Ask HN: How does your team manage tech debt? - <AUTHOR> My team recently built out a new React app from scratch and we were planning on building it as perfectly as possible. However, due to deadlines and requirement changes reality struck and we were forced to make shortcuts. There is a bunch of tech debt and a lot more feature requests.<p>What are some good strategies to manage the existing tech debt while also having time to build out the new features. What does your team do? <comment><USER2> We use multiple things.

* We do code reviews and inline/trello todos. If we're on a tight schedule, this helps us remember why and what needs to be reworked.

* When adding new features we use regular development cycle (spec, design, review, develop, test, finish), but we also add one more process before finishing that is focused on improving todos from previous cycle. The reasoning is that after todos have been sitting there for a while, you might look at them a bit differently and while something wasn't as obvious back then it might become now. Refactoring matters a lot to us. We don't overdo it however and dedicate 1-3 days to it from the cycle.

* If any major/breaking version of react/django/drf comes out, we pause and update the tech stack. Run tests and fix any issues.

* If any major bug that hinders the users experience occurs we allocate resources in parallel with the current dev cycle.

* Update the documentation early and often.

* Write tests. Tests force you to kill the debt before it happens. We have much better unit test coverage than integration test coverage for our front-end.

</comment><comment><USER3> A couple of strategies have worked for teams I lead.

One is to simply let the system fester until it falls over due to the debt and causes a customer to complain loudly, or if you have a competent Product owner/manager with your team she recognizes the need to pay it off before it becomes an issue. This is useful in an environment where product or sales want to deliver more quickly than good engineering allows. Note: _document what is tech debt and why it exists as you build features._ Make it clear _while the features are built_ that the speed of development is not sustainable and use your documentation as support. Keep metrics (e.g. profile your code) and document how to make them better. You should know what is and isn't tech debt in this scenario. Document it so that you cover your butts _and_ demonstrate the willingness to help the team achieve it's product or sales goals while you demonstrate the technical proficiency that gives non-technical folks confidence in your team.

Another is to simply keep a well documented log of items that are recognized as technical debt after the fact. Along with this, document how paying the debt off benefits the business.

In both cases perhaps the most important thing is this: build relationships with product, engineering leadership and sales to have the social capital to be heard and allow your technical competence to carry sufficient weight for getting time to work on debt.

</comment><comment><USER4> We try hard not to create debt on purpose. But that is never easy.

We have a low volume/high ticket price product so for every feature/task/goal we discuss as a team "will this create more customers or just make current customers happy". This helps us control debt because we stay focused. Often (but not always) debt is inversely proportional to focus (at least for us).

When we do incur debt, we try to document inline: why and what. And add a todo how to fix. We also discuss each debt as a team so everyone understands.

Usually we let it sit for one or two dev cycles. Sometimes we find we didn't need it in the first place and rip it out. Other times, we'd d we did need it so we try to clean up sooner rather than later. This is pretty common for major new features. Ship and MVP quick, then clean it up. Because we have a long dales cycle, we often have time between demoing a new feature (mvp) and shipping a lower sent version.

This is our more recent strategy. Obviously we have debt from long ago. We try to clean as we go with the general trend of reducing debt (even if we have short blips of increasing).

I realize this approach won't work for everyone and every project but it does for us.

</comment><comment><USER5> \- React app from scratch

To manage technical debt you need to pick tools at the start that enable easier and safer refactorings at a later date. JS is not a good fit for this.

The problem you have is the time spent maintaing a JS project can eat up the time you could have used to refactor it.</comment>


The loneliness of the long term flexible worker - <AUTHOR> https://workplaceinsight.net/the-loneliness-of-the-long-term-flexible-worker/ <comment><USER2> "Furthermore, nearly half of those surveyed felt that the use of technology such as video conferencing had negative effects on their social connections with colleagues."

I've been working remotely for over a decade and I agree with this. If you are single and get all of your social connections from work, you will feel lonely and remote work might not be for you.

I have a family and get to spend more time with my daughter and I go to local meetups regularly to maintain a social life/meet new people.

Remote work also allowed me to travel the world and meet people from all over the place.</comment>


Ask HN: telecommuting from another country - <AUTHOR>

Hi, I'm a guy from Buenos Aires(Argentina). I'm looking for a job but in my country there are very few places where Django is being used. I could learn PHP and MySQL and get a job quickly but it's not my idea to work with a language I don't like.
I'm considering the possibility to work for some US company but I don't know if this is possible. I think I've a decent english level(I hope so :) ) and I've been programming with Python/Django for 2 years.
So I would like to ask you if is it possible to work this way. If you hace some experiences it would be great to read them too.
Meanwhile I'm working(with Django) in a few web apps that I hope to finish soon(learning how to deploy).
Thank you for your time. Mariano. <comment><USER2> I suppose you mean as a freelancer/consulting etc and working remotely? How much is your hourly rate? I'm not in the US, but ping me and we can figure out if there's a synergy there.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I mean that. I think u$s20/hour is fine. Thank you for your interest, I'll contact you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hello Mariano,

Working from home or from a different country is the same thing. With the Internet you can be working from anywhere and for anyone.

One of my colleagues is a programmer and he works from a different country. With Skype, IM, SVN, and Google things become a lot easier and you don't even feel that he is not physically here.

The major hurdle for you would be the language barrier (there is always one) and the time difference. The former will get a lot easier as time passes by and you get more confident. The latter might be a bonus for you, especially if you are a few hours ahead of your colleagues. You can support systems earlier (or later) and extend the working day by a few hours which will in effect help the company with deadlines etc.

To answer your question, you can work for a US company. All you will have to do is file a particular tax form or something like that (the company's accountants will let you know about this) and it will be income for you in your own country.

Best of luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm aware I've to improve my english skills. I've an FCE(First Certificate of English) but I know that's not enough. My plan to improve is to write a blog and continue talking to foreign people in argentinian hostels.

Thank you for your answer!. I'll begin to look for opportunities.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is #deleteFacebook an opportunity for a startup? - <AUTHOR> I remember when we were in college how super dependent we were on our blackberrys to arrange study groups and get updates on our courses. No one really used whatsapp back then because we were reluctant to give out our phone numbers
One day the blackberry servers crashed and we were at the end of the semester, we really suffered... everyone was looking for an alternative. A bunch of us moved to whatsapp as a temporary fix, until a couple of months later the blackberry servers crashed again. That's when the rest of the bunch moved to whatsapp. Never went back to blackberry again.
Do you think there another social media platform out there benefiting from the deletefacebook move? Or is this the perfect time to start one? <comment><USER2> > Do you think there another social media platform out there benefiting from > the deletefacebook move?

Probably every other one; especially those that directly compete with Facebook/Messenger in terms of use-case, or those that target more tech-savvy people, or those worried about privacy (ei, Signal, I'd assume Nextdoor since I'd guess it competes heavily with Facebook Groups, though I wonder if Snapchat too, since it competes mainly with Instagram which surprisingly I've heard little about).

> Or is this the perfect time to start one?

Maybe? Building a startup takes a while and it's unclear wether this is a temporary hit to Facebook or something more long-lasting. I personally think it's temporary-- being from outside the US I don't think this level of angst against Facebook is universal, but I might be wrong. Just like most people here, my evidence is anecdotal.

The privacy-savy people spearheading #deletefacebook are a good market to start, though keep in mind they'll scrutinize the business model a lot more. If twitter is any indication, as of yesterday there's a good 50,000 vocal people who deleted facebook as of yesterday (minus people just tweeting about the trend, plus people who delete and don't tweet, plus people who deleted it before the #deletefacebook hashtag) [1].

[1]: [http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/article/6958e119-50eb-49f8-825...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/article/6958e119-50eb-49f8-825f-64edcf885f81)

</comment><comment><USER3> > Do you think there another social media platform out there benefiting from > the deletefacebook move?

It's called Mastodon. Chances are the last time you heard of it was because Lance Ulanoff couldn't find William Shatner and decided to bitch about it in Mashable instead of admitting his ignorance and asking more experienced users for help.

> Or is this the perfect time to start one?

Now would be a great time to start a hosting service that makes it easy to set up personal instances of Mastodon, Pleroma, or Diaspora* and offers support and updates. Such a service would ideally be based in a country that is subject to EU data protection laws and has a habit of saying "Warrant or GTFO" when Uncle Sam wants users' data.

</comment><comment><USER4> Same UI/UX, homomorphic content encryption, different business model.

It almost certainly won't work but one can dream.</comment>


My Favorite Paradox: Simpson's Paradox - <AUTHOR> https://blog.forrestthewoods.com/my-favorite-paradox-14fab39524da <comment><USER2> Calling it a paradox makes it sound as though something difficult to understand is happening. In most cases it is simply necessary to make sure that you are comparing 'like with like', that is, comparing things that are of the same class and that are actually comparable.

Of course t=it is still valuable to be reminded that averages can make it seem that things are of the same class when they are in fact not. So it gets one lonely upvote from me.</comment>


South-Pointing Chariot - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South-pointing_chariot <comment><USER2> Without a compass, it seems like this would cumulate error in less than a mile that would make it useless for navigation. A turn or two of one wheel would make the doll point in the opposite direction, yet driving over rough terrain for a mile would cumulate at least a few turns difference. It seems like this is its true purpose instead:

>If the real purposes of the chariot and the accounts of it were amusement and impressing visiting foreigners, rather than actual long-distance navigation, then its inaccuracy might not have been important.

<comment><USER3> The fun part of this article for me is the bit relating such a chariot built with a differential gear arrangement to the differential geometry of the surface upon which it travels:

 _If the south-pointing chariot were built perfectly accurately, using a differential gear, and if it travelled on an Earth that was perfectly smooth, it would have interesting properties. It would be a mechanical compass that transports a direction, given by the pointer, along the path it travels. Mathematically the device performs parallel transport along the path it travels._

 _The chariot can be used to detect straight lines or geodesics. A path on a surface the chariot travels along is a geodesic if and only if the pointer does not rotate with respect to the base of the chariot._

 _Because of the curvature of the Earth 's surface (due to it being curved around as a globe), the chariot would generally not continue to point due south as it moves. For example, if the chariot moves along a geodesic (as approximated by any great circle) the pointer should instead stay at a fixed angle to the path. Also, if two chariots travel by different routes between the same starting and finishing points, their pointers, which were aimed in the same direction at the start, usually do not point in the same direction at the finish. Likewise, if a chariot goes around a closed loop, starting and finishing at the same point on the Earth's surface, its pointer generally does not aim in the same direction at the finish as it did at the start. The difference is the holonomy of the path, and is proportional to the enclosed area. If the journeys are short compared with the radius of the Earth, these discrepancies are small and may have no practical importance. Nevertheless, they show that this type of chariot, based on differential gears, would be an imperfect compass even if constructed exactly and used in ideal conditions._

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If I had to build something like this in 1000 BC, I'd use a cart with wheels that did not turn at all and put a heavy statue on top. Then, whenever it came time to change direction, I'd get a few guys to hoist the statue up, while someone else rotated the cart independently. (And there are easily mechanical ways to make this process simpler.) You could recalibrate using the sun or stars.

A differential gear would automate all of this, but would be unmaintainable, expensive, would barely work for more than a few hundred yards, and all this in an era where labor is slave-cheap.

EDIT:

Another way would be to use multiple carts, only move one at a time, and calibrate it from the others, survey style. Cumulative error should be far smaller this way, and you would have fewer terrain problems.

<comment><USER5> I think you're assuming their roads were straight. This wouldn't work at all on a winding road/trail where turns are constant.

<comment><USER4> It would be a massive annoyance, but would still work better than a differential gear made with the materials science of the time. I personally think that the story is fantasy.

<comment><USER6> There's nothing particularly difficult or expensive about a wooden differential.

edit: no seriously, zoom in on this pic here [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d6/South- po...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d6/South- pointing_chariot%2C_China_Court%2C_Ibn_Battuta_Mall%2C_Dubai.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here's a terrific explanation of how differential gears work, from a film produced by GM in the 30s: [https://youtu.be/yYAw79386WI](https://youtu.be/yYAw79386WI)

<comment><USER8> That really is a great explanation - thanks for linking it. The whole playlist deserves a watch: [https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLI7lqC4ZBnInJOAwogQJtSq...](https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLI7lqC4ZBnInJOAwogQJtSq4UQu69Pjj4)

I'm on my fifth and have to confess that I've learned quite a bit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> A number of years ago I read a book about the invention of the Segway ([https://www.amazon.com/s?k=1578516730](https://www.amazon.com/s?k=1578516730)) and apparently Dean Kamen used a "south-pointing chariot" as a metaphor for a really cool hack that is subsequently made unnecessary by a superior technology.

The point being that it's very easy to get attached to your really cool hack but it's often best to just let it go once a better solution comes along.

</comment><comment> tom-thistime Who knows, but it's possible that this invention was originally meant kind of tongue-in-cheek. I think any mechanical designer who could understand how differential gears produce this result would also be aware that small errors (skidding of one wheel or whatever) would accumulate. Also it really invites comparison to a magnetic compass, which is much simpler, cheaper, more foolproof, and probably also invented in China.

But the Chariot does work as a sort of pastiche of people or organizations who don't listen or look around them.

<comment><USER10> It looks like a nice solution for navigating a forest or a desert during the mid hours of the day without getting lost, requiring only a calibration at morning.

I imagine magnetic compasses are a later invention, because they really make no sense if you can use a compass.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I was so fascinated by this invention as a kid that I tried to build it with Lego.</comment>


How do you get past writer's block? - <AUTHOR> http://codecube.tumblr.com/post/29277518714/writers-block

<comment><USER2> [http://www.sfwa.org/2011/12/guest-post-how-i-went-from- writi...](http://www.sfwa.org/2011/12/guest-post-how-i-went-from- writing-2000-words-a-day-to-10000-words-a-day/) helped me defeat writer's block like nothing else I've ever come across.</comment>


Apple needs to tackle the issue of smartphone addiction - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.co.uk/article/tony-fadell-apple-iphone-addiction-control-design <comment><USER3> I don't get why people think that this is apple's problem.

Do a better job of parenting. Have some self discipline.

There are so many products in this world that take advantage of our biology. The iPhone is just one. And it's currently being obsessed over by media outlets. What about all the processed foods making people fat and unhealthy? What about Starbucks selling addictive drugs on every corner and getting away with it? Same with Coca-Cola, why is adding addictive chemicals to a soda that is sold to everyone including children okay? What about television? All of these TV shows coming out are designed to hook you in. Walking my dog every night, I can see everyone just sitting in front of their televisions, wasting time.

If you are going to force a company to help people ween themselves from addiction, don't be a hypocrite. You have your own addictions and vices, what makes yours more valid than someone else's. If we are going to make products provide tools to limit their own use, lets do that with all of the addictive products out there, and not single out one company because it's trendy to not be on your phone.

<comment><USER4> One day, an old man was walking along a beach that was littered with thousands of starfish that had been washed ashore by the high tide. As he walked he came upon a young boy who was eagerly throwing the starfish back into the ocean, one by one.

Puzzled, the man looked at the boy and asked what he was doing. Without looking up from his task, the boy simply replied, "I'm saving these starfish, Sir".

The old man chuckled aloud, "Son, there are thousands of starfish and only one of you. What difference can you make?"

The boy picked up a starfish, gently tossed it into the water and turning to the man, said, "I made a difference to that one!"

<comment><USER5> The old man then went home and penned an article titled "The sea needs to tackle the issue of washed-up starfish"; the Moon was blown up, and the tides ceased.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Something that I don't know if they've mentioned specifically in public was that the Apple Watch was partly designed to deal with smartphone addiction.

I don't have a citable source handy here, so it's just my word, but when I interned with Apple last year there were a few "town hall" events where interns could ask questions of senior management (Cook, Ahrendts, Cue, Maestri, etc). At one of them (I think the Tim Cook one but I'm not 100% certain) someone asked about smartphone addiction. He pointed out that the Apple Watch actually plays a role. It gives you a tap when you get a notification, but the tap isn't too intense and doesn't go for more than a moment. In user studies, they found that people were much more likely to simply dismiss notifications from the Watch than if they weren't wearing one.

The effect of this was that people weren't unlocking their phones as often, and by merely avoiding unlocking the phone people were not as tied to using it. It used to be the case for me that I would get a notification, unlock my phone and attend to the notification, and then immediately afterwards open Reddit or Facebook or something because, well, I was already on my phone so why not?

Since getting an Apple Watch, I've noticed I do this much less. Maybe part of it is that I'm more cognizant of the problem, but another part is that it's much easier to simply disregard the notifications since they're more fleeting now.

I'm sure this sounds like a sales pitch for the Watch to some people, but I don't mean it that way. I just thought it was very interesting when Cook (I think) pointed out that this was a deliberate consideration with the Watch and then I was able to anecdotally confirm its effectiveness myself. I wish I had an actual source to cite for this, but notes are forbidden in the town hall events.

<comment><USER7> I purchased the Apple Watch when the cellular version came out. You can bet that my smartphone usage has gone down since I've stopped carrying it around.

I get my messages, my calls, and my emails. I can get directions if necessary. I even get my wallet, my weather, my reminders/schedule AND my music. What else do I need?

EDIT: Did I mention it also tells time?

<comment><USER8> Fuji X series have the IQ of a "real" camera but a very portable form factor.

I currently carry a Nikon FE film camera around when I want a camera small enough to forget about, but I am itching to get an X100F in particular.

<comment><USER3> I got the fuji x-pro2 for this reason. I used to carry a bunch of canon gear... till I stopped bringing it anywhere because it was too heavy.

I traded it all in for a fuji, and 2 small primes, and I bring that camera everywhere.

<comment><USER9> Unfortunately one can't beat physics.

If you need reach and magnification, for example at an airshow, then you need a long lens with a lot of glass. At that point the weight of the camera becomes irrelevant.

If you just need a couple of primes for street shooting then just about any camera manufacturer will sell you something small and lightweight. Fuji don't have any particular light-attracting or gravity-defeating magic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've been struggling with addiction in various forms for my entire adult life, so I have a decent understanding of it imho.

When I first learned what a smartphone was, I knew immediately that I would become addicted to it if I let myself.

I simply chose not to get addicted to smartphones by never purchasing one, and it's working out quite well so far.

I know they're awesome little nuggets of technology, but I just don't want to be that connected... so I don't own one.

For the same reasons that I choose not to continually purchase the latest gaming console.

Spending $1,000 on something every 6 months (amortized cost of the smartphone + connectivity charges) that eventually becomes worthless isn't far off from a serious drug or alcohol addiction financially speaking...

And now all of my "straight laced" friends can hardly even carry on a casual conversation without looking at their smartphones every few minutes has only reinforced my way of thinking.

They use smartphones as passive babysitters for their children when they're on short car rides without hesitation.

The look on a 3 year old's mesmerized face as they stare into a tablet disgusts me to no end.

I now choose to never own a smartphone.

I know they're a detriment to society.

Perhaps when I am old, dying, and actually in desperate need of "contact", I'll splurge on one.

But until then, I'm perfectly content receiving and composing emails from a full-blown computer with a keyboard... and sending the odd text message through my dumbphone.

I work in the tech industry, and refusing to own a smartphone hasn't slowed me down yet!

<comment><USER11> Kind of funny that they finally found something to hook the rest of 'em - <USER2> the strait-laced people as you say. Many people would never be caught by any of the typical addictions -- Smoking is socially stigmatized, drugs are illegal, alcohol addiction is kinda sorta alittlebit mostly "hereditary" in the loosest sense of the word, gambling for most people requires a long car trip. But a smartphone has none of those limitations.

EDIT: I suppose the most widespread addiction is coffee. Still king.

<comment><USER12> I think it helps to have been addicted (maybe "dependent" is a better word) on something that has been socially stigmatised to see it for what it is. Friends will quite happily point and label it an "addiction" it out to while ignoring their own "habits".

(I think I would draw the line between dependence and addiction when it starts affecting your normal life, but again that description is pretty subjective).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> In general, I agree strongly with this sentiment:

> What does a healthy, moderate digital life look like? I think that > manufacturers and app developers need to take on this responsibility, before > government regulators decide to step in

As a bicyclist and driver I believe one of the best ways to enact this would be add a feature that allows investigators / insurers to answer the question of "whether the device was I use at the time of an accident".

I've taken to yelling "get of your effing phone" at drivers obviously looking down at devices while I'm driving, walking or cycling around; I think the phone doing that would be more efficient.

<comment><USER14> I agree. Additionally, the rule against using a phone while driving should actually be enforced. It is very much like speeding. Enforcement is practically non-existent so of course everyone continue to do it.

<comment><USER13> Agree, outdoor magazine has a detailed piece about this [0], somewhat ironically the author, a friend of mine, was killed recently by a vehicle (an accident; the truck hydroplaned into him while he was fixing a flat) [1].

[0] [https://www.outsideonline.com/1930211/bikes-vs-cars- deadly-w...](https://www.outsideonline.com/1930211/bikes-vs-cars-deadly-war- nobodys-winning)

[1] [https://www.outsideonline.com/2282551/author-and-cyclist- and...](https://www.outsideonline.com/2282551/author-and-cyclist-andrew-tilin- dies-in-collision)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think smartphone use has split into two paths: utility and "discovery." Utilities are the tools we use every day, the tools we want to be stable, fast, and (relatively) unchanging. E.g. sms, maps, browser, phone, camera, email. "Discovery" is all the new, unstable, changing stuff. I think there's an enormous market for a utility smartphone...and it doesn't even have to be a smartphone. Something between an old Nokia and an iPhone, but still a precision-crafted, luxury device.

<comment><USER16> This. I have thought a lot about switching to a "dumb phone" recently. There were two things that I use regularly that would make this switch tough though:

1) Google maps. This is so much better than using a built-in or dashboard- mount GPS that it would be hard to go back. 2) Podcasts. I listen to these in the car and having a good app for them is nice.

Ultimately, I decided to delete the apps on my phone that were sucking up my time, but it takes a good amount of self control not to install some of the new ones, and I still succumb to checking my notifications more than I'd like.

I would love the product you are describing though. In particular, I remember my old Nokia had like a week of battery life and I'd be willing to give up a bunch of functionality for that alone.

<comment><USER17> I made the switch a few years ago. (Got disgusted with myself for neglecting my kids to check work emails). It was much easier than I thought it would be. To your points:

1) Maps - I try to look at an online map before I leave for a place. If the directions are just too complicated I'll print the last leg or so. This has gotten me temporarily lost before, but figuring it out on my own makes for an adventure (definitely not for everybody) and significantly increases my retention of the geography of the area. I do miss real-time traffic-informed routing, though (i.e., Waze).

2) Podcasts - My dumb-phone has an MP3 player, but the UI was so bad (especially for longer tracks like podcasts) that I ended up buying a used iPod Nano. Works great for me.

Downside is the phone is thick ("is that a flip-phone in your pocket, or...") and the UI is clunky, and sometimes it crashes when family send me large files over MMS. I'm seriously considering that Light Phone 2 someone linked above. Seems about perfect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I have to wonder - what is staring at our phones all day doing to our necks? And are we going to have an epidemic of debilitating cervical spine issues pop up 10 or 20 years from now?

<comment><USER19> I don't really know that I stare at my phone any more than I used to stare at books/magazines/newspapers.

So I'm screwed either way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is this shifting the blame? It seems people are addicted to smartphones because it's what they want. Or put another way what else draws interest in their life. Which goes to a quality of life aspect.

The onus should not be on the manufacturer to address addiction. But instead, provide means to combat addiction. Apple has that notification toggle. What more do we want, auto lock after X hours of usage. This will probably be harsh but how about learn some self-discipline. If a stepping program is needed, then implement that. Like to ween people off. But it shouldn't be a constant. Why are you checking your phone so much? Why aren't you out doing something, or talking to someone? If you don't want to do that, why are you complaining about checking your phone so much.

That is to say some people are introverts. They don't want to talk much. The smartphone allows them to better socialize, and keep to their habits.

I've noticed since I upgraded to a pixel. I find myself subconsciously pressing the fingerprint authentication while it's in my pocket. Not looking at it, but just pressing it feeling it unlock. I came to this realization the other day. I was reminded of some of my other addictive behaviors. I'm looking at dumber phones now actually.

I've recently downgraded in a way. My biggest use of my phone was for music. I grabbed an old iPod nano and put Rockbox on it. Largely leaving my phone in my backpack. I've also eyed the recent Nokia phones.

<comment><USER21> Subconsciously pressing the fingerprint authentication in your pocket is reminiscent of... the One Ring...

I can relate to your iPod story. For me, smartphone has been mostly for reading. I used Kindle among other apps on my phone. Having recently bought a Kindle my iPhone sits untouched in my pocket.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Legitimizing smartphone addiction is the main reason why Apple will never put a dark mode in iOS. Atleast I hope they don't. It has never been a personal problem (I am carrying my own bunch of bad habits) but I hate watching friends, partners constantly checking their phones in the night.

<comment><USER23> What do you mean by 'dark mode'?

I turned my screen black and white, which supposedly lessens the addictiveness. You can also invert the colors for cool matrix like effect... if you are into 90's Winamp Themes.

<comment><USER24> Modern Android has a f.lux-like effect where it changes the colors on your screen to be warmer so they don't affect your sleep as much. I assume that's what he means by 'dark mode' (it's 'night mode').

<comment><USER25> iOS has something similar - called 'Night Shift'. I think he's talking about having a theme that is a dark background rather than a light/white one, though.

<comment><USER22> Yes a lot of apps provide a night/dark mode as an in app purchase. Convenient, yes. Addicting, yes++.

You mentioned Night Shift and I think it actually is a great compromise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The Cali Cartel needs to tackle the issue of cocaine addiction —- but don't hold your breath.

<comment><USER27> Exactly.

The addictiveness of smartphones isn't a "byproduct" of these devices. It _is_ the product.

<comment><USER28> Bear in mind that Apple keeps 30% of App Store revenue, which is tens of billions of dollars a year. If they just sold the hardware they wouldn't care at all how much users use it, but if users are on their phones for hours on end it's more likely they'll spend money on apps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> With the Apple Watch with LTE, Apple _is_ tackling the issue of smartphone addiction.

I've been using my Apple Watch as my sole form of communication for 3 months now, it's great.

<comment><USER30> Does Siri understand you well, or do you have any cases where you have to scribble, send typos, etc?

What do you do for taking notes? Do you have a system for processing later on a phone or a computer?

Any apps like whatsapp where you can't initiate a message? How do you get around it?

Do you carry a phone? If not, do you carry a camera?

I'm interested in doing the same myself.

<comment><USER29> > Does Siri understand you well, or do you have any cases where you have to > scribble, send typos, etc?

Siri works pretty well in most situations. It doesn't work great when I'm in locations with spotty WiFi and LTE. Siri also doesn't work well when I'm in meetings or on the bus, so I scribble in those situations. I really wish I could use Palm's "Graffiti" instead of writing out the letters, it would be so much faster! I also do send typos sometimes.

> What do you do for taking notes? Do you have a system for processing later > on a phone or a computer?

I do not have a system for taking notes on my phone or watch. I use org-mode for my notes so I carry my computer around with me at work as a portable org- mode system.

> Any apps like whatsapp where you can't initiate a message? How do you get > around it?

I don't use Whatsapp, but I do use Signal and not being able to initiate a message is very frustrating. I end up using iMessage in those situations, which isn't ideal. I hope that Signal makes an Apple Watch app.

> Do you carry a phone? If not, do you carry a camera?

I don't carry a phone for 5-6 days out of the week. At this point, I only take my phone with me if I want to have a "GPS" or a camera. I do miss having a camera, but it's a small price to pay for being free from the constant distraction of a phone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I think I disagree, but in a good way. Apple needs to protect privacy. Google, FB, et all are pushing devices that upload as much information about users as possible. The most recent Apple update resounded with me in that it said 'privacy is a fundamental right'. What Apple needs to tackle is the issue of becoming an advertisement agency.

</comment><comment><USER32> This article.... where to begin. Firstly this isn't an "Apple problem". Their smartphone product is one of many. We also see plenty of non-smartphone digital addictions. It's not about smartphones either.

And then this:

 _" You should be able to see exactly how you spend your time and, if you wish, moderate your behaviour accordingly."_

If anyone needs to use an app to check whether they're spending too much time looking at apps, then it's game over. If we need to regularly consult a computer to determine how to live our lives without consulting the computer too much, it's game over.

Is society really in this much trouble, that people are writing articles asking for tech giants to save us from tech products? In so many ways that is like giving up as a thoughtful being, formerly in control of your own life and decisions, but now admitting you are merely a fish. Worse than a fish because of what you've lost. You once had organic direction and intuition, but now have an app for that.

</comment><comment><USER33> Tony Fadell says,

> I think that manufacturers and app developers need to take on this > responsibility, before government regulators decide to step in.

Tim Cook recently said, "I think the best regulation is no regulation, is self-regulation". And Tony Fadell expresses a similar idea here. That no regulation is the best idea and that companies should "behave" so that the status quo of no regulation continues.

But how do they keep these opinions in the face of all the enormous evidence that companies are very specifically designed to be unable to self-regulate? The very structure of a corporation today means it is incentivized to sneak by and almost break as many laws as possible to be short-term profitable. This is incongruent with long-term health, growth, capitalism, and everything else, because it is a strong forcing factor towards _very bad corporate behaviour_. Constantly lobbying for "no regulation" or to act quickly before those big- bad-regulators come in to protect consumers from poison and addiction makes no sense.

Companies will behave badly as long as the law allows it. Suggesting that the companies should behave better while suggesting that there should be absolutely no consequence for bad behaviour legally is a bizarre doubethink. I don't get it.

<comment><USER6> > Tim Cook recently said, "I think the best regulation is no regulation, is > self-regulation".

This quote was made with regard specifically to Facebook's recent problems with privacy, and Cook then immediately said: "However, I think we're beyond that here." Clearly he thinks regulation can be necessary sometimes, and specifically he has been an advocate for user privacy. I don't know that he intended these words to be applied generally to all companies for all issues.

> But how do they keep these opinions in the face of all the enormous evidence > that companies are very specifically designed to be unable to self-regulate?

1\. I don't think companies are "specifically designed to be unable to self- regulate." Where did you get that from? While it may be true that this is often the case, it seems odd to suggest that this is a specific part of the design of a corporation.

2\. Apple has self-regulated with regards to user privacy and security, in ways that other companies have not. They have deliberately made themselves known for not selling user data, and have drawn direct comparisons between themselves and other companies for not collecting significant amounts of user data to be used for any purpose.

I dunno, your points don't really seem very well researched. You said "Companies will behave badly as long as the law allows it" and I certainly agree with this to an extent (and this seems to be your main point), but your overly strong statements ("corporations ... break as many laws as possible") reduce the effectiveness of your thesis.

<comment><USER33> > Cook then immediately said: "However, I think we're beyond that here." > Clearly he thinks regulation can be necessary sometimes

If there is even a slightest chance of a hundred-billion dollar corporation ignoring morals and helping foreign powers install a dictator and destroy truth in publishing and trust in America, then it should be clear that _Regulation was required from the start_. There is no "oops now we get it we should have had regulation for this particular instance". You can't do that, it's too late. Regulation was required from the beginning. It always is.

> 1\. I don't think companies are "specifically designed to be unable to self- > regulate." Where did you get that from? While it may be true that this is > often the case, it seems odd to suggest that this is a specific part of the > design of a corporation.

There's another reply to me asking this, but I'm not sure how to respond. It just seems obvious to me that the tragedy of the commons situation that results from raw competition (and enshrined in corporate structure, tax law, etc) results in corporations being incentivized to find ways "around the rules" to get a competitive "advantage" over others.

> Apple has self-regulated with regards to user privacy and security, in ways > that other companies have not.

You don't know this, though. You can't know, because you can by definition never know what "self-regulation" a company might be doing. From the outside, all Apple is doing here is marketing material. You can't know what their self- regulation means.

<comment><USER34> The problem with ex-ante regulation is that you can kill really good ideas before they take off. Government regulations should target known problems rather than problems that people imagine will happen. That does mean we need to let some problems happen, but that's a tradeoff worth making in a society that cares about making innovation possible.

By the way, when Facebook was new nobody would have guessed that it might be involved in a Russian plot to influence a presidential election more than a decade in the future, so regulation would not have been proposed anyway.

And back in the 90s, the Justice Department claimed Microsoft was a monopoly that could only be stopped by government action. And then over the next few decades, Microsoft was knocked off its pedestal by companies and market trends that nobody anticipated. If it really had been a monopoly, that wouldn't have been possible.

Governments have a pretty bad track record of predicting the future, especially regarding the interaction between technology and culture.

> You can't know what their self-regulation means.

You also can't know what internal steps a company like Facebook has taken to deal with government regulations like GDPR. But you can measure outcomes. Given that regulations are intended to produce outcomes, that's what you ought to be measuring anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I hope Apple does provide the tools to help users control their usage. If they do, it'll be a prime example of the difference in philosophies (or marketing, if you will) between Facebook and Apple. Facebook would never help you curtail usage or take control of usage. They would want users to be oblivious to what's harming them and enable them, in the name of "engagement".

<comment><USER12> I wish there was an open source alternative to either of those two corporate monsters. I had the Ubuntu phone, but it wasn't great and as many of the apps were web based it was fairly useless when I travelled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> If we can hold Facebook accountable for our data, there is no reason why we can't make Apple responsible for our behavior. Apple blames others for addiction, but I think it is time they recognize the damage they are doing to people's minds. In another decade, I am sure there will be sizeable longitudinal survey's pointing to smartphones and people's psychological problems.

</comment><comment><USER37> Have a switch that reduces motion effects and dulls the colors... smartphone dramamine.

Otherwise, society is likely to devolve further into ground-lighted sidewalk crossings with distracted people hunched over, oblivious to everyone else and missing life. Tinder: nuf said.

[Insert Banksy smartphone lovers gaze pic]

</comment><comment><USER38> iOS' "Do Not Disturb While Driving" is a good example of how they're trying. Sure it's touted as a "safety" feature, but it's doing what they need to do: encourage the user not to use their phone all the time.

</comment><comment><USER39> Shouldn't the onus be on the developers of the applications sitting on top of the smartphones? We don't chide PC manufacturers for video game addicted kids, do we?

</comment><comment><USER40> Three years ago I posted this... Any suggestions how to tie iPad entertainment time to Khan academy progress? Does anything like this already exist? [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9299697](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9299697)

A few days ago Apple approved my app that does exactly that. Currently it is free. Search the iOS store for StudyCity. I am very grateful to Apple for approving my app. When you make a "unique" app, there is no guarantee that Apple will approve it. FYI, my project email is firstname.lastname@example.com The website is StudyCity.org

</comment><comment><USER41> A tool like RescueTime helps segment one's use of devices and services - it's pretty insightful in terms of measuring one's "Digital Weight"

</comment><comment><USER42> > "Pain killer manufacturers need to tackle the issue of opiate addiction"

Looks like they already have, lol (all the way to the bank).

</comment><comment><USER43> I'm such a cynic these days.

When I see an article like this, all I can think of is that this is the angle the FBs and Googles of the world will use to give Apple it's own share of social responsibility problems.

Hey, yes, we collect all data, but Apple, you really should be doing something about phone addiction. Especially since you, Apple, have "system-level control across devices".

Definitely understand how that comes across as conspiracy theoryish, but the timing is too inviting.

</comment><comment><USER44> Why does this has to be an issue with the companies ? It's the same thing with videogames after some time you'll get a message like " You have been playing for XX Hours, we reommend that you take a break. " and it's understandable but if it's not smartphones people will get addicted to something else.

This is more of a culture issue that should be addressed in schools from an early age ( at least in my opinion ).

</comment><comment><USER45> I know HN is big on personal responsibility, so here are two tools to help you deal with phone addiction.

I made Space [http://youjustneedspace.com](http://youjustneedspace.com) which help with individual apps.

An Android launcher called Siempo [http://www.getsiempo.com/](http://www.getsiempo.com/) is a more complete app control system.

</comment><comment><USER46> Worldwide, Google has a much larger market share. Let Google take the lead.

</comment><comment><USER47> Actually, Apple doesn't "need" to do anything.

</comment><comment><USER48> Why are we so eager to blame companies on HN. I wish people would take ownership for their own actions instead of blaming companies. I can't wait for the article, "Take ownership of yourself, stop blaming others".

</comment><comment><USER49> [http://www.wired.co.uk/article/tony-fadell-apple-iphone- addi...](http://www.wired.co.uk/article/tony-fadell-apple-iphone-addiction- control-design)

The actual UK article TechCrunch is basing its summary on

<comment><USER50> Thanks! We've updated the link from [https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/16/tony- fadell-is-worried-abo...](https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/16/tony-fadell-is- worried-about-smartphone-addiction/).

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> An Apple cash cow is financializing your personal data via a vast sprawling ecosystem [http://www.visualcapitalist.com/personal-data- ecosystem/](http://www.visualcapitalist.com/personal-data-ecosystem/)

To pick Up Faddell's analogy, this is like letting big sugar regulate itself. It doesn't and has spent millions pushing red herrings like 'low fat' to protect its profit machine.

In a parallel universe 'How to take on Big Sugar and win' 'Camilla Cavendish, the initiator of the UK's tax on sugar, says it's time to start treating it as nicotine' [https://www.ft.com/content/6be1a340-3e3d-11e8-b9f9-de94fa33a...](https://www.ft.com/content/6be1a340-3e3d-11e8-b9f9-de94fa33a81e)

Money is the only language the tech platform barons speak too, despite all the posturing...

<comment><USER51> This seems more like a criticism of Facebook or Google.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> The majority of the population has been brain washed into believing that they need a computer that's physically attached to them 24/7.

I believe that there is immense value in not having a _smart_ phone.

It's a value that can't be packaged into a box and sold for the sticker price.

It's the value of being more engaged with your own life and the things that actually matter to you.

<comment><USER53> > It's the value of being more engaged with your own life and the things that > actually matter to you.

My mother uses her smartphone to connect with family who are far away. Pray tell how that's not being "engaged with her own life and things that actually matter to her"?</comment></comment>


Baidu Takes FPGA Approach to Accelerating SQL at Scale - <AUTHOR> http://www.nextplatform.com/2016/08/24/baidu-takes-fpga-approach-accelerating-big-sql/ <comment><USER2> This is kind of amazing. I have often really wondered what would happen if you basically created a directed acyclic graph/dataflow for data processing (for example, how Apache Spark distributes processing/operations), and then accelerated the operations using physical implementations in FPGAs. After all, a SQL query, when optimized, is essentially a graph of operators that data flows through.

You do have to pass your data through the accelerator to get the processing... which potentially means huge volumes of data moving into this physical processing layer (probably can be done in parallel over a network at high speed) - I would assume this is why shared memory bandwidth was a problem.

This would provide some really interesting options though - imagine feeding data from two disparate databases (say, Oracle and SQL server) in a data flow into this thing - now you have accelerated cross database joins (as long as you can handle the bandwidth and processing on the way in).

There was this post before on HN previously lamenting the state of tools for working with FPGAs, and my related comment wondering if what Baidu has done here was possible:

\- [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9408881](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9408881)

\- [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9410160](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9410160)

<comment><USER3> There is quite a bit of work on this topic in Databases, and stream processing is one of the primary use cases they identified (in particular, if you can put the FPGA device between the network and the CPU, it works out quite well). This is one of the early papers:

[http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1687730](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1687730)

This one appears to be a more recent survey paper by some of those authors:

[http://www.morganclaypool.com/doi/abs/10.2200/S00514ED1V01Y2...](http://www.morganclaypool.com/doi/abs/10.2200/S00514ED1V01Y201306DTM035)

As someone else pointed out, this was also one of Netezza's differentiation.

<comment><USER2> That book likes like an excellent resource. Thank you for sharing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For GPUs, not FPGAs, but PostgreSQL has PGStrom[1] for offloading large table scans. Still a work in progress.

[1] [https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/PGStrom](https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/PGStrom)

<comment><USER5> CUDA Only. Is PGStrom in Active development? Or is it more of an proof of concept stage?

<comment><USER6> Looks active at github, [https://github.com/pg- strom/devel](https://github.com/pg-strom/devel)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm an FPGA/ASIC engineer that does some software as a hobby (mostly clojure, some python. C and Pascal if you go back far enough).

Although I focus more on verification these days, I've done ASIC design for about 16 years.

I'd be very interested in working with anyone on figuring out if we can make something better by leveraging hardware.

<comment><USER8> I've been working with FPGAs for 4 years and shortly on ASICs before that, did software in a previous life (and still do), do you have something specific in mind?

<comment><USER7> No, I personally don't. I was into reconfigurable computing for a while, sort of where I think intel is going with their combined CPU/FPGA project. Just In Time logic configuration.

But I figured I would throw my offer out in case there were people thinking they could solve or enhance something with an FPGA, but didn't have the experience to get started.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This looks pretty cool. Any idea of which database they're doing this on?

I don't see it listed out in the article anywhere. I would guess it's a FOSS database (i.e. either Postgres or MySQL) but also wouldn't be surprised if at their scale they've created something entirely in house.

<comment><USER10> MySQL is dominant in China Internet companies.

<comment><USER11> That's pretty interesting. Do you have a source for that?

<comment><USER12> NOTE: most of these website are in Chinese

Taobao [http://mysql.taobao.org/index.php?title=首页](http://mysql.taobao.org/index.php?title=首页) 360buy [http://www.infoq.com/cn/articles/exploration-of- distributed-...](http://www.infoq.com/cn/articles/exploration-of-distributed- mysql-cluster-scheme)

Tencent [http://tencentdba.com](http://tencentdba.com)

DiDi [http://os.51cto.com/art/201604/508514.htm](http://os.51cto.com/art/201604/508514.htm)

<comment><USER6> "Tencent is using PostgreSQL for data mart in their big data system" \- [https://pgconf.ru/en/2016/89691](https://pgconf.ru/en/2016/89691)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> such FPGAs seems to be on the edge of what is export controlled, recently even regular Intel CPU got blocked for delivery to China :

[http://www.pcworld.com/article/2908692/us-blocks-intel- from-...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/2908692/us-blocks-intel-from-selling- xeon-chips-to-chinese-supercomputer-projects.html)

and around an year ago some Russian guys got busted for selling the FPGAs to Russia (and those FPGAs were less powerful):

[http://kron4.com/2015/03/21/sf-business-owner-arrested- for-a...](http://kron4.com/2015/03/21/sf-business-owner-arrested-for- allegedly-smuggling-programmable-electronics-to-russia-laundering-millions/)

<comment><USER14> Baidu has an office here in US, they could build it here...I guess

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's no wonder Intel made a big FPGA acquisition lately. This sort of acceleration has enormous upside potential, _especially_ if this sort of thing comes part and parcel with your CPU.

<comment><USER6> Intel is not alone - [http://openpowerfoundation.org/blogs/fpga-acceleration- in-a-...](http://openpowerfoundation.org/blogs/fpga-acceleration-in-a- power8-cloud/)

> In addition to the CAPI 2.0 coherent links running atop PCI-Express 4.0, > there is a further enhanced CAPI protocol that runs atop the 25 Gb/sec > Bluelink ports that is much more streamlined and we think is akin to > something like NVM-Express for flash running over PCI-Express in that it > eliminates a lot of protocol overhead from the PCI-Express bus

[http://www.nextplatform.com/2016/08/24/big-blue-aims-sky- pow...](http://www.nextplatform.com/2016/08/24/big-blue-aims-sky-power9/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> MapD does some of this, but with GPUs: [https://www.mapd.com/product/](https://www.mapd.com/product/)

</comment><comment><USER17> Finally! In 2011, when I was working on optimizing 100Gb databases on dedicated hardware for small businesses, everyone in the database world was talking SQL chips and PCI-E fast storage. Fast forward to today when cloud and virtualisation and now I'm working on "big data" 400Mb RDS instances. Its time we go "retro" and #gophysical for some things.

<comment><USER18> If anybody has the resources to start building dedicated FPGA (or whatever) instances for SQL workloads it would be one of the public cloud vendors (AWS, Azure, GCP).

<comment><USER17> Good! They will have to set aside servers that do just databases with SQL chips, but either way, I would be happy if they do that.

I would also be interested to see if there is a new trend to go back to owning commodity hardware, putting CoreOS+docker on it + a database with a hopefully inexpensive SQL chip. Moving away from VMware, massively expensive servers, massively expensive SANs, proprietary backups..

Would be very interesting to see.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Very cool work but since its easy to get memory-bandwidth bound with SQL I would wonder if it would make more sense to use GPUs with 10X the bandwidth. I know FPGAs will be getting HBM as well so this might help.

Disclaimer: I work at MapD, a GPU database company. ([http://www.mapd.com](http://www.mapd.com))

</comment><comment><USER20> Online stock brokers and finance companies have been using FPGAs for quite some time now because of latency as a microsecond can literally cost them millions. It is good to see these beasts making their way into crunching "Big Data" in non-finance domain.

</comment><comment><USER21> isn't this already implemented in Datawarehouse appliances like Netezza (now part of IBM), which targeted solving the problem of analytical queries on huge sets of data??

<comment><USER22> I guess Baidu hired some former Netezza guys and they decided to copy/steal from their former company to meet with their KPIs,which is quite common here in China

<comment><USER23> Ahh yes, my old boss was next door neighbours with the Netezza CEO back in the early days circa '06\. I worked a little with the platform back then, and i saw this article and was like, thats they they did! Back then, u had to shard ur database to take advantage of the parrallel processing, not sure how far its come now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> kiril-me They are crazy! Very interesting case. How they support such DB? As I know FPGA has limits on updates.

What tools they use to create relational algebra?

<comment><USER24> > As I know FPGA has limits on updates.

HFT firms have been banging on the drum of making FPGA's infinity programmable for a decade and lots of commercial FPGA's can be re-flashed now without worrying about the number of times you do it.

I've seen re-flash counts up to 100,000 times.

Hey put this in the "what has HFT actually done for the world" list of answers:)

<comment><USER15> I've never seen an advertised limit on FPGAs. You'd probably grow old and die before you ran out of reflashes since that process takes a fair amount of time. 100,000 flashes at even five minutes each is over a year of relentless flashing.

<comment><USER25> Is there a Jenkins plugin for that? :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Naive question, but wouldn't this work only with ECC-enabled graphics cards like NVidia Quadros? Possibly that's the only reasonable choice for servers, but the price is much higher.

<comment><USER15> They're using a Xilinx FPGA card, not a GPU. These are two totally different things, though the FGPA card is usually a lot more expensive than any GPU on the market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> isn't this already implemented in datawarehouse appliances like Netezza (now part of IBM)?

<comment><USER2> Most likely I believe the answer is yes. But since these appliances have been proprietary, not much is publicly known about what they do internally. I suspect that some design like the one we are seeing here at Baidu has been their secret sauce for some time.

<comment><USER27> It's no secret. Netezza has been using FPGAs since the beginning. Here is a link to a paper that describes the Netezza approach: [http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpapers/pdfs/redp4725.pdf](http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpapers/pdfs/redp4725.pdf)

The Baidu approach seems very similar.</comment></comment></comment>


NFC Business Cards by Moo - business cards with a microchip - <AUTHOR> http://uk.moo.com/nfc/ <comment> ryan-c This page has been up for a while, but as far as I can tell this is still vaporware - nowhere to order, no prices.</comment>


Ask HN: Can app be downloadable while submitted to Mac store for review? - <AUTHOR>

While an app is submitted to Mac Appstore for review (first version), is it okay to have it downloadable for testing? <comment><USER2> In what sense? You can use testflight[1] to bundle a version for specific users.

Naturally, you can't have it downloadable for the general public whilst it's under review but testflight is one of the more popular methods to share the app with clients/testers/team members etc.

[1] <https://testflightapp.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> This is specific to iOS. My app is on Mac store (desktop). I'm assuming from your answer that the app can't be available for public download when submitted to appstore for review.

Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> i guess, you can do. it has been different AppID. For example : <http://culturedcode.com/things/> is do this. Maybe, it has been different AppID.</comment>


2+2=1? Playing with modular arithmetic - <AUTHOR> http://maxwelldemon.com/2011/11/20/22-1-patterns-in-modular-arithmetic/

<comment><USER2> Modular arithmetic is probably one of the coolest subjects we covered in high school, but we didn't spend enough time on it. I actually learned all about it from reading Simon Singh's _The Code Book_ in sixth grade--it's a great introduction to cryptography and covers the basics of modular arithmetic to introduce RSA.

Towards the end of high school, I decided to play around with graphing equations as colors. I came up with a bunch of cool patterns including pretty much all of the ones in the article--the easiest way to make a function well- behaved across a color channel is to make it mod 255. Playing around with different functions this way is really fun; I suggest everybody try it.

If you want to draw pictures like this but don't want to write your own program for this, you can use mine: <http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~tikhon/draw>.

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks like the stuff I like to play with:

[http://alquerubim.blogspot.com/2010/07/o-vendedor-de- tapetes...](http://alquerubim.blogspot.com/2010/07/o-vendedor-de-tapetes.html)

<http://alquerubim.blogspot.com/2010/07/visoes-do-camelo.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> Beautiful work!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Pretty cool. I always thought fractals looked like Cthulhu. Also the part where Cthulhu is said to be a cosmic entity and bring subconscious anxiety to humans. Reminds me of fractals in math class.

</comment><comment><USER5> Pretty darn cool!</comment>


NoScript extension officially released for Google Chrome - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/noscript-extension-officially-released-for-google-chrome/ <comment><USER2> Serious question: what use cases are there for using NoScript with Chrome? My assumption is that people using NoScript are concerned with data collection, and wouldn't use Chrome as a result.</comment>


Jeff Hawkins: Brains, Data, and Machine Intelligence [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cz-3WDdqbj0 <comment><USER2> I was fortunate to discover Jeff Hawkins in the early 2007 , when he was exploring brain science .. .I went through his lectures for entrepreneurs at ecorner.stanford.edu , being indian ,I had to literally slow down the video to understand his speech and he is like Bill gross, very very fast in articulating and highly energetic in their talk. You can feel their passion in their work.

Incidently Jeff Hawkins was the first to work on Palm software.....you can say early versions of today's smartphones.

Coming back to brain science , I somehow feel it's more to do with complexity (Santafe.edu).

I am waiting for jeff Hawkins to launch a university like santafe.edu ( complexity) which works exclusively on brain science. Perhaps that would increase application of brain science.

</comment><comment> java-man I think this is the most interesting direction of research in CS one can get involved with today. In 10-20 years, half of CS graduate will be working in computational biology and the other half developing SDR-based machine intelligence.

<comment><USER3> It is not clear that these methods work better than "traditional" deep learning methods; in fact, they haven't produced any good results yet, and most experts think the hype around CLA is not because of its technical properties.

See e.g.

* [http://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/25lnbt/ama_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/25lnbt/ama_yann_lecun/chigv2l)

* [http://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/2lmo0l/ama_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/2lmo0l/ama_geoffrey_hinton/clw89b4)

* [http://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/2iejpg/syst...](http://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/2iejpg/systematically_compared_with_other_pattern/)

<comment> java-man Can "traditional deep learning methods" replicate the kind of unsupervised learning demonstrated by cortical.io's semantic retina (fox eats rodent example in the video)?

<comment><USER3> Sure they can, see e.g. [http://nlp.stanford.edu/pubs/SocherChenManningNg_NIPS2013.pd...](http://nlp.stanford.edu/pubs/SocherChenManningNg_NIPS2013.pdf) or [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1301.3618v2.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1301.3618v2.pdf).

Check the first paper - when working on this problem researchers from Stanford developed a way to measure the quality of an approach, evaluated the results on 30k+ relation examples from 2 different datasets and compared their algorithm with 4 other algorithms.

The problem with cortical.io or numenta (both commercial companies) is that they don't compare their approaches with existing approaches and don't evaluate them on public datasets. And when people do such comparison existing approaches turn out to be better.

It is totally possible these algorithms are good and they provide something that "traditional" methods don't provide. But this is yet to be shown; for some reason authors decide not to "compete" on a same ground. Instead of "promoting" their methods in scientific community via publications / comparisions with existing approaches they seem to focus on people who have little knowledge of modern machine learning. Also, they use their own terminology and usually refer only to their own papers or to some obscure papers from ten years ago, which doesn't help.

<comment><USER4> >" _But this is yet to be shown; for some reason authors decide not to "compete" on a same ground. Instead of "promoting" their methods in scientific community via publications / comparisions with existing approaches they seem to focus on people who have little knowledge of modern machine learning._"

You'd have to provide them then with a decent argument about what economic/competitive benefit they would get by what you suggest. You say they're commercial companies, so then don't be surprised when their approach is based on financial incentives. But trust me, they're probably _begging_ to have someone show them a better alternative that will give them a competitive edge.

So, either no one like you has given them that alternative/idea. Someone has already, and they rejected the financial benefit. Or, finally, someone already told them your idea but they discovered there was no financial benefit and the only benefit was for the greater society.

<comment><USER3> A cynical view on this could be the following: Numenta sells licenses, cortical.io sells api requests, they benefit from more developers using their tools. Commercial companies which fund deep learning research (like Microsoft and Google ) develop their own products which are based on machine learning, they benefit from advancing state of the arts, from better algorithms. So we have quality publications and algorithms from Microsoft or Google and quality marketing from Numenta or cortical.io.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> java-man What might be interesting is to stream stock market data (trades as well as company's press releases) into the Grok algorithm. People who will manage this by the next market crash will be very rich indeed.

<comment><USER5> Im working on this now, but not using grok, using NuPIC core directly. Its been fun maintaining my own private fork of the repo while I scale the algorithms to run on > 1 machine i.e. be able to build a model of any topology where the regions aren't necessarily on the same machine, but still must be fast.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Please stop talking about machine intelligence without reference to normatively correct principles of quantitative reasoning. "I tried it and it scored well in validation" just shows that you've managed to apply _some_ kind of statistical principle, not that you've found a way to build complete machine intellect.

<comment><USER7> Does Hawkins do that? I've not watched this one yet, but his talks are always much more high-level than that I think, and while his work is under the general umbrella of artificial intelligence, what he is actually trying to do is to emulate the human neo-cortex in gritty detail.</comment></comment>


Bitcoin vs Snapchat vs Tumblr - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=bitcoin#q=bitcoin%2C%20snapchat%2C%20tumblr&date=1%2F2010%2048m&cmpt=q

<comment> Stealth- I think it's important to keep this in context, especially for Snapchat. Snapchat is an _app_. Their website contains almost nothing. I bet a VERY small percentage of people who use Snapchat have ever seen their website, much less google'd the term.

</comment><comment><USER2> Neither Bitcoin nor Snapchat does host content, why would I search for it more than once?

Whereas "tumblr cats", "tumblr article that I've read last week", etc are much more viable.

</comment><comment><USER3> Apples to Oranges, really.

<comment><USER4> Apples to oranges to pomegranates, more like it. Why pick these three things in particular to compare?

<comment><USER3> I'm assuming they all have a similar market valuation, or that they did 10 minutes ago or something. Not sure.

It's pretty tough to follow BTC's market valuation right now. Within the last 3 days it has been valued between 441 and 900 USD on MtGox.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Thanks! This is some very interesting feedback on the relative mindshare for each of these : )

<comment><USER6> Not sure if this is representative of "mindshare". Tumblr is a web platform, no doubt you'll get millions of typeins just because people are too lazy to type in the .com in the address.

Snapchat is a mobile platform, there's no real reason to Google "snapchat". Even if you wanted to download it you'd go directly to your app store.

<comment><USER5> Seems like I stand corrected.

Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Thanks for sharing, not what I would have expected! Does it mean we should invest in Yahoo?

</comment><comment><USER8> Really shows how our minds are slightly warped by reading all these tech sites.

</comment><comment><USER9> Estonia seems very tech savvy</comment>


Show HN: Nova - an 'innovation management' platform - <AUTHOR> https://hi.novatools.org <comment><AUTHOR> I bootstrapped this with a partner, and working on it for a few years now part time. I am the only developer.

Nova has an online whiteboard, a bunch of innovation tools (think user empathy maps, story boarding, team building, idea generation etc), card decks, and you can build custom tools and decks and template projects.

Hoping our work pays off. Any feedback is appreciated :)</comment>


Perfect Audience Launches P2P Retargeting: Directly Target Partner Site Visitors - <AUTHOR> http://marketingland.com/perfect-audience-launches-partner-retargeting-network-directly-target-others-sites-visitors-83518

<comment><USER2> This is an interesting approach at connecting companies with relevant audiences for each other and I'll probably be reaching out to the Perfect Audience team to learn more as this seems to be where a lot of things are pointing in the digital media world.

That said, I have several thoughts/concerns that I'd love you guys to address:

1\. If we have existing partners we work with, why wouldn't we just have them place our pixel on their site/in their container tag? Then we could use this with whatever network we wanted instead of being locked in with Perfect Audience. The Bid Guard piece could be interesting in some cases, but depending on other targeting options being used, may be unnecessary.

2\. Do companies need to make their audience profile publicly visible? The information that would be listed (site traffic, types of visitors, etc.) is VERY valuable info to some companies that are not traditional publishers and don't want to publicize that data.

3\. Echoing jamiequint's suggestion for the option to simply buy access. In some cases, it may not make sense for a company to offer up their user data as currency depending on how they approach privacy, but buying access to other's may still be fine.

4\. Also echoing the thought on enriched tagging. Being able to bid up on someone who purchased compared to someone who just visited is VERY valuable.

5\. Have companies needed to change their privacy policies as a result of using this? Seems like you would need to make it clear that you are selling your user's data if you participate, even if the exchange isn't a direct monetary one.

6\. Does this work in conjunction with cookie syncing providers like LiveRamp, etc. to tie everything together in one's DMP? It would seem you could only account for overlap from visitors you've tracked with the Perfect Audience tag, but there may be existing audience data in a DMP that an advertiser would like to dedupe against.

7\. Do you provide any reporting insight into cross-site behavior? Seems like if both partners opted-in to it, that could provide some really unique data for both parties. For example, is the cross-pollination providing mutually beneficial results? If so, it may make sense for the advertisers to engage in additional co-marketing opportunities.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great questions!

1\. If you swap pixels you are giving another company control over your own audience data. The other company can do anything it wants with that data. This is bad for your visitors and bad for you as well. We know there are sites willing to do this, but they've talked to us and told us how much they hate doing it. We think it's bad news.

Also, if you swap pixels and you both target eachother, you will absolutely be driving up your marketing costs. And that's also really bad.

With Connect, we're serving as the audience traffic cop, maybe audience escrow is a better way of looking at it. No data changes hands or control and no bids get jacked up. It's better on all fronts.

Instead of swapping pixels back and forth, you can use software to manage access.

2\. Absolutely not. Nothing is public. All profiles are locked down behind a registration wall and behind other requirements like "has tag installed" and "has at least 1000 cookies". We have no intention of publishing a public list of people using Connect. Right now you can find people to connect with by syncing with your LinkedIn contacts, by directly inviting people to view your profile, or by seeing who's connected to people you are connected to.

In addition, there's hardly any hard data shared on the profiles. We include a rough range of audience size and a list of who their connections are...and that data is available only to people you connect with...who must be using PA. So it's all very restrictive.

3\. Stay tuned! :)

4\. Stay tuned! :)

5\. No data is being sold. No data is changing hands. We've consulted with several lawyers who see no need to amend privacy policies that already address retargeting.

6\. We don't work with LiveRamp and 3rd party cookie syncing providers because they expressly resell and repurpose the data they sync with. We're working to go in the opposite direction where marketers know exactly who's getting access to their data and who's not.

7\. We're getting this question a lot. Happy to hear any product ideas you might have!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Direct link: [http://www.perfectaudience.com/connect](http://www.perfectaudience.com/connect)

We're really excited about this new feature. Retargeting is great and for most companies it's the best performing marketing channel they have, but retargeting only reaches people you've already interacted with. How can you reach NEW prospects with the same ROI?

We thought a lot about the problem and are testing a P2P approach. About 100 companies, a mix of SaaS and retail are testing it now, sending connection requests and retargeting eachother's audiences. ROI has been fantastic.

If any HNers with audiences looking to connect with other audiences want to reach out (A4A), ping us at email@example.com and we can set you up with some extra free credits.

</comment><comment><USER3> Didn't this launch a month ago?

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope. We opened the beta about 14 days ago.

<comment><USER3> Very cool, would be nice if this expanded to data tagging (more granularity than just visited site) and if it was it possible to buy/sell rather than just trade in the future

<comment><AUTHOR> These are all great ideas that we're hearing from others. Definitely stay tuned.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: If you have a hard time reading can you still be good programmer? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> One of the most impressive programmers I know is blind. So yes,it is possible.

Being dyslexic myself I can say some languages are easier for some people than others. For example I like java verbosity and camel case as it helps with my particular variety of reading problems. This frustrated me because I love python in its philosophy but I can't work in it.

</comment><comment><USER3> My brother reads on average 0 to 1 book a year and he is a better code than me. I personally read about 50 books per year. There is nothing about programming that requires you to be a good reader. If you are an avid reader, you will get some more interesting ideas to make your life and work more fulfilling. If you study another language, you will find many similarities with the grammar structure of a "human" language and the grammar structure of most programming languages leading to much cleaner and more well formed code. As a programmer, as long as you can think clearly about your problem, understand your users, and have a good understanding of the documentation of the tools that you are using you should be fine. Reading more exposes us to ideas that we would usually never think of ourselves but in my personal experience there are few ideas that come through this way. Most things come to you the old fashion way -- trial and error. As long as you are persistent and dedicated to your craft you can become a good programmer regardless of where you start and how often you read.

<comment><USER4> > and have a good understanding of the documentation of the tools that you are > using

This is really the counterpoint to what you're saying.

You have to read documentation. It's dense and boring. It's the hardest thing to read. A poor reader is going to have a rough time with it, IMO-- particularly so if they stumble into a poorly documented tool or API.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have a degenerative eye disease and have worn many different variety of contact lenses (RGP, scleral, piggy-backing etc) before eventually undergoing a corneal transplant.

I made do for years, it has never been much of an inhibitor.

<comment><USER6> keratoconus ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Depends how hard you try, but don't let reading stop you!

My greatest mentor was mostly blind. He could see the terminal but would need to be about 2-4 inches away and would be energetically moving his head as he read the contents of the screen.

</comment><comment><USER8> Yes, some of the best programmers I've ever met had a hard time reading.

</comment><comment><USER9> I have a super hard time reading. ADHD and all that. Getting started with a new tool is hard, but I power through it. Sooner or later it gets easier.

</comment><comment><USER10> yes, most code is (jokingly): write once, read never^^

It is also said that it is 10x more difficult to read code than to write it.

If you enjoy it, practice. Comment well.

If there is something you don't understand, rewrite, break it up into smaller pieces. it really takes a long time to understand things, considerable effort is most of the time required - but it gets easier as your skills improve.

For your own sake or for whomever might read code in the future. Keep it small, simple - It really helps!

</comment><comment><USER11> It depends on what "hard time reading" really means. But generally the answer is no.</comment>


Browsix: Unix in the browser tab - <AUTHOR> https://browsix.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> Author here. One thing to emphasize is that all processes run in the browser and are isolated from whatever underlying OS/filesystem the browser is running on - there is nothing special to think about in terms of sandboxing or security. If as a developer you want to give users access to their underlying filesystem, you can do so as usual (HTML5 FS API in Chrome, [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Using_files_from_we...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Using_files_from_web_applications) in general).

</comment><comment><USER2> It wont' be long before I will run my full Desktop working environment into a "Terminal Browser". Looking forward!

</comment><comment><USER3> "Browsix can free you from the chore of sandboxing and load-balancing programs server-side." I am still not sure, how does this avoid load-balancing in server side.

</comment><comment><USER4> Will it run xmonad? ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> not yet :) We're currently focused on command line programs -- it would be really neat to see Haskell running by adding support for Browsix into [http://haste-lang.org/](http://haste-lang.org/)</comment></comment>


Behind the 'Bad Indian Coder' - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/10/behind-the-bad-indian-coder/280636/

<comment><USER2> In my experience, I have never had any problem working with Indian coders (having worked with many), but I have had problems working with coders who are on a 12 hour time difference and are far removed from the business's objectives.

i.e. it's not the people, it's the system.</comment>


DANE is a protocol that enables verified TLS connections without CAs - <AUTHOR> http://wiki.halon.io/DANE <comment><USER2> And all you have to do to use it is sign up for a PKI controlled by the United States Government! What a deal!

</comment><comment><USER3> Crypto as I know it doesn't allow performing an authenticated key exchange between two entities without neither a pre-shared secret nor a trusted third party (CA) [1]. Anyone who promises anything like that is either selling snake-oil or hiding some requirement. DANE still requires trusted third parties, I'm not sure why it's better than the current model.

[1] There's [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle%27s_Puzzles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle%27s_Puzzles), but it's not really practical when you make it secure and not secure when you make it practical.

<comment><USER4> It requires the trust of the DNS roots. Which is pretty neat actually: [http://www.root-dnssec.org/](http://www.root-dnssec.org/)

And it requires your registrar to not try to perform a malicious attack against you. But at that point, most registrars already have access to a root CA, and your domain - they could easily break your environment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have been working with this for quite some time now. I was pretty surprised to see this on HN as news.</comment>


Show HN: Coloured progress-bar for your Golang CLI - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/alexellis/cli-progress-animation <comment><USER2> Neat stuff!

I have an unusual interest in progress bars. I've tried for years to come up with something better (no luck yet!). In particular I'd like to see more reliable ETA's in progress bars. At Microsoft in particular, there were so many progress bars that said "10 minute remaining", for like an hour or so.

One thought I've settled on is that every progress bar should create a documented estimated time remaining prediction at the very beginning, and send a copy of that, as well as the results, to the user as well as the creators (if the user has opted in), so that the forecasts could improve over time and be more reliable.

I'm not sure what that would look like, but seeing your project rekindled that wish for me. Nice job!

<comment><AUTHOR> Good luck! Glad it had a positive effect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Also: [https://github.com/reconquest/barely](https://github.com/reconquest/barely)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for sharing, it looks quite similar!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How much is a link to my app worth?  - <AUTHOR>

I just got featured on killerstartups.com, now I have people actively vying for my wallet. Some sites offer to write a review for a fee (read sell a link). Most are relatively low page rank ~PR2.<p>Has anyone bought links this way, and did anything good come of it? <comment><USER2> I'd recommend against it, although I don't have experience.

1) if they're reputable, they will just review you (not charge a fee). Also recall that the FCC requires bloggers to include financial disclosures now, so that will lessen the impact. 2) if it's not a reputable blog/site, then you're not going to get much PR benefit 3) a lot of these sites exist just for PR, and will eventually get revealed/shut down (there are few/no guarantees that the site will exist shortly, or that it will continue with any positive page rank. Chances are they built their PR on greyhat techniques) 4) Doubtful that you'll get any meaningful signups through this, which means that you're just thinking about your PageRank. Which leads to, 5) don't manipulate your PR; it will quickly become a full time job. The proper way is to follow all the google guidelines and build longer lasting relationships with legit bloggers and review sites.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks, seems reasonable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'd second not buying links this way. There's a ton of free ways you can personally market your app already. Since you mentioned the sites that solicited have relatively low page rank, it's not worth the time/risk/money.

</comment><comment><USER4> Agree with the others, buying links isn't worth it. Google will eventually catch on and devalue it, so it's a waste in the end.

Focus on sites/bloggers where your potential users are. The most useful links are the one's that actually drive traffic directly to your site that end up converting.

I listen to/trust Rand from SEOmoz on SEO issues, here's his thoughts about paid links: <http://www.seomoz.org/blog/our-stance-on-paid-links-link-ads>

</comment><comment><USER5> Paying for backlinks is garbage, just keep pumping out your product. When you're at a stage where you can write something interesting, whip together a press release and mail a bunch of tech blogs. If you get coverage from even 1 of the big guys, theres a trickle down effect where tons of blogs will write and link to you thereafter.</comment>


The Broken Promise of Blogging on the iPad - <AUTHOR> http://nerdgap.com/the-broken-promise-of-blogging-on-the-ipadyour-post-is-almost-never-finished-and-ready-to-publish-using-only-the-ipad-at-least-none-of-mine-ever-are-virtually-all-of-my-blog-posts-include-two-ele/

<comment><USER2> It's bizarre to me that many blogging platforms still treat blogging as a content-production exercise, when in reality it's a blend of content-producing and content-aggregating. I wish more platforms would build on what Tumblr has done in terms of making aggregation more painless.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Speaking of which, does anyone know of a better app for blogging on iPad? If not, there's a great idea for any iOS Devs. Create a great one, and tons of us would be happy to pay the price of an iWork app or so for one!

</comment><comment><USER3> Exactly - hello, MarsEdit for mobile, please?

<comment><USER4> As I understand it, this is in development. I'm interested to see how he (Daniel Jalkut) solves the rich text editing problem.

<comment><USER5> I'm sure it can be done (for the majority of cases) without editing any HTML by hand. iOS has text selection, so text styling and linking can work the same way it does on a real computer. For things like image arrangement, that's generally done via CSS by applying a class that already exists. Doesn't seem like there are too many challenges, we just need someone to go and do it and make it look nice.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Financial Forecast for Inventory Based Product - <AUTHOR>

Hi I'm trying to do some basic financial forecasting for a business that has inventory.  We occur the cost of materials in one month.  Should i record that into the cogs in one month or have it related to sales and spread out with the rest of the cogs? <comment><USER2> IANAA, but would suggest this depends on the purpose of the Financial Forecasting.

If you're trying to run a cashflow projection, you probably need to record cogs in the month the cost is incurred.

If you're trying to determine margins, it may be better to records cogs when they're actually sold - just be sure to factor in any loan costs that may be associated (and ignore 'opportunity costs' from purchasing early, because you may as well pull figures out of thin air).

If the forecasting impacts on Tax, then that probably throws another spanner into the works, which I can't really help with.

Edit - you may also want to post the question over at Chuwe.com - hits their audience nicely.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very Helpful, Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Anything Financial can benefit from Pacioli's treatise (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luca_Pacioli>) :)!

If you modeling using a spreadsheet or by pulling records off a database or an old and ancient ledger the method is the same:

\- When you Purchase

       debit stock,  credit Creditor

\- When you Pay

       debit Creditor, credit Bank

\- When you Sell

        credit stock,  debit customer +
          debit profit (difference between sales price
          and purchase price)

\- When you receive the money (if you selling on credit)

        credit debtor, debit bank

When I started in coding normal accounting methods seemed long and convoluted! However, as the years went by I discovered that this is the easier way to visualize the flow of financial transcactions and it automatically caters for time.

We should call any db based on this as a Pacioli's Datastructure:)

As a bonus, the method includes a test. The sum of all the above transcactions === 0;</comment>


I Tried Market Prediction with Machine Learning - <AUTHOR> https://towardsdatascience.com/what-happened-when-i-tried-market-prediction-with-machine-learning-4108610b3422 <comment><USER2> It sounds like the validation set was seriously overfit.

If you run 10'000 experiments over thousands of indicators, you're bound to find some that idiosyncratically perform well on the validation set but underperform out-of-sample.

You also can't conclude that "there was no subtle underlying pattern" just because you couldn't find one...

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Original for Medium-phobes:

[https://shortcircuitsandinfiniteloops.blogspot.com/2019/11/w...](https://shortcircuitsandinfiniteloops.blogspot.com/2019/11/what- happened-when-i-tried-market.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Thanks for this. I still want to try, even if it does fail. Sounds like my idea of a very good time.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree! It sounds like a fun experiment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So many more failures should be published and documented like this, it's _immensely_ valuable.

Thanks to the author for writing this article.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, those were my thoughts. The idea of making money from projects like this is alluring but probably unrealistic, and it's good to have an honest assessment like this.</comment></comment>