?) or J (composability of primitives), even though some approximations could be made.

It's fishy idea to search for a singular "perfect" language - unless that's something like English, with all its imperfections built-in.

<comment><USER11> The singular "perfect" language would have to have pluggable syntax - so that anyone can have their perfect syntax as long as it generates the same parse tree.

At the same time, its type system will be pluggable too, so that people can keep improving the type system (dependent types, dynamic types, etc.) without changing the language.

Oh yeah, and of course its code generation/execution model will be pluggable as well. Do you want to interpret it? Sure! Do you want to compile it so it performs better on your target computers? No problem! Compile it to JavaScript? Why not?

In that way everyone can be programming in the same language that's flexible enough for everyone's use, but at the same time can contain DSLs. Pluggable syntax/custom type checking means you can embed SQL code and make sure it's valid before running it. It also means SQL could be a custom SQLStatement data type with its own semantics.

In short, only a language that allows every type of programming can be the "one true language"

<comment><USER12> Doesn't this just describe lisp, though? Most of your questions have a dialect or library set that is specifically made to address them.

<comment><USER11> No, lisp doesn't allow you to specify your own syntax. You can't just start writing stuff without parens and define what that parses to later.

<comment><USER12> You'd be somewhat surprised on that point. Especially if you just take it such that everything is just trying to build up an s-expression. While the homoiconicity of the language is incredibly cool for macros and whatnot, I don't think you strictly need it. Especially not at the top level. (That is, if you made a language that "compiled" down to s-expressions, what is missing?)

At the extreme end, take a look at Dylan.

Though, I was really referring to your other points. It seemed every one of your "questions" is directly addressed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Your logic and reasoning seems to be all correct except for one thing... "Better languages" don't necessary succeed. I mean, just look at PHP and Javascript... Would you say that they were doomed to succeed because of their language features? There's more to "language success" than the technical characteristics of the language.

<comment><USER14> Yes, PHP and JavaScript show that deployment is everything. A language that works well with your target platform is better than one that doesn't.

(With PHP, it was apparently a bit subtle; ISP's can host it easily and it works well with live updates via ftp, and that beat out language features.)

Objective C is a third example: It's popular because iPhone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The author raises valid points about Haskell, but I disagree with his statement about a static-typed lisp. Typed Racket is useful and enjoyable to program with, and includes a handy optimization coach.

</comment><comment><USER16> Using the type system to create less buggy code beyond what's done in mainstream statically typed languages (that are not types-all-the-way-down) is an interesting, but still very-much -open research question. The type system, beside being expressive, would need to be easy to understand and debug and require significantly less effort to wield than debugging less-typed code.

On a related note, I'm watching with interest how the new Java 8's pluggable type systems[1][2] would play out (I understand the project is expected to have a big released April 1st). Those are pluggable intersection types, that can be inferred and injected to legacy code that was written without them.

[1] [http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/java/annotations/type...](http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/java/annotations/type_annotations.html)

[2] [http://types.cs.washington.edu/checker- framework/](http://types.cs.washington.edu/checker-framework/)

</comment><comment><USER17> Original hn discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2062436](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2062436)

</comment><comment><USER18> i would argue that clojure is very successful i think (probably more like a statment of obvious) language success depends equally on the libraries available for it

clojure have a lot of libraries, and leiningen

and echo the "worse is better" slogan i think that languages that offer a little more feature above the current mainstream languages, will success more than languages that offer a lot more

most programmers are doers, they prefer to spend more time doing rather than learning

languages that are too smart ... are less likely to succeed not until the day ... they become only a little bit better than the mainstream

we move slowly from c to c++ to java to ruby ... the next big language is one that is only a little bit better than ruby ... not a lot better

i think clojure fit the bill

<comment><USER19> If clojure is only a little bit better than ruby, is there a language you think is a lot better?

<comment><USER18> well, i guess ... having a second thought about it, clojure is very different from ruby, being a lisp

i am sure most of the ideas in clojure wont be alien to most rubyist ... but still its a fairly large departure from ruby

a language that is only one or few steps above ruby, will have to use closer syntax ... be more or less focused on OO rather than functional programming

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Can someone explain why anyone would think that dynamic typing is "clearly-on- the-horizon" for Haskell? (Not saying it isn't; just wondering.)

Also, FTA:

> Haskell is clearly moving towards dependent typing, which in theory, allows > the expression of _arbitrary invariants_ that are maintained statically, > without having to run the program.

Well, "arbitrary" within limits. Dynamic type checking is still strictly more powerful than static type checking -- in the sense of what Boolean statements it can test about particular values -- no matter how you slice it.

(No, I'm not arguing for dynamic type checking.)

</comment><comment><USER21> So Haskell will eventually be able to do everything lisp does, but it's _impossible_ for lisp to do everything Haskell does. I smell bullshit.

Both languages have their place. Sometimes functional and type-safe isn't the best way to go about something. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it depends on the programmer.

There is no One Right Way or One True Language.

<comment><USER22> Also, it's a weird comparison because Haskell is one, crisply-defined thing -- but what does he mean by "Lisp"? Common Lisp? Scheme? Racket? Clojure? Does Dylan count? The only Lisp he mentions specifically is Emacs' Elisp -- which would be a straw man to pick for a comparison.

Things like Typed Racket (and its port to Clojure.Typed) show that you can have a lisp with static typing, as well as the traditional strengths of a lisp.

You can also have a lisp like Dylan or Pyret that doesn't even use s-expressions, but is most definitely a lisp.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> haskell evangelism? I mean I like haskell, but this theory or prophecy is based on no facts.

</comment><comment><USER24> It seems weird to think that there exists any language currently which will wind up being the one-true-language.

As an industry (and a research area) there still doesn't seem to be any real consensus around "what's best"; just a bunch of differing opinions and trade- offs. I don't think any amount of evidence (were it even to exist) would convince someone not amenable to strongly-enforced static types to see their value.

The entire practice of software development seems oriented around feelings and past experience. I can appreciate that their are groups of people doing research to try and bring rigor and quantified data to the process, but if at the end of the day, a developer can spend a weekend putting together a node.js web app and have that take off and prove successful, you've pretty much lost any opportunity to convince them that they should stop using their tools and switch to some different tools.

I don't actually think there's anything wrong with that either; good for them for being suspicious.

I decided to investigate Haskell about 8 months ago when I had an opportunity to write a big system for my job. It fit well within my constraints and requirements, and the little I knew of it at the time seemed like it would be a good language to spend time getting to know.

I liked that everything in the language seemed like it got there through reasoned debate and experimentation, and that it seemed like a language- feature sandbox that more mainstream languages were eventually pulling from (Perl advocates say the same thing about Perl, mainly that it already has all the features that other languages are now trying to figure out how to implement). I liked that they don't seem to punt on the hard problems (which over time become more and more of the problems left for languages to address), even if that means that doing complicated things in Haskell is complicated.

I don't know how I'd feel about Haskell suddenly becoming super popular though. Even aside from the "God I hate that this band I've been into for a while is now suddenly popular" trendiness, I don't think the community would be able to handle sanely what an influx of massive amounts of new users would do to things. It's hard enough getting all the category theorists and abstract algebra professors to deal with the fact that Cabal takes lower and upper bounds on dependencies.

If I could spend the entirety of my career using Haskell for everything, maybe that would be great. I haven't gotten good enough yet to have strong opinions about its failings, so I'm still very much in the honeymoon period.

But that seems like a silly thing to shoot for, even if I feel the same way about Haskell in 10 years that I do now. And it seems silly to expect that everyone else would feel the same way.

<comment><USER25> I love Bob Harper's view that something like Type Theory will eventually become the one-true-language. His arguments arise from a POV pretty different from the standard argument here—it's not that some particular implementation will win, but instead that the entire design space of languages we will eventually gravitate to type theory because it's just _right_.

<comment><USER26> At the end of the day who wants dependently typed bash?

It's a great intellectual position for happy hour at the campus pub. Yet from a practical standpoint, it's hard to see how programming languages requiring more attention to type system will facilitate banging out code for ordinary problems more quickly.

There are times when it is really important to be able to prove code is correct and times when it is enough to just provide a plausible answer. The market for ML on Rails remains without validation.

<comment><USER27> With something like Haskell (very good type inference) the types will only bother you if you're writing wrong code (or writing particularly complex expressions, I'm not necessarily against compilers complaining about things that are complicated).

It's not a free lunch, but damn is it cheap.

<comment><USER26> The Haskell compiler will complain if I am writing wrong Haskell code, or more generally when the types are indeterminate and can't be inferred.

This not the same as 'wrong code' in the abstract. The code will run fine if I don't pass in mismatched data, or more generally bad data. And if I am passing in bad data, static typing doesn't give me good answers, it just keeps the program from crashing. Don't get me wrong, there are times when crashing is bad. But there are times when the cost of a runtime error is nominal and the value of flexible code is high.

Static typing trades one type of cognitive overhead for another. The Java program of 500 classes is its manifestation.

<comment><USER28> What is the cognitive overhead Haskell is introducing? Types? Because as far as I can tell we use types in all OOP, they're just implicit and not checked.

<comment><USER26> Static type checking, regardless of language, requires thinking about programs in a particular way because one possible mode of failure is prioritized over all other modes. It does so regardless of whether absolute type safety deserves to be prioritized given the purpose of a particular program and it does so regardless of whether absolute type safety is an appropriate concern at a particular stage of the program's development.

Static typing can make "how do I get this to compile?" a design criterion Consider year 2038 problem. In MySQL, various date types are coerced to the timestamp type by design. Otherwise the program would not compile. Compilation takes precedence over problem solving.

[http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/datetime.html](http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/datetime.html)

<comment><USER25> I've personally found that static typing is an aid to comprehension and thought. I spend more time fiddling with untyped code than typed code. I also disagree that static typing prioritizes a particular mode of failure—the notion of failing to typecheck is a rather general one.

<comment><USER26> There are two contexts in which one can think about data types. The first choosing among or constructing data types as abstractions. The data type as metaphor is useful regardless of language. An important property of this context is it's not just useful externally via an automobile class in a used car lot application but internally with ports and pipes for I/O and threads and locks and semaphores for processes and so on.

But the other context in which we select and choose and construct data types is because a language insists upon it. Here our choices are not based on how to best represent the world, but by how to package our metaphor into a pre- existing schema. The very first time we compile our code, we have been forced by the compiler to crystallize our code based on an early guess.

When a flat roofed building uses scuppers to provide emergency overflow drainage, it is good if water passing through them makes a mess of the plantings below and perhaps stains the facade. It indicates that the primary drains are clogged before the roof collapses. Likewise, runtime type errors might be preferable to zeros silently inserted into a database.

Static and dynamic typing each catch some types of errors at runtime at the expense of masking other types of errors at runtime.

<comment><USER25> I think runtime errors are a fine way of detecting such failings. I don't understand why typing is at odds with that.

I think types make us write out the why next to the what. That why might be a domain model justification, or something much more trivial. It's also completely possible to encode an untyped regime in a type system. You're always crystallizing your design, you just can either provide good information to understand its failings and be more prepared to fix them. Or not and chase logic errors throughout an undocumented, dynamic system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I fail to see the concrete examples you came up with to back your claims up. Or...were there none?

</comment><comment><USER30> Lisp can do that stuff. Point two depends on the implentation but point one is standardized.

</comment><comment><USER31> Why controversial blog post titles get clicked and why...

</comment><comment><USER32> The impression I have from reading the comments, seems to indicated that many believe Common Lisp not to have types !

With CLOS (and :before methods!), and optional type declarations, and the awesome implementations which do type inferencing, you tend to catch far more bugs compared to say, something like Python.

Yes, dear brethren, Common Lisp code (with SBCL) will not compile if the ftype conflicts with the inferred types of the arguments.

Edit: Besides, the author, does not seem to have the same opinion about Lisp vs Haskell today.

<comment><USER33> It really is amazing how many errors SBCL catches during compilation. At first it was annoying me coming from a more lax CLISP, but then I found that it was always my mistake that resulted in them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> How is something which needs a >700 MB runtime doomed to succeed. I think even Java is smaller than that. Not sure though.

<comment><USER35> 700 MB runtime implies every compiled binary is 700+ MB, which is obviously untrue. You probably mean the compiler and standard libraries.</comment></comment>


Malaysia says almost certain debris found off Madagascar is from a Boeing 777 - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/07/30/us-malaysia-airlines-crash-reunion-idUSKCN0Q32EM20150730 <comment><USER2> Breaking news! Someone is almost certain about something that might imply something else, maybe.

</comment><comment><USER3> > Australia's Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss said the object had a number > stamped on it that might speed its verification.

This should clear up fairly soon then.</comment>


Is the Linux Desktop Dream Dead? - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/208337/is_the_linux_desktop_dream_dead.html <comment><USER3> Please, don't send FUD here.

PCWorld is a magazine witch primary Ad buyer is Microsoft, this kind of magazines live from their ads(I have worked on printing presses), not for their customers paying the magazine.

<http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html>

No, Linux is not dead, and you make the numbers totally up(1% market share). Linus is not going to be professional in the areas that commercial software makers only support Windows or Mac(games, CAD, CAE, publishing...) until they support Linux, but is the only OS in witch you have total control.

<comment><USER4> If you would have read the first sentence in that article, you would've seen the author argues the contrary ... that Linux on the desktops is not dead.

On the other hand your point is totally useless.

         Linus is not going to be professional in the areas that
         commercial software makers only support
         Windows or Mac

NO SHIT ... unfortunately it is not going to happen soon. You know why?

Because Linux users don't pay for software, and proprietary software has some kind of stench attached (RMS says so).

E.g. Adobe tried to ship Flex Builder for Linux: <http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flex/flexbuilder_linux/>

And I've been to one internal meeting in Adobe that discussed the viability of Linux. Users not paying for software was problem #1, but they still considered it viable because of recent trends (e.g. Dell / Walmart starting to sell Ubuntu / gOS computers).

Guess they backtracked on that decision based on consumer feedback.

<comment><USER5> perennial chicken/egg problem, but they 'chickened' out I guess (yeah, bad pun).

Would be interesting to know the final reason for killing it. At that time, I had a _need_ for Flex Builder, and wanted it on Linux, and would have paid for it in a heartbeat. Others I know would have too. But we couldn't because it's not available.

I've paid for other software on Linux in the past (financial software, mostly) and got tired of waiting for the programs I wanted and needed to be available on Linux, so I jumped to a Mac. I'd been a rather late holdout, only jumping in late 2008, after about 8 years of trying to do only Linux on the desktop.

I guess there were never enough of us to make certain software profitable, or _insanely_ profitable, which is perhaps what vendors like Adobe were after.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think the desktop itself is dying. The Linux desktop, however, did give birth to KHTML, which became one of the major browser platforms. You can now access your apps without a proprietary software requirement on most devices. A win, but not in the way anyone expected.

</comment><comment><USER7> Linux got a lot of momentum from the "Microsoft is evil" camp. However, OS X sucked off most of that momentum, and now I would guess the primary users of Linux are developers who deploy onto Linux servers or embedded devices who realize that it's easier to develop on the same platform you deploy on. (And who have a lot of knowledge about the platform because they deploy on it).

But there is a growing "Apple is evil" movement, and I expect Linux to get some momentum from that. I wish that more people would try Linux for it's positive features -- for example, Virtual Desktops is my killer feature, but Linux still gets most of its users because its "not Windows" and "not Apple".

One huge advantage that Linux does have is that it's really the only Desktop platform that's seeing rapid advancement. KDE 4 is maturing into a very nice platform, Gnome 3 is coming out soon, all with significant changes and enhancements, for good or bad. OTOH, OS X 10.7 is coming out with what, an app store?

Of course, neither Microsoft nor Apple are putting a lot of effort into desktop environments because of their decreasing relevance...

<comment><USER8> > for good or bad. OTOH, OS X 10.7 is coming out with what, an app store?

... that could be described as a credit-card-aware half-brained package manager...

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> In the meantime mobile phones will probably (if not already) be most people's interaction with "computing" and there Linux is a compelling story.

</comment><comment><USER10> Linux is a passable desktop OS if you're a developer or most of the things you need live in the browser. I have an Ubuntu box loaded up and sitting in the garage just in case my Macbook gets stolen or dies on me, and I know that I'd be able to clone my projects and be up and running and billing clients again in a couple of hours.

That being said, desktop Linux is lacking a lot of the other things that I use on a daily basis (no, Gimp and OpenOffice.org are NOT "just as good"), and I just don't enjoy using it as much as OS X.

However, I in no way look down on the people who love their Linux desktop machines more than life itself, because without them we wouldn't have things like Webkit, TrueCrypt, VNC, Wine, Eclipse, and Cedega (and its cousin Cider, for running Windows games on Linux and the Mac, respectively).

So keep hacking away on your Linux desktop machines!

<comment><USER11> I'm the opposite, I used OS X for a few months and found it abysmal for development, really unfit for power-user usage (keyboard accessibility was horrid) and completely uncustomisable. I switched to Linux and never used it again.

I used to use Windows before that, but now I've switched all my computers to Linux. Windows is a close favorite (7 is great), but installing the dev tools I need isn't easy (or possible, sometimes). OS X is a distant third.

<comment><USER10> I can understand that point of view, but I notice that a lot of desktop Linux users bring up UI customization as one of the big arguments for using Linux.

I've always seen extensive UI customization as just one more distraction between me and real work. I'd rather just set a flat black or very minimalist wallpaper and get cracking instead of spending hours finding the right interface theme, tweaking the colors and fonts, and designing the perfect wallpaper to highlight my CPU/RAM/weather/calendar desktop widgets (I have done all this before).

I'm actually really glad that the only UI customization that's easy to do in OS X is choosing between color or greyscale title bar close buttons.

<comment><USER10> Spaces definitely has its issues, that's for sure. Aside from the alt+tab problem you mentioned, it just started feeling really slow so I turned it off.

I guess you could make an argument that Apple gets a lot of usability ideas from Linux, but when they go through the Stevejobsification Process they tend to lose some of their usefulness in trade for simplicity and prettier looks. I think the problem is that the only people who even notice these things are power users, so it's not even a factor in adoption rates.

<comment><USER11> Probably, but the stevejobsification process in this case completely missed the purpose of the feature and produced a larger desktop instead. I agree that only power users notice these things, but I was commenting on why I don't use it, not on why I don't want other people to use it :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I use Ubuntu out of the box for desktop machines and Centos for servers. The Gnome/Ubuntu desktop is OK and way better than XP for me. (Yes, I do know my tastes are 3 sigma away from the norm, but I am not sure which direction.)

I am irritated by the tendency of the Linux Desktop designers to clone the Windows and/or the MAC Desktop features and problems, good and bad. I would prefer a Linux Desktop that provides a better interface than the competition, one without the warts of the other products.

I do not see the need all the graphical configuration themes and options, which just seem to add complexity. Few of the people I know use anything other than the "standard" configuration simply because a private configuration needs to be maintained and provides almost no marginal advantage.

I find Desktop GUI tools are frequently cumbersome and using them causes a lot of busy hand work. Shell command lines, BASH scripts, and Python programs work better for me than the Desktop GUI. I am frustrated when Desktop Tools are not easily usable from scripts as sometimes is the case with Gnome.

None the less, I think the Linux Desktop is alive and well.

</comment><comment><USER13> _The 21st-century desktop isn't based on the fat-client desktop of the last 25-years. It exists on the Web in Web-based applications and software as a service (SaaS) and what I call "Content as a Service." If the content providers have their way, you'll view content from the Web instead of downloading it._

So I just took a break and played a round of SC2 and now I'm back to do some work in Photoshop/Excel. Just thought you'd like to know.

</comment><comment><USER14> Daddy, what's a desktop?

</comment><comment><USER15> Yes.

And no.

Linux was never a very good _desktop_ OS. Though it was a fair to perhaps good workstation OS. However, the future of the desktop may well be in mobile- heritage OSes such as iOS and Android. Just as the PC grew to fill its mini- computer and mainframe big brothers' shoes so mobile OSes are likely to mature into robust desktop platforms (though founded on different paradigms).

And if that's the case, then the linux desktop dream may yet live indirectly, through android and related offerings (chrome OS, etc.)

<comment><USER8> > Linux was never a very good desktop OS

Have you ever seriously tried to use it? Because, lacking a proper official definition of what a good desktop OS is, I am very satisfied with the one running in front of me and can only say it's really good. Good as in "solid and predictable".

I understand there are Linux distros for every taste, from the heavy-duty- server guy to the most curious hacker that wants to compile the kernel for every upstream release, but I find - and that's first-hand experience - <USER2> makes for a very nice destkop OS.

<comment><USER11> I agree with you on everything, except the fact that it's solid. In my experience, it crashes a bit more than Windows (Gnome/the GUI does, the rest of the system runs great). E.g. gwibber-service keeps taking up 100% of my CPU at random times, network-manager-applet keeps disappearing, disconnecting me from the net, etc.

Other than that, I love it, it's my main OS. I just wish they debugged it a bit more. Ubuntu is known for using bleeding-edge packages rather much...

<comment><USER8> I have experienced some Gwibber weirdness, but in 10.04. It's been behaving very well on 10.10 and I haven't seen Gnome crashes in a long time except one during the upgrade from 10.04 to 10.10 (since no non-linux desktop OS can do such a feat - imagine upgrading from Windows Vista to Windows 7 while you work on the machine being upgraded... - I consider that a moot point)

It's hard to debug with the vast amounts of undocumented hardware people run it on. The developers have access to only a tiny fraction of all the hardware combinations their users have and an even smaller fraction of those have some documentation or specs developers can write for. Graphic accelerators and wireless interfaces are just two very visible categories where far too many hardware manufacturers want to make sure open-source developers fail.

There used to be a hardware popularity/test app with Ubuntu. I can't find it on 10.10 but, if it might be useful for you to run it or whatever came to replace it. Also, it's entirely possible very few people run it on the exact hardware you have and filing a bug report may help others with similar problems.

<comment><USER11> Ah, it's good to know Gwibber is fixed in 10.10 (I'm running 10.04). I'm waiting a month or so after each release, because upgrading right after release has given me problems in the past.

Gnome doesn't crash _completely_ , just a few applets disappearing or other weirdness. I agree that it's hard to debug wireless adapters or graphics, but gwibber, for example, shouldn't really take up all your CPU like that.

It's generally fine, everything works fine on all my computers, except nm- applet, which does crash on three separate computers quite frequently. I hope it's fixed on 10.10, thank you for the info!

<comment><USER8> There is no way to escape the fact that Ubuntu has less users than Windows has beta users. It takes a lot of luck to expose more rare bugs during the beta stage, specially in short cycles like Ubuntu's

But I kind of like having a new desktop rolled out every 6 months, even if the price is having to troubleshoot stuff or filing bug reports. If I wanted a boring, stable, rock-solid OS, I would run Solaris 10 on my PC ;-)

On your nm-applet thing, are the three computers using the same wireless interface?

<comment><USER11> What do you mean? They have different adapters, they are on the same network most of the time but it happens both on other networks, plus it happens to a computer that doesn't even have a wireless interface.

It hasn't happened in a while, thankfully.

<comment><USER8> Oh no.. Same as in same model. It could be a problem specific to that particular chipset. You can report a nm-applet specific bug with apport-bug. This helps a lot with triaging and collects hardware info and meaningful (hopefully) logs automagically.

<comment><USER11> Ah, right. I tried apport-bug but it said "You need to specify a PID", and I have no time to research that right now... I'll try later on, thanks!

<comment><USER8> Thanks.

The more users that report bugs, the better coverage the software will have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Android will be bigger than Windows ever was.

</comment><comment><USER17> Yes it is.

</comment><comment><USER18> Linux desktops will never die.</comment>


Show HN: Domain Crawler - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/zillabyte/domain_crawl

<comment><USER2> does this obey robots.txt and have some sort of delay so it doesn't take down a site?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a starting point for a crawler, and does not have limiters on robots.txt and sleeps yet. Users could easily add them in if want to crawl with it.</comment></comment>


Classic amiga demos/intros in html5 - <AUTHOR> http://wab.com/ <comment><USER2> As someone who spent the last two years of his life helping people learn canvas: _Love love love._

These are wonderful, and its especially wonderful that it's open source so others can learn from it. Even more so since there are so few good examples of animation(s) out there right now.

...On the other hand, demos/intros/effects that use a library that is explicitly made for _just_ old-school demos/intros (<http://code.google.com/p/codef/>) are not as helpful to would-be canvas programmers and artists as it might be otherwise (if the demos/intros were made from scratch and stood alone).

> "PLEASE USE Chrome / Chromium to browse this Website !!"

I use chrome but this line reminds me of "This site best viewed in Netscape Navigator", which is a tad irksome :(

<comment><USER3>
        (more than 300% perf Vs FireFox ;) )

That line reflects people's bad perception about browsers (It's obviously wrong). Only thing that doesn't work using chrome is the music on the home page, speed is the same on both browsers.

<comment><USER4> It was probably true at the time it was written. Chrome had a clear speed advantage for quite some time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Excellent. Now to find some time to recreate the RSI Megademo(1) (Romeo Knight!) and and Scoopex Mental Hangover(2) and I never have to boot up my A500.

(1) <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9zDWgeV8zY> (2) <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37XY28YDju4>

Edit: maybe someone here knows/can guess; I'm looking (for a long time) for a cracktro which had a very long musical score which culminated in a Jean Michel Jarre kind of high pitch synthesizer fest. It had (only? I don't remember a scroller or anything else) a 3d starfield which moved back and towards you with the music.

</comment><comment><USER6> Amazing work!

Minor pet peeve, my favorites are missing;

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=It-f6CCVtx8> (the low youtube framerate sadly doesn't do it justice)

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5BDh4z5gis> (tune...)

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wG84cj4rago> (NSFW)

<comment><USER7> IMHO, I didn't like (1) or (2) - but I was very fond of your third (NSFW) link.

However, the demo that first blew me away on the Amiga was Blizzard Crystal Hammer, <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXBx6U_JWfQ>

That's when I first realised that the Amiga could be like the C64.

I used to be active on the scene (as a demo coder and cracker) - and it's great to see that people still celebrate the old days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sweet, haven't seen this site before!

For more nostalgia, a large collection of cracktro remakes in Flash can be found here: <http://flashtro.com/>

</comment><comment><USER9> Great demos, thanks. Anyone know how the smooth scrolling is achieved? is there an equivalent of a BitBlt in HTML5 Canvas?

<comment><USER10> Yes, Canvas has a drawImage method which takes a source image/canvas and draws it on the destination canvas.

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Canvas_tutorial/Usi...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Canvas_tutorial/Using_images#drawImage)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is the only one I remember from back in the Amiga days... the one with the red bouncing balls ... by "Dr Mabuse" <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RO5xaP5TSk> Not sure if it is on WAB or not, couldn't see it.

</comment><comment><USER11> WAB and are nothing but thieves, be careful what you use from CODEF because I guarantee NoNameNo the talentless bum has stolen every source he has in CODEF from other people and removed their names and license details.

<comment><USER8> What are the 'original' libraries/components then?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Really, really cool. I just wish the code would be a little cleaner (lots of global variables, using new Array() instead of []), which might serve as a bad practice to people learning Javascript.

<comment><USER13> What's wrong with []?

<comment><USER14> Nothing. He's complaining that they used new Array instead of it.

<comment><USER13> Oh, I thought he meant the other way round, my bad!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Llvmcpy – Python bindings for LLVM auto-generated from the LLVM-C API - <AUTHOR> https://rev.ng/llvmcpy <comment><USER2> Please forgive my ignorance, but how would this be useful? I am not familiar with compilers or what having bindings in Python to a compiler would help.

<comment><USER3> You could, for example, write a compiler in Python that generated native code (or LLVM bitcode to be passed to llc or whatever) via the LLVM API. Writing a compiler in Python vs. C/C++ would be a lot easier in a number of ways.

I'm not aware of any "production grade" compilers that do this, but no hard reason why not, I guess. Seems like it'd be nice for prototyping etc. if nothing else.

<comment><USER4> More on what Thomas said:

[http://www.llvmpy.org/](http://www.llvmpy.org/)

<comment><USER5> _" This project has been deprecated and is no longer being actively developed. We strongly suggest migrating to llvmlite. "_

try [http://llvmlite.pydata.org/en/latest/](http://llvmlite.pydata.org/en/latest/) explanation why [http://llvmlite.pydata.org/en/latest/intro/index.html](http://llvmlite.pydata.org/en/latest/intro/index.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> yjftsjthsd-h Didn't see in the readme: why "final"? I could see it being considered complete or failed, but it's unclear.

<comment><USER6> I believe it's because llvmlite is now suggested.

The llvmpy page mentions:

> Warning

> This project has been deprecated and is no longer being actively developed. > We strongly suggest migrating to llvmlite.

[http://llvmlite.pydata.org/en/latest/](http://llvmlite.pydata.org/en/latest/)

<comment><USER7> Why is this relevant? Are llvmpy and llvmcpy related?

<comment><USER6> Oh, my bad. You're right, I got my links mixed up.

aleclm has responded with the correct answer, ignore mine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How does this compare to llvmlite?

Is this going to support a larger portion of the LLVM API?

<comment><USER9> It looks to be a less complete solution, since it only relies on the LLVM C API which is incomplete. llvmlite digs into the C++ API as well, so while it has more work to do to keep up with changes in LLVM, it's more more feature- complete

<comment><AUTHOR> The LLVM-C API is quite powerful, and I'm planning to upstream some patch to expose additional stuff. On the other hand, llvmlite doesn't even parse existing IR, it's basically write-only. Plus, representing the IR in Python makes it less memory efficient than using the native representation.</comment></comment></comment>


Apple pays $38B tax by onshoring profit and avoided $40B tax offshoring it first - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2018/01/18/apple-bonuses-money-us-350-billion-taxes-trump/ <comment><AUTHOR> I mean.. $38B of $40B is still better than $0 of $40B. So, at least there's progress...

<comment><USER2> It's $38B of $78B

<comment><AUTHOR> oh. well then... that's disturbing.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Facster.com technology demonstration - <AUTHOR>

I am presenting for your consideration not so much the Facster.com website (a prototype with some rough edges) but the underlying technology. I've long been dissatisfied with the availability and presentation of raw data on the internet. Here is what Facster does:
1) All data from any source on one unified graph 2) Time series data presented in original n-dimensions 3) Full key-word search
4) Browsing  by the original publisher's organization 5) Data selected from any source joinable to any other selections 6) Full data provenance, sources, footnotes, etc.
Superficially Facster supports time-series data, but when you consider any datum has some sort of time attribute, all data can be put in the Facster schema, allowing discovery and joining with any other data.
The web site includes three full editions of the Statistical Abstract of the United States, one edition of the Statistical Abstract of California, and a small abstract of the 2000 census.
The goal: pull all government, industry, and NGO abstracts into the Facster schema and onto the Facster graph.
P.S. If you throw an error, please send replication steps to the support email on the contact page. <comment><USER2> Where's the demo?

<comment><AUTHOR> When I refer to Facster.com as a "demo", most every link (except the obvious ones like external links and links to the contact page) is walking through the site content using features of the API. You could, for instance follow the links to browse all the 4,591 data series currently on the Facster graph.

Searching currently requires an exact match on keyword (obvious room for improvement there). Search results are organized in a single fashion, but could theoretically be organized in many different ways. Also UIs could be devised to derive more value from available meta data. A RESTful interface could be bolted onto the system. In short, there are many other uses that could be made of the Facster graph.

Look to the search results for instructions to derive custom data series through joining selections from disparate data series, and notice the search page keeps track of your custom selections during your session.

So in other words "demo" means this is a very rudimentary use of a diverse unified data graph.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How should I open-source my iOS app? - <AUTHOR>

My friend and I just released out first iPhone app, "Silent Shout" (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/silent-shout/id439580131?mt=8&ls=1), and we want to open-source it. I've never open-sourced anything, and have never done much more than fork open-source projects and modify them for my own purposes, so I'm quite ignorant about the process of open-sourcing projects.<p>Our goal is to allow people to use the code and learn from it for any non-commercial purposes. We want to retain the right to earn money from the project (through future in-app purchases, or adding a price to the app for v2). I'd love for this to be a collaborative project, rather than something like Canabalt (https://github.com/ericjohnson/canabalt-ios) which seems like its simply a one-time code giveaway. Is there a license which fits our case, and aside from setting up a public git repo (which I'm in the process of doing, https://github.com/workwithnano/silent_shout), does HN have any other advice for us? <comment><USER2> Find a license that matches your needs and put notices in all your source files. <http://www.opensource.org/licenses/category>

You own copyright on the work, and there's no giving away those rights by licensing it. Furthermore, there's nothing stopping you from granting someone else a different license to the source (one permitting commercial use in consideration of a fee paid to you, for example).

The license permits others to do what you've licensed them to do. It places no restrictions on you, the copyright holder, except that you cannot revoke a license for code already released to someone unless the license permits such action (which no open source licenses do, as far as I know).</comment>


Online Algorithms in High-Frequency Trading - <AUTHOR> http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2534976 <comment><USER2> The sad thing about any thread including the term "High-Frequency Trading" is that we won't be able to talk about the technology, and instead will need to relitigate automated trading.

I think we'd have been better off if the title of this thread had been "Online Algorithms in Automated Trading Systems". As far as I understand, that title has exactly the same meaning, but doesn't set off a crowd of HN commenters who have never placed a limit order jumping in to crow about _Flash Boys_.

I'm a little frustrated, since this is a technical topic that happens to be very relevant to me right now (I'm not a trader, FWIW).

<comment><USER3> The High-Frequency Trading Arms Race: Frequent Batch Auctions as a Market Design Response[1][2] is a must-read. The tldr; is that a continuous mechanism (sequential trade processing) only looks efficient in time-space, but is actually inefficient in volume-space (most of the volume trades at stale prices). The solution is discrete batch auctions (batch trade processing).

1\. slides: [http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/eric.budish/research/HFT- Fre...](http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/eric.budish/research/HFT- FrequentBatchAuctions-Slides.pdf) 2\. paper: [http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/eric.budish/research/HFT- Fre...](http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/eric.budish/research/HFT- FrequentBatchAuctions.pdf)

<comment><USER2> This is really interesting, but doesn't it presume that there's only one trading venue for each instrument, and that instruments aren't correlated?

You can make time discrete for a single auction, but the time between auctions still has to be continuous unless everything's traded in a single exchange, which can't in reality happen even if we want it to (and we probably don't).

As I understand it, most of the most dramatic HFT stuff is already targeting multi-venue trades or correlations.

<comment><USER3> I think it is modeled in terms of endogenous vs exogenous entry. But I might be wrong, please correct me if I misunderstood.

<comment><USER2> It's obvious that they see the issue, since the examples in their slide deck are about correlation between different securities and between the same security trading on different exchanges. What I don't see is how batch auctions get around the distributed systems problem; we're still talking about an eventually-consistent system, right? There still must be opportunities for sniping, right?

(I'm not smart enough to know the answer, which is why I'm asking).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The first section of this which relates HFT to one-pass algorithms is kind of useless. Online estimation algorithms are much more broadly applicable than that, and I'd expect that their relevance to HFT would be immediately obvious. I've never worked in HFT, but I've probably written the online variance algorithm at 3 of 4 companies I've worked. If you care about metrics such as "how quickly are each of my customers sending me requests?", then this stuff is relevant to you.

But more to the point, is there anyone in these fields who _doesn 't_ know this stuff? At a basic level, the things that you can do a really good job estimating in an online way are closely related to sufficient statistics, which every undergrad stats course should cover. And hopefully anyone actually involved in writing HFT systems has way more stats background than that -- right?

<comment><USER2> I'm a systems programmer with a pretty primitive intuitive sense for maths. I "agree" with you, in the sense that the algorithms this article mentioned were intuitively obvious to me and thus seemed like they couldn't be sophisticated. What's the state of the art for online estimators?

I've been playing with simulations of market maker algorithms from the literature, and simple Bayesian stuff and MLEs are all I've really seen, which makes me think that the interesting stuff isn't in the literature.

<comment><USER5> There is a lot of literature, but it may not be easy to find out, and different domains use different names for it.

One keyword to look for is 'stochastic approximation', with a long (> 50 years) history in engineering and stats. Another one is 'stochastic gradient', which got a resurgence following the whole deep learning craze. There is also 'particle filtering' in signal processing.

One generic article I may recommend is [http://leon.bottou.org/publications/pdf/online-1998.pdf](http://leon.bottou.org/publications/pdf/online-1998.pdf), it does not require much math knowledge, but that may be less practical than what you want.

The 'onepass' keyword mentioned in the original article is another keyword to look for (see e.g. interesting work to do Monte-Carlo based linear algebra operations for very large matrices, this used to be a reference, not sure what's the state of the art is: [http://cs- www.cs.yale.edu/homes/mmahoney/pubs/matrix1_SICOMP...](http://cs- www.cs.yale.edu/homes/mmahoney/pubs/matrix1_SICOMP.pdf))

<comment><USER6> > ... different domains use different names ...

I agree. In engineering, many of these algorithms can be coded using digital filters. Here's the exponential weighted variance:

      import scipy.signal as dsp
      import numpy as np

      b = np.array([alpha])
      a = np.array([1., -(1 - alpha)])

      # Compute exponential weighted average
      signal_ = dsp.lfilter(b, a, signal)
      # Compute exponential weighted variance
      ewv = dsp.lfilter(b, a, (signal - signal_)**2)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is there a mirror? Seems like too many connections at the moment.

<comment><USER8> google cache should do the trick if it's down

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:WqysSpS...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:WqysSpS- SBoJ:queue.acm.org/detail.cfm%3Fid%3D2534976+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ie)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Needs a date stamp (2013).

</comment><comment><USER10> Could somebody explain what the use is of HFT to society? Because I don't get it.

Links are also welcome.

<comment><USER11> Before HFT, there was only a few market makers, which meant the bid-ask was high (if you wanted to buy or sell right now, you'd pay more), liquidity was low (it'd be harder for you to get in or out of a large position and in hard times it would take longer for the market to recover - See 80s crash vs flash crash).

With HFT, there's a lot more competition over the bid ask spread. Trading firms are essentially in an increasingly expensive fight over pennies, which is good for everybody else, since it's cheaper prices, more liquidity, and a more efficient market.

The people it's bad for is the old-school style brokers (which are effectively gone now) and large investmant banks who have a fundamental view on the market (they need to be smarter about executing since the market is more efficient and reacts much more quickly to their buying and selling).

<comment><USER12> Which brings us to the next question: What is the social benefit of a slightly smaller bid-ask spread and a few milliseconds of faster liquidity? And are these benefits worth the massive amount of wealth extraction from the rest of us that HFTers are engaged in?

<comment><USER13> The book "Flash Boys" by Michael Lewis chronicles the rise of HFT, and basically argues that it doesn't really provide that much of a benefit.

[http://www.amazon.com/Flash-Boys-Michael- Lewis/dp/0393244660...](http://www.amazon.com/Flash-Boys-Michael- Lewis/dp/0393244660/)

<comment><USER14> Standard PSA about "Flash Boys". If you are interested in HFT you are better off quite literally not reading that book than reading it. It is very biased and largely inaccurate.

If you want to read narrative non-fiction about HFT, "Dark Pools" by Patterson, which also has its mistakes, is much better.

<comment><USER15> I would also recommend reading "Flash Boys: Not so Fast" ([http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00P0QI2M2](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00P0QI2M2)).

<comment><USER16> Written by a high frequency trader. Are there any third parties that have deeply explored HFT and come out in defense of it?

<comment><USER14> Sure. Vanguard has the widely publicized view that HFT helps to bring down the cost to retail investors for instance

[http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ff8c6486-cb37-11e3-ba95-00144feabd...](http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ff8c6486-cb37-11e3-ba95-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3ReBeAyhg)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Anyone who thinks HFT is something needed should go read Flash Boys. HFT is basically front running with some variations. There is a small amount that is necessary arbitration that will have to be done at some speed, but by and large it is not performing any sort of a service, it is taking advantage of the people trying to buy and trade stock by being a manipulative middle man.

<comment><USER2> There are three sentences in this comment. The first two are wrong, and the third is hard to understand, but if I understand it correctly, it too is false.

1\. _Flash Boys_ has been panned by technical experts and makes very little sense to people with a basic understanding of how the markets work. I can link to technical reviews if you'd like to see them. I'd be interested in _any_ technical reviews of the book that defend it; I haven't seen any. As a fan of Michael Lewis: this book was surprisingly bad.

2\. Front-running is an agency problem. It's what happens when your broker knows you're about to move a lot of stock and, acting on that insider knowledge, jumps in front of your trade. Market-making isn't front running. To make a colorable argument that HFTs are frunt-runners, describe a hypothetical sequence of trades in which that happens ("BOB BUY 10 @ $10, CAROL SELL 10 @ $10.01, &c"). If HN history is any guide, that exercise will quickly deflate the notion that there's front-running (or even any unfairness) happening.

3\. HFTs were preceded in the markets by the human specialist system, in which people deliberately increased the spreads to scalp money from trades. HFTs fight over pennies. Human specialists rigged the stock markets so that every share included a premium denominated in dimes and quarters paid directly to the specialists.

<comment><USER16> Nothing in this comment contradicts or disproves that front running can and is happening. Flash Boys described a large order going to an exchange and HFT firms seeing that, buying stocks on other exchanges before the real purchaser, and selling them back to the real purchaser after the first exchange they get to can't fill their large order. HFT firms know there will be buy orders at the other exchanges and they run out in front of those buy orders to become a middle man. That is the very definition of front running and it was obviously happening. Do you have information that directly contradicts this?

<comment><USER2> First, that's not the definition of front running, and second, the expectation that a large order can trade atomically has never been valid, and, if you consider the computer science behind it, _can 't_ be valid.

<comment><USER16> If that isn't front running, then what is? And if you wouldn't call that front running, what would you call it? You haven't offered anything to back up any of what you've said.

All I'm saying is that sub-millisecond HFT is only useful to the people doing it and no one else. People defending HFT as being necessary and helpful is ridiculous. Even an exchange where orders go in over the course of a second, are matched up within the exchange, then traded, would not offer latency to a person, but would offer everyone a chance to sync with the exchange cycle and submit their orders with enough time to be matched. If all the exchanges someone was trying to use worked this way it would offer no disadvantage to a human trader, but would make the HFT arbitrage much less lucrative.

<comment><USER2> Like I said upthread: front-running happens when a broker takes an order for a client and, before submitting it to the market, trades against that order. Front-running is an agency problem.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Study finds we think better on our feet, literally - <AUTHOR> http://phys.org/news/2015-04-feet-literally.html <comment><USER3> > Engagement was measured by on-task behaviors such as answering a question, > raising a hand or participating in active discussion and off-task behaviors > like talking out of turn.

Funny, these are pretty much the tasks I prefer to do while standing. I love to get my inbox to zero in the morning while dancing from one leg to the other.

When I need THINK, however, I'll lower my desk and sit down in my comfy chair, put on heavy headphones (even when I'm alone), and disconnect from the world. I'd love to see whether these children would do better at 4-hour exams with a standing-biased desk, as well.

<comment><USER4> It seems some people can't think unless they can also fidget. Fidgeting is something that's normally punished in classrooms as disruptive (and it sometimes is) rather than tolerated as needed for some people, or better diverted into discrete non-distracting fidgeting.

I tend to think the "different learning styles" stuff is mostly not right (people might prefer visual over text but when you test them after different styles the results don't show any significant differences) but this - <USER2> some people to fidget - seems to be getting some evidence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I hope people don't oversimplify the conclusions here. One notable thing is that students weren't forced to stand. Instead they were provided with a tall desk/stool combo that facilitated standing while allowing for sitting.

<comment><USER6> What makes the title completely wrong. Study does not find we think better on feet. It finds we think better when we are allowed to sit, or stay on feet, as pleases us.

And by "us" on the above paragraph, read young children. I'd bet it extends to adults, but the study actually didn't find anything about us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> When I have phone interviews, I tend to stand because I can sort of `run through my ideas`.

<comment><USER8> I guess I'm the weird one, I just lay in bed it's just comfortable and relaxing. I don't want to go across as nervous via phone and plus it calm me down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Sponsored by the manufacturers of standing desks.

<comment><USER10> The closest I could find to support your assertion is

 _Lessons learned from his research in this area led to creation of Stand2Learn, an offshoot company of a faculty-led startup that manufactures a classroom version of the stand-biased desk._

I have been using a motorized adjustable height desk at work for close to 8 months now. I use it in the standing position almost the entire work day, every day. Anecdotally, I do not buy that it makes any difference to my thinking ability. I find it is better for my general physical well-being.</comment></comment>


I survived rapture 2011...Did you? - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/pages/I-survived-rapture-2011/210588752315149

<comment><USER2> ...maybe it's because we're all sinners and god decided not to take anyone.</comment>


An OpenStack Crime Story solved by tcpdump, sysdig, and iostat - <AUTHOR> http://draios.com/openstack-crime-story/

<comment><USER2> Excitability aside, I agree it is thoroughly negligent of Ubuntu (and Debian?) to ship with vhost-net disabled. This has been on in the EL/Fedora distros since the feature was added.

This makes me wonder how much Ubuntu is actually running cloud deployments. If it was so popular, surely someone would have hit this before.

It also makes me wonder what other basic fundamentals are completely backwards on this truly mediocre distro.

Anyway, you've solved this problem for yourself, log a bug and get this fixed for everyone.</comment>


Venus Spinning Slower Than Thought - <AUTHOR> http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/02/120214-venus-planets-slower-spin-esa-space-science/

<comment><USER2> So how do they know it's slowing down and not a mistake in measurement?

</comment><comment><USER2> That slow rotation rate has always bothered me. Will be need a way to speed it up when we terraform it? Or is there a way to live with nearly year long days?

</comment><comment><USER3> What's speed of Thought?</comment>


Understanding Comics (free Sample) by Scott McCloud. Must Read for UI Designers - <AUTHOR> https://www.nonforum.com/?nfid=9174 <comment><USER2> The article is behind a login to a private forum - but I can imagine what the discussion might be like.

I have been recommending this book for web design professionals for years. Understanding that comics (in the BIG view, as McCloud has describes it) have something to teach in regards to communication of ideas in a visual medium, is "Understanding Comics" big contribution.

UX ideas are hard to describe in static wireframe layouts. Comics provide suggestions for a visual non-text language to communicate these designs.

"Understanding Comics" \- yes. Web designers, UX designers, and others should take the time to read through it.</comment>


Australia Bans Cash for All Purchases Over $7,500 (Jul 2019) - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/australia-bans-cash-for-all-purchases-over-7-500-start-1825946888 <comment><USER2> The war on cash marches on. The limit will get lower and lower and eventually individuals will have no right to trade or enter into transactions as individuals. You'll always have to use a third party institution to pay for things. Paying yourself will be a crime and transactions will be at their whim. All economic activity will be surveilled and stored.

</comment><comment><USER3> Original post on this topic: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17043340](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17043340)

</comment><comment><USER4> Thus encouraging the black market economy to transition to cryptocurrency even faster.

</comment><comment><USER5> They have similar limits in Europe already. Is this also the case in the US?

<comment><USER6> Technically in the US any transaction over $10,000 is supposed to be reported to the IRS ([https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs- pdf/f8300.pdf](https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f8300.pdf)), but I'm not sure how strict enforcement is on that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Curious. By "cash" do they mean only actual stacks of bills or all forms of "paper" payment like checks and cashier's checks too? Maybe not since those require a bank account and are traceable?

<comment><USER8> The article says checks are allowed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> so... use bitcoins!</comment>


List of Guantanamo Bay detainees accused of possessing Casio watches - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Guantanamo_Bay_detainees_accused_of_possessing_Casio_watches <comment><USER2> It's the #22 best selling watch on Amazon.

[http://www.amazon.com/Casio-F91W-1-Classic-Black- Digital/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Casio-F91W-1-Classic-Black- Digital/dp/B000GAWSDG)

</comment><comment><USER3> I clicked through to the wikipedia entry for the first 10 detainees, in no case is possession of this particular model of Casio watch the only or even primary point of evidence in support of their detention. Some choice bits from various entries for people on this list:

 _The detainee met with and received money from Usama Bin Laden.

The detainee fought on the front lines for approximately nine months and fired his weapon at coalition forces.

Detainee stated he offered to help the Taliban.

The detainee resided in Taliban safehouses during his travel to and within Afghanistan._

This is certainly a curious thing, but without further info and context I have no basis to make a judgment one way or the other whether possession of this particular model of watch while in Afghanistan/Pakistan is sufficiently unusual to be used as a point of evidence in proving a close affiliation with al qaeda/the taliban. Unfortunately, this wiki page does absolutely nothing to further that investigation, other than to highlight something seemingly odd.

<comment><USER4> _point of evidence_

No, those are _unsubstantiated claims_ , not evidence. The people who made those claims were compensated for 88% of detainees.

How many people, for money, would claim that you, InclinedPlane, met with and received money from Usama Bin Laden? It only would take one.

If there's evidence, let's have trials.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The list is surprisingly long. Obviously detaining someone simply because they wear the cheapest mass-market watch out there is ridiculous, but could it be statistically unusual?

</comment><comment><USER6> It's a kiss-simple, cheap, innocuous (until recently) timing, team coordination, and secondary intelligence gathering mechanism (via time-indexed observation logs of potential target activities).

These models are probably available for cash (at or below cost) through a plethora of street-side vendors, pawn shops, and cheap electronics retailers in any metropolitan area.

In principle, this is no different than "burner" cell phones historically used by drug dealers (and featured prominently in season 3 of The Wire).

I can envision more well-funded groups using Flip cameras.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think I have some family members that should go to Guantanamo then.

Also, almost any watch or clock could be modified to become a timing mechanism for an explosive device, this one really is no exception.

</comment><comment><USER8> Dammit - I was thinking of buying these!

Muddy application of Bayes' rule here: From what I understand, they (with a capital T) determined P(watch | terrorist) to be a high probability; however, this doesn't necessarily mean that P(terrorist | watch) is also high.

</comment><comment><USER9> What's next - drive an Isuzu?</comment>


Supertux on X11(unity7) vs. Mir(unity8) - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVhlunj1Evk <comment><USER2> It doesn't really seem like a decent comparison when you look at the comments and read that he used two different graphics drivers for the comparison. Proprietary for the first demo, open source nouveau for the second (which I suppose is more impressive considering their differences, but anyway). Anyone know why that is?

<comment><AUTHOR> \+ 2 recorders.

X11 SimpleScreenRecorder

Mir mirscreencast | ffmpeg

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This would be more interesting if Mir was being compared to Wayland.</comment>


How Blockchain Could Kill Both Cable and Netflix - <AUTHOR> https://venturebeat.com/2018/01/28/how-blockchain-could-kill-both-cable-and-netflix/ <comment><USER2> This is one of the dumbest articles I've read in a long time.

> Content creators could create shows and make them available over a > decentralized platform instantly – no need to go pitch a studio or try to > get Netflix to put you on their system. No more gatekeepers that have to > approve your content.

When you go to a network, or Amazon, or Netflix, part of what you get is distribution. But that's not what you go to them for. You go to them for _MONEY_ , since producing high-end media content is _expensive_. And in exchange for their money, you agree to only distribute that content on their network.

But without the money to produce the content, the rest is meaningless.

<comment><USER3> in 2007ish, there was lots of new content creators coming on the scene, but often producing 8 minute episodes.

I found them quiet enjoyable, like 'the guild', but a lot of people struggle with the idea of watching something so short. I had to twist arms to get people to watch it. once they did, they enjoyed it a lot, but were still unwilling to watch content of that length. unfortunately, I think short works much better for independent content producers.

<comment><USER2> > unfortunately, I think short works much better for independent content > producers

I agree, that size video is great for independent producers. But there will always be demand for large spectacle productions, and for the foreseeable future, those will cost large amounts of money. Simpler distribution won't—can't—help with that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's no how there. Just a bunch of hand-wavy stuff. They talk about the freedom of content providers to go around Netflix and Amazon, but in a lot of cases those companies provide money to content creators to produce the shows, not just distribution to customers. They make it sound as though you can crowd source production costs after the fact using tokens. Good luck with that.

Reminds me of the old Slashdot meme: 1) Blockchain 2) ??? 3) Profit!

<comment><USER5> You've revealed the Blockchain gnomes' secret business plan!

I'm guessing Netflix will be fine, especially if the rumors of them being bought out by Apple are true.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> How clickbait could kill both discourse and logic.

It seems like people randomly generate an article title from buzzword soup, write it up and call it a day.

What a time to be alive.

</comment><comment><USER7> Did they just invent BitTorrent?

It doesn't have blockchain to be precise, which won't hurt IMO because discovery becomes more problematic with time. But the rest of stuff is here.

<comment><USER3> i guess other peer to peer networks, you can always bring a person to court over sharing something. Whereas blockchain it can be more anonymous and content can be split on many machines?

Let me know if i am thinking of this right. i think we all could use a little more clarification on how this changes things over existing techs

<comment><USER7> Whereas with blockchain you can bring everybody to court because they all share the same infringing material.

There was a long discusion about what happens when blockchain contains some piece of information That Is Forbidden To Possess. You could probably claim you didn't have the intent. But with Pirate Blockchain you sure do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How does content distribution in any way relate to blockchains? If there's a point here, I seem to be missing it entirely.

<comment><USER9> It's literally just peer to peer networking and computation, but paying people to participate by programmatically doling out crypto currency to people who are contributing.

This isn't bittorrent. It's not blockchain. It's kind of a weird hybrid of the two.

It's actually a really brilliant idea, if they pull it off correctly.

The article is completely written like shit, though.

Check out:

[https://livepeer.org/](https://livepeer.org/)

[https://viuly.com/](https://viuly.com/)

<comment><USER10> Someone needs to product the content it doesn't materializes out of the ether.

The distribution itself is not a problem the blockchain can solve or should solve it just adds an unnecessary cost on top of other method of distribution.

<comment><USER9> You're right. It would probably make more sense to just have a peer to peer storage and computation network with a bidder/buyer market (which could accept everything from USD to any random crypto-currency). There's no good reason to have the system built on a blockchain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why would I run a node on something like this? What's the incentive?

It breaks down 4 benefits:

Free up content creators. Sure, or they could, you know, throw it up on youtube, twitch, vimeo, or any other centralized app.

New channels. This is just shit writing. This is 90% the same thing as bullet 1.

Advertising and Free Content. Again, see all the other centralized apps. Also, there would 100% need to be a middle man. Thats what a decentralized block chain is. Hosting a blockchain has costs. Especially something as space consuming as video hosting.

Paid Content. Still a problem already solved by not being on a decentralized application. I can't wrap my head around why someone wouldn't just host their own content if they have anywhere near enough money to produce content good enough to charge for.

</comment><comment><USER12> Napster, plus a way to monetize the content? That's how I read the beginner doc on the LivePeer site this article links to.

"Livepeer's peer-to-peer network lets you stream what you want, when you want, without a single point of failure or censorship."

Yeah, that's just plain ol' P2P. Blockchain is distributing a public list of transactions via P2P. Livepeer is using a blockchain to record streaming transactions, and pay the node responsible for streaming.

</comment><comment><USER13> I fail to see what advantage this holds over YouTube.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm of the opinion that as long as youtube doesn't make profit then anything is possible.

</comment><comment><USER15> I took time to write a well-researched response to this. [https://medium.com/@fzero/blockchain- blockchain-6c5d60923050](https://medium.com/@fzero/blockchain- blockchain-6c5d60923050)

</comment><comment><USER16> How to make coffee with blockchain

</comment><comment><USER17> -_- what a silly article.</comment>


Show HN: Robinhood users vs. the S&P 500 - <AUTHOR> https://www.quiverquant.com/sources/robinhood <comment><AUTHOR> I made this dashboard using data from RobinTrack to create a hypothetical portfolio based on Robinhood user holding data, and compare its performance to a standard S&P 500 market index.

I found that Robinhood users underperformed the market by an average of 4% over the last year, however this is partially due to lower volatility in their investments.

Let me know if you have any suggestions on how to improve this data!

</comment><comment><USER2> I think the low cost stocks like F(ford)/ Go pro are given to the users free via Robin hood referral? if that's the case, then its not something they bought it but only _got_ it, so cant derive at an investing pattern with it?

</comment><comment><USER3> It would be interesting to be able to see the historical weight for each sector.

<comment><USER4> You can use ETFs tracking the S&P 500 to get such historical weights. [https://claisne.io/exploring-sp](https://claisne.io/exploring-sp)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is this including options trading?</comment>


U.S. busts Tor drug market, arrests eight - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/17/us-usa-drugs-internet-idUSBRE83G01Q20120417

<comment><USER2> That's a shame. These guys' lives are going to be seriously messed up by this, and from the drug list, it looks like they were selling fairly ethical stuff; according to the article, they sold "LSD, ecstasy, fentanyl, mescaline ketamine, DMT and high-end marijuana".

<comment><USER3> Ecstasy is horribly nasty stuff. People rarely OD, but it can vary quickly do significant and permanent brain damage with heavy use. The real problem is when the symptoms show up they are basically permanent. Honestly, prolonged heroin use is significantly less harmful, the only good thing about ecstasy is the unpleasant side effects and fairly long high limit how much people take.

<comment><USER4> There are two major misconceptions around MDMA, both funded by flawed government studies. The first misconception is that MDMA causes "holes in your brain" but this study was debunked. The original claim was based on the notion that MDMA "destroys up to 80% of your serotonin neurotransmitters irreversibly." This was shown to not be true for two reasons: a much larger study (the largest study ever conducted on MDMA use) showed that it's only possible for MDMA to affect up to 5% of your serotonin levels, and it's reversible after a period of weeks or months of nonuse.

The second major misconception is that MDMA causes Parkinson's. The original study was retracted because the drug manufacturer mislabeled the MDMA bottle as Methamphetamine, a completely different drug. They gave the Methamphetamine to monkeys instead of MDMA.

I would recommend checking this out: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjvNCijeYlI>

Skip to part 3 if you're wanting to get to the scientific studies.

<comment><USER3> I gave a little more detail here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3850923> But, while the holes in the brain and Parkinson's where not accurate there is significant evidence that MDMA causes issues and it's not old enough for a lot of long term issues to show up.

PS: My mother has a PHD in neurology with a focus on brain development and MDMA is the drug she was most frightened of. Not that that actually means much in the grand scheme of things, but she has done a lot more literature review of MDMA than I or I suspect anyone on HN has done.

<comment><USER4> Nobody knows what happens to long term chronic users of MDMA. But we do know that the propaganda that was spread by US government funded studies has been debunked. Scare tactics should be treated with strong skepticism. Before club users got their hands on it and it got banned in 1985 (against a federal judge's recommendation nonetheless), MDMA was a perfectly acceptable drug used by monks, priests and therapists for couples therapy.

Edit: can you please link up the studies you're referring to?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Wired Article: [http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/04/online-drug- market-...](http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/04/online-drug-market- takedown/)

Cali DA press release: <http://www.justice.gov/usao/cac/Pressroom/2012/045.html>

Full indictment (66 pg. pdf): [http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2012/04/WILLEM...](http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2012/04/WILLEMSIndictment- FILED.045.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER5> 5,200 orders valued, in total, at $1M. Over a ~2 year period. That's it? Hardly seems like much of a story. Particularly since Tor is of limited use when your system depends on electronic payment systems.

<comment><USER6> I believe they were using bitcoins to anonymize some transactions.

The hardest thing for a regular consumer I would think would be finding a drop point. Drugs and things sent through the mail would be fairly easy to track to a consumer who could then be charged for possession.

<comment><USER7> > _Drugs and things sent through the mail would be fairly easy to track to a > consumer_

Yeah, how?

<comment><USER8> Assuming they found them in the mail during transit using xray or some other method since they were in canada, shipping to US goes through customs which has special rules allowing that, then they can look at who is receiving the package and then they get them to squeal on who the dealer was.

<comment><USER7> I don't think they x-ray every single package, that's just impossible, and who would look at all the x-rays.

So even if they do it,

1) your chances of getting caught are extremely low

2) i don't think you're liable for receiving a package (though you may be for keeping and not reporting it).

<comment><USER8> Yea it's certainly a complicated situation for both you and the police to figure out. The problem is I don't think I'd trust them to not try to strong arm you into confessing and saying who it was, assuming you did order them even if they couldn't prove it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm curious how they attacked this network -- I'd assume the payment side is still the easiest, and they could look for some patterns and then set up physical surveillance at WU or other locations to catch cash transactions.

<comment><USER10> > accepting payment through PayPal

Uh. How did they expect to remain anonymous with a PayPal account?

<comment><USER11> hahaha...seriously? with PayPal? i suppose it could (maybe) be done with prepaid credit cards, but still.

<comment><USER9> Use forged documents for everything (including your bank accounts), and keep really small balances. Maybe also do business accounts, ideally also with forged info (particularly for US businesses, people don't check the documents very well). I assume PayPal does lazy checking, and will not check a low balance account as much.

Linkability is the real enemy of anonymity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If these guys were using e-gold or some other alternative payment system, the Feds would raid the currency operator's offices as well and seize servers (as they have done in the past). Not so with PayPal and Western Union (I'm not disagreeing with the lack of such action).

</comment><comment><USER13> When I saw the title, I immediately assumed it was Silk Road. _That_ would have surprised me, as the operators have no part in the actual business, and all trades are conducted with bitcoins. If Silk Road went down, _that_ would be news, as they really embrace strong crypto and opsec.

</comment><comment><USER14> 8x life in prison for $1M in drug trafficking?

<comment><USER15> Costing society probably $100K/yr/each to imprison them.

<comment><USER16> Nope. It costs close to $30K/year to imprison somebody in the US. So make that $250K/year to imprison this sorry bunch.

<comment><USER17> In California it was $50,000 for the 08-09 year. But if you read the footnote it states "since 2000-01, the average annual cost has increased by about $19,500." Almost a $20 thousand increase in 8 years, I'd hate to see what it is now or worse in another 7 years.

We have to add in the cost of Correctional Officer salaries and the Wardens who can easily make over $220,000 a year.

[http://www.lao.ca.gov/laoapp/laomenus/sections/crim_justice/...](http://www.lao.ca.gov/laoapp/laomenus/sections/crim_justice/6_cj_inmatecost.aspx?catid=3)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> So were they actually selling the drugs or were they just operating a marketplace similar to Silk Road?

Also, why the hell would they use PayPal?! At least SR uses bitcoins.

</comment><comment><USER19> Reuters.com pulled it off.

</comment><comment><USER20> Web page is dead.

Was this silk road? I've been meaning to scrape prices from there as a pet economics project.

<comment><USER4> No, the project was called The Farmer's Market. While it operated on Tor, they accepted payments over PayPal which completely breaks the anonymity chain. Silk Road is still operational and uses other security mechanisms (in addition to a decentralized, digital anonymous currency) to further anonymize transactions, running all payments through a tumbler.

<comment><USER20> Someone should write up a tour guide to the deep dark web.

I doubly wish I was indexing silkroad's prices, so we could see the price impact this event has.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Why on earth would an online drug marketplace use traceable currency? Silk road got it right using BC.

</comment><comment><USER22> Looks like Hushmail was their weak point. Feds got court order from Canada based on treaty and it flowed from there.

But yeah, between advertising, shipping, getting paid and moving money around it's hard to stay anon .

<comment><USER23> I never understand why people have such a fundamentally difficult time grasping the concept of plaintext and/or subpoenas. If someone knows enough to trade drugs on Tor, they definitely should be using strong encryption on anything and everything pertaining to it, including email.

Month after month handfuls of new stories come out about someone outed and/or owned by emails or other plaintext communication that was not encrypted or cryptographically signed. You'd think it'd sink through after a while.

You have no reasonable expectation of security for anything that is not fully encrypted with vetted, real-world strong encryption. While you may _want_ something to stay under wraps, you're just leaving it there for the taking unless it is stored on permanent storage only in encrypted form.

<comment><USER7> My theory is that only idiots get caught. If you read the article, it was a tiny operation considering the global illegal drug market. They only sold $1M worth of drugs in three years, that's silly.

They didn't catch some big fish criminals, they caught some idiot kids who thought they could easily make money.

<comment><USER24> "My theory is that only idiots get caught"

No, only idiots do this to begin with.

<comment><USER25> As much as I agree, do you realize how big the active drug trade is? There are a lot of very smart people out there.

<comment><USER26> It's about half the size of the _legal_ (pharmaceutical) drug trade, which is big.

Taking out a group with $1 million revenue is like taking out a local pharmacy.

<comment><USER23> Maybe there's value in the fact that this was an Onion service that was targeted specifically -- are the Feds trying to send a message about Tor? Was this whole operation hinged on the PR or was there some strategic value to taking out the group (assuming your analogy to a local pharmacy holds true, which I don't necessarily believe)? Perhaps the Feds were scared _because_ Tor was involved and wanted to strike before the defendants wised up and went totally dark with more anonymous payment schemes (anyone using PayPal obviously has no reasonable expectation of anonymity), knowing that PayPal et al only keep records so long?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> No way, "high-end marijuana". Crazy. Extremely dangerous!

<comment><USER28> It's dangerous to compete with state-protected real drug cartels.

In all seriousness... does anyone think the present-day prohibition racket isn't just as corrupt as what was going on in the 1920s? Drug Enforcement Agency... who do you think they're enforcing for?

It's almost impossible that it wouldn't be that corrupt. There is just _too much freaking money_ involved, the stakes too high, for massive numbers of people to _not_ be on the take.

<comment><USER29> Seriously. Why don't you just wake up and get a grip.

The majority of the countries on this planet have similar drug policies to the US. They aren't all corrupt and in many countries the policies are quite effective. So to rant on like a crazy person about corruption and conspiracies just makes you sound unstable. There are many practical areas that the US can focus on like better border controls rather than opening up the can of worms that is legalising all drugs.

<comment><USER18> There are quite a few studies that show the correlation between legalizing drugs and domestic crime - Portugal being one of the most cited - and it's been shown that legalizing drugs actually decreases crime. We should be sending drug addicts to rehabilitation centers... Not prison, where drugs are rampant and only further increases the drug addicts dependence on narcotics.

<comment><USER30> Nitpick: Portugal didn't legalized drugs; "we" just decriminalized the possession of small quantities. It's still a crime to grow, cook, distribute and sell them.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Missing Introduction to React - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/javascript-scene/the-missing-introduction-to-react-62837cb2fd76 <comment><USER2> I've been using Angular 1.x for a private project for a while and have been mostly happy (apart from the performance). It basically has everything I need.

I laughed a bit when I read this last part: "I recommend paring React with Redux, Redux-Saga and RITEway. I recommend pairing Redux with Autodux and Immer. For complex state transitions, check out Redux-DSM."

That's a whole lot of new libraries to pair and learn, too.

<comment><USER3> Redux adds a ton of mental overhead and is unnecessary on most projects. I've literally never had to use it, except to remove buggy redux code when vanilla React with props does the job better.

Angular 1 was great, and if you like that style of framework, Vue would be more your speed than React, as it's semantics were originally based on Angular 1</comment></comment>