Ask HN: How often do you vote on posts in the "new" tab? - <AUTHOR> I am curious how posts from the "new" tab ever make it to the front page. Most posts there have 1 or 2 upvotes only and the posts disappear within an hour. With such low votes on the new posts, how do they ever come to the front page at all?
I see there are many interesting posts in the "new" tab. I vote on them but they don't stand a chance to come on the front page because I am the only one voting.
Do HN members really look at the "new" tab to see what interesting posts are there and upvote them? Or do you only see the front page and upvote posts there? <comment><USER2> Somewhat off topic, but I would welcome having a very small section of 2-3 randomly selected posts from "new" show up on top of the regular home page.

That way "doing my part" in scanning over the enormous volume of new posts becomes frictionless.

<comment><USER3> They do this, but it shows up on the bottom of the front page and it isn't random.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380)

<comment><USER4> Only one of my submissions made it to the front page and that's how it got there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I almost never even browse by New, but when I post a post I wish more people did heh

Sites like Reddit and HN really need to display new and popular posts/comments side by side. HN already gives new comments a chance by putting them at the top, but they could take it further.

</comment><comment><USER6> As often as possible. Otherwise the front page is dominated by big media sites like The NY Times, which frankly is about as anti-"Hacker" as it gets.

<comment><USER7> The paywall thing is making my HN experience worse over time. The "web" link doesn't work to get past it anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Posts on the Front Page got there by being voted on when on the "newest" page, there is (almost) no other way of getting there. So everything you see on the Front Page was once taking its chances on getting noted on the "newest" page, and succeeded.

And to answer your question, I always visit "newest", and if there's something there I like, or that I think is informative, useful, or relevant, then I upvote it.

There must be others who do the same, otherwise nothing would reach the Front Page. They may be a minority, though.

<comment><USER9> No. If someone submits a link that's been submitted recently their submission upvotes the original. I'd wager that that's how most links hit the front page.

<comment><USER8> > _If someone submits a link that's been submitted recently their submission > upvotes the original._

I have done some experiments on that and it's not always the case. There have been times when I have an old version of "newest" loaded, inadvertently submitted the same link, been taken to the existing submission, and seen that the points on the submission haven't changed. So that's not the whole story, even for that part.

> _I'd wager that that's how most links hit the front page._

It would be interesting to know the statistics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Imgur's community once made an experiment: people browsing 'new' were to upvote everything at all, to show the frontpage crowd what garbage they deal with. It sorta worked in that regard, but actually stuff that was upvoted to the very top turned out to be most delightfully wacky, more so than I've seen on the web in years, before or since. That night was the best time Imgur has delivered, for me. A part of it is that on Imgur, you mostly only glance at pics for a second to get the crux and move on (at least before all the videos). Not wade through a text for ten minutes.

They also had (maybe still do?) the phenomenon of 'late night Imgur': when most US normies are off to sleep, only weirdos are there, and lots of strange stuff is floating to the front page. Mostly taking some frightening form.

But in fact, 'new' on Imgur is an unending stream of complete trash: no-effort meme pics made by teens spiced up with thousand-time reposts. I have no idea how anyone can be browsing that.

</comment><comment><USER11> I often start with the new page, I enjoy as much the flagged and dead links which can reveal some interesting tangential subjects to HN that piqued my interest :)

</comment><comment><USER12> Only when I am super addicted to HN and only when I am submitting I am going through the New Tab.

Think the current system is broken and have the feeling that in the early votes is too much bias (either through high karma folks, maybe internal hidden push votes etc from HN internal circles eg. admins, alumina).

Btw very good question and I'd love to see someone from HN giving an official statement plus comment how much HN-internal bias might influence the early votes.

</comment><comment><USER13> To answer the question, I occasionally browse new and upvote posts. Probably around 30%-40% of my upvotes are from new.

However, my understanding was that newer posts got mixed in to the front page, so posts worthy of upvotes have a chance to receive them. Example: this very post, as of time of me writing this, has only 10 upvotes and was on the front page for me, in between two posts with hundreds of upvotes.

<comment><USER8> > _this very post ... has only 10 upvotes and was on the front page for me, in > between two posts with hundreds of upvotes._

That's common, as the "score" for a post is (very roughly) points divided by time. So a newer post with fewer points can still have the same "score" as an older post with many more points, giving the effect you've seen without the cause you posit.

So what you say about the mixing may be true, but is not evidenced by the example you've quoted.

<comment><USER13> If that's the case, then what you gave is the reason, is it not? A post made 1 minute ago will have 100x the score a post made 100 minutes ago, and this boost in score at a young age will cause a young post with only 1 or 2 upvotes to hit the first few pages for a short time, giving it a chance to get more upvotes if it's a good post.

<comment><USER8> No, because there are other factors mixed in, such as requiring a minimum number of upvotes by contributors not recognised as being in a voting ring, and beating the "gravity" factor. There are also penalties applied for certain types of posts and sources, boosts applied for certain types of posts, and penalties for some conditions. For example, when a post hits 40 posts, if the number of comments exceeds the number of points, a "probable flame war" penalty is applied.

So it's not the case that posts from the new page "get mixed in" to the Front Page, they get there on merit based on getting enough votes in a short enough time. To say they get "mixed in" implies that they are simply plucked from the "Newest" page and put on the Front Page regardless of votes. And that's not the case.

Usually.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> After going through a few pages on the main page (or until I start seeing posts I've already seen) then I go to the "new" tab. I read a lot of those and upvote the ones I think should be visible on the front pages. If it's something that's really interesting/useful I try to comment so as to give it a bit more visibility. I like to think that most HN users do the same :-)

</comment><comment><USER15> I use [https://github.com/dickmao/nnhackernews](https://github.com/dickmao/nnhackernews) as my newsreader, and so my default view is "new". The filtering is the most naive possible (only show brand new submissions or comments for articles you've read). When I wake up, there are 200-300 new submissions on the queue. Of those I might click through on 1-2. The morning ritual takes about 2-3 minutes. In my haste I'm sure I'm skipping some interesting-to-me items.

The holy grail is of course a toutiao filter. Netnews has always been needles- in-haystacks since Usenet. The migration from nntp to http has imo made the problem worse. At least with reddit's subreddit granularizing, one stands a chance of getting read. With HN's monolithic "news" category, it's all pretty random.

</comment><comment><USER16> To be frank I never visit the new tab, only the home page and I don't bother going to page 2, like the majority of members I believe.

On the other hand, I actively hide threads I'm not interested in, like petty politics or things that have absolutely nothing to do with technology.

</comment><comment><USER17> I have had friends tell me when they are going to post on new, and upvote. I do tend to look at new when they mention this. I'm sure a large chunk of the stuff that gets on the front page has a similar initial boost.

</comment><comment><USER18> I do quite often, both because my content addiction requires more than the front page provides and my vanity likes the idea that my comment will be read by a lot of people if the post makes it to the front page.

</comment><comment><USER19> A couple of times a day I scroll down looking for the interesting things that might be lost, upvoting generously.

Perhaps you could double down and do a HN Poll post to find out?

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you tell me how to create an HN Poll?

Or if someone is familiar with creating an HN poll, would you please create it and share the link here?

<comment><USER8> You need a minimum amount of karma to create a poll. If you search you can probably find an estimate of the required level, I don't know it offhand. Then you can search for how to create a poll (probably the same search will give you both answers).

 _Edit:_ Here's a start:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3380115](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3380115)

 _Edit:_ I don't know why you were downvoted, so I upvoted to compensate. It's a reasonable question, although it is answered by doing a quick search.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Update: I'm going to make a point to go through the new page more often and upvote development/programming/comp-sci related articles. I have a feeling a lot of us complaining about that HN front page is containing less-and-less hacking related articles are the same ones that never go through new and upvote stuff :|

</comment><comment><USER21> I use HN as a link aggregator almost exclusively. My ritual in the morning is to check the "new" tab all the way back to where the links (and their order) start getting familiar. I do this a few more times during the day. Rarely read the comments. Upvote links to math/tech books that I find to be great. For "fun times" I prefer 4chan and youtube.

</comment><comment><USER22> I browse the "new" tab almost every time I browse HN, every 2-3 days, usually 2-3 pages back. I almost always find some interesting stuff there, some days more so than in the "main" tab. I regularly upvote stuff. Also, like others said, I also browse it right after I submit a new link, but that's because it's shown right after I submit.

</comment><comment><USER23> You can vote on things? Thanks for letting us know.

<comment><USER8> Perhaps you are unaware, but your comment comes across as having a sarcastic tone, which is possibly misplaced. As such, people are likely to downvote you, which will delay your acquisition of karma, and hence your ability to do all sorts of things on the site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Voting cartels. That's the only way anything gets any attention anywhere these days.

</comment><comment><USER25> Mostly when I submit something myself and then I come back to it during the day. So take a look at my submission list, multiply that by 3, and that's how many votes I gave to the new tab, presumably.

</comment><comment><USER26> I generally never browse by new and I think these kind of posts tend to attract replies from users who do.

</comment><comment><USER27> I do. Mostly when I am posting, I will scroll down and read a few of the posts.

Otherwise I will check it maybe once a day.

</comment><comment><USER28> Every so often when I tell myself I have nothing better to do, like while falling asleep.

</comment><comment><USER29> I usually read HN every day over breakfast. I only look at the new tab about once a month.

</comment><comment><USER30> Once every two months I'll vote 3-5 times in 'new'.

</comment><comment><USER31> Thanks for that, I'll try to remember to do that more often.

</comment><comment><USER32> Hah, I forgot about it. So here's an upvote to the reminder.

</comment><comment><USER33> Is there a new tab :P</comment>


Building a JavaScript Promise from Scratch - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/gitconnected/understand-javascript-promises-by-building-a-promise-from-scratch-84c0fd855720 <comment><USER2> There is a subtle issue here: all parts of the suggested promise implementation run synchronously.

In spec-compliant promises, the executor runs synchronously [1][2], but the promise must wait until the next turn of the event loop [3] before calling the 'then' method.

[1] [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36726890/why-are- javascr...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36726890/why-are-javascript- promises-asynchronous-when-calling-only-synchronous-functions)

[2] [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36932244/what-is-the- int...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36932244/what-is-the-intention- behind-clause-2-2-4-of-promise-a-spec)

[3] [https://github.com/promises-aplus/promises- spec/issues/68](https://github.com/promises-aplus/promises-spec/issues/68)</comment>


Songza for Video Launches Publicly - <AUTHOR> http://5by.com

<comment><USER2> I'm the lead developer on this project. We're looking backend & frontend developers!

We use AngularJS on the frontend and Django in the backend. There's some Flask and Node.js mixed in too.

email me at dcaplan at 5by.com</comment>


Buffett wins $1M decade-old bet that the S&P500 would outperform hedgefunds - <AUTHOR> http://www.aei.org/publication/warren-buffett-wins-1m-bet-made-a-decade-ago-that-the-sp-500-stock-index-would-outperform-hedge-funds/ <comment><USER2> And I'm just going to self-promote a bit and say that the bet was registered via a project I worked on, the Long Now Foundation's project Long Bets:

[http://longbets.org/](http://longbets.org/)

We've been going since 2002: [https://www.wired.com/2002/05/longbets/](https://www.wired.com/2002/05/longbets/)

We are happy to host bets of long-term significance, and the minimum bet is only $200/side. I am glad to personally help shepherd people who are serious about bets to make sure you get through the process.

I would especially like to see HNers making bets about the things we argue a lot about. Bitcoin! VR! Uber! If you're tired of people posting waffle on some topic where you have a strong opinion, then challenge them to put money down.

<comment><USER3> If longbets.org was really serious about long-term bets, it wouldn't be restricting years to only 5 digits. Haven't they heard of the Y100K problem?

<comment><USER4> What is the Y100K problem. More importantly, who would they pay out at that point when both parties are dead

<comment><USER5> What if you want to bet they find a cure for death?

<comment><USER2> We would totally accept that bet. The closest bet we have right now is bet 11: "At least one human alive in the year 2000 will still be alive in 2150."

[http://longbets.org/11/](http://longbets.org/11/)

The tricky part is coming up with a clear agreement about what "cure" and "death" mean here. But there's a lot of good discussion around e.g., the extropians, so I think a solid bet could be created.

<comment><USER6> Does "Brain in a Jar" count? How about a Ghost in the Shell? More likely this is a bet on if Cyrogenics finally works out.

<comment><USER2> You mean for that bet? Good question, and not one I'm likely to have to answer. But from the arguments, the spirit seems to be about traditional meat- brain-in-meat-body life.

Or do you mean for your own? This is between you and the person you bet with. If you have a firm opinion, definitely find somebody on the opposite side and see if you can put together a bet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This does not surprise me.

My personal experience with hedge fund managers is that they are good salesmen that peddle their financial expertise to clients, convincing them of their financial rock-star status (usually gained through a lucky investment or two). Paulson is a classic example. Wealthy individuals buy into it, especially those that are less educated (e.g. those that have inherited money), and happily allocate away their money to these guys. Once the funds grow to a certain size, then they might consider pitching their investments to pension funds, and their money pot grows, as does the nominal value of their fees. By the time they have pension funds on board, their investments get less and less risky, eventually looking more and more like a basket of standard commodities or a standard equity index! Thus, the value they add also becomes smaller and smaller.

In my opinion, the hedge fund industry is a bit of a farce, but there are a small number of firms that do have a secret sauce that works sometimes (rarely forever though). In my experience, the firms that tend to make consistent money are the market makers, rather than the speculators.

<comment><USER8> Nothing works forever but there are funds like Renaissance Technologies' Medallion which may just be getting heads for a long time but rather seem to have some secret sauce that works for a long time. Usually though they're not very large and don't seek out investments.

<comment><USER7> Yes, Renaissance is an exception. I would argue that their nature of their strategies almost puts them into a pseudo market maker category (I've personally never worked with/for them, but I hear much of their strategy is statistical arbitrage, made possible by favourable transaction fee set ups and fast, colocated execution infrastructure).

<comment><USER9> Plus apparently some dodgy "creative" tax code interpretations around short- term/long-term gains.

<comment><USER10> Is it dodgy? You buy a share in a fund, that fund buys and sells, should you pay capital gains on every sale that fund makes? I don't think that has any precedent. You pay tax when you sell your share.

<comment><USER9> The type of strategy they employed isn't something small time investors could. It was a complex option scheme essentially buying options on their own short term trading.

<comment><USER11> While what you're saying is true, in fairness there are two caveats:

1\. Virtually all profitable strategies run by hedge funds are inaccessible to small time investors nearly by definition, because they have more capital and lower capacity constraints,

2\. The partnership you're talking about with Deutsche Bank doesn't account for most of their returns, and was only in effect in the last decade, not decades before.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Reminds me a little of traffic. Yesterday I was cruising down the highway in the leftmost lane, going about 80 with a line of other cars. The other two lanes were actually more clear, but cars were going much slower.

I notice this one car, weaving in and out of traffic in these two lanes, trying desperately to get ahead, constantly cutting people off. They did this for 40 miles, weaving in and out, sometimes getting ahead of me by quite a bit, sometimes falling behind.

If they had just stayed in the left lane and cruised, they would have arrived at their destination at exactly the same time.

My point is, it seems to be human nature to be bad at estimating long term averages, whether it be stock picks or just driving down the road. Checkout lanes are another example that comes to mind.

<comment><USER13> Some people think you should not be in the left lane unless you are passing at that moment. In some places, there are even signs saying "keep right except to pass". Perhaps this person was driving aggressively because they were enraged at the line of traffic on the left. Which is to say, they may not have been doing it for a quantitative benefit as you assume. This might strengthen rather than weaken the analogy to the stock market though...since it could be that people invest in hedge funds not to increase their average return but to reduce the regret of not owning "winners" and having something to talk about.

<comment><USER14> It's not just some people. It is actually the law in most states (albeit a seldom-enforced one).

Don't cruise in the left lane.

<comment><USER15> I wish this were true of most states in the USA. It's certainly true in many parts of Europe.

I don't have an especially authoritative source, and the first map I found was made seven years ago, but I don't think things have changed much:

[http://jalopnik.com/5501615/left-lane-passing-laws-a- state-b...](http://jalopnik.com/5501615/left-lane-passing-laws-a-state-by- state-map)

Only the green states would map to "don't cruise in the left lane"; the laws in the majority only say you shouldn't drive slower than normal traffic in the left lane.

<comment><USER16> That map is out of date. Oregon is now in the green group.

<comment><USER15> Good to know!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> For anyone interested in this bet, Ted Seides (the losing party) did a good podcast on the topic: [http://capitalallocatorspodcast.com/BetwithBuffett/](http://capitalallocatorspodcast.com/BetwithBuffett/)

My layman's understanding of hedge funds is they are better at hedging losses than increasing gains. So in good years they might underperform the broader market (e.g. gain 9% instead of 12%), but in bad years they should lose much less (e.g. lose 5% instead of 15%).

I think this bet was largely a bet on the broader market dropping after a long run-up (which would theoretically favor hedge funds), but instead the market kept rising more and more.

<comment><USER18> Yes, this was the origin of the term "hedge" fund, but in recent ~decade has come to mean "actively managed investments" because the name sounded cool to people who don't know that the word "hedge" means something intentionally conservative and boring.

<comment><USER19> Yeah, it's hedgy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Has anyone done the analysis to see if the stock-picking by those managers was worth anything at all?

Obviously it wasn't worth the fees they charged. But if all those fees had been flattened down to the same expense as the Vanguard fund, would their advice have been worth anything over the index? To a first approximation, it looks like the answer is no.

<comment><USER21> Investments can have a dual mandate - high returns BUT also low volatility. Many hedge funds will admit their returns may not beat the S&P500, but will counter that their returns have lower volatility -- achieving more _consistent_ gains over time.

To answer your question, sounds like the answer is still no, but it is worth noting that this whole conversation is ignoring the volatility side of the conversation.

<comment><USER22> You are correct except that doing this over 10 years somewhat removes the 'ignoring the volatility' argument.

<comment><USER23> >>You are correct except that doing this over 10 years somewhat removes the 'ignoring the volatility' argument.

Only lessens it slightly. There are plenty of bad 10-year periods you wouldn't be happy with if you were 50-55 years old with all your money in stocks, not to mention an index fund tracking the S&P500 rather than the full index.

Obviously holding index funds that are primarily stocks is the play when you are younger, but risk-adjusted returns matter a lot more for someone with big money as they approach retirement. It's worth exchanging returns for lower volatility down the line. Not that I think this bet could have turned out any other way, of course...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It's interesting that while the S&P did beat these hedge funds, Buffet's own Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B) seems to have beat the S&P handily[0], with an increase of ~130% from $77.93 in 2007 to $179.89 today.

I know Berkshire isn't actually a hedge fund, but is very analogous to a giant mutual fund, albeit one that takes a very active ownership role in the companies whose shares it owns.

0:[http://quotes.morningstar.com/chart/stock/chart.action?t=BRK...](http://quotes.morningstar.com/chart/stock/chart.action?t=BRK.B&region=USA&culture=en_US), look at the 10-year chart.

<comment><USER25> Yup this is the optimal strategy. I figure that one out a couple decades ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Index funds will almost always outperform actively managed funds. They are the best choice for the layman investor. An excellent book on this topic is The Little Book of Common Sense Investing by John Bogle.

[https://www.amazon.com/Little-Book-Common-Sense- Investing/dp...](https://www.amazon.com/Little-Book-Common-Sense- Investing/dp/0470102101)

<comment><USER27> "Rest Estate always goes up!"

"Index funds will almost always outperform actively managed funds."

Convenient investment vehicles should not stop you thinking. Index ETF were a great idea. But now everybody is pouring tons of money into them. Not sure this is a good idea, at least not on the scale how it is currently done. A stock is priced by supply and demand. There are stocks where there is basically very little real trading. Only ETF and some HFT funds. Yet, the stock is rising with the index. What happens in a downturn? What happens if this stock drops significantly more? Every ETF has to re-balance to reflect this fact, easily leading to a feed-back effect.

Some people betting on it: [http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-04-09/horseman- global-unv...](http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-04-09/horseman-global- unveils-new-shorting-philosophy-using-etf-flows-catalyst)

<comment><USER28> Index funds have to outperform active funds and traders in aggregate by definition. It's not a claim or debate, it's simple math. After savings on taxes and expenses, indexes represent the average + a fair bit more than other options. There is no feedback effect, except that more people indexing will lead to more trading arbitrage opportunities, which people will take and which doesn't hurt indexers, who will continue to take the market average return plus what they save in expenses and taxes. As an aside: the last place to get financial advice is Zero Hedge. Try this instead:

[http://www.etf.com/sections/index-investor-corner/swedroe- wh...](http://www.etf.com/sections/index-investor-corner/swedroe-why-index- investing-wins?nopaging=1)

<comment><USER29> This is true in aggregate, with the additional caveat of _over an asymptotically long timeline_. Part of the goal of hedge funds, or at least some, is to hedge investments so that you might not get hurt as hard during a recession as the market.

There can still be active funds that perform better than the market, or the market as measured by an index ETF. Unfortunately with the way funds are marketed, funds can often just employ survivorship bias so that all funds look very good. Also, index funds do not have to outperform active funds/traders by definition, because not only can active funds invest in assets outside of the index (other stocks, real estate, futures, options, etc.), but active funds can also have more profitable allocations. Obvious proof: if the value of every stock in the S&P 500 were now worth 0, active funds wouldn't, ergo active funds will not necessarily always be outperformed by indexes.

I think that for your average investor, indexes are the way to go at the moment, but it's not impossible for there to be a world where active funds are often better.

<comment><USER30> >This is true in aggregate, with the additional caveat of over an asymptotically long timeline.

This is true over any timespan. At any point in time the active part of the market holds the same stocks as the passive part of the market and thus has the exact same risk and returns. This is as true over a century as it is over a month.

>not only can active funds invest in assets outside of the index (other stocks, real estate, futures, options, etc.), but active funds can also have more profitable allocations

If your active fund is investing in different markets then it's not comparable to the index. If there's an advantage in investing in those assets the solution isn't to buy the active fund. The solution is to find the index funds that will also give you exposure to the same assets and buy those instead gaining the same advantage of the same returns with less fees.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I feel like there's some cognitive dissonance surrounding hedge funds in popular culture -- on the one hand you have people saying that any outsized short-term gains seen by hedge funds are the result of some selection/survivorship bias, and on the other hand you have people saying that any outsized returns are the result of illegal privileged information (see the TV show 'Billions').

I realize that there are enough hedge funds out there that both things can be happening. It's too bad that there's so little visibility into the industry, it would be fascinating to see some kind of hedge fund taxonomy.

<comment><USER32> It doesn't have to be illegal.

Hedge Funds have access to CEO's, they'll go in and interview them. Ostensibly, the CEO cannot say anything that is not 'public information' \- but if you think about it, then why would the Fund even talk to the CEO if 'all info is public'?

Because a lot of nuance can be gained from in person interviews. Little tidbits of information gleaned can make a difference.

I'm not hugely knowledgeable of that industry, so I can't speak of the 'for sure' bad things happening, but I know at least one manager who does this.

Funny: he totally does not believe that they really gain an edge over the public. Then I ask him why he bothers with the interviews and he doesn't have a very good answer. It's almost funny. I suspect his fund partners have a better clue.

So that's one thing.

Another - is that simply by having fewer regulator requirements, hedge's can do all sorts of things that bigger funds cannot.

As far as 'hedge funds not doing as well as the S&P' \- well - the S&P changes, and it's made of pretty good companies. Also - a lot of funds come and go - it may not just be 'survivor bias' \- some may very well just be dam better than others. Almost all of the gains in VC go to top funds, and there's tons of churn in the bottom 50%, but that is a different dynamic.

<comment><USER33> I think the rationale that you can gain nuance from in-person interviews about public information is where science and mathematics turns into wizardry and human bias nonsense.

If the evidence suggests access to CEOs like this works, there's probably something else going on. Maybe a bit more winking and "I didn't say this but..."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> It is not really surprising that a large group of hedge funds underperformed the S&P500. In fact, William Sharpe made the argument a long time ago: in aggregate, active investors hold the passive portfolio and earn the same return as passive investors before fees, but lower returns after fees. In aggregate, this is always and necessarily true: [https://web.stanford.edu/~wfsharpe/art/active/active.htm](https://web.stanford.edu/~wfsharpe/art/active/active.htm)

<comment><USER28> It's so simple and obviously true yet a shocking number of people think it could be otherwise (e.g. if too many people index).

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> So clearly, for the individual, the optimal strategy is to simply invest in index funds and just wait.

But a new question that is being raised is: "what happens if everyone only invests in index funds?"

<comment><USER36> This has been answered a thousand times. Everyone will never invest in index funds. What will happen is more and more people will invest in index funds until there are so little people actively investing in the stock market that the ones that do are able to beat it. However, them beating it will only net (after their fees) the same returns as index funds thus striking a balance where index funds match the performance of active investors.

If either index funds or active investors (after fees) make more money, capital will move to the one that pays more until they balance again. We have had way too many active investors for a long time which is why index funds have constantly outperformed active investors but eventually they will balance as more and more people move their money to index funds.

<comment><USER18> You are missing the point. Once almost everyone invests in index funds, what will determine the price of stocks?

<comment><USER37> > Once almost everyone invests in index funds, what will determine the price > of stocks?

there are hundreds or thousands of index funds, all investing in different subsets of the market. money flowing back and forth between those funds will shift the relative value of their underlying sets.

also all the other answers, such as, that's unlikely to happen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> If anyone finds this surprising I'd highly recommend reading 'Smarter Investing' by Tim Hale, which does a great job of advocating for index-based positions. With the exception of C, those fund-of-funds have done incredibly badly.

One of the interesting things Tim discusses is that this poor performance compared to market tends to make investors second-guess their investments (often for good reason looking at those returns), and buy into the fund that did well last year instead. So you're also getting into a sell-low-buy-high routine.

</comment><comment><USER39> Question for financial types: For a few years I've owned a small selection of shares in FTSE companies (15 of them at the moment). I don't really do this scientifically, I just look for large, well-established companies where their shares look cheaper than long run, and buy those. (Partly I do this so I can see everyday companies that I own a tiny bit of). Is this practically equivalent to owning index-linked funds? Am I missing out? I plan to hold them for many years, and it's mostly "play money".

<comment><USER40> There's two parts to this answer.

First, the numbers thrown around are that once you own 15 diversified stocks you have reduced your portfolio risk by 70 percent. That's not bad. At this point your volatility may not be that different than a market index. Of course it's different for every set of stocks, but I think this is a safe-ish guideline. So in that sense you are not missing out a whole lot.

Second, and more importantly, it is very simple to put together 15 stocks with a low volatility, but also with very low returns. This is because the vast majority of the returns of an index come from a very small number of outperforming stocks. It's like the 90-10 rule. 90 percent of an index's performance comes from 10% of the stocks. Those aren't the exact numbers, but when you only pick 15 stocks, it is very likely that you will totally miss out on all outperforming stocks.

Here's an article that talks about this in more depth and uses real numbers: [http://www.efficientfrontier.com/ef/900/15st.htm](http://www.efficientfrontier.com/ef/900/15st.htm)

<comment><USER23> >>This is because the vast majority of the returns of an index come from a very small number of outperforming stocks.

This is the only thing the parent commenter needs to read to understand why indexing is not equivalent to owning 15 stocks that theoretically reduce portfolio risk (my guess is that the stocks are highly correlated and have too high of weight towards IT and not enough towards boring fields like industrials).

<comment><USER39> Actually the opposite. Being in IT, I never buy IT stocks. They're mostly everyday brands and industries.

<comment><USER23> >>Being in IT, I never buy IT stocks.

That, ah, is even worse. Your diversification... isn't. Just because you have a job in IT doesn't mean that's adequate exposure. There is a large difference between a paycheck and investments in the large cap IT sector.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Although there is still tons of money going to actively managed funds it seems to be more and more common knowledge that index fund investing is ultimately the smartest thing to do for personal finance.

Does anyone know what the risk factors are (if any) to this type of passive investing if EVERYONE begins to do the same thing?

<comment><USER42> I had an interesting conversation with a very smart investor last year, and basically his idea was that while active managers will sell certain specific stocks (less volatile stocks) to fulfill redemptions in the event of a decline and/or crash, ETFs will generally just hit an (automated) sell on everything across the board. So proportionally they will sell off significantly more volatile small and midcaps vs large caps.

Every since I have had that conversation, I no longer invest in passive index funds or ETFs.

<comment><USER43> This is incorrect, especially with ETFs. With an ETF, the seller/buyer (the individual, not the fund) pays all of the transaction costs. So buying and holding an ETF doesn't expose you to the problems which the behavior of panicking investors^ _. The same is not always true for mutual funds.

_ caveat: Vanguard index funds may be special and this doesn't apply to the same extent because the ETFs are a dual share class of the larger mutual fund.

<comment><USER42> But you are still exposed to the market, which can decline significantly. People will withdraw money from their passively managed funds when the market starts tanking. We have no idea what will happen in the next 'fear trade' when everyone starts dumping shares.

Stocks can go crazy and this could create a death spiral on the ETFs, because an ever more frequent decline can lead to significantly more volatility in small and midcaps, and more people withdrawing funds from their ETFs, which in turn will cause more liquidations.

All reasoning (to some extent) is lost as to which assets to liquidate. Actively managed funds will generally liquidate assets that don't cause too much swings in share prices in a downturn. Liquidating $50MM worth of Google won't make a big difference, but liquidating $50MM worth of SmallCap generally will put significant pressure on the share price. On the flipside: imo it does create a significant buying opportunity when it comes to small cap stocks.

Tl;dr: in my view, the more money that ends up being managed passively, the easier it will become to beat the market as an active investor.

<comment><USER43> There are two concerns: transaction costs (tracking error relative to index return) and index return.

Those who believe in generally efficient markets want to capture the market return, however volatile, with as little tracking error as possible. Since the ETF holders don't actually _sell_ any stocks when the prices decline, their returns are temporarily depressed. If and when prices recover so too will their value.

There is nothing unique about ETFs in this respect. Your critique is more about index funds in general, not ETFs specifically. ETFs practically differ from mutual funds only in things like transaction costs.

re your tl;dr: Sharpe's theorem shows that active investors will underperform passive investors after costs. Notice that this does not depend on the number of passive investors (and certainly at this point we're nowhere near any of the percentages of passively managed assets which people say may be worrying).

Overall, I do not think your critique is well-informed by the facts.

<comment><USER42> To each their own investment style (and there are many), but markets (in my view, and in the view of many others) are not efficient. (More than) half of what determines the stock price is psychology and herd mentality. It's not just numbers, and more an art than it is a science. Larger cap stocks however are generally priced more correctly than small- or mid cap stocks.

Second to that is that your returns will also depend on the risk you are willing to take. Investing through index funds and ETFs will correlate with a certain alpha, but that doesn't mean returns can't be higher if you are less diversified (and thus taking more risk).

Depending on the type of companies you are investing in, you might be comfortable taking a bigger risk with the goal of achieving a higher return.

Say you're working in technology and truly understand it, you can probably outperform the market significantly by investing in 3 to 5 technology stocks. Is it riskier? Yes. Is it worth it? Some people will say yes, others say no. And that is absolutely fine.

<comment><USER43> > Investing through index funds and ETFs will correlate with a certain alpha

Thank you for showing others that you do not know what you are talking about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> For context the losers argument is that Buffet picked a good team in a good period and he would have a good chance in a second cycle. [https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-05-03/why-i- los...](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-05-03/why-i-lost-my-bet- with-warren-buffett).

<comment><USER45> A weak attempt at damage control.

He keeps reiterating his parole that experts who actively select assets know more then the average Joe.

Even though the average Joe just completely blew them out of the water over a whole decade :)

<comment><USER13> I agree that said experts probably don't know enough to justify their cost.

But if the conclusion one draws is that the US large cap stock market is the place to put your money for the next 100 years just because it was great the last 100 years, I think that's the wrong lesson. Of all the markets in all the countries in the world, and all the asset classes, the US stock market has been an outlier for a long time, and it can't continue forever. Like Moore's law, and declining interest rates, and population growth, every trend stops somewhere since it would otherwise eat the world. Generally right at the point almost nobody is left to bet against it.

There is no such thing as completely passive management - someone at least selects components of an index, and you at least choose which index and that is always going to be pivotal with respect to investment success. I don't think there is logically any way around some degree of deliberate selection of assets. All people can do is pay less for the illusion of expertise.

<comment><USER46> Isn't that last sentence the whole point, though? I thought that index funds didn't generally do better than actively managed funds in terms of raw returns, they just didn't do much _worse_ , and the vastly lower fees mean that you come out ahead overall. The point of an index fund isn't to attain some sort of stock picking nirvana where nobody's really picking anything, it's just to get a fee of 0.04% instead of 2%, or whatever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Am I reading that right? S&P500 nets you on average a 10% annual return of investment? Does that mean you can "just" invest ten times your yearly living expenses and practically live off idle income? How does that not completely destroy the economy and why isn't everyone doing it?

<comment><USER48> > S&P500 nets you on average a 10% annual return of investment?

In the last 10 years, yes. Historically, it's been closer to 7% in real terms (adjusting for inflation). There are no guarantees that this will be the case for the future.

> Does that mean you can "just" invest ten times your yearly living expenses > and practically live off idle income?

You'll need more than that because there are multi-year periods where the s&p 500 declines. The number that has been bandied around for a 'safe' withdrawal rate is 4% [1], so you'll need closer to 25 times your yearly living expenses.

> How does that not completely destroy the economy and

Because not everybody is doing it. If they were you wouldn't be getting those returns, obviously.

> why isn't everyone doing it?

Most Americans have less than $1000 in savings, let alone 10x their yearly living expenses.

[1] [http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/05/29/how-much-do-i- need...](http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/05/29/how-much-do-i-need-for- retirement/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Hedge fund guy here.

\- You have to consider risk. Perhaps use volatility as a proxy. Were the funds more or less volatile than the S&P? There are funds that are more and funds that are less. The bet ought to be adjusted for that, ie some form of risk adjusted return.

\- It's a rigged bet. A fund of 5 funds of funds is going to be the market, minus fees. Yes there are funds that aren't just long the market but quite a lot will be. Many managers find it a sensible bet to add some beta, because the market often goes up and you will often be judged vs the market, not absolute returns. Throw them all together in a pot and all the spice is gone. Now take out fees.

\- Plenty of individual funds did beat the S&P (I'll toot my own horn here), but to beat the average someone's gotta be under average, typically other hedge funds.

\- You have to wonder how the bet would have fared had we not experienced the unprecedented reaction of central banks to the crisis. I don't know if Buffett had considered that, he's a smart guy, but it didn't seem like that was what the bet was about. If the market had been allowed to take a "more natural" course perhaps the funds would have looked better.

\- You can find long periods in the past where the S&P was sideways. The constant advice to index is simplistic. Think about your own situation before you do that, there's at least a lot of interesting things to learn before you give up.

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

Seems to be a lot of response to this. Now I'm not saying it was particularly smart to bet against the market. In fact if you read closely you can see why. Which side of the bet would I have taken? Well, if I wasn't running a fund, I'd have taken Warren's side, for the same reason. As it happens you have very little credibility as a fund manager if you're not invested in your own fund, so I ended up backing myself. (Which is not quite the same as the bet.)

For your average guy, I don't think there's a smart way for you to pick a fund to beat the market. You have to spend time actually investigating each strategy. An example of a fund who I think will provide a risk-adjusted market beating return is a guy I met once. He knows a bunch of stuff in detail about the valuation of exchange traded funds, and has infrastructure (technical and legal) in place to exploit discrepancies. It's quite far away from what people normally talk about when they talk about "investment". Most managers do not do this; they will just give you a variant of "I'm good at guessing and I can handle risk".

Regarding central bank intervention, of course it's a manager's job to think about what might happen. I'm merely saying that most of them probably didn't see it coming, and that that is the major component of the underperformance. Consider that the HF marketing is basically "we'll think about the future for you". Now if what ends up happening is basically that you should buy everything and hold it, then why would you expect a guy who can predict turns to do any better than the market? Keep in mind you're paying fees for him to sell and buy as things go up and down. Note that several managers did in fact close down, not because of catastrophic losses, but because they got fed up with the game.

<comment><USER28> > You have to consider risk.

The question is: OK, you account for risk, now what? You can manage risk by tempering an all-stock portfolio with bonds, lowering volatility. Why pick high-cost hedge funds over that option?

> Throw them all together in a pot and all the spice is gone.

Except if you look at the breakdown, any one of those sub-funds did poorly. None beat the S&P.

> Plenty of individual funds did beat the S&P

But how is an investor to know in advance? Also: winning funds tend to rotate around - can't use past performance as a reasonable guide to pick a fund going forward.

> You have to wonder how the bet would have fared had we not experienced the > unprecedented reaction of central banks to the crisis.

You can always argue this time was different, but the reality is we had roughly 7% average returns on the S&P over the course of the bet, which is pretty typical. It wasn't just some short period, either - for nine out of the ten years the S&P won the bet against the group.

> You can find long periods in the past where the S&P was sideways.

Which is why a smart portfolio is three-fund, covering global stocks and bonds. A portfolio of that makeup does not tend to travel sideways for long periods like the US market can alone. Take for instance 2000 to 2010, in which US stocks did go sideways - bonds and international stocks compensated for that.

At the end of the day, instead of excuses/explanations (no offense intended) I'd like to see you make a case for who should be using hedge funds and why.

<comment><USER50> > The question is: OK, you account for risk, now what? You can manage risk by > tempering an all-stock portfolio with bonds, lowering volatility. Why pick > high-cost hedge funds over that option?

I think his point is that hedge funds may have higher risk-adjusted returns than the S&P 500, despite lower absolute returns. For (ridiculously unrealistic) example, say you have an average 7%/yr return on the S&P 500 with volatility of ~14% and a hedge fund with a 5%/yr return but volatility of ~1%. At the end of the time period, a fixed $1M investment is clearly going to come ahead on the S&P 500 but the hedge fund is clearly the better fund, as matched for volatility (through leverage) with the S&P 500, the returns would be 70%/yr.

You'd pick the hedge fund because matched for volatility (through leverage or bonds or what have you), the hedge fund performs better.

<comment><USER28> It's theoretically possible but I'll believe it's actually possible when I see it. I don't see volatility data in the linked article, but if they released it somewhere we could perhaps model a stock/bond portfolio of comparable volatility and see how they did. I would be willing to bet the stock/bond approach would win on a risk-adjusted basis, but can't say without data.

Meanwhile, though, a generic vanilla Total Bond market index fund over the past 10 years returned 4.3% annually. A $100,000 investment would have turned into over $150,000 over the course of the bet, higher than the hedge fund collection. So the hedge funds would have to have less volatility than a very steady intermediate-duration bond fund, which, incidentally, had far lower draw-downs in its worst years. So at the very least, in plain language, if 'big drops' are a measure of risk, then the hedge fund set was riskier than bonds and still lost to bonds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Key here is long term. If you are investing for long term and choose hedge fund then you are a sucker. Smart investors choose hedge fund only for short term investments and only because they know the fund is trying to exploit some information asymmetry. Such funds are usually ultra secretive and you would get to invest in it only because you knew someone running it.

</comment><comment><USER52> Even though Efficient Market Hypothesis doesn't take into account some short- term subtleties and inconsistencies of human behavior, the insights it provides tend to dominate in the long term, which seems to be the case here with Mr Buffet's winning bet.

<comment><USER53> So then how did Buffet make his money?

<comment><USER54> Fundamental analysis, arbitrage plays and, starting out, investing other people's money with hugely favorable commission structure for himself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> So obviously the Hedgefund didn't beat the market enough to have a better return for the investors....

But is there anyway to compare the (Returns + Extracted Money Through Fees) vs S&P500 to see the potential return of the Hedgefund before the fees were extracted?

<comment><USER56> Not likely. They were a "fund of funds", and hedge funds rarely actually disclose their investments even to investors, let alone the general public. You'd be lucky to even get a list from one fund, let alone all of them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> I don't have problem people investing their personal money in hedge funds, but as indicated by the article, large institutions also invest in hedge funds, which in many cases are just a collection of smaller hedge fund, each charging hefty fee.

</comment><comment><USER58> So how is Mortimer paying him the bet? Is it a suitcase full of $1 bills?

<comment><USER59> The money is going to Girls Incorporated of Omaha, the charity chosen by Buffett.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> > The five he selected had invested their money in more than 100 hedge funds,

Wouldn't the average performance of that large a set anyway approach that of the S&P?

</comment><comment><USER61> Did anyone calculate how would be the perfomance if there was no fee for the hedgefund?

</comment><comment><USER62> Best $1m in marketing that Ted Seides ever spent for 10 years of profile.

</comment><comment><USER63> So, for the non financially savy, how can I set up my portfolio to bet on index funds?

<comment><USER64> Just buy shares of SPY. It tracks the S&P 500. Keep in mind, returns aren't everything. They have to be considered along with risk. The S&P 500 also has big downturns of 20% or more. A good measure of return to risk is the sharpe ratio. The S&P's isn't all that good. This is why people invest in hedge funds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Okay so any leveraged real estate fund would have outperformed the S&P500, without the possibility of a sudden margin call

Any leveraged bond fund should have been able to as well, a carry trade from 2012 in European government bonds should have made many hundreds of percent

A futures fund should have been able to

A commodity options should have made monumental gains over the 85% that the S&P500 gave in 10 years, honestly should have made that in a month

A fund that did what Warren Buffet got rich doing, by buying up bad companies and improving, should still have gotten high returns

And finally, there were simply no cryptocurrency funds around!

The problem, I say smugly, is that these fund of funds were probably all macro funds with too many assets under management, making them hard to manage in the niche markets I proclaimed.

A fund with 1 billion AUM cannot manage that much real estate without eating into the management fees. There is not enough liquidity in the options market, and definitely not enough liquidity in cryptocurrencies.

But this unfortunately influences perception that "NOBODY" is able to make / promise more than 5% a year over several years. This is false but I'm not going to try to change your mind. Consolidating capital with someone managing <500k to around 25 million should be able to consistently take advantage of these less scalable opportunities for great profits. After all, it is how Warren Buffett himself got 100s of thousands of percentage gains in his hedge fund of $105,000.

<comment> compiler-guy The problem for the every-person is finding the one that succeeds rather than fails. Given that in the aggregate these investments so severely underperformed, we can conclude that on an weighted average basis, you were more likely to lose money than gain money.

No one disputes that some funds will over perform. The question is, which one? If you can predict that reliably, you will be rich.

Most people can't.

<comment><USER66> Not just predict which ones, but get them to take your money too. AFAIK, many of the ones that are performing really well don't want to expand their AUM that much and so don't advertise and won't take just anyone's money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> The problem IMO is that stocks outperform bonds in the first place because of the debt-based economy. I suspect it is part of why Glass-Steagell was repealed in the first place.

<comment><USER28> Stocks should outperform bonds because they are riskier than bonds. Why would you expect or want it to be otherwise?

<comment><USER67> But the more stocks outperform bonds, the more things like the repeal of Glass-Steagell are encouraged.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> Eye catching headline, but the set of hedgefunds is diverse with a large range of performance. I imagine the upper tails do pretty well

<comment><USER23> Can you guarantee me access to upper tail funds? I'm interested. I'd love to get my money into Medallion.

<comment><USER68> That was kind of my point. Funds like medallion exist and succeed pretty consistently, but they are the tail. Certainly others go above and below at various points in time

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> What is increasing S&P value other than the crowd willing to walk a little further out on the gangplank?

I'd say it's a little too early to call that bet.

(people can vote this one down as much as they want. The reality is that is the only thing making the value go up now.. just more people crowding into the same trade. Watch out when the crowd changes its mind)

<comment><USER59> The bet was started right at the peak before the 2008 fall. It still own.

One can of course win any bet by stopping it when it's convenient, but that doesn't make it a very good bet, which is why a fixed period is used.</comment></comment>


Why I want to learn to code (and how I plan to learn) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.howtoprogram.tv/post/3118918393/why-i-want-to-learn-to-code

<comment><AUTHOR> Over the course of the past few months, my friend Dan (<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=theli0nheart>) and I have been talking about launching a website that would help aspiring programmers learn how to code. There are a ton of resources out there already, but it's so confusing to a newbie that it's almost impossible to make a solid start without someone walking you through the process.

Dan's an experienced hacker. I'm not, and during the process of my first startup, I realized how much more valuable I'd be if I knew how to program - even if my focus was biz-dev and marketing.

We came up with the idea to build a website where he'd post videos and notes that would teach me to code from scratch. Along the way, I'd blog about my experiences so new programmers could follow along. The big goal is to foster a community for people who are interested in learning how to hack, share resources, and meet each other.

It will be a fun project and we're excited to see where it takes us. Hopefully you'll all join in and make it better than just we could all by ourselves. We have a landing page set up and would love you to check it out and leave your email.

Feedback and advice are really appreciated! Here's the link again - <http://howtoprogram.tv>.

<comment><USER2> What is your target demographic? I'd love to see something for younger kids/teens.

<comment><USER3> I think we're targeting everyone who wants to learn!

If anything, I think that younger kids might have an easier time grasping some concepts than those who are older and might have to adjust their way of thinking. Kids have no baseline. All in all, my goal is to make these lessons as clear and easy to follow as possible for everybody.

<comment><USER4> What language(s)?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Learn Python the Hard Way is highly recommended. It forces you "through the moves" of what a programmer does in as plain and basic a way as I've seen. (Edit-Test-Debug cycle.)

</comment><comment><USER6> Great idea! I'd love to see the "interactive" side of your idea. For me the coolest thing about starting to learn coding was writing a line, running the app and seeing something output to the screen.

Also what helped me learn was having a mentor who would answer questions and push me to keep learning. I learned a lot mostly from books and working on things I wanted to build. However I recently went through Rails for Zombies and really enjoyed the interactivity of it.

Just thought of a silly but perhaps useful feature... (And assuming this is all done on the website) At the end of each tutorial ask them to write out a commit command. Get them used to version control (Git would be great).

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER7> I think a website to teach people to program could be very useful. However, I do not think videos are the best way to do this. People would want to see your examples in text on the screen so they can copy it, or just take their time reading and understanding it at their own pace.

Also, if the lessons are laid out in text, you will receive much more search engine traffic from people who are trying to figure out how to do something.

<comment><USER3> You make an excellent point!

We're going to do written tutorials and screencasts side by side. I think the goal of the videos in large part is to get people interested.

It doesn't take a lot of commitment to watch a video. On the other hand, a written tutorial takes a little bit more effort to see the end result. I think a healthy dose of each is what we're aiming for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Two quick options - either to try or just use to inspire you.

You should look into BlueJ. It was developed specifically for the purpose of making learning object oriented techniques easier (with Java): <http://www.bluej.org/>

Another option, is to think of Rails. Rails is known for getting programmers productive with very little setup - and there are videos online showing you how to build a blogging engine in 5 minutes. And there are a lot of similar series by the Rails guys that discuss various aspects. Try them out. You might make a lot of progress.

</comment><comment><USER9> Why not just go buy a copy of "How To Design Programs", or use the free second edition at <http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/HtDP2e/> ?

(Personally, I learned from a copy of IBM's BASIC Reference, circa 1985, and later a copy of Microsoft's "C for Yourself". But that was a different era.)

</comment><comment><USER10> This is a great idea. I've followed your twitter and I put my email in. I'm looking forward to seeing the project launch soon.

</comment><comment><USER11> I registered and came out from lurking to comment.

As someone who, professionally, works worth only VBA and a form of LISP to do numerical analysis, this sounds great. I've been itching to expand my coding horizons for a while now and this seems very interesting.

I entered my email address and look forward to launch.

</comment><comment><USER12> jaretmanuel.com/hackerville The further you can dig in on the technical side the better advantage and more value you will be to your endeavour. Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER13> Good luck, from a fellow traveller. Education is hard!

<comment><USER3> Thanks! I'm not sure if we realize what we're getting ourselves into, but no matter what, it should be fun!</comment></comment>


DefaultApp - <AUTHOR> https://tyler.io/default-app-for-mac-ios/ <comment><USER2> There's a lot of discussion in the comments here about Electron vs. native apps. But last year's Catalyst project, which allows you to ship iOS-based projects on the Mac, opens an important new path. I've been surprised not to see many people discuss it!

In particular, this means that you can use React Native to build native macOS apps. You still get live reloading, hot code push, pleasant abstractions, etc. Most importantly, though, these apps can use straight-up AppKit controls on macOS and straight-up UIKit controls on iOS. Better still, you can use react- native-web to ship such projects on the web too.

You will+should, of course, have many platform-specific branches. But I find that the vast majority of my code is shared, and there's a _world_ of difference in being able to use the same development tools to ship polished software on desktop, mobile, and web.

My most recent project builds to macOS, iOS, Android, and web out of the same Typescript project. There was certainly some toolchain chicanery involved in this, but now that it's set up, it's delightful.

Many of the companies shipping Electron apps on desktop are shipping React Native apps on mobile. I would very much like to see React Native-based desktop apps replace Electron apps.

<comment><USER3> As a user I don't want a React app. I want a native app.

I can understand why you as a developer don't have time to maintain the different platforms, but for a UI app running on my laptop or desktop I care about one platform and that is macOS.

It's okay if it's Mac only and many apps are.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, but let's be honest. Most users don't want a specific app. They want functionality. They'll pay for functionality in a React App while eschewing a native app without the functionality. The practice of this means solving the problem the fastest is the most important part. And if someone can rapidly build a native app so be it, but if they can only rapidly build React apps that's what they should do.

Or they can do otherwise and they'll learn.

<comment><USER5> > Yeah, but let's be honest. Most users don't want a specific app. They want > functionality

True, but they also want to be able to run it without bringing their crappy laptop to a crawl. Devs excuse their inefficient code with "modern hardware is fast enough", but it ceases to be fast enough when the majority of your apps are inefficient. Try running Slack, Discord, Skype, Spotify and a couple Chrome tabs on a last-gen laptop. And now try to run something actually useful (Office, a game, whatever). You can't.

I've seen completely non-technical users say "ugh, another web app". Alternatives are few, so users won't use something else, true, but that's not an excuse to keep making inefficient apps.

(I realize this doesn't apply nearly as much to React Native, but only React was mentioned above and this is a rant I've had prepared for a while now...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Reading the comments here, I find it very distressing that people in our industry can _simultaneously_ say the following two things:

1\. Consistency is extremely important for UX and one of the cornerstones of user-friendliness

2\. Users who aren't developers probably don't care too much about "native look and fell".

If users, indeed, don't care if some applications don't look and can't be handled like other applications, maybe it's time we judged designs more in terms of innovation and usability, and less in terms of compliance. I haven't seen a new icon set, application theme or website that didn't look like any other icon set, application theme or website in years.

If they _do_ actually care, then maybe let's admit that. I'm not advocating for burning all JavaScript to the ground, but it would certainly help if we'd treat inconsistencies as bugs, so that we could use frameworks like Electron to write better (i.e. more consistent) applications, rather than hand-waving them as unimportant, except in topics about UX rather than Electron, in which case they're totally important.

<comment><USER7> I think that there is a way these two points can live in the same universe. One the one hand users expect a consistent UI, especially on mobile. While apps are free to define their own user interface and style, they should follow certain patterns that other apps in the past have established.

When I hear the other point that users dont care about UX what that boils down for me is they don't see all the little things that we see. They still expect a consistent user interface but seeing a menu not render exactly where it should, an animation that stutters for one frame or other small things. These are all things that we as developers scrutinize but the user doesn't notice all that often.

Now we should still scrutinize those little things. I feel like the thing that makes some apps feel more "magical" than others is how polished those little details are.

<comment><USER8> > They still expect a consistent user interface but seeing a menu not render > exactly where it should, an animation that stutters for one frame or other > small things. These are all things that we as developers scrutinize but the > user doesn't notice all that often.

I find it's the other way around. Quite often it's the developers who don't care if a menu is out of place or if an animation stutters.

The users, however, _do_ see these things. They might not be able to articulate it, but they _will_ see it. And call your app slow (animation stutters), unpolished (menu not rendered where it should) etc.

That's why, for example, MacOS has been getting so much flak these past years: they've stopped sweating the little details, and people _noticed_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Native Mac apps feel like a dying breed that are succumbing to janky web > views

Yeeaaahhhh, not really. I was a diehard "native" person until recently and I can't believe just _how much better_ developing for web technologies is than writing native Mac.

If you're experienced enough to write a polished Mac app (and that is a non- trivial undertaking) you're experienced enough to write a polished front end in Electron.

Use a lightweight framework (e.g., Vue), be sensible about what you're asking Chromium to draw for you and unless you're doing something really simple -- be ready to write a backend in C++ or equiv.

I'm not saying that is easy, but in terms of complexity it's a wash. The upsides are substantial:

1\. Multi-platform with very little additional work

2\. Modern web standards + a good IDE are _so much fucking better_ to work with, really

3\. Easy to drop into WebGL if you need it

4\. Less vendor lock-in

The only place I see it making sense is if you're _only_ working with a single platform -- of course, you have to ask yourself how good of a business decision that is.

<comment><USER10> This is a judgement on cost, and you're advocating for cheap app development for you.

But what about the cost for the users of your app?

* Huge memory impact for your app

* Non-native look and feel (no, neither Vue nor anything else give a native app experience)

* Possible security holes, as Electron is patched behind Chrome, and your app therefore behind Electron

* and more.

What you're asking is that to ease your job, you give your customers a non- native UX (subjectively "bad", but that judgement is something I think most HN readers would agree with); and you value their computer resources very little (ie you don't respect your users' computers and are happy to waste their computing memory and CPU.)

Electron is the solution when a developer values themselves over their customers. Now, you can make an argument for that, such as getting your minimum viable product out to market quickly. Over time, as the app develops, the attitude of happily giving your user lower UX quality and wasteful applications is harder and harder to justify ethically, though I admit that's only true if predicated on a foundation that you should respect your customer or have pride in your work.

<comment><USER11> > Electron is the solution when a developer values themselves over their > customers. Now, you can make an argument for that, such as getting your > minimum viable product out to market quickly. Over time, as the app > develops, the attitude of happily giving your user lower UX quality and > wasteful applications is harder and harder to justify ethically, though I > admit that's only true if predicated on a foundation that you should respect > your customer or have pride in your work.

You're entitled to hold this opinion but preaching it as if it is an objective truth and thereby disrespecting other developers is just obnoxious. Luckily the users can decide for themselves what is unethical or not. I have 5 electron apps open right now (Spotify, Slack, Figma, VS Code and Notion) and I find it absolutely absurd calling the devs unethical because of their choice. They have provided me with some fantastic value. Is it great that they take up ~100MB of memory each? No but it's not even close to as big of a problem as some devs try to make it out to be. 8 gigs of RAM is around 30 bucks. Get off your high horse.

<comment><USER12> The RAM thing is disingenous. Even on a desktop it could be more expensive than that to add more RAM, say if all your memory slots are populated. If you have a Macbook with soldered RAM, it could cost you a new laptop and thousands of dollars to get more RAM. But I guess Spotify is worth it.

<comment><USER11> Nowhere did I mention upgrading. The example was meant to give a general estimation of how much RAM costs and establish a frame of reference for statements like "huge memory impact". If RAM still cost say $100 per GB the situation would be entirely different.

<comment><USER12> I don't see how that's relevant. Upgrading is the point - previously the user's PC was sufficient, and now it is not as it is runing slow. Now the user has to buy a new computer. In the past they might have to do this to use the lastest games or such. Now it's necessary in order to run Spotify and Slack.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Shameless plug: I did a similar thing for browser extensions to have a fully functional browser extension with Vue and Tailwind in under 30 seconds: [https://gumroad.com/l/XUPxA](https://gumroad.com/l/XUPxA)

I actually like the idea of opinionated starter kits a lot, especially when built out of experience over multiple projects they show a lot of maturity, tailored for a specific workflow. Depending on the developers, these kinds of kits are mostly made for specific use-cases, and they pick the technologies already so that once the project is kicked off most of the non-crucial decisions are already made. Most of the time I have found myself thinking about which database library to use, what Docker image to deploy, which UI framework to use and all these kinds of decisions that have not much value add if all the other alternatives are getting the job done as well. If I were to start building a native macOS app, I'd definitely go for something like this because I just want to get to the core of the thing, not spending time on choosing libraries or thinking about where to put files.

Great job!

<comment><USER14> What do you think of Tailwind - about to pull the trigger and buy it

<comment><USER13> Overall I enjoy it a lot, it gave me a big productivity boost. Everytime someone talks about Tailwind there is a huge discussion going on here, but I just gave it a try a couple months ago and I really enjoyed it. The thing I love the most is, I can get something going without thinking about what padding to use, how to align things, what color palette to use and all that kind of stuff, while also having all the flexibility to change things at the end. YMMV, but I think you wouldn't lose much by trying that out, the worst case is you spend couple of hours and you don't like it, but a better outcome is you spend couple of hours to save yourself tens of hours, so I think it's a good bet.

<comment><USER14> thanks, i just bought tailwindui!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Welp, if we're gonna do the same tired arguments (Electron, etc), I guess I'll go ahead and inject another HN-meme into this thread. Let's talk about Rust.

I, like many, want to write the same code across platforms. I do not want to use the JS toolchain (the modern one, Webpack & co). I don't want to use C, because writing C feels contrarian outside of certain cases given the options available today. I want something that's fast, safe and mostly cross-platform.

So I started porting AppKit to Rust. There's an example you can see here - it's meant to feel similar to writing native UI in Swift.

[https://twitter.com/ryanmcgrath/status/1238285152771440640](https://twitter.com/ryanmcgrath/status/1238285152771440640)

I plan to put this in a longer blog post, but effectively I don't think write- once-run-anywhere UI works for the class of products I want to build. I don't mind rebuilding the app UI using GTK, AppKit, or what have you... provided I'm not running some ridiculous setup just to get code shared across platforms. Rust and Cargo do incredibly well with this.

I'm building my next product in this as a way to dogofood and force the functionality in. If you're interested in following along, you can check out the repo below - note that it's still experimental, the example app (Subatomic) has not been updated for recent changes yet, and the main repo doesn't have docs being built just yet (though I'll probably have this later this week).

Anyway, that's my bit - wondering if there's a better way to achieve cross platform code without the headache, so consider this another foray into getting there.

[https://github.com/ryanmcgrath/appkit- rs](https://github.com/ryanmcgrath/appkit-rs)

</comment><comment><USER16> Tangential: we've been using xcodegen ([https://github.com/yonaskolb/XcodeGen](https://github.com/yonaskolb/XcodeGen)) to generate our projects from a simple yaml file. Don't need to muck around with Xcode toggles, easily repeatable, and .xcodeproj literally stays in .gitignore. Never know why Apple consistently shyes away from more programmatic generation of stuff.

</comment><comment><USER17> The fact that we need such boilerplate solution to start building a simple Mac app without having XCode in the way in 2020 means a lot about the current state of native app development.

<comment><USER15> Eeehhh, this kind of comment erases a lot of the default things you get with Cocoa/AppKit (document handling, system integration, etc). These concepts aren't as widely understood as the concepts in web-dev-land because they're implementation specific, but they're pretty well designed and genuinely very powerful once you use them.

Xcode just hides them away from you, is all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is there anything like this default app framework maintained for GTK or TCL or whatever the native KDE / GNOME framework is available for desktop Linux? I exclusively use Ubuntu as my OS for three computers, and I'm building out some front-ends for myself, and native desktop clients aren't cheap to make (in time and effort).

</comment><comment><USER19> Great idea. I created a similar template for my personal projects which use `Go + Docker + Google Cloud run` stack - [https://github.com/ashishb/golang- template-repo](https://github.com/ashishb/golang-template-repo)

</comment><comment><USER20> Nice! A lot of the things included are helpful.

Title should mention that it's about macOS though.

</comment><comment><USER21> _While it certainly works for me and serves as the basis for all of my apps, I don't know yet if it will work well for others the way my PHP framework has over the years._

It will definitely work better for people if the source code isn't all tagged "All rights reserved", in conflict with the MIT license. :)

<comment><USER22> While it's confusing, "All rights reserved" isn't actually a license and doesn't conflict with MIT; it's effectively just a (now-redundant) part of the copyright notice. It's been redundant for a long time (since the Berne convention), but doesn't strictly speaking do any _harm_.

<comment><USER23> This is correct. "All rights reserved" was a way of claiming copyright, similar to the © symbol. Open source non-public domain code still has a copyright, it is just licensed for use under an open source license.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> In a similar effort, here is a minimal Swift module (i.e. a reusable code package) which can be used a starting point for new projects:

[https://github.com/fulldecent/swift5-module- template](https://github.com/fulldecent/swift5-module-template)

</comment><comment><USER25> Does something similar exist for, lets say, iOS or Android? A good foundation to build upon.

</comment><comment><USER26> Tyler! I knew I recognized that name/company. I bought VirtualHostX eons ago and it helped me out a lot. This sounds like a great project, this guy makes good stuff.

</comment><comment><USER27> I've been toying around with a macOS app idea for awhile. This looks like a great starting point for someone like me with no macOS native dev experience. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER28> I do the same. I have my own for flask website setup with SQLite with user signups etc all configured. I also have some JavaScript SPA projects configured. I can clone the git repo and start doing something useful in a few minutes and all my scaffolding work is done.

While there are scaffolding tools already available sometimes those scaffolds are a bit too bare bones and you need to add some other common bits and pieces.

</comment><comment><USER29> There's no mention about how it is licensed?

<comment><USER30> OP here. Thanks for pointing out that omission. It's MIT like all my other stuff. I've updated it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Should add support and all the boilerplate for NSDocument and CoreData. That's a bit more robust DefaultApp.

Love this though.

</comment><comment><USER32> I created something similar for front end js applications [https://github.com/spicalous/webpack- scaffold](https://github.com/spicalous/webpack-scaffold)

using: webpack, babel, sass, auto-prefixer, eslint, chai, karma, mocha

</comment><comment><USER33> I have something similar I use in Visual Studio - it's a module file full of useful functions, that saves me rewriting the same code over and over again for each new app.

For example, I have GetFile() and SaveFile() functions which I use ALL the time, also as I'm on windows, I've wrapped up a bunch of Registry code into nice 'SaveRegValue' and 'GetRegValue' functions.

All in all there's about 50 or so functions in the module. Personally, I thought every coder did this?

Edit: I'm not dissing the OP, just surprised that there's value in sharing these things.

<comment><USER34> That seems to be a very different thing. You're talking about a utils file / module you're carrying around, OP is about a ready-made application template (à la cookicutter).

<comment><USER35> Did you read the article? It mentions "Two helper classes that make building a typical macOS source list easy." which is exactly what OP is talking about. So helpers classes, while not being all the project presented here, are an important part of it.

<comment><USER34> > Did you read the article?

I'm wondering if you did.

> It mentions "Two helper classes that make building a typical macOS source > list easy."

TFA goes much further than that, it's an actual working application in a box. You can copy the template, build it, and it runs.

A template can include utilities, not the other way around.

> So helpers classes, while not being all the project presented here, are an > important part of it.

They're an important but relatively minor sub-set of the whole.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Native apps beat Electron/Web Apps anyday. There are many areas where Native apps have the upper hand w.r.t Electron.

Memory Usage

A few years ago while trying to figure out why I was running out of RAM, I stumbled upon chrome's task manager. Gmail was using up 700MB of RAM and all I had open was the Inbox. No fancy search box or Compose, the Inbox was taking up 700MB of RAM to display lines of text in a Tabular format. I've been a heavy user of Email clients and if you pick any of the native clients (Thunderbird, Outlook, Apple Mail) and open a bunch of searches and compose windows the memory usage will still stay below 100MB. I used mIRC a few decades ago to connect to multiple chat servers, run my own bots, serve files over DCC and run scripts all while staying under 20MB of Ram. These days to send a text message over Slack I need over 1GB of RAM. Even basic apps with all of their trackers, external javascript scripts and doms take up 100s of MBs in memory. And the most common solution to running out of memory is to close chrome windows.

Battery/CPU Usage

DOM is slow. Updating layout and repainting is even slow. Javascript being a dynamic language is slow. Web apps are anything but simple these days and since they have to work under the limitations of all the slow components, the CPU ends up making up for it. Chrome is almost always present in my Macbook's 'Using significant energy' tab. On the other hand, I rarely if ever see native apps in the battery bar unless I'm doing something which should actually consume a lot of CPU cycles like running multiple synths in Ableton or Compiling. When apps are built for mobile, battery usage is a major area to optimize on. But nobody even gives it a thought for web apps

60 FPS

Mobile apps run on 60fps, Native desktop apps run at 60fps, Games run ( or at least are designed to) run at 60fps. Instagram on chrome starts at 2-3 fps and usually hovers around 30fps. My laptop which is supposed to be more powerful than my mobile phone is only able to churn out half the frame rate even though they are both running at the same resolution! Web apps are not buttery smooth and can be jerky at times. Sure somebody can work really hard and optimize a website to run at 60fps at all times, but it needs a lot of effort. Mobile apps run at 60fps out of the box without much effort. Mobile and native apps use the GPU a lot more efficiently. Since they have a lot more information about which controls are being used, they can recycle items a lot better and do a much better job at hardware acceleration via the GPU. Not to mention that you have access to raw graphics APIs in case you want to push UI performance even further.

Runtime Environment

You can build desktop apps in a plethora of languages and even for mobile apps you have many cross-platform frameworks. But building for the web(and electron) forces you to HTML/Javascript(and derivates). Javascript is a dynamic prototypical language that was not designed for the scale of apps that are being built in it today. It has no type safety, memory leaks are common and it's slow due to its dynamic nature. While there have been many efforts to improve performance like V8s JIT, it still lags behind a lot of major languages. WASM seems promising, but it's still has a long way to go. And it's laughable how weak the browser platform itself is. SQLite is available on raspberry pi, embeddable systems, mobile platforms and just about every other platform on the planet. You can store data, run complex relational queries and do more with so less. But it is not available on the most widely used platform on the planet, the browser.

With the rise of electron apps, big and bulky web apps have started making their way onto the Desktop. There are some who are even trying to get the same apps on mobile via PWAs. While the web has the advantage of easy accessibility, IMO we have sacrificed too much in terms of user experience for that one convenience. If you built an app with the same UI and functionality in a native language and as a web app, the native app will run circles around it.

</comment><comment><USER37> Thanks for sharing. For me getting started is always the hardest thing, so something like this helps a great deal.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is very useful - definitely bookmarking this to remember for the next time I write a macOS app.

</comment><comment><USER38> I'm sorry to knock down OP here but I've been doing Mac development for a long long time.

A default app to me as a bare minimum involves:

• Custom Application class • URI specifications • Custom NSDocument • Custom window controller • Customized NSToolbar • CoreData support • "Feature" targets / I.e. Todo target

I've written a script which sets and generates all this for me:

macapp new —with-ui —styles

<comment><USER30> OP here. I think we're aiming for the same thing - though with slightly different priorities.

Of your list of minimums that DefaultApp omits:

Not every app adheres to a Document-based pattern. The apps I personally build typically fall into a "shoebox" style where explicit documents aren't used.

And there are other data layers than CoreData, which is why I didn't add that - especially since even with CoreData everyone has their own favorite library/framework. So that's easy enough to drop-in for those who want it. (That said: probably 95% of the apps I write use CoreData, so )

A customized NSToolbar would be great, but, again, there are so many implementations out there, which one would you pick that would satisfy the majority of apps/developers?

Anyway, like the accompanying blog post says, this project is "highly opinionated". It's just what I've cobbled together over the years. I'm not going to die on a hill for any of my particular choices. Do what works best for you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> My 2 cents, Flutter for the desktop will disrupt this market in the near future.

</comment><comment><USER40> I've never worked in macOS before, is there something exceptionally difficult about decent boilerplate code?

</comment><comment><USER41> I think the real sentiment I see in the comments about "using web tech instead of native is selfish/unethical/etc" is:

why isn't there a desktop technology that can compete with the ease of development as using web technology?

I feel this very much. I'm building a _reeealy_ simple app and I'm looking at Svelte Native (Svelte + Nativescript) to get things going. But even that's not quite native. But Android and iOS development are also a mess.

<comment><USER42> Qt and wxWidgets come to mind.

Definelty easier than making divs pretty with CSS spaghetti.</comment></comment>


There Is No Invisible Hand - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/04/there_is_no_invisible_hand.html

<comment><USER2> Paul Ormerod makes a similar argument in Why Most Things Things Fail: that the economy is a dynamic system, therefore any theory that rests on an assumption of a static equilibrium will not reasonably approximate reality.

It seems though that most economists rarely talk about the invisible hand.

There seems to be more talk of 'emergence'.

Personally, the use of the term 'invisible hand' seems to be increasing, but it seems, in my opinion, to be coming from those who oppose free(r) markets. And it seems to muddy the waters as it is based in metaphor.

Classic liberal economists seem to agree that yes the system is dynamic, that it can rarely be predicted with the tools we have now, and that the best way to communicate the needs of the market on both the supply side and consumption side is through an unfettered price signal.

</comment><comment><USER2> "Believing far too credulously in an invisible hand, the Federal Reserve failed to see the subprime crisis coming."

I assume he is stating the Fed believes in a stable state.But the Federal Open Market Committee meets 8 times a year to evaluate the interest rate, which is in constant flux at their hand: <http://www.moneycafe.com/library/fedfundsratehistory.htm> That seems hardly like the activity of an actor who believes they are in a stable environment.

</comment><comment><USER3> The absence of an invisible hand is caused only when it is wiped away by the punching fist of the government. Whether it is by artificial money out-of- nothing, by regulations or by expropriations and controls. Mr Schliefer is an excellent example of the "intellectual class" ([http://www.caseyresearch.com/cdd/doug-casey-pseudo- intellect...](http://www.caseyresearch.com/cdd/doug-casey-pseudo- intellectuals))

<comment><USER4> "The absence of an invisible hand is caused only when it is wiped away by the punching fist of the government"

I assume you have some evidence of this and it's not just based on ideology since that would make you a pseudo intellectual. You should pass that evidence on to economists, they've been looking for it everywhere.

<comment><USER3> Well, I think my view is pretty rational, I don't see it based on ideology as such. It's more the other way around: because by studying economic history, and economy in general, I became convinced of the values of (personal) freedom. But, to give some evidence that a stable equilibrium can occur: In the times of history when the free market determined what money was (precious metals), prices remained stable, sometimes for centuries. But once a government starts to interfere with debasing the money by law until it has no intrinsic value anymore, and keep printing it (so the same amount of goods & services are chased by more and more currency units), you can't have actual price information anymore. It's like measuring a distance with a yard stick whose units increases logarithmically in time.

<comment><USER4> Sure, but there were a lot of other things that remained stable/stagnant as well as prices. Like most measurements of progress or quality of life.

Your view isn't irrational, but if it's not based on ideology and it's not based on evidence then what is it based on? (hint: its actually ideology, it just doesn't feel that way because it's not an insane belief and it's a popular one)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: pion TURN, an extendable TURN server written in Go - Sean-Der https://github.com/pions/turn <comment> Sean-Der Hey HN!

After using other TURN servers we decided to write our own and try to solve the issues that bothered us. If it is missing a certain feature please request it, would be happy to work on anything 1:1 to improve it. The more users the better it gets!

Features

\----

* Easy Setup - We wanted to lower the barrier of entry when starting a WebRTC project. simple-turn is a statically built TURN server, configured by environment variables. The entire install setup is 5 commands, on any platform!

* Safe - Golang provides a great foundation to build safe network services. Especially when running a networked service that is highly concurrent bugs can be devastating.

* Integration friendly - We makes no assumptions about how you authenticate users, how you log, or even your topology! Instead of running a dedicated TURN server you can inherit from github.com/pions/turn and set whatever logger you want.

* Embedable - You can add this to an existing service. This means all your config files stay homogeneous instead of having the mismatch that makes it harder to manage your services. For small setups it is usually an overkill to deploy dedicated TURN servers, this makes it easier to solve the problems you care about.

* Readable - All network interaction is commented with a link to the spec. This makes learning and debugging easier, the TURN server was written to also serve as a guide for others.

* Tested - Every commit is tested via travis-ci Go provides fantastic facilities for testing, and more will be added as time goes on.</comment>


Commander, the spaceship to the Galaxy of PyPI - <AUTHOR> https://anvaka.github.io/pm/#/galaxy/python?cx=-2700&cy=377&cz=5622&lx=-0.0869&ly=-0.2315&lz=-0.0338&lw=0.9684&ml=150&s=1.75&l=1 <comment><USER2> This is fantastic on my iPhone. Looking around just works, and feel right.

</comment><comment><USER3> Are these flying 3-D views standardized? Is there a common WebGL framework for something like this, which includes user interface controls? Something where we can just plug in our own data?

<comment><USER4> They are not standardized. However if you'd like to render your graphs in this tool refer to this doc: [https://github.com/anvaka/pm#your-own- graphs](https://github.com/anvaka/pm#your-own-graphs)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Good use of accelerometer.

</comment><comment><USER6> Why why why is the help menu bound to the mouse scroll? Bind it to 'h' or '?', or better yet, don't make it disappear. I had to reload the page to get it back.

<comment><USER4> I observed people using the tool before it was bound to the scroll. Almost everybody used scroll in attempt to fly forward, while WASD navigation wasn't obvious. So I decided to show help on scroll...

Will bind it to h and ? as well

<comment><USER7> Any specific reason not to allow mouse wheel as fly forward/back?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Really cool to see how the Zope/Plone ecosystem is so highly interconnected but rarely used outside.</comment>


Ethereal becomes Wireshark ... now Sharkfest - <AUTHOR> http://www.lovemytool.com/blog/2007/10/sharkfest-2008.html#more

<comment><USER2> Really? I skimmed the article, but Sharkfest only seems to refer to a conference about Wireshark.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it is the first user conference for the open source network analysis software. Sharkfest is the new name for Ethereal. It will be a great conference, meeting the man himself, my hero, Gerald Combs. And it is in our neighborhood.</comment></comment>