Why It Might Be a Good Time to Revisit Ray Dalio's 1937 Analog - <AUTHOR> https://thefelderreport.com/2018/07/25/why-it-might-be-a-good-time-to-revisit-ray-dalios-1937-analog/ <comment><USER2> The Dalio points might be relevant but overlaying a chart on top of another and drawing analogues based purely on aesthetics is bad finance. There's a reason hedge funds aren't pitching clients on technical analysis based trading...it's because technical analysis is the astrology of the investment world.

Also, everybody seems to be scared about the yield curve, but the problem with using an inverted yield curve as an indicator is that...while it may be a good _recession_ indicator, _recessions are a bad indicator for market performance._

Capital Minded ([http://capitalminded.com](http://capitalminded.com)) did an interesting chart in one of their recent briefings that showed stock market performance through the last 9 recessions. I'll try and dig it up and edit this comment.

But essentially half of the time, the market is _net positive_ by a lot during recessions.

Hence why market timing is a fool's errand.

<comment><USER3> Didn't Paul Tudor Jones overlay charts to predict the 87 Crash?

Saw something like this in the Trader documentary:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Documentaries/comments/4cke1z/trade...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Documentaries/comments/4cke1z/trader_the_documentary_1987_rare_documentary/)

<comment><USER2> I've seen that used to sell a lot of cheesy "online trading school" e-courses but I can't speak to whether that was what ultimately drove him to make the trade.

This article seems to suggest Jones got the idea from a guy named Robert R. Prechter using Elliot Wave Theory: [https://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/13/business/13speculate.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/13/business/13speculate.html)

Prechter called the '87 crash using wave theory, but he also called for "the end of the great bull market" in 1995. Which was 5 years too early (ie. flat out wrong).

The lesson here is there's always somebody calling for the next collapse. When it inevitably happens each time, there's always a fresh stock of people you can point to who "called it." Whether this is genuine smarts or just random probability, is questionable.

<comment><USER4> "Prechter called the '87 crash using wave theory, but he also called for "the end of the great bull market" in 1995. Which was 5 years too early (ie. flat out wrong)."

He was in good company though - Greenspan's comment about "irrational exuberance" was in 1996, when the Nasdaq was around 1300 compared to its peak over 5000.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > The correlation between the S&P 500 over the past four years (black and > white candles in the chart below) and the four years leading up to the 1937 > top (blue candles) is roughly 94%.

Please tell me you didn't just correlate two price series :/

<comment><USER6> Why is that a bad thing?

<comment><USER5> Prices aren't stationary, which means (essentially) that they move around and compound on themselves. Correlation assumes that the two time series being correlated are stationary. If you want to correlate two price series, you do so using returns (e.g. +1%, -2%, ...), which are a stationary series. If you run a correlation on price series, you'll get silly high values like 94%.

<comment><USER7> I'd go further and suggest using changes in the logs of the price over time.

<comment><USER5> My understanding is that using the first difference of the log is just an approximation of % change that is in common usage primarily because it was computationally faster and because it's closed form is smooth. I could be wrong though. Is there some advantage to doing that that i'm unaware of?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This article predicts a coming crash of markets, essentially.

It attempts to make some parallels to history and show similar graphs from the past and today.

Of course, if this information were truly accurate, they wouldn't tell anyone and they'd just start shorting all the things...

<comment><USER9> Shorting and then telling the herd is exactly what's done. Once you take the short position, you want to scream at the top of your lungs and bring about that catalyst/trigger asap. Spread rumors, write hit pieces, etc... Observe the half-baked hit pieces on TSLA by Chanos and co.

When right, these people will dampen the bubbles and falls preventing catastrophe of greater magnitudes.

<comment><USER10> Chanos kept his short on TSLA secret for 3.5 years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> No, not 1937. Very different situation. The US was slowly coming out of the Great Depression with massive Federal spending and jobs programs. Union membership had doubled in the previous five years. Complete opposite to today.

<comment><USER12> We might be looking at a similar situation to the 1930s again, but with the USA closer to 1930s Europe and China closer to 1930s USA. China has had a recent speculative stock bubble. Also, the Smoot-Hawley Tariffs took effect in 1930 (we're just threatening trade war now).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Ray Dalio said the same thing in 1982, pushing him near bankruptcy to the point where he was forced to let go of all his employees—there's no doubt he learned since then but keep in mind he also made the same error in 2011.

[https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/15/ray-dalio-went-broke-and- nea...](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/15/ray-dalio-went-broke-and-nearly-shut- bridgewater-hedge-fund.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> That broken clock may never be right, he's been saying the same thing since 2011:

[https://twitter.com/EconomPic/status/1022191087589314561](https://twitter.com/EconomPic/status/1022191087589314561)

<comment><USER14> A broken clock is right twice a day, but a running-but-off clock can be wrong forever ;-)

</comment></comment><comment> fake-name Jesus, why does their garbage jerberscript break ctrl+click?

</comment><comment><USER15> With current tax cuts, I can see a delay in down turn compared to what happened before

<comment><AUTHOR> what was interesting was trump's comment the other day regarding paying down the debt using the gained taxes in gdp growth. I haven't done the math myself, but it's an interesting scenario to thing through if it's possible because I don't think it's one that many people are thinking about.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Where to find someone to review my code? - <AUTHOR> Exists some place like this? A place where experienced people help a young padawan to evolve his crafts? Just by providong feedback and direction.<p>How i find one? <comment><USER2> [https://codereview.stackexchange.com/](https://codereview.stackexchange.com/)

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://www.codementor.io/](https://www.codementor.io/) [https://www.airpair.com/](https://www.airpair.com/) [https://hackhands.com/](https://hackhands.com/) (not sure if still active) [https://officehours.io/](https://officehours.io/) (not sure if still active)

<comment><USER4> Has anyone experience with officehours.io? I like the concept and it sounds like something HN would typically be interested in but all previous posts about them didn't get any traction.

<comment><USER5> Officehours hasn't seen a lot of traction. That said, it's still running, and has some activity.

To our surprise, the biggest problem is in getting requests for advisors' time. Turns out many will share their experience; fewer feel comfortable asking for it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> [https://exercism.io/](https://exercism.io/)

Mentors give feedback on exercises in most mainstream languages. You can also mentor one track while being mentored in another.

<comment> nithya-p +1 Its been very helpful for me

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Go to Github and look at projects where there have been a few recent merged pull requests. Look at listed issues, the TODO file and so forth. Fix an issue and send a pull request.

After a few such patches, this will start getting you code reviews. People have much more time to review your patches to their code than they do to make suggested patches to your code.

<comment><USER8> I was just going through GitHub and couldn't find how to do "few recent merged pull request".

Any pointer?

<comment><USER7> Well let's say you know Kotlin well and program for the Android platform a lot. You can search Github for projects using the Kotlin language which contain the word Android, with the most stars like this:

[https://github.com/search?o=desc&q=language%3AKotlin+Android...](https://github.com/search?o=desc&q=language%3AKotlin+Android&s=stars&type=Repositories)

We go down six and see Google's android architecture components. We click on it and click on pull requests. We look at what is open and what is closed.

We see a month ago someone sent a pull request which was merged -

[https://github.com/googlesamples/android-architecture- compon...](https://github.com/googlesamples/android-architecture- components/pull/479)

If we go back more we can see other merged requests in the recent past.

This is a project with a "few recent merged pull requests". People sent a patch to the code in a pull request, and their branch was merged into the main code base.

While this example was Android and Kotlin, you can look at other languages you have more familiarity with, and other focuses. Projects with a lot of stars and/or forks are good candidates to look at, and you can sort by them. I did add the caveat recent though, as sometimes a project has been abandoned for a year or more, and there might be no active project owner to merge pull requests.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> [https://www.reddit.com/r/codereview/](https://www.reddit.com/r/codereview/)

</comment><comment><USER10> I'd also highly recommend to share a link to your code now. You're top on hn/ask, you'll get quite some folks looking at it and maybe someone is interested in helping you out.

<comment><USER11> Agreed. OP, if you are still able to edit your post, place a link to the one GitHub project of yours that you most want feedback on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It is difficult to get code reviews without working on a full-time job. I would suggest to read Pragmatic Programmer. It has some nice wisdom on how to write elegant code.

<comment><USER13> It can be difficult with a full time job too, unfortunately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I do that! I specialize in reviewing and auditing delivered work for entrepreneurs/investors/etc, which is a slightly different perspective than code reviews for developers themselves, but depending on your project and needs I can do that too.

I also offer ongoing mentoring for independent freelancers, if that's the track your on.

Contact info and and website in profile.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm surprised there hasn't been more mention of GitHub.

<comment><USER16> How is this going to help though? If you are starting out and have a few test projects on github it doesn't really happen that random people discover them and do a code review. It barely happens with bigger open source projects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> If you're ok to pay some money, try codementor.io. If you're stuck on some weird problem in a new language/framework that you're not able to google out of, you can hire some mentor there.

</comment><comment><USER18> [http://www.twoleaps.com](http://www.twoleaps.com)

It is centered towards university students but everyone is welcome.

</comment><comment><USER19> You can send me an email. I have 3 years of experience developing large scale as well as performant software, including work experience at two YC startups. Mail: email@example.com

Note: This opportunity window is only open for a short period before I start something else. Post which it will become less likely for me to respond frequently.

</comment><comment><USER20> It depends on your goal. If you are looking for performances, many times, the good team practice isn't the fastest, or simplest.

What about writing quick units tests and make your own comparisons? What is working nice for you, is probably the best way, anyway!

</comment><comment><USER21> Subreddit for the given language. Any kind local meetup for given language.</comment>


Show HN: Kopi – safeguard your email address and help manage the email firehose - <AUTHOR> https://kopi.cloud <comment><USER2> A few bits of feedback:

* I was confused by the idea of making a "keyword" (no explainer) and why I then had to "create account" (I thought I already made an account by verifying my email?)

* I love the concept of burner emails and i'm a happy user of 33mail.com for this purpose, particularly because you get [anything]@[someusername].33mail.com. I tend to sign up for things with an email like amazon.com.274652@[myusername].33mail.com

* using my own domain is critical since I can't be sure how long your service will be around for: if you shut down tomorrow at least all the emails won't bounce (which could be a nightmare)

* something I don't currently have a solution for is self-deleting forwarders. I'd like to be able to sign up with eg petition.30d@[whatever] and have it make a forwarded that will self destruct

* your story / background is really important for a service like this: who are you? Where are you based? Why do you care? I couldn't find this easily

* if you don't know it already check out Michael Bazzell's podcast on inteltechniques.com. I wouldn't have tried 33mail or MySudo without his thorough background research

Thanks for working on stuff like this!

<comment><AUTHOR> > confused by the idea of making a "keyword" ....

Yep. I'm working on a "How it works" section that'll walk through the whole process with screenshots, to hopefully make this clear before having to sign up.

> using my own domain is critical

Yep, it's on the roadmap: [https://kopi- cloud.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/kopiweb/pages/2...](https://kopi- cloud.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/kopiweb/pages/259489793/Kopi+Roadmap) I felt I really needed to get something out there to start gathering this sort of feedback. I'm trying to get to an "MVP" where "viable" explicitly means something people are willing to pay for. I'm not sure how many people really want that (even though I know I do personally). Kopi already supports it on the back-end - I run a personal domain on it separately from the ones users can register. But having the core support the feature and having it be ready for public consumption is a different kettle of fish. If you're interested in guinea-pigging something, drop me a line and I can probably get it going quite quickly - in a "do things that don't scale" kind of vein.

> something I don't currently have a solution for is self-deleting forwarders

Yep, both keywords and addresses in Kopi support an expiry date on the back end because I thought I wanted this personally. But it turned out I didn't really want it enough to even implement it. As opposed to the RSS forwarding that I smashed out in a weekend PoC for myself and now can't live without and desperately want to expand >.<

> your story / background is really important for a service like this

To be honest, I never thought about this at all. Your comment made me think, and it occurs to me I've actually been subconsciously avoiding associating myself with Kopi directly. I'm wary of having much stuff about myself on the internet. I guess I need to think carefully about this and pick a horse.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN, author here.

I've been scratching this itch for a while, and now I think it's ready to share: [https://kopi.cloud](https://kopi.cloud)

* Protect your real email address by handing out generated addresses that you can block in the (mobile friendly) web app with a single click. Sign up to mailing lists, product demos, etc. without fear.

* Mark email addresses to be viewed in your RSS reader - incorporate them into your downtime reading flow. I like to use this for notifications from StackOverflow, LinkedIn, mailing lists that get too chatty, etc.

* Uncouple from Google, etc by taking control of one of your fundamental contact points.

It's a paid service - currently priced at USD $2 / month with a free trial to test if it works for you.

What do you think HN - is $2 too much to ask? Kopi will never have ads or harvest people's data. I want to build a self-sustaining service that does enough useful things that people are willing to pay a minimal amount.

All feedback appreciated - especially suggestions for features you might be willing to pay for.

I don't have pre-existing accounts or reputation on sites like Product Hunt etc. - if you think Kopi might be useful to folks, please feel free to share.

Also an "Ask HN": I see a fair few comments lately where Kopi might be helpful to people. What's the HN community feeling about when it is or isn't Ok for someone to post a comment reply pointing out their product might be able to help? I've read [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), but it doesn't seem to address this question.

<comment><USER3> >is $2 too much to ask?

I'd gladly pay $2 to retire my army of throwaway emails, assuming the service remains as currently advertised. How many email domains do you have available to choose from, and how do you plan to deal with vendors potentially banning your domains?

This is more of a general thought, but privacy is another concern. There are plenty of companies who took customers' money and then sold their private data anyways. I'm more inclined to trust a startup like yours, but somewhere down the line I see this as a possibility. Is there ever a way for a customer to be sure a company isn't misusing their data? Are there any 3rd parties who can confirm/audit their practices?

>What's the HN community feeling about when it is or isn't Ok for someone to post a comment reply pointing out their product might be able to help?

I'm still new here, but from what I've seen it's probably okay as long as the context is relevant. I see people pushing startup solutions on a daily basis and it's usually cool stuff.

<comment><AUTHOR> > how do you plan to deal with vendors potentially banning your domains?

See other comment, but I do plan to implement a feature where customers can bring their own domain. There's also a roadmap item to expose keywords as "sub-domains" (i.e. "firstname.lastname@example.com"). Of course, subdomains won't help if they ban a top level domain.

Additionally, I use AWS Route53 and all domains are managed with a full "infrastructure as code" approach. Having lots of domains won't be any kind of serious overhead to manage, except for the 50cents/mth cost (and inconvenience to users, but that pain can likely be mitigated).</comment></comment></comment>


Infected by ideas - <AUTHOR> https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2020/05/infected-ideas <comment><USER2> A little strange that the word "meme" does not appear anywhere in the article.

<comment><USER3> Perhaps the co-opting of the word by popular culture has removed Dawkins' meaning from the vocabulary of the masses? That's a shame if so. It is a powerful concept.

<comment><USER4> Anecdotally I've had someone tell me that Dawkin's meme and internet memes are not the same thing because they wrote a graduate thesis stating so.

<comment><USER5> Demonstrating the power of memes in the process.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Type Erasure with Merged Concepts in C++ - <AUTHOR> http://aherrmann.github.io/programming/2014/10/19/type-erasure-with-merged-concepts/ <comment><USER2> I am very confused by the definition of type erasure which is being used in this work.

As a type theorist, my working definition is "terms which have types inside them are turned into terms which do not have types inside them"; this is a process which occurs after types have been checked/inferred, and before execution. This is crucially _not_ something that programmers do: if you take a polymorphic interface and wrap it up in one that doesn't quantify over types, that wasn't type erasure.

But perhaps I have simply misunderstood the code in this post; I'll admit it's been a while since I have read C++.

<comment><USER3> When I frist saw the title of Zach Laine's talk, I was confused too. Type erasure for me is what happens with generics in Java, i.e. type information is discarded after compilation. In this case, the type is still present at runtime. I saw this technique described as "type safe void*", which is paradoxal to me. However, I do get the idea behind this, but I think "type erasure" is a wrong name for it.

<comment><USER2> Yes, I think this stuff has nothing to do at all with type erasure. it's very confusing when a well defined concept gets appropriated for something that is very different, and totally unrelated.

<comment><USER4> Not sure about its exact origins, but in the C++ context the usage is pretty well established. AFAIK it was first used to denote the way std::function (then boost::function) is able to hide the actual type of a callable object while retaining type safety.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is pretty awesome – I'm writing a Python extension in C++ that piggybacks on top of NumPy dtype codes, and I _thought_ that I could "just" use templates to deal with dynamic typing. It proved to be waaaay less straightforward than that, and I had to hack through a lot of stuff with cumbersome macros, and wound up with a gigantic binary image as a result. Actually doing type erasure in C++ (which type erasure, as I understand, is like de rigueur in Java) cuts through all of that cruft… and so, to the refactormobile! Yes.

<comment><USER6> Care to blog about your refactor? I can sort of see how you could use type erasure combined with numpy dtypes but it would be great to see a concrete example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Noob question here. In a dynamic language, say python, would duck typing solve the greet_tom problem described here?

<comment><USER8> In C++, duck typing (structural typing) could be represented explicitly using type erasure (explicit in how you have to declare what the structure is) or using templates, which do not require declaration of the structure beyond the actual use in code (though concepts allow you provide structure requirements). Templates result in code being generated for each set of template arguments used. Type erasure does not - or at least not nearly as much (the constructors of the type-erased type almost certainly use templates). In this way, the type erasure approach most closely resembles the behavior of Python (virtual calls), while the template approach most closely resembles the style of Python (no declaration of structure required). There is no ideal way to get both the behavior and style of Python, but you can get pretty close by passing only one type of type-erased type to a function template - only one template function will be produced, which would make calls to virtual functions.

<comment><USER7> Amazing, advanced C++ is simply beautiful :P It is very interesting to learn about the hoops static type checking has to jump through.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: ChartBlocks – Create and share charts in a few clicks - <AUTHOR> https://app.chartblocks.com/tryme A hosted chart builder for quickly designing charts and embedding or sharing them. <comment><AUTHOR> Creator here - would love feedback about what kinds of features would make this a useful tool for you.</comment>


Google's Digital Creative Guidebook - <AUTHOR> http://www.creativesandbox.com/guidebook

<comment><USER2> It looks really impressive and I realize this is a creative showpiece, but is anyone else getting tired of all this "swiping" being forced upon users who aren't even using touchscreens? Between this and Microsoft's Metro swipes, it's getting a little ridiculous. I really hope this doesn't become an even bigger trend because it's horrible for usability.

<comment><USER3> Yes, especially considering that this particular piece isn't available on touchscreens. The click-and-drag experience is even worse with a laptop trackpad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was looking at the source when I noticed that the formatting of <http://creativeguidebook.appspot.com/js/fbk.min.js> actually spells out "WE ARE HIVE". [1]

[1] <http://www.wearehive.co.uk>

<comment><USER5> Perhaps I'm being thick here, but I wasn't able to find anywhere this is spelled out. Care to elaborate?

Also, fun fact: Copying/pasting the code in that minified file either results in weirdness or complete crashing from Notepad++, depending on the file encoding setting.

<comment><USER6> I also didn't find any references in the minified code, but clearly this was done by WeAreHive, a small boutique agency in London.

From their website:

 _"We were brought in by adam &eveDDB to work on interactive pop-up book designed to showcase the talent and innovation of Google's Creative Sandbox Gallery, and built entirely in HTML5 and CSS3."_

Correction: HTML5, CSS3 and.. Flash.

<comment><USER7> Where is the Flash?

<comment><USER6> I should retract the last line of my previous comment.

While the site does indeed has flash, it's just because the standard YouTube's player respecting previous selections (or lack thereof). I used to have YouTube as HTML5, but recently re-installed Chrome recently and I guess it went back to Flash as a default player.

So, kudos to the developers. No more "but"..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Google's recent websites for marketing - this and <http://www.themobileplaybook.com/> \- really stand out. Their production value is just amazing, and in case of Mobile Playbook, content is great too.

<comment><USER9> It honestly is amazing.

I'm a front end dev, and have worked on some big and gorgeous sites, but damn... I've been working on startups for a couple of years and feel like the web has moved massively in that time... who ever is making this stuff is amazing (although I assume this isn't a single man effort)

Who else is feeling inadequate ;)

<comment><USER10> me :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It appears your computer doesn't support CSS3 3D Transforms...

<comment><USER12> Yes, Google, that's because you've blacklisted my perfectly good graphics driver and broken it for me (Chrome/Linux/Nvidia). Well played. How about next time you give ME that choice?

(I know about the workarounds. It's not my machine, I don't have root or sudo, and I can't be bothered to find out where Chrome is hidden on this mess of NFS-mounted filesystems. It used to work, now it doesn't. Story of the web.)

<comment><USER13> There is a flag to unblacklist your graphics driver in chrome. I have had to use it when experimenting with WebGL.

Go to chrome://flags and enable Override software rendering list.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Cool, looks oddly familiar: <http://2012.beercamp.com/>

</comment><comment><USER15> Does it say anything about "Mobile First"?

I'm not able to get past "The mobile optimised Creative Sandbox is coming soon..." on my iPad.

<comment><USER3> Don't feel bad, on my Nexus 4 I'm redirected to a mobile subdomain and 404'd.

But you probably mean something along the lines of: "Increasingly, users are accessing the web from a mobile, therefore it's critical that your presence on the web is optimized for mobile devices. Studies have shown that 2/3rds of users will not return to a site that is not optimized for mobile."

That was floated next to a Flash video embed with no fallback. But here's the fallback on YouTube: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja7abx3OPOQ> It was easy to find once I opened the whole presentation in a desktop browser with Flash support, click-dragged back to the page, clicked the magnifying glass icon to spawn the popup, then the More Info tab, then the YouTube icon in the lower- left corner of the video to 'view on YouTube'.

I'd send you a link, but there isn't one. It's all one URL. And you're probably not part of the 1/3 that will return to a site that isn't optimized for mobile anyway.

<comment><USER6> :)

To add to the irony, it didn't work for me on Chrome v23. True, not the first time I see Chrome struggling to read fancy HTML5 sites (Google's Exquisite Forest was another one, and some areas on Chrome Web Lab are definitely better experienced with Firefox).

And yeah, I had to _install_ flash in order to run the videos on this site...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Great fun, but I'd quite like to link to a certain 'tab' and send it in an email. Sadly, it looks like I'll have to email instructions on how to get to that 'tab', which will be tedious.

</comment><comment><USER17> Jakob Nielsen would have a field day with this.

<comment><USER18> Correct me if I'm wrong, but the purpose of this isn't necessarily to be useable but rather attention grabbing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Wow, this is truly an eye opener. Not as fast as I would like to see (running chrome on MBP 15 retina), but it's so beautiful.

</comment><comment><USER20> All I can think is that they are violating Apple's patent on page-turning. So much for not being evil, Google...

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm getting a 404. Looks like this has been removed?

<comment><USER21> My bad, it's just 404'ing from mobile

<comment><USER3> It's their bad; phone tries to redirect to the mobile subdomain, while tablet gets the proper "mobile coming soon" placeholder.</comment></comment></comment>


Trailer for "first" crowdsourced movie - <AUTHOR>

Sorry if this comes across as spam, but I'm psyched that our little website hit one of its major goals.
When we launched Massify two years ago, our goal was to make a movie through the website - from picking the story to casting the film to the film's poster - everything happened and was decided on-line, through the site.
Well, we've done it and the film is finally coming out :)  The trailer is here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5P-2rXS5LS4
Will be in theaters Jan 9th-15th and then straight to DVD after that.
Big shout out to all the peeps in #startups :) <comment><USER2> The more people you have working on anything artistic, the more average the result is going to be. The possibility to crowdsource books has existed for thousands of years - all you'd need to do is make a group of people sit together in a room and try to collaboratively write such a book.

But it has never worked with that. And it will never work, because when too many people collaborate, they tend to stay safe. They don't do new things.

The only way to crowdsource is if you make several people work parallel on independent parts of the project, and then mix them together at the end. For example, you have 15 people who are working independently on the soundtrack for the movie, and then a panel of judges picks the best soundtrack. If you let people vote on the result, they won't choose the best, they will choose the most familiar.

Crowdsourcing can work, but you still need to specialize people within it, and then give them creative freedom free of criticism from others.

</comment><comment><USER3> A little surprised at the negativity in the comments. Most student films suck ass, too, but they're an important accomplishment nonetheless. Come to think of it, the majority of work that hackers churn out is shoddy and a reinvention of the wheel, but it's part of the process that sometimes produces something awesome. Even if this movie sucks, it's still an important accomplishment because they actually created something in a way that no one has before (to my knowledge).

Congrats to everyone who worked on this.

<comment><USER4> Doing something in a new way is not an important accomplishment, doing something in a better way is. If a new way of doing something is scientifically designed to produce crap, it's far from an accomplishment. It's a waste.

Having a large group of people vote on a movie is the easiest way to ensure a result that is mediocre for its budget range.

<comment><USER5> I disagree. Doing something in a new (and curious) way is definitely a worthwhile venture (if not an accomplishment). There is a very good chance that new way can inspire other people do something the better way. New ways inspire ideas in people, which is good.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I disagree with that. New is not, in and of itself good. Granted, good and new is better than good alone, but new itself is not as good as either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well, it looks just as awful as every low budget slasher Hollywood puts out these days. Do you count that as a success? If so, then good job.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I consider it an accomplishment.

I consider it an accomplishment because we opened up a career for a bunch of people who were outside the system. We made dreams happen and we're going to be doing it again and again and again.

I think it's pretty cool that this twenty-something kid from South Carolina has now produced his first film that is dropping in 800 theaters. He went from working at a gas station to sitting on a set watching his idea be brought to life by a crew of people. That's fucking awesome no matter how you slice it.

I also think it's cool that 4 people got cast into roles that would have otherwise been years away from them.

And I think it's an accomplishment that a plucky web designer was able to design a poster and have their work show up in theaters and on DVD covers.

As a bonus, it's an accomplishment that we were able to put a community around the process and do something really far outside of the system.

The end result is in the hands of many more people beyond those that worked on it through the site, so the process of getting there is much more important than the final destination.

I mean, dude, we made a movie with PHP. Who the fuck has done that?

So yeah, thanks, I think we did a fantastic job.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, it's neat the way the process worked, but I guess I'm unable to see the value in coming up with a novel process to produce more slasher-film garbage. Hollywood regurgitates this crap 10 times a year, except (judging from the trailer) with more polish. They don't need crowdsourcing to add to it.

There's an entire independent film system out there. Lots of plucky people from a gas station in Whereversville end up getting their movie produced that way (or even through the major studios occasionally) every year. Not every movie is written by a John August or a Josh Friedman.

Hollywood is still much more meritocratic than most of the rest of America, and if 4 actors are years away from such a role, there's a good reason for that. The system is flawed and imperfect, and ripe for change, but it still functions at a level where if anyone is so good that they can't be ignored, they'll end up on top. By removing the process entirely, you remove what little quality control remains.

I'm just not sure that making a movie with PHP is a good idea if more of the same crap that's been destroying the industry that some of us still love for 20 years is the result. Perhaps I'm just a curmudgeon clinging to some silly notion of the movie as America's greatest art form, but this looks like something we'd be better off without.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Congrats guys!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The site is here: <http://massify.com/></comment>


Show HN: Blanqd – Fill in the blanks. Engage with your news - <AUTHOR> http://blanqd.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Bummer...

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Author here. Will answer questions as best I can.</comment>


CPython internals: A ten-hour codewalk through the Python interpreter (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzV58Zm8FuBL6OAv1Yu6AwXZrnsFbbR0S <comment><USER2> I put together a ebook on the internals of the python interpreter. Get it for free at [https://leanpub.com/insidethepythonvirtualmachine](https://leanpub.com/insidethepythonvirtualmachine)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is awesome - I wish every large software project had something like this that was a prep-course to be able to start contributing meaningfully!

<comment><USER4> Not a prep course, but for example Redis has a very good source code overview here [https://github.com/antirez/redis#redis- internals](https://github.com/antirez/redis#redis-internals)

More remarkable is the fact that antirez updated the documentation in response to a post in Reddit. [https://www.reddit.com/r/redis/comments/3re0aw/any_pointers_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/redis/comments/3re0aw/any_pointers_towards_learning_internals_of_redis/) Thank you antirez! :-)

<comment><USER5> Also check out libpng's source.

[https://github.com/glennrp/libpng](https://github.com/glennrp/libpng)

<comment><USER6> Oh wow. That's beautifully done. Simple comments that explain clearly what the code is doing, pretty clear choice of variable names so little head-scratching going on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I feel like I should understand this but I don't: What names are looked up by name vs. by number in CPython?

That is, I think local variables and constants are looked up by a small integer which the CPython compiler produces by stack analysis.

But any globals must be looked up by name: functions, classes, modules, global variables. And methods on classes, attributes on classes.

I'd be interested to get clarity on that, and any pointers to relevant code/docs. Is this addressed in the videos? I have looked through the CPython source a lot, and even patched it, but the lookups are a little hard to follow. I've played with the "dis" module and code objects.

EDIT: Answering my own question, it seems like I was confused about the index into co_names, which is a small integer into a list of strings, and then the lookup of that string. So it's a 2-step process?

<comment><USER8> You can find out by using dis and checking what is load_fast, load_const or load_global. Attribute lookups are always just that as far as I know. The dot operator has a bunch of paths.

<comment><USER7> Yes thanks, I think that is right... LOAD_FAST and LOAD_CONST are by number, and used for local variables and constants.

LOAD_NAME, LOAD_ATTR, and LOAD_GLOBAL are all lookups by name, and are used for everything else: globals, object attributes and methods, modules, etc.

It seems that if Python had a static module system, all the lookups by name could be compiled down into lookups by number.

[https://docs.python.org/3/library/dis.html#python- bytecode-i...](https://docs.python.org/3/library/dis.html#python-bytecode- instructions)

<comment><USER8> I'm not clear on the status of PEP 509, but it could/should make LOAD_NAME and LOAD_GLOBAL approach the speed of LOAD_FAST. It'll set a flag on the globals dict (or any dict?) that trips when the dict is mutated. Non-mutated dicts can have fast repeated lookups.

[https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0509/](https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0509/)

Dictionaries got some sweet upgrades for v3.6.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here's the main page: [http://pgbovine.net/cpython- internals.htm](http://pgbovine.net/cpython-internals.htm)

</comment><comment><USER4> Do you need an understanding of compilers to go through this? What are the prerequisites?

<comment><USER10> No. They skip the python to bytecode compiler and go straight to the interpreter and runtime. More or less. You should know C.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Curious: At any point, is it explained why the Global Interpreter Lock is necessary? If so, I'll spend the time to watch.

<comment><USER12> It's not necessary, it was a design choice that made sense back in the 90ies. In a multithreaded environment you can lock at a fine grained level or on a coarse grained level - or you can crash, but let's ignore that as an option. Python chose coarse grained, giving up parallel interpreter computations, but gaining a lot of thread sync overhead. All attempts so far to remove the GIL have resulted in a (usually much) slower interpreter, but the latest attempt shows some promise and it's thinkable (but not guaranteed) that in a few years there will be an official GIL-less cPython.

<comment><USER11> Do you happen to have any papers about the current efforts to remove the GIL?

I love Python, and use it a lot for ETL type work, but if threading worked well, I could/would possibly use it for far more purposes.

<comment><USER13> Can you give an example where the GIL is really holding you back?

Because with multiprocessing and greenlets, 99.99% of concurrency problems are trivilially solved by current Cython.

<comment><USER12> actually GP, but it has held me back in the past.

I'm writing a transpiler that uses global information from codebases, and so it transpiles potentially hundreds of files at once and creates rather complex data structures. Compute bound for quite a while, so I tried speeding it up with multiprocessing (since multithreading would be useless). But with multiprocessing it took longer to serialize/deserialize the complex datastructures for each process, so I had to give up. Next time I have time for this I'd probably try to use Jython as a drop-in replacement and see whether I can get it to run with GIL-less multithreading.

<comment><USER14> It sounds like you have a couple of hot paths and are not optimizing them. I can't tell for sure without seeing any code but nothing in your post screams out "this will be slow" or "I need parallism/concurrency". Perhaps it's the data structures you are using?

<comment><USER12> I already did extensive profiling and performance improvements, at this point I'm quite sure that if I could do multithreading on my lab's 24 core Xeon Haswell machines I'd be getting a nice speedup.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> In the first video he stats that every language have a compiler.

A interpreted language does not need to be compiled into bytecode. Some languages are compiled to bytecode some are interpreted as is.

</comment><comment><USER16> It seems to be about Python 2. Too bad it's not about 3.

<comment><USER9> I watched this series more than once, it has so much details. I believe python-3 is not complete rewrite of python-2. So there must be lot of common code between them. So its useful regardless of its python-2 series or not.

<comment><USER17> > I believe python-3 is not complete rewrite of python-2.

Python 3 is not even remotely close to a Python 2 rewrite. Much changed UI- wise, but the core is very similar if not identical.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Between Python 2 and Python 3, what are are the differences in CPython?

<comment><USER19> that's a great question! i never did a diff of the source, but a good place to start is to diff ceval.c, which contains the main interpreter loop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Dr. PG has a Youtube channel? I never knew.

This looks awesome!

</comment><comment><USER21> Kinda painful to watch... thank god for the playback speed X 1.5</comment>


Ask HN: Is it a good idea to let investor/s view your ticket/task list? - <AUTHOR>

Would this have a positive effect for investors and the team? <comment><USER2> Oh god no.

That's a great way to make it not be used for real things

Trust is a key component among employees. Letting your investors into that mix will just lower the trust there, and get less useful stuff on the todo list.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. Why the hell would they want to meddle like that? Do they not trust you to Get Stuff Done? Do you not trust yourself?

If they do not trust you, it is possible that they view you as some kind of glorified employees and see themselves as your boss. They're not, they're just investors. It might be worth to give this relationship some thought and then discuss it with them somehow. You didn't start a startup to gain another meddling boss.

<comment><USER2> I think your comment fits any number of meddlesome investor scenarios! Archiving for later use

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm having trouble parsing the question.

When you say "investors", do you mean "potential investors we are currently courting", or "shareholders"?

If you mean "shareholders", the answer is "no". If they have a seat on the Board, then they are entitled to board-level information, but this wouldn't generally involve unfiltered access to your task list.

If you mean "potential investors", then the next question is: "as a one-time thing, or on an ongoing basis?" If you mean "on an ongoing basis", the answer is "no"-- there's no reason to give someone on the outside this kind of information regularly. If, however, you mean "as a one-time thing", then the answer could be "yes", as it might be a good way to give the investors a better view of what you are trying to achieve, and where you are in the process.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's a great test for whether you have helpful investors. If a good conversation comes out of it and you learn something, you have amazing investors. If they say, "You know how to interpret this better than I would, so go to it," that's fine. If neither of those happen, that's a warning sign.

So I would say show them before they invest and see what happens.

</comment><comment><USER6> 1\. Generally you would not want them to micro-manage your operations.

2\. If you are hard working and having good progress, it should not matter too much.

</comment><comment><USER7> I would love this and think it would be tremendously positive.

95% of the information shared in an organization and put onto a task list is about milestones that need to be hit, progress towards those milestones, and information that needs to be gathered to make this happen. All of this benefits from more helpful eyes on it. If your investor happens to know someone at an organization that your salesperson is trying to sell then they should help. If they have another portfolio company solving similar engineering problems, your teams should get together.

Most people are intelligent enough to be able to use this information to help and not try and micromanage. If they do try to do that, then you tell them to lay off and stick to helping people do their jobs instead of interfering.

Put it another way -- if you don't think your investors can handle this extra information and use it to be helpful, why in the world did you take money from them?

</comment><comment><USER8> I think it would depend on your investors. Do they have a background that would enable them to fully grok the task list and offer useful, actionable advice?

While I've never heard of investors getting involved down to this level of detail, perhaps in certain circumstances it could be beneficial for them to offer guidance on accomplishing certain tasks if they have the skillset to do so. I tend to doubt that anything good would come of this idea though.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Let me play devil's advocate.

The purpose is for them not to meddle (eek!) but to be more informed, (give better suggestions, know how close you are to a milestone, have less meeting)

For the team, itll be a good motivational tool and reinforcement mechanism.

ITs a bad idea if you have a bad investor, good idea if you have a good investor.

\---end of devil advocation (?)

<comment><USER9> It still seem unnecessary. I have a hard time believing that most investors would want to even spend the time to go through a bug/task list since most of those won't need suggestions. You shouldn't need to be told which bugs are important and how to implement them! On the flip side I don't see anything wrong with a high level overview of maybe the milestone objectives if they ask. But every single little bug and task if over the top.</comment></comment>


Computer viruses slow African expansion - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/aug/12/ethiopia-computer-virus

<comment><USER2> Not to turn this into a Slashdot thread, but I find it puzzling that the article fails to mention Linux till the final paragraphs, then quotes someone who is either being taken out of context or is a moron: "Khokhar says it's no magic solution. "If you suddenly had an increase in Linux or Mac use in China, you'd find those two platforms are just as vulnerable.""

Er, no: if you compile from the source or use well-known downloads, it's pretty damn unlikely that you're going to have the same problems you have getting CS 4 from a Warez site.

<comment><USER3> I think what the article is saying is that if Linux or Mac OS X becomes more used, then you will begin to see viruses pop up on those platforms. Of course, I would argue that it's harder to find/write/distribute exploits for a unix system than windows.

<comment><USER4> This was clearly true of windows pre-vista. Post-vista windows, it may not be so much. The vista security model is a very different beast (assuming the same quality of user).

<comment><USER5> Interestingly, for the average user, Ubuntu provides a much more centralized software repository than either Windows or OS X. Not to say that malware targeting that platform doesn't exist; but it's more likely to be aimed at Firefox than the base OS. It's much harder for a non-computer-savvy person to screw up a modern linux desktop than any version of windows.

But basically what I hear you saying is that Vista was an attempt to catch up to the safety and security of the linux desktop...

<comment><USER4> In many ways Vista surpassed Linux. Linux has very rough process/file levels (user, group, root). Vista allows you to have your processes (or root's processes, IIRC) not be able to write to your files.

Which is a big win when a user level process (e.g. firefox) gets hosed (which can happen quite easily to things like browsers).

Now this is wholy for the OS. The user issue you bring up still exists (and I don't think Microsoft can fix that one).

<comment><USER6> > Which is a big win when a user level process (e.g. firefox) gets hosed > (which can happen quite easily to things like browsers).

Run Firefox under a different user account, with limited access to the system. Problem solved.

<comment><USER4> It's not solved. How do you download a file? How do you let it download _this_ file, but not _that_ one?

Firefox isn't built to understand that concept, so it takes more than just denying it write privledges to solve.

<comment><USER6> You download to the dedicated users home directory, and then you make your main user part of the same group as the firefox-user. I didn't get the last part of your question? Why wouldn't you want to download _that_ file?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> What an interesting problem. Unfortunately, the problem is not the anti-virus software, but a general lack of technological knowledge, which is expected for a developing country.

Moving to a "more secure" OS (i.e. Linux) would be a good solution. This will result in computing legitimacy (less pirating) and viruses. I doubt the normal student or government worker (or anyone, really) need that super-advanced feature on Microsoft Word.

Yet unfortunately, once again, there are bigger problems in Africa than lack of technology. Fix the government corruption problem first, and things will start falling into place.

<comment><USER4> I don't use office software much. However, Word is much, much nicer than OpenOffice. Even for basic editing. If people are doing almost anything more complicated than the basic text document, they can use the well-researched UI.

Whether that is worth the price tag is up to them.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> There are a litany of economical, cultural, geographical, and other issues at play here. Plenty of opportunities for enterprising startups to solve problems.

<comment><USER6> Unfortunately not much money to gain from it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Just like Aids....</comment>


Match.com buys OKCupid - <AUTHOR> http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/02/iacs-matchcom-buys-okcupid-online-dating-site.html

<comment><USER2> Still trying to figure out why HN is obsessed with this story...

<comment><USER3> OkCupid is free and has railed against paid dating services for ever ... To see them sell to one of them (notably their main rivals) is just mindblowing.

<comment><USER2> I know, I just feel like I've seen 5 stories in the last 12 hours on it...seems a little excessive.</comment></comment></comment>


JetBrains: The State of Developer Ecosystem in 2017 - <AUTHOR> https://www.jetbrains.com/research/devecosystem-2017/ <comment><USER2> Rust went into "Other"? :(

<comment><USER3> They don't sell a Rust IDE.</comment></comment>


Will we ever see Bitcoin at $1,000 again? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/zapchain-magazine/will-we-ever-see-bitcoin-at-1-000-again-54a43a154812

<comment><USER2> No.</comment>


North Korea Changes Currency - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125975276400572645.html <comment><USER2> In Poland (and I imagine other socialist countries), people who made a bunch of money took pains not to get stuck with cash, for exactly this reason.

Since it was illegal to own foreign currency, a popular solution was to buy and store grain alcohol, on the assumption that no conceivable change in political system would ever make booze lose its value.

The approach had two main drawbacks - you needed a fair amount of space to store large quantities of ethanol, and you had to safeguard the storage room against the depredations of local aficionados.

<comment><USER3> The automatic response of the North Korean government would be introducing a prohibition. Or maybe that already happened, who knows.

<comment><USER4> They don't even need to go that far. They can just ration supply, forbid stockpiling and fix the price to artificially low levels.

This was occurring as recently as last year all over the world when commodity/food prices spiked. Anywhere you see black markets, you can find rationing and price fixing nearby.

<comment><USER5> The reverse is often true as well. Anywhere you see rationing and price fixing, you can find black markets nearby, assuming the distortion is high enough.

<comment><USER6> Yes, seems like trying to stop free markets from developing is just like trying to hide information or keep a theatre free of ringing phones. It can be tried, and sometimes even successful, but gosh it's a lot of work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This seems like one of those hypothetical microeconomics questions... you know, the ones that are never really supposed to happen.

"It also reported instances of wealthy people from cities rushing to rural areas on Monday in hopes of buying commodities with the old currency before people in those areas heard about the exchange process."

</comment><comment><USER8> I wouldn't rule anything out in the DPRK.

As an example, here's Juche, the official state ideology, summed up in an exchange:

Peasant: "I am hungry. I need bread".

Soldier (part of the supposed "revolutionary" class): _points gun at peasant_. "Are you hungry now?"

Peasant: _gulp_ "No".

Stalinism to its logical conclusion.

</comment><comment><USER9> what's happening in north korea is an abomination of human rights infringements. i think most westners, especially those who's countries never experienced communism, can't really imagine/comprehend daily life there. I watched this documentary on North Korea a while ago and found it very interesting [<http://educatedearth.org/video.php?id=2642>]

<comment><USER10> The background music and production reminds me of Lost. Maybe Lost is actually based on North Korea. It wouldn't be all that far fetched.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> holy crap, did a government legally just steal all the money from it's people?

<comment><USER12> What if people disagree and just keep using the old currency among them ?

Yeah, I guess they'll get shot.

Also, the mention of "closed-circuit system that feeds into speakers in homes and on streets but can't be monitored outside the country" reminds me so much of Brave New World/1984/Big Brother stuff.

<comment><USER13> Re: 1984

My first thought was "How wicked!" Second thought was "Hey, but we have those thingies in Russia too!"

There is a wired radio system in Russia, established way back in the Soviet era, which transmits three radio channels. Simple receiver can consist basically of a loudspeaker and variable resistor as a volume knob, while more complicated receiver can receive one of 3 channels. There's a simple receiver on the wall next to me as I write this. Interestingly, I couldn't find any pictures of my exact model, so here's my (lame) attempt: <http://www.flickr.com/photos/22022497@N04/4154137046/> There's another, 3-channel one, of the latest incarnation (late 80's or early 90's) in the kitchen. When my dad bought it, I remember everyone coming to our house thinking it's a VCR, so that should say something of its size and form factor. It still sits up there near the ceiling mainly because of its large luminiscent clock on the front panel. We don't turn these radios on except maybe twice a year out of curiosity :)

These things fit the description "closed-circuit system that... can't be monitored outside the country" if by that you mean "wired"

<comment><USER14> What do they play on these channels?

<comment><USER13> Music and various programes; nothing special.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> That is very sad and reminds me of Soviet Union collapse. Old people who saved their entire lives had bags full of money that suddenly became worthless ( well some used it as a toilet paper...). It's a recurring theme in Russian movies from 90's , bag of useless cash.

PEOPLE ! The most important thing in your life is your close ones.

</comment><comment><USER16> This reads like an Onion news story. If only it was...

</comment><comment><USER17> Vaguely similar currency-expiring policies have been suggested for the US, as well. See this column from Harvard's Gregory Mankiw in April of this year:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/business/economy/19view.ht...](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/business/economy/19view.html)

</comment><comment><USER18> Very similar to the Pavlov monetary reform in the Soviet Union - I was just a kid but I can remember that:

"Within hours of the stunning announcement, massive lines had formed in the bitter, early-morning cold, waiting for banks to open. "People are afraid," says Vladimir Kuzmichov, a retired engineer nervously fingering his cash notes outside a Moscow bank. The Soviet state bank had just proclaimed that all 50- and 100-ruble notes would be banned and saving accounts would be partly frozen. Each person could exchange up to 1,000 rubles, the equivalent of less than four months' average pay, for small-denomination notes."

<http://www.businessweek.com/archives/1991/b319837.arc.htm>

</comment><comment><USER19> WTF? - "North Korea's official news agency, TV station and major newspapers, which are monitored in South Korea and Japan, by late Wednesday still had not announced the currency exchange. Instead, authorities continued to transmit information through a closed-circuit system that feeds into speakers in homes and on streets but can't be monitored outside the country."

Can we just buy the country and let the leaders go into exile?

</comment><comment><USER20> This illustrates why government should not be trusted with the control of money. What N. Korea is doing is massive theft, but so is the issuing of any fiat currency. The Federal Reserve is just a better thief than N. Korea because it steals at a slower, smoother rate, thus not totally killing the incentive to produce.

</comment><comment><USER21> How different is this from officially devaluing the currency _in situ_? This has been done more than once in the USA (see [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_States_do...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_States_dollar) )

<comment><USER3> Very different. This is capping, not just devaluating. If you're devaluating, let's say, by 10%, if you had $10 you will have $9 (it will be still $10 but it will be only worth $9), if you had $100 you will have $90, if you had $1000 you will have $900, etc.

In this case, they're capping as well at $40. If you had $10 you will still have only $9, but if you had $100 (or $1000 or a million) you will only have $40. That's it. That's not just taxing wealth, it's taking all the wealth away.

<comment><USER21> So it's like devaluation, but with a "progressive" twist?

<comment><USER3> Well, yeah, infinitely progressive. It's like if the tax rate above a range was 100%.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Maybe I'm totally missing something, but how exactly do they expect their citizens to buy food now? If everyone suddenly has $40 and that's it, that sounds an awful lot like an awful lot of people are going to starve to death.

<comment><USER23> Well, there are several levels of answer to your question. First of all, there are no currency exchange there and people are not allowed to have a foreign currency (USD). So this "equivalence" is established with black market exchange rate which represents not the parity of prices of commodities but the (high) value of USD for the back market participants. It is normal since the black market participants are involved into contraband and they need foreign currency badly. So for $ 40 in black market exchange rate you can get a lot of food there. The second level of the problem is that the food/goods market there is government-controlled and for some goods there is no market at all - they are centrally distributed by the executives. So the amount of savings is not directly connected with the consumption level. And the next point is that the person who have a job and a regular paycheck doesn't need to have a lot of savings in order not to starve. As I can understand the social contract of the socialists' states is the lack of unemployment, so anyone is employed even if his work is not needed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Given that it's happened before there, I'd favor commodities to currency. It's hasn't been a bad strategy when your government is creating new money at rapid rate and calling it quantitative easing either.

<comment><USER2> The hard part is choosing the commodity, and figuring out how to store it. If you _really_ think all hell is going to break loose, to the extent that the dollar might one day lose a bunch of its value overnight, then you are limited to stuff you can store in your own house, with all the attendant security problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This only affects paper cash though, right? So assuming they have most of their value in a bank, savings, stock, physical assets, or whatever it is they do in "DPRK," then they should be sort of okay.

But I have nooo idea how the banking thing works in DPRK. For all I know, everyone's "bank" is a box filled with cash. Which would make this currency switch suck a lot.

<comment><USER2> Stock? Bank accounts? What planet do you live on?

<comment><USER25> I live on Earth. Also, North Korea uses the Korea Exchange: [http://www.mapsofworld.com/north-korea/economy/stock- exchang...](http://www.mapsofworld.com/north-korea/economy/stock- exchange.html)

My point is that North Koreans, like anyone else in the world, communist or capitalist, have very little of their value in the form of paper currency. Whether it be goats, rice, gold, stock, bank accounts, etc.. They may value themselves based on a nationally recognized currency (the won?), but that doesn't mean that most of their value is in the form of liquid cash.

The theory of currency recognizes the value of a currency based on its level of trust (to be paid back). Soo in a country like North Korea (ESPECIALLY), citizens probably rarely maintain their worth in the form of paper currency. Because they don't trust it (whether they consciously realize it or not). If Americans don't trust the US dollar, you can imagine that North Koreans don't trust their own currency. Educated or not, brain washed or not, that's common sense.

Another example. I personally trust the American dollar very much. But how much do I have in the form of liquid cash? About $50 in my wallet. The rest of my worth is in assets, stock, savings, 401k, car, tv, intellect, etc. Just not liquid cash. So if America changed currencies all of the sudden, I'd say, "Rats, I just lost $50."

Sooo, again, my point is that this probably doesn't change much for North Koreans. Especially since most of them probably have very little personal wealth anyway (paper cash or other forms of value).

Heavens.</comment></comment></comment>


Melissa Di Donato Appointed CEO of SUSE - <AUTHOR> https://www.suse.com/c/news/melissa-di-donato-appointed-ceo-of-suse/ <comment><USER2> There's a lot of misunderstanding here about what "Independent Company" means. In the business world, it's understood as "not having shares that are traded on the stock market". So, SUSE is "independent" since it has never IPO'd; while RedHat isn't "independent" as you and I can buy shares in it.

See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_business](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_business) for confirmation: "An independent business is a business that is free from outside control. It usually means a privately owned establishment, as opposed to a public limited company, the latter of which is owned by investment shares traded in the stock market."

</comment><comment><USER3> From the end of the press release:

``About SUSE

SUSE, the world's _largest independent_ open source company''

"Wait, isn't RedHat the lar... oooh, someone at SuSE marketing is on the ball."

<comment><USER4> It's right in the beginning of the press release and i find this marketing BS so unbearable that i didn't read any further. It's the typical BS i come to expect from venture capital owned companies (i've heard that all the time when i was working for one).

And how is Suse "independent" when it's owned by some swedish private equity group? See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EQT_Partners](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EQT_Partners) And, interestingly, see the german wikipedia entry for much more companies owned by EQT. [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/EQT_(Unternehmen)](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/EQT_\(Unternehmen\))

How is Suse independent, again?

<comment><USER5> My interpretation is that they and Red Hat are just as "independent" as each other. That is they can do whatever they want as long as they keep making money...but if they don't then they can and will be course corrected by their respective owners.

<comment><USER4> So, how is that independent? And i guess, that if both are equally "independent" then RedHat would be larger one, wouldn't it?

And what does "largest open source" mean, anyway? More employees? More customers? More revenue? More contributions to open source?

<comment><USER6> Biggest in terms of market cap afaik.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I came late to linux in heavy use, being a BSD person of old. Commercialized BSD exists but the foundation(s) behind the major flavours are clearly NFP models.

So as a late linux adopter, in Debian, I am wondering why people see value in SUSE and RedHat since all my experience has been the SLA value is .. dreck. No problem we had with a RH kernel or OS behaviour was fixed inside our $SLA$ in the EL release we had. All problems were either WONTFIX or re-install later EL.

Debian update/upgrade appears to work. Fixes get applied. What am I missing? If they want to own SAP-ON-LINUX or ORACLE-ON-LINUX why should I worry?

I am more concerned about GPL and ZFS these days, than commercial backing: I dont think it actually adds value to me. (20+ nodes in a research cluster, cloud)

<comment><USER8> I can't comment on the value of SLAs, as I was never directly involved (but what I heard is pretty much what you mention). What I can tell you, however, is that there are companies where higher-ups won't agree to an IT proposal if it doesn't include commercial support, whether useful or not. Company policy mandates it so it gets done.

<comment><USER7> Yea. Probably thats how we wound up there. We bought off risk, by spending money that it turned out didn't resolve the risk when it hit, but because we TRIED we got to shift blame, by not owning "you broke it you fix it" to the management view.

<comment><USER9> I know people that work at SuSE, in a nutshell, they are like Redhat in that they don't really provide linux only, they provide ways of integrating it into your business.

That is where Debian just isn't going to compete. And that is why SuSE exists, they're selling much more than linux.

<comment><USER7> That integration can be super-useful. If you "get" SAP or "get" salesforce or whatever, having a vendor who can talk vertically integrated helps.

But right now, I think we're all staring at alpine in kubernetes asking if the old giant unix model is the one we want.

<comment><USER8> > But right now, I think we're all staring at alpine in kubernetes asking if > the old giant unix model is the one we want.

I think "all" is a bit of an exaggeration though :). Besides, _something_ is hosting all those Alpine containers, and while I'm pretty far removed from this field, I hear it's not Alpine most of the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It will be interesting to see how things change now - both SUSE and RedHat have gone from engineering leadership to business based leadership.

While there was a lot inside of SUSE that could have used more business focus, the ethos of the company is what made it so successful.

<comment><USER10> I don't believe that it will be interesting. It will be a catastrophe. For SUSE much worse than for RedHat. Hopefully this UK lead will be over soon.

</comment></comment><comment> W-Stool Who are SUSE's main customers these days? Self hosted SAP shops?

<comment><USER11> Anecdotally, you're correct SAP shops and I have seen a lot of Linux on z Systems running SLES.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> My first introduction to self installable Linux OS was with SUSE Linux. I still remember my summer break of 2001 when I spent most of the time installing and configuring SUSE Linux on my laptop. At the time, finding certain drives/applications to run few things were really hard compared to Windows but man that was fun. I remember being able to install sound driver and do some cool things. Nowadays, everything is pre-packaged and no fun :)</comment>


Ask HN:  Are you a rebel? - <AUTHOR>

One would expect a lot of people on HN to be rebels, but one might wonder from the comments on this site whether this is so.  For example, there is surprisingly little criticism of computer science, social networking, employment, etc.
It seems that there are few true rebels as most people try to be part of one group or another.  For example, I would not consider people who are part of a counterculture to be rebels if they are part of a large group.
Are you a true rebel? <comment><USER2> No. I refuse to conform to expectations of non-conformism. (And you may all be individuals, but I'm not.)

</comment><comment><USER3> If your definition of being a rebel means not being "part of one group or another", then I would speculate that the number of "true rebels" on HN is zero.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, not part of a large group.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > One would expect a lot of people on HN to be rebels

Why?

<comment><AUTHOR> Because entrepreneurship involves rejection of authority -- namely a boss.

<comment><USER5> Most people on HN are neither rebels nor entrepreneurs. They have drifted here from other social news sites suffering from the Eternal September effect.

In fact, I'd argue that this site has far more rigorous unwritten social rules than other sites. It feels like a priggish country club at times. The average HN user is concerned more with politeness than insightfulness.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't think your definition of 'true rebel' is really that robust. A rebel is not a someone who refuses to be apart of anything. A true rebel is someone who acts of their own convictions, and those convictions happen to conflict with the hierarchical structure the person is acting within.

I was definitely a rebel for a big part of my life; my convictions haven't changed, but I can barely call myself a rebel now.

I was a raging atheist in an east-texas public (read: baptist) high school. I was a catalyst in the conversion quite a few kids away from their church, and the catalyst for many dozens in getting high their first time. I didn't do it because I hated the establishment, though I did hate the establishment. I did it because a) I thought religion was bad, and b) I thought getting high was good.

I was a successful rebel in that regard, not only in my endeavors, but I benefited socially from it as well. I had hot girlfriends and got a superlative at prom, people liked me etc.

Now, ten years later, my convictions are largely the same. But I live in the northeast. Atheism is boring when everyone around you isn't a raging theist. Being a pot evangelist doesn't really make sense to me anymore.

However, my convictions with regard to politics and science are often severely removed from the general zeitgeist. In that regard I am still a rebel. However, since I don't actually function in any visceral way inside a hierarchy that those convictions conflict with day to day; I don't really feel like or consider myself a rebel like I did back in the day.

With regard to seeing a lack of rebels here; I am not surprised at all. Not because I don't expect self-directed people here (as all true rebels are), but because of what is being discussed. Computer science especially doesn't leave too much room for rebels. Sure there are design elements that people don't like (I love web2py but pyhtonistas seem to hate it); but that is hardly 'rebellious.' Computer science is such an objective `thing` that if you disagree with 'everyone' you are probably wrong, rather than a rebel.

As far as employment: ???. There are more people per capita here than nearly anywhere with people taking an alternative approach into making money. How often to you hear 'degrees are worthless, if you can code you can get paid' on here?

Social networking, I have to somewhat agree with you here. I am somewhat surprised by the lack of foresight people show with their willingness to divulge their lives to facebook. There are however many of us who opt-out; I'd guess a larger-than-average population here than elsewhere do opt out.

But in general, a rebel is not one who is 'not part of a large group.' That is a loner. Or a nihilist, or a pariah. A true rebel is one who exists within a hierarchy and acts in ways that defy the implied or explicit authority of the hierarchy. Not being part of a majority is only incidental; a true rebel who convinces 51% of people to be on their side no longer has anything to rebel against.

tl;dr: I used to be a rebel but not anymore. People don't come across as 'true rebels' on here as often as they are due to what is being discussed.

<comment><AUTHOR> By social networking, I was referring to its use in Silicon Valley -- as opposed to merit alone.

And one can criticize computer science based on its claim that it is the best way to study computing.</comment></comment>


Sheryl Sandberg sells 946K shares for $26.2M gain - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2012/12/07/sheryl-sells/ <comment><USER2> There is a VERY large chance cap gains taxes are going up next year as part of the "fiscal cliff"

Stock changes consistent with this, and executive stock sales consistent with this, _mean nothing_.</comment>


Java Array - <AUTHOR> http://www.virtualspecies.com/2015/03/java-array.html <comment><USER2> The author gets a few names wrong. "The length of an array can be determined through the length variable of the array object[...]". `length` is a property and not a variable, otherwise it would be writable with the suggested semantics of changing the length.

They also use a for-loop with a counting variable instead of the iterator pattern. The latter might be preferable because the array index is not actually important for that example.

Otherwise the article is fine for beginners.</comment>


The Economics of Testing Ugly Code - <AUTHOR> http://www.1729.com/blog/EconomicsOfTestingUglyCode.html

<comment><USER2> The author mentions that changing tested code decreases its value. The steepness of this curve varies greatly depending on the language. The strong guarantees of a language like Haskell mitigates the risk and so ensures a less dramatic drop.

But what I find more alarming, is that the author completely misses the human side from the perspective of programmers: a good programmer that is forbidden from changing ugly code will become frustrated and will either become less productive or leave.

If there are developers that don't care about ugliness and are very productive, then I am in big trouble (since they would be better hires from a business perspective than me). However, there is quite a strong connection between the caliber of a developer and his or her aesthetic sense in code.

If one looks at projects like Squeak, it's clear just how much good developers can achieve with a relatively small amount of well crafted code. A lot of good programmers are unable to reach this kind of potential because of the coding tar pits they have to negotiate every day at work.

<comment><USER3> "The strong guarantees of a language like Haskell mitigates the risk and so ensures a less dramatic drop."

Haskell's strong typing _may_ help prevent some bugs, but Haskell's evaluation model means that even a slight change (literally one character) can change the performance characteristics of your program, in space and time, by orders of magnitude. Because of that, I've found that Haskell programs require _more_ testing than Python programs, to ensure there are no edge cases that have space leaks.

I am a fan of Haskell for some classes of programs (like compilers and inference systems) where you can spend a lot of time perfecting a strongly- typed data model that is fairly unchanging--one where "Big Design Up Front" makes sense. But, I cannot say that Haskell's strong typing is always a net plus when the data model needs to be frequently updated. In Haskell you often have to write extra code, or code that is more abstract in order to get programs to typecheck. Then, you still have to write almost the same kinds of unit tests that you would have to write if you were using any other language. With Python or Ruby you can skip the type system workarounds, which often means you have less code to deploy. I am a big believer that less code == better code.

Dealing with ugly code is part of being a good developer. I believe you should leave ugly code around until you need to change it. When you need to change it, you can rewrite it to make it more beautiful, but only if that beautification facilitates the improvement you were originally tasked with making. But, it is usually a bad idea to go around tidying up code for the sake of tidiness.

Also, think about this: if the original code is really unclear, then what confidence do you have that you understand it well enough to rewrite it correctly; if the code is clear enough to be easily rewritten, then why does it need to be changed?

<comment><USER2> My Haskell experience is too limited for me to have experienced performance changes resulting from small code changes. OCaml has a fairly predictable performance model and a language which combines aspects from OCaml and Haskell (this is the point where someone shouts "Scala!") will go a long way to reduce brittleness in the code and won't require much testing for unexpected performance issues.

I thought more about the original article yesterday and realized that - regardless of the language one uses - the author made a mistake by implying that the quality peak is equally high as one moves to the right of the graph. If by "beautiful code" we mean well designed code, then changes will have far less far-reaching effects. The quality peak will be lower (relative to the graph) and hence the descent induced by changes, less steep. And this happens because as you rightly state, less code == better code.

If a company needs to be agile (in the general sense of the word), their software should also be easy enough to adapt to changing circumstances. Given that good code allows for such changes, the extra effort to produce good code pays for itself.

On the other hand, for a piece of software that is at the end of its lifetime, there is little of sweeping changes. Beautification of end-of-life code is a bad use of time.

You are right that a programmer should be willing to endure some ugly code. Anything which encodes real world relationships (which are complex and messy) will have some ugliness in it. A programmer which rails against this makes life difficult for everyone around. But this can be taken too far and I have known people that are too conservative in this regard; this made the software unnecessarily hard to maintain and the programmers unhappy [1].

The answer to your last statement is that if you have to modify barely understandable code, then it is worth refactoring (and as a last resort, rewriting) it, even if you don't understand every aspect of it. If you don't you will likely spend more time trying to paste your code in somewhere in the hope that it will work and in so doing you the crufty monster will get even bigger and harder to maintain (and you don't gain an understanding of the code which is a very valuable asset to the owners of the code).

[1] No company has a legal obligation to keep employees happy. But such companies can expect mediocrity if they're lucky but probably much less.

Edit: I obviously don't know HN's markup. Fixed italization.

<comment><USER4> Surround phrases to be shown in italics with asterixes...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting. I'm not entirely sure how well the argument holds, but it does put forward some interesting points.

One of the weaker aspects of this article is that the author doesn't define "value". I'll take a stab at it: for a business, the value of its software is how much money it can make or save from it. There are two components to this value, an immediate, obvious one ("can we sell/use it tomorrow?") and a long term, less obvious one ("can we still sell/use it in two year's time?").

The graphs and explanations, I think, apply fairly well to the "immediate value", but less so to the long-term value. The long-term value of code you can keep evolving, cheaply, to meet user demands for years, is much greater than that of ugly code that will become a viscous nightmare within a few months. Immediate value is very important too, but generally is focused on at the expense of long-term value, particularly by non-developers, who aren't fully aware that code can reach a point where it's so nasty that the only solution is a bullet to the head and a rewrite.

So I think the problem is more one of making the long-term value of beautiful code clearer, rather than one of flattening spikes. The curve to the right of the spike rises much faster and much higher than in the graphs, and it's worth moving there if you have people who are capable of it.

<comment><USER6> I think the graphs, bu fault of 'value' not being defined, are showing a hybrid of the long-term and immediate value of the code. Take, for example, a strict refactoring of the code, in the sense that only implementation is being changed and no features are being added. The immediate business value of that action is near zero, but the long term value is more. What the graphs point out is that, due to manual testing and production environments rigorously stress-testing a particular, perhaps brittle, snapshot of the code, the amount of refactoring and beautification of the codebase required to provide a baseline level of long-term value equivalent to the spike is much higher. Yes, the code will be cleaner, and easier to maintain and update for the future, and the resulting spikes from testing and production deployment will be that much higher, too.

Take a look at the very last graph. I would posit that once the code is beautified and a more flexible version deployed, non-source readers would see another spike at the end, but from the original spike, it's hard to justify the valley of little incremental value.

<comment><USER7> You're both missing something important. It's who decides on how to define "value" and in most cases, it's management, and it's almost invariably short- term value that wins out.

The reason?

Most organizations believe that software engineering is easy, and therefore software engineers are as interchangable as cogs. Most corporations don't understand or value experience.

<comment><USER5> I'm not missing that. That's the gist of my comment...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> But testing also reduces ugliness: The act of making code unit testable makes it less ugly, because unit testing requires access to a portion of the code in isolation, thus making the code more modular. Modular code is less ugly (or so I claim).

That's an intriguing idea about DSLs enabling customers to see the ugliness. But why would customers look? (A parallel is non-lawyer customers looking at legal documents for beauty) Does anyone have experience with DSL's for non- developer customers? eg: SQL is a DSL for business analysts - but they develop in it, not just look at it.

 _This form of testing is called production._ :)

<comment><USER9> _Does anyone have experience with DSL's for non-developer customers?_

I did that on one project. It didn't work. The response we got was "But I'm not a programmer." We replied, "But you don't understand! This is not a general-purpose programming language, it's a high-level domain-specific scripting language!" The response we got was, "But I'm not a programmer." I learned a lot from that experience.

<comment><USER10> Yeah... but in my company, there are many cases where job positions have spontaneously materialized that are essentially programming positions, but that we have "con" someone into doing it even though it really is programming. The users are, for all intents and purposes, programmers... but we have to keep them from finding that out!

<comment><USER9> Surely you're not going to get very good programmers that way?

<comment><USER10> But they're not _technically_ programmers. I'm talking about applications that require extensive customizations to be useful. There's a lot of cases where people are having to trick people with the business knowledge into doing the configuration for them because the 'real' programmers can't or won't do the work. _This_ is where we should be looking at applying DSL's.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> So in summary: don't write ugly code, because once you do it's permanent.

<comment><USER12> You missed a very important point: What makes it permanent (or at least provides much of the inertia) is the risk of reintroducing old bugs and not wanting to manually test all over again. _Automated testing does not have this problem._

In practice, of course, this depends on how badly the testing framework is entangled with implementation details, rather than testing via a public interface. If making changes means having to rewrite 90% of your automated tests, you haven't gained much.

(The article has a couple other potential threads in it, as well, but that seems like the main idea to me.)

<comment><USER2> "Automated testing does not have this problem."

Good point. I mentioned in another comment here that some languages (like Haskell with its strong, static type system) mitigate this problem. And for languages without static type systems of this nature, automated testing can produce the same effect (which is not to imply that tests for Haskell programs are useless).

<comment><USER12> Look like I simultaneously replied to your comment with the same comment you were posting on mine. :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Mythbusting Competitive Programming – You don't need to learn it - <AUTHOR> https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/mythbusting-competitive-programming/ <comment><USER2> Isn't the idea of competitive programming not about learning to be clever, but about being such a good programmer you can come up with these clever things, and have a fun outlet for it? Competitive programming isn't a goal per se, so much as it is being able to compete is a result of actually being good enough at something to _become_ clever about it.

Runners tend to be _good_ runners before they ever attempt to break world records. Chain saw jugglers tend to be good regular jugglers before they switch to chain saws and then attempt world records.

In a professional setting, clever is pretty much always stupid.

There's nothing wrong with competitive programming. But like juggling chainsaws, it isn't worth much outside of pub talk. It is something fun for those who have the skill, or enjoy seeing the skill demonstrated in crazy/entertaining ways.

And most importantly, "Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute." \-- Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, MIT Press

</comment><comment><USER3> At this point, does anyone seriously consider LeetCode et al to be a "good" way to pick candidates? The impression I get is that it's typically considered the least bad option, at best.

The only insight I might add here is that selecting for candidates who are willing and able to sink time into algorithm study is also selecting for candidates who won't go home at 5:30 if you give them problems to solve. That probably isn't an accident.</comment>


Ask HN: Making quick cash (10-20 hours tops) as a developer - <AUTHOR> Long shot, but can someone think of place, ways to make some cash on a side as a developer? I'd be happy to work for bellow market rate in exchange for small scope and quick payout. <comment><USER2> ITPro.TV is starting a software branch of their company and are in need of subject matter experts to do 10-30 minute videos on a variety of subjects. [https://itpro.tv/course-library/](https://itpro.tv/course-library/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool thanks, I'll check it out!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Upwork?

TopTal if you're good enough to jump through their hoops.

<comment><AUTHOR> Toptal has short gigs? I thought it was all full time stuff</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is the most painful part of your meetings? - <AUTHOR> from thinking that you need one, receiving an invitation, during the meeting... to a week later <comment><USER2> 1\. When people come unprepared to discuss the meeting's topic and all the meeting is wasted bringing people to the same level of understanding (e.g. discuss CI options and some people don't know what CI is, made up example). As a bonus, the people that got their day disrupted because they have to prepare for the meeting feel frustrated that others didn't do the same.

2\. Vague meeting goals and no expected outcome. After an hour, the meeting ends and nothing was decided, no clear consensus, etc.

3\. Having to join a meeting because people can't communicate in written form properly and think a meeting will be easier. Especially hard when people are in different timezones.

</comment><comment><USER3> For me:

1\. No clear agenda, or "standing meetings" for no reason.

2\. Clueless people in the meeting that need to be brought up to speed when an email could have been enough.

3\. Being in a meeting when you shouldn't really be there - a total waste of time. Musk is onto something here.

4\. Meetings that can easily be an email.

</comment><comment><USER4> The ones I dreaded most were stand up meetings. Mostly they force you to listen to things you already know.

Any team with decent teamwork, who have lunch together, communicate together, or even shitpost on Slack... they will know what's going on. Trello updates or some tool equivalent makes trivial progress updates unnecessary.

</comment><comment><USER5> The extensions. I would love meetings to be time-boxed. A meeting more than 30 minutes serves no purpose.</comment>


Moonlighter's Dilemma: Guide to Starting a Startup PartTime - <AUTHOR> http://blog.buzzoo.net/2007/03/01/moonlighters-dilema-guide-to-starting-a-startup-partime/ <comment><USER2> It takes an extraordinary amount of drive to keep trying in the situation described, but where does that drive come from?

Do you have a vision of something that "needs" to be done and you just have to find out how to do it? ... Or are you driven by a need to do something, anything, but you still don't know what?

At some point these combined forces overwhelm you, you must risk everything and there will be no going back. Nor does success, however you measure it, bring relief because the goal posts keep moving.

</comment><comment><USER3> Everything can be seen as an opportunity rather than a weakness. Like the people at 37 signals say: "Embrace your constraints Let limitations guide you to creative solutions

There's never enough to go around. Not enough time. Not enough money. Not enough people.

That's a good thing...."

And also the gapping void: 7\. Keep your day job.

I�m not just saying that for the usual reason i.e. because I think your idea will fail. I�m saying it because to suddenly quit one�s job in a big ol' creative drama-queen moment is always, always, always in direct conflict with what I call "The Sex & Cash Theory".

THE SEX & CASH THEORY: "The creative person basically has two kinds of jobs: One is the sexy, creative kind. Second is the kind that pays the bills. Sometimes the task in hand covers both bases, but not often. This tense duality will always play center stage. It will never be transcended." http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/000889.html

</comment><comment><USER4> These suggestions resemble a lot the advice given to new assistant professors on how to find time for research among all the teaching, committees, etc. Strange to find it here... But #4 is very relevant (no offense YC News!).

<comment><USER5> I'm wishing I could successfully internalize #4 right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> A full-time startup project might mean 12+ hours a day. In that scenario it doesn't really hurt to spend the first few hours "getting in the zone" or "wasting time". If you only have a 3 hour slot then a couple non-productive hours can be crippling.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, it can be crippling.

But once, I went a whole week sleeping 3 hours a day. I'd spend from 11-7 at work, then 8 PM - 7 AM on my startup, sleep 'til 10, repeat. I loaded up on NoDoz. After that week, I got a horrible cold, and was knocked out for the week after that (though I still went to work), but in the meantime I got a large number of features done.

My point is, if you have the drive and commitment, you will *find time*, even if your situation is biased against finding time.

Shawn

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> My situation exactly. Thanks for the advice.

</comment><comment><USER8> If you're an average American watching 4 hours of TV a day just swap that time for your startup and you'll be halfway there. After a month of part time work you'll be able to tell if you should go full time or not.

I'd rather be fully immersed in whatever I'm working and make great rice and beans.</comment>


Enough April fools? - <AUTHOR>

There are quite a few on the home page now :)
Any chance we could limit new submissions to intellectually curious  or particularly good ones (e.g. XKCD was pretty good, as was Kernel.org).
Alternatively maybe tag submissions with "April Fool" or something so we know ;)
(feel free to disagree if I'm just being kill joy) <comment><USER2> I think the goal should not be to eliminate them...but improve them. For a presumably intelligent crowd, there sure is a dearth of humor here at HN. C'mon, guys!

</comment><comment><USER3> Perhaps we can also limit the complaints about april fools on HN. There are several of these as well. :)

</comment><comment><USER4> Yeah, I agree... especially since almost all of them are lame this year except for XKCD.</comment>