Pretend to be a lasership commander using only your keyboard - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/YASME-Tim/laserman

<comment><AUTHOR> If just one bored soul is happy with this game for just 5 minutes, that'll make the time spent worth it :D!

I wrote this game in shell, because I was bored. It interprets the keycode of the pressed key on your keyboard and plays a mp3. Simple, but fun :).

<comment><USER2> Freaking hilarious. You brightened my day sir.

<comment><AUTHOR> There is only one way out! (ctrl+d) :D.

Good to know I made you smile!</comment></comment></comment>


What's New in BareOS - <AUTHOR> https://www.bareos.org/en/whats_new.html <comment><AUTHOR> Excerpt:

"We also put a lot of hours into the modernizing of the legacy code. We replaced GNU Autoconf with CMake. As a result the source code is much easier to maintain.

Instead of 70,000 lines of Autoconf scripts there are now about 5,000 lines of CMake to look after – a pretty good result."</comment>


Tom Anderson's thoughts on Ice Cream Sandwich - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/112063946124358686266/posts/8vMbDSiaPdg

<comment><USER3> Other things that I noticed when I updated my Nexus S:

* Scrolling and transition animations are a bit smoother. Not quite iPhone smooth but almost. * The tile based rendering for the browser is quite noticeable. While a page is rendering you'll see some tiles rendered at various resolutions or not at all and you can be waiting a while sometimes before the tile you want to read is rendered. * The browser has a save for offline reading option. * The browser allows many more 'open' tabs than it did previously * The locked screen now lets you swipe right to unlock, or left to turn on the camera. This is great for fast access to the camera app. * The locked screen also shows controls for pausing and skipping songs when the music app is running. * Contacts that don't have an international prefix are no longer recognised. I was a bit confused when I started getting messages from unknown numbers before realising I had to update my contacts. * I can no longer lock the screen when playing Angry Birds. When I unlock, the app has died (presumably run out of memory). I guess this is because ICS takes more memory. * The task manager now has thumbnails and is a lot slower to load.

So overall I would agree there are some improvements, some changes and some new bugs. But I would recommend upgrading if only for the improved speed - <USER2> find it strange that Tom didn't mention that.

</comment><comment><USER4> My overall experience on my Nexus S:

-Horrible, awful battery life. Probably about 12 hours. Hoping they get a fix out soon...

-UI is much smoother and more polished than Gingerbread (smoother animations, extra room to put apps on homescreen with the bottom bar)

-The new widget features are great (can add a homescreen icon to call/text a specific person, play a playlist, navigate/open a map for a specific location)

I love it except for the battery issues.

<comment><USER5> >-The new widget features are great (can add a homescreen icon to call/text a specific person, play a playlist, navigate/open a map for a specific location)

The widgets you listed here are identical to their GB counterparts.

Also, I find it strange you get such poor battery life. The battery life on my Nexus is far superior to stock.

<comment><USER4> > The widgets you listed here are identical to their GB counterparts.

... shit, did they really exist before? Wow, I'm an idiot. I guess I never looked at the widgets menu very closely until I got the upgrade...

> Also, I find it strange you get such poor battery life. The battery life on > my Nexus is far superior to stock.

It seems to be a (nearly?) universal issue - Google stopped the OTA update due to the battery issue. ([http://www.technobuffalo.com/companies/google/android/google...](http://www.technobuffalo.com/companies/google/android/google- postpones-ice-cream-sandwich-update-for-nexus-s/))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The tl;dr on this one seems to be: Some things are different. Some things are better. Some things are hard to find. Is there any unique insight in this submission that I'm missing?

<comment><USER7> I found it interesting. I have a Galaxy Nexus on the way, and now have a list of things I'd like to try.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> CM9 capitalizes on ICS changes and adds some interesting things already. For one, you can enter names "t9-style" into the dialer and it will suggest the closest contact without having to scroll. Very nice if you have hundreds of contacts.

Just a thought, if you've got a Nexus, you're 5 minutes away from having CM9.

<comment><USER8> Hm? Are the nightly builds out already? Or are you on Koush's builds?

<comment><USER5> Koush isn't building for the Galaxy Nexus (sorry, I didn't realize the OP article was about a N-S build), he has builds for the Nexus S, though someone else is building from his work, he's back on his own awesome projects.

The CM team is working on CM9 and you can build it yourself (with cherry-picks from gerrit/github if it fits your fancy). Fitsnugly and winner00 are maintaining builds on rootzwiki. (Fitsnugly is a bit more stock and winner00 includes more, what I would call, non-kosher bits).

The CM team used to let the build bots run pretty early on in the development cycle and stopped doing so for various reasons. Fortunately their code is all open source.</comment></comment></comment>


Ben Goldacre: Here's the foreword to my new book, Bad Pharma - <AUTHOR> http://www.badscience.net/2012/09/heres-the-intro-to-my-new-book/ <comment><USER2> Ben Goldacre was on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 this morning discussing his book with a representative of the pharma industry.

Platitudinous and evasive answers from the industry rep while referring to Goldacre's 'extremist' views. He's hit a nerve and they don't appear to have a good rebuttal.

For those with iPlayer access you can here it again here: <http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01mw2d4>

Edit: Ben Goldacre piece was at 08:34. Excerpt of just that section is here: [http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9754000/9754505....](http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9754000/9754505.stm)

<comment><USER3> It's interesting that once upon a time, he was being called a shill for big Pharma, thanks to his anti-quackery (read: anti-homeopathy) stance.

<comment><USER4> Which is hilarious, because "big pharma" own the big "alternative" "medicine" companies too - it's a multi-billion dollar business, of course they want a slice of that pie!

<comment><USER5> I didn't know that. Is there something I can read that'll back it up?

<comment><USER4> I can't recommend any text on the subject more highly than "Bad Science" by Ben Goldacre. It covers a lot more topics than just this, but it still covers the basics very well and I believe it has references for its claims (it has been a while since I read it and I don't have a copy to hand to check).

<comment><USER6> In the ePub version I have (from the iTunes store), there are a decent number of references in the back of the book, as well as some pointers to further reading.

I would assume they are also contained in the print version.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, I have a copy of the print version (not at hand though..) and I can confirm this.

The last few pages have a large number of references in them, and made me think for a few seconds that the book was longer than it actually was :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's important to note that Goldacre is writing from Britain, relying mostly on British examples. The regulatory system is somewhat different in the United States, so while some of his critique of new drug approvals generalizes to the whole world, the specifics of what countries are already doing to reduce the problems in regulation (which have been well known to many research-oriented physicians for years) vary from country to country.

As usual, I have to recommend here the edited group blog Science-Based Medicine,

<http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/>

which like any blog includes some daily articles that are duds, but which also features some of the best discussion in popular language by statistically astute medical researchers on what needs to be reformed in regulation of new drugs, and what is already working better than some possible alternative approaches. A recent post there, in this instance by a lawyer,

[http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/stem-cell- ther...](http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/stem-cell-therapy- regulation-plays-catch-up-2/)

is a thoughtful discussion of some of the regulatory trade-offs.

AFTER EDIT: Two things to add here. The clinical trials registry

<http://clinicaltrials.gov/>

hosted by the U.S. National Institutes of Health is one response to some of these concerns that precedes the publication of Goldacre's new book (which I intend to read cover to cover). It has a lot of information about human patient clinical trials being conducted all over the world.

Reviewing another recent post to Science-Based Medicine,

[http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/news-flash- doc...](http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/news-flash-doctors- arent-all-compliant-pharma-drones/)

I see it mentions Goldacre's new book (favorably) and also analyzes a very recently published study about physician influence by drug companies. I have submitted that here to HN

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4569970>

for thoughtful comments by all of you.

<comment><USER9> "It's important to note that Goldacre is writing from Britain, relying mostly on British examples."

At least judging from this example, the majority of his book is sourced from two earlier books that were written about the FDA and the American drug system:

The Truth About Drug Companies by Marcia Angell

Overdosed America by Jonathan Abrams

Those were published in 2004 and 2005, so there are a few studies published since then on the influence of pharma funding on trial outcomes, but nothing that contradicts the earlier results.

In general though the problems are exactly the same between the US and the UK. There are a couple drugs that are legal here and not there and vice versa, but the underlying system corruption is identical, because it's literally the same studies (or at least the same methodology) that is used to get the drugs approved in both countries.

Also, as I've said before, that science-based medicine blog is mostly industry propaganda. There is overwhelming evidence that drug companies have a massive influence on doctor's prescribing habits, e.g. <http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=192314>

Here they are literally arguing that doctors aren't influenced by the file drawer effect because doctors can tell the difference in methodological rigor between good studies and bad studies. That has to be one of the dumbest and most intellectually dishonest arguments I have ever heard. Science-Based Medicine (the blog) reminds me a lot of Brawndo. Their basic argument in every article is just "but it's what plants crave!!1"

<comment><USER8> Alex, I have lived in more than one country, so I have made specific observations of precisely how little influence the FDA has on the drug regulations of other countries. And I previously provided numerous examples to you of the FDA keeping drugs off the market or removing drugs from the market based on evidence of safety and effectiveness.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4245571>

I would submit that the underlying system corruption is probably stronger among enterprises that sell schedule I controlled substances here in the United States than among those that sell government-regulated, physician prescribed medications. Both regulatory systems, the system that makes some drugs I've seen you speak up for contraband, and the system that makes some newly invented drugs legal items of commerce, may indeed need further reform. But it's an exaggeration (contradicted by thoughtful comments by drug industry researchers who have already posted replies in this thread) to say that the enterprises that develop new drugs for prescribed medical treatment are corrupt in general beyond what Goldacre claims with specific evidence.

<comment><USER9> "But it's an exaggeration [...] to say that the enterprises that develop new drugs for prescribed medical treatment are corrupt in general beyond what Goldacre claims with specific evidence."

edit: Response moved to pastebin: <http://pastebin.com/cniysd82>

(Didn't realize how long that was going to get.)

<comment><USER10> You've damaged this comment page and shown your immaturity to the public.

<comment><USER11> I think you're being dramatic. Posting a too long comment in trying to make a point?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm curious to read the book--I write software used to collect data during phase 2 and 3 clinical trials, so I have some understanding of both how trials are designed as well as what the regulators are looking for in the data. In my experience, there is a strong push for both good data and preserving the "voice of the patient" from many of the scientists who develop the trials (not necessarily the drugs, but the trials on the drugs). Whether pharma follows this advice is a different story.

Another anecdote: in the 15 or so years my employer has been around, we've only seen a handful of NDAs (new drug applications) go through on the hundreds of studies to which we've supplied software.

All that said, despite receiving my paycheck from big pharma, I'm sympathetic to Goldacre's criticisms. As I mentioned, the founders of my employer (both software folks and clinical scientists) have worked to change the way trials are run in order to provide better data. Whether the sponsors properly use this data is another story.

<comment><USER13> I've also done a stint in big pharma, on the R&D side, running computational clusters for bio and chemistry modeling. The impression I got was that the majority of work was for improved science in order to create drugs that saves lives or improve it dramatically. The biggest money makers were things that deal with diabetes and heart disease, not things like antidepressants and ED. I think some focus was lost on the business/marketing side where opportunities were pushed and exploited in certain drug lines beyond what was reasonable. I get the impression that most of these issues were before 2006, it's actually not in the best interest of the pharmaceuticals to operate in this manner either if they want to remain in business. The regulators have also caught up. That said, it's easy to see the mistakes in retrospect, this has happened over the history of many drugs that have come and gone.

<comment><USER11> Anecdotal "data point": my wife works in the biotech field. For one very large company they had a drug developed that worked but had to be dosed dependent upon weight.

Marketing felt that doctors would only use the product if it was simple enough, so they made it a one-size-fits-all dose.

<comment><USER14> Medication non-compliance is a big problem.

About half the English medication budget (£4.5 billion of £9 billion) is wasted because people don't take their medication correctly. This isn't just the medication for little things either. A major cause of transplanted organ problems is people not taking the meds correctly.

Not great sources, but:

(<http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/casenotes_20040817.shtml>)

(<http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/casenotes_20060509.shtml>)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is one of the reasons I left Medicine for computing... He is not right that doctors are oblivious to these mechanisms. Most of the things he is talking about are very well known to the doctors, but most of them become obvious only when you start practicing, and (for most) there is no turning back. Most people (unlike me) don't feel very comfortable abandoning 6-10 years of time money and effort investments and switching jobs, and they choose to play the game...

</comment><comment><USER16> Yes, Medicine is not performing as well as it could do.

But it is a million times better than medicine circa 1263 AD

I am reminded of the Google logo "Don't be evil". I always heard that and wished that I really was living in a world where evil was defined as monopolistic business practises and bad UI, instead of rape, genocide and torture.

I respect Ben Goldacre, and I understand the need for a little hyperbole. But forcing pharma and regulators to publish all trials, and fund independant on- the-job training will not lead to order of magnitude changes. Its an evolution not a revolution.

Some day someone will find cancer's penicillin. They will probably have been badly funded, and roundly ignored by the rest of Chinese medical establishment (!) and none of the prescriptions in Ben's book will have helped.

I would liken this to the car industry - If the world has not invented the internal combustion engine that is not something changing regulation will fix. Ensuring that after it is invented, the industry is honest, accountable and constantly pressured to improve - that is fixable.

Welcome to Nader-hood Dr Goldacre.

<comment><USER17> >> But forcing pharma and regulators to publish all trials, and fund independant on-the-job training will not lead to order of magnitude changes.

No, but it will allow people to make more informed decisions about what medicine they should take, and give a more realistic picture about its effectiveness. There is no justifiable reason to withhold trial data...

<comment><USER16> I quite agree and beleive that we should have all trials published openly. I think Goldacreas book is a good salient point in a tidal change coming. I am hopeful.

However my point was that the hyperbole was a little too much - Goldacre has a difficult tightrope to walk - to stir people up enough that he (sells books and) convinces them action is necessary, and yet does not actually go over the top and accuse a generally beneficial-to-society pharma industry of being one step above arms dealers.

I think he will pull it off and look forward to putting it on my Xmas reading list.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's getting some great reviews on Amazon: <http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/RIBC5ED8IUT4X>

> Despite this book being an excellent take down of the pharmaceutical > industry which everyone should read it completely fails as a flickbook. I'd > expect a writer of Goldacre's calibre to be able to stick small pictures in > the bottom right of the book's margin creating an animated effect of > himself, astride a unicorn, vigorously stroking the horn until finally, a > moment of satisfaction

<comment><USER19> What actually happened: It got one absolutely idiotic review from someone who hadn't read it but wanted to complain that it wasn't an anti-climate-science book (yes, really), and now all the other reviews are making fun of that one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's fair to look at this industry with a critical eye, but let's not forget that many of these companies have spent billions of dollars to develop drugs that cure many very serious diseases.

I can't take serious the statement "the way medecine works is ludicrously appalling" if you consider people can now live a fine life with the AIDS virus and there are hundreds of diseases that can now be managed and cured, thanks to medicine.

<comment><USER21> What very serious disease have they cured recently?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Here is a way to bribe journals, by purchasing large quantities of "reprints":

[http://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2012/07/03/richard-smith-medical- jo...](http://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2012/07/03/richard-smith-medical-journals-a- gaggle-of-golden-geese/)

With so much money at stake, all this should surprise no one. And anyone with an ounce of brains should be very cautious about drugs.

<comment><USER14> Elsevier have done some dodgy things in the past, such as printing fake journals which appeared to be peer reviewed but not disclosing sponsorship.

([http://classic.the- scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/27...](http://classic.the- scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/27383))

Pharmaceutical companies used to spend vast amounts promoting their medications to English GPs. (Estimates suggest over £10,000 per GP, with 40,000 GPs in England.) And, because of our tight regulation that sum was probably less than in the rest of Europe. I'm pretty sure that has now stopped.

(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3700513>)

> And anyone with an ounce of brains should be very cautious about drugs.

Bob is taken to hospital. Bob is unconscious. Or Bob has a learning disability. Or Bob is going through psychiatric crisis. Or Bob speaks a different language than all the clinicians. Or Bob is under the influence of drugs / alcohol. Or Bob is not that bright.

I agree that people should be careful with medication, but it's a shame that we have to do so. I trust doctors, and I sort of trust pharma (I wish there was better regulation), but I'm still wary of meds.

(In the UK about 10,000 people die each year because clinicians make mistakes with medications. Compare that figure to Road Traffic Accidents (about 3,000))

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I suspect I've missed the boat on this one, but in any case:

About a year ago, I began an (overly) ambitious project to build a database of the scientific evidence behind the use of herbal supplements to treat a variety of conditions. I sank my nights and weekends into it for a couple of months but only got as far as one test section. It's sat more or less derelict ever since.

Aside from a mostly ignored Reddit submission, no-one has ever really seen it. If you have a minute, take a look and please let me know any thoughts you have about it at all.

<http://herbevidence.com/data/Erectile_Dysfunction>

(Forgive me, the section on ED happens to be one I wrote up as a test section because I was researching it anyway as a writing gig. Click on the name of each supplement in the first table to go to the full page for it.)

<comment><USER24> You may be interested in <http://examine.com/> which is a project similar to yours but focused mostly on fitness supplements specifically (although it has articles on major other supplements like fish oil). Their editors have actually provided a lot of write-ups even though they are just volunteers originally from reddit's Fitness subreddit.

<comment><USER23> Yeah, I've been following them for a while. Aside from the obvious difference in focus, my biggest gripe with that site is that the basic taxonomy is per supplement. The typical use case is the user hears about supplement A, hears it's good for purpose X, then searches for "A" or "A fox X", finds the examine.com page, and sees if A is really good for X.

With my project, the basic taxonomy was always per-complaint (or per-illness if you prefer). It doesn't presuppose the user has ever heard of any particular supplement. The idea is the user can browse to the page that documents their condition and quickly see a summary of all the evidence for all the different tested herbal treatments.

Now, I'm not at all sure that this difference in structure justifies starting all the research etc. from scratch. It may be the case that examine.com could trivially switch over to the structure I used. But I do think that my structure is superior.

<comment><USER25> <http://examine.com/health-goals/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Indian here,

One of my uncle is a nephrologist in the US. He recently came to India for a vacation and my talks with him were all about these issues. About how doctors work, their protocols, procedures and ethics etc and things like that. From what I could decipher doctors are not super humans how have miracle cures for every disease to exist on earth. What doctors are generally taught in medical school is to first learn about healthy bodies so that they can later to distinguish between a healthy and unhealthy body. Then they are taught pathology, stuff like dissecting dead humans and learning their internals. And then there are things like anatomy, metabolism, physiology etc. After all this they then go on to diseases and their cures.

In an ordinary medical school course. With all that heavy syllabus the actual disease-cure part is taught in a no more procedure than if-then-else decision tree scenarios. Its something like this, Imagine you are taught 100 different symptoms for fever. Combination of all those 100 scenarios in 'OR' and 'AND' conditions lead to various conditions of fever with various diseases. That's what we are talking about here. Imagine you having to remember all this, will it really possible? May be for an year or two but with time that sort of knowledge erodes quickly.

On top of this they are taught nothing much about the root cause of these diseases. Their cures. Are they addressing the root causes or just managing symptoms.

When they go on to their MD. Then comes little special training and details with investigation, practice and learning about a specific organ/part of the body. This is still understandable.

But in general most doctors work like a software cache. The diseases and cures they pull out are the ones cached with the recent patients they are treating.

So yes in general most doctors really work only like decision trees at the most abstract levels. Most don't have people skills, most just don't listen to patients completely. Its all working at the most abstract levels with guess work at times.

The break through stuff happening in medical science is not your physicians clinic. Its in things like vaccinations, surgical sciences, diagnosis and stuff like that.

</comment><comment><USER27> I've always been curious why clinical trials are so expensive. Does anyone know an approximate cost breakdown of a typical clinical trial say for a new drug?

Really you're just having a few hundred people take a pill and monitor their progress. I always wonder why that should cost more than 10 or 20K per patient even with overhead.

<comment><USER9> "Does anyone know an approximate cost breakdown of a typical clinical trial say for a new drug?"

No one knows exactly because drug companies are allowed to count many of their marketing expenses are part of their R&D. For example, phase IV trials are mostly done as marketing as an excuse to bribe doctors with tens of thousands of dollars to put patients on the drugs in exchange for answering one or two questions about their opinions on the drug that are completely unscientific and unpublishable.

That said to get a drug through phase III trials shouldn't cost more than about $20 million. You can go to MAPS webpage and see their budget and how much they are projecting it's going to cost to get MDMA approved. The reason the pharma companies claim that it takes billions per new drug to develop is that they're basically counting marketing expenses, other failed drugs, regulatory fines, etc.

<comment><USER27> That's really interesting. Thanks. So in theory a startup might be able to get that 20 million figure down to 5 million if they're lean?

<comment><USER9> "So in theory a startup might be able to get that 20 million figure down to 5 million if they're lean?"

Not likely, MAPS is already as lean as you can get. And they have a big advantage since there have already been dozens or hundreds of previous studies done on MDMA to establish safety.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Hardcover/Paperback/ePub available now in UK; not available in the US until January 8th (3 1/2 months).

It's a shame; I would have bought 2 copies as Christmas gifts. He's going to lose a lot of US sales to piracy.

<comment><USER29> <https://twitter.com/bengoldacre/status/249918250962530306>

" @bengoldacre

If you're frustrated by later publication in other countries, register your Kindle at 1 Road Street, London W1A 1AA <http://amzn.to/Uhr0p4> "

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Ben Goldacre is a legend. Buy this book for your friends for Christmas!

</comment><comment><USER31> I wonder if Goldacre's solutions would actually help. If it's so easy to fix the system, people would have already done it.

<comment><USER32> > If it's so easy to fix the system, people would have already done it.

This doesn't follow at all. The difficulty of fixing a system is just one possible reason it might remain as it does; regulatory capture is another, as is well-financed lobbying at the legislative level.

Pharmaceutical companies have a very clear financial interest in seeing as broad as possible use of their products, and demonstrably have the lobbying reach to forcefully advance this interest. If reform of medical trial data regulation is not a vote-winning platform (and it's hard to argue that it's uppermost in many voters' minds), then it's perfectly plausible that a broken system would persist despite the availability of easily-implemented solutions.

<comment><USER31> You are proving my point. There are many difficulties to fixing the system. Broken system persists because 'solutions' cannot be easily/successfully implemented.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How are you using FaaS in your startup? - <AUTHOR> I am seeing more and more companies in Who's Hiring mentioning serverless/Lambda/FaaS.  I'd like to hear some of the use cases for how AWS Lambda and other FaaS offerings are being used in startups.<p>What are some of the challenges you've faced in going that route, and why did you decide to build on Lambda (or equivalents)? <comment><USER2> We use it for a ton of our APIs. So far it's been great. Basically anything that don't have long processing times.

The main challenges that we've had are pretty funny tbh. The documentation is scattered because we use the Serverless framework and when you are looking for answers people maybe using the wrong terminology. The ecosystem isn't set up well for transpiring ES6+ features, and we were waiting for a while for queues as an event source (all good now!). when you do have to interact directly with amazon the documentation is terrible.

the only other thing that is funny is having to explain the benefits to other people, and how it works. Devs that are deep in the standard monolithic framework approach seem to take a little longer on the uptake, but thats not really a big deal.

<comment><USER2> ^^ sorry about the grammar

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> We are building serverless and some other services / products on Kubeless (for it's common interface to both pubsub and req/resp) and Google CloudRun for arbitrary Docker capabilities.

Keep an eye out for our open source Heroku built on GCP

</comment><comment><USER4> Come on gang, help a liberal arts major (and aspiring SaaS founder out) and give more use cases ;-)</comment>


What nobody will tell you about JSON - <AUTHOR> http://elitalon.com/2016/07/25/what-nobody-will-tell-you-about-json/ <comment><USER2> This is an assessment of several JSON libraries in Swift. An accurate title might be, "The state of JSON in Swift" or just "JSON in Swift". There is no generally new or useful information here for non-Swift devs.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree and thought about this too but chose the original title of the article because that's what's usually done here.. And now I can't edit the title anymore :(</comment></comment>


LHC reaches operational temps, collisions start in 5 weeks - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/10/final-lhc-segment-reaches-operational-temperature-at-19k.ars

<comment><USER2> I did a trip there last month and it was excellent to see the equipment close up. Will be fascinating when it starts up again.

<http://www.jgc.org/blog/2009/09/geek-side-trip-cern.html>

<comment><USER3> To CERN's credit they do a very good job with tours. It was even better when you could go inside before it was closed up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How many years of failure would it take before you would seriously consider this hypothesis? [http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/biology_evolut...](http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/biology_evolution/article6879293.ece)

5 years for me.

<comment><USER5> How many operational failures were there, exactly? I think it was at least 2 or 3 fairly large setbacks, right? I guess the problem here is just how damn long the system takes to cycle up and down. I imagine if the LHC could turn on and off within a few hours we would have seen the entire facility blow up if the theory were true.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "The idea is to run the LHC over the winter at half its rated power before bringing the collision energy up to its full 14 tera electron volts (TeV) sometime next spring. At that point, we should see... well, we're not entirely sure what."

Kind of laughed at that part.

<comment><USER7> I would put money down that what we'll see is it breaking again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's news like this that makes me wish that <http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/> had an RSS feed.

Edit: looks like they added one. Now I can allow myself to sleep again.

<comment><USER9> Viewing the source on that site is much more fun than the site itself.

<comment><USER10> > this is the fault of daniel drucker firstname.lastname@example.com

The 14-year-old wizard himself. A net.legend!</comment></comment></comment>


Startup Quote: Seth Godin, founder, Squidoo - <AUTHOR> http://startupquote.com/post/2400059848

<comment><AUTHOR> Competition validates you. It creates a category. It permits the sale to be this or that, not yes or no.

\- Seth Godin

<http://startupquote.com/post/2400059848></comment>


Return of incandescent light bulbs as MIT makes them more efficient than LEDs - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/12093545/Return-of-incandescent-light-bulbs-as-MIT-makes-them-more-efficient-than-LEDs.html <comment><USER2> I have some "neutral" color LEDs that give a light more like mid-day sunlight, which is great, and I wouldn't want to go back to the warm color incandescent light bulbs.</comment>


A Partial Inventory of Gustave Flaubert's Personal Effects - <AUTHOR> http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/08/15/a-partial-inventory-of-gustave-flaubert%E2%80%99s-personal-effects/

<comment><USER2> No pants? Was there some kind of taboo regarding the mention of trousers?</comment>


Show HN: Greater Peace of Mind Guaranteed, or Your Money Isn't Refunded - <AUTHOR> http://vowofnow.com

<comment><USER3> Let me get this straight. You've hired a Zen master so that your team can encourage people to meditate in order not to lose the money they've gambled? You seriously think you can inspire true meditation in someone by making them worry about the money they'll lose if they don't "meditate?" What's wrong with you? More importantly, what's wrong with the obviously fraudulent Zen master that's helping you do this?

First of all, meditation shouldn't have anything to do with a financial worry/financial incentive. This is one of the most dishonest things I've seen on HN. It's a cheap way to make money off the unsuspecting, naive crowd that's never had the patience or discipline to try meditation and has money to waste. Your website isn't even technically innovative; it makes money by encouraging people to give you their money, and you get to keep it if they don't achieve deeply personal goals that involve _detachment, peace and personal discovery_. How are you helping? How is taking money hostage contributing to the spirit of true meditation?

If you want to make money, go beyond an HTML page that laughs in the face of meditation and make something actually useful, like a real product.

I'm saying this as someone who did specialized research in Zen buddhism in an academic environment for one year.

<comment><USER4> His name is 'milkman', after all.

<comment><AUTHOR> LMAO! :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You have a typo in your subline: "Pledge money and vow to mediate for 30 days straight."

I am assuming mediate should be meditate, unless you really want my help in a peace process (not wise).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. I'll correct that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> You're getting a pretty hostile response!

People are free to spend their money on whatever they want. I'd prefer them to spend money on meditation than on, for example, telephone psychics or homeopathy.

Motivation is a tricky, unsolved, problem. It's really important too - <USER2> need motivation to stop smoking, to eat better, to exercise more. These all have serious public health impacts. So I welcome anyone working on this problem. I hope you're keeping detailed stats.

Good Luck!

</comment><comment><USER7> Awesome! Love the idea, and would love to partner up and make a deal to get people excited and started meditating. I released Buddha Mind (<http://buddhamindapp.com>) yesterday, an app which incorporates a heart rate monitor to measure changes in your heart rate variance.

Shoot me an email at my username at gmail dot com, and let's see if we can't get more people excited about meditating and learning to control their mind.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. Lets do it. I'll zip you an email now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> First off, I think it's a cool idea. Now, I certainly don't expect this is the case here, but the cynic in me notes that in a set up like this, there is actually a financial incentive for the 'service provider' here to provide such a bad product that they actually turn customers away.

The better the service provided, the more likely customers are to stick with the program, and the less money they make.

<comment><AUTHOR> I certainly can't wait to get feedback from the people who are already taking the vow. Hopefully they achieve greater peace and make meditation a fun habit and will tell others. Then I can get some testimonials for the site.

<comment><USER9> I am going to give it a try, and my evaluator is an orthodox buddhist practitioner. Without criteria for what constitutes a success, do you realistically thing people will qualify for the "Refund" level of completion?

I guess, what is the plan for people who do complete the 30 days and try their best, get a positive evaluation from a peer, but then don't meet your criteria? "Sorry you did your best, but I'm keeping your 20 bucks."

I already paid, so you'll be hearing back :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I read about someone pledged to give money to the KKK if she ever smoked again. The negative association was motivational. The strength of the feeling was stronger than the urge to break the habit.

</comment><comment><USER11> only 15 minutes ? lazy bastards. kyōsaku thwack

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I agree. Things don't even get interesting for me until 30 minutes in.

I wanted it to be attainable for everyone though, even novices with "monkey mind".

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I would pledge between $5 and $10. No thinking. At that point we may even start to talk subscription.

<comment><AUTHOR> Twenty seemed like the magic number for me after much deliberation, but maybe I could add "commitment levels" or whatever so people can increase or decrease the amount of their pledge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> genius!

<comment><USER14> my thoughts exactly

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks guys!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Uh, this is really stupid. You can do this exact same thing for any activity for free with joesgoals.com or any of the tens of other freely available "don't break the chain" web apps.

Here are some more:

[http://www.openforum.com/articles/17-best-tools-and-apps- for...](http://www.openforum.com/articles/17-best-tools-and-apps-for-building- new-habits-and-goals/)

<comment><USER16> I think the difference is that this website isn't a generic habit forming tool. There's a specific goal and the website will provide you information on how to achieve it.

According to the FAQ:

> Pay the $20 pledge and follow the Zen Master's instructions that are emailed > to you

That said, I'm not very comfortable with this website since the parameters for success and the content of the program are not clearly defined before you commit... and 20$ isn't a throwaway amount in my local currency (besides there's the inconvenience that even if the money is returned, I will loose the currency conversion cost).

<comment><AUTHOR> Great feedback. I need to clarify that.

Basically, the Zen Master provides an assessment form for your evaluator to fill out and sign.

The evaluator you choose is the one who decides at the end of the 30 day VOW of NOW whether you have achieved zen mind through diligent meditation practice - and get a refund (or not).

This system provides feedback from a trusted peer, as well as provides a money incentive (your own money).

<comment><USER17> Wow. This couldn't sound any more like a scam. So it's basically a cable Christian channel asking people to donate money to save their souls. Or the Catholic Church offering to sell Indulgences to sinners. Nice startup.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I guess if you want to make money off the failures of others... Personally, that's not something I would ever want to be associated with.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, that's a little unfair to say since you don't know me or my motivation behind this project.

The only person that can "fail" you is your evaluator - the person YOU choose to help you keep your vow. Your evaluator must fill out an assessment after your 30 day vow which decides whether you get your refund.

EDIT: Bailing out early from the vow also makes a person ineligible for a refund. The VOW of NOW is for 30 days in a row, no less.</comment></comment>


Blast from the past: Hacker Test. Score? - <AUTHOR> http://www.hungry.com/~jamie/hacker-test.html

<comment><USER2> I remember seeing questions like this, and not even being able to imagine that amount of data.

0210 Do you use more than 16 megabytes of disk space?

0211 ... 256 megabytes?

0212 ... 1 gigabyte?

0213 ... 16 gigabytes?

0214 ... 256 gigabytes?

0215 ... 1 terabyte?

</comment><comment><USER3> Just in case, do not image search "naked floppy" if you are unsure of what that is in reference to the question "Have you ever booted a naked floppy"

<comment><AUTHOR> ROFL! That just made my day!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hehe, sorry. Flashback to when I was 12 and found this test the first time. :P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Most of it works out alright (I got 263), but some of them are much easier to get today than in the olden days (More megabytes than megabucks, 1TB of diskspace, T1 or faster connection, etc.) and some much harder (Read all the newsgroups, Jensen's device, anything with punchcards etc.)

<comment><USER5> The first week I used usenet, I did in fact read every post on every discussion. Stunning to see the subsequent growth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's amazing that 50% of this is still relevant (it's from 22 years ago)

</comment><comment><USER6> I scored 85, I'm ashamed :/

The test is brilliant though!

</comment><comment><USER7> Too many checkboxes...

var c=document.getElementsByTagName("input");for(i=0;i<c.length;i++){c[i].checked=true;}document.forms[0].submit()

<comment><USER8> foreach( c in doc.getByTag("input") ) { c.checked = (rand()%3 == 0); }

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Any one know what they mean by "Ever change the value of 4?"

I took it to mean, mess with people by remapping keys or using base 3 or something in the program, but I've always tried to find a more "real" solution, but being a binary system I can't think how it would be possible 100 is 100 is 100.

<comment><USER9> You can change the value of any constant in FORTH, using something like:

: 4 9 ;

... whereupon '4' will push the value '9' on the stack instead.

FORTH is an interesting language that I would recommend everyone learn, and that I would never use in any production system. (Yes, I know about Open Boot).

<comment><USER10> Does this count? (Ruby FWIW)

class Fixnum; def ==(o); true end end; 4 == 5 # => true

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> 0x78

I didn't know what a lot of that meant. I'd be curious to see how scores and age relate. For example, in the list of programming languages I know, I didn't check a single box. But in the question above that asked how many programming languages I know, I answered "more than 4"!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I got 146. Not bad, but I used to score higher... Not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing!?...

<comment><AUTHOR> 0x92 if you wanna do it in hex.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> 212\. Got a little creative with some answers to balance out technically yes/no responses, and a few "was there when it happened"s.

</comment><comment><USER12> Hmm, 0xF6. Officially declared a hacker.

</comment><comment><USER13> 227 Here

Though there's just something wrong with a "hacker test" that starts counting at 1 instead of 0.

</comment><comment><USER9> 283\. And I remember Bandy-Grams (Hi, Andy!).

</comment><comment><USER14> 0x57. Ouch. Operator.</comment>


Ask HN: Is Your Work Meaningful? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> It depends on the view.

I currently build a "VPS"-Company based on the uberspace model (PAY-WHAT-YOU- CAN). Version 2 will have the ability to encrypt the hard drive and the RAM using AMDs Epic platform (SEV).

The "confidential computing" things gives my work the meaning of giving small users (1VM) the ability to hide there information. As of current knowledge the SEV feature is secure.

So hopefully it will help users to get cheap and near bare metal security for there VPS.</comment>


Ask HN: I'm building budgeting app. What features would you look for? - <AUTHOR> I started budgeting years ago and I was never able to find an app (or even webapp) capable of doing so for me. Perhaps I didn't search enough.. budgeting apps that come to see this thread in the future, please don't judge me :)
Some of them integrate with your bank account, credit card and I'm not really interested in this sort of stuff. I don't want 3rd party apps having access to whatever my bank produces, not to mention that are hundreds of banks out there and I'd assume that making those integrations are in fact a big deal and possibly dangerous (for a security point of view).
In my specific case, it all started with a local spreadsheet on my laptop, that later became a google forms (I wanted to save new transactions "on the go" and also share it with my wife) and now I'm going to build yet another budgeting app for my needs. Nothing fancy, but just something helpful and makes me proud of.
If you are using a budgeting app already, what's missing?
If you wish to use one, what sort of features would you look for? <comment><USER2> The ability to automatically rename transactions to more friendly names but not break future imports.

* Let me create a payee like "Amazon" and define some rules to map transactions to them. Make sure there's some flexibility. Regex would be nice but probably doesn't have to be that powerful. Things like "AMZN MKTP%" and "AMAZON.COM%".

* Make sure that for all functions in your UI/API/whatever that the transactions are as if they were all to the single payee "Amazon."

* But, and this is the thing that other budget software gets wrong, keep the original transaction around so that when I reimport my transactions they get mapped correctly.

Support payment apps like Venmo/CashApp without having to treat them like this weird account. I get that's how accountants do it but I just want to import my Venmo and link the transactions.

* If I split something with someone then only count the money I spent toward my budget category. Other apps add this as a "credit" to the category which, while works, is silly and gives a distorted picture of my spending. I buy $60 worth of food for friends but _I_ only spend $10 then I want the $50 be its own thing and moved out of the category once linked. I should be able to do this with cash too. Give me the option to hide such transactions since they're not really mine and just noise to my spending.

* Similarly, let me choose how I want joint spending to work. If me and my husband have a joint checking account in addition to our personal accounts and I set a global rule like "keep under $200 for groceries" then allow me to decide whether I want $200 spent from the joint account to count as $200 or $100 (or really any split I suppose).

Make income work less silly than imaginary infinity dollar accounts. Behind the scenes do what you gotta do but make it okay to have money appear from nowhere. I don't want my stimulus check to live in an imaginary "The Fed." Accountants I guess love it but it's just noise to me.

Another one for managing multiple accounts and marriage/roommates. Allow creating account-local, person-local, and global rules and buckets for everything.

<comment><USER3> Hi! Founder of [https://lunchmoney.app](https://lunchmoney.app) here. On the go right now, but really quickly, I've built a Rules engine within the product that does exactly what you're looking for. Also, granular settings for whether a category will be counted towards income, budget and/or totals allows for greater control over organizing your transactions. If you end up checking it out, let me know what you think!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Basically every major budgeting app I've looked at doesn't allow rolling buckets of money. For example, my wife and I budget $X per month for travel, but we only travel once or twice a year. What I'd really like to be able to do is allocate some amount every month to certain activities and have my budget keep track of how much I've saved for that purpose.

On the other side, sometimes it's hard for us to reconcile our food budget between months. If we have a big grocery trip on the last day of the month, we kind of expect to spend less the next month but won't always remember that when we go reconcile our budget.

<comment><USER5> Mint.com's budget feature let's you choose to roll over money.

<comment><USER6> Is Mint's budget still based on an estimation of income and not real income/cash-on-hand?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hi OP, I was in your exact position just over a year ago. I had been using my own spreadsheet for 1.5 years and finally found time to turn it into a web app (backstory at [https://lunchbag.ca/lunch-money](https://lunchbag.ca/lunch- money))

The main features I found missing in other budgeting apps that prompted me to make my own were:

\- native multicurrency support (I travel a lot and am a digital nomad by lifestyle, so this was quite important to me)

\- curtains pulled on the "magic" that some budgeting apps try to add to my transactions

\- the ability to split/group transactions so I can see how much I actually spent when I pick up a large bill and friends pay me back

\- separate tracking of recurring expenses

\- seeing historical spending trends and having information help drive my budget for the next month

I've implemented all of this and more. If you're interested, check it out at [https://lunchmoney.app](https://lunchmoney.app). I'd love to hear what you think.

In terms of what's missing that's not currently on the roadmap:

\- rollover budgets

\- a savings and/or goals feature

\- debt repayment feature

As made evident by this thread, everyone has their own preferred way to budget, and of course there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Looking forward to seeing what you build, if you end up going down that path. Cheers!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey jnfr!

Your app is definitely what I envision for mine. Website and all that is absolutely amazing! Congrats!

My app is "similar" in some ways but, of course, in a very small scale at the moment (still in development: live for me, wife and a couple of friends).

This is what I've got so far:

\- Web version only

\- Multi currency is a must for me too (Brazilian living in Europe here)

\- Looking at the screenshots of your app, I also have the "category listing" by percentage. I don't look at it on a daily basis but I think it's important to at least have some control over stuff I'm spending my money with.

\- Under the hood, I share the same "account" (but different user credentials) with my wife so we both leverage saving transactions wherever we are, together.

\- I've also got historical transactions. It's the only way I found how to identify where my money is going over time.

\- No "budgeting" per se: I understand how some folks need to spare X amount of money for "Groceries" or "Travel".. and as some have already pointed out, I don't want to be on day 20th of the month and running out of budget for a specific category and not being able to keep spending if I have to. For a customer point of view, it would bring me "frustration" by simply checking that I'm below budget on the next month. Again, I value that, but I'm fine with my finances.

For now, I'm not sure how I can make money out of it. I'm strongly thinking about simply releasing it, getting feedback and improve along the way. I don't want to be a competitor of yours and I'm more than happy that list your app as an alternative if necessary as soon as I go live!

Again, congratulations. I want to be a solo entrepreneur in the future. I'm not just there yet.

Thanks for your insights and good luck with your product!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Honestly, I need two things: a simple interface that let's me log an expense in a few seconds, and a detailed analysis that I can look at (spendings per weekday, per week, per month; maybe an overview that links similar expenses [food] together so that I can see the frequencies?). If that is well done then I'm mostly set.

<comment><USER8> > in a few seconds

And in the bare minimum of clicks. Intelligent defaults of cursor placement and number pad.

I've tried a few and cobbling together the best of the best I think it goes something like:

1) take out phone and unlock

2) click on app

3) app opens into entry mode with default category already selected, number pad up and ready to go, and the cursor on the entry. So, all I have to do is enter the price and hit enter.

3) -alt And if I'm entering an non default category it's a click away with large buttons and clear feedback.

4) Close phone

5) put it back in my pocket.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> In my opinion budgeting apps conflate accounting with budgeting.

Categorizing bank charges is accounting. Spending money then categorizing expenses is a terrible way to budget in my experience. It's backwards.

I separate my income into different accounts, then spend from those accounts.

This has many advantages:

\- Not possible to overspend.

\- Extra money rolls over.

\- No time wasted accounting, labeling, reconciling, etc.

\- No need to share transaction history or credentials with budgeting apps.

Privacy.com let's you create virtual credit cards with spending limits. That's the closest thing to my ideal budgeting app, but the limitation is I can't withdraw cash.

The app I want is a bank that can easily create multiple accounts and associated debit cards.

Before online shopping this was simple, I just had to take out the cash I needed for the different categories and keep them separate.

</comment><comment><USER10> Similar to what others are suggesting:

Month-to-month doesn't work.

Mint's budget breakdown totally fails if my Landlord cashes my check too early/late.

Month-to-month doesn't work for expenses that aren't monthly. Example: travel.

Month-to-month doesn't work when the calendar lines up and you get 3 paychecks that month instead of the normal 2.

I'd be curious for a budgeting app that still has the concept of a month, but isn't locked to calendar dates.

Rolling average? Bucketed allotments that roll over? Maybe

<comment><USER6> The biggest problem with tools like Mint's is that it's not really a budget. It's a way to say "I don't want to spend more than X in a time period" but it says nothing about how much money you have _now_ for spending. YNAB's approach (not unique to them but particularly pushed by them) is _much_ better, where you only budget/allocate money you have. So I send in my check for my water bill, I have the money now. If they don't cash it until next month that's fine, my YNAB budget still has that money marked for that spending. I had the same issue with rent, where I'd pay it at the end of the month, but half the time it was cashed the next month. So every other month I'd spend double what was expected (for the month), and Mint went nuts. YNAB doesn't care.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I use YNAB right now. It works pretty well, but I have a few issues:

Multi-currency support requires setting up multiple budgets and switching between them. For a while I needed to track both USD and ARS, but the ARS was for a much smaller amount and limited scope. It was annoying having to switch between the budgets when I was traveling in Argentina, but still had to manage things in the US.

Multi-month view. YNAB4 had it, it was great, YNAB5 dropped it. This let me easily see trends over recent months for the same category, and could budget ahead more easily as I started getting ahead on my money (I liked budgeting ahead more than setting up an emergency fund category, made it clear how far ahead I was, and in the worst case I'd take money from 1-3 months out to use for present day emergencies).

Choice between rolling over funds or releasing them at the end of a time period. If I budget $200 for groceries and only use $150, in YNAB it automatically makes that $50 extra available the next month. I want that. But that's not always the case, I'd like the option of releasing the funds at the end of the budget period. Let's say I budget $500 for a trip, and only spend $400, that extra $100 would be better served (for me) freed up and applied to another category, as my travel (especially these days) is infrequent.

Alternate time periods. jdtbuchanan also mentioned this. I budget $100/month for eating lunch at work, spread over 20 work days (most months) means $5/day. But if my team and I go out for an expensive lunch, I'll hit the limit much earlier. So the spending is within my budget, but not the intent of my budget. I'd like to be able to see daily/weekly/monthly/quarterly/semi-annual/annual budget options (at least the periods below a month, budgeting for quarterly expenses with a monthly budget works, but budgeting for daily/weekly expenses doesn't work as well).

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm not looking for a budgeting app so much as something that tracks my expenses. I don't know how much I'm going to be making each paycheck, so traditional budgeting doesn't work for me. What I'm looking for is:

\- Import bank files (ofx / qfx)

\- Let me flag some transactions as 'do not import'

\- Ability to categorize transactions, and have it auto-categorize transactions as they're imported. This should be done by name and amount. Eg - $80 from Chevron might be Auto Fuel, but $5 from Chevron might be Snack Food.

\- Ability to split transactions

\- Ability to manually enter transactions. Because sometimes I pay cash

\- Ability to have sub-categories. Eg: Car; Car : Fuel; Car : Maintenance; Car : Repairs; Car : Insurance;

\- Ability to view spending by category by month / by year. This can either be by sub-categories, or roll sub-categories into a parent category. Be able to drill-down to get more details.

<comment><USER6> This is an aside, but there are basically two ways to do budgeting:

Forecasting (what most people think of as budgeting) where you assume some average inflow and calculate the average/target outflow for various categories for each month. This doesn't work with irregular income unless you set your outflow to below your average inflow (which may not be easy to predict for freelancers, part-time workers, or people who get tips).

Actual budgeting where you take the existing cash on hand and designate/allocate it for spending categories. I have (made up numbers) $5k on hand, I have to pay my mortgage ($1500) leaves me with $3500. I set some aside for groceries ($400) leaves me with $3100. Repeat until this month's categories are done, put any excess into the next month. Maybe I have $1k free after budgeting so I can put $1k to next month's mortgage. Then on my next paycheck I can budget the remaining $500 to that and start on other categories. At the end of this exercise, I know my money will get me through this month (or not) and how much further it'll go.

Of the two formats, the former only works if you have a regular paycheck and very little deviation in spending from month to month. The latter works very well for many more people in a variety of situations because it is based on reality.

While I use YNAB and would recommend it, there are other systems out there that do the same thing. And I've used ledger-cli for it as well (but really wanted the mobile interface and something my wife would use). You can start with either as an expense tracker, and then after a month or two (once you've tracked your spending so you know your current level) you can switch to using them as budgeting tools (YNAB does that out of the box, ledger-cli takes a bit more work).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Looks like a few people are starting to create their own budgeting apps. I've seen Lunch Money in the space for multi-currency support. I'm also building an app, using Flutter and some backend server/database, haven't decided yet. Main features I'm thinking about:

\- Open source, self hostable with a paid hostable subscription option that syncs to different devices. Unfortunately one time payments don't really cut it for sustained development.

\- Native performing clients for web, mobile, and desktop (iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, Linux are all supported by Flutter, but the app will not necessarily have native UI though). This can be done through Flutter which compiles ahead of time without running on a JS VM like Electron or React Native. Hopefully you should get good performance.

\- On the feature side of things, rolling daily/weekly/monthly budgets, with the envelope system where you allocate a budget per day/week/month and try not to go over it. If you do, you'll have to pull from another budget. Also gonna have a way to budget for some event in the future, and split up that amount into timeperiod based increments. For example, if you estimate you want to take a 6k vacation in a year, the app would help you budget 500 a month.

\- Undecided on whether it should be manual transaction entry only or whether it should integrate with banks, Venmo, and the like. Some people like one, and not the other.

\- Analysis over timescales and categories. Especially annoying in Mint to mark a merchant like "AMZN" into "Amazon" and not have it propagate across all findings of the word "AMZN".

\- Similar to analysis, have forecasting as to what I might spend in the future. This can be from recurring transactions, pattern recognition and the like.

\- Have good splits. Other apps don't let you split money easily, if from Venmo or whatnot. If I split dinner with a friend, I don't want to see that I've spent all of it in my food budget, only that I actually spent half and my friend recompensated me.

What else would you want?

</comment><comment><USER13> Rolling daily budgets for incidental expenses. Any budgeting tool I've used has focused on Monthly budgets. I don't find this helpful for small things like lunches out, drinks with friends, etc. If I get a notice that I've hit my budget on the 20th of the month. I'm not going to just stop doing anything social for 10 days which makes the budget kind of useless. However, if I allocate $20 each day I'm much more likely to look at the app and decide what I'm going to spend based what I've accumulated and as long as I don't end the month negative I'll be on budget.

</comment><comment><USER14> Alert me when a bill is over a specified confidence interval.

For example, if my bill is $10/month +- $5 (std), then it will alert me if it exceeds $6.49 more than the $10/month (the 80% confidence interval.) This is useful for phone bills which can go up by a certain amount (e.g. long distance) but don't have a fixed threshold. If they're over by a few dollars for a few months then I've probably added an add-on, but there's no "fixed" amount that it should be, just that it's not too much more than it was.

<comment><USER3> Check out [https://lunchmoney.app](https://lunchmoney.app) (disclaimer: I'm the founder). We have a fully customizable rules engine which we've just augmented to allow for email notifications, so you can create very specific criteria for imported transactions to be alerted on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It hasn't been released yet, but know that Microsoft is looking to hit this space as well with their Money app.

If you're looking at DIY budgeters who don't want third-party access, I'd make sure that subviews of specific goals, like a pay down chart of student loans or month-over-month of credit card bills. Since you're manually entering information, your primary sell is probably going to be UI-based.

<comment><USER12> Do you have a link to this Money app, or perhaps a news source? I only found the older desktop version from some time age when searching Microsoft Money app.

<comment><USER16> >> Microsoft announced this past week that they are going to be releasing an app to help manage money, called Money in Excel. The new feature will be a part of Microsoft 365 and is going to mirror many of the features and qualities available in the tech giant's Excel spreadsheets both in appearance and the way it works. With the new app, users will be able to sync their credit card and bank accounts to it in order to automatically keep track of purchases, deposits, and each accounts' balance. Money in Excel will be able to help users identify trends and patterns in their spending along with several key components to keep users up-to-date on their accounts. (Source: Motley Fool) (Note: My company, The Marks Group PC, is a Microsoft partner).

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/quickerbettertech/2020/04/12/mi...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/quickerbettertech/2020/04/12/microsoft- rolls-out-a-money-management-appand-other-small-business-tech- news/#28b12e3e60d2)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> You should check out ynab and /r/financier

</comment><comment><USER18> For the past 3 years, I have been using this super simple spreadsheet based on double-entry accounting

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1CwCamSEqPXiv0jwSobJl...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1CwCamSEqPXiv0jwSobJlj8r0EAvMTEY- N_2OWLqpUC8/edit?usp=sharing)

</comment><comment><USER19> Hi, I don't use budgeting on a regular basis, but when I need it for a project or a trip I use ledger-cli.org

It isn't a "batteries included" solution, but with a little creativity it allows you to do pretty much anything you want.

If you are prepared to even build your own app, I thing it might interest you.

</comment><comment><USER20> Good Budget is the one that I use after trying a TON of them in January this year. It was one of the few that really does the kinds of things I want.

Some things that I wish it had or did differently are:

\- The progress bars should show the money that is scheduled to be used for a given bucket (probably in a different colour or something)

\- It'd be nice to show a $/day remaining for a bucket, again taking into account the scheduled transactions too

\- In the upcoming transactions, it should show all the upcoming repeats for a given transaction within the current budget period.. E.g. if I have something that is $100/week, the scheduled transactions only shows 1x $100 transaction. You can replicate what I want by creating 4 different transactions that repeat every 4 weeks, but thats silly :D

\- I'd like a way to enter a transaction as a 'draft' very quickly via a home screen widget or even Siri or something. And then I could go in and edit it later to set the bucket it comes from etc.

\- It has no good way to do long term savings - you can create a goal bucket for it but the bars etc for it become kind of meaningless.

</comment><comment><USER21> * Offline.

* Open source.

* No telemetry sent.

* One-time fee, no 'subscription'.

* Linux-compatible.

</comment><comment><USER22> Has anyone used lunchmoney.app?

<comment><USER12> I have, at least for the free trial amount. It didn't really stick for me, because of no mobile app so I can't add transactions on the go, and the budgets just seemed...forgiving? I want to control my spending, I don't want to be told it's okay and that I can spend more. At least for me, I want hard cut offs. It's a fine service, it just didn't work for me necessarily. I also don't use their multi-currency support as I don't travel or have multiple currencies.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for giving Lunch Money a shot! The mobile app is coming soon, but as a one-woman team, I'm focused 100% on rounding out the core product before introducing another platform and slowing down my development cycles. Cheers!

<comment><USER12> Thanks Jen, looking forward to it. I've heard about your story from IndieHackers, very inspiring, it made me want to create an app for my budgeting needs as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Everything that YNAB has, plus forecasting.</comment>


Apple to Acquire Majority of Intel's Smartphone Modem Business - <AUTHOR> https://newsroom.intel.com/news-releases/intel-smartphone-modem-business/#gs.s1ws99 <comment><USER2> That's fantastic news. Apple will continue to fight Qualcomm. By the continuation of development 5G modems, which Intel stopped. Over threats by Qualcomm. Qualcomm is easiest the worst bully in the market, by far worse than Oracle. One has to step up against their continuous patent infringement threats.

Using something like Huawei would have been better though, to get rid of US backdoors in the baseband. Chinese backdoors are only a problem for Chinese, US backdoors for everybody. Apple could e.g. ship phones with Intel modems for the Chinese market.</comment>


Show HN: Parrot.vc – I forced a bot to read 65,000 VC tweets and it became a VC - <AUTHOR> https://www.parrot.vc/ <comment><USER2> > Income inequality is an enormous problem. What do you use it for?

... this is amazing.

<comment><USER3> "Maybe in some niche B2B fields I don't know your people just randomly die in your house while you are there."

I hope these weren't related

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "I think this is God's gift to me to understand that I'm not investing you if your idea doesn't slap, HARD."

[https://www.parrot.vc/-Lv-_lL5xTiAl_dpthO7](https://www.parrot.vc/-Lv- _lL5xTiAl_dpthO7)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Parrot.vc is a bot trained on tens of thousands of VC tweets that uses predictive text to generate amazing, new startup advice. Share your favorites!

Gavin Belson - hit me up, this is the perfect acquisition for Hooli.

PS - you can follow Parrot.vc on Twitter as well ([https://twitter.com/parrot_vc](https://twitter.com/parrot_vc))

<comment><USER5> Is the source code available anywhere? I've been mulling over a similar project but don't have a lot of ML experience myself, would be great to look at the innards of a working example...

<comment><USER6> An easy way to get started that doesn't use pure ML is Markovify [1]. I used it for a couple of projects last year.

[1] - [https://github.com/jsvine/markovify](https://github.com/jsvine/markovify)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "With a powerful narrative, you should be able to go from raw materials to a launch ready vehicle in 60 days."

If this isn't the best sign of the times, idk what is.

Edit: This one killed me

"VC is hard. This is a great fucking deck..."

<comment><USER8> Hmm, that's weird. I got the exact same phrases. Are these actually bot- generated in real-time or is the app just pulling from a set?

<comment><USER9> I also got "VC is hard. This is a great fucking deck..."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Okay, I've spent a little more time on this than I probably should have, but I think I realized something. The reason this works is mostly due to the VCs being generic in general. I've been reading the tweets they're based on and they're equally nonsense as the bot tweet. But bashing multiple tweets together, still produces something that's... coherent? I mean, yea, they're coherent. But it works because it lacks detail.

There's almost no detail or focus on a concrete idea in any of these VC tweets. Everything is so damn vague and abstract in the original tweets, they can apply to anything or anyone. Thus, chopping and mixing them is meaningless, because they are void of meaning to begin with... Sort of the same way horoscopes work. They're pretty broad and the reader fills in the gaps and details. VCs talk like old gypsy fortune tellers... they're vague, tell you roughly what you'd like to hear and are generally useless sacks of breathing meat...

Damn, that was a wild ride...

<comment><USER11> Agreed. Most VCs are just that, useless sacks of breathing meat.

For that reason, I've avoided them. Even during parties, I (unfairly) dismiss someone the moment I find out they are a VC and just invested in ...(insert famous tech here)...

Based on personal experience, VCs are statistically more likely having a conversation with you thinking they are better than you the whole time (and therefore knows better).

Not all VCs are like that, but unfortunately most of them are. Greedy, prideful people have caused me a great deal of suffering in my life and most VCs are just that.

<comment><USER12> > thinking they are better than you the whole time

Do people really think like that? This sounds like possibly a personal insecurity. I don't know too many grown adults who think things like "I am better than you". Better at what? making money? Smarter? Getting dates?

I don't know... maybe I'm just too optimistic but all of the VCs I've met have been super nice.

<comment><USER13> I a lot of people measure their own self worth by comparing themselves to others. For people with a job where they directly create something, usually they are proud of that thing they created. People who work in these kinds of business roles often don't actually _do anything_. They have to see themselves as a necessary (and rare!) oil that enables creators. For many, it's really important to their self worth that they think, "Without me, you would be nothing. Yes, I know you can actually do the thing that you are doing, but _I_ am the gatekeeper."

I mean, some people think that VCs are "useless sacks of breathing meat". So when the VC in question needs to feel a sense of self worth, they need to come up with a reason that they are needed in the equation (whether justified or not). They also need to project that feeling because who will seek out a VC that's a useless sack of breathing meat. You want to seek out a VC that's the gatekeeper to riches.

You get this kind of sub-vocal interplay and posturing. I'm sure it's super stressful to the people in question. Every time they meet someone they may feel they have to justify their progression beyond meat sack level. They may feel that they have to justify it to themselves.

And interestingly, having projected their desired ego and internally swallowed their own special brand of Kool Aide, quite a few are actually convinced that they _are_ the gatekeepers to riches and everybody else is lucky just to be in the same room.

Being human is hard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Capital is in such oversupply that you have to lock down the system from yourself to credibly tell customers you won't screw them over.

[https://www.parrot.vc/-Luq3q03hYSF0vm4mVUb](https://www.parrot.vc/-Luq3q03hYSF0vm4mVUb)

<comment><USER15> I think this means that there's so much capital out there that you can operate without any profit until you dominate the market, so your users will effectively be convinced that you are a saint. Just remember to lock down the system from yourself and don't say anything that can break this illusion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> VC twitter is excruciatingly cringe. I cannot imagine giving equity to these virtue signaling parrots.* The worst offenders are the people who

\- have never personally taken a company from zero to one (even worse: when they have internally taken a company from 1 to N, and think that qualifies them).

\- have a huge portfolio full of incremental companies

\- constantly talk about trends on Twitter

\- constantly talk about politics on Twitter

\- are not currently operating their own moonshot/Unicorn

\- are a bit too ridiculous when trying to hide their own greed

\- talk constantly about the importance of "mentoring" you, when really just wanting access to your company

\- have never actually taken a hard stand/risk on anything in their entire lives

Imagine instead getting a small check from Elon Musk when he was operating at Tesla/SpaceX, or even from then-no-name Sam Altman when he was running Loopt (as Stripe did from both). These investors are great because you know they're going to soon step the fuck out of your way and focus on their own projects. They might also be able to actually help you when you need it (both parties respecting each other's scarce time).

* Exceptions: PG, Naval, and part-time VC partners that actively operate their own companies.

<comment><USER17> The quoted long lines are unreadable on mobile unfortunately

<comment><USER18> Why does everyone bash the commenters for using these quotes instead of hn for not fixing it? It's not like it's hard to fix.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I clicked through like 15 of these and they were all pretty nonsensical. Not sure if this is more damning of tweets from VC's or the bot itself...

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha I'm sure it's somewhere in the middle. Never said it was the smartest algorithm. If you hover over the VC's name, it'll show the actual tweet that was sampled.

<comment><USER19> You wouldn't happen to be from the La Cañada area of SoCal would you?

<comment><AUTHOR> Born and raised!

<comment><USER19> I'm pretty sure I used to see a physical therapist as a kid who knew you well. She knew I was building websites and told me about you and what you were working on. If I remember correctly you used to be quite stoked about Coldfusion. What a small world!

<comment><AUTHOR> Jane?! That is a small world and a great memory! I used to be a huge ColdFusion fan.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> >I was trying to make a profit is pretty constraining. You have to satisfy customers or you go out of business. [1]

Hehe this one was pretty good.

[1] [https://www.parrot.vc/-LuhxfJS6wU2jI7ulPj0](https://www.parrot.vc/-LuhxfJS6wU2jI7ulPj0) via @parrot_vc

</comment><comment><USER21> "I stand with the people of China and that they need to hire researchers to design some new architecture, or anything extremely fancy."

This is amazing. Reminds me of the postmodernism generator: [http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/](http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/)

<comment><USER22> I just got the same one... Are they pre-generated maybe?

Edit: Link: [https://www.parrot.vc/-LvAxcZD23ySp2dL0sZw](https://www.parrot.vc/-LvAxcZD23ySp2dL0sZw)

<comment><AUTHOR> They generate on a cron job every 15 minutes and I also pass the site through a Cloudflare cache because I'm cheap and the actual code runs on a $5 DigitalOcean box :-)

<comment><USER23> That's not cheap: that's smart. Knowing this makes me like the whole thing even more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> "Trading legally on inside information is one of the most valuable places on the Internet."

[https://www.parrot.vc/-Lutw051bTJRl4uGlK0i](https://www.parrot.vc/-Lutw051bTJRl4uGlK0i) \-- wallstreetbets here I come!

</comment><comment><USER25> "Thinking about diversity in terms of ethnicity, gender, and/or education status, you are leaving money on the table."

Perfection.

</comment><comment> rc-1140 "Canceling sneaky charges is one of the most predictable but consequential developments of the 2020s"[0]

 _Instantly_ reminded of all of the posts about ISPs and cellular carriers tacking on all sorts of goofy fees and their usual monetary "practices", felt it was especially relevant now that some of those fees are being exposed as being BS surcharges anyway. Can't name any sources off the top of my head but there was an article here on HN about it some months ago.

[0] [https://www.parrot.vc/-Lv6SAuk6w0OJpbhw22_](https://www.parrot.vc/-Lv6SAuk6w0OJpbhw22_)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ugh my relationship with Spectrum

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It looks like it uses tweets that were a reply to another tweet. This makes some of them read weird since there is missing context. I wonder what it would look like if it only used tweets that were original.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmmm I hadn't thought of that. That's a great point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Great, congrates, sounds like your bot is going to be the first computer program to demand worker's rights and protection from cruel and unusual punishment.

But seriously wanted to say it's pretty stellar and so far none of these seem "bot" like. They read pretty genuine... which says a lot of how idiotic a lot of these VCs are.

</comment><comment><USER27> @nloui any chance you're willing to share your dataset? Would be fun to replicate this with GPT-2 fine-tuning instead of a Markov chain.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, I should be able to throw it onto a repo later.

<comment><USER28> Ping this thread when you do!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> "I have nothing to do with startups but everything to do with my original statement."

Source: [https://www.parrot.vc/-LumCfM7z4sQiNiXMJIU](https://www.parrot.vc/-LumCfM7z4sQiNiXMJIU)

</comment><comment><USER30> > "the bear is sticky with honey"

If you don't understand the tweets, it's because they have a deeper meaning.

</comment><comment><USER31> "My long-promised current view of what I want to be remembered, the guy who invented the crapper rule."

... A rogue philosopher VC

"There's nothing lean about spending 12-18 mo working hard to make a lot of money."

</comment><comment><USER32> Most of the ones I got looked like they were generated from replies to other tweets. The lack of context made them boring, even if that makes it easier to make them comprehensible. (I would love to see this experiment run on a dataset that filtered out reply tweets.)

But then, it have me this gem:

"It's sad when people don't understand the value of a program that targets them. I mean I do see the value, I just don't like floppy pizza."

</comment><comment><USER33> > I would like to see if there's demand. But I am talking about _dead_. As in > no pulse.

This one is too weird.

</comment><comment><USER34> Thank you for sharing this, some of these are pure gold.

This one is just fun

\- "Sorkin is going to have a custom GIF library curated by @jposhaughnessy."

These sound like fodder for an insider trading prosecution:

\- "Saved a man going into an interview with that. One of my favorite funds rn."

\- "Amazing company. I was thinking more in terms of deploying, deleting, etc."

\- "Canceling sneaky charges is one of the most predictable but consequential developments of the 2020s."

\- "YC partners know, because they get around advertising, because a lot of material on this."

\- "Could agree more. Have looked at a bunch of #rockstarninjas but ended up with a bigger bag of money they will leave you to secure the bag."

</comment><comment><USER35> > The future isn't always like the past. Causal first principles thinking > matters!

Hmm...

</comment><comment><USER36> > Notice I didn't say the users had to use the fact that prior financings are > used as comps for other financings.

Ingenious.

My favourite Markov chain is the one trained on Puppet documentation and the works of H.P. Lovecraft.

</comment><comment><USER37> > It's sad when people don't understand the value of a program that targets > them. I mean I do see the value, I just don't like floppy pizza.

This one made me laugh.

</comment><comment><USER38> This is hilarious. Can we get a blog on how you built it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, definitely. Or just retrain Parrot on VC Medium articles and have it write itself :-)

<comment><USER38> lolz

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Ed: rm useless "bug" report.

oh lord.

> I believe that being more at peace in the present would have given me > greater patience and ability to be more wordy in order to seem genuine?

A bot talking about how to seem more genuine. By being wordy, in an awkwardly long sentence. The irony burns. [https://www.parrot.vc/-Lv4C1NRdxJrut8qiuK_](https://www.parrot.vc/-Lv4C1NRdxJrut8qiuK_)

</comment><comment><USER40> Best I can tell from the bot's output, I guess VCs just run around on twitter doing nothing but providing inane drive-by commentary...

</comment><comment><USER41> > Just read the article in the Financial Times said Silicon Valley's most > valuable lesson is to focus on women attendees.

This is perfect.

</comment><comment><USER42> I didn't think any of the ones I saw made remote sense, as someone who follows a decent # of VCs on Twitter...

</comment><comment><USER43> " Maybe in some niche B2B fields I don't know your people just randomly die in your house while you are there."

Amazing! Hahaha

</comment><comment><USER44> > This will be one of the places technology is financed. But the future would > be built somewhere else.

> But the software market is about to get a lot out of drug experimentation > but I would recommend those who want to work will need to work.

Seems like overfitting a bit. But it's a super funny output.

</comment><comment><USER45> "In general, I think it's better to focus on everything else. How can we solve this?"

</comment><comment><USER46> All this needs is $1 billion ready to invest and seriously it's exactly the same as any other VC.

</comment><comment><USER47> A tweet with 26 separate inspirations: "Would love to hear a solution." ([https://www.parrot.vc/-Luic4DYDS2sZZwQD5L-](https://www.parrot.vc/-Luic4DYDS2sZZwQD5L-))

I feel like there are multiple layers to this

</comment><comment><USER48> > I don't think users will choose cross-platform over performance.

I've got bad news for you…

</comment><comment><USER49> "I am now racking my brain to recall where I used to be a dissenter of highly remote teams. No more."

[https://www.parrot.vc/-LukH2OpIjNi3PhhChNI](https://www.parrot.vc/-LukH2OpIjNi3PhhChNI)

</comment><comment><USER50> "I have nothing to do with startups but everything to do with my original statement."

[https://www.parrot.vc/-LumCfM7z4sQiNiXMJIU](https://www.parrot.vc/-LumCfM7z4sQiNiXMJIU)

<comment><USER51> Mmmm, a time where I can appreciate recursion

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Overtrained? This one just shows a snippet from the 3rd credited author. [https://www.parrot.vc/-LuiS-9VuUs2-2aAPVKy](https://www.parrot.vc/-LuiS-9VuUs2-2aAPVKy)

</comment><comment><USER53> > Good news to wake up to the fact that ISAs without safeguards are naturally > regressive.

Hmm. Very interesting. Maybe we should in fact have more exceptions in the ISA and let there be more context switches to the kernel.

</comment><comment><USER54> « Yes. The solution is not to be best at XY & Z, it's to continue to build a list of VC's who are "next level" value add. »

This one was especially rich since it points to the genrator's oncoming sentinence

</comment><comment><USER55> This is great! Super similar to a project I put out 2 months ago: [https://twitter.com/vctweetbot](https://twitter.com/vctweetbot)

<comment><USER55> Documentation here: [https://manmeet.substack.com/p/vctweetbot](https://manmeet.substack.com/p/vctweetbot)

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> How did you train it? Adversarial neural network? Markov chain?

</comment><comment><USER57> Two favorites:

"Billionaires" has nothing to do with those who can't graduate to higher wage jobs from that starting point.

50% of millennials want to be heard and appreciated.

</comment><comment><USER58> > You might want to go to work tomorrow, so...

That _suspense_...

</comment><comment><USER59> > "if you have a 1000X returner, then that is still pretty good. VC is > asymmetric. You don't try to get 9 out of 10."

Vaguely meaningful.

</comment><comment><USER60> I want to set this up as a chat-bot and have it randomly dispense wisdom in the main channel.

</comment><comment><USER61> "Ever since I left Facebook board, I have become convinced its the new diabetes."

(Ok, I wrote that.)

</comment><comment><USER62> "Income inequality is an enormous problem. What do you use it for?"

Some of this stuff is gold

</comment><comment><USER63> Now train a second bot on parrot.vc advice to make bets via MicroVentures...

<comment><AUTHOR> Perfect - starting the AngelList syndicate right now. Haha

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> How can I hire this person?

</comment><comment><USER65> > "Industrial farming is one of the days for me."

\- Jack Dorsey (?)

</comment><comment><USER66> I wish this thing would close its quotes and parenthesis

</comment><comment><USER67> > Haha "I have a hard stop" is a great alternative to DUI.

Truth

</comment><comment><USER68> what is a VC?

> Canceling sneaky charges is one of the most predictable but consequential > developments of the 2020s.

this is pretty cool.

<comment><USER32> Venture capitalist. Someone who invests in startups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> No, it didn't become VC, because it ain't giving me any moneys.

I even said "AI" and refreshed my bank account balance, but still nothing.

</comment><comment><USER70> works well, it would have fooled me. The quotes are as bizarre as the real ones :-)

</comment><comment><USER71> This is excellent.

</comment><comment><USER72> How does it work?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a markov chain trained on around 65,000 tweets from around 50 VC's.

<comment><USER73> You _really_ need to say that explicitly somewhere. The "I forced a bot" phrasing used in the current HN title is a clickbait trope that's not applicable here, and those "I forced a bot" scripts from Keaton Patti have spread misinformation on how AI text-generation works.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> Ooh, this is interesting. Were all the VCs you used from outside the EU? Because this seems to contain personal data, names etc. and raises the interesting question of the compatibility of some ML with GDPR.

</comment><comment><USER75> Just to clarify, does VC stand for Venture Capitalist in this context?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep!

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> So lots of people in this thread that realize vcs are supercilious talking heads. Why does Paul graham, the blogger who claimed Microsoft is dead and that lisp , which btw is untyped and slower than maybe even Go, is a competitive badvantage get admiration? Is it just by the wannabes?

<comment><USER77> Lisp was a competitive advantage for the company that made him rich in the mid-90s. He wouldn't claim it is for a new company starting out now. He later wrote that Python and Ruby were a competitive advantage. They wouldn't be now. But other languages/platforms are. His claim wasn't that Lisp is and will always be a competitive advantage, but that at any time, there is a powerful platform available that few developers/companies have embraced yet, but that could be a competitive advantage to a company that does.

As for Microsoft, it still is dead in the sense that he articulated in that essay; it doesn't offer any novel/powerful/ubiquitous platforms that new companies could or should build new products/companies on. It barely exists as a mobile platform, nobody has built significant new companies out of Windows desktop software in years, and its cloud platform is just one of several, and far from the biggest/best. He never said it would go out of business, just that it would become a generic BigCo, which is exactly what it is.

He also built a new type of investment company that invested in Airbnb, Dropbox, Twitch, Stripe and many other new startups, before any other VC would look at them, and at a tiny fraction of the valuation that other VCs would invest at. That investment model he pioneered has since been imitated countless times around the world - unsuccessfully, in most cases, because he did such a good job that others couldn't seriously compete.

With all that said, I think there's plenty he's been wrong about, but he's been right about the most important stuff, and deserves admiration for that.</comment></comment>


First Interview After Acquisition With FriendFeed And Facebook  - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/10/first-interview-after-acquisition-with-friendfeed-and-facebook/?awesm=tcrn.ch_4arS&utm_campaign=techcrunch&utm_medium=tcrn.ch-twitter&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_content=twitter-publisher-main <comment><USER2> "Friendfeed's core values, portability and aggregation of content created everywhere, will happen at an accelerated pace at Facebook."

If that's actually true, that would be an exciting turn of events at Facebook...

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting: _Friendfeed has 12 employees, and all but one are engineers_

</comment><comment><USER4> "Note that translations are rough, I took notes and I usually can't read my own writing."

Seriously Mike?</comment>


Ask YC: What is the Best Website to find StartUp jobs? - <AUTHOR>

What is the Best Website to find StartUp jobs? <comment><USER2> <http://startuply.com/>

</comment><comment><USER3> I've had good luck with Standout Jobs, the 37signals job board, the joel on software job board and surprisingly even craigslist!

Also, there's startup jobs here from time to time (<http://news.ycombinator.com/jobs>)

Other than that, I'd also check the community mailing lists, the ruby-nyc list for example gets a lot of job postings! Another Rails specific place I've had interest from is workingwithrails - lots of people go through profiles there and send out emails.

Best of luck!

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the mention of Standout Jobs, I appreciate it. Startup jobs isn't our focus necessarily, but we do have a lot of great startup companies using the product. And we're not a startup job board; we'd much prefer to turn every startup's career site into its own destination site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The best way to get a startup job is to network into it. If you're in SF, this is very easy - just go to all the web2.0 parties/meetups and you'll meet people hiring in no time.

</comment><comment><USER6> startuply and npost are both good.

<comment><USER7> Thanks noodle! I run nPost (<http://www.npost.com>) and definitely appreciate the good feedback.

There are lots of job boards out there, but only a few that are solely focused on the tech startup community, such as nPost and Startuply. Both only make the community stronger.

Startuply has a great site and we wish them the best.

Nathan Kaiser nathan [at] npost [.] com

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's a list of startup jobs sites here, <http://www.moondust.dds.nl/jobs.html>

</comment><comment><USER9> yourfavoritestartup.com/jobs

</comment><comment><USER10> I keep a fairly comprehensive list of startup job source here: <http://possibility.com/wiki/index.php?title=JobSearchSites>

</comment><comment><USER11> You also want to try npost.com

Lots of startup jobs in various companies around the US. And they do really great networking events here in Seattle.

</comment><comment><USER12> Also, from times of yore: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=192977>

</comment><comment><USER13> craigslist has many startup jobs listed.</comment>


REST API's are Crud - <AUTHOR> http://girders.org/blog/2013/04/02/rest-apis-are-crud/ <comment><USER2> I completely agree with this posting. REST seems to be an api antipattern but it has gained a lot of traction because its easy to write.

As a response to SOAP, REST seems like a relief. But dialing back abstraction to the level of CRUD seems like a completely bad idea.

Getting home for dinner does seem like a benefit to the typist.</comment>


Lyme disease vaccine: the frustrating reason there isn't one for humans - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/5/7/17314716/lyme-disease-vaccine-history-effectiveness <comment><USER2> This is the third time this link has been posted in the past three weeks or so. And not only that, every time, it ended up on the front page. Just before that these posts started, there was an article posted that says "Lyme disease is coming back" or something like that...

Makes one wonder....

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd love to see a vaccine against Lymes that's safe, but this article is dogmatically supporting literally anything pro-vaccination. They don't even know how long the immunity lasts, this is clearly not tested nearly enough for wide use on humans.

<comment><USER4> 905 total adverse reports including non-serious effects and including effects that happened at the same rates as in non-vaccinated individuals (such as arthritis), out of at least 1.4 million isn't "safe" or "tested nearly enough for wide use"?

\- Arthritis didn't occur during the clinical trial

\- When it did occur when the vaccine was distributed, it happened at the same rate as in non-vaccinated individuals

It's rather clear that it was pulled from the market due to FUD and nothing more</comment></comment>


NYC Taxi Dump Catches Strip Club Johns - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/10/01/wide_open_data_nyc_taxi_dump_catches_strip_club_johns/

<comment><AUTHOR> In light of the recent noise about the Uber Rides of Glory Post, this one was posted a few months ago. Brings into question similar privacy concerns.</comment>


Huge Google Privacy Blunder Shares Your Docs Without Permission - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/07/huge-google-privacy-blunder-shares-your-docs-without-permission/

<comment><USER2> I'm guessing "cloud" is the new web2.0 for Arrington.

<comment><USER3> Arrington didn't write this. Jason Kincaid did with contributions from Robin Wauters.

<comment><USER4> I would read it charitably as synecdoche: the part (Arrington) for the whole (TechCrunch).</comment></comment></comment>