CBOE Will Start Bitcoin Futures Trading on December 10 - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-04/cboe-says-it-will-start-bitcoin-futures-trading-on-dec-10 <comment><USER3> I think these futures will do a few things for bitcoin.

\- allow an explosion of ETF's, including levered ones, to begin trading. With futures you can now hedge out your bets so it should, at least in theory, be easier to find a counter party to write you a swap against bitcoin volatility. It also lays the ground work for the SEC to see a functioning market for these products which they ahve said is a prerequisite to allow bitcoin ETF's to trade.

\- give some rules around what's considered a fork and what should be ignored in the bitcoin world. Each of these products will provide some "adult" guidance to other markets as to which alt coins, forks, etc should be considered vs ignored.

From an implementation perspective there are two differences I see between the COBE and CME implementations.

1) The CBOE's contract size will be based on a single bitcoin, while the CME's contract size will be based on five bitcoins, a current notional value of more than $50,000.

2) The CBOE's contracts will be cleared by Options Clearing Corp. while CME will clear its own futures. The CME has estimated that initial margin on the contracts — or the amount of collateral set aside relative to the value of a trade — may be as high as 30 percent, an unusually high amount.

<comment><USER4> > _these futures will do a few things for bitcoin_

They also permit borrowing. If I borrow U.S. dollars from you and then disappear, a court can drain the funds (if they're there) from my accounts. That wasn't possible with cash. The capability enabled an explosion in credit and financial creativity.

Bitcoin, natively, is like cash. Borrowing and rates are afterthoughts. Futures fix that.

There is a certain hilarity in the multiple layers of hypocrisy here. A bankless Bitcoin coöpted by the banks. Investors wanting Bitcoin washed of its principles. Wall Street establishing itself as a gatekeeper to cheers from its detractors. Nevertheless, a lot of money is to be made.

<comment><USER5> Unless the volatility were to go down in the extreme, nobody has any business borrowing or lending in bitcoin. I'm sorry but it's absurd, unless done as speculation.

Basically, borrow bitcoin and you are in a short BTC speculative trade, lend it and you are long the same. If you'd borrowed $100 worth of bitcoin last year, you'd owe what, $1,000 this year? It's not a loan, it's a bet. And how do futures fix this?

Rates? Even mentioning rates on a BTC "loan" sounds entirely out of place.

OK but money isn't just about credit. It has two other functions: store of value and means of exchange.

As a store of value BTC is highly uncertain. It will multiply or decimate whatever value you try to store in it.

I thought it might be interesting as a means of exchange, and maybe it is in certain situations, but commissions seem too high for use as a major global digital payment system. You pay out of your currency to BTC, then from BTC to the target currency, plus the transaction fees which can be prohibitive unless you're moving some serious loot. I make a lot of small international payments and would love a great solution, but I can't see bitcoin as it. Who actually uses BTC? I mean, other than speculators? ("Investor" is a euphemism here, buyers of bitcoin are commodity or currency speculators.)

<comment><USER6> While I believe other coins will inevitably be better suited for handling transactions than bitcoin, bitcoin may end up being the best store of value due to the amount of liquidity it has. Because of this bitcoin tends to act as the gateway to alternative currencies/tokens. It seems like a weird self- fulfilling prophecy.

I predict even when a better chain comes along than bitcoin, bitcoin will still enjoy the benefit of being the gateway to and from traditional funds. Demand for alts will create demand for bitcoin which I think we already see.

<comment><USER7> Bitcoin is as liquid as a mattress industry before Casper.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm a fan of Bitcoin but here's the truth (source: me, I ran a public company): The real boon here is for new cryptocurrencies as opposed to Bitcoin as it will experience naked shorting resulting in artificial 'sell pressure' from large institutions and hedge funds due to these futures contracts.

In other words, you can take out a large short position without needing any fulfillment while at the same time it factors as 'shares short' against Bitcoin. 'Shares short' is a major component used by institutions to calculate or re-price to the downside and when these numbers are inflated that can result in inaccurate pricing for the benefit of the manipulator.

There are plenty of examples of this and one of the most high profile cases is related to OSTK (Overstock): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_M._Byrne#Campaign_agai...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_M._Byrne#Campaign_against_naked_shorting_and_analysts)

It's a high-level form of manipulation. This will also reduce Bitcoins volatility and opportunity for large gains in short periods of time.

Of course the reverse is true if institutions want to battle it out on the short and long side but meanwhile the banking divisions of investment banks (JPMorgan et al) remain scared to death of Bitcoin. Ultimately, Bitcoin will have to have more institutional allies and supporters than the worlds banks (banks hate Bitcoin, it makes them irrelevant in the near future) which is quite possible.

New cryptos with low floats (low circulating supply) won't be affected as much thereby offering larger gains in shorter periods of time which will attract more of the typical cryptocurrency day traders and traditional traders.

More on this here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13844765](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13844765)

<comment><USER9> That's not how futures work. For every long futures contract there is also a short one, the net position is always zero. There are also no shares involved.

<comment><USER8> "The Truth About Naked Short Selling" [https://www.investopedia.com/articles/optioninvestor/09/nake...](https://www.investopedia.com/articles/optioninvestor/09/naked- short-selling.asp)

"The basic form of short selling is selling stock that you borrow from an owner and do not own yourself. In essence, you deliver the borrowed shares. Another form is to sell stock that you do not own and are not borrowing from someone. Here you owe the shorted shares to the buyer but "fail to deliver." This form is called naked short selling. These short sales are almost always done only by options market makers because they allegedly need to in order to maintain liquidity in the options markets. However, these options market makers are often the brokers or large hedge funds, who abuse the options market maker exemption. (For more, see How To Work Around A Market Maker's Tricks.)

Shorting Without Failing to Deliver There is another form of short selling, which I describe as synthetic short selling. This involves selling calls and/or buying puts. Selling calls makes you have negative deltas (a negative stock equivalent position) and so does buying puts. Neither of these positions requires borrowing stock or "failing to deliver" stock.

A collar is nothing more than a simultaneous sale of an out-of-the- money call and a purchase of an out-of-the-money put with the same expiration date. Another way to short sell is to sell a single stock future, which is equivalent to naked short selling. No shares are borrowed, however, and no shares are failed to deliver..."

"... There are similar future transfers if you have sold calls or sold single stock futures. When you buy puts and fully pay for them, there are none of these money transfers after the purchase, although the value of your account certainly fluctuates as the value of the puts fluctuates.

All of the above ways to obtain negative deltas cause pressure on the value of the stock similar to how straight sales of long stock puts pressure on the price of the stock..."

Continued via the link above which is well worth the read. All things considered, we are ultimately talking about derivatives and derivatives of derivatives.

<comment><USER10> Good for you that you ran a public company, and you may well be right on the boon for altcoins bit, but please know you are incorrect in relating options and shorting to futures trading. Please try to seek first to understand and only then to be understood.

source: cfa, sellside and buyside trader.

<comment><USER8> I don't think you understand how options/futures can be used to create artificial 'sell pressure' and in conjunction with the DTCC and CapitalIQ. You should research this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I feel like I must have a misconception about bitcoin. Coins are earned by calculating hashes for transactions. As the amount of coins grow the difficulty of calculating hashes increases. This limits the creation of new coins, which increases the scarcity of coins and thus their value. This keeps the incentive to mine at a more or less steady level, thus sustaining the network.

But.. Why spend something that is guaranteed to become more valuable? If I had something in my pocket that I knew would become more valuable by systemic necessity, I'd save it as long as I possibly could. Doesn't this completely undercut the idea of bitcoin as currency?

<comment><USER7> It won't. Bitcoin is a fad. It will run out of fools and when it does there wont be a way out.

Let me illustrate it on a very simple scale. There are four participants in a market. Each one starts with 100 coins and $100 USD. Each coin is valued at a dollar. Minimum units are 1 coin and 1 dollar. What is the maximum market value?

The correct answer comes from a single pre-final stage:

One person has 400 coins another person has 400 USD and the other two people have nothing. At this point the person with 400 USD pays $400 USD for 1 coin giving all 400 coins value of $400 each i.e. $160,000, except there are no $160,000 in this market.

<comment><USER12> Far too simple of an analogy. First there is competition between miners so there's never going to be a single source, plus there are millions mined already in the pool. Also, bitcoins are currently divisible to 8 decimal places but that can be changed as soon as it's needed.

It's quite possible in 20 years that 0.000000000001 of a bitcoin will make the average house payment and by then, we'll have friendly names for all the decimal places.

<comment><USER13> > It's quite possible in 20 years that 0.000000000001 of a bitcoin will make > the average house payment

No, it isn't.

<comment><USER14> Thats a bold claim given the history.

<comment><USER13> No, it isn't.. and I sincerely hope you're joking.

You should do the math on that and figure out what the value of a single bitcoin would have to be to make it come true. If that doesn't wake you up to how ridiculous that claim is, I don't know what to tell you.

I'll even go incredibly easy on you and let you assume the average mortgage payment is only $100.

Hint: it's a number larger than the US GDP

It's somewhat terrifying to me that I even have to argue this with someone.

<comment><USER14> OK, I didn't do the math. Thanks for the correction :). Turns out - <USER2> ignore your generosity there, that we are realistically talking around 1000 trillion. National debt is at like 14 trillion. Chinese M1 money stock is 7 trillion. Now at the current growth rate, which is unreasonable to continually sustain, could continue to be high for a while, and you can't ignore the incredible growth of the global narrow money stock - [https://data.oecd.org/money/narrow-money-m1.htm#indicator- ch...](https://data.oecd.org/money/narrow-money-m1.htm#indicator-chart) (10x in 15 years - 62x for Turkey in 20 years!). So I'll agree with you, highly, highly unlikely - but not at all beyond the realms of possibility - given what appears to be highly improbable (yet predictable history).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> My thoughts on Bitcoin futures at CBOE and CME:

\- Unlike LedgerX, the futures will settle in cash, NOT in Bitcoin. So they won't _directly_ create demand for more Bitcoin.

\- In effect this is a "bookie pool" for institutions to place side-bets on bitcoin. Although there might be some consumer participation - I reached out to several CME brokers and at least two of them, NinjaTrader (US) and RBC (Canada), intend to provide the futures product to their retail investors (pending internal review).

\- Biggest customers will probably be institutions who want to short (bet against) Bitcoin, and those who want to establish a long position (bet in favor of it) but are prevented from buying bitcoin directly (due to regulations, security / handling concerns, etc). You would think the CME trade throttling rules in particular would make buying the asset directly a more attractive option for those who want to go long and have access to other marketplaces (i.e. existing exchanges). For that reason, after the initial "rush" to get in, I think there's a risk the CBOE and CME markets will tend to attract more "shorters" than "longers".

\- Naked shorts (placing short orders for assets you don't have and don't intend to buy) are an interesting aspect which I don't fully understand. I think the practice is illegal in US securities, although one of the exchanges from which the CME price index will be derived (Kraken) apparently already allows naked shorts (surprised that didn't catch the eye of regulators).

\- A lot of the money in Bitcoin today is retail. Are those folks ideological, or easily spooked? (Probably a mix). What happens if folks start seeing red futures around the corner? Is there a risk the futures indices (with their more-disciplined institutional money) will start leading (rather than following) the Bitcoin price?

While I'm excited by this development (obviously a lot of great PR) I'm concerned there might be risk of it backfiring compared to the overly optimistic expectations I've been reading from existing Bitcoin holders. I really do hope it paves the way to ETF's (where you actually buy a basket of Bitcoin) - something I'd be a lot more excited for. In the meantime, here's hoping my cautious skepticism is unwarranted.

There's some good discussion over at Quora: [https://www.quora.com/How-will- futures-trading-on-CME-affect...](https://www.quora.com/How-will-futures- trading-on-CME-affect-the-Bitcoin-price)

</comment><comment><USER16> Will be interesting to see how closely these track BTC, both initially and in times of stress.

BTC is difficult to short so if/when there is a sharp decline in price you have to rely on people buying futures instead of BTC outright. I suspect this isn't going to happen so on price declines the futures will fall further than BTC, also leading to bigger crashes in BTC.

Maybe that is a good strategy, wait for some weakness and sell the ____out of it to see how far it crashes.

<comment><USER17> Could you say more about why you think the futures would crash further? My understanding is that these are cash settled, so this isn't like a normal commodities market where you actually have to deliver the underlying.

<comment><USER16> That's the interesting part we're going to find out.

Yes they're cash settled on the expiry date so on the 3rd Friday of the month the future that expires that date will have the same price as BTC.

When there is time to expiry though, what is the mechanism that keeps the prices aligned? If BTC is difficult to short natively, there isn't an easy way to keep the futures at fair price.

IE if BTC is worth 10k and someone keeps selling futures down to 9.5k, why would BTC drop? Only if a buyer chooses not to buy BTC but buys the future instead. But if the future keeps dropping those guys will get scared off.

The real thing is no one knows so we'll find out soon if/how this will work.

<comment><USER18> the cash settled futures market is more like you betting your neighbor $100 that the price of BTC will rise by a certain date. the futures exchange acts as the bookie and just exists to track the BTC price on the crypo exchanges and settle the futures contracts ( bets ).

<comment><USER19> But the bet is open to anyone and, as the parent said, if the future is much cheaper than the real thing the people who want to get exposure may use the future (removing demand from BTC) and if the future is much more expensive arbitrageurs will sell futures and buy BTC at the same time (adding demand).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I like how everyone has moved on to ignoring the fact that 5-10% of all Bitcoin are controlled by an unknown party. Would this be acceptable in any other currency? [https://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the-well- deserved-f...](https://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved- fortune-of-satoshi-nakamoto/)

<comment><USER21> I was just saying this to someone. ~4% Control ~95% of all bitcoin. Could anyone explain to me how this is acceptable? Why buy a currency that is worthless without electricity and where the wealth is so unevenly distributed? I'm curious. To me that's already two good reasons to stay away. Am I missing something?

<comment><USER22> Would you use a currency where 10% every year (not once) goes to a relatively small number of banks?

USD M2: [https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/money- supply-m2](https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/money-supply-m2)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Will this have an effect on the price of BTC? Anyone have any idea or can speculate as to what happens on December 10th?

<comment><USER24> I found this article helpful: [https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2017-12-04/bitcoin...](https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2017-12-04/bitcoin- s-diverse-futures-contain-buyers-and-sellers)

tl;dr:

\- Increase access to btc (futures can be more liquid than BC itself, which has large transaction costs and transfer times)

\- Probably reduce price volatility in general, but futures could also compound speculation

My guess is that BTC will rise in price, and I think the recent price increases are partially explained by the news of future markets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I wonder how long before bitcoin gets banned by us gov completely (or at least conversion to/from usd by us banks).

It seems like this thing is ripe to create either some systemic financial crisis or help governments of countries that are not exactly allied with us interests (china, dprk etc).

<comment><USER26> Couldn't someone just publish a print version of the source code and whitepaper and it'd fall under the First Amendment? I believe this was done for PGP [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy#Criminal_i...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy#Criminal_investigation)

<comment><USER27> You can publish a book on how to grow marijuana. They can still make using the book illegal.

They can even make using PGP illegal, and there are politicians trying.

<comment><USER28> Huh? There are all sorts of such literature available legally. The US government does not (in 2017 at least) ban these things.

Unless you have a recent example?

<comment><USER27> My point is that while the literature is available, implementing its content is still a controlled action.

For a reference, I mentioned your example of PGP, which would be made illegal to use under this proposed law [https://www.scribd.com/doc/307378123/Burr- Encryption-Bill-Di...](https://www.scribd.com/doc/307378123/Burr-Encryption- Bill-Discussion-Draft)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Imagine the margin call you're going to get whenever the market swings wildly against your direction...

I assume that most interested parties will use these for hedging purposes, but there's bound to be a few poor souls out there waiting to use these for speculation.

<comment><USER30> Since these are cash settled futures, a large move up may have the unintended consequence of generating more selling pressure. If you're hedging a long BTC position with futures, you could run short of cash required to maintain the position. Thus, you would sell BTC to get USD. If this were a BTC settled contract, you would just hand over the BTC at delivery.

Since these are USD settled, futures might put a damper on the rate of increase.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm curious as to how they're planning on tracking price of the underlying (in this case BTC itself).

Could be a great opportunity to arbitrage based off of price desync across exchanges.

</comment><comment><USER30> One thing this does is create preferential tax treatment for short term bitcoin trades. These are section 1256 contracts, so instant 60/40 tax split, vs 100% real income tax.

You'll see some institutions move away from the BTC/USD market for this reason.

</comment><comment><USER32> I am wondering if anyone has been in contact with a brokerage that is going to list the Cboe futures when then 'go live' on Sunday. I haven't spoken with one that hasn't said 'we'll wait and see'.

</comment><comment><USER33> Bitcoin is a currency right? Where is the Forex level leverages being offered? We need to speculate on bitcoin with 100:1 or 200:1 to really get this bubble expanding.

Failing that, ill settle for a x3 ETF

<comment><USER34> your tone makes it sounds like you are being sarcastic. in case you weren't, you can do 100x leverage here: [https://www.bitmex.com/?lang=en- US](https://www.bitmex.com/?lang=en-US)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> it has recently come to my attention that Darknet vendors now prefer Monero over Bitcoin - it's more anonymous, and transactions are (currently) faster. I don't know if that means anything long-term, but Darknet was the first place that had a lot of Bitcoin adoption. It's currently very difficult to buy Monero with cash, typically you buy Bitcoin and exchange it for Monero on a secondary exchange.

</comment><comment><USER36> With every passing year, more and more financial products and services are being created around Bitcoin: futures, ETFs, swaps, and so on.

These products built on each other: the ability to hedge with futures will enable the creation of additional Bitcoin products and services, entangled with each other in complicated financial networks.

Regardless of what you think about it, Bitcoin is slowly but surely becoming a PERMANENT component of the world's financial infrastructure.

It's not difficult to imagine a future in which having some kind of Bitcoin exposure in a portfolio becomes conventional wisdom.

<comment><USER37> That seems dangerous akin to '08. Crypto in general isn't being used for much relative to its current hypothetical value.

It's being propped up by a few huge investors. Once those investors have tripled their investment and grown bored speculating, they'll move on, and there'll be a run on crypto driving its value through the floor.

So any exposure through retirement accounts or other investment products seems really dangerous.

But idk

<comment><USER38> > Once those investors have tripled their investment and grown bored > speculating

Can you point out to any example in history where an institutional investor has gotten out of investing because they have grown bored, and the profits they have are enough for them?

<comment><USER37> no but I imagine large funds change investments many times over their lifetime particularly in its riskier allocations.

funds are usually made up of larger contributors so while idk of an investor that's grown bored there are plenty of examples of funds offloading investments for other financial products

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> A lot of money has been made on the way up. And a lot of money has to be made on the way down. But for that, some more pumping is needed. HODL.

<comment><USER40> Agree, futures volumes need to be massive for short manipulation to be viable

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> it will be interesting to see how they determine the settlement price

my prediction: huge amounts of bogus trades every day to manipulate it

<comment><USER34> CME will be using Bitcoin Reference Rate (BRR). I don't believe CBOE has published how they will do theirs. [http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/cf- bitcoin-reference-rate.ht...](http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/cf-bitcoin- reference-rate.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I had trouble understanding bitcoin myself, and therefore stayed away from it, but what made me understand it, if shinny metals and compressed carbons pieces have huge markets, eg. gold has a cap of 7 trillions and bitcoin is just 150 billions, and just work why bitcoin would not also work, even when you buy gold jewellery or diamonds, in the back of your mind is the resell value, (hedge against inflation), not that they look much better than a fake, or the coated version.

Maybe in US inflation isn't a problem but in my country until a few years 7% inflation was low, although maybe the official inflation is low, but as far as I know asset prices have gone up due to quantitative easing.

<comment><USER24> The rub is in "gold just works". It doesn't just work, there are reasons it has retained value for so long and reasons it might not forever.

The intrinsic value of USD is it's the only currency you can use to pay taxes to the US government. The intrinsic value of gold is its industrial/commercial uses. The intrinsic value of bitcoin is a nearly incorruptable transaction ledger while also being trust less.

None of these things "just work", some or all will fail eventually.

<comment> FLUX-YOU >The intrinsic value of USD is it's the only currency you can use to pay taxes to the US government.

This isn't intrinsic value. The government can conceivably decide USD is worthless (it won't, probably ever, unless the US collapses). USD relies on the US government for value.

Being able to burn money to start a fire would be intrinsic value. Same for gold's conductivity and its other industrial uses. They are physical properties.

<comment><USER43> I think its a stretch to say that the US gov will decide USD is worthless. So the expected intrinsic value is as he stated, the power of the US government to levy taxes. I would also include the domination of the USD in oil trade as another intrinsic value.

<comment><USER44> Intrinsic value is a term with specific meaning going back to the days of commodity money. I don't disagree with your point, but by definition the things you mention are not intrinsic value in the monetary theory sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I wonder what the source of Bitcoin's price will be for settlement, and more importantly whether it will be immune from price fixing.

One thing we know is that you can't trust market participants: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libor_scandal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libor_scandal)

</comment><comment><USER46> I wonder how this all will work with such huge transaction delays.

<comment><USER47> They're trading futures not bitcoins directly.

<comment><USER48> This doesn't matter. The HFT arbitrage guys (if they haven't already) will move in to bring the other components of the fragmented market inline. This is just a natural progression with markets becoming more efficient.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Are CBOE and CME are providing liquidity (fulfilling buy/sell orders) or are they simply operating a pool where traders bring their own positions and act as a settlement platform between participants?

How can they grantee 'legality' of the coins being traded by those participants in the 2nd scenario? Let's say then the coins being traded in the 2nd scenario are identified by the IRS as 'bad coins' \- will they freeze the coins held by that account until the legal dispute is settled?

How can you grantee the legality of coins in an option contract if the coins held by one party prior to the contract expiration are seized?

I'm very curious how they're going to handle these scenarios. Personally, I wouldn't trade on this.

<comment><USER17> It's cash settled. No actual Bitcoins change hands:

[http://cfe.cboe.com/cfe-products/xbt-cboe-bitcoin- futures](http://cfe.cboe.com/cfe-products/xbt-cboe-bitcoin-futures)

This is not unprecedented. If you look at weather futures, for example, nobody's going to want to take delivery of a petagram of cool air. Or think about index futures: who wants to receive 1 share of 500 different stocks at settlement time? When the underlying commodity is hard to work with and people still want to gamble^W hedge their risk, cash settlement solves plenty of problems.

That makes sense here. People who need wheat or steel to run their business and want to lock in prices might buy futures. But approximately nobody actually has a business need to deliver 1,000 bitcoins in February. At best, they might want to hedge some sort of risk. But more likely, it's straight up speculation from people who don't care about Bitcoin as such, but just want to get in on the action.

<comment><USER49> Will CBOE offer the ability to accept coin delivery in this market?

<comment><USER50> no, it is cash settled only</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why Atos' Zero Email policy makes no sense - <AUTHOR> http://blog.grexit.com/why-atos-zero-email-policy-does-not-make-sens

<comment><USER2> Of the three "solutions", wikis and discussion forums are "pull" formats, they don't work well for notifications, for example, informing team members of a change. The third, newsfeeds or activity feeds are going to be even _more_ cluttered than a heavily CC'ed email system.

<comment><AUTHOR> billswift, thats precisely what I said too :)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What do you think when you see Twitter bootstrap - <AUTHOR>

What do you think when you see a site is made with twitter bootstrap? Especially with all of the defaults? I mention this because it seems that every site that I see is built using twitter bootstrap, which while great, is getting a little repetitive. <comment><USER2> _What do you think when you see a site is made with twitter bootstrap?_

I couldn't care less.

 _Especially with all of the defaults?_

I couldn't care less.

 _I mention this because it seems that every site that I see is built using twitter bootstrap, which while great, is getting a little repetitive._

Do you do nothing but click around startups that are linked on HN? Then sure, you're going to see a lot of Twitter Bootstrap. But otherwise, TBS sites are, what, like, 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% of the web? I think this is all much ado about nothing, personally.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's a function of the HN echo chamber. I used Bootstrap to quick do something at work, and everyone loved it. They've never seen bootstrap, or anything like it before. These are technically inclined IT people, but they're not bleeding edge like HN.

I personally don't care about the styling, so long as there's visual flow. We can all pick Wordpress out of a lineup, but do you go "eww, Wordpress"? I think too many people try to use Bootstrap as a substitute for visuals rather than trying to leverage it to fit their content. I believe you can do that even without tweaking the stock color scheme.

</comment><comment><USER4> You will find that any repetitive design eventually becomes annoying, as do songs that receive continuous airplay.

The bootstrap framework is what is important, the design can be customized. Most people don't bother because they have in invested in Twitter Bootstrap in order to fast prototype.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's a prototype. A proof of concept. If it works and people like it, then they can do a custom design.

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess that is exactly how it makes me feel, like I am dealing with a prototype and it is somewhat less trustworthy...

<comment><USER5> You get the core functionality because you are an early adopter (e.g. Hacker News user). The frills and marketing, such as the custom design, is what will acquire customers like your friends.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I see a lot of these, but I just think to myself that without bootstrap those websites would have probably ended up being some ugly wordpress theme instead, so I'm thankful!

</comment><comment><USER7> I like bootstrap because it allows me to iterate quickly.

Problem is a lot of people dont dig into the actual styling of the page and leave the standard stuff in it.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think about barfing because Bootstrap is over used so much.

</comment><comment><USER9> I have used Bootstrap and it requires considerable effort to make the site look different. Some simple things like changing header color and height require external help (stackoverflow etc.)

Over time I will be able to build a site as good as any on Bootstrap.</comment>


Bank of England payment system crashes - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/oct/20/bank-of-england-payment-system-crashes

<comment><USER2> If this had happened with Bitcoin, it would be front page news globally. No one knows what this "glitch" is, where it came from, whether an attack, software or hardware failure, yet everyone blithely trusts the BOE to reconcile the amounts and fix the problem without reporting the cause.

This story is highly indicative of the doublethink when it comes to software applied to money functions, the irrational trust in government institutions and central banks (independent or not). Bitcoin will remove this opaque, centralized system and replace it with something solid, open, trustworthy and incorruptible.</comment>


'Secret agents' warning removed from Chrome incognito tab - <AUTHOR> http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/chrome/app/generated_resources.grd?r1=239201&r2=239282 <comment><USER2> Terrible change, IMO.

Even if the older expanded list skewed a bit into jokey territory in the wording (which I think is fine, even for -- maybe especially for, the secret agent bit because jokes are a fantastic way to highlight injustices) it gave Joe Random user a much better idea of what things incognito won't protect him from than the new text does.

The dividing line of protection incognito gives you may seem completely obvious to anyone reading HackerNews, but I assure you that it is non-obvious to my non-tech friends and family who tell me their new computer has "2 terabytes of memory".

<comment> line-zero I once had a conversation with someone about how Incognito Mode doesn't actually provide anonymity, and he said, "No, it's cool dude. I have my DSN [sic] set to 184.108.40.206 -- that makes you totally invisible online. It just makes it look like you're Google. Don't worry."

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This seems to happen a lot after a certain half life - all of the little quirky personality-showing additions get stripped over time in projects like this. Even happens in code comments too.

Things slip through the cracks and go to production, and then everyone complains and then things with too much color get pulled.

<comment><USER4> Software grows up too, for better or worse. I find this less surprising than nmap losing "...requires root privileges which you do not appear to possess. Sorry, dude."

<comment><USER5> I think like people software should have character and history as long as they do not interfere with functionality. I am always a bit sad seeing either one go.

<comment><USER6> If you come up with a way to make sure no one ever gets offended again, let us know. =/

We had to pull a Konami code easter egg from our website when a customer complained.

<comment><USER7> What a sad human they must be to _know_ the Konami code but somehow not _appreciate_ it.

<comment><USER8> I can imagine people being offended depending on what happened when the code was entered.

<comment><USER6> Just [https://kickassapp.com/](https://kickassapp.com/)

(I actually don't know where we got the source code from; it was added before my time.)

<comment><USER9> Woah, sweet!!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> People had apparently been complaining for awhile (search for the bug thread on this); for instance: [http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.web.chromium.bugs/1815...](http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.web.chromium.bugs/181502)

<comment><USER11> on unreasonable grounds...

>> _Government surveillance is nothing to joke about_

i didn't consider it a joke, and i'll let the next one speak for itself:

>> _it isn 't performed by secret agents, but via lawyers and engineers_

<comment><USER12> If government surveillance isn't performed by secret agents, then clearly the secret agents joke has nothing to do with government surveillance.

<comment><USER13> The quote is "surveillance by secret agents".

Given that "secret agent employed by the gov't" is by far the most common usage of "secret agent", anyone fluent in English would parse the original warning as "government surveillance performed by secret agents". That isn't to say that I agree with the complaint, but your comment makes no sense.

<comment><USER12> Sure, it was just meant to be a joke.

<comment><USER13> -_- my bad. I guess the fact that I took it seriously is testament to the fact that that kind of statement (said in all seriousness) is pretty common these days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Interesting that this change from early December is being discussed now. A more recent commit (from @__apf__) in mid-December changes the text to, as the author puts it, "increase emphasis on what incognito _doesn 't_ provide".

[https://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome?view=revision&revisio...](https://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome?view=revision&revision=240758)

</comment><comment><USER15> Maybe the joke just isn't funny any more.

<comment><USER16> Maybe it's not a joke?

<comment> line-zero It was their way of warning us.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Probably because government surveillance is completely expected now.

</comment><comment><USER18> "Cookies are delicious delicacies"

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=213186](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=213186)

<comment><USER19> So this is why Never-Ending Language Learner thought that computer files were baked goods.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never- Ending_Language_Learning...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never- Ending_Language_Learning#Process_and_goals)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I for one welcome this change, on stylistic grounds. Browsers are used by many people around the world from all ages, all of what they tell to their users must be carefully edited to avoid misunderstandings and anything not necessary needs to be removed. A joke or half joke like that was prone to misunderstandings and unnecessary.

</comment><comment><USER21> I bet the folks over at [https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!forum/chrom...](https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!forum/chromium- dev) must get a good chuckle out the hysteria swarming over this

</comment><comment><USER22> If only this was a canary clause.

</comment><comment><USER23> Out of sight, out of mind

</comment><comment><USER24> it also won't protect you from bullying from people named incognito

</comment><comment><USER25> Here, have some Streisand effect, Google!</comment>


Is Silicon Valley Pouring Its Money Into the Wrong Stuff? - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB20001424052702304642804580013221074317914

<comment><AUTHOR> First link to avoid paywall: [https://www.google.com/search?q=Is%20Silicon%20Valley%20Pour...](https://www.google.com/search?q=Is%20Silicon%20Valley%20Pouring%20Its%20Money%20Into%20the%20Wrong%20Stuff%3F)</comment>


Man lives off Craigslist ads for a month - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/technology-blog/man-lives-off-craigslist-ads-month-turns-adventures-082433333.html <comment><USER2> 1 month seems like too short a period why not one year?</comment>


Google haxor - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/webhp?hl=xx-hacker

<comment><USER2> Yeah, this is really old :)

There are other translations as well:

<http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=xx-pirate>

<https://www.google.com/webhp?hl=xx-bork>

<https://www.google.com/webhp?hl=xx-elmer>

<https://www.google.com/webhp?hl=xx-klingon>

</comment><comment><USER3> This is ancient, at least a decade old. There's also google in latin, although I don't know if it's meant as a joke or it has a practical use.

<comment><USER4> Yes, as is Google Pirate[1] and all of the Facebook equivalents.

[1]: <https://www.google.com/webhp?hl=xx-pirate></comment></comment>


When Bullet Points Go Terribly Wrong: How Not to Write a Tech Job Listing - <AUTHOR> http://chicago.craigslist.org/chc/bus/1009850632.html

<comment><USER2> About 7/8 of the way down: *Must have perseverance to read and understand complex product requirement lists.

<comment><USER3> Too bad when they hired the author of the posting the didn't include:

* Ability to summarize

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would have totally applied, but then I saw bullet point no. 114 : Must have pet chicken.

Dammit.

<comment><USER5> Go to a petting zoo and get it over with, or if it could be a male chicken...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Am I the only one who saw this, and immediately thought "please don't be my CL job post, please don't be my CL job post"?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> So... what you're saying is you need someone to code AND design AND market your product and we need to have an advanced degree in either Business Adminstration OR Computer Science to prove that we can do it. I hope you're at least bringing cash

<comment><USER7> AND administer all of the systems.

<comment><USER8> I noticed that, too -- it really looks like they want a single individual who can both make high-level technical decisions and implement + support a bunch of infrastructure at the same time.

I would call that person a co-founder, not a CIO, and a particularly over- burdened one, at that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Mistake number one: looking for a vice president on craigslist.

</comment><comment><USER10> Looks to me like the biggest problem here is a lack of white space -- if there were blank lines before "Implementation & Development", "Management", "Position Requirements", "Knowledge & Expertise", and "Personal Attributes", this would be far more readable.

</comment><comment><USER11> "As a member of the senior management team, participate in the selection and registration of the company's web site domain names, including any related- but-unused domains that could compromise the integrity of the business (through competition, typosquatting, etc.)."

This makes it sound like they could be having board meetings concerning whether to a register a domain to protect against typo squatting. Also they are asking for someone with exposure with business theory and governance processes. Since they haven't even registered a domain, I'm guessing it's just one or two mba's looking for someone to develop their product.

</comment><comment><USER12> A really good case for basic inline formatting.

Any website that takes text blurbs that could be more than a paragraph should support some formatting.

At least: bold, italics, blank lines, and bullet/number lists.

And please, put a bullet-list of how to format the text to the right of the text box. It's not hard.

<comment><USER13> So you're saying this is a bad job posting because Craigslist must die?

<comment><USER12> Nah, that they (and other text-submit-heavy sites) should put in a little formatting support.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Probably a copy+paste issue where some of the formatting was stripped. Meh.

<comment><USER3> That must be why they need a VP with HTML skills.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Beyond the obvious overwhelming qualifications, I have to ask: they expect to interview lots of people with five years of startup experience in downtown Chicago? Really?</comment>


Big city left with no bookstore - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/01/22/laredo.books/index.html?hpt=T2

<comment><USER2> Maybe -all- the corporate bookstores will tank. And then the little indies with their low overhead and innate charm could fill the welcome void.

That'd be good. Cuz: you can't browse through hundreds of books at Amazon, and make those amazing discoveries that change your life. And you can't pick something on a whim and take it home to read that evening at Amazon. You can't talk to a human being, or meet other readers at Amazon.

Only the little bookstores ever have that oddball stuff that bigstores will never carry that you can pick up and smell and leaf through and take a chance on.

Corporate bookstores weren't an improvement, they were a symptom.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> "I seriously don't understand why people don't just like reading that much"

Although the article mentions Amazon, it doesn't bother to even entertain the possibility that a bricks & mortar bookstore is unnecessary. Furthermore, I find browsing for books on Amazon to be a much better experience than standing around bookstore shelves. Clearly, some people have a strong emotional attachment to bookstores, but their apparent grief seems over the top.

<comment><USER3> I love going to author events at book stores.

Recently saw Dawkins at the Tribeca B&N.

Sometimes I also like paging thru mags.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> this seems like a problem with a simple solution. someone should open a mom & pop bookstore.

especially considering the support being shown by the community for books.

<comment><AUTHOR> Perhaps the bookstore ought to be a non-profit offshoot of the literacy campaign mentioned in the article.</comment></comment>


Valveless Pulsejet Engines 1.5 - <AUTHOR> http://www.pulse-jets.com/valveless/

<comment><USER2> Another intermittent engine (that you really can make at home): the putt-putt or pop-pop boat: [http://blog.jgc.org/2011/06/making-ponyo-or-putt-putt- boat.h...](http://blog.jgc.org/2011/06/making-ponyo-or-putt-putt-boat.html)</comment>


Status.im partners with the team behind the programming language Nim - <AUTHOR> https://our.status.im/status-partners-with-the-team-behind-the-programming-language-nim/ <comment><USER2> this is great for nim, really cool language that could use the support.

</comment><comment><USER3> Excellent news.</comment>


Enable Node.js to Run with Microsoft's ChakraCore Engine - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/4765 <comment><USER2> It's important to remember that ChakraCore only currently builds on Windows, so this is only for Windows Node.js builds.

The ChakraCore roadmap [1] shows that they plan on porting the interpreter to Ubuntu, but not to Mac OS, and they don't plan on porting the JIT. So even it does go Windows + Linux, it will still be a low-performing toy on Linux.

This is vaguely interesting from a technical point of view, but doesn't seem like it'll majorly impact the future of Node.js, except maybe as something Microsoft can offer for Azure customers that choose Windows Server.

[1]: [https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/wiki/Roadmap](https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/wiki/Roadmap)

<comment><USER3> The goal is for all of ChakraCore to be broadly cross-platform eventually, including the JIT, and including many more platforms than just Ubuntu x64. The roadmap reflects our next steps for the next 6 months but is not the entire journey.

Disclosure: I work on Chakra

<comment> shawn-butler >> An implementation of ChakraCore interpreter and runtime, no JIT, on Linux.

You should update the wiki if you work on the project then. The stated roadmap goal seems fairly clear and aligns with a typical Microsoft strategy to ensure Windows remains the premium platform for its "open source" efforts.

Not being negative that is just the way it has gone in the past so you are fighting an uphill battle.

Disclosure: None

<comment><USER4> Even the updated Roadmap suggests that Windows remains the primary platform. This Windows-first backend is a bad idea for Node.js, unless the team (and MS) commits to supporting Linux and Mac on par with Windows. That includes not releasing unless they have performance/feature parity on all major OSes, and committing equal resources to all.

While MS is nowhere as powerful as it was in the 90s, this is exactly how MS- Java happened and why Sun went to court.

<comment><USER5> Almost all software has a primary platform. There are a lot of free software apps where windows is either not a priority, or where the devs refuse to implement patches that improve how it works under windows. Additionally, this is just one engine that node supports, in addition to v8, and I assume that with this, other engines can, or could be added in the future. Node's goal is to be a javascript server platform, and that means having hooks both upward and downward to make developers' jobs easier.

<comment><USER4> > Almost all software has a primary platform.

I have no disagreement with software having a primary platform. However, it would make a lot of sense for open source software to choose an open source platform as primary.

Add: I guess what I'm saying is, if you're making enhancements to an existing Open Source project which already works on non-proprietary platforms, it would be better if those enhancements work equally well on non-proprietary platforms.

<comment><USER6> There are tons of FOSS/OSS projects for which OSX is the main platform.

Windows isn't exactly a "proprietary" platform, the OS is closed source and proprietary is but it's the wrong definition to use to describe it as a platform especially today with PAAS/IAAS.

Windows isn't free that's true but as far as PAAS (Azure/Azure-Like) goes it's not really a critical part of the pricing, and even for IAAS it's not that important.

One could also say that RHEL, SLES and the likes are proprietary distributions of Linux, they are open source, but proprietary none the less.

<comment><USER7> What remarkable or known FOSS/OSS projects are OS X as the main or only platform that aren't inherently platform specific like homebrew?

I can't think of one open source project that I use that is only available on OS X or primarily an OS X project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is awesome, but before anyone uses this for something real keep in mind that the way this works is that Microsoft has created a shim on top of Chakra that exposes a V8 API.

If V8 changes its API drastically (which it frequently does) this little experiment is basically over. There is only so much work people can do to keep up with a moving target.

Barring NodeJS creating an abstract JS engine API that developers can create v8/chakra/spidermonkey adapters for I can't see this being a success.

That being said, I hope that Node and V8 coupling becomes less tight and the interface between the two does become abstract so that we can all benefit from a choice of engine that implements the requirements of NodeJS.

<comment><USER9> The thing is, Node needs to keep up with those same APIs.

<comment><USER10> It needs to call them, not implement them. I am guessing the former is a lot simpler than the latter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Many posters in that Github Chakra pull request thread appear to be in the "Node is V8 and only V8" camp. This is disappointing. Since when is having a bigger developer community, supporting the latest ES6 standards, and having wider reach for NodeJS a bad thing? Look at what the friendly rivalry has done for the various browsers - the competition benefitted everyone and advanced technology immeasurably.

<comment><USER12> I'm a node.js developer and I don't really care what interpreter is being used as long as any code submitted to NPM is compatible with any version of node.js regardless of the JavaScript engine.

The only issues would be in ChakraCore were to support additional ES6/7 features that people started to use that wouldn't work on a V8 node.js instance, or the other way around.

<comment><USER13> How is that different from how node v5 supports additional ES6/7 features that don't work in node v4? In the end you can only rely on package authors to be aware of their targets' capabilities and code to the minimum baseline accordingly.

<comment><USER12> npm needs to learn how to deal with that. For example, if a package is marked as requiring 5.4, but you have 4.2, then it should automatically use a tool like babel to convert unavailable ES6 syntax to ES5 for compatibility. I really want to be able to write my modules to take advantage of ES6 while not having to build all that babel stuff into my module for compatibility.

<comment><USER14> Some of that is possible, but some of that is not. Consider the use case of WeakMaps or Proxies that cannot truly be polyfilled, they need to be implemented at the language level.

Suppose you could transpile what is possible, then throw errors otherwise, however that would involve parsing each file in an NPM module which is probably an unreasonable task performance wise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't understand what the goal is here. Honest question, not a criticism. Can someone please explain. Is the intention to have node work on multiple Javascript engines like spidermonkey? I can see why Chakra developers could want this but as a developer using node I don't see how I would benefit.

<comment><USER16> Competition in the space leads to better engines.

I put a link in another comment to last week's discussion on the topic. But my main concern is developers writing code that tries to bend around then V8 implementation, even if it's not required by the language.

One great example from that thread was about try/catch:

"For example, a try/catch in V8 triggers deoptimization for the entire function it's in, while it might not in other engines. So this leads to many developers avoiding try/catch in performance critical code. This ends up with them avoiding it in general usage, which means that now "avoiding try/catch" is considered a general purpose performance tip in javascript, even though it might only apply to one engine (and the v8 team has expressed interest in trying to stop that deopt)"[0]

"It is a good example actually. Chakra does fully optimize functions with try/catch. Caveat: we don't optimize try/finally yet... Disclaimer: I work for MSFT on Chakra."[1]

"try/catch has pretty much no runtime overhead in SpiderMonkey unless an actual exception is thrown."[2]

[0] - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10896729](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10896729)

[1] - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10896971](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10896971)

[2] - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10897851](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10897851)

<comment><USER17> And that was just the first thing off the top of my head, there are tons of other little performance things that many people consider a "JavaScript thing" instead of a "V8 thing"

<comment><USER18> Does it matter? If V8 deoptimizes code with try/catch, then I as a developer need to account for that.

<comment><USER17> It does!

V8 has expressed interest in fixing the try/catch deopt, but it keeps falling behind on their list because not many people are using it.

Most people aren't using it because V8 (and in some minds, mine included until 5 days ago, all of Javascript) doesn't optimize it.

It's a bit of a catch 22, and having alternate engines where that deopt doesn't happen can be the way out.

Basically having an alternate engine makes sure that stuff like this doesn't become _permanent_. You'll probably avoid try/catch in performance code for the near future (and i'll most likely do it as well), but the hope is that multiple implementations will force V8 to fix that issue (if it can be called that) at some point and eventually this little bit of optimization will no longer be necessary.

<comment><USER19> > it keeps falling behind on their list because not many people are using it.

How can that be true? try/catch is as common a JS idiom as a for loop.

This causes significant trouble all over React and many other libraries, as many hot areas of code are covered in try/catches to ensure developer error doesn't blow the whole render. Optimizing it could lead to pretty serious performance gains.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> There's a Microsoft blog post which gives much more details: [https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2016/01/19/nodejs- chakra...](https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2016/01/19/nodejs-chakracore- mainline/)

</comment><comment><USER11> I hope the V8 C++ API doesn't become the defacto Node engine API. Node really needs a proper engine-neutral API. This way the native node modules can truly be portable across engines and across node versions.

Supporting additional JS engines would ultimately lead to a healthier ecosystem and higher quality JS implementations.

</comment><comment><USER21> Congratulations Microsoft and the Node.js team! Providing alternate JavaScript run times is critical to the success of a platform that requires predictable performance on a variety of environments. I'm so proud of everyone making this come true!

Great work everyone.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm not sure if Google and V8 have always gone out of their way to embrace Node and optimize V8 for Node. Perhaps they have. I'm not sure.

But this is Microsoft going out of its way to provide a swap-in engine for Node, with a focus on optimizing the engine for Node through benchmarks, and cross-platform builds in the pipeline.

Hopefully, Microsoft will be able to achieve the following:

1\. A smaller Node binary through a stripped-down engine.

2\. A GC optimized for Node and server applications.

3\. An engine optimized for Node, working closely with Node's core technical team.

Perhaps this might encourage Google to do the same.

</comment><comment><USER16> Some HN comments on this topic from when ChakraCore was announced last week.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10896063](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10896063)

</comment><comment><USER23> I am sure I'm a minority on this thread - but does anyone else think that if the engine is being developed in the open as open source then competition is not a good thing. I believe it's similar to having io.js and node.js - together it is a stronger platform. To this end, I think it would have made a lot of sense for MS to collaborate with webkit/blink and vice versa... that's the true spirit of open source IMO... I don't believe the web is stronger with more rendering engines and more JS runtimes... I think it's weaker. What would make it stronger is more open source and more collaboration. We have to be very happy that MS is taking the first step in this direction. Open Sourcing ChakraCore is a huge first step and now integrating it with other systems as well . I just hope over the next 10 years we see more collaboration between webkit, blink, gecko, and trident... as well as the JS engines...

<comment><USER24> If "together" means Google is involved, I absolutely prefer the separation. Google has repeatedly screwed me over by letting their products stagnate and, sometimes, killing them off. I find it incredibly frustrating that so much of my work and digital life rely on the whims of Google.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> They should also have the option to use FireFox's engine as well.

Who has the fastest JS core these days?

<comment><USER26> Letting ChakraCore run means effectively "wrapping Chakra to emulate V8's APIs". There was an experiment to do this for SpiderMonkey at one point but it's a lot of work to maintain.

<comment><USER27> Here's Mozilla's effort to implement the V8 api on spidermonkey if anyone's curious:

[https://github.com/zpao/spidernode](https://github.com/zpao/spidernode)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> nevi-me Interesting development, a good one at that!

A few questions though. Node tracks V8 releases, so the first thing I'm wondering is whether ChakraCore will continue emulating V8 APIs into the future? What happens when ChakraCore adds breaking changes which V8 doesn't support?

I presume MS will be supporting most development on the engine, as they benefit from IoT Core and other applications relying on Node. If Mozilla were to do the same and add SpiderMonkey, this would likely see the 3 major vendors accelerate adoption of JS standards further. I'm more bullish on JS development into the future.

If I were to predict, I'd see Node switching to ChakraCore as its primary engine in a year. V8 has been 'we build you follow'. I know Domenic and other Google developers have helped with the relationship with Node contributors, but what will happen when MS offers a less-maintenance-prone engine? Embrace, extend, extinguish!

<comment><USER28> > If I were to predict, I'd see Node switching to ChakraCore as its primary > engine in a year.

Chakra doesn't even compile on Mac OS or Linux, where the majority[1] of instances run. If I didn't know better, I'd say Microsoft isn't interested in Chakra-Node running on other platforms - only on Windows, but with a V8-beating performance or other 'desirable' Chakra-only extensions (extend). Want high performance NodeJS? Find it on Windows/Azure (extinguish)

1\. This is an educated guess

<comment><USER5> The roadmap for ChakraCore includes getting it to run cross-platform. Additionally, as ChakraCore is Free Software, you're more than welcome to fork it and/or submit patches as needed.

<comment><USER29> "Patches welcome" is not a particularly compelling response to "it doesn't run on any of the platforms people currently use".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Checking ChakraCore with static analyzer:[http://www.viva64.com/en/b/0370/](http://www.viva64.com/en/b/0370/)

</comment><comment><USER31> With Microsoft starting to open source more projects, things like this really start to become a reality. Awesome pull request, and I look forward to playing around with this once the request has been merged. (If it does get merged)

</comment><comment><USER32> This is great. I still feel that Google isn't particularly excited about Node.js. It's good to see that Microsoft puts faith in the platform.

I guess Google has a few conflicts of interest with Go and Dart.

<comment><USER33> Google use a lot of Java, I believe. That probably has something to do with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Why should a developer care about this? What does ChkraCore bring to the table that V8 doesn't ?

<comment><USER35> ECMAScript 2015 coverage (even some ECMAScript 2016) by ChkraCore is better than V8 (or SpiderMonkey) [1]

[1] [http://kangax.github.io/compat- table/es6/](http://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/)

<comment><USER36> > V8 now has 92% ES6 coverage in Chrome Canary (on track for shipping in > Chrome M49)

Source: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10932790](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10932790)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> What is a potential benefit of using Chakra over V8? performance? licensing?

</comment><comment><USER38> Has anyone wrote up a Chakra vs V8 comparison?

</comment><comment><USER39> What does this mean for noje.js?

<comment><USER40> Embrace, extend, extinguish.

<comment><USER41> Can you explain what you mean by this comment in this context?

<comment><USER42> We'll see how long it takes to go cross platform.

Only then can someone really say but so far this PR doesn't make me feel very comfortable with the Node ecosystem going forward.

<comment><USER41> Linux support for ChakraCore is planned within the next few months: [https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/wiki/Roadmap](https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/wiki/Roadmap)

We can see if that actually happens.

Can you explain what makes you feel uncomfortable about the Node ecosystem? I believe Node.js already works on non-Windows platforms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is incredibly cool, I have a request.

Please do not post comments on the GH issue unless you have something important to add. These issues gain a lot of attention and it makes it _incredibly_ hard for collaborators to communicate.

Locking the issue to collaborators means other people from the outside who have a significant contribution or want to help can't do that.

Comments like +1 -1 and such create a significant amount of noise.

Support open source, keep the discussion clean.

<comment><USER43> Looks like that didn't work out well. [https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/4765#issuecomment-172933...](https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/4765#issuecomment-172933447)

Right above your clone of this comment on the thread. :/

<comment><USER44> Looks like this is a trolling attempt. The comment was subtly changed and the author, [https://github.com/ingIor](https://github.com/ingIor), is a misspelling of inglor and has no contributions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> As a long time JS developer I was blown away by the V8 performance, and it still amaze me. And it works very well on Windows.

What would be cool though, is if we could use vbScript in Node. Because vbScript is even easier to learn then JavaScript!</comment>


Show HN: Interactive diagrams of Rx Observables - <AUTHOR> http://rxmarbles.com

<comment><USER2> Very cool stuff. Might I suggest adding a small link to a brief tutorial on reactive streams at the top of the page? Add that and even someone who has no concept of reactive can grok the basics in no time!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! That's a good idea. Actually the plan is to integrate rxmarbles into [http://reactivex.io](http://reactivex.io), see this [https://github.com/ReactiveX/reactivex.github.io/issues/1#is...](https://github.com/ReactiveX/reactivex.github.io/issues/1#issuecomment-51230987). So in the near future, reactivex.io will be the go-to site for learning Rx.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How "technical" Is a Technical Solutions Engineer Position at Google? - <AUTHOR>

I've been rejected for an SRE position after the on-site step because of one particular interview. The others did succeed according to my recruiter, who offered to contact me again in one year for applying for the same position (I guess this is how these things work); I replied: "Yes, why not?", I've no rush at the moment.
After some weeks another recruiter reached me by email saying that he received my resume from the recruiting team, and asking if I could be interested in applying for a Technical Solutions Engineer position ([1] or [2]). I'm sure he could provide me all the information I need, but I was also looking for an impartial and external point of view, so I'm asking here.
My doubt is that this role may be too distant from a generic system/software engineer position and not particularly inline with my academic degree: a MSc in computer science. I'm maybe wrong but, reading the information reported in the links, it seems to me that ultimately it boils down to a customers support job (especially [1]) and that it may give little to no advantage to one who plans to eventually switch to a different engineering position; I don't know... I'm perceiving this as a "backup offer".
In your opinion, is it worth to take this chance even if I'm interested in other engineering positions? Is my view about this somewhat biased by the rejection?
Thank you so much for your time.
[1]: https://www.google.com/about/careers/search#!t=jo&jid=107445001& [2]: https://www.google.com/about/careers/search#!t=jo&jid=106825001& <comment><USER2> Your view should be biased by the rejection. "Apply again in a year" is their standard rejection script.

Google has so many candidates applying that they can act like the attractive woman who has 100 people asking for her number every day. Google will look for the slightest excuse to reject someone.

You might as well interview and see what happens. However, I would be reluctant to waste a vacation day on an interview if I already have a job.

Another possibility is to get hired at Google, wait 1-3 years, then try to transfer to something better.

The most likely outcome is that you will go on the interview and it will go nowhere.

Google has a bad reputation among candidates who interviewed and didn't wind up working there. It's for a good reason.

</comment><comment><USER3> The Google TSEs I know have a background in software engineering / comp sci. And from my informal conversations with them, they seem to be deep enough in code to their liking.

But you're probably going to get better information from the recruiter, or better yet, the interview panel. I'd go, do the interview, be honest, and ask the interviewers about this stuff.</comment>


Ground Collision Avoidance System 'Saves' First F-16 in Syria - <AUTHOR> http://aviationweek.com/defense/ground-collision-avoidance-system-saves-first-f-16-syria <comment><USER2> The USAF finally went for that? It was first demonstrated in 1998, and has been used by the Swedish air force for years. Their slogan is "You can't fly any lower". Here's the 1998 writeup, copied from Aviation Leak: [http://www.f-16.net/f-16_versions_article8.html](http://www.f-16.net/f-16_versions_article8.html)

The technical paper: [http://www.icas.org/ICAS_ARCHIVE/ICAS1998/PAPERS/182.PDF](http://www.icas.org/ICAS_ARCHIVE/ICAS1998/PAPERS/182.PDF)

The actions this system takes are drastic. Roll rates to 180 degrees/sec to get to wings-level, then a 5G pull-up. The pilot's helmet may be banged against the canopy. It's so drastic because flying 150 feet off the ground in mountainous terrain is normal procedure for fighters. If the system has to act to avoid a collision, that action has to be very aggressive.

Here's what it looks like to a pilot:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPr2LWctwYQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPr2LWctwYQ)

Here, the pilot puts the plane into an insane bank and, as he says, "goes to sleep" and releases the controls.

<comment><USER3> ... and here is a longer video from NASA about their development of collision avoidance system that can work for regular planes too: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWx6-aK8Ick](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWx6-aK8Ick)

<comment><USER2> That's so NASA PR. About 80% of the stuff in that video was not done by NASA. The F-16 auto-GCAS was a USAF/Swedish Air Force/Lockheed project. The NASA people are just reusing that technology on a model aircraft.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Reminds me of a description of air combat where the pursued would dive, and then pull out at the last possible moment, hoping the pursuer would misjudge and pull out too late. One pulled out so low he raised dust on the ground.

My father liked to attack ack-ack positions by diving vertically on them, as the gun crew obviously was reluctant to fire straight up. Of course, you gotta keep a real close eye on your altitude and airspeed doing that.

<comment><USER5> There was an incident (among many) between a Swedish figher and the Russian figher on Swedish territory maybe 20 years ago where the Russian was following the Swedish fighter. The Swedish planes being more sophisticated then the Russian fighters, the Swedish pilot went for the sea, straight bown. He pulled back when he knew his plane would make it, but the Russian figher jet could not handle the G's, broke and crashed into the sea killing the pilot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is really interesting. I found a PDF with some neat details and imagery describing the thinking that goes into Auto GCAS:

[http://www.sfte2013.com/files/78993619.pdf](http://www.sfte2013.com/files/78993619.pdf)

I don't know if it's just coincidental, but a lot of the examples seem to be concerned with keeping jets from flying into mountains, as opposed to flying into level ground, which was the first thing that came into mind when I saw "Ground Collision."

<comment><USER7> Cool find! The pictures (and one slide) show an Android phone being used on a "Dryden drone", looks like it might have been a prototyping platform. Would love to see more detail about this.

Edit: Ah, here's a senior project at CalPoly that was sponsored by NASA and looks related: [http://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...](http://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1199&context=mesp)

<comment><USER8> Quite impressive senior project. I know CalPoly aerospace does well with interacting with the industry and NASA.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "According to the Air Force, 26% of aircraft losses and 75% of all F-16 fatalities are caused by such accidents."

Wow.

<comment><USER10> Keep in mind that jet fighter crashes are often survived by the pilot if he or she has the time to react and bail out. Many crashes are caused by technical malfunction or loss of control at altitudes where the pilot has plenty of time to react.

However, if the pilot is still on board, ground collision at flight speed is almost universally fatal. Fighter pilots during ground attack or low-level dogfighting are always pushing the envelope both in aerodynamic/structural capability and maneuvering wrt. terrain hazards, so ground collision is a very serious safety hazard. Military pilots have much, much smaller margins of error than commercial or recreational pilots.

<comment><USER11> The article specifically talks about controlled flight into terrain, which, by definition excludes malfunctions.

<comment><USER12> I think the point being made about malfunctions is that they are less likely to lead to fatalities than CFIT. This would explain the high percentage of fatalities caused by CFIT.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The Stuka had a slightly less sophisticated version of this in 1935:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junkers_Ju_87#Diving_procedure](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junkers_Ju_87#Diving_procedure)

<comment><USER14> Significantly less, but still impressive for its purpose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Can you imagine the testing rigor you would need for this sort of system, knowing that if you incorrectly engaged or steered the aircraft, you would be responsible for killing the pilot?

<comment><USER16> My thought exactly. Warning! Warning! NullPointerException!

No, that's a contract I do not want.

<comment><USER17> I remember reading somewhere that these guys get all the time they want to program these systems, and the environment is very relaxed - I suppose for this very reason.

<comment><USER18> Write one line of code everyday, make sure it's bug free.

I wouldn't be surprised if they used functional programming and avoiding object orientated programming.

<comment><USER19> Why wouldn't they be using Ada? That's exactly what is was developed for.[1]

Does anybody know if Ada is still in use for writing new applications?

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_%28programming_language%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_%28programming_language%29)

<comment><USER20> You can take it a step further and use SPARK:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARK_%28programming_language%2...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARK_%28programming_language%29)

<comment><USER19> Excellent. I wasn't aware of SPARK.

It could have been useful for Toyota, rather than the ad-hoc mess they wound up with controlling their cars. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8905718](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8905718)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> That's great.

Maybe someone here can enlighten me as to why the systems, specifically TCAS and GPWS in modern civilian planes are only ever used to issue warnings/recommendations, but never take control? it would have at least prevented the überlingen mid air collision and probably some other CFIR incidents in the past years.

I thought about this for a while and couldn't come up with a really good reason.

<comment><USER22> Auto GCAS also used in cases of G-LOC (G-Induced Loss of Consciousness) which is practically unheard of in a civilian airliner that is able to land safely afterwards.

Fighter aircraft frequently engage in maneuvers that are seconds away from hitting the ground (or water) if something goes wrong.

überlingen was a tragic anomaly caused by multiple factors, the pilots knew they were on a collision course but due to the conflict between TCAS and ATC they collided. This possibility has been reduced by issuing a TCAS reversal if the other jet responds differently than expected.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is fascinating stuff. Does anybody know the whole cost of this system? I only was able to find a pdf and it says that the seed money was $2.5 millions. If anybody is interested here's the link: [http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/337112main_Auto- GCAS...](http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/337112main_Auto-GCAS-NR- AFPS.pdf)

<comment><USER24> I found this PDF: [http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/budget/fy2015...](http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/budget/fy2015/usaf- peds/0207133f_7_pb_2015.pdf) that says it cost ~2 million to integrate in 2013.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I just finished the book "Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed"

[http://www.amazon.com/Skunk-Works-Personal-Memoir- Lockheed-e...](http://www.amazon.com/Skunk-Works-Personal-Memoir-Lockheed- ebook/dp/B00A2DIW3C#)

It was a great book that almost feels like the pre-scrum manifesto applied to building aircraft.

<comment><USER26> All right, this has nothing to do with the Northrop/GD F-16.

<comment><USER25> FTA: "Auto GCAS, which was developed by Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> "a 5g pull"

Yikes!

<comment><USER28> That's a pretty run-of-the-mill acceleration as far as fighter maneuvers go. Momentary accelerations in excess of 10g are not unheard of and the use of an ejection seat exposes the pilot to 12g or even more.

<comment><USER29> Yeah but ejecting is often career ending because of those G's.

<comment><USER30> I was curious how traumatic it can be. Went searching and found this abstract from a paper[1] studying ejections in the German Air Force from 1981-1997:

"[86 ejections from 56 aircraft had an] overall success [(survival)] rate of 97.6%. Of all 85 participants, 12 (14%) were uninjured, 41 (48.2%) were slightly injured, and 30 (35.3%) were severely injured. Typical injuries were those of the spine and lower limbs. The most common severe injury was a vertebral fracture caused by ejection acceleration. This is followed by lower limb injuries received during the parachute landing fall."

[1] [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10596782](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10596782)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Why are we bombing Syria?

<comment><USER32> Google 'isis' aalong with beheadings, rape, child slavery, sex slaves, burning people alive, burying people alive etc. Alternatively buy a newspaper from time to time.

<comment><USER31> Funny that you and many others got angry because I asked the question that you want to no longer have anyone ask.

Is each bomb going to kill ISIS, or might it do more? Then "why are we bombing syria" never stops being a relevant question to ask, and never one that is fully answered until the answer becomes that we are not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> hmm ... as a pilot and student of WW2 combat, I think this might be ok in peace-time, but definitely a problem in war time.

\- to avoid radar, you have to fly low - tree-top high \- to save ammo, you have to shoot near ground-targets \- can the software be fooled in mountainous terrain? \- what about off-field landings? \- Japan's most effective bombers were kamikaze, and American pilots also considered ramming other aircraft after their ammo ran out \- if the software is wrong, does it roll inverted and pull down at 5G? how do you stop it?

<comment><USER34> From [http://www.aerotechnews.com/laafb/files/publications/ala_100...](http://www.aerotechnews.com/laafb/files/publications/ala_10082010A20.pdf), it looks like it's designed to avoid "nuisance activations": "As Nils got down low, I could see dirt being kicked up off of the desert floor and no nuisance activations."

<comment><USER35> 1,600 automatic avoidances in 141 hours of flight. Holy crap, that's a lot of "point it at the ground, hope you don't die". Unless they did something else?

<comment><USER36> Surely they just set the ground level to be higher?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Object detection and pose estimation using Center Point Detection - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/xingyizhou/CenterNet <comment><AUTHOR> Highlights of this technique:

Simple: One-sentence method summary: use keypoint detection technic to detect the bounding box center point and regress to all other object properties like bounding box size, 3d information, and pose.

Versatile: The same framework works for object detection, 3d bounding box estimation, and multi-person pose estimation with minor modification.

Fast: The whole process in a single network feedforward. No NMS post processing is needed. Our DLA-34 model runs at 52 FPS with 37.4 COCO AP.

Strong: Our best single model achieves 45.1AP on COCO test-dev.

Easy to use: We provide user friendly testing API and webcam demos.</comment>


Show HN: Text Message turns on blender - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=226kdTCxLsA Turning on the blender is obviously insignificant, but we did this as a proof of concept. Right now I'm getting it to work to unlock my door (I just have to machine the clamp). I've cut it down so it's one line of code started with an incron script. I can share it if there's any interest. <comment><USER2> That looks very complicated compared to what it needed to be. Can't find the link now, but there was a guy on hackaday or somesuch who connected the vibration alert to his car to start/unlock (don't remember which) it. So, get an old, cheap phone, take out vibration motor, connect to blender on/off toggle, then simply ring the phone and the blender starts. Its free too, because the call never has to go through.

Of course, doing it by sms the way this guy did means you can send it more complex commands.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's pretty sick.

This is actually much simpler than it seems. It's just a microcontroller hooked up to the switch (just two wires). The version shown in the video costed much more than it needed to only because we didn't know what we were doing at the time. The whole package can be done wirelessly for ~$35. The benefit of this method is the expandability factor. It can be hooked up to almost anything.

The text message backbone is just a postfix mail server running incron which starts a bash script to parse the message.

<comment><USER2> Yes, thats what I was thinking when I wrote the final sentence. The vibration method is simpler - but this way has many more uses and can be expanded. Great work either way!</comment></comment></comment>


Autoscaling with Capistrano, NFS and Runit - <AUTHOR> https://bugsnag.com/blog/autoscaling-capistrano-nfs-runit

<comment><USER2> From the article:

> NFS lets you share a directory between multiple servers (think of it as > Dropbox for servers).

So, ignoring that NFS is nothing like Dropbox, there's nothing wrong _per se_ with using NFS on a cloud setup for shared storage, this setup assumes that your NFS server will always be up. For anyone who has worked with NFS servers, you'll know that this isn't always the case. (Who here has lost a day when your NFS mounted home directory won't load?)

And you don't want to deal with a down NFS server when you're trying to auto- scale. Somewhere you'll always have a single point of failure, but I've always tried to make NFS not be it.

</comment><comment><USER3> NFS is a single point of failure. If something goes wrong on your NFS host, you'll break your entire cluster. That obvious oversight combined with calling it "Dropbox for servers" makes me think that whoever designed this doesn't understand NFS.

</comment><comment><USER4> Well hold on with the NFS hate everyone. I worked for a (very large, very deep-pocketed) web hosting company around 10 years ago, and they used NFS to deploy their software, configs (this was just before Puppet started getting popular), and user data. This worked VERY well. Granted, they were running on some pretty heavy iron (a couple dozen NetApp filers, all clustered 11 ways to Sunday) to make sure that the NFS facilities stayed up, but If You Know What You're Doing(tm) and err on the 'fast' and 'good' sides of the 'fast, cheap, and good - pick two' aphorism, NFS is quite useful.

<comment><USER2> Exactly - you were working with a well engineered system that could handle failover. Simply installing an NFS server on an Ubuntu VM isn't going to come close to the reliability that you'd want for this job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Good luck with those stale NFS file handles...

</comment><comment><USER6> "NFS lets you share a directory between multiple servers (think of it as Dropbox for servers)."

Oy vey. ;)

<comment><USER5> More like, "Dropbox is like NFS for desktops"

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> You're probably better if using Cephfs or Lustre then NFS. Linearly scalable, no SPOF (single point of failure).

<comment><USER8> AFS is quite well suited for this use case: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_File_System](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_File_System)</comment></comment>


Discovery's final flight (video & images) - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/us-news-blog/2012/apr/17/space-shuttle-discovery-twitter there are more images at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/gallery/2012/apr/17/space-shuttle-discovery-flight-pictures <comment><AUTHOR> there are more images at: [http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/gallery/2012/apr/17/space-...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/gallery/2012/apr/17/space- shuttle-discovery-flight-pictures)</comment>


Ask HN: How secured are keybase Per-User Keys? - <AUTHOR> It seems that with rollout of teams, Keybase guys have fully transitioned to Per-User Keys (PUKs). The PGP is still around, but by default you secure all your communications by PUKs. Given how fundamental this <i>new</i> key distribution scheme has become I'm wondering if anyone has reviewed how secure and reliable the distribution protocol for per-device private portion of the PUKs is. It is very lightly documented here https://keybase.io/docs/teams/puk and what sticks out to me is that Keybase centralized server has now become a SPOF for per-device key distribution (since I can't see how I can put a new PUK to, lets say, devices that are offline) <comment><USER2> I don't have much to contribute to the conversation, but also curious.</comment>