Bruce Sterling on the Big 5 Tech Giants - <AUTHOR> http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/495/Bruce-Sterling-and-Jon-Lebkowsky-page02.html#post42 <comment><USER2> "But, "the Internet" is done already. It had a great historic arc, but it maxed out on its own excesses and unconfronted issues, much like the Space Age and atomic power did. Anybody who still thinks "net neutrality" is the be-all and end-all of the modern tech biz can go somewhere where they still enjoy net neutrality -- the flatness, the small pieces loosely joined, the permissionless innovation, etc.

Go to Iceland, maybe. Sure: go start a no-permission Internet website in Iceland. Birgitta Jonsdottir will be nice to you, you might even get fan mail from Wikileaks. Otherwise, it's quite like building your own crystal-set ham radio. Nobody will stop you, because it just doesn't matter."

That hits hard, and deep, but I expect it's true. If we think of the Internet as a geographical space, the age of exploration and setting up your own environment is over; the age of vast companies owning both your attention and content has begun, and I don't know if it will ever end.

<comment><AUTHOR> But the analogy doesn't hold too well. There were hard limits on the space to explore and live. The only limit on the Internet is the global attention span. People who want wilderness can find it. It just isn't a hell of a lot of fun being paid no attention whatsoever. But it does mean there are opportunities for refragmentation.</comment></comment>


Linux Jobs Forecast: Pressing Need for Linux Talent - <AUTHOR> http://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-media/announcements/2013/02/2013-linux-jobs-forecast-pressing-need-linux-talent

<comment><USER2> Our school's IT department just upgraded the server we run Moodle (an open source CMS) on from Windows Server 2003 to Ubuntu Desktop. They used the desktop version of Ubuntu because no one in the 13-man IT operation knew how to use Bash.

We hackers live in a gated community. I've seen people in shock when they find out someone doesn't run Linux as their main OS. I was flabbergasted to find out none of our IT folks knew how to use the terminal.

tl;dr The double bell curve of tech talent is still in full swing.

<comment><USER3> It doesn't really matter that they used the desktop version. The packages are all identical. The kernels are compiled slightly differently (server kernels have longer time slices) but you won't really notice that.

I lived through the era of Windows trouncing Unix. A major reason why it happened is because people were familiar with Windows on their desktop and found the gui tools easier to use on their servers. The various Unix vendors did start coming out with graphical administration tools, but many of them were pretty dire.

Using Ubuntu Desktop on the server means they can use it on their desktops and become familiar. And maybe they will eventually graduate to using command lines, but they don't have to for a lot of administration.

<comment><USER4> _"I lived through the era of Windows trouncing Unix."_

On servers? There was no such era! Windows _never_ dominated the server market. Sure, there were some companies that were Windows shops, but most servers were and still are unix/linux.

 _"A major reason why it happened is because people were familiar with Windows on their desktop and found the gui tools easier to use on their servers."_

This might be true for mom & pop shops where the servers were run by desktop users, but on the enterprise level where corporations could afford their own sysadmins, Windows is and always has been a minor player.

<comment><USER5> Are you sure about that? Novell / NT Domains, then subsequently Active Directory has been a big part of every large corporation I've worked at over the last 20 years. Externally the web servers might be UNIX, but internally the infrastructure is heterogenous and the office stuff (authentication, email, etc.) lives on Windows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is one of those places when distinguishing between the kernel and userland is not only useful but necessary. I just don't believe that "Ninety- three percent of hiring managers say they will hire a Linux pro in the next six months". Ninety-three percent of companies do NOT need kernel hackers, they want UNIX pros.

EDIT: By UNIX pro, I personally mean people who are familiar with the typical _nix stack, e.g. GNU/Linux,_ BSD, Darwin. This would encompass sysadmins, programmers, etc.

<comment><USER7> WTH is a "UNIX" pro? From what I understand they want experienced Linux sysadmins/devops.

<comment><USER6> > From what I understand they want experienced Linux sysadmins/devops.

I mean, I just guessed based on how "Linux" is typically used, i.e. GNU's userland. I don't exactly have time to call up "93% of hiring managers" and ask them personally.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So I already know system admins are in high demand. I am a computer science undergrad and hope to get a sys admin job out of college. What should I be doing on my own to get a job like this? (besides playing with different linux distros and learning commands).

<comment><USER9> I would suggest looking into the Redhat certifications. Even if you don't want to take the test, they cover a wide range of topics that will give you a good base. The list of exam objectives alone will point you in the right direction to get started. You aren't likely to brush into things like autofs just playing around at home. But something like that is much more common in larger environments.

Learn to do things that you read about in system admin blogs. Spinning up VMs, clearing log files, and setting up monitoring systems. Learn to roll your own package. Even better yet maintain one for a distro and put that on your resume.

Make a effort to become familiar with several scripting tools. You don't have to master them all, but make sure to pick up enough to be able to read code in bash, perl, python, and maybe even ruby.

The final step to being a Linux admin is learn Windows. Most real world jobs require that you have to deal with both. Even if it is not your primary responsibility, you will need to know how to inter-operate with Active Directory and the services that hang off of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm not trying to be rude or anything, but what exactly is a 'linux' or 'unix' pro?

<comment><USER11> I think the distinction he was trying to make is that UNIX skills are those that are transferable between UNIX modelled OS's e.g. shell programming, administration, application development. Whereas a Linux pro would be someone whose skills are specifically on that platform. The most obvious reason being kernel programming expertise which is almost the epitome/definition of Linux.

<comment><USER12> Could also be someone from a Unix background that also knows specifics of how to optimally manage typical Linux business deployments (usually RHEL, SLES, etc). I can't tell you how many long-time Unix admins I've worked with that didn't know anything about how to create a start/stop init script that was chkconfig compliant (chkconfig originated from Irix I belive), and end up making symlinks in /etc/rcX.d manually. Or be able to debug boot problems (requires knowledge of at least some kernel boot parameters, the initrd, order of the various startup scripts, etc).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is great news for Linux. There are a LOT of companies who's entire infrastructure is the MS Windows environment and hopefully they'll begin the switch!

<comment><USER9> Increase in demand for Linux talent may indicate an increased use of Linux. It also sends up a flag for existing MS shops that says "Don't bother cause you won't be able to hire easily".

A significant chunk of MS's total cost of ownership argument is the wages of Windows admins versus Linux admins. This news only gives that argument more weight at least in the short term.

<comment><USER5> Indeed. Scratch a working heterogenous single sign-on environment based on Linux servers and I think you'll find well-paid admin staff behind it. Interop is just not simple, although with Samba 4 it might just have got better - I've not tried in the last 6 months.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> All Linux is Unix but not all Unix is Linux. Applicable?</comment>


23andme on sale for $99 on Amazon temporarily - <AUTHOR> https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B01G7PYQTM/01825-20 <comment><AUTHOR> I _think_ this is actually pretty relevant to the HN audience.

Many of my techie friends who I sent this deal to were really glad, and a few bought some to give as birthday gifts.

</comment><comment><USER2> Gotta build that genetic database...</comment>


Getting started with gnuplot - <AUTHOR> http://math-blog.com/2008/06/08/getting-started-with-gnuplot/

<comment><USER2> I like gnuplot, but it has definitely been eclipsed by `ipython -pylab`. That's an ipython interpreter, with numpy and matplotlib automatically loaded.

It's prettier, and it's very helpful to live inside a (better) python repl.

For those who really like gnuplot, it has an emacs mode, which is helpful:

<http://cars9.uchicago.edu/~ravel/software/gnuplot-mode.html>

<comment><USER3> thanks for the heads up</comment></comment>


Using a Keras Long Short-Term Memory Model to Predict Stock Prices - <AUTHOR> https://heartbeat.fritz.ai/using-a-keras-long-shortterm-memory-lstm-model-to-predict-stock-prices-a08c9f69aa74 <comment><USER2> This is pure nonsense. This isn't even the right way to begin thinking about this as a forecasting task — the target series should be log-normal returns, not raw asset price. The performance of this model is laughably bad, which is probably why he spends zero time evaluating its effectiveness. You could trivially get better forecasts than this by _naively repeating the last- observed price_.

This isn't ML. It's cargo-cult performance of words and ideas that ML people use.

<comment><USER3> Can you clarify why "the target series should be log-normal returns" is important or provide a pointer for more information?

<comment><USER4> Investment markets operate on relative gain, not absolute gain. E.g.: if you invest in a stock and it gains $5, this would be a great return for a $1 stock but a poor one for a $1000 stock, so the absolute gain doesn't mean anything on its own. A 5% return always means that you've gained 5% on your investment.

<comment><USER5> Would it be the same (valid) with percentage returns?

<comment><USER2> Less so. Log-normal returns are better because they have the property that a summation of log-normal returns over contiguous intervals is equal to the log- normal returns of the combined interval. In other words: Losing 5% and then gaining 5% doesn't put you back at exactly 100%, and log-normal fixes that.

<comment><USER6> In the extreme, two successive trades, where the first gains 110% and the second loses 100%, "average" out to a 5% return. However, you don't want to make that pair of trades.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm not a purist believer in the efficient market hypothesis. BUT, I doubt there's much alpha to be gained simply from looking at price data which is widely and publicly available. Also keep in mind that markets are dynamic feedback loops so even if this model had an edge, the act of publishing this article would work against you to neutralize that edge in the future.

There's a good reason the most successful 'quantitative' trading fund, Rennaisance Technologies is so secretive and subjects its employees to a lifetime NDA/non-compete.

If there is edge in the market (and I think there are anomalies that can be traded on), I would assume it to come from correlating proprietary datasets with price. Or datasets that have a high barrier to access/analyze. One example that I'd bet still works in some industries would be counting trucks from a supplier to estimate product demand before the companies announces earnings ;)

<comment><USER8> These predictions can also be self-reenforcing. If enough money believes the model is accurate, it will create it's own market conditions. In a distopian AI stock prediction world the best model will be the one with the widest publicity and adoption, not the best data points.

<comment><USER9> The problem I see with that hypothesis is that the asset pricing must eventually be tied to actual performance--while it may be self-reinforcing to some extend, if it _is_ fundamentally wrong, there will be a reckoning and an adjustment after a high value stock goes bankrupt, for example.

<comment><USER10> But the stock market isn't just a bunch of people placing speculative bets about company performance; it's a bunch of people placing speculative bets about company performance by _buying shares of the companies_. If the market is irrational, it can actually _prop up_ companies that would otherwise go bankrupt.

<comment><USER9> I suppose they company could continuously issue stock in this case.

But in this world, it actually makes sense for those companies to stop doing their normal business and just go into the business of selling their shares.

This reality sounds absurd, but you could argue that BTC market is there. Enough of the market thinks that "always buy" is a good investment, regardless of the real-life value of the asset. Or maybe, less controversially, gold is that market. Any asset that is always increasing in value and not related to the real value of that asset is just a store of value.

<comment><USER11> Both of those things have valid services that I pay for.

BTC provides a number of services. From money changing and international money transfers to actual investment brokerage. Granted, the number of securities available in BTC is less than spectacular, but it's not zero. I pay for both those services. Now you may argue that those are unregulated services and therefore have trust issues, but one might argue that all markets have trust issues, and the only difference is the level. BTC, so far, seems to be more trustworthy than, for instance, the ECB (e.g. the Greek payment limits and the Cypriot bail in, one of which affected me, and both of them used MY money to achieve political aims, without my approval).

Gold provides a store of value, with a good story behind it. I pay my bank, I believe, around $40 per year for that same service. With frankly, not as good a story behind it (as I trust my bank less than I'd trust a bar of gold under my pillow when it comes to still having value tomorrow. Not that I have the kind of spare change to make that a pressing issue, but ...)

So given that both BTC and Gold provide services that clearly people are willing to pay for, who's to say they shouldn't have a valuation based on that income like every other financial service provider in the world ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> All these LSTM Stock Market tutorials seem to be a variation of this guys tutorial which he did a while ago:

[https://github.com/jaungiers/LSTM-Neural-Network-for-Time- Se...](https://github.com/jaungiers/LSTM-Neural-Network-for-Time-Series- Prediction)

Except Jakob explains the folly of the method.

Whereas the author of this piece says the following:

From the plot we can see that the real stock price went up while our model also predicted that the price of the stock will go up. This clearly shows how powerful LSTMs are for analyzing time series and sequential data.

<comment><USER13> I made this code [https://github.com/mouradmourafiq/tensorflow-lstm- regression](https://github.com/mouradmourafiq/tensorflow-lstm-regression) at least 6 months earlier than the first push in the github repo you mentioned, and I am sure many people did some version before that. A lot of people sometimes just need a reason to play with some technology. I assume that OP used stock market to learn about LSTMs.

<comment><USER12> The guy I posted uses Keras which is what this guys code looks like.

I am sure plenty of people have done lstm on the stock market but the form of the code looked similar between the two.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The problem with these types of systems are it's difficult to do backtesting on a single continuous data stream... I write about that here:

[https://blog.projectpiglet.com/2018/01/perils-of- backtesting...](https://blog.projectpiglet.com/2018/01/perils-of-backtesting/)

I recommend doing something similar to the original post. Neural networks tend to produce valid looking output for a stock price easily, a random walk does too. You have to find correlations, causations, and then review the results carefully.

For reference, I wrote my own financial advisor (not directly utilizing deep learning, that functions relatively well):

[http://projectpiglet.com/](http://projectpiglet.com/)

It works relatively well when checking the "causality" which also has it's limits: [https://blog.projectpiglet.com/2018/01/causality-in- cryptoma...](https://blog.projectpiglet.com/2018/01/causality-in- cryptomarkets/)

EDIT: Added some evidence:

* 2016 stocks: [https://imgur.com/a/j8YWR](https://imgur.com/a/j8YWR)

* Early 2018 crypto: [https://blog.projectpiglet.com/2018/01/30-weekly-returns-usi...](https://blog.projectpiglet.com/2018/01/30-weekly-returns-using-piglet/)

* Early 2018 stocks: [https://twitter.com/AustinGWalters/status/976347632439209985](https://twitter.com/AustinGWalters/status/976347632439209985)

* All 2018 on Robinhood only: [https://imgur.com/a/2CxEFqI](https://imgur.com/a/2CxEFqI)

* Also (I am lettergram on HN), created: [https://hnprofile.com](https://hnprofile.com) and [https://redditprofile.com](https://redditprofile.com)

<comment><USER15> Interesting but i am a non believer can you provide figures that show gains through years?

<comment><USER14> Added in an edit update - I have more, but just tossed some together for you from 2016 - 2018.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I preliminarily did the same thing as in this article a while back (with crypto data, since it's easily accessible), just as a way to learn keras.

Somehow my network always learned to output a delay of the input no matter how hard I tried to shape it. I've searched through literature briefly and some examples. Some blog posts even claimed they had good time series prediction when I clearly saw they were having the same problem.

What I mean to say is, be critical of what you find online, and be critical of your results. This is definitely not an easy problem, and some argue that it's unsolvable all together :)

<comment><USER17> You are not alone. With time series that is the easiest solution for any model. That is why you need a lot of work creating your datasets and the experiment setup with time series. To avoid the easy solution and obtain something useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Do not minmax scale the data. New data outside ranges seen before will be chopped off. Do make relative (high/low), so patterns you find generalize to other domains. Don't fit complex LSTM models on tiny datasets. Somehow this is the shiny thing all starters jump on, while the most simple models are the most proven and robust. Don't just share such a model without giving a disclaimer ("I never tried this out on real data, and would not invest my own money in this solution"). This is real money, real economies, and you could horribly crash these. That is also why you don't write with authority about how to build a bridge (while you never crossed a bridge you've build before). The only reason for the "clearly showing how powerful LSTM models are" is it responding to test set samples it got wrong, and correcting with a lag. How about some evaluation, preferably on another stock than trained on?

<comment><USER19> > _This is real money, real economies, and you could horribly crash these. > That is also why you don 't write with authority about how to build a bridge > ..._

Setting aside that first bit of hyperbole, I don't see the danger in the bridge example. I mean, if engineers are building bridges based on information they've gleaned from internet articles, there are larger issues at play.

As far as markets, retail traders basically exist and have existed within a massive bubble of misinformation since forever. There's a reason order flow is so valuable.

<comment><USER18> ML is dangerously overhyped (that is an issue at play). This article uses min max scaling, so it will treat a 30$ stock as if it were 20$. You want someone like that managing your pension fund?

I refer to engineering code, because it is clear to me we don't want our bridges build by those not skilled enough to make safe bridges. Yet, it is not so clear with ML/AI, while the potential for damage may be even greater.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Modelers%27_Manife...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Modelers%27_Manifesto)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> These types of experiments pop up from time to time. You have to compare the performance relative to the single lag error. So the baseline is to use the previous time step to predict the current time step. Ultimately, it's not worthwhile to attempt to predict stock timeseries the SNR is far too low. It's more valuable to attempt to predict a trend, e.g., +1 is there will be upward movement in time window x, -1 if downward, 0 is within some epsilon of the current price.

</comment><comment><USER21> 11:15, restate my assumptions: 1. Mathematics is the language of nature. 2. Everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers. 3. If you graph these numbers, patterns emerge. Therefore: There are patterns everywhere in nature.

<comment><USER22> > Everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers.

One of the biggest problems facing someone trying to assemble a numerical model of some thing or process is whether or not their model is _adequate_ to describe the phenomena they are observing.

This is why psychology remains a statistically modeled science, largely relegated to anecdotal research.

(Note that my intent is not to speak ill of psychology and its cohort, only illustrate that just because you can slap numbers on a thing doesn't mean you've described it well.

Look at the transition of understanding from Newtonian mechanics to relativity and quantum mechanics. Newtonian mechanics was enough until someone saw Mercury was doing weird things it shouldn't.

And before Newtonian mechanics we had a broken description of the solar system with more exceptions than rules. We were throwing numbers at a system and failing, in some part, to describe it with consistency.)

<comment><USER23> Well said. Having to add increasingly many edge cases to your model is a sign your model is insufficient.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This doesn't take away from the exercise, but I notice the model seems to "predict" the movement just after it occurs.

It just lags the current price. If there is no alpha in the price signal, then the rational thing to do is to just stay at the current price, which is what the algo seems to have learned to do.

</comment><comment><USER25> Pretty underwhelming. From the very limited experiment demonstrated, the LSTM seems to be playing catch up rather than actually predicting trends.

<comment><USER26> I noticed this as well.

Many data science thought pieces don't quantify the results, and it's suspicious that they're not included in detail (typically, the R^2 of a simple stock market prediction model is super low, making it impractical putting actual money on the line as it's barely _better than guessing randomly_ : [https://twitter.com/minimaxir/status/1021885939361042432](https://twitter.com/minimaxir/status/1021885939361042432) )

<comment><USER27> _> barely better than guessing randomly_

In the stock market something that is consistently better than guessing randomly is very valuable! You don't need much of an edge to make a lot of money.

(I'm very skeptical about approaches like the OP though)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> You can use whatever prediction technique you like, but if your model is wrong, then so will the prediction. Predicting stock prices requires considering as many factors as you can gather that goes into setting the stock price, and how the factors correlate with each other.

> previous price of a stock is crucial in predicting its future price

This is a poor and incorrect model. The stock price has plenty other variables and many of which are unknown. What's used here is just a single variable.

</comment><comment><USER29> This is complete rubbish. Zero evaluation compared to any sane baseline, zero thinking about representation (predicting raw price?!). I'll just say it, ML was frankly better when fewer people knew it and there was less money in claiming to be an expert.

</comment><comment><USER30> Signal/noise on the market is extremely low, and determining whether you're predicting something or just data snooping your way to a function that looks like it predicts something is a serious competitive advantage in itself (... because all you need then is novel functions to try).

Working out a function that passes a split test is inevitable and easy tbh. That function then making money is highly unlikely. This is especially true if your data sources are public.

</comment><comment><USER31> My favourite part of this is that Francois Chollet (the author of Keras) specifically warns against this exact use of LSTMs in his book (Deep Learning with Python)

</comment><comment><USER32> The author uses stock market as a toy example. He is not actually attempting to do serious forecasting.

Only comparing the prediction accuracy against simpler models like ARIMA or VARMAX (as the author suggest) can tell you if the model has any use.

<comment><USER33> It seems like if you do anything with financial data like this, people often aren't capable of accepting that it's just a toy example — they judge it as if it must be intended to really make money. I don't know why.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Again, as always, and every time -- if a stock market price-predicting scheme worked, it would not be published on the internet for free. It would not be for sale. It would be in constant use to make money for the authors.

</comment><comment><USER35> I'm skeptical of any system that proves it can predict stock prices vaguely.

I would be less skeptical if it was more humble, and specific in its constraints. For example, could it predict the % probability a stock would up X% if it had N consecutive negative days? Or, how many minutes/hours after earnings are announced is the after-hours price usually indicative of what the price will be the next day?

You can't predict everything, but you might be able to have a probabilistic prediction of _specific_ scenarios. though even then I'll still be skeptical.. daily stock movements are totally random.

</comment><comment><USER36> I saw some guys present who did this with currency trading. They had to retrain the model every night and it didn't trade for the first four hours after the market opened.

</comment><comment><USER37> Total noob question in this space (algotrading with DL algorithms).

What DL is good at, is to automate tasks that are easy for humans (e.g. telling cat from dog, understand a sentence from sound wave, translation, etc) but hard for machines without DL.

Now, if a task is even hard/borderline impossible for humans to achieve (e.g. predicting stock market with higher accuracy and consistency), why would we believe DL could do a better job than humans?

<comment><USER38> DL isn't just good at automating human tasks (see AlphaZero and AlphaGo).

It can be used to recognize patterns and train to solve problems better than humans. Though in this case since the market is people making predictions about a prediction I'm not sure how much it'd help.

There's probably something about humans using a rough estimate of what the stock has been historically to inform where it could go though so it's value is probably non-zero.

<comment><USER37> By DL, i meant generic DL techniques like CNN, LSTM (used in this article), which relies on large amount of labeled data to train, and predict on similar data, thus my comment about automation. Alpha Go (Zero) is very specialized for the game of go, not sure how much of its specialized algorithm could transfer to other generic use cases.

<comment><USER19> > _Alpha Go (Zero) is very specialized for the game of go, not sure how much > of its specialized algorithm could transfer to other generic use cases._

AlphaZero is a generalized successor, and it does just that:

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

<comment><USER37> Good to know it generalized, but seems it's only generalized on board games like problems where you have a problem space to search through, is that understanding correct? If so, it probably won't help in the use cases we are talking about here, right?

<comment><USER38> Yeah it's not an AGI, but I think the response was more that DL isn't necessarily limited to automating tasks that are easy for humans but hard for machines without DL (which I think was your original statement).

DL could potentially do a better job by recognizing patterns in the dataset that lead towards winning (making more money) that humans might miss. Like how AlphaZero can recognize moves in Go or Chess that humans don't understand are the best moves to make.

It's not obvious to me how this would be done, but I think it's plausible that some clever implementation could help.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> These predictions and models work until they don't. And when they don't, they blow up in spectacular fashion.

Look at Long Term Capital Management. It had big names behind it and the model/strategy made a lot of money, until I believe the Russian bond crisis caused the markets to act irrationally. Then everything they had invested in quickly went down the toilet, and it was big enough to almost cause a financial crisis.

</comment><comment><USER40> I wonder if someone could comment on how AI is used at big investment banks? I assume its much more than technical analysis (like this model). I imagine that NLP might be helpful for quickly ingesting a news feed and then making buy/sell decisions based on the news in less time than humans can read and react?

<comment><USER35> As you mentioned, one way is to quickly ingest earnings announcements from press wires/company websites. As soon as the earnings report hits the wire, they want to immediately known how big a miss/beat was it, and whether they should immediately dump it or buy more.

Other examples include analyzing the words/sentiments in earning calls, to see if certain words indicate a bearish or bullish signal. For example if a CEO mentions the word "headwinds", does that historically lead to a much better quarter next time?

Some other companies do analysis with public/private data. For example, you can use a weather dataset to calculate the average temperature for all cities where there are restaurants owned by Cheesecake Factory in a quarter, and see if it will negatively or positively impact sales.

<comment><USER41> I don't think you need AI for that, though. There are news feeds that are specifically designed to be machine readable. All you need to do is parse it and compare the actual numbers to the expected ones, then calculate the delta for your pricing model. All of this is pretty simple. The real challenge is being faster with this than the competition.

<comment><USER35> You're absolutely right. None of this is AI. Wall Street is notorious for making stuff sound more impressive then it really is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I don't know what's more embarrassing. This article, or the fact that it's #1 on HN right now.

</comment><comment><USER43> Is this graph at the end a one-step-ahead prediction? Because if it is, then it looks very much like a 50/50 success/failure ratio. Which is what I would expect, because otherwise you could extract a signal from it.

</comment><comment><USER44> I cannot fault your enthusiam but I can fault your method :)

Read Tsay's Financial Time Series Analysis for a better idea how to forecast financial data.

The biggest problem you will face is stationarity: the statistical properties of the data is not constant over time. For example, the mean and std dev is not constant over time. Using returns instead of raw prices helps to make better financial forecasts.

Two methods to explore:

1\. You are better off predicting stock prices by predicting future returns and then forecasting is the current price plus predicted future return.

2\. You could use your neural model to predict absolute size of returns using realized volatility.

</comment><comment><USER45> No, this is a bad example of prediction; if you bet money on the direction of prediction, you'll lose much. Drawing prices and making it looking as similar is not correct prediction. At least you should show >50% correct direction prediction if it is considered to be "well processed" machine learning.

</comment><comment><USER46> From my experience, LSTM or other recurrent neural network models only work "well" at forecasting bounded and periodic or oscillating time series. Might work for something like seasonal sale data, but would fail spectacularly with unbounded and chaotic time series like stock prices.

</comment><comment><USER47> I used to run a technical analysis site for exchange traded funds (ETFs).

Skipping to the "results" of this experiment, I am seeing nothing. It looks like a slow, short period moving average (SMA)... which does nothing in terms of predicting anything. It just averages out the chaos over time.

</comment><comment><USER48> > From the plot we can see that the real stock price went up while our model > also predicted that the price of the stock will go up. This clearly shows > how powerful LSTMs are for analyzing time series and sequential data.

Is laughter or tears the right reaction here?

</comment><comment><USER49> I know nothing about ML and not very much about finance, but I find it incredibly unlikely that some random guy on Medium has an algorithm that can be used to accurately predict the market. Why isn't he hilariously rich?

</comment><comment><USER50> I believe a simple moving average would achieve the same result and that mixing training and test data for validation invalidates your model results...

On a positive note, nice showcase of how simple implementation with Keras is.

</comment><comment><USER51> Seriously, how on earth is this the news #1 of the frontpage of HN? Isn't this community supposed to know better?

Before clicking I thought "I bet they do stacked LSTM to predict the _next_ time step" :|

</comment><comment><USER52> Let's take it easy on the author... LSTM's _are_ cool especially when you first grok them, and stock data is the most abundant time series data out there.

<comment><USER53> It's the webdev equivalent of creating a log-in form tutorial and putting the password in a JavaScript variable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Think the important thing is model performance and tuning hyper parameters which is missing from this tutorial.

Without that you are just regurgitating some model that does something.

</comment><comment><USER55> Simple linear regression would work just fine for something rudimentary like this. This using neural nets stuff for everything lately is getting ridiculous.

<comment><USER56> What about trainnig a nn for linear regression?

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Regardless of whether or not this would make anyone money, it's a really nice introduction to forecasting time series using LSTMs. Thanks for the post!

</comment><comment><USER58> Shame on me for looking. But this is a account that post only from fritz.ai -- might be nonsense spam.

</comment><comment><USER59> Well, I'm only on mobile. But the problem with stock prices is often that you don't have good data, unless you are working for the big four or whatever. And even then, they are apparently still working on integrating external data in real time.

Imagine having the whole Twitter stream, maybe categorized by some network in an automatic way.

Also prequential evaluation.

</comment><comment><USER60> Feed it 3 cycles of a perfect sine wave. What does it predict?

</comment><comment> java-man It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.

\-- Yogi Berra

<comment><USER61> Have heard this quote attributed to einstein.

<comment> java-man Or Bohr:

[0] [https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Niels_Bohr](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Niels_Bohr)

[1] [https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/10/20/no- predict/](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/10/20/no-predict/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Predicting stock prices with deep learning is the "Killing Baby Hitler" of Time Travel. Even though they know it won't work out, everyone tries it their first time.

</comment><comment><USER63> Isn't the concensus these days that every bit of information is squeezed out so that the stock price always reflects all that is predictable?

In addition, major factors are external and trying to predict further price only based on past price is bound to disappoint.

</comment><comment><USER64> Oblig XKCD [https://xkcd.com/1570/](https://xkcd.com/1570/)

Seriously tho', articles like this need to come with a big banner at the top saying _warning: do not try this at home_.

</comment><comment><USER65> wonder how effective those models will become when everyone starts believing in those models to do trades.

<comment><USER66> The vast, vast majority of trading is fully automated algorithmic already.

<comment><USER67> Of which almost all is HFT. And by definition HFT has to be fully automated. I'm not sure if there's any data on the kind of algorithmic trading that the article talks about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> Why on earth there is supposed to be even a correlation between so-called past and future (bullshitting as a business aside)?

It is like predicting Trump by Nickson or, even better - predicting a next Trump.

</comment><comment><USER69> We'll know if it works when he gets to be a trillionaire.</comment>


BetaBox – a custom prototyping lab built inside a shipping container - <AUTHOR> https://betaversity.com/betabox/

<comment><USER2> Saw this on Dwell the other day. They have some crazy/awesome stuff going on. Not sure about their range, but they seem pretty cool. Can't wait to try their latest product.

</comment><comment><USER3> Whoa. Way to get creative with a shipping container. Atlas looks cool, too.

</comment><comment><USER4> Ha. I want one.</comment>


Is Google Making Us Stupid? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google

<comment><USER2> I do find that I no longer read through things (especially opinion pieces) with that sense of "truncated thought" whenever I come to a questionable assertion or statistic.

It used to be that I'd feel an uneasy _is that right?_ feeling at these points and try to remember to check that out later. Now I'm very likely to pop google open next to the piece and check immediately.

Very often things I'm reading "strike out" with a few bogus assertions or statistics and don't get read all the way through.

Reading anything without google except fiction where I wish to suspend disbelief feels weird now.

Google makes us smarter, not stupid, because it allows our brain to be an L1 cache instead of the entire store.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's the breaking-up of essays into 4 or more web pages that irritates and turns off the reader...

</comment><comment><USER4> It's wrong to say technology is making thought more shallow. What's happening is the digestion of information is becoming a heavily collaborative process instead of a strictly personal one.

</comment><comment><USER5> Read the whole thing... if you still can.

<comment><USER6> I was gonna read the whole thing, but the first rambling paragraph bored me and I got distracted by something on newegg.

(On a serious note: what a linkbait headline!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> No.

TV is making people stupid.

<comment><USER8> No, it was _reading_ that made people stupid. We just can't memorize epic poems the way we used to.

<comment><USER9> How can you assess that the epic poem was memorized (correctly) if you don't have a written record of the original version (I'll assume where there's reading there's writing)? Maybe it wasn't even epic at first.

<comment><USER8> Actually, I vaguely remember reading about a study of bards which showed that -- surprise, surprise -- thousand-line epic poems _aren't_ memorized word-for- word. Certain famous lines are memorized, the overall plot is memorized, the meter may or may not be fixed... but a bunch of the details end up being improvised. Fans of folk music or jazz should be completely unsurprised by this.

The moral of this story is that the identity and talent of the person "transcribing" an epic poem into print -- or playing that folk music into the recorder -- are really important.

Of course, perhaps a dedicated critic of writing would laugh at the absurd notion that an epic poem whose words _were exactly the same at every performance_ was somehow "more correct". Why, if you standardize the words, the art is gone! That's the approach taken by dedicated fans of concert music and jazz: it's the little differences in interpretation and approach that make each performance fresh and unique.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Goboy: Multi-Platform Nintendo Game Boy Color Emulator Written in Go - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Humpheh/goboy <comment><USER2> For something more complex, I have written a mostly working Nintendo DS emulator in Go, with JIT, 3D graphics, and whatnot: [https://github.com/rasky/ndsemu/](https://github.com/rasky/ndsemu/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I've often thought of writing my own emulator for the NES or GB/GBC to learn a little about how emulation works on a more fundamental level.

I understand a lot of it is the process of translating machine code from, say, the GB processor to x86, but I'd love to learn more!

<comment><USER4> > I understand a lot of it is the process of translating machine code from, > say, the GB processor to x86, but I'd love to learn more!

You don't really need to translate to x86 per se. You can start off with an interpreter that takes in the 6502 or Z80 instructions (as represented by the binary data in the input ROM), then immediately perform operations based on those instructions. For example, if you're holding onto an in-memory representation of the GB registers, and you encounter an "add" instruction, you would perform the addition and update the registers.

And if you're writing the emulator in a high-level language, you never really think about x86 instructions.

The hard part, then, is timing. You need to make sure the different operations that would be happening in hardware--namely performing the CPU instructions, alongside audio and video operations that would normally happen "in the background"\--happen in sync. But that's a later step after you start on your first prototype!

<comment><USER5> I have a question there. CPU instructions and what they do are highly documented and easy to replicate, but I'm guessing that timing is significantly less slo. How do you get that right?

<comment><USER4> Timings are usually documented as well, usually at the clock cycle level.

Beyond that, you have to worry about hardware peculiarities that happen to affect maybe a few games, and at that point, you might start reverse engineering the behavior of those games!

Take a look at this article talking about exactly those thinking issues: [https://www.tested.com/tech/gaming/2712-why-perfect- hardware...](https://www.tested.com/tech/gaming/2712-why-perfect-hardware- snes-emulation-requires-a-3ghz-cpu/)

<comment><USER6> Why not link to the original article?

[https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes- power-...](https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-one- mans-3ghz-quest-to-build-a-perfect-snes-emulator/)

<comment><USER4> Oops! I searched for the article, then picked one of the results. I didn't realize the one I linked wasn't the original because I only looked through it enough to make sure the right content was present.

Thanks for the correction!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I feel envy. I'm writing an NES emulator with a friend and it's taking so long... The gui is stealing my sanity.

At least the CPU is completely done.

I'll lurk his code :D

</comment><comment><USER8> As somebody not versed at all in the front end part of an emulator, what's a good resource for learning how to put together something that will actually render frames? No preference on technologies here.

<comment><USER9> Emulating the frame is also just part of the emulator. I.e. you got the display memory in some array (of pixel colors) in your code and the emulated instructions modify it. Then you just have to draw whatever is in that array on a "canvas" that your programming language supports.

<comment><USER8> It's the drawing bit that I don't have much experience of haha

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Nice!

As someone who also wrote a GB emulator as a learning exercise, I found the sound code to be the worst part by far to write - getting sound timing right etc is very difficult (as the GB sound output changes instantly - it has no buffers etc)

</comment><comment><USER11> Well done!

Everybody who's interested in multiple platform emulation with a nice UI should check OpenEmu: [https://openemu.org/](https://openemu.org/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Cool! I also wrote a Gameboy emulator in Go, but I never got to supporting audio or GBC. I wonder how much harder it is to do Gameboy Color once you've got decent Gameboy DMG emulation?

<comment><USER13> There aren't actually too many differences between GBC and DMG emulation as most of the hardware was consistent between them. The main change is around the PPU and the memory, as the GBC added some internal memory banks which are used for tile attributes and colour palettes etc. The actual changes around the graphics rendering aren't very significant other than some conditionals for GBC mode - you can see them here where `isGBC` is used: [https://github.com/Humpheh/goboy/blob/master/pkg/gb/ppu.go](https://github.com/Humpheh/goboy/blob/master/pkg/gb/ppu.go)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> How would someone begin to work on something like this?

<comment><USER12> My recommendation is to start with the CPU emulation. The CPU in the Gameboy has decent documentation and there are plenty of implementations to look at if you're stumped. (One I like particular is the core in Higan, a multisystem emulator written in C++.)

<comment><USER15> I remember seeing some people recommend starting with the NES rather than the Gameboy - any ideas on this?

<comment><USER16> Start with Chip-8 or Space Invaders, both of which are substantially easier than the NES and Gameboy.

<comment><USER15> Took me a minute to realise you were talking about 8080 emulation - not Atari emulation: [https://github.com/superzazu/invaders](https://github.com/superzazu/invaders)

<comment><USER17> How did you reach that conclusion?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I like that the language is a part of the name.

</comment><comment><USER19> Love the name!</comment>


NEXTREALITY – The platform to discover and show the best in AR and get AR jobs - <AUTHOR> http://www.nextreality.tv <comment><AUTHOR> Hey We're really excited to present the Nextreality platform to the Hacker News community.The purpose of Nextreality is to be the destination the people discover and show the best augmented reality projects.

Soon, we'll also be launching jobs, meet ups and learning resources to be the best place for all your AR needs.We think AR is going to be a very big deal and with Apple's iPhone announcement tomorrow, it's time to get started. We envisage nearly all mobile apps and interactions being AR first and with that, there's currently a big skills gap.

The most exciting thing about this development is that AR is a blank slate. Most of the rules and 'best practices' have been defined in app and web development. That isn't the case with AR.

We're hoping that a lot of these best practices will be defined on the Nextreality platform and we hope you'll help define them.

In addition to the Nextreality platform, we've also launched a Slack channel where you can connect with the Nextreality community. You can find a link to this community on www.nextreality.tv

We're really looking forward to your questions and suggestions to make Nextreality better. It's early days, but with you guys, we hope to make it the best platform for you to learn, show, get jobs and meet.We look forward to seeing you there, Dean & the Nextreality team</comment>


The coming shortage of helium and how government policy is creating it. - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=the-coming-shortage-of-helium-2010-06-30 There's a mandate that sales cover the costs associated with the helium reserves, so they've lowered the price to increase the sales in the short run without regard to the long term strategic value of having a huge chunk of a limited world supply. <comment><USER2> That is a nasty linkbait-y retitling. As far as the Helium Privatisation Act goes, the government was being accused of "waste" in 1996 when it was sitting on a vast stockpile of helium (from prior military uses.) It decided to sell it off over a controlled period so as to not depress the price excessively and put private suppliers out of business. They gave themselves the deadline of 2015 to have it all sold, presumabley so as to reduce the government debt in a reasonable time frame. [1]

Now it seems that helium is much more valuable but the price is depressed because this stockpile has to be sold by 2015. So something that made sense at the time now doesn't, and a new act is needed to say they can take longer to sell the helium. Government fail? Only if they don't change the policy.

Oh, and the HPA almost unanimously approved by Congress (411-10, with 12 not voting.) [2]

EDIT TO ADD: I am grumpy about this because titles like that generally go with the articles along the lines of "nasty government interfering with the market." But in this case, the report wants the government to be the government, to act strategically, not to sell at the market price but above it, and generally to interfere. The 1996 Act stopped the government doing its job in order to cut perceived waste and debt. The act should never have passed congress in the first place, or at least not in such a fixed way, but it did because it fitted people's stupid, prejudiced narrative that the government is too "big".

[1] [http://www.helium.com/items/874929-understanding-the- helium-...](http://www.helium.com/items/874929-understanding-the-helium- privitization-act-of-1996)

[2] [http://projects.washingtonpost.com/congress/104/house/2/vote...](http://projects.washingtonpost.com/congress/104/house/2/votes/137/)

<comment><USER3> >So something that made sense at the time now doesn't, and a new act is needed to say they can take longer to sell the helium.

This sort of thing shouldn't require an act of congress/parliament.

A general rule of not selling >$Y of goods that are above X% of the yearly market without treasury approval would seem more sensible.

<comment><AUTHOR> The post office can't even stop delivering mail on Saturday without an act of Congress. The wheels of bureaucracy continue to turn despite whatever signals the market sends.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is helium being used not only because it is inert but for its other properties as well? I mean if an application just needs an inert gas could it use argon instead?

<comment><USER5> It plays a big role in cryogenics, too. Helium is the standard way of cooling (non-HTC) superconductors down to operating temperature.

<comment><USER6> Right on. MRIs need liquid helium to cool their superconducting magnet, and they need to be topped up every so often, to accommodate boil-off. It's getting pricier to do so, increasing the cost of an already expensive apparatus.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> OK so how does one profit from this? I have tried to find a way to buy Helium futures before, but haven't been able to. Does anyone know where/how this is possible?

<comment><USER7> Why would you think that it's a better idea to buy helium now than it was to buy lithium before the recent discovery of large lithium deposits in Afghanistan?

<comment><USER5> I don't follow... More lithium was found, whereas helium is going to become scarce. What do the two have in common?

<comment><USER8> Well, we could always find another large deposit of helium in some undiscovered salt mine. Unlikely, but there are still parts of the earth largely unsurveyed. So maybe. After that, maybe in 50 years we'll start mining helium3 from the moon, or producing it ourselves in a fusion reactor.

<comment><USER5> From what I understand, He-3 would actually be consumed in plausible energy- netting fusion reactions, which is the reason for the whole lunar mining speculation. I think prices would need to be pretty steep before lunar mining makes economic sense.

<comment><USER8> The reaction you're thinking of is: Deuterium + He3 -> proton + He4 + energy. So the reaction also yields helium. Helium is a very common product from fusion reactions. We can produce it now, just not in very large quantities. But cryogenics have money, and a need for helium, meaning they might be willing to pay for it being produced in such a way in the future.

<comment><USER9> Given the amount of energy that is produced for every atom of helium you are getting this is an unlikely path to adding to the global helium reserves. We would be able to power a small country with the energy that would be produced in the course of getting enough helium to fill a small blimp.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Dammit, what shall I fill my blimp with now? Hot air?

<comment><USER11> I was just wondering earlier today how long world helium reserves could last. For airships a 90% reduction in carbon emissions won't matter if helium becomes the economic bottleneck. Sort of depressing how soon we seem to be reaching a point where depletion of earth resources is inevitable.

Hydrogen would be interesting if we could make it safe enough. It could double as a fuel source for the ships, too.

<comment><USER12> Unless we find a way to make profitable fusion.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is it about other programming languages that you just don't like? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Background: I'm more of an idea person, I like making my ideas come to reality.

Java: \- I don't like having to type 'class', public, private, return types, parameter types, etc. over and over again. Writing Java is like owning and driving a boat. Its great once the boat is sailing everyone is drinking beer, but getting the boat to the water (assuming you didn't park it in the marina), setting up the boat, refueling, is too much work.

JavaScript: \- All the freedom and speed that you take advantage of in the beginning to quickly build a prototype comes back and bites you in the ass. Once you starting having multiple people on the project, errors become abundant (Cannot access property of undefined). Javascript is like driving a hummer. It feels comfortable at first, and then you start to realize that gas and upkeep is taking a toll.

C: \- You have to code so much to get so little. Spending mental bandwidth on memory allocation takes your attention away from your core app features.

Python: \- Great for a small subset of tasks, but limiting. You can't build mobile apps or websites with python.

These are a few that comes to mind.

<comment><USER3> Ad JavaScript - use TypeScript. It is a game changer that made web, mobile app and server development one of the nicest experiences I ever had in software development.

You don't have to start using every single feature from day 0, you can write JavaScript with types (in classes), and let other (e.g. variable) types be inferred. Even that small subset of features can catch almost every null reference error you've ever got.

<comment><USER2> agreed :)</comment></comment></comment>


Detect audio frequency using HTML5 (and more) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rserota/wad <comment><USER2> If it meets the guidelines, this might make a good "Show HN".

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

</comment><comment><USER3> Just look up HTML5 guitar tuner

</comment><comment><USER4> Demo of pitch detection?

<comment><AUTHOR> Everything is available already. If you want to see how it works just follow the instructions:

[https://github.com/rserota/wad#pitch- detection](https://github.com/rserota/wad#pitch-detection)

<comment><USER4> If you want me to see how it works, put up a demo.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not my product. I was using it for my project and because I had good experience I decided to share it with others.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


IMDb message boards shutting down effective February 20, 2017 - <AUTHOR> http://www.imdb.com/board/announcement <comment><USER2> This is incredibly sad news. I've been a regular reader of IMDb message boards for over 15 years now. It's the last actual forum that I still visit.

There's so much valuable information stored on those boards, it's a tragedy to see it get deleted. Sure the most popular movie threads might be filled with toxic flamewars, but the long tail of more obscure movies has reasonable discussion and human recommendations of other similar movies. It's precisely this why I'm extra sad about this whole situation. It's not difficult to find a community to talk about the next Star Wars, but there aren't really any places where discussion (in English) about 20 years old Dutch movies happens.

<comment><USER3> I'm archiving as we speak. Will eventually make its way into the Wayback Machine.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Picsee. Faster than Words - <AUTHOR> http://picsee.cc

<comment><USER2> Picsee is an app where you can enjoy visual communication by sharing Camera Rolls with your close friends and family. Since your photos are sent right when you take a photo, it's like sharing eachothers' visual experiences on the spot which brings about a feeling of closeness.

</comment><comment><USER2> here's a detailed blog post about how Picsee is revolutionary for digital photography:

[https://medium.com/picsees-studio/charging-intimacy-into- the...](https://medium.com/picsees-studio/charging-intimacy-into-the-internet- fa9eb3c67c77)</comment>


Teaching programming languages: a novel approach - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/sk-teach-pl-post-linnaean/

<comment><USER2> Krishnamurthi has also done some really great work teaching introductory programming. He and his coauthors wrote a book meant to occupy a similar space as SICP, available here: <http://www.htdp.org>. The reasons why they felt an additional text in place of SICP was necessary can be found here: <http://www.ccs.neu.edu/scheme/pubs/jfp2004-fffk.pdf>.

Krishnamurthi and his colleagues also maintain Racket (<http://racket- lang.org/>), a first-class development environment, and excellent documentation. All and all just a really great example of academics who simultaneously care deeply about teaching, publish top-tier research, and release real-world tools.

<comment><USER3> FYI, there is currently ongoing work on HTDP2 -> <http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/HtDP2e/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've read the paper, but I still find the grand metaphors like "Post-Linnaean" a bit of a reach. If you want to say that we've reached a point where few languages are pure in their approach (functional, object-oriented, etc), fine. If you want to say modern languages don't pay much a penalty for garbage collection, also fine. I just don't see the evidence that the approach hinted at has relevance to any context outside of Shriram Krishnamurthi's classroom at Brown University. It seems that most of his points that have practical application will be really old news to the programmer part of the HN readership, and have no practical value for those who aren't.

<comment><USER2> What gave you the impression that the paper was supposed to have relevance outside of a classroom? The paper has practical applications to teaching, which should be self evident given the content and venue of the paper. If you don't care then don't upvote the story. But don't try to pass off your point as a valid criticism of the paper.

<comment><USER4> Sorry I wasn't clear. I wasn't trying to pass anything off. Someone posted a link to paper - I read it and wasn't impressed with the reasoning. (And less than impressed with the over-reaching metaphors.)

I do disagree with the author's apparent contention that, say, a historical appreciation of the evolving nature of programming paradigms is somehow holding students back today. Aside from argument by assertion, I'm missing the evidence that his approach is the solution to a problem.

What I was also missing, and am still unenlightened about after your response, is the relevance of his classroom approach to say, the readers here. It seems nearly monthly we have a story related to the virtues of SICP and that I get -- it's a great book that's changed a lot of programmer's perception of what programming is about. In this case, I'm missing a similar connection outside the classroom.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In case anyone's scared away by the format, it's an accessible, three-page, quick read. And it's really interesting. The author's approach of blending language survey with language construction is a strategy I've recently employed, and I've grown more as a programmer, more rapidly, because of it.

</comment><comment><USER6> Krishnamurthi's class was one of the best classes I've ever taken. The book didn't exist when I took it, but the the lecture notes from our class would eventually become the basis for the book, so I assume the book's excellent as well.

</comment><comment><USER7> We used this at UT Austin, and it's a great book. It doesn't have a lot of stuff that you would find in a graduate PL course (e.g. type theory), so it doesn't prepare you to read PL papers, but building a lisp in scheme is a lot more fun than learning type theory!

And probably more useful, as the author asserts in his paper.

<comment><USER8> I could be wrong but I'm fairly certain PLAI covers basic type checking & inference. It doesn't get into harder stuff (e.g. dependent typing) though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Shriram Krishnamurthi is a genius; I saw him at a conference last year and regardless of the topic of the talk given, he always had insightful comments and questions that were close to a level of having done the research himself. Honestly, I have never met anyone more competent in such a variety of topics.

</comment><comment><USER10> you can find the full length pdf book here, with free of charge or payment option:

[http://www.cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Books/ProgLangs/200...](http://www.cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Books/ProgLangs/2007-04-26/)

</comment><comment><USER11> I was hoping the "novel" approach would be to use realistic fiction to get students inside the mind of a programmer, using actual languages. A novel has an advantage over an autobiography because the characters can be put in teaching situations in an ideal order. Also, if the author is honest about his own experiences, he will not let the characters self-edit their experience to present a hopelessly optimistic or pessimistic picture of programming.

<comment><AUTHOR> Natural language is ambiguous, sorry for being misleading; I meant "novel" in the sense of "fresh, not seen before", referring to the more pragmatic paradigm described in the paper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The comments in this thread are so gushing that I suspected we were being scammed by vanity accounts trying to flog this guys wares (books), but they're mostly from big karma/long time readers so I was wrong.

Okay, so other than being a hyper-intelligent pan-galactic sex god, what has this guy done for us lately? (read as: request for more info and less gushing. Let's just take the gushing as given)

<comment><USER13> I guess a few of us have been through a programming language concepts course, and felt that the matter is really interesting, but that it could be better connected to what's happening on the ground. This guy is vocalising that perspective.

Also, Racket is promising. I think this is the first time we've had a scheme platform that has this combination:

\- Simple installation

\- Solid package management arrangements.

\- Multiplatform

\- Nice IDE.

\- Free software

\- Easy access to unix api

Other lisps have had a couple of these features. But Racket is the first lisp I've seen that feels like a serious alternative to perl/ruby/python. It may lack a solid standard library - I haven't looked into this yet.

<comment><USER12> So he made some contributions to Scheme. Anything else?

<comment><USER14> There's more, but if you just stop there and understand PLT's contributions to Scheme, you'll be gushing too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> just by reading the contents, i wish i had this book 20 or so years ago. back then, i had to find these subject piece by piece in books and white papers. work of a genius. thanks.</comment>


Alan Kay at TED: A powerful idea about teaching ideas - <AUTHOR> http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/228 <comment><USER2> Anyone else underwhelmed?</comment>


iPhone Fever Is Fading - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlanticwire.com/business/2013/01/iphone-fever-fading/60940/

<comment><USER2> Apple did a silly thing by locking themselves to one single design.

The iPhone is instantly recognizable, sure, but it's also old at this point. Something like the galaxy s3 has a bigger screen, feels more pleasant in my hands than my iPhones, and is something that apple would have a tough time changing to.

Yes, they made it a little tiny bit longer, but it's still more-or-less the same design.

<comment><USER3> I think its the software itself that feels ancient. The home screen is basically identical to the first iPhone's. The navigation is clunky, too, compared to most of its competitors.

(Note: iPhone user since 3G, iPhone app developer too)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is speculation parading as news.

<comment><USER5> [http://venturebeat.com/2013/01/14/apple-iphone-5-display- ord...](http://venturebeat.com/2013/01/14/apple-iphone-5-display-orders-cut/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The design of the iPhone 5 isn't up to scratch, IMO. The black model especially looks like something the janitor from a Hitachi research lab.

The iPhone 4, on the other hand, was a design classic.</comment>


Dead Man's Snitch – Monitoring for Scheduled Tasks - <AUTHOR> https://deadmanssnitch.com/ <comment><USER2> I don't know if this is what lead to this going up, but patio11 mentioned this service the other day in his epic post about Tarsnap: [http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/04/03/fantasy- tarsnap/](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/04/03/fantasy-tarsnap/) .. he uses Dead Man's Snitch to ensure his backups continue working (or more accurately, to notify him when they don't!)

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice branding. Most monitoring tools are overly complicated, both in their features as well the use-cases they try to cover. I like the clear focus of this; the product itself doesn't require one to invest a lot of time, which is a good thing.

Just some questions:

\- how do you prevent unauthorized snitches from screwing with your data? Wouldn't it be wise to limit a snitch to a certain server ip?

\- why only an iOS app? This excludes lots of potential customers (including me).

\- why not offer an API, so we can securely fetch the status of our snitches?

I like the singular focus. Some people don't want very complicated feature rich monitor systems. I can imagine using a solution like this, esspecially in those cases, where more feature rich monitor systems are not being considered.

Yet, you offer a pricing model that suggests something completely different. That you are a very complicated feature-rich monitor system. The value you provide at each price point is simply not warranted.

I doubt this will have a large uptake, but if it does, i'm the first one tempted to compete. The required architecture is not complicated enough to warrant such high margins on such low costs. Cloud providers, even the budget ones like DigitalOcean, could easily offer something like this for free to their customers.

Now, you could argue that the price includes high quality support. But that's the not the audience of such a singular focus tool. If i need support, i'm obviously spending enough time interacting with it, that i would be better off with a more feature-rich monitor system. (which are available at similar price points)

Who's going to pay 600 dollars a year for 300 snitches? To build this at scale may take more effort, but from the perspective of your customer .. wouldn't most of them be able to build something like this for internal use in a single day? There are open source solutions with more features you can install with a single command.

I'm just wondering: but wouldn't you have much more customers, and hence, more profit, if you would provide 500 snitches at 100 dollars a year? Or alternatively, offer the service for free, but just charge for the apps yearly? In the end, a single snitch will do at most 24 empty GET requests a day, where you store a timestamp. A single VPS should be able to handle 10k snitches easily. (less than 3 requests per second)

<comment><USER4> You do realize that 600 dollars a year is next to _nothing_ for a business? I don't even run a business, I am just a freelancer, but I'd happily pay 600 USD/year for this service if I needed it.

The price doesn't make a real dent in any serious budget, so why bother? And 600 dollars is _really_ cheap compared to anything that could happen when you miss an important event. Email campaign not sent? This could cost thousands of dollars or more. Backup not done? Could be millions of dollars for some kinds of businesses.

I think the service is priced reasonably. If you think otherwise, start a competitor. If you can convince me that your service will reliably mail me on incidents _no matter what catastrophe happens to your data center_ , I might use it over theirs (Should I ever need such a service. As I said before, I don't need it right now.).

<comment><USER3> >You do realize that 600 dollars a year is next to nothing for a business?

I get that. But at that price point, there are similar solutions available with much more coverage and features. This isn't actually competing with DataDog, Munin, Nagios, New Relic on features or reliability.

>? This could cost thousands of dollars or more. Backup not done? Could be millions of dollars for some kinds of businesses.

If thats the bussiness risk you are taking, you shouldn't be depending on just a ping after a cron job! Phooff. You do realize this thing is essentially only measuring if the cron job has executed. Not if it is succesfull. Sure you can script the success/failure state. But how are you going to test that against a myrid of potential failure states? What does the proccess return when the OOMKILLER gets its? Do you know?

The only reason to use something that 'just does pings' is because it's not important enough, and you don't want to invest that much time and effort. Those other tools require to be a integral part of your setup, but they'll give you much better monitoring capabilities and actual ease of mind. More importantly, rather than warning you when things have gone wrong (after the fact), they'll warn you in advance things are not looking good. They'll monitor the actual proccess, not if they were launched every hour, but what they were up to.

This product is in a very interesting niche because it seems to target projects-not-important-enough-i-wouldnt-bother-but-if-its-this-easy-why-not. But it is not priced accordingly.

>Should I ever need such a service. As I said before, I don't need it right now.

Those projects where you don't need them for: those are only ones where a product like this makes sense. If there are lots of dollars on the line, i strongly suggest you use actual industrial-grade monitoring solutions, not a ping after a cron job.

<comment><USER5> >But at that price point, there are similar solutions available with much more coverage and features.

Exactly. I sit on a quarter-million dollar budget for hardware and services, but I still have a value-for-money filter, and this doesn't pass it. I might as well use this:

[https://github.com/grahambell/crab](https://github.com/grahambell/crab)

for free, or pay for a monitoring solution that is higher reliability, is inside my network, and doesn't charge me _per cronjob_. Even at the bulk plan, half a cent for a single cron job to send a single daily http request and only alert the one guy who has an iPhone seems... unreasonable. It doesn't scale for me.

By way of comparison, for that price I can get 20 private repos on Github, which consume _oodles_ of space and networking resources.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Small gripe, based upon prior painful experience... you should always set a timeout on curl requests (or any others for that matter). There's not one by default!

It's -m <seconds> in the curl command line client.

<comment><USER7> Good point, we'll make a note to include this in our documentation!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Been using DMS for over quite a while now. It is an absolute must-have for anybody depending on scheduled tasks, and I haven't found anything like it.

And it's so cheap that there is no reason not to do it.

My only gripe is that I can only get alerted via email, which is the most often overlooked channel. I've hooked those emails up to HipChat, but some direct options for services like HipChat, Pagerduty etcetera would be nice.

<comment><USER3> Doesn't it do push notifications on iOS?

<comment><USER7> Yes, the iOS app has full push notification support! To suggest other integration points, please contact us at email@example.com.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As an aside, does anyone make a cron panel for humans? I'd find that really useful as I'm usually so busy being distracted by the next big thing that I forget to take care of repetitive tasks.

I know I can achieve something like that with my Google Calendar but I don't like the way repeating events fill it up -- it would be better if they just showed for the next occurrence.

<comment><USER10> Why not make a second calendar in GC, put the repeating events there (with notifications enabled), then hide it from the main view?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Been using DMS for years now (it was recently bought by Collective Idea). Love it so much that I'm on the testimonials page.

The reason we started using it is because it's hard to notice the absence of an email alerting you that job xyz is complete. E.g. when our nightly backup would complete, we'd get an email. We'd also get N other emails nightly emails about other tasks that would run.

On the rare occasion that e.g. backup wouldn't complete it would be really tough to notice that you _didn 't_ get the email.

What you really want is to hear nothing UNLESS something goes wrong, which DMS makes happen. Love love love it.

</comment><comment><USER12> Nice job! -- we actually needed this so badly a few years back that I wrote a simple app in a day to do this myself, though it's not very robust. I am actually surprised it's taken so long for someone to offer a SaaS version. Your pricing is so reasonable that I'd switch to your app if you could just flush out one more feature.

I actually _don 't_ want another app for reporting. I already use a monitoring service (pingdom) and would prefer to keep all of our "alerts" organized through a single service.

Could you offer a http-based public status page? Our system allowed each snitch to be tagged with a tag like "net.tourbuzz.db.replication.upToDate" and then a url like [http://foo.com/deadoralive?filter=net.tourbuzz](http://foo.com/deadoralive?filter=net.tourbuzz) would allow us to use a single Pingdom monitor to alert us if any of snitches in that namespace failed.

This is a simple tagging structure that makes it easy to organize large numbers of snitches into manageable groups and easily integrate it into existing monitoring/alerting infrastructure.

Feel free to email me directly if you want more info.

</comment><comment><USER13> Looks very interesting, but unless I can host it myself it's a no-go for me.

<comment><USER8> Uhm, the whole point of services like these is that they are external and not tied into your own hosting.

Also, it knows absolutely nothing about your services and doesn't require any level of access. All you do is ping it.

<comment><USER14> It requires internet-level access. So internal hosts that shouldn't have internet access (like a backup machine, where all your most critical data is stored) might not be able to reach it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Looks pretty cool! You should really rework the Plans page. At first I didn't realize there was more content below the "Free" plan, because I'm on a 13" OS X machine so scroll bars aren't visible by default.

</comment><comment><USER16> If you are like me and already have nagios and nrpe in use, you can use a simple python script[0] to monitor the output of the cronjob and get an alert by nagios. [0][https://github.com/rndmh3ro/check_exit- code](https://github.com/rndmh3ro/check_exit-code)

</comment><comment><USER17> as much as I hate to admit it, jenkins makes a superb replacement for cron.

It keeps a history, has excellent error handling capabilities, and can scale quite well.

also the integration with git and the like makes updating jobs super easy.

<comment><USER18> Hudson/Jenkins works well for us. We've moved all our scheduling jobs out of cron and other uglier options (like maestro) into Hudson.

In addition to sending emails when things break, it can also post to our Twitter feed and send SMS alerts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I like it. Pricing seems a bit high though. Development wise this is a 1-2 day project.

I can't see myself spending much on something I could roll my own version of in a day or two.

</comment><comment><USER20> So instead of MAILTO=sendmail I use MAILTO=[http://deadmandssnitch/report](http://deadmandssnitch/report) or similar?

<comment><USER14> That would actually be more stable, since it would rely on a network designed for fault-tolerant redundant store-and-forward messaging.

Instead, each cron job runs an HTTP GET, and later you can view the service's website to see the tests that have requested successfully or haven't responded at all. Unfortunately for your system, if there's a network hiccup, you won't know why your jobs failed and the job will hang on the HTTP call. Also, you're paying for it instead of just sending e-mail alerts to yourself.

<comment><USER21> _Unfortunately for your system, if there 's a network hiccup, you won't know why your jobs failed and the job will hang on the HTTP call. Also, you're paying for it instead of just sending e-mail alerts to yourself._

Critically importantly for this use case, if you are doing something critical for your business (say, backups or your daily billing run or sending reminders to thousands of people or what have you) and something goes wrong with your network and makes you unable to curl, _you get told about that_. If you instead do self-hosted email, and your network fails, _you don 't get told about that_.

It's fail-open vs. fail-close. That's literally so core to the product it _is alluded to in the name_. A Dead Man's Switch doesn't go off if anything goes wrong, it goes off _if everything doesn 't go right_.

<comment><USER22> The problem with that setup is that you get alerts that will get lost in the noise. Systems like Nagios, I can set up dependencies, so that I won't get a flood of alerts when the network goes down, or set up maintenance windows so that when I am working on a system, I won't get spurious alerts. Also, self- hosted tools like nagios mean that I can hook it up to send an SMS or use a backup connection, or run a script that triggers an arduino-controlled bat signal to alert me. None of this is really possible with DMS

<comment><USER23> That's only an argument that there are _some_ cases where DMS is inappropriate, not that it's inappropriate for _all_ cases. Considering that in general, setting up a robust Nagios install, configuring it, and maintaining it, costs far more than DMS, there are many scenarios where DMS is the rational choice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> the referral features is nice though. Free snitches for every person you refer.</comment>


A set of challenges to teach security "gotchas" when using AWS - <AUTHOR> https://summitroute.com/blog/2017/02/26/flaws_challenge/ <comment><USER2> I'm the creator if you have any questions.</comment>


Ask HN: What are some side hustles for Software Developers? - <AUTHOR> I'm soon to start a family with my fiance and been thinking a lot about my income. I work in NYC where rent is high. I'm making 70k a year as a Software Developer. I'm grateful to have a job during this economic downturn.
But I wonder what are some side hustles I can do to make some money on the side? I was thinking about doing Instacart, but I have software engineer skills why not use those?
Are there any side hustles you recommend on doing? <comment><USER2> Before talking about side hustles, I think you can rephrase your question as "How can I increase my income", not "how can I make money on the side". The reason you should focus on that is that's likely the lowest hanging fruit in this situation. Focus on improving your salary, and then once you've done that, then think about side hustles if you want to. It's awesome that you have a job during this economic time, but 70k a year in NYC isn't enough to be comfortable and is likely not reflective of what you're contributing. There are lots of other posts on HN and elsewhere on improving your compensation so I would suggest looking around at those. How long have you been a developer? My guess is your market salary is at least 100% higher than what you're currently receiving, especially from looking through your post history it's clear you have initiative and drive. Like others are saying here it sounds like you're being taken advantage of--don't make the mistake of sticking around at a company where being compensated/rewarded for your hard work feels like pulling teeth--not saying that's the case but it's something to think about.

I would check out HN who is hiring and apply there. Going to your current employer and asking for a 100% raise might be something you would only consider once you have another offer on the table. Don't be bashful about going after another offer--depending on how young you are and when you take into account compound interest you can be freeing decades of your life up later in life. And keep in mind applying to jobs can be competitive in this market--but nobody ever asks about the jobs you didn't get later on.

</comment><comment><USER3> My first job out of college in NYC paid $80k, and I am not a particularly good, money hungry, or hard working developer. I was able to get that to $100k within a year (age 23) via negotiation.

You're getting taken advantage of. Even if you're 22 (and if you are, I'd delay having a family tbh), you could probably get to six figures by applying to another job.

I understand times seem tough but honestly my company and others have been hiring just as much if not more. No offense to any service workers but a software engineer in NYC having to Instacart is... not right.

</comment><comment><USER4> You could:

\- build your own side project that you really believe it will bring some income, something that actually provides value to someone

\- hunt short-term gigs, there are many marketplaces, see UpWork for example

\- YouTube/Streaming is booming at the moment and can be turned into incoming coming in (monetisation through ads, sponsors, etc)

I think it takes time to create a descent side hustle so whatever you choose, you have to stick with it for a while. Don't expect high returns from the first week.

I would suggest IndieHackers[0] as a resource for building bootstrapped businesses but may not be exactly what you are looking for.

I would also like to mention the YT channel TechLead[1] which I have been following for a while now. The guy has been putting content out there for quite some time now, until he built a paid side project and has just been using his YT platform to promote that. He's giving lots of info on that on some of his videos[3]. Whether you like the guy or not, I think he has some valuable resources and information to take.

Refs:

0\. [http://indiehackers.com/](http://indiehackers.com/)

1\. [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4xKdmAXFh4ACyhpiQ_3qBw](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4xKdmAXFh4ACyhpiQ_3qBw)

3\. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jVMy0lpAcI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jVMy0lpAcI)

</comment><comment><USER5> One assumes you already work 40 hrs/wk. People rarely hire for 2-3 hrs/wk for software devs. You have to do 10 hrs minimum in most cases.

That brings you up to 50 hrs/wk at least. Are you going to have the energy to share home and childcare work on top of that?

Honestly you can double your salary right now by leaving NYC. Your company isn't paying you NYC-adjusted wages anyway. I made (annualized) $80k as a summer intern there in college years ago. You should get more as a software dev with a degree.

Places like Nashville, Atlanta, Tampa Bay, and Research Triangle all have lower cost of living than NYC (you could pay the same rent and actually have a yard) and lots of software jobs if you don't want to go remote.

Remote jobs should become easier to find as well, in case you want to move somewhere that doesn't have a big tech presence.

<comment><USER6> > Places like Nashville, Atlanta, Tampa Bay, and Research Triangle all have > lower cost of living than NYC (you could pay the same rent and actually have > a yard) and lots of software jobs if you don't want to go remote.

There might be jobs in these areas, but they won't pay NYC- or SF-level salaries.

<comment><USER5> > _There might be jobs in these areas, but they won 't pay NYC- or SF-level > salaries._

You're absolutely right.

Those cities actually pay _better_ than NYC when you adjust for cost of living[1][2][3]. In every ranking, there are few major cities worse to be a software engineer than NYC.

And OP isn't even close to making median or average salary for NYC. S/he's close to entry-level.

The cost of living in NYC is unjustifiable, which is probably why people are leaving[4] in droves.

1\. [https://www.codementor.io/blog/best-cities-software- engineer...](https://www.codementor.io/blog/best-cities-software-engineer- earnings-271vpf599k)

2\. [https://insights.dice.com/2019/02/28/salary-compare- income-c...](https://insights.dice.com/2019/02/28/salary-compare-income-cost- living/)

3\. [https://www.economicmodeling.com/2019/04/10/buying-power- cos...](https://www.economicmodeling.com/2019/04/10/buying-power-cost-of- living/)

4\. [https://gothamist.com/news/census-report-new-york-losing- new...](https://gothamist.com/news/census-report-new-york-losing-new-yorkers)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> People are saying you are underpaid at 70k/year in NYC, but a question that needs to be asked is - what is your level of experience?

If you are mid to senior level, yes, you're grossly underpaid. If you're entry to junior level, then I'd say you're still underpaid, but not extremely so.

Unless you're working in a tech company (excluding early stage startups) or finance (banks, hedge funds), I'd say 70k for a junior engineer isn't _extremely_ underpaid.

FYI, I started my career a decade+ ago in NYC at 45k, but at a (big) company notorious for underpaying. Five years later I moved to a better company, but that 45k starting salary continued to hurt me and my new base salary as a 5yoe SWE was 75k - in finance at that. Meanwhile we have fresh grads starting at FAANG at well above six figures :)

But to directly answer your question, the "side hustle" that will most easily (relatively speaking) help you to increase your income is to become a Professional Leetcoder/Professional Whiteboard Technical Interviewer. I say that with no snark, and I too, am in a quest to become one.

</comment><comment><USER8> That might not be what you want to hear, but 70k in NYC is a bad salary..

Why wuld you want a side hustles when you can double your salary ? That may not be easy, but it's doable. Side hustles: improves; so you can get a good salary.

</comment><comment><USER9> Your side hustle should be leetcode because you are severely underpaid for NYC.

</comment><comment><USER10> I made 78k as a web developer in Connecticut in 2004. You need to find another job. 70k in NYC is too low for a software developer.

</comment><comment><USER11> You are likely dramatically underpaid.

See [http://levels.fyi/2019](http://levels.fyi/2019)

Get on LinkedIn. Update your profile and start looking for a new job. With a good profile recruiters will message you.

</comment><comment><USER12> The best side hustle right now would be to sell an online course or an ebook. This is not going to be very easy though.

You need to first build your user base. You need to have a user base to sell something to. There is a few ways to do this:

Youtube channel Twitter Github

Once you have a follower base belonging to a particular niche, its easier to sell to them than to random paid followers you can get on fb.

Plenty of programmers and designers do this. This takes time, you need to post quality content to build up a user base and then sell them something they need.

</comment><comment><USER13> Why would you start a family at age 22?

<comment><AUTHOR> just curious where does it says im 22? lol is it a profile?</comment></comment>


Jeff's Letter to the Angular Team and Community - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@jeffbcross/jeffs-letter-to-the-angular-team-and-community-5367934a16c9 <comment><USER2> That was a brutal reading. Working at Google I had a feeling there's a feeling of moral superiority among most people. We are led to think we are there because we are the smartest and because we are the nicest people (googly). But as the company grows and internal conflict and competition sparks we see people's true face. Google is just not very well equipped to deal with that, not management, not HR and not even the other employees.

They don't know what to do to deal with a bully and without recourse the bully thrives, climb the ladder and cement their position.

It's a different company than it was 7 years ago. But it's also not that different from most other companies. But the employees still believe in that moral superiority and it will be painful to get everyone aclimated with how things are now.</comment>


Safari Reader: Killing Google? Apple's Weapon of Mass Destruction.  - <AUTHOR> http://jimlynch.com/index.php/2010/06/07/safari-reader-apples-weapon-of-mass-destruction/

<comment><USER2> So did you post this to show how ridiculous it was, back when it was posted in 2010? Some may say, sure it seems ridiculous now in hindsight, but I say, from my Apple-hater perspective, that it was always ridiculous. Further recent data just proves it to be so, with Safari still sitting at around 4% market share as it has for some time (S4 + S5) [http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/06/17/report- the-most-common-w...](http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/06/17/report-the-most- common-web-browsers-and-browser-versions-today/)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a native feature in iOS5. Also not all are running the latest iOS5.

This move is a kill for the real estate of the web - the publishers. Exposing READER feature in the browser means users are going to disable all ads in iphone and ipads in iOS5.

Knowing this great feature I used yesterday in my iPhone, I now install the Reader addon for my Firefox; say Adblocker in Firefox.

The publishers run the web with the content. There was a time when content was the king. Now, Platform is the king. It's a platform war.</comment></comment>


Facebook 'unintentionally uploaded' email contacts from 1.5M users - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-unintentionally-uploaded-email-contacts-from-1-5m-users/ <comment><USER2> How do you "unintentionally" upload contacts when you have an "importing contacts" dialog?

<comment><AUTHOR> Very good question- maybe the wording should have been unintentionally stored the information, but i think Facebook is basically just trying to downplay this case.</comment></comment>


Justin.tv: unlikely to be duplicated - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2007/05/22/justintv-unlikely-to-be-duplicated/ <comment><USER2> "It will offer people a vanity URL (<http://justin.tv/name)> and..."

They really need something more generic. Justin.tv is too personal and people like owning stuff. Give them something more generic like lifecast.tv or reality.tv or something like that.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. That's a pretty bad decision. I want to see another Justin signup at <http://justin.tv/justin> or a guy named Kan at <http://justin.tv/kan>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not much more info than the TC article.</comment>


China's 'Twitter' introduces contracts to curb rumors - <AUTHOR> http://edition.cnn.com/2012/05/10/world/asia/china-weibo-contracts/index.html

<comment><USER2> That sucks!</comment>


A hospital crisis is killing rural communities. This state is 'Ground Zero' - <AUTHOR> http://www.georgiahealthnews.com/2017/09/hospital-crisis-killing-rural-communities-state-ground-zero/ <comment><USER2> A lot of practices and smaller clinics/hospitals are specifically targeted by larger chains to be acquired and to boost numbers. The whole system is fucked up.

I'm of the opinion that we should just open another branch, same as we do with the military, and say "Hey, you're going to get a good wage, but you will be deployed across the country to do tours of duty. You will be given standardized equipment and training, and you will be expected to care for your patients in whatever numbers and time they give you. In exchange, we'll cover education and housing for you".

It's disheartening to me that we also have so many people practicing medicine in other parts of the world when we have so many underserved here.</comment>


ssh whoami.filippo.io - <AUTHOR> https://blog.filippo.io/ssh-whoami-filippo-io/ <comment><USER2>
      +</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---+
        |                                                                     |
        |             _o/ Hello!                                              |
        |                                                                     |
        |                                                                     |
        |  Did you know that ssh sends all your public keys to any server     |
        |  it tries to authenticate to? You can see yours echoed below.       |
        |                                                                     |
        |  We tried to use that to find your GitHub username, but we          |
        |  couldn't :( maybe you don't even have GitHub ssh keys, do you?     |
        |                                                                     |
        |  By the way, did you know that GitHub publishes all users'          |
        |  ssh public keys and Ben (benjojo.co.uk) grabbed them all?          |
        |                                                                     |
        |  That's pretty handy at times :) But not this time :(               |
        |                                                                     |
        |                                                                     |
        |  P.S. This whole thingy is Open Source! (And written in Go!)        |
        |  https://github.com/FiloSottile/whoami.filippo.io                   |
        |                                                                     |
        |  -- @FiloSottile (https://twitter.com/FiloSottile)                  |
        |                                                                     |
        +</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---+

<comment><USER2> related, how to remove ssh keys

[https://superuser.com/questions/30087/remove-key-from- known-...](https://superuser.com/questions/30087/remove-key-from-known-hosts)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The SSH server that knows who you are</comment>