Ask HN: Should I buy "The Art of Computer Programming"? - <AUTHOR>

I'm a computer engineering grad student. Right now, it looks like I'll be working in OS and parallel computing research after school. With that in mind (i.e. I am not a startup type, nor do I write web pages), is TAOCP something I should buy? <comment><USER2> Yes.

Not because it's a research resource, although it is, but because knowing that stuff is likely to be relevant to your success in said research.

</comment><comment><USER3> Only if you are in the market for comprehensive reference. Reading through TAOCP is a good project for the eager-to-learn beginner, but you probably already know the essentials of the material from your coursework. It's a compendium of the "proven useful" stuff, which tends to be older material. Research papers will have more/newer information. TAOCP will have more examples.

</comment><comment><USER4> If you're still a student, check it out from the library and see if it suits you.

<comment><AUTHOR> I just checked and all three volumes are checked out for at least a month.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> No, it's more like a decoration piece then anything. Read research papers online of the areas you're interested in.</comment>


Everyone in the world should be taxed on their energy footprint - <AUTHOR> https://aeon.co/ideas/everyone-in-the-world-should-be-taxed-on-their-energy-footprint <comment><USER2> I agree only if truly _everyone_ is and not _only the western rich people_ are.

<comment><AUTHOR> Also one potentially extremely controversial question would be whether parents should be taxed for their offspring.

<comment><USER2> True. Imagine a third or second world family, depending on inefficient means of generating energy, with a lot of children. The energy footprint tax would be huge. Who pays for it?</comment></comment></comment>


Google Blunder - <AUTHOR> http://way2top.org/business/google-blunder/558/ <comment><USER2> This isn't the first time they've made currency conversion errors: see [http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/04/google-adsense- currency-e...](http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/04/google-adsense-currency- exchange-rates.html). Wonder if they made the same mistake in euro and pound accounts?</comment>


Slides and notes from my three hour Redis tutorial - <AUTHOR> http://simonwillison.net/static/2010/redis-tutorial/

<comment><AUTHOR> Anyone got any good Redis use cases or success stories I could add to a future version of the presentation?

<comment><USER3> The PyCon live stream we did was a pretty good case study. We pretty much hacked together a pub/sub system on top on BLPOP, so it'd be even easier going forward. Hopefully we'll open source it :/ (we've been meaning to for a while now...)

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome, I'll keep an eye out for that. Don't suppose you have any interesting numbers on traffic / performance etc?

<comment><USER3> I don't have any numbers, but during Guido's keynote (which was twitter powered) tweetfall was too far behind live, so they switched to using our feed. We frequently got comments that we were updating faster than twitter.com was :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _This is a good example of Redis forcing you to denormalise your data - <USER2> item that is tagged gets a set of tags, while each tag gets a set of item IDs._

Simon, not sure what you meant by "denormalise" here but what you've described sounds fully normal to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's up to you to manually maintain both of those sets, which means the information about what is tagged with what ends up stored twice and there's a risk that it could get out of sync.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> can someone explain how writes are faster than reads?

<comment><USER6> I don't know, but remember that redis writes aren't hitting the disk synchronously.

<comment><USER7> Writes are saved to an in-memory table first and are burst to disk asynchronously. But, when the burst happens, the writes to disk are sequential - this is key. No reads to the disk are done before writes (which occurs in MySQL).

<comment><USER8> Same idea in Cassandra: <http://wiki.apache.org/cassandra/FAQ#reads_slower_writes></comment></comment></comment></comment>


China seeks to signal coronavirus under control - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51813876 <comment><USER2> 1\. Tell the labs to report COVID19 cases as "seasonal flu"

2\. Stop reporting cases to unblock quarantine and travel restrictions

3\. Economy back to work while rest of the world is trying to quarantine

4\. Virus runs a course through the whole country and kills 30 million "expensive" old people with comorbidities, yielding a huge win against a long- term existential threat associated with ageing population.

Win-win for CCP, as far as they are concerned.</comment>


Cryptol DSL, a tool for writing correct crypto algorithms, is now open-source - <AUTHOR> http://www.cryptol.net/ <comment><USER2> Looks neat. We need more simple and verifiably correct cryptographic primitive frameworks that people can build upon to help secure the world. It'll take another 10-15 years before industry catches up.

The DSL allowed me to find a (trivial) error in the SHA-1 spec -- the description says 0 <= t < 79, but below they allow for 0 <= t <= 79 (which is also the cryptol implementation).

<comment><USER3> Nice catch! We noticed that error as well but didn't want to poke the NIST folks in the eye on the web page -- we're hoping to win them over with Cryptol, not put them on the defense. We're planning to submit an errata report on their website next week.

<comment><USER4> How many more errors are you planning on submitting to NIST?

<comment><USER3> That's the only one I caught while preparing the website.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Cryptol is REALLY cool. I followed its genesis from the Haskell community as it was primarily developed at Galois. Cryptol can be compared to Haskell somewhat neatly as similar with a significantly enhanced type system capable of representing more cryptographically important notions.

For anyone with an interest in Haskell, security, and/or dependent types it's worth taking a closer look at Cryptol.

<comment><USER6> In case it wasn't clear, the DSL itself is also written in Haskell.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> TL;DR Cryptol is an amazing tool for communicating crypto specifications with your peers, for testing crypto implementations and for doing crypto research and formal verification. It has the most amazing and practical use of a SAT solver I've ever seen.

I've touched it briefly a very long time ago, so don't believe me blindly, but this is my impression of what Cryptol is about in practice:

* If you're publishing a paper on a new cryptographic building block, lets call it AES2, you need to specify it. Instead of using the usual math-oriented pseudo-code or unreadable-to-your-peers C, you can use the Cryptol DSL, which looks familiar to your readers but can be executed and toyed with.

* If you're implementing AES2 (be it in Cryptol, C, VHDL or assembly language) you can ask the Cryptol runtime to verify it against another implementation (usually a Cryptol implementation taken from the paper on AES2, but you could write your own or use an existing implementation in another supported language). The Cryptol runtime may be able to tell you if they are mathematically identical (and I do mean mathematically: this is not unit testing but proving identity). I say "may" because not every function can be verified this way - that would solve the proven unsolvable Halting Problem. This is implemented by translating the tested implementations to logic circuits and using a SAT solver to prove that their XOR is constant 0. (Please take a moment to reflect on how awesome this is.)

* If you're researching crypto, it gives you a programming language and toolset very fit for experimenting with cryptographic building blocks and running the sorts of statistical tests that you'd want to run on them in the process of research. It also gives you tools for formal verification (mathematically proving properties of your AES2 proposal in a way that a computer can verify is error-free).

* In theory, you can compile a Cryptol specification to optimized C or VHDL and use that in your project. acfoltzer said in this thread that Cryptol 2 is a rewrite and the compiler still isn't done (it was for Cryptol 1).

In a sane world, crypto journals and standards institutes would not accept proposals of new crypto building blocks that don't come with Cryptol code, and implementations would always use the Cryptol toolset to automatically mathematically verify that their implementation is identical to the published specification, eliminating many classes of implementation bugs.

This wouldn't have prevented Heartbleed, which isn't a crypto implementation bug.

</comment><comment><USER8> > The Cryptol specification language was designed by Galois for the NSA's > Trusted Systems Research Group as a public standard for specifying > cryptographic algorithms.

> In addition, much of the work on Cryptol has been funded by, and lots of > design input was provided by the team at the NSA's Trusted Systems Research > Group, including Brad Martin, Frank Taylor and Sean Weaver.

[https://github.com/GaloisInc/cryptol](https://github.com/GaloisInc/cryptol)

<comment><USER9> And it sounded so promising.

<comment> a-saleh Hey, NSA is quite big :-) I remember reading how one branch of NSA tasked with strenghtening of TOR crypto was angry at anothe branch of NSA that tried to covertly introduce vulnerabilities to it...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't know how to take it.

 _" A Cryptol implementation of an algorithm resembles its mathematical specification more closely than an implementation in a general purpose language."_

So it's some easy-to-read DSL (at least from the authors perspective, but whatever). Well, yeah, it's cool. But there're many cool DSLs. And here we're talking about _cryptography_ , that dangerous mystical beast. It's tricky. Many of those algorithms are invented with hardware performance in mind. So "who uses it" isn't really enough this time. There should be at least implementations of the most widely used algorithms and comparison of those from, say, OpenSSL. Are they fast enough (and on which platforms/architectures)? How complicated machine code is actually produced by this DSL? Aren't there some tricky issues with it, like, say, counting cash misses? Timing attacks? Power attacks? If so, are OpenSSL implementations doing any better? Or maybe they are even worse somehow?

It isn't something that makes me think "Wow, that's cool! I should use it in my next project!" the very moment I see it. It should be _explored_ , and I think the authors are first who should provide some info on how safe is it.

<comment><USER11> You're dead on. Cryptol is meant first and foremost as an executable specification language. There's an interpreter so that you can run your algorithms on concrete values to make sure that, for example, your test vectors check out. There's also a symbolic simulator for building formal models of the functions you define, so that you can prove properties about those programs using SMT.

Previous versions of Cryptol included backends for producing C and VHDL for higher-performing implementations on CPUs and FPGAs. Cryptol 2 is a ground-up rewrite and those backends aren't there yet, though we have plans to be working on new backends soon.

Cryptol is largely focused on issues of functional correctness. For power and timing attacks, you might want to build a C or Assembly implementation by hand that addresses those. However, what you're left with is fairly difficult to reason about on the level of functional correctness. We have another project, the Software Assurance Workbench, that builds formal models from LLVM and Java code. With this in hand, you prove equivalence between the hardened, high- performance implementation and the Cryptol specification.

Does that help clarify the role Cryptol might play in a cryptographer's workflow? Also, could you elaborate about your "how safe it is" question? I'm happy to answer :)

<comment><USER10> > Does that help clarify the role Cryptol might play in a cryptographer's > workflow?

Yes, thank you very much. I erroneously assumed that it's intended to address _implementation errors_ (that is to _replace_ C or asm implementations with something easier to code). The "safety" I meant is irrelevant in case of "theorem prover" of course.

As I understand it's pretty unique tool in sense of easiness to generate VHDL specifications and such (as well as pretty DSL itself), as it's explained nicely in the presentation _m0nastic_ reported on ( [http://2012.sharcs.org/slides/hurd.pdf](http://2012.sharcs.org/slides/hurd.pdf) ). But, anyway, could you compare it somehow to the other "proving" tools that already exist, say Agda or Coq? I'm not expecting some specific information, just curious.

<comment><USER11> > I erroneously assumed that it's intended to address implementation errors > (that is to replace C or asm implementations with something easier to code).

Indeed, and those are absolutely things we need to watch out for when building backends suitable for direct implementation.

> But, anyway, could you compare it somehow to the other "proving" tools that > already exist, say Agda or Coq? I'm not expecting some specific information, > just curious.

Agda and Coq are both much more general-purpose and powerful in terms of the types of programs and theorems they can express. Cryptol is specialized toward theorems involving functions that manipulate sequences of bits. As a result, it's much easier to start Cryptol up and prove properties of crypto algorithms, but you aren't able to express the range of theorems that you can in a dependently-typed language.

For example, Cryptol lets you write polymorphic functions and theorems, but if you wanted to prove something about such a function:

      plus_id : {a} (fin a) => [a] -> Bit
      plus_id x = x + 0 == x

You'd first have to instantiate `a` to some concrete size, rather than proving it for all `a`, which would be a beginner-level proof in Coq or Agda:

      Main> :prove plus_id
      Not a monomorphic type:
      {a} (fin a) => [a] -> Bit
      Main> :prove plus_id : [32] -> Bit
      Q.E.D.

So overall I'd say it's the classic story of the tradeoffs of a DSL. It's easier to get up, running, and proving things within the domain, but the domain itself is more restricted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This looks really great - not only is the tool itself very useful, but I was surprised to find that it comes with what appears at first read to be really good documentation, with plenty of examples. More software should have docs like this (although a html version of the PDF would be nice).

</comment><comment><USER13> www. subdomain seems broken.

[http://cryptol.net/](http://cryptol.net/) works

</comment><comment><USER14> If I understand correctly, this is meant to be used to help implement existing known good crypto algorithms correctly, not help design new crypto algorithms, which you absolutely should not do unless you're one of the few (thousand? hundred? dozen?) qualified to do so.

<comment><USER15> No, it's useful for both.

Here's a presentation they gave in 2012 about Cryptol that does a pretty good job explaining it:

[http://2012.sharcs.org/slides/hurd.pdf](http://2012.sharcs.org/slides/hurd.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> "In addition, much of the work on Cryptol has been funded by, and lots of design input was provided by the team at the NSA's Trusted Systems Research Group, including Brad Martin, Frank Taylor and Sean Weaver."

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm getting NXDOMAIN on the www link. Change it to the bare domain.

<comment><USER11> It should be working again within minutes; sorry for the DNS snafu.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Reminds me of TLA+ but for crypto</comment>


HTML5 vs Flash Argument - A Mortal Wound Quote from Google - <AUTHOR> http://www.zingchart.com/blog/2010/05/13/html5-vs-flash-argument-a-mortal-wound-quote-from-google/

<comment><USER2> _"Hmmm…what was that about mobile, iPad's, overhead, etc. Steve?"_

The i* devices have hardware h.264 decoder chips, I'd be surprised if mobile safari's implementation of html5 video didn't make use of them.

</comment><comment><USER3> Crap piece. Obviously browsers, incl. Chrome, will soon use HW acceleration whenever possible, meeting or exceeding Flash's implementation. As others note, this has nothing to fo with HTML5 or the merits of <video>, etc.

</comment><comment><USER4> From what I understand, that quote is about the performance of Chrome, not HTML5. And isn't decoding of video something that's _not_ in HTML5 in the first place, but rather up to the browser?

<comment><USER5> Flash has several failure modes on windows let alone less well maintained versions. For a good example go to armorgames.com and click around till you get a few flash advertisement on the same page as a game and watch everything slow down even if your CPU is not pegged.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is complete horseshit. Would you like to see snapshots of htop cpu usage with the <video> youtube beta enabled/disabled?

edit: Oh wait, if they meant in Windows, then that makes some sense since Flash actually might suck less. Either way, I'm sure that native accelerated playback is coming eventually.

All I know is, I can't watch more than two, ahem, YouTube videos at once unless it's using HTML5/video.

edit2: Either way, this article is just silly. It's over the top and in your face when it has no right to be. Unless you want to ignore all Linux/Mac/iPad/Android users and also want to ignore the fact that eventually native/hardware-accel playback will hit other platforms as well even with h264 or v8 video.

<comment><USER6> Oh wait, if they meant in Windows, then that makes some sense since Flash actually might suck less. Either way, I'm sure that native accelerated playback is coming eventually.

All I know is, I can't watch more than two, ahem, YouTube videos at once unless it's using HTML5/video.

<comment><USER6> Sigh, I meant to delete this after editting the first post. Sorry! :(</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: ShivyC – Hobby C compiler created in Python - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ShivamSarodia/ShivyC <comment><USER2> The parser has a somewhat unusual structure:

[https://github.com/ShivamSarodia/ShivyC/blob/master/shivyc/p...](https://github.com/ShivamSarodia/ShivyC/blob/master/shivyc/parser/statement.py)

It's been a while since I've had to use the phrase "exception-oriented programming", but it fits that code well. While that might be a useful or even necessary pattern to parse something like C++ which can have almost unbounded ambiguities, AFAIK C can be parsed solely by branching on the next token in the stream except for one tiny case (typedefs).

<comment><USER3> That's not an uncommon practice in Python based on its (relatively) fast handling of exceptions. Maybe you could call it "break things and move fast."

<comment><USER4> Using exceptions is totally common, but this seems to raise/catch/log 6 errors each time it tries to parse a `for` statement. I'm a noob when it comes to compilers, but maybe a token -> function dictionary would be a better approach?

<comment><USER3> That does sound a bit extreme. (I freely admit I went by this description and never looked at the parser code myself, though some other portions I _did_ read were pretty normal Python.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Now, compile CPython in it and you're fully boot strapped.

<comment><USER6> Cool!!!!!! Really cool! Did you try it?</comment></comment>


The Seller Who Allegedly Defrauded Square Out of Millions - <AUTHOR> http://www.buzzfeed.com/nitashatiku/square-fraud-losses-single-seller#.uj8Rj1JExk <comment><USER2> The lawyer's words don't pass the smell test.

> "I don't know with 100% certainty, ma'am, but I would guess that [Urbanovsky > and the single seller] probably are [the same person]," her lawyer Steven > Lefler told BuzzFeed News.

He just admitted on record that his client cost the payments company they used several million dollars.

> "This is a case that I didn't charge enough money for," Lefler told BuzzFeed > News.

> "But of course, I'm her lawyer. So who gives a shit what I think."

This is quite possibly the single least professional lawyer I've ever seen.

<comment><USER3> The only words he should have spoken were 'no comment' and hung up.

If he were my lawyer he'd be out on his ass.

<comment><USER4> I'm guessing he is figuring out that he's not getting paid for this gig ...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was confused about what "bogus discounted travel vouchers" were so I found some more detail about the fraudulent business in this local TV story: [http://www.ketv.com/news/company-sold-flight-vouchers-but- no...](http://www.ketv.com/news/company-sold-flight-vouchers-but-now-cant- honor-them-all/31926228)

> "The price that I was look at was for a 90 day in advance reservation for > $139 round trip anywhere that Southwest flies," Creative Creations customer > Phyllis Hicks said.

> Hicks paid for several tickets and received a receipt. The voucher explained > that customers would fly on the days they requested, and a confirmation > should arrive at least month before departure.

> However, Hicks never received her confirmation email because Creative > Creations exceeded the 2,000 vouchers for flights in March.

> "They're asking people to cancel their March vouchers. Well, I travel March > 26, and it's not an option to cancel," Hicks said.

What a weird model. The "you can only redeem 2,000 of these per month" angle almost makes this sound like the business was trying to be a Ponzi scheme. But it just doesn't make a lot of sense.

<comment><USER6> It sounds like they resold the vouchers before buying them from Southwest expecting that they could buy an unlimited number. But Southwest got wise to it and limited the program. And then their business didn't maintain enough cash reserve for refunds (or had customers unwilling to accept refunds).

I wonder if the intent was ever to defraud, or if they just made a colossal mistake.

<comment><USER5> To my knowledge Southwest doesn't sell such a 'voucher' product, though.

It seems possible that this company was just selling 'vouchers' and, when it came time to fulfill the 'voucher', they were just buying a plane ticket with cash.

You could get away with this for a while by booking flights only for the people who wanted the least expensive itineraries and only on sale … and by taking in new money promised against future months to pay for the current month's sales.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I find the 0.1% loss rate for Square to be much, much lower than expected. I'm actually shocked by that, especially given their size.

</comment><comment><USER8> "But of course, I'm her lawyer. So who gives a shit what I think". Wow, I've never heard that from a lawyer. I bet he's not getting any money either.

</comment><comment><USER3> If square is the 'merchant of record' that is a very risky proposition. See also: DMR and iBill.

<comment><USER9> This should not be surprising to anyone. This is how these things work. It's the reason PayPal is so brutal. To avoid things like this.

<comment><USER3> > This is how these things work.

It isn't always. Segregated merchant accounts are the way to go if millions of dollars change hands at that level the overhead of setting up a merchant account are negligible, and if you can't get one then that's a pretty good sign you shouldn't be working with that kind of money.

A couple of these instances and square will get shut down by VISA and that's the end of that. That's the references to iBill and DMR, that's exactly what happened to them and all their merchants were left without recourse.

<comment><USER10> How would segregated accounts help? Square's 0.1% loss rate would never be grounds for a shut down. Do you have any idea what you're talking about?

<comment><USER3> Yes, I have an idea what I'm talking about.

I followed the shut-down of Dacotah Marketing and Research and iBill from 'row #1' (as a mid-sized merchant with an inside line into the company about what was going on) and the main problem was that amongst the 1000's of good merchants there were a few bad ones. VISA warned them once, fined them the second time and shut them down the third.

In both cases I lost a ton of money and I am definitely not the only party that did so.

Since then I have my own merchant account and never a problem since.

What is the main difference between 2015 and 2004?

<comment><USER9> > Yes, I have an idea what I'm talking about. > I followed the shut-down of > Dacotah Marketing and Research and iBill from 'row #1' (as a mid-sized > merchant with an inside line into the company about what was going on)

To be fair, that's still as an outsider for one particular incident. Has someone who was basically on stage to your "row #1" for other companies, you are missing a few pieces. Maybe not in that case, but the idea that segregated accounts is some magical pill for someone in the IPSP space isn't entirely true.

And if Visa was involved, it wouldn't do anything.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Makani's airborne wind power system takes flight offshore - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/makani-blog/makanis-airborne-wind-power-system-takes-flight-offshore-907fd4c9af86 <comment><AUTHOR> "Takes flight" and crashes:

To demonstrate our offshore flight capability, we completed two flights from the floating platform. The first quick flight included launch, hover away from the perch, and an autonomous landing. The second, longer-duration test, demonstrated robust crosswind flight. The kite flew beautifully, accurately following commands from the flight controller, and affirming that its motion and that of the floating platform matched our pre-test simulations. In preparation for landing, the kite smoothly transitioned out of crosswind into a stable hover. However, it did not successfully land on the platform, and the flight ended with the loss of the energy kite. Both offshore flights gave us a wealth of new information that the team is now busy analyzing and applying to making system improvements.</comment>


The Valedictorian of University of Maryland drops out right before graduation - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/valedictorian-university-maryland-drops-out-school-two-managadze?trk=v-feed&lipi=urn%3Ali%3Apage%3Ad_flagship3_feed%3BofcRyCoUE%2FR8KI665VXTVQ%3D%3D <comment><USER2> I found the letter to his parents, in which he explains at great length how people should lead their lives, rather condescending. His parents probably have much more experience with life than he does, and have lived through difficulties that he can't even imagine (e.g., his stepfather grew up in the Soviet Union). Some of the points in his letter are things that he'll probably change his mind on later. For example:

 _" I would die absolutely happy if I died right now."_

Clearly, he has no children or anyone else who depend on him for support. Someone who is responsible for the lives of others would probably not be happy to find out that they only had a short time to live. But hey, he's not even responsible for himself:

 _" Please don't disown me yet though. I really need a place to stay before my start ups get funded. I don't even have money for food right now."_

So he's just informed his parents, via e-mail, that he's (1) flushed all the money they paid for his college expenses down the drain and (2) expects them to support him indefinitely (what if his startup doesn't get funded?). He's put them in the difficult position of having to choose between supporting him and letting him go homeless, without even the courtesy of asking them if they had the desire or resources to support him. (Presumably his parents are trying to save for their retirement and for his little sister's education, and would much rather he started paying his own way.) Those are the actions of an immature, entitled child.

</comment><comment><USER3> Peeps. This is 100% real in the sense that he is dropping out. He is not the valedictorian, because he doesn't have the gpa and UMD only has a medalist. I also have many friends who live and work with him.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thing to note: it's brought to my attention that he may never of been Valedictorian, and the UMD might not even give out that award.

<comment><AUTHOR> But this is definitely a real student.</comment></comment>


Kidnapping: An Efficient Business - <AUTHOR> https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/05/09/kidnapping-efficient-business/ <comment><USER2> I was kidnapped many years ago and in conversation with them (to calm them and myself) they regarded kidnapping their profession, literally asking me to allow them do their job.

You could feel they had a script for how things had to go. First they scare you to try to get you to say things from which they can get a feel for how much you're worth, then they throw a high number (I guess based on the previous step), negotiation starts, the ransom delivery and finally release.

<comment><USER3> If you like to share this information: Which country was this?

I imagine someone has to be quite psychopathic (or extremely greedy) to do kidnapping. I would imagine it is usually very traumatising for the victims, regardless of how friendly the kidnappers might seem.

<comment><USER2> This was in Venezuela over 10 years ago.

It was quite surreal, I was even lectured by one of them about being out at night, that I should be more careful since there's "bad people" out there and I was lucky to get caught by some good ones (!). I guess that shows what their frame of mind is, or how they excuse the whole thing to themselves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For people who wonder 'but how do these organizations get all that £€¥$ to fund their terrorism acts?

Drug trafficking, robberies, kidnapping. Counterfeit products and human trafficking are also two more standard 'revenue streams'. In the case of ISIS apparently it was stealing and selling Oil. Depending on the country you live in, bank robberies either contribute to a gangs' income, or if funds local or international terrorism. This is the main reason police does its best to arrest them. The loss of a bank's £€¥$ is bad, threatening some bank employees and customers is bad, funding the next 'Sri Lanka' is far worse (I am NOT pointing fingers or taking sides - just using this example as it was the most recent).

<comment><USER5> A lot of terrorist organizations have state sponsors. Al Qaida began through sponsorship of the US and Saudi Arabia in an effort to bog down the pro-Soviet Regime then in power in Afghanistan.

Edit: Of course, illegal activities help to both supplement state funds and hide their source.

<comment><USER6> I worked for a tech company in the past that had a product that would help stop kidnappings.

We made a sale to the government of a large third world country. They made their first payment and we began to deploy, but obstacles kept arising and nothing more came from it. The subsequent payments weren't made, the product might have disappeared from their warehouse, etc., so we fled the deal.

As it turns out, half the government wanted to end kidnappings, while the other half was perpetrating them. Either side was quick to pocket any lose budget on its way to unwary vendors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Relative risk/reward.

Kidnapping in the US is extremely high risk and low reward.

Kidnapping in the developing world is a different story.

In some places, kidnappings are now being conducted further down the wealth food chain targeting middle class victims at the maximum daily withdraw cash limit in ATMs.

Transactional, high velocity kidnapping,

Unlikely to be investigated and followed up by overwhelmed local law enforcement.

<comment><USER8> I remember that in Ecuador and Peru people called that kind of kidnapping "secuestro express."

<comment><USER9> In Brazil, it's "sequestro relâmpago", roughly translated to "lightning kidnapping"

<comment><USER10> If in Brazil you are carrying a concealed weapon like some people do in America, will as many "sequestro relâmpagos" still be successful?

<comment><USER11> I only have one friend who was kidnapped and having a concealed weapon wouldn't have helped him. He had three guys pointing weapons at him before he even realized he was being kidnapped.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> 'ndrangheta (one of the strongest mafia in italy) in early days built entire cities kidnapping people, many child of italian entrepreneurs

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27Ndrangheta#Modern_history](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27Ndrangheta#Modern_history)

[https://www.fabioitri.com/scomparsi_their_bodies_will_never_...](https://www.fabioitri.com/scomparsi_their_bodies_will_never_be_found-r7566)

</comment><comment><USER13> If you think you are about to get kidnapped, the earlier you attempt to escape the more likely you will succeed. The longer you wait the harder it will get. So try to escape _right away_.

<comment><USER14> This sounds to me like reading the statistic backwards in terms of causation. I imagine people who can and are willing to try escape as soon as they can while people who either don't want to try or simply can't will never escape.

<comment><USER15> You can cause a scene earlier, break windows, set off car alarms. That's a lot harder once you're in a vehicle or in a house being held.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > In 2017 Qatar reportedly paid $1 billion to an al-Qaeda affiliate and Iran > to win the release of a royal hunting party.

These numbers are wild. Why doesn't this happen more often in the US?

<comment><USER17> Better law enforcement. This sort of business happen in countries with corruption off the charts.

<comment><USER18> Or those that have a collapsed state I worked for a Huge Arab firm in the London office and one our guys in Beruit got grabbed - we got him back.

Not sure if it was just cash or "we know where your mum lives be terrible if anything happed to that street".

<comment><USER19> Speaking of Beirut.

"Four Soviet diplomats were kidnapped in September 1985 by a fundamentalist group called the Islamic Liberation Organization. Russia quickly dispatched its Alpha group, tasked with counter-terrorism hostage-rescue operations, to Beirut. Once the team learned that Arkady Katkov, a consular attaché and one of the four hostages, was killed, they responded quickly by tracking down and locating one of the kidnappers' leaders (or relative it's not clear). In order to send a clear message to the terrorists, Alpha group members castrated the hostage, cut him down into pieces and sent him to the hostage takers. They also threatened to kill more of the kidnappers' relatives if the Soviet diplomats were not free."

[https://blogbaladi.com/how-russia-responded-to-the- kidnappin...](https://blogbaladi.com/how-russia-responded-to-the-kidnapping- of-four-soviet-diplomats-in-beirut-in-1985/)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


$1 chip tests for HIV in 15 minutes, fits in your wallet - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/1770850/the-10-cent-plastic-chip-that-quickly-detect-hiv-syphilis <comment><USER3> I really doubt the "no human interpretation" part of the Engadget article. I've been involved in HIV education as part of the gay community, and this sort of kit worries me greatly. If the test is an antibody based test, then it could do far more harm than good by giving uneducated users a false sense of security: a negative result does _not_ mean that you don't have HIV.

While I'm sure that everyone on HN understands the seroconversion window period, this is simply not the case in the larger community. Ignorance about HIV is widespread. I cannot even begin to count the number of people who believe that pulling out before ejaculating affords some sort of magical protection from the virus. These are the same people who upon seeing a negative result would assume that they're safe without condoms.

The CDC states that the window period for detectable HIV antibody formation is three months; however, this figure is based on first generation HIV tests and is considered somewhat conservative. Public health experts like H. Hunter Handsfield state that detectable antibodies usually form in four to six weeks.

Whatever figure you choose to believe, it's a pretty significant time period. And it's a _deadly_ one. It's during the window period that an HIV infected person is most infectious. Their viral loads are off the chart and they can unknowingly infect multiple people in a short period of time.

The "cure" for HIV is the same as it has always been: education and safer sex practices. HIV is largely a preventable disease. I would be okay with personal test kits if they were bundled with extremely clear educational packets printed in multiple languages. But this particular kit is advertised too much like a silver bullet to assure me that the manufacturers are anywhere near that responsible.

<comment><USER4> "HIV is largely a preventable disease."

Except when the government is responsible for spreading the disease. 50% of all new infections come from intravenous drug use, and an even larger percentage are secondary to drug users. If you're gay then it's not illegal to use condoms, but if you're a heroin user then you can literally get put in jail for trying to use clean needles.

What's more, many black communities in the US have higher HIV rates than sub- Saharan Africa. Why? Because so many black males are in prison that it completely changes the sexual dynamics for everyone left on the outside. And further, many of those in prison contract the virus and then end up spreading it throughout the larger community once they get released.

<comment><USER5> \</comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--- but if you're a heroin user then you can literally get put in jail for trying to use clean needles. \</comment><comment></comment><comment>---

Many pharmacies have programs for drug users to buy clean needles, no- questions-asked for exactly this reason.

I am not negating what you said, I'm am sure there are elements of the program (or accessibility) that make it a less-than-perfect solution, but it does exist.

<comment><USER6> >Many pharmacies have programs for drug users to buy clean needles, no- questions-asked for exactly this reason.

unfortunately, not being a drug user i couldn't benefit from it. Once i needed to buy a syringe, and when i'd ask for it (it was here in Bay Area), they would make big eyes and refuse. Surprised, i tried a couple other places - <USER2> same. Until, at another place, they sold it to me and made sure that it packed so when i'm walking to the car, it wouldn't be visible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> You know what would be a _fantastic_ sub-market for this? Bars and clubs in college towns. Regardless of whether you believe 1-nighters are moral or not, they're going to keep happening. Might as well promote safety and reduce the spread of STIs.

Edit: I don't mean this should be an _alternative_ to traditional protection. It just adds another layer of certainty.

<comment><USER8> I really don't think that is a good idea. If people believe they won't get AIDS, which is the scariest STI, they'll be less likely to use protection, which will increase the spread of things like chlamydia (which has only minor side effects, like possible infertility) . Also, I bet the error rate goes up to a scary level once you have it being self-administered by drunk people.

<comment><USER9> As a recent college student, take your paternalism and shove it. I want this.

<comment><USER8> As a current university student, it's not my paternalism. It kind of sucks, doesn't it?

But it's like lots of things in life: sometimes we can't have nice things because other people, who are much less mature and sensible than you, will misuse them, so nobody is allowed them.

Also, "paternalism" is an irritating dog whistle. We are talking about "public health policy", which also means such sensible things as that you can't have plastic surgery done in a car garage or buy cola sweetened with lead acetate or Cyclamate.

<comment><USER10> Condoms won't slow the spread of crabs, scabies, or the common cold. Maybe we should ban those too under your logic.

<comment><USER8> I oppose making a less safe substitute available and I think how people actually act is fair game to consider.

Condoms don't substitute for something equivalent that is safer (some people try to make out that they substitute for abstinence, but that is obviously not true since abstinence is obviously not equivalent).

This device could equivalently substitute for condoms (actually, it's probably cheaper and more fun than condoms as long as you don't mind a small pinprick), but it's less safe. Thus my opposition.

<comment><USER10> Surely then you are opposed to The Pill and other contraceptives that do not hinder the spread of STDs. A major, _if not the primary_ , reason people use condoms under usual circumstances is to prevent unwanted pregnancies.

This device is _not_ a substitute, nor will anyone with a conscience and a brain present it that way. It is something to be used _in addition_ to existing technologies and sensibilities. It is about _increasing_ available information so that people are able to make _more informed_ decisions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think it's worth pointing out that while this is great tech, it's still relying on antibody detection, and the incubation period between infection and antibody production can be anywhere from 6 weeks to 6 months. However, you yourself become infectious from a couple of days after infection, and in fact there's often a really high viral load in these early few weeks/months before antibodies start being produced.

Long story short, for the 2-6 months after you first become infected the test would return negative, but you'd still be highly infectious.

<comment><USER12> 40 TIMES more infectious. To emphasize how important this is.

Some researchers estimate up to 1/2 of new infections are from people who would test negative in this test.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> A 6% false positive rate? You don't want anyone taking this without probable cause then, else you're going to get a metric crap-ton of people going to their doctor's and having to have a full workup done.

Edit to clarify: My point was that just because it was cheap doesn't mean it'll ever be sold to the public. Apart from anything else, consider the psychological impact of discovering you (may) have HIV from a test kit you picked up from next to the Oreos on a whim.

<comment><USER13> Of course at $1/15m/test, a battery of tests is practically built in to the price. If the instructions are to "take three cards and put a drop of blood on each," and that it isn't a positive result unless all three agree, you've solved that problem.

<comment><USER14> Works for medical professionals, but I think to sell this to the general public, those three cards should be baked in together to avoid confusion.

<comment><USER15> Highly unlikely that three runs of the same test are fully independant, i.e. they might match all on the same antibody which is similar to an HIV one but not due to a HIV. You likely only prevent operation goof-ups like "oops, spilled a bit of blood from the needle of my bro here ..." (or something less fancy and more likely).

Which is why in practice you run a different test to confirm results.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Statistical note: With a 4-6% false positive rate, this device is only useful where there is a very high probability of infection. In much of the developed world where HIV infection rates are a fraction of one percent, this would mean that the overwhelming majority of positive tests are false positives.

<comment><USER17> the article claims a 0% false negative rate. This is a MUCH more important claim. False positives are fine, if scary, you go and get a proper test the next day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The title in the nature.com report includes "in the developing world", so I wonder if this will be one of those products that doesn't really get targetted towards US/EU - where, while we may not have HIV problems anywhere near as bad as in Africa, but a $1 15 minute test would still be insanely useful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Even if they don't intend to market this to the US I will do whatever I can to see that it is easily available here.

<comment><USER19> Are you involved in the project?

<comment><AUTHOR> No.

Innovation in practical use medical technologies is one of my personal passions and frequently on the receiving end of my philanthropy.

<comment><USER19> Well kudos to you, good sir.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I wonder how this will come to market and how privacy will be protected. I know purchasing a test chip is not the same as confirming HIV positive but it is a data point, just as pregnancy tests are. If it's OTC do you have to consider how easy it is to track?

<comment><AUTHOR> I could foresee these items being purchased in bulk by individuals. At the $1 price point Bachelors and Bachelorettes around the world might purchase these as frequently as Condoms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> These will never be available over the counter because they would lead to a rash of suicides by people who test positive and are infected as well as the false positives. HIV testing is generally done in conjunction with professional support and not something that should be done at home.

</comment><comment><USER22> As someone who had a false positive not long ago, I am _not_ gonna be using this anytime soon.

</comment><comment><USER23> At this price, countries should just purchase a test for everyone, and eradicate HIV.

<comment><USER24> How would testing everyone eradicate HIV? You'd need to remove the genitals of anyone who tested positive, which I'd imagine would be a little difficult to get through most democratic legislatures.

<comment><USER25> Just like most other disease control campaigns, you appeal to people to change their behaviour, you use social control to support their choice to comply and ultimately you use laws and the iron fist of the state (see smoking or leprosy as good examples).

Seriously, in campaigns to minimise HIV transmission in much of the rich world, they generally use self-interest, people's feelings about their loved ones and the broader sense of social concern as drivers, and above all, non- judgemental honest information - that has worked pretty well in many places (although concern about rapid infection growth in some communities amongst young men-who-have-sex-with-men has been growing recently).

Fear-based campaigning hasn't had a particularly good track record in public health campaigning, at least as far as I recall (just one statistical analysis of road-safety campaigns: <http://eprints.qut.edu.au/1839/1/1839.pdf>)</comment></comment></comment>


Gay Liberation in East Germany: The unexpected LGBT golden-age under communism - <AUTHOR> http://bostonreview.net/gender-sexuality/samuel-clowes-huneke-gay-liberation-behind-iron-curtain <comment><USER2> _A gay golden age in East Germany reveals that Soviet politics were more dynamic than we admit—and that gay rights has less to do with democracy than we tend to assume._</comment>


Show HN: Text Better – Communicate Better – Relationship Better - <AUTHOR> http://trylovetap.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi!! LoveTap creator Ben here.

LoveTap uses trend analysis on your texts to help you learn how you're doing in your relationship - all by analyzing your texts.

It's only for android, but I'd love for you to try it out.

Free. No ads. No tracking.

Check out the product hunt for more info! (or just go try it out) [https://www.producthunt.com/posts/lovetap-text-analyzer- for-...](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/lovetap-text-analyzer-for-android)</comment>


Tips for Getting Started With AWS - <AUTHOR> http://jamescarl.us/blog/5-tips-for-getting-started-with-aws/

<comment><USER3> > For the love of all that is good, save your .pem file to some kind of cloud > storage so you'll never be without it.

For the love of all that is good, don't do this for anything beyond random hobbyist screwing around. A Dropbox compromise shouldn't risk your entire company's server infrastructure.

> If you only have need for one free tier instance leave it running.

No, because the 750 hours/month can be used by more than one instance. You could, for example, try out database clustering by running two t1.micro instances for two weeks.

> Finally resist the urge to use your GUI when working with your project even > when your working with your project on a local machine you'll find that as > you move along with your project you'll be in better control of the project > when it's on the remote server.

The AWS Console is perfectly usable for 99% of what you'll need to do. Most users won't need anything beyond it.

<comment><USER4> > For the love of all that is good, don't do this ...

I, too, was astounded that anybody would be recommending keeping your keys 'public' like this. By all means, keep it on a few USB sticks that are nicely secure - and have a good plan in place in case you lose one.

<comment><USER5> Here's a better idea. Learn to use IAM properly and rotate your keys on a schedule.

<comment><USER6> You're thinking of AWS access keys. Not the same thing.

<comment><USER5> Oh, I thought this article was about AWS not SSH. My bad. Yeah, don't rotate your SSH keys either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A bit disappointed by this. As mentioned by ceejayoz, don't upload your .pem file anywhere!

AWS has tons of weird/interesting quirks - I thought this article was going to be about those.

Here's my 5 tips for AWS...

\- SQS: encodes messages by default! plan accordingly if you are going to be sending large bodies (265K max).

\- ELBs: they need time to warm up if you get a huge traffic spike. ELBs won't start scaling unless that traffic is sustained for a certain time (usually minutes).

\- S3: watch out for "eventual consistency" if you're going to upload lots of files and try to access them right away - they might not be available immediately.

\- Cloudwatch: set up alarms to make sure your billing never goes over threshold X in time Y. If someone compromised your account (because you uploaded your .pem file in cleartext to dropbox) and is mining bitcoins on your machines, you'll be notified.

\- VPC: if you're going to build a services-oriented infrastructure, consider using a VPC! Unless you need to have all your services exposed to the public internet, it could save you a lot of time and security configuration trouble.

<comment><USER3> On the last point, just use a VPC, period. I believe Amazon has now made this the default for new accounts, in fact. They come with no downsides and lots of benefits - being able to change security groups on the fly, elastic IPs that stay with the instance when stopped, etc.

<comment><USER8> True, all new AWS accounts create VPC based configs. [http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonVPC/latest/UserGuide/defaul...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonVPC/latest/UserGuide/default- vpc.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you choose to upload .pem to cloud storage, make sure you secure (encrypt) your .pem file, since it allows total access to the boxes! You should also secure remote access via the "security groups" firewall by only allowing known ip addresses (you can edit this via the aws console as needed). Since he mentioned the "The Command Line Crash Course" [1]. I might chime in with a couple into screencasts I've created.

Crash Course on the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard @ [http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/12-crash-course-on-the- fil...](http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/12-crash-course-on-the-filesystem- hierarchy-standard)

Crash Course on Common Commands @ [http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/13-crash- course-on-common-...](http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/13-crash-course-on- common-commands)

Crash Course on Man Pages @ [http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/19-crash- course-on-man-pag...](http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/19-crash-course-on- man-pages)

[1] [http://cli.learncodethehardway.org/book/](http://cli.learncodethehardway.org/book/)

<comment><USER10> I suggest using a TrueCrypt volume with your credentials, stored on Dropbox.

<comment><USER11> I email myself my encryption passwords so that I - and any interested government agencies - can log in without me needing to remember them all the time.

<comment><USER10> Worry not, I'm sure the US government would just go straight to AWS. No need to get your private key from you.

Edit: Please don't just downvote when I rebut sarcasm/snark with fact. Discuss!

<comment><USER12> AWS does not have your private key, that's how public key infrastructure works. ;)

<comment><USER10> Once you have physical access, no need for the private key. Unless you're encrypting all of your data, they'll just snapshot your VM to go through it later (or your EBS volume, depending on where the data is stored).

And yes, you can write out whatever is in RAM just as easily.

Did everyone forget that "cloud" means "someone else fully controls the hardware"?

<comment><USER12> Right, but this has nothing to do with the practice of protecting your private key.

That the most sophisticated attacker with the most resources _may_ be able to tunnel into your data is no excuse for lax security.

<comment><USER10> I was replying to this parent post: "I email myself my encryption passwords so that I - and any interested government agencies - can log in without me needing to remember them all the time."

Yes, you should protect your private key. No, protecting it isn't going to stop a government agency. A VM is not Schroeder's cat: you can peak without there being any evidence. That was my point. Apologies if I wasn't straightforward in my explanation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> My tip number 0: Use a CMS. It's a beautiful thing to start an ec2 instance, run Ansible, get a drink of water, and return to a fully provisioned and configured machine.

Tip 0.1: Use Vagrant with an EC2 box, and just 'vagrant up' yourself a fully operational machine.

<comment><USER14> Why are people so thrilled about a slower more error prone way to do what amazon provides already? Just make an ami for each kind of server you want. Now you skip the waiting part, and the "oops, my pile of messy ruby scripts fucked up configuring the server" parts.

<comment><USER3> You can use Ansible to create an AMI to get the best of both worlds - <USER2> provisioning, plus the ability to make new AMIs in a repeatable, self- documenting manner. You're arguing configuration management is "error prone", but I've found it a lot _less_ error prone than other methods. If something doesn't install right I can blow away the whole thing rather than trying to un-break a destroyed install.

If your Ansible scripts are in Ruby you've done something very odd, and if they're messy it's your own fault. Mine are pretty clean, and once built they work the same way for subsequent runs.

<comment><USER14> >If your Ansible scripts are in Ruby

The popular options are in ruby. Just because you use a less popular one that is written in python doesn't change the main point.

<comment><USER3> Ansible itself is Python, and the docs all use Python examples. I've yet to come across a Ruby one...

<comment><USER14> Why are you replying if you can't be bothered to read?

<comment><USER3> The post you replied to was about Ansible (which is pretty popular).

If you're intending to bash Puppet/Chef, why are you doing it in response to someone mentioning how handy Ansible is?

<comment><USER14> [http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/straw- man.html](http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/straw-man.html)

<comment><USER3> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non_sequitur_(logic)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non_sequitur_\(logic\))

<comment><USER14> Seriously? Read the thread. You responded to "Using config tools isn't helpful" with "but mine is python!!1". Nobody cares, it is a completely irrelevant detail. I simply said ruby because the two popular options are both ruby. It still applies to fucking cfengine, it doesn't matter the specific tool.

<comment><USER3> The Ruby-based CMSes are very, very different from tools like Ansible. That's an important issue when you're bashing the entire range, seemingly without any thought for the situations that make them useful and without knowledge of other options than Puppet/Chef.

<comment><USER14> >The Ruby-based CMSes are very, very different from tools like Ansible

No they are not. I've probably been doing system administration longer than you have been alive. I've used everything from cfengine to salt. They all cause more problems than they solve.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> #1 tip Know your AWS service limitations before you start using it! specifically with services like Cloudsearch and dynamodb!

2nd, know your usage upfront before you incur thousands of dollars in usage fees! services like dynamoDB can become very expensive very fast!

</comment><comment><USER16> Don't listen to these comments. I urge EVERYONE to save their perm files somewhere. Trust me, the rist of getting compromised is nothing compared to the risk you're exposing yourself to if you don't.

<comment><AUTHOR> Simple! Excellent point thanks for posting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> how did this make it to the front page of HN?

<comment><AUTHOR> beginners luck ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Just a bit of advice, the body font you chose is terrible at smaller sizes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Okay cool. I'll be sure to try out some new ones.</comment></comment>


Why I'm learning Emacs - <AUTHOR> http://isaacsu.com/2011/11/why-im-learning-emacs/

<comment><USER2> Don't get me wrong, I use and love emacs, but I think it's a little silly to learn a new editor just because Steve Yegge says that all the "world changing" developers use it. As with any tool, pick the editor that that 1) is suitable for your task 2) you are comfortable with. Doesn't get any simpler than that.

<comment><USER3> The problem with that logic is that the best tools also tend to be the ones that take a bit of effort to become comfortable with. If you always go with what you're already familiar with, you'll never get anywhere.

Also, it's pretty hard to judge how suitable a tool as versatile as Emacs is to your task without already being at least familiar with it.

Ultimately, I'm a big fan of trying to use new stuff "just because". I've found some of my favorite tools this way: Haskell, Emacs and even Linux.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm learning emacs also, but I have been using it since perhaps 1990. Steve's article has a lot of good stuff in it.

However, there is one world-changing programmer that I know of (and I would guess there are likely others) that is rumored to have used VI and not emacs. As I understand it, Paul Graham used (uses?) VI and not emacs. Oh, another is Cutler, writer of more OS systems than most of us have ever used: RSTS-11, Vax VMS, and Windows NT. He uses Slick Edit. I am sure the list goes on. Where I work, primary editors include Pico, Textmate, Emacs, vim, sublime.

Presumably you are here to build amazing stuff, and unless your Amazing Stuff is a world-beating editor, your editor is not your job. So don't get too hung up on the editor. Lots of good ones out there.

</comment><comment><USER5> A nice halfway house: <http://gitorious.org/evil/pages/Home>

<comment><USER6> It's really great. I've been using it for a few weeks and barely missing vim at all.

Emacs clearly has the superior extension mechanism, especially if you're writing a lisp of some sort. But I believe vim clearly has the superior key bindings.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Was this submission flagged down? If so, why? Because it kinda disappeared off the front page for me.</comment>


Are you allowed to listen to music at work (with headphones)? - <AUTHOR> I joined a new office since January. Work isn't very exciting but it pays alright although not great pay. However, when I used my headphones to listen to music, the boss said he doesn't like it. So, I don't listen to music at office. However, I sometimes wish if I had some music. On top of that, my office doesn't have any eating area, no kitchen, no fridge, no microwave. No talks besides ones related to work. If something was discussed before, no discussion on same thing again because boss thinks it's waste of time. I got yelled at couple of times because there were some bugs. I'm not sure if I'm over reacting or the office isn't good. We are just 3 in office including boss. <comment><USER3> Tip of the iceberg. Leave ASAP.

My coworker (a salaried employee) was working on the weekend as a courtesy to my boss (small business). She saw him wearing headphones and told him to take them off immediately and that they weren't allowed.

He never came in on the weekend again.

Rules like 'no headphones' are the signal that the boss is suffering from pathological behavior. This is a very unhealthy environment for the employees. Leave immediately.

<comment><USER4> +1 I never got my head around to understanding why its hard to understand that each has his own hacks to being productive. Listening to music is just one of the things that just works for me. Moving away from my workstation is another that works great for me when i am stuck with some problem.

But sometimes people frown, its their problem not ours.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This sounds like a very bad workplace. Not just in terms of perks, but in management style. _Only_ talk about work while at work? Mmmm....OK, there's always lunch time. No "discussion on same thing again because boss thinks it's waste of time"...either you're exaggerating or your boss sounds like a deluded-YOLO-Steve-Jobs-wannabe. And the ban on headphones seems like a move out of insecurity, as if your boss can't trust you to stay focused on your job unless he has the uninterrupted ability to get your attention at all times during the day.

And getting yelled at over some bugs? If you have a choice, move out, ASAP.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sometimes I think I'm exaggerating because all he wants is money's worth. I should be working hard and giving good quality work. But once he explains and we agree to build features in some way, discussion on the same thing irritates him. Once I misunderstood what he wanted me to test. Next day he gets angry and mumbles for 5 minutes and then get's angry because he just wasted 5 minutes saying the same thing. Most of my work is good. There is a senior guy who is nice person. He's been there for 2 years now but last 3 guys hired in my place left within 3 months. One was fired, other two left.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> That sounds like a bad place to work. In better workplaces, and in terms of headphones policy, wearing them should be allowed, but it should be seen as a temporary do not disturb sign, and one shouldn't wear them all the time. Being in a shared office implies communication between the other people and wearing headphones all the time may interrupt with that.

In practice, what I've seen is that in the mornings with the stand ups and other meetings and calls with clients nobody wears headphones. Then after lunch and heads go down, the headphones go on.

<comment><USER7> I don't agree at all.

In an open space office headphones = working. No headphones - temporary you may disturb me now sign. Anything requiring more than 2 people briefly talking -> find an office.

And that's why open offices are horrible for devs - you work on your own 75%+ of the time and you get to choose between slowly damaging your hearing or being distracted and not getting any work done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> That sounds like a toxic environment and my advice would be to move on.

<comment><USER9> I'd second this advice. Also, did you notice any warning signs during your initial interview? If not, you should consider incorporating some questions that'll feel out the office culture.

<comment><AUTHOR> No, there weren't any warning signs. Interview went well. The bloke seemed reasonable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> >I got yelled at couple of times because there were some bugs.

I'm having trouble finding words strong enough to convey how absolutely unacceptable that is. I would start interviewing at other companies immediately. When asked why, cite this. If you can afford being unemployed (check unemployment eligibility), I'd walk out of the office immediately the next time your boss yells at you.

"Don't make mistakes" is a completely unreasonable demand. If you want fewer mistakes, implement better processes and teach people better techniques.

</comment><comment><USER11> That sounds like a really unpleasant work environment. I don't think you're overreacting.

</comment><comment><USER12> Your employer is paying for your labor, nothing more. If it doesn't impact safety, workplace rights or efficient collaboration, it's none of his business. He doesn't own your time, your sensory experience, or your right to happiness.

Make that clear and if nothing changes move on.

> I got yelled at couple of times because there were some bugs.

This is entirely the wrong way to deal with bugs. Bugs are not the product of bad programmers; bugs are symptoms of bad processes. Bugs happen. The response to them should be preventative, not punitive, i.e., how did this happen, how can we detect it in the future, is it worth not just detecting but preventing in the future, and if so, how do we do that systematically. Of course there will be bad programmers, but environments like this give them the scaffolding to improve, and if they don't there's much more basis for letting them go than just, "you made a bug."

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't consider myself even a good programmer. I get things done and I want to learn better techniques. However, in the past I have worked in places which had nice perks, nice team, great process ! However, good thing about this office is that I waste no time. I have never googled or open any website except directly related to work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> You don't seem to be overreacting. That's a small, intense, pressure cooker type environment with a lot of control going on.

If it were me, I would be looking elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER14> Is your boss over 45? It could just be a generational thing. For context, in my younger days, I worked in offices where no one ever (literally NEVER) took a personal phone call unless it was an emergency (this is before mobile phones and texting). And it still looks strange to me when I see people working at an office with headphones. (Even though I prefer to work with music).

<comment><USER15> What does 45 have to do with it? I'll be 60 this year and I often use headphones in the office, my boss doesn't care as long as I don't drum too loudly on the desk while listening to Deep Purple, Led Zep, King Crimson, Scooter, etc., etc.

I mean really, people my age and older invented the personal music player and so on. You could make a good case for saying that Masaru Ibuka invented the Walkman at Sony and he was born in 1908, around about the same time as my grandfather! He was already 70 when it was launched.

<comment><USER16> Older people have more experience in old school workplaces. Check out the new Alabama Shakes record, you'll dig it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Okay, so no headphones. How about playing some music in the open? I've worked in small workshops were we all built a playlist and everyone put in their favorite stuff so the music would rotate. Doesn't have to blast, keep it low so it doesn't bother anyone outside your immediate area.

<comment><AUTHOR> That'll be a very bad idea. He doesn't even like vibrating phones. One day the senior guy was told to turn off vibration because he was getting multiple messages. This senior guy is amazing. He's cool. He says don't feel bad. Boss gets angry sometimes because may be he is in pressure but he is not a bad person. This guy really has done great job there but even he gets blamed many times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> What if you decided to wear noise canceling headphones to keep you in the flow of work? Which I actually think listening to music does. Your boss sounds like a dick-tator or you're working in some government office in communist China. Leave now.

</comment><comment><USER19> All the places I have worked allowed headphones. I don't think I'd work somewhere that didn't allow headphones. How do you get in the f'n zone without some awesome music?

</comment><comment><USER20> Your workplace sucks.Move on as soon as you can. Seriously.

</comment><comment><USER21> > Are you allowed to listen to music at work (with headphones)?

Really up to the work place I guess. All my work place so far let me listen to music with headphones...

I'd start looking for another job unless you don't have any good resume experiences and having a hard time getting a position. Then you would probably want to stick it out for a year and get friendly with that 1 other worker for a reference.

</comment><comment><USER22> At every job I've worked that involved programming and working inside of an office, I was permitted to listen to music on my headphones.

</comment><comment><USER23> How someone gets their work done shouldnt be a concern for your boss, as long as you did it yourself within the reasonable amount of time. Asking you to not listen to music, just because, sounds unfair and ill-advised.

Sounds like you're new to working, so dont make any opinions about work culture from this. Workplaces are much much nicer than what you're experiencing right now.

</comment><comment><USER24> One office I worked in had a 2 kW sound system and sound proofing. Happy days !

Currently, the open plan office I work in makes headphones a necessity - <USER2> focussed isolation and for calls.

So you're lacking basic amenities, your colleagues are antisocial, blame and aggression take the place of thorough testing.

Sounds to me like the office isn't good.

</comment><comment><USER25> What are you supposed to be doing at said office? Does it involve answering calls or hearing people talking to you?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not at all. I add features to existing product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Where I work we have music playing within the workplace through speakers, we're also free to use headphones if we wish. I don't see why you wouldn't be allowed to be honest - that seems a little unfair!

</comment><comment><USER27> I had to invest in noise cancelling headphones solely to use at work because the office is so damn noisy and so many people lack consideration towards others.

</comment><comment><USER28> it would sound like as if there could be office environments for you where you would feel better. are you coding? how long have you been in this (or a similar) position?

I would start to ask myself what I'm getting from the job (besides the money) and why I joined in the first place. maybe make a weighed pro's and con's list and see how I score.

does that help?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I do coding. I think the same. Nothing except money. The code base is old and I'm advised to follow the same coding pattern, copy paste and make changes. No new looking or different code allowed even if it is new and great technique. Boss doesn't want to learn and manage it if I'm gone. The man is fine during lunch, nice talk but once we get into office, it's pin drop silence. I once asked what should I do today, what should I work on. He says "Sip coffee, lay back and enjoy the day. Can you do that? " I was speechless ! :)

<comment><USER29> It seems like a very bad place to work in. If you're coder, you can surely find something better. Your boss should be left with no workers so that he can learn it's not the way to run business. This is not even micromanagement. Just take away the pay and it's pure slavery.

What I'm used to is unlimited holidays, time to work on own projects, as many breaks and as long as I need. But this is standard way to treat coders in Dublin (Ireland). Listening to music? Please, we're even given headphones if we want. I hope your company is just the odd one out. Just move asap.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow ! I envy you but you must be really good at what you do !

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Out of curiosity, what country do you live in?

<comment><AUTHOR> You won't believe it but this office is in Sydney, Australia. When I told this to some people, they were shocked this kind of office existed here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Don't walk away. Run.

You are at the very bottom as far as work environments go.

 _I got yelled at couple of times because there were some bugs_

There is no point discussing further or bringing anything up to your "employer". Just leave.

</comment><comment><USER32> I can even use my speakers. THANKS GOD.

</comment><comment><USER33> If you are in Europe, your company may forbid listening to music in house rules, to avoid paying a media tax.

<comment><USER30> That's insane. I live in Europe and I've never heard of such a rule/law (nor any company forbidding music).

Even friends in 'stiff' industries, like banking or law, can listen to music at work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Start sending out your resumes and taking interviews.

You're working for a control freak. It will not end well.</comment>


My Project: Qotr, a quote board for your friends - <AUTHOR> http://qotr.net/

<comment><AUTHOR> Many of us are familiar with <http://bash.org>, or have our own Google doc full of funny things people have said in IRC, Campfire, et. al; my friend and I put together a free service where you can create your own quote board.

Boards are public by default; you can set up a whitelist to keep things private, and set mods and admins who can administer quotes and board settings. You can also set up sub-boards, such as "x.qotr.net" and "z.y.x.qotr.net"; permissions and quotes are inherited.

It has an API built in as well; you can make requests with a token you are assigned on your account page after sign up. It's a RESTful interface, so you can get/post/put/delete quotes to boards.

It uses PHP and MongoDB, hosted on EC2. We built this mostly in a weekend, and open-sourced a PHP framework that came out of it at <http://github.com/Olivine-Labs/Mint> (although we need to, um, build documentation and examples.) We're working on rebuilding and vastly simplifying Mint as well, over the coming months.

<comment><USER2> The website looks very good in spite of the distracting ads. Good luck! Did you use a design library like bootstrap?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks; we had an internal debate on wether or not to use ads, and we decided to see what happened if we included them. It is backed by bootstrap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> You've done very well to find a four-letter domain name for a 'weekend project', let alone a relevant one. My circle uses a self-hosted homegrown wiki for this sort of thing, so we don't have searching or sorting, but content is malleable, organisable and totally free-form.

A point to make about our system, is that everyone is trusted enough for us to not employ any sort of account system. We do however publically log IPs with a hash of the user-agent, so people can at least see if the same person was responsible for multiple edits. Since this sort of information can be gathered by any website, i like to think making it public gives our non-technical users a more solid understanding of how their actions online can be traced.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks; we were both pretty surprised that it was available. We kind of named the site based on the domain, rather than the other way around.

I like the idea of making edits public - kind of Stack-Overflow-like in a way, so that if someone with mod access edits your post, you can see who. We could also put in an option to allow everyone mod access, more wiki-like; if you have a trusted whitelist that could access your board, only those people would be allowed to read, and therefore edit.

Cool ideas. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Who owns the commented we post? Do they automatically become the property of Olivine Labs LLC? The ToS makes no mention of this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Updated; you own the content, and grant us a license to use. IANAL; I modeled it after several other sites.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here <http://qotr.net/Quotes/> the quotes draw less attention than the buttons themselves. You could make the font bigger or more attractive, I guess.

What language did you guys use in this project?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, that's a good point. We should tone down the buttons a bit; maybe use colored arrows (a la Reddit) instead of bright buttons.

We used PHP and MongoDB with our homegrown framework (<https://github.com/Olivine-Labs/Mint>); we're working on solidifying the framework and getting documentation and examples together.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> For those not reading the title, link is <http://qotr.net>

</comment><comment><USER7> Good luck

A Lot of developers have a MOTD file in their applications, before I compiled my motd file I looked everywhere for a simple motd feed but gave up as it was all too much time and trouble and quicker to compile my own off the various text files out there. Maybe a future market but I doubt it (there again porn sites do quite well and you can get it for free)

You _seriously_ need some sort of moderation, no-ones going to stay on a page where on the first page one of the quotes is "does this work"

<comment><AUTHOR> We do have moderation, and you can set admins and mods on your own board, but I'm trying to refrain from using it too much. I hope that downvotes / new quotes drown out the 'does this work' kind of 'quotes'. I prefer a more open form of governance than heavily moderated, but maybe I need to prune some of the bad quotes?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ugh, seriously? Is this what modern web application development has come to?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a weekend project that a friend and I put together. If you have any constructive criticism, I'd love to hear it.

It's a fun project that we built for ourselves, then opened it up to whoever else wants to use it for free. Thanks for calling it "modern web development", though; we're proud of the framework and our implementation. Even if you were being sarcastic.</comment></comment>


Lessons learned from a failed poker software business - <AUTHOR> http://www.mattmazur.com/2008/11/all-in-expert-lessons-learned/ <comment><USER2> I don't think you had a failed poker software business. You wrote, released, and announced some software. That's simply step one, and the very minimum. Next, you need to iterate, which may include adding features found in other software, creating a web version, and more. I see very few lessons here, and they are on how to fail.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, you're right. As I mentioned in the post, I use the word "business" liberally for lack of a better term. If there had been a future for the product I would have iterated, created a web app, etc, but I decided it wasn't worth the effort. As far as the lessons, figuring out how something fails is strongly tied to figuring out why it succeeds.

<comment><USER3> "but I decided it wasn't worth the effort."

Good decision. It seems like you have a lot of talent and can make a LOT more money in a vertical other than poker. Also, it will probably be more enjoyable in another domain.

My 2 cents. We tried to a business in the lottery space once because it seemed there were no good tech companies there, there was a ton of money at stake, and lots of innovation to be done. But after a short time it was really demoralizing to be in that type of vertical. Fail fast and move on!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I note that on the website there seems to be no real screenshots of your application in action that give me a good idea of what it does and how it works. In my opinion, this is a huge mistake - I generally won't download /anything/ unless I've seen a screenshot first.

<comment><AUTHOR> You mean the little dinky gradient grid on the front page isn't enough? Just kidding -- thanks for the feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think taking down the site was a bad idea, after reading your article, I would have bought it (my pain treshold for random purchases goes somewhere around $20 so if you decide to sell it for under that, please drop a notice).

I'm an entrepreneur myself (We sold our company to a quite big company about 1,5 years ago), I think what really went wrong was not the product, niche or anything like that. It was the marketing/sales. You should never underestimate how hard selling even a good product is.

also, this kind of a product will never "get old", the principles behind it will be the same forever so if it's good and you get enough people who purchase, you will get snowball effect by mouth to mouth marketing.

I think the worst decision you made was to waste your work when you took the site down. I also think your name is awful, it's so generic that it's hard to even find using google so what I would do is to republish the program with catchy name and add a link from your blog.

Also it's not a bad idea to hang in places like digitalpoint forums and hire some indian to submit your tool to X directories, that will cost you about $10-20 and you will get a lot of google goodness.

edit: you are giving it free now? Okay suits me but I would have bought it. How about adding at least a donation button?

<comment><AUTHOR> Very good post. I have a lot to learn about advertising. While it's nice when your product sells itself, there's clearly a lot of value in a great advertising campaign. I could have done much better following through after I launched.

I liked the name, but the problem was the three words: all+in+expert. There was a time after it launched where the site came up as #1, but now its faded into oblivion. I thought it succinctly captured what the software was about, but as you said, maybe it wasn't catchy enough.

I'm launching a new site in a few weeks which I'm going to do a few things differently with. The digitalpoint idea isn't bad.

No need for a donation, your advice is far more valuable than $20 will ever be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thanks for sharing the insight. A few months of work in exchange for some valuable lessons learned - well done.

</comment><comment><USER7> It sounds as if you didn't try any advertising at all, except for a small announcement in a poker group? I think you should have put a lot more thought into how to get users to find your product. Like, sometimes (often, maybe), people don't even know they could use something and that something they could use exists. You have to educate them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. I added a bit of clarification to the article since it did read like the one post was the only thing I did.

After it launched I decided that the best way to demonstrate its utility was to search poker forums for problems and then post the ALL IN Expert results. I wound up adding a feature to the software that let people export the results in a forum-friendly format which also linked back to the site. This helped bring some people to the site and if I had continued it for some time it may have brought in a few more registrations. In hindsight maybe I should have done this more. It's hard to say... No matter how much you prod a dead duck it's not gonna move much.

<comment><USER7> Not saying that it would have been successful, hard to say.

But reading "Advertising is a tax for being unremarkable" seems a bit harsh. In some businesses, there simply is no other way. For example recently I heard from some online dating services that they really boil down to the hard calculation of "how expensive is it to convert a user we bought with advertising". Like if they raise their conversion rates, they can afford more advertising, and so on. Sure, maybe sometimes there will be a "hit dating service" that spreads through word of mouth, but the others seem to do OK, too.

Especially in Poker it seems advertising is huge?

<comment><USER8> > In some businesses, there simply is no other way. For example recently I > heard from some online dating services

I don't think advertising is necessary for an online dating service. For example, quite a few of my friends are on OK Cupid, and as far as I know they don't do much advertising.

"Advertising is a tax for being unremarkable" is a really succinct way of putting it.

<comment><USER7> Even if you can be successful without advertising, it seems a bit silly to be against it. If you know that by investing 100000$ in advertising, you can earn another 1000000$ in revenue, why would you not do it? Just because it loses you points in the indie scene?

I used to be all negative about advertising, but I changed my attitude since I realized that nature itself relies heavily on advertising. A beautiful flower is advertising, too. Even a flower has to announce "I am here" with colors and odors. Maybe in some cases a "social recommendation mechanism" is also at work (like the bees who inform other bees about food sources), but without such a mechanism, how are your clients going to discover you?

<comment><USER9> One example answer is that if your gross margin is anything under 10%, you shouldn't spend $100m in advertising for $1mm in marginal revenue.

Doesn't happen often in software, of course.

<comment><USER7> I admit you have lost me here - why should one not make that investment?

<comment><USER9> Let's say your gross margin is 9%.

You spend $100K in advertising. You get an additional $1000K in revenue, on which you make a 9% profit. You bank $90K profit from this.

You're $10K worse off for having done that advertising.

<comment><USER7> OK - not so used to terms like "gross margin" ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm guessing your problem is a miscalculation in target market.

People will be either

1: Very good at poker. In which case they can go through this mental, odds- calculating process in their head without the need for software. or

2: Not very good at poker. In which case your software is immensely confusing. They need to be able to put opponents on a range of hands (how does a novice guess what an opponent most likely has? half-likely has?) in less than 20 seconds (the time online poker software gives to each player per turn).

I play poker pretty often, and can tell you that odds calculation is never a fixed thing (so it's hard to replicate with software), and even considering my poker background, the screenshots of your program still confused me.

<comment><USER11> 1) Wrong. Complex odds can't be calculated in your head. Even the math PhDs who do well at poker calculate EVs against a range of holdings with a computer.

For instance, if you can calculate your equity with T9s against a range of (AA-22, Ak-AT, A9s, KQ-KT, K9s, QJ-QTs)in your head, consider yourself a genius.

The type of software he built is very popular among people who are good at poker or trying to become so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Does "estimating your opponent's hands" have any value? If you could do that with any certainty you probably don't need a calculator.

EDIT: I realize that estimating your opponent's hands is important. Basic poker there. I'm talking about "estimating your opponent's hands" which is featured in one of the calculator's screens. That seems like an iffy thing to feed into a computer. It's a garbage-in-garbage-out situation.

<comment><USER13> Being able to figure out what kind of hand your opponent has is the difference between winning and losing poker. You usually make a guess based on previous behavior, how much aggression your opponent has shown so far, the position your opponent is in (acting first is a huge disadvantage) and so on.

If you make no estimate what kind of hand your opponent has you can only reason in three ways:

a) you assume he always has the best hand. So you throw away your hand.

b) you assume he always has the worst hand. So you put your chips in.

c) you bet big if you have good cards, and you throw your cards away when your cards are lousy.

Clearly (a) and (b) are bad strategies.

The last strategy is not as bad as the other two, but still terrible. More often than not your cards are bad. So your opponent will figure out you're not willing to make large bets with lousy cards, so every time you don't bet, he will, and every time you bet, he won't. You're going to lose your chips that way. Basic game theory.

So you need to figure out what cards he could have been dealt so that his actions make sense. Then, from that range of plausible cards, figure out how often he has a better hand than you do. If you like your odds, you put your chips in. Otherwise, you throw your cards away.

It's a lot more complex than this, of course. But the point is that "estimating your opponent's hands", as difficult as it may be, is absolutely crucial if you want to win.

<comment><USER14> I suspect that the best long term stable strategie is to randomly assign a personal value for this hand. Something like .75 to 2x the actual value of your hand before the bet to reduce the amount of signal your sending out. If your both doing this and playing perfect poker then nobody wins.

Finding what the best random function might be would be an interesting test of machine learning. But in the real world few players are going to do something like this so finding out what their approach is is going to be a better approach.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Perhaps you can make an online free version and put some ads?

<comment><AUTHOR> Given the small target audience, I don't think it would be worth it to convert it into a free web app. Anyone that wants to toy with it is welcomed to download the desktop app now anyway.

<comment><USER15> I was mentioning it because there may be people interested in a web version of the poker calculators. As far as I know the known names (pokerstove etc) are all Windows-based and only Ed Miller has an online equity calculator in his page.

There may be more poker players like me who doesn't use Windows at home and I could see the value of having a re-sized small web window while playing with just three boxes (pot, my stack, opponent's stack) plus a small pre-selection of opponents ranges (ex: top 10%, top 40%, any two) so it can be used in real time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Thanks for posting. I'm finding myself in a similar situation, but I've adopted a different strategy. I'm writing a second, semi-related app that I hope will help build the brand equity. There are a lot of insightful comments in this thread.

My marketing and advertising are weak.

</comment><comment><USER17> You would have generated the target 40K in profit if you'd have simply taken the time you spent on developing the odds application, and put it into building a poker bot and playing limit hold'em instead.

</comment><comment><USER18> Why don't you give it away for free to people who sign up using your affiliate link for a poker room?

<comment><USER11> Hard to make any money that way. Most people who want this type of program already have accounts at the one or two sites worth playing at.

<comment><USER18> I was thinking of this program, which is distributed that way. <http://www.calculatem.com/> There are a lot of casual users who would definitely be interested in something to give them an edge, but I guess the problem is they don't know such programs exist.

And sure, most people probably already have accounts at their preferred sites, but it doesn't hurt to have it as an option. It's easy enough to open a new poker account (well, it was when I was playing before Bush messed things up) and getting the typical bonus + software could be enough to play for a week at a second tier site.

<comment><USER11> Those calculatem people are constantly emailing me asking if I'll link to them.

<comment><USER18> Looks like that strategy is working for them. <http://www.google.com/search?q=poker+calculator>

<comment><USER11> Yeah, not bad at all. It's labor-intensive, but does appear to pay off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> $10 (or $40) isn't enough for me to take you serious. Would you make a move on $10 stock advice?

<comment><USER11> I would buy a $10 program that aided me in making stock picks if it were simply doing mathematical computations for me. This is more the equivalent of a program that computes PE and dividend ratios than one that says "Buy AAPL at $95". Except that dividend ratios can be computed trivially in your head, while equity against a range of holdings given certain chip stacks cannot.

<comment><USER19> Point taken. I didn't read the details. Sounds more like it truly is worth $0.

<comment><USER11> Yeah I'm not sure exactly what it does that some of the free ones don't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> How can this be a Fail? Give it for free if that what it takes then adapt it to make money.

<comment><AUTHOR> "Give it for free if that what it takes then adapt it to make money." -- I laughed.

With a lot of work it might one day make some decent change, but again, it's not worth it at this point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I wouldn't consider this a failure. Guessing that you don't want to run into legally shady territory (assuming you're in the US) and start an online gambling site, it's hard as hell to make money in _anything_ related to games, especially public-domain card games. For example, I'd doubt that the designers of card games like _FreeCell_ and _Ambition_ ever made a cent off their inventions.

I'll point this out, though: games do well when the economy tanks, so I wouldn't give it up just yet. ( _Monopoly_ was invented, in its modern form, during the Great Depression.)

<comment><USER11> You have no idea how wrong you are. There's a tremendous market for poker- related apps. It's an industry that rakes in at least hundreds of millions annually.

If I told you what I made off of this sort of thing in the pre-UIGEA days (and especially before Party spun off its skins sites) you'd shit your pants.

Top rakeback providers made 6 or maybe even low 7 figures per month at the pinnacle. The Poker Tracker guys have sold many thousands of copies at $50 a pop.

Games in general are the only thing monetizing well right now on Facebook and MySpace platforms too, and the #1 most profitable is almost certainly Zynga's Texas Hold'em.

<comment><USER21> I looked into it a little bit. You're completely right. I was wrong.

I remember looking at the casual games business in 2006 and realizing that there was almost no money in it at the time, but that changed, and Texas Hold 'em is, anyway, it's own beast.

I'm very surprised, though, that the Texas Hold 'em blip is still sustaining. It's a fine game, but you'd think people would get sick of playing the same game after a while, and look into something more adventurous.

<comment><USER11> Well, poker has been popular for over a century. Hold'em has a lot more cachet due to having relatively (for poker) low variance, yet still enough that any clown can win. It's got faster action than anything but a craps table. It takes only a few minutes to learn and can never truly be mastered. It's still got that kinda seedy feel to it. High school kids think a top poker pro is on level with a rock star or pro athlete (I know because I was one for a while and my wife is a teacher).

I think TV ratings have come down a bit, but I'm pretty sure it'll be around for a while. I wish other games like pot limit omaha and badugi were more camera friendly, as they're a lot more skill intensive.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Amazon Tanks 11% After Reporting Strong Q4 Miss with $1.00 EPS, $35.7B Net Sales - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/28/amazon-tanks-11-after-reporting-strong-q4-miss-with-1-00-eps-35-7b-net-sales/ <comment><USER2> Absolutely a non-issue for Amazon. People are likely selling since Amazon's sales are likely to decrease seasonally (though, while that's generally true of retail, I don't exactly know Amazon's financials from the past few years).</comment>


Your Gas Stove Is Bad for You and the Planet - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/opinion/climate-change-gas-electricity.html <comment><USER2> Induction works fine. Our house is all electric. On the coldest winter days the heat pump needs some help using some resistance heat which isn't as efficient - but it does just fine. No need to have gas.</comment>


Forbes names Ireland best country in the world to do business for the first time - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/kurtbadenhausen/2013/12/04/ireland-heads-forbes-list-of-the-best-countries-for-business/

<comment><USER2> There's a lot of context missing from this article.

 _Unemployment remains stubbornly high—a recent 12.8%—providing companies a large labor pool to pick from._

Whilst the percentage is accurate, the final statement isn't if you are referring to a tech workforce. There is a huge issue of emigration in Ireland, levels not seen for decades and the vast majority of skilled tech workers are heading for the UK, Canada, the US, Australia & NZ where there are more opportunities and, in most circumstances, better wages.

The other major oversight is the cost of living. Dublin is a beautiful city with a fantastic tech culture however it's also an exceptionally expensive city to live in.</comment>