How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2013/04/29/interview-how-ray-kurzweil-plans-to-revolutionize-search-at-google/ <comment><USER2> All grand plans indeed ... but a higher priority should be making search even work at all.

Google search returns approximate results, related results, results with your words split (or joined) and other nonsense to drive ad views.

Even using the so-called "power tools" like allinsite: and the (barely functional) quotation marks, you still get very shoddy results.

Anyone who ever searches for very specific groups of terms knows exactly what I am talking about: enter search terms, click on result, search in page for term, doesn't exist.

<comment><USER3> As annoying as the approximation can be, I'd like a citation for "to drive ad views". It seems much more likely that it was added for the obvious reason - to improve search results, on average, for most people, because relevant results don't always contain the exact search term you put in. In my case, as many times as it's burned me, there have also been a few where I remember it presenting exactly the results I wanted, and it's probably done so many more times without my noticing. YMMV, and it would certainly be nice if Google were better able to distinguish queries that should not be rewritten from ones that probably should, but that's no reason to assign nefarious motives.

As has been mentioned, you should probably set your default search to verbatim mode.

<comment><USER4> Whatever the reason. It has changed recently and is annoying.

Search for "vertx play framework" and the last two search results don't have the term vertx despite pages and pages of results with the term. I don't understand how dropping search terms can make the results more relevant.

Also you can't set the default search to verbatim. You can only hack the query parameters in specific browsers.

<comment><USER5> Add quotes around vertx.

<comment><USER6> This is where I miss the old + sign.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Douglas Hofstadter once said of Ray Kurzweil and his grand ideas: _"It's an intimate mixture of rubbish and good ideas, and it's very hard to disentangle the two, because these are smart people; they're not stupid."_

I think Google (and Larry Page) is betting that they will be able to separate out this mixture.

<comment><USER8> The irony is that you could say the exact same thing about Douglas Hofstadter himself.

<comment><USER9> Really? I don't think so.

For one, Kurzweill DOES have "grand" ideas. Extravagant visions of a future with technological immortality, singularity, etc. Hofstadter does not. He merely examines some things, like cognition, and proposes some theories about their workings. Like, you know, every scientist.

Kurzweill comes out as grandioze, obsessive and deluded, Hofstadter like a normal writer, no more or less strange than, say, Marvin Minsky.

<comment><USER10> Except that Hofstadter, other than writing about his ideas and theories, has accomplished jack shit.

Pragmatically speaking, Kurzweil is miles ahead of Hofstadter in terms of putting his theories and ideas to practice.

It's very easy to criticize visionaries, until they achieve something. Then nobody holds the critics accountable for their negative attitudes towards the visions, and the critics probably would claim that the progress was obvious (in hindsight everything is obvious).

<comment><USER9> > _Except that Hofstadter, other than writing about his ideas and theories, > has accomplished jack shit._

Why would he have to accomplish anything else? He is not an inventor, he is a writer.

> _Pragmatically speaking, Kurzweil is miles ahead of Hofstadter in terms of > putting his theories and ideas to practice._

I don't think so. He merely invented some low hanging fruit in early computer science, like OCR and text recognition. Things on which other people worked and had results too.

And things that, even now, 3 and 4 decades after his inventions, are miles BEHIND of his expectations of them, and somewhat of a disappointment still.

> _It's very easy to criticize visionaries, until they achieve something._

And it's equally easy to be a "visionary", if you don't have to also achieve those visions. Visionaries are a dime a dozen, especially in California.

<comment><USER11> >>I don't think so. He merely invented some low hanging fruit in early computer science, like OCR and text recognition. Things on which other people worked and had results too.

It only looks like low hanging fruit after it is done.

>>And it's equally easy to be a "visionary", if you don't have to also achieve those visions. Visionaries are a dime a dozen, especially in California.

What exactly is your overall point? Most visionaries will fail because that is just how things are. Leonardo da vinci was a great visionary that could not fulfill any of his visions. Visions that were fulfilled hundreds of years latter. Eventually somebody will fulfilled those visions. Again, I don't understand what you are bitching about.

All this irrational hate against the guy for daring to dream what would be one of the greatest achievements of human history is unnerving. Eventually we WILL have strong AI, we are living proof that it is possible just as birds were living proof that things could fly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm working on some open source projects that pertain to recognizing entailment in plain text. Entailment is the relation that holds when one text "follows from" another.

For example, "Carolina beat Duke" follows from "Carolina defeated the Duke Blue Devils once again". I have a demo here: <http://ec2-23-22-22-135.compute-1.amazonaws.com:8001/demo>

Here's an example app that uses entailment recognition to answer natural language polar (yes or no) questions: gavinmh.github.io/HelloTablet.

I'd be happy to talk to anyone who is interested in getting involved.

<comment><USER13> I like your demo. Do you have references to papers that you used as a basis for your code?

<comment><USER12> Thanks. It is based on <http://nlp.stanford.edu/~wcmac/papers/nli-diss.pdf>.

I use a simpler alignment representation, and use semantic role types in the predictions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > _How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google_

By rigorous hand-waving, as he mostly does things the last 1-2 decades?

<comment><USER14> Haters gonna hate. Larry Page obviously didn't hire him and let him take up Google's resources for his "rigorous hand-waving".

How does this one-liner contribute to the conversation at all? Your negativity is unenlightening and obnoxious.

<comment><USER9> > _Haters gonna hate. Larry Page obviously didn't hire him and let him take up > Google's resources for his "rigorous hand-waving"._

No, he did it to get some PR of Google as a mad-genius storage. He also did it with tons of other semi-retired Comp Sci legends. He might also like the guy, or believe the Singularity mambo-jambo himself.

There's a line going around about Google being where "old computer scientists go to retire".

> _How does this one-liner contribute to the conversation at all?_

By giving a summary of the whole thing? A very succinct one at that? If it's also accurate (which you can argue about), then it's a perfect contribution to the conversation.

<comment><USER14> It's still a shitty thing to say. Why do you think he's set to accomplish nothing but get PR for Google? Because he's old?

The guy isn't an idiot, and has managed technical teams his entire life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is it just me, or does Ray Kurzweil seem to be getting younger? I remember seeing a speech of his a few years ago, he had a nervous tick where he was blinking his eyes constantly. He also looked a lot older. Now, he doesn't have that tick, seems to have more hair, etc.

I know he takes like 100 pills every day

<comment><USER9> People can look older and younger at different times, depending on weight gain or loss, stress or depression, choice of clothing, plastic surgery (duh!), more or less workout, etc.

Him getting 100 pills every day: I don't think is very relevant. Mostly delusional. If that worked, pharmaceutical companies would have made it into one mega-pill, and sold it for a fortune to rich people years ago.

<comment><USER16> Something as simple as lighting could also play into it depending on what opportunities you have for seeing someone at different times.

As for your argument against 100 pills, that only holds if it's well-known or well-established that it works and works safely.

<comment><USER9> > _As for your argument against 100 pills, that only holds if it's well-known > or well-established that it works and works safely._

Or semi-safely. The rich are also "early adopters". Also see tragically failed plastic surgeries and BS like cryogenics.

But still, that it's not "well-established that it works and works safely", is exactly my point about his use of the pills. Mostly wishful-thinking on his part.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Call me paranoid, but this has to be the mashup best suited to produce Skynet.

<comment><USER18> Yes, but they'll need Boston Dynamics in the mix before they can build terminators.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> while Wolfram said that the bottom-up approach is the new kind of science

<comment><USER20> Wolfram and Kurzweil are betting on opposite horses here. I work for Wolfram, but I'd be delighted if the ML-approach works. Personally, I think we need a diversity of approaches to really understand how to crack the nut of 'hard AI' (if that is even a sensible thing to pursue).

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I wonder what would be the best strategy for google to monetize such an asset as ibm watson? Surely ads based model is not the best way(since they've already got a large part of the internet ad market and given that only google, ibm and maybe microsoft could build something similar.

If it's a truly competitive advantage, wouldn't offering it for startups/other-businesses in return for equity would offer bigger profits?

<comment> alok-g My best understanding is that Watson would be too costly as compared to Google.

<comment><USER21> They say now it's "a pizza-box-sized server".

<comment> alok-g Thanks. I could find some references using those keywords!

Do you then also know about the cost per query as compared to a Google search? Or alternatively, how much concurrent traffic can they handle with that server?

<comment><USER21> I don't know, but i don't think that really matters. google mostly deals the "cheap" stuff, while watson deals with really valuable stuff , so compute cost is is not so important.

I think there was a query on quora about this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think Google Books project provides an interesting twist on this. Now their AI not only has the whole content of the publicly accessible Internet to study but also quite nice chunk of material ever put on paper.

</comment><comment><USER23> >Kurzweil eventually wants to help create a "cybernetic friend" that knows what you want before you do

I am not sure I want that. At least not as much as Google does. Kurzweil is going to help me click on more ads. Shreds any sense of him being a visionary.

<comment><USER24> I'm 100% sure I don't want this. Exploration and discovery as a whole is one of the most rewarding experiences we have as humans. I don't want that outsourced to some machine/ algorithm. I addition to that, we deal with so much cognitive dissonance within our brains on a day to day, minute to minute, millisecond to millisecond basis, I'm not convinced Google (even with their massive cache of data on us) could even predict what we "want" anyhow. Think of youtube and it's "recommended for you" video suggestion. Just because I listen to Lil Boosie every now and then dosen't mean I want to hear all the shitty southern rap songs it's choosing for me.

<comment><USER25> I'm not in love with the personally tailored search experience as it stands.

I'm totally OK with searching "#{my_city} taxi" instead of "taxi" if it means when I search "abortion" I get a sampling of search results that has the greatest co-citation... instead of something that myopically focuses on Google's perception of my preferences.

At the least, I'd like to be able to switch off the personalization. But anyway... Beating a dead horse here in this community, I'm sure.

<comment><USER26> If only there were a way to predict that users searching for "taxi" tend to want local results, and users searching for "abortion" don't. You know, like that other search engine does, called, um, Google:

<https://www.google.com/search?q=abortion>

<https://www.google.com/search?q=taxi>

Or if you were willing to type more than 2 words into the search box before blaming Google for failing to read your mind, while you simultaneously tell Google to stop trying to read your mind.

<comment><USER27> I believe he's trying to say that he doesn't want results tailored to him at all. For example, if I were republican, I'd tend to get anti-abortion material when searching.

He seems to be saying that he'd be okay with typing in his city name to get local results in exchange for not having any personalization. In other words, it's beyond local vs non-local.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Every time I read about machine learning work that is being done at Google, that's available if you're a Real Googler, and then compare that to the closed-allocation nightmare the other 90% face, it makes me want to fucking rage out and fly a plane into Mountain View...

... land, get off that plane, take a cab, and have a polite but blunt conversation with the founders about how to fix their company. (What did you think I meant?)

Artificial intelligence is nice, brahs, but natural stupidity in the form of closed allocation and Enron-style performance reviews are putting that company at 10% speed. Clear out the latter and you'll have plenty more muscle for the former.

I'm sure Ray Kurzweil will do amazing things, but he'd do even _more_ amazing things if the company still had the machinery (e.g. open allocation, a culture of human decency) to bring talent to him properly. The whole reason he is there is to work with great people that the company is supposed to be better equipped to find than he is... but how will that work, given that the company sold off its ability to reward and recognize talent just to appease McKinsey?

<comment><USER29> I'm a little curious - have you done machine learning work that's made it into a real product?

I tried doing it a bit with my last project. My results were basically terrible. It turns out that getting useful results out of heterogenous, vague, fuzzily-specified real world data is really hard.

I'm tight with a few folks in Search Quality whose job _is_ that sort of data- scientist machine-learning work, and they're really good at it. Y'know what 90% of their daily time is spent on? Compiling golden sets. Labeling training data. Running MapReduces to collect basic statistics about their data set. Running MapReduces to identify representative members of their data set, and outliers that should be excluded. Shoving data into R to visualize it. Futzing with numeric coefficients. Building webpages and tools so they can visualize the data and results, futz with the numbers online, and get feedback in real time. Collecting test sets and running your algorithm against them, and then trying to figure out why your losses are losing.

Machine-learning from a practitioner's POV is not at all like the textbooks and theoretical papers suggest. I'd estimate that less than 10% of one's time goes into the "fun" part of machine learning - brainstorming new signals and writing the code to extract them and feed them into your classifier - and 90% is on the kind of grunt work that hard science grad students do all the time. You get paid well for it, but that's because a lot of the work is _really_ boring and time-consuming. I suspect that I get a far more frequent rush of accomplishment as a mostly-UI guy than the data scientists in my department get.

It's a tool. It works well in some cases, but it can take a lot of effort to get it to work well.

<comment><USER28> I can only speak for myself here, but I find a lot of what you described as "grunt work" to be fun. Yes, it's true that when you work with real world data, you don't only work on the mathematical modeling, and you spend a lot of time just setting yourself up to be able to do what is typically called the "fun" part. For me, personally, I find all of the work involved to be fun-- even setting up a data pipeline and figuring out how to distribute a computation. Automating away grunt work and setup process is fun, too.

Part of what makes data science fun is the machine learning itself. And an equally interesting part of it is is that it involves so many other parts of computer science that a typical corporate job would call "too hard" and isolate you from.

At least based on what I've seen, data scientists are _respected_ and this means they get dibs on the most interesting projects. However, the interesting projects themselves involve a lot of detailed work (that's the nature of technology) and if you're _that_ interested, you're going to want to do it yourself, at least until you really understand the problem (at which point, you'll automate the dull stuff).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Kurzweil has grand ideas, thinks out of the box enough for people to call him crazy. I would guess some of those are the kind of grand / crazy ideas larry and company want to pursue too. So i think it is a good fit. For more information on the man and what motivates him. See the documentary the Transcendent Man, <http://www.amazon.com/Transcendent-Man/dp/B0051Y6NQA></comment>


The End of the Facebook Era - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/aaron-greenspan/the-end-of-the-facebook-e_b_575921.html

<comment><USER2> This article was absurdly dramatic. He's right about one thing, though -- that the media is largely influencing the public opinion of Facebook. The number of emotionally fueled articles that have been written about Facebook recently (at least in my opinion) greatly outweighs the actual severity of the situation.

<comment><USER3> I agree. And personally, I find a big gap between what concerns "the media" and the people around me. Among my 400 facebook friends, I've gotten 2 or 3 status updates concerned with new privacy rules. Meanwhile on hacker news I see a dozen of articles in a day about it

<comment><USER4> Selection bias? People concerned with facebook privacy aren't making status updates any more?

<comment><USER5> If the people concerned with privacy issues leave the service, doesn't it inherently resolve the issue?

<comment><USER4> For them, yes. For Joe Whoops-I-Didn't-Want-My-Mother-To-Know-I-Was-Gay perhaps not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I feel like its 1994 and all my friends are on AOL, while I enjoy the open internet.

<comment><USER7> I disagree with that analogy. AOL was trying to put the entirety of the internet within its walled garden: the Web, games, email, everything. Facebook is only trying to dominate one space: communicating with your friends. Admittedly, that is a very important area, but the benefits of having all of your friends on one platform are huge, and Facebook is simply working towards that.

Further, what's "the open internet" in your analogy? There is no decentralized social platform that at all compares to Facebook, and currently I fail to see how there could be one that is viable. Diaspora will certainly not be it, unless the readership of HN encompasses all of your friends.

<comment><USER8> I'd argue that email is already a decentralized social platform and so is XMPP (for instant messaging) and NNTP was (for newsgroup discussions)

<comment><USER9> You could also argue that email and NNTP are failed social platforms, mainly due to spam issues. Newsgroups have been almost entirely replaced by one-off forums like this one, and email requires massive continuing efforts to block spammers.

<comment><USER8> You could also argue that the solutions to that are known but not currently widely used. If you were to create an iteration of email where there only people aloud to email you were the people in your address-book, would that not be a bit like Facebook is now. Identifying people can be done via signing messages with GPG so no one could forge the sender.

Having everyone sign messages on NNTP would work too since you could whitelist a set of people or alternatively a black list of known bad people.

Forums like this are good, but lack the convenience that a NNTP news reader used to have of having all your conversations in one place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A visionary stands on the shoulders of giants, but for some, a pile of small people will do.

</comment><comment><USER11> I've been suspecting that he's a sociopath. First, being in a position of power puts him in the right demographic. Then, he seems to continue to do whatever he can get away with, then come with an apology that seems sincere enough that people buy it, and then he keeps on as before. I don't know how you can launch Beacon, the way it was launched, with other people knowing what was going to happen (1), and be surprised when it's a PR disaster. Either he's stupid or he was just testing what he can get away with.

(1) <http://gigaom.com/2007/11/06/facebook-beacon-privacy-issues/>

<comment><USER4> Honestly, I've always been skeptical that "sociopaths" really exist as a psychologically distinct group from, say, run-of-the-mill jerks.

It's easy to find first-person accounts of what it's like to be, say, schizophrenic or delusional or manic-depressive or to have Asperger's, but I've never heard of anyone admitting "I'm a sociopath. Here's what it's like to be me."

<comment><USER12> It wasn't really that hard:

[http://www.amazon.com/Little-Bastard-Autobiography- Sociopath...](http://www.amazon.com/Little-Bastard-Autobiography- Sociopath/dp/1605639451)

<comment><USER11> Well, this guy is quite different from the reddit link I posted nearby in this thread. He seems concerned about his children's wellbeing, and curing his condition, I didn't think that sociopaths could do this.

<comment><USER12> agreed. I liked your reddit link - interesting read.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm confused. Did Greenspan create HouseSystem or theFacebook? In the article he say, "In late 2003 I created an on-line, opt-in web site referred to as "the facebook" exclusively for Harvard students..."

</comment><comment><USER14> Aaron... Aaron... Aaron! GET OVER IT!

House System, was, at best, about 10% as influential in the creation of Facebook as was Friendster. You take every opportunity to hate on Mark and Facebook, even when it makes no sense... Why can't you just move on? Mark/Facebook owe you nothing; quit deluding yourself. Go be productive!!

<comment><AUTHOR> Always this comment... Sigh.

<http://www.thinklink.com>

I can be productive and write too.

<comment><USER15> Why not go help the Diaspora folks? They won't rip you off, it's all open source.

<comment><USER16> There's no "it" yet. Just a lot of promises.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I too stopped signing in to facebook well before it became trendy. My reason was that facebook was becoming more open and less like the closed social network I shared with my friends.

</comment><comment><USER18> Interesting that it's on HuffPo, considering how completely (some would say intrusively) they have embraced Facebook (and Twitter) on their website.

<comment><USER19> Huffington Post embraces lots of illogical points of view.

<http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=463>

<comment><USER19> Okay, I am curious about downvotes to my reply above this. No disagreement was posted in reply, so I'm not sure what is being disagreed with here.

Thanks for your wisdom.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "Facebook is a ponzi scheme... of people and sense." Great line.

</comment><comment><USER15> All Facebook needs to do is create a few generic privacy profiles, and default to one of the more private ones. Privacy problem solved. But, I get the feeling there's a corporate culture of vicariousness, exposure and a touch of schadenfreude. That culture is permeating into popular culture.

<comment><USER21> It might not be that simple. I was reading an article earlier today that pointed out these privacy decisions have mostly been made to simplify the internal processes of the application. That linking too many different parts of data was having a huge effect on the growth of facebook, and this has driven the problems we are facing today.

It also helped them escape the growing pains we have seen form twitter and the like.

<comment><USER19> _That linking too many different parts of data was having a huge effect on the growth of facebook_

This is why I'm still not sure that Facebook can do anything to monetize its user base without being off-putting to many members of its user base. To not be annoying takes a lot of data processing for every page view (and every advertisement served up), while to be profitable (and speedily responsive to user page requests) requires as little demand on the Facebook server farms as possible. It may not be technically possible today to run a profitable Facebook that pleases many normal users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Remember Zuckerberg's 60 minutes interview? Perhaps he was nervous, but there was something _off_ about him. I don't think this is evidence that he's a sociopath, but if I squint my eyes and add a dash of the damming condemnations that are leaking out left and right these days, he certainly seems like a sociopath.

Who knows, but Facebook isn't just Mark, it's a large team of highly intelligent and talented (and in most cases PHD level) engineers who I'm sure want nothing more than to protect people's privacy, make a fantastic product, and above all help people connect with current and past friends.

</comment><comment><USER23> This article has zero credibility. Aaron Greenspan tries to dress it up as some sort of analysis, but it's actually just more of the same: sour grapes. To Aaron:

Aaron, I don't doubt that Zuckerberg screwed you over. Unlike many, I'm willing to take you at your word. You should have written your book, _profited from it to the max_ , and then relegated the whole thing to cocktail party joke. There's no reason to cling to this story; it can only make you look bad.

</comment><comment><USER24> The word sociopath is used here with kind of an 'evil' bias. But the term really has more to do with how social / external inputs affect decision making.

Really, what is the difference between being a sociopath and being relentlessly resourceful?

<comment><USER12> They're orthogonal issues:

To be relentlessly resourceful is a great quality in anyone. You get things done.

To be a sociopath means you have lack of empathy or remorse, usually with an inflated sense of self worth.

You can be a resourceful sociopath, or you can be resourceful but empathetic and socially responsible. The former implies you're likely to screw people over and not care about it.

<comment><USER24> I really think this is an unfair stereotype. Being relentlessly resourceful is only a great quality as it relates to a great goal or ambition.

You could have an evil resourceful person who is not a sociopath. You could have a good resourceful person who is a sociopath.

Just because you are a sociopath does not mean you can't pursue a socially responsible goal. Also, the the definition of 'good', 'evil', 'socially responsible', we know are relative terms. In history, some sociopaths have used resourcefulness to re-define these norms for society.

The point I am trying to make is that being relentlessly resourceful, in the most rational sense, often means acting like a sociopath in the sense that you need to disregard social inputs unless they help accomplish your goal.

<comment><USER12> Sociopaths are unconstrained or uninfluenced by how they affect the well being of those around them, unless the effects help achieve their own goals or ambitions.

You can certainly find a sociopath that is helpful to society, they just wouldn't care on an emotional level.

I would be hard pressed to find an evil person who is relentlessly resourceful and social responsible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Ok, facebook is fucked - great!!! Zuck creeps me out big time.

now give me an alternative, where I can just transfer all my information, friends, and photos in one click, and I'll move - no questions asked...

damn, didn't think so.

<comment><USER26> <http://www.joindiaspora.com> , not ready yeat. You just have to wait :)

<comment><USER25> I'm aware of diaspora, but do you think that it will import all my account info, friends, and photos from facebook?

<comment><USER27> Sure, a little web-scraping/API python script goes a long way.

<comment><USER25> true, but who actually owns the data?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I sincerely doubt this is going to be the end of the Facebook era. There are way too many people using the service and only a tiny fraction of them are going to delete their profiles anytime soon.

</comment><comment><USER29> And the Huffington Post is built to last, and has a sane & modest founder?

</comment><comment><USER30> Read some more of Aaron's stuff, including his _Authoritas_ thing he promotes at the end of the article, and _he's_ the one who comes across as the possible sociopath.

<comment><USER31> I don't believe one must label every self-promoter a sociopath. And Aaron's post is foremostly a promotion for his self-published 2008 book, _Authoritas_ , whose sales are currently lagging ([http://www.amazon.com/Authoritas- Students-Admissions-Foundin...](http://www.amazon.com/Authoritas-Students- Admissions-Founding-Facebook/dp/1606690000))

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Bias much?

<comment><USER33> ad hominem much?

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Is it just me or is this a real piece of crap? He talks about how it was _his_ idea and how he was maligned by Harvard admins, yada yada, which is typical talk. However, what the heck is the thing about Zuck being a "sociopath"? Now I don't know him, and he does look and (from what I read) act weird sometimes but who cares? Most founders and successful CEO's are in that same boat, otherwise they wouldn't _be_ that successful. Examples range from Oracle's Ellison to RoR's DHH, and of course Jobs.

The FB privacy thing has turned into a true media frenzy. Look, FB is not going to go away anytime soon, users just have invested too much time into it. So, forget about the whole "four brave kids take on FB with open platform". How to make FB behave nicely without any viable competition is the question here.

</comment><comment><USER35> Honestly, I don't care what old people like this have to say about Facebook. I was in college when it launched and I still use it every single day. People like this and Calacanis can shove it when they say the Facebook Era is over. Go ask a bunch of highschool and college students right now if they think Facebook is dead, because they are who matter. Anyone that knows that demo can agree they are hooked and don't give a shit about 99% of the privacy concerns all over the news. Give it up grandpa, Facebook doesn't care about you. We never wanted you anyways. : /

<comment><USER36> _Honestly, I don't care what old people like this have to say about Facebook._

If you're going to comment on an article, you might want to take the time to actually read it. The author graduated from college in 2004 and is in his mid to late 20's.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> And Aaron Greenspan is at it again.

Seriously, he needs to find a new hobby. He looks like an absolute twat, pursuing that "OMG Mark Zuckerberg stole my idea" horse for half a decade.</comment>


Why can you deposit your check by phone? - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/i2pi/status/1270935973484826624 <comment><USER2> The Twitter conversation ... diagrammed:

[https://www.solipsys.co.uk/Chitter/ChecksByPhone.svg](https://www.solipsys.co.uk/Chitter/ChecksByPhone.svg)</comment>


Ask HN: Debunking the SV silly-money-for-silly-ideas myth - <AUTHOR> As a middle aged tech guy, I am sometimes asked by younger fellows why SV uses so much money for b2c ideas that would be deemed spent, foolish or unfeasible elsewhere. In other words, how can you get running big funds for another basic SaaS or copycat app or mechanical IoT equipment. The latest source for discussion was Juicero, something a local team over here, out of the SV, was thinking of a few years ago and had to drop because of absolutely no traction. My collaborative answer is it is something related with venture capital placing speculative bets in the hope of winning the unicorn lottery, sometimes independent of the substantial merit of the underlying project. I realise it is a bit consolatory and no one is satisfied. Better answers then? <comment><USER2> Here's Matt Bruenig for you:

> "The unwritten story of the Juicero debacle is that high income inequality > causes capital to be misallocated towards luxury production."

</comment><comment><USER3> It doesn't seem like a myth to me. Vast amounts of money being spent on stupid consumerism, selling user information to the highest bidder, ADS ADS ADS ADS, businesses that are so good at losing money they'd do better if they literally burned piles of cash every day...</comment>


Ohloh has fixed incorrect code analysis issue - <AUTHOR> http://www.ohloh.net/blog/Latest_Updates_to_Project_Statistics_and_Line_Counts With the recent code push, Ohloh has fixed the issue that produced incorrect code analysis reports for many projects. More details in linked blog post. Since NumPy was mentioned on HN before; here is the updated analysis - https://www.ohloh.net/p/numpy/analyses/latest <comment><AUTHOR> It will be a while before we fix analysis on all the projects. Some of the projects have been updated, for example NumPy (<https://www.ohloh.net/p/numpy/analyses/latest>)</comment>


Azul Systems To Open Source Significant Technology in Managed Runtime Initiative - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoq.com/news/2010/06/azul_ori

<comment><USER2> Seems to be syscalls to allow userspace to manage virtual memory with more power and responsiveness, so as to allow garbage collectors to take advantage of hardware capabilities -- sounds quite interesting.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's great to see this finally happen. Kudos to Azul!

Now let's hope the OpenJDK patches will be accepted and merged back upstream.</comment>


Jukebox - your democratic music player - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/lociii/jukebox If you like Zach Holman's play (https://github.com/holman/play) but don't like Ruby (like me) check out Jukebox. <comment><USER2> See also Zach Holman's Play, which integrates with Hubot, the Campfire chat bot: <http://zachholman.com/screencast/play/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Holman's play is almost the same product - but I don't like Ruby :-) Feel free to add Hubot support to Jukebox.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I know some places where this would become a powerful Rickrolling machine. Other than that, this is clearly useful, thanks for sharing it.

</comment><comment><USER4> You might consider using a different name or at least adding some words so people can find it. Looks like a useful and nice project!

<comment><AUTHOR> The project has been published today and google already knows about it: "jukebox democratic" -> no. 5 on google "jukebox democratic player" -> no. 1 on google

What else should I add? I'm open for any proposals. Thanks!

<comment><USER5> Maybe you should actually call it "Democratic Jukebox"? I think it has a bit of a ring to it and is more distinctive than just "Jukebox".

<comment><AUTHOR> Hell yeah. Renamed it yesterday. Thanks for the proposals.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The 5 Biggest Interview Mistakes Startups Make - <AUTHOR> http://blog.standoutjobs.com/the-5-biggest-interview-mistakes-startups-make/ <comment><USER2> Articles like this remind me of everything that's wrong with the tech hiring process. Especially the linked "new-hire checklist", which says that you should demand _"imbalance"_ and _"a glass full of kool-aid"_ in your candidates, but mysteriously downplays the importance of _"domain knowledge"_ (really...this is what the author considers to be _good_ advice?)

Beyond that, I don't think I'm the only good developer who is tired of the "gauntlet" mentality in tech interviews. Coding questions are fine and puzzles are sometimes acceptable, but you have to remember that their _only_ purpose is to answer one question: _does the candidate know how to code?_ If you already know the answer to that question, it's time to sell the interviewee on your company -- not to alienate them by beating them senseless with ever-more- difficult problems and brain teasers.

Every interview question should satisfy one of two criteria:

1) if the candidate answers correctly, would it make me want to hire him/her?

2) if the candidate answers incorrectly, would it make me want to avoid him/her?

If your questions are "hard", but they don't satisfy one of these requirements, they're useless. And importantly, once you've got a sense of the answer to these questions, _you're done with the interview_. There's no need to drag it on, and subjecting a candidate to a grueling, capricious interview process can _only_ serve to alienate her from your company.

<comment><USER3> Good points.

Agree with the premise that interview questions should provide useful information.

However, recruitment is a delicate dance (much like any kind of relationship where there's both "buying" and "selling").

Anything that's overly formulaic is probably sub-optimal.

At the end of the day, you're trying to have a conversation that helps both parties determine if it's a good "fit". There should be an overarching "goals" for the questions, but not everything that's said or asked will neatly satisfy the criteria. Successful recruiting is more nuanced.

<comment><USER2> What's more formulaic: asking a small set of questions that are known to provide real information about a candidate's skill, or conducting an eight- hour "gauntlet" interview loop of brain-teasers and puzzles?

Questions assessing "fit" satisfy the criteria I outlined: a good answer "fit" question will make you want to hire the candidate. A bad answer will make you want to avoid her.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like this overall. I read Joel Spolsky's book on hiring techies and I've tried his interview process for the past ten interviews I've done. Some things work and some things don't.

I would add to this article and to Joel's approach that you need to ask some basic coding questions during the telephone interviews to at least pick up on things to review during the in-person interview. Example: for a programming job, I want to know if a person knows the size of an "int" or if they can tell me what the difference between a struct and a class is. If they can't, then I need to make the decision right now to drop this candidate or consider them for a more junior position.

Here's what happened to me recently: I have a job opening for a junior programmer (still do actually) and I had a phone interview scheduled. I prepped my notes and asked what I thought were good questions ("Tell me about that job. Tell me about a challenge you had. Where do you see yourself in 5 yrs?"). The candidate breezed through these questions and I was excited.

For my in-person interviews, I had decided to use a 10-question Basic Skills test. It is handwritten and very, very easy: "Write out the numbers 1-10 each on a separate line in a console app", "describe how a web app works in detail as though you are describing it to a brand new tech writer". It is timed - it's really, really easy - and I allot up to 20 mins.

I handed my candidate the test as the first thing and he failed miserable. Next!

My fault for not having a better phone interview process in place.

</comment><comment><USER5> After a successful interview, both sides know whether the answers to all of "can, will, fit" are yes.

The other mistake that companies make is in the description that they use to find people. If a description says "{framework}" and nothing else, folks are going to assume that {framework} is your problem and that you don't have anything else. If you're developing {framework}, that's reasonable, but if it's just a tool being used correctly, it isn't your problem and you should talk more about what you want folks to do with {framework}.</comment>


Ask HN: I know a guy with great talent. What to do? - <AUTHOR>

I know a great young designer. He is only 15 years old, nobody takes him seriously and I think he can make some money with his designing skills, what should he do and how can I help him (I'm 18 and I'm developer)?<p>- His English is good<p>- Knowledgeable in HTML/HTML5 and CSS<p>- Skilled in Photoshop<p>- Knows very basics of JavaScript<p>- Decent with frameworks like Twitter bootstrap, Gumby...<p>- Some of his recent work:
 * http://ewooy.com/img/truffle.png<p>* http://ewooy.com/img/streamio.png<p>* http://ewooy.com/img/edure.png<p>* http://ewooy.com/img/flare.png<p>* http://ewooy.com/img/enyo.png<p>* http://ewooy.com/img/karla.png <comment><AUTHOR> Clickables: <http://ewooy.com/img/truffle.png>

<http://ewooy.com/img/streamio.png>

<http://ewooy.com/img/edure.png>

<http://ewooy.com/img/flare.png>

<http://ewooy.com/img/enyo.png>

<http://ewooy.com/img/karla.png>

</comment><comment><USER2> Hey! My name's Annie and am looking for a technical partner(s) to help me get my app company off the ground and to apply to Y Combinator (deadline: March 29th). Interested? I really liked the look of your projects so far!

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, I'm developer and I can connect you with designer friend.

Send me details to firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER2> Great! Thanks! Just sent an email over

-Annie

<comment><USER3> For future reference, there is no need to sign individual posts. You can add information to your profile by clicking your username in the top left corner of the website. Users can then click your username for more details on you personally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You've posted his work here. You're already helping him ;)</comment>


Show HN: 8chen – A New Hacker News Client for iOS - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/8chen-for-hacker-news/id1308885491?mt=8 <comment><USER2> Couldn't tell from the screenshots, does this allow login/submission/commenting/my threads/etc?

<comment><AUTHOR> It does not (yet). Sorry!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looks great, is fast and feels good so far.

There is one nitpick I have: The usual iOS swipe from left to go back is not working on iPhone SE (iOS 11.2)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I wasn't aware of that bug. Surprising because it works on iPhone 6/7/X!</comment></comment>


The sick incentives of online publishing - <AUTHOR> Just a short comment on something I noticed: Yesterday, this article scored hundreds of votes on HN: http://www.factmag.com/2016/02/11/soundcloud-financial-report-44m-losses/
The article was based on a news which two days earlier had been covered by multiple outlets, among them Hypebot, the FT, and Music Ally.
What made the Factmag article different from the other ones, apart from that it was published 2 days later and did not do more than summarizing the news others already had been reporting? Factmag used the most dramatic headline imaginable, emphasizing an allegedly existing existential threat to SoundCloud.
Considering that the article dominated the HN frontpage for many hours it must have received quite a handsome number of visitors (not even factoring in all the subsequent sharing which happens after an article hits the HN top spot).
This is a prime example for the sick state of online publishing. The incentives are completely skewed. Putting a more negative spin on an old story should not be rewarded like that.
This situation needs to be fixed. <comment><USER2> The HN posting that you're complaining about getting the attention was the _earliest_ one posted. Are you saying you prefer that _dupes_ get more votes than the first posting on a given topic?

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed, theoretically the fault is that no one (including me) posted one of the earlier articles about the news.

But, from a quality focus, yes, I think if there clearly are better and earlier posts about the same news, with the same (or in that case, more comprehensive information, like e.g. Music Ally's post), HN would benefit from actually not surfacing the clickbaity, dramatic rewrite that was published 2 days later.

It is also clearly stated in the submission guidelines: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter. "

In that case, this rule was broken, and that behavior was rewarded.</comment></comment>


After false Hawaii missile notice, FCC launches investigation - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/01/after-false-hawaii-missile-notice-fcc-launches-investigation/ <comment><USER2> > HI-EMA did not have an automated way to send a cancellation of an "event" > message, so it had to issue one manually.

Why is this kind of engineering so common in the US? Another example would be the No Fly List which, until recently, was almost impossible to get off, whether one had been added by security personnel or a grumpy airline employee. Where is the worst case analysis?</comment>


Twitter is a Communication Platform, but Facebook is an Identity Platform - <AUTHOR> http://www.insidefacebook.com/2009/06/08/will-facebook-and-twitter-become-communication-tools-or-identity-platforms/

<comment><USER2> Facebook is basically an address book with applications built on top of that for sharing information with those people.

At its heart it's all about identity, and that's what really makes it work.</comment>


Gmail chat is sent to wrong person - <AUTHOR> http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/gmail/Sc0d0ELkrUM

<comment><AUTHOR> This just happened to me, it was extremely weird. Any message I sent to one person, another random contact received them. Very scary bug...

More: [https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!category- topic/chat...](https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!category- topic/chat/i-found-a-bug/BHmppu49I0s)</comment>


Ask HN: Feedback on idea- a knowledge bot for Dev Teams - <AUTHOR> Looking for feedback on this idea i'm working on: a knowledge bot for dev/engineering teams.
The idea is there is org-specific developer-related knowledge spread across various machines/apps (wiki pages, github, box, etc.)  and you want to quickly get specific knowledge relevant to you right away.  For example, if i'm trying to connect to my local database and need db connection info, i would pop my cli and type: `bot whats our app connection info for the postgres db?' and the bot will return relevant org-dev specific knowledge.
Think of it as your team's collective knowledge (thats spread across a plethora of cloud and local apps/machines) suddenly accessible via the cli.  No need to login to a separate app and sift through various pages to find what you need.  The data comes to you.
Any devs that work in a team think this is useful?  Would you pay for such a tool?  How often do you find yourself having such a problem- if you can describe the problem too please. <comment><USER2> I could see that being useful in slack. Especially if you could "cc @bot" when answering a teammate's question to add an item to be knowledge base and it had strong NLP to handle different phrasings of both input and question.

I'd probably need to trial it for proof of usefulness before paying anything more than about $25/yr total for it, and that may put you in a bind as the developer - since (for a team the size of mine) you'd need at least a 6-month trial just to populate the knowledge base with enough items to be useful and then a couple more months for using it to become reflex.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just curious, why do you prefer bot against other types of UI ?

edit - example of tools solving similar problem:

[https://kite.com/](https://kite.com/)

[https://kapeli.com/dash](https://kapeli.com/dash)

<comment><AUTHOR> Dash and Kite are mainly for code documentation/info.

What i'm thinking is more about your team's specific info- such as:

\- what is the postgres db connection info

\- how to setup remote debugging environment

\- give me our test machine information

\- fetch the latest styleguide doc

\- what is our security guide on sensitive info

\- how to build x (where x is a product our team works on) on linux/windows

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I always want to type a library or function in and get example code. be interesting to have it connected to scripts. like "is x123 server up?" runs a script gets an answer.</comment>


Trump2cash – A stock trading bot powered by Trump tweets - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/maxbbraun/trump2cash <comment><USER3> >This bot watches Donald Trump's tweets and waits for him to mention any publicly traded companies.

Ok, simple enough, go on.

> When he does, it uses sentiment analysis to determine whether his opinions > are positive or negative toward those companies.

Eh, sentiment analysis isn't perfect but it has come a long way, plus Trump does typically say what he means in simplistic language.

> The bot then automatically executes trades on the relevant stocks according > to the expected market reaction.

Ah market psychology. Stop. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200. This is the tricky bit that a toy project will never get right and turns your slick algorithmic trading project into a monkey and a dart board.

Though this is a sweet example of an API mashup.

<comment><USER4> It's perfectly workable. The bot just needs to weigh its trades properly and provided the sentiment signal has any alpha, it can be combined with other analysis to run a profitable strategy.

I've seen this working and working very well (day job), although not specifically with Trump tweets.

<comment><USER5> If it works, the last thing you want to do is post it on HN, because it'll stop working once everyone starts using it. Everybody else running the bot will bid up the prices of affected stocks before you can get to it, and so by the time your bot gets around to executing its trade, you'll be buying at inflated prices and lose money as everyone else takes their profits.

<comment><USER6> Not necessarily. If you can get a bunch of unsophisticated traders on relatively high-latency connections (AKA the readers here) to execute a known strategy, you can actually make a lot of money by simply frontrunning them. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I actually did some basic analysis of this recently - can you really make money in the stock market trading on Trump's tweets. [https://medium.com/karan/can-you-really-make-money-when- real...](https://medium.com/karan/can-you-really-make-money-when- realdonaldtrump-tweets-about-a-company-1f99a9e337ca#.d8q5fmp9c)

My answer was maybe but I'd rather not put my money at the mercy of a lunatic.

<comment><USER8> Your entire economic system is at the mercy of said lunatic.

<comment><USER9> As we've seen recently, the power of the POTUS is not unchecked.

<comment><USER10> We've seen recently that it _can_ be checked. Our hope is that those that with the ability to check him continue to do so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Very cool. Funds have been capitalizing on Trump's tweets since at least December (but probably November) of 2016: [https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-12-07/flash- cra...](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-12-07/flash-crashes-and- trump-trading)

I'd be interested in learning why TradeKing was used , as I haven't used it myself - was it for an especially solid API, or just because TradeKing is easy to get set up and doesn't require a minimum investment? If anyone wants to play around with this and has at least $10k to play with, Interactive Brokers will give you better fees.

OP, you might be interested in Quantopian's Zipline algorithmic trading library, which is also in Python: [https://github.com/quantopian/zipline](https://github.com/quantopian/zipline)

Also, I feel like there should be a disclaimer that given how accessible this strategy is (both in required skill and resources) and how much attention the Trump tweets phenomenon has gotten, any alpha from this has been almost certainly lost to other firms. This is a cool project, but it's probably not actually an effective strategy anymore.

<comment><USER12> > OP, you might be interested in Quantopian's Zipline algorithmic trading > library, which is also in Python: > [https://github.com/quantopian/zipline](https://github.com/quantopian/zipline)

Or backtrader (backtesting and live trading with Oanda and IB)

[https://github.com/mementum/backtrader](https://github.com/mementum/backtrader)

<comment><USER11> Nice, now I've got something else to play with this weekend.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> another version could be to capitialize on this:

"The efficient markets hypothesis may be "the best established fact in all of social sciences," but the best established fact in all of financial markets is that, when there is news about a big famous private company going public or being acquired, the shares of a tiny obscure public company with a similar name will shoot up. I don't know what that tells you about the efficient markets hypothesis, but it happened to Nestor, Inc., and to Tweeter Home Entertainment, and to Oculus VisionTech Inc., and now it has happened to SNAP Interactive Inc.:

In what is almost surely a case of mistaken identity, investors sent shares in a little known startup called SNAP Interactive Inc., ticker STVI, surging 164 percent in the four days since Snap Inc. filed for a $3 billion initial public offering. The $69 million SNAP Interactive makes mobile dating apps, while the IPO aspirant is the parent of the popular Snapchat photo-sharing app. These stories are always less impressive when expressed in dollar terms than they are in percentages. In the four trading days since Snap Inc. filed its S-1, SNAP Interactive has traded 19,963 shares, worth less than $200,000, according to Bloomberg data. If you had a cunning plan to buy up SNAP shares and sell them for a quick profit when Snap filed to go public, it might have worked, but not in particularly huge size."

article here: [https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-02-09/quasi- ind...](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-02-09/quasi-indexers- growth-and-confusion)

<comment><USER14> There was an article a while back -- [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1144548](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1144548) \-- purporting that the efficient market hypothesis is true if and only if P = NP. ... which I'd argue implies social science is overly optimistic about that hypothesis.

<comment><USER15> That also implies that if the market is very close to efficient, you need absolutely massive amounts of computational power to bring it even closer (i.e. to make money). So even if it is inefficient, that doesn't mean anyone can reasonably expect to find exploitable patterns.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Pretty clever and effective message. I'd put money on this being shared by all my friends on Facebook in a few days.

Trump's last couple tweets have backfired and actually increased his targets' stock price though. You might have to flip the algorithm around if this continues.

<comment><USER17> I read it as the stock market betting on the constitution. Mr Trump is not allowed to impact Nordstrom negatively for his daughter's sake.

But most of the other tweets are about cases where he could harm them as POTUS.

<comment><USER18> If he can't do anything, why would the stock change at all?

<comment><USER17> Speculation again: it highlighted that Nordstrom would not be pressured into a decision that would yield poorer results.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Brilliant. I've been thinking about something like this for a while.

Why don't you take it to the next level? Provoke Trump on Twitter, associating yourself with a company. Then short that company's stock and wait until he lashes out against them. Profit!

<comment><USER20> It's weird because he probably doesn't read his mentions... except sometimes he RT's someone in his mentions?

Is he looking?

<comment> angry-hacker He's not the only one handing his Twitter account I'm sure.

<comment><USER21> Yes. Surely, he must have several other insane people helping him. I.e. that much insanity cannot physically be contained in a single human being.

<comment><USER22> Load-balanced insanity. Truly, we are living in the future.

<comment><USER23> Hmm, Insanity as a Service might actually be lucrative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> An ad agency did this 3 weeks ago

[https://www.t-3.com/works/the-trump-and-dump- bot/](https://www.t-3.com/works/the-trump-and-dump-bot/)

</comment><comment><USER25> Novel project, but not useful. Trump tweeted thanks to Intel on Feb 8th which was a super positive tweet. Since then $INTC is down about 2.6%.

<comment><USER26> He tweeted negatively about Nordstrom, stock went up. We might be onto something here...

<comment><USER27> One can easily place bets on the volatility of a stock. If you expect it to move, but you don't know which direction, that is tradeable knowledge.

<comment><USER28> Tweets seem to have an impact of around 1-3% lasting hours to days. Many (most?) stocks have too high implied volatility to begin with for straddling by tweet to be a productive strategy.

<comment><USER27> Even as an ensemble?

<comment><USER28> If you could spot the tweet and know the direction it'd move there might be cheap enough options to make money on one side, but the "ensemble" aspect of a straddle means that you need to make twice as much to cover the premiums before you make any returns.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> If many people use this bot, it will make Trump's comments actually effective, which is a pretty bad idea imho.

What about a bot which would do just the opposite?

<comment><USER30> I think you have this backwards. If Trump tweets a negative sentiment, the bot buys from the company. If everyone did that, the price would go up - just the opposite of the current effect!

<comment><USER31> I know very little of the stock market, but shouldn't the bot buy shares when he tweets _positive_ comments? Because that's when the stock is expected to rise and you can sell it later for a profit.

<comment><USER32> Indeed, but the comment you're responding to was tongue-in-cheek, specifically suggesting that Trump being positive of a stock is a negative indicator for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> alex- As the poster doesn't this gives Trump the power to manipulate markets with nothing more than a tweet?

You could argue he already has this power, but before the message needed to resonate with a large collective of people. Any public figure (like Warren Buffet, etc) can express an opinion that might effect the stock they are commenting on.

However as this group of people automate trades on only the contents of his tweets (and not say the contents of the tweet as well as past company performance, current POTUS approval ratings, dividend plans etc) he gains a scary amount of control over the markets.

To put another way. The only people who know what he will tweet earlier than these bots are Trump and maybe a select group of people he tells before hand.

<comment><USER33> Politicians impacting the stock market is nothing new. Pipeline and coal companies plummeted with Obama's executive orders, and the executive branch DOJ created a huge drop in prison stocks with what was effectively an indirect tweet. Solar stocks zig zagged according to the latest Solyndra and renewables subsidy activity. The only thing new is Twitter as a more easily machine- readable mouthpiece.

Congress actually gets a free pass on buying and selling stocks with insider information and many have done so for decades: [http://www.cbsnews.com/news/congress-trading-stock-on- inside...](http://www.cbsnews.com/news/congress-trading-stock-on-inside- information/)

<comment><USER34> I think what's novel/different here is the examples you all cited are examples of market reaction to government action, compared to, let's call it "executive sentiment". The distinction here is people are anticipating future actions based a politician expressing feelings rather than taking action.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> martin-adams This could make quite a fun experiment to see if it works. Crowdsource an investment of something like $10,000 and let it run for a year. At the end, donate all proceeds to charity.

<comment> grif-fin Good idea! Where to begin?

Shall we go for refugee charity?

<comment><USER35> I would say to organizations that directly support people, be it Direct Relief, The ACLU, or Charity: water.

Other good options are FIRST, Girls Who Code, and The Geek Group, all orgs that focus on STEM Education and getting people into the STEM fields.

Just to name a few groups to directly counterbalance his behavior.

<comment><USER36> > _Other good options are FIRST, Girls Who Code, and The Geek Group, all orgs > that focus on STEM Education and getting people into the STEM fields._

How do these technical organizations counterbalance anything he is doing?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> (I know this is just for fun, but...) I believe this won't work because of high-frequency trading. By the few seconds this latent python script will take to get the tweet, analyze the tweet, and execute a trade, high-speed bots will have already done something similar to a price level they decided was appropriate using sophisticated algorithms.

So basically, instead of this bot betting that Trump's tweets will change stock prices, you're actually betting on the HFT bots being wrong about how much Trump's tweets change stock prices.

<comment><USER38> This implies that HFT algos know of Trumps tweets. Is this really done?

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> The fact that Trump has the vocabulary of an 8th grader makes this a lot easier.

<comment><USER40> From a brief search, most presidential candidates speak at around an 8th grade level. (Which makes sense. They need to appeal to a broad audience, and speaking at a higher level is usually counterproductive anyway unless you have a specialized audience.) Trump's speaking level is more like 3rd or 4th grade.

<comment><USER41> From a recent Fresh Air interview with Trevor Noah. Earlier on he explains with a more personal anecdote why simpler language matters. But is there such a thing as too simple? Is 8th grade language more effective than 4th grade language? Later on Trevor Noah says

      You know, funny enough, one of the biggest moments of
      realization was when Donald Trump won the election because
      when I came into the show, I said, I think this guy can win.
      This was when he first came down that escalator. He gave his
      first speech.

      And then I was like, wow, this guy's going to do well. And I
      remember people laughed at me. People were like, oh, you
      silly ignorant person who's just come to this world. You
      clearly shouldn't be at "The Daily Show" 'cause you don't
      know what you're talking about. And I was like, but I don't
      know. He seems like he connects with people. I can relate to
      him as a performer. I can see what tools he's using. He's
      good at riffing. He's good at taking the crowd on a journey.
      I can see what he's doing.

      And people would say - and all throughout the race - <USER2>
      there were times when, on the show, I would mention it. You
      know, I mean, that's why I said Trump reminds me of an
      African dictator. And that's where that came from because
      everyone said to me, this guy is - he's just a fool. He's
      just - he's a buffoon. I said, yeah, you can say that. But
      I've seen this before. I have seen this before. I've seen
      clowns that go on to take over their countries. I've seen
      buffoons who end up ruling their worlds. And it came to
      pass.

      Source: http://www.npr.org/2016/12/16/505847054/trevor-noah-says-he-grew-up-in-the-shadow-of-a-giant-his-mom

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I have been doing the opposite.

Whenever Trump signs on executive order or signals an intention, I presume it will either fail or will end in bad results for the poor and middle class.

Then, working as if that were true, I see if there are any stocks or ETFs that would benefit from that and buy some.

I have been doing pretty good!

<comment><USER43> The market as a whole is going up. Are your seeing above market average returns?

<comment><USER42> Very much so! [1]

You can even see on the chart how there was very little until inauguration, giant leaps after unpopular EO's, and you can even see the portfolio drop when Trump took a beat and eased up on the EOs after Feb 3rd.

[1] [http://i.imgur.com/OoeMEJF.png](http://i.imgur.com/OoeMEJF.png)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44>
        This bot watches Donald Trump's tweets and waits for him to mention any publicly traded companies. When he does, it uses sentiment analysis to determine whether his opinions are positive or negative toward those companies. The bot then automatically executes trades on the relevant stocks according to the expected market reaction.

OK, so what's the expected market reaction? If Trump hates your company, does that make your stock go up, or down?

<comment><USER45> Down on the immediate, up after some hours:

The article just mentions how it ended the day (UP), but it started by going DOWN quite a few % after Trump spoke against it:

[http://fox6now.com/2017/02/09/nordstrom-stock-defies- preside...](http://fox6now.com/2017/02/09/nordstrom-stock-defies-president- trump/amp/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I think Nordstrom stock went up after a negative tweet because it was seen as good publicity for the company. Trump didn't actually "threaten" to retaliate or anything, whereas for companies like Ford or GM he actually said he would impose a heavy "border tax" if they opened factories elsewhere.

<comment><USER47> perhaps further sentiment analysis could be used to determine whether the tweet implies the company can expect government action for/against them.

<comment><USER46> Maybe a bit difficult to do so because of the limited amount of data, but we could maybe only look at the tweets with positive sentiment, in which case the stock price will likely go up. As it is good publicity for the company and Trump was positive about the stock as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Cool project!

Makes me want to think of another fun way of crowdsourcing stock tips for fun.

Maybe something like TwitchPlaysWallStreet?

</comment><comment><USER49> I have one of these as well, but i would've died if it was live trading during the nordstrom incident. They've gone up quite a bit since then.

</comment><comment><USER50> Regardless of this bot being complete, there are better options already mentioned using options instead of short term stock purchases.

Looks like deciding the sentiment of the tweet is still on the to-do list.

def get_sentiment(self, text): """Extracts a sentiment score [-1, 1] from text."""

            # TODO: Determine sentiment targeted at the specific entity.

</comment><comment><USER51> I like this. I think something similar for Theresa May and the GBP:EUR exchange rate might be a good addition.

<comment><USER52> Won't work as well: the market now prices in the drop in GBP after she speaks, so as soon as there's even a hint she's going to say something substantive, the market drops like a stone, then recovers a bit if she doesn't say anything _too_ awful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Nordstrom went up after Trumps rant, didn't it? But all in all this looks like a fun thing to do.

</comment><comment><USER54> You know at the end of Men in Black it zooms out and our galaxy is just one marble in a galactic game?

I feel like this game is just a small scale version of the one being played by a higher force by making Trump president.

<comment><USER55> The higher force being Putin? /s (sort of)

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> It would work better is you knew in advance what Trump is going to tweet, not possible of course unless you work for twitter or for Trump?!

<comment><USER57> That would likely be classed as "insider trading":

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

<comment><USER58> For that you'd have to be an "insider" which obviously isn't the case here.

<comment><USER57> You don't need to be hired by the company to be classed as an insider (though that obviously also counts). If you are privy to non-public information (which you would be if you were forewarned about a Trump PR stunt before it happened) and then you trade stock based on that information then legally you could be classed as an insider.

In fact that wiki link I posted earlier previously says just this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insider_trading#Definition_of_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insider_trading#Definition_of_.22insider.22) (last paragraph on 'Definition of "Insider"')

<comment><USER58> Who is the "insider" in this context then?

Here's a hypothetical scenario:

My buddy Sean from the white house texted me a few days ago that "Trump is going to make negative comments about Nordstrom soon", I shorted Nordstrom stock based on this information and made huge profits when Trump said the things Sean promised he would.

Do you think _someone_ would be guilty of insider trading here? Nobody involved is connected to Nordstrom in any way.

<comment><USER59> Yes, you are guilty by trading using non public information about a material event.

<comment><USER58> That information would have to come from a Nordstrom insider for it to be "insider trading". Neither Trump or Sean are Nordstrom insiders.

It's also extremely important to note that the SEC and the courts have very different definitions of "insider trading".

<comment><USER57> i don't mean to sound dogmatic but the source I cited does explicitly say that the "insider" does not have to work inside the company specifically but rather just be privy to non-public information.

Unless you can find another citation that contradicts my point then I'm going to have to assume my point is correct. And I say that welcoming a correction in the name of "science" :)

<comment><USER58> >In the United States, Canada, Australia and Germany, for mandatory reporting purposes, corporate insiders are defined as a company's officers, directors and any beneficial owners of more than 10% of a class of the company's equity securities. Trades made by these types of insiders in the company's own stock, based on material non-public information, are considered fraudulent since the insiders are violating the fiduciary duty that they owe to the shareholders. The corporate insider, simply by accepting employment, has undertaken a legal obligation to the shareholders to put the shareholders' interests before their own, in matters related to the corporation. When insiders buy or sell based upon company-owned information, they are violating their obligation to the shareholders.

Presumably it's not this chapter you're referring to.

>For example, illegal insider trading would occur if the chief executive officer of Company A learned (prior to a public announcement) that Company A will be taken over and then bought shares in Company A while knowing that the share price would likely rise.

Probably not this one either

>In the United States and many other jurisdictions, however, "insiders" are not just limited to corporate officials and major shareholders where illegal insider trading is concerned but can include any individual who trades shares based on material non-public information _in violation of some duty of trust_. This duty may be imputed; for example, in many jurisdictions, in cases of where a corporate insider "tips" a friend about non-public information likely to have an effect on the company's share price, the duty the corporate insider owes the company is now imputed to the friend and the friend violates a duty to the company if he trades on the basis of this information.

Despite the fact that this chapter doesn't contain anything relevant either, it's probably this one you're referring to. There's no corporate insiders or relationships involving a duty of trust here.

I think you may be misinterpreting your source.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> > mention any publicly traded companies

How often did that happen in the past?

(Not paying attention, specialty of the house ;-)

<comment><USER61> You can check that at [https://twitter.com/Trump2Cash](https://twitter.com/Trump2Cash).

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> This is fun. However, does this bot perform better than a random bot? and if yes, how much?

<comment><USER63> According to [http://trump2cash.biz/](http://trump2cash.biz/) ,

"Overall, the algorithm seems to succeed more often than not: The simulated fund has an annualized return of about 59% since inception. There are limits to the simulation and the underlying data, so take it all with a grain of salt."

<comment><USER62> Yes, I saw that. What we don't know is whether the bot just got lucky. Inferential stats are needed to determine this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> But see this, which says his tweets generally don't make much difference: [https://www.ft.com/content/a962c1f8-ee44-11e6-930f-061b01e23...](https://www.ft.com/content/a962c1f8-ee44-11e6-930f-061b01e23655)

</comment><comment><USER65> the problem is hedge funds are already on his twitter like white on rice. Maybe there is hope in looking for breaking news from less-followed accounts.

</comment><comment><USER66> I can't state how stupid this is. As if that person's bullshit's power of nuisance wasn't large enough, let's add automated echo chambers with a direct effect on the economy!

Don't be surprised if this crazy economic system can collapse any seconds with ideas like this.

</comment><comment><USER67> How many times do we have to go over this?

stocks are a random walk.

<comment><USER22> That may or may not be true, but it's irrelevant in this case. The bot is basically front-running the market, or trying to anyway, by trading directly on a stimulus that the market (potentially) takes time to internalize and react to.

If this worked, I'd expect the HF funds to start doing it too, and even faster, and then the advantage would be destroyed.

<comment><USER68> This is not front running (which is illegal). It's trying to be faster than people who trade manually based on the same info. The term front running has a pretty clear definition, it's roughly when a broker trades on your orders before executing them.</comment></comment></comment>


Dancer 1.2000, finally out - <AUTHOR> http://www.backup-manager.org/pipermail/dancer-users/2010-November/000513.html

<comment><USER2> For anyone wondering what Dancer is: <http://www.perldancer.org/>

<comment><USER3> No wonder Perl is dead if all they have is such a piss poor Sinatra ripoff.

<comment><USER4> Ignorance is bliss.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Dancer is very easy to get started with, and very simple to deploy. If you have a small project with using perl in mind, it might be worth checking out. The documentation is okay, but getting better surely. If you have any quick questions about Dancer, I'd recommend checking out the project's IRC channel.

</comment><comment><USER5> Congratulations on the stable release. When are you updating the website with that that fancy new template I recall seeing a few months back?

<comment><AUTHOR> Soon, very soon :) We'll provide a new kickass design as well, stay tuned ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Don't let this poor project spoil Perl for you, instead take a look at Catalyst, the number one Perl Web Framework with a gigantic community and multiple books behind it. <http://www.catalystframework.org>

<comment><USER7> I have used Catalyst a bit, bought the book and appreciated it. I have never used Dancer, but it look good; I'll probably learn it.

Otoh, what I _really_ don't like is a just created troll account, like yours.

<comment><USER6> They had it coming, stealing code and ideas never ends well.

<comment><USER8> How do you "steal" an idea, especially from a free software project?

<comment><USER7> chromatic? Received your new book from Amazon yesterday. :-)

A really nice overview, I'll recommend it and not only for newbies.

(-: I'm ashamed to admit it as a non-native English speaker, but the few pages on Unicode is probably what will be most useful. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Looks like a cheap ripoff of Mojolicious.

<http://mojolicious.org> <https://github.com/kraih/mojo>

<comment><USER9> I think both frameworks share similar vision and there is no need to attack each other.

<comment><USER6> Looks more like Dancer took the vision from Mojolicious and butchered it.

<comment><AUTHOR> No, the vision comes from Sinatra, not Mojo. The original blog post (French): <http://www.sukria.net/fr/archives/2009/07/17/teaser/>

There are similarities though between both frameworks, but they are definitely different.

Calling Dancer a rip-off is a bit easy, regarding all the community work that has been done recently.

<comment><USER6> By all measurements the community of Mojolicious seems a lot bigger. Just because you rip another project off with 3 people doesn't make it any better... just shows your lack of actual vision and focus.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Principles For Successful Web Apps by Fred Wilson - <AUTHOR> http://app.arcticfoxtv.com/d/onbxr <comment><USER2> The video is 27 minutes long, with about 5 minutes of Q&A at the end and IMHO worth watching all the way through, but the '10 Golden Rules' he discusses are...

1\. Speed - more than a feature, mainstream users tend to be least forgiving, slower apps grow slower.

2\. Instant Utility - service has to be useful straight away, without lots of length configuration or importing data, use tricks to add utility (crawl web for initial population), example: Google Video took weeks to encode video...YouTube made it available ~immediately.

3\. Voice - Attitude/personality from software/application. Example: Twitter 'Fail Whale' creates a "voice".

4\. Less is More - example: Facebook at launch had a tiny amount of features versus now. Del.icio.us was limited but powerful... "one little thing...get a lot of utility..."

5\. Programmable - Allow other people to add value to your application. Read/Write APIs. Lets developers add data/utility and "energy".

6\. Personal - User's own data / their personality establishes emotional connection between user and app. Makes them "invested" in the product.

7\. RESTful - ?misuse of the term. All accessible resources in application have a clean URL where it can be accessed. Example: Twitter URLs easily understood from just the URL. ("<https://twitter.com/#!/fredwilson/lists>)

8\. Discoverable - How do people find your app? Take advantage of search (SEO) and social media (virality) and build apps from the ground up to BE viral and optimized for search.

9\. Clean - Application has focus per page and functionality on each page is limited. Lots of space, big fonts. Don't let the user get it wrong. Example: Tumblr login ("<http://www.tumblr.com/login>) - ie. nobody won't know what to do.

10\. Playful - Help users have fun and incentives for the user to behave in ways you want. Example: Weight Watchers has a game dynamic with setting goals and achieving weight loss / LinkedIn & Facebook & Twitter with friend/follower counts / FourSquare badges and mayorship.

<comment><USER3> I just wanted to say thank you for this summary! :) Very good overview in retrospective after having watched the video. Good start to the discussion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hey HN, I'm one of the Founders of Arctic Fox the platform which is powering this presentation. You can find out more info at www.arcticfoxtv.com

<comment><USER5> FYI it worked for me on Chrome 20.0.1132.47 m but not on Firefox 13.0.1. The slide show advance is one slide behind the slide I click (so I can't see the last one) and the video doesn't play.

<comment><USER4> Hey Ryan, thanks for letting me know, I just tested on Firefox 13.0.1 and it works for me. I will investigate further.

<comment><USER5> I'm looking at it on Windows XP (hangs head in shame), in case that makes a difference.

<comment><USER6> Holy 12 years ago Batman!

<comment><USER5> The computer and OS are not my choice. At home and on my netbook I run Ubuntu.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great presentation - Love the Arctic Fox platform - we use this for all our presentations & recordings (1000 hours of content)

</comment><comment><USER8> Really interesting platform. Where can I read more about pricing?</comment>


Function hooking in Swift - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rodionovd/SWRoute/wiki/Function-hooking-in-Swift

<comment><USER2> The "function trampoline" that's described looks more or less like the Block ABI. Some good learning is available in the source for `libclosure`, [Language Specification for Blocks]([http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/libclosure/libclosure...](http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/libclosure/libclosure-63/BlockSpec.rtf)) and [Block Implementation Specification]([http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/libclosure/libclosure...](http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/libclosure/libclosure-63/BlockImplementation.txt)).

\----

Consistently being able to hook functions in Swift is going to be a pain in release mode optimizations, as the Swift compiler does aggressive inlining.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've seen this concern that there are no function pointers in swift, and it seems to come from a misunderstanding on what it means for functions to be first class.

From [https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documenta...](https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documentation/Swift/Conceptual/Swift_Programming_Language/) :

You use function types just like any other types in Swift. For example, you can define a constant or variable to be of a function type and assign an appropriate function to that variable:

var mathFunction: (Int, Int) -> Int = addTwoInts

mathFunction can now be passed around, fed in as a parameter in another function, etc. mathFunction is for all purposes a function pointer.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, there isn't any _C-style_ function pointer (means you can not get it's raw address in memory to do something with it), but yeah — you can pass functions as arguments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very interesting write-up, thanks! Makes me want to get back into C programming :) How did you manage to learn all of this stuff, for a new, closed-source and relatively undocumented (e.g. @asmname) language?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's all about reverse-engineering stuff; my usual workflow looks like: (1) Complile some Swift program & look at the disasembler listing of it (I use IDA and — for Objective-C — Hopper Disassembler); (2) Do some changes in source code in the program, compile it again, and see diffs in disassembler listing; that way I can see what is changed and how.

About the @asmname thing: you can easily dump every default Swift module using a REPL command:

repl> :print_module Swift

There you can find a lot of interesting language lexems and more, so all you have to do is to try using them in your code until you don't figure it out ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> const char type:1; // I'm not sure about this and padding, char padding[7]; // maybe it's just a uint64_t too...

This is for struct alignment to address boundaries. It's fairly typical C and results in some performance optimizations.

</comment><comment><USER6> Boo. Hoo.

</comment><comment><USER7> I know its a new language, but does every blog post about Swift now need to show up on HN front page? I thought it was bad for "anything JS related" posts here.</comment>


CA Cert - <AUTHOR> http://www.cacert.org/

<comment><USER2> Oh man, if they could pull this off, that would be so great. It causes me physical pain to have to shell out $100's to VeriSign for certs.

</comment><comment><USER3> Their website seems very vague if you don't know why you're there, and information (such as "where do I find assurers/how does one become one?) don't have easily accessible answers...if they want to garner public support their site needs to be much more informative.

Wow, I've spent way too much time in web dev...the first thing I do when I visit a webpage is consider its usability...

</comment><comment><USER4> I use their SSL certs for domains. Works great. I also use their personal S/MIME certs. Here's one site using a CAcert SSL certificate. Hostgator only charged 10 dollars to install it. <https://16systems.com/main.html>

</comment><comment><USER5> Uh, hello? Extortionate certificate fees aren't a technical problem. It's the "getting inclusion into Internet Explorer" problem that actually matters. What possible evidence do these people have that they'd be successful with this?

<comment><USER6> They mention on their wiki that a $75k+$10k/year audit will get them into IE, but that is out of their price range now. They are in process for mozilla. For safari the same $75k audit or "equivalent" will suffice.

Perhaps some company will fund them for the PR credit? Perhaps they could take donations? $85k/yr isn't too much. I'd chip in $20/year in a heartbeat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Something about this doesn't add up.

There are bound to be non-trivial administrative costs and considerations involved with being a provider. How do you cover all sorts of complex admin and legal requirements with a free model?

<comment><USER8> Donations? Easydns.net was mentioned in the DNS thread as just as good as the pay competitors, only free. They ask for a $15-$30 donation

<comment><USER7> Yeah but DNS management ain't being a certificate authority.

I mean, I have no idea the obstacles. Some that come to mind: having a certified secure location, keeping records in a fire-proof safe, having yearly audits, being bonded at some amount, etc.

I know that some folks would consider these just BS barriers set up to keep the small guys out, but you could make a really good argument that to do what they want you should have to jump through some of these hoops.

Beats me though. I'm just idly speculating.

<comment><USER9> > Yeah but DNS management ain't being a certificate authority.

Indeed, it's harder in most respects.

Having a certified secure location is actually less good than having a dispersed and challenged base. This is a solved problem for eg. distributed hash tables and the techniques can be repurposed here.

Can you tell me with absolute certainty that Thawte or NSI would not facilitate a man-in-the-middle attack for the right price? And if they did, how would you know?

<comment><USER7> I'm sorry. I was unable to follow your comment.

DNS management is harder than an unknown amount of administrative overhead for being a certificate authority? I'm not sure I can comment on that one. How would you know that to be true? Do you know all of the costs involved with being a certificate authority? If so, you haven't brought them up here.

The next sentence about "having a certified secure location is actually less good than having a dispersed and challenged base" means what, exactly? I didn't think we were talking about what was good or not. The point was the expenses were difficult to overcome on a free model. And why would having a dispersed and challenged base be good? People who are somehow challenged and live in random locations are good to have? --- not tracking that.

I have no idea what competitors would or wouldn't do. I believe that plays into my point: there are a lot more expenses in being an authority than simply running a crypto routine (from a secure key generator even)

DNS administration is being done all over the place in all kinds of ways. The technology and market is mature. CAs are either mostly new or running a monopoly -- which means there's probably a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes which is proprietary.

<comment><USER9> > there's probably a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes which is > proprietary.

There really shouldn't be, though. I set up a CA for a large company way back in 1998 and while it was a pain in the ass, it wasn't something that a novice Perl hacker couldn't get to run smoothly. (This was before Microsoft fucked everything up by not allowing people to import trusted root CA certs into their own browsers, hence the exorbitant $85K fee to do today what I did for free then)

It just isn't that hard to maintain the CRLs and a CA with a proper chain. It's an issue of trust like anything else, which is why I brought up the difficulty of determining whether you trust eg. NSI or Thawte.

If you think DNS is easy, I think you should try and get a tld delegated to you. Then sit through some ddos attacks on your tld's root servers and see how easy you think that is. Consider that DNS is meant to be more or less contstantly available, while a cert chain only needs to be checked periodically (and the CRL on cert load). Neither is earthshatteringly hard, neither is easy, they just are.

Both rely on standard protocols with extensive documentation.

<comment><USER7> Yeah I got your point about a tld. But I don't think the equivalent for root CAs are something like "man-in-the-middle" attacks. Seems it would be much more political in nature -- ie, something like "next year you guys have to all learn Klingon, wear the same clothes, juggle at least 4 hours a week, and then put up a million in escrow to reduce our risk"

After all, it's a trust game, right? So if you're one of the few people running root CAs, you're going to make it really, really difficult to be able to trust other people at your level -- for the benefit of the users, obviously </sarcasm>

As we both know, setting up just any old kind of CA isn't the toughest thing in the world to do. It's getting accepted by the community and making the certificates into something useful that's going to be a pain.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Gameboy Emulator for Emacs - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/vreeze/eboy <comment><USER2> These kind of awesome and strange project always confuses me: as a vim person, I deeply doubt if this Emacs is the text editor I heard before.

<comment><USER3> Emacs is not a text editor. Emacs is a portable programming platform and text editing is just the default application implemented on it.

<comment><USER4> Sounds like overkill to me.

<comment><USER5> Yet we have entire editors that do far less that require a entire web browser and take 100+ Meg's of ram to run.

Edit: gigabytes of ram.

<comment><USER4> That's overkill too.

<comment><USER6> "There are two kinds of overkill: the sort of overkill that lets you write Gameboy emulators, or Enterprise overkill; the sort of overkill that's only bloat. I have no patience for useless things."

<comment><USER7> Who said that?

<comment> aerique<USER6>
</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In the late 90ies, the joke was always that Emacs is short for Eight MBs And Constantly Swapping.

<comment><USER9> Or the world's most advanced single-threaded OS.

<comment><USER10> In all seriousness, I'd prefer to edit code in Sublime Text, or if I want something on the CLI just use vim. All I really need when I'm messing with a bash script or something is some syntax highlighting and I'm happy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> emacs is a great OS but for text editing I prefer vim.</comment>