Raganwald's Tooling for Turing Machines - <AUTHOR> https://leanpub.com/tooling <comment><USER2> (So is this April Fools or not?)

<comment><USER3> Not a joke.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Author here. This is a work-in-progress.

Ask Me Anything.

<comment><USER4> Great idea for a book.

1) What "level" of programmer will this be pitched at? e.g. No experience programming, regular "working programmer" with no theory background, someone with an undergrad CS degree, someone with 20 years of industry experience, etc.

2) Have you decided on the Turing machine yet? Will the interpreter be provided as a "given" or will the reader have to write an interpreter in a higher-level language first? e.g. I'm imagining something that reads a state table description and a representation of an input tape, performs the work, and then hopefully stops and outputs the tape.

<comment><USER3> Like JavaScript Allongé, I am planning for it to be readable by someone with just a smattering of programming familiarity. But also like JavaScript Allongé, I hope for a fairly substantial learning slope.

I don't imagine writing the first interpreter will be onerous. Here's one I wrote specifically to be "pessimum" without being gratuitously so:

      const aMachine = (() => {
        const HALT = 'HALT';
        const LEFT = 2;
        const RIGHT = 3;

        function kiss4({ description, tape: _tape }) {
          const tape = Array.from(_tape);

          let tapeIndex = 0;
          let currentState = description[0][0];

          while (true) {
            if (tapeIndex < 0) {
              console.log('moved off the left edge of the world');
              console.log({ tapeIndex, currentState, currentMark, tape: tape.join(' ') });
              return tape;
            }

            const currentMark = tape[tapeIndex];

            const rule = description.find(([state, mark]) => state === currentState && mark === currentMark);

            if (rule == null) {
              if (currentState !== HALT) {
                console.log('no rule for this state and mark');
                console.log({ tapeIndex, currentState, currentMark, tape: tape.join(' ') });
              }
              return tape;
            }

            const [_, __, nextState, action] = rule;

            if (action === LEFT) {
              --tapeIndex;
            } else if (action === RIGHT) {
              ++tapeIndex;
              if (tape[tapeIndex] == null) tape[tapeIndex] = 0;
            } else if ([0, 1].includes(action)) {
              tape[tapeIndex] = action;
            }

            currentState = nextState;
          }
        }

        return Object.assign(
          ({ description, tape = [] }) => kiss4({ description, tape }),
          { constants: { LEFT, RIGHT, HALT } }
        );
      })();

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Fun! Two thoughts: if I recall correctly, Turing lays out progenitors of STDOUT and system libraries. Do you touch on them? Also, do you refer to Petzold's wonderful The Annotated Turing? [1]

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

<comment><USER3> I probably will refer to The Annotated Turing. Although to be clear, this book will not be about computability.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> For those unfamiliar with the author: he is one of about a dozen people I can can remember, where I immediately knew "wow, this guy is smarter than you, and almost as funny. Let's enjoy this"[1].

He's also a good example for the yiddish concept of "Mensch".

continue here: [http://raganwald.com](http://raganwald.com)

[1]: Bragging not intended–it just seems to me like the difference must be fairly large in any direction before I consciously notice it.</comment>


What's really across the ocean from you when you look straight out? - <AUTHOR> http://andywoodruff.com/blog/beyond-the-sea/ <comment><USER2> While it's a pretty picture, it's all wrong. The coast line is pretty much fractal. There's no real "straight out". Zoom in a little, and you will see your perpendicular line is not perpendicular.

<comment><USER3> I don't understand why that makes it "all wrong". I understand the coastline is fractal, but I think the article uses a reasonable method for sampling the continuous coastline and showing possible destinations.</comment></comment>


New Evidence Suggests Humans Arrived in the Americas Earlier Than Thought - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/04/26/525628056/new-evidence-suggests-humans-arrived-in-the-americas-far-earlier-than-thought <comment><USER2> It's only 50 miles by sea from Eurasia to the Americas. People got to Australia around 40,000–60,000 years ago by boat so it seems unlikely that people needed a land bridge to get to the Americas.

Remember, the globe also looks like this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo#/media/File:Inuit_conf_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo#/media/File:Inuit_conf_map.png)

PS: I suspect the Americas where well known in the 1700's, but nobody was talking to the Russian Far East when map making.

<comment><USER3> Also, Beringia went through many cycles of land and sea coverage[0]. Our climate has been pretty up and down since homo sapiens came onto the stage.

Aside: The land-bridge was not just a passing point, it was actually a nice place to sit and stay, due to the wind, sea, and glacial climatic issues. Also, the coastal-migration idea states that we just skimmed the coast all the way to at least Chile. The issue with that idea is that all those coast lines and settlement areas are about 200m under water now and were likely destroyed by wave action, so it's hard to prove. Beringia is a really cool place to study, pardon the pun, and helps change some ideas about how humans came to be. It seems like we've been pretty smart for a long long time. There are civilizations all over the globe that rose, fell, and died, and we will never ever know of them. The idea of 'civilization' is ancient, it seems.

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

<comment><USER4> > It seems like we've been pretty smart for a long long time. There are > civilizations all over the globe that rose, fell, and died, and we will > never ever know of them. The idea of 'civilization' is ancient, it seems.

I've wondered about that a lot, actually. If homo sapiens have been around for ~200k years (according to wikipedia), what were we doing for the first 185k years? What changed ~15k years ago that we started building cities, constructing tools, etc., and why did it take 185k years to happen?

On a larger time frame, how many species have lived and died and had every trace of their existence crushed and melted down by plate tectonics?

It's fascinating to think about, and a little sad that we'll never know the answer.

<comment><USER5> "What changed ~15k years ago that we started building cities, constructing tools, etc., and why did it take 185k years to happen?"

Old question, the answer is: Agricultural Revolution

<comment><USER6> That's the traditional answer, but it's wrong. Göbekli Tepe[1] decisively pre- dates agriculture. Although it wasn't inhabited, it displays a level of technology and social organisation on par with city-building. But agriculture definitely had nothing to do with it.

Not saying that I've got a good answer for what _did_ happen -- just that agriculture wasn't it.

1: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe)

<comment><USER7> If it wasn't permanently inhabited, then it's not a city. There are the remains of massive camps in Russia built out of Mammoth bones and tusks that held many thousands of people, made possible by massive culls of migrating herds, but these are not permanent settlements either.

Living permanently in the same place on a large scale is a completely different way of life compared to living a mainly nomadic life and gathering at special sites from time to time, even if you make a permanent mark on those sites.

<comment><USER3> Permanent populations are not a sign of civilization. Many religious sites today are sparsely populated except for once/twice a year, but we still have civilization. The Mongols were civilized even when they were raiding the entire old-world and establishing many dynasties. They had writing, religion, generals and well-organized armies, a bureaucracy, laws and customs, tariffs, etc, just not a single plot of land they went to sleep on every single night. Heck, even NYC doubles in population daily [0], those people may be daily commuter nomads, but they are 'civilized' people.

[0][https://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/03/commuters- near...](https://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/03/commuters-nearly- double-manhattans-daytime-population-census-says/?_r=0)

<comment><USER7> >Many religious sites today are sparsely populated except for once/twice a year, but we still have civilization

Yes, but we don't have civilization because of those religious sites.

<comment><USER3> How do you know?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Given

1\. a site that appears to have been used by humans to do some kind of processing of bones, and

2\. very old (130k) bones at that site that have been processed,

how would you rule out the possibility that the site was made and the bones processed by people that came much later (say, 15k years ago) who _found_ a bunch of 115k year old bones from animals that died from natural deaths and used them?

<comment><USER9> I'm pretty sure that they would have been fossilized by that point. Broken rock is different than broken bone.

<comment><USER7> Fossilisation takes much longer and very different conditions over millions of years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Notice that the article states the bones themselves are from 130kya, not that they were discovered in a layer of sediment deposited 130kya. This means that the age of the bones says nothing about the tools scattered around them at the site, or the ancient users of those tools.

Taking this into account, I think a more plausible explanation is that ancient humans - Clovis ancient (13kya) or perhaps older (20kya) - discovered these bones and kept them, used them, then discarded them or lost them with the other stone tools from the site.

<comment><USER11> The video in the middle of the story [0] says that they were found in a silt layer (which I'm guessing is aged at 130kya)

[0]: [https://youtu.be/HyfSsgCrjb0?t=1m21s](https://youtu.be/HyfSsgCrjb0?t=1m21s)

<comment><USER12> It pains me to see these scientists handling those ancient bones with bare hands. That's not a good practice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> For a skeptical point of view, see the second half of Jared Diamond's article: [https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27111](https://www.edge.org/response- detail/27111)

<comment><USER14> The problem with that argument is that you can use it to attack, well, anything, so long as the countervailing viewpoint is threatening to your own worldview. One could very well have applied the same objection to the null result of the Michelson-Morely experiment: since it showed that the Earth was acting weirdly with respect to the lumeniferous aether, obviously there must be something more pedestrian at work than "the aether doesn't work like we thought it did."

In Diamond's case, he's dismissing all claims of pre-Clovis settlement of the Americas. For most mainstream anthropologists, the case is settled: Clovis was not the first group of humans to settle the Americas, and the Americas were settled perhaps ~20kya, not ~13kya, probably via coastal migrations (whose sites are now underwater) rather than via the interior route blocked by the Laurentide. The biggest problem with the traditional Clovis + ice-free corridor hypothesis is that the Laurentide opened up about a 1000 years too late.

For someone like Jared Diamond, I suspect the main resistance to accepting earlier habitation of the Americas is that it throws major wrenches into the hypothesis that the mastodons were hunted to extinction by early humans.

<comment><USER15> Do you have a reference supporting "For most mainstream anthropologists"?

Do you have an explanation for why pre-Clovis humans didn't leave a ton of remains everywhere?

<comment><USER14> No, I don't have a specific reference supporting "for most mainstream anthropologists." Rather, this comes from most of my reading of books, websites, and various forums, and the general consensus I've gotten from it all is that there's few people trying to defined Clovis-First. See <[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3kmwfq/clovi...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3kmwfq/clovis_culture_and_the_first_people_in_america/cuysjut/?context=3>) for an example of such a commentary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> A slightly more skeptical look at the claims: [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-bones- spa...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-bones-spark-fresh- debate-over-first-humans-in-the-americas/)

Still, I love any evidence that the world may be more complicated and strange than we previously thought. This is definitely a story that sparks the imagination.

</comment><comment><USER17> More coverage of this can be found on ArsTechnica. A few more details are given that the NPR report omits.

[https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/04/unknown-humans- were-...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/04/unknown-humans-were-in- california-130000-years-ago-say-scientists/)

</comment><comment><USER18> You can count me firmly in the skeptics category. However, it is interesting, and human beings have been around a long time. It would be a bit surprising if no one ever made it to the Americas until "recent" times.

<comment><USER19> I'm skeptical of this finding however it seems ludicrous to mean that scientists accept on its face that humans reached Australia like 50000 years ago, crossing over 55 miles of water but a 50-mile wide Bering Strait would pose huge problems.

<comment><USER14> Sea-levels were not the same 50kya as they were today; they were about 120m or so lower. At that level, a lot of the seas in Southeast Asia and Australia just simply cease to exist, and so the ultimate water gaps are only a few km wide--very likely, you could see the other shore at times. Of course, at the same time, the Bering Strait didn't exist for similar reasons.

By comparison, Madagascar, which is ~400km from Africa, was never settled by African tribes (they were settled from Austronesians from Indonesia). Malta, about 80km from the closest land in Italy, was apparently settled only around 7kya.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> New theory: they were a Hominid people (but not Homo Sapien or human) that came to America to escape marauding communities of humans attacking them.

<comment><USER12> That was pretty much my conclusion too. Homo Sapiens got out of Africa around 130-90k years ago. Here they found bones broken by tools. Those bone-breakers might have been humans (as Homo genus) but definitely not our species. _Our species_ got in Americas much, much later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> So lets look at the evidence:

OUTLIER DATE:

This site is an outlier among archaeological sites in terms of the date. The date given for Californians according to this research is 130 000 year ago.

As far as I am aware, the earliest recorded human site outside of Africa is one in China 120 000 years ago.

And even that site is an outlier because human migration into the middle east began happening 120 000 -100 000 years ago, 60 000 years ago into Asia, and and 45 000 years into Europe.

Now that in itself is not conclusive, maybe there are older sites that we haven't found and this discovery pushes back human migration. Except there are other problems here.

LACK OF HUMAN REMAINS OR HUMAN ARTIFACTS

So the scientists say the rocks have markings that look like they had been used as a hammer and anvil and there are some mastodon bones near it.

Now no actual human bones were found near this site. Which is certainly not impossible for these kinds of sites. More problematic is that there were no obvious stone tools other than rocks with markings that look like they'd been hit.

With ancient humans, especially ones capable of hunting mastodons, you would expect them to make sharp stone points by flaking (hiting one stone against another). This should leave flakes and tools on the ground. Yet, at this site, there were no stone tools of this sort found anywhere at this site.

LACK OF CUT MARKINGS ON BONES

Further, once ancient humans killed the mastodon, you would expect them to cut pieces of flesh off with a stone knife so that it could be eaten. This process would leave marks on the bones where the flesh had been cut. The article tells us that no such markings were found on these bones.

> Yet there were no cut marks on the bones showing that the animal was > butchered for meat.

AVAILABILITY OF ALTERNATIVE EXPLANATIONS

None of these factors itself is fatal, but all three combined, the outlier date (way to early considering the mainstream evidence shows that our species were just getting set up in the middle east at this time,) the absence of human tools nearby, the absence of cut marks on the bones, the absence of any human skeletons or remains in the area. All of these lead me to think there must be another explanation.

It's not impossible that the bones of dead mastodons can get trampled or broken. Under the right circumstances, it's not impossible that trampling can cause rocks to smash against one another or leave marks on the rock. Maybe there was a cliff in the area many years ago and the bones and the rocks took a deep fall. In any event, there are alternative explanations and it is not inconceivable that this happened through natural means. This is hardly smoking gun evidence of human in California 130 000 years ago.

USE OF WEAK EXPLANATORY MECHANISMS

And I think the weakness of this evidence is belied by the unusual explanatory leaps made by the discoverers. When pointed out that there is no evidence that the remains had been butchered for meat, he responds:

"The suggestion is that this site is strictly for breaking bone, to produce blank material, raw material to make bone tools or to extract marrow." Seriously? Why would they break bones without butchering the meat and eating it? Why would you have a separate site just for bone marrow? That makes no sense.

EVIDENCE THAT IS ANYTHING BUT CLEAR LABELED AS CLEAR

>He says the rocks showed clear marks of having been used as hammers and an anvil.

Really, I mean they have pictures of the rocks on the site. It doesn't seem that clear to me that they were hammer and anvil stones. Are they clear to anyone else? They could just easily be old worn rocks. I would expect humans that could make it from Africa or wherever all the way to California 130 000 years ago to be somewhat advanced enough that they have tools more advanced than just two random pieces of rock to bang together. This was the age where humans had started molding rocks for suited purposes by flaking them. Why they would just use two natural rocks instead of created rocks is questionable. If you type in acheulean tools into google, you can see the sophisticated flaked tools (sharp looking leaf shaped blades) our ancestors were making 1.7 million years ago . . . yet ones that traveled all the way to California and kill mastodons are still stuck banging random un-molded rocks against each other for marrow- why?

I have nothing against pushing back migration to Americas, but this site is probably more wishful thinking on part of its founders than legitimate discovery.

<comment><USER22> What bothers me is that nowhere in both articles I read do they once mention: "what if it wasn't what we are postulating it is." That tact of reasoning is never explored. The entirety of their position is foregone conclusion. I'm not saying they are wrong or right, but first of all, it seems entirely unlikely due to everything we already know. Second of all there are no human remains, just some rocks that _kind_of_ resemble tools and some broken bones that they can date. It is closer to flight of fantasy that proven fact. I wish they would approach it as such while chasing their hypothesis. I would feel much easier about it. But I suppose people who don't brandish brazen egos are much less likely to get the front-page stories.....

<comment><USER23> The questioning you claim to be looking for starts in the second paragraph of the NPR piece and continues throughout the article. Trying reading it through and counting each time one of the scientists quoted says something like "if true", "it's an outlier", etc. or talks about the additional evidence they'd like to see or challenges yet to be explained.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> [http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13166597-beyond-the- blue-...](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13166597-beyond-the-blue-horizon)

</comment><comment><USER25> I think it was Nova a while back that suggested that clovis technology came from a stone age french tribe, and that there were traces of them in the genes of eastern native americans.

<comment><USER26> I recently watched a NOVA documentary from last year that refutes the Eurocentric theories of Clovis origins.

Great Human Odyssey: [http://www.pbs.org/video/2365856257/](http://www.pbs.org/video/2365856257/)

Geneticists sequenced the DNA from a young boy's 13,000-year-old bones found in Montana. His DNA matches a specific combination of Eastern Asian and Siberian DNA that is found in all North and South American native populations, and only in these populations. This lends to the theory that the first people to permanently settle the America's (Clovis) were made up of groups from Siberia and Eastern Asia combining and crossing the Bering Strait.

<comment><USER27> but given political considerations, can that particular science be trusted?

<comment><USER28> If you're going to object to their science, let's hear the actual objections and not just handwavey notions that somehow the science is bad because you don't favor the conclusions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The journal article in Nature can be found here[1]. The abstract is publicly accessible with the article behind a paywall. I'm not familiar enough with the dating method to comment on the possible problems of the age determination, but it was calculated by the complicated method of "230Th/U radiometric analysis of multiple bone specimens using diffusion–adsorption–decay dating models indicating a burial date of 130.7 ± 9.4 thousand years ago."

[1][https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v544/n7651/full/nature...](https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v544/n7651/full/nature22065.html)

</comment><comment><USER30> That cant be right. Humans didnt leave africa until 100 thousand years ago.

If this is real there should also be more evidence of them. Not just the this one find.

<comment><USER8> Homo sapiens mostly didn't leave Africa until about 100k years ago, but when dealing with these things there is always a fair amount of uncertainty so some _could_ have left much earlier.

There are also other early human species besides Homo sapiens that could in theory be responsible for something like this.

Homo erectus was galavanting around the world perhaps up to 2 million years ago, and they were tool users. Homo heidelbergensis was on the move around 600k years ago. Homo neanderthalensis was out of Africa around 300k years ago.

<comment><USER27> maybe there was a form of homo erectus already in america, using stone tools etc, having arrived 130k yrs or more ago, and then the indians wiped them out when they arrived much later--that would explain indian tales of having wiped out primitive cannibal tribes (a movie called bone tomahawk was inspired by these tales)...of course the political considerations would tend to suppress this idea.

<comment><USER31> Come on, you can't take legends from circa 1500 AD to be evidence of anything that happened somewhere between 11,000 and 20,000 years earlier, especially without writing. It's far more likely that primitive cannibal tribes were made up wholesale than that societies carried the memory of them for more than 10,000 years.

<comment><USER32> The Klamath Native American tribe has legends of the eruption of Mt. Mazama that formed Oregon's Crater Lake - which happened in ~5677 BC [1]. If oral legends that reflect real events can last seven and a half thousand years, is there any reason to think they couldn't last 15ky, or 20ky? It seems to me all that's needed is a continuous cultural line.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I really wish I could bet against this XKCD style its quite a sure thing.

It doesn't make sense plus we know there are competing issues at play as people try to get get know in their fields by finding 'the oldest'

Extrodinay claims need extrodinay evedence here they seem to have fit a theory that would lack provable evedence as a explanation.

</comment><comment><USER34> There's a lot of Sasquatch stories among Native Americans.

Homo Floresiensis overlaps with the Ebu Gogo myth: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebu_gogo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebu_gogo)

<comment><USER25> It's hard to believe a story can persist for 15,000 years by verbal transmission.

<comment><USER35> Hard to believe, but it happens. Australian Aboriginal story telling, for example, conveys historical events from 10k+ years ago: [http://theconversation.com/ancient-aboriginal-stories- preser...](http://theconversation.com/ancient-aboriginal-stories-preserve- history-of-a-rise-in-sea-level-36010)

<comment><USER36> You may find this interesting: The town of Carencro, Louisiana takes its name from an American Indian legend about a mastodon that died there. The name has been interpreted as either "carrion crow" for wake of vultures that feasted upon its carcass, or "carnero"\--"bone pile"\--for the bones of the creature itself. The fossil was discovered in the 18th century. Oral cultures have a long memory.

<comment><USER25> Mastodons used to be everywhere. Finding a mastodon's bones is not that unusual, so is not compelling proof of the veracity of the legend.

<comment><USER36> As far as I remember the story was regarding a fairly specific segment of Bayou Carencro where the creature was said to have drowned, and is where the fossils were found. That makes it a bit more compelling than some Mastodon being unearthed in the general region.

<comment><USER25> That is some good evidence. But consider that if there are 1000 stories, and 1 turns out to have supporting evidence, does that mean the other 999 are reliable, too?

It's like the psychic who correctly predicted the last 7 presidential elections. One doesn't hear about the other psychics whose predictions didn't pan out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> ECREE. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." -Carl Sagan</comment>


What the interns have wrought, 2020 edition - <AUTHOR> https://blog.janestreet.com/what-the-interns-have-wrought-2020/ <comment><USER2> For those who don't know, Jane Street is one of the best performing algorithmic trading firms on Wall Street. Probably the largest Ocaml shop on earth.

It's a lucrative job for strong programming talent. Engineers there routinely make well over $1mm/year (edit: after a few years).

They are similar to Two Sigma in tech focus and talent, which is a more well- known firm.

<comment><USER3> "Routinely" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. I can confirm it's possible, as I've been in the industry and have spoken to people who make seven figures at Jane Street. But I would rather say it's "reasonably attainable" for an engineer who has been there for at least five - seven years and is really hitting their stride with the type of work. They _do_ routinely beat out top tech compensation, and most engineers there are doing quite well - in the mid - high six figures. This is still saying a lot, since it's not really reasonably attainable for someone to hit seven figures per year even in FAANG - that would require an exceptional package at L7/E7, a good package at L8/E8, or very lucky timing and significant stock growth at L6/E6. Most engineers will never reach those levels.

There is a caveat to mention: keep in mind that compensation at these firms exhibits survivorship bias. A new grad engineer at Jane Street will receive around $300 - 400k all in first year compensation: around $150k base, $150k guaranteed end year bonus and $100k sign on bonus. From there, what typically happens is further recalibration a year later. Either you're good enough to maintain at least that level of comp, and you stay, or you're out within a year or two.

This means that you may not get an initial pay raise by joining, if you're extended an offer. Engineering offers from top trading firms are often an initial paycut, or an equivalent package, for anyone who is senior or higher at a place like Google and Facebook. You don't generally get to really significant compensation beyond tech until you're a few years in, and implicit in that assumption is that you'll actually stay there.

So let's say you're a new grad with offers from Jane Street, Citadel, Google and Facebook. You'll probably get $400k from Jane Street and Citadel and $200k from Google and Facebook, including sign on bonuses. If you join one of the trading firms right out of school, you'll develop an affinity for the work faster (if you're good enough to stay), and you can reasonably expect to make up to $1M/year by the time you're 30.

But now let's say you're L6/E6 at Google/Facebook. Maybe you're 30 and have $500k total compensation per year. Jane Street isn't going to offer you significantly more than half a million a year just because of your level in tech, unless they have a really pressing need and you're an industry expert. You will probably receive about the same package, with the possibility of making significantly more after developing more experience with their tech stack and work, after a year or two.

The "shock and awe" competitive packages are given to new grads who can be developed from day one, but senior hires require further calibration. There is a ceiling on what trading firms are willing to offer people who have exceptional promise but otherwise no domain experience in finance.

In any case the people I know at Jane Street are consistently exceptional. I highly recommend the firm if you're interested in their work. Likewise Hudson River Trading has a very similar profile but is smaller and has more of a startup feel to it.

<comment><USER4> This comment really did not help my depression as someone that makes $150k two years into a FAANG job. I've never even been able to get interviews from HRT or Jane Street, and my Citadel offer was less than $200k...

<comment><USER3> Comparison is the thief of joy. You are more than your work, and I would say you'll always be unhappy if you define your identity or your success by how much money you earn. Someone around you will always earn more than you, or have some other successful characteristic that you do not.

That being said: while it's not perfectly meritocratic, I would say tech and (this side of) finance is uniquely attainable for someone who has the determination and tenacity to build the requisite skills. You don't need to have gone to a particular school. Barring a felony, your past choices in life will not hold you back.

If you already got into one of FAANG, you almost certainly have a strong baseline skillset already. If it's really important to you, focus on achieving further mastery of your craft and figure out what you need to do to pass an interview at this kind of firm.

<comment><USER4> > or have some other successful characteristic that you do not.

That's both fair and true, but I'm someone without _any_ successful characteristics.

> You don't need to have gone to a particular school.

All of the interns in question went to top schools of course :)

> If you already got into one of FAANG, you almost certainly have a strong > baseline skillset already

While I wish that were true, unfortunately, the FAANG is Amazon so I don't think that's much proof of anything. I would work towards achieving mastery of what I would need to do to pass an interview, but I can't even get an interview - again, because of my current company and undergrad.

<comment><USER5> You are making 3x the median family income for this country while getting to work from home and stay safe from COVID-19. The job market is imploding around us while we work cushy tech jobs. Abject misery abounds as people lose their loved ones and their livelihoods.

It comes off as as quite tone-deaf when tech people complain about their $150k salaries. There are way too many entitled people in tech who have never worked a shit minimum wage job in their lives.

Look, if you really want to make it to a company like Jane Street, there IS a path. It's not a path that many have the energy to take but it's there. If you are having trouble getting interviews you can do a ton to produce content needed to raise your online profile. You can make lots of meaningful open- source contributions on github. You can produce great blog content. You can code live on twitch and develop a following. If you combine that with actually developing the algorithmic chops to pass their interview process, you can get into a company like Jane Street.

I personally don't view maximizing my income at the expense of all else in my life as a good way to live so I won't be grinding it out to get one of these jobs, but if that's what you really want then the path is there. But you probably will still be unhappy once you achieve it if you're unhappy right now.

And don't be so hard on yourself. If you've made it as far as you have, you definitely have successful characteristics. You're not special, and that's OK. But just because you're not special doesn't mean you don't have successful characteristics.

<comment><USER6> >It comes off as as quite tone-deaf when tech people complain about their $150k salaries. There are way too many entitled people in tech who have never worked a shit minimum wage job in their lives.

Seems quite tone-deaf to compare yourself to the worst off. It's easy to pat yourself on the back for not having to sleep in the dirt but that's not a very high bar, is it? Some people want to have purpose and to keep growing and becoming better and more successful -- it's not tone-deaf to want that. And you don't have to absorb the misery of everything that's happening around you or you won't have time to do anything else.

<comment><USER4> I've seen your username before on CSCQ. Tell me - is there any hope for people like me? Any way that I can come even close to matching your total compensation anytime soon (Which I'm assuming is around $350kish)?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Bravo for not only having internships that matter, but highlighting them as well.

<comment><USER8> A few other places do this too.

<comment><USER9> ..and a lot of places absolutely don't.

Let us celebrate the successful ones who do eh.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I completed the interview process at Jane Street last year and received a verbal offer after my on-site which they then proceeded to rescind while we were discussing pay ranges, claiming they had decided instead to fill the position I applied for with internal staff. Their recruiter handled it with a high degree of professionalism but the experience left a bad taste in my mouth nonetheless.

<comment><USER11> Sorry to hear about your experience.

I have to ask: Who gave you the verbal offer? Was it an internal recruiter, external recruiter, or the company's HR department?

I mentor a lot of college students. They're always very nervous about the possibility of rescinded offers despite how rare it is in practice, so I'm curious about the details of your situation.

When mentoring people, I always advise people to never assume an offer is a done deal until you've received the official offer letter with compensation details and a start date. Unethical recruiters are notorious for misleading candidates into thinking the job is a sure thing in order to discourage them from interviewing elsewhere.

When mentoring hiring managers, I emphasize the importance of never misleading candidates into thinking they have a job until we send the official offer letter. It's common for new hiring managers to get so excited that they give the candidate too much information too early. Even simple statements like, "We were really impressed with your performance and now I'm going to work on getting you an offer" can be disastrously misleading to candidates who don't realize that their interviewer/recruiter isn't the only decision maker in the process.

<comment><USER12> > I always advise people to never assume an offer is a done deal until you've > received the official offer letter with compensation details and a start > date

They can still rescind at that stage as well though can't they - it's no more concrete, legally, is it?

<comment><USER13> You could sue at that point.

<comment><USER14> For what, exercising the "at-will employment" clause that's in most non- contractor employment contracts? You could no more sue them at that point than they could sue an employee for not giving two-weeks notice. Please don't spread misinformation.

<comment><USER13> In Canada this is not true and can be backed up with cases.

If you live in an at-will state I completely understand you would have few rights.

An employer can sue you for two weeks and any damages that comes from that event.

<comment><USER15> You mention Canada as though we have one unified set of laws, but that is not the case. In Ontario, for example, I can fire an employee without cause prior to their first day of work or even on their first day of work but before they official start and I am not required to pay them anything.

To the best of my knowledge, most of Canada follows the same rules and the only province that is likely to differ about this is Quebec.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Let me know if I'm wrong, but it seems like Jane Street is going contrary to the HN common belief that a lot of things should be "buy" instead of "build" and yet they are quite successful

<comment><USER17> Yep, and they use OCaml! I always feel like I have to point it out since people do not think much of it, have lots of misconceptions of it, and so on.

<comment><USER18> I guess I might have some misconceptions of OCaml. Are there other companies that use it? I ask because whenever someone says "OCaml is used in industry, for example, Jane Street", they say it like it's just one example, but it's _always_ Jane Street.

<comment><USER19> The OCaml website lists some companies it [0], I think there are a bunch of new blockchain startups that are also using OCaml but are not on that page.

[0] [https://ocaml.org/learn/companies.html](https://ocaml.org/learn/companies.html)

<comment> non-entity Is there something about purely functional languages that make them attractive to blockchain applications? I remember a post on here a little while ago complaining about Haskell adoption in industry was being mostly led by cryptocurrencies.

<comment><USER20> Just to make it clear, OCaml is not purely functional.

<comment> non-entity Oh sorry, not sure why I thought it was.

<comment><USER17> Yeah, it most likely is not. I mix imperative, OOP, and functional all the time. Parts of my codebase that has to do with algorithms are written using imperative style, the "public API" is OOP (class, object, methods) which makes the use of my library a breeze, and the rest is functional.

To give you an example of how you would use some crypto-related library that implemented its API (?) in OOP:

      let x = new Foo.bar in
      x#absorb a;
      x#squeeze b;
      x#reset

Or take a look at: [https://github.com/xavierleroy/cryptokit/blob/master/src/cry...](https://github.com/xavierleroy/cryptokit/blob/master/src/cryptokit.ml?ts=2#L1023)

This (this entire file) is a great example, too!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I know a guy who works at Jane Street; he was formerly one of the brightest undergrads at Caltech. He turned down an offer to do a PhD at Berkeley to take the Jane Street offer, IIRC. He is pretty idealistic and has an interesting philosophy about working in finance: he thinks moving money around isn't that societally valuable, but he donates 10-15% of his income to charity each year (I think he picks charities using the GiveWell/effective altruism methodology). In his view, the value of his lifetime charitable contributions exceeds the impact he could hope to have in pretty much any other field of endeavor, so the job is completely worth it.

<comment><USER22> > moving money around isn't that societally valuable

I would say hedge funds have massive negative social value (especially quant/HFT ones), and actively contribute to wealth inequity. Robert Mercer is a prime example of this. Not saying I think your friend is a bad person or should quit, but it's kind of a naive justification.

<comment><USER23> I'm curious why you think HFT is harmful. They do the same job that human market makers used to do, buy vastly more efficiently, leading to lower prices for "customers" (IE lower spreads), and lower profits for the industry:

> TABB Group estimates that US equity HFT revenues have declined from > approximately $7.2 billion in 2009 to about $1.3 billion in 2014.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20140404072855/http://tabbforum....](https://web.archive.org/web/20140404072855/http://tabbforum.com/opinions/no- michael-lewis-the-us-equities-market-is-not-rigged)

I mostly agree that Robert Mercer has been a force for evil in the world, but subjectively my impression is that finance billionaires are more likely than people from other industries to spend their money on relatively uncontroversial philanthropy.

<comment><USER24> HFT specifically is a form of largely zero-sums arms races. Is it _really_ useful to society if there are entities that issue orders with microsecond (or less) response times rather than on the order of seconds or minutes? Yet a significant amount of brainpower and resources is essentially wasted on this problem.

The story about lower spreads is also rather dubious. I can believe that going to sub-second HFT reduces spreads slightly, but what's the point? By how much, exactly, is the spread reduced by going to the extremes that HFT goes to, and how does it compare to just your regular intra-day swings?

What's useful to society at large is long-term capital allocation. Regular people don't do day-trading, they place orders "at market" maybe a few times per year at most (or perhaps monthly as part of an automatic plan). The loss from intra-day variations will dwarf the measly reduction in spread that is achieved using sub-second HFT.

So in that light, it's good to see that apparently HFT is becoming less profitable.

<comment><USER25> I think at this point the benefits of HFT to markets (lower spreads, more liquidity, faster incorporation of information into prices) is pretty undisputed. I'll let you do your own research, but just to address your point about spreads:

When you participate in the market, the spread is the "price" you have to pay to transact. When this goes down, it benefits all participants in the market, and especially the ones that are doing "long-term capital allocation" you are talking about. Rather than take my word for it, here's a quote from the CEO of Vanguard: "From a data perspective, we can see what's happened to our fund shareholders over the last 20 years, and they've benefited by that reduction in transaction costs." [1]. If you're managing trillions of dollars of 401ks, pension funds, etc, and you are constantly rebalancing your assets, buying new allocations, etc, any tiny reduction in average spread is a huge savings on net. A big part of the reason why there's been an almost universal reduction in fund management fees, saving retirement savers an enormous amount of money over the last 10 years or so is this reduction in spreads. This is absolutely a huge benefit to society, and its almost entirely attributable to HFTs.

You're correct that it HFT is a zero-sum arms race, and maybe you could make the argument that in an optimal allocation of society's resources, perhaps you could have less than the current number of participants. But I think you could actually make this argument about almost all lucrative & highly competitive fields. If anything, HFT is _more_ productive per unit of labor, relative to other sectors of society - that's why the compensation is so high!

The total number of programmers and quants that work in HFT, at least for the 5-10 significant players, is probably less than the number of programmers Google alone employs (last I checked, there are about 30k programmers working at google. There's almost certainly less than 30k quants and programmers working at the main HFT firms). How many programmers do you "need" to optimize ads for eyeballs? Or how many programmers do you "need" to make mobile phone games? Or work on social networks? etc etc.

HFT is a small, niche, industry, and I think extremely productive per employee relative to most other industries. It replaced the tens of thousands of manual traders that used to be responsible for arbitrage and market making with automated robots, dramatically increasing market efficiencies while reducing the amount of human capital required to provide those services. It seems pretty misguided to make the argument that HFT is somehow "bad" or a "waste" of resources, given how much of an improvement it was to what there was before, and also given how small the industry really is.

[1] [https://www.cnbc.com/2014/04/25/vanguard-chief-defends- high-...](https://www.cnbc.com/2014/04/25/vanguard-chief-defends-high- frequency-trading-firms.html)

<comment><USER24> You may be confusing HFT with algorithmic trading in general.

You also disregard my whole point about just how high the HF in HFT needs to be. One can easily imagine a market that operates in rounds of blind auctions, one auction per second or one per minute or something along those lines. This would take out a _lot_ of the arms race, and it's implausible that spreads would be much higher in such a market in a way that would hurt other investors: after all, you'd still expect competition between participants in a way that drives their profits down.

> A big part of the reason why there's been an almost universal reduction in > fund management fees, saving retirement savers an enormous amount of money > over the last 10 years or so is this reduction in spreads.

That makes zero sense. A significant loss due to higher spreads wouldn't show up in fund management fees, it would just show up as lower returns of the fund _before_ management fees.

> If anything, HFT is more productive per unit of labor, relative to other > sectors of society - that's why the compensation is so high!

That's at least doubtful. I would argue that compensation in HFT is high because it sits adjacent to large streams of money. In practice, a lot of compensation is ultimately about siphoning small fractions away from the streams of money you're near to, and the size of that stream makes more of a difference than almost anything else, but that's really only a form and function of power -- it doesn't correlate with how productive you are to society. (I suppose if you just _define_ productivity as compensation per hour worked, as economists often do, then what you say is strictly speaking true, but it's also kind of circular and therefore meaningless.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Does Jane Street and similar firms hire Math or CS PhDs with backgrounds in theory?

<comment><USER27> I'm not at Jane Street, but at G-Research (also quant finance). Much as a joke goes which I first heard in the Effective Altruism sphere, our quants come from _all kinds_ of backgrounds: their PhDs are in fluid mechanics, statistical physics, pure maths, you name it!

<comment><USER8> how easy do they switch to Quant finance? I don't know anything at all but it seems like an entire new field to learn.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Off a tangent but whenever I hear OCaml I can't stop thinking about F#. I started dabbling in F# in my spare time but time didn't allow a deepdive. From a few months of playing with it it seems like a solid alternative to other languages and codebases appears to be easier to follow though I never used it in the real world. Does anyone with real world experience have the patience to write about it? Does using F# make coding fun again? Also, does it look like F# will pick up in popularity anytime soon? Thanks

<comment><USER29> I've been working with F# for about 5 years now, love it. The .net ecosystem has a huge amount of libraries available, performance is excellent, and F# is a joy to develop it.

<comment><USER28> Thanks. Can I ask you what line of business your company is? Is it financial by any chance? Thanks

<comment><USER29> Healthcare

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Damn. You gots some sharp interns.

Good show!

</comment><comment><USER31> What are the advantages of Re over Re2?

<comment><USER32> There might be others, but the big advantage in my eyes is that Re, because it is pure-OCaml, is platform independent, whereas Re2, being backed by the C++ lib of the same name, is not. At Jane Street this is relevant because we share a lot of code between Linux servers and JavaScript (running in Chrome) clients.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Wow. These interns at that comapany are working of stuff that's way more interesting and complex than the crap I deal with at my financial company.

From what others are saying, it looks like they pay way better too.

<comment><USER27> Honestly quant finance has a lot of _really_ interesting problems in. That XKCD about "why would I want to be paid lots to work on fascinating problems with the brightest people in the world" is… actually kind of true.

<comment><USER33> My company basically restricts those sort of positions for business people that learn Python and R. They are very hesitant to promote IT people into that type of role.

I'm getting tired of implementing/coding other people's solutions or just copying legacy processes into new tech. It would be nice to actually work on the problem and the processes that would most effectively solve them.

<comment><USER34> That sounds like a recipe for a lateral move. You've got the domain knowledge already; train up with an eye towards what other fintech companies are hiring for, and your chances of busting out of the rut are decent.

Good luck!

<comment><USER33> I don't have much domain knowledge, at least not to the level they want (CFA charter).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Impressive stuff, congrats to these three

<comment><USER8> Only one of them have a LinkedIn. Super curious about their background.</comment></comment>


Show HN: I made a Flappy Bird like game - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zerobudgetdev.BucketCopter&

<comment><USER2> I don't think many people are going to buy your game because as you say it's very similar to Flappy Bird and there are thousands of Flappy Bird like games out there, yours is not much different from all of them.

Your game is not a clone like others but it's not different enough so people are going to pay 1€ (especially in Android) to play with it. Maybe if you make it free you can have a chance of getting people to try it and find out it's better than the other Flappy Bird games.</comment>


Transparency Reports Database - <AUTHOR> https://transparency-reports.silk.co/

<comment><USER2> What is compliance rate? x/100 ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, those numbers are percentages.</comment></comment>


Why freelance iOS developers don't develop their own apps - <AUTHOR> http://coryliu.com/post/16914257988/why-freelance-ios-developers-dont-develop-their-own

<comment><USER2> Marketing the app truly has been the hardest part for myself as well... would really appreciate any pointers from fellow iOS devs on "what has worked" to get more reach for your apps. Has anyone tried a professional marketing company for example?

The first thing that obviously can't be stressed enough is that your app MUST be as polished as possible. But the "what now?" question still seems to be quite open for most indie devs...

<comment><AUTHOR> I wouldn't use a marketing company unless they specialized in app promotion. Apps are such a weird, new and nontraditional medium. I think we generally look at optimizing in two places: within the app market (soliciting ratings, reviews, keywords, titles, screenshots, and volume of downloads) and outside the app market. Since we have no clue how internals work, its probably better to spend time on external marketing.

Some basics that all devs should get down:

\- a hit list of blogs that target your audience, pitch to them and get coverage

\- submit to app review sites

\- start building an email newsletter (integrate mailchimp into your app)

\- if possible, cross promote through someone else's newsletter

\- have a landing page + centralized FB page. Try to build up "Likes" so you can communicate with users in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Another issue that the article does not completely touch on is, that developing and successfully selling an app is not just writing code. It is creating a software product business, which requires a lot of other skills. So some developers are freelancing to build up those business skills slowly as freelancing is somewhere between running a business and writing code, others just have no interest in building a product company.</comment>


ShowHN: Scraped 800 .vimrc files from github, analyzed for fun - <AUTHOR> http://www.mcphersonindustries.com/vimrcs/

<comment><USER2> Would love to see something similar for "emacs"

I just learned something new for example today - using the ".dir-locals.el" to specify per-directory variables :)

I want to learn vi/vim, but spent already so much time learning emacs (and still feeling baby in it... which is good!)

<comment><USER3> > _spent already so much time learning emacs (and still feeling baby in it... > which is good!)_

Nobody has _really_ mastered Emacs. Nobody.

There's simply too much detail, much of it hidden in the shadows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's interesting that "set autoindent" is so common. I replaced this with "filetype indent on" some years ago, since I'd rather have language-sensitive indentation.

<comment><USER5> Thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Normalisation of settings would be a very good thing to do. 'ruler' and 'ru', 'autoindent' and 'ai', 'etc.' and 'et cetera'.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll work on combining these; as a vim neophyte I wasn't totally sure which ones might overlap. At least I got color|colorscheme.

Thanks!

<comment><USER5> When you do :help autoindent or :help ai you can see the short version and the long version.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Very cool project, thanks for sharing! :)

What could be interesting addition, would be to see how these change over time, ie .vimrc trends.

I had a similar idea for analyzing dotfiles stats, which was subsequently filed in evernote as a 'yet-another-hack-i-would-like-to-do-someday-but- realistically-probably-will-not' ;)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Did this for fun mostly to test out casper.js (it's nice!)

I'd welcome any feedback on how to better present interesting data, or answer any questions. Thanks!

<comment><USER8> Will you release the source? I don't use any of the stuff you use, except vim, would be interested to have a look

<comment><AUTHOR> I have 2 repos on my github account:

<https://github.com/alexmcpherson>

One is a scaffolded rails app with interesting folders /scraper and /files

And the other is the microsite that was linked in the parent post

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What a surprise: 574/800 useless set nocompatible. Cargo cult for the win!

<comment><AUTHOR> What is it purported to do vs. what does it actually do?

<comment><USER5> Vim can run in "compatible" mode (Vi-like settings) or "nocompatible" mode (Vim-like settings).

        :set nocompatible

is used to switch Vim from "compatible" mode to "nocompatible" mode.

 _A lot_ of people put it at the top of their .vimrc, usually together with a comment telling that it's needed for many options and features to work correctly.

But Vim _actually_ switches itself to "nocompatible" mode _if it finds a vimrc_. It can be the default vimrc in /usr/share/vim/vim7x/ or your own .vimrc, it doesn't matter.

You can test this by removing this line from your .vimrc, launching another Vim instance and doing :set compatible? With or without that line, you'll get nocompatible.

Having this line in your .vimrc essentially does nothing: it sets something "on" that was already "on". As such it's useless cruft but it is not dangerous.

The _real_ problem with it is that it demonstrates a dangerous cargo cult trend among Vim users who copy/paste entire vimrcs from Github or top ranking blog posts without thinking about it for a second. Because this line and the comment appeared in a rather famous blog post(1) by a rather famous vimmer it's now just… everywhere.

I have a lot of respect for Steve Losh and I absolutely don't blame him for including this line in his post: it's useless but harmless so there's no big deal. I certainly have a lot of useless redundant stuff in my .vimrc, too. And I'm totally guilty of using his whole .vimrc verbatim when I started.

But all the people who copied this line from him or from others who copied it from others who copied it from him (who probably copied it from someone else, why not?) should show a little less lazyness, I believe. And a more critical mind.

(1) <http://stevelosh.com/blog/2010/09/coming-home-to-vim/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm, maybe I'll get around to looking at his vimrc and seeing what proportion of the settings are in the scraped files. I bet I could further validate your cargo-cult hypothesis.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why there is a lot of programming courses on MOOCs not a one course about Linux? - <AUTHOR>

A lot of MOOCs offer free courses on programming but I never come across a free course to learn about systems (Linux in Particular). <comment><USER2> That is because you don't need a MOOC to learn it. There are literally tons of resources available for learning how to be a sysadmin (online and for free, see IBMs website, they have it too).

As per Linux desktop, it is practically just as easy to use as Windouche.

For Linux dev work, you'd best go with a CS course teaching C++/Java.

However, I like the idea of getting at least linux desktop to the masses through a MOOC. Generally, you can now do everything on Linux that a basic Win user does.

Generally though, the Win vs. Unix fight doesn't matter to the common user. It is like cotton and nylon factories fighting to win over the person wearing the t-shirt (who, although now may care, because being 'green' is a big ad promotion and kind of makes sense) who in times gone buy, didn't care what material the product was made from (as other aesthetics like brand-name, etc. trumped it).

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been using linux professionally since 1996 and might be convinced to create one if there's sufficient demand. How much would you pay for such a course?

</comment><comment><USER4> Linux is not a course typically taught in universities. For the same reason they don't teach courses on Excel, Word, Photoshop, Firefox, etc.

<comment><USER5> Linux is much more complicated than Firefox and Word and there is a reason not to teach how to use private company products. Linux is free and open source and I too, cannot see any reason that these courses are not offered. Unix is typically bound with academia.

<comment><USER4> I agree with you that its very complex, and very widespread, and i could see why you'd want it to be taught. But I still think it's not something that belongs in a university. It's still just a specific instance of a piece of software.

BTW, isn't Firefox is open source? You can replace my exaples with their open source equivalents (LibreOffice, Gimp, etc) and the argument still stands.

A uni should teach algorithms and data structures, networking, threading, etc, not how to use firefox.

Likewise, a uni should teach operating systems, threads, hardware, compilers, memory management, etc, but not Linux.

Even programming languages are generally not taught as ends in an of themselves. Good schools expect you to pick them up as part of the class. For example, the course is about data structures, but you will code in Java, C, and LISP during the semester, and you are expected to pick them up. They may help you a bit in learning them, and give you background on them when you move to a part of the course that switches to a new lang.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Make a course...</comment>


Boston University tries to take a bite out of Apple over LED patent - <AUTHOR> http://www.universalhub.com/2013/boston-university-tries-take-bite-out-apple

<comment><USER2> If I were in high school BU's litigious new leaf would certainly make me want to go there. /s</comment>


Google's Eddystone beacons offer a privacy-focused way to track your stuff - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/04/googles-eddystone-beacons-offer-a-privacy-focused-way-to-track-your-stuff/ <comment><USER2> Here's the spec, in case anyone is interested: [https://github.com/google/eddystone/tree/master/eddystone- ei...](https://github.com/google/eddystone/tree/master/eddystone-eid)</comment>


Ask HN: What are some good Machine Learning resources? - <AUTHOR>

I'm currently learning and researching more in the field of Machine Learning. I started with Machine Learning course in Coursera (http://ml-class.org/).<p>Any other/more suggestions to go deep into the topic? <comment><USER2> Some great resources just mentioned here.

If you're interested in Machine Learning and Cloud then you should definitely try AWS ML and Azure ML.

"Amazon Machine Learning is a service that makes it easy for developers of all skill levels to use machine learning technology."

"Azure Machine Learning: a cloud-based predictive analytics service."

Here two great tutorials (with code) on Amazon ML and Azure ML.

Amazon Machine Learning: use cases and a real example in Python [http://cloudacademy.com/blog/aws-machine- learning/](http://cloudacademy.com/blog/aws-machine-learning/)

Azure Machine Learning: simplified predictive analytics [http://cloudacademy.com/blog/azure-machine- learning/](http://cloudacademy.com/blog/azure-machine-learning/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I'll try these out. Can they be used for learning? I feel it's more like services.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> For a weekly collection of ML related news and resources, you may want to look at [https://aiweekly.curated.co](https://aiweekly.curated.co)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! This will help me to stay motivated every time when a mail comes :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would concentrate on just Andrew Ng's course until you finished it. Even though the problem sets are solved using Matlab/Octave you will learn just about all the theory you need to later try different frameworks written in different languages. I earned a 99.6% grade in that class (I have a few decades of AI experience, so I took the class as an excellent review) and I feel that every minute spent on this class was worthwhile.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the advice. Right now, I am concentrating only on the course. I just wanted to keep some resources for later.

I'll keep this in mind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Checkout, [https://github.com/josephmisiti/awesome-machine- learning](https://github.com/josephmisiti/awesome-machine-learning)

This is not exactly resources for learning machine learning but frameworks you can use with your favorite programming language.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's good. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here's my list of suggestions:

[http://digitalmind.io/post/deep-learning](http://digitalmind.io/post/deep- learning)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's great! Thanks.. Is that your own blog?

<comment><USER6> Yep =)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Some good books on Machine Learning:

Machine Learning: The Art and Science of Algorithms that Make Sense of Data (Flach): [http://www.amazon.com/Machine-Learning-Science-Algorithms- Se...](http://www.amazon.com/Machine-Learning-Science-Algorithms- Sense/dp/1107422221/)

Machine Learning: A Probabilistic Perspective (Murphy): [http://www.amazon.com/Machine-Learning-Probabilistic- Perspec...](http://www.amazon.com/Machine-Learning-Probabilistic-Perspective- Computation/dp/0262018020/)

Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning (Bishop): [http://www.amazon.com/Pattern-Recognition-Learning- Informati...](http://www.amazon.com/Pattern-Recognition-Learning-Information- Statistics/dp/0387310738/)

There are some great resources/books for Bayesian statistics and graphical models. I've listed them in (approximate) order of increasing difficulty/mathematical complexity:

Think Bayes (Downey): [http://www.amazon.com/Think-Bayes-Allen-B- Downey/dp/14493707...](http://www.amazon.com/Think-Bayes-Allen-B- Downey/dp/1449370780/)

Bayesian Methods for Hackers (Davidson-Pilon et al): [https://github.com/CamDavidsonPilon/Probabilistic- Programmin...](https://github.com/CamDavidsonPilon/Probabilistic-Programming- and-Bayesian-Methods-for-Hackers)

Doing Bayesian Data Analysis (Kruschke), aka "the puppy book": [http://www.amazon.com/Doing-Bayesian-Data-Analysis- Second/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Doing-Bayesian-Data-Analysis- Second/dp/0124058884/)

Bayesian Data Analysis (Gellman): [http://www.amazon.com/Bayesian-Analysis- Chapman-Statistical-...](http://www.amazon.com/Bayesian-Analysis-Chapman- Statistical-Science/dp/1439840954/)

Bayesian Reasoning and Machine Learning (Barber): [http://www.amazon.com/Bayesian-Reasoning-Machine-Learning- Ba...](http://www.amazon.com/Bayesian-Reasoning-Machine-Learning- Barber/dp/0521518148/)

Probabilistic Graphical Models (Koller et al): [https://www.coursera.org/course/pgm](https://www.coursera.org/course/pgm) [http://www.amazon.com/Probabilistic-Graphical-Models- Princip...](http://www.amazon.com/Probabilistic-Graphical-Models-Principles- Computation/dp/0262013193/)

If you want a more mathematical/statistical take on Machine Learning, then the two books by Hastie/Tibshirani et al are definitely worth a read (plus, they're free to download from the authors' websites!):

Introduction to Statistical Learning: [http://www- bcf.usc.edu/~gareth/ISL/](http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~gareth/ISL/)

The Elements of Statistical Learning: [http://statweb.stanford.edu/~tibs/ElemStatLearn/](http://statweb.stanford.edu/~tibs/ElemStatLearn/)

Obviously there is the whole field of "deep learning" as well! A good place to start is with: [http://deeplearning.net/](http://deeplearning.net/)

<comment><USER8> Those are great resources!

In case you are interested in MLaaS (Machine Learning as a Service), you can check these as well:

Amazon Machine Learning: [http://aws.amazon.com/machine- learning/](http://aws.amazon.com/machine-learning/) (my review here: [http://cloudacademy.com/blog/aws-machine- learning/](http://cloudacademy.com/blog/aws-machine-learning/))

Azure Machine Learning: [http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/machine- learning/](http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/machine-learning/) (my review here: [http://cloudacademy.com/blog/azure-machine- learning/](http://cloudacademy.com/blog/azure-machine-learning/))

Google Prediction API: [https://cloud.google.com/prediction/](https://cloud.google.com/prediction/)

BigML: [https://bigml.com/](https://bigml.com/)

Prediction.io: [https://prediction.io/](https://prediction.io/)

OpenML: [http://openml.org/](http://openml.org/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I went through the links and your review. They are really good. Thanks!</comment></comment></comment>


Brian Aldiss has died - <AUTHOR> https://www.curtisbrown.co.uk/news/announcement-of-the-death-of-brian-aldiss-obe <comment><USER2> Sad to hear this - last of a magnificent cohort of SF writers, for my money. The genre's moved on for sure, but there's a certain style and mode to that era that appeals to me enormously.

When I was a kid I used to think of an ABC of truly great SF - Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke - but I never really entirely felt sure that A was for Asimov, and not for Aldiss. Perhaps there was a second team - Aldiss, Ballard... Chilton, maybe?

<comment><USER3> > _" Sad to hear this - last of a magnificent cohort of SF writers, for my > money."_

This prompted me to look at how many of my favourite SF authors are still alive - and the vast majority are dead. I honestly think that the era of true Science Fiction is over (as opposed to Science Fantasy which is still going strong).

<comment><USER4> On the contrary, I have been getting into modern science fiction after being raised on my dad's collection of Asimov/Clarke/Heinlein/etc. and the modern stuff is great. Check out Vernor Vinge, Greg Egan, Kim Stanley Robinson. None of that is science fantasy. If anything, I'd say that science fantasy is _less_ popular now than it was two or three decades ago. Look at the popularity of modern TV and movies: Arrival, The Martian, Gravity, The Expanse, Interstellar. Three of those are complete hard science fiction and the others are more in the vein of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Contact than Star Wars.

<comment><USER5> Interstellar is solidly science fantasy. Arrival is arguably science fantasy since it's central conceit isn't very sciencey (amazing movie though).

The Expanse is borderline since there's basically a magic substance (the proto molecule), though everything _except_ that is very hard sci fi.

<comment><USER6> > Arrival is arguably science fantasy since it's central conceit isn't very > sciencey

Read the original short story: the actual premise is actually _very_ science-y, and completely "true sci-fi." Don't want to spoil it here though.

> though everything _except_ that is very hard sci fi.

Yeah, personally I think sci-fi (rather than sci-fantasy) is allowed to break a single physical law and still be considered sci-fi, as long as it's done consistently and the consequences properly explored.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> His first work that I remember reading was the short story "But who can replace a Man?" in the Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories (AFAIK) along with Ursula Le Guin and other authors. I was very impressed by the simplicity of his narrative, ability to paint a detailed picture and raw story-telling ability. A grave loss to the sci-fi world.

</comment><comment><USER8> Brian Aldiss speaks of his admiration for and troubles with Stanley Kubrick:

[http://www.independent.co.uk/arts- entertainment/films/featur...](http://www.independent.co.uk/arts- entertainment/films/features/brian-aldiss-kubrick-spielberg-and- me-9245178.html)

More:

[https://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/clippings.an...](https://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/clippings.and.notes/97.Baxter.Kubrick.html)

[https://www.webofstories.com/play/brian.aldiss/67;jsessionid...](https://www.webofstories.com/play/brian.aldiss/67;jsessionid=2507FB47113B3FE6D61111D2E5C0B706)

</comment><comment><USER9> Never read Aldiss. Any recommendations on which book(s) to start with?

<comment><USER10> Avoid the Helliconia books, they're a grim, hard slog. Sorry I can't give a positive recommendation, I avoided his novels after trying to make it through those. Always enjoyed his short stories that appeared in the popular anthologies, though, and he's got some story collections that are probably good.

<comment><USER11> > Avoid the Helliconia books, they're a grim, hard slog.

Another data point: I enjoyed them.

<comment><USER12> So did I. They are grim, but that's kind of the point -- it's a reflection on the tragedy of history and how people end up making the same mistakes over and over again.

<comment><USER10> When I said "grim, hard slog" I was referring to the experience of reading them, not the nature of their content. The experience of reading anything that monotonous would be pretty grim, even with a brighter theme and a happy ending. Of course, ymmv, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I distinctly remember some of his stories, in particular "Heresies of the Huge God" [https://archive.org/details/Galaxy_v24n06_1966-08](https://archive.org/details/Galaxy_v24n06_1966-08) and "Confluence", which is structured as a glossary for an alien culture.

"Hothouse" is quite a fun read as well.

</comment><comment><USER14> _Report on Probability A_ was a novel I never finished as a teenager. Might track a copy down again - it is a formalist experiment as far as I can find out.

Getting your head around it could be seen as a challenge.

<comment><USER15> The only book I put aside without finishing (Downbelow Station by C.J.Cherryh) was recommended to me again years later and when I did pick it up I found it _gripping_.

I really recommend you try Report on Probability A again, it was one of the best books I ever read!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> He wrote "The Malacia Tapestry", a book I really liked. The Helliconia trilogy was not so compelling, though.

</comment><comment><USER17> Please edit the topic to summarize what he did, or what kind of topic he's relevant to. I never heard this name and therefore guess many others didn't either.

</comment><comment><USER18> Was never a big fan. Don't remember that I read anything other than a short story. More Jack Vance & Gene Wolfe. For fun Moorcock & Ellison.

RIP.</comment>


Ask HN: Should I drastically increase my pricing (grandfathering included)? - <AUTHOR>

My SaaS app tends to attract a lot of customers who upgrade to paid plans but are actually ultimately not really interested in running a business long-term. Our app is actually an ecommerce platform. Our churn is pretty high, but customers are not switching to competitors, just dropping out. I know because their domain names tied to their online stores remain abandoned.
Should I increase my pricing by at least 200-400% to see if this attracts only the most serious customers, and so that I can better focus my effort on serving them instead of spreading myself too thin? Currently, we are definitely underpriced in the market (an indirect consequence of me being the sole employee and living in a country with much lower expenses), and there are also signs that potential customers have problems taking us seriously because of that.
Once we hike our price (to $200/mo), we will be comparable to other competitors. I just felt that undercharging hasn't done us any good for so many months.
What do you think? <comment><USER2> Yes, you probably should increase prices, but _just_ increasing prices isn't going to get you instantaneous credibility to make sales with more qualified clients. It is difficult to point to things you could do to improve perceived credibility without seeing your site, but examples would include a) making sure the English is flawless (only mentioned because of the country with lower expenses -- your writing here is very good), b) displaying social proof such as logos of credible existing customers and/or media mentions and/or vanity stats, and c) generally having a design and experience which screams Credible.

You'll note that your situation is seen over and over and over again by folks who build business tools, by the way. At low prices you get pathological customers. This is exactly what Spreedly and Chargify reported on HN previously, and it comports with the experience of many other companies which have not said so publicly.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello Patrick,

Our landing page is actually converting pretty well, at >5% conversion rate (visit-to-trial signup). The problem is that I'm not sure if the right people are converting. We have no indication on the quality of those signups.

If you are willing to help me out, I'll send you an email with my website, so that you can give quick thoughts. I would say the things you pointed out are _generally_ fulfilled, but I may be wrong and biased too.

<comment><USER2> Drop me an email and I'll give it a quick once-over.

<comment><USER3> I"m not in any way involved with the OP but:

Thanks for being awesome Patrick. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If your intial costs are very high, and that is causing the issue, just wrap people into a contract - maybe 6 months up front (with a 30 day trial) and then you can go month-to-month after that.

It's becoming bad form to charge 'registration fees,' because everyone thinks that with IT you can do all of the paperwork for free. Especially in business- to-business when you're dealing with tightwads quite often.

Figure out what your minimum contract duration to break even ( _t_ ) would need to be at your current prices. Multiply _t_ * 1.25 and round to the nearest 4 or 6 month interval. That's your new initial minimum contract length.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think you need to consider how this will impact your bottom line. Is your cheapness (excuse the pun) your major selling factor i.t.o competitiveness?

Is your 'market share', only the cheap clients? Generally businesses carve out a niche inside their market.

If that above statement is true, you'd probably lose almost all your business.

If you want more money (without losing your client base), add functionality and give them the option to use it (at a price).

I'd say if you already have all or most of the el'cheapos, then cater for them. Make it easier to setup shop and for you to manage them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately, it is possible that both the questions you posed are answered in the positive. We are grandfathering existing customers, so hopefully if we ever hit a brick wall with new customers, we can just rely on existing income from existing customers for the time being.

But we really want to take a bite at the enterprise/corporate segment, since we believe that what we have is even better than what our premium competitors offer. We have a couple of those now paying a lot of money but are succeeding in making profits, perhaps because their higher fees make them treat their business more seriously.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> A relevant HN'ers blog post and the HN discussion:

[http://jacquesmattheij.com/Double+your+price+%28and+no%2C+I%...](http://jacquesmattheij.com/Double+your+price+%28and+no%2C+I%27m+not+kidding%29)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1639712>

<comment><AUTHOR> A quote from JangoSteve that really resonates with me: "There are ways your users tell you your product is too cheap, without actually having to tell you. One good indicator is when you have a lot of people signing up, and then not using it, in which case your product is so underpriced that it attracts indifference."

Our product attracts a lot of indifference. This is good in the short-term (free money), but ultimately we don't get to provide the value we want to provide, garner feedback from their regular usage, and they also eventually cancel and not even switch to a competitor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The first thing you must do is find out why your customers are abandoning your product. I think increasing the price without fixing the core problem will not help much.

<comment><AUTHOR> Talking to them, I realise that a lot of it is just, "Wow, it's taking up much more time and money than I expected." While we can abstract away some of this time and money investment through better features and better UI/UX, a lot of them are just gunning for building a passive income engine without even investing much money and time in the initial stages. They are the classic get- rich-quick-passive-income-work-from-home crowd, if you will.

Certainly, there are many aspects of our SaaS platform that can be improved, but we have been constantly learning from our customers who are still continuing their subscriptions with us. So hopefully we are indeed improving our platform over time and tackling some core problems (sample bias, of course, but better than nothing).

P.S. Out of 39 people whom we surveyed over a few months (mostly people who continue to upgrade after the trial), 26 said that they will be "very disappointed" if they could not use our platform again, so hopefully this says something about our product/market fit.

<comment><USER8> What is taking up most of their time? What can you do to help reduce that, if anything?

<comment><AUTHOR> The nature of our industry (our customers' industry, to be precise) is that you need to have fresh products/offerings up every other day or so. So the process of adding content is time-consuming. But the same can be said for our competitors. This is one aspect that is very difficult to abstract away.

We have tried: letting them create copies of content, letting them create drafts, and also letting them appoint other users to create content on their behalf.

<comment><USER8> Not sure if you've tried this because you didn't mention it...

How about letting them schedule and set future publish times for the items? As a small biz owner, if I'm in the groove of adding products, I would love to just spend 4 hours straight on a Sunday night adding all the products for the week and have the system publish them on a schedule I set. It's much harder (and more annoying) to do this fresh every day for 15 minutes than doing so in a large block of time.

If freshness of the content is a real concern, I'd pay for something like that to make my site appear more fresh.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can't you do A/B testing on it?

</comment><comment><USER10> why not add a 'platinum tier' with an easy to give away service that you know most customers already don't use, and charge extra for it?

or add incremental charges to existing plans to push customers towards the new platinum tier?

and, btw, if you don;t know the lifetime value of your customers by source and date, you should do more tracking</comment>


How Harvard helps its richest and most arrogant students get ahead - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/09/19/how-harvard-helps-its-richest-and-most-arrogant-students-get-ahead/?utm_term=.ca63a84333f6 <comment><USER2> previously: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15288168](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15288168)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm very happy that there are people out there calling this stuff out and fighting the good fight because that's how progress is made.

It makes me especially happy because practically speaking, day to day, I really don't care. At all. And I'm not being sarcastic or cynical, it's just an approach to daily life.

Stress about the stuff you can control. Luck, privilege, timing; some people have them some people don't. All you can do is work hard. Keep taking shots and hope for the best.

</comment><comment><USER4> As a HYP alum (don't want to be more specific than that), this jives with my own experiences, both at college and in high school (where some students kept their heads down and worked for their grades, and others worked but also had the temerity/privilege to go ahead and ask for a better grade).

In some sense, you can't really blame the students for asking. The system allows for it (may even encourage it), so from a game-theory perspective, the better strategy is to exploit all the advantages you can.

The unfairness comes from the way such things are handled unevenly. Student A who's richer/better connected/more famous/etc. will get better outcomes from asking, compared to student B who's maybe just a regular smart person who went to public school and managed to squeeze past admissions but isn't connected to anybody important. Just regular old privilege, pure and simple.

For the record, I graduated with a 3.2 GPA that probably would've been lower at somewhere that somehow magically didn't have "grade inflation" problems... and that was after my school went through implementing a controversial "grade deflation" policy. I feel like I benefitted from being part of a system that was afraid to harshly grade its students, but I also never asked any professors directly to revise my grade higher.

I did receive indirect/unsolicited help, such as a dean who showed concern after I failed some midterms the semester I broke my ankle and missed weeks of class and became depressed and unable to socialize, or a professor who graded a senior project much more generously than I felt the work deserved (a B+ for something I crammed together in the last 4 weeks, when my roommate who did something much more involved and much better researched, also got the same B+).

<comment><USER5> "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

They wouldn't have had to write the line, if it was self-evident. Or true.

<comment><USER6> Self-evident is not necessarily the same thing as obvious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is why grade inflation should be curbed at an institutional level. When you compare schools like Harvard and Stanford, where As are very common, to schools like Princeton and MIT, that have some sort of deflation in place, it becomes clear that the latter do not "help" their richest and most arrogant students.

That said, schools like that probably have other informal systems in place that ensure the powerful have their kids stay ahead.

<comment><USER8> A cynical view would be that the schools are just preparing those kids for the world ahead -- where the same rules apply (e.g., Bailouts)

<comment><USER7> That's a very fair point, that is probably just as "real" as it is "cynical."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't think this is unique to Harvard or privileged students. The idea that the student is a "customer" and should be treated as such, including being indulged by professors and administrators, has been gaining significant traction over the last decade everywhere. You can also see it in how administrators bend to the demands of activist student groups asking for some of the most absurd accommodations, punishment of their enemies, restrictions on allowed speech and events, etc.

</comment><comment><USER10> It is incredible to see that prestigious academic institutions have to bend over instead of promote true meritrocacy. Not only this further the notion that the well offs are getting an edge in everything but also, adding insult to injury, no matter how hard you work, there is no way you can win this game by meritocratic means.

<comment><USER7> I think your last statement only holds true if the _only_ people coming out of Harvard that have any chance in society are those with straight A's. I'd argue that anyone at the school is already "winning this game."</comment></comment>


Car Talk guys are retiring... - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2012/06/08/154576808/car-talk-guys-are-retiring-but-their-best-stuff-will-be-rebroadcast

<comment><AUTHOR> I have to say, this is one sad day for American culture. These guys, Click and Clack the Tappet brothers, were a constant presence for some 25 odd years. Always entertaining, sometimes insulting, and nearly always humorous. I loved their take on focus on the people and their relationships with their machines.

Sad day. But the podcasts live on!

Onward, Click and Clack!

</comment><comment><USER2> It goes to show the diversity in careers pursued by among MIT alumni.</comment>


Telegram has raised an initial $850M for its billion-dollar ICO - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/16/telegram-ico-850-million/ <comment><USER2> The inherent issue with ICOs is pricing.

Buying tokens, which can be exchanged for a service at an unknown ratio (price), amounts to financing a new fast food chain by buying a million tokens for $1,000, where the tokens can be used to purchase hamburgers once the chain opens. The problem is that you have no idea if those million tokens — once the chain is up and running — will buy a thousand hamburgers or three.

So there's a dichotomy here. Either your tokens remain low in value, and the end product of the business will be cheap (as it's priced in these tokens) and you make no money as an investor, or the token price will increase and the end product will be expensive (but you'll be able to sell your tokens for a profit).

In the end it's a useless proposition: either token holders will be able to buy cheap hamburgers if the token price is low (thus causing a loss to the issuer/hamburger producer) or they will sell their expensive tokens for dollars and use dollars to buy their hamburgers elsewhere.

<comment><USER3> It's launching an airline by pre-selling miles. Sure, you might have 1,000,000 miles and Platinum status on that new airline, the boarding passes are on the blockchain, but the airline gets to control the mile redemption rates and status privileges for that Platinum level.

<comment><USER4> Also if people redeem these miles, wouldn't it bankrupt the airline or at least significantly affect its profitability?

<comment><USER5> It you control the redemption rate then you can just force redemptions below some level that keeps you profitable.

Airlines do this already, frequent flyer-eligible tickets are a small portion of the overall tickets available, blackout dates, etc...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Maybe I'm the last to join the party but if i understand correctly, is this money they are going to receive as investment?

I ask because as much as i can google I can't find any product they are selling or any ad they are displaying, so what is being bought here?

I'm not trying to be sarcastic, is there something i am missing?

<comment><USER7> Per the SEC filing, yes, they are receiving the $850M as cash from private investors (mostly VCs).

The "product" they are selling is tokens for their ecosystem, described in this leaked whitepaper: [https://drive.google.com/open?id=1oaKoJDWvhtlvtQEuqxgfkUHcI5...](https://drive.google.com/open?id=1oaKoJDWvhtlvtQEuqxgfkUHcI5np1t5Q)

<comment><USER8> Thanks, that was a good read. And raises a lot of questions in my mind.

They are going to use PoS mechanism. So, I had to look at the token distribution scheme. 4% by the team and 52% by "Ton Reserve", which I think is not explained. With only 44% held in hands of non-Ton people, is this even decentralized?

<comment><USER9> ICOs aren't decentralized. They are tokens sold by an entity that premine them and generally control most aspects of the project. There might be exceptions, but I can't think of any.

<comment><USER8> So are you saying when Ethereum did ICO it was not decentralised? And you do realise this will have its own blockchain and only reason there needs to be a blockchain is "decentralisation".

<comment><USER9> Ethereum didn't even exist when it ICO'd, neither in code or in blockchain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is truly nuts. We are living through some truly irrational craziness that makes the dot com bubble look like nothing. When this correction comes it's gonna be really bad. Greed is not a good thing folks.

</comment><comment><USER11> To be honest I have not seen any official marketing page from telegram nor any ico calendars like [https://www.coingecko.com/en/ico](https://www.coingecko.com/en/ico) . Is this entirely private by some group of deserving entities? When will the public can and able to participate?

<comment><USER12> They seem to want to do things properly wrt SEC. That would mean only advertising to accredited investors.

<comment><USER13> Thanks to securities laws, the rich get richer, and the poor have to wait for the scraps.

Ideally the SEC's mandate would be limited to going after P&D groups and other scams, and no longer include enforcing restrictions on selling securities to unaccredited investors as a non-public company.

If the poorest households are allowed to spend 9% of their income on lottery tickets, I don't see the justification for preventing unaccredited investors from investing in whatever they want.

All it does is eliminate the long-tail of small companies and nonprofessional investors from participating directly in a key sector of the economy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is going to be an interesting fiasco, chewing ever more on the shaky public trust. The layman still getting in on this stuff makes it so private investors can liquidate their worthless investment at a premium, the former won't learn before the later does.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is hilarious as so many people use telegram to pump and dump crypto currency using Telegram.

</comment><comment><USER16> One of the wealthiest russians Roman Abramovich invested about $300M in Telegram.

[https://en.crimerussia.com/oligarchs/roman-abramovich- invest...](https://en.crimerussia.com/oligarchs/roman-abramovich- invests-300mln-in-pavel-durov-s-telegram/)

<comment><USER17> That means that Roman Abramovich is the largest investor in Telegram ($300M is 35% of $850M).

<comment><USER16> The only question is - was it business investment followed by will of Abramovich or something else?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Other than the people at the top laundering money, I don't see how anyone could get tricked into putting any money into this.

<comment><USER19> We now live in a world where you can have two products side by side, where one has any of "Crypto" "Block" Coin" or "Chain" in their name or description and the other does not, where both products do the exact same thing, and have one of them raise billions of dollars overnight from VCs and the other one not get a single upvote on the new page of HN.

We truly live in a post-informational time. Everything is emotion. Nothing is about rationalization or sense or an actual understanding of how something works. Because we don't know how the thing worked, the numbers got _giant_ , and we want giant numbers too. So if you use the same words as the thing we will plow money into you like no tomorrow because we still don't understand the thing but we see 1000x profit in 5 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Isn't their crypto implementation still private?

<comment><USER21> It is. I hope they don't do the same thing with their code for whatever they're making.

<comment><USER22> What do you mean by "it is"? The Telegram client is open source.

<comment><USER23> In this case "private" have nothing to do with the code license. Problem with Telegram is that protocol and cryptography they use is their own. They might use better reviewed protocol like one of Signal, but they didn't.

No need to explain what dangers same strategy going to cause with cryptocurrencies.

<comment><USER24> Was the Signal protocol reviewed in 2013 when Telegram was launched? It seems it was developed in 2013.

I'd say the biggest problem with Telegram is the fact that E2EE isn't enabled by default and no one (that I've chatted with) uses it.

<comment><USER25> The official desktop client doesn't even support it, after years of people asking for it. Telegram is basically equivalent to Hangouts or any other random chat app, if you care about security.

<comment><USER24> Yup, terrible. The native macOS desktop client (available in App Store) actually supports it. At least it did when I tried it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Relevant: 'Dawn of the Billion Dollar ICO' [https://hackernoon.com/the-dawn- of-the-1b-ico-a0486f6587a2](https://hackernoon.com/the-dawn-of- the-1b-ico-a0486f6587a2)

</comment><comment><USER27> There's obviously no way they need so much money. The discounts pre-sale investors receive on their tokens will be enough to let them sell at a profit when the tokens become saleable. We don't even know how far along is the implementation they're working on, what will future adoption be like - at this point, there's only insider investors looking to cash in on the hype.

<comment><USER28> Yep. 850m is a crazy amount of money for product development. What do they want to do with all that money?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Given that Russians created Telegram, why does anyone trust it?

<comment><USER30> This is a quite racist and unnecessary comment. It doesn't belong on Hacker News.

<comment><USER31> I am not sure how you think that's racist. Distrust in Russian products is a current discussion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Another ICO. ICO that, ICO this... you cannot even go to another tech conference without an ICO gets mentioned. All this 1000 of crypto coins are useless in long term and I won't support Telegram too. There are 3 main players named Bitcoin, Litecoin and Ethereum which will stay here longterm and I don't see that changing anytime soon.

<comment><USER33> You mention Litecoin but not Ripple?

<comment><USER32> Ripple will also stay I think. But I would be careful of Ripple. Just my opinion. It's interesting it's connected so well with many financial institutions and that they have big names on board but I would be a bank I would rather look in something like Stellar than Ripple which is (theoretically) in a centralized control of one entitity. All this locked up XRPs which are not in circulation would not let me sleep well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I guess they are expecting x20 basing it on the 20B paid to Whatsapp

</comment><comment><USER35> More Russian bullshit.

</comment><comment><USER36> There's definitely zero hype left in Blockchain.

<comment><USER37> crypto/blockchain is significant and has broad implications for how human social structures cooperate on a global scale. consider everything you do on a daily basis and think about transactions and interactions you have with others - all of them</comment></comment>