Your lifetime earnings are probably determined in your 20s - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/02/10/your-lifetime-earnings-are-probably-determined-in-your-twenties/ <comment><USER2> If you are reading this comment on HN, you are not normal, average, or a reasonable datum to extrapolate from. You are more likely to have a career in which you are rarely seen as a replaceable part. Your employers will negotiate with you rather than fire you. You will build up enough reserves that an unexpected layoff is painful rather than crippling, and you will consider many factors besides money when taking a new job.

In short, if your comment on this can be summarized as "that isn't what happened to me", that's because you are an outlier.

<comment><USER3> That's the whole point in unit testing, agile methodologies and all the other processes - to make programmers like parts of a machine and easily replaceable. Having worked for one large investment bank, the work was really boring, and in my team hardly anyone lasted much more than a year. But they had the money to keep hiring and essentially throw more money at the problem.

<comment><USER4> Totally agree on your comment on agile. It is a blight on our profession. I was having beers with an old friend from undergrad yesterday - our career paths have taken us very different places. What's common is that both of our employers have been instituting agile in very dysfunctional forms. My friend and I are both in our 30s and we were jokingly thinking how long we can take this crap before we have to either move to management or change careers completely (unlikely since we love tech so much).

I would not put unit testing in the same camp - frankly, my employer doesn't care about unit testing at all - to my chagrin. Senior developers sneak in unit tests on the minutes of breathing room we get. I actually got a lecture on "company cares about customer visible features". Well .. you know what? Software that doesn't crash is a pretty darned customer visible feature.

What makes me very uncomfortable is that my current situation reminds me of what I saw on the news about the BP oil spill incident. Management asks very pointed and specific questions - engineers answer truthfully. Mgmt makes wild decisions based on half information. I fear this kind of crap is rampant in organizations not run by technical people. Is it any better at places run by technical people?

The fundamental problem plaguing our industry is perhaps not agile - that is a mere symptom of it. The core problem IMHO are treating people like cogs and the need to continuously move faster.

Rant over. I needed that. Off to sneak in some unit tests.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I started working as help desk at 23 for $28k a year.

I switched jobs to software development at 30 to go from $34k to 45k (note that I made a bigger jump at 30 than in all of my twenties.

I'm in the process of switching to a job that pays $115k, two years later.

Do I wish I'd done this a decade ago? Certainly. But if you're sitting there thinking "my twenties are over, I'm done," think again and go learn something new.

<comment><USER6> Exactly. I now make more than double of the highest-grossing year from my 20's.

This article is just fear mongering. If you belong to the group of people reading comments on HN, you are able to drop in and out of the work force as you wish and do whatever you want with your life. If you want to maximize income in your 20's and reap the rewards of early investment, fine. If you want to travel the world now and jump in the game later, that's also fine.

<comment><USER7> Why does everyone seem to assume all HN readers are smart, highly motivated and undoubtedly will be successful?

<comment><USER8> Correct, we all are in startups with 90% chance of failure ;)

More seriously, I laugh when former colleagues think of me as successful. It's correct that I've launched a successful product, but money is so random that I rather consider myself as "having fun and learning to launch a product" than "being successful".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> At first the 38% increase from 25-55 seems absurdly low for the average worker, but I have to remind myself what average is. I recruited for roles in areas where pay for a position starts at $12-15/hr, and don't go much above $20/hr. People get stuck in this range. Similary I've seen accountants stay around the $60k range in some areas throughout their career.

Wish they dug into deeper analysis instead of having fluffy explanation and conclusion. Interesting things to look into would be what makes average increase so low? What are the top 5% doing to get 230% growth, how about those 1% that get 1500% growth?

</comment><comment><USER10> That's another good reason to start saving as early and as much as you can.

If you're interested in this topic, there's a good subreddit [0] with much information on how to start.

[0] [https://www.reddit.com/r/financialindependence/](https://www.reddit.com/r/financialindependence/)

<comment><USER11> Or, it's a good reason to make sure you do everything you can to get in the top percentile careers, spending whatever resources you have to do that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it ... he who doesn't ... pays it." Einstein.

That's why it's also so important to start saving early and invest it regularly.

<comment><USER13> Additionally, compound interest is why it's so important to not carry debt.

That mortgage your financial advisor wants you to keep? Get rid of it. Over pay principle as much as permitted.

Consumers refer to such things as 'debts' or 'payments', but financial institutions call these 'liabilities'. Financial institutions use the correct word, and don't like to hold them for good reason.

<comment><USER14> Weird that I was given the completely opposite advise by my bank about never paying off completely any debt straight away, to build up my credit rating ....

<comment><USER13> Precisely!

Financial institutions 'caring' about one's credit rating == confidence that one can handle the liabilities they want one to hold. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Tell that to the guys who made Jira.

But seriously, this is about as insightful as saying career choice affects lifetime earnings. Most people have settled their career by their early 30s. Throw kids into the mix and its no big surprise.

<comment><USER16> > Throw kids into the mix and its no big surprise.

In my experience kids can have quite the opposite effect - I got a lot more ambitious when the first one arrived, and I've almost doubled my salary since then (a bit more than four years).

<comment><USER17> Sure, but if I double my salary and my wife drops out of the workforce to be a full-time parent, on average our income stays the same :)

<comment><USER18> The WaPo article wasn't about the Mad Men universe though.

<comment><USER19> In europe this is still very common.

<comment><USER18> Labour force participation rates by sex: USA: 70.2% for men, 57.7% for women. Europe (OECD countries): 79.7% for men, 62.6% for women. So it's more common in EU for women to work than their sisters in the US, but the gender difference in participation rates is also higher in Europe.

Sources: [http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_303.htm](http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_303.htm) and [http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=LFS_SEXAGE_I_R](http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=LFS_SEXAGE_I_R)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Really? My current career essentially started when I was 30 years old. Now I am 40 and --adjusted to local purchase power based on Numbeo-- I am making ten times as much compared to when I was 25. I do not think this article is true in the technology industry -- certainly doesn't apply to me

<comment><USER21> First of all, the OP says "probably", not "always". It sure does not apply to everyone, the claim is it's just a likelihood.

Secondly, you can say that career selection in your 20's impact your later earnings, even if the actual growth of earnings happens later. An indicative example is of course two persons, citizens A and B. Citizen A goes to work in manual labor after primary education. Citizen B goes to high school and then gets a university education. Citizen A may well be earning much more in his early 20's than citizen B.

Depending on how long the studies take, citizen B has earned little money by the time he/she is 25, while citizen A who went straight to work, say in construction, has been accumulating earnings for many years. Still, the future potential of earnings for citizen B has been built with the education, even if it is not visible in his/her annual earnings yet, and the only monetary thing to his name is some debt taken for studies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I started working as a fulltime programmer (in Hungary) when I was 23 at market rate.

Today I'm 34 (still in Hungary), and my net salary has gone up 5.3x.

Another 2-3x is doable by handpicking a high-paying job here in Hungary (eg. an investment bank), another 2-3x if I were to go abroad.

For 10x and higher further multiplies I will have to try a startup again (my first one failed), although that's not a salary, it's equity.

I consider this high rate of increase a lucky thing: basically I chose to become a programmer at the right time when the industry is hot. I often remind myself that maybe in 30 years this will not be so, and maybe programmers then will be like chemical engineers today.

<comment><USER23> > _" [...]and maybe programmers then will be like chemical engineers today."_

Could you elaborate what you mean by "chemical engineers today"?

<comment><USER24> I studied to be a chemical engineer at one point (with engineering physics, but ok).

Of the guys in my class, and wildly guessing, I would say that less than 50% work with something chemical related, mostly either in pulp, oil or fuel cells. A bit more than 50% work with something related to programming or computer modeling, and outside that a variety of odd jobs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is a tiny article with suspect conclusions. Link to the actual study, which doesn't really make the same narrow conclusion as the article. [http://www.newyorkfed.org/research/staff_reports/sr710.pdf](http://www.newyorkfed.org/research/staff_reports/sr710.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER26> This correlates with reports about the earnings of Phd's in fields like biology and the system of postdoc work.

</comment><comment><USER27> Statistical law can't tell the truth of human life. The past does not mean everything,at least does not represent future.Anyone can change and alter the trajectory of his life only one in our study between.

</comment><comment><USER28> Surprising they didn't even speculate that maybe labor market fluidity might be a bit higher than it used to be.</comment>


Show HN: Harp Platform now available to the public - <AUTHOR> http://blog.harp.io/posts/harp-platform-now-public

<comment><USER2> I really, really would love to give this a try but am totally turned off by the requested "read and modify everything" Dropbox permissions. Although the Harp application does a really good job explaining the limitations of the Dropbox permissions API after a denial during the Dropbox authorization step, I'm still not comfortable. I hope it's true that OP is working with Dropbox to improve the situation as stated :)

<comment><USER3> maybe I'm missing something but why not just signup for another dropbox account and use that one for this instead?

<comment><USER4> Yes, this is one option to work around Dropbox's limited permission options here. You can create another Dropbox account and link that to Harp Platform. Then, share your application folder with your main Dropbox account and match the directory structure (put it inside harp.io/apps/), and continue using the Harp Platform normally.

<comment><USER5> Ohhh! Gotcha! I'll do that!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I still think that the harp product (brand?) is all over the place. From what I've seen, harp is all of these things:

\- A command line utility for creating a preprocessing-enabled server

\- A static site generator like jekyll

\- A "front-end publishing platform" for Dropbox

This leads to poor understanding of exactly what "Harp" is and what it helps you accomplish.

<comment><AUTHOR> I can understand the confusion. Best to think of it like this, "Harp" is a static web server with built in preprocessing. "Harp Platform" is a service for running Harp apps in production.

\- "Command line" \- happens to be the way you access the web server.

\- "Generating static assets" is just a feature of the web server.

\- "Dropbox integration" is just a feature of the platform.

Hope that helps clear things up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why do the build process (preprocessing) on the server?

<comment><USER8> so that non-devs can do edits via editing, dropbox syncs, push using web UI, and have the magic happen w/o needing devtools everywhere.

<comment><USER7> Not really, they still have to have node, npm, and the harp cli installed to use it locally. And if you're going through the work of doing all that, why not just do the build step on the client.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Should be "boat". Freudian slip!

"...and the community gets a bloat load of terrific open source libraries along the way."

</comment><comment><USER10> Looks good. Wish it wasn't tied to Dropbox though. I'd almost definitely use it if I could work out of my own WebDAV server.

<comment><USER11> Well, good news for you, you can run the harp server on your own hosting! However, at that point I would just use the static site generator that I am accustomed to (Wintersmith).

<comment><USER10> Oh, very nice!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm waiting until Dropbox pulls a Twitter-move and disallows third party integration.

<comment><USER13> I don't see how that would make any sense. Why would they do that? To me, it seems like Dropbox wants to sell storage to people, the more things that plug into Dropbox, the more storage they sell.

Twitter made a bunch of moves to limit third party integration because they need to control the channel so they can sell ads to be displayed on the platform, and display promoted accounts and tweets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> "How to be an absolute zero when it comes to SEO"

<comment><USER15> Can you elaborate?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Congrats!</comment>


What exactly is a doctorate - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/5613794/what-is-exactly-a-doctorate

<comment><USER2> Original source, and submitted earlier: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1588727>

Much discussion there.</comment>


The Formal Design Model of an Automatic Teller Machine (ATM) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Yingxu_Wang/publication/220636950_The_Formal_Design_Model_of_an_Automatic_Teller_Machine_ATM/links/004635205604ed075a000000.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> The Alice malware attacks is a good example of a need for more formal ATM software design toward a more secure firmware/OS package.</comment>


The Intelligence of Plants - <AUTHOR> https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/09/26/the-intelligence-of-plants/ <comment><AUTHOR> "Intelligence is really the central question in all of this. What, precisely, is it? Must the ability to remember, learn, and decide come from neurons and a "brain," as we tend to think of it, or should we broaden the definition to include a 'mindless mastery,' as Anthony Trewavas, an emeritus professor of biological sciences at the University of Edinburgh, calls it? The crux of the question rests on whether we think we are the center of the universe and that our mechanisms for remembering and learning, are superior. Or, might we be willing to see that there are other, nonneurological modes of thought? Might we be willing to de-center ourselves and view the environment through a nonhuman lens?"</comment>


Chez Scheme is now free - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/cisco/ChezScheme <comment><USER2> Dybvig's compiler course was exemplary. Say what you may about Scheme, you learned so much more in those classes. His Scheme Programming Language book is highly recommended. Especially check out his extended examples chapter: [http://www.scheme.com/tspl4/examples.html#./examples:h0](http://www.scheme.com/tspl4/examples.html#./examples:h0)

<comment><USER3> I thought scheme was like the beatles - people universally only had good things to say about it.

<comment><USER4> I might not be getting a reference here, but FWIW, I had a recent experience with Scheme that was interesting.

I did SICP nearly 19 years ago as a freshman, in 1997. And then a few months ago, I ported the metacircular-evaluator -- the "crown" of the course -- to femtolisp (the Lisp implementation underlying Julia).

My thoughts were:

1) It sure is awkward to represent struct fields 1 2 3 as (cdr struct), (cadr struct), (caddr), ... Yes this is nice to show that car and cdr are all you need as axiomatic primitives, but for practical purposes it's annoying. You end up with lots of little functions with long names.

2) Scheme code is very imperative! Even the metacircular evaluator uses set- cdr! and so forth. I don't like imperative code with the Lisp syntax.

3) It is awkward to represent environments with assoc lists. I feel that having a language which is really bootstrapped requires some kind of hash table/dictionary. Because you need that to implement scopes with O(1) access rather than O(n). I believe there are experimental lisps that try to fix this.

4) Macros also seem to have a needlessly different syntax than regular functions. There are Lisps with f-exprs rather than s-exprs that try to fix this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fexpr](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fexpr)

I was surprised by #3 and #4 -- it some sense Scheme is less "meta" and foundational than it could be. #2 is also a fundamental issue... at least if you want to call it the "foundation" of computing and build Lisp machines; I think this is evidence that this idea is a fundamentally flawed. #1 just makes it pale into languages like Python or even JavaScript.

<comment><USER5> >1) It sure is awkward to represent struct fields 1 2 3 as (cdr struct), (cadr struct), (caddr)

Every Scheme implementation I know of supports record types aka SRFI-9[0]. No one actually makes new data types from cons cells.

>2) Scheme code is very imperative!

Scheme supports many programming paradigms. Imperative programming is one. Functional programming, object-oriented programming, and relational programming are others. Not all Scheme code is imperative.

>3) It is awkward to represent environments with assoc lists.

Every Scheme implementation I know of has traditional mutable hash tables. Sometimes you want a hash table, sometimes you want an alist. It depends.

>4) Macros also seem to have a needlessly different syntax than regular functions.

I don't really understand this point. Are you talking about syntax-rules? If so, then I must disagree. syntax-rules is a very elegant language for defining hygienic macros.

SICP does _not_ teach you everything that Scheme has to offer, and the Scheme implementations of the 1980s are a lot different than the Scheme implementations of 2016.

[0] [http://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-9/srfi-9.html](http://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-9/srfi-9.html)

<comment><USER4> OK, point taken about #1. It is valuable to have the basic axioms and then separate syntactic sugar.

But #2 and #3 are what I would call bootstrapping problems... in other words, there is a reason that C is the foundation of computing rather than Lisp. I don't think anybody really thinks otherwise anymore. But for example, set-cdr! is not in the lambda calculus, and you need it even for basic things.

Likewise, Scheme implementations have mutable hash tables, but they're written in C and not Scheme. I don't know how you even write a hash table based on cons cells rather than O(1) indexing.

Regarding #4, here is a good link. The basic idea is that macros could just be functions on lists, and then you get composition of macros like you have composition of functions. Paul Graham incorporated this into Arc.

[http://matt.might.net/articles/metacircular-evaluation- and-f...](http://matt.might.net/articles/metacircular-evaluation-and-first- class-run-time-macros/)

My point is you could say Scheme sits at a somewhat awkward place between "not foundational enough" (not fully bootstrapped) and "awkward in practice" (compared to say Python). Though I wouldn't go as far as to say that... Obviously it was groundbreaking work that influenced Python and R and tons of stuff we use today. It's outstanding research, but it feels like it has been almost fully incorporated into the computing culture now.

<comment><USER5> >there is a reason that C is the foundation of computing rather than Lisp. I don't think anybody really thinks otherwise anymore.

C is not the foundation of computing. Why would you say this?

>Likewise, Scheme implementations have mutable hash tables, but they're written in C and not Scheme.

A native code compiler written in Scheme would have its hash table implementation also written in Scheme.

>I don't know how you even write a hash table based on cons cells rather than O(1) indexing.

You wouldn't do that! Cons cells are not the only primitive data type! Another primitive type in Scheme is the vector, which is a mutable array.

I'm sorry, but you greatly misunderstand Lisp and how compilers work.

<comment><USER6> > _C is not the foundation of computing. Why would you say this?_

Because all the popular OSes, drivers, userlands, servers, GUI libraries, and compilers/languages are 99% written in C (or C++ which is close enough).

<comment><USER7> That's ignoring all the computing work done before C. C and UNIX were huge steps back in computing, that we're only slowly beginning to recover from.

<comment><USER8> There a sentence from a famous women in the history of computing, I don't recall which one, about C setting the progress of compiler optimizations back to the dawn of computing.

<comment><USER9> Perhaps it was Fran Allen. In _Coders at Work_ , she has quite a few things to say on the topic:

\--- Begin Quote ---

-Seibel-: When do you think was the last time that you programmed?

-Allen-: Oh, it was quite a while ago. I kind of stopped when C came out. That was a big blow. We were making so much good progress on optimizations and transformations. We were getting rid of just one nice problem after another. When C came out, at one of the SIGPLAN compiler conferences, there was a debate between Steve Johnson from Bell Labs, who was supporting C, and one of our people, Bill Harrison, who was working on a project that I had at that time supporting automatic optimization.

The nubbin of the debate was Steve's defense of not having to build optimizers anymore because the programmer would take care of it. That it was really a programmer's issue. The motivation for the design of C was three problems they couldn't solve in the high-level languages: One of them was interrupt handling. Another was scheduling resources, taking over the machine and scheduling a process that was in the queue. And a third one was allocating memory. And you couldn't do that from a high-level language. So that was the excuse for C.

-Seibel-: Do you think C is a reasonable language if they had restricted its use to operating-system kernels?

-Allen-: Oh, yeah. That would have been fine. And, in fact, you need to have something like that, something where experts can really fine-tune without big bottlenecks because those are key problems to solve.

By 1960, we had a long list of amazing languages: Lisp, APL, Fortran, COBOL, Algol 60. These are higher-level than C. We have seriously regressed, since C developed. C has destroyed our ability to advance the state of the art in automatic optimization, automatic parallelization, automatic mapping of a high-level language to the machine. This is one of the reasons compilers are... basically not taught much anymore in colleges and universities.

\--- End Quote ---

(taken from pp. 501-502)

<comment><USER8> Yep that one.

<comment><USER10> Great quote. I had never read that one. The irony of language wars about the monolith that is C vs. the many higher-level languages that allow a human to code according to his mental abstractions and cognitive ability, rather than memorizing machine-specific, or os-specific facts that don't translate over to newer machine architectures. All this on HN, running on a Lisp, Arc, that once sat upon an academic scheme now called Racket.

I agree C is necessary for low-level programming, but for the meat of all the other applications and usages, higher-level languages are needed. I don't mind programming certain things in C, but I thoroughly enjoy the mental exercise when programming in the J programming language, Lisp, or Forth. Yes, Forth. C programmers can have the Earth; I would like to be coding with the fellas who design mission-critical software for satellites like Rosetta, and groups like NASA and the ESA, using Forth in Rosetta's case [1].

Slim Whitman sold more records than the Beatles, or so I think I heard that on a late-night TV commercial back in the 80s, but I never owned a record from him ;)

      [1]  http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/2003ESASP.532E..72B

<comment><USER11> This is a bit off topic, but would you mind sharing what resources you used to learn forth? I'm interested in the language myself, but I don't really get how to use it. I've learned the basics about defining words and manipulating the stack, but whenever I try to apply it to an actual problem, I have a very hard time even understanding how to approach, wheras if I were using a procedural or OO language, I would know where to start.

Any advice on getting over this hump?

<comment><USER10> There are the main books everyone refers to like 'Thinking Forth' [1], and others, but I really learned faster by picking up Factor [2] and Retro [3]. The community on Factor is very helpful and smart. I actually wrote my first real Forth program for work in Factor. I had written a lot of one-liners, and some curiosities, but this was a business need met in one night. It was basically a program to munge a whole lot of tab-delimted text files, and do some math on fields and then generate a report. It was all < 100 LOC, and it was easy to interactively test if I was missing anything in the interpreter. Retro is cool, since it is so minimal, and there are add-ons for Chrome so you can run it in your browser locally to try it; otherwise, you download the image file for your platform, and Retro itself. Retro was built on a VM called Ngaro, which is an interesting diversion, but not Forth. There are also microcontroller ports of Forth [4], which I found a lot easier than using the assembler for a particular microcontroller. FlashForth has been recently updated, and is featured in a 'Circuit Cellar' magazine article. I have also purchased iForth [5], since I had stopped dual-booting linux at the time, and it offered a lot for Windows, and mathematics (fast). I hope these help you get started. If you are a maker, using an Arduino or PIC-like chip with FlashForth is great. The whole dictionary, or word list (all the defined functions called 'words' in Forth, are listed in the reference I provided). In Forth, you can easily add to the dictionary, it is concise enough to know your whole system in a short time, and add to it when you need it. Good luck!

      [1]  http://thinking-forth.sourceforge.net/
      [2]  https://factorcode.org/
      [3]  http://forthworks.com/retro/
      [4]  http://flashforth.com/tutorials.html
      [5]  http://home.iae.nl/users/mhx/

<comment><USER11> Thanks for the reply. Those look like some pretty cool resources, and I can't wait to check them out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> IIRC, this was a high performance scheme developed at Indiana University that was closed source for a long time.

Good on Cisco for open sourcing it.

I'm interested to hear what regular scheme programmers feel about this news.

<comment><USER13> And aside from the JVM implementations and some works in progress the last time I checked, the only one with native instead of green threading.

<comment><USER14> Racket has native threads, called "places".

<comment><USER13> Not in the shared memory way I mean (which I did not make clear), per [http://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/parallelism.html](http://docs.racket- lang.org/guide/parallelism.html)

 _The racket /place library provides support for performance improvement through parallelism with the place form. The place form creates a place, which is effectively a new Racket instance that can run in parallel to other places, including the initial place. The full power of the Racket language is available at each place, but places can communicate only through message passing—using the place-channel-put and place-channel-get functions on a limited set of values—which helps ensure the safety and independence of parallel computations._

Compare to current Guile, where the documentation says sharing a hash table without using a mutex will not corrupt memory, but probably won't give you the results you desire.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Cisco prices from 2013

        SP-SW-LMIX0CH0 SP BASE Chez Scheme Dev Env for Wind,  Per Unit  $65.00
        SP-SW-LMIX0CHL SP BASE Chez Scheme Dev Env for Linux, Per 10    $325.00
        SP-SW-LMIX0CHW SP BASE Chez Scheme Dev Env for Wwind, Per 10    $325.00
        SP-SW-LMIX0CH1 SP BASE Chez Scheme Dev Env for Apple Mac,Per 10 $325.00
        SP-SW-LMIX0CHA SP BASE Chez Scheme Developm $65.00
        SP-SW-LMX01CHL SP BASE Chez Scheme Developm $65.00

<comment><USER16> Chez Scheme price schedule I received in 2002:

        Chez Scheme Version 6
        Software License Fee Schedule
        V60901f

        Supported machine types:
           Intel 80x86 Linux 2.x
           Intel 80x86 Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000
           Silicon Graphics IRIX 6.x
           Sun Sparc Solaris 2.x

        Classification                                  License fee (USD)
        </comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-----
        Single Machines
          first machine per machine type                            $4000
          each additional machine                                    3000
        </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-----
        Site
          first machine type                                         9000
          two machine types                                         14000
          three or more machine types                               19000
        </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-----
        Academic Site (for qualified academic institutions)
          first machine type                                         4500
          two machine types                                          7000
          three or more machine types                                9500
        </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-----
        Corporate
          each machine type                                         24500

</comment><comment><USER17> For people interested in the legalities of licenses, it's released under the Apache License 2.0 which is a "free software" opensource license that is compatible when combined with GPL3, but not with GPL 1 or 2.

the Apache 2.0 license includes not just copyright but patent licensing, so the software will contain no hidden patent restrictions for patents owned by the creators and contributors.

<comment><AUTHOR> Why did you quote free software but not opensource? I am curious to know what the difference in your writing intended to convey.

<comment><USER18> That may be because "free software" is still an ambiguous term, while open source is relatively unambiguous. I prefer to use Free Software as my disambiguator of choice, but I understand the GP using the other form, and occasionally use it myself.

<comment><AUTHOR> In my experience, people frequently think that "open source" means a bunch of different things, such as "visible source code" (and nothing more) or "opposite of commercial" (i.e. no money allowed) or "inviting public participation" (as in "open source governance").

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What is the library ecosystem like? This is ultimately what limits all other Scheme implementations.

<comment><USER20> That is indeed a great question. Anyone know? I used to use Scheme for prototyping numerical code, etc., but have switched to Julia. Partly because Julia is more convenient in some ways, but mainly because of access to libraries, both native Julia libraries and Python libraries (via PyCall). I personally still prefer Scheme as a language, but missing libraries is a real problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Making fast scheme interpreters is something I always come back to, a timeless exercise that makes for a great way to decompress over a week (wow I'm a nerd). I'm excited to find some nuggets of micro-optimized gold!

<comment> j-pb Compiler. Chez scheme is compiled with a nano-pass compiler. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Os7FE3J-U5Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Os7FE3J-U5Q)

<comment><USER21> Compiler what? I simply said that I enjoyed writing fast scheme interpreters.

<comment> j-pb You said it again. It's a compiler, not an interpreter.

<comment><USER22> Its both a compiler and an interpreter. Read up on Petite Chez Scheme.

<comment> j-pb Yeah most compiled lisps need to do some interpretation in case an unsuspecting eval comes around ^^

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's about time! Although I'm curious---how did Cisco end up owning it?

<comment><USER24> If you look at scheme.com, you will see Copyright © 2011 Cadence Research Systems. Cisco bought Cadence back in 2012.

<comment><USER25> (Cadence for those who don't know are basically the equivalent of SolidWorks for _anything_ in EE. They are the only company ( _maybe_ Synopsis or Mentor, but I think there are a few holes here and there) on the planet that lets you go from designing something as simple and low level as an analog jellybean op- amp (with state of the art EM and S-param simulation) and verification, to RTL design (full power simulation and everything), to piecing together TSMC[edit: learn2proof-read, self]-based fab designs on their 28nm processes (ASICs or SoCs), to laying out boards at the Altium level. You're paying around 100k/yr/seat for all this but if you're actually using the whole feature set it's worth every cent.

Other than Solidworks (which has everything from industrial machining stock cold-rolled steel and the finite-element analysis of your components all the way to computational fluid dynamics of anything your engineering heart could desire) I've never seen a company cover such an industry so thoroughly, so well[1].)

[1] Maybeeee Adobe has equal coverage re: for vector work with Illustrator/image manipulation with PS/page layout and typesetting with PageMaker/Indesign and doing post on Video with After Effects and such. And I don't think anyone would disagree, the degree of complexity for this genre of software is on a different tier.

edit: Haha. Confused Cadence _Design_ Systems with Cadence _Research_ Systems. Thanks for correcting me. Mea culpa. Keeping this up just for continuity sake. Viva la Scheme though! Have an upvote, @beering ;)

<comment><USER26> I'm _pretty_ sure that the Cadence you're thinking of is not the Cadence that owned Scheme. Cadence Research Systems was afaik a tiny entity that mainly owned Chez Scheme.

<comment><USER27> Yeah, it's a sifferent company. I doubt Cisco could even afford an EDA vendor other than little Mentor. Parent is also wrong about Cadence being only one that can do each of the major jobs: all of them have products for that. Too many to keep travk of actually.

Mentor has an advantage since they acquired Tanner, best of the budget ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I used Chez Scheme for many years and loved its lightning fast compile times. For example, I'm not aware of any other full-scale compiler that can compile itself as fast as Chez can.

<comment><USER29> OberonSystem can build the whole compiler, OS, and applications in around 3 seconds.

<comment><USER8> I look forward to the day someone takes the effort of writing a bare metal runtime for Go and producing something like "Goberon", given the influence.

<comment><USER30> This is pretty close: [https://github.com/deferpanic/gorump](https://github.com/deferpanic/gorump)

<comment><USER8> A step on the right direction, but I was thinking more about Oberon System 3 with its Gadgets UI framework.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Looking forward to having this integrated in geiser/emacs. I worked with chez recently, and it is really a high quality scheme implementation.

<comment><USER3> Any details on what you were using it for? What did you like about it vs something like Racket?

<comment><USER31> We have a macro expander for pascal written in scheme (quick and dirty draft made by me that worked so well it stayed). We had some performance problems with some crazy recursive macros (it generates a _lot_ of code. Don't ask, I am not allowed to talk much about it), so I investigated porting it to chez.

Instead I just switched to guile (scheme implementation) trunk and got a 3x speedup. Did some optimizing work and it ended up at 4x, which is good enough.

<comment><USER5> What Scheme implementation did the code originally use?

<comment><USER31> The Guile 2.0 branch. I don't know what magic optimisation dust they sprinkled over the upcoming 2.2, but it sure is fast.

We thought about using chicken, but it depends quite a lot on using syntax- case to deconstruct everything, and I didn't want to learn their implicit renaming stuff.

Apparently the 2.2 branch has full elisp support. Can't wait for Emacs to run on it.

<comment><USER5> Ah, that makes sense! Guile 2.2 has a completely rewritten compiler and virtual machine. I'm happy to see some real-world instances of it greatly improving performance.

<comment><USER31> "greatly improving performance" is an understatement! It was literally 3x. I didn't even have to change anything. Not bad for a language that usually beats python by quite a large margin :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Someone explain to me: Chez vs Gambit vs Chicken vs Bigloo. Which do I pick? Especially interested in parallel/multithreading abilities, standards compliance, and overall performance.

<comment><USER33> Out of the four you mentioned, only Chez has true posix threads.

<comment><USER34> Bigloo has support for posix threads. The only one on the list that absolutely does not have them is Chicken.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Why should I be interested in this - given there are many free high quality implementations for Scheme like Racket, Gambit etc?

<comment><USER36> Chez is known for being very fast, and for using state-of-the-art compiler technology.

<comment><USER35> Any numbers?

<comment><USER37> Look at Clinger's benchmarks for Larceny.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is great. I was hoping this would happen. The reason was a paper posted here in the past tracing its development from 8-bit days. I was impressed but knew it needed a community and OSS license.

Good.

</comment><comment><USER38> Very cool!

I had trouble building it on Linux if I tried to set --installprefix= to a non-standard location, it built fine using the defaults. Nice!

On OS X, I have a clang version of gcc installed and perhaps because of that my build broke.

<comment><USER38> UPDATE: building on OS X:

I installed gcc-5 using brew, set "alias gcc=gcc-5", and then ./configure ; sudo make install worked fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Wow, I never thought they'd open source Chez. This is really cool.

</comment><comment><USER40> Wow, this takes me back. I took intro CS at IU in 1993. At that time they were still teaching Scheme, using George Springer's _Scheme and the Art of Programming_ and something like _The Little Schemer_ (but not that because I guess it didn't come out for another two years). Delightful language with a really clean library. I always found Common Lisp's naming conventions to be—dare I say it?—PHP-esque in their irregularity. Scheme, meanwhile, actually _has_ naming conventions. :)

<comment><USER41> The Little LISPer (precursor to the Little Schemer) was definitely in print and used at IU in the 1980s. Maybe that was it?

<comment><USER40> That must've been it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> A quote from BUILDING: "Building Chez Scheme under Windows is currently more complicated than it should be. It requires the configure script (and through it, the workarea script) to be run on a host system that supports a compatible shell, e.g., bash, and the various command-line tools employed by configure and workarea, e.g., sed and ln. For example, the host system could be a Linux or MacOS X machine. The release directory must be made available on a shared filesystem, e.g., samba, to a build machine running Windows. It is not presently possible to copy the release directory to a Windows filesystem due to the use of symbolic links."

Maybe someone have managed to build the Windows version?

</comment><comment><USER43> Pretty great, always wanted to look at the implementation.

</comment><comment><USER44> Wow, such a big news! I have heard so much praise about it and have been always want to use it. Now dream comes to true. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER45> anyone know how this became cisco's to release?

<comment><USER46> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11572733](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11572733)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> This is good news. The code is worth reading. It is as good as MIT Scheme, and less esoteric than Gambit.)</comment>


Ray Kurzweil Plans to Create a Mind at Google - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/view/510121/ray-kurzweil-plans-to-create-a-mind-at-google-and-have-it-serve-you/

<comment><USER2> It will be interesting to see how having Norvig and Kurzweil at the same company will work out. As I understand it their approaches to AI are about as different as they can be.</comment>


How Apple store all your email metadata for years on their servers - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/bugbountywriteup/how-apple-stored-all-your-email-metadata-for-years-on-their-servers-2a61b1a3232d <comment><USER2> To me the far bigger issue with Apple is them forcing you to agree to them collecting data on people you interact with to use their products in the US.

I am fine with me agreeing for my data but should NOT be able to agree to them collecting others data.

Here is the key piece of the Apple privacy agreement in the US.

"When you share your content with family and friends using Apple products, send gift certificates and products, or invite others to participate in Apple services or forums, Apple may collect the information you provide about those people such as name, mailing address, email address, and phone number. "

A link to the US version.

[https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en- ww/](https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww/)

Suspect that the agreement is probably different outside the US?</comment>


How Space Weather Could Trigger a Future Economic Crisis - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-01-19/how-space-could-trigger-a-future-economic-crisis <comment><USER2> As a background, I used to work on the FAA - WAAS[0] a system that provides more accurate GPS and more importantly provides realtime integrity reports of GPS for users. A big part of my work was studying ionospheric storms and how they affected GPS. We made the majority of analysis from collected data from the late 90s and onward, the sad truth is that we have no real idea of what a massive solar event would do to satellites and the earth.

Satellites in general have a very hard time discharging large amounts of current, because there simply is no ground and the possibility of a Carrington Event[1] in the modern age is simply frightening. An event of this size today could possibly knock out thousands of satellites at once -- including the entire GPS constellation.

The effects on earth could be very damaging too, what would happen we aren't quite certain. However, you could see arcs from power lines or any long distance wire as it would provide easy paths for electrons. This also could affect any computers much like an EMP blast. We could be looking at a large percentage of all electronics broken. So we might suddenly have large areas, with no power, no electronics, and no communication.

After spending lots of time learning about the science behind these storms, to me this is the stuff of nightmare fuel.

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Area_Augmentation_System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Area_Augmentation_System)

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859)

<comment><USER3> > Satellites in general have a very hard time discharging large amounts of > current

Um... don't you mean "charge" instead of "current"?

> We could be looking at a large percentage of all electronics broken. So we > might suddenly have large areas, with no power, no electronics, and no > communication.

As a HAM radio operator, this is why I want to build a transceiver that has no semiconductors in it. If it's not connected to a large antenna, or to the AC network, or to any long wires, there's no way anything coming in from space could fry it (that would not fry me too).

<comment><USER4> If you arent attaching it to anything, put it in a tinfoil sac. It will be fine and ready to go when needed, semiconductors and all.

<comment><USER3> Well, if you go into the physics of the whole thing, penetration depth, skin effect, absorbance, etc, you realize there's always a combination of factors that will screw up your silicon. Plus, if it's not in the bag when it hits, it gets fried. Plus, it should be more like a military-style box than a bag.

Tubes are just a heck of a lot harder to screw up, except mechanically.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The descriptions of effects of the 1859 solar storm on the telegraph system[0] are pretty crazy. It started fires, shocked operators, powered unplugged machines, etc. Can't imagine what that would be like with all of our modern machines.

[0]: [http://www.history.com/news/a-perfect-solar-superstorm- the-1...](http://www.history.com/news/a-perfect-solar-superstorm- the-1859-carrington-event)

<comment><USER4> They fail to mention all the very similar accidents that happened in those days regardless of space weather. We have safety systems in place today (fuses, breakers, grounded parts) to prevent accidents that were once the norm. They will also mitigate space weather effects. It would be bad, but not nearly as destructive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > A world without power because of damaged transformers would become > economically stagnant

Economic stagnation would probably be the least of our problems. The cascading issues from a world without power for an extended period of time are incredibly far reaching. It would most certainly be a form of chaos.

<comment><AUTHOR> > _a world without power_

A CME wouldn't cause a world without power. It would cause _parts_ of the world to lose their power _grids_ and satellites. Generators would almost certainly be hooked up to critical infrastructure and cities in rich countries.

<comment><USER7> "A CME wouldn't cause a world without power. It would cause parts of the world to lose their power grids and satellites. Generators would almost certainly be hooked up to critical infrastructure and cities in rich countries."

This is true, of course, however I am pessimistic about the ability for manufacturers to resist cutesy network/cloud/status/monitoring functions in these devices.

I am sure that somewhere, right now, there is a diesel generator acting as backup for something critical that is plugged into ethernet and queries a license server every five minutes.

<comment><USER8> There might be massive issues for power distribution but not power generation as generation can be quickly taken off grid. Local power plants could then be brought back very quickly.

There could still be issues in specific areas dependent on long distance power. However, nuclear subs and aircraft carriers have been used in the past to provide power for critical infrastructure ~(40+MW a pop) and local power grids would not be impacted long term. Compared to say a war this would be a minor long term impact.

PS: The $613 billion estimate over 5 years is 0.15% of the ~390,000 billion world GDP over that same 5 years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Saying it would cause a crisis is unlikely, at least long-term, since anything to would cause spending to recover and the cause of the "crisis" would be known and accounted for.

To put this in perspective, America alone lost tens of trillions of dollars in from the peak to the trough of the whole 2008 crisis:

[http://money.cnn.com/2011/06/09/news/economy/household_wealt...](http://money.cnn.com/2011/06/09/news/economy/household_wealth/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Am I right in thinking with advanced warning this could be mitigated by simply shutting down the power grids for a few hours? That would be a big deal, but clearly not as bad as taking it out.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the massive electromagnetic flux caused by the CME interacting with Earth's magnetosphere induces current even in powered-down systems. I believe it's necessary to cut lines and perhaps even disconnect individual transformers from the grid.

<comment><USER10> Absolutely, but transformers can already be disconnected from the grid, you just have to have the guts to do it in advance.

<comment><USER11> How long does that take to do though? My understanding is that the scale of a CME is what makes a potential disaster.

<comment><USER12> The major distribution sub stations already have remote controlled disconnects that isolate them from the power grid it's a basic requirement for maintenance.

They can have some pretty powerful arcs too: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5YxdRfAe14](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5YxdRfAe14)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Forget CMEs. They're really transient. Grids can be fixed in a couple of months. What can't be fixed is a new Fukushima event.

How about decreased solar output for 70 years, like the Maunder Minimum? That would realy trigger a full scale economic crisis.

<comment><USER14> How fast grids can be fixed depends on what breaks.

If large power transformers (LPTs) get fried, the lead time for manufacturing replacements can exceed 20 months [1]. They're so expensive that spares are not commonly bought or built.

As well, a Carrington-scale CME event could wreck enough grid infrastructure to require a black start [2] of unprecedented scale.

Our energy infrastructure has never experienced a Carrington CME. I think it could easily take a year or more to get back to the continent-wide coordinated grid we now have.

[1] [https://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/Large%20Power%20Transfor...](https://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/Large%20Power%20Transformer%20Study%20-%20June%202012_0.pdf)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_start](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_start)

</comment></comment><comment> guard-of-terra It won't trigger an economic crisis. What it would trigger is an economic boom. Capital owners will all have to pony up to repair the infrastructure they own or depend on. You might get some of your possessions damaged, but after that making quick buck will become easier for a duration.

<comment><USER15> Broken window fallacy?

<comment><USER16> If you are breaking the windows of a very rich man who has most of the windows in your community due to his enormous house, and your economy is largely window-installation based...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I find it interesting that Bloomberg gets all hyped out about the consequences of Outer Space events that may eventually happen and we do not have any way to prevent, but cheerfully ignores the consequences, - and the very tangible costs, - of Climate Change here on Earth.

"We can't dodge, prevent or suppress solar flares. But we can increase funding for early-warning systems such as the Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado."

Oh, wait. Nevermind... I get it now.

<comment><USER18> No one is very worried about the consequences of climate change here on earth.

Exhibit A: The White House's official policy on climate change does not mention the word "nuclear"

When Obama came into office, 66% of America's power was from fossil fuels. When Obama left office, 66% of America's power was from fossil fuels.

<comment><USER19> I don't think your last sentence is accurate. [https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cf...](https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cfm?t=epmt_1_01)

<comment><USER20> You table shows figures that sum up to 70-71% fossil fuel in 2008, and 66-67% in 2015. The major change is the shift from coal to gas but the total did not decrease as significantly.

<comment><USER21> The oil price plummet, and the natural gas boom, both made it very hard economically to not use fossil fuels. I'm not making excuses, just providing an explanation.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Action and habit - <AUTHOR> http://lesswrong.com/lw/60y/action_and_habit/

<comment><USER2> _Watch your thoughts, for they become words._

 _Watch your words, for they become actions._

 _Watch your actions, for they become habits._

 _Watch your habits, for they become your character._

 _Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny._

Under the guise of being a piece of wisdom, this, to me, sounds like a healthy recipe for going insane. Watch your thoughts? Indeed. Might as well try to bite your own teeth.

The world becomes a lot more fun and easier to deal with once you stop trying to control everything and realise that things tend to work pretty much ok even if you don't keep a paranoid eye on them.

I much prefer the following Haiku:

 _Sitting silently,_

 _Doing nothing_

 _And the grass grows by itself._

<comment><USER3> In defense of a cheesy classroom poster, a better verb would be _observe_. You're (reasonably) interpreting "watch" as something like "control" ("Watch this prisoner."), but it can also mean simply to look at ("Watch the tide roll in.")

As the human default seems to be blind acceptance of every rationalization that appears in our minds, simply being more aware (by observation) that who you are is a process and not an immutable state can be a profound step.

<comment><USER4> I'd have picked 'consider' or 'contemplate' rather than 'watch.'

Apart from the Orwellian undertones, you can 'watch' something without even understanding it, much less influencing or controlling it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This post is very insightful.

To break down what it says, and offer my own thoughts, often, the path to doing something at first challenging is: thought -> action -> habit, belief/better life or outcome.

Achievable steps is also key. Trying to rush the process and immediately reach the endpoint results in frustration.

So, "I want to learn to swim" => Spend 15 minutes practicing => Spend 15 minutes practicing 3 times a week... and so on, gradually ramping up is likely to work, while, "I want to learn to swim" => 3 practices weekly of 1 hour is likely to fail, in my experience.

</comment><comment><USER6> Here's to hoping Eliezer is habitually setting aside time for writing more Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

<comment><USER2> Yes, we need to make him think more about that, so those thoughts can become words, and those words can become bytes, and those bytes can become words again, and then finally return to their thoughtful state in my amused mind :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why is the post by "superasn" dead? It's topical, relevant, has useful information and is not rude or insulting.

<comment><USER8> Could it be a false positive triggered by an automated system that kills posts with improper capitalization by new accounts?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Quite Biblical. Paul says we are to be transformed through the renewing of our mind.

</comment><comment><USER10> I find posts like this very annoying. As swombat points out, the claim that you should "watch your thoughts" leaves one wondering: how do I do that? The answer I assume I would get, were I to ask the author this question, is: "Just do it!" Of course, the author has conveniently left out details regarding what type of support he received from family/friends/coaches.

Anyway, that's exactly why this type of crap isn't useful.

To become excellent at a contingent skill (e.g. swimming, chess, math) you must surround yourself with excellent, honest people who care about you.

To become excellent at a trascendental skill (e.g. "strength," "bravery") you must isolate yourself and go very deep.

There is no other way.

<comment><USER11> That seems a bit harsh to me. Self motivation - both through thoughts and through actions - is a very necessary part of building habits. Outside motivation can be great too, but unlike self motivation it's not always available. Will the friends/family/coaches wake up at 5am to convince you not to sleep in? Even if they would, I'd rather be able to do it on my own.</comment></comment>


Ask PG & HN: Subscription or Data Licensing, as business model? - <AUTHOR>

I am not sure if PG answers these kind of questions but it's worth asking.
I am working on a simple service to sort reading material. Something, say, like Read it Later or Instapaper which does some sorting based on some social media things. (Of course this is not full idea but that hardly matters).
Now there are two ways I can go:
Subscription based Service There will be a free account but for better experience and features. You pay, say, $5-$15 a month. That's simple charge user for what they use.
But then is asking user to pay for what otherwise is free, is that cool? And not even sure if "technically" selling sorted links is cool with Publishers.
Free Service, Sell Data: Somewhat what Crowdbooster is doing? Service is free but data of, say, reading habits can be useful for advertisers or publishers. That can be licensed.
What are your thoughts on both business models (if I can call them that). <comment><USER2> Charging isn't about whether or not it's "cool" to do so, it's whether or not people will actually pay for it. Is your idea significantly better than what already exists so that people would actually pay to use it, instead of some existing free product?

For either option you need to figure out whether there's a viable market that will pay for what you're selling.

</comment><comment><USER3> Do you want your customers to be _people_ who pay a monthly fee or do you want your customers to be _corporations_ who purchase the data from you?

There's nothing wrong with building a subscription based service and having people pay for it - I think that's a 'better' business model than free -> data harvesting, but the real question is _what will people_ [corporations or individuals] _pay for_?</comment>


Ask HN: HN Videochats on demand? Rooms by topic? Let's set some ground rules - <AUTHOR> http://tinychat.com/icfw2q <comment><AUTHOR> Many of us login several times a day, and spend at least several minutes reading and commenting.

Let's set up web/videochats with 1 hr advance warning on topics of interest. Many think this could be very beneficial to this community.

It's a way to get faster, more involved conversation on issues that require more than a forum post to really discuss.

Comment below whether you would prefer text chat or video chat, topics of conversation, and any other ideas

!!! Comment & Upvote if interested and we'll set this up

Setup: Post on Ask HN for a "HN Chat at 8pm EST, Topic: _____"

Platform: tlk.io for textchat or appear.in for videochat?

# per videoroom: 6? 8? 10?

Moderators?

Guest speakers?

<comment><USER2> hello, not a bad idea. But i couldn't write on the webchat

<comment><AUTHOR> Strange - maybe there's a better alternative to tinychat?

<comment><USER2> This? [https://appear.in/](https://appear.in/) for videochat?

<comment><AUTHOR> that should work. we'll have to see how popular this idea gets.

shouldn't be too hard, given that many threads have 200+ upvotes daily</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Programmer at heart of tech workers' class action case wants to block $324M deal - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/programmer-at-heart-of-tech-workers-class-action-case-wants-to-block-324m-deal/

<comment><USER2> Prior discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7731756](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7731756)</comment>