Bancor Is Flawed - <AUTHOR> http://hackingdistributed.com/2017/06/19/bancor-is-flawed/ <comment><USER2> Great great great great article. Never seen so much facts and analysis in an Ethereum/ICO post (aside from Vitaliks maybe).

This whole ICO craze is going to hurt Eth in the long run, just like fraudulent campaigns hurt Kickstarter. People need to realize those ICOs are completely overhyped right now, lacking anything worth investing in the most cases.

<comment><USER3> The problem is, even if you know this its still a Keynesian Beauty Contest, as you can make money by following the hype along for a while.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Bancor's initial response isn't great:

[https://twitter.com/bancornetwork/status/876934646344404992](https://twitter.com/bancornetwork/status/876934646344404992)

since they mentioned FUD, it sounds like they're afraid Gun's post may affect trading of their token.

<comment><USER5> >it sounds like they're afraid Gun's post may affect trading of their token.

Yes, it works out quite nicely all round. They, by taking his ability to move the market so seriously, grant him social proof that can't be obtained any other way. He, very magnanimously, walks back his most serious attacks, to wit: their team are not credible, and the problem they want to address "is not a real problem". And anyone else who wants their token to pop* will know who they'd better have inside the tent.

* Bancor's token becomes tradeable shortly, see [https://blog.bancor.network/token-activation-update-285ba819...](https://blog.bancor.network/token-activation-update-285ba81995b1). It would have been tradeable today, but they have some last minute debugging before their smart contract is ready to "automate Yellen", as Sirer puts it. It's hard to begrudge them this, having seen how Yellen performs in the unpatched 1.0 release.

<comment><USER6> For the record: I have not walked back any criticism. I saw a brigade forming, and the last thing I want to be is the kind of person who, wittingly or unwittingly, creates a social media brigade. My own blog has been brigaded countless times, and I know how it feels. So do allow me to walk a nuanced line, if you will -- we're all better off if we can diffuse tension instead of getting entrenched in all out assault mode.

<comment><USER7> I really appreciate your stance, but I have a question: if your goal is to walk a nuanced line, why use Twitter to walk it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > There already exists a common currency through which we can trade. It's > called ether, and we can use it no matter which token pairs we want to > trade...

Exactly. For every ICO that pops up, ask does this use case require a special token? Often ether would be sufficient or even preferable because of greater liquidity.

Exchange between digital assets can be easily facilitated with something simple like Prism: [https://info.shapeshift.io/blog/2017/05/21/introducing- prism...](https://info.shapeshift.io/blog/2017/05/21/introducing-prism-worlds- first-trustless-portfolio-market-platform)

<comment><USER4> if you cut through the hype, Prism is an ethereum hosted CFD (contract for difference) platform.

They claim that they will be taking the other side of customer bets on portfolios initially, and hedging by buying the underlying. later, they envision other market participants will short coin portfolios.

With CFD's upside and downside is capped. so neither party is investing, just betting.

<comment><USER9> _Prism is an ethereum hosted CFD (contract for difference) platform._

Is the Tel Aviv binary option crowd somehow involved with this? Having been closed down in binary options, they've been pushing "contracts for difference" and "ladders".[1]

[1] [https://www.spotoption.com/products](https://www.spotoption.com/products)

<comment><USER4> this is aimed at cryptocurrencies and designed to not have counter-party risk. self executing smart contracts.

one problem is that they may be relatively expensive because they require "gas" to execute but on the plus side they can't be shut down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The underlying problem here is that the ICO model as most-frequently implemented is pretty broken.

It's kind of a like a hybrid between an IPO and a Kickstarter, but:

1\. With kickstarter, the reward has roughly constant value with respect to the total funds raised;

2\. With an IPO, the supply is predetermined. While the cost per share may be astronomical by the time you get around to buying in, it's clear what fraction of the offering you're purchasing.

ICOs tokens typically have:

1\. value inversely proportional to the total funds raised; and

2\. (since supply is not determined until the end of the ICO in many cases) no clarity around what fraction of the offering an investment actually purchases until the offering is complete.

This leads to some pretty crazy situations, Bancor being the most recent and most notable example, but in general, it just doesn't really lead to very sane practices.

\---

This is precisely why IPOs are conducted the way they are, with investment banks pre-purchasing a predetermined number of shares just shy of what they expect to be a fair market value, handing that money to the company, and then selling those shares on the open market.

<comment><USER11> ICOs implementations have varied, such that while your points about inverse value and transparency of fraction of offering may hold for some, ex. Bancor w/ it's "hidden ETH cap" announced at 80% full [1], it does not hold for many others, ex. SONM capping at 331,360,000 SNM for 117,337 ETH for a pre- determined max ~$42 million ICO [2]. Whether or not the SONM-style, Bancor- style, or some other style of ICO has "most frequently" been done is an open question?

[1] [http://www.newsbtc.com/2017/06/06/bancor-ico-starting- june-1...](http://www.newsbtc.com/2017/06/06/bancor-ico-starting-june-12th- participation-terms/)

[2] [https://ico.sonm.io/](https://ico.sonm.io/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Dumb question: does anyone know if any of the ICO-ing companies have "cashed out" to actual hard currency?

<comment><USER13> Its a reasonable question: a lot of these articles (which I dont necessarily disagree with otherwise) uses phrases like this one does:

"raised a record $144M" and "raising 9-digits cash"

Which isn't true. They raised 0 USD, and selling whatever the equivalent of ETH they did raise would likely crash the value significantly, such that they'd never see $100M+.

 _If_ they sold slowly, and _if_ ETH value stayed relatively stable during that time, and _if_ the exchanges were reliable for large, frequent withdrawls, and _if_ all of this didn't raise huge red flags with the banks and governments in their jurisdictions, there might be something to it. That's a lot of ifs.

<comment><USER14> They raised about 3 million in USD and 2 million or so in Euro. So, there is cash involved, but most is BTC ETH LTC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Just wondering how those of you who have known about Ethereum for a while but didn't buy it feel about missing out on >3000% returns this year. I didn't buy any and dislike knowing I could've been rich.

<comment><USER16> I used to go to these Wednesday night Bitcoin meetups at "Bitcoin Decentral" in Toronto.

Half the people who attended these were idiots looking to make easy money for no work. A quarter were guys who had gotten into bitcoins when they were cheap and had decided that they were geniuses, and not simply fortunate. The first half loved listening to these guys.

The last quarter were actually interesting people, into crypto and crypto- currencies, doing cool stuff. And some of them were into this thing called ethereum. Sometimes there were talks with that Vitalik guy.

And I did not buy even a single coin.

It was a bad investment. It was some random guy at that weird house on Spadina Ave who said he was making a better Bitcoin. Sane people do not give money to schemes like that. Those crazy idiots who wanted to get rich for no effort, let them throw their money at this ethereum thing, just like they'll throw money at every pyramid scheme and the Toronto housing market.

<comment><USER17> Wow. I could have written this and every word would still hold.

I think the one thing that was clear to me is that this Vitalik guy was some kind of genius. But, still I didn't buy/mine.

I wish my coding skills had been better at the time and that I had looked into the code (and not just the whitepaper which is kinda like a fairytale to me) and realized its value.

<comment><USER16> Were you at the creepy house on Spadina too? If so, we may have met. I only went a handful of times, but if you really scouted them out the good people there were fascinating. I wish I'd kept in touch.

<comment><USER17> Yeah I think it is (was) called Bitcoin Decentral. I think I was only there two or three times but I definitely met all the types you described :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> We need a futures market for crypto currencies. It would massively aid in hedging and price discovery. It would be easier for the price to adjust down to since there would be an easy way to short them too.

<comment><USER19> Possibly dumb question: What is the point of a futures market for a currency?

I understand why futures markets exist for e.g. oranges (seasonal production cycles) and jet fuel (to avoid storing a years' worth yourself). But currencies are available 24/7/365 and have zero storage cost.

<comment><USER20> 1) You may not be aware that there are futures markets for all fiat currencies, e.g. the USDX for dollars.

2) Currency futures markets exist to allow you to bet that the value of the currency will decrease, by offering to sell you the currency at price below the current market rate in the future.

In markets where there's no easy/legal way to bet that prices will decrease, asset bubbles are common, as "bulls" bid up the price, and "bears" just sit on the outside waiting for the bubble to pop.

If bears could bet that the value would decrease, this would lower the price of the asset today. In this way, price signaling can allow the market to reach an optimal shared opinion about the "true value" of an asset.

There are a lot of cryptocurrency bears who think that the long-term value of Bitcoin and Ether are approximately zero, that cryptocurrencies are in an asset bubble, and that this is wasting valuable time and money that the economy should spend on other things. By betting against cryptocurrency, bears could help to end the bubble in a safer and slower way.

(Or so they say. Sometimes future markets can exacerbate price instability when the whole market behaves irrationally.)

(The other reason futures markets exist is to allow people holding the currency to reduce ("hedge") the risk that the value of the currency will decrease. Thus they can make small bets against the currency, and if it rises, they'll still make money, and if the value falls, well, at least they'll win their bet.)

<comment><USER19> Example: 1 USD is currently worth 0.79 GBP. If I wanted to bet that the USD would decrease in value against the GBP, I could enter into a futures contract (assuming the existence of a wiling counterparty) to purchase 0.75 GBP for 1 USD at a date 3 months in the future. If I was right, and the exchange rate drops to 1 USD = 0.7 GBP, then I profit 0.75 - 0.7 = 0.05 GBP.

Instead, I could have just bought the 0.79 GBP immediately and then waited 3 months, and then I would have profited even more: 0.79 - 0.7 = 0.09 GBP.

What does the existence of the futures market allow me to do that I can't already do in this scenario?

My point was that in cases where production is cyclical or storage fees are nonzero, it might be difficult/impossible to trade on the spot market, or it might be prohibitively expensive to hold the item yourself. But currencies don't have either of these problems.

<comment><USER21> > What does the existence of the futures market allow me to do that I can't > already do in this scenario?

Leverage.

So I had a look at live data for an example. As of writing, 1GBP = 1.28 USD. Let's look at some example scenarios, assuming I believe 1 GBP will be worth 1.41 USD (+10%) in 3 months and want to make as much money as I can with a $100k investment.

\- I buy USD from a regular bank or currency exchanger and wait 3 months. If the price goes up 10%, I make $10k. If the price goes down 10%, I lose $10k. If nothing happens, I lose nothing.

\- I buy GBPUSD futures contracts. I need $7346.25 margin to open the contracts and $5877 to maintain them (per [https://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/index.php?f=marginnew&...](https://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/index.php?f=marginnew&p=fut)) and I control 62500GBP ($80k) per contract. With $100k, I can buy 13 contracts and control $1.04M. If the price goes up 10%, I make $100k. If it goes down 10%, I lose $100k.

And then, for fun:

\- I buy 86 options for a GBPUSD futures contract at a strike of $1.28 for $99k. If the price goes up 10%, I make $593k. If the price is at ~$1.30, I lose nothing. If the price is below $1.28, I lose $99k.

I'm no expert on futures however so there might be something wrong here, though the answer is definitely leverage.

<comment><USER22> You don't need a forward/future to introduce leverage.

We can trade GBP/USD between each other with as much leverage as we like without any future time conditions. All we need do is agree to pay each other the difference in value as the price changes, multiplied by our agreed leverage.

At some point, one or other of us can close the deal and settle the outstanding amount.

If you can't strike a deal directly, you go to an exchange or clearinghouse of some kind that will introduce buyers and sellers. Once again, leverage can be created without any forward or future.

<comment><USER18> You basically just recreated a forward where either party is able to unilaterally end the contract. (Forwards aren't standardized so can have weird quirks like this.)

<comment><USER22> Fair point. So where does the definition of a forward end? Could you then classify anything where you don't take delivery of the underlying entity as a 'forward', even if there is no end point and no promise of any kind of future time (however negotiable)? Where does the boundary lie?

<comment><USER18> A forward is just a future that isn't standardized and not traded on an exchange. Forwards are over the counter contracts that are written for each deal.

Forwards came first. You would go to an investment bank tell them you wanted to hedge whatever you had and they would write up the contract between you and them. Obviously there is no secondary market for these things and two contracts could have different terms in them.

So futures were invented. They standardized the underlying product (e.g. a type of wheat, a particular duration on bonds, a fineness of metal, etc), the expiration date, the delivery location (or financially settled), and the size. Now since all these contracts are fungible a market can be formed to trade them back and forth.

Those are basically the only differences.

<comment><USER22> I understand the terminology difference of forwards and futures, what I was asking about was when does a deal become a forward? The standard "I'll agree to buy oil from you at this price next year" is obviously a forward, but a deal where there may be no particular timeline or even a promise of one seems to be more hazy.

<comment><USER18> The dividing line would be the requirement for all contracts to be equivalent and traded on a venue. So an expiration date is probably a requirement. I have a hard time imagining such an open ended contract.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Wow, 144M. As a crypto n00b, can someone clarify if this is "real" money? Just wondering since I have never heard of Bancor before and this amount of funding is incredible.

<comment><USER4> its in ETH, not dollars, so it would be quite difficult to convert without slippage because the markets are quite illiquid.

Basically, people trading their ETH paper gains as a diverisification play.

<comment><USER9> _Its in ETH, not dollars._

Oh. This suggests that ETH is way overvalued and illiquid.

We're about to find out how liquid Bitcoin really is. The Mt. Gox bankruptcy trustee has 202,185 Bitcoins and may have to convert them to yen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I feel like the article definitely has some merit but the timing of it (days before a TBD announcement on token trading), the inclusion of very obvious non-unique points (i.e. not scalable, anything Bancor can do Ethereum can do - uh, why not include the definition of Turing complete here) and the false assumption that Bancor's use case is for a groundbreaking ERC20 token that's going to be traded on every exchange makes the author's claim dubious.

A more likely use case for Bancor is some SMB (store/restaurant) or content creator issuing tokens to be used for membership reward/points or for voting on a new video/project idea, not for Augur/Steem/Gnosis 2.0 to issue an ICO.

If you take this gross assumption of the equation, his whole argument about slippage or "trailing the market", etc are gone. You're issuing some small time tokens. There no reason to always buy back from the market and there are no big players trying to "deplete your reserve." The author makes it sound like I'm selling some popular cryptocurrency at a fixed price and am being left to bleed dry when in actuality, I'm issuing my_random_token for friends and customers.

I didn't review the code but if what he's saying is correct, there is a reason for alarm regarding their reimplementation of basic arithmetic functions(!!!) and user overpaying.

By trying to make this into a laundry list, it comes more off as a FUD argument, very similar to what Bitcoin maximalists were doing post the DAO hack to Ethereum.

(Disclaimer: my Bancor holding is about 0.5% of my total Crypto portfolio).

<comment><USER25> >(store/restaurant) or content creator issuing tokens to be used for membership reward/points

Why would a restaurant use this for membership point when a glorified Access db would work just as well?

<comment><USER26> We are witnessing the dotcom bubble version 2: crypto bugaloo

<comment><USER27> We're gonna rock down to electric revenue.

And then we'll take it higher!!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Is there a way to fix no one being able to short these things? The counter party risk and irrational exuberance outlasting ones solvency should be solvable somehow?

<comment><AUTHOR> Remember the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. It is seldom a good idea to short an asset just because you think it is a bubble, unless you're able to call the peak.

<comment><USER29> True, but even so. Most bubbles see at least a few players stake long bets against them (e.g. housing), usually whoever is rich enough to eat months or years of margin calls.

Letting pessimists enter the market rationalizes things that much faster. For something like BTC, the market is actively pressured to stay irrational because any non-holder who expects prices to drop can't enter - you only play if you're bullish.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I bought some BNT... Now the price is only 2.72$ :[ ([http://bancorprice.org/](http://bancorprice.org/))

</comment><comment><USER31> As an experienced trader in FX and us stocks, and as a bit of a budding technologist, how can I best get into speculating Ethereum?

I've tried getting into ethereum, and am super interested in programming numerous smart contracts, but have showed up late to the party, so all the docs are in varying levels of accuracy (out of date) and it seems like i have to download a million and a half heavy applications just to participate. Red flag. It seems weird that company with so much interest and participation doesn't have proper documentation.

Is there a way to go short; are there options markets; is it currently possible to bet against the price of a smart-contract like Bancor?

<comment><USER32> IMHO, I wouldn't consider yourself late to the party. There's a ton of work being done on the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) and new languages are coming out for it (like Viper). The biggest challenge at the moment is knowing which resources are still relevant and worth grokking. As long as you stay curious, I'd say there's a great chance your future in the market will be mildly prosperous at worst.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I would like to know if anyone reading Hacker News invested in BNT. Or any other token.

They look so obviously overpriced - it is difficult for me to understand why people are buying into this.

</comment><comment><USER34> Official response [https://blog.bancor.network/this-analysis-of-bancor-is- flawe...](https://blog.bancor.network/this-analysis-of-bancor-is- flawed-18ab8a000d43)

</comment><comment><USER35> I wish I knew what an ICO was

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

</comment><comment><USER36> Of all the names they could have used...

</comment><comment><USER37> All you have to do is throw a rock at the button on the wall, and a gate will drop on its head. Wait, that's Rancor.

</comment><comment><USER38> how did this thing even get 140M? Is this "funny money" ?

</comment><comment><USER39> I hope hard fork is not going to happen in the future because of them.

</comment><comment><USER40> Jesus christ. I read that as "bacon is flawed" for a second and nearly got a heart attack.

Bacon is perfect.</comment>


The Entrepreneurs Handbook – 54 Resources For First Time Entrepreneurs - <AUTHOR> http://www.quicksprout.com/2009/05/10/the-internet-entrepreneurs-handbook-%e2%80%93-54-resources-for-first-time-entrepreneurs/ <comment><USER2> There are a number of good resources on here, but it amazes me that there are no Paul Graham references at all. I don't know about anyone else, but I've found damn near all of Paul Graham's essays incredibly useful over the years. A list of a few of the most relevant ones (bear in mind that most are tech- specific to some degree or another):

      http://paulgraham.com/relres.html
      http://paulgraham.com/fundraising.html
      http://paulgraham.com/13sentences.html
      http://paulgraham.com/newthings.html
      http://paulgraham.com/die.html
      http://paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html
      http://paulgraham.com/mit.html
      http://paulgraham.com/bronze.html
      http://paulgraham.com/startupfunding.html

There are others, but those are a few of my favorites.</comment>


European Contact with the Americas May Have Triggered Global Cooling - <AUTHOR> https://eos.org/articles/european-contact-with-the-americas-may-have-triggered-global-cooling <comment><AUTHOR> Reference: Actual study [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027737911...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379118307261?via%253Dihub) "Earth system impacts of the European arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492"</comment>


Ignore what EA is telling you about Sim City - the real issue is ownership - <AUTHOR> http://www.attendly.com/ignore-what-ea-is-telling-you-about-sim-city-the-real-issue-is-ownership/

<comment><USER2> This is silly. You've licensed nearly every game you ever bought since the 90s, likely even before that. You've never owned it; you just felt like you did. Server-side storage and 'online-only' gaming just solidifies this in a technological sense, not a legal one.

<comment><USER3> But practically no company could ban you from accessing your savegames with your licensed software, since both were in your physical possession. Now they can.</comment></comment>


Le Sortie de l'opéra en l'an 2000 - <AUTHOR> http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2007676247/ <comment><AUTHOR> English title: Leaving the Opera in the Year 2000. Created in 1902 by Albert Robida.</comment>


Are nomads already living in the future? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/digital-nomad-stories/are-nomads-already-living-in-the-future-5be86f38cfcc

<comment><USER2> >It turns out that the labor costs in Romania are similar to those in the Philippines, but internet speeds are much better and there are no typhoons.

I keep wondering why so-called "digital nomads" keep moving to south-east Asia over Eastern Europe. The latter has similarly low prices, much less crime (unless you go _too_ far east), better Internet access, much less likelihood for coups, less disease, easier access to typical Western food & goods, cheaper access to whatever country the "digital nomad" is originally from... I could go on.

Does the temperature difference between Thailand and Eastern Europe really make the entire difference? (Even then, Albania or Montenegro aren't _that_ cold.)

<comment><USER3> I suspect that many of the "digital nomads" who move to Asia are attracted by stereotypes about Asian culture and Asian women.

<comment><USER4> Don't forget the lady boys.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Launching a startup and work on your previous company at the same time? - <AUTHOR>

I have a small affiliate company which generates decent amount of revenue as commission for selling someone else products.
I'm now thinking of launching a startup and I am not sure if my startup will succeed. So is it a good idea to work at my affiliate company and do a startup at the same time ? People say to quit your previous job and then only you can succeed in your startup, why can't you work on 2 things at once ? Because I would be just betting on this startup which I'm not sure if it will succeed.
Any thoughts ? <comment><USER2> Although you'll need to spend 100% of your time on your startup, at some point, you don't have to start that way. Just make sure that you do whatever you can to fully switch context when working at your job or on your startup. Trying to do both, switching back and forth during the day, will drive you crazy. So in short, yes it can be done.

BTW: if you haven't read it already, read "REWORK" by the guys from 37signals. They talk about this misconception.

Also, starting your startup this way is incredibly hard. But, if you are really serious, you'll find a way and all of the sudden you'll find yourself spending more time on your startup that at your job. Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> awesome, thanks for the book name

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> To some extent, it depends on the context . Personally, I think you should give your startup 100%. I've had to make a similar decision before and chose that route for a few reasons:

1\. for most startups, except with the exception of some lifestyle startups, it won't succeed if you give it 50%.

2\. it matters to you, personally. leaving the comfort zone was, to me, a statement to myself that I'm committed to this and have no fallbacks. With this point, I was really influenced by that one HN post about how Alexandar the Great would burn the ships they used to go somewhere for war, basically to say "theres no retreat"

</comment><comment><USER4> I've been down the same road albeit everyone is different and the general scenario you painted isn't enough for me to warrant giving any advice off hand. If you'd like to get in touch, my email is my username at da google famous email domain.

</comment><comment><USER5> Just do it.

It's all case by case. If you think it will work, make it work.</comment>


Logical implication in action - a poll - <AUTHOR>

I submitted a poll,
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2124808,
then realised the short-coming that people would see the current voting before casting a vote.
Here's a quick experimental hack as an alternative.
In the light of a recent article (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2121428) by Tim Gowers about the difficulties some people have with mathematical logic, I wondered what people here would answer to this question.
Suppose I have four cards. Each card has a letter on one side, and a digit on the other. I arrange them so that you can see "D", "3", "K" and "4". I then claim that every "D" has a "4" on the other side.
Which cards do you need to turn over to see if I'm right?
Click on the appropriate link. <comment><AUTHOR> Click on your choice:

Just D - <http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/LogicalImplication.html?D>

Just 3 - <http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/LogicalImplication.html?3>

Just K - <http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/LogicalImplication.html?K>

Just 4 - <http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/LogicalImplication.html?4>

D and 3 - <http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/LogicalImplication.html?D3>

D and K - <http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/LogicalImplication.html?DK>

D and 4 - <http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/LogicalImplication.html?D4>

3 and K - <http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/LogicalImplication.html?3K>

3 and 4 - <http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/LogicalImplication.html?34>

K and 4 - <http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/LogicalImplication.html?K4>

D, 3 and K - <http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/LogicalImplication.html?D3K>

D, 3 and 4 - <http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/LogicalImplication.html?D34>

D, K and 4 - <http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/LogicalImplication.html?DK4>

3, K and 4 - <http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/LogicalImplication.html?3K4>

All of them - <http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/LogicalImplication.html?D3K4></comment>


Google Enterprise Search - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/enterprise/search/products/?utm_source=gdn&utm_medium=cpv&utm_campaign=northam-lcs-search-website-leads-youtube-us-en&utm_content=dinosuar <comment><USER2> [https://www.google.com/about/company/history/#2002](https://www.google.com/about/company/history/#2002)

2002 - "The first Google product for enterprises is released: the Google Search Appliance is a yellow box that businesses can plug into their computer network to enable search capabilities for their own documents."

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been doing a lot of research on enterprise search products lately and one of the biggest issues is security. Unleashing search on corporate systems where permissions aren't managed really well is a big risk.

<comment><USER4> For some of our systems, we use Alfresco and/or Drupal, both which have Apache Solr as an easily-configurable search backend, and which works basically plug- and-play with the respective systems' content permissions.

Using the free versions of all three (Solr + Drupal + Alfresco), search is fast and access-controlled very easily.

I worked for a company that had a Google Search Appliance about 6 years ago, and, like others have said, it basically sat in a rack somewhere and collected dust once we started using some form of integrated search. The GSA was fast and relatively easy to use, but required an expensive initial purchase + ongoing licensing/update fees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Apart from the fact that this isn't a new product. From a ranking and relevance point of view, can the same (internet) search algorithms be reused for internal (intranet) search? Often permissions, links and usage are not reflective of the importance or reputation of a document like on the public web. Often emails carry a bulk of the decision making material.

Not to downplay the importance of an enterprise search offering, but I don't think Google just packages there standard search in a box nor do I think 1 single GSA box can solve enterprise search.

</comment><comment><USER6> We had one of these like a decade ago. I think it just sat in the DC collecting dust. Really wanted to look inside but they weld the damn thing shut and you have to ship it back to goog for maintenance.

<comment><USER7> They've historically (until this generation -- I haven't poked at our new ones) used commodity Dell servers, along the lines of a 2U PowerEdge. While they were welded shut, it was entirely possible to wipe them and reimage with your own Linux install, provided you had a way to boot from USB. We did this with all of the previous generations of appliances after they were replaced by the new contract. They became perfectly serviceable test boxes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This has been available for roughly a decade. They work well, and they can certainly produce a lot better results than Google Site Search.

</comment><comment><USER9> There are a few of these on eBay, I wonder what the pricing model is. Surely Google doesn't like them just popping up, but I guess if you're out of your agreement you can resell them?

<comment><USER10> I think you can't use it as a search engine after the license expires, so thus on ebay are just useful as a server you can install something else on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Please take a look at [https://www.mindbreeze.com/](https://www.mindbreeze.com/). We offer solutions for site search (hosted yet produced for the concrete site and therefore highly customizable) as well as enterprise search. See also some examples [https://insite.mindbreeze.com/demotheatre.html](https://insite.mindbreeze.com/demotheatre.html).

</comment><comment><USER12> I really like everything on GSA expect the price tag. I am not much fan of Site Search since I have no control on Meta tag level. I wish they would have kept Google Mini as middle layer between GSA and SiteSearch where I was able to control search in custom <meta> tags. Perhaps also they could have put Mini to Virtual Image or cloud instead of having to buy hardware with it just to make it easier.

</comment><comment><USER13> It's interesting that this should pop up today. This morning I attended a Google-sponsored event where they spoke a little about GSA.

I'd have assumed that another HN reader was present but I'm in a city with a pretty non-existent tech community and the event only had ~30 attendees, the majority of whom were energy sector CEOs and GIS people.

</comment><comment><USER14> Has anyone had experience with alternatives to Google Site Search? How did they compare?

<comment><USER15> We used FAST Search.

An interesting anecdote about the Google Search Appliance, a bunch of companies complained about them in the beginning because they conflated "search intranet" with "search file shares" and of course Page Rank is not as effective on file shares as it is on web based systems.

<comment><USER16> I used to work at FAST, but left soon after they were acquired by Microsoft. How did you use it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is this a competitor/replacement for ElasticSearch or SOLR? How is it any different?

<comment><USER18> It is basically a self hosted scraper and search engine in one. You give it your URL and some display templates and it indexes your site in much the same way Google normally would. The only difference is that the results are stored and served locally. They charge based on documents indexed. I don't think it would be good for storing arbitrary data like Solr, just web pages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> How long has this been available? And what are the prices, would love to learn more.

<comment><USER20> 99k for a three year commitment. Check out GroupByInc.com, too. It's a merchandising layer over the GSA. Very bad ass.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I used a google mini and learned xslt/xml/xsl. It was pretty cool...

<comment><USER22> Is there a replacement for the mini? We're still using ours, and don't need the full Google Search Appliance.

<comment><USER21> As far as I know your only options now are the GSA or Google Site Search. The mini is on Google's incredibly long list of discontinued products and services.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Since when Site Search became a paid product?

</comment><comment><USER24> Why isn't there an AWS EC2 AMI of this?

<comment><USER25> Because Google Cloud Platform [https://cloud.google.com/](https://cloud.google.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Google Search Appliance? Perhaps they should call it NSA Search Appliance. It's even a recursive acronym.

</comment><comment><USER27> You gotta wonder if it calls home with your data.

<comment><USER28> You got a firewall so you don't have to wonder.</comment></comment>


SeatMe is hiring - <AUTHOR> http://www.seatme.com/jobs/ YC reject. Was swallowed up into another startup, got funded, and looking to grow my team. <comment><AUTHOR> I was a recent YC reject. I got swallowed up into another startup, got funded, and looking to grow my team.</comment>


The Backbone's connected to the... - <AUTHOR> http://www.kashflow.com/blog/the-backbones-connected-to-the/ <comment><USER2> > (don't worry, no death by Powerpoint here)

well, technically PP wasn't used here, but the unnecessary transition effect makes me feel like it was.

<comment><USER3> "reveal.js" is a fucking plague, and image macros are the new wordarts.

Welcome to PP 2.0, browserdeath edition.

<comment><USER4> I actually find presentations like this to be an easier way of obtaining information than long blog posts.

"WHO WROTE THE 'DEATH NOTE' SCRIPT?" released on HN earlier this week was very interesting but I kept losing my place down the page.

<http://www.gwern.net/Death%20Note%20script>

<comment><USER3> > I actually find presentations like this to be an easier way of obtaining > information than long blog posts.

I have little issue with presentations in and of themselves, although generally speaking either the presentation is missing most of the relevant information or it's just a more annoying format for a blog post.

I _do_ have an issue with reveal.js which is the epitome of "style over substance" presentations full of pointless rotations and intractable multi- dimensional navigations, and with overuse of image macros which are the lowest common denominator of the modern web and the most information-free way to waste time and bandwidth.

> "WHO WROTE THE 'DEATH NOTE' SCRIPT?" released on HN earlier this week was > very interesting but I kept losing my place down the page.

A bigger difference is that this piece happens to have actual content. And dense one at that. It's not trivial to read let alone skim.

<comment><USER4> I agree with you. Do you think presentations like this have any place, perhaps more to large groups of people at HN London rather than a singular user?

<comment><USER3> Oh yes, the format is OK as a support for a talk (although this one precisely has way too much text crammed in some of the slides), and of course the navigation is not an issue when the creator is the one showing the deck.

I also think presentations could work better as a single-consumer format if "presentation notes" were available alongside, expanding on the slide itself with what the presenter would usually talk about. Essentially a slide becomes a "hook", a header for a page of content. And the presentation itself becomes a sectioned/paginated post. But I don't know any presentation site which provides a good interface for that (I don't believe speakerdeck does anyway).

<comment><USER4> Interesting, I think you could take that further for group presentations. Say when you are actually in a presentation - the 'presentation notes' are sent in real-time to mobile devices.

Could you explain further as to what the interface would be like? If the presentation is full screen, where would the notes be? Somewhere off-page that you could pull in if needed?

<comment><USER3> > Interesting, I think you could take that further for group presentations. > Say when you are actually in a presentation - the 'presentation notes' are > sent in real-time to mobile devices.

That's a pretty interesting idea, and it could help e.g. non-native or disabled audience follow the talk.

If the on-device UI is done well-enough, it could also help with the usual "ask questions at the end" format: tap the text and jot down a quick reminder, and at the end of the presentation the things you tapped can be displayed for review or questioning.

> If the presentation is full screen, where would the notes be? Somewhere off- > page that you could pull in if needed?

Sure, but I think it'd work better if the interface was closer to "presenter view", with the slides taking only part of the screen (say half) and the notes/accompanying text taking the rest. Then you could have something similar to e.g. Reeder/Mac's interface, using the spacebar to read "the next thing", either scrolling down the text (if not all of it can be displayed) or switching to the next slide (if the text is under a page or its end has been reached)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The author is saying the technology lagged behind, and presents content that just says "you can use javascript for more than you could in IE5!"

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't really know why everybody is crazy about Backbone, when Qooxdoo (<http://qooxdoo.org/>) it's a lot better than it. You don't even have to know/touch html/css. You also have an automated generated page (that contains all of your js files or 1 big file if is min), OOP classes 'like' in Java, and full UI library.

<comment><USER7> > You don't even have to know/touch html/css.

Most people here know and prefer html/css to magic.

> You also have an automated generated page (that contains all of your js > files or 1 big file if is min)

Easy with Rails. A lot of backbone apps are running on rails.

<comment><USER4> I see lots of backbone app tutorials with Sinatra, would you suggest that Rails is better?

<comment><USER7> I don't know whether it's better or not. But I think Rails is good enough and has a lot of advanced functionality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Are you seriously suggesting wikipedia becomes a single page app?

No really, I realize you say that server refreshes work for wikipedia, but you really seem to be suggesting that all websites should be single page apps.

<comment><USER9> I'm with you on this. mv* Javascript frameworks just don't make a lot of sense on a primarily "document" (and I use that term loosely) based site, like Wikipedia. Things like backbone have their place, but it isn't on every site every made.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Does Kashflow jibe with Canadian banks? And is there an Evernote addon in the plans?

<comment><USER4> There is dropbox integration, why would you need evernote?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Thank you for sharing this. I actually enjoyed reading it, very entertaining!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot! Glad you liked it...

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> More like death by kittens

<comment><USER4> Sorry, we're planning to cross-post this to reddit ;)</comment></comment>


WP for nubes - <AUTHOR> http://bizanosa.com/wordpress-tutorial-for-beginners/ <comment><USER2> We should really stop telling people that they should learn to code to create their own websites. This is the exact reason WP is what it is today and why most sites have no quality, don't meet any screen reader criteria and so on.

Ether you know what you are doing, or you going to write bad code. What ultimately will reduce your users/sales/SEO and everything else you care about.</comment>


The False Musk-Jobs Parallel - <AUTHOR> https://mondaynote.com/the-false-musk-jobs-parallel-f038093ac033 <comment><USER2> This sounds like the title of a big bang episode.</comment>


Ask HN: Where can I find high quality writing services? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking for someone to write high quality article/blog post (about NYC). There are tons of companies I could go with, but I'm completely unfamiliar with this whole area. Any recommendations? My budget is 100-300$ per article. <comment><USER2> I'd recommend checking out [https://scripted.com/](https://scripted.com/) and [https://www.textbroker.com/](https://www.textbroker.com/) \- I've heard good things about both. We're also launching a content delivery service over at [http://www.camayak.com/](http://www.camayak.com/), but it's new so you'd be an early customer for a beta service.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have a close friend who is in your price range, depending on the length of the article. He's written for Business Insider, Cosmo, and Brooklyn Daily Eagle (from NYC).

Contact me at email@example.com and I'll forward his info.

</comment><comment><USER4> Check these out,

[http://conorth.co/](http://conorth.co/) [https://collegecopywriters.com/](https://collegecopywriters.com/)

</comment><comment><USER5> You have to be kidding. And I mean full John McEnroe "You cannot be serious."

First of all $150 for a 750-word article would be a good payment. Assuming you aren't asking for more words than that ("blog post" suggests no), you can have your pick of people.

Second, evaluating writers is the simplest damned task in the world. Read their frigging code.

Third, average reading speed is 200 words a minute, so you could read an entire submission in less than five minutes. Practically speaking, you would probably need less.

Elance and Odesk merged and are now called Upwork. If you posted the job (number of articles, average length) and asked them to send you sample pieces and an online portfolio, you would be overwhelmed.

Even if you insisted that they have a verified business address within 50 miles of Manhattan, you'd still have a fire hose to drink from.

I wouldn't entirely recommend Craigslist, but you can find a lot of people there-- some of whom are very good and still struggling to make ends meet-- if you don't mind swatting away the 8-balls who will apply (CL gives you a custom email for replies, so you won't deal with them forever.)

Writers tend not to hang out there, but Behance or Dribble do have some.

Let me close by restating my opening. Some questions that get posted here are difficult to answer; others have expectations are ridiculous. But the thing every freelance writer wants most is a steady stream of assignments that lets them make a pretty good income per sale.

Four posts a week at $150 would be $600, which is $15 an hour-- enough to pay bills.

Your request is comparable to posting "I'm a supermodel who really enjoys having sex with men with small penises and no social skills. Can anyone on HN help me?" Your big problem would be people thinking you must be a scam, because your request sounds too good to be true.

UPDATE: There are, by and large, two broad types of writers: extroverts who promote themselves capably, but might or might not have equally good skills, and introverts who lock themselves away and aren't great at self-promotion.

The first group is pretty easy to find, but often not worth the price. The second group takes some hunting but can give you better results for less.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well. I'm not kidding at all. I read a bunch of reviews as for the Elance/Odesk/Upwork/Etc. Most of what I heard is "stay away from them if you are looking for something really good". I also found a couple companies that do (as per reviews) a relatively good job. But the prices are crazy ($300-500 per article). Some other companies say "30$ for 1000 words article". So I was a bit confused about all of these costs.

<comment><USER6> What do you mean by "really good"? Spelt right and mildly engaging, or the next EB White's "This is New York"?

First you'll find on Upwork or Textbroker no problem. Latter will be a long search for a great writer who creates exactly the work you want.

Writing is like most other unregulated professional services in that costs vary wildly, as does quality, and the two are not necessarily correlated.

Get samples, ask friends for recommendations, find blog posts you like and e-mail the authors, give small easily completed sample tasks that grow into big assignments and build a solid relationship with one vendor over time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm the founder of CoNorth.co (thanks for the recommendation, vigneshrams!). We work with many startups and our rates start from $150. We also offer a money back guarantee. If you have any questions or would like further info, you are more than welcome to email me directly: email@example.com

</comment><comment><USER8> I dunno if it is within budget but checkout [https://scripted.com/](https://scripted.com/)

I remember it was considered one of the highest quality services out there (never used it personally, though).

</comment><comment><USER4> Check these out,

[https://collegecopywriters.com/](https://collegecopywriters.com/) [http://conorth.co/](http://conorth.co/)

</comment><comment><USER9> I've been a writer and editor for six years, but I'm currently also a grad student, so I'm always looking for work. My email address is in my profile.

</comment><comment><USER10> I posted something here, then deleted it to protect my privacy. I do freelance work. You can email me for a copy of what I posted earlier.

Best of luck.</comment>


Apple Rejects Launcher App - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/29/apple-rejects-launcher-the-app-that-lets-you-launch-other-apps-from-ios-8-notification-center/

<comment><USER2> Look forward to an 'amazing' new feature with iOS 9.</comment>


Turn a Raspberry Pi into an FM transmitter - <AUTHOR> http://makezine.com/projects/make-38-cameras-and-av/raspberry-pirate-radio/ <comment><USER2> Just blew my motherboard by updating the bios via one of dell's software updates and corrupted my bios. The board doesn't have a dual bios configuration so its corrupted so I can't pull the battery or reset the CMOS.

All of my research showed that most people just pony up and replace the mobo for $200. Unwilling to give up I kept researching and found that you can turn your Raspberry Pi into a flashrom to restore your bios. [http://flashrom.org/RaspberryPi](http://flashrom.org/RaspberryPi)

Waiting on female to female GPIO connectors to come in mail before I can hook my raspi up to the SPI sockets on my mobo and reflash the bios. Got my fingers crossed, if this works it will be a great win!

<comment><USER3> It should work. If you have serious trouble with that then there are also devices like the Bus Pirate[1] that can do the same thing (Though I have yet to do it myself).

It's really neat how easy this kind of thing has become recently with all of the hobby electronics guys driving the market and opening up doors that 10-15 years ago looked bleak at the time (though that could just be my memory coloring it).

I have used similar stuff to fix up routers (though haven't had to interface with the flashrom directly) and install openwrt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You can also use a bare raspi (plus a couple passives...) as a 10mW QRP transmitter: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QRP_operation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QRP_operation)

With the right software, plus favorable ionospheric conditions, you can get really, really good range. This guy did 7,600km, eastern Austria to south Florida: [http://gerolfziegenhain.wordpress.com/2013/04/13/raspi-as- ws...](http://gerolfziegenhain.wordpress.com/2013/04/13/raspi-as-wspr- transmitter/)

<comment><USER5> You also need a very, very good antenna for that sort of stunt.

QRP is tough. I'm a licensed HAM radio operator and my Tx has a 5 W final stage, so I fit right into the QRP limits. It's tough. You're at the mercy of the ionosphere all the time.

100 W amplifiers are cheap. :)

<comment><USER4> Plus he's doing QRSS using WSPR, which transmits at the breakneck pace of 1.46 baud. Supposedly WSPR works down to -28dB.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WSPR_%28amateur_radio_software%...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WSPR_%28amateur_radio_software%29)

<comment><USER6> I use a WSPR transmitter that outputs around 200mW on 20m and am easily heard all over North Americdn and Europe. I've also had two South Pacific reports.

This was into a poorly tuned dipole at 35ft.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> a-priori As an amateur radio operator, I think this is fascinating, because they claim it can transmit on the 2m VHF band (144-148MHz) that's popular among hams.

But I have some concerns about its signal characteristics, since you're essentially abusing digital hardware (GPIO) to produce a modulated output it wasn't designed to produce. Someone with a spectrum analyzer should check to see if it produces any nasty harmonics, or similar noise, that could interfere with other stations.

<comment><USER7> If you need a datapoint on how noisy those signals are: some people have combined a 144.6Mhz Raspberry Pi output with a narrow passive bandpass filter to generate a relatively clean and powerful 433MHz signal (the third harmonic, which is quite strong in a square wave): [http://www.skagmo.com/page.php?p=projects/22_pihat](http://www.skagmo.com/page.php?p=projects/22_pihat)

<comment><USER8> Recently I did a similar project in which a malicious hardware device leaks a victim's data (Password, credit card #, etc.) through a similar technique.

We used an FPGA though, so with a 100 Mhz fundamental frequency we had harmonics well into the 1.5 Ghz. We called it CPU-SDR. Video here:

[https://sites.google.com/a/groundworkstech.com/index/blog/rs...](https://sites.google.com/a/groundworkstech.com/index/blog/rsa-2014 ---about-cpu-backdoors-and-data-exfiltration)

Bonus: Using mutiple PCB traces, you have a basic Yagi-like directional antenna. Feeding different traces you can modify the RF radiation pattern it in real-time.

<comment><USER9> You've indeed invented MIMO.

<comment><USER8> It's more like a Yagi, as currently I feed only one of the "antennas" and the modulation is very limited.

But messing with the phases should be possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you're interested in getting into RF, I'd suggest getting a software- defined radio like bladeRF[1]. It allows you to make a lot of cool devices without being a hardware whiz.

The guys who run it are extremely knowledgeable about RF and there's some really cool stuff being done with it [2][3].

[1]: [http://nuand.com/](http://nuand.com/)

[2]: [http://bladerf.blogspot.com/](http://bladerf.blogspot.com/)

[3]: [http://www.irrational.net/2014/03/02/digital- atv/](http://www.irrational.net/2014/03/02/digital-atv/)

<comment><USER4> I wish they had put the $420 price of the basic model on the front page.

<comment><USER11> Yes, it's not exactly in the raspi price range. That range is covered by the TV-tuner SDR receivers and other USB-stick receivers.

On the other hand, for what it does, that x40 is actually quite cheap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Reminds me of Fabrice Bellard generating TV signals (analog and digital) with a VGA card.

[http://bellard.org/dvbt/](http://bellard.org/dvbt/)

</comment><comment><USER13> There are two previous discussions of this that might also be worth reading:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5103031](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5103031)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4899505](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4899505)

</comment><comment><USER14> It will transmit radio noise on many other frequencies. I played with this stuff when i was a kid to jam neighbor's TV's (they only used antennaes). Worked like a charm.

It's very hard and expensive to transmit signal on a single frequency. And very easy to pollute everything.

<comment><USER15> > _It 's very hard and expensive to transmit signal on a single frequency. And > very easy to pollute everything._

FM transmitters for MP3 players are cheap and work well (within a very short range, but that's their use-case), see for example [http://www.amazon.com/FM- Transmitters-MP3-Player-Accessories...](http://www.amazon.com/FM-Transmitters- MP3-Player-Accessories/b?ie=UTF8&node=13981621)

So surely it can't be _that_ hard or expensive - unless it changes when you try to broadcast to more than a few feet away?

<comment><USER16> If you can only broadcast two feet, who will care that you are flooding the spectrum?

So I don't think you can assume they are particularly clean transmissions.

<comment> mark-r If they meet FCC regulations then yes you can assume that. If they don't meet FCC regulations then they're illegal. I don't know how much policing goes on for that though.

<comment><USER16> I thought FCC regs involved a distance component? Like, they don't measure EMI right on the surface of the device.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Make has covered it before: [http://makezine.com/2012/12/10/raspberry-pi-as- an-fm-transmi...](http://makezine.com/2012/12/10/raspberry-pi-as-an-fm- transmitter/?parent=Electronics)

Note that the news here is only the Make project on it, as this has been known and working for well over a year. The current PiFM software uses DMA from the userspace to play without clicks and without taking the whole CPU. The later versions also appear to support stereo, so I can't make much sense of this sentence in Make's tutorial (step 5):

> Each file is then re-encoded into a mono format the PiFM radio can handle.

If their pre-configured image is really doing this, it is doing it wrong, I think. Worth noting that the PiFM script is capable of reading from stdout, and not just play WAV files, so the possibilities go well beyond playing music off a SD card.

By the way, here is the original page in a Wiki (of which Make shows a screenshot, but I found no link): [http://www.icrobotics.co.uk/wiki/index.php/Turning_the_Raspb...](http://www.icrobotics.co.uk/wiki/index.php/Turning_the_Raspberry_Pi_Into_an_FM_Transmitter)

edits: add information

</comment><comment><USER18> you could use this to broadcast RDS, and then tell the other cars on the road that there is a blockade ahead, it would be like that Bruce Almighty scene, well maybe not...

<comment><USER19> _It has enough range to cover your home, DIY drive-in movie, a high school ball game, or even a bike parade (depending on the stragglers)._

Interesting idea... but wouldn't you need to increase the broadcast range for that to work effectively?

<comment><USER20> Maybe every car with the system could work as a re-transmitter?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Nice! Way back I did something similar in the AM band with one of the 8 pin PIC chips [1], didn't play music though, just sent morse code. The RPi version is much nicer, you could have it talk to you :-).

[1] [http://www.mcmanis.com/chuck/robotics/projects/eelb.html](http://www.mcmanis.com/chuck/robotics/projects/eelb.html)

</comment><comment><USER22> Is it possible to both receive and transmit FM simultaneously?

Could this be used to create a simple, low bandwidth wireless connection between 2 pis?

</comment><comment><USER23> Would it be possible to modify this to work at 125khz to use passive RFID?

</comment><comment><USER24> There are some really good legitimate uses for this, but I'm concerned that it's going to turn into another Defense Distributed situation =-(

<comment><USER25> I'm not sure exactly how they compare, other than the fact that both have a potential for some form of misuse.

Exactly what concerns do you have?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> After starting the broadcast: "Keep in mind that it'll take about 15 seconds to warm up"

What does that mean? What needs to warm up?

<comment><USER4> Boot up. It runs a full Linux stack, and the raspi CPU is not astonishingly fast.

<comment><USER27> I just rebooted my rapberripi running archlinux, It took ~2 seconds from the time I rebooted it to me being able to ssh into it.

The pi started to respond to ICMP packets in 19 seconds

[http://pastebin.com/JQmCmHXH](http://pastebin.com/JQmCmHXH)

<comment><USER28> Hmm, maybe a Raspberry PI could be easier and more reliable replacement to virtual machines?

(I love Vagrant/Virtualbox but sometimes, after putting the laptop to sleep, it stops working and I have to reboot).

<comment><USER29> They're not that fast. A single thread build of my python/c project (pillow) takes ~ 15 seconds on a vm, ~ 30 on an ancient core duo laptop, and ... still waiting on the raspberry. edit: 5:15. So 25 times slower.

<comment><USER30> I did an analysis of Mathematica benchmarks on the Raspberry Pi and found it to be 15x slower _at best_ and much slower when there are CPU specific optimizations:

[http://adereth.github.io/blog/2014/01/06/benchmarking- mathem...](http://adereth.github.io/blog/2014/01/06/benchmarking-mathematica- on-the-raspberry-pi/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Hmm add a line-in, transform the signal, pipe it over to the transmitter and BOOM; silent disco!

</comment><comment><USER32> Personal number station here we go!

</comment><comment><USER33> Great ! I just managed to transmit the FM signals, I used my micro USB cable stuck in 7th Pin

</comment><comment><USER34> Why not just make one out of a single transistor and some resistors? #overkill

</comment><comment><USER35> This is awesome! Now what kind of bandwidth can we get out of this?

</comment><comment><USER36> Does anyone have the ISO or a torrent of it?</comment>


Shoelace.css – a CSS starter kit - <AUTHOR> https://labs.abeautifulsite.net/shoelace-css/docs/?beta2 <comment><AUTHOR> I created Shoelace.css because I felt like Bootstrap 4 was taking too long and getting way too heavy for what it's intended to do.

The idea with Shoelace.css is:

\- pure CSS, yet highly customizable via CSS variables

\- import everything with one <link> and customize it in your own stylesheet

\- 31KB minified for everything

\- no unnecessary components

\- no JavaScript

It's great for prototyping and in production with modern browsers. If you need to support older browsers, the docs provide info about using appropriate polyfills.

Hope you like it!

</comment><comment><USER2> "You can customize Shoelace without editing core files or using a preprocessor. To add customizations, simply override one or more of the variables found invariables.css in your own stylesheet."

Nice. I love living in the future.</comment>


This is the new standard in xkcd explained. - <AUTHOR> http://kirindave.tumblr.com/post/287665759/abstraction <comment><USER2> You could link to the post on xkcdexplained instead of blogspam: <http://xkcdexplained.com/post/285788458/abstraction>

<comment><USER3> But then how would he get new visitors to his blog? ;)</comment></comment>


When was the last time you looked at your business plan? - <AUTHOR> http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1457-when-was-the-last-time-you-looked-at-your-business-plan

<comment><USER3> As posted on their site...

"Sure, thinking about the future can help. But writing it down and thinking it's any sort of plan is foolish. The truth is you're not going to know what to do until you're actually doing it."

I think that's a very short-sighted and foolish comment to make.

A business plan can have many uses, but here you're thinking about the internal uses (rather than for raising investment or other external validations). For internal purposes, a business plan achieves several objectives:

1) It sets out a clear, common vision for the business. You can have endless conversations in the coffee shop or over a beer, but once you see them in writing, things take on a clearer reality. So the first internal purpose of a business plan is to ensure that all the founders are on the same page and clear about it.

2) It ensures you've given at least some token thought to all the key elements of a business. If you're smart, before writing your business plan, you've had a look at a few templates and noticed what is supposed to be in there. Based on that, you'll spend time thinking about things such as logistics (if relevant), cash flow, marketing, sales, market research, competitor analysis… All those are things that should be at least considered before you commit the next 3 years of your life to chasing an idea.

3) As part of this, a business plan helps you to validate, more explicitly, by putting some numbers into it (those should be very conservative numbers for sales and very exaggerated numbers for costs) that all these different aspects of the business are viable. It's worth doing that tiny little bit of work to ensure that it is even possible theoretically for your business to turn a profit.

4) If you have more than 2 founders (and even if you only have 2), a thorough business plan can also be a management tool, by making it clearer what the essential parts of the business are and thus making it easier to coordinate those tasks between all the cofounders.

It's funny, I wouldn't be surprised to hear the typical SV start-up moaning about business plans, but 37-signals, of the "getting real" school, should understand better than many other people that making sure the business is cohesive and has the potential to be profitable is very important. A business plan can do just that, and all that for only a handful of weeks of work on the side... seems like a bargain.

I'll just add also that planning – which is the only purpose you're considering – is actually, imho, the least important use of a business plan. Just because it has the word "plan" in the name doesn't mean it needs to be a glorified gantt chart.

<comment><USER4> re: #1, "Common Vision": You don't need to write a plan to have a clear/common vision. A conversation and a short written paragraph or two does the trick. I agree that written documents can provide some clarity.

re: #2, "Ensures token thought to key elements of a business": If you need artificial structures to ensure that you think about something important, you're in trouble. Sure, whip up a spreadsheet with some prices and churn numbers to get a sense of the scale you'll need for a SaaS offering. Sure, poke around at ad rates in your vertical if you're going ad-supported. But the key is thinking about it and learning about some of the realities-- not a formal document.

re: #4 "a management/coordination tool" - Huh? In a 4 person business, people are going to refer to the business plan to know what they should be doing? Naw, they should be referring to customer feedback, 1-page feature summaries, visual prototypes, notecard stories, and app/biz analytics....

The point of their gripe is that things change. Dramatically. You'll look back at the assumptions that are core to your business plan and laugh about how stupid you were (I know I would if I'd written one). Some of the exercise is valuable-- to stretch muscles you're going to need (thinking about monetization, distribution, etc)...

But at the end of the day, it's usually akin to a virgin trying to write a sex manual-- no amount of research/planning is going to make it a good/accurate plan.

<comment><USER3> _But at the end of the day, it's usually akin to a virgin trying to write a sex manual-- no amount of research/planning is going to make it a good/accurate plan._

It doesn't need to be accurate. Even a virgin can benefit from thinking about what he's going to be doing once it all starts happening. I'll also add that running a business is a lot less instinct-driven than sex (well, for most people... I know some exceptions!).

 _rere: #1_ \- it's quite possible that a short paragraph is not enough to set out all the key elements of a multi-year venture. In my experience, in fact, that's pretty much always the case.

 _rere: #2_ \- Not everyone has been running businesses since they were born. Artifical structures help in running a business just as they help in many other things.

 _rere: #4_ \- you don't need to refer them back to the plan all the time, but it helps split up all the stuff that needs to get done so that it's easier to assign ownership for chunks of it. Of course in a start-up everyone does a bit of everything, but that doesn't mean everyone should step on each other's feet constantly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's the act of developing a business plan that is important, not the plan itself. There is also much more to a business plan than just projecting revenues.

If you are realistic, planning forces you to actually _think_ critically about things like startup and ongoing costs, cash flow, suppliers, sales pipeline, time/resource requirements, the window to achieve profitability before you run out of money, and most importantly the critical steps you need to take before you start.

After you're in business the game changes. Then it becomes much more about flexibility and adapting to new information and changing situations. There is no doubt that if you blindly stick to a plan no matter what your business will fail, but this doesn't discount the value of the up front planning process.

</comment><comment><USER6> "In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable. " - <USER2>

<comment><USER7> And "No plan survives contact with the enemy." - Helmuth von Moltke

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think that a Business Plan is a working document that needs to change and evolve with the environment that your business is in. What I like about a business plan is the fact that it helps you to think about how you are going to run/operate your business and to put in down in writing forces you to think about it.

</comment><comment><USER9> when I wrote it...I honestly can say that I haven't opened that file since.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm sorry, who writes a business plan these days? Just find a great market, build a great team and relentlessly build your product.

Business plans are for suckers.

<comment><USER11> Failing any of those, just relentlessly promote your product ;-)

I kid, I kid...

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Never bc I never wrote one.</comment>


Wolkenkit 3.0 – a CQRS and event-sourcing framework for JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://www.thenativeweb.io/blog/2018-12-04-18-17-introducing-wolkenkit-3-0/ <comment><USER2> From the home page:

"wolkenkit is a CQRS and event-sourcing framework for JavaScript and Node.js which fits perfectly with domain-driven design (DDD). It provides the technical foundation for your application, including an event-store and a scalable real-time API. This allows you to focus on what's essential: Solving actual real-world problems in no time."

I've been a developer for decades and this means almost nothing to me. I'm sorry if this comes across as harsh - I'm just trying to be helpful. What's your elevator pitch for this product? I'm not looking for CQRS because I don't know what it is. How many more people might you attract to your product if you could translate your pitch into how it benefits me? It's really hard coming up with your one-liner in plain English. But every time I see a one-liner that means very little to me as a programmer (which is unfortunately most projects), I encourage folks to put in the effort. Otherwise, I just skip over it and move on. And I'm guessing I'm not the only one.

Here's a one liner I think works well: "React: A JavaScript library for building user interfaces".

I hope that helps.

<comment><USER3> Maybe you should check out CQRS? You already know what a UI is, so the React tagline makes sense to you. Likewise with CQRS and the other things you don't recognize, they'd make sense if you spent as much time looking them up as writing about how you don't know what they are? I mean, this is not a product, it's a software framework. Maybe that's a product to someone, but to me that's a tool you need to learn about if you want to make sense of it. It's like you're expressing frustration about not knowing something, which is easy to fix in 2018.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think one thing that is also important here is (and this also may sound harsh, but is not meant to be offensive): If you don't know what CQRS and event-sourcing are, you probably don't have the problem that CQRS and event- sourcing solve ;-)

<comment><USER3> Which is funny because I'd think anyone who's ever tried building and then maintaining a web app would recognize they have the problems CQRS/ES is trying to solve, but the that shouldn't be taken for granted I guess.

<comment><USER4> This architecture isn't necessary for most apps. It meets a specific need with serious constraints that have to be considered before making use of it.

<comment><USER5> The catch with CQRS is that it isn't widespread enough that everyone recognizes its shortfalls, and the upsides are really easy to convey:

\- Excellent auditing abilities

\- "time-traveling" debugging (you get the entire history of what happened)

\- Easy backup abilities (append-only stores are objectively easier to backup)

\- Datastores tailored to your querying requirements (say bye to monstruous SQL queries)

These are the things you see on CQRS-related websites. Then you decide to try it or to research conference talks and such and you find out the downsides:

\- Data deletion is now a PITA (and you need it if only for legal reasons)

\- Doing actual transactions (in the ACID sense) is now somewhere between hard and impossible

\- Welcome to the magic world of non-linearizable datastore operations. Here be dragons.

\- If you make a mistake (wrong event / wrong data in an event) you will suffer from it greatly, possibly for all eternity.

<comment><USER6> I think you're speaking more about event-sourcing than CQRS. CQRS is a generic concept that's only about separating writes from reads. It's useful paired with event-sourcing but on its own it does not suffer these specific drawbacks.

Another problem with event sourcing is that there is no easily definable concept of a "field" that can be read from and written to using a named address (contrast with a SQL table column identifier). For a given aggregate, you'll have a single command service that writes a set of "fields" and an unbounded number of query services that receive a copy of that "field" from the event stream and can transform it in any imaginable way. Your "field" may be renamed and moved around through its journey from your command service's API request body to your event's serialized form and to your query service's internal data structures and its final resting place on the query service's persistence data store (mongodb or SQL table or whatever).

To identify a field, it's best to use its writable address, and you'll need to come up with your own identifier namespace and naming convention to represent those addresses.

<comment><USER5> > I think you're speaking more about event-sourcing than CQRS

True. I was reading to the comments here and yes, most of them were focusing on the Event Sourcing part of Wokenkit, not the CQRS so my mind got tricked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Love how the "Getting Started" to Wolkenkit doesn't even have any tangible code until page 3. If your quick start guide can't even get to the point until halfway down the page, I'm gonna bet that your framework isn't very user- friendly.

Also, can anyone tell me what this even does? I've been clicking around and besides a bunch of vapid "philosophy" documents I can't figure out what the fuck anyone would use this for...

<comment><USER8> As others have said on this page, event sourcing is one of those technologies where if you don't know what it is, you certainly don't need it. Even if you do know what is, you usually don't need or want it unless you have no choice.

In event sourcing, instead of having stateful objects, you have a log of events that you use to build that state. It gives you powerful rollback, backup, and history features at the expense of some insane code complexity (usually solved by tooling). When paired with CQRS, another architecture separating reads and writes in your abstractions, and done well with events that are domain oriented ("AccountingReconciliationStarted" instead of "StartButtonClicked"), you can hide most of the code complexity and allow developers and less technical users to focus on domain complexity (i.e., the logic that matters to the real world).

At least in theory.

<comment><USER9> Why the insane code complexity? Yes there can be a lot of complexity in storing the events but using Kafka or similar event stores which provide libraries for handling the connection details should remove most of that complexity. Then your code can essentially be written as a map-reduce. Add a stream filter and it can easily be transformed to/from a Redux event system to a business one. Perhaps if your codebase didn't build on a streaming architecture it would necessitate a lot of advocacy code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is the one that you can't use for commercial projects?

<comment><USER11> Very funny, since we tried this... 6 years ago. At the time, HN reaction was: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3931525](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3931525)

And you know what? It was true. We changed the licensing to MIT for most of Opa ([http://opalang.org](http://opalang.org)), but maybe a bit too late.

<comment><AUTHOR> But what other options than going dual-license do you have if you want to do open-source in a sustainable way? MIT does offer nothing here, unfortunately.

<comment><USER11> There are many good business opportunities if your open source technology, without strings attached, gets popular. You could just sell professional support as part of subscriptions and verified builds. Later on, when you release a new version, you can still support the previous one or build migration tools that you include with subscriptions, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's true, but on the other hand there are also successful (A)GPL open source projects … think of Linux (or MongoDB, at least for a long time).

<comment><USER12> See also "economy of scale"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Looks really interesting.

Are there any companies using this in prod already? Or any load experiment numbers? Proving that this actually is a "scalable real-time API"?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your nice feedback :-)

Yes, it is already running in production, but due to NDAs, unfortunately I can't provide any details here.

Regarding the scalability most is prepared, but there are still a few things that need to be done. We would be more than happy for anyone who wants to contribute or to sponsor us. For details see [https://github.com/thenativeweb/wolkenkit/issues/90](https://github.com/thenativeweb/wolkenkit/issues/90)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> [https://www.wolkenkit.io/#getting-started-test- drive](https://www.wolkenkit.io/#getting-started-test-drive)

I don't see any messages in my network console, so it seems the message form is actually not really sending anything and the app is not a real wolkenkit app. Am I right?

<comment><AUTHOR> The getting started part is only simulated, to actually get started, please see [https://docs.wolkenkit.io/3.0.0/getting-started/creating- you...](https://docs.wolkenkit.io/3.0.0/getting-started/creating-your-first- application/setting-the-objective/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Why does libraries like this insist of using a query language similar to SQL rather then map, reduce, filter that are more like JavaScript!? Or is SQL so much better ?

</comment><comment><USER16> That header animation was cool only the first 50 times I saw it

</comment><comment><USER17> CQRS and Event Sourcing ... run away, run far, far away.

</comment><comment><USER18> when do you use cqrs/es ?

is this like Datomic?

<comment><USER19> To cut a long story short: Event-sourcing as a persistence mechanism, where you store deltas instead of the current state, similar to what Git does. CQRS is a pattern to separate the write side from the read side of your application, with the goal of being able to scale both independently of each other.

Regarding Datomic: I'm not an expert for Datomic, but AFAICS Datomic is primarily a database, while wolkenkit is an out-of-the-box full-featured framework for business logic, storage and so on.

<comment><USER20> Just to clarify here: event sourcing is _not_ what Git does at all. Git stores complete snapshots of objects, not diffs [1].

Event sourcing itself is a fairly straightforward concept which the parent does sum up though - store events which describe what happened to an entity in a system rather than the resulting state. The state of an object can be derived via application of a left fold over the history.

[1]: [https://willi.am/blog/2014/10/14/for-the-last-time-git- store...](https://willi.am/blog/2014/10/14/for-the-last-time-git-stores- snapshots-not-diffs/) \- this is the best reference I can find quickly, though the git manual would obvioiusly be more authoritative.

<comment><AUTHOR> As said, "similar" to what Git does ;-)

Conceptually, it's still capturing the deltas, instead of storing the current state and overwriting it. Storing the history is the key ingredient here, and of course, there are differences in how to achieve this.

<comment><USER20> I would argue that there is a fundamental difference between the two: one stores the state and calculates the deltas, and the other stores the deltas and calculates the state.

Both are common in systems, but only the latter is event sourcing - at least if the definition is to have any use and not become overloaded.

<comment><USER3> Yeah every time people say Git stores deltas it's sad because the fun thing about Git is that it DOESNT store deltas.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


UK Proposes All Paychecks Go to the State First - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/id/39265847

<comment><USER2> Unsurprisingly, not true.

The discussion document (link below) suggests that instead of sending employee's tax _information_ to the government once a year, modern computing and telecommunications would make it easier for everyone if that information were updated each pay period.

[http://customs.hmrc.gov.uk/channelsPortalWebApp/channelsPort...](http://customs.hmrc.gov.uk/channelsPortalWebApp/channelsPortalWebApp.portal?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=pageLibrary_ConsultationDocuments&propertyType=document&columns=1&id=HMCE_PROD1_030623)

In the UK, employers are responsible for calculating and withholding tax, and only self-employed people need to file tax returns on their own behalf. If you change jobs it can be 4-6 weeks before your tax paperwork arrivse at your new employer, because it is sent from your old employer to the treasury from there to your new place of work; during this time you pay 'emergency tax' at the highest rate. Any overpayment is refunded as soon as the new employer has the tax information, but until they get it their payroll will cover themselves by withholding the maximum. This is not a fun thing when you begin working or change jobs, because for a month or so your employer is working on the assumption that you are fabulously wealthy until the Treasury gives them evidence to the contrary, regardless of how much your actual job pays. So everyone who enters/moves within the workforce is taxed like a bank CEO for the first month - something that's a lot more memorable than the refund which comes many weeks later.

Employer filing of payroll and income tax information each pay period would eliminate this archaic practice and make it easier for both employers to do payroll and employees to switch jobs, because the current tax information could be passed back to a new employer just as quickly, eliminating the wasteful (and expensive) disruption. They further suggest that if this worked out well, employers could upload gross pay information and have the treasury do the work of calculating the taxes, which would reduce employers' administrative overhead considerably as they would no longer be required to collect taxes and tax information on behalf of the government. It would also increase employees' financial privacy, since the Treasury would be storing the same information that it does now but it would no longer need to be duplicated in the recorrds of a person's employer for the purpose of calculcating their taxes.

It even states specifically: _At no stage would HMRC [the tax collection agency] or its agents have direct access to any money or information contained in the recipient's bank account or indeed the bank account itself._

The notion that the money is proposed to go to the government first is simply Not True. It's a short document written in plain English. There is no way that CNBC could have interpreted it the way they did unless they are either stupid or dishonest. You've been had.

<comment><USER3> That's what I thought initially - but I kept on reading. Chapter 5 details exactly this scenario, albeit as a "more radical" "longer-term" option.

<comment><USER2> You cannot have been reading very closely Tim, because the quotation about 'at no stage would [govt.] have access to money or information about the recipient's bank account, or to the account itself' is drawn from section 5.10.

The ideas examined are for the centralization of payroll information for purposes tax calculation only. Money transfers would continue to take place between employee and employer directly, not least because an employer may be making other deductions for the purpose of pension contributions, union dues or whatever which do not have any bearing on tax liability.

As I said, in the UK the government already collects all this information already. The change which is being proposed is to gather electronically it each pay period instead of a batch at the end of a company's fiscal year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Communism much?</comment>


List of multiple discoveries - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiple_discoveries <comment><USER2> Here is an article which examines this phenomenon in more depth: [http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2142320.pdf?acceptTC=true](http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2142320.pdf?acceptTC=true)

</comment><comment><USER3> In 2002 I invented the Trie data structure. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trie)

I used it in a programming competition to very quickly count and sort the words in a book.</comment>


How to decode a QR Code by hand [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KA8hDldvfv0 <comment><USER2> It's almost as absurd as calculating a SHA256 hash by hand: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3dqhixzGVo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3dqhixzGVo)</comment>


What the Highest-Paid Programmers Earn - <AUTHOR> http://adtmag.com/articles/2011/05/27/what-highest-paid-programmers-earn.aspx

<comment><USER2> I've said it before but I'll say it again: the highest paid programmers don't call themselves programmers. There are a lot of things you can do which involve slinging code that pay rather substantially more than the equivalent amount of undifferentiated code slinging.

<comment><USER3> I've apparently missed this in the past. Would you mind elaborating?

<comment><USER4> Basically be a domain expert, rather than an implementation technology expert.

<comment><USER5> No - basically, have your contribution be measured in how much value you added to the business. EX: App redesign makes sales go up 10k then the work was worth 10k

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The highest-paid programmers usually become rich via: 1) Founding a business or startup. 2) Becoming an early employee of an averagely successful startup, or a per-IPO employee of hugely successful startups (Facebook, Google). 3) Becoming an IT manager or quants/traders at IB or Hedge funds 4) Becoming world-leader in open-source technologies (e.g. Scala, Hadoop, JQuery). 5) Writing books, giving lectures: teaching others how to become great programmers.

<comment><USER7> What does 'rich' mean?

If you mean upper-middle class then 4 and 5 are out of the question

If you mean upper class (top 1%) even 3 is out of the question. 500K a year is upper-middle-class in jersey and middle-class in manhattan. And after all of those expenses, you would be lucky to save 100K of that after taxes

If you mean `rich` (i would define rich as having enough money not to need a paycheck from another company -- maybe 10M in the bank is a good threshold) then 1 and 2 are the only ways to go

One thing to note: taxes are a pain. Most people in that 200-500K range are stiffed by the AMT (why I had to pay AMT at 22 is beyond me)

<comment><USER8> 250k/y is rich, even in NY [http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra- klein/2010/09/even_in_...](http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra- klein/2010/09/even_in_new_york_city_250000_i.html)

<comment><USER7> rich is not measured as a percentile! If you take rich as a percentile, then yes 250k is rich.

If you take an absolute measure of rich and compare cost of living, 250K is really not that much. Especially after taxes and the ilk.

<comment><USER8> Somehow over the last 10/20 years, the notion of "rich" has had a much bigger inflation than the rest of the world, this is particularly true in the US. If your definition of "rich" is not needing a paycheck, then 2M with 2% interests over inflation should be enough to live OK in most countries except maybe Switzerland, Denmark or Norway.

<comment><USER7> The rub is in the statement " 2M with 2% interests over inflation", which is harder to sustain over terms over 10 years.

<comment><USER8> OK... I have two answers to that. First, when you are rich, it is easier to get a better return on investment. Because you can afford better advisors, and because you work with higher volumes, bringing the transaction costs down, and possibly accessing to expensive investment products other can't afford. There are many articles on the rich getting richer, I will not post another one here.

Then, second point... Let's say you just get the return as high as the inflation... You still have a 2M pie you can eat from :) That would mean for example 50000$ a year during 40 years, augmenting pair with the inflation. I don't know well in other countries, but for me that would be enough to let the state retirement come. That wouldn't be the millionaire life but quite enough to enjoy my life with what I'd like to do. But for now I rather work and code/design things that matters :)

<comment><USER7> "when you are rich, it is easier to get a better return on investment" <\-- This argument is valid at a scale two orders of magnitude higher than what I am talking about. It's easy to lop people with 1M net worth in the same bucket as people with 10B net worth, but there's a very meaningful difference there (beyond whether or not you decide to get a third bugatti). A million-dollar portfolio is below the thresholds that many financial institutions would consider for an investment.

"Let's say you just get the return as high as the inflation... You still have a 2M pie you can eat from :)" <\-- lets say you are 25 now and you live to be 80. Even if you can just match inflation, you have less than 40K per year to play with. In most suburbs of NYC, its hard to live on that (taxes on a house alone will eat away a quarter of that).

Your arguments would be valid if I decided to move to a third world country. I could go to India and live like a king for the rest of my life on less than 300K USD. But now you are comparing apples to oranges here: taking earnings from a place where earnings and costs are high, and exporting them to a place where costs are low.

NOTE: My goal isn't to pick a fight. You will understand when you get there that a million dollars just isn't that much (and not in a keeping-with-the- joneses sense)

<comment><USER8> I quite get you're arent't picking up a fight :) I understand your points and agree we are picking different environments for investment. As I said, in Europe when you get at 0 when your are 67 (max!) is then covered by state retirement.

Your point made me think about geo difference BTW. It is now clear to me how much the US needs more performance from you to ensure retirement. BTW feel free to tell me if you want to follow that thread per email... I'd be glad to.

<comment><USER7> put your email in your profile :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I imagine some of the top level programmers at Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc probably earn in the mid six figures.

But just like executive pay, there's a point where the bonuses and profit sharing make up the vast majority of your compensation. Base salary stats don't really apply then.

</comment><comment><USER10> I think you probably have a better chance at making 1.2 million from your own company than finding a job that will pay you that much.

<comment><USER8> Yes. You also have a much better chance of getting broke with your own company than getting a six fig salary at an existing company - so at the end it is just basic risk management.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This omits bonuses, and other out-of your salary payments, that programmers usually take. I've heard about minimum 15% bonus at google for example. (and 15% meaning not very good performance)

<comment><USER12> Even for a new employee at Google, Facebook, etc. bonuses and stock make up a significant percentage of pay

eta: new as in "unproven and fresh out of school." The statement because trivially obvious when you're talking about VPs acquired from PayPal, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The person making 1.2 million isn't just a programmer, but he/she also understands the business well. More so, he/she is an integral part of the business.

<comment><USER14> That person was probably Sergey Aleynikov, who made $400k at Goldman Sachs then jumped ship to Teza for $1.2m - salary. He was doing high frequency trading code in C++. This is a matter of public record. Unfortunately he's now in jail having been accused of stealing said code from GS.

EDIT: I have now read to the last page of the article, and I guessed right!

<comment><USER15> Aleynikov was convicted, not just accused. Teza came in with a low offer and then bumped it up to $1.2m when he offered to give them Goldman code.

<comment><USER14> Interestingly, for a while I used some of Aleynikov's code myself, he wrote Oracaml. It hasn't been touched since 2006, doesn't build with the current OCaml or GCC without some hacking, and he's probably not going to be uploading patches from jail! So I restarted the project as OCI*ML on Github.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you look at that H-1B table that was up here a while ago, there are at least 24 software engineer, analyst, programmer type entries that paid more than $500k and up to $1mil and 52 entries between $200k and 1mil. Those exclude managerial or executive job titles. Although given how many errors that table had, I don't know how accurate that information is. I'm sure there are plenty more non visa people that earn in that range or above.

</comment><comment><USER17> Incidentally I can't say for the US but in the UK our industry pays the equivalent of $125k - $190k for security testers in the app space.

We (mandalorian) don't, but instead focus on more freedom and better jobs. Not hiring right now, but check back in a couple of months.

</comment><comment><USER18> I've always felt that some people were 'coders' who given an algorithm or a task can craft an elegant piece of code which implements that algorithm tweaked in any of a number of directions (fast, robust, testable, portable, Etc.)

Other were 'analysts' who took problems and solved them with a combination of coding and process and perhaps hardware.

Then there were 'techs' who, given a set of steps, translated those steps into something a machine could consume.

Analysts seem to have the widest range in pay, coders are pretty bunched up around various levels of experience.

</comment><comment><USER19> _...some of them are willing to pay at least $1.2 million per year to programmers who can code them better than anyone else._

Correction: some of them are willing to pay at least $1.2 million/yr to a programmer _who can bring them source code representing the cumulative effort of a team_ from one of the most 'respected' firms in the industry.

</comment><comment><USER20> Google Offers Staff Engineer $3.5 Million To Turn Down Facebook Offer

[http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/11/google-offers-staff- enginee...](http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/11/google-offers-staff- engineer-3-5-million-to-turn-down-facebook-offer/)

<comment><USER21> isn't staff engineer a manager?

<comment><USER22> A staff engineer could just be someone who's one level above senior. Someone like that in Mountain View probably makes around $200K/year.</comment></comment></comment>


A curated list of Startup Terms - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/LukeJamesFitzpatrick/code-cloudme-startup-terminology

<comment><AUTHOR> Are any startup words/ phrases missing? Love to get some feedback.</comment>


FCC approves emergency alert text-messaging system - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/04/09/fcc.cell.phone.alert/index.html <comment><USER2> I was wondering how long it would take for something like this to go into effect--the school I'm currently attending (University at Buffalo, in NY) started an text message alert system last September.

It's good to know that all of the major cell phone companies have jumped on board (or claim to expect to, which I suppose is largely different from actually doing so), though I'm curious as to the balance between executives wanting to gripe about the bottom line, and not wanting to seem "unAmerican".

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, the University of Pittsburgh started their system at the same time. It works well.</comment></comment>