Russelfuture

Sort of an off-the-wall idea: Do some kind of event, maybe a promotional thing connected with the business model of your intended product. Or maybe a hackathon or competition of some sort with a cash prize. It can let you find people who are keen, willing to get out there, and you can interact with them to try to ensure a good fit. Most startups fizzle out. In any early-stage thing, you need some initial folks with open-ended skills - willingness to work hard to learn new tech, and ability to see thru the clutter to get to a working result. Virtually any code you need can be found now on github, right? So for your first guys(or gals), you want folks with a prospectors mindset. And that means you will have focus now on prospecting also. Since everything is changing fast now, the town or city you are in can help - people in same profession tend to cluster. Figure out where the clusters are (Universities, big shared workspaces, etc.) and put the word out and describe what you are looking for. And remember that randomness is a good friend. If one looks at success stories, random contacts - at conferences, coffee-shops, etc., often figure in the process. Best of luck!

Yes. Yes. You can use HTML and write just fine. It's a markup language, like old runoff, which could be used to generate nice, fancy prospectus documents for a major gov. agency in a far northern country I worked in, when I was a wee child. A good markup language is all you need. It makes for better writing, because the writer focuses on content, not the pretty presentation, which should be done after the content is written.

I am getting my nose rubbed in this truth - about the benefits of basic minimal website design. Most websites are useless. Mine is pretty useless. I write it to have a web-presence, promote my consulting business, and because I feel a need to write (maybe that is an illness? - not sure..). I find writing forces me to think better, and the investment side of our business, requires I think well, or we die quickly. It's a harsh world now.

I found this Hackernews post, by researching how to update critical browser stuff, which has been borked for us, by our trading platform provider. Updating browser on Linux - and guess what? - lose all bookmarks, all customizations, everything. Arrrrgh!!! (happens EVERY update, of course).

Simple is often better. And the Web (most of it) has become crap, mostly. Or dangerous, toxic vector for economic assault. Bloody awful, nasty and sad. So it goes.

I am converting our crappy website from a provider (one.com) which bought our simplesite.com website builder thing, which worked pretty good. But the site had all this fancy stuff for menus and images and videos, and a truckload of .css stuff - sure, nice and fancy. But the conversion to the One.com builder stuff, does not work, of course. We cannot update (at all) our site from the data-description that one.com has in it's website-builder software. As of the forced conversion, we were complete off the air. Borked.

SO, this is stupid. Complexity and fancy design - is mostly stupid, and it also creates contrived dependency (keeps customers locked, makes them be forced to open their wallets and send you cash - good for providers, bad for customers.)

I got so pissed off, I decided to do it all ourselves. We built our site at AWS as an EC2 instance. Fucking website-building software is a scam, mostly.

The original poster is right. All you really need is HTML (AND some stuff to render videos and audio and maybe code to get paid for stuff, maybe...). Most of the .css stuff is fluff. And people are getting REAL tired of being dusted with fluff. OP is right.

Our old website is https://www.gemesyscanada.com It was a mess - a long bunch of stuff, posted over the years, research-logs, blogs, notes, etc. But now that it is a One.com, we cannot update it. The websitebuilder software gets to 90%, and then hangs - and we do not even get any error messages telling us what the problem is. Arrrgh.

We are building a simpler version - using AWS-EC2 - we have one free EC2 instance which I am experimenting with: http://35.182.107.190 and that is it. We have not even got a domain set up yet - it's all hacking & testing for now. But it looks like we can go this route. The whole thing is an exercise in vanity and ego. It really is, honestly. But why not? It is what our tiny little business does, and it is what I am. I've been doing AI since I went to Dr. Geoff Hinton's classes, and got a copy of Xerion working on a P/C running Linux - back in the 1990's. One must not hide one's light under a bushel, right? So, we need a website.

And a bad one, that looks goofy, and is honest, is better than a really fancy one, full of obfuscation, deception, dis-information and old-fashioned lies. (Kinda like - oh - just about most things now?)

All you may need is HTML. Yup. Mostly true. - M. Langdon, Director, Owner, Floor-cleaner, Barn-builder, Portfolio Manager GEMESYS Ltd.

This may sound silly, but: - my hacked iPad. It's first generation, original software was stupid, but with "RedSn0w" and all of Freeman's Cydia apps, it has turned into my favourite device. It has a full, Linux-like file system, I can have all sorts of material on it, SSH works fine, can use it as a controller, and I can still browse (some) internet sites. (Using it to write this). I have Macbook Pro, a bunch of Linux boxes, couple of nice Acer laptops, but this ancient iPad is so very well made, and all the Cydia stuff just works. My partner has a modern iPhone, but I like this old iPad, where each key on the screen is half-an-inch across! - my AR-15. AK's are prohibited where I live (and so now is my AR), but folks need to understand what a fine triumph in modular design and excellent ergonomics, the American-designed AR-15 rifle really is. Early rifle designs were just not good - soldiers would pull the trigger, and be blinded as the breech blew up in their face. The AR is light, lethal, and reliable. Like most good design, it is the result of continuous improvements over a long time span. - The Piper PA-28 "Warrior" general aviation light aircraft. This is just an amazingly successful design effort. Everything in aircraft design is a series of trade-offs, weight, strength, durability, reliability, ease-of-use, safety, complexity, simplicity, and so on. I did all my fight training as a young fellow on Cessna 172's, which are also excellent examples of very good design. But the 172 feels like what it is, to fly - a solid, simple workhorse. The PA-28, with a 160 or 180 hp engine, manages to feel quite different - like being able to drive a Camaro around in the sky. It's not a Ferrari, but it had several fine design features that made it feel like a much more substantial and flyable aircraft, especially for a kid learning to fly. It was real fun. The wings were tapered. Compared to older "Cherokee" models, which did not have tapered wings, the difference was significant. It is, of course, a low-wing aircraft. This makes for a much more attractive flying experience - you are driving a platform, not hanging from a wing, in a little box. And this aircraft has a stabilator, instead of a tail-plane and an elevator. On the Piper, as you pull and push the control wheel, the whole rear wing tilts up and down. This is just a genius design feature, and gives the aircraft a nice lively feel, even if you are flying the cheapest, entry-level version, which does not have retractable gear. (If renting at a flying club, you probably won't have any retractables - since some student might forget to drop the gear, and may well wipe out the aircraft.) Our club had one Warrior, and it was a very big treat, when I could book it and take it away up north, for a weekend. The little design genius features, made it very fun to fly. I recall dropping the flaps involved pulling on a lever, much like a sports-car emergency brake. (On the Cessna, to put down flaps, you throw a switch on the panel, and listen for the servo-motors). But on the Piper, you pull on this lever, and feel the wind on the flaps, as you pull them down. You literally could feel the air, as you flew thru it. And with those tapered wings, and the rear stabilator, you could drop a wing and dive down quick, and the whole experience was wonderful, because of these specific design improvements over the old square ( non-tapered) wings of the older "Cherokee" models. - lastly, (call me crazy, if you must), the original APL computer language, which I learned when very young, because it was the only interactive environment available. APL was (is) very different, but it turned out to be an amazingly useful languange and environment to learn. I met Ken Iverson (the inventor author of APL), and he and I did not see eye-to-eye on things. But APL was a work of genius. APL was very popular inside IBM in the early days, and the first IBM P/C was actually pre-dated by an IBM Personal Computer that ran APL, called the SCAMP, which came out in 1973, if I remember correctly. I still use APL applications, and we use them, because they make us money. And that is always important in any product design... :)

I debated for a while if I should post this - but decided I had to. I actually built a working IEC fusion reactor in my basement, back in 2005-2006. I got to "first fusion" on Sept. 25th, 2006, and posted a video of the reactor working, on Youtube. I just checked, and the video is still there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g18xpYXamAs

IEC (Inertia Electrostatic Confinement) fusion can be done, with a high-vacuum system, a high-voltage DC supply, and a vacuum-chamber with a high-voltage feed-thru. It is dangerous, but doable, and I believe I had the first working, amateur-built fusion reactor in Canada. One can confirm that fusion is occuring, by using sensitive chemical neutron detectors that workers in nuclear fission plants typically carry. I used BTI (Bubble Technology Inc.) detectors, which look like little test-tubes, and show small bubbles in a gel-like liquid, if exposed to a neutron flux.

My reactor was never able to produce more than 10^6 to 10^7 neutrons per second, which is a very weak neutron field. I used a small "lecture bottle" of non-radioactive deuterium (heavy hydrogen gas), and it worked well. I had to construct a deuterium injection system, using some high-vacuum valves, and a gas-feed-thru on one of the vacuum-chamber ports. The vacuum-chamber itself, and the high-vacuum diffusion pump (which used a mechanical vacuum pump, connected to a device which uses hot-oil vapour) and the high-voltage DC power supply, were all sourced from surplus equipment found on eBay, and imported from USA into Canada. The importation of each item was an adventure in itself.

One needs to put about 15,000 to 25,000 DC volts negative, on the confinement grid, and the vacuum chamber needs to be evacuated to about 10^-4 torr or better. I estimated the device needed mean-free path length of almost a 1 cm, for the D2 ion circulation, which is a very rarified environment.

What is really interesting about fusion, is how difficult it is to make happen. A palladium-wire grid would be better for the spherical confinement grid, but I used stainless steel. (Palladium is expensive, I had no source for it, and I am not Tony Stark...)

But the reactor did produce nuclear fusion events, using the D2 gas, and the high-voltage charge on the confinement grid. This technology was first invented and patented by Philo Farnsworth, an American researcher and inventor, who in the 1930's, invented electronic television. He invented the first electronic TV camera - the iconoscope - and fought with Sarnoff at RCA for years over the patent rights for electronic TV. Farnsworth's IEC fusion reactors also worked, but attempts to scale up the technology were not successful.

The various attempts at creating commercially viable fusion reactors are interesting. We keep getting close - but nothing that produces a useful level of net energy output, has yet to demonstrated, as far as I know. I sincerely hope some sort of breakthru is possible, at some point. My device - and most of the IEC devices - are able to produce a significant amount of neutrons, and research efforts at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, were able to demonstrate a powerful IEC reactor, which produced an intense neutron flux, sufficient to ablate the walls of the vacuum chamber (the chamber wall looked like swiss-cheese, under electron-microscope examination), so we know this technology is able to produce a serious amount of fusion events.

But taking this approach and using it to generate a net-energy output, has not been possible. My device was roughly 1500 watts in, and 1500 watts of heat out, plus maybe one or two extra milliwatts (or maybe a few hundred nanowatts). Not even enough to really measure.

I have followed all the various attempts to get some net useful energy out of fusion reactor technology, and I truly hope something becomes possible. We seriously will need this technology, and we are so close to having it. I wish all these researchers - public and private - the very best of luck.

Yes, absolutely, I want to say this also. Hacker News / Ycombinator is very fine and excellent. Thanx for running this site. It is unique, the format is genius simple, and I learn and discover things here I would otherwise have no knowledge of. We are in rural location in Canada, coming in via Starlink now. The internet is critical for us. It is our economic, social and scientific link to the world. Sites of the quality of Hacker News are rare now. If we ever manage to get to and live on Mars, I hope we can have satellite relay link to HN. Happy Thanxgiving to everyone. And best of luck for everyone's future projects!

There are a few good things, but mostly, much of the modern tech is nasty and just not good - honestly. I am in my 60's now, and still remain a pure hacker of tech - really. I built a working IEC fusion reactor in my basement, I run a 12+ node LAN at the Farm, and recently bought another car. I love the idea of Tesla, and the F-150 Lightening, but the Tesla SUV is $120,000 in Canada, and that is just too much. But I do have Elon Musk's Starlink dish, and it is just magic wonderful. It's $145 per month here, but we can afford that. Some tech is truly great - but an awful lot is just terrible. You need to know this. And it gets worse each year. Honestly, aeriously. My partner has a MacBook Air - the SSD just died. We are lucky, since it is a 2012 version. We just ordered a 250gb upgrade (and the damn little 5-point screwdriver to open the back of the damn thing. But we expect to be able to fix it fine. But since 2018, the vermin at Apple have been soldering the (failure prone) SSD chips to the mainboard. We find the old-tech is good ( I run mostly Linux boxes - for various needs). Honestly, everything is getting crappy and nasty. You need to appreciate what I saw when younger - the first Moon landing - and the last on in 1972, with the electric car on the moon. It's 2021, and we could not go to the moon, if Earth's life depended on it. I watched and experienced the transition from propeller drive Viscount aircraft, to DC-9s, and then 747's. As a kid in University, I flew to England, on Wardair, and we drank cheap drinks in the upstairs lounge for most of the flight. Way better than Concorde! I put email into a major Gov't Ministry (as an independent consultant, and I watched it make major changes, as a stiff, old-world style org was flatlined by the technology (we used Novell Networks). We installed a DecSystem 2020, and changed completely how a big, powerful group operated. We watched the Space Shuttles debut, and promise space-travel for all nations, with the ISS, which was billed as a stepping stone to the planets and maybe even the stars. I bought and demonstrated a Z80 Northstar 64K, with a working Pascal compiler which could do what the DEC 2020 could do, at a tiny fraction of the cost. We saw the disruption of the disruptive tech that was only a few years old. I paid $6000 for an initial IBM 5150 P/C, with dual drives, which had a Fortran compiler, which was solid and good and gave the right answers. And I bought one of the first lunch-box sized cellphones, which was just awesome, science-fiction level cool - and then replaced it in a few years with a Motorola handset - and then a flip-phone. The technology was wonderful, it was reliable, and bloody well made. Now, it is crap. Seriously. It still is sort-of workable, but I find everything has some kind of trick, or some kind of gotchya worm built into it now. Stuff fails regularly. Products are released, and the public customers are used as testers. Early versions of anything now are riddled with bugs, flaws, and are horribly, badly engineered. Boeing builds expensive aircraft on the cheap, and the dogshit crappy software flies perfectly fine aircraft into the ground. The USA gives up on space - were it not for Elon Musk, they would have no civilian space transport to the ISS. Electronics are built with custom ASIC chips, not industry standard hardware - so that failure in in-built, and hardware has to be thrown away every few years. The internet, which promised knowledge and access-for-all, has morphed into a shit-stained back alley, dominated by scammers and hard-core criminals. Everything good, useful or honest is behind a paywall. I have to grit my teeth to use it now. This was not how it was supposed to be. It's wonderful to see the videos on the little helicopter flying on Mars - really very amazing. But exploring by sending robots is tragic and cowardly - and offers so little. Honestly - we need to change the program. We need to deregulate basically everything. Everything. It sounds crazy, but otherwise, the future is going to be 20 or 30 billion people, choking on their own fumes, fighting over the few remaining resources. We need to drive the technology forward with a military-grade urgency. I know it's possible, because I saw it happen when I was young. And it is not happening now.

This is cool. Good to see. Thanx for posting this. If someone is coding some serious math hackery, drill down into the app and you'll often find someone's variant/version of the old IMSL library routines, written - in Fortran - back in the 1960's. Why? Because that code was extensively tested and was deemed trustworthy. And even better - just went to my bookshelves and found it: "Optimization Techniques With Fortran" - James L. Kuester, Joe H. Mize, McGraw-Hill, 1973, ISBN 0-07-035606-8. It's just an awesome book - it's 9inches by 11 inches, 500 pages chock full of detailed explanations of many of the state-of-the-art circa 1973 optimization techniques for search methods, linear and quadratic programming tricks, least-squares (linear and non-linear methods), dynamic programming (a math technique for making a series of interrelated decisions), and so on. The book has code, examples and detailed explanations - with numerical examples - and flowcharts even, to explain exactly how the code works, and what the program is actually doing. And its all Fortran - some of it IBM/360 Fortran - all in Courier font that's easy to read and use. I had a client that just typed in all the code for a Simplex LP program, and used it to construct a big optimization solution for how to structure the re-investment actions of a large bond portfolio in a treasury department of a big organization.

Before there were neural networks and image-hacking, there was the gritty math-hacking to optimize big gobs of interrelated stuff that had to happen in the right order. It was almost always done in Fortran, and I suspect a lot of it still is. (And if it was not done in Fortran, it was done in APL. Ask an Actuarial scientist, if you doubt this..) Please don't laugh at Fortran. It can not only help you fly your spaceship to another planet (and get you home again!), it can also make you (and your client) rich, since you can build solid, bulletproof code from those old libraries that just works, and hence create flaw-free solutions to really critically important applications. This proposed extension looks useful.

I had six apps on Google Playstore several years back. They were free, no adverts or in-app tricks... Google removed them, since I didnt keep creating new versions. Oh well. But the API churn has become explicit neo-monoploy strategy. Google and Apple should be broken up. Two companies control all mobile software distribution - and restrict and block independent developers using all the classic tricks of monopolists. It's just nuts. No other industry is this concentrated. There is no innovation happening here. 15% smaller size? So what. This whole exercise is to maintain and extend control. Regardless of where one sits on the political spectrum, this is just "company store" monopolist tricksterism, and the solution is to dust off the old Anti-Trust laws and break this abusive entity into three or four seperate companies. "Trust Busting" is something both the Right and the Left can agree on. Break Google up. If - as a developer - you want to distribute your code as an .APK, then you and your customers should be able to make that choice. This current economic model is not only bogus - it is actually contrary to black-letter US law.

This is a good and important essay. I was crazy-lucky, being born at a time and place when kids could be left alone to build stuff and play with real technics when still young. I built hovercraft, rockets, ballistic devices, and hacked with vacuum tubes and transistors and tesla coils and radios and early computer stuff. It was wonderful. Oh, and biotech, too. All before high-school. Now in my sixties, but still like a crazy kid with tech. The tech helped me learn the complex stuff - the math - but it also taught me early I could get help/assistance and better faster results working with smart people. Doing - not just reading about it - but doing it and testing and trying again, and failing and then nailing success - this is so powerful and good. We got airplane crazy for a while - and I built no-airfoil Laminar winged models which flew fine. There were no video games - we built stuff and hacked it and sometimes had accidents... But I learned most of what I needed to know in life doing - doing and failing and fixing and then getting it to work.. This is the algo for life. You will have silly setbacks and make awful boneheaded mistakes - but when DOING you learn quick that nothing is final. If you didnt get killed, you can try again. I never heard this called "agency". But doing - and learning to think, and plan, and then act, and then evaluate - this is really key. Many folks who just write and talk - they never experience true harsh failure of the system. But nature is a really good teacher. She shows clear truth - and you can learn just by keeping your eyes and brain open - and remain curious and driven to know the why and the how. The studio is maybe the kitchen table, or the basement. And maybe the library and Google and DuckDuckGo. But build something. Build a car. Build a go-cart or a rocket. Build a working computer from a bag of parts bought online from Mouser or Digikey. Build a working fusion-generator ( you can buy "lecture bottles" of non-radioactive deuterium. ) Learn to program, and hack together a working version of mplayer from source code, and get it running on a Linux box, and listen to streaming Radio Caroline (the original pirate-radio in the UK from the beginning of open-source hardware). The author here is wise,and makes a very key point. DO something - MAKE something - pull together the bits and pieces of stuff and knowledge that transform nature and get her working for you - instead of you being a slave to her. I remember school was pretty awful... It had to be endured. And it interfered with my experiments. :) I built a TEA laser in my basement. You need a DC power supply, and a bunch of stuff you can buy at Staples - plastic sheets, aluminum foil, etc. It was first written up in Scientific American in 1974. And I also built software machines to hack the markets. To my great surprise, they seem to work. If a dullard like me can do it - any sufficiently motivated person can. :) Do things and make things. You will learn skills that can be used to make the things you want to happen, actually happen. Good essay. - Russel F.

If its a big idea, break it down into smaller pieces and try to prototype smaller parts - eg before organizing 100m, see if your idea works on 20 people. Also, try to boil the big idea down to an actual example where it does/does-not work or apply. Also - review the history/literature of your idea. This is key. You will always find historical analogues for just about any idea you can conceptualize. Someone will have had the same or similar idea before, and it will likely be in the historical record somewhere. Read the history, to go further, faster. And if the big idea is worthwhile, share it with others and get their views - but try to use your ears to listen. Don't listen with your mouth (as so many do). Recognize also that big ideas and results that come from them, often start - in science especially - from careful observations of small anomalies. Try to pay attention to see things that others miss - often these micro-observations are both the source of and can hold the solutions to something that turns out to be really significant. Also, if the big idea is also a problem, you might benefit from using the tricks and techniques of creative thinking algorithms of De Bono - invert the idea, transpose with random phrases, etc. And final comment - beware of "big ideas" that are just sophistry and obfuscation. You deal with those by using courtroom techniques to pull out the truth, and show that your counterparty is either just "talking his position", or perhaps outright lying.

Learning Z80 assembler, matrix algebra, reloading (9mm, .45, etc.), how to draft detailed building plans (something that is detailed enough to get a building permit approved), and market "Technical Analysis" - the study of chart patterns to set buy/sell points.

  This all seems a bit silly, but everything is closed.  Also doing a lot of wood cutting and cleanup in the forest.  We built a custom designed Z80 SBC ( single board computer), with its own Z80MON monitor, and the genius guy I am working with has managed to put the BASIC interpreter into the monitor.  Just got MInipro installed and working on the MACbook, using HomeBrew.  I'm trying to get one of those TL866II pROM programmers - first one ordered got bounced by customs.  We've ordered second one, paid premium to have it couriered.  All the flights are ground-stopped, so it may be a while.   I really like the idea of building a whole computer from parts ordered from Mouser, having all the Monitor and interpreter code, and being able to download the code into A ROM chip, plug it in, and link to the thing with Kermit or Screen session from a Linux box, and have it process matrix data from our AI stuff.  
 

We live in deep farm country, where self-reliance is pretty hard core. Some farms up the road from ours, are not even on the grid. (They have wind generators and diesel tractors - some even have CNC machines).

We still have good internet access, and we are on-grid, but this whole virus-driven economic meltdown has absolutely confirmed our expectations. We are seriously looking at something that will look like the 1930's now. I worked in 8080 Assembler years ago, and I'd forgotten so much. But I've got two Z80 SBC's working now, one with it's own standalone VT-100 emulator board, and a little 40$ Chinese made VGA screen, which actually works pretty good. I can run that config off two lithium-ion batteries. The missing piece is to be able to use an SD-card. We have a prototype of a much more complex SBC that has a sound chip, and an SD card driver chip. It runs full CP/M, but I like the more simple design, since it does ot use surface mount - real old school.

And there is this ton of other stuff that must be done. We need to be able to reload, and I have all the dies and such for this. We are also doing a bunch of in-house food preparation, since the electricity is still working, and so we are making different types of food that can be easily frozen.

And the price action on the investment portfolios is requiring attention, since we have these predictive algorithms that are offering some insite into where to place trades. The markets are insane, but there are opportunites that do crop up. I realize that most traditional "fundamental" analysis is of little value in this kind of environment, as the automatic algos are running most of the action. We have no chance at all of accessing any "government money", so we are really working our existing systems just to try to bring in some liquidity by quick in and out action. So far this is working, but it is absolutely crazy.

We have non-trading long-term positions on the left side of a tradional barbell, and these are just getting slaughtered. It feels like stories I read about in wartime, those First World War stories. Your whole "picture of the world" falls apart, and suddenly, all that crazy, hacky stuff you thought you would never really need or use (like the gas-mask in the garage) - suddenly, it's the stuff that is keeping you alive, and your economic and technical process actually working.

So, I am going thru notes, and invoking stuff that we documented back in 1987 ( mkt crash), and in 1998 (Russian Default), and of course the 9/11 stuff, which was short and sharp, and followed by a big pop. But the data this time suggests no - too much has been badly damaged already. So we are mainly working on a plan to survive economically, for the next 12 months.

We should be OK, but only because we had these backup Plan B and Plan C's and such. We went to Costco two days ago, and a hundred people were lined up, out into the parking lot, as "social distancing" was being enforced. It's making us pull out the SHTF playbook plans. It could all be summed up as "We are reviewing our strategies for maximum independece, and actively working to enhance our capacity for fully independent action." And I am reviewing all my Linux notes - we have several flavours of Linux boxes, that run the analytic and data management stuff. Need to ensure we can keep on keeping on. So far, it's all ticking along ok, but it's all up to us now. We are learning to be 100% self-supporting, I guess would sum it up. So far, it's working. But it's a new world now. We are all going to need a lot of different skills.

This is an interesting thread - thx for posting. I used to know a bunch of folks that used both J and K. I still use APL - the old APLWin 3.5 from APL2000 (Manugistics/STSC).

APL was the first language I learned as a tiny child. I write my pseudo code in it. I live in a ranch house out on the tundra, with a 50ft transponder antenna behind the place which links me to the 'net. I've used C, c++, Python with all the numpy stuff, etc and a few flavours of TensorFlow.

But it's APL that gets it done. I've heard of K, and I knew a guy who worked for Arthur Whitney. Languages like K and J and APL can be fast, if you use them right. And it is almost tragic-comical, that the genius of the APL glyphic character set was given up, just as wonderful devices were created which could paint any character at all on the screen. My girlfriend uses Japanese Kangi and Hirogana on her iPad, no problem. In a GUI environment, the original APL characters are easy and clear - no need for silly ASCII overloading.

See, I have these simple GUI apps, written many years ago in Windows, using APLWin 3.5. They still run, and I use them daily. They keep track of financial time series data, and I can use them in a variety of ways. The APL stuff can convert tables of various formats into conformable vectors, which can be transformed into input for GNUplot or TensorFlow or even (my favourite), Hinton's original Xerion product, which I have running on some Linux boxes.

APL is simply a wonderful, easy, useful language that can allow one single person to support some mission-critical production-grade software. Example: This AM, I discovered that all the data tables that my data-table downloader had got last nite, had a new format, with a zero-row of data, and today's date.

This meant when I updated the database of time series data, I got tables where every series had a bogus, zero-valued most recent date.

It was 7:30 AM, and markets would open at 9:30. A bit of code inspection, and a simple fix: Update the MERGETABS function with two lines of code:

       ZEROROWS <- 0 = +/PNEW[;(1 downarrow iota 1 downarrow rho PNEW)]
       PNEW <- ( tilde ZEROROWS)/[1] PNEW

And this solved the problem. Update the runtime version of the workspace by changing QuadLX latent expression to start the GUI when the W/S is loaded, and roll out the new W/S to a few different boxes. All done before Mkt open.

The code above just takes the new table PNEW, selects the data columns, finds those that are zero valued and removes them using a boolean vector reduction along the highest dimension (the table's rows). Easy peasy. Done quick, and done right.

With my data updated and correct, I run some stuff against it, and get the courage to hold my positions - concluding it will be an up day, as the stuff I run helps me make that decision. I close the day up, just under $40,000 to the good. (Crazy day...)

And oh, btw, the APL stuff runs on both Linux and Windows boxes - and the Linux is both 32-bit and modern CentOS 64-bit. I still run the old 32-bit boxes because they are very fast and very reliable. The APL stuff runs on the Linux boxes under WINE, which works amazingly well.

It's old school stuff, but it just works. APL is the magic that lets me do the other magic, that pays the bills. I gather that K can provide something similar for big corporate environments, when the datasets and timeseries get crazy large. You can write anything in any language - but one must not lose sight of the objective, which is to make the business side of things work well. One can write APL - or any language - in a way that is unclear and confusing. But you don't have to do so. If you are careful, you can build APL solutions that are fast, easy to maintain, and smoothly flexible. Maybe this is possible in K as well?

Ok, Read the story/read the comments - the 1.135 billion $USD got my attention. First "WTF?" was same as "corndoge": Who the hell is "The Internet Society?" Lotta reading... and then the penny hit the floor: "Ah! A bunch of clever boys in Cali got the US gov. to give them admin. of the ".org" domain name that folks used if they hacked/outbid/cheatedoutof their .com TLD? (I lost mine to Serbian jewel thieves..) It became the PIR, and the guys running it got to drop the $ from registrations into a non-profit, and claim administrator salaries, board seats, nice Cali. offices, and all the perks. But their was both risk and work involved, and the non-profit status, meant they cculdn't pocket profits and make a big score. But along comes this idea: They can flog the ".org" registry, and its recurring revenue-stream, to a "for-profit" entity that a couple of insiders create just for this purpose. "Whoopdedo" notes that dns data indicates each user of .org is valued at about $135. Based on telco and cable company purchases, that valuation per subscriber looks about right. The two insiders take the valuation data to moneyboys, and suggest that the rev. stream can be jacked maybe 10% per year, best case. The moneyguys agree to fund the deal into the 10 digit range, and the project gets the greenlight. The plan offers "The Internet Society" a massive payday, which as even their own pressnotes say, will give them the same revenue, but without having to do any work, deal with actual users, or take any operational or legal risk of any kind. As another users suggests - They can "raise awareness" from nice Cali. offices, and then break for lunch.

But the whole deal smells a bit of sulfur and hotwind, no?

Or did I miss something? How did the "Internet Society" get its "ownership" of the .org TLD registry? Did they buy it? If they bought it, then for how much? From my understanding, they just got given it, by the US Gov't., with a mandate to run it at cost, more or less.

So, as some suggest, there is a risk that the $1.1 billion could be considered a pure profit - which would seem to put their non-profit status at risk.

Also, by selling the very thing they were established to administer, that should maybe terminate their mandate, and one might also argue that the $1.1 billion represents funds that belong to existing .org registrants, and should be refunded to them all.

The "Internet Society" is not a for-profit corporation, right? So where do they get off by just wrapping up their administrator-role in a big package, and selling - without any bidding process even - to a couple of folks who promise to maybe raise the user-fees by 5 times the rate of inflation for the next few years?

How do "Board Members" of the "Internet Society" actually get to become "Board Members" of the "Internet Society"? Who appoints them? Shareholders? Not likely.

The note from the "Barnes" fellow is interesting. He was the "Security" guy at Cisco, apparently. Now, those guys at Cisco, I've heard of them. They sell all those American-designed routers that beacon all their traffic and meta-data back to the NSA servers. I'm sure that's a fine thing to do, as it keeps us safe from bad guys.

But when I look at the details of this proposed deal, I start to wonder who the "bad guys" really are.

I have an alternate "deal" idea: Fire all the "Board Members" of "The Internet Society". Tell them "Thank you for your contribution." and send them home. Replace them all with different folks who might be expected to have a better understanding of what their role should be. Just an idea. And it won't cost $1.135 billion USD. And it won't require the .org domain be re-priced.

Really interesting post. My suggestion: Hacking the stock market with AI's, algos, and current results from neural-science research, and large, accurate historical datasets and analytic models. There are lots of regs that mandate "prudent man" behaviour for agents and brokers, and myriad regs around capital required to execute or margin trades - but the domain of research-gathering prior to trade execution - is essentially wide open for "outsiders". Company officers face restrictions on when they can buy or sell company stock - but non-insiders have wide latitude, and in most cases are free to make buy/sell decisions whenever, and at any rate they wish to pay for. You are free to invest and speculate - and lose - your own money. And the neural-science on this is interesting. Most wealthy speculators in commodity markets, mostly lose. Most gamblers at casinos mostly lose. If you have wealth, you are able to give it away (or piss it away), without restriction, unless your family members can get you declared "mentally not competent". Also, environments where very complex regulations exist, allow and encourage "regulatory arbitrage" - structures can be created which take advantage of various regime differences. But the fact remains, few regulations exist which can effectively prevent someone giving away, or destroying their own wealth. (I recall a fellow in Sweden, who was ordered by a divorce court to turn over half his wealth to a former wife. He withdrew over $100,000 in life savings in cash, and carefully burned it all.) People face few restrictions in disposing of wealth. Charities exploit this fact relentlessly. Also, there are few restrictions on attending school, or gaining education - except in truly horrible societies, such as religiously deluded cultures, which for example, prevent women from gaining education to maintain breeding stock. But civilized societies encourage education, and often subsidize it. The existence of unlocked libraries (in ancient times, they were almost always locked), and our western-cultural concept of freely available science information, remains the greatest unregulated open space. It is also where the greatest opportunity resides. Western culture is unique, in that it "deregulated" knowledge acquisition, and scientific inquiry in the early 1600's. And there remains a risk of "re-regulation" of science inquiry. Imagine a world run by book-burning god-believers. You don't have to imagine. You can study the historical examples. Quite possible that science knowledge may be restricted and access regulated in the future. But for now, gaining knowledge, using that knowledge to get rich, and then giving away the wealth accumulated, remains an essentially unregulated activity.