"This is my Merrill Lynch portfolio – 1.83% expenses, underperformed S&P 500" - <AUTHOR> http://hellomoney.co/portfolio/347

<comment><USER2> Problem with the arg how can an "average" investor expect to compete against the big dedicated investment houses is that in most respects the big guys are average at best.

Speaking as a former aspiring fund manager turned software developer, most of the tools at these manager's disposal are simplistic and completely invalid yet in most cases the manager's don't quite understand them anyways.

Bottom-line: its a boys club of MBAs whose curriculum still says the sharpe ratio is important and holds their students responsible for at the very most being able to calculate probabilities from a normal distro using a table of values.

Solution: invest in a lot of risky small companies, you will lose most of the time but, those few winners more than make up for the loss. Spread across enough bets stats says its very unlikely to lose. Contrast that with your family's 401k split in two a few years back while invested in the "blue-chips"

</comment><comment><USER3> I've had pretty good luck in the market. Owned a REIT ([http://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/reit.asp](http://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/reit.asp)) during the housing boom, owned APPL during their run up, and recently TSLA. When I don't have a company I like I've owned QQQ (Power Shares 100), AGG (iShared Bond), and various ETFs. I'm young so I can take risk, but honestly you can manage your own investments without the fees.

</comment><comment><USER4> Pretty good portfolio, if you think 1.83 expexses fine, you have to bet more risks.

</comment><comment><USER5> 1.83%? That's highway robbery!

<comment><USER6> Maybe not: [http://www.reddit.com/r/investing/comments/28ys30/this_is_my...](http://www.reddit.com/r/investing/comments/28ys30/this_is_my_portfolio_managed_by_merrill_lynch_it/cifsa0p)

<comment><USER7> There's always a winner but many many more losers for active portfolios in general.

The research shows that the passive index tracking approach very convincingly beats actively managed portfolios net of taxes and fees.

<comment><USER8> Approve!

I don't understand why Average Joe thinks he can beat investment firms long term with staff dedicated to tracking each and every tradeable asset. Who do you think you're trading with?

If you want to gamble on a company or a market shift then fine, but for the most part that's just what it is - gambling.

<comment><USER9> The Average Joe shouldn't be "trading." But the individual trader absolutely has certain advantages over hedge funds and large institutions. One of the biggest is that the average individual trader can move the needle without establishing large positions. This often makes it possible for the individual trader to take positions in securities that larger players couldn't invest in even if they wanted to (and no, I'm not talking Pink Sheets issues).

There are of course lots of reasons many individual traders are not successful. Lack of discipline and poor money management are far bigger contributors to individual trader failure than lack of dedicated staff and institutional tools.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Microsoft Is Disappearing Before Our Very Eyes - <AUTHOR> http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2012/12/03/microsoft-is-disappearing-before-our-very-eyes.aspx

<comment><USER3> _Surface is available only through Microsoft, and the limited distribution is going to make it a nonplayer this holiday season. The more powerful Surface Pro -- fueled by Windows 8 Pro to give a more complete PC-like experience than today's Surface -- will be out next month, all but killing demand for the less powerful Surface that's available now._

Bingo! Surface-RT made it in time for the holiday season... but Surface-Pro did not. Cue the Osborne Effect [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_Computer_Corporation#Th...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_Computer_Corporation#The_Osborne_Effect).

<comment><USER4> Surface Pro will sell even less than Surface RT. rumored price & battery life are already seriously hampering any lust people might have had for it. If I have 1k to spend, I'd rather get a proper ultra-book.

<comment><USER5> It has the same battery life as the 11 inch Macbook Air and very similar specs across the board.

In what way is it not a proper ultra-book ?

<comment><USER6> The keyboard isn't glued on, it's held by magnets and flops off, provides no structural support. You can't prop it up in your lap like you can a MacBook Air or any notebook for that matter. It's a tablet with a keyboard that's only useful if you have a desk.

It runs Windows 8 and only Windows 8, so unlike a MacBook or even a small Dell notebook, Linux isn't an option. It's locked down in the worst possible way, more like an iPad than an Air.

I'm not even sure what the market for this is. People who want a computer with a relatively terrible keyboard? People who want a bulky alternative to the iPad?

My only hope is the pen is actually useful as this would be less expensive than the equivalent Wacom Cintiq.

<comment><USER7> Surface Pro can run classic Windows apps in desktop mode remember - <USER2> locked down.

<comment><USER6> I'm not talking about apps, I'm talking about the entire OS. This is not intended to be a general purpose computing device. It is not a traditional notebook or a replacement for one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Have been using the Lumia 920 for 2 weeks now. It's the first phone since the original iPhone that I can't stop playing with -- details are just right across the board. It's light on apps but I don't use anything other than email, twitter, and RSS reader anyway. Video/Photos and screen are awesome. Scrolling is awesome. You should give one a try before declaring MS dead in mobile.

<comment><USER9> The question isn't "Is it good?". The question is "Is it selling?". What are the sales figures for windows on mobile?

I wouldn't mind giving it a shot next time I buy a phone, but most people I talked to seem to consider it a minus. Yeah, I know, anecdotes are not data, but from everything I read so far, sales are sluggish.

It's a pity. I want to see more than just Android and iOS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I been using windows 8 for a while and it is definitely how the future will look like. It is really good on desktop and it is perfect on tablets. I don't have surface as I already have two ipads and kindle and it would be too much.

FYI I use OSX more then win and then it comes ubuntu, which is unfortunate for ubuntu. I am developer so I think I need to know all of them well to be effective.

I think Apple is making sure people voice their displeasure with win8 as it is genuinely ahead of OSX in both functionality and design. I can't tell for sure what will happen but I definitely would like to use something like win8 in the future. Also, by saying it is ahead, that doesn't mean it is flawless :), there is a ton of room for improvement.

<comment><USER11> _I think Apple is making sure people voice their displeasure with win8_

That is one hell of a conspiracy theory. Got any evidence?

<comment><USER10> No but Apple is expert to sway the media to do what it wants. I mean, lately it's been releasing barely upgrades and it was covered with anticipation that no other groundbreaking technology got.

New windows is really good, I don't like that MS is copying Apple and making whole thing closed, kind was hoping things would go the way of the linux, not the way of the apple, but... So, it is not perfect, but it is very futuristic interface that works.

What I specially like is that they designed interface in such a way that it doesn't require insane graphics card just to get it to work well.

I think we all need a lot of options and dissapearance of any would hurt us big time.

<comment><USER12> That's evidence?

I also think we all need a lot of options and the disappearance of any will hurt us – UEFI Secure Boot is going to reduce the number of OS options, because it raises the price of being able to boot on generic PC hardware from $0 to $99. Many OS's will work together the way Fedora, SuSE, and Matthew Garrett are working together, so it may not cost each OS $99, but anything more than $0 is a loss.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As a programmer, I always want a powerful, open computer that I can do anything on. So it is taking a long time to dawn on me that the typical American (and I don't know enough about other cultures to speak of them) would much rather have a trendy, hip, portable iPad than a "full" computer. It's not like they're going to learn to program it or anything.

I'm sure this has been obvious for a long time to non-programmers who are observing, but I'm glad I'm at least becoming aware now.

<comment><USER14> Its not about trendy or hip (those are generally ways people insult mere mortals), it is about appliances versus computers. We can now build a device that does 95% of the things a PC does and is very easy to learn to use because of touch. PC's are devices of the twilight zone that require a priesthood to maintain and use. Never mind the rituals (always check your virus protection, watch out for e-mail attachments, reboot if it locks).

Get in most cars and they are automatics even though car lovers despise non- manuals. Gear heads still exist, but it gets harder now. Basic education opportunities have disappeared from most high schools. Look at the car ecosystem and see where computers are headed.

<comment><USER15> You seem to imply that iPads never lock up and never have to be rebooted. Not so.

<comment><USER16> They might need rebooting once in a while but the maintenance of an iPad is negligible compared to a proper pc.

<comment><USER17> I own a number of electronic devices - Galaxy Nexus, iPad (3rd gen), MacBook Pro, iMac, and a Windows desktop.

Surprisingly, the most unreliable (in terms of application crashes and weird issues that require a reboot of the device) is hands-down the iPad. I guess a few mitigating factors might be - app crashes are usually relatively easy to recover from, reboots fix most other problems, and viruses/malware (which have traditionally been vexing for many casual PC users) aren't an issue.

<comment><USER18> I'll supply a counter-anecdote... my iPad has never crashed nor needed a non- update reboot in the year I've had it, whereas my Galaxy Nexus is a continual source of reboots, dropped signals and general trouble :-)

<comment><USER17> Yeah, my Nexus is slowly overtaking my iPad in that department.

It is a little surprising to me that I appear to have far more negative experiences with iPads than is normal - I don't really do anything out of the ordinary or even push the limits of the device, and yet, I run into all sorts of consistent minor issues that seem to be indicative of software issues (especially with mobile Safari).

Don't get me wrong - I'm generally happy with the device, I'm just a little surprised at how flaky it is at times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I bought windows 8 because of the cheap first day release price. I dislike it intensely.

<comment><USER20> I actually like it when I need to use it. Hitting the windows key and typing what I want is very useful and I find it more functional than what was in Windows 7. I don't really use Metro for much more than that, but on a desktop I don't really need to use it for anything else. The Desktop app runs great and is lighter than Windows 7, which was a really solid operating system.

Edit: Also, give some time for it, its app market and hardware designed for it to mature.

<comment><USER21> >Edit: Also, give some time for it, its app market and hardware designed for it to mature.

In other words, probably wait for Windows 9? =P

<comment><USER20> Well, I wouldn't put Win 8 and Vista on the same level, so I hope not. Sadly, that is a possibility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It was a mistake to try to make one OS for both desktops and tablets. The form factors and usage styles are too different for a single OS to tackle well.

What you end up with is an unholy chimera of an OS that does neither well and the irony here is that everybody in the industry knew this.

Truth happens. Microsoft needed to listen but didn't.

<comment><USER23> Apple will have a unified OS for their notebooks, phones, and tablets in the near future. We'll all say how ingenious it was, and wonder why nobody ever tried it before.

<comment><USER22> The graphical elements may look similar but Apple is smart enough to know that touch screens call for certain UIs/metaphors and that desktops call for others.

The UI metaphors that work for PCs don't necessarily make sense on touch screens and the ease of use tablets afford due to their "touchability" is what Steve Jobs promised when he heralded this as the Post-PC era.

Microsoft is simply not in a position to say "We agree with Apple". Doing so would betray Microsoft's current PC using customers.

So its hand was forced to merge tablets (which have been killing PC sales for 2 straight years quarter after quarter, something even MS can't afford to deny) and the PCs that have brought MS this far.

To make things worse MS made Metro which makes apps all look so similar that there is no way for developers to stand out driving some of them to other platforms.

<http://www.riagenic.com/archives/889>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The scene: a board room, the meeting is about to start.

Steve: Hey Jim, what's that?

Jim: This is a surface tablet.

Steve: Where's your laptop? We need to go over and edit our serious business documents, which we use for serious business. Tablets are toys. We don't want you playing angry birds in our serious business meeting!

Jim: I don't need it. This thing runs full Microsoft office.

Steve: Whaaaaaaaa...

I think everything will be fine. I see mine as less of a consumer tablet and more of a business one. I am looking forward to the full release of office 2013 (it comes with the preview release).

I hope eventually I will be able to compile small custom .net apps for it without going through the store.

</comment><comment><USER25> "lowest price this year" is a completely arbitrary time range limitation.

<comment><USER26> It's been flat for investors for a decade.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> im thinking of getting a Surface Pro as a laptop replacement

i find that i just use my laptop with docks now anyway..

</comment><comment><USER28> linux guy here, microsoft is not disappearing anytime soon(sometimes i think sadly not), nor is windows8.

Windows 8 is quite successful believe it or not. Microsoft still owns the government. They can sell them whatever the hell they want.

Hybrid tablet/laptops(not talking about surface)? Windows 8 is the best OS to use in that case(it's really just two OS in one nothing more)

What about secureboot? Basically EFF has to beg Microsoft to give them permission to install linux on all those new windows ultrabooks.

I mean WTF, Microsoft going away? Hell, I wish that was the case!

<comment><USER29> _Basically EFF has to beg Microsoft to give them permission to install linux on all those new windows ultrabooks._

This is actually very interesting- for those not following along already check out [http://www.zdnet.com/linux-foundation-uefi-secure-boot- key-f...](http://www.zdnet.com/linux-foundation-uefi-secure-boot-key-for- windows-8-pcs-delays-explained-7000007841/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Apple was there just a few days ago. Market is not perfect and far from rational.

<comment><USER4> Apple's stock trajectory over the last few years is nothing short of ridiculous, which is not the case of MSFT's stock.

<comment><USER31> That is because Microsoft had already had it's crazy growth in the 80s and 90s while Apple came out of it's death throes in the 2000s. Not to mention that MSFT gives dividends out to stockholders which keeps rewarding the shareholders and the stock price down.

<comment><USER32> Both AAPL and MSFT pay dividends with the yield being around 3.5% for MSFT and 2% for AAPL. Dividends seem to be a new post-Jobs thing for AAPL and may not continue into the future.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Coursera course 'Fundamentals of Online Education' closed without warning - <AUTHOR> http://chewingthistles.wordpress.com/2013/02/05/24-hours-a-long-time-in-online-learning/ <comment><USER3> I've had many great experiences in Coursera run by mathematicians, computer scientists and biologists.

If an "expert in online education" is significantly worse in his/her own field than a biologist or mathematician, then I'd suggest choosing another, more suitable profession.

Similar sized and larger courses have been run many times for a year now - <USER2> you want to call yourself expert, then you should be at least a bit informed what worked/didn't work in these previous huge courses, and what approaches can't possibly work at that scale.

</comment><comment><USER4> Inside Higher Education reporting on same story, with several links to other detailed sources:

[http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/02/04/coursera- force...](http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/02/04/coursera-forced-call- mooc-amid-complaints-about-course)

</comment><comment><USER5> I am in another Coursera course that seems to be experiencing some issues. It seems this whole process is like early beta software (not like gmail "beta" years later...). Which is fine with me as a consumer.

I was a bit frustrated that the process wasn't a bit clearer up front. And it does seem they haven't really figured out he huge class size issues yet. It does seem to me it woudl have been better to start out slower and work out some of the kinks but so much is done so quickly these days I am not really surprised they jumped in with both feet quickly (it seems to me).

The coursera effort really seems like a pretty audacious effort to me. Running into issues as they try to make it work isn't that surprising. I do think pulling the plug if things are really not working seems like the better choice than just pushing forward. Giving themselves a chance to regroup rather than try to just forge ahead seems like the better option. Granted not getting into the mess in the first place would be better but I'm willing to accept the idea that maybe they just ran into more problems than they imagined and just need some time to figure out alternatives before doing some great things in the future.

<comment><USER6> curiouscats- Just curious, what course are you taking on Coursera thats experiencing similar issues?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Big fish in a small pond moved to a much larger pond :-(

After reading I get the strong vibe that the instructors had online education experience in the context of the 20-person online classes that have existed at universities years before MOOCs. Then they moved into the giant MOOC pond thinking it would be the same. Unfortunately, they found out they were now small fish in the big pond of 40,000 eyeballs judging and crashing systems that previously worked smoothly.

</comment><comment><USER8> It appears the instructor is employed as an "instructional designer" in Georgia Tech's distance learning program. Superficially, traditional distance learning programs have something in common with MOOCs, but there are a number of important differences. An obvious one is scale and it seems like the instructor was legitimately unprepared for the M in MOOC. Unfortunately, (and obviously generalizing here) another one is quality. Distance learning programs have long been second rate and even though the MOOC format isn't perfect, there are some very good professors teaching fields they have made significant contributions to, which is not something I've experienced with distance learning. My take away? You have to vet the instructor.

<comment><USER3> MOOC's have significantly different expectations for quality.

In an average university, there are decent professors successfully teaching students a topic that they know, and have a bunch of years experience in teaching that topic.

But in a MOOC that is not enough - since a single MOOC can scale to almost all the world needs for that subject, there is no need for a thousand professors teaching the same subject, only the best ones. Some things are unavoidably "lost in translation" due to lack of face-time, but a great prof in a MOOC will still be better than the perfectly ok professor at your closest average university.

To do MOOCs the way they should be done, you don't need to "vet the instructor" in the way that teachers or professors are vetted. The quality threshold here is very simple - are you one of top 10 people in the world in your narrow subject area? If not, you don't need to apply.

The great MOOC courses I had were good only because the teachers were far more qualified than any professors teaching the same subject in 500 mile area from me, _that_ is the value-add of MOOCs. The courses would not have been great if they were taught by simply a random good professor from a good university.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Not only do they have to upgrade their system, but they're going to have to replace most of the course material for "Week 3: Architecture, or Just Use Google Docs".

</comment><comment><USER10> It is very ironic that the worst class is precisely that one about online education. May be it is a class about what not to do.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, I think if the course was on something else people might have been a lot more forgiving. I guess the instructor has spent some time with the theory side of online education but is totally out of their depth with doing it in practice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't get it why Coursera can't fix its video player. It's their core technology right?

I can't resume videos from where I left, every video just opened for 1 sec. is considered 'watched', to close the video popup on iPad I need to play 'find a close button' game and overall the user experience of watching videos sucks a big way.

<comment><USER13> Why don't you download them instead?

<comment><USER14> In this particular course, some videos were heavier than 800 Mb.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't understand complaining about the "without warning". If the course was so bad there was no hope getting it to work, surely the best decision was to stop it. So how should they have killed it with a warning? Send an email with "we are going to close this class in 2 days"? Would that have been better?

</comment><comment><USER16> I took the Computational Investment class a few weeks ago (Form Georgia Tech too) and it suffered similar problems. Poorly prepared and no comparision to the great Stanford classes. I guess Coursera does not have a real QA department yet, but this will surely improve over time.

</comment><comment><USER17> I've been following the MOOC wave since the "early 3" Stanford classes back in Fall 2011. I've continued both on Udacity and Coursera partly auditing and partly participating.

The fiasco with the MOOC class, IMHO, was probably avoidable.

For one MOOCs of the Coursera/Udacity scale have been around for little over a year and I doubt even Andrew Ng/Daphne Koller or Sebastian Thrun would call themselves experts in what a MOOC is. No one knows yet and we are in a transient phase while this new knowledge works its way though the academic environment. What MOOCs will be next year is very different from what they are today. So for someone other than a founder of a MOOC to teach a class on MOOCs raises some questions. Creating models of what a MOOC is while the area is in such flux only creates more noise in the channel. For another how is it a surprise that 40K+ people signed up, for any MOOC instructor at Coursera, let alone for a class on MOOCs.

It's unclear how Coursera let a class on this topic be offered not even counting the QA issues.

While OP raises many issues in the blog post about this class and the instructor there are similar patterns in many other classes.

MOOCs as they exist today are massively instructor/university/vendor centric. This is partly because they are an incremental step away from a university experience and instructors are leraning how to play in this new arena. Also because they are free and the value to the student just of the content and structure is huge. So the motivation to expend the effort ot make it additionally student centric is small. The current state of the art is more than good enough and will be for some time.

Even then there are somethings I have seen on Coursera which could be relatively easy to do and improve the experience for everyone.

There needs to be some sort of experience sharing forum for course instructors so knowledge sharing takes place. This seems to be missing as evidenced by comments in the first week by many instructors asking for patience as they work out the kinks and learn the ropes.

Specifically instructors need to have data on previous instructors' class experience - what worked what didn't. Maybe this is available but perhaps it's not being used enough.

Suggestions to instructors from what I see over the last year

* Think through your class requirements will it scale - this is not your university class on video - it's a massive beast that needs to be fed.

* Will it be secure on an Internet scale. For instance the absolutely excellent Data Analysis class by Jeff Leek of Johns Hopkins. He had to remove a requirement for people to submit executable R code in assignments bec it would run on other people's computers during peer-evaluation. Not criticizing this class but asking will future classes have this data point available to them? Not sure.

* any special things you need to do for your class (such as the Google spreadsheet usage in the class mentioned by OP) - has it been done before at the scale. Do you have TA's or support staff that have done this before? Pl. don't use the class as a scaling experiment.

* be available on the forums if possible or make it some TA's job to monitor all forums (not sure how one person could do this especially as the class progresses) Jeff Leek being live on the forums makes the class extra special.

* if possible create weekly video "screenside chats" like Jennifer Widom did in the very first online Intro to Database class from Stanford - they were excellent as were the Google Hangouts by Thrun/Norvig in the AI class. Andrew Ng's closing statement after his Machine Learning class was very deeply felt. While student centricness is not expected at this stage - communicating with students in this fashion makes your class much more engaging and you much more human. Also it's likely (wild ass guess) that completion rates might improve with this - worth investigating. I also remember emails from the AI class exhorting students not to give up. In contrast I have received emails from classes (not to be named) congratulating me on how awesomely I have done when I haven't even logged in once :-)

* as far as # of quiz attempts and using late days there is a wide spread of parameters across classes. My suggestion as a working professional is that 5 late days for say 8 quizzes and 8 assignments is not enough. In addition I found that a 4% penalty per late day was probably much more reasonable than a 50% penalty. Other than that 1 quiz attempt is too little but 100 is too many somewhere in the region of 5 seems more appropriate.

That's all for now - hope this is helpful.

<comment><USER18> I'm currently taking the Single Variable Calculus by Professor Ghrist from uPenn, and I think it hits all the correct notes:

\- Prof G and several of his TAs are in the forums. If you post a good or interesting question, they will show up and offer an answer.

\- The class is incredibly complete: way more complete and self-contained than any other MOOC that I have tried. Prof B is incredibly knowledgeable and quirky to say the least.

\- With the above said, the class demands a ton of self-study, but it is backed up with a lot of homeworks. Each lecture has a hw associated with it. They do have an attitude that you must struggle with the material and keep doing it over and over until you get the questions right and it starts to become second-nature. They pull this off by never giving answers to hw's.

\- Despite the attitude with the hw, they have given amazingly complete answers to Exam 1 and Exam 2

\- They offered a diagnostic exam before you start. This would let you know right away if this class will beyond your head.

\- They really put some time into the class. The entire course is beautifully hand-drawn and I think the professor said that the drawings alone took 1200 hours or so. If you add in the Exams, hw, and the exam answers, there must be something like 1500 hours committed to making this course great.

I'm not entirely sure what to think of the grading:

4 Exams at 5% of the grade each Final = 80% of the grade.

I sort of like it because it gives you a bit of room to screw up and recover, but it is definitely shattering to do bad on an exam and start worrying about how bad the final may turn out. It is an interesting way to encourage you to take the work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Since the course was offered by Georgia Tech, hopefully the Computing Education blog (run by a GT professor) will have more details: <http://computinged.wordpress.com/>

</comment><comment><USER20> Not sure why they would give the students access to the raw Google Spreadsheet rather than using a write-only Google form.

1) Collect name, email address with Google form. 2) Run simple macro to assign to groups. 3) Sorted. As it were.

<comment><USER21> If the article reflects the truth in any way, it sounds to me like the instructors were in over their heads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This will make an interesting case study, in worldwide PR as much as anything. As a Brit, I hadn't heard much about Georgia Tech until now, but I'm pretty certain that if I wanted to take a global MBA, I wouldn't go to the place with the famously incompetent MOOC instructor.

</comment><comment><USER23> 40,000 students are demanding their money back.

<comment><USER24> Coursera's free.

<comment><USER25> That's the joke.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Where do you buy and sell side projects? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Depending on the type of project you're looking to buy and the amount you're willing to invest, here's a handful of marketplaces and brokers for online assets for small/mid-sized projects (with some larger scale ones):

[https://www.sideprojectors.com/](https://www.sideprojectors.com/)

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

[https://www.flippa.com/](https://www.flippa.com/)

If you're talking about generally larger investments, probably walking away from the realm of side-projects, there's these few that are generally geared at more of a full business acquisition style sale:

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

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

[https://empireflippers.com/marketplace/](https://empireflippers.com/marketplace/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Good list, thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Flippa is an option if it's a smaller project [1].

If the project is moderate sized to larger, it would be advisable to speak with an Investment Banker.

[1] [https://www.flippa.com/](https://www.flippa.com/)

</comment><comment><USER4> [https://www.sideprojectors.com](https://www.sideprojectors.com)

Happy to help and and answer any questions! :)

</comment><comment><USER5> UpWork</comment>


Jason Calacanis To Start New Angel Group - <AUTHOR> http://www.pehub.com/55877/jason-calacanis-to-start-new-angel-group/

<comment><USER2> Fairly simple idea here: i'm going to create a free option for startup companies to meet angel investors. I know most of the major ones myself personally, and the ones I know obviously know the rest of the angel network.

So, I'm going to host a breakfast or dinner quarterly in Los Angeles to start. Five companies pitching for 10-15 minutes each (or something like that).

No charge to angels, no charge to startups... all merit based.

you can follow progress at the #oaf hashtag on twitter or watch www.thisweekinstartups.com

building it with an open model, expanding to 20 other cities over next year, etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd like to see a non biased comparison between the different VC and angel groups. There seems to be many groups out there making it difficult for a newbie to pick one that suits their needs.

<comment><USER4> I think you have it somewhat backwards.

Of course it is good to get rid of the obvious scammers, let's say you rule out everybody that charges a fee to pitch, after that you are lucky if one of the remaining ones will invest in you, it is not like people will be falling over each other to make an investment.

The investment business is a buyers market, and almost always you have to be willing to 'play the field', in other words prepare for a number of pitches to similar parties in a short span of time.</comment></comment>


Let's add a statistical profiler to Chicken Scheme - <AUTHOR> http://www.more-magic.net/posts/statistical-profiling.html <comment><USER2> There's been a statistical profiler for Gambit Scheme since 2005 by Guillaume Germain ([https://duckduckgo.com/html/?q=guillaume+germain+statprof](https://duckduckgo.com/html/?q=guillaume+germain+statprof)). It's written in Scheme unlike this one, including the signal handler, which accesses the current continuation of the running program and from that extracts the information it needs. The continuations represent the "real" backtrace as opposed to the tracing, and they are always there of course (there's no disabling them as that would defeat the running of the programs). The profiler could thus extract the proper dynamic context (I don't remember if it does, but it could be extended to do so) and thus avoids the risk for surprise mentioned in the article.

I'd expect most Scheme implementations to have a statistical profiler by now?

Gambit gets several things right (continuation representation, debugger, perhaps multithreading (although other Schemes got that too)), although at the same time its internals are undocumented, difficult to work with (I found the abstractions used a bit lacking, and it's mostly a big amount of code without visible dependency structure which in its current state basically can't be run/changed/analyzed in pieces), and after an unlucky stint at a PhD under its author (1) I stopped plans to work on it. I'm still looking for a Scheme implementation that's got those things down similarly well but is more amendable (perhaps Scheme-48 although it doesn't have any real community).

(1) he's a demanding person to work with, but to be fair mostly the reason for the failure was that I was ill-prepared.

<comment><USER3> By multithreading, do you mean concurrency, or does Gambit expose raw threads to user programs? I'm rather convinced that a pthreads-like or Java-like interface to threads is too low-level and error-prone for most programming outside of kernel or standard library programming. We have less error-prone concurrency interfaces in Erlang-like CSP or Scala Actors.

<comment><USER2> I was referring to its built-in raw threads including mutexes, condition variables, and what it calls mailboxes (communication channels between threads) as well as object ports. You can build an Erlang style system easily on top of those (this is Scheme, after all, so you've got macros to help build abstractions, although the system doesn't offer the means to enforce separation (your programs can access symbols that allow to circumvent any separation attempts)), as the Termite project(1) in fact did (also about a decade ago).

(1) [https://duckduckgo.com/html/?q=gambit+termite](https://duckduckgo.com/html/?q=gambit+termite)

I was mentioning threads since Marc Feeley, its author, was a forerunner in implementing threads on Scheme systems (he authored the threading SRFI (2)). It's a green threading system (support for millions of threads, it doesn't come with support for libev though, so YMMV).

(2) [http://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-18/](http://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-18/)

Thing is, the thread system, like the rest of the system (e.g. he devised an I/O layer that tries to be OS agnostic), tries to come as shiny closed system for the user (with comprehensive user docs), whereas I'd much prefer for the parts to be openly accessible/exchangable. For example I'm often barely using the built-in OS-agnostic I/O layer and instead wrote interfaces to POSIX via the FFI. And I don't use the threading system often. My biggest use case for multi-threading is SMP support which I need to do by running separate Gambit instances (or by way of fork), accessing a common storage layer implemented via POSIX (currently in the works, and I'm writing it in a way that should make it easy for me to move to other Scheme systems).

In essence, from my point of view it's a system from academia with a quite explicit attempt to be practical for industrial use but falling short on the latter front pretty much exactly because it tries to do the latter itself.</comment></comment></comment>


Formal Specification of the x86 Instruction Set Architecture [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/10697957.pdf <comment><USER2> 2011? Whaaat? Science has ended, there is nothing new to discover anymore.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder if even Intel ever had a document this complete.</comment>


Feathercoin's Peter Bushnell: There's room for more crypto-currencies - <AUTHOR> http://www.coindesk.com/feathercoin-founder-peter-bushnell-talks-about-cryptocurrency-challenges/

<comment><USER2> The article really doesn't do a good job of answering why was it developed. Why do we _need_ feathercoin? It's a litecoin fork. What improvements does it offer? "4x more coins"? Ok, but how does that add value? I'm all for innovation, but feathercoin doesn't seem to be doing it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Dunno.

From a Crypto-Anarchy sort of perspective I would have thought diversity, even if it's Malibu Stacy with a new hat. The more systems the better.

Entropy I would have though is the enemy of control.

But could it weaken litecoin? Not sure. Could it allow more hedging and a stronger market, intuitively I would have though so.</comment></comment>


German foundation says democracy is declining worldwide - <AUTHOR> http://www.laprensasa.com/309_america-in-english/3656369_german-foundation-says-democracy-is-declining-worldwide.html <comment><USER2> The news report is wildly misleading, the underlying study barely measures democracy at all. A more honest name would be the "governments that do what Bertelsmann Stiftung wants them to do index".

[http://www.bti-project.org/en/index/methodology/](http://www.bti- project.org/en/index/methodology/)

Various non-democratic elements that they include in the methodology are "No interference of religious dogmas", "market based competition", "anti-monopoly policy", "anti-inflation policy", "social safety nets", "equal opportunity" (under welfare regime), "GNI cc PPP rescaled", "education index", and all sorts of other things.

I'm all in favor of market based competition and anti-inflation, but you can totally have a democracy that lacks these things - Greece, for example. Voters might be influenced by religious dogmas and vote against market competition and equal opportunity; this is a feature of democracy.

<comment><USER3> _market based competition and anti-inflation, but you can totally have a democracy that lacks these things - Greece, for example._

What? Greece is part of the Euro area and therefore under the ECB anti- inflation umbrella. This resulted in moderate inflation until the crisis at which point it's experienced deflation.

[http://www.tradingeconomics.com/greece/inflation- cpi](http://www.tradingeconomics.com/greece/inflation-cpi)

Greece also has market based competition under EU law; it's enshrined in the _aquis communitaire_.

<comment><USER4> The ECB is not that strongly against inflation. They have a goal of 2% inflation. They've also received criticism from the German Bundesbank for risking to much inflation with their programs.

<comment><USER3> That _is_ strongly against inflation - targeting 2% is the generally accepted optimum value, as price levels aren't uniform across the economy and targeting 0% requires actively driving down wages resulting in lots of needless strife.

(Also, think carefully about what a zero inflation target means in an economy coupled to the German economy: it would mean Greek wage and price levels below German price levels _forever_. In order for Europe to converge, local price levels have to change.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's a pity they only analyzed developing countries. Would be great to sea how European countries and the USA would be ranked in comparison.

<comment><USER6> They didnt include EU and US because democracy there is dead and buried.

<comment><USER7> Even if that was true, there's more to Europe than the EU.

<comment><USER6> Non EU European countries are actually included mind.

Also: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_bailout_referendum,_2015](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_bailout_referendum,_2015) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_European_Constitution_r...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_European_Constitution_referendum,_2005) und so wieder...

Please entertain me with tales of how democracy in EU is alive and well... Not even going to touch democracy in the US, current presidential campaign speaks for itself...

<comment><USER6> yet downvoting me won't make that kool aid taste less bitter :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here's the link to the actual index mentioned in the article: [http://www.bti- project.org/en/index/status-index/](http://www.bti- project.org/en/index/status-index/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here is the link to the press release by the way. Not sure if it would be better to use that link.

[http://www.bfna.org/media_advisory/global-index-sees- tough-t...](http://www.bfna.org/media_advisory/global-index-sees-tough-times- for-democratic-change)

</comment><comment><USER9> Not as misleading than the titles are the introductory sentences of the press release:

"Democracy and models of social market economy are being challenged worldwide. At the same time, the influence of religion on political institutions and legal systems is on the rise."

</comment><comment><USER10> > ... and an increase in religion's influence in political and legal > institutions.

It's local. It's not worldwide.

</comment><comment><USER11> "Democracy is declining worldwide", huh? I had no idea there were significant instances of rule by citizen majority since the Roman Republic eclipsed Hellenistic Greece, if you can even push it that late. Given that the HN forum is populated by so many technologists, I'm surprised more people aren't bothered by the loose and often wrong application of terminology.

<comment><USER12> That's because "democracy" includes more than "direct democracy".

1) "Several variants of democracy exist, but there are two basic forms, both of which concern how the whole body of all eligible citizens executes its will. One form of democracy is direct democracy, in which all eligible citizens have active participation in the political decision making, for example voting on policy initiatives directly. In most modern democracies, the whole body of eligible citizens remain the sovereign power but political power is exercised indirectly through elected representatives; this is called a representative democracy." \- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy#Types_of_democracies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy#Types_of_democracies)

2) "The pure form of direct democracy only exists in the Swiss cantons of Appenzell Innerrhoden and Glarus.[16] The Swiss confederation is a semi-direct democracy (representative democracy with strong instruments of direct democracy). The nature of direct democracy in Switzerland is fundamentally complemented by its profound federal governmental structures (in German also called the Subsidiaritätsprinzip).

Most western countries have representative systems. Switzerland is a rare example of a country with instruments of direct democracy (at the levels of the municipalities, cantons, and federal state)." \- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_democracy#Switzerland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_democracy#Switzerland)

You may of course regard this as not sufficiently significant. Personally, I include some of the things of Norse/Germanic law as examples of direct democracy. Eg, from [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thing_of_all_Swedes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thing_of_all_Swedes) :

> All free men living in the realm and who were able to wield a weapon had the > right to participate, and the assembly was led by the lawspeaker.

3) Voting eligibility then was not based only on citizenship. "Participation was not open to all residents: to vote one had to be an adult, male citizen who owned land and wasn't a slave, and the number of these "varied between 30,000 and 50,000 out of a total population of around 250,000 to 300,000." \- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athenian_democracy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athenian_democracy) .

Thus, the women citizens couldn't vote, so it wasn't "citizen majority" in our post-Suffragette understanding. Of course, the concept of "citizen" is tricky. If you define 'citizen' as 'the people with the right to vote' then the women of Athens were clearly not citizens. Then again, under that definition, felons in the US who have their right to vote taken away would not be citizens either. You might look to the government at the time to use their definition, but letting the lawmakers decide what 'citizen' means is suspect. An absolute monarchy, dictatorship, or other autocracy could count as a democracy if the ruler declares "I am the only Citizen". Or, quoting Terry Pratchett:

> Ankh-Morpork had dallied with many forms of government and had ended up with > that form of democracy known as One Man, One Vote. The Patrician was the > Man; he had the Vote.

<comment><USER11> I think this is extremely significant. As I said elsewhere in replies, the original study (or the summary brief about it linked here) gives zero insight into the design of measures they use to quantify "democracy", and leaves all of us commentators free to read different shades of meaning in the material you reference, let alone our often misinformed personal opinions. My point wasn't to revel in the pedantry of precise definitions, but "reductio ad absurdum" of the idea that anyone reading the link could take seriously the pedantic claim that democracy has been seeing "decline" without knowing what definition was under the authors' assumption. This is why social science often gets a bad rap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Neoliberalism is not the same thing as democracy.</comment>


On the Polish Paradox - <AUTHOR> http://www.booksandideas.net/How-to-Live-in-a-Hostile-World.html <comment><USER2> "Neoliberal globalisation has exploited or demolished local economic resources, impoverished large fractions of population, increased social and economic inequalities, introduced the ruthless law of the fittest and harsh struggle for survival and, last but not least, privatised social services depriving millions of basic life security."

<comment><AUTHOR> "Let us keep what we have, don't trust anyone, keep the aliens out."</comment></comment>


Facebook, telcos to build subsea cable for Africa and Middle East - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/14/2africa-africa-middle-east-facebook-subsea-cable/ <comment><USER2> Yay. More (meta)data for FB to collect.</comment>


Show HN: Open database of American doctors - <AUTHOR> https://www.opendoctor.io <comment><USER2> Nice, but I've got an error: [https://www.opendoctor.io/advsearch/?dtype=name&qtype=name&r...](https://www.opendoctor.io/advsearch/?dtype=name&qtype=name&reset=1&q=House&address=New+Jersey&Find+Doctors=Find+Doctors)

<comment><AUTHOR> Will fix thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The search results should be sorted by something - let the user choose the sort criteria but default to name.

<comment><AUTHOR> I will asap! thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Where does the data come from?

<comment><USER4> I'd love to know as well. There's a lot of great data on doctors in the US at data.cms.gov and data.medicare.gov. Socrata, the company I work for, builds and hosts the APIs so let me know if I can help in any way!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why can't JSX be added to the language? - <AUTHOR> JSX is such a nice abstraction to work with. Why why why why why why why why why can't we make it part of the language <comment><USER2> Funny you should ask that. Someone asked that exact question in Reactiflux a couple days ago. This was my response:

> Many reasons. For one, anything that the browser supports now, it has to > support... forever. For another, all browsers up until now don't support JSX > syntax, so you'd still have to compile your code to handle all existing > browsers.

> Also, the JSX syntax is not React-specific. Typical usage is to compile > `<MyComponent>` to `React.createElement(MyComponent)`, but you can edit your > build settings to compile it to other similar APIs for other frameworks.

> The JSX syntax has been pretty stable for a while, but there's been plenty > of proposals to tweak it further. How would that get handled?

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess your reasoning makes sense, but obviously there are counter arguments:

> Compiling for older browsers seems ok. If we stop additions for this reason, > we would essentially stagnate the whole ecosystem.

> Sure, JSX is not react specific. No arguments here, but we should be able to > come up with some convention - maybe `h` function? maybe the jsx pragma > comment?

> We've made sense of much more complicated mutually conflicting standards > problems before... we just declare stuff to not work anymore... like marquee > tag... and if it does not make sense sometime, we put in feature flags, or > `use jsx` language pragma? maybe `use jsx 1.0`, `use jsx 2.0` ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Mozilla actually had something similar to JSX at one point:

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Archive/Web/E4X](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Archive/Web/E4X)

<comment><AUTHOR> JSX sure has some overlap with E4X, however, JSX has no relation to the E4X specification:

[https://facebook.github.io/jsx/#prior- art](https://facebook.github.io/jsx/#prior-art)</comment></comment>