The largest offshore wind farm is nearly complete, can power 1M homes - <AUTHOR> https://edition.cnn.com/2019/09/25/business/worlds-largest-wind-farm/index.html <comment><USER2> My local constituency was going to achieve this honour but unfortunately the local MP Robert Syms (known to be somewhat corrupt) killed the project on utterly bullshit grounds (it would barely have affected the view): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navitus_Bay_wind_farm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navitus_Bay_wind_farm)

As a contrast, it was also reported today that Hinkley point will be £2.9 billion over budget: [https://www.bbc.com/news/business-49823305](https://www.bbc.com/news/business-49823305) luckily for them, they get to charge £92.50 per megawatt hour upon completion - locked in for 10 years. While wind power is costing us £40 per megawatt hour, not guaranteed, and likely to decrease.

<comment><USER3> Wind farm protests about aesthetics mystify me.

Driving through central Kansas, the towers are just this stark reminder of how far we've come, and how little we are. You see nothing, nothing, nothing... then BAM! These massive towers generating energy from the winds on the plains, in a state named for the people of the south wind. All of them impossibly tall, the field going on for miles, your mind doesn't even really process how big an individual one is, let alone the scale of the whole farm.

They always hit me like a monument. Like that feeling you might get walking into a cathedral with a slow whistle up at the ceiling. It's more than that, though, it's bundled up with a bit of futurism from the new tech, a bit like finishing a piece of utopian sci fi at the same time.

There's no accounting for taste, for sure. So maybe some people are just accustomed to the way certain views used to look and don't want any change. Maybe they grew up there and have strong attachments.

It's just hard hearing people dismissing beauty as blight, something that could be sublime if they just looked at it a slightly different way.

<comment><USER4> I worked in wind energy visualisation and attended many community presentations - I've been up-close to these protests. It's not just about aesthetics, concerns range from fear of lowered real-estate value, low frequency health scares, wildlife concerns, shadow flicker and so on. Like you, I think they are beautiful - however at least here in Holland, that is generally not the case. I've seen a Vestas V164 in the flesh at a testing facility in Denmark and it was quite possibly the most incredibly man made object I've ever seen. With a 164 meter rotor diameter, your eyes almost can't work out how to focus on the blades - especially if you're standing directly under it. One moment the blade tip is close to you, and moments later it's 160 meters away. Amazing stuff.

<comment><USER5> Sounds incredible! When I worked for Vandebron we had a visit to a farmer in North Holland who had 2 wind turbines. They weren't the newer models so not the biggest, but I indeed remember the crazy feeling of perspective changing too fast when you looked up at the blades turning from directly underneath. It was a windy day, too....

I wish I'd been able to go up to the top. Must be amazing!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Just a single rotation of one of the turbines can power the average home for > an entire day

That is incredible!

<comment><USER7> By my power-wasting standards, I use about 8 KWh a day. A max 7 MW(h?) turbine generates at most 1.94 KWh of electricity a second. It seems to take 3-4 seconds for a single turn. The math checks out and this is, as you say, incredible.

<comment><USER8> 8 KWh/day is very impressive. How did you get it that low?

<comment><USER9> Is it low? My last bill said I averaged 5kwh/day last month, my February bill averaged 7kwh/day. That's gas heating and hot water though.

<comment><USER6> I have a smart meter in my apartment.

A few weeks ago I was on holiday. Usage was 2.5kWh per day, about 100W, which is the fridge and a low power PC (NUC).

Otherwise, it's 3-6kWh per day, and depends whether I did laundry and cooked or not.

District heating and water.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Something many people are not aware of is that the UK is a lucky country in terms of natural resources, with these resources playing a critical role in the development of the country over thousands of years. Wind power is just the latest example, and there's still plenty of resources left underground for the future, should the economics turn positive.

Somewhat ironically, one factor that has greatly facilitated the development of offshore wind in the UK is the world leading expertise in offshore construction gained through decades of exploitation of North Sea oil and gas.

<comment><USER11> Wind particularly. There are _nine_ licences agreed for farms as large or larger than Hornsea One, including Hornsea 2 and 3. Another licence round due in a couple of years, and a lot of coastline to go...

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wow, a seven-megawatt wind turbine is ~9300 max horsepower.

Looks like the capacity factor is around 38% so the turbines are making ~3500hp avg.

[http://energynumbers.info/uk-offshore-wind-capacity- factors](http://energynumbers.info/uk-offshore-wind-capacity-factors)

<comment><USER13> This commentary is a bit humorous. Is there some purpose for which the alternative to using a wind turbine is using a herd of 3500 horses?

"Horsepower" as a unit made sense when it was being used to market steam engines as an alternative to horses, because it made the tradeoffs obvious: it's clearly cheaper and easier to maintain steam engine than the 20 horses needed to do the same work. It might still be relevant for something like tractors where horses would be a reasonable alternative, but something like "carbon tons" (the tons of carbon produced by fossil fuel production of the same electricity) might be a more useful comparison for wind power.

<comment><USER14> horsepower was always just marketing bunk, with no actual work equivalence

<comment><USER15> It was a decent approximation of a the level of continuous work output you could expect out of a horse without taxing it too much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "On the other hand for offshore wind farms in Denmark the normalised load factor falls from 39% at age 0 to 15% at age 10."

[https://www.ref.org.uk/attachments/article/280/ref.hughes.19...](https://www.ref.org.uk/attachments/article/280/ref.hughes.19.12.12.pdf)

The title should say has the capacity to power 1M homes. No wind farm ever generates to capacity. And they age very quickly.

This tech maybe better and last longer than in the quoted, but it will still degrade over time. So in 10 years maybe it will be 20%?

Wind is not reliable – so where does the power come from when the wind is not blowing? If you say batteries, then you need excess generation (a lot) and a lot of batteries.

<comment><USER17> Wait, they lose 60% of their energy production potential within 10 years?

This number seems unbelievable.

Are the rotors falling off the towers and not getting replaced?

Are you sure that number is correct ?

<comment><USER18> "There are two plausible explanations for the observed decline in average load factors as wind farms age. The first is that the turbines become less efficient over time as a result of mechanical wear and tear, erosion of the turbine blades and related factors. The second is that the turbines experience more frequent breakdowns and their operators take more time to bring them back into service because they are less concerned about the performance of older plants. Both reasons may be relevant in different circumstances and it is not possible to identify a primary explanation from the data. "

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> So... average household (in America, anyway, don't know about UK) uses a little more than 10,000 kwh of electricity per year... one kilowatt-hour of electricity creates 1.1 - 1.2 pounds of carbon dioxide... so each household emits maybe 6 tons of CO2 per year from electricity usage.

So if this is 1 million homes, that's 6 megatons of CO2 saved per year. The world emits 37 gigatons per year. So this saves 6/37,000, or ... I just got depressed.

Every (very little) bit helps, right?

<comment><USER20> Yes, we just need to build about 5000 more of them. Or 2500 wind and 2500 solar. It's possible -- there are lots of facilities we have 5000 of in the world. For example, there are more than 5000 airports with passenger service, all built in the last 110 years.

<comment><USER19> If you go by number of turbines (which you shouldn't since these are probably way bigger than average), the US currently has about 325 of these farms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The economist had an article about this too: [https://www.economist.com/britain/2019/09/21/lessons-from- br...](https://www.economist.com/britain/2019/09/21/lessons-from-britain-the- worlds-biggest-offshore-wind-market)

</comment><comment><USER22> The engineer in me wishes there were more hard numbers, like "what is the operational cost of the wind farm?"

One of the fun exercises to run would be a win farm that was powering a submerged data center (so that it could dissipate heat into the ocean).

<comment><USER23> The Google data center in Hamina, Finland makes use of seawater for cooling, I believe. [https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/locations/hamina/](https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/locations/hamina/)

<comment><USER8> Google also had experimental sea cooled servers in the bay for a while. I'm not sure if they're still running that program.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> 1M homes, or three bitcoin mining ops.

</comment><comment><USER25> Incidentally this wind farm was the largest contributing factor to the blackout in London a few weeks ago when it decided to shutdown during a transient cause by a lightning strike, subsequent transmission line trip, and 200 MW of generation tripping. Then Hornsea wound down 700 MW. Some software change performed the next day apparently fixed the problem.no details on what it was though yet, or why the 200MW steam turbine also tripped.

</comment><comment><USER26> It's clear now that we'll be able to power much more of our power needs by using wind and solar. More 'exotic' schemes today like using the tides might not even be needed, but we'll see.

</comment><comment><USER27> Great spell checking CNN Business. "is located farther out to see than any other wind farm"

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm curious what's the effect of interfering with the wind patterns?

<comment><USER13> Gosh, there are currently 5 responses to your question and every one is pure speculation.

Folks, if you don't know the answer, don't answer.

<comment><USER29> I don't know man?

In this case, giving the numbers of how much we'd need to harness to have an effect is pointless. We aren't really in any kind of a place to grasp the enormity of the numbers. Numbers that big really do become meaningless.

Wind is just second order solar energy. Massive amounts of solar energy make it to Earth in a given year. I suppose if you must have a number, we can work in either kWh or BTUs. Won't really make a difference to the enormity of the outcome though.

For instance, in BTUs, about 80 million british quads of the energy that the sun gives earth will make it to the surface in a year. (I know the sun delivers more than 80 million british quads, but I'm not counting the 30% that gets reflected). Now I'll be nice, and say an additional 10-20% of that is absorbed by biomass. (It's not, it's way closer to 10%, but I'm being nice.) And an average American home uses what? say 50 million BTUs a year, (About 12 - 15 thousand kWh), if they're being profligate?

So the wind is coming from the interplay of the solar energy absorbed by different areas of the ocean and different areas on land. (Another caveat, our atmosphere can trap some of the energy, which will add to new energy sent by the sun, and kind of spiral in that fashion. This is what happened to Venus, which is why they have like 500 mile an hour winds there.) In any case, ignoring the climate warming, we'd have to find some way to harness enough wind to make an impact against, say, 20 million british quads of BTUs.

Yeah. That's not gonna happen.

This is what I mean by incomprehensibly massive numbers. Basically, we'd have to harness enough wind to power roughly 5 billion groups of US homes, where each group would contain about 1 trillion US homes each. That would be just to have a _1 percent_ impact on the energy in the winds on this planet in a year. And the required number goes _up_ with global warming, because more wind.

At this point we're talking monopoly money man. It's meaningless. Again, we don't have the smarts or technological know how to do anything even close to that, and don't really have any kind of frame of reference as a species to meaningfully ponder the implications of such enormous numbers and amounts of energy. Even thinking about it only makes you consider the smallness of mankind.

<comment><USER13> _> We aren't really in any kind of a place to grasp the enormity of the numbers. Numbers that big really do become meaningless._

If that's true, that's all the more reason not to comment.

You're saying we can't grasp the numbers, but apparently you think you can grasp them well enough to conclude that humans won't have a significant effect.

If we really can't grasp the numbers, then the only conclusion we can come to is that we don't know. I think "I don't know" is something that we need to say more often if we're being honest with ourselves.

 _> For instance, in BTUs, about 80 million british quads of the energy that the sun gives earth will make it to the surface in a year. (I know the sun delivers more than 80 million british quads, but I'm not counting the 30% that gets reflected). Now I'll be nice, and say an additional 10-20% of that is absorbed by biomass. (It's not, it's way closer to 10%, but I'm being nice.) And an average American home uses what? say 50 million BTUs a year, (About 12 - 15 thousand kWh), if they're being profligate?

> So the wind is coming from the interplay of the solar energy absorbed by > different areas of the ocean and different areas on land. (Another caveat, > our atmosphere can trap some of the energy, which will add to new energy > sent by the sun, and kind of spiral in that fashion. This is what happened > to Venus, which is why they have like 500 mile an hour winds there.) In any > case, ignoring the climate warming, we'd have to find some way to harness > enough wind to make an impact against, say, 20 million british quads of > BTUs._

Back-of-napkin math is pretty unconvincing. For example, you made no mathematical connection whatsoever between the energy from the sun numbers you were throwing around, and the amount of that that gets converted into wind energy. You said that 80 million quads of energy hit's the earth from the sun, so your "20 million British quads of BTUs" is arbitrarily choosing to say that 1/4 of the sun's energy is converted to wind?

So let's sanity check that. quads is a unit of energy E, and E = 1/2 x m x v^2

Now let's convert our numbers into reasonable units and plug them into the equation. 20 million quads = 2 x 10^7 quads. 1 quad = 1.055 x 10^18 joules[1], so that's 2.11 x 10^25 joules. The mass of the earth's atmosphere is 5.15 x 10^18 kg[2]. Plugging these numbers into E and m in the equation, we get:

        E = 1/2 x m x v^2
        2.11 x 10^25 = 1 / 2 x 5.15 x 10^18 x v^2
        2.11 x 10^7 = 1 / 2 x 5.15 x v^2
        4.22 x 10^7 = 5.15 x v^2
        2.1733 x 10^8 = v^2
        14700 = v

Just to be clear, joules is kg x m^2 / s^2 and our mass was in kg, so this velocity is 14700 m/s. You guessed that 20 million quads of the sun's energy was being converted into wind, but if that were true, the average velocity of the earth's atmosphere would be 14700 m/s. To be clear, that's the _average_ velocity, and we know that wind isn't uniform throughout the atmosphere, so some parts would be _faster_. For comparison, the speed of sound in air is 343 m/s.

So yeah, the numbers you are using are incomprehensibly large because they are wrong, wrong, wrong by a few orders of magnitude.

To be clear, this isn't a criticism of wind power. It's obvious that the clear and present danger of global warming is a much more pressing concern than unknown effects of wind power. It's a criticism of people answering questions they don't know anything about.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quad_(unit)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quad_\(unit\))

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth)

<comment><USER13> While I was calling you out for essentially making up numbers, I noticed that my [1] link above contains the global energy consumed in 2004. I decided to look for more recent numbers, and on this page[1] found that estimated world energy consumption was 5.67 x 10^20 joules.

Let's convert that to wind speed:

        E = 1/2 m x v^2
        5.67 x 10^20 = 1 / 2 x 5.15 x 10^18 x v^2
        5.67 x 10^2 = 1/ 2 x 5.15 x v^2
        1.134 x 10^3 = 5.15 x v^2
        2.2 x 10 ^ 2 = v^2
        14.8 = v

So we'd expect that if all the world's energy came from wind, it would reduce wind speed in the world by an average of 14.8 m/s.

For comparison, average wind speed in Chicago, the windy city, from 2010 to present was 9.9 miles/hour[2] = 4.43 m/s.

Before you lose your calm, and conclude that wind power is evil, let me reiterate, _back of napkin math STILL shouldn 't convince anyone of anything_. I'm merely posting this to show that back of napkin math can be used to calculate much different results.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption)

[2] [https://wind.willyweather.com/il/cook- county/chicago.html](https://wind.willyweather.com/il/cook- county/chicago.html)

<comment><USER30> I think that you missed a time term somewhere. You're looking at global energy use for an entire year. Don't you want to normalize that to joules used per time period (i.e. power) before determining how it affects instantaneous- average wind speeds?

The lowest published estimate I have seen for extractable global wind power [1] is as little as 18 terawatts in the paper by Miller, Gans, and Kleidon:

"Estimating maximum global land surface wind power extractability and associated climatic consequences"

[https://www.earth-syst- dynam.net/2/1/2011/esd-2-1-2011.html](https://www.earth-syst- dynam.net/2/1/2011/esd-2-1-2011.html)

18 terawatts happens to be _exactly_ equivalent to an annual energy output of 5.67 x 10^20 joules.

18 terawatts is the low end of the estimated range in this paper; the upper end is 68 terawatts.

[1] The authors only considered wind farms placed on land, perhaps because offshore wind was so much more expensive in 2011. Their lowest estimate is too low, even if you stick with the rest of their methodology, after adding offshore wind.

<comment><USER13> > I think that you missed a time term somewhere. You're looking at global > energy use for an entire year. Don't you want to normalize that to joules > used per time period (i.e. power) before determining how it affects > instantaneous-average wind speeds?

Nope. I may have messed up my calculations somewhere, but I'm quite confident in my equation (kinetic energy E = 1/2 x m x v^2).

That paper looks pretty interesting, but I'm going to follow my own advice and admit I don't know: I don't have the background to evaluate the validity of their atmospheric model. The conclusion[1] is pretty important if it's true.

[1] "Furthermore, we show with the general circulation model simulations that some climatic effects at maximum wind power extraction are similar in magnitude to those associated with a doubling of atmospheric CO2. "

<comment><USER31> Parent is correct. You've calculated that a year of energy consumption is equivalent to the kinetic energy of the atmosphere moving at 14m/s.

This says nothing about how energy flows through the system, which is what will determine the impact on wind speeds.

<comment><USER13> > You've calculated that a year of energy consumption is equivalent to the > kinetic energy of the atmosphere moving at 14m/s.

> This says nothing about how energy flows through the system, which is what > will determine the impact on wind speeds.

 _shrug_

I'm not gonna teach you guys high school physics. You can look up E = (1/2)mv^2 in any Physics textbook or your favorite search engine.

Before you disagree further, try calculating this yourself. Look up how to calculate the final speed of an object from kinetic energy. Make sure you plug energy units (i.e. joules) into E and power units (i.e. watts) into P. This isn't hard math, and the necessary equations are all over the internet.

<comment><USER31> The value you plugged in was a year of energy consumption. Why not a day, or a century?

If you used the former, it would tell you that wind speed would be reduced by 0.04m/s. If you used the latter, 1.4km/s.

You're not using the equations incorrectly, but they're not telling you what you think they are.

They are telling you - if we store up all the power use of humanity for this length of time, then use it to blow the air, how fast will it go.

<comment><USER13> > The value you plugged in was a year of energy consumption. Why not a day, or > a century?

...because when I pulled the number from wikipedia it said it was the energy consumption for a year, not for a day or a century.

> You're not using the equations incorrectly, but they're not telling you what > you think they are.

> They are telling you - if we store up all the power use of humanity for this > length of time, then use it to blow the air, how fast will it go.

...no, it's telling me if we collect the _energy used by humanity during this length of time_ , then use it to blow the air, how fast will it go. You cannot use "energy" and "power" as if they were interchangeable, they are not.

What you may be missing is that these physics equations go both directions. If we take the blowing of the air and use it to produce the energy used by humanity during this length of time, we'd expect to see the same _decrease_ in speed.

<comment><USER31> There's nothing wrong with my sentence. It might be a bit informal, but "power use for a length of time" is a quantity of energy.

The decrease in speed you're describing is _one time_ , not continuous. This is the issue both parent and I are pointing out. It's a shame to me that you aren't willing to see your error and instead resort to nitpicking, but I'm not going to try to explain a third time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> How many birds is this going to kill? I've read somewhere it's not that nice to them.

<comment><USER33> Don't believe everything you read. Bird death from turbines is essentially nothing next to bird death from hitting buildings, or, worse, cats.

It's a persistent myth, and recently back in vogue due to the tweeting of a certain orange personage, but wind farms as bird-destroyers are not worth worrying about.

<comment><USER34> Agree that the wind turbine thing is overblown.

However, according to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, there's no evidence cats are causing problems for bird populations in the UK at least.

[https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and- wildlife/advice/gardening-...](https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and- wildlife/advice/gardening-for-wildlife/animal-deterrents/cats-and-garden- birds/are-cats-causing-bird-declines/)

This might be different elsewhere though.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best resources to learn about stock trading and investing? - <AUTHOR> When you search for courses on how to learn software development, there are tons of resources, meanwhile when you search for courses on how to stock trade and invest, only investopedia comes up.<p>What are some good resources (preferably video) which are not books, to learn these subjects? <comment><USER2> Bogleheads community, including a wiki [https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Main_Page](https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Main_Page) and forums [https://www.bogleheads.org/](https://www.bogleheads.org/)

<comment><USER3> +1. Bogleheads has an amazing community maintained wiki. I would add that their recommended reading list of books is also excellent: [https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Books:_recommendations_and_r...](https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Books:_recommendations_and_reviews)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A Random Walk Down Wall Street: Including a Life-Cycle Guide to Personal Investing by Burton Malkiel

Burton Malkiel Wrote "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" In '73. Have His Views Changed? -- [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLJCEP83QTM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLJCEP83QTM)

Burton Malkiel | Talks at Google -- [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnCxlIQjT-s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnCxlIQjT-s)

</comment><comment><USER5> I think the best way is to learn how to read and understand financials, like a 10-Q, and other basic concepts and then get going on either a real account (with say 5% of what you intend to invest down the line) or paper trading. However a real account will be much more educational because with paper trading/investing you'll be inclined to ignore losses or make money taking much greater risks than you'd want to make with actual money. Just do a ton of googling, most financial books I read have not been super helpful, if you are only doing stocks there are frankly not a lot of concepts to learn.

Personally I would not recommend "trading" as an amateur at all. If you are investing over months/years that's one thing, but making money long term over <1 week time spans on stocks is quite hard. I think the appeal of amateur "trading" is that it's job-like but the reality is that you're not going to make significant money with a smallish account, retail tools, and no professional experience.

In general I would never advise joining a course or "paid discord" or on stock trading. Those are pretty much all scams. There are some real, formerly successful traders that do these but the one I'm familiar with basically went broke several times because he opened himself up to too much risk (which is why you don't see a lot of successful traders selling courses, they are too busy making money trading). Some of these courses also sell straight up misinformation like Technical Analysis

<comment><USER6> Technical Analysis is not misinformation. Research it. A lot of people think so but if you know what you are doing it's way better than fundamental analysis, depending on what you are doing. I.e. doing TA for long-term stock holding is probably not ideal but trading options with TA is definitely profitable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you are wanting to learn because you find it interesting or are looking to work in the industry - follow the advice in this thread!

If you are looking to do some personal finance - in general it's not a good idea to pick your own stocks. You are going against massive analysis teams in Goldman Sachs, and they are probably going to win. Instead look into index funds or similar!

<comment><USER8> This is sage advice.

Warren Buffet is such a firm believer in this principle that he bet a hedge fund manager $1 million that he couldn't beat the S&P over a decade[0]. Buffet won. The S&P beat the manager by 5% ANNUAL return.

Hedge fund managers pick stocks all day, every day. If these guys with Ivy League finance bona-fides aren't able to consistently beat the S&P, you should really think about whether you'll be able to beat it in your spare time.

[0][https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/306846](https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/306846)

<comment><USER9> > he couldn't beat the S&P

if someone has bought FAANG + MS + TSLA 10 years ago - would s/he beat S&P ?

<comment><USER10> If someone bought FAANG + MS + TSLA today and compared it to 10 years from now would they beat the S&P?

That's basically the point. It's easy to beat the S&P with knowledge in retrospect.

<comment><USER11> For an example where betting on tech (tech startups, at least, which is considered a hot sector) hasn't played out, cnsider the Vision Fund.

<comment><USER9> Vision Fund had no vision fund. Their portfolio companies were useless right off the bat

<comment><USER7> Easy to say in hindsight, eg companies like WeWork while obviously shit now definitely looked like it would revolutionise an industry at the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It depends actually what is your purpose.

If you intend to learn about stock trading for personal finance reasons you can follow a lot of blogs or podcasts in the FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early) community. Some examples are the stock series of JL Collins ([https://jlcollinsnh.com/stock-series/](https://jlcollinsnh.com/stock- series/)) and the Mad Fientist ([https://www.madfientist.com/](https://www.madfientist.com/), the blog is a bit tax focused, but it goes well with the Podcast).

If you want to learn about active trading then you need vastly different resources and not really my expertise.

Just wanted to mention that there are basically two philosophies here and based on either what knowledge you want to gain or how much risk you want to take as an investor you will need to choose what to learn.

</comment><comment><USER13> Try reading company annual and quarterly reports to help decide if you want to invest in their stock or not. These reports contain a wealth of information including candid management discussions, financial sheets, disclosures and much more. These are long documents that do take time to read but my side project (shameless plug) [https://www.Last10K.com](https://www.Last10K.com) aims to help investors read these documents more efficiently.

You can also google study materials for the Securities Industry Essentials (SIE) exam which covers basic securities information that can be applied to investing.

[https://www.finra.org/registration-exams-ce/qualification- ex...](https://www.finra.org/registration-exams-ce/qualification- exams/securities-industry-essentials-exam)

<comment><USER14> I don't think diving into reports is the right step for someone who's asking where to start.

You need a lot of context for what you're seeing in your average quarterly. Perhaps start with reading something like _The Intelligent Investor_ to understand fundamental analysis, then read them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I like AAII, American Association of Individual Investors. It's a independent, non-profit organization with resources and publications to learn about investing without bias to any particular company or product. [https://www.aaii.com/](https://www.aaii.com/)

I see they have on-demand webinars, too. [https://www.aaii.com/webinars](https://www.aaii.com/webinars)

Local chapters have meetups with presentations and discussion. Now online, of course. There's a page on their website about local chapters and their activities. Presenters at chapter meetings are supposed to be educational and without a sales pitch. In practice they're 98% educational and may have a slide or a handout on the company they work for. Here's the YouTube page for past presentations from one chapter. [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnxl8fQH-F4ooXb-U8IO6zQ](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnxl8fQH-F4ooXb-U8IO6zQ)

Ameritrade has videos on learning about investing, trading, and their platform features, including most basic "this is a stock, this is a bond" type videos. I thought E*Trade had a bunch of similar videos, but I'm not finding them now. Both E-Trade and Charles Schwaub have both live and on-demand webinars. Probably other brokers do also. [https://us.etrade.com/knowledge/investing- basics](https://us.etrade.com/knowledge/investing-basics) (more textual) [https://us.etrade.com/knowledge/events#events_tab2](https://us.etrade.com/knowledge/events#events_tab2) (on-demand webinars) [https://www.tdameritrade.com/education/investment- videos.pag...](https://www.tdameritrade.com/education/investment-videos.page)

Trying to look at it with the eye of a beginner, it seems to get pretty specialized pretty quickly. Hope you can find something in there that fits what you're looking for.

</comment><comment><USER16> Stock trading and investing, while not mutually exclusive, are not the same thing. Please be aware of the difference before starting to trade.

That said, I don't have a good resource on trading, but when I looked into it many years ago, most of them were either selling a platform/brokerage that promoted frequent trading (hence earning commission fees) or trying to sell information products by "gurus" that somehow decided to teach the ways of trading instead of becoming a trader themselves.

</comment><comment><USER17> I would actually recommend learning accounting, not 'investing'. Why? Because accounting teaches you to understand how a company reports, which is frankly more important than any get rich quick investing book.

Accounting is incredibly dense, and you will come to appreciate the many ways in which companies can report the same information. You'll also understand what the terms you see thrown around mean, and you'll also see why financial math is not software math.

</comment><comment><USER18> > _When you search for courses on how to learn software development, there are > tons of resources, meanwhile when you search for courses on how to stock > trade and invest, only investopedia comes up._

I think the problems are similar for both subjects. When you search for software development, where would you even start? What language? Web, mobile, embedded? The software development world is large and there's no good single resource to "learn" it.

Ditto for investing; it might even be a _larger_ subject. If you want to "learn to invest" because you want to save money, your best bet is to use a service that buys ETFs, contribute money monthly and never look at it.

However, if you're interested in investing as an art/science, there's a vast literature. Stocks? Bonds? Private equity? Distressed assets? Real estate? Cryptocurrency? Options, futures or other derivatives? Long or short? Active or passive? Fundamental or technical? On what scale do you plan to hold your investments?

The fact is, there's no right way to start. You have to narrow it down. I see a few recommendations to read financial reports. Sure, maybe. But this isn't 1975; I bet 75% of financial professionals have never read a 10k.

</comment><comment><USER19> I highly recommend "The Little Book of Common Sense Investing" by Jack Bogle. It's a super short book full of great advice from the inventor of the Index Fund:

[https://www.amazon.com/Little-Book-Common-Sense- Investing/dp...](https://www.amazon.com/Little-Book-Common-Sense- Investing/dp/1119404509)

<comment><USER20> I second this. Forget about trading, stock picking, and other wastes of time (and money).

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> You will find links to some MOOCs here: [https://learnawesome.org/topics/cd05721c-f47f-4351-a637-8d1a...](https://learnawesome.org/topics/cd05721c-f47f-4351-a637-8d1a47cc5fc5-trading)

The one called "Trading Basics" by ISB seems like a good starting point.

</comment><comment><USER22> I've been investing for a long time. Biggest key: open an account, add money, and buy something. You will rapidly learn what works, what doesn't, what drives price etc.

Reading financial statements is a good exercise and certainly important if you are investing at the institutional level, but you'll find that price has a lot more to do with supply and demand of investors who want the stock than anything else.

This supply and demand principle in economics is oft lost in investing principle books that try to teach theory of valuation, etc.

Assuming you are into tech, since you're here, you will find that tech stocks will barely reflect what an investing value book would teach. Possibly even teach valuations that are off by orders of magnitude due to the money being thrown at tech growth stocks.

Price doesn't equal valuation until you are trying to sell.

<comment><USER22> If you are still looking for books, Margin of Safety is good. Intelligent Investor (though very outdated) is good. Jack Bogle stuff is good . Read annual LP memos from hedge funds and institutions like endowments and pension funds. They are throwing around big money and it's fun to see what they think about.

Some good memos - Baupost Group, Berkshire Hathaway, Howard Marks. Email me if you want any more info.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> MIT OCW has videos of their Finance Theory class online, and it's fantastic. The professor, Andrew Lo, is a great lecturer, and explains everything really well. Doesn't cover everything you're looking for, but it'd be hard to beat as a general introduction to the subject.

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUl4u3cNGP63B2lDhyKOs...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUl4u3cNGP63B2lDhyKOsImI7FjCf6eDW)

Not only is it interesting in its own right, but it was coincidentally recorded as the 2008/2009 financial crises was unfolding, and many of the lectures open with a few minutes of discussion about what was going on in the economy at the time. Neat to hear an econ PhD give a play-by-play on an economic meltdown.

<comment><USER24> Is there something like this but fast forwarded to now?

<comment><USER25> I also noticed this was from 2007/8, just as the financial crisis was getting started. I'm looking forward to watching this series and then finding some sort of update for the last decade or so. To the extent that finance professionals and investors would have taken courses like this one and learned things like this, it will be useful to have a similar foundation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Of popular intellectual topics, nothing is simpler to explain:

* If you want to gamble, go to Las Vegas.

* If you want to make money, invest in index funds.

Further reading: [https://arachnoid.com/equities_myths/](https://arachnoid.com/equities_myths/)

Yes ... it really is that simple.

<comment><USER27> What do you do if you want to minimize the effects of an upcoming devastating market crash but still retain the value of your retirement (I.e. not cash out and get penalized)?

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> [https://www.youtube.com/c/ThePlainBagel/](https://www.youtube.com/c/ThePlainBagel/) \- Not really a course, but this guy gives really good advice on stock trading and investing without all the bullshit

</comment><comment><USER29> [https://www.twitch.tv/thestockguy](https://www.twitch.tv/thestockguy) \- I can personally recommend this channel for your daily dose of stock related entertainment. It's not a yolo on options channel, it's just a guy that wants to see other people grow their hard earned money into something meaningful.

The discord associated with this twitch channel has an amazing help section, search and you'll find some remarkably well written answers. Just avoid the degenerate-chat topic though.

</comment><comment><USER30> Via the The Big Picture by Barry Ritholtz "Retired and want to try day trading? Read this first: the overwhelming pattern is for them to eventually lose much of their winnings." Marketwatch [https://www.marketwatch.com/story/retired-and-want-to-try- da...](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/retired-and-want-to-try-day-trading- read-this-first-2020-07-07)

</comment><comment><USER31> For fundamentals, this resource by Varsity (kind of like Robinhood of India) is pretty good. It uses India's stocks as examples and deals in Rupees and not in Dollars.

After learning the basics, I would recommend "The 80/20 Investor" book. The book has very good advice how to buy stocks, market bubbles and building the circle of competence.

</comment><comment><USER6> Just added a few of the resources posted on this thread [1].

The page is hosted by us but the resources are not connected to us.

[1] [https://marketgodfathers.com/best-resources-to-learn- about-s...](https://marketgodfathers.com/best-resources-to-learn-about-stock- trading-and-investing/)

</comment><comment><USER32> QuantInsti offers a course that is really in-depth. It's like 4 months. All video based with live instructors, practice and tests. It's worth the money IMHO.

Ernest Chan has written several books. He also offers live courses. He is one cool dude.

Learning to read candlestick charts and recognize patterns.

Backtesting your strategies is crucial.

Try to use data sources that haven't introduced survivorship bias.

</comment><comment><USER33> Although you do not want to read, I recommend a book 'Warren Buffett's Three Favorite Books' by Preston Pysh. It is written in an easy to digest style. He has videos to explain every chapter. He boils down a lot of the Buffett theory on successful investing.

</comment><comment><USER34> [https://www.internalpointers.com/category/finance](https://www.internalpointers.com/category/finance) is a good resource to grok the basics and if you are feeling lucky after you can bash out some C++ as well from the main url.

</comment><comment><USER35> I'd recommend Khan Academy - the videos there are always succinct and clear, and it's free, an incredible resource imo.

Introduction to Financial Accounting on Coursera is also great, will help to understand business valuation, read a balance sheet, etc.

The Plain Bagel on Youtube is a good investment channel, no bs.

</comment><comment><USER36> I like "Unconventional Success" by David Swensen, who was Yale's endowment manager for a while (and his apprentices now run several Ivy endowments). Very Bogle-esque

</comment><comment><USER37> Kevin O'Leary from shark tank has a good deal of online advice about investing and budgeting in his YT channel.

</comment><comment><USER38> [https://anchor.fm/valuehive](https://anchor.fm/valuehive)

</comment><comment><USER39> [https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/](https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/)

</comment><comment><USER40> The Intelligent Investor by Ben Graham.

</comment><comment><USER41> The telegram group at vectorspace.ai

<comment><USER42> How do I join this group?

<comment><USER41> [https://t.me/joinchat/GrCYjA8rPgD8coAiEhRuBA](https://t.me/joinchat/GrCYjA8rPgD8coAiEhRuBA)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Movie Wall Street with Charlie Sheen and Michael Douglas.

</comment><comment><USER44> Start with it after November.

If you think you can miss eg. 5k. Only buy 2.5 k. In stock, the rest is spare money for drops.

Only buy the ones that you have a good guess for ( happens once in a year).

If you get to 20 k. Congratulations. Now change tactics. Buy stocks that are undervalued and don't buy too much. If it drops pretty hard, buy again. The goal is to reduce your average purchase price.

Hold till you think it's appropriate to sell.

The more money you have, the more you can diversify your portfolio.

Don't use your savings, only what you will never need.

Be prepared to lose it all at the start. And lose up to 75% every 8 years when you begin to slowly diversify your portfolio.

If you don't know what you're doing. Buy an index when it's low/drops. I'm a big fan of the Netherlands.

Ps. Crisis ain't over yet.

<comment><USER14> You're being downvoted because you're mentioning a strategy. This is not educational. Furthermore, as someone who does a lot of quantitative research on the market I'm not convinced at all that your strategy will beat the market when adjusting for risk.

You also say things that are unintelligible to someone who knows nothing about the market. Buy undervalued stocks? What does that mean? Most people think stocks with lower share prices are cheaper — let alone something that's not dead wrong like evaluating based off P/E ratio, which is still incredibly wrong.

So I'd recommend against giving trading advice to someone asking for how to educate themselves.

<comment><USER44> Ok, seems fair.

I was just giving 2 cents on practical learnings, which is indeed not an answer to his posed question. But perhaps useful in the idea behind the question ( starting with trading stocks).

Most important take-away from it: you can lose a lot.

Additionally, I always asses for risk. Eg. I lost 0€ because of Covid, because I had no stocks when the markets dropped.

I didn't mention how to pick stocks though, which is the most important thing. Since there are multiple reasons why you would pick a certain stock.

Eg. Markets re-open worldwide => I bought WTI on 29/04, endresult was 40%.

I'm positioning myselve right now to multiple market scenarios with an expected (gamble) vaccine in December 2020 ( which is pretty early, I know) and where the vaccine test results come in at the end of the summer. I'm also taken into account the pumped up market by the US government and potential geopolitical issues.

These things can't be done by a AI/ML right now. There is literally no precedent for it.

\--

Just a question, what would your general strategy be? I did check out technical indicators in the past, but I have a hard time believing in it.

In the end, I believe the stock market is about emotions in a numbers "game". It's not that quantitive as most people think.

What's your take on that statement?</comment></comment></comment>


The Twitter Hack:  How it happened and what's being done - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcworld.com/article/156359/twitter_hack_how_it_happened_and_whats_being_done.html

<comment><USER2> All this blog-blathering about the twitter "hack". There doesn't appear to have been any "hack", just high-profile people with weak accounts got exploited. Like they do on almost every system that allows public access.

Use a lame password, or enter your password into too many shady 3rd party sites, and...</comment>


Love-Hate Relationship with Frameworks - <AUTHOR> http://logiccolony.com/2010/10/29/Love-Hate-Relationship-With-Frameworks.html

<comment><USER2> There are some titanic-sized caveat that applies any time you start having the "there's a more direct way of doing this", or "this doesn't fit the framework" conversations.

Whether or not you agree with the philosophy of many of the existing frameworks, the people who are writing them develop, think, and live at a higher level of abstract thinking than most developers. If you look at the total pool of developer talent available, only a small portion ever write a successful framework? Why is that? Because writing a framework that is, at the same time, flexible, fast, and powerful is incredibly difficult.

I can't tell you how many times I've sat across from the table and listened to someone tell me how their problem doesn't fit pattern X. In most cases it's true there is a more direct way to accomplish a task, but patterns aren't designed to provide direct solutions, they're designed to structure your code in a way that makes it modular and easy to maintain.

When you deviate from the path, you better have a good reason, because you're often trading a lot of things that aren't immediately apparent: abstraction, consistency, maintainability, and portability.

</comment><comment><USER3> When people start working around the public API by calling private methods it's because the framework is being used in a way that wasn't planned for. If we could adapt the public API to provide the required functionality then the framework would over time become more adaptable. The issue then becomes a social one, how to organise and consolidate the customisations that everyone makes. Github uses the forking and pull request functionality to address exactly this issue. It allows developers to maintain a version of a framework with their own customisations. Any of these customisations that would be useful to enough other developers can then be incorporated into the original framework.</comment>


Ask HN: Bootstrapped business is good but slow growth. Should I raise money? - <AUTHOR> hi all. I run a 100% bootstrapped SAAS business and I am solo. Part time right now and I have a fulltime job as well. I literally built it on top of wordpress (dont't ask) to validate the idea and before I realize, I have 35 payinng customers and revenue averaging $7000/month. Cost is about $1500 for servers and ocassional freelancer work.
Here is the issue. The application is not a very simple thing and a lot of potential clients want demo or discuss things over phone. I am getting a lot of interest from potential clients but being solo, I don't have much time to entertain all queries.
So in short, I am growing but very slow and not able to yet quit my fulltime job because I have high family expenses (2 kids,mortgage etc). And just to confirm, the profits from this business is not yet enough for me to do it fulltime and support my family.
I have a potential Angel investor who I could talk to and may be get some funding so that I could quit my job (which i really want to quit) and do this fulltime ? That way, I could scale it faster and may be hire an employee or two as well.
I also have plans to revamp the entire app by getting rid of wordpress and building it properly now that I have validated the idea.
Technically, the platform being wordpress is very limiting and I have plans to revamp it but again, need a good team for that.
What would you do ? I know everyone's situation is different but really want some advice here. <comment><USER3> Why not hire and train a part time person (or friend) that can help cover demo's and help you grow a little faster and stay bootstrapped. It would mean that you would need to add more customers before you can go full time but it is a way to stay bootstrapped and not take others money. You could even pay this person per lead closure, so for every client they get signed up you pay them $200 (or $400 whatever).

You could also work to simplify/automate the on-boarding, spend some of your monthly revenue on creating some videos that cover the features/questions people seem to ask the most about. You can make a few videos, 45 seconds or less, and have those on the site for users to view without registering. Then record a full demo that is say 5-10 minutes and if someone registers for more information then send them a link to that video and then follow up with them. You may help shorten your need to be involved in every sale, and decrease on- boarding time. This doesn't mean you can necessarily make a sale without jumping on the phone, but it does mean you may be able to minimize those conversations more and therefore make them more scalable and even possibly easier for you to train others to help you close deals.

In the end, raising money takes way more time and effort than you initially think, and even with friendly investors it can change your ability to go the direction you want. Lastly, remember a lot of investors try and minimize founder salaries, and if you need 10-14k a month to survive then you may struggle to find an investor that will commit when 85% of his investment is just paying for you. If you are thinking you just need 50k to make it for 3-5 months, you might be able to get that more through friends/family/bank to help bridge the gap until you get more signups.

<comment><AUTHOR> Excellent points. I already have a detailed video demo of the app and quite a few marketing materials. In fact, the videos are the reasons I get a lot of inquiries because people love it. For existing clients, I have a lot of training materials in the form of videos and FAQs as well that they can go through. In fact, that is the first thing I ask them to do when they signup. That keeps the number of support tickets much smaller.

But overall, I can only give it so much time. There is support tickets, presales inquiries and a bunch of other things (billing/accounting). So I am always choosing (and struggling) on what to do when.

You nailed it perfectly about my financial situation. I need about 10K cash per month for family expenses (dont judge, my kids daycare costs 3K total and my mortgage+taxes is 3K being in the East Coast).

I could always sell my house and scale back but I really don't wanna do that because I wont save much in rent anyway.

Knowing that this business model is solid and if I had the right team and time/money, I could scale it a lot faster, I am leaning towards the funding option but want to be very very careful of course.

<comment><USER3> No judgement here, I am right there with you. I live on the east coast and have a wife, 3 kids and all the expenses that go with the family too. So I get it. And you should really be thrilled you have done so well, that is totally awesome.

Video's are awesome and seem to really help. Glad they are already working well for you.

To your other point, I have trained my wife to handle our non-automated billed clients and I have outsourced all the other details like Accounting etc. It is amazing how much that frees up time and really does not cost much at all. I also use an online accounting system that is integrated to our products/services so that when a client purchases it is automatically added to the accounting system and so it removes the need to do bookings etc. The accountant than picks it up from there and does their thing and keeps everything straight for me. If you haven't already done that it may be worth your while to go there. Since you are using Wordpress there are existing integrations to QuickBooks, even if you don't use it for accounting today it might be worth moving to it and buying one of the plug-ins for like $100.

We just built a subscription service website for a client (they do online training with videos and quizzes) and they wanted it in Wordpress, so we utilized Woocommerce, Paid Membership Pro and a QuickBooks plugin that basically allowed us to write a very small amount of code (for that part) but let them have a fully integrated solution from signup to purchase to accounting. Just a point, not an endorsement for any of those products, but damn it works and it was way cheaper than a fully custom solution for them.

Lastly as to hiring someone, since you are in a more expensive part of the country, you could train/hire someone in say the Southeast or mid-west where salaries are a bit lower. Also, if you don't need a developer type to do the demo's, then you can likely find someone for a pretty reasonable rate to help you get people signed up.

<comment><AUTHOR> wow. I heavily use Woocommerce in our app because we charget subscription and then our clients sell things as well. And yes, it is so powerful and just works. Unfortunately, I have overall issues with Wordpress to be utilized as a scalable SAAS product. But no denying the power of these plugins.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wouldn't take funding . . . stay bootstrapped . . . sounds like you're growing things nicely . . .

You're making enough you could hire an assistant to handle some of the support, inquiries, billing/accounting so you can focus on demo's and growing . . . support would probably be the first thing to outsource . . . setup a google doc outlining typical questions/responses . . . so it's pretty straight forward and have them send something more complex on to you to handle . . .

That will free up some time for demos, etc.

You might get a bump from conversion optimization, reducing churn, etc . . .

Could you go to 4 days per week at your day job . . .

Start doing one demo call over lunch a few times per week . . .

I think there are lots of less expensive ways to gain more time/revenue vs. losing equity.

Good luck scaling your SaaS.

</comment><comment><USER5> pertinant quote from Mike Taber of singlefounder.com

>Great, I've built a bunch of systems… Now What?

>You have one job left: Fire yourself.

>That's right. Once you've built the process and have tested it to be sure a) it's doing what it's supposed to and b) has a feedback loop that lets you monitor it's progress, you need to fire yourself from executing that process. Outsource it, hire someone part-time, hire an employee, use a virtual assistant, automate it with code, etc. Whatever the case may be.

>If a process you've developed is functioning properly, then as the business owner, you probably shouldn't be doing it.

>Your job is not to build products. Your job is to build systems.

>That's how profitable companies are built.

<comment><AUTHOR> thx for your answer. Makes sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not sure if you're talking about scaling to a $10MM exit or $10MM in annual revenue or what exactly in 7-10 years, but that sounds to me like too little too long for a knowledgeable SaaS investor to invest in - they're looking for something that has the potential to be at least an order of magnitude larger.

That suggests to me that either a) you're not going to be able to raise in the end, which is bad because you're wasting time, or b) you _are_ going to be able to raise but only from unsophisticated investors with unrealistic expectations, which is a hell of a lot worse.

It would be a real shame to give up a lot of control and attach yourself permanently to unsophisticated investors with unrealistic expectations - <USER2> so you can quit your job a few months sooner.

If I were you, and if I really thought my business' potential was $10MM in revenue in 7-10 years, I'd gut it out and do what I needed to in order to continue to bootstrap until I could safely quit. You've got the potential for a great personal outcome - if you can just keep it personal.

</comment><comment><USER7> If it were me I would rather be bootstrapped but take a little longer to get there. To me there's no point in swapping a boss for an investor.

I see you mentioned that you already have videos & training materials for users. I would start to document how you do the onboarding in person so you can teach it to someone else. Don't underestimate the value of high-touch sales. It shows that it's working for you.

With you currently having a job, you could invest your current income into rebuilding a new (non-WordPress) version. If your current version is on WP - do you really need a team to create your new version - or just someone contracted for a few months & then on retainer.

Once the new version is up to the same feature set as the current version - migrate users over. Then pour your income into streamlining your business, hiring employees etc.

<comment><USER8> Here's a great podcast on high-touch sales [http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/07/24/kalzumeus-podcast- episod...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/07/24/kalzumeus-podcast- episode-8-high-touch-software-sales-with-steli-efti/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I would recommend you contact patio11 or read up on some of his materials about passive marketing. Why not provide a free/demo tier of your software that is rate or context limited (or returns junk data). If they want to discuss over the phone, do it, for now, but work aggressively on a comprehensive FAQ.

That said, if you're clearing $5500 a month from your side project _and_ working fulltime, why can't you save up for 6 months then quit your job? That should give you close to 6 months of runway for your project, which should be enough to allow you to extricate yourself from WordPress and hone your marketing strategy.

Finally, I mean if the angel is someone you trust who is offering fantastic terms and isn't looking for a huge chunk of your business, there's no reason not to go for it.

</comment><comment><USER10> In general it is not a choice, but a question of numbers. Software businesses tend to benefit from having many customers, which requires growth and capital. A consultancy that develops and uses software tools might go the bootstrap route. Do the numbers and then decide. What does it cost to add and maintain a customer? Would you get more customers with a better feature set? How smooth is the API, interface, and documentation?

I have a nice consultancy that developed many unique software products. Over the years I have not been able to maintain them. If I had taken outside money I could have taken those tools to market and probably grown beyond my current stagnation point.

</comment><comment><USER11> How about getting a loan from a bank? That way you don't have an angel breathing down your neck, so have some air to scale the business, which then should be big enough to pay for your salary

</comment><comment><USER12> See if your company allows for a sabbatical. If they do, save the side revenue for a few months to prep for the sabbatical. Then devote yourself 100% to it to push it to the next step. Afterwards, you have a job waiting for you and you should have done enough work to see whether the future of your business is viable.

Employees and/or partners is also a good idea.

</comment><comment><USER13> If you have to ask others, you're probably not ready to jump ship and go 100% on this business. I don't mean to discourage you because in your place I would probably do it, but it will be very stressful especially with your family situation. If you already have doubts going in it will be very hard on you.

</comment><comment><USER14> You don't happen to be in the Hudson Valley do you? We've got the Hudson Valley Tech Meetup second week of December and there's several folks just like you at that. Several now have distributed workforces.

Happy to introduce you.

PS. I'm totally intrigued now to find out what your WP app is!

<comment><AUTHOR> sure where exactly is the meetup ? I will try to make it. How do I signup ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm looking to relocate to NYC/DC and I have a passive income stream that supports me. I've been looking for jobs that would utilize my journalism/sales experience, but with a focus on technology.

Care to chat?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi sure. how can I get in touch with you ?

<comment><USER15> You can reach me with an email to this address: firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Are you me?!

Wow this described my situation __exactly __.

Same revenue, same costs, same lifestage (2 kids, mtg), same high paying job, etc.

I've found some ways to make the process even more self-serve than it already is, maybe we can compare notes?

<comment><AUTHOR> wow. That is a coincidence. But every word is true :) How long you been doing this ? And yes, would love to share notes. How to contact you ?

<comment><USER16> 2.5 years. Yeah I think I could be at $1mm ARR in 3-4 years if I was full- time. I'm just too risk averse to make the jump from my current gig.

I've tried hiring a full-time salesperson to grow the business, but it's just really hard to find the right person.

[edit] email me at my HNusername at google's mail service.

<comment><USER17> It's hard only if you are being very stingy about the money. Have you considered taking them in as a partner (which they are as employee < 3)

<comment><USER16> Not stingy, just picky.

I have an offer at for $60k base with $100k on-target earnings. I wouldn't say that's stingy at all.

<comment><USER18> Depending on whether or not you need a "localized" sales guy and where your location is, isn't $60K a lot of money for Americans too?

I would think that finding "one perfect guy" may be the ideal tactic in an ideal world, but when one wants to scale a business to go from $7000 p.m revenue to even a modest $21,000 p.m, then even 'mediocre' sales people that speak well enough in your chosen language of your market could sell your product.

$60K could probably hire 3 people from East Asia?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> First, congratulations. And good on you for not putting the cart before the horse (quitting before having revenue).

Could you hire an employee, part-time, using the revenue you are currently bringing in?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thx. Very difficult to hire someone locally. I am in NYC area and with my profits before taxes being 5K (give or take), I doubt I can find someone even part time here in the US. I could go offshore but I dont' want to because of timezone and communication gap issues. I know this because my current freelancer even though good, is offshore and I am not able to drive things forward with him as smoothly as I want to. Btw, I noticed on your profile that You do C# .NET MVC. I am revamping the app in exactly that :)

<comment><USER19> I understand. I guess it depends on the level you are hiring at. If you need someone who has specific knowledge then they are probably too expensive, but if you can train someone, then you can probably hire someone with very limited experience and willing to grow with a company.

Good luck on your venture. Exciting times ahead for you and it's inspirational for the rest of us. Feel free to shoot me an email if you'd like to discuss the C#/MVC aspect.

<comment><AUTHOR> Would love to chat. Coffee or lunch on me too since you are in NYC :). How do I get in touch ? I don't see your contact info in your profile.

<comment><USER19> Hmm. I thought it would show my email in my profile. You can email me at partisanyc at gmail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'd be happy to help with moving it away from WP into something stable/scalable. Feel free to drop me an email if you're interested.

</comment><comment><USER21> How long did it take to reach that revenue?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well When I started, it took me abouta year to get first 20 clients. But since then, on an average, just with inbound marketing, I am getting about 6-8 clients per month (this includes clients leaving on an average as well). My motivation to do this fulltime has many reasons:

1) Quit my job (very high paying btw)

2) I love this business and really want to spend all my professional time only on it for next few years.

3) Really scale this business because I have seen the potential. i could be delusional but based on my experience so far , I think this could be a $10 Million business in 7-10 years if done right with scale.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> i'm curious, what is the business (if you don't mind sharing)

</comment><comment><USER23> Gut feeling: that's a high revenue for one person. It can be easy to take for granted if the growth took a long time. But just wanted to offer another data point, that my old partner and I only managed about $1500 a month on our best month selling shareware games 15 years ago (this was before app stores, we were high on sites like download.com, but never saw anything approaching exponential growth).

It's straightforward to make more than that consulting. The catch is that consulting businesses generally have no intrinsic value. Their value is in the workers, so if there are N people and one of them leaves, they're worth about 1/N less. In other words, the have less resale value than product businesses.

So I would say, if you want your business to be worth something, consider streamlining it to the point where it no longer needs you. The catch to that is that it isn't something you do while you are still working on your minimum viable product (MVP). So ask yourself:

1) are you still getting established? \- then bootstrap, nobody will lend you money other than credit card companies

2) or are you at a point where you have some breathing room? \- consider funding from family and friends because even long tail decline can pay them back

3) or is everything in place to the point where you are ready for exponential growth? \- raise big money

I started writing a big spiel about brick and mortar stores and getting loans in exchange for a stake in the business but it wasn't something that couldn't be gleaned from watching a few episodes of Shark Tank.

The way I see it is, you're probably still a consultancy, still in phase 1, but on the threshold of phase 2. But congats, because most people never make it that far. So are you familiar enough with promotion and branding to get new business on your own? Or can you find a partner somewhere who is as established as you in some way (having either skills or cash), who will help you rather than hinder you? Or do you have a family friend who has experience running a business and more importantly, has the cash you get you to phase 2 in a short amount of time?

Concretely, it sounds like you need money so you can give your full attention to refactoring and hiring for growth, and you know an angel investor. Don't hold onto the job. But don't go and borrow more money than you need either. You're in a unique position where you could borrow 6 months or a year's wages without having to work for and save that money yourself (which takes 10 times longer - so if you wanted to save $10,000, you would have to earn $100,000, which most people don't have the means to do, and that's the actual thing that stops people from starting their own businesses, not dedication or talent or the things that hackers tell themselves to feel special). As a general rule, a bank might lend you what you have in savings. But an angel investor might lend you a lot more for some percentage of the business. A partner would want half, but maybe there's a sweet spot where you could borrow more and give up less, because you have enough cashflow to survive on your own without the money. I made the choice to give up my job and go it alone a couple of years ago, but I don't have 2 kids to support, and now it's not so much about the money as missing the interaction with smart people. So now ironically having a great team and a sustainable income would be more attractive to me than any amount of money, because the sky would be the limit. Maybe thinking about what you really want, and accepting that you're being given a special opportunity rather than merely weighing risks, will help you decide how to proceed. Good luck!</comment>


Ask HN: how to find a good mentor? - <AUTHOR> I feel I need one, especially as I'm going to try and do my first real startup, but I don't know where to find such a person.
1) Where do you find this kind of people? Incubators? Posh parties? Shared work spaces? Networking?
2) Should the mentor be a person highly experienced? Or just more experienced than me?
3) I know it's a bidirectional exchange so I have to provide something to have it. How is this really working?
4) And in time scale, how much does a good mentor follow his protegé?
Thanks for any suggestion! <comment><USER2> You don't need a mentor. You need to start doing interesting things.

When you're doing interesting things you will meet people who are motivated to help you.

People won't take much of an interest in a person who is looking for a mentor but not doing anything.

Stop overthinking this. Establish relationships with other entrepreneurs near you. You can shoot the shit with them when things are good and when things are bad. You'll get introduced to other interesting people.

One day maybe you'll meet the fairy godmother you seem to be seeking, but if you don't you'll have made a start and know some interesting people. And, crucially, you'll be doing something.

 __Edit __: Just saw that you're based in London. Go to the meetups and hackathons and python dojos and LRUG etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks georgespencer, that got me realise probably I'm just planning stuff that doesn't go planned.

I was going to meetups and LRUG, but in most of them I just found people that talk and don't do, so I decided I stopped going until I roll out something or at least do some customer dev.

Thing is with this approach I won't meet any fellow entrepreneur, too extreme, isn't it? ;)

<comment><USER3> I'm going to disagree with georgespencer -- not with his perfectly reasonable suggestions, but with the premise that it's not worth seeking out a mentor. On the face of it, nobody "needs" a mentor, but the entire idea behind a mentor is face-to-face networking and advice. In addition, you will be borrowing your mentor's bona fides when you're having lunch with connections you've made via your mentor, and this can go a long way. A friend of mine has Gary Reiner for a mentor -- having that kind of horsepower behind your idea is priceless.

Having said all this, your best bet is to network and seek out introductions. You can't come in "cold", but "lukewarm" is okay, as long as there's a personal connection of some kind to your mentor -- whether it's a shared vision or a shared connection.

ETA: clarity.

<comment><USER2> I didn't mean to imply that in general it's not worth seeking out a mentor: I meant that for OP it's not worth it because he doesn't have anything he needs mentoring on.

If he needs mentoring on founding his startup or building a working version of his product, he's falling at the very first hurdle (beyond "having an idea"), and also the part of the process which is incredibly well documented online and elsewhere. It's formulaic.

We have two excellent NEDs at my company who are about as good as it gets, mentor-wise. But I'd never have gotten anywhere with them without first _doing_ something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> How do you find a good spouse? By dating several people.

With mentorship-ask several people for advice. You can basically use cold calls here, many people love advising others. I've used LinkedIn to find experts on a problem I'm facing and ask them for advice, with great results.

Then, more importantly, apply their advice and _tell them how it helped_. This can be as simple as sending an email afterwards saying "Hey X, your advice on Y helped us in Z way." This is important because 90% of people don't actually act on the advice they receive. By acting on the advice, you make it clear that you actually value what your potential mentor has to say.

</comment><comment><USER5> I wouldn't flat out ask people to mentor you, just as you wouldn't ask someone explicitly to become 'close friends' right away - great relationships take time to be developed.

Instead, how about simply asking a more experienced entrepreneur or investor for their advise on your startup. Depending on where you live, you could approach them at local startup events (where are you based?) - offer to buy them lunch or coffee in exchange for their advise. Who knows, ideally one of those might become your startup's first investor - as the not-too-old adage goes, ask for advise to get funding, ask for funding to get advise.

Most people will be flattered if you just genuinely ask them for their opinion and help - the rest has to be developed over time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your tips fab1an. I understand it's more of a human relationship than simply a business one. I'm based in London, by the way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> When a friend of mine moved to New York City, he started reaching out to top- notch designers (there are quite a few there) basically saying "Hey, I'm new to the town, here's what I do, here's what I've done, would you be interested in getting together to talk?" and surprisingly, a few of these people made time in their life to meet him. He has since fostered a relationship with industry leaders and now meets and works closely on side projects with some of the biggest names in design. I'm not saying this will always happen but I think you would be surprised at what people are willing to do if you show motivation. I agree with previous comments that you should be doing interesting things but also be prepared to just share your hopes and goals.

To answer your questions: 1) anywhere 2) yes. yes. 3) I think a good mentor will realize the nature of the relationship. I don't think they're always looking to gain something. 4) no idea.

</comment><comment><USER7> In order to find a good mentor you need to know what you need to be mentored on - that is, what do you want to get out of the relationship? As you are starting a startup you can possibly find a mentor in any type of startup- related activity (startup law, accounting, programming, marketing, growth- hacking, etc). Only by starting your startup will you figure out what explicitly you need help with and can then figure out who is the right mentor to approach.

So I agree with georgespencer - you don't need a mentor right now, you need to start doing things. As you do these things it gives you something to talk about with various people and then you can dive into a mentorship relationship.

Regarding bidirectional exchange - perhaps you are very good at some things others are not. You can use this to mentor your mentor.

As you grow and learn your mentoring needs may grow and change, so what you are really should be seeking is a community not a mentor. Go to the meetups / hackathons and make friends so you can join the community.

</comment><comment><USER8> Don't forget, it is fundamentally easier to coach someone than to act on advice. So the field for potential (good) coaches/mentors is relatively large.

The famous/successful/rich all got very lucky at some point (in addition to hard work), so many of them might not be the most valuable mentors. Especially if you're not already connected.

And of course, reading good authors will do a world of good. Writers like Peter Drucker, Zig Ziglar, and Jim Collins can be fantastic teachers.

Finally, there is a cottage industry of "pay me and I will give you advice." Which is sad faced panda to the max. Probably don't waste your time and money there.

:)

</comment><comment><USER9> Check this book out - there's a whole section on mentors...

[http://www.amazon.com/The-Students-Guide-Success- Connections...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Students-Guide-Success- Connections/dp/1585425567)

</comment><comment><USER10> Good look on your search.

It's always nice to sit/talk with people who are more experienced than you in a particular subject of interest. My wish.

</comment><comment><USER11> it's near you. it's you.</comment>


Image manipulation library for Node.js. Requires ImageMagick. - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/vdemedes/magician <comment><USER2> This is just a shim on top of imagemagick command-line tools: [https://github.com/vdemedes/magician/blob/master/lib/magicia...](https://github.com/vdemedes/magician/blob/master/lib/magician.coffee)

I would prefer full in-memory API bindings as rmagick does.</comment>


A Year Using Matrix and Riot - <AUTHOR> https://itscode.red/posts/1-year-using-matrix/ <comment><USER4> Project lead for Matrix here. This is a pretty accurate post, and in terms of the negative points we are _painfully_ aware that UX on Riot (and performance on Synapse) still has a way to go. The current stuff we have in flight to fix this are:

* Lazy-load all room members rather than push them proactively to clients. This should improve initial sync times and subsequent RAM usage by anywhere from 3x to 20x depending on how active your account is.

* Cross-sign E2E devices when you log in so nobody ever has to verify them again. This should kill the constant device verification (and key sharing) warnings.

* Refresh the whole UI/UX of Riot. We have an ex-Canonical/Ubuntu pro-designer working on a complete facelift of Riot/Web, coming in the next few months.

* Perf improvements across the board on Riot/Web - particularly optimising React when switching rooms, and switching from Draft to Slate in order to speed up and stabilise the message composer.

* Algorithmic improvements to Synapse to speed up the hottest paths (shifting from O(N) to roughly O(1) with the size of the room) - [https://matrix.org/_matrix/media/v1/download/jki.re/ubNfLtrm...](https://matrix.org/_matrix/media/v1/download/jki.re/ubNfLtrmXZMmlGjJZYPnlHHy)

* Algorithmic improvements to Synapse to avoid fragmentation of rooms by partitioning the DAG into 'chunks', avoiding stale/dead/orphaned chunks from contributing to the fragmentation of the overall room - [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1E0cmEeMDwcQarFYxpZ0b9aoQ...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1E0cmEeMDwcQarFYxpZ0b9aoQbf1ODxwRx7YWIo5nWt8)

On the minus side, we've been badly slowed down by constant firefighting keeping the Matrix.org homeserver operational despite massive growth, as well having to do a lot of preparation for GDPR compliance - <USER2> [https://matrix.org/blog/2018/05/08/gdpr-compliance-in- matrix...](https://matrix.org/blog/2018/05/08/gdpr-compliance-in-matrix/).

On the plus side, we have a lot of new people joining during May to work fulltime on Synapse, Dendrite and Riot/Web - which once we get past the mythical man month stage should make a huge huge difference.

Fun times...

<comment><USER5> I use Riot on a daily basis and I like the overall concept, we love federated where I communicate. So let me try to share some experiences that bugger me the most because I really hope you could imporve on those things. Imho those things are more important than UI. (form follows function, sorry guys ;D)

\- Messages that can't be decrypted on only some of my devices. This for example forces me to use my phone while sitting in front of my riot desktop application. This becomes worse if ppl send me URLs. I have to forward them from my phone to my pc - using an empty channel with only me reading, having riot telling me that noone is listening :D. Im-/exporting all keys on all my devices only helps for a while and is impossible while not at home. This mostly - but not only - happens with linux.

\- Searching the history doesn't work well at all. Shows zero results for a string, scrolling up proves that wrong.

\- My phone doesn't stop to blink even tho I read the message on my pc.

\- I really do not like electron and things relying on 100+mb google sandbox software. But well, I understand your need to use it... ;D

<comment><USER6> Have you used any of the Qt based client? I'm asking because I'm interested in Matrix, the idea and the protocol look great but there is no way I'm using an electron app...

<comment><USER4> I use both nheko (Qt/C++), Fractal (GTK+/Rust) and Quaternion (Qt/QML) on a regular basis, and they are all very usable albeit not as mature as Riot yet. Definitely worth a go though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Another huge issue is how painfully slow the client is. Simple tasks like > switching between groups takes up to a second

Guess the author hasn't used Slack lately...

I run both Slack (for work) and Riot (for personal, on the matrix.org server) and while I don't use Riot as much as Slack, I really love it. I think the UI is great. I am fairly used to IRC though, and I think that's where Riot gets a lot of its DNA from, so maybe I'm just used to that setup.

For the project being open source, and for the short time it has been alive, it has come so incredibly far. I can't wait to see what else they do.

</comment><comment><USER8> > This has improved a lot since a year ago but there still needs to be a > massive change in the UI design to make it comparable to the competition.

I agree whole-heartedly with this. I am not entirely sure who decided on Riot's garish green UI filled with circles and non-standard UI controls and wildly variable padding/spacing and communities bar that takes up space even when not joined to any communities, but it looks a mess.

If you look at Slack, Microsoft Teams etc, they are consistent, they are clean and they look like they have been designed by professionals. Riot doesn't - yet - and I can quite understand that putting people off, given that there aren't many other Matrix clients for the average user.

<comment><USER4> You're always welcome to change the garish green in settings, and likewise hide the communities bar (although we expect communities to be used more and more in future, just as they are in Slack and Discord etc).

Meanwhile, the upcoming redesign pretty much removes the green and the circles anyway :)

<comment><USER9> Where can one sneak a peak of the redesign?

<comment><USER4> We'll do a blogpost shortly to show where it's at and gather feedback :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> After seeing a post on HN about Matrix a few weeks ago, I decided to see about setting up a home server on the headless Ubuntu box in my closet. All in all, it was pretty painless. The one thing I couldn't figure out was the built-in audio/video calling functionality, although the Jitsi videoconferencing widget did work (once my dad I managed to find all 20 of the volume knobs throughout the OS that need to be unmuted to have both the speakers and microphone working on both ends).

</comment><comment><USER11> I Tried to use Riot.im with a friend of mine, who's also a hacker and we couldn't figure out how to create a room for us to chat. We're probably too dumb for this.

<comment><USER12> Bottom left; click the little person icon. A modal pops up asking you to enter the user ID of the person you wish to chat with.

There are valid complaints to be made about Riot's UI, but I really don't think that's one of them.

<comment><USER11> We did that many times, but nothing appeared on each other's screen, it seemed as if the IDs were being sent to /dev/null.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What confused me about Riot when I tried it was that when I picked a friend to chat, it created some kind of new room instead of.. not sure how to call it, a P2P chat? Like it's on slack or other services. For eg. I could remove messages but my friend couldn't which makes it weird (I'm an admin in a P2P conversation?)

<comment><USER14> It seems Matrix really blurs the lines between a direct chat and group chat, it's one of the things I would like to be clearer.

For example, when you start a direct chat, it's realy just a group chat with 2 people. If you invite another person (or even just an integration like giphy search!), the UI stops listing it under the other user as a direct chat and it seems indistinguishable from a chat room. Even removing the extra user seems to not get it classified again as a direct chat.

If Matrix people are reading this - it would be great to have better distinction between direct and group. And it would be nice if integrations could somehow not break that illusion. And perhaps a warning if adding an integration / user will irreversibly make a chat a group chat.

<comment><USER15> Yes! This is (one of the many things) addressed in the redesign. Also found it confusing, but don't worry, it will be fixed :)

Can't wait to share some of the new designs with everyone!

If anyone has other suggestions or frustrations, send them to me - <USER3> are in my description.

I'm the guy working on a major UI/UX redesign for Matrix/Riot that Matthew mentioned above.

<comment><USER16> the closer we could get to the realchat interface from 2003 / 2007 - I'd love to see it. ( [http://weblog.globaladvancedmedia.com/2018/realchat- backend-...](http://weblog.globaladvancedmedia.com/2018/realchat-backend- pages-one/) )

rooms, pms, all kinds of options, modern design in a layout that worked even at 1/4 monitor screen fine.

Of course it did not work on mobile - so it didn't have to think about how that would re-arrange and look. However it is clean and intuitive for many I think.

The backend options for changing colors and making / trading entire themes was decent as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> One thing I discovered when introducing other people to Riot.im and that even confused myself was the sign-up procedure. You think you are signing up but instead you are trying to sign in.

Other than that I am happy with Riot.im.

</comment><comment><USER18> Is multi-account support being actively worked on for Riot? So (as a use case) I can be signed in to my personal matrix.org account and my (work) private HS account at the same time?

If not I was planning on taking a look at it myself despite my JS being rusty and have never done anything with Electron before but I haven't had time to go through the code and see how much of it is designed being built around just a single user account. I remember the old Matrix Console app for Android had multiple account support.

<comment><USER19> What's wrong with multiple tabs in a browser?

<comment><USER20> Even more resource usage and doesn't work on mobile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I would've liked a better segregation of how it was a year ago and how it is now, along with some kind of bullet list showing the salient points that the author wants to highlight.

I've tried Riot briefly, and am very much interested to see such a decentralized solution becoming mature. I really can't wait for it to become something that can be "sold" to people who aren't into technology but care about the user experience and ease of use.

</comment><comment><USER22> For 1-to-1 chat, XMPP seems way better suited. However, Matrix feels like a really nice IRC successor. I hope both can live in a somewhat symbiotic relationship.

<comment><USER23> What makes XMPP "better suited" for 1-on-1 chats? I use both XMPP and Matrix for both 1-on-1 and group chats and found neither lacking in any case.

<comment><USER22> What I meant is rather "chatting with friends and family, Facebook style", as opposed to "chatting in organized teams and groups, Slack style".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> What Matrix offers differently from Jabber?

\- Jabber has definable custom xml schemas where you can also define your own protocol on top of it for media exchange, voip and etc.

\- Also, it is pretty decentralized.

In the current incantation jabber also has performance advantages, having a server implemented in low level language and all the existing jabber clients around.

EDIT: Keep in mind I am not criticizing Matrix, I just found it to have a staggering amount of features similar to Jabber, which is "kinda" used but sadly didn't quite fly like other not-foss alternatives like Telegram/Whatsapp. We all really need a good decentralized and open IM protocol.

</comment><comment><USER25> One thing I noticed when I tried it out a year or so ago was the high data usage on mobile devices even when messages weren't being sent or received.

I had set up our own Synapse server but the high data usage, quirky 1-1 vs rooms chats, etc. made it tough for me to adopt fully.

I do hope to use it in the future though as I really like the concept but it wasn't quite there for me yet.

</comment><comment><USER16> really excited about this. Just need a way to give some users moderator powers to click to see ip addys of other users when issues arise - and the power to ban them by ip, subnet, as, cidr, hostname. (and any other options)

One troll with a couple of VPNs and wow, the damage that can be done is something else.

Would hooking [https://access.watch/](https://access.watch/) into a home server or something like it make any sense / make it easier / faster to roll something like this out?

Can't wait to get into this more, so many possibilities.

I am right in thinking that having a home server that does not connect to the main rooms on the main matrix server would save 80% of the ram and much of the lag?

</comment><comment><USER26> Off topic, but I love the simple & clean design of this site/blog. I think I'll borrow it for my personal blog.

Did some homework, looks like it was built using Hugo: [https://gohugo.io](https://gohugo.io)

</comment><comment><USER27> Is there interop with existing chat server protocols? I would think this is hard to achieve but I figured it would be worth the question

<comment><USER28> Yep, you can bridge Matrix with a lot of stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Hola</comment>


Ask HN: Should computer games be built on Vim style keybindings? - <AUTHOR> In a hypothetical scenario, since Vim is praised for its multi functionality and speed, what are the cons except keyboard might get damaged?
How would navigation work?
What would be the possible mistakes a player can make after getting familiar with keybindings?
Why is the role of mouse not eliminated only in gaming? Instead, it got more sophisticated and much more demanded for this use. <comment><USER2> I think perhaps you are confusing the idea of VIM's input paradigm being efficient for text editing, with the idea of VIM's input paradigm being efficient in general. Video games that have adopted the use of a mouse have not done so for lack of a keyboard - they have done so because the combination of a mouse _with_ keyboard is more powerful than one or the other. They're using the right tool for the job.

A mouse's strength comes from its ability to encode movement. A keyboard can do this also, but it requires many more inputs to achieve the same result. Consider that for every unit we wish to move a pointer, we need to either press a key once, or move a mouse 1mm. If I wish to move the pointer 100 units, I need to press a key 100 times. Whether I choose to do this repeatedly or by using the system's key repeat feature to make it happen, it will take some time. With a mouse, I just need to move the mouse 10cm. One movement of the mouse is worth 100 keystrokes. Increasing the efficiency of the keyboard requires added complexity. In the case of VIM it might translate to something like "100j". But continually typing "100j45k10l" etc is not beneficial for fast paced FPSs.

A mouse's disadvantage while editing text, is the requirement for both hands to be at the keyboard at the same time in order to type anything moderately complex at a reasonable speed. For a user with a taste for speed and efficiency, the act of moving a hand to the mouse and back can take what feels like a lifetime. VIM's power isn't in its ability to point better than a mouse - it is in describing the actions required to modify text in a manner so efficiently that the act of using the mouse becomes less efficient.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

I was thinking of a simple game, sort of like Vimium where if you pressed 'f' you'd get all the keybindings mapping the objects in the virtual world. From what I understand, the disadvantage lies more with keyboard and VIM won't be of any substantial help.

I didn't consider a sister perspective - -Moving the mouse over a mouse pad (2D) to make a gun point all the directions in 3D. This illusion can become much more complicated if a target and the cross needed to adjust according to distance between me and the target

\- Finding a target and pointing to it with a gun wouldn't be much fun if we'd make VIM to find it for us( like how it does in Vimium on a web page) where you'd just press 'f'. Even if that wasn't the case, keying in the (x,y,z in metre) to fire shot at a particular location every time we make a wrong guess would be frustrating.

\- Pulling trigger of a gun and pausing to take my time feels much more controlled and exciting in pressing the left click of a mouse to our needed pace where in that instant we can decide if we want to save ammo or fire some more shots.

\- What if the other guy keyed in correctly and you died or nobody standing against each other is able to throw granades at each other to kill? I'd imagine someone throw the keyboard off just because they made a silly mistake of wrong parameters.

\- Combining above three, I'd have to wait until 8 bullets are emptied (if on VIM I pressed '8j') and can't re-adjust to fit more with the target while I can simultaneously fire shots like I could do in mouse. This would make me feel slow instead of VIM's supposed quickness.

I didn't even consider head-shots and all other bonus point actions.

The above points are just with respect to a gun. What about other hand held objects like snipers, dynamites, bags,UI/UX options etc.? It would feel like one man making a factory work. The game wouldn't reach its end goal of making a user enjoy.

A mouse, like you said, augments many more parameters of reality to operate simultaneously making it more closer to reality. I get this epiphany as I write - Virtual reality is the way to go instead of mouse/keyboard/VIM centric as it makes the user, centric.

My question, I realize is as stupid as it gets. Games have already incorporated enough keybindings like hotkeys,shortcuts and cheat codes( although discouraged) to make user comfortable with just one hand on keyboard( and other on mouse). VIM or any other style wouldn't add anything to begin with?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> To improve my Vim skills I once patched the Boulder Dash clone that comes with Debian to use hjkl.

Didn't work well, because in this game you often need to press two keys simultaneously. In the normal touch typing position h and j share the index finger, so you can't press them at the same time without leaving the normal position.

You don't have this problem neither with WASD nor the inverse T-Shaped cursor keys because you can press all the useful two-key combinations conveniently with just three fingers (no thumb, no pinky needed). You can't press up and down at once, but that doesn't make sense anyway.</comment>


Show HN: Mp3 vocabulary generator - <AUTHOR> http://language.andrewdenhertog.com

<comment><USER2> Cool idea. It'd be nice if you could crawl a dictionary and generate words on a particular topic.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey nice idea. The project's in its infancy, but I'll add this to the stack. Thanks!</comment></comment>


JRR Tolkien's Nobel prize chances dashed by 'poor prose' - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jan/05/jrr-tolkien-nobel-prize

<comment><USER2> Lesson: Enjoy whatever it is you enjoy. I know people who get upset when their favorite song doesn't make some end of year "best of" list. Don't let other people decide what you should like.

<comment><USER3> The Feynman Rule.</comment></comment>


Show HN: TaskList – Mobile Friendly Task Mgr for Slack - <AUTHOR> http://tasklist.guru <comment><AUTHOR> TaskList is the easiest and fastest way to organize your Slack teams' tasks.

1 - powered by 2 commands in Slack, /task and /list.

2 - Mobile-friendly! You can edit/manage with any device.

3 - No logins. Who wants to remember another password? Nobody on your Slack team needs to signup or login.

</comment><comment><USER2> It doesn't automatically redirect from non-WWW HTTPS to WWW HTTPS

<comment><USER3> really? does for me.</comment></comment>