Bond crash across the world as deflation trade goes wrong - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/11666355/Bond-crash-across-the-world-as-deflation-trade-goes-horribly-wrong.html <comment><USER2> Strong language for a piece of financial news.

> ... crash ... horribly wrong ... clear warnings ... catching fire ... > vengeance ... violent ... epicentre ... horribly wrong ... drama ... > capitulation ... a lot of pain ... crash ... accident ... hammer ... > crushing force ... shock ... vigilantes ...

Looks well set up to trigger sentiment analysing trader bots.

<comment><USER3> Your comment is even better set up. I can imagine in future articles will have "(bots ignore)" in the articles ;)

<comment><USER4> Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has been accurately described as "never the calmest man in a room", so the first cut of such a bot would be really simple ^_^.

Seriously, he's been lots of fun to read since the start of the Clinton administration, but after a while you learn to apply a mental filter. For that matter, much of the British press is way more ... passionate than ours, that's one of its charming qualities. Along with oddities like the tabloid Daily Mail doing a lot of good reporting along with the celebrity articles, often better for US events than US media.

<comment><USER5> >the tabloid Daily Mail doing a lot of good reporting

Pardon?

<comment><USER4> Seriously!

In the example I'm best acquainted with, the 2011 Joplin, Missouri tornado, their early reporting was as good as anyone from the outside. In my personal photo gallery [http://www.ancell- ent.com/1715_Rex_Ave_127B_Joplin/images/](http://www.ancell- ent.com/1715_Rex_Ave_127B_Joplin/images/) the before and after pictures of my apartment complex at the end were grabbed from the Daily Mail. (EDITED from Daily Mirror.)

In general, in events where photos matter they're really good, and their copy, once you filter out the "passion" as I put it above is pretty good, especially since they don't overly try to force things into irrelevant narratives. More straight reporting than US we pretend to be objective "journalism".

I suggest you try them a few times when a "breaking" event happens, e.g. a hostage situation.

<comment><USER6> Are the Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail associated? You're citing an example from the Mirror to illustrate why the Mail is not bad, which I don't quite understand.

<comment><USER7> The photo is also credited to AP (which makes it's appearance elsewhere coverage more than reporting).

<comment><USER4> That's a rather fine line, or at least I consider the job of "reporting" to include gathering and selecting from all things that are relevant, which would of course include 3rd party wire photos.

<comment><USER7> It's certainly pedantic, my point is more that coverage is a clearer description of the process of printing stuff off the wire, not so much that reporting is the wrong word for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nitpick: What's with those charts trying to predict economic quantities such as debt ratios for decades into the future (as the last chart in the article does)? Such predictions are entirely impossible, and their only conceivable purpose is to mislead the reader.

There should be some kind of media best practices against that sort of thing.

(Speculation about the far future is fine, but then your visualizations have to make it entirely obvious how uncertain the future is, by showing the full range of scenarios and how wildly they always differ.)

</comment><comment><USER9> Love that sentence:

 _[...] 'narrow' M1 money in the eurozone has been growing at a rate of 16.2pc (annualized) over the last six months. You do not have to be monetarist expert to see the glaring anomaly._

Even though you do not have to be a monetarist expert, it's probably easier to see the glaring anomaly, when you understand some of the concepts mentioned. :)

<comment><USER10> You need the previous paragraph to see the anomaly:

"a small army of hedge funds and 'prop desks' trying to squeeze a few last drops out of a spent deflation trade"

You probably know about inflation (prices going up) and probably have heard of hyper-inflation, where the government just keeps printing more money, so there is too much money for the economy. As happened in the Weimer Republic or Zimbabwe. Perhaps you've heard the old joke of someone having to take a wheelbarrow full of money just to buy a loaf of bread, leaving it unattended for a moment, and returning to find someone had dumped out all the money and stolen the wheelbarrow.

Deflation is the opposite, where there is a shortage of money.

M1 money is the money you can spend. It's a subset of M2 money which is the money you can spend in a bit. Which is a subset of M3 money which is the money rich people can use without spending, plus all your money.

So, the traders have been trying to make money from deflation, a shortage of money, when money has been growing at 16.2%. That's the glaring anomaly.

The trader explains this as, "We're too dogmatic". This is trader talk for, "We're a bunch of barely numerate halfwits who have no idea what we're doing. None of us do. We're just trying to get out of this shitty business as multi- millionaires before we die of a heart-attack aged 40."

Hope that explains it OK.

<comment><USER9> I see. Thank you for the explanation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Has the deflation dragon been Slain? Let's see. My perspective is that there have been many false dawns in Japan, even after more than 20 years there is still no clear way out. Of course Japan is a special case: as close as it is to China. As long as PRC growth slows, the developed world may get some respite from deflation. Which is intended as observation, not judgement. Good wishes to the Chinese economy.

<comment><USER5> Japan isn't special. Japan is a taste of what's to come.

<comment><USER12> Well, no, Japan is a taste of what's to come _if we do what Japan did_ and if the circumstances are the same.

To say that Japan is the inevitable end result, no matter what we do... I'll just say "Objection, your honor. Assumes facts not in evidence."

<comment><USER13> > Well, no, Japan is a taste of what's to come if we do what Japan did and if > the circumstances are the same.

Have an aging population and birth rate contraction? Because that's the fate (which ISN'T A BAD THING) of all developed countries.

<comment><USER4> That's a VERY BAD THING if your aging population can't be supported by a too small younger demographic. One of Japan's solutions has been in part to simply lose a lot of their old age pension records in a conveniently incompetent computerization effort for the less powerful, the ones in the high risk, low reward sector of the economy (not the salarymen). Another has been what sure looks like unsustainable borrowing.

But eventually present consumption by definition has to come from present production, and that looks unsustainable, at least while keeping everyone at First World levels.

Addressing AnimalMuppet's point a bit, a welfare state is incompatible with unrestricted immigration by people with low earning potential, as we're experiencing today. It makes the welfare state all the more unsustainable, and at least one side of the isle ought to be concerned that it noticeably strengthens capital's hand.

<comment><USER13> I don't agree at all. You're assuming you need people to support an aging population, while at the same time everyone is crying out that automation and software are going to make everyone redundant.

Has anyone not imagined these two points intersecting?

<comment><USER4> I don't see it happening soon enough for a whole bunch of reasons. The suppression of nanotech development for an "ultimate" solution, the current VC, IPO etc. situation which is anything but hardware friendly, in sharp contrast to the, oh, pre-mid-90s or so, to just how darn hard this stuff is.

My mother was a RN, my father managed the business affairs of a lot of doctors, one of which was his primary hunting partner, my youngest parent is almost 80, this is not stuff you can automate now at any level beyond say lab work, and I don't see that changing in time.

I, at least, and not "crying out that automation and software are going to make everyone redundant" prior to some nanotech utopia, which is some years out from even achieving the first levels of Drexler style nanotech.

<comment><USER13> > I, at least, and not "crying out that automation and software are going to > make everyone redundant" prior to some nanotech utopia, which is some years > out from even achieving the first levels of Drexler style nanotech.

Then I think we have much work to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I would be grateful is someone could turn this into lower-level language!

<comment><USER15> When you buy a bond, you are making a loan. You have agreed to hand over a bunch of money today and in return you get scheduled payments from the lendee. The quarterly or biannual or yearly payments are set in a specific currency.

If you recall the stories told about Germany after WW1, they jacked up their inflation because their repayment (pmts were to France, I believe) amounts were set in Deutsche Marks. Because the German gov't could print marks, they could raise inflation arbitrarily. Inflating the volume of deutsche marks in circulation makes each individual deutsche mark less valuable.

So in the late 20s or early 30s, the German got had cut themselves a sweet deal handing worthless deutsche marks over to the French and the german people would buy loaves of bread with wheelbarrows of Deutsche marks, according to the tales.

Inflation is not only the result of printing extra money. If workers become more valuable, their salaries rise and they have extra money to spend, the merchants they trade with can raise prices as well, etc.

So from a naive, freshman macroeconomics view (ie mine), increased trade, increased demand drives inflation in the currency. By that same token, decreased economic activity, laid off workers etc drives deflation. In that scenario, money is worth more and more because many people don't have it. That's when someone on the street in the Great Depression trades a pound of apples for a nickel, when currency is scarce and valuable.

So betting on deflation can be tantamount to betting the U.S. economy at large will tighten up and times will be rough. It is my understanding of the Telegraph headline that many traders bet on an economic downturn that never got as bad as they had hoped for.

<comment><USER16> My finance buddies have been waiting for the bomb to blow up for a decade. It's really a game of musical chairs.

The less pessimistic view of this (which my aged father holds) is that the saving grace of the US is while we have problems, China + Japan + Europe have awful demographics and we're stealing many of their best youngsters. And our popular culture is amazing- nobody else is even close. Unfortunately, this means we probably won't address our problems in a timely manner. A Chinese meltdown makes the US a more attractive place to put money.

<comment><USER15> >A Chinese meltdown makes the US a more attractive place to put money.

You're totally right.The slowdown in emerging markets relative to their strength in the wake of the financial crisis could be the lion's share of the dollar's strength.

The fact that we haven't had a government shutdown in a while could be playing a big part. This stuff is so complicated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> A story about a global "bond crash" that _only_ appears in the Telegraph? The Telegraph which is bought and paid for by HSBC?

</comment><comment><USER18> _" They always thought there would be some other sucker to buy at an even higher price. Now we are returning to sanity."_

Great quote. It's interesting that stocks are up over the past couple of days, despite the fact that they're already at record highs. It'll be even more interesting to see what happens when the Fed starts unwinding its QE bond holdings.

<comment><USER19> Rising interest rates make it unattractive to hold long-term bonds. For example, when interest rates jump from 3% to 4%, the net present value of 10-year bond drops by 10%. So as soon as investors believe that the turning point has come, the rational reaction is to sell bonds, amplifying the raise in interest rates even more.

But where will they put that money instead? Letting it sit around in cash is not a wise idea because oftentimes, rising interest rates come hand in hand with inflation. Your best bet is to buy something of "real" value, be it gold, real estate, or stocks. In my opinion, this could explain the growing divergence between stocks and bonds. At least for a while, I would expect this to continue and stocks to go up with bonds falling, or at least stocks not fall as much as bonds.

Then again, it is very hard to predict such things.

<comment><USER20> But according to the fed model [1] stock prices decline when interest rates rise. How do you account for that?

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fed_model](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fed_model)

<comment><USER21> It depends on the real interest rate.

Suppose you buy a long term bond yielding 5%, inflation was 2%. Now rates of bonds w/ comparable maturity and credit go up to 7% and inflation goes up to 4%.

Your bond is going to be worth a lot less now, but stocks could be (in reality not necessarily...) more robust to this change.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Ben Bernanke: Why are interest rates so low?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9289612](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9289612)

</comment><comment><USER23> Bad week to buy a mortgage.

<comment><USER12> If you mean as an investor that you buy someone's existing mortgage, yes, it probably is a bad week to do so - unless you get it at a discount.

If you mean, buy a house using a mortgage, though, it's a great week to have done so - if you had a lock on last week's or last month's rate. It still might be a good time to do so.

And if you haven't refinanced and have a high rate, well, it looks like that ship is just about to sail. Do it now if it makes sense, because you won't have the opportunity to do so much longer...

<comment><USER24> Raising interest rate will limit number of people that can/are willing to take a mortgage, which will limit the demand, which will make house prices to go down.

Raising interest rate will limit the investments, jobs, salaries, which will make more people default on their houses. Which will boost the above effect.

So yeah, you can buy a house for X, with a nice tiny interest rate, but your house soon might be worth 3/4 * X or even 1/2 * X.

The time to take mortgages is when rates are being lowered, not when their being raised. The rate itself is not very important. When interest rates are high, the prices are lower. When interest is lower the prices are higher. It's the dynamic (change in interest rate) that is important. You want the person you can sell the house to, be able to pay you more than you paid.

* Note, I'm not an expert, I might be wrong. This is not a investment advise.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, the effect you describe is very real. It's because the demand price curve for houses is set by the monthly payment, not by the total price, and the monthly payment depends on both the price and the interest rate.

So what you ideally would like to do is buy when the interest rates are high (and prices low), then refinance as the rates drop, and get both lower payments and increased total value.

But rates aren't going to drop for quite a while, so now what do you do? It seems to me that prices are low for how low the rates are, so buying is still (to me) a reasonable decision.

> * Note, I'm not an expert, I might be wrong. This is not a investment > advise.

Ditto. Also note that I already own a house, so I'm not taking my own advice, either.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


First Chrome OS netbook expected this month - <AUTHOR> http://www.geek.com/articles/gadgets/first-chrome-os-netbook-expected-this-month-may-be-google-own-brand-hardware-2010112/

<comment><USER2> I'm excited to hear that but also surprised.

When I checked on Chrome OS project page only a few weeks ago, it looked like the project had done very little of public mention since a year ago. And the video on the linked page with the demo is a year old.

And, I'm confused about what Google is doing with Chrome OS and Android. Google TV runs an old version of Chrome, stamped as a newer version, but is supposed to later run newer Chrome and Android apps. I know that Android isn't really mean for netbooks (even though it has been run on some), and I like the idea of Google providing an operating system that can run seemlessly like the rest of the web in a browser. But, it almost feels like these two efforts (Chrome OS and Android) should be managed by two different companies. I just don't see how the company can effectively focus on one or the other in marketing and not cause problems for the other: If I create an ad for Chrome OS that implies running in a web browser OS is smarter, that would be a slight against Android, even if it is unrealistic to run Chrome OS on a mobile device; similarly, if I create an ad for Android saying that people should buy Android because there are 50 million apps (not yet, but just an example) then that might be a slight against Chrome OS which may have many fewer apps available in the Chrome OS Web Store ( <https://chrome.google.com/webstore> ).

<comment><USER3> The Android/ChromeOS strategy makes sense from Google's point of view. At this stage in the game, it's unclear whether the future of app development is browser-based or native, but it's incredibly important to get the answer right. So what do you do? If you're Google, you run a big A/B test and let the data decide.

Apple is doing something similar on a smaller scale by investing heavily in both webkit and native apps. In the short term it causes some developer and user confusion, but it's worth it to make sure they aren't left behind if web apps win in the end.

<comment><USER2> I don't think it is an A/B test. They just want to dominate the web in the short and long term. The majority of their efforts support this hypothesis.

To own the web in the current day and age, they would want to:

\- Own the browser (so they started the Chrome project)

\- Own the OS (preferably using Chrome, to reduce complexity/overhead/duplication)

\- Own the applications/be what people use (Google apps, App Engine, Search, Gmail, ...)

\- Own the data (Search, Maps/Street View/Google Earth, Google Base, Google Apps, Google Groups, Gmail, ...)

\- Make business dependent on Google (Search, Ads, ...)

To own the web in the future they would want to:

\- Embrace web to transition world from client-centric/thick-client to fully browser-based that just _happens_ to run on their browser. (I doubt they will make the browser pluggable, using the excuse that this would be way too complex.) Android does not further this purpose as much as Chrome OS.

Android was originally supposed to be a temporary solution to the mobile OS (like iOS, Windows Mobile, etc.). However, when it took off (exceeding their expectations, I imagine) they had to temporarily deprioritize Chrome OS. But, eventually mobile devices could run Chrome OS, at which point they'd ditch Android.

I think Apple is making a similar play now, heading towards the eventual "merge" of iOS and OS X, using the iOS model of controlling the apps sold via the app store in OS X until mobile devices are powerful enough to run (the future version of) OS X (after it has been redesigned to better support usage on a smaller screen without mouse, etc.). Except that Apple won't (in this century) ditch the significant investment in Cocoa for a browser-based OS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Netbooks just seem like a solution needing a problem to me. My kids have a netbook that I bought them for Christmas last year, but the greatly prefer using a regular sized computer or my iPad.

<comment><USER5> The problem: I want to browse the web (on the go) for long periods of time, on a reasonable screen and without a cord.

Potential solutions: Traditional laptop: nope. Probably < 4 hours battery, huge and heavy, overpowered for the task.

Phone: nope. screen is too small for comfortable web browsing, typing is slow.

Tablet: sure, this would work. But they're > $500, so that's a pretty solid commitment.

Netbook: yep! > 10 hour battery life, okay screen, perfect solution to "I want to browse the web on the go". They can be had for ~$200, so you can save hundreds by not going for a tablet.

Note: I own a netbook and love it (I have the new System76 Starling). I don't own a tablet. So maybe I'm biased.

<comment><USER6> _The problem: I want to browse the web (on the go) for long periods of time, on a reasonable screen and without a cord._

Once again, Apple has the right answer. Go lighter and not too small. I think there was a powerful economic incentive to go with smaller screens for early netbooks because one could still deliver laptop-like functionality with cheaper hardware. The problem with this is that the user has to pay with less comfort. The smaller Unibody Air still has a comfortable keyboard and a screen larger than most netbooks.

To make a profit: sell something with components like the 11" Macbook Air, with just as much performance and a comparably slick design but just a tiny bit thicker, with a plastic body, even less weight, and over 8 hours of real- world battery life. There are currently 11" netbooks, but they seem to fall short in one or two of the above aspects. (HP Mini 311 is close.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Google is going to have a really tough time marketing this. It's a bold idea, which, one way or another, is probably the correct direction for personal computing. But the timing is just too soon. And I doubt people are willing to hand a golden key to all their data, documents, photos, passwords, everything to a single company.

Also I wonder if Google even realizes that the iPad has pretty much nuked the entire netbook market. Nobody really wanted these machines anyways, they wanted touchscreen tablets.

<comment><USER8> Actually, I think quite a lot of people won't care about this golden key thing. If they did, they wouldn't be using Facebook either.</comment></comment>


No best practices: The fallacy of methodologies - <AUTHOR> http://danieltenner.com/posts/0016-no-best-practices.html <comment><USER2> > When someone picks out the bits that might work for a specific project but > doesn't succeed, the blame that they receive is "you didn't follow the whole > methodology".

I wouldn't say "blame", really; it's more that you shouldn't say you failed while doing X, if you weren't really doing X. That casts a bad light on X, whether it was X's fault or yours that the project failed. Just say you were adopting an organic/syncretic methodology, and leave it at that.

</comment><comment><USER3> After 4 years at Accenture with a responsibility for 'process' in one's title and enough free time to gain a familiarity with Dilbert cartoons but not enough to consider the possibility that perhaps people have thought deeply about these problems before. Maybe they even wrote papers.

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

And they did, except better. They even came up with that title, except better.

<comment><USER4> There are no such thing as old jokes, my friend. To a newborn, every joke is a world première.

<comment><USER3> I sort of expect someone who's held a job in tech and self-describes as a CTO of a start-up to actually know some of the good old jokes. My expectations of newborns, are, as you suggest, less stringent.

<comment><USER4> I tend to write for my readers as opposed to writing for myself. I've rarely found out something that I didn't already know, from reading one of my own blog posts!

It seems you got this impression from reading this post that this is a new realisation for me - it's not, I just happened to write about it now. I'll try to make that clearer in future posts.

<comment><USER3> _It seems you got this impression from reading this post that this is a new realisation for me - it's not_

I didn't know you were the author of the post. The impression I got was that you were blithely unaware of the basic literature on the subject. And really, if you're going to make a post called 'No best practices' and don't reference Brooks at all, it's hard to come up with explanations other than 'plagiarism' or 'ignorance'.

In fact, while I have you on the line, let me ask you directly - had you read the Brooks essay?

<comment><USER4> Yes, I have. I'm not quite sure how "someone wrote a related paper 30 years ago" prevents me from writing a blog post on a topic that I want to write about, though.

<comment><USER3> Well the thing is, someone actually wrote a seminal, much quoted paper 30 years ago. _You_ wrote a _"related"_ platitude-laden derivative and borrowed the title 30 years later. Nothing prevents you from doing that at all. Common decency suggests you should reference the original, if you were, as you claim, well aware of it. That's all.

<comment><USER4> Please note that I said I have read that paper. That doesn't mean I was thinking of that paper when I wrote this blog post. Pardon me for not having absolutely everything I have read in mind whenever I write a blog post.

Anyway, this conversation is incredibly tedious. I'm done with this thread.

<comment><USER3> You noted it here, not in your post. Citing references and work your work is based on is certainly quite tedious. Sometimes doing the right thing is tedious. Doesn't make it any less right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I agree with this post 100%. _However_ , there is one thing I'd like to note. While I agree that one should not be blindly obedient to methodologies, one should make an informed decision about what parts to pick and choose. Unless you've actually tried the _whole thing_ , chances are you won't be informed enough to make a good decision. Otherwise, it's way too easy to look at some parts of the methodology and say "well that just sounds stupid" without really seeing the benefit.

I'm not saying everyone needs to drink the Koolaid at first, but I do feel that it's better to err on the Koolaid side until you have a better understanding of what works and what doesn't.

</comment><comment><USER6> > the methodology is rarely to blame for a failed project

Truth is, it's always the person in charge who is to blame.

That and natural disasters, but those are far less frequent.

</comment><comment><USER7> OP's post says more about the consulting industry than the best practices they promote. Let me explain...

I was brought in by a Big 5 firm to rescue some of their clusterfucks. One project was 18 months old and one year behind. Another was "90% complete" for the past year. They gave me a laptop with their own systems analysis / project management app on it. Everything had to go through it. After 2 days it was clear that this "system" was cause of most of their problems. Why? Because no one thought any more. They just plugged everything into the app and submitted the reports every Friday whether anything made sense or not.

I showed the app to a friend of mine who was an expert consultant (not Big 5!). It was clear to him why they did this.

He said, "The sole purpose of 'best practices' and tools like this are to make people who don't know what they're doing _appear_ as if they did. They pay people $50 per hour and bill them at $300 per hour. The difference, after expenses, goes to the partners. That's their business model. It's that simple. So, forget about best practices and just do your fucking job. You'll eat them alive."

Thanks, Tom. I've been doing that ever since. You were right.

<comment><USER8> What he actually said was that his consulting company told him not to use all of the process all of the time but rather to pick and chose the bits that were appropriate.

I'm not saying that you are lying about your experience, or that I have much respect for the big consulting companies or their business models, but your comments misleadingly characterize what he posted.

(In my experience the big companies I have worked for had better processes, and better guidance on how to apply them. But they had to have that to cater for some of their other issues.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's _method_ , not _methodology_. The former refers to a specific process or procedure employed to accomplish a task while the latter describes the study of such processes and procedures. The discussion we are engaging in here is a form of methodology; the things being discussed are methods.

I don't tend to get hung-up on usage, but it really is shocking to see how many articles, blog posts, and comments written on this subject make this mistake.

<comment><USER10> Merriam-Webter [1]:

1 : a body of methods, rules, and postulates employed by a discipline : a particular procedure or set of procedures

2 : the analysis of the principles or procedures of inquiry in a particular field

You're speaking of definition (2), but OP is using (1) properly, in my estimation.

[1] <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/methodology>

<comment><USER9> USAGE NOTE Methodology can properly refer to the theoretical analysis of the methods appropriate to a field of study or to the body of methods and principles particular to a branch of knowledge. In this sense, one may speak of objections to the methodology of a geographic survey (that is, objections dealing with the appropriateness of the methods used) or of the methodology of modern cognitive psychology (that is, the principles and practices that underlie research in the field). In recent years, however, methodology has been increasingly used as a pretentious substitute for method in scientific and technical contexts, as in The oil company has not yet decided on a methodology for restoring the beaches. People may have taken to this practice by influence of the adjective methodological to mean "pertaining to methods." Methodological may have acquired this meaning because people had already been using the more ordinary adjective methodical to mean "orderly, systematic." But the misuse of methodology obscures an important conceptual distinction between the tools of scientific investigation (properly methods) and the principles that determine how such tools are deployed and interpreted.

<http://www.answers.com/main/ntquery?s=methodology>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's always good to distinguish between rules and judgment. Rules should assist in good judgment, not supplant it and push it out. This is essentially the root of much criticism of government and other large bureaucracies: That you often can't do things which make sense because it is against some silly rule. Start-ups have a chance to put good judgment to use without being hampered by entrenched, illogical, outdated or counterproductive rules. Hopefully, they will take that opportunity and run with it and then resist temptation to implement a bunch of bad rules (which is basically the topic of discussion of several recent threads here along the lines of "Don't go punishing all of your customers over the actions of one/a few").</comment>


I Started a $20K/Mo Cigar Subscription Business as a College Student - <AUTHOR> https://starterstory.com/stories/how-i-started-a-20k-mo-cigar-subscription-business-as-a-college-student <comment><USER2> > I always felt like subscription boxes for something non-consumable, like > socks, wouldn't work. After a few months, you would have enough and cancel > the subscription.

Socks and underwear are definitely consumables - they wear out from regular wear and washing. And they have a definite advantage over cigars: they don't give your customers horrible diseases. (I watched someone die of lung cancer. It's not a pleasant way to go.)

<comment><USER3> Heavy smokers have a ~25% chance of getting lung cancer (plus various other horrible things), it drops to ~15% for light smokers, that's people who smoke many cigarettes a day every day. This service sends out 4 Cigars a month, the lung cancer risk from that is minuscule.

<comment><USER4> Another way to view it is that they encourage people to start smoking ("new hobbyists").

In addition, while they currently send out 4 cigars a month, from the article:

"We haven't been extremely active in the larger cigar community because the hardcore fans generally buy in bulk cigars, which isn't really our customer. Our customers are generally beginners/novices who are interested in getting started. _This is an area we are interested in jumping into soon, however._ "

(Emphasis mine in the last sentence.)

It therefore doesn't seem like they are limiting themselves because of any concern about the health of their customers.

When would the disease risk be high enough that you think it would be unethical for you to sell/distribute cigars?</comment></comment></comment>


Stop using JWT for sessions - <AUTHOR> http://cryto.net/~joepie91/blog/2016/06/13/stop-using-jwt-for-sessions/ <comment><USER2> Terrible, Terrible advice.

Here's an actual quote from the article:

"...unless you are operating at the size of Reddit, you will not need 'stateless sessions'." So for the rest of 99% of the technology world, you don't need stateless session because TFA says so.

<comment><USER3> Why would the advice be terrible?

There are some "hard" trade-offs in using stateless sessions and the article argues that you are better off storing sessions on the server, as long as it doesn't start costing you more than dealing with such trade-offs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This line is just incorrect:

> The only correct CSRF mitigation is a CSRF token

Custom headers are better, imho, if you have an ajax-driven app. There is 0 chance of csrf ever happening if you require the session token be passed in a custom header and hold the session value in localstorage.

Source: I am an infosec professional.</comment>


Mathematics Pioneer Ingrid Daubechies Has More Barriers to Break - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/mathematics-pioneer-ingrid-daubechies-has-more-barriers-to-break-11579888523 <comment><USER2> Back in 2014 I went to a seminar she gave about, among other things, the forgery detection work. The basic idea seemed both simple and clever: a forger is trying to match the original painting or style as exactly as possible, and so paints more slowly and carefully, and this introduces more slight wobble in the strokes.

</comment><comment><USER3> Non-paywalled version:

[http://archive.is/N8vpp](http://archive.is/N8vpp)

</comment><comment><USER4> I think the climate in departments at big universities has significantly improved now that the oldest faculty members are dying off in earnest. People who deserve tenure are unable to get it due to decades of administrative creep, while the worst offenders often remain protected by it. Daubechies is brilliant and was also involved in the "Eigenfaces" work that made the rounds a few years ago, and is also an excellent instructor and lecturer. Her presence has elevated the Duke math department for years.

<comment><USER5> That could certainly be true if Universities were 40 years old.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's nice to read about Daubechies here on HN. I remember reading a few of her papers circa 2006 for an academic project. At the time I was accustomed (prejudiced, maybe) to see mostly male authors in all the papers I used, and I was a bit surprised to learn that the I in "I. Daubechies" meant Ingrid. I'm happy to see her still going, her work is awesome.

<comment><USER7> I had the opposite experience when I met Jan Hesthaven at a GR conference. Turns out it is a German man's name and not a woman, which I found out after professing how much I love the hard 'J' versions book on spectral methods for time dependent problems.

<comment><USER8> What is GR? General relativity?

So there are two Jan Hesthavens? One (a man) who works in GR and another (a woman) who works in signal processing or time series analysis?

<comment><USER9> Sounds like they went around the conference talking about Jan (as in Janet), when other attendants knew this work was by Jan (Yan).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Here's a radical request.

A living wage for non-tenured faculty.

<comment><USER11> adjunct faculty teaching a full load (2/2) make a very nice wage at my uni (~70k). the problem isn't the wage but the exactly what non-tenure implies: lack of job security.

<comment><USER12> Does class size matter? i.e. Does the adjunct have to generate (> 100%) funding for their pay?

<comment><USER11> honestly i'm not sure. the particular adjunct i have in mind teaches one large lecture style class and a smaller (but still larger than topics class size) elective class.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Facebook's Zuckerberg says sorry in full-page newspaper ads - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/25/europe/facebook-zuckerberg-cambridge-analytica-sorry-ads-newspapers-intl/index.html <comment><USER2> This reminded me of Kalanick falling on his knees in an absurd display of contrition: [http://www.businessinsider.com/how-travis-kalanick- behaved-i...](http://www.businessinsider.com/how-travis-kalanick-behaved-in- final-months-as-uber-ceo-report-2018-1)</comment>


Hetzner Hostage - <AUTHOR> http://wlad.svbtle.com/hetzner-hostage

<comment><USER2> You should have a look at OVH, they include DDoS protection by default and their prices are the best available on the market:

[http://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated- servers/enterprise/](http://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/enterprise/)

<comment><USER3> I'm curios, do they actually do any kind of protection, and what's their limit?

<comment><USER2> You can read technical stuff there :

[http://www.ovh.com/us/blog/a1171.protection-anti-ddos- servic...](http://www.ovh.com/us/blog/a1171.protection-anti-ddos-service- standard)

And:

[http://forum.ovh.co.uk/showthread.php?6661-URGENT-AND- IMPORT...](http://forum.ovh.co.uk/showthread.php?6661-URGENT-AND-IMPORTANT- Anti-DDoS-Protection)

"Our surplus network has a capacity over 2 Tbps. We have three VAC in production, so we can manage up to 480 Gbps/480 Mpps."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This raises an attack vector for Hetzner's business itself. By finding their larger clients and DDOSing them, Hetzner's business itself becomes at stake.

<comment><USER3> Yeah exactly, that's what I thought. If this is the way Hetzner deals with even such small attacks, some competitor that has enough power could potentially take out a lot of their clients and Hetzner would get the bash.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> No story here. No budget provider I've looked at says they will help you withstand a DDoS attack. [Thanks to the commenter who says OVH does, I will look into them closely.]

I did this due diligence for a 10-user app. These guys have no excuse for not planning for a DDoS with a serious business.

</comment><comment><USER6> One of the big political blogs in New Zealand recently had a similar problem with Linode.

They got DOSed so Linode shut them down, then they found a new provider but had problems moving to them since they couldn't get into the linode server to copy the data.

[http://www.whaleoil.co.nz/2014/01/ferals-faults-fixes-co- pil...](http://www.whaleoil.co.nz/2014/01/ferals-faults-fixes-co-pilots- report/)

</comment><comment><USER7> You have two ISPs for any business-critical service that matters, and you switch between them either using BGP in your router or using DNS if you have not implemented BGP.

With a single provider, it's a gamble, although the expectation for _any_ reasonable provider is that they just let you saturate your link speed with no questions asked, and block the offending traffic in their router if you can identify it for them.

</comment><comment><USER8> Since this seems to be a problem for growing startups. Does anyone have any information on what other companies cater to the european market and will not hold you hostage if you get hit with a ddos attack? I'm looking specifically for servers in Germany, if anyone has any clue.

</comment><comment><USER9> You can get a dedicated server with 128GB ECC RAM and 2 SSDs for $188 at Hetzner. 188 bucks. Wow.

I guess the original post perfectly explains how such low prices are attainable (no customer support, etc).

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm trying to think of the economic way to run a robust small scale service. I think you need a way to rapidly spin up a replica service on an entirely different provider.

I'm picturing a setup where you run on a cheap Hetzner host or similar with the DB synced to a slave replica on EC2 or other cloud provider and a build system so that you can spin up a whole replacement infrastructure on EC2 if there is a severe outage or failure in commercial relationship and switchover by changing the DNS settings.

</comment><comment><USER11> > I almost failed off chair, I could not believe that someone was able to find > the ip.

cloudflare adds a direct.* subdomain that points to your actual IP.

</comment><comment><USER12> I have been a customer of Hetzner for several years now. Everything is fine and cheap if you have no problems, but their support is the worst.

<comment><USER13> I was also happy with Hetzner when I used them a few years back. But I didn't need their support other than for replacing hard drives, which they always handled quickly and without problems.

One of my servers were once used in a amplification attack (DNSSEC...) for a few days before I noticed. I guess Hetzner didn't detect this because just the uplink got saturated. Had to manually request a null route so I could SSH to another IP alias on the box. I wouldn't mind if they automatically did this for me since the offending IP would be unavailable either way. At least they don't charge you for DDoS traffic, like my current European budget provider does.

If you move to something like Cloudflare, make sure to at least firewall off everything but their IP addresses. Otherwise it will be trivial for the attacker to connect to all the port 80's in the IP allocation to the provider they know you were using, and compare the responses to what they get from Cloudflare, to obtain your service's origin.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmzHIB18XT8](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmzHIB18XT8)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6018796](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6018796)

Doesn't sound like they have changed at all in the interim.

</comment><comment><USER15> You get what you pay for...

<comment><USER16> Actually OVH have very similar prices and are much more reliable.

As others have mentioned they've got DDOS protection on some of their newer plans.</comment></comment>


California lawmakers approve drone trespassing crime bills - <AUTHOR> http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_XGR_CALIFORNIA_DRONES?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2015-08-24-21-06-16

<comment><USER2> I'm happy these bills are as limited as they are.

Given that we recently had a bunch of absolute morons who decided to fly their drones in an _active airplane firefighting zone_ , I'm pleasantly surprised they didn't create something totally draconian.

</comment><comment><USER3> Unenforceable? Until drones have a 'vin' what can you do?</comment>


Blackstone Group and KKR try to derail surprise healthcare billing law - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/13/upshot/surprise-billing-laws-ad-spending-doctor-patient-unity.html <comment><AUTHOR> This is completely expected behavior from two firms that have been found to "use out-of-network billing to significantly raise the amounts they are paid." [0]

[0] [https://www.nber.org/papers/w23623.pdf](https://www.nber.org/papers/w23623.pdf)

Luckily congress is trying to fight back: [https://energycommerce.house.gov/newsroom/press- releases/pal...](https://energycommerce.house.gov/newsroom/press- releases/pallone-and-walden-launch-bipartisan-investigation-into-private- equity-firms)</comment>


BugJail: New Java debugger – debug across time with mouse - <AUTHOR> https://bugjail.com/ <comment><USER3> Bugjail was mentioned in a thread about a xor bloomfilter alternative. Or at least that's where I saw it first mentioned. My bet is it triggered op's posting.

<comment><USER4> That was quite interesting: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21841921](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21841921)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hey, I'm Henri, founder and lead developer of BugJail. I just noticed traffic spiking and came to see what is going on :)

The landing page wasn't quite ready for spotlight, but such is life :)

All feedback is highly appreciated, no matter how brutal.

And if you have any questions, feel free to ask!

<comment><USER6> I think you need to make the experience more concrete.

On the visceral side: put up some example videos of use. If you can't do it to the level of polish you like, get someone else to do it for you as an unofficial one. IntelliJ is already slow, and I'm worried about event- recording debuggers being only useful for small programs -- larger ones eat up too much RAM and cpu overhead to be tractable.

On the power side: show some sophisticated use cases using real libraries and real problems to fix. What stuff can I find out directly that I can't easily do in IntelliJ?

Can I directly query the DB? Can I use those queries' results in regression tests?

When I read the page, I thought "Oh, like the valgrind family of tools for Java, nice." So perhaps some pre-baked validations using the tech you've built could be useful.

<comment><USER5> Yep, I think video would be a perfect fit.

About performance impact and program size: BugJail can be used also with hardcore programs, like databases and compilers, where event based record-and- replay debuggers typically struggle. There's still significant performance hit, around "twice as slow", but it won't be orders of magnitude slower.

Also, BugJail is tested with large applications. For example one test is startup sequence of Eclipse, on 5 year old box with 32GB. The result is ~700 million rows in database, in ~30 seconds. It does consume all memory, and your workstation will scream for mercy, but it gets there :)

Direct DB query is not available in current beta, but it is partially implemented in dev version: it shows the results, but there is no navigation from the query results to CallTree, Source code view etc. So: coming, but not yet.

I hope I answered your questions at least partially? It's 7AM in the morning, after one of the hottest days in Australian history, and a surprise appearance in HN front page, so I might not be quite the sharpest tool at the moment :)

<comment><USER7> From what I understand, some time sequence databases use some sophisticated compression techniques. Are you there already or is that on the roadmap?

I think it would be kinda cool in a way to go back to dual-machine debugging but I'm not sure everyone else would agree with me.

<comment><USER5> There's fair bit of compression already, but actually I haven't done that much industrial spying into time-series databases, good idea, thanks.

Also, I've tested dual machine debugging with BugJail, as part of spike towards CI/QA/SIT/UAT/Pre-Prod use. It works okey-ish but the (crappy 1GB) network became bottleneck and it was slower than single box.

<comment><USER6> If 1GB wired doesn't work well, WiFi will be worthless. Compression is a really good idea

<comment><USER5> My "Fair bit of compression" was massively simplified: there isn't one true canonical "compression", but dozen different places and ways where and how to compress.

BugJail does compression around storage layer, but nothing before the network hop from capturing agent to processing server.

And fully agreed of course; when BugJail graduates to CI/QA/SIT/UAT/PreProd use, it will need compression before the network hop. But that is some time away. Currently the agent and server run in same box, and compression between them has negative net effect (compression uses more CPU than what shifting around less data saves).

<comment><USER7> statsd might be a good example there. Local coalescing before reporting upstream.

Basically they didn't make the client smart, they made a proxy and spam loopback.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Database-backed debugging is great! It means that debugging can be done as a data science exercise, which is very useful when, for example, a rare confluence of external factors make the program behave badly.

Earlier examples: "Debugging in the (very) large", which describes how Microsoft used Windows telemetry, especially for debugging weird slow-down glitches. In the networking domain, where there is AppDynamics for trying to debug the interactions between network and distributed services.

I'd love to see data-science style debugging much more accessible (especially in Python). And it's great to see that you're making a serious effort to get the user experience right -- though I hope that the underlying data will also be accessible from more capable data science platforms.

<comment><USER5> BugJail writes its data files in open source format, Apache ORC.

You can load the data files directly to Spark, Hive or anything else that reads ORC, and then use Python to query, visualize or get statistics from the captured program execution.

Give it a try and let me know how it goes?

<comment><USER9> I think it might be really useful to run BugJail as an (optional) CI step and offer the user to download, integrate with the IDE, or have historical data. But I didn't fully understand the license regarding such usecases.

<comment><USER5> Absolutely. The long term plan is to do separate edition "BugJail for CI/QA/SIT/UAT/PreProd/etc", so that when things-are-not-fine on server, you don't need to repro but just load the capture in BugJail and see what happened [edit: that in addition to your "post CI build step" use case; both uses seem compelling].

But the current beta version is not robust enough and doesn't handle long captures well enough. I want to make sure that BugJail doesn't waste people's time, hence the license allows only capturing from local workstation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> [https://pernos.co/](https://pernos.co/) is making a very similar omniscient debugger based on rr for AOT compiled languages with DWARF info.

</comment><comment><USER11> How is this different than [http://chrononsystems.com/](http://chrononsystems.com/) ?

</comment><comment><USER12> The page needs an editor, stat. The grammar is _not good_. I'd be happy to do it to be fair, doesn't seem that big a job.

<comment><USER5> Thanks, actually I'd really appreciate your help! My email address is the contact page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wonder how they are able to trace and capture variable and stack state at a rate of 20M invocations — per second!?

How is this possible on the JVM?

(I'm aware of the instrumentation API that profilers use but I thought they had to do sampling to limit interference with program performance and they are not capturing all the data req'd for debugging either.)

Anyone know?

<comment><USER5> There is no single trick, just lot of hard work.

If there's interest, I can write a blog post about this.

<comment><USER13> I would love to read this. Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is really neat and I wish I had this around 10 years ago when I had to migrate Java apps.

However, these days I rarely need to debug programs while developing - <USER2> usually use some combination of TDD with unit/integration testing and it gets the job done with the added bonus of being easy to maintain down the road.

Of course if you're on a project where time to market is critical and you need to sacrifice tests, I suppose a debugger is required. But then again, you're probably not using Java either.

<comment><USER15> I don't see a conflict between using debugger and TDD.

I use the debugger to set breakpoints when running my unit tests all the time. It lets me understand the code better when developing it.

Also convenient when pasting in data from production into the unit test to find what is causing the bug.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Since "database" and "relational model" is mentioned, I assume the collected data is indeed being written to an RDBMS. Would be interesting to be able to poke around in that with some SQL, even if not available as an official API.

<comment><USER5> Sure, I can add that to next major beta. Thanks for the suggestion!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I tried using it and my first impression is that it's pretty difficult to use for a webapp (or maybe just specifically a Spring application since there are a ton of added proxy classes) without the ability to search. You need to know exactly which thread accepted your http request and then dig your way down the call stack to find your method invocation. You should be able to search for your method invocation and then go back up the call stack from there.

Other than that, seeing exactly how long every single method call took is awesome. I think there's a lot of potential, but without the ability to search I can't see myself reaching for this again

<comment><USER5> I totally understand your point.

The search functionality is currently under development, and it's by far the most critical 'missing' feature.

As a workaround for webapps: using the 'Capturing Assistant' and configuring BugJail to capture only your own packages helps a lot. That way you usually see clearly which thread handled the request, and also have less app-server / framework level crap that you need to expand through before you get to your own code.

If you'd like to get notified when the search functionality is available, just shoot me an email (my email is in the contact page).

Thanks for providing the feedback, and sorry that the initial experience wasn't better.

<comment><USER17> Thanks for your reply. I actually did specify my packages in the agent -javaagent:/Users/aa/.BugJail/agent.jar=--snapshot:.--primary:io.mycompany. __but it didn 't seem to help too much. I'll shoot you an email to get notified - is there an estimated timeline?

<comment><USER5> Hmm, if setting --primary didn't help, then it might not have worked (aka Bug in BugJail..). I'd love to check that further tomorrow, if you have couple of minutes?

As for the search/query timeline, I'm afraid to say anything more exact than "month or two". The core search/query is working on dev version, but it needs a lot of work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I tried playing around with this and I can't see it being useful for me currently. If the source and tracing information were more tightly integrated it would be a lot more useful. Offering a more traditional debugging experience with the ability to rewind time to the last time a value is set would also make it valuable.

A specific issue I ran into was that multi dimensional arrays do get logged as changing when a value is set in the bottom layer. This meant for my application the were a bunch of init calls setting that value, but none of the actual logical changes were tracked.

<comment><USER5> The source and tracing sides will definitely get fully integrated. This is only the second beta that even has the source side at all, so it's just "early days".

The line/statement level traditional debugging is possible to implement with currently captured information, but the implementation is seriously hard, likely in 2021+ timeframe.

About the specific issue: I'd really like to get that fixed, do you think you could shoot me an email so that I can followup in case that i cannot repro the bug (my email is in the contact page)?

Many thanks for the feedback & apologies that the initial experience wasn't so great

<comment><USER18> I made a gist [0] that demonstrates the issue. Line 5 does not make a node in the timeline.

I look forward to seeing what bugjail becomes in the future.

[0]: [https://gist.github.com/TheThirdOne/7af9356dfb89d21816250017...](https://gist.github.com/TheThirdOne/7af9356dfb89d218162500179514b2c6)

<comment><USER5> Thanks, appreciated. I get this fixed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> No Java 11 support? I was interested in giving it a try after the holidays, since it look like it would be a good tool for the type of bugs we have.

I think it could be a big barrier to adoption, considering how Java 8 is EOL.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, Java 9+ is on roadmap for next beta.

When the previous major beta was released there was one dependency that didn't support Java 9 and locked everything to 8.

If you'd like get notified when Java 11 support is ready, you can just send one line ping email (my email address is in the 'contact' page).

Many thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Two comments on the website:

There is some reference to a beta in 2018. Should remove that.

Also, a video of the thing in use would be helpful. Put it right up at the top. Show me something I can't do now. Include specific examples.

<comment><USER5> Thanks, that 2018 is a very unfortunate typo, should have been 2019.

And agreed, video would be great, but it takes fair bit of time away from development, so I'm undecided.

<comment><USER20> Shouldn't take long. Google "screencast software". Record yourself: "Hi, this is Henri. Let show you how find bugs with BugJail..." Do a 3-minute video with some simple examples. Put it on YouTube and embed it in your site.

If I were doing it, I'd budget 4-8 hours of work and close to zero cost.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This looks really good. I like the fact you can drill down and have a replay debugger with a slider! Great job! I wish it worked for python!

</comment><comment><USER22> The `direct answers` looks fascinating! Do we have some equivalent tools for c++ or python? I'm tired of step step step...

</comment><comment><USER23> I would imagine that the execution logs would get rather large. Is there a way to dynamically trigger logging as well?

<comment><USER5> The execution logs (or "Captures", in our Jail terminology..) do get fairly large if you capture something hardcore, like database or compiler.

For normal web/business/enterprise applications you can configure BugJail to only capture your own packages, which massively reduces the file size (and performance impact).

To give concrete example of hardcore scenario, capturing startup of Elasticsearch results in about 85MB file.

There is no way to enable capturing dynamically, and this is likely never going to be supported, due to the way how BugJail works (it reconstructs the program execution, so if beginning of the execution is missing, "things are not fine").

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> As a constructive feedback on just the presentation of the landing page I think the screenshots are showing some code with theme colors that are kind of ugly. I understand this is a landing page but if you care about Developer Experience DX I'm sure you can find a theme that is better looking or inspiring.

<comment><USER25> Those images aren't visible on mobile. And I was expecting much worse when I viewed them in desktop mode.

Based on the stage they're at, I'd save optimizing the landing page design for the future.

Though, I would put effort to better describe the problem on the landing page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Looks like a pretty nice way to debug Java programs! I look forward to testing it.

One quick note though, you might want to consider removing the politics from your screenshot before really releasing this product. You've got a great product here, but there's no need to inject politics - even if it's amusing to some. It takes away from the seriousness of your project and makes it feel more like a personal side project instead of something I should pay for and build into my workflow, in my opinion. Just my two-cents.

<comment><USER5> Yep, it was already mentioned somewhere here, but basically: I agree & will do.

I look forward to your feedback on the actual product, be as brutal as you can / want! :)

<comment><USER26> Great! I've shared your link with a few other java devs and the consensus so far is this looks like an amazing tool. I can't wait to take it for a spin! Keep up the great work!

<comment><USER5> Thanks, appreciated!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This doesn't work if source code is not available. I can get a trace of the function calls but no arguments, or return values or anything. This makes it entirely useless as a reverse engineering tool, something i was very excited to use it as due to it essentially being a tracer. It also NEEDS modern java support.

<comment><USER5> Actually, it does work without source code (or, should work)

The left side 'CallTree' is fully functional, and shows owner instances, arguments and return values. If you click those, then the Object/Array is displayed at bottom and is expandable just like in normal debugger (+slider to change debug time). So only the right side "Source" view is missing if you don't have source.

If the above doesn't work, could you get in touch and I'll get it sorted out? [https://support.bugjail.com](https://support.bugjail.com)

And fully agreed on Java 9+ support, coming in next beta.

Thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I find this very interesting. Can you use it integrated in IntelliJ. How about as a paid plugin?

<comment><USER5> There's no plugin yet, but definitely coming (I've been using IntelliJ almost 20 years now, so also want that integration for my own use).

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Sounds similar to sayid, though generalized to the entire JVM?

[sayid]: [https://github.com/clojure-emacs/sayid](https://github.com/clojure- emacs/sayid)

</comment><comment><USER29> How does it compare to Chronon DVR[0] for Java. Seems similar functionality wise

[0] [http://chrononsystems.com/](http://chrononsystems.com/)

</comment><comment><USER30> android debugging to start in late 2018...

is there any progress on this project (bugjail in general I mean, not android)

<comment><USER5> Auh crap, that is just typo, should have been 2019. BugJail is under very active development.

<comment><USER31> Late 2019 is right now, any time after now is really really late!

<comment><USER5> I finally got the courage to deploy new version under heavy traffic, so it's mid 2020 now. No more snarky comments for half a year :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Can I get the source? In other words, how do I debug the debugger?

<comment><USER33> I'm guessing "no", but it sounds a lot like DTrace/BTrace with many enabled probes married to a DB.

<comment><USER33> See [https://news.ycombinator.com/vote?id=21846545&how=un&auth=99...](https://news.ycombinator.com/vote?id=21846545&how=un&auth=995cf76915ecf63357da8f609c96704d4e305e99&goto=threads%3Fid%3Dcryptonector#21846545)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This looks like rr or GDB reverse debugging but for Java.

<comment><USER35> Have a question to rr or any replay debuging tool, does it still work if the program has database access while the replaying machine doesn't have or not have the same database?

<comment><USER36> Yes, it records all syscall return values, so the replay doesn't actually need to perform them. This means that IO (GUIs, network accesses, etc.) shouldn't happen on replay, in general. (The replay does show stdout/stderr data, so perhaps those are special-cased?)</comment></comment></comment>


Why your $5 per month are worth it to pay for Medium - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@manojsurya3110/why-your-5-per-month-are-worth-it-to-pay-for-medium-bb4f422c5057 <comment><USER2> It's definitely not. Thank Baal for uBlock Origin and temporary containers firefox et al. Medium is basically quora with a slightly bigger "stick" I mean who pays for it? Not me.

I'll start paying for medium once the nukes go off. After that it's self service. Don't pay for Medium it's a shit place. As convenient as the concentration camps back in the old days. convenient doesn't mean good. Boycott medium quora and all these shit places. Or let them drown on their own just choose your ad blockers right and don't pay for medium it's trivial to circumvent. Fucking cynical fuckstars. Fuck medium and the indian enclave of quora. What a piece of shit

0/0 would not pay. Will never pay. Fuck medium and quora with a circumcised atlantic ocean depth interrogance. let them burn. What a cocksucking show

<comment><USER3> while its not exactly how I would have said it, that's pretty much my sentiment as well. I don't click medium links except in anticipation of a dumpster fire.

It seems like a way to make a nobody blog slightly more legitimate with a well known url, but to me the url is now well known for its low quality.</comment></comment>


2.5 year old Galaxy Nexus/Nexus 4 issue marked as obsolete - <AUTHOR> https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=35139

<comment><USER2> [https://hn.algolia.com/?q=nexus+4+obsolete#!/story/sort_by_d...](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=nexus+4+obsolete#!/story/sort_by_date/0/nexus%204%20obsolete)

</comment><comment><USER3> So, the same tech as the iPhone 6 is now obsolete?</comment>


Ask HN: Do you use MOTW (Mark of the Web)? - <AUTHOR>

Please refer to:

  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms537628(VS.85).aspx

  http://www.helpstuff.com/motw.html
 Do you use this stuff? The creepy thing is that I somehow saw this "injected" in my very trivial static site (using nginx). Is it possible that nginx may have added this? Do you think this MOTW is useful at all?
Answers to any of these questions will be appreciated! Thanks.
PS: Why aren't my links clickable? =S <comment><USER2> That "injection" was probably done by internet explorer, as stated in the first sentence of that msdn site. I don't have IE, so can't give you a certain answer. Check your site in another browser to see if that motw isn't there. I bet it won't be.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's puzzling me beyond belief. I first saw, of all things, using netcat! I don't use IE... but that showed up there. Now I'm a level-1 rookie, and I know my VPS security settings are very lax (e.g., I use root all the time), so I could only understand it with a benign intruder. Beats me...

<comment><USER2> Well, sounds like you got some `chown` to do...

Some security considerations can't be overlooked, granted; but don't fret, it was possibly put there client side(One might even hypothesise that a WYSIWYG editor put it there by default, but I deem you would have seen that). Just give the url to someone and ask them if it appears in the source. If it does, delete it and see if appears again. If it does, then do get paranoid with security, I guess.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> > Urls become links, except in the text field of a submission.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> IMPORTANT UPDATE: I now realize this happened when I saved to disk my webpage _using Chrome_ (!!!!). Frankly I thought Chrome would never do this, along prodigal_erik's lines. It looks like IE is not the only one that isn't bit- for-bit faithful...

</comment><comment><USER4> Never heard of it...</comment>


Can an Algorithm Spot the Next Google? - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.aspx?id=37387

<comment><USER2> I don't recall Google ever sitting in white space - there were search engines and internet ads were seen as a significant source of revenue for portals before it came along. What made it successful were incremental improvements over existing competitors products, e.g. no banner ads and page rank v. gopheresque curation</comment>


The longest study on happiness - <AUTHOR> http://www.ted.com/talks/robert_waldinger_what_makes_a_good_life_lessons_from_the_longest_study_on_happiness <comment><AUTHOR> I am curious to see more opinions on this study. The speaker argues that good relationships improve our health and success in life. I wonder how much of it is the other way around though. Maybe cause and effect are inversed?</comment>