chrisduesing

Isn't donating money to someone wanted by the state a crime? He might be hiding out in Russia, but I'm not...

Considering the CFTC didn't regulate Bitcoin until today I wouldn't think so. Their application would have been received with a polite "save yourself some time and money, we don't regulate that" I imagine.

Unless someone was working with the CFTC to have them move it under their jurisdiction for a competitive advantage or something, but even then CME or ICE could jump in so that would be a risky move.

I can't think of any other reason, but who knows.

This is an interesting development. Typically commodities futures and options contracts can only be traded on a DCM (designated contract market) like ICE or CME. After leaving once DCM, the Chicago Climate Exchange, I started an exchange as a service startup, Exchangery, and sought DCM status. It requires a 12-18 month approval process, typically > 500k in legal fees, and a guarantee fund that is based on the amount of money moved across the platform. The last requirement could easily be 10s of millions for something like Bitcoin. It used to only be imposed on clearing firms, but post Dodd-Frank it is applied to the exchange as well.

This is drastically going to thin the players in the space, and probably force most bitcoin exchanges to stay strictly in the non-derivative trading world. It might also tempt players like CME and ICE in to trading futures on Bitcoin if they think the volumes are potentially large enough.

As far as SEFs go, they are limited to swap trading, which can be dressed up to act like an option but isn't really the same thing.

Fun times ahead.

Generative Art, a Practical Guide Using Processing by Matt Pearson, and Learning Three.js, The JavaScript 3D Library for WebGL by Jos Dirksen

The document includes a 1x preference, anti-dilution, board seat, etc. Aren't those fundamentally the things that make their shares different than common? Can you disentangle the name 'preferred' from the added rights over common shares?

That is code for "wow, this is way more work than I thought it was going to be."

A Car Guy's right hand man

An article, 4 nouns and an adjective. This isn't parseable without 3 or 4 passes. The idea is spot on, it's short and simple, but improve the English to make a reader's life easier. You have seconds to let someone know what you do and this is wasting time.

Torque Specs Fluid Capacities Body Dimensions Tow Ratings Maintenance Schedule

Ruby, Python, Javascript... You told other commenter's here that this list is meaningful to people in the know. It's not, there is no context. Why are you listing these words?

We're building a community of comprehensive, accurate vehicle data. And we need your help gathering info about the cars and trucks you work on. Technicians and DIYers, join the beta program to get first access to the app and help shape the community.

Now I know what you want, but not really why. What is in it for me? This will presumably take me time and effort to use, what do I get out of it. Don't tell me it is obvious, again if I substitute tech terms for auto terms I still have at best a vague sense of what I am getting myself in to. Paint a picture.

Educational and entertaining as always Evan, I would love to see a similar writeup on Elixir. Maybe a Chicago Boss port is in order ;)

I started about 1.5 years ago and it has been great. Strength training + cardio, planned by someone else, on a schedule, guided by a coach, with peers that encourage and motivate you. It pretty much addresses all of the psychological reasons people normally quit going to the gym after a month.

We're a marketplace that uses Balanced's ACH + escrow for moving money between buyers and sellers. I am glad to hear you will be supporting this on Stripe, but since I only have 90 days to migrate when will api/ruby support be ready and where can we find docs?

Perhaps the docs are available as soon as I migrate? I am hesitant to start that process until I have code written to support Stripe. I don't want to end up with my data on Stripe going stale while I am still using Balanced to move money. Of course I am only assuming that scenario is what would happen, the announcement is pretty thin on details.

Yes. Of course I wouldn't characterize it as blindly following so much as being able to rationally step back with some perspective and identify some trends as positive.

Lisps are a beautiful and powerful family of languages, but you are conflating the implementation with the idea. The names of functions from 30 years ago are not what makes Lisp special.

You know the term REPL, right?

Yes, and notice how it doesn't stand for Rrepl-Evl-Princ Loop.

There is a good rationale behind those names.

No, there is a good rationale for having separate functions, there is no logical rationale for prin1, princ and pprint.

Let's take "prin1 produces output suitable for input to read." from the link you provided. Since we are redesigning the language anyway, let's call that evalable-print or readable-print, or anything else in the world that semantically captures it's meaning. Because when you have a language with hundreds of obtusely named library functions it requires an unnecessary amount of cognitive load added to the already taxing act of programming. Functions that are easier to remember are directly related to code that is easier to read and understand.

So in 2020 people will have forgotten the etymology of print or format, rendering them nearly meaningless while princ, car and cdr endure?

That's rhetorical, you don't need to reply.

No one is arguing that CL sucks, but that if you are going to re-skin the whole thing with learnings from modern languages, with features like string interpolation, then you might as well make the function names more intuitive while you are at it.

The specific example is talking about doing away with the format function in favor of the princ function. What is the argument against calling it print? No one is suggesting fprintf by the way.

You and the parent are also citing spoken languages, and certainly if you are a Chinese speaker then the difference between princ and print is going to be nominal to you. However, if you are a native English speaker, not so much. Really though, once you learn one programming language with standard library function names in English, then the second will be easier to learn if it uses similar names.

Back to the subject at hand, the case being made here is that most modern languages choose things a bit easier for the brain to parse; they aren't overly shortened, they aren't Hungarian notation, etc.. The reason for that is that it requires enough brain power to learn a new language, its structure, libraries and quirks without also having to memorize strange sequences of consonants.

Here is some code I wrote yesterday. Even if you never saw Ruby before in your life, don't know what blocks are, and have no idea what the array/enum functions are, you can probably figure out what this code is doing.

invoices = @organization.subscriptions.collect{|s| s.invoices}.flatten

current_invoices = invoices.select {|i| i.invoice_period_begin_date <= Date.today && i.invoice_period_end_date > Date.today }

current_paid_invoices, current_unpaid_invoices = current_invoices.partition {|i| i.paid?}

and THAT is why if you are designing a new language from scratch, you should strongly consider using intuitive function names.

I do. There is a reason for the success of Ruby and Python, and why Elixir is dragging Erlang in to the present. It turns out you don't just have to write your language in the shape of the machine/vm but it can be a tool conformed to the mind of the programmer. "princ" is not easy to remember, read or associate to other things one already knows. The point of a project like this should not be to save old school programmers (who won't use it anyway) a few keystrokes, it is to throw away the cruft of decades of "a very good reason" decisions for something simpler and better thought out.

I really like the direction of this project, but I agree with the parent comment, it doesn't go far enough.

Mercaris, data and trading for Organic agriculture, based out of 1871, founders are grads of Excelerate (now Techstars Chicago), recently closed a Series A, hiring/growing.

How are all writes immediately consistent? What if two clients make simultaneous writes to each shard? Or more extreme, what if there is a net split and writes continue on both shards?

I suppose I could just ask if you have an architecture document floating around :)

As I mentioned the code that writes the event to the db notifies the client about it, so it knows about the client. This isn't really an issue.

In the case of an exchange I never split a single order book across multiple servers, but I can imagine a lot of applications where this could be an issue. How do you handle data consistency across nodes? Ultimately you have to solve the same issue...

Again, this isn't a big limitation for my use case. That said your answer has certainly given me a greater understanding of other circumstances where it would be very useful. Thank you.

So obviously that would be application specific. In the case of an exchange when a client connects they get a snapshot of the whole market and then begin receiving streaming updates that took place after that. I generally prefer ascending event ids over timestamps but either approach is workable. The logic about which id to start with can be managed by the server in a socket implementation or on the client when polling. So, disconnects/reconnects for that type of application are handled fairly elegantly.

Looking at the docs it doesn't appear this is meant to stream to the client, but to the server. From there you would still need to manage queues and sockets, etc.. I've had to write several exchanges that do something along these lines (stream order data to a client) and I've always accomplished it by having the code that writes to the db also push a client update to a queue.

I guess my question is why would this be a preferred solution? It seems to run afoul to the 'one job' design goal. What am I missing?

"This means that somewhere, this instance needs to be connected to a proxy server, which assigns a 10.x.x.x address to the “Windows” machine, and then forwards the connections through. Basically, world’s weirdest, most hipster ISP on the face of the earth."

I wonder if there will ever be a business case for things like this. I sit across the hall from a startup that sells mp3 gramaphones, etsy is a huge success, there are strange Kickstarter projects every day. Is nostalgia a permanent long tail phenomenon, or a fad from which people will move on?

It's not power, it's credibility. If someone who has never done anything says they are going to accomplish something large people are skeptical. If someone who already created a successful and highly adopted programming language says they are making a new one people are rightly intrigued.

I am trying to hire Rails programmers and everyone I talk to from other founders to recruiters to lead devs all report the same problem: too many Rails jobs way too few available programmers.

Unfortunately I am not looking for remote workers though. Good luck in your search, I am sure you will find something!

There are a lot of non-Apple products. I recall seeing things like printers buried in the old design, but I assume drones are new? I am curious how people will feel about the perceived dilution of the brand vs. knowing their audience and curating interesting ancillary product offerings?

Does this imply we are headed towards a future where there isn't a 10x difference between the best programmers and the worst? Where someone comes up with repeatable training that can help programmers advance throughout their career?

50mm is an aberration, it is the only glass you can get <f/1.8 affordably (35mm are ok in this regard as well). Go check out the price of a <=f/2 100m+, which is much more suited to portrait, macro, etc. Then go look at <f/4 for 200m+ for wildlife and sports. Now you see why it is so damn expensive to be a professional photographer, and why the average person isnt posting stunning wildlife or safari shots to their facebook wall.

This is why people are willing to spend so much more on glass than camera bodies. The glass will continue to work forever, and depreciate very little relative to the camera which, like every gadget, will be "worthless" in 4 years.

Take a look at the Sony A7S, it's dynamic range and low light performance are quite impressive. Reviewers seem impressed with it's video capabilities as well, though I only shoot stills.

Senior RoR Developer - Mercaris - Chicago, IL

Mercaris provides data reports and auctions for Organic and non-GMO crops to help farmers, food manufacturers and retailers bring healthier products to market and meet skyrocketing consumer demand. We recently closed a $2.5M series A funding round and are looking to expand our team.

We are looking for a mid/senior level Ruby on Rails developer to join our team and contribute significantly to the codebase and the company. Salary will be commensurate with experience. Benefits include fully covered medical, 401k with 3% match, and equity. The position is located in downtown Chicago, IL.

Your Skills and Experience:

5+ years of development experience, with a substantial amount of experience developing Ruby on Rails web apps. HTML, CSS and Javascript skills are of course fundamental as well.

An interest in mentoring and teaching other developers.

Assisting in putting best practices, processes and frameworks in place that help scale the development process as the team grows.

Send any questions or resumes for consideration to chris.duesing at mercariscompany.com.

I won't get in to fundraising in Chicago in a public forum, but you aren't hearing me argue. That said, fundraising typically only requires a warm intro. Techstars alums can get to pretty much anyone in the country. Our fundraising was not held back by access, it simply required purchasing plane tickets. I should shut up though, our Series A lead ended up being a new firm in Chicago, and they are great.

Again, if you aren't planning on fundraising, don't go through an accelerator. They are seed stage investment vehicles. Once you take investor money the clock starts ticking on an exit. Perhaps that should be in bold print somewhere, but we all read HN, this should be fundamentally understood by everyone.

I would counter argue that Excelerate/TS isn't expensive, given the stage that they come in they are severely diluted by the time you raise an A, and they have a business to run. I think you could make an argument that YC is by comparison cheap, not a bad thing considering their track record.