Having fun with fashion week and deep-learning, on video - <AUTHOR> https://vimeo.com/194022746 <comment><AUTHOR> This is the result of using deepomatic.com fashion detection API on each frame of a streetstyle fashion week video.</comment>


8 Safety Tips for Developers to Secure the Code - <AUTHOR> http://www.zealousweb.com/blog/8-safety-tips-for-developers-to-secure-the-code/ <comment><USER2> The article is so general it actually hinders a developers chance to find something helpful.

Thorough testing. Research into bugs. Remain updated and prepared. Use encryption.

These are answers for kids in 8th grade IT class.

Point 5. (Seek code analyzers' help) is actually a risk.

</comment><comment><USER3> 0) Don't try to create your own encryption methods.</comment>


Ask HN: Is using master/slave terminology anti-diversity? - <AUTHOR> We got a PR in our repo https://github.com/rudderlabs/rudder-server/pull/432 requesting us to change the master/slave terminology to main/subordinate.
I really appreciate the author for bringing this issue up but somehow the main/subordinate doesn't seem right too.
Wondering if people have thought about this. And if yes, what alternative terminology people have been following? <comment><USER2> IMHO "Slave" is the problematic word here. I think it's better to avoid the slavery analogy and instead use "worker" or "replica".

<comment><AUTHOR> master/replica sounds perfect to me. That should be fine I guess?

<comment><USER3> "master" even on its own os potentially problematic because of the relationship with the word "slave" even if you cage that to "replica".

I'd suggest changing both, so you won't possibly be asked to change again later. I went with "Primary/Replica" here, because it's genuinely more logically descriptive of the roles, as well as moving completely away from older "traditional" use of language that might cause offence or hurt.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> No, since in IT it doesn't associate the concept to racists one.

Think about master/slave hard drive controllers (the old IDE interface) for instance. And what about the Git "master" branch: what has to do with racists concepts? And what about "master degree"?

</comment><comment><USER5> My expedience is once the language police start driving the conversation everything loses momentum and starts to fall apart. Because when the top of your list of demands are inane superfluous things it makes everything else appear so as well.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've thought about this since the days of IDE drives. As a black person in America I see it as a reminder of a painful legacy reduced to a catchy mnemonic. Those kinds of things waer in you, just like seeing 5 out of 7 people on US currency being slaveowners.

<comment><USER7> I am from Europe and I never thought that for things as IDE drives it has such connotation in the US. I feel sorry how things are. If American society wants to heal from this past, they will need do acknowledge the pain it brought.

Heck, in Germany quite a few two-letter abbreviations like "SS" are that taboo that you'll never find them even in numerical source code. ("SS" was the acronym for the Nazi storm troopers.) These letter combinations are utterly burnt and nobody uses them since the WWII was over.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This recent discussion lists a bunch of options: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23811866](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23811866) \- which is best depends on the context

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the pointer. Missed that thread

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Both words need to go imo

</comment><comment><USER10> `leader/follower` is one option you can consider.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, that sounds much better

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> icecube/snowflake</comment>


Guns are selling out across America - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/gun-sales-surge-over-growing-safety-concerns-first-time-buyers-2020-7 <comment><USER2> I can tell you as someone who identifies as progressive/liberal who thought I would never own a gun (no kids but still, no need to have something deadly like that) that I've seriously been considering it lately.

I first thought about when COVID-19 hit but told myself it would be unsafe and stupid for me to buy a gun when I couldn't do what I considered "table-stakes" for owning a gun (train for hours and hours at a range, take classes on gun safety, etc). In the last week I've been considering breaking my own "rules" on that too.

Watching the country spiral out of control (in so many ways) is terrifying and I have the financial means to purchase 1-2 guns, a safe, and lots of ammo. I'm quickly running out of good reasons to not "pull the trigger" as it were...

This is one community that I'd be interested to hear feedback from on this. I have no desire or want to use a gun on a living thing but I'm increasingly feeling like a baseball bat is no longer acceptable for home defense. When things go bad they go bad quickly, I don't want to be left exposed.

<comment><USER3> You are responsible for your own safety. Period.

A firearm, for most people, is the most effective means to defend themselves against another aggressor. That doesn't mean that it's the right call for everyone.

You're right though, training is necessary "table stakes" and I hope that's not what you're going to sacrifice if you purchase. At the very least, go to an outdoor range and get some amount of practice in so that you can handle your firearm safely.

Also, you need to make the decision up front that you're willing to defend yourself with deadly force. Some people can't or are unwilling to do so. This is a far more consequential decision than most people realize. Without training, practice and the will to use it a firearm is simply a liability.

Some other thoughts:

1\. Consider getting a medical kit and keeping it on hand. You're far more likely to use it and Stop the Bleed classes are free. It won't cost much to keep on hand

2\. Get Concealed Carry Insurance. You'll need legal representation in the case of defending your life.

3\. Realize that after you take a life, you'll likely need counseling. Prepare accordingly

<comment><USER4> And yet you get a gun and the person that gun is far and away most likely to kill is you or someone in your family.

Your post has a ton of fallacies. Are you going to constantly carry your gun? You still think it will protect you if someone has the drop on you? The amount of cowboy situations where guns actually will help are pretty small.

<comment><USER5> When the police department is defunded in your town, you better hope you have a weapon.

<comment><USER6> Citation needed.

<comment><USER7> What would he cite? That there's police departments being defunded in USA right now?

<comment><USER8> His insinuation seems that crime would immediately (eventually?) spike up once police doesnt have the same financial means. So a citation that says lower police funding correlates to higher crime (specifically at current levels of police funding) would help.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Gun sales tend to boom when the democrats are likely to win the next election.

Also, more free time for hunting along with so much else closed.

I wonder how the increase has compared to canoe sales.

<comment><USER10> People aren't buying Glocks because they're hunting in their spare time. The shelves aren't empty of .223/5.56 ball ammo because it's coming up on deer season. In fact, I was at a Cabela's a couple of weeks ago and the only ammo they had were hunting rounds (and nothing in 5.56/.223 or 7.62x51/.308, not to mention handgun cartridges)

There are three main reasons this is happening: the possibility Biden will win, the canoe effect, and — this is the big one — looting, arson, violent crime, property crime, and societal unrest combined with calls to defund the police.

People are realizing that you cannot rely upon the police now or in the future to save the day (TBH, you never could) and arming themselves as a result. There are also people on the left who are armed to protect themselves from the far-right, and PoC who want to effectively protect themselves against racist aggressors.

<comment><USER9> I wonder how many "first time buyers" are just friends/relatives buying to get around retailers limiting sales per transaction.

<comment><USER11> I hope not for their sake since that would be a straw purchase---a federal crime.

<comment><USER9> Straw purchases are only when buying for someone that can't _legally_ buy a gun/ammo.

Lots of shops limiting gun/ammo sales to X/person to maintain stock.

There should be no issues with buying a gun and then deciding to sell it to someone eligible after quickly deciding you don't want it anymore, no?

What are the laws about carrying your spouse's gun?

I genuinely don't know.

<comment><USER11> > Straw purchases are only when buying for someone that can't legally buy a > gun.

Not quite [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abramski_v._United_States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abramski_v._United_States)

> There should be no issues with buying a gun and then deciding to sell it to > someone eligible after quickly deciding you don't want it anymore, no?

Yeah it's confusing because you can buy a gun with the intent to gift it to someone. In your example, it would come down to proving that you lied when filling out the 4473.

> What are the laws about carrying your spouse's gun?

Depends on the state. In my home state of Arizona, none. I can carry my gun, my wife's gun, or a friend's gun not even a carry permit required. Aside from prohibited possessors (felons, etc.), I can loan or transfer to anyone who is of age a gun. Moreover since Arizona has no registration and is a community property state, "ownership" is no different than any other piece of property and considered both of ours.

In my birth state of California, you can only carry a gun that is on your permit, and as far as I know, you can get a gun on a permit that has been registered to you (either through DROS or self-register when moving to the state---note that possession of an unregistered gun is not a crime).

So unless the state prohibits the transfer without a background check through a dealer, you can probably carry your spouse's or friend's gun

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What did they think was going to happen when everyone on TV started screaming "DEFUND POLICE!" ?

Did they really expect people to just accept that they're now completely defenseless. (Not that dialing 911 and waiting an avg of 15 minutes for a response is much of a defense, of course)

<comment><USER13> As someone living in Minneapolis and owned a business in St Paul Midway where police have actually been defunded I feel no less "defendful" than last year. The police are pretty useless at keeping me personally safe and keeping my property safe,there has been no sudden spike in crime. Guns are essentially an adult nightlight and are rarely used. Shit is not hitting anything, crime is far below where it was in the 90s when Minneapolis was known as Murderapolis and I see no evidence showing it's going to go that way but I read a massive amount of fear mongering online. People bought a ton of bitcoin and thought the price was going up to $100,000...they were wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hunting dangerous and/or delicious animals notwithstanding, a gun is a tool that we invented for killing our fellow man with good efficiency and effectiveness.

I'm curious about what aspects of the state of affairs in America has citizens deciding that they now need to improve their ability to kill their neighbors and countrymen.

<comment><USER12> You're pretending that all killing is OFFENSIVE.

If someone comes at you or your family with the intent to harm them, and you kill them for it, that's DEFENSIVE.

It's enshrined in the 2nd Amendment of the US Constitution for a reason. The founding fathers didn't just get back from some sweet hunting trip when they wrote it; They just overthrew an oppressive tyrannical government to defend their homes and families.</comment></comment>


Most recent MIT grads cannot power a light bulb with a battery - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=188&v=aIhk9eKOLzQ <comment><USER2> The statement in the title that " _most_ recent MIT grads cannot power a light bulb with a battery" is certainly not supported by the linked video, in which a handful of people fail at this task. They may have posed the problem to hundreds of students and shown a small number who failed.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The reason this astounded me was that as a ham I could have solved this problem at fourteen. Might have stumped me for a few seconds having one wire instead of two but I would have gotten there.

But maybe it's not unusual because I've had recent college CS grads fail the FizzBuzz test.</comment>


The #1 Mistake in Driving Growth - <AUTHOR> http://blog.yesgraph.com/numero_uno/ <comment><USER2> If you're really eager to see the kind of content we'll publish about growth, check out this talk at Airbnb. Sorry for the bad audio! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZkipR4mMpY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZkipR4mMpY)</comment>


Dating vs. Startups - <AUTHOR> http://jtame05.wordpress.com/2007/07/11/dating-vs-startups/

<comment><USER2> I thought the two were mutually exclusive...</comment>


The Go Programming Language by Brian W. Kernighan, Alan Donovan - <AUTHOR> http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Language-Addison-Wesley-Professional-Computing/dp/0134190440/ <comment> vezzy-fnord What made Go click for me is a simple realization: it's a language made by systems people, not by PL researchers.

Everything makes sense after that. The language in isolation is boring and perhaps even anachronistic: a modern ALGOL dialect with first-class green threads.

But as many people have said, the tooling and the libraries are simply top- notch. This is unsurprising: the people behind Go all have experience with things such as Research Unix, Plan 9 and just infrastructure in general. They've been instrumental in shaping up the lower level workings of our present systems, so they're intimately aware of those aspects. 9P, Acme, rio, the Acid debugger, the Plan 9 compiler collection... among other tools, reflect that their brilliance is in engineering rather than science.

But more importantly: these people are experts in managing complexity and _integrating_ things. Thus, in isolation, Go's components look bland and uninteresting. Cumulatively, they form a unique experience. Hence why Go has such a strong culture of "pragmatism" that a lot of PL geeks scoff at.

So I've pretty much stopped thinking of Go the language, but rather Go the toolchain.

</comment><comment><USER2> I've not been a huge fan of Go (more of a Rust person). However, seeing these authors, I'm now itching to get my hands on a copy of this book and give Go another shot.

I wish I didn't have to wait until the summer for it!

Edit: Also, I realize it's unfair to compare Rust to Go, since they really fill two different PL niches. I actually think there is plenty of room for both languages. By my statement above, I just meant that I'm more drawn to Rust's functionally-influenced approach than Go's modern take on the imperative paradigm.

<comment><USER3> K&R had some wonderfully tricky exercises. This should be fun. (Assuming I don't give up again!)

Edit: Hmm, perhaps I should dust off that copy of K&R and continue from where I left off? :D

<comment><USER2> I've actually used some of the exercises from K&R when learning other languages, they're so good.

This should be a _lot_ of fun.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Go, with its simplicity, is a gift from the generation of masters to today's professionals, but many of today's professionals appear too ignorant to see the wisdom of the language. It used to drive me crazy when I would read negative comments in r/programming and HN, but I don't even pay attention to the negative comments anymore. The adoption is far better than I was afraid it was going to be.

<comment><USER5> I think it's rather the height of hubris to accuse your contemporaries of being "ignorant" because they disagree with your assessment of this particular tool.

Go is an interesting shift in language design, basically discarding many modern trends and techniques and returning to a much simpler paradigm. It's a totally valid approach with lots of merit — complexity can be a killer. In addition, the concurrency primitives, decent stdlib and tooling make Go pretty great to use in some respects. It's likely to be well-supported for a long time and is a suitable tool for many tasks.

On the flipside, using it often feels like a bit of a slog. Error handling is simple (good) but repetitive (bad). Keeping generics out of the language avoids complexity (good) but results in repetitive and awkward code (bad). Lack of features like pattern matching and higher-order functions makes some code irritatingly tedious to read and write. And so on.

Point is, it's perfectly valid to look at these decisions and say "I don't like Go because it is missing these features", as much as it's valid to say "The simplicity of Go is a useful feature". Ignorance is not a prerequisite for disagreement.

So please have some respect for opinions which differ from your own, and think about offering something a little more constructive than insults.

<comment><USER6> In an essay titled "Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language"[1] Brian W. Kernighan wrote:

      The size of an array is part of its type
      If one declares

         var     arr10 : array [1..10] of integer;
                 arr20 : array [1..20] of integer;

      then arr10 and arr20 are arrays of 10 and 20 integers
      respectively. Suppose we want to write a procedure 'sort' to
      sort an integer array. Because arr10 and arr20 have
      different types, it is not possible to write a single
      procedure that will sort them both.

      The place where this affects Software Tools particularly,
      and I think programs in general, is that it makes it
      difficult indeed to create a library of routines for doing
      common, general-purpose operations like sorting.

People who complain about the lack of generics in Go are making the same argument that Kernighan made against Pascal viz. that it is tedious to write library code in the language.

EDIT: Also it is not uncommon for a feature that is deemed essential by some to be thought of as adding too much complexity by others. For example,

      "I've seen [visual] editors like that, but I don't
      feel a need for them. I don't want to see the state
      of the file when I'm editing."

said Ken Thompson [2] when comparing line editors like ed to visual editors like vi or emacs.

[1]: [http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on- pascal.html](http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html)

[2]: [http://web.archive.org/web/20080103071208/http://www.dcs.qmu...](http://web.archive.org/web/20080103071208/http://www.dcs.qmul.ac.uk/~george/history/)

<comment><USER7> [http://golang.org/pkg/sort/#Sort](http://golang.org/pkg/sort/#Sort)

So, something like that?

Interfaces, man. They're better than you think.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, fuck this type safety and performance thing...

<comment><USER7> It's type safe and there's little performance hit. Please note that the "Interface" there is _not_ "interface{}" ... it is a somewhat unfortunately named interface: [http://golang.org/pkg/sort/#Interface](http://golang.org/pkg/sort/#Interface)

The Go authors were following a practice that seemed like a good idea at first, and they've now admitted was probably a mistake... i.e. if your package is mostly about a single interface, name the package something informative, and call the interface type "Interface". This works relatively well from calling code, since it'll be referenced as "sort.Interface", but it makes the documentation for the type potentially confusing.

<comment><USER9> It's not very friendly to the optimizer though. In order to achieve the same performance as a templated generic version by eliminating vtable dispatch, the optimizer needs to (1) convert the recursive sort function to a loop; (2) inline the sort function; (3) promote the interface to the stack via escape analysis; (4) SROA the interface; (5) constant-propagate the SROA'd functions to their use sites; (6) inline the now-constant functions. You need a pretty powerful optimization framework with a well-tuned pipeline like GCC or LLVM in order to do all of that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Oh. Thank goodness for that.

Now I can resist every publisher that wants me to write a book on Go, and tell myself that was OK to do because I'd never write as good a book as those two.

<comment><USER11> What modesty!

<comment><USER10> What you call modesty I call self-awareness.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> For those of you who are not familiar with "The C Programming Language" (also written by Kernighan), see: [http://www.amazon.com/C-Programming- Language-2nd/dp/01311036...](http://www.amazon.com/C-Programming- Language-2nd/dp/0131103628/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1425561072&sr=1-1&keywords=the+c+programming+language)

</comment><comment><USER13> I have mixed feelings about Go.

For those who didn't try it yet here are the biggest advantages of Go:

\- it's totally easy to learn and can be mastered in a day

\- it's fast and typesafe

\- the concurrency model is great,no question

\- I personally like the error system, no exceptions but you can still "bubble up" errors with multiple return types

\- it has, in my opinion a comprehensive standard library,you can even do websockets and image compression with it.

The draw backs :

\- no generics clearly the biggest drawback, which means a lot of copy and paste

\- the lack of idiomatic way to deal with dependencies(no defacto package manager)

I think the ease of use justifies Go adoption in any team. It doesn't replace ruby or python for web programming ( little value in coding a CMS in Go , rails makes more sense),but when it comes to backend or webservices, it's a killer tool.

compared to java, it's as fast and consumes WAY less memory.

<comment><USER14> > which means a lot of copy and paste

Again, I don't think Go is perfect but on my list of wants, generics are not in the top 5. Can you qualify "a lot" in a real project you've worked on? Because after writing a good chunk (over 50k lines) of Go code, I haven't felt the sting as much as I hear it complained about.

> the lack of idiomatic way to deal with dependencies(no defacto package > manager

Again, is this really a big deal? There's plenty of options, and if you are shipping any-type of commercial product you are going to want to be vendoring your dependencies in-house anyway. In which case, depending on something like NPM/remote maven repos is not a viable options anyway.

<comment><USER15> > _Again, I don 't think Go is perfect but on my list of wants, generics are > not in the top 5._

Would you mind sharing your top 5 wants? I'm interested.

<comment><USER14> Sure! In order:

A Debugger.

Better IDE options.

Binary sizes small enough to use for embedded programming.

Pauseless Garbage Collector.

Less awkward variable declaration.

<comment><USER16> > A Debugger

[https://golang.org/doc/gdb](https://golang.org/doc/gdb) (some limitations IIRC)

[https://github.com/derekparker/delve](https://github.com/derekparker/delve) (a work in progress, but promising)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I was a bit surprised by the length. Not a huge difference, but one of the best things about the K&R book was how short it was. But, I too have been been curious to look into Go. This might be the excuse I needed.

<comment><USER18> I'd say any length increase would be justified, Go does have a pretty large standard library...

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> YES. I read and re-read the original K&R (The C Programming Language) book many times as a child. It's one of my favorite tech books ever written: clear, concise, challenging, useful.

I've recently started writing more and more code in Go, for simple performance reasons, and it'd be amazingly great to relive the K&R wonders of my childhood with a new language =)

Just pre-ordered a copy, can't wait.

</comment><comment><USER20> I look forward to the time when Go adds generics and all the people who told me that you don't need generics in Go start telling me how awesome and super- duper useful generics are.

<comment><USER21> Here's rsc (one of the core Go dev's page) on generics.

[http://research.swtch.com/generic](http://research.swtch.com/generic)

They do believe it's a useful feature, they just don't think the tradeoffs justify it yet. (People who loudly clamor for generics tend to ignore these tradeoffs.)

<comment><USER22> Unfortunately, that thing is a false trichotomy. The fact is, choosing option 1 does not save you from the consequences of options 2 and 3. The reason is that the programmer now has to make a choice between boxing things manually, or implementing the same algorithm multiple times, just as the compiler would have done. So in reality there is a dichotomy: slow compiles, or slow runtimes.

<comment><USER21> Definitely some truth to this, but in practice, the fact that you have to manually do things means that you'll make decent choices -- you'll use interfaces for most stuff, and specialize the stuff that needs to be concrete, and life will be OK, if a bit clumsy.

With generics, it's easy to end up in a situation where just by instantiating some simple-seeming class, you get a whole giant pile of stuff, more than any sane programmer would create by hand.

(I wish I had it at hand, but there was an excellent post from a .NET/CLR guy a while back that went into all the crazy stuff that got instantiated just by creating one specialization of List<T>, the associated performance overheads, and the things the compiler and runtime tried to do to avoid those.)

<comment><USER23> You should, however, note that Go does not have inheritance. That single difference reduces the `crazy stuff' by an order of magnitude. In addition, not having inheritance also means that you do not need to take variance into account, which further reduces the complexity significantly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Awesome. For those who don't know, Kernighan is the "k" in "awk" :)

<comment><USER25> Also the "K" in "K&R" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_C_Programming_Language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_C_Programming_Language)

<comment><USER26> Also, the K in Kernighan Lin (Graph min cut) and the Lin-Kernighan heuristic (Traveling salesman)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> It's Brian Kernighan, enough said. I am sold.

<comment><USER28> I actually have to say I wasn't familiar with this author having never spent time in C. After some Googling I'm excited to see he's fellow Canadian and looks to be a pioneer in computing as well. It also seems he's worked with Rob Pike, another fellow Canadian :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Good news! I think Go is the best alternative between C speed and simplicity of Python!

</comment><comment><USER30> 320 pages vs. 274 for the 2nd edition of _The C Programming Language_. Not bad, considering how much more "stuff" Go has in it vs. K&R C.

</comment><comment><USER31> Anyone know if Kernighan has written a lot of Go code himself, or is he onboard more for his technical writing skills?

(There's the Bell Labs connection of course)

<comment><USER32> Kernighan is one of the core authors of the language. So I'd say it's for more than just his technical writing skills.

<comment><USER31> No he isn't. Thompson gets slighted the same way by everyone thinking K&R _created_ C, when that was T&R.

They may all be greybeards but they are in fact distinct people!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> That's really a good news. "The C Programming Language" is one of my favourite book. This should the next one!

</comment><comment><USER34> "Good Programming is not learned from generalities, but by seeing how significant programs can be made clean, easy to read, easy to maintain and modify, human-engineered, efficient, and reliable, by the application of common sense and good programming practices. Careful study and imitation of good programs leads to better writing." \- [1]

I'm a huge fan, have nearly everything Kernighan's been involved with, and have profited greatly from his writing. I look forward to picking up the Go book, and modernizing a bit.

[1] 'Software Tools', Brian Kernighan, P.J. Plauger, 1976

</comment><comment><USER35> In my personal view, I find it disappointing that someone like Brian Kernighan, as a co-author of C, only got as far as Go. I would have loved it much more to see him working on a language like Rust, that actually seems to point to the future of programming languages (or does its best at it), while Go looks like a stopgap and a dead end right from the beginning.

Go seems a fine piece of engineering in so far as it directly implements Google politics & some of their technical interests, but it's of little use outside of that, despite all the hype. A pity, really.

<comment><USER36> Go and Rust are allies, not enemies. Rust is a language driven by a goal, not by blind ideology, and that goal is to make the world a safer place by leveraging memory safety in a low-level context. Given that Go is _also_ memory safe in its default configuration, any C or C++ service that is rewritten in Go still has the effect of making the world a safer place.

Programming languages are a means, not the end!

<comment><USER37> That I agree.

Regardless of I and others might think about Go's design, every user application that gets written in Go instead of C or C++ (assuming C like code instead of proper safe C++14), is an improvement on the current torrent of CVE exploits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> It has been a long time since I bought a hardcopy programming book. Alternate forms of documentation and a Safari subscription have replaced these semi- frequent purchases. And although I can't argue against the practicality and economics of this new way, it certainly evokes none of the excitement of getting the new language book home, cracking the binding, and spending the rest of the evening curled up on the couch.

Go has been my most used new language and the timing of this book is good. I'm looking forward to adding it to my (real) bookshelf.

</comment><comment><USER39> I would like to take a glance. Does any one know where is the Table of Content? Thanks.

<comment><USER40> [http://www.informit.com/store/go-programming- language-978013...](http://www.informit.com/store/go-programming- language-9780134190440)

Seems like a no-nonsense approach like the K&R book. I am sold already :).

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> The book is the #1 Best Seller in Computer Programming Languages and it's not even been released yet.. wow! I'm studying their C book right now for a university class, probably going to pick this one up right after.

</comment><comment><USER42> Thanks Dave for the link. I just pre-ordered the book :-)

</comment><comment><USER43> for folks who don't know it (yet), here is the toc: [http://www.informit.com/store/go-programming- language-978013...](http://www.informit.com/store/go-programming- language-9780134190440)

</comment><comment><USER44> No Kindle edition? :-(

<comment><USER45> Considering this thing doesn't release until August 2015 I think they have plenty of time to add one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Honest question here: Why do I need a book about Go when all the doc is living online? that just feels so 90's.

</comment><comment><USER47> Too bad you can't buy it in a Kindle edition, I would have bought that.

</comment><comment> enahs-sf All the fun of The C Programming Language with none of the K&R braces!

</comment><comment><USER48> Am I blind, or is there only a paperback edition, no digital version?

</comment><comment><USER49> Great, now I have to learn Go to justify getting this book!

</comment><comment><USER50> Does anyone know if they are selling a digital version?

<comment><USER51> Considering that it's not currently for sale, there's no digital version. That said, the publisher typically has had digital versions in the past so I'd expect there to be one when it's finally available for sale.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> There's a common saying that, "Everything about Go is great - except the language".

I guess a book written by Kernighan himself shows how wonderful the ecosystem is.

<comment><USER53> It's in no way "common" saying!

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> So when do we start calling this K&D?

</comment><comment><USER55> Well, goodbye $40.</comment>


Exploiting modern microarchitectures: Meltdown, Spectre, and other attacks - <AUTHOR> https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/closing_keynote/ <comment><USER2> Masters certainly knows what he is talking about, but still the presentation was not a highlight.

Bringing 90 slides with too much fine print stuff on each of them (optically unreadable in half of the auditorium) is an insult to the audience. He told that we are not supposed to read them until maybe afterwards. So if we are not supposed to read them, then don't show them. Is a presentation without (useful) slides a good presentation? Sometimes, but probably not in the case of such comlicated technical details.

One good way for structuring keynote is to target 30% to an audience that has basically no previous knowledge and make them go home with the feeling they learned something. I don't belong to that group, but I have the feeling they turned to no reception mode quite soon.

The second 30% so that experienced listernes can follow, agree and get some deeper insights. That's were most of his presentation was. But too many details and too high speed for any tired conference attendee to follow after 5 - 10 presentations.

The remaining 30% for the experienced guys to keep their mouth wide open and understand that there is a lot they still don't understand. I don't think I saw that part, but maybe I was in no reception mode when that part (should have) started

(sorry for the iterations of this comment, should not type such long text on touch screen that does not do what you mean)</comment>


Rovio did $3 billion in revenue and is "insanely profitable" - <AUTHOR> http://www.whiteboardmag.com/peter-vesterbacka-rovio-did-3-billion-in-revenue-and-is-insanely-profitable-graph/ <comment><USER2> I genuinely like that Rovio is making good money, however it's this type of hyperbolic growth that is (1) not realistically reproducible and (2) makes people think that it's reproducible. In other words, an outlier. It once again reinstates the idea that the general public thinks this stuff is built over night and an app can be made with $10k.

This is not an knock on the author, but I think a more thorough report on the years of poor growth Rovio experienced is much more enjoyable and realistic to read. I can't find it right now, but I believe the Atlantic wrote something just like that.

Edit: I should probably clarify, I actually think the bigger issue I have is that the graph is particularly disingenuous, the "hockey stick growth" should follow the company from when they were founded in 2003...10 years ago. It may actually like more like a traditional hockey stick.

<comment><USER3> Yep, I've heard that they made dozens of games before Angry Birds took off. I would like to think that this shows the sort of long-term view the government R&D grants can give you.

Which VC would let you continue after, say, ten failed products?

note: I have no info on whether this is the case for Rovio, but I know the government has been trying to support / set up the Finnish game industry cluster for around ten years, and now with Rovio and Supercell that is finally starting to pay off.

<comment><USER4> Surely you aren't suggesting that the government should fund game developer R&D.

Forcing the general public to fund bringing your ideas to fruition is a _completely unsustainable_ economic model.

Governments all over the world are flat broke from this type of thinking.

<comment><USER5> > _Forcing the general public to fund bringing your ideas to fruition is a > completely unsustainable economic model. Governments all over the world are > flat broke from this type of thinking._

Actually most of the cool stuff we have, we have it because of government funding research. Including the very internet.

<comment><USER4> While, you are correct that a lot of innovation and "cool stuff" has come from government programs and funding, I would disagree that "most" of it is because of government funded research.

Can you prove to me they wouldn't exist otherwise? People like Tim Berners-Lee didn't come up with the ideas they came up with because they were government funded. They created things because they were innovative and smart.

The fact that YC exists is proof that government programs are not a prerequisite.

<comment><USER5> > _Can you prove to me they wouldn't exist otherwise? People like Tim Berners- > Lee didn't come up with the ideas they came up with because they were > government funded. They created things because they were innovative and > smart._

That's orthogonal. And company X's engineer didn't create Y because he was working in the private sector, he created it because he was innovative and smart.

Still, Tim Berners Lee WAS government funded. As was Arpanet. As was TCP-IP. As was most early work on computers. As was lots of basic physics, chemistry etc research before the US had any scientists worthy of mention (in Germany, France, Britain etc).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think Rovio and other similar (and similarly successful) game publishers owe at least one Ferrari to the Box2D author :)

<comment><USER7> Should all of the startups on HN owe the creators of PHP, rails, python, and every other framework a Ferrari too?

<comment><USER5> > _Should all of the startups on HN owe the creators of PHP, rails, python, > and every other framework a Ferrari too?_

If they are successful and the rely on those programs, sure, why not?

That's how you get more support for Open Source software, and more funds for projects that benefit everyone. OSS was moving faster at the late nineties- early 2000s, when huge companies employed tons of people to work on the Linux kernel, libs, frameworks, the desktop, etc, that it does now.

<comment><USER3> It may be a cause or effect of this, but the open source culture has fractured in the 2000s to many smaller projects or libraries instead of these huge mega- projects (say Linux, GNOME, KDE, Mozilla, OpenOffice) that mostly come from the 90s.

<comment><USER5> I'd say it's an effect. Without corporate funding large and co-ordinated projects (Gnome, KDE, OpenOffice et al) have fallen by the wayside.

That's why progress has got so slow the last 6-8 years in so many parts of the OSS world (and on lots of proprietary software, that lazily relies on OSS). Things like Gnome or OpenOffice are essentially the same as they were 10 years ago, whereas the proprietary alternatives have gotten tons of changes.

GTK+, the main toolkit behind Gnome has one (1!) major contributor (which complained about the issue). In a proper world, something like this, used by so many millions, should have at least a full time team of 10 persons.

Contrast the additions to GTK+ in the last 10 years with the development of the corresponding Cocoa libs, and it's like night and day. A tree-view widget here, a spinner there, ...

Small libraries and stuff can still flourish under such an environment, but not big, co-ordinated projects.

<comment><USER3> I'd agree otherwise, but GNOME is a bad example. In the last couple of years they've rewritten a lot of their stack. All APIs are now on GObject Introspection, the GNOME Shell is a completely new thing, written in JavaScript, new set of default applications, etc.

But then again, they seem to still be receiving some amount of corporate sponsorship from Red Hat.

A few years back (when Nokia stopped supporting the project) things looked a lot more gloomy: [http://wingolog.org/archives/2008/06/07/gnome-in-the-age- of-...](http://wingolog.org/archives/2008/06/07/gnome-in-the-age-of-decadence)

Then again, any desktop environment or toolkit is bound to be somewhat unsexy these days when the focus is on web and mobile.

I also wrote about this back in 2008: <http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/gnome_in_decay/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Thanks for posting, dirtyaura (I wrote the article). Rovio is insanely good at keeping that Angry Birds brand relevant, but I do wonder whether they're too dependent on that one brand. (Armchair business strategist much, lol?)

<comment><USER9> Good story, however I'd like to ask if Vesterbacka made any clearer statements on what "managing revenue" means. Their 2011 filing for the Finnish officials state they made about 75 million euros in revenue (far from the $500 million cited in the article).

Does this number represent the value of the merchandise sales of the company or was he explicitly referring to the revenue of Rovio itself?

Edit: here's the link to the Finnish officials' records [http://finder.fi/Televiestintälaitteita%20ja%20palveluja/Rov...](http://finder.fi/Televiestintälaitteita%20ja%20palveluja/Rovio%20Entertainment%20Oy/ESPOO/taloustiedot/1176759)

<comment><USER10> Finnish accounts show only the financials of the individual P&L rather than the "consolidated Rovio group" P&L. Unless one is provided with an organisational and shareholding structure (with corresponding financials) it is impossible to know what is and isn't accounted.

<comment><USER8> So you're basically saying we can't know how much business Rovio is generating through fiscally optimized holding structures outside Finland, then?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In other news, you guys crashed the server. It will be up again soon.

</comment><comment><USER11> Which games take off is not super correlated with quality; I would argue that Angry Birds is above average, but not exceptional. The whole "hit" phenomenon is highly dependent on initial conditions, a sort of semi-random positive feedback loop. When building a game, one's idea of success should be the cultivation of a dedicated audience large enough to sustain your business. Counting phantom billions will lead to terrible design decisions, usually imitating random aspects of successful projects, like some statistically- illiterate lotto player diligently searching for patterns in previous winning numbers.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> As I originally posted this to HN, I must say that the claims in the article don't hold on closer inspection. I shared it too quickly without checking facts and thinking it through, shame on me on spreading misinformation.

Good commentary about the claims: <http://bgr.com/2013/02/11/rovio-revenue- debunk-324583/>

<comment><USER8> As the author of the article, I share your concerns.

I asked Vesterbacka for comments when I posted the first version, but he only responded later this afternoon. (I'm now waiting for feedback from the Marketwatch/WSJ reporter where the claims originated).

If you've followed the post, you'll see that I updated it regularly in the course of the day with information from this thread, with a window of a few hours where unfortunately I couldn't update the post because the site went down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's reprehensible that they aren't directly funneling all profits to the creator of the Box2D framework. All they did was skin a few Box2D function calls.

<comment><USER13> My apologies if you're joking or being sarcastic and I didn't detect it.

I suppose if that's "all they did" - any of us who could do that could've been sitting on that 3 billion, right? Heck, even the Box2D guys could've done it.

There's a small difference in saying "they should've employed the Box2D guys" or "generously funded the project" and "they should funnel all profits" - perhaps Rovio deserves some credit here for turning a little casual iPhone game into a household name.

<comment><USER14> Parent should really adhere to Poe's law of internet trolling.</comment></comment></comment>


What's new in Rails 4.1 - <AUTHOR> http://coherence.io/blog/2013/12/17/whats-new-in-rails-4-1.html

<comment><USER2> I have a fairly strong aversion to the way they implemented enum for ActiveRecord - choosing to back it with ints and also leaking that implementation detail through using the ordering of the enums as the int is a bad choice. Also the method name collision issues that go along with that are just silly - it would be so much easier to just prefix the methods with the column name, e.g. #status_new?

There's some other interesting stuff in there, though, and this is a good writeup of some interesting features.

</comment><comment><USER3> Great features. Now it really makes me to think about upgrading my rails 3 apps to 4.1</comment>


Chinese Markets Halted, Equities Plunge Another 7% - <AUTHOR> http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2016/01/china-markets-halted-in-14-minutes-17.html <comment><USER2> China unfortunately created stock market but doesn't have the requisite pieces to allow one to operate properly.

For a fully functioning stock market you need:

\- capital, which they have

\- speculators, to make trades happen, they have these

\- transparency in how your market works, or atlest the appearance that the market is fair to all

\- and you need stoggy old buy/hold/long only investors. China is missing these.

In most markets the latter is done by ETF retirement investment and pension plans who have to invest 100's of billions of dollars each year.

The scariest thing about this for the global equity markets is that in 10-20 years the top 3 markets could be China, India and the US.

Whether or not you like the US stock market, it is fairly transparent and not run by the whims of the government. The other two countries are about as opaque as you can be. Speaking as a person who actively invests money, that's a very troubling thought.

As one economic nobel prize winner put it... "China and India haven't put out a credible macroeconomic number in the past 10 years".

China is also loosing alot of money each month trying to support the yuan. I saw a credible estimate of about 100 billion a month since October.

<comment><USER3> So why are people then trading stocks in China or India or wherever if they don't trust the system? They wouldn't be able to become the largest stock markets if nobody would trade there and there would be nothing to be scared by.

<comment><USER4>
      > So why are people then trading stocks in China or India or
      > wherever if they don't trust the system?

If you're speculating, i.e. purchasing for the sole purpose of selling it to someone else, who is also speculating, it doesn't matter whether the system is trustworthy, it only matters whether there is a "greater fool" standing ready to trade with you.

If the perception is there that people are trading in these markets, people will trade in these markets. But without fundamentals, the whole thing can quickly suffer from a collapse in confidence, followed by a "run."

It's no different than buying Bitcoins. Why speculate in bitcoins? Because other people are speculating in bitcoins.

<comment><USER5> I have been playing a fun game where I see if a financial article on YC has bitcoin mentioned in the comments. It is in basically every comment section of anything related to finances. Personally I speculate in Bitcoins as a hedge against variations in cash and stocks. I like to think of it as e-gold that has some advantages and disadvantages versus a solid asset like gold. Due to the increasingly global and digital nature of our existence I think BTC has a very high potential upside.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> c-slice Median P/E for Chinese stocks is ~58. This is ~3x higher than every other major exchange. This is just part of a much larger correction.

[http://assets.bwbx.io/images/iIS_j8I_fYlI/v2/-1x-1.jpg](http://assets.bwbx.io/images/iIS_j8I_fYlI/v2/-1x-1.jpg) Source: Bloomberg

<comment><USER6> Those PE's made sense (to some/most) when the economy was growing 8-9% and revenue was following that growth, but now that it is down to ~3% with revenue following (or shrinking for a lot of the larger companies) those prices really need to come down and might even be discounted to reflect regulatory risk.

The hedge funds who saw this coming are doing very well at the moment [0] [1]

[0] [http://www.barrons.com/articles/hedge-fund-posts-strong- gain...](http://www.barrons.com/articles/hedge-fund-posts-strong-gains-by- shorting-china-1440825847)

[1] [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-17/hedge- fund...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-17/hedge-fund- gaining-138-says-china-short-targets-easier-to-spot)

<comment><USER7> Doesn't this projection depend on the assumption these companies operate entirely within China and not global markets?

<comment><USER6> Chinese growth was becoming less dependent on exports as global demand flattened out:

[http://www.usfunds.com/media/images/frank-talk- images/2012-f...](http://www.usfunds.com/media/images/frank-talk- images/2012-frank-talk-images/2012-ft-jan-jun/ChinaGDPgrowth-041212.gif)

The current growth slowdown is largely due to decreased domestic consumption growth:

[http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Research/Files/Blogs/2014/0...](http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Research/Files/Blogs/2014/04/22-china- growth-data/china-contributions-gdp-growth-dollar-2.jpg?la=en)

Of the top listed companies in Shanghai, most are banks, petro, insurance, energy, etc. that are domestic driven (the SSE website is down at the moment but the list is here: [http://english.sse.com.cn/listed/list/](http://english.sse.com.cn/listed/list/))

I don't think there were many expecting that a public company investment in China would be supported by exports.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> They've already given up on the circuit breakers: [http://www.cnbc.com/2016/01/07/chinese-securities- regulator-...](http://www.cnbc.com/2016/01/07/chinese-securities-regulator- suspends-market-circuit-breakers.html).

<comment><USER9> Interesting. Considering they stop people selling stock last time. Ha. Lets keep an eye.

<comment><USER10> They don't stop people from selling. Circuit breakers are useful for one-time flukes (e.g. Flash Crash) but for sustained downturns they can actually make things worse.

If you think you _may_ want to sell at all tomorrow but also think a circuit breaker could trigger, you're going to sell first thing in the morning. So will everyone else.

The circuit breaker can actually trigger a worse panic as investors all try to squeeze in sell orders at once. This triggers the circuit breaker, confirming everyone's fears, and starts again the next day.

<comment><USER11> It makes it worse when they say they are propping up the market, if the market is at a relative peak and daddy warbucks shows up saying he'll buy anything no matter the cost, of course everyone is going to get out while the getting is good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A thing to remember in this are the sizes of the various markets.

NYSE, the largest in USA, has a combined market value of 20 trillion dollars, whereas the largest in China (Shanghai Stock Exchange) has a combined market value of 4 trillion. This is for two economies of about the same size.

This means that when the Chinese market drops (or raises) the overall impact for the wealth of the country is much smaller than a similar change would cause in the American markets.

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

<comment><USER13> While GDP (PPP) of China and USA are similar, this isn't the same as saying that their _wealth_ is similar.

The USA's net national wealth is about $85 trillion, while China's is about $22 trillion. I have a feeling that a much larger proportion of the USA's stock market is held by foreigners compared to China.

It is possible that drops (or raises) in the Chinese market actually affect Chinese wealth _more_ than in American markets...

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

<comment><USER7> I'd be more interested in what percentage of the US stock market vs China is held by a tiny percentage of the population vs a broader public. Reductions in wealthy by a tiny minority has a smaller impact than the latter when looking beyond statistics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14>
      So... in about 15 minutes of trade in China, a whopping
      $637 billion in market cap was wiped out.

From yesterday [0]... that's more than the GDP of some countries.

[0] [https://twitter.com/DavidInglesTV/status/684922104412672001](https://twitter.com/DavidInglesTV/status/684922104412672001)

<comment><USER15> But that's just market cap, which isn't comparable in any way to GDP.

Both are measures of very different things, and both are very different to actual money.

<comment><USER16> > Both are measures of very different things, and both are very different to > actual money.

I don't really agree with you.

GDP measures the value of goods and services produced by a country over a specific timeframe.

Market cap (in this context) measures the value of all companies listed in the stock exchange.

Both are ways to measure an economy, and both are measured in units of money. What's the difference between money and "actual money"?

<comment><USER17> Here is some enlightening story:

Tourist walks through some distant mountain village and meets the villager shouting "My dog is for sale". So the tourist asks

"How much for your dog?" "$1 million", villager replies.

Tourist just sighs and continues his walk. Later the same day tourist is coming back. He meets the same villager, so he asks:

"Did you sell your dog?" "Yes,to my neighbor, for $1 million" "Really? And he paid in cash?" "No, he gave me two cats, but they are $500.000 each"

The market cap valuation works in exactly the same way.

<comment><USER18> Doesn't that just prove that 1 dog = 2 cats and not that anyone was actually willing to pay $1 million for the dog? People are spending real money, that they could equally well as spend on other things, on stocks - they're not just trading stocks, correct? The man in your story couldn't actually sell the dog to someone for $1 million, but people who own stock can sell for cold cash.

Or am I wrong?

<comment><USER19> For small trades on the public market yes, you can trade for cash at approximately the price listed on the exchange at that moment in time.

If Bill Gates wanted to liquidate his Microsoft stock, though, it's unlikely that his sale price would match the exchange. Once you get into trades of a significant portion of the company, there's not enough guaranteed to be enough liquidity at price listed on the exchanges.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> For some perspective look at the Shanghai composite's chart since 2000. The price is still above its 50 day moving average...

[http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=000001.SS+Interactive#{"s...](http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=000001.SS+Interactive#{"showSma":true,"smaColors":"#cc0000","smaPeriods":"50","smaWidths":"2","smaGhosting":"0","range":"max","allowChartStacking":true})

This is hardly some sort of disaster or the end of China's prosperity. Just a bump in the road for investors.

</comment><comment><USER21> On August 23rd, 2015 China announced they would be allowing pension funds to invest in the domestic stock market for the first time ever. [1] Funds were "allowed" (why would they want to invest in a falling, low-confidence market?) to invest up to 30% of net assets. Clearly the government wanted to allow liquidity to flow into the market and calm investors, and it seems to have worked for ~6 months.

So now the average Chinese consumer will be double-hosed: once over by losses to their personal retail brokerage account, and again by losses sustained by their pension funds.

Hopefully enough Chinese consumers made enough money from the crazy ride up on the market that they cashed out periodically and invested in sensible hard assets such as homes and cars. Because the correction will probably be very painful.

[1] [http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/23/china-to- allow-...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/23/china-to-allow- pension-fund-to-invest-in-stock-market-for-first-time)

</comment><comment><USER22> Tomorrow, they will let it fall[1]

[1][http://www.bbc.com/news/business-35253188](http://www.bbc.com/news/business-35253188)

<comment><USER23> Well, then it's time to buy ProShares UltraShort FTSE China 50 [http://www.etf.com/FXP](http://www.etf.com/FXP)

<comment><USER24> Caveat emptor: [http://www.thestreet.com/story/10457663/1/the-perils-of- the-...](http://www.thestreet.com/story/10457663/1/the-perils-of-the- proshares-ultrashorts.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> What is a price? It's the amount two people agree to transact for, nothing more.

Price trends don't necessarily mean anything, and corrections are _good_ as much as they are bad.

A correction means the previous price was incorrect, yet when prices fall humans sentimentally believe the old, higher price must have been correct. It's ridiculous.

Governments take extensive measures to control prices and to alter public perception of risk. Sometimes this adds stability to prices, but it often sets things up for a more drastic correction later.

Some investors are over-leveraged and must cash out to avoid ruin. Others are speculators trying to ride various trends, but in the end we all benefit from prices being corrected.

<comment><USER11> > yet when prices fall humans sentimentally believe the old, higher price must > have been correct. It's ridiculous.

Only sellers believe this, buyers believe that the old lower price was correct and they are being gouged. (See anyone who tries to buy a generator _after_ a hurricane)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I wonder if the auto-halting behavior makes the problem worse, not better.

Psychologically, if you know the markets will close if they drop too fast, it might actually encourage traders try harder and rush faster to be the first one to sell off more stocks that day before time runs out.

</comment><comment><USER27> The Chinese stock market is so far divorced from the real Chinese economy as to be a joke. The government intervention is direct and strong, far stronger than anything we saw in 2008.

These companies' listed values might have well have been picked by a roulette wheel.

<comment><USER28> What numbers are you comparing though? The headline figure for TARP in the US was $700 billion, but even the GAO audit cannot perfectly trace how much it actually cost, as opportunity cost can't be calculated. Financing TARP took resources away from infrastructure projects or other projects for which positive economic externalities apply directly to society, not just bondholders.

China has 4x the population of the US. How "big" would the intervention have to be to be stronger than anything in 2008?

<comment><USER29> TARP was fully repaid. It didn't take money away from routine infrastructure spending. TARP was financed through deficit spending, and it never amounted to $700 billion as it was reduced to a limit of $475 billion. The final tally was $426b put in, $441b repaid.

At this point China has thrown roughly a trillion dollars just at trying to prop up their stock market [1]. That doesn't include what they've burned trying to control their currency, what they've spent trying to keep their real estate bubble from completely falling apart, and what they've spent dealing with zombie companies and their vast shadow corporate and muni debt, and so on.

[1] [http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-china-markets-rescue- idUKKC...](http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-china-markets-rescue- idUKKCN0PX0AU20150723)

<comment><USER27> A nit I'd like to pick is also that China has a vastly smaller PPP adjusted total GDP. So even four times the number of people, even a guaranteed loan program the size of TARP would be a larger intervention.

To digress a little bit, I know this may be heresy, but TARP was the single most courageous and under appreciated accomplishment of the G.W. Bush administration.

It's an economic miracle that when push came to shove, suddenly we were all Keynesians again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Looking at the graph the Chinese market traded around 2000 to 2500 from until late 2014 so that's probably what its companies are worth. Since then it doubled with speculators buying because things were going up but now that's stopped and the companies are still worth what they are worth and so back it goes. That's how markets are supposed to work - people but and sell stuff for roughly what it's worth.

The current Chinese government seems to have some other bright ideas though like trying to boost prices when there is a parade on ([http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2015/08/31/china_s_stock...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2015/08/31/china_s_stock_market_intervention_the_government_intervened_for_the_sake.html)). Not sure that works long term.

</comment><comment><USER31> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10862007](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10862007)

I'm surprised there's no mention of the impact of recently rising Federal Reserve Rates[1] on the Chinese Currency or the fact that the Yen was recently added the IMF's Special Drawing Rights currency[2]. Since China's moves in August I think its fair to characterize this as a currency war. And it's Dollar Hegemony that's hanging in the balance[3]. Many have characterized it as a war for much longer. What's different now? The proxy wars between the United States and Russia are heating up and tensions between China and the rest of East Asia are heating up. Western sanctions on Russia for Ukraine pushed it toward China and that may just have been the tipping point[4]. I find it remarkable how able the performances of equity markets are to obfuscate the currency and bond markets that are driving them[5]. When equities move fortunes change, when currencies move, the balance of power on the planet changes.

[1] [http://qz.com/588049/what-the-fed-was-thinking-when-it- final...](http://qz.com/588049/what-the-fed-was-thinking-when-it-finally- raised-interest-rates-last-month/)

[2] [http://www.globalresearch.ca/chinese-yuan-incorporated- into-...](http://www.globalresearch.ca/chinese-yuan-incorporated-into-imf- special-drawing-rights-sdr-us-congress-gives-in-and-endorses-the-imf-quotas- reform/5499619)

[3] [http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/ben- bernanke/posts/2016/01/07...](http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/ben- bernanke/posts/2016/01/07-dollar-international-role)

[4] [http://www.economist.com/news/china/21650566-crisis- ukraine-...](http://www.economist.com/news/china/21650566-crisis-ukraine- drawing-russia-closer-china-relationship-far-equal)

[5] [http://qz.com/588704/chinas-stock-market-isnt-the- problem/](http://qz.com/588704/chinas-stock-market-isnt-the-problem/)

</comment><comment><USER32> This sounds pretty crazy, but is it possible for the Chinese government to manipulate the American stock markets by playing with its own stock market?

China knows that when its markets plunge, the American markets plunge too.

Is there a way for China to create the _illusion_ of its markets plunging, without losing real value (or at least profiting from the perspective of some influential power in China)? Perhaps they could accomplish such manipulation through a combination of 1) collusion between the CCP and the largest investors in the Chinese market, 2) currency manipulation, and 3) shorting of US equities?

I know this sounds speculative and vague, because honestly I have no idea what I'm talking about. But China certainly has the motive to manipulate American markets. And since the foreign investment is asymmetrical (e.g. the Chinese can invest in NYSE, but Americans cannot invest in Shanghai), China has an opportunity to "play both sides" of a Shanghai market crash and any corresponding American market drop, while American investors cannot do the same.

So... is it _possible_?

<comment><USER33> But China wants its people to feel wealthy. The property boom ended, then there was gold boom. They wanted a stock boom. People that feel wealthy are happy citizens. They have every reason to keep the stock market high.

<comment><USER34> The current government doesn't want to lose the Mandate of Heaven: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandate_of_Heaven](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandate_of_Heaven)

They know their history.

<comment><USER35> I mean, you could say the same thing every year for any ruling party for the past millenium. I'm not convinced it's at all relevant to the conversation any more than any government beholden to its people.

<comment><USER34> I think the Chinese tradition of accepted regular popular revolt makes this possibility weigh more heavily on the communist party's collective mind than, say, that of the Indian ruling party.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> People often point to the "ghost cities" like Ordos when declaring China to be in a massively overbuilt real estate bubble. Yet studies such as those done by Mckinsey below predict 350M more people moving to cities by 2030 [1]. Given NYC has a population of about 8M, it appears China actually needs to build an additional 44 NYC sized cities (or expand existing ones) by 2030.

Makes you question weather they really in a bubble? It appears they could fill Ordos and 43 other new cities in the next 15 yrs! Perhaps they need to be putting these cities up even more rapidly.

[1][http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/urbanization/preparing_for_...](http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/urbanization/preparing_for_urban_billion_in_china)

<comment><USER37> The issue may not be that there is too much building, but that they're building in places people aren't going to be moving to. Ordos is in inner mongolia, and while there are a lot of people there, a lot more are moving to the east coast cities.

Right, like if you were predicting 40% city growth in the US, the solution would not be to build new mega cities in Utah (which has a comparable percentage of US's population as Inner Mongolia has in China).

<comment><USER38> Would it be outside the realm of possibility for China to mandate that people move to those cities to fill them?

<comment><USER39> No.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> If you go to google finance and plot the S&P 500 for all known time you get a chart that goes back to 1975. I see three big humps 2000, 2007 and 2015. This is obviously not the most sophisticated analysis, but, there seems to be a pattern were the market gets over excited and then blows off steam. Maybe we are at the start of a correction.

The only thing that concerns me is that those market peaks/humps were due to humans getting concerned and changing behaviour. Maybe now that most trades are just computer to computer the Algos don't "know" to be "scared" and cool it we might keep going up till some epic event corrects it.

I am hoping it's a 1-2 year correction that goes down 50-60 percent. But, who knows.

</comment><comment><USER11> What China did just put out a giant flashing neon sign that they will buy any (overvalued) asset at the current market price.

Every owner of an equity is lining up to sell their assets to the big idiot with the giant flashing neon sign saying they will buy anything, knowing that the more they flood the market, the more the central committee will buy.

China, you just got played, welcome to the market.

</comment><comment><USER41> The great recession of 2016 has begun.

This is China finally having their 2008 and it impacting the world.

<comment><USER42> I agree, it could very well prompt a recession. Also looking at the technicals, the 1 year percent change of the S&P 500 is negative, which is a strong recession indicator historically. The 150-300-39 day MACD also looks bad. These indicators have both only been negative one other time since 2009, which was in September 2015.

Lastly the US CAPE ratio is pretty bad too.

<comment> UK-AL For the past few years, someone has predicting a recession in the next 6 months via technicals.

Technicals = Star Signs in most cases.

<comment><USER42> Well have you actually run a historical trading simulation (like I did)? You would know these indicators are far superior to a buy and hold strategy.

<comment> UK-AL I've heard many people say the same, which then never comes true. Just because stuff happens in the past, doesn't mean it will come true.

The fact that people know this information, changes the outcome which is why markets are so hard to predict.

<comment><USER42> There's countless different indicators and investors don't follow the same ones, if any at all. Most people aren't computer programmers who have run historical simulations. Just because you know something doesn't mean that other investors do. For example I bought lots of Bitcoin when it was at $16, because I thought I knew something other people didn't, and I was right.

The fact is if you followed the indicators that I mentioned since 1950, your net worth growth rate would've increased at least 50% without even using leverage. Trends in the general stock market change slowly (the price doesn't look like random noise) and that's why it's predictable enough to beat a buy and hold strategy.

<comment><USER43> So are you mostly short on the S&P 500? If I was guaranteed a recession, I would be.

I'm long on the US stock market because if US companies are good at one thing, it's their 5% YoY growth.

<comment><USER42> I was long until today. And now I'm short because of thresholds that were hit by my technical indicators.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> What does this mean in layman terms?

</comment><comment><USER45> What does this mean for Bitcoin?

<comment><USER11> Nothing, the block chain fixes all this because hashes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Maybe we should have start numbering those plunges? It's harder to follow them.

<comment><USER47> I think names would be better, like they do with hurricanes.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Anyone moving their company out of the UK following Brexit? - <AUTHOR> Between Brexit, the Snooper's Charter and the fact that we are 2 EU migrants we are thinking of moving our company out of the UK.
I've seen a few places that look interesting and would fit our requirements (basically being able to do everything in english and not having to live there):
- Ireland
- Estonia (saw http://howtostayin.eu/ this morning)
- Singapore (https://blog.ghost.org/moving-to-singapore/ for an example)
Any other place in the EU with a good track record on surveillance laws would be good as well.
Is anyone in the same situation or has done this kind of move? <comment><USER2> I know this might sound ignorant but can you not stay in the UK and just trade with the EU? I mean I buy stuff from European countries and I'm in the US. Why can't you?

<comment><USER3> There's a greater than zero chance that EU residents will lose the right to legally reside in the UK.

The new PM has threatened it, and when she was called out her response was "What you want to let _criminals_ stay in the country?!". So yeah…

<comment><USER4> Yeah, but she's just posing and is not credible in this respect. It's a bit like hitting the nuclear self-destruct button or something. Germany and France are making it quite clear that access to the common market includes reasonably free movement of people, compliance with EU law, paying into the pot, and sorting out the situation of UK residents in the EU (also a problem) and EU residents in the UK. Methinks the chance that EU residents will lose the right to legally reside in the UK is close to nil - at the very least those that are there already.

What will more likely happen is that the UK will get a deal a bit like Norway or Switzerland where they basically apply EU laws and without having a say on what they are, and business as usual will resume in the name of keeping the City intact - with UK voters more disgruntled than ever.

<comment><USER5> > Germany and France are making it quite clear that access to the common > market includes reasonably free movement of people, compliance with EU law, > paying into the pot, and sorting out the situation of UK residents in the EU > (also a problem) and EU residents in the UK.

That's all well and good, but all of those things are what people were voting to get rid of with a Brexit vote. It will be a tough sell.

<comment><USER4> Indeed, but that's what awaits them. Hell will freeze before the UK gets the EU perks without the costs, if only because the EU leaders are adamantly determined to set an example to flush any "let's leave the EU" incentives in other countries. For better or worse the UK will serve as an example that other nationalists will turn to and say "hell no we don't want this after all". The deal the UK will get will _not_ be something to be looking forward to.

I for one am fully in support of putting them in the same position as Norway, and that's probably more than EU politicians will be happy to accept. That is: UK pays EU fees without the discounts they've negotiated for years on end, complies with EU laws, and gets free market access in exchange for freedom of movement. And without voting rights. There has been no shortage of walking on eggs since the UK has been around in the EU. And the voters were still unhappy, so if anything, good riddance. Then again EU leaders aren't very open to this idea insofar as I understood, because it's a great deal.

Another scenario would be to give them the same deal as Canada: apply EU laws just like Norway, and pay into the EU, without any vote. Oh wait! Yeah, voters will _not_ be happy. But hey, they're the ones accepting that their politicians lie to them.

Yet another scenario is that the UK does _not_ leave the EU. It might happen, after all. Will that be democratic? No. But it will be "constitutional", if one can use that word for a country that has none. Yet it certainly might be the lesser of all evils.

Truth is we don't know, and "tough sell" is not part of the equation. The UK is not in much of a position to negotiate. Especially with the quack they put at the top of their Foreign Office - who somehow managed to insult just about every foreign nation out there before even getting his new job. Credit to the new PM in this respect: she's making the chap own it.

<comment><USER6> currently the most likely scenario is that UK will prolong the uncertainty as long as it benefits them, ideally until the market stabilises.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Consider Berlin, besides being very cheap, it is a great place for startups. It also happens to be easy as everyone speaks English.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you do government interactions in english as well (think HMRC, tax etc)? The other guy in the company is german so it's not a huge blocker but I don't speak german myself and it would be nice to understand official documents

<comment><USER8> Government interactions in English are functionally impossible. I'm happy to help out with stuff like that (tax stuff, company formation stuff, work permits, citizenship, any other related bullshit) for anyone moving to Germany. I had someone help me like this when I moved here and I'm happy to pay it forward.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The Financial hub in Frankfurt will likely attract the more serious and large businesses in the banking industry.

As for myself, personally, I was already abroad when the ship sank so all I have to do is not return. Come to Sweden my fellow expatriots! lots of tech!

<comment><USER10> If you don't mind I have a few questions about working in tech in Sweden:

\- How easy have you found finding tech jobs in Sweden, do you have any advice for good places to look? \- How does the pay compare to other countries/cities you've worked in? \- Do you speak Swedish at work/is it possible to get by without being fluent in Swedish?

<comment><USER11> The most important question: how do I find an apartment to rent in Stockholm city center without Swedish connections and without spending more than 1/3 net pay?

<comment><USER12> It's the same all over. In what capital city of a major democracy are there jobs _and_ affordable apartments?

I initially meant that rhetorically, but now I'm actually interested to know. Maybe there are good non-govt jobs and low prices in smaller capital cities like Ottawa (<0.8M) and Canberra (<0.4M)? Educate me!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm going to go ahead and throw in Granada, Spain as a lovely place for tech startups. Good university, livable college town, cheap cost of living, and not a lot of competition for talent.

<comment><USER14> Are you from/living in granada by any chance? I just moved to Granada and would love to know more about the local tech/entrepreneurial scene.

<comment><USER13> I'm from Granada, but I moved to California 15 years ago. I keep in touch with friends, some of them have their own company ([http://www.celtiberian.es/](http://www.celtiberian.es/)). Ask away if you have any questions. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The surveillance state is a legitimate fear, but people are seriously overblowing the business threat of Brexit. Trade still exists. It won't be any more difficult to trade with the EU than it currently is to trade with the US.

If anything, there are probably some very real long term benefits that can come from this. Smaller governments (Geographic and demographic small, not %-of-GDP small) have some serious benefits in terms of their ability to adapt to the world around them.

For example, a floating currency means that your currency can adapt to your conditions, and not your conditions weighted by your economic impact relative to your peers. A floating currency would have benefited both Greece _and_ Germany during their last economic conundrum.

Another benefit is that it is much harder to hide corruption as well as nominally-legal forms of corruption like pork-barrel spending. Special interest groups become much more limited in scope. Democracy is more accountable because it is smaller and can command more attention.

Think of any reform attempt like you think of refactoring code. Which program can handle simple refactorings better? The 20k LOC program, or the 2m LOC program? I would be willing to bet that most 2m LOC java programs are still stuck on java6, java7 if they're lucky. If the US were more federated than it currently is, we probably would have switched to the metric system sooner. We probably would have overhauled health care sooner (we might have had 50 different types of health care systems, but we would have reformed them in the 80's instead of 2010 and we would have a very clear picture of which reforms worked well and which ones didn't). It will _always_ be easier to get 50m people on board with an idea than it will be to get 500m people on board. In fact, it might even be easier to reform the ridiculous surveillance state that the UK has going.

Brexit might have been led by despicable (IMO) rationales, but from a business/economic perspective the negatives are overblown and nobody is talking about the benefits.

<comment><USER16> Didn't the UK already have the benefit of a floating currency since they use the pound instead of the euro?

<comment><USER15> They did, but there was a regularly debated possibility of adopting the Euro. Now that possibility doesn't exist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Not moving, but it seems some companies are not planning to open offices there anymore, like Rancher,

\- [https://twitter.com/smw355/status/746204644947296257](https://twitter.com/smw355/status/746204644947296257)

</comment><comment><USER18> This question has come up so often in last few weeks that we gathered some reading and tooling to help pragmatic post-Brexit decision making, here: [https://teleport.org/brexit](https://teleport.org/brexit)

<comment><USER19> This is a great resource, thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> No one knows what the new arrangement will be yet (including with existing EU migrants) so would you not be better off waiting until you know what is actually going to happen? Unless of course you already have good reason to want to leave.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm curious what Europeans think about that howtostayin.eu link? Someone sent it to me this morning. Reminds me of the old Perpetual Traveler and offshore schemes except this time for an unexpected goal haha.

</comment><comment><USER22> Personally, I'm basing my startup on the brexit fallout depressing the value of the pound, making outsourcing development to the uk cheaper than ever :) to wit I have set up [http://brexitlabs.com](http://brexitlabs.com)

In all seriousness, I don't have a company to move, but I am seriously considering moving. I have a family here so it isn't as simple as pack up and go, but I've emigrated before so....In the meantime, parody seems my best bet. :)

</comment><comment><USER23> Come to Ireland, we'd love to have you! 100% English speaking, culture very similar to UK, but our cities are not franchise laden cookie cutters of one another. Dublin is expensive but Cork, Galway, Sligo, Donegal, pretty much anywhere else is affordable and easy to reach. The people are friendly, the food is good, and there's lots to do.

<comment><USER24> Can't agree more!

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> In Malta you also get to do everything in English and foreigners with companies have nice tax breaks.

<comment><USER26> The internet is _terrible_ though. Everything else is pretty good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> For clarification, is anyone on this thread in the process or committed to moving their company out of the U.K.? Realize there is plenty to speculate about and there are many great alternatives, curious who is actually doing it.

</comment><comment><USER28> What about Lisbon? Portugal is very, very cheap compared to London and Berlin.

</comment><comment><USER29> I read the ghost article but they mentioned many times that the country "Must be outside the EU", which is like the Brexit impact is not enough ...

<comment><AUTHOR> They were mostly complaining about the VAT MOSS, which is very annoying by itself

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> How about Amsterdam?

<comment><USER31> Yes I just moved to Amsterdam (after 4 years in SF, 10 years in Montreal, and growing up in Paris before that) and it all seems way better than expected so far.

Everyone speaks english, most services also offer communications in english (bank, etc.) so really I don't find myself stuck trying to translate Dutch all the time (until I learn it) and tech seems to grow a lot here. While working in the city, I can see a lot of local tech and SV tech (Uber, booking, Atlassian, etc.).

It's also super cheap overall, and most foreign skill workers get 30% of their salary tax free.

As to move your company, I quickly looked and it seems like the taxes for companies in Amsterdam is easy and nice. 20% on the first 200k, 25% for the rest. And apparently lots of things deducible.

<comment><USER32> How do you find the take-home part of salaries compared to the US? I'm considering moving, but from what I've seen, they're only about half. Still considering as I work remotely, but that may not be the case forever.

<comment><USER31> if you take the same base salary and apply the 30% ruling, it's roughly the same. You take a little more home in amsterdam.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Doing the Brexit means wider economic freedom not narrower, isn't it? Then what's the main driver to move out UK after Brexit?

</comment><comment><USER24> Yep, moving www.secfirst.org to Ireland in the next few weeks.

Many reasons:

-Brexit - London doesn't just seem like the place it once was years ago. The shine has gone from it.

-Surveillance - IP bill etc. We build open source technology for human rights defenders. We don't want to be based in a place where people might try to compromise Umbrella etc ([https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.secfirst.u...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.secfirst.umbrella))

-Talent - most of our team is either Irish or in some way Eastern European. We want to be able to continue to attract and work with people like that.

-Eurozone - sterling is just a mess at the moment

-Business - Corporate tax in Ireland is low and there is a good small tech sector. Also small but decent grants via www.idaireland.com www.connectireland.com www.enterprise-ireland.com

-Personal - Dublin has been (who knows in the next few months) really on the way up for the past year or two. The atmosphere is amazing. It's gotten very cool and tolerant (Gay marriage referendum was very symbolic of that). Also we don't have a far right/left the way that the rest of Europe has. Irish people continue to be awesome to work with and mostly, great fun to be around.

If your thinking of Dublin and looking for more info, drop me a mail to the place in my intro...

There are inevitably going to be some negative things people will mention about Dublin, as this topic came up before on HN so i've reposted my response here:

\----- Some of the negativity doesn't make sense. The piece about not living in the city centre and instead the suburb commuter towns is madness. Totally the opposite. The commuter towns to Dublin are boring as hell, housing estates with very little services. Inner City Dublin is rejuvenating very fast, and parts of it feel like a smaller, more intimate version of Shoreditch or Williamsberg (except with better pubs and bars!). You can basically walk across most of the city within 45 mins.

Transport is poor compared to European standards and the cost of living is quite high. But if you live close to the city in Dublin it's not bad and it's a great place to socialise and be within 45 minutes of nature. It's probably one of the few capital cities in world where it's not unusual to strike up a conversation with a random person beside you on a bus. Also it's a pretty easy place to do business. Our nature is humourously sarcastic and not liking authority which means we are pretty good problems solvers and management tends to be quite flat. The software is also small, so your only ever really a phonecall away from having a pint with whoever you need to speak to in the whole sector - from a graduate you met at a conference to a government Minister.

People also work to live not live to work (like the US) which makes a big difference. Also a big part of worklife is around interactions with colleagues - it's basically an assumption that most offices are full of at least a few characters who like to have the "craic" and banter. When working abroad I found I really missed those tiny interactions you have on a daily basis in Ireland - e.g someone telling you a story and making you laugh. Even in London you don't get that. It's not something you can pickup by getting an MBA but it makes such a big difference to the quality of life - compared to a stale work environment.

<comment><USER34> > It's gotten very cool and tolerant (Gay marriage referendum was very > symbolic of that).

this is a bit of a stretch, the politics are still very much driven by religion (e.g. abortion requires a trip abroad, normally to the UK).

the UK parliament passed gay marriage before, and it didn't require a referendum (as it was uncontroversial amongst the electorate)

<comment><USER24> Agree on abortion. Ireland had to have a referendum as it was a constitutional issue. I'm not saying Ireland is Amsterdam, just a very different place to 20 years ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> No</comment>


Instagram has lost nearly $300 million—and it's not all Facebook's fault - <AUTHOR> http://upstart.bizjournals.com/news/wire/2012/08/21/instagram-has-lost-nearly-300-million.html

<comment><USER2> It wasn't "failing to protect". At the time Facebook was the hottest stock going; choosing to make the contract for a fixed number of shares rather than using a floating share exchange ratio was perfectly reasonable.</comment>


My Problems with Bitbucket Cloud Pull Requests - <AUTHOR> http://www.niladicpodcast.com/blog/2017/4/my-problems-with-bitbucket-cloud/ <comment><USER2> Bitbucket PM here - thanks for sharing this. We definitely have a lot we can improve around PRs and have some folks looking into it now. We'll definitely take your ideas into consideration.

I'm curious about how you use Bitbucket Cloud. Why did you decide to base your dev flow on forks and bookmarks instead of named branches? Are you working as an individual (and accepting PRs on open source or similar) or as part of a team?

Have you given any thought to moving to named branches -- or even git? Are there other problems there that you're trying to avoid? (As you might imagine, that's where the majority of our customers are today, using various branching models on git rather than forks/bookmarks on hg.)</comment>


Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong - <AUTHOR> https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/everything-you-know-about-obesity-is-wrong/ <comment><USER2> Almost everything about this article is wrong, and it's way too damn long.

> . The first is that diets do not work. Not just paleo or Atkins or Weight > Watchers or Goop, but all diets.

Atkins (and other low carb diets like keto) honestly take people back to the diet we had in the 1950s/60s. Lower carbohydrates.

The fact is we are fatter, collectively as a human race. There has to be a cause for that; a cause that can be reverse. We weren't always like this; and study after study is showing us the "low fat" diet has been a disaster.

We need waaaay less sugar and starches in our diets. And it's so impossible because it's difficult to find anything on the shelves of a grocery store that aren't loaded with them.

The industry was so afraid of the Adkins diet in the early 2000s they paid Harpers to publish a total 'fake news' article after he died; blaming the death on his diet. This was later redacted, but it was too little too late. Even today, people still believe he died of a heart condition.

The industries need people to keep consuming sugar to keep their bottom lines growing. Imagine if Adkins had taken off and today, every fast food place had a no-bread, low-carb option? My hypothesis is that we'd see obesity rates drop across the US and eventually the world.

</comment><comment><USER3> This article was about a hundred times longer than it needed to be. Here's the thing. Hormones don't magically create voodoo energy out of thin air, otherwise all our bodies would be free energy machines hooked up to a central grid.

A calorie is a calorie. If you're overweight, consume fewer calories. If you're trying to gain weight, consume more calories. All of this talk about hormones and not being able to cook reeks of laziness and a lack of willpower.

Change your eating habits. There's no need for 3 meals a day with a number of snacks. It doesn't have to be an extreme zero-carb or pure carnivore thing. Just consume balanced macros and eat at a calorie deficit and I guarantee you'll lose weight.</comment>


How a Marketer Turned His Own Pain into a $7M SaaS Business - <AUTHOR> http://www.conversionaid.com/podcast/rick-perreault-unbounce/

<comment><USER2> Saving this one to listen to! I also came across the conversionaid website recently via closingcall website.</comment>


Jony Ive is Now Playing the Steve Jobs Role - <AUTHOR> http://www.macrumors.com/2012/11/05/jony-ive-is-now-playing-the-steve-jobs-role/

<comment><AUTHOR> From everything I've read about Sir Jony Ive, he might actually be a better Steve Jobs than Steve Jobs was.

</comment><comment><USER2> hmmm... This might actually be a wise move for Apple. Tim Cook's business savvy, Jony Ive's design presence.</comment>


RVM Cert Expiration - <AUTHOR> https://rvm.io/

<comment><USER2> Saw this last night when I tried to setup RVM on a new machine. Quick fix is to do the following (from: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6414232/curl- certificate-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6414232/curl-certificate- error-when-using-rvm-to-install-ruby-1-9-2/11780019#11780019))

      echo insecure >> ~/.curlrc

</comment><comment><USER3> And now all my scripts fail.</comment>