Ask HN: The ideal company for programmers, or giving freedom to your programmers - <AUTHOR>

I find myself often torn between two desires:
a) Having the freedom to work on something I'm passionate about. And being able to work on it by my schedule (this doesn't mean I'll be working 4 hrs a day, but it does mean that I can choose to work 4 hrs on a day of low creativity). I usually conclude that I'll need to start my own company if I want to achieve this.
b) Building a great product. Working on something like a Google Android, which usually requires a team.
I think the crux of the conflict is this: If given the freedom to work according to my creative instinct and my schedule, my output in one week would far exceed the 40 hr output that my company gets out of me right now. My company (and many others that I've seen), unfortunately, do not realize this, or can not risk having a "maverick" on the team. In the end, its a loss for the company, and frustrating for me.
Programming jobs require creativity. By letting your programmer go for a long ride, grab their favorite drink, go to their favorite hangout etc, they probably will have a much more elegant and solution to a given problem than having to stay chained to their desk for 8 hrs a day and hammering out a solution.
A related issue: I'm not sure why I dont see more work from home IT companies. Why are we still stuck in the industrial age, where working during the day hours, being at a certain location, and hammering away for 8 hrs was equivalent to producing a certain amount of output? We have tools that make working from home easy for employees, and gives them freedom to do other things with their lives.
Some background (kinda boring):
I'm in my mid 20s, have a grad degree from a great school, and have been coding half my life. I work a 9-5 job where I get to work on technologies that I enjoy, but I'm not passionate about the product. I dislike being chained to my desk. I don't see the reason why I should not be able to work in more relaxed settings, and by my schedule (specially since we communicate 90% by email anyway).
I don't see myself taking the YC plunge because I am married and have a kid, so taking a risk is kinda hard at this point. I am working on a product of my own, but between work and other stuff, I don't get to put as much time on it as I want.
Any suggestions? I'm leaning towards saving up and then taking 3-4 months off my job to work on my own product.
- Edit to clean up formatting. <comment><USER2> I totally agree with your sentiment here:

 _Why are we still stuck in the industrial age, where working during the day hours, being at a certain location, and hammering away for 8 hrs was equivalent to producing a certain amount of output?_

If you haven't seen the Ted talk below, it's a must watch:

<http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> What a great talk..

 _Now, to forward to boss or not to forward_....

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I feel the same way.

It's funny you mentioned working-from-home companies, because that's exactly how I deal with this problem. :) And it's something everyone should ask about at an interview; these days, a company had better cough up a VPN to hire me.

It's simple: I _know_ that I'll think of something at midnight on a Wednesday, and want to log in to flush it out (or sometimes, when I wake up on Sunday). So I work at home at least half the time; and if I'm feeling even slightly lacking in energy, I don't even bother logging in. I know that eventually the drive will return (probably later that afternoon or evening). I have a cell phone, I check E-mail and office voice mail now and then. And I've been finishing at least as much every week as I did years ago when I was in the office all day long, except I'm a lot happier.

<comment><AUTHOR> I do have VPN access, its just for after hours work though :-\

Does your company have a policy to let people work from home as long as they are productive, or did you have some convincing to do?

<comment><USER3> The VPN has always been available, but I have only used it extensively in recent years. It probably helps that teams are now spread further around the world, because it has forced people to restructure their work to deal with large gaps in communication. We'd already been sending messages and waiting hours for a reply, so people no longer expect to be in constant contact. So I didn't really have to convince anyone, I just reminded key people that I do work at home a lot, and to call me by cell when necessary.

Though, I've seen certain managers have a real problem with people working at home, and they even managed to fire people based apparently on that. Fortunately, those managers are no longer here, because that same intolerance made them ineffective managers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm doing freelance contracting and trying to build a development/consulting shop partly for the same reasons you gave: I like the freedom and I think it's more efficient and modern, and frankly more adult & unpatronizing. Lets me work when, where, how I want, and unlocks enough extra free time & energy that I can spend more of it on other things like hobbies, friends, family or other enterprises or personal investments. A net-win overall. Not perfect, has downsides. You have to spend more time selling yourself, and there's more uncertainty about your future paycheck stream. And can be more isolating. And this giant spider hunts you wherever...oh wait. Nevermind that last thing.

But seriously, back to your post, if you do take time off to work on your own product, I suggest you don't burn any bridges employment-wise, and maybe set it up as an unpaid sabbatical with your existing employer, with an agreed upon return date. That way, you have the option of returning to them and that steady paycheck if your experiment doesn't get traction. This is more important because you have wife and kid. Also, use tools/tech that are good for rapid development and experimentation (Python, Ruby, etc.), make a Minimum Viable Product, launch/feedback/tweak/repeat, and don't underestimate the importance of marketing & advertising.

Another option for striking out on your own is to ease into it gradually by first becoming a contractor/consultant. The work you do is similar to salary/staff in that you're writing software for other folks, fixing bugs, etc. except you have more freedom/time/control to work on other stuff, like a product/service startup. And you can blur the line by developing a product/service whose design was informed by, driven by common demands from, or was a by-product of, your contracting work. That was the 37Signals route I think, and lots of similar stories out there.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. That is exactly what I'm thinking of doing. Take unpaid time off. Launch my product early (2 months into the leave, hopefully), interact directly with consumers, implement, improve, and hopefully have something that I can work full time on at the end of 4 months.

Re: your point about isolation, this is why I like the WFH approach. You give people freedom, but you still work as a team. It seems more win-win to me overall, than striking out on my own.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "I don't see myself taking the YC plunge because I am married and have a kid, so taking a risk is kinda hard at this point." ... "I'm leaning towards saving up and then taking 3-4 months off my job to work on my own product."

Couldn't you do both? Seems like you could save up and go for YC while working on your product. Either way you'll have a similar amount of risk. One could even argue that with YC's network you'll have less risk since you'll be around like minded people and more opportunities will open up for you if your original idea fails.

Whatever you decide, go for it!

</comment><comment><USER6> This resonates with my recent experience. I got bored of the 9 to 5. My job was alright, sometimes fun even. But last Wednesday I woke up and just couldn't do it. So I quit and started working on my own project.

When it's repeated a thousand times, it starts sounding like a cliche, but it is true - life is short. Do something which fulfills you.

 _So no, there's nothing particularly grand about making money. That's not what makes startups worth the trouble. What's important about startups is the speed. By compressing the dull but necessary task of making a living into the smallest possible time, you show respect for life, and there is something grand about that._

\- <http://paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> Good on you. I hope it works out for you. Please do post updates here (to motivate yourself, and others :)) of your experience.

<comment><USER6> Thanks hackoder. I'm looking forward to writing a nice long 'Thanks HN' post. But not before I have something to show. I am scared announcing my plans might make me less likely to accomplish them.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've found that taking steps to get people involved with my plans makes me _more likely_ to achieve them. I'll definitely be sharing initial versions of my app with the community here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> old-gregg Do you want to relocate to NYC and work on exciting product at the already profitable startup? We offer great salary, meaningful equity and I guarantee you the product will get you excited. See my profile.

<comment><USER7> "Do you want to relocate to NYC and work on exciting product at the already profitable startup?"

I think one of the things he's looking for is the ability to work from home.he mentions it very clearly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you're looking for a company to work for, you might enjoy:

<http://www.codesourcery.com/>

...depending on your interests.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I feel a little under-qualified for what they are developing, but this strikes home with me:

 _CodeSourcery has no central office. We work when we want in an environment in which we are comfortable. We can work wherever we want: from a coffeeshop, a library, or anywhere else on the planet with an internet connection. We see our friends and families throughout the day; not just early in the morning and late at night._

Good to see that there are companies which are interested more in what you can do and less in forcing their way of working on you. Are you working for them?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why can't you build a great product working by your schedule? Working on a team doesn't mean being with the team at all times. You need both time alone and time together.

<comment><AUTHOR> That was exactly my point. I want to be able to work by my own schedule (with reasonable overlap with the team) and still build a great product. What I feel is that companies (or atleast mine) aren't structured this way.

<comment><USER9> You're right very few companies are structured that way, but you can start your own.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What kind of product do you want to work on that you would feel passionate about?

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been considering that myself quite a bit, and I find that its a combination of things:

\- Something where I can interact directly with the client/consumer. I dislike having to program by specs, when I _know_ that they are written by someone who doesn't understand end users. Simple, effective touches are usually missing, and the feedback loop is so long that apps take years to evolve.

\- Something challenging. I want to stay up at night visualizing possible solutions. That kind of excitement makes the time spent worth every second. And with the opportunity to think and implement a solution that works _really_ well for the problem.

\- Something that makes a difference. Doesn't have to be something ground- breaking, but it shouldn't be a CRUD front-end either.

This is harder to quantify than I thought. I guess it depends on the novelty of the idea, the silken smooth end-user experience (think iPhone- _I own a G1 myself, but man does the iPhone provide a great experience_ ), and the quality/succinctness/simplicity of the code.</comment></comment>


The uses and abuses of mathematical models - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/specialreports/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=15474075

<comment><USER2> I was reading this and feeling - this feels familiar. So I did a simple search:

<http://searchyc.com/submissions/model?sort=by_date>

No wonder it seems familar: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1126580></comment>


Show HN: 2017.sucks – List bad events that happen this year - <AUTHOR> https://2017.sucks <comment><AUTHOR> Build using:

\- VueJS 2.0

This was a learning experience for me in Vue, so any code reviews in that would be very helpful.

The design was by a hired freelancer as its an area I desperately do badly at.

Code is here: [https://github.com/alexbowers/2017.sucks](https://github.com/alexbowers/2017.sucks)

Hosted on GitHub Pages.

<comment><USER2> Well done. You could add a favicon, it looks strangely unfinished without

<comment><AUTHOR> Added the favicon. Suffice to say, you should now believe I am no front-end designer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The div with a scrollbar on the left is strange :)

It's the div "container-left", remove it :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Please could you explain or screenshot what you mean by strange?

The scrollbar should only be there if the height of the description area is too large, such that it needs to be scrollable.

<comment><USER4> I can reproduce the problem both in Chrome and IE11: [https://postimg.org/image/em6kzpbrb/](https://postimg.org/image/em6kzpbrb/)

It works just fine in Firefox.

EDIT: this solves the problem:

      .container--left { overflow-x: hidden; }

<comment><AUTHOR> Weird. Windows?

<comment><USER4> Yes, Windows 7.

I updated my post with a quick solution ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, thats been applied now. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The list should already be waaaay longer than that.

<comment><AUTHOR> If any particular event springs to mind, feel free to send either an issue or a PR with a link to an article on the event, and it can be added.

These are based on some rather vague criteria (in the readme), and what events I happen to know about.</comment></comment>


Find out if your iphone UDID was compromised - <AUTHOR> http://udid.afitnerd.com/

<comment><USER2> _"The service checks to see if the hashed value exists and then lets you know if your udid is among the ones compromised. Only hashed values are stored in the service, not any of the raw udid values."_

So all the site owner has to do is hash the udids to know who you are?

<comment><AUTHOR> The udids have already all been hashed. It is the hashed values only that are stored on the site. The only piece of information sent to the site is a hashed udid (the udid is hashed on the browser before any information is sent over the wire).

<comment><USER2> I realize that. But all the site owner has to do is keep a list of the UDID->hash mapping and then he can lookup the original UDID...

<comment><AUTHOR> I think you may be missing the point. I already have all of the 1,000,001 original UDIDs posted by AntiSec. I don't need to go through all that hassle you describe. I wrote the script that generated the hashes from the original UDIDs.

The point is that in order to stop people from passing their UDIDs around the net they way some other checking services have made them do, this service does not have any of the original UDID's on local storage. Even if my site is compromised, it will not further the spread of UDID information.

Of course, you do have to trust that what I am saying is the truth. Anyone can choose NOT to submit their (hashed) UDID to my site.

<comment><USER2> I may be missing the point. I am not trying to be difficult, I promise. What is the difference between me sending you my UDID and me sending you my hashed UDID?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> If your UDID tests negative, you still could be compromised. The original FBI file had 12 million. AntiSec released 1 million.

This linked testing site says 20 million, which is wrong, as far as I know.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for info. I've updated the information on the page.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: us-east-1's zip code[s]? - <AUTHOR>

The last outage is supposedly related to the storm. Does anyone have this information? <comment><USER2> us-east is at least partially in Equinix facilities not far from Dulles airport in Ashburn, VA.</comment>


Alex Stepanov (STL) just published a book on math foundations of programming - <AUTHOR> http://www.elementsofprogramming.com/book.html

<comment><USER2> This is exactly why I love HN. Thanks, Misha.</comment>


ACLU Letter to the Senate Opposing Israel Anti-Boycott Act - <AUTHOR> https://www.aclu.org/letter/aclu-letter-senate-opposing-israel-anti-boycott-act <comment><USER2> Why is it being attached to an import/export and bank bill? How are those related at all to an anti-boycott act?</comment>


Ask YC: what is your favorite startup related quote? - <AUTHOR> So, what is your favorite startup related quote? <comment><USER4> "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery (from <http://workhappy.net>)

</comment><comment><USER5> Shakespeare' quote:"Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we might oft win, by fearing to attempt."

From: What They Don't Tell You About Being An Entrepreneur ( [http://how2livelife.blogspot.com/2008/03/what-they-dont- tell...](http://how2livelife.blogspot.com/2008/03/what-they-dont-tell-you- about-being.html) )

<comment><USER6> I loved it too. Printed it, and it's now on the wall.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Whether it is urban legend or not is still an open question but this ad, supposedly placed by Ernest Shackleton in London newspapers before one of his expeditions, sums up a startup nicely:

"MEN WANTED FOR HAZARDOUS JOURNEY. SMALL WAGES, BITTER COLD, LONG MONTHS OF COMPLETE DARKNESS, CONSTANT DANGER, SAFE RETURN DOUBTFUL. HONOR AND RECOGNITION IN CASE OF SUCCESS."

Cheers

Jason

</comment><comment><USER8> Henry Ford: "If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have asked for a faster horse."

</comment><comment><USER9> Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm. (Winston Churchill)

</comment><comment><USER10> "It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by the dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly; so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat."

Theodore Roosevelt

<comment><USER11> That's way too long and that makes it harder to remember.

<comment><USER12> Wisdom is seldom related in one sentence.

<comment><USER11> Zen maxims and the like are usually one-sentence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If you have two choices, choose the harder.

\--Paul Graham in <http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html>

</comment><comment><USER14> Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein

</comment><comment><USER15> Do, or do not. There is no try.

<comment><USER16> +1... by Jedi Master Yoda.

<comment><USER17> My Yoda TomTom voice says this when the TomTom turns on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> not a quote, but i like the poem "if" by rudyard kipling. it kind of describes the sort of evenness and perseverance that is required of an entrepreneur...

<http://www.swarthmore.edu/~apreset1/docs/if.html>

<comment><USER12> >If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same;

...utter brilliance there. It's amazing how the poems I thought were cute in high school ring so true now that I'm in my 30's.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16031>

</comment><comment><USER20> "Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades" \- James M. Kilts, CEO and President, The Gillette Company.

<comment><USER21> From one of the best Onion articles out there: <http://www.theonion.com/content/node/33930>

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I can't believe I'm quoting Donald Trump, but..

"If you're going to be thinking anything, you might as well think big."

<comment><USER23> This is in the same genre of something that a couple of old former oil field managers said to me once (after they had left the oil and gas industry to start a company doing water table analysis for municipal water supplies):

"You're going to bust your ass no matter what. You might as well bust your ass for $10 million instead of $10 thousand."

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> When the winds of change are blowing some people are building shelters, and others are building wind mills. \- Chinese proverb

</comment><comment><USER25> Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

\- Robert Frost

</comment><comment><USER5> "Go the extra mile. It's never crowded."

</comment><comment><USER26> Randy Pausch (speaking of apparent barriers between you and your goals): "The wall is there for you to show how bad you want it."

(From his "Last Lecture", <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo>)

</comment><comment><USER27> Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. \- Mark Twain

For a true writer [hacker?] each book [project?] should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed. How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him. \- Ernest Hemingway

The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought- stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. -Fred Brooks

Programming...gratifies creative longings built deep within us and delights sensibilities we have in common with all men. -Fred Brooks

</comment><comment><USER28> 'Think of yourself as on the threshold of unparalleled success. A whole, clear, glorious life lies before you. Achieve! Achieve!' - Andrew Carnegie

</comment><comment><USER29> Don't be afraid to try something new. Remember that a lone amateur built the ark and a large group of professionals built the Titanic.

</comment><comment><USER27> Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.

\- Anais Nin

</comment><comment><USER30> "Build your castles in the air. That is where they belong. Then go build foundations under them." -- Henry David Thoreau

</comment><comment><USER31> I didn't realise this was a pg quote until I Googled it:

"If you want to win in a software business, just take on the hardest problem you can find, use the most powerful language you can get, and wait for your competitors' pointy-haired bosses to revert to the mean."

I've seen enough PHBs around software to know you won't be waiting long.

</comment><comment><USER32> "Do Something Small Useful Now." Bob Bemer, inventor of ASCII

</comment><comment><USER33> "Make something people want."

</comment><comment><USER34> "Cash is king. Every week figure out when you will run out of cash. Figure out when the last payroll checks will clear, in best and worst case circumstances. Assume the worst case." -what smart people told me + I found to be true

</comment><comment><USER35> We're like _____ for _______. (comparison quote that almost guarantees failure)

<comment><USER36> I think this is a good way to describe startups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Happyness is a positive cash flow \- A sign on an CFO desk at Digital Equipment Corporation.

From: <http://www.cryan.com/quotes/>

</comment><comment><USER38> Two somewhat related quotes:

Short version:

"Bad shit is coming. It always is in a startup." -Paul Graham

Long version:

"First, and most importantly, realize that a startup puts you on an emotional rollercoaster unlike anything you have ever experienced.

You will flip rapidly from a day in which you are euphorically convinced you are going to own the world, to a day in which doom seems only weeks away and you feel completely ruined, and back again.

Over and over and over.

And I'm talking about what happens to stable entrepreneurs." -Marc Andreessen

</comment><comment><USER39> "SPLIT YOUR LUNGS WITH BLOOD AND THUNDER! When you see the white whale! Break your backs and crack your oars, men! If you wish to prevail! This ivory leg is what propels me! Thrust your harpoons to the sky, Aim directly at his crooked brow, And look him straight in the eye! WHITE WHALE-- HOLY GRAIL!"

I took this quote to heart when I first read (guess what book) and it seems to apply to nearly every situation I've been in, somehow.

</comment><comment><USER40> "Almost there"

</comment><comment><USER41> "In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable." \- Dwight D. Eisenhower

</comment><comment><USER42> To lead people, walk behind them. - Sun Tzu

</comment><comment><USER43> "The quickest route to describing a seed's output is to sprout it." \- Kevin Kelly, 'Out of Control'

</comment><comment><USER44> "The work of intellectuals is ordered and paid for by Governments or rich men, whose aims probably seem absurd, if not pernicious, to the intellectuals concerned. But a dash of cynicism enables them to adjust their consciences to the situation." \- Bertrand Russell

</comment><comment><USER11> Consistency, not novelty, is the key to success - John Berardi Shove the sun aside - Dave Weiner

</comment><comment><USER45> This guy needs coffee and crullers, STAT! -- Wayne Campbell (Wayne's World)

</comment><comment><USER46> "Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance." - <USER2>

</comment><comment><USER47> "It's not important to get it right, it's important to get it going"

</comment><comment><USER48> 'Do it Fu*king Now'

[<http://seoblackhat.com/2007/01/29/do-it-fucking-now/>]

</comment><comment><USER15> Not a quote, but if you need inspiration:

<http://reddit.com/r/inspirational>

</comment><comment><USER49> "the future is in beta"

Wired used to have great passages on the inside of the front cover. this one always stuck with me.

<comment><USER32> The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed." William Gibson

The challenge in a startup is to discern the harbingers from the outliers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> "Non notationes, sed notiones" (Not Notations, but Notions) \- Carl Friedrich Gaus

</comment><comment><USER51> "In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is."

</comment><comment><USER52> genius is craziness controlled

</comment><comment><USER53> Lots of these are trivialisms and quite a few are contradicting eachother.

</comment><comment><USER54> "The finest steel has to go through the hottest fire." -John N. Mitchell

</comment><comment><USER55> "We don't have venture capital, we just have money." --Philip Greenspun

</comment><comment><USER56> "Anything you can conceive and believe, you can achieve" - <USER3>

<comment><USER57> That one's Napoleon Hill, from "Think and Grow Rich."

<comment><USER58> A book that never fails to invoke in me the opposite feeling this thread is looking for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Guy Kawasaki: "Too many companies duke it out on the same curve. If they were daisy wheel printer companies, they think innovation means adding Helvetica in 24 points. Instead, they should invent laser printing."

</comment><comment><USER60> You cannot hide two things: 1\. Talent 2\. Itching

</comment><comment><USER61> "When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it." -- Paulo Coelho

</comment><comment><USER62> Because its there...

</comment><comment><USER63> "Read Paul Graham"

</comment><comment><USER64> "billions and billions"

-Carl Sagan

</comment><comment><USER65> The difference between genius and insanity is measured only by success.

\- Eliot Carver</comment>


Show HN: Bitcoinica - Advanced Bitcoin Trading Platform - <AUTHOR> https://www.bitcoinica.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN,

I'm the creator of Bitcoinica. I'm not so established here. To be honest, I'm only 17.

Please try it out. (I can pay $1 for you if you're not willing/able to deposit, email me at firstname.lastname@example.com. :-D ) You can leave any suggestions, comments, bug reports and feature requests here. I'll look through every single comment. Thanks!

<comment><USER2> _I'm the creator of Bitcoinica. I'm not so established here. To be honest, I'm only 17._

You're 17 and you've already created something like this? I see a _very_ bright future ahead of you :) Well done, great work!

<comment><USER3> This is true, I expect him (or her?) to go far!

Unfortunately, seeing his age put me off depositing money into the account I just created. When dealing with my money, I want a team of people with a lot of experience in security and dealing with problems under pressure. He may have this, but at 17 its unlikely. My quick evaluation may be unfair, but I'm unwilling to take that chance with money, especially after MtGox showed us all what kind of problems could occur if not enough work is put into preventing potential problems.

So, at least for now, I'll pass. Having said that, the site looks great and I wish the creator the best of luck and lots of success!

<comment><AUTHOR> When I first decided to disclose my age, I have considered this problem. Actually this is a psychological paradox: proving myself honest doesn't always make me more trustworthy.

It's just like the warranty of your gadgets. Getting a wonderful repair service may make you feel better than having no problem at all.

I have no problems with this kind of thinking. It really doesn't matter to me. I'll prove my competency with time.

Your judgement is actually fair. Thanks for that!

<comment><USER4> To be honest, your age isn't a problem, because the average above-average developer is _still_ not competent to write this sort of software. If you had been doing security and financial software _since birth_ , I _might_ consider putting a bit of trust in the kitty to start.

I'm going to pitch a different take than a few others: Yes, great initiative, please keep trying things and building things, but _end this project now_. There are no probable outcomes where you do not end up having to explain where thousands of dollars of other people's money went to some angry people. There's also _very_ nontrivial odds of being on the wrong end of armed Federal agents, based on some of the other comments you've made here. This is a horrible, horrible first-project sort of project.

Let me put it this way: Would you be willing to convert the BitCoins in your system into cash, put it in your front window, and post daily pictures of the pile of cash to your Facebook account, set to public visibility? Because that's roughly what you're doing.

<comment><USER5> Sadly, I have to agree with this.

You're very smart, zhoutong, and your eager and polite acceptance of feedback does you great credit. But I would not attempt what you're doing, and I know a fair amount about both trading infrastructure and security.

And though your site is very impressive, I immediately spot a major omission: you say nothing about your margin call policy. Do you have one? What will you do when one of your users' accounts goes to zero, and then negative?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, we have. I admit that I didn't make it visible on the site itself. But the system checks every single user every 5 seconds.

We have two metrics: net value and minimum net value. When NV < MNV, all positions are immediately liquidated. When NV < 2MNV, a warning is visible on trading panel. (Future feature: margin call email)

These metrics are completely transparent, showing in different colors to represent health status. Once you give it a try you will know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This seems far more advanced than usual for Bitcoin. Nice!

I have little insight into the security of your software, but I hope you have also considered the peculiarities of Bitcoin. To name just one thing that would be far harder in a normal market: open a Bitcoinica account, deposit $10 000, buy $50 000 in Bitcoin, sell BTC really expensively at Mt Gox as the system frantically tries to rebalance. Given the volatility of BTC, this may be profitable even if[1] you subsequently abandon the Bitcoinica account (which is likely to hold $-40 000 in dollars and less than $40 000 in BTC at un-spiked prices...)

[1] EDIT: Actually, it's _only_ profitable if you can get the Bitcoinica account into the red. But given enough ability to move the market, that's definitely possible.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your wonderful suggestion!

Honestly speaking, I haven't considered this because at first, it's hard to find anyone willing and able to deposit $10,000 (Mt. Gox limits withdrawals, including redeemable codes. Can be lifted though.) Even if that happens in reality, I have already designed some counter-measures:

\- The system will automatically break large orders down to 50 BTC increments in a chain. Execution of new orders in the chain will require validation of status of previous rebalance process.

\- Limit orders won't be executed further, because the price must increase.

\- Market orders will be executed at higher and higher prices, and due to low liquidity, the spread will be larger too.

\- The user will run out of margin very soon.

Since I mention that Bitcoinica guarantees liquidity, measures like this must be implemented. Hopefully they are useful to counter malicious trading attempts too.

I'll think about this in detail though. Will further refine my algorithms before the launch of Trading API (which is very dangerous if the algorithms are problematic).

Edit: line breaks

<comment><USER6> Well, wonderful suggestion - I'm trying to break your scheme for my own amusement. ;-)

Note that the attack works fine if the system allows me to keep buying BTC at, say, Mt Gox' price plus 10%. (For values of "works fine" which handwave a lot of practical issues, like paying you untraceably and making sure that I don't get undercut at Mt Gox too often.)

Maybe you should switch to 1:1 leverage for all accounts once the total balance goes over $1000 until you've had some time to think this kind of thing through?

EDIT: you also want a security@ account and a PGP key. I'm also happy to remove this discussion if you'd prefer that; I arguably shouldn't have posted the first post publicly.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for that! Really.

I will consider this and focus on my algorithm design further.

I don't mind if you leave the discussion here. Hiding a problem is never the solution. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like the site. A few notes:

\- Running on Heroku is not really an asset security wise. I would put something more significant to ensure users that your site is secure.

\- Make sure your site is secure; it will be attacked often and by professionals. Consider hiring an expert.

\- The highlighting is kind of distracting and busy.

\- You should be able to access some charts and see the going rate without signing up and loggin in.

\- What is a Mt. Gox Redeemable code?

\- There are laws in most countries that regulate banks in regards to leverage. Have you considered any of this?

\- Margin trading is risky and some people will lose more than they bargained for, expect some repercussion.

Best of luck!

<comment><USER8> There is zero chance that someone who believes they are getting security out of hosting on Heroku and using Rails (because it has force_ssl and protect_from_forgery) is going to build a secure trading application.

I admire the ambition and for this stage of his career he's obviously cleared the bar, but it's also good for him to learn that in the real world security isn't graded on a curve, and people with more time and experience than him have failed to secure Rails apps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> A brand new financial trading platform written by a lone teenager in China? Here let me give you lots of my money! Not. :-)

Somewhat tongue in cheek. I wish you luck and admire your effort, but advise you to be humble about your skills and pay massive attention to the security aspects of your creation, and certainly engage outside experts who have much more experience in this area. Otherwise you are likely heading to a big public security/financial mishap.

</comment><comment><USER10> The site looks great! However, what I'd really love to see in a platform is not advance trading features, but an easy way to convert USD to BTC and vice versa. I realize that this is a real challenge given the anonymity provided by the Bitcoin network and the only real instant transfer of money is through credit cards (which like to chargeback). If someone would solve this problem, you have a winner.

<comment><USER11> That's _exactly_ what we thought, and so we started a site to allow easy conversion of USD/BTC:

<https://www.get-bitcoin.com>

We've been in business for a few months now, and don't want this to sound too sales-pitchy, but our customers all love us because converting used to be such a headache. For payment methods, we don't accept credit cards (for chargeback reasons as you mentioned), but we do accept prepaid debit cards, and we have Dwolla, MoneyPak and Western Union as "instant" payment options.

<comment><USER12> This is a bit off topic, but the FAQs on your website recommend that people insure shipments of cash. As I understand it, UPS/USPS/Fedex will not insure cash or cash-like items. You should look into this so that you don't misguide your customers.

<comment><USER11> USPS will insure cash up to $5,000 for standard domestic mail, and up to $25,000 for registered mail:

<http://www.snopes.com/legal/postal/sendcash.asp>

<comment><USER12> Thanks for the correction. I was at the UPS store the other day and this guy wanted to insure $10,000 in cash he was mailing to his nephew. He wanted to mail the cash to keep it off the record and out of the view of the IRS. The people working there said UPS and FedEx wouldn't insure cash. But, apparently the government will.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Very very cool! The idea is great and the interface looks slick!

However, what do you do in terms of protecting people's accounts? You say that the money is stored in your account? Gasp! How do we know you can't turn around and take all the money?

Also, what do you do to protect the accounts from a single rogue trader? If someone deposits money, margins up and loses a bunch of money, how do you protect the rest of the accounts?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have replied several comments about the security issues. Maybe you can take a look at them.

For the margin trading problem, we liquidate positions by force when the user's net value falls below maintenance. All data is transparent and you can see how far you are from being taken over.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I already mentioned below that I thought your site was nicely done. But you didn't answer my questions directly which makes me a bit wary.

My questions aren't site security questions per se, they deal more with the business of your site. Also, my questions are blunt, but not disrespectful, so don't be offended.

1) How do I trust _you_? How do I know you're not going to run away with all my money? Who are you?

Registered brokerage accounts have segregated funds, so that brokerages can't get access to my money in case the brokerage goes under. You are saying everything is in one giant account. In the case you suffer a catastrophic loss, how do I know my money is safe? Also, how do I know you're not Madoff and won't run away with all the money?

2) How are you affording the ability to margin people's accounts? Where are you getting the money?

3) You say you check for margin requirements every 5 seconds? If I were a market manipulator, I would wait for the order book on BTC to thin out, then I would massively short the markets. This would hopefully trigger massive margin calls on your end, and forced liquidation. Since the order book is thin, I would probably be able to cover at rock bottom prices. Also, presumably you (the site) would suffer tremendous losses.

How do you protect your customers from this?

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. We can almost never be a registered broker for Bitcoin trading. There's almost no law regulating this market either. If you can't trust me now, it's all okay. I have never asked for trust. What I do is to write apps in the way that people feel trustworthy and reliable. If after, say, 3 months, my site grows larger with no known security issues, then the time will make it more trustworthy.

2\. Not all people are doing long or short at the same time. Not all people are utilizing their margin fully at the same time. Not all people have active positions at the same time. We have a pool of money to make this possible.

3\. Bitcoinica is not an Exchange. We don't match orders ourselves. The rates you see are inclusive of liquidity concerns. If there's excess positions, we trade them in Mt. Gox to balance our portfolio. When the order book is so thin that you can already move the market with your short positions, chances are the forced liquidation has already taken place. (Thin order book -> larger spread -> lower buying rate)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Considering all the security issues with the Bitcoin ecosystem and the resulting mistrust, I think you need to be very explicit about your security.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I understand your concern. Bitcoinica has several features/characteristics that make itself like no other:

\- There's no Bitcoin wallet. Most incidents happen with stolen or lost wallets. Bitcoinica holds all the money and coins in traditional banks and other exchanges (currently only Mt. Gox).

\- Bitcoinica runs on Heroku. Generally apps hosted in the cloud are more secure. Ruby on Rails itself is very secure too. (protect_from_forgery, html escape, force_ssl, etc)

\- No account minimums. If you're unsure, you can deposit $1 first and try to do some trades.

\- Margin trading. This reduces risks. You don't have to deposit 100 BTC worth of USD when you want to long/short a 100 BTC position. 20 BTC is enough. Only when you lose a lot, you can consider adding more margin.

I think trust is a common problem for all websites like Bitcoinica. That's why we designed the platform in the way that attempts to solve the fundamental problems.

There's instant deposit and withdrawal too. You can transfer money from Mt. Gox when you want to trade and transfer it back after you close your position. (Assume that you trust Mt. Gox.)

<comment><USER15> _Bitcoinica runs on Heroku. Generally apps hosted in the cloud are more secure. Ruby on Rails itself is very secure too. (protect_from_forgery, html escape, force_ssl, etc)_

Uh-oh. Ruby on Rails has a lot of default settings that are decidedly _not_ secure; our own Patio11 wrote an article on this topic for the CACM not too long ago.

You might want to sit down with a security professional before too long, and get an outside opinion on your code.

<comment><AUTHOR> Currently our only non-trivial security challenges are as follows:

\- SQL Injection

\- Source being viewed

\- Financial attacks

I believe that Rails has no problems with SQL injection? All my database queries are going through ActiveRecord.

Heroku protects everything nicely. Even the filesystem is read-only. There's virtually no way to control the server provided Heroku's 3-layer architecture (Varnish, Nginx and Thin).

We don't operate a Bitcoin wallet. Basically hackers have nothing to steal. Even if we are totally owned, the most that hackers can do is to get some free money and make some trades. After all, we can obviously identify and not to approve withdrawals (for unusual and large-amount ones).

<comment><USER8> You should know that when you write comments like this, you communicate two (bad) things:

(i) You don't know enough about appsec to be communicating things about the trustworthiness of your application.

(ii) Any feedback you're given about the threats your application faces is just going to get added to your list of "security challenges" you are aware of or have tried to address, which implies that anything anyone does to help you with your security is just going to be used to mislead others. No thanks!

I'm thrilled at the idea of a 17 year old building applications that need serious security countermeasures and would generally love to help. But not when the stakes are "other people's money".

You should pick a different project. For a variety of reasons. How about take your Bitcoin exchange and do (another) play-money exchange, like for a prediction market?

<comment><USER16> Seconding Thomas' advice. You could even write against the API of one of the existing prediction markets (thus inheriting their user base) and try to add, e.g., options to it. That will give you plenty of holes to shoot in your foot without ever causing more damage than wiping out the geek cred of someone who tried to prop trade using the knowledge that there are unlikely to be two next US presidents.

P.S. I used to participate on a prediction market. Was winning the Internet after going all in on three presidential elections. Got wiped out by JPY breaking a hundred two years too late for my contracts to pay. Did not jump out window.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Question for @zhoutong ...

When did you start working on this project and have the negative events (guy losing 500K, MtGox hacking, etc) of the last few months affected your development and outlook?

Site looks great. Twitter bootstrap?

<comment><AUTHOR> I only started working a week ago. I'm currently in school holiday, so I can afford long hours. And since this is a solo project, I have no communication problems. I can just do what I have planned and thought.

These negative events are actually quite normal. Actually they present us with all kinds of problems. Every entrepreneur's task is to solve problems. And now we have more problems to solve.

Being optimistic,

Positive events == opportunities

Negative events == opportunities (for those who are smart)

You can look through some of my comments here. I have explained how I solve the security problem.

Yes, I'm using Twitter Bootstrap. It's very easy to get started for a non- designer like me.

<comment><USER17> Wow. Hell of a weeks work. I agree about Twitter Bootstrap... Using it on a project I'm working on now. Loving LESS...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Looks pretty cool. I dislike the random pink highlighting, it's noisy. Avoid smiles, as cool as it is, you must look professional in business ;)

That said, maybe a security section would be great. eg encryption, security, independent audits, etc. Here's an example: <http://help.github.com/security/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Yes, I have a long to-do list for these now:

\- Tour

\- Terms of Service

\- Privacy Policy

\- Security

\- Help (probably)

A lot of writing work! I'm a non-native English user though.

<comment><USER19> I'd be happy to proof read your copy, just drop me an email email@example.com :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> That's a great site and will help people that haven't got any trading experience to 'play' a little bit without having to do all sorts of things in the 'real' money market

A little feedback: Tooltip texts for some of the interface elements would be nice. I had to think a bit before figuring out that "P/L ($)" is supposed to be profit/loss.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your feedback!

It's easy to make tooltips with Twitter Bootstrap. I have written Javascript to enable all the "title" attributes.

I will definitely put more tooltips here and there and launch a new version in probably a few days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> It looks great. It's good to see more things appear in the Bitcoin space.

I would add a tour page, perhaps with screenshots so people can see how it works without signing up.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your suggestion.

Yes, I will definitely do that if the test run is successful. Probably I will launch the Tour together with Trading API.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Can you explain your margin fees somewhere on the site?

Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER23> How do I logout without a logout button?

<comment><USER24> Delete your session cookie. Or he could add a logout button.

<comment><USER25> Deleting a session cookie is not the same as a logout button, because the session needs to be terminated server-sided as well, otherwise it is still active and anyone with access to the session ID could restore the session (until the natural session timeout occurs - which entirely depends on the server's configuration).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Spread seems high.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you compare to Forex brokerages, yes. But consider the volatility of BTCUSD, you can make profits despite the high spreads.

Usually BTCUSD can fluctuate 5% - 20% everyday, and the spread is only about 0.5% - 2% (one side).</comment></comment>


The PC upgrade cycle slows to every five to six years, Intel's CEO says - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoworld.com/article/3078078/hardware/the-pc-upgrade-cycle-slows-to-every-five-to-six-years-intels-ceo-says.html <comment><USER2> What's interesting is if you extrapolate this out to the future. This would be more accurately stated as "the hardware we were building five or six years ago only needs updating now".

Now, there's obviously different needs that drive that, but what worries me is what it means for the PCs built now.

It's entirely possible that we've seen the last full refresh of hardware we'll ever see. It's not inconceivable to imagine that today's hardware will now never be less than good enough, unless VR really explodes. And that's far from a given.

If a PC five years ago lasted five years, it's quite possible one today might go 10-15 years. At some point, the new box market is going to slow to such a crawl, and be so commoditised that it's not worth anyone's time building new ones at scale.

I suspect this is what we're starting to see in the mobile device world too as part of the reason for the slowdown there. Everyone has a smartphone, and mostly now they're good enough. Replacements will increasingly require either massive jumps in some area (battery life most likely), or device failures/damage.</comment>


Minimizing Logic Expressions - <AUTHOR> https://lab.whitequark.org/notes/2020-04-06/minimizing-logic-expressions/ <comment><USER2> See also [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karnaugh_map](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karnaugh_map) for a human-applicable algorithm to minimize logic expressions.

<comment><USER3> EE/CS here. Kmaps only work for 4-5 variables unless you're some sort of 4D-chess wizard. And they're meant for manual, human pattern-matching rather than automated evaluation.

There are numerous, specialized bi/tri/quad boolean logic prime implicant optimization algorithms for combinational logic and expressions like QM and MQM.

<comment><USER4> I once did the reverse karnaugh mapping on a set of expressions to minimize their complexity; the input set was 7 bits.

Specifically, I created an instruction mapping on a 7b opcode space such that the decode logic for the critical paths was short (eg, branch decode). It took multiple sheets of paper, a few tries, and a couple of days, but it wasn't too bad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Oh, this is great! Some time ago I tried to hand optimize S4 group multiplication. S4 group elements are representable on 5 bits, so it is a 10 bit -> 5 bit function. Directly optimizing it on Karnaugh maps is infeasible. I managed by breaking it down to Z2, Z3 and V4.

I would love to unleash a bruteforce optimization on it.

</comment><comment><USER6> Cool, only a few days ago I explained my daughter about that. Does finding the minimum logic expression also implies it uses the minimum number of logical gates ?

<comment><USER7> I don't think so, because CMOS circuits are not restricted to being series- parallel like, as in logic expressions. For example, one can implement, e.g. not(AB+CD+E(A+C)(B+D)) with just five gates (one per input) for each of the direct (pull-down) and complementary (pull-up) network.

<comment><USER8> This makes sense when comparing the instruction set to the logic circuit of the 74181! So many seemingly complex instructions for such a simple circuit :). Thank you for pointing this out!

<comment><USER7> 74181 is based on TTL logic not CMOS, but you're right that similar considerations can apply to a higher-level logic circuit, and that these explain how "seemingly complex" can in fact be quite simple.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> When I needed to do this, I just grabbed Z3 and applied this little bit of black magic from the cookbook:

        (apply
          (then ctx-solver-simplify propagate-values
            (par-then
              (repeat
                (or-else
                  split-clause
                  skip))
              propagate-ineqs)))

Works pretty well for my problem (simplifying the branch condition paths for entering a given basic-block in a symbolic-execution system down to something human-readable), and best of all, it has no corner-cases requiring manual human teaching. (It's the ctx-solver-simplify bit that gets you most of that; it's a pretty powerful engine.)

</comment><comment><USER10> > Although I could use an off-the-shelf logic minimizer here (like Espresso), > most logic minimizers solve a different problem: quickly translating large > designs to simple netlists. However, I would like to have a complex output > netlist: the ATF15xx CPLDs have a hardware XOR gate that I would like the > minimizer to infer on its own. On the other hand, I don't really care about > the runtime of the minimizer as long as it's on the order of minutes to > hours

This is called technology mapping and logic minimizers (like Espresso) do it _all the time_.

Just think of it: who defines what the basic logic modules on your netlist _are_ ? What if your only module is a XOR gate?

<comment><USER11> I don't think Espresso can do this. The Espresso Wikipedia talk page has this: _" Espresso is a pure two-layer sum-of-products or product-of-sums minimizer without xor or factoring capabilities."_

There is also a paper by E. V. Dubrova et al. about finding optimal AND-OR-XOR expressions which has extensive comparisons with Espresso.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This sounds like proof normalization in linear logic.

<comment><USER13> In many flavors of logic, not just linear logic.</comment></comment>


Warner Music Takes Down All Videos from YouTube - <AUTHOR> http://fredstechblog.blogspot.com/2008/12/warner-music-takes-down-all-videos-from.html

<comment><USER2> The fact that Warner (A) uploaded content to a site known for user-generated content, not for the monetization of said content after (B) having not done any research into the fact that YouTube doesn't have a business model for paying people who upload said content (C) expecting to be paid for sharing their content is indicative of why the record industry NEEDS to fail about as much as the auto because of their absolute refusal to cope with changing demands (I apologize for the run on sentence).

Wake up, this is 2008. Either get with the program, evolve with the technology or GET OUT.</comment>


A Black Hole Threw a Star Out of the Milky Way Galaxy - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/14/science/stars-black-hole-milky-way.html <comment><USER2> (Edit: To get an idea what this would look like if you were to watch this star moving across the sky like a comet)

The sun's apparent diameter in the sky is roughly a half a degree. Over the course of an hour, it will move approximately 15 degrees across the sky, or rougly 30 apparent diameters. The actual diameter of the sun is ~860,000 miles, making the 'apparent velocity' of the sun across the sky nearly 26 million miles per hour or ~6 times faster than this beast.

I mention that to apply wet socks to any notion of a bullet star flinging across the sky like tracers at the Knob Creek night shoot. It's fast yet, but at that scale, doesn't look it.

(for the uninitiated - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h11uEvGc7u8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h11uEvGc7u8) )

<comment><USER3> The 15 degrees comes from the Earth's rotation, right? Not sure what you're trying to compare here. If I spin in a circle at 1 second per revolution, I guess I can make the sun travel about 2.2 billion miles per hour using your numbers.

<comment><USER4> > any notion of a bullet star flinging across the sky like tracers at the Knob > Creek night shoot. It's fast yet, but at that scale, doesn't look it.

That would appear to be what the poster is trying to compare, there.

<comment><USER2> Bingo

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That ended abruptly. And on a bit of a grim tone. How many college students leave home and never return, not even once. Oh well, at least it wasn't written in the New Yorker where it would have required a 10k word "slice of life" preamble before even discussing the star. "Dr. Li always enjoyed feeding pigs on the weekend..."

As for the star, I wonder what type of relativistic effect a person orbiting it might experience. I assume 4 million miles per hour is an appreciable fraction of C.

<comment><USER6> It's 0.6% c.

<comment><USER7> Wow, that's actually really moving! I wonder how close the star got to being shredded in the process. The gravitational forces must have been pretty powerful.

<comment><USER8> It's just freefalling. So there won't be any significant forces on it unless it gets very close.

<comment><USER7> Well that's the questions really isn't it, how close did it have to get and what was the gravity gradient? Too close and tidal forces would strip off the star's upper layers, or tear the whole star apart. We detected that happening not long ago.

[https://www.sciencealert.com/we-ve-just-caught-the- immediate...](https://www.sciencealert.com/we-ve-just-caught-the-immediate- aftermath-of-a-black-hole-tearing-apart-a-star)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Fascinating. I wonder if any planets survived this "flinging manoeuvre".

This star is also covered in the latest episode #159 of the Interplanetary Podcast: [https://www.interplanetary.org.uk/post/159-andrew-rader- beyo...](https://www.interplanetary.org.uk/post/159-andrew-rader-beyond-the- known)

<comment><USER10> Imagine being an astronomer in a society living on a planet orbiting an intergalactic star like that: no proper stars in the sky, just smudges of distant galaxies. It might be difficult to discover the "Copernican principle" in such circumstances.

<comment><USER11> There'll be plenty of quasars to act as stars, the big problem is they will be _very_ hard pressed to measure any exosolar distances at all.

This particular star is not that big too, so over its lifetime of 1Gyr it'll make it pretty far in the local group. For fictional purposes you could therefore imagine a solar system being sent from one galaxy into another one, that'll make for some interesting astronomical history!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> [http://archive.is/6KYjo](http://archive.is/6KYjo)

</comment><comment><USER13> >the seriously blinding speed of four million miles an hour

That's ~600km/s. The Sun's orbital speed around the Galaxy: ~200 km/s. Distance from BH to "suburbans": 400ly or 3.8x10^15km. Time to escape: 200k years.

<comment><USER9> According to the paper it's moving at 1700km/s (see also: [https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=4+million+miles+per+ho...](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=4+million+miles+per+hour) ). I prefer "20.4 light seconds per hour" :-) It's also 0.56% the speed of light.

The escape velocity of the Milky Way is 500km/s.

<comment><USER13> I divided by 1.8 instead of multiplying by 1.6 and messed it all up. Got it only now, thanks for the correction!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I believe some of the stars very near our galaxy's central black hole have been measured at ~3% of the speed of light, at periapsis. They are gravitationally bound, though, so their total energy (after subtracting out the gravitational potential energy) is less than this star.

</comment><comment><USER11> As far as I can tell the big deal is they are completely sure it came from Str A*.

It is also moving too fast to be easily explainable, but for now I would bet on this simply being a very extreme event. The set of hyper velocity stars is rather small at the moment, something like ~20 in total, so I don't think there is any reason to believe we have an unbiased sample.

Amusingly they do use it to measure the position of the _sun_!

Preprint at: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.11725](https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.11725)

</comment><comment><USER15> Did the black hole impart any energy to the leaving star? It sounds more like there were two stars each under the other's influence and the black hole removed one star, freeing the other to go off on an adventure

<comment><USER16> The author said on /r/space that was the case -- this was a binary system with the stars orbiting very close to eachother.

<comment><USER17> He was asking if the velocity was given by the black hole, or if it was already there from the binary star orbit.

I can't figure out any way a black hole can give velocity (relative to the black hole) - any increase in velocity would be balanced by a decrease as the object leaves.

<comment><USER18> Not velocity - momentum is what is conserved. So the black hole could have absorbed the equal and opposite momentum, but being more massive, not gained much velocity. Or, a hypothetical scenario in separating the two it could have flung them in opposite directions, in which case it would be net zero momentum. (But I don't know if - and kind of doubt whether - that is a possible outcome of a three-body interaction.)

<comment><USER19> relevant:

Factual explanation of the 3 body problem: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three- body_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-body_problem)

And the 1st book of an (excellent) si-fi triology: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three- Body_Problem_(novel)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three- Body_Problem_\(novel\))

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The headline ("A Black Hole Threw a Star Out of the Milky Way Galaxy") isn't very accurate. The black hole in question is the super-massive black hole in the middle of our galaxy, and like most galaxies, there's only one of them. The article does go on to explain that, which is great, but it would be nice if the headline writer hadn't dropped that essential fact.

<comment><USER21> What's not accurate? When I read "a black hole", I don't assume we're talking about Sagittarius A*, just a black hole.

<comment><USER20> ... that's exactly what's inaccurate. It's not just some ordinary black hole, it's the unique one in the Milky Way galaxy.

<comment><USER22> ...all definite articles can also be indefinite. The title is absolutely correct.

<comment><USER23> Remind me when you "see a sun rising in the morning" next time. Using an indefinite article here is noticed by the reader and will pose the question "Oh, is there one more?". In language rules are sometimes not as absolute as "all definite articles can also be indefinite".

<comment><USER24> This is not a proper comparison, as the relevant property is not of something being the only member of a category, but of being the already mentioned one.

For the sun we suppose the person speaking knows of THE Sun. For the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy we don't.

This can be easily shown as "The Black Hole Threw a Star Out of the Milky Way Galaxy" is clearly misusing the definite article.

<comment><USER25> "The Black Hole at the Center of the Milky Way Threw a Star Out of the Galaxy" would probably be an alternate way to write the headline using the definite article.

Agree that _just_ an article swap leaves the headline worse off.

<comment><USER26> I agree this is a better headline. In the original, I was left wondering if it was possible for a black hole outside of our Galaxy to eject a star from ours.

<comment><USER24> That should be impossible (unlikely), but it could have been a smaller black hole around the galaxy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Sorry for the offtopic post. I recently see a high number of posts linking to nytimes.com. Every time I'm not able to read the articles because they are paywalled. I'm accessing them from Europe, is the experience different from the US? Or is the majority of HN have NY Times subscription?

As an alternative, I found an article by CCN: [https://edition.cnn.com/2019/11/12/world/milky-way-black- hol...](https://edition.cnn.com/2019/11/12/world/milky-way-black-hole-star- scn/index.html)

<comment><USER28> You can block Javascript and cookies just for nytimes.com. Suddenly the site is fast, too!

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> when they say "it's currently 29000 light years away from earth", doesn't that mean that was its position 29000 years ago ?

<comment><USER30> Yes. However, it's like pointing at the sun and say "That's not the sun, the sun was there 8 minutes ago".

<comment><USER31> I'm listening to Carlo Rovelli's book, "Reality is not what it seems", and I'm _still_ hung up on the concept of the "extended now". The way he describes it, everything being relativistic, there's no such thing as an "objective" point of view. So, if I understand his take on your example, we're not seeing the sun as it was 8 minutes ago. It simply takes 8 minutes for the sun's "now" to reach us.

<comment><USER32> That reminds me of a very important aspect of distributed systems (computer science) - there is no global clock!

<comment><USER33> UTC is a global clock. If I show the time in Sydney and the time here in UK, Sydney will be 150ms behind to me, and 150ms ahead to a viewer in Sydney, but I know the distance therefore I know if the clocks are in sync.

The time dilation between the two places is on the order of femtoseconds/second, a millionth of a clock cycle of a cpu.

<comment><USER34> Sounds to me like you could have equally started that post with "UTC is not a global clock".

<comment><USER33> It's a global clock. UTC is the same time in Miami as it is in Singapore.

The accuracy of the delivery of that timesource is 10ns in theory, and upto 1000ns in practice.

<comment><USER35> CET and EST are also the same time in Miami as in Singapore. That's just how time zones work. The distinction with UTC is that it isn't tied to any particular physical location, it's not the "time zone" for anywhere.

But UTC is ultimately defined by consensus. We need a reference clock and we need to be able to measure or estimate our skew in order to sync to it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Anybody else think of Lovercraft when you read this? And wonder, but what if?? (it's actually some battle between elder gods)

</comment><comment><USER37> What a mean bully!

<comment><USER38> s/ully/ouncer

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Yeet

</comment><comment><USER40> Log in or create a free New York Times account to continue reading in private mode.</comment>


Al Jazeera in Egypt is cable's 'Sputnik moment' - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2011/01/31/al-jazeera-in-egypt-is-cables-sputnik-moment/

<comment><USER2> There is a lot of support for Al Jazeera English in the west now, but when they report facts and show images that are news worthy but put American lives in danger, it will again be the outcast station.</comment>


How to solve an everyday problem with pure functional programming - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6190745/struggling-with-using-pure-functional-programming-to-solve-an-everyday-problem

<comment><USER2> Title is linkbait. The linked question isn't about the merits of functional programming. It's about a user trying to wrap their head around it.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't understand what I am supposed to take away from this link. I basically agree with the top-rated answer; that approach looks to be about how I'd do it. Is there something unusual here?

EDIT: This comment was written at a time when the submission had a less descriptive title.

<comment><AUTHOR> Changed</comment></comment>


Why don't hotels use Roombas? - <AUTHOR> http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/01/why-dont-hotels-use-roombas/

<comment><USER2> This article was already discussed today, and then it was killed.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=264808>

Incidentally, the discussion there is much more intelligent than what's here right now. It's a shame that article was killed.

<comment><USER3> Why was it killed? It definitely seems to fit the criteria of "stuff interesting to hackers". I mean, it's robots.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Let's play Ask Matt Maroon: <http://mattmaroon.com/?p=416>

<comment><USER5> Matt Maroon, you're a fun guy. (But your category links are all broken.)

<comment><USER6> The comments links are all broken too, at least for me.

<comment><USER2> Actually, all of his links are broken. Everything goes to the main page.

<comment><USER3> They seem to work for me. What browser are you using (FF3 here). Perhaps it was a temporary problem due to one of my plugins.

<comment><USER2> Also on FF3. If I click any link (say, "Twitter Revisited"), I just get your latest article. The URL bar changes, but the content doesn't.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for letting me know guys. I'll try to figure out what the hell is wrong with it. Everything works fine for me in both browsers and Safari on my Mac, even after clearing cache, switching to/from OpenDNS, etc.

I need to just hire someone to make me a custom theme anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Another couple of possibilities:

1\. The cleaning staff management has their offices located in the 19th century.

2\. Roombas are easy to steal. Even in the nicer hotels, the paintings are bolted to the walls. Free-roaming robots that can fit in a suitcase? I think not.

3\. Durability may be a concern.

4\. Room turnover needs to happen very, very quickly, and so hotels are waiting for the 'Roomba-SS', because they need supercharged V8 cleaning power.

<comment><USER3> Theft is a huge problem, especially for the only inanimate object that could be plausibly said to have ran away on its own. The hotel can, of course, bill you, but you can just dispute the charges.

The guest only has to convince his credit card company that there was no Roomba when he got there. Given the state of charge backs in the industry today, that would be a shoe-in. You probably could convince them there was no painting if you stole that and tried.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Roombas are slow, fragile, and don't actually vacuum very well. They are costly to buy, maintain and replace.

Minimum wage labor is cheap, easy to find and easy to replace. Its usually fast and does a pretty good job of vacuuming.

Add to that that roombas need a lot of "support" to run. (Empty, charge, clean out when jammed with crud, send back when broken) and its WAY easier to point to an old hoover and make vacuuming motions and them point to the rooms than to explain to someone how to use a roomba. (Especially around a potential language barrier.)

The robots are coming, but not until they are tele-operated under contract (like ADT does for security) and the hotel staff doesn't even have to think about them. They just pay their "vacuum bill" and it happens.

</comment><comment><USER9> Because Roombas don't work very well.

<comment><USER10> Bingo! Anyone who has seen room service in action knows housekeeping spends about 80 seconds spot vacuuming each room where Roomba wanders around aimlessly for about 30 minutes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> ... because people would be stepping on them all the time.

I could list other reasons, but I guess Matt Maroon beat me too it.

</comment><comment><USER12> #5 and #7 are the only items on the list that make good sense.

</comment><comment><USER13> They are slow, that's why.

</comment><comment><USER14> ... because a Roomba can only vacuum and do nothing else.

</comment><comment> cypress-hill immigrant labor is cheap, plentiful, and scrubs toilets too

<comment><USER15> I think this is the crucial point. Probably the people who clean hotels do not usually buy Roombas. If a lawyer buys a Roomba, they are saving time that is worth 100/hour (or whatever). If a hotel buys a Roomba, they are saving time worth 10/hour (or whatever). A very different calculation.

<comment><USER3> At the same time, even if you assume the lawyer could spend his vacuuming time working instead (not exactly a safe assumption, as I learned the hard way once) the hotel laborer easily spends more than 10x the amount of time vacuuming that the lawyer does.</comment></comment></comment>


SpaceX has signed the world's first private passenger to fly around the Moon - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1040397262248005632 <comment><USER2> Pan Am signed people up for moon flights in 1968.†

We'll see if SpaceX lasts longer than PanAm did.

† [https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/were-you- member...](https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/were-you- member-"first-moon-flights"-club)

<comment><USER3> SpaceX has been kicking ass for a while now, I wouldn't bet against them being in it for the long haul.

BUT, I don't think the people who sign up for this should seriously expect to fly around the moon. That is a very very non-trivial engineering challenge, and the only people who did it were highly trained, had balls of pure cast iron, and frankly accepted the very real possibility of death. I feel that the statements "SpaceX is the real deal and not to be discounted" and "selling tickets to the moon is a PR farce" are compatible.

<comment><USER4> > the only people who did it were highly trained, had balls of pure cast iron

Astronauts are highly-trained, but I haven't seen any evidence they were necessary - they don't do the orbital calculations, and if there was an emergency, Ground Control would solve the problem.

<comment><USER5> > and if there was an emergency, Ground Control would solve the problem.

False. If there was an emergency, it could take several minutes for communication. Multiple responses could take an hour or more. They were highly trained to deal with issues because of this

<comment><USER6> Nope, not to the Moon. It takes less than 2 seconds. You can still do interactive conversation with that delay. Remember, the speed of light is very big!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's on BFR, not Dragon2, so probably a few years away.

Their previous plans for a lunar flyby were with a Dragon 2, which would theoretically be possible as early as next year.

</comment><comment><USER8> They already announced this, nearly 2 years ago. Wake me when BFR has successfully returned from orbit

[https://www.spacex.com/news/2017/02/27/spacex-send- privately...](https://www.spacex.com/news/2017/02/27/spacex-send-privately- crewed-dragon-spacecraft-beyond-moon-next-year)

</comment><comment><USER9> Musk tweeted a Japanese flag shortly after, so unless they're delivering sushi to the moon, it's someone Japanese.

</comment><comment> swingline-747

        Fly me to the moon
        Let me play among the stars
        Let me see what spring is like on
        A-Jupiter and Mars
        In other words, hold my hand
        In other words, baby, kiss me

I knew a guy whom took dates to buzz around the Statue of Liberty about 20m away, pre-9/11.. now dudes are going to have to take them literally around the moon. To afford this, anyone got any hot stock tips? :)</comment>


Retro Stack Exchange – for all your burning old school questions - <AUTHOR> http://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com <comment><AUTHOR> So I posted this link because I think a lot of people on HN enjoy old tech. The questions people post on are pretty interesting and the answers even more so. I am typing this on my Mac hooked to a 34" 4K monitor. Behind me is a Commodore 128D with 3 drives, a Plus/4 with a tape drive, Vic20 and a PCJr. I got my start in Basic on the Vic and C64, then onto 6502 ML. I think today we forget what it was like to have to code with only 3.5K of RAM (Vic20). It is fun to play with the old stuff. Also I have yet to find a RPG type game that has the depth of Ultima IV on the 64.</comment>


Werner Vogels on Amazon EC2's new persistent storage feature - <AUTHOR> http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2008/04/persistent_storage_for_amazon.html

<comment><USER2> "We are talking about this service at this early stage because we believe this will help many of our EC2 customers with setting their development priorities for this year."

translation: "Contrary to what we usually do, we decided to announce this still under development features so Google App Engine doesn't continue to steal headlines, or any future clients choosing a platform, from us - you know how the press loves to champion Google innovation."

</comment><comment> meat-eater This new feature addresses what I think is the biggest complaint about EC2, as seen on their discussion boards. People used to complain about the lack of static IPs, now that's no longer a problem. Once they get around to rolling out this feature to the public, the only legit complaint that people would have for them is the base cost when starting out.

When your traffic is zero or very low, as in the case of when you're just starting out, a conventional VPS host is still a lot cheaper. But the good thing with AWS is that it's easy to port your apps to run on their platform.

<comment><USER3> "But the good thing with AWS is that it's easy to port your apps to run on their platform."

Once you have mountable volumes, you can pretty much run the LAMP-style stack of your choice unmodified, right?

<comment><USER4> Pretty much. You essentially get your persistent read-write /var filesystem. You can keep the read-only parts of your system in your boot image. Unix has a long heritage of working in such an environment. It's a natural fit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That's pretty awesome. I think Amazon is doing the right thing, and keeping things open, unlike Google's closed system. I have been trying it out, and I don't like the idea of building an app so closeley tied to one vendor.

The only thing that Amazon needs is a good online system for managing their offerings. I guess scaler and rightscale try to solve this problem, but amazon could provide some better system managing themselves.

</comment><comment><USER6> this is yet another step in the right direction. amazon is clearly listening to their target consumers. can't wait to try it out.</comment>


Meteorjs open source markdown presentation maker with realtime broadcasting - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/zhouzhuojie/hast

<comment><AUTHOR> I especially like the real-time broadcasting feature that I needed awhile back, but couldn't find it anywhere.

If anybody knows any other product with such a feature, I'd be glad if they shared it here.

</comment><comment><USER2> this is how everyone will be doing e-books (in real time) in the future.

-bowerbird</comment>


How do you reject Engineering candidates? - <AUTHOR> http://code.dblock.org/how-to-reject-engineering-candidates

<comment><USER2> I would love to give and receive this type of thoughtful feedback every time I go to hire somebody or apply for a job. Even if you don't end up hiring somebody, they'll still walk away with a good impression of you and tell their engineering friends about your company's high character, so it's not time wasted to do this.

The problem with giving this kind of feedback is that if you word something incorrectly or something is accidentally (or deliberately) misinterpreted, you can open yourself up to a discrimination or other type of lawsuit.

So this is the big barrier (for me at least) to giving out this level of feedback to every potential hire.</comment>


Can Y Combinator buy the domain hackernews.com? - <AUTHOR> Why has YC never purchased hackernews.com. I always accidentally go to hackernews.com. It would great if they just purchased it. What does the community think? <comment><USER2> This is hacker news dude. Just edit your /etc/hosts file.

<comment><USER3> that's lying to yourself :p

<comment><USER4> or defining your own reality :p

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Space Rogue has owned and used hackernews.com since before Paul Graham had even sold Viaweb to Yahoo. I think maybe we should let him keep it.

<comment><USER6> Pretty sure it's not a matter of letting him keep at. I don't think selling would be consistent with L0pht's ethos.

<comment><USER7> L0pht was always for-profit :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "n" \+ enter is all I need.

<comment><USER9> ditto

<comment><USER8> And now you're making posts, too. Down the rabbit hole you go!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think the percentage of people who physically type in the url is miniscule.

<comment><USER11> I type it in. Though usually (sad, maybe) just typing "n" is enough.

<comment><USER12> I type it all when I come to a browser I've never used before ... and then it's always a few seconds of "wait, what was the domain again? was it .net or .com or .org?"

Yep, usually "new" is all I get before it's near the top of the list. Sometimes I even use the "bookmarks" menu, but that's pretty rare.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> [http://hackerne.ws](http://hackerne.ws) works.

</comment><comment><USER14> It is nice of YC to host Hacker News at all (I mean, it makes sense for business reasons and all), but I don't think it's fair to expect them to pay for a hefty domain name purchase on top of already providing a free service.

<comment><USER15> pg could probably pay for it with the change in his couch cushions, so I doubt cost would be much of a issue.

Although, the YC staff might consider the influx of new users to be counterproductive, and also the current url does have 'ycombinator' in it.

But in any case, first come, first serve. Just ask Nissan Motors. Or whoever owns nissan.com

<comment><USER16> Wouldn't that money be better spent going to a charity or a startup?

<comment><USER17> There the unfounded assumption that the old domain owner will spend the vast stacks of cash on the proverbial "blackjack and hookers" and waste all the rest, instead of spending it on charity and startups.

<comment><USER16> Spending money on "blackjack and hookers" is a better spending of money than a domain name. It would be more fun at least.

<comment><USER17> Eh, who here wouldn't trade that away to post on hacker news...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Notice that Hacker News is kind of hard to find and use in a number of ways. Once I'd heard of it, it took me a little while to actually find the forum, figure out how it works and how to create an account. Slightly annoying, but I tend to think now that it's better this way - it probably encourages high- level discussion and discourages trolling and lame jokes by making it so that low-effort commentators will get tired of trying to figure it out and go to Reddit or something instead.

</comment><comment><USER19> I suspect it's that it's a hefty price tag for a simple website that doesn't directly generate revenue.

<comment><AUTHOR> Two companies in their portfolios are worth $10B+. I am aware their equity portions are still very small, but I would be surprised if they didn't have the money to afford it.

<comment><USER20> Many of the YC partners are themselves independently wealthy. Regardless, the domain seems like good branding for YC. Removing the "ycombinator.com" from the address would lessen the connection for new users.

<comment><USER19> Exactly - the branding is to ycombinator, not just news to hackers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I use [http://hackerne.ws](http://hackerne.ws) which works well too.

</comment><comment><USER22> It's nice as it is. Also I believe YC people see it as some sort of brand (and even ad).

</comment><comment><USER23> Interesting enough the most popular news clone of HN - designer news has a similar domain ... news.la????????.com .

That's classic example of "Content is king" principle and how domain names might be irrelevant if you have enough popularity.

</comment><comment><USER6> Ironic, given the number of YCombinator startups with "Get", "Try", "The", "App", etc prefixes and suffixes in their domain name, to say nothing of the various TLDs like .io, .ly, .co, .es, etc.

</comment><comment><USER24> I use hckrnews.com, which is a much more convenient version for me. I even wrote a bookmarklet so I can use it on my iPad while the links still point to hn.algolia.com (which is my preferred tablet experience).

</comment><comment><USER25> Space Rogue (of L0pht fame) owns hackernews.com and (at least, up to a few years ago) publicly pondered reviving Hacker News Network, his old infosec news website, which was immensely popular back in the day.

</comment><comment><USER26> what for? nobody types it in, and it's probably in the hundreds of thousands. And keeping it on a subdomain probably keeps away a lot of idiots.

<comment><USER27> How does using a subdomain keep away the idiots? Would some people try to go to www.news.ycombinator.com?

<comment><USER26> they keep trying to go to hackernews.com because sombody told them about ¨hacker news", and lose interest once they get there and dont find it there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Am I the only person who uses hackerne.ws?

<comment><USER29> Besides one other commenter, looks like it. I never knew! But then again, I typically type it like twice a year, the rest of the time n+enter does the job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I use [http://hckrnews.com/](http://hckrnews.com/)

Just two letters short...

</comment><comment><USER31> Vimium: type b to search bookmarks (or shift+b for new tab), and then h to bring up Hacker News

</comment><comment><USER32> I always type hckrnews.com (but it is an alternative front page design)

</comment><comment><USER33> a lot of people I imagine don't actually go to news.ycombinator... I always go to hckrnews.com instead--much better interface imho.

</comment><comment><USER34> firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment><comment><USER35> Nice Try.</comment>


Skyfire iOS browser approved by Apple, converts Flash video to HTML5 - <AUTHOR> http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/11/02/skyfire_ios_browser_approved_by_apple_converts_flash_video_to_html5.html <comment><USER2> Am I correct in assuming this only works on h.264 encoded "Flash Video". Then there is no conversion going on - but a very smart solution that should make some money on what would be a relatively straightforward app to make.</comment>


Artist made only $2,700 in royalties from 43M plays on Pandora (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/pharrell-made-only-2700-in-songwriter-royalties-from-43-million-plays-of-happy-on-pandora-2014-12 <comment><USER2> 2014 was before Pandora bought scraps of Rdio to build an on-demand platform from.

Royalties are complicated (and I'm only going to get the gist of it right), but Pandora uses DMCA rights to essentially act as a "radio station." That's why the interface is structured that way, and what artists holding out on Spotify can still be heard (when shuffled) on Pandora. Radio was always seen as promotional, and the royalties are _really_ low, hence $2,700. On Spofity, this would be more like $160,000.

<comment><USER3> Do you mind explaining a bit more why this story is a problem? I assumed rightsholders would sign a contract with Pandora and it's their business what rate they negotiate. If they think it's too low, they can just not sign, can't they?

Apparently there's some government specified royalty for broadcasters, which includes Pandora, of $0.00176/play [1]. So maybe they're not allowed to demand more??!

[1] [https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/02/28/will-pandora- media...](https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/02/28/will-pandora-media-ever- turn-a-profit.aspx)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Flagged because that makes it sound like the $2700 was all he made. While in reality he made an order of magnitude more from it. It is just the part called "songwriter royalities" that was $2700.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right, I dropped the ball with the title, but unfortunately I can't edit it now.

Clarifying information for readers:

The original title of the article is: "Pharrell Made Only $2,700 In Songwriter Royalties From 43 Million Plays Of 'Happy' On Pandora"

Relevant quote describing the issue:

> Despite Pharrell's ubiquity, "Happy" made $2,700 in publisher and songwriter > royalties from 43 million Pandora streams in the first quarter of 2014, > according to an email from music publisher Sony/ATV CEO Marty Bandier > obtained by Digital Music News.

Pandora's response (trimmed):

> ...However, we wish Mr. Bandier would provide the proper context and facts. > Pandora is already the highest paying form of radio to both performers and > songwriters. We have paid more than $1 billion to rights holders since our > inception, which amounts to over half of all revenue we have generated. > Regarding the specific songs he mentions in his letter, Pandora paid all > rights holders more than $150,000 in just three months, substantially more > than the $6,100 he suggests.

> The issue is not whether Pandora pays enough in royalties. The real issue is > the financial dispute between labels and publishers about how to divide > Pandora's industry-leading royalties. Mr. Bandier and his label peers (many > of whom work within the same companies) are free to decide amongst > themselves to change the split between songwriters and performing artists of > the substantial royalty revenue already paid by Pandora. We'd also encourage > that same group to provide transparency about how those dollars flow to the > artists and songwriters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Assuming the "happy" song was 5 minutes long, 47M plays ~ 5400 months of playtime. At $10/month subscription revenue, that's $54k. So, the artist is getting 5% of the gross revenue. Not sure how that compares with radio/ satellite royalty streams.

Edit: It was 43M plays, not 47. So, ~ 5.4% of gross revenue.

<comment><USER6> You're missing a multiplier there, the average of every users playtime/realtime fraction. Let's generously assume that to be 10% (meaning every user listens for 2.4 hours every single day on average) and then it comes to 0.5%

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> That's low, but I'm curious as to how much was paid in total to the record company. Also, I wonder what artists think is fair to pay for a stream of a song?

<comment><USER8> > Regarding the specific songs he mentions in his letter, Pandora paid all > rights holders more than $150,000 in just three months, substantially more > than the $6,100 he suggests.

> The issue is not whether Pandora pays enough in royalties. The real issue is > the financial dispute between labels and publishers about how to divide > Pandora's industry-leading royalties.

<comment><USER7> Good catch, really the title of the article should be "Artist made only <$> from <Record Company> for 43M plays".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Article is from 2014, and the year should be included in the title.

<comment><AUTHOR> My bad, edited it now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wow, that's really high. While he was doing nothing, he got paid $2,700, what an enviable position.

<comment><USER11> Imagine if this mindset was applied to every minute a developer wasn't actually writing code...

<comment><USER12> Imagine if software companies paid their employees royalties on the code they wrote instead of just paying for the development time... ;-)

<comment><USER13> If you can negotiate it then a % of revenue or profit is totally doable as a consultant bringing additional millions to the table.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I feel an artist should be able to make a good living from their work.

Should they make 10s of millions, while LunchBox Joe gets sued into bankruptcy if he shares a few songs electronically? No, I don't think that's right, either.

It's time we re-thought artists rights in the electronic age.

<comment><USER15> Honest question, has an average Joe ever gotten sued into bankruptcy?

I'm definitely on your side here, just curious.

<comment><USER14> Yes. Here's a woman who was told to pay over $9000 per song for 24 songs she shared online.

[http://www.startribune.com/ruling-stands-brainerd-woman- must...](http://www.startribune.com/ruling-stands-brainerd-woman-must- pay-222-000-for-illegal-music-downloads/198858541/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Hard to feel sympathy for this. What is his hourly wage like $200/ hour?</comment>


Map Matching in a Programmer's Perspective - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/valhalla/valhalla/blob/master/docs/meili/algorithms.md <comment><USER2> That's fun - when I was working on this problem a few years ago and unable to find sufficient academic literature on the subject I thought I'd "invented" what turns out to be known as the Viterbi algorithm (duh) and hadn't thought too much of it. Turns out what I thought I'd invented is also a HMM, which is doubly funny because I've never _quite_ managed to wrap my head around HMMs (though several times I've tried). It's interesting how a lot of algorithms are a lot more intuitive than most of the rigorous academic notation make them seem...

Code for anyone interested [https://bitbucket.org/ris/tsbp/src](https://bitbucket.org/ris/tsbp/src) [http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/That_Shouldnt_Be_Possible](http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/That_Shouldnt_Be_Possible)

Interesting to look back on the code and see that as much effort is spent on heuristics trying to decide where in the track to spend the calculation effort than anything else.

<comment><USER3> Indeed.

The need for rigor often means certain parts of an argument get emphazised when they distract from the intuitive explanation. Also, when things get mathematically people have an urge to show how it connects to other mathematical results. Those connections are interesting in their own right, but they might not be related to the engineering problem at hand.

The result is that understanding the literature can involve a long hard slog through other literature, just to discover that most of what you read was irrelevant.

This is what it is often easier to discover things in the lab than in the library.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you'd like to try map matching as a hosted API right away, see screenshots, demos, and more at [https://mapzen.com/blog/map- matching/](https://mapzen.com/blog/map-matching/)

Context: This is a link in to Valhalla documentation. Valhalla is an open- source routing engine led by Mapzen. We also offer it as a hosted SaaS on mapzen.com

Disclaimer: I work for Mapzen.</comment>