Tisp: Time is space programming language - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/raviqqe/tisp <comment> m-j-fox Will be neat if it works. The problem with parallelization is that it's hard to get performance wins. There's a lot of benchmarking and you have to be careful to stay on the right side of Ahmadel's law.

Can the analysis be automated? I hope so. That would be cool.

Haskell itself is extremely amenable to this sort of thing but no one has figured out how to implement it AFAIK. It may be possible with profile-driven optimization to at-least guarantee adding a thread doesn't do more harm than good.

<comment><USER3> I wonder if anyone has written a language in Erlang. I imagine the prolog-like pattern matching could make lexing/parsing fairly easy and it would be straightforward to add concurrency wherever you needed. The only downside I can see is that maybe interpreting a language would be too cpu intensive for Erlang

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice piece of work, but:

> This is an immature concept

I believe the author meant an immature instance of an old concept, certainly.

Just spend an afternoon looking into the literature about parallel programming languages, data flow programming languages, or flow-based programming languages, and you will realize that this is certainly not an immature concept. Research in that spaces has been going on since at least since the early 70s.

<comment><USER5> Well I'm glad you nitpicked what he wrote even though you knew what he meant. I'm sure he appreciates it.

He's cited several older languages, so it's pretty obvious that he's aware of some of the historical happenings related to parallelism.

Edit: he or she, or whatever

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a he

<comment><USER6> With hindsight he's a he :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What is time is space?

Edit: found the explanation in here: [https://raviqqe.github.io/tisp/](https://raviqqe.github.io/tisp/)

Cool concept, are there other languages that do this concurrency by default thing?

<comment> Ono-Sendai I have a language called Winter that has experimental support for automatic parallelisation: [http://www.forwardscattering.org/post/22](http://www.forwardscattering.org/post/22)

See also [http://www.forwardscattering.org/post/47](http://www.forwardscattering.org/post/47)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Impure function calls in pure functions are detected and raise errors at runtime."

Is there value in having a pure/impure distinction when all pure functions end up needing a try/catch around them?

<comment><USER9> Can you elaborate a bit on what you mean?

<comment><USER8> It seems like this distinction could be done at compile time instead of at runtime.

<comment><USER9> Ah okay, makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I really like the "parallel" by default paradigm, or perhaps rather, I think it has great potential. When you consider any hardware design (Verilog, Chisel, etc.) the default is to execute in parallel, and sequential is explicit i.e. by instantiating a flip flop or other memory element. If you write in Verilog, you can arbitrarily reorder your lines of code and the resulting hardware is exactly the same (modulo anything you did with always blocks which can be entirely restricted to your sequential elements if you wish).

<comment><USER11> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dataflow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dataflow)

> Data-flow hardware (see Dataflow architecture) is an alternative to the > classic Von Neumann architecture. The most obvious example of data-flow > programming is the subset known as reactive programming with spreadsheets. > As a user enters new values, they are instantly transmitted to the next > logical "actor" or formula for calculation.

Nobody (yet) has been able to get dataflow languages fast enough to beat conventional ones.

<comment><USER12> labview is quite fast.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Slight off-topic, but why people are using Google groups? That site feels so unusable, yet seems to attract all the leet (Tisp author suggests discussing in the group he created there).

<comment><USER14> Hosted, free, indexed on Google search, simple and reliable admin, email and web forum style usage.

I'm not what could be better without paying or self hosting, though I do wish we could have built in formatting like Github and an API for the messages.

<comment><USER13> Something like reddit seems way more useable.?

<comment><USER14> Reddits don't work via email, though I envy the tree approach to discussions

<comment><USER15> FYI, you can have tree-threaded conversations in email too. Thunderbird has pretty good support for it, which is why I use it for mailing lists.

The only reason more people don't know about this is that support for it has always been poor at best in Outlook, which is what most of the world uses as their email client.

In Thunderbird the option is View > Sort By > Threaded, which you need to set per folder (it's off by default). I set up filters so I have one folder per mailing list.

This is _not_ the same as Outlook's group-by-conversation feature, which is based on subject lines. It is full tree-threading based on the in-reply-to header, same as Usenet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This language is coded in Go. Just recently I was wondering if there were any Go-coded languages out there which were inspired by Haskell, Clojure, and OCaml. I have read that the Go compiler includes design choices from Plan 9 which make it both fast and simple to manage. I wonder if inheriting this supposed advantage will help Tisp in the long run.

<comment><USER17> I'm working on a shell scripting language that, like Tisp, is rooted in functional and concurrency paradigms while still offering some degree of backwards compatibility with traditional shells like Bash.

It's very immature at the moment but the repo is below if anyone else is curious:

[https://github.com/lmorg/murex](https://github.com/lmorg/murex)

I'm not suggesting my level of coding is comparable with the others mentioned though. Murex was created to scratch an itch rather than delusions of thinking I could write a powerful next gen programming language. I intend murex to be more of a REPL shell than something one would use to write scalable applications.

<comment><USER16> Your approach to murex "to scratch an itch" reminds me of Larry Wall's motivation to create Perl. :) Did you draw any inspiration from Perl? What about PowerShell? That's Microsoft's now cross-platform shell language - <USER2> also enables one to accomplish a lot with simple one liners.

Thanks for sharing! I'm using NixOS right now & perhaps it would benefit from a murex package.

Btw your github looks awesome! DHCP as a FUSE filesystem?? Woah.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Not long ago another attempt at flow-based programming was on HN. Whereas Tisp is implemented in Go & Lisp/ML-influenced, Fractalide is Rust & leverages Nix: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13138271](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13138271) [https://github.com/fractalide](https://github.com/fractalide)

</comment><comment><USER18> I like the idea of wrapping forms in (seq ...) explicitly. This makes the program read more closely to the declaration of a state machine, with smaller sections that represent state transitions (and are, most likely, expected to be atomic).

</comment><comment><USER19> So, this is basically functional reactive programming?

Possibly minus the "functional", I haven't looked that closely at it. Haskell has some libraries that attempt to implement the concept, though.

</comment><comment><USER20> > \- Purely functional programming - Impure function calls in pure functions > are detected and raise errors at runtime.

Bzzz, wrong answer. This is too naive to be workable. It implies you need to drop out of your language in order to _build_ those functional components.</comment>


HN, I just built this 2D game designer. What do you think? - <AUTHOR> http://www.spritedeck.com/

<comment><USER2> I'm on Linux, so I can't test the actual app.

However, I'll say that the website didn't feel very clear about what the app is supposed to do. My first assumption was that this was a game engine.

After glancing over the first page, I saw it depends on Corona. I had never heard of Corona before. (I'm slightly more familiar with PC gaming than mobile gaming.) My next thought was "Which of these two things is the game engine, and what is the second one?" I had to Google to find out what Corona does.

From what I gather, Corona is a Flash-like compatibility layer over iOS, HTML5, and Android. Your app seems to be a sprite editor that exports to Corona. Apparently neither one provides a full game engine.

Is that correct? Whether I'm correct or not, I would recommend updating your site so that people can find that out without having to dig like I did.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about the confusion. We are targeting Corona community members at this moment, thus the lack of information on Corona.

You are correct, Corona is similar to Flash, and just like Flash, it leaves engine building to the community. Most developers I know have their own custom engines. SpriteDeck has a XSLT based code exporter that can target custom engines. I'm documenting that today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looks interesting.

Couple of suggestions:

1) Please mention somewhere that it requires Adobe Air. Not everyone wants to install it (I didn't mind though)

2) Allow exporting of the layout to some generic vanilla xml/json format (so it can be used by people who are not using Corona). Alternatively, support export plugins

3) When importing images, allow the user to specify if the image should 'stretch' or 'tile' when resizing.

Haven't explored any more of it. It's a good looking app though!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback!

SpriteDeck has a customizable, XSLT based code exporter. If you save the project as a ".deck" file, and open it in a text editor, you will see the full dom of the project. I'm working on documentations for that today.

Btw, if you drag the bottom or right resize handle, it stretches. If you use the bottom-right handle, it resizes while preserving aspect-ratio.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The demo videos are under the "Learn" tab.

Here is one that shows you how to build comic book apps with no coding, <http://www.spritedeck.com/learn/comic.html>

And here is one that shows all the fundamental features, <http://www.spritedeck.com/learn/>

Better docs are coming soon :)

<comment><USER4> Those videos don't play on my iPhone, vimeo mentions there is no mobile version, so a text summary of those videos would be helpful for scanning...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks good at first glance. It's late at night so I've also not tried it yet. There's something "missing" on the landing page but I can't quite tell what it is. Just a feeling I have.

I've been messing around with Corona since we all read about that 14 year old who "won" the app store.

As it turns out... I kindof dislike Corona in general. Although physics in five lines is cool, and I _do_ have an interactive game compiled for both iPod and Android, I find that Corona is poorly documented and inconsistent.

Maybe I'm being picky and impatient - there's a lot to be said for the ridiculously rapid application development and the incredibly low price of their software license.

At the end of the day though, it's not the cost of the tools that is the main issue - it's your ability to develop with them.

I find asset management in Corona development & the lack of good debugging tools to be positively stifling.

A functioning IDE is a third-party tool.

Oh and LUA as a language? I know WOW supports it, but I hate the lack of direct support for OO (can be done with a big of hacky-ness but it's a frigging pain).

Since then I've picked up the Unity3d engine and run with it.

GUI dev environment. Your choice of C#, Javascript, and some other languages... An active "stack overflow" style support forum. Used by 100,000 developers. Compiles game code for iPhone, XBOX, PS3, Wii & the Web... (not sure about android)

Has physics. 3D native. Imports models from everything from Blender through Maya & 3Dstudio... Bajillions of pre-fab functions standard. Amazing series of tutorials on youtube (look up Tornado Twins). Free license for everyone earning less than $100K (enough to get you rolling)

After a week in Corona with good, but not stellar results, I jumped onto the Unity engine and had fantastic results very quickly.

I really hate to say it because I followed Carlos' tutorials and the anscamobile team seems to very genuinely care about providing a top-of-the- line product, but it's really just not there yet.

Unity 3d is a far better choice. (for now, in my opinion) - you'll at the very least be able to use C# and Javascript "in the wild" if your game plans don't work out. Think about it... what are you going to do with LUA? Write a WOW addon? (to be fair, some of those guys make $100k in profit sharing from sites like curse... but that's another rant)

Anyways.

@ZYANG - you may want to compare notes with your tool against the Corona Rapid Prototype tool built by nerder in Silverlight <http://www.nerderer.com/crp/> I was planning on working this weekend on a Unity project, but I'll try to find the time to have a play about with this and get your some, constructive feedback. (if my opinion's worth anything ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Corona is 2D. Unity is, well, 3D. Apples and oranges.

<comment><USER5> But Unity can be used for 2D development. [http://unity3d.com/support/resources/tutorials/2d-gameplay-t...](http://unity3d.com/support/resources/tutorials/2d-gameplay- tutorial)

and can create for iPhone. <http://www.zombievilleusa.com/zombieville1.html> [http://appadvice.com/appnn/2009/12/apptalk-interview-with- no...](http://appadvice.com/appnn/2009/12/apptalk-interview-with-noah-bordner- developer-of-omg-pirates-and-zombieville-usa/)

They're both development environments, they're both designed to help you create code for mobile devices, they both have physics and are currently marketing in the 'game engine' space.

It may be apples to oranges - but they're still both fruit.

I'm not saying corona has no advantages. There are some... but in terms of product maturity and value for dev time spent (learning the framework, system and language), In my opinion Unity comes out way further ahead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Looks lovely, although I haven't tried it yet. The website is a little sparse on information though and it's hard to see what features the product has from the videos. Some demos would be nice, or videos of the demos. Maybe a SDK reference so we can see what the underlying tech can do.

Of course being able to publish to the web would be an awesome addition (even if it's Flash).

<comment><USER7> I agree. An About page would really help understand what the product is, and why you've made it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Your intro video shows fuck all. I'd expect to see some actual game design / play rather than just composting a few images.

Many when told they will get "X" but can't find "X" will click away to one of the other gabazillion things the internet has to offer.

</comment><comment><USER9> For everyone wondering about Corona:

<http://www.anscamobile.com/>

It's a game studio for mobile platforms, including ios and android. It has a yearly fee.

<comment><AUTHOR> For those who are not familiar with Corona, it's a 2D sprite and event system similar to Flash. In fact, the co-founders of Corona are ex-FlashLite PMs.

Corona uses the Lua vm, which reminds of AS2.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I had no idea what Corona was. I'd be nice to offer some sort of explanation.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is really cool, but I wish it didn't depend on AIR... Any plans for a native OS X app?

<http://al3x.net/2011/01/15/user-hostile-platforms.html>

<comment><USER12> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2108294>

<comment><AUTHOR> SpriteDeck is developed in six months by myself and a part time contractor. We are bootstrapped, with a limited budget/time. On top of that, we have to support both Mac and Win. We couldn't have pulled this off without AIR.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Does it run under Wine on Linux?</comment>


Writing UIs on Elm lang - <AUTHOR> Why Elm can't have a XML-based language to declare the UI like React's JSX? Coding UIs with functions its pretty unreadable. Or does people get comfortable with that? <comment><USER2> JSX-like precompiler for Elm: [https://github.com/pzavolinsky/elmx](https://github.com/pzavolinsky/elmx)</comment>


Show HN: The Open Anatomy Project - <AUTHOR> https://openanatomy.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hello, I'm the principal investigator for the Open Anatomy Project.

The Open Anatomy Project is an effort to develop community-authored, high- quality digital anatomy atlases that are free and open for any purpose.

We believe that anatomical information is so important for human health that it should be free and easily accessible. Our lab, the Surgical Planning Lab at Brigham and Women's Hospital, has developed a variety of detailed data sets through grants funded through the National Institutes of Health (NIH). NIH also sponsored development of 3D Slicer ( [https://slicer.org](https://slicer.org) ), our open-source cross-platform medical analysis and visualization platform.

Open Anatomy is a way for us to make that data useful for medical education and further scientific discovery. We are structuring the atlas data format to allow concepts from collaborative software development (such as diffing, forking, and pull requests) to be used as part of open data development. As a result, we believe we can build a community-based atlas portal based on the same principles as Wikipedia and GitHub. The atlases are modular, so pieces can be used for new applications such as 3D printing, VR simulators, or data mining.

At the same time, we're working with medical colleagues throughout the world to create new atlases and to use them where they are needed most. We have collaborators in the Canary Islands, Senegal, Mozambique, and Mauritania who are working with us to bring our atlases to their medical classrooms.

Our atlas viewer is very much a prototype and isn't mobile friendly yet, but it shows off the atlases. We also have a tool called TAViewer ( [https://taviewer.openanatomy.org](https://taviewer.openanatomy.org) ) for browsing medical information from Wikipedia and Wikidata. We want to integrate it with the anatomy browser to allow atlases to be spatial indices for anatomical information.

We are looking for collaborators and sponsors of all types to make this dream of free and open anatomical information a reality.</comment>


Troubleshooting obscure OpenSSH failures due to a broken firewall - <AUTHOR> http://engineering.pivotal.io/post/ssh_handshake_failed/ <comment><USER2> Quote: "Once again, though, it's not quite OpenSSH. For one thing, our server- side binds to port 2222, not sshd's 22. Also, it's written in Golang, not C (both the client and the server)."

Makes the subject a bit wrong.</comment>


A stock market game where you invest $50,000 of someone else's real-life money - <AUTHOR> https://medium.freecodecamp.org/a-stock-market-game-where-you-invest-50-000-of-someone-elses-real-life-money-4dd98482651b <comment><USER2> cool but id like to see it taken a little further, run three simultaneous systems, one on stock, one on forex and one on cryptocurrencies and see which one comes out on top (or more likely which one takes longest to lose most of its initial stake)

</comment><comment><USER3> yesterday: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14713997](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14713997)</comment>


My latest app: TapType, an iPad keyboard for Windows - <AUTHOR> http://taptype.me

<comment><AUTHOR> What are your thoughts?

A free version will be released soon! (you can follow me on twitter for updates on that here: <http://twitter.com/kanebennettt>)

</comment><comment><USER2> looks good!</comment>


[Ask HN] How should I teach myself about investing? - <AUTHOR> I've been told "go and ask a financial advisor" but having read "24 Standard Causes of Human Misjudgment" I'm not so keen on mainstream advisers ...
I want to understand the field of investing myself, but I'm in the awkward position of not knowing who the experts are, or what the successful methodologies are.
Anyone care to offer some pointers? <comment><USER2> Benjamin Graham's "The Intelligent Investor." The Rich Dad, Poor Dad series. Learn solid economics, accounting and law; at least enough so you can identify good advisors in these areas.

<comment><USER3> Yes to Graham.

Emphatic no to Rich Dad Poor Dad. Here's why: <http://www.johntreed.com/Kiyosaki.html>

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the link on Kiyosaki.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Upvoted just for the fabulous essay you referenced.

I'm not sure what sort of investing you have in mind - small face-to-face angel participation, or working the treasury bond market. Nor do you say much about the size or timescale of the investments you'd like to make. And I'm in no position to give you expert advice either; all I can say from experience is that nonprofit financial advisers generally seem more helpful with advice about saving rather than investing (eg what sort of IRA and 401k options are available) while wealth management experts either charge a hefty premium for their opinion or function as sales staff for a range of vehicles and funds operated by an employer.

since patience is a key aspect of investment, I think you might as well park your cash for a few months and begin with the basic-but-essential advice offered by the SEC: <http://www.sec.gov/investor/pubs/begininvest.htm>. This will teach you the fundamentals of how to read a balance sheet or 10-k filing, how to make sense of popular metrics and acronyms and stuff like that. At the same time, take out a subscription to the Economist, Wall Street Journal or Financial Times. there's another newspaper called Investor's Business Daily but I don't rate that very highly. See what insights you can glean on your own for a few months, then buy a few serious-minded books rather than the get- rich-quick variety.

At that point, go talk to some financial advisers, and it will be much easier to assess the quality of their advice without feeling baffled by jargon or bamboozled by a sales pitch. I know, this is kindergarten-level advice from a first-grader - sorry if you've already done all this and are looking for a more technical insight.

</comment><comment><USER5> In addition to taking economics, accounting, and law classes, I really learned a lot from reading public corporation's proxy statements. I would literally spend hours reading through Disney's annual proxy statements. You can find them on the corporations' site usually or as an SEC EDGAR filing. I also learned quite a bit from going through SEC filings <http://www.sec.gov/edgar.shtml> of companies I admire (Google, Disney, etc).

I also just looked at public stocks (finance.google.com) and tried to figure out what everything meant (EPS, P/E ratio, ROE [return on equity], etc). Reading articles in the Wall Street Journal also taught me a lot.

</comment><comment><USER6> Basically it comes down to the following:

1) If you're low risk then stick it in a stable government bond.

2)If you're medium risk stick it in an low-fee index tracker

Most funds under-perform the market. There's no statistically sound way you can differentiate successful funds from lucky funds.

Trying to beat the market is a suckers game. There's no way you can out- analyze an analyst who spends 100 hours/week understanding a sector unless you have inside information or unique expertise. The first is illegal, the second is unlikely.

<comment><USER7> if you are a medium/high risk I'd say go for mutual funds. but don't get a US based funds. the fee is very high and pretty much not worth it. get an offshore funds instead. funds in developing countries do not charge yearly fee, only an entry/exit fee. Indonesian based funds, which I invested on, has recently gained over 100% return this year. Read: [http://www.thestreet.com/story/10684590/indonesia-etf- up-146...](http://www.thestreet.com/story/10684590/indonesia-etf-up-146-gets- top-rating.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> One of _the_ best sources for investing wisdom is Warren Buffet himself. Read his annual letters to shareholders (<http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/letters.html>) and his "owners manual" for stock in his company (<http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/>).

His way isn't sexy, but it works and makes sense.

<comment><AUTHOR> Works? I'd say that's an understatement :-) According to Wikipedia: "Berkshire Hathaway stock produced a total return of 76% from 2000-2010 versus a negative 11.3% return for the S&P 500."

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Simple advice: Read the classics. Study successful investors. Study failures too!

Good advice: There is no substitute for investing with your own money. Investment simulators are absolutely to be avoided.

Hard truth: It will take years but investing will teach you much about yourself that you don't know (and some of it will not be flattering but you will eventually come to grips with it.) Knowing yourself will eventually make you a better investor and thinker.

</comment><comment><USER10> 3 ways people make (or claim to make) money in equity markets:

1\. Technical analysis - trend following, etc. I personally was unconvinced but some people swear by it.

2\. Fundamentals/value investing. Read the intelligent investor and security analysis. Very sound IMO.

3\. Arbitrage - read "Beat the Market" by Ed Thorp. Also very sound IMO.

</comment><comment><USER3> Spend some time here: <http://www.bogleheads.org/>

read the wiki; post questions in the advice forum; read some of the suggested books. I think William Bernstein is probably the best of them.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is a good talk by Charlie Munger - <http://www.ycombinator.com/munger.html>.</comment>


The unreasonable effectiveness of Soccermatics? (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.interaliamag.org/articles/david-sumpter-unreasonable-effectiveness-soccermatics/ <comment><USER2> Funny to stumble across this on Hacker News.

I'm the analyst mentioned in the article. Happy to answer any questions about our weird little industry.

<comment> r2d2-c3po From following various soccer blogs, it seems that defensive stats aren't as polished and explored as offensive ones. I'm curious what stats beyond things such as tackles/interceptions are looked at. For example, Maldini has the reputation of being one of the top defenders ever, but also is known for his quote "If i have to tackle, then I have already made a mistake" (paraphrased). His tackling stats seem to support that style of play in that he made fewer challenges than most. Perhaps he made tons of interceptions, and in that sense, never had to tackle? I'm unable to find a good source of his playing stats.

Anyways, what sort of things do you look at for defensive players? It seems that its when I look at things such as WhoScored's statistical team of the season, it has players such as Mustafi, who generally has a negative reputation for his play. I suspect he is so high because the rating metric used by whoscored overvalues offensive contributions of defenders, vs. pundits more likely look for a defender's defensive contributions. Are there any form of 'advanced stats' for defenders beyond the basic measured stats of challenges, interceptions, etc, that you and/or the industry looks for?

[https://www.whoscored.com/Statistics](https://www.whoscored.com/Statistics)

<comment><USER2> Defensive metrics are very difficult for a couple reasons.

The first problem is the data. The soccer viewing public is largely familiar with event-level data, typically provided by (my previous employer) Opta. They've done a great job normalizing soccer statistics on the cultural level, but the information they've collected at scale isn't that useful for creating good defensive metrics.

Other companies have sensed an opportunity here and have started providing more detailed data around things such as defensive pressure. Suddenly, you can contextualize each offensive event with the level of defensive pressure applied to it. I think this will be a game changer, but we're in early days there.

Other companies provide player-tracking solutions that give you real-time position of all players on the field. This is great because you have a "complete" picture of the game, but it requires a lot of work to build more sophisticated spatial/geometric models.

There's also the "Howard Effect", coined largely as a basketball term, but it's similar to the Maldini example you provided. Some defenders are so good that they don't have to be "active" defenders. That's something which is really difficult to adequately control for.

<comment> r2d2-c3po Thanks! Also, what are some sources for stats that would be available for free online? I've looked at some 538 stuff, some Statsbomb stuff, whoscored, and football-data.

<comment><USER2> Legally, there isn't much. Most of those sites are powered by Opta data, which is exclusively for-purchase.

Statsbomb is a little different. They've started collecting their own data and are offering some free data from various Womens leagues.

<comment> r2d2-c3po Thanks! Appreciate your comments

<comment><USER3> This repo should grow each week, and eventually catch up to the real world in terms of NWSL data:

[https://github.com/statsbomb/open-data](https://github.com/statsbomb/open- data)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For those interested in this sort of thing, 'packing' and 'impect' are also interesting to read about, developed in Germany but it still hasn't widely spread into the mainstream like more traditional stats like possession, pass completion %, or meters run. These traditional stats very often do not explain why team A or B actually won the game. Therefore, two new statistical measures were developed, which better explain why a particular team won a game.

Packing is the measurement of how many opposition players are beaten by a pass (or dribble or other move).

Impect is the number of deep lying defenders beaten, which is obviously more valuable compared to high pressing strikers.

The key insight is that defenders beaten, particularly deeper-lying defenders are the measurement needed to identify who is expected to win (and therefore assessing the value of passing players, or defenders).

[http://bundesligafanatic.com/20160610/impect-packing-the- fut...](http://bundesligafanatic.com/20160610/impect-packing-the-future-of- football-analytics-is-here/)

<comment><USER5> I'm not that familiar with soccer stats, but this section needs a reply:

> A "shutdown" cornerback like Richard Sherman can be a star in the NFL thanks > to interceptions, broken up plays and tackles. "Lock down NBA defenders" > like Bruce Bowen and Dennis Rodman can prove their worth with steals, blocks > and rebounds. Football has goals and assists, that's it.

Just as in soccer, those "counting stats" are not great measures of defensive ability. The recently retired cornerback Darrelle Revis was regarded as the best defensive player in the NFL from about 2009-2011. Yet he did not rack up interceptions or pass breakups -- in fact, in 2010, he had 0 interceptions and only 9 pass breakups over 13 games. Why? Because the receivers he was covering were never open, so quarterbacks rarely attempted to pass in his direction.

Similarly, steals, blocks, and rebounds are only a vague indicator of defensive ability; it's never a bad thing to get a steal or a block, but if you routinely leave your man to try to poke the ball away from someone else's man, you're likely hurting your team overall. The NBA has been working on developing better stats, including deflections (you get your hand on a pass but don't necessarily come away with the steal) and shots defended (you're within a short distance of a shooter). But Darryl Morey, general manager of the Houston Rockets and a well-known stats nerd, has said in a Reddit AMA that no publicly available defensive statistic is useful.

Part of this is because all three sports in question are team sports, which means a great deal depends on the defensive scheme. You may not block shots, but is it your job to block shots or to stop the ballhandler from getting near the basket? You don't get tackles, but is it your job to get tackles or to funnel the ballcarrier right into the linebackers?

It's extremely difficult for any outsider to determine the defensive effectiveness of a player. The only thing we can offer is guesswork.

<comment><USER6> Sounds very similar to the problem of accurately assessing performance of software developers working as a team.

Sure, you have people who write a ton of code and implement a lot of features, and fix a lot of bugs, who clearly are contributing a lot. But you also have people who, though other means (code reviews, refactoring and other code- health work, etc) ensure that a project is maintainable and sustainable.

How do you measure the value of 100 bugs that never made it to production because of high quality code-reviews? Or those 5 high-value features which were a snap to implement because somebody took the time to clean up all the cruft from Mr Rockstar Bro who made a gigantic mess?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > _The fact that non-mathematicians can produce sharp and correct criticism of > an applied mathematician's work shows us that the success of mathematics > does not rest on its abstract beauty. The ability of researchers not versed > in the subtleties of mathematics to help develop models contradicts Wigner's > 'unreasonable effectiveness' argument. It tells us that people not trained > in mathematics are also able to give deep insights to the subject. > Mathematics is not there to be discovered, it is part of the patterns of > reasoning in all of our brains._

The key insight. It kind of reminds me of how physicists like Robbert Dijkgraaf (I think) have argued that physics and other fields are now contributing to mathematics through their own outlandish needs for weird maths.

<comment><USER8> I found this article a bit odd; in my mind, some parts seemed to contradict others in strange paradoxical ways.

For example, from your quoted section:

> _Mathematics is not there to be discovered, it is part of the patterns of > reasoning in all of our brains._

Isn't that the very definition of elegance? He later says, talking about A.J. Ayer's definition of "non-sense":

> _Wigner freely admits that his idea about maths comes from a feeling that > can't be verified by known scientific methods_

Elegance, while there is often a wide collective understanding of what it means in mathematics, is essentially a subjective, aesthetic property; an intuitive one. Is this not exactly what:

(a) Wigner means in that quote,

(b) A.J. Ayer means in his definition, AND

(c) the author refers to as "patterns of reasoning in all of our brains"?

<comment><USER9> We like compression. That's our main requirement. We may not like hard coded constants in our physical theories but thats only because we'd prefer a single constant that uncompresses to all six. Or a single law about laws that uncompresses to the entire theory. Constructor theory [1]

We also like symmetry but symmetry is just a way to identify attack surfaces for compression.

[1] [https://www.edge.org/conversation/david_deutsch- constructor-...](https://www.edge.org/conversation/david_deutsch-constructor- theory)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is this an article or a book teaser?

(DDG !libgen soccermatics)

Ah, looks very good!

<comment><USER3> There's two editions of Soccermatics, and his new book Outnumbered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Related research on basketball: [https://www.physics.umass.edu/events/2015-09-09-statistics-b...](https://www.physics.umass.edu/events/2015-09-09-statistics- basketball-scoring-and-lead-changes) (arXiV: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1503.03509](https://arxiv.org/abs/1503.03509))

I had the pleasure of attending the mentioned colloquium by Sid Redner back in 2015 and I was absolutely blown away by the effectiveness of a simple random- walk model.

</comment><comment><USER12> > The ability of researchers not versed in the subtleties of mathematics to > help develop models contradicts Wigner's 'unreasonable effectiveness' > argument. It tells us that people not trained in mathematics are also able > to give deep insights to the subject.

This would seem to be consistent with the notion of "common sense" that it's possible even for an average person to be able to ask meaningful questions and cast doubt on subjects they're not specifically trained in.

</comment><comment><USER13> Newton developed the mathematics of calculus to solve physics problems. That goes against Wigner's hypothesis. I believe that it is difficult to pinpoint where inspiration comes from. However, mathematical rigor can often help. You could also argue reductionalistically that, since we all live in a physical universe, we are always inspired by something physical.

</comment><comment><USER14> interesting read. some of the passing diagrams and such are quite interesting. arsenal fan fyi, COYG and FOYS (ef off) spuds fans. with wenger gone arsenal will overtake =)

from a blog post, shows passing networks and has some vector fields overlaid on the soccer pitch. [https://www.fourfourtwo.com/features/soccermatics-how- mesut-...](https://www.fourfourtwo.com/features/soccermatics-how-mesut-ozil- so-good-and-why-wenger-relies-ramsey)

</comment><comment><USER15> "The unreasonable effectiveness" is the new "considered harmful". Be more creative!

<comment><USER16> You should write an article called 'The unreasonable effectiveness of "The unreasonable effectiveness" considered harmful'</comment></comment>


Common Stock Option Mistakes - <AUTHOR> http://www.bryanbyrne.com/2011/09/23/common-stock-option-mistakes/ After spending a decade at three successful startups (Yelp, Zillow & Hotwire) I thought I'd share some lessons learned about stock options. <comment><USER2> This should be required reading for every first-time start up employee -- certainly would have cleared up a lot of my confusion!</comment>


DigitalOcean and Privacy - <AUTHOR> https://marteydodoo.com/writing/2013/03/19/digitalocean-and-privacy/

<comment><USER2> Updated the forum question - we've since updated our TOS with our privacy policy and submitted it to Safe Harbor:

<https://www.digitalocean.com/tos>

Thanks

<comment><AUTHOR> I mentioned the fact that the Terms had been updated in my essay. I am more interested in why no privacy provisions were originally included in the terms, and why it took so long for them to be updated.</comment></comment>


Show HN: The start of an ambient house track I made (for programming) - <AUTHOR> https://soundcloud.com/sarrif/mirrage-unfinished

<comment><USER2> Fun - thanks for sharing. It's already 3:00 - what else is left to do?

Sounds good.

Critique - the quality of sound (of the instrument choices) at 2:00, for example, is so much more powerful than the track from 0:00 through 1:30. FWIW

</comment><comment><USER3> I like it! It will definitely need more evolution of style like you began exploring towards the end to keep it from being just the same loops for hours.

Do you have samples for the individual tracks which layer in during the first 2 minutes? It would be interesting to attempt to procedurally generate an approximation of something good which would fade into the background while working.</comment>


Show HN: VPNHome – 1-click, self-hosted OpenVPN deployment and management app - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ezaquarii/vpn-at-home <comment><USER2> I think you might be surprised how straightforward an app like this would be for Wireguard, and, unlike OpenVPN, for which there are a zillion wrapper options, Wireguard really needs some non-shell-user UX love right now.

Have you considered doing a version of this for Wireguard? It's much, much better than OpenVPN.

<comment><USER3> The other day i commented same thing in the Wireguard thread but got downvoted.

I've hard time installing Wireguard on a VPS.

<comment><USER3> I deleted that comment already.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It would properly be safer to use algo. [https://github.com/trailofbits/algo](https://github.com/trailofbits/algo)

<comment><USER2> This comment is inexplicably downvoted; if you're going to set up a VPN for the first time and don't want to get sysadmin-level intimate with Linux networking to boot up Wireguard (surprisingly easy!), Algo is your best bet.

<comment><USER5> I feel like "here's a similar tutorial for algo, which has these advantages ..." would have received upvotes. This just looks like it's pissing on the efforts of the actual post.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This looks interesting, and I'm going to try it. Alternatively if you want something a little more lightweight but less-feature packed, there's [http://www.pivpn.io](http://www.pivpn.io)

</comment><comment><USER7> I recently found a similar solution, Outline [1]. Works pretty good, fast, open source.

[1] [https://getoutline.org/](https://getoutline.org/)

<comment><USER8> Looks cool, but FYI for those trying to remove themselves from the Google surveillance ecosystem... Outline was created by Jigsaw, an Alphabet/Google owned subsidiary. Outline could very well have the best intentions, and they likely do based on Jigsaw's mission, but the link to Alphabet/Google should caution some people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I had an OpenVPN server setup for the first time yesterday with a docker container, in about five minutes. This thread's app is probably very useful but I figured someone in here might be interested in the docker container. I found it at the top of google with "openvpn docker." I ended up using the thread on HN yesterday to setup wireguard instead, though. I used the ansible setup and it was a breeze as well.

Sorry for not staying on topic. VPNHome looks nifty.

</comment><comment><USER10> Looks great, but I prefer to use native Cisco IPSec[1] so I don't have to install 3rd party applications. Works out of the box with macOS, iOS, and Android. Non-technical users can follow a tutorial and setup on their devices. It does lack some nice-to-haves such as two-factor authentication though.

[1] [https://github.com/hwdsl2/setup-ipsec- vpn](https://github.com/hwdsl2/setup-ipsec-vpn)

</comment><comment><USER11> I say this on every VPN thread and it's still the best advice:

Just use Wireguard.

<comment><USER12> I say this on every VPN threat and its still the best advice: Just use algo (IPSEC VPN): [https://github.com/trailofbits/algo](https://github.com/trailofbits/algo)

Wireguard is great, but is not supported on many devices, and does not auto provision configuration files for all your devices. Please look into algo, it really is the best solution for 99% of people.

<comment><USER2> IPSEC and OpenVPN are far more dangerous than Wireguard is, so while it might be simpler for some kinds of users to boot up an OpenVPN connection, that doesn't necessarily make it the "best solution".

<comment><USER13> What's wrong with OpenVPN?

<comment><USER14> OpenVPN depends on TLS and basically all the code in openssl (many lines of code, not possible to audit by one person).

In a version I used, after TLS handshake it used a custom bulk data protocol and defaulted to blowfish for the crypto (these defaults might have changed since).

It runs in userspace so the speed is not good.

IPSec has better performance because it runs in the kernel, but the protocol is bad and the amount of code in the kernel is enormous, as much as all of openssl, and this cannot be audited by a single person.

Wireguard has good performance, has only ~4000 lines of code that need to be audited (designed to be audited by a single person) and uses very modern crypto.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> We host a similar solution: [https://www.tinfoilsecurity.com/vpn](https://www.tinfoilsecurity.com/vpn)

It's also open-source: [https://github.com/tinfoil/openvpn_autoconfig](https://github.com/tinfoil/openvpn_autoconfig)

</comment><comment><USER16> works in china?

<comment><AUTHOR> The VPN is self-hosted, so: 1) technically yes, you can install it on your laptop and deploy VPN to any Linux or OpenBSD host 2) legally, I have no idea if your government allows you to use a VPN

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> A good friend is working on a similar idea, and live-streaming his process on Twitch, and doing this as a SaaS. He's calling it Ghostifi, more info below.

[https://twitter.com/_rchase_/status/1074789686261022720](https://twitter.com/_rchase_/status/1074789686261022720)

He's charging for this because he has some nice convenience features (like auto-rebuild server every day, week, etc), and then managing the VPS integration to make it one click rebuild anywhere in the world, etc.

Been using it for ~7-10 days and getting amazing speeds on my iPhone/Mac. Well worth the small fee he's charging for a dedicated VPN point that I can rebuild whenever on a different location.</comment>


NSA surveillance may be legal – but it's unconstitutional - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/nsa-surveillance-may-be-legal--but-its-unconstitutional/2013/06/21/b9ddec20-d44d-11e2-a73e-826d299ff459_story.html?tid=rssfeed <comment><USER2> I do find arguments based on strict legality to be just a tad strange.

Just because something is strictly legal doesn't mean that it's right, nor that it's in the spirit that the law originally intended. I mean, it was legal to exterminate Jews in Nazi Germany, send millions to death camps in Soviet Russia and starve 10s of millions to death in Communist China.

Strict legality is particularly low bar to pass. What happened to the spirit of the law? What happened to public discussions of the law? What happened to proportional use of the justice system? What happened to basic human rights?

Maybe I'm just naive, but when people hide behind the "Well it's legal! A secret court said so!" charade, even when they know that that it doesn't follow the spirit of the laws that they currently operate under, it just pisses me off.

It's kind of like when someone cheats a system using a secret loophole that was clearly not intended to be used for that purpose. The person then turns around and says that it's a perfectly legitimate move. They then move forward on the assumption that the mere existence of said loophole gives them carte blanche to just do whatever they hell they want to do.

It appears as though the NSA has hacked the legal system.

<comment><USER3> Bingo. The entire NSA hearing a few days ago was NSA directors pointing out under which law they perform each action. They could do it, because according to US law it _is_ legal.

The much more deep rooted question is "is this good?" Every aspect of law in the United States can be changed and rewritten according to the conscious of the people, though this takes a long time to do. Legality is temporary. Under ideal circumstances we would debate "right vs wrong" and change laws accordingly.

<comment><USER4> There's also a big difference between new law - which can be batshit insane - and settled law, which has both passed constitutional muster and become widely accepted. Trying to reconcile "consent of the governed" with "secret law" goes in the opposite direction.

<comment><USER5> I thought NSPD-51 solved all of that, putting the Executive Branch above the constitution, so it's actions didn't have to pass muster.

I wish I was kidding:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Presidential_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Presidential_Directive_51)

[http://www.marjoriecohn.com/2007/05/unitary-king- george.html](http://www.marjoriecohn.com/2007/05/unitary-king-george.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As the Constitution is the "supreme law of the land", nothing "unconstitutional" can simultaneously be "legal."

<comment><USER7> Until the SJ rules that a law is unconstitutional, it is still a law. When they make a ruling, it stops being a law.

I'm disappointed in the number of people who care more about legal vs illegal than about right vs wrong. Laws can be constitutionally proper and yet wrong.

<comment><USER8> > I'm disappointed in the number of people who care more about legal vs > illegal than about right vs wrong. Laws can be constitutionally proper and > yet wrong.

I'm disappointed at the number of people who project their value system ("right" and "wrong") on to everyone else then call all the people that disagree with them "Brave New World"-esque Sheeple. I just heard Clinton talking about the NSA situation today on Bloomberg. He said something along the lines of: we should make sure protections are in place, but you can't expect the government to ignore e-mail, etc, when everyone uses it to communicate these days.

The reporter seemed entirely happy with the answer. So: whose ideas of "right" and "wrong" are we using?

<comment><USER9> How could this be disappointing? Nobody cares about what's legal, that is the point. We care about what is just.

<comment><USER10> You know that semantic distinction wasn't the point of his comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm sure the NSA has enough interesting information on the supremes to ensure that a constitutional ruling never happens.

</comment><comment><USER12> > As for Section 702 of FISA, the Supreme Court has held that the Fourth > Amendment does not protect foreigners from searches conducted abroad.

But PRISM, as opposed to "upstream collection", isn't (necessarily) about searching foreigners abroad, or even at the border. It's about searching their stuff held on servers (sometimes) located inside the US and run by US companies as part of a business agreement with those foreigners. (However I have heard it suggested (IANAL) that sufficient legal cleverness can allow this to be characterised as a border search.)

> But it has never recognized a foreign intelligence exception to the warrant > requirement when foreign-targeted searches result in the collection of vast > stores of citizens' communications.

Maybe. However the FISA appeals court certainly appears (IANAL) to have decided that a foreign-intelligence exception exists [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5917223](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5917223) . Once again, from the Yahoo! case ruling [http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/doj/fisa/fiscr082208.pdf](http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/doj/fisa/fiscr082208.pdf) :

 _2 . The Foreign Intelligence Exception . The recurrent theme permeating the petitioner 's arguments is the notion that there is no foreign intelligence exception to the Fourth Amendment's Warrant Clause. 6 The FISC rejected this notion, positing that our decision in In re Sealed Case confirmed the existence of a foreign intelligence exception to the warrant requirement._

And again, this is a ruling on a law which allowed intentional targetting of US persons, though outside the United States.

<comment><USER13>
      | However I have heard it suggested (IANAL) that
      | sufficient legal cleverness can allow this to be
      | characterised as a border search.

Every airport is considered a 'border.' So even cities that are greater than 100 miles from a land border, or the ocean have a 100 mile circle around their airport where 'border searches' can happen. It doesn't take much legal cleverness to apply this to foreigners accessing US-based resources while sitting at home in a foreign country.

<comment><USER14> The 100-mile number is taken from a federal law that was found to have no importance with respect to constitutionality. The Supreme Court made is clear that border searches must actually involve border crossing.

[http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=6933260753627774...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=6933260753627774699)

<comment><USER13> Tell that to the US Border Patrol searching an detaining people that just happen to be near the border. It's especially fun for people that have their visa status in limbo because the State Department is processing an update. They are allowed to stay here, but all of their official papers are expired, so Border Patrol throws them in jail for a few days until they sort things out with the State Department. This all happens on regular roads that are not within distance of a border crossing.

This case is from 1973, and while it may presumably apply here, the CBP doesn't seem to think that it does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If it's unconstitutional, it is illegal, period.</comment>


Dart Lang 1.2 Released - <AUTHOR> https://www.dartlang.org/

<comment><USER2> Here is the announcement page: [http://news.dartlang.org/2014/02/dart-v1-2.html](http://news.dartlang.org/2014/02/dart-v1-2.html)

And release notes: [https://groups.google.com/a/dartlang.org/forum/#!msg/announc...](https://groups.google.com/a/dartlang.org/forum/#!msg/announce/Pm0DH7B6V6Y/BDD- ArOJsf4J)

</comment><comment><USER3> Working on a project that I kind of want to use the same language for the frontend and the backend. There's, obviously, vanilla JS, maybe clojure and clojurescript, but Dart...

For some reason I never realized it could be used server side. Anyone have any practical experience with an app built entirely in Dart?

<comment><USER4> It works. There are a few people using it server side. There is a Heroku build pack. The HTTP server is a bit slow, sounds like this is being addressed, and shouldn't be a limiting factor. I wrote a postgresql driver, which works ok. More users, issues filed and patches are always welcome ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Politics aside, I find it interesting Dart isn't getting much traction at this point. It seems it should be in a similar position to Java during the first wave, but it clearly isn't.

By itself it's clearly not bad, it's just not better enough than what is there already to suffer the inter-ecosystem pain with native JS. Since it can't do anything JS can't the only selling point it really has is to build large JS systems in some other safer language, but we've been there before with GWT, and that didn't set the world on fire either.

<comment><USER6> Java (Vs. Visual C++) had the industry and Academia trying to break free from Microsoft's grip by going cross-platform and later in-browser.

Dart just doesn't have that kind of driving force going for it.

<comment><USER5> True, I had missed that.

Maybe it's that environments mean much more than languages, and with Java the JVM was the killer thing which dragged the language with it. Spark might be that killer platform for Dart, but it strikes me as wishful thinking, especially with players like github coming into that side of the market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been working on a Dart project ([http://frontiermap.s3-website-us- east-1.amazonaws.com/](http://frontiermap.s3-website-us- east-1.amazonaws.com/)) with StageXL, a Dart transcription of ActionScript's library: [http://www.stagexl.org/](http://www.stagexl.org/)

I've been meaning to write a blog post on my experience with Dart and StageXL, but as far as the Dart part of things, a few misc. observations:

* Dart shows a lot of influence from Java, and obviously some tinges of JS. I don't really care, I wanted a productive web language with optional static types.

* It is a "boring" language in that it's not doing anything new or earth-shattering syntactically or conceptually. This ended up being a positive to me, in that I was able to ramp up extremely quickly. I'm a Pythonista by trade, I know enough JS/CoffeeScript to get by, and I've got a little bit of Java experience.

* Dart comes with so many tools, to the point where I'm not constantly trying to find and piece together core components like "module" imports, package managers, unit test frameworks, documentation generators, IDE. Not all of the tools are extremely polished at this point (their package browsing/searching site is incredibly basic), but there is a clear "way" to do most things. There's nothing stopping anyone from writing alternatives to the official stuff, either.

* The Dart->JS interop is OK for simple usage cases, but can get a bit complex for others. This is my only big hangup for non-hobby projects. This will improve with time, but it's very clunky for now.

* Types don't have to be specified, but I have tended to provide them for everything. I really like being able to do this, even coming from a Python background.

* The Dart IDE is surprisingly helpful. Debugging is decent, and they've stripped a ton of the bloat out from its Eclipse underpinnings. It does crash a bit on Arch Linux with the latest Oracle Java, though. That said, I hope they get in with the IDEA guys like they did for Android.

* My particular project uses WebGL, and I'm compiling to JS. I have yet to run into any complications with the conversion, and the generated JS has worked well on my two mid-range dev machines (Linux and Mac OS 10.9 on Chrome and Firefox).

* The error messages shown during interpretation/compiling are helpful most of the time, but can get a little more cryptic in certain cases (I've yet to find a pattern, but there probably is). I expect this to improve with time.

Overall, I have been very pleased with Dart, and like it (as a langauge) a lot better than CoffeeScript. Optional types has been my favorite feature, and I really like how "batteries included" Dart is. I'm a backend guy, so I don't have the drive or mental bandwidth to go looking at the various packaging/importing/testing/doc utils in JS land (although that is a perfectly viable approach if you have the time and experience).

The ecosystem obviously can't be compared to JS, since Dart is in its infancy. It'll be good enough for some usage cases, but you may find yourself re- inventing things for others (or shoe-horning things in via the JS interop). For hobby projects, Dart is going to get the nod over the alternatives (Typescript, CoffeeScript, pure JS) until it burns me.

<comment><USER8> What if anything makes Dart better than say ES6 or ES7 or whatever version of JavaScript that adds optional types, generators, etc...

<comment><USER9> Dart is usable now. ES6 has long been delayed, and who knows when ES7 will be available for mass usage.

There are lots of intro pages out there to get you a little more familiar with it [0][1][2]. Dart as a language spec isn't all that deep, and it tries to keep things simple and easy to use. A lot of the power I feel like comes from the library and tools that come with the language.

[0] [http://programming.oreilly.com/2013/05/dart-is-not-the- langu...](http://programming.oreilly.com/2013/05/dart-is-not-the-language-you- think-it-is.html)

[1] [https://www.dartlang.org/docs/dart-up-and- running/contents/c...](https://www.dartlang.org/docs/dart-up-and- running/contents/ch01.html)

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dart_(programming_language)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dart_\(programming_language\))

<comment><USER9> To add a few more useful links. Language spec[0][1] is available under a free license and they welcome input on it[2]. The 3 top starred bugs in their bugtracker are: enums, non-nullable types, and "await" support [3], though I don't expect non-nullable types to ever be added, but they like hearing what is important to programmers. If there is really a killer language feature that people want, starring it will increase it's chances of being considered.

[0] [https://www.dartlang.org/docs/spec/latest/dart-language- spec...](https://www.dartlang.org/docs/spec/latest/dart-language- specification.html)

[1] [https://code.google.com/p/dart/source/browse/trunk/dart/docs...](https://code.google.com/p/dart/source/browse/trunk/dart/docs/language/dartLangSpec.tex)

[2] [http://news.dartlang.org/2014/02/standardizing-dart-1st- ecma...](http://news.dartlang.org/2014/02/standardizing-dart-1st-ecma- tc52.html)

[3] [https://code.google.com/p/dart/issues/list?can=2&q=&sort=-st...](https://code.google.com/p/dart/issues/list?can=2&q=&sort=-stars&colspec=ID%20Type%20Status%20Priority%20Area%20Milestone%20Owner%20Summary%20Modified%20Stars)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'd love to see dart going mainstream, but nobody would integrate VM, except google.

<comment><USER11> It doesn't matter. It compiles to JS and you still get a better language in which to develop large apps. The generated JS is probably faster because of the static analysis.

<comment><USER10> Of course it does. Extra abstraction that may cause pain in fixing nasty production bugs, can't use goodies from Dart jak SIMP etc. Logically it doesn't matter, but empirically that doesn't happen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is pub.dartlang.org Dart's "CPAN"?

I don't know Dart, but it looks as if you need a Google account to upload packages to that central package repo. Is that correct?

</comment><comment><USER13> Comparing TypeScript to Dart, one is clearly much better.

<comment><USER14> Would you like to share the answer with the rest of the class?

<comment><USER13> My comment was for the people that tried both, not bait for the people that know one and not the other.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's "Dart" not "Dart lang" just like it's "Go" not "Golang". Let's keep SEO out of common language.

<comment><USER16> sudo apt-get install golang

<comment><USER15> emerge go

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Dart: Google's ActiveX

<comment><USER18> Dart is nothing like ActiveX. But apparently it is "cool" to invoke ActiveX for any browser technology you don't like.

ActiveX was a way of loading untrusted binaries in-process with the browser and running them unsandboxed.

Does Dart run untrusted machine code unsandboxed? No.

If Dart is Google's ActiveX, then JavaScript is Netscape's ActiveX, Java is Sun's ActiveX and Emscripten is Mozilla's ActiveX. (Note: none of these is actually true)

Comparisons to Silverlight or Flash would also be inaccurate, since neither can compile to JavaScript and both are closed-source technologies that are not on any path to being standardized.

<comment><USER19> Dart is Google's JavaScript. JavaScript was developed exclusively by Netscape and forced upon the web because of their dominance. Everyone agrees in hindsight that it was bad to do it that way. And now today Google is attempting the same thing.

<comment><USER20> > _Everyone agrees in hindsight that it was bad to do it that way._

I, for one, don't. Better Javascript, with all its warts, than the W3C taking 10 years to create some standard language that was a comitee monstrocity (as they used to do a lot, until HTML5).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Nuclide - <AUTHOR> http://www.nuclide.io

<comment><AUTHOR> Release announcement: [https://code.facebook.com/posts/397706937084869](https://code.facebook.com/posts/397706937084869)

Facebook group: [https://www.facebook.com/groups/nuclide/](https://www.facebook.com/groups/nuclide/)

</comment><comment><USER2> Been using it this morning, feels like a decent editor, can't see it replacing phpstorm or pycharm for me but I could see me using it for stuff outside of those two where a comparable IDE doesn't exist.</comment>


Ask HN: Does Apple know about my upcoming wedding? - <AUTHOR>

I just tried apple music. After initialization I get my recommendations and the first is a playlist called "THE WEDDING PARTY". Since I'm going to marry in some weeks this is kind of weird...<p>* Is this by accident? * Does apple take over my spotify history? I was looking for a wedding playlist there.. * Do they match up different services and have found out about my wedding in my mail account or something else?<p>Is anybody out there with a similar experience? <comment><USER2> You carry around a device with two cameras, a microphone, gps, and various other sensors.

They know everything about you.

They know what your face looks like when you poop.</comment>


How to Choose the Right Remote Development Team - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ekipa.co/custom-software-development-choosing-the-right-team/?utm_medium=blog&utm_source=ycombinator&utm_campaign=sharing

<comment><USER2> I don't think this can work at all. You don't hire a remote team, you hire individual freelancers and a local manager to manage them, otherwise you are caught into a scam system which won't let you go until you run out of money.</comment>


Why do we work on things that don't matter? - <AUTHOR> http://evhead.com/2007/11/why-do-we-work-on-things-that-dont.asp

<comment><USER2> Because otherwise the rubber dog poo factory would close down?</comment>


AMBROSIA: High perf, exactly-once, failure oblivious distributed programming - <AUTHOR> http://christophermeiklejohn.com/pl/2018/12/15/ambrosia.html <comment><USER2> AMBROSIA[0] Actor-Model-Based Reliable Object System for Internet Applications sounds like Erlang OTP but with C# on .Net Core. This could become interesting if they support F# and running outside of Azure. There's a note about an Azure subscription currently being required.

[0] [https://github.com/Microsoft/AMBROSIA](https://github.com/Microsoft/AMBROSIA)</comment>


Kickstarter Campaign Produces Large Affordable CNC Cutting Machine - at-fates-hands http://www.archdaily.com/798562/kickstarter-campaign-produces-large-affordable-cnc-cutting-machine <comment><AUTHOR> Repost of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12705546](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12705546)

</comment><comment><USER2> The OP should mention that this isn't the first time the creators have run a campaign. As a frequent reader of r/shittykickstarters, my initial reaction was " _Someone ambituous wants someone else 's money to produce something that sounds awesome but will probably fail in reality_"...but these folks [0] have passed the main litmus test of actually delivering on their previous campaign [1], which means they're much less likely to fuck up like Coolest Cooler or the many other KS projects that amount to nothing, because they have supply- chain experience and realistic expectations.

(some examples of hopeful, non-scamming amateurs going down in flames are Peachy Printer, the $99 3D printer [2], and Zano, the nano drone [3])

[0] [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1830738289/maslow- cnc-a...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1830738289/maslow- cnc-a-500-open-source-4-by-8-foot-cnc-machi)

[1] [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/makesmithcnc/makesmith-...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/makesmithcnc/makesmith- cnc-the-most-affordable-desktop-cnc-rout)

[2] [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/117421627/the-peachy- pr...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/117421627/the-peachy-printer-the- first-100-3d-printer-and-sc/posts/1707009)

[3] [https://medium.com/kickstarter/how-zano-raised-millions- on-k...](https://medium.com/kickstarter/how-zano-raised-millions-on- kickstarter-and-left-backers-with-nearly-nothing-85c0abe4a6cb#.g8nqtzd7l)

<comment><USER3> Full disclosure: I'm the contractor that designed the USB version of the Peachy Printer, but have nothing to do with the YXE3D other than being a mentor of sorts to their electronics lead.

[http://www.yxe3d.com](http://www.yxe3d.com)

Last I heard, they're on the cusp of shipping what is essentially the Peachy in a better form factor with all of the rough edges worked out (eg successfully going through a laser safety classification). The Peachy was legitimately close to being a success, and had the other founder (who I've never met) not stolen the money, I'm pretty sure it would have shipped.

Still a bit grouchy about all that. I put a pile of creative engineering into the electronics and firmware, only to have the project scuttled by the finance fuck up. And while that team probably started out having insufficient experience building and shipping a product, they did a pile of learning and were on the cusp.

I'm very glad that yxe3d is keeping the design alive, it's just unfortunate that the Kickstarter backers won't be made whole.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How far is this from being able to print ikea furniture or a kitchen cabinets?

<comment><USER5> It's not accurate enough to do either :)

At least, you'd _notice_ the issues.

Note that no cnc of this style will really ever produce raised panel kitchen cabinets.

Slab ones or fake raised panels out of MDF you could probably do, but gravity is on the wrong axis here, so i wouldn't expect great results for the latter.

You can't make real dovetail drawers without vertical holding, but you can make fake ones that look about right.

But there, they require something about 7-10x more accurate than this thing.

So the true answer is "really far".

Also note that cabinets are mostly plywood and not solid wood (because solid wood is not really stable enough), so you also need edge banding

I won't go into the finishing aspect.

Just to give you some idea of speed as well, most cabinet shops making cabinet parts do a sheet of parts in 5-10 minutes at 1200-1600ipm

This thing would take ~20-30x as long, minimum, to do the same sheet, at 48ipm, even if it was accurate to do so.

It's a minimum because you don't have the acceleration numbers here. The 1200-1600ipm ones are very fast accelerating machines so the _average_ ipm is quite high.

No idea on the maslow (and i expect the "real world precision" goes down as the acceleration speed goes up. Even with a closed loop, it doesn't save you, because then it has settling time, etc)

<comment><USER6> Any idea what tolerances this thing is supposed to hold? As someone who started reading Hack A Day, then later became a machinist in a well equipped production shop, it kind of blows my mind how far off the hobbyist equipment is from production machinery (and most of them have no idea). After running Citizen screw machines, 4 and 5 axis mills, wire and sink EDMs, and dual spindle lathes which can hold ±.0005" all day, and grinders which hold ±.00005" it's somewhat grating listening to people say that desktop 3D printers and such will revolutionize the world.

Apart from that, this looks like a great platform for large crafts, engraving, and signage projects, but I expect it's manufacturing capacities to be rather limited. Another tool in the toolbox is never a bad thing.

<comment><USER7> It's horribly inaccurate even by desktop 3D printers standards. I'd be surprised if it can stay 1mm and the repeatability is probably non-existent</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Graphene aerogel takes world's lightest material crown - <AUTHOR> http://www.gizmag.com/graphene-aerogel-worlds-lightest/26784/ <comment><USER3> So if we wrap this material in mylar and remove the air, we'd have solid balloons without needing helium? Sounds good to me.

<comment><USER4> What would be the economic implications of "float stone", that is a solid material which is lighter than air or at least neutrally buoyant? Say a molecular structure that creates pockets of vacuum at the micro scale.

<comment><USER5> Strap one on your back and you can swim in the atmosphere like a diver in water.

Although it would have to be over 66 cubic meters for an 80kg person in 20°C air. If it is spherical, it would be c.a. 5 m in diameter.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the napkin calculation. How does that compare to the volume required for the amount of helium or hydrogen that would be required to achieve the same buoyancy?

<comment><USER5> This new material is 0.16 kg/m3, presumably if it's filled with vacuum.. Helium is 0.17 kg/m3 at 20°C and hydrogen is 0.09 kg/m3. At the same time, air is 1.2 kg/m3.

So, the volume of each needed to lift 80kg (which would have to include the person and whatever structure to contain the material), is 80/(1.2 - <USER2> of material) m3. So:

Helium: 78 m3, or sphere of diameter 5.3 m

Graphene aerogel: 77 m3, or sphere of diameter 5.3 m

Hydrogen: 72 m3, or sphere of diameter 5.1 m

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> They claim less dense than helium. Then they show it not floating in air.

Something is not right there.

<comment><USER8> It's porous, so think of it as a sponge soaked with air.

The sponge that one washes a car with will float on water until it is soaked with water.

<comment><USER9> So the sponge material itself must be heavier than water, e.g, more than 1 kg/L. Otherwise it would still float. Same holds here

<comment><USER8> Well, sure. It's made of carbon. Carbon isn't going to be lighter than anything ahead of it on the periodic table.

<comment><USER10> Atomic mass is totally different thing than density

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This should be an interesting experiment, test to see how much charge the graphene will hold.

Being less dense than air means that its structure won't inhibit attraction/repulsion and being conductive means that it will be able to transport charge to its surface. And just like an 'air' balloon you can stick to the roof after rubbing it to your head, it seems like it should be able to do the equivalent of a Van de Graf charge transfer inside the "block" to transfer charge to the graphene.

At which point you can make a balloon which 'repels' the Earth (or is attracted to it).

Interesting times indeed.

</comment><comment><USER12> Note that this is the world's least dense material, not the world's lightest. They mention the density measurements but conflate it with weight in the title and elsewhere.

Sigh, journalism. Sigh.

</comment><comment><USER13> I love graphene and aerogel. Graphene aerogel is super interesting.

What I would like to see is a graphene base capacitor/circuit 3d printed and insulated by regular aerogel. Where you have a circuit which is completely protected by the insulting aerogel.

<comment><USER14> What did the aerogel do to become insulting?</comment></comment>


What features would you like to see added soonest in your favorite C++ compiler? - <AUTHOR> http://herbsutter.com/2012/10/03/poll-what-features-would-you-like-to-see-added-soonest-in-your-favorite-c-compiler/

<comment><USER2> Static If [1]. Would simplify a lot of template code, like generic data structures with optional features.

template <class Entry, bool useParents> struct AvlTreeHelper { int balance; Entry \ _child[2]; static if (useParents) { Entry \_ parent; } };

template <...., bool useParents> void ...::insert (...) { ... static if (useParents) { // fixup parent pointers } ... }

Such optional behavior can be achieved with existing C++ features by inheriting specialized template classes, but it makes code very unreadable, especially when you have big functions with small conditional parts inside, or when you have more than one boolean condition.

[1] [http://www.open- std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2012/n332...](http://www.open- std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2012/n3329.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd like to see better template error messages.

<comment><USER4> Have you seen the "template type diffing" (<http://clang.llvm.org/diagnostics.html>) in clang?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's not my favourite compiler, I don't even use it, but I would like to see C99 support added to one.

<comment><USER6> Same here, but we are in the minority. [http://herbsutter.com/2012/05/03/reader-qa-what-about-vc- and...](http://herbsutter.com/2012/05/03/reader-qa-what-about-vc-and-c99/)

We do not plan to support ISO C features that are not part of either C90 or ISO C++. I understand C programmers may be disappointed or angry with this answer and I'm sorry to have to say no here. It's true, and very quotable, that "focus means saying no," but that doesn't make it easy to say -- it is hard to say no to you, and I'm sorry to say it. But we have to choose a focus, and our focus is to implement and innovate in C++.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Bank 2.0. How would you build a better bank? - <AUTHOR>

I was thinking about consumer banking while reading this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=948460
I came to the conclusion that consumer banks have a lot that are in need of fixing/improving. I posted a comment about how I would build Bank 2.0 if I had the means. I figured that I would post a discussion on the subject to hopefully get a lot of input from a lot of smart people.
My question to you is, how would you build your Bank 2.0? How would you make money? How would you be different from other banks out there? You have some seed money (for new banks, this might be about $20M), and your goal is to start a bank in your town. How would you start, and how would you grow?
I'd like to focus this discussion more on consumer banking (think, checking, saving, and small business accounts). <comment><USER2> Marketing Idea - Make checks "Viral": Add "Deposit this check into a new account at X bank and receive an additional $100 _".

_ is for the disclaimer on back with legal requirements. $100 or $50 or whatever you think your new customer acquisition costs should be.

Different way of banking idea: Get rid of checking accounts all together. Instead you have a 2 Line of Credit accounts plus a Money Market account.

1 Zero interest LOC (ZLOC)and 1 variable interest LOC (VLOC).

At the end of the month the money in the MMA pays off the ZLOC completely assuming 100% coverage. Any overage goes to the VLOC.

Having the ZLOC eliminates the NSF fees a customer gets when they go over but it lets the bank generate interest fees on the VLOC if not payed by the end of the month. The deposits go to the VLOC first until it is zero, then move to the MMA.

Bank collects interest on MMA from the FED and makes money on loans fees/interest since you are bypassing the 10% reserve requirement and not even using the sweep method.

<comment><USER3> _Marketing Idea - Make checks "Viral": Add "Deposit this check into a new account at X bank and receive an additional $100"._

Just fwiw, this is a good example of how far behind US banks are. Until I moved to the US, I had barely used a check in the past 5 years. Now not only do I _have_ to use them for a bunch of stuff (e.g. paying rent), I even have to _pay_ for the checks themselves!

Banking 2.0 in the US should be less about adding features, and more about fixing all the blatantly broken stuff and dragging the whole system into the modern age, imho.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> One thing that irks me about banks is that checks don't appear on your balance sheet until they are cashed.

More and more people these days aren't balancing their checkbooks and simply using the bank website's readout of available money to determine whether or not they have enough money in their account to pay for something. However, this is flawed for checks as they aren't logged until cashed. I've had more than one occasion where I got burned by this thinking I had more money in my account than I actually did because I had sent out a check that my landlord didn't get around to cashing for a few weeks.

This seems like the way the world is headed and it still kind of boggles my mind as to why we have both the account ledger at the bank's website and a separate piece of software to balance our books. (Mint.com, Quicken, etc.) The only reason this dichotomy exists as far as I can tell is for things like checks which are outstanding and not debited against your account when you cut them. (Ok, obviously there are other things they do like budgeting, etc. but why can't that all be done with my bank's website?)

My ideal Bank 2.0 would incorporate things so if I pay my rent with a check or send a check to someone through the web billpay, it is deducted from my account immediately so I cannot accidentally spend that money which is out there. Obviously it would take user interaction to log the check they wrote to someone in the case of a personal check, but with the web billpay it could be done automatically. By reducing the balance when that check is cut, it should do it throughout the system (aka not simply symbolically) so if I go to the store and make a purchase with my debit card, my balance with the check cut is taken into account and it doesn't allow me to spend the money for the check.

In the event of a stop payment on the check or a lapse of a certain period of time, the money would be returned to my account, so a lost check wouldn't screw me over. This would eliminate this huge problem along with the pain of having to maintain an additional piece of software to monitor my account.

<comment><USER5> ING Direct debits the money from your account when they cut the check, and then re-deposits it (without interest) if it hasn't been cashed in 90 days or has payment stopped. They also don't issue manual checks, so that isn't an issue. Anecdotally, it seems to work well.

In regards to maintaining your own ledger instead of just using the bank's, the primary purpose is to help catch any errors that the bank makes with your account. Personally, I have few enough transactions that I can generally keep track of them in my head, but I could easily see how you might need some help with that if your finances were even a little more complicated than mine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Check out pcfinancial.ca.

Here in Canada I thought we were totally behind on just about everything the states has. That was until I tried living there. Banking in the states is so fragmented and difficult! The big banks were a nightmare to deal with when something goes wrong and merely average when everything was fine. The smaller banks, some of which are awesome, are useless when you leave their prime territory. Even in Manhattan, it was difficult to find a branch let alone a bank machine of WaMu - which is the one I finally settled for. I'll admit that if you can get an employee type plan from Bank of America that cuts fees and makes it all nice and dandy then you are better off doing that.

OTHERWISE, look at pcfinancial. It's so basic and hasn't changed it's services much in the last 10 years I've used it. Use that as a base model and innovate. Also, look up how much money you need to have to legally register as a banking institution.

</comment><comment><USER7> My bank 2.0 wouldn't be a bank as such, it would be an infrastructure provider with APIs for everything. Anyone could then build their bank-service on top of that. Want that debit card, this checking service and venmo.com for mobile micro payments? Just authorize them to your account, and you're going.

Any withdrawal from the account would require a full trace with timestamps and as much data as is available to be filed in the system. E.g. it would be expected for a web shop to save the invoice for your order directly in your account.

Still, I'd expect this to be regulation and liability hell, and if it isn't, I'm sure our friendly neighbourhood politicians and litigators will make it so in a jiffy.

</comment><comment><USER8> Semi-related: Does anyone know why credit card transactions can be authorized in seconds but ACHs (or whatever underlies online bill payment) take days to go through?

<comment><USER9> ACH uses the check clearing system (since that's exactly what they are: checks). This system was originally designed in a time when checks needed to physically move from bank to bank, and while there have been attempts to speed it up, debit cards have removed much of the pressure for making this timely.

<comment><USER10> Check21 should have alleviated this but I think ACH and Check21 are separate rules systems. A bank I use (USAA) lets me scan checks and upload the image to deposit the check. Funds are available instantly (I do not know if they are lending me the funds interest free during the window, or if it is actually cleared instantly).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Take some time to read about what Vernon Hill did at Commerce Bancorp.

Hill came from a non-banking background, he was an owner of Burger King franchises. As a result though, he really figured out that one of the keys to creating a thriving bank was to make a bank that had great customer service.

Mostly, innovations are used to get cheap deposits. If there is a bank that can innovate and do it correctly, then it can work well. Commerce is a great example of one that did achieve it. Their efficiency ratio was higher than most peers but that's because they kept their bank open 7 days a week and they made it so you really wanted to visit their branches. They used nice colors, had super friendly tellers (they weren't stuck behind bullet proof windows or a mini gate), and they didn't make branches look like a post office or a jail cell.

Their whole idea was putting more money towards non-interest expense but they were able to charge less for deposits since they were more convenient. It definitely worked. If you could invest in safe assets you could earn a wider NIM than peers.

HOWEVER:

You can be the most innovative banker in the world but if you make bad loans you'll go down.

<comment><USER12> vernon hill writes regularly at <http://www.bankstocks.com/>

<comment><USER11> Just be cautious of Tom Brown (the owner of that site). The guy is basically a huge gambler/perma-bull on banks. A lot of his insights were proven to be wrong during the crisis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> First I would cut the "Checks take N days to clear", "electronic transfers take 3 days", and other similar crap. Second I would allow the creation of multiple sub-accounts which can be used for single transactions, single receiver, or rate limited transactions. Think ING Orange sub-accounts but with external interfaces and on sterioids.

<comment><USER9> _First I would cut the "Checks take N days to clear",_

The only way to do this unilaterally is to loan your customers money you don't have for certain, yet. Legally, checks can be revoked up to _six months_ later, so how many days a check takes to clear indicates nothing more than the confidence the bank has in final clearing, which won't happen for some time after that. So, people with bad credit, or who have previously overdrawn, are probably higher risks for depositing checks (especially personal checks) which may be revoked later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's perhaps more a matter for regulation, but the current disparity between the value of the service and the cost should go. The customer should pay small, reasonable fees for everything. It is highly distortionary and is symptomatic of a dysfunctional market for banking services.

In the UK a few years ago the 'public debate' raged over ATM fees. Banks stopped cooperating and started charging about 2 pounds to the customers of other banks. It was pointed out that the amortised cost to them for a withdrawal was 30p. There was outcry and now they charge nothing. Apparently there are but two stable pricing policies - exorbitant and 0.

In general all basic banking is free, and they make profits by getting people into debt, or selling daft insurance schemes, or giving terrible rates of interest. Of course for the sensible individual this is not wholly a bad thing, if you can weather the hail of junk mail/promotions this business model entails and are prepared to move your savings account every year to make sure it has a reasonable return.

In my mind there is no reason for credit cards to exist at all - if you want a loan or overdraft, then get one - really they are a conflation of services: Visa/mastercard + overdraft + purchase insurance. What is desirable is a debit card that has visa/mastercard (encouragingly these do exist more and more, but are not the norm) and purchase insurance. i.e something functionally equivalent to a credit card, but without the capacity to get the owner into debt.

I like some of the other things people have suggested as well. Of course most of the ideas being voiced here are not exclusive!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> To start, my Bank 2.0 would do a lot to change the way credit/debit cards are authorized. clawrencewenham had some great ideas about this here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=948965>

Basically the owner of the card would have final control over charges on it. The bank could automatically call or text you and ask for a code before authorizing a transaction, and the cardholder would have white and blacklists with custom rules about when/how much a particular merchant could charge.

In my bank, I would probably stay away from mortgages and credit cards (I could offer them through a 3rd part supplier, but I wouldn't carry any of the balances). This is to make reserves more manageable. Today's banks have massive departments dedicated to managing reserves and working with overnight and discount loans. By eliminating/outsourcing these functions, I think more could be dedicated to serving the customer. Most of the money for the bank would be made through an agreement with someone like Visa or Mastercard, so that whenever someone charges their card, part of the fee that merchants pay goes back to my bank as the card issuer.

<comment><USER11> I don't see why you would not offer mortgages.

The point of a bank is to have a healthy net interest margin on the funds that they are borrowing and the funds they are loaning out.

Mortgages are like having a long term contract where that margin is secured. Also, think about it. If you are not making mortgages, you're going to be looking at more consumer-focused later credit stage loans.

Commercial real estate, construction, small business loans. All of these are loans that are more difficult to write and typically carry higher loss rates. When I look for banks to invest in, I am typically looking for banks that write mostly single family mortgages because they are more secure than those lending to local businesses/developments.

Also, I think you are confusing most banks with the dealer broker model - Bear/Lehman/Merrill/Goldman/Morgan Stanley. Those banks had massive amounts of overnight lending. Commercial banks like JPM, Wells, and BoA did not. That's why they are able to thrive and consolidate during the crisis.

A great bank will have sticky deposits -- low yield Savings accounts, checking accounts. Not high yield CDs.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was thinking about mortgages in terms of a bank in my home town. Being a smaller bank, I'm not sure I would like to be carrying a lot of loans, but I could create them for other's to carry in return for a commission. You are right, I might be confusing banks and brokers.

<comment><USER11> You would be pretty surprised. The loan books on most tiny banks are mostly comprised of single family mortgages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Never call me on the phone. The promise of that alone would make me want to switch banks. Calls for security reasons are fine.

Seriously, the number of times my bank calls me is ridiculous. Usually it's to sell me extra stuff. Sometimes it's "to make sure my experience is satisfactory". It would be satisfactory if they'd switch to using email ;) Asking nicely to stop calling has not worked. Getting mad stops the calls for a few months. Then they start again. I guess their telemarketers are paid commission only.

Have an awesome web interface. Something like Buxfer, but built right in. In fact, I think Buxfer should become a bank :)

</comment><comment><USER16> Perhaps it's a lofty suggestion, but I would definitely bank at any bank partnered with a gold mint which allowed me to convert my savings to gold bullion with one-click. After the purchase, I would be allowed to visit my own safe with the physical bullion. That would be incredible.

Add a beautiful/easy online interface to manage your accounts, your gold, and foreign currencies.The bank would charge premiums for conversions in small quantities, or add a premium to the spot price.

Plus all the best aspects of current banks - as few or as low fees as possible, weekend hours, etc.

</comment><comment><USER17> If ingdirect.com had paper checks (even for a fee) and a branch I could visit (if I really wanted to talk to a person) it would basically be perfect.

<comment><USER18> They're surprisingly good about answering the phone. No menu bullshit, just call and someone picks up.

If ING Direct interoperated with Mint, it would basically be perfect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> No more overdraft fees. That's a start—a big start.

</comment><comment><USER20> Give people interest on their savings.

</comment><comment><USER21> Here, accountability is key: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accountability>

So I'd use a social way to make all the structure accountable. A "real time" way of figuring out how any portion of the money deposited in the bank is being used, and the possibility to opt-out with one's money if, say, high executives have deep pockets or they invest in coal, oil, weapons, etc. (via funds, etc.)

</comment><comment><USER22> I would eliminate overdraft fees on DEBIT accounts.

<comment><USER8> It does seem odd that almost anyone can get a no-fee credit card but it's hard to find a no-fee overdraft line of credit.

<comment><USER18> ING Direct and US Bank both have no-fee overdraft lines of credit.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How can someone find my LinkedIn just from visiting their site? - <AUTHOR>

I visited a site earlier today while I was googling for something, visited one page and left the site, didn't sign up for anything and later tonight I noticed that someone from the company looked at my profile on LinkedIn, did I get tracked through cookies somehow? <comment><USER2> I cannot remember the name of it, but I definitely read a post somewhere about a company X that does this as a service. In short, company A who you have an existing account with shares your info with X, who saves it to a cookie. Company B which you visited does the same. Both of them can ask X for info about a site visitor by virtue of the sharing policy...

I find the idea pretty disgusting.

<comment><USER3> You're right. Ugh I can't remember either, but I vaguely remember learning about it on Hacker News.

It was nothing technically illegal or anything malicious, it was just normal web-cookie tracking in overdrive. Then the company whose page you hit pays the tracking company for the information.

There have been universities that looked into it for their admissions pages, but decided against it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> would it be cool to share the site?

I have never heard of this happening

<comment><AUTHOR> NTT DATA

<comment><USER4> Well I visited them in incognito mode and it took it a day or 2 but someone from the company looked at my linkedin.

How is this even possible? wtf</comment></comment></comment>


Five Ways to Ace Your Next Phone Interview - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mightyspring.com/post/61597975567/5-ways-to-ace-your-next-phone-interview <comment><USER2> _> 'If you're ever asked, "Do you have any questions?" and your reply is no, mentally deduct 20 points from your personal score immediately.'_

I expect that's how it plays out, but I personally find the "Do you have any questions?" bit, or at least such a hard and fast dismissal in response to it pretty silly.

The last two places I've interviewed are companies I follow closely in the news who have secretive interview processes. The things I'd really like to know like are things an interviewer can't/won't answer.

I can certainly contrive a question engineered to demonstrate my knowledge and engagement with the company, but what good does that do either of us? It's like asking "What's your biggest weakness?" and being satisfied with a dead stock "I'm too driven and strive for perfection."

Ideally, my questions should be answered by having a real exchange during the interview. Unfortunately, the majority of time I've spent in recent interviews has been on quizzes and whiteboarding.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think it's somewhat amusing that there are more posts about how to handle interviews as a prospective employee than there are posts about how to handle interviews as an employer. This is despite the fact that in today's hot market I hear "We're having a hard time finding people" from companies more than I hear "I'm having a hard time finding work" from individuals.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is a good example of a good inbound marketing type blog post: short, clear, genuinely useful for some, with a clickable title (numbered lists are low risk of taking up too much time) and with a clear link back to what you're trying to sell at the end.

</comment><comment><USER5> I will add a sixth: Put yourself in a position where a phone interview is not necessary...</comment>


Ask HN: Rails Searching Ferret or Sphinx? - <AUTHOR>

I am implementing full text search in my web application and I can't decide between Ferret or Sphinx. Does anyone have feedback? <comment><USER2> I can say that I've used both on a couple of projects and thus far sphinx with the thinking sphinx plugin has been the best option for me.

</comment><comment><USER3> sphinx

</comment><comment><USER4> tsearch2?</comment>


Of these newish programming language which ones would you start using? - <AUTHOR> I've recently come across the Nim programming language and recalled that I have run into a few interesting language that can compile to Javascript such as Lua, Elm, BuckleScript etc.<p>I'm curious what languages if any people see themselves using and why? <comment><USER2> Personally? Lua and/or moonscript. Not only does it transpile to javascript, you can even compile the Lua C code to Web ASM and run it in the browser directly with relatively good speed. Aside from that, you can use it to program games (löve and many other frameworks), http backends (openresty, luasocket, luahttp, etc.), using LuaJIT you can even write quite performant code for computationally expensive processes. Aside from that, if you write applications from scratch in a language like C, C++ or even Pascal, you can easily embed Lua as a scripting language.

But again, that's just my personal opinion, and I must admit that I am somewhat of a Lua fanboy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Would you stake a future on Lua? I think it's a cool language as well but I'm not sure how much gain in popularity it has.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> ClojureScript - although I already use, if I didn't, I'd start. Why? I feel like learn it makes me smarter.

<comment><AUTHOR> Never got the hang of Lisp based languages myself</comment></comment>