Reddit's profane, greedy traders are shaking up the stock market - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-26/reddit-s-profane-greedy-traders-are-shaking-up-the-stock-market <comment><USER3> Come on man, there's no where near enough volume there to move anything but the most low volume of stocks. All they trade in is meme stocks like TSLA, NFLX, MSFT, AAPL etc., and a few 100k on calls here or there won't budge the price in the slightest.

On top of that, it's not even a P&D group, people there are just trading against each other, you have both bears and bulls and thetas. There's never been a concerted effort to pump SPCE for instance.

<comment><USER4> I have a theory that WSB are so bad at trading that they actually do manipulate stocks due to messing up every automated trading platform that assumes there'd be some logic to the trades being made.

Someone's just bought a $1000 call option on a stock that's currently $400? Automated trading systems will probably raise alerts on that stock since someone must know something for that to happen.

This appeared to happen when WSB were meme-ing on TSLA and a whole bunch of them bought $1000 call options when it was $400. Shortly afterwards TSLA skyrocketed in value.

<comment><USER5> Can they be bad at trading? [https://xkcd.com/2270/](https://xkcd.com/2270/)

<comment><USER6> I wonder why this wouldn't work. If 90% of retail traders lose money, then why doesn't Etrade and Robinhood bet against its worst performing customers? Is there some law against this?

<comment><USER7> IIRC there was a scandal not so long ago with a forex broker that was just not executing trades from dumb clients, sitting on the other side of them itself instead. I don't know if it's exactly illegal in a direct way, but it's a bad look, and I think there was a fine in this case.

<comment><USER8> Basically a bucket shop: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucket_shop_(stock_market)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucket_shop_\(stock_market\))

Those are considered illegal in US. CFD and like skirt the law here.

The big problem with bucket shops is that they tend to not honor the bets once you start winning too much as Jesse Livermore found out in late 1890s.

Still common today with all the fake forex exchanges. The rare winners have trouble getting money out.

<comment> blaser-waffle What are some examples of Fake Forex shops?

<comment><USER8> There are many of them in Europe and the smaller ones change names quickly.

Turn off adblock and go to finance and forex oriented sites. You will see many ads for them at least in Europe.

A common marketing strategy for them is to offer heavy affiliate comissions and this leads to make-money-with-forex type of affiliate sites. That's another sign.

Bigger ones would be someone like Saxo Bank which started as a bucket shop in 90s and now is medium sized and somewhat legitimate now.

Another sign to be aware is the use of Metatrader software. Up to version 5 now.

I am sure there are turnkey solutions offering a whole bucket-shop as a service.

Even if there are honest bucket-shops you are still betting against the house not against other players in the market. Might as well bet on horses or sports then.

EDIT: nice discussion here on situation in UK: [https://www.elitetrader.com/et/threads/is-there-an-actual- ma...](https://www.elitetrader.com/et/threads/is-there-an-actual-market-for- cfds-or-are-cfd-firms-just-bucket-shops.318978/)

<comment> blaser-waffle Good reply. Thank you for the detail!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As someone who was a very early member of /r/wallstreetbets:

1) /r/wallstreetbets and /r/wsb are two different subreddits. /r/wsb are for those that got banned from wallstreetbets

2) When wallstreetbets first started it wasn't as crazy as it was today. There were some aggressive gamblers but there was opportunity for real due diligence and decent conversation. I contributed more than a few posts back in the early days. After it got crazy I unsubscribed until recently. Robinhood and the options trading and margin trading has really made things crazy. I see absurd bets made on there that make me both jealous and glad I'm not 25 with too much money to gamble.

3) those who say it's likely too small to make a difference go check out the timing of the Lumber Liquidator due diligence post and the subsequent jump in price. I don't know what the difference is between pump and dump vs posting due diligence but there definitely was a correlation. I wish I still had my data account because I would love to see the exact correlation of options trading and stock trading to the posts.

4) the memes and gifs are hilarious if not vulgar and bigoted. But if you have thick skin some of the memes are very well made.

<comment><USER10> 3) You don't need to have complete data to report what you think is a market manipulation scheme to the SEC for investigation:

> _Tips - Report a potential violation of the securities laws directly to > firstname.lastname@example.com. Please do not use this email box for general comments > or questions._

<comment><USER11> Just remember that reporting things to the SEC makes _you_ the enemy.

The SEC exists to protect the people exchanging securities.

<comment> murph-almighty I just want to point out that "protecting the people exchanging securities" by extension also means "people who trust money managers to exchange securities on their behalf", which would include most people with a 401k or a pension, not just some stereotypical stock jock. Come on, dude.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Back in the early 2000's I worked for a company that was was hired (via intermediary law firms) by publicly listed companies to investigate pump and dump schemes on Yahoo message boards (you might call that the "Reddit of the early 2000's").

It involved a lot of web scraping Yahoo with Perl (specifically LWP) and then lots of analysis by humans with some help from automated tools. For example, if you plotted a histogram of each user's posts, you could clearly see when someone was at work (posted between 9am and 5pm with a drop off around noon) and at home (posts between 6pm and 2am with a peak around 10pm).

The analysts would often find a piece of information from a 2 year old post, e.g. 'Go Cubs!', and a one week old post "I just attended my 20 year UofI reunion" and quickly be able to narrow down on who the person might be. Coupled with Lexis Nexis (which was just coming online at the time), we routinely narrowed down individuals to just one possible person.

Given that this was done back in the early 2000's using ancient servers (by today's standards) and basic statistical analysis with a lot of legwork, I would be surprised if there weren't companies also trying to find the people on Reddit today.

<comment><USER13> Hah... The guys on the scox message board automated this pretty well; there was a user named warmcat who even opened sourced some of it.

The Reddit comments usually aren't long enough to be meaningful, and I think that there are now organised p&d teams, so that level of investigation isn't very useful anymore

<comment><USER12> > The Reddit comments usually aren't long enough to be meaningful, and I think > that there are now organised p&d teams, so that level of investigation isn't > very useful anymore

The Yahoo comments usually weren't that long either. The key point was that while each individual post gave you, on average, only a little but of information, in the aggregate you got enough to narrow down who the source was to within 5 people. From there, you could usually narrow it down using "legwork" etc.

<comment><USER14> With something like Robinhood, where you're trading, presumably they have your bank details (and phone details) so pinning your trades on a irl person is a given.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Hey! I'd like to shamelessly plug my new project here:

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

We're writing about this speculative culture emanating from WSB and 4chan in a daily email. We send out a list of the most mentioned stocks, and do a longer form commentary, with quotes from those communities a few times a week.

It's just an email now, but we're going to roll out options analysis and a few other goodies in the coming weeks :)

(The language can be a bit crude, so this might not be for you, if that is a concern.)

<comment><USER16> FYI: Since you're in the US you can drop the double opt in on your news letter. I'd setup your page to feed to an Excel sheet or something and use that to feed into your email sending software.

<comment><USER17> No, please do _not_ drop a double opt-in on this or any situation where you're collecting email addresses. People mistype email addresses all the time. Always verify email addresses before using them.

(This is a personal pet peeve since I have a short email address that tons of people sometimes think belongs to them, and get a huge amount of mail intended for other people.)

<comment><USER15> Thanks for the heads up. Reenabled!

<comment><USER18> Good choice. Just to elaborate: double opt-in is expected behavior from customer-centric companies, and expected behavior from good actors in the email ecosystem. It's not necessarily required by law in the US, but it's a good practice nonetheless: always make sure you have permission from a recipient to send an email.

Anyone can pass anyone else's email address as input to a form, so simply receiving an address as input is not actually permission. If a newsletter does not employ double opt-in, then it will eventually end up on a list of "single opt-in newsletters" which are used to harass people by subscribing their email to a ton (100s or 1000s) of newsletters that they don't want. People who are the victim of this will rightly mark those messages as spam, causing your email reputation to drop. Random Internet bots will also submit subscriptions using your form with weird addresses for who-knows-what reasons. It's a very good idea to have some data validation to make sure garbage doesn't end up in your list, and double opt-in is one of the best ways to achieve that.

Furthermore, competitors might maliciously attack you by subscribing random email addresses to your list. They can get these addresses from data dumps from compromises (like what haveibeenpwned is using). Sending to these addresses will harm your reputation because recipients will mark as spam, or will fail to interact with your messages which is also a spam signal. Smart malicious competitors will cause you to start sending to spamtraps.

The best defense against being manipulated in these ways is double opt-in. Lastly, your email list _as such_ has more value overall if you know that every single entry was confirmed by double opt-in.

As a corollary, you should remove addresses from the list if messages to the address start bouncing, or if you receive a spam complaint from them; sometimes people are lazy and will mark spam instead of unsubscribing. Ideally, support the List-Unsubscribe feature so that people can unsubscribe from it directly in their email client. A good email platform will help with all of these things.

I consider single-opt-in use of email addresses to be a dark pattern or anti- pattern in most contexts, especially non-transactional contexts like newsletters. Any sort of recurring communication needs double opt-in.

<comment><USER19> > I consider single-opt-in use of email addresses to be a dark pattern or > anti-pattern

This is wrong.

I want to be able to enter an email address and get a newsletter. This is good UI/UX blah

There is nothing dark about helping a user using single opt in. Single opt in is great and preferred.

But because of the world we live in, as you explain well, we have to make everyone's lives a PiTA by securing it.

It might be a anti-pattern collecting emails to easily, since the Spam Bots might punish you because of bad actors, which reduces your email reach.

But it's also a anti-pattern to think double opt in is normal. If you can get away with not doing it, then don't. ie. I see idiots doing it in corporate settings or after having paid money

<comment><USER20> > There is nothing dark about helping a user using single opt in.

Someone thinks my email address is their email address, and keeps filling it in in various places as "their" email address.

They seem to live in France, and so the things they sign up for are in French.

Sometimes, these are double opt-in, and I can just ignore them.

Other times, I suddenly have to figure out how to unsubscribe from a newsletter that's in french.

Often, the "unsubscribe" link is just a mailto link to their customer service, and now I have to hope they can understand my English as I ask them to remove me from their list.

Also, this same ne'er-do-well has taken out loans with my email address as one of their few pieces of contact information. So now I have a loan company trying to get money from "me." Obviously, loan companies aren't going to be very accomodating when you tell them they have the wrong address. _That 's what they all say_, no?

(It's not quite identity theft, as the loan people really are after _the other guy_ , not me. It's not _my_ credit score being impacted. They just emailed me because mailing the address on file, phoning the phone number on file, etc. didn't work.)

Wouldn't it be great if I could contact this person to tell them to stop? Well, think about how I could accomplish that for a moment. All I know about them is... my own email address!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > You're in private mode. Subscribe to continue reading in private mode.

I didn't realise that Bloomberg blocks private mode too. Messages like this assume that tracking is the default and make sure that we keep losing privacy. I really dislike this trend.

<comment><USER22> They detect your private mode using JavaScript; you can bypass by pausing script execution with the developer console immediately after the article loads.

<comment><USER21> It doesn't really work, some users get treated as bots, see: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22428193](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22428193) .

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> So I was one of the first people on Wallstreetbets to post options YOLO around 2015, back then it was nothing but rainbow dick banners and penny stocks. I had previously interned at a brokerage and had just graduated college with a degree in physics(I understood the math behind options). Not hearing back from quant trading firms because I guess BSc is not enough for them, I said fuck it and started taking speculative bets on my own, lost half before I went all in on what I believed to be a fraudulent stock that was getting crushed, bought really far OTM weekly puts and was lucky that the CEOs collateral was liquidated which further tanked the stock. I then just bought AMD SQ when it IPOd and put the rest into ETFs and only traded small amounts on options the side. Just funny to see how far people ran with it. I tried warning people that while I wasn't a "pro" and I was playing up a degenerate trader/4chan character I was aware of the risk I was taking but we know how that turned out.

<comment><USER24> I absolutely love that Wall Street Bets has graduated from penny stocks to options bets.

It was so frustrating in the earlier days of WSB to want to talk about options. The rules were that "it was the place to talk about VIX and speculative options trades" but it was just full of trash about biomed penny stocks and FDA approval gambles.

It was what set it apart from other "finance" communities online and especially reddit: not being risk adverse.

But then it became similar to other finance communities by having an absolute anathema to anything bitcoin or crypto. The mods there didn't seem willing to see them as options trades that never expire. Crypto has similar returns to options contracts, without the time limitation or theta decay or an actual option. If you are an options trader, crypto is _not risky_. This still seems to be the case there, so thats been making it less interesting to me.

If I do fund an equities options account and want to trade earnings or some follow on swings for the rest of the quarter, I still like to enjoy the memes and laughs with the WSB crowd.

They really fall short on commodities trading, credit trading, crypto trading, amongst other markets.

<comment><USER25> > But then it became similar to other finance communities by having an > absolute anathema to anything bitcoin or crypto.

Thank god. I just recently joined WSB and would immediately quit if this was about shitcoin gambling. Options at least are based on stocks and they have real value. Way different than the inherent value of 0 of crypto BS.

<comment><USER24> I trade them as digital commodities, which obliterates the stock-like value argument.

Oil was 23 cents a barrel once and people were worried about it crashing to 10 cents. The utility of oil had not expanded and it was a viscous substance without any intrinsic value, yet.

Oil doesn't need to be physical to retain that reality.

Most commodities, including the largest cryptos, have options on them.

> really fall short on commodities trading, credit trading, crypto trading, > amongst other markets.

Exhibit A

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Wait, people actually go to /r/wsb for investment advice? The entire time I thought it was a mix of posting wins/losses along with some memes/humor.

<comment><USER27> It is exactly that. Sometimes there's actual, solid, investment advice hidden in posts. Sometimes.

<comment><USER28> Wsb is in the honey moon stage of a subreddit where you find a ton of amazing humor and and an occasional deeply insightful comment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> As a regular of WSB, this article is just absolutely absurd. Which I guess is the regular for Bloomberg these days (seemingly the Buzzfeed of business news it appears). All you'll find on WSB is a bunch of homophobic bored desk workers. The idea that subreddit of only a few thousand guys (mostly) with an extra $500 to blow on meme stocks can move a stock in _any_ significant way is laughable.

<comment><USER30> Yeah, I was under the impression that ~95% of posters on WSB don't actually day trade and are just there to meme and laugh at the trolling/idiocy. The other 5% are the fools YOLOing their college loans.

The charm of the subreddit is that it's hard to figure out who's who.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I have a pet conspiracy theory that WSB is used by insiders to signal trades to each other disguised as sh*tposts and hidden among the rest of the overwhelming noise.

I love WSB, though. It's been a constant source of laughter and entertainment over the past few years. Now that it's hit the mainstream, I hope the wild culture doesn't dilute down too much.

<comment><USER32> it's not insider trading if the info is public /s

<comment><USER33> "how can we have insider knowledge if none of us have knowledge?" \- actual Reddit comment quoted from article

<comment><USER32> _big brain time_

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Never underestimate the survivorship bias in public stock picking forums. Reddit is no exception.

There are a few honest stories of losses and failure in WSB, but the majority of loss stories or bad picks quickly fade into obscurity or are deleted by their original posters. What remains are the highly-upvoted success stories.

<comment><USER35> 1 million in losses makes you a mod.

If anything wallstreetbets loves massive loses more than massive gains.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> This article doesn't seem to address 3 big issues: Firstly, most of the stuff on /r/WSB is talking about massive market cap companies like TSLA and AMD. Some punter putting his life savings in AMD puts is not going to actually move the market. I would love to see numbers on this but my gut says that reddit posters posting about their $50k investment in a company that is worth several billion is just retail noise. It's not moving stocks.

Secondly, maybe there are some people genuinely attempting to use the forum to pump and dump but frankly, they're probably not succeeding and even if they are, that's exactly the sort of person the SEC is actually interested in prosecuting. But literally there is no evidence it's happening at all, let alone at any scale or is profitable.

Finally, I love the idea that market makers are just sitting there going "sure is weird that we've seen a lot of retail flow on MIK, better continue straight forwardly hedging using the future and not exploit this predictable market pattern"

</comment><comment><USER37> /r/wallstreetbets is one of those strange communities that provides nearly limitless comedy. Best watched from a distance.

</comment><comment><USER38> Yes people are "greedy" who trade stocks. GTFO of here with that hype shit.

<comment><USER39> How dare these filthy peasant redditors profane our sacred and pure institution of derivatives trading with their foul lust for social mobility?

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Matt Levine's take: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2020-02-26/money-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2020-02-26/money- stuff-reddit-posters-pick-the-stocks-now)

I'd really recommend subscribing (free, email, don't think there's RSS) if you don't already (I got the recommendation on HN). He's prolific though, rarely a day without an email, and often two or three - it wasn't long before I couldn't keep up; I just skim and read more thoroughly those that grab my attention now.

<comment><USER41> Pretty sure he does one per weekday unless he's off work. Don't recall ever receiving multiple in the one day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Interesting parallels w Bernie bro story: we can't tell if they actually have any influence, and we can't tell if they did have an influence whether or not that would be a good thing. All we really know is that the old school whales like Bloomberg find them annoying.

</comment><comment><USER43> I use Robinhood app to gamble on options, most of the times I lose and sometimes I won big to cover all losses.

I don't understand options, other than a few things about them which help me trade them

It's ok to ignore the big picture. Not everything has to have a profound meaning behind and similar are the stock moves. I believe most of the movements are irrational, so studying fundamentals or anything is going to offer nothing other than wasted time.

I love the crazy vibe of that subreddit which motivates me to take crazy positions which I'd have never taken if I carried on with my risk averse friends.

Even if probability of becoming double digit millionaire from a single digit millionaire is small through options trading. It's well worth it because once you've saved enough to retire, why not bet on random positions? You never know when you'll fall on the long tail end of the game and experience the Black Swan event which changes your life forever.

Then I am also doing other things which people might consider crazy like steroids to maintain Greek god physique - considering neither I am model, atheletic or body builder.

YOLO is not bad way to live if it gives you the highs you need move out of sorrows and sufferings.

<comment><USER44> Since you work out: you must have seen that results accumulate (such as being able to lift more). The problem with the WSB style of trading is that the knowledge doesn't accumulate. It's just gambling all the way down. And you still end up spending time on it! If you'd like an easy-to-read + thin first book on options, I'd recommend Frans De Weer's "Introduction to Options Trading":

[https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Options-Trading-Frans- We...](https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Options-Trading-Frans- Weert/dp/0470029706)

<comment><USER43> Look into Green Lumber Fallacy.

<comment><USER44> Good one! This actually does apply to options trading. Pricing quants may need to be masters of stochastic calculus, Ito's lemma, et al, but if you're trading and not pricing them, this analogy applies: even riding a bicycle, when described with physics equations, probably involves higher-order calculus that would put 2nd order options greeks to shame, but one does not need to understand the maths to learn cycling or even be the world's best cyclist! Similarly, if you trade the same instrument enough, you build "muscle memory" for how it moves, i.e., you get a feel for vega, vanna, et al which is almost visceral. The practitioner may use informal descriptions like, "uh oh, I can feel it bend now" rather than calculus to refer to a gamma-based acceleration of option price, but it is perfectly good enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Couldn't you replace this headline with, "Wall Street's profane, greedy traders are shaking up the stock market" and have it be as valid, if not more, than talking about people on reddit?

</comment><comment><USER46> People dismiss wsb but gambling is a big issue here in the US. This is exactly what happened during dotcom.

</comment><comment><USER47> This is giving wayyyy too much credit to a sub-reddit that's all about poking fun at the trading game, and each others. Please don't throw your money away following them.

</comment><comment><USER48> I recall there's a way to sign up to an email subscription of Matt Levine's writing, without Bloomberg and their pop-ups. Anyone know how to do that?

<comment><USER49> Maybe this? [0] I had an issue where I was sub'd for a while, "lost" emails, then it shows up fine again.

[0] [http://link.mail.bloombergbusiness.com/join/4wm/moneystuff-s...](http://link.mail.bloombergbusiness.com/join/4wm/moneystuff- signup&hash=54223001ca3ffcf40f2629c25acea67a)

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Wow, this title sure got changed to something far more inflamatory than it was an hour ago, when it was something closer to "reddit picks your stock". Nice one, bloomberg.

Oh wait, Bloomberg's trying to run for president?

Owning one of the authoritative news outlets feels like maybe that's an illegal conflict of interest, there, then.

</comment><comment><USER51> For those interested in r/WSB's reactions... [https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/f9sx9d/cong...](https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/f9sx9d/congrats_autists_the_cover_of_bloomberg/)

</comment><comment><USER52> Someone started a cryptocurrency version of WSB recently as well: [https://www.reddit.com/r/SatoshiStreetBets/](https://www.reddit.com/r/SatoshiStreetBets/)

</comment><comment><USER53> Related: r/pennystocks

[https://twitter.com/packyM/status/1229910436184756225?s=20](https://twitter.com/packyM/status/1229910436184756225?s=20)

<comment> 52-6F-62 I can't tell if they're being serious or not. One of the commenters was right. It's almost exactly Stratton Oakmont [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratton_Oakmont](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratton_Oakmont)

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Related column: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22425390](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22425390)

</comment><comment><USER55> Are the effect of the coronavirus on the stock market could be opportunity for investing? The SP500 went down 8% this past 5 days. I'm wondering if that will go lower those next days.

I have a bit amount of money on the side, I didn't know where to invest. Would now be a good opportunity to lump sum all the money, or would you Dollar Cost Average?

Anyone else with the same dilemma, and would have more arguments? Or maybe an other perspective on that?

<comment><USER56> this seems like a conversation to have on wallstreetbets rather than HN

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Sentiment analysis is not new, and I would imagine it's ancillary at best to a proper trading outfit. Well equipped market makers and HFTs make money on price movement (and exchange rebates). A flurry of out-of-the-money calls is unlikely to adjust an underlying equity price significantly enough to be statistically important.

</comment><comment><USER58> [https://archive.md/GncCZ](https://archive.md/GncCZ)

</comment><comment><USER59> Usually if you think you are fcking someone in the stock market, you are usually the one being fcked

</comment><comment><USER60> The article's opening paragraph might have been a somewhat accurate depiction of reddit 12-13 years ago, but it's changed a lot since then. It's hard to take the author that seriously when the bias against reddit is that clear in the lede.

</comment><comment><USER61> > After years of indifference, individual investors seem to be finding their > way back to stocks, for better or worse.

There's an old adage in London that it's time to sell when the retail buyers start entering the marketing...

</comment><comment><USER62> In other news, Vegas' profane, greedy gamblers are shaking up the economy.

<comment><USER63> I've never gambled before in my life. I've always been a very conservative indexer, but... I've got some spare dough. I have always been quite interested in the finance side of things, having worked under and been good friends with a dude with a graduate degree in Quantitative Finance, I spent years learning about random bits of finance stuff from him - enough that I knew a good bit about of some of /r/wallstreetbets' favorite investments, options.

I've been having a pretty good time perusing the forum and making bets of my own, even making a decent profit (relative to the money put in). I don't risk more than I'm willing to completely lose though. Some people on that forum are a quite reckless.

<comment><USER62> I'm curious why you chose to reply to me specifically with this. I assume you agree that there are both kinds of people in Vegas, and the analogy still stands?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> New side-project idea: WSB sentiment analysis tracker linked to RobinHood API

</comment><comment><USER65> What's wrong with ordinary traders taking advantage of the flaws in dealers and big money bots? Aren't they (dealers and such) the ones who have been doing it forever?

<comment><USER66> Exactly. As someone who has made substantial profits over the years (including a six-figure profit on the recent TSLA and SPCE rally) thanks to WSB, it brings me great joy knowing I'm pocketing money straight off Wall Street institutions.

WSB tends to celebrate losses (aka "loss porn") and it's well-deserved - <USER2> tend to do really stupid things (like "YOLOing" 100% of their portfolio into a single position). But if you know how to manage risk effectively (Kelly's criterion etc) it's possible to consistently make profits.

Amidst the chaos of shitposts and degenerate gambling there is often quality DD hidden throughout. The odd thing is I suspect WSB has reached critical mass to the point where it's achieved feedback loops and can actually move markets, thanks to algorithms misidentifying unusual options volume caused by wild speculation & shameless gambling.

<comment><USER65> Interesting you mentioned "Kelly criterion", I have been interested in it for some time and the articles I read seemed to point out that it works "best" only after the fact (after the trade has been executed). How do you deal with this?

<comment><USER66> This is a common way to implement it: [https://www.investopedia.com/articles/trading/04/091504.asp](https://www.investopedia.com/articles/trading/04/091504.asp)

It's not foolproof, but generally the idea is to keep positions small (relative to portfolio size) and quickly take profits - which is critical when dealing with something as insanely volatile as options. With options one can also improve their odds with intermediate strategies (such as call debit spreads, straddles/strangles during earnings). I often will temporarily buy calls on something like TECS (-3X Inverse Technology ETF) when I'm speculating on multiple tech earnings plays within the same week - that way if my calls on Apple or Microsoft don't pan out it'll be offset by the inverse ETF gains. Options can be an incredible tool, and used properly can be excellent for managing risk effectively.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> I can't even scroll the page on my computer using Safari. It just freezes immediately. Is a Core i5-6500 already too old for Web browsing?

</comment><comment><USER68> A very prescient XKCD (which as afar as I can tell, was released before the article was published):

[https://xkcd.com/2270/](https://xkcd.com/2270/)

</comment><comment><USER69> How is anything WSB does worse than say, high-frequency trading?

</comment><comment><USER70> Can anyone explain the strategy it's talking about?

<comment><USER71> The WSB strategy: Buying call or puts instead of individual stocks. Calls are when you think a stock is going to go up, puts are when you think it's going to go down. Instead of having to buy an individual stock, you can simply buy a call because you think the stock price will go up. If it does go up like you project, then you will make money. If instead it goes down, you lose money. This is generally a non-standard type of trade for the common investor.

It's easy enough on the surface to understand, but much harder to actually execute, because you generally do want some deeper understanding of market trends and how stocks move. That barrier of entry hasn't slowed down most people on WSB, because the loss porn was kind of the point of the subreddit. They didn't really care if they guessed right, they cared about having the most daring bet.

<comment><USER72> A lot of the craziness is from exactly what bets they are making. The cool thing to do is to buy "Out of the Money" options (where $TSLA might cost $420/share but the options are for $450), sometimes with borrowed money. These options are dirt cheap, so you can buy a ton of them. Usually you lose your whole investment when the options expire, but if the stock jumps over the price of the option you can make a ton of money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Wall Street will catch on and come around to set a trap

</comment><comment><USER73> what if it's just HFT with some natural language AIs posting on reddit?

</comment><comment><USER74> Oh my God they're using swears?

</comment><comment><USER75> Paywalled site, T$DR.

</comment><comment><USER76> OK, Boomerberg.

</comment><comment><USER77> So subreddits are either echo chambers or hopelessly conflicted? I'm not defending WSB but isn't the entire point of internet forums / reddit discussion to argue about things? I absolutely hate any subreddit where only one train of thought is allowed and everything else downvoted.

</comment><comment><USER78> document.getElementById('graphics-paywall- overlay').remove();document.body.style = 'overflow: auto;'

</comment><comment><USER79> tl;dr the wallstreetbets hive mind has the purchasing power of a mid size hedge fund

if there's roughly 1000 upvotes on a piece of content, and assuming only 1% of lurkers ever up vote; that means there are roughly 100,000 people taking investment info from this sub.

let's say they have an average portfolio size of $10k, then 100,000 users * $10,000 = $1 billion dollars.

assuming they split the portfolio by meme %, so like 1/3 TSLA, 1/3 SPCE, 1/3 AMD; then we're looking at like $330 million in trading volume going into SPCE.

when you look at the last couple days of trading volume on SPCE, about 30million shares traded daily, was previously around $10 a share , it about equals out, that like $300million dollars of meme money did a pump and dump on SPCE</comment>


Cambodia, Home of 'The Killing Fields,' Becomes a Retirement Haven - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/02/world/what-in-the-world/cambodia-retirement.html <comment><USER2> _The magazine reported that an American retiree could fund "a relaxed and comfortable lifestyle" in Cambodia on nothing more than a $1,000-a-month Social Security check._

You can do the same in some eastern European countries, and they have the advantage of not being Cambodia.</comment>


If there's no 16-bit layer in 64-bit Windows, how come 16-bit installers run? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2013/10/31/10461992.aspx <comment><USER2> My favorite comment in the thread is from John Ludlow who explained why you would want to package a 32 bit program with a 16 bit installer:

"The installer has to be the lowest common denominator in terms of bitness. This is because it needs to be able to check whether the application can run on that system and give an intelligent "um, you can't install Program X because your computer is 16-bit and doesn't support it" message rather than falling over in a big heap."

Exactly right. And the kind of detail that is easy to forget about.

<comment><USER3> That's really something the OS should be able to do. It ought to be able to examine the dependencies of the app and throw up a helpful alert if they're not met.

Of course, since the common case is newer apps on older OSes, that requires thinking ahead before such a problem actually happens, and that's tough. Even if you implement it, it's hard to get right because it's hard to really test. Apple does this, but the facility was broken in several Mac OS X releases, making it far less useful than it should have been.

<comment><USER4> In the case of 16-bit Windows, this would have been particularly difficult to foresee. Even when Windows 3.0 shipped, it was still planned that OS/2 would be the 32-bit successor to Windows, so there was no 32-bit Windows target even on the roadmap.

(According to the book _Showstopper!_ , when Microsoft ditched OS/2, they created Win32 by taking the OS/2 API and fixing any divergences from Win16 to make it look as compatible as possible.)

<comment><USER5> If they had designed the win32 PE .exe format differently, they could have included a 16bit NE stub to throw up a messagebox with the message - in the same way the .exe files already include a 16bit MS-DOS MZ .exe stub with an equivalent message.

<comment><USER6> I believe this is the case. If you try to run a 16-bit executable on x64 Windows, you will receive a "not compatible" error MessageBox essentially saying WOW cannot help you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For extra fun, give a runnable file (any EXE, or CMD or BAT file) "install" or "setup" (I think that a prefix also works). You'll get a "do you want to run this setup program" dialog unless you have UAC turned off.

This is hard-coded in some horrible place. It cost me a day once. I mentioned it to a guy next to me at work (random sample ex-MS dev) and said the same thing.

The Windows kernel is (for the most part) a pretty good piece of engineering. The stuff on top of it, not so much.

<comment><USER8> Of course it's hardcoded. In Vista and above you have to include a manifest file telling the OS whether you require elevation or not. In order to support old applications written pre-Vista, and to protect users against developers who don't care to learn how installers are supposed to work, Windows will force UAC if the file name sounds like something a setup program would call itself, particularly when most installers will install or modify things that require Admin privileges -- such as writing to Program Files.

This seems perfectly sane and reasonable to me. What's the alternative? That manifest-less installers should fail because a user forgot to manually elevate a program by shift-right clicking it and selecting "Run as Administrator", all because they upgraded their OS and now their installers won't run any more?

<comment><USER9> I think the objection is not "old installers shouldn't be elevated" but that making the OS decide this based on the filename of the EXE is a disappointingly kludgey (but sadly unsurprising) way to do the job.

One alternative might be to have a security framework that offered the UAC prompt when a program actually attempted to do something that required elevation. I had thought that was the way UAC actually worked.

I wouldn't be surprised, given all the details, to learn that this "check the filename" approach really was the most sensible and appropriate thing to do at the time. We could call it a matter of "path dependency" if we're feeling charitable or a matter of "painting oneself into a corner" if we're not.

What I find so fascinating and irritating at the same time, every time I hear about some bit of Windows internals like this, is that MS seems to need an exit from a corner they've painted themselves into _all the time_.

<comment><USER10> _> One alternative might be to have a security framework that offered the UAC prompt when a program actually attempted to do something that required elevation. I had thought that was the way UAC actually worked._

This is how it works in most cases, but it's different with access to directories inside "Program Files" folder: because it was a common behaviour in the past, there is a such feature as UAC virtualisation:

[http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/bb756960.aspx](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/bb756960.aspx)

 _> Prior to Windows Vista, many applications were typically run by administrators. As a result, applications could freely read and write system files and registry keys. If standard users ran these applications, they would fail due to insufficient access. Windows Vista improves application compatibility for standard users by redirecting writes (and subsequent file or registry operations) to a per-user location within the user's profile. For example, if an application attempts to write to C:\Program Files\Contoso\Settings.ini, and the user does not have permissions to write to that directory, the write will get redirected to C:\Users\Username\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files\contoso\settings.ini. For the registry, if an application attempts to write to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Contoso\ it will automatically get redirected to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\VirtualStore\MACHINE\Software\Contoso or HKEY_USERS\UserSID_Classes\VirtualStore\Machine\Software\Contoso._

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is a good example of the straightjacked of backwards compatibility. Not too long, not too short, a fun display both of people who know what they're talking about vs just complaining.

Also a good example of inside the box thinking. The reason you need to run a 16 bit installer is the software isn't free or open source therefore a simple recompile with a newer version of debhelper or whatever isn't going to bring it up to modern packaging standards.

<comment><USER12> "The reason you need to run a 16 bit installer" is to display a nice "Tough luck, you need a 32-bit computer to install this" message to the user, instead of an ugly Windows error message.

This was important at the time. And the whole point of backward compatibility is to allowed old applications (written, compiled and packaged _at that time_ ) to work.

Even if the software is open-source and has been repackaged in the meantime, the old version you found on a long-forgotten CD rotting away in your basement doesn't have that. The Windows philosophy is to make sure that this one still works (which is a crazy goal IMO, but an interesting one).

<comment><USER13> MS has gone to great lengths to reach that goal. There is even special code in Windows to ensure the DOS version of SimCity works: [http://ianmurdock.com/platforms/on-the-importance-of- backwar...](http://ianmurdock.com/platforms/on-the-importance-of-backward- compatibility/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Windows: A 64-bit extension to a 32-bit patch for a 16-bit GUI shell running on top of an 8-bit operating system written for a 4-bit processor by a 2-bit company who cannot stand 1 bit of competition."

<comment><USER15> Unfortunately, no longer really true since they switched from the DOS based Windows to the Windows NT branch. (At least I think so.)

The snide about competition has also become somewhat hollow. Microsoft would love to go back to the monopoly days of the late nineties. But those days are gone.

<comment><USER16> In fact a merge happened, windows kernel now is mostly NT based but has DOS era artifacts on it.

<comment><USER7> When I had access, I decided one afternoon to read the source to the CMD interpreter.

It was about as bad as I thought it would be.

About an hour into using my Mac Pro's shell, I wanted to weep in relief. Microsoft _does not get it_. (Or if they do, it gets perverted into something like PowerShell, which I recently wasted a week on).

<comment><USER17> What is Mac Pro's shell? You mean your shell on OS X? And what did you find so bad with Powershell?

<comment><USER7> The "terminal" on MacOS X. It has:

\- tabs

\- cut and paste that actually works

\- various ways to focus windows

\- hey, search!

... and a bunch of other stuff. While CMD.EXE has its feet firmly rooted in 1982 or so.

Yeah, I know you can buy more whizzy shells. But MS really has no excuse for letting the NT console system rot as much as it has. Given that their programmers use it /all the time/, I find it hard to believe that someone hasn't written something better. (PowerShell overshot the mark, and wound up being unusable).

<comment><USER17> So all your complaints are against the terminal emulator, which everyone agrees is bad. Use something like ConEmu. Here's Scott Hanselman on ConEmu - [http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ConEmuTheWindowsTerminalConsol...](http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ConEmuTheWindowsTerminalConsolePromptWeveBeenWaitingFor.aspx)

> PowerShell overshot the mark, and wound up being unusable

You haven't still any points against Powershell and continue to pile up on it.

<comment><USER18> ConEmu can't fully replicate the CSRSS terminal behavior. It breaks pretty grossly when using advanced console functionality that works correctly in CSRSS's own terminal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> People speculate in the comments that Microsoft could provide a 16bit emulator in Windows for DOS applications. In fact they have an x86 emulator in Windows, but not for DOS.

It's used to run int10h calls (VGABIOS) on early initialization, funnily even on UEFI.

<comment><USER20> I don't understand why they gave up on DOS compatibility for 64-bit Windows.. the effort could not have been all that much for them (either with an emulator or x86 tricks). The benefit is huge: they can continue the lock-in of ancient DOS programs. For example, I can report that OrCAD for DOS works better in 32-bit Windows XP better than it ever did in MS-DOS.

Likewise, I don't understand why vm86 mode can not run directly from 64-bit mode in x86. This seems very like an architectural mistake to me.

<comment><USER21> As I remember, when an x86-64 chip is running in 64 bit mode, it can run 32 bit code, but the option necessary to run in 16 bit mode was removed. To run DOS they'd basically have to have a full emulator for a 286, like a limited version of bochs.

<comment><USER22> I don't know what mechanisms they use, but VMware's various products run 16-bit code just fine on x86-64 chips. Are you saying they added a full 286 emulator to their virtualization products?

<comment><USER19> Essentially yes. But I guess they simply kept their virtualization code from pre-hardware virtualization times around. 286 shouldn't require much maintenance :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's worth pointing out that, while 64-bit Windows has dropped its 16-bit layer, 64-bit Wine has not. You can happily run your original 16-bit version of Chip's Challenge on an out of the box 64-bit Linux/Wine install these days.

</comment><comment><USER24> All this is exactly why I've stopped buying PCs and use Windows. Silly inconsistencies like shell not supporting > 260 file paths (I know that _some_ Win32 APIs and NT itself limits file paths to 32,768 or so Unicode characters), but it's all those patches, inconsistencies, limited shell (cmd.exe), drive letters which drive me crazy. With Mac OS X and Linux all that is gone, and the world seems a better place now.

<comment><USER6> Don't laugh, but there is "PowerShell." :) ( _laughs_ )

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The idea to do something like that is just plain... ugly. It's almost like guessing MIME type based on the file content (hint: IE). I wonder how long it will take until someone finds a security exploit of this "feature"?

<comment><USER26> > It's almost like guessing MIME type based on the file content (hint: IE).

Hint: Linux? It does something similar pretty much on the OS level.

<comment><USER27> That's on your file system.

The HTTP protocol specifies that, if the server says a document is 'text/plain', the client must not attempt to second-guess it based on content.

IE second-guesses it based on content, so you cannot serve up something that looks like HTML as text/plain to get it to display.

Substantially worse, IMO.

That said, it'd be better to actually save content types in extended attributes or something. And make all applications magically save and respect these attributes.

<comment><USER28> Actually MS broke HTTP protocol on that one and it lead to some very interesting exploits. Malicious user could upload a GIF to some site which allowed image uploads. Image would appear normal to a casual observer, except that it was specially crafted so that IE thought it was actually a JavaScript file (because it guessed the file type on its contents and didn't obey server- side set MIME types) and executed it -> XSS.

I don't think Linux does anything remotely like this. It does allow you to use "file" utility to guess the contents of the file, but it doesn't act on it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> So we are still a long way off having sensible Linux style repositories then...</comment>


Why Git Ain't Better Than X - <AUTHOR> http://unspecified.wordpress.com/2010/03/26/why-git-aint-better-than-x/ <comment><USER2> The author claims that a 10x speed differential is inconsequential. I don't agree. Note that in his sampling, things were already taking 2-3 seconds on a relatively small repository. What happens when you get to the size where a git diff takes 2-3 seconds? Does bzr take 20-30? Surely that's not acceptable.

I understand that people can go overboard on the optimization, and can ignore more important things because of misleading or unimportant benchmarks, but there is something to be said for speed when it's taken on balance.

This article didn't point out any reason I would trade git for the much slower Bazaar, just said that Bazaar is not as bad as it looks on the Git is Better Than X website. That's not really a very convincing argument if I'm already using git.

<comment><USER3> > This article didn't point out any reason I would trade git for the much > slower Bazaar, just said that Bazaar is not as bad as it looks on the Git is > Better Than X website. That's not really a very convincing argument if I'm > already using git.

I'm guessing that's why the article is titled "Why Git Ain't Better Than X" and not "Why Bazaar is Better Than Git"...

<comment><USER4> A couple of weeks ago (apropos <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1180434>) I looked up the 'advertising' at [http://doc.bazaar.canonical.com/migration/en/why-switch- to-b...](http://doc.bazaar.canonical.com/migration/en/why-switch-to- bazaar.html)

For v2.0+, they quote 1.0 sec commits on the Firefox 3.5 repo test (vs. 1.1 for hg, 0.35 for git).

[Pointers to binary data performance figures (e.g. repo size deltas vs. SVN, etc.) gratefully accepted]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Personally, I am a big fan of Git's staging feature. I think Git takes the right approach here. I Love having the ability to commit only certain things, and yes, (in cases) only certain changes in a file. This allows for very granular commits if you are trying to keep good history/notes in your commit messages. This also allows you to easily commit changes specific to what you are trying to accomplish with the commit. I prefer small commits with comments specific to the changes rather than "well its working, time to commit everything". I'm not saying you can't do this with other dvcs, but I like Git's default workflow for this.

<comment><USER3> Mecurial's MQ extension is basically git's index on steroids.

With a single MQ patch you basically have git's index. You can continually add things to the patch and then finalize it into a commit when ready.

With multiple patches you have multiple indexes which can be pushed and popped, reordered, folded together, finalized into commits, etc.

To be fair, MQ's user interface needs some work. It's far from perfect.

<comment><USER6> And if you don't like it, the Record extension ( <http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/RecordExtension> ) does most of what Git people would want, although it doesn't yet have the ability to split a modification into modifications of smaller granularity.

<comment><USER7> try crecord ( <http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/CrecordExtension> ) for granularity

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > So I don't need to mentally deal with repositories vs branches, I just store > my large projects in a shared repo, and it's all good.

And here I was thinking he was going to explain why it's better to have them separate. If I must decide if I need a repository before creating branches, to me it means exactly I _do have_ to deal with repositories vs branches.

</comment><comment><USER9> > _I haven't used Mercurial, but this page indicates that the basic "clone" > command does a full expensive branch, while the "branch" command does a > cheap local branch. So this argument only applies to non-distributed VCSes._

I don't know how branches work in Bazaar, but Git branches _are_ cheaper than Mercurial's when you factor in administrative overhead.

Local Mercurial branches aren't disposable, like Git's are. In Git, I often whip up and subsequently dismiss 3-4 branches when tidying up my repository history (for example when I committed something in the wrong place, committed with wrong log message, etc...). Mercurial branches live forever in the repository graph and I have to explicitly "close" them, while in Git I just forget about them and the repository does too.

<comment><USER10> Mercurial actually has lightweight branches like Git; they're just anonymous, as in Monotone, not named like Git. There's an extension for Mercurial, called bookmarks, that allows you to name your anonymous heads, giving you Git- equivalent functionality.

You're correct that Mercurial's (IMHO badly-named "branch" command) is much heavier-weight than Git branching. I consider them closer to changeset labels than branches.

<comment><USER11> bzr has the bzr-colo plugin to support co-located branches. Like I said in another comment, I think bzr, git and hg are comparable and there isn't a clear winner (and there need not be).

<https://launchpad.net/bzr-colo>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> We've been using bazaar at Fluther for a while and I have to agree with the author's sentiment for the most part.

The whole "Git is better" thing annoys me. Dvcs _are_ better, but I think it's mostly a wash between bzr, hg, and git. Yes, bzr is slower here and there (used to be annoying, now it's fast enough that it's a basically a non-issue). The parts I like more than git (though I'm no git pro) is the very flexible work-flow options (we use multiple, and they're awesome), the excellent merge algorithm, and the directory/branch structure, to name a few.

Git is great. So it bazaar. It's all this machismo that bugs me. We should really be on the same side trumpeting why dvcs are better.

<comment><USER11> I have to agree.

IMO bzr, git and hg are comparable and these dabates are no different emacs vs vim.

My personal preference is bzr but I quite like hg also. I also like git but the only thing that keeps me away from git is the whole fanboy culture around it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I personally don't care if X is 1ms faster than Y, I wish though the developer of X and Y would agree on common command-line arguments and workflow (and hide the details from me) so that I wouldn't have to write my own wrapper.

</comment><comment><USER14> I gave a long detailed response to this over on reddit:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/biv72/why_git_a...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/biv72/why_git_aint_better_than_x/c0mzr6a)

</comment><comment> loup-vaillant He doesn't mention Darcs. Is this system so irrelevant? That would be too bad, I love relatively independence of it's patches. (Plus, the UI is really good at reminding you what you could have forgotten.)

<comment><USER15> In my experience it doesn't take too long to find a pair of patches that commute which actually let you checkout a broken tree state. It's nice in theory, but in practice the DAG properties of the "mainline" DVCSes are very useful so that you can have guarantees about the non-brokenness of every point in the tree.

I think there's a lot of good to be had for commuting patches during code review, before they're final, but once finalized, they make the most sense in a DAG.

<comment><USER16> Isn't it obvious that two patches in, say, different files might repair the same bug, but in incompatible ways? --It's the nature of programming, everything is connected. But they won't depend on each other from the point of view of the VCS, of course. If I pull and apply both, things will go wrong. Isn't this possible in all systems? I can always apply my way into a broken system.

When I have things right, and it compiles and I'm ready, I `darcs tag` -- for example. There are many ways of referring to patch-piles as adequate to compile together.

Though it's clear that `darcs` isn't good for all purposes, at least in its present form -- I don't think anyone says it is -- it is excellent for many; certainly almost everything up on GitHub would do better with `darcs`.

The most important advantage of it, it seems to me, is the complete transparency of the process and the underlying model; it is completely missing the black box aspect of something like `git`. People rightly praise many of the features of `git`, which I use, with amazement, in connection with some projects I help with. But I feel that all the enthusiasm for it is a bit like enthusiasm for something like Word, or some similar monster GUI program, on the part of people who have no idea what it's doing, how it goes about it; and all `git` tutorials are like tutorials for people about how to use Word. Learning new combinations of commands, is like learning about esoteric drop down panels in Word. --Though I suppose one can't blame `git` for the incredible tiresomeness of its enthusiasts.

<comment> loup-vaillant "`darcs` isn't good for all purposes"

I dont understand. What Darcs isn't for that Git _is_ for? And for what usage specifically Darcs is better? I like Darcs, mind you. I like it better than Git. However, I don't have enough experience with either to really make an informed choice, let alone a choice depending on intended usage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm about to adopt DVCS but can't decide between git, hg, bzr or whatever. These flame wars are paralyzing because they look like I have to pick a religion.

<comment><USER18> DVCS folks like to say that the real enemies are the people still using Subversion, rather than the competing DVCS tools. What they fail to realize is that DVCS fragmentation a big part of the reason people like me continue using Subversion. If there were a clear DVCS winner, I would have switched years ago.

Fortunately, it looks like git is starting to take the lead in this fight. As a result, I've started moving some of my projects over. From what I've seen, git has the best internals. The absence of explicit deltas in the core database is a particularly brilliant move on git's part. In the long run, I hope that wins out over bzr and hg's slightly better user experience. After all, it's much easier to fix user interface problems than to change a tool's core architecture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Good to hear Bazaar speeds have improved. When I tried using it, it was painfully slow, taking 20-30 seconds for a simple 'bzr log'.

<comment><USER11> > When I tried using it, it was painfully slow, taking 20-30 seconds for a > simple 'bzr log'.

When did you use it? On what history size? bzr 2.x series is quite fast.

<comment><USER14> Here's the difference between

bzr log on my clone of emacs:

        23.040u 1.518s 0:25.31 96.9%	0+0k 0+73io 0pf+0w

git log on my clone of emacs:

        2.197u 0.226s 0:02.89 83.3%	0+0k 36+14io 0pf+0w

<comment><USER11> What was the version of bzr and git? Was this windows or unix? I suspect its unix only. It would be good to see the numbers on both platforms. Is this a limited rev history or the entire history? You also don't mentioned the exact commands you run. Do you use n=0 or n=1 with bzr? I would normally use n=1 as n=1 is not of much interest. Such limited microbenchmarks merely spread FUD.

Also, while choosing a DVCS, the common operations have to be fast not all operations. So the interesting benchmark would provide numbers for all the common operation. Just running one operation can be misleading. I do much more with my DVCS than just run the log operation :-)

Also, I don't see myself doing a log of a full 20+ year history multiple times during the day (In fact I have never done that). The commands I use normally, are fast enough large repos with bzr (emacs included).

<comment><USER14> You know, I had bzr 1.17 or similar. I upgraded to 2.1 and got the same time (slightly over 25 seconds). git version is 126.96.36.199. Both on my mac (I don't do Windows). In both cases, it was whatever "<cmd> clone <url>" does by default. So pretty much, all defaults all around.

I mentioned this because someone else was saying it was as fast. I don't know anything about the n= things... I just ran "bzr log > /dev/null" and "git log > /dev/null" (my shell automatically times all commands).

I tend to use and search logs a lot in my projects. With 2s to generate a log output, you won't think about the cost of looking through the whole thing for something (I did similar in an active hg project earlier today).

I do get your point. It's not a... holistic benchmark. In another thread, someone called fowl on the article discussing size vs. bytes transferred. I thought it'd be better to think of that as time. Cloning roughly the same content via bzr and git (memcached master branch -- which is cloned at lp and contains just about the same history, though is somehow smaller at lp) takes a bit over 20 seconds and a bit under 4 seconds respectively.

I suppose it's valid to argue that you don't clone much, either. At some point, one would wonder whether you avoid certain things _because_ they're slow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> X is a windowing system. It makes no sense to compare Git to X.

</comment><comment><USER21> whygitisbetterthanxIsBetterThanwhy-git-aint-better-than-x:

\- more readable font sizes and font-vs-background colors

\- better use of whitespace

\- supporting graphics

\- minimal, tasteful use of color/shading</comment>


If i = 0, why is i += i++ 0? - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13516689/if-i-0-why-is-i-i-0 <comment><USER2> The answer, from the same site:

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24853/what-is-the- differe...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24853/what-is-the-difference- between-i-and-i)

" _++i will increment the value of i, and then return the incremented value._ "

" _i++ will increment the value of i, but return the pre-incremented value._ "

<comment><USER3> yep that's 101 stuff eh?

<comment><USER4> It's a bit more subtle than that.

      i += i++;
      Console.write(i);

could print 0, 1, or 2 depending on the order in which

      i++

and

      i += <value>

is evaluated. From the winning answer, what's really happening is:

      int i = 0;
      i = i + i;
      i + 1; // Note that you are discarding the calculation result

This kind of nonsense is the reason why Python doesn't have prefix and postfix increments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Using gcc or g++ I get "1" not "0" for that expression, as I would intuitively expect. But this is undefined behavior in c/c++: tmp.c: In function 'main': tmp.c:3:5: warning: operation on 'i' may be undefined [-Wsequence-point]

<comment><USER6> Eh?

int main() { int i=0; return i += i++; }

Returns 0, as expected.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why did they close the question?

<comment><USER7> I still never understand why they close some questions. Quite often I find a very useful answer that's posted on a closed question.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is for c# not c or c++, fyi

</comment><comment><USER9> this is correct. i = 0; i+=i++;

(0) + (0)++ = 0 next time around (1) + (1)++ = 2

<comment><USER4> Unfortunately this is not correct.

If you run

      for (int x = 0; x < 10; x++)
      {
        i += i++;
        Console.WriteLine(i);
      }

i is always 0.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> undefined behavior, isn't it? might as well be 42.</comment>


Ralph Goings, Photorealist - <AUTHOR> http://www.ralphlgoings.com/

<comment><USER2> It's interesting to see his work improve over the years. I imagine the improvement is in part from the advancements in photography equipment.

What I don't understand is how anyone can draw/paint anything that realistic. Especially his most recent work. I doubt I would even be able to tell had I not know that wasn't a photo.

<comment><USER3> As to technique: I expect he's using a modern version of camera obscura or similar, using e.g. a projector slide (i.e. non-negative negative) for a base.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camera_obscura> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camera_lucida>

etc.

<comment><USER4> according to this pdf:

<http://www.ralphlgoings.com/downloads/j_parks_article.pdf>

Your 'expectation' is dead on. In a way that's a pity! That way 'painting' gets reduced to painting over a projection.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photorealism>

It's a strange use of the word 'painting', which to me does not bring an association with projecting an image on to the canvas with it.

<comment><USER5> There's still a lot of talent there. It's not easy to coax that level of realism out of oils, but it can be done.

However, he's doing a lot of those in watercolors, and getting watercolors to do that convincingly is (in my experience, anyway) quite a feat.

With that said, I'm usually more partial to more expressive artists--I'm not fond of the "human Xerox machine" approach to art.

But when the artist does it with this level of technical skill...oh, man.

<comment><USER6> Agreed 100%. I'm also not a fan of photorealism, but I believe that other posters in this thread are underestimating the skill of the artist. Especially now that I realize that he is working in watercolor, which doesn't easily allow the kind of layering that you can do in acrylic or oil.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It would be interesting to see some of his works in greater detail, eg. using Gigapan zoom (see <http://gigapan.org/viewGigapan.php?id=27105> for a photographic example).

</comment><comment><USER8> It's a shame that he doesn't paint something more compelling than ketchup. Photographers can create truly astonishing work based only on what they get through a lens. With his technique he could produce even more impressive and thought-provoking images, and that would be worth much more artistically, IMO.

</comment><comment><USER9> My high-school art teacher once questioned painters like these: "why not just take a photo?"

<comment><USER10> My college art teacher told me these are done by taking a photo, making a slide out of it, and projecting that slide onto the canvas.

Apparently some of the old master painter used a camera obscura and one might have even nudged his in the middle of a painting thus moving one of the ears way out whack in the final painting.

I can't be bothered to google it right now.

And I'm not accusing this guy of doing it that way, but how would you know?

<comment><USER11> That, or projecting it next to the canvas and copying. I don't object to this technique (in fact, I'm learning towards doing something similar for an art project I have in mind), but my first reaction to the work of this artist is that it's banal and suggests a refusal or fear of engaging with the subject in any meaningful way.

I'm a shy person myself and can relate to not wanting to snap a photo or sketch overtly, but 'here's what some people look like when they don't know you're staring' isn't revealing very much of anything.

If you like the hyper-realitic painterly technique but (like me) prefer a more provocative application of it, you may share my enjoyment of Istvan Sandorfi: <http://www.fosaw.com/> I can't afford any of his art, but I have spent a few hundred bucks on buying the catalogs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's like someone took a 17th century Dutchman and brought him to 20th century America.

</comment><comment><USER13> He really likes Heinz ketchup

<comment><USER14> Can't blame him for that... It's really awesome, isn't it?</comment></comment>


Images for Games - <AUTHOR>

I have an idea to build a blackberry game based on some tech I recently implemented on another project.  It uses SVG to create interactive web pages that work on Blackberries, mobile phones... pretty much everything except things like the iphone. (no comment)<p>So the problem is where do i go to get graphics for characters.  I need space ships, aliens, space marines that kind of thing.  But I have no idea where to look.  Anybody have any ideas?  Anybody want to help?  Obviously I can't draw and have no budget yet so professional help is probably out of the question. <comment><USER2> <http://www.turbosquid.com> is a good place. There are plenty of royalty-free 3D models available that you and render down to a 2D bitmap.

The <http://www.gamedev.net> forums might be able to help you focus your search further.

Regarding the iphone: I'm sure the canvas tag works, and I believe there's more than one Javascript canvas->SVG layer floating around.

<comment><AUTHOR> hey good thinking! thanks</comment></comment>


Crypt Editor - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/alseambusher/crypt-editor <comment><USER2> intresting. would be good to encrypt with the gpg key that already exists for my user.

PS: i tried with sublime (as editor) on mac but it does not work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed now.

<comment><USER2> pulled the last and tried but no luck. Am I missing smt? sublime is a symbolic link on my mac, may be that a problem?</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best Hackathon Practices? - <AUTHOR>

As many of you may/may not know, there's a pretty awesome hackathon starting in a couple hours (MHacks!). What kind of tips does HN have for going to hackathons? What should the people who want to learn do throughout the weekend? What about the people who want to win prizes? Or those who want to connect with recruiters? Or meet/date people?<p>Let's hear it, HN. How do you handle hackathons? <comment><USER2> Time is your biggest constraint. Work accordingly. Choose a project that you think you'll be able to implement in a quarter of the time allotted. You'll be grateful when you run into snags during development and you'll have some extra time for polish and presentation.

</comment><comment><USER3> Meet people. There is a wealth of talented and interesting people at a good hackathon.

If you're joining a team, be very clear about your abilities and limits so they can resource properly.

Find people who need a break and chat to them about what they're working on, what they do normally. Again, meet people.

Talk to the sponsors, even if you don't need help. Those guys/gals are usually rad.

Presentation matters. Practice yours.

</comment><comment><USER4> Pick a target that you can make worse/better depending on time constraints.

Focus on what is essential vs. What is nice.

Focus on your strong suits. Have an artist doing visual elements? Build the visual interface first.

</comment><comment><USER5> Slightly off topic, know any details about MHacks only seeing start and end times on their website.</comment>


How to conduct a closed beta testing with zero budget - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@ulaholovko/how-to-conduct-a-closed-beta-testing-with-zero-budget-acd19c2de43 <comment><AUTHOR> The goal of this post: incrementally show how we conducted a closed beta test from scratch — within a limited amount of time and with limited resources.</comment>


Emergency Response to the Tesla Model 3 [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2X_WorH4pUw <comment><USER2> Interesting. Tesla seems like a lot more cumbersome vehicle to perform dash evolution/extrication due to the presence of the high voltage battery.

for example, in a traditional vehicle, a dashbeam blowout is performed using a higher speed ram. Without this, you have to make 3-4 more cuts to the vehicle

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-n65nm5yQKs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-n65nm5yQKs)

Tesla model access for the rocker channel is also inconsistent and a little scary. Rocker cuts made to the X for example _seem_ to be permitted, however in the model S they might be lethal. I really wish they had more in the series on this.

disclosure: I was a volunteer firefighter for a few years after highschool.

<comment><USER3> Considering that Tesla's cars are significantly less likely to flip, significantly less likely to catch fire, slower to burn when they do catch fire, and the safest cars ever tested by the NHTSA ...is it fair to say that the added extraction complexity is somewhat of an acceptable trade-off?

<comment><USER4> >significantly less likely to catch fire, slower to burn when they do catch fire

Citation please. This directly contradicts the anecdotal experience of literally everyone I know who deals with crashed vehicles (10 < sample size < 20, ~66% tow truck drivers). Compared to other EVs Teslas definitely seem to be the most flammable. Everyone who handles crashed cars seems to regard a mangled Tesla as a hot potato unlike a Prius, Leaf or ICE car.

The NHTSA stuff and crash safety I believe, that's well documented by reputable sources (e.g the NHTSA). Nobody except Tesla and their fan-base seems to be saying EVs are less flammable on a per crash basis though and even then nobody says point blank that crashing a Tesla is less likely to result in fire than crashing something else.

Edit: I am specifically talking about the likelihood of fire per serious crash. Not average number of fires per vehicle or per mile.

<comment><USER5> "/r/teslamotors: Are Teslas historically more likely to catch fire? I did an Excel and the answer won't surprise you." [1] [2]

[1] [https://i.redd.it/h7qse91ostt21.png](https://i.redd.it/h7qse91ostt21.png)

[2] [https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/bg2rib/are_tes...](https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/bg2rib/are_teslas_historically_more_likely_to_catch_fire/)

Disclaimer: Model S, X Owner

<comment><USER6> Maybe the fact that rich, educated people drive Teslas, and poor, uneducated drivers don't accounts for it (my hypothesis is that rich, educated drivers have fewer accidents on average since they are less likely to DWI, etc)?

To control I would want to see what % of Tesla _crashes_ catch fire compared to ICE _crashes_.

<comment><USER7> Driver status aside (no idea how to judge that), stats for regular vehicles rarely include only less than 5 years old, premium cars. A 15 year old unmaintained clunker is probably more likely to catch fire in case of an accident. I would imagine that considering models from the same years and same price range might paint a different picture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder if we'll see more standardization in electric vehicles so that fire departments don't need specific vehicle training to know what to cut and where.

Although we haven't seen that yet with hybrids (that also contain potentially hazardous batteries) that have been around longer.

<comment><USER9> I wonder this too.

Military jets have a "RESCUE" lever by the canopy to disarm the ejection seats. I wonder why cars don't have something standard and simple like that.

If every car model needs unique training on what secret cuts to make in what order, that's a fail.

<comment><USER10> Most US electric cars now have a cable marked with a yellow and red first responder cut point tag. You can see that briefly in the video. You cut the cable on both sides of the tag, so that the remaining ends can't touch, and the battery is isolated. There are where-to-cut guides.[1]

[1] [https://www.ncdoi.com/OSFM/RPD/PT/Documents/Coursework/EV_Sa...](https://www.ncdoi.com/OSFM/RPD/PT/Documents/Coursework/EV_SafetyTraining/EV%20EFG%20Classroom%20Edition.pdf)

<comment><USER9> I think you also want to disable unfired airbags after the car has stopped crashing. There are cases where rescuers leaned in on passenger side, putting pressure on seat, and had the airbag deploy on them. I think there's other concerns that cutting door sills can cause deployments.

Oh and killing the engine would be good too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Imagine if first responders had to watch a 20 minute video for each of the several hundred models of cars that are on the roads. Doesn't seem like a scalable approach.

<comment><USER12> We don't. It's a cool video for a training night but really it's a pretty standard dash roll. Electric cars present a very real danger but so do ICE. High pressure fuel lines with pumps that don't shut down. Diesel engines which "runaway" with air intake leaks.

Every call is a special situation where you start with a baseline tactic and evolve the approach as needed. 20 minutes is overkill but the whole time we were watching it here we were discussing extrication in general. "Would you do this or that? What would you look for here? Did you see their step cribbing placement?" The Tesla responder guide is awesome and available online and is all you "need" to know where and what to cut. The video is more a conversation starter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I know it's necessary for safety, but it always makes me sad to see cars destroyed for crash tests and fire safety testing.

<comment><USER14> If you look closely, it appears the Model 3 they used in the dash displacement later on in the video had some damage on the sides — it may have already been salvaged or totaled.

At least they made good use of a basically dead vehicle assuming that's true.</comment></comment>


Google's Cat & Mouse SEO Game: Google's Collateral Damage - <AUTHOR> http://www.seobook.com/googles-cat-mouse-seo-game

<comment><USER2> What I'd like to see somebody from Google explain to me is why Google considers Wikipedia as an example of a high-quality site (Cutts says so in [http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/03/the-panda-that- hates-...](http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/03/the-panda-that-hates- farms/all/1)), when Wikipedia users copied and regurgitated content from a website I own at least 4000 times (that's how many times it's been referenced on different Wikipedia pages, it has likely been copied thousands of more times without being referenced). Wikipedia ranks #1 or #2 for almost all these articles when my site is rarely among the top ten and it has also been hurt in this latest update. How does this work?

<comment><USER3> The big issue here is that if you don't get other people to link to your stuff then Google has little way to distinguish quality vs non-quality, source vs copy, lower quality rewrite, etc.

While many people find push marketing tasteless and annoying (and perhaps a signal of poor product quality), the truth is that most successful sites have relied on the person launching them already having some combination of status + influence + distribution + connections, or they used push marketing for a while to build that following and awareness.

The easiest SEO answer to obscurity or lack of awareness (assuming the on-page SEO & site structure are solid) is to think territorially & dominate a niche where you can own the idea. This is a great article on that front. <http://www.copyblogger.com/how-to-dominate-your-niche/>

<comment><USER2> Right, I understand technical reasons why Wikipedia outranks this site. Google started by being terribly arrogant in thinking that they are smarter than SEOs and their search engine would be so hard to game, that they made the Page Rank values publicly visible. It went downhill for them quickly, necessitating introduction of no-follow, which is why my site gets no benefit at all from any of these Wikipedia links. Wikipedia also benefits from all other content on their site (some of which is admittedly good enough, especially in topics of interest to programmers).

<comment><USER3> Here is another great article for understanding the Google / Wikipedia ecosystem <http://www.johnon.com/399/google-las-vegas.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I really like the info-graphic, but then again I'm kind of a visual thinker. Perhaps a more entertaining way to diagram it would be "The Land of SEO" which is really just the outline of Eurasia and you could map Ghengis Khans great battles to seminal moments in SEO strategy changes. Brad Templeton's email on ARPAnet about sending a joke a week to a billion people who had to pay a penny if they thought it was funny would make him a multi-millionaire was fairly prophetic. With ad clicks or 'page views' standing in for sending fractions of a cent.

It will be interesting to see how this evolves over time. One of the things I don't like about the idea of 'tv unplugged' aka the Hulu Model, aka the Netflix model, is the idea that ads you don't like could follow you from channel to channel without you being able to switch. This evolution of Google's strategy between revenue, value, and antagonizing advertisers has great depth and complexity to it which will take time to play out.

Next up, the great 'unflowering' where all of the useful information gets locked up behind paywalls and the 'free' information you can get on the internet is about as useful as the 'free' information you can get from those papers that are free at the coffee shop.

<comment><USER3> I think there will always be some amount of great content accessible because brand & popularity are required to be able to charge, and there will always be someone who is either really hungry and willing to put the extra work in, or they are just doing what they love & delighted to share it.

Pieces may go behind paywall (like our site or iTulip) but they both still share lotes & sites like KhanAcademy offer tons of great accessible content.

The big issue though is that in most markets people have to get a bit shook down before they find what they need. I remember thinking that search and ads were going to be huge when I bought Inktomi & DoubleClick stock during the last stock bubble. I of course got my head served on a platter on that, but it was cool to get into search a few years later & be right that time. The Google IPO gains made up for the losses on the earlier bets, but everything comes down to timing & then just sticking with something you believe in.

The first site you find in any category won't likely be the best one, just the one which is the most heavily marketed. But the same was true before their was a web.

The hard part with paid content is that the more common it becomes the harder it is for Google or other ad networks to take a big slice of the value chain. For that reason I see the move to paid online content being a slow one (outside of niche b2b sort of environments).

<comment><USER4> Valid points, I won't bore HN with my theories about what makes the information economy tick but suffice it to say that the value chain will evolve as efficiencies in the market are developed.

"The Google IPO gains made up for the losses on the earlier bets, but everything comes down to timing & then just sticking with something you believe in."

Yes, but Google's performance in the last 5 years hasn't been stellar (from a stock perspective, instead what might have been dividends is being banked by the company, which is another rant) The tricky bit is understanding why Google and not Altavista or Yahoo? Not because they didn't have traction and penetration, but I believe because they didn't understand the economics of what they were selling.

Imagine that Zog the caveman starts getting trade goods for pies made out of mud. He's thrilled and others get into the mud pie business, but one guy realizes that the pies that people want are round and hard and so he also gets into the mud pie business but only makes his pies out of hard fired clay. He becomes the dominant mud pie seller and runs the other guys out of business. Could they have prevented it? Sure they could but they needed a better understanding of how and why customers valued their mud pies.

Google got there sooner and it gave them a tremendous advantage, but at the same time, to completely abuse the metaphor, they realized they had an elephant's tail and knew when to step aside when the crap came out. But they still struggle with elephantness, or at least they did 12 months ago :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Am I the only one that finds it hilarious that they used an infographic to describe the pitfalls of handling SEO spam?

<comment><USER3> The point wasn't just that Google has to handle spam, but also that they are stuck dealing with it even as they create/fund much of it ... and that their "solutions" for round 1 leave unforeseen exploit in round 2 or 3.

To out it as an equation...

increased weight on domain authority + rel nofollow + premium adsense feeds = Content farm problem

Their latest update left a couple other big exploits open as well.

As far as faulting using an infographic as a format goes, people are more receptive to them than textual articles.

Sure some people do exploitative crap about total junk & have spammy storyboards put together by total strangers for $20, but the above was a storyboard that came from someone who has watched how search has evolved over the past ~ decade, with literally 20,000+ hours of experience in the SEO game.

I could write a 9000+ word article like <http://www.seobook.com/relevancy/> but generally the market is more receptive toward infographics. As a marketer it is generally easier to go with human nature than to try to fight it. That is marketing 101 ;)

And since people do exploit infographics for links, sure it can seem cutting edge to label anything in an infographic as 'spam' (or some such), but if you could find me another online document that has described everything on that page with better clarity & in a way that is easier to consumer faster I would be quite surprised.

<comment><USER5> Right, you're talking about the pitfalls of handling SEO spam, e.g. unwittingly creating more spam vectors through your attempts to stop previous ones.

My point about infographics is although they may indeed deliver a message effectively, they are infamous for being used as link bait to game SEO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I love Aaron Wall's blog, but can't you guys quit being suckers for infographics?

<comment><USER3> How else would you suggest visually laying out the patterns? Would you like it in a flash file instead? :D

<comment><USER7> Prose might be a good alternative. Your infographic is laid out like a flowchart, but seems to be anything but. I found it extremely hard to follow, and would've preferred 500 words instead.

<comment><USER3> The tricky part was that many of the things were happening in parallel...so it is somewhat hard to connect it all together. I sorta tried to push it as best I could into a cohesive organization with themes like "link spam, adsense, content mills & domain authority" but search is pretty complex and I am sure we could have done a bit better...one problem with anything like this is determining how deep or nuanced to go with it. The more information you put on it the harder it is to keep it organized.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Employers of Mid Front end Devs, whats the min you'd want in a portfolio? - rex-mundi I'm looking for work but I don't have much work based examples which I feel are suitable for a portfolio.
Atm I'm going back and forth, part of me says that I really should have a feature complete app with tests and the full works but I don't think that's realistic atm as I have limited time available and alot of that will be taken up job hunting.
What's the minimum you'd want to see in a portfolio which would prove to you know I enough to be able to do the job?
Also would you prefer multiple tiny examples (thinking maybe codepen-like stuff) or maybe a larger single example on github? <comment><AUTHOR> I'm not quite sure what you mean by "Mid Front end Devs". Do you mean not Jr and not Sr? I guess I wouldn't be quite sure how to express that either :|

I've interviewed tons of front end devs, all for product companies whose candidates are fairly different to an agency (agencies candidates with personal portfolios are likely more common). Having a portfolio at all is rare. Most anything that shows that you're active in your craft will be a plus. Github profiles are common but honestly they, on average, show near-zero public activity. Obviously there are outliers who are active in open source but my own experience shows that even very good senior devs at well-funded startups don't have much time for open source except in the rare case where a specific OS tool becomes core to their employment.

Seriously, anything that shows that you used time outside of work to create things is a plus.

<comment> rex-mundi Yep, I meant between Jr & Sr, I wanted to use Midlevel but but I had to keep the title short for hn 80 char limit

Thanks for answer, that's a real help, all the postings I've been looking at ask for github url & examples of work so I thought not having anything was abnormal

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, if you can look someone's portfolio up online then, by default, they have a portfolio. What you're not getting from that type of search is the thousands of people who don't have a portfolio online.

Here's my github url: [https://github.com/wwalser](https://github.com/wwalser)

That shows very little public activity. However, even that amount would be impressive to me if I saw it from a candidate. The reason is that, when interviewing a someone from a product company, I implicitly understand that they are going to have thousands of lines of code written for a private company (and therefore not publicly available). In my case [http://askinline.com](http://askinline.com) is that work.

Hope that perspective is helpful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> It's nice to know that given a large amount of JS, this person won't create a single file and dump everything in there. I want to see code organization and deployment techniques. My concern is how the code will scale.

Most people have tiny code examples. A company looking to hire someone full time will need someone to create entire platforms where things like caching become critical.

You have to prove that you can work well with the existing huge codebase and won't make it horrible for others to read your code.</comment>


Arkansas' largest newspaper giving away iPads to keep subscribers - <AUTHOR> https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/nation/2019/05/25/arkansas-newspaper-ipads/39515823/ <comment><USER3> Local and probably even statewide newspapers are mostly going to be gone. I don't know how we'll be able to have knowledge of and discussions of events using facts. It's hard enough time even with trustworthy sources - <USER2> people just ignore facts.</comment>


Orbeus announces breakthrough in visual recognition technology today - <AUTHOR>

Based on the previous success of the ReKognition API, Orbeus is proud to announce the official launch of a new feature today: concept recognition.
Concept recognition supplements ReKognition's existing facial recognition technology with object and scene recognition capabilities, making ReKognition more powerful and accurate than ever before. We invite you to try out the new feature here: http://rekognition.com/demo/concept or download our demo iOS app here: http://orbeus.com/rekoeye_inhouse/
Using the deep learning algorithm, ReKognition is currently able to identify 2,000 objects and scenes in images. Have suggestions or thoughts? We would love to hear them! Please email us at firstname.lastname@example.com <comment><USER2> Can't upload photos it just loops for ever</comment>


Cobalt Robotics Introduces a (Mostly) Autonomous Mobile Security Robot - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robots/cobalt-robotics-introduces-mobile-security-robot <comment><USER2> BLS statistics say there are about 1.1 million "Security Guards" employed in the US. [1] (For comparison, the total of Taxi Drivers and Chauffeurs, Heavy and Tractor-trailer Truck Drivers, Bus Drivers, and Delivery Truck Drivers and Driver/Sales Workers is about 4 million in total [2].)

Is it reasonable to compare the scale of impact that this might have in the security space, compared to, for example, how self-driving cars might impact space of professional drivers?

Knowing next to nothing about the physical security world... what fraction of these roles are serviceable by a robot like Cobalt's video shows today? What further advances are required to be more useful?

[1] [https://www.bls.gov/ooh/protective-service/security- guards.h...](https://www.bls.gov/ooh/protective-service/security-guards.htm)

[2] [https://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material- moving/t...](https://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material-moving/taxi- drivers-and-chauffeurs.htm) [https://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and- material-moving/h...](https://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material- moving/heavy-and-tractor-trailer-truck-drivers.htm) [https://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material- moving/b...](https://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material-moving/bus- drivers.htm) [https://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material- moving/d...](https://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material- moving/delivery-truck-drivers-and-driver-sales-workers.htm)

<comment><USER3> This sounds more like a mobile security camera than a replacement for a security guard. I'd be surprised if a large chunk is taken out of that employment market anytime soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I drove past an office in Mountain View a couple of weeks ago in the middle of the night, and there were two Dalek-looking robots patrolling the empty parking lot, making whooshing noises, talking to nobody, and covered in flashing blue and white lights. It was surreal and funny and oddly unnerving.

They didn't look like these, so I guess there are at least two companies building autonomous security robots.

<comment><USER5> There's also Knightscope, which appears to be based in MV.

[http://knightscope.com/](http://knightscope.com/)

<comment><USER4> That's the one! They were the big white ones with round heads. Their blue light "eye" slot looks ominous in the dark.

Also, my first thought was, "I bet those are expensive...and they're just left outside in the open like that. I'd be worried someone would steal them."

<comment><USER6> No worries -- they can hire guards to watch them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm trying to think how this might fail - like if someone throws a bag over it. But then I guess it just immediately calls the police assuming foul play? I guess if you cut wireless communication and then covered it with a bag it would be ineffective, but I'm guessing places with enough loot to seriously interest thieves can afford more than just the robot. I guess it's basically a mobile and controllable security camera. How unhappy are places with security camera setups today and what do they cost?

It's certainly an interesting idea and I could see it working, but there are so many moving parts I could see a lot of issues. But it seems like most of those problems can be ironed out with time. Best of luck to Cobalt!

<comment><USER8> Adversarial examples?

<comment><USER9> Hang an iPhone in front of the robot's camera. Run a green screen camera app on the iPhone. Wear green.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The shape seems to be inspired by _Chopping Mall_ [1][2].

[1]: [https://demonsresume.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/chopping_ma...](https://demonsresume.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/chopping_mall_001.jpg)

[2]: [https://horrorpediadotcom.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/choppi...](https://horrorpediadotcom.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/choppingmall1.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER11> Does it have enough face recognition ability to at least recognize people it's seen before on the same shift?

</comment><comment><USER12> Is there a standard protocol/wireless/IR standard to call elevators that robots can use?

</comment><comment><USER13> Awesome work.

How soon before it can open doors and go up stairs?

More importantly, do your customers care?

</comment><comment><USER14> * EXTERMINATE * EXTERMINATE * EXTERMINATE _

</comment><comment><USER15> I hope Tom Selleck is being notified.</comment>


Donald Trump calls for ideas to make America great again - <AUTHOR> https://apply.ptt.gov/yourstory/ <comment><USER2> Is this site even legit? It's not the usual domain, and I can't find anything on this ptt.gov domain.

<comment><AUTHOR> Found it here: [https://twitter.com/transition2017/status/796728512547786752](https://twitter.com/transition2017/status/796728512547786752)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Haha. "We the People" in online form submission.

</comment><comment><USER4> You mean he had no idea how to do it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Why else would he do this?</comment></comment>