Ask HN: Small Business Loan VS Angel/VC - <AUTHOR>

I am looking for some capital to allow me to quit my 9-5 job, and work on my startup full time.
I know most tech startups these days are going with angels, super-angels, and VC funding. It kinda-seems like every tech startup these days is drinking the angel/VC koolaid. The financing option I never hear about in technology and on YC, is a traditional bank small business loan.
On first inspection is seems like a great option; I don't have to give away any ownership of my company. Once approved, the bank gives me money, and basically says do whatever you want with it, just pay us back.
The downside is of course the interest, but assuming I can become profitable in the short term, interest is negligible.
Wanted to get insight from the YC community though on thoughts about small business loans. <comment><USER2> The problem you will find with small business loans, SBA especially, is that you can't get approved for one without revenue, or an asset that you are purchasing.

You could check out a non-traditional source for financing like <http://www.lendingclub.com> , but even that maxes out at 25K and is personally guaranteed (rate depends on mostly your credit score). (disclosure: I did some consulting for them a few years ago)

Bottom line: Small business loans aren't for startups, they are for established businesses.

</comment><comment><USER3> Banks are not in the business of startups. Angels and VCs are. Small business loans for a startup are very unlikely, and only really occur when the Small Business Administration gives the bank federal assistance.

Additionally, betting on being profitable in the short term is not a good bet.

</comment><comment><USER4> You stand almost zero chance of getting a small business loan, possibly only if you offer a personal guarantee to back it up (meaning you personally are liable to repay the loan).

Given the vast majority of startups that either fail to gain decent revenue, or just outright fail to launch, I'd have to say that you'd be crazy to offer a personal backing to loan vs. giving up some share of the company to an investor.

No offense, but if you're even asking about this, you probably don't want to be considering the loan route.</comment>


Monsters From the Id: The Making of Doom - <AUTHOR> http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=21405

<comment><USER2> i submitted john romero's comments on this article earlier:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=439758></comment>


I no longer want to be a developer - <AUTHOR> http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/78956/i-no-longer-want-to-be-a-developer

<comment><USER2> There's the thing with good developers. We tend to fit into the INTP range of things, but many flop over to the INFJ and INFP realms as well. Meaningful work, as it were, is incredibly important to the latter two. That's not to say the INTPs don't need the same thing, but to the INF* crowd, its a basic building block for success. Without it, we (INFJ here) burnout incredibly quickly and cease to be as productive as we could be. Anytime I see that "meaningful" this or that in someone's declaration of burnout, I can't help but smile. Not out of schadenfreude, but out of joy that the self regulation of that person's life kicked in. Its a great feeling when you get out of that slump, and recognizing that you're in it is the first step.

<comment><USER2> I sense disagreement due to the down votes. Care to discuss? I'm actually interested to hear someone else's viewpoint on this. :)

<comment><USER3> Perhaps people downvote the argument which is based on socionics. I've noted similar down votes on comments where the underlying basis was not well established.</comment></comment></comment>


What everyone in the SOPA debate is missing: IP is not a fundamental right - <AUTHOR> http://rondam.blogspot.com/2012/01/what-everyone-in-sopa-debate-is-missing.html <comment><USER2> In the modern world, "property" may be tangible or intangible, as the law may recognize it.

Law may take all sorts of forms. In the U.S., it may take the form of a federal constitution or a state constitution, or of a federal statute or a state statute, or of a federal administrative regulation or a state administrative regulation, or of a federal court decision or a state court decision.

For example, with patents, you have a constitutional provision that empowers the federal legislative branch to authorize grants of limited patent monopolies, you have federal statutes dating back to 1792 that implement that authority by conferring rights on inventors to apply for and obtain patents, you have a regulatory framework under the USPTO that sets out a framework for evaluating what is or is not patentable, and you have federal courts that adjudicate disputes affecting the enforcement of patent rights. One can argue over whether patent grants are "property" or not but this is really more a philosophical argument than a legal one. Those who oppose patents philosophically will argue that patents are nothing more than monopoly grants that cannot be said to have equal dignity with tangible forms of property and that are therefore not worthy of the label "property." In this view, the "property" label has merely been hijacked by those who seek to unfairly skew the debate over whether patent monopolies should ever be granted in the first place. Yet, while this sort of discussion frames the philosophical debate, the law gives patent holders a full complement of rights that confer all the attributes of property: under indisputable governing law today, such rights can be owned exclusively by someone to the exclusion of all others, they can be licensed to others by the rights holder via a license in exchange for value given (fees or royalties, one-time or recurring) or otherwise, either exclusively or non-exclusively, they can be assigned, transferred, or sold for valuable consideration, they can be passed by inheritance in the case of individuals or sold out of bankruptcy court in the case of any holder, and each successive buyer of the rights has valuable, exclusive rights that certainly resemble "property" whatever the philosophical arguments pro or con in using that label. When the Nortel patents sell for several billion dollars on auction, or when Google buys Motorola for many billions of dollars when the main asset is its patent portfolio, the commercial players are buying valuable intangible assets, i.e., bundles of legal rights that can be possessed, used, improved upon, bought, sold, sued upon, and legally enforced to the exclusion of others. In every functional sense, that is "property" whether it is ultimately some fundamental right or not in the philosophical sense.

The same goes for copyright, which protects tangible forms of creative expression, whether writings, films, compositions, software code, or many other items. As with patents, the rights associated with legal protections of such creative expressions can have huge value and such rights can be "owned" by a specific holder to the exclusion of all others, can be licensed, sold, gifted, passed by will, etc. in much the same manner as can tangible forms of property. Such rights, then, in a legal functional sense, have all the attributes of "property" whatever they may be in a fundamental, philosophical sense.

The same goes for trademarks - a form of intangible right by which the law protects a merchant's right to use marks or symbols to identify the origin of goods or services so that others cannot fraudulently pass off their goods or services as those of another. Unlike patents and copyrights, trademarks have their origin in judicial decisions by which the courts decided to grant forms of "property" protection to protectible marks created by merchants while selling their goods or services in commerce. Later, federal statutes and regulatory structures were set up to facilitate more efficient registration of such marks. The result, though, is the same as in the case of patents and copyrights: trademark rights can be bought and sold, licensed, sued upon for enforcement, etc. in all the ways that tangible forms of property can be and in this legal, functional sense they are "property" as much as anything else can be called that.

So too trade secret rights are ascribed to commercial information that is both proprietary (i.e., "owned" by someone) and confidential and such rights similarly can be sold, etc., as in asset sales or stock sales by which entire companies are acquired.

At every level of law (federal and state constitutions, statutes, regulatory bodies, and courts), the foregoing forms of intangible rights are recognized and protected as "property." In the legal sense, then, IP is indisputably treated as "property" whether or not it is "fundamental."

SOPA is illegitimate not because copyrights are illegitimate by nature but because it seeks to take a reasonable enforcement scheme relating to copyrights across the web and turn it into a bastardized version that is grossly unfair and highly destructive. One can argue that copyrights are illegitimate by nature but that is a philosophical argument and not a legal one. Legally, copyrights have consistently been enforced in the U.S. since the adoption of the federal constitution. Are they always legitimately enforced? As a matter of policy, they have not been, in my view. The copyright extensions, the grabbing of public domain materials to put them back in copyright, etc. have been products of grotesque lobbying efforts and cravenly legislative efforts that serve no proper purpose other than to favor a privileged few in efforts that clearly damage the broader society (this is another way of saying they don't serve the legitimate purposes of copyright in the first place). That said, however, the core of copyright has a long and well-recognized place in American law and (I believe) broad significant support from the many people who believe that creative efforts should not be treated as common property but should be protected (within limits) for the benefit of their creators.

It thus seems to me irrelevant to say that IP is not a "fundamental" right (I would agree that IP rights are not fundamental in the constitutional sense). Yes, Congress could constitutionally act to repeal the implementing statutes. But so what? Copyright has been consistently implemented and enforced in the U.S. since the beginning of the nation and there is every reason to believe that it will continue to be protected as "property" in the sense I describe above for many years to come. Copyright may not be "fundamental" in the constitutional sense but it is deeply entrenched in our nation and (in my view) continues to have strong support among the broader public. One can support it while adamantly opposing SOPA. The two should not be confused.

<comment><AUTHOR> I do not say that copyrights (and patents) are illegitimate by nature. All I'm saying is that it's important to keep in mind _why_ copyrights exist: it is not because the Founders thought it was a fundamental, inalienable right, it is because IP is a pragmatic solution to a practical problem: how do you encourage people to put forth the effort required to invent things and create art? The default state is not that people have a "right" to their work, the default state is that everything is in the public domain, and copyrights and patents are a deviation from that ideal. They are a legitimate deviation for a legitimate purpose, but a deviation nonetheless. I think that it becomes clearer that SOPA is illegitimate when viewed with that perspective.

<comment><USER3> One might argue that the "default state" for all forms of property, including my car and dinner plates, is in the public domain. What fundamental law that transcends the Constitution says my car is "mine"? Yeah the Constitution has some base in natural law, but that's subjective western thought too, nothing universal. I agree 100% that IP laws today need tweaking, or scrapping, but GP is right that the philosophical debate over it is an unrelated issue.

<comment><USER4> Taking your car or movie is a fundamental issue. Copying your car or movie is not.

Edit: reflecting on my comment I realize everyone, me included, is looking at this wrong. There is a Constitutional issue - Fourth Amendment "secure in papers and effects". Nobody has a right to just look at & act on the contents of your "papers" (now extending to digital video etc), and contractual access thereto must be respected. You may not like the contracts limiting access to something, but you have a natural obligation to respect them. Copyright and patent law were stopgap measures in place for where such controlled access was hard to implement.

Just a thought.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've always thought this is one of the more brilliant quotes concerning intellectual property rights/copyright, in response to those who feel that they "deserve" or are somehow entitled to the protection of IP rights:

"Wise assessment of copyright policy should have nothing to do with how you feel about the person or entity who holds the right at any particular time, because copyright policy is not about identifying wonderful and meritorious people and ensuring—certainly not as an end in itself, anyway—that their income is proportioned to their intrinsic moral desert—or lack thereof. We are all the massive beneficiaries of millennia of accumulated human scientific knowledge and cultural output, and not one of us did anything do deserve a jot of it. We're all just extremely lucky not to have been born cavemen. The greatest creative genius alive would be hard pressed to create a smiley faced smeared in dung on a tree trunk without that huge and completely undeserved inheritance.

So banish the word "deserve" from your mind when you think about copyright. Nobody "deserves" a goddamn thing. (I say this, for what it's worth, as someone who makes his living entirely through the production of "intellectual property.") The only—the only—relevant question is whether a marginal restriction on the general ability to use information incentivizes enough additional information production over the long run to justify denying that marginal use to every other human being on the planet, whether for simple consumption or further creation."

<http://www.juliansanchez.com/2011/03/30/4457/>

<comment><USER6> This point cannot be stressed enough, ideas owe _everything_ to that which comes before it, acting like somebody brilliantly creates in a bubble without outside inspiration and help, therefore deserves to take away all the reward is toxic.

Its the tragedy of the commons at an idea level really.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Kinsella, a legal professional in the area of IP in the US, covers the legal and historical context surrounding IP and comes to similar conclusions. In short, he concludes, you cannot have Intellectual Property rights without restricting someone else's Physical Property rights; IP is fundamentally at odds with Physical Property rights.

True to form, his book is available for free in digital formats: [http://mises.org/resources/3582/Against-Intellectual- Propert...](http://mises.org/resources/3582/Against-Intellectual-Property)

And audio: [http://blog.mises.org/11717/against-intellectual-property- au...](http://blog.mises.org/11717/against-intellectual-property-audiobook- version/)

EDIT: clarified that Kinsella is a lawyer and knows this subject well

<comment><USER8> It reminds me the Monsanto Canada Inc. v. Schmeiser case, in which, the IP on GMOs is clearly at odds with the land property rights of the owner.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

       (1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life
           of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific
           advancement and its benefits.
       (2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material
           interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic
           production of which he is the author.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human_Rights#Article_27)

<comment><USER10> Please forgive me if I'm missing something, but doesn't Article 29, Section 3 make the Universal Declaration of Human Rights kind of a joke? The right to enjoy the arts doesn't really have teeth if the UN can just say it's contrary to its principles.

<http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/> Article 29, Section 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: "These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations."

<comment><USER9> I think for context the full article needs to be posted.

       (1) Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free
           and full development of his personality is possible.
       (2) In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be
           subject only to such limitations as are determined by law
           solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and
           respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting
           the just requirements of morality, public order and the
           general welfare in a democratic society.
       (3) These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary
           to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

The purposes and principles are defined in the preamble of the declaration.

       PREAMBLE

       Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal
       and
       inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the
       foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,

       Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted
       in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind,
       and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy
       freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want
       has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common
       people,

       Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have
       recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and
       oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of
       law,

       Whereas it is essential to promote the development of friendly
       relations between nations,

       Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter
       reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the
       dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights
       of men and women and have determined to promote social progress
       and better standards of life in larger freedom,

       Whereas Member States have pledged themselves to achieve, in
       co-operation with the United Nations, the promotion of
       universal respect for and observance of human rights and
       fundamental freedoms,

       Whereas a common understanding of these rights and freedoms
       is of the greatest importance for the full realization of this
       pledge,

<comment><USER10> Gotchya, so you're saying that the 'purposes and principles of the United Nations' is being used as a technical term referencing the rest of the document, and doesn't depend on what the organization of the UN wants at any specific moment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I agree that "Intellectual Property" isn't property per se.

It's just too easy to re-invent a particular bit of "IP". I mean, I've done some of those on-line "C Programming Interview Test Questions", and come up with something _identical_ to the given answer, except for choice of variable names.

Independent invention just ruins "IP" as property.

<comment><USER12> Independent creation only applies to copyright. If I independently write the same code as you, we both have copyright on it.

Patents exclude independent invention. If we both invent the same thing and I have the patent, you cannot use your invention.

Trademarks allow independent creation in separate geographic areas, but a pre- existing use can exclude an independent creation.

This is one of the many reasons that "Intellectual Property" is a misnomer - the differences between copyrights and patents and trademarks are probably larger than the similarities.

<comment><USER11> I agree with you on the distinction of copyright and patent with respect to independent invention. But that's just a human-made distinction, in the USA. Whoever wrote the laws didn't get independent invention enacted in patents.

I also agree with your reason for "IP" as a misnomer.

I wanted to speak in a general or philosophical sense. not in a legal, specific sense. The internally-inconsistent concept of "Intellectual Property" founders on the rock of independent invention, if you reason from first principles, rather than attempting to propagandize your way through to some kind of state-enforced monopoly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> loup-vaillant Edit: I see that the following comment may invalidate mine. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3463292>

Minor point:

> _Congress is constrained to grant this right only in service of a specific > purpose. namely, to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, and > only "for limited times"._

This is not exactly what I read it. I understood that the congress can grant monopolies to promote Arts and Science. Nothing more, nothing less. It doesn't explicitly forbid the congress to use those monopolies for other purposes. Nor does it say anything about the case where granting monopolies doesn't promote Art and Science at all, by the way.

Now if it can be established that such monopolies hinders other rights described in the constitution, then you are correct: they can only be used to promote Art and Science. And if we could further establish that those monopolies _do not_ actually promote Art and Science, then it may be unconstitutional to use them at all.

<comment><AUTHOR> > It doesn't explicitly forbid the congress to use those monopolies for other > purposes.

What forbids Congress to use those monopoly grants for other purposes is the doctrine of enumerated powers.

<comment><USER13> > What forbids Congress to use those monopoly grants for other purposes is the > doctrine of enumerated powers.

Except that said doctrine is mostly dead, thanks to the commerce clause, an expansive definition of "interstate", and "promote the general welfare".

<comment><USER14> What? The Constitution gives the government the right to legislate to promote the general welfare?

So they could compel people, with the treat of prison time, to exercise and eat healthy?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Every time I see the term, I can't help but imagine Mike Myers, on the verge of being verklempt suggesting that its neither "intellectual", nor "property" and then instructing us to talk amongst ourselves.

</comment><comment><USER16> Instead of calling intellectual property we should refer to it as intellectual monopoly since that is really what its. It restricts what you can do with your own property.

<comment><USER8> Monopoly can be more restrictive actually. For example, if it is only a monopoly, the institution can grant the monopoly but restrict patent transfer/sale. Consider that most patent trolling companies are using patents they acquired, it may be a good thing. But as long as the current system setup goes, it is full property rights you have over your intellectual "product" (i.e. right to use, transfer, exclude and destroy)

<comment><USER12> Actually, copyright and patent exclude the right to destroy.

A patent must be filed & public to be granted.

A copyright must be registered to file suit.

To allow destruction would violate the very purpose of patent/copyright.

<comment><USER17> > A copyright must be registered to file suit.

Nope! Not in the USA, anyhow. If you sue without registering, all it does is make statutory damages unavailable, it doesn't block you from filling suit. Also, you can register any time before filing suit, losing only your presumption of validity in certain cases. That said, both of those things are highly desirable, so it would be pretty silly to sue without taking care of those matters first.

That said, get a lawyer if you ever have more than an academic interest in this, because there are always weird edge cases when dealing with the law.

<comment><USER12> <http://www.copyright.gov/fls/sl09.pdf> states:

...the Copyright Office must have acted on your application before you can file a suit for copyright infringement, and certain remedies, such as statutory damages and attorney's fees, are available only for acts of infringement that occurred after the effective date of registration.

<comment><USER17> Hmm, you're right. I got confused somewhere.

[http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/...](http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter0/0-d.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Looking into the original intent of the constitution and imagining the emotions of those involved with its drafting leaves a sense of fantastic optimism, intelligence, and idyllic hope. It's a beautiful piece of Ameprican history that I always take the time to read into when it comes up. I'm glad it was brought up in this context.

</comment><comment><USER19> For the record, the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (which is mostly law in most EU countries), does, unfortunately, state (in Article 17.2):

> Intellectual property shall be protected.

It's unfortunate that, unlike the US Consitution, there is no explicit mention of purpose, limited time, etc.

</comment><comment><USER20> When the discussion of rights comes up, I think that George Carlin has some wise words on the subject.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9-R8T1SuG4>

"...Either we have unlimited rights, or we have no rights at all." -George Carlin

</comment><comment><USER21> How does this distinction reframe the SOPA debate?

<comment><AUTHOR> The current debate is framed by the presumption that "intellectual property" is a fundamental right that must be protected, and the disagreement is only over the means by which this is done and the collateral damage that results. Questioning the premise of "intellectual property" (and, by extension, "online piracy") makes the position of SOPA's supporters less tenable.

<comment><USER21> I was hoping for an explanation of how the current arguments draw power from the distinction between 'fundamental' vs. 'government granted' rights. Simply restating that "the debate is framed that way" provides no such explanation.

The position of SOPA's supporters is "hey government, there are people stealing our work on a massive scale; fucking do something about it." The actual enforcement mechanisms in the bill have taken center stage in the debate because that position statement is credible (and obviously so).

I did not hear the author's post as questioning authorship as a concept, or the fact that U.S. law recognizes authorship as an activity which confers upon the author legal rights (or are we calling all of those 'privileges' now?) that are not granted to everyone else.

<comment><AUTHOR> (Note: I am the author.)

Here's an analogy: imagine a time before the civil war when slave owners go to Congress to demand draconian measures be enacted to find and repatriate runaway slaves, i.e. "Hey government, people are stealing our property, fucking do something about it" as you say. One can argue against such measures on all sorts of pragmatic and legal grounds, but all of those arguments are strengthened if one questions the underlying premise that humans can legitimately be considered property.

Likewise, all of the pragmatic and legal arguments against SOPA are strengthened if one does not tacitly accept the premise that intellectual property has the same legal standing as other kinds of property.

<comment><USER21> Thanks, I think I now understand (better, at least) where your original post was coming from.

So now that we're not "tacitly" accepting that IP has "the same" legal foundations qua other properties like cars and laptops, do you also intend to non-tacitly reject the claim that "online piracy" is a thing that subjects content producers to harm?

Because it seems to me that if you agree there is harm at all, we jump to a debate where we're arguing (I think) whether the Extent of the harm is such that the Proposed Enforcement Mechanisms and Penalties are a legitimate fit.

My impression of the SOPA hearing was that's pretty much where we are today. e.g. Google's recommendation to "follow the money" was an attempt to fit an enforcement mechanism to illegitimate financial gain by parties other than the content owner.

<comment><AUTHOR> > do you also intend to non-tacitly reject the claim that "online piracy" is a > thing that subjects content producers to harm?

I would say that I would examine this claim under the new, more correct perspective rather than reject it. "Harm" is a relative notion. The baseline state against which the situation is be measured is that all information by default should be in the public domain. The gains that authors get from copyrights are a _grant_ , not an entitlement, to encourage them to produce. So the "harm" is that the grant is (perhaps) smaller than it would by under a more aggressive enforcement regime.

The real test ought to be: is the grant large enough to serve the purpose, i.e. to encourage people to produce creative works? The answer at the moment seems to be manifestly that it is. I would challenge you to find even a single example of a creative work that might have been produced but wasn't because of fear of piracy.

<comment><USER21> I strongly agree that harm is relative, and that the relative harm of infringement must be balanced against the potential harms of any enforcement mechanism (with significant room for error on the side of under-enforcement).

I strongly object to the idea that IP rights are only real to the extent that they are a) granted by the state and b) encourage additional creative effort. Utilitarianism is a great model for a democratic society to use when encoding things into legislation, but isn't a great "be all" for ethical theory or ontology.

Your test and request are problematic. If there is a creative work that might have been produced but wasn't, for the reason you'd like me to somehow cite evidence for, by what search method (other than knowledge of my own personal creative endeavors) should I seek out such an example? And if I pluck from my own experience, what would constitute evidence that the actual reasons for non-production are what I claim them to be?

I would bet there are thousands of bedroom-class electronic music producers who never devote a ton of effort to their talents because of the rate at which music is pirated. The number of hours it takes to become passable at production is quite large, even with great tools. And even if they become accomplished, they have no great hope of turning that accomplishment into gigs or recordings that pay a living wage, precisely because piracy became so rampant that people now expect new artists to give away their first EP-worth for free or under a "pay what you want" scheme.

The world has decided that the fruit of those first 1000-4000 hours shouldn't cost anything. You're telling me that doesn't have a chilling effect on people deciding whether or not to spend that kind of time?

"But see," I imagine you saying, "Now we only get artists who were willing to do Whatever It Takes to become great!" Yeah well, a lot of those folks suck compared to some other guy who had a family and a mortgage to think about; you'll just never hear that guy.

<comment><AUTHOR> > I strongly object to the idea that IP rights are only real to the extent > that they are a) granted by the state and b) encourage additional creative > effort.

Then you'll have to amend the Constitution. Or you could try to make the argument that the 1st amendment supersedes the Article 2 authority to establish copyright. Some people are doing that, but I'm pretty sure they're going to lose.

> If there is a creative work that might have been produced but wasn't, for > the reason you'd like me to somehow cite evidence for, by what search method > (other than knowledge of my own personal creative endeavors) should I seek > out such an example?

By the same methodology that you use to do any market research: ask people in the industry. There is ample precedent for this sort of thing. For example, the production of small general aviation aircraft more or less ceased during the 80's and 90's. It was pretty straightforward to show that the reason this happened was because of liability laws. These laws were changed in 1994, and now the production of light aircraft resumed.

I don't see an analogous shortage of movies. Quite the opposite: there seems to be an overwhelming glut on the market. The Sundance Film Festival got 8000 submissions for 100 openings. There's so much new music coming out that it's a full time job to keep up with it all. That seems to me like pretty compelling evidence that piracy is not much of an impediment to production.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> IP could bot be a fundamental right, but unrestricted communication is.

</comment><comment><USER23> Since this article talks about the constitution, I wanted to quote the preamble to the bill of rights. Since this set of amendments was enacted, as part of the deal to get the constitution passed, it is illustrative of the perspective of right at the time of adoption of the constitution.

"THE Conventions of a number of the States having at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added: And as extending the ground of public confidence in the Government, will best insure the beneficent ends of its institution"

In other words, the Bill of Rights was enacted "in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers". This is referring to the limited powers granted to the government in the constitution. Notice, the preamble doesn't say "in order to grant rights...". The bill of rights contains "further declaratory and restrictive clauses".

Thus, these clauses are not designed to create or grant rights, but are of a "declaratory and restrictive" nature.

The constitution does not create any rights. There is no such thing, in the american form of government, as "constitutional rights". People often use this phrase when referring to the Bill of Rights, but it is imprecise, because the Bill of Rights doesn't grant rights. IT doesn't say "the people shall have the right of free speech", instead it says "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;"

The right of free speech, as recognized by the First Amendment, _precedes_ and predates the constitution.

The constitution is a document constructed under a theory of natural rights, by a group of men, many of whom had just fought off a government they considered oppressive because it didn't recognize their natural rights.

Every right, IP, or not, precedes the constitution, they are not granted by the constitution.

Thus, where the constitution says: "The Congress shall have Power ... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

The use of the word "securing" is deliberate.

I'm not going to debate whether intellectual property is a natural right or not. (But I wonder, if you come up with an invention but don't tell anybody, isn't that a natural property right? I mean, to say that you don't' have a right to it, would be to say that others have the right to forcibly take it from you, wouldn't it?)

My point is simply that the constitution doesn't grant any rights, rights precede it. The constitution gives the federal government _limited_ and _enumerated_ powers. And the federal government does not have the power to pass SOPA, both because there is no _enumerated_ power to do what it does, and because the first amendment forbids it.

The question of whether IP is a natural right is a separate one, and opposition to soap on constitutional grounds does not imply conceding it, or not.

<comment><USER24> As a community of thoughtful 21st-century people, I suggest we reject entirely the idea of "natural rights" and treat it as an archaism.

Natural _laws_ exist; regardless of anything you, I, or the government does, gravity continues to exist as a physical, observable force. Natural rights do not work the same way; they are inherently and in principle unobservable both directly and indirectly. The only thing that is real are the rights that we have in practice (e.g. as a function of law, economics, culture) and the rights that we ought to have, based on testable theories of how these rights lead to human flourishing.

I say this not to demean rights or to say rights or liberty are unimportant. (Similarly, if I say evolution rather than direct divine intervention created humans, that does not demean humans.)

The reason I make this claim is because "natural rights" is a complex concept that many people struggle to understand. But most of that struggle comes from it being an unsustainable idea as well as a dead end: it discourages serious consideration of how we should best organize our society. Religiously-inspired philosophers (John Locke, in this case) spent much time on ideas like this; certainly some people inspired by these ideas did some good things. But I think in our modern era we should set these ideas and other bad philosophy aside and work from better foundations.

Not only will this lead to stronger, more useful thinking generally, but it will also lead to more secular, persuasive dialogue with our legislators in the short term. They are bound in various ways by the Constitution, but they are not bound by the theory of natural or inalienable rights, which is not actually part of that document (see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declarationism>).

edited for clarity.

<comment><USER25> Better foundations? You mean utilitarianism? That's a dead end too.

As a monkey-troup-descended race, we operate on some pretty common and predictable impulses. To manage those impulses we establish some premises and call them rights. Right to life, liberty etc.

Call them something else than 'natural rights' if you must, but its folly to ignore their existance.

<comment><USER24> _Better foundations? You mean utilitarianism? That's a dead end too._

Currently, utilitarianism does seem to have problems, but not every framework for measuring or improving social well-being will necessarily share the problems of utilitarianism. One promising approach: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_approach>.

 _...we operate on some pretty common and predictable impulses. To manage those impulses we establish some premises and call them rights. Right to life, liberty etc._

If I understand you correctly, you are saying that rights are something separate from natural impulses; they are things that we use appropriately manage (or channel) those impulses. I basically agree. But: "manage" must mean some goal that is separate from the impulses themselves, and when we establish rights that we think will appropriately direct impulses towards some goal, those rights--whether inspired by science or theology--cannot be considered natural. They are human guesses, subject to scrutiny, discussion, and improvement--to call them natural is untrue and confusing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> edit: Just because I'm stating this fact, doesn't mean that I endorse it. Please, just because you agree that the world unfortunately is this way, don't downvote me as if I'm the cause of the current state of affairs. I'm not old enough or powerful enough to be so.

Is the author a constitutional lawyer? Because if not, I really can't trust any of this.

The reason that constitutional lawyers exist is because this short document is deceptively sophisticated and every interpretation of every stanza has seen its day in court almost every generation since its authorship.

Just reading something and assuming that the legal ramifications are clear and apparent without knowing the extensive history of the actual legal ramifications belongs more in the world of political opinion than anything remotely approximate to legal standing.

It's almost as if a corpus of court proceedings a 100 meters long should be affixed to every word in order to gain an appreciation for what is legally pursuant via the constitution.

<comment><USER27> I'm not sure I can agree with everything you're saying. Was the Constitution written with the expectation that later generations would consider it "deceptively sophisticated" and that only "constitutional lawyers" should be able to make sense of it? Was it purposefully written so that later constitutional lawyers could interpret it in new ways that seem counter- intuitive to everyone else? I don't think so.

<comment><USER26> Of course not. But that's what's happened. And as a result, the barrier to entry in knowing the true meaning is now quite high.

I'm not placing a vote of approval of this reality; just stating that it exists. It aggravates me too.

<comment><USER27> Then where did the supposed complexity come from?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The fastest production-ready image resize out there - <AUTHOR> https://blog.uploadcare.com/the-fastest-production-ready-image-resize-out-there-part-0-7c974d520ad9 <comment><USER2> Alex, do you have any interest in an FPGA based resizer?</comment>


Chrome only future for Flash on Linux - <AUTHOR> http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Chrome-only-future-for-Flash-on-Linux-1440104.html

<comment><AUTHOR> this makes firefox more attractive again. ^ ^</comment>


What to do with small data? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/rants-on-machine-learning/what-to-do-with-small-data-d253254d1a89 <comment><USER2> Use Excel.

<comment><USER3> That does make it very natural to scale to big data (aka lots of Excel files).</comment></comment>


Microsoft: The "Velvet Sweatshop" (1989) - <AUTHOR> http://www.krsaborio.net/research/1980s/89/890423.htm Really illuminating article written in 1989 on Microsoft's culture. Any parallels you draw to large corporations of today are strictly your own. <comment><USER2> It's shocking how well replacing "Microsoft" for "Google" and "1989" with "2008" works.

<comment><USER3> It's only shocking if you haven't lived through it before.

Google's growth will slow, and the most ambitious employees will move along or retire (this is already happening), leaving the careerists to take over. As the management structure of the company ossifies, the young employees will stop working quite so many hours (why bother, if it's not going to make you rich?), and a job at Google will become Just Another Daily Grind (tm). Over time, the free food and massages will look as dated and manipulative as the free soda at Microsoft, and the company will become an elaborate, kabuki- theater version of its youthful mythology.

I think you know you're on the bad side of this narrative when you start to see Audis and Volvos in the company parking lot. Clunkers are good (the employees are young and hungry) and ridiculous sports cars are okay (the employees are newly rich and brash), but luxury sedans are the death knell for innovation. (And yes, in case you're wondering -- the lots at Microsoft are positively _filled_ with them).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The image the author paints of Ballmer in a red bikini will haunt me for the rest of my days.</comment>


Ask HN: Review my first website design - <AUTHOR>

http://csa.22web.net/<p>This is my first website design for the Computer Science Association, BITS-Pilani, India. I have been learning HTML, CSS and jquery for a month now and this was the first actual work of mine. Please review it. <comment><USER2> If you've been doing that for only 30 days you're going to go very far.

The only remark I've got right off the bat is that to load the contents of the like this is not very friendly with respect to indexing by search engines.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I do know search engines have problems indexing AJAX, but I ended up doing it anyways because this was going to be very specific to be used mostly within our college and others when technical festivals come around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I am going to agree with jacquesm on this one. You really have a very simple and classy eye for designing a website. Good Job on this. And yes, it is a little bit harder for the search engines to index the website.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks. I liked minimalist designs on the web, and so designed this on the lines of those.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great, except I'm not really a fan of the (slow) on hover animation, nor of the indentation of the currently selected element.

<comment><AUTHOR> The idea was to make the currently selected look distinct from others since the URL reflects no changes. So, do I remove the effect and keep the color change only?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Link. <http://csa.22web.net/></comment>


Physics explains why time passes faster as you age - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1516804/physics-explains-why-time-passes-faster-as-you-age/ <comment><USER2> I always thought it was because each time unit's size is a function of percentage of the total time experienced.

In other words, a 2 month summer is a significantly larger percentage of the overall lifetime of a 5 year old as compared to the very small percentage those same 2 months represent for a 90 year old.

Likewise in the formative years, you are constantly experiencing and learning new things. So the number of "aha" moments one would remember get fewer and farther between as one matures. By the time you're old and wise, you've seen just about everything and it takes more effort to have a memorable "aha" moment.

Together, in youth you have a very large percentage of your life's time, along with a whole lot more novel experiences makes looking back at the time feel much longer than currently experienced.

</comment><comment><USER3> Funny, I was thinking about this just recently...

I rediscovered a way to slow down time, significantly. To do that, I all have to do is water-fast. That's that simple :-).

Especially when folks around are eating normally.

Perhaps, it is some how related to the components mentioned in the article:

>".... Time is happening in the mind's eye. It is related to the number of mental images the brain encounters and > organizes and the state of our brains as we age. ...."</comment>


Show HN: Rental apartment quality data in augmented reality, for SF and NYC - <AUTHOR> http://getaugrented.com <comment><USER2> Cool!</comment>


Elon Musk at TED (Feb 2013) - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=IgKWPdJWuBQ

<comment><USER2> I have seen a lot of videos with Elon Musk recently and this one is one of the best. It also contains some interesting footage of what the people at SpaceX are doing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed, I thought it was a great interview. I also quite liked the talk he gave at Oxford University:

[http://www.treehugger.com/green-investments/tesla-ceo- elon-m...](http://www.treehugger.com/green-investments/tesla-ceo-elon-musk- gives-hour-long-speech-university-oxford-video-and-audio-q-a.html)</comment></comment>


Netflix performance on Verizon and Comcast has been dropping for months - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/02/netflix-performance-on-verizon-and-comcast-has-been-dropping-for-months/ <comment><USER2> Hint: never use Comcast for residential service. Sign up for business service, even if you're just one person in an apartment. You get better support, less BS, and (likely) improved immunity to copyright-trolling law firms.

They will still route about 10% of your packets via the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, of course, but that's just the nature of the beast.

<comment><USER3> This also prevents you from using your own modem and requiring you to lease one of theirs (not to mention requiring a year contract), doesn't it?

<comment><USER4> You can use your own modem with Comcast business service (I do) but it took about two weeks of calling all the tech support numbers I could find until I finally got a tech who was able to do it. Not because it's hard to do, but because most of the people I talked to were lying or incompetent.

The guy seemed a bit weirded out at how profusely I thanked him -- after all, all I'd done was tell him the model and MAC address of my generic Motorola modem.

Don't waste your time explaining to them why you want to use a real modem (I have my own router/firewall, their modem had NAT I could not disable) or that it's the same modem that works on the residential service (which is the same physical network). It won't help, just say "I bought a <VENDOR> <MODEL> modem, can you set it up on my account?" and hang up and try again if they act like your request is bizarre.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for this. I've been wondering, so tomorrow. I'm going to start the process.

<comment><USER6> It saddens me that I feel like every interaction with Comcast is a "process" at best and an outer circle of hell on average.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The problem here is that Comcast and Verizon don't want to pay for the upstream bandwidth to the Netflix Open Connect CDN which means that as Netflix increases quality and gains additional subscribers, the time-weighted bitrate (TWBR, the metric they use to compare ISP performance) will continue to plummet. This isn't to say that all Comcast and Verizon customers will feel this pain, some markets have better performance than others (e.g. SF Bay being an example of poor performance).

Edit: Other CDNs such as Akamai, Level 3 and Limelight pay to peer with Comcast; whereas Netflix refuses to since Comcast will simply gouge them for the opportunity. Netflix is increasingly moving away from third-party CDNs and onto their Open Connect CDN which will escalate this to a fever pitch.

<comment><USER8> It should be noted that having a Netflix OpenConnect Hardware Appliance is 100% free of charge for ISPs. The device itself is free, but I suppose you could factor in the cost to power the 4U server and the rack space used by it but those costs are negligible compared to the additional peering bandwidth used by not having one.

From the FAQ[0]

      >What does the appliance cost my organization?
      > The appliances (and any necessary replacements) are provided
      > to participating ISPs free of charge when used within the
      > terms of the license agreement.

[0](PDF) [https://secure.netflix.com/us/layout/signup/deviceinfo/OpenC...](https://secure.netflix.com/us/layout/signup/deviceinfo/OpenConnectDeploymentGuide-v2.4a.pdf)

<comment><USER9> It's also worth noting that a 10ge flatrate port to Cogent isn't going to cost them that much either -- and then they don't have to deal with any additional hardware, just a crossconnect. But for some reason, paying an additional ~$6K a month so that millions of your subscribers have better service is too high a price to pay

<comment><USER10> 10 gigabit can't come close to covering the growing demand, no?

During primetime hours, Netflix represents some substantial fraction of total U.S. internet traffic. If you're Comcast, running 25% of the U.S. broadband market, you're seeing a big chunk of that traffic. What if Netflix decides to double their max streaming rate? Or quadruple it? We can argue again about what it means that Comcast sells you a 20Mbit-max connection, but as a practical matter, it will cost them a lot more than $6K/month to keep up with Netflix's growth in subscribers, average daily viewership and stream quality.

<comment><USER9> 10Gbps isn't a _lot_ in terms of total capacity or utilization but even a 100 extra kbps of burstable bandwidth/user can greatly improve the experience. It's the difference between buffering every 30sec and watching with only minor stuttering. Also, bandwidth costs only go down/mbps as you get bigger. $6K/month is what you pay if you're a small business; Comcast or Verizon would get high-level pricing (puts their cost somewhere around ~$3.5K/mn). A 50Gbps commit with another 50Gbps at 95th percentile pricing would would cost them fractions of a cent per customer but would make people much happier.

Now they'll never to it because they'd rather keep that ~$25K.

<comment><USER10> 100Kbps/subscriber is around 200Gbps for Comcast. And that's just 100Kbps! Netflix is going to keep telling their customers they're getting a suboptimal HD experience (and they'll be right!) until the average stream gets somewhere near Blu-ray's ~20Mbps. Maybe half that if you think codecs are going to get better, but by then 4K will be winding down the pike.

The point is that for Comcast and Verizon, there's no end in sight: A few more ports connected in a few more data centers isn't going to do more than make a few subscribers slightly happier for a few months.

<comment><USER9> It doesn't _have_ to be dedicated, just bustable to a reasonably large number of subscribers at a time. Netflix will prefretch data and a small amount of burstable bandwidth goes a long way in viewing quality. This isn't about letting everyone stream SuperHD content at the same time, this is about relieving some pressure around the average bitrate (somewhere around 1900Kbps)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have a theory... (based on personal experience). The issue for many is (was) with Apple TV, and not Verizon.

I updated my Apple TV in november (shortly after Netflix introduced its SuperHD mode). For a long time after that, Netflix performance was abysmal (dropping down to sub 480p at times, especially during the night time).

I complained to netflix and verizon. The latter suggested I try connecting to netflix on a PC connected to the modem. I did and experienced no problems. No problems on my Android device or chromecast either. Only my Apple TV box had issues. Ultimately I found a thread on the forums which suggested a hard boot (power down) of the Apple TV device. Once I did that, the problems went away. If you have Verizon and use Apple TV to watch netflix, give it a shot.

I would love to see ars/netflix display a bandwidth graph by device.

<comment><USER12> We have a 40Mb link from XFinity (Comcast), and we _only_ have problems with Netflix. Amazon prime streaming works great, Hulu worked great when we had it (I couldn't stand paying to watch the same commercial over and over again), HBOGO, XBLN movies, and the assorted Xfinity services all work perfect. It's only Netflix that we have trouble getting a HD stream from.

We use these services on an Xbox, Roku, and Kindle/PC - and Netflix is consistently the slowest of them all, no matter the platform -- sometimes not getting an HD stream at all during playback, but usually only getting HD stream for about 30-40% of playback.

<comment><USER13> I had the opposite experience: Netflix was fine on Comcast, Amazon Prime was surprisingly poor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Lesson: don't get your internet service from a company that also tries to sell you entertainment content. They're going to fuck you over both ways.

<comment><USER15> Too bad there are no other reasonable options. Not sure what the lesson is there - move, I suppose

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Part of this is seasonal traffic trends. Here in the North East when the weather starts getting hostile around November we see a big uptick in bandwidth usage among our customers. Utilization tends to peak in January and starts breaking as soon as the weather warms up. You can see a less dramatic dip on this chart from the same period last year. With the long stretches of cold weather all over the US this year I suspect ISPs all over the country got hit hard. It's also the season for many millions of new devices to get unwrapped and turned on.

</comment><comment><USER17> It really annoys me when people present data on charts and the lower range is not zero. This article shows a speed comparison for Verizon and Comcast. The Verizon chart ranges from 1.8Mbps to 2.3Mbps. The Comcast chart goes from 1.4Mbps to 2.2Mbps. This is lazy at best, disingenuous at worst.

People, stop doing this! Start a chart like this at zero. Only if that is meaningless, do something different (it's not here). But is really that hard to at least be consistent?

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm on Verizon FiOS in Pennsylvania, with the standard residential 15/5 service, it's 10:44PM, and Netflix is streaming at a steady 3-4Mb/s. I guess I'm lucky?

[http://i.imgur.com/akih9HA.png](http://i.imgur.com/akih9HA.png)

<comment><USER19> You're on FIOS and you're getting 3-4MB/s and you're feeling lucky?

How sad.

<comment><USER20> He only has 15 Mbit service. He's actually getting ~2x what he's paying for.

<comment><USER7> 3Mbps is 0.20x (of 15Mbps) what he is paying for.

<comment><USER21> Bits != Bytes.

Mbps == Megabits/sec

MBps == Megabytes/sec

<comment><USER22> >I'm on Verizon FiOS in Pennsylvania, with the standard residential 15/5 service, it's 10:44PM, and Netflix is streaming at a steady 3-4Mb/s. I guess I'm lucky?

He wrote bits, he's only using a 5th of his pipe.

<comment><USER23> Corroborated by the png he linked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> What if we started netneutrality.js? Something that shows a banner on sites for people using Verizon/Comcast. Perhaps that will raise more awareness for the issue?

<comment><USER25> It would be interesting if such a script used WebRTC to collect data from many users in a distributed manner and stored the information in a DHT that researchers could query for data to determine which providers are and are not being a good netizens.

<comment><USER26> It's worth nothing that the FCC has a speed test app which is trying to gather exactly that kind of data:

[http://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-unveils-mobile-broadband- spe...](http://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-unveils-mobile-broadband-speed-test- app-empower-consumers)

(source available here: [https://github.com/FCC/mobile-mba- androidapp](https://github.com/FCC/mobile-mba-androidapp) ).

It's currently more focused on mobile networks, but it also gathers Wi-Fi performance data as well. And given recent developments, I wouldn't be surprised to see the FCC broaden that focus.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I have residential fiber from a local isp @100mbps up & down, and have definitely noticed netflix has been horrible for a few weeks (appletv).

I took a look at my airport stats, and it seems the atv had connected at 1mbps to the AP, which would certainly cause problems. A reboot of the ap & the atv resolved the issue.

If you have apple gear, you can see the data rate for your device by option- clicking the AP in airport assistant.

</comment><comment><USER28> Is there any way to (do these comparisons) differentiate between Comcast Residential & Business?

</comment><comment><USER29> I cancelled Netflix as a Charter customer because performance was terrible, while Amazon Prime works fine.

<comment><USER30> Don't Amazon and Netflix both stream from the AWS cloud?</comment></comment>


Algorithm for converting a finite state machine into a regular expression - <AUTHOR> http://qntm.org/algo

<comment><USER2> Just had a second look at your algorithm.

You're essentially running a well-known DFA-minimization algorithm (see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DFA_minimization> or <http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~cdm/pdf/minimization.pdf> ), and then running Brzozowski. This isn't new at all, though I'm pretty impressed you reinvented the minimization algorithm.

<comment><USER3> Well, there you go then. I did make an effort to find what I'd done online, but since there is no explicit "minimization" step in the way I've phrased my algorithm I probably didn't stand a chance. Apparently that DFA minimization thing is on any Computer Science degree course, which of course I've never taken (I only discovered state machines as a concept about six months ago).

Thanks for reading, everybody.

<comment><USER4> At least you know for sure that what you came up with was worth coming up with. ;) I do that all the time, and it's a mixed bag of pride and annoyance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I apologise for the site loading slowly, my entirely unrelated page <http://qntm.org/uk> "The Great British Venn Diagram" is currently being hammered by Redditors.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is basically a course study in formal languages. What is more fascinating is that you arrived at the same abstraction independently.

</comment><comment><USER2> There are several completely different algorithms for converting DFAs into regular expressions. See <http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~cdm/pdf/KleeneAlg.pdf> for three. One of my favorites involves eliminating states by replacing all pairs of transitions through them with regexes -- it winds up looking almost exactly like the Floyd-Warshall algorithm.

</comment><comment><USER6> The site wasn't loading for me, but it did load (albeit slowly) from a Coral Cache link:

<http://qntm.org.nyud.net:8080/algo>

<comment><USER7> It loads for me, it just loads slowly.

Cached version: <http://cache.historious.net/cached/569458/>

Edit: P.S. If you used the cached version, can you let me know how it worked for you? I stumbled across historious and I'm testing to see how well it works.

<comment><USER8> Heh, I went to historify that site and post the cache to help out, but wasn't sure if it would be seen as shameless promotion. I'm proud this feature sees usage, and glad you like it!

EDIT: I'm glad to report that server load is at 0.01 right now, so hammer away, Varnish is pretty much indestructible.

<comment><USER7> I've been using Historious for the past few days and it has worked pretty well for me so far. We'll see how it works in a month or so when I need to find that Really Useful Article :)

One thing that I did notice about the cache is that when qntm's server was getting hit hard, it was taking ~5-10 seconds to load the cached page. I think this is because even though you cache the page, it was trying to load the CSS, images, and js from qntm's server. Not that big of a deal, but I was expecting it to load faster.

<comment><USER8> Fantastic, I'm glad it's been good so far. Finding that Really Useful Article is working very well, I've been using it for months and it's great :P

Unfortunately, it can't _not_ load the CSS/JS/images from the other site, as it would take some pretty involved spidering and a bit of additional code on our end to support caching CSS/JS/images, so it's not very much worth it.

What _is_ worth it, though, is building in a sort of version of Readability into the cached page. So you will be able to click "light view" or something and reach a well-formatted page with only the text for the bulk of the article. This is so you can read it better if the parent site is down (it'll load faster without CSS/JS) and you can read it on your mobile, kindle, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hmm my relevant theory is a little sketchy, but there are FSMs that aren't modellable by regex right? (e.g. Nested tags).

<comment><USER10> FSMs can't handle nested tags. Pushdown Automata can.

<comment><USER3> Most "regular" expression engines in modern programming languages can handle back-references (e.g. "(.)\1"), which are actually so complex that you need a full-blown Turing machine to handle them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Any mirror?

<comment><USER12> Try googling for:

      cache: url you want cached

(I only found this trick out a couple days ago)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> If you find this interesting, you may be interested in this as well: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_height_problem></comment>


Raster CRT Typography According to DEC - <AUTHOR> https://www.masswerk.at/nowgobang/2019/dec-crt-typography <comment><USER2> Reminds me a bit of a weekend project I did a few years back: When I was about 6, my dad went out and bought what would be the family computer for half a decade, a TI-99/4a. The thing that stuck in my craw was that even though Apple and Commodore had mastered the lowercase Latin font, the lowercase letters on the TI were just tiny uppercase ones. So flash forward 25 years or so, and I'd downloaded a TI-99 emulator to play with, and decided to see if I could put an Apple II font on it. It was relatively easy to find the font in the ROM, and I found a donor font through Google. Kludged them together, and it worked beautifully. Lowercase letters on a TI-99! No idea WTF they were thinking with the original font.

<comment><USER3> I don't know either, however TI at the time also produced the "Silent 700" terminal series and it had the same font (all essentially upper case characters just some larger and some smaller.

Perhaps it was an early example of the DRY mantra being applied incorrectly.

<comment><USER4> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_caps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_caps)

<comment><USER4> That was an unobjectionable comment, so I guess the downvotes are a stimulus to try to get me to write more. The Wikipedia page for the TI-99 mentions the "small capitals" but does _not_ link to the page I linked to. So some people, at least, who read that page won't get the reference to the typographic tradition (if that's what it is).

A larger issue is the idea that, by choosing a small caps style for their font, TI were acting inexplicably or irrationally. It is worrying but not surprising that the HN crowd finds it disturbing when a company makes a creative decision that doesn't have a clear business case behind it, while being completely innocuous, and which potentially could have helped to differentiate their products. It's the typical negative engineer stereotype coming through: "No imagination or creativity allowed, except if it's to solve a specific problem".

<comment><USER5> That Wikipedia page you linked to explains that small caps are used almost exclusively to emphasize or distinguish text from text set using the usual mix of uppercase and lowercase letters. So pointing out that small caps are a well-established typographical practice does nothing to explain what TI was thinking by including small caps but not lowercase. And no matter how innocuous you consider it, it is clear that the decision strikes many users as odd, and that it comes across as something of an unattractive technological limitation, akin to the then-recent systems that only supported uppercase.

<comment><USER4> It's slightly complicated, but the smaller caps of "small caps" _are_ the lower case. As Wikipedia says, setting text in small caps is "technically not a case-transformation". In those days it would not be surprising that a system would only have one font.

I don't know about the Silent 700's font, but it looks to me like this probably wasn't a mistaken case of the DRY principle: after all, the TI-99's lower case letters are still stored as separate bitmaps (they are reproduced in an image here: [http://electrickeet.com/line- itfont.html](http://electrickeet.com/line-itfont.html)).

So it is clear, at least, that they had the storage for lower case, and for whatever reason decided to go with a small caps font. It isn't a result of a simple limitation that they hacked around by scaling bitmaps or something like that. I wouldn't like to speculate about what fraction of users found it odd at the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting post. From my work on 1980s micros that used CRT TVs for display, the phosphor response described here seems to be a bit oversimplified.

In my purely subjective experience, rise time seems to be shorter than fall time - pixels will usually be visibly blurred on the trailing (right) edge, but sharper on the leading (left) edge. Another thing I noticed is that a longer horizontal row of pixels will leave a longer decay on the trailing edge than a single pixel. For example, the Ts will usually have their horizontal line visibly stretched on the trailing edge, even when the vertical line seemed sharp.

Of course, purpose-built terminals might have used different phosphors than cheap TVs of the time. It might also have to do with video amp bandwidth, or something else electrical.

<comment><USER7> Without disagreeing with you, the diagrams from the linked page are pretty much reproductions of the ones from an official VT100 technical manual, [https://vt100.net/docs/vt100-tm/](https://vt100.net/docs/vt100-tm/)

It appears to me that the rise/fall graphs are just graphs of ideal RC networks, while the whole true CRT system will have lots of other factors such as inductance going on.

When it comes to comparing what you might recall of CRT TVs and 80s micros to what a dedicated monochrome CRT would show, well, the dedicated CRT was much better and sharper, particularly if your color display technology involved a "composite" system like NTSC or PAL, where horizontal luminance (Y) bandwidth was SEVERELY limited to "make room for" the color information (I/Q).

To get an idea of how much Composite video encoding degraded picture information, take a look at modern videos of "RGB-modded" classic consoles such as [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpdpAxzjmA8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpdpAxzjmA8) \-- As far as I understand from the video explanation, both signals are video- captured, so this is not a "CRT effect", it's a "composite video effect" that makes the right-side image so smeared. There's also the palette difference, but that's more a matter of preference.

<comment><USER8> What does the long decay times of forbidden transition lines have to do with analogue circuits?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There's a really interesting video about character generation on HP 264x series terminals: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QikO0WOAGWI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QikO0WOAGWI)

<comment><USER10> That's nothing! Tektronix did vector fonts in the 60s using analogue ROMs.

<comment><USER11> That's nothing, the Jaquet-Droz family were producing glyphs from mechanical analogue storage in ~1770. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bY_wfKVjuJM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bY_wfKVjuJM)

<comment><USER12> Also, see the use of a metal plate as a binary storage device for fonts used for the print on punch cards with the IBM key punches:

[https://www.masswerk.at/misc/card-punch- typography/](https://www.masswerk.at/misc/card-punch-typography/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Fantastic. My favourite terminal I worked on was the amber-colored vt320 hooked to a sun box and sometimes to an sgi. There was something special to it, even 'back in the day'.

<comment><USER14> Truth - the only problem with those old terminals was the keyboard. They tended to not have the control key or ESC key (DEC terminals) in a nice spot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Similar project is cool-retro-term [1] although I think the defaults are a little over the top.

[1] [https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro- term](https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term)

<comment><USER16> cool-retro-term is my go-to terminal program for quick projects that don't need multiple panes.

It freaks out the IT guys and our workspace consultants, which is a bonus.

The only downside is that on macOS it crashes on quit. But since I'm quitting it anyway, no harm done.

<comment><USER17> Why would cool-retro-term "freak out" IT professionals any more than a typical terminal emulator? Does "freak out" have some additional definition I'm unaware of?

Personally I found cool-retro-term lacked support for a few ANSI escape sequences I needed for tmux to work quite how I liked which prevented me using it as my daily $TERM. I'm sure with a bit of effort I could have gotten it working but it was an effort not work making when there's literally dozens of other ${TERM}s I could use and the only thing in favour of cool-retro-term is novelty.

I do really like how cool-retro-term is an expansion of the acronym CRT. Clever project naming.

<comment><USER16> _Why would cool-retro-term "freak out" IT professionals any more than a typical terminal emulator?_

Because a typical terminal emulator doesn't make the brand new monitor they just installed look like it's broken.

<comment><USER17> Cool-retro-term doesn't make a brand new monitor look like it's broken. The effect of CRT isn't even remotely what an LCD looks like when it fails.

So I'm guessing when you say "IT professionals freak out" what you actually mean is "idiot desktop support engineers who think anyone who uses the command line are 'l33t h4xx0rz'".

In which case they'd have a hernia if they saw the kind of workspace a typical non-poser runs.

<comment><USER16> _So I'm guessing when you say "IT professionals freak out" what you actually mean is "idiot desktop support engineers who think anyone who uses the command line are 'l33t h4xx0rz'"._

You guessed wrong, since they're used to seeing me use iTerm all over my other monitors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> On an unrelated note, I wish somebody made a modern portable and low-power hardware terminal. Something with eInk, or maybe even reflective LCD, like those old "electronic organizers", but with a full-size screen. If it can do serial and serial-over-USB, that can come in handy with headless boxes, RPi etc.

<comment><USER16> Until that happens, Prompt for iOS by Panic Software out of Portland is very useful. I've used it on my iPhone in emergencies for years, and recently put it on an iPad and it really shines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is the HTML5 "workbench" VT100/220 emulation available to try? (Didn't see a link to it)

</comment><comment><USER20> DEC Terminal Modern, fitting the old character shapes but having smooth outlines, is rather nice. It's almost like the new Chicago font, which Apple remade as a vector font that would produce the original bitmaps if rendered at the original size.

I'd like to see that for the "fixed" font used as the xterm default. I got addicted to this font, but pixels are getting smaller and my eyes are getting worse.

</comment><comment><USER21> We need the VT52 experience: relay clicks as you type.

<comment><USER22> Some of IBM's mainframe terminals used a solenoid which would hit the side of the keyboard's case to indicate that a key-press was successfuly registered. This was in addition to the well documented clicking noise of IBM's keyboard switches.

<comment><USER23> IIRC original 3270 keyboard had solenoid that physically prevented user from pressing any key when the terminal was busy and would not be able to register the key press.

<comment><USER22> The solenoid on the one which I have (a 3278 keyboard) is separate to the keys. It is true that the solenoid will not operate when the terminal is unable to accept any key press, but it does not impede the operation of the keys themselves.

To the best of my knowledge, the only IBM keyboards that could flat out prevent the keys from being pressed were ones based on the Selectric typewriter mechanism, such as the 2741

<comment><USER24> In order to prevent two keys being active simultaneously, the Selectric had a linear track full of steel balls running from side to side, with just enough free space to allow a metal tab from a single key to enter. So locking the keyboard was just a matter of having a solenoid occupy the free space.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Excellent research. I wonder who the artist is who drew the typeface and whether they realized at the time that it would have such significance that somebody would still be studying their work so many decades later

</comment><comment><USER16> It's interesting that DEC did horizontal pixel stretching because individual dots would be too precise to be seen because of phosphor latency.

The Commodore 64 had a similar problem with single-pixel latency, which is why the vertical portions of its character ROM are all two pixels wide. Otherwise, the character would be too blurry to be read comfortably on televisions of the era.

I used to love making my own C-64 fonts pixel by pixel and comparing how they looked on a Panasonic portable TV versus my Commodore CM-141 monitor.

</comment><comment><USER26> this is great!

I'm a regular user of the glasstty font + the 'tritty'[1] utility which emulates serial line I/O to create the 'true unix terminal' experience.

Looking forward to the next post!

ps: improved smeary-220 font would be great :b

.. [1] [https://github.com/sjmulder/trickle](https://github.com/sjmulder/trickle)

<comment><USER23> I'm not sure that all the smearing and blur is historically accurate for vt220. I still have Wyse WY-150 (IIRC) on my desk and while it has somewhat poor contrast (which seems to be mainly caused by worn out contrast pot, I gotta fix that someday), it has exceptionally crisp display. I remember the same "crispness" feeling from various amber phosphor MDA monitors.

<comment><USER26> good point - I actually do have a 320 and the topics discussed in the article seem to jive with my experience with it..

but yes, it is very crisp - i think the point of the 'fuzzing' details discussed here is that they actually help the overall clarity (e.g. a 'dithering' sort of effect)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I need to find/buy an eeprom and programmer for my VT102, the character ROMs are failing and the text is totally garbled

</comment><comment><USER28> This is great! Id love if this expertise was added to the cool-retro-term project.</comment>


Quick start guide to research on human factors of software engineering - <AUTHOR> http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/blog/guidehciseresearch.html <comment><USER2> In my experience for most developers the behaviors boil down to just a few questions?

1\. Are the developers willing to write original code or must they be limited to configurations or tooling?

2\. Are the developers willing to accept any API (RTFM) or must the developers be limited to prior known APIs?

3\. Are the developers willing to accept failure for missing unspecified, but commonly known, requirements such as accessibility, usability, security, or domain specific knowledge?

4\. Are the developers willing to alter their personal routines to accommodate a shift in requirements and delivery dates or do the developers shift requirements to accommodate their routines, such as work-life balance?

5\. Will the developers write technical documentation to describe process and approach or will the developers shift requirements in anticipation of forth- coming technical documentation?

6\. Will the developers refactor code to achieve simplicity (imperative), descriptive concepts (declarative), code style, or not at all? The motivations generally do not overlap.

7\. Will the developers accept code that better achieves business concerns or end-user preferences (object measures) in violation to preferred structures or styles (subjective measures)?

8\. Are the developers willing to read the existing code (RTFC) before recommending new tools or solutions?

</comment><comment><USER3> I really want this kind of research to flourish, but the first click I made on an interesting looking paper led me to: "To measure tool usage, we randomly sampled code changes from four Eclipse and eight Mylyn developers and ascertained, for each refactoring, if it was performed manually or with tool support. We found that refactoring tools are seldom used: 11 percent by Eclipse developers and 9 percent by Mylyn developers."

To be fair, I haven't read the paper and the rest of the abstract looks reasonable: "To understand refactoring practice at large, we drew from a variety of data sets spanning more than 39,000 developers, 240,000 tool- assisted refactorings, 2,500 developer hours, and 12,000 version control commits."

But what the heck is the first bit for? Of 12 people I know, the vast majority don't use refactoring tools. That's not the basis on which to launch a study. I've skimmed the abstracts of the other papers as well and I'm not all that impressed. Everything seems to be doing comparisons against Eclipse. While Eclipse has a variety of different usability features, I'm actually not convinced any of them help at all (which is why I don't use it ;-) ). So at the very least, I'd like to see a baseline against a traditional text editor like Emacs or Vim. The "improvements" in usability that they are measuring may simply be the avoidance of problems in Eclipse. I'm not trying to start an editor war here, I'm just saying you can't assume that any single editor is a good baseline. I'd argue strenuously that feature rich editors like Eclipse, IntelliJ, VS Code, etc, etc are particularly bad candidates because nobody has really measured the effectiveness of their features.

Without being too negative, I hope there are better papers on these kinds of topics because I think it's incredibly important.</comment>


Q: Is it better to use Facebook's developer toolkit, or roll your own? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> If your speaking about Facebook's API then that the decision on whether to use it is highly dependent on the purpose of your site. Personally, I would think very carefully before branding your site as a Facebook addon.

You might be referring to Thrift. In that case, it's only useful if you want to do cross-language services. I don't think an early-stage startup needs this sort of architecture but I guess designing for scale never hurts.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The power of the internet today is the social component. It seems silly to spend resources reinventing the wheel. Does it make sense to use Facebook's developer toolkit?

1) Should you worry that you're relying on the infrastructure of another company? Will VCs worry about your long term prospects?

2) Would it be ok to use the developer toolkit until your business is a success, and then switch to your own code?

<comment><USER3> Mu.

What are you trying to write, and how well does it overlap with the toolkit's intended purpose? Put another way, if you wrote your own, how different would it be?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There would be almost nothing in common with your non-FB "toolkit" and the FB one. Theirs is a way to access the FB database, yours wouldn't be.

Hopefully you're not imagining that FB for some reason decided to give away the tools that would be needed to create another FB. That's not what they mean by "toolkit".

</comment><comment><USER5> Better yet, just simply tell us what you're trying to do...

Also, they're coming out with a bunch of new stuff towards the middle of may.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd love to tell you what I'm trying to do: But I'm not really sure yet.

Clearly, it's hard to ask for advice on an issue that's not fully fleshed out.

It's just that so many webapps today need to have user authentication/profile management, it seems a shame to have to build your own for two reasons: 1) You're wasting your time building something. 2) People trust you with their personal information, I think people are more willing to trust, say, a facebook, then they are joestartup.com. I say this based on my intuition.

<comment><USER5> Why don't you "flesh" it out here? Maybe it'll help solidify your idea in your mind, or more than likely, evolve it.

Just throw it out there, even if it sounds stupid in your own mind.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: disrupting fund management - <AUTHOR>

in April 2011 IBM released a repirt that the fund management industry destroys $ 1.3 trillion globally each year - through bad advice, high fees, underperformance...etc. The report was pulled 4 days later...I've been in this industry
myself for a very long time and know that this figure is probably correct.That prompted me to create a platform that will allow a user to select from a number of academically and empirically researched investment approaches one or more that suits him/her, test it on the instrument of his/her choice and subsequently invest accordingly. At the moment it is very patched up with no interface etc. Looking for pot. coder/CTO to turn this into a highly automated app through which at a second iteration a user can immediately invest automatically if so desired.
Any other ideas in this context very welcome. <comment><USER2> Why bother? The WSJ Dartboard Contest proves that a boring, geriatric buy & hold investment portfolio outperforms managed portfolios for the average investor, so there's no need to be met -- except to dispel the ignorance of the public about the true role played by stockbrokers (i.e. lining their own pockets at the expense of the untutored investor).

Prove this view wrong -- include in your program a "strategy" that involves buying an index fund and sitting on it. Compare it to the others, as the WSJ contest did. See which approach comes out ahead over time -- as the Dartboard contest proved.

[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000087239639044402420457804...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444024204578044390473058954.html)

Quote: "The darts [i.e. the random stock picks] have historically beaten the readers [i.e. the picks of "experts"], with 28 wins out of 47 contests."

Or is it your plan to make people pay to discover that the simplest strategy is also the best?

</comment><comment><USER3> How do I contact you?

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


The London Scene: Songkick mix British propriety and Silicon Valley style - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/apr2008/tc20080420_326487.htm

<comment><USER2> long live the YC PR machine.

having said that, there is real substance behind songkick. pete and ian are plenty talented.

<comment><USER3> not forgetting (drum-roll) Michelle, Dr. Philip, Wynne, Lee & latest recruit Mr Dan Lucraft ;-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Songkick rocks period.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd just like to point out that Ian Hogarth has the face of a man.

</comment><comment><USER5> Is YC scoring all these PR hits? Or is it the individual startups?

<comment><USER6> 80-90% the individual startups (including in this case).

One reason there seem to be so many YC-funded startups in the news is that there are just so many of them. Maybe also that the YC brand is starting to be known by reporters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> they are good citizens too - big up for the YC News meetup last Friday :-)

</comment><comment><USER8> Good stuff guys. Always good to see more London love :-)

</comment><comment><USER9> Great positive article for London guys, London is after all the center of the world when it comes to music !!! So Silicon valley needs London's inspiration or we will all be forced to be in bowling alleys on Saturday nights... hehe

Congrats guys</comment>


Sourceforge now using "enhanced" (Ask.com) installer for some downloads - <AUTHOR> http://sourceforge.net/blog/today-we-offer-devshare-beta-a-sustainable-way-to-fund-open-source-software/

<comment><AUTHOR> If you have a sourceforge account, please let the admin of Filezilla know that this is not very cool: [https://sourceforge.net/sendmessage.php?touser=156254](https://sourceforge.net/sendmessage.php?touser=156254)

<comment><USER2> And don't forget to donate something for all these years of improving and maintaining FileZilla. [https://filezilla- project.org/donate.php](https://filezilla-project.org/donate.php)

But you've already donated, right?

<comment><AUTHOR> I will be shortly. I'll be interested to see a response from the project admin first.

Put it this way, if they'd asked for a few bucks and put up a Flattr or a GitTip, it would have been a no-brainer for me. Flattr especially is really easy.

<comment><USER3> Flattr is a way for users to feel good but doesn't really make any useful amount of money for the publisher/developer (each Flattr is just pennies and the number shown is the number of Flattrs over all time, years in many cases). It's more an ad for Flattr than anything else. The space on your site would make FAR more money serving an ad.

<comment><USER4> That depends on the person donating. if the Person as a $10 budget but only flattr's 2 project then each project would be $4.5

but if they flattr'ed 10 projects each project would only get $0.9

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Who uses sourceforge? I hope proxy providers will stop supporting sourceforge entirely. On the other hand I don't care about Windows users, they can have all Adware on the world, actually they have :P

<comment><USER3> Millions of people use SourceForge, many without knowing it. It's one of the only hosts that make available free open source binary download hosting (Github doesn't, Google Code is discontinuing it).

Most Windows users have no adware at all, but you likely already know that.

<comment><USER6> Not true re: Github. [https://github.com/blog/1547-release-your- software](https://github.com/blog/1547-release-your-software)

<comment><USER3> From the documentation, this seems only geared towards specific ZIPs of what is already on Github and is discussed as such in all press announcements. Basically, an easy way to have Acme 1.0, 1.1, 1.2 zips of code alongside each other as easily accessible zips. Nowhere is it indicated that this is for binary installer releases (EXE/MSI for Windows or DMG for Mac) or that these types of installers and their large associated bandwidth requirements are supported. Is this clarified somewhere else?

<comment><USER7> from the blog post: "You can also attach binary assets (such as compiled executables, minified scripts, documentation) to a release. Once published, the release details and assets are available to anyone that can view the repository."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Thus losing their last holdout ? I'm not sure what the guys owning sourceforge are thinking those last few years, but boy do they try their best to kill their website ...

<comment><USER9> They're thinking they want to make enough money to keep the site running. They've found that begging and running ads prior to downloads just isn't enough and that this more aggressive approach might help.

Yes, they will lose you. But I suspect they think they'll gain more in partnerships with popular software than what they loose. Especially if you were a leech.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> For the curious, this is an optional program at SourceForge being offered to developers as a way to monetize their work. The developer needs to specifically request it. SourceForge gets a cut, so does the developer. The installer is their first stab at this process and is using the bundling technology from Ask.com. As offer-based installers go, this one is about as good as it gets. It makes a single offer and has an Accept and Decline button with the user selecting whichever one they want (not a pre-checked box accepting the offer above a Next/Continue button). If accepted, the installer installs the offered software and it gets a standard entry in Windows' Add/Remove Programs that works as expected. If declined, the installer continues. The installer then downloads the originally-requested software.

The two issues with the current installer are that (1) it is served in place of the requested file with no indication that a substitution is made as the user downloads and (2) it requests admin rights before it starts downloading the software, which can be a security issue. Roberto (who posted the article) has stated that they are working on #1 in terms of the text shown on SourceForge as you select to download and download. As for #2, there may be some ways to rework the installer so this is not an issue. I'll mention it to him when I speak to him.

SourceForge has one other revenue-share program with developers where you place the SourceForge-branded download buttons on your own website that link to your downloads on SourceForge and you get a small cut of the ad revenue made from the download page.

If I recall correctly, SourceForge has been losing money for a few years now. Dice Holdings picked up SourceForge and Slashdot while Geek.com kept ThinkGeek.com, so they are now separate entities. These new experiments are attempts to get SourceForge to be self-sustaining/profitable. Ad revenue alone likely won't cut it.

Unfortunately, Google Code, Github and others don't offer the full breadth of services that SourceForge does for open source projects. Google Code, Github, and others have all ditched binary downloads, so SourceForge is one of the only providers to make binary downloads available to Windows and Mac user at no charge. This is why SourceForge is popular for real apps (FileZilla, Pidgin, PortableApps.com, etc) and Github is popular for components (node.js, jquery, rails, etc). The code zips available at other providers are of no use to end users.

As full disclosure, I run PortableApps.com, one of SourceForge's largest projects pushing quite a few TBs of downloads through their mirror network. We make use of the SF-branded download buttons revenue share program but do not make use of nor have any plans to use the "enhanced" installers. Everything I've discussed here is already publicly available, I just thought it would be handy to have in one place.

<comment><USER4> Just wanted to add, since many people dont know, last month GitHub added a new feature called "Releases" that does allow you to attach binaries for projects

[https://github.com/blog/1547-release-your- software](https://github.com/blog/1547-release-your-software)

<comment><USER3> In all the documentation and press materials, they're still referred to as zips, though. Do you know if they support proper uploads and downloads of EXE, MSI and DMGs directly? Github used to support that a while back and purposely disabled it. Google Code has recently begun disabling it due to 'abuse'.</comment></comment></comment>


Jack Ma: US wasted trillions on warfare instead of investing in infrastructure - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/18/chinese-billionaire-jack-ma-says-the-us-wasted-trillions-on-warfare-instead-of-investing-in-infrastructure.html <comment><USER2> How would infrastructure help a so-called civilized society if we were to turn our backs on minimum decency, especially for the elderly, disabled and others shown to be untrainable? Why not add up the trillions squandered on the War on Drugs prison-industrial complex and trillions wasted in Iraq, whom had nothing to do with 9/11?

There aren't enough jobs because there is an oversupply of productive capability (population is what it is) with fewer people combined with a (currently) corrupt US govt, resulting in extreme capital concentration by a few. Extreme inequality set the conditions for Trump, Brexit and the French Revolution. Balance is needed, or upheaval becomes increasingly probable.

Grass roots gotta get back the political process and clean organized labor is what has always worked (though paid usually in blood.)</comment>


Show HN: Sidedoor – Find your next engineering job through a trusted referral - <AUTHOR> https://www.sidedoor.jobs <comment><USER2> I'm unclear how this will solve the underlying root cause of the coding interviews -- if you are matched up with a stranger, how are they supposed to know whether you are all talk or whether you can deliver?

Referrals from people you have worked with before make sense - you know their work. But having a conversation with another engineer and expecting that to become a referral sounds odd - such interactions don't give the same level of knowledge of one's work as having actually been on the same team.

<comment><AUTHOR> @codingdave - The goal for us isn't to solve the underlying root cause of coding interviews. In our previous companies, we'd still always do whiteboard style coding interviews with referral candidates. The goal for Sidedoor is to skip conversations with recruiters and get fast-tracked directly to an onsight. A conversation with an engineer is the best way for a candidate to understand

1\. The technical challenges at a new company. 2\. The team dynamic at a new company.

<comment><USER2> Aha, gotcha - that does make more sense. I may have been over-estimating the relationship it builds because of all the other discussions surrounding interviews these days.

Thanks for the clarification.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi All!

We're a group of engineers that have worked in the tech industry for the last 10 years. Over that time, we all realized that the best engineering teams that we've all worked on have been close, tight knit groups that had a lot in common.

Every company that we've worked for has had an employee referral program, but the effectiveness of those programs pales in comparison to the costly external recruiter led solutions out there. Recruiters ended up making a ton of money and taking large finders fees for performing a task that was better suited to our own employees. Our goal with Sidedoor is to turn employees at every level of the company into the most effective recruiters.

If you're looking for your next job and want to work for a great tech company, sign up as a candidate today.

</comment><comment><USER3> sounds like a useful service, however, I tried to signup as a candidate but the buttons do not function.</comment>


The U.S. has a staggering pilot shortage - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2017/07/27/news/companies/pilot-shortage-figures/index.html <comment><USER2> > Over the next two decades, 87 new pilots need to be trained and ready to fly > a commercial airliner every day in order to meet our insatiable demand to > travel by air.

> That's one every 15 minutes.

uh....</comment>