Clever recruiter email, I thought for a second I was being asked on a podcast - <AUTHOR> Subj: Looking for podcast guests<p>Body: I'm interviewing accomplished professionals and thought leaders about the challenges and experiences they've had with hiring and recruitment. Your feedback will inform our ongoing market research. There's also the potential to be featured on our weekly podcast and/or blog (with your permission of course)! Are you available to jump on a quick 15 minute call sometime in the next week to talk shop? <comment><AUTHOR> But it's nothing different than, hey I'm a recuiter, are you looking for a new job? I can place you.

</comment><comment><USER2> ... "Looking for potential podcast guests"

I don't really see the issue or anything interesting.</comment>


Dropbox Owns Cloud Storage on Mobile – Says This Report - <AUTHOR> https://cloudrail.com/cloud-storage-report-dropbox-owns-cloud-storage-mobile/ <comment><USER2> It certainly owns cloud storage on the desktop, if only because it actually works.

For the life of me I cannot understand how Microsoft screwed up OneDrive so much. On one hand if you ever leave a file unsaved, Microsoft Office will harass you forever about it. Office 365 pushes you to save files on OneDrive, but frequently you try to save a file on OneDrive and it fails. That's a failure mode that simply can't happen, ever.

In the case of both Google Drive and OneDrive the sync client itself seems to be unstable (stops working) and impairs the performance of the computer.

<comment><AUTHOR> Providers take the same approach with cloud storage as they do with messaging apps (Skype, Hangouts). Just good enough to be somewhat useful but we don't care if people complain. It is not our core business. That is why Dropbox, which it is / was their core business, has the best product.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is the best way or software to learn how to type fast these days? - <AUTHOR>

Is Mavis Beacon any good? What are the most fun games to practice? My typing is around 60-70 wpm and just ugly. Shame on me for being so lazy. Time for a change. <comment><USER2> Typingweb.com is how I went from about 50 words / minute pecking to 80 touch typing. After you get to a certain point with the tutorial the only thing that you can do to get faster is practice. One of the world class typists used to type out a 1000 word block of text each day, starting over whenever he made mistake (this was after he retired.) If you don't have any writing assignments that you are obligated to do, I suggest copying a few pages worth of articles each day. Alternate focusing on perfect accuracy for one article and then focus on speed for the next. Eventually you should get faster.

</comment><comment><USER3> While I don't remember how difficult it got, I know I loved Typing of the Dead. Orbs the old "House of the Dead" game, but users a keyboard instead of a light gun! Of course, good luck finding a legit copy...

</comment><comment><USER4> Very impressed with Z-Type: <http://www.phoboslab.org/ztype/>

</comment><comment><USER5> If you already have a good foundation and just need to practice, typeracer is excellent.

<http://play.typeracer.com>

</comment><comment><USER6> play.typeracer.com

</comment><comment><USER7> try out gtypist if you use Ubuntu.</comment>


Analysts: No hope for TPP after Trump win - <AUTHOR> http://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/trump-trade-tpp-2016-presidential-election-231112 <comment><USER2> This might not be such a bad thing.

[https://www.eff.org/issues/tpps-copyright- trap](https://www.eff.org/issues/tpps-copyright-trap)</comment>


Henrietta Lacks' Lasting Impact Detailed in New Portrait - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2018/05/15/611389741/henrietta-lacks-lasting-impact-detailed-in-new-portrait <comment><USER2> While it may be taboo, I think it's important to add context to her impact. Her 'contributions' were more than a 'sad story'. She was a Black woman who was experimented on without consent and without compensation who created one of the most important cell lines in medical research. 'Contribution' implies she did it willingly. 'Sad' implies it was unavoidable. These were deliberate acts grounded in racism and sexism to rob an American and human being of any reasonable sense of dignity. The fact that she happened to have remarkable genetics is a key leverage point that can remind people of the importance of ethics, not just science. It's extremely important for that to be a part of the headline, not just a detail if you click through to the story.

<comment><USER3> As much as this story is fascinating, "her" impact is actually non-existent. The cells of the HeLa line come from a routine biopsy; she had no knowledge and no part whatsoever in anything that was possible thanks to the cells line that was taken from her.

<comment><USER4> Why is this being downvoted? If people want female and/or black symbols, there are so many others who actually made a contribution (David Blackwell of the famous Rao-Blackwell equation, Shafi Goldwasser who won a Turing award, etc.).

Are we going to now start celebrating the people who got the first smallpox or polio vaccines as great contributors to science just because they were chosen to be the first for a procedure?

Attributing impact to figures who didn't personally do anything demeans the struggles and accomplishments of actual minority scientists.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If anyone is curious about her life and contributions to science, I'd pick up a copy of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks ([https://amzn.to/2rLLIHU](https://amzn.to/2rLLIHU)). It touches on some pretty heavy sociological issues as well.

<comment><USER6> Almost never upvote, but did here.

This book will be a quick read for most people, as the author is very good with her prose and knows how to weave a narrative. The impact that Ms. Lacks had on modern science cannot be understated, and it will be a good evening read that both gives you a basic run down of the impaction science that her cells had on modern medicine as well as a very sad story with some positive outlooks on the results of Ms. Lacks' contribution to modern medicine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Radio Lab did a great episode on Henrietta Lacks in 2010: [https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/91716-henriettas- tumor/](https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/91716-henriettas-tumor/)

</comment><comment><USER8> It is apparently not unusual for hospitals now to do pelvic exams on anesthetized patients without consent:

Pelvic Exams On Anesthetized Women Without Consent: A Troubling And Outdated Practice: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17088054](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17088054)

</comment><comment><USER9> The OP is a light, short article that thoroughly justifies the title. Not sure why the HN title is different, editorialized, and less informative than the original article.

<comment><USER10> We changed the title from "The new Henrietta Lacks' portrait is really good".

Submitters: please follow the HN guidelines, which ask: "please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait" and "Don't editorialize."

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> my bad!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The one piece of imagery, the piece doesn't mention. Her hat is designed to deliberately echo renaissance halos, I guess.</comment>


9.5mm Firefox browsers use Adblock Plus Daily - <AUTHOR> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/statistics/addon/1865 This means about 10% of all firefox browsers on any given day block online ads. (See http://blog.mozilla.com/addons/2009/08/11/how-many-firefox-users-use-add-ons/) Is it right for mozilla to advocate adblock? Is mozilla liable due to promotion? Will the online industry ever address the rising use of adblock a la MPAA/RIAA? <comment><USER2> Please keep in mind that these numbers are not 100% accurate. We do the best we can to parse out the add-on version check pings that this number is based on, but what we don't do is systematically attempt to track users. That means we don't have a cookie that we can rely on to determine exactly how many users are using a particular add-on. We can only count the number of pings.

Firefox will ping for a version check multiple times during the process of a browser upgrade. The user can manually check for updates as many times as they like. There are weird mis-configured proxies that can spam a single ping a hundred times for some reason, and there are browsers that have been recompiled for a variety of reasons that can behave in a non-standard fashion.

In each of these cases, we do the best we can to eliminate spurious or duplicate requests, but because of NAT and DHCP, we can't really rely much on an IP address to determine the validity of a set of requests.

Personally, I'm happy to provide less accurate statistics and be able to feel good that I am not violating Firefox users' privacy. This extends down to things such as not even storing IP addresses in our data warehouse once the access log data has been parsed. Regardless of the fact we have privacy policies that state we won't do anything bad with the data, I prefer to not even have the data available in a database at all.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This means about 10% of all firefox browsers on any given day block online ads. (See [http://blog.mozilla.com/addons/2009/08/11/how-many- firefox-u...](http://blog.mozilla.com/addons/2009/08/11/how-many-firefox- users-use-add-ons/)) Is it right for mozilla to advocate adblock? Is mozilla liable due to promotion? Will the online industry ever address the rising use of adblock a la MPAA/RIAA?

<comment><USER3> "Is mozilla liable due to promotion?"

Liable for what?

<comment><AUTHOR> Liable for lost advertising revenue due to the 'defacement' and 'republishing' of copyrighted content under the DMCA. It is a stretch, but America is a litigious nation and the courts have a tendency to rule in favor of big business (because they support the economy). And if the courts wont rule the first time around, there are always lobbyists to help change laws.

<comment><USER4> I think it would be a humongous stretch to say it's defacement. The server client model is the important factor I think here. A server sends data to the client to display in a manner it chooses fit. If a browser chooses not to request certain content, or chooses not to display it to the user, there is no defacement going on. If it is legal for there to be rendering differences at all between browsers, I think adblock fits into that gap as well.

As you said however, who knows what crazy justification they will come up with, and what the courts will buy.

<comment><AUTHOR> I definitely agree with you. Right now I'm trying to get into their argumentative mindset. I think web properties can argue that their copyright extends to HOW the content is displayed. This point is furthered if online sites can prove that their site is generated dynamically based on specific browsers. If they can argue that they manually create different (authorized) versions for different configurations (1 configuration for each browser, os and monitor type), and that all of those configurations contain ads. The courts may find that any configurations outside the site's authorized versions are unauthorized, an infringement of copyright and illegal. To me it almost makes sense. Thoughts?

<comment><USER2> If the web properties could successfully argue that their copyright extends to how the content is displayed, I think it is likely they could get a lot more bang for their buck by suing Microsoft for the mangled content that comes out of the many millions of IE 6 browsers still being used out there. :)

That said, I highly doubt either lawsuit has much of a leg to stand on. Content transformation is a long standing and tacitly accepted feature of web protocols. Caching, zooming, and even assistant technologies such as a screen or braille reader would run afoul this argument.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Millimeters?

<comment><AUTHOR> In finance, MM stands for millions. It can also be MLN.</comment></comment>


Mean Variance Optimization - <AUTHOR> https://www.datanitro.com/blog/2012/08/07/Mean-Variance-Optimization/ <comment><USER3> Interesting stuff...

A further point to consider if we're talking about real world applications is that it is not actually established that markets have finite variance - seriously.

In the 1960's, Benoit Mandelbrot began his research into chaos and fractal by looking at markets and finding that non-Gaussian, Levi-Stable distributions modeled changes in the market best[1]. And these L-stable distributions don't generally have a finite variance and sometimes don't have a finite mean [2].

And it is fairly easy to see how a market tends to not be Gaussian; change based on a Gaussian distribution tends to be random walk a la Brownian motion, where the final position of a variable is the sum of many small changes in the variable. Non-Gaussian, infinite-variance-distribution-based movement on the other hand has the property that the final result of a variable tends to be more the result of a finite number of large changes rather than a lot of small changes. And this is what the stock market often looks like. A few wild moves often impact things as much as the incremental changes. The apparent mean, variance and distribution of stocks on a day-to-day basis may not pan out in extreme situations and these can eat away the rest of your profits. If the stocks that seemed independently in normal conditions all go down in crash, your estimated-correlation-based-diversification hasn't protected you very well.

The Black Swan is a sadly too-simplified popular summary of these points.[3] It does point to the general idea. The higher-level take-away is that infinite variance distributions exist and indeed, you can not apriori assume a given distribution you are working with isn't one.

[1] [http://books.google.com/books?id=6KGSYANlwHAC&lpg=PP1...](http://books.google.com/books?id=6KGSYANlwHAC&lpg=PP1&ots=yULs5p13Uo&dq=Benoit%20Mandelbrot%20fractal%20and%20scaling%20in%20finance&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q=Benoit%20Mandelbrot%20fractal%20and%20scaling%20in%20finance&f=false) [2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A9vy_distribution> [3] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Swan_(Taleb_book)>

<comment><USER4> Actually, financial markets have employed non-Gaussian Levy processes in modelling derivatives for a long time (it is a bit different from the Levy distribution, I agree - but nothing stops the processes from having non-finite moments).

For example, a very widely used process for modelling information-driven timeseries (like stock returns) is the jump-diffusion model where the diffusion component is a Brownian motion while the jump component is a Poisson process.

The underlying volatility is often modelled using a different process - e.g. the SABR model, the Heston model etc.

There are similar cases for interest-rate processes (Hull-White/BDT etc) which have to satisfy conditions of mean-reversion and no-arbitrage across the yield curve.

See, it's not as if we don't realize that the underlying processes are mathematically inadequate to fully explain all market movements. But for a model to be useful, it has to satisfy two conditions:

1\. Be able to produce a non-arbitrageable "mid"-price for making a market (ie if someone asks a trader to quote the bid-ask for an option, e.g.)

2\. Be able to reproduce the current market prices of an asset/its derivatives. This requires model calibration.

Models are chosen based on how easily and how fast they can satisfy 1 &2.

Do they produce risk numbers that are believable? Probably yes, if the model has been calibrated and has been tested against out-of-sample inputs.

Do they guard adequately against event-risk (the thing you would try to signify using your "infinite" variance distributions)? Probably not - but then again, nothing does. How would you go ahead and calibrate the Levy distribution so that the sampling process can explain currently tradeable market prices? Would be it a "do once, leave forever" calibration? Or would it change from day-to-day (ie "local" calibration)?

<comment><USER3> Well more interesting stuff. My Googling yielding woefully incomplete references for your keywords. So "a long time" means what here? Some pointers would be useful here. I'm interested, help me out here.

I know there was a book giving long reworking of Black-Scholes for Levi-Stable distributions in the early 2000's.

Of course, while you described the sophisticated approach, from Black-Scholes to the Gaussian "coupela" to the _OP_ , the unsophisticated approach has a lot of traction still.

If we're ranging around all our interests in the market, I'd offer what I might hope would be the Minsky comment; _"the fault, dear Brutus, lies not with our models but in our selves"_. Gaussian models reappear because they have "predictiveness". The problematic sides of the more sophisticated models are tolerated for the same reason. Greed tempts us always to irrationality jump from what Keynes called _uncertainty_ to mere probability.

Btw, what do you think of Doug Noland of prudentbear.com?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm an analyst for a quantitative hedge fund. Please, _please_ everyone promise me to never base your investment decisions on this discredited form of mean-variance optimization.

This method of stock selecting was invented by Harry Markowitz in 1952. In the intervening sixty (!) years we have accumulated overwhelming evidence that plain vanilla mean variance optimization doesn't work. Among its many flaws:

1\. It makes unrealistic assumptions about the distribution of returns (i.e. that they are multivariate normal, when it is well known that returns exhibit heavy tails, time-varying volatility, fluctuating correlations etc etc).

2\. It relies on you having good estimates of the expected annual return of individual stocks. How do you propose to get these? Don't say you'll use historical measurements, unless you really believe that last year's return is a good predictor of this year's return (it's not, except perhaps in some sectors, and even then it's difficult to measure and you'd be subject to crash risk).

3\. The optimization procedure is error-maximizing. That is, even if returns _were_ multivariate normal _and_ you had a reliable way to measure the expected return on stocks, you'd still have errors in your covariance matrix, and these errors are amplified by the optimization procedure. You can see this in the article, then the "optimum" portfolio recommends putting 75% of your portfolio in MSFT and shorting AMZN and AAPL. Does anyone really believe that's sensible? Does anyone believe that such a portfolio is diversified?

The problem is that your model of stock returns is subject to massive overfitting. Let's say you have data for the last 10 years (i.e. about 2500 days). If there are N stocks in your portfolio, you need N(N+1)/2 pieces of information to specify the covariance matrix, which puts an upper limit of 70 stocks in your universe (since 70 * 71 / 2 ~ 2500). A good rule of thumb is that you should have 10 observations per free parameter, which cuts that number down to 22 stocks (22 * 23 / 2 ~ 500). I think that most portfolios consisting of 22 single-name stocks aren't sufficiently diversified (and you'll still be subject to the first two problems above).

In 2012, _no one_ should be using mean-variance optimization to select stocks. At the very least, shrink the covariance matrix toward some sensible prior (e.g. constant correlations, sector correlations, or a factor model) and backtest your strategy over the past 10-20 years and look at the annual volatility, size and length of drawdowns, skewness and information ratio.

<comment><USER6> Very interesting post -

Other than using a shrinkage estimator for the covariance matrix - <USER2> techniques would you suggest make sense for doing portfolio optimization?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> For your sake, do not base any investment decisions off of this model. Historical correlation != future correlation. You are MUCH better off using the Fama-French three factor model as a starting point.

An example of historical correlation severely understating risk was the 2008 financial crisis. Default rates of mortgages in, say, Florida that historically had little correlation with default rates of mortgages in Nevada suddenly became very correlated. Measuring risk in this fashion is not robust enough for investment decisions

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fama%E2%80%93French_three- facto...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fama%E2%80%93French_three-factor_model)

</comment><comment><USER4> Firstly, nice effort.

Secondly, some features you could add:

1\. Constrained optimization - including budget constraints, sector selection constraints etc. A tough one would be cardinal constraints e.g. I am limited to 4 stocks etc.

2\. Return attribution - whether the returns your portfolio earned were due to stock selection or asset allocation or both (Brinson Model: [http://www.mscibarra.com/research/articles/2002/PerfBrinson....](http://www.mscibarra.com/research/articles/2002/PerfBrinson.pdf)).

3\. Performance and compression - how would this deal with huge covariance matrices? 10000 x 10000? Matrix operarions on these wouldn't be trivial. In- memory serialization/deserialization issues also come to mind. (edit: then again, Excel can't do 10k x 10k :) )

4\. I'm not conversant with SciPy - does this use BFGS/similar for optimization?

5\. Compute as a service? Host a grid? Let calculation requests come to you via Excel? (Nobody would want a 10000 asset timeseries to be processed on their CPU for two hours).

<comment><USER8> I second everything photon has said and would add that anyone using this model should acknowledge the risk they are taking by using past stock correlations to predict future optimal portfolios. While this approach is central to finance, recently (past 18 months) we have seen bizarrely correlated asset price changes due to macro issues (especially in Europe).

These macro issues may change the way stocks correlate in future markets. I would back test any portfolio with data from at least 18 months ago to make sure it still looks pretty good.

<comment><USER4> _> we have seen bizarrely correlated asset price changes due to macro issues_

Actually, this is quite expected given event-risk in the market. For example, even in a non-crisis situation, correlation increases in intra-day trading when market-moving news is due - e.g. payroll numbers are due or ISM numbers are released.

Coming back to the present, headline-risk hasn't been as high as it has been since May, 2010 as we keep having one EU summit after another, one central bank announcement after another and each having a huge impact on how asset prices behave.

So the correlation is not entirely bizarre - people have been making correlation trades as well - for example JP Morgan's huge loss while betting on credit index tranches was a bet on implied vs. realized correlation (it didn't play out as expected, of course).

I'd be interested to know how people are playing this out in the equity space - via variance swaps?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It looks like the optimal weights for AMZN and AAPL are negative. That doesn't seem possible unless you're shorting them, but that's a quite different risk profile than going long.

<comment><USER8> That is just another point of optimization he needs to add.

<comment><USER9> It doesn't look like there are any limits on the weighting, even on the high end.

Furthermore, he's using closing price, not adjusted closing price. So splits and dividends aren't included. (which is most of the return in MSFT for the last 8 years or so).

<comment><AUTHOR> It's easy to switch to adjusted closing price - there's a 'which_price' dictionary that has adjusted price as an option. The weight limits do go a bit crazy if you can get close to 0 variance (but that's hard to do in real life).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Decent article, but I wanted to add a little extra warning to this:

>One way to do this is to look at past returns and come up with the historical correlation.

Be very wary of historical correlations, at any level. I am old enough (I was in my early teens) that I can remember the screaming of economists during the 1970s stagflation - it was _known_ that you could not have high inflation and high unemployment at the same time. Until we did.

</comment><comment><USER11> I may be totally off the mark here (it has been 5 years since I last studied portfolio management) but if you have 2 stocks that are totally negatively correlated, with the same expected return, won't you have a return of 0%?

</comment><comment><USER12> There are already a number of libraries in R that do this (including reverse portfolio optimization and Black-Litterman optimization)!

</comment><comment><USER13> just a small nitpick, you should be able to calculate portfolio variance using simple matrix operations instead of writing a double for loop.

something like.

temp = a* std_dev

var = np.dot(np.dot(temp.T, cor), temp)</comment>


Ask HN: Any recommendations for an interactive web demo framework? - <AUTHOR> I'm thinking of starting my blog, and one of the topics I want to touch involves manipulating some graphs and diagrams, and I'd like the user to play with the "illustration" itself.
I'm trying to find an easy-to-use framework that could get this job done. I haven't done a ton of frontend dev, but I can wrap my head around programming concepts, btw. I'm sure a frontend dev doesn't even need to ask this question, so I hope there are other people on the same boat as me.
edit: I do like what they're doing at https://distill.pub/ -- not sure if the framework (if any) they are using is easy to work with. <comment><USER2> Try tangle ([http://worrydream.com/Tangle/](http://worrydream.com/Tangle/)) or its markdown relative Fangle ([http://jotux.github.io/fangle/#](http://jotux.github.io/fangle/#)).

Or Idyll - [http://idyll-lang.org/](http://idyll-lang.org/)

</comment><comment><USER3> You might try Loopy: [http://ncase.me/loopy/](http://ncase.me/loopy/)

Or its brand new sibling, Joy: [http://ncase.me/joy/](http://ncase.me/joy/)

Both by Nicky Case, who has made many explorable explanations: [http://ncase.me](http://ncase.me)</comment>


Kotlin in enterprise - <AUTHOR> https://email@example.com/kotlin-in-enterprise-71adbdb3cf8f <comment><USER2> >You also would probably mention that the code would be less likely to be buggy and crash due to the null safety principle. Not really. Although it makes it easier to deal with null values, Kotlin is no miracle cure. A null value comes from somewhere. If your logic is wrong, your logic is wrong, no matter what is the language used.

I haven't used Kotlin extensively enough to know how much the null safety really helps, but this reasoning seems incorrect to me. You could extend it to say that static types aren't useful either, but in both cases there's a significant benefit from getting faster feedback that your logic is (or might be) wrong.

<comment><USER3> I've found it enormously useful to have languages which check on possible nulls and make sure I've attempted to handle them, rather than just merrily throwing a null reference exception when I get a surprise.

It's also extremely handy to know that a given method simply cannot return null, based on nothing but its type, in a way that the compiler will have enforced.

I feel the author is really underestimating the impact of null safety on avoiding these annoying bugs in the first place. To my mind it's like saying dynamic languages are as solid as static once once you've written your test suite - that test suite's probably going to have tests in it that you're returning the type you expected from a function, something the compiler could easily be handling for you. What a waste of time! Just like unchecked null handling.</comment></comment>


I learned to code, build a web app and launch it on Product Hunt in 2 months - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@AndreyAzimov/i-learned-to-code-and-build-a-web-app-in-2-months-da8f2932c139 <comment><USER2> Those are some great coworkers to work alongside. I know both by reputation alone. Levels obviously for all his awesome work in the digital nomad scene and Oskar because of his work on spaced repetition for learning coding languages.</comment>


Ask HN: Can I sell software that uses Android Debug Bridge? - <AUTHOR>

I want to sell a product that wraps the existing android debug bridge (adb) with a nice UI and sell it.
I've noticed from http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11565689/android-adb-redistribution that I shouldn't include the software in the final executable.
I intend to have my software call the adb instance that the user has already installed separately. It wouldn't be considered redistributing adb as far as I know.
Does anyone know of any issues with this system? <comment><USER2> Adb source code is distributed under the Apache license. IANAL but even if the T&C for the SDK has restrictions on how the SDK as a binary distribution can be used, that would not affect the use of Apache licensed components of the SDK.

The choice of using an adb included with your product vs one from the user's SDK could be based on which versions you want to support.</comment>


Show HN: FNSH – App that helps you focus and finish tasks - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fnsh/id1137230589?ls=1&mt=8 <comment><AUTHOR> I am a designer trying to get my head around swift and I built this over two weekends.

If used properly, this app can help you get your tasks done on time/quicker without procrastinations or distractions.

Happy to hear your feedback and to see how I can make it better!

<comment><USER2> Imran, I already loved your idea. Hunted it on ProductHunt: [https://www.producthunt.com/tech/fnsh](https://www.producthunt.com/tech/fnsh) It's a beautiful app! :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Appreciate it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> What happens after you do 15? Does it make the app unusable? That seems like it would constitute as a "trial" app which is not really allowed.

But it's in the App Store so I guess that's not the case?

Looks nice, might use it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it is a trial app. Didn't know that App Store would have an issue with that.. Well, they let this slide, so I guess I am okay! :)</comment></comment>


New Genetics Discovery: All Blue Eyed People Related to Brad Pitt (for real) - <AUTHOR> http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,532346,00.html <comment><USER2> Now _this_ is a decent science article. Maybe I should start reading _Der Spiegel_.

Of course, technically _all of us_ are related to Brad Pitt. And I'm not convinced that, though I have blue eyes, I'm really that much more closely related to Brad than any other Indo-European is.

<comment><USER3> It is possible to have blue eyes and be more distantly related to Brad Pitt than family members with brown eyes. I'll describe as follows. Brown eyes is a dominant genetic trait. Blue eyes is a recessive trait. Therefore, it is possible for two parents with brown eyes to have kids with blue eyes. This is a child with blue eyes which is more distantly related to Brad Pitt than either of its more closely related brown eyed parents.

You can use the converse to spot illegitimate children, as my old biology teacher done on dull parent evenings. This is because two parents with blue eyes are unlikely to have a child with brown eyes ( <http://www.athro.com/evo/gen/inherit1.html> ) and certainly not at the 10% ratio observed by my teacher. If you're a fellow with blue eyes and your partner has blue eyes then kids with brown eyes probably aren't yours.

<comment><USER4> There is a reported 8% children-not-from-their-daddy in western societies.

On a related note, the very first words from most mothers who just gave birth to their husbands is "it looks just like you". Psychology at play: we see what we want to see!

<comment><USER2> I had to read that sentence three times to make sure I wasn't reading a synopsis of _Oedipus Rex_. :)

<comment><USER3> Very Freudian. Tell me about your mother.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Dogs Test Drug Aimed at Humans' Biggest Killer: Age - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/17/us/aging-research-disease-dogs.html <comment><USER2> Ignoring the human side, I would be thrilled if I could have my dog live 20%-30% longer with a daily pill. I suspect many pet owners would feel the same.

</comment><comment><USER3> Seems like a puff piece probably by the makers of the drug, and their P/R agency. More info:

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


Chinese programmers work like slaves in Cambodia - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@zhongguo321645/electric-shock-baton-headshot-how-badly-the-chinese-programmers-who-were-cheated-to-cambodia-1145f4d17a55 <comment><USER2> So much sex and violence it sounds absurd. Any other sources on this?</comment>


Slippery chicken: Open-source algorithmic music composition environment - <AUTHOR> http://www.michael-edwards.org/sc/

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm currently taking a coursera [Fundamentals of music theory]([https://class.coursera.org/musictheory-001/wiki/Meet_the_Tea...](https://class.coursera.org/musictheory-001/wiki/Meet_the_Team)) class from Dr. Michael Edwards and team from University of Edinburgh. He has deep knowledge in the field. After the class I'll work on this software, hopefuylly.

</comment><comment><USER2> I really like this idea, and the precompiled lisp images made it simple to have this up and running instantly to play around with.

</comment><comment><USER3> Cool project! Kind of an unfortunate name.</comment>


Inferring too much (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://lanzkron.wordpress.com/2011/02/21/inferring-too-much

<comment><AUTHOR> An interesting technique for optimizing, in particular, matrix operations in C++ (or even C, with the usual increase in verbosity). Also used in the Eigen math library ([http://eigen.tuxfamily.org](http://eigen.tuxfamily.org)).

I hadn't considered the issue that type inference presented here until reading this article (and some of the comments - the issue is also present with template type inference).</comment>


NyaoVim: Web-enhanced Extensible Neovim Front End - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rhysd/NyaoVim <comment><USER3> This is really awesome. This is a taste of the fruits of Neovim's development. While my experience with performance in Electron-based editors has largely been poor, the fact that _real vim_ can now be plugged into other editor experiments makes me _very_ excited for the future of editors.

<comment><USER4> Right, my first thought was that Electron is an instant show-stopper, but it's great to see how far Neovim has gone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Doesn't building a front end with a kit as heavy and unwieldy as Electron kind of defeat the purpose of a small, light console editor like vim/neovim? Don't get me wrong, this looks nice, but if I were a (neo)vim user I think I'd be far more attracted to a front end as light as (neo)vim itself.

<comment><USER6> I get where you are coming from, vi and vim being rooted in low bandwidth light interfaces. However, I think a lot of vi/vim users would like a more fully featured IDE that had the power of vi/vim in terms of usability.

<comment><USER7> Given the number of vim users I know that install a dozen plugins, I'd wager you're right. Surely, I can't be the only person who uses stock vim, though.

<comment><USER8> I use both. I have my vim IDE-like with a fair number of plugins. It's my kind of "IDE environment", and for this I would love to get those kind of integrations.

But whenever I have to open a large file, or just make a simple edit to a file on a server, I have a very simple vim with no plugins and a very small vimrc that should work everywhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Don't get me wrong: this is cool.

But... I'm not sure this is a good idea for a full time editor.

Having used Vim for years, then briefly Neovim, I recently switched to Spacemacs (Emacs + Evil) and haven't looked back. The advantage of Vim now is in it's lightness, so I still fire it up out of habit to edit config files etc.

Wrapping Neovim in Electron might well yield a really nice Atom competitor in the future, and it has the advantage that it is easily hack-able through something less esoteric than elsip. I just think it's a tough sell to developers when Spacemacs, Sublime and stock Vim exist.

</comment><comment><USER10> Even though I am not a fan of `electron.js`, but this looks promising GUI for `neovim`, though some editor properties are not taken from original `.nvimrc`, e.g. theme is different. Which is slight bummer, but hopefully easily configurable.

+1

</comment><comment><USER11> Fantastic! Trying it now. Love that you used Typescript.

</comment><comment><USER12> I wonder how this compares to vim-mode in Atom ([https://github.com/carlosdcastillo/vim- mode](https://github.com/carlosdcastillo/vim-mode)) which is based on those two same technologies..

<comment><USER13> vim-mode in Atom is like having a Chevy (Atom) and sticking a Ferrari (vim) badge on it.

NyaoVim is more like having a Ferrari (neovim) with an automatic transmission (NyaoVim).

Not a perfect analogy but I think it gets the point across.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> There seems to be some dissatisfaction with Electron in this thread. I've heard some good things about building desktop apps on top of Electron but have not had the need to try it yet. I'm curious what people's gripes are.

I have heard that Atom is very slow, but I had chalked that up to the core of the editor being written in a high level language and being subject to stop- the-world GC. Your text editor has to move at the speed of your thoughts (or at least your input).

Given that neovim is implemented as native C and offers a wrapper API, do the same problems exist? Am I misjudging where the issues with Electron/Atom lie?

<comment><USER15> Atom is getting a lot better, though it used to be pretty bad. I made a video a while ago comparing Atom, VSCode (also Electron), and Sublime Text 3 where you can see the difference.

[https://youtu.be/fjR5X-4--kg](https://youtu.be/fjR5X-4--kg)

But like I said, the current (1.5.x) version of Atom is much faster to load, so they're working on fixing it.

<comment><USER16> It's not just load time, browsers generally suck at rendering because the CSS/DOM is hardly an optimized spec with plenty of legacy/complexity, and most of the implementations have decades old roots and legacy design decisions as well. Even VSCode which is miles ahead of Atom has rendering performance issues on my laptop - I can see it drops frames when scrolling and stuff like that. Servo is showing how much you can do if you start from scratch on that front, but if you just forgo the entire web stack you can do much better still simply by not having to implement DOM/CSS

So something like Qt or native GUI frameworks are always going to outperform DOM based GUI, and CPUs stopped getting faster so most of these issues aren't going to be solved by hardware improvements (GPU rendering requires a big overhaul of browser stack).

<comment><USER11> Servo has a "webrender" backend that is GPU-accelerated. While it isn't nearly at feature parity with the established rendering engines, it is an order of magnitude faster at rendering the features that it currently has implemented.

It won't replace your current browser for some years, but I see no reason why it couldn't serve as the engine for something like Electron.

<comment><USER16> Sure but it's still going to be slower than a native GUI library designed for GPU acceleration because you still need to implement CSS layout and DOM which are suboptimal by design. Maybe by the time Servo lands to mainstream it will be fast enough that it won't matter - but right now that's just not true - <USER2> is still an inferior platform for GUI because the performance sucks and that's not going to change any time soon - Servo isn't even close to complete yet.

<comment><USER17> Not necessarily. For instance I believe Nyaovim actually renders to <canvas>. So there is very little dom. I'm sure there is some overhead, but I don't see any reason why the performance can't get on par, if not close to native application performance.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


N is a Number: A Portrait of Paul Erdös - <AUTHOR> http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/portrait-of-paul-erdos/

<comment><USER2> I think I first learned about Erdos when I learned a prof who taught one of my undergrad CS courses looked after Erdos for a while -- handling his finances, etc. He was the one who bet Erdos he couldn't quit amphetamines for a month (and turned out to be wrong, but Erdos blamed a month-long mathematical slump on the bet).

</comment><comment><USER3> Here is an interesting fact, that I read about Paul Erdos, He once said all babies (he used to call them epsilons, because babies are really small!) remeber the solution for Riemann Hypothesis. The only problem though is that they tend to forget everything once they reach the age of six month.</comment>


Cyberattacks: Washington is hyping the threat to justify regulating the Internet - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20100429/cm_csm/297733/print

<comment><USER2> This link results in a redirect loop for me, the following seems to work: <http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20100429/cm_csm/297733></comment>


Ask HN: How would you invest $500K? - <AUTHOR> If you had $500K to invest, which would be your entire equity, cash money, how would you invest it?<p>It's your equity so a low risk would definitely be considered. Looking for creative advices, not boring banking stuff... <comment><USER2> 1\. Pay off any debts I had.

2\. Keep 6 months reserves in cash (maybe 12 depending on my view of the current political outlook)

2\. If I had plans to staying put for at least 3-5 years, a down payment for a modest home in a good neighborhood, possibly a fixer, something I could rent out in a few years if I moved. I am young(ish) and have good earning potential so am confident that taking out a mortgage at current historically low rates and investing the rest in the stock market will provide higher returns in the long run than paying a house off immediately.

4\. Put the rest in low-fee index funds.

If you don't already have a burning passion to pursue something that this money enables you to do and you have other sources of income already, don't go looking for a hole to throw your money down.

Unless it's money you can afford to lose, your investments _should_ be "boring banking stuff".

</comment><comment><USER3> I hate to be dismissive but if it's your entire equity and you want low-risk just settle for the "boring" stuff. And get on with your life. You don't want to keep thinking about that money. You won't beat the market. If you can beat the market then go do that professionally (and still invest in the boring stuff personally!!).

</comment><comment><USER4> Honestly, you should probably ask what you want to accomplish with the invested money before deciding how to invest it. Are you planning on mitigating variance in income/employment? Then you're much more adverse to variance and illiquidity. Are you planning on setting yourself up for financial independence? Then you can probably handle risk much better and something like an equity index fund would work well. Want to make sure your child can go to college? Something like [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guaranteed_Education_Tuition_P...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guaranteed_Education_Tuition_Program) would be an excellent choice. Want to generally make the world a better place? Investing may have superior alternatives, such as donating to an anti-malaria charity.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'd start with 10k inflation adjusted personal Series I savings bonds from the US treasury, which pay quote a bit more then any available CD in terms of APY, and have a 3 months interest penalty for 5 years after purchase. I'd probably wait until after april 30th, since the fixed rate interest rate on them is currently zero but will hopefully go up. You don't pay state or local taxes but you do pay federal taxes.

That leaves 490k. I'd put 100k into wealthfront, so they will use individual stocks instead of etfs for tax loss harvesting.

I'd take 90k and invest it in AA or A rated municipal bonds, if you are in a state where gains are tax free, creating the beginnings of a bond ladder. We expect the fed to raise interests rates 3 times next year so I'd probably split this 15k for the first raise, 25k for the second raise and 50k for the third raise.

if I have a 401k I'd invest the maximum 18k in 2016 and contribute the 18k in 2016, making purchases immediately after interest rates go up in dividend stock etfs, reit etfs, broad market etfs, and a small cap etf. Likewise 5500 each ear for an ira, or possibly a roth IRA, depending on current income levels.

I'd save 153k in a savings account like synchrony bank with 1.04 apy interest. Part of that should be a year's expenses, the rest used to purchase stock in solid companies if the market crashes. I'd want to adjust this after a market crash year.

Then I'd split 300k into 100k for a broad based index etf, 50k in a small cap etf, 25k in a midcap etf, 75k in a large cap etf, 25 k in a bond etf. I'd spend 5k on individual stocks using a robinhood account, so I could get a feel for the market. The remaining 20k would be for taxes on any dividends, idly playing the market so I wouldn't touch the bigger investments, and an emergency fund, again placed in a synchrony or equivalent savings account.

<comment><USER6> What's the theory behind these investment choices? They sound reasonable, and I'm curious to learn how you arrived at them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Honestly, I'd leverage it to purchase real estate split between some rentals and rehabs when the right opportunity came up. For me the passive income of rentals and being able to leverage the $500k into far more is just to attractive. If you just put $500k into the market or business ideas, your level of risk varies more and the payoff is far into the future if ever. People are scared of real estate still some because of the last bust, but the reality is it is the single greatest generator of sustained wealth. Even people that make their money in other places like a startup, eventually find out that leveraging liquidity to enter the real estate market pays back in huge ways.

Real estate isn't risk free, but even in down cycles you don't lose all your value, e.g. a $200k house doesn't become worth $0. The key wealth generator (not get rich quick scheme) in the history of the US and most Countries is real estate (land/property etc). This means finding and buying in the right areas and not being afraid to cross state lines etc. Leveraging the $500k in California won't get you really far, but doing it most other places will let you really do quite well and you can have passive income coming in within a few months.

Also, done right, you'll still have a significant amount of the money to invest into other things like the stock market to diversify yourself.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's the closest answer to where I'm at now... real estate is the best candidate at the moment, rental properties or flipping houses.

Besides California, where would you be looking to buy?

<comment><USER8> Just anecdotally, I have friends who have been very successful with buying and renting condos/apartments in a college town. Demand for rental units stays high (well-known, reputable public university).

Oddly enough, they have generally negative experiences renting to parents of students instead of directly to students.

I will say that my friend works full time as the property manager for their units. It's not a passive investment.

Several years ago, I talked with an accountant who had clients who owned rental property about the ROI. The feedback was that if you had to hire a property manager and outsource all repairs/maintenance, the value proposition of rental property was greatly reduced and closer to neutral than many owners initially assumed.

It looks like it is working out well for my friends though - they were able to leverage their financing as they acquired new units because interest rates have been so low. They have been cash-flow positive for many years. But they also capped themselves at about 20 units under management.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> How you invest depends on what your goals are. You need to define the "why" before you can move on to the "how".

<comment><AUTHOR> The goal is to double equity in max 5 years. Long term vision is to retire in my 40's

<comment><USER10> In finance, there is a rule-of-thumb called the rule of 72. Basically, 72/X = # of years to double, where X is the compounded rate of return.

Solving for your request, 72/X = 5, X = 14.4%.

So to double your investment in 5 years, you need to find something that will give you 14.4% return for 5 years in a row. That high of rate (in this climate) would require a fairly risky investment.

<comment><USER7> A 14% return on properly selected and executed rehabs is very easy to do, in fact I'd be really disappointed if that is all that came back. Do this 2-3 times a year and it is easy to grow the money. But to get 14% consistently annually out of the stock market IMO is tougher without some high risk, which depending on age may not be a big deal.

But you have to study the local market some and talk to realtors about what is selling where, and why it is selling over other properties. Then ideally team up with another investor/rehab person for 1-2 and get a feel for how to be successful. I say that cause doing it wrong can be a recipe to losing money quickly too.

<comment><USER11> > A 14% return on properly selected and executed rehabs is very easy to do.

This is unrealistic in the SF bay area. First time home buyers are paying top dollar for "fixer uppers" and in many cases just tearing down the existing home and replacing them with a new ones.

Good contractors have several month lead times and are being paid in excess of $300 per square foot for doing renovations.

Real estate agent commissions are three to six percent of sales price.

<comment><USER7> My suggestion to the OP is to look outside of CA in general, not because it isn't possible to make these returns but because in CA the rehab & rental market are a lot tougher in many ways, taxes, fees, a heap full of regulations (good and bad) etc. And it isn't that you can't make these returns in the SF Bay area, it is just that the cost to enter the market is significantly higher both in terms of dollars and knowledge, plus the proper type of inventory is constrained. The risk right now with the Bay area market is also far from ideal, and should stop any small investor from entering. Hence why you have to find markets, and neighborhoods within markets that are better to work in.

Real estate commissions are basically the same across the US, and 6% is common, 3% to buyers agent, 3% to sellers, with lower fees in some markets or if you negotiate them down (careful what you negotiate here though it can backfire fast). These are always a factor you add to your deals to see if they are good or not, e.g. taxes (both while holding and at sale), costs of materials & labor, interest costs, loan fees (if any) etc.

As for the contractor availability, 60-90 days of lead time is not uncommon right now for decent contractors most places. But here is the key, if you do things legally, i.e. with permits, it takes 30-60 days to get all the permits in line usually and most contractors will come aboard if you hire them, get all the paperwork started through the system and be ready to go the minute they can. At the same time not all rehabs require a GC or permits, so you can hire day labor or handy people to knock a ton of stuff out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There's really only two dominant choices here; "boring banking stuff," e.g. a well-diversified hedge fund, or cutting-edge financial engineering that you'll have to earn (or hire) a specialized PhD to implement. Anything in between and you're just playing out of your league; your cleverness won't win against the army of brilliant quants that have devoted their lives to this sort of junk.

</comment><comment><USER13> I've never tried it, but take a look at the investment strategy called the trident portfolio. It claims a consistent 11% CAGR (compound annual growth rate) for the last 40 years. Trident consists of the following:

        1/3 VBR
        1/3 GLD
        1/3 TLT

You'll have to rebalance to keep the ratios all 1/3 approximately once a year. There is a great response on Quora by Milos Baljozovic that I highly recommend related to the trident strategy.

[https://www.quora.com/I-won-the-lottery-and- have-5-million-i...](https://www.quora.com/I-won-the-lottery-and- have-5-million-in-the-bank-now-How-should-I-invest-to-live-off-the-interest)

Honestly, you'll probably be ok just buying a standard ETF such as SPY or QQQ (more volatile), waiting 5 to 10 years without doing anything and cash it in.

<comment><USER14> Forty years is such a small window. I'm not convinced at all.

<comment><USER13> Forty years is actually a decent timeframe in terms of capturing the market's cyclical nature.

Do you have investing experience?

<comment><USER14> Not for the larger cycle IMO. Last forty years almost perfectly covers the working (productive and consumptive) lives of the baby boomers and all that went with that. It also is the first and only 40 year period after Bretton Woods, so we can't conclude much about how gold will behave in the next forty year period. And then there's the very unique 8 years and counting of ZIRP and QE which affects Treasuries. Not just ZIRP but rates generally have declined immensely since the 70s, 80s and 90s overall which favors Treasures as well as the rest of the portfolio. I'm not sure US small caps will be as competitive going forward either -- are we getting the high growth companies on the stock exchange as small caps anymore? Maybe they're all being bought by large caps, staying private until they're large caps themselves, or just not competitive in a US economy that seems to be dominated by large multinationals with all sorts of advantages. There was also a tremendous amount of deficit spending throughout this period which has contributed much of the growth and it's arguable whether that can continue in kind.

Also, maybe I missed this but I didn't see any mention of dividends in that post. Is the 11% CAGR including dividends paid out and reinvested?

Unfortunately due to the lack of floating gold price before this 40-year period (conveniently) we can't compare to the prior forty years before that.

I don't want to be too critical; it's interesting. I do believe small caps are better for a young person to invest in as they have higher risk tolerance, but I'm concerned about the quality of small caps we're seeing on US public markets these days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'd buy as much property as I could in the middle of nowhere and build a cabin.

</comment><comment><USER16> Take my aviato money and start my own incubator.

<comment><USER17> Making the world a better place through constructing elegant hierarchies for maximum code reuse and extensibility

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I would start by investing in myself. I would put 100K away so I could do whatever I wanted for a year if things go south (aka invest in my free time), I'd pay off my debt (around 100k) and I'd get a top of the line computer system (desktop/laptop,etc) so that I would be able to be the most productive I could be when writing code. I'd invest in the community by taking time off to contribute to the open source community. With the extra money I have stowed away I could live off that and not have to worry about any income, which would free me to focus solely on learning the larger OSS projects and contributing to them. I would probably put 100K to 200K in a REIT that I'm invested in that gives 13% dividends. After that, I would try some P2P lending since I would have extra income that I could afford to lose since the 500K wouldn't get me to accredited investor status.

</comment><comment><USER19> The answer depends on whether this is "play money" or "my entire life's savings"....

</comment><comment><USER20> I have my 401k in a "cash option" right now. pretty worried trump gets us into a trade war and huge global market crash. just not sure on timing. of course if he gets a tax decrease through congress it could back fire on me.

<comment><USER21> I'm borrowing most of my 401k to finance a home purchase. I trust me paying it back at 4.5% then the market over the next 2 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Another option to consider is something like Betterment.com or Wealthfront. These are automated investment services and allow you to tune your investments based on your goals. I use one of them and it has worked out well for me.

</comment><comment><USER23> I would probably buy a house in the outskirts of seattle or denver for maybe 250K - tons of houses around 3beds, minimum 1500 square feet, if you expand the search. Then, start a private repo doing an MVP based on my open source project, then try to find a product manager type to bootstrap a startup, somebody hungry who would live in the 3rd bedroom and go full throttle for half a year or so, then if that fails when I'm down to say 100-150K, I put that money into TBills and get a job if I can't find revenue or funding.

<comment><USER24> You're talking serious "outskirts" of Denver for that price.

<comment><USER23> 653 on Zillow all throughout the metro area, for 3 bedroom houses over 1500 sq feet. SF really distorts our perception of reasonable prices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I think you'd rather want an answer that you'd be able to follow. If someone told you about their experience with stocks or with business and you didn't have that experience how much useful would that be to you ?

I'd invest it by buying some books about investing first.

</comment><comment><USER26> I would write a crawler that crawls amazon and stores number of reviews for major consumer brands like Fitbit and GoPro. then go long on those that have a spike in reviews before earnings. and go short on those that have declined

</comment><comment><USER27> I would invest in my business. Quit consulting (which pays bills day to day) and focus on expanding our training catalog (I love training and we are really good at it). Expand Sales and Marketing activities.

</comment><comment><USER20> Some depends on age and planned retirement age. 55 or greater. I'd pay off house. pull out 25-50k each year I got closer to retirement and let the rest ride in stock market.

under 55, I'd keep 400k in stock market.

</comment><comment><USER20> here's a neat article on playing a stock market dip with options.

[https://www.thefelderreport.com/2016/08/15/worried-about- a-s...](https://www.thefelderreport.com/2016/08/15/worried-about-a-stock- market-crash-heres-how-you-can-tail-hedge-your-portfolio/)

</comment><comment><USER28> I would buy myself a lot of time and then give some serious thought as to how to spend that time productively.

</comment><comment><USER29> Or Domain Names

</comment><comment><USER30> Index funds

</comment><comment><USER31> Pay off my house, and put the remaining ~200K into buying a rental

<comment><USER32> that gives you a sense of security but you are losing the most important reason of owning your own house, Tax Deduction!

<comment><USER31> My mortgage payment would be redirected into other investments. I would take an additional ~1900/mo going into that than a tax deduction any day

<comment><USER32> you can invest your whole money and easily get an %5 return ( more than your interest rate) on that. and invest that money instead and you will get the tax benefit of the deduction as well. double dipping ;)

<comment><USER31> With much more risk. Don't forget to take that into account

<comment><USER32> if the end goal is investing anyway the risk should be the same, your house is not completely risk free investments considering the crashes. and getting %5 out of rental is not that risky! not much more than your home.

<comment><USER31> I think we just have different opinions on risk and investing

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Probably chuck it at real estate.

Maybe bet a bit on raising interest rates as a hedge.

</comment><comment><USER34> 1- Find a 3rd world paradise beach

2- Buy a place there

3- Spend it for the rest of your life

</comment><comment><USER35> Some in cash , then a Vanguard LifeStrategy fund matched to your age

</comment><comment><USER36> Gold and silver.

</comment><comment><USER37> Dividend paying stocks.

</comment><comment><USER38> Buy Bitcoin and HODL.

</comment><comment><USER29> Google

</comment><comment><USER39> I would personally invest a small portion of the money(about 5k) in Bitcoin. Bitcoin value has been rising recently. If the trend continues,the value will double mid next year, and triple by the end of next year, so you would have made 10K with your initial investment. But keep in mind that Bitcoin is volatile and such investment is considered high risk investment.

<comment><USER40> When will it quadruple? Quintuple?</comment></comment>


Firefox Add-ons with the Slowest Start-up - <AUTHOR> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/performance/ <comment><USER2> As long as we aren't talking minutes and just seconds, I close my browser once every 24 hours typically.

I can deal with a 15 second startup time for a super-rich browsing and debugging environment.

Once loaded, new tabs/windows do not have the startup penalty.

That said, the worst plugins can probably modify themselves to lazy-load the bulk of their code once the browser is started in the background when idle is detected?

</comment><comment><USER3> Unfortunately, for me its a catch22 situation. I hate firefox because its slow, and love/depend on firefox, because of firebug (which apparently makes firefox slow.)

<comment><USER4> i resisted switching to chrome for months because i thought the chrome inspector was inferior to firebug, but i got used to it after forcing myself to switch primarily to chrome. now i find it's actually superior in many ways.

<comment><USER5> Indeed. Little things like proper emacs keybindings in the JS terminal (Ctrl-P for previous line = lifesaver!) make Chrome's inspector preferable. Haven't needed to go back except for the YSlow/Firebug integration [probably a Chrome plugin for that as well].

<comment><USER6> FireQuery is the only thing in Firebug that I can't seem to get in Chrome.

<comment><USER7> Firequery, YSlow, or more generally any Firebug extension not built into the Webkit Developer Tools.

Also, proper stack traces.

<comment><USER8> YSlow was recently released in chrome flavour:

[https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/ninejjcohidippng...](https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/ninejjcohidippngpapiilnmkgllmakh)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think I have quite a lot of them (Firebug, greasemonkey, NoScript, Scarpbook, etc.) but the thing is, I don't close my browser every hour or so. Startup times are nothing if you don't do startups too often.

What would bother is any performance impacts with them running. However we don't have figures for that.

</comment><comment><USER10> This page is responsible for a lot of FUD.

So many people take it to mean, in effect, "Firebug makes Firefox slower". When in fact it means "Firebug makes Firefox slower to start up".

This page says nothing about the performance impact once firefox has loaded. I think that would be a more useful metric, and hope to see it in the future.

<comment><USER11> I have nothing to prove it, but I heard many times at least from former version that Firebug was quite memory hungry, thus slowing Firefox after many hours of use. I may be wrong.

<comment><USER12> It's true, it got a lot better with firefox 3.5.

Not sure if it was firefox or firebug that improved things (or both).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Would be more interesting and useful to see the overall impact of the addons on loading pages.

</comment><comment><USER14> I hardly start up Firefox unless for upgrades. A list of add-ons that reduce loading / rendering performance would be even more interesting. I know by experience that the Skype one is very bad (and Firebug also slows down, but that's expected and luckily you can disable that when not debugging).

<comment><USER15> My Firefox 4 often became unresponsive for 3-4 seconds. Just today I finally nailed the cause - Mozilla's own Open Web Apps addon. After disabling it everything flies again :-)

So it's not only about startup time. My desktop computers (and so Firefox) usually run without restarts. I really hope that Electrolysis (out-of-process stuff, now implemented only for plugins like Flash) for addons will make finding bottlenecks far easier.

EDIT: It seems the Mozilla plan is not to have each addon in a separate process: <https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Jetpack_Processes>

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The slow startup isn't so much a problem for me, because I normally fire up firefox only once a day. However the latest 4.0 on Mac OS X suffer from a terrible memory leak, and I must restart it every two hours or less. else my mac slows to a crawl and restarting firefox literally takes minutes (swap...).

In fact it's so bad that I'll probably revert to FF3.6 on Mac OS X until there's a serious update.

</comment><comment><USER17> Faster start-ups are fine, and all, but I'm much more interested in what happens after the start-up. For example, I'd be more interested in knowing what is causing Firefox to consume 500-600 MB of memory, once a few hours have passed.

</comment><comment><USER18> Well, complex addons like Firebug or iMacros will always be slower than addons that are essentially fancy bookmarks.

I do not care about start up time - I do care about page load time and general responsiveness once Firefox is running.

</comment><comment><USER19> Regardless of Add-on start-up speed, I found annoyance with Firefox itself. Occasionally on launch, I would be asked whether I wanted to install or skip updates to my Add-ons.

I found this process of having to choose to install or skip to be too much of a distraction, killing my flow when I was "in the zone" and wanted to look something up fast.

For this reason I stopped using Firefox and have been happy with Chrome ever since.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm not getting it - why is addon loading a blocking action in the browser startup process in the first place??

I'm only using Adblock out of those, and i wouldnt mind if adblock was not loaded until a few seconds after I got control. This would highlight very effectively that the addon - and not the browser - is slow. And hopefully get the authors to have something done about it.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm quite disappointed that they don't seem to provide any feedback or guidance for developers on how to write well-performing plugins. Without that to sweeten the post it just seems a bit ungrateful, given that plugins are one of the major reasons Firefox got so popular in the first place.

Edit: it's there on the right, but my well-honed ad blindness didn't let me see it. Either way it's not exactly prominent.

</comment><comment><USER22> This could potentially have a bad impact on the usage of Firefox. A heck of a lot of developers use it specifically for its addons like Firebug..

Will more people now leave Firefox on the bench and pick other inspectors like Google Chromes?

Maybe Mozilla should have thought about the impact that such an article could potentially have before releasing it to the big bad world..

</comment><comment><USER23> While I am personally largely against extensions, I wouldn't be if their allocation was managed better. I think that the extension should say what websites it's intended for (Greasemonkey does this) and be in the javascript process for those pages only. It shouldn't be separate, it shouldn't be in memory before the page is even open.

<comment><USER24> > While I am personally largely against extensions

... what? _Why in the world?_ If no browser had extensions I'd probably quit the web altogether.

<comment><USER23> I've been using Opera for years, if I did need anything I'd use UserJS (Greasemonkey done properly, built-in). I have no extensions, and only two userJSs (youtube download, and gawker fix). I have adblocker and firebug as built in functions of the browser, I have custom searches instead of things like Tineye extension that I have on Chrome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I use two browsers, for very separate purposes. Firefox is for research (good automatic proxy handling, Zotero), Chrome for general browsing (fast, stable). It's got the added benefit that it splits my focus--if I'm on Firefox it's for serious stuff.

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm using the web-developer add-on without this impact. [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/web- developer...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/web-developer/)

</comment><comment><USER27> Funny how we always want more when we're given something. I'd like to see what the add-ons do to page loads and also the same for Chrome.

</comment><comment><USER28> Ah! This is good. I've been looking for this. Feels good to see that just one web developer addon (Firebug) features on the top 10.

</comment><comment><USER29> I'll gladly take that kind of hit if it means I can use Firebug.

Heck, I'd gladly pay a few hundred bucks for it if it was a commercial product.

<comment><USER30> They accept individual donations and corporate sponsorships, and they also sell some stuff: <http://getfirebug.com/contribute>

(You probably know that already but I am mentioning it for people who don't. I had never thought of Firebug and donations myself until I saw a message during an upgrade about a month or two ago.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Ironically the add-on fastest fox slows down firefox by 33%.

</comment><comment><USER32> Mozilla should really get their own house in order (re: Firefox 4 huge memory leaks) before calling out add-ons on slow performance.

</comment><comment><USER33> #8: FastestFox - Browse Faster

</comment><comment><USER34> Ironically Fasterfox is one of those problems.

I am annoyed by the slow startup time of FF, but since it mostly stays open all day long I can deal. I think the adblocking that firefox has is superior since it can prevent content from being downloaded, that alone is worth it. Firebug + FireSass + FireQuery are some tools I can't live without. Chrome has yet to match the features. Sure some keybindings are not as great, but overall a better tool is a better tool.</comment>


Utter.io API Reference - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/kordless/9dbac7af840e8ded1fc3

<comment><AUTHOR> Wrote this for a friend who was wanting to give away some instance time. Figured I'd share it up here!</comment>


I spent a weekend at Google talking about charity. I came away worried - <AUTHOR> http://www.vox.com/2015/8/10/9124145/effective-altruism-global-ai

<comment><USER2> The article has nothing at all to do with Google.

<comment><USER3> But if it wasn't mentioned, fewer people would read the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _" No [nuclear] bombs have been detonated for 70 years."_

That is wildly inaccurate. At best, no nuclear bombs have been detonated _in anger_ for 70 years.

A nuclear weapon was detonated during nearly every year between 1945 and 1996 [1], when the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty was adopted [2], over 2,000 weapons in total. Several nuclear weapons have been detonated since, though the rate has decreased [3].

If the author is intending to show how a group of dedicated, thoughful scientists can preempt disaster, this was a poor example.

[1] [http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Library/Catalog](http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Library/Catalog)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_Nuclear-Test- Ban...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_Nuclear-Test-Ban_Treaty)

[3] [https://www.ctbto.org/nuclear-testing/history-of-nuclear- tes...](https://www.ctbto.org/nuclear-testing/history-of-nuclear- testing/nuclear-testing-1945-today/)

EDIT: The article has been corrected.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure if you read incorrectly, or it the article was updated after your comment, but I don't see that quote anywhere. What I do see is:

"Just as nuclear scientists developed norms of ethics and best practices that have so far helped ensure that __no bombs have been used in attacks for 70 years __, AI researchers, he urged, should embrace a similar ethic, and not just make cool things for the sake of making cool things. "

That said, attributing nuclear disarmament solely to "norms and ethics" of scientists is pretty reductive on the part of the author. In fact there were large nuclear disarmament movements in Japan, UK, and the US after WWII. It was as much public pressure as anything that lead to the Partial Test Ban treaty in '63\. Similar movements in the 80's led to further reduction in arms. One million protestors marched in Central Park in '82, protesting the nuclear arms race. That's a staggering number and indicative of how widespread and popular the nuclear arms reduction movement was at the time. Comparing that to the "Anti-AI" movement—which just about everyone would agree is pretty niche—is problematic at best.

<comment><USER4> The article was updated. I have to imagine many people pointed out the error.

Good observation on the disarmament movements. I wonder if "nuclear holocaust" qualifies as an "existential risk" for those who consider AI to be one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For these guys rational thinking has become a kind of solipsist secular religion and, like with all religions, its adherents are seriously delusional.

<comment><USER6> Rational and delusional are nearly antonyms.

<comment><USER7> Rational/irrational and delusion/fidelity are incommensurable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Silicon Valley billionaires have proved repeatedly that they are nothing more than overgrown teenagers. I hope that they do achieve interstellar colonization. This planet will be better without them.

<comment><USER9> As far as I know, of the five panellists only Musk is a billionaire - the rest are researchers/academics (Nate Soares is an edge case, but still, as the executive director of MIRI, I doubt he's rolling in cash - the whole organization has less than $2M/y in revenue).</comment></comment>


Show HN: My new personal website - <AUTHOR> http://andrewcantino.com

<comment><USER2> Discovered your <http://underthesite.com>. I think it's a great & DRY way for those who want to tell users what technologies are used.

</comment><comment><USER3> Really nice, the only thing I thought is that it might be nice to "collapse" text back up into the keyboards which cascade them down?

Really like the "You can see everything" pop up at the bottom after 7 clicks - I didn't use it, but it was nice to have the option

</comment><comment><USER4> Nice work! I'd had this idea for my personal pages, too, specifically for my CV/Resume! Would love to see a blog post describing how you've done it (I know the code is there, but a discussion of it would be informative).

</comment><comment><USER5> This is fantastic - I loved the ant simulation!

It was a bit cryptic to get some of the content; perhaps you could have an alternative and more straight forward navigation system.

</comment><comment><USER6> The technology is cool and it works like a charm. However, the approach of using "mystery meat" navigation for an entire website is pretty tedious for this visitor.

</comment><comment><USER7> I thought that was pretty cool up until I tried to hit the back button. It doesn't diminish the coolness, but it'd be a good thing to fix.

(Also Go Jackets!)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm torn- it'd be fairly easy to use pushState to add history, but it'd also be very annoying for the site to add 100s of history pages to your browser. Thoughts?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It gets annoying pretty quickly but the idea is nice.

</comment><comment><USER9> Cute and incredibly memorable! It definitely made me 10x more interested in who you are and what you do :)

</comment><comment><USER10> Looks like <http://www.telescopictext.com/>

<comment><USER3> Presumably why he credits it for the inspiration

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I would like to know how that effects affect SEO.

</comment><comment> saiko-chriskun dude I love it :D. is the javascript you're using for the text an in-house solution or from a plugin?

<comment><AUTHOR> In-house, fairly straightforward, plus jQuery.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'd love comments and suggestions!</comment>


Broadpwn Bug Affects Millions of Android and iOS Devices - <AUTHOR> https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/broadpwn-bug-affects-millions-of-android-and-ios-devices/ <comment><USER2> > Users that didn't receive this month's Android security patch should only > connect to trusted Wi-Fi networks

Turning off Wi-Fi before leaving home and office helps. Apparently few people do that. A customer in the tracking industry (beacons estimating people in stores) told me that about 80% leave Wi-Fi always on.

I hope I'll get that patch soon. The last update for my Sony phone was the security update of May. Nothing on June. I guess that most Androids didn't and won't get anything.

<comment><USER3> >told me that about 80% leave Wi-Fi always on

which means 20% don't, which is suspiciously high considering how much of a hassle it is to turn wifi on/off. then again, they could have unlimited data on their phones.

<comment><USER4> Maybe they just randomise broadcast packets MAC addr?

<comment><USER5> MAC address randomization must be implemented properly to be effective. This is not always the case ([http://papers.mathyvanhoef.com/asiaccs2016.pdf](http://papers.mathyvanhoef.com/asiaccs2016.pdf))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > BCM43xx family of Wi-Fi chips included in "an extraordinarily wide range of > mobile devices" from vendors such as Google (Nexus), Samsung, HTC, and LG.

It would be great if there were a published list of exactly which devices are vulnerable, or a way to check your device for whether this part was present. Is there anything like 'adb shell lspci' I could run to find out whether my devices have the broadcom parts? I know my Nexus 5x has a QCOM SoC, so I assume it lacks broadcom WiFi. But the rest of the family's devices -- what of those?

<comment><USER7> On any device that isn't obscure, iFixit does a teardown detailing most of the parts on the board.

<comment><USER8> A lot of vendors have multiple designs hiding under the same model, either through time (e.g., PS3 and Xbox 360 each had something like 5 revisions with different chipsets, not all were accompanied by change in box design), or just sharding - iphone 6 had two different models at the same time (one broadcom and one qualcomm IIRC) because they couldn't or wouldn't source the quantities they needed from just one source.

iFixit is nice, but it is not an answer to the request made by GP (an answer to which would be useful).

<comment><USER9> Samsung are pretty notorious for this. Most of their phones come in many different models for different markets, from a quick google, both the S7 and S7 Edge have 14 different variants each. Some have different CPUs, many have differing internal parts, etc. It's a minefield.

[1] [http://techbeasts.com/list-of-samsung-galaxy-s7-s7-edge- mode...](http://techbeasts.com/list-of-samsung-galaxy-s7-s7-edge-model- numbers/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > The attacker doesn't need any user interaction to exploit the feature. A > victim only needs to walk into the attacker's Wi-Fi network range.

> In its security bulletin, Google rated Broadpwn as a "medium" severity > issue, meaning the company doesn't view it as a dangerous vulnerability, > such as Stagefright.

Wait, really?

<comment><USER11> Just guessing here but if it is true that you need to be connected to the rogue network for this flaw to be exposed, that could knock the severity down a notch. Like the difference between a pre-auth attack and an attack requiring authorized access.

</comment></comment><comment> Black-Plaid > Artenstein has later confirmed on Twitter that connecting to a malicious > network is not necessary.

> Users that didn't receive this month's Android security patch should only > connect to trusted Wi-Fi networks and disable any "Wi-Fi auto-connect" > feature, if using one.

What is the point of the second statement?

<comment><USER12> Perhaps the auto-connect feature is what makes " _connecting to a malicious network [not] necessary._ " It's easy to dismiss that second clause, but my guess is that it does some sort of network ping that opens itself up to the attack.

<comment><USER13> From what I can gather from a quick look at the 802.11e QoS spec* this is pretty much spot on. Many wireless clients (e.g. many phones) ping in order to discover networks faster than the access point's broadcast interval and to connect to 'hidden' APs that might not broadcast. In response, a malformed WME packet could be sent that the wireless chipset would listen to and parse.

*I am definitely not deeply familiar with WME.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Apple patched it in iOS 10.3.1 according to this report: [http://cert.europa.eu/static/SecurityAdvisories/2017/CERT- EU...](http://cert.europa.eu/static/SecurityAdvisories/2017/CERT-EU- SA2017-008.pdf)

<comment><USER15> From what I can tell that is unfortunately not correct.

Broadpwn is another serious Broadcom WiFi security bug, different from the bugs patched when Google Project Zero revealed their research in April.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> More details as well as how to trigger the bug and what devices have been tested against it: [http://boosterok.com/blog/broadpwn/](http://boosterok.com/blog/broadpwn/)

We will know a lot more after @nitayart presents at BlackHat.

</comment><comment><USER17> "There is no information on the status of this bug for iOS devices."

That slightly contradicts the headline.

<comment><USER18> iOS does a lot to treat the networking stack and its third-party firmware code as untrusted, and limit its exposure as much as possible. So it sounds like the exploit can get to the Broadcom chip on iPhones but can't pivot to the OS from there. Hooray for defense in depth!

<comment><USER19> Eeem... could you provide some sources on that or is it just speculation on your part?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> You know it affects Android but you only suspect it might affect iOS. That headline is misleading. "The researcher specifically points the finger at the Broadcom BCM43xx family of Wi-Fi chips included in "an extraordinarily wide range of mobile devices" from vendors such as Google (Nexus), Samsung, HTC, and LG." is missing one rather obvious vendor.

<comment><USER21> To be fair, apple does its best to keep users in the dark in these matters. Every os release is full of security fixes they don't tell to about.

Given apples history with wifi exploits there is a reasonable chance they are vulnerable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> What about laptops with Broadcom Wi-Fi?

</comment><comment><USER23> I wonder if they're patching the firmware or just the Linux driver for the chip.

</comment><comment><USER24> Funny that Broadcom's Wifi business was just sold to Cypress last year.</comment>


Donald Knuth -- "How Did I Get Into Computers?" Video - <AUTHOR> http://webofstories.com/play/17078 <comment><USER2> This is a great video, but be sure to check out the rest of the series with Knuth.</comment>


There's less to Facebook and other social networks than meets the eye - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9990635 The fifth paragraph made me think. What if Google, Yahoo or Microsoft started a social network based on the addresses in their webmail apps? It would instantly be bigger than Facebook.
<comment><USER2> What would be really interesting is if the social networks start using eachother's APIs to import and track friends from rivals. You could add the myspace app to your facebook account, and then you could track your facebook friends while using myspace (vice versa ad infinitum). After the carnage, there would be a single portable social graph. And the sites themselves would be commodities.

<comment><USER3> Well with what you describe, the graph would become the commodity, the sites themselves would remain unique and competitive, but as interfaces to the graph.

Overall I think your idea sounds like a win for all. Users could have a single presence at the site of their choice, with friends from other sites, new entrants would have a lower barrier of entry, and existing sites are less likely to lose users to the network effect. Of course, the big players would probably have more competition from niche players too, so I guess that would be the downside for Myspace and Facebook.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The most interesting, underutilized and least known aspect of Facebook's platform, imho, is the fact you can export Facebook data to other sites and other communication systems (albeit in a limited way). O'Reilly's been blogging about this lately.

[http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/10/mark_zuckerberg_fa...](http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/10/mark_zuckerberg_facebook_backstage.html)

"I do think that there are two views of the social graph, though, and how it gets deployed: there's a platform view in which it can be exploited to build smarter applications on Facebook; there's a deeper view in which the Facebook- discovered social graph can be accessed by other applications elsewhere on the net. Facebook's granular control of what information you reveal and to whom is thus a key part of the platform -- but the question is how far Facebook will go in letting other sites use this information. If Mark's answer is the first, Facebook is ultimately a closed platform; if the latter, it becomes a true open platform and value enabler."

Here's a relevant post to that: [http://gigaom.com/2007/10/18/big-internet-is- web-20s-os-so-w...](http://gigaom.com/2007/10/18/big-internet-is-web-20s-os- so-who-owns-the-apps/)

The Economist article also confuses news feeds (your friends actions, on your FB homepage) and mini-feeds (your own actions, on your profile page). Makes you wonder if the author has actually ever been on to Facebook. Perhaps there's less to The Economist's analysis of Facebook than meets the eye?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The fifth paragraph made me think. What if Google, Yahoo or Microsoft started a social network based on the addresses in their webmail apps? It would instantly be bigger than Facebook.

<comment><USER5> Obviously size isn't the only thing that matters. That graph in the middle of the article is a pretty sick demonstration that MySpace is _dominating_ this game. And yet, nobody's trying to buy it off of News Corp. Valleywag's claimed that Rupert Murdoch is a lot more excited about Facebook than his own purchase. As is the rest of Silicon Valley, hence the valuations that have nothing to do with the user numbers. Or the yearly revenue...

The thing that is most similar between (post-IPO) Google and Facebook is the immense, almost unbelievably universal goodwill held about the company by the public. Goodwill's not actually worth much money in and of itself, but if the entire world wants Facebook to make money, it eventually will. Let's hope that happens before the users leave.

<comment><USER6> So if it isn't the users and it isn't the revenue, then Facebook's insane valuations are the product of... hype?

Valuations aside, you're right in saying what really matters is monetization and this is where Google shines. I don't care how much information Facebook has about me, I don't go onto Facebook looking to buy things. I go there to see what's going on in my friends' lives. As the article states, ads on Facebook are an annoyance.

Google's in the right market for targeted ads because when we're looking to buy something, we're more open to advertisements and clicking on them. On Facebook, I'd guess that very few, if any, are looking to buy something (and hence Facebook's abysmal click-through rate).

Also, I can't see users leaving Facebook (eventually the time sunk into building connections just entrenches you into the network), but I hope it figures out something quickly, or these valuations might drop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> 22% of Canada uses Facebook.

The next 5:

Norway: 18.68%

UK: 10.58%

Sweden: 9.09%

Australia: 6.64%

United States: 6.57%

Those numbers are silly.

<http://tinyurl.com/22jnu5>

</comment><comment><USER8> How could there be less to it? It's a CRUD app.

<comment><USER9> ... queue bandwagon backlash

<comment><USER10> Facebooker is the new AOLer.</comment></comment></comment>


Make Your Ruby/Rails App Fast: Memory Profiling Using ruby-prof and KCachegrind - <AUTHOR> http://blog.pluron.com/2008/02/memory-profilin.html <comment><USER2> Stop relying on a server-side framework to do everything. Leverage the client!

</comment><comment><USER3> sweet, some Ruby programmer must have stumbled across XDebug :-)

one of the only truly beautiful things ever to come out of PHP</comment>


Ask HN: Passive income as a dev? - <AUTHOR>

Hi!
Lately, I have been on the fence about going back to the freelancing adventure - I'm currently a dev. (also called a "CTO"). I had a fair success with it on oDesk and could imagine living from it if push came to shove; however, I'm very interested by the 'passive income' type of online businesses.
How could I, a competent full-stack developer, work toward creating passive income, a little bit at a time, so that in a few years, I can start living the dream of taking freelancing jobs only when I want to, rather than when I need to :)
Usual passive income strategies (based on producing content) aren't very attractive to me. What seems to be up my alley, is to help startups with little or no technical skills to build their MVP, get it from rough idea to a working, deployed, product then let them deal with the actual work of selling it, in exchange for a small equity/share of the profit (the passive income) and a low flat rate based on requirements. I think that overall, it's a good deal for people currently struggling to find the right technical partner or having issues with finding reliable developers with experience taking 'vague requirements' and turn it into 'something marketable'.
Does this approach make sense or do you think nobody will ever go through the hassle of onboarding a 'technical partner' they don't know and isn't interested to stay in the long term? If you put it like that, it sure sounds like a silly idea :) But my hunch is that while yes, it's not an ideal situation, the alternative, for some startups, is even worse:  never getting a working product out of the door, spending weeks in dead ends due to lack of experience, or paying a freelancer 100$/h for 2 weeks, pay the bill, and then never sell the product.
I'd love to know the thoughts of this community on this, and how you'd get started on this? Other ideas are welcome!
Thank you! <comment><USER2> People won't onboard a freelance developer for a short project unless they are desperate (and startups can often be desperate in different ways), but they will onboard advisors and consultant leaders to get them through tough periods. The difference in actual day-to-day can be minimal, but it's how you present yourself. "I'm a CTO", not "I'm a dev (also a CTO)".

You could become a consulting CTO for hire. Talk to some of the startups in your target group, and to non-technical founders, to understand more about what they would pay for, and what results they would want to see in order to pay the bill. For example, selling the product might not be the goal; raising investment is more likely.

For some, it may simply be coming in, assessing the state of things, making a list of recommendations, and hooking them up with full-time CTO candidates.

For others, having a technical advisor who can screen, interview and hire their future tech team is incredibly valuable.

For MVP building in the specific stage you refer to, as others have said, profit sharing isn't a particularly reliable model. The MVP may never take off, and by the time it does, they may have built a whole team and rewritten your code.

Other than content, here's one thought. What if you built up a set of talented developers who need your skills too - junior folks looking for exposure to portfolio projects, senior devs happy with a 9-5 but wanting some intellectual stimulation and to learn new techniques and technologies. Then effectively set up a MVP shop, where you manage the first stage of the 'idea to code' pipeline, but hand off the bulk of the implementation to others. Perhaps these others bill hourly and you get a cut. You can even be a broker for just introducing the two and still get a cut, though smaller.

One thought, I think that this pattern of work can be detrimental sometimes. An engineer joining a startup doesn't want to see a bunch of spaghetti code written by some consultant who is no longer around. It's often the case that she has to deal with it, but it can be a red flag of sorts. There's a whole second set of consulting needs around transforming a messy MVP which has started to show traction into a scalable, reliable product. It's uglier, harder, and therefore probably harder to find people who are truly good at it. But a lot of that may be relationship-based -- understanding what the startup leaders really _want_ and what's working, translating that into new requirements, and keeping them happy if the work required to make it scalable is a lot more complex than it seems from the outside.

</comment><comment><USER3> There's a great book that can help you - "Start Small, Stay Small". It is exactly for that kind of people, developers looking to create some passive income.

Usually passive income is either content(like udemy videos or books), or apps. Because you don't want to create content - it's probably best to come up with a product idea and develop it.

I think that building MVP product for startups is, first of all, much closer to freelansing than to passive income, and second - if you have skills and resources necessary for building a product - why not build one for yourself? If it will be profitable - you'll start having a real passive income, instead of trading your time for money.

Also, in my opinion, this is way more fun, because you control all the aspects of the product, from idea to execution and selling.

</comment><comment><USER4> To me part of the allure of a passive income project is being able to control more than just the technical aspects--to be able to define the customer-facing and business pieces too.

Perhaps more importantly, your chance of producing meaningful income goes up exponentially if it's a one-person show. A small startup has the overhead of at least ramen-level salaries for a few people, possibly an office or shared space. If they've taken seed money their investors will be pushing for growth over profitability or possibly even revenue. If you're doing a profit share, even in the best of cases it may be a looong time before there's any profit, even if there is meaningful revenue.

Every startup is a longshot. It's an even longer shot if you're taking a sliver of profit from people whose interests may not be well-aligned with yours.

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess the delusion I'm under is that it's possible to have the cake and eat it :) Large startups with seed money won't probably be needing my service under the conditions I described in the OP, and small startups will be struggling for so long that unless it blows up to become the next big thing (probably won't), the actual passive income I could get wouldn't be meaningful. Thanks for your input!

<comment><USER5> It is possible - It's just difficult.

You have to set yourself realistic expectations of what you'll get out of it in the end.

I've recently bought a dev's app and kept him on board with a % share of ad revenue. ( + cash milestones until the advertising revenue is significant enough )

Just need to find the right person.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting! Can you share a bit on how you met this dev? Did you come up with this way of compensation upfront, or is it a deal you struck after some time working on it with him/her?

<comment><USER5> He contacted me trough one of my websites and offered me his services. I already knew him before he contacted me ( through his app ) so i offered him to buy out his application that wasn't doing so well.

We made an initial call, I've pitched him several different structures of compensation and let him come up with a price for his app that he was happy with, then struck a deal the following day.

There's a few reasons the reason it got done so quickly, we both had worked with the same people within the niche.

I've also explained to him my strategy upfront to get the app back on the road, so that probably helped.

You just need to find the right match.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: GPG keyserver gossip network visualization - <AUTHOR> http://bl.ocks.org/diafygi/3f344c22f8a37a7b2151

<comment><USER2> I did something similar with a force-directed graph layout: [https://Andrew.Kvalhe.im/hairball-artists- rendition](https://Andrew.Kvalhe.im/hairball-artists-rendition)

<comment><USER3> I've been working with embedding scale free graphs into a hyperbolic plane. I think it would make a good visualization tool for "hairball" graphs. What to have a chat about math?</comment></comment>