High Frequency Trading and Finance's Race to Irrelevance - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/06/high-frequency-trading-and-finances-race-to-irrelevance/ <comment><USER2> I want to shed some light on this topic. As a former HFT quant, I find the general "Main Street" sentiment toward the profession to be misguided.

1\. HFT does NOT take anything from most investors most of the time. Most investors trade on a much longer investment horizon than any HFT firm. If you are a normal investor, you can lump up most of HFTs into the same bucket as the exchange itself. Most of them engage in some combinations of (i) pure arbitrage (ii) very short-termed statistical arbitrage (iii) market-making based on (i) and (ii). None of this is really that relevant to most investors. The only time HFTs can screw over a lot of investors is when their software goes awry. But this is a risk that any computerized system has, high frequency or not. If there is a major bug in Chicago Mercantile Exchange's matching engines, that would be a total disaster.

2\. HFT firms do have huge execution risks: if you are making a two-sided market, there is a chance you can get "swept", meaning when the value of the underlying moves faster than you can react, you get filled on one side of the order without a realistic chance of hedging for a profit. HFT firms do a ton of research into estimating their execution risks. (edit: This point is often glossed over, making HFTs look like this evil superpower group of nerds exploiting other investors. That's not the case)

3\. Finally, most HFT traders don't go into the profession solely for the money, just like most people do not apply for YC solely for their passion. Most of my former coworkers weren't that greedy and led pretty modest lives despite making hundreds of thousands of dollars. For them, high frequency trading had a locally optimal balance of tackling intellectually challenging problems while getting paid handsomely.

I won't say HFT is the most valuable thing that its practitioners can be doing. I think the (trading) world would operate just fine without all these micro-second level transactions. But they are NOT the next subprime mortgage, and I just hope folks stop commenting on stuff they have no clue about.

<comment><USER3> If you step back for a second. You say: " HFT does NOT take anything from most investors most of the time."

Yet the HFT people are making tons of money. Where is it ultimately coming from?

<comment><USER4> "tons of money" is also relative. HFT firms make way less money than the ibanks that act as middle men to most investors and the exchanges.

Most of the money in HFT actually comes from those previously more rapacious middlemen's bonus.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > What Lewis's book demonstrated to me isn't just how "bad" HFTs are per se, > but rather, what happens when finance keeps walking down the path it seems > to be set on — a path that involves abstracting itself from the creation of > real-world value. The final destination? It will enter a world entirely of > its own — a world in which it is fighting to capture value that is > completely independent of whether any is created in the first place.

I'd say the financial markets have been there for 6-8 years already.

<comment><USER6> Nothing will change, since it's turtles all the way down.

The first person to discount a bill at the very first bank was "abstracting itself from the creation of real-world value".

Later, I'm sure someone said the _exact same sentence_ that you just did when the first exchange traded fund (ETF) was created. I know for a fact it was said throughout the 90s in relation to derivatives, etc.

In the future, HFT as it exists today will be a quaint feature of a bygone era that will be referenced to illustrate the problems with whatever new practice has superseded it.

What _does_ matter is where you are on the spectrum and how fragile that makes you, but there is no natural law limiting how abstracted you can be and how fragile you can be. By some relative measures we're impossibly abstracted and fragile, but by other relative measures (as yet unknown) we're adorably simple.

<comment><USER7> I thought EFTs were only possible due to HFT, which seemed like one of the greatest benefits to retail investors. A little bit of arbitrage tax is no where near as bad as sales loads and management fees.

<comment><USER8> The only problem is that arbitrage tax is hard to measure, while sales loads and management fees are predictable values. But I agree with your point overall.

Getting pennies skimmed off of my trades is not nearly as big a deal as a 0.1% yearly recurring fee on say... a $100,000 retirement account. (ie: $100 / year). Those tiny percentages add up to a huge amount of money in the long run.

I've heard of reports of 1.5% or even higher management fees (or ~$1,500+ / year in this example)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> HFT provides liquidity, and extracts a price for providing that value.

HFT seems like stealing only because they are using advanced technology methods to make money, whereas in the 1980s and before market makers routinely manipulated the spread and pocketed likely a similar percent of trading profits.

At least the online brokerages and pioneers of HFT broke down the antiquated 1/8 stock price ticks and lowered the spread and per share transaction costs.

<comment><USER10> Ugh. The memes. HFT is not "liquidity". The purpose of the "speed" is to elicit information.

<comment><USER11> This comment isn't even wrong.

<comment><USER10> Thanks for the clarification. /S

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I started reading the Cringley book on IBM. It's a captivating and maddening read. By this story IBM management, trying to satisfy the desires of shareholders looking for earnings growth, is destroying the company.

HBS is graduating lots of portfolio managers and analysts who contribute to this phenomenon. Not so many HBS grads in HFT, based on the folks I know in the industry.

HFTs certainly aren't driving major global corporations into the ground by pushing for stupid forms of management like share buybacks, "outsourcing" core competencies, and the like.

I give this guy credit for referencing these impacts. I don't think HFT is really part of that trend at all. HFT is actually pretty benign when you dig into the details. Sure, they scalp pennies here and there, and it adds up. But the competitive pressures on technology force efficiencies to a point, which is good for the market.

<comment><USER13> I agree . I am far from an expert but I did not understand the connection between HFT and companies making bad long term decisions for short term. He said himeself that HFT firms don't care about the actual companies anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> > it allowed the high frequency traders to peek at the ballots others were > sending in to the newspaper before they arrived, in turn giving them the > ability to cast their votes using information not yet available to the rest > of the market.

From what I gathered from Lewis's book, the crux of the problem is that people were doing their trades in multiple exchanges and that HFTs were simply noting trades in the fastest exchanges to reach (like BATS) and using that information in exchanges that were farther away.

To take his analogy, it would be like using the results published in another newspaper the day before to determine your ballot choice.

</comment><comment><USER15> There is a very deep misunderstanding of the purpose of stock trading. Somehow almost everybody assumes that the very purpose of stock investment is to time the market. But no, timing the market is only a mechanism of the market. Those who successfully time the market are more a part of the market mechanism rather than the customers/end users of the market.

The only real purpose of financial markets is risk management. Any human society (and non-human societies also) has to risk some capital to gain more capital/value. The purpose of stocks and financial markets in general is to diversify the risk, while still funding oportunities and it's the only proven mechanism by which a large portion of the population can participate in this wealth creation.

The value of risk management is hard to fathom. But if you are a programmer, you might want to try and simulate "gambler's ruin" and see what happens with high risk or low risk strategies. In this simple game, computing the right risk management is the difference between stagnation and exponential growth. In a complex economy, this seems also to be true.

</comment><comment><USER16> Summary: investors who focus too much on short-term results are bad for the long-term success of the companies they buy and sell.

High-frequency traders are somewhat similar, in that they don't care enough about the long-term health of the companies they buy and sell. Therefore they are bad.

<comment><USER17> I'll agree with the first premise. But I don't think the 2nd bit follows.

The reason speculation based on short-term results is problematic is that it creates perverse incentive structures that discourage a company's management from thinking too much about the long-term success of the company. But that's only possible because speculators are able to create market demands that punish and reward specific kinds of behavior. But HFT doesn't really create demand; it only responds to it. So the analogy fits in every spot except the only one that matters for the sake of the argument.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Treating HFT as a proxy for 'Finance' is a flawed premise.

Without 'Finance', you would not have: \- Cheap mortgage rates - mainly due to securitization. \- Cheap loan rates - yes, car leasers, I'm looking at you.... \- Rational commodity markets. Think Starbucks, every car/computer made today. \- You get the idea.

Certainly, some aspects of modern markets appear to add little value, but the bulk of 'finance' benefits not only companies but everyday consumers immensely. -

<comment><USER4> Without market makers and other speculative market participants you would not have rational commodity markets or liquid price efficient equities.

HFT versions of those market participants are dramatically more efficient and fair than the participants they are replacing. That efficiency is shared with every other participant.

If you believe in public commodities and equities markets, it is extremely hard to argue against HFT and in favor of pit traders...

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I used to work at Merrill Lynch, I saw what the focus on short term results did and the culture it created. It was almost always about the quarterly results. I once saw an entire team of bond traders fired because their quarterly results weren't up to scratch, only to literally be hired back within days at a much, much higher cost, because the market suddenly turned almost overnight and Merrill Lynch was caught without a bond team in that area and had to frantically scramble to get one at almost any price.

That particular team had been highly profitable, but their last quarterly result were poor. It mattered not that overall they were still vastly ahead in terms of profit for the company. They had a bad quarter and the next was looking poor, so they had to go, in order for the managers to have something to say to their investors.

If the share price dropped a few cents or if the results weren't up to or exceeding market expectations, they would fire a few thousand people. I kid you not, this is how investment bank culture works. You are only as good as your last quarter.

Traders would take very risky positions with huge or unknown long term risks, in order to make short term gains - for which they are richly rewarded. No one cared that this wonderful basket of exotic options was actually full of potential toxic waste, as long as it was printing money right now. By the time it exploded, most of those traders and managers would have made their millions and be retired or working somewhere else.

It was and probably still is this intense focus on the short term that caused ML to very nearly go under and why ML is now called Bank of America ML. I doubt they have learned and the next black swan event is going to take them out, or the one after that.

</comment><comment><USER20> An article written by a journalist, about a book written by a journalist. And neither of them have a clue. Layers upon layers of idiocy.

</comment><comment><USER21> > Now, there are some rockstar CEOs — who oftentimes happen to be founders, > such as Bezos, Steve Jobs, Reid Hastings — who have the ability to resist > the pressure that the markets put on them.

Another possibility the author should consider: there are some CEOs who have the ability to convince human investors that their long-term visions are worthy and deserving of steadfast support.

What the author fails to address is the fact that not every chief executive has a great long-term vision, and not every chief executive is capable of persuading investors that he or she is capable of realizing such a vision. The implied notion that investors are somehow obligated to give the companies they invest in an arbitrarily long period of time in which to execute regardless of evidence of tangible progress is foolish.

</comment><comment><USER22> The Oslo Børs stock exchange in Norway has a fee that will affect unnecessarily high order activity in the stock market, to prevent high freqiency trading. Here's more info:

[http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/b1a73be4-a57b-11e1-a77b-00144...](http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/b1a73be4-a57b-11e1-a77b-00144feabdc0.html)

[http://www.oslobors.no/ob_eng/Oslo-Boers/About-us/Press- room...](http://www.oslobors.no/ob_eng/Oslo-Boers/About-us/Press-room/News- from-Oslo-Boers/Oslo-Boers-to-discourage-excessive-order-activity)

</comment><comment><USER23> Time and time again this discussion is hampered by the term "high frequency trading" which is much too general. An instance of a HFT algorithm behaving poorly should not condemn the practice as a whole.

Saying "HFT is bad, just look at electronic front-running" is like saying "Sorting algorithms are slow, just look at bubble sort".

</comment><comment><USER24> So the problem with traditional buy and hold investing based on fundamentals is that it's very slow. I don't mean slow in terms of latency and distance to servers, I mean that financial returns accumulate slowly. Investing in the market as a whole will return roughly 10%-15% depending on the year. This beats what most individual day traders and money managers can do, but is nothing close to what a well positioned HFT trading firm can make.

"Sophisticated" trading strategies exist because the finance industry has focused itself on one goal to the exclusion of all others: Make as much money as possible. It doesn't matter if it's a zero sum game or if the most fit companies are being selected based on research in a darwinian process. A rational actor is going to chose 30% over 10% every time.

The bottom line is that predicting the success of a given company is hard. Predicting what the other actors in the market are going to do is also difficult, but is much easier by comparison. Asa participant in the market you want to be in Keynes' newspaper contest, not in the business of making broad predictions about the future. As a member of society we'd prefer that capital be allocated to the firms that will use it to our most benefit. I don't think anyone wants to use the law to change the current system so that it is more useful to society. A lot of people are also unhappy with a lot of finance being in its own bubble of "irrelevance". This is a decision that we're all going to have to make about how we want the financial markets to work. Things seem to be working out ok now, in a general sense, so change might be a long time coming.

<comment><USER25> >This beats what most individual day traders and money managers can do, but is nothing close to what a well positioned HFT trading firm can make.

I don't know if this is actually true if you average up all the successes and failures. Probably more like, for every successful [daytrader|money manager|HFT firm] there are 9 that lose money or go bankrupt and nobody ever hears about again or includes in average return calculations.

It's just that the rewards to the few successes are so tantalizing, there's never any shortage of folks jumping into the game trying their hand at it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I really can't take any lessons derived from Lewis's book on HFT to heart, because every HFT friend I talk to (even the ones who are quite objective about its role in the markets) insist that much of the book is simply wrong.

<comment><USER27> Which parts?

<comment><USER4> The major problems with the book fall into 3 major categories:

A) He implies (but never proves) that HFT market makers use low latency connections, to buy shares ahead of other market participants, to sell back to them risk free. This is not how HFT market making works. HFT market makers are pricing on all the exchanges at the same time. So what they are doing is not buying something and selling it back to you risk free, but changing the price of their own offering to reflect new demand.

B) That any of this is secret or requires insider information. It is all available on public websites, including governmental agency ones (for instance all "exotic" order types go through a public approval process). Further, in the book the only proof of ill gotten proprietary information being used for profit was from the supposed "heroes" of the story.

C) That HFT is a large force that abuses it's power to take advantage of buy side participants who have "Main streets" best interest at heart. In fact, HFT firms are the small guys bringing efficiency at the cost of the powerful entrenched buy side middle men.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I see HFT as a form of arbitrage. If you have huge volumes you can make money on FX markets too - but basically you get price convergence. The big players make enough of it to make it worthwhile, but it's really on the fringes.

<comment><USER29> I have never heard of any firm making consistent positive returns on foreign exchange markets, in fact, it is often cited as an example of an efficient market, because it is so unpredictable. Alan Greenspan's autobiography mentions a discussion he had while working at Goldman Sachs, where he asked them how GS was making a consistent profit on FX (because no one else seemed to be able to), and they responded that it was because they got a commission from making the trades on behalf of the customers, but GS never traded FX on its own accounts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> The first part about Keynes is depressing. It presupposes there is only one winner. This is what anti-capitalists want everyone to believe. One winner, everyone else is a loser.

</comment><comment><USER31> HFT is a very small subset of finance. I doubt it will drive the whole industry to irrelevance. It will only drive itself to irrelevance.

</comment><comment><USER32> We still need to stop calling it High Frequency Trading and refer to it by what it is: Digital Front Running.

<comment><USER29> HFT is completely distinct from front-running.[1][2] Front-running means that you (as an investment bank or other trading company) buy and sell stocks according to the orders you have received, but not yet executed from your clients (usually large institutional investors). HFT just means that you are quickly executing trades based on some algorithm(s).

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High- frequency_trading](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-frequency_trading)

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Front_running](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Front_running)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I am so tired of clueless pundits talking about HFT...

</comment><comment><USER34> Three words on this "race to irrelevance": _lead versus leave_.

Our society is in a state of _secessionism_. Much of the escalating economic inequality comes from that impulse. The rich of yesterday (1945-73) saw themselves as _leaders_ of the society. The rich of the new Gilded Age (1974-2014+) have given up and just want to escape it. They want private schools, country clubs, and closed social networks. They don't want to lead the masses, they want to leave them.

Silicon Valley has been making its secessionist impulse visible of late, but HFT and "high finance" show a different secessionist tendency: the desire to get outside of any given industry or company and "float among" them as a financier. The brightest young people are being told not to join the regular economy with the proles, but to become part of an elite system of hedge funds, private equity shops, and overcapitalized "startups" whose products are meaningless other than advertising expenses to get middle-management positions, 10 years earlier than otherwise, for the founders.

The smartest people have given up, sadly, on leading. This makes "leave" the attractive option. If you become a management consultant or investment banker, you don't have to commit to one industry or business. You float around until you make friends who can place you at high levels.

After spending 8 years in a number of places but much of it in "the real economy" I can't say that I blame the leavers. The leavers are now ahead of me, career wise, as venture capitalists and the like; and there isn't much out here in "the rest of the economy" to lead. Perhaps paradoxically, the world ends up being run by leavers, because average people don't want to be led by the highest level of talent; they want leaders they can relate to.

<comment><USER35> You are making some good points here.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why do you want to teach your children / significant other to code? - <AUTHOR> There have been many posts recently on the topic of the best resources for helping children / non-technical significant others to learn programming. I'd like to better understand the motivations behind these posts - are your children asking to learn? Are you trying to set them up for a career? What is your aim? <comment><USER2> Because it's both a tool/method to solve problems with, and a practical expression method for ideas.

I very much doubt they will be programmers, just as I doubt they will be auto mechanic, carpenters, plummer's, welders, etc... But I still teach them those skills as well. I really have no idea what the well settle on being over the course of their lives, but the more exposure to different methods and tools allow them to understand problems in better ways.

Like the saying goes, if the only tool you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail.

</comment><comment><USER3> Programming computers is a significant part of my life. And I'd love to share that with my partner, so that they have some visibility into the thing I do almost every day.</comment>


Show HN: Safely share and compare your Startup Engineer Salary - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN,
This is a mixture between a Show and Ask HN. I really appreciate your time and thoughts on this.
My name is Alexis and I would like to show you something I've been working on on the technical side: It's called Huddle Metrics.
Huddle Metrics is basically a safe place for you to anonymously share and compare sensitive data with your community. Sort of like a very controlled collaborative spreadsheet, really. Or a survey. But hopefully better.
Think engineering salary and your equity in the company.
Information that you track yourself but that's too taboo to share. If a pool of the data existed, however, it would be beneficial to you contributing because you would get to see what's market.
After running a pilot Huddle throughout this year with a bunch of startups, my friend Adrian and I created a system that allows you to create any sort of Huddle or "Data Community" for different topics.
For demo-purposes I've created a Huddle around Startup Engineer Salaries because I've seen this discussion come up a bunch of times and I'm an engineer myself.
To get an idea please check out http://demo.huddlemetrics.com/start/1040592633 (This is super raw and imperfect but I feel it works well enough)
To the non-engineering public here at HN: I'd love to open the discussion further than the demo and hear what you think would be other immensely valuable metrics to share and compare with the HN community.
Again, thank you for your time and consideration and please comment away with ideas, criticism and metrics you would like to see shared!
With best wishes,
Alexis <comment><USER2> The first thing I see is that in the bar chart, you've sorted the salaries ASCIIbetically. This is a problem^1, as this is not what users expect.

I can't exactly put my finger on it, but I'm finding the filtering confusing. Perhaps because I can't see all the data at first, I'm not sure what I expect to see after filtering.

[1] [http://blog.codinghorror.com/sorting-for-humans-natural- sort...](http://blog.codinghorror.com/sorting-for-humans-natural-sort-order/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Gotcha, on load, the table is sorted by columns[0] but it should sort salaries by numerical value when you click on that columns' header and not ASCII (Thank you for the link!)

On the landing-page you can't see the pagination but if you click through to the demo that's there and maybe that way less confusing. I get it though. The filtering isn't perfect yet and it's good to hear what you're struggling with to understand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looks great! Can I sign up on this demo site and get a working account? Or is it for businesses only?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good questions. This is really just a demo, but if there is more interest I'll happily create a production version!

But it's definitely not just for businesses. You could create a Huddle around pretty much any interesting topic/metric.

What would be an important metric that matters to you?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Look cool</comment>


How to make wealth (2004) - <AUTHOR> http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html#f5n <comment><USER2> > Suppose you own a beat-up old car. Instead of sitting on your butt next > summer, you could spend the time restoring your car to pristine condition. > In doing so you create wealth. The world is-- and you specifically are-- one > pristine old car the richer. And not just in some metaphorical way. If you > sell your car, you'll get more for it.

Wow. I know it sounds obvious, but for some reason this was an epiphany for me. If I just... do something, I can create value where there was none before. Suddenly it seems like there's infinite opportunities.

<comment><USER3> The flip side of the coin is that, if we use that definition of wealth, then that means wealth is also subject to entropy. A car that you restore to pristine condition will rust and decay over time, even if you don't drive it. It will lose its value.

So it seems like becoming wealthy isn't just a matter of generating value, but rather generating it faster than it disappears.

<comment><USER4> Well, wealth is subject to entropy. We usualy call it "expenses".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Good essay. Though I'd err new developers to not be so easily persuaded by 'the multiplier' effect. In a company your $80K job is a specialist role. One where you focus and get good at one thing. All the million other things are taken care for you, because you weren't recruited for those roles. Just your one.

Working on your own product or in a startup is a comparatively generalist role. Or should I say multiple specialist role as you need to be good at a lot of different things that are outside of, and dare i say sometimes more important than, technology.

Believing that your 'working harder' is making more progress isn't necessarily true. Does that feature you're building excite your customers as it does you? Working for a month at 3x capacity on something that no one wants equates to zero value.

<comment><USER6> There are two things at play here. One is that not everyone is cut out to be a multi-specialist or a startup founder. Another is that there are lots of people who are, but they don't think they are capable of it.

The only way you can find out if this type of startup life is for you is by trying it. The first type will try and fail, but the second type will succeed if only they try.

<comment><USER7> Actually, it's worse than that. There are so many factors beyond your control, you could try like nine or ten times before you found out whether you are cut out for it or not. Not saying people shouldn't try, just that it's not as simple as only trying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is one of those articles I keep referring to my friends although it is almost 10 years old. It opened my eyes on how the world works, I think I learned more from it about wealth than from my entire college education (and I majored in economics).

<comment><USER9> Yes, it had lot of eye openers. I enjoyed it but it's definitely not more valuable to me than a college degree.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Cool essay, but :

> Many employees would work harder if they could get paid for it.

is just wrong. See <http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html>

<comment><USER11> No its very true.

Money remains a big motivation factor for those who don't have it.

In general people don't get motivated by what they already have.

<comment><USER12> Motivation/Money is a logarithmic curve.

<comment><USER13> The original statement is thus valid.

<comment><USER12> For small values of money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I conceive of the value of a company to be the amount of added efficiency it brings to processes undertaken by its customers. If the company and product can either save or give entities time or money, it can theoretically extract some of those efficiency gains in the form of money. I think the "what people want" objective misses the mark a bit, since it implies an a priori desire for the wanted thing in advance of that thing existing. In practice, people just want efficiency and certain products are better at producing that at scale than others.

<comment><USER15> A counterexample would be entertainment, e.g. minecraft.

<comment><USER16> Good point. Minecraft provides a lot of value for me and my family. It is a game we play together, even though we live towns apart. It is also a game that I'm using to teach my girls how to program (on the Rpi). Who knows what my girls will go on and build? Wealth can be created by things we misjudge.

<comment><USER17> _It is also a game that I'm using to teach my girls how to program (on the Rpi)._

That sounds cool, please explain more :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I enjoyed this essay immensely when it came out, and it's still worth discussion.

One thing that isn't discussed much [1] in this essay is the difference between _rent collection_ and _wealth creation_ (I wouldn't go quite so far as to say it's _missing_ , which would imply that it should be there and isn't).

PG does conclude in this essay that on critical ingredient to encouraging wealth creation is allowing people who create wealth to keep (a lot of) it. I do agree. But looking back at the massive banking bailout (for instance), it's hard to avoid the conclusion that at least some of the massive fortunes were obtained through rent collection or even wealth destruction. Even in Silicon Valley, there are issues as well. The massive wealth of Microsoft was based heavily on leveraging a pretty aggressive monopoly - I've also read arguments that Facebook also occupies an incredibly profitable spot as a natural monopoly - earned fair and square, perhaps, but a monopoly nonetheless.

My guess is that everyone agrees that there is a mix of rent collecting and wealth creation - the real differences probably come in the extent to which people believe these two different activities occur. If you believe that most of the fortunes in the US are based on highly creative wealth generation, you're probably at ease with inequality and low taxes. If you believe that it is mainly rent collection, cartel and monopoly building, and an incestuous relationship with government, you probably aren't at ease with these things.

[1] It is mentioned, particularly in the first paragraph under wealth in power. I'd be interested in reading a PG specifically devoted to the difference between rent collection and wealth generation, the extent to which this is a problem, and what we might do about it.

</comment><comment><USER19> Thinking about this and defining "value" as "what people want" (i.e. "wealth" in the essay), it seems to me that every freely-entered-into transaction must increase overall value. [Since the two exchanged items must be valued more by their final owners than their initial owners, otherwise the transaction would not occur.] This seems intuitively sensible to me and suggests that trade is a good thing :-)

However, this then leads to some, to me, unintuitive conclusions:

1 - "value" can disappear very rapidly. (I valued an ice cream more than £1, bought it (total value in the world goes up), then ate it (total value in the world goes down)). Also, simply becoming disillusioned with something destroys value (I value it less).

2 - the advertising and marketing industries create a lot of "value", by making people want more. (Yesterday I would only valued a new pair of shoes by brand X at £20. Today I saw an ad which made me covet them. I now value them at £100. If I find them for sale at £40 I will buy them and be very pleased.)

I've not studied economics, is this definition of fairly ephemeral and manipulatable "value" meaningful?

</comment><comment><USER20> Very good essay with lots of wisdom. A couple of nitpicks, only because they keep popping up when I discuss this with people

1\. The beginning has an overly technical explanation of wealth in relation to hours worked. Sort of PG's law of conservation of effort. I don't think the relationship is that precise. In all likelihood, what you work on (market opportunity) matters more than the quanta of hours. You can work 16 hours/day every week for two years and have a failed startup while you can have a pretty good success with putting in 10-12 hour days (putting aside efficiency considerations).

2\. 'Make something people want' is perhaps not the most helpful way to frame what you should be doing in a startup. I mean it is true at a top level way (surely, nobody would want to work on something nobody wants). However, it seems like an end result of 'x' things that should be done so you get to making what people want.

<comment><USER21> Number 2 will not work without ample advertisement. And you also have to think which people do you want to want your product.

<comment><USER9> "Number 2 will not work without ample advertisement." I disagree, if people already want something bad, there is no need for ample advertisement, it will advertise itself on social media, word of mouth, free press articles etc (other people will talk about it, if it really is a promising solution).</comment></comment></comment>


Feinstein Wants Twitter to Just Hand Her a Bunch of Private Communications - <AUTHOR> https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20171102/16380738541/dianne-feinstein-wants-twitter-to-just-hand-her-bunch-private-communications.shtml <comment><USER2> How does it feel to want it?

That is, I don't care how bad she wants it. She can get lost.

<comment><AUTHOR> She's asked for communications that belong to parody accounts as well as Assange's true account, do they even know what they want?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: C++ or java for machine learning - <AUTHOR> i'm wondering which programming language should i learn for machine learning along with python? other programming languages would be appreciated <comment><USER2> You can get higher performance with C++ if you go wild with SIMD intrinsics and other advanced features. That is, for low-level coding of algorithms with the highest speed and memory, C++ beats Java. On the other hand, C++ will bog you down in details that may drive you insane. You might think you are on top of it, but you're secretly afraid to make any changes to the algorithm because it takes 20 minutes to build your code, you might make a mistake calculating derivatives by hand, etc.

The advantage of Java is in building systems that are distributed. You can build things like

[http://lmax-exchange.github.io/disruptor/](http://lmax- exchange.github.io/disruptor/)

and Hadoop. On paper you could write systems like that in C++. In practice you can get C++ code like that to work most of the time in a controlled environment with a huge amount of work because you have to deal with entropy at every layer that Java pumps out for you.

On the other hand, for many kind of algorithms, you can get even better results using tools like Tensorflow which are intended to compile automatically for parallel computation, will calculate the derivatives for you, etc.

Related to that is the classic strategy of linking to "old codes". Even in the 1990s, programming in C and Java in grad school for physics, I never wrote matrix factorization codes, but just used LAPACK written in Fortran but enhanced by the hardware vendor (IBM, Intel, ...) to take advantage of parallel features. This was faster than anything I would write, took less of my time, and had fewer bugs.

Today you would take advantage of that in python by using numpy and related tools.

Maybe your best bet is to learn how to use FFI inside out so you can use code other people wrote from the C universe because there is a lot of it.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't think you should learn a _language_ for machine learning. Learn algorithms and techniques.

In particular, C++ and Java aren't different enough from each other that one is going to have a big edge over the other in machine learning. An algorithm that can be implemented in one can be implemented in the other, without a radical difference in code size, development time, or execution speed. Java may be slightly easier due to the possibility of running off the end of arrays, and following uninitialized or stale pointers, but you're not supposed to write C++ that way any longer. It's much easier with C++11/14 style coding.

(There may be differences in availability of useful libraries between C++ and Java, which may be what you're really asking. I don't know enough to answer that.)</comment>


Laterpay – Buy digital content, pay later - <AUTHOR> https://laterpay.net/ <comment><USER3> This business model was previously tried by Kwedit. I was sort of disappointed when they abandoned it, because it deprived the world of kwedit default swaps.

See: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1099811](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1099811)

<comment><USER4> You made a good point about Kwedit back in the day, which I believe applies just as well here. Namely, micropayments on the nickel-and-dime scale are seriously challenging. How does a vendor price them effectively? How do you get a consumer to wrap his/her head around them?

Everybody understands the value of a dollar; nobody understands the value of a nickel. Coins, pseudocurrencies, and loyalty points seem much better suited to overcoming that psychological barrier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The concept is interesting. However, I don't think that the concept of "use now, pay later" is really what prevents people from doing micro transactions. The real work is to convince content providers to hide their stuff behind cheap paywalls and use their system.

Flattr never gained enough traction and I don't see how laterpay solves this problem.

<comment><USER6> Good point, I was wondering how the link was made to the content provider.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> A digital loan shark that will only let you have €5. Sound business model there...

</comment><comment><USER8> >Why buy 200 coins in a game when you only need ten?

Great. Another psychological trick the F2P devs can add to their toolbox.

<comment><USER9> That made me stop short, too.

When do you _ever_ "only need 10"?

<comment><USER10> An extra 5 moves in Farm Heroes Saga requires 9 coin thingies. I don't remember how much that is in USD because I've never actually bought any.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > otherwise they will just fill up with throwaway accounts.

this is exactly the kind of strategy that 'poor' people take to maximise the effectiveness of 'freebies' (which includes credit). i hope they have some strategy in place to mitigate that risk...

</comment><comment><USER12> Assume you want to read an article because it relevant for work. Assume your salary is $25 per hour. If you think for just 5 seconds whether you should pay for the article or not this will costs your employer 3.5¢. So at least in that context a price of 5¢ or 10¢ per article should absolutely be a no-brainer.

What I have no idea is if you can sustain a business at that price - <USER2> producer and payment provider. And I am also unsure how well that translates to non-working time. It is at least often argued that you should value that time just like your working time. Psychological barriers as mentioned by others are a very different matter, too.

</comment><comment><USER13> Content producers and techies want something like this (microtransactions) to work so badly that they keep trying to make it happen, despite the fact that people quite simply don't want it. They keep thinking "maybe I just need to make it more usable" when PayPal has been quite usable for nearly two decades.

People don't want to buy a bunch of small stuff a la carte. They just don't.

<comment><USER14> counter-example: the billions of apps sold for 99 cents on the Apple app store.

<comment><USER13> And yet you could buy TV shows there a la carte and nobody does. Suppose maybe I should have specified reading material though.

<comment><USER15> The reason people don't buy TV shows is due to bad pricing and lackluster value.

I know a lot of people who wait to buy a TV series when it comes on DVD because they cannot understand why the sum of all episodes available for digital download costs the same as the DVD, when there are much lower expenses. Also they need to pay extra for any specials.

Hollywood and studios assume that people are willing to pay more for instant access than they pay for physical products. And there in lies the problem why very few people but TV shows a la carte.

On the people who download from p2p etc. a number of people would pay if the amount was lower, and within this group are a number of people who download from p2p now and buy the DVD when it has released.

This is also a big attraction for people waiting a year+ for a season to show up on netflix.

You reasoning is unfortunately an ad homeinem.

<comment><USER16> > I know a lot of people who wait to buy a TV series when it comes on DVD > because they cannot understand why the sum of all episodes available for > digital download costs the same as the DVD, when there are much lower > expenses.

This sounds like an education problem: how do we make people understand that the cost of printing DVDs is negligible (in fact, practically nothing) in comparison to the efforts of hundreds if not thousands of trained individuals, tens of millions of dollars of specialized equipment, and the limited availability of their favorite actors?

<comment><USER15> To my knowledge the perceived expenses with DVD comes from the costs consumers think that comes from packaging, warehousing and sales.

To be honest I completely agree that this is not substantial and should not affect the costs and margins for the studios.

There is definitely an education problem, but the bigger issue is the consumption problem, that is, people who are willing and able to pay for digital downloads of TV shows are prepared to wait a few months - a year to buy a DVD or watch it on Netflix.

Sure we could try and educate these people about the minuscule difference in price. But chances are we would still fail to increase the perceived value.

And there in lies the problem and an opportunity to find a better delivery system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> As a publisher, I'd question when I'd actualy get money for the content I sold, if I have to wait for every "customer" to accumulate €5 before they forked over cash. Until LaterPay has significant market penetration, the likelyhood is that small publishers will never see any revenue.

</comment><comment><USER18> Sounds similar to tipit.to which friends of mine did. Unfortunately, like a lot of money transferring services, they ran into a lot of fraud. Any money -> something -> money service online makes it really attractive to launder stolen credit cards.

</comment><comment><USER19> "no upfront registration" is a misnomer, as you will obviously have to sign-up in order to partake of the service.

I would assume you will also have to register a payment method, otherwise they will just fill up with throwaway accounts.

<comment><AUTHOR> According to this german blog post (It's an interview with a famous german blogger/tv presenter who is working for Laterpay in a consulting position) [0] you don't have to sign up to use it at the beginning. You basically just say "I want to pay for this later" and once you are hitting the 5 euro mark it'll prompt you to sign up and pay for it.

[0] [http://meedia.de/2014/03/21/richard-gutjahr-ueber- laterpay-p...](http://meedia.de/2014/03/21/richard-gutjahr-ueber-laterpay- paid-content-nach-dem-bierdeckel-prinzip/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm having a hard time understanding what I can use this service for. Can somebody please provide one or two concrete examples of potential use cases? Thanks very much in advance!

</comment><comment><USER21> I like how the login/sign-up button click boxes conform nicely to the central circular 'or' area.

...but that's about it.

<comment><USER22> Quite clever. The white border on the circle is pixel-perfectly tuned to match the white margin between the buttons.

...sounds like hell to fix for IE. Glad I don't do css.

They also have a .call-to-action class for that green color, which is cute.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> missed the bitcoin train.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't really see the connection between Bitcoin and Micro-Payment services at all. Bitcoin is hardly easy and instant unlike Flattr (Although I'd say Flattr isn't really that easy and straightforward as their intro video wants people to believe) and this service.

<comment><USER24> Dogecoin managed to be pretty easy, though. (I've never used bitcoin, so I don't know how much difference there is.)</comment></comment></comment>


Are you a musician? - <AUTHOR> Just curious about the life of a musician. After graduation from music school as a music student, what kind of career path they pursuit? How do they make their living? Where do you hangout as a musician? <comment><USER2> I'm just another data point, but, in my case, the honest truth is that I deliberately avoided a career in music because I thought that it would be too hard and/or risky to make much money. My formal studies were in computers, science and tech. I never dropped music from my life; I still avidly pursue it as a hobby, including both performance and songwriting/composition. I just don't rely on it to put meals on my table or keep a roof over my head. I make music for the sake of itself, and the pleasure and joy of it, not to make money. i.e. because I want to, and when I want to, not because I have to.

<comment><AUTHOR> so where do you usually hangout online for your musical interest?

<comment><USER2> I don't per se "hang out" anywhere online. Most of my musical activities are engaged in within meatspace. At most, I might share the occasional recording on social networks. I've participated a bit in music-related forums.

Technology hasn't progressed far enough yet for musicians to be able to play together real-time over the Internet. That'll be a great day when it comes, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Yes, a flautist since 1994. I began college in 2003 as a flute performance major, then sophomore year changed that to a music minor and graduated 2007. A few odd jobs after college, then began using my psychology minor to get into social work. Switched careers over a year ago into software development. Recently joined the community pops ensemble. As a musician, I spend time at jazz clubs if my town has them, or seek out fellow musicians on Meetup.com.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks</comment></comment>


A Dark Web Search Engine Can Be Your Eyes in the Internet Underworld - <AUTHOR> https://www.hothardware.com/news/beacon-dark-web-search-engine-probes-the-internet-underworld <comment><USER2> I always understood the dark web as the non-indexed part of the web, so, by making a search engine on the dark web wouldn't you make it not dark web?</comment>


Calculating integer factorials in constant time, taking advantage of overflow - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20151214-00/?p=92621 <comment><USER2> If you enforce n<=12 (to prevent undefined behavior) in the original "naive" algorithm, then it too is constant time, i.e., O(12).

<comment><USER3> _Constant_ time goes beyond O(1), it means that the lower bound is equal to the upper bound. 10! can't be faster than 12!

<comment><USER2> No, I don't think so. O(1) is "constant" time. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_complexity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_complexity)

<comment><USER3> O(1) is a constant time _bound_. But when people talk about constant time they often mean literally constant, such as to avoid timing attacks.

<comment><USER4> Its true that constant time is sometimes used in that way, though in discussions of computation complexity, "constant time" usually means O(1).

There narrower use is more like Θ(1) with the upper and lower constants identical.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You can also compute the factorials at compile time with templates:

template<int64_t n> int64_t fact() { return n * fact<n-1>(); } template<> int64_t fact<0>() { return 1; }

The book "Modern C++ design" from Alexandrescu extensively covers that kind of stuff.

There might even be a way to use a loop and constexprs.

<comment><USER6> Won't most modern compiled languages statically evaluate constant numerical expressions?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I found this rather strange. Use of the word "calculate" is a bit of a stretch with dealing with a lookup table to get results. Worth reading, however.

<comment><USER8> The point is that the lookup table contains results for _all_ inputs to the function that have a defined result (that is, functions that do not trigger overflow and thus undefined behaviour). In that sense, it has the same semantics as the original function although most people would not suspect that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> ... or get real: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling%27s_approximation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling%27s_approximation)

<comment><USER10> I was expecting to see a variant of this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Interestingly, I was just doing some calculations over the weekend involving large factorials. Naturally, I used a "big integer" library to overcome the limitations of the hardware architecture. That anyone outside a class-room would be willing to restrict themselves to 32 or 64 bit for the largest integers thus seems contrived: of course, dealing with factorials will quickly get you past your system's word size, but that's what arbitrary-length integer libs are for.

<comment><USER12> Depends what you need them for... In statistics, factorials appear in normalizing constants for various distributions (e.g., Poisson) and often you're working with floating point log-probabilities, in which case you can use the log-gamma function (built into most math libraries) to replace the log factorial. And that's a 64-bit float, no bignums needed.

<comment><USER13> But in what situation would you actually need an arbitrary precision library for general statistics? Ie, in what situations would any reasonable approximations not suffice for reasonable real-world precision?

Eg, Stirlings approximation for ln(n!) should serve fairly well for moderate and above values of n. And knowing your statistical distribution at large n you can likely find a decent distribution from a discrete case requiring n! into a continuous one, eg Gaussian.

<comment><USER12> You wouldn't, for statistics. That's my point.

Only in number theory problems do you actually need bignums for factorials, and those are usually toy problems or modulo some big prime.

I don't know of any actual applications where you need to compute the bignum factorial. I'm curious what the GP needed it for.

<comment><USER11> I needed them for a toy problem as well. Tried to experimentally verify the equality of two formulas involving large factorials. It was a counting problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wonder if old school developers are more likely to think of these types of solutions.

When I wrote games for older hardware every frickin' thing possible used look up tables to maximize speed.

Coincidentally I received this type of problem later when interviewing at MS, but it wasn't Raymond Chen's group.

<comment><USER15> What do you mean? They asked you to compute something but expected you to use a lookup table instead?

<comment><USER14> Yes, it was the only way to speed up an algorithm's implementation and they wanted to see if you could realize that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've used a similar technique for base-2 logarithms, when I knew the context in which it was used would only require handling powers-of-2 up to 16384: [https://github.com/scotts/streamflow/blob/master/streamflow....](https://github.com/scotts/streamflow/blob/master/streamflow.c#L269)

<comment><USER17> Dude, your case statement will compile into a bunch of test and branch instructions, implementing a binary search if you're lucky, and a linear search if you're not. Better to use __builtin_clz() or similar, so your function will just take a few cycles with no (expensive) branching. Extra bonus: with care, it can work for all inputs, giving a truncated or rounded result.

<comment><USER10> On x86, it could also compile down to just a _jmp_. A _bsr_ would still be faster, but it would probably be worth checking that ___builtin_clz_ actually compiles down to _bsr_.

For portability reasons, it might be better just using bit tricks and letting the compiler try to optimize it though. Clang and GCC do pretty well here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I like the idea of hybrid. Since the value of a factorial depends on the factorial of the previous 2 numbers. Cache fact(n) and fact(n-1) for a selection of n's. eg n = 10, 100, 1000, 10000, ...

</comment><comment><USER19> Meanwhile, here's an artistic rendering of the factorial function:

        ┬────────────────
        ┼─────────────┬──
        │ ──┬──────── ┼ ┬
        │ ┬─┼─┬────── │ │
        │ │ │ ┼─┬─┬── │ │
        │ │ │ ┼─┼─┼─┬ │ │
        │ │ │ └─┤ ├─┘ │ │
        │ │ │   ├─┘   │ │
        │ │ ├───┘     │ │
        │ ├─┘         │ │
        └─┤           │ │
          └───────────┤ │
                      └─┘

(a diagram of factorial on Church numerals)

</comment><comment><USER20> There's a similar algorithm for O(1) primality checking. It does require access to Google though.

<comment><USER21> This also works well for reversing many cryptographic hashes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I like this. It clearly shows that for all the computing power available, some algebra or calculus can be better for discovering the general form of a solution.

</comment><comment><USER23> Clickbait much.</comment>


I3wm and Ubuntu 20.04 server without any useless packages - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/efazati/i3buntu <comment><USER2> So I have no idea what the poster means by 'without any useless packages' but I can talk a little to why packaging i3 is good.

Firstly, I like i3. Of all the tiling Window managers I've tried it seems to be the best mix of minimal, easy to understand, easy to configure and brings all the benefits of tiling WMs in terms of workflow and aesthetics.

What i3 doesn't do out of the box is look very good or have many common tweaks and quality of life improvements. This is something where the i3 community spin of Manjaro [0] shines because it bakes all of this in and gives you a gorgeous, modern-looking WM as default.

Regolith [1] was the first attempt I saw at providing this out of the box, but I'd definitely be interested in ways and means of containerising configs and i3 setups so that they are more easily accessible and can be tried out more easily.

[0] [https://manjaro.org/download/#i3](https://manjaro.org/download/#i3) (Direct link is broken. Click 'Editions -> Community -> I3')

[1] [https://regolith-linux.org/](https://regolith-linux.org/)

<comment><USER3> Maybe I'm missing something but there's no option for i3 in that Manjaro URL.

I currently use Regolith but I'm looking for something lighter but still doesn't force me to configure every single thing like battery or wifi.

<comment><USER2> Make sure that your browser is directing you to the URL which includes the '#'. If it doesn't, you can find it under 'community' flavours.

edit: nope, you're right it isn't working!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I spent a couple of years running an extremely minimal arch I3 install. It was fantastic doing things within my normal workflow, but when you have to introduce new tools, new network requirements, etc. it takes a fairly significant amount of effort. For instance- connecting to my university's wifi took hours and required hacking up a python script that wasn't compatible with my system.

I think a lot of the fight against 'bloat' is largely ideological and not really rooted in practicality, but it definitely makes for a good learning experience

<comment><USER5> I recently switched to KDE, Which lets you use i3 as the window manager. You still get KDE's bar and applets like the network manager and such. Not nearly as minimal as the arch setup I had before, and takes a depressing amount of time to log in and out in comparison, but so far is otherwise worth it for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > without any useless packages

redis, cmake, caffeine, unrar, vlc, postgres, docker, axel, fish, fzf...

really?

</comment><comment><USER7> I just reinstalled my machine from Ubuntu 16.04 to 20.04. I'm using i3wm for a few years, and things never worked out of the box. The sound applet, VPN, and other small things that quickly add up.

I'm now using Regolith [1] and loving it. It offers a clean and neat i3wm installation, but still uses Ubuntu's system admin tools. It was really simple to install: just install Ubuntu, add its PPA and run apt-get.

I highly recommend it for anyone that likes i3wm but doesn't want to be fiddling with configuration files to connect to a new WiFI or pair bluetooth headphones.

[1] [https://regolith-linux.org/](https://regolith-linux.org/)

<comment><USER8> Mhm. Looks nice. Is there an equivalent for sway/Wayland?

My external monitors behave nicer w/dock un-dock under gnome/Wayland. I'm planning to give sway a test when I get around to upgrading to 20.04..

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> What are "useless packages" and why were they made?

<comment><USER10> Here's a subset of active processes on my system, where I know that these have never fulfilled their purpose, given the way that I use my computer:

\- /usr/lib/evolution/evolution-source-registry

\- /usr/lib/evolution/evolution-alarm-notify

\- /usr/lib/evolution/evolution-calendar-factory

\- /usr/lib/evolution/evolution-calendar-factory-subprocess

\- /usr/lib/evolution/evolution-addressbook-factory

\- /usr/lib/evolution/evolution-calendar-factory-subprocess

\- /usr/lib/evolution/evolution-addressbook-factory-subprocess

\- /usr/lib/evolution/evolution-calendar-factory-subprocess

\- /usr/lib/evolution/evolution-calendar-factory-subprocess

Side note: I blogged about this last year, outlining a policy that distro package maintainers could adopt:

[https://www.colbyrussell.com/2019/05/15/may- integration.html...](https://www.colbyrussell.com/2019/05/15/may- integration.html#self-culling-services)

The idea is that any background service should be sufficiently self-aware, i.e., able to understand that (a) it is a service was installed by default (without explicit action on the part of the user; it was just included in the default install) so that it may at some point be of use, and (b) in the last (say) 4 months since the system was first installed, the service has never been exercised for its original purpose. Given those conditions, the system should retire the service for the foreseeable future, so that it no longer runs in the background.

<comment><USER11> Using a heuristic like that is mostly unnecessary when your daemon supports socket/dbus activation. In that case it's only brought up on-demand when another program tries to send a message to it.

The programs you listed are part of evolution-data-server and are used as the backing store for your calendar, clock and address book, which the GNOME panel integrates with. You can kill them but gnome-shell will start them right back up again when you open the calendar and it does a query to see if you have any events.

If you're in a non-GNOME session (like i3) and systemd is still starting those daemons, you can turn them off with some stop and disable commands:

        systemctl --user stop evolution-addressbook-factory
        systemctl --user disable evolution-addressbook-factory
        systemctl --user stop evolution-calendar-factory
        systemctl --user disable evolution-calendar-factory
        systemctl --user stop evolution-source-registry
        systemctl --user disable evolution-source-registry

Or you can try your luck with removing the evolution-data-server package.

<comment><USER10> > try your luck with removing [...]

Sure, I could. But refer to my comments in that post:

> _I 'll uninstall these sorts of things, unless there's any resistance at all > [...] in which case I tend to immediately write it off as not worth the > effort_

My comment was not a StackOverflow-style cry for help. It was only meant to provide some data points in response to the person who asked, 'What are "useless packages"' and an alternative to the other person who dismissed the reference to "useless packages" on the basis that they "were made and included because lots people want them".

EDIT: Thanks for the detailed response, anyway. Since you've written it here, it might be indexed and become useful to someone who _is_ trying to get to the bottom of things—and who maybe otherwise wouldn't have ever found out how to deal with this—and now they can.

<comment><USER11> My comment was to give a practical alternative to the solution you were floating which is not really going to work in this scenario. I have done the work in removing the "resistance" for you.

Trying to guess which services are inactive and kill them off won't fly when the point of the service is to sit idle for a really long time (potentially on the timescale of months/years, i.e. just as long as you suggested if not longer) and occasionally send notifications when the user has a calendar event coming up.

<comment><USER10> > I have done the work in removing the "resistance" for you.

Sorry, you misunderstand. The "resistance" was on the day that the system was installed and while casually scanning a list of installed packages and selecting ones to be removed, and then having the package manager complain about unsatisfied dependencies.

Your message is a path to achieving the original goal. But it's not a magic eraser that made the original resistance disappear. Your message here suggesting how one might get down to the bottom of things now is neither unwelcome nor welcome. It's simply moot.

> the point of the service is to sit idle for a really long time (potentially > on the timescale of months/years

I'd wager that the difference in size between these two groups:

\- those who go months or years without ever having used the thing, and then suddenly change their patterns and start getting use out of it; versus

\- those who go months or years without using it, and never end up doing so

... is probably an order of magnitude (or maybe a couple) in favor of the latter group. Even ignoring that, there's an implementation strategy up for adoption that facilitates the former use case but doesn't involve persistent services sitting by idly, waiting for the first instance to come along. It doesn't have to be a trade-off; that's not an intrinsic consequence of the problem here.

<comment><USER11> This is an asynchronous forum. If you find my information moot or unwelcome, you can just ignore it.

It would be impossible for a daemon to categorize its users into those two groups and decide when to stop itself from running because it cannot see months into the future. The other implementation strategy already exists and I talked about it, it's to use socket/dbus activation to start the service on- demand. But that doesn't work in all cases such as with idle notifications, so I would argue that it is a trade-off.

<comment><USER10> > It would be impossible for a daemon to categorize its users into those two > groups and decide when to stop itself from running because it cannot see > months into the future.

The scheme I outlined doesn't ask anyone to look into the future. It asks that the service look into the past.

> I would argue that it is a trade-off.

Argue if you want—it seems you're predisposed to it. I said it's not an _inherent_ trade-off. The developers/package maintainers are certainly making a trade-off. That's not the same thing as that trade-off being unavoidable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> In my (albeit limited) experience, those "useless" packages tend to be not so useless in order to have a somewhat functional installation.

Example: By default, Ubuntu+GNOME installs various utilities that you WILL need unless you want to do everything by hand. nm-applet, bluetooth applet, volume applet, etc.

Of course you have to add this to the i3 configuration manually, but that's the beauty of running i3. Yes you may have useless packages hanging around. But they will not be running UNLESS and ONLY IF you wish for that to be the case.

But when you need those "useless" packages, and you will most certainly need them to connect to your Wi-Fi network, you will be happy to have them already on GNOME and not have to install everything package by package and perhaps even compile an alternative software because it's the only one you found referenced on a reddit thread.

Basically, what I'm trying to say is, it's fun to do this once as an exercise to know how your computer works (learn what a compositor is, learn how pulseaudio works, etc.). But beyond that, it starts to get pretty tedious and not fun.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can include them based on your need instead of adding them because someone else likes to use them

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > without any useless packages

This is as opinionated as it can get. No specific mention of any of those packages either. So what am I looking at?

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right, I should update readme for more detail. but mainly there is no dm ( display manager ) also I didn't add most of the gnome related packages

I will write a good comparison

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's nice to see people sharing - but this seems like a terrible way to install the needed packages, with a separate install per package, rather than a list of packages..

[https://github.com/efazati/i3buntu/blob/master/run.sh](https://github.com/efazati/i3buntu/blob/master/run.sh)

Something like:

[https://wiki.debian.org/AptCLI?highlight=%28%5CbCategoryPack...](https://wiki.debian.org/AptCLI?highlight=%28%5CbCategoryPackageManagement%5Cb%29#Restore_installed_software)

apt-clone: [https://github.com/mvo5/apt-clone](https://github.com/mvo5/apt- clone)

Or indeed like it's done here, but supplying a list of packets to apt, rather than a list of apt command lines to run one after another...

But the best way would probably just be a fork of regolith, and create a meta package.

</comment><comment><USER14> Why Ubuntu and not Debian for a project like this?

<comment><USER15> Having used both recently, I found when some vendors target just one distro to package for, they target Ubuntu because it's more popular, not Debian.

I thought "No problem, the .deb format works on both!". But in practice the Ubuntu and Debian release cycles are not aligned and so their dependency trees are not always aligned, so some vendors .deb package for Ubuntu may not work on Debian.

You can choose Debian and hope you don't run into this, or you can choose Ubuntu and benefit from current and future support from a more popular desktop distribution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> You probably want Regolith Linux instead, or an Ansible-based solution which will work better for updates.

This project is an opinionated one-time install script. After initial install, good luck!

</comment><comment><USER16> It is still installing Bluetooth support, ansible, terraform and all kind of things. Maybe you could group these so they can be disabled individually. I guess the notion of "useless" package really differs from users to user and doesn't really allow for a "standardized minimalistic experience".

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right about those packages. I removed them, I will try to make better packaging system for diffrent usage

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> How is this different from installing ubuntu and then installing i3 ?

<comment><USER15> This is Ubuntu _server_ plus i3 and some opinionated other package choices. This ends up being fewer overall packages than Ubuntu _Desktop_ plus i3.

<comment><USER17> I'm still confused about why this exists when you can install Ubuntu server and i3...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is there much point in enabling compositing if we're installing i3 with this method? Would it even make a difference?

<comment><USER16> I3 supports compositing, I used it to have semi transparent floating windows (heresy for a tiling wm isn't it) and it also greatly improved some stuff such as smooth scrolling that was all teary.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> In this project, you can install i3 from the Ubuntu server without installing anything that you don't need.

<comment><USER19> To be honest, this looks a lot more like a script to set up your preferred environment, not a minimal i3 install. It includes a lot of packages like Firefox, docker, fish, etc that have nothing to do with i3.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right. maybe it is better to remove all apps from the repo and put them in another place to let users choose based on their need</comment></comment></comment>


NumPyPy progress report - running benchmarks - <AUTHOR> http://morepypy.blogspot.com/2012/01/numpypy-progress-report-running.html

<comment><USER2> This is something like the holy grail for me.

I am a machine learning research, using the python/scipy/theano stack. One problem performance wise is that I can get my models reasonably fast with Theano--but as soon as I need a python for loop (e.g. by using Theano.scan) performance dies. As soon as you have a couple of nested (e.g. due to a Jacobian matrix instead of vector) performance is virtually gone again.

I'd love to use numpypy, and the way I see it not much is missing.

Keep up the good work! I wish I cold fund you! :/

</comment><comment><USER3> This is good news, although confusing Laplace transform and Laplace equation makes me think that before using their numeric code I should check it thoroughly.

<comment><USER4> Fortunately for you, we're only dealing with things like addition, multiplication, maybe sinus and even so we rely on the processor to do the job :-) The rest is dealt by numeric guys from the original numpy and we're simply reusing those parts. It's important for us to understand how processors work and how to make sure we do _exactly_ the same computations, but not much above that.

Besides, believe it or not, having non-english maths background makes you seem incredibly dumb (which might or might not be the case).

EDIT: I should maybe stress this point more. It's very important for us to get _exactly_ the same results, or more numerically stable as original numpy, not just the same algorithms, so we won't be experimenting on that field.</comment></comment>


MacOS Mojave Patcher - <AUTHOR> http://dosdude1.com/mojave/ <comment><USER2> My 2009 iMac didn't support Mojave, but with this patch, it's been working flawlessly. Highly recommended.</comment>


Edward Snowden's father writes open letter to NSA whistleblower in Moscow - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/02/edward-snowden-father-open-letter

<comment><USER2> "We encourage you to engage us in regular exchanges of ideas or thoughts....".

Surely, his father and his father's lawyer would consider that regular exchanges may be a little difficult at the moment.</comment>


Show HN: Flarum – Delightfully simple open-source forum software - <AUTHOR> http://flarum.org <comment><USER3> Bugs/feedback welcome, I assume?

1\. Bug: The "read the rules" banner link is broken. [http://discuss.flarum.org/d/392/frequently-asked- questions-p...](http://discuss.flarum.org/d/392/frequently-asked-questions- please-read-here-before-posting/1)

2\. Bug: Long titles overlap with tags. [http://imgur.com/jFGRHtC](http://imgur.com/jFGRHtC) This is on Chrome 44.0, Windows 10.

3\. Feedback: The Title/Tag banner at the top of every post seems too large. 141px tall and no way to dismiss/shrink. This is especially noticeable given the bold banner colors. It's very attractive, but I keep looking for the dismiss button.

4\. Bug(?): Over quota error in pusher.min.js. [http://imgur.com/xmXPLaq](http://imgur.com/xmXPLaq)

5\. Bug: Avatar 404s. [http://imgur.com/xmXPLaq](http://imgur.com/xmXPLaq) (same image as previous) [http://imgur.com/QkPaxr9](http://imgur.com/QkPaxr9) (discussion list broken images)

6\. Feedback: Why no infinite scroll on the main page? "Load More" works fine, but seems inconsistent with the in-thread scrolling.

7\. Feedback: The "move" icon on the infinite scroll scrubber seems a touch odd, because it indicates 2-dimensional motion. Maybe "ns-resize"?

With all that said, this seems very nice. It's simple from a user perspective, and it's attractively designed. It's responsive, and from a quick glance the docs look nice. I love the infinite scroll scrubber. Nice work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback!

1\. Fixed.

2\. [https://github.com/flarum/tags/issues/10](https://github.com/flarum/tags/issues/10)

4\. Haha, I don't want to pay for Pusher right now. Will be working on a self- hosted push solution soon.

6\. [https://github.com/flarum/core/issues/115](https://github.com/flarum/core/issues/115)

<comment><USER4> Hey,

I work for Pusher and I have upgrade your account to a business plan for now.

We always love to help up and coming product, especially open source ones so drop me an email at email@example.com to discuss this further. Happy to help.

S

<comment><USER5> This is some customer service right here, well done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> We had looked at a bunch of forums from the traditional forums like MyBB, PhpBB, Flux BB to newer takes on forums like Vanilla, Discourse, Nodebb and Esotalk an year ago.

I liked the minimalism of Esotalk but it was being phased out in favour of developing Flarum. I found Vanilla was somehow missing the typical community feel of forums though lowendtalk is using it and is one of the busier communities.

Discourse was Ruby and extremely difficult to install and we did manage eventually but I always felt you need to be comfortable with Ruby or have managed hosting with Discourse. It's a handful.

Flux BB was one of the fastest of the traditional forums then. Arch Linux uses Flux BB and its a busy forum. It will be interesting to see which way they go now that it is going to be Flarum. I remember seeing some heated discussions in the Fluxbb forums about the shift.

We just added a flarum container in the Flockport app store [1] for those who want to give it a quick spin. It will work with LXC and most likely Nspawn too for those who have a recent versions of Systemd.

[https://www.flockport.com/store](https://www.flockport.com/store)

<comment><USER7> I'm surprised Phorum gets so little press: [http://www.phorum.org](http://www.phorum.org)

Phorum powered MySQL:s own (very large-scale) forum (does it still?) among other things, and in a way it seems to share a lot of the light-weightedness with some of the more modern ones in this thread.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sad to see this eating up and killing off FluxBB. Seems like we're slowly but surely running out of basic, universal, no-nonsense forum software in favour of a move to Twitter/Facebook-timelines or Stack Overflow-style layouts, none of which are great mediums for organised discussion.

<comment><USER9> Xenforo is just about best of breed in the domain of modern, traditional forum software. Even phpBB is still around.

I don't blame people for trying to come up with new forum paradigms instead of reimplementing the same solution over and over again.

Then again, forum software that implements modern expectations is never going to be basic.

<comment><USER8> I would argue however that both Xenforo and phpBB are ridiculously bloated and should hardly be called basic. phpBB more so than Xenforo obviously. None of them offer the far more robust approach of FluxBB.

Thankfully, as FluxBB is opensource, it can be forked and saved from this development direction.

<comment><USER10> > and should hardly be called basic

That was danneu's point - that any forum that actually implements most of what people will want out of it (just to start with - <USER2> subforums/categories, user permissions, tags, thread and user following, local and email alerts, broad formatting options, media embeds, per-user display settings, etc etc...) is going to be well beyond "basic" just to get a userbase in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hey Toby, I'm really glad to see the beta drop! I've been looking at setting up a forum for [https://cachethq.io](https://cachethq.io) and have been holding off doing so, so that we can use Flarum!

How did you find your JS framework change in the end? Did it all go well?

What plans do you have for the future of Flarum? A marketplace perhaps?

<comment><AUTHOR> The JS framework change (Ember to Mithril) was a great decision for us, especially given our focus on being fast and lightweight. The codebase ended up being far simpler too. I've been meaning to write a blog post about all the details!

Beyond stability and more features, I hope to set up some services around Flarum later this year – an extension marketplace being the first. In order for Flarum to succeed, building a great ecosystem is a must.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This looks great! I've been looking for a good alternative to replace Vanilla Forums for a while. I think I'll hold off until Flarum stabilizes, since it seems like a natural replacement as well as a substantial upgrade!

One question:

I've had quite an ongoing fight with spammers, and none of the Vanilla Forums plugins solve it adequately (including using all of the available plugins together). How does Flarum help keep spammers at bay?

<comment><AUTHOR> It doesn't at the moment! D: That's something we plan to address very soon though. Not sure what specific strategies we'll implement – will sit down and nut it out in the next week or two. [https://github.com/flarum/core/issues/271](https://github.com/flarum/core/issues/271)

<comment><USER12> Thanks for the reply! I'll keep an eye on github, and quite look forward to shiny new forum software soon :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What is your forum software bringing compared to Discourse ?

I actually hate Discourse, for me, this is not the way a forum should be, and from my quick glance at your website, it seems that you go in a very similar direction (which makes me sad :( )

<comment><USER11> I setup Discourse for a couple of days and absolutely hated everything about it.

\- It actually ok to setup, following instructions.

\- The UI is awful.

\- Changing the sub domain didn't work until I executed some commands.

\- The admin panel was awful, just a mess.

\- The frontend didn't really guide the user through what they were doing.

<comment><USER14> Plus it takes 1+GB of RAM to run properly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I took a peek at the source code. Extensions are Composer packages that hook into the core dispatcher, while the frontend extends Mithril components written in ES6. I'm in love.

</comment><comment><USER16> The design is incredibly on-point. The breakpoints for smaller screens work well for me, and everything is where I would expect it to be. The subtle animations and the crisp/clean interface are very refreshing.

Last time I looked at the forums/bb landscape it still seemed to be dominated by phpBB, WordPress' bbPress, and vBulletin. I hope these really fall out of style, as I just don't believe communication online happens in a way that lends itself to those architectures anymore.

</comment><comment><USER17> Very nice. I love the technology stack, and am curious whether it can run on shared hosting. I see some bash scripts in the source though, and I wonder whether this will alienate windows devs or not.

The technology choices seem to be: PHP + Laravel components + LessCss + Mithrill.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! The compiled source ([http://flarum.org/download](http://flarum.org/download)) should run on shared hosting no problems. The bash scripts are only for building that ZIP that we put up for download, and setting up a Vagrant development environment. See [http://flarum.org/docs/contributing](http://flarum.org/docs/contributing) for more info.

<comment><USER17> Another question: how do you plan to deal with SEO?

<comment><AUTHOR> We output a copy of the page's data within <noscript> tags. (e.g. [http://discuss.flarum.org/?nojs=1](http://discuss.flarum.org/?nojs=1)) Admittedly it's currently pretty bare-bones and not actually very optimized, haha

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why is almost all forum software written in php? Is there something about the language that makes it ideal for forums? Is it a historical artifact?

<comment><USER19> It is a prerequisite for wide adoption. It is far easier to find a free or cheap PHP host.

<comment><USER20> That, and PHP projects are the easiest to install on web hosts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I was looking at forum software for the first time in years just last month, and was surprised at how fresh EsoTalk looked compared to the traditionally crufty UI patterns of even more progressive forum packages. As you might imagine, I was then completely blown away when I saw its successor! Congratulations on the beta launch; it looks amazing.

</comment><comment><USER22> On a side note, does anyone else find the text of the website difficult to read due to low contrast against the background?

</comment><comment><USER23> I couldn't find information about this in the documentation. How hard is it going to be either to replace the core authentication with my own implementation, or use Flarum's authentication outside of Flarum? My goal would be to write a lightweight CMS which shares a login with the forum.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is something we haven't tackled yet, but we definitely want to make this kind of thing easy at some point in the future.

<comment><USER23> Is there an issue on github I can subscribe to for this?

<comment><AUTHOR> Just made one: [https://github.com/flarum/core/issues/274](https://github.com/flarum/core/issues/274)

<comment><USER23> What if I don't want to use Laravel? :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Okay, this bugs me just a little bit.

From the story page[1]:

> A piece of software that depends on extensions will surely fail without the > establishment of an ecosystem. I do not intend to make the same mistake with > Flarum.

This seems incorrect to me. If you look today, there are still a several people that actively develop plugins for esoTalk. The community has contributed plugins for Markdown, OAuth, signatures, and social sharing. I myself have made Mandrill and Mailchimp integrations within the last couple months.

> Without the feedback of a team, I have produced some low-quality code and > APIs that will surely need revision.

This statement about Flarum sounds to me like the stated reason esoTalk[2] was left in favor of a complete rewrite—it needed a lot of work.

Reviewing some of the history... There was an open source forum solution that had an established base of users that was completely abandoned for an attempted kickstarter of a ground-up rewrite. The kickstarter didn't work, so they're bootstrapping it and going to try to monetize with a paid marketplace and a "service-based business." It all strikes me as a promotional effort to base a kickstarter and a business around.

Toby has already been successful in making a fast and simple forum software, esoTalk. Toby, if your interests are in making freely available forum software but your career path remains focused on medical school, why invest so much time into starting a business around new forum software instead of just putting some time into revamping what you already had?

I'm trying to see the motivation behind this as something which would justify killing off your own forum project and leaving folks who use your software, besides making some cash on a side business, but I can't.

[1]: [http://flarum.org/story/](http://flarum.org/story/) [2]: [https://github.com/esotalk/esoTalk](https://github.com/esotalk/esoTalk)

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair points. I guess I consider esoTalk to be somewhat of a lost cause in terms of the way it's built. It's a pain to implement fixes and features, maintain, and is pretty limited in what it can do (and how it can be extended). Simply put, I didn't enjoy working on it.

When I said "I have produced some low-quality code and APIs that will surely need revision", I'm mostly talking about more semantic things like class naming and organization. The majority of Flarum's architecture is very solid, testable, and will be easy to maintain. Doesn't compare to esoTalk.

Admittedly, if I just wanted to start a business and make some cash, you're right: I probably could've just persisted with esoTalk. But it's not all about money – it's also about doing the best work that I can, enjoying it, and making damn good forum software with great potential.

There will eventually be a migration path from esoTalk to Flarum, and I still merge PRs from time to time... so I like to think I'm not completely abandoning the esoTalk folk!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The in-topic scrubber is great UX compared to pagination.

[https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/spa/quq37nq1583x0lf/d2lm88...](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/spa/quq37nq1583x0lf/d2lm886x.png)

<comment><USER10> I wonder how well it scales to upwards of thousands of comments, though. There are some forums I've seen where it's not unusual to have threads that are several hundred pages of 20+ posts each.

It also seems like prime territory to have something added in the style of the Xenforo threadmarks plugin: [https://github.com/Sidane/xenforo- threadmarks](https://github.com/Sidane/xenforo-threadmarks)

Basically, the thread author (or admins) mark particular posts, and a table of contents to them gets auto-generated, and each of those posts in the thread gets forward/back buttons to skip to the next/previous. It makes long-running threads much more navigable, especially single-purpose ones (game walkthroughs, following the news about specific events, etc).

<comment><USER9> I wonder the same thing.

Massive threads are somewhat of a proving ground for every forum implementation and feature. Like when you first realize that `OFFSET` SQL for pagination just isn't gonna cut it.

For example, I recently read a field report of someone migrating their Xenforo forum to Discourse ([https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-for-me-6-weeks- in/319...](https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-for-me-6-weeks-in/31900)) that had issues with megathreads after the migration since Discourse sends down a list of all post_ids in the topic, a known issue.

That threadmarks plugin is a brilliant idea, like a curated table-of-contents or places-of-interest. I'm going to implement that on my forum.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I really like that someone is still trying to innovate on PHP forums, and _not_ by simply offering a service. There is still a market for self-hosted forums, and most of the current offerings are basically rotting on the vine.

</comment><comment><USER26> What are the blockers on using Flarum in production? (Bugs, changing API's, etc) I would consider putting this into light use for a private forum to with maybe 10 to 40 users. If it is not yet ready for this, when would you expect it to be? (Note: your Roadmap is currently empty.)

My experience with many other projects would be that sometime prior to a Release Candidate you would want people to be testing and using the Beta.

I am just evaluating Discourse for a small group, but it looks like Flarum would be a better fit for my use case.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's buggy, prone to spam, probably not secure, missing features, etc. Probably should've named it an alpha, almost. But if you're game you could give it a spin - we're running our support forum on it currently. Will fill out that roadmap tomorrow :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This looks interesting, but it would need proper, nested subforums that are more discrete than the current tag system to really substitute for any of the major forums I use.

This isn't because of navigation, but because of the alerts and other cruft that particular sections in large, long-used forums accumulate over time. Per- section alerts (boxes at the top of the page separate from threads) in particular don't seem to be replicable here outside of the descriptions at the top.

</comment><comment><USER27> Will Flarum function as a QA site, with a way to vote up answers like stack overflow?

<comment><USER24> Going off of how Toby's last forum project went[1], most things that aren't essential to the project are left open to implement as plugins. esoTalk does have a plugin that lets conversation authors mark one reply as an answer, so I think it's reasonable to guess that one will eventually appear for Flarum.

[1]: [http://esotalk.org](http://esotalk.org)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Great job Toby & Franz!

I've used PhpBB (spam magnet), NodeBB (too buggy), and am now on Discourse, which is great but eats server space for breakfast.

Flarum look very cool — I'll give it a spin as soon as it's stable.

</comment><comment><USER29> Toby

Given than flarum.org is down due to moderate traffic, any immediate plans to include sometype of content caching within Flarum?

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm really in love with this. Subtle but comprehensive UI devoid of all the clutter.

</comment><comment><USER31> It's coming along great! Good work!

I really liked esoTalk and looking forward to installing this soon!

</comment><comment><USER32> What is your technology stack?

Looks good overall.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Technology stack is PHP, JavaScript (Mithril), Less. More info here: [http://flarum.org/docs/extend/](http://flarum.org/docs/extend/)

<comment><USER32> You mean mere core php? (I am from mob so nt seen the code on git)

No use of modern framework like laravel or something?

<comment><USER33> Looks like it uses some Illuminate (Laravel) components: [https://github.com/flarum/core/blob/master/composer.json](https://github.com/flarum/core/blob/master/composer.json)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> > You're viewing the HTML-only version of Flarum Community. Upgrade your > browser for the full version.

Thanks but my browser is already the latest version. At least you show something without javascript.

<comment><AUTHOR> Flarum automatically redirects to the non-JS version if there's an error booting up the JS app. What browser are you using?

<comment><USER34> Palemoon 25.7.0

I do see more than just that message. On [http://discuss.flarum.org/](http://discuss.flarum.org/) I see a list of links to various posts.

<comment><AUTHOR> Mind reporting an issue for this? ([https://github.com/flarum/core/issues](https://github.com/flarum/core/issues)) I can't test directly because I'm using a Mac, but it would be great if we can continue investigating on GitHub :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I really would like it if people started writing these kinds of things in modern languages.

<comment><USER36> go for it.

Also, there's nothing wrong with PHP.</comment></comment>