Show HN: My Turbo Pascal compiler in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://www.teamten.com/lawrence/projects/turbo_pascal_compiler/demo/ <comment><USER2> Your project is great, Pascal is really underrated language.

I looked at parser (hand written are best), this part spotted my eyes [https://github.com/lkesteloot/turbopascal/blob/master/Parser...](https://github.com/lkesteloot/turbopascal/blob/master/Parser.js#L487) \- IMHO order of checking whatever node is identifier or not have to be reversed. Now, such simple program:

program Test;

procedure foo; begin end;

begin foo := 10; end.

produces error 'Error: can't cast from 70 to 76 ("10", line 8)' \- whatever this means. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Well the error message is confusing (it's trying to cast from an integer (type 70) to a procedure (type 76)), but it's correct to fail to compile. But yeah I'm not sure that my logic there is altogether correct. I re-wrote it a few times as I found new cases that weren't correctly handled. Specifically, I'm not sure whether the type of the identifier should guide the parsing. It's similar to the "x*y" ambiguity in parsing C (multiplication or declaration of pointer variable y).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Very nice indeed.

It was a pity that C took over the PC world as it did, Turbo Pascal could do everything better than it, including being safe by default, modules, OO.

Why Borland, why!

<comment><USER4> I never liked Pascal verbosity back in school but I loved C right away... Maybe it is just a matter of taste?

<comment><USER3> I never understood the complaints about verbosity in Pascal languages and the escape to C, Perl and friends.

Why not use APL then?

Programs are to be read, not to be write-only.

<comment><USER5> Pascal verbosity does not add information, but noise. As humans, we recognize symbols and structures better than words. {} as delimiters make much more sense than BEGIN/END.

<comment><USER6> I always thought there was a use for something like RATFOR for Pascal; maybe Ratscal? It could have left most of the verbosity in place, but replaced the BEGINs and ENDs with { and }, and that would have made it an almost perfect language from my point of view.

<comment><USER7> Nimrod is a lot like a modernized Pascal with a Python-like syntax.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Very nice! Now I've got to see if my old floppies are still readable.

While in college, I got myself an oddball MS-DOS computer. My dad read an article in the business pages about this guy who had the audacity to market a complete software product for 39 bucks. Dad didn't know anything about computers, except that there was growing interest in programming, so he got Turbo Pascal version 1 for me as an Xmas present. That was the original version, and I stuck with Turbo Pascal through successive revisions until 1994 when I discovered HyperCard on an Apple Mac.

In my view, among the strengths of TP, its manuals shouldn't be overlooked. Each version came with a relatively slim yet complete manual that a person could actually read. Of course it helped that the target platform was relatively simple too.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, the manuals were great. (Though I bought them again on eBay for this project and they actually contained a lot of errors!) But also the floppy came with sample programs, and I learned most of Pascal from those.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I forwarded this to Anders Hijlsberg [1]. It'd be fun if he commented on this here.

I cut my programming teeth on Pascal and Turbo Pascal. This is hugely nostalgic for me!

[1][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg)

<comment><USER10> Maybe he will rewrite it in TypeScript?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Pascal, my childhood love. I spent so many days in TP 7.1 coding games with the graph library!

At some point I made a GUI for DOS, similar to Windows Explorer (with a desktop, icons, start menu, context menus and obligatory clock! :) ).

I called it Winnie. Then my 386 died and I lost the code :/

Thanks for the memories!

</comment><comment><USER12> OMG!!! That was my favorite TP. I learned to program using Turbo Pascal.

Congratulations on your work and thanks for the nostalgia!

<comment><USER13> Likewise!

I started in Basic then moved to Turbo Pascal so I could compile my code & distribute it - mostly on 5.25" floppies as cover disks on magazines.

Later by uploading them to BBSes via a 9600bps modem (yes 9.6Kbps was super quick in those days)!

<comment><USER14> Pretty much the same here. I purchased Borland TP5 in high school which was the first version with "OOP" but I think we were using versions 3 & 4 at school which were also nice.

The equivalent of WordPress back then was Telegard which was written in Pascal. The sourcecode got loose which resulted in several spin-off "Telegard hacks" and many of the "elite" BBS where essentially themed versions of that original Telegard.

Then I heard Pascal morphed into Delphi? I never made it to Delphi. By 1994 I was into Javascript, Java, Rexx and best of all the opposite sex ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Seriously cool. But I can't imagine ever using it ;-) Half the fun of TP was all the libraries, like to interface Souldblaster, modems, etc. All that stuff is long gone.

</comment><comment><USER6> Very slick. I'm impressed at the compilation speed, given that it's in JavaScript and I'm on a slow machine. Pascal always was good for that — and you've made me miss it.

</comment><comment><USER15> Great work, well done! Pascal was the second language I learned, after Basic.

I'm interested in studying the code and possibly replicating it for the purpose of learning about how compilers work. Could you give a general overview of the components, or steps you took to implement them? Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! The code is on GitHub: [https://github.com/lkesteloot/turbopascal](https://github.com/lkesteloot/turbopascal)

It's a two-pass compiler. The first pass runs the code through the Stream, Lexer, and Parser classes to generate a parse tree (with type information). The second pass generates bytecode using the Compiler class. The compiled bytecode is then handed to Machine to execute. Start in IDE.js in the _run() function. Also go into turbo.css and comment out the "display:none" line in the .debug-output block. That'll let you see the parse tree and generated bytecode.

<comment><USER16> > see the parse tree and generated bytecode

Make that a feature!

<comment><AUTHOR> Done! Try the hidden "X" command.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Nice, presumably you take the x86 emulator from yesterday, and boot it with a copy of the TurboPascal disk?

Took me a good 30 minutes to remember how to write hello world in PASCAL :-) And I admit I forgot about the period on the End statement.

<comment><USER18> I found more details here, including a link to the source code:

[http://www.teamten.com/lawrence/projects/turbo_pascal_compil...](http://www.teamten.com/lawrence/projects/turbo_pascal_compiler/)

Well done!

<comment><USER17> That is awesome, somewhere I've got a pretty printer I developed for TurboPASCAL. I tried to sell all the rights to Borland in exchange for a enough cash to buy a decent oscilloscope (I have a history of 'consulting for toys' :-)and they weren't going for it. In hindsight (much later) I realized I should have set the price really high, let them try a demo with a non- refundable deposit of 10% of the price, and then feigning sadness when they decided not to proceed :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Boy, does that bring back memories. Turbo Pascal was just plain wonderful software. As for Pascal, I never got over the array length being part of the array's type.

<comment><USER20> I remember you could define an array to be indexed by an enumerated type which was nice. I haven't seen that done elsewhere.

<comment><USER3> At least in Ada, Modula-2, Modula-3 it is also possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Nice! I still have an Atari Portfolio in my kit, running Turbo C 1.0 .. those were the days! Everything you needed to rule the world in a single .EXE. Or .. was it a .COM? 64k should've been enough for everyone .. ;)

</comment><comment><USER22> /* set overflow to auto */ #screen { overflow: auto; }

<comment><AUTHOR> :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The examples compile super fast. How long did it use to take?

<comment><USER23> ..Turbo Pascal was sort of shocking, since it basically did everything that IBM Pascal did, only it ran in about 33K of memory including the text editor. This was nothing short of astonishing. Even more astonishing was the fact that you could compile a small program in less than one second. It's as if a company you had never heard of introduced a clone of the Buick LeSabre which could go 1,000,000 MPH and drive around the world on so little gasoline than an ant could drink it without getting sick.

[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000023.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000023.html)

I miss Joel's writing!

<comment><USER24> It was only shocking to people used to complicated behemoths of multi-pass compilers or complicated optimizing compilers with expensive internal representations.

Turbo Pascal really mostly "only" does things the way Wirth used to: As simple as possible. Wirth's languages are all designed for single pass compilation with direct code generation, and if you write your compilers that way, they will be fast. It is very, very hard not to make them fast that way.

His compiler textsbooks, all the way back to "Compilerbay" in 1977 (using PL/0 as the language) included full source code for compilers following that style, and they're so small the entire compilers fit in a few handful pages.

(EDIT: just to make clear: I _do_ admire Turbo Pascal - I used it quite a lot, but main the genius of Turbo Pascal was to pick the Wirth way of doing compilers and integrate it with a simple "IDE" \- a large part of the amazing impression of Turbo Pascal was that you did not have to write your code to disk, exit the editor, run a compiler etc. but could do it all in one)

<comment><USER25> I remember that differently: on Z80 CPU machines, UCSD Pascal was slow. It compiled to the p-code (it was both an "operating system and compiler" and they wanted it portable). On the first PC's (8088 CPU), Microsoft's Pascal was slow. It produced obj files. Turbo Pascal was lightning fast on both. It had to be implemented contrary to beliefs common then: it was itself written in asm, it was never just a compiler but the editor and compiler at once, kept everything in memory if it could, produced the pure native code processor specific and never produced obj files.

<comment><USER24> UCSD Pascal was slow because the compiler was written in Pascal and compiled to p-code itself (the source is available: [http://techtransfer.universityofcalifornia.edu/NCD/19327.htm...](http://techtransfer.universityofcalifornia.edu/NCD/19327.html) ).

It was not a good benchmark. It was prevalent because it was trivial to port, not because it was good.

(Note that UCSD Pascal was based on a part of Wirths research groups "porting kit" \- their intent was not for p-code to be used for production systems, but as an easy way of getting a Pascal compiler running on a new platform to be able to then use the target platform while retargeting the code generator)

> It had to be implemented contrary to beliefs common then: it was itself > written in asm,

That was nothing out of the ordinary at the time, though not something Wirth himself did, as a large part of his mission was to teach the development of compilers.

But compilers for small systems were often written in asm at the time. It'd not be very viable to write compilers in high level languages for a C64 or other home computers, for example, yet there were plenty of compilers for small systems. When I wrote my first compilers on the C64 and a bit later on the Amiga, it never even occurred to me to write them in a high level language until a few years later (incidentally when I got HiSoft Pascal - an integrated Pascal environment for the Amiga very much in the spirit of Turbo Pascal)

> it was never just a compiler but the editor and compiler at once, kept > everything in memory if it could, produced the pure native code processor > specific and never produced obj files.

That's _technically_ true, though the compiler that became Turbo Pascal was actually originally a separate, stand alone compiler.

Combining the compiler with the editor _was_ fairly uncommon and certainly innovative. When Kahn at Borland decided he wanted an environment like that, though, he went out and bought an existing, standalone, commercial compiler, from Anders Hejlsberg, and brought him to Borland.

Producing pure native code on the other hand was not unusual - UCSD's p-System was an aberration in that respect, and it's greatest lasting legacy was in inspiring VM based systems; e.g. Bill Joy has cited it as one of the inspirations behind the JVM. Not producing object files was also quite common - for many small systems there was no tradition of object files at all, as they were too small for separate compilation to make much sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Nice, no Compile option though? Is it an interpreter? I tried a Hello, World, and the (Input,Output) after the program name choked it. Nice job!

<comment><AUTHOR> The "Compile" option was, I think, for when you wanted to generate a .COM or .EXE. So I don't support that. The "Run" command does compile and run, though.

<comment><USER27> If I remember right it was COM only until TP4.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is cool. I remember having this on DOS in the late 80's. Never really got into Pascal though.

</comment><comment><USER29> Yay, I don't have to use ctrl-K codes like the original TP3 editor!

</comment><comment><USER30> severely cool.

-bowerbird</comment>


Ask HN: Examples of short and ethical privacy policies - <AUTHOR> I am writing a privacy policy for a community website. I want it to be concise and to only use plain English. I want to highlight that no external tracking services are used and why this is important. Are there any good examples out there that I could use as a template? <comment><USER2> Usual advise is not to copy but for inspiration I kind of like this [https://volafile.org/privacy](https://volafile.org/privacy)</comment>


Discover the best of PHP - <AUTHOR> http://www.abcphp.com abcphp.com is a social news website made for people to discover and share PHP related content from anywhere on the Internet, by submitting links and stories, and voting and commenting on submitted links and stories. <comment><USER2> I'm still looking...

</comment><comment><USER3> you posted this one before (only without the www.)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> abcphp.com - Discover the best of PHP</comment>


Show HN: Komet – Native commit editor for macOS - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/zorgiepoo/Komet <comment><USER3> Do you know GitX? It's perfect for quick git commits with line-by-line staging and unstaging.

[0] Up to date fork: [https://rowanj.github.io/gitx/](https://rowanj.github.io/gitx/) [1] Original: [http://gitx.frim.nl/](http://gitx.frim.nl/)

<comment><USER4> Last commit: "Nov 10, 2014" [https://github.com/rowanj/gitx/commits/master](https://github.com/rowanj/gitx/commits/master)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5>
        > Not being stuck in a save-and-close model, applying a
        > commit takes only one action

Uh... `:wq`?

<comment><AUTHOR> "<escape> colon w q <return>" is _too_ many 'actions' for me personally (and anything that needs me to reach to escape is really asking for it), and I sometimes even mess that combination up (I used vim before using Komet). I learned about :x recently which is only just slightly better, but not in my muscle memory yet. Then one may need to decide when to use q! or cq to discard..

I also prefer using a native editor and am more productive with spell checking and auto correction, surprisingly.

edit: I'm also not a user that uses the keyboard _all_ the time. After using Komet, I am surprised how often I actually used the mouse to hit commit instead.

<comment><USER6> I use Vim for regular development and has mapped <Space> to colon in normal mode, so for me it feels very much like a single action to just tap those three keys in quick succession with different fingers on one hand then tapping <Enter> with the other hand. It's like executing a fighting-game combo, the muscle memory makes it feel like a single action even though you're hitting several keys.

But it's arguably true that Vim is the wrong choice as the default commit editor since the majority of users probably will not feel very comfortable in that environment. In hindsight, nano would probably have been the better choice for default.

However, since I'm already a heavy Vim user (and have the vim-fugitive plugin installed), I would never go for anything else.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have invoked '<escape>:wq<return>' many times; it should be in my muscle memory but it's still something I get wrong on occasion. I can definitely see <space> being better than colon (it gets rid of shift!), although I still have beef with escape. I don't want to play the fighting game :).

What about canceling commits? Sometimes you want to quit without saving, and other times you want to exit with a failure status (which has little application elsewhere). A "commit" editor should be smart enough to decide which to do under a single action.

I acknowledge this isn't intended for those heavily invested in their CLI editor of choice.

<comment><USER7> Btw you can cancel a commit if when issuing :wq the whole file is only composed of either blank lines or lines beginning with #

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, but why would one remember that if they could just do :q! regardless if there's new unsaved content or not.

Relatedly, why would one remember to do :q! or :cq depending on if there's pre-existing content if they can just cancel in Komet and have it do the right thing ;)

<comment><USER5>
        >  they can just cancel in Komet

What is `:q!` if not "just cancel[ling]"?

I'll take four keystrokes over <move hand to mouse>, <move mouse to button>, <click button> (and a debatable <move hand back to keyboard>). Even if you count that as 3v4, the keystrokes are quicker than the mouse movements.

I get that not everyone wants to deal with vim, and may use a GUI editor for other stuff - but for something as small and specific as git commits, I really don't understand why you'd want to install something new; for what, a button?

<comment><AUTHOR> :q! quits without saving the text file which only aborts a commit if the message is empty, meaning it's not sufficient if the message has pre-existing content when you open it.

And you largely misunderstood. Komet has a shortcut for making the commit (command return). The mouse is just a supplemental possibility....

Having a more convenient shortcut is not the only reason I use Komet.

[edit]: and to address for "something as small as commits" \-- well, I write commits pretty often. So it matters a great deal to me to have an aiding tool, and definitely not for a task I'd consider 'insignificant'

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Isn't "macOS 10.10" an incorrect name? It's OS X up to 10.11, and then macOS from 10.12 onwards.

Regardless, this app is quite nice.

<comment><USER9> You're absolutely right, but I think that saying "requires OS X 10.10 - <USER2> 10.12," or "requires OS X 10.10 - 10.11, or macOS 10.12 or higher" sound weird.

<comment><USER8> I would simply say "requires OS X 10.10 or later"

<comment><AUTHOR> Apple docs have references to eg: "macOS 10.8+" regarding SDK version. This may still be up in the air, but I predict it will be natural eventually to just use macOS everywhere.

<comment><USER8> Wow really? I've never seen that in user facing information (eg they kept using "Mac OS X" for older versions when they dropped the "Mac" a few years ago

<comment><AUTHOR> I was referring to technical developer documentation, but I don't think user facing info will be that much revealing until after 10.12 is released.

I say that I predict using macOS will be "natural", although that doesn't necessarily mean it'll be "technically correct" for older versions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Not sure how that is better than rendering the editor in the terminal. It's not like you can use that terminal for anything else anyways because it's now waiting for that GUI editor to close.

<comment><AUTHOR> On the contrary, I've found keeping the terminal history visible while making commits to be a useful reference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Doesn't macos have vim then?

</comment><comment><USER12> What don't just use GitKraken?

</comment><comment><USER13> editor = subl -n -w

<comment><AUTHOR> Tried this before making Komet but from what I tested I found this to be slow (stuck in save-and-close model) and obstructive (can bring other sublime documents active).</comment></comment>


Exploring AirBnb Data in Boston - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@vql/13-boats-and-a-castle-airbnb-in-boston-1dad9a92039a <comment><AUTHOR> Developer/Author here - I built a data analysis tool (it's like IPython notebook minus the Python!). This is my first published analysis using the tool.

Short demo video [https://getvql.com/demos/boston_airbnb_reviews.html](https://getvql.com/demos/boston_airbnb_reviews.html)

<comment><USER2> If you made this as advertising for your tool, you may want to show that it can do more than simple column charts.

And from a product standpoint, "Ipython without the Python" is _Excel_ , which your video corroborates.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm working on some analysis showing more of the functionality.

It's like Excel connected to your Postgres! A common use case though is for people to use VQL to filter/aggregate the data and then export to Excel.</comment></comment></comment>


DIGG and Reddit Killer from Former Amazon Engineer - <AUTHOR> http://findory.com/ <comment><USER2> Reddit is still good by me if we can just get the political stuff out of there. I don't mind a few good stories here and there, but it's become completely overpowering, especially in the Hot list. If you use programming.reddit.com you're in good shape. Still good stories, and any submission you make can still get some traction if people like it. General stories though get clobbered by the relentless Iraq/Iran/Bush/Anna- Nicole/Cheney/RandomGayPastor element.

<comment><USER3> tagging is coming, saith the founders... that should solve a lot of those problems

<comment><USER4> It's starting to look like they got lucky once, and won't be finding any more ground-breaking features. I'm just saying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> While I agree that personalization is the way to go, I think that most users would like more control over personalization rather than rely on some mysterious collaborative filtering algorithm. Moreover, people read blogs for a reason: they actually want to see all the postings from those blogs, not potentially interesting postings from unknown blogs. Consequently, instead of having a collaborative filtering algorithm, one might use a social network approach. Moreover, rather than recommending individual posts, the user would instead build a set of trusted sources (users and/or feeds) via the social network.

</comment><comment><USER6> Isn't development on Findory suspended? (http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/01/14/findory-to-deadpool/)

<comment><USER7> "the online news space is grossly oversaturated. It will take a significant technology step forward for a new startup to get traction."

Seemed to be room for something like news.YC (yah, I know it's a much smaller niche). It's the social networking side that findory is missing, which, BTW, is why it's cool, but not in the same category as digg and reddit. No user generated content that I could see...

<comment><USER4> I would say that reddit *created* it's startup oriented niche to a large degree - Particularly for college and maybe even highschool guys who know computers well but never seriously considered starting a company so soon.

In this regard I think of the early reddit and now n.yc more of as clubs, like the acm club I used to attend, than another news site. What really makes this club great is it's members and what they come here expecting.

Why is the linked news site failing? Right off, the front page design is a show-stopper. I can hardly force myself to get past that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I can't seem to find a link for follow-up discussions, which is a big part of why I go on reddit.</comment>


Find Your Species Name on Darwin's Birthday - <AUTHOR> http://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/792164 <comment><USER2> Cool! I got a frog called Rana Johni after typing John.</comment>


Shorting Home Equity Mezzanine Tranches (2007) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://static1.squarespace.com/static/56e34fd9e707eb512223f372/56e89b00fd211959539d959d/56e89b02fd211959539d9669/1458084610683/2007_Subprime_Shorting-Home-Equity-Mezzanine-Tranches.pdf?format=original <comment><USER2> I was involved with similar trades at JPMorgan and Citi. Investment bankers gave these presentations to hedge funds to convince them to short the housing market. Then, they created a CDO, called the hedge fund the "manager" and tried to dump the bonds on Asian and Middle Eastern investors.

<comment><USER3> > tried to dump the bonds

How did that go?

<comment><USER4> Pretty good, in actuality. Europe got it way worse than the United States.

<comment><USER5> More details about this, if you can?

<comment><USER6> Ctrl+F "Dusseldorf"

[http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/08/the-big-short-germany- and-...](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/08/the-big-short-germany-and-toxic- financial-products/)

<comment><USER5> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Would this have convinced you to short home equity mezzanine tranches in 2007? I'd like to think I'd have had the foresight to see what was coming if someone was pitching it to me like this. If I'm being honest however I'm not sure how convinced I'd have been by these slides.

<comment><USER8> > I'd like to think I'd have had the foresight to see what was coming if > someone was pitching it to me like this.

Well, you can test yourself, short ideas are abound in these uncertain market conditions. It's surprisingly hard to have clarity while things are happening, even if they are obvious in hindsight. For example, do you believe you should

1\. Short restaurant equipment suppliers because up to 15% of restaurants could go out of business? [https://www.presciencepoint.com/research/research- archives/m...](https://www.presciencepoint.com/research/research- archives/middleby/)

2\. Short Chinese tech companies claiming to have exponential growth numbers in the wake of "The China Hustle" and Luckin Coffee? [https://citronresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/GSX- Te...](https://citronresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/GSX-Techedu-The- Most-Blatant-Chinese-Stock-Fraud-Since-2011.pdf)

3\. Short tangentially related healthcare companies trying to cash in on COVID test kits? [https://hindenburgresearch.com/scworx-evidence-points-to- its...](https://hindenburgresearch.com/scworx-evidence-points-to-its-massive- covid-19-test-deal-being-completely-bogus-price-target-back-to-2-25-or-lower/)

I believe at least one of these things will appear extremely obvious in hindsight ("duh, restaurants going out of business was a no-brainer").

<comment><USER9> I feel like one of the biggest opportunities in the 2007/8 housing market short was the speed at which it developed.

More specifically: glacially.

Up until the credit markets froze up, all the information was available, with time to digest and for anyone to act on it.

That's the most interesting thing about this presentation. I'm assuming this or similar was the one dramatized in _The Big Short_?

It's simply saying that something doesn't add up. Then laying out its case for the numbers that were added.

At a macro level, there isn't much complexity:

(1) Home price appreciation is strongly inversely correlated with default rate.

(2) CDO are created with sharp risk cliffs related to systemic default rate.

(3) Current home price appreciation + observed default rate + CDO pricing does not add up. Ergo, one of those things must be wrong.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, I think people knew it would eventually play out because of the marco, but for traders its important to figure out how to get the cheapest exposure to the short until it happens.

Even in the big short, they show the routes different traders took to get short exposure and all took various amounts of heat until it payed off.

Same is true now wrt to corporate bonds (or I should say was true, way more expensive now to short than it was say during the entire time of 2019), one know's they will go tits up, but getting the cheapest exposure will enable to either build the position with minimal/fixed draw down or sweat every bps move against you.

<comment><USER4> The Big Short covers it fairly well, but doesn't give Burry enough credit / blame. His crowning achievement wasn't in deducing the bonds were overvalued/fraudulent, it was in finding suckers to take the other side of the bet. This is alluded to in the casino with the Cornwall Capital guys, but was a real thing. Plenty of people wanted to make the moves they did, but had trouble finding outs.

<comment><USER11> I worked as a software developer for a subprime prop trading desk at a big bank from 2006 to 2009. Our two main RMBS traders were short from about 2005. They would get beat up every week in capital committee meetings, and were told "what is wrong with you guys, the guys on the dealer side are crushing it with this stuff".

Finally in 2008, these guys booked like $100 million in profits. But it didn't matter at all cause the dealer side lost $50 billion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Can you share the original source / how you found the document? Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> I've actually reposted this a couple times since I thought it was interesting and it never gained traction, so at this point I don't remember for sure how I originally came across it. A quick search shows this page has the same link and some more info: [http://www.scmessinacapital.com/blog/2015/04/where-can-i- see...](http://www.scmessinacapital.com/blog/2015/04/where-can-i-see-a-copy- of-greg-lippmanns-famous-2006-short-subprime-presentation-sent-from-deutsche- bank-to-hedge-funds)

So I suppose the context was probably that I had just watched The Big Short and was reading up on the topic some more haha.

<comment><USER13> It looks like an addendum to (or part of) "Wall Street & the Financial Crisis- Anatomy of a Financial Collapse"

[https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/PSI%20REPORT%20-%...](https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/PSI%20REPORT%20-%20Wall%20Street%20&%20the%20Financial%20Crisis- Anatomy%20of%20a%20Financial%20Collapse%20\(FINAL%205-10-11\).pdf)

Yep, there's a reference on page 289.

1119 2/2007 "Shorting Home Equity Mezzanine Tranches," Deutsche Bank Securities Inc.,

and there was an earlier version, from 2005.

1314 See, e.g., 2/2007 presentation, "Shorting Home Equity Mezzanine Tranches," prepared by Mr. Lippmann, DBSI_PSI_EMAIL01988773-845

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> On your site you have the brk reports back to 1965, but I think all are availalbe from public sources.

Here is 57 though 2012. If I'm mistaken and this looks like its from one of the books let me know and I'll take it down.

[https://send.firefox.com/download/9a64844c1321c00c/#aKJwkyJh...](https://send.firefox.com/download/9a64844c1321c00c/#aKJwkyJh6X6IUmva- PzxdQ)

Thanks for the share that is the subject of the post.

Edit for clarity: Early ones are Buffett Partnership, NOT brk.

</comment><comment><USER15> From what I gather, they're basically saying that the 10 year old housing boom is at an end now.

</comment><comment><USER16> If you want to see some crazy financials, you should go and look at the oil and energy sector right now.

<comment><USER17> why is that?</comment></comment>


Google: We Suck At SEO. Badly. - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/google-we-stink-at-seo-2010-3

<comment><USER2> Article says the first Google result when you google "search engine" is 5th place.

For the same search, Yahoo places itself as #1 and Google #2.

Bing's takes the old school award: #1 is Dogpile, #5 is Altavista. None of the big boys from today are in the top ten, not even Bing themselves. I like that, its like they've got a small ego.

</comment><comment><USER3> The reason this has been low on their priority list is that their organic SEO is amazing. Have you ever searched for a Google product and not found it on the first try?

Google is the one company in the world for which SEO doesn't matter, because they can change the rules at any time. A query for "google finance" that doesn't bring up google.com/finance as the first hit will be recognized by all internal search engineers as broken, and relative weights of signals (and hence rankings) will be changed accordingly. A little uptweak on organic SEO plus a little downtweak on premeditated SEO and voila.

This isn't even wrong, it's just the way it is.

</comment><comment><USER4> There's a helpful slideshow (viewable as one page) of Google's many mistakes.</comment>


Occupy Gezi - <AUTHOR> http://occupygezipics.tumblr.com/ Photos from protest against Turkish Government to show, people have the right to protest.<p>http://fakfukfon.wordpress.com/2013/05/31/atencionatencioattentionattention/ <comment><USER2> Photos from the protest against Turkish Government to show people have the right to protest.</comment>


Ask HN: The VC and the Geek.  Do VC's only care about 'management team'? - <AUTHOR>

My understanding, based on nothing but some reading, is that as an engineer, I have zero credibility when it comes to VC's.  They see me as something like a janitor or an electrician, or any other skilled craft.  "You need them, but which exact one you get doesn't really matter."
My understanding is that VC's don't invest in technology, or in engineers, they invest in management teams.  You need the resumes in your portfolio that have letters like 'MBA' on them, instead of letters like 'EE'.  I assume if your letters were 'PhD EE', that might compete with 'MBA' ... barely.
I have used this knowledge as an excuse not to even try to get VC money for any of my projects that currently languish in notebooks due to lack of capital.
So, my question here is ... Am I wrong? <comment><USER2> VCs invest in founders, not management teams. Some of the good ones have a strong preference for those founders to be engineers.

Most of the most successful VC investments have been backing very smart engineers. This pattern is not lost on them.

<comment><AUTHOR> citation please? While this is sweet kool-aid, and I like the taste a lot, this is in direct opposition to almost all VC websites that I have read.

I expected this answer, posting here. I WANT this answer. But I need more. I need convincing that the VC sites are wrong.

Here's links from a one minute google. [http://www.smallbusinessnotes.com/financing/venturecapitalde...](http://www.smallbusinessnotes.com/financing/venturecapitaldecisions.html) [http://www.markpeterdavis.com/getventure/2008/08/hi-mark- big...](http://www.markpeterdavis.com/getventure/2008/08/hi-mark-big-fan.html) [http://126.96.36.199/search?q=cache:HQ8zeI6-mXUJ:www.va- int...](http://188.8.131.52/search?q=cache:HQ8zeI6-mXUJ:www.va- interactive.com/inbusiness/documents/MAN_VC1.doc+%22management+team%22+vc&cd=5&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

... and so on. I have a bookmark folder filled with these somewhere, but for now, you get the idea.

<comment><USER2> NEA and Sequoia funded us when we were 20 year old hackers with NO business experience whatsoever.

<comment><AUTHOR> Would you agree that most 20 year old hackers are NOT funded?

Why do you think you were funded? What made you different from those who didn't get funded from those companies? Was it your demo? Was it a patent? Just an idea that was so brilliant, no demo, patent, or experience was needed?

I'm very interested in any introspection you might share, as to why you got funded when others did not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Only bad VCs are looking for startups founded by MBAs. The better ones are looking for people with technical backgrounds who are willing and able to figure out how business works.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right. Good! Am I going to argue with pg? If I could ask you for one more comment...

Most consumer electronics products that you see on store shelves are not patented. They're not sufficiently innovative to deserve one. That's also the case with my portfolio. I have a few pending patents, but as far as legally defensible IP, not so much.

My idea is to select perhaps 10 products, complete with photos of prototypes, and/or schematics, as well as trademarks that I have reserved, domain names associated with those trademarks, the few patents I have, and my resume, I guess, and create a package I can give to VC's.

Then, in the package, select one of those products as a "first product", and present a timeline and budget for bringing it to market.

Is this something that could fly?

<comment><USER3> VCs don't generally want to see a portfolio of ideas. You're supposed to be the expert: they expect you to choose. What they want to see is a group of smart founders who plan to work in a promising area.

Also, they're generally leery of consumer electronics. Not that you shouldn't do that, but if you do, you should do it a la Meraki: make version 1 yourself in your basement, get ramen profitable by selling it to early adopters, and _then_ go to VCs once you can show it's already taking off.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for telling me that probably would not have worked, and about the reluctance regarding consumer electronics. It makes sense they would be so, for the very reasons that are hindering me. (high initial investment, IP infringement risk, multi-country compliance, etc).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I agree with your thoughts. It is sometimes difficult to digest not getting a fair opportunity, but after all, the world outside the school is not, well, the school. I also have EE background, with .95 PhD, and despite being ahead of the tech horizon, it's especially painful to be rubbished by some haphazard investors.

However, i am sure, if i put my full energy behind it, someday it will certainly fly with or w/o VCs on board. So, the real key is perseverance and commitments. And of course, finding like-minded or like-positioned people helps getting there.

</comment><comment><USER5> I believe you are wrong. It isn't about degrees as far as I understand, but it is about the ability to sell the idea, manage it through production and growth.

When a VC says they fund a team, they don't mean they fund degrees. Funding a team will often mean funding people with experience, or some other factor that lets the VC know that this is the right horse to back.

Lots of engineers get funded, but they don't get funded for 'projects that languish in notebooks due to lack of capital'.

So that's the problem first. You need to be able to sell your idea, and likely you should probably be on the road to building it or have something built before looking for funding.

Pick up Curtis Carlson's book "Innovation: the Five Disciples to Creating What Customers Want". It will help you put together the proper positioning for your idea and get it ready to be heard.

\----- EDITED ----- I REALLY liked Sama's response (which wasn't there when I wrote my original response above).

My response is probably focused on steps. You can't go right from idea to VC (unless you have some serious connections and likely some very serious successes in your past as well).

An idea is just an idea. It is a management team (which _might_ need a good engineer) which brings the whole thing together.

Rarely (though it does happen) is an engineer the best person to lead a business. Think Apple - Woz was the engineer, Jobs the manager/marketer. You might need to find your Jobs if you're Woz (okay, that's not the way the history works, but you get the jist).

By the way, I'm in your boat (kinda) I'm the engineer of my start-up and also trying to be the management guy. It's tough going it alone, once you're in it, you'll likely understand why VC's focus on the team aspect.

<comment><AUTHOR> I get that if you don't try, you won't succeed, hence my questioning here, as a way to jump start myself, perhaps.

It does sound a little silly, doesn't it. Here's some guy claiming to have all these ideas in a notebook, but he's obviously not trying to do anything with them, or they wouldn't just be in a notebook.

I have developed mass market consumer electronics for many years, for large companies. I simply want to continue to do that, for myself. I know, from actually doing it for many years, that $100K is very cheap, and $300K is normal, by the time you get plastics designed, molds tooled, PCB's and components purchased, etc. As your complexity goes up from there, so do your costs. Then it's time to actually go buy components, arrange shipping, and have the thing manufactured. Some things do not bootstrap. You either write the check or you don't, period.

These products will not change the world. They're not revolutionary, and frankly, the world will get by just fine without them. But there is money to be made from them, as people will buy them.

So, here I am, with experience and ideas, but a strong feeling that I can't close the deal, based on a lot of reading that I've done.

<comment><USER6> The best thing you could do if you have really been reading carefully is to get started on building what your idea is. And VCs may not be what you need - if you really believe the products would sell you could try bank/credit card loans etc. It is not as if there was no entrepreneurship before VCs came into picture. With or without VCs, with or without certain degrees from certain schools, entrepreneurs will always be there and keep finding ways to chase opportunities they believe in.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well said brother! While I'm not certain I'm willing to put $300K on credit card, I know there are people who have done this.

I agree that there is never an excuse, you just have to try a different way, till you succeed.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What do people usually do after they run a failed startup? - <AUTHOR> http://www.victusspiritus.com/2011/01/27/what-do-people-usually-do-after-they-run-a-failed-startup/ <comment><USER2> Whatever the hell they want to? Sheesh - it's a failed startup, not the loss of a child. People fail at all sorts of things all the time, and the best way to guarantee an eventual success is to keep stepping up to the plate.

<comment><USER3> Easy to say. But a "failed startup" is often coincidental with a failed relationship, failed self-image, drained savings, eroded health.

Starting another one right away can be a 'rebound' decision. It can be helpful to wait a little while, maybe work at some mundane job until you get your perspective back.

But yes, keep positive, assume you will soon be back in the game.

<comment><USER2> Sure - I understand all of those consequences, but none of them are showstoppers that should preclude you from doing something else. It may not be ideal, but in life you play the hand you're dealt, and getting up from the table (metaphorically speaking) is RARELY a sound decision. Like I said, they can do whatever the hell they want to. The worst possible choice out of "whatever the hell they want to", though, is nothing.

<comment><USER3> We're in agreement.

I also wonder what the real question was behind the article. Is the author a lost soul? Suffering and looking for life direction? Or just needing advice about how to fill out taxes after the financial chaos that is a failed business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> After my startup failed (and all of the pivots we could think of didn't work), I tried a few other ideas with different partners. None of those worked, and I ended up doing consulting work (mostly for other startups) for a while. It paid ok, but I realized that I wasn't really doing my own thing, and I could do significantly better by working for someone else. I also kind of realized that I just wasn't ready to go out and start something else for various reasons.

A pretty interesting startup made me a pretty good offer, and after consulting for them for a month, I figured that I might as well take the stock options if I was working for someone else. Worked there for a while, and then they got acquired by a big company. Got to see an acquisition first-hand, which was definitely interesting. Now I'm working at a big company, which I never thought would happen again, but I guess that I see it in a different way.

I'm not really sure how I got from point A to point B, but it has been an interesting ride. And I think that pretty soon I'll be ready to start something else.

</comment><comment><USER5> Do it again, but better. Typically with a higher chance of success and re- using all the connections they've made during the running of the previous one. There is no stigma attached to failing at starting up because the rest of the business world knows how hard it is and those that are successful likely have had a few failures themselves to look back to.

</comment><comment><USER3> Start another one!

</comment><comment><USER6> This had me thinking about that interview question:

"In a country in which people only want boys every family continues to have children until they have a boy. If they have a girl, they have another child. If they have a boy, they stop. What is the proportion of boys to girls in the country?"

Replace girl with "failed startup" and boy with "successful startup" and the answer must be the same... the overall success rate of all startups must be 50%, assuming that people always try for a successful one after they fail.

Of course, that means there will be those who succeed on their first try and you might be the one that experiences twenty failures in a row...

</comment><comment><USER7> It is interesting because we put a lot of ourselves in the code we write and the ideas pursued. So when something fails, It can be a process to get over it. Although trying and failing is better than never taking a risk.

</comment><comment><USER8> Get an MBA?

<comment><USER9> Disheartened with technology during the lull after the first dot com bubble burst, I went to law school.

After finishing up and working at a law firm for a year, I realized that I'd rather fail at startups than do that for a living.

<comment><USER10> Did you study IP law?

That may help you succeed at failing to fail.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> You only really fail when you stop trying.

</comment><comment> what-to-do Try to understand what went wrong, take a break, and scout for the next opportunity, patiently.

</comment><comment><USER12> they start their next startup. Until they stop failing.</comment>


YC Application Translated and Broken Down - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@zreitano/the-yc-application-broken-down-and-translated-e4c0f5235081 <comment><AUTHOR> With applications due soon, I thought this could be helpful. I would appreciate any comments/critiques. Happy to answer any questions, as well.</comment>


How Vice Hacked Google Glass To Tell Crisis Stories - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcolabs.com/3015109/how-vice-hacked-google-glass-to-tell-crisis-stories

<comment><USER2> Flagged for lack of actual hacking.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. The thought of some guy trying to use glass with a Bluetooth keyboard to VNC into his desktop during a riot was certainly comical...</comment></comment>


Researchers can track hazardous chemicals from fast-food wrappers in the body - <AUTHOR> http://exactlyscience.com/archives/11793.html <comment><USER2> Blogspam of

[http://www.uab.edu/medicine/news/latest/item/1459-journal- re...](http://www.uab.edu/medicine/news/latest/item/1459-journal-researchers- can-track-hazardous-chemicals-from-fast-food-wrappers-in-the-body)

with author credit (Tyler Greer) stripped out, as well as the first paragraph (hence the odd read). Original also has a lot of context links and a video.

Related story, with studied fast food chains named:

[http://news.nd.edu/news/new-study-finds-extensive-use-of- flu...](http://news.nd.edu/news/new-study-finds-extensive-use-of-fluorinated- chemicals-in-fast-food-wrappers/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Original Research paper: [http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.estlett.7b00042](http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.estlett.7b00042)</comment>


Ask HN: How do you keep track of astroturfers on HN? - <AUTHOR> I've noticed a lot of astroturfing in the past couple years. It's led me to visit HN less and less often, which probably isn't such a bad deal. The problem is that i sometimes feel like I am the problem, but i'm a peace-loving hippy... so maybe that's not a reasonable assumption.
I wonder if anybody would identify the same in this thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19251589
There's a style of commenting which (to me) sounds like it's written by a Mandarin speaker with great, non-native English skills. And it seems to me like astroturfing...
Is anybody keeping track these folks? Does YC care? Is YC in on the gig?
Any thoughts would be appreciated... even if you want to just say i'm crazy, it'd be interesting to have some discussion in the community about this. <comment><USER2> If you think you have identified some sort of astroturfing effort, the best solution is to contact the moderators using the link at the bottom of the page.

HN mods do regularly act against users who post solely in support or opposition to a single company (or for example, always promote one company and simultaneously attack it's competitors), or people who use HN to "wage ideological battle" by arguing for one position to the detriment of any other discussion on the matter.

There's not a lot of discussion in the community on it because HN would much rather not be bogged down by people complaining about other users, and would rather deal with it privately.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll try that, thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've seen... I don't know that I'd call it astroturfing, but at least people pushing an ideology. I mean, we all have our view of the world, and we all think ours is right. But some people will argue every post opposing their view. And they Just. Won't. Stop. I mean, they may talk about other things on other threads, but when a thread talks about _their_ position, they will never stop arguing. They will never give any acknowledgement that people on the other side had any valid points. It's like talking to a brick wall.

I'm tempted, when I see this behavior, to just say "With those who will not listen, it is useless to have a conversation", and walk away. But I'm pretty sure they'd reply something like "I will listen, but everything you say is wrong".

Other than flagging it or otherwise contacting the moderators, I don't have a good solution. It sure doesn't help the atmosphere of the board to have that kind of "conversation", though.

<comment><USER4> That's what makes it hard to discuss politics on the Internet. Not saying that in-person conversations can't be difficult too, but in person people start off with a level of basic human respect that can move a conversation along.

Plus there isn't the possbility of cutting your conversation short so you can correct all the other people who commented in a similarly wrong manner.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's some topics that _rapidly_ attract a certain pattern of posting. Where the first comments are something blatantly wrong, or just wildly provocative. Often only tenuously, if at all, related to TFA. They then proceed to answer every. single. comment. with more provocation.

See it enough times and it looks like these low karma and activity, often recently created accounts, show a real pattern. Call it astro turfing, call it gaming the algo to trigger a spam flag for burying the thread on HN, or call it an incredibly unlikely coincidence, I do wish it were not so.

Oftentimes it's not even a great article or study they're attacking, just that the topic exists at all. If it were left alone to sink or swim with real comments, half the time they'd sink intellectually due to it being poor reporting, or reporting a flawed study etc.

I find it one of the more frustrating things about current HN, but I know of nowhere else free of it.

<comment><USER6> If nobody is downvoting their comments, I suppose they are good comments? Otherwise, HN blocks low karma accounts for hours after writing two or more comments within XX minutes and receiving a downvote on any of them (I know because it regularly happens to me and I can't reply to anything).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's a style of commenting which (to me) sounds like it's written by American speakers with great, native English skills. And it seems to me like astroturfing...

<comment><USER2> I can spot Googlers (and relatively recent Xooglers) by their commenting style usually, with no other obvious disclosure. The funny thing about this, is they can be from wholly unrelated divisions from what they're commenting on, and not marketing people. Which is to say this isn't an accusation of wrongdoing here. They just have... a certain style that's distinctly Google, and it's kind of audible when reading.

I think it'd be really interesting to do some sort of data analysis on HN comment text, sorted by employer or country of origin, maybe known CEOs versus marketers versus engineers who comment, or whatever else, and see what patterns could be found. Are there certain sentence styles that correlate to different groups, or a noticeable difference in vocabulary?

<comment><USER4> I feel like most sites have a kind of commenting monocolture that's specific to the community on that site. For example, Reddit comments on popular threads can be indistinguishable from each other due to the use of "inside jokes" based around quoting a meme or something from pop culture. Everybody seems to comment in the same way in order to get upvotes from other users who "get it".

Twitter and Tumblr are similar in that users are often trying to write witty one-liners, which too end up leaning on pop culture references.

That said, what you are proposing could absolutely be used to suss out not astroturfers exactly, but fanboys of certain things. Jordan Peterson, Elon Musk, etc., they all comment in the same way when a critical article about them is posted on a message board.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> At the risk of winding up on someone's enemies list here, let me make a suggestion: "keeping track of astroturfers" is the last thing you want to do.

Trolls, shills, false flaggers, etc. are a problem in just about any online forum. But they don't win by posting. They win by convincing you to look at a thread with suspicion and assume malice, by encouraging an atmosphere of paranoia that has a chilling effect on discourse, and by leading you away from honest discussion with fruitless tangential arguments that poison the well and get threads flagged.

The site guidelines already provide what I think is a decent strategy. Assume good faith on the part of a commenter, and respond to the strongest possible interpretation of their argument (steelman, don't strawman.) If after a response or two, it seems like someone isn't arguing in good faith... then just ignore them. Fold the thread and move on with life. If they're being uncivil or outright malicious, flag them.

</comment><comment><USER9> Is there a litmus test for testing if someone is a "Mandarin speaker with great, non-native English skills"?

</comment><comment><USER10> I've been accused of being an astroturfing shill on multiple platforms...

I wonder if the reason is simply my poor grammar.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> My personal solution is to keep a spreadsheet of names, occurrences, and then review the comments over time. It's a pretty new effort though.

<comment><USER6> Wait, you're manually datamining comments with a spreadsheet? That sounds really dedicated.

<comment><AUTHOR> it's not really datamining, it's more like subjective opinion recording.</comment></comment></comment>


Would you leave on a UFO today? - <AUTHOR> http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2011/03/would-you-leave-on-a-ufo-today-and-other-mini-escape-ideas/

<comment><USER2> Whoa. I've discussed this myself in my ... youth. Now I don't for fear of being labeled as a weirdo. I think still think I would go.

The universe and the brain are both infinite: you can feel the same way either by looking inwards (connecting to people, meditating etc) or by exploring the wonders of the universe. Guess what evolution has equipped most of to do better? Sorry about the babbling. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> You ever have one of those days though where its just hard to look inwards. Harder than usual, even if you are into meditation, prayer, etc.

I've had a couple of days like that this week.

Sometimes you just want to go to a firing range and fire some guns for awhile.</comment></comment>


Any startups doing anything interesting with MS Silverlight? - <AUTHOR>

I have an idea for a rich media site, and I think Silverlight is the perfect technology for it.
Its also still in its infancy which is great as it means my app is more visible and its possible MS will use it as a "Use silverlight it rocks and you get this cool website to use!" but it also has the con of chance of Silverlight failing and me being stuck with an app in a dead language. So my question, is anyone working with Silverlight? How do you find it? Are you worried about the small (but growing) userbase? <comment><USER2> I'm doing something in Silverlight, but it's just to have a rich version for 1.0. We'll immediately hedge it on release with a JS/CSS/Canvas version. I agree with Scott that it has performance issues, but nothing that's causing a real problem. Also we're storing the data on S3 and eventually the main logic engine on EC2, so the idea is that it's only for a rich, but very dumb, UI. I'm still, at this stage, happy with the decision to use it -- if that helps you at all.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've tried it, played with it, and it's honestly just so much less-rich than Flash and significantly slower than Flash that we bailed on it and went with Flash. I liked the idea of Silverlight (I'm a .NET guy) but at the end of the day, it was more about user experience than developer experience and we felt Silverlight just didn't give us what we thought our users wanted.</comment>


Ask HN: Best beginner database? - <AUTHOR> I'm developing a pet project (essentially a wishlist) using Node and Express so I can learn how to develop full-stack web apps. I was thinking of using Mongo to store data for the backend, but I don't think it's the database I should use as a newbie to databases. What do you think? <comment><USER2> Why mongo is terrible: [http://www.mongodb-is-web- scale.com/](http://www.mongodb-is-web-scale.com/)

Mongo is a bad choice for 99% of projects. Unless you're 100% sure your data is unstructured and will never ever relate to anything else, it's probably bad.

Mongo is designed for _unstructured_ data. That is data which has a very loose relationship to any other object, and data which changes often or is unpredictable. To top it off, Mongo _doesn 't have transactions_. Without transactions, you have to implement them by hand with something like Redis, which is rather iffy.

You almost always have structured data. A wish list would probably relate to products, which relate to merchants such as Amazon, Newegg, Ebay, etc.

Those relationships are a pain to express in Mongo. In-fact it even ends up being _slower_ to express them in mongo, because of it's lack of JOINs, since they don't expect you to have relations.

I personally recommend MariaDB (MySQL fork, included by default on most linux distros now to replace mysql-server). Despite it's poor reputation, it's used (in some form) by practically every big company, including Facebook and Google.

PostgreSQL is another great option. I've found it a bit more difficult to find guides for Postgres, which is why I recommend it second to MariaDB/MySQL.

Postgres is not flawless, it has awkward quirks, like the fact you cannot sanely upgrade postgres versions without exporting all of your data, and then re-loading it again. However, it is regarded as the most powerful open source database, and possibly the most reliable database.

</comment><comment><USER3> Forget about MongoDB, it's terrible choice for 99% of projects.

Use PostgreSQL.

<comment><AUTHOR> Could you elaborate as to why it's such a bad choice and also in which use case you would find it acceptable to use Mongo? I really want to understand why certain tools are better for certain tasks.

<comment><USER3> MongoDB is never acceptable. Let's make this short and concise.

[edit: fail. This answer is crazy long. Seriously, this topic should be covered in a book. I'll write one some day]

\--- ONE DECISION RULE TO RULE THEM ALL: SQL databases are easier to use and maintain than NoSQL databases. Always use SQL when possible, only use NoSQL when forced to.

\--- If you have less than 1 TB of data, you should use a normal SQL database.

It's the easiest to use, it runs on a single node, it supports "JOINS", it supports transactions, it fits all the most common needs.

The usual free SQL choice is PostgreSQL. Sometimes it's MySQL instead (mostly for the Apache+PHP+MySQL stack for which there is cheap hosting service available).

\--- If you have more than 1 TB of data, you have to use a NoSQL database. (Cassandra, ElasticSearch, Riak)

They support splitting data and operations over multiple nodes which is necessary to handle this scale. The downside is that they can't support joins nor transactions because of that.

\--- Never use MongoDB.

99% of projects should use a traditional SQL database as per the major rule. The project is simple enough, SQL is fine!

The 1% of complex web scale projects MUST NOT use MongoDB under any circumstances. MongoDB has know reliability and scalability issues that WILL lead to disaster. Use either ElasticSearch or Cassandra instead (depending on the usage).</comment></comment></comment>


'No' usually doesn't mean 'No' but 'Not yet' - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2011/02/05/no-usually-doesnt-mean-no-but-not-yet/ <comment><USER2> Protip -- Don't try to reframe a common phrase with a distinct social message to sum up your article on "getting things done" because while there is a useful message here it is blunted by the reader having to wonder if the author is some kind of a rape apologist or something.</comment>


Show HN: Git (& Jekyll) backed websites anyone can edit. Beta - <AUTHOR> http://www.spintoapp.com

<comment><USER2> 1st: Congrats on shipping :)

2nd: Works as advertised! Merging git commits from my machine and editing online (Mercury editor, right?) works fine, see both changes live instantly. Process is really streamlined.

But it's kinda slow, partly I figured that's because you're on HN. But the major advantage of it being statically 'deployed' is that it would be fast. Isn't it deployed on something like S3/Cloudfront?

<comment><AUTHOR> 1st: THANKS :-)

The editor is Mercury with a bunch of bugfixes and additions. That is probably the thing I need to focus on most through this beta period. Polishing Mercury or building something else. I'm involved with the project and have talked to Jeremy a bunch.

The static sites feel slow? They are not on cloudfront right now, that was a bit too much premature optimization. They are on Varnish.

<comment><USER2> Yep, static sites feel slow, but maybe that's just the geographical distance at play (I'm in Europe).

Any plans on merging those bugfixes and additions back to the Mercury project? :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah they're all upstream. Jeremy added me as a core contributor on GitHub, I was firing off too many pull requests :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I recently made a university CS club website [<http://csclubsjsu.com/>] using the Jekyll+Github stack. It wasn't using any platform in particular, just a Jekyll project automatically deployed to our server from a Github project using post-commit hooks.

The entire thing took almost no time at all and I've received a lot of positive feedback about being able to edit most pages 'live'.

<comment><USER4> I'm interested in what you used for live-editing, and whether you think the OP's product would solve any pain for you.

<comment><USER3> If you visit the site you'll see 'Edit this page' links at the top of each page (sans a few) - go ahead and click it to find out!

As far as the OP's product goes, I think it mainly helps you in the design & layout phase along with the WYSIWYG editor. It's a CS club, so WYSIWYG is not going to be popular, and we already did the design & layout. So I don't think so, but I do see OP's product as an endorsement of the idea.

<comment><USER4> Ah, I see. I was assuming your solution was also edit-in-place. Still cool though!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It seems that conflicts are handled by "last person" wins.

I created a site and cloned it. I opened a page in the HTML editor. I edited that page in my git clone and pushed. Finally I edited the open page in the HTML editor and saved.

Both edits are in the repo history, but the edit I pushed via git was clobbered with the content saved via the HTML editor.

I assume this is intentional, but it would seem to me that the HTML editor should note the revision which is being edited, and then upon save if a new revision has been pushed behind its back at least inform the user that the page has been changed in the meantime. (Even nicer would be for the HTML editor to notice updates that happen while the page is being edited and pop-up some sort of notice maybe?)

I'm guessing the same thing would occur if two users edited the same page via the HTML editor?

Edit: On second thought, maybe spintoapp handles multiple users correctly and I only observed this behavior because I used the same account for both edits.

Edit 2: There's a broken link on [http://www.spintoapp.com/documentation/controlling_editable_...](http://www.spintoapp.com/documentation/controlling_editable_content) \- "You can learn more about fetching changes with Git." links to www.spintoapp.dev.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right, if you open a page then push a change then save the page, the pushed change will get overwritten. I think the best option to lock during editing might be to just reject the push while the editor is open. Thanks for your thoughts.

And I'll clean up that link!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> FYI, the icons (supposed to be next to "Click to edit", "Drag and drop image upload", ...) don't show up correctly on Firefox 11.0 on Windows XP 32 bits.

The symbols instead looks like non-printable characters or something like that

<comment><USER7> It might be because they're using Font Awesome for the icons instead of Glyphicons. I don't think the developers are interested in fixing it, though: <https://github.com/FortAwesome/Font-Awesome/issues/81>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I was thinking jekyll could do with a nice web-based frontend for when i just want to quickly write a blog article without spending ages uploading images and re-generating the site. Nice to see someone has a similar idea.

After trying it out for a bit it seems to work fine as a simple jekyll front- end, but it looks very early stages atm. I couldn't figure out how to get the page editor to work properly, and oddly enough there is a separate edit screen for making blog posts which in effect just gives up and leaves you with a basic text box.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, the blogging is very basic. Very, very basic right now. The page editor is my focus because it enables something new, but I do want to flesh blogging out properly before exiting beta.

If you have any other thoughts on what you'd like to see in blogging, do contact me! email@example.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Clicked on create site, got taken to Google accounts. Hit Ctrl+W.

I'd like to be told when I'm about to be sent to a third party site which will try to collect my personal information, thank you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Me too. I'm A/Bing some language on the main landing button and one version doesn't inform you. Thanks for the feedback!

Oh, and Google is only used for auth. I request nothing but your name and email address, and have no ability to access any additional information from Google.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Technically I like it at lot, I'm looking to build a similar thing but I'm still in the conceptual phase.

I think you should define better your target market to be able to seduce them better, maybe move the 'Try it out' to the top of the screen and talk about some use cases of your target market. I'm just trying to help, I'm sure you know better of your business than me.

<comment><AUTHOR> There is still much to do on the marketing site, you bet! Email me if you want to talk more about the idea and market: email@example.com Talking is always a plus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Any chance you guys will be doing a wordpress-like thing with this by open sourcing the software and charging for hosting?

</comment><comment><USER12> Request rejected.

Your request was not processed. The parameters of your request may be incorrect, or you may not have access to this url. If you believe you are arriving at this warning in error, contact email@example.com.

<comment><AUTHOR> Howdy there! Thanks for taking a look! I'm not sure what problem you ran into- but do fire off an email telling me what you were doing and I'll figure it out right away: email@example.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is a great idea...I use Jekyll for my blog but sometimes wish I could post quickly through my browser. Congrats on shipping!

</comment><comment><USER14> I have one question: Does a "save" in the online wysiwyg editor trigger a commit+push in the Git repo upstream ?

<comment><USER2> from my 10 minute experience with the product: yes.

<comment><USER14> Cool. Really impressed!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I already use git pages to host my homepage. Would have been nice to be able to just edit that repo.

</comment><comment><USER16> Why doesn't GitHub let me edit like that?

How can I edit like that, without a 3rd party?

<comment><USER17> Honestly I think it's only a matter of time. They have online editing already.

I've been watching for Columnist to have a source code drop. I'm hoping it will be open sourced: <http://substance.io/michael/columnist> Demo: <http://columnist.devseed.com/>

<comment><USER18> It is open-sourced?

<https://github.com/substance/substance/blob/master/LICENSE>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> congrats man, we'll definitely play with it these days.</comment>


Kickstarter scam: graphene capacitors - <AUTHOR> http://www.eevblog.com/2014/07/28/graphene-lithium-ion-capacitor-kickstarter-bs/

<comment><USER2> The actual article title is "Graphene / Lithium Ion Capacitor Kickstarter BS". The submitter's title makes a claim about the state of mind of the person behind the Kickstarter that requires knowledge that the submitter does not have unless he knows the person or has psychic ability.

<comment><AUTHOR> scam: "a dishonest scheme; a fraud."

Let's count the red flags:

\- he's made claims of performance that are far in excess of what anyone else has managed with the same technology

\- he's lied about the purpose of the kickstarter; originally, it was to cover PCB fabrication costs, now, it's to cover graphene capacitor costs

\- he's consistently refused to produce any hard data to validate his claims

So it's actually _two_ scams: snake oil, and a bait and switch. Classy.

<comment><USER2> You are confusing fraud with incompetence. Everything he has done is consistent with someone who is not competent, and perhaps a touch paranoid. Not producing hard data actually points away from a scam, as scammers will just make up data.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are hell bent on being generous. Don't take that as a criticism :)

Okay, let's leave aside the issue of raw data. Let's say he really does, cross his heart and hope to die, think that running a kids toy with a couple of batteries is an appropriate way to back up his claims.

What about the bait and switch? He simply lied about what the kickstarter funds would be used for. First it was for PCB fab, now it's for a run of customer graphene caps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I wonder ... given the guy is claiming he needs $8k for a minimum purchase of components that clearly can't & don't exist, has he been scammed by a dodgy supplier?

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, that's too generous. If he _was_ scammed himself, he doesn't seem averse to doing the same to his backers.</comment></comment>


Tim Cook: Apple doesn't donate to political candidates and PACs shouldn't exist - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/tim-cook-apple-donates-0-to-political-candidates-2019-4 <comment><USER2> "Apple CEO Tim Cook will host a fundraiser with House Speaker Paul Ryan next week as the iPhone maker tries to strengthen its relationships with key Republicans" (2016)

[https://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/tim-cook-apple- paul-r...](https://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/tim-cook-apple-paul-ryan- fundraiser-224554)

So much for privacy/environmental sustainability I guess

<comment><USER3> > Cook is hosting the fundraiser on his own accord, as Apple does not have a > corporate political action committee like Facebook, Google and other tech > giants in Silicon Valley

<comment><USER4> > as the iPhone maker tries to strengthen its relationships with key > Republicans

<comment><USER5> Doesn't Apple have a fiduciary duty to its shareholders?

Sure American politics is corrupt but it would be utterly asinine for a big company like Apple not to engage with politicians.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I just found this website by googling and thus I'm not sure of its credibility, but if I'm reading it correctly, Apple contributed $1,677,466 and spent $6,620,000 on lobbying in 2018. Seems like that could qualify as a "political donation."

[https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?id=D000021754](https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?id=D000021754)

<comment><USER7> Well, the original article states the following:

        - Apple, as a company, does not donate any money to political candidates, CEO Tim Cook
          said on Tuesday.

        - He also said he doesn't believe that political action committee (PACs) should exist.
          PACs allow corporations and others to secretly donate large sums to campaigns.

        - While Apple doesn't try to get particular politicians elected, it still spend
          millions annually on lobbying, records show.

        - Cook explained, 'We focus on policies, not politics.'

I think this is an excellent stance, admirable and more companies (e.g. Google) should follow suit.

<comment><USER8> > We focus on policies, not politics.

I read that as "As long as you vote for what we want, we'll ignore anything else you may be doing". They can't escape politics if they want to influence (inter)national policies.

<comment><USER2> "As long as you're giving us tax breaks and not regulating us, we don't care about your politics when it comes to LGBT/Environment or whatever else politics is about"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Everyone's favorite bookmarking site likes to call attention to this sort of thing every now and then. It's pretty surprising IMO:

[https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1120320958382755840](https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1120320958382755840)

</comment><comment><USER10> I want to create a lobby group / PAC that will promote the idea and lobby US lawmakers to make lobbying illegal. Once it is successful enough to be unable to do it's job, it will dissolve, distributing its money to pre-appointed charities.

</comment><comment><USER11> So Apple doesn't do lobbying? Because that's the same thing basically

<comment><USER12> Paying politicians (through their campaign funds) because they hold certain views is quite different from trying to persuade politicians of a certain view without giving them a financial incentive.

Furthermore with lobbying the activity is largely in public, while it can be unclear on what basis or understandings direct campaign donations are made.

<comment><USER13> > Furthermore with lobbying the activity is largely in public

Disregarding popular movements that's not how lobbying works at all. No private special interest group is going to be advertising the many ways in which it is trying to influence a person holding public office. You subscribe to a service providing you with personal data, you attend the same events, you help them. For example by commenting on or even drafting legislative texts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is there any megacorp that doesn't do political donations (Neither as a corporation or from upper management) and also has a $0 lobbying budget?

</comment><comment><USER15> How little money FAANG spend for lobbying is a compliment to US political system.

Few millions a year for companies doing 10s or 100s billions in revenue, that's really rounding error.

And they would spend more if ROI is there but obviously it is not.

<comment><USER16> Why is it good when it is effective but relatively cheap?

It says more on US politicians being cheap and essentially easy to indirectly bribe.

<comment><USER17> Why would it be cheap if it is effective? It's a zero sum game and there are intensely competing corporate interests. If it were highly effective, the price would be bid up.

<comment><USER18> Because there are way more politicians than there are companies?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What does the fox say? I want to be President, says he.

</comment><comment><USER20> Our of all the tech companies that lobby, I wish Apple did more. They are the only major privacy concerned tech-giant and they produce the least environmentally damaging hardware.

I agree it shouldn't happen, but if politicians have to listen to money, at least listen to the lesser evil.

<comment><USER21> Privacy is a differentiator for Apple. If the regulators forced others to respect it more, it would arguably not be in Apple's best interests.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Apple is great. Thank you, Apple. And thank you, HN, for helping Apple with spreading more facts about Apple.

</comment><comment><USER22> Doesnt donate to political candidate

Doesnt run a PAC

Doesnt NOT donate to PAC, which can be for any cause or even a political candidate and also anonymous

Cheeseburgers shouldnt exist either, I still eat them

</comment><comment><USER23> Okay, so Cook is implying here that Apple's maneuvers are not only restricted by rule of law, but by some underlying ethical principles. This model is bolstered by similar pronouncements he's made on privacy.

Apple is a company that benefits enormously from the intellectual and physical infrastructure of the United States. From this, many onlookers derive the ethical principle that Apple should pay its "fair share of tax".

So Cook's Apple must also have a meta-ethics that somehow judges this is not an important ethical principle.

Part of me wonders if this meta-ethics involves a cost-benefit analysis. And wonders when the rubber hits the road whether Apple's ethical principles actually go beyond the default corporate ethics of maximizing shareholder value within the rule of law.

 _On the other hand_ , anyone saying bad things about PACs, and good things about privacy, is fine and dandy with me.

Which means this ad must be made for people like me.

<comment><USER12> On what basis do you decide that Apple doesn't pay it's 'fair share'? On the face of it they seem to pay a fair bit. They are the largest single tax payer in the world, with a global effective tax rate of 24.6%.

I'm sure there are some ways they minimise their tax bills, but it's not as though they don't pay tax or even pay very little tax overall.

<comment><USER6> Apple spent years keeping over a hundred billion offshore in order to avoid paying taxes.

<comment><USER12> Apple paid taxes on all of those funds, in the jurisdictions in which the money was earned just like any other company. The US is the only country I'm aware of that charges tax on income earned abroad.

The US system is ludicrous. A few years ago a British politician, who has never resided long term in the US but who's mother was a US citizen, renounced his dual US nationality because the US tried to tax him on his sale of his house here in the UK.

<comment><USER24> > Apple paid taxes on all of those funds, in the jurisdictions in which the > money was earned just like any other company.

Snort! [https://www.cultofmac.com/302651/apple-avoids-paying- taxes-i...](https://www.cultofmac.com/302651/apple-avoids-paying-taxes-itunes- revenue/) , no they pay taxes in Luxembourg and say they have little profit in other European countries. But can we blame them, I would also try to optimize my taxes, and even the guy who set up this tax scheme to benefit Luxembourg is now... the president of the European Commission: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxembourg_Leaks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxembourg_Leaks)

<comment><USER12> From the article you linked:

>Here's how Apple avoids paying nearly all taxes in Europe:

That's blatant click-bait. It actually only applies to iTunes revenue which is a sliver of Apple's overall tax bill, most of which is paid on physical products taxed like any other manufacturer.

The basic fact is Apple pays a huge tranche of taxes to governments all over the world, more than any other single tax payer. Picking at little threads round the edges of their tax practices doesn't change that fact.

<comment><USER24> > The basic fact is Apple pays a huge tranche of taxes to governments all over > the world, more than any other single tax payer.

Source please? And more than any single tax payer where? Are you claiming Apple is the largest tax payer in every tax regime of the world?

> Picking at little threads round the edges of their tax practices doesn't > change that fact.

OK Mr. Fanboy, nice work diminishing a tax avoidance as "picking at little threads". Sorry I insulted your idol.

Getting fined by the EC doesn't make it sound like what they did were legal: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU_illegal_State_aid_case_agai...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU_illegal_State_aid_case_against_Apple_in_Ireland) . Of course, if the government says it's legal it might as well be legal, it doesn't mean it's morally correct, no wonder the populists hate the technocratic governments who are in bed with the corporations.

I guess in your books "they paid enough" is good enough to make them the good guys.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Forbes asking ad blocker users to log in rather than turning them away? - <AUTHOR> Navigated to a Forbes article recently and was about to exit since their Ad-wall detects uBlock when I noticed that the usual message had changed: https://i.imgur.com/fHawyXE.png<p>Logging in with a Google account did permit me to access the page [1]. Logging out and navigating back to the page brought up the "Sign in" prompt most of the time.<p>[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2015/09/02/father-and-son-become-billionaires-with-tanium-the-worlds-hottest-cybersecurity-startup/ <comment><USER2> It changed because they get your data when you connect via Google account, which is an alternative revenue compromise.

<comment><USER3> I actually consider this acceptable. I may begin using forbes again. I would briefly turn off adblock and then reload it if the data/article wasn't obviously available elsewhere, but I would let them have my basic google data to read an article.

It doesn't make a ton of sense for them though, right? I mean that would just verify through google analytics that a real user is reading their article and maybe some basic demographic information which could be pitched to advertisers...oh wait, they also verified these users won't run malware on their systems.

The only way they could seemingly benefit is if someone clicks the around the web links at the bottom, which again I consider fair play.</comment></comment>


Afraid/disgusted of Facebook? Use this link to delete your account - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account

<comment><USER2> I deleted my facebook account last year after i upgraded to the new timeline which was still a preview to developers only. I was concerned about the lack of privacy at the time, it was only till recently that they included more settings. The one thing i regretted the most was losing my facebook vanity url. Even after deleting your account your url (facebook.com/username) is gone forever!

<comment><AUTHOR> you worry over a url?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I have been off Facebook for sometime now for a variety of reasons. People who know me are probably tired of my rants about privacy, data retention, and other Facebook woes. But I have years of pictures on there, and conversations, and memories. I have downloaded a back up of it all but can't bring myself to click that delete button. It'd be like burning my journals!

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess thats a personal call. After seeing the craigslist killer's subpoena , i d rather not have journals, that all my crazy rants and personal quotes and other moments being presented to cops and lawyers to read and laugh at.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Ideas for a simple distributed on-call rotation organizer? - <AUTHOR> Hi folks, we are a distributed team across multiple timezones with 24/7 on-call rotation, previsouly using PagerDuty but unfortunately they are too expensive for us (an infant startup). We are now trying to use Google Calendar so everybody can see/edit entries but it's very error prone and too static, with no integration with anything we use. We would love to stick with Google Calendar though, however organizing overrides, swaps and exceptions is basically a pain... any suggestions on something else that is simple enough but that does the job well? <comment><USER2> How does the number get rotated with google calendar?</comment>


Quantum Computing explained with a hands-on tutorial in 10 mins - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@viveckh/build-a-quantum-circuit-in-10-mins-ft-qiskit-ibms-sdk-for-quantum-programming-75435b99ee9e <comment><USER2> From [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

> _Are reposts ok?_

> _If a story has had significant attention in the last year or so, we kill > reposts as duplicates. If not, a small number of reposts is ok._

It's not very clear, but something between 5 and 10 repost are too much. Specially if you repos the same three articles every day.

Don't expect to get much response if you continue to post the same thing. Moreover, some people will start to flag these stories.

</comment><comment><USER3> I vaguely thought I'd seen this submitted before, so I did a search:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22172799](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22172799)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22163917](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22163917)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22120280](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22120280)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22094323](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22094323)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22079230](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22079230)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22065500](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22065500)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22054428](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22054428)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22047802](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22047802)

All by you, and all in the past three weeks.

In fact, looking at your submission history you just submit the same few items over and over and over again. The FAQ[0] says:

> _Are reposts ok?_

> _If a story has had significant attention in the last year or so, we kill > reposts as duplicates. If not, a small number of reposts is ok._

Personally, I think your re-posts don't qualify as "a small number".

Looking further at your profile, you've made exactly one comment, and that was on one of your own submissions. You're not engaging with this site, you're simply flooding it with your own writing.

Edit: I see gus_massa[1] has said the same thing[2].

\</comment><comment>--

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=gus_massa](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=gus_massa)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22238938](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22238938)</comment>


Things First-Time Founders Regret Saying - <AUTHOR> http://viniciusvacanti.com/2012/04/23/things-first-time-founders-regret-saying/

<comment><USER2> Unfortunately, for those that actually utter things like this (the younger me for example) a list of "what not to say" is not going to explain "why not", which is the most important part. That usually comes with experience.

<comment><USER3> Out of curiosity, how old are you?

<comment><USER2> I was founded in 1981.

<comment><USER3> Thank you. I have met people who say things about their "younger selves" when they were 20. Wanted to know if there was enough time difference between you now and you then to take your comment to heart.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Things First-Time Founders Regret _not_ saying more often:

"No."</comment>


Cryptocurrency Market Cap Gains $21B in Four Hours - <AUTHOR> https://beincrypto.com/cryptocurrency-market-cap-gains-21-billion-four-hours/ <comment><USER2> Main reason it does is people afraid Tether is about to collapse, so everyone fleeing into Bitcoin from Tether.

Arbitrage bots pick that up and drive prices on real USD exchanges, also triggering "short squeeze".

Downturn is expected when these money will flow from Bitcoin into real USD.</comment>


The Genius Who Perished on Flight 11 - <AUTHOR> http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/201308/the-genius-who-perished-flight-11

<comment><USER2> ___On another occasion, Lewin called Linux, which made servers in North Carolina, to say Akamai needed around 1,000 servers in four weeks. The company said such a large order wasn't possible; they needed more time. Instead of pleading with them, Lewin sent them an e-mail to confirm a deadline of four weeks. That night, he went to the hardware store and bought tool kits, flew to North Carolina with some of his best engineers, and showed up to work at Linux the next morning. A baffled employee said, "Sir, who are you here to see?" Lewin replied: "I'm not here to see anyone; I'm here to build servers." Within four weeks, he'd helped Linux construct more than 1,000 new servers._ __

Linux. Right.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think I read somewhere that he was actually the first person to die on flight 11.</comment>


Aircraft concept shows a hypersonic vehicle for passengers - <AUTHOR> http://www.boeing.com/features/2018/06/hypersonic-concept-vehicle.page <comment><USER2> Never thought I'd see an article from the Daily Star (basically the UK National Enquirer) on Hacker News [edit: link changed by mods]

Further links here explaining the theory behind the hypersonic engine and hinting the main reason for Boeing producing this concept art (which doesn't have any theoretical specs to back it up) is to draw a bit more attention to its hypersonic military projects which might be a very early starting point for the development of big hypersonic passenger aircraft, maybe, if the economics ever look remotely sane. [https://www.popularmechanics.com/flight/a21948533/boeing-](https://www.popularmechanics.com/flight/a21948533/boeing-) [https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/boeing-unveils- lo...](https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/boeing-unveils-long-term- concept-for-hypersonic-airl-449749/hypersonic-passenger-plane-concept/)

<comment><USER3> The first article has wrong figures.

"the skin of the aircraft (probably made of titanium) gets as hot as 12,000 degrees F during flight because of air friction."

First, there's no material on earth that could sustain that kind of heat. Titanium has a melting point at 3,000 degrees F. Tungsten about 6,000 degrees F. Other composites, maybe a bit more. But nothing at 12,000 degrees F.

Second, the only plane that somehow had regular service at that kind of speeds was the SR-71. It was indeed made of titanium. The front of the plane had to sustain a temperature of over 600 degrees F, and it was only for short periods of time. Nothing close to 12,000 degrees F and was already a feat.

Third, titanium is extremely hard to work with. Ask the SR-71 guys. Tools had to be made especially to build that plane, for hundreds times more than regular tools. They break down often and you need to replace them. Nothing to sustain a production line.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [http://www.boeing.com/features/2018/06/hypersonic-concept- ve...](http://www.boeing.com/features/2018/06/hypersonic-concept-vehicle.page)

It's a concept that is 20-30 years off. Neat, but not real yet.

<comment><USER5> Thanks, we've updated the link from [https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/world- news/712276/boeing-hy...](https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/world- news/712276/boeing-hypersonic-plane-concorde-airliner-new-york-london- mach-5-plane-future), which is less... pleasant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've heard this sort of aircraft promised since I was in 3rd grade, and I'm sure it was promised to my parents before I was born.

Who knows if we'll ever be flying anything like this to carry passengers. If it was more profitable than flying what are essentially planes from the 1950's, someone would have already turned these triangular "hypersonic" planes into a reality and made a fortune.

</comment><comment><USER7> "20-30 years"

</comment><comment><USER8> I can't find any reputable news source for this, the article doesn't even mention a code name.

</comment><comment><USER9> video with sound on autoplay. a no-go for me.</comment>


Epic Games Asks Court to Allow Fortnite Back on the App Store - <AUTHOR> https://www.macrumors.com/2020/09/05/epic-injuction-fortnite-reinstatement/ <comment><USER2> Wow this is a total loss for Epic and total win for Apple. Now nobody will stand up to Apple for doing anything, even the things they should rightly stand up for.

In a way this sucks because Epic made Apple's monopoly much stronger than before and no other developer will dare to fight. What Epic did was wrong, but they still had a point, they just spoiled it for the rest of us.

I guess the only way to escape this Apple/Google duopoly in mobile is for some completely new platform to emerge. any ideas?</comment>


Ask HN: Website not appearing in Google search anymore? - <AUTHOR>

Long time ago I made small adsense niche website howtohavetwins.org Small website, earns like 5$ a month :) It was 3rd search result on first page when you type 'how to have twins' on google.com. But few days ago a noticed that it's gone from google. I checked Google webmaster tools and I didn't receive any warning messages. How can I get my site back on google?
I read somewhere that the reason for dropping from google can be spam on your site? I use wordpress plugin which automatically post content related to any topic of your choice to your site, maybe that's the reason for this?
Thanks for any help. <comment><USER2> "I use wordpress plugin which automatically post content related to any topic of your choice to your site, maybe that's the reason for this?"

This is most likely it. It sounds like your blog is just re-generated content from someone else's site.

<comment><AUTHOR> So if I disable that plugin and remove all generated posts, will the website appear on Google again?</comment></comment>