Day Trading for a Living? - <AUTHOR> https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3423101 <comment><USER3> They have a reason to make that article: there is a lot of companies fooling the Brazilian people over this.

I'm a Brazilian software developer for the financial market. I also made some financial courses on the same university that the authors.

Brazilian stock exchange market has exploded in the last years and most of my friends decided to 'work' as traders. None of them with prior knowledge or experience in the market. All of the posts on Instagram every time they earn some money.

The cause for this fever was the marketing around 3 or 4 companies who sell the dream of financial independence through high-risk financial market lessons. Normally they offered courses to famous people for free and use their image to convince the rest of us.

One interesting thing: they normally sell the course with a private platform to trade the stocks included. I believe that they use that platform to collect data and operate against the traders that use that platform. They know the strategy that they are going to use (because they teach them), so it is easy to operate against.

<comment><USER4> > One interesting thing: they normally sell the course with a private platform > to trade the stocks included. I believe that they use that platform to > collect data and operate against the traders that use that platform. They > know the strategy that they are going to use (because they teach them), so > it is easy to operate against.

You're assuming a complex strategy is needed when a simple one can easily suffice: simply pretend that you executed the trades, give the clients their profits, and keep the losses. In other words, the broker can take the opposite side of every deal and keep the spread and commissions. If, indeed, the client is trading based on no information whatsoever, then the broker wins and the client loses.

To improve this, the broker can throw out the best performing clients, since they might genuinely know what they're doing.

I'm not suggesting that this is what any particular broker does, but it's a strategy that works very well, at least in principle.

<comment><USER5> A business using this approach is called a Bucket Shop - it's both fairly well-known and explicitly illegal in most places: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucket_shop_(stock_market)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucket_shop_\(stock_market\))

<comment><USER6> It's also very similar to 'spread betting', explicitly legal in the UK and a large industry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For anyone interested in a great story about a world class mathematician who built a company that has used algorithms to beat the market for the last few decades, James Simons has an impressive record:

[https://www.ted.com/talks/jim_simons_a_rare_interview_with_t...](https://www.ted.com/talks/jim_simons_a_rare_interview_with_the_mathematician_who_cracked_wall_street?language=en)

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QNznD9hMEh0](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QNznD9hMEh0)

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Simons_(mathematician)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Simons_\(mathematician\))

One other thing, the Simons Foundation funds Quanta Magazine, whose articles frequently appear on HN:

[https://www.quantamagazine.org/](https://www.quantamagazine.org/)

<comment><USER8> Someone will always beat the market, because that's what we're looking for.

I think it was on "Thinking Fast and Slow" that I read it's pointless to analyze the stock market winners, since it's a random process. Imagine there are 30 million entities that own stocks in the US - individual, companies, funds, etc... If on a given year half of them did better than average (with some rounding liberty):

      1st year: 15M better than average
      2nd year: 7.5M better than average
      3: 3.25M
      4: 1.6M
      5: 800k
      6: 400k
      7: 200k
      8: 100k
      9: 50k
      10: 25k

And so on... after 20 years, probably 25 traders will have beaten the market for 20 years straight. Next year, same thing, 25 traders will have beaten the market, and so on. In the US, there's always someone who has beaten the market over the last few decades - there's nothing special about them. Randomly picking stocks would give you the same end result. But since we're storytellers, we build an explanation and go with it.

<comment><USER7> Who said it's a random process? Stock prices don't go up randomly over the long term.

Joel Greenblatt had 50% yearly returns for a decade.

Renaissance Technologies uses algorithms.

Also, I don't think you would expect someone to beat the market every year, but over a ten year period, for example.

<comment><USER9> I've got a roulette "system" too. Trust me, it even has _algorithms_ and _machine learning_. I'll sell you the book.

The discussion reminds me of a fun exercise we did in one of my B-school classes: everyone stands up and flips a coin. If you flip heads you sit down and stop the game. Everyone who flipped heads flips again, with the new tails flippers sitting down. At the end when there's one person left, the prof interviews him, asking "how did you become so skilled at flipping heads?" and "what advice can others take to get as good as you!"

This is what we are doing when we admire stock pickers and try to figure out what their secret is.

<comment><USER10> Well Claude Shannon and Ed Thorpe did figure out how to beat roullette. And BlackJack. And then Thorpe figured out Black Scholes and made a killing in the markets trading warrents.

See my above comment about how statistics does not bear out your fooled by randomness theory.

<comment><USER11> I don't have a dog in this fight but Ed Thorpe has one of his funds liquidated via RICO. He's usually used as an example in the positive case for "only bad behavior gets outsized market returns" argument.

Scholes & Merton got famously wrecked in the markets.

<comment><USER12> This is the perfect example of broken telephone. (If you don't know the full story and fail to post any source)

The reason why they got the RICO.

"From 1969 to the end of 1987 the amount invested rose from $1.4 million to $273 million. Its limited partners saw their wealth grow at 18.2 percent annualized after fees. PNP had no losing years — and not even a losing quarter."

The regulators thought that it was a Ponzi scheme based off that information or did they...

"But most knowledgeable observers believed that the charges — filed under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act — were also intended to get the Princeton Newport principals to testify against Michael Milken, the controversial "junk bond" trader who had upended Wall Street conventions and who had dealings with PNP."

The regulators thought that it was a Ponzi scheme, when in reality, they mastered the tax code and created losses via hedging, which was legal at the time.

"The resulting charges were related to trades that PNP had made to create losses that would offset corresponding gains that arose during the firm's hedging maneuvers."

"The Princeton Newport attorney, Theodore Wells, a Harvard Law and Harvard Business School alumnus known for high-profile white collar criminal defense, argued that the trades were allowed under IRS regulations. They even had a former IRS commissioner, Donald Alexander, prepared to testify in their defense. The judge would not permit it."

>I don't have a dog in this fight but Ed Thorpe has one of his funds liquidated via RICO.

First off, his name is Edward O. Thorp [https://g.co/kgs/jfpjL1](https://g.co/kgs/jfpjL1) not "Thorpe"

>Ed Thorpe has one of his funds liquidated via RICO.

Please post a source because almost all of the charges were overturned.

"Ed Thorp, who was not greatly affected by the criminal charges, was able to restart his hedge fund activity. In 2012 Thorp's net worth was estimated at $800 million."

All of this information came from this source.

[https://communitynews.org/2017/02/28/from-fat-cat-to- rackete...](https://communitynews.org/2017/02/28/from-fat-cat-to-racketeer- jay-regan-says-no-way/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't doubt the headline, but "We observe all individuals who began to day trade between 2013 and 2015 in the Brazilian equity futures market" seems like a weird way to come to that conclusion.

<comment><USER14> Why weird?

<comment><USER15> Because that is not a representative sampling of the day trader population. Assuming the techniques of the study were sound, at best we can conclude whether or not day trading Brazilian futures is a sustainably profitable undertaking.

<comment><USER16> Wouldn't you need a basis for believing that day trading Brazilian futures has unique properties not present in other markets to assert this? E.g. the volatility or spread is significantly larger than European futures or the information flow is more tightly de/regulated etc.

Is there a basis for believing this?

<comment><USER17> Making an assumption about the population based on a small non-random sample is usually the belief that needs to be justified by evidence.

<comment><USER18> 20,000 people is not a small sample. Sampling bias is still an issue with large populations, but generally significantly less important.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If you take Jan 1, 2013 to Dec 31st, 2015, the Brazillian stock market did very, very poorly. That probably explains why it was nearly impossible since most traders are probably long, not short the market. So even taking 1 day positions in stocks, still on average over 3 years will experience signifigant downward price pressure.

That said, the fact that the market is bad, is just randomness and shows one of the major difficulties with relying on investment income to support your life. Sometimes stuff just sucks, for very long periods of time. Meanwhile you must pay your bills.

That doesn't even get in to whether or not these people dramatically underperformed the market. They very likely did, but I also bet some of them outperformed based on luck or skill.

Stock market investing is something everyone should try at somepoint in small doses just to understand how difficult it is. Its probably the hardest way to make money in the world and even the best investors usually have a bad few years which ends their careers.

<comment><USER20> > Its probably the hardest way to make money in the world

Just no. Certainly it's not easy. But the hardest? I'd say there is a long list of occupations which most people would consider harder on various dimensions.

<comment><USER21> I think what parent commenter means is that it would be unlikely for almost anyone to make money that way, no matter how smart they are or how much time they put in.

I think they aren't saying that it's a hard profession by itself in the way that you are talking about — only that the expected returns are negative for almost anyone.

So in that case it's not calling day traders smarter or harder working than others. It's saying that no matter what your level of intelligence or other personal attributes there is likely some other job that would have much higher expected returns.

For person A it might be to be a firefighter, for person B, to be a gymnast, for person C, to be a brain surgeon, for person D to work as a maid. Etc etc.

At least that's the way that I read it.

<comment><USER19> Really well put.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Putting aside the potential quality issues of the study, the headline here in HN isn't accurate and made a lot of people comment about how wrong it is.

The study doesn't literally say "impossible" but "virtually impossible" and they do say that a very small percentage was able to make about $310 a day which is about ~110k a year.

<comment><USER23> 0.0051% of the study group, to be precise.

The more interesting trend, which isn't covered in the abstract, is that profitability is inversely correlated with how long you stay at it. It was 30% of people who day traded for one day and gave up on it, and steadily dropped down to 3% for people who kept at it for more than 300 days.

As a stats person, that struck me as a very evocative distribution. The paper put it nicely: "This peculiar pattern is similar to what we would fi􏰄nd, for instance, in the casino roulette."

The next thing I would want to know is, if you model the stock market as a machine that simply gives random payouts drawn from some distribution, what is the probability that a set of 1,551 groups of 300 random draws from that distribution would contain at least one set that averages more than $310? If the paper ran such a model, I didn't see it.

<comment><USER24> Yes, it certainly looks like what would be dictated by statistics with random chance that eventually reverts to a slightly negative mean.

In the short term it's not that unusual to flip a coin and get 5 heads in a row, but the more you throw the closer to a 50-50 split you'll see.

<comment><USER23> I'd also be very interested to see what would happened, hypothetically, if everyone just stopped trading after some fixed number of hours, held that position until the point when they decided to give up trading, and then liquidated it.

My hypothesis is that their average returns would end up being much higher than the returns they realized by day trading that whole time, due to less money being lost to fees.

<comment><USER25> ICO bagholders disagree

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I mean you may as well say: Study shows it is impossible for an individual to build a tech start up as a living.

Just because something is hard doesn't mean it's impossible. Day trading, like many other risky ventures, is something that is very hard and unlikely but for the few who succeed ends up being very profitable.

<comment><USER27> The abstract of the paper seems to suggest otherwise: _We observe all individuals who began to day trade between 2013 and 2015 in the Brazilian equity futures market, the third in terms of volume in the world, and persisted for at least 300 days: 97% of them lost money, only 0.4% earned more than a bank teller (US$54 per day), and the top individual earned only US$310 per day with great risk (a standard deviation of US$2,560)._

My interpretation of this, is that those they tracked in this study, it's not even all that profitable for the few that beat the odds while being exposed to significant risk.

<comment><USER26> But what should we compare those odds, how are we supposed to interpret this?

Imagine we tracked a group of 1000 randomly picked individuals who wanted to be a brain surgeon. I don't know for sure but I wouldn't be surprised if of 1000 randomly chosen people, only 3 people managed to succeed at it after 4 years.

But no one would ever say "Study shows it's impossible for an individual to become a brain surgeon." or imply that it's just random luck to be a brain surgeon. Instead we conclude that being a brain surgeon must be very hard and require a great deal of dedication and commitment.

The reason day trading is singled out whereas brain surgeons are not is that the barrier to entry to become a day trader is very low, anyone can try to become a day trader and many people think they can succeed at it.

The proper conclusion to take from this is isn't that the stock market is pure luck or just a form of gambling... it's that one shouldn't be deceived by the low barrier to entry into thinking that they can succeed at it. It's really hard, soul crushing work to be a successful day trader in much the same way it's really hard work to do anything in life that pays well.

<comment><USER28> Isn't it possible that there is simple not enough information in the system to successfully day trade (at least in this particular market). Considering that the daily movements of stocks are like a random walk, I don't find it hard to believe.

<comment><USER26> It's often difficult for me to discuss this since I do automated trading. I've been doing this for over 10 years now, have grown a company out of it that has 30 employees, and I maybe lose money 2 or 3 days out of the entire year and often times due to technical reasons...

Either daily movements of stocks are not at all like a random walk, or I am just one heck of an astronomically lucky guy. Now I do consider myself fortunate and privileged, for sure... but the amount of luck it would take to repeatedly make money on the market day after day that can fund a decently sized team of high paying engineers, data center costs/hardware costs, so on so forth... it's unthinkable.

The stock market, at least to the degree that I am involved in it, very short term market microstructure, doesn't behave anything like what economists say it does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The results are fairly obvious to anyone who has read "A Random Walk Down Wall Street".

Day traders rely on technical analysis which is the equivalent of astrology in the financial sector.

<comment><USER30> "Random Walk Down Wall Street" is somewhat outdated and a lot of the evidence from behavioural finance doesn't really support its central thesis. It's more dogma than anything.

<comment><USER31> The central thesis of short term market movements (say day to day or week to week or month to month) being a random walk is about 99.7% correct.

This is a statistical reality, you can literally crunch the numbers! Behavioral finance has nothing to do with it.

<comment><USER32> about 99.7%?

I've always hated the argument of this book: yes the markets are chaotic and short term movements appear random, but the appearance of being random is not equivalent to being caused by a random process. The book makes a big deal about how technical analysts saw patterns in random data so it must be bunk, but this doesn't really say anything about the predictive power of technical analysis when the data is generated by the aggregate actions of thousands of traders instead of a coin toss.

Price action is not the result of investors literally buying or selling at random. Each action is undertaken in response to external conditions and it is far from absurd to believe that patterns can exist in the price.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> "The easiest way to make a small fortune in the stock market is to start with a large one."

<comment><USER34> Man this one is wrong lol

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> With big enough equity and proper risk management, one can do so. Problem lies with low equity & high expectation which often leads to improper risk management and a sudden margin call. i.e. it's really easy to make $1 with $1 billion account size with risk nearing zero, but trying to make $1 with $100 is exponentially hard & risky. These so called day traders opt in for later b/c they are trained by the course & society & influences to do so.

<comment><USER36> Every retail trader I've talked to, wants to start with $1000 or less and make $300-$400 per day. Literally everyone. After they lose their 50th $1k, they still aim for the same. It's like an addiction to gambling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I always thought the problem with day trading is an absence of information: How does a single individual know enough about about all the various entities they are trading to really know when one is going up or down?

Seems like an institution with dedicated employees performing due diligence will know much more than an individual day trader, and thus will be able to make better decision about when to buy and sell?

Anyway, my bias has always been that day trading is really gambling.

<comment><USER38> All effective trading is, essentially, insider trading. Not in the legal definition, but in the sense that to beat the market, you have to know something that "the market" doesn't.

Or, just get lucky.

The only personal example I have is from buying NFLX stock about a decade ago. I saw a news (Slashdot I think) story that Netflix's servers were having an hours-long outage. I can't remember if it was mentioned in the story that their stocks took a dip, or I just happened to look. Either way, I noticed that their stocks were down about 30% on that news, which seemed silly to me. The market was treating this like it was some kind of disaster for the company, whereas I was pretty confident it was a temporary blip.

I bought the stock, just a few hundred worth since I was in my first barely- over-minimum wage job at the time. Netflix got their servers running again, and the stock recovered the next day. I decided to hold on to the stock because, why not? Today, it's worth about 20x what I bought at.

If only I'd bought more.

My point is, I knew that the market was wrong, and an hours-long server outage wasn't a reason for Netflix to suddenly be worth 30% less than it was the day before.

To successfully pick stocks, you have to have some kind of expertise or insider knowledge to know when the market's wrong, and you're right. Most of us, in most situations, don't have that kind of expertise or insider knowledge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> It's not impossible, there are many people who make decent money from day trading. It might be more accurate to say "study shows it is difficult to earn a living trading stocks"

<comment><USER40> The abstract, of course, contains more detail than the headline regarding exactly what is claimed:

> We show that it is virtually impossible for an individual to day trade for a > living, contrary to what course providers claim. We observe all individuals > who began to day trade between 2013 and 2015 in the Brazilian equity futures > market, the third in terms of volume in the world, and persisted for at > least 300 days: 97% of them lost money, only 0.4% earned more than a bank > teller (US$54 per day), and the top individual earned only US$310 per day > with great risk (a standard deviation of US$2,560). Additionally, we find no > evidence of learning by day trading.

<comment><USER41> The interesting bit to me is, "we find no evidence of learning by day trading". This implies to me that the top earners are merely lucky, and have no special knowledge or advantages.

<comment><USER42> We were taught explicitly in my (highly-ranked US) business school that stock performance is a random walk and success is luck.

<comment><USER43> This is an interesting concept to be teaching business school students.

Doesn't this amount to telling you your education is useless?

<comment><USER44> No, because running a business and stock trading are different things.

<comment><USER43> running a business is just the opposite side of the stock trading coin.

If the stocks themselves are random walks, then the underlying company performance must be random walks. If your education does indeed improve the outcomes of the business you manage and run then that would mean stock performance can be influenced by things other than luck.

Unless of course you are operating under the premise that company performance and stock performance are unrelated.

<comment><USER44> I don't know. But a business may perform predictably from the insider's point of view ans unpredictably from the outside.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> While I agree that day trading anything is an extremely poor idea- why is trading by banks/hedge funds/Goldman Sachs etc. consistently profitable? (Or if isn't profitable, why do they do it?) Is it just the massive informational advantage that they have? I'm not advocating for trading per se (I certainly don't do it!)- just curious about how large financial institutions presumably turn trading profits in light of EMH

<comment><USER31> Goldman Sachs isn't profitable because of prop trading. They charge fees for services. It's that simple.

<comment><USER45> So then why do they trade at all then? I'm not arguing for trading, I'm just curious.

It seems like the existence of 'trader' as a job at all of these financial institutions kind of disproves EMH if you have enough market data

<comment><USER31> They don't.

After the Volcker rule the big banks had to close their prop trading groups: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_trading](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_trading)

The idea that investment banks are filled with human "traders" is Hollywood nonsense.

Most trading activity (and even filling of retail order flow) is now done by quant-driven funds.

<comment><USER45> According to LinkedIn there are 573 people with the job title 'trader' at Goldman Sachs. I'm scanning through the list now- titles like Fixed Income Trader, Mortgage Trader, Rates Trader, Oil Trader, Equity Sales Trader, FX Trader, Emerging Markets Trader, Base Metals Trader, Interest Rates Trader, Investment Grade Bond Trader, Equity Derivatives Trader, Commodity Trader.... I found all of these on the first page of results (25 people)

<comment><USER31> By contrast, about 37,000 people work at Goldman. Those people with the name "trader" in their title are simply executing client trades as a service for fees—-not speculating with the banks own money.

I stand by my point, the idea that Goldman is full of traders in the Hollywood sense is nonsense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I have a couple friends that do day trading on "technical analysis". As in, they only trade on the chart movements. Both claim to make money consistently. I generally believe them, but it seems like black magic to me. Especially when they explain what they're doing in detail.

Not sure I understand this study tho, and whether or not it relates.

<comment><USER23> One thing to keep in mind is that even a random number generator can trivially turn a profit when the market is trending up. It's when the market is volatile or going down that you get a real test of how well a strategy works.

Which isn't to say that technical analysis is unfounded. And I do believe that there are opportunities that exist for individuals that haven't been arbitrated out of the market by the professional quants simply because they don't represent enough money to be interesting on an institutional scale. But it takes something like a bear market to really know for sure if you've found those opportunities, or if you're just riding a rising tide that lifts all boats.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> There are prop firms[1] filled with traders regularly making money hand over fist. Many of those traders also make a killing on their personal account.

So while certainly not easy, it's possible.

Trading suffers from some of the same problems of web development: few barriers to entry leading to an abundance of low-quality participants, and the mostly autodidactic nature of skill development.

Like 10x engineers, 10x traders exist. But getting there requires thousands of hours of deliberate practice, discipline and conscientiousness - <USER2> typically not found among the get-rich-quick crowd who discovered trading after clicking a Youtube ad for forexbillionaredaytrader.scam

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_trading](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_trading)

</comment><comment><USER48> Something that's probably not mentioned in the article is that it's really easy to get into day trading in Brazil. I think I read somewhere that in the US you need a US$ 25k account to day trade; in Brazil with a US$ 50 account you're in the game. There are many zero-fee brokers (though those are a recent development, I don't remember those in 2013), and capital gain taxes are 20%.

In fact I'm surprised that day trading in Brazil is not more popular than it already is. It's basically legalized gambling. I do remote work as a software developer in Brazil and I've been playing a bit with options swing trading on the side (which is even cheaper than day trading); I don't plan to make a living out of it, but it can be fun (and a bit addictive).

</comment><comment><USER49> This is akin to saying "it is impossible to gamble at the casino for a living", which for the overwhelming majority of people is true. Having said that, it's not impossible. People have beaten casinos before, and they have beaten markets, by finding an edge over the house (or market) - but it's never the typical Joe type. In day-trading, the typical Joe uses so-called "technical analysis", the same stuff you'll find in books and taught by course providers, which offers absolutely no edge over the market. It's simply cashing in on hope.

<comment><USER50> I think the "for a living" is really about beating it longer term and the income comes in a sustainable fashion.

Even someone beating a casino I would think would get some big payouts to live on long term... but that casnio is gonna notice and shut down that "living" or just ban you. In that sense you're not doing it "for a living" as much as hoping to make enough money in a short span to maybe last longer term.

Now maybe they find new ways to beat the casino but to do it sustainability is questionable.

So beating the casino seems different than "for a living" IMO.

<comment><USER49> Large, irregular payouts can also constitute a living. In extreme cases, it might even be just one payout.

<comment><USER50> I think the study shows that even that didn't happen for anyone in the market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> You see it on Instagram all the time... charlatans hawking 'trading systems' on equities, options, fx, etc. They're targeting people who want to 'take control of their lives.' Trading is like professional sports: once in the while a natural comes around, but for most, it's a great way to lose buckets of cash. Even for traders' with a gift, it takes about three years to develop a kind of market sense or intuition. Then there are the markets themselves: with low-latency and HFT, you're almost never in control. You can only hope your algo is close to one the other traders are using. I especially love those flim-flam artists--hawking FX futures trading as a way to financial independence--their own usually. FX markets are controlled largely by central banks who don't always let the market know what they're doing and includes some of the world's most capitalized banks. It's hard to know what to do in a market with all of these massive external forces. Most importantly, the markets have evolved over the last 15 years to a point where if you're not low-touch, you're going to lose. Having said this, last year I beat the S&P soundly. It was a good year. It did take a minimum of 60 hours a week and was a stressful roller coaster at times. This year... forget it. With one of the least stable administrations in place, the market can reverse direction multiple times in a day. You'd better be automated for that.

</comment><comment><USER52> That is so misleading! I have been day trading profitably for the last 6+ years. It is more than enough to cover my living expenses for a family of 4. But I also work (freelance dev), because it cannot cover my home EMIs.

My returns are not too high, but much better than bank interest rates and probably much below professional traders. The only thing stopping me from earning my EMIs or more income is the allocated capital, which is limited to stay in the game long term without losing my shirt. Even though I had a profitable strategy even before I started trading profitably, it took me 2.5 years to align my comfort/tolerance level with risk management. i.e. its not just about having a profitable strategy. I did minor tweaks on my strategy only 2 times in all those years.

I do not doubt that many fail with day trading. In my case, day trading is stressful and takes anywhere between 5-8 hours of my time daily including time spent outside market hours. It is stressful, exciting and frustratingly boring while waiting for opportunities. And to add to the stress I freelance too, mostly before trading hours and some after. Doing both feels like slogging everyday and on some days I have an internal struggle about increasing the trading risk. And there are times where other traders will (unintentionally) gaslight by telling me how their monthly returns are equal to my annual returns.

<comment><USER53> Ok but the last 6 years the market has generally only gone up. If you are doing technical analysis, you would expect to actually be profitable in an expansionary period. The problem is if you trade the same way in a deflationary period you will lose all of your gains.

<comment><USER54> It'd be interesting if the trading interface could silently flip the chart & swap the puts & shorts during a deflationary period, so that you could keep trading the same way, while taking into account a bear market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> But this is directly in contrary to people who have told me they can make 20% a week day trading!

By my calculations, the guy who told me that a few years back should literally own the entire world by now.

</comment><comment><USER56> I've done ok trading stocks and FX, probably enough to live off. There is a caveat however; you need to have a sizeable portfolio to begin with. Otherwise, the risks you'll need to take are simply too large.

If you think you're going to turn £5k into £500k in a year, forget it! But turning £5k into £5.3k is certainly doable.

Scale that initial portfolio to £5m, and you can take home £300k with relative ease in a good market- that's a very comfortable income for most people.

<comment><USER57> That's less then 10٪. Long term stock market returns are around 7% and considerably less riskier.

<comment><USER56> Yes, long term 7% is the quoted number, however that can be over a couple of decades (maybe more) and you may need to endure a recession or two.

With a bit of active management, I manage to achieve 6-8% each year, but I avoid large negative hits that an index fund might endure in a bad market.

So, I'm sort of returning similar returns to market, but with less volatility in the bad times. I'm sorta happy with that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Their title should really say "now" at the end. It was definitely possible before. I know people who did it, and they weren't just bragging about fake gains. I saw the accounts. I saw the rigs. And I saw them go from one small house to a bunch of rental houses and a big mansion using day trading profits.

And they all retired before 2008.

</comment><comment><USER59> The article is very good, but there is another dimension to be evaluated: There are two futures contracts that attract a lot of trading volume in Brazil: ibovespa futures and dollar/real futures. Both contracts have two tickers each, the "full" and the "mini". So we have: INDFUT, DOLFUT, WINFUT and WDOFUT (those two last are the "minis").

The common lore (or myth) goes as follow: The average trader starts trading paper money in a demo account, then goes to the mini to "learn to feel the pain" and if successful migrates to the full contract.

So, to really have the bigger picture, the study must be expanded to include the four tickers. Them we can really now if the "pros" playing on the full contract are really making any money.

</comment><comment><USER60> Two axioms for small investors: 1\. You can't make money by day trading. 2\. Technical analysis is bunk.

<comment><USER61> I would like to expand on this point because while it is true as stated above, there is more to the picture from my perspective. Day trading and technical analysis are certainly bunk, but the problem I see is people equating day trading with making intelligent stock picks which were NOT driven solely by technical analysis nonsense.

For instance, predicting that a certain company's product will steal market share from a competitor based upon personal experience in the same industry and then purchasing stocks based upon this is an extremely viable strategy. Especially, if your intentions are to hold for the long term (beyond 12 months). You just need to get comfortable with the boundaries of your own understanding and make rational decisions based on this. I always see this black and white discussion (put everything into a broad market EFT vs day trade on technical analysis) without much discussion of intermediate strategies that are based on actual concrete research and understanding of the relevant markets.

<comment><USER60> I do the above, but I think it might be vanity. It's not clear I shouldn't spread risk via ETFs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Is it just me who thinks really weird the idea of "working" without producing anything?

<comment><USER63> Think of a used car dealership. They buy cars and resell them later for (usually) a higher price. Are they not producing anything?

As the sibling comment pointed, participants in a market are producing and consuming liquidity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Impossible? Lol I have a handful of friends that do this. It's hard work but they make 5 to 6 figures consistently per year.

It's very very hard, and not everyone can do it. I tried and lost a lot of money. But it's definitely not impossible, that is simply a lie.

<comment><USER65> Your particular logical fallacy is "cherry picking".

<comment><USER64> You only need one example to disprove that something is "impossible".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> _We show that it is virtually impossible for an individual to day trade for a living, contrary to what course providers claim. We observe all individuals who began to day trade between 2013 and 2015 in the Brazilian equity futures market, the third in terms of volume in the world, and persisted for at least 300 days: 97% of them lost money, only 0.4% earned more than a bank teller (US$54 per day), and the top individual earned only US$310 per day with great risk (a standard deviation of US$2,560). Additionally, we find no evidence of learning by day trading._

</comment><comment><USER67> Aren't futures contracts, by definition, zero-sum?

The _average_ profit should be pretty damn close to zero (ignoring/averaging across trades with non-daytraders).

<comment><USER68> This is a common misconception. Futures contracts are very often used for nonspeculative purposes (e.g. Starbucks locking in prices for buying milk or farmers locking in prices to sell wheat). This is a form of insurance. While the end users are ultimately may net with each other, the intermediaries who take risk matching these parties charge a fee (the spread) for doing so.

Why can't the end users trade with each other directly and avoid such fees then? Often they are not in the market at the same time or want to trade different quantities, relying on the intermediaries to resolve these problems.

<comment><USER67> I get that the insurance has a value of its own, but what about the trading of futures specifically?

Suppose I buy a biotech stock at $10/share. They make a breakthrough, and the stock shoots up to $110/share. I make +$100/share, but no one has lost the corresponding $100.

Suppose I agree to buy an ounce of silver from you for $20 in January. If silver is $21 then, you effectively lose a dollar , since you need to chip in a buck to get me my silver. If it's $19, you can slip a dollar into your own pocket before buying the silver on the spot market. Regardless of how it turns out, the total gain is zero.

What am I missing?

<comment><USER68> Suppose a farmer wants to lock in the price of milk produced the farmer's dairy. The farmer wants to sell futures and sees a market of 18.30 / 18.50. These prices are probably being shown by a market maker. The farmer sells the futures to the market maker at 18.30. A few minutes later, Starbucks would like to buy the same contracts, to lock in its costs for the next month. Starbucks buys at 18.50.

These two participants have paid the market maker, in total, 0.20 in spread. Here, the spread is the fee the market maker charges for facilitating liquidity. At this point, the net sum between the three participants is still 0. However, we also need to factor in the fees charged by the exchange, any taxes that may be charged on the transaction (for example the SEC fee in equities), clearing fees, and funding costs.

On the whole, the transaction between the three participants was negative sum. However, the market maker is running a business by reflecting those costs, and the risk premium, in the spread. Even though this transaction is negative sum, it, presumably, still provides economic value to the farmer and Starbucks.

<comment><USER67> Isn't that example nearly zero-sum (ignoring the spread)? If the spot price for milk goes down later, Starbucks loses a bit of money. If it goes up, the farmer has effectively "paid" for an advance.

My point is that futures are _by construction_ zero-sum (ignoring spreads) or negative sum (including them). Thus, any analysis that averages across market participants' P&L will conclude that futures trading is unprofitable[0], except for the market makers. This is true regardless of the savvy of market participants.

[0] Obviously, it doesn't capture non-cash considerations. Starbucks and the farmer both might be thrilled with reduced risk. But paper doesn't consider those factors either.

<comment><USER68> > Isn't that example nearly zero-sum (ignoring the spread)?

But ignoring the spread is incorrect, and nearly zero sum is not the same as zero-sum. The spread is the fee that market makers earn for a service they provide. You're also not considering other participants. The price changes you're talking about could be driven entirely by end users, or they could be driven by speculators, arbitrageurs, and others who are providing separate services (price discovery, liquidity, balance sheet, arbitrage, etc.) and are also capturing some of the value.

> futures trading is unprofitable[0], except for the market makers

If you are explicitly excluding participants who profit by providing financial services to markets, then you are begging the question.

> Obviously, it doesn't capture non-cash considerations. Starbucks and the > farmer both might be thrilled with reduced risk.

Transferring risk can definitely provide economic value (insurance policies exist for this reason), but it should be noted that there are other advantages as well. These futures transactions can help Starbucks manage inventory without needing to maintain large stockpiles of perishable or reduce the volatility of prices charged to consumers.

<comment><USER67> Are you saying that the "misconception" is that it's actually slightly negative-sum, rather than exactly-zero sum? If so, great, I agree. It doesn't change my point at all; if anything it makes it stronger.

 _I_ am not excluding anyone; I'm trying to explain why I think the result here is not particularly enlightening.

<comment><USER68> My understanding of your comments is influenced strongly by this statement:

> Thus, any analysis that averages across market participants' P&L will > conclude that futures trading is unprofitable[0], except for the market > makers. This is true regardless of the savvy of market participants.

By virtue of offering various services to market participants, savvy market operators can consistently generate profit. In the context of this article, I took your statement to mean that any given participant cannot consistently do so.

At the same time, the end users entering into these transactions understand they will be paying these fees, just as a firm expects to pay a fee to borrow money from a bank. If we describe this process as a zero-sum game, it gives the impression that trading is a speculative casino, reallocating money to participants at random (the misconception). If we describe it instead as negative-sum, where participants are paying/paid for services, it better reflects the economic value of the transactions.

> ignoring/averaging across trades with non-daytraders

I didn't see this bit for some reason when originally responding to your comment. Had I, my comment would have been stated differently.

<comment><USER67> That's not what zero-sum means. The definition of a zero sum "game" is simply one where the participants' payoffs (here, profits) sum to zero.

Nothing in the definition prevents some participants from being better players than others. As you noted above, some entities might also prefer to "buy" stability for their main operation instead of trying to minimize their spending on some of its inputs. Nevertheless, for every dollar made on futures, someone has lost (at least) that much. Except for the market-maker, the entire thing is a closed system. Thus, you'd expect the average return, across everyone trading the contract, to be zero, which is exactly what this paper shows.

The paper does show 47 people who turned a profit. Their analysis can't distinguish between rubes who haven't (yet) reverted to the mean and savvy traders with some kind of effective edge. It would be interesting to see what the loss distribution looks like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> Reminds me of:

> It's said that most at home traders fail, but this is incorrect: they fail > at making money, but they are successful at feeling like a trader. That is > the goal; the money is secondary, which is why they fail at making it.

      — The Last Psychiatrist, Who Can Know How Much Randi Zuckerberg Is Worth?(http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2014/03/who_can_know_how_much_randi_zu.html)

</comment><comment><USER70> In the time frame tested, Brazil's equity markets fell about 60%. I'm sure more than just 'day traders' failed to make money.

</comment><comment><USER71> I've always wanted to design a slot machine that traded a few NASDAQ stocks.

You go into a bar, run your credit card and stick some money in the machine, buy/sell some shares (with leverage?), machine owner skims off fees, cash out when done.

I never thought day trading worked very well and given the number of non-human brains on the other side (plus the overhead), the odds are good that the odds are bad.

</comment><comment><USER72> In the whole paper, there's no mention of whether the market itself was growing or shrinking. This makes the results kind of hard to trust. Assume the market lost money for these dates, then it would follow that most traders on that market lost money as well. The results should at least be controlled for the overall rate of change of the market.

<comment><USER73> I don't think that's how day trading is supposed to work. Successful day traders are supposed to make money whichever way the market is moving, by taking short positions when the market is going down and long when the market is up. Buy-and-hold investors (quite the opposite of day traders) are the ones who make money when the market as a whole goes up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> Sorry this doesnt fly.

I think at best we can conclude that the trading methods used by the sample are ineffective for day trading in Brazil. Now if their methods are similar to that of the population, one may be able to conclude that common day trade methods are unsustainable within the brazilian market

</comment><comment><USER75> I don't understand. If companies (pensions, banks, funds) regularly trade and make profit (ie: for a living), why can't individuals? I think this study is flawed, more likely the Brazilian market had problems during the study's time period.

<comment><USER76> Putting your money in a savings account already gets you 6%-10% depending on how Brazil's economy is doing. Putting your money in real estate gets you 10%-50% depending on the neighborhood. But both of those investments require big/old money, and the younger generation does not have that (not uncommon for a highly qualified engineer or mathematician to live at their parents until they are 28, because they can not afford to rent or buy a apartment).

So, daytrading has become extremely popular. It is the "make 2000$ working from home" style and seedily advertised everywhere. For instance, the night door man at a medium-poor hotel was up all night looking at candle graphs and drawing trendlines. My girlfriends social media is full of influencers who get free money to play and then only report on their winnings. I spoke with a professional gamer who quit university to do nothing but Twitch stream and day trade. He makes 6400$ a month in a country where the minimum wage is 290$ (though cost of living can be on par with the big cities in the US).

The data they used is pretty solid, but then again, if you make serious money with day trading, then you find a so-called "little way" to avoid detection and scrutiny. For instance, it would be slightly more complex to use 20 accounts, vs. just 1 account. You can trade on another person's details.

I think the biggest part of the losses are caused by the hype, and targeting this hype to financially illiterate people, who do not have much money to weather a bad streak. Many ordinary people were also sucked into Bitcoin around December 2017, with taxi drivers investing in fractional BTC, only to see their savings and vacation money drop to 25% of the original value.

Market was not super (but is recovering).

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> FX trader here. I do trade daily for the last 18 months, mostly algo, and it IS possible to make profit every single day. Just aim for 0.1% per day and you are set for life. You aim for the 0.1% of your capital, so when the market goes against you, you got enough margin to keep the account alive.

Anton Kreil has a good video (I will add it later - walking now) that tells the tale how the markets are set up to rip you off/apart. He mentions the 90-90-90 rule.

90% of retail traders lose 90% of their capital every 90 days. I have seen this happening so many times to retail traders who want to get rich in a week that I just stopped talking to other traders because they never learn their lesson.

Edit: Anton Kreil's video on how the system is stacked up against 'you'. He of course also sells the 'secret recipe' to win!!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzFl0uDwAQY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzFl0uDwAQY)

<comment><USER77> If you could make .1% every on the stock market that would be a return of 29% a year. I am not sure how many hedge funds could get you that kind of return.

FX is different and I guess there are differences in terms of trading days, but returning .1% every day would be very hard.

<comment><USER36> I'd say even more than 20% per year, because you aim for 0.1%, but when the market goes against you, you may end up having a max floating -20% but that will close with a 2% profit that day.

The Broker will only cheat a little just to push you over the edge. As long as stay far-far away from the edge, you are safe. If you aim for 0.1%, even if they (broker, markets, price action) do their worse, they won't get you past 10% (that's x100 the 0.1% risk:reward you aim for).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> Nonsense. Of course you can. You just have to sell it as a course rather then do the trading.

</comment><comment><USER79> "We observe all individuals who began to day trade between 2013 and 2015 in the Brazilian equity futures market, the third in terms of volume in the world, and persisted for at least 300". How do they know it is "all"?

</comment><comment><USER80> Day trading seems similar to online poker, where 98% of players are loosing players.

<comment><USER81> And yet, every poker player will tell you about how they always win. The same goes for daytraders I guess

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> In other news, it's virtually impossible to earn a living buying lottery tickets.

</comment><comment><USER83> Anecdotal sure but I know many who are trading derivatives at a profit — they're being conservative but selling and buying options can be lucrative although it goes against the efficient market hypothesis

</comment><comment><USER84> This year has been unusual but it is pretty wild as someone fully invested in stocks (including individual picks) how many times I found myself making more than my rent or paycheck in a day.

</comment><comment><USER85> What do you think traders who work at banks are doing? Last I checked, they made more than bank tellers.

(Being facetious, looking at one instrument in one market is awful...it deserves a stupid response).

</comment><comment><USER86> That 100% assurance that no one can day trade seems a bit, ever seems like a bold declaration. I'm sure there are prodigies that can, but the other 99% of us suck at it over time.

</comment><comment><USER87> Mandatory reading for anyone considering trading stocks: [http://edmarkovich.blogspot.com/2013/12/why-i-dont-trade- sto...](http://edmarkovich.blogspot.com/2013/12/why-i-dont-trade-stocks-and- probably.html?m=1)

TLDR: just invest in an index fund.

<comment><USER88> Until Michael burry pointed out that indexes have a grown into a bubble...

</comment></comment><comment><USER89> Start with a big pot, learn python, don't be stupid.

</comment><comment><USER90> This is probably the worst retitle I've seen on HN

</comment><comment><USER91> That's not really a claim that science can prove.

</comment><comment><USER92> Teaching people to day trade as a career sounds kind of like teaching people to challenge NBA players to basketball games for money, as a career

</comment><comment><USER93> It's possible, because people do it.

Maybe they mean day trading isn't something that can be managed, metricized, and scrummed to death like some other fields?

</comment><comment><USER94> Humans day trading is harder / impossible mainly because computers do it now, and do a much better job of it.

</comment><comment><USER95> > 97% of day traders lost money

How can I take the opposite side of these trades? Is this what James Simons is doing?

<comment><USER96> Buy and hold...simple as that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER88> I find it interesting that all the comments on here seems to corroborate this evidence.

It doesn't seem like a large percentage of comments are saying "this is false, because I make a living day trading!"

Instead most of the comments say something like "this story is untrue because I know someone who makes a living day trading"

Knowing someone != being someone

<comment><USER97> Many people who are actually successful with day trading (as opposed to selling pitchforks to miners) don't like to brag or talk openly, or post flashy pictures on social media.

Why? Because they don't need the attention. They don't need people begging to mentor them for free, or share the strategy they've worked for months or years, or ask for free stuff since they didn't really "work" for it like lottery winners, or criticize their livelihood saying it can't be done. There's just no point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER98> The subject of this post should be changed to remove "impossible."

</comment><comment><USER99> It is difficult to make a living but you can make money day trading. Market isn't the fastest. You can capture value on big events like the Boeing issues and other events. If you have risk appetite you can write options and pick up nickels in front of a steam roller.

<comment><USER100> With risk-defined option trading, you decide the size of the steam roller.

<comment><USER101> The pennies stay small though

<comment><USER102> Look up the Wheel Strategy. Good way to start trading and it's fairly profitable because it's long term investing with a boost to your cash flow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER103> It's widely known that 99% amateur traders loose money.

</comment><comment><USER104> What happens is you get people "day trading" in a period of time when there's an extended bull market and they think they're geniuses / financial whizzes.

</comment><comment><USER105> Is Day Trading the same as Momentum Trading?

</comment><comment><USER106> With small account, yes it is impossible

</comment><comment><USER107> Efficient Market Hypothesis anyone?

</comment><comment><USER108> ES just retested 3000 - good time to try a short position on United States stock market index futures.</comment>


Dear Amazon: Convert My Dead-Tree Library to Kindle Books - <AUTHOR> http://elidourado.com/blog/dear-amazon-convert-my-dead-tree-library-to-kindle-books/

<comment><USER2> > _Convert My Dead-Tree Library to Kindle Books_

This won't work. Someone might argue that we have the right to turn our printed books into computer media, but as Google is finding out, this is only true under very particular circumstances.

If we could do this at home with a scanner and OCR software, that would be one thing. But it can't be a walk-in business model -- there are too many thorny legal issues. Someone might convert a book he doesn't "own" in a copyright sense, and promptly try to sell it _en masse_ , after which the storefront book conversion business would be shuttered by legal action.</comment>


Unsafe Notes - <AUTHOR> https://avc.com/2019/05/unsafe-notes/ <comment><USER2> Perhaps I'm missing something, but I thought the new(ish) post-money SAFEs addressed a lot of the issues here. It's way easier for founders to calculate how much dilution is taken on with each new SAFE. I am all for the suggestion of making the pro forma cap table public amongst all initial investors.

</comment><comment><USER3> Discussed at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13850733](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13850733)</comment>


Ask HN: Tell me an engineering war story from your career - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Well, this is a different war story.

We just received a new Mainframe from IBM. Big beast big power consumption.

My primary task was to be Sysadmin of LPAR/instances of Linux inside the new IBM.

The new mainframe was unpacked, and the power connectors had to be "modified" to the local standard. You know.. You ask your local contractor to read the manual in English and hope for the best.

There was two person on that day on that Data Center. Me and the IBM Tech Representative.

Well, I was checking some blade servers looking at the Robotic library, and I see him plugin it 5 meters from me.

I just heard a BANG. And for the first time, I saw an electric fire. Like a Dragon spitting green fire. I shout for him stop and move away. He by instinct unplugged it (I grabbed a chair to throw at him if by chance he gets stuck on electricity).

It stops. And everything gets pitch black. Lights on He looks at me. I look behind. And there are. 200 servers Down. all Down. It even had broken the APS system.

I walk to the extension. Dial 2 __8 to my co-worker and say:

"P.... come here. Serious! Get everybody here... Big problem.. BiiiiiiiiiiiiiG." We had to start everything on its right orders (SAN storage, ADs, Servers, SQL) but we knew it.

8 minutes late the electricity company appears the IBM tech had to go to the hospital with cardiac arrest by the stress.

The IBM tech guy got lucky and is alive. I got a good recommendation for keeping cool in emergency situations.

<comment><USER3> > I got a good recommendation for keeping cool in emergency situations.

For someone who's been there and got out alive, it's easy to _keep calm_. For someone's first time, it's easier said than done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In 2003, I was working for a startup in India doing GPS/GSM based vehicle tracking system for fleets of trucks. The trucks would have our unit installed in them, and they would use GPS to get the location and send it to our server via GSM text message. Back then, GSM coverage not good, and trucks would go out of coverage for days. To further complicate matters, our firmware used to crash and the unit would stop sending updates.

To help us troubleshoot this, my boss asked me to program the unit to give a missed call to the server every hour. If we got a missed call, we knew that unit was still working. In countries like India, giving a missed call is a zero cost way to communicate. For example: You would pull up in front of a friend's place and give them a "missed call" to let them know that you are waiting outside etc.

Anyway, I implemented the logic and we sent off our field techs to intercept trucks at highways and update the firmware.

The way I implemented the logic was the unit was to call our server's modem number every hour at the top of the hour. No random delay nothing. So, soon after that, around 50 units tried to call our server at the same time. Remember the clocks in the units are being run off GPS and they are super accurate. This caused our telecom company's cell tower BTS to crash. Cell service in my office area, a busy part of Bangalore, was down for a whole 2 hours.

I was called into the telecom company's head office for their postmortem. They didn't yell at me or anything. They were super nice. In fact, when I finished explaining my side of the story, one of their engineers opened his wallet and gave a hundred rupees to another guy. Guess they were betting on the root cause. From what I understand, they escalated the bug to Ericsson who manufactured the BTS and got it fixed. For my part, I added a random delay and eventually removed that feature.

<comment><USER5> Cool story. While not the same thing, the last line reminds me of exponential backoff.

BTW, the term "missed call" may not be familiar to people outside India. For those not familiar, it's ringing a number and them disconnecting before they pick up. Serves to notify them that you called :)

<comment><USER6> I would assume the term "missed call" is both obvious and universally implemented (as in phones show the message) but I could be wrong on that last part for a few places I guess.

<comment><USER5> True, I did think that - since it is a pretty obvious idea that anyone can think of - to use it as a signal to the called party, but was thinking more in terms of India being a less rich country (broadly), so more people may do it here to save money :), since, though it's only a little each time, it can add up if one calls people a lot. On the other hand, India nowadays has very cheap mobile rates compared to many other countries, I've read.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This was probably my first real job/contract out of college. I was a VB script/web developer and landed a part time gig at this one man wealth advisory firm who wanted to build a side business from processing charitable donation online (back in 2001).

The owner was a very impatient youngish founder who new just enough about HTML/CSS to have the dangerous notion that he new something about programming. Additionally he was obsessive compulsive to the point where when he saw that different browsers didn't render the HTML/CSS EXACTLY identically in all cases, he had me redo ALL text on the site as IMAGES!..because those would look the same regardless of what the browser supported.

Now, the payment processing part. Since he was a cheap bastard and didn't want me spending any time on actually versioning, managing code, doing deployments, testing etc....we only had one development/test environment: PRODUCTION.

Yup, I'd connect my trusty VisualStudio IDE directly to the file system on the production IIS webserver and code away. Whatever I had coded when I hit save...was live.

No issue. Since we had no monitoring, logs, analytics or anything else unnecessary like that, he never could tell how many live transactions were lost because I had forgotten to close some tag, looped once too many times, mistakenly truncated some part of a card number, swapped the first name and the last name field accidentally or mistakenly told the payment gateway to CREDIT rather than DEBIT the charity's account (yes, that one did happen...and he did notice).

I would come home a nervous wreck every day just wondering what kind of pissed off customer calls I'd be hearing about the next day for something I had done that day.

<comment><USER8> Scary. How long this pattern continued? The owner of the firm wasn't aware of these sode effects?

<comment><USER9> these types of owners dont care about these things. they want new feature now and they want problems fixed now.

<comment><USER7> Yup, pretty much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Doing a digital video upgrade for a historic movie theater -- brand new 3D-capable projectors that cost more than my house. Everything's checked out great, the projector has run perfectly for test screenings. Fast forward to opening night, half an hour before showtime, somebody opens the door to the control room and the projector suddenly shuts off. No warnings, no chimes, just crash shutdown. They start it back up, and a few minutes later the same thing happens again when the door is opened. They managed to keep the door closed through the opening night showing, and got the manufacturer on the phone ASAP. Manufacturer goes through the super-secret diagnostic log files.

Turns out that the only difference between testing and opening night was that the front doors of the theater were open, and it was a windy night. The projector has a "wind vane" style airflow sensor in its exhaust vent to check and double-check that the fans are running correctly. The sudden changes in airflow when the control room door was open was enough for the airflow sensor to drop and trigger a panic shutdown. Since the projector also had fan sensors and temperature sensors, the manufacturer okayed us to bypass the airflow sensor.

</comment><comment><USER11> I was not the one who pulled the trigger as luckily I was out on vacation, but it is one that I keep in the back of my mind whenever I am playing with stuff.

Early in my career a fellow team member working with me at a fairly well known fortune 500 company was testing out a process where using Microsoft Forefront Identity Manager we would cleanup in-active accounts and shuffle things around to various systems auth systems. Since this service was used to sync our prod AD and test AD there was a "connector" into prod. From this single FIM instance you could hit dev, test and prod ADs. Sadly there had never been any rules put into place to prevent a push from test -> prod.

On the day that this co-worker was doing some testing he somehow managed to push a change that he though was going to our test AD but instead went to the prod AD. This change ended up wiping out quite a few prod AD accounts. As in totally deleting them. All of our systems, including the phone system (not sure why) were tied into AD. All of the sudden people on our floor were saying they couldn't login to anything or send e-mail. Soon we found out that the CEO of the company was feeling the same pain and on top of that, was not able to receive or make phone calls. My co-worker took a look at the process he was running and realized he had screwed up big time. He killed the process but not before about half of our production AD had been wiped out.

Like most backup systems, restoring our AD from a backup had not been tested in awhile. Between figuring that out, since it naturally didn't work as designed, and having to get the backups from our off-site backup company most of the company was unable to do anything for about 8-10 hours. This included remote sites, field techs, customer support agents, etc.

What sucked is that this co-worker was one of the top members of our team and had been handed this FIM environment that somebody no longer with the company had built. On top of that he was not provided any sort of formal training and was really learning on the job. They let him hang around for another week or so and then let him go.

<comment><USER12> Why would they let him go after they just spent so much money training him?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I was one of 7 people coding one of the 7 different real-time sensors for a large networked product. Another team was programming the central network manager and data processor.

The project was late and there was a daily-charge penalty clause in the contract with the customer, a very large company. A long enough delay could wipe out all the profit from the project. So engineering management told the programmers to suppress all signs of runtime bugs, no error messages, no halts, just slog on, bugs and all.

I objected, nobody paid attention. For my sensor, I had it scream bloody murder (on the diagnostic console) for every runtime problem it found. So I could fix it. The rest of the team followed instructions.

My unit was debugged, up and running, a year before everybody else. If the whole project would have been ready, the profit would have been reasonable. In a whole-team meeting,near the end, I asked the testing team if they had found any bugs in my unit. They asked "What's that?". They didn't even know its name. Suddenly, I was a hero.

</comment><comment><USER14> One of our servers stopped responding for 30 seconds every once in a while.

Spent some time trying to figure out why. No luck.

Spent some more time.

Eventually I realized that the log timestamps were weird - it looked like the query _had_ been sent a response, but the log message appeared 30 seconds later.

I instrumented the servers to measure disk latency. I noticed massive spikes in latency every few hours. Couldn't figure out why. Then someone told me the servers were running on virtual machines with a shared NetApp for storage... and it all came together.

Every few hours a multi-gigabyte file was delivered to each machine. This was a design that had originally been done for physical machines. With virtual machines, 30 copies of a multi-gigabyte file were being dumped to a single NetApp, filling up the file server's memory buffer and making disk latency spike since it was waiting for physical writes.

Meanwhile, the server I was debugging was doing log writes in the main I/O thread, so it blocked on handling requests when this happened.

I went and talked to team lead for the server. "Oh yeah, we fixed that recently, logging will be in its own thread as of next release."

:facepalm:

Moral of the story:

1\. Talk to the people maintaining the software before you spend too much time debugging.

2\. Disks _do_ block, don't assume they won't.

3\. Changes to operational setups can have significant, hard to predict impacts.

If you want to hear more stories, I'm writing a weekly email with one of my programming or career mistakes: [https://softwareclown.com](https://softwareclown.com)

</comment><comment><USER15> From back in my sysadmin days when I worked for a Electrical Engineering firm which specialized in power distribution (power lines, power plants, etc). We had a homegrown datacenter in the basement with dedicated AC, backups, and fire suppression system. It even had a home designed air handler system for moving vast amounts of air through the room in the event of AC failure. Oh and a home grown diesel generator -- cuz electrical engineers.

Datacenter had about ~300 servers in it. Not huge, but not small either. The lynchpin in the system is this: neither the battery supplies or generator can run the AC or air handler, so when the power is out everything non-essential needs to come down to maintain sane temps in the DC.

Anyway, my page goes off in the middle of the night -- power outage. The DC is running on battery backup. I hurry into the office to start powering things down as temps are climbing. I start shutting down VM's, blades, and 1/2U servers. About 1/2 of the way through, the power comes back on -- but the AC isn't kicking on (red flag). The air handler will function though, so let's run with that until the AC guy comes out.

I start powering everything back up. At this point, a few co-workers trickle in to help. After about 2 minutes the fire suppression alarm triggers -- 30 sec to evacuate the DC. I glance over to the air handler vent, and it's SHOOTING flames into the DC. We oh-crap the heck out of there just in time to see the suppression system trigger and the door lock closed. I run to the electrical panel and kill the power to the AC and air handler knowing that they were possible sources of the fire. The fire dept. arrives and forces us out of the building. At this point, nearly the entire DC is cranking on sustainable power with 0 cooling. It's a locked box effectively. We watch our notification slowly alert to servers going down hard due to heat one-by-one. VM hosts -- boom. Network switches -- Boom. SAN -- BOOM.

Long story short, we lost a number of servers and restored a lot of data from backup once things were back online. The cause was traced back to the wiring of the air handler motor. When the power came back on, only 2 of the 3 phases came back online. This was enough for the UPS system to operate, but not enough for the AC (wired correctly). The motor on the air handler was 3 phase but installed incorrectly (or something to that effect, it's been years and I'm not an electrician) allowing it to run, but turning it into a ticking time bomb of an electrical fire.

Fun times.

</comment><comment><USER16> Not sure if this counts as engineering or a war story, but in my first job as an undergrad, I was hired as a "web intern" to setup a CMS for a non-profit. They offered me two CMSs from which to choose, Drupal or Joomla, a list of functionalities they wanted, and let me run loose. I was making progress, right up until the Executive Director told me I wasn't allowed to write "custom code" due to the possibility that I may one day leave. No HTML, CSS, JS, PHP, etc. that wasn't by default output from the CMS. The ED didn't believe I could write modules, so I ended up doing that, saying "look it's a default from this module in the CMS," and somehow that got the okay. A year later, when the ED retired, they hired me as a freelancer to redo everything in a more sensible way.

</comment><comment><USER17> A client's implementation of our report distribution service would unpredictably send copies of old reports, often completely different reports, often for completely different entities, often reports that were not intended for distribution.

The distribution service used the same reporting system as our ad hoc notification service. Records for scheduled distributions had a field that stored the ID of the scheduled event that prompted the report generation. In this way, the distributions could grab all the output by event ID without needing to know anything about the reports themselves.

The problem: The ad hoc system relied on the same behavior, but since it didn't have actual scheduled events, the programmer who implemented it halfheartedly spoofed an ID based on the current time when the ad hoc notification created report requests. Over time, these spoofed IDs collided with the real event IDs used by the scheduled distributions.

We entered a bug report. The bug report got closed, because the developers said the module was being re-implemented in a different language, so the functionality would likely be different (read as "broken in different ways").

Time passes. On a lark, the colleague I originally investigated the issue with suggests we do a code review to see whether the bug did indeed get fixed.

The new programmer copied & pasted the original Visual Basic code responsible for the bug into the new Visual Basic .NET project, comments and all.

In the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It's about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It's about love and memory. It's about sorrow. It's about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.

</comment><comment><USER18> I was the primary ops guy (well before the concept of devops and when separation of duties was important) and ended up being the primary troubleshooter for problems. During one of the meetings between DEV, QA, RC, and I, the software architect exclaimed that RC had to be exaggerating since he just said it took X time to transfer the installer from one machine to another.

I looked at him and said the installer is ~200MB in size, 20 seconds is more than reasonable. He started arguing that the network connections had to be at least 100meg links so it shouldn't take more than 2 seconds. It went round and round, until I realized he didn't understand that network links were in bits/sec. At this point, he was refusing to listen and started disparaging everyone 'against' him. I gave it one more go and showed him the unit conversion and basic math on file size, rate, and time.

For a while, it looked like he was trying to get everyone arguing against him released since he was an 'architect' and everyone else was engineers and I was just the ops guy. Too bad for him, he didn't realize in the land of inflated titles, I was the security, storage, and infrastructure architect. I just felt it was presumptuous and relabeled myself the ops guy.

</comment><comment><USER19> Datacenter cooling can be problematic in unexpected ways: NASA's Mission Control datacenter at the Johnson Space Center was an interesting beast - designed for the IBM vacuum tube behemoths of the 1960s, it was both huge in acreage (only a small corner was used by the '90s) as well as arctic in it's cooling capacity (since every tube literally had a heater in it!) In the mid- to-late '90s, working at Sun, I put in the first ATM and Fibre Channel networks in there, the latter initially connecting up a bunch of the new SPARCstorage arrays (30 individual disks per array unit!) to the brand new UltraSPARC servers.

As I hinted earlier, the AC system was epic - literally cold enough to hang meat. It originally used several chillers, but even after turning off all but one, it was still _FREEZING_ (well, nearly) in there - there was literally a rack of parkas hanging at the entrance, and you put one on if you were staying more than a couple of minutes.

Not long after the system went in, we got a call from their admins saying there was something wrong with the network, as they couldn't get the Storage Arrays back up - sometimes. Eventually, a pattern emerged: the Arrays refused to restart after they had been shut down for more than an hour or two, but when we took them back to our office, they worked just fine. Turns out the problem was thermal: The room was so cold that the new state-of-the-art HDDs literally didn't have the torque to spin the platters up again against the cold-shrunk tolerances. We checked with Seagate and they said NASA was operating the disks well _below_ their design temperature - they had never expected anyone to do that! The fix: 1) Don't shut the array down for too long, and, 2) if you really have to shut it down longer you'll have to wrap the whole array in plastic to prevent condensation, then take it outside to let the disks warm up enough before bringing it back into the DC and spinning up before the disks almost literally froze up again! This was, of course, duly written up in an official NASA policy and procedures manual. I suppose SSDs were a big win for NASA, as I expect the problem only got worse with succeeding generations of spinning drives....

<comment><USER20> The house where I used to livewas extremely poorly isolated. The computer was in the bedroom (no heating) and during the winter we had to bring in a space heater and direct it at the PC for half an hour or so. Damn thing wouldn't start up otherwise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The customer was a Bank.

One the biggest banks in Europe.

They just bought (aka "rescued") another bank somewhere in Europe and they wanted to lay dark fiber for datacenter synchronization.

And they wanted us to manage that network.

After several weeks laying fiber, and setting all connections we started the network manager on the operations center... and couldn't see any device, except the "secondary" network manager in customer premises wich could see everything.

Turns out the "security" people at the simply put a Firewall between the NOC and the network and didn't allow any traffic to go from the NOC to the fiber optic devices.

We asked them to give us access but they didn't have IPv4 addressing compatible with ours. Whay? Because the bank used all IPv4 address space internally. All private IP adressing was already alocated and the NAT ("public") they could use colided with other customers equipment.

Finally I had to build a ugly "semi-isolated" network island between the bank, the noc, and some virtualized workstations that could "see" (natted) the customer devices (wich we were paid to manage) and the NOC workstations.

On the plus side, that junk made me write the best documentation I've ever made because just in case something broke in the middle of the night.

</comment><comment><USER21> I was winter. The #@! coldest winter I saw in a long time and I was on call.

Sometime in the middle of the night, I received an SMS: "Datacenter temperature is high: 24C" (yes, centigrade about 74F).

I saw the graphs and I could see there was a temperature spike. In the last hour the datacenter went from 16C to 24C and it was going up.

Three of the four industrial HVAC machines failed that night. Nobody knew why - I called the HVAC technician (he would come around 9am) and meanwhile I opened _all_ windows and doors in the datacenter floor to stabilize temperature. 26C inside the DC, -6C outside.

Turns out HVAC systems used water... and someone broke the pipe isolation and the water froze inside.

It was fixed in the morning aplying a blowtorch to the 3 frozen pipes, then when we had water in the circuit instead of ice, HVAC machines made the DC cold again.

Temperature peaked at 27C in the morning (-1C ouside) - at 28C (84F) the VP of Operations would call everybody for a controlled datacenter shutdown that - fortunately - didn't happened.

6 months later I had a similar problem with HVAC. This time water evaporated inside the pipes and we had a "normal" panic because both the inside and the ouside were hot.

That was my last on-call duty.

</comment><comment><USER22> 2011 Facebook login was broken because they had assumed a function on Date- maybe a date.js function? Working at LivingSocial we relied heavily on Facebook login working. So did our competitor Groupon. I recall we figured out the Date dependency and patched it externally and deployed before Facebook or Groupon had it fixed a few hours later. Was a lot of fun and rewarding seeing this fixed so quickly.

</comment><comment><USER23> Check out Chat wars. MS tries its best to get -AIL users on MSN Messenger

[https://nplusonemag.com/issue-19/essays/chat- wars/](https://nplusonemag.com/issue-19/essays/chat-wars/)

</comment><comment><USER24> My first job out of college was for a fabless semiconductor company in Southern California. We had a small (~20 racks) data center in the ground floor of the building, and I was involved in its design & operation.

Top-level execs had made the decision to not get a backup generator. The one compensation was that we got a manual transfer switch, so that we could easily truck in a generator & cooling in case of a planned outage. There was the possibility that we'd be moving at some point, so self-containinment was a big thing.

Taking that into account, I suggested getting an Eaton 9390 UPS, with two IBC-L battery cabinets and an IDC breaker/distribution cabinet. ([http://lit.powerware.com/ll_download.asp?file=Eaton9390UPSBr...](http://lit.powerware.com/ll_download.asp?file=Eaton9390UPSBrochure9390FXA.pdf)) The distribution cabinet outputs went to in-rack Eaton RPMs ([http://powerquality.eaton.com/Products-services/Power- Distri...](http://powerquality.eaton.com/Products-services/Power- Distribution/rpm.asp)), and from there to PDUs.

This setup gave us ~45 minutes runtime at normal load, and more if we shut down non-prod. The one time we had an outage (during my tenure there), shutting down non-prod allowed us to ride the outage. I also liked this setup because our only connections to the outside (power-wise) were from the fused disconnect input, and the EPO. In the end, the "single-line drawing" looked like this:

      Building fused disconnect-->Manual Transfer-->IDC cabinet breakers-->UPS-->IDC cabinet-->Rack-->PDUs
      Outside Generator Hookup--->    Switch        (input/bypass)               dist. panel   RPMs

Everything after the Manual Transfer Switch was either internal to the UPS, inside the racks, or in flexible conduit. I loved it so much!

Unfortunately, the electrical engineer hasn't seen such a thing before. In the past, the 480/208 transformer was external to the UPS, and this is what the electrical engineer was used to. So, the engineer wrote up plans to run an electrical duct from the UPS, to the Manual Transfer Switch, and then on to the transformer (in other words, back to the UPS).

I totally missed this mistake on the plans. It was actually caught by the construction crew, who was laying out the ductwork and realized that something looked weird.

In the end, one of the conduits was used, and the other one was just left in place. Luckily our connections from the IDC distribution panel to the RPMs were flexible, because that second conduit got in the way of pretty much everything.

</comment><comment><USER25> Wednesday, August 7th, 1996. A day that will live in infamy.

Well, kinda. It was the first really big Internet meltdown that I recall.

That was the day that AOL had a 19-hour network downtime. It's been surprisingly hard to find news articles from the time that talk about it, but the key mistake that was made was AOL decided to update the software on their Cisco routers at the same time that the same was done on our upstream feed (ANS). In hindsight, I think the cascade failure was obvious, as was the fact that ANS was our Single Point Of Failure (SPOF) to access the outside world.

But there's another part to this picture that you don't see in the stories on C|Net, CBS News, etc.... That was the impact made on e-mail services around the world.

At the time, I was the Senior Internet Mail Administrator for AOL, and a few months before I had figured out how to cram about 40-50 MX records into a 512-byte UDP DNS packet. Your servers would query for the MXes for aol.com, and you'd get back a list for a.mx.aol.com, b.mx.aol.com, etc.... That would be a total of six or seven hosts, and each of those hosts would have six or seven IP addresses listed for them.

Under normal circumstances, this would mostly be okay. You'd query for the MXes, you'd get back the list, you'd try to make your connection on port 25, and after a couple of tries the odds were that you'd get through.

However, the TCP network standards required that you spend two minutes trying to connect to the first IP address, before you can proceed to the second. And in a pathological case, if all forty-five or so IP addresses timeout, then you've just spent about ninety minutes trying to send a single e-mail message to AOL.

If you have a queue retry period of sixty minutes, then when you still have another thirty minutes to go on that second message, you'll fire off another queue runner, and it will probably also get stuck sending a message to AOL.

Rinse and repeat enough times, and you fill up your RAM, your virtual memory, your swap space, and everything else you've got, all with queue runners that are stuck trying to get messages to AOL. Then your kernel panics, your system reboots, and you start the cycle all over again.

This happened across the entire Internet.

While the network layer itself finally came back up after about nineteen hours of downtime, it took about a week for the Internet e-mail backlogs around the world to finally recover.

Sanford Wallace was put out enough that he publicly claimed that I was trying to put him out of business, and then published the phone numbers for my desk and my home, and suggested that angry people call me up and tell me what they think of me.

I have been told that this event is the primary reason why qmail and postfix were created.

<comment><USER26> I was at EarthLink at the time. I remember our systems melting down with all the AOL mail in our queues.

<comment><USER26> Spamford Wallace got sentenced to 30 months in jail last year: [https://www.google.com/amp/amp.timeinc.net/fortune/2016/06/1...](https://www.google.com/amp/amp.timeinc.net/fortune/2016/06/16/sanford- wallace-spam-king-jail/%3fsource=dam)</comment></comment></comment>


Images Are Slowing Down the Web - <AUTHOR> https://blog.kraken.io/images-are-slowing-down-the-web-heres-the-fix/ <comment><AUTHOR> We experimented with a SaaS product which deletes all of the images on the Internet. That proved difficult, so we came up with [https://kraken.io](https://kraken.io) instead.

</comment><comment><USER2> Long live Lynx!

<comment><USER3> Or w3m, links and elinks :-)</comment></comment>


Sugar may be as damaging to the brain as extreme stress or abuse - <AUTHOR> https://theconversation.com/sugar-may-be-as-damaging-to-the-brain-as-extreme-stress-or-abuse-53813 <comment><USER2> In that way that has become tediously predictable, the headline (and the article, after the end of the first para) bear almost no relation to the actual study which in fact only measures a particular effect similar to a very particular kind of simulated early life stress in rats.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd love to see more studies like this, because it sure feels like an obvious truth to me.

Being a relatively new parent, I have observed on many occasions kids going from peaceful and well mannered, to completely crazed and manic in mere minutes after being exposed to large amounts of sugar. I always wondered what kind of chemical thunderstorm was going off in their brains to account for the totally random, thoughtless, crazed monkeys they become.

<comment><USER4> Actually it's been pretty heavily debated whether that effect actually exists at all: [http://www.webmd.com/parenting/features/busting-sugar- hypera...](http://www.webmd.com/parenting/features/busting-sugar- hyperactivity-myth)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd like to see the study expand to include sugar alternatives common in diet drinks. Many feel that this is still a safe alternative.</comment>


India unveils $35 computer for students - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/07/23/india.thirty.five.dollar.laptop/index.html

<comment><USER2> Similar articles for reference:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1543328>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1540120> <\- This one has lots of comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1540494>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1541197>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1541514> <\- This one has a few comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1542275>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1542557></comment>


Fix a page in Barbie's book - <AUTHOR> http://computer-engineer-barbie.herokuapp.com/

<comment><USER2> On top of sending the wrong message to would-be STEM girls, it also sends a message to girls who aren't into science/math. It tells them that those STEM girls could just act more feminine, helping to "justify" dislike and bullying.

I wonder how this stuff keeps happening at Mattel - whether it's because they insert flirtation with boys into every Barbie story, or there was an actual directive to make her look ditzy for marketing reasons.

<comment><USER3> I wonder how the original "Barbie" lady would feel about how negatively- stereotypical and cliche these books are...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I showed some of these to my daughter in middle school and we both found the submissions hilarious! We then had a talk about about trolls and the internet and how we could implement a meme-creator for Minecraft pics.

Edit: our fave so far: [http://computer-engineer- barbie.herokuapp.com/view/115](http://computer-engineer- barbie.herokuapp.com/view/115)

</comment><comment><USER5> I read this on planet debian a couple of days ago:

[http://blog.halon.org.uk/2014/11/barbie-the-debian- developer...](http://blog.halon.org.uk/2014/11/barbie-the-debian- developer/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=barbie-the-debian- developer)

Barbie debian developer + systemD. Wins hands down!

</comment><comment><USER6> Previous submission's comments: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8635866](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8635866)

</comment><comment><USER7> Well, as big a fan of the BLO[1] as I am, I think your energy might be better spent elsewhere.

Lamilly[2] was successfully crowdfunded, manufactured, and is shipping soon. She's already a world traveler and will surely have more career options than Barbara soon.

[http://www.rtmark.com/blo.html](http://www.rtmark.com/blo.html)

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

</comment><comment><USER8> Why do I have a feeling that internet trolls will descend on this?

Great work, although with just a little more work, I think the font could match the one in the book a little better.

</comment><comment><USER9> This page is terrible, and those submissions are one of the reasons the internet is such a hostile place. It looks straight out of 4chan.

<comment><USER10> Really? Seems to be mostly try-hard humour.

[http://computer-engineer-barbie.herokuapp.com/view/266](http://computer- engineer-barbie.herokuapp.com/view/266)

[http://computer-engineer-barbie.herokuapp.com/view/402](http://computer- engineer-barbie.herokuapp.com/view/402)

<comment><USER9> Keep in mind that the rating is constantly changing. I guess HNers have taken the lead now, as I don't see the guy with the scissors on its eye anymore, but wait until 4chan hears about it.

Here's a couple about "fags", drugs and overall trolling

[http://computer-engineer-barbie.herokuapp.com/view/42](http://computer- engineer-barbie.herokuapp.com/view/42)

[http://computer-engineer-barbie.herokuapp.com/view/73](http://computer- engineer-barbie.herokuapp.com/view/73)

[http://computer-engineer-barbie.herokuapp.com/view/74](http://computer- engineer-barbie.herokuapp.com/view/74)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm not sure what to think of this ...

</comment><comment><USER3> Can we make this about the factual and technological errors in the book rather than rally around it as Social Justice Warriors?

Maybe Barbie's team's organization was agreed upon by all members and she WANTED to do the design work while the two guys did the actual coding. Maybe she plans to do the coding for the next project. A better name would have been Coder Team Barbie. Let's start there.

When you make a big deal out of stuff like this, you're turning it into the thing against which you are claiming to fight.

Stop "playing the victim" and make a better version without the elitist SJW attitude. The first step toward equality is to stop being the bully or the victim, whichever one applies.

<comment><USER2> There's nothing perceived about it. The entire premise of the doll and every page of the book is misogyny. This isn't "Designer Barbie," it's Computer Engineer Barbie - to have her hand off the programming work to the men is demeaning to women.

I'm not sure why you feel the urge to play devil's advocate. My wife (a developer) pointed it out to me yesterday. She wasn't enraged, but she thought it was comically misogynistic, and I don't see how anyone would disagree.

My daughter certainly doesn't need this kind of influence, and I'd prefer the doll/book be pulled from the shelves and fixed.

<comment><USER3> I re-read it, and you're right about the misogyny. I edited my reply to hopefully better match my original intent.</comment></comment></comment>


React Native Starter – Free Mobile Application Template Built with React Native - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/flatlogic/react-native-starter <comment><AUTHOR> Hello Hacker News community!

OP is here.

My company have been working on lots of react native projects recently and we have extracted some sort of a starter project that helps us to bootstrap development of mobile applications. We decided to give back to the community and open sourced it.

I would appreciate your feedback and comments!

Thank you</comment>


OpenSeaMap: die freie Seekarte - <AUTHOR> http://www.openseamap.org/index.php?id=openseamap&no_cache=1 <comment><USER2> To this day, how reliable are these kind of maps? I am not to familiar with open water maps and/or navigation but my experience from navigating close to shore tells me that charts not being precise can be quite devastating. Positive to the project as a whole, just curious. And maybe i just missed it on the page, but do they cross reference submissions with for example government funded mappings of the sea?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tw9RmMl7v5Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tw9RmMl7v5Q)</comment>


Browser-independent bookmark manager buku v4.3 released - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jarun/buku/releases/tag/v4.3 <comment><AUTHOR> buku is a powerful bookmark manager written in Python3 and SQLite3. When I started writing it, I couldn't find a flexible command-line solution with a private, portable, merge-able database along with seamless GUI integration.

buku can auto-import bookmarks from your browser(s) or fetch the title and description of a bookmarked url from the web. You can use your favourite editor to compose and update bookmarks. With multiple search options, including regex and a deep scan mode (particularly for URLs), it can find any bookmark instantly. buku can look up the latest snapshot of a broken link on the Wayback Machine. There's an Easter egg to revisit random forgotten bookmarks too! Buku is too busy to track you: no hidden history, obsolete records, usage analytics or homing.</comment>


Must-have robots come nearer with software explosion - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21328485.500-musthave-robots-come-nearer-with-software-explosion.html <comment><USER2> "You need to log in to read this article"... :(</comment>


CryptoCribs – An Airbnb alternative for the crypto community - <AUTHOR> https://www.cryptocribs.com <comment><AUTHOR> We've built this over the summer and launched it four weeks ago. We currently have around 150 listings and a couple hundred of users. We charge a small booking fee to bootstrap this (less than half of what Airbnb takes). The fees fall to zero if a user books or hosts a couple of times and/or gets positive reviews. Would love to get some feedback or have you as guests or hosts. If you're already hosting on some other site, just pm me the link and we'll set up the listing for you</comment>