20 years old: Microsofts first website recreated - <AUTHOR> http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/discover/1994/

<comment><USER2> One huge server-side imagemap. Yep, this is authentic 1994!

Whatever happened to imagemaps anyway? I guess they just went completely out of fashion sometime around 1998. Before that, they were quite extensively used to create webpages that resembled HyperCard at its simplest.

<comment><USER3> If you only use one image how will your navbar have JavaScript hover substitutions?!

<comment><USER4> Swap out huge images with each state highlighted of course. If we get really fancy we can preload these images on body load.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Some good notes on its reconstruction can be found in the readme: [http://www.microsoft.com/en- us/discover/1994/readme.html](http://www.microsoft.com/en- us/discover/1994/readme.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> I checked the http headers - hoping to see them serving this up with a time era webserver (EMWAC). Nope, IIS-8. Still, pretty neat.

</comment><comment><USER7> Gotta hand it to 'em. They've always had an eye for design.

</comment><comment><USER8> Is it a coincidence it looks like a CD-ROM?

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm going to keep asking every time a Microsoft website is posted:

Why don't they embed their fonts? Indifference? Laziness? Ineptitude?

Obviously I don't mean this retro landing page, just click through to any other page of theirs. It's all Times and Arial.

<comment><USER4> Why would they embed fonts that are standard on Windows? Chances are good you already have the font. And if you don't use Windows, why would they care?

<comment><USER9> By that logic, Google should only care about their sites working in Chrome?

Also, any web developer should be thoroughly embarrassed if their unintentionally have Times on their site. That is an unequivocal "something got fucked up" error, especially because it means you didn't care enough to make a fallback.

<comment><USER4> See that doesn't really apply to basic fonts like Times and Arial though. If you we were talking about rare fonts I can understand why you would want to embed them. But with these two all systems will have an equivalent font to render. For instance on Mac it will use Helvetica. On Linux it will probably have Arial or Helvetica depending on user's choice. And this applies for every OS I can think of.

What I'm saying is not that they should ignore user's but that it's probably not an issue in the first place. They use basically boilerplate Serif and Sans-Serif fonts.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


AOL dumps $850M Bebo acquisition - Why big M&A rarely works - <AUTHOR> http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2010/04/aol-dumps-850m-bebo-acquisition-why-big-ma-rarely-works.html

<comment><USER2> >Why big M&A rarely works

Big M&A always works, all the people involved in this got large bonuses and promotions, then they left for new jobs with experience of managing $Bn M&A deals - which gets them up the promotion ladder.

What happened to all the people at AOL who said it was a bad deal, where are they now?

<comment><USER3> Yup that's the real issue... big bonuses for big M&A deals... just happened with Kraft buying Cadbury, huge bonus to the CEO for simply doing what they were hired to do.

[http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2010/04/corporate...](http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2010/04/corporate- gigantism.php)

"Brief synopsis: Kraft acquires the 200 year old British confection-maker Cadbury after a heated battle. The chairwoman and CEO Irene Rosenfeld (already not a good sign, best practice is to separate the two roles) was awarded a 41% pay increase, bringing the total to $26 million for 2009 for her "exceptional role" in the Cadbury transaction, as well as her "commitment to fiscal discipline."

... "The punchline is that Kraft actually screwed up. Part of their plan for Cadbury involved closing off the company's pension plan but there's "an obscure clause in Cadbury's pension trust deed that makes it almost impossible to close the scheme." As a way 'round this obscure clause, they've issued an ultimatum to employees, threatening them with a pay freeze unless they "voluntarily" agree to opt out of the pension plan. Point being that no matter how obscure the clause may or may not have been, this is supposed to be part of your due diligence before you buy a company, to say nothing of "exceptional" performance"

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> All those AOL'ers who were laid off during 2008-2010 must be so glad the money saved on the reduced headcount payroll went to investments such as this.

<comment><USER5> Wrong way of thinking about it. A company like AOL does need to invest in modernizing their business model somehow to stay relevant. The Bebo buy was rather poor, but the general idea of rebuilding AOL into something else is a good plan. If they don't remake AOL into something else, the layoffs will keep coming as the company dies a slow death.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> One of the most successful big acquisitions in history was Illumina's $600M acquisition of Solexa in 2006. They moved at warp speed to get out the GA and the story since that point has been world domination in the sequencing biz.

(this kind of success for big m&a is, as dodge notes, exceptional)</comment>


16 Major Firms May Have Received Early Data From Thomson Reuters - <AUTHOR> http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/16-major-firms-may-have-received-early-data-from-thomson-reuters-20130905 <comment><USER2> I don't understand on what legal basis the SEC could force Reuters to stop selling the information to different people at different times. Reuters is simply not under their jurisdiction, and the University of Michigan Survey is not a public good, which everyone is entitled equal access to.

On the other hand, the SEC could forbid registered entities from buying the survey before it is generally available.

More importantly, I think Taibbi's outrage is misplaced - I don't see a victim here.

<comment><USER3> The problem isn't that some customers are given first access, it's that they are given secret first access.

If Reuters had made it widely known that the report would be issued to customers in a higher tier first, this wouldn't be a problem. The fact that they were giving it out to certain customers first without telling others that they were going to be getting it later is the material issue. They were, fundamentally, helping create inside information for certain customers and creating an opportunity to exploit other investors who would be unknowingly trading with an information gap.

Even though the report was going to be widely disseminated, getting it ahead of other people without them knowing allows for you to create a huge market advantage for yourself if you know those other people are going to be trading on the same information shortly.

<comment><USER4> Yes, doing research and gathering information does give you a huge market advantage.

That's not the same thing as inside information, which is privileged information given to you by a corporate insider with a fiduciary duty to all shareholders.

<comment><USER5> The difference isn't nearly as cut-and-dry as you think, especially since a variety of regulatory institutions have varying rules between them. Some jurisdictions cast a very wide net so that even associates and family members are included.

Since this debacle is approaching world-wide proportion then the impact will be similarly global.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _> Specifically, Nanex saw a spike in the milliseconds before 9:54:58 on December 7th, 2012. To be exact, they saw a flurry at 9:54:57.18, nearly a full second before the "third-tier" algorithmic subscribers got their data at 9:54:58 a.m. This is exactly what you would expect to see if someone, or a bunch of someones, had access to the data even before 9:54:58 a.m. In this game you would want to hold your cards until the last possible moment before placing your bets._

A phenomenon not unlike what many of us have experienced bidding for an item on ebay.

Yet another example of the game being rigged. I don't invest for a living, but I've always thought it folly to approach the exchange in any manner other than a long term diversified one (as an individual investor). Maybe it is my lack of sophistication in the area, but anything else feels like gambling to me.

<comment><USER7> As someone who does work in this industry, a spike before the number is completely explainable without anyone having early knowledge.

Lots of market participants are speculators. If you are speculating on the results of the number, you need to make sure your orders are in before it. Everyone in the low latency game knows when the number is coming, so it makes sense for speculation orders to go in when they do.

Now if Nanex wanted to prove something, they could show that a high percentage of those orders are consistently on the "right" side of the number, something they haven't done.

<comment><USER6> I think that the unethical (illegal?) problem is already inked in black and white where the three tiers of market information recipients exist.

I didn't make that clear at all in my comment, but yeah, I agree that the 4th tier is definitely speculation at this point.

I agree that it would be interesting to look for the payout skew for the numbers; that would just verify an additional transgression in my book. Unfortunately nobody reads my book so to speak :)

<comment><USER8> It's neither illegal nor unethical for a private entity to invest money and manpower to compile statistical data, to release it in a staggered fashion, and to charge purchasers for early access.

<comment><USER9> It sounds innocuous enough with absolutely no context, but the fact is that they are selling market-moving data, and they know it. They know exactly what staggered release of this data does: create an uneven playing field for all but the wealthiest investors. This causes the creation of false profits that don't come from actual risk, or underlying value of securities, but by screwing retail investors, pension funds, and anyone else who doesn't start off with absurd amounts of money to begin with. Sure sounds unethical to me.

<comment><USER8> Of course they are selling market moving data. If it weren't market-moving, why would anybody pay a premium price for it? Just because something is market-moving does not make it "material, non-public information" about a specific company. And just because something is market-moving doesn't mean that a trader or hedge fund or whoever makes use of this data will gamble correctly and win every time.

You see people paying for privileged access to information all over the place. For example, on a slower time scale, industry analysts hawk expensive monthly newsletters or one-time reports. Bloomberg terminals provide news feeds and market data for the bargain price of ~$2000 a month.

<comment><USER9> I'm no financial or legal expert, but by market moving I am referring to data that moves the aggregate market in a fairly predictable direction. If jobs or the consumer confidence numbers go up, the market follows and vice versa. If your system gets this data before everyone else you essentially have a money- printing machine (at the expense of everyone else).

If you report data that's valuable because the federal government uses it in monetary policy decisions, then just push it to your customers as soon as its available for a flat rate.

When a company intentionally holds back data to make money on an incremental time difference, I'm sorry, that seems scammy and unethical to me.

As to Bloomberg consoles, that seems like a slightly different case, but if they similarly tier, then it is also unethical IMO.

Don't pit your customers against each other.

<comment><USER8> In the trading game, there are very few things that move the broad market in a predictable direction. Simple correlation and causality get very, very hazy. It's not a simple matter of:

* get data a little early

* go long on the index

* profit!

A trader could execute all possible best-practices, and the numbers go the 'wrong' way. Or they go the 'right' way for a while, but then turn around as other traders cash out. Regardless, there's no guaranteed profit just because you have paid for early access.

The presence of risk-taking traders on all different time scales in secondary markets means that there's liquidity and accurate price-formation at a range of different time scales. At the very shortest time-scales, all customers are _already_ against each other - it's the nature of a very liquid market, where A's gain is B's loss and vice versa.

But all this churning activity means that if you want to cash out your Apple stock, there's going to be a buyer right there on the other side, at all times. Without a deep reserve of risk traders willing to take the other side of every trade, liquidity is lost and capital is less likely to be attracted to the public markets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Honestly Stock Market investing is not nor has it ever been for the common man. The hyper aggressive day trading & HFT sector is not for the common man. As for the slow long term investment route, the biggest section that gets abused by the savvy investors is the institutional pensions and such.

Bottom line if you are not going to put in significant effort you are not going to get much out of the stock market except by pure luck, and on average your going to lose... for the common man the effort necessary to make an extra 15% on your yearly income in the stock market, is more than if you did overtime or even went out and got a part time second job to earn that extra 15%

<comment><USER11> Day trading and HFT are not for the common man. But regular long term investing is.

Getting a part time job is only a good idea if you have very few assets. Suppose you have 50k in salary and 50k in assets, then it's much easier to earn an extra 5k per year than it is to get an extra 10% return on your investment.

However, if you have 50k in salary and 500k in assets the story is the other way around. Investing 500k for 10 years with 6% interest instead of 3% interest leads to gains of 395k and 172k respectively. In this case making an effort in investing your money sensibly will lead to an extra 22k every year. A substantial difference. And as your assets increase your investment strategy only becomes more important.

Then there's the issue that not investing your money simply isn't a viable option. Inflation will chip away at your money at 3% per year, so you lose 25% of your money every 10 years if you stick your money in a checking account. Then there's the issue of employer-based 401k matching. You pretty much have to invest here, otherwise you lose out on free money. And if you just pick some investment funds at random you're going to do very poorly indeed (because many 401k funds are basically scams)[1].

[1] See [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/retirement- gamble/](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/retirement-gamble/)

<comment><USER12> > Day trading and HFT are not for the common man. But regular long term > investing is.

+1

I drop a portion of my money each month into selected ETFs and it's done well for me (ha, the market has been on a bull rush, of course it did well for me).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Matt Taibbi is the man - he's one of the only investigative journalists to consistently stay on Wall Street's ass and make reading about it entertaining (and not just depressing).

<comment><USER7> Except he is nearly always incorrect in what he is reporting. For instance, in this article he makes a claim that early reuters data leads to front-running. That is just technically wrong. If he is going to report on a subject, understanding the basics of it would be a good start.

<comment><USER14> err, isn't Front-running knowing what your customers are going to do as a trade and getting in first (so if you order my guy to buy IBM, I simply buy some IBM first, then sell it to you, making a little bit off your order).

So if I know the results of the orange harvest before you, I can buy frozen OJ futures and sell them to you _even if you are not placing an order through me_.

You still lose out, I still take advantage of my private knowledge. Whats the difference?

<comment><USER7> The difference is that one is illegal and unethical and the other isn't. There is no promise in the markets that everyone will have all relevant information at the same time and at the same quality. Why should that promise exist? If I spend my time and energy doing more research than you, why should you get the same advantage?

What we do have is a promise (cynical folks might say promise is too strong here) that if you are my broker, you can't use my non published order desires to take market positions.

We also have a promise that certain covered individuals working for a publicly traded company, cannot release certain material pieces of information about that traded company to anyone early, nor can they trade on that information before it is released.

The problem is not private knowledge, there is tons of that in the market, and that is what makes people take different market positions, thus enabling the market to exist. What is problematic is for people to take advantage of information that no one else could conceivably get.

<comment><USER15> > There is no promise in the markets that everyone will have all relevant > information at the same time and at the same quality.

There may be no such promise but it is not clear on its face that such a promise should never exist, for example, to maintain liquid and orderly markets.

Is there any situation where it would be desirable?

If only 10 entities could buy real time stock quotes from the exchanges and everyone else had a 5 minute delay, wouldn't that be undesirable?

And what about government interest rate decisions? Should some entities be allowed to get early access?

<comment><USER16> This comment is running off on a tangent but I think it's important to understand that Kasey is right here, and front-running orders requires knowledge of the victim's specific trading intent. You aren't "front-running" simply because you're smarter than some other market actor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If you're going to engage in an arms war, you better have the best tools. I never really understood how small investors think they can do microtrading, but apparently it is common since the trading sites bombard you with the very latest statistics.

<comment><USER11> Since all trading sites get a commission on each trade it's no surprise that they don't push people to put their money in a number of Vanguard index funds for 30 years.

On some of the investment funds offered by my bank their fees are so high the investment fund will never ever make money for the customer. And yet they shamelessly sell it anyway.

<comment><USER18> I use TDAmeritrade, which actually offers a number of vanguard and iShares ETF's commission free. It really incentivizes investing in those rather than anything else. I know there has to be a catch somewhere on it, but I don't see what it is...

<comment><USER11> 9 out of 10 times this means TDAmeritrade receives a kickback from Vanguard/iShares whenever you buy their shares. So there is a commission, and it's still being paid by you (albeit indirectly). This kickback doesn't need to be very large because TDAmeritrade isn't doing much work. My guess is that you can't buy shares in Vanguard's low profit margin funds (such as VFIAX - 0.05% expense ratio) without any fees, only Vanguard's high margin funds.

Of course, Vanguard wants to steer people to their more profitable investment funds, and paying the sales fee to the bank on behalf of the customer is a good way to do that.

<comment><USER18> Perhaps. I'm quite green when it comes to investing, so I probably haven't paid as much attention to expense ratio as I should have, but I have tried to minimize investments in high expense ratio accounts. The big one for me that I get commish free is IVV, which, if I buy in small chunks monthly isn't too bad at a .07% ratio, no?

<comment><USER11> IVV is very solid. IVV is competing fiercely with the new competitor VOO and SPY (the 3 funds are effectively identical). Vanguard charges the least (0.05% per year) and SPDR charges the most (0.09%). 3 years ago IVV had an expense ratio of 0.09%, now they're charging 0.07% and I expect their ratio to go down to 0.06% in the next year or two. Vanguard is trying to steal their lunch.

So if you get IVV without commission you're benefiting from this price war.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> From the point of view of maintaining a just society, the big problem with allowing things like this is inconsistency in enforcement. Either you level the playing field with respect to informational advantages across the board, and you prosecute bad actors with impunity, thus making it unattractive to bad actors, leaving only good-faith actors participating. Or you make it a caveat- emptor market, where no actor has any guarantee of a fair trade, leaving everyone to question any trade they want to participate in. This will drive out all the good-faith actors that know the game is rigged and not in their favor and it will leave only actors who are trading on the idea that they think that the fool at the table is not themselves.

Personally, I'd be very curious to see two parallel markets for securities: one that is completely unregulated where anything goes and one where any bad actor is prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, including multi-year jail sentences and fines that are many multiples of past ill-gotten gains.

This would leave every actor with the choice of participating in the market they want to participate in, including both investors and companies. Companies could choose to list their securities on one just one of those two exchanges or both, and investors could invest only in companies on one exchange or on both exchanges.

The problem with the status quo is that the only actor who knows what exchange they are playing in is is the bad actor. The good actor often will not know that his counterparty is acting in good faith or is corrupting the system until after losses are suffered.

Creating a market for markets, where you can choose between unregulated and regulated markets, allows actors to choose which system they prefer to participate in and leaves regulators free to actually enforce the regulations without being soft for fear of what it may do to the market itself, which is exactly what happened in the 2008 crisis. Regulators were scared shitless of really prosecuting bad actors for fear of plunging the world further into a recession.

<comment><USER20> Sounds good to me. The regulators will never allow it, though. It decreases their own power. They would call the unregulated markets a danger to the economy as a whole.

(Ironic, isn't it? Since the "Great Recession" was caused by government, as well as the fact that we're still in a slump and will be until there is major political change.)

The business of the SEC is to nanny rich adults, and nobody wants that job because they just care so much about those rich adults and truly want to force them to do the best things for themselves. As if forcing people to be good were even possible.

<comment><USER21> > the "Great Recession" was caused by government

This is true only in that it was a direct consequence of deregulation that removed regulations designed to protect against a repeat of the Great Depression.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Ask HN: Why can't I spot the sucker in the stock market?

</comment><comment><USER23> It strikes me that there is now enough evidence that high frequency trading & algorithmic traders are a blight on the markets. They should either be banned, or protections put in place to negate the arms race they cause. I see this 'early data' as part of that arms race.

Does anyone have any evidence whatsoever that high frequency trading is a benefit? I've read arguments that they are market makers by creating liquidity. But, I've yet to read a compelling explanation as to how they actually achieve that, nor how its provably valuable to the market as a whole.

<comment><USER24> Chris Stucchio addresses this at [http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2012/hft_apology2.html](http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2012/hft_apology2.html)

He links to the HN comments as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> If there is one thing I've managed to become sure of in my time on earth, it is that existing financial systems are explicitly designed by the status quo to be abused by the status quo.

</comment><comment><USER26> The article suggests that more than a few seconds of privileged access to an important economic indicator would have little value due to the speed of algorithmic market participants. I disagree. Imagine that you knew this morning's unemployment number a second before everyone else. Could you have become a bazillionaire? No. Your potential windfall would be limited by how much of a position you could take on without moving the prices of instruments past the point of where they likely would end-up after the general availability of this economic indicator. Order books are fairly light right before a number is released because most participants presume themselves to be the victim of a better-informed trader if the option they "wrote" by putting an order on the book is exercised. So, you as a well-informed trader would have limited opportunity to take on position without paying at least as much as the likely value of that position after everyone knows what you knew a second beforehand. Conversely, imagine that you knew a day or two ahead of time what this morning's unemployment number would be. You could slowly build up a huge position and make orders of magnitude more.

</comment><comment><USER27> Can any legally informed HNer explain the probability of criminal prosecution? The article seems to imply that it is un certain that this is illegal, but to me it seems like this is insider trading at the very least and maybe something else (criminal). The article says on this:

      > There are disagreements as to whether or not this practice is illegal.

<comment><USER4> If Steve Ballmer comes up to you and says "hey buddy, I'm retiring soon, better buy some MS since the price is going up", and you buy, that's insider trading.

If I (unrelated to Steve Ballmer) tell you "hey, that guys getting old, he'll probably retire soon", that's not insider trading.

Near as I can tell, the Reuters early release is firmly within the category of the latter. I can't see any reason why early release of private research would be illegal.

<comment><USER14> Is there a pricing page on the Reuters site that says "standard", "Two Seconds early" and "One hour early"?

If not I suspect its illegal.

Al Capone was done for tax evasion, cannot see why Reuters cannot be in breach of a Fair Trading / Sales Act :-)

<comment><USER7> As the article points out, the contract clearly shows the 3 known levels data distribution times (2 seconds early, on time, 5 minutes delayed).

If they were releasing it at other times it would most likely be a contract breach or some other civil matter.

But that is a big if. All this article points to to prove that is a disgruntled employee and a Nanex study (all months old) that do not have any proof of early release.

<comment><USER28> This is not the customer's contract, it's the University of Michigan's contract.

If the regular customers know that there are other more privileged tiers that impact the value of what they're buying, I guess it's ok. Otherwise, i think it might qualify as fraud

<comment><USER7> These tiers are widely known about in the algorithmic trading community. There is marketing materials on Reuters site outlining the advantages [http://thomsonreuters.com/machine-readable- news/](http://thomsonreuters.com/machine-readable-news/) and if you are event trading you certainly pay for this.

If the 4th secret tier exists, that would be a bigger problem but there is no proof of that in the article. It is all speculation.

<comment><USER29> Where can I find tiers and pricing? Just curious..

<comment><USER7> I don't actually use their service, I assume pricing is available via a sales rep via their contact us page. If you want notice about the tiers, take a look under the "Suite Components" portion of the link I provided.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> If it's survey data, it seems as though Thomson Reuters should be able to release it however they want to release it.

For individual investors, sitting on the sidelines, watching the carnage and then jumping in is probably the best play. No small investor can beat the machines at their own game, but you can most definitely take advantage of the swings in the market caused by the machines...

</comment><comment><USER31> Quite frankly I believe there should be a cooldown period between trades, with the effect of eliminating the practice known as High Frequency Trading.

</comment><comment><USER32> I deduced a long time ago that the "Wall Street + Washington DC + Big Media" combined entity/ecosystem is rife with front-running tailored to the Big Money players.</comment>


ASK: iPhone Contract Work - <AUTHOR>

What is the average I should expect to pay an iphone app developer for a piece of contract work?  I have an idea for an app but have no experience in working with a developer.  What is the going rate? <comment><USER2> The ranges are all over the place. But I would say for a competent developer they start around $50 per hour. Under this rate, and especially at the lowest rates, quality becomes a gamble. You might be able to find someone competent living in a country with lower costs of living, offering a lower rate, but usually if they're good, their rates will just be slightly lower, especially since iOS development is such in a high demand now. There's a post on StackOverflow ([http://stackoverflow.com/questions/209170/how-much-does- it-c...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/209170/how-much-does-it-cost-to- develop-an-iphone-application)) that contains a lot of information about what it means to build a quality application, and that will give you some idea of the time frame you can expect. There are also some mentions of websites where you can look for hire.

</comment><comment><USER3> This might help you: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/209170/how-much-does- it-c...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/209170/how-much-does-it-cost-to- develop-an-iphone-application)

From what I've seen, standard rate for iPhone development (in the US anyway) is around $125/hour.

<comment><USER2> heh. That's pretty much a reference post now, I see.</comment></comment>


Massive Malware Infection Invades Google Play Store – Fortune.com - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2017/09/14/google-play-android-malware/?utm_campaign=fortunemagazine&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social&xid=soc_socialflow_twitter_FORTUNE <comment><USER2> I don't understand how the perpetrators can cash out their premium text message earnings without getting caught.

Can somebody offer insights?</comment>


Cutting 300 Calories a Day Shows Health Benefits - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/16/well/eat/cutting-300-calories-a-day-shows-health-benefits.html <comment><USER2> behind the china great firewall so unable to open this article, but in general i agree with this title, i was also observing simple things while in china in terms of eating habits, typically meals in asia are family style and you grab small portions of each shared dish unlike in western countries where you have a full meal placed in front of you. when i was growing up in the states, i was always told not to waste food, so if given a big mac, it's getting finished, if a big plate of pasta, devoured. this probably can explain the differences in waist sizes between the 2 regions, asians eat more family style where you take what you can eat instead of being dictated by chilis, olive garden, or mcdonalds in terms of what your body requires from a meal.

diet is pretty important for me now as i try to watch my weight, i drink water or hot tea only, absolutely no soda, juices, etc, i also try to eat 60-70% capacity per meal as i dont exercise that much, mostly just sit in front of the computer all day, so there isnt a need for all those calories like before when i was lifting weights and playing basketball for 6 hours a day, few to little carbs (bread, rice, pasta), some fruit for snack, and absolutely no junk food. obviously if i exercise, i will have a little more carbs that day. but overall do you need that many calories a day?

you also need to train your stomach, it's like a balloon, eat too much and it stretches out and takes a while to get back into its initial size, so try not to binge eat (binge drink also, i used to olay tennis, could drink ,2 gallons of water in an afternoon), also keep in mind physical pro-portions of food/drink, so dont eat 4 slices of pizza and beer, go with 1 slice, and maybe some salad, some red wine.

</comment><comment><USER3> Too bad sugary/fatty food is addicting.

<comment><USER4> Fatty food is addicting? I can understand the argument that sugar has the appearance of being addictive (even if maybe it isn't _technically_ addictive...) but fat?

<comment><USER2> long live bacon!

<comment><USER5> The addictiveness of bacon might be due to the salt.

Even though I am not addicted to fat (I think), it is vital for the "filled" feeling I have after a meal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Isn't caloric restriction one of the few things to robustly show huge benefits in longevity etc across species?

<comment><USER7> Caloric restriction extends the lifespan of mice, but I don't think there's any good data on longer-lived animals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> TL;DR Cutting calories and starchy food made me lose weight, lowered my blood pressure and blood glucose levels dramatically.

A year ago I observed a morning blood glucose level ranging from 95-110. And after eating foods with lots of carbs my blood glucose levels would rise to 160 or 180 or even 200 (in the first hour after eating). Weighing 85kg, 6ft tall, 40in belly (for all of my life I had the tendency to gain a fatty belly, even when I worked out a lot). With several family members who were diagnosed diabetes, some of them on insulin. So for me it was a matter of time until I would be diagnosed pre-diabetes and eventually diabetes.

So I tried to change something. Did some research, started running and fitness exercises, counting calories.

I did lose weight. In the beginning cutting on carbs and sugar felt like trying to get away from drug addiction. I would catch myself in the middle of the night in the kitchen eating sugary things.

After a few weeks of disciplined eating of three meals a day, no snacks in between, ultra low carb in the evening I lost many pounds. But it was always a struggle. So I started doing some more research, found out about various diets (low carb, keto, focusing on low glycemic index foods, intermittent fasting, atkins and whatnot).

There are many approaches, many suggestions.

Here is what I found out works for me:

1\. First and foremost: Restricting calories is the essential ingredient in weight control for me. - Reduce portion sizes. Omit breakfast or dinner. I skip breakfast and eat 900 kcal for lunch at 12pm and another 900 kcal at around 6pm. No food afterwards until next

2\. Then, equally as important is: Eating healthy. So restricting calories does not mean I can go and fill the remaining calories with hamburgers.

3\. If I start a new diet, it will take some (painful) time of adaption. In the meantime I need to have an iron will to keep on track

4\. Observing, counting, measuring creates self awareness (meta-cognition), and that alone makes me eat more consciously

5\. Dieting is a lifelong exercise. Eating the way I want, without any plan, will make me gain weight, guaranteed.

6\. Our western lifestyle and diet (food is available in abundance, lots of processed food, sugar everywhere) will make me gain weight.

7\. I started avoiding processed food almost altogether. I gave up on sugary drinks years ago. I gave up on consuming alcohol recently.

And here is the more important thing for someone trying to avoid diabetes: Diabetes is also called "glucose intolerance". Glucose is one form of carbs, another is fructose. Fructose is being processed in the liver. Glucose is processed with the use of the hormone Insulin. My body reacts extremely intense to glucose intake. It will produce way too much insulin. Now I won't elaborate on this process. Only this: When diabetes is a form of "glucose intolerance", why not cut back on or totally avoid glucose?

That is exactly what I did. I eliminated glucose from my diet. (Eating green vegetables instead.) And I restricted my calory intake by omitting breakfast. The results were clear: I lost many pounds, and I can sustain that. Not feeling miserable anymore. And no food cravings anymore.</comment>


Germany's top financial supervisor dismissed a decade of warnings about Wirecard - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-germanys-sec-dismissed-a-decade-of-warnings-about-wirecard-11594907212 <comment><USER2> Also, under Helmut Kohl, despite advice from experts to use fiber, the German government wired the whole country with copper instead because the ministry of infrastructure at the time had stocks in the copper business leaving the country's internet behind Ukraine or Belarus.[1]

If you're on the DAX or a politician, you're untouchable in Germany and lots of people inside and outside of Germany have no idea of how insanely corrupt the German government and their corporate buddies are.

Sure, it's not like Russia or the CCP and you're not in danger of being suicided if you uncover some high level dirt but nobody really ever gets punished when obvious corruption gets proven so I have no idea how they always manage to looks so good in the corruption statistics.

[1] [https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/deutschland-warum- unsere...](https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/deutschland-warum-unsere- handynetze-so-schlecht-sind-kolumne-a-1297362.html)

<comment><USER3> >If you're on the DAX or a politician, you're untouchable in Germany and lots of people inside and outside of Germany have no idea of how insanely corrupt the German government and their corporate buddies are.

This is obviously not true. There have been numerous uncovered political scandals in Germany that have led to politicians and managers loosing their job. Christian Wulff (Former German President), Guttenberg (former Defence Minister), etc.

<comment><USER4> Even though losing the job is not a punishment, not everyone even lost his job.

Andreas Sheuer is still in charge of transport as a federal Minister, despite the 500,000,000 € heavy corruption scandal.

Von der Leyen got even "promoted" to EU-lead position after heavy corruption scandal last year when she was a Defense Minister of Germany.

Not only Germany, but in the whole EU commission leadership it would be hard to find someone without corruption scandal, accusation or conviction.

<comment><USER5> The problem is that gross incompetence is not a crime.

You can't arrest someone on account of them being an idiot.

It's the responsibility of the other party members and especially the opposition to demand him being removed from office.

Funnily enough the Green Party demanded exactly that, but then again that's the same party that wants general speed limits...

So yeah, of course any party that wants to get reelected in Germany will stand behind that clown, as long as that clown fights for "Freie Fahrt für freie Bürger!" and lets them keep their drivers license, because 21 km/h above the speed limit is just a trivial offence...

<comment><USER6> > The problem is that gross incompetence is not a crime

I think it should be. You get the power over large sums of money and for that you're liable with your life.

<comment><USER5> Problem is, you wouldn't find anyone willing to take that job then.

We're all just human after all and making mistakes is part of the human condition.

<comment><USER6> I think it's a comfortable lie people say.

There's so much that comes with the power that it's a very shallow argument to make.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sadly can't read the article as I don't have a subscription but have followed this in the FT.

Germany has an ultra-protectionist political culture for pet German companies. Wirecard was one such pet company but there are many others who have benefited from implicit state support in the form of lowered standards and private favouritism: Deutsche, VW, Siemens, etc. Wirecard even holds a banking license so should be subject to quite a lot of oversight from the regulator but the head of BaFin ("Germany's SEC" as the headline states) makes the risible excuse that he didn't apply proper oversight to them because they are arguably a "technology company".

Disappointingly there is very little doing. The pan-EU regulator, ESMA, basically is not equipped to properly investigate and censure BaFin - they're really just a standards body similar to the IETF or ANSI. No I can't imagine much will change.

<comment><USER8> This is a nice summary for those who either don't have access to the FT coverage or are out of the loop:

When €2 Billion went missing at Wirecard:

[https://finshots.in/archive/wirecard-accounting- scandal/](https://finshots.in/archive/wirecard-accounting-scandal/)

<comment><USER9> here's the ft link containing all their wirecard coverage: [https://www.ft.com/wirecard](https://www.ft.com/wirecard)

i think some articles there are free to read.

for example: [https://www.ft.com/content/284fb1ad- ddc0-45df-a075-0709b3686...](https://www.ft.com/content/284fb1ad- ddc0-45df-a075-0709b36868db)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Not only that, they went after the short sellers who were writing about it publicly.

> Germany's pursuit of short sellers began when Perring's previously little- > known outfit, called Zatarra Research, published its report about Wirecard.

> In March, just three months before Wirecard's collapse, prosecutors dropped > their case against Perring after he agreed to make a donation of an > undisclosed sum to a charitable organization.

Finance watchdogs are archaeologist organizations when it comes to fraud, they come in after the fraud has blown up and sift through the evidence to see what happened. Between that, they are busy going after people with too little money to defend themselves mostly.

[https://www.yahoo.com/news/germany-long-lonely-campaign- batt...](https://www.yahoo.com/news/germany-long-lonely-campaign- battling-051620645.html)

<comment><USER11> They didn't prosecute "short selling", they prosecuted market manipulation:

1\. Get a large short position

2\. Publish damaging information

3\. Profit

It doesn't even matter if the information is true. If it is true, it is insider trading. If it isn't true, it is libel. Either warrants prosecution.

<comment><USER12> > If it is true, it is insider trading.

No, it's only insider trading if the information is based on insider (AKA private) information. Anything that can be derived from public information, even with a stretch, is also considered public.

<comment><USER11> I could have made myself clearer, I am talking about "damaging insider information". Publishing already published information isn't exactly news.

In this case, the alleged accounting fraud mentioned in the FT article _was_ insider information.

<comment><USER13> It depends where the knowledge came from - did it come from an insider, or was the accounting fraud discovered by poring over public records?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Looks like BaFin was not merely incompetent but actively malfeasant. People were apparently wrongly convicted due to their good-faith efforts to expose the fraud.

 _BaFin's role includes ensuring that listed companies abide by securities law, for instance by communicating truthfully with their shareholders. But BaFin didn't look into the lawsuit's allegations against Wirecard because there was no evidence the company had provided misleading information, the spokeswoman said.

Instead, BaFin opened a probe into the accusers. Wirecard had filed a complaint with the agency and the Munich prosecutor after the suit caused its stock to slump. Two former officials of the small shareholders' association were charged, convicted of market manipulation and handed suspended prison sentences._

Are these folks going to have their names cleared now?

<comment><USER15> And be compensated?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Lest anyone think this is limited to Germany, consider the length of time it took for the US SEC to catch up with Bernie Madoff:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madoff_investment_scandal#Prev...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madoff_investment_scandal#Previous_investigations)

[https://www.google.com/search?q=warnings+bernie+madoff](https://www.google.com/search?q=warnings+bernie+madoff)

<comment><USER17> The Madoff case was utterly ridiculous.

The good part of it is that since Madoff the SEC is paying money to the whistleblowers, proportional to the money that they ultimately recover in fines. There's now even a proper industry of lawyers that will help you package the whistleblower case for the SEC.

Any of you out there seeing fraud - please help clear the system and get yourself some good retirement money!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> There is also an element of hubris where Germany and the EU so badly wanted to have a tech champion emerge that was competitive on a global level, where they looked the other way anytime someone raised concerns. The FT has been criticizing Wirecard for yrs..

<comment><USER19> The EU has plenty of tech companies competing on a global level. They're not the ones that you may think of but they're there regardless.

<comment> advanced-DnD German government, politicians are investors are too conservative to invest in tech companies that are not run by their peers.

<comment><USER19> The EU is far larger than Germany, though it is definitely one of the larger economic drivers. But France, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Germany too have their own contributors who quietly perform and try hard not to attract too much attention to their origins.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The denial here was pretty strong, as Wirecard was one of the few success stories of a German technology company rising into the DAX that _wasn't_ founded over 80 years ago. Sadly, this may only fuel skepticism towards tech further instead of causing the possibly necessary reforms.

<comment><USER21> [__REDACTED__]

<comment><USER22> Op was speaking in the past tense and implied that it's _not_ a succes story because of the fraud and lies. So I'm guessing you're being downvoted for overseeing that part.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I would like to see EY pay for the whole thing (since they were paid to check the books, which they obviously didn't). Also a big tree of associates and their superiors from BaFIN, Wirecard, EY, KPMG, etc. (maybe also some institutional investors, who are supposed to do due dilligence) getting fired and prosecuted for defrauding and not checking properly, please. But I am dreaming - three people will get convicted, some ten-points program will get presented to reform BaFIN so business can continue as usual.

<comment><USER15> IIUC, EY was paid to check that what was reported in the books balances to zero.

They were not paid to check that what was reported in the books was "correct".

That's not EYs job. If somebody thinks a company lies in their books, they report it to BaFIN, and it is BaFIN job to investigate. They did the opposite of that here though.

<comment><USER23> Okay, if this is true, you are saying they are making billions by running a simple algorithm? Why do they exist?

<comment><USER15> Because people make mistakes, and if you make an accounting mistake in a company listed in one of the largest indices, those mistakes are usually in the order of billions.

So it definitely makes sense to require multiple accountants to check the books of these companies _for mistakes_.

Also, running the simple algorithm is the last step of the job. When somebody gives you their books and transaction data, you need to convert that to a format you can first process, which is 99% of the work. Books, receipts, etc. come in dozens of different formats. Running the algorithm is 1% of the job.

E&G is required to check that, if there is a receipt from an external company that gave Wirecard 2 billion, and another receipt of Wirecard sending those 2 billion to a bank in the Philippines, that those are properly noted in the books and everything balances out properly.

They are required to assume that Wirecard is working in "Good faith", and this is not a German thing: everything else is just impracticable.

Even if you were to throw an infinite amount of money and time at the problem to verify that all transactions actually happened as reported, if all sides of the transaction are in on the scam (the company that gave wirecard 2 billion, wirecard, and the bank that stores them), then there is no way for E&Y to find out.

If they are aware of criminal activity, they must report it, and maybe E&Y did not wanted to be aware of that, but who knows, maybe Wirecard was just good at scamming, or E&Y was aware of that and reported it to the German SEC. We do know that a lot of people did report Wirecard to the German SEC over the last 10 years due to suspicions of criminal activity, and the German SEC, which is the only authority that can investigate Wirecard properly, did nothing about that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Even worse, the german treasury secretary Olaf Scholz apparently was already informed about the suspicions the BaFin had back in February 2019.

[https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/scholz- wirecard-101.html](https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/scholz-wirecard-101.html)

<comment><USER25> To be fair, so was literally everybody else since FT published its story about this in January 2019 and Singapore raided Wirecard offices in February 2019:

[https://www.ft.com/content/284fb1ad- ddc0-45df-a075-0709b3686...](https://www.ft.com/content/284fb1ad- ddc0-45df-a075-0709b36868db)

So this seems like a complete non-story.

<comment><USER26> This makes BaFin's and Scholze's behavior even worse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> What do you expect from a country where the largest bank has been knee-deep in money laundering scandals for years and where $36b of tax money were stolen in the cum ex scandal while politics looked away?

</comment><comment><USER28> Germany has a very high amount of corruption, even if the statistics look solid. This case of looking the other way is probably even a more benign example.

<comment><USER29> I consider myself ignorant here, but compared to what? In CPI or similar measures typically only Nordic countries come out ahead of Germany...

<comment><USER28> It is entrenched in the (political) culture of Germany. As I said, metrics are difficult to compare, so determining the degree of corruption is always a poor approximation. Transparency International usually has some good data, but they are completely off when it comes to Germany.

We have cases were public officials got bribes and weren't convicted or even didn't lose their position. Our former, former chancellor Kohl still refuses to testify against people that were involved in illegal party donations for his own party. He promised to keep it secret. The public is just told that these dirty money trails are "political reality".

But these are just the higher profile cases. It is prevalent in the industry too. That can have advantages as business do cooperate very closely with each other, but corruption is the inevitable result. A start up culture like in the US would just barely be possible, because established players will get their hands on the money that is available for investments.

Additionally, EU initiatives against corruption that mostly tried to introduce transparency about financial transactions are always rejected by Germany, with dire consequences for other countries.

Officially there is no legal term for corruption at all. Using your position of power to further personal gains is completely legal if no other laws are violated. There was "Amtsmissbrauch" at some point, but that was scrapped by the Nazis. Contemporary politicians probably think that not everything they did has been bad...

Aside from that there is also a lot of child abuse and getting dissidents declared to be insane by state authorities, but that is another story.

The CPI is a corruption -perception- index and Germany can be quite discrete about corruption and there is a tendency of people to believe the state. Neither Hitler nor the GDR-regime could change that apparently.

<comment><USER30> You're claiming CPI is off as well as Transparency International. So what exactly are you basing your claim on that Germany has a "very high amount" of corruption? Just your personal impression? Seems very prone to be biased for many reasons.

<comment><USER31> CPI is by Transparency International, and it has basically nothing to do with corruption, it is a public image index: nothing more, nothing less.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> maze-le > Sure, it's not like Russia or the CCP and you're not in danger of being > suicided if you uncover some high level dirt

You are not going to get disappered, but you are in danger of getting a fraudulent "psychiatric diagnosis" if you are a tax investigator uncovering dirt about some politicians or their cronies.[0][1] In this case the investigator got free, but I am sure there are some cases out there of people who didn't got as much publicity. Consequences for the people that instigated this? None! Nothig to see here, move on... And the so called "Psychiatrist" is still free, and had to pay a meagre 200000 in damages.

> lots of people inside and outside of Germany have no idea of how insanely > corrupt the German government and their corporate buddies are

That is so true, I always cringe when people use Germany as an example of a society that doesn't have a lot of corruption -- we have, it's just buried under lots and lots of red tape...

[0]: [https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/psychiater- muss-s...](https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/psychiater-muss- steuerfahndern-in-hessen-schadensersatz-zahlen-a-994523.html)

[1]: [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steuerfahnder- Aff%C3%A4re](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steuerfahnder-Aff%C3%A4re)

<comment><USER32> The affair you're talking about happened more than a decade ago, it was a major and pretty unique scandal in Germany, and the "expert" has been convicted not only to pay damages, but was also found to be guilty of malpractice. The state eventually offered the investigators to be re-hired.

There were no consequences for the "instigators" because, to my understanding, it couldn't be proven that there was criminal intent.

The events got plenty of media attention and high-ranking officials and judges denounced the actions of the agency.

No country is safe from corruption, but this story certainly doesn't support the notion of the country being corrupt, much less "insanely corrupt".

<comment><USER33> Is it unique? Didn't Gustl Mollath [0] also end up in a psychiatric facility and it started with him claiming that a bank was evading taxes? He was involuntarily committed to a psychiatric facility. After years in there it turned out that his claim about the tax evasion was reasonable. From what I can tell, he spent ~6 years locked up in a psychiatric facility and got €600,000 in damages.

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

<comment><USER34> Based on your "also": According to the spiegel article the investigators didn't end up in a psychiatric facility, but got a diagnosis of inability-to- work and pensioned.

The case for Mr. Mollath was much worse.

<comment><USER35> And it happened in Bavaria. We do have a certain tradition with such kind of things, it even has nickname since the Strauss days: Amigo Affairs. Most high level political corruption and fraud cases had Bavarian politicians involved. Especially when arms or taxes are involved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Softbank invested $1 billion in Wirecard just under a year ago. Son isn't having a good time around these times.

<comment><USER37> Actually it did not - SoftBank _employees_ contributed into a special purpose fund created for this investment, and that fund bought a convertible bond issued by Wirecard.

Although it has been reported as a "SoftBank investment", it's pretty clear that no SoftBank money was part of the deal.

<comment><USER38> That's almost worse. The fact that SoftBank employees were willing to pile their own money into this fraud should tell you something about the due diligence they're doing when dealing with other people's money.

<comment><USER37> I don't think you're aware of all the details here. The special purpose vehicle also structured a transaction with Credit Suisse which effectively allowed the bonds to be resold immediately to institutional investors. The fund (i.e. SoftBank employees) had no ongoing risk exposure and pocketed the pre/post-deal spread in the share price.

Matt Levine has an article about that on Bloomberg: [https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-07-02/free-w...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-07-02/free- wirecard-money-costs-softbank)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> The Wirecard stack so far:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23668365](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23668365)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23662704](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23662704)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23638624](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23638624)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23611347](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23611347)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23598824](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23598824)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23573386](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23573386)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23438323](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23438323)

This, from April 2019, reads interestingly now: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19737344](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19737344)

<comment><USER40> Indeed, after my comment on that last links thread, I took out a sizeable short against Softbank, which paid fairly well. Masayoshi San's reality distortion field has since pulled a second (or third even) act against investors, perhaps time to double down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> [https://archive.md/TTZ1H](https://archive.md/TTZ1H)

</comment><comment><USER42> Germany also did not aggressively investigate Volkswagen for the emissions scandal.

[https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-volkswagen-emissions- germ...](https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-volkswagen-emissions-germany- regulati/germany-rallies-around-volkswagen-in-diesel-emissions-scandal- idUKKCN0S91AS20151015)

<comment><USER43> The state government of lower Saxony (the state where VW is based) owns 25% of VW. I don't think that's a coincidence. Edit: looks like it's 20%

<comment><USER44> how can a company be both owned by, but also regulated by "the same" entity? that is a conflict of interest aint it?

<comment><USER45> So, we should forbid all politicians to own stock.

<comment><USER46> No, but it should be in a blind trust.

[https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/blindtrust.asp](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/blindtrust.asp)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> SEC is garbage every where. I found a foreclosed property that was lost due from a reverse mortgage and the lender wasn't in a hurry to sell for fair market value. I dove in and found out that this company is taking poor performing reversed mortgage properties that are at risk of foreclosure and packaging it as a securitized debt and selling to Wallstreet. Pretty much stamped AAA+ by Moody's filed by SEC, same ol crap from 2008 is still happening, and the house can't even sell for how much they loaned out. Depending on any govt agency to protect us is just dreams, dig into the data yourself and figure it out. Lots of people noticed issues with Wirecard, you can do the same for any US company just learn to read their 10K filings, they might lie but it's often a good start.

<comment><USER48> Not saying that your example isn't a valid critique, but shouldn't you weigh the number of problematic cases against the number in which the SEC functions well?

Moreover, certain parties would benefit from the SEC being starved of resources due to people not trusting governments in general anymore. Its a strategy that has paid out in the US in many instances.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> >Germany's SEC

Talk about a US centric headline lol

<comment><USER39> Ok, we've inlined that bit in the title.

<comment><USER49> Thanks. Was frankly more amused than complaining but I appreciate you changing it

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Smells like corruption to me. There's no way a government agency would consistently turn a blind eye otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER51> I can't read the full article

</comment><comment><USER52> Who else read it "Wireguard" and worried :p ?

</comment><comment><USER53> What do you expect from a country with more lobbyists than members of the federal parliament.

<comment><USER54> Wouldn't most countries experience this reality? Upper limit on members of a parliament is probably a couple of hundred, and lobbyists would almost always outnumber them.

<comment><USER53> I didn't say it's just in Germany like this. But espacially the Car Manufacturers are almost invincible in Germany. Their "Punishment" for the emissions scandal was a government funded exchange programm combined with buy bonus from the Goverment. Basicly they got a boost in sales for their misconduct.

<comment><USER22> Well in their defense the rest of the world was pretty harsh for them and to let the ship sink was not an option. I think if you're being blunt about the car emissions scandal one could say that each manufacturer got a hand held above their head from the country of origin. E.g. America gave GM a pass.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Also, some people praise the German government for being able to manage an economic powerhouse, but hey, if you keep your currency relatively low to others (by having them all pegged, or even better, replaced with a single currency), of course your production costs stay cheap. But at what cost to your neighbors?

[https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/26/german...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/26/germany- damaging-european-economy-raise-german-wages)

[https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/magazine/16Europe-t.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/magazine/16Europe-t.html)

<comment><USER5> Not only is your comment completely unrelated to the issue at hand, but your references are as well.

The slightly one-sided (who would've guessed from UK publication) Guardian article simply ignores the internal issues that the southern European countries have carried around for decades and doesn't even mention the success of the Baltic states (I wonder why).

The NYT article, aside from being 9 years old and written in the context of the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, didn't age well either - especially regarding its prime subject Ireland...

<comment><USER21> Most of the comments here are about German government corruption and incompetence.

The articles maybe old but the facts still haven't changed; the Euro was a bad thing (yeah, yeah, citation needed).

I disagree with your insinuation that a UK publication must be against the Euro (such a cheap conclusion!), the Guardian does lean towards the left, but it is also a pro EU.

<comment><USER5> > Most of the comments here are about German government corruption and > incompetence.

Yet neither is addressed by the articles you linked. If illustrating corruption or incompetence was your intend, then you simply missed the mark with those articles.

There's suitable, prominent and recent examples for both, but "Euro bad" definitely isn't one of them.

<comment><USER21> People praise the government for the stable economy, attributing this to competence. The truth is (in many economists' opinion) the stable economy is because of the bad construct pegging the European currencies, probably not because of good governance.

Sorry I can't provide you with proper up-to-date citations, but you declaring "that's not the case" does not make it the case. Well, me declaring "that is the case" does not make it the case either.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Clojure on Heroku with Noir and Mongo in 10 minutes - <AUTHOR> http://thecomputersarewinning.com/post/clojure-heroku-noir-mongo

<comment><USER2> I wasn't aware that Heroku currently supported anything other than Ruby or node.js, and after looking through their site I can't see anything about Clojure or the JVM either. Does it support JVM languages now?

<comment><USER3> The Celadon Cedar stack has "undocumented" support for leiningen projects (Clojure). I'm not sure about anything else though... That being said, a big selling point of the new architecture is that they should be able to add new languages/frameworks fairly easily, so maybe we'll see some other JVM languages show up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I can assure you that this will take more than 10 minutes. Don't have a heroku account or the heroku app already? There goes 10 minutes right there. Using a system slightly different than their system? Add in a few more steps to get all the prerequisites figured out.

<comment><USER5> Okay, let's see... I'm starting now, at 2:18.

First: usually don't have wget on a Mac, so used curl to download lein. Have no idea what happened, got lein: line 110: lein: command not found and a JVM trace.

Followed the directions on the lein page, which worked out identically but somehow it worked this time. Now it's 2:23.

I'm still installing the heroku gem... it's 2:27.

Hmm, that went squibby. Think I need to redo it as root. Meanwhile, I signed up for a heroku account.

See I have to give Heroku my credit card number to install the mongo add-on (...), okay...

After screwing up the syntax for the configuration file, I now have a working (?) app. It doesn't seem to do anything though, the /welcome page says "Welcome to noir-mongo-heroku". Total time, starting from scratch, has been about 25 minutes if anyone is counting.

Anyhow, I'll figure this out and thanks for getting me started! I've been wanting to do something lispy and something JVMy for a while, and now I'm all set.

<comment><USER6> Ok, don't be jerks people. Post intelligently. You have all set up first, then read and understand what you have to do. >Start the clock >Do the tutorial >Stop the clock Then and only then show your stats.</comment></comment></comment>


Ethereum Alarm Clock - <AUTHOR> http://www.ethereum-alarm-clock.com/ <comment><USER3> While this site looks interesting enough and even the comments below sort of say the same thing. What is this? I mean really. I look at this site and think. I do not know what this is. And even worse there is nothing on the site that even remotely explains it. Why was it even posted?

<comment><USER4> Its a cron system for decentralized apps. Since there's no way to run 'cron' trustlessly, this alarm clock creates an incentive to call functions at given time periods.

Its one of those things that you need some background on Ethereum to understand, but if you understand Ethereum you know why something like could be the cornerstone of a lot of apps.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for clarification. I had the same problem as OP and was literary scratching my head.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This sounds interesting, but I'm not sure I really grasp what it 'is'. Can you explain what this it to me, as if I were 5 years old? I really struggle to understand two things:

a) What this is. b) Why it's valuable.

<comment><USER7> On Ethereum there is no built in way to have a contract be called periodically, say every 5 blocks, or at a specific time in the future. This contract creates a market which allows contracts to hire people to call them at the requested time.

<comment><USER8> What is a contract, and why would people want one called periodically?

<comment><USER9> > What is a contract...

A contract is a group of functions that live in the Ethereum Blockchain (a distributed virtual machine for running decentralized applications)

> Why would people want one called periodically?

For the same reason people need cron to call periodic functions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For those of us who are new to Ethereum:

 _Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference._

[https://www.ethereum.org/](https://www.ethereum.org/)

<comment><USER11> After reading about this for the past hour or so, I found this to be the most helpful document to understanding Etherium: [https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Ethereum- Development-T...](https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Ethereum-Development- Tutorial)

<comment><USER12> Great. It's essentially a cluster computing platform with a handful of small permutations on that basic idea. Why don't these people use more accessible language? It would dramatically help increase adoption.

<comment><USER13> > _Great. It 's essentially a cluster computing platform with a handful of > small permutations on that basic idea. Why don't these people use more > accessible language? It would dramatically help increase adoption._

I guess because they aren't aware of the precursors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Ethereum's contract system has no way of knowing whether events outside its little world actually occurred. It can't tell if someone who said they'd send your alarm message actually did so before paying them. There's talk of "trusted intermediaries", but if you have trusted parties, then you don't need Ethereum.

The banks that are talking about blockchain technology for settlements have a better handle on this. If bond ownership transfers are actually recorded through a transaction on the bond blockchain, then you could have offers, acceptances, contracts, and verified deliveries without a trusted back-end service.

Conceivably you could put a music or video download service on Etherium, where you got a crypto key to unlock the content by paying for it. But Etherium can't tell if the key you got was any good, or that the file it unlocks was what was ordered.

Does someone have a convincing use case for this thing?

</comment><comment><USER15> So often Ethereum straddles the line between brilliant and terrible idea.

Outsourcing function calls to 'trusted' providers is brilliantly interesting, and a terrible, terrible idea.

What if this used for trading purposes, e.g. price reports from an exchange?

<comment><USER9> > What if this used for trading purposes, e.g. price reports from an exchange?

Timestamping trades clearly is not the use case for this. Don't blame the tool but he who uses it in the wrong way...

<comment><USER15> I urge you to read this classic, The case of the killer robot. [http://tareksobh.org/online_courses/cpe300/Lectures/Lecture1...](http://tareksobh.org/online_courses/cpe300/Lectures/Lecture11/The_Case_of_The_Killer_Robot.pdf)

I believe all engineers have a responsibility to adjust design for risks, especially unintended use cases.

Most engineers would generally agree with this principle, although I have found software engineers tend to be a little more lax than, say civilian engineers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Just one minor problem: _There are no guarantees that your function will be called_. So it's an alarm clock that might not work.

<comment><USER17> Is this because of the unknown cost at the time?

<comment><USER18> I believe the reference is coming from [http://docs.ethereum-alarm- clock.com/en/latest/overview.html...](http://docs.ethereum-alarm- clock.com/en/latest/overview.html#guarantees):

Guarantees - Will the call happen?

There are no guarantees that your function will be called. The design of this service is meant to provide the proper motivation for calls to be executed, but it is entirely possible that certain calls will be missed due to unforseen circumstances.

<comment><USER19> Strictly speaking, there is no such a thing as "guarantee". Your alarm clock may malfunction in an important moment. An asteroid can suddenly wipe civilization with all insurance providers (now that's an idea...) So you - <USER2> a strict sense of a word - always have to estimate and compare probabilities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Why is a caller pool required? You don't care who calls your contract, as I see it, nor how reliable they are in general - provided they call _your_ contract at the right time, you're happy!

Since the caller gets rewarded for making the call, the incentives should be in place to make things work without any need for centralization.

<comment><USER7> Calling contracts has to be profitable, otherwise nobody would do it.

Since there is no way to reject a transaction, every person who attempts to execute a scheduled call will have to pay some small amount for the transaction. If the service is implemented as a first call wins sort of thing, then all of the people who tried and failed would be out the gas cost of that transaction. For calling contracts to be profitable, these costs would have to be covered somehow, otherwise there is no incentive for people to execute calls.

So, this cost would have to be offloaded onto the people scheduling calls which would cause a significant increase in the overhead of scheduling a function call.

The alternative solution I came up with was having a caller pool. The people executing the calls are guaranteed a window of time where they can call the contract and also incentivized (by their bond) to fulfill that duty lest the next person in the pool claim their bond.

I'm open to alternate solutions to this problem.</comment></comment>


Introducing Wolfram Alpha Notebook Edition - <AUTHOR> https://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2019/09/the-ease-of-wolframalpha-the-power-of-mathematica-introducing-wolframalpha-notebook-edition/ <comment><USER2> It's been a long time since I used Mathematica (I still think it is an absolutely awesome product even though I'm not a huge fan of the language, to say the least), so I might not have context. Question to more knowledgeable people - is this the first sign of the recognition that the rest of the world is actively contributing to and using Jupyter (compared to proprietary and non-free Wolfram/Alpha) and a desperate attempt to stave off the eventual irrelevence?

It does look to me very similar to the SAS situation, where they continue to exist (and still hold ground in some serious places) but the rest of the world has long moved on to R and Python, and SAS has completely lost that generation...

<comment> alok-g My best understanding is the following:

Given the proprietary model and pricing, they have not seen the adoption they were hoping for for offerings like Wolfram Cloud. As you mentioned, FOSS tooling in the meanwhile has been slowly and steadily becoming good enough, though still far behind the commercial offering from them.

The current release announcement however may not be related to the above. Wolfram Language has had natural language capabilities for quite some time now, so the said release seems to be a natural extension.

It's a great product. I just hope they are able to lower the prices drastically while still hitting their margins via increased sales.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> First a paragraph about how awesome they are, then some more BS about how they came to this "revolutionary" idea.

The power of Jupyter is being able to reproduce somebody else's math and then take it in another direction. It has to be open source to actually work. I wish the best for Wolfram, but I hope Alpha Notebook won't take off in science community.

</comment><comment><USER4> Wolfram alpha was pretty impressive when it came out, and remains on of the best ways to do quick back of the envelope estimates. However, the lack of improvement over the years has been very dissappointing. My subjective experience has been that capabilities been steadily broken or removed. It used to be possible to do an ideal gas calculation for example, by just typing something like "10^10 _(boltzman constant)_ (room temperature)/(1 liter). Good luck making that work now. They also continue to persist with their nonsense subscription model where they refuse to sell institutional licenses so they can ultimately extract more money from students.

Its a shame there arent better open source alternatives yet.

</comment><comment><USER5> Its like a Hollywood pitch. "Hey Wolfram|Alpha is popular, and so are Mathematica Notebooks, lets make 'Wolfram|Alpha vs Mathematica notebooks' "

</comment><comment><USER6> Seems extremely powerful. When exactly is the cloud version coming out?</comment>


Steven Pinker's rules for writing better - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/1084490338629242880 <comment><AUTHOR> 1\. Reverse-engineer what you read. If it feels like good writing, what makes it good? If it's awful, why?

2\. Prose is a window onto the world. Let your readers see what you are seeing by using visual, concrete language.

3.Don't go meta. Minimize concepts about concepts, like "approach, assumption, concept, condition, context, framework, issue, level, model, perspective, process, range, role, strategy, tendency," and "variable."

4.Let verbs be verbs. "Appear," not "make an appearance."

5.Beware of the Curse of Knowledge: when you know something, it's hard to imagine what it's like not to know it. Minimize acronyms & technical terms. Use "for example" liberally. Show a draft around, & prepare to learn that what's obvious to you may not be obvious to anyone else.

6\. Omit needless words (Will Strunk was right about this).

7\. Avoid clichés like the plague (thanks, William Safire).

8\. Old information at the beginning of the sentence, new information at the end.

9.Save the heaviest for last: a complex phrase should go at the end of the sentence.

10\. Prose must cohere: readers must know how each sentence is related to the preceding one. If it's not obvious, use "that is, for example, in general, on the other hand, nevertheless, as a result, because, nonetheless," or "despite."

11\. Revise several times with the single goal of improving the prose.

12\. Read it aloud.

13\. Find the best word, which is not always the fanciest word. Consult a dictionary with usage notes, and a thesaurus.

</comment><comment><USER2> Is there a term (preferably derogatory) for replying to a comment/article that contains a list by extending the list? "I would add <unnecessary additions to list>" ... drives me crazy!

</comment><comment><USER3> His lecture on style is entertaining and informative: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODzR1mjB99Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODzR1mjB99Q)</comment>


Writing a Procedural Puzzle Generator - <AUTHOR> https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2019-05-14-procedural-puzzle-generator/ <comment><USER2> Simon Tatham has some advice on writing puzzle generators from his collection of games [https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/devel/w...](https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/devel/writing.html#writing- generation)

<comment><USER3> I was wondering who would've already mentioned him, I wasn't expecting it to be someone else who also used to go to the Carlton. Tech's a small world sometimes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > _And for a game like this, there 's really no point in trying to make those > puzzles by hand. That's a job for a computer._

A hundred good puzzles with a difficulty ramp-up would be way preferable than 100 randomly-generated 'probably? interesting' ones.

I much prefer puzzle games where there's a 'trick' to solving a puzzle (like the puzzlescript genre, Pipe Push Paradise, Build Me a Snowman, Stephen's Sausage Roll), or mindless automatically-generated puzzles from Simon Tatham's collection.

<comment><USER5> You mean "over", not "or"?

I've somehow caught the Slitherlink bug and solved countless Slitherlink puzzles. For that use case, I suppose automatically generated is the only feasible way to go.

Maybe it also makes sense to use computer assistance in handcrafted puzzles at times.

<comment><USER4> > _You mean "over", not "or"?_

clarification: I mean what I wrote. I tried the author's game and found it lifeless and too much work, the worst combination of attributes from my two preferred puzzles styles I described

<comment><USER6> How is this puzzle style different than the procedurally generated ones in Simon Tatham's collection?

<comment><USER4> So I guess I was pretty condensed in my post:

> _mindless automatically-generated_

the 'mindless' is: solving is mindless application of heuristics/solving rules & the challenge is not to complete the puzzle but to do it in minimal moves/time.

The author's puzzle is too hard to solve mindlessly & then doesn't generate goodwill the way a hand-crafted stumper does in the puzzlescript-type games

<comment><USER6> Ah, so you're saying, you want them to either be easier, or more clever? I guess that makes sense; I like solving Picross puzzles, but I enjoy them most when I can work through them at a rapid clip, just chasing clues and following the patterns. Harder ones can be fun, but I don't get the same sense of relaxation out of them.

<comment><USER4> I'd say 'more mechanical' instead of easier, but yeah, pretty much

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Reminds me of the puzzles for an iOS game I put out a couple of years ago: Little Broken Robots. In that game you had numbers but could "walk" out from a number that many spaces. You had to fill in all the empty spaces.

My strategy for generating puzzles was island based. I had a board checker that would scan through the grid and place all empty spaces that could be reached contiguously into a single "island." I would then pick a random island (the first island was always the full grid), pick a random tile in the island, pick a random number with a max value of either the puzzle's max (up to 8), and then drunk walk outward. In the event the drunk walk got "stuck" it would just pick a different starting tile within that island.

Recompute islands and repeat until there are no spaces left. Island with only 1 square are "dead" and just get filled in with blocker tiles.

Each puzzle had many solutions, but because there was always a "right" pregenerated solution we could give hints based on the canonical solution.

</comment><comment><USER8> I love the human responses are that the puzzles seem to have a gotcha, as if designed by a human.

"A common theme for positive comments has been about how the puzzles always feel like there's a clever gotcha in there."

I have tried generating fun minesweeper boards, where 'fun' is moves requiring multiple pieces of information to progress.

The boards I initially generated tended to be annoyingly difficult because the last moves required reasoning about 4 mines left. Assigning funness to moves requiring too many pieces of information turned out to be too difficult for humans (or me at least) to solve and thus became un-fun.

[http://danamlund.dk/funminesweeper/funminesweeper_idea.html](http://danamlund.dk/funminesweeper/funminesweeper_idea.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> This is cool! I once wrote a method for generating logical deduction problems:

[https://github.com/shaungallagher/cheryls- murder/blob/master...](https://github.com/shaungallagher/cheryls- murder/blob/master/cheryls-murder.ipynb)

As with the procedural puzzle generator, it takes a bit of sifting to find puzzles that are both possible and challenging to solve. But it gets you most of the way there!

</comment><comment><USER10> Very interesting write-up. I have ran into a similar problem with generating mazes that are interesting to solve for humans. Depending on the desired difficulty you want the path to have a certain length and a certain number of forks as well as a certain length for dead-ends.

I wonder whether omitting the grid was a conscious decision, I feel the images would be more clear with a grid of some sort.

</comment><comment><USER11> Since the game was out [1] I was hooked into the game for a solid month. It's the kind of essential and basic puzzle with a fresh and new mechanics that can pass the test of time. There should be tons of clones in mobile app stores already.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19075490](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19075490)

</comment><comment><USER12> I think theres a middleground to autogenerated puzzles, they can be curated by humans. Puzzles could be autogenerated by the author of the game, played and the good ones saved and ranked a level of difficulty.

</comment><comment><USER13> Yay, I was hoping there were some information about this out there! I've developed a few types of puzzles that I've been trying to come up with the puzzles by hand, and it's been really slow going.

I do agree that coming up with them by hand and designing puzzles with intent and possibly a theme is still probably for the best, but I think a hybrid approach, where you can use these generators to help give you ideas or starting points or fill in some gaps can be useful.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've been wondering if the book "Mazes for Programmers" might also contain some useful advice. Or maybe the algorithms can be found elsewhere, too.

It describes various strategies for proceduarly creating mazes. Perhaps many puzzles can be mapped to a maze, as the search tree for solving them would essentially be a maze?</comment>


IRS Wasn't Fond of Open Source Either - <AUTHOR> http://programming.oreilly.com/2013/06/irs-wasnt-fond-of-open-source-either.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Or a lot of other groups [1], but I thought this was the most relevant to HN

[1] www.nytimes.com/2013/06/25/us/politics/documents-show-liberals-in-irs- dragnet.html</comment>


Moin - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moin <comment><USER2> My grandparents live in Groningen (The Netherlands) near the border with Germany and saying 'moi' to everyone you meet is one of the highlights when I visit the village they live in.

PS: I think I visited this wikipedia article earlier this week, but I cannot figure out why, very coincidental, what prompted you to post this?

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm surprised to see this pop up here. Wonder why?

<comment><USER4> Trying to break up a history of posting links from the same domain with something else?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have to explain Moin so often that I started linking to this article from the "about me" section on my blog: [https://merlinscholz.name/](https://merlinscholz.name/)

</comment><comment><USER6> In southern Brazil's german towns people greet with "Moi" or "Moia". It was explained to be a contraction of "gutten Morgen".

</comment><comment><USER7> In Luxembourg [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Moien](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Moien)

</comment><comment><USER8> After 20 years, I learned what MoinMoin wiki was named after. (if I knew it, I totally forgot.)

</comment><comment><USER9> Moin moin HH!!!

</comment><comment><USER10> moin</comment>


Pogue Reviews the Nexus S - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/16/technology/personaltech/16pogue.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Nonsensically he blames the two mail apps on Android's openness.</comment>