-- --- •-• ••• • -•-• --- -•• • •• -• •--- •- •••- •- ••• -•-• •-• •• •--• - - <AUTHOR> http://mattt.github.com/Morse.js/

<comment><USER2> I thought this was going to be a plugin that would allow a user to click in Morse code on a text input in order to "type" their text. I'm kind of disappointed that it's not, since I've been meaning to write a browser extension to enable Morse code input on all text fields after someone suggested it as an addition to Tapsure (<http://www.chrisfinke.com/addons/tapsure/>).

<comment><USER3> You'd imagine someone would do this sooner or later. My skills are horribly rusty, but they might be worth brushing off. Lots of people did it for their ham licenses and it's certainly faster then t9, possibly qwerty-on- touchscreen. Especially with two-switch repeating ones (i.e. one button does dot dot dot dot.. one does dash dash dash... at a set speed).

<comment><USER4> Code is no longer a requirement for a HAM license. Got my license without doing a code test.

<comment><USER5> I would have gotten a General license back in the day instead of a Tech+ if I could have managed a few more WPM worth of Morse code. Then again, I was in a rush to study before the test (it was hard to find an exam in rural Iowa), so I barely managed the slowest Morse code test with the amount of time I had to study. I passed the written test for General just fine, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Reminds me of an old Steampunk Workshop build that taps out RSS feeds on an actual telegraph. <http://steampunkworkshop.com/telegraph.shtml>

<comment><USER7> Woah. That's awesome.

<comment><USER8> I really like Jake's work.

If you like that, be sure to check out his his altoid-tin electro etching [1], Girl Genius trilobite broach [2], and Victorian RV (school bus conversion) [3].

[1] <http://steampunkworkshop.com/altoid-etch.shtml>

[2] <http://steampunkworkshop.com/electro-mach.shtml>

[3] <http://steampunkworkshop.com/bus1.shtml>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Title says "Morse code in javascript".

I tought I could just paste the title in Morse code into your script/page, but I see it goes only the other way, right?

<comment><USER10> Title says "Morse code in javascript" in Morse code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is really cool. I think I might use morse code to encode a secret message in the next beat I produce :)

<comment><USER12> This is what the beginning beat of YYZ by Rush is doing with the letters Y-Y-Z. Not much of a secret message since it's the title.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> See, but visual is not a good way to learn. You must do the audio from the get-go, otherwise you have to learn it twice.

</comment><comment><USER14> bringing back some bad memories. I was forced to learn Morse code in the Navy and to type it at 20 words per min, and write at 10 words per minute. I have been trying so hard to forget it, and now all I can hear is long and short tones in my head.

</comment><comment><USER15> I would love to see a brail version so that I can make my content sites more accessible.

</comment><comment><USER16> fun stuff. i recently set up my old ham radio station again and it's been really fun. morse code is alive and well and is still a highly efficient way to make contact with distant stations.

<comment><USER13> Agree.

I put up my 54" mast on my suburban, whip out my hp200lx for logging, put the bencher on the console, attached with a couple major rubber bands, and I am rollin.

JA, other pacfic; A russian near the south pole, all with 100 watts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I know I could have found a translator to convert the code for the title into plaintext, but I downloaded the list of Morse Code and gave it a go manually.

I know. I'd have failed my HAM radio test, back when Morse Code was a requirement.

Morse Code, BSL and Pitman shorthand are three skills I really regret not learning when I was very young (not because the opportunities were there and I refused - the opportunities were _not_ there; not, at least, where I grew up).

<comment><USER18> Want to learn Morse Code? Harry Lorayne, the memory expert, has a mnemonic way to do it.

The system is as follows.

        1)  t and d represent dash; r represents dot
        2)  commit 26 phrases to memory

Here are some of the phrases:

        Awful rat
        Big terror
        Crazy torture
        Dreamy tearer

Translating "Awful rat": This phrase means "A" is dot dash, because Awful starts with an A, and rat has an R and a T in it.

Likewise, B is represented as dash dot dot dot, because "Big" starts with a B, and "terror" has trrr in it.

Look at this link, and you'll know Morse Code in no time. This can get you over the initial hurdle of memorization, but obviously doesn't relieve you of the need for practice!

[http://content.yudu.com/Library/A18m6u/HowtoDevelopASUPERPO/...](http://content.yudu.com/Library/A18m6u/HowtoDevelopASUPERPO/resources/206.htm)

<comment><USER19> That's not an ideal way to go. Morse is an aural language and needs to be learned by sound. Knowing what combinations of 'dots and dashes' compose various symbols is next to useless: A is _didah_ , not "dot dash".

The optimal way to learn it is by having a partner or computer app transmit individual letters at relatively fast rates, so you don't have time to parse them into their elements. Then, adjust the transmission speed by varying the time between letters, gradually ramping things up as your recognition skills improve.

<comment><USER18> I can't debate you on that. I'm just reporting what I read in Harry Lorayne's book. And with one simple reading, and about 5 minutes of rehearsal, I knew all 26 letter translations.

But I never tried to convert it to use.

It seems on the internet, some who have learned Morse Code recommend techniques like this, while others recommend against mnemonic techniques.

Wikipedia has a few other examples of other mnemonic devices, so it seems that someone has found these techniques useful. And people learn differently.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morse_code_mnemonics>

If I compare it to learning a foreign language, I know my experience with that was that the hurdle of memorizing vocabulary was large, and memory techniques helped that. But it wasn't until I practiced, that I was able to "think" in the foreign language, and all intermediate steps went away. And books on memory book say that same thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> could someone explain what the WPM slider does?

<comment><USER21> If you click on the alphabet, it plays sound. WPM controls the playback speed.

<comment><USER22> Also, you can click the text above the text box after you've entered a sentence, and it will sound out the whole sentence in code.

<comment><USER23> I had to read the README on github to figure this out; not discoverable enough. A cue could be displayed on hover at least.

The WPM slider should be at the bottom of the page beside the text box.

Nice hack!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> ....- ----- ....-: GET <http://mattt.me/mint/?js> 404 (Not Found)

<comment><AUTHOR> Heh, thanks for reminding me that my Mint installation moved :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> now if i had the time to parse that into audio... <https://wiki.mozilla.org/Audio_Data_API#Writing_Audio>

</comment><comment><USER26> This is going to be very useful when the EU instates their internet filter...

</comment><comment><USER27> This would be infinitely cooler if it played back your sentences.

<comment><USER28> It does. Click on the morse code above the sentence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> buggy as fuck in Opera.

<comment><USER30> Opera does not support the Ruby tag: <http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/WD- ruby-19981221/>

It seems to me that amongst the other major browsers, Firefox does not support it either, while Webkit browsers and Internet Explorer support it.</comment></comment>


Github Application for Android - <AUTHOR> http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=627423

<comment><USER2> Need a better way to enter the API key. With no copy and paste, entering a 32 character sha hash is a fail.

</comment><comment><USER3> Has anybody made an Android-based git client? Preferably with a text editor.

In theory, JGit could be used (not sure if it'd have any problems on Dalvik). Conflicts would be a pain to handle, but other than that...</comment>


Dribbble - A Designer's Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://dribbble.com/ <comment><USER2> One of the cool things about twitter is that you don't need headlines, thumbnails, or previews. A tweet is one complete thought.

If you're going to arbitrarily restrict the images to a small size, it doesn't make sense to then use a slightly smaller size as a preview and put each "large" on its own page. If you want to enforce simplicity, make full use of the simplicity.

</comment><comment><USER3> "There is no sign up for Dribbble at this time. Membership is entirely driven by our users - all members of Dribbble have been drafted (invited) by other members."

So it's not really the same as Twitter, it's more of an elite collection of select designers showing you pretty stuff. Similar to the way design blogs and their aggregators work now, but this gives it more of an "exclusive, members- only" feel.

That said, there's some good design work to be seen. If you're a designer, you should have most of these designers' feeds in your reader of choice already (I'm already following most of the designers I saw listed).

</comment><comment><USER4> This is the best thing to come out of twitter yet.

EDIT: Will trade beer for an invitation ;)

<comment><USER5> lol, where should I ship it? :)

<comment><USER6> To the address in my profile :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm not a designer, but I have to create basically all the website designs for work, plus my own projects and I found the website-tag rss feed pretty inspiring. Only takes a few minutes out of your day but gives you some cool ideas and insight.

<http://dribbble.com/tags/website.rss>

</comment><comment><USER8> They are doing something kind of similar to what we're doing at Forrst (<http://forrst.com>) for developers (and designers, too.)

</comment><comment><USER9> It is an amazing community to watch. Design leaves a lot on the cutting room floor, and in dribbble you see both final products and bits of glory that may have never been appreciated or reviewed.

I hope they open up some parts of the site for others to see. Some very fresh work going on by some of the best designers in the world, sharing openly, participating freely and having a damn good time doing so.

</comment><comment><USER10> Very nice concept. I think you need to spend some time working on the UX. The flow to get me to know what is going on could use some work (also to get me to wanting to sign up).

Cool name too. I'd even recommend calling it Dribbbbbbbbble, so I have to bookmark it.

</comment><comment><USER11> The RSS feed is buried and the site is invite-only. Two major failures for an otherwise decent idea.

<comment><USER12> The current community would most likely say "invite-only" is a feature not a failure.

Dan made the executive decision to open the site up to viewing by the general public against the wishes of a lot of the members.

Community quality is an issue that most sites just try to ignore. When someone tries something different to relative success -- invites are extremely hard to come by and current members are very active -- rushing to call it a failure is short-sighted.

<comment><USER3> Or, it's his opinion. He didn't say the site was a failure, just that from his perspective, those are two things that make this site not worthy of further attention.

I waffled a bit on my opinion of this site, but the best way to categorize the site is to think of it like a design aggregator. The aggregation is a bit more focused and driven by the members, which effectively weeds out the general crap you'd find on any other free-for-all design site. By this metric, signal- to-noise is extremely high, and the site is a success.

However, the elitist vibe that this whole site creates doesn't sit well with me. I hated that crap in high school, and my feelings haven't changed much on that in the intervening 20 years. Dan and his community can keep the site private. I didn't start designing to win popularity contests. This, to me, is also a failure of the site.

Also, realize where this is being posted. Most news here concerns start-up businesses. If you have no profitability, and are a communal-invite-only image posting site, it sounds like it will be a failure. As a pet project, I'm sure it can sustain itself indefinitely.

Aside from all that, I do like the site on its technical merit alone. Somebody create a site that does the same thing, but is open to the public. 120,000 pixels, a way to screen grab easily, and a REGISTRATION PROCESS. I'll sign up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The "All-Stars" list looks a lot like my "you are following" on Twitter.

</comment><comment><USER14> Image a twitter for composers.

</comment><comment><USER15> The intentionally misspelled name could be a challenge to new users as it may be confusing.

Also, when I hear the word "dribble" I think of pee, preventing me from taking the site seriously.

Just my two cents.

<comment><USER16> Most people connect that word with basketball.</comment></comment>


Amazon Kinesis Firehose – Simple and Scalable Data Ingestion - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-kinesis-firehose-simple-highly-scalable-data-ingestion/ <comment><USER2> It says at the bottom of the post that this service is available now, I can't see it in the console though, at least in eu-west-1 and us-east-1

<comment><USER3> It often takes several hours for AWS to roll it out to the various consoles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> At Asana, we've been beta testing Kinesis Firehose. It's been quite convenient not having to manage much, and having the data end up in S3. We're also using Kinesis streams, and have a simple KCL app to pull from streams and write to Firehose. We're looking forward to when streams can be as easy to manage, or when we KCL apps can read from Firehose.

<comment><USER5> I'm confused.. why would you need a KCL app with Firehose (for reading or writing)?

<comment><USER5> Ah.... because AWS built these as two separate user-facing services, with completely different API's and no way to use their common underlying foundation together.... go Amazon...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't understand why Kinesis Firehose isn't more tightly integrated with Kinesis Streams and have unified API.

I want to be able both reading at different offsets in the stream AND backup it to S3 or ingest into Redshift.

With current offering I need to duplicate data into two different services with different APIs.

<comment><USER7> To avoid interference between user application and theirs? Kinesis has pretty delicate throttle per shard and having user application that is out of their control working off the same shard will probably make the Firehose part much more fragile.

If you're already doing all the Kinesis shard management/KCL willy nilly why not just dump it to S3 yourself? Firehose seems to be targeting users who don't want to deal with sharding.

<comment><USER6> Yes, I figured out that Firehose is more higher-level product, than Kinesis. Maybe in the future it will be extended with API to read from a delivery stream.

There are competing products, like Google Cloud Pub/Sub where there is no need to manage shards manually or run your own workers, like KCL.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6>
        $ sudo pip install awscli --upgrade
        ...
        $ aws firehose help

        FIREHOSE()                                                          FIREHOSE()

        NAME
               firehose -

        DESCRIPTION
               Amazon  Kinesis  Firehose  is  a  fully-managed  service  that delivers
               real-time streaming data to destinations such as Amazon S3  and  Amazon
               Redshift.

        AVAILABLE COMMANDS
               o create-delivery-stream

               o delete-delivery-stream

               o describe-delivery-stream

               o help

               o list-delivery-streams

               o put-record

               o put-record-batch

               o update-destination

        	                                                            FIREHOSE()

</comment><comment><USER8> This is basically kafka + [https://github.com/linkedin/camus](https://github.com/linkedin/camus) which is pretty cool.

</comment><comment><USER9> I have a question: if I were to send say 10000 event objects into a Amazon Kinesis Firehose stream it's clear that I should expect them to show up in an S3 bucket of my choosing, but should I also expect that my account will not incur any S3 HTTP POST API request fees ?

Is dodging those HTTP POST fees the value-add over simply using the S3 HTTP API yourself ?

<comment><USER10> Unless I am reading it wrong, it sounds like you need to pay for the requests as well. From [https://aws.amazon.com/kinesis/firehose/pricing/](https://aws.amazon.com/kinesis/firehose/pricing/):

> Storage

> You will be billed separately for charges associated with Amazon S3 and > Amazon Redshift usage including storage and read/write requests. However, > you will not be billed for data transfer charges for the data that Amazon > Kinesis Firehose loads into Amazon S3 and Amazon Redshift. For further > details, see Amazon S3 pricing and Amazon Redshift pricing.

<comment><USER9> To me this sounds like a way to avoid the hassle of creating a lambda to buffer streaming data into chunks before HTTP POSTing them to the S3 API.

But to me it wouldn't make much sense to use Kinesis Firehose unless the fees were cheaper than what it would cost to utilize AWS Lamdba for the same work. I mean it can't be all that many lines of nodejs code to pop events off a stream, flush them into a tempfile in batches, HTTP POST those batches to S3 with appropriate error handling/retry logic.

Admittedly I haven't crunched the math but just by eyeballing their pricing I suspect it may be more expensive than using your own lamdba. I wonder if Kinesis Firehose is implemented internally as an AWS Lambda, it wouldn't surprise me.

I suppose that eventually the pricing on this service will drop once someone open sources such a lamdba, especially since installing a lambda is so remarkably simple.

<comment><USER11> The only complication with this approach right now is that Lambda scripts can't communicate with anything inside a VPC (such as most Redshift instances). I imagine they will fix this issue in the future though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm still a bit ignorant as to how kinesis works, can someone explain why this would be preferable to uploading directly to S3?

<comment><USER13> Good question. Here's one benefit. With Kinesis you can batch a bunch of writes to S3 that would have otherwise resulted in many small files in S3.

In other words, you can make small writes to Kinesis and then read out in larger amounts and write larger files to S3. This is a huge optimization for any job that runs across the data in S3. Many small files can really undermine performance in something like Hadoop MapReduce because of the additional request overhead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> What are some typical use cases for Amazon Kinesis streams, on the web?

<comment><USER15> Analytics event or IoT event ingestion, for example. Then, you can hook up AWS Lambda to the Kinesis stream to actually do any processing/aggregation.

Or, if you're using the new Firehose product, you could also use Lambda and attach it to the S3 event source using the bucket that the Firehose dumps into to perform batch processing on these records.

<comment><USER14> How is that different than just saving database records?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Just so I'm understanding, is this a Kafka competitor?

<comment><USER17> This looks like an AWS version of Apache Flume and Kinesis looks like an AWS version of Apache Storm. Does AWS have a Kafka equivalent i.e. a pub/sub message queue?

<comment><USER18> Kinesis != Apache Storm The easiest way to think about Kinesis is a managed queue that can remember the history for the past 24 hours.

<comment><USER17> Ah OK. I saw that it kept state so I thought it was like Storm. I don't fully understand Storm. However, Kafka can not keep state (and neither can Flume). So Kinesis is a queue that has some state?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Hmmmm, I certainly hope dang or another admin consolidate all these stories into a single "Amazon" thread. Can't have multiple stories from a single company eating up space on the front page.

<comment><USER3> Someone complains about this every time there's an AWS announcement day. Each product gets substantially different conversations. It'd be very frustrating to have to skim through dozens of top-level comments to find one on the service you're interested in.

<comment><USER19> I hope you detected my sarcasm. I'm 100% with you and was upset when they consolidated all the MSFT hardware announcement threads the other day.

<comment><USER3> Sorry, I didn't... because someone genuinely complains every time there's a big AWS dump. :-p</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Node v0.8.12 (Stable) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.nodejs.org/2012/10/12/node-v0.8.12/ <comment><AUTHOR> Apparently the stability index is worthless. "crypto: Reduce stability index to 2-Unstable" from "Stability: 3 - Stable"</comment>


Games That Teach Programming: A Brief Overview - <AUTHOR> http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RobLockhart/20130905/199667/Games_That_Teach_Programming_A_Brief_Overview.php <comment><USER2> He forgot about all the robot fighting games, where you 'program' a robot (or tank) to fight other robots/tanks, such as: [http://fightcodegame.com/](http://fightcodegame.com/) [http://robocode.sourceforge.net/](http://robocode.sourceforge.net/) [http://www.nessbots.com/](http://www.nessbots.com/) and dozens of others: [http://www.sumost.ca/steve/games/](http://www.sumost.ca/steve/games/)

Also, there are tools that make it easier for kids/beginners to create games, and in doing so learn programming, such as: [http://www.playmycode.com/](http://www.playmycode.com/) [http://pixieengine.com/](http://pixieengine.com/) [https://www.scirra.com/construct2](https://www.scirra.com/construct2)

Some other LightBot-like games include Cargo-Bot, Robologic, and several others: [http://breakoutmentors.com/kids-programming- resources/](http://breakoutmentors.com/kids-programming-resources/)

There's ComputerCraft in Minecraft, etc.

And there's learning programming by modding games/simulations such as minecraft

<comment><USER3> Also Colobot (and CeeBot, etc.) from [http://www.ceebot.com/](http://www.ceebot.com/).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd like to throw in a mention for LittleBigPlanet 2[1] on the PS3 as well. The first game in the series allowed users to create their own platforming levels using simple but powerful tools, which more talented creators used to build things like physical logic gates that allowed for more interactive creations. In LBP2, the developers embraced that side of the game by adding proper logic gates which could be packed into microchips, objects that allowed creators to read raw button inputs from the controller, and so on. People have gotten incredibly creative with those tools, going so far as to build everything from custom games to ray tracers in it. Also the visual style of that game is just incredibly charming, far cry from the aesthetic of most modern AAA games.

Another worthy mention is SpaceChem[2], a game that revolves around bonding elements together using a deceptively sophisticated visual programming language. It's not really directly about programming, more of a puzzle game really, but I feel like it uses the same part of my brain that programming does and it'd be a good way to get people into the coding mindset.

[1]: [http://www.littlebigplanet.com/games/littlebigplanet-2](http://www.littlebigplanet.com/games/littlebigplanet-2)

[2]: [http://www.spacechemthegame.com](http://www.spacechemthegame.com)

<comment><USER5> Is LittleBigPlanet 2 a significant improvement on the first one? I'm wondering if it's worth buying the second one at this point

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Running an Ultima Online server with an emulator called RunUO was a fantastic learning tool for me in high school.

I've always thought you could craft a curriculum around developing for the emulator.

You could start off small as I did by just teaching students how to create items in the game. Show the inheritance hierarchy where 'Uber Sword' inherits from 'Sword' which inherits from a base class 'Weapon'..

Teach students how to write their own spells in the game with delays and different damage types which exposes them to simple if/else logic, timers, enums, etc.

Advance to creating your own monsters and NPCs that respond to player speech which teaches state/simple AI/string manipulation.

You could leave the server running 24/7 so players could play/develop/hangout together.

Show how items disappear from the game world on reboot and how to serialize the game objects.

You could have an exam in the game where players showcase what they've developed and culminate with an all-class battle.

I think a stripped down MMO like this could be the perfect environment to foster creativity/learning.

<comment><USER7> Man I remember RunUO, it was crazy having the ability to run your own "shard" or server

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> My introduction to programming was ZZT-OOP[1], the language built into the roguelike ZZT created by Tim Sweeney (Unreal.)

Each ASCII character with a program was an object and they communicated by passing messages to each other. Items like bullets and the player also could pass messages to these custom objects. I remember piecing together some complicated multi-step, multi-object behaviors in a sort of concurrent programming.

My other introduction was changing the behavior of the gorillas in GORILLAS.BAS. From that I learned about Basic, and eventually wrote my first utility for another game, which was a battle success estimator/damage calculator for Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri.

I think the playfulness of games and the more straightforward representation of objects in games really helps children understand the point of programming and some programming concepts that are more obscured in business/utility software.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZZT-oop](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZZT-oop)

<comment> jay-anderson ZZT was also my first programming experience. It was great. The message passing concurrency was pretty nice except it worked as an external goto. Also zzt-oop had lots of shortcoming so people had to come with with very creative workarounds (especially for arithmetic). Despite that it was good fun. In some ways it'd be nice to have a modern clone with an improved language and a similar simple model (graphical objects with contained concurrent programs, message passing only).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Anyone play Rocky's Boot? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky%27s_Boots](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky%27s_Boots)

[https://www.google.com/search?q=rocky's+boots&safe=off&clien...](https://www.google.com/search?q=rocky's+boots&safe=off&client=safari&rls=en&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=8X8rUuu5Guv84AOJrYHoDQ&ved=0CAkQ_AUoAQ&biw=1543&bih=1308)

I didn't realize until college that I had been learning EE when I was a kid.

<comment><USER10> Its successor, Robot Odyssey ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Odyssey](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Odyssey)), was great. It was the inspiration to create a programming game as a distraction for users during the bitbucket migration a couple of months ago.

I'd link to the bitbucket game but that's too much self promotion for a Saturday.

Edit: s/it's/its/ \-- I know better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> SpaceChem teaches a lot of programming concepts, even if it's not explicitly a "programming game"

[http://blog.gashlin.net/?p=415](http://blog.gashlin.net/?p=415)

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

</comment><comment><USER12> Weirdly enough, Light Bot is one programming game I enjoyed the least. My personal favourite would probably be Manufactoria [1].

[1] [http://pleasingfungus.com/Manufactoria/](http://pleasingfungus.com/Manufactoria/)

<comment><USER13> Manufactoria gets insanely hard incredibly fast. I need to retake Automata & Computation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Tutorials are all very well, but what we really need is the programming equivalent of Geocities or Diaryland. That's how many of us got started with HTML and CSS - by making stuff and trying to get it to look nice.

Ideally this place would take care of the back end and provide a few basic components (e.g. pages, views) for you to structure your app. There would be code boxes for you to type into, and once you click save you'd be able to view and use the app at username.site.com. At first you might piece together a program out of pre-written components via point-and-click, then you might tweak the code to better serve your app, later on you'll get bored with the presets and start writing your own functions...eventually you'll learn to code from scratch.

There are tools that come close to this (GAE for example), but nothing at the absolute-beginner-anyone-can-do-this level.

</comment><comment><USER15> I personally think games with level editors are one of the best introductions to programming.

My first exposure to "programming" when I was in middle school was using the Warcraft 2 level editor, setting up custom triggers and using my imagination to build something I thought would be fun for others to play.

<comment><USER16> Exactly. Or modding/scripting games.

That's basically 1000000x better than those games that stress on learning programming or are build around coding. A game that is good by itself and has a great map editor or a good api for modding. Now that's fun. These "programming games" just make me think of tricking people with no interest in programming to do some. Not that I don't recognize some do enjoy these and fall in love with programming thanks to them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'd like to give a shoutout for our graphical implementation of Ruby Warrior if I may :)

[https://www.bloc.io/ruby-warrior](https://www.bloc.io/ruby-warrior)

<comment><USER18> Have been playing with this for a few minutes. It's been pretty enjoyable, I especially like the animated graphics. With things like this I always wonder what the experience is like for people who have never programmed. Do you have any idea? I am going to share with some of my non-technical friends but it's possible they won't ever get around to playing it.

<comment><USER19> I have almost no programming experience, and this game expects you to know quite a bit about programming conventions. My experience so far includes:

* "I don't really know what call means in this context, but based on previous knowledge, I'm guessing I should replace the example words with that."

* "Oh, right, I remember based on previous knowledge that "#" means comment, so I should remove that part too."

* "Oh, maybe I need the exclamation point that previously looked to me just like punctuation, because I know that code is precise about punctuation like that."

* "I don't know how to use if/else in Ruby, but I can guess that I just type 'if' and 'else', because Ruby has a reputation for simplicity."

* "I can also guess based on previous knowledge that indentation probably means something in Ruby, so I'll try indenting things."

And that's about as much guessing as I feel like doing for a game, and I'm still on level two. (I know I could easily learn how to play the game by looking at any basic guide to Ruby; I'm just demonstrating how it feels for a person without any experience.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The Big Trak [1] laid the foundation for me even before Logo. I wish I had one today for my kids.

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

<comment><USER21> [http://www.amazon.co.uk/Zeon-Limited-BIGTRAK- Bigtrak/dp/B003...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Zeon-Limited-BIGTRAK- Bigtrak/dp/B0035IZ85G/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1378652099&sr=8-1&keywords=Big+Trak)

<comment><USER20> Wow, thank you. I hope it is true to the original.

<comment><USER21> The one I saw in a local model shop was identical, they also do a mini-version which has the same interface but is tiny by comparison.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> All the games from Zachtronics probably more or less fit this theme:

[http://www.zachtronicsindustries.com/games/](http://www.zachtronicsindustries.com/games/)

</comment><comment><USER23> Anyone here remember Omega Tank by Origin? An old DOS PC game that gave you a simple but effective environment to program combat tanks to fight against the computer or programs written by your friends. Awesome game.

<comment><USER24> Omega was fun. I still have the box edition. Here is a good link describing the game --

[http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/29295/Omega.html](http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/29295/Omega.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> One programming topic I'd love to see a game for is software concurrency. This is one topic near and dear to my heart which I think a lot of us struggle with since a lot of it can be so counter-intuitive. Reading through "Java Concurrency in Practice", some of the ideas and best practices really popped out at me as something that could be translated into an abstract art style game, and for some reason, the mechanics of guitar hero with multiple guitars visualized in my head. It would be a fast paced game with trippy colors and great digitized procedural music, and you shouldn't need to know anything about programming to play. Threads could be visualized as lines going through space, and you have to protect data units with good use of abstractions, queues, locks etc so they don't get corrupted. And the better you get, the more threads you have to deal with and more advanced topics/tools you'd need to use. I'm not a game developer, but I'd love it if such a game existed :)

<comment><USER26> Someone mentioned Spacechem in the comments. I don't want to register there to comment, but Spacechem is pretty much all about synchronization of two threads of execution. Also, it's worth noting someone actually built a Turing machine in it.

I also wonder why Minecraft (and especially Redpower 2 mod) didn't get a mention.

I also enjoyed Lightbot, btw. But someone should turn that to a real game, not just flash (bigger desk, larger program space).

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> My daughter used Microsoft Kodu Game Lab at summer camp and had a blast. I just started to look at it but it looks like a decent intro for at least the 7-8 year old group.

</comment><comment><USER28> I wonder that the article does not mention Second Life. SL is a real boring thing, as long as you only consume it, but it becomes fascinating, once you start to design.

I know several people who learned Gimp because of SL, or scripting. Scripts could be as easy as a "say hello" if someone walks through a door, or as complex as self driving cars, or a 200x100 meter big pinball game, that requires 3 players: One for each flipper, and one inside the ball. Linden Scripting Language makes quarternions as easy to use as Havok physics.

</comment><comment><USER29> I have a game that is nearing completion that uses coding (drag and drop, think logo) with an emphasis on forks and events [http://moaijs.moaiforge.com/progrocket/index.html](http://moaijs.moaiforge.com/progrocket/index.html)

(requires WebGL)

</comment><comment><USER30> There is also the Schemaverse ([http://schemaverse.com](http://schemaverse.com)), a multi-player space battle game for learning SQL, pl/pgSQL, and really any other language that has a library for connecting to PostgreSQL

</comment><comment><USER31> I don't know, but the game which got me interested in programming was Quake because of QuakeC. The game itself doesn't have anything to do with programming at all etc. but you can look in all the game files (not only code, also art assets etc.) and it was so easy to change things around. To build a simple level and write some scripted events, was really rewarding because you made something in really short time which you could actually really "see" (in the gameworld).

Those games which try to teach you programming with little games/puzzles or whatever don't have any value to me. I don't know...

</comment><comment><USER32> I am building modul.io [1], a "multiplayer sandbox" which allows to setup AI- controlled entities in JavaScript.

[1] [https://github.com/lisezmoi/modul.io](https://github.com/lisezmoi/modul.io)

</comment><comment><USER33> It's a shame that CogniToy's MindRover is not mentioned, it really captured my imagination, and I wish there were more games like it. It does appear to be sadly defunct, however.

<comment><USER34> I was a big fan of that game. I loved trying my hand against the online competitors, but I was 14 competing against much older people. I got trounced :(

Still, Corvus's mid tier match. I managed to win it by developing a rover that could lead its shots.

My god, if I could just go back and time and have another crack at this game with what I know now.

I wonder if the old data is on one of my hard drives. I made a two vs two rover mission with large rovers. You could make some scary rovers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I've built a few games along these lines, the most publicized of which is Forth Warrior: [https://github.com/JohnEarnest/Mako/tree/master/games/Warrio...](https://github.com/JohnEarnest/Mako/tree/master/games/Warrior2)

I have some slow backburner plans for a game with similar mechanics but an easier introduction for total beginners and more challenging end-game tasks such as dealing with concurrency.

</comment><comment><USER36> Note that CodeHero, who is mentioned here, reached front page in HN last year[1] with a non flattering headline.

They seem to be doing much better nowadays, I found this recent video[2] of theirs to be quite inspiring.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4912712](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4912712)

[2] [http://primerlabs.com/codehero](http://primerlabs.com/codehero)

</comment><comment><USER37> A year or so ago we we created a site that teaches intro to HTML/CSS via games called CodePupil. We haven't worked on it for quite sometime, but here are 2 games we created...

[http://codepupil.com/game7.html](http://codepupil.com/game7.html) [http://codepupil.com/game5.html](http://codepupil.com/game5.html)

</comment><comment><USER38> [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnage_Heart](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnage_Heart)

<comment><USER39> Looks like the PSP re-release was Japan only. :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Are there any games made to help software developers improve their design or intuitive skills? Maybe something where you have to minimize dependencies or visualize program flow, or apply known design patterns to solve problems... I'm envisioning minigames that are basically koans with immediate feedback. I think I would find those very useful.

</comment><comment><USER41> Kara ([http://www.swisseduc.ch/compscience/karatojava/kara/](http://www.swisseduc.ch/compscience/karatojava/kara/)) is an excellent and fun game to learn finite state machines. Also, there are variants to learn Java and concurrency.

</comment><comment><USER42> FWIW a list of the game and similar links from this page - [http://alicious.com/learning-programming- games/](http://alicious.com/learning-programming-games/). There are reviews of a few of the links too.

</comment><comment><USER43> It isn't out yet and isn't publically available, but Quadrilateral Cowboy will feature programming style puzzles heavily.

[http://blendogames.com/qc/](http://blendogames.com/qc/)

</comment><comment><USER44> Creating a context where learning to program replaces our school system: [http://www.gebloom.com/blog/Softworlds](http://www.gebloom.com/blog/Softworlds)

</comment><comment><USER45> If you made a game that used programming, but didn't play like something trying to teach you stuff what would it be like?

</comment><comment><USER46> Magic the gathering will teach you more about the stack then you ever wanted to know.

</comment><comment><USER47> It makes me sad that Garry's Mod was not at the top of that list.

</comment><comment><USER48> shbobo.net</comment>


MPG of a Human - <AUTHOR> http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/11/mpg-of-a-human/

<comment><USER2> There are bike power meters that measure exactly the wattage one can put out. Why did the author bother calculating drag coefficients and such?

A 40km time trial takes about an hour to finish, at about 250W sustained ( 250W/h = 900kJ ), or about 22.5kJ = 5.3 kCal per km.</comment>


React with C++: Building the Quip Mac and Windows Apps - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@btaylor/react-with-c-building-the-quip-mac-and-windows-apps-c63155c1531b

<comment><USER2> As users are editing a doc, do you send diffs? What diff algorithm do you use? What's your logic like for merging changes and handling conflicts?

<comment><AUTHOR> Our documents are broken into lots of smaller components we call sections. So, in a billeted lost, each list item is its own section.

Sections have a GUID and can be modified without touching any of the other parts of the document. This is useful in that it minimizes most common merge conflicts - they only happen of people edit the same sentence or spreadsheet cell while offline, but simultaneous edits of the same doc generally don't result in the need for any merge algorithm.

For offline edits of the same section, we use a fairly standard three way merge algorithm. Then, we show the edits we chose in the left hand side of the doc with the conversation along with a "Revert" button so you (the end user) can revert if our algorithm was wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Already using Quip for Mac, loving it. Great job.</comment>


How Do You Guys Deal with Spam Comments? - <AUTHOR>

As The spamming is increased dramatically and WordPress is a one of the most targeted platform. If you have been using WordPress for a while, You might have noticed thousands of Spam Comments. Actually, I want to know How do you deal with Spam comments? <comment><USER2> For Wordpress I have a two pronged approach. The first is Askimet which still catches a lot of spam, and the second (much more effective approach) has been the plugin "IP Geo Block".

I started off with a blacklist containing the usually spammy suspects (China, India, Ukraine, Russia, Brazil), since they appeared to be the source of most of my spam comments.

It was OK, but stuff was still getting through. I then found it better to maintain a whitelist:

      US,GB,CA,DE,NL,SE,NO,DK,FR,ES,IT,BE,PL,SI,SK,LI,CH,PT,AT,AU,NZ,FI,EE,IE,IS,JP,LU,LV,ZA

My theory is that anyone (excluding VPN users) that originates from a poor country, especially one that is non-English speaking, is more likely to be a spammer. My reasoning: spamming is a low margin business that uses outsourced cheap labour and/or countries that have a poor record of cracking down of spamming and botnets.

To date this has been very effective. What spam I get these days is the tamer 'test the water spam'. I think this is where spammers use new email accounts to try and get them onto Askimet whitelists (bloggers are more likely not too mark these as spam). There are never any website urls in the content though there maybe a link in the website field, and the email reads something like:

       This is very interesting, You're a very skilled blogger.
       I've joined your feed andd look forward to seeking more of your great post.
       Also, I have shared your site in my social networks!

Here are my stats (blocked comments by country). I don't get many comments on my blog in total anyway:

      Blocked by countries
      CN: 3787
      RO: 76
      VE: 236
      TR: 133
      ID: 69
      IN: 12
      SC: 30
      AR: 3
      AL: 1
      TH: 46
      BR: 33
      UA: 284
      RU: 145
      CZ: 4
      IL: 8
      MO: 2
      MY: 4
      VN: 9
      EU: 4
      SG: 9
      LT: 1
      EG: 11
      HR: 5
      BD: 5
      MX: 1
      PH: 1
      TW: 29
      PE: 3
      PK: 3
      TJ: 1
      RS: 3
      KR: 5
      HK: 45
      CO: 6
      DZ: 6
      GR: 2
      PR: 1
      IR: 3
      NG: 6
      LY: 1
      CR: 1
      MD: 3
      BA: 1
      PA: 1
      SD: 1
      IQ: 7
      MM: 1
      CL: 3
      AE: 2
      KH: 2
      BI: 1
      NP: 1
      HU: 4
      PY: 2
      A2: 2
      A1: 1
      KZ: 1
      EC: 2
      LB: 1
      TN: 1

</comment><comment><USER3> there is a nice little plugin "confirm you are not a spammer" which cuts down on comments quite a bit. I also make sure my blacklist is up to date ( I use this one):

[https://github.com/splorp/wordpress-comment- blacklist/blob/m...](https://github.com/splorp/wordpress-comment- blacklist/blob/master/blacklist.txt)

with both of those solutions, my main site does about 5k UV's a day, and I see about 20-30 spam comments per day (as opposed to a few hundred, easy)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I found some solution about it and combined all with one that makes WordPress 100% spam-proof. All of these solutions are recommended by some famous WordPress experts. [http://www.bloggingguts.com/deal-spam-comments- wordpress/](http://www.bloggingguts.com/deal-spam-comments-wordpress/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Try to use Disqus for a while, you can transfer your Wordpress comments to Disqus and use WordPress as your blogging platform.

</comment><comment><USER5> The simple answer is not to run a blog on a platform that allows anonymous commenting. Apart from simple, that may also be the only answer.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is not a solution! We need a platform that meets with our needs, Though It can has lots of bugs and issues but It also has solutions, We just have to find that.

As I think :)

<comment><USER5> If you think of a way to allow anonymous comments without spam, by all means get a patent right away.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Akismet?</comment>


Understanding science is not always as hard as you think - <AUTHOR> http://www.jgc.org/blog/2010/03/did-monbiot-try-to-understand-climate.html

<comment><USER2> My favorite approach to reading science papers of all types is to assume the paper to be bogus, and then read it in order to find out why. If I am doing battle with the author every sentence of the way, I am forced into reading carefully and skeptically. If the author still has me convinced at the end, good on them.

I will say this approach is easier when you have had someone you trust teach you how to read scientific papers. In undergrad and in med school, professors would present us with two similar papers both published in top journals and ask, "Which one is wrong?" It was a highly valuable training exercise for me. The gist of the message that I got was this: (1) If you really need to understand the paper, ignore the discussion (and, sometimes, the results) until you have mastery of the methods and figures. (2) If you are really lost, read the discussion to see what the author thinks she is showing, then go back to the results to see if you agree.

</comment><comment><USER3> Part of the problem is that you have to "Read Like Math" and not "Read Like A Novel." Papers aren't taken seriously unless they sound serious, and people like to read adventure stories. Anything else is just "too hard."

People don't know how to read scientific papers. They don't know how to find the story in the stilted and stultifying prose. They don't know that you can skim bits and return to them later, you can read through to get the sense, then return to see the details.

And it's got scary looking equations.

<comment><USER4> I actually wish a lot of papers in my area (speaking as a grad student) had more novel-like writing and were less hung-up on seeming formal. I've been reading a bunch of logic papers lately, mainly to mine techniques and ideas for an application-oriented use of logic that my thesis is built on, and the papers parcel out concepts _so_ slowly, and fail to explain any intuition about them, that it's pretty slow going. It's like 90% proofs that I don't care about (put them in an appendix) and 10% actual content I might want to read.

<comment><USER3> I agree with you, but that's what you have to do to get published. My first PhD thesis was rejected, although my _viva_ saved me and I was given permission to re-write. The second version had mostly the same material, mostly the same proofs, but was written in a style that made it seem harder and more inaccessible. It appeared more impressive, so it made a better impression.

Clear, accurate and engaging writing is hard and undervalued.

My advice is: learn to live with it. After all, you don't really have a choice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Understanding a single scientific paper is easier than many people think. Understanding something like the temperature trend from 1850, or the growth trend in artificially-bred corn over the last 100 years, is pretty easy, requiring little more than grade-school arithmetic.

But in my experience, people don't want to merely understand the existence of that trend. They want to understand the broader ideas of climate science, evolution, medicine, etc. That means understanding where the data comes from, what sort of filters have been applied, what principles account for it, how those principles have been lab-tested and on what scale, etc.

It's that sort of understanding that's hard.

</comment><comment><USER6> I didn't read the full paper, so I could be wrong but... I think its MUCH harder to understand than he gives it credit for.

The equation on page 4 is enough to confused people, especially with C_H is described as "any homogenisation adjustment that may have been applied to the reported temperature."

It does't appear to be doing any high level math, but lots of people don't remember that (x^y)(x^z) = x^(y+z) so its going to be hard to get through a paper like this.

That being said, the number of people who could read this and understand it does seem to be much higher than I thought before.

</comment><comment><USER7> Okay, I'll bite. Is the raw data available -- with no extrapolation or filling. Just a big series of: station, long/latt, date, max-temp, min-temp? Data that no human hand has touched since the original reading?

That would be a wonderful CSV file to play around with. It couldn't be that big of a file either.

<comment><USER8> Looked at the paper linked in TFA [1]. Said something about "HadCRUT" temperature data, so I Googled it. Third link down was [2], which has data downloads. Also checked wikipedia, which linked to [3], which has that and many more datasets.

[1] <http://hadobs.metoffice.com/crutem3/HadCRUT3_accepted.pdf>

[2] <http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/>

[3] <http://hadobs.metoffice.com/>

<comment><USER7> Alright I've clicked on all those links, read the text, and downloaded the files.

I've got files for variations, I've got files for averages, I've got files I don't know what they are.

Now back to my question: anybody know where the unaltered data, by day and location, is? Direct link would be awesome.

This isn't too much to ask, right? I mean, if we've been keeping temperature records, surely there has to be the raw data somewhere in an easy-to-consume format? (I'm not trying to be cynical or sarcastic. For all I know there might be good reasons for such data not existing or I might have a case of the doofus here)

<comment><USER9> There was a thread on HN some time ago and I saved this link, which has some instructions on where to find the data and a description of the format.

ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/gsod/readme.txt

I wanted to start a little project to process it but never got around to it.

Hope this helps.

<comment><USER10> I've seen claims somewhere (maybe at "Watts Up with That") that no unmodified climate station data exists, that it's all been modified or corrected to adjust for something.

Is this data raw?

<comment><USER11> Well, it does exist, you just have to go back to the _original_ sources, e.g. the meteorological organizations of the various countries, militaries, etc.

As far as I know, the position of the CRU is that they have no original unmodified raw data anymore. Don't know about NASA and NOAA.

<comment><USER11> This article claims that 3 out of the 4 datasets available, the ones from the CRU, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) and National Climate Data Center Global Historical Climate Network (NCDC GHCN), are not independent and that the latter two were felt by NASA to be inferior to the CRU's. The article doesn't have anything on the raw data, however.

[http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/climategate-stunner-nasa- heads-...](http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/climategate-stunner-nasa-heads-knew- nasa-data-was-poor-then-used-data-from-cru/?singlepage=true)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is that really science? I could follow the same steps to balance my checkbook in order to determine spending periods.

If they'd created a small model of the Earth and applied what they know in order to determine the truth of their hypothesis, than yes, I would say they're doing science. Has the bar really dropped this low?

</comment><comment><USER13> > _subtract the average temperature from the observed temperature for the same > month ... If it's getting hotter the anomalies will get bigger._

Based on the above, it should be noted that anomalies are signed, and an anomaly of +5 is bigger than an anomaly of -10, if I understand correctly.

<comment><USER14> > subtract the average temperature from the observed temperature for the same > month

How are we computing average? The average daily high? The average daily low? The average of the daily midpoint? The average at 9am? The average at whatever time the person got around to recording it? These things affect what one can see in the data and how it relates to reality.

My point is that even simple sounding things aren't necessarily.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm finding this true as well. I was in graduate school for a year and got my ass kicked. I actually failed at least one course. I was lucky enough to swing into industry with a better job than most MAs or "ABDs" get so I didn't go back for a second year.

I kept myself in challenging work and average 10-15 hours per week studying CS concepts. Now those same subjects that kicked my ass seem not only comprehensible but beautiful. What was a poorly-motivated technical mess of symbols (to me) I can now relate to real concepts in CS, and I could play with them if I needed to. (Godel numbering? Oh, that's Lisp encoded in the integers. Primitive recursion? It's a for-loop.)

So it seems like I'm "smarter" at 26 than at 22, contrary to stereotype. Because I have more experience to relate new concepts to, I find it much easier now to learn new concepts in mathematics and science, except for the fact that I have 1/4 as much time in which to do so.

The problem is that most people are taught subjects like algebra and calculus without much motivation and with no prior experience, so only natural ability and parental expectations can drive people to learn them. Calculus isn't actually hard, unless your algebra sucks. Algebra is only hard for so many people because it's poorly-taught and often not well-motivated, so only people who get a lot of encouragement (often because of natural ability and a developed inclination to solve puzzles) learn it.

The lesson I take away from this is that education (about sciences, but also literature and history) isn't something that should occur only for those who are too young to be economically useful; it ought to be an ongoing process.</comment>


Client-Side Templating Breaks CSS Transitions - <AUTHOR> http://geon.github.io/Programming/2013/05/11/client-side-templating-breaks-css-transitions/

<comment><USER2> Good point, another approach could be to use a templating system where the ui is bound to a js object like knockout.js or angular.js.</comment>


Startup Climate - <AUTHOR> http://patriciahandschiegel.tumblr.com/post/75896607/startup-climate

<comment><USER2> I think the last point is the most important:

"6. Everybody seemed to feel the web game has shifted to the higher level. A lot appeared to feel that small publishers and sites would start to be squeezed out of the market in the coming years."

This is true, but I don't think it's completely accurate. To succeed as a small publisher, you will need to be remarkably talented and know how to efficiently market your site.

Gone are the days of lame content sites succeeding on pure bulk, like About.com. Except for Mahalo I guess.

<comment><USER3> I always thought Mahalo was a sort of fameballer site. The only people I know who've heard of it know it because of Jason Calcanis' reputation as "most obnoxious person in the world". I used to like it, but half a year ago it turned cluttered and ugly. Is that really a popular web site, or does it just get attention from Media 2.0?

<comment><USER2> Yea, it's a total SEO play. Just look at the way they interlink their pages and shamelessly promote high search volume queries like video games.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> 1\. Nobody expressed interest in content, social media or social network sites.

It think this is a real shame. All the Facebook, but for my dog / Facebook, but for my garden / Myspace, but for my Facebooks have really given a bad name to this genre of site. It became the type of site for people who were looking to cash in quickly or had no business getting involved in the internet.

The problem is that the web is a social animal. People want to interact and share. I hope we see the move toward social/crowd-source sites with loftier goals. I think there is still a lot of value to be had in these types of sites.

</comment><comment><USER5> None of these are extremely surprising:

#1 considering VS's have probably heard half a dozen "Facebook, but with FeatureFoo" pitches a dozen times a day for about a year.

#2 and #3 go hand-in hand - Google seems to have gotten the top of the hill on monetizing people going from one place to another on the web. If you figure out how to take away 1% of their tolls, you've got a successful startup.

#4 is an old one - education doesn't scale. Web can make it scale, with money to be made.

#5 is the core of "Web2.0"

#6 seem to be off - as jwesley expounds on well.

</comment><comment><USER6> Keep in mind these are the authors' impressions from talking to VCs, who traditionally (and perhaps by definition) are at least one beat behind what's really going on.

<comment><USER7> Right on. This is conventional and repetitive thinking and should be ignored at all costs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Very interesting.

I think the web game for general apps has shifted up a gear. However I believe this down turn in the economy is going to drive more 'less tech savy' users to try and make a buck on the web.

To Jo Bloggs the web is an income stream he should be using to get through this economic downturn. As an entrepreneur this is a market worth tackling? What do you think?

</comment><comment><USER9> FTA:

 _If the above seems vague, it's deliberate. Details are reserved for [whatis9.com] clients. But, the above should be enough for some entrepreneur to be dangerous._

Given the entrepreneurial spirit of HN, let's try to collaboratively dissect each one of these together.

</comment><comment><USER10> This reminds me of posts I read back in 2002 and in 2005. Which of cource prooved to be wrong.

</comment><comment><USER11> Thanks for the posting this link. It is concise and written by a very experienced entrepeneur.

Good advice for those in startups now. If you don't have funding and you're not focused on monetization of web traffic, don't go to VCs.

<comment><USER12> "and you're not focused on monetization of web traffic"

If you are, perhaps you don't need VC though...

<comment><USER11> I'm not clear I follow your logic. If you are focused on monetization, that just means you have a business plan with a great monetization story.

To get from a Business Plan to a staff, office, and working product, you need to get some moolah. If just a small amount of money, then you don't need VCs. Angels or bootstrapping will do. If you need a large amount of money, then VCs are the way to go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _Real solutions to better monetizing the web are what investors are interested in._

Such as...

<comment><USER14> They're looking for someone that has figured out a better a way...or rather, that they (they being the VCs) believe has figured out better/different ways of monetizing web traffic.

It's all a crapshoot until it's actually been done and works.</comment></comment>


Dividends and Buybacks Now Larger Than Total Reported Earnings for Entire S&P500 - <AUTHOR> https://thesoundingline.com/dividends-and-buybacks-now-larger-than-total-reported-earnings-for-the-entire-sp-500/ <comment><USER3> This is how its supposed to work. The whole reason stocks have fundamental value in the first place is because they're claims on the future profits of the company. 100% of a company's earnings legally belongs to the shareholders; it's nice to see them actually returned to the shareholders (vs. blown on overpriced acquisitions) for a change.

It does mean the end of a cycle, though, and not just a "stocks go up, stocks go down" cycle. It's rational for corporate management to retain earnings and invest in future growth opportunities when the expected returns from those growth opportunities are greater than the cost of capital. That they're returning capital to shareholders, even in an era of historically low capital costs, indicates that they can't find growth opportunities at any price.

<comment><USER4> But they aren't just using their earnings. They are borrowing too.

<comment><USER3> That just means that at current interest rates, the stock's forward P/E exceeds the rate of interest. It's rational to borrow money to buy stock if the earnings spun off by the stock exceed the rate of interest. You're basically arbitraging against the bank: the bank gives you money to buy out people who think the stock is overvalued, you give them a set amount of interest for the money, and if it turns out you're right and the stock's future earnings exceed the price of that money, you pocket the difference at the expense of people who left the market. If you're wrong and earnings are less than the interest rate, it's reflected in net income, the stock drops, and you (and the rest of the shareholders) eat the difference, often in a dramatic fashion.

With low interest rates, high corporate profits, and low growth, I'd expect to see a lot of debt added to balance sheets; it's a way to lever up the capital structure to the benefit of existing shareholders, as long as profits remain high and interest rates remain low. (And corporate bonds/loans are usually fixed interest, so the interest rates are locked in until they need to go back to the debt markets.)

<comment><USER5> > If you're wrong and earnings are less than the interest rate, it's reflected > in net income, the stock drops, and you (and the rest of the shareholders) > eat the difference, often in a dramatic fashion.

Or you've already moved on, and the next CEO eats the difference. The incentives between those two vary wildly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was taught in economics classes that buybacks make sense when there is nothing the company believes it can spend the money on instead to increase its profit. If this is true, should we be concerned that this is a market signal that the economy as a whole is running out of opportunities to invest in new technologies and instead just trying to hold onto its own value? If that is the case, I imagine that buybacks could be viewed as a signal that the market is moving more in the direction of being zero-sum and less in the direction of expanding. And if that is true, does that suggest that this phase of growth in the business cycle is coming to a close?

I agree with the logic behind the arguments that a company buying its own stock should be a signal that the company believes in its business and valuation, but it also seems that many companies that also believe in their business and valuation also sell stock to raise money in order to expand, with the belief that the sale will result in individual stocks increasing in value even after the dilution. It seems hard for both cases to be true, but perhaps they are.

If this logic is sound, it seems that we should be at least somewhat concerned about this.

Also, I didn't understand how cheap credit is encouraging buybacks if companies aren't buying their own shares on credit. Would someone be able to explain this better than the article? (Thanks!)

<comment><USER7> I was taught in economics classes that buybacks shouldn't increase the stock price at all, which clearly isn't true in practice. It ends up being more complicated than the simple models would suggest.

<comment><USER8> How could the price not go up? I understand buybacks as reverse dilution. Each share represents a larger percentage of the company, therefore it is more valuable and it's price should be higher. Is that wrong?

<comment><USER9> The company becomes equally less valuable after a buyback.

Consider a company with value of $1000, with 100 shares outstanding. Each share is $10. Buying back 10 shares, the company spent $100, so the company is now worth $900 and has 90 shares outstanding. Each share is still $10.

This is the basic model that shows share price should be unaffected by buybacks, but there are other effects. The buyback could signal to investors that the company is unlikely to be inefficient with capital, so investors would value the company at $910 instead of $900.

Alternatively, in a demand/supply model of shares, the buybacks could have exhausted some of the supply of shares, so the valuation for the company settled on by the rest of the market is higher.

There's no clear answer here, but reality is probably somewhere between these models.

<comment><USER10> I think you may be confusing market cap with share price. Market cap does not generally increase with buybacks, only share price does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Can't see this ending without a lot of pain. Credit is so easy that it becomes easier to reduce the amount of shares out there to prop up their price than do what capital markets are supposedly designed for - offering more shares to invest in capital. Yet raising interest rates would crash the market. At some point true price signals will leak through and the tiny hole in the wall will become a flood...

<comment><USER12> Once a company has no need for more cash, there is no point to sell shares. The whole point of a IPO is to fund growth / give founders and early employees a payout.

Share buybacks aren't about propping up the price (when done correctly). They're about tax efficiently increasing your ownership share. Or you can think of it as paying money now to reduce the amount you need to pay in dividends, all else equal.

Share repurchasing is just a tax efficient way to return money to shareholders. People love dividends yet look at buybacks as insane. Why?

* Note: buying back shares when your company is overvalued is insanity. I'm not endorsing that. But if you're in a situation like AAPL, they are hands down the correct move.

<comment><USER13> Because it's difficult to distinguish between executive leadership trying to efficiently return money to shareholders vs propping up the share price so that they see a personal benefit via their own shares increasing or via contractual bonuses.

Given that there's an incentive to spend other peoples money(shareholders who bought shares) to increase their own(via bonuses, salary, or granted shares) it's fairly safe to assume that execs are following the incentive

<comment><USER14> "Spend other people's money" is a really weird way to put it IMO - <USER2> chose to invest in the company because they thought it was a good investment. Investors would rather have the stock than the cash they paid for it. When the company does a buyback, the shareholder investment in the company becomes more concentrated. Each share represents more stock and less cash, making it possible to construct a higher-equity lower-cash portfolio. This more purely fulfills the investor's revealed preference of owning the stock. If they change their mind, they can always sell.

<comment><USER13> I'd agree that it would be a weird way to put it if both sides had the same level of information. In this case execs okaying the buybacks have access to more accurate and immediate information than the potential investors and they have a way to funnel that investor money into their own pockets. In this situation I stand by characterization of this

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> After the 2017 tax bill this was bound to happen. consolidating stocks allows greater control over the corporation by the high % owners, minimizes activist investors, reduces accountability, and further funnels profit to the top. Whatever that "poll" advertisement is at the bottom with a caricature of AOC was misleading and dishonest at best. What agenda is this site pushing i that's their biggest ad on this article?

<comment><USER16> The site probably doesn't control the ads that appear, and such an ideological slant doesn't look evident looking at the titles of their other articles.

The first bit is bang-on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> For some counterpoints, consider this paper from Cliff Asness of AQR fame. [https://www.aqr.com/Insights/Research/Journal- Article/Buybac...](https://www.aqr.com/Insights/Research/Journal- Article/Buyback-Derangement-Syndrome)

</comment><comment><USER18> Surely it ends when the corporate Credit Default Swap (CDS) rate rises, and credit rating drops, so the interest rate paid by the company rises when they have to refinance their bonds. Eventually, interest on bonds exceeds cashflow, and they have to borrow more to pay interest (Ponzi phase).

At the margin, the lowest investment-grade BBB company drops one notch and becomes High Yield 'junk'. Then insurance companies and pension funds with fiduciary obligations must divest themselves of the bonds, so they sell and force the yield (interest rate) even higher.

Companies have borrowed too much to perpetuate buybacks, jack up the share price, and reward executives with profits on share options. Half of all bonds are at BBB, just one downgrade from junk [1]. This situation is highly unstable, just one snowflake will create an avalanche of downgrades, and a true Black Swan will bankrupt many companies [2].

These companies have run off the cliff, and if they look down into the abyss, they will fall (e.g. GE [3], IBM). As with sub-prime mortgages, CDOs and MBSs during the Great Financial Crisis, pulling the trigger depends on the ratings agencies. Last time they were asleep, or perhaps complicit (euphemism for corrupt). Let's see what they do this time.

[1] [https://www.marketwatch.com/story/half-of-investment- grade-b...](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/half-of-investment-grade-bonds- are-only-one-step-away-from-junk-status-2019-01-07)

[2] [https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-03-05/bis-warns- market-c...](https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-03-05/bis-warns-market-crash- risk-looming-fire-sales-over-mass-bbb-downgrades)

[3] [https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-11-13/collapse-has- begun...](https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-11-13/collapse-has-begun-ge-now- trading-junk)

</comment><comment><USER19> If you need evidence that our economy is at least partly broken, this is it right here. Companies that are swimming in cash reserves are using their money to artificially boost shareholder returns instead of actually investing in things like capital expenditures, R&D, or higher salaries. On one hand (as the article points out), this is driven by cheap credit, but on the other hand I think the question needs to be asked: have large corporations just run out of things worth investing in?

<comment><USER12> Stock buybacks aren't artificial boosting. It's the correct move when your company is undervalued and you don't have better investment options.

See Apple for an example of doing it right.

See Chipotle for an example of doing it wrong.

<comment><USER20> It's also a more tax efficient way of distributing returns to shareholders than dividends. GP does not know what he's talking about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Credit is attractive for two reasons:

1\. Interest rates have been held artificially low by the Fed and other Central Banks, which have also flooded the financial markets with trillions of new dollars/euros/yen.

2\. Interest payments are tax deductible, but dividends are not. Debt and equity should be treated equally.

Also, there are now many _weak_ corporate bonds (CoCo, convenant-light), which mean that bondholders have fewer rights and priorities in the line of creditors, should the company get into financial difficulties. So the debts are treated as bonds for the purposes of taxation, but the rights of the bondholders are little more than shareholders - a double whammy for the company makes it a simple decision.

</comment><comment><USER21> 1\. Companies are borrowing money and going into debt to buy their own stocks. 2\. Some stock holders and insiders have huge holdings, a perfect supplier for the stocks to buy. 3\. Stock volume exploded soon after trump was elected in the s&p 500 and the Dow. But a comparable surge in volume in the Russel 2000 and NASDAQ is not there. 4\. As a result of the buying pressure, stocks rise, the market looks to rise in value. 5\. Eventually money is not cheap to borrow any more. 6\. More than 50% of the buying power suddenly stops.

</comment><comment><USER22> This is not a good sign. One of the important things for companies to do is to turn the total earnings into a stable flow of cash.

But if cash outflow is larger than inflow then companies are mostly sitting on negative cash flow. The difference is being covered up by borrowing at low rates. These loans put strain on the future cash flow. Without any reserves to fall back on there might come a time when these companies will be strapped for cash.

</comment><comment><USER23> Buyback Derangement Syndrome

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/buyback-derangement- syndrome-15...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/buyback-derangement- syndrome-1534460606)

</comment><comment><USER24> This sounds very sustainable and rational.</comment>


Twitter Is a Flaming Trash Pile - <AUTHOR> https://gawken.com/twitter-is-a-flaming-trash-pile-7629c7d705d6#.v99girv5m <comment><USER2> This is why I roll my eyes when I see someone claiming that X is bad and Y exists because they got death threats on Twitter. I wonder who _doesn 't_ get death threats on Twitter these days.

It's a cesspool.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's not twitter that's the problem - twitter is just a place for humans to post things.

The problem is that the great unwashed masses are assholes.</comment>