lorddoig

> this works in 2015? I'm pretty sure I remember people trying this and website owners deploying countermeasures in the '90s.

Oh yes, it works. It works wonders. It can very often quadruple the d/l rate.

> For small spreadsheets this will take a minute or so. For large spreadsheets it is best to run it overnight.

Ah, Ruby.

Maybe I don't fully understand the issues at play here but I remember reading about so-called 'unums'[0], an alternative binary number representation that seems quite amazing. I don't understand why it doesn't get more attention, apart from the fact it would need to be supported in CPU hardware to be of any real use.

    [0]: http://sites.ieee.org/scv-cs/files/2013/03/Right-SizingPrecision1.pdf

Now it decides I can reply.

It's revenue, not profit, because I'm coming at this from the perspective of money (potentially) wasted. It's all in the first link.

It's a number I found some time ago that on further investigation appears to be quite wrong as you say. It seems it's closer to 1tn USD annually, which would rank around number 16 in world GDP tables.

Edit because HN isn't allowing a reply: these numbers are industry revenue, not profit.

    https://www.bcgperspectives.com/content/articles/financial_institutions_pricing_global_payments_2014_capturing_next_level_value/
    http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?order=wbapi_data_value_2013+wbapi_data_value+wbapi_data_value-last&sort=desc

I profoundly disagree. You may very well be right about the majority of that money servicing large corporations, but bear in mind that we're talking about a pot of money the size of Jupiter here. Payment processing alone is worth somewhere in the region of 1trillion USD annually. And that's just for moving money i.e. shuffling rows around databases. Bitcoin, while definitely imperfect, offers the hope of innovating this whole industry into oblivion and replacing it with something entirely autonomous.

The insurance industry is worth another ~5trillion USD annually. The name of the game here, of course, is predictive analysis and I'd bet that my Netflix recommendations are more accurate than any assessment any insurance company has ever made of me.

I think you'd have diversification up the wazoo in extremely short order.

Edit: accuracy

> Should all the financial regulation exist?

Almost certainly not. The regulatory burden of operating in the finance industry is overwhelming - innovation is not so much stifled as killed. The big boys thrive because the little guy doesn't stand a chance from the get-go. The whole industry is estimated to be worth ~17% of global GDP and that money, which is almost equivalent to the output of Europe (or every country in the world except the top ~17 richest nations), goes to a list of companies so small you could probably write their names on a single page. It's a joke.

> How is this different to how Apple (Microsoft, IBM, Oracle etc.) play the game?

At what point has coercion come in to putting a iDevice in your hand? Sure we could have that argument about advertising but Apple doesn't do a whole lot of that and the advertisements they do create are hardly designed to manipulate you - not to mention we are comparing them to the Romans here...

> This is a wonderful sentiment to approach commerce with, but it's all too easily forgotten when you're already at the top of the game. To stretch my already two-dimensional metaphor, it's at this point that empires start to stagnate, and eventually fall.

It's not a sentiment, it's the very essence of commerce. If you remove that incentive (and decline to implement an authoritarian regime to organise by force, like communism) then you have nothing but a bunch of former bureaucrats twiddling their thumbs (and likely starving to death.)

Commerce is about trading things you have for things you want: no more and no less. The problems of today are not the fault of freely organised trading by independent actors - that, instead, is the thing that brought us out of the stone age - but by the truly pain-in-the-arse implementation details of making this "system" moral and fair (define those terms however you will.) The reason I've air-quoted "system", btw, is because it is no such thing. If the apocalypse comes and the political/financial system falls, and you find yourself holed up in some basement with a stash of weaponry but no food you'll see that commerce is as natural as breathing. We have literally studied magpies and chimps making what we would call business decisions. Commerce is not evil, the system we've built around it is - I think this is the paradigm you have issue with, and it's something you ultimately need to take up with the political system.

Apple's success is owed to being good at this fundamental notion of trade, instead of gaming the system to their advantage (how many Fortune 500's would fall with a fraction of the competition Apple faces?) In order to fall one of four things would have to happen: 1) the entire system turns against them; 2) they stop being good at being Apple; 3) someone else learns how to do as they do or; 4) their actions ancillary to the product they provide me (like OPs points) become so offensive that they outweigh the benefits of being an Apple customer for a significant proportion of the consumer base. Personally, I see none of these as being particularly realistic or becoming so anytime soon.

I'm not sure it's the same you know. Lands are conquered and retained with politics (i.e. charismatic bullshit) and the application of brute force. It's about suppressing the wills of others whereas winning at commerce in a competitive environment is about understanding and fulfilling them. That, I would argue, is a significantly more challenging task. Many large companies are defined by their size and the advantages it brings, but not so for Apple: lots of companies have the resources to do what they do and yet only Apple ever pulls it off. They really are a different beast.

But I do agree with your other points.

There are a lot of valid criticisms that can be thrown at Apple these days, and maybe they're not "our" friend.

But I find myself thinking more and more that when a company becomes the most valuable private entity in the history of humanity off the back of luxury goods the vast majority of the world can't afford - and in a highly competitive arena too - you really have to assume they know what they're doing when it comes to doing right by themselves. And who can blame them for that?

Apple have won: in business terms, they define success. Standing in judgement of them makes me feel foolish.

I didn't intend to ruffle anyone's feathers with that comment. Yes I suppose I am misreading it, but I don't think I can be blamed for walking away from that exchange thinking transpilation to JS was the last word on the subject.

Anyway great work man. It's a happy day.

Praise the lord, that was sooner than I expected. Next up: the DOM. Then there will be peace on Earth.

Does anyone know when all this started? I ask because only 83 days ago Brendan was on here telling us pretty emphatically that this was a bad idea and would never happen.

> Although I'm sympathetic to the author, it really is Stripe's prerogative to do business (or not do business) with anyone they want.

While of course this is true, it's not really a defence in the grander scheme of things. Stripe's business model is not only propped up by the oligopolistic/cartel-like nature of international payment processing, it's a product of it. These guys may find another processor, but as long as a tiny, tiny group of banks/payment processors call the shots on what kind of transactions are allowable legitimate businesses like this will always be looking over their shoulder. Fundamentally all this comes out of banking regulation. I find the whole industry woefully unacceptable.

Is it high-risk though? Or is it just perceived that way? It wouldn't surprise me if Stripe and/or the banks saw the word "weed" and shat a brick without actually performing any kind of analysis.

> A good wine, recommended by your local -serious- cavista could change your life too.

Which did it for you?

This argument can be extended to any luxury good - why buy a Porsche when a VW will get you there? Why buy a silk sweater when you've a perfectly serviceable woollen hand-me-down?

Obviously these things are not equivalent. The car you buy, the sweater you wear, and the wine you drink are a few of the many little things that make a person who they are - in a sense, they're the distinctions that comprise the very essence of culture. What is a person (when viewed through another's eyes) if not the product of the decisions they make? And what is knowing someone, if not having an understanding of how they reach their decisions?

Not all wine is created equal - that's just true. Like food, code, art, music, and math, it's a thing that becomes more appreciable with knowledge. A lot of people would be just as impressed by a+b=c as they would be by Euler's identity, the Zeta function, or e=mc^2: normal people don't go around talking about the beauty of math, and yet those that know about it are captivated by it. It's the same story with Lispers and "Maxwell's equations of software". Are they deluded? No. Is it completely subjective and worthless? No - there is real, objective awesomeness in these examples.

Wine is not math or Lisp, but it's also not 100% bullshit (probably more like 60%.) This article is just another "please be like me" appeal, and they're getting dull now. There's potentially a lot of joy to be had by liberating your tastebuds from the likes of Gallo. $5/btl wine is not great stuff - it was probably a grape less than a month ago, and when you take into account vineyard margin, distributor margin, retail margin, the bottle, labelling, taxes, and shipping, you find the actual liquid in the bottle was created for pennies. It's treated with additives, flavourings, and sugar to make it both palatable and consistent: the grape is but a substrate. Like pink slime. $5/btl wine is the 1990's McNugget of the booze world. Each and every bottle is a shrine to engineered mediocrity.

Excuse me, non-American here, but a passage from an article linked within states[0]:

> The nine justices request that U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, Jr., the government's top lawyer before the Supreme Court, weigh in on about 20 cases a year in which the federal government has a strong interest. The justices generally give greater weight to what he or she says than other third parties that take a side in a case, an influence which has caused the solicitor general to be dubbed the "tenth justice."

Question: what the fuck?

    [0]: http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/05/15/google-oracle-lawsuit-idUSL1N0Y32YG20150515

Using Uber with certain disabilities appears to be a real problem, this is true, but there's a very real risk that regulating Uber to within an inch of it's life will make it just another cab company -- and then what? What's the point?

The goals here are not in question: Uber should not be turning these customers away - ever - and currently it seems to be deficient in that regard. But Uber's success is testament to the fact that the old system was also deficient, just in different ways and for different people. Solving this problem optimally is a big thing to ask of a centuries old legislative/political machine, and it's quite likely it just plain old won't manage it - some absurdly moralistic view such as "all Uber cars must be capable of accommodating wheelchair passengers" is a far too predictable outcome, if we let it get that far.

There is almost always a better way, and we should be very careful about going on a witch hunt with things like this, lest we allow the old guard to slowly destroy this exciting new world minutes after we build it.

Although your suggestion may be popular, it is, in fact, suboptimal.

If one believes that "JS is the worst thing to happen to the web" and that "some other language would miraculously solve all of the problems" then going off into the wilderness to "create" is almost certainly a dead-end endeavour. A language is only one component of what's needed to replace JS - there's also winning over 4 major browser vendors who've dumped no trivial quantities of money, time, and PhDs into polishing this particular turd.[0] Then there's the standardisation peeps and so on. It's not so much a technical challenge - many existing languages could add support for DOM APIs and become an in-browser candidate relatively trivially - but a political one. And when was the last time you heard of someone solving a political problem by saying "hey guys, I've got a great idea here"?

Some not-absurd propositions:

    1. "The finance system is shit"
    2. "Modern government is shit"
    3. "JS is shit"

All 3 of these have many potential non-shit replacements - but things never change. Why? Because barriers are very, very real. These things could only ever fall to the most expertly executed, well resourced, and lucky of targeted attacks.

The only viable strategy for the average "hater" (whose "hate", incidentally, is emphatically not invalidated by his lack of perfect solution) is to try to affect top-down change. Now, no one person is likely to achieve this - even exceptional people have a fearsome challenge when faced with groupthink (Galileo, anyone?)

So what is in the "haters" toolbox? Well, seeing as web standards authorities are run like district councils in the 1980's (go try to find out how to make your view officially known on an ECMAScript draft), us in the peasantry have little but our ability to create and maintain a murmur - and occasional scream - of discontent which hopefully, one day, might have some psychological effect on those who do hold the power, because lord knows it's not us users. You may recognise this particular strategy from historical great hits such as "representative" "democracy" and friends where it has been, on the whole, a slow, inefficient, wasteful, but occasionally effective way of going about things.

So my well thought-out and actionable strategy is to ignore this advice and continue to grumble - and, if you can manage it, try to be just a little bit louder than last time: shit adds up at scale.

    [0]: Mr Eich told me himself that they're too invested in JS, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9264531

New to programming? I've been coding since I was 12 and only recently have I become confident in the procedure to exit emacs.

I shouldn't have said paredit - I thought it had become a general term (is there one?) Most of my experience is with Cursive's 'Structural Editing' (sounds general, but is it?) features, and that's what I had in mind.

I wouldn't give a newcomer emacs (or vi) but I would give them the concept of paredit. The problem with that is fundamentally the keyboard, and it's a problem for the more seasoned of us too. I would kill for a programmable numpad-sized keyboard with removable caps that can be labelled by design so I can have a physical button for the operations I perform most often. I know similar things can be achieved with midi pads, but they're far from perfect. Programmable, configurable keyboards were a thing when I was at school (around the tail of the BBC Micro era) - where did they go?

I was thinking the other day, after reading the post about the Unison project, that graphical editing could be a really neat idea - "there is no syntax, you manipulate the AST directly" kind of thing. Then I started to try to flesh out how such a thing might actually work and I quickly realised that it offers zero benefit over editing standard Lisp syntax with paredit. They're equivalent.

From everything I've read I'm pretty sure that if it's a complete rewrite in another language then it's legally "divorced" from the original project. You can own (and ergo license) an implementation of an idea, but you can't own or license the idea itself. Same with patents - you own the how, not the why.

I think there are some issues here.

Browser vendors have indirectly created the money sucking machine that is the certification industry by requiring potential root CAs to have been audited to a very thorough standard (e.g. WebTrust).[0] Most of these audits implicitly require dedicated premises, extreme physical security measures, dedicated hardware, multiple dedicated uplinks, 24x7 personnel, and more. Even browsers that don't use their own cert store prop up this system by using the OS store which does require said audits. (And if anyone doubts how instrumental the browsers are to the continuance of this system, imagine how relatively niche the X509 industry would become if they moved to using something else.) As anyone who has tried to grok the documents at [0] will attest, it's a damn scary thing. Honestly you may as well try to start a bank. Or a country.

This level of difficulty creates a monopoly (or oligopoly, to be more precise.) Few people have the will/finance to do it so few do, and those who do get to take the piss with pricing. As I previously wrote[1], this means FOUR companies control the CAs that issue 91% of ALL the internet's TLS certificates.

LetsEncrypt seems like a good thing, and it might be, but it also might not be. It is, underneath all the PR, pretty much just another root CA who holds itself to the same auditing standards. It is no-doubt a very expensive undertaking and as such we may reasonably assume that there will be few, if any, additional zero-cost, fully-supported CAs in the future: and herein lies one problem. Unless you have specific requirements that LetsEncrypt just doesn't support, you have no reason not to use them. So a future CA landscape might be ONE company controlling 99% of the internet's secrets. Oh dear.

What's more, we should not underestimate the importance of cheap shared hosting. The internet is a medium for information and nothing more, and everybody has something that they might wish to broadcast. Currently, deprecating vanilla HTTP is akin to deprecating the ideas of millions of non-experts who rely on shared hosting to participate. We're telling them to join us in the land of VPSs and terminal emulators/Plesk (shudder), or to use one of the many PaaS services we've created over their own homemade solution. This is fundamentally anti-technology, which is supposed to harness innovation and make lives easier. This point is especially pertinent when you consider that the vast majority of these sites probably don't need encryption at all, so it's not even like you can mitigate the pain with direct benefits - because there are none.

Finally, TLS is a pain in the arse to administer. Really - it's not fun. I'm no stranger to it, and even I get a bit of a sinking feeling when it has to be done. To this day I'm bound to using Chrome, because no matter what I do I cannot get Firefox to parse (never mind accept) my NAS's self-signed cert. Requiring TLS across the board is tantamount to requiring many millions of hours of pain across the world.

To hold up some moral torch that does not have universal applicability and actively makes life difficult, and then declare it as canonical truth that all must adhere to is arrogance of the highest order. A great deal of chat in the tech community is dedicated to lambasting short-sighted and ill-conceived laws (think surveillance, copyright, patents, etc.) and yet here we are, making them. We have to do better.

    [0]: http://www.webtrust.org/homepage-documents/item27839.aspx
    [1]: http://lorddoig.svbtle.com/heartbleed-should-bleed-x509-to-death

8pts, 6 comments and already the site's buckled.

Sometimes this place makes me think that not putting a caching proxy in front of your blog should be a crime.

If the victim/complainant/whatever was the one with the camera, you'd still get most if not more of the benefits of accountability. So how can we make that happen instead? Simple - have the police there in two distinct roles: 1) a cop; and 2) your own personal film crew. They'd film it and perhaps even hold it "in trust", but you'd own it. Such a system would empower citizens a lot and contribute almost nil to the scary mega-state.

We're currently experiencing a shift to authoritarianism by the backdoor with NSA and friends, and in such times cheap and effective solutions such as this, which achieve the stated goal and no more, should be championed I think.

"Perfect" isn't a loaded word here, it just means maximally rational.

Take 2 bundles of products - A & B. They both cost the same, but bundle A would bring you 2x as much joy/utility/whatever-you-want-to-call-it than bundle B. To choose bundle B would be "less good" for you than choosing bundle A: that's what irrationality is...by definition. Choosing A is the "most good" option: that's what rationality is. Someone who chooses A over B 100% of the time is a "perfect consumer".

> Isn't it depressing to see how technology is turning us into perfect consumers?

I don't know what somebody on the street would consider a 'perfect consumer', but an economist would use that term to describe someone who made strictly rational (i.e. objectively good) purchasing decisions. Maybe I've been drinking too much kool-aid from the econofountain, but what on Earth is depressing about that?

I haven't written go in a while, but I recall being rather dissatisfied with the so-called 'if-hell'. I've been wondering lately - is there any reason why you couldn't/shouldn't use monads for this? Nothing obvious popping out of Google.

"gonads" would be my choice of name for this library.

Hexagonal packing is good but hexagonal packing into a hexagon appears to be leaving the edges of your search radius uncovered.

The packing density is about aligning on a hexagonal lattice, the points of which are a simple function of the inner circle's radius - the points in each row are 2r apart and every other row is horizontally offset by 2r * tan(60) (I hope that's right). Could you not build a row of circles out from the center to the right edge and copy it to the rows above, offsetting as required? The length of any given row is then half of the chord it sits on i.e. sqrt(r^2 - d^2) where d is the distance from the center, in this case 2r * row-index -- with this you can then filter out which circles are outside the containing circle for that row. This fills the top-right quarter segment of the circle, and the whole thing can be filled by flipping the coordinates along x to get the bottom right, and flipping all of that along y to get the other half, then dedup the cross that forms in the middle.

I think, in terms of coverage, this must always be at least as good as a hexagon built out from the center, but that should be a rare case and most of the time it'd be better.

Evidently I'm not a mathematician. Am I being stupid here?

This makes me envious. In the UK, Holy Mother State has determined that 2Mbps + nasty contention ratio + fair usage policy and/or usage cap = "broadband".