Pineapple.io: Like reddit for design resources - <AUTHOR> http://pineapple.io/

<comment><USER2> Thanks guys :) I am the creator. I had intended to post this as a show HN but it got popular on reddit and seems to have spread faster than I anticipated,heh. I really appreciate all your feedback and will look into any suggestions. I've heard the white space complaint a few times so I'll be fixing that

</comment><comment><USER3> Reddit also has /r/Design and /r/web_design as well, if you're interested. I think this is nice though, because the spillover from larger reddit hits those places relatively hard - I visit HN for the same reason, so this might be interesting.

<comment><USER4> Both of those are pretty desolate places. They're like some post-apocalyptic world where what passes for good design is just about anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Getting in before the cynics; This is great! You've done a wonderful job. Looking forward to see this evolve.

EDIT: One area for improvement would be contrast. There is a lot of white, making it hard to distinguish between elements.

<comment><USER6> Agree with the contrast issue, definitely need some kind of bg to the rows. Alternating light colors may do the trick?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm curious as to what deficiencies reddit has that made you choose to create a site like this. In other words, what features would reddit need to make you think that reddit solves the problem sufficiently?

<comment><USER2> I didnt come up with that tagline, this was submitted by someone else. But.. for the full answer, see the FAQ (question #2 and #3): <http://pineapple.io/faq>

I apologize in advance for the typos, it was really long programming day when I wrote that part of the FAQ. I just noticed them now.

<comment><USER2> Well, reddit just isn't meant for searching by topic and finding a list of resources. Aside from the obvious thing like it's not focused on news/updates type reading.. it allows you to very quickly find a set of tools. Try googling 'web design tools' and youll see it's kind of a pain. Try finding that on reddit and you may find a few threads on the subject but what if you want it for a specific language?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I quite like it. Had a look at the SEO tag and I was pleasantly surprised that on first look there were some useful articles in there rather than it being stuffed to the gills with spammy links. Same goes for the python tag.

I think the title is a bit wrong. This is more like a better quality tutorials link site to me, rather than Reddit. I was going to say more like HN but then I realised that a big part of HN is the commentary, which this site doesn't appear to have.

<comment><USER2> Thanks! As I mentioned before, I didn't really choose the title. According to the last 50 tweets on twitter however it seems my site has been coined 'the reddit of ___' .. ha. I dont mind though, I appreciate the encouragement from everyone.

Theres actually comments and discussion but I think it's in it's early stages still as far as finding it's flow as far as commenting, userbase, etc.

We also rule the site with an iron first for quality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nice work. A really great idea, I'm working on something similar for musicians though. Nice niche you've picked, I hope it all works out for you. As someone else has already pointed out, you need to fix that contrast my eyes find it hard to focus between text and backgrounds besides that I would definitely use this.

<comment><USER2> A lot of people have recommended this but I'm not sure the best way to really go about doing this... do you have any ideas?

<comment><USER9> While I am not a fully-fledged designer I would experiment with changing the background colour to an off-white, something like: #EFEFEF - you'll notice if you do that then things are easier to read immediately because content is being separated into its respected sections.

The white you have around each submission is fine, changing the background colour seems to make it easier (at least for me) to read the site. There are probably other ways, but this is the first immediate thing I can recommend.

<comment><USER2> Thank you very much.. this is definitely something I will tweak simply due to the amount of people requesting it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For a community based around design I'm surprised the thumbnails are as small as they are. I like the idea though.

<comment><USER11> I agree. Making the thumbnails larger would be a big improvement. Also for me personally, the page looks slightly cluttered. There's so many little details. (I do like the logo mouseover though.)

<comment><USER2> What specifically looks cluttered? I'll look at removing some things. I've heard the same feedback elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I love the branding. Regarding the limit on creating new tags when submitting, while the site is new I think you should lift that restriction. I wanted to add a new tag ("cheat sheets", seems like a common one).

<comment><USER2> I have gone ahead and added the tag for you. I wanted to basically force people to add to what I have instead of using tags that already exist but they didnt know what to search for. If you tell me what resource it is that you wanted that tag I will edit it (this feature to let users edit their own post is in the works, ive already coded it i just need to run some tests for bugs, and ill push it out)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I like the idea and plan to make it my home page, but there is lot of coding nerdliness that doesn't exactly fit with design.

Are you just trying to fill it out for now and as it gets busier, narrow the focus?

<comment><USER2> It's actually for both designers and developers, not just designers. But perhaps you could add a few default tags you like, "web design" for instance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Handy. Thanks :)

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm working on something similar at the moment. Looks great!

</comment><comment><USER16> 70% vim Related stuff</comment>


Bat-Killing Wind Turbines Outfitted with Systems to Stop Carnage - lil-scamp https://news.duke-energy.com/releases/duke-energy-renewables-to-use-new-technology-to-help-protect-bats-at-its-wind-sites <comment><AUTHOR> This is a very short article with an absolute dearth of information and an extremely misleading and baiting headline. If someone is willing to do the legwork to locate some real information these projects, this technology, and what Duke is doing I'd really appreciate it, but this article in particular is far too low quality to justify its position on the front of this site as is.

Wind turbines can and do kill bats. We (as an industry) unfortunately learned this in the wrong way initially, when we sited and built wind projects without doing the study and siting work that what we should have done. But now when we site projects and machines now we try to do things right. For projects that pose risk to bats that involves wildlife studies from third party experts that include evaluation of bat habitat, identifying bat hibernacula, performing mist netting and bat habitation studies to identify actual species presence, and where needed incorporating turbine curtailment approaches to reduce bat take. We consult with the US Fish & Wildlife Service as well. The approach for birds of concern is similar, but mitigation approaches vary by species.

Note: I am not a bat or wildlife expert myself. But I work with these firms during project development, and I support the technical side of consultations with FWS, and so on.

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's the actual press release from Duke. It has a little more information on the technology, though it's still not super detailed.

[https://news.duke-energy.com/releases/duke-energy- renewables...](https://news.duke-energy.com/releases/duke-energy-renewables- to-use-new-technology-to-help-protect-bats-at-its-wind-sites)

<comment><USER2> Ok, we've changed the URL to that from [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-26/bat- killi...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-26/bat-killing-wind- turbines-outfitted-with-systems-to-stop-carnage) in a small gesture against information dearth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This article is surprisingly short. How many bats are being killed? Are birds having similar issues? Will it help them too? Come on, Bloomberg.

<comment><USER4> [https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-are-bats-affected-wind- turbine...](https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-are-bats-affected-wind-turbines)

They're pretty deadly, and it's not collisions that kill them. It's the pressure differential caused by them. It's too hard on their lungs and makes them rupture. It's less deadly to birds in that way, their respiratory system tends to be sturdier.

<comment><USER5> That is kind of ironic - even knowing that durability isn't monolithic and based off of different things. Birds known for coal mine canaries have the more durable lungs.

<comment><USER6> Indeed! Birds in general have infamously sensitive lungs, apparently because their respiratory system is a one-way loop instead of an in-and-out piston. They can exhale one breath at the same time that another is passing through the lungs. It's amazingly efficient, serving the high oxygen and cooling needs of active flight, but it's far more susceptible to airborne pollutants of all kinds.

But, apparently, sensitivity to pollutants is unrelated to sensitivity to pressure.

Biology is fascinating.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> [https://www.windpowerengineering.com/business-news- projects/...](https://www.windpowerengineering.com/business-news- projects/duke-energy-to-install-nrg-systems-bat-deterrent-system-at-its-wind- farms/)

</comment><comment><USER8> Not dismissing the danger to bats in general, as they do provide more good services to nature than bad, but let's not forget, that in numbers, bats comprise more than 1/4 of all mammals. Losing a few, while likely (hopefully) preventable, is not a real dent in their population like it would be with eagles or other birds with smaller populations.

<comment><USER9> >is not a real dent in their population

In aggregate, sure, but is there an acute local impact that is more serious?

<comment><USER8> Bats are the single best resource for keeping the populations of bad insects down. Some places have actually imported bats for this reason.

<comment><USER10> I second this. I have a bat that lives in my roof (yeah, that will eventually be a problem) and eats its body weight in mosquitoes and moths every day. A neighbors bat tested positive for rabies and that is my only real concern. I keep an eye on mine. The species in my neck of the woods lives about 15 years. That's 15 years of free pest control.

<comment><USER8> Some people have actually gone so far as to have an outside wall taken out, a bat house installed (prevents ingress into the house at large) and then sealed up save the small bat entrance. They enter, hang, sleep, exit. There is a tray that can be slid out, washed, and re-inserted. This is not for the faint of heart, as the potential for exposure to rabies and other toxic goo is high, but some do it nonetheless.

<comment><USER10> I am actually considering something like that. At some point, I need to strip my home down to the studs regardless. I might just have a box on a lever-pole that allows lowering and cleaning.

Being attached directly to the house means that each time a new pup is born and hits the teenage years, it has to learn it doesn't have dominion and eventually stops complaining when I make noise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> [https://www.nrgsystems.com/products/bat-deterrent- systems](https://www.nrgsystems.com/products/bat-deterrent-systems)

Without giving much detail, I was associated with this project in one of the companies involved with recent testing. It was an interesting project, for sure.

</comment><comment><USER11> Wow. This thread is full of anti-nuclear fudd. An amazingly powerful two sentence Bloomberg blurb!

Generation 3 nuclear is on the way, with bipartisan support. Dozens of startups are working on generation 4 and on nuclear fusion. Is ycombinator involved in any?

</comment><comment><USER12> sort of interesting and related:

Moths can jam Bat "radar"

[https://steveblank.com/2009/03/23/if-i-told- you-i%E2%80%99d-...](https://steveblank.com/2009/03/23/if-i-told- you-i%E2%80%99d-have-to-kill-you-the-story-behind-the-secret-history-of- silicon-valley/)

</comment><comment><USER13> I like that an article about using ultrasonics to deter bats includes the button "listen to this article".

</comment><comment><USER14> Robin, hand me the bat-deterrent bat-spray!

</comment><comment><USER15> Wind farms provide unstable power to the system; therefore from basic electric power systems theory(college level), you need to have a base station(coal or nuclear or gas) to provide stability to the system. Germany has not shut down any coal powered factory but they export any excess energy to nearby countries. Wind farms went up just for the investors sake and because of the "let's save the planet" fad. Look at your bill. If you did not provide subsidy to them through your bloated bill, the "investors" could not build wind farms. It is not economical, plus, you destroy the microclimate on mountain ridges where you put the wind farms. It's just another way to shaft the public

Check out these posts:

[https://www.energieverite.com/post/lancement-du- collectif-%C...](https://www.energieverite.com/post/lancement-du- collectif-%C3%A9nergie-v%C3%A9rit%C3%A9)

Are renewables affecting income distribution and increasing the risk of household poverty? [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BF1kms5myPTky4yWopKNGNHDLEQ...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BF1kms5myPTky4yWopKNGNHDLEQWNXMT/view)

<comment><USER15> Also the following is in German: [https://www.tichyseinblick.de/wirtschaft/hans-werner-sinn- ve...](https://www.tichyseinblick.de/wirtschaft/hans-werner-sinn- vernichtendes-urteil-ueber-energiewende/)

Professor([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans- Werner_Sinn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Werner_Sinn)) says that moving to renewables will never work. Period

<comment> shaki-dora Some German has-been who is spending his retirement drifting off into right- wing populism isn't going to convince anybody.

<comment><USER16> I'd like that to be true, but these people are very much influencing those that want their statements to be true (so they don't need change anything).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Big Renewable Lie ( Doc by Michael Moore) - <AUTHOR> https://youtu.be/Zk11vI-7czE <comment><USER2> This is actually _Planet of the Humans_ , which has been roundly criticised - and I would say fairly so - in many places. See previous posts such as:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23017344](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23017344)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22983743](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22983743)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23031911](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23031911)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> this doc illustrates the enormous realities of energy challenges with sober clarity by Jancovici [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wGt4XwBbCvA&feature=share](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wGt4XwBbCvA&feature=share)</comment>


Scale of the universe (flash) - <AUTHOR> http://primaxstudio.com/stuff/scale_of_universe.swf

<comment><USER3> The knowledge that these orders of magnitude exist is one of the great gifts of science to humankind.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is like the modern _Powers of Ten_ (<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Z53wTtGGA0>)

Beautifully done.

<comment><USER5> This animation and that video always make me pause and contemplate the significance of the little websites I work on and their role in the universe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Check out the size of the giant earthworm. 7 meters. Yeesh.

<comment><USER7> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microchaetus_rappi>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Love, love, love this.

Was surprised (which only shows my ignorance) of the sizes of some stars, compared to 1 AU.

Also - how is the estimation of the size of the universe (not the /observable/ universe) done?

<comment><USER9> I would imagine it's done using some kind of estimate of the known current rate of expansion and assuming some kind of model for the rate of acceleration.

<comment><USER10> I thought that if the universe is "open" then it is only the visible universe that is finite, and the rest is actually infinite. i.e. there's stars "all the way" it's just that we can only see stuff 14 billion light years away.

Another point: in one part it says "we are probably not at the center" - <USER2> thought the notion of a "center of the universe" was meaningless in the same sense that any point on a sphere is not "the center" (if the universe is "closed"), and you can't have a "center" of an infinite plane (if the universe is "open").

<comment><USER11> Also he mentions preons, hypothetical particles of which quarks are made, which I believe is an idea mostly done away with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I see something like this every now and again, but this has to be the best in a while for giving the sense of scale. Its a shame the information on the lower scales contains guesswork like preons and strings.

</comment><comment><USER13> Very nice! Everyone should show this to their kids as soon as they can grasp it.

</comment><comment><USER14> Makes you wonder how people can have the gall to suggest that humans have any sort of purpose.</comment>


Professor Frisby Introduces Composable Functional JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://egghead.io/lessons/javascript-refactoring-imperative-code-to-a-single-composed-expression-using-box/ <comment><AUTHOR> See also the Reddit discussion:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/5hfq6n/100_minu...](https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/5hfq6n/100_minutes_of_free_functional_programming/),

Examples from the course:

[https://github.com/dmitriz/functional- examples](https://github.com/dmitriz/functional-examples),

and the wonderful e-book "Professor Frisby's Mostly Adequate Guide to Functional Programming" by the same author:

[https://drboolean.gitbooks.io/mostly-adequate- guide/content/](https://drboolean.gitbooks.io/mostly-adequate-guide/content/)</comment>


Robinhood: $0 commission stock brokerage - <AUTHOR> https://www.robinhood.io <comment><USER2> They appear to charge TAF and other regulatory fees ([https://brokerage- static.s3.amazonaws.com/assets/robinhood/l...](https://brokerage- static.s3.amazonaws.com/assets/robinhood/legal/RHF%20Retail%20Commisions%20and%20Fees%20Schedule%20Rhfv1.2%2020131210.pdf)) -- and based on the fee numbers it looks like they don't have significant volume -- but the website shows "FEES $0" in the app screen. The fees may not seem to be a lot, but saying that fees are zero is a factually incorrect statement.

The fact that they don't list exchange fees seems to suggest that they may end up routing orders to a market maker and collect fees from that (the exchange fees are generally 30 cents per 100-share lots). If so, they should note on the website that they are making money by selling flow

<comment><USER3> > Exchange fees

According to their site, they claim that you'll "buy and sell at the best possible price"; I'm not sure how they are able to make this claim if they cannot route your orders directly to the exchanges.

On their mockup on their site, the orders screen has an "Estimated Price" which is a strange field as typical order types should be either "Limit" or "Market" and should show the bid/ask spread on the current security; so I'm guessing that the best "possible" price is the "market price" and they are doing a combination of

1) Internal matching; orders aren't being routed to exchanges but if are internally matchable, just reconcile the books internally and they collect the bid/ask spread on both side of the trade.

2) Payment for order flow: they route your orders first to Citadel and Timberhill where marketmakers love to take the other side of retail order flow.

3) Internal marketmaking: they'll take the other side of your trades themselves and try to immediately close their negative positions by routing the order to an exchange for rebates and a better price.

<comment><USER4> >Internal matching; orders aren't being routed to exchanges but if are internally matchable, just reconcile the books internally and they collect the bid/ask spread on both side of the trade.

Doesn't that violate national best bid? Also, a lot of retail dumps market orders, so how do you determine the price to match buy-sell pairs at?

<comment><USER3> Well, you are matching the buy and sell order of your internal orderflow at market prices, e.g.,

Retail trader Bob wants to buy 100 shares of MSFT at the market price Retail trader Sue wants to sell 100 shares of MSFT at the market price

NBBO of MSFT is at 36.70/36.72

You fill Bob at 36.72; and you fill Sue at 36.70. So Sue's account is credited with 3670 cash while Bob's account is debited by 3672 cash for the privilege of owning 100 shares of MSFT; while you collect the $2 difference and get RegNMS compliance.

<comment><USER5> I don't think this works for typical retail brokers. There's just not enough volume, except for in a very small handful of the most active stocks. Remember, nowadays people expect execution confirmation in less than 1 second.

Now, on the other hand, if you're Getco, you get to see these orders from every broker in the country. If you can trade against that, you can make money even with a bid/ask spread of $.02.

So if you're Getco, (hypothetically, I have no direct knowledge of them, except that they're big in market making) you can go to the retail broker and offer them price improvement.

E.g. in return for the order flow from that broker, Getco fills them "inside" NBBO. Getco bids 36.7001, Getco asks 36.7199. (I get confirms like that constantly from my retail brokers). Getco also gets rebates from the exchanges for "adding liquidity". I.e. NYSE or NASDAQ pays Getco for certain types of orders. Getco can kick back a portion of those rebates to the brokers.

This type of market making (known as specialists on the NYSE) was wildly profitable up until decimalization about a decade ago. Now there are only a few firms left, because the spreads are tight, so the volume needs to be high in order to make any money.

Plus, one bad day because of a computer error can totally destroy your company. E.g. when Knight Capital Group blew up just one year ago and was subsequently acquired by Getco.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ah, I think I figured it out. Un-informed retail flow is valuable. When I was an options market maker we paid a sweet premium for a particular retail brokerage's flow and still made a killing on it. Robinhood.io would appeal to individuals who value smaller commissions over better execution, i.e. those with limited capital or investing experience. So that gives them one side of their revenues.

But that's not enough - the fixed and variable costs to providing even decent execution are staggering.

I think the second bit, margin lending and API access, might be them selling sheeps' clothes to the wolves. As a sophisticated trader, it may be of value for me to mix my flow with that of unsophisticated retail traders. It's an interesting model and a careful balancing act. As a market maker I would keep a close eye on the information content of their trades and cut them off the moment they started looking too sensible. Compounding the problem would be that the informed traders will tend to dominate the un-informed, in terms of volume.

My alternate hypothesis is they're going to offer commission-free trading in a limited pool of symbols - you should be able to get sufficiently reliable retail flow for, say, AAPL to be able to internally cross most orders.

P.S. Not sure using FINRA affiliation to vouch for your security credentials is compliant

<comment><USER7> Laughing at 'unsophisticated retail traders.'

So, now I'm unsophisticated because I would like to own some individual stocks? You assume the execution is all that matters, but if you are investing in the long-term profitability of a company, then I certainly hope a few hours or even a day doesn't matter. But a $10 commission on a $1000 trade starts you at 1% in the hole.

<comment><USER8> If 1% puts you in the hole for a long-term trade, you better rethink your strategy.

<comment><USER9> 100% minus 1% is 99%. You thus have less than your principal. I.e. in the hole. It's pretty simple.

<comment><USER8> Right, in the hole initially. If you don't crawl out of the hole, you're long- term investment failed either way -- and 1% isn't gonna make or break you, unless you are extremely diversified. If you are extremely diversified, you probably won't be using one of these services anyhow -- you'll be putting in lots of funds to a real platform that gives you rates for large sums of cash.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you want a real brokerage that uses technology to keep costs down, check out Interactive Brokers. ([http://interactivebrokers.com](http://interactivebrokers.com))

With IAB, a small player (5k+ in IRA or 10k+ in normal account) can trade on terms comparable to what a mid-sized fund can get.

When it comes to financial assets, I'd rather pay an established player $1 per trade than a fly-by-night operation $0.

<comment><USER11> I've had experience with IB in a quant fund setting. I was impressed with it. Significantly further ahead of the curve in regards to their API offering compared to other brokerages.

At my last check it was mostly geared towards C++/Java with less than ideal documentation. However there are some good open source wrappers available (Python): [https://github.com/blampe/IbPy](https://github.com/blampe/IbPy)

As stated in the parent comment, the minimum account balance is $10k.

<comment><USER3> Not to mention PDT requirement is $25K and more like $30K if you want to get a good buffer zone. You can also trade it via FIX. They open sourced their API here: [https://github.com/InteractiveBrokers/tws- api](https://github.com/InteractiveBrokers/tws-api)

<comment><USER11> Thanks for the Github link. I hadn't realised they had become open source!

Although (I had a 404), I think it's actually: [https://github.com/InteractiveBrokers/tws-api- public](https://github.com/InteractiveBrokers/tws-api-public)

Indeed the PDT requirement is a pain...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> tl,dr; brokers don't charge commissions because it costs them anything to execute your trade, the fair price for a retail trade is actually less than $0. When you're paying e-trade $10, you're paying for their marketing.

For those wondering why they can offer $0 commission, it's because retail brokers actually _make_ money on every trade you make. When you send your $10 through etrade or some other brokers, they don't actually send your order to the market, they _sell_ it to getco or some other market maker.

The reasons are complex and linked to NMS regulation. In short, there are two types of traders, informed and uninformed. Market makers do not want to trade with informed traders, because they tend to lose money on those trades. However, reg NMS mandates that every one gets the same best bid and offer. So the spreads you'll see on the market reflect conditions where adverse selection is anticipated, which is why it's very profitable to trade at those prices against uninformed flow.

Now why don't brokers offer to pay rebates (less than $0) to customers? Well they're not legally allowed to do that. The SEC regulates the maximum rebate and it's not that big.

So why does Ameritrade for instance will charge you for trades? They don't execute anything after all... Well, they're just the middle men. What you're paying for is their advertising campaign that got you to open an account in the first place.

<comment><USER13> This isn't true. The money gained by selling the trade to market makers is small, and can easily be much less than the commission. The commission is the cost of doing business. Regulatory compliance and information technology ain't free.

Maybe you mean the _marginal_ value of a trade is less than $0, but I'm not convinced that's true ether.

However, AFIAK the rest of the information in this post is accurate.

<comment><USER14> The Tx costs of a trade will probably yield a rebate but they will need to move significant volume to generate enough revenue to cover their other costs. There would be no commission if they sold their flow. The only other way to make money here is to internalize even further and give bad fills or jack up other fees.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "Robin Hood" seems to be a misnomer for this service.

The character Robin Hood stole from the rich to give to the poor. In contrast robinhood.io encourages every-day folks to compete against the elites in the stock market. Which explains why elite capitalists are funding the robinhood.io venture.

If you're not paying for the product, you are the product.

<comment><USER16> > If you're not paying for the product, you are the product.

People have been restating this tedious point for years. Do you really think if you pay a few bucks a month for something like Netflix, they just decide "well we've already got this guy's 7.99, there's really no need to make any use of his data for additional gains".

<comment><USER15> You are pointing out that the converse of my statement isn't necessarily true. I agree with you: if you are paying for something, you might still be a product.

<comment><USER16> The statement itself isn't true from the outset, consider NPOs, OSS, Wikimedia projects... It's just a meaningless cliché.

<comment><USER15> It's a truism, roughly equivalent to "there's no free lunch."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This looks really cool but I couldn't shake that feeling of, "If you're not paying for it, you're the product."

I didn't feel any better about that when I saw that Google was one of their major investors.

Still hoping for the best though.

<comment><USER18> You're the product even if you are paying for it. You don't think for-pay services won't try to make more money or gain more value from the data you're providing them?

<comment><USER17> For-pay services have an incentive not to do something with my data that upsets me enough to leave. Let's say an advertising company offers eTrade 50-cents for info on every trade I make. That's free money for eTrade right up until I, as the client, decide that's intrusive and take my business elsewhere. Now eTrade is out my $10/trade, let alone the 50-cents.

But you don't have that leverage with a free service. To them, (in the long run) making some money at the cost of pissing off their customers is better than making no money at all.

<comment><USER19> Pissing off customers is more of a short-term approach to making money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Your fees is commission + the spread. Will be good if the executions are good, but one cent in spread on 1000 shares is $10 anyway.. Also $50 to close the acct.. what other unusual fees in there?

</comment><comment><USER21> Long time HN member, but as a courtesy to some of my clients, this needs to be on a throwaway account.

Free retail brokerage is something that needs to happen, and I applaud the effort. Brokerages provide a real value add for some services. Offering trading technology, market data, margin, dealing with block trades/portfolio trades, access to OTC, dealing with regulations/back office -- those are real services. Charging me to route an unleveraged, vanilla equity buy order to an exchange and pass the exchange's execution report back to me just because, by convention, exchanges don't want to deal with retail clients directly -- that's just introducing inefficiency and being a middle man.

That said, I don't like the fact that they have a "How We Make Money" section without more extensive disclosure. In my mind, either don't have one (I challenge you to find a single large brokerage that does), or have a more detailed explanation of how the modern brokerage business works. The truth, given the value proposition of free trading, is one that I'm happy to embrace.

I can't say with any certainty what they're actually doing; I can only speak to the industry on the whole, but most retail brokerages make money from:

1\. Retail market making 2\. Netting across client order flow (probably not applicable here) 3\. Asymmetric exchange fees/rebates

The rules on all three are highly country/exchange dependent, but here's an abridged version.

1\. Retail market making involves selling order flow to third parties who are able to execute it at a price better than anything that's currently showing on a lit exchange. I've included more details on this below the fold since a) it helps explain their estimated cost graphic, and b) it's one of the most hyped and misunderstood practices in finance, so people should at least decide how they feel about the practice based on correct information.

2\. Netting comes about when you're dealing with lots of order flow at a bank/brokerage with multiple lines of business. Your clients might be, on average, and across some time horizon, buying and selling roughly the same amount of a security. You can fill your client at market price, taking the inventory down on your own book, or cross it immediately against an existing position. Most countries/exchanges still require you to 1) pay taxes and exchange fees and 2) print the trades on a market venue for disclosure/price discovery purposes, but there's still some benefit to be had as you can avoid market impact (moving the market when transacting a large order), crossing the spread (paying the differential between the buy price and the sell price), and "long sell" short restricted securities (many countries have regulations on short selling, some banning it all together, so having natural long inventory to sell against is valuable).

3\. Asymmetric fees are the most straight forward. Many U.S equity exchanges charge a fee for taking liquidity (crossing the spread) and offer a rebate for posting it (submitting limit orders that don't cross the spread). By charging people this fee when their order does cross the spread and not giving them the rebate when it doesn't there's an easy differential to capture. Also, as noted in their fee structure, they're passing along all regulatory fees to the customer.

It's important to note that no matter what a brokerage does, the net effect is always a price that's better than or equal to what's showing on any public exchange, and what you as a client could get otherwise. In my mind at least, arguing that "I could have gotten a better price on my own if I had access to the same unfair advantages (read: technology/scale)" makes about as much sense as begrudging Google/AWS for buying hardware in bulk, spending billions on data centers that make more efficient use of power and bandwidth, and subsequently undercutting you in a web services platform pricing war. Anyone who wants to come along and usurp the throne is free to spend the money and hire the right people to do so. For me, I'm happy to let my broker engage in these activities if it gets me a better price than I could get for myself otherwise, after fees. I pay Google/AWS/Linode/Heroku to do things cheaper than I could practically speaking do them for myself.

Taking the above points into account, the feasibility of a free or nearly free brokerage (again, note the reg fees) is very real. I'm excited to see how this plays out.

==

Details on retail market making

U.S equities exchanges are highly fragmented compared to those in most other countries. It's common to have a single name trade on several lit venues, and when you count dark pools/other forms of liquidity, that number can easily approach twenty or thirty. As an investor you have a regulatory right to specify how your order gets routed. However, most people just want the best price (this sounds like a truism, but sometimes other considerations outweigh saving a millionth of a cent per share), and access to private dark pools isn't a god given right. There are thousands of pages of regulations regarding order routing, right down to what type of client account it is (is this pension fund money? is this an IRA account?) but the redux is -- you can never fill a client at a price worse than what's being offered on any public exchange.

Enter the retail market maker. For certain types of orders/accounts (back to the thousands of pages of regs...), if the client doesn't explicitly specify an exchange, the order can be routed to a retail market maker. Said market maker can fill the order at a price better than what the market has to offer, or immediately pass it along to the exchange. Surprisingly, they'll actually pay the brokerage for the privilege of doing so. Why would they do that? The name of your game as a market maker is netting. If you have a large, unbiased stream of order flow, statistically speaking you hope to see it balance out with market indices/other correlated equities (hedging) or itself (crossing) over a short time frame. Until it does so you have risk exposure, so from an economics/efficient market standpoint your job as a market maker is to provide liquidity and price risk premium.

These groups have access to good technology and are well integrated with all of the lit venues/dark pools. Their volumes are huge so they get exchange discounts and dark pool fees (as any individual trader who dealt in those volumes would). They also have good credit and large account balances, so their clearing/margin/and funding costs are lower. As such, the brokerage makes money (risk free), the retail market maker might or might not make money (depending on how good they are at their job, and the space is competitive enough that only the good ones are left), and the client gets a better fill price than they would have on the exchange. Ironically the only people hurt by this are the HFT guys who now have highly refined (read, directionally correct over a few second time span) orders hitting the exchange.

<comment><USER22> Agreed. Furthermore this statement:

> _Robinhood is venture-funded by Google, Andreessen Horowitz and many others, > which affords us the freedom to focus on building a wonderful brokerage > experience rather than short-term profits._

...just smells of lock-in. Is "free trades" for perpetuity?

<comment><USER23> Can you explain the types of lock-in that might be faced a little more? I understand that once you hold some stock with them they might introduce fees prior to you selling it, but I'm assuming you have something more in mind.

<comment><USER24> Just general trading restrictions to prevent excessive intraday trading.

I guess that's why there will be a Premium service and an API.

With zero brokerage, you can write bots that make money and abuse the market to no end with very small capital.

<comment><USER25> It's not really that easy. The spread is still not zero and you may still get bad fills if you are slow or if the latency is high enough (assuming that you are taking liquidity).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This made me think about this old Saturday Night Live skit.

[http://screen.yahoo.com/first-citywide-change- bank-2-0000005...](http://screen.yahoo.com/first-citywide-change- bank-2-000000534.html)

"All the time our customers ask us, how do we make money doing this? The answer is simple. Volume."

</comment><comment><USER27> If you're Canadian and looking for an online discount brokerage, I've had good luck with VirtualBrokers ([https://www.virtualbrokers.com/](https://www.virtualbrokers.com/)).

Their website is ugly and old-school, and their online interface - at least the basic one - feels like it's from ten years ago, but it's cheap (and has different pricing plans depending on how you want to trade).

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't think anybody has pointed out this fine print yet:

       $0 trade Commissions are currently only available
       for Robinhood Financial self-directed brokerage
       accounts via mobile devices

Note: only available for ... MOBILE DEVICES

More fine print: only available in CALIFORNIA

</comment><comment><USER28> Some context is appreciated... signup page is pretty sparse on the details. Sounds like they'll charge for API access and margin trading.

[https://www.robinhood.io/faq/](https://www.robinhood.io/faq/)

<comment><USER29> My first thought was "sounds too good to be true, what's the catch?" and sure enough one of the first links is "Learn how we make money." That link goes to the FAQ section where they explain that.

<comment><USER30> They've got a few revenue generating plans:

* charge for API access * provide a margin facility (charge interest on a loan provided to facilitate trading).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> It seems that this project emerged out of the Robinhood iOS application they were previously developing. I spoke to the founder of Robinhood a few months ago, and they looked quite centered around the idea of crowdsourced finance. It's pretty interesting that they've decided to change their product completely, and it seems like a smart decision in the long run.

</comment><comment><USER32> What about options? People who do enough trades where costs start to matter are usually trading options. If you are just adding ETFs to your portfolio every month Schwab already has commission-free ETFs, etc.

</comment><comment><USER33> This is a bad business. Competing on cost against large incumbents without a defensible low cost position in a competitive industry without most target users paying high costs currently (interactivebrokers).

<comment><USER34> how does interactivebrokers compare to this in terms of cost? are there any hidden costs retail investors should be aware of?

<comment><USER33> The fees, listed on the website, are mostly transparent but complex.

You must pay at least $10 in commissions each month or they charge you the difference. Depending on how much you trade this might be a deal breaker. There is also a minimum initial deposit.

Virtualbrokers is another option with more choice of fee structure. I don't think they have a minimum monthly fee but they charge you for data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Seems OK - but is anyone going to trust this? One idea is a low-amount "test" fund to keep around a year or so? Anyone have ideas on how to feel better about actually using this for larger sums of money?

<comment><USER36> [https://plus.google.com/+GoogleVentures/posts/XbTiwbzaL6e](https://plus.google.com/+GoogleVentures/posts/XbTiwbzaL6e)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> From the FAQ it would appear that they are backed by Andreesen Horowitz and Google (Ventures?) amongst others so cash burn may be ok for a while.

Its spot on that High Frequency traders pay nothing beyond regulatory fees (or get money back) to trade as they provide (theoretically) market liquidity. Not sure you can extend that argument to individual investors unless they scale massively, but the technology for trading isn't terribly complex.

One wrinkle is in less liquid names, where their algorithms will likely lag those of larger brokers for a while.

</comment><comment><USER38> [https://www.loyal3.com](https://www.loyal3.com) kinda does the same thing and it's live now. It works with the companies to provide fee-free stock for longish term buy-in. Plus, you don't have to be an institution to grab some IPO fluff. Plus, for non-recurring purchases you can fund with a credit card.

(You can't execute a trade at any given time during the day. You put in "Buy $100 worth of AAPL" and they execute it at the end of the day. Same with sell orders.)

<comment><USER39> Really liking Loyal3. The ability to buy into an IPO at the same price as institutional investors is actually pretty cool. As a data point, IPOs priced in the last couple months closed their first day of trading 34% higher[1] than underwriter pricing.

1\. [http://www.renaissancecapital.com/ipohome/pricings/priced.as...](http://www.renaissancecapital.com/ipohome/pricings/priced.aspx)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I dont have the finra guidelines in front of me, but the statement that they work with finra and imply that doing so means they have solid security seems like a violation.

</comment><comment><USER41> This looks really cool. The first question that comes to mind from the .io tld is does it have API access?

There was a company called Zecco (zecco.com) which also did something similar with zero commissions (hence the name). Not sure if they're still active.

Update: looks like they (zecco) were bought by tradeking.

So from the FAQ Page it looks like they will make money from margin accounts (presumably swap/interest) and also by charging for API access.

<comment><USER38> Why does a .io TLD make you think about API access?

<comment><USER42> "input-output"

<comment><USER38> "indian ocean"

<comment><USER41> That may be where the tld belongs but you'll find a disproportionally large amount of .io sites serving up APIs

<comment><USER43> Huh, go figure. It really took off as the home for artisanal techie websites:

[http://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/artisanal-websites-the- ri...](http://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/artisanal-websites-the-rise-of-io- domains-for-well-crafted-web-services)

(Beattie credits evocative short name, stable British administration, lots of available short and English word domains.)

<comment><USER38> Yup, nothing to do with APIs though.

Another clever new-ish one is .ac, but it's more expensive than the already expensive .io.

<comment><USER44> The Rise of .io Domain Names for APIs: [http://blog.programmableweb.com/2013/08/28/the-rise-of-io- do...](http://blog.programmableweb.com/2013/08/28/the-rise-of-io-domain-names- for-apis/)

.io domains are very popular in a ton of different areas, though!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> As far as I can tell, this is amazing.

One could take trading systems previously designed to operate on large minimum balances of $50,000+ (so as to render the impact of transaction fees negligible) and run that same system on comparatively small account balances, perhaps even as low as $500.

In theory, the percentage returns in both cases should be the nearly same. Obviously a 25% annual return on $500 is a lot less exciting than a 25% return on $50,000. However, the fact it's now possible to even do this (again, as far as I can tell) is exciting.

As other comments have pointed out, trade execution quality may end up being merely average on this platform. But, if your trading system is operating on a sufficiently long time frame, then executions become far less important.

Concerning other comments regarding classification as a Pattern Day Trader and being required to maintain a minimum $25k balance, I believe it only applies to margin accounts. Obviously this means no short selling, but small loss, considering.

</comment><comment><USER46> I recently got into the world of Bitcoin and was really impressed with the ease of acquiring bitcoins and selling them on.

I wish trading stocks was as easy and cheap as this. This is one of the reasons why I'm too nervous to buy invest in the stock market or just put some money in it for fun, the barriers to entry are bafflingly complex.

<comment><USER47> In my experience, the barriers to entry into the bitcoin/cryptocurrency world are much higher than the equities world for lay persons.

<comment><USER46> The main issue for me has always been the fee for a trade and the need to have a minimum balance or whatever

This is often cripplingly high. I mean, if you're just putting £100 on, you'll wave goodbye to £10 for each trade you make. Even if you just buy one stock and sell it one year later that's £20 gone plus any capital gains taxes.

I know the stock market is for people making long term investments with big lump sums, but for people at the bottom, the barrier to entry is too high

<comment><USER48> The incremental minimum for buying the S&P 500 Vanguard fund is $100. Minimum of $1,000 in an account. Cost 0.05% per annum. That's not much of a barrier.

<comment><USER49> That 0.05% is for accounts worth more than $10,000. It's 0.17% otherwise (so still low). Vanguard also charges accounts with less than $10,000 in a fund a $20 service fee (clear information about the availability of the lower cost 'Admiral' shares does not seem to be readily available, but it seems for index funds it may be the case that you have to maintain an account at Vanguard).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Here's a bitcoin/tor "equivalent": [http://torbrokerge7zxgq.onion/](http://torbrokerge7zxgq.onion/) or [http://torbrokerge7zxgq.onion.to/](http://torbrokerge7zxgq.onion.to/)

<comment><USER51> How long must they have let scallion/Shallot. [https://github.com/katmagic/Shallot](https://github.com/katmagic/Shallot) is quoting a 10char prefix on the order of decades for a single machine.

<comment><USER52> It's an interesting question how much added flexibility decreases the time. If you add a letter to the pattern it increases the complexity by a factor of 36 (26 letters, 10 numbers), but if you add an optional letter it actually halves the complexity, because strings are acceptable either with or without the match. If their pattern was torbroke?ra?ge? then based on the time quoted, if it takes 2.5 years for 9 letters, we'd expect only 114 days for 9 letters plus three optional letters. The fact that they only have one letter missing means they probably didn't have much more than 2 optional characters, since you would expect on average half of them not to appear.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Uh is this as cool as it looks?

No minimum balance, $0 commissions. Trading for the normal person.

The name Robin Hood is perfect.

<comment><USER54> For the 'normal' person the barrier isn't commissions and fees, but knowledge.

<comment><USER55> Knowledge isn't a barrier to participation, though it is a factor that affects outcomes.

Commissions, fees, and minimum account sizes can be barriers that prevent participation at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Looks nice. Glad my data is secured by fingerprints, round green thing and square green things.

</comment><comment><USER57> Ain't no such thing as a free lunch folks...

<comment><USER58> Always free cheese in a mousetrap

<comment><USER59> That's my favoring saying, by the way, but is this more expensive to build and maintain than, let's say, Gmail? I doubt that. Also, there are many ways to monetize - I'm sure Google has something better in mind that the simple commission-based approach.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Ok so...

1) How will they afford SIPC coverage? (That is the insurance for your money in case they fail.)

2) Will they do any securities lending with purchased stock?

3) How much will they charge for selling a stock short?

4) Taxable reporting? Do they handle that or is that up to you, the investor?

<comment><USER61> _1) How will they afford SIPC coverage? (That is the insurance for your money in case they fail.)_

I would bet that a good portion of their outside investments would go toward this while they are growing. If they can make enough on their API and margin trading that would cover it long term. I would also bet their margin trades will have a bit higher lending costs than a typical trading platform.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> The enthusiasm for this suggests that there are many people trading frequently enough and making low enough returns that existing discount brokerage fees are significant. Are they doing HFT from home?

<comment><USER63> Perhaps more aspirational than reality. How many of us would love to write a computer program using a stock trading API just to see if we can beat the market? But the up front fees make that expensive to even try.

<comment><USER64> Check out Quantopian, where you can do just that in Python. Backtesting / paper simulation is free.

(disclaimer, I work there)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Really? $10 is too much for a trade? And anyone with any reasonable amount of capital is going to choose them based on this? I don't think so. I certainly wouldn't.

And their going to make money on margin accounts and API access? Anyone sophisticated enough to be trading on margin or paying for API access has enough funds to not care about $10 trading fees. Seriously - on a $10,000 trade, that's a tenth of a percent. You've got to be a hedge fund with millisecond precision to care about that.

<comment><USER66> I'd like to be able to spend <$1k per stock, $10 is a 1% fee on a $1k order, and if you want to sell later and the stock hasn't appreciated in price another $10 = 2% total fees.

$10 each way fee can seriously eat into the EV of people looking to make small orders, and disadvantages this group against the wealthy (who already have a host of other edges!)

I'd like to spend a few hundred on several stocks, but the fee makes this not worth it. Leaves me with the option of don't, or put it all in one stock which isn't a good idea.

<comment><USER65> Exactly my point. If you're buying <$1k in a stock, you're likely not going to be a big source of revenue for margin loans or API access.

So basically, they will attract lots of small, active trading accounts. I don't see the model.

<comment><USER67> If they actually have lower expenses than competitors, they may be competative on margin rates. If that is true, then anyone who manages to make some money trading small amounts and wants to scale up is likely to stick around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> As others have mentioned, other brokerages have tried offering zero-cost or ultra-low-cost trades, only to slowly restrict the number of free trades available and eventually move to charging for all trades. Zecco was the most prominent.

I'll be interested to see if they can find a sustainable business model. I'm on the fence about whether I'm going to open an account. Even if they go under, there's basically zero risk to customer funds, but it is a hassle to do paperwork on another account.

</comment><comment><USER69> Pedantic rabbit trail -- Robin hood reclaimed excessive taxes by force from a tax drunk government and gave it back to it's over taxed citizens.

People seem to forget this often.

<comment><USER70> Not in the mythos I'm familiar with; he robbed anyone who came past who had sufficient money, and redistributed it.

Taxation in the 12th century was also pretty much limited to the landowning few.

<comment><USER69> Yes, but the most prevalent mythos whence these articles come is the bad prince John and his tax happy governance.

King Richard (the Lionheart) gets kidnapped while fighting in the Crusades. Prince John burdens his brother's people with an excruciating tax which John says is for the ransom to set their beloved king free.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> This is another area rip for disruption. Does anyone knows why all these firms such as Fidelity get away with charging dollars on every trade? Is it because exchanges charge these feeds? But then I guess HFT people must be enjoying per trade fees of almost zero. Why they don't have to worry about per trade fees?

To me it looked like each trade is an electronic entry in market and should cost near-zero dollars givens the volume of all trades.

</comment><comment><USER72> $0 commission sounds surely alluring, but what about exchange fees? For some securities, exchange fees are greater than broker commissions.

</comment><comment><USER54> This doesn't have enough features to be valuable to me. I'll gladly pay up to 50 dollars a trade if the features are worth it.

My current broker offers me great execution, trading on a number of international markets, allows me to settle trades and hold a number of different currencies, and good research tools.

At the moment this service seems to be worth exactly what they charge for commissions...

</comment><comment><USER73> I can guarantee that they will lose to Interactive Brokers on price. IB has structural cost advantages in internal matching and zero customer service (possible given the more advanced user base). It's also very very stupid for a retail investor to chose a broker based on fees.

A 10-25bp difference in execution on a $10k+ trade easily covers any commission.

</comment><comment><USER74> I think this landing page design is great. First glance shows:

\- their tagline and what they do "$0 commission stock brokerage"

\- why I should sign up "stop paying $10 for every trade"

\- clear call to action "get early access"

\- giant iPhone graphic gets cutoff and leads you to scroll down

</comment><comment><USER75> Would this be restricted to American investors only?

</comment><comment><USER76> I'd be more worried about quality of execution than $0-10 commission, for reasonably sized (non single share) trades.

</comment><comment><USER77> Robin Hood, $0 fees, pompous venture names - there must be a catch somewhere :) I'm positive HN will find out.

</comment><comment><USER78> The names Awesome. I am LHW..(Laughing in a Healthy Way)

Wish you Super Duper Success :)

</comment><comment><USER79> I read the title as "$0 commision block storage"...

</comment><comment><USER80> Well, they got my email address.

</comment><comment><USER81> Very sweet homepage by the way.

</comment><comment><USER82> No fees baby - it's the future, and it's coming in 2014 to payments as well.

</comment><comment><USER83> Is this US only?

<comment><USER84> [https://brokerage- static.s3.amazonaws.com/assets/robinhood/l...](https://brokerage- static.s3.amazonaws.com/assets/robinhood/legal/RHF%20Jurisdictions%20Rhfv1.1%2020131101.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> looks awesome. an area ripe for disruption.

</comment><comment><USER86> hoping this is not too good to be true.

</comment><comment><USER87> love the design

</comment><comment><USER88> ..that's how we will build our user base and data-sets for ML algorithms and perform beta/stress testing, and, of course, would never announce any fees, we promise.)

</comment><comment><USER89> I just signed up, and I hope it's not just a new way of getting Emails? It seems to good to be true?</comment>


A Visionary Project Aims for Alpha Centauri, a Star 4.37 Light-Years Away - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/13/science/alpha-centauri-breakthrough-starshot-yuri-milner-stephen-hawking.html <comment><USER2> Question: Does anyone understand how propulsion is achieved here? How does the foil sail catching laser light propel something forward?

<comment><USER3> The light transfers some of it's momentum to the sail as it bounces off of it. It works in a vacuum, but there's too much drag to use it in an atmosphere.</comment></comment>


ThinkNear Acquired 7 months into pivot - <AUTHOR> http://www.adexchanger.com/mobile/telenav-owner-of-scout-me-buys-hyperlocal-ad-platform-thinknear/

<comment><AUTHOR> And we are hiring our 6th, 7th, etc. engineers! <http://careers.thinknear.com/></comment>


API Status - <AUTHOR> http://api-status.com/ <comment><USER2> I like this as an example of how you can do savvy marketing via using engineers to build stuff. They're in the monitoring business: all it takes is them sending one guy to snap a few of their own APIs together, put a quick design on it, and buy a $10 domain name. Then release it, promote it a bit, and it gets you incredible marketing returns relative to the amount of effort it took you to put out together.

Doing conversion tracking from the mini-site to the main site so that you can justify with real data that your 4 hours of work actually mattered is also a nice touch. (Check the links.)

</comment><comment><USER3> The history definitely needs some work, since foursquare's API was down for a few hours yesterday and it doesn't reflect that.

Every time it checks, it should keep track if anything is down, and if something was _ever_ down that day, it should reflect that.

Either they're not doing that, or they're not checking anywhere near enough (looks from twitter like foursquare API was down at least 4 hours).

<comment><USER4> If you click through you can get a timeline history that shows when a service was down. Maybe the history on the main page just reflects the status the service was in for the majority of the time each day. Either way, yes, that part needs some work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Being a UI person I wonder if this is as optimal as possible. I believe the default is that everything is working fine, no need to show me that as a horizontal rule. If there is something wrong it could have a rule with details and a link.

</comment><comment><USER6> <http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/api-status.com>

</comment><comment><USER7> it should list the last downtimes instead of displaying a block of green icons. i am assuming that apis are up most of the time...

</comment><comment><USER8> Do these guys have an API?</comment>


Ask HN: Gmail showing new 'dev' options at the bottom - <AUTHOR> My google apps / gmail account is showing two new links at the bottom left of my mobile web session.
1) In red is a link that says 'Send internal feedback'.
2) Another link toggles between 'Show consoles/Hide consoles'.
Neither link is operational. Is this a bug that is revealing internal developer links by accident? <comment><USER2> I can see it too → [https://i.imgur.com/UeMHPys.png](https://i.imgur.com/UeMHPys.png) Clicking the "Send internal feedback" link triggers an error in the JavaScript console that says _"ReferenceError: Can 't find variable: FEATURE_STRING"_ while clicking the "Show Consoles" link simply toggles an internal state that apparently makes a development console visible to whoever has access to a debug UI. I found "gfeedback.js" but following the code all the way down only results in a request to [https://www.google.com/tools/feedback](https://www.google.com/tools/feedback)

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe if one is able to activate the feedback feature and attach their CV, Google will offer a job interview.</comment></comment>


Show HN: A WebGL-based Complex Expression Parser and Plotter - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/brandonpelfrey/complex-function-plot <comment><USER2> Heh nice, here's a rotozoomer: [http://brandonpelfrey.github.io/complex- function-plot/?expre...](http://brandonpelfrey.github.io/complex-function- plot/?expression=eippXigxK3QpK3oqdA==)

edit: a nicer rotozoom: [http://brandonpelfrey.github.io/complex-function- plot/?expre...](http://brandonpelfrey.github.io/complex-function- plot/?expression=KHoqNCkqaV4oMSt0KSsoeipwaSkqdA==)

</comment><comment><USER3> Very nice!

I have spend the last hour trying to display the Poincaré disk[1], but to no avail.

I have z * ( cos(1.57 * (a^2+b^2+1)^(1/2)) / sin(1.57 * (a^2+b^2+1)^(1/2)) ), which project the coordinates to the infinite on a circle. But this is only a fancy zoom, straight lines are not projected to circles.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poincar%C3%A9_disk_model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poincar%C3%A9_disk_model)

<comment><USER4> From the docs:

"It's important to note that When rendering with these infinitely-tiled images, the mapping that is rendered is actually the inverse of the function given. This is because it is prohibitively expensive to compute images of the function itself. (In fact, we are rendering a kind of "pull-back".) Specifically, when rendering a pixel in the image, the location of that pixel in the complex plane is passed to your function, which produces a complex value. That transformed value specifies a location in the original image. This procedure is fast, but plots the inverse of the function given. So, if you want to plot e.g. log(z), then you should instead put in e^z."

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, this seemed kind of "unfortunate" when I started this project, but it still turned out to be an interesting/fun toy.

The issue is that when you compute where f(z) sends each point in the complex plane to, you would need to color in the pixel corresponding to that transformed point. f() is user-defined, so it could be a very weird function that could cover some portions of the image we're trying to draw but not others, etc. Moreover, even if I had some kind of procedure for determining which x's to sample so f(x) lay inside the image we're trying to draw, it's not amenable to GLSL. This is typically referred to scatter vs. gather-type operations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Note that you can apparently use the `t` variable to express time.

Ex: t*z

<comment><AUTHOR> I should probably try to find a way to make it clearer what all can be done, or make it more obvious where the documentation is ("t" is mentioned there.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> z ^ z

I love thinking about this, as it goes negative.</comment>


Executive Computer: Mother of All Markets or Pipe Dream Driven by Greed? (1992) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/1992/07/19/business/the-executive-computer-mother-of-all-markets-or-a-pipe-dream-driven-by-greed.html <comment><USER2> Doesn't these two statements describe best how Apple and Intel succeeded or failed in mobile?

Apple: "[..] John Sculley, the chief executive of Apple Computer Inc., who says these personal communicators could be 'the mother of all markets.'"

Intel: "[..] Andrew Grove, the chairman of the Intel Corporation, [..] He says the idea of a wireless personal communicator in every pocket is 'a pipe dream driven by greed.'"

</comment><comment><USER3> It's crazy how accurate this article was. How far along were mobile phones during 1992?

Also,

> Once in the meeting, the executive could take notes on the device, and even > order pizza for the group using a combination of custom electronic forms and > wireless fax

Close enough :P

<comment><USER4> > It's crazy how accurate this article was. How far along were mobile phones > during 1992?

Mobile phones weren't very far along at all. PDA's (personal digital assistants) on the other hand were slow, clunky, had hard to read screens and were expensive, but if we transported a 20 year old back in time they'd definitely recognize it as a primitive mobile phone. They gained actual phone functionality 5-10 years later.

One of apples big innovations was to call them phones instead of PDA's, but when you include PDA's (including the apple newton) the evolutionary history is much more obvious.

<comment><USER5> I don't agree that PDA's were really slow, or clunky, that's hindsight, when I bought mine, they were expensive, fast, lightweight and awesome. By the time the Psion 5 came out around 1997 I was receiving email and sending faxes from a Psion 5 > PCMICA Adaptor > PCMCIA Modem (Goldcard) > Data Cable > Nokia 8110 and it certainly felt like the future :)

<comment><USER4> I may be confusing them with the later windows mobile and cheaper Casio ones (which I was rocking as a super sophisticated primary school kid at the time), but I remember noticeable input lag and frame rates of approximately 1fps. As amazing as they were at the time I still found them slow and clunky, was the Psion noticeably better?

<comment><USER6> Both Psion and Palm where really great. I used a Psion 5 (and later 5mx) as my main 'laptop' for a while. Working with text and spreadsheets was amazingly smooth, and it had a battery life that most smartphones today would envy. Oh and the keyboard design on the Psion 5 was one of the greatest pieces of industrial design the computer world has ever seen.

<comment><USER5> It's really difficult to talk about speed, it's clear we all experience it quite differently depending on our path, so for me I'm here, it was smooth, copy and paste just worked across apps, integration between calendar, todo and email(i think?) just worked, the device form factor, widescreen clamshell with the butterfly keyboard deserves a comeback, imagine the spec you could cram in, for reading and writing a wider screen for me is preferable to a taller one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > At the other end is Andrew Grove, the chairman of the Intel Corporation, the > huge chip maker based in Santa Clara, Calif. He says the idea of a wireless > personal communicator in every pocket is "a pipe dream driven by greed."

Well, Intel never really made a mark in the smartphone era too. Atom processors were a dud.

</comment><comment><USER8> On one hand, this is, as others have noted in this comment page, astonishingly prescient.

On the other hand, Andrew Seybold was right in that it took 15 years for the iPhone to arrive.

There was one "island of stability" with the amazing Palm & Psion devices (which weren't really "connected" devices), and then a discontinuous jump to the iPhone and its descendants.

A sobering thought on the speed of technology uptake.

<comment><USER9> In the early 1990's, DEC (Digital?) Cambridge was demoing a tablet prototype, with assorted Moore's law curves suggesting viability in early 2000's. Then there was the wait for a market to gel.

When will software development get a screen-replacing HMD? One might manage it with existing parts for under $1k... but absent a demonstrated market, no one is bothering to build it. So maybe next year. Maybe _more_ capable systems happen first, because some "companies will pay $10k for _this_ " has a clearer market story.

Market prediction is hard. As is some tech path prediction. But some tech changes are more predictable, and when those intersect clear and funded needs... some forms of prescience seem less hard than others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Personal flying machines: inevitable necessity or luxury?

<comment><USER7> Self driving flying electric cars - inevitable or pipe dream?

<comment><USER11> Well, I would say, the mother of all mobility market!

<comment><USER12> Driven by greedy descent!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Building a Game Network Protocol: Reading and Writing Packets - <AUTHOR> http://gafferongames.com/building-a-game-network-protocol/reading-and-writing-packets/ <comment><USER2> I disagree: [https://github.com/tinspin/fuse](https://github.com/tinspin/fuse)

<comment><USER3> Care to expand on that?

Why do you disagree? What specific points do you disagree with? Is that link meant to be a counter to the argument that "text formats suck?" If so then how does it demonstrate this?

If you're saying that your text protocol is good enough for your purposes then I have to wonder if maybe you aren't doing anything particularly latency sensitive.

<comment><USER2> Instead of sending 20-30 position/rotation delta packets per second, you could only send something when there is something to send = some key is pressed (move forward, strafe left, fire gun).

Imagine Counter-Strike without sending the rotation of the player until he actually fires his weapon or changes his strafe/run/walk direction.

It works surprisingly well, and with prediction you can't even tell there's a difference most of the time.

Check out rocket league for a working example.

But with fiber spreading like wildfire because copper is oxidizing globally, our challenges are not text based protocols:

Latency is not bandwidth. Binary does not travel faster than text.

The only problem we have is peak Moore's law and peak oil hitting simultaneously, so optimizing and distributing server systems, preferably decentralizing them into client P2P, is our only challenge.

So my bet is to build a strong async. HTTP backbone now to cater for all futures = organizing these P2P nodes.

That doesn't mean I'm against binary P2P UDP protocols once IPv6 gets a critical mass. But that might be never!

Text is better for protocols because humans can read it.

Instead of implementing TCP on top of UDP, let the internet hardware people implement XYZ under your TCP! Do you think that's ethernet running under the atlatic ocean?

<comment><USER2> Except this only works if you remove the analogue mouse rotation since the movement will be impacted by it.

Ignore that Counter-Strike example, I should not write answers at 3 in the night on a forum that stops editing after a couple of hours, actually nobody should use a forum like that; here's a forum I built that works like reddit with 100% read uptime: [http://talk.binarytask.com](http://talk.binarytask.com)

The caveat of "send on key press/release only" is that you need digital movement, but it's one that I'm perfectly prepared to accept since it allows MMO with text based protocol!

Until IPv6 at which point we can build P2P VR MMO (head, hands, eyes, body, voice etc.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I had a system that looked a little like this that I think I might write a small post about it (after I get some approval from friends).</comment>


The Price of a Hard Drive - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/09/the-price-of-a-hard-drive/

<comment><USER2> I recently noticed the same (that the tradeoff of price vs. capacity seems odd lately).

The author was criticized for failing to notice that one of the drives he included in his chart, a Seagate Cheetah, was actually a SCSI server drive: I think this drive must be inadequately described or incorrectly classified online because I had it come up in my own Newegg search results for desktop drives, and I was similarly confused by it. So that's on Newegg or Seagate, not the author.

The point of the article is still valid, I think, provided you look at the BOTTOM of his datapoints (though he actually tried to fit a line to the mean).

When I say I think the current price/size distribution is odd, I must say what I would expect instead. I think I would have expected one of two things: either that it be like processors, in which increases in price grant diminishing returns near the top end, or to be a kind of "lazy J" shape like RAM (mainstream RAM is cheap, rising in price as you move right, but small, old obsolete RAM can be overpriced rising toward the left). Instead, hard drive pricing seems to be tending to a very linear ratio so there's no _obvious_ best value point anymore. That's the real take-away.</comment>


Windows 8: The desktop review  - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/computing/138816-windows-8-the-desktop-review <comment><USER2> I read this until the guy said he used 'notepad' to write articles. Notepad? Really? He is a professional writer?

Reading on was not worth my time.</comment>


Will Rackspace Partnership Save FathomDB?  - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2009/12/17/will-rackspace-partnership-save-fathomdb/ Disclaimer: I work for Rackspace and know the FathomDB team well.
This topic is interesting to me in general though and this is a good example to use for a talking point.
First, my opinion on this specific case -- I don't think partnering with us "saved" the company.  I do think it certainly helps them to reach an additional audience.
So now to use this as a more broad example case of the real question here, "As a startup how do you pick the proper defensible niche so you can grow enough to compete in broader open markets?"
I believe Fathom has done this by slicing up AWS instances going down to a smaller starting point.  Amazon isn't likely to enhance RDS to target the tiny customers but the "tiny DB" market can be enough for a startup to reach the elusive "ramen profitable". <comment><AUTHOR> Disclaimer: I work for Rackspace and know the FathomDB team well.

This topic is interesting to me in general though and this is a good example to use for a talking point.

First, my opinion on this specific case -- I don't think partnering with us "saved" the company. I do think it certainly helps them to reach an additional audience.

So now to use this as a more broad example case of the real question here, "As a startup how do you pick the proper defensible niche so you can grow enough to compete in broader open markets?"

I believe Fathom has done this by slicing up AWS instances going down to a smaller starting point. Amazon isn't likely to enhance RDS to target the tiny customers but the "tiny DB" market can be enough for a startup to reach the elusive "ramen profitable".

</comment><comment><USER2> I also work for Rackspace. While it is in our best interest that FathomDB sticks around, it's also in developers' best interest to use it. Why? No lock- in. We like these guys. We think they work hard, and they truly are a service oriented company. And if you decide you want to use them with us, or with Amazon, or any of the other clouds that emerge, FathomDB won't lock you in. Good stuff.</comment>


Show HN: Keratin AuthN – Accounts and Auth Microservice in Go - <AUTHOR> https://keratin.tech <comment><USER2> We're currently using this as our auth layer for [https://empatico.org](https://empatico.org), so it's production ready!

</comment><comment><USER3> How does it compare to Hydra/Dex? What I'm missing is a page that tells me where it sits in the ecosystem. A versus page if you will.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd love to fill that in! If anyone would like a comparison, please add links in this thread and I'll reply. Later, I can collect it into a published page.

<comment><USER3> That would be great, thanks! Here are the links to the projects I mentioned.

[https://github.com/coreos/dex](https://github.com/coreos/dex) [https://github.com/ory/hydra](https://github.com/ory/hydra)

<comment><AUTHOR> > Dex is NOT a user-management system, but acts as a portal to other identity > providers through "connectors."

> ORY Hydra is not an identity provider (user sign up, user log in, password > reset flow), but connects to your existing identity provider through a > consent app.

AuthN IS all the things that Dex and Hydra say they are not. I'll bet it could integrate with both given a bit of investment, e.g. by satisfying the "consent app" expectations.

AuthN does use as much of the OpenID Connect protocol as I could manage though. I started there and streamlined down to optimize for API-driven interactions rather than the redirect-driven interactions that are common with OAuth and OIC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Today I was evaluating what I we should use for something like this, a unified Facade with an API.

We evaluated Traefik and Kong. Decision was for Kong, since we need more features like auth, logging, rate limit.

<comment><AUTHOR> Strong choice! My dream is for AuthN to provide authentication and account functionality for folks who have not yet invested in an API gateway, and then seamlessly plug in when their architecture matures later. Extracting user accounts can be a difficult barrier for transitions like that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This looks pretty reasonable! I would love to see a Cloud Storage backend. A minor quibble is that I think that managing your own metrics in Redis is probably not the simplest or most flexible approach - instead, you should consider exposing a /metrics endpoint that can be ingested by the user's monitoring tool of choice (Prometheus/InfluxDB/etc).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

Have you seen the /stats endpoint? It exposes the metrics as JSON, which may be a good match for your suggestion. I'd also like to export the key events to a STATSD-compatible sink so a sophisticated user can manage metrics in their own system.

Redis is already on hand because of other features though, and HLL is a pretty cheap integration. I figure it's a decent starting point for many people.

<comment><USER5> It looks like the /stats endpoint consults the Redis database and returns processed data. If we're aggregating metrics externally, it would be more idiomatic for this to be totally stateless and just expose hot metrics - it's the aggregator's job to store and process the data. This can be quite painless using something like the Go Prometheus library.

Being tied to Redis is also not great. For instance, it looks like everything apart from the metrics could comfortably live in Google Cloud Storage if you had a backend for it. Cloud Storage really isn't an appropriate place to put frequently updated counters, though. So if I deployed AuthN, I would want to be able to ditch Redis.

I should stress, though, that these are quibbles. I think AuthN looks very nice, and the quibbles are cropping up because I'm trying to figure out if I can use it. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> That all sounds like a direction I'd happily consider:

* Google Cloud Storage implementations for data interfaces

* Metrics interface with a Prometheus implementation (STATSD to follow)

* Redis-backed HLL metrics are optional

Feel free to open issues in the tracker if you reach that point!

<comment><USER5> Good stuff.

I have one other bit of feedback on the architecture, and I realise that this one might be too different from where AuthN is currently. I see that there are a small number of API endpoints that you've marked "public" that users are meant to be able to reach. In practice, the user's POSTs would always be terminated upstream from the AuthN server itself, either at a gateway or by just relaying the requests through from the front-end servers themselves. A service that's part public/part private is much more perilous than a service that is one or the other. All things considered, these public endpoints seem like a very minor convenience to the integrator. I would just make the AuthN API private, and ask users to implement the public endpoints themselves by making requests to the AuthN API.

If you DID make all endpoints private, you're no longer tied to HTTP, and you have a nice opportunity to use GRPC instead. I've recently started rolling it out in my own services, and it's unexpectedly great considering the track- record of similar ideas. It's very performant, pleasant to work with, has a mature ecosystem of surrounding tools, and you get client API implementations in a wide range of languages for "free" (or at least at a cut price).

<comment><AUTHOR> My intention for the user-facing endpoints is that the host app will never need to see or accidentally log a user's password. It's a pattern inspired by credit card vaults.

Could you still achieve your deployment goals with a Gateway/WAF setup that proxies the user-facing endpoints? The only issue I'm presently aware of with this setup is [https://github.com/keratin/authn- server/issues/8](https://github.com/keratin/authn-server/issues/8).

<comment><USER5> Sure - in my case this would be a load balancer on Google Cloud configured through a Kubernetes ingress. All the public paths available on the Auth microservice would have to be listed explicitly. You have to be very sure in this scenario that only the public URLs are reachable.

I see the motivation for sending user passwords straight to AuthN, but I do wonder if on balance the dangers of correctly configuring a shared public/private service don't outweigh the dangers of relaying the password through your front-end (which has to be able to access private endpoints on the AuthN service anyway). If you really didn't want your front-end to touch passwords, you could have a tiny sidecar service that only exposes the public endpoints and speaks GRPC to AuthN.

Anyway, this is well into debatable "matter of opinion" territory, and I don't want to waste your time. Thanks for publishing AuthN - I'll keep a close watch as you progress.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Am I missing something, or does this really have no support for TOTP/HOTP? An authentication system without 2FA or U2F support in 2017 seems... lacking (or unfinished).

<comment><AUTHOR> It's on my roadmap. Prioritizing is hard. :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> How does AuthN compare to Keycloak?

[http://www.keycloak.org](http://www.keycloak.org)

<comment><AUTHOR> Keycloak does some really great things. It does require managing a Java runtime though, and is missing the streamlining that allows AuthN to run as an invisible API.

Keycloak (and similar) hosts and renders your login page. You customize through theming. You're expected to redirect users through a standard OAuth2/OIDC flow on a different domain.

AuthN doesn't render any HTML. That's all you, from start to finish. This means you have control over the UX and can build the login page directly into your own app, just like you would when using an auth library in a typical monolith.

<comment><USER8> What, I can't simply post to any login/register/logout uri's and expect either a redirect with configuring headers back or an object that let's me manage the token manually?

EDIT: I've been trying out keycloak and it looks great but I've always assumed I just had not figured out how to make that happen. As the documentation is quite large and of the harder kind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> the toplevel links (implementation / deployment / configuration) don't work for me, they go to say

/keratin/authn-server/docs/config.md

which is a 404 presumably instead of

/keratin/authn-server/blob/master/docs/config.md

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed, thanks!

<comment><USER9> no problem, btw, the first time I did make test I got this, but after that I was not able to repro it again and make test always worked, pasting here in case you are interested

        Creating authnserver_server_1 ... done
        TEST_REDIS_URL=redis://127.0.0.1:8701/12 \
          TEST_MYSQL_URL=mysql://email@example.com:8702/authnservertest \
          go test ./data/... ./models/... ./tokens/... ./ops/... ./config/... ./lib/... ./api/... ./services/... .
        [mysql] 2017/11/08 13:27:23 packets.go:33: unexpected EOF
        [mysql] 2017/11/08 13:27:23 packets.go:33: unexpected EOF
        [mysql] 2017/11/08 13:27:23 packets.go:33: unexpected EOF
        --- FAIL: TestAccountStore (0.01s)
            --- FAIL: TestAccountStore/MySQL (0.00s)
                Error Trace:    account_store_test.go:43
            	Error:		Received unexpected error driver: bad connection
            			Connect
            			github.com/keratin/authn-server/data/mysql.ensureDB
            				/home/luser/go/external/src/github.com/keratin/authn-server/data/mysql/db.go:71
            			github.com/keratin/authn-server/data/mysql.TestDB
            				/home/luser/go/external/src/github.com/keratin/authn-server/data/mysql/db.go:27
            			github.com/keratin/authn-server/data_test.TestAccountStore.func3
            				/home/luser/go/external/src/github.com/keratin/authn-server/data/account_store_test.go:42
            			testing.tRunner
            				/usr/local/stow/go-1.9.0/go/src/testing/testing.go:746
            			runtime.goexit
            				/usr/local/stow/go-1.9.0/go/src/runtime/asm_amd64.s:2337
            			ensureDB
            			github.com/keratin/authn-server/data/mysql.TestDB
            				/home/luser/go/external/src/github.com/keratin/authn-server/data/mysql/db.go:29
            			github.com/keratin/authn-server/data_test.TestAccountStore.func3
            				/home/luser/go/external/src/github.com/keratin/authn-server/data/account_store_test.go:42
            			testing.tRunner
            				/usr/local/stow/go-1.9.0/go/src/testing/testing.go:746
            			runtime.goexit
            				/usr/local/stow/go-1.9.0/go/src/runtime/asm_amd64.s:2337

        FAIL
        FAIL	github.com/keratin/authn-server/data	0.040s
        ?   	github.com/keratin/authn-server/data/mock	[no test files]
        ?   	github.com/keratin/authn-server/data/mysql	[no test files]
        ok  	github.com/keratin/authn-server/data/redis	0.771s
        ?   	github.com/keratin/authn-server/data/sqlite3	[no test files]

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the report! I believe I've tracked this down to an initialization routine that MySQL goes through on the first boot. It happens after docker- compose unblocks. Likely a wontfix. :/

<comment><USER9> cool you found the root cause, I take this is not the code path that runs in CI? otherwise I'd think you'd hit it all the time unless somehow the MySQL container sticks around...

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah. I think Travis provides a warmed server.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Has Keratin gone through any security research / penetration testing?

<comment><AUTHOR> I would dearly love that! The answer is not yet. Can you recommend any testers that are OSS-friendly?

My current plan is to set up a HackerOne page. I know that bug bounties don't replace good penetration testing, but it's a start.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is SAML supported and if not is it planned in the near future ?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm currently investing in JWT and have not done enough research on SAML to make it part of my plans. Happy to learn more.

<comment><USER11> You might want to take a look at AWS-Cognito and their SAML and OAuth2.0 integration. For our enterprise startup, we are leaning towards Cognito to provide multi-tenant UserPools with customer specified authentication providers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is there an API client for this in Go?

<comment><AUTHOR> Seems like an oversight, doesn't it? I've created an issue to track here: [https://github.com/keratin/authn- server/issues/15](https://github.com/keratin/authn-server/issues/15)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's just name/pass

It would be much more interesting to me if it also did Oauth2 login with Google/Facebook/Twitter/etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, name/pass sounds pretty simple, doesn't it? But doing it correctly, securely, with a service architecture? That gets interesting.

> It would be much more interesting to me if it also did Oauth2 login with > Google/Facebook/Twitter/etc.

Totally agreed. The reason I designed AuthN around accounts first is because I believe that's the best way to launch an app. OAuth2 and OIC logins are powerful, but they're secondary to the classic login.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> almost no test coverage. did i miss them ? for proper use in production you would need to have hundreds of unittests and a whole bunch of component + integration and e2e tests.

<comment><AUTHOR> Tests are colocated inside packages (folders) using a `_test.go` convention.

Service tests[1] are the main unit tests, and use mock implementations of the data store interfaces.

Data (DAO) tests[2] are generally run across every implementation using only the public interface. This helps me stay sane with the mock implementations.

The API tests[3] are integration tests, and use Go's excellent httptest package to boot a real server and execute real HTTP commands.

[1] [https://github.com/keratin/authn- server/tree/master/services](https://github.com/keratin/authn- server/tree/master/services)

[2] [https://github.com/keratin/authn- server/tree/master/data](https://github.com/keratin/authn- server/tree/master/data)

[3] [https://github.com/keratin/authn- server/tree/master/api/acco...](https://github.com/keratin/authn- server/tree/master/api/accounts)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> "Microservices perform better, especially when written in Go."

Nonsense.

<comment><USER16> Sort of agree, that's a very noisy and broad statement. I'd argue that the underlying I/O and event loop implementation matters more. At the end of the day it's all about highly available systems. Am I wrong?

<comment><USER17> Microservices need to be divided up _very_ carefully, with full knowledge of the latency trade-off of moving functionality across a network gap. A same- datacenter round-trip takes 5,000 times longer than a main memory access, and 1,000,000 times longer than an L1 cache access. There's no silver bullet in performance or scalability. Each solution will require trading off advantages that matter less to achieve business goals.

Here are a few references that leap to mind (I keep the first printed out and pinned right next to my monitor).

[https://gist.github.com/jboner/2841832](https://gist.github.com/jboner/2841832)

[https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-mind-blowing-facts- about...](https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-mind-blowing-facts-about- computers/answer/Thomas-Cormen-1)

<comment><USER18> > A same-datacenter round-trip takes 5,000 times longer than a main memory > access, and 1,000,000 times longer than an L1 cache access.

This is a ridiculous comparison though. When have you ever seen a situation where a micro service was accessed over the network to fetch something that would have been in L1 cache? And yes, having a value "in memory" is faster, but in most cases these days things aren't "in memory", they're "in memory in memcached, somewhere in the cluster, probably not on the local server so you have to go over the network anyway".

Just out of curiosity though, I tested on our network. Our RTT between servers is less than half a millisecond. Our fastest service can get a cached reply back to the calling service in 35ms, whereas many calls are >100ms and some are much longer (e.g. initial login calls). It would take a lot of external login calls to noticeably (to the user) increase even the fastest service.

We also use Redis and memcached, and spread those across other services. Excluding specifically HTTP overhead and just looking at network latency, a few memcached calls which hit non-local servers in the cluster cost us as much in latency as one HTTP call would.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Livre, a free, open-source eBook reader - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/livrereader/livre <comment><AUTHOR> This is a side project of mine arising from my frustration that existing eBook readers for Linux are ugly as sin. It's not yet fully-featured, but it has enough functionality that I have switched to it as my default reader.

Feedback and contributions are welcome!</comment>


Neural Symbolic Machines: Learning Semantic Parsers with Weak Supervision - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.00020 <comment><USER2> I know that the field of deep learning / machine learning generally moves too fast for researchers to target conferences or journals, but several of the citations in the PDF of this article are missing (LaTeX inserted [?]).

(GRU, in case anyone is wondering, stands for "gated recurrent unit" and is a building block of standard LSTMs)

EDIT: now that I've finished the paper, I've realized that the citations are straight-up missing. That's no good, but I'm sure the authors just messed up the arxiv upload. If OP knows them, they should let them know... failing to include any citations at all is a quick way to decrease the credibility of an article.

<comment><USER3> I've let them know already. I think it is just a LaTeX compilation issue.

<comment><USER4> If you look at the source you see that the \cite{} statements do reference meaningful anchors but that the bibtext file seems to be missing from the LaTeX archive:

[https://arxiv.org/format/1611.00020v1](https://arxiv.org/format/1611.00020v1)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hi, I am Chen Liang, the first author of the paper. Thanks for pointing out the Latex problem and sorry for the inconvenience.

We are trying to fix the Latex problem and submit a replacement to ArXiv soon. In the meantime, we hosted the PDF version of the paper on another link:

[https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Chen_Liang14/publicatio...](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Chen_Liang14/publication/309606982_Neural_Symbolic_Machines_Learning_Semantic_Parsers_on_Freebase_with_Weak_Supervision/links/581a876c08aed2439386c07f.pdf)

Thanks and look forward to your feedbacks and suggestions :)

</comment><comment><USER6> Interesting. It wasn't until the end of the paper and re-read the top that I noticed "Liang" isn't actually Percy Liang (with whom Berant has collaborated a lot in the past)</comment>


StartupGuild 2.0 - <AUTHOR> http://startupguild.net

<comment><AUTHOR> A few questions have been coming in about the email@example.com email address. Hopefully these notes will answer those questions:

\- The main purpose of the email address is for the signup process with Yammer

\- We are not suggesting the email address becomes your new general email address

\- The email address is simply a forwarder to your normal email address

\- We do this because Yammer requires that all users have the same root email domain

\- We are unable to offer short versions of the email address all users have firstname.lastname format

<comment><USER2> Exactly. Yammer is cool because it is focused on professional/enterprise social networks, but broken because it doesn't recognize that people want to create adhoc social networks to work together.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> StartupGuild is like the Facebook activity stream you wish you had... :)

<comment><USER3> Great call on going w/ Yammer

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Amazing stuff. Already addicted to this. It's like a social network full of entrepreneurs, a lot of from HN.

<comment><USER5> It looks promising... Already a lot going on :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Could you post a screenshot of what v2.0 actually looks like? Maybe an example of the 'activity stream'?

It looks interesting, but I don't like signing up for something without getting seeing a sample.

<comment><USER7> Here you go: <http://i.imgur.com/ZCzU3.png> :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The only problem with the StartupGuild on Yammer is that I'll spend even __more time on social networks __and __less time on getting actual work done __;(

But I like it!

</comment><comment><USER9> What kind of qualifications are necessary to join this community?

</comment><comment><USER10> Awesome place. Indeed, the activity stream I've always wanted.

</comment><comment><USER11> So you recreated a Facebook Group outside of Facebook?

<comment><USER12> Technically, Yammer created Facebook groups outside of Facebook. It's a bit strange, but I think he chose a nice tool to facilitate the group.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's awesome.</comment>