How to Run Wordpress on AWS - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/QuinnyPig/status/1250910042246660096/photo/1 <comment><USER4> There is a lot of scoffing in this thread and I agree AWS does make some things overly complicated but I think the scoffing here is unfair because the architecture looks far more complicated than it actually is.

First of all, lets bare in mind this is talking about larger, enterprisey installs. So what would you need if you hosted on-prem:

\- a DB with a read replica in case your main DB died (RDS can actually build read replicas for you pretty easily so this part of the deployment would be much easier than doing the same MySQL replication config on-prem)

\- Redis for caching (my experience with WP is a couple of years out of date now but when I last managed an highly popular WP install (several in fact) Redis or Memcached caching was a necessity to get the kind of page load times our visitors expected)

\- Shared storage (bare in mind you're running more than one WP web server - if this was on prem you'd be hosting those files off a SAN)

\- A load balancer (I don't think I need to explain a justification for that one)

\- And probably a CDN too (reduce the stress on your web-servers and internet gateway)

That's literally the bare minimum any large Wordpress application would need and that's all that AWS architecture is outlying. Sure there's a few more items on there like NAT gateways but those are just network stacks that are deployed as part of your VPC (or in on-prem terms, that's just the VLAN and/or subnet management that you'd assign to your load balancer).

If you don't need multiple web-servers nor high availability then your architecture becomes drastically simpler (no load balancer, no shared storage, no replica DB, etc) but also you would run the risk of downtime and even data loss. Which might not be an issue for some people but it's also not one of the selling points of AWS. So you'd be better off with shared hosting or a managed WP service -- or to put it another way, AWS was never going to be a good fit.

edit: Personally I think the issue here is more WP -- or rather the classical CMS design -- than it is AWS. A static site generator style of CMS would be a lot simpler cloud design and run a lot cheaper too. WP is designed from an era when web shops had this infrastructure set up by default.

<comment><USER5> But all what you described will port, with some adjustments, to a different provider for another decade. This is all to host on one specific host. The money spent on planning and architecture is a one time cost and it is very high. Not to mention the much higher cost of ownership over time for hosting on AWS.

AWS feels like hosting on IIS back in the day. It was extremely expensive and pointless for more than 50% of their customers, but people kept saying "but we're enterprise!" and throwing money away until the world finally woke up.

<comment><USER6> AWS is just not a toolset optimized for Wordpress in a SMB/Startup/Hobbyist org. And organizations who do enterprisy stuff on AWS aren't optimized for IT practices that look sane to others.

You need this complexity in an enterprise environment because the web teams don't have access to databases, and the DBAs aren't allowed to manage databases outside of the data network, etc. That's why enterprise content management exists. Big companies and public sector value repeatability and seperation of duties over cash and time.

<comment><USER7> Separation of duties is the root of so much evil. I'm very glad to work in an environment where anyone can _submit_ a change to anything - it just has to go through code review. Same security property: malice requires conspiracy. But also safety against mistakes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> While this is indeed overly complicated, you have to take into account the fact that there are websites of all shapes and sizes powered by WordPress these days, and not just blogs, but things like eCommerce, booking, dating sites, forums and more, some of which would actually benefit from an overly complicated setup like this.

If you're just running a simple WP blog, you could host it on a cheap shared hosting package and not worry about devops, and as long as you use a cache plugin that will serve your entire site as static content, you'll be able to handle a large volume of traffic easily.

<comment><USER9> >> While this is indeed overly complicated, you have to take into account the fact that there are websites of all shapes and sizes powered by WordPress these days, and not just blogs, but things like eCommerce, booking, dating sites, forums and more, some of which would actually benefit from an overly complicated setup like this.

It's amazing what runs on Wordpress and how relatively easy it is to scale with straightforward infrastructure. I think the diagram is for to enterprises which adore the complexity (because the enterprise architects won't be doing any of the maintenance), and is conditioning people to solutions which will have high consumption cost (because your money is best left with whatever cloud provider you choose.)

That doesn't mean you shouldn't go all in on taking advantage of your cloud provider when you have a good model of costs and performance. However, you are best starting with the needs of the application and working from that point as you allude to.

<comment><USER10> > I think the diagram is for to enterprises which adore the complexity

Bingo. Anecdotal experience: I saw this happen at my last position where they did an over-complicated/fragile WordPress setup with K8s.

We went over to K8s for "performance optimization", "security", and "system stability"... what bothers me the most as a WordPress expert (specifically with HUGE/redundant rollouts) is that none of these reasons/bottlenecks were studied before designing the infrastructure. K8s is great, but if we start throwing arbitrary infra at our problems all we see is increased complexity without addressing the core tech issues.

When I pushed to load test the new infra it was met with crickets - <USER2> because that was never the goal in the first place. The goal was to jam a sexy technology into our stack so someone's quarterly goals were met with some lookin' pretty/SF-deluded engineering director that touts not knowing development/architecture makes him better in his role.

Honestly - it's just job security, chasing a dragon, and cargo-cult for most of these orgs... if we were _actually_ on the hook for "more with less" you would _NEVER_ see an atrocity like what was posted. KISS is sure out of style when it comes to these fool's outrageous egos/budgets.

<comment><USER9> > KISS is sure out of style when it comes to these fool's outrageous > egos/budgets.

We will see how it survives this potential long-term economic downturn we are in, or approaching. I laughed out loud when you mentioned K8s for "security".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is ridiculously over the top.

I run our organization's WordPress sites on Elastic Beanstalk (just do a "eb deploy" from your Git repo of the site and it gets up there), plus RDS (Amazon Aurora) and CloudFront. EB and Aurora auto-scale and CloudFront does its CDN thing.

I highly, highly recommend Elastic Beanstalk ( [https://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/](https://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/) ) to anyone who wants their org to concentrate on creating value (new/better code) and being cost-efficient (use the compute power needed that minute instead of overprovisioning) instead of fiddling with custom server configs and wondering if you're fully patched up. It was a game changer for us.

<comment><USER12> Sounds like your setup is only 2 steps away from what OP describes:

1\. If you need multiple WP instances, you'll need to duplicate that setup with read replica + load balancer

2\. If you want to do things enterprise-proper, you'll want to set up a VPC, which means you need the internet gateway + some routing setup

And voila, thats the above architecture. If you don't need it you don't need it. But none of this is particulary complicated to set up if you know what youre doing, especially if you're using Terraform.

<comment><USER13> > 1\. If you need multiple WP instances, you'll need to duplicate that setup > with read replica + load balancer

Don't forget that wordpress is not stateless. It'll need write access to its code directory, which complicates scaling. AWS has EFS which support up to 1000 clients, but at that point you'll probably better off rewriting your website with something else that easier to scale on the cloud.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Holy smokes!

And I just did a WordPress demo site using AWS Lightsail for $3.50 USD per month (obv the lowest tier).

Took me less than an hour to get it all rolling.

Just check out the feature list: [https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/features/](https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/features/)

There are some oddball finicky things about it (like not seeing the instance except in the Lightsail interface unless you manually fix or migrate it) but it was easy as pie.

<comment><USER15> I set a wordpress using digital ocean . They had a template and make it pretty easy..

I used to use AWS when I was at a startup. this light sail seems similar to Digital Ocean's built in templates.

I appreciate the easy set up of the database and code and that it gives you a sane path to https.

[https://marketplace.digitalocean.com/apps/wordpress](https://marketplace.digitalocean.com/apps/wordpress)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> When I hear things like "Wordpress Powers 85% of websites", I wonder how many of them are running on a $5/month shared host

<comment><USER17> You can handle a surprising amount of traffic with a $5/month Linode.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Provisioning a single Wordpress box is very straightforward using AWS Lightsail and a Bitnami Wordpress image. You can push it up to the equivalent of an m5.2xlarge instance. Unless you really need auto-scaling, this seems like overkill?

<comment><USER19> EBS volumes have a ~99.9% reliability rating so on a long enough timeline you're going to need to restore from snapshots.

Writing to EFS however means that you can just treat your EC2 instance as a stateless front-end server that can be swapped out whenever needed.

Couple that with an autoscaling group and when the instance inevitably dies, it'll automatically come back up on a new host.

I don't have an ops team so I prefer AWS to be responsible for stuff like this wherever possible.

<comment><USER20> I have a Wordpress blog that has been continuously up, barring two host server migrations (~3 hours), since 2004.

It is powered by a Linode. I have literally never needed to manage the server unless I was actively working on something, like changing the theme.

People overcomplicate things these days. You could spend X hours creating some autoscaling, autorecovering setup; but for 99% of projects, it'd maybe encounter an outage that requires your intervention, once a decade.

<comment><USER21> Fair, but how many customers do you serve? The example provided was enterprise level. TBH I would have not chosen Wordpress as the application of choice but the architecture is what would be recommended for an enterprise solution.

Too many people are getting hung up on it being WP. AMZN doesn't care what the application is and has no vested interest (that I'm aware of) in WP.

EDIT: clarity

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I personally wouldn't build my own infrastructure. I'd use something like [https://convesio.com/](https://convesio.com/) and let them handle the scaling.

<comment><USER23> Exactly. Wordpress (plus plugins) is too much of a liability to host yourself. Personally use wpengine.com with comes with tools to keep Wordpress updated with the latest security patches automatically

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Amazon has found a way to attach a profit model to sophomore developers' tendency to over-engineer absolutely everything. It's brilliant. Imagine if the authors of all those object oriented design patterns books had found a way to charge people by the minute for each abstraction in a FactoryFactorySingleton!

<comment><USER10> > Amazon has found a way to attach a profit model to sophomore developers' > tendency to over-engineer absolutely everything.

Amen. It's also becoming the "safe" thing to do to put all of your eggs in the Amazon basket. Also just think about all of that data we're giving them... gah.

They're laughing all the way to the bank.

<comment><USER24> Meanwhile for companies like ours _not_ doing this is a competitive advantage. Peoples' jaws drop when we tell them how insanely little we spend on cloud for hundreds of thousands of concurrent users and a lot of stuff going on.

The secret: a la carte bare metal (packet.net, datapacket.com) for high-load and especially high-bandwidth stuff combined with a simple not-over-engineered services deployment in Google GKS with instances tuned for our work load (high CPU, low memory) so we are not paying for RAM we do not need. We are really only using Kubernetes to keep stuff up and auto-scale. We are not even close to using all K8S's features.

GKS is most of the price tag. We could go down to about 1/4 the monthly cost if we rolled our own Kubernetes cluster with Rancher or something at packet.net, but the added labor might negate the savings. We may still do this if we grow significantly, since at larger scales the added labor may be justified by geometric cost savings.

In general the bigger you are the more sense it makes to roll your own. Small and growing: use managed stuff. Bigger: consider bare metal and DIY clusters. Even bigger: co-location can start to make sense. HUGE: build your own data center! It's always a pure spreadsheet decision though. Also keep in mind that you can sometimes split your stack and do managed for one part and bare metal for another. For us the split is between things that are micro-service based, database backed, and need to auto-scale vs. dumb simple bandwidth and CPU pumping services that are trivial to deploy and require little attention. The latter is what goes on bare metal for massive operational cost savings. The former goes in GKS for _labor_ cost savings.

... and yes, it's very stable, and probably more stable than finicky over- engineered Rube Goldberg machine AWS deployments that engineers constantly have to fiddle with.

<comment><USER10> > We could go down to half that price or less if we rolled our own Kubernetes > cluster, but the added labor might negate the savings.

It's so refreshing to see someone taking this sort of complexity into account when planning new infrastructure. There's a HUGE cost to training and supporting a new infra paradigm that I often see decision makers ignore completely... in their defense it's a difficult thing to predict but that's not a reason to ignore the overhead!

<comment><USER24> Always try to do a spreadsheet and estimate the actual cost.

The last time we did the math it was kind of a toss-up between roll your own bare metal cluster and GKS when labor costs were considered, but those are _estimated_ labor costs and we also didn't want to deal with the hassle. GKS meanwhile destroys Amazon, so all the big clouds are not equal.

We decided we might make the leap when the savings for bare metal over GKE are 2X or more, since that leaves a good margin for under-estimating labor (which is probably the case).

I edited the parent to add a point about rolling your own making progressively more sense the bigger you get. That's because modern devops lets you leverage a skilled admin across a big deployment, so the labor cost becomes somewhat fixed and allows you to leverage the economy of scale and the cost advantages of bare metal (to a point).

But do your own estimates! There are many details. One detail is that bare metal bandwidth (especially egress) is _radically, ridiculously, nonsensically cheaper_ than any of the big cloud providers. I italicized those because damn do the big cloud providers ever rape you on bandwidth. The same is true to a less absurd degree for raw CPU power. It mystifies me when I see people doing deep learning on AWS. Storage on the other hand is _far_ cheaper on Amazon and other major cloud providers, especially when you factor in the cost of achieving high reliability and uptime. If you are warehousing a ton of data, you might never want to leave these (unless you actually get bit enough to build your own racks!).

Edit: caveat on storage: check out Backblaze B2 and using it from a nearby bare metal data center if you are mostly warehousing and not heavily accessing. Again: there are many many devils in these details, so do your own shopping and cost estimates for your unique workload and factor in everything: compute, storage, bandwidth, labor, uptime requirements, agility, rapid auto- scaling needs, geographic location and/or multi-location needs, etc. Hosting/cloud is a huge market with a dizzying array of choices each making sense for different mixtures of customer profiles. Expect to spend a day or two just surfing around and shopping.

FYI the bare metal hosts we've had good luck with are packet.net, datapacket.com, and OVH, in approximately that order. (For OVH we have only used their bare metal hosts and can't comment on their other services.) There are others. We had lots of odd issues with Hetzner but they are dirt cheap partly because they cut corners like using desktop-grade hardware. Hetzner may actually make sense if you need a ton of super-cheap _compute_ and have a load that is very tolerant of node failures, since as far as I can see nobody sells CPU as cheap as they do. If I were doing a ton of deep learning model training I'd consider using Hetzner for raw compute power cheap and I'd treat the nodes operationally like on-demand/spot instances.

You might look at Digital Ocean and Vultr too. DO is adding some managed services and apparently they're decent. In the past the simple "we give you a VM" hosts have occupied an uncanny valley though: not as cheap in price/performance terms as bare metal "rent-a-box" hosting, and not rich enough in services and value-adds to compete with big cloud.

<comment><USER10> > One detail is that bare metal bandwidth (especially egress) is radically, > ridiculously, nonsensically cheaper than any of the big cloud providers.

I work in the ISP space specifically with folks who help place businesses in datacenters. This is 100% accurate - sometimes it can literally be pennies on the dollar for egress.

> Storage on the other hand is far cheaper

Agree - S3 will always be a backbone component of my toolbox when building out infrastructure. It's been solid from day-1 when I was in my early 20's using it on remix competition sites (wavs are big... 10-20 wavs per-song oh god). The awe still hasn't worn off for me as to how quick I can scale large-scale web-friendly/secure storage with tools like that.

\---

On the VPS hosts... I'm weirdly loyal to them and have kept infra on Linode for _years_. I also have had extraordinary positive experiences with DO as well. I find they have the customer service that solutions like AWS lack for the little guys... if we're talking about a big spend then yea I will totally go to a more formal provider, but for my stuff I prefer knowing that there's solid engineers on the hosting side that I can actually talk to.

I'm REALLY excited to see folks like Linode/DO support things like S3-compatible APIs, K8s, etc. I think that's important for those solutions to stay relevant.

\---

Thanks for such a great response - conversations like these are invaluable, and I've definitely learned from this! I am VERY interested in Vultr - <USER3> could have used them 5-6 months ago for GIS crunching (fiber maps, lit building lists, geocoding, census blocks, etc). Once I open that up as a service to my users I'll likely be on the hunt for SSD-backed high-compute on- demand instances.

<comment><USER25> DO also has great overall documentation quality and standards, IMO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The question of whether this is overly complicated is a wrong question. While in most cases this might be too much, there are situations where this is necessary. It all depends on the use case.

I for one welcome the description of high-traffic production level architecture description. Usually on the internet, it is hard to find a real setup description. Most of architecture examples are simple, not something you would use in production yourself. Plus, simplifying architecture is always simpler, than thinking how to make it scalable properly.

</comment><comment> john-shaffer I would not use Wordpress to serve a large site directly unless I had no other choice. You can create a much simpler, faster, scalable and more secure architecture using WP2Static ([https://wp2static.com/](https://wp2static.com/)) to publish static files to an S3 Bucket/CloudFront deployment (or your storage+CDN of choice). WP isn't designed for this type of deployment, but the right plugins (e.g., WP Serverless Forms, WP Offload Media Lite) make it work.

If you run the Wordpress instance locally or otherwise secure it from public access, you don't have to worry about keeping WP and its plugins updated, which saves considerable time and expense. This is my go-to solution whenever a WP install is requested.

</comment><comment><USER19> As it happens my company has hired a marketing company who wants to use Wordpress for our new website.

This design really isn't so far out from what I planned but the NAT gateways aren't necessary and I was going to use Fargate instead of EC2 to host it. Also, I was going to host it in a single availability zone as the impact of downtime is minimal.

EFS seems like a natural choice also for upload directories, etc, and you can attach EFS volumes to Fargate containers now.

I'd be interested to hear if anyone else has done this and what their experiences are.

<comment><USER27> You can aim to run a truly stateless wordpress container using [https://github.com/roots/bedrock](https://github.com/roots/bedrock) for the wordpress install together with Composer and [https://wpackagist.org/](https://wpackagist.org/) to manage your plugins and dependencies.

Then there's [https://github.com/deliciousbrains/wp-amazon-s3-and- cloudfro...](https://github.com/deliciousbrains/wp-amazon-s3-and-cloudfront) to offload all media files to S3 (consider putting a Cloudfront distribution in front to get a custom domain + HTTPS).

I've been there and I can't honestly recommend it. You'll be on your own. Also, it really really feels like Wordpress wasn't made to be deployed this way. If I were you I'd rather use a good hosting provider like WPEngine and spend my time on more valuable things.

<comment><USER10> Yep - I run my own composer-driven WP setup based on the roots design and can honestly say that it's an anti-pattern with how WP wants to handle plugins/themes/core updates/etc.

I say it's an anti-pattern because we're talking about WP - a platform that allows you to arbitrarily update PHP files from a web admin/install plugins/etc... It's this sort of flexibility that our clients/end users want and when we start designing that BS out due to security reasons it typically ends up in a user yelling at me for "WHY CAN'T I JUST INSTALL A PLUGIN LIKE THE WORDPRESS TUTORIAL SAYS?!"

When you come back with "security", and "I have to review that code" it almost always falls on deaf ears. When you start designing the flaws out of WP infra you start to realize those same flaws are why marketing is hellbent on keeping it as a CMS - they hate working with/waiting on devs to get things done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> WordPress is popular because it's very easy to setup. Just throw it into your htdocs folder, install some theme and plugins and you're good to go. Make install harder and you'll lost a big reason to use WordPress.

I think the only reason someone would do this is when a company that's using WordPress want to migrate to AWS to use "cloud" technology but don't want to invest in rewriting their website, which is odd. If they have engineering capability to move their WordPress site to AWS with complicated architecture, surely they have the chop to rebuild the website with something else that more compatible with cloud technology?

<comment><USER25> If it's low traffic enough and the footprint is small, couldn't the whole thing be thrown in a couple S3 buckets? I'm still learning this stuff.

<comment><USER13> I don't think you can run PHP off an S3 bucket. You certainly can sync the upload folder (static files) to S3 as a form of CDN via some 3rd party plugins, but it doesn't solve the main issue when you try to run wordpress in multiple instances load-balanced setup (I assume the diagram is intended to address this, hence the complexity). For low traffic sites, you probably won't need to worry about this yet.

The real headache is when you need a load-balanced setup. You'll need to keep the whole wordpress directory (not just the upload directory) synced between instances, which you can't do over S3. NFS is a popular option, but NFS server usually have a hard limit on the number of connected clients, which ultimately limit the number of your instances (e.g. if you need 20 instances but your NFS server crap out when >12 clients connected, you're out of luck). Amazon EFS supposed to solve this since it supports up to 1000 connected clients, but people often complain about slow performance.

That being said, scaling wordpress to handle high traffic is a headache unless you write your own theme and plugins. The majority of wordpress sites use those visual editor plugins and mega themes, which is a nightmare when you hit by high traffic as they are often impossible to cache (crazy stuff such as css/ generator that vary its output depending on user agents, etc) and often rely on wordpress statefulness (write arbitrary files to arbitrary locations, which means typical load-balanced/autoscaling architecture will not work as it assume your application is stateless). Personally, I'd rather rewrite the whole site with something else than trying to setup a load-balanced wordpress installation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> During a hack day a small team and I got WordPress running on Lambda, serverless.

We custom compiled PHP from source to run in the lambda environment then got node to pass the requests to PHP cli.

Took some tinkering but we got it working.

</comment><comment><USER29> Unless I'm a fortune 500 why do I need AWS at all, I can use Linode, DigitalOcean etc to set up stuff fast and easy, instead of spending all the bandwidth then getting lost in AWS maze.

<comment><USER30> You can get an AWS VM for $3.50/mo

And you can keep using AWS until you're part of Fortune 500

<comment><USER31> Using AWS always gives me anxiety. It starts at $3.5, then some random thing happens you click a random amazon page and bam you pay 350 that month until you realize. Might not apply to 3.5 you are talking about but I've had enough with AWS. Unless the client really needs something global, I think you can always get away with DigitalOcean or Linode type of VPS. Heck I've been using CloudWays for basic projects, takes 10 seconds to launch the app and manages DigitalOcean for me. Magento and other root necessary apps I use LEMP image with Digital Ocean. AWS development and debugging are not for small players.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> And that design (the Amazon one) will be unusably slow for any actual uncached access!

WordPress on EFS (and they explicitly mention PHP files on their EFS description) is unbearably slow!

</comment><comment><USER33> That is an extremely simple architecture design. Reverse proxy to load balance two instances. Two instances with a cache talking to RDS and an EFS volume to ensure uploads and files stay consistent.

The networking is the bit that most people don't care about or see, but it's there, and that's it.

</comment><comment><USER34> There's always the Lambda PHP runtime...

</comment><comment><USER35> Next: How to run wordpress on ENIAC

</comment><comment><USER36> Just use lightsail? Literally what it's for

<comment><USER37> Good for your personal site, bad if your revenue depends on it</comment></comment>


A Directory of High Quality, Real-Time Event Sources - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/todsac/eventsources <comment><USER2> This is a nice list! But seems to be misusing both "real-time " and "event sources" (or I misunderstand the terms) as there doesn't seem to be a way of actually connecting to the sources and receive events as soon as they happen.

Clicked on a few of the sites, some support polling apis but seems most of them don't.

<comment><AUTHOR> The purpose of the list is to aggregate sources of data that you can connect to and receive events as soon as they happen. If there is one that you believe does not support real time events, then let me know and I will remove it.

<comment><USER2> Ok, using the first item as an example ([http://3taps.com/developers- overview.php](http://3taps.com/developers-overview.php)). None of their endpoints seems to support SSE, long-polling, streams, websockets, tcp sockets or any other type of "real-time" feeds. But they do have a polling endpoint that you have to hit with GET requests. Does that classify as real-time in your list?</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Where to find real life machine learning problems to solve - <AUTHOR> Any business / personal problems or frustrations you face or people you know face in their daily life that you think can be solved with ML. Can be specific to the industry you are in. <comment><USER2> There's a German startup doing inventory projections for bakeries. Team of two data scientists, they just got funding. Basically bakeries already collect data on unsold products, lots seasonal, on paper. The startup tries to predict future sales on a per-branch level if I understand correctly.

</comment><comment><USER3> Here are a few

\- How to sort industrial trash using computer vision

\- Better voice interaction with better context

\- Better forecasting algorithms

\- How to find missing objects example an airplane in the pacific ocean</comment>


A Better Pip Workflow - <AUTHOR> https://www.kennethreitz.org/essays/a-better-pip-workflow <comment><USER2> Unfortunately this workflow is pretty fragile and it will _not_ protect you from any of pip locking shortcomings.

It will basically work only in favorable cases where you have no ambiguous choice, no conflict (A depends on B==1.2.3, C depends on B==2.3.4), no reinstall to consider (git VS non git deps for instance), ... Really pip-tools is not that bad for now, until pip itself moves toward industry standards by default (lock file, deps resolution, reliable version checks, ..)

</comment><comment><USER3> I can second this method, I use docker to generate my frozen requirements though. This allows you to get a frozen set of requirements from a clean environment without the random stuff that can be installed locally.

[https://gist.github.com/kbrownlees/80c1a16aa226e5d52677e011b...](https://gist.github.com/kbrownlees/80c1a16aa226e5d52677e011b14767a9)

</comment><comment><USER4> Working on a primarily php project that also has a fair amount of python, a source of frustration has been breakage from sporadic pip package changes. This seems like a reasonable approach to help maintain some sanity.</comment>


Wikileaks server for sale on eBay - <AUTHOR> http://www.bahnhof.net/wikileaks

<comment><USER3> "Bahnhof falsely claims that the server being auctioned was 'WikiLeaks primary web server'. It was not." \- @wikileaks

[https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/374608602796785664](https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/374608602796785664)

<comment><USER4> "primary web server" is the key word. Seems like they were clients though.

We support RSF. We do not support Bahnhof exploiting the privacy and goodname of their clients for marketing purposes. - <USER2>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It would be really cool if the HDD's were not wiped, although it would be illegal to sell it if it had the leaked info (I think, not a lawyer here)

<comment><USER6> They could've imaged them and then conveniently 're-leaked' it after the item was delivered.

<comment><USER7> I wonder if that would impact the value to a collector. To IT people it's just the exact same 1s and 0s, but to a collector would it be considered a restoration or would it be considered to be non-original data?

<comment><USER8> I spouse it depends on the fidelity of said restoration. Of even one bit is on a different sector I would say it is not original.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bitcoin has risen more than eightfold in past year - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-15/bitcoin-is-literally-soaring-into-space-after-rocket-like-surge <comment><USER2> That is figuratively the worst title I've ever read.

<comment><USER3> They are launching a satellite, the headline is accurate.

<comment><USER4> No, if they were launching a rocket full of Hard Drives with bitcoin wallets on them it would be literal. They aren't adding anything that my partents aren't gettin out in rural USA with their current satalite internet. (remindes me, need to pay my dial up bill before I go out there next week)

<comment><USER3> As long as a copy of the Blockchain is on the satellite (which seems likely given the mission) then the headline is accurate.

It could just be a bent pipe comm satellite, which would make the headline mostly inaccurate, but it seems like having a copy of the blockchain on the bird would be a big win. A lot of the queries could be completed without having to bounce back to the ground if a copy of the blockchain was available on the satellite.

<comment><USER5> There is no copy of the blockchain on the satellite. These things are just repeaters for the signal sent up from a teleport station, presumably owned by Blockstream.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Can somebody ELI5 how cryptocurrencies don't run afoul of Ponzi scheme laws? The only way the price can be going up is if new money is coming in constantly, right?

<comment><USER7> Well, in a nutshell, it's not a Ponzi scheme, which is not just a random slur you can fire at anything that vaguely seems like fraud, but a specific scheme that works in a specific way.

In particular, it isn't clear to me how you can have a "decentralized" Ponzi scheme without making it something fundamentally different from a Ponzi scheme.

To the extent that BitCoin may be fraudulent or people may be engaging in illegal behavior, it's going to be other things. Perhaps somewhere someone's even running an actual Ponzi scheme _using_ BitCoin. But BitCoin itself is not a Ponzi scheme.

<comment><USER6> Current bitcoin holders can only see gain if new "investment" (I find that term funny since it's a "security" with no fundamentals) comes in. That's pretty much the definition of a Ponzi scheme.

 _Perhaps somewhere someone 's even running an actual Ponzi scheme using BitCoin._

Sure, but that's a different question. I'm talking about new investment in a security being the only source of increased value in that security. Which is what a Ponzi scheme is.

<comment><USER8> >Current bitcoin holders can only see gain if new "investment" (I find that term funny since it's a "security" with no fundamentals) comes in. That's pretty much the definition of a Ponzi scheme.

Equally true of most other commodities and currencies, right?

If you have a gold bar, or a stack of 10 Euro notes, the only way you make money off of it is if enough more people want to buy gold/Euros that the price goes up. Neither asset does anything on its own.

A critical ingredient of a Ponzi scheme is fraud.

<comment><USER9> The price of a traded item can go up, even with _no_ investment: people do not have to trade for the price to increase or decrease. Sometimes price movements coincide with lots of actual trades occurring, and sometimes they coincide with very few/no trades occurring. The latter happens once in awhile.

Taken to the extreme to illustrate: if _everyone_ together today instantly decided each bitcoin was worth $1b, then in that first instant, nobody would sell and no trades would occur, but the price would be very different.

<comment><USER10> If the price is determined by how much someone is willing to buy or sell for, how do you determine the price when there are no trades being made?

How does simply deciding 1 bitcoin is worth $1b effect the value of bitcoin if no one is willing to buy at that price?

<comment><USER9> 1\. There is more than one way to measure 'price,' and

2\. 'willing to buy' and trades executed are two different things.

If you are measuring the price of bitcoin by looking at the price of the last trade that occurred, then you are right: trades need to happen for you to get price information.

But there is also the order book. In [1], thousands of 'intents to trade'/outstanding orders are displayed but no trades are listed.

When I looked at the page, the highest anyone was willing to buy (in this specific order book at this time) was $4076, and the lowest anyone would sell was $4086.

This is a good indicator of the current consensus on Bitcoin price but isn't actually trade data.

Now, let's say the market gets just a little more bullish on Bitcoin and someone places an order to buy at $4080. Has the price of Bitcoin changed? One could argue yes if you judge price from the order book: from ~$4081 to ~$4083 or so. But no trades have occurred.

So back to the original question: in the absence of trade data, the price of bitcoin can be seen from what everyone decides it is, via an order book.

[1] [https://www.bitstamp.net/market/order_book/](https://www.bitstamp.net/market/order_book/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Aren't there better ways to broadcast the data? Say using SMS services which seem already quite used by farmers in remote places [1].

Also it's unclear how people in these remote places will acquire their first bitcoins.

What I like about Bitcoin is the way that the tokens are distributed (via PoW currently).

If there was a way to distribute a new cryptocurrency, somewhat fairly, within these remote places that have no internet, and let them bootstrap their own economy, now that would be cool.

For these places what is needed is a sort of an "offline cryptocurrency". They don't care about sending 5 btc to the person across town instantly... they care about sending 5 btc to the person in front of them at the market.

1\. [https://www.theguardian.com/global-development- professionals...](https://www.theguardian.com/global-development- professionals-network/2012/nov/27/farmers-mobile-phones-sms-agriculture)

<comment><USER12> Bitcoin is only so valuable _because_ its a pyramid scheme. All the participation and engagement by miners and anyone looking to get rich off it is predicated on how most bitcoins were already made so any market growth translates into increased prices and scarcity for the bitcoin that exists.

This is the fundamental problem with making a cryptocurrency that can actually serve its users well. To get popular, you need to be a get rich quick scheme, but to actually be useful, you need to not deflate out of control forever.

But bitcoin is doing what it was meant to do. It wasn't meant to promote a healthy monetary policy or be a pervasive useful currency to replace the fiats we have now - it would have had a much different coin issuance algorithm / monetary growth policy otherwise. It demonstrated the capabilities of proof of work distributed consensus and made its early adopters ludicrously rich.

</comment></comment><comment> TD-Linux Better links are the Blockstream press release: [https://blockstream.com/2017/08/15/announcing-blockstream- sa...](https://blockstream.com/2017/08/15/announcing-blockstream- satellite.html)

And the website: [https://blockstream.com/satellite/](https://blockstream.com/satellite/)

</comment><comment><USER13> The news is so behind actual crypto performance. Shocking, as it's all readily available.

This is like the 10th time the news catches up to a surge only after there's actually been a quick drop (like today. BTC, ETH, LTC all down 5-6% over 24h).

The volatility itself (in crypto) creates amazing short turn-around opportunity for those willing to take some risks and set up basic limit buy/sells (gdax makes this very easy).

</comment><comment><USER14> "Literally soaring into space"

<comment><USER4> blue origin or spacex is going to send a rocket up there and comeback with a pile of literal bitcoins, in a treasure chest. Then we will fly to Mars and live there with the money we make from collecting bitcoins from space.

Everything about this is hype. Everytime I hear someone talking about bitcoin, I squint my eyes and think, I don't think you know what you are saying. This is another case of that for sure.

<comment><USER5> Hype? You can use it today, for free. It is operating and 100% open source.

[https://github.com/Blockstream/satellite](https://github.com/Blockstream/satellite)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Has anyone done the math to see the effect of ransomware on the bitcoin price? How much demand is from folks buying their data back?

<comment><USER16> not much considering $300 million usd worth of bitcoin was traded with South Korean Won in the past 24 hours compared to wannacry ransom that raised around $50k, exchanges have more influence than ransoms [https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/bithumb/](https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/bithumb/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> > the entire cost of all equipment needed to connect your computer to the > Blockstream Satellite network is only about $100 USD

So you need to buy a SDR transceiver in order to operate...

[https://blockstream.com/satellite/blockstream- satellite/](https://blockstream.com/satellite/blockstream-satellite/)

<comment><USER5> Not sure why you are being downvoted for one of the few on topic posts in this thread.</comment></comment>


Angels Are No Longer Angels... so what are angels now? - <AUTHOR>

Angels are now acting as VC's...VC's are acting as even harder VC's... so 2 questions:
1)  Who/What are the new angels?
2)  Where do early stage pre-revenue startups get money now? <comment> puzzle-out Find a deprived area which has been earmarked for regeneration, apply for development funds. East London 2012 has helped my start-up gain pre-commercial funds, and we return in the summer to bid for another round. We are affiliated with the local university, which makes us eligible for a university spin-out fund.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The head winds of being a first time entrepreneur combined with the economy... not helping. Any thoughts? Venting due to similar feelings?</comment>


Kotlin 1.0 Beta Candidate Is Out - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2015/10/kotlin-1-0-beta-candidate-is-out/ <comment><USER2> I quite like Kotlin. It was discussed here on HN before:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9946527](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9946527)

I've written a couple of articles about it

[https://medium.com/@octskyward/why-kotlin-is-my-next- program...](https://medium.com/@octskyward/why-kotlin-is-my-next-programming- language-c25c001e26e3)

and one on doing functional programming with it:

[https://medium.com/@octskyward/kotlin- fp-3bf63a17d64a](https://medium.com/@octskyward/kotlin-fp-3bf63a17d64a)

</comment><comment><USER3> I hope that this will allow the Android tools team to start seriously considering supporting it with Jack & Jill (if that's not already the case).

</comment><comment><USER4> Honestly, what's wrong with Golo [0] or Ceylon [1]?

[0] [http://golo-lang.org/](http://golo-lang.org/)

[1] [http://ceylonlang.org/](http://ceylonlang.org/)

<comment><USER5> It seems they have even less "adoption" than Kotlin.

      Golo is a simple dynamic, weakly-typed language
      that favours explicit over implicit.

Not interested.

<comment><USER4> May apply to Golo, but not to Ceylon, which truly is the better Java.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is it just me, or does this (and the last few milestones) read like a burning car crash?

The regressions around type parameter syntax and statics feel especially painful.

If the language keeps getting more and more compromised with every milestone, why not stick with Java 9? This hardly qualifies as a "better Java" anymore...

<comment><USER6> I've tracked Kotlin for 2+ years, and it has gotten better. The restrictions are to make sure that decisions that are made after 1.0 are not breaking, but permit more options. It is called "careful planning." No thanks, Java 9 is klunky.</comment></comment>


Distributed web systems with Consul, Diplomat, Envoy and HAProxy - <AUTHOR> http://johnhamelink.com/distributed-web-systems-with-consul-haproxy-and-envoy.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, OP here - let me know what you think of my setup (and my writing style!)</comment>


Ask HN: How did you find a job in another country? - <AUTHOR>

In an effort to keep this fairly general so that it will help others in similar situations, here's an outline.
I'm currently looking for a job outside of the country I'm living in. I've done this before (almost 10 years ago) and found that the lack of contacts and not having permanent residency status hindered my job search. To top it all off, I've just finished a long stint at university, so I don't have much full time experience on my resume.
I've seen a number of posts recently about recent graduates looking for work, and most of it seems to boil down to building a network, either online or, better yet, in real life.
To those who have successfully sought work in another country, what advice do you have regarding:
- Finding a job in an environment where you have few to no contacts.
- Making contacts in a place that it may not be practical to go often (or even more than once).
- Convincing companies that it's worth taking on a foreigner (with all the paperwork  and uncertainty which this entails).
- Showing that you've got the skills to do a job without years of full-time experience to back it up.
I'd also welcome advice on my specific situation, so here are the gory details in bullet form:
- Australian.
- Lives in Spain.
- Just completed a PhD in computational number theory.
- Studied computer science and worked as programmer before that.
- Looking for software / research "industry" job.
- Have lots of part time experience (web and mobile apps).
- Looking in USA (north-west coast) or Germany.
- Have social media, but few professional contacts. <comment><USER2> Take a look at, "How to Land a Legal Job Overseas" by Sidney Korshak. It's geared towards lawyers, but you will probably find some useful advice. I got mine on Amazon.

<comment><AUTHOR> That looks interesting, I'll check it out. Maybe someone needs to write one of these for software engineers...</comment></comment>


T-shirts in today's tech industry like this aren't appropriate - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/Exclaimer/status/454210398833483776/photo/1 <comment><USER2> This is so bizarre it's almost funny.</comment>


Ask HN: Are any of you using Windows Azure? - <AUTHOR>

If so, what's your opinion of it? (Especially curious to hear about SQL Azure experiences) <comment><USER2> We are using it as an elastic cloud solution. To make a long story short we've decided Azure runs on killing innocent baby kittens and that the machines are provisioned by a man riding around their data center on a Segway. Hope that helps.</comment>


Atomic Scala - <AUTHOR> http://www.atomicscala.com/book

<comment><USER2> Glad to see Bruce Eckel involved. It's interesting to see just how many Scala books have been cranked out in the last 6-12 months or are currently in progress.

</comment><comment><USER3>
You can download the first 25% of the book here.

Ummm ... where?

<comment><USER2> Seems he forgot the link. Another excellent book for learning Scala is Scala for the Impatient. The first 9 chapters are free: <http://horstmann.com/scala/>

<comment><USER4> The link is now working.</comment></comment></comment>


On Free: a flight across Europe for five pounds is indistinguishable from magic - <AUTHOR> http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2007/11/a-flight-across.html <comment><USER2> I've taken advantage of a bunch of these flights (I'm from the UK).

I live in the US now though and I'm wondering why this model hasn't taken off here. For me to fly just over one hour (San Francisco to Las Vegas) recently cost me around $80 each way - and that was after an hour of looking for good deals.

<comment><USER3> That's a horrible price. You can get flights for about 39 dollars each way (JetBlue, Virgin America, etc). Try Kayak.com, virginamerica.com, southwest.com, jetblue.com.</comment></comment>


The Sharing Economy Isn't About Sharing at All - <AUTHOR> https://hbr.org/2015/01/the-sharing-economy-isnt-about-sharing-at-all

<comment><USER2> Yes, it's a very strange name. It's all renting and services, there is little/no sharing involved.

<comment><AUTHOR> 10 bucks say a reporter came up with that name initially</comment></comment>


U.S. considers ending rule allowing spouses of H-1B visa holders to work - <AUTHOR> https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/u-s-considers-ending-rule-allowing-spouses-h-1b-visa-n830221 <comment><USER2> If they had any idea what it costs to live in a popular work-visa place like Silicon Valley or Austin, they'd never even consider this. Oh, and there's _already_ a good chance the visa holder is underpaid due to shenanigans (nothing like the risk of losing your visa from switching jobs to keep you in one place, with no ability to negotiate).

The entire U.S. immigration system needs a massive dose of humanity injected. It's ridiculous how their methods needlessly create stress on individuals and families. The DEFAULT policy in any situation should be: "treat this HUMAN BEING like a human being, a potential contributor to our greatness who clearly wants to be here, do everything possible to make their contribution easy".

<comment><USER3> Even from a utility perspective it is disappointing to see, since much more often than not, the spouse of a H1B holder is also a highly educated professional who would meaningfully contribute to our economy.</comment></comment>


InVision makes the case for going all-in on remote work - <AUTHOR> https://fortune.com/2020/07/05/remote-work-office-culture-coronavirus/ <comment><AUTHOR> Why digital transformation is the competitive advantage most companies are too stuck in their ways to see</comment>


Experimenting with creating web apps in the time it takes to write a blog post - <AUTHOR> http://chestergrant.posterous.com/experimenting-with-creating-web-apps-in-the-t#

<comment><USER2> There are only a few web apps I think can be useful within this 3 hour construct. I think it's much better to develop a web app that takes about a weekend or maybe 2 to complete. You get something with a lot more value and can truly extend your ideas outward. Furthermore, a weekend still provides the construct of "fast."

Building a web app in 3 hours will leave you at best with something like threewords.me or its clones. While those can go viral, they rely heavily on luck. Why not spend 2 hours and build a beautiful and captivating launch page for an idea that would take you a weekend or two to build. Then, spend 1 hour reposting it everywhere and try to get feedback. This way, you can see if the concept itself gets any traction.

<comment><USER3> We would like to think it should be possible to create useful webapps in Akshell within 3 hours and are working to create a set of libraries and standard components to make this possible. See our (old) screencast for an example: <http://vimeo.com/11831303>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> While I agree that it's probably impossible to produce a whole web application in 3 hours, I think the point here is more about incremental delivery_. Note that in the post, OP is actually talking about 3-hour _features_ , not entire apps (after step 'show to people' you can go back and develop another 3-hour feature, if you like). And I doubt there exists a web application (or almost any piece of software, really) that couldn't be developed this way.

.. _: <http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?IncrementalDelivery>

Problems, however, arise when your idea requires specific domain knowledge which you haven't got yet; it's likely that you'll need some time to become comfortable in this particular area. Though I doubt it should necessarily be counted as time spent on app development.

And there's always some in-brain idea development. Say, you have an idea of blogging via email. You cook this idea inside for a few days, working out some details in background, then sit down, code for a three hours, and boom, you have posterous. Then you see that people don't care about email blogging, but they care about bells and whistles, so you sit another 3 hours and create basic skinning support. It's better than when after two weekends on email- blogging you discover that you were going in wrong direction. (Of course, I know nothing about real Posterous development, I just tried to clarify.)

Also, I think it's generally useful to be able to produce something in 3 hours. You need to keep your tools hot & ready.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is a good exercise to help train yourself to strip out the less important ideas/features. Do it enough and apply the new learnings toward a bigger project.

</comment><comment><USER6> I can make a sandwich in ten seconds. Am I a baker or someone who makes a sandwich ?</comment>


Thinking Outside the Cube: How offices will change–for better and for worse - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/thinking-outside-the-cube/399374/?single_page=true

<comment><USER2> > After a group of scientists complained to Chu Foxlin, the Cambridge > architect, about distracting office noise, for example, she proposed > installing isolation cones—made of felt and large enough to work inside—that > would hang from the ceiling to about three feet from the floor.

The Cone of Silence. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_of_Silence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_of_Silence)

</comment><comment><USER2> > 1968: The designer Robert Propst invents the precursor to the cubicle. Three > decades later, he will denounce the cubicle's overuse as "monolithic > insanity."

Moral: be mindful of what you create.</comment>


PredictEasy – My Little Venture for Dummies - <AUTHOR> http://predicteasy.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone, I'm delighted to share my latest and pretty simple venture. There is a huge buzz around predictive analytics, machine learning, and deep learning. So I thought what if I can build a simple tool for non-programmers to start using prediction in their day to day life. Just like using it with MS Excel or their own app, which I really enjoy now :).

Been working away on the MVP for most of the last month, so it's awesome to be able to keep working on it has got the "launch" out of the way. I've been lucky to have some great friends trying it out for weeks now and helping me shape it, so this doesn't feel like a huge event, just another step in iterating to keep improving the product.

Please check it out and let me know your feedback, you're always awesome - [http://predictEasy.com](http://predictEasy.com)</comment>


Show HN: a Lisp that uses JSON instead of S-expressions (in .js) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jes5199/brid.js <comment><USER2> I really like Lisp (I was even paid to develop in it for 6 years) and these days I love JSON because of its Lisp-ish nature - but those expressions look _damn_ ugly to me.

<comment><USER3> You could lose the quotes around strings, but you'd still have the commas.

Maybe start with lisp and just add {key: value key2: value2} syntax for tables? It'd be useful to get ruby-style keyword args for free, at least.

I spend a lot of time thinking about keyword args because I've been working on a lisp interpreter that supports them. Here's a webserver that is nice to read because of a crucial keyword arg (it starts with a colon):

[http://github.com/akkartik/wart/blob/460565a2e0/064http- serv...](http://github.com/akkartik/wart/blob/460565a2e0/064http- serve.wart#L10)

Like in python the keyword arg is always optional. You could delete it from this definition and it would behave the same.

In conclusion: please try to include python-style keyword args in your next language. You never know when they'll come in handy.

<comment><USER4> What's wrong with Common Lisp's keyword arguments? I'm not being snarky, just asking. I'd say CL works at least as well as Python in this respect.

<comment><USER3> No, in Common Lisp you can't mix a keyword arg for a non-keyword param, or vice versa.

<comment><USER5> You can do (&rest all-args &key keyword1 (keyword 2 default2)) and then try to figure out all-args in the function body.

How does Python handle mixing order of specifying keyword args positionally and with a keyword?

<comment><USER3> Python requires all args following a keyword arg to be keyword args:

      >>> def foo(a=0, b=1, c=2): return [a, b, c];
      ...
      >>> foo(34)
      [34, 1, 2]
      >>> foo(b=34)
      [0, 34, 2]
      >>> foo(b=34, 35)
      File "<stdin>", line 1
      SyntaxError: non-keyword arg after keyword arg

I chose instead to simply bind args by position after keyword args have been taken:

      wart> (foo :b 34 35)
      (35 34 2)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I still think there's room for experimenting with a Lisp that has the hashmap (a.k.a. dictionary, associative array, property bag) as its organizing principle rather than the list. There's nothing better than hashmaps for exploratory programming. If there is something to be gained from building a Lisp in terms of them (from the ground up; I don't mean support for object literals), I'd like to know what it is. This has little to do with syntax.

<comment><USER7> This presents a very thorny language design problem. Lists have this very nice property that they are _ordered_ , which lets you attach implied semantics to the _position_ of an element, e.g.:

(defun foo (a b c) ...)

We know this is a function defining because the symbol DEFUN is in the FIRST position of the list.

Associative arrays are unordered, so you have to explicitly label everything:

{ top-level-form : defun, arguments : { 1 : a, 2 : b, 3 : c }, ... }

Or something like that. You can see where that would get annoying.

Exercise for the reader: what happens if you base a Lisp-like language on vectors instead of cons cells?

<comment><USER6> Could you allow (a b c) as a synonym for { 0 a 1 b 2 c }? That's more or less how JS deals with this, though JS feels messy under the hood.

 _what happens if you base a Lisp-like language on vectors instead of cons cells?_

I want to know that too! One thing is that you lose cons and cdr (except by copying the vector), so you lose the ability to do most of the classic Lisp things efficiently. You must have something in mind other than this?

<comment><USER7> > Could you allow (a b c) as a synonym for { 0 a 1 b 2 c }?

Yes, of course, but all you've done is re-invent vectors.

> you lose cdr (except by copying the rest of the vector)

Copying the rest of the vector is not semantically equivalent to CDR unless you are being purely functional. But you can actually implement CDR using displaced vectors.

> You must have something in mind other than this?

Could be :-)

Try writing EVAL for a vector-based Lisp and see what happens. In particular, when you're done, make a list of all the primitives you needed to employ in order to do it. There's a deep insight at the end of this process. (No, I'm not going to tell you what it is.)

<comment><USER8> > In particular, when you're done, make a list of all the primitives you > needed to employ in order to do it. There's a deep insight at the end of > this process. (No, I'm not going to tell you what it is.)

Having done this before (<https://github.com/munificent/lark>), all it meant for me was that numbers and basic integer arithmetic became primitive. The clever bit about McCarthy's original metacircular interpreter is that it didn't need any types at all beyond atoms and cons cells: no bools, no ints, no nothing.

I found it interesting, but I don't know if I reached any deep insight. Maybe that's just me, or maybe I missed something.

<comment><USER7> I suppose depth is in the eye of the beholder. That's pretty much it: to build a Lisp out of vectors you need numbers as primitives. To build a Lisp out of cons cells you don't.

Follow-up exercise: do you need numbers to build a Lisp out of associative arrays? (Hint: this is not a trivial question to answer.)

<comment><USER3> Rereading McCarthy's paper yesterday I noticed for the first time that it didn't need numbers. But I hadn't connected all the dots yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> How is this different than S-expressions? It seems equivalent modulo syntax.

"They are _typically_ represented in text by parenthesized, whitespace- separated sequences" - S-expression, Wikipedia, emphasis added.

<comment><USER10> He should call them SMexp.

(Mexp used [].. _out_ )

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Any new McCarthy LISP implementation is destined to provoke the programming equivalent of "git offa mah lawn!"

</comment><comment><USER3> Get thee to the arc forum, where the six of us will provide good entertainment: <http://arclanguage.org/item?id=15422>

</comment><comment><USER12> What is the purpose of the "quote" parameter? The only place it is in the code is here:

else if(x[0] == 'quote'){ return x[1];

So why not just skip that extra verbosity? What am I missing?

<comment><USER13> Quote prevents evaluation. If you didn't quote it, x[1] would get evaluated as code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Does it use more JSON data types than arrays? The only examples are

      ["map", ....]

I don't see any `{ }`, etc.

<comment><USER15> There is only one other composite data type besides arrays: objects. I don't think these are being used for invoking functions, but I think it would be interesting to try.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Many people seem to confuse lisp's expressiveness with its syntax.

Syntax is just the beginning.

How you abuse it, to get things done is the more important thing. Please take time to explore this aspect more than those silly fracking parens.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm sorry, but I cannot get excited over Yet Another Implementation of McCarthy's LISP[1]. If your Lisp had _any_ interesting feature, e.g. call/cc, or object system, or nifty macro system, or something else, then, maybe, but doing the the same old, trivial thing, again and again, does not seem very interesting for me.

We don't usually see yet another Brainfuck interpreter, or yet another Fibonacci queue implementation on HN's front page, so why LISP?

[1] - <http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/paulgraham/jmc.lisp>

<comment><USER18> (cranky

You know, we have the upvote arrow for things that excite you, and the "Go read something else and comment on it" feature for things that don't float your boat.

Clearly this is not spam and it is not off-topic. So:

You asked the OP and/or your fellow HNers why they upvoted this onto the front page. I ask you, why this comment, what value does it add to my life to read about how smart and educated you are?

What about all the people who haven't seen an implementation of McCarthy's Lisp? Do they not deserve to find this interesting? Should they turn in their HN accounts and head over to reddit?

I wrote an implementation of Scheme in Java with macros, tail call optimization, lambda hoisting, a bunch of stuff. Yet I find this interesting. Is there something wrong with me?

)

<comment><USER18> Raganwald, you pretentious douche:

> I wrote an implementation of Scheme in Java with macros, tail call > optimization, lambda hoisting, a bunch of stuff.

Greenspun's Tenth Law is widely accepted, demonstrations of it in action add nothing of value to the programming community. Furthermore, writing a Scheme in Java is likely to be a project where you learned nothing of interest about Lisp or about Java.

—signed, Nikolai Bourbaki

<comment><USER19> Misapplication? I thought the Law was meant to describe accidental implementations of Lisp rather than overt ones.

In other words, "the complicated system you made _just happens_ to contain a Lisp, and if you had noticed that requirement in the first place its design would have been cleaner."

<comment><USER18> I think you have captured the spirit of the law. The project in question was the development of a scripting language for something-or-other, so this wasn't an accidental implementation of Lisp, it was done with malice aforethought.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


'Zork' Source Code, Presumed Lost, Has Been Uploaded to GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://kryptonradio.com/2019/04/18/zork-source-code-presumed-lost-forever-has-been-uploaded-to-github/ <comment><USER2> Note that the "Historical Source" repo has LOTS of stuff - most (all?) Infocom titles, Leisure Suit Larry, Deluxe Paint, Descent, Hexen, several MUDs, and tons of games I've never heard of. (Many of the non-Infocom titles are forks from other sources, so I guess it's more of a collected list, not a single huge source dump.)

There's even unfinished/unreleased source for an Infocom Hitchhiker's Guide sequel. Peeking inside:

        <OBJECT ZAPHOD
         (LOC RAMP)
         (DESC "Zaphod Beeblebrox")
         (TEXT "Zaphod looks completely normal, except for his two heads.")

Repo list: [https://github.com/historicalsource?tab=repositories](https://github.com/historicalsource?tab=repositories)

Zaphod source: [https://github.com/historicalsource/restaurant/blob/master/p...](https://github.com/historicalsource/restaurant/blob/master/people.zil#L265-L268)

</comment><comment><USER3> In 1979 I was an ATE of Computer Magazine in charge of the Microsystems Section. Stanford and the rest of Silicon Valley were all playing Adventure. I heard about Zork and solicited an article from the authors, which was published in Computer Magazine. M. Blank, T. Anderson and P. Lebling, "Special Feature Zork: A Computerized Fantasy Simulation Game" in Computer, vol. 12, no. 04, pp. 51-59, 1979. doi: 10.1109/MC.1979.1658697 keywords: {null} url: [https://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MC.1979.1658697](https://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MC.1979.1658697)

</comment><comment><USER4> This is from April and was discussed here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19672436](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19672436)

</comment><comment><USER5> I stumbled onto a "ZIL Community" while browsing the comment threads when this news was posted last time.

[https://vaporware.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/ZC/pages/1998192...](https://vaporware.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/ZC/pages/199819268/Getting+Started)

My goodness, the obsession bordering on genius or madness - this language has some serious fans, after all these years since ZIL was created (~1979). And what's with the "vaporware" subdomain of Atlassian..?

It looks it might be one very hard-core ZIL enthusiast.

Here's his repo for ZILF, "a set of tools for working with ZIL (the Zork Implementation Language), including a ZIL compiler, ZAP assembler, and ZIL libraries for writing text adventure games."

[https://bitbucket.org/jmcgrew/zilf/wiki/Home](https://bitbucket.org/jmcgrew/zilf/wiki/Home)

</comment><comment><USER6> Not just Zork, but also a bunch of other Infocom games such as Infidel and Bureaucracy.

There's even some Sierra game code for Leisure Suit Larry there, though not the whole game: [https://github.com/historicalsource/leisuresuitlarry](https://github.com/historicalsource/leisuresuitlarry).

</comment><comment><USER7> Here is the link to the repo itself. [https://github.com/historicalsource/zork1](https://github.com/historicalsource/zork1)

</comment><comment><USER8> Lost? My buddy Tom has a copy...

<comment><USER9> The source code for the game, rather than the game itself.

<comment><USER8> Yup Oops - maybe its Adventure. I'll ask him this afternoon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm hoping someone uploads the source code for the Landmark game to Github.</comment>


Why Arrington is Wrong about Yahoo!-Google Deal - O'Reilly Radar - <AUTHOR> http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2008/06/why-arrington-is-wrong-about-y.html <comment><USER2> That was a well thought out post. In addition to my previous comment posted here, <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=217636> I forgot to mention that Yahoo is quite big in the non US, BRIC (Brazil Russia India China) market. I am not sure finance types really understand what drives techies, creation and creativity as the root of one's personality and validation. While I'm as much for making a buck as the next person I'd rather do it while creating something.

MSFT stock has been flat for half a decade now while Yahoo's been going up slowly in the same time. If their Panama system does well, maybe they can get a piece of the Adwords pie.

I think Ballmer's been a disaster for Microsoft, no CEO has had such flat ratings on stock for about a decade and still kept his job. Though stockholders might think Jerry's doing a lousy job only 16% of their stocks would've seen the MSFT valuation of $35. Which translates to about 12% gains overall or a $2.4 increase in share value from when MSFT's interest in Yahoo went public. Even if they dump their stock now, they're coming out on tops. So I give props to Yahoo for aligning with Google in the meanwhile and safeguarding their research and development teams and work.

</comment><comment><USER3> I fear what happens if someone buys Yahoo then tries to break up (or ruin) Geocities and Yahoo Groups. Geocities is a treasure trove of old and new websites and it should not go the way of most web hosting ISPs did, by deleting millions of webpages.

</comment><comment><USER4> Arrington is wrong about everything. So what's new.</comment>


The Graham-Blumenthal Bill: A New Path for DOJ to Finally Break Encryption - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/graham-blumenthal-bill-new-path-doj-finally-break-encryption <comment><USER2> Not sure if this is a "trojan horse" for breaking encyrption, or if this is really just another push by the eff to keep section 230 immunity as bigtech so desires.

<comment><USER3> Interesting, could you elaborate what section 230 immunity entails?</comment></comment>


Discussion about Quantum Computing with Professor Andrea Morello from UNSW - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDW9bWSepB0 <comment><AUTHOR> Also Dave added an (1) edited down version of his conversation with Prof. Andrea Morello (to less than 30mins) if you don't have time to view the whole 1h45 video.

(1) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOQhdgY8aBM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOQhdgY8aBM)</comment>


Samsung's Galaxy Note Is the Most Useless Phone Jonathan Geller Has Ever Used - <AUTHOR> http://daringfireball.net/linked/2012/02/15/geller-galaxy-note <comment><USER2> I figure this is to show how wrong both of them were, considering Samsung has already sold 5 million of them, and the people who got it love it. There's no such thing as a perfect screen size. In the end touchscreen phones are just tablets, so it's better to see them from that perspective than just as a "phone", which is a function people use less and less:

<http://www.paulgraham.com/tablets.html>

</comment><comment><USER3> The iPhone is the most useless phone I have ever used.

Do you really care? Nope.

It works for people good for them if it does not they can use something else.</comment>


Ted Nelson's Computer Paradigm Expressed as One-Liners (1999) - <AUTHOR> http://hyperland.com/TedCompOneLiners

<comment><USER2> Ted Nelson is very quotable and I would highly recommend reading at least the freely available excerpt [1] from his seminal 1974 book _Computer Lib / Dream Machines_ to anyone who frequents HN. For those who don't know, his most famous invention is the term "hypertext" and he also appears to have invented, though is lest often acknowledged for, the history stack with its accompanying "back" button in Web browsers.

Nelson's writings have a different sensibility from the mainstream of both his fellow computing pioneers of the 1970s and the hackers of today. An example of his thinking from before even UNIX was a household name is that Nelson decried hierarchy as a form of organization for data (e.g., in a computer's file system), instead emphasizing association [2], which he thought closer to how humans actually organize knowledge. He also argued that instead of dialogue- based computer instruction that was taking off at the time the best method to use a computer for learning would be to "motivate the user and let him loose in a wonderful place", that place being a hypertext knowledge base (see [1], p. 313).

It is disappointing that in spite of Nelson's books being incredibly influential (to the point where they were reprinted by Microsoft Press because of the company's fondness for the author) most of his ideas never saw a complete implementation in a popular product. I'd love to read a doctoral thesis/book on the history of Project Xanadu -- a hypertext Web project started in 1960 that was supposed to have content transclusion and microtransactions (!) -- with an in-depth analysis of the factors that led it to where it is now (i.e., still unfinished today). (Gary Wolf's article "The Curse of Xanadu" [3] is the closest we have to that but it has multiple problems, to the point where Nelson has published a refutation [4].)

Today Ted Nelson's background in art (the man has, among other things, a claim to writing the world's first rock musical [5]) and fondness for pure performance (which is what I believe his recent video "I Think I Know Who Satoshi Is" [6] to be) may be a factor that limits the appeal of his message to most "techies" (his term), preventing them from more deeply investigating his message.

[1] <http://www.newmediareader.com/book_samples/nmr-21-nelson.pdf>

[2] Nelson's alternative to the file hierarchy was associative "metadata" a-la the MEMEX (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MEMEX#Associative_trails>). With WinFS canned I'm still waiting for someone to implement something even close to that.

[3] <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu.html>

[4] <http://xanadu.com.au/ararat>

[5] [http://people.oii.ox.ac.uk/dutton/2007/12/10/the-first- rock-...](http://people.oii.ox.ac.uk/dutton/2007/12/10/the-first-rock-musical- remembered-by-ted-nelson/)

[6] <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emDJTGTrEm0>

<comment><USER3> I very much agree. I find it amazing that he does not get more credit. What is very unfortunate is that Ted never took the time to learn more about programming languages. For example file systems are there for a reason and only now, with all the computing power, can we partly realize alternative structures.

<comment><USER3> P.S.: TN is one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century. Perhaps not top10, but definitely top50, after Einstein, Freud, Chomsky, etc. He talked about personal computing before personal computers. He invented (i.e. thought of) Hypertext, before people did have access to computers. Building things is important, no doubt. But thinking about them is also important. Note the three thinkers I mentioned also never built anything. They wrote books/articles. For instance Nelson largely influenced IBM in building the PC. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kasu0BhRFGo>. He also influenced Steve Jobs, I believe quite heavily. At least Woz mentions the influence of Nelson and I think many ideas of Jobs actually came from Nelson in some sense.

<comment><USER4> In re hypertext, there is precedent in the widely published works of Vannevar Bush.

Nelson spent a lot of time refining many ideas that were not really viable before the availability of computers. Given the timeframe (growing up under the shadow of the Military Industrial Complex and then maturing during the Cold War/proxy wars) he hit a very ripe time for populist activists.

I do think Nelson is one of the most influential thinkers regarding information science, but not as much as he desperately reminds people that he was. I also do not think his limitation is his inability to program computers, as he had a number of well-funded people helping at different times.

I suspect that, if you were to sit down and force rank the 50 most important thinkers of the 20th century, you'd have to exclude Nelson. Had he realized his ideas in a timely fashion, or inspired anyone to realize and exceed his visions, then his place would be secured.

However, I think much of what he created, other than the specifics of a great potential implementation, would be classified as simultaneous invention. Semantic networks existed before hypertext and it's a pretty nominal step from there to the basics of hypermedia. The Mother of All Demos is probably the best example of his contemporaries realizing their ideas.

What he does have is charisma and an ability to communicate his ideas. He gets people fired up about his dreams of a better world, and yet it has not come to pass. No one has been inspired enough to implement Xanadu. It's appropriately named. It's an interrupted dream that is incomplete.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I found this a good takeaway:

> What people call an "intuitive interface" is generally one which becomes > obvious as soon as it is demonstrated. But before the demo there was no > intuition of what it would be like. Therefore the real first sense of > "intuitive" is _retroactively obvious_.

Programming languages often tout their "intuitive" this or that—syntax, semantics, whatever. It's all crap written by a well-meaning designer who's gotten so deep in their design that they can't see how "obvious to me" does not mean "obvious to any equally intelligent person".

Consider the kinds of interfaces which actually _are_ intuitive, say, well- designed radio or temperature controls in a car. They afford experimentation, provide instant feedback, and need little to no labelling.

That's how I think programming ought to be, at least at a beginner level. A text-based programming language is a great tool for power users, but it's totally unapproachable for a new user because they don't know the shibboleth. A blank slate is not friendly; in the _rare_ event that the fledgling has a specific problem in mind already ("I want to make Mario!") then they almost certainly don't know even the most general form of what their solution would look like. Your beautiful, informative, 400-page manual does not make your language intuitive, just usable.

The end goal of my current language project—which is textual—is to serve as a basis for that kind of interface. If the system is designed from the beginning to support experimentation and play, and there is a 1:1 mapping to the "real thing" to avoid the disparity of "beginner mode" and "advanced mode", then I think that would open up programming to a lot of people.

Essentially the opposite of COBOL: don't try to make a system "easy for non- programmers". Try to make a system that helps people become programmers so that they can realise their visions of games, applications, art pieces, and beyond.

</comment><comment><USER6> The saying, _the perfect is the enemy of the good_ sums up a lot of Ted Nelson's life.

He has a lot of ideas. They inspire people. He's been working on them for ages. (Xanadu was started in 1960.) But he never is satisfied, he's always changing it, he never releases (OK, an incomplete form of Xanadu was released in 1998...), and the key parts that people care about have been released elsewhere in a form that he doesn't like.

<comment><USER7> A bit worse than that; from a friend who looked at it:

They didn't do the basic end to end work, so creating a client to display a Xanadu document was almost impossibly onerous. You had to grok and use around 6 different things, and, well, however nice the backend might be, it just wasn't practical.

Also an example of the perils of stealth mode, I found the above believable simply because they'd been in stealth mode _for decades_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Oh, SURE the Macintosh interface is Intuitive! I've always thought deep in my heart that command-z should undo things." -- Margy Levine

Genius.

</comment><comment><USER9> Feels like this article could be summed up with "everything you know about computers is wrong and poorly designed"

<comment><USER4> That's just about right, though.

The Unix model is a mess, the WOSA is a mess, personal computing hardware is a stack of hacks, programming environments are a poorly integrated mess, software 'engineering' is still back in the age of siege engineering rather than modern engineering discipline, and emacs still takes ages to boot.

Computers are marvelous productivity and life-enhancement tools, but following the easy path has led to stagnation in the mainstream.

<comment><USER9> upvoted for "emacs still takes ages to boot" -- hit me right where it counts.

I wonder though, is reckless advancement better than taking time to do it right? A lot of people are finding success with the fail-and-iterate model -- isn't that essentially what we've identified as a problem now?

<comment><USER4> Incremental improvements are improvements, but one runs the risk of reaching a local maximum. As we see a significant change in the landscape (say, networking, SMP, or GPGPU, which haven't been prevalent since companies wrote their own minimal operating systems when receiving a computer), we build on what we have rather than breaking it down and factoring new capabilities into our way of thinking. We know it's a good idea to do so, but the advancements tend to be limited to academic or research oriented projects rather than widespread commercial pursuits.

There's a good reason for this, which is backwards compatibility, in terms of concepts, education, maintaining a skilled workforce, and retaining the value of prior investments in hardware and software.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> TL;DR: Grumpy, bitter man is grumpy and bitter.

I suppose Nelson deserves _some_ credit for being a visionary, but there are two definitions for visionary in the dictionary: (1) A person with unusual powers of foresight; (2) A person given to fanciful speculations and enthusiasms with little regard for what is actually possible.

Nelson is obviously much more the second than the first.

He's no more visionary than at least a thousand other people who ACTUALLY DID STUFF.

Some really smart individuals, like Nelson, get lost in their own private jungles. Here's an example of what I mean. Nelson inserted a note in this document in 2012 wherein he points to the rise of XPointer and XPath as validating something he said back in 1999. XPointer and XPath?! XPointer and XPath have had barely any impact on _anything_ that's happened in computing since 1999.

Nelson is apparently in such a deep fog of irrelevance that he somehow perceives XPointer and XPath as being important in some way? It's bizarre. I think it illustrates why he never managed to accomplish anything or make any actual contributions beyond his "visionary" grenade-throwing.

<comment><USER3> Yes! You're almost half right! But more seriously TN is one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century. see my note above.

<comment><USER10> I am _thoroughly_ familiar with Nelson. I've read probably a majority of everything he's ever written. He's a smart man and a visionary. As I stated.

Doesn't change the fact that he hasn't been very successful at turning his ideas into anything actually useful to people, and doesn't change the fact that he shits all over the amazing accomplishments of thousands of other people who _have_.

<comment><USER3> I'm talking about his impact on history, not necessarily the validity of his arguments in the year 2013. Almost all work in history morphs into something else. He influenced others who have build the computer industry a great deal as far as I can tell. For example if one wonders where Steve Jobs got so many great ideas in the early years it's probably in part due to Nelson, for example understanding computing as an expressive medium, as a replacement for paper. Clearly the work of Berners-Lee is directly influenced by Nelson. Unlike Gutenberg he didn't actually build the printing press. But he should be mentioned as a major contributor to the modern computer world. I very much doubt that "thousands of other people" can claim anywhere such things. According to wikipedia: "The crucial underlying concept of hypertext originated with older projects from the 1960s, such as the Hypertext Editing System (HES) at Brown University, Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu, and Douglas Engelbart's oN-Line System (NLS)." So there are perhaps 5 or 10 people who are the first level input nodes for the web. Not "thousands". By this line of reasoning Bill Gates contributed more to the web, because the Internet Explorer was widely adopted.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


New 9front (Plan 9 fork) release "PLEASE EXCUSE ME THE OUTFLOW" - <AUTHOR> http://ninetimes.cat-v.org/news/2016/01/09/0/ <comment><USER2> I forget we make releases. If you want to download the image here's the link to the iso ( [http://9front.org/iso/9front-5048.e16a172bcae6.iso.bz2](http://9front.org/iso/9front-5048.e16a172bcae6.iso.bz2) ), link to dash 1 ( [http://fqa.9front.org/dash1.pleaseexcusemetheoutflow.pdf](http://fqa.9front.org/dash1.pleaseexcusemetheoutflow.pdf) ), and our site ( [http://9front.org](http://9front.org) ).

</comment><comment><USER3> More about 9front:

[http://fqa.9front.org/dash1.pleaseexcusemetheoutflow.pdf](http://fqa.9front.org/dash1.pleaseexcusemetheoutflow.pdf)</comment>


Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg Meets China Propaganda Chief in Beijing - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/20/facebooks-mark-zuckerberg-meets-china-propaganda-chief-in-beijing <comment><USER3> Zuckerberg wanted his employees to read the latest book by the current Chinese president a few years back. The book was pure propaganda.

I wish he represented freedom and standing up for everyone's freedom of speech (and privacy), but just looking at his personal history and actions, I just don't think this is the case.

<comment><USER4> Zuckerberg desperately wants his toy to capture India and China - <USER2> countries with massive population where Facebook is literally unknown at the moment.

For India, it's a socioeconomic problem - hence the Internet.org/"free basics" shilling.

For China, it's a political one - hence the shoulder rubbing.</comment></comment>


29 Design Features That Increase Your Home's Value - <AUTHOR> https://www.realestate.com/articles/finance/design-features-that-increase-home-value <comment><USER2> They forgot the biggest one: #30 Be located in a location where it's illegal to add more housing supply.

</comment><comment><USER3> No, you can not just add solar panels to a house and make it worth 40% more. Literally every home would have solar panels on it if that were even remotely true. The truth is that you are unlikely to make your money back on most home improvement projects, especially if you hire a contractor.

Also there is an upper limit on how much you can increase the value of your home because you are limited by the value of your neighbor's homes and nearby comparable homes. If you spend more on improvements than that upper limit, you are almost guaranteed to lose money.

Also most first time home buyers lose money anyway because they fail to properly assess the value of a property, they negotiate poorly, and they get emotional about it.

</comment><comment><USER4> Having the phrase "solar panel" in a property description may correlate with a 40% increase in "expected sale price" (the blog post doesn't say what they mean by this), but having solar panels in your home correlates with all sorts of things that haven't been controlled for in the analysis (for instance how warm the local climate is).

Much more useful would be an estimate of how much a home's value would increase if solar panels were installed. That figure is certainly much less than 40%.

Reference: I built Opendoor's home valuation model.

</comment><comment><USER5> This reads like a list of savvy remodels added to flipped homes in outrageously expensive areas. It's easy to imagine someone adding a solar roof, a fancy ceiling and a pergola to sell a 1,200 square foot bungalow in SV for way more than it's worth. But most of these would be almost impossible to add to any true starter home in the midwest, which probably average around 1,600 square feet - where do you add the mud room and home theater?

</comment><comment><USER6> This is clearly for specific areas of the world. In Canada "gas furnace" is really the only option, and solar panels aren't terribly feasible.

That being said, I recently bought a home that checks a lot of those boxes (gas furnace, clawfoot tub, hardwood floor, central vac, mid-century) and it was on the market less than 24 hours with multiple offers, so clearly the items are valued. I just question the ability to add those percentages to it.

</comment><comment><USER7> The author didn't do a very good job interpreting these statistics. The conditions that would exist when someone would choose to invest in solar panels exclude a large fraction of homes; solar panels are a recent enough addition for most that homes which have been allowed to fall into disrepair are excluded. They further exclude homes that don't have a view, homes that are part of a multi-unit bloc, and, in some cases, duplexes.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is pretty meaningless without real dollar amounts.

<comment><USER9> The percentages seem more informative to me, since they are meaningful across different locations. If you don't know what 40% of a home price is in your area, do some research.

<comment><USER8> I believe that they are not meaningful across locations. Things like solar arrays and bathtubs have a similar cost around the country, but house prices can vary wildly.

<comment><USER9> This is plausible, but would imply that improvements like these would be more common in lower-house-cost areas, since they'd make a "bigger" difference. That doesn't seem to be the case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Actual headline article is "29 Design Features That Helped Starter Homes Sell For More Than Expected" and it has home theater in the list.

Which starter home buyer is looking for home theater ? I live in bay area so may be I don't get it :) . For starter home, only requirement here is to be within 1.5 million dollar :D

<comment><USER11> A starter home is not "1.5 million dollar [sic]".

<comment><USER12> I could be wrong but last time I checked you'd struggle to get a starter home for <1.5 mil in Cupertino CA :)

<comment><USER11> Which you can easily argue is not the place right now to be picking your Starter Home.

The point still stands.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Solar Panels is #1. What I've heard about that is there's no return on investment. What'd be a nice add-on to the article is the ROI figures for each feature.

<comment><USER14> Yah I think it varies from region to region too. I don't think a mudroom in souther California helps much. Would be great to see some research around this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Real estate article is trending on hacker news :) #bayarea

</comment><comment><USER15> Very Interesting...I wonder how much subway tiles would add to value? I always thought those were winners.

Sure does look like Quartz is beating Granite at this time.

</comment><comment><USER16> In short, be trendy. The items that increase your value today could very well decrease it 5 years from now.

<comment><USER5> Sure, but chances are that many of your house's existing features are becoming progressively less trendy over time, and you could have something hard to sell (or daunting to update) if you don't do too much over a few decades of home ownership.

<comment><USER17> > chances are that many of your house's existing features are becoming > progressively less trendy over time

Depends on the time window really.

Hardwood floors were considered dated and carpet luxurious for a while</comment></comment></comment>


NBA player selling his branded shoes for $14.99. Disruptive, maybe? - <AUTHOR> http://www.starbury.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> More info: [http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_15/b3979091....](http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_15/b3979091.htm)

</comment><comment> daniel-cussen Definitely disruptive. I realize it's not extremely recent, but I'd still say this disrupts things, not unlike EMI's decision to get out of the RIAA. It's the ideal post that isn't strictly startup-related but is still interesting to hackers. Upvote x2.

</comment><comment><USER2> This has been out for almost 2 years, it's old news.

<comment><USER3> I'm still glad he posted it, because it's new to me.</comment></comment>