JSXGraph - the best way to visualize/plot data - <AUTHOR> http://jsxgraph.uni-bayreuth.de/wp/ JSXGraph is a cross-browser library for interactive geometry, function plotting, charting, and data visualization in a web browser. It is implemented completely in JavaScript, does not rely on any other library, and uses SVG and VML. JSXGraph is easy to embed and has a small footprint: less than 100 KByte if embedded in a web page. No plug-ins are required! Special care has been taken to optimize the performance.<p>Starting with version 0.80 JSXGraph supports multitouch devices like the Apple iPad and devices running any browser with SVG support. <comment><USER2> Finally got to connect, it seems... bloated to me, the fact that they state only 100kb when embedded into a webpage? only?

</comment><comment><USER2> Anyone else unable to connect?

<comment><AUTHOR> yes, unfortunately the university of bayreuth has some connection troubles right now.

it work from time to time</comment></comment>


Nokia and Ericsson looking into moving operations from China - <AUTHOR> https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2019/06/08/exclusive-nokia-andericsson-plan-emergency-break-up-trade-war/ <comment><USER2> Watch China refuse to allow modern test and assembly machinery to be exported</comment>


There is no language instinct (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://aeon.co/essays/the-evidence-is-in-there-is-no-language-instinct <comment><USER2> I"m not sure this is completely related, but every time I think about Chomsky and language and universal grammar, this comes to mind and still leaves me baffled and amazed. This is a short 5 minute video on whistling Turkish. In a village in Turkey, they uphold the tradition of communication by whistling phonemes. It is a direct mapping of Turkish to Whistling Turkish, where every phoneme in Turkish has a whistling equivalent. The difference is it uses pitch changes as phonemes. It blows my mind.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQf38Ybo1IY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQf38Ybo1IY)

<comment><USER3> There's a similar tradition of whistled Spanish on the Canary Islands. It was used to talk across mountain valleys and stuff. UNESCO designated it as some kind of cultural heritage, I think.

<comment><USER4> Whistled language isn't all that uncommon: it also happens in some Inuit languages and tonal languages. The even have different airstream mechanisms IIRC: Inuit whistled languages use palatal whistling, whereas on Silbo Gomero (pardon the spelling) you whistle into your hands.

Check out the Piraha channls, where they also have "hum speech", "yell speech", "musical speech". [http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003175.h...](http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003175.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> this article is bad. chomsky and his ilk have always acknowledged the wide variety of linguistic behavior; that's the whole point. universal grammar is the parameters to be set (what sounds have meaning? what word order is used? etc). learning a language is the setting of those parameters.

humans may have linguistic "knowledge" that they're born with, they may not... but this article is beside the point.

<comment><USER6> This article is very much on point when it comes to the language debate, you're just taking an oddly hedged position on it.

Chomsky and his ilk have made very strong, very specific claims about language in the past. They have claimed that certain combinations of linguistic parameters are impossible, and that certain features are shared by all languages. They have actively denied the wide variety of linguistic behavior until the evidence piles up enough that they change the topic.

Followers of this brand of linguistics have resisted empirical tests of these claims, and some of them have academically attacked those who disagree. And yet these claims have been chipped away anyway until all that's left is a really vague claim that most humans can communicate using recursion.

Your second paragraph seems at odds with your first. If these parameters exist to be set, that's knowledge. Knowing that word order _is a thing that can vary_ is knowledge. Chomsky says we are born with this knowledge. Some who disagree with him say we aren't born with it, and that we have to learn it from experience.

In the part where you hedge and say "they may not...", you're surprisingly agreeing with this article more than Chomsky. Chomsky would say "Humans absolutely have linguistic knowledge they are born with. Anyone who disagrees is a behaviorist charlatan."

Chomsky's linguistics was indeed a way better model of learning than behaviorism, but that was 60 years ago and we need a better model now.

<comment><USER7> I have no idea about the details of this debate, but even so it's obvious that this article screams warnings signs - it's full of tricky strawmen and other fallacies.

For instance, it makes the absurd comparison between the supposed innate talent for language and a spiders web-weaving - spiders weave webs without examples, so why not kids? Spiders are about as poor a stand-in for a human as you'll find in the macroscopic world. Also, even if something is instinctual, it's hardly reasonable to assume that instinct will _always_ overcome any situation, regardless of trauma, especially in a animals as impressionable as humans. Finally, just because an animal has an instinct and/or innate aptitude doesn't mean that practice is irrelevant. The girl that was held in a cellar until she was 13 only shows that either the instinct isn't absolute (no surprise there), or even just that the instinct still requires exercise.

Then there's the flatly false statement that dna doesn't have the storage capacity to store a universal grammar. Oh really? The human genomes codes for on the order of a gigabyte of data. AFAIH, there's strong evidence that there's _not_ a lot of evolutionary pressure to keep genomes small, IIRC based on the observation that even small, competing microbes have dramatically varying sizes of genomes (when you'd expect smaller-genomed competitors to have won if it really mattered). For some context: A compressed wordlist containing 350000 english words is less than a megabyte. In general, grammars tend to be much smaller, especially if you consider that it's not claimed that a full grammar is stored, but at most the "basics" that can get rehydrated based on _learnt_ language. Another poster in this thread claimed his 500 line python program can generate a good approximation of human language given enough input data. I wouldn't be surprised if a few kilobytes would suffice to describe the components from which any grammar can be built - much smaller than the full grammar itself.

There's another absurd misunderstanding of evolution in which the article manages to suggest that because evolution is necessarily continuous in the space of genomes, it thus must be continuous in the space of outcomes (i.e. language is so large a leap, it couldn't have evolved). I'm sure many creationists feel the same way about the eye - not to mention the fact that the article then proceeds to knock down some straw-men about when that language ability might have evolved according to chomsky (which is basically saying that because chomsky apparently doesn't know how language evolved, his other theory must be false. Really?)

I have _no idea_ about the details here, but this article is about as unconvincing as you can get. He may well be right - I'm not a linguist, and to be frank I'm not entirely sure why the claim even matters (not a great sign for a scientific hypothesis). But I'm sure this article isn't making a lot of sense.

<comment><USER4> That discussion of evolution seems to me like he was paraphrasing and criticizing Chomsky's ideas of language evolution. Chomsky has both argued for an innate language organ and language acquisition device, and been critical of attempts to explain such a thing in terms of evolution. It's a weird position that the author is right to criticize (if a bit clumsily). [http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002134.h...](http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002134.html) [http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1995/nov/30/genes-m...](http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1995/nov/30/genes- memes-minds/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hmm, given that a few hundred line python script fed with large stream of characters can start producing sentences with correct grammar (however mostly nonsensical), I agree that we, given the complexity of our neural networks, don't need any pre-existing machinery to learn languages.

<comment><USER7> But in order to do that, the "model" (i.e. the python program itself) needs to be carefully selected. Most python programs - or other programs - won't do this. Indeed, you need to construct the program to pay special attention to particular kinds of statistics, and the choice of those structures would correspond to the hypothetical "universal grammar" \- at least, as far as I understand without being overly encumbered by any expertise on the matter ;-).

<comment><USER8> I wrote the parent comment on the go so here's more details. I'm specifically referring to the python script [1] mentioned in the article titled "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks" [2]. I don't know much about ANNs but after a quick glance at the code, it seems to be setting up a generic three layer RNN. Based on this, I would argue that ability to learn patterns in sequence of data is all that's needed to learn a language. Calling it a "grammar" ties it too much to concept of language since such learning ability extends beyond human languages.

[1]: [https://gist.github.com/karpathy/d4dee566867f8291f086](https://gist.github.com/karpathy/d4dee566867f8291f086)

[2]: [http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn- effectiveness/](http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/)

<comment><USER9> Chomsky based his original argument that language is an innate ability of the human species on a famous mathematical result by Mark E. Gold, from a paper titled "Language identification in the limit" published in 1967 [1]

Gold's result basically says that it's impossible for a learner to learn a non-finite language (which means anything from regular languages and above) without access to an infinite number of examples, both positive and negative, of the language, or failing that, access to an oracle that knows the language perfectly and can confirm or reject the learner's evolving model of the language. In some versions, the oracle must respond to errors with a _negative_ counter-example, teaching the learner why its model is wrong ("if the sentence you just formed was correct then you could form this other sentence, which is obviously wrong").

As far as I know, Gold's result still stands. So I think you may be overestimating the power of the python script you link to.

I should say that I'm aware of Karpathy's project, and it's really cool (or awesome if you prefer), but reproducing text is not the same as learning language.

In other words, if you expect any program to learn language, you better have infinite data to train it with and also an infinite amount of time. I stress that this doesn't only apply to human languages. You can try teaching a network to learn the syntax of Java, for example. You'll still need infinite resources, or an Oracle.

++ Edited to remove unfortunate scare quotes and also to add: if you could machine-learn a language, even "just" a CFG, we wouldn't need to write parsers for programming language compilers anymore. It would suffice to present a machine learning algorithm with some examples (a lot of them probably) and the algorithm would form a model of the language, that we could then use as a parser.

This is far from the state of the art today, however.

__________________

[1] [http://web.mit.edu/~6.863/www/spring2009/readings/gold67limi...](http://web.mit.edu/~6.863/www/spring2009/readings/gold67limit.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've been thinking lately that our brains might have evolved for communication using language. The fact that they can also do philosophy, math, science and engineering is just an unintended (yet fortunate) consequence of having enough capability to handle language.

Learning a foreign language can be as challenging as learning to program or building a software system. It takes a lot of dedication and practice. Involves using a lot of memory and pattern recognition, and all the "intellectual" capacities that are needed to handle a large engineering project.

</comment><comment><USER11> I only scanned through this very long article to pull out useful info.. I got this:

> [Chomsky] concluded that [children] must be born with a rudimentary body of > grammatical knowledge – a 'Universal Grammar' – written into the human DNA.

> ... Chomsky is plain wrong

> What is in dispute is the claim that knowledge of language itself – the > language software – is something that each human child is born with.

> Our brains really are 'language-ready' in the following limited sense: they > have the right sort of working memory to process sentence-level syntax, and > an unusually large prefrontal cortex that gives us the associative learning > capacity to use symbols in the first place.

> And of course, language doesn't need to be spoken. ..linguistic meaning can > be conveyed in multiple ways: in speech, by gestured signs, on the printed > page or computer screen. It does not depend upon a particular medium for its > expression.

> As it happens, cognitive neuroscience research from the past two decades or > so has begun to lift the veil on where language is processed in the brain. > The short answer is that it is everywhere.

> Why is it that today, only humans have language, the most complex of animal > behaviours?

> [Early humans'] new ecological situation would have led, inexorably, to > changes in human behaviour. ... This allows us to picture the emergence of > language as a gradual process from many overlapping tendencies.

> We see this instinct [(cooperation)] at work in human infants as they > attempt to acquire their mother tongue. Children have far more sophisticated > learning capacities than Chomsky foresaw. They are able to deploy > sophisticated intention-recognition abilities from a young age, perhaps as > early as nine months old, in order to begin to figure out the communicative > purposes of the adults around them. And this is, ultimately, an outcome of > our co‑operative minds.

<comment><USER12> I always like to frame this kind of thing using the term "appropriateness."

We can imagine an amoeba having a rudimentary ability to detect whether its surroundings are hostile or not and employ an instinctual response to evade it. It's not much of a leap from there to say humans have a social instinct, and that our ability to evade hostility has become strongly correlated with our ability to identify behaviors that are appropriate in context.

And language is, in an abstract sense, just this: choosing appropriate actions. Maybe they're words. Maybe they're intonations. Or other social norms. Nobody learns 'just' language as a child, they learn a whole way of life. They learn "swearing is wrong," not simply "this is the proper syntax for swearing." And they _feel_ its wrongness when they swear. You can't know what swear words mean if you can't feel that, and you probably won't be able to survive very well as a human if you can't determine what behavior is appropriate or not in your situation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's not about the brain, it's about the body. Right brain innate connection to ones own body and to the world. We know that there are nouns because the body senses objects. We know there are verbs because the body can make movements. We know there are adjectives because the objects differs. It's a very left brain dominated view that would even contemplate that a language system would evolve free of interaction with the world, only through dna construct some language organ.

And language is probably a product of singing. Checkout "The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World". Singing is used to share feelings in larger groups then ordinary grooming permit. Language is a systematization of singing. That is why music evokes feeling response more readily then words in ordinary speech, speech evolved later.

</comment><comment><USER14> My _favorite_ theory of the origin of language: [http://www.amazon.com/The- Symbolic-Species-Co-evolution-Lang...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Symbolic- Species-Co-evolution-Language/dp/0393317544). It unfolds a bit like a murder mystery, so I won't spoil the ending for you. If the middle section seems a bit of a slog -- persevere!

</comment><comment><USER15> "the chances of two individuals getting the same chance mutation, at exactly the same time, is even less credible. And so, according to the theory of the language instinct, the world's first language-equipped human presumably had no one to talk to."

This is why I believe that if there are any genetic encodings for language (whether either specific to language alone or non-specific but used also by language, if you get my drift) they must have occurred with twins who were then able to communicate more effectively with each other relative to their peers and so they survived and so did their offspring and their genes spread throughout the gene pool. I know it's a wacky idea but it gets around the rebuttal of "presumably had no one to talk to."

And sure, it's an unlikely event but we're talking hundreds of thousands of years here, thousands of generations, billions of people.

</comment><comment><USER16>
        Ctrl+F Everett

...I thought as much

<comment><USER17> Mind sharing what the impact of the result of that search is supposed to be?

<comment><USER18> Daniel Everett is an anthropologist who has made some extraordinary claims about an Amazonian tribe called the Pirahã.

<comment><USER4> OK... but so what? If you're doing a general interest article on debates in linguistics in the last 10 years, you're going to end up covering Everett's work and its implications for Chomsky's theory du jour. This article's discussion of Everett and recursion was pretty brief, overall. [http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2012/03/28/poisonous...](http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2012/03/28/poisonous- dispute/) [http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004592.h...](http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004592.html)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Let's crowdsource a startup idea - <AUTHOR>

I like to break problems into their components. What happens when you do that to the problem of, "How do you create a successful startup?"?
The way I see it, you need to have an idea for something that people genuinely want(1) and you have to be able to build it(2). Traditionally, the idea part grows organically, or comes from thought and research from one person or a small group of people. But what about having a large group of people brainstorm startup ideas? Could that produce better results? Let's try it!
1 - And that could be provided with sufficient profit margins, and that is defensible etc.
2- This could be broken down much more. Ex. get a team together, raise money, do research, acquire relevant skills... <comment><AUTHOR> Idea: a marketplace for startup ideas.

Users submit ideas for things they'd pay for (ex. I'd pay $100 for simple earbuds that don't break, I can wear while working out, and that don't get tangled up). Other users vote to confirm that they too would pay for that, and enter their email address to be notified if someone implements it.

Someone who wants to start a startup could browse through the ideas, and have the option to pay for that list of customers. If this happens, the person who started the idea would be compensated, to incentivize people to contribute ideas.

</comment><comment><USER2> I love the brainstorming, designing, and building stages of product development, but this is a very misguided thread.

Startups shouldn't start with ideas. They should start with markets. Ideas mean nothing if you don't have an unusually inefficient way to sell the products that come out of them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Don't ideas take that stuff into account? Ie. isn't the market and the ability to build and sell the product part of the idea? I can't imagine an example where it isn't. Like how could you make the following statement concrete: "I have an idea for a startup but don't know who would want it and don't know how it could be built or sold". Granted, you could say things like, "time travel", but those clearly aren't startup ideas. To me, for it to be considered a startup idea, it must at least try to address these things.

If not then let me be clear that I intend for that to be part of the discussion. After all, when you break down the question of "how do you build a successful startup", those are things that have to be addressed.

<comment><USER2> > _Don 't ideas take that stuff into account? Ie. isn't the market and the > ability to build and sell the product part of the idea?_

Ideas take that stuff into account, but "the ability to build and sell the product" are not part of the idea.

For example, I have a friend in the accounting industry. She says that tracking time spent on each client is still a huge pain point. Many firms do it with Excel spreadsheets, and some of them even use email.

I have an idea to solve that problem. I know how to build app, pitch it, and support it.

The obstacle is that I only have that one friend in the accounting industry. I could get her firm to use it, but I don't have any particularly special ability to convince the rest of that antiquated industry to modernize itself.

I learned this same lesson with a restaurant startup years ago. Unless you have very easy access to lots of prospective clients, you should never start a company to target those people.

(I'm talking about B2B above. The situation is a little different for B2C products, which just require tons of capital and a reasonable user-acquisition cost for that type of product.)

There's a reason investors are always talking about "unfair advantage", and that always means people. Being cashflow-positive is a game of pushing down your costs (for acquiring and serving users) and pushing up your per-user revenue.

The two factors that influence those metrics the most are your team and your access to the target market. A great team means that your sales move quicker, your product-development process is shorter, and you need fewer people. Access to your target market means that cash comes in sooner, sales cycles are shorter, and sales are bigger.

So when I say that startups should start with the market, I don't mean someone should say, "X market really needs Y product." I mean someone should say, "I know a bunch of executes in the [X] industry, and I can meet any one of them tomorrow."

<comment><USER3> > "I know a bunch of executes in the [X] industry, and I can meet any one of > them tomorrow."

This is how we operate in our B2B. Talk to forty potential clients and find the problems at least several of them have in common. Then reduce the list of problems to the ones in your domain, that require relatively little customisation per client, etc.

I make it sound very simple; in reality you end up customising for each client, getting bogged down in maintenance, fielding feature requests that the rest of the client base won't require, etc. Running a business, in other words!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Dissolve it, or limp-along? - <AUTHOR> Long story short, I'm a very minority player in a small startup focused on the energy sector. For a variety of reasons it hasn't taken off. Now there is talk about shutting down. This leaves whatever equity I might've accumulated equivalent to Chuck-e-Cheese tokens. This is quite unfortunate, but part of the gamble we all take.
Personally I think the energy sector is both a calling (to fight climate change) and an amazing opportunity. I truly believe our ideas will still work someday. But we didn't have enough business experience (or perhaps, nerve) to get lift-off, and we're out of runway.
So enough second-guessing - here's the question: Do I let the company dissolve, lose my vested equity and a fair bit of pride... or do I see if we can pay the annual fees and taxes to limp along for another year while the principal goes and finds a proper day-job for a while.
Cheers <comment><USER2> Sounds like you're burnt out and need a change. I wouldn't worry about the equity so much, as you've said, it has near 0 value.

You didn't state where you were incorporated, what your costs of incorporating, etc. were.

I've kept a Delaware C corp going for a few years because the cost of shutting down and starting again is more than the cost of the taxes, and I can use the structure for another business in the future. I guess it also depends on how complicated the corp structure you put together are.

Aside from the cost of maintaining the corp, if you're comfortable with keeping it, why dissolve?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea good points, Delaware indeed. Guess we can see what the accountant costs will be for a year or two under both scenarios. Thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The belief in the energy sector, its opportunities and challenges is orthogonal to the economic value of equity in the current company. Normally, "principal" refers to people who have singularly or jointly a controlling interest of an enterprise. If that's the case, the decision to fold is their's. Leaving to get a day job is a tell.

Good luck.</comment>


Show HN: Word.Center – Generate made-up words to name your startup - <AUTHOR> http://word.center

<comment><AUTHOR> This was a project I made in a little over 4 hours, from idea to finished implementation, and finally purchasing the domain and setting up the hosting on S3 (since it's entirely static).

Completely pointless, but it was fun to make.

<comment><USER2> Good effort!

Seem to have lost a few minutes clicking generate..

What's the sad smiley I keep getting?

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess sad smiley isn't very explanatory. It happens when there are either no consonants or no vowels selected. It's a dead simple algorithm that alternates between the two.

I should have it ensure at least one vowel or consonant is provided when clicking randomize, or give a popup.

Thanks for your feedback.

<comment><USER3> It often seems to put two vowels together, which works for "oo", but not reaylly for "yy" or "ii"

<comment><AUTHOR> That's definitely unexpected. The only case I would expect is "yy" since 'y' is an option under both consonants and vowels.

I'll investigate. Thanks for pointing it out!

<comment><USER4> Could you enhance the character slider to allow a user specified "recipe"? Like a setting for the ratio of of vowels to consonants? That might reduce the occurance of 'yy' like results.

Pretty cool project - thanks for posting!

<comment><AUTHOR> I certainly could. I'll add it to my backlog. Thanks for your feedback.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> haha pretty cool

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I'm glad you like it. :)</comment></comment>


Tactics for Finding Early Customers For Alpha/Beta Feedback - <AUTHOR> http://groups.google.com/group/lean-startup-circle/browse_thread/thread/58d7cdbc0908e54a

<comment><USER2> Judging by the upvotes, everyone (myself included) want to know how to find early customers but no one has any other suggestions?

I had some success by emailing photographers (my market) who were interviewed in magazines or by interacting with them on Twitter but I'd love to hear other suggestions</comment>


The rise of MEMS microphone arrays - <AUTHOR> http://www.edn.com/design/analog/4457396/SmartEverything-and-the-rise-of-the-microphone-array <comment><AUTHOR> Iwanna hacked version: phase-array real time acoustic camera, with audio Hz displayed as colors. Also perhaps tweet the azimuths of all distant gunshots.</comment>


Ask HN: Use Amex at online store that only accepts Visa? - <AUTHOR>

Sometimes I'd like to make a purchase using my Amex credit card rather than my Visa debit (pseudo-credit) card. Many online stores don't accept Amex because they charge a higher fee. Is there any service that will, for a nominal fee, grant me a "temp" Visa card that is loaded with credit from my Amex? <comment><USER2> Does this do what you need? [https://www.entropay.com/](https://www.entropay.com/)</comment>


The 10 Best Startups From Y Combinator's S12 Demo Day - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/21/best-of-yc-demo-day/ <comment><USER2> >9gag aggregates memes and jokes from around the web — much like Reddit

Evil persons would mention that much of the content on 9gag is copied from Reddit's r/funny (which is on a large scale hard to proof) - but they got funding, so why not, looks like a viable business model.

The example-pic the article uses can be found on Reddit, with the same title, over Google: [http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/ykrlh/when_links_are_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/ykrlh/when_links_are_more_than_ten_words_long/) Can't tell which one came first, as the article's pic doesn't have a time.

>Its founders say that in July, 9gag had more than 65 million unique visitors, compared to Reddit's 39.7 million

According to Wolfram Alpha, Reddit has roughly double the amount of unique daily visitors when compared to 9gag: <http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=reddit+9gag> (Keep in mind these numbers are daily, not monthly like in the article)

<comment><USER3> Wolfram Alpha also uses Alexa which is next to useless for traffic estimates.

<comment><USER2> True, because it's based on their spyware-toolbar, so you only measure the people who are relatively clueless about their computer - but in absence of the 9gag-people citing their sources there's not much more to do.

I don't know how ranking.com generates the numbers, but in their ranking reddit.com is 11,763, 9gag is 11,768 and 4chan is 11,775 - all kinda identical.

<comment><USER4> Actually, 9gag does release their numbers, via Quantcast[0]. According to those, they have a long ways to catch up to Reddit, which even in 2010 [1] had more than double the visitors (3mm vs 8mm "people" monthly).

Incidentally, the 65mm visitors from that quote seems to have been actually referring to page views, of which Reddit had 429mm monthly in 2010.

[0] <http://www.quantcast.com/9gag.com> [1] [http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/experts-misunderestimate- our-...](http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/experts-misunderestimate-our- traffic.html)

(disclaimer: I work for Quantcast).

<comment><USER2> Cool! Thanks for the insight, so did they mix page views with unique visitors?

Also, off-topic question: How do you measure a visitor's income or education level, do you deduce based on location?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >"Forget everything you know about telepresence robots."

Done.

<comment><USER6> I just have to say (post upvote) that this was one of the funniest comments I have read on HN. It so perfectly points out how ridiculous much of tech coverage is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is click bait. Expect to see a similar post with a different selection of startups on GigaOM, VentureBeat, TNW, Mashable, Pandodaily and every other such site.

You also have to wonder about how they select these startups (other than at random)? It's comparing apples to oranges and doesn't even seem to have a consistent metric (expected roi, innovativeness of idea, best pitch, etc).

Why is instacart not on there?

<comment><USER8> Yes, I was really curious about their metrics for ranking the startups.

As you correctly pointed out - why is instacart missing while 9gag is present? I can name so many much better alternatives to 9gag: instacart, KIPPT, Everyday.me etc.

<comment><USER9> 9gag is a pretty obvious selection - they have tens of millions of users.

<comment><USER8> I was under the impression that quality triumphs over quantity for these cases.

<comment><USER10> Your opinion of the content/product being sold should not be mistaken for the quality of a business model. The two are vastly different things. For example, I don't smoke cigarettes--hate the things, but I'll be damned if tobacco wasn't a great way to make a buck in the past century.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> 9gag certainly illustrates how hard up the Internet is for high-quality humor. (Just now, browsing the site, I didn't find anything I would want to share with my friends.)

Fundersclub sounds quite disruptive.

Bufferbox might be useful (at the right price) once it is within walking/bicycling distance of my house, as a UPS store location already is.

<comment><USER12> I just had a weird thought:

Could FunderesClub be an avenue for laundering money?

Think of it this way - an entity or a group could setup many accounts on FundersClub to invest small-ish amounts <9500 in many many avenues and be able to make interest on that money and then sell whenever they want. Because they invested smaller amounts than would be required to be reported, however you would have to pay tax on all interest/dividends received over $1500.

Although, I am sure there are some very creative financial mangers for the elite of silicon valley that do away with even these rules with a deft hand...

<comment><USER13> There are many many vastly easier and lower risk ways to launder money, which don't leave a well documented audit trail throughout the system.

I think your average individual or organization laundering money would want to invest in the kind of things he understood, like small businesses, in the later stages of laundering money, too.

<comment><USER12> I am not a clever man, please explain the vastly easier methods.

<comment><USER13> Place into cash-based businesses with minimal consumables tracking (nail salons, hairdressers, laundromats, service based businesses in general); layer via vendors to those businesses (invoicing for product they don't receive, or just marking up product they do get to premium prices), integration by dividend/partnership payouts to individuals, or other commercial transactions to other businesses. (Really, now that layering happens inside the USA to avoid bulk currency smuggling detection, and happens in businesses vs. cambios, layer/place/integrate is a much fuzzier distinction than it was in the 1980s. It's basically "get physical cash plausibly into a till" and then cycle it.

<comment><USER12> This might sound crazy and naive but this sounds like the most ripe area of cyber fraud: creating an ap/series of apps (inventory, sales, POS, etc) that supports this type of fraud...

They already exist... on the industrial scale. Which is where the rumored Wachovia laundering of mexican drug money was really active...

<comment><USER13> Yes, selling "licenses" which can be transferred, redeemed, and re-used is pretty plausible. However, your average Mexican cartel leader doesn't understand software, and is going to be a lot more comfortable with a sketchy mundane business where he can physically see it and understand it.

Cellphone stores are often used for this, I think, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is a good crop and I can see a lot of success coming from all of these companies. There's a market out there and it's waiting to be tackled. Several of them are known solutions applied to another niche.

There is more of a real world feel to these companies. Robots, Big boxes of delivered things, instacart which isn't in this list, but is another example.

I also notice there's a lot more traction already with these companies than I remember -- it's a more mature bunch. I wish you all the best of luck. The journey hasn't even begun yet, but you've come a long way already.

<comment><USER15> Part of the perceived increase (though certainly not all of it) is that the batch sizes are several times larger than before. Whereas before you might have a shooting star or three in a single batch, now you might have a dozen, even if the proportions remained about the same.

<comment><USER14> INteresting when you put it that way. There are 75 in this batch and this is only 10 of them. Being in ycombinator in earlier years almost guaranteed you'd be covered in the big blogs and well... _heard_ of. There are some of the 65 remaining startups in the bunch I'll probably never hear of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> A common trend I am noticing amongst these startups are that they target a particular industry pain point, and have the ability to charge for their product. None of them seem the type that can be huge businesses, but they all seem like they can turn a profit. Call it lower risk investments if you want.

<comment><USER17> A pain point is the way to start. Some, like the perfect fitting shirt or the package delivery kiosk, could give a strategic advantage to an existing industry player, and therefore provoke an acquisition bidding war. Or, they could conceivably found a new player in that industry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Most of these seem like derivative of other successful startups, like most of YC companies. They all just seem "done" already, so what's the point? On another thread there was the release of a YC-based iPhone controller which was no better than 5 or 6 other competitors in the exact same space. So what kind of advantage do these fancy-pants YC companies really have over their competitors over the MEGA HYPE of demo day?

Probably nothing. The consumer putting up his bucks is what really matters.

<comment><USER19> No, these ideas are not "done". Do you have telepresence robots in your office? Or Bufferbox-like delivery boxes in your mall? I don't.

Saying these businesses are "done" is like saying mobile phones were "done" when Motorola launched their first phone. Startups are about creating businesses, not about materializing some idea the first time on the Earth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Not trolling. Genuinely curious. What exactly does TC rankings mean? It is not like they have a good track record of non-biased tech news reporting. I have avoided their websites/articles like the plague for the past 3 years so I don't know what their record has been as of late, but I doubt it has changed for the better since then. Judging by headlines I see here on HN, I am willing to bet that it has changed for the worse if that is possible.

</comment><comment><USER21> I wonder what happened to Diaspora. [http://allthingsd.com/20120511/diaspora- says-its-back-on-tra...](http://allthingsd.com/20120511/diaspora-says-its- back-on-track-joins-y-combinator-program/)

I was really expecting to see what kind of product they would launch. Did they just not launch at the demo day but still working on it, or did they actually pivot into something else?

<comment><USER22> They launched Makr.io (<https://makr.io>) a few days ago here on HN.

<comment><USER23> I asked this question before: <http://hackerne.ws/item?id=4391638> and still wondering: 1\. Does Y Combinator then own a stake in Makr.io or Disapora? 2\. When a company pivots, does YC own a stake in the pivot? 3\. How about side projects?

<comment><USER22> YC owns a stake in Diaspora. Diaspora owns Makr.io, therefore YC owns a stake in Makr.io, as long as the Diaspora team set it up as an entity separate from Diaspora, not owned by Diaspora (the company, not the team).

When a company pivots, it's the same thing. It's usually the same company legally and fiscally, in which case YC still has a stake. If the company pivots and the founders decide to set up a new company, and the old company does not own the new company, then YC does not have a stake in the new one unless the founders are good sports and cut them in.

Side projects are usually built under the corporate umbrella, in which case the profits/losses from the side project count as part of the owning company's. In this case, YC's stake in the parent company carries over to all side projects (unless, again, they set it up as something separate from the company).

<comment><USER23> What's stopping someone from using the lessons learned from a failed company over to a new entity - IP ownership? E.g. I'm pretty sure Waterloo Velocity doesn't own a stake in Pebble (the iPhone watch) even though the project began there as Allerta (a Blackberry watch) and was admitted into YC as inPulse. Wondering if these are just company name changes, or product name changes, or separate entities? As the founder would have therefore received funding for R&D from Velocity, YC and Kickstarter without necessarily putting out a product. (Though I'm sure there's some intellectual property claims made). That would mean a +1 in favour of patents, to protect the interests of the accelerator.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Huh, we've had something like bufferbox in Norway for years now(I think). Don't know how popular it is though.

</comment><comment><USER25> Double Robotics looks very interesting! I've seen teleconferencing "creatures" before but this one seems very appealing.

Quite surprised about 9gag though. When did they start? Their pictures were so popular for some time it gives me the feeling that they've been online for ages already.

</comment><comment><USER26> Where are the ''Kill Hollywood'' startups?

<comment><USER27> This seems difficult because what makes Hollywood profitable is the movies they make, which cost big dollars and often license expensive IP from others (think Transfomers, superhero movies, etc.). It seems like the kind of thing that's hard to disrupt on a low budget.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This article crashes safari on my ipad2 - three times in a row now...

Anyone else care to test it?

<comment><USER28> I've been noticing that if I open two or more TechCrunch articles in tabs, all of the TechCrunch tabs become unresponsive. I have no idea what they are doing to upset Chrome so badly...

<comment><USER12> > _I have no idea what they are doing to upset Chrome so badly..._

I think it would be Chrome's grammar and spell-check function that gets overloaded....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> www.virool.com - Platform to distribute and market videos. Company makes $0.12/second.</comment>


WooCommerce is Biggest eCommerce Platform Now. Surpasses Magento - <AUTHOR> http://builtwith.com/ecommerce/

<comment><AUTHOR> I am aware Magento powers _big_ sites and some of them are so big and complex that its unimaginable to run them on WooCommerce.

What is surprising is that WooCommerce is not entire project but just a WordPress plugin!

I think this is quite a big achievement for a plugin.</comment>


Squants: The Scala API for Quantities, Units of Measure and Dimensional Analysis - <AUTHOR> http://www.squants.com/

<comment><USER2> This library is a good example of what Dan Describes in this talk

Daniel Spiewak discusses problems and design considerations which arise when dealing with multiple data that must work together in the same function- which is to say most functions.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVXt1RG_yN0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVXt1RG_yN0)

</comment><comment><USER3> Java 8 adds support for type annotations, which enables developers to write code such as:

@Currency("USD") double amount;

These annotations can be checked automatically using a compiler plug-in, such as the Checker Framework [1]. The Checker Framework comes pre-packaged with a units checker [2] along with checkers for null pointer errors, locks, string formatting, security, and many more.

Java's domain-specific language (DSL) features aren't as rich as Scala's. However, you could implement some DSL-like features using aspect-oriented programming (AOP) tools or other similar compiler plug-ins.

[1] [http://types.cs.washington.edu/checker- framework/](http://types.cs.washington.edu/checker-framework/) [2] [http://types.cs.washington.edu/checker- framework/current/che...](http://types.cs.washington.edu/checker- framework/current/checkers-manual.html#units-checker)

<comment><USER4> I would strongly discourage the use of compiler plug-ins, especially those which modify the bytecode. Not only does it make for code which is hard to follow and difficult debug, but most of them break with each new JDK release, often in unpredictable ways, forcing you to wait for updates.

Given the choice I always pick Scala over Java. Maintaining legacy Java code with AspectJ, Lombok and other behind-your-back bytecode manipulations are literally the bane of my existence.

<comment><USER3> There's two different issues here: (1) whether or not to use compiler plug- ins, and (2) whether or not to use compiler plug-ins for metaprogramming.

Using plug-ins for automated analysis improves the quality of your codebase. The annotations serve as a machine-checked documentation which make the code easier to debug.

As you point out though, the benefits of plug-ins for metaprogramming (such as implementing a DSL) is not always as clear-cut: you have to pay the price of maintenance, much of which is not always obvious up-front.

You face many of the same issues when designing a DSL in Scala --- the DSL may generate code that depends on a custom run-time or library.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nice, seems like this would fit well for cryptocurrencies.

</comment><comment><USER4> Nice work!</comment>


Ask HN: Why are we a throw away culture? - <AUTHOR>

This is a question that I've been pondering about for a really long time. We as humans are so wasteful. Think about the last time that you bought something, it could be anything. Think about all the packaging materials that you threw away. Something has to be done to remedy this mindset because eventually we'll run out of space to put all of this trash. I wanted to ask a few questions to try and wrap my head around why this throw away mindset exists:
1) What are some of the obstacles preventing a consumer to recycle?
2) Why aren't all packaging materials recyclable?
3) Why do most people just trash materials instead of recycling it?
4) Why are some materials made out of non-reusable material?
5)Lastly, does anybody have any ideas of how to go about changing the mindset of the individual towards pro-recycling? <comment><USER2> To me it seems like the fundamental problem is that packaging is never sent back to the manufacturer -- it never becomes a problem or a cost to the manufacturer so they never pay any attention to it. From the manufacturer's point of view, the purpose of packaging is to win the sale. So it must look as appealing as possible on the shelf in the store.

Not only the packaging, but the product itself never gets sent back to the manufacturer after it no longer works or the customer is no longer using it. So any pollution caused by the product is not the manufacturer's problem, doesn't present them with any costs, and therefore never gets any attention.

Actually sending things back to the original manufacturers is a logistical problem that is not worth solving, in our current economic arrangement. The problem of buying materials and assembling them in to products, packaging them and selling them is worth solving, because there is money to be made at the end of the process. Basically the answer all your questions is money.</comment>


Youtube is down (for me). Anyone else? - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCbuRA_D3KU&noredirect=1

<comment><AUTHOR> All video URLs I have tried (over 50) report a 500 with a screen like this: [http://oi40.tinypic.com/2ni6y4g.jpg](http://oi40.tinypic.com/2ni6y4g.jpg)

Curious.

Am using chrome on Mac OS X.

But working in Safari and Firefox.

Any idea what all that means?

</comment><comment><USER2> It happens to me only when I'm logged in. In anonymous chrome window everything works.

<comment><USER3> For certain videos in chromium I would get "This video is not currently available" in the flash player but the same url would work if opened in private browsing window. I fixed it by clearing the cache and cookies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I find DownForEveryoneOrJustMe ([http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/](http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/)) to be an invaluable tool for this kind of question.

</comment><comment><USER5> Its up for me, but I don't use their player so that could be part of it.

</comment><comment><USER6> Not for me.</comment>


Kamaelia - Distributed Programming in Python - <AUTHOR> http://www.kamaelia.org

<comment><USER2> Personally I wouldn't classify Kamaelia as a distributed programming system, though it would be nice to increase support in that direction. :-)

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't think the title of the article is accurate - this looks more like a simple generic data-flow kernel. It's probably good for tasks that can take advantage of concurrent decompositions but I don't see any obvious support for distributed computation.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can use a dataflow graph to do distributed programming. Kamaelia is useful for more than just distributed programming, I agree, but I think programming concurrent/distributed systems is one of their main goals, as I understand it.</comment></comment>


Bleep by Bittorent - <AUTHOR> http://blog.bittorrent.com/2014/09/17/bittorrent-bleep-alpha-goes-public-introduces-mac-and-android-apps/

<comment><USER2> As long as it's not opensource there is no reason to trust it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just like Sync, their product that competes with dropbox, I can't really trust it since it's closed source.

<comment><USER4> Private, secure communication... Until we're subpoena'd.</comment></comment>


Bitcoin crashes over 25% in 24 hours, under $180 - <AUTHOR> http://bitcoinity.org/markets <comment><USER2> Yeah, as much as I like the concept of bitcoin (and the blockchain), I don't see adoption becoming anything more than anecdotal.

No interest rate, and you have to secure it yourself? No thanks. My "big bad bank" guarantees me at least a small interest in saving money, and if my card is stolen, I get a new one in 24 hours and all transactions are cancelled. I'm happy to pay some transaction fees ("extortion!") to get that kind of insurance.

Bitcoin is the electronic version of "let's buy a lot of gold and stash it somewhere".

EDIT: Burn karma, burn. Ah well.

<comment><USER3> I don't own any bitcoins, but felt like pointing a couple of things out.

Whatever shreds of interest your bank gives you will be way, way less than the inflation you're experiencing. In other words, your money's purchasing power keeps decreasing even if you're getting some interest on it, ie. you're losing your wealth.

Bitcoin doesn't experience inflation like that, so it should be a better store of value than your fiat currency. I said "should" because bitcoin has been in a speculative bubble, and just came down even more. Right now it's still just a speculative asset, but it _could_ serve as a stable currency.

Your card is irrelevant.

Transaction fees are not extortion. They're a massive skimming operation inflicted on the masses, because the masses have no choice but to eat them. Thank your state-maintained bank cartel for that.

<comment><USER4> There are no grounds to say that BTC should be a superior store of value. Aside from its very public history of being an absolutely _abysmal_ store of value, it also has no central bank tending its value, as fiat currencies do, and no substantial trade denominated in it, which is what gives fiat currencies value in forex markets. It is _solely_ a speculative vehicle. It sucks at commerce and it sucks at investment.

Bitcoin's sole value as a currency lies in its ease of use as a back-end for transactions. It's not a bad intermediary for transactions between people using different currencies, provided the third party transaction service has legal, fast, and cheap ways to convert to and from fiat in both countries. But then, it's not so much a currency as a transport layer with added uncertainty.

I've yet to see a compelling case for BTC as anything but TCP/IP for dollars or a wayback machine for anything you want. It's bad for savings, god-awful for investment, and useless for [legal] commerce.

<comment><USER5> I think you're attacking somewhat of a weak-man: the people saying Bitcoin _as it is valued right now_ is any sort of store of value (and there are, indeed, such people) are obviously slightly insane.

But in a long-term sense—an imagined future where all the speculative value has gone out of Bitcoin and it is now just "worth what it is worth"—it would make a fairly good store of value, in exactly the same way gold would if we knew exactly how much of it there was to mine out of the earth, if some property of the (never-changing) extraction process meant that it was only able to be mined out at an exactly inverse-exponential rate, and if it were very easy to handle the resulting gold in 0.00000000001g pieces.

<comment><USER4> A store of value must be such over any given timeframe. If the balance in your savings account is worth $100 today, $50 in three months, $150 in six months, and $75 in a year, then it is a terrible store of value -- regardless of whether it's worth $200 two years from now.

Similarly, talking about imagined futures is not a convincing way to defend a currency as a store of value. If you have to posit that your money will still be there iff A, B, and C are true, then you're not going to park your money in that particular stall.

<comment><USER5> I'm not saying people should be putting money into Bitcoin now because they should assume A, B, and C will be true.

What I'm saying is that there's no reason to assume that you won't see Bitcoin's value stabilize e.g. ten years from now, and Bitcoin _become_ a useful store of value from that point forward.

Or, to put it another way, just because the Bitcoin that exists today is a bad store of value, doesn't mean that "Bitcoin is a bad store of value" is an immutable fact about Bitcoin. It could just be a fact about _today_.

<comment><USER4> Well, sure. PHP could also become a nice language to code in. Neither outcome seems likely, given what we've seen in the past.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not really surprising. 2014 was meant to be the year of bitcoin and it flopped as far as the general public was concerned. Bitcoin picked up some more merchants but they almost universally saw disappointing sales or dramatic drop offs(Overstock the poster child which at one point was claiming serious expectations of $15-20m in bitcoin sales ended up with a 5th of the lower end of their claim).

Mining companies are closing left, right, and centre, and bitcoin exchanges are shutting down for more profitable ventures.

I don't think Bitcoin is dead or even close to dead but I'm pretty sure we've seen its peak.

Unlike the previous bubbles this one was in full sight of the general public with constant media coverage. It's gone to $1000 had most people(in western nations) learn about it and respond almost unanimously with 'Meh'.

<comment><USER7> "Was meant to be" amounts to your own view. The software isn't even called 1.0 yet, and the core developers all say the important applications are a couple of years away.

Yes, Bitcoin was probably hurt by the mania surrounding $1000. Had it gone to $180 from $30, without the spike, there would be calls of tulip mania instead.

Is it too early to build applications on top of Bitcoin? No, I don't think so, some wants to be in early. But to call "the year of" on what amounts to beta software and VC backed startups is a bit much.

<comment><USER8> _The software isn 't even called 1.0 yet_

Neither is node.js, yet tons of successful startups run on it.

For years, Gmail was still "beta". If it had a major security leak, "it's beta" would mean little. It would still qualify as a failure.

<comment><USER9> > Neither is node.js, yet tons of successful startups run on it.

It will get them off the ground. Then they will need to start rewriting a backend pipeline in something fast and predictable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> On December 23 a Missouri court ordered a winddown of Butterfly Labs and they began a refund plan.....now here is my theory...I was looking at the blockchain and came across a 5000 btc utxo taken incrementally down to 0....it was sold off continuously. It took me to here. [https://blockchain.info/address/12WRnQR85ZUT7dhmaHBNL5dde2QL...](https://blockchain.info/address/12WRnQR85ZUT7dhmaHBNL5dde2QLYieW6v)

Activity on that address started back up on 12/23 the day the courts provided control again. Ive tied it to butterfly labs because a OP_RETURN said paycoin.com linked to Josh Zerlan an employee of butterflylabs.

What is scary is another 90000 unspent coins reside here also controlled by butterfly labs. [https://blockchain.info/address/1B9KrM7bjhJ42qJSWr1KJrNTAP1S...](https://blockchain.info/address/1B9KrM7bjhJ42qJSWr1KJrNTAP1SNGMpJu)

I think youll have butterfly labs forced to continue to sell the remaining 94000 coins in this court mandated wind down in order to provide refunds to those customers....That is a ton of coins to continuously dump...it exceeds 24 hour volume on the largest exchange.

<comment><USER11> Gee, almost sounds like Butterfly Labs was a scam on top of bitcoin scam. Sell preorders for a money printing machine, build said machine, and sit on it printing money for yourself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Does it really matter ?

Wouldnt it smarter to use bitcoin as a secure way to make payments, but not to keep as a currency ?

For example, if you want to buy something using bitcoins, you just buy the exact amount of bitcoins you need, you make the transaction, and the people who gets the bitcoins just convert it back to dollar.

To escape the fluctuation of the conversion rate, just open a bank that keeps amount in dollar and only do transaction with a corresponding amount of BTC, depending on the conversion rate. It's an easy way to diversify payment alternative, while being pretty safe and avoiding fluctuations of BTC.

I don't see any other way to use bitcoin. It's pretty hairy, but it might be a viable alternative to paypal for example.

<comment><USER13> You incur two sets of transaction fees and bid/offer spreads, so it's quite a pricey way of doing a transaction. And you lose any prospect of getting your money back in the event of a dispute.

<comment><USER12> At least there's more competition possible between people who sell BTC. right now there's only paypal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I mined about 200 BTC in 2011 and I must say, they have changed my live. I still have 150, so during the passed 4 years, while bootstrapping 2 startups, those mere 50 bitcoins I sold have meant that I have been able to keep both companies running. Without those 50 coins, I'm not sure how I would have continued.

But the most important thing was not the value of those 50 coins. Which really isn't that big a deal. It was the knowledge that "I have a buffer, a reserve" and that knowledge has allowed me to make deals in the interest of future growth, instead of short term continuation. I got to decline offers, that I otherwise would have needed to survive.

Now that both companies are making a profit, I have learned how important it is to have a big buffer and I thank Bitcoin for that. I also thank Bitcoin for the financial independence I now have, even though it is an indirect result.

I still watch the markets and hope some other honest hardworking guy out there gets as lucky as I got.

<comment> k-mcgrady This is nothing to do with Bitcoin. You basically won the lottery. Some people mined or bought Bitcoin, it got a lot of media hype so the price sky rocketed, and then your coins were worth a lot of money. If I bought 200 BTC now and waited a few years I doubt I'd have the same experience. I'm happy for you that you got to use that to help you start a business but it was a lottery win.

<comment><USER15> "If I bought 200 BTC now and waited a few years I doubt I'd have the same experience."

Why? This is like the 5th or 6th boom bust cycle in Bitcoin and each boom has been bigger than the last. even the current long price decline is not unprecedented.

<comment><USER16> This is like the 100th boom busy cycle in the stock market and each boom has been bigger than the last. Why not invest in equities?

Because past performance is not an indication of future performance, and because you don't know when the cycles are going to fall. Unless you're willing to lock up that capital whilst waiting for the uptick you're taking a huge risk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The reason could be that Russia started banning bitcoin websites. [https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/russia-blocked-several- bitco...](https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/russia-blocked-several-bitcoin- sites-preperation-russian-bitcoin-ban/)

</comment><comment><USER18> I wonder if this is due to the Bitstamp fiasco.

Because of what ultimately happened to mtgox, when the bitstamp exchange came back online again, a lot of people probably wanted out as quickly as possible, fearing it to be insolvent.

Since keeping bitcoins oneself is too technical, the easiest path to cut ties with bitstamp would be just to sell, and probably many of them did.

</comment><comment><USER19> Low was 152 at Bitstamp, quite a dump [https://bitcoinwisdom.com/markets/bitstamp/btcusd](https://bitcoinwisdom.com/markets/bitstamp/btcusd)

</comment><comment><USER20> It seems that most people still don't fully grasp why bitcoin is valuable or for that matter why fiat or gold are valuable. The best explanation I've seen is actually the series of slide the Winklvoss twins put together (when they were taking a break from creeping everyone out).

[https://winklevosscapital.com/value-investors-congress- prese...](https://winklevosscapital.com/value-investors-congress- presentation/)

<comment><USER21> I was hopeful, but it doesn't explain why gold has value. It just starts with the assumption that it does. I'm afraid that sooner or later folks will realize it's just a shiny metal with little intrinsic value, much more abundant than many elements.

<comment><USER20> It absolutely explains that bitcoin, gold, and fiat all have value because they are strong in various properties of money. Gold is scarce, durable, fungible, portable etc. all to a certain degree. Not much money is history has had 'intrinsic value' so their intrinsic value becomes the properties of ideal money that they posses.

If water was scarce, it would probably make good money. But water is both abundant and not atomic so it can be created.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> From what I can tell, it looks a lot like the oil price collapse. Not that it's directly connected, because BTC holdings are still very low and not really part of any serious investor's portfolio.

But it looks like a lot of people have invested in extraction capacity, and they need to sell to remove their BTC risk. They're buying the mining equipment in dollars after all. And they know that faster and faster chips will come on the market.

On the other side of the equation, demand doesn't seem to have increased quite as much as expected. You still have to go out of your way to find something that you can buy with BTC. Heck, I have a few BTC and I've never used them for anything, and never come across a vendor of something I wanted who wanted BTC for the item. In fact, there are only three categories of people I've met who were interested: nerds, people who wanted drugs, and people who wanted to launder money.

<comment><USER13> Izabella Kaminska of the Financial Times has been following this: [http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2015/01/09/2084052/bitcoins- upcom...](http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2015/01/09/2084052/bitcoins-upcoming- capital-crisis/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's amazing how so many people are concerned about the dollar price of Bitcoin. If you believe in Bitcoin, you want Bitcoin and not dollars.

<comment><USER24> Not trying to be cynical about this, but: You want nice things, not bitcoins and not dollars.

Currently, more market actors accept dollars (or Euros, or JPY, or UKP) than bitcoin, hence you're closer to the things you desire if you have dollar liquidity than if you have bitcoin liquidity.

Investments, on the other hand, should be neither in dollars nor in bitcoins, because dollars have inflation and bitcoin is too volatile.

<comment><USER25> If you truly believe in Bitcoin, you believe that a) there is a good chance that in the future USD, JPY, EU, UKP et al. will be worthless relics, ornaments in a history museum that schoolchildren laugh and joke about and b) that the world would be a massively, massively better place if a) were to eventuate.

Your job is to buy as much Bitcoin as you can as cheaply as possible, cross your fingers and try and do whatever you can to make a) happen, while spending at little of your BTC as possible. You hope to profit immensely but you are also excited for how the world as a whole will profit.

If a) doesn't happen, then you basically have to go back to the drawing board for imagining a way for society to progress and you to make some money.

<comment><USER26> > If you truly believe in Bitcoin, you believe that a) there is a good chance > that in the future USD, JPY, EU, UKP et al. will be worthless relics

"believe"? You sound like a cult member. There is 0% chance that the world currencies will disappear anytime soon. If it did, bitcoins would be worth nothing anyways.

> will be worthless relics, ornaments in a history museum that schoolchildren > laugh and joke

I think you are describing bitcoins...

The pathetic desperation of bitcoin fanatics like you is laughable. It's like listening to a retarded islamist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Are oil and bitcoin becoming less valuable? Or is the value of the measuring stick, the dollar, changing?

If you measured how tall your kid is every day and he's 5'1" one day and 4'8" the next and 6'1" the day after that, there just might be a measurement problem.

For whatever reason, the end of quantitative easing or whatever, the dollar is getting stronger.

<comment><USER28> The dollar began running right around July 1st (the effect of the Fed shutting down QE):

[http://finviz.com/futures_charts.ashx?t=DX](http://finviz.com/futures_charts.ashx?t=DX)

Oil began falling at the same time:

[http://finviz.com/futures_charts.ashx?t=CL](http://finviz.com/futures_charts.ashx?t=CL)

And bitcoin also began the current downturn about the same time. I'd be very reluctant to link the dollar's increase with any of the decrease in bitcoin, even though it's an interesting discussion point, with some money potentially flowing out of bitcoin and into dollars (since it's gaining value, and likely to gain more if the Fed proceeds to raise interest rates this year).

That said, gold on the other hand has not taken a beating since July 1st despite the dollar's significant move:

[http://finviz.com/futures_charts.ashx?t=GC](http://finviz.com/futures_charts.ashx?t=GC)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> If people actually started using it as a currency instead of only using it to trade for other currencies, it would be more stable.

<comment><USER30> They do: [http://blog.bitpay.com/2013/12/11/bitpay- exceeds-100-000-000...](http://blog.bitpay.com/2013/12/11/bitpay- exceeds-100-000-000-in-bitcoin-transactions-processed.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> People might want to ask the question why the Bitcoin price goes down so much. One reason might be that keeping up network security is too expensive with Bitcoin (proof of work) and the miners have to sell their bitcoins to cover their electricity costs. Now if there is not enough demand for bitcoins then the price declines since miners continuously have to sell to cover costs. This also has been laid out here [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-TLA3j-ic4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-TLA3j-ic4) As the guy in the video points out there is not only one way realize blockchain technology and proof of work surely is not the least expensive. Proof of stake systems mitigate the "high cost for network security problem". I suspect that one or more proof of stake systems will be part of the next round of innovation (and the next bubble) based on blockchain technology.

<comment><USER32> POW's waste has always disturbed me. If BTC was inherited as the global store of value it would just help destroy with planet with the emissions required for security.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> So I can't find anything in the comments: what's the cause for this sudden crash?

<comment><USER34> I think the most likely scenario is the Butterfly Labs theory;

[http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2sdwf8/butterfly_la...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2sdwf8/butterfly_labs_is_the_culprit/)

Basically, BFL pre-sold a ton of miners to people, never actually sent them, mined a ton of bitcoin 'testing' them and were then sued when they refused refunds. The FTC got involved and told them to send customers their money so at some point, BFL has to liquidate a large number of coins to meet those obligations.

People have tracked large portions of the sell pressure to known BFL wallets and the rest of the downward pressure is probably just follow-on selling continuing the yearly trend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> If you truly believe in Bitcoin, this is just one more insignificant blip on a path, driven by inexorable network effects, that leads to Bitcoin becoming the sole world currency and savings commodity, leaving the fiat currency milieu of 2014 in the dustbin of monetary evolution. A chance to buy at a relative discount and nothing more.

<comment><USER11> are you talking about Beanie Babies?

<comment><USER25> No, I'm talking about something which has the potential to be _the_ world currency.

<comment><USER35> dogecoin?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Could be something as simple as a russian margin call... commodities in general are having a rough time.

</comment><comment><USER37> Bitcoin is the currency of future. It looks promising but to change people's mindset and to get accepted widely, it will take some more time. We just need to be patient and believe in this future currency.

</comment><comment><USER38> Oil price has also fallen over 80% during 2014 but I guess it's more fun to talk about a "crashed" technology in here.

<comment><USER39> The oil price fell closer to 50% than 80% in 2014: WTI went from $110 to $53.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Which will most likely immediately follow people buying at low and preparing to pump again.

</comment><comment><USER5> Huh. Does this have anything to do with the 1.25-hour mining gap that occurred on Monday?

<comment><USER41> No. It's all speculation.

<comment><USER42> The majority of bitcoin transactions are speculation. If you ever purchased or sold bitcoin because you expected a price appreciation/depreciation, you were speculating.

There was a very small percentage of the market using it to buy online goods that wasn't speculating, but it's small representation is the reason the price is so unstable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Great, time to buy!

</comment><comment><USER44> its not about bitcoin, its about the blockchain.

</comment><comment><USER45> Went to purchase $100 worth of Bitcoin back in the day at $0.03 ea. CC didn't go through. Thought I would try again the next morning with a different card. After sleeping on it, decided it was probably a waste of $100.

I'm even less inclined to spend $100 now.

<comment><USER46> Cool story bro,

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> 1\. Thought it was a scam. 2\. looked into it and realized I was wrong. 3\. Looked into building a mining rig. 4\. Worrried about ROI, after energy and hardware. 5\. Seems like everyone was mining. 6\. Knew I competed with entities with deep pockets. 7\. T.V. news started to treat bitcoins like gold quotes. 8\. Started seeing bitcoins accepted here. 9\. Wish I didn't procrastinate years ago. 10\. Glad I didn't invest in bitcoins. 11\. I wish it well though. Anything is better that credit card transactions--with their fees. It is still a great idea, and I hope this is just a market fluctuation!

<comment><USER47> Read past the first sentence? Or, was the problem TLDR? "One of the days Alice, POW. Straight to Control-Delete!" I was praising the blessed Bitcoins?

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Cue the standard HN bitcoin thread with everyone explaining why it is dead, why it could never work and why everyone involved with it is a scam or stupid anyway...

</comment><comment><USER49> bitcoin is dead. long live the bitcoin!

</comment><comment><USER50> Time to get more cheap coins

</comment><comment><USER51> bitcoin, just like oil have dropped because energy will be cheap / nearly free soon.

<comment><USER52> Explain?

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Meh.

</comment><comment><USER54> If you see the trend, it is definitely sinking...</comment>


The Speed Camera Lottery - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcaKocRXCB4

<comment><USER2> Also known as "lining up incentives". That is, "not getting punished" is a weak incentive (especially when the odds are so low). "Maybe winning money" is a much stronger incentive (even when the odds are low). "Fun" is nice but I bet it would have very little to do with the success of this idea.

Relatedly, I've wondered why pro-follow-the-speed-limit types don't spend more time reminding people about the benefits in terms of gas mileage. On most cars you get better fuel efficiency at 65mph than 70 and still better at 55mph. (Roughly: 100km/h better than 110, and better still at 85.) In days of expensive fuel, it seems like people would/should be receptive to this argument....

<comment><AUTHOR> Not murdering people is another plus!

 _Research suggests that pedestrians struck at 30 mph have about a 1 in 5 chance of being killed. At 20 mph the chance of a pedestrian dying is 1 in 40. In order to improve safety on the streets where we live, we will amend our guidance on speed limits, recommending that highway authorities, over time, introduce 20 mph zones or limits into streets that are primarily residential in nature and which are not part of any major through route. Similarly, we will encourage local authorities to consider introducing 20 mph limits or zones in town or city streets, such as around schools, shops, markets, playgrounds and other areas where pedestrian and cyclist movements are high._

\-- <http://www.howwedrive.com/2009/04/24/a-safer-way/></comment></comment>


An alternative to fat JARs - <AUTHOR> http://product.hubspot.com/blog/the-fault-in-our-jars-why-we-stopped-building-uber-jars <comment><USER2> > We have over 1,000 microservices constantly being built and deployed.

Wait until they find out how much faster in-process function calls are than RPCs.

<comment><USER3> Wait until they realized microservices can be deployed independently and have strict APIs without people using classes they shouldn't or creating spaghetti code because they have 800k LOC.

<comment><USER4> > without people using classes they shouldn't or creating spaghetti code > because they have 800k LOC.

Honestly, if you can't trust your devs not to make a mess in a monolith, you can't trust them not to make a distributed mess with microservices.

Both architectural patterns have their uses. Neither will save you from bad developers.

<comment><USER3> I think monoliths lend themselves to hacks more often than microservices do. It's too easy to just import something you shouldn't, where as breaking the rest API is a lot harder. You can't just do a bad database access because there's usually a network firewall that will keep you from doing your tomfoolery on the DB.

I also could be wrong about this, but I like the microservice after projects reach a certain size.

<comment><USER5> The problem with API is that is not an easy to create a good one. It's so easy to do it wrong, and once you do, it's very hard to change it later. API should be created pretty much by a committee where everyone from the company can have an input how it will affect them.

It's not a panacea, it looks like you're just pushing the complexity into another place.

<comment><USER3> At least with an API, people seem to care more about consensus and seem to agree that it should be planned out. "Just make it work" seems to happen to the guts.

And no, not panacea, just a way of thinking that I think is useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Everyone uses fat JARs because it removes a lot of things that can go wrong operationally (especially when standing up new servers).

The approach described in this article is the way Java was designed to work; but then everyone said you needed a "self-executing" service binary for portability. Enter the fat JAR, containers, orchestration layers, etc.

JVM application servers are certainly the way to go if you run a bunch of Java. But then you're committing to maintaining a bunch of dependencies on your application servers, so really you're pushing the tech debt down the line to your ops folks who now have to ensure dependencies are synced, maven servers running and updated properly, proxies punched for new external dependencies, etc.

</comment><comment><USER7> Cool! We've been doing something similar with public Maven repositories as the backing store.

Jonathan: if you're listening, have you guys looked at Maven as a source instead of an S3 upload? What percentage of your dependencies are internal vs. external? We get 10-20x space savings from public-Maven-only elision.

EDIT: we've been working on a similar technique for executable JARs as well, which shares the same general optimization numbers and approach. It's a bit trickier, since we want to preserve the same 'java -jar' syntax, so requires a bit of classloader tomfoolery, and corresponding classloader awareness in code.

<comment><USER8> I would recommend against depending on public repositories (of any form) as a backing store for repeatable builds. We've repeatedly seen public repositories remove packages, disappear entirely or otherwise make third party projects a release depends on unavailable. If bringing up a production service requires the presence of Maven, it will suffer an outage.

Treat any open source project your product depends on the same way you would anything you paid cash for - store a copy in your code repository and back it up with the rest of your source code.

<comment><USER9> You can run Nexus or Archiva or some other Maven artifact mirror within your network to get the best of both worlds -- maven builds and none of your stuff will break if central is down.

<comment><USER8> Since those are proxy caches, they don't provide repeatable builds. The referred to release can be changed without your knowledge and Nexus will happily serve that to you as correct.

<comment><USER9> I don't follow. I shouldn't have mentioned Nexus as I'm a lot more familiar with Archiva. But,

\- if the release of the same version was changed upstream, and you want this change to be picked up, that's not a repeatable build anyway.

\- if the release was changed upstream and you don't want to pick it up, configure Archiva to fail on checksum mismatch [1].

\- or as an alternative to enforcing the checksum, configure your local repo as internal instead of proxied, and handle it all yourself [2].

[1] [https://archiva.apache.org/docs/2.2.1/adminguide/proxy- conne...](https://archiva.apache.org/docs/2.2.1/adminguide/proxy- connectors.html)

[2] [https://archiva.apache.org/docs/2.2.1/adminguide/repositorie...](https://archiva.apache.org/docs/2.2.1/adminguide/repositories.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Back in the day , used to have all common dependency jars in server/lib folder and only deploy slim application war to the server . Reminds me of this

<comment><USER11> What was the process for adding or removing a dependency? Changing a version? If two apps needed different versions?

<comment><USER9> You added the dependency to server/lib. You standardized on versions, and applied only security fixes, testing them in a separate environment first. You only upgraded versions of libs if you had a critical feature you couldn't live without, of if your existing libs were about to be deprecated and out-of- support.

I'm not saying it wasn't a dark time, but it had its merits and drawbacks just like everything else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I did my first fat jar project in 2010 with embedded jersey and it was about 10mb. We use dropwizard now and most of our microservices sit at around 20mb which I think is still slim enough to avoid the extra overhead of managing the dependencies on deployment. IMHO Its hard to overstate how much benefit you get from java -jar

<comment><USER13> You can have both. Capsule.io (I'm a developer) gives you the option of either embedding all dependencies in the JAR (including native libraries, if you need them), or just listing Maven dependencies and having them downloaded, cached, and shared on the first launch. It also lets you supply all the JVM flags directly in the JAR manifest.

<comment><USER12> I'll have to check it out, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> First thought (to the article title "Why we stopped building fatjars") was that the build person had "graduated" and took their newly "acquired superpowers elsewhere" [0]

Joking aside, fantastic idea =)

Have you received a cease and desist from SlimFast yet for violating their trademark?

[0] - [http://fortune.com/disrupted-excerpt-hubspot-startup-dan- lyo...](http://fortune.com/disrupted-excerpt-hubspot-startup-dan-lyons/)

<comment><USER15> Don't believe everything you read -- especially when there's a single source.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This sounds pretty sensible. I wonder if there's a simple way to reproduce it. Maybe:

      I. Build your app as a thin JAR, with:
        a. a Main-Class entry in the manifest
        b. Class-Path entries in the manifest
        c. a file containing a list of dependency coordinates (group, artifact, version) in META-INF
      II. Write a shell script (for whatever value of 'shell' you like) which:
        1. takes a Maven repo URL and a Maven coordinate (group, artifact, version)
        2. downloads the JAR from the repo, extracts its dependency list, then pulls its dependencies too
        3. (optionally) somehow records which JAR is the main one, say by writing a tiny shell script or a symlink pointing at it

You might be able to use a standard embedded POM instead of a dependency list, which might reduce the work a bit, but that would then require doing transitive dependency resolution at deploy time, which is probably a bad idea.

Phase I is something like 10 - 20 lines of Gradle, tops. You could pack it up into a plugin easily enough. Phase II is a similar amount of shell script, maybe more.

For extra safety, add SHA3 hashes to the dependency list file, and check them when you download the dependencies.

I've described this as using a Maven repo, but that doesn't mean it has to hit Nexus or whatever; you can just put JARs in S3 in the right layout. A while ago, i was doing this by maintaining a repository locally, and just pushing the whole thing to a Bitbucket website:

[https://bitbucket.org/twic/twic.bitbucket.org/src/14ac48d4c4...](https://bitbucket.org/twic/twic.bitbucket.org/src/14ac48d4c4a9/repository/?at=default)

You could do something similar, perhaps going from Nexus to S3.

<comment><USER11> This similar to our setup with the slimfast-plugin. We use the maven-jar- plugin to add the Main-Class and Class-Path entries to the manifest. At build time, we use the upload goal of the slimfast-plugin to upload the dependencies. It automatically reads the configuration of the maven-jar-plugin to make sure the paths it generates match the classpath in the manifest. Then it spits out a JSON file that has info on each dependency, including its location in S3, file size, checksum, and relative path where it needs to be copied to match the Class-Path in the manifest (the JSON entries look like this [https://gist.github.com/jhaber/3029dc55a568f0954b1c4b459657e...](https://gist.github.com/jhaber/3029dc55a568f0954b1c4b459657e1bc)).

On deploy, the simplest way to get up and running is to use the download goal of the slimfast-plugin. It reads this JSON file, downloads each dependency (using an optional cache folder), verifies the file size and checksum, and copies it to the correct relative path. The application will then start up happily with java -jar.

At HubSpot, we instead integrated this download step more transparently into our deploy process. At build time we read this JSON file and store the dependency information in our build database. Our deploy infrastructure already accepts S3 URLs and handles downloading, caching, verifying checksums, and copying to arbitrary directories so we just piggybacked on this existing functionality to have it download the application plus all of its dependencies for us.

<comment><USER16> Here's my very rough attempt in Gradle:

[https://bitbucket.org/twic/ensure](https://bitbucket.org/twic/ensure)

Turned out to be more than 20 lines, but then i did it in Java rather than Groovy.

I do the downloads from the Maven repo (which should be your internal Maven repo!), so there's no need for an upload step. Deployment is done with a shell script with a few undemanding dependencies - unzip, curl, and openssl to verify the digests. I use a TSV file rather than JSON because it's easier for the shell script to read!

My next trick will be to figure out how to get this into a Cloud Foundry buildpack ...

Oh, the name: [https://ensure.com/nutrition- products](https://ensure.com/nutrition-products)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Here is something I mentioned on the reddit post:

You can go just as far with [http://www.capsule.io/](http://www.capsule.io/) and the capulet to import dependencies with Maven (from a Nexus proxy that also fronts S3)

You are now deploying thin Jars and having the artifacts cached on the local host through maven~!

</comment><comment><USER18> It's neat. But is it worth it? I thought inbound for S3 was free so the 150 Mb doesn't cost much. You're paying $0.25 a month to store up to a gig of fat jars so really nkthing. It's 20-ish seconds faster. Assuming a CI build, that doesn't matter. It is a more complex solution. This makes it more brittle. Which makes it more bad. Finally you're losing the single deployable. When something goes bad, you can't just download the jar. You have to fish through the maven dependencies.

<comment><USER19> > _It 's neat. But is it worth it?_

Saving traffic is good in general, insofar as it speeds deploys and allows higher container density.

But for me the key was trying to get out of dependency hell. The shade plugin isn't perfect.

I work at Pivotal, we inherited the Spring team from VMWare. When I first saw Spring Boot I wondered what all the fuss was about. Then I worked with a classic Spring-with-hand-rolled-Maven app and oh boy, let me tell you, _I got it_.

Having someone else level the dependencies for you? Huge. I'd be interest if this tool can help Spring Boot too, though the runtime downloading of dependencies is not without problems.

<comment><USER11> Agreed, we might not have done it if we had to resort to having the application download its own dependencies at startup. In our case, our Mesos scheduler, Singularity, handles S3 artifacts at deploy time for us. Previously we gave it a single S3 URL for the fat JAR, but now we just give it a list of artifacts (the app plus its dependencies) and it handles everything for us so it's not much more complexity and ended up being really easy to integrate into our deploy process. By the time the app starts up, all of its dependencies are guaranteed to be present (if an S3 download failed, the deploy would have failed) so it's totally transparent to the application.

<comment><USER19> That makes sense.

I'm used to having to worry about disconnected environments (I worked on Cloud Foundry buildpacks for a while), for which Spring Boot's JARs work a treat.

In a fully connected environment this approach looks promising. If I bump into any of the Spring folks I will mention it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> To deploy a process in my current project, I use Apache Ivy to resolve its dependencies (starting from a small set of top-level modules). Then I cache the results because Ivy resolution tends to take a while when you have a lot of dependencies and a lot of repositories.

Then I send a message to a remote agent with the command to run (classpath, main class, jvm args, args, configuration, etc). The agent then downloads the jars that are not already present in its cache with a valid SHA-1 checksum then starts.

Works quite well.

</comment><comment><USER21> Sounds like an interesting idea. I would be even more excited to see someone leverage Gradle for this. Assuming you publish your custom jar artifacts from your build server, your "deployment artifact" could be a single Gradle file that acts a your JAR dependency definition and execution wrapper. For deployment, sync the Gradle file and execute the wrapper to launch the service with Gradle handling all dependency updates and caching.

</comment><comment><USER22> Reinventing OSGi configurations.

<comment><USER23> We're using ServiceMix as a container for services (micro or otherwise) and while OSGI isn't without its own annoyances, it really is nice once you get everything working.

The biggest problem I've found so far is simply 3rd party dependencies that aren't packaged with OSGI manifest information. Recently I specifically had an issue with Spring in this regard (yeah, yeah, don't use Spring, I know... but there was a specific reason in that case, at least initially) that would have been easy to resolve if the Spring guys still distributed OSGI'ified versions of their jars.

Still, all in all, I'm pretty happy with this approach.

<comment><USER22> > The biggest problem I've found so far is simply 3rd party dependencies that > aren't packaged with OSGI manifest information.

It's a mess, and I fear Java 9/10's modularization approach will even make it worse (so that instead of P2 (Eclipse's Equinox' OSGi bundles) and Maven, we'll have another set ... sigh. I'm still looking for a solution that transparently translates Maven metainformation to OSGi bundle information at some higher level (for example by hooking into the OSGi container's dependency resolution logic).

Edit: apparently, such a mechanism exists (ResolverHook)

<comment><USER12> isn't that exactly what wrap is for?

<comment><USER23> That has mostly worked well for me when dealing with non-OSGI jars. Once I figured out how to set things up using the features.xml file and specify wrap: for the generic jars, things worked nicely.

All of this said, I'm fairly new to OSGI, so I may still run into some dark corners that will turn me off. But right now, it seems to be serving the purpose well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It doesn't use S3, but you can do something similar with Coursier:

[https://github.com/alexarchambault/coursier#launch](https://github.com/alexarchambault/coursier#launch)

</comment><comment><USER25> On limited information, this sounds like a work around on a root problem of runaway dependencies.

Maybe something like proguard could reduce deployable jar size to only the classes used.

I assume these are daily dev deploys and not production deploys.

<comment><USER11> We definitely have some dependency cruft that could be trimmed (lots of relocated copies of Guava due to incompatibilities, for example).

We do frequent production deploys (of individual services, there's no such thing as deploying our entire application). To give an idea, it's a little before 1pm here and across our team there have been 180 production deploys already today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It's hard for me to understand why in 2016 200MB files are still any kind of real problem.

<comment><USER27> From the article:

 _" Combining 100,000 tiny files into a single archive is slow. Uploading this JAR to S3 at the end of the build is slow. Downloading this JAR at deploy time is slow (and can saturate the network cards on our application servers if we have a lot of concurrent deploys)."_

<comment><USER26> I wasn't being critical of the OPs build process. I agree that uploading 200 MB to S3 is _slow_ , but it shouldn't be.</comment></comment></comment>


How Your Phone Can Keep You from Getting Depressed - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Really? My phone causes depression every time I look at it.</comment>