My Favorite Strange Number: Ω - <AUTHOR> http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2008/12/my_favorite_strange_number_cla.php <comment><USER2> And oddly enough, one of my favorite numbers is the Ω of S=k*ln(Ω) fame.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcanonical_ensemble>

</comment><comment><USER3> Different but related -- The busy beaver game and the Σ function:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busy_beaver>

</comment><comment><USER4> This is discussed in the following google Tech Talk, "Incompleteness: a personal perspective" from Cristian Claude

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYjmiT422yQ>

He discusses, amongst other things, the work done on computing this uncomputable number, and why that isn't a contradiction. I think one of the people involved is in the audience.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't understand how omega can be be incompressible. Compression, from the information theory perspective, allows me to send the string

      Digits #10000 to #100000 of the decimal representation of omega.

which any competent human could "decompress" into the corresponding digit sequence (inasmuch as it's computable)

<comment><USER6> you're right that the isolated assertion is not at all sensible, but the wider context is that you are considering all possible algorithms and the sequences that they generate, and looking for some way of compressing as many of those as possible. you should read one of chaitin's books for a better idea (they're generally "accessible", but at some point you just give up trying to make complete sense of it all...)

in other words, you are choosing your compression for one particular algorithm (the one that generates omega - you could go further and say it's 1 for omega and 0 for everything else). this is a common problem in arguments about compressibility (if we're only trying to compress beethoven's ninth then i can do that in one bit too) - you have to be talking in an "average" or statistical sense for things to be useful.

having said that, the exact nature of what they're saying is still not clear to me (ie it's not clear exactly how the details of the argument work out, or how this eventually ties back to <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannons_source_coding_theorem>).

<comment><USER6> i think another replier here may also be correct that chaitin, in particular, includes the length of the decompression code. unfortunately i can't delete my answer for some reason (too old i guess).

<comment><USER5> No, I think that your answer made the most sense. The length of the decompression code is a constant, whereas Omega has an infinity of digits, so it doesn't matter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The link to Calude's paper in the article is broken, it is this: <http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~cristian/Calude361_370.pdf>

</comment><comment><USER8> The Halting Problem theoretically defines the limits of computation, but has anyone in a pragmatic, everyday coding situation actually reached that limit? In the practical sense I've never seen it have any bearing. Perhaps the problems I'm working on are too mundane.

</comment><comment><USER9> I had just remarked, the other day, that people obsessed with Chaitin's Omega are much more interesting than people obsessed with Pi.</comment>


A Faster Way to Try Many Drugs on Many Cancers - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/26/health/fast-track-attacks-on-cancer-accelerate-hopes.html

<comment><USER2> The biggest breakthrough here is the FDA's acceptance of basket studies-- claiming that they would approve drugs on it alone. That's a big win for patients, who based on current practices, would have found themselves in the control group.

</comment><comment><USER3> This article describes "basket studies" in which patients with different rumors that share underlying mutations will receive the same targeted therapies. The name is inelegant but the logic of targeting shared mutations in a basket of genetic disease is rational. The hard part will be teasing out signal due to drug effect from signal due purely to enrollment in a trial, which as stated in the article will require large-magnitude effects, and probably heavy comparison to outside data.

One could also imagine a study protocol in which a single patient receives many drugs targeted at various mutations, and the results could make sense only at a large scale after decomposing the signal from many recipients of the cocktail. This, however, is not what is described in the article.

</comment><comment><USER4> This startup ([http://www.flatiron.com/](http://www.flatiron.com/)) is attempting to create a database of cancer etc. At first I thought that the idea was a bit too ahead of its time but now its value is becoming clearer. Data will be a very powerful part of defeating cancer.

<comment><USER5> It seems like they are doing more than that, though. Cancer data has been collected (by law) and stored for decades. I'd be curious to see if FlatIron was using historical records from Cancer Registries (California's Cancer Registry has millions of cases, for example), or just "EMR and billing systems".

<comment><USER6> >Cancer data has been collected (by law) and stored for decades

Have tissue samples been stored as well over the decades? I am not sure about DNA preservation over the years, but it might at least give us some ideas of cancer, especially inheritance issues surrounding cancer.

<comment><USER5> You are correct about the tissue samples. CCR mostly collects treatment, demographic, and disease information. I didn't get the feeling from their website that FlatIron was collecting tissue samples, either, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Paywall.</comment>


Bitfinex bitcoin exchange hacker offers 1000BTC giveaway - <AUTHOR> https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1574127.0 <comment><USER2> The "dead man's switch" which would effectively destroy the funds in the future is interesting. Assuming whoever it is doesn't do it themselves, would anyone actually make the effort to feed that transaction into the system?

<comment><USER3> if it has a significant transaction fee added then it certainly will, I assume if you are doing this then you make the transaction fee e.g 100BTC and it guarantees it will be mined. If it is not mined then no one can access the funds anyway so for the miner they may as well take the mining reward than ignore the transaction.</comment></comment>


Apple gave Uber's app 'unprecedented' access to a secret backdoor - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.in/Apple-gave-Ubers-app-unprecedented-access-to-a-secret-backdoor-that-can-record-iPhone-screens/articleshow/60963865.cms <comment><USER2> To summarize, Uber's app had a private entitlement ( _com.apple.private.allow- explicit-graphics-priority_ ) that Uber says was used to draw the map on a phone and send to their Watch app. Updates to the Uber app and the Apple Watch now allow them to do it directly on the watch. The entitlement is no longer needed and Uber says it's being removed.

The entitlement _could_ have been used to record users' screens without their knowledge. On the one hand, there's no evidence of this having ever happened. On the other, Uber has been known to engage in activity explicitly against App Store rules to collect data on iPhone users, so it's hard to take their word for it.

[https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/04/tim-cook-once- slappe...](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/04/tim-cook-once-slapped-uber- on-the-wrist-for-breaking-the-app-store-rules/)

EDIT - note that Uber's response says their device fingerprinting was withing Apple's guidelines. But Apple has gone out of their way to make it so that apps can't fingerprint devices between installs, so color me skeptical. They've gotten to bend a lot of rules that I don't think I'd get away with.

<comment><USER3> WRT device fingerprinting: I am not an app developer but I recall reading a recent comment here on HN that Apple now provides a built-in way to do fingerprinting but that, IIRC, it is to be able to track multiple installations of the same application on a single device.

I certainly agree that we shouldn't simply blindly trust Uber if they say they haven't misused this privilege (due to their previous behavior). I certainly would not be surprised to learn, at some future date, that they were, in fact, abusing this entitlement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Over the past month or so we've be hearing this meme on HN that due to its business model not depending on advertising, Apple is the one company that can be trusted to have the incentives to protect their users privacy.

Oops.</comment>


How Japan handles long shopping lines - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2012/11/23/time-lapse-video-how-japan-handles-long-shopping-lines/ <comment><USER2> I don't get it.

Is that entire square a cashier's area? How do they get through so many people? How are all those people able to walk away at once?</comment>


Grid operator Cal-ISO says generation shortfall might prompt more blackouts - <AUTHOR> https://www.spglobal.com/platts/en/market-insights/latest-news/electric-power/081720-grid-operator-cal-iso-says-generation-shortfall-might-prompt-more-blackouts <comment><AUTHOR> Follow up to: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24188135](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24188135)

This gives an explanation for what's happening and why:

"We told the California Public Utilities Commission of a 4,700-MW need through 2022 and that gap started in 2020. Despite all that, only 3,300 MW was authorized for procurement and none starting until 2021," Berberich said during a special telephone conference the Cal-ISO Board of Governors held Aug. 17, following a weekend during which the grid operator twice conducted rotating blackouts because of high demand and tightening reserves.</comment>


Ask HN: Who's hiring (Jan 2011)? - <AUTHOR>

There have been 'Who's hiring?' threads in the past and It would be great to know if there are some updates on the needs (I'm sure it has changed).<p>Please lead with the posting locations.. <comment><USER2> This thread has already happened twice in the last 13 days. Here are the threads for reference (ordered from newest to oldest):

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2097735> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2057704>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, that was great!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Cambridge, UK. Healthcare startup looking for two Ruby on Rails developers (salary plus options), see <http://about.nhs.info/></comment>


Safari Push Notifications - <AUTHOR> https://developer.apple.com/notifications/safari-push-notifications/

<comment><USER2> Before adding new features, can you make it so my Safari, when one page gets stuck, doesn't need to force-reload _all_ pages? Because that's just weird.

<comment><USER3> Safari in Mavericks is process-per-tab so that will be fixed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This seems like a useful feature. Any chance of an open standards process bringing this kind of functionality to browsers with more market share?</comment>


Further proof that millennials are the brokest generation - <AUTHOR> https://slate.com/business/2018/12/millennials-are-the-brokest-generation.html <comment><USER2> I think what is missed is while millennials have less money, they also have options to get by for less too.

In the past if you could not afford a car you took the taxi (expensive) or the bus (time and route limited), today Uber and Lyft are a lot cheaper than taxis while going where you want.

In the past if you could not afford a house, you rented. Today, while numbers are limited still you have the option of getting a tiny house for a lot less than what a full house cost. And a better place than what the old trailer homes would get you.

In the past if you could not afford full vacations, you went camping and rarely left the country. Today you can get things like Airbnb for a lot less than a resort or hotel.

And of-course internet for movies, music are cheaper ways to get entertainment too.

<comment><USER3> People love to point out that TVs are cheaper, but that is dwarfed by millenials' insane student debt and the cost of housing where they can actually get jobs, your spiel about tiny houses notwithstanding.</comment></comment>


Google's getting B(l)ing - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/freeze-frame.html <comment><USER2> I don't see a helluva lot of point. It seems like it's just a thumb in the eye of bing and everybody who has said "I like bing, it has pretty pictures". But it completely avoids the actual value of bing, which is to give you a new and interesting pretty picture every day. And in fact, just reading this article made me go look at bing's last few pictures.

If I want to look at one of my _own_ pretty pictures, or some other picture I've chosen myself, I'll just make it my desktop background.

<comment><USER3> "... I'll just make it my desktop background."

Interesting. This is actually what first came to my mind: Google is copying the desktop? Not Bing. As many of you said, Bing isn't the first web page to put a pretty background picture (some of the first web pages were the first web pages with pretty background pictures, were they not?). And, as we concluded, the concept is different - choosing, instead of getting a random pic.

So, now you can change the "desktop background" of your google homepage - "the Internet", as often called by many people where I come from. Add some shortcuts to the picture with pretty custom icons (links), support for a clock, a calendar (widgets), a tray or a bar with quick launch and various options...

If only a browser existed that loaded automatically when you start your computer, without the need for all that "windows loading stuff"... :)

<comment><USER4> Chrome OS?

<comment><USER3> Exactly. Just asking a question from the perspective of a !hacker. :)

I was aiming at the concept of the "cloud desktop", as kierank commented in the meantime.

<comment><USER5> If you're looking for an experience similar to the concept of a "cloud desktop," you should try out Favetop. It has icon shortcuts, which you described above, along with media management and social sharing capabilities. We currently do not have a customizable wallpaper option as of right now, but we are planning on offering this feature in the near future.

<comment><USER6> You could perhaps try and internationalise it a bit. e.g. Hulu replaced with BBC iPlayer etc.

<comment><USER5> Thank for the suggestion. We're going to continue to try our best to ensure international users have as many of their favorite web apps and sites available to them as U.S. users. We currently have over 1,000 web apps and sites in our database for you to choose from and we are looking to offer users the option to upload their own site icons very soon. Btw, the BBC iPlayer app is now available with the added ability to directly search it from your Favetop if you'd like. If you have any other suggestions please let us know through the "Suggestions/Feedback" link on our homepage. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Best pics don't interfere with the purpose of the page.

<http://i.imgur.com/uobal.jpg>

<comment><USER8> Is there a way to use Bing background automatically for Google?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Now that every browser includes a search bar next to the address input, why go to Google's home page at all? I very rarely do so.

<comment><AUTHOR> In order to develop my own opinion, I've been running a little experiment for the past week in which I switched the search box to Bing.

Basically, I have found very little difference in Google and Bing's search. They are both equally functional and fast. If anything, I've found that I have no reason to switch back to Google - Bing's daily rethemeing adds a little spark to my day.

I encourage everyone to try this for a week. You'll be amazed at how undifferentiated the two major search players truly are at search. These little user delighters are going to be a huge component in the battle for search revenue in the near future.

<comment><USER10> Agreed - other than coverage and update frequency, they're very similar results. I think I actually prefer Bing overall.

<comment><USER11> I disagree, every new server or desktop I setup has bing as the default search engine, before switching them to google, I'll sometimes try my search in bing and be horribly dissatisfied. I may have learned how to search on google (in a way to get better google results) but I can't figure out how to get Bing to give me what I'm looking for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My mother regularly tells me how much she loves the Bing photos and how she's looking forward to "what will they put up next." She was asking yesterday how long it would be before Google did the same. Now we know...

</comment><comment><USER13> Tweet a picture? Given up with Buzz then?

<comment><USER14> Fortunately google is not quite as dumb as other companies in forcing every aspect of its business to pay the "strategy tax" of supporting every other product of the business regardless of whether it makes sense or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I love the idea. I'm not sure if the implementation would be better than the current white page (I'm very easily distracted, and I sometimes spend a couple of minutes on Bing just flipping through the background photos - they're a sampling of current world affairs, if you don't know) and so I think this is a visual improvement.

That said - I may well waste more time changing my background image the way I do my wallpaper.

</comment><comment><USER16> No dice if it removes holiday logos like iGoogle does.

</comment><comment><USER17> Yet another step in turning the browser into an operating system -- customizable backgrounds.

</comment><comment><USER18> Given the fact that the company relies so heavily on data when making UI decisions, I have a feeling that Google must have some pretty convincing data that would lead them to copy bing both in search results, and now with these iGoogle options...

<comment><USER19> Or, they're trying to encourage you to be logged in when you search. IIUC, you won't see "your" personalized picture unless you're logged in and cookied.

<comment><USER20> We have a winner ^

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Bing is hardly the first search engine to use a photo as a background image. Ask and Wikia Search are two examples off the top of my head that have offered that feature as well (most likely before Bing was launched, too.)

</comment><comment><USER22> But it won't have the mouse overs that gives you little factlets? Does anyone know where Bing gets the images and facts for the mouse overs? Is it someone's job to put those together?

<comment><USER23> It definitely looks like the mouseover content is manually inputted, but since Microsoft acquired Powerset (<http://www.powerset.com>) last year, they could also pull some information about topics from it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> They should have left this kind of thing to iGoogle I think. Even if people like it, it's going to subtly dilute their image of Google being The Dead Simple choice.

<comment><USER25> How so? It's an _optional feature_. It's not enabled by default, so only those who want this feature will be using it.

<comment><USER24> Assume for the sake of argument that you agree it is a harmful feature for Google's image in the long term. In that case does making it an optional feature make any difference, beyond minimizing the damage?

<comment><USER25> Making it optional isn't "minimizing the damage", it's making a feature available to people who see it as a _positive thing_. This will improve Google's image in the eyes of its users, not harm it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Just one market route to drive more users to their homepage. Definitely an optional preference.

</comment><comment><USER27> New Google is the new New Coke. I guess that makes Bing Pepsi.

</comment><comment><USER28> Great title!

</comment><comment><USER29> heh... <http://imgur.com/rUt1A.jpg>

<comment><USER30> Is that the UCSD library?

<comment><USER29> China Pavilion at 2010 Shanghai World Expo.

It took me a couple months of using Bing to figure this out, but if you mouse over the little copyright symbol in the bottom-right of the image, it will tell you who took the picture and what it is of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Well, the point is that now I can have a hubble deep field image as my background for google search, which is a enough reason for me to stay logged in to my google account at work, which I normally don't.

So it's good for their stats department.

</comment><comment><USER32> Why is this on hacker news?</comment>


Consent Matters: When Tech Takes Remote Control Without Your Permission - <AUTHOR> https://puri.sm/posts/consent-matters-when-tech-takes-remote-control-without-your-permission/ <comment><USER2> I remember being spooked when my calendar started being proactive about reminding me to wish my friends a very Happy Birthday before the event actually occurred.</comment>


Ask HN: What tool(s) do you use to plan and report findings from your A/B tests? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> As distinct from performing the A/B Tests? We use PowerPoint and Excel to plan and report and Optimizely, VWO to run them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, once terms of keeping track of the qualitative aspects. Things like context, insights, learnings, next steps, methodology, etc

And you just keep track of those preso's and in Dropbox/drive/box?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You can look into lab notebook solutions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Any chance you've got a link you could share?

<comment><USER3> [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5443717/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5443717/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What service/bot can auto-submit startups to blogs? - <AUTHOR> i remember reading here on HN someone launching such a thing.. but i can't find it.<p>i want to post to ALL these: https://github.com/mmccaff/PlacesToPostYourStartup <comment><AUTHOR> ahh found it! StartUpLister

via this blog post comparison review: [https://mystartuptool.com/blog/the- best-startup-submission-s...](https://mystartuptool.com/blog/the-best-startup- submission-services-comparison.php)</comment>


Show HN: RxDB v3 – JavaScript Database and ORM - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/pubkey/rxdb?v=3.0.0 <comment><USER2> Great job! I played with RxJS and it's so useful in some cases. I'm sure RxDB will also help us a lot.

I have some questions:

1) How much storage space can we use? 2) How fast will it work? I uderstand that it's async, so I guess that browser scripts won't be blocked. 3) Are there any known limitations? Is it production ready?

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. Storage-Limit depends on which browser you use it, see [https://pouchdb.com/faq.html#data_limits](https://pouchdb.com/faq.html#data_limits) In other environments, storage is unlimited.

2\. No, browser-scripts will not be blocked. It works quite fast. The speed depends on which storage-adapter you use. In browsers for example its slower with localstorage compared to leveldb in nodejs as storage-adapter.

3\. Yes its production ready.

<comment><USER2> Good to know. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> What is the primary storage used? localStorage?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's based on the ecosystem of leveldown-adapters. Therefore you can switch arround the adapter to use RxDB in different environnements.

There are adapters for indexedDB, localstorage, websql, filesystem and many more.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you manage you money? - <AUTHOR> I'm interested to hear how people manage their personal finances, and any advice on that score. Do you do it through your bank, do you have a personal broker, online services?<p>I am especially interested in hearing from people outside the US, more so if they have assets in the US that they manage as well. <comment><USER3> I use GNU Cash [http://www.gnucash.org/](http://www.gnucash.org/)

My bank allows me to export statements in CSV or Quicken(?) format, but it is often easier just to key them in manually.

I treat credit card spending as a "Black Box" only recording the monthly payments out. Should probably break that down further so I can see where we're wasting money.

I _try_ to align Direct Debits (regular monthly payments in the UK) so they come out on the same day / week. Some companies are more helpful than others at moving them.

No cheques - thankfully their use is in the way out in the UK. Similarly, I try not to use cash - far harder to track spending.

I leave investing to professionals. There's no way I can compete on the stock market with people who do it full time and have billions to play with. So I let my pension fund do that work for me.

Hardest thing to track is ad hoc payments through PayPal - either to people or as payment from friends & companies.

Sadly, my bank doesn't offer mobile banking, but I'm happy enough with Web access. I don't need spending alerts, to make sudden payments etc.

The most important thing - if you're married/living together/in a relationship - talk to your partner! Explain your priorities, talk about realistic goals, work out how you'll split bills etc. Money breaks up too many relationships.

<comment><USER4> My partner and I have open communication about finances and just recently set up some budgets for various spending categories. The main point is getting a realistic picture of where we stand on it each week & month. Mint is great but is not accurate enough so it becomes just as much work to categorize expenses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I just spend less than I get. I know how much comes in and my spending habits are fairly predictable, so nothing too fancy.

For obvious reasons I tend to charge everything to my credit cards and then just pay them off before the due date.

I have an account and a debit card that's only for ATM usage. The account behind that card has a nil balance unless I'm about to get cash, in which case I just use a banking app to do a quick transfer. It takes about a minute or so from app launch to available funds. I have this separate account in case the card gets skimmed.

In essence, with this separate ATM account and my credit cards, I'm keeping my cash in cold storage until it's go-time.

Other than this, I don't really do anything magical or fancy. I used to diligently keep track of every expense but it didn't really add anything to my life so I stopped doing it. I'm not a fan of wasting time.

As a contingency against losing my wallet (which has happened exactly once!) I have a second set of bank accounts and credit cards. These backup cards stay at home. If my wallet disappears and departs from my life I don't have any downtime; I just switch over the backup while replacements are on their way.

I keep my wallet as empty as possible and only carry the bare minimum I need for my day to day. Most of the time I don't even get my wallet out and just use my phone to pay for things. Most places where I go have PayPass enabled terminals.

<comment><USER6> It's interesting to see the dichotomy here. Some people meticulously manage every penny, and others like you and me just make sure we spend less than we earn.

I'm curious to see the financial status of everyone writing in this thread now though. As a person just entering the work force, I don't have much in the way of wealth so I know I'm not a good example here.

<comment><USER7> I've found that the best way to save money is not to manage every penny but manage your own expectation of what is expensive and what is cheap.

A lot of people increase their spendings proportionally to their income so when they get more money, they acquire more expensive tastes, go to more expensive restaurants, buy more expensive cars and so on.

It's an easy trap to fall into especially with peer pressure but if you can avoid it, then it becomes easy to spend less than what you earn without tracking every penny (or at least it's easy for most people here who tend to earn more than the median salary).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I do it through a bank + spreadsheets. Even though I live in France currently, I mostly keep my money in JPY and USD since this is the money I get from customers. I used to have more Euros but got scared before the Brexit vote and decided not to have too much liquidity in Euros for now. I do own an apartment in a EU country so I'm still invested in the EU going well.

In term of investments, I tend to prefer long term investments rather than short terms one. I've bought some apple shares which I don't touch and I have invested in some index funds.

I do have an accountant to keep my company's book.

I do not expect to be able to get pension from my country by the time I retire so I save and make sure that I'll have enough to live by that time. To that end, I live well below my means and try to save 60% of my income each months.

This does mean that I have a relatively small apartment, that I do not splurge on restaurants and that I tend to not want to buy stuff (this is connected to the fact that I like not having much clutter in my life). I strongly believe that it's easier to continue having the same lifestyle as you did when you started working than returning to a cheaper lifestyle after having had a taste of luxury. So I avoid luxury for now.

In term of spreadsheets, I maintain two spreadsheets.

1\. Recurring income and expenses. This allows me to track recurring expenses and decide or not to cut them. I make sure to review it every 2 months

2\. Investment spreadsheets, this is a spreadsheet I use to track the different investments I do and the monthly return I get on them. I only review them once a month because I do not want to make impulsive decisions regarding my investments. I've found that it's too easy to panic and make bad decisions and it's also healthier not to worry constantly about one's investment. I probably leave money on the table because of this but it's the choice for me (and then again I have less risk of losing everything).

In term of credit card spending, I set a limit as to what I spend every month and will only really analyze my spendings if I near that limit.

EDIT: Quick hint for people who need to deal with multiple currencies, it's worth looking at a specialized service like Currencies Direct (but there are many others), they tend to give much better rates than banks. I've saved over $1000 this year by doing this.

<comment><USER8> On the topic of currency exchanges: recently I had to send a five figure sum to China. Banks in the U.S. offered me 6.245 on the same say as banks in China offered me 6.55. Safe to say I was very vocal about the fact that I was sending US dollars and had no interest in foreign exchange services.

<comment><USER7> Yes, it's been my experience to always transfer the foreign currency to China and do the exchange there. But that's something to always check with any countries... It's very easy to assume and lose a substantial amount of money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> You might like this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvZSpET11ZY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvZSpET11ZY)

My personal method is to have a standard of living high enough that I don't have to really think about it much. A small amount of discomfort, but not much. I'm a naturally frugal person so it's not so bad.

I have a single credit card, a single debit card, and various Vanguard accounts (IRA, Roth IRA, Brokerage). I keep a few months of cash liquid in the bank account, whenever it gets a couple thousand over that I transfer it to my Vanguard accounts.

Vanguard is very easy to manage. About an 80/20 mix between US and international, and an 80/20 mix between stock index and bond index for both US and international. So only 4 index symbols to deal with and rebalance every 6 months or so. Increase the size of your bond holdings as you get older.

I log into my bank's website to pay my balance every month, and to view my transactions for that month to make sure there's no fraud/stolen card. I look at my net worth in Mint every few months just out of curiosity. I used to use Mint for tracking budgets for stuff like food, but I found that my happiness went down drastically if I tried to artificially limit my spending because I feel like I'm already really frugal.

This is enough for 95%+ of people assuming they're saving enough and making enough to save enough.

</comment><comment><USER10> Simple Excel spreadsheet where I keep track of any regular expenses (subscriptions, rent, ...) and my investments.

I'm based in Europe but have most of my investments in the US largely due to my phenomenal broker there: [https://www.interactivebrokers.com/](https://www.interactivebrokers.com/)

Interactive Brokers allows you to exchange currency basically without fees and at real market rates.

In terms of investments I keep it simple and split the money in fixed percentages between cash, bonds, index ETFs, and gold. This saves a lot of time and fees.

</comment><comment><USER11> I highly recommend Ramit Sethi's [http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com](http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com). It's a great book for those clueless about personal finance and managing their money and he gives you lots of common sense advice based on psychology/human behavior. Ramit is one of the smartest people of our time in general and I take you will love his other content as well (I definitely do.)

Once you're up to speed on that and want to get really fancy you should check out [https://www.youneedabudget.com](https://www.youneedabudget.com).

Good luck on your journey.

<comment><USER12> Be careful with the advice that tells you how to get rich by saving a bit of your income and not buying the things you can't afford. The only person it will make rich is the author of the book. Your average person in the US makes $29K/year. Subtract taxes, rent, insurance, transportation, food, utility bills, medical bills, and you're usually left with close to nothing. Even if you're a developer who makes $150K, you can probably save up $50-60K/year, if you live extremely frugally. So it will take you 17-20 years just to get to $1M, assuming you can inflation-proof your savings. And I don't consider $1M in savings "rich" \- it's not enough to retire without worrying (medical bills will go up as you age).

<comment><USER13> Most people don't have the self control to follow that advice anyway. It won't get you filthy rich but it will get you ahead of roughly 90% of the population.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> [http://ledger-cli.org](http://ledger-cli.org)

<comment><USER15> I also use this. I liked it so much that I wrote my own parser, importer and web application to view a bunch of different reports.

[https://github.com/howeyc/ledger](https://github.com/howeyc/ledger)

<comment><USER16> Neat! I'm pretty tied to the ledger format but I'm not confident that C++ ledger will be around forever, so the more implementations the better.

Do you have any plans to support automated transactions? I use them quite extensively.

<comment><USER15> No, I do not. I have never used them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I use [https://www.mint.com/](https://www.mint.com/) for managing my finances; it allows me to aggregate my information across banks and manage budgets/alarms as well.

</comment><comment><USER18> Here in South Africa there is an excellent service called 22seven.com which tracks my spending and income on various bank accounts (everything can be done with bank cards and bank to back transfers, cheques are not a thing).

I pay an accountant / financial advisor to help me with taxes on payments from multiple freelance clients and she's also recently advised me what savings accounts to use:

1\. 3 month emergency tax fund 2\. Unit trust with 50-50 shares / bonds composition 3\. Pension 4\. Cash saving for property

</comment><comment><USER19> Poorly :/ I'm fairly nomadic, and it's a struggle to even keep a debit card that works globally, let alone optimize banking fees and exchange margins. My bills are in 3 different currencies. My backpack is cluttered with change, in currencies that I am unlikely to use anytime soon, but in quantities that make exchanging them pointless.

I really can't wait for digital currencies to penetrate further into mainstream.

Thanks for asking, hopefully I'll spot some good tips here.

<comment><USER20> Have you seen Revolut? It allows you to spend money/convert between currencies very easily and the charges are minimal

<comment><USER19> Not available in the Middle East yet, bummer. Financial tech is basically in the dark ages here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I have 15 years of transactions in Microsoft Money, a Windows application. I choose it at a time when the only other alternative was Quicken, and I hanged on to it ever since for its clean and simple UI, ease of use, and its reporting and forecasting features.

Unfortunately, Microsoft retired this product about five years ago but still makes it available as Money Plus Sunset Deluxe edition, available as a free download.

<comment><USER22> Agree with this. When I managed my finances with Microsoft Money I felt in control of everything - the temptation was to spend too much time managing it.

I've never found a application / app / web site which works so well for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I've been using No Thirst's MoneyWell for OSX to manage our family finances over the past six years: [http://nothirst.com/moneywell/](http://nothirst.com/moneywell/)

The idea of mapping the balances in my accounts (cash, bank account and credit) to a set of buckets ("digital envelopes") really resonates with me. Every paycheque gets assigned to the Salary bucket, and I have a set of fill rules defined to move money from income buckets to expense buckets such as the mortgage, consumables (my version of groceries), kids savings, etc. No money actually moves when the fill rules execute: it's just bucketing. I'm free to "move" the money around manually too.

I don't care about the physical mechanism to spend money anymore: cash, credit and debit all have to be assigned to a bucket in the end. (Though I do prefer the credit card for the rewards, and have it automatically paid off in full each month.)

Some buckets go negative: when we redid our floors, I "paid" out of the projects bucket, and then "repaid" that amount to myself over the next few months. I didn't borrow any money externally, and kept the overall bank balance well above zero by maintaining a "minimum balance bucket", along with the regular funds in all the other buckets.

My wife and I have "personal" buckets - money to spend, or more crucially, to save over a few fill cycles. It's very freeing for both of us.

I haven't been terribly successful at getting non-technical folk to use it, because it really requires you to buy into the "bucket" (e.g. digital envelope) system. It also changed ownership a few years back, and development has slowed, though not stalled.

</comment><comment><USER24> My wife and I use [https://www.youneedabudget.com/](https://www.youneedabudget.com/)

<comment><USER25> I use this too, although I use the "classic" desktop application instead of the new web based subscription service they have now.

The desktop application has served me well for 2 years now and I can see that going forward.

A good thing about it is it supports importing transactions from Quicken format, which my bank offers, so keeping up to date is a fairly quick process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm probably not what you mean by being both outside the US and with US assets, but...

I live in the UK, have to pay my US student loans, which is a bitch.

I used to have a US bank account registered to my parent's address over which my mother had Power of Attorney. I'd transfer a decent sum of money using a forex 2-3 times a year and pay the student loans monthly out of that

However, the bank account kept going dormant because of there being no personal type contact. So I ended up closing that account out of fear I'd lose access to it.

That left me with two ways to pay my student loans, forex and paypal (looking at you Discover, only allowing paypal is terrible).

So I paid off the loan that required me to use paypal by socking all the saved money I had at it, and now use a low-fee, good exchange rate forex to pay the other loan monthly.

Everything is handled completely online, and I only keep one set of UK bank accounts.

Personal savings into a stocks and shares ISA happens automatically every month, plus a work pension that I manage online.

</comment><comment><USER27> I hope it's okay for a shameless plug here. I use YNAB before but have been creating my own solution for about a year or so. It's here: [https://www.everypocket.com](https://www.everypocket.com). I'm outside the US and the online banking systems are not very good at personal finance, plus I have about 3 accounts in different banks for different purposes, so I can't use bank's solutions.

I'm a big supporter of manual entry for the extra clarity on what I've been (and will) spending on, I know many people find it cumbersome.

</comment><comment><USER28> Credit union with a savings and checking account, mint for tracking, betterment for IRAs and emergency fund with their recommendations for allocation. I used both lending club and prosper but I am winding those down.

</comment><comment><USER6> As I am just entering the work force, I'm curious to hear about the financial status of the people replying to this thread. I understand if you're reluctant to share that here, but I think it would make a big difference. For example, if a lot of high-income earners/high wealth-owners in this thread tend to do X, I might be more disciplined to do X.

<comment><USER29> I would probably be considered high income/moderate wealth. I started tracking everything with Quicken back in the 90's when I realized I was just pissing it all away. I switched to MoneyDance when intuit started screwing with the Mac version of Quicken, and it does what I need. I track and categorize every expenditure and every account: cash, asset, liability, retirement, college, investment. I learned to do this from the book, "The Millionaire Next Door". They had results from a study they did that showed people who spend more time watching their money tend to have more of it over time (i.e. even if they started with little). After a while it becomes routine. I spend collectively 1-2 hours per month working on my finances.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the book recommendation! I'll have to take a look at it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> My wife and I have accounts at Fidelity and my local credit union. My wife manages the CU and handles stuff like groceries and gas. She mostly gets a wad of cash each week, and spends that. Nothing comes out of the CU account automatically, so no "surprises".

I "manage" Fidelity account in the exact opposite manner - almost 100% automatically - paying all the bills and such. Fidelity knows of the biller and can pay the exact amount each month for many of my bills. The others, such as my electric bill are mostly on payment plans that make it the same each month and re-adjust once or twice a year, so Fidelity just sends a check to an address with the account number in the memmo. It also automatically sends money to the credit union, retirement accounts, etc.

Oh, and we have a separate account for giving, both to causes that we support and people in need. Some of its automated, some of it changes each month.

</comment><comment><USER31> I sidestep the whole issue by now having any.

<comment><USER31> On a slightly more serious note though, I manage the data about what little I do have - money inflow, outflow, categories of spending, etc. - <USER2> Perfios[1], which is sorta like Mint for Indians.

[1] [https://www.perfios.com/](https://www.perfios.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Bank only, but I'm also only 25 years old and have nothing but a house, a car, (which I bought with cash) a savings account, a checking account, and a mutual fund.

That might change once things start getting more complicated, (Kids!) but for now, it's very easy to keep track of everything.

</comment><comment><USER33> After months of research, and not wanting an online software, I ended up on [http://www.mybudgetview.com](http://www.mybudgetview.com)

It's a free cross-platform GUI like Quicken (I guess). Developers make money by selling addons.

</comment><comment><USER34> First I make sure I ~2 month pay available in 'cash' in a separate bank account, and top that up if I had to take anything out of it over the past month. Then I move 20% of my after tax income into index funds as soon as I get paid. Then I pay my bills and just spend whatever I feel like spending for the rest of the month and then before my next paycheck I move whatever I have left into index funds. I've found that I have a pretty good 'feel' for how much money I have and what I can afford to spend so I've never felt a need to track my spending.

</comment><comment><USER35> Simple spreadsheet with liquidity planning about one year out, business and private in different tabs and a third which pulls all that together plus a list of major assets.

I do this because I do not expect to be able to depend on anything outside of myself for my later days.

I don't use any outside advisors but I do have someone keeping the books and occasionally they will inform me of some detail that might be worth pursuing. (One of these for instance is that in NL income from rental property is nearly tax free if you own the property privately.)

</comment><comment><USER36> I maintain some Python scripts that graph my spending from CSV transaction exports: [https://github.com/amboar/fpos/](https://github.com/amboar/fpos/)

It does a few nice things like automatically determining your recurring income and expense patterns, which allows it to do a bit of forecasting. I'm working on expanding that capability at the moment to summarise savings progress for recurring expenses with multi-month periods. Contributions welcome!

</comment><comment><USER37> It's in a nice little wooden box on my desk. I pick a large bill when my wallets looks to be emptied. If I need to buy something online, I fill my bank account a little.

I don't see the need for management, I know in my head how much I have. I tried to set up spreadsheets, apps or other fancy things to keep track of my spendings, but I abandoned all of them in a few days due to lack of motivation.

I wish I had your problem :)

</comment><comment><USER38> I made an app for myself to track every transaction, but I stopped after realising that I don't really need to. I am quite frugal so I simply don't spend enough that I feel I need to know every little detail.

I might check the total every now and then out of interest. I also don't have any investments or a lot of recurring things.

</comment><comment><USER39> I used to use GnuCash to track everything, all credit card purchases, mortgage principle and interest...literally everything about my finances. But now I have reduced my footprint to the point where I spend substantially less than I make, so tracking everything like I used to do seems pointless. Using something like mint.com can be a way to get something almost as good as GnuCash with much less effort. But I never felt comfortable giving them all my online banking passwords, so I stayed away from that.

As far as spending goes, I buy just about everything with my Citi Double Cash credit card which pays 2% cash back on all purchases. I have an automatic transfer that pays the balance in full every month, so I never have to worry about late fees or interest payments. Any other bills, deposits, etc that can't be put on the card are set up as automatic deposits/withdrawals, so managing everything takes essentially zero effort. Almost all of this stuff happens via my CapitalOne 360 (formerly ING Direct) high interest savings account. They give me instant transfers between that and my 360 checking account as well as have a feature where overdraft on the checking account gets handled with no fees from the savings account. This means that I am able to keep the vast majority of my cash on hand in a savings account, so I maximize the returns of that money too.

Since my spending habits are now naturally restrained and I'm not concerned about tracking where my money goes what I do now is my own simplified take on a cash flow report. Every month I record in a spreadsheet the balances of all my cash accounts (two checking and one savings account). I also record the sum total of any deposits I make to investment accounts. I don't record the actual value of the investment account because then there would be lots of fluctuation due to the market. All this takes me like 5-10 minutes every month. From these four numbers I can derive a very accurate picture of exactly how much money I am saving every month, and when I subtract this from my actual after-tax paycheck amounts, I know exactly how much I'm spending.

The information I get from this report tells me the only number that really matters for early retirement: your savings rate, as a percentage of your take- home pay. From this you can get a really good idea of how long it will be before you can retire ([https://networthify.com/calculator/earlyretirement](https://networthify.com/calculator/earlyretirement)).

</comment><comment><USER40> Does anyone fully account for their physical assets and use depreciation methods to follow their value accordingly? I took an accounting module very recently and am about to implement personal balance sheets and income statements for my personal aid. I'm trying to decide what's through enough and not overdoing it.

</comment><comment><USER41> I use YNAB, the money I make this month will go towards expenses next month. It more or less follows Dave Ramsey's philosophy of "give every dollar a job". This allows us to know how much we have to spent in each category and to make sure that we don't forget to save for insurance, hoa fees, etc.

</comment><comment><USER42> I work fulltime + have a side business ( freelancing and actually the same as my fulltime job)

I save all my extra money ( most of my expenses are in the weekend), have some recurring income ( in the form of hosting + some subscriptions on ledenboek.be ) and now starting a ecommerce for additional funds in a niche market

</comment><comment> bash-j I've been using Budget Calendar www.mishell.ca for 6 years and I highly recommend you try it. The calendar interface is intuitive and easy to understand. The android version uses the same file format as the desktop version so you can keep your file synced in dropbox, google drive, etc.

</comment><comment><USER43> > I am especially interested in hearing from people outside the US

I don't have a credit card. To be fair, nobody here has a credit card. I just spend less than I get, and I try to save something every month. I put my savings on a saving account.

That's all.

<comment><USER6> I was surprised to hear recently that _most_ non-Americans don't have credit cards. I'm totally against spending money you don't have, but I only use my CC to build my credit rating (and to get those nice reward points :) ).

<comment><USER43> Also "credit rating" is not a thing...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> online banking :-) +bitcoin. It's not that hard, just make more than you spend. Invest in stocks, crypto, real estate, ETFs, index funds. Don't forget to join angelist if you are an accredited investor.

<comment><USER6> I like this: "make more than you spend."

Most people say it the other way: "spend less than you earn."

But one gives an emphasis on earning more income (more income === more money to save), the other simply limits how much you can spend.

I found that by focusing on _earning_ more, I had to worry less and less about spending less.

<comment><USER45> Many people find that their spending increases with earnings, and that even if they're earning above average they don't have any savings or pension sorted out.

<comment><USER6> I agree with this too. Saving/"not-spending" is important, but I still think that earning is more important.

A tip I once read that made sense to me:

\- Every raise you get (of predictable income), save 50% of it (so if I get a $10k/yr pay increase, I should increase savings by $5k/yr).

\- Every bonus you get (unpredictable income), save 90% of it

My savings and lifestyle would increase together as I begin to earn more, and all it takes is the discipline to follow those two rules.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I have used EveryDollar (everydollar.com) for the past year and it really helps me track spending. They have a plus version that only works with US banks but I have used the free version for a while now.

</comment><comment><USER47> Poorly.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Those of you who said they use a financial advisor -- where/how did you find a reliable person/firm?

<comment><USER48> My financial advisor was a friend (he suffered an undiagnosed heart attack a little over a year ago). I trusted him, with skepticism given his profession, but I was never really sure if I was getting the best advice.

\- The advice for college financing in colorado is great assuming laws don't change in the next 15 years. You can move money between one account and a college account for a few days before cashing it out.

\- The rest of our money is scattered between a number of funds I've never heard of.

I still think the best advice I've ignored is from my brother's FIL: put your money in a vanguard fund and forget about it;

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Using the danish overlay banking service www.spiir.dk</comment>


Star got swallowed by a Warp in Space-Time - <AUTHOR> http://www.popsci.com/fast-orbiting-pulsar-no-longer-detectable-researchers

<comment><USER2> No! The title is wrong! The star was not swallowed, she is fine, thanks for asking. The article explain the situation better.

The pulsar is preceding (you can simplify this as "rotating") so the pulsar is no longer "pointing" sometimes to the Earth. We can see directly the pulsar, because it's small and far away. We only can see the emission beams, I like the lighthouse analogy. It's "pointing" elsewhere, so it's still there but we can see it.</comment>


EWD692: Dijkstra's Review of Backus's Turing Award Lecture [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd06xx/EWD692.PDF <comment><USER2> Typical EWD. He has his approach ("the postulational method"), and anyone who doesn't use it cannot really reason about programs and programming languages. It's especially funny to see EWD get so snotty about functional programming.</comment>


Nietzsche's Eternal Return - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/10/14/nietzsches-eternal-return <comment><USER2> I've always found his concept of "live life in such a way, that at the end, you could say once more!"

Just imagine, how different would life be if people tried to live it in such a way, that if there was eternal re-occurrence, they would be content to relive it indefinitely.

The funny part really is, for all you know this isn't the first time where having this conversation.

<comment><USER3> > live life in such a way, that at the end, you could say once more

This is in stark contrast with Hinduism and Yoga - there the goal is to never come back!

<comment><USER4> In a sense, the idea of eternal recurrence (and much of Nietzsche's philosophy) was a direct attempt to reject Eastern (or Buddhist) conclusions.

Schopenhauer had a metaphysics & morality that was fairly consistent with (and maybe informed by) Buddhism - i.e. existence is suffering/dukhka, this arises from will/trishna, and its cessation can be achieved through something that looks like the dissolution of the self.

Nietzsche, who was an avid reader of Schopenhauer, ran with the idea that life was fundamentally a process of will/craving, but spent his career trying to reject the conclusion that this is something to be overcome.

I find Nietzsche's philosophy makes a lot more sense when motivated in this manner.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> These two excerpts probably explain what 'Eternal Return' is referring to.

> To the opponents of democracy, Nietzsche says, in essence: Just wait. > Liberal democracy will devour itself, creating conditions for authoritarian > rule. Disorder and instability will sow distrust in politics itself. "Step > by step, private companies will absorb the functions of the state," > Nietzsche writes. "Even the most tenacious remnants of the old work of > governing (the activity, for example, that is supposed to protect private > persons from one another) will finally be taken care of by private > entrepreneurs." The distinction between public and private spheres will > disappear. The state will give way to the "liberation of the private person > (I take care not to say: of the individual)."

> The entrepreneur Peter Thiel, an avid reader of Nietzsche, says things like > "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible." ... For > tech billionaires, national and racial hatreds are inconveniences; their > authoritarianism wears a cosmopolitan face, promising frictionless commerce > for all.

<comment><USER6> That's not what the eternal return refers to. It refers to physics - that the Universe will expand from and collapse to singularity and then do it again. His argument that if matter is finite, and time is infinite - therefore if we are composed of matter and given an infinite amount of time he thinks it is inevitable that matter/oneself will return to the exact same state over and over again.

It is an interesting thought experiment and I don't believe he's 100% correct with it, although I'll spare my interpretation.

It's not that the things you're saying don't have some relation to Nietzsche, but it has more to do with his thoughts on morality and so you're lumping things together in a categorical error. It's more important to think about it than to think Peter Thiel did all the heavy lifting for you already.

<comment><USER7> That's not it either. Eternal return is a actually a mental model to prepare yourself for all decision making: make the choice that you would be willing to live with choosing again and again for eternity. It's about removing yourself from cultural and political expectations and struggling through the only path that is uniquely you, because any less would be to lose yourself.

Someone suggested in another comment that you wouldn't know which life this is currently. This is also missing the point. Neitzchean eternal return is more like a Hell: relieving all your mistakes over and over for all time. Destined to make the same choices while woke to their failings.

The idea was to assert a non-humility and non-christian model of morality (a morality of self-realization)

<comment><USER6> Your last sentence is correct more or less, but I will say it can be both things at once, Nietzsche was taking a big gulp with that exercise and physics is part of it based on how he thought about it in relation to reality and his timeframe, not abstract unprovable concepts - a philosopher's job isn't to take you in one direction, so that's all that matters, although I will say Nietzsche was so close, but at the same time suffered from his own fatal flaw - dogma. Though he criticized Socrates exploitation of tragedy to convolute philosophy over the years, he seemed to see in his own self as some sort of tragic figure with people using morality as a way to shortcut. His longing for the 'ubermensch' is his own kinda distorted way of longing for a Christ like figure who knows that reason should prevail over morals - he maybe shouldn't have written off psychology and the Bible so hastily.

Where Nietzsche failed to connect the dots as a result of his logical error (righteous dogma/indulging in tragedy as a moral device with his longing for a savior figure) is that he is essentially arguing that the only sin is original sin. Before I get into how his argument fits into that, let me restate his argument in a logical manner so you can tell I understand it somewhat. Morality is a problematic logical argument because it means different things to different people depending on their intrinsic motivations (which are somehwat animalistic, unless one trains one mind to think logically, and even then still one must always learn to recognize the beast) - therefore it is subjective, and non-quantifiable and therefore useless to an intellectual argument - this creates false equivalence, this creates conflicts when people insert morality into their reasoning - it is a logical shortcut.

Back to original sin - "Eating from the tree of KNOWLEDGE OF GOOD AND EVIL" \- the Bible is a liar's paradox and if you start to look at it that way it's logical masterpiece and you bet whoever wrote it understood human nature and physics big time. Nietzsche believed whenever you thought you had knowledge of something, you had probably made some logical error in pursuit of a truth you wanted to believe was fixed. He is probably right - God is not divine justice and if it were we've all probably manipulated it to our subjective whims. Jesus isn't magic. But perhaps they are useful analogs : God is Truth, and unknowable - Jesus/Nietzsche/Ubermensch represents logic coupled with mankind's initial logical fallacy (pride of knowledge/divine b.s.) thus becoming a pariah (crucified/madness/misappropriated), just believing they could say something was good or evil without providing rationale as backed by a societal construct that was made to keep some kind of order (such as saying there is no relationship between physics and philosophy and religion and space/time) - but that's neither here nor there for me to speak of, I'd rather someone else pick up the hypothesis, but I may chime in if someone goes too far off course with this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> 'On the Genealogy of Morals' was the most coherent, accessible, and IMHO relevant text to out times, that Nietzsche ever produced.

<comment><USER9> This book changed my life, and sparked my interest in philosophy generally. Highly recommended.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Just go and read Deleuze's essays on Nietzsche. They're short and extremely insightful

<comment><USER11> You'd be much better advised to just go straight to the source and read Nietzsche, especially as he's one of the most readable, entertaining, and interesting philosophers ever.

You'd do yourself a disservice by looking at him through someone else's inevitably distorting glasses.

<comment><USER12> do you have to learn german just to read nietzsche?

<comment><USER13> As someone that has learnt German for other reasons, it definitely helps. There is a lot of word play in German in his writings that I feel translation loses. As well as emphasis in word choices stemming from German as a language that tends to either get glossed over or overlooked.

But in the end, no you don't, but it helps in the nuances of what is trying to be conveyed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14>
      Nietzsche is dead

</comment><comment><USER15> This article, as to be expected by the New Yorker, is fairly underwhelming, lacks a point and is outright wrong in a few places. For one, trying to apply Nietzsche's thought to modern politics is to completely misunderstand the man. His work has nothing to do with the supposedly 'new' phenomenon of news and media lying about the truth. It is far deeper and profound than the Trump- buzzword article of the day.

It's probably fair to say that Nietzsche, if he were around today, would almost certainly have no interest in the petty squabbles of democratic politics. To assign him a political viewpoint is to misunderstand that he is fundamentally interested in the individual human being as a self-contained phenomenon. His philosophy is not accurately characterized as "individualism" but it is absolutely not political in nature.

In any case, the title refers to an interesting idea which oddly enough isn't even mentioned in the article itself: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_return#Friedrich_Nietz...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_return#Friedrich_Nietzsche)

<comment><USER16> I agree with everything you said but this part:

> the individual human being as a self-contained phenomenon

He was absolutely an existentialist, but I think his rebuke of the Cartesian _cogito_ undermines that self-contained concept.

<comment><USER15> I was trying to avoid delving into his whole idea of the will and explicit anti-'selfhood' as it seemed a bit too much for a HN comment. But yeah, I was trying to say that N. isn't really a political thinker. He is better described as interested in fundamental forces that are far deeper than (what he perceives as) the petty mob values of democratic politics or a simple concept of individualism.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > Scholars still debate what Nietzsche had in mind. A physically stronger > being? [..] A kind of cyborg?

Nevermind scholar, what person who actually read Nietzsche seriously considers either of those? I would really like to see a source for this other than pop culture. Even "spiritual aristocrat" is weird, "spiritual athlete" would make more sense to me (even though it still wouldn't really _say_ anything).

Consider the opposite of the Übermensch, the "last man": [http://thelastmanonearth.blogspot.com/2009/03/nietzsche- and-...](http://thelastmanonearth.blogspot.com/2009/03/nietzsche-and-last- man.html)

Or this:

> _Anyone who doesn 't want to belong to the masses need only cease to go easy > on themselves; let them follow their conscience, which cries out to them "Be > yourself! You are none of those things that you now do, think, and desire." > Every young soul hears this call night and day and trembles, for when it > thinks of its true liberation, it has an inkling of the measure of happiness > for which it is destined from eternity. As long as it is shackled by the > chains of opinion and fear, nothing can help it attain this happiness. And > how bleak and senseless this life can become without this liberation!_

\-- Friedrich Nietzsche

I don't know what the Übermensch is, I always read Nietzsche like a poetry collection anyway, rather than a coherent model, and I haven't read Nietzsche in ages -- but I am pretty sure being one's own person (which of course is different for everybody) is part of it.

<comment><USER18> The most consistent interpretation IMO is 'person who engages in self-mastery to overcome obstacles'.

I think that interpretation also jives with why he was so critical of pity and humanism: because he genuinely believed that some suffering is needed because overcoming obstacles through exertion of the will is the only way for humanity to live a satisfying existence.

That's my $0.02 anyway...

<comment><USER19> The concept of self-mastery suggests that the outcome of the ancient dictum 'Temet nosce' (know thyself) is part of a (once well-known?) psychological process, of a liberation from ignorance.

I see an echo of that in Jung's 'individuation'. I see other echoes in Gurdjieff & Ouspensky's writings, in the efforts of the (non-materialist) alchemists, in Maslow's 'self-actualization', in Bucke's 'cosmic consciousness', etc ... and that's just in the West.

Huxley displays a somewhat more universal (but abstracted) outline of this constellation of efforts in his 1946 _The Perennial Philosophy_.

Long ago I waded (not very deeply) into N., but as I recall, he explored a lot more than this one idea. Maybe he's become most identified with it because its other numerous threads are too esoteric ... or concealed.

NB: One Jung take on Nietzsche (1936): [https://www.philosopher.eu/others- writings/essay-on-wotan-w-...](https://www.philosopher.eu/others- writings/essay-on-wotan-w-nietzsche-c-g-jung/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The article goes on and on but says nothing insightful. Just Wikipedia-like facts, strung together for the purpose of who knows. Be warned or be content that you're not the only one with that feeling.

<comment><USER21> > _The article goes on and on but says nothing insightful._

It's not supposed to.

A better title would be "A general introduction to Nietzsche's life to people who have only heard his name" \-- rather than the more promising "Nietzsche's Eternal Return" which only concerns half a hastily written paragraph in TFA.

That said, it's quite poorly informed in the philosophical aspects (didn't bother to check the biographical ones):

" _Scholars still debate what Nietzsche had in mind. A physically stronger being? A spiritual aristocrat? A kind of cyborg?_ "

Scholars might still debate "what Nietzsche had in mind" with Ubermench, but they don't consider any of the above options (except perhaps "a spiritual aristocrat", and that's still extremely vague).

<comment><USER22> Why do current scholars consider meaningful a philosopher who left poorly specified one of the core idea about which he wrote?

<comment><USER23> Nietzsche also put an end to a century of increasingly technical and analytical philosophy by dropping a lot of truth bombs that exposed the futility of a century of German philosophy. He's kind of an edgelord by 19th century standards, but he wasn't wrong that German philosophy had been intellectual masturbation with no meaning for quite a while.

His wordplay is an intentional reaction to blowhards like Kant and Schopenhauer — who attempted to be so precise they were almost certain to be proven wrong given enough time. He is intentionally vague, because he's allowing for the fact that definitions and sentiments change arbitrarily over time. But he is intentionally evasive in his prose to distance him from a specific German philosophical tradition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> While I don't agree with everything Pinker says, I must say, Pinker's point on "Drop the Nietsche" in his book, Enlightenment Now, did influence me:

 _Keep some perspective. Not every problem is a Crisis, Plague, Epidemic, or Existential Threat, and not every change is the End of This, the Death of That, or the Dawn of a Post-Something Era. Don 't confuse pessimism with profundity: problems are inevitable, but problems are solvable, and diagnosing every setback as a symptom of a sick society is a cheap grab for gravitas. Finally, drop the Nietzsche. His ideas may seem edgy, authentic, baad, while humanism seems sappy, unhip, uncool. But what's so funny about peace, love, and understanding?_

Edit: "I agree" \--> "influenced me". Maybe reading more of Nietsche might open up my mind more on his work. :-)

<comment><USER15> Pinker is perhaps the single most uninformed public "intellectual" in society today. His ideas are slightly above Gladwell yet somehow he commands respect. I really don't understand it.

<comment><USER25> Ad hominem attacks don't really improve the level of discussions on HN.

<comment><USER15> I don't consider it an ad-hominem attack. The man has consistently shown that he is vastly undereducated on things he has public opinions on. The quote linked to above is a perfect example - it reads as if from someone who skimmed the Wikipedia article on Nietzsche and spent zero time attempting to understand his thought.

For anyone who has even a passing knowledge of Nietzsche's ideas, Pinker's quote is just hilariously, woefully ignorant. Nietzsche was not a pessimist - if anything he was an optimist. It's only in the (uninformed) public imagination that he is some kind of nihilist pessimist. Judging from Pinker's quote, his knowledge of Nietzsche doesn't go deeper than public hearsay.

Considering that nearly all of Pinker's works suffer from this same flaw, I have no problem dismissing him.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> _yawn_ I'm tired of Nietzsche. Just as the world needed a new prophet, Zarathustra, we need a new misunderstood, brooding, wishes-he-were-a-poet grimbad philosopher. Nietzsche is great, but the motions of the ages are even startig to catch up to him, too. _Ecce Homo_ is still interesting and somewhat relevant, but all of his other works are full of ideas that hae been sufficiently adopted or misappropriated by society at large as to be faux pas or bland. His war against Christian society and morals, for instance, while stylistically interesting, is almost entirely irrelevant at this stage in history. He's become idolized and his message has become diluted, just like everyone else.

That said, he's still a delight to read. Some of the aphorisms are also still glittering gems. I just find the major concepts in his thinking are somewhat musty at this point.

<comment><USER27> Nietzsche never truly had a war with Christianity. He was an optimist often mistaken as an nihilist. I'm skeptical why he never went into how free will is an illusion and otherwise his writing illustrates he thought people could make themselves have a good destiny or not. His eternal reoccurrence theory even is more understandable when thinking from a hard determinist mindset.

<comment><USER28> > I'm skeptical why he never went into how free will is an illusion

> Men were considered "free" only so that they might be considered guilty – > could be judged and punished: consequently, every act had to be considered > as willed, and the origin of every act had to be considered as lying within > the consciousness (and thus the most fundamental psychological deception was > made the principle of psychology itself).

Source: Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How well does the Windows version of node.js work? - <AUTHOR> I'm a node developer, I've been developing on Linux and then OS X for the last decade or so (in Python before node came along).
For various reasons - mainly around hardware - I'm interested in Windows. I use Sublime, Sourcetree, git, RethinkDB, and other apps that have Windows 10 versions. I also use Sketch which has no Windows 10 version, but Adobe XD is similar.
Does anyone develop on node / Windows every day? How well does it work? Do you have issues with path length? Apps assuming path separators? Do you have issues with c modules? Do you lose productivity from random brokenness? Or is it pretty solid? <comment><USER2> I use Node on Windows regularly as I have a client whose stack is mostly based on .NET, but they recently started using Node as well.

I use Visual Studio Code. Atom also works well. I was told that Visual Studio should also work, but apparently I'm simply not clever enough to figure out how to make it do what I want it to do.

Path length is definitely an issue; I check out all git repos directly under C:\b\ which is usually enough to work around path length issues. Path separators usually just work as Windows is rather good at translating / to \, but still it's good practice to use path.join / path.resolve rather than "hardcoding" separators.

Getting node-gyp working is black magic and it requires the recital of arcane incantations, but it's doable. However, some node-gyp modules are not very well tested on Windows and fail all sorts of weird ways. For example (and this might have been fixed since then, haven't checked in a while) the "pg-native" module (native driver for PostgreSQL) builds on Windows, but crashes when you're trying to use it. Fortunately, many native modules have JavaScript-only alternatives that you can use on Windows.

Npm works well, but due to how file locking works on Windows (you can't delete (unlink) open files), you can't always run npm update while your application is running.

Generally speaking, once you have a solid initial setup, things tend to work well. I don't run Node on Windows in production, but it performs well for development purposes.

<comment><USER3> Have you tried npm 3? Does its flattening solve your path length issues?

<comment><USER2> Yes, I use node 5 and npm 3 and it improves the situation. That being said, npm 3 won't help if the project's folder structure is itself deeply nested.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> My primary development box is on Windows (for reasons similar to yours) and Node.JS is for better or worse, my bread & butter.

The single biggest issue with Node.JS (or Python, Ruby, Lua, PHP, etc) development on windows is in my book the difficulty of setting up the build tools so that you can compile native modules. It always takes me at least an hour, as instructions seem to stop working between major OS versions, MSVC versions and the versions of whatever language you're using (relevant example: you recently had to patch psycopg2 to get it to build in the VC compiler required by Python 3.5)

Path-wise, you won't encounter any trouble: Windows accepts / just as well as the preferred \ and the OS supports long file names; it's just the tooling that's bugged. npm3 mostly solves the issue, but if you're stuck with v2, `npm install -g rimraf` to get a long-path-aware version of `rm -rf` that you can use to "reset" your node_modules folder.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Windows accepts / just as well as the preferred \

So someone can (naively) concatenate paths with / and fs.readFile() and require() etc will still work?

I'm on npm v3 right now anyway for the dedupe and better shrinkwrap features so no need for extra work.

<comment><USER4>
      B:\_purgatory>mkdir hello
      B:\_purgatory>echo "test" > hello/world

      B:\_purgatory>node
      > var fs = require("fs")
      undefined
      > fs.readFileSync("hello/world")
      <Buffer 22 74 65 73 74 22 20 0d 0a>

As for require, iirc "/" is part of the spec and gets normalized to the OS standards afterwards

<comment><USER5> OK, I just have to ask... what are you developing that it deserves the project title of "_pergatory"?!?

<comment><USER4> B: is my workspace partition, and `purgatory` is just the name of a folder I use for files and folders that I will eventually either delete or include in an existing project (helps when I'm in over my head with git). Underscore is there to show up first in explorer

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's an interesting time to be asking the question, because the new "Ubuntu for Windows"[1] subsystem will provide another alternative for running node.js on Windows.

I certainly wouldn't want to try it now unless you really want to be a beta tester for Microsoft, but in a few months that may be the superior alternative for node.js on Windows.

1: [https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2016/03/30/run- bash-o...](https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2016/03/30/run-bash-on- ubuntu-on-windows/)

<comment><USER6> I did try it. Node works fine even though I didn't do anything exotic on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> At my last company we built an internal build/deployment tool and dashboard. Because we serviced a lot of clients and a number of them were .NET projects, our tool had to be deployed to Windows. There were a couple of devs who did their work in Windows and I did mine in OS X, using a VM to test for compatability.

There was always something wrong, usually in some plugin that assumed weird things about file paths. I think we submitted like 25-30 PRs to various plugins, a number of which weren't taken in because they didn't want to maintain Windows compatability.

One of the bigger issues we had was in fronting the application with IIS and logging it. It's been about 18+ months now, so the specific are foggy but our application took a long time to be resilient on Windows, to the extent that we ran the same code deployed to Windows and Ubuntu for about 8 months and primarily everyone used the Ubuntu server because it was always working.

Windows is very often not even a tested platform for most plugins, which leads to very weird things very deep in code that take quite a while to figure out.

With all of that, the Node community moves fast, so you could hope life's better now than 18 months ago- but I doubt that the community suddenly decided to add Windows to their development cycle.

In the end, we wound up with a very stable, very awesome build and deployment platform that worked great for us- and unlike all the other options we looked at, handled the gamut of C#, Java, PHP, front end only, whatever projects we had and deployed them in all the ways they'd want to be deployed. 18 months on, with little maintenance the system is supposedly still going strong- so developing Node on Windows is possible and you can make it stable, but you will very likely be doing a lot of work on other people's projects that you want to use, and you'll need to be okay with that.

</comment><comment><USER8> I use node on Windows everyday and very rarely run into any issues. Following the dev environment setup from microsoft's node.js guidelines[0] should take care of a majority of any issues you might run into with handling path length (tools for removing things > MAX_PATH), using c modules, etc...

[0]: [https://github.com/Microsoft/nodejs- guidelines](https://github.com/Microsoft/nodejs-guidelines)

</comment><comment><USER9> I've worked with nodejs on Windows daily for years now and have very few issues. Almost all of those issues can be related to:

\- Bad npm scripts in `package.json`; usually maintainers with a severe OS X slant who don't consider that setting environment variables requires some cross-platform love (getting better though thanks to an awareness of this in the community and packages handling it such as `cross-env` and `better-npm- run`)

\- Modules that require being built via node-gyp require some combination of Python 2 and VS 2010. Once these are on your PATH there is no more friction.

\- Path lengths are not an initial problem with npm 2 on install but will grow to be an annoyance later. The flat(-ter) module folders provided by npm 3 is welcome.

</comment><comment><USER10> Yes, we develop many cryptocurrency/blockchain applications (e.g. Bitcoin, Ethereum) using Node.js under Windows. Some people use Visual Studio (I think the best) while others use WebStorm.

The issue with path length is almost always experienced with Visual Studio and when it is solved is because the developer moved the project to C:\ the same project works well with WebStorm.

I don't remember having issues with path separators, we even move the projects from Windows to Linux and they work without changes. There are typical recommendations when you use filesystem operations directly like using specific modules for handling paths.

Native modules are a difficult aspect of development, but this is not Node specific but general. We have similar experiences in other programming languages. We even wrote an article for a specific case [http://blog.coinfabrik.com/installing-copay-in-microsoft- win...](http://blog.coinfabrik.com/installing-copay-in-microsoft-windows/)

So, we are happy developing in Windows and the native modules are the only critical aspect, but if it is just a compilation issue it can be solved with some effort.

</comment><comment><USER11> We develop in Windows and Mac and they have been remarkably solid with a few gotchas.

One, the case sensitivity of file names. Two, compiled modules have not behaved well on Windows in all cases. We tend to avoid them. Three, the path length has definitely caught us. However, NPM now mitigates that with a new flatter directory structure.

<comment><AUTHOR> Which specific native modules have been a prob?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It makes me rip my hair out. I brought my own SSD to work to install Linux Mint because I was sick of Windows headaches. You are REQUIRED to install Visual Studio for most npm installs to work (for building stuff). Constant file path issues. That's corrected by deleting the node_modules folder which sometimes takes 20 minutes, and often also fails because the file path is too long which means you just have to rename it and have it forever stuck there unless you get some special software to remove it. Installing web stack takes longer on Windows and is error prone. Lots of smaller projects don't work well on Windows. You have to use inferior version of name version manager. The list goes on. Don't do it.

<comment><USER13> 'npm install -g rimraf' will provide the special software needed to delete files whose path names are too long in Windows. I deal with this _all the time_ with Atom extensions, and it drives me crazy. It drives me crazy that it's even possible for the normal file creation APIs to create files that the normal file rename and delete APIs can't process.

<comment><USER12> I was honestly in disbelief when I first came across it. It just seems insanely stupid on so many levels.

<comment><USER14> AFAIR, the case is that NTFS supports long file paths very well, and Windows has APIs to deal with long paths, but a lot of software (Windows Explorer inexplicably being one of them) uses old APIs that choke on paths over 260 chars.

`rimraf` solves the issue of deleting such files and it's one of the must-have tools when doing node dev on windows, like `grep` etc

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> We're a .NET shop that has started using node for new projects, and it's been a happy path so far. Native modules have only rarely been an issue, only when they require a specific version of Visual Studio, of course different than the one we use. All our build tools are available under Windows. Stability is not a problem either. Test and prod environments are linux boxes, but I have never seen a bug that appeared only on one OS, so cross-compatibility is not an issue. And there are plenty of text editors and related software you might need to choose from, so I don't think you'll miss anything critical.

</comment><comment><USER14> Been using node on win since 0.8, mostly for tooling (not prod servers). JS stuff works fine. I don't write C modules so can't tell. Bugs on Windows are rare, mostly smallish and easy to fix bugs on obscure one-man modules developed on osx - but once a module gets traction, it gets win support soon. No issues with paths, though I use node tools via git bash only.

The issues with paths generally manifest themselves in test suites due to sloppy test (expected /foo/bar, got \foo\bar) but in practice it doesn't matter. Use path.resolve in test, fixed.

</comment><comment><USER16> As another node developer, I left Windows ~2y ago for Linux. node and it's ecosystem were already well supported on Windows back then.

Development-wise, I can't remember a single issue with node (file-watching even worked quite well). Working with Docker however wasn't nice. But I believe that changed in the meanwhile?

As a side-note: Ubuntu/Linux came a long way. I went back-and-forth between both a few times during the last ~10y. Things that scared me (window management being a big one) are a pleasure to work with in Ubuntu nowadays.

<comment><AUTHOR> Understood. I've used Linux desktops on and off since the 90s. Not discounting your experience, but my own is that every time I think everything is fixed, it isn't:

\- My last Linux desktop was purchased for hardware that had 100% OSS drivers: even then compositing on an external display wouldn't work.

\- The Windows machine I'm looking at has a version sold with Ubuntu. It's still pretty awful according to HN users.

I speak a lot, I need to be able to plug into every projector 100% of the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you wait for a couple of months for Ubuntu for Windows to be bundled in the new release of windows you can just use that and probably avoid most of the issues mentioned here.

</comment><comment><USER17> Works pretty well. There are some npm packages that don't work with windows. [subst]( [https://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp...](https://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en- us/subst.mspx?mfr=true)) solves the path issue. Also with bash on windows in the future it shouldn't be any issue.

</comment><comment><USER18> So the thing is, if you're doing Node development on Windows, you're not going to be running in production on a Windows box, right? So use Vagrant or Docker or some other "run in a virtual Linux environment" thing, which will make your dev machine match your server environment more closely.

<comment><USER19> I hear MS is really pushing Node on Azure. There was another HN article recently mentioning something like $100K of discounts for the first year, but to tell you the truth, that wasn't really enough to pique my interest in Azure. The only reason I'm here is for disaster stories and popcorn ;)

Things must have gone pretty bad if Azure is offering Linux now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I have been developing side-projects with node on windows for years and I've, other than some "native" modules not building, didn't have any big problems. Everything's been very stable for me. For the native modules, it's usually resolved if you have MinGW or something similar.

</comment><comment><USER21> You could still use Docker or a vagrantbox if you ever encounter problems.

</comment><comment><USER22> I use OSX at work and GNU/Linux and Windows at home. The only issue I've had are native modules but with msys2 I've usually been able to solve them 90% of the time.</comment>