Lottery-Like Prizes Coax Savings. What's the Risk in Expanding Them? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/21/business/lotteries-savings-accounts.html <comment><USER2> >>> While the state lotteries in the United States don't achieve those particular goals, they already do some good. Roughly 40 percent of the lottery income is used to finance education, environmental protection and other causes.

That's dubious, because money is fungible. In my home state, lottery money "for education" was matched by a reduction in money for education from the state's general fund.

<comment><USER3> That's such a good point, the lottery revenues aren't "increasing", they are "replacing" funding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The premise of the article is that by making the interest on savings accounts a lottery (lower base interest rate with the chance for large lump payouts) seems to appeal to people while simultaneously reducing their lottery spending.

At least in theory, this seems like a great idea. Potentially ripe for abuse, just like a lot of lottery systems (eg. the McDonald's Monopoly conspiracy where employees hoarded the winning tickets).

Hopefully the law can be changed enough to start a larger sized trial.

<comment><USER5> You could make this pay out _better_ than actuarially-fair prizes, by having the savings fund invest some of the lottery jackpot in call options on a diversified portfolio. That way, the fund would be able to pay out _more_ prizes when the markets are doing well, while still keeping a "baseline" level of draws at all other times. The reason why this would provide _better-than- fair_ payouts is that these options are effectively on the capital markets line, i.e. investing in them is essentially _removing_ risk that other market participants would otherwise have to face!

<comment><USER6> So kind of like [https://www.nsandi.com/premium- bonds](https://www.nsandi.com/premium-bonds) ?

Those are government bonds, but it's not far off your idea.

Edit: for clarity, the effective rate paid does vary over time according to interest rates, which usually have some relation to how well the markets are doing.

<comment><USER5> > interest rates, which usually have some relation to how well the markets are > doing.

Uh, maybe? There is a positive correlation of sorts, but it's nothing to write home about. It doesn't seem like this product was _designed_ with any attention to the potential of better-than-fair payouts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > _" But protecting people by ending lotteries isn't a practical solution: If > anything, gambling and state-run lotteries are growing enterprises in the > United States and many other countries."_

What are the practical problems with banning state-run lotteries as they currently exist? The article doesn't explain this assertion. Is it just realpoltik pessimism over the ability to change the status quo and get state governments to give up an unethical source of revenue? Or is this a standard _" prohibition creates criminal opportunity"_ issue?

The idea of gamified savings accounts seems very interesting. Legalizing gamified savings accounts while also banning traditional state-run lotteries seems like a decent idea to me.

<comment><USER8> "Or is this a standard "prohibition creates criminal opportunity" issue?"

This is exactly it. And it is not something that should be dismissed, it has pretty much been proven correct. In the US, before state run lotteries were present and popular, there were criminal run "numbers games" which were quite similar to lotteries but with much worse payout ratios and where the criminals that ran them often refused to pay for various reasons.

In the Scorcesse classic movie "Mean Streets" one of the storylines is about a kid that wins one of those numbers games but the person that runs the game refuses to pay him because he is of a mixed race.

Numbers games are very rare in the US nowadays and when present are only present in poor immigrant communities that do not know much about the state run lotteries. The state run lotteries did a pretty good job of getting rid of the numbers games and thus depriving organized crime of a source of revenue while providing better odds of success for lottery players and also taking in money for the government and thus saving taxpayer money.

The original lottery idea was also reasonably effective at keeping individual betting volumes low. They did this by making sure that each ticket was relatively cheap and required relatively large amount of work to determine the winner. Thus it was hard for someone to buy many tickets. Unfortunately, this is something that has slowly been eroding as lottery systems try to get more revenue and encourage compulsive buying.

So no I do not think state lotteries should be banned but it may be a good idea to change the rules for advertising or the games themselves to discourage individuals from blowing too much money on them.

<comment><USER9> This is a very useful perspective on the positives of lotteries. I've always found them to be bogus, borderline theft. But when you consider the fact that it mitigates--almost entirely removing--more shady versions of the game, it makes lotteries seem more like a necessary evil for the time being.

However, that's not to say that the government couldn't do a better job of educating the public on it. Lotteries are definitely aggrandized with all the bells and whistles to make people feel like they have a real shot at winning which I would argue could draw in people who wouldn't have played--lottery, numbers games, or otherwise.

<comment><USER10> Couldn't the government do the same for other kinds of vice (drugs, prostitution)? They could permit activities to the level where you get a power law kind of trade-off between consumption and risk from consumption so as to monitor and educate participants over a long period of time (more than 80/20 for behaviour with more detrimental outcomes). You also get the benefit to study the behaviour and figure out how it works in order to have truly effective solutions through repeated experiments etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A savings account with prize interest is still a tax on uneducated people.

The "educated" person will look at the data, realize that they are paying for that prize with a lower interest rate, and switch to a different product.

I know I did - I realized that the savings account paid a lower interest rate to compensate for the prize and decided to not play.

Example from New Zealand: [http://www.bonusbonds.co.nz/](http://www.bonusbonds.co.nz/)

They don't have any guaranteed interest!

Analysis: [https://www.moneyhub.co.nz/bonus- bonds.html](https://www.moneyhub.co.nz/bonus-bonds.html)

Term Deposit Rate from same bank:

[https://www.depositrates.co.nz/by- provider/6/anz](https://www.depositrates.co.nz/by-provider/6/anz)

<comment><USER12> >A savings account with prize interest is still a tax on uneducated people.

But people aren't completely rational. Playing the lottery isn't something a completely rational person would do.

In general, people with lower incomes have less education. Even highly educated people often have little understanding of the basics of managing money.

Given that it's unlikely lotteries will go away anytime soon, I think it's okay to offer "harm reduction" methods. Even if only 10% of people participated, if they began to move up socioeconomically, it may help others develop better habits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> If increasing the savings rate were actually a priority, then it can be achieved easily. Raise interest rates.

The Fed and its nearly decade long war on savers gave those with money to save essentially negative return on their investment.

It should be no wonder that savers decided to walk.

<comment><USER14> The desire to get the little person to save more is telling me massive inflation is coming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Any prize is still taxable income in the USA. That absurdity needs to be removed before this can make inroads. E.g. if you win a car but are very poor then you might reject the car as you can't afford to pay the sales tax on it. I've seen this before.

</comment><comment><USER16> Views on savings tend to swing extreme in the US, just 13 years ago Bernanke warned against "the savings glut" and the negative effects it was having on US economy.

[https://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2005/20050...](https://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2005/200503102/)

</comment><comment><USER17> Can't we have a lottery that, as a prize, provides basic income? Then at least we can use it to do experiments with the concept of UBI.

<comment><USER18> a) They already do. You're given a choice between a single payout or regular installments over a period of many years (i.e. basic income). b) There's no shortage of BI experiments, both past and ongoing. [https://www.businessinsider.com/basic-income-experiments- in-...](https://www.businessinsider.com/basic-income-experiments- in-2017-2017-1/) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income#Examples_of_basic...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income#Examples_of_basic_income_and_related_systems)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The fact that stupid people spend a lot of money on the lottery is a feature, not a bug. It allows us to extract much needed tax revenue from them without them even realizing it. Because of this, they're happier with government than they would be if they were taxed directly. This reduces the risk of extremist (communist, socialist, nazi, etc) politicians sweeping into power by riding the discontent of the masses.

</comment><comment><USER20> "...something that truly benefits ticket-buyers: by nudging people to save more or, even, to engage in safer sex."

Whoa. I guess poor people should not be allowed to participate in the joys of family and child raising. How did this get by editorial?

Edit: at the end of the article, the author links sex to health. I apologize, I didn't make it that far. Would have been better to say heath education in the earlier statement...

<comment><USER21> Because that's not what it's saying? Safer sex means not getting HIV in this context. Similarly, not having unintended children would also be a benefit that does not say anything about forbidding people from raising children if they so choose.

<comment><USER20> Ya, sorry, I jumped to that conclusion based on an early statement.</comment></comment></comment>


How to visualize the bail out  - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=at3MNu8BRwQ&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fthestimulist.com%2Fwhat-could-we-do-with-1-trillion-video%2F&feature=player_embedded

<comment><USER2> I visualize it kinda like a black hole.</comment>


Netflix accounts for more than a third of prime-time internet traffic in NA - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/567752/netflix-accounts-for-more-than-a-third-of-primetime-internet-traffic-in-north-america/ <comment><AUTHOR> Also of note: "Sandvine's report says 65% of aggregate online traffic in North America is currently from real-time entertainment—i.e., audio and video streaming—marking a significant increase from 49% in 2011."</comment>


Here are 588 women in the UK who could speak at your tech event - <AUTHOR> https://www.techworld.com/careers/here-are-uk-women-who-could-speak-at-your-tech-event-3645661/ <comment><USER2> Is there any evidence to show that men in general are working to keep women out of the tech sector? From what I've seen, any woman who wants to commit to learning and getting a job has been completely free to do so. For example; my sister, who's a software engineer because I got her into it years ago. And from what I've seen; nothing has stopped her. It just seems to me that women in general aren't interested in the field, and I'm not sure of the specific reason for it at this point.

<comment><USER3> Yes. I suggest doing a google search for why there are so few women in tech; you will plenty of articles, including some that point to recent studies. For example:

[https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/stanford-research- explains-...](https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/stanford-research-explains- lack-of-women-in-tech-men-make-them-unwelcome-before-they-even-apply.html)

It's also interesting that your sister's experience is reflective of the findings in various studies. Would your sister have pursued tech without your support?

<comment><USER4> I've worked in companies both in the mid west and in Silicon Valley. I think this culture is much more pervasive in the valley. In most other parts of the country where normal people work, women are accepted just as well as men. In fact, every company I worked for in the mid west had a reasonable amount of women, whereas the Silicon Valley companies had very few if not at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The author of this post is doing a huge disservice to the almost 600 tech experts listed.

She is clearly suggesting that we should invite these experts not because they are experts but because they are women.

How acceptable is that ?

Hence , I will never get why tech industry believes so much it must be so « inclusive ».

Okay then , can we have the same thing for female dominated industry ? Sociology , Education , Nurses ? Where are the articles complaining about those sectors being crowded with the opposite sex ?

Why on earth do we have conventions with « Women who codes » but not «Women Carpenter » or « Women BrickLayer » etc... or those jobs degrading or something ?

Tech is the only sectors that believes it is so ahead in terms of values that it's « okay » to choose people based on criterias like gender or ethnicities similar to google hiring scandals[0], and call that « Progress », and « Inclusiveness »

Sometimes I wish I was in the valley to work for top companies , then this type of articles pops up and it reminds me that I would have an arguments with nearly every co-workers on this topic almost every day.

An expert should be invited because he has dedicated a portion of his career studying a problem in depth and has come up with solutions or concepts that help elevates the debate , of which he is willingly to share this knowledge with an audience.

An expert should never be invited because of his or her gender or other criterias outside of his/her work.

[0][https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/ex-recruiter- accu...](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/ex-recruiter-accuses- google-hiring-discrimination-against-white-asian-men-n853601)

<comment><USER6> > Hence , I will never get why tech industry believes so much it must be so « > inclusive ».

Because being exclusive on the grounds of race, gender or age is against the law? All of those are illegal in the UK where the speakers are based.

More diversity in the workplace also makes them more enjoyable places to work. They may also bring different experiences and points of view in how a site or piece of software may be most useful, leading to more success in the market. A market where women occasionally buy things too.

Same for conference speakers. I want to hear perspectives that I cannot have had. There'd be no point going if everyone had my white middle aged male point of view. I want to understand and see the opportunities I'd otherwise miss, the UX, marketing or expectation differences between generations, gender or regions.

I'm surprised we still have this conversation, sadly.

<comment><USER7> Got any proof on that market success? I still haven't seen any. There are plenty of fields that do just fine without explicitly encouraging a balance of women while still being inclusive to women who show merit.

<comment><USER8> Even the simplest Google search would answer this for you. But here's a recent example [https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/business- et...](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/business-ethnic- gender-diversity-performance-levels-better-study-workplace-office- mckinsey-a8166601.html)

<comment><USER7> "McKinsey's research found that diversity has the most obvious impact on financial performance when it is found in executive teams and roles that are directly in charge of generating revenue."

Here are the ratios of men to women in the boards of directors in the top three companies by market cap in the world:

Apple: 3/15

Amazon: 2/9

Alphabet: 2/11

<comment><USER8> Just imagine how much _better_ those companies could be if they had more diversity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> meghan-maternie To all the men saying/thinking "hey this isn't equal and maybe women just aren't as good at tech," I invite you on a journey with me back to my first basketball game in the 4th grade.

I had seen sports my whole life but had never played them, and was also very good at being a good little girl. So while I got that sports was a competition (duh), in my first game I was dumbfounded as to how I was supposed to compete, because I was supposed to be nice and kind and not cause trouble. I literally passed the ball back to my teammates every time.

After the game, my Dad pulled me aside and said what would become a catchphrase of his and would change my life: "Meghan, be aggressive."

This was mind blowing. No person, no movie, no tv show had told me in the 90s that I could (and should!) be aggressive. And still be a good girl.

Two years later, I was the kid on the team that came close to fouling out bc I would use the box out very enthusiastically. My dad never stopped telling me to be aggressive. I ended up an all state field hockey athlete in high school, primarily because of my skills as a defender who was not afraid to get in the way.

For those who say women are predisposed biologically to not be good at things: Do you think my biology changed? Was I always born an aggressive woman, or was it a learned behavior? This example is a microcosm of thousands of other examples from a life where the messages one absorbs can shape action. (Others: Had I never been sexually propositioned by sources as a reporter, would I have been more aggressive about who i invited to drinks? Or in tech world, if a woman wasn't the only woman on their team/division/whatever for the past few decades, would they have stayed longer?) If you want to measure my testosterone, fine, but please also control for the fact that I never got any sort of message about how it could be a good thing if I was aggressive until I was 10 (plus a million other things like that.)

On the topic of bring more gender parity to nursing and teaching, please do. I would love to see more male engineers give up six figure salaries to learn what it takes to be a nurse or a teacher and wonder why they make so much less in return. Perhaps it's because things considered "women's work" was never highly valued to start?

<comment><USER9> > "hey this isn't equal and maybe women just aren't as good at tech," ... > "women are predisposed biologically to not be good at things"

No one has said that. Please assume some good faith that when people say they don't want speakers to be selected based on gender, it means they don't want speakers to be selected based on gender. There is not a single comment under this article that has said or implied that there are difference in the ability of men and women to perform skillfully with technology tasks.

> On the topic of bring more gender parity to nursing and teaching, please do.

Sure, lets bring in a universal affirmative action law that dictate that any industry that has more than 60% women or men must apply affirmative action for any new hire. I would enjoy to see that experiment. For reference, the top 3 most gender segregated professions (99.4% or higher) in Sweden a few years ago was midwife, dentist nurse, and stone layer. Engineers didn't even breach top 50, and is pretty average in gender segregation.

<comment><USER10> Why would you expect her to assume good faith of men arguing against her inclusion? Especially when we know that men from white nationalist groups have purposefully infiltrated technical spaces in order to fight the inclusion of women and underrepresented racial minorities? ([https://www.thestranger.com/news/2017/10/04/25451102/we- snuc...](https://www.thestranger.com/news/2017/10/04/25451102/we-snuck-into- seattles-super-secret-white-nationalist-convention))

These men are making a _political_ argument, not an intellectual one. They are arguing that nothing should be done in the face of obvious injustice. If they cared to read it, there is significant peer-reviewed work that says they are wrong, but because they are making a political argument not an intellectual one evidence does not matter. Expertise does not matter. Has any one of these guys offered a shred of evidence for their beliefs? Have any of them offered the credentials that qualify them to opine on this topic?

Someone who comes in and says "you shouldn't use C because it is slow as shit" wouldn't be taken seriously or treated as though they were arguing in good faith. Neither should these obviously-wrong dudes.

Just like with Holocaust deniers, engaging with these people only legitimizes them and their politically-motivated beliefs. (See for [https://slate.com/technology/2018/07/the-askhistorians- subre...](https://slate.com/technology/2018/07/the-askhistorians-subreddit- banned-holocaust-deniers-and-facebook-should-too.html) effective strategies to engage with people who are arguing for political reasons.) To do otherwise demands that women participate in their own marginalization, which explains why most of them don't bother and just quit, creating an echo chamber where men can keep reassuring themselves that these political beliefs are more important than facts. Frankly, it is a disgrace that Hacker's News is willing to host this tired bullshit, and YC should seriously consider the impact doing so has on their brand.

<comment><USER9> When it comes to gender segregation we are all marginalized in one place or an other. That is what 88.6% gender segregation for women and 88.4% gender segregation for men means in raw Swedish data.

There is no data to support that affirmative action is an effective strategy in dealing with this problem. There is also no support to the idea that a failure with inclusions is the reason why 88.6% women and 88.4% of men work in gender segregated professions here in Sweden. The very little of real scientific data, in the several research studies I have read, is ones that simply say that people feel more confident being around people who share the same trait as themselves. Multiply that effect with every challenge a person goes through from selecting a professions to being a student to graduation to seeking a job to staying in a professions for several years and what we get is a significant increase risk for members of the minority group to not select the profession or quit.

A solution need to fit the problem. 88.5% of the population has ended up gender segregated in Sweden. Is the method that the article suggest an effective strategy for that goal, and if so where is that evidence? Someone suggested that gender difference in preference is the cause but similar the data I have read on preference differences are not significant enough to explain such extreme segregation that exist here. The parent posts here suggest misogyny, which then would imply misandry to explain why an equal amount of men do not end up in professions dominated by women, but that seems poorly supported by peer-reviewed work that looks to explain gender segregation in general.

But as I suggested above, I would not mind seeing a experiment where people tried applying affirmative action as a general solution to fix gender segregation. Similar ideas has been tested before in smaller scales, like Sweden when it tried to do it in higher education. They had to scrap it because a court deemed it discrimination to give benefits to individuals based on gender, even if they were a minority. Norway is currently testing a different version, which will be interesting to see develop. I do expect it to run foul of the same issue as here in Sweden but they do have different laws and their relation with EU laws is complicated.

<comment> meghan-maternie Some data for you: 100 years ago, I couldn't vote in the United States. 50 years ago, my best shot at not living in poverty would've been marrying well. 25 years ago, starting and running a company would've been preposterous.

100 years ago, could you vote? 50 years ago, could you pursue a career and succeed on your own merits versus seeking a spouse? 25 years ago, were men starting companies?

Do you think perhaps that history contributes to the "failure with inclusions"? Do you think women ended up dominating careers like midwifery and nursing because they all just happened to realllllllly like that? Or because that was available to them to have some agency over their lives?

<comment><USER9> 100 years ago men were forced at gun point to put on a military uniform, and fight and die in wars. The agency of individuals during world war 1 and world war 2 was nothing like today.

Womens right to vote in the United States was largely pushed around 1910 because the government ran out of men to send to the frontline and wanted to create a draft for women. In order to do so however the argument went that it would not be fair to force women to fight the war unless they also had a vote. If I remember the dates right, in early 1914 the changes was put to the house of representatives but the decision but was postponed and then the war ended. The discussion of a draft for women ended, but the right for women to vote continued and in 1920 the nineteenth amendment was ratified.

If I lived 100 years ago and had a choice between voting and being forced at gun point to the trenches to die, I would not pick voting. Dieing in war is not my cup of tea and the probability of survival was not great during world war 1. A mans life a 100 years ago was that of extreme variance where we remember the few individuals that had many children and lived a long life, and the rest died horrible with no agency and is long forgotten.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I would include Magda Jadach, Raspberry Pi Foundation software developer, speaker at various conferences regarding teaching kids how to code: [https://www.linkedin.com/in/magdalenajadach/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/magdalenajadach/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Have each of these women been repeatedly rejected from giving talks at conferences or something?

<comment><USER10> If you aren't aware, usually a significant portion of speaking slots are filled because organizers reach out and solicit speakers. Indeed, I don't know of many conferences that could fill their schedule if they relied exclusively on inbound speakers, and doing it that way would be a recipe for having the same twenty dudes speak each year, which isn't going to create the best possible event for attendees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Speak about what?

</comment><comment><USER14> Everybody's free to submit a talk to mostly any event. If women feel like doing that less so than men, I don't see why thats a problem.

<comment><USER15> An argument like this generalizes into: everybody's free to do anything and there are no problems. At least you included "I don't see".</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Mind mapping tool that uses space to hold information - <AUTHOR> I recently saw a landing page of some mind mapping / knowledge base tool. The tool has 'quirky' way to hold information on the space - they used maps that looked like a game-map and claimed something 'we do know that information is not flat'. Unfortunately I forgot what was the tool name but I really want to try it so if you can help me find it I'd be grateful. From what I recall the landing page was blue and they had similar graphics to this promoting their tool: https://img.craftpix.net/2017/11/level-map-2d-game-backgrounds-1-720x480.jpg<p>Of course if you know something that sounds similar I would also like to see it. Thank you. <comment><USER2> There was a thread 8 days ago: [https://www.nototo.app/](https://www.nototo.app/) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22087780](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22087780) Any chance you mean that one?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much! That's it!</comment></comment>


Clarifying the Twitter Rules - <AUTHOR> https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/company/2017/Clarifying_The_Twitter_Rules.html <comment><USER2> I take it that their abusive behavior change is to highlight that they will never ban the POTUS from their platform no matter how he violates their ToS?</comment>


Ask HN: Your input on a platform I am building  - <AUTHOR>

As a freelancer I have been extremely frustrated with how hard it gets sometimes to get work. Especially, if you are new to freelancing.
I think most freelancers ignore the value of testimonials and positive client experience. Although other platforms allow people to endorse, I think there is a need for a platform where client's positive experiences becomes the core feature of a profile and not side feature.
Currently, I am working on developing the site but went ahead and put up the sign up page, blog and all. Link: squiry.com
Would love to hear your thoughts on idea itself and if you have any suggestion. <comment><USER3> The problem is real.

I'm not sold on the solution. Having built a successful consulting company, we've found that most of our business comes from word of mouth referrals.

After that, it comes from people who've found our side projects and wanted something like that.

Even after we get an introduction, people generally want to see a portfolio of work and get an estimate of time/cost before they go to check references.

Honestly, we don't even put testimonials on our web site, and that'd be an easy place to add them if they were valuable at all.

That being said, having reviews of things like accountants could be useful for us. Yelp never really caught on for that, and the reality (with accountants, and other service providers) is that you don't often get to experience many different types, so it's hard to leave a comparative review. Also, because they have fewer clients (than restaurants have patrons, for example) reviews are scarcer... and correspondingly I'm disinclined to leave a negative review. Sites like best vendor are ostensibly already trying to solve this issue. I don't think they've found success yet.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback. What we are trying to do is give someone an idea about a particular freelancer, how they work, what was past experiences like and then the potential client can see their portfolio. It's basically a profile and they will have all the info needed to hire someone. The key focus is positive experience of their clients.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I really like the idea but I think your greatest challenge will ensuring the site doesn't get spammed by false reviews.

I have nothing to add as far as a solution goes but I can say that when I see reviews or testimonials the first thing I do is try and verify the online presence of the poster. Whenever I see a link to LinkedIN it shows me that at least there is a real person here who I can check out.

If you can solve that problem without involving Facebook I'll signup. Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the boost. Reviews will be moderated. As of now the plan is to have all feedbacks/testimonials go directly into user dashboard which will then be approved or declined by the user. Of course, there will be some negative reviews as well but the user has the choice to either approve or decline them. This means there will only be positive reviews, but then again testimonials are mostly positive. Whether or not people choose to show both the good and the bad is upto them. Clients who want to leave testimonial won't have to sign up, ever. This is to encourage them to leave testimonials. The only way facebook will be involved is if the user wants to share their testimonials/review on their profile page.

"....reviews or testimonials the first thing I do is try and verify the online presence of the poster." --> We will have links to client sites or some form to verify that it is not fake. Still working out the details but definitely something we are considering.

Thanks again for your input. Very much appreciated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Would hiring companies just go to LinkedIN instead?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, they could and most likely will. However, in my experience - <USER2> freelancers don't get hired via LinkedIn. linkedIn, it seems to me is mostly used by big companies.

With this platform, new and upcoming freelancers have a way to show what their clients are saying. Of course, linkedin has an endorsement feature but it's mostly noise. The platform is basically a professional profile but with enough info and past experiences of the clients which I think gives enough info to a potential client to at least reach out to someone. We are still refining the idea and about how this could be even more useful, but the key thing we want to focus on is how we can reduce clutter and provide enough info to someone looking to hire a freelancer. Hope that makes sense.</comment></comment>


Cool Retro Terminal - <AUTHOR> http://diego-pacheco.blogspot.com/2017/07/cool-retro-terminal.html <comment><USER2> The project's Github page is a better link: [https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro- term](https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term)

It's available for Mac even though the blog post doesn't mention it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Trevor Blackwell wrote a cool "Apple2" hack for Xscreensaver that doubles as a usable terminal.

[https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/screenshots/](https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/screenshots/)

<comment><USER4> FYI, there's an anti HN referral script happening that redirects to a rude image on imgur.

<comment><USER5> I fell for that.

Is this the JWZ of "no you have two problems" regex quote? What does he have against HN?

<comment><USER6> The very same. Also the JWZ of "Unix port of Netscape" fame, and the XEmacs/LucidEmacs fork of GNU Emacs.

He's... not a fan of Y Combinator: [https://www.jwz.org/blog/2017/02/noted- fascist-collaborator-...](https://www.jwz.org/blog/2017/02/noted-fascist- collaborator-peter-thiel-has-managed-to-compromise-the-aclu/)

(and again, you'll need to copy/paste that link rather than clicking on it)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's a similar terminal for macOS and iOS called cathode. iOS version even uses accelerometer to mimic screen wavering when moved.

The mac version was using a lot of CPU cycles, so I stopped using it, but it's worth checking.

</comment><comment><USER8> I use 'tritty' (for slow terminal line) in combination with the directly- extracted font from the vt220 (for looks) for much the same effect in a more portable way. It doesn't emulate the CRT artifacts, but it's generally pretty good to emulate a 'real terminal' feeling.

[https://github.com/sjmulder/trickle](https://github.com/sjmulder/trickle)

[http://sensi.org/~svo/glasstty/](http://sensi.org/~svo/glasstty/)

The tritty timing was a bit off on OpenBSD last I tried (IIRC something about the sleep granularity being to large and so the emulation always going too slow), but on Linux & MacOS it works great.

I just use a separate terminal config/start script and fire it up in 80x24 for small-scale admin-type tasks or when I feel like low level focus, and a regular setup for everything else..

</comment><comment><USER9> The green and orange terminal screen colors will fit perfectly with the themed colors of this keyset, intended for users of Cherry-compatible mechanical keyboards: [https://www.massdrop.com/buy/massdrop-x-admgc-sa-green- scree...](https://www.massdrop.com/buy/massdrop-x-admgc-sa-green-screen- custom-keycap-set)

</comment><comment><USER10> "Uncle Bob" Martin also used it in his videos (([https://cleancoders.com/](https://cleancoders.com/)). While watching the video, I recognized the Cool Retro on some of his segments where he was showing lines of code. By the way, his videos are really quirky with lots of scenes, and highly recommended, despite not being free.

Sometimes, I get an urge to buy used VT terminals on Ebay, but then stop myself from making such mistakes by watching htop running on Retro Cool, and appease my nostalgia.

</comment><comment><USER11> It works on Linux, but some bugs aren't fixed for a long time and the project looks stalled. They also should have renamed the binary to crt.

<comment><USER12> ln -s, or alias it

<comment><USER11> That's what I do :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This (1) gif from the github page brings out all the school days of "hacking" nostalgia

1: [https://user- images.githubusercontent.com/121322/32070717-16...](https://user- images.githubusercontent.com/121322/32070717-16708784-ba42-11e7-8572-a8fcc10d7f7d.gif)

</comment><comment><USER14> I love it. I always have my Mac terminal set to Homebrew to make me feel and look like a cool hacker - and to match my Matrix screensaver, of course.

I was thinking of switching to primary Linux desktop soon, so I'll be sure to install this.

<comment><USER15> According to another poster they have a Mac version available on their GitHub page. I checked and they do.

[https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro- term](https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Tried it for what it's worth some time ago. Pretty novel and cool looking. Ended up removing it again; I found it too novel even after fiddling with settings.

</comment><comment><USER17> I would love for it to be able to use arbitrary fonts :) At present, it only works with fonts it was compiled with.

</comment><comment><USER18> (2017)

</comment><comment><USER19> My new favourite thing.

</comment><comment><USER20> is there a similar CSS/JS framework for the web?

<comment><USER21> I was thinking the exact same thing as I have been porting some old terminal based games to the browser and having a decent looking terminal interface would really help with the immersion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I agree, it is cool. Real-looking, too.

</comment><comment><USER23> Nice, but a complete rip-off of the look and feel of the Cathode app, who did it first, a decade or more before.

<comment><USER24> Cool Retro Term began in November 2013, Cathode in January 2011. That's rather a short "decade or more".

And I think that you'll find that TeleVideo et al. actually did it first, three (proper) decades before either of those. (-:

<comment><USER23> > _That 's rather a short "decade or more"._

I meant they did it a decade or so before NOW -- not a decade or so before this project, which I knew started in reaction to Cathode, but didn't know when exactly.

<comment><USER25> Your grammar is misleading then.

> a decade or more before

should probably read

> a decade or more ago

<comment><USER23> Yeah, I'm notorious for hastily typing my HN comments and making tons of grammar mistakes and typos...</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Questions to ask when someone pitches product - <AUTHOR>

i am planning to meet with a guy.... he has a background in sales and before that, design.  he is trying to pitch me on the idea of being a partner in a business he has planned.  generally i just plan to listen to the pitch and think it over... any ideas on questions to ask? <comment><USER2> One thing he needs to have figured out is: how are you going to get people to come to your site. Since he has a background in sales, he should already have a solid plan for how to get visitors and turn them into users. If he doesn't that is a huge red flag. You can have the most awesome value proposition ever, but if you don't know how to get users (not just traffic), then it doesn't matter at all. Most people underestimate how hard it is to get people to use stuff on the internet.

Also, if you gave us a general idea of the market or general area the idea falls under, we could provide more specific advice.

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER3> If he wants you to be a developer, I'd ask for hourly rate plus large equity stake. If someone's only looking for free labor to execute their idea, they usually back out when hearing this.

</comment><comment><USER4> What have you done to get this business going other than contact me and write a pitch? How have you attempted to validate the assumptions of your business so far?

</comment><comment><USER5> \- what problem or gap in the market are you addressing?

\- who are your competitors, how are you different?

\- whats the business model, path to profitable, and when?

\- what's the biggest hurdle the venture faces - in your opinion?

\- show me the analysis/numbers? (to see that due diligence has been attempted)

<comment><AUTHOR> these are good questions...

when you say "path to profitable"... do you mean.. how to get traction or sales?

what kind of analysis/numbers should i be looking for? market size?</comment></comment>


Camera freezes time at 10 trillion frames per second - <AUTHOR> http://www.inrs.ca/english/actualites/worlds-fastest-camera-freezes-time-10-trillion-frames-second <comment><USER2> _"It's an achievement in itself," says Jinyang Liang, the leading author of this work, who was an engineer in COIL when the research was conducted, "but we already see possibilities for increasing the speed to up to one quadrillion (1015) frames per second!"_

Just getting started... o_O

<comment><USER3> Honest question, what can be seen at one quadrillion fps that 10 trillion cannot already see? This question is out of pure ignorance and wonder, like "Why would you ever want to move faster than a horse". But this is at a scale I just cannot think in anymore.

<comment><USER4> Imagine expirmental physics. Being able to watch things like explosions in super minute detail. Watching light propogate.

<comment><USER5> Umm good luck getting enough photons to see anything. Shot noise

<comment><USER4> So shoot at 1 quad, and average 1000 frames to one output frame? Light will still be moving less than 1mm per frame.

<comment><USER6> Pretty sure the light is integrated over a frame anyway, so that will get you the same results as just shooting at the lower framerate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Where is the video? That's what I'm looking for

<comment><USER8> Here's a video from 2011, but it's only at 1 trillion FPS using the same laser pulse approach - [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-fSqFWcb4rE](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-fSqFWcb4rE)

Also, the music is pretty cringey, so I'd just leave it muted...

<comment><USER9> Watching this confuses me as to the timing of it all... if the conceit is that we're watching the bundle of photons move through the bottle that's because the photons from the source are hitting the camera, right? So is it the light moving through the bottle + the travel time to the sensor? Should refraction and reflection across the surface cause a lot of weird visual interference (as the bottle's size is no longer insignificant the time scale for lights velocity)? Is that what we're seeing there?

<comment><USER10> I had this similar realization when I watched that video from 2011 the first time around (hard to believe it was 7 years ago).

It also gave me this odd sense of blindness, in that I cannot actually see what's in front of me, only what literally interacts with my retina, almost like it's made of tastebuds for light. Still weirds me out when i think about it.

<comment><USER11> Your eyes are terahertz radio receivers!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Reminded me of this TED talk on femto-photography: [https://www.ted.com/talks/ramesh_raskar_a_camera_that_takes_...](https://www.ted.com/talks/ramesh_raskar_a_camera_that_takes_one_trillion_frames_per_second?language=en)

</comment><comment><USER13> "This new camera literally makes it possible to freeze time"

It literally freezes time? Come on..

</comment><comment><USER14> How close is this to planck time?

<comment><USER15> Hijacking this as it's getting intelligent responses: what's the greatest resolution we could measure today, and what's physically possible?

<comment><USER16> Well, let's do some quick and dirty math.

Let's say you have a very bright light source, and that light source results in shining a full 100 Watts of light into the sensor of your camera (I'm using this not as a typical example but because it will make it easy to scale the answer). Photons of visible light have an energy of at minimum 1.5 electron- Volts (800nm red light), which means that 100 Watts of light represents 4.2e20 photons per second.

And that means that with only 100 Watts of light reaching your sensor you cannot attain an fps higher than 4.2e20, because at that speed you'd only get on average around one photon per frame. More realistically you need tens of thousands to millions of photons per frame to have some meaningful level of dynamic range and spatial resolution, which limits the fps to around a quadrillion fps per 100 Watts of light falling on the sensor.

Though once you get into that range you also have problems of signalling, we don't really have electronics that work at those speeds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I imagine this would give discoveries in the LHC a boost, or at least some amazing footage of atoms colliding and exploding :) That would be amazing!

<comment><USER18> No, for a few reasons:

First they are producing too many collisions (probably many quadrillion of collisions, I can't find the exact number). Most of the are boring, so they have a lot of filters to select and save only the slightly interesting collisions, because otherwise it would be impossible to save the data. IIRC they only got a few thousand of Higgs bosons, he signal to noise ratio is almost 0.

Second to film something using light, the object must be bigger than the wavelength of the light. There are some tricks to reduce this a little, but you can't film elementary particles directly. The old method was to let the particles create small bubbles or drops of water inside a recipient, and then photograph the chain of dots with visible light. In the new equipment the process is more complicated, but the interesting part of the collision is too fast and too small. They only measure the particles that are flying away after the interesting part happened, they only measure the leftovers and try to reconstruct the actual collision.

Third, the interesting collisions have strong quantum effects, and the quantum effects "disappear" when you are using light that is strong enough to get an accurate position of the particles. You can imagine that if the light is strong enough, then the light itself will bounce against the particles and modify the direction and the collision. It sounds somewhat like magic, but it's possible to write this correctly and precisely using a lot of math and is one of the bases of quantum mechanics. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> How many frames per second would you need to film at for a photon of light to be in an identical position on 2 frames?

<comment><USER20> For 635nm red laser light, you'd need to be sampling somewhere in the order of 9.4 x 10^14 times a second to get two samples per cycle. Based on roughly 300000000m /635nm x2 but then the question comes down to how many cycles make up a photon and does that question even. Make sense in the first place.

<comment><USER21> >9.4 x 10^14

Can you explain how did you get this number for the red wavelength?

Also can we fundamentally "see" a photon?

<comment><USER20> I was working from the idea of a nyquist or sampling rate needed to "perfectly" reproduce a wave form. I know this works for lower frequencies but I have no idea how well it translates to something like optical frequencies/light. You can find frequency from speed / wavelength: f = v/l or in our case f = c / l since we're dealing with light.

I was using 635nm as the wavelength (basically a red laser). That gives you:

3 x 10^8 / 635 x 10^-7 = 4.7 x 10^14

Which should be about 470 terahertz (4.72 x 10^14) give or take a bit. To sample that "perfectly" you'd need to sample at twice the frequency or about 940 terahertz or (9.4 x 10^14).

As to your second question, I know that there are single photon detectors. Past that, you've got me. I don't know if that can be classified as "seeing" or not. As to size, there's [https://briankoberlein.com/2015/04/14/thats- about-the-size-o...](https://briankoberlein.com/2015/04/14/thats-about-the- size-of-it/) but that might or might not make sense.

That's about the limit of what I'm willing/able to say on the subject.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This phys.org "article" is simply a copy of the INRS press release you can find here: [http://www.inrs.ca/english/actualites/worlds-fastest- camera-...](http://www.inrs.ca/english/actualites/worlds-fastest-camera- freezes-time-10-trillion-frames-second)

Actual paper: [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41377-018-0044-7](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41377-018-0044-7)

Website for the INRS lab's project on this: [http://coilab.caltech.edu/research_6.html](http://coilab.caltech.edu/research_6.html) (includes PDF of the above paper and others)

As almost always, the phys.org "article" adds nothing of value to the press release it reproduces.

<comment><USER23> Thanks for the links! I see your point, but lots of people wouldn't know about this if it was just a press release. I know I don't have enough time to check for them.

<comment><USER24> Yes, of course. The person posting the link, however, should do even the tiniest bit of legwork.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It doesn't really capture 10 trillion frames per second. The laser pulses at a regular interval, and the combination of the regular pulsing + multiple pictures taken at different points along those pulses makes for 10 trillion distinct frames captured within the timeframe of 1 second. There is no actual video captured.

I get that being a tech journalist is difficult, you have to juggle between the tech and the layman. But after writing a headline, read it back to yourself and ask: _will this put the wrong idea in people 's minds?_ If the answer is yes, rewrite it... even if it sounds less cool.

<comment><USER26> I don't quite understand how your original point refutes the headline. They are saying that it captures frames at a rate that, measured in seconds, would be ten trillion frames per second.

The headline seems entirely accurate.

<comment><USER27> How long can they maintain that frame rate for?

<comment><USER28> From what I understand, it is a camera, so as long as you can record data fast enough. I didn't read any limitation of the current setup across time (there is one across space though). So far, it is only 25 frames captured, it is fundamental research, not yet a product people can get value of.

Note that what we want to observe with those cams are very short, transient phenomenons. When I was doing my internship at a particle accelerator called GANIL, we were _only_ recording 0.5 second, which already represented close to 1TB worth of raw data. It takes months to interpret and analyze results.

EDIT: typo

<comment><USER29> That's incredible. How long did it take to write 0.5s of data to disk? I'm guessing there's no way to sustain this as you'd be so far behind after only a single second. I'm pretty sure we can still only store a few gigs per second. Please correct me if I'm wrong. Very interesting though!

<comment><USER30> The best way to think of this is it might take 100 seconds to 'record' those 10 trillion frames that occur in 1 second.

That doesn't seem to make sense, but imagine this. You want to shoot 100 frames of the first millisecond of an airsoft pellet leaving a gun, but you have a camera that only shoots around 2 frames per second.

Your airsoft gun shoots 1 ball exactly (1ns accuracy) every second, exactly the same velocity and direction.

You have your camera, that only captures 2 frames every second, but this camera has an insane shutter speed, 1 microsecond, and has a shutter with that you can time to the gun exactly.

You can also delay the release of the shutter by 1 microsecond increments.

So, you start by taking 1 picture, 10 microseconds after you shoot your pellet. Then in the next second, 20 microseconds, you do this 100 times. You stitch this all together, and you have a video in super slow motion of an airsoft pellet leaving a gun. It just happens to be 100 different airsoft pellets.

<comment><USER31> I agree that the article isn't very clear on this, but I believe you're describing the previous work.

> Using current imaging techniques, measurements taken with ultrashort laser > pulses must be repeated many times, which is appropriate for some types of > inert samples, but impossible for other more fragile ones.

The new innovation here actually records the frames right after each other of one single event:

> The first time it was used, the ultrafast camera broke new ground by > capturing the temporal focusing of a single femtosecond laser pulse in real > time (Fig. 2). This process was recorded in 25 frames taken at an interval > of 400 femtoseconds and detailed the light pulse's shape, intensity, and > angle of inclination.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> It would be cool to record single photon splittings along some path, as they happen in real time [0].

[0] [https://www.nature.com/news/2010/100728/full/news.2010.381.h...](https://www.nature.com/news/2010/100728/full/news.2010.381.html)</comment>


The Pomodoro Technique - stop procastinating and make deadlines your friend - <AUTHOR> http://www.tecnicadelpomodoro.it/docs/francesco-cirillo/2007/ThePomodoroTechnique_v1-3.pdf

<comment><USER2> Anyone read it? Is it worth reading? 44 pages is pretty lengthy if it's just the usual masturbatory self-improvement stuff (but I'm willing to believe that it's not, if someone can summarise why it _is_ better than the other stuff)...

<comment><USER3> condensed version:

1\. use a kitchen timer

2\. minimize interruptions

3\. work in iterations of 25 minutes with 5 minute breaks

4\. change it up sometimes longer or shorter breaks longer or shorter work chunks.

5\. plan your day

6\. change your plans as needed.

That's pretty much it.

//Pomodoro=tomato //his first kitchen timer was shaped like one.

<comment><USER2> Ah yes, I tried that for a while. Even wrote an article about it: [http://www.inter-sections.net/2008/04/23/de-batching-or- how-...](http://www.inter-sections.net/2008/04/23/de-batching-or-how-to- juggle-too-many-balls)

It works well, but gets boring after a while... I've found it works best when you're drowning under a sea of small tasks.

<comment><USER4> Why does it work best for small tasks? His example tasks are 5-8 pomodoros long.

In my opinion, no self-help guide applies for everyone; we all have our own strengths and vices.

It seems that this one is designed to help build concentration and minimize interruptions by defining concrete "work unit" blocks, thus helping to build discipline in fighting off distractions (internal & external).

I don't feel strongly about his views on the perception of time, but it's not that important to the whole article.

<comment><USER2> _Why does it work best for small tasks?_

Well, in my case, when I'm doing a long task that I enjoy I tend to enter an obsessive mode that's far more productive if uninterrupted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My main problem is just getting started on a task, but once I get started I can usually follow through. What do people here do to get over that inertial bump?

<comment><USER6> Make it into a ritualized behavior. A 5 minute routine that says "and now I'm going to make this task my main effort".

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I read the whole article. It is designed for certain types of task, and it is not appropriate to others. For example, sometimes my tasks involve, "travel to the city and speak with Joe." "Travel to the city" takes 40 minutes. It should not be split into two work units with a break in between. Further, "speak with Joe" would not be splittable. How am I going to say, "Joe, when the timer rings, we are going to get up and not talk to one another for 5 minutes."

However, for desk-work it might help me. I have to stop every 20 minutes and take a 5 minute break anyway due to RSI. Using this interval as an atomic unit for task completion, recording, and estimation may be useful.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've been using this trick when dealing with boring tasks, to prevent my mind from wandering. If you are on a Mac, this widget can crack the whip on you by chiming at regular intervals: <http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/status/prodme.html>

Of course, the preferable solution is to find a job where your tasks aren't boring.

</comment><comment><USER9> I like the general idea, although if I had a kitchen timer ticking on my physical desktop and going off every 25 minutes, my officemates would beat me senseless, which could have some impact on my productivity.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> [http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/magazine/17-01/mf_sel...](http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/magazine/17-01/mf_self_help?currentPage=1)

"Diary of a Self-Help Dropout: Flirting With the 4-Hour Workweek"

</comment><comment><USER10> I can recommend getting timer-applet if you're running Gnome.

</comment><comment><USER11> I may actually try this. I think I'll pick up a timer after work.

<comment><USER4> If you have an iPhone, it has a nice timer app built in (not necessarily directed only to you creativeembassy, but to the general, largely iPhone-using HN public)

<comment><USER6> I've had the timer randomly quit on me if I switched off the phone, which made me lose confidence in it.

Whatever the bug was may have been fixed, but that doubt stops me from using it exclusively.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This sort of thing seems to work well when you have a lot of well defined work to do.

But what do you do if your work is not well defined or clear cut? Sometimes slowing down, taking a step back, looking at the big picture, and thinking outside the box produces much less work with much more impact. Then you don't need your timer nearly as much.

<comment><USER13> I have been using the technique for a couple of months now. I love it and I would say that for me, it works for both kinds of work. I know it sounds silly, but it has come to a point where the ticking sound is my work-mode reminder which helps me stay focused. Also, I have started competing with myself to see how many pomodoros a day I can do.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been using a timer on the computer. I think a ticker might drive me nuts, but I get what you mean by the ticking sound.

I've been using something similar for my meditative practice, only I use incense. I sit there until the entire stick burns off. What ends up happening is that I subconsciously associate the meditative state with the smell of sandalwood incense.</comment></comment></comment>


Adding AJAX to rails with less than 20 lines of IntercoolerJS - <AUTHOR> http://intercoolerjs.org/tutorials/crud.html

<comment><AUTHOR> You can take a look at this diff if you want the TLDR:

[https://github.com/LeadDyno/intercooler-tutorial- app/commit/...](https://github.com/LeadDyno/intercooler-tutorial- app/commit/b425ad671746c34039bd84fc76bb7c11d6537b24)</comment>


Nexus 4 soldout means new Nexus 5 for developers - <AUTHOR> http://knowtifier.com/news/303/sold-out-nexus-4-not-returning-to-play-store-hits-at-a-nexus-5/ Nexus devices seem to be the only pure developer devices for Android. Google did announce Android 4.4 so maybe Nexus 5 is around the corner. <comment><USER2> Direct link to article:

[http://www.slashgear.com/google-nexus-4-8gb-model-wont-be- re...](http://www.slashgear.com/google-nexus-4-8gb-model-wont-be- restocked-03295851/)</comment>


The dangerous myth still believed about the Lehman Brothers bust - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-dangerous-myth-we-still-believe-about-the-lehman-brothers-bust/2018/09/09/5a2f8a9c-b2bc-11e8-9a6a-565d92a3585d_story.html <comment><USER2> This is basically right. It's a myth that anyone believed in any of the stronger forms of efficient markets. The interaction of ineffective regulation and political lobbying had a lot to do with the crisis.

Related myth is the idea that nobody saw it coming. I went to a luncheon at Goldman's in 2006 where they announced things would start looking rocky in 2007 and the big whammy would be 2008.

<comment><USER3> Yes - the Associate class training of Lehmans in 2005 had a few speakers that were warning of an oncoming crisis. And the folk on the mortgage desks had early view of the problems that were becoming unmanageable.

<comment><USER4> Is there any sense of something like that happening today?

<comment><USER3> I work far away from that sort of thing now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is counterfactual nonsense.

Greenspan supported the repeal of Glass-Steagall, and also supported the Commodities Futures Modernization Act, which did a huge amount to legitimise Credit Default Swaps.

He opposed HOEPA oversight by the Fed of fraudulent liar's loans by unregulated lenders. He was on the wrong side of multiple conflicts of interest, including some related to Enron's SPV frauds.

While Greenspan was giving PR-scented talks about the renewal of trust in the markets after the regrettable failures of the Enron years, the FBI was warning there was an epidemic of mortgage fraud.

So - no. Greenspan was not a misunderstood and essentially powerless economic moralist. He was at ground zero of the crash, and deserves a significant share of the blame for it.

<comment><USER6> There's the old saw about the "repeal" of good ol' Glass-Steagall again. The change in 1999 merely did away with restrictions on commercial banks and investment banks being controlled by the same holding company. There were enormous moral-hazard problems for _all_ banks, and that was induced by what were then only widely assumed bailout guarantees.

I'm just a random guy on the Internet. Maybe you'll believe WaPo[0].

 _But why let facts get in the way of a good screenplay?_

 _Facts such as that Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch — three institutions at the heart of the crisis — were pure investment banks that had never crossed the old line into commercial banking. The same goes for Goldman Sachs …_

 _The infamous AIG? An insurance firm. New Century Financial? A real estate investment trust. No Glass-Steagall there._

 _Two of the biggest banks that went under, Wachovia and Washington Mutual, got into trouble the old-fashioned way – largely by making risky loans to homeowners. Bank of America nearly met the same fate, not because it had bought an investment bank but because it had bought Countrywide Financial, a vanilla-variety mortgage lender._

[0]: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/lets-shatter-the-myth-on- glas...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/lets-shatter-the-myth-on-glass- steagall/2012/07/27/gJQASaOAGX_story.html)

<comment><USER7> Yes. There's also the fact that institutions that would have violated Glass- Steagall, like JP Morgan Chase and USAA, came through the financial crisis better than pure investment banks.

And one of the tactics to help stop the crisis was to allow remaing investment banks to convert to bank holding companies that accept deposits--which would have also violated Glass-Steagall.

And that Europe didn't have a regulation like Glass-Steagall, yet the crisis didn't start in Europe, it started in the U.S.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> (preface: I'm not an American, I'm just interested!)

The language used to talk about economics is so technical that any talk about what is or isn't still believed is practically unknowable. I'd accept that there is a consensus on "it is obvious what the problem was when Lehman went bust", and simultaneously that there is no consensus on "what was the problem was when Lehman went bust".

This article talks in general and specific terms about the regulatory framework. Seems reasonable. But in this age of fractured politics (where no blow is too low) an opinion piece is either preaching to the choir or being completely ignored.

Macroeconomics has a major theme - how to divide the economic pie up in a manner that encourages people to contribute to said pie. I'd rather know who is still talking seriously about the growing and contributing part of that theme and whether they are currently in charge or currently not in charge of the financial system.

Modern economic management is really focused around debt (c.f. how the money supply is enlarged and how quickly that happens in the US). After 2008, it isn't obvious whether the debt-based approach is growing the pie as there seem to be a real indicators that are not promising. I suspect that debt is simply moving pieces of the pie around. But intead of establishing these broad and general strokes of the picture people do love to dive into the detail of regulation where they are going to make mistakes, be wrong and get defensive about points that ultimately do not matter.

<comment><USER9> Economies are debt based since the invention of debt basically. Debt-basedness is not the problem.

Nor is the balance sheet of central banks. Inflation is low despite huge QE programs.

The problem is that there is no countercyclical program to save for the eventual downturn. (Important note, there never really was. Centuries ago villages disappeared, cities emptied out, thousands died from starvation, crime was worse, and armed conflict coming to town was very much always a possibility). Sure there are social support systems in many countires. The US has a very inefficient one, it doesn't really help getting out of the gutter.

<comment><USER8> > Economies are debt based since the invention of debt basically. Debt- > basedness is not the problem.

It may not be the problem but it is a good stating point. The degree of indebtedness is important.

> Inflation is low despite huge QE programs.

My understanding is that inflation is measured as a consumer-goods-only effect and that the QE programs gave vast sums of money to people who used it to buy assets (kind of a tautology that, because obviously it didn't end up flowing into consumer goods).

The fact that it didn't show up in the inflation statistics is a good start, but why is that the only way it can cause problems? It looks like the government picking winners and losers, and governments have a terrible track record of making those decisions.

<comment><USER10> > The degree of indebtedness is important.

I think what you mean is the ability to service the debt under a variety of non "act of god" scenarios.

There are a lot of companies around the world defaulting on USD denominated debt now because of rising interest rates, that at ZLB, would have been able to keep racking up the debt because it would have still been serviceable.

Same is true for a lot of governments with a decent amount of USD denominated debt that are finding it hard to service because of currency outflows from domestic financial (debt/stock) markets in response to rising interest rates (combined with a lack of sufficiently acceptable local options).

>It looks like the government picking winners and losers, and governments have a terrible track record of making those decisions.

It definitely seems like this to me, and is more pronounced/easier to see in places where the state has a heavier influence on the markets. But even this will only last so long before it doesn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> [https://outline.com/MxvDb6](https://outline.com/MxvDb6)

</comment><comment><USER12> In the end the only strong indicator of economic success in the long term seems to be the quality of the rule of law in a jurisdiction. It's not that the rule of law in the USA is poor compared to everywhere else, but that it could be made better still and this would be a way for the USA to both continue its global leadership and to better deserve its global leadership.

</comment><comment> d--b > The answer is that the capture of Congress by financial lobbies ensured the > balkanization of regulation into an alphabet soup of agencies, many of them > underfunded and ineffective.

I thought at this stage everybody knew that already.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is bananas. This is like piling explosives around the base of every skyscraper in Manhattan, connecting it all up with fuses and then blaming the ignition of that fuse for the ensuing disaster.

Yes, we get it. Mortgage credit was too easy to come by in the 2000s. That availability was driven by government subsidized lending. But that bubble should've burst and triggered a recession that was perhaps a bit worse than ordinary. It left a crater in the global economy because the financial products it tourched off happened to connect every major financial institution in a way I don't think anyone understood until the autopsies of the Great Recession started to come in.

<comment><USER14> The government was not responsible for the sub-prime mortgage crisis, only a tiny fraction of sub-prime loans were due to legal mandates (6%).

[https://www.cbsnews.com/news/loans-to-low-income- households-...](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/loans-to-low-income-households- did-not-cause-the-financial-crisis/)

<comment><USER13> I'm saying it doesn't matter either way.

To me it doesn't matter who built or lit the fuse. The piles of interconnecting ordinance were the derivatives. Any asset in a bubble that had decent exposure in a derivatives market could've triggered the disaster. The layers of deals too complex for anyone to understand that entwined many major financial firms are what made the Great Recession "Great".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Seems to be trendy these days to say that there is going to be another downturn or collapse whereas in 2007 saying such things you might be branded as a heretic. Ever since 2009 some people made careers out of saying there is going to be a collapse, indeed Zero Hedge has predicted 11 of the last 7 doomsday collapses in the USA since then. I've come to see people like Zero Hedge, Jim Rogers, Peter Schiff, as permabears and as such not too interesting to hear about their particular predictions. The massive inflation never happened, and there was no collapse. But what is interesting is that there is a chorus from the opposite end now, that is saying it is inevitable. That seems unusual. Seems that the concensus among these sorts say that things will probably be fine till about 2020 then it blows up. It being about everything that is overvalued, which is also nearly everything. I actually lost the entire bull run because of fear.

I figure this stuff is being dredged up because of the 10 year anniversary of 2008. The whole world is going to change by April next year, I think the US economy might be chugging along even in spite of the hell everyone else is about to endure in their markets because Trumps tax cut is basically a multi- trillion dollar cash stimulus in the economy that goes broadly to nearly everyone.

I made a couple observations: The fed is now afraid to show its cards. No longer will it give forward guidance because they are not actually sure what they need to do. If they raise rates they risk collapsing prices on debt instruments, if they lower rates they fear inflation. As for protecting the currency, they don't need to do that. The dollar is already a policy nightmare for most of the world as to its current value. Inflation isn't bad at all either. Employment is as good as it gets I think. So why raise rates? But this is their plan. They plan to raise rates all the way to 2020 (familiar year reported) and then... what? Also, I've been seeing ads for adjustable rate mortgages at very low rates. Are they going to reset everyone's mortgage in 2019 causing a huge downwind pressure on home prices? That seems to be the 2006 2007 2008 pattern all over again.

<comment><USER16> Why April next year? Do you got some event in mind?

<comment><USER15> Month after brexit of course

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If key figures at the federal reserve didn't (don't?) believe in the self- regulating power of a free market, that's nice, but this article still seems to suggest that said belief is still alive and well among highly influential figures in the economy, i.e. those financial lobbyists or their interest groups must either

a) Believe that a free market can police itself; or

b) Be so myopically hell-bent on the bottom lines of their interest groups that they're willing to recklessly sabotage important regulatory impediments to meet their ends.

Either way, a lot of powerful people could still probably stand to be admonished on the importance of well-enforced regulations, even if those admonitions are embarrassingly basic. Am I missing something here?

<comment><USER10> The thing is, both of those are irrelevant in the long term, because there will be a time under either scenario where a) or b) will not protect their six or their balance sheets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> So it boils down to the U.S.' broken political system? If the effects of a financial crisis are felt across the globe, why not have an international comitee that regulates the markets? One that is not prone to lobbyists and campaign contribution mania?

<comment><USER19> Because then populists could score cheap points by railing against "unelected bureaucrats"... e.g Brexit

<comment><USER20> So the problem with having unelected bureaucrats is that it is too easy to come up with arguments against having them?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> If, as the author claims, the economists all knew the efficient market hypothesis is mistaken, then why didn't they inform the public during the bubble, and get it to pressure the politicans to regulate the financial markets?

Also, whether or not the economists believed in the efficient market hypothesis at the time, the conservatives and libertarians sure did, and they continue to do so.

</comment><comment><USER22> Man that was hard to read...

</comment><comment><USER23> Let me know when people are ready to get down to brass tacks about the Fed; that it is an unconstitutional abrogation of the congress's powers, that it was created and passed under the most dubious of circumstances and by the most duplicitous group of people, and that the very banks that cause it's various crashes are the ones who own it and run it and bail themselves out. The FOMC is corrupt. The POTUS can do nothing other than appoint the board and hope they do what is needed.

People let the economists use word-salad to confuse and obfuscate matters, and this article is just naive whitewashing that does no root cause analysis and ignores the rca that has already been done.

when speaking about the financial system, I am often reminded of Ralph Waldo Emerson, "For a thousand hacking at the branches of evil, only one is striking at the root."

</comment><comment><USER24> Also Bahnsen's book, Crisis of Responsibility, which makes the point that everyone blames wall street or the government, but no one talks about main street's culpability.

At one time it was considered an iron clad rule that Americans would always pay their mortgage. But something changed in the American character and suddenly millions of Americans were fine with defaulting on their debts.

There's plenty of blame to go around, but this recent turn to populism in the wake of the financial crisis is particularly ugly for its rank hypocrisy.

<comment><USER25> This is an embarrassing untruth told by one who has no idea how most of the US lives. A huge portion of the US lives a few paychecks away from default because so much of most families incomes is needed just to keep your head above water. Rising home prices made homes look like an excellent investment that Americans could no longer afford to pay for when the bankers tanked the economy in the process of milking as much as they could from it.

Losing a home thrusts one either out into the street or onto the mercy of families because the financial ruination may make it somewhere between difficult to impossible to rent even if one has the money. It ruins your credit, breaks up families, ruins relationships, hurts ones job prospects even.

The idea that people faced ruin because they didn't have the character to live up to their obligations is more than offensive.

When I lost mine after weathering a number of crisis the bank wasn't interested in anything less than all back money due immediately or nothing so catching up was impossible. Hell there was even a government program to help people stay in their homes that would have lent every bit of the money required to catch up and the bank wasn't interested.

In brief shove your crisis of responsibility because you have no earthly idea what peoples lives are like or the shit they have had to slog through.

<comment><USER24> You know nothing about me. I'm sorry that you had a difficult personal experience.

This is a gross sociological question involving millions of people. Nothing anyone can say about a question like this can possibly cover every case.

Maybe Bahnsen is wrong, but he's not uninformed. He works in the financial industry and makes an interesting argument.

<comment><USER25> He works in the financial sector and his argument after his sociopath colleagues tank the economy is that its someone else's fault. That's fantastic.

Banks are supposed to be experts in assessing risk and financial products. If an expert sells a bunch of bad loans knowing he is going to fraudulently sell them on to others anyway its the experts fault for tanking the economy.

At worst the buyers are stupid. There certainly was no crisis of faith and values.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Animating URLs with JavaScript and Emojis - <AUTHOR> http://matthewrayfield.com/articles/animating-urls-with-javascript-and-emojis/#%F0%9F%8C%92 <comment><USER2> I love the creativity of the hack, especially when he sync'd the video position with the scrubber. Respect.

I also love the guy's vaguely deranged, Adult Swim -inspired commentary. I went from hater to fan in about 30 seconds, once I realized that he must idolize Tim Heidecker. Again, respect.

However, what I love the most is how the video was composited and edited. What tools do you use to pull that together without slaving over every detail? It looks deceptively low-budget but there's a lot of really subtle details in the way he zooms in on the URL, tweens and flips his video around that make the whole thing feel like a Tim and Eric special feature.

I'd love to know how to produce that sort of result on a meaningfully short timeline.

<comment><USER3> Heyyyy thanks glad you enjoyed it! I was surprised to wake up and see this on Hacker News today.

Thought I'd comment on the video editing:

It is all pretty low tech. I use Adobe Premiere to edit and mostly just animate transform, scale, and crop effects to achieve everything. Like for the zooms you pointed out I double up a layer of the screencap and then crop and scale. It's a bit painstaking at times.

Another little part is when I do the screen recording I set my desktop background to an image with a colored box area of 1280x720. This is the area I know will be "on screen". So I have the windows I want to pull in during the video just outside this area. Then I crop to this box in editing. I think this is better looking than just capturing the whole desktop, and I like the live feel.

I'm enjoying evolving this style... I sometimes have thoughts of making some kind of gross homemade video compositing tool in JS. But I haven't gotten there yet...

<comment><USER4> Everything about this is great, I'm not a big video watcher but I just sat through that whole thing it was gold. The selfie direction flips, the interjections from you in another setting instead of chopping the video (both funny but also a nicer way to do it honestly). The concepts you're showing. All really good. Keep it up I'll be watching!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Those idiots over at Google AMP are working on destroying the web when they could be working on something productive like this.

<comment><USER6> It's sad/funny that some big companies adopt AMP in their products even faster than Google themselves.

<comment><USER7> Big companies care about how they appear on search results pages, google doesn't.

<comment><USER8> Google: Look at me. I am the result page.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _Company checks on Employee 's search history_ So what's so interesting about matthewrayfield.com that you had to go there 59,000 times in the last hour?

<comment><USER2> Updating the hash of a URL doesn't (or shouldn't) make a request to the server, so your abstract employee hero is safe.

<comment><USER10> The abstract company villan has access to the locally stored history too.

<comment><USER11> That's what history.replaceState() instead of history.pushState() is for.

<comment><USER10> They have monitors on all javascript calls the browser makes too, "for security".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This reminds me of putting marquees in the window.status like 20 years ago

<comment><USER13> The spirit is there definitely.

My take is that it's only a matter of time before emojis creep into every area where text is used.

Let's hope they won't ever become a mainstream part of programming languages.

<comment><USER14> > Let's hope they won't ever become a mainstream part of programming > languages.

knowing a few people in this world, I am sure that this will certainly happen way before you can have variables named α, β, γ

<comment><USER15> You can already use Greek letter variable names in Python: [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17043894/what-unicode- sy...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17043894/what-unicode-symbols-are- accepted-in-python3-variable-names)

I've used θ in code dealing with angles before.

<comment><USER16> That's a bad idea. How are other developers supposed to type this character (unless they are from Greece)?

<comment><USER17> keep it in the copy paste buffer, obviously /s.

For an even more extreme version, look at Perl6's atomic operators: [https://docs.perl6.org/language/unicode_ascii#Atomic_operato...](https://docs.perl6.org/language/unicode_ascii#Atomic_operators) (or any other operators on this page for that matter).

IMO, it's not a "bad idea". Code is meant to be read, not written. If it renders the code more readable, then that's a win. But obviously, whether those symbols _actually_ make the code more readable is debatable.

<comment><USER14> > whether those symbols actually make the code more readable is debatable.

In general, it would be rather silly to use greek letters for variable names. Yet sometimes, they tend to make numerical code much more readable when you are copying a mathematical formula verbatim.

Compare using "πθ" versus "M_PI*theta" several times on the same formula, for example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."

<comment><USER19> That was literally the first thing they did! They stopped, thought about whether or not they should, and then did! And now we have animated url emojis and an island filled with dinosaurs and what could possibly go wro

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is equal parts terrible and fascinating. I hope no one will start doing this, but I love the idea and the quirkiness of the whole site!

</comment><comment><USER21> This page will wreck your browser history. The post explains the rationale at the end, but frankly speaking there should have been the warning for each checkbox.

<comment><USER22> If you're using Firefox you can Control+H then right click on the site and select the option labeled "Forget About This Site". Done.

<comment><USER23> Wow, that took multiple minutes to run here.

Well done to the author of this hack on finding a way to dump massive amounts of data to firefox's sqlite store.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is very cute and all but... you know... don't actually do this! Please. Even if you make it so that it doesn't break the back button or history, URLs are things that people copy and paste and send to people. They are put into Word-documents, bookmarks and archive.org. It's not a place for dynamic animations.

URLs should be static, simple, and as short as is reasonable.

<comment><USER25> While in the video he's updating the location hash (which breaks the backbutton), one can implement this using history.replaceState[1] to keep the back button working normally. He also mentions parsing the animated URL the figure out how far the video was loaded. So if you want you can use the animation in terms of navigation. Or alternatively just put the animation behind a separator and have your router ignore the animation part.

This would preserve both the back button as well as bookmarking! Note that this video is more of the hacking nature _what fun things can we do with the URL bar_ , he stated a number of times that it's more cool than actually useful.

[1]: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/History_API...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/History_API#The_replaceState\(\)_method)

<comment><USER26> In the article it does state that the history API _could_ be used and why it wasn't.

The first point about updating the whole URL is easy to render moot: when you push new state using the history API, replicate the effect of location.hash by making sure you only change the hash part.

The second part is the sticky one for the "ain't this cool" factor: the throttle in some browsers effectively limits constant animation to 3fps. This isn't an issue for things like the video progress example though: that only needs to update once per second. _If_ you made a library to wrap this idea for easy reuse you _could_ easily implement change detection and other rapid change throttling to smooth things out (so short bursts of many updates work, but longer bursts don't cause a complete stop until ~30s has passed) rather than having to implement these for each use of the technique. ("if" and "you could", because who in their right mind actually would?!)

<comment><USER27> All I know is he tried pushState. Perhaps replaceState is not throttled, because it doesn't create new history entries, just replaces the last one.

Try this in chrome console. And yes, it doesn't throttle at all.

i=0; setInterval(() => history.replaceState('', '', '/' \+ (i++)), 50);

It's interesting how people will just believe everything, even if the test is 30 seconds away.

<comment><USER28> I'm pretty sure Chrome has different behavior with Dev Tools open and Dev Tools closed, and also with what it does with code posted in the console and code run as part of the page.

So just because it is not throttled when run in the console doesnt necessary imply it wont throttle as part of a regular page as well.

<comment><USER27> It does not in this case. It's just not throttled.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> We need this. The whole Internet is on the brink of destruction and animated URLs are going to save it. And ISPs are giving a discount on connections with animated URLs.

</comment><comment><USER30> This deserves to be on awesome-quirks, I think

[https://github.com/dsalaj/awesome-quirks](https://github.com/dsalaj/awesome- quirks)

</comment><comment><USER31> Cool! It did however completely break my back button....

<comment><USER32> Because it manipulated the hash component directly. By using the "replaceState" method of the history API [1] you could avoid polluting the browser's history.

[1] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/History_API](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/History_API)

<comment><USER33> Didn't the article say the history API was throttled on Chrome and Safari?

<comment><USER32> You're right, I missed that part.

For the Chrome part in any case it doesn't match my experience: under linux Chrome will happily update the url up to every 20ms (50Hz). At higher frequency it will throttle it saying that otherwise the UI would hang. The limit on Safari (which I cannot test) can be annoying in fact, but not as much as an URL updating 20 times per second :-)

By the way I also find the other reason for not using the History API to be a non-issue, since you can just use the location object to build the whole url from scratch, if you really want to

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Similar to [https://web.archive.org/web/20110726095900/http://probablyin...](https://web.archive.org/web/20110726095900/http://probablyinteractive.com/url- hunter)

</comment><comment><USER35> Am I going crazy or haven't I used websites that update the favicon to indicate things like new notifications?

Here's a 16x16 pixel game of Defender implemented by animating the favicon: [http://www.p01.org/defender_of_the_favicon/](http://www.p01.org/defender_of_the_favicon/)

<comment><USER36> Github does this for pull request status, it's really great

<comment><USER35> Looking around for more, [https://travis-ci.org/](https://travis-ci.org/) updates it with build succeeded | failed | in-progress.

The few websites I first checked, like Facebook, I must've misremembered. But it's definitely still out there in the wild.

<comment><USER37> Gitlab CI also updates the favicon

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> One downside is that it basically renders the back button useless. I ran the examples you provided (which were great fun!) and when I tried to get back to hackernews I realized each step in the animation had been added to my browser history

<comment><USER39> you can use replaceState for that and back will work fine

<comment><USER40> I didn't really look at the code, mostly because I just found the idea interesting as I hadn't considered it. Kind of surprised that it's not using the history api to replace the hash.

<comment><USER41> He explains in the article that he couldn't do it with History API since it is throttled by the browsers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I'm just waiting for mainstream media sites to abuse this to put: 20% OFF SUBSCRIBE NOW in the URL of their page.

Edit: HN doesn't support emoji in comments. That was supposed to be surrounded by sirens.

<comment><USER43> If you _ever_ see emoji in hackernews comments then hackernews, as it has been, is over.

<comment><USER44> ..why? i see comments with ':-)' all the time. are the people here so pretentious that they're fundamentally opposed to using an ideogram?

better hope there aren't any closeted road-signage-designers lurking on HN then

<comment><USER43> Emojis are too jocular for the tone we are trying to strike here. They lower the level of discourse down to something more like Reddit or Twitter.

<comment><USER45> Man, I wish I could use the eye-roll emoji here

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I realize everyone hates videos on HN and probably scrolled right past it, but this guy is hysterical. Worth watching the first couple minutes at least.

<comment><USER47> You got me to go back and watch it. It was great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Am I the only one thinking about buying many domain names to do the animation on the actual TLD ?

<comment><USER49> You can't do this on the domain name, or even subdomain. Changing origin requires actual navigation, and would probably trigger loop detection.

<comment><USER50> It's probably possible to do fast enough if the site is nearly empty (just with a window.location.href script tag). But it would definitely trigger a full page rerender.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Well no one was expecting emojis, so let the old guys have some fun as well? Have had this idea for a long time, but by now it remained only as a concept. Someone hacked the access to my notes, or maybe certain ideas are universally silly-genius?:)

</comment><comment><USER52> An alternative to this is changing document.title, which makes the animation a lot easier to see in Safari (plus it doesn't kill the back button) :)

</comment><comment><USER53> Well, I suppose if you're missing the old days of the internet with pages of flashing icons, this will be comforting.

</comment><comment><USER54> Note: you must have <meta charset="utf-8" /> in <head> for this to work.

<comment><USER55> Or you can just use \u escape codes and keep all your source in ASCII.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> The combination of animations on the URL and emojis looks great! And i think some of the use-cases, like progress indicators or simple spinners can be pretty legitimate (though maybe it's just my cute-hack-friendly mind thinking this :P)

I didn't know about `location.hash =` not being rate-limited like history.replaceState() is! Knowing this would have been useful when (ab)using this idea to make a playable game on the URL ([https://epidemian.github.io/snake](https://epidemian.github.io/snake)). I stumbled upon Chrome's rate-limit quite a few times (now it seem to have been raised). Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER57> look at what you've done to your browser history

</comment><comment><USER58> There are a few ccTLDs that allow emojis in domains. [0] So you could buy all the ones you need for an animation and set up a redirect loop.

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji_domain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji_domain)

<comment><USER59> Unfortunately they still appear as punycode in most contexts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> I love stuff like this. It's not practical and likely breaks a lot of standards but I love it.

</comment><comment><USER61> This got me thinking about some standardized control elements websites could put in the address / menu bar.

Something like media controls, progress bars or even consent banners. This way they would have an unified appearance and could be user scriptable.

<comment><USER62> Unless someone browses full screen or bookmarks the app to their home screen on mobile so there is no visible url bar to animate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> After visiting the site using Firefox the history contains hundreds of those URLs with emojis. Also, the "back" button is completely broken because of this. Interesting way to prevent user from leaving the site.

</comment><comment><USER63> Ah the marquee tag for URLs :D

</comment><comment><USER64> Niiice! I did a similar goof with [http://caust.in/urler/](http://caust.in/urler/) a couple of years back but I love the useful applications.

</comment><comment><USER16> I think in Japan he would be arrested for corrupting browser's history.

</comment><comment><USER65> Use incognito mode for this site... your back button will thank me

<comment><USER40> Or, just open in a new tab.

<comment><USER65> Tab will still foobar your history though, wouldn't it?

<comment><USER40> yeah, but only for that tab... same as on an incognito tab.

edit: apologies... I'm still used to the _old_ history behaviors, I don't use it much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Clever hack, but impractical; ruins history, back button, and urls are usually pretty long meaning the loading bar will not be visible or partially visible.

</comment><comment><USER67> This is the best thing I've ever seen on Hackernews.

</comment><comment><USER68> Looks really shity on a mobile phone and blocks the back button. Ah and it also spams the history, great :)

</comment><comment><USER69> It blew my mind, then I tried to hit 'back' and now I understand why nobody does it (yet) :P

</comment><comment><USER70> Doesn't work for me (Chrome 73) :/

Edit: nvm. Didn't realize it was in the hash section.

</comment><comment><USER71> so much history.

</comment><comment><USER72> But can you build an animated waveform using this approach?

</comment><comment><USER73> Everyday we stray further from god's light.

</comment><comment><USER74> Animations don't work on cromium (android)

</comment><comment><USER75> wavyurl.com works amazingly well on chrome mobile but firefox mobile just puts the unicode characters there. BOO!

<comment><USER76> Working perfectly fine on my firefox

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> My firefox got OOM killed thanks to this.

<comment><USER78> You are probably using Simple Tab Group

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> please no

</comment><comment><USER80> And that's something!

</comment><comment><USER81> looks good, but completely spoils the back button, hence not applicable for any SPA. too bad.

</comment><comment><USER82> add it at dailyhack.xyz

</comment><comment><USER83> Another perfect example of the childish activities of the web today. Remember the days when postings were about serious technical advancements and not random hobbyist activities?

<comment><USER84> What? Stuff like this is what made the web fun. At least he put it on his own blog instead of facebook.

<comment><USER85> Agreed, sometimes it's nice to take a break from all the serious development and do something fun.</comment></comment></comment>


India: Intimations of an Ending - <AUTHOR> https://www.thenation.com/article/arundhati-roy-assam-modi/ <comment><USER2> Arundhati Roy has always been a powerful voice for humanity, diversity, and freedom and this Nation article is no exception. Worth reading and contemplating what is happening, right now, in the second most populated country in the world.

"...a shadow world is creeping up on us in broad daylight. It is becoming more and more difficult to communicate the scale of the crisis even to ourselves."</comment>