Ask HN: Which IDE you use and why? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> JetBrains IntelliJ.

Over the years I've used Xcode, VisualStudio, Borland, Eclipse, JDeveloper, Netbeans, Notepad, Atom, Sublime etc to write code

I use IntelliJ/IDEA because it's a tool that delights. Not many bits of software are such that I interrupt other colleagues to show them some neat feature or shortcut.

<comment><USER3> It's not even about the hotkeys. It is rather about the fact that you start thinking in terms of how the given code can be refactored with just a couple refactoring functions. Working in large codebases becomes extremely easy. Inline this method, extract that method, extract interface here, delete this interface and use this base class instead of that, extract a class from parameters of the method...I could go for days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Visual Studio Code. It does everything I need very well, and otherwise gets out of my way. To whatever extent an IDE can be credited for small productivity gains, I'm more productive since switching than I've ever been in 30 years.

<comment><USER5> Yes. I was sceptical at first and it took a while, but I'm now a convert, it keeps getting better and better too, quite rapidly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Android Studio. Many of the benefits of IntelliJ for Android.

I really like how easy it is to find a method or a hint of something in a huge codebase. Or refactor or rename files. The way it tells me that I copied this line here but forgot to change something. Small things like when constants are don't follow naming conventions or are put in a bad location. And the bits of advice here and there on better ways to write code. It's like an automated mentor.

</comment><comment><USER7> I use a simple, terminal-based editor I wrote myself, because it does everything I want and doesn't bother me with features I don't care about. It is not perfect but it is good enough.

I have also been using VS Code lately, which is fine, though I had to spend a lot of time learning how to configure it to stop flashing and blinking and getting in my way with all of its distracting attempts to help me.

</comment><comment><USER8> I used to use IDE's but have changed over to Sublime Text.

I really got turned off from my tool (IDE) assuming things I wanted to be done and doing things for me without my knowledge. I don't need wizards to start projects. I also wanted my editor to open when I open it and not seemingly minutes after that.

This means I don't have high-end things like documentation lookup at a keypress while editing. I'm ok with that, I can find the docs online, probably already have them open if its part of a language I'm not familiar with.

</comment><comment><USER9> I love Atom. The plugins and customizability are nice.

</comment><comment><USER10> Visual Studio Code.

If I were in the JVM world then IntelliJ IDEA.

</comment><comment><USER11> I have used vi since my university days when the CS lab would close at 10 pm but if I went to the library I could login over a VT-100 terminal and get an additional 2 hours to submit a project.

I use vim now mostly with plugins like vim-go

</comment><comment><USER12> I use Visual Studio, it has everything i need and it simply does the job

</comment><comment><USER13> Komodo Edit, Vi, Visual Studio, and Visual Studio Code, depending on the context.

And Cloud9. Very nice online editor.

Edit: I should state that grep is one of the most important components of my development cycle.

</comment><comment><USER14> I do embedded C++ work on (almost-exclusively) ARM cortex microcontrollers and have switched all of my development to Visual Studio + VisualGDB. It's super nice.

</comment><comment><USER15> Intellij IDEA.

Years ago I used Eclipse, but eventually tried Intellij and I've never looked back. It's such a great tool and I'm happy to pay for it.

</comment><comment><USER16> vim, and I still love it.

I'm considering writing my own native desktop app that has the keyboard shorcuts of vim that I use, but I'd be able to customize it more.. maybe a 3d world where my open files are like mine craft blocks.. and my build process is like a river.

Who would use it?

</comment><comment><USER17> Vim, because it does what I need.

</comment><comment><USER3> Everything jetbrains. Resharper at work, pycharm and idea at home.

<comment><USER5> I use jetbrains when I have to but there's something very odd (and IMO ugly) about the way they render.

<comment><USER18> All jvm GUI apps look ugly and "off" for some reason for me too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> At work I use Visual Studio; at home I use JetBrains Goland.

</comment><comment><USER20> Sublime Text with a few add on packages.</comment>


Y Combinator Summer 2013 Demo Day, Batch 1 - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/20/y-combinator-summer-2013-demo-day-batch-1-meet/ <comment><USER2> I remember a time when this very TechCrunch article would come out and I'd read through it with a sense of dismay at the sheer unadulterated badness of every single idea.

Things have changed.

An example: _Teleborder charges $5,000 per visa application, ... gathering documents, collecting information, and sending information to the government._

This is one of those ideas where you just stop and wonder why nobody has run with it before. These guys are going to make bank. I rode a dotcom into the ground in the early 'aughts that was tackling a similar problem with 10x the paperwork of a H1B and roughly 0% of the hair-on-fire demand that tech companies with tons of money have for help getting labor into the country.

That's the kind of company I wish I'd founded. Nice work.

<comment><USER3> I m not sure if this will work.

The cost per app goes down with each additional app. After about 10 apps the company typically has figured out and streamlined the entire process. The documentation requirements for the H1B applicant are pretty well known. (previous status, transcripts, degree certificates,...). These are not overly complicated documents (unless you are a special case).

Also 5k fee sounds kinds of high (I am assuming these are in addition to the government fees). A lawyer for h1b application should not cost more than 2 to 3k. So, why would a company pay more NOT to work directly with a lawyer?

On the other hand, if the fees include government fees then this is a very good deal.

H1b applicant feels secure in the knowledge that his application is handled by a lawyer. Its like buying an insurance, they are indirectly buying "peace of mind". If they find out that company is not directly using a lawyer, I am not sure how they will react.

Am I missing something?

<comment><USER4> You're not far off.

My girlfriend and a couple friends recently went through this year's LCA process (H1B, H1B1, etc.) and the lawyers cost exactly that: $2-3k.

The $5k price point is only going to drive away your target market. These customers are people who have already busted their ass to get a work sponsor, so they know the ins and outs of the market, including what the laywers cost and who is typically better. If they don't, then they are deferring to their employer's lawyers, who are already experts, to handle it completely.

There isn't anything new that teleborders is bringing to the market here, except a more expensive price point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Liked this comment on the SpoonRocket story:

"Reminds me of a tactic used by my father's friend, who owned a pizzeria. He noticed that about half the orders were for large pepperoni pizzas. So he had his drivers always carry an additional large pepperoni pizza in the car, and he'd call them mid-route if an additional order came in. It usually did, so thankfully very few cold pizzas died, and he sold more pizzas per hour than before. Saved on gas, drivers made more tips, and eventually he ended up getting heaters and drivers carrying as many as 10 per trip. Combine that with the deeper large pepperoni price cut he could now afford, it was quickly became the busiest joint in town. Too bad he never expanded."

Makes me imagine a person/duo in a van, back filled with a limited range of curries on the go and rice cookers, driving around a particular area getting delivery requests and payment on their phone. Drive the short distance (you're already in the van with the product), ladle out servings and walk them to the door. It'd be hard to beat that sort of delivery time and it might make for a few impulse orders.

<comment><USER6> > _Almost all programming [pizza delivery] can be viewed as an exercise in > caching._

\-- Terje Mathisen

Extra food in the car is like the L1 cache of the food world. Now that I think about, I'm pretty sure that every company in the world is just an exercise in caching.

<comment><USER7> And in the case of food processing, cache "expiration" is definitely something to take into account :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Floobits works really well from my limited experience. I've used it in Sublime while my friend was in vim and it worked flawlessly. Much better than our experience with attempting something similar with Screenhero. We tried Flooty (live terminal-sharing) as well, and it's in a mostly-working state. If you've ever tried Nitrous.io's shared tmux sessions, it works almost as well. I see Floobits becoming a tool used by many, many developers.

I like Toutpost's idea, but I'm not convinced by their approach at the moment. Though I'm actually in the process of making something pretty similar for a specific audience in Django.

If they were in my area already, I would probably try out SpoonRocket immediately. I already prepare and cook all my meals, but I'm still prone to getting some food near campus once or twice a week. $6 for a delivered "designer" meal is pretty compelling if they manage to maintain that price outside of their current area.

</comment><comment><USER9> There is no way that YC now considers 10% weekly revenue growth low. That's 142x a year. I'm pretty sure any investor would be happy with that kind of traction, especially if the company has their unit economics figured out, like Prim appears to have.

<comment><USER10> _> A good growth rate during YC is 5-7% a week. If you can hit 10% a week you're doing exceptionally well. If you can only manage 1%, it's a sign you haven't yet figured out what you're doing._

[http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Kivo sounds really fantastic. I can remember having 272 versions of the presentation back in the day I worked in the bank.

The only obstacle I see is that majority of the potential users are not allowed to install any software themselves, but given that they already signed up some big customers they definitely can cope with that.

<comment><USER12> Also starting with consultancies is smart. Once you get Deloitte and McKinsey they're going to be recommending that to clients since it's what they know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Article claims that Prim's 10% weekly growth is "low by Y-Combinator standards", but in "Startup = Growth" pg wrote that 10% weekly growth is great growth pace, and above 5% is good. Has the baseline of YC companies improved that much?

<comment><USER14> Techcrunch author may be reacting to growth rates right after launch that Demo Day pitches tout, which of course are through the roof (often over 100% week- over-week).

The 10% PG talks about is something you try to do week in and week out long after your press spike. It's insanely hard to do, but even if you come anywhere close you are doing very well.

</comment></comment><comment> k-mcgrady Prim: interesting and I'm sure useful for a lot of people. I hope they're right that they can eventually lower prices though because that seems very expensive. Also is there a trend towards or away from using laundromats? Where I'm from it's unusual not to have your own washing machine and I wouldn't move anywhere that didn't have one.

RealCrowd: Really interesting startup but with the recent housing crisis they may have trouble convincing people it's a worthwhile investment and not a total gamble. I'm really interested to see where this goes and if it ever moves to include the general public (i.e. non-accredited investors).

StatusPage.io - I'll be using this immediately. Useful product and it looks like they already have quite a few high profile companies as customers. Hard to have an opinion on the pricing as I've no idea how many users would subscribe to these notifications.

<comment><USER15> Founder of RealCrowd here - thanks for the comments. We're focused only on commercial assets now that produce stable cash flow - think of a starbucks or an office building in SoMa that has consistent monthly income from rental payments. Homes should be viewed as shelter, not as a primary vehicle to create wealth.

It will be very interesting to see where the JOBS Act goes and how we can incorporate pure crowdfunding into our platform. Bringing access to this class of investment is what we're after and we're really excited to do so!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think GoComm and Kivo have the best chance of this batch. I think GoComm especially is a good idea and in retrospect so obvious, that i wish i would've though of it. Coordinating people, even in small scale events is painful. I remember when i helped with fencing tournaments our club ran (running computer system) it was a constant trouble tracking down free pistes, referees, making sure other stuff (refreshments, garbage and similar) was ok... we solved this with having a dedicated person on the floor in the hall, keeping an eye out and keeping me in the loop, but that isn't very scalable

</comment><comment><USER17> "Today, some $29. 6 billion in smartphone cases are sold every year."

Really? No way. I'd be amazed if this was a correct figure.

</comment><comment><USER18> StatusPage.io looks like a very good and needed product but I feel like the fact they are a 100% AWS service this wouldn't be ideal for companies who also host their product in AWS. What happens when an AWS-related issue comes up? Your customers may not be able to get to your product as well as your status page.

</comment><comment><USER19> I love that every app is labeled "It's (insert other app) for (insert what is does)." Example: YAMMER FOR MOBILE WORKFORCE, Mint.com for legal spend, CLICKTALE FOR MOBILE, YELP FOR LATIN AMERICA.

UGH!!

<comment><USER20> It seems to be the best way to get new ideas across to people. How would you describe them in a clearer way that as many people would understand?

<comment><USER21> Also, Glio looks like a copycat, so it is exactly Yelp for Brazil. That is what they are building, not just a form of explain their model.

Remember those times when people discussed how YC model was "cooler" than Rocket Internet model? Those times are gone.

<comment><USER22> I don't think that is an issue. The value in Yelp is largely in the reviews, the rest of how it works has been done plenty of times for plenty of different things.

Just like a groupon or stripe, the venue reviews space really needs boots on the ground and some local knowledge to work right, so there is a big opportunity for essentially a copycat model for that market (same as has happened for a long time in china).

Bringing these tried and tested ideas to places just catching up to the rest of the world with digital connectivity is probably going to be very lucrative over the next decade for people well positioned to do so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> meh. none of these ideas other than Standard Treasury seem particularly compelling,

and there goes whats left of my karma...

</comment><comment><USER24> This is all very well, but what would Edward Sno.... Just kidding.

Good luck to everyone in all three Techcrunch pages. Entrepreneurs are heroes and I hope you all make it big.

</comment><comment><USER25> How many "X for Y" ideas can you count?

</comment><comment><USER26> all the companies are listed here: [http://ycuniverse.com/ycombinator- companies](http://ycuniverse.com/ycombinator-companies)

most of them have already been on techcrunch by the time demo day rolls around.

</comment><comment><USER27> Please see the HN poll to predict top YC summer 2013 performers. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6249141](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6249141)

</comment><comment><USER28> Looks like the screwed up tagline for SpoonRocket - "reviews for everything" looks like a copy/paste from Toutpost right above it...

<comment><USER8> Yeah there's another error in the Floobits section. The bit about earlier coverage was mistakenly copy-pasted from the section about Standard Treasury.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Congratulations to the Apptimize team! Proud to have been a part of it. :)

</comment><comment><USER30> I wonder why GraftConcepts didn't go the Kickstarter route.

</comment><comment><USER31> Is there a link to the video presentations?</comment>


Inventing Monads - <AUTHOR> https://blog.kabir.sh/posts/inventing-monads.html <comment><USER2> > I'm fifteen years old with good knowledge of mostly high school level math, > and may have missed some parts.

Kabir,

Great work on getting this done. I wonder if looking around for and mentioning the similar "You Could Have Invented Monads"[0] would be a good move

[0] [http://blog.sigfpe.com/2006/08/you-could-have-invented- monad...](http://blog.sigfpe.com/2006/08/you-could-have-invented-monads- and.html)

<comment><USER3> I know "20y of professional practice in the industry expert"s who would look at you with a blank stare for such mastery of non-trivial abstractions, and yet not get it.

Good job is what I mean

<comment><USER4> As one of these guys (not yet 20 years experience but close), I concur. I don't accept defeat though as I'm actually trying to learn FP for the third time! I bookmarked this blog post for when I get to monads again.

Actually I'm fine with "lightweight" FP like Scheme or Elixir (HOFs, recursion, immutable data, etc.) but still struggle with "real" FP like Haskell or functional Scala (algebraic data types, monads, lenses, etc.)

By the way I couldn't help to notice that the blog also features a CSS centering article. The author really is into esoteric concepts!

<comment><USER5> for a good explanation what ADTs are useful for watch Effective ML by Yaron Minsky from 18:00 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-J8YyfrSwTk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-J8YyfrSwTk)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Think of monads as a way to overload a semicolon. It might sound a little > crazy at first, but imagine being able to override the semicolon to reduce > boilerplate in specific code blocks. That's basically how monads are used in > practice.

Lol, this resonated well. It is both brilliant but also extremely confusing (talking with experience). In my previous company, when we collaborated while researching Monads, we ended up in this conclusion as well. Some even argued that Monads actually override the indentation before an expression to turn it into a statement which doesn't help at all either.

</comment><comment><USER7> That's a pretty good explanation, thanks. Along with the monads in Clojure [0] article I read recently, I feel I'm getting a decent grasp on monads finally.

Now they're beginning to click, I don't feel they're too complicated. Simply a way to insert a converter function between each stage in a good-old-fashioned pipeline of function applications? The converter takes the output of each function, transforms it so that it can be piped into the next function, then takes _that_ output and combines it with the previous one, etc. Please, someone enlighten me if I've got the wrong end of the stick.

[0] [https://github.com/khinsen/monads-in- clojure/blob/master/PAR...](https://github.com/khinsen/monads-in- clojure/blob/master/PART1.md)

<comment><USER8> You have it right.

It is literally a container that allows you to pipeline functions on its contents. The only technical catch is that you aren't allowed to change the type of the contents in the function. That means if you start with something of type A in the container, you have to get a container containing something of type A at each stage of the pipeline.

There are probably 3 popular uses for monads. First to defer error handling. You allow type A to include some kind of error state. The you run your entire pipeline of functions, but at every stage if the container contains an error, you just return a container with the same error as output. That way, none of your pipeline stages need to check for valid input -- they just assume there were no errors before their stage.

The second main case is to defer processing until a later time. You have a pipeline of functions and a container. As long as you don't look at the result of running that pipeline, even if the container doesn't contain anything yet you can pretend that it represents your result. You can pass that along in your program, gradually appending more functions on your pipeline as you go. When you finally put something in the container, you can see what the result is. This is useful when you don't know what your result is right now, but you know what processing you want to do when you get the input (for example, if you are going to query some external system and when it returns you want to do some processing. You can go ahead and pretend to process that result and when the data finally arrives, then you can actually get the result of the computation).

The third main case is when you have a big list and you want to narrow it. For instance, you might have a list of food. You want to narrow that to a list of fruit. Then you want to narrow that to a list of red fruit. Then you want to narrow that to a list of red fruits that are berries. Instead of writing a function to do your whole query, you can separate it: A query for fruit. A query for red. A query for berries. This can make your code a lot easier to read.

There are other things you can do with monads, but that's the basics IMHO. They really are simple, but suprisingly enlightening. You might think, "This constraint that I return the same type each time is kind of annoying", but if you spend a fair amount of time with monads you will see that this allows you to make pretty amazing assumptions in your code -- which, in turn, let you do very powerful things.

<comment><USER9> " The only technical catch is that you aren't allowed to change the type of the contents in the function. That means if you start with something of type A in the container, you have to get a container containing something of type A at each stage of the pipeline."

I don't think this is correct. What doesn't change is the overall type constructor (e.g. if you start with a list, you'll still end up with a list... If you start with an IO action, you'll still have an IO action). But the type that is wrapped by the container can and usually does change. e.g. if you "map" over a list of A's, you'll get a list of whatever type your map function returns - still a list, but a list of B's, not a list of A's. fmap :: (a->b) -> [a] -> [b].

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you can implement flat_map [0] for something, it's (probably) a monad. You might as well call monads FlatMappables.

That's the simplest, most understandable and most accurate explanation for an initial intuition I've come up with so far.

[0] [https://apidock.com/ruby/Enumerable/flat_map](https://apidock.com/ruby/Enumerable/flat_map)

<comment><USER11> It needs to be associative. More concretely, if you want to have something like "do notation" that makes sense, so that you can write code like:

        x <- f(a)
        y <- g(b)
        z <- h(c)

for composition, then it needs to be the case that x.flatMap(a => f(a)).flatMap(b => g(b)) is equivalent to x.flatMap(a => f(a).flatMap(b => g(b))). Unfortunately people sometimes implement a flatMap where these are almost, but not quite, equivalent, which leads to very confusing behaviour and subtle bugs.

You also need to be able to "point" a pure value and have the equivalences you'd expect - this often ends up being important as e.g. the base case of a recursive function.

<comment><USER10> Sure! But note I said "initial intuition". return/pure and monad laws can be explained later, once one understands that there's really nothing magical about monads.

<comment><USER11> Of course there's nothing magic. But I think it's important to grasp the definition as a whole rather than thinking monads are "just" some subset or superset - the full definition of a monad is quite short and every part of it is vital, even if it doesn't seem so to start with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Just want to say, this guide has one massive advantage that's usually missing: multiple monads.

Far too many tutorials I've seen in the past will pick only one to use as an example, then act as though that specific monad's functionality applies to monads in general, which just confuses the issue.

</comment><comment><USER13> Monads are not invented, they are discovered multiple times. You invent toilets and gadgets, but every time you come across a mathematical object, if it really is that object (with proofs), then it must be the same one (a.k.a. diagram commutes).

</comment><comment><USER14> Wow, I haven't seen a monad tutorial in over a decade. Very nostalgic post.

</comment><comment><USER15> Good attempt, it's good thing to popularize powerfull concepts in programming, which are not as hard as most programmers think they are. However I have one big problem with this article. Code snippets are so horrible. Seems so unpractical. Perhaps because I never used functional features of Javascript?

<comment><USER16> Hey! I attempted to make the code snippets use practical concepts, but they aren't very practical for use in actual JavaScript code — the reason being that JavaScript is not a functional language and doesn't have syntactic sugar for monads.

However, I chose JavaScript because I believe it's more familiar and widespread, and it can be easier to explain a foreign concept when it's done in a language that more people feel comfortable with.

<comment><USER17> Interestingly for someone like me who has had the luxury of never having to read or write a line of JavaScript, it was all alien gobbledygook. Whatever that code was supposed to be doing was not clear to this C++ programmer.

<comment><USER16> Sorry about that haha, the style of programming in this guide is _very_ different from C++, and it relies heavily on currying and lambda functions using next-generation JavaScript syntax. Nonetheless, I think it can offer a new perspective because JS is more comfortable than Haskell for most developers.

<comment><USER17> Oh I'm fine with all those concepts. C++ has anonymous functions, and I'm a Haskell programmer too. But whatever syntax JavaScript uses is not standard across other imperative languages.

<comment><USER16> My bad then, that's fair. JS has been deviating from C-style syntax and it really shows in this article haha</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Zuli Smartplug - <AUTHOR> https://zuli.io/

<comment><USER2> A dimmer with motion sensor and a WiFi interface. Correct?

<comment><USER3> No - based on the information on the website, and some of their "common support questions", the plug works over Bluetooth Smart. According to one of their support docs, "Zuli Presence will not work if you don't have your phone with you." \- so instead of motion detection, it looks like it detects you based on the range of your paired phone, and their "Zuli Presence" feature requires "a minimum of three Zuli smartplugs"

[http://support.zuli.io/hc/en- us/articles/204311329-Technical...](http://support.zuli.io/hc/en- us/articles/204311329-Technical-Specifications)</comment></comment>


Proper Breathing Brings Better Health - <AUTHOR> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/proper-breathing-brings-better-health/ <comment><USER2> I had a nasal problem that I didn't know about until I tried breath right strips. Wearing those things was life changing for me. I felt like a different person and honestly can't believe I spent my entire life not realizing I had a problem.

Eventually got it fixed permanently, but yea...breathing is huge.

EDIT: The problem I had was called Nasal Valve Collapse. It's something that happens in much older people, but essentially if I inhaled hard through my nose my nostrils collapsed so I'd have to breath through my mouth. It made aerobic exercise very difficult, taking deep breaths in general too.

I discovered how big of a deal it was when I tried on of those 9 Round gyms in my early 30s. The 1st round is jump rope and it tore my throat up. I was so exhausted after 3 minutes of jump rope that the rest of the workout was basically awful. I came back the next week (my throat was really sore for a week) with a Breathe Right strip on to see if it helped. I did the whole workout, jump rope included, like it was nothing.

After I saw the difference, I tried sleeping in them and woke up more alert than I had in recent memory. Great night sleep. Then eventually, I tried just wearing one all day when I was working from home and it was significant by the end of the day.

There was a point where I just realized that I felt so much better wearing them that I was literally wearing them all the time, including in the office.

Eventually I decided to visit an E.N.T. who diagnosed me and gave me a couple of surgical options...which were both kinda scary and didn't have great success rate. I visited another to get a 2nd opinion and he was confident that it could be fixed with a slightly modified septoplasty.

I ended up doing the surgery and I'll go ahead and tell you, the recovery is awful...but it worked. I still see a marginal benefit from using a Breathe Right but I probably have 70% of the improvement all the time from where I was before.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for posting this. I've experienced something similar. My nasal passages have almost always been swollen since I was 11-12. Most ENTs I'd seen over the last 15-20 years have completely failed to provide me with relief. Earlier in 2018 I visited an ENT who noted that my turbinates were "absolutely massive" and the rest of the nasal passage was swollen.

Sometimes the swelling would affect the rest of my airway and I'd feel like I couldn't take even a moderately deep breath. I'd be rushed to the ER but the doctors couldn't find anything other than an elevated heart rate (and some immediately went to their go-to diagnosis of it being stress or a panic attack). After going through that about 10 times, I got a good doctor who told me: "oh dear, you're actually choking." But then, things like hereditary angioedema were ruled out, and the cause remained elusive. I later discovered I could control my symptoms with diet.

I'm now looking into having somnoplasty to reduce the size of my turbinates, but it's unclear whether doing so will simply shift the problem to another narrow point of my swollen nasal passage.

I appear to have lost some kind of cosmic lottery because I also have severe digestive issues and must follow a very strict diet (which also reduces the airway swelling). As you touched upon, it is very hard to accept that you spent most of your life not being able to be yourself. I know I spent most of mine in a subdued fight or flight mode due to the chronic strain on my basic bodily functions. It's been a cruel existence thus far and I can't wait for the day I can rid myself of this torture definitively (my plan for fixing my problems is getting closer to fruition and I've had some success with some of the measures I've tried).

<comment><USER4> I'm curious how often these kinds of symptoms are caused by an undiagnosed chronic viral infection.

<comment><USER5> I'm pretty sure i've had a chronic sinus infection for a few years now. When I was a kid I was told I had narrow sinuses...I used to get ear infections pretty much any time i got sick. I find they don't drain properly. It always feels like there's liquid on one side. I can tell days it's worse, the area below my ear and jaw are warm to the touch and hurt to press.

It comes and goes. The breathe right strips mentioned by another commenter helps. I find it feels more clear the next day after using them.

But i've found the biggest thing that helps is paying attention to.my stress and the way I hold the muscles in my face. I find making a concious effort to takes some time to do some deep breathing and focus on relaxing the muscles around my eyes and my jaw really helps. A few days of keeping up with that and I findy breathing and pain and such go away.

I also find it to.be a good way to gauge my stress levels. When the sinus infection cones back and stays for a bit. I know i've been slacking with being mindful and letting stress get on top of me.

<comment><USER4> Sleep makes a huge difference. Insufficient sleep compromises the immune system. Sleep deprivation also causes increased anxiety.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Standing up straight isn't as easy as it sounds. For a lot of desk workers you're going to have to fix your tight hamstrings, abnormal pelvic tilt, and weak abdominal muscles before it will be possible to stand up straight.

<comment><USER7> Sort of anecdotal, but as soon as I started deadlifting I noticed an immediate improvement in standing posture.

<comment><USER8> If you have enough flexibility to be _able_ to do deadlifts or squats properly, then sure, it helps further.

For my part it took months and hurting my back (thankfully not seriously) before I realized my entire posterior chain was basically too tight for me to be able to keep my back firm enough to do especially squats, but deadlifts too to a certain extent, safely at all but the very lightest weights.

Deadlifts and squats with low weight are good ways of seeing if you have sufficient flexibility, though. If you can't do them with good form even at low weights, then it's definitively a sign you need to do more stretches.

<comment><USER9> Flexibility really is a thing; I never knew ankle mobility was my main issue until a personal trainer pointed it out and made me do some exercises to help out with that. Knowing it now and knowing what should be possible, I almost feel like reduced ankle mobility is a disability. It can be improved with exercises and training, but it's something that needs focus.

<comment><USER10> How did you improve it? My right ankle has been less mobile ever since a sprain nine years ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I feel like the Wim Hof method ought to be mentioned here. It is imo the fastest and most direct route to understanding what this article is talking about.

<comment><USER12> I tried Pranayama for some time, but found it to be very complicated to follow for 20 minutes at a stretch. In contrast, the Wim Hof method was very easy to follow. The feeling of increased energy, and the absence of nasal congestion for a certain period afterwards, was instant. Wim Hof also claims long-term benefits.

The only drawback I felt was a kind of nervous energy which made it slightly harder to focus on a long piece of text etc., similar to having too much coffee in one go.

<comment><USER13> > The only drawback I felt was a kind of nervous energy which made it slightly > harder to focus on a long piece of text etc., similar to having too much > coffee in one go.

Circulate it through the Microcosmic Orbit to balance it. You're driving too much energy up to your head. You need to bring it back down.

<comment><USER14> > Circulate it through the Microcosmic Orbit to balance it

I beg your pardon?

<comment><USER13> A lot of the more intense breathing practices drive energy upwards into the head (whatever you want to call "energy" the feeling can be one of congestion/headaches/stimulation, etc). It's important to draw it back down to the belly or Earth to reduce this.

Put the tongue on the roof of the mouth and move your awareness from your head down through your tongue and on down the front centre line about an inch inside the body. Someone jacked up on some of these breathing practices might also have over-stimulated their adrenals, so it's also important to concentrate on relaxing. Once you can go right down the front line, loop back under the trunk of your body and go up the spine. Just keep moving your awareness around this loop while relaxing, making sure to finish at the belly.

Failing that, try walking barefoot while allowing yourself to relax more and more. It should have a similar effect.

<comment><USER15> I've been doing taiji for a couple of years -- interestingly, they also talk about a cycle of qi that passes down the front of the body, around the perineum, up the back, and over the head down through the tongue on the roof of the mouth. This is supposed to be going on during standing meditation. I haven't experienced it yet, but it's early days for me.

<comment><USER13> Yeah it's the same thing. Tai Chi and the Microcosmic Orbit are both Taoist practices. In fact they go together like a hand and a glove - you only see the glove and that's all a lot of Westerners learn, but it's all about the hand.

You might be interested in "Awaken Healing Energy Through the Tao" by Mantak Chia [1] (there's also "Healing Light of the Tao" but it goes on a bit and TBH it isn't very easy to learn from a book).

Tai Chi - like yoga asanas actually - can be done as purely physical movements, or you can be more mindful and trace your awareness through your body along these pathways to tap into the energetic/qi level. It goes for any exercise really - I do it in the gym on the cross-trainers. I just relax more and more and feel my hip bones pumping tingles up from my feet to my head and back down. I get off feeling very different compared to just doing it as a purely physical exercise.

It'd probably only take you a couple of days practice to feel something moving in the Microcosmic Orbit - definitely not years of practice.

[1] [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Awaken-Healing-Through-Tao- Circulat...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Awaken-Healing-Through-Tao-Circulating- ebook/dp/B01NGTUSV4)

<comment><USER15> Thanks for that! I thought you were coming at this from an Indian/Yogic tradition, and I guess the confluence is less surprising if it all comes from Daoism.

My teacher is very much about awareness and the way it moves through the body; the interplay of will, qi, and strength. I'm slow mostly because I started out with some pretty gruesome hip immobility issues, and have treated taiji like physical therapy for the past two years. I'm only just coming out of the gross mechanical problems now, and starting to become more aware of the subtler issues at play.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> A helper for rhythmic breathing written in CSS. Following this a few minutes is very calming.

[https://www.vandenoever.info/breathe.html](https://www.vandenoever.info/breathe.html)

</comment><comment><USER17> One of the great things of long distance running is the very, very deep breathe I get into after approx. half an hour. This feels like a great oxygen shower. This energizes my whole body and brain for the rest of the day.

</comment><comment><USER18> I've been experimenting with mouth taping recently. When I'm able to use it effectively it does result in a much more restful sleep and my blood pressure seems to be lower the next day. I believe that the lowered blood pressure is due to the enhanced nitric oxide absorbed (it's produced in the sinuses). Unfortunately I'm frequently congested so it's difficult to do this without the use of a decongestant.

<comment><USER19> Do you eat dairy, soy, and/or bananas? They're all very high mucous producing foods and can impact breathing significantly.

<comment><USER20> Dairy products do not cause an increase in mucus production but can cause a thickening of phlegm [0]

[0]: [https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/common- cold/e...](https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/common-cold/expert- answers/phlegm/faq-20058015)

(there are numerous studies supporting the lack of an increase in mucus due to dairy which can be found by searching "milk mucus increase")

<comment><USER19> This statement is a bit confusing; "Phlegm is a slightly different substance. It's a form of mucus produced by the lower airways — not by the nose and sinuses — in response to inflammation. You may not notice phlegm unless you cough it up as a symptom of bronchitis or pneumonia;" searched "mucus vs. phlegm" on Google.

Therefore isn't a thickening of phlegm (a form of mucus) an increase in quantity, therefore we can say it increases?

The doctor who wrote the response in your link is saying "Phlegm is the thick, sticky mucus that drips down the back of your throat when you have a cold. Although drinking milk may make phlegm thicker and more irritating to your throat than it would normally be, milk doesn't cause your body to make more phlegm. In fact, frozen dairy products can soothe a sore throat and provide calories when you otherwise may not eat."

However as we just read: "Phlegm ... is a form of mucus produced by the lower airways — not by the nose and sinuses" \- so it can't be a "Phlegm is the thick, sticky mucus that drips down the back of your throat when you have a cold."

So is the doctor wrong? Is Google's top result wrong with its "mucus vs. phlegm" answer?

Also that link you provided links to no scientific research. The quick search I did on other scientific research, the methods don't seem too sound for controls - likewise if mucus production is caused by inflammation - if that person is only removing say dairy from their diet, however their body already has significant or "maximum" inflammation (leading to them producing their maximum amount of mucus they otherwise would) then they're not going to have an increase simply by adding another inflammatory factor, unless they reduce inflammation "completely" first.

<comment><USER20> After looking into it a little more, I'm inclined to agree with you just because I couldn't get any definitive definition on the distinction between phlegm and mucus.

> Therefore isn't a thickening of phlegm (a form of mucus) an increase in > quantity, therefore we can say it increases?

I don't necessarily agree with this. You can change the viscosity of water by adding gelatin, but you didn't add more water to make it thicker.

But I am most certainly not a doctor and I realize I have no idea what exactly phlegm is!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Saltwater Washes (Nasal Saline) for Sinusitis helps a lot to clear any obstruction in the nasal cavity, it helped me breathe better.

</comment><comment><USER22> For some reason when the chiropractor does some work on my back and neck, I feel a release of musuc at the top of my nose and it becomes easier to breathe through it.

Anyone knows why that is?

<comment><USER23> Placebo. Chiropractic is not real.

<comment><USER22> Maybe the chiropractor can't help my case. However, I do feel this release in the nose. I have no idea why that is. The placebo in my case might be the dissipating headache after the "adjustment", but the nose mucus release is certainly not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Wildest thing I read lately in Michael Pollen's How to Change Your Mind was that breathing in a certain way can induce a trip similar to consuming lsd.

<comment><USER25> Curious--is this hyperventilation, a la Wim Hof?

<comment><USER26> I read a bit about holotropic breath work, and it seems to go on for 20 minutes or more, while Wim Hof sticks with 30-40 from what I have done with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The article or the whole technique that sounds a bit para-scientific about normalizing the heart beat is dead wrong. The vagus nerve actually increases what is called heart rate variability which is a very good thing and even a longevity/cardiac health marker. The total opposite of making all heart beats equally distant.

</comment><comment><USER28> This is nice to know, I do use rhythmic breathing a lot when I try to meditate and you can inmediately feel the results, but I didn't know at nostril breathing, I noticed a lot through my life that I've always had difficulty breathing through either nostrils (it kinda changes), It hasn't give me as much trouble as other people in the comments, but I've grown paranoid of it lately and I can't do this technique at all pleasantly, should I have it checked?

<comment><USER29> I can of course not assess your breathing difficulties at all but maybe it's just the non-pathological [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasal_cycle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasal_cycle) ? Although the Wikipedia article says that usually one should not notice the effects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> From a book I read years ago:

"a 1987 survey of cardiac arrests at the Menninger Clinic (quoted with great regularity in Rodale Press's various publications) reported that all heart attack victims represented in that survey sample were high chest breathers"

As opposed to belly/abodminal breathers. I can't find the actual survey though.

<comment><USER30> But why not mention the book's title. Oh look it's 'Path Notes of an American Ninja Master' \- [https://books.google.be/books?id=sTTzcNwWqPUC&lpg=PA62&ots=I...](https://books.google.be/books?id=sTTzcNwWqPUC&lpg=PA62&ots=ISv6rlas6N&dq=a%201987%20survey%20of%20cardiac%20arrests%20at%20the%20Menninger%20Clinic%20\(quoted%20with%20great%20regularity%20in%20Rodale%20Press's%20various%20publications\)%20reported%20that%20all%20heart%20attack%20victims%20represented%20in%20that%20survey%20sample%20were%20high%20chest%20breathers%22&pg=PA62#v=onepage&q=a%201987%20survey%20of%20cardiac%20arrests%20at%20the%20Menninger%20Clinic%20\(quoted%20with%20great%20regularity%20in%20Rodale%20Press's%20various%20publications\)%20reported%20that%20all%20heart%20attack%20victims%20represented%20in%20that%20survey%20sample%20were%20high%20chest%20breathers%22&f=false)

Plenty more great quotes to be had in that book, for sure...

<comment><USER13> Like the part where he recounts his Kundalini awakening experience? Yeah, that blew me away. Even more when I realised it was real... Oh, and look, he triggered it - like many yogis - with breathing techniques...

<comment><USER30> It IS amazing what one can do to one's brain just by breathing! The laws of physics remain unchallenged by this, however.

<comment><USER13> > The laws of physics remain unchallenged by this, however.

Of course. Who's claiming otherwise?

<comment><USER30> Sorry, I'm out of time and can't engage with this further.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Playing the didjeridu, particularly with circular breathing, is great fun for learning some good breath control. I'm sure other wind instruments may have similar benefits (caveat: IANAM - I am not a musician).

</comment><comment><USER32> Does anyone have experience with Sudarshan Kriya from Art of living? Is it any good?

<comment><USER33> I have never heard of art of living in India.

But sadhguru and ram dev baba were famous in India for yoga and meditation.

Sadhguru speaks in English, if it helps. By the way sadhguru speeches are just awesome.

[https://isha.sadhguru.org/in/en](https://isha.sadhguru.org/in/en)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> i read about an awesome breathing exercise here in hn some time ago [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18527251](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18527251)

</comment><comment><USER33> I'm in no way affiliated.

Sadhguru and ram dev baba were famous in India for yoga and meditation.

Sadhguru speaks in English, if it helps. By the way sadhguru speeches are just awesome.

[https://isha.sadhguru.org/in/en](https://isha.sadhguru.org/in/en)

<comment><USER35> Please, no. Jaggi Vasudev and Ramkishen Yadav are both quacks if not charlatans.

> By the way sadhguru speeches are just awesome.

I would have expected to find this opinion on Quora, not HN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> But breathing helps your body burn. Doesn't deep breathing cause you to turn to cinder faster?

<comment><USER37> Ahh, ashen one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> From my personal experience I can confirm that breathing right makes a big difference but the article fails to mention one very effective approach in many cases to improve breathing, septoplasty. Issues you can have due to breathing defficiently (in my case, using the nose): \- Dehydration \- Headaches \- Extra energy spent / having to put effort in the task \- Need to empty / clear your mouth of food, etc so you can breath with your mouth

<comment><USER39> I got a septoplasty recently (less than a month ago, still recovering from surgery) and I can 100% see the difference in my sleep quality.

My non-24 schedule is much closer to normal now. I no longer wake up with a completely dry tongue / nasty taste in my mouth.

Additionally my surgeon found and got rid of polyps in my nose which were the cause of my anosmia. I can finally sense smells again.

If you're interested in the surgery, contact an ENT for a diagnosis and a pneumologist for a sleep study.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> So, I resort to the alternate nostrils technique when I'm having a panic attack, but I didn't know it was an actual thing until I read this article. Interesting that I'd pick it up on my own.</comment>


Books for founders at each stage of a startup - <AUTHOR> https://startupcountryblog.wordpress.com/2016/11/08/books-for-founders-at-each-stage-of-a-startup/ <comment><USER2> _Crossing the Chasm_ , Geoffrey Moore, might have been on that list. It's more marketing than startup focused.

<comment><USER3> Agreed! Crossing the Chasm provides great clarity in introducing the reader to a very specific situation. For small start-up technology firms eyeing their first steps to full scale commercialization advises in this book are ideal.

<comment><USER4> Ordered just now ! After reading this post. Thanks</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is your side project? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> [https://cineargus.com/](https://cineargus.com/)

Follow directors, script writers and DOPs on movies and get alerted when new movies they work on come out.

I wrote it mainly for myself. When I sit down to watch a movie I decide on what I want to watch based more and more on who made it rather than what it's about. E.g. Taylor Sheridan wrote "Sicario". Based on how much I enjoyed that movie, I knew I would likely want to watch "Hell or High Water".

Still a bit incomplete, I haven't written the "how it works" section yet. But you can search for movies and find people that worked on them, follow them and get alerts.

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://github.com/spro/practical-pytorch](https://github.com/spro/practical- pytorch)

A tutorial series to help people learn how to use machine learning (especially RNNs) for NLP tasks.

</comment><comment><USER4> SimpleRM, a sort of a personal CRM for friendships/colleagues/etc.

I'm re-doing the frontend right now as the currently available version was from when I started learning React... have come a long way since.

[http://simplerm.co/](http://simplerm.co/)

(it is available in https but my certs expired and I forgot to do them over the weekend :grimacing:)

</comment><comment><USER5> A tiny GUI automation scripting language (five commands) built on top of Python 3 and Pyautogui that will enable me to automate more than 50% of my current data entry job. :D

</comment><comment><USER6> My last side project was this free Tumblr Theme called Dark Side inspired by the Star Wars franchise. Got about 750 active installs in the first month, pretty happy about it: [https://www.tumblr.com/theme/40329](https://www.tumblr.com/theme/40329)

I also released on GitHub in case people want to fork and customise it: [https://github.com/edmundojr/tumblr- darkside](https://github.com/edmundojr/tumblr-darkside)

</comment><comment><USER7> Currently most active is Lifoo ([https://github.com/codr4life/lifoo](https://github.com/codr4life/lifoo)), a Lisp/Forth-inspired language that's embedded in, and compiles to Common Lisp. Good luck trying to generate funny money from of that idea :) Still, I wouldn't change the experience for anything; it might be imperfect, but this one is mine; no more squeezing ideas into what someone else once thought was possible.

</comment><comment><USER8> [https://logmyhours.com](https://logmyhours.com) Time tracking, invoicing, project & employee management. Launched it in Aug 2015, and launched the app last Aug. Hoping to go full time in the next 12 months if things work out.

<comment><USER9> How's your traction so far?

<comment><USER8> Bit slow at first, but doing pretty good now. Been maintaining around 10% growth MoM since Jan 2015. This month has been awesome though, almost doubled last month's revenue!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> [https://play.freeciv.org](https://play.freeciv.org)

</comment><comment><USER11> Currently building a GUI for the Composer package manager (PHP) - [https://getcomposercat.com](https://getcomposercat.com) It's not released yet but starting to get there.

</comment><comment><USER12> [https://dilectee.com](https://dilectee.com)

Site to help people with their decisions.

I created it as a way to learn web development (React, Django), since I'm coming from system programming.

</comment><comment><USER13> SendToMyCloud -- A public inbox for your Dropbox or Google Drive.

Launched here on HN a little more than 2 years ago.

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

(among others mentioned in my HN profile)

</comment><comment><USER14> [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=be.nebuleux.jt...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=be.nebuleux.jtrains.android)

jTrains is an offline tool to plan railways trip in Japan.

I developed it for my own needs but figured people might like it so I ended up publishing it on the Google Play Store.

It is a bit rough on the edges but I very much welcome any suggestions for improvement.

</comment><comment><USER15> Currently improving my postcard sending service - [https://postbirdy.com](https://postbirdy.com) . Which is not really something special, just a fairly basic, yet functional service with my attempt to try making it quite fast and not hated by google PageSpeed Insights.

Also working on a simple service of screenshotting a website from multiple browsers (well, technically just emulating size and user agent with possibly PhantomJS). Not yet live, maybe in a week or two. Taking my time!

</comment><comment><USER16> Plusaroo ([http://plusaroo.com/](http://plusaroo.com/)): Easily plus songs on Spotify with a Mac menu bar button and keyboard shortcut.

Rekindlr ([https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/rekindlr/id1072608462?mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/rekindlr/id1072608462?mt=8)): Power user app for Tinder users. Sort your matches by distance, last active and age.

</comment><comment><USER17> [https://www.versionsql.com](https://www.versionsql.com)

Version control add-in for SQL Server Management Studio.

</comment><comment><USER18> SOFTWARE:

TXR: data munging and system scripting language, in active development since mid 2009. Contains innovative Lisp dialect and original document pattern matching language.

[http://nongnu.org/txr](http://nongnu.org/txr)

NON-SOFTWARE:

Currently subtitling an epic 1980's Japanese rock concert video of the group Show-Ya. Captioning of the original language done. English translation done for the first song.

</comment><comment><USER19> [https://sweatshops.github.io/Komuter_Page/](https://sweatshops.github.io/Komuter_Page/)

An iOS app to show schedule of upcoming train in my country, I built it because I got frustrated waiting train as the train intervals is 30-45 minutes in my country, many time spent wasting for waiting train lol.

</comment><comment><USER20> [https://www.skipthestamps.com/](https://www.skipthestamps.com/)

A simple tool to send people postcards (either anonymously or signed). Choose from 5 of my preset photos or upload your own.

Mainly wrote it because I always had issues abandoning side projects before I ever released it to the world.

I also wanted to get more comfortable with React.

</comment><comment><USER21> When planning a yearly roadtrip with with our buddies in a mix of email, WhatsApp and Doodle we figured this should be solved more easily: JayPads ([https://jaypad.de/](https://jaypad.de/)), a tiny mix of Slack and Doodle/Post-Its, requiring no logins or downloads, is the first step.

</comment><comment><USER22> [https://matchr.in](https://matchr.in)

An app which connects you with an anonymous person who might share the same interests as you. Once you're comfortable, you can unlock each other's profiles. Done with most of the programming.

</comment><comment><USER23> [https://booknshelf.com](https://booknshelf.com)

A website to help people discover great books and bookshelves on different topics. It's also a place to keep track of your books, creating shelves and staying organized with your readings!

</comment><comment><USER24> [http://goodfood.tips](http://goodfood.tips)

A website where I create city food guides. Currently with a nice collection of food articles about that city. Thinking about adding a checklist thingy for dishes to eat when you are for example in Bangkok.

<comment><USER25> Heads up, getting a SSL cert error ERR_CERT_COMMON_NAME_INVALID

<comment><USER24> Thanks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> [http://new-app-site.herokuapp.com/](http://new-app-site.herokuapp.com/)

It's a way for app developers (and iMessage app developers) to promote their apps without making a whole website themselves.

</comment><comment><USER27> Building mobile apps for [http://baghchal.net](http://baghchal.net) (it's a board game), but struggling to find out proper business model for it. If anyone gets any ideas on a quick look I'd appreciate a comment.

</comment><comment><USER28> [http://tagly.azurewebsites.net](http://tagly.azurewebsites.net) it's like HN with tags, but does a lot more. Currently use it as a bookmark webapp as I continue to expand it's functionality

</comment><comment><USER29> [https://bestfoodnearme.com](https://bestfoodnearme.com) food dishes by location. I wanted a way to find great food without having to read reviews. I am launching a redesign in 2 months

</comment><comment><USER9> A cyberpunk newsletter: [https://www.exolymph.news/](https://www.exolymph.news/)

Sadly I had to reduce frequency from 3x per week to once a week, but I'm going to keep on keepin' on.

</comment><comment><USER30> [https://www.FindLectures.com](https://www.FindLectures.com) \- collection of academic & conference talks, historical speeches, documentaries that I'm curating.

</comment><comment><USER31> EngageKit, visioned to be a customer engagement platform.

Currently only the knowledge base feature is built in. The other features are still wip.

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

</comment><comment><USER32> One project is Padmapper for affordable housing since the affordable housing sites built by government contractors are not great.

[https://github.com/codeforsanjose/findahome](https://github.com/codeforsanjose/findahome)

Another project is the programmatic serving of California drought data via a JSON api.

[https://github.com/codeforsanjose/calidrought](https://github.com/codeforsanjose/calidrought)

I also am thinking of a tiny little golang website that helps people organize board game parties - basically a wrapper around meetup.com.

As far as non-tech projects, I want to make a bar cart I own prettier by lining the inside of its top tray with an LED strip.

</comment><comment><USER33> [http://fooltools.net/](http://fooltools.net/) Simple online tool site, created as excersize, from tasks I needed

</comment><comment><USER34> [https://www.scyware.com](https://www.scyware.com)

Automated trading bots and indicators for the cTrader platform. Profitable since 2013

</comment><comment><USER35> Right now i am working on [https://ForwardMX.io](https://ForwardMX.io)

</comment><comment><USER36> [http://www.spotlive.io](http://www.spotlive.io) A market place for bands to get gigs in Australia

</comment><comment><USER37> [https://senzu.io](https://senzu.io) \- Learn how to manage your personal finances

<comment><USER38> [https://senzu.io/budgeting?salary=3&state=AA](https://senzu.io/budgeting?salary=3&state=AA)

Check this out</comment></comment>


Twitter effectively killing JSONP too - <AUTHOR> http://blog.dansingerman.com/post/31052497029/twitter-effectively-killing-jsonp-too

<comment><USER2> This doesn't mean killing JSONP dead, it just means that you'll need a server- side script to generate oauth-authenticated URLs first.

This is what I do in one application right now, and it works really well, meaning that for the calls in question, the rate limit applies to the user's IP and not our server's.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've thought about that sort of approach. Can you describe in a bit more detail how you do that, especially how you ensure it is secure?

<comment><USER3> It's not a strict answer, and I'm not the one being asked, but about doing "that" while having at least JSON alone, you can proxy the queries and wrap answers by yourself. E.g. in nginx you can use HttpEchoModule:

<http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpEchoModule>

[http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2011/07/nginx-json- hacks...](http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2011/07/nginx-json-hacks.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The lesson is not "do not build on someone else's platform", but "be careful whose platform you build on". There have been signs for quite some time now that twitter was not particularly supportive of things built on them.

<comment><USER5> Is there any way to know if one party is more reliable than other? Four years back, was there any way to know that Twitter would limit their APIs and change their terms and conditions the way they have done? If not, isn't the lesson here "do not build on someone else's platform"?

<comment><USER6> Either that, or "sell your company within four years".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> They "sunsetted" @Anywhere so they can focus on embedded tweets, a more focused attempt to provide badges/widgets for browsers. So really I doubt they want browser apps calling their API directly, but rather to use their embed timelines.

I realise that's a tiny subset of what's possible with the JSONP API, but that's my guess about why they won't support JSONP.

And, if they do shut it down, it sucks. I've run <http://listoftweets.com> for several years and made various other Twitter mashups using their JSONP API.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm wondering (a) if people are going to switch to screen scraping as a way to avoid the new API restrictions, and (b) how much Twitter could do to thwart such attempts.

My (uneducated) guess is that it might play out like other DRM wars. Twitter could come up with new ways to scramble their HTML/CSS/JS to make it harder to automatically scrape... until scrapers evolved to deciper the new patterns, ad infinitum.

<comment><USER9> If they're willing to flip off search engines and do all page rendering in JS, there's no limit to what they could do to make a scraper's life hell.

It'd be relatively simple to generate non-sensible fonts (where code points don't map as expected) where the browser still renders legible tweets but scrapers get unintelligible gibberish. The special font would essentially be a one-time pad, generate new font mappings every few requests and your HTML is essentially uncrackable to scrapers that don't have the horsepower to OCR every tweet (at which point you may as well pay for Gnip anyway).

<comment><USER10> True, but it would be much simpler to hack the Twitter native applications to do the dirty work for you, depending on your purposes.

That, or just use the oauth_secret from the official Twitter applications; those were cracked ages ago, and even if they changed them (thereby breaking all their old applications), they're super-easy to crack again.

<comment><USER9> Hardening the webpage would still decimate the amount of people with the skill/motivation to pry out tweets. HTML scraping is much more accessible than poking around native, source-less apps. (And if it was still a problem, the same tactics as above would work equally well in native apps.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> They will be killing a lot of third party plugin too, a good example would be the wordpress plugins, a lot of them use the jsonp stuff.

Seems weird to mee, but hey, anything to make money in the end I guess

</comment><comment><USER12> Well, goodbye twitter widgets on lots of websites, I guess. (deviantART does a JSONP widget on user pages, lots of wordpress plugins do it, etc...)

<comment><USER13> Somehow I feel we're really not losing that much.....

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Does this mean that "[http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline/<user...](http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline/<user>.json) will be deprecated? Or is this talking about authentication?

<comment> mike-cardwell They deprecated RSS the other day. Even if that's not deprecated yet, you should assume it will be at some point. They seem to be slowly removing access to everything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Do all calls to the Twitter API require authentication now? It used to be that some calls (like search) did not require authentication, and I would assume those would still work with JSONP?

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope, all REST calls now require authentication: [https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1/overview#Authentication...](https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1/overview#Authentication_required_on_all_endpoints) (and search is now formally part of the REST API as of v1.1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Good. JSONP is stupid anyway.

<comment><USER17> Care to elaborate, or are you just baselessly venting against acronyms?</comment></comment>


TSB Bank: Botched upgrade has left customers unable to access their accounts - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/apr/24/tsb-customers-online-banking-chaos-accounts <comment><USER2> The amusing thing is, they forgot to cancel the automated press release that's boasting about a successful go-live:

[http://prensa.bancsabadell.com/en/News/2018/04/banco- sabadel...](http://prensa.bancsabadell.com/en/News/2018/04/banco-sabadell- successfully-completes-tsb-technology-migration)

<comment><USER3> Taken down now

Backup 1: [http://archive.is/WnwiB](http://archive.is/WnwiB)

Backup 2: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fprensa.bancsabadell.com%2Fen%2FNews%2F2018%2F04%2Fbanco- sabadell-successfully-completes-tsb-technology- migration&rlz=1CALEAJ_enUS730US730&oq=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fprensa.bancsabadell.com%2Fen%2FNews%2F2018%2F04%2Fbanco- sabadell-successfully-completes-tsb-technology- migration&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.965j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)

<comment><USER4> _The teams that have participated in migration have proven to have the skills and knowledge required, which they have significantly developed and honed during the course of this project. Banco Sabadell's proposal to be an agent of change has become evident, with an advanced technological proposition, not only in the domestic market but also on an international scale. With this project Banco Sabadell has created a competitive and value-added platform for the TSB franchise._

Funny and poignant

</comment></comment></comment><comment> cup-of-tea The IT systems of these companies are held together loosely with gaffa tape. This kind of thing could happen at any time. This is what happens when you deliver your project due to pressure from non technical people even though you know it's not properly finished. Why do people not listen to the professionals when it comes to IT?

In my current job I have repeatedly told non technical superiors that reverse engineering an outdated API is not a proper solution and could fall apart at any time. They do not care. It doesn't even register. Do civil engineers have this problem if they realise there might be a structural weakness?

<comment><USER5> As far as I know civil engineers can go to prison if the construction they took part in collapses - no such provision is afforded to software engineers.

<comment> FLUX-YOU Besides simply quitting, what can a civil engineer do to blow the whistle on a company that is cutting corners for a bridge?

<comment><USER6> In the US civil engineers must go through a multi-year certification process that involves a significant amount of on the job work in addition to standardized examination before they are labelled a Professional Engineer (PE).

As a PE, they can face significant legal repercussions for errors in work they approve.

The benefit to the PE is that many Civil Engineering projects are legally required to have a PE design/approve them. The PE literally has a physical stamp they use to stamp blueprints and designs when they approve it. Work won't proceed without that stamp.

So, if a PE refused to approve a bridge design, presumably it would be very difficult to find another PE who would approve it (especially given the record of the first PE rejecting the plans) and the work would not proceed.

<comment><USER7> If software engineers could potentially face legal repercussions or jail time for serious errors, unsound technical judgment, or bad ethical decisions, it would enable a lot more push-back on these poorly-planned projects and corner cutting. I've always thought it was pretty sad that lawyers are held to higher professional and ethical standards than software engineers.

<comment><USER8> > I've always thought it was pretty sad that lawyers are held to higher > professional and ethical standards than software engineers.

I think that's a bit silly. The vast majority of software is trivial stuff and no real harm is caused when something goes sideways. Few of us work on safety critical systems. When a lawyer screws up it often does a lot of harm and they are also inherently bound by our legal systems. Corruption and negligence/incompetence in this area lessens the public's faith in those systems.

Lawyers and civil engineer inherently take on far greater responsibility than your average Joe Schmoe programmer writing yet another CRUD app.

<comment><USER9> That's true, but what about the software engineers who _do_ build world- changing stuff? I think that we should definitely hold them to a higher standard than we currently do.

<comment><USER8> >That's true, but what about the software engineers who do build world- changing stuff?

Yeah I can get behind that. I work in biotech/cancer diagnostics/prognostics and we could definitely afford a higher standard, especially around the core stuff (e.g. the CV/algorithms people, but also the typical IT end of things.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Cross-post from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16911321](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16911321) :

This appears to be an IT failure comparable to the 2012 and 2015 IT failures at the Royal Bank of Scotland. These involved multi-day / multi-week full/partial outages, and multi-million pound fines.

FT: [https://www.ft.com/content/9178ef60-46d9-11e8-8ee8-cae73aab7...](https://www.ft.com/content/9178ef60-46d9-11e8-8ee8-cae73aab7...).

Background: TSB is a UK bank. They had a planned 50-hour maintenance window over the weekend (Fri 16:00 - Sun 18:00), to move away from Lloyds's systems (following the "un-merger" in 2013-2014). This went wrong, in what is likely to become a textbook example of an IT failure.

From a letter from Nicky Morgan, chair of the UK Parliament's Treasury committee, to TSB CEO Paul Pester:

> The reports of unauthorised transactions, access to other customers' > accounts, and failures of in-branch services have all the hallmarks of an IT > meltdown. This is yet another addition to the litany of failures of banking > IT systems. Potentially millions of customers could be affected by > uncertainty and disruption.

Some interesting screenshots of people seeing debugging information in the front-end: [https://twitter.com/bcleeve/status/988333991676796928](https://twitter.com/bcleeve/status/988333991676796928) [https://twitter.com/apphancer/status/988698182170357760](https://twitter.com/apphancer/status/988698182170357760) [https://twitter.com/thejackthomson_/status/98856435451268710...](https://twitter.com/thejackthomson_/status/988564354512687104)

Ironically, TSB's parent company issued a press release (in error?) claiming that the migration has been a "success"! [http://press.bancsabadell.com/en/News/2018/04/banco- sabadell...](http://press.bancsabadell.com/en/News/2018/04/banco-sabadell- successfully-completes-tsb-technology-migration)

</comment><comment><USER11> This article from 3 years ago predicted this situation:

Sabadell warned about 'high risks' in IT integration of TSB [https://www.ft.com/content/c5157c1e-20ab-11e5-aa5a-398b2169c...](https://www.ft.com/content/c5157c1e-20ab-11e5-aa5a-398b2169cf79)

</comment><comment><USER12> It's got so bad that when my partner went into our local branch they were handing out cash and writing it down in a little book because none of their in branch systems were working either.

<comment><USER13> I'm actually old enough to remember when that was normal. You could also phone your branch and the security was basically someone who recognised your voice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I logged in to my TSB account yesterday and found angular placeholders and bits of un-rendered html all over the place. The previous version was all server side rendered and worked perfectly.

<comment><USER14> Move fast and break things....

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Why didn't they roll back the update as soon as that was discovered? Would've caused another downtime of a few hours but better than the current chaos.

<comment><USER10> I have no inside information for TSB, but I have worked on other large migrations before at $DAYJOB.

Based on the original planned 50-hour outage, I suspect that TSB chose a "big bang" migration: all-or-nothing, no rollback possible. These are technically easier (so cheaper) to develop, but far far riskier than taking a phased approach.

I have successfully argued against such approaches in the past, due to the high risk of catastrophic failure if it goes wrong (i.e., exactly what has happened to TSB).

I regard TSB's failure as an in-the-making textbook example of "how not to do it".

<comment><USER16> Often, these kinds of migrations are the only option due to previous cost cutting/money saving decisions - likely due to pressure from the business and nothing to do with any technical reason.

I remember one migration which involved lots of internal services which were all tightly coupled, meaning updates across the whole backend, not just the part that needed it and no way to do a phased rollout. It was made worse by the fact that the update was to the platform and that depended on a DB upgrade, but that upgrade was incompatible with the old version which meant _everything_ had to be done at once.

They had no disaster recovery plan. They got it done, but I'm sure a lot of people involved went grey early thanks to that nightmare.

Of course the business had no idea of the utter mess that caused all of this and continued to make harmful decisions in the name of saving money and further underfunding the IT department.

<comment><USER14> Even with tightly coupled systems, ultimately it's all bits on the wire. You can always develop shims or intermediaries to perform a phased migration with rollback options. Of course that takes time and costs money, which is why some people take the damn the torpedoes approach.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Ironically I tried to close my TSB account on Saturday morning because I'd just switched to Monzo Bank and was told they couldn't close my account due to the issues they were having.

Still no access to my old account this morning...

<comment><USER18> Have you switched to Monzo as your full-time bank? I use it for everyday spending but I not sure I want to put my wages into it yet.

<comment><USER19> I tried Monzo and they're awesome, but ended up ultimately moving to Starling. Reason being they have a full FSCS license, so your balance is guaranteed by the government up to around £85k.

Apart from that they're both much the same, and both leagues better than a normal bank. It's amazing buying stuff or getting cash out and the notification comes through on the phone before the ATM tells you the cash is coming!

Another good thing both have - you can switch off cards instantly. I thought i'd lost my Starling card when out last week, instead of cancelling it I just temporarily halted it until it was found.

<comment><USER17> Monzo now has a full FSCS licence.

<comment><USER19> Good to know, thank you.

What I do love about Monzo is their approach to development - they blog everything, even the outages. Good to see the process involved in making a new bank from scratch. I'm keeping the account as a scratch account but have already moved the direct debits from my old Halifax account to Starling.

<comment><USER20> Monzo's head of engineering will be keynoting at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Copenhagen next week, and talking about past outages: [https://kccnceu18.sched.com/event/Dsan/keynote-anatomy- of-a-...](https://kccnceu18.sched.com/event/Dsan/keynote-anatomy-of-a- production-kubernetes-outage-oliver-beattie-head-of-engineering-monzo-bank)

<comment><USER17> That sounds great. Gutted I won't be there, hope it's recorded!

<comment><USER20> Yes, we'll have it on the CNCF YouTube channel a few days later.

[https://www.youtube.com/c/cloudnativefdn](https://www.youtube.com/c/cloudnativefdn)

<comment><USER17> Amazing, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The banks owners LLoyds PLC have an earnings call 26/04/18\. Will be interesting to see if this incident is brought up.

EDIT: Sorry correction, looks like they sold the stake in 2015.</comment>


What I'm Going to Change in Light of 'Dead Men Write No Code' - <AUTHOR> http://blog.grobinson.net/2016/02/07/what-im-going-to-change-in-light-of-dead-men-write-no-code/ <comment><USER2> There are studies showing that a lot of the negative health effects can be attributed to just the sitting, regardless of the amount of exercise[1]. Personally I can really recommend looking into the standing desk. Also great if you tend to get kinda restless after sitting up for long periods, like me.

[1] [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3404815/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3404815/)

<comment><USER3> Getting an easy to convert standing / sitting desk was easily the best decision I have made. I now stand most of the day, sitting down when it gets a bit tiring and after lunch.

I cannot recommend this enough for anyone sitting in front of computers > 4 hours / day.

<comment><USER4> For those looking into a standing desk, someone on HN recommended simply buying a tall desk with a tall chair, architect style, as opposed to an expensive/complicated setup to move the desk up and down. I want to look down into this option, as it's apparently cheaper and simpler.

<comment><USER5> I beg to differ. The good thing of an adjustable desk is that you can set it at the perfect height both when you're standing and sitting. Many of us type on the keyboard while arms are resting on the desk. If the desk is too low the back suffers. Standard desk height is 90cm (Europe), and for me that is too low. I set it at around 96 cm when sitting.

The chair is also very important (does it help you to have a correct sitting position) and should be adjustable to have a 90 degree leg bend too. And the screen should be in front of the eyes while sitting and standing (standard feet for many computer screens raise them way too little from the 90cm desk), so you may need an extra arm.

While standing, I try to take my shoes off as shoes (even if by 1cm) usually alter the natural position of the feet on the floor and that goes up to the back too. I've also seen people stand on soft playground mats for extra comfort.

The downside of all this is the prices (good office chairs starting on 800 euro and same or more for standing desks). Hopefully your employer can provide it...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here's the HN discussion of the "Dead Men Write No Code" article, which this article references:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11040932](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11040932)

</comment><comment><USER7> Tea is good, but Brits overdo black tea; just do black/green/red or skip the black altogether and go easy on the red. And no milk ofcourse although that's probably the hardest part to leave out.

<comment><USER8> > And no milk ofcourse although that's probably the hardest part to leave out.

There's nothing wrong with milk, unless you're not including it in your diet tracking, react poorly to it, or have a personal opposition to drinking it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Eat more vegetables. Visit the doctor to get a blood test.</comment>


Do Millennium Villages work? Why we may never know - <AUTHOR> http://aidwatchers.com/2009/10/do-millennium-villages-work-we-may-never-know/

<comment><USER2> I find it odd that he is complaining about a resource limited organization not stepping beyond its goal _to "show what success looks like"_. Because it's hard for a resource limited world to help that much everywhere at once.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's not quite his complaint. His complaint is that despite the project being quite well funded (relative to others), they don't seem to take an active interest in measuring results that they can be accountable to. It is somewhat remarkable that they wouldn't though if the goal of the Millenium Villages is to show others 'the way'.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Golf Ledger – Share, Discover and Discuss All Things Golf - <AUTHOR> http://www.golfledger.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, everyone. I've been mostly a designer/front-end guy my whole life. I've always wanted to build a golf community so about a year or so ago, I set out to learn Python and Django. I finally got to a point where I knew enough to build what I wanted and Golf Ledger is the result of my efforts. Let me know what you think.

Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER2> I've tried it out, definitely better than just using the golf reddit. Less cruft and cleaner interface. Just needs a community.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for giving it a try. Definitely needs more people posting. :)</comment></comment>


Square jumps in market debut - <AUTHOR> http://reuters.com/article/idUSL3N13E45620151119 <comment><USER2> A couple of interesting things about the IPO. A Lot more the trades happening are tagged as coming from trade reporting facilities, which means they were crossed/filled by internalizes, than is normal.

This usually means retail flow( regular folks) using E-Trade, Ameritrade, Interactive Broker, Scott Trade, etc to buy/sell shares. These firms get paid to send their orders to HFT firms who fill the orders internally(ie not on an exchange) and then use trade reporting facilities to notify the markets of these orders.

Also supporting this thesis is the number of small and odd lot trades.

So you could argue that main street likes Square more than Wall street.

With the market down and Match.com's IPO popping less, this is a very good opening for them.

Having said that, the real test for most new stocks is 6 months out when they've had 2 reporting quarters, options start to trade and short interest numbers( a measure of how many people want to short the company) start to have some validity.

Question to anyone more informed than me......

Do squares late series investor's liquidation preference kick in at the IPO opening price or the vwap price through the day?

If it's the former, then the late stage investors are going to get a great double dip of getting a huge increase in shares due to the ipo price being below their strike and get the benefit of this pop.

Maybe late stage investors aren't as dumb as people around here have been claiming lately?

<comment><USER3> Yeah; this happens a lot with big tech IPOs. Typically they will spike on day 1 with lots of individual investors buying in to the hype train. I would expect to see Square drop precipitously over the next week/month as the professional investors can make money by pushing the valuation down, then it'll stabilize somewhere near the IPO price in 6-12 months. Company fundamentals have very little to do with share price in the first year or two of an IPO; it's almost entirely psychological.

And nobody's been claiming that late-stage investors are dumb; in fact quite the opposite. Late stage investors tend to be very large, professionally managed equity funds - they are as savvy as investors get, and they're strong- arming early stage investors into unfavorable liquidation preferences. They're also the type of investor to have media / analyst contacts they can use to push down the IPO price knowing that it's going to pop. The discussion with late stage investors is really "the fact that late-stage investors are sucking up a disproportionate share of the profits from unicorn exits is endangering the VC investment model".

<comment><USER4> None of what you just said has any basis in reality. If you really did know all of that, you would have spent every penny you have a) buying the stock at IPO and b) selling it tomorrow and then immediately shorting it and waiting.

<comment><USER5> It's incredibly difficult to short an IPO within the first 30 days because the SEC requires the underwriter to wait at least 30 days to lend out shares for shorting.

So then you'd have to get a retail or institutional investor who JUST PURCHASED shares to lend them to you to short.

In which case, why would they bother buying them in the first place.

<comment><USER6> This isn't entirely true. If you hold securities in a margin account, your broker can lend the shares out to another client of theirs to short. You have no say in the matter. It's up to your broker to balance the number of longs vs shorts internally. But you can most definitely short on day one. I've done it and my account balance only has 1 comma in it.

If the short to long ratio gets too close, they will close out shorts or try to borrow from other clearing firms so that they don't end up naked. Early on, most firms will just close the short.

<comment><USER7> > This isn't entirely true. If you hold securities in a margin account, your > broker can lend the shares out to another client of theirs to short. You > have no say in the matter.

I don't think what you said is 100% true either. Charles Schwab brokerage definitely asks before lending out, advertises the interest the borrower is willing to pay on the loaned shares, enrolls the willing lender into Schwab Securities Lending Fully Paid Program, and then buys an insurance policy from Lloyd to cover counter-party default. All of this is done via FedEx letters and hand-written signatures.

Sounds like some brokerages don't ask and keep the fees and accrued interest to themselves, which is shady. ETFs and mutual funds don't have to ask anybody, of course, and usually pass on revenue from securities lending to their customers via lower fees.

<comment><USER6> Are you sure that's not only for cash accounts. Pretty much every margin account agreement I've ever seen says that they can lend out your holdings without your explicit consent or that acceptance of the agreement is explicit consent.

Cash accounts are different creatures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This seems to be a pretty common thing. Why don't IPOs use some sort of auction structure to discover the right price at the time of the IPO, rather than setting a price up-front and trying to figure out the optimal number ahead of time?

<comment><USER9> Google used a Dutch auction in their IPO. But then again they are pretty obsessed with auctions. There is some research on auctions for IPOs, e.g. [http://www.nber.org/papers/w16214](http://www.nber.org/papers/w16214), that suggests they are too complex for investors.

<comment><USER10> And Google still had a 15% first-day pop, which is just about the normal size for a traditional bank-run IPO.

<comment><USER4> It absolutely it not normal. If there was ALWAYS a 15% pop, then IPO prices would be 15% higher.

<comment><USER11> It's not a given that a stock that just popped 15% trades the same as a stock that was offered at a 15% higher price in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The financial press has spent the last two weeks lambasting them for a valuation that was essentially a down round from their last private financing. I'm sure they were aiming for a small pop, but 60% does make it look like they left money on the table and that they might have taken some of the heat off the criticism around the discounted valuation.

They just needed to get the deal done ([http://avc.com/2015/11/getting-the- deal-done/_](http://avc.com/2015/11/getting-the-deal-done/_).

</comment><comment><USER13> They didn't per-se leave money on the table. The 60% pop is for shares that are actively trading. The actively traded amount is much much less than the amount that was taken in by institutional investors that would agree to hold the stock for an extended period of time.

<comment><USER14> Side question on this: Are there ever efforts to have varying lock-up periods for different institutional investors? So there is a multi-stage gradual introduction of more actively traded shares?

<comment><USER7> Yes, for example, FB [http://www.thestreet.com/story/11666479/1/heres-the- rest-of-...](http://www.thestreet.com/story/11666479/1/heres-the-rest-of- facebooks-lock-up-schedule.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The proper conclusion is that Square raised a lot less money than it could have raised, and investment bankers are very happy with the cream they are skimming off the top for their friends.

A pop makes for a good headline. But really it is a terrible deal.

<comment><USER16> That's not necessarily accurate if the pop today is being caused by average public investors. As someone else noted, it would mean main street likes the stock more than Wall Street.

<comment><USER15> How not accurate?

The half about investment bankers and their friends being happy is guaranteed to be accurate because they bought low and now get to sell high.

As for the other half, it is theoretically the job of Wall St to figure out what main street will like. However Wall St makes money by being bad at that job. Is there any wonder that they are consistently terrible at it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It is weird that I can't find neither the SQ symbol or SQUARE in Google Finances but it is available on Yahoo.

<comment><USER18> Not that surprising, IPO days are weird for that sort of thing. It will show up here: [http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ASQ](http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ASQ)

<comment><USER19> In my experience, stocks never show up immediately after IPO on google finance. I always end up using Yahoo to watch the price for the first few days.

<comment><USER18> It's really a shame that Google has abandoned Google Finance. Seems like a pretty low-cost high-reward vertical for them (advertising to people who care about financial markets is lucrative).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> So they basically left money on the table?

<comment><USER21> These days, you "have to" leave money on the table, or your IPO is deemed a "failure" (see: Facebook).

<comment><USER22> What would you rather have ... less money but CNBC and the internet calling you a huge success, or more capital available to run your business but CNBC and today's internet echo chamber calling you a failure. I'd choose the latter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It is truly amazing how bankers always get away with this kind of incompetent non-sense. Every single time a stock sees a "jump", it is because those "analysts" did a poor job in evaluating stock price. And company going IPO is leaving money on the table, which is stolen by those greedy (too polite a term for bankers) bankers.

<comment><USER24> -> It is truly amazing how bankers always get away with this kind of incompetent non-sense.

-> And company going IPO is leaving money on the table, which is stolen by those greedy (too polite a term for bankers) bankers.

Well, it appears both these statements can't be true. Bankers can't both be so stupid so as to leave such amazing amount of money on the table...and then also be so smart that they reap the rewards of significant underpricing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> How much of the stock is publicly available? What is the corporate structure, i.e. is this a one share, one vote set up?

<comment><USER26> "We have two classes of authorized common stock: the Class A common stock offered hereby and Class B common stock. The rights of the holders of Class A common stock and Class B common stock are identical, except with respect to voting and conversion rights. Each share of Class A common stock is entitled to one vote. __Each share of Class B common stock is entitled to ten votes __and is convertible at any time into one share of Class A common stock. "

"After the completion of this offering, our existing stockholders will continue to hold all of our issued and outstanding Class B common stock and will hold approximately % of the combined voting power of our common stock. As a result of their ownership, they will be able to control any action requiring the general approval of our stockholders, including the election of our board of directors, the adoption of certain amendments to our certificate of incorporation and bylaws, the approval of any merger or sale of substantially all of our assets, and certain provisions that impact their rights and privileges as Class B common stockholders. See "Description of Capital Stock.""

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Yahoo finance says the market cap is only $340M, but all the articles leading up to today said their valuation was going to be $2.5-3B.

Did they really only IPO less than 20% of the total company and keep the rest private?

<comment><USER28> That isn't how it works. They create some new shares and sell them. The rest of the shares are held by the current owners.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I gotta ask, why will Square succeed in a market that is surely going to be controlled by device (phone/watch) manufacturers?

</comment><comment><USER30> From what I remember, IPO prices tend to aim about 15% below what the market value should be. It's a big incentive to get the big players (institutional investors) to get in on the IPO and get the stock moving. Pretty sure Square might have offered a deeper discount to make the offering look successful.

Regardless of the actual prevalence of that strategy, I don't think we'll have a meaningful narrative about Square's IPO until the market has it for at least a few days.

<comment><USER31> What you remember from where?

<comment><USER30> Financial coursework, not anything I can cite but this should work: [http://www.crab.rutgers.edu/~yaari/Articles-PDF/IPO- Hauser-Y...](http://www.crab.rutgers.edu/~yaari/Articles-PDF/IPO-Hauser-Yaari- JLEweb.pdf). Estimates that this IPO discount is around 18.4% in the US.

"The price discount varies over time and across initial public offering (IPO) mechanisms but remains economically significant everywhere. Span- ning 4 decades and 38 countries, Ritter's (2003) survey of international studies reports a mean first-day return (commonly equated with the offer price discount, or underpricing) ranging from 5.4 percent (Denmark) to 257 percent (China), with a median return of 20.7 percent...[the] U.S. mean return [was] 18.4 percent [from] 1960–2001"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This is no surprise for anyone who is using Square Cash. Clearly the best product on the market for its purpose.

<comment><USER33> It seems unlikely that they'll be able to transfer money for free indefinitely. Their competitors hold on to balances for a reason: it's the only way to build a sustainable business on top of free money transfers.

<comment><USER34> Square Cash recently introduced the ability to send money w/ your credit card (before it was just debit). Square takes 3% of those transactions. Also, I think they charge 1.9% for non-personal use when sending money w/ a debit card.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Big shorting coming.</comment>


How Much of the Unobservable Universe Will We Someday Be Able to See? - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/03/05/how-much-of-the-unobservable-universe-will-we-someday-be-able-to-see/ <comment><USER2> Does any know a scientific estimate for the mass-equivalent of all electromagnetic energy in the universe? Also, can the Cosmic Microwave Background mass-equivalent be separately estimated?</comment>


The Wolfram Alpha Demo Returns, This Time With Actual Footage Of The Service - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/30/the-wolfram-alpha-demo-returns-this-time-with-actual-footage/

<comment><USER2> If what's in essence the same article gets posted a couple of dozen times, am I allowed to make the same cynical/snarky comment each time?

</comment><comment><USER3> This is much better than the previously posted video, but you would think MIT could do a bit better video quality wouldn't you?

</comment><comment><USER4> So basically the service is the digital version of one of those constants tables at the end of notebooks.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's time for Wolfram to shit or get off the pot. Has anyone ever seen a single use of it that wasn't scripted?</comment>