Kelly Criterion (2007) - <AUTHOR> http://r6.ca/blog/20070816T193609Z.html <comment><USER2> The Kelly Criterion was the subject of an incomprehensibly bitter argument in the 1970s/1980s. Paul Samuelson, considered by many to be the greatest economist of the 20th century, believed the Kelly Criterion was wrong. And not just wrong but SO WRONG that anyone who believed it was an idiot.

The kind of idiot who could only understand single syllable words. So he wrote a paper in the Journal of Finance and Banking in words of only a single syllable saying why no one should use the Kelly Criterion.

[http://www-stat.wharton.upenn.edu/~steele/Courses/434/434Con...](http://www- stat.wharton.upenn.edu/~steele/Courses/434/434Context/Kelly%20Resources/Samuelson1979.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Samuelson's argument basically comes down to the fact that the investments that maximize growth don't maximize your utility unless your utility is log(wealth), and to him it was completely obvious that people should act to maximize their own utilities.

However, there have been a couple recent developments that somewhat undercut his line of thinking. First of all, to the extent that people's behavior can be described by utility theory, we all roughly have isoelastic utilities ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isoelastic_utility](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isoelastic_utility)) with a parameter not too much greater than one. As a result, the ideal investments for most of us are near Kelly.

Second, there's a body of theory that asks what the optimal strategy for investment is given a certain number of years, and it turns out that the ideal strategy is to follow the Kelly approach until near the deadline and then to switch to the investments that maximize your own utility as the time to act grows short. This work is known as turnpike theory for reasons that never really made sense to me.

There are still concerns about Kelly investments, but Samuelson's argument isn't really one of them.

<comment><USER4> > investments that maximize growth don't maximize your utility unless your > utility is log(wealth)

This needs a slight adjustment to be _exactly_ true:

> investments that maximize growth don't maximize your utility _at a specific > time horizon_ unless your utility is log(wealth)

The reason is that in situations of repeated investment, Kelly's policy actually does maximize many time-indefinite notions consistent with linear utility -- for example, if you have a fixed wealth goal (retirement) that is enough successful wagers away, Kelly will minimize the expected time to get there [1].

For me, the important limitation for Kelly is that it is designed around timescales that involve many many repeated bets. Like most asymptotic results, Kelly can win marathons and lose sprints -- so it's important to consider which situation you're in.

[1] [https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~aldous/157/Papers/Good_Bad_Ke...](https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~aldous/157/Papers/Good_Bad_Kelly.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The the main flaw of the kelly criterion (along with a number of other results in investment theory like Markowitz allocation) is that in practice it's extremely difficult to know the distribution of the result you're betting on.

The mean and variance of a prospective investment are not observable. But more to the point, if you try to use some sort of proxy like a sample mean or standard deviation, you'll get inconsistent results over time. We're a long way from the clean, simple, i.i.d world that theorists like to play in.

<comment><USER6> In such cases what are models that are more effective?

<comment><USER7> You could probably model something that uses sampled variance less aggressively

<comment><USER8> Something bayesian

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> One thing I find really interesting about the Kelly Criterion is that it exposes a very stealthy and fundamental "rich get richer" phenomenon.

Most real-life risks have a minimum and maximum investment amounts, meaning that you can't just size the bet exactly as Kelly says. So if your wealth is low, you cannot rationally participate in many risky but positive-expected- value investments.

Simply put, the poor can't take many worthwhile risks (think college!) without rising ruin (and sub-optimal growth). Conversely, the rich can come closer to maximizing EV in many risky markets at once, increasing income and growth while even decreasing variance.

</comment><comment><USER9> Ex hedge fund guy here. You can extend this into continuous space and use that to tell you how much leverage you should have, given some Sharpe ratio.

Results may surprise you (it's a lot for even a modest Sharpe). But also most practitioners aren't going to use the full number. If you've overestimated it you are always worse off on the right side of that.

<comment><USER10> It's common to use some percentage of the Kelly-calculated stakes in betting, Kelly might be the _optimal_ sized bets but it is extremely aggressive. IIRC, even if you are calculating your % edge correctly, Kelly staking means that any point, you've got a 50% chance of losing 50% of all your existing bank at some point in the future. Not many investors/gamblers can stomach that!

<comment><USER7> I mean, it's not acceptable to use it if there are no stakes below a certain point and no way to borrow more money. Or if the stakes below a certain point have worse returns (higher house take)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The Kelly Criterion is the subject of an absolutely incredible book by William Poundstone called "Fortune's Formula".

In the course of discussing the formula, the book takes you through the birth of the MIT blackjack team, the genesis of statistical arbitrage, and mini biographies of people like Claude Shannon and Ed Thorpe. I can't recommend it highly enough.

<comment><USER12> Don't forget the organized crime connection. It was an absolutely fascinating read.

My dad was a daytrader (read: armchair gambler) but this helped him curb his trading - he wasn't ready to do all the statistical analyses to keep rigorously investing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The most interesting thing to me about the Kelly criterion is that it demonstrates that the martingale system[1] is a bad strategy even if the odds are in your favor!

While it's immediately obvious that the martingale is bad if the odds are in the house's favor, it's less obvious that you are likely to go bankrupt with the martingale even if the odds are slightly in your favor (assuming the house's bankroll is much greater than yours).

1: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martingale_(betting_system)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martingale_\(betting_system\))

</comment><comment><USER14> This massively oversells the usefulness of the Kelly Criterion. The opening lines are

> One should buy stock when it is undervalued. What I have always wondered > about is how much stock one should buy. A few months ago I stumbled upon the > answer which is given by the Kelly criterion.

But the rest of the post analyses a mathematical game which has nothing to do with buying stocks, and is in fact only useful in theoretical situations where you know the precise distribution of outcomes.

<comment><USER15> >> But the rest of the post analyses a mathematical game which has nothing to do with buying stocks, and is in fact only useful in theoretical situations where you know the precise distribution of outcomes.

You might want to think about that. In the real world you don't know anything with precision which means you probably can't do better. One of the unrealistic aspects of it was the idea that you can play as many times as you like, but that's not possible in the real world. But we can move toward playing many times through diversification. That's a good lesson in itself.

<comment><USER16> I don't think diversification is much like playing multiple games at all.

One expands on the axis of time, with the game constant. The other expands on the number of unique games all played simultaneously

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Always a good topic to discuss. Many applications to high-frequency trading due to the probabilistic nature of outcomes.

Here are 2 previous HN discussions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13143821](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13143821)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2504222](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2504222)

</comment><comment><USER18> I've only barely looked into the Kelly Criterion, but can someone explain the intuition behind maximizing the expected value of the _log_ of your wealth? Trying the same derivation mentioned in the article but without the logarithm: the expected value comes out to 0.5×(1 + 1.1×f) + 0.5×(1 − f) = 1 + 0.05f which would make it seem that betting the entire fraction always maximizes your expected value. But why does this reasoning break down in the long term, and why does maximizing the log seem to make it work?

<comment><USER19> Betting everything maximizes your mean wealth. Using the Kelly Criterion maximizes your median wealth.

Let's say there are 1024 (2^10) people with $1 each, and a bet which is 50 / 50 of returning either 3x or 0x (i.e. you bet $1 and either get back $3 or $0). Let's further specify that there will be 10 rounds of betting.

Using the "bet everything" strategy, you end up with the following distribution of outcomes:

10 wins, 0 losses -- 1 person: $59,049 1 or more losses -- 1023 people: $0

The average ending balance is $57.67, while the median ending balance is $0.

Using the Kelly Criterion, one will bet 25% of the bankroll each time. You will end up with the following distribution of outcomes.

0 wins, 10 losses -- 1 person: $57.66 1 wins, 9 losses -- 10 people: $28.83 2 wins, 8 losses -- 45 people: $14.41 3 wins, 7 losses -- 120 people: $7.20 4 wins, 6 losses -- 210 people: $3.60 5 wins, 5 losses -- 252 people: $1.80 6 wins, 4 losses -- 210 people: $0.90 7 wins, 3 losses -- 120 people: $0.45 8 wins, 2 losses -- 45 people: $0.22 9 wins, 1 losses -- 10 people: $0.11 10 wins, 0 losses -- 1 person: $0.05

The average ending balance is $3.25, while the median ending balance is $1.80.

Incidentally, the choice of maximizing the median is somewhat arbitrary. You can also use a similar approach to maximize, say, the 25th percentile outcome, at the expense of average and median outcomes (You would bet 10% of the stake each time, yielding a 25th percentile of $1.08, a median of $1.25, and a mean return of $1.28).

<comment><USER20> If you're allowed to bet a different proportion of your money in each turn then you can push the median even higher than the Kelly criterion. For example consider the strategy that bets nothing if it has more than $2.98, whatever is needed to reach $2.98 on the next bet if it has less than $2.98, or bets everything if it can't reach $2.98 on the next bet. This strategy has a greater than 50% chance of ending up with $2.98 since it has a 50% chance of success on the first bet and a nonzero probability of success after that. So its median outcome is $2.98.

I don't know which strategy actually maximises the median, but I suspect it involves being conservative after you've been lucky and agressive after you've been unlucky.

<comment><USER21> I guess you are right. A minor issue is that you have to beat the 1.8 value of OP in (or in less than) ten rounds because if you have infinite rounds then median can grow infinitely (am I right?). It is not clearly visible in your solution, that it really happens in less then 11 rounds.

But it is easy to extend the strategy with this: First get half of the people above 1.8 by betting 0.400000000...1. Now half of the people have 1.80...1. They are finished.

Half of the people have .5999. They can do all-in twice, then 25% of them will be above 1.8. That is 3 rounds in total.

edit: the maximum of this exact 3 round strategy is betting 8/11$=0.72 in first round, then in round 3 we will have 62.5% of people at 2.45$ edit 2: got the numbers wrong in previous calculation, fixed

(Now someone should chime in, and present the actual optimal solution. ;)

<comment><USER20> The reason I chose $2.98 was that if you follow my strategy then that will lead to you betting $0.99 in the first round. If you win then you end up with exactly $2.98 and stop betting. If you lose then you end up with $0.01. If you were to bet all of it for the next 9 rounds then there is a 1/2^9 chance of you ending up with $0.01×3^9 = $196.83. Since this is more than $2.98 my strategy must have at least a 1/512 chance of achieving $2.98 even if it loses the first round. Since the chance of winning the first round is 1/2 the overall chance of ending up with $2.98 is greater than 50% and hence $2.98 is the median.

I think I can run a computer search to find the actual optimal strategy. I'll report back with the results.

<comment><USER21> Ok.

An additional thing is, if you find the optimal strategy in the form of: "in n round the best achievable median is x betting this and this way", you should check the strategy when n approaches infinity - I will not have been surprised if it turns out to be the Kelly Criterion after all - and OP will be right in this sense (though presented the fact _somewhat_ badly by limiting the number of rounds)

<comment><USER20> Okay so I ran my program and I didn't manage to find the exact optimal median but I narrowed it down a lot. I'm assuming each bet is a whole number of cents.

I found that there was a strategy that achieved $6.84 with probability 1/2 + 1/2^10. So the median is at least $6.84 (which is 3.8 times the median achieved by Kelly criterion!).

I found that there was no strategy that achieved $6.87 with probability 1/2 or greater, so the median is less than $6.87.

I found that $6.85 and $6.86 could both be achieved with probability 1/2 but no greater.

So the median is somewhere in the range [$6.84, $6.855].

The optimal starting bets of these strategies show some interesting behaviour. For example if you want to have a greater than 1/2 chance of achieving $6.84 then your starting bet can be $0.22, $0.26, $0.31, $0.36, $0.40 or $0.50, but no other value. Make of that what you will.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's the expected growth rate, so yes it would vary in a real-world instance. I wondered for a while why they've taken the logarithm, but I think it's just because growth models are normally defined exponentially (with the rate being a parameter inside the exponential) - it shouldn't make a difference to the result.

As for varying, that Samuelson article says:

> For N as large as one likes, your growth rate can well (and at times must) > turn out to be less than mine - and turn out so much less that my tastes for > risk will force me to shun your mode of play.

<comment><USER23> The real reason to take logarithms is that investment strategies repeatedly multiply our net worth by random factors. Taking the logarithm turns multiplication into addition, and we know a lot about the statistics of adding lots of random things together. (Thanks to the Weak Law of Large Numbers, the Strong Law of Large Numbers and the Central Limit Theorem.)

<comment><USER24> I think the log is just the utility function. You could substitute it with any non-linear utility function and it would've gave you another answer that makes sense for that utility.

The main takeaway is that a linear expected utility doesn't make sense.

It would've told you to bet all your wealth every game, which does result in a higher linear expected value, where you win (1+1.1)^N with probability 1/2^N at time N, but 0 otherwise. But no real human would take the bet of extreme high payoff at extremely rare chances with ruin otherwise.

Also see St. Petersburg paradox for a similar "paradox" resolved with expected utility theory.

<comment><USER23> I'm sorry, but you are plain wrong. The log has nothing to do with utility. And there is no chance of really understanding the result if you're confusing yourself with that bad idea.

To start, EVERY utility function that is both increasing and sublinear will agree that Kelly is the best strategy. Whether square root, log, or bounded - it doesn't matter. The details of your utility function are unimportant.

What matters is that each iteration of an investment strategy multiplies your net worth by a random factor. But log turns multiplication into addition. And statistics has very strong results about sums of independent variables.

The result is that with 100% odds, a player following Kelly will eventually wind up ahead of any other static strategy that you could choose. Both wind up ahead and eventually remain ahead. Which is why a wide variety of utility functions will conclude that Kelly is the optimal strategy.

<comment><USER20> > To start, EVERY utility function that is both increasing and sublinear will > agree that Kelly is the best strategy. Whether square root, log, or bounded > - it doesn't matter. The details of your utility function are unimportant.

This is simply false. This is easy to check for the sqrt utility case. You can calculate the optimal proportion for a single bet and note that it's different than for Kelly, and then you can calculate the utility-function-given-that- you're-about-to-make-a-bet and check that it's still proportional to sqrt. So by induction you are always going to bet the same proportion no matter how many bets you have to make, and this proportion is different from Kelly.

> The result is that with 100% odds, a player following Kelly will eventually > wind up ahead of any other static strategy that you could choose.

This is true in the sense that the probability tends to 100% as the number of bets tends to infinity. But this doesn't make Kelly optimal, because in the event that the Kelly isn't ahead the expected utility of the other strategy could be much higher than Kelly.

<comment><USER23> For one iteration? Sure, you can get any answer. However attempting to apply induction to that is wrong because as the number of iterations increases, the range of likely rates of return for each strategy converges, and Kelly is the one that converges to the highest rate.

As for the 100% odds answer, what I said was true is true in the sense that it is actually true. No ands, ifs, or buts. With 100% odds, Kelly eventually wins over any other strategy. Period.

The question of whether this makes Kelly optimal is not the question that the theorem was trying to answer. And therefore is irrelevant. Now in fact this does make Kelly optimal for a wide range of utility functions. But far from all possible ones.

The point being that it is important to separate a mathematical point from our interpretation of what that point implies. When you confuse the two then you get yourself into an unnecessary muddle. Kelly is a statement about the probability of one strategy beating another. It isn't a statement about how you should bet.

<comment><USER24> Using ln as our utility, at time N we get:

      E[ln(X_1*...*X_N)] = sum E[ln(X)]

So kelly happens to maximize this expected utility by construction since it was derived by maximizing expected log of one round of betting (E[ln(X)]).

But if we use square root as our utility instead:

      E[sqrt(X_1*...*X_N)] = prod E[sqrt(X)]

We would maximize this expected utility by maximizing E[sqrt(X)]. Going through the same calculus we can see that we don't arrive at kelly.

Where did I go wrong?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> There was a hedge fund manager named Mark Sellers who blew up his fund in 2008 by following the Kelly Formula exactly, which had told him to put 90% of his fund in a single stock, which was a small offshore oil/gas driller. It was real money too, over $200 million.

<comment><USER26> Nominative determinism? Although perhaps Mark Buyers would have been even more appropriate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The reasoning behind the Kelly Criterion was explored recently in a more broad context, showing that the logarithmic utility is not required: [https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.4940236](https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.4940236)

Taleb has a good discussion here: [https://medium.com/incerto/the-logic-of- risk-taking-107bf410...](https://medium.com/incerto/the-logic-of-risk- taking-107bf41029d3)

</comment><comment><USER27> Most of the examples of Kelly criterion application are either concrete bets with discrete payoff/loss odds and values, or assumed to be normally distributed. This paper discusses how extremely skewed outcomes (eg, stock options) should affect the Kelly calculation: [https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2956161](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2956161)

</comment><comment><USER20> I think the Kelly criterion doesn't apply as widely as people think it does. Its derivation is based on on maximising the growth rate of your fortune. But this is equivalent to assuming that money has logarithmic utility for you. If you don't value money in a logarithmic way then you shouldn't use the Kelly criterion.

Personally I feel that my utility function is sublogarithmic. If I'm just spending on myself then beyond a certain point additional money makes me absolutely no happier. Note that the usual justification of progressive taxation also assumes sublogarithmic utility. So based on this we should be more conservative than Kelly.

On the other hand, if I plan to give money to charity then my utility function is almost linear. Big charites can absorb a lot of money without becoming less effective. So in this case you should be maximally aggressive, betting everything at every opportunity.

Sometimes people say that because the Kelly criterion maximises growth rate it will be the best "in the long run" even if your utility function isn't logarithmic. But I've never seen any evidence of this. Does anybody know of a toy model where you can prove the Kelly criterion is optimal even if your utility is linear?

<comment><USER28> >Sometimes people say that because the Kelly criterion maximises growth rate it will be the best "in the long run" even if your utility function isn't logarithmic. But I've never seen any evidence of this. Does anybody know of a toy model where you can prove the Kelly criterion is optimal even if your utility is linear?

Here's one [https://greek0.net/blog/2018/04/18/kelly_criterion3/](https://greek0.net/blog/2018/04/18/kelly_criterion3/)

Basically it says that if you are making bets where money_(i+1) = f_i(money_i, x_i), such that your money always remains above zero, then you can apply the product form of the law of large numbers [http://www.jams.or.jp/scm/contents/e-2006-6/2006-60.pdf](http://www.jams.or.jp/scm/contents/e-2006-6/2006-60.pdf)

That means that over a long enough period any betting strategy that maximizes the geometric mean of the rates will beat any other bet with probability approaching 1. p(money(optimal strategy) > money(other strategy)) --> 1.

If your utility is monotonic (x > y implies that u(x) > u(y)) then I think this also implies that p(utility(money(optimal strategy)) > utility(money(other strategy))) --> 1.

Basically, you are eventually almost sure to have more money with this strategy than any other. If more money implies more utility, then you are eventually almost sure to have more utility with this strategy than any other.

<comment><USER20> > this also implies that p(utility(money(optimal strategy)) > > utility(money(other strategy))) --> 1

That's true (at least as long as the other strategy also bets a constant proportion of wealth each turn). But it doesn't mean that Kelly is optimal. It could be that in the (increasingly unlikely) cases when the other strategy beats Kelly, the utility produced by the other strategy is _much_ greater than that produced by Kelly. Then the other strategy could still be better overall.

In other words, even though we have

        p(utility(money(Kelly strategy)) > utility(money(other strategy))) --> 1

we also have

        Expectation[utility(money(Kelly strategy)) - utility(money(other strategy))] < 0

Here's a simplified example of what's going on: consider the bet where you get a penny with probability 1-1/n, and otherwise you lose $(2^n). I think this bet gets worse and worse larger n gets, but the probability of having higher utility if you take the bet tends to 1.

<comment><USER28> >That's true (at least as long as the other strategy also bets a constant proportion of wealth each turn).

Does it require that assumption? I don't think it even requires identically distributed returns on each component bet. It just needs money_(i+1) = f(money_i, x_i) to have strictly positive support right? Then you can just push it into log space and apply the law of large numbers, telling you to maximize the expected log of f(money_i, x_i) wrt x_i. Nothing about fractions or constant fractions shows up in that derivation.

The usual statement of the Kelly criterion is about fractions, but the more general question is whether maximizing expected log is (eventually) optimal, which seems to only require being able to apply the law of large numbers in log space.

<comment><USER20> Imagine we started with $100 and were betting on a fair coin with fair odds. There's no edge so Kelly says to bet $0, and hence the Kelly strategy stays at $100 forever. You can give yourself a very high chance of beating the Kelly strategy if you use a Martingale strategy. Bet $0.01. If you win then you have $100.01 and you should not bet again. If you lose then bet $0.02 next time, and then $0.04 and then $0.08 doubling each time until you win. When you win you will go up to $100.01, which beats the Kelly strategy. So Martingale beats Kelly unless you go bankrupt by losing too many times in a row before getting a win, which only happens with a very small probability. So there are strategies that have a high probability of beating the Kelly criterion.

For simplicity I gave the above example in the degenerate case where the edge is zero. But I think the analogous strategy works in all cases. If you aim for just a penny over the Kelly strategy then you have a high probability of success.

<comment><USER28> Fair point. And while it's too late to edit my post, I think I found the flaw in the math.

Just because X converges in probability to x, f(X) doesn't necessarily converge in probability to f(x). If that were so, then logarithmic utility would be sound, but it isn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> "If all the economists in the world were placed end to end they would not reach a conclusion" -Isaac Marcoson (attrib. 1933 by O.O. McIntyre)

[http://www.systemicrisk.ac.uk/sites/default/files/downloads/...](http://www.systemicrisk.ac.uk/sites/default/files/downloads/publications/dp-52.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER30> The correct number of individually picked stocks you should buy is most probably zero: httpedmarkovich.blogspot.com/2013/12/why-i-dont-trade-stocks- and-probably.html?m=1

<comment><USER7> If you plan on tax loss harvesting through direct indexing, you can buy 500 stocks directly and sell one stock to buy a highly correlated one to decrease your tax payments in taxable accounts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Wow, this is the 2nd time in two weeks that something has appeared on my probability homework and then made the front page of HN almost immediately.

Coincidence?

Who else is taking Stat 110?

</comment><comment><USER32> A similar (but more useful) position sizing strategy is the Optimal F formula, described by Ralph Vince in his book Portfolio Management Formulas. But its real value is in showing you your 'cliff of death' curve: how close you can get to bankruptcy given your position sizing.

In my opinion, position sizing is more way more important (and less understood) than market timing.</comment>


Refactored PHP engine makes Wordpress 20% faster - <AUTHOR> http://news.php.net/php.internals/73888 <comment><USER2> I love how, through all the hate and bandwagoning, some people don't get discouraged and actually do something to improve the product.

We still do new projects in PHP and we couldn't be happier.

<comment><USER3> > We still do new projects in PHP and we couldn't be happier.

I concur, especially when frameworks like Symfony exist. Reading all this smack talk about PHP on HN is so alien considering how thriving the PHP community actually is.

<comment><USER4> Nobody mentions how much or little the PHP community thrives. People point out how bad PHP compares against other languages. The fact that you enjoy using PHP and that you can create great products with it does not imply that it has no flaws.

Many have been where you are now, and then moved on to other languages to never ever look back. From what I've seen, the reverse is much less common.

<comment><USER3> > Nobody mentions how much or little the PHP community thrives. People point > out how bad PHP compares against other languages.

I don't actually think that faults in a language matter that much if the people using it are competent. Both Javascript and Perl come close to PHP in terms of negative traits, yet a lot of good software was written with both. The same can be said about PHP, the only difference is that people on HN have very little idea about what contemporary PHP (language and software) looks like.

<comment><USER5> There are many good PHP web frameworks out there today, yes. These don't somehow erase PHP's core flaws as a language though.

You can make a new project in Symfony or Laravel, sure, but you'll get that same niceness plus way more goodies if you use a popular Python or Ruby framework.

<comment><USER6> I think you need to qualify that a bit - what are "way more goodies" exactly?

Can you name something that Python can do that PHP can't?

<comment><USER7> Real production ready servers ,complex scientific calculations, 2d, 3d games , to name a few things. PHP is not general purpose. Python is.

PHP has type hinting and interfaces that makes it "java" like(it's a strength).

Python doesnt have interfaces but allows type hinting through decorators.

        @typecheck
        def gimmeFloat(a:int, b:list, c:tuple=(1,2,3)) -> float:
            return 3.14

<comment><USER8> And who is talking here about a general purpose lenguage in this context, i only care about the web stuff i don't need things that ain't gonna use.

<comment><USER9> It's also a far more readable language, which matters more than anything in large-scale projects

On the other hand, <? ?>.

<comment><USER8> Large scale projects doesn't need "more redeable" languages, it needs good engeneering and type checks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Wordpress 3.6 – 20.0% gain (253 vs 211 req/sec)

How do you generate 211 pages per second on Wordpress to begin with? My server does page generation for my own custom-built blog in ~15ms, but takes a whopping three seconds for a single Wordpress page. I know it's somewhat offtopic and it's about the relative results, but what hardware is this?

<comment><USER11> My Linode VPS spits out WordPress pages in 33.811ms (via ApacheBench, concurrency=10 for a couple hundred requests). I don't use any kind of content/page cache. There's no reason WordPress would be 200 times slower than your custom blog -- WordPress isn't some kind of complex software. It's a handful of very small PHP classes that choose a theme file based on the URL, include it, run a database query to select some posts, wrap the result rows in objects, and pass them to the theme to spit out. I've had hundreds of concurrent visitors on my blog without registering any load. If your site is taking 3 seconds to return a page, there's something wrong and it's not the choice of blog platform.

<comment><USER10> I meant a clean wordpress install. No themes, no plugins, just a basic install. Three seconds. My own blog does about 3 mysql queries and manages that in 8ms at best (usually 22ms at worst; typical seems to be around 15ms). The most limiting factor for Wordpress was cpu speed.

<comment><USER12> Maybe try increasing the PHP memory limit? I don't think Wordpress is causing the slowness you are seeing.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, WordPress can get slow pretty quick, but a naked install should be pretty snappy. The codebase itself is pretty small (~50kLOC) but the DB queries can get ugly depending on the plugins installed. Naked WP on GoDaddy or similary crap shared hosting site can be slow, but certainly not on a VPS.

<comment><USER10> Mostly CPU usage would jump to 100%, it's not mysql or RAM shortage. I know an Intel atom isn't much, but it ought to do better than this, especially compared to custom software.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Refactoring Wordpress will make it even faster. Look at the difference between Drupal and Wordpress. It's amazing Wordpress is still used for big sites while a ton of recourses could be saved.

But great work on the PHP engine!

<comment><USER15> Agreed. I ran a benchmark against CodeIgniter on a test box recently and was suprised that a single query app performance went from around ~20k req/s with raw PHP (no framework) to around ~3k req/s with CI and thought that was bad for a framework. I didn't realize Wordpress performance was so much worse especially given its popularity.

Most Wordpress sites use a caching plugin like WP Super Cache or Varnish-type setup if they get decent traffic though.

<comment><USER16> CI is a badly designed and outdated framework. For real speed you should use something more professional like Symfony2.

<comment><USER17> I won't disagree with you that CI is outdated, but it was originally created to work around the limitations of PHP4 and early versions of 5.x. Looking back in hindsight, it may seem "badly designed", but that would be taking it out of context.

Also, CI out performs Symfony in the web framework benchmarks: [http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/](http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/). I certainly would never equate Symfony to "real speed".

<comment><USER16> You really think those guys know how to configure for production a hundred frameworks? If you base your decisions on those benchmarks, you are gonna have a bad time.

<comment><USER17> I'm sure their benchmarks are more than adequate. In either case, if your barometer for what makes a good PHP framework is based on performance, you certainly wouldn't be choosing Symfony. If anything you'd go for for HHVM or Phalcon.

<comment><USER16> That makes no sense whatsoever. Symfony2 is fast as hell. If you don't think so, you simply don't know how to properly configure it for production. There isn't much _real_ speed you can gain from using weird things like Phalcon, unless you don't know the first thing about caching. In fact, not having all the caching mechanisms that Symfony2 gives you will probably _slow down_ your application, even if your code is written in C.

<comment><USER15> You realize that those benchmarks are all open source and they encourage patches from anyone if they can demonstrate it benches better?

So instead of just saying their Symfony benchmarks are bad, submit a pull request to fix whatever you think is wrong so they can get more accurate benchmarks next time.

Also their tests are run without caching for a reason. It's not a test of the language/framework if they just use whatever language to generate a static/cached file and serve it with nginx.

<comment><USER16> Really? I'm supposed to go and work for free for them, just to prove your wrong? No thanks.

> Also their tests are run without caching for a reason. It's not a test of > the language/framework if they just use whatever language to generate a > static/cached file and serve it with nginx.

Haha lol, so the tests are explicitly meaningless. I guess I'm done here then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Great news. HHVM and now PHP 5.7, both with JIT - the future of PHP looks bright.

<comment><USER19> To my knowledge a JIT compiler is not being added to PHP 5.7. Can you clarify your comment or provide a link to the source where you heard this?

<comment><USER20> I'm not the person you replied to, but I got the same impression.

The linked email in turn links to the PHP NG page ([https://wiki.php.net/phpng](https://wiki.php.net/phpng)) on which the version number mentioned is 5.7.0-dev

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Good news, any idea which version this will be included in? I know PHP 5.6 is already in beta, so I'd assume this'll be PHP 5.7, but this is really good news. We have some sites that are just begging for an actual 10-30% increase in speed.

<comment><USER22> I suspect this'll be the basis of a new major version, based on early discussions. It probably won't be a 5.x release.

<comment><USER18> There are already PHP 6 books out there from 2009 (planned v6 renamed to 5.3): [https://www.google.com/search?q=php+6&tbm=bks](https://www.google.com/search?q=php+6&tbm=bks)

They could name it PHP 7 to avoid further confusion.

<comment><USER23> PHP 6 was really about unicode support. It will actually create even confusion among veterans. Also, those PHP 6 books are really aimed at beginners.

In addition, skipping a version number also creates confusion. If they were going to go this route, they should have done it a long time ago (around 2010-2011).

[http://www.slideshare.net/andreizm/the-good-the-bad-and- the-...](http://www.slideshare.net/andreizm/the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly- what-happened-to-unicode-and-php-6)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This sounds like a nice improvement to PHP performance. Are there any parts of the language that will have to change for this enhancement? I expect that that changes will be minimal, if any are needed.

<comment><USER25> From what I can see there shouldn't be any userland breaks unless it's very obscure.

In the internals all of the zend_hash apis have been updated so it may have an effect on some extensions, though the core extensions can all be updated.

<comment><USER24> I think you're right. The line that made me think that something might change is:

"we changed the basement trying to keep most of the building unchanged."

The "most" part made me wonder what obscure part of userland it would be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Love the work, but honestly by the time PHP 5.7 is ready for mainstream (with extension support mysqli, memcache, mongo), Facebook HHVM will be the defacto standard. FB has a huge head start and can throw nearly unlimited money and engineering hours at the problem. Seems like a losing battle, but perhaps I am wrong.

<comment><USER27> PHP's success is the result of PHP being available at even the tiniest webhost. I don't see that happen for FaceBook HHVM, though. FaceBook HHVM performance results will spur on Zend's efforts in making the PHP engine faster, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> It is good to hear that they even managed to refactor their code, even if you don't look at the performance benefits. Now, I hope that their next major upgrade will be a complete API overhaul, though it means making the existing thousands of themes and plugins incompatible.

</comment><comment><USER29> Can't wait to play around with this once they support a few more extensions!

</comment><comment><USER30> The parser needs to be rewritten really.

<comment><USER31> Why do you say that? The parser looks no more or less horrible than the rest of the code base.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Why does it matter? Visitors should never hit WP anyway if you are smart. Set up caching.

<comment><USER33> It makes a big difference if your site isn't just for displaying static HTML content - for example, a WordPress-powered community where users log in to your site.</comment></comment>


Working from home was the dream but is it turning into a nightmare? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/15/working-from-home-was-the-dream-but-is-it-turning-into-a-nightmare <comment><USER2> Is this surprising? This entire pandemic has been a parade of seemingly obvious realities being presented as novel and surprising by various gadflies.

At least with regard to working conditions, I think I'm representative of a sizable population of workers, and some realities about WFH struck me as obvious immediately and have continued to be obvious since March.

I live in a small, one-bedroom apartment. I don't want to allot space to a dedicated work area. It takes away from my already limited living space. If I had rented this apartment with an eye toward setting up a home office, I might feel differently, but I don't.

I was skeptical that office culture would reconfigure itself to become more asynchronous and more supportive of WFH. I think my skepticism has been vindicated. Meetings are longer, more frequent, and less effective. Written documentation, written project planning, and code reviews are still undisciplined and haphazard. Tasks fall through the cracks and hand-offs are an afterthought. Slack continues to be a source of constant distraction.

One aspect of WFH that I didn't estimate well is the level of ambient noise in my apartment during the workday, compared to the noise level in an office building. Office buildings I've worked in have some constant level of HVAC hum and background people chatter. My apartment in the suburbs, by comparison, is constantly bathed in noise from lawn care teams (at my complex and adjacent ones, several days each week), rumbling delivery trucks, ice cream trucks, service vehicles (there always seems to be a Roto-Rooter van in the neighborhood), and miscellaneous neighbor activity (an outdoor punching bag, a car idling under my window, a metal zipper banging in the building's clothes dryer).

For me and people in situations similar to mine, WFH has offered few improvements over working in an office building, but added many distracting indignities.</comment>


An overview of modern SQL-free databases - <AUTHOR> http://00f.net/2009/an-overview-of-modern-sql-free-databases <comment><USER2> BDB is not mentioned, but Lightcloud, a ~500 line Python script is.

<comment><USER3> Hey, BDB sounds like a tried and true technology; we can't possibly have that in our app cloud. Only the fad and bleeding edge for us.</comment></comment>


The NYC tech scene is exploding - <AUTHOR> http://cdixon.org/2010/02/01/the-nyc-tech-scene-is-exploding/ <comment><USER3> I love NYC. My life is there. If I could move my startup to NYC, I would do it in a heartbeat. But every venture requires _capital_ , some more than others. Pretty much all "early stage" funds make one or two early stage investments a year, most likely into someone they already know. That means most first-time entrepreneurs have to pitch to dozens of funds before they get funding. Most first-time startup founders I know scheduled three meetings with VCs per day, five days a week, for at least two-three weeks before they got anywhere. That's at least thirty meetings with all kinds of VCs of all shapes and sizes! If you were to do this in NYC, you'd exhaust your opportunities within two days. Six funds cannot possibly support a healthy startup ecosystem. The Valley has thousands, and I've still seen some good early stage teams that didn't get adequate funding. All arguments end here - no capital, no startup scene.

If you've already started a successful company before and you already have a good relationship with one of the funds in NYC (i.e. they invested in you before and you didn't screw it up), you can start thinking about starting up in NYC. If your company is taking off like a rocket, you can start thinking about moving to NYC (in this case you'll get funded pretty much anywhere). If you can bootstrap, you can start thinking about starting up in NYC. Otherwise, moving your startup to NYC is suicide.

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't know about exploding. The impression I got from the last year and a half there was that they're always asking each other and investors--how come we're not Silicon Valley?

While there is defn a tech scene there, it doesn't seem to compare in spirit, concentration, and amicability here, when it comes to tech. Even just a month and a half in Mountain View, I've seen a noticeable difference.

</comment><comment><USER5> Good to hear. I could definitely tell that the Ruby job scene has grown there since I last looked for a job 2 years ago. In my last job search, there were very few jobs in NYC for rubyists - now there are quite a few. Most of the jobs I applied for last month were in NYC and today is my first day working at my new job there.

Any other devs in NYC? Any great user groups or events that I shouldn't miss? I'm working remotely at the moment, but will be moving there this month and am hoping to get to know some interesting folks there!

</comment><comment><USER6> NYC might not have had any 'runaway' successes recently, but it's had some rather respectable advertising-related successes in the last few years - <USER2> example, Right Media, TACODA, and Quigo. The employees at these companies have largely gone on to take more-responsible positions at a variety of other advertising-related startups, many of which are doing rather well. When it comes to online advertising, at least, the talent pool over here is getting pretty deep.

</comment><comment><USER7> Am I the only person in NYC rolling their eyes at this continual barrage of "IN NYC IT RAINS MANNA FROM THE SKY!" ?</comment>


Hydraulic Rock Storage – an efficient system for large grid scale storage [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.cleanenergybusinesscouncil.com/wp-content/uploads/HeindlEnergyPresentation.pdf <comment><USER2> From the article: requires _" Possibly compact, homogeneous rock with little tendency to fracture."_ That's rare geology. It's rare for a tunneling project to find nice hard homogeneous rock through which a tunnel can simply be bored without supports. Both the Gotthard Base Tunnel in Switzerland and the NYC East Side Access, although in areas where such rocks exists, ran into incompetent rock.

In practice, they'd probably have to line both the hole and the plug with something like tunnel lining segments.

<comment><USER3> > It's rare for a tunneling project to find nice hard homogeneous rock through > which a tunnel can simply be bored without supports

Obviously you've never played Dwarf Fortress.

<comment><USER2> "Rock is dross or nedross. Dross does not crumble; it is rock to trust, grain pure throughout. Nedross rock cannot be trusted, even if it looks solid and pure in grain. It fails. It is -- not truth."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hydraulic Storage in general: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_accumulator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_accumulator)

</comment><comment><USER5> Similar concept to ARES that has been discussed here before;

[http://www.aresnorthamerica.com/](http://www.aresnorthamerica.com/)

<comment><USER6> At first this looked a bit weird. It may be a bit more land intensive, but the idea is sound, and would be able to expand to full capacity gradually. I like it a lot better than the hydraulic storage for the near term.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Earlier this was for a much larger cylinder, say kilometers across, where you could leave the nature at the top intact. They have explanation here.

[http://www.authorstream.com/Presentation/heindl-958931-hydra...](http://www.authorstream.com/Presentation/heindl-958931-hydraulic- energy-store-system/)

(Edited to change info it was the same guy, added url)

</comment><comment><USER8> That is so cool. Now I want to install a hydraulic piston under my house. During the day excess solar production lifts the house, at night as the house slowly sinks it provides power. Zero foot print chemical free energy storage.

Would make for an interesting front walk, that basically would turn into a staircase as the house went up :-)

<comment><USER4> Install a stationary gatehouse with an elevator.

Plumbing? You're on your own.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Could the same system be implemented with a column of concrete and a tank of water under the surface of the ocean?

</comment><comment><USER10> interesting idea.

if the seal breaks, then most of the energy stored in the system might over an interval of only a few minutes go into kinetic and potential energy in the form of water flowing over terrain and water gushing high into the air, so at the least it seems like a bad idea to have a road containing through traffic as close to the facility as depicted in the final image in the OP (the PDF).

</comment><comment><USER11> Why r ^ 4th power? The weight of the rock is ~r ^ 2. Potential energy is weight X height lifted. I'm confused.

<comment><USER12> > Why r ^ 4th power? The weight of the rock is ~r ^ 2.

No, because, as shown on the fourth page, the length of the cylinder is ~r making the weight ~r^3 (if the length was constant, the weight would be ~r^2.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I am not a physicist... Why is setting a rock atop a column of water better than an unadorned column of water?

<comment><USER14> The basic idea is that you are storing energy by lifting something heavy. The more mass you can lift, the more energy it can release as it falls back down. Rock density varies, based on the type of rock, but it is generally 2-3 times heavier than water for a given volume. The limiting factor for water energy storage systems is how much space it takes to store all the water. So the big chunk of rock on top of the water column means you can store more energy in the same space.</comment></comment>


Fools and their crypto - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/30/fools-and-their-crypto/ <comment><USER2> Every few decades, libertarians need to be reminded why regulations exist. Time passes, and people forget why the SEC, FTC, FDA, FDIC, OSHA, child labor laws, et al were even created.

Cryptocurrencies created a completely anarchic monetary system, which people have used to layer investment systems on top of. Naturally, low hanging fruit scams and cons have arisen, and some form of governing structure will eventually be imposed, if not by actual governments, then by the community. Then more sophisticated abuses and negative externalities will arise, and ever more sophisticated regulations will be imposed by the community to thwart them.

In the end you may end up with something very much looking like a government, where people with connections and leverage in the governing structures get to decide the evolution of the rules, where a few players with disproportionate wealth or hashing power, help elect those people to committee positions. And once again, people will be looking to create systems to escape the defacto control and cronyism imposed on the system.

I guess what I'm saying is, nature abhors a vacuum, and given human nature, most systems will evolve to thwart the worse tendencies of the worst people, opening opportunities for others to capture power. So in the end, rather than seek to bring down our democratically elected government monetary systems via technology, we should seek to evolve them with ideas from technology.

Because booting out fiat currency and rebooting with crypto really just forces a painful relearning of all of the lessons we've learned in the last century of modern finance.

<comment><USER3> I'm a registered Libertarian (lol) who isn't against reigning in ICOs. My chief concern is regulation creep from problems that do exist, to problems that may exist in the future, but aren't really a current concern. I find targeting the latter gives a government a whole lot of elbow room to extract wealth, via things like trade license fees, ICO officiation fees, a requirement that a coin some some property that creates a weak binding with a given fiat currency, etc.

It is worth noting though, that ICOs are primarily a problem because there are a lot of hungry investors looking to 100x their returns, and don't have the tech background required to dissect a whitepaper. Protecting the gullible and uninformed from the manipulative is one of hardest tasks of any society, and the fight is never ending.

<comment><USER4> your point about needing a tech background to invest is like saying that one should have a finance background to invest in an IPO. I disagree.

<comment><USER5> It's very much a thing over in Europe though, the new MiFID II directive is a thing intended to protect investors - one implementation that (online) investment banking sites have to offer now is things like a basic test, that is, you need to prove you have half a clue what you're doing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Imagine you're investing in Apple in 1980. There is plenty of risk involved > and you're still not sure this Jobs kid has what it takes, but do you like > the idea? The mission? The product?

This is delusional. From Apple's Wikipedia:

"Between September 1977 and September 1980, yearly sales grew from $775,000 to $118 million, an average annual growth rate of 533%"

They were selling products that people wanted for profit. Comparing ICOs to this is ludicrous and seems to me to encapsulate the hazy thinking of this entire sector.

<comment><USER7> We aren't there yet. Successful projects are building protocols with the goal of developers using them to build next-gen products that people actually want. Current speculation (a16z, polychain, ...) is that it will take another few years for this rollout to really take effect.

<comment><USER8> > products that people actually want

This part of the process is usually considered one of the first steps in a successful business.

<comment><USER9> > This part of the process is usually considered one of the first steps in a > successful business.

You're absolutely right, of course. However, I'm reminded of this wonderful (recent) quote by Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi:

"Business is actually surprisingly good for everything that the company went through. The part of the business that is not going well is the profitability part. We have some details to work out."

[https://www.axios.com/uber- ceo-1516627656-77c68a5a-6d42-4c85...](https://www.axios.com/uber- ceo-1516627656-77c68a5a-6d42-4c85-8ab5-284516cbcb69.html)

<comment><USER8> I don't understand the "however" part.

People actually want to press a button on their phone and have a car show up and take them somewhere seamlessly. Uber has been doing that since they launched.

Doing it profitably and sustainably is another question. But the basis of the enterprise isn't even a little confusing.

<comment><USER9> I think we're on the same page.

My point: a business without actual products people want to use is not viable (contrary to what some appear to think), but a business without profitability is not viable, either.

(you're right, Uber has a slick product, though arguably because they subsidise it.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I will repeat myself from another ICO thread last week: you cannot have investment vehicles where commiting fraud results in no punishment. It simply doesn't work. Until someone figures out a way to even somewhat integrate ICOs into the existing legal system, this will keep happening.

I have proposed one possible solution to this problem here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16208325](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16208325)

<comment><USER11> > Until someone figures out a way to even somewhat integrate ICOs into the > existing legal system, this will keep happening.

They're already integrated into the legal system. What new laws are needed?

<comment><USER10> You shouldn't be able to run one unless you're a registered company. It has to be relatively easy to come after you for fraud as an investor.

Considering that this is a mechanism that is predominantly used to fund projects or companies anyway, I don't think that's an irrational requirement.

<comment><USER12> all the same laws are applicable and fraud is fraud.

what is more interesting is that a variety of traditional control mechanisms appear to be ineffective at stopping the two voluntary parties from interacting whereas for banking and brokerages they are sufficient.

I'd hate to see a second useless set of laws be made, similar to "hate crimes" (a crime is a crime - except when you say a certain something or think a certain way?? wtf) but how would you even enforce a law requiring specific criteria for an ICO when an anonymous 14 year old kid anywhere in the world can do it in 20 minutes??!

i am of the thought that not every guerilla ICO has to be brought to justice but the "rule of law" requires some semblance of respect and obedience and I've been to countries where everything is up for negotiation and no law is "rule". slippery slope. perception of authority should not be diluted if possible.

seems the nation state's reach has started to exceed it's grasp....

<comment><USER13> I've never understood the problem some people have with hate crimes. Don't we already have plenty of crimes where the only differentiator is mental state or intent? Hard to see how a hate crime classification is any different than, say, Murder 1 versus Murder 2.

<comment><USER14> I would assume it's a perceived sense of lack of fairness in the sentencing; to be clear, I share your position on hate crimes. They exist for the same reason that we have both Murder and Manslaughter charges, because our system of law considers intent as part of the sentencing.

But it is not hard to see how some would view such laws as unfair. Intent can be difficult to prove and it requires interpretation; if you believe in clear cut and easily understandable laws, then naturally Hate Crimes and other such laws probably seem like a bad idea, and I get why that is frustrating and even intimidating with how fast gossip can travel. The system itself is built with release valves, but it's likely not much comfort for the wrongly accused.

I think that's a separate problem, however, which is just exacerbated by perceptions of laws like Hate Crimes as opposed to being caused by the laws themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There's a thing that bothers me with ICO, it's when people call it an investment. It has nothing to do with an investment, it's basically a presale for the service that the company will provide.

It offers you _nothing_ of what buying shares of the company will (except when explicitly specified in the token sale) : no dividend, no voting power...

Expecting to earn money by buying tokens in an ICO is pure speculation, as you expect the token to go up. But this goes against the real user's will to use the service: they want a fixed price (who wants to use a service which price changes every day?)

To sum up, buy tokens as you would buy presales in Kickstarter, to support the company, but don't expect to earn money with it if you really it to be a real service / product. And avoid ICO that make you the promise of earning quick money.

<comment><USER16> Agreed 100%. Buying tokens from an ICO is akin to funding a project on kickstarter - and we all know how often kickstarter projects fulfill their promise..

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Now the red flags are:

1- Silly idea adjuncted with the blockchain label 2- No immediate answer to the question "How this is going to make money ?" 3- A white paper without substance, just a piece of marketing paper convincing you about the scheme with lots of use case diagrams etc 4- Ratio of advisors and other fuzzy titles / technical people at 10+

</comment><comment><USER18> Serious question: are there any ICOs that aren't scams? Or are there any ICOs that have raised money for something and have actually delivered that something? Seems like everyone from children to grandmas are doing ICOs these days and I've yet to hear about anything that _wasn't_ a scam.

<comment><USER19> I'd say there are some. Dragonchain for example which I invested in seems ethically run and have delivered pretty much what they said.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Separating bad actors and their crypto from good actors and their crypto is where were headed next. Lessons in due diligence apply to crypto just as with any other investment vehicle but it seems many have missed this. The crypto space is being refined, which is a good thing.

<comment><USER21> Yes, I am confident that there are as many good actors in cryptocurrencies as there are in any other multi-level marketing scheme.

<comment><USER20> Many of them are MLMs but I'm referring to the ones that are not, the ones that actually using the crypto capital for true innovation.

<comment><USER22> Name 1 that has used that capital to achieve over 10$ million in profit per year.

<comment><USER20> It's early days. Think Netscape.

<comment><USER23> Name one use case for cryptocurrencies where they work better than existing technologies and that does not involve buying illegal stuff online.

Seriously, I must be writing a comment like this one at least two times a week lately on HN. I keep hearing "blockchain technology is here to stay, think of the possibilities!" and I say that it's already showing its limitations and people are scrambling to find real world use cases for them. See the Diamond Coin story the other day, or that Kodak Coin thing. When you look closely you realize that the technical side of things doesn't really hold up or could be achieved using good old non-buzzword technologies.

Cryptocurrencies are amazing if you want to create a ponzi scheme or buy drugs online. For everything else there's Mastercard.

<comment><USER24> How about five?

* private transactions: your identity need not be associated with donating to wikileaks or buying a sex toy

* irreversible: no chargebacks or transaction reversals

* unseizable: protection against civil forfeiture, IRS account seizures for "structuring", etc

* remittance: send any amount of funds anywhere in the world with minimum fees with no 3rd party ever having access to funds

* exit from corrupt monetary policies: see Argentina, Venezuela

But apparently these don't apply to you personally so it may be best to continue swiping your Mastercard™.

<comment><USER25> Paranoid much?

In a world where someone will steal your account if you so much as look the other way, this is a good thing?

Because paying taxes is for chumps.

Tell us more about those fees... You want your transaction to happen when?

Replace corrupt monetary policy with corrupt money. Flawless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> (Article is about cryptocurrencies)

<comment><USER27> you mean cleptocurrencies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The one question which any of these Crypto ICOs dont answer is why do I want to get paid/pay in their coin over actual cash! There is only drawbacks with it!

</comment><comment><USER29> So is crypto-everything (keeping with the current stupid trend where "crypto" refers exclusively to blockchain technology) in free fall, yet?

</comment><comment><USER30> Hopefully a wake up call.. but probably won't be.

<comment><USER31> It won't be. Every ICO I've bought into and the subsequently sold once it hit the exchanges has made me ridiculously amounts of money. Some sells were stupid, others were brilliant but they were all green.

My stocks have increased as well and hold the majority of my investments, but they increased by 11% last year. My Cryptocurrency increased by 1153% in the same period of time. As long as that happens Cryptocurrency isn't going away, even if it makes no sense.

It's taking money from other people by selling useless shit, so it's obviously not going to last forever.

<comment><USER32> > but they increased by 11% last year.

S&P 500 rose 23% last year, maybe you just invest in an index fund.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> It seems like I will continue collecting downvotes on this topic but I will give yet another try.

I would not be totally against regulation and government intervention into blockchain space (and any other space as well). In fact, it would be really good for the space have reasonable but friendly regulation which would clean up space from outright scams.

Unfortunately, governments usually don't try to came up with reasonable regulation but rather killing regulation. One notable example is BitLicense which lead to mass exodus of cryptocurrency-related companies from New York.

Real life example of sad result of such regulation:

[https://www.stellar.org/lumens/build/](https://www.stellar.org/lumens/build/)

> If you live in a restricted area — any country on the U.S. sanctions list, > as well as the states of Alabama, Connecticut, Hawaii, New York, Vermont and > Washington — regulations prevent us from sending you lumens. Unfortunately, > therefore, residents of restricted areas are not eligible for an award.

This sentence is exact reason why I really hate regulators and people who are very enthusiastic about big government cracking down cryptocurrency space just because of few really stupid and obvious pump and dump scams on coins I've never heard of.

Fortunately, I don't live in New York and US. I'm rather give here examples familiar to Hacker News readers.

Another thing I hate about regulators is notion of accredited investor. Which says:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accredited_investor#United_Sta...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accredited_investor#United_States)

> In the United States, to be considered an accredited investor, one must have > a net worth of at least $1,000,000, excluding the value of one's primary > residence

Which basically says - rich gets richer and you poor little guy is too stupid for participating in potentially highly lucrative deals.

I know what you will say - the governments try to protect ordinary people from scams. Don't you think it's a little overshoot??? Instead of keeping so high barrier of entry, the government could impose some sort of exams if you want to accredited investor. Or as alternative, make sure a person won't put more than 10% of early net income in high risk projects. That's what I would call friendly regulation.

So I see how government try to regulate (just practically ban things) and I tell - it's better having no regulation at all!

<comment><USER34> Some of the information you present is incorrect. One example: An accredited investor doesn't need $1MM net worth in the US. The requirement can be satisfied by just $200K personal income. This is stated in the very first sentence of the wiki entry that you linked.

> _Which basically says - rich gets richer and you poor little guy is too > stupid for participating in potentially highly lucrative deals._

It's more along the lines of having enough money to weather the value of your investments disappearing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'm guessing this was their address: [https://etherscan.io/txs?a=0x931d387731bbbc988b312206c74f77d...](https://etherscan.io/txs?a=0x931d387731bbbc988b312206c74f77d004d6b84b)

It was a very small ICO, something close to 2 ETH.

</comment><comment><USER36> There was this other load of shit that tries to keep track of every diamond. Sure track the ones that are tracked!

</comment><comment><USER37> So like Wall Street.

</comment><comment><USER38> I'll bite.

How does a slow, expensive, global time-stamping service which cannot scale to billions or even tens of millions of users create a foundation for a sound business model to track all the food?

<comment><USER22> That's to come in their second white paper which handles scaling which nobody else has solved. /s

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> They raised $11. So basically everything went fine. They tried to scam, but it didn't work so they exited with penis.

<comment><USER40> Did you perhaps mean to write "pennies"?

<comment><USER41> Doubt it.

[https://twitter.com/thelateempire/status/957527371221028865/...](https://twitter.com/thelateempire/status/957527371221028865/photo/1)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> "They created a credible white paper that, at the very least, tickled some of the neophilic nerves, and they had an active, if scammy, social media presence. That is literally all you need to run an ICO these days and they did exactly as expected.

Then the whole thing imploded. On the 28th the scam shut down, leaving a website containing a single word: penis."

</comment><comment><USER43> For real though...when will we stop using crypto to refer to cryptocurrencies? Crypto is short for one thing and it's cryptography.

<comment><USER44> This sentiment comes up in almost every crypto thread and I think it's a bit misguided. It's referred to as crypto because...that's how people know it.

Google trends explains my point better than I ever could.

[https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=crypto,cryptography,cryptocurrency)

<comment><USER26> It also shows that this conflation is very, very recent. I _assume_ this is either because some people realized that there is "more than bitcoin" now, so you can't keep saying "bitcoin" and mean all the cryptocurrencies, and they just thought "jeez, cryptocurrency is such a complicated word. Let's just use crypto!"

In any case, crypto has been established as short for cryptography for far longer than any of these currencies existed. It is used in this way as a distinguisher in many contexts (e.g. crypto-phones, crypto-locker, crypto protocols, ....); calling "crypto-X" just "crypto" is unnecessarily ambiguous.

(either...or it's some guys pushing their agenda very hard in the last few weeks)

<comment><USER45> However you feel about it, the change is happening. People clearly don't think the ambiguity is as problematic as you do.

<comment><USER26> What makes you say that? Neither is it inevitable, nor do people not care, as is evident by that literally every time an article using this term the wrong way is posted, people _will_ post clarifications what the article is actually about and express their annoyance regarding the issue.

Clearly, people _do_ actually care about others trying to coopt well- established language for their often fishy schemes.

<comment><USER45> Yes, a small number of people do care about this -- how many comments are these compared to the ones that are discussing the topic itself?

All I'm saying is: If you're going to try to tell people to not change the language as people seem to want to change it, because you don't want the language to change, then prepare for complaining for a long time with no results.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> "Crypto" is NOT synonymous with cryptocurrency.</comment>


Bitcoin Jumps Above $10k for the First Time in Six Weeks - <AUTHOR> https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bitcoin-briefly-jumps-above-10-162914283.html <comment><USER2> Historically, buying the high at the end of a bear market has been a winning strategy.

Of course, past performance is no guarantee of future results.

</comment><comment><USER3> And Gold broke $2000 for an all-time high.

<comment><USER4> People hedging USD from what I have heard</comment></comment>


The Web-based version of Apple Music has officially launched - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/the-web-based-version-of-apple-music-has-officially-launched/ <comment><USER2> Apple takes so long to add cross-platform support despite these services making money with more potential to do so with cross-platform. icloud.com is unusable. Keychain is available only on Mac and iPhone and restricted to Safari.

I understand they are trying to lock-in users to their platform / devices but there would be more users if cross-platform versions are available making more money for them eventually.

It's not like consumers are buying a Mac or iPhone because Apple Music experience is better, or iCloud experience is better.

<comment><USER3> The entire idea behind keychain is its only used on trusted hardware. How do you propose that Apple verifies hardware that it doesn't control?

Apple Music has been available on Android since basically day one and now it's available on Amazon devices. AppleTV and AirPlay are being supported on third party hardware.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I keep hoping that Apple will come around to making their catalog available losslessly. I don't need or want "HD" audio. I just want CD quality audio. I can't pick out artifacts in AAC 256 that some people claim to. But on the other hand, I (and this is unscientific) find that my ears get tired listening to compressed audio vs uncompressed streams.

Tidal and now Amazon offer lossless steaming, but I personally prefer the integration and UI of Apple Music with our various iDevices. I believe it also is still possible (though a little janky in the UI) to stream your own tracks back to yourself for when Apple Music is missing obscure recordings.

I keep saying it, but the perfect music service is obvious and nonexistent currently:

1\. Good catalog of music

2\. Lossless option (don't believe it matters? Fine. Charge people who insist on it for the feature. I pay $25/month for a family Tidal subscription. You can think I'm a sucker.)

3\. Let me add my own recordings with metadata and stream my unified catalog back to me in the same UI.

<comment><USER5> It'd probably require renegotiating all their licenses with the RIAA and such. Granted, they did it before with 128 to 256 kbps (and removing DRM at the same time) quality. So, I'm sure they could, but the thing is most people don't care.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Almost identical to the "native" app with some added responsiveness, the macOS version being a souped up Ember application for the past five years has really paid off here.

<comment><USER7> Actually they are taking advantage of WebAssembly and ported some of the original C++ and Objective-C code to it.</comment></comment>


Show HN: CodeNav – token highlighting and click-to-find usages on GitHub - <AUTHOR> http://www.ianww.com/codenav/

<comment><USER2> This looks really cool. Looking forward to trying it out.</comment>


The Untold Story of Larry Page's Incredible Comeback - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2014/04/25/google_s_larry_page_the_co_founder_s_untold_story.html

<comment><USER2> Worth the read!</comment>


Show HN: Turnip Trader – Animal Crossing Turnip Exchange and Community Site - <AUTHOR> https://turniptrader.com <comment><AUTHOR> I've been enjoying playing Animal Crossing over the last week so I spent a few hours and put together a site for players to coordinate and visit one another. It's pretty basic right now, but I hope to add some extra features in the future!</comment>


Show HN: LinkPeelr URL expander - <AUTHOR>

LinkPeelr is a URL expander that takes a URL and "peels" it to show you the URL that you will actually be taken to. It works on any website with any link or URL shortener service. It's basically a web service built with App Engine and a companion Chrome extension that pops up a tooltip with the target URL when you hover over shortened links.
I've been meaning to make something like this for my own use for a long time as I find short URLs slightly irritating because they hide the real domain, which often informs the quality of content. LinkPeelr was also small enough that I could finish it over a couple of weekends and get a feel for some new tools I intend to use in future projects. I've uploaded everything to Github so if you are interested, you are welcome.
Please check it out and let me know what you think. Do you find it useful? What would you improve?
App:
 http://linkpeelr.appspot.com Chrome extension:
  https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/ahhcmjnfhbpgagklnjhlcabnbcdgipje?hl=en Github:
  http://github.com/ibagrak/linkpeelr <comment><USER2> V. useful. And thanks for putting the source online -- a great help to those of us looking for solid app engine examples.

</comment><comment><USER3> great app!</comment>


Running a Small Website Without Commercial Software or Hosting Services: Lessons - <AUTHOR> https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/lessons-learned.html <comment><AUTHOR> I've been running a website on a Raspberry Pi 3. It's cheap, consumes almost no electricity, and it does the job.</comment>


Why open source developers are trying to manipulate GitHub? - <AUTHOR> Have you tried looking the history of every "popular" open source framework or library? I myself have been checking this for a couple of months now and I can surely guarantee you that most maintainers are updating their outdated projects with bull$hit commits (docs/deps) just to manipulate the "Latest commit" to the users. I'm so frustrated because it's cheap, dirty and completely unethical. You can't just force the users to believe it's updated till today when your last "true" (bug or feature) commit was 2 years ago just to persuade someone to use your thing. Some developers are actually doing hilarious commits only ONCE per month for years. I have seen many examples but I won't point fingers directly and blame them publicly. I just want this to be stopped, many great projects have their last commit a year ago for example but everyone knows it's maintained, you don't have to cheat users just to gain downloads/stars for your next job application. <comment><USER2> Updating docs or dependencies is part of maintaining a project. If no new features are needed the author doesn't need to do more. As a user it still shows me the maintainer is alive, uses a computer and does open source work. I have 5+ such projects. For some I wouldn't even update the dependencies but I get automated messages about security issues with dependencies so of course I'm interested it fixing that.

> many great projects have their last commit a year ago for example but > everyone knows it's maintained

How does everyone know?

<comment><USER3> > How does everyone know?

I think one year is not out of the actively maintained zone for a mature project, but that >18-month zone is problematic. Also the number and type of issues. I was just yesterday looking at such a Schrodinger's project and wishing I had a way to determine if it was still maintained.

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly. I have never experienced problems caused by outdated stuff with code less than a year since the last update.

Edit: People __ALWAYS __fix things when something outdated breaks the whole project.</comment></comment></comment>