Why we used Pony to write Wallaroo - <AUTHOR> https://blog.wallaroolabs.com/2017/10/why-we-used-pony-to-write-wallaroo/ <comment><USER2>
        > The standard JVM garbage collection strategy is "stop the world."

This is quite an over-simplification for what is a fundamental property to think about when designing a performance-oriented system.

The default collector in HotSpot does, I think, stop the world when collecting. But it also does multiple small collections between larger major collections. It, by default, optimizes for throughput over latency since most applications care more about overall throughput than low latency.

Even with the default, you can tune the maximum latency if you want to sacrifice throughput:

[https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/technotes/guides/vm/gc...](https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/technotes/guides/vm/gctuning/collectors.html)

Not only that, but HotSpot also features a true concurrent collector, which is a command-line flag away.

<comment><USER3> Depends on the sizing I believe. One problem I see in Java-based DB like Cassandra and Elasticsearch is JVM busy doing garbage collection. The major collection kicks in all the time. Probably because of bad config and bad data usage pattern, but it is still a common problem for me. I am all ears for advice.

<comment><USER4> This was an anti-pattern of the runtime model that Java inherited from Smalltalk. Tuning the GC used to be an arcane art. There was also a lot of effort put in by programming shops to just reducing GC pressure as an optimization. This is why I appreciate Golang's pragmatic approach of not using the GC by avoiding the heap. The main benefit to having GC is to make initial development faster by reducing the severity and frequency of mistakes. It's really there as a safety net, not as a foolproof end-all be-all. Use tools in a way which plays up their strengths.

It's hard to tune a GC to be super-fast. It's easy to profile and find your biggest memory leaks.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, there were plenty of GC languages with value types when Java came about, I was bit disappointed it only had them for primitive types.

Now they are trying to fit them in without breaking backwards compatibility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> From Pony documentation:

Simplicity

Simplicity can be sacrificed for performance. It is more important for the interface to be simple than the implementation. The faster the programmer can get stuff done, the better. It's ok to make things a bit harder on the programmer to improve performance, but it's more important to make things easier on the programmer than it is to make things easier on the language/runtime.

This is an excellent design decision. Yes, performance sometimes introduces complexity, and I have been in teams where the philosophy is: "It does not matter if it is slower, but any high schooler that knows HTML has to be able to understand it". The purpose of a program is to satisfy the users, not the developers or the managers, and if the next developer needs to study a thing or two before understanding the code that is OK.

Simplicity should be sacrificed for performance.

<comment><USER4> _The purpose of a program is to satisfy the users, not the developers or the managers, and if the next developer needs to study a thing or two before understanding the code that is OK._

 _Simplicity should be sacrificed for performance._

This is self contradictory. Programmer resources need to be allocated to pleasing the users. To please users, you need a certain amount of performance. Performance is not simply and end in itself. Programmer resources can be used to please users in other ways.

<comment><USER6> I was keeping it PG-13

<comment><USER4> HR is happy to know!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have been looking over to this language every now and then for a long while now, and this article finally motivated me to actually learn it.

But it seems the documentation is a bit out of date - I cannot even get the "Hello, world"-program to build correctly, neither on Debian Stretch nor on openSUSE Tumbleweed.

It is quite frustrating if you try to learn a new language, and when you make your first step, you step on a nail.

And it is even more frustrating, because Pony looks _very_ interesting, for the reasons the linked article explains. ):

UPDATE: On Debian, telling the pony compiler to --pic does the trick.

UPDATE2: On suse, installing binutils-gold solved the problem.

UPDATE3: Now we're talking! This language is very, very interesting, indeed!

<comment><USER8> Sorry to hear that. As far as I know the documentation should be up to date, but it's entirely possibly you've found an issue.

If you like you can hit up the mailing list ([https://groups.io/g/wallaroo](https://groups.io/g/wallaroo)) or the IRC channel (#ponylang on freednode, [https://webchat.oftc.net/?channels=wallaroo](https://webchat.oftc.net/?channels=wallaroo)) to see if anybody can help, or if you think you've found a bug you can file an issue in github ([https://github.com/ponylang/ponyc/issues](https://github.com/ponylang/ponyc/issues)).

UPDATE: I'm glad to hear you got it working!

<comment><USER7> > I'm glad to hear you got it working!

Me, too! This looks pretty exciting!

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm often lurking on IRC if you need help.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Author here. Small bit of background. I'm VP of Engineering at Wallaroo Labs and a member of the Pony core team (many folks at Wallaroo Labs are now actively involved in the Pony community).

Happy to answer any questions here or if you prefer, via email:

firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER9> Have been impressed with Pony the few times I've seen it on HN, thanks for your work on Pony and Wallaroo.

I'm guessing that tooling for Pony still needs some refinement, but as things are now what would you recommend to someone new to Pony (e.g. editor, package manager, build tools, debugging tools)?

Oh and just out of interest, did you evaluate Rust as a language for Wallaroo? I do think Pony has the potential to be stronger in certain areas, but it seems like there's a certain amount of overlap in terms of use cases.

<comment><USER10> I'm an engineer at Wallaroo Labs and I've been writing Pony for the last two years. We're using pony_stable (which is the primary package manager at the moment) and make for managing builds. I currently use Sublime 3 as my editor and lldb for debugging. I know that others are using emacs and vim as well.

We did consider Rust as there are certainly overlaps in their approaches to safety (though coming from different angles). In the end we thought that Pony would be better for managing concurrency for our particular use cases, which we thought mapped well onto the actor model.

<comment><USER11> > we thought mapped well onto the actor model.

Out of curiosity, were there a widely accepted actor lib/approach in Rust (I know there are a few like RobotS and others), would that have affected your decision?

<comment><AUTHOR> It might have. When we were looking at Rust, it was a topic of conversation.

<comment><USER12> In general, it's not a space where there's a hyper-mature library, but there are some cool stuff happening today: [http://cityboundsim.com/devblog/my-full- rustfest-talk-with-n...](http://cityboundsim.com/devblog/my-full-rustfest- talk-with-networking-live-demo)

That said, I mean, if you want to go full actors, Pony is a great choice.

<comment><USER13> Oh wow, I used to follow Citybound development a while ago when it was still written in JS. Anselm is an amazingly talented developer and it's great to see him working with Rust!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I used Pony and bindings to opengl to write the (very) start of a graphics engine. [http://www.charlesetc.com/stars- game-7.html](http://www.charlesetc.com/stars-game-7.html)

It was surprisingly easy to learn - I found the capabilities system rather intuitive compared to other methods for safely managing data races. Also the syntax is really simple and easy to read!

</comment><comment><USER15> JVM GC is an interesting topic since recently there was a proposal for the ZGC project in the OpenJDK mailing list. [http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/announce/2017-October...](http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/announce/2017-October/000237.html)

" _ZGC has been designed with the following goals in mind:

\- Handle multi-terabyte heaps

\- GC pause times not exceeding 10ms

\- No more than 15% application throughput reduction compared to using G1_"

<comment><USER16> My understanding (which might be out of date now) is that G1 still doesn't perform as well as CMS, so i'd be more interested in a throughput comparison to that!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I do enjoy reading these "Why we used <x> to build <y>" posts, as they're usually insightful and provide a glimpse into languages or frameworks I'm not familiar with.

On the flip side, I can't help but wonder how likely they would have been to use Pony had none of their core team members been active in the Pony community.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hope you enjoy this one as well.

We weren't active in the Pony community until we decided to use it for Wallaroo. We felt it was very important to invest in the improvement of Pony. And to do that, we needed to be part of the community.

Pony became our runtime instead of writing one ourself. That doesn't mean we don't have to work on our runtime. It means we are sharing the burden with others.

<comment><USER17> Oh wow, well I'm all the more impressed then. It's admirable to try out new tech and venture into the unknown. Kudos!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Pony looks really interesting and I look forward to trying it out. I can't help but try to reason about how my work language would handle these problems. Go.

Highly concurrent: check.

Predictable latencies: I think that's a check, the go gc has had alot of engineering put into it to provide good pause times. There are some edge cases still.

Data safety: I think go is weakest here in terms of language design. Go does have go build -race which works pretty well for me, but I can see how some wouldn't consider it sufficient. It also wouldn't catch single threaded ownership problems, which can happen.

Easy way to interact with other languages: via CGO and buildmodes you can trivially call go from other languages. Some don't like that the runtime is still shipped and started, but the fact remains that you can cffi go functions from python very easily.

I'll have to check out pony this weekend. I've read up on it a bit but haven't compiled anything.

<comment><USER8> That's great! We're collecting stories about peoples' first impressions of Pony ([https://www.ponylang.org/categories/my-first- pony](https://www.ponylang.org/categories/my-first-pony)), so if you're interested in contributing to that please get in touch.

I'm an engineer at Wallaroo Labs and I've been learning Go so that I can add a Go API to Wallaroo. Your analysis looks pretty spot-on based on my experience.

The buildmodes is go definitely make it easy to call Go from other languages. The trickiest thing I've run into so far with calling Go is that you aren't supposed to hold on to Go pointers outside of Go code, so I'm having to jump through some hoops to hold on to objects between calls.

I have an RFC for Pony that I need to finish up that will let you call Pony function from C. I'm planning on getting around to that soon, as I think it will help improve our FFI story.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Really good post. Haven't heard much about Pony but seems like a really interesting language and like something I could use for a particular project.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks.

If you ever want to talk Pony, you can find me lurking in the Pony IRC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Never heard Pony before. Sounds like a faster, type-safe erlang? Sign me up, looks awesome!

<comment><USER21> Well, there are several major differences. Erlang actors are lightweight green-threaded continuations, pony uses lockless threading from a threadpool, so you use will all your cores. Pony is much faster in CPU (on par with C++ with OpenMP), on IO it's about the same, as IO is mostly about avoiding waiting.

Pony uses much less memory, there's no beam overhead, the GC protocol is better, the object overhead is much smaller.

Pony allows zero-copying messages (call-by-ref vs call-by-value), which allows using fast shared memory threading models (besides copying values). All this is compile-time safe via the type-system.

The pony stdlib does not support blocking IO, which is probably a good decision, but you need more overhead adding the wait logic by yourself.

Erlang supports distributed actors, pony not yet. Sylvan and Sebastian are working on it, but it's not easy. See [https://www.ponylang.org/media/papers/a_string_of_ponies.pdf](https://www.ponylang.org/media/papers/a_string_of_ponies.pdf)

Erlang supports macros via elixir, pony not.

Pony's capability-bases type system is far too advanced for a regular user. You need much longer to learn it and come up with compilable designs. This might be frustrating.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Does Pony have preemptive scheduling? Does Pony have an equivalent of Distributed Erlang?

<comment><USER8> Pony does not do preemptive scheduling. Pony actors have behaviors, which can be thought of as methods that handle messages that are sent to the actor; these are the unit of scheduling, and a behavior runs from beginning to end without preemption. Multiple behaviors can run at the same time, but only one behavior per actor can be running at any time.

There is currently no equivalent to Distributed Erlang, but that's something that the creator of the language has been looking into.

<comment><AUTHOR> A bit more info. Sebastian Blessing did a thesis on Distributed Pony. You can read it here: [https://www.ponylang.org/media/papers/a_string_of_ponies.pdf](https://www.ponylang.org/media/papers/a_string_of_ponies.pdf)

At this time, there is no "in the wild" implementation.

<comment><USER23> Thanks. As an Erlang fan, I'm curious how types and networking are going to overlap.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is interesting - you wanted actors, you wanted a pleasant programming language and you wanted to be on the JVM.

I'm curious why you didn't choose Kotlin with Vert.X . Kotlin is a small town language that won only because it was loved by the community...Nobody "pushed" it. And it has won - it's now officially supported by Google.

Vertx is a superb actor model framework with first class kotlin support. Its extremely high performance ([https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r8&hw=i...](https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r8&hw=i7&test=plaintext)) and is pretty popular ([http://vertx.io/whos_using/](http://vertx.io/whos_using/))

From a forward looking perspective, why Pony ... Especially if it's development has stalled.

<comment><USER25> There's also quasar for actors. [http://docs.paralleluniverse.co/quasar/](http://docs.paralleluniverse.co/quasar/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> For a moment I thought this was about the Pony ORM (Python) - looks like there are quite a few popular projects named Pony, perhaps we should use "Pony Language" instead of just "Pony" for the sake of disambiguation.

</comment><comment><USER27> Are there any statistics that compare this to some similar existing software?</comment>


Verizon support rep admits anti-Netflix throttling - <AUTHOR> http://boingboing.net/2014/02/07/verizon-support-rep-admits-ant.html <comment><USER2> Actual headline should read: "Confused front-line tech support rep parrots back answer to a leading question that he probably didn't understand"

</comment><comment><USER3> Similar story to the one from a couple of days ago?

Am convinced that support reps would know nothing about throttling, and wouldn't trust what they say on the matter.

</comment><comment><USER4> Or, you caught a guy agreeing without understanding because, if the user thinks he solved with the problem you should just go with it.

<comment><USER5> Or you just kept asking different service reps until you found what that had no idea what you were talking about just said, "Yup!"

I have no idea if or if not Verizon is fucking with Netflix. However, this reporting is absolutely worthless and is basically just muck racking at this point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Direct link: [http://davesblog.com/blog/2014/02/05/verizon-using-recent- ne...](http://davesblog.com/blog/2014/02/05/verizon-using-recent-net- neutrality-victory-to-wage-war-against-netflix/)</comment>


The best, and the worst, of the coronavirus dashboards - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/615330/best-worst-coronavirus-dashboards/ <comment><USER2> This comes as surreal for me! We're just one step away from "The top 11 Vue.js coronavirus dashboards".

<comment><AUTHOR> The title is a bit awkward IMO.</comment></comment>


Intel to introduce processor with remote kill switch - <AUTHOR> http://www.tgdaily.com/opinion-features/53108-analysis-intel-to-introduce-processor-with-remote-kill-switch?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+tgdaily_all_sections+%28TG+Daily+-+All+News%29 <comment><USER2> What about a new generation of viruses able to brick your computer using this technology?

It also could be a way for Intel to kill old computers in order to make people buy new ones (Most people would think that their machines were simply too old and died) if wikileaks is still alive then, we might get confirmations about such nasty tactics.

I just hate when efforts and money goes into disabling : I get mad when I can't read an original DVD because of DRM protections (happened three times last month). I hate it when clients money pay for efforts against them. It reminds me of the Sony rootkit. All this is so wrong.

<comment><USER3> It's not in the best interest of the usually seen computer viruses to brick a computer this way. A bricked computer cannot be turned into a spam zombie or a node in a botnet.

However, considering the implications of Stuxnet, I can see a lot of uses for processor kill switches. Imagine not only having to replace all your centrifuges, you also have to replace all desktop computers in your government offices, as well as the servers running your supply chains. To make it more interesting, try to do that during an invasion.

To be fair, you may want to brick a stolen computer, but that only guarantees it will never show up on any authorized dealer who can check the serial number against a list of stolen computers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why would they add this feature? Are they going to sell more chips because of it? Do they see a person who's on the fence about whether to buy a computer with Intel inside, and have this be the thing that pushes them to decide to buy? I find that extremely unlikely.

Instead, it seems like Steve Jobs has shown the world that you can sell somebody a product but still maintain control of the product after the transaction. Intel is apparently saying "We gotta get us some of that"

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't get the bad angle. Remote kill-switches would be very useful for corporate devices.

A problem would arise if Intel could also surreptitiously do firmware changes via this mechanism. On the positive side, however, companies could push updates automagically.

As long as a customer knows what he's buying and can disable the feature, it's a great addition for people or companies needing extra security.

<comment><USER6> It's definitely there, though it would be mitigated if the buyer can disable it (though how would you know it worked until it didn't?):

If _they_ can kill it, others can too. Be they script kiddies, bored geniuses, or businesses or governments that would like to see your computer die.

The trick is that if there is such a desirable off button, it _will_ be discovered, reverse engineered, or leaked. There's no "if", only "when".

<comment><USER5> "If they can kill it, others can too."

Cryptographic science is mature enough to provide a robust solution to that problem.

<comment><USER6> It's mature enough that it's known there cannot _be_ a "robust" system like you seem to be hoping for.

At some point down the chain, you trust someone else with your computer's off switch. If they give it away/sell it/have it stolen, a stronger system merely means you're _more_ assuredly screwed because there's less they can do to prevent it from working as advertised.

And this is all aside from cryptographic weaknesses. Sure, there are strong / robust systems, but at some point the ultimate authority lies somewhere, somehow, and it can be taken. Even something like BitCoin, a nigh-authority- free system, is vulnerable to this; if enough malicious computers perform enough malicious calculations, they can convince everyone that _their_ transaction history is the correct history. Or a virus could do their work for them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> How can you implement a remote kill switch without also creating a permanent unblockable remote code execution vulnerability? The only way I see to do it would be to have the chipset monitor all network interfaces for the packet of death, and give the chipset the ability to inject packets for the purpose of authentication before it actually kills the system.

</comment><comment><USER8> This article is a pure spin! This technology (or similar) is already in the processors today. But:

1) it has to be activated

2) it has to be paid for (subscription)

3) the laptop can be enabled again if you recover it from the thief

4) it is only in the Q or QM chipsets

Seriously, I'm all for being paranoid when it makes sense. But you already have to trust Intel if you buy a processor from them. And I believe the technology can implemented securely (unique RSA key pair for each processor?)

see [http://www.techzone360.com//topics/techzone/articles/127365-...](http://www.techzone360.com//topics/techzone/articles/127365-remote- kill-switch-added-new-intel-processor.htm)

Edit: also it's apparently old news: [http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Desktops-and- Notebooks/Intel-vPro-E...](http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Desktops-and- Notebooks/Intel-vPro-Enhancements-Coming-with-Sandy-Bridge-551570/)

<comment><USER3> There should also be lots of ways to permanently brick a computer with software.

In the good old CGA/MDA days all you had to do was to program the wrong scan rate in your CRT controller and watch as your monitor exploded, fireworks included.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9>
        Instead of a kill switch Intel could have went with a Lo-Jack type system.

Nearly all laptops these days come with the LoJack bios agent pre-installed: <http://www.absolute.com/en/products/bios-compatibility.aspx>

Notable exceptions include Apple, Sony, and the Lemote Yeeloong (of Richard Stallman fame).

Interestingly, Absolute Software has no formal connection with the LoJack corporation other than licensing their name for the software.

<comment><USER10> Did some digging, and LoJack security vulnerabilities were detailed at BlackHat 2009:

[https://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh- usa-09/ORTEGA/BHUS...](https://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh- usa-09/ORTEGA/BHUSA09-Ortega-DeactivateRootkit-SLIDES.pdf) [https://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh- usa-09/ORTEGA/BHUS...](https://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh- usa-09/ORTEGA/BHUSA09-Ortega-DeactivateRootkit-PAPER.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> In related news, I hear that AMD has some nice processors coming up.

<comment><USER12> Intel had better make this an opt-in, and then opt-in again option. AMD will clean house otherwise.

The number of use cases where this can go horribly wrong, either due to malice, or indeed because of an Intel software update error far outweighs the potential benefits to me as an individual.

My principal worries if my laptop gets stolen are. a. that I can recover my work --> backups b. that my data remains protected --> encryption

Bricking a stolen laptop does not do much for either. The only way I can see this being a good thing, is if sufficient numbers of stolen laptops get bricked, and this in turn lowers the overall laptop theft rate.

Not sure that this will happen though. Many mobile phones have had this option for a while, and still phones get stolen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> If this sort of thing were ubiquitous on the market for years, it would eventually become common knowledge that laptops brick themselves after being stolen. In which case it would very probably reduce laptop theft.

That's an awfully long haul down the road from here, though, and quite a few concerns to deal with along the way.

None of this is carved in stone, of course. Intel's software-readable CPU serial numbering raised privacy concerns and was retired, for example.

<comment><USER3> > In which case it would very probably reduce laptop theft.

Or just increase the availability of used parts...

<comment><USER14> Except for processors of course. (Intel wins there)

<comment><USER3> _Very_ good point...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The first fruits of the "synergy" from the Symantec acquisition? Snicker.</comment>


Startup team sizes - <AUTHOR> http://tomtunguz.com/span-of-control/?

<comment><USER2> With the right people, it is not necessary to pre-determine team size. Let teams form and morph organically.

I have observed that when you have a highly motivated group of people, they will subdivide into teams automatically as well as add and subtract team members without outside direction.</comment>


Dart 1.23: Better strong mode support - <AUTHOR> http://news.dartlang.org/2017/04/dart-123-better-strong-mode-support.html <comment><USER2> Full changelog [https://github.com/dart- lang/sdk/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md#12...](https://github.com/dart- lang/sdk/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md#1230)

I really like how detailed the changelogs are, including examples and snippets. It has excellent documentation in general.</comment>


Show HN: Tool to organize and refine ideas – Walling - <AUTHOR> https://walling.app <comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone! Elmasry here from Walling. I've launched Walling before on ProductHunt but I'm excited to introduce the tool to HN community.

Whether you're working on a project, researching a topic or writing an article, you can use Walling to create a Wall to organize and refine your ideas and thoughts and eventually get a visual overview of your notes side by side and you can refer back to that wall when you start the actual work.

I'd love to hear your thoughts, feedback or questions!

<comment><USER2> Congratulations, the application looks beautiful and your landing page is really clear.

My only feedback is that functionally this looks very similar to OneNote, which is a tool that most of companies have already included in their Microsoft Office license.

Am I missing any big differentiator?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey! Thanks for the feedback :)

Unlike OneNote and other linear layout tools, Walling lets you throw out your ideas into Bricks and worry later about organizing and revising them and with those bricks/ideas side by side, Walling empowers you to step back and get a high level understanding of what you're working on.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are the hottest startups related to beer / brewing? - <AUTHOR> I am a tech entrepreneur and I live among apps and tech stuff but I'd love to discuss the what is going on the beer and brewing startup environment of these days.<p>What are the innovations in this market, products related and what the big and also the small craft breweries are doing to innovate ? <comment><USER2> Mikkeller, who know a thing or two about brewing, seem to be making a big push into non-or-low alcoholic beers that actually taste interesting. And speaking personally I'd love to see more things happening in this front. As an old old man (ie past 35) who cannot drink like he did in his youth I'd love to go to the pub on a Wednesday, have 6 pints of varied and interesting beers and still be at work and ready to go the next morning.

<comment><USER3> As an also-over-35, I don't think it's just the alcohol. (Feel free to slap me down with science.) A beer hangover is now more severe than an equivalent- amount-of-alcohol hangover from say, vodka.

<comment><USER4> Someone told me that it's because you consume too much fluids when drinking beer, causing mineral and vitamin imbalances or some such. (I ain't no scientalist!) This makes sense if true, since to reach the same level of alcohol in your blood you simply have to drink more beer than say vodka, which is obviously much stronger.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [https://www.brewdog.com/](https://www.brewdog.com/)

also see [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/29/brewdo...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/29/brewdogs- open-source-revolution-is-at-the-vanguard-of-postcapitalism) which was on HN not long ago, discussion here [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11201300](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11201300)

</comment><comment><USER6> I just heard a story on NPR about a startup in Boston called Purpose Energy turning waste water from a brewery (Magic Hat brewing) and turning it into usable energy (methane). There are other efforts to use brewing waste more environmentally/economically in permaculture [1], but this is the first I'd heard of them using it to create energy.

Here is the full story.

[http://www.pri.org/stories/2016-09-14/massachusetts- pushes-b...](http://www.pri.org/stories/2016-09-14/massachusetts-pushes-brew- new-green-businesses-help-fight-climate-change)

The company is only a small part of the story on clean energy startups and the company doesn't just work with breweries, so it is only slightly related to the original question. Still, it sounds like this is a big problem for breweries to deal with and there is some innovation happening around it.

[1] [http://plantchicago.org/](http://plantchicago.org/)

<comment><USER7> The idea of fermentation to kill bugs and what not is mentioned in the documentary How Beer Saved the World.

If I remember rightly, they make a brew out of pond water towards the end

[https://vimeo.com/23278902](https://vimeo.com/23278902)

<comment><USER8> The only part of that documentary I don't like is that they purposely don't mention that they boil the pond water while brewing with it (like you would normal water when brewing). It would have been way cooler if they had shown that yeast alone was enough to kill off other bad organisms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Analytical Flavor Systems[0].

We built a AI for beer flavor profile consistency and quality optimization. NVIDIA wrote an awesome article about us here[1].

 __More Info __

Analytical Flavor Systems uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to build tools for the food & beverage industry. Our Quality, Process, and Market Intelligence services create real-time predictive decisions metrics at each stage of a products life-cycle. We leverage our predictive models across products & industries for flavor profile optimization, production process optimization, demographic targeting & cognitive marketing - helping companies create and sell the best product to their highest value consumers with every batch.

Our Services

__Quality Intelligence__: Real-time predictive quality control, assurance, and improvement from human sensory data.

__Process Intelligence__: Real-time predictive process control and optimization from human sensory data + manufacturing & LIMS data.

__Market Intelligence__: Linking flavor-profile, demographics, and sales data to find the highest value consumer demographics for a product's flavor- profile.

[0]www.Gastrograph.com

[1] [http://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2015/09/02/beer/](http://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2015/09/02/beer/)

</comment><comment><USER10> BrewLog is helping smaller brewers manage their brewing operations/data online. Giving the smaller guys access to the tech the bigger companies have. [https://brewlog.com/](https://brewlog.com/)

<comment><USER11> Hey, thanks Cody!

Greg here, Founder/CEO of BrewLog. I used to work with cody in a previous company.

I wouldn't necessarily describe our product that way. In fact, it was spun out of a 50BBL/yr brewery. A lot of the functionality is most useful to bigger breweries (notifications, activity feed).

The difference with much bigger breweries is that they have automated stuff. We're talking with Semens, and we're working with a few breweries to hook up smart WIFI/Cloud enabled temperature sensors to pull data in.

We've got a lot of smaller breweries in our Beta right now too. We're focusing on making the brew sheet work for all different types of breweries at the moment, as brewing processes can be different for various breweries.

We're about to launch a bunch of other neat stuff, like yeast management and tasting.

But yeah, if you've got a commercial brewery, we'd love to talk to you! Get in touch with me at email@example.com.

<comment><USER11> Don't see an option to edit here, I meant 50K (50,000) BBL's, not 50

<comment><USER12> Typically if you click on the "X minutes ago" it links to the comment itself, then you can edit it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'd love to get involved in creating a decent piece of brewery management software, I've heard it's all pretty horrific (from a sample size of two). What's the state of the art in brewing software?

<comment><USER14> Big or small?

I think the 'big' answer is all about low-level control logic and embedded systems. I can't speak to how horrifying it is relative to other industrial controls, but they're a world all their own.

On a homebrew scale, though, there's some awesome stuff like this: [http://ohmbrewer.org/](http://ohmbrewer.org/)

The idea is that it's an actually valuable spot for an IoT product, because homebrewers would rather not sit for hours measuring exactly when to advance the brew. So you put together a monitoring-and-transition system, plug in your specs, and OhmBrew automates the process. Also, open source so you can check out what they're building.

(I'm not affiliated, but I met them and they seemed like awesome software & beer geeks.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think this looks interesting for home brewers [http://www.grainfather.co.uk/](http://www.grainfather.co.uk/)

</comment><comment><USER16> [http://brewfactory.org/](http://brewfactory.org/)

"Full-Stack Homebrew with IoT and Node.js" a blog post about: [https://blog.risingstack.com/brewfactory-full-stack- homebrew...](https://blog.risingstack.com/brewfactory-full-stack-homebrew- with-iot/)

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm a professional brewer and fermentation technologist, formally trained in Brewing Science and Technology, also in Microbiology and Microscopy. I'm in early stage development of a new software solution for breweries of any size and eventually expanding to wineries and distilleries. Prototype is already fully functional, it consists of constantly updated database of commercial raw ingredients along with its analysis, specifically for accurate recipe development, it will also assist and manage all of your operations from "grain to glass". Another big feature is the new and way more affordable technology the we are implementing of remote monitoring and eventually control and automation of all operations, both Hot Side, Cold Side and Storage. We also want to extend the software for management of Brewery QA & QC and Yeast Lab operations.

I'd love to discuss the project with whoever is interested, feel free to comment below :)

</comment><comment><USER18> I'll add one on the edge — Rhinegeist [0] in Cincinnati, Ohio.

They are not a startup in the sense of software or technology, but in the case of a _very_ rapidly expanding craft brewery. Their growth and expansion since the first beer ~3 years ago look a lot like a startup, and they've raised at least $10M in funding [1].

[0]: [http://www.rhinegeist.com/our-story](http://www.rhinegeist.com/our- story)

[1]: [http://www.ohio.com/blogs/the-beer-blog/the-beer- blog-1.2731...](http://www.ohio.com/blogs/the-beer-blog/the-beer- blog-1.273124/rhinegeist-announces-10-million-investment-1.574600)

</comment><comment><USER19> Tilt is an affordable innovative density meter. It measures the angle/tilt of the device floating in the fermenting beer. [http://tilthydrometer.com/](http://tilthydrometer.com/)

<comment><USER20> Hey cool, someone's made one of them.

If only I'd published something in 2012 when I made a start at making a tilt hydrometer but didn't finish it. Silly patents [http://www.google.com/patents/US20140260607](http://www.google.com/patents/US20140260607)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't understand the innovation that makes it possible, but Aurochs Brewing has a gluten-free beer that's actually tasty.

[http://www.aurochsbrewing.com/](http://www.aurochsbrewing.com/)

</comment><comment><USER14> [http://ohmbrewer.org/](http://ohmbrewer.org/)

Open source IoT for homebrewers, designed to replace "sit and watch the temperature" with a cheap PID monitoring system.

</comment><comment><USER22> I am a fan of what the guys at [http://www.swig.co/](http://www.swig.co/) and [http://www.drinkeasy.co/](http://www.drinkeasy.co/) are doing (disclaimer: I know the founders).

Swig is a social application that enables you to discover new brews that you might like (based off of you and your friend's preferences); sort of like Pandora for your palette.

Drinkeasy is an extension of Swig and enables you to order those drinks.

<comment><USER23> ordered through drinkeasy's SMS bot for the first time (sits on top of ezras.com) a little while ago. Great service!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Mezcal Tosba has an interesting story: [http://www.moleandmore.com/mezcal- diaries/2014/1/26/mezcal-t...](http://www.moleandmore.com/mezcal- diaries/2014/1/26/mezcal-tosba)

As a New Englander I am biased, but I am partial to Downeast Cider: [http://downeastcider.com/](http://downeastcider.com/)

</comment><comment><USER25> That's a good question. I can easily foresee someone inventing a "vapable" alcohol solution that could be revolutionary ;)

For now, most of the capital is being allocated to distribution. "Uber for liquor" 1-Hour delivery model:

[https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/10/the-new-age-of- alcohol/](https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/10/the-new-age-of-alcohol/)

<comment><USER18> Re: Vaporized alcohol

It seems to already exist — Vaportini [0], Vapshot [1]. (I haven't tried either personally.)

[0]: [http://vaportini.com/](http://vaportini.com/)

[1]: [http://www.vapshot.com](http://www.vapshot.com)

</comment></comment><comment> J-dawg I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned Brewbot yet

[http://www.brewbot.io](http://www.brewbot.io)

</comment><comment><USER26> [https://www.beermenus.com/](https://www.beermenus.com/) seems to have growing traction. I'm a happy user. Cool email alerts features.

I wish they had an API. I tried to build something on top of Untappd but kept hitting rate limits (note to Untappd: charge me)

</comment><comment><USER27> [https://itunes.apple.com/de/app/bierkeller-beer- cellar/id104...](https://itunes.apple.com/de/app/bierkeller-beer- cellar/id1049437504?l=en&mt=8) is definitely worth a look :)

</comment><comment><USER28> Marketplace for craft beers, direct from the brewery -

[https://www.eebria.com/](https://www.eebria.com/)

They also have a trade site -

[https://www.eebriatrade.com/](https://www.eebriatrade.com/)

<comment><USER29> eebriatrade seem really interesting! I signed up to that a while ago, so that I can order a keg for christmas :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> There's NextGlass that's here in Wilmington NC. I think they're using machine learning to figure out how your brew really tastes. [https://nextglass.co](https://nextglass.co)

</comment><comment><USER31> Something might come out of this:

[http://www.nature.com/news/tapping-genetics-for-better- beer-...](http://www.nature.com/news/tapping-genetics-for-better-beer-1.20336)

Editing genome of yeast with CRISPR

</comment><comment><USER32> Brewpublik is a curated craft beer delivery service to your home or office. They're a 500 Startups company:

[http://www.brewpublik.com/](http://www.brewpublik.com/)

<comment><USER33> Great company. Used by a ton of offices for beer in the Bay Area.

</comment></comment><comment> l-vincent-l [https://www.picobrew.com/](https://www.picobrew.com/) makes a good platform/product.

</comment><comment><USER34> [https://ubrew.cc/](https://ubrew.cc/) \- an open brewery where you brew the beer

<comment><USER8> It's a U-brew store like they have in every small city, except a bit more modern and much more hip because it's under a railway arch in London. But all of the founders and employees are very nice and they are doing well. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> [http://www.bierdar.com](http://www.bierdar.com) \- An app for beerfinding using iBeacons?

</comment><comment><USER36> [https://www.brewtoad.com/](https://www.brewtoad.com/)

</comment><comment><USER37> [http://kegerator.com](http://kegerator.com)

</comment><comment><USER38> [http://www.whitelabs.com/](http://www.whitelabs.com/)

A team of biochemists found this. They have a very scientific approach and you should check out the kind of teams they have.

<comment><USER39> White Labs is not a startup: they've been providing liquid yeasts (to home brewers and breweries) for a fairly long time.

Chris White, of White Labs, wrote a great book on yeast:

[https://www.amazon.com/Yeast-Practical-Fermentation- Brewing-...](https://www.amazon.com/Yeast-Practical-Fermentation-Brewing- Elements/dp/0937381969)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Untappd</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone Interested in Authoring/Collaborating on a Software Product? - <AUTHOR> I'm not entirely sure if this post is allowed, so feel free to remove if not.
Hello! I have recently created a digital product platform that is based on Git. So think Envato, but friendlier to devs and much more technical and deep support of all things Git.
I very recently published a test product and went through a first public release. Things are looking pretty good!
Now I would like to talk to more potential authors who may want to collaborate or offer an existing digital product up on the platform I've created.
I'm a full stack engineer that can assist there, or with UX, design, or marketing. (I'm also the sole creator of this product: design, ux, backend, etc, so I can collaborate in many roles)
The platform is https://git.cash - you can read a bit about it on the homepage and the about page.
Anyway, thanks for looking! And if anyone has suggestions on where to find authors, if not here, I'd be much appreciative.
Cheers. <comment><USER2> Show HN is what you'd normally use. [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

Your homepage doesn't really tell me what this is, apart from it uses Git somehow. You told us ^^there, but not on the homepage.

Is it a RAD tool? A new alternative to something like meteor? What's it got to do with Sketch plugins?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for taking the time to submit feedback to me! I appreciate it, and agree, the homepage really does kind of suck.

I hesitate to put this up on Show HN for reasons you outlined. Mostly I am interested in finding authors until I have time to redo the layout. Being a one-man show is very taxing!

BUT, again, very happy you said this and have added "Make a better homepage" to my task list because of this message :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm not sure who your target end-user is, but I think the focus on "git" both in your branding and explanation leads people to focus on that aspect rather than the (great) idea of having easy-to-use revision management for digital assets. How that's implemented (in this case, git) is irrelevant to a marketing manager or a creative who is supplying the content.

If developers are a large part of who you see as your end user, then sure, keep as is. But if they're not, I'd consider re-evaluating the use of git as your main selling point and highlight the "history tracking" aspect of the product.

</comment><comment><USER4> Have you thought about cutting your fee to 7% plus 3% to paypal or stripe and letting the author set a commission for affiliates. So if I offer 25% an affiliate would get 15%.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm a "product marketer", and this was difficult for me to understand. I don't know what this is for (after reading your opening comment), and I can't figure out what should I be doing. If you receive similar feedback from other marketers, maybe consider making it easier to understand?

</comment><comment><USER6> Please just let me scroll down to some content first without choosing one of the 'im a' s.

Edit: To ask,

What prevents me from distributing products by allowing others to use my paid copy's machine as a remote? Am i missing something?

</comment><comment><USER4> And what would be really cool is to allow people to sell the resale rights. So, if I buy the rights I could make all future profits of the eBook, template, photo etc.

</comment><comment><USER7> This violates the Git trademark, which the team announced they would begin enforcing this year due to a proliferation of products and services naming themselves after Git. If you're going to move forward with this, you need to apply for permission to use the Git mark.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oof, I'm so very happy you shared this with me. Looks like I'm rebranding!

<comment><USER6> This may help in determining where you might stand on the naming:

[https://public- inbox.org/git/20170202022655.2jwvudhvo4hmueaw...](https://public- email@example.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> so can I fork your product and sell it and split the fees?

or if I check in a rewrite of a paragraph and you approve the check in do I get a cut your future sales?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey! Sorry I realize now maybe the idea of Git-powered products wasn't very clear.

No forking/reselling takes place (unless of course that is desired by the product creator). The only role Git plays is first-class support for developers to do things like:

1\. Do a "git pull" to get product updates instead of having to go to some online UI (like CodeCanyon) to get a zip archive, then manually do a diff to see what changed. And my favorite thing is you can add the git repo in your package manager (like npm or composer), which none of the other product platforms allow.

2\. Creators can make releases (like GitHub does them), which is very cool for managing release-specific issues/bugs, handling subscriptions per-release, or allowing customers to get updates only when you're ready for a release.

As far as compensation goes for any collab done related to this HN post, I'm open to any suggestions. My main goal is to find creators, not to profit from the collaboration directly. Mostly just looking for fun creators to work with and willing to help them any way I can!

<comment><USER8> Now that I am thinking about it I am amazed that this is not how existing platforms work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right! I've been developing this for almost a year now, and any time I spoke about it at a networking event, each dev says "Wait, you're right. Why doesn't this exist?"

It has been nice to hear that, it helps with the crushing doubt in my mind that I've wasted the past 7 months of my life.

<comment><USER4> so, your core use case is a marketplace for code packages. The thing you offer no one else does. So, if I do a git pull or link to a package on something I haven't paid for it will block me?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hi @zschuessler,

I am interested to collaborate. Please ping me at firstname.lastname@example.com</comment>


Gordon Gekko on Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://twitter.com/GordonGekko <comment><USER2> What made the original Wall Street movie a classic is that, despite Oliver Stone's liberalism, he created a character in Gorden Gekko who was a genuine advocate of capitalism, even if he personally represented the less attractive side of capitalism. The greed is good speech is fair and accurate, because greed is really the desire for more, and it is a motivator.

Now, 30 years later, Oliver Stone has become a marxist who loves Hugo chavez, and advocated that the US government nationalize the oil industry like chavez did, which is no small point, as it was the shrugging of capitalists in Venezuela that resulted in Chavez cracking down with violence and nationalization of the oil industry... and the flight of the best and brightest resulting in the dea spiral the country is now in....

And this new movie, im afraid, is going to be knocking down a strawman with capitalism painted on his chest. This Gekko Twitter account doesn't seem to really even be trying to channel gekko. At least compared to the original.</comment>


Npm's new search scores code quality and maintenance - <AUTHOR> http://blog.npmjs.org/post/154912817335/better-search-is-here <comment><USER2> Nice this is great. The original npm search was super frustrating. Typically it involved a process of searching for keywords and then opening up dozens of tabs and finding the package that solved my need, looking at GitHub stars, and verifying it was actively maintained.</comment>


Open Source Guilt and Passion - <AUTHOR> http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3349-open-source-guilt-passion?

<comment><USER2> This is something I've struggled with for years. I still feel guilt over the projects I've abandoned in the past for various reasons. My first open source project was ringconnect, which would listen on a phone line for a specific pattern of rings and then connect to the local ISP and send an email with its current IP address. I wrote it so that I could connect to my home machine from campus without having to waste a quarter on a phone booth (the quarter is returned if the other side doesn't pick up). Releasing it as open source was almost an afterthought, but the result was a whole bunch of support requests that spanned almost a decade (the last requests I got were from someone in Africa who needed to keep computers in contact over regular phone lines). I felt so bad that I couldn't fix things anymore because I didn't have a modem...

Now I'm plagued with guilt because I am currently maintaining 3 major projects that are building up issue tickets, and I just don't have enough time to keep them all going the way I'd like to, yet I can't bear to abandon any of them (indeed, I have so many MORE ideas I want to bring out!).

What I do know is that I used to love receiving issue notifications, but now that time is really at a premium, I get a sinking feeling instead because I know that I'll have to pick and choose what I fix. I just hope that eventually I'll be able to get on top of things again.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a very interesting point (re: the guilt especially) - sometimes I'm almost dissuaded from releasing code because in the end it might have a net negative impact on my life.

There's even stories of people hunting down email addresses from git/SVN commit data and emailing about problems years later to people who only ever released the code as a "hey, this is interesting" attempt.

I'm not sure what the solution is - responsibility is important in any healthy open-source project, but sometimes I just want to release code as a way to potentially let someone else do a bit less coding, not as some well-maintained library attempt.

<comment><USER4> Related - I once answered a stack overflow question and the guy hunted down my phone number and called me to see if he could get clarification. So crazy.

<comment><USER5> Holy cow! I've done a ton on SO, and I've never gotten any message outside the site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Don't know if github made things easier or harder. Want to contribute a patch? Fork the code, make your changes, do a pull request...

In the old days, we just sent a diff to the maintainer and that was that. It could either be accepted or it wasn't. It was quick and simple.

In the old days, opensource projects would also have a site, with downloadable artifacts, and wouldn't present the user with a source tree which may or may not work, and with millions of forks leaving the user doubting which is the official one.

It is a dumping ground of code.

</comment><comment><USER7> Basically all of my code I've ever written (as someone who's yet to find an actual job coding) is "open source" simply because I use GitHub for everything, not necessarily because I _want_ people to look at it ;)

I have a few projects languishing I'm concerned about - an aborted attempt at making an EmberJS build system using Grunt, an aborted attempt at making a localStorage adapter - that I still see being starred or even forked.

I wish GitHub had some way of marking a project as "inactive" with a big warning banner. I suppose I should go back and update the READMEs of those repos to note such, but it'd be nice to have just a checkbox to tick and get a big ol' warning without having to actually update the repo.

</comment><comment><USER5> If one took the attitude of "this software works for me and you're free to use it if you like," there'd be no guilt or stress in open source. But we want to help others and/or gain reputation by solving their problems, too, which leads us to feel obligated to maintain it.

This is mostly a good thing, I think; without it, we'd have a lot of one-off projects with limited reusability.

But it's also valid to say "I no longer have time for this, anyone is welcome to take it over." It just takes a bit of emotional strength to do that.

(Dr. Nic in the Ruby community is aggressive about doing this.)

</comment><comment><USER4> Love this article - really fantastic writing, and the doodles are a nice addition. I'm surprised I'm not seeing this rocket straight to the top. I have yet to host a very popular open source project, but this advice is great for if/when that happens.

</comment><comment><USER8> Dude, Fat talked about the same topic at dotJS. Funny</comment>


Wireless, moving charging overcomes major hurdle in new Stanford research - <AUTHOR> https://earth.stanford.edu/news/wireless-charging-moving-electric-vehicles-overcomes-major-hurdle-new-stanford-research <comment><AUTHOR> NB: Title edited for space.</comment>


Life's First Molecule Was Protein, Not RNA, New Model Suggests - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/lifes-first-molecule-was-protein-not-rna-new-model-suggests-20171102/ <comment><USER2> What random organic processes were used in the creation of said proteins? Still seems to fail the smell test as far as the organic chemistry synthesis processes required.

Irrespective of any organic synthesis in the laboratory, one still has to explain an actual random non-laboratory synthesis process. Will have to wait and see what ensues.</comment>


Show HN: Read Hacker News in a Pinterest Way - <AUTHOR> https://hnews.xyz/ <comment><USER2> Have to increase my list now...

        React.js

[http://hackernews.azurewebsites.net](http://hackernews.azurewebsites.net)

        React.js

[http://hackernewsmobile.com](http://hackernewsmobile.com)

        Vue.js

[http://vuejs.github.io/vue-hackernews](http://vuejs.github.io/vue-hackernews)

        jQuery

[http://hackerbra.in](http://hackerbra.in)

        jQuery

[http://hckrnews.com](http://hckrnews.com)

        Vanilla

[http://ihackernews.com](http://ihackernews.com)

        Ionic

[http://codepen.io/lamogura/pen/QbGXrg](http://codepen.io/lamogura/pen/QbGXrg)

        Angular 2

[https://hswolff.github.io/hn-ng2](https://hswolff.github.io/hn-ng2)

<comment><USER3> I like this one (another React version)

[http://insin.github.io/react-hn/](http://insin.github.io/react-hn/)

<comment><USER2> Oh that /is/ a good one. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Take this as constructive criticism, rather than a complaint. But the "pinterest" layout is exhausting at this point. Too many sites use it, and it's the opposite of a good user experience in my opinion. With that said, good for you for working on new projects!

<comment><USER5> I second this, while also upvoting the OP because I think this is pretty novel and kudos to the author for putting it together.

Scrolling through pictures makes me feel like my IQ loses 20-30 points... I just want more eye candy, rather than carefully reading the text. But I imagine that's more a thing of taste and interaction style, and it's pretty neat that we can change the HN UI to suit our own desires/needs.

If only the same were true for Facebook and the like!

<comment><USER4> The Pinterest layout really is for the lowest common denominator, and that's why it works for its target audience. However it just doesn't work for anything else at this point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Cool I guess, but it only serves to make me re-realise how much I dislike the grid layout.

Edit: To be clear, it is nothing against the project itself. Only in general that it makes it hard to scan pages with layouts like this.

<comment><USER7> I agree - I think this is a great idea and really cool to see. However, when I first went to the site, there was something off putting about it which I couldn't put my finger on. Thinking about it, I think it's the amount of eye movement required to scan the links. With HN, on a wide screen, scanning the stories to find ones I want to read only requires a limited amount of movement, mostly downward, whereas with the grid, I have to scan across the entire screen and after doing so, completing one row, I've only scanned the titles of four stories...

Nonetheless, I like the innovative idea. Thanks for sharing!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is the first alternative I feel is worth using. It actually adds something to the experience. I already found some articles where the headline was not that interesting but I could see was something worth reading from the image alone. Good job!

</comment><comment><USER9> Nice. I own the ycombinator.news domain and was planning to do a similar thing but never got to it. If you want it, I'd be happy to give it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, you should build your own. It's quite fun! I've shared the code on [https://github.com/valentinvieriu/visual-hacker- news](https://github.com/valentinvieriu/visual-hacker-news) please feel free to fork it. It's free. The hard part is the caching. I suggest using [http://cloudflare.com](http://cloudflare.com) as a free solution

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Cool to see how HN user comunity always shows new ways to read your favorite News Source. I think, first I noticed was [http://hack.ernews.info](http://hack.ernews.info)

It is time to make my own HN frontend! :) And this applies, for each of You!

Anyway my favorite frontend/design and UI is still [https://news.ycombinator.com](https://news.ycombinator.com) as it is fine to read and navigate 500 times per day and also offers the procrastination mode if I declare my self as addicted for compulsive HN site visiting. (Witch I should activate long ago :).

</comment><comment><USER11> Technologically nice, but I really hate the Pinterest Way so I would never use a website with that kind of layout.

</comment><comment><USER12> I really like this. I'm sure there's features missing like comments and some kind of visited indicator but I like the thumbs. Helps to give context to the headline.

I'm not getting 500 stories as the description described.

Is there a reason you're using the yeoman favicon? Did the generator put it there?

Should mention you're using koajs, [http://koajs.com/](http://koajs.com/), I'm sure folks who haven't used would like to check out your code.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the feedback. It was a weekend project, and yes I'm using a yeoman generator for the angular project. I'm using KOA just as a thin web server and also as a proxy to cache the images.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I am glad to see that the grid of images is actually equally aligned, rather than being presented as a jumbled, unequally-aligned mess like Pinterest's grid is.

</comment><comment><USER14> For certain stories, much nicer to browse this way! For other's, it just doesn't make sense (a single page with heading and code... hmm).

Either way, great job!

</comment><comment><USER15> Cool. The only thing not yet emulated is the screen blackout forcing you to login or register, but otherwise it's decent.

<comment><USER16> Exactly what I was about to say, but less cynical than I would have put it. Thank you for sparing us all from my snarky remarks.

OP: Don't degrade your accomplishment by comparing it to Pinterest. The super smooth scrolling makes this feel way better than Pinterest!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Could do with a link to comments.

<comment><USER18> I'd also like to see comment links. Very cool project and something I would use!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> FIREBASE WARNING: Specified Firebase has reached its Peak Connections limit. If you are the Firebase owner, consider upgrading. ([https://visual-hacker- news.firebaseio.com](https://visual-hacker-news.firebaseio.com))

<comment><AUTHOR> That's funny. The firebase database I'm using it's the public Hacker News API. Should not have this limitation

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I like the idea and trying new things. However, here are a few subjective points (I am not a designer!):

* Somehow pinterest pictures paint a richer front page, and that works for them. The frontpages from HN do not give the same pleasing aesthetic.

* What I like about the current front page is that nothing distracts me from the content (headlines). Loads quickly with minimal clutter.

</comment><comment><USER21> The only improvement I'd like to see is a way to know when I've already visited the link, i.e. purple/light gray links.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've put it on my list. Glad to see the amazing feedback. I'll make sure I will add more features in the near future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> You made it onto your own front page. Very meta!

</comment><comment><USER23> Neat project. I would not mind that view occasionally (perhaps as an option) but not all the time. Thanks for the link.

</comment><comment><USER24> @wanda do you know about HN Cards on iOS? (shameless plug, but it's free so...)

<comment><USER25> Try replying to them, @'s have no power here

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I think this is really cool! Great job!

</comment><comment><USER27> Kinda cool, but pretty bad on mobile.

</comment><comment><USER28> Very nice

</comment><comment><USER29> Love it!</comment>


Acne vulgaris: a disease of Western civilization (2002) - <AUTHOR> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/12472346/ <comment> EZ-E I read lots of research papers about acne and I tried many things including diets, removing dairy, removing sweets, changing pillow sheet daily, many kinds of anti acne treatments.

The only thing that worked was roaccutane. After the treatment it slowly comes back so I beat it permanently with low-dosing (a 10 or 20mg pill every now and then)

I realize there must be a reason deep down that caused it. Typically dermatologists first try to give a cleansing treatment with some kind of scrub cream (will solve it if hygiene was the issue). Then they try anti biotics (if bacteria is the issue) then finally use the nuclear option with roaccutane which works with practically every one (but relapse can happen)

<comment><USER3> It's not permanent but once you are over with it the age of acne has "gone through" (though yeah some pop up eventually)

<comment><USER4> How long it takes? I'm 30 now and I would have breakouts if I didn't apply benzoyl peroxide twice a day.

<comment><USER5> That stuff is the devil. Thought I had oily skin. I didn't. It was a reaction to benzoyl. Switched to Cetaphil which I add pure tea tree oil to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I used to get bad acne as a teenager. I remember thinking it was some kind of cruel joke that I'd look in the mirror on Sunday night and see a fresh spot emerging, _just_ as the others had cleared up, just as the school week was about to begin. Looking back, I think I understand what was happening. On Fridays I'd always eat a lot of sweets. They were banned in the household except for Fridays, and so we'd gorge on confectionary and fizzy drinks. Then, like clockwork, I'd break out in spots a couple of days later. So the culprit would seem to be refined sugar or some other common ingredient, taken in high concentration.

I can't believe I didn't figure it out at the time.

<comment><USER7> Sugar and dairy products may be one of the problems. Lack of exercise could be one as well. There's some research on this, although some reviews seems to indicate that the evidence isn't 100% clear.

I think the other piece of puzzle, where there's a dire need of research, is on the microbiome of the skin. Having a healthy culture of good bacteria on your skin may be important. That's why washing with soap can cause as much damage as it helps -- if you overdo it, you don't just kill the bad bacterias, you kill the good ones too.

I've experimented a bit with Mother Dirt.. I can't say it's a cure for anything, but it does seem to help.

[https://europepmc.org/abstract/med/29601613](https://europepmc.org/abstract/med/29601613) [https://europepmc.org/abstract/med/21916275](https://europepmc.org/abstract/med/21916275) [https://academic.oup.com/fampra/article/22/1/62/440463](https://academic.oup.com/fampra/article/22/1/62/440463)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a really interesting idea. Come to think of it, I've spent a lot of time on extended camping and hiking trips and cant come up with a memory or picture when my skin wasn't at its best then.

Also: that microbiome could be include yeasts, which also naturally live on the skin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think more effort is needed to understand the relationship with skin conditions and the families of bacteria, fungi, etc on our skin. Antifungal drugs, such as Ketoconazole are known to cause acne in some people. I suspect it isn't causing cysts, but that killing off fungus, makes for a huge opportunity for bacteria. For some reason certain fungi cause the skin to grow faster, clogging pores with dead skin. Similar stories here about killing off bacteria to help with infected pores.

<comment><AUTHOR> Someone else mentioned this here. Like I said there, I really think the same way. Not just for acne, but other dermatitis conditions are really not understood.

So how do you get back a good balance of healthy bacteria/fungus on your skin? Rub some dirt on your face?

<comment><USER8> Other people, preferably without skin conditions. I used the traditional approach. It's anecdotal, but I've noticed a correlation over the years.

<comment><AUTHOR> You know what's interesting, and perhaps a cruel fate, is that teenagers, and maybe even children, with worse skin likely get less skin-to-skin contact with other teenagers, family, etc., and perhaps further inhibiting their healthy biome/immune system later in life in a phenomenon that is not dissimilar to how Amish children's increased exposure to bacteria positively develops their immune systems. Someone should publish research on this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's funny that literally every comment in this thread claims to have solved the problem. But every single solution is different.

<comment><USER10> Except the ones who didnt solve it, but have tried every option so far mentioned, and not mentioned including eastern-european village-methods of egg yolk mixed with honey and special bark from some tree, and just yawn and keep on procastrinating.

<comment><USER11> Just raw honey helped for both me and my brother, after suffering for a decade with acne, came across this thread in reddit, and it helped.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/16t0n4/bad_acne_befor...](https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/16t0n4/bad_acne_before_and_after_i_put_raw_honey_on_my/)

<comment><USER12> Specifically propolis, which is pretty good for feeding specific kinds of skin bacteria.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Had persistent mild acne for a long time. Had chemical peels, used antibiotics, BP, SA, removed dairy, didn't touch my face, fasted, used cleanser and oil-free moisturizer, etc. Kinda helped, but not really.

So I stopped using all products. Only water. Face got better over the next few weeks. I also stopped caring too much. About anything in life. Long story short, it was a multi-year self-development process that culminated that summer, but essentially I became much more relaxed and secure with myself.

Have had clear skin ever since, and I feel great.

</comment><comment><USER14> I had chronic acne for the entirety of my teen years and even into my 20's. I tried all sorts of things. Benzoyl Peroxide, Salicylic Acid, various mail- order subscription kits (you know the ones). Nothing worked.

I ended up getting rid of it after I went to a dermatologist that recommended I wash my face daily with Cetaphil face wash (available at just about any grocery or drug store). I also completely stopped using any and all hair products.

No hair gel. No hair spray. Nothing. Just washed my hair every morning with Head and Shoulders shampoo and rinsed, lathered up the cetaphil and applied all over my face. Let it sit for half a minute or so, then rinse. Blow dry and water for styling.

Acne solved.

Since then, I have shared this technique with a number of other people, and they were all able to solve their acne issues the same way.

I still get the occasional flare up every once in a blue moon, and I've noticed a direct correlation to whenever I eat a lot of ice cream or drink milk (even though I have been tested and don't have milk allergies). I'm not sure how it's possible, but if I drink a glass of whole milk, I can reliably count on getting at least 3 zits in the next week, after months of absolutely zero skin problems. So there is definitely something going on there.

<comment><USER15> Milk and acne have a relationship: [https://nutritionfacts.org/video/the-acne- promoting-effects-...](https://nutritionfacts.org/video/the-acne-promoting- effects-of-milk/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Going paleo did a trick for me. Looking back, a was eating such amounts of shitty food, that I am very fortunate to end up being pretty healthy at all

</comment><comment><USER17> I had severe acne for many years. I tried a lot of different things, but I discovered that I had a personal trigger - if I ate a lot of carbs and fats together combined with irregularity of my bowel movements, I would break out. So I basically cut out sugar and took steps to make myself as regular as possible. Acne completely disappeared. I didn't really lose weight (I was never fat) and I didn't really get too much healthier since I still eat a lot of "non-sugary" junk food.

But even now, around the holidays when there is lots of candy and unhealthy food, if I eat too much sugar and don't have regular bowel movements, the acne comes back like it was never gone. It's crazy, but I'm approaching middle age and this is still a thing.

And this isn't something that applies to other acne sufferers I've met, either. This is my trigger, they have theirs.

</comment><comment><USER18> Just to add another +1 to the anecdata points here, I had pretty bad acne well into my 20s, and experimented with a variety of measures for controlling it.

The biggest win was to stop using ordinary soap to clean my face. Once I switched to just rinsing it with plain water, 70% of my acne disappeared.

Some acne persisted around my nose and "T-zone" (the upper middle part of the face). I tried using a number of facial cleansers daily in the shower on just this area, and eventually found one that was far more effective than any other -- the brand is Aveeno and it has microbeads in it (which I heard are now illegal in the US).

I'm now typically acne free, but to this day if I binge eat greasy foods for a couple days (the biggest culprit is pizza, followed by burgers), my face will start to get oily and pimples will start to form around my nose/T-zone. Also if I'm out in the heat sweating a lot, a bit of acne forms after a few days. Aside from these extreme situations I have very little acne.

This all suggests to me that the face's microbiome plays a big role--too much soap or too much sweat are both capable of interfering with it, and too much oiliness probably blocks the pores. TL;DR more limited application of a milder cleanser seemed to be the biggest win for me.

This experience led me to be judicious with soaps and other cleansers on the rest of my body as well--the stinky bits like armpits get soaped up and cleaned daily, but I pretty much just rinse the rest of my body in the shower unless I've been doing hard physical labor or something. My skin's very healthy and people say I smell good so it seems to be working.

<comment><USER19> I have a similar reaction to excessively binging on greasy (also high sugar) foods like pizza.

A solution I found that almost always prevents the greasy food acne effect, is l-lysine. I'll take ~1,000mg or so if I eg eat a bunch of pizza. No idea why it works exactly, there's speculation that it aids the skin's defense against acne. Another option that also works but is more potent, is a low dose of vitamin A, which reduces oil production for some people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I had moderate / server acne in my late teens (25 years ago now)

Benzyl Peroxide - no effect apart from making skin on face very dry

Daily Erythromycin (oral antibiotic) for months and months - no effect. (I dread to think what havoc that pointlessly wreaked on my microbiome at the time)

Roaccutane - complete cure within weeks HOWEVER in hindsight this coincided with an unusual period of depression, so was quite alarmed to see the reports of suicide risk more recently. That was not mentioned when prescribed, probably before there was evidence.

One thing that's guaranteed to make me a bit spotty, even in my mid forties is a sugar/chocolate binge, so for me the finger definitely points at sugar.

<comment><USER21> Similarly in my mid-40s any substantial amount of 'milk' or white chocolate, or cocoa-based drinks and cakes, will retrigger.

Proper dark chocolate is fine, though possibly because it is eaten in smaller quantities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Over time, in my case, I've seen that there's a certain threshold for eating (refined) sugar. Once I go past that, flare-ups start.

After years of trying this/that (including UV), tetracycline was the first thing that helped -a lot-. So there's an infectious component. Sebacious blockage (humidity is one factor) followed by infection seems a likely culprit.

I've also noticed something I've never seen mentiond: facial eruptions are often symmetrical on the horizontal. Maybe that's hygiene-related.

Acne sells a lot of product; maybe that's why there's been little resolution (apart from treating the symptoms instead of the cause) in decades.

<comment><USER23> antibiotics usually help - once. They also nuke a lot of things with them. And I recall a study showing they literally make you dumber - although I'm not certain on that.

I think acne has been 'solved' with isotretinoin mostly

<comment><USER24> Antibiotics make you dumber?

I think I need a source for that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Whilst living in hotels a few years back, I experimented with the provided moisturiser as aftershave. I soon noticed that rubbing any excess on my face reduced the number of spots I had, and now I apply it daily and get no spots.

Not applying it for a single day has a >50% chance of having spots appear. My hypothesis is it adds a mechanical barrier to my pores. The paper suggests various environmental factors might be behind it, so reduced exposure to anything airborne could be related.

Using moisturiser daily is certainly something that would have shocked my (more closed-minded) younger self - not being something that 'real men' would do.

<comment><USER26> Completely agree. The only post-shower routine I have is to put a pea-sized amount of _whatever_ skin lotion is available (ideally not oily, the hotel ones are usually perfect), and just apply it on my face. If I don't do it, I feel my skin stretch and get very dry.

Another thing I've been trying is after shaving, put a first layer of high quality Aloe Vera gel. Then once it starts drying out and stretch the skin (usually 60-120 seconds), then put the moisturizing lotion. Good results so far.

Why? No idea, just felt right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I think the microbiome on the skin and face is a large factor.

Controlling it is not as straightforward as a 'quick-fix', as it literally has a life of its own.

For me, the fix was wiping my face only with cotton face-wipes and water, and avoiding soap. (To be clear, I use soap everywhere else, but just use face- wipes on my face).

I actually came across this quite accidentally whilst camping. At the time, I thought it strange that an apparent lack of skin amenities made my skin better.

My theory is that disruption to the microbiome is a large factor, caused by detergents affecting the skin, and diet affecting the gut (which we know connects to other systems and microbiomes).

<comment><USER26> I avoid wiping my face at all, with any products. The only thing I do is rinse it with warm water whilst in the shower and follow up with a tiny amount of whatever moisturizer is available after the shower. Used to have acne as a kid, I don't anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I've had acne since I was a teen. I've tried every face cream and acne soap on the market. After 30 years of acne, I've finally found something that works - adapelene gel. It's a retinoid, a type of chemical related to vitamin A. My acne is a vitamin deficiency, but no amount of supplements would have fixed it as it's genetic deficiency in my skin. Benzoyl peroxide works well on red, inflamed acne but not on deep cystic acne. It's because they have different causes.

<comment><USER23> That retinoids (Vitamin A-like) work (be it isotrotinoine or topical creams) don't have to mean that a vitamin deficiency is the cause. Vitamin A and retinoids have very specific effects on skin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> My understanding is that acne is correlated with milk consumption - after all, milk is meant to grow a calf at an inhuman rate (quickly doubling its mass).

Relevant video: [https://nutritionfacts.org/video/the-acne-promoting- effects-...](https://nutritionfacts.org/video/the-acne-promoting-effects-of- milk/)

</comment><comment><USER29> I have struggled with this for all my life (m/37). I have methodically tried all medications mentioned, and although most work they are just too invasive, like the benzozyl peroxide and facial antibiotics. Four weeks ago I started trying an enzyme solution to apply to your face by a Dutch/Swiss biotech startup. I have seen an immediate decrease and wold recommend it for everybody to try: [https://www.gladskin.com/en/acne](https://www.gladskin.com/en/acne)

</comment><comment><USER30> Avoiding stress and sugar was what solved the issue for me.

</comment><comment><USER31> This study by Loren Cordain, the antropoligist founder of the paleo-diet, is flawed in several ways. Isolated tribes lead completely different lives from Westernerns. They also often share very little genetic material with us. E.g two neighbouring African tribes can be genetically more separated than all white people in the whole world.

Regarding acne and diet, here are two quotes from two meta studies:

"We did not realize how daunting it would be to write an article dedicated to making sense of the relationship of acne to foods. It turns out that there are no meta-analyses, randomized controlled clinical studies, or well-designed scientific trials that follow evidence-based guidelines for providing solid proof in dealing with this issue." [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2836431/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2836431/)

"Despite the inundation of epidemiologic studies, mostly of unsatisfactory quality, and the abundance of beliefs and perceptions among acne patients about the role of diet in the pathogenesis of acne, there is a paucity of reliable information. In the few studies that have been undertaken, no specific foods (including fatty foods and chocolate) have been identified as causative factors. Yet, the question of whether common perceptions and beliefs prove to be fact or misconception is more than an academic issue. It is of importance due to the practical implications of these beliefs for acne management.

Alas, after reviewing the relevant published data, we can conclude that insufficient serious effort has been invested in investigating these questions, which are prevalent and consistent across different cultures. At present, we are bereft of reliable answers based on scientific evidence. We hope that the day when we will be able to knowledgeably advise our acne patients on the role of nutrition in relation to acne etiology is not too far away." [http://centrespringmd.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/The- Rol...](http://centrespringmd.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/The-Role-of-Diet- in-Acne.pdf)

Both mention Cordain's study and explains why it is no good. If you believe diet is causing acne, you might as well believe in homeopathy and healing too. All the anecdata in the world cannot change that.

If you think X (eating "bad" food) causes Y (acne), then observing (not X)and(not Y) doesn't prove anything because there is no PREDICTION involved. However, there is an obvious way to try and test the causality; DO X and observe Y. Eat as much pizza and chocolate and drink as much milk and soda you want. If you after t days have a face full of acne then CONGRATULATIONS! You have done something thousands of dermatologists have been unable to - <USER2> demonstrated a causative link between diet and acne. It would truly be a huge breakthrough and you would have revolutionized the science of dermatology.

I find it very odd that, despite all the anecdotes, not a single person has conducted any such experiment.</comment>


RIP Rudin - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Walter_Rudin&oldid=363394862

<comment><AUTHOR> I can't find any non wikipedia source for this news on the web though a friend of mine in the math department at Johns Hopkins University says that his dept chair sent out an email broadcast.

(For the uninitated, Walter Rudin is a distinguished mathematician. He wrote some Analysis texts that have been standard undergrad reading material for decades.)

</comment><comment><USER2> I never forgot his wonderful book Principles of Mathematical Analysis, which I read from cover to cover as a grad student in the late 70s.</comment>


Writing a Business Plan - <AUTHOR> Hi, In a very early stages of forming my idea and write a business plan. Any recommendation on easy platform to work with? ready plans formats etc. <comment> tonic-music Yes, [http://bizplan.com](http://bizplan.com).</comment>


Adaptive Parallel Computation with CUDA Dynamic Parallelism - <AUTHOR> http://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/introduction-cuda-dynamic-parallelism/

<comment><USER4> Nvidia is YEARS ahead of the competition. They're playing a whole different game.

<comment><USER5> I recently switched from CUDA to OpenCL, so I could use AMD's cards which are (imo) much better value. So yes, Nvidia are playing a different game - <USER2> prices.

I can see why many people prefer them though, if they have the cash - <USER3> up AMD's cards on Linux is a real pain with drivers, profiler, etc - in that department Nvidia are miles ahead (whilst AMD and their customers are in the 7th circle of hell).

Hopefully the competition will keep spurring them both on.

<comment><USER6> So when will OpenCL provide the same support for integrated C++ and Fortran development, on the same source file, CUDA allows for?

Only now is OpenCL having the first steps with language agnostic GPGPU bytcode and C++ support.

That premium price pays off in developer productivity.

<comment><USER7> > So when will OpenCL provide the same support for integrated C++ and Fortran > development, on the same source file, CUDA allows for?

Pretty much any language that has an llvm backend should be easy to port to OpenCL now that we have SPIR.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Where can i find more things like "the Do lectures"? - <AUTHOR>

I recently came across http://www.dolectures.co.uk/ , perhaps on HN (I don't remember..) and found most of them really interesting. I thought they were a very contrasting and interesting group of people and some of them brilliant in there own simple ways.<p>I was wondering if there were there were some other things similar,talks or writings alike, that have influenced you somehow and affected the way you think about things? <comment><USER2> Based on the url a few of you may have seen this. <http://ycombinator.com/munger.html> I found that this talk affected me. I printed it out, I re-read it every once and a while. The thought process is so clear, I got the same feeling reading it as when I learn something basic and useful, that I knew I was missing.

Also, I found this useful: [https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study- of-intellig...](https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of- intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/psychology-of-intelligence- analysis/index.html) There is a pdf as well. A good roundup and reminder of what it takes to think analytically about non-technical topics.</comment>


From Freemium to Paid, to the cover of Hacker Monthly. The Bidsketch story. - <AUTHOR> http://thestartupfoundry.com/2011/03/21/from-freemium-to-paid-to-the-cover-of-hacker-monthly-the-bidsketch-story/

<comment><USER2> I actually found the related article more interesting about how his conversion numbers shot up when he dropped the free plan.

[http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2010/08/18/why-free-plans- dont-...](http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2010/08/18/why-free-plans-dont-work/)

However I always wonder, is having a good chunk of free users in the beginning a necessity to help spread word of mouth and get bloggers talking which improves your google rank down the road.

</comment><comment><USER3> I agree, the related article adds a lot. Having free users is only cool if you can both; afford it and have it add to your bottom line. But I think the old- fashioned idea of receiving income for delivering value, should make a prompt comeback.</comment>


Money as Debt - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy-fD78zyvI

<comment><USER2> Uhh, dude? Wrong forum. You aren't helping your cause by spamming here.

[FWIW I'm an Austrian too, but the hyperbolic video title "Corrupt Banking System - Cartels Robbing the Public" makes the PBS-like history of banking look frightening.]

EDIT (after watching all 50 minutes). Holy Fscking Stuff: about half way through it changes from an explanation and critique of fractional reserve banking into a Marxist rant about historical inevitability and sustainable development.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've got no cause, other than to share an interesting presentation of how banking works. Unfortunately the bias does detract (e.g.: the title.) And it's much worse in the later parts...

<comment><USER2> "worse in the later parts?" The message arc is "the capitalists are right, so let's try communism instead." Do yourself a favor - grab a copy of "The Road to Serfdom" and spend less time on the internets.</comment></comment></comment>