Chinese insurer's facial-recognition software offers a cautionary tale - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-14/china-knows-how-to-take-away-your-health-insurance <comment><USER2> Yes this is horrible but... wont this inevitably self correct?

The further they go down this road, the more their acceptance criteria will converge on insuring people that never need a payout. Once people clock onto that fact, the insurance becomes worthless - At which point other insurance companies will be able to come in and compete on a non-discriminatory basis and operate on the principle of a tax that spreads cost rather than a gamble that attempts to never actually deliver value to the customer.

... or you could just skip straight to an actual tax based health system and cut out the profiteering middle man. Yes I like the NHS.

<comment><USER3> China already has universal healthcare, it's just not very good yet.

<comment><USER4> Universal healthcare? What does that mean?

In China, we only have one type of healthcare, the one that needs to be paid. There is no healthcare for free here.

(Unless of course, you're a high ranking CCP party member, that way you can enjoy all the goodies from all over the country for free, including free blood plasma from young people* to keep you feel good when you're old. *Caution: HIV maybe included due to technical difficulties).

<comment><USER3> Technically we (and our employers) pay for it via payroll deductions from our paycheck (the one labeled social health insurance? They then gave us a healthcare benefit account (in my case linked to bank of Beijing). It was all very useless, but technically China is listed as a country with universal healthcare.

Never donate blood in China, unless you are forced to by your school/work unit/whatever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Phrenology makes a hearty comeback this time with the help of AI.

Psychology based on the skull vs psychology based on the face and "micro- expressions"

[http://www.victorianweb.org/science/phrenology/intro.html](http://www.victorianweb.org/science/phrenology/intro.html)

1.The brain is the organ of the mind.

2\. The mind is composed of multiple distinct, innate faculties.

3\. Because they are distinct, each faculty must have a separate seat or "organ" in the brain.

4\. The size of an organ, other things being equal, is a measure of its power.

5\. The shape of the brain is determined by the development of the various organs.

6\. As the skull takes its shape from the brain, the surface of the skull can be read as an accurate index of psychological aptitudes and tendencies.

<comment><USER6> #4, 5, 6 are very dubious.

Elephants have huge brains yet they don't rule the world.

<comment><USER7> Other things aren't equal.

Brain size correlates strongly with body size.

Also: Phrenology is bunkum.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> BTW -- The author (Cathy O'Neil) is awesome.

This particular problem has always existed in insurance. The best way to make a profit is to not insure sick people. I was hoping the cautionary tale was that it didn't work for the insurer, rather than it being a ripoff for the customer.

Digging a little deeper, it looks like their plan is to implement a telemedicine+drug kiosk system at Chinese scale which is interesting. That should work.

Their PR person claims they hit 80% 'positive' rate on detecting lies using micro-expressions. Seems... unlikely. When the dust settles, it will probably just turn out that that preventing people from lying about identity so you can't escape your past has all the value and the rest of it is worthless to the insurer.

[https://www.mobihealthnews.com/content/ping-good-doctor- show...](https://www.mobihealthnews.com/content/ping-good-doctor-showcases-ai- powered-unstaffed-clinics)

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/shuchingjeanchen/2018/06/06/chi...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/shuchingjeanchen/2018/06/06/chinese- giant-ping-an-looks-beyond-insurance-to-a-fintech-future/#af5feab48f33)

</comment><comment><USER7> The future resembles the past.

Dan Bouk, of Colgate University, is a historian of bureaucracy, including insurance, which has a long history of discrimination:

 _His work investigates the ways that corporations, states, and the experts they employ have used, abused, made, and re-made the categories that structure our daily experiences of being human. His first book,_ How Our Days Became Numbered: Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual _(Chicago, 2015), explored the spread into ordinary Americans ' lives of the United States life insurance industry's methods for quantifying people, for discriminating by race, for justifying inequality, and for thinking statistically._

[http://www.colgate.edu/facultysearch/facultydirectory/dbouk](http://www.colgate.edu/facultysearch/facultydirectory/dbouk)

</comment><comment><USER9> These systems can be extremely profitable even when they give massive amount of false positives.

Example:

Without algorithm:

For every 100,000 customers true 1,000 positives. Each positive leads to $1,000 payoff (on average). The cost is $10 per customer.

With algorithm:

For every 100,000 _potential_ customers the algorithm identifies 9,500 false positives and 500 true positives. You reject these 10,000 customers. Now you have 500 true positives for each 90,000 customers. The cost is $5.56 per customer.

The end result of extensive customer profiling is that wrong friends in the social media, wrong words, or any physical trait that has little correlation with something cost incurring can increase the cost of your life.

</comment><comment><USER10> The AI Winter is coming. Are you strong enough to survive?

</comment><comment><USER11> These are all great points.

1\. How can you expect the AI to determine liars?

2\. Risk pooling versus segmentation is bound to be controversial, especially in health.

<comment><USER5> At the end of the day it's a con to bilk people out of more money or deny insurance to those that they don't like or maybe they have some "secret" stolen information that the person is a insurance risk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's reasonable to charge fat people more. It's something you can measure objectively. It's also something under your control.

The lie detector is just bunk though. If something is really a factor then measure it or test for it objectively.

<comment><USER13> >It's reasonable to charge fat people more.

It's only reasonable insofar as you view insurance as a profit-maker and deprive it of its social function of financial relief.

<comment><USER14> Not allowing insurers to charge people who engage in unhealthy behaviour is effectively forcing people who make good health decisions to subsidize people who make bad health decisions. From an economic perspective this has a negative social function, incentivising bad behaviour and punishing good.</comment></comment></comment>


Wii-Trained, Sword Wielding Industrial Robot... - <AUTHOR> http://gojomo.blogspot.com/2007/01/i-for-one-welcome-our-wii-trained.html

<comment><USER2> Impressive. But seems a bit high in latency.</comment>


App Development with Swift - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/app-development-with-swift/id1219117996 <comment><USER2> App development with Swift gets you great things such as upgrading your iPhone, but then getting locked out of development because xcode is out of date. But wait, the next version of xcode requires your OSX installation to be Sierra (which your computer is not candidate for upgrading to)! Excellent.

<comment><USER3> it's also one of the highest-paying software niches

this might not last, but you can always switch to android. unless mobile dies out completely, but that won't happen for a while

<comment><USER4> > it's also one of the highest-paying software niches

Thats a myth, app development is one of _lowest-paying_ software niches. Many don't even earn enough to recover their $99 fee.

Sure, Apple hands out a huge pile of cash but almost all of it goes to King, SuperCell and other big corps.

<comment><USER5> My IOS app business failed and I was forced to take a job at a company with a free iOS app. Net result?

I still make $1,000 to $2,000 a month from my old apps, without updating them.

I now make over $130k a year (salary + benefits) in my day job doing iOS development, in a city with one of the lowest large city cost of living in the U.S.

Apple just announced they've paid out over $70B to iOS App developers since the store opened. You don't have to be an owner of King or SuperCell to have gotten your share of that money.

<comment><USER4> I don't know about your apps, they may be great and 1K a month may be what you consider a great success.

But multiple studies have shown that only a select few make the big bucks:

[https://techcrunch.com/2014/07/21/the-majority-of-todays- app...](https://techcrunch.com/2014/07/21/the-majority-of-todays-app- businesses-are-not-sustainable/)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


I've just finished the world's most gratuitous Flickr photo browser - <AUTHOR> http://kurtpreston.com/flickr_cards

<comment><USER2> The splotchy background is equally gratuitous :)

</comment><comment><USER3> this is great!</comment>


Deploying big Spacy NLP models on AWS Lambda and S3 - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@xoelop/deploying-big-spacy-nlp-models-on-aws-lambda-s3-2857bfc143ba <comment><USER2> I built something similar to this last year and wow this is just much... better

I find the choice of Flask + Zappa a little weird - I much prefer serverless.com for infra as code - but it makes sense after staring at it long enough</comment>


Ask HN: How do you decide something is worth buying? - <AUTHOR> Let's say you want to buy something expensive, how do you determine whether it is worth it? <comment><USER2> I've never had any difficulty buying expensive things I need/will-for-sure- use-and-provide-objective-value. Cars, house, etc.

Personal hobby type items, I'll research for weeks or more. I also enjoy the analytical process of understanding needs/wants and learning the product area. At some point, I'll converge on something that seems the most suitable for my priorities. Or sometimes one of my top picks will get big discount. I'm usually very happy with my purchase, partly from bonding during the process. Often I'll stop using it after a number of months. I never regret my purchases. I should sell things off when I know I won't use them but I'm either I'm lazy or sentimental (not sure which). [I have a VW & Yamaha collecting dust in the garage right now. I decided I wanted each before they were available in my country.]

</comment><comment><USER3> To judge whether I personally want to buy something (not judging its quality)

1\. I put it on a note with the current date.

2\. I set an arbitrary date that is 1 day / $100 OR 30 days (depending on which is shorter)

3\. I revisit the prospective purchase in my head until the deadline and ask "Do I still want this"

4\. I purchase on the deadline

Judging value: Customer reviews and corporate manufacturing practices and corporate political stance

<comment><USER4> That would mean spending 2 weeks to decide to buy a new camera lens, and a month to buy a car.

If I crash my car I have about 2 weeks to make a decision about replacing it because I can't expect the insurance to pay for a rental car forever. My family has one car and we live on a farm, so it is not a decision of "do I want to buy a car or a particular car?" but rather a process that privileges expediency as opposed to cost.

I know families that have 3 or 4 cars and trucks and they are never in a hurry to buy a car, they take advantage of sales and it is a different experience.

A retired agronomic economist who owned the building I worked in bought a Corvette for $30,000 (at least half off) during the 2008 crash because the Chevy dealer needed the cash and he didn't.

Sometimes you have to strike when the iron is hot in a case like that and that is what I do with the camera lenses. I almost always buy used and refurbished and I know if I wait long enough I will get a good deal.

<comment><USER3> Sure, I only wrote what I do. Please take every initiative to develop your own criteria and practices.</comment></comment></comment>


Mike Novogratz Is Set for Comeback With Cryptocurrency Hedge Fund - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-26/mike-novogratz-is-set-for-comeback-with-crytocurrency-hedge-fund <comment><USER2> This fool thinks he can time the market.

>"I sold at $5,000 or $4,980," he said. "Then three weeks later I'm trying to buy it in the low $3,000s. If you're good at that and you're a trading junkie, it's a lot of fun."

My guess is that this is not going to end well for him or his fund.

If you want to read a similar story read this twitter feed [0]: it's from a very confident trader who probably lost around 1-2M. We will probably not know the exact number because he stopped tweeting.

[0] [https://twitter.com/fomoer](https://twitter.com/fomoer)

<comment><USER3> Timing the market isn't as hard in a sustained bull market, because being right %50 of the time still results in returns. When Bitcoin makes all time highs, selling some is an easy strategy, and then when some random news hits and it drops, or whales start throwing weight around, then you can buy in at a discount like this guy did.

The article leaves out that it has come back up to $4k right now.

Since so many traders are following stock oriented trading strategies the market dynamics end up being a lot like stocks with sentiment driving direction, which is probably not super hard to trade (though I'm not good at it.)

So much of the stocks value and future depends on regulatory environment and stocks are located in one jurisdiction... meanwhile bitcoin global.

So as time goes on, any one jurisdiction making scary noises has less effect on bitcoin.

The drop to $3k was due to china "banning bitcoin" (for like the 8th time this year) and it was quickly shrugged off... I remember china "banning bitcoin" back in January taking us from $1,200 to $800.

<comment><USER4> > Timing the market isn't as hard in a sustained bull market, because being > right %50 of the time still results in returns. When Bitcoin makes all time > highs, selling some is an easy strategy, and then when some random news hits > and it drops, or whales start throwing weight around, then you can buy in at > a discount like this guy did.

This speaks like someone who hasn't traded bitcoin, at least recently. I'll tell you that the non-stop jump from 900 to 3.000 hit very bad the very best of traders. That's an event where you lose money even though we are still in a bull-market. Now think how much you'll lose when the tables turn (bull market to bear market).

Trading is hard business.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> He calls Bitcoin a bubble, and yet, he's launching a new $500 million fund to BUY Bitcoin -- including $150 million of his own money!

WHY would he be doing this?

Quoting from the OP, here's his answer:

 _" This is going to be the largest bubble of our lifetimes, and so .. remember, bubbles happen around things that fundamentally change the way we live. The railroad bubble, railroads really fundamentally changed the way we live; the Internet bubble changed the way we live. And so, prices are gonna get way ahead of what they should be. You can make a whole lotta money on the way up. And we plan on it. At one point you're going to have to sell."_

<comment><USER6> I'm gonna ride this Ponzi scheme all the way to the top!

<comment><USER5> Was the railroad bubble of the 1840's [1] a Ponzi scheme?

Was the dot-com bubble of the late 1990's [2] a Ponzi scheme?

Were the electricity, automobile, aviation, radio, and television bubbles of the "Roaring 20's" [3] Ponzi schemes?

Just because something is in an asset-price bubble doesn't necessarily mean it's a Ponzi scheme. Yes, many if not most investors ultimately lost money in the electricity, automobile, aviation, radio, television, railroad, and dot- com bubbles, but those bubbles left behind an enormous amount of investment in infrastructure from which we are benefiting to this day.[4]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Mania](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Mania)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot- com_bubble](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roaring_Twenties#Economy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roaring_Twenties#Economy)

[4] Buffett wrote a great article touching on this in 1999, at the peak of the dot-com bubble: [http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive...](http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1999/11/22/269071/index.htm)

<comment><USER7> You are comparing cryptocurrencies to highly regulated securities markets. I don't think that is a fair comparison yet. From the average person cryptocurrencies look exactly like a Ponzi Scheme. People who got in early are most likely to make money. Many other could as well. But the majority will not and if a majority tried to get out we'd find that there is not enough liquidity in the market to back it. Maybe someday it will be fair to compare cryptocurrencies to securities, but for now it's is closer to junk bonds or a ponzi scheme. And I don't think a marketing and branding campaign is what it needs, it's structure and security.

<comment><USER8> >You are comparing cryptocurrencies to highly regulated securities markets

but SEC wasn't even founded til 1934, which makes that point only apply to the dotcom bubble.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > "I sold at $5,000 or $4,980," he said.

I doubt it. If you follow the Bitcoin price you'll know that a lot of indices reported the price hit over $5,000 but that was because the Chinese exchanges were trading at a premium (up to $5,150 on OKCoin) which dragged it up.

It didn't actually hit $5,000 on Coinbase, Bitfinex and Bitstamp - and when it did trade at high $4900s it was for low volume for a very short period of time

The reason why the price delta between the USD and CNY exchanges is high is because of how difficult it is to trade between the two (also because of restrictions on CNY)

So he's either trading on Chinese exchanges and figured that out, or ..

<comment><USER10> It actually surpassed $5k for about 3 hours on CEX.IO [https://bitcoincharts.com/charts/cexUSD#rg60zig5-minzczsg201...](https://bitcoincharts.com/charts/cexUSD#rg60zig5-minzczsg2017-09-01zeg2017-09-02ztgSzm1g10zm2g25)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Maybe some people here can help answer some questions I have:

1 - Where can you spend Bitcoin?

2 - What percentage of outstanding Bitcoins are used for trade? i.e. exchanging currency for a good

3 - People have been saying it could be used for illegal activities. I understand each transaction is recorded in the global public ledger using the ID. Is it possible to trace who is behind each transaction? Can it be used for illegal activities? If so what percentage of Bitcoin does this make up?

<comment><USER12> 1) Here is a list [https://99bitcoins.com/who-accepts-bitcoins-payment- companie...](https://99bitcoins.com/who-accepts-bitcoins-payment-companies- stores-take-bitcoins/) \-- a lot of stores indirectly accept bitcoin via payment providers like bitpay.com, but I could not find a list.

2) Hard to tell because of (3). But you can approximate it using the exchange volumes: [https://bitcoinaverage.com/](https://bitcoinaverage.com/)

3) Unless you are doing a targeted search, mapping an individual to one of his addresses, it is very difficult to run an analysis. This makes it hard to answer (2). It successfully used for illegal activities.

<comment><USER11> Thank you VMG

On 2) could one strip out speculators from the exchange volumes?

<comment><USER12> My answer is no, simply because even the definition of "speculator" is unclear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Gold is a 6000 year old bubble: [https://www.coindesk.com/citi-chief- economist-bitcoin-closes...](https://www.coindesk.com/citi-chief-economist- bitcoin-closest-commodity-gold/)

<comment><USER13> This one might pop if we get profitable asteroid mining.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > "I sold at $5,000 or $4,980," he said. "Then three weeks later I'm trying to > buy it in the low $3,000s. If you're good at that and you're a trading > junkie, it's a lot of fun."

Why not make your trades public then? You can make them publicly encrypted and then publish the keys later if you want to brag.

And is he talking about a small trade here? 4980 was the maxima (the tip), so little money changed hand at that price.

I take any person who says that as a fraudster selling to the ignorant. If you can make, with persistence, 30% returns in a few days then why raise capital in the first place?

</comment><comment><USER14> Specifically, he compares compares blockchains to the Internet and railroads:

"It is a bubble. This is going to be the largest bubble of our lifetimes, and so .. remember, bubbles happen around things that fundamentally change the way we live. The railroad bubble, railroads really fundamentally changed the way we live; the Internet bubble changed the way we live. And so, prices are gonna get way ahead of what they should be. You can make a whole lotta money on the way up. And we plan on it. At one point you're going to have to sell."

<comment><USER15> everything he says seems fairly obvious but he never seems to answer the tough question: when do you sell?

<comment><USER16> My answer: Take a look at the dotcom bubble, adjust nasdaq marketcap for inflation (and maybe much more because of ZIRP) and there you have your target market cap.

<comment><USER15> What's your reasoning behind this? When all the dumb money is in, it's time to get out?

<comment><USER16> Yes, the only question is when the dumb money is in. I guess dotcom is here a historical precedent.

Since we cannot really know, I will just use that number and gradually sell around it. Of course that might make me the dumb money but that's a risk I'm willing to take.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's very high risk, but I can imagine the bull case becoming a reality some day:

Approximately $10.5 trillion US dollars exists today. Some sources claim that the total value of all fiat currencies in circulation (or storage) in the world amounts to $75 trillion.

The total market cap of ALL cryptocurrencies today is less than $150 billion. This means that if cryptocurrencies replace traditional currencies, then you can expect a 500x increase in the total value of all cryptocurrencies. But it's not going to all go into Bitcoin; it's going to be spread across millions (if not billions) of unique cryptocurrencies and new ones are going to rise and fall all the time (like apps on the app store, except fairer). There will be exchanges to convert between any cryptocurrency immaginable; they will all communicate with exchanges via a standard protocol. So any new currency which implements the protocol will be immediately tradeable on any exchange.

Different groups of people will affiliate themselves with different cryptocurrencies and this will allow the combined net worth of different groups of people to float freely on the market based on how much the rest of society values their labor/output. To get rich, it will just be a matter of associating with the the right groups of people at the right time (by buying their currency). It will be the ultimate free market.

<comment><USER3> The thing is, unless you are auditing the code it's hard to know which cryptos are competent and which are just BS.

On the other hand, since the code is open source, then you can audit the code.

A crypto hedge fund that spends a lot of money actually auditing code might have great returns.

</comment></comment><comment> m-p-3 It could very well be a bubble, but I never put more than I am willing to lose.

</comment><comment><USER18> I think that the idea is that the total volume is low enough that this person thinks they can manipulate the price. They say "it's a bubble, it's going to pop" and then they sell $30million in obfuscated coins. Everyone goes "IT'S POPPING!" and they sell, and then he buys $470million in coins.

</comment><comment><USER19> It is also good to try to have a balanced view and separate signal from noise. Chris Burniske published a few days ago an article about cryptoasset valuations trying to start a serious framework for analyzing cryptoassets [1].

Beyond the valuation, the innovation behind Bitcoin and few others make sense taking into account scaling issues and security thresholds.

Sharing here [2] a work in progress about new insights in the field (e.g. Spectre).

[1] [https://medium.com/@cburniske/cryptoasset-valuations- ac83479...](https://medium.com/@cburniske/cryptoasset-valuations-ac83479ffca7)

[2] [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VfvfAA2v7EhAaxKmw95GJ0pv...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VfvfAA2v7EhAaxKmw95GJ0pv6SYdrcHxmGd7KwUL4Es/edit?usp=drivesdk)

<comment><USER3> Be vary wary of the "peer review" status in that spreadsheet. Academic peer review is a lot different from a code audit, and at least one of the projects you have listed engaged in a lot of, shall we say, less than secure practices in implementation, like embarrassingly insecure.

There's a world of difference between academic peer review and adversarial code review.

<comment><USER19> > Academic peer review is a lot different from a code audit, and at least one > of the projects you have listed engaged in a lot of, shall we say, less than > secure practices in implementation, like embarrassingly insecure.

Which project are you referring to? If you are referring to IOTA it is a preprint.

Also here we put a new link to the doc: [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1J8hehbnZWzcIUMQcxMiGbjz8...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1J8hehbnZWzcIUMQcxMiGbjz86wDu3zDFF7UtkR0XjGE/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Most people think it's a bubble, and nobody thinks they're the greater fool.

</comment><comment><USER10> He is a billionaire who puts his money where his mouth is: he revealed in April he had $100 million(!)'s worth of Bitcoin & Ethereum. [http://money.cnn.com/2017/04/20/investing/mike-novogratz- bet...](http://money.cnn.com/2017/04/20/investing/mike-novogratz-bets-big-on- bitcoin-ether-blockchain/index.html) Went up 3-5× since then...

</comment><comment><USER21> If a tree falls.. i mean the other well known saying,

"if a bubble doesn't burst while you are in it (invested and cashed out), was it really a bubble?"

<comment><USER22> I'm really starting to respect it a lot more as a bubble now that most people have stopped trying to pretend it's a viable currency/transaction processing system.

It's really, like, the platonic ideal of a bubble, perfect for separating fools from their money: slow growing, with no clear limit in site, but volatile, and decoupled from reality. It's beautiful, really.

<comment><USER3> Bitcoin is many things, and the most important thing is it's a currency outside of the control of governments. Right now that's new enough that it's primary value proposition is anti-inflation (in venezuela) and "digital gold" in much of the world. Is there no legitimate value to letting chinese people move money?

Also, between SegWit, Lightning Network and side chains, the scalability is going to be nearly unlimited in about two years, so the idea that it's not a "viable transaction processing system" seems a bit silly. In fact it works now, globally, without serious problems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Ultimately what makes for a successful cryptocurrency is security and network effects.

Now security not just includes the quality of the cryptography but the quality of the network, and the design of the currency to allow it to be used reliably.

This factor is all about engineering. And the thing about cryptocurrencies is that they are so novel and so new that there are a really small number of good cryptocurrency engineers. I've worked with a lot of second raters (I'm maybe a third rater myself) and talked to the first rate people. This is not a skill people will be getting with a class or two at a MOOC. (Or I wouldn't be a 3rd rater)

On both measures: Security and Network Effects bitcoin is the king.

The second most popular is Ethereum which is starting to get a lot of holders but seems to be constantly engineering its way out of disaster (the blockchain is already bigger than bitcoins and it's growing faster and new code is being thrown in all the time.)

Move fast and break things makes sense for facebook- they can fix any problems trivially. This is not the case for blockchain systems and thus the risk for ethereum is pretty high. To their credit they have been able to avoid catastrophe so far, but it's a lot less safe in this regard than bitcoin. (And theres some fundamental problems with Proof of Stake that may be exploited when Ethereum goes to that mechanism.)

Right now there's money to be made trading between these alternatives to bitcoin and bitcoin, but that's mostly trading on hype, not utility.

Bitcoin itself isn't even yet having its value follow utility, though it's adoption in situations like Venezuela is starting to prove some of that utility (and here again Ethereum has done good by being GPU mineable, something you can do in probably any country, unlike Bitcoin which requires expensive and mostly-single sourced ASICs)

I don't see where Crypto hedge funds have any advantage. They can't engage in the kind of market manipulation or derivatives trading that typical hedge funds seem to make their money with.

</comment><comment><USER23> Title is not accurate, what he actually says is that it will be not that it is currently.

Also lots of errors here like mistaking ICO for Internet Coin Offering instead of Initial Coin Offering.</comment>


Ask HN: Got a fresh phish today: "Follow up to new Prime pricing and free promo" - <AUTHOR> That was the subject line.  Anybody else seen this?  Part of what concerns me is that it came to the address I do use for Amazon (and not much else).
Select lines from the header:
Return-Path: <firstname.lastname@example.com>
Received: from a9-67.smtp-out.amazonses.com (a9-67.smtp-out.amazonses.com. [184.108.40.206])
Received-SPF: pass (google.com: domain of firstname.lastname@example.com designates 22.214.171.124 as permitted sender) client-ip=18.104.22.168;
DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; q=dns/txt; c=relaxed/simple; s=6gbrjpgwjskckoa6a5zn6fwqkn67xbtw; d=amazonses.com; t=1483384690; h=Message-ID:Date:Subject:From:To:MIME-Version:Content-Type:Feedback-ID; bh=KlVPQqTXT2zb6Y9xwXYfvP8SYIpWHh0GthjR8Q7iByU=; b=u9vM7GZMzqt03Vq1OX+NkG8FcsrrFyZxwTOkfLSPrIyWTu8tFL526ImGOPmpFns/ 5YEjb6g226az++hW+OGDpN8V5JrP3BbKMWztBPbdQRLF1xjuC+5nacaZAaO0sZDX5lt ODHRN612wDuZ55pZNv/ARN6uz7+4QEs4uEg4f4fo=
Subject: Follow up to new Prime pricing and free promo
From: Janine from Insync <firstname.lastname@example.com>
X-SES-Outgoing: 2017.01.02-188.8.131.52 Feedback-ID: 1.us-east-1.kMPw8yWuaLivva0y4oCs8H+U0sOXjFz/H1BJQEUL2g0=:AmazonSES
Link in the body was: [http://berenice.eocampaign1.com/67a2a516-d10b-11e6-8561-06ead731d453/acd0a= 9b3-d11d-11e6-8561-06ead731d453/9a4aa60e-c786-11e6-90cc-06ead731d453/link-c= lick] <comment><USER2> I may be wrong, but it looks like your fake "amazon" spam is ironically being delivered via Amazon's Simple Email Service (SES)?

[https://aws.amazon.com/ses/](https://aws.amazon.com/ses/)</comment>


Ask HN: Zero-cost startups for ordinary Americans? - <AUTHOR>

Something of a different challenge for HNers. I have a friend ("from the Internet," so to speak) who is in a difficult situation. She's highly literate and intelligent, although advanced math is out of the question for her. Lives in upstate New York with her mother, who is also unemployed, and somewhat physically disabled; they're both short on income. She has a two-year degree that doesn't reflect her abilities, and little work experience to put on her resume. To top it off, she suffers from celiac disease, as well as anxiety issues, that prevented her from reaching her full potential for the first half of her twenties.
I don't think finishing a four-year degree is in the cards right now, and there's little seed money she could raise. I'm told that there are few jobs in the area, and enough demand for the ones that do open up that her background excludes her. What kind of steps can she take to improve her standard of living in the short-term while raising her prospects in the long term?
So far I've thought of some obvious things, like: 1) Cooking local gluten-free products, to be sold at farmers' markets and the like -- perhaps with some of the proceeds going to research
2) Using freelancer sites like Odesk to try and find writing-related work
I'd appreciate HN's thoughts on the plausibility of these and other ideas. As an engineer, I don't really know what it's like to be in this kind of situation. <comment><USER2> Piggy backing off paulhauggis: How to Make It on Craigslist: [http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/16529584021/how-to-make- it...](http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/16529584021/how-to-make-it-on- craigslist) <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3515294>

</comment><comment><USER3> I'll speak from experience that the buying/reselling on Craigslist will be hard in smaller metros, especially ones where you have to drive far to get between buyers/sellers. The gas costs alone could eat away at your profit.

When I lived in Seattle, WA, I would buy/resell everything from stereo equipment and sporting goods to high end office chairs and make about $500 - $1,500/month with about 10 hours of work a week. Goodwill and thrift stores were gold mines but YMMV.

</comment><comment><USER4> The problem is that most businesses take time and marketing to make any kind of profit.

What about buying and selling stuff on craigslist?

</comment><comment><USER5> Do you have a ballpark figure of how much money she'd like to make each month?

<comment><AUTHOR> I would not be so ambitious -- but I have to believe that any entrepreneurial activity is better on a resume than nothing at all. It can't lose money.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: When do you need sales pipeline saas products? - <AUTHOR>

Is it overkill to be using tools like close.io before company reaches $10,000 monthly sales? Trello.com or excel are 2 other possible low tech solutions. <comment><USER2> Is close.io really a business? Similar products have been around for years... Screen pops on CID was big in the 80's</comment>


Two In Five Adults Have 'Changed for the Better' Thanks to Lockdown - <AUTHOR> https://www.studyfinds.org/survey-2-in-5-adults-feel-theyve-changed-for-the-better-thanks-to-coronavirus-lockdown/ <comment><USER2> It's a self reported pool, so it is measuring what people feel about the lockdown, not if they changed at all.

</comment><comment><USER3> What about all the people that lost their jobs and now can't provide for their family? Or the small businesses that are now permanently closed?

<comment><USER4> Yes, how have the other 3/5 fared?

<comment><USER3> ugh.</comment></comment></comment>


Augmenting Human Intellect (1962) - <AUTHOR> http://web.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Engelbart/Engelbart_AugmentIntellect.html <comment><USER2> I would highly recommend looking at the doug engelbart institute website[1]. There are a lot of very interesting ideas both about technology and about human behavior.

I started a project[2] to try and understand these ideas and it has been a very enlightening journey.

Also a better formatted version of Augmenting Human Intellect can be found here[3]

[1][http://dougengelbart.org/](http://dougengelbart.org/)

[2][https://github.com/smarks159/hyperdocument-system- wiki](https://github.com/smarks159/hyperdocument-system-wiki)

[3][http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html](http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Off topic: it's really strange to arrive a page only containing "content" and no ads, navigation etc. this is no normal anymore :(

<comment><USER4> But it's still more [http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/) than [http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/) it doesn't take much to get a pleasant design for reading.</comment></comment>


Taiga.io – Named in Opensource.com 2014 Top 10 Open Source Projects - <AUTHOR>

Docker, OpenStack, Apache Hadoop amongst others named. http://opensource.com/business/14/12/top-10-open-source-projects-2014 <comment><USER2> This could have been a fine URL submission.</comment>


Rust now has more than 100'000 commits - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/ <comment><USER2> What an amazing time to be alive!</comment>


Large areas of London to be made car-free as lockdown eased - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/may/15/large-areas-of-london-to-be-made-car-free-as-lockdown-eased <comment><USER3> Cautiously optimistic about this! I live in London and expected a swing towards more cars as a result of this (which would be barely manageable).

However, there's one caveat here:

> Officials said they were working with boroughs to implement similar > restrictions on the minor roads they manage within the area

Some boroughs (e.g. The City) have historically been very interested in pedestrianising, but others (e.g. Westminster) have fought tooth and nail to ensure that roads are cars-first.

I would expect them to put up a fight here, too, so this is probably far from settled.

<comment><USER4> > Cautiously optimistic about this! I live in London and expected a swing > towards more cars as a result of this (which would be barely manageable).

Mmm...in theory this sounds good. I wonder if the people that could/cycle aren't already doing it. I have a number of colleagues who live in London. However they're just too far away from the office to be able to cycle let alone walk there. London's a big place. A lot of people use trains and buses to get from the periphery to the centre. I'm not sure cycling or walking is an option for them.

<comment><USER5> _> I wonder if the people that could/cycle aren't already doing it._

I know plenty of people who are within cycling distance, but haven't chosen to cycle because they prefer other options for transport and fitness.

Cycling comes with certain inconveniences that it takes a certain enthusiasm to overcome. You have to own a bike you're happy to use. You have to be fit enough for the distance you need to go. You have to plan out and learn a route. You may have to be confident/experienced/macho enough to ride among traffic and navigate big multi-lane junctions. You have to be willing to shower and change at your destination, or not do so. You might need to buy lights or bags or even different clothes. You have to be willing to get wet in the rain. You may have to figure out how to store your bike at both ends.

I agree not everyone will be able to change to cycling, of course. Reading to Paddington can be done in 30 minutes by train, but takes 4 hours by bike - <USER2> some people have disabilities or other things that keep them from cycling. But I'm confident there are plenty of people who can rise to the challenge despite not having done so before.

<comment><USER6> _Reading to Paddington can be done in 30 minutes by train, but takes 4 hours by bike_

I don't think anybody is suggesting that, in fact I wonder why you even raised it.

<comment><USER5> Because I agree with chosenbreed37's point that some people are "just too far away from the office to be able to cycle"

And if I'd chosen a non-ridiculous number for my example, someone would have 'corrected' me by telling me they cycle that far. I've met Londoners who have a 2 hour cycle commute, by choice because they love cycling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The city of Vienna did this with their major shopping artery (Mariahilfer Straße), despite an enormous amount of skepticsm. They closed off all traffic in some parts, and most of all traffic in others (to allow for crucial intersections). Where allowed, traffic is limited to a pedestrian tempo.

The experiment was a huge success. Commerce has never been busier. I don't think that the drivers miss the roads, and the biggest skeptics -- the shopowners! -- are the greatest benefactors now.

They're extending this concept to further areas now. Promote pedestrian, bike, and public transportation traffic, reduce or eliminate everything else. It's great.

<comment><USER8> These pedestrianization experiments seem to usually work, and I support them. Does anyone know where they've failed?

<comment> iso-8859-1 IIRC, it failed in Durham, NC a couple of decades ago. According to the city museum.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hard to imagine people will accept a return to brown air and constant carnage. Most living people have never seen air this clear, or experienced cities so quiet.

<comment><USER10> The city being so quiet also means that a lot of people aren't there to actually see it.

<comment><USER9> For American cities it means that people who live in the suburbs aren't driving all over our city centers all day long. I don't know what it means for London.

<comment><USER11> I think there is a yang to that yin in that without folks from the burbs coming in, those city centers might not be what they are today after a while...

Sometimes I wonder if folks worried about 'those people from the suburbs' coming in would just result in cities being slightly more dense ... suburbs.

<comment><USER12> People from the suburbs are great to have in the city if they're people. It's just that their cars are deadly and a massive waste of public space. Rail remains the best solution for this, as it will be again when we're on the other side of this pandemic.

<comment><USER11> Yeah I'm all for giving folks as many efficient ways to get into a city.

I can't wait for a train to be built near me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Compare to NYC, which has no cohesive plan for people movement without public transit.

It's going to be a challenge to come out of this crisis in car-centric American cities. Even a small mode-shift to private cars in somewhere like NYC will cause insane gridlock, air pollution, and quality of life issues. Our cultural dislike of walking and biking is going to make healthy recovery much more difficult.

<comment><USER14> I know this is a drop in the bucket, but FWIW in Brooklyn I've been seeing easily 3-4x the normal bike traffic, and bike shops consistently have long lines outside all day, every day. I've personally bought an e-bike to commute with once I can get back to the office. Hopefully this might be kind of a hinge moment for bikes in the city? Or maybe it just snaps back to normal in a couple months, who knows.

<comment><USER12> Hopefully it will be a huge moment, but without safe bike infrastructure (of which car-free or local-car-access-only areas are the best type) the traffic that comes roaring back will scare many new cyclists away.

The city's failure to plan is resulting in many people buying cars — even though it is physically impossible for everyone in central neighborhoods to buy cars.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> _It will take a monumental effort from all Londoners to maintain safe social distancing on public transport as lockdown restrictions are gradually eased. That means we have to keep the number of people using public transport as low as possible._ \-- Mayor Khan

ISTM the way to make distancing possible on public transport is not to keep people off transport, but to increase capacity. If the train runs every 30 seconds, you'll get quite a bit more breathing room than if it runs every five minutes.

[EDIT:] I should have noted, since I've never been to UK this is more of a general observation than a specific recommendation. Certainly most transit systems in USA have the physical capacity, if not the operating budget, to run much more often. Any bus system, however, could buy more buses, if social distancing on transit were a priority. Perhaps I am too suspicious but when I hear "don't ride the train" I translate that to "we're getting rid of the train". Probably not happening in London but you could see it anywhere in USA.

<comment><USER16> This supposes there is capacity to increase frequency. For almost all lines in London frequency was already at max. For example the Victoria line trains run every 100s (it's actually harder to get faster than that) at peak times. Despite this the line is always completely packed (often waiting a train or two to get space) at peak times. Similarly on some routes it's a continous line of busses so capacity can't be added there either. Additionally stations that required lifts (elevators) can't increase capacity.

Now during Covid capacity was reduced but it's being ramped up again.

In London there is physically no way to physically distance people using public transport. The only way it'll be achieved is to get everyone who can walk or bike to work to do so. From my experience only a tiny fraction of the number of people who could bike to work did so.

Now the offices are too small to physically distance people anyway so there are issues there too.

<comment><USER4> Curious...if everyone is wearing a mask or equivalent does that not reduce or eliminating the need for distancing...?

<comment><USER16> Wearing a mask reduces the risk of infecting others. Standing futher away also reduces the risk. Together you achieve an even greater reduction. No one measure is going to be the silver bullet.

Physical distance is also about more than just not breathing in other's air. It also makes it easier to avoid touching the same surfaces too much. Have a look the number of hands on the centre poll on a London underground train during rush hour.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Encouraging people to walk and bike, while also reducing pollution, is a great way to reduce the effect of future health problems. Wish they'd do this in NYC. You could close 30-50% of the streets, convert them into parks, and the only negative impact would be that people have to walk an extra block to get a cab.

</comment><comment><USER18> I hope it will be made permanent. As tourist I would like to visit car free cities. For London residents clean air.

Modern large cities are incompatible with cars.

</comment><comment><USER19> Easy to do that in the summer, but what happens come winter in a rainy city?

The future is in hybrid, low impact remote work, and minimal city traffic. Mass transit and traffic jams belong to the industrial era, should have been abandoned long ago

</comment><comment><USER10> Milan is also planning to work on bike lanes at this time (it's very bad for biking as of now)

</comment><comment><USER20> > It will take a monumental effort from all Londoners to maintain safe social > distancing on public transport

This is why we need work from home. Banning cars and forcing public transport is not going to fix the problem!

<comment><USER21> They're talking about a part of London where many people walk to work anyway. This just gives them more space and eases crowding on sidewalks. Also, not every job can be done from home.

<comment><USER22> Walk to work after getting off crowded busses tubes and trains</comment></comment></comment>


Why you should avoid cheap software development - <AUTHOR> https://articles.squads.com/why-avoid-cheap-software-development-fd5cb2bc959#.szd9hh27r <comment><USER2> Money (hurr) quote from my last (potential) customer: "100€/h?! No one will pay you that much!"</comment>


Michael Dell Bought His Company Too Cheaply - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-06-01/michael-dell-bought-his-company-too-cheaply <comment><USER3> This logic is terrible. The share holders would have never gotten $17.62 so why are they being awarded $3.87 per share with interest?!

Reminds me of the land taxes on the value of the property. The value of the area goes up, the house is taxed into a higher bracket because it is worth such and such. But no one will buy it for that appraisal so how can it have that value?!

Or collecting comics or coins. My comic book is valued at $1000! Great, but no one will buy it for that much. I only get $500 offers for it. Things are only worth what they are actually exchanged for.

<comment><USER4> I don't understand all the rules at play here, but from a fairness standpoint, you shouldn't be forced to sell. That is the real problem as I see it. At least people forced to sell here got some money to kind of even things out.

Can someone enlighten me here? What is the reasoning for allowing people to buy from people who don't want to sell?

<comment><USER5> Think of it more as a hard asset rather than as voting rights in a company:

Through one reason or another, you and I both own portions of a house. I own 95% of it, and you own 5%.

I want to sell, because I would like to have the money. You believe if we wait a year we will make more money. Is it fair that your very much minority position could prevent me from selling my much larger stake? It's a house so chances are we can't sell it piecemeal (which is unlike stock of a company, but very similar to going private as a company!)

<comment><USER6> Except you point of the very problem with your argument. Stocks are liquid as small percentages of the company. It is quite possible for a single individual/organization to accumulate the vast majority of the shares/control of a company without forcing anyone to sell.

I've been through this a few times with stocks I've held, and rarely am I happy about the outcome. For example about 10 years ago I saw something that apparently no one else on wall street saw, so I purchased a number of shares in three competing companies in proportion to how well I saw them profiting over the next 5-10 years. It wasn't 6 months later that Warren Buffet announced he was buying the company I had bet on the heaviest.

Lets just say that I'm still sore about it 10 years later. I even checked the, "I want my stock converted to BRK/A" but they ignored it, because I was going to have too small a fraction of a single share of BRK (which would have been amusing by itself). Heck, in the 10 years since BRK/A has again doubled.

So, IMHO, its just another case of the market being rigged for the big investors.

<comment><USER7> Why didn't you buy shares of brk/b on the day your sale closed?

<comment><USER8> Without speaking on the GP's behalf, perhaps the leverage in a particular strategy represented by investing directly in the company made the risk worthwhile whereas the more diversified, risk-averse but lower-leverage investment represented by BRK/B was not?

<comment><USER6> Yah, basically, what I did was buy more of the competing companies, even though I didn't think they were as as well positioned. Turned out to be a fine investment, better than the BRK would have been.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can someone give the devil's advocate view? As others are saying, the judge's ruling is ridiculous. I can understand if there were material misrepresentations that affected the offer price, but to rule that you should offer _more_ than the market was valuing it? Even though no one was actually willing to pay that price? And on the grounds that "investors are too stupid to correctly value it"?

Isn't the whole point of a buyout that you think other investor's are incorrectly valuing a venture based on the available information? If any buyout is going to be subject to this later, with-more-hindsight review that forces buyers to "top up" to the "correct" value, what's the point?

Sometimes I wonder how business manages to work at all in the presence of this "jackpot justice".

<comment><USER10> The issue is that some shareholders were forced to sell at $13/share even if they didn't want to. There were a minority of shareholders who were holding onto the shares on the assumption that the new long term vision would work out great and expecting their shares to be worth something >$13/share. Those people were forced to sell at $13 because the majority of shareholders agreed to take $13/share and let the company go private. Maybe someone bought at $14 a share years ago and simply was a buy and hold investor living off the dividends and convinced that it was under priced but totally ok with that because they expected to own the company forever. That person would be pissed at the $13/share offer.

<comment><USER11> Isn't that part of the risk when you invest in equities? If you don't want to be forced to sell (or deal with bankruptcies, etc.) you can always buy bonds or ETFs or other less risky ventures.

<comment><USER12> Shareholders take that risk against the backdrop knowledge that in situations like this they can seek appraisal from the court. Not that I think such appraisals make all that much sense with publicly-traded equities, but nonetheless these shareholders bought the stock assuming the appraisal right would be available.

<comment><USER13> Courts of course should always be last resort, after all, there could be fraud (e.g. if the CEO was deliberately hiding some information that would have increased the market price).

But the problem with this ruling is, that it's ridiculous - the court's argument is basically that the "fair value" is above what PE paid because PE wanted to make a profit! It basically contradicts the whole idea of the market (buying something if you think it's worth more than the current price)!

<comment><USER14> In a market, typically things are sold voluntarily. These are people who were forced to sell.

<comment><USER15> Exactly, you are abandoning market and its prices once you say "those stocks are just pieces of paper now, we'll give you few bucks for each so you won't sue us"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> More financial writing should be like this. The various points of view are clearly presented and explained in proper layman terms and it made for very nice reading.

<comment><USER17> Matt Levine is the best. All of his writing is basically like this. Highly recommended!

<comment><USER18> He also writes the best footnotes I've ever seen. :-)

<comment><USER19> Yeah holy crap I'm still reading the footnotes and they may be even more interesting than the article

<comment><USER20> He is known for his footnotes and acknowledges that he is known for his at times excessive (much to our joy) footnotes. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This whole article is a little misleading. It makes it sound as if anyone who happened to own Dell stock at the time of the buyout could have sued to get some extra cash.

But only in the footnotes does it mention this:

>To be eligible for the court-ordered price bump, investors must have voted against the transaction.

Clearly, everyone who owned Dell stock at the time thought it was worth _more_ than $9.35. That's why they held the stock in the first place! Those who thought the company was worth _much_ more (say, $18 per share), presumably voted against the transaction. They were understandably pissed when the transaction succeeded anyway, so they sued. But those who voted in favor of the transaction didn't get an extra penny -- they agreed on a price, and that's what they got.

On a related note, here's an interesting game theory tangent: If you think the buyout offer is a great deal, should you vote for it? After all, if you're confident the deal is going to succeed even without your votes, maybe you should vote against it -- to preserve your option to sue for even more money. But if everyone thinks like that, then the deal won't go through at all...

<comment><USER22> Yeah, as your last paragraph explains, that rule makes the whole thing even more crazy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Vice Chancellor Lester quotes in an opinion from 2014[1]:

[S]elf-interest concentrates the mind, and people who must back their beliefs with their purses are more likely to assess the value of the judgment accurately than are people who simply seek to make an argument. Astute investors survive in competition; those who do not understand the value of assets are pushed aside. There is no similar process of natural selection among expert witnesses and [] judges

And

―The benefit of the active market for UFG as an entity that the sales process generated is that several buyers with a profit motive were able to assess these factors for themselves and to use those assessments to make bids with actual money behind them. For me (as a law-trained judge) to second-guess the price that resulted from that process involves an exercise in hubris and, at best, reasoned guess-work.

[1] [http://courts.delaware.gov/Opinions/Download.aspx?id=215980](http://courts.delaware.gov/Opinions/Download.aspx?id=215980)

<comment><USER24> Apparently this Laster guy has been an tough judge for cases like this over the past few years, and has spoken out against this before:

From the article (in reference to shutting down a suit against Aruba for selling too cheaply to Hewlett Packard) "It wasn't a first for Mr. Laster, long the court's firebrand. In his six years on the bench, he has made weeding out weak cases something of a pet issue. But "this time feels different," said Ed Micheletti of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, in part because Mr. Laster's colleagues are joining him."

[http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-judge-who-shoots-down- merger...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-judge-who-shoots-down-merger- lawsuits-1452076201)

It seems that in this case he felt that the price discovery mechanism of the process and go-shop wasn't sufficient to reach the theoretically "correct" price, which makes sense. The reason any market approaches efficiency is because investors can easily buy and sell undervalued or overvalued securities. In massive transactions of this sort, there are only a handful of buyers who can participate, and it would be unreasonable for such a situation to be as efficient in price discovery as a liquid, publicly traded market.

My sense is that the issue is more with the law, and ability to challenge this sort of thing (which is mostly capitalized on by specialized hedge funds who buy shares and sue) holds a transaction to a different standard than when it actually occurred. Specifically - the board, representing the fiduciary interests of shareholders, should be expected to make a reasonable effort to get the best price. If markets are not efficient and no one has the capital to step up and make a purchase, how would they know that? You can never prove the counterfactual in that type of situation, and it seems dangerous to attempt to do so via ex-ante analytical modeling.[1]

1\. I get that this concept is widespread in settlements of all sorts (loss of use, damages, etc.), but in this case, no one was defrauded or coerced. Shareholder agreements were obeyed, and that should be that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Well said. It reminds me of all the bluster I hear from people about how they are _" 100% sure"_ that _" FB is definitely overvalued at $80B"_ or _" AMD is certainly undervalued at $5B"_ and yet, they never seem to back up their certainty with the actual act of buying or shorting the stock in question. When it comes to financial markets, anyone who doesn't put their money where their mouth is, should be completely and utterly ignored.

<comment><USER26> "Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." \- John Maynard Keynes

<comment><USER27> But nobody was insolvent. That quote sounds like it's more suited to catastrophes than to run of the mill equities acquisitions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Just to put this into perspective, only a relatively small number of people are eligible to receive the higher price: they must have voted against the buyout and jumped through some other hoops that indicate they were against the lower price. (They were forced to sell and presumably wouldn't have otherwise sold without a higher price.)

<comment><USER29> Doesn't this create some sort of prisoner's dilemma situation, in which it's in the best interest of each individual shareholder to vote no to a buyout, hoping that a majority votes yes, but if a majority votes no, noone gets anything above market price.

<comment><USER30> Only if you think the company is actually worth more. If you think it's worth less and the buyers are suckers, then you'd want to vote yes so you can get extra money before reality sets in. Which is to say, your incentives for voting line up with whether you think the buyout is a good deal.

<comment><USER31> I upvoted you, but there's still some possibility of perverse incentives. Let's say I am a stockholder, and I think the sale is a good one - <USER2> buyers are suckers! But I also recognize that most of the other shareholders feel the same. So, to hedge my bet, I vote "no" so that if it turns out the buyers were _not_ suckers, I can sue.

My scenario is that I vote "no" even though I think selling is the right decision. I feel I can do this because I recognize my vote will likely not prevent the outcome I want, and it insulates me against the risk that I, and others, are wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> That is just bizarre. So if you buy out a company where no other group even tries to outbid you investors can later come back and claim you did pay a fair market value?

Has this happened with other buyouts or mergers? I thought the point of the share price was to show what investors were willing to pay. To assume every buyout is purposefully under cutting the price by 25% will just depress future offers

<comment><USER23> IANAL but you can search through the Delaware court system website[1] with the text "appraisal" and find plenty of examples of this sort of lawsuit, which I understand is very common (perhaps to the degree that every buyout gets challenged by shareholders who voted against the buyout).

[1][http://courts.delaware.gov/opinions/](http://courts.delaware.gov/opinions/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Btw HN editors: The title is misleading. What it's actually saying is "Court shouldn't have ruled that Dell buyout paid too little".

<comment><USER33> That wasn't my takeaway. The implication of the title, in the context of the article, is that the suit would have had less merit if the sale price had been higher.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> At first I thought this was silly, but when you're negotiating a complete buyout, it can be tricky: What if you really really didn't want to sell the stock at the price, maybe you had just yourself identified it as a value deal (hard to prove), and felt coerced into the buyout for a value that didn't, say, recouperate the expected gain. What if you had an outstanding sell order at $20 (unlikely, but easy to prove). In theory, what one should be doing is to drill down the ask chain until all of the outstanding asks are fulfilled. But that's not really possible either.

Of course, having a judge decide is silly, too.

</comment><comment><USER35> The given example - $10 v. $20 so you pay $12 - is an example of the principle of consumer surplus. Not the EMH.

"The efficient markets hypothesis" is not precisely the same as "consumer surplus". The EMH is dependent on consumer surplus, but the EMH could be wrong and consumer surplus would still not be.

Consumer surplus is a _microeconomics_ concept; the EMH is macro.

This error isn't critical to the rest of the article, but it's jarring to see something like that in the first few paragraphs.

<comment><USER9> True, but the concept of consumer surplus fundamentally changes in financial markets, in which both parties want the same thing -- more money. In most markets, people want different things, so it's understandable for both parties to be better off, since each value's the other's stuff more. Nothing funny about Alice valuing Bob's widget more than her wadget, and vice versa.

But when both parties want "the thing that throws off the most money", it's a lot harder to come up with a scenario in which (reflectively consistent) preference sets allow for a range of possible sale/purchase values.

IOW, it's fine for a worker to be (hypothetically) willing to take a lower- than-market value for their labor ... but if a financial seller is, then there's (probably) a misvaluation somewhere, and thus an EMH violation.

<comment><USER35> Shhhh! The Commies might be listening! :)

The only reason I ... tolerate markets ( and I tolerate them quite well ) is that they act as a price discovery mechanism, a way of constructing decision trees using dynamic information. I have enough bandwidth to understand that basic trade - someone selling vegetables on the side of the road - is a win- win. Beyond that? I dunno. Hypothetically, Bob and Alice are specialized to each widget, which makes them more efficient.

If we cannot come up with a preference-relation in which a range of possible sale/purchase values is allowed, then we can't really even hoist consumer surplus into use to support the EMH, can we? Isn't it at its core now a _phony_ , game-playing exercise? There's no there there; it's curve-fitting nonsense on stilts at best.

Self-referential systems are known to be deep pools of unmanageable complexity. And M&A seems to be a widely ignored disaster.

I suspect - but really lack the chops to prove - that Adam Smith had it right all along, but that humans will always revert to isolated pools of mercantilist rent-seeking. That "markets" require beings who do not exist, or who have managed to get just enough ethical boilerplate to avoid the rent seeking. Just as Progressivism requires philosopher kings, so do ( apparently ) markets. So we're down to "well, it keeps the people who might otherwise be violent busy."

When asked about American democracy, Ghandi said "I think it would be a good idea." I think capitalism would be just such a good idea.

ObDisclosure: I have an old Usenet contact who is quite wealthy from a hedge fund. This guy's a PhD in applied math. He reports "I refute the EMH thusly" by kicking the logo of his firm.

<comment><USER36> EMH is probably undecidable given like what you said "Self-referential systems are known to be deep pools of unmanageable complexity." An entangled web of horrible horribly reactive code/systems that percolate from some perverted sense of fundamentals to the furthest farthest markets an "efficient price." Knowing what we know about "markets" and the implementation of these markets, HFT, market makers, and the clusterfuck that is all the "financial" industry that tries to capitalize on little tiny arbitrage amounts..Yeah, the markets efficient, if efficient is a synonym for reactively retarded. The market is an elephant with the tail of a donkey that has nerves that propagate at the speed of light. Efficiency really doesn't mean much if the quality of the information that is efficiently transferred is between a retarded chameleon and a groundhog with a bad hair day. But as long as everyone agrees its an elephant and believes the myth that elephant prices make sense...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> It seems much easier to convince a court of a high stock price than it does an entire market. Therefore, sell at the price offered and spend your time on convincing the court, later.

<comment><USER14> You aren't allowed to get the court to second guess the selling price if you consented to the sale, only if you were forced to sell.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Can this ruling be appealed?

</comment><comment><USER39> What this article does not explain is who is entitled to the money. It just says those who have jumped through hoops. I owned dell stock and it was sold without my consent, am I also entitled to the increased amount?

</comment><comment><USER40> One of the best finance articles I've read in a long time.

</comment><comment><USER41> > Again, this is super oversimplified; please don't use this description to > prepare for your investment banking interviews.

Disregard that note, and sue Bloomberg and the writer anyway. Seems to work, according to the text.</comment>


Ad Blocking, Ad Networks, and Your IP Address - <AUTHOR> https://snelling.io/on-ad-blocking <comment><USER2> Amongst those four arguments, I again don't see mine:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10241380](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10241380)

I don't want ads because I don't want to be manipulated into buying things I don't need. I especially don't want to allow this manipulation while I'm in the middle of something else.

Even if ads were presented with speed, privacy, and safety, I still don't want them.

<comment><USER3> Fair enough. So, you just have to not use websites that live off ads.

<comment><USER4> Why does (s)he have to do that? Because the video makers don't want you to watch it without seeing the ads is not a sufficient reason. Content producers just have to accept the fact that they don't get to control how people see their stuff once they put it out there, just like TV producers didn't get to prevent you from flipping channels during an ad break.

If you disagree, as the copyright holder of my posts, I revoke your license to download them. I guess you'll just have to read HN comments pages where I haven't posted.

<comment><USER5> Why isn't it a sufficient reason? If they say "don't watch my video unless you pay $5" are you okay with that or do you just think whatever they made you're entitled to it, you never have to give what they ask in return? Isn't it up to them to decide what they want to charge you (pay $$, watch this ad, etc.) and for you to decide not to watch if you don't want to pay whatever they are asking?

How is this any different than say GPL in that you can either pay the price "make your modified version GPL too" or you can not modify the software. Do you also think that's not for them to decide and that you should just use and modify the software anyway?

PS: please don't turn this into a thread about the minutia of the GPL. That's not the point. The point is whether or not the same concept that lets a creator set a software license and choose the terms, whether that concept also applies to other creations, videos, books, movies, games, magazines, articles, etc..

<comment><USER4> I hope you realized you've proved my point by replying to my copyrighted post, in which I revoked your right to download it (which happens after you reply to it).

When the demands of copyright holders are not reasonable, we are not ethically required to comply. Your words say you disagree, but your actions show otherwise.

<comment><USER6> Aren't you a bit childish today?

<comment><USER4> Not just today :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I know that iOS 9 is allowing ad-blocking, but a majority of the articles I've seen on HN and elsewhere aren't saying anything new. Yes, we know what an IP address can reveal, and we also have heard all the arguments behind blocking ads or not. But nothing has really changed since iOS 9, besides the fact that even more people are doing it.

</comment><comment><USER8> If you think AD blocking alone is enough to protect your privacy, think again. I think the real problem is fingerprinting. You are always going to be tracked on the web, and one can tunnel their traffic through a hardware-based TOR router, and surf with Lynx browser and still get tracked. Also blacklisting entire classes of AD networks is not thorough enough as a lot of publishers are doing 'roll your own' ADs. You can't block an 80x80 banner graphic with a link yet (well you could if you block images, but we're not all neckbeards who surf with Lynx). You could thwart low hanging fruit stuff like 1x1 pixel beacons, but AD serving technology is ambiguous and also one of the many hard problems of the web.

Shameless plug, I wrote about how to thwart browser fingerprinting here: [http://blog.higg.im/2015/04/29/do-ad-blockers-and-anti- track...](http://blog.higg.im/2015/04/29/do-ad-blockers-and-anti-tracking- plugins-only-partially-solve-privacy-on-the-web/)

My current solution is use any number of things on privacytools.io and try not to centralize browsing to one device and one network. A bit obvious, but you would be surprised how many people just use their phone to navigate the web.

Like all hard problems, there is no sweeping silver bullet that will solve this. You have to get smarter about your browsing. The 'mixing effect' of cities is a great idea, and cheap $10.00 internet enabled burner devices for surfing the web are awesome too

</comment><comment><USER9> IP addresses can be geolocated. Big deal. This article seems a little out of date when it comes to what an IP address means for home users. (For mobile users, there are far easier means of tracking than via IP address.)

For instance.... "One important thing to note is that most consumers probably have a "dynamic ip address" meaning that your internet service provider probably rotates this ip address ever 24-48 hours. Your internet service provider usually charges more money for static ip addresses which is where you keep the same ip forever."

Really? Mine hasn't changes in over a year. My ISP could change it, but absent any reason to do so they don't bother. Once upon a time they would assign new IPs when boxes turned off and on, but security measures these days mean neighbourhoods are assigned small pools of IPs. Turn off and on and you will more often than not be assigned the same IP. Besides, nobody turns off cable/DSL modems anymore anyway. Truly dynamic IP's disappeared with dialup.

And... "So each and every web request I make to any website, can find out my city, state, zip code, internet service provider, time zone, average city income, average population, and if I'm residential."

Nope. Mine is always wrong. All the geolocation services place my IP in the wrong city. That's because my area is served by boxes one town over. So all the info gathered via my IP address beyond which state/province I'm in would be incorrect. These online IP databases are not the same as actually phoning an IP for a street address. They are at best a good guess.

<comment><USER10> MaxMind themselves only claims something like 80% accuracy on getting the correct city with their commercial geoip database

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I would gladly pay a small fee to not have to see adds.

The issue is how to solve that, how could i pay that fee in a simple manner where the cash only goes to the sites that i use.

<comment><USER12> Google has a proposal for this: Google Contributor [1]. Of course, only works for Google ads, but this is a substantial portion of the web.

However, I don't like the current proposition: you pay for seeing less ads, but there's no tier guaranteeing no ads. Even if they guarantee 99% less ads, I still wouldn't sign for it.

Paying for seeing less ads does not change the incentives for tracking and targeting, and may even worsen them: surely Google will start by cutting the less targeted ads. The more I cut the ads, the more targeted the remaining ads will be, and stronger will be the incentive to track me.

Only by a policy of no ads and no other revenue stream besides my money would avoid the perverse incentives that are in place for tracking - and trying to change - my behavior.

Of course, Google Contributor would still have to track the sites I visit, so I wouldn't be able to prevent tracking with a technical tool if I signed for it. This adds even more to the argument that Contributor is only an option if no ads are allowed, so that he incentives for targeting and analysis are now removed.

[1][https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/](https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/)

<comment><USER13> That does't solve Google tracking your every move around the internet. They still get all your information.

They are only doing this to save face or to find an alternative path of revenue.

I refuse to be tracked, specially by a corporation whose president is quite against privacy and anonimity and has a lot of friends in the US government.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt#Privacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt#Privacy)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Flogging a dead horse of a story certainly brings in the clicks, which in the past has resulted in more advertising revenue.

I'm interested to see if this continues, or if it declines since there is a reduced financial incentive.

I could imagine that in a world of paywalls, this is disincentivised, since your users don't want to have the same crap thrown at them over and over (as opposed to now, where publishers make as much controversy/noise as possible in the hope of attracting new clicks).

Could it be that this change in model requires more thoughtful journalism?

</comment><comment><USER15> This is pretty low quality description of a very complicated industry: [http://www.lumapartners.com/lumascapes/display-ad-tech- lumas...](http://www.lumapartners.com/lumascapes/display-ad-tech-lumascape/)

And the best part, nothing is said about the fact that blocking inside apps is not on the table, so Apple is simply driving more dollars to where they stand to capture the most from them.

</comment><comment><USER16> The war of ad-blockers and anti-ad-blockers will be ugly, I suppose.

Say, if Youtube is going to enforce anti-ad-blocking across the site, and I believe the could do that-their Chinese copycat, Youku, has already done this long time ago, will you give up watching? That might be a hard question to answer.

<comment><USER17> The answer is that anti-anti-ad-blockers will start to exist. As long as users still have control over the software they run on their devices, they will have the advantage in this war. That control seems to be slowly disappearing, unfortunately:

[http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html](http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html)

[http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html](http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html)

<comment><USER18> Already existing.

After [https://github.com/sitexw/FuckAdBlock](https://github.com/sitexw/FuckAdBlock) was invented, and I got annoyed,

I reported [https://github.com/sitexw/FuckAdBlock/issues/26](https://github.com/sitexw/FuckAdBlock/issues/26)

and wrote this solution to the issue [https://github.com/sitexw/FuckAdBlock/issues/26#issuecomment...](https://github.com/sitexw/FuckAdBlock/issues/26#issuecomment-141711992)

<comment><USER19> How is it a moral issue? If it's immoral to block certain behavior on sites, then it's just as if not _more_ immoral for users to block ads in the first place. The usual argument is that sites with ads constitute an implicit agreement, etc. If users have the prerogative (regardless of moral ambiguity) to block content they don't like, sites have the same prerogative to block unsavory visitors as they see fit. To say that using FuckAdBlock is forcing anyone to accept content is complete and utter nonsense.

<comment><USER18> No, I mean: I do not care about a website showing me an ad as plain .

I have no issues with those ads.

I have issues with ads running javascript, tracking me, and trying to abuse holes in my browser to install malware.

And it is immoral to force people into running those ads.

<comment><USER19> No one is forcing anyone to whitelist the site and view the DRM'd content. The site is simply offering an explicit choice to the user: go away or play by our rules. Whether or not serving the ads in the first place is morally correct simply does not matter—the price for admission could change to require the user's car, their livelihood, their life, and the premise is the same. There's an explicit acknowledgement of the cost and a conscious choice by the user.

An apt analogy would be a magazine on a table with a sign denoting the price. Without FuckAdBlock, the sign reads "Price: ___". Taking the magazine and not paying anything isn't immoral, it just shows you value yourself above others (nothing wrong with that). With FuckAdBlock, the sign now reads "Price: Your kidney". By taking the magazine and not paying, you're quite literally stealing, regardless of the price now on the sign.

<comment><USER18> No one can force me to watch or click ads either. I can just glue something over my screen – or just mute the sound and watch some other video while an ad is running.

Many people even are okay with watching TV 15min delayed, and instead having their receiver automatically cut away the ad breaks.

You can't force ads on users.

Now, with the web, we have ads that aren't just annoying, but actively malicious.

And while I'm the kind of person that often gives people money because they need it – be it because they can't afford a bus ticket, or whatever – or that I often if I am at a place with a sign "pumpkins 2€" (where you can take yourself, no one watches, etc) still pay more than those 2€.

So it's not like I actually like doing this.

But advertising is not acceptable. And as long as someone can program computers, I will not see interactive javascript ads. Image ads with a simple image in a link? I even have a whitelist for such ad networks. Seriously.

<comment><USER19> I'm not arguing that ads are acceptable, merely that it's acceptable for sites and users to come to an agreement where ads must be "unblocked" in order to view content.

Whether it's the publisher's job to inform the users of the risks involved with allowing ads to appear is questionable (should the publisher also inform the user that staring at a monitor for extended periods of time can cause adverse effects, or is this simply common knowledge and implied?).

If you want to discuss the morality of online advertising, that's another story altogether. In my opinion, ads used to benefit the common good at the expense of taxing individuals of time and attention are fine. Take Google for example, the ads they show collectively benefit the public distribution of knowledge (search, maps, books, entertainment, etc.) Just like with any government, if you're unhappy with how taxed resources are managed (or the amount you're taxed), you're free to leave society and live outside of civilization.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's funny how both sides of the argument think that ads are something people has to "put up with". If ads are really that good, not watching would cost you (either money or a nice opportunity for good products). For now I don't really see that much of benefit of seeing them (it's the absent of benefits so it's really hard to measure though). I hope web ads companies one day start producing ads that are actually pleasant to watch (some TV commercials are doing a good job here). Until then, you can't really stop people blocking ads.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is a war that will force websites to find workarounds ... from redirecting you to a message saying sorry this content is blocked you are running an adblocker to innovators creating work arounds that ad blockers can't block and they are more annoying then the ads we have now.

The web has flourished and we all get to enjoy it for free because advertising. Though the majority here seem to want all ads to be blocked... does that mean the majority will then sign up and pay each site for their content? Highly doubtful ... so what is the solution, people need to be paid for the content we consume each day for free on the web!

<comment><USER14> I certainly expect there will be a war - a highly asymmetric one. The cost of developing 'anti-ad-block' tech will exceed the cost of updating filters for some time.

It will also lead to more intrusive ads in a world where user expectations have changed. Users will become used to a "quiet" web and might just prefer to hit the back button.

Another point worth making. If your content is good enough for me to turn off my ad blocker, it's probably good enough to paywall. If not, you have no chance.

<comment><USER22> Not really, a site can just proxy ad content through their servers. How can an ad-blocking service tell the difference between an image needed for the site and an image that's an advertisement?

<comment><USER14> It will be more challenging but not a big issue. Ads will still contain signals they're an ad (I'm reminded of banner ads on the Web 20 years ago).

Back hauling traffic through the site may happen, however that's a huge latency penalty and also will reduce the amount of data leakage. Networks will no longer have carte Blanche access to end users. Also worth noting is that it increases the complexity of the technical implementation from 'drop in this code' to 'get your backend team to change your architecture in this way'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> A note about the IP addresses: Some ad networks/analytics software does not store your IP address, but an anonymized version of it (eg. drop the last octet[1] or an store only an hash). I believe that they must do this in order to operate legally in certain countries.

They can still store the geoIP information without storing the IP, though.

[1]: [https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2763052?hl=en](https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2763052?hl=en)

</comment><comment><USER24> Where you are is only marginally useful to advertisers. What you've clicked on is sort of useful. The really valuable information is what you've bought and paid for.

That's what makes Amazon go. Other advertisers would like that info, but they have to buy it from people who actually sell real stuff, and those sellers don't sell it cheaply.

(Of course, Amazon's product recommendations would be more useful if they stopped spamming them with ads for their failing mobile devices.)

</comment><comment><USER6> As a publisher who depends on ads I do not have a problem with people using adblockers. Those wouldn't click on an ad anyway, so no money lost. But those guys running around and installing adblockers on every computer where they have access to, even without asking the owner before, those guys suck.</comment>