China's Underground Wholesale Markets - <AUTHOR> http://www.youngmoneychina.com/2014/08/the-truth-behind-chinas-underground-wholesale-markets/ <comment><USER2> You know, I don't think I'm alone when I say I'd actually get a lot out of a blog post on 'how to open a foam recycling plant in China.'

<comment><USER3> Indeed, it was a fascinating article. I've read similar things from the guys at Dangerous Prototypes who shipped out there to prototype products; plenty of blog posts where they come back with a suitcase full of tactile switches or find out the best way to print onto heatshrink. Always carry a calculator seemed to be the main takeaway.

And then I read the bio and read "I bought a factory" and "For my second factory". It sounds like it's a fairly straightforward deal to do that in China (if you have the cash). I'd also be really interested to see what kind of hoops you have to go through, the regulatory process, hiring/maintenance and so on. And of course how much does it cost?

<comment><USER4> Straight forward is way way off the track. When doing business in China it's more like hunting in the jungle. There are some people better suited for the jungle than for the well structured city life, though. And because these are only a few, they have a relatively easy life in China. Don't take that as a hint that everybody can go there and buy factories like Pokemon trading cards. Even big, successful companies are constantly failing in China.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Strangely, this reminds me of some sci-fi story, "First Contract".

In a nutshell, aliens buy Jupiter (most of the mass in the solar system) for the space-colonial equivalent of shiny beads, wrecking the world economy with an influx of tech-goods. One down-on-his-luck CEO struggles to get Earth out of "third world" (solar-system?) status by--how else--using cheap labor to export kitschy crap :p

<comment><USER6> Where can I find this?

<comment><USER3> Here: [http://www.amazon.co.uk/First-Contract-Greg- Costikyan/dp/031...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/First-Contract-Greg- Costikyan/dp/0312873964)

<comment><USER6> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Thanks for the comments.

Yes there are some of these places that are not "underground" but obviously there are the suppliers and areas that are less known and more used by traders like me as opposed to the more touristy types.

Regarding bitcoin, yes it does away with the payment issues but thats not the only problem with ordering from china i guess, things like ensuring the product is the correct quality, arranging freight on large consignment orders and needing to buy from multiple suppliers are why a lot of buyers like this guy buying the tv's come to china in person.

Thanks again.

Daniel

</comment><comment><USER8> Pretty good read. I'd love to go down there and visit some of these shops, just for the hell of it. I buy quite a lot of accessories from AliExpress myself

The server seems to be down/extremely slow to load. Try the Google cache version: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:UevJZk_...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:UevJZk_wcOQJ:www.youngmoneychina.com/2014/08/the- truth-behind-chinas-underground-wholesale-markets/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca)

<comment><USER9> AliExpress seems to have many sellers selling fake (copy) products. How else a Samsung Galaxy S5 would sell for < $200 whereas the market price is between $500 and $600.?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The AHAMAY outboard motor is worth the scroll.

<comment><USER11> I have to wonder if it says "YAMAHA" on the other side, as if someone was handed a photograph of a Yamaha motor and they just flipped the artwork for the other side, not realizing it was text.

<comment><USER7> The police here ride AMAHAY bikes,

Im serious.

Its even written in the same font.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The Zhong Fa Electronics Market in Beijing looked like I imagined the DigiKey warehouse to: resistors stall, oscillators stall, FPGA stall, etc.

Photos (note: less crowded because I went on a Sunday morning):

[https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B6vx0hWnq- f-V3Z5M0FR...](https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B6vx0hWnq- f-V3Z5M0FRMUJDeWc&usp=sharing)

</comment><comment><USER13> Unfortunately, the author seems to be doing a bit of hocus-pocus hand-waving to make these "underground" malls seem like some mystical place. If it's too inconvenient for any of you to make it into China, you can always stop by Hong Kong.

In the district of Wan Chai (a fairly touristy area of Hong Kong), there's a fairly well known place known simply as the "Computer Centre". In it, you'll find two floors of a giant warehouse packed floor to ceiling with shops selling everything from a refurbished matte black MacBook from 2006 to an "iPhone 7". I do have to say that the vast majority of the products are legitimate, but there are booths which cater to the less-discerning customers. The great benefit of buying in Hong Kong is that you'll often find products from the mainland side and from the factories in Taiwan.

<comment><USER7> Hi,

Sorry if you feel like that, i thought it was pretty straight forward no bullshit article.

You can't really compare these underground markets (That are actually markets, physically under the ground, many of them illegal and only for wholesale buyers) I'm talking about to the shopping malls in Hong Kong which are just flashy shopping malls that anyone can walk in to.

But sure yeah, you can buy things from Hong Kong, its safer, you likely won't get ripped off but at the same time your not going to get rich doing it.

Thanks for the feedback though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Funny that, just purchased one of those fake iPhones. Looks and feels the same, runs an android OS that replicates iOS perfectly. Pretty good fake if you ask me. The lower price genuine android phones will dominate the lower priced foreign markets in my opinion.

<comment><USER15> Do a netstat on the open connections on your highly esteemed hardware and be amazed at the backdoors tunneling straight to china.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is mislabeled. It's about Guangdong (likely mostly Guangzhou and Shenzhen specifically), not about China in general.

Chinese markets in general are about the domestic market, with very few exceptions in some border regions (a few regularly sell to Russia and Mongolia in the northeast, Southeast Asia in the southwest, and Central Asia in the far west).

Guangdong by contrast cut its teeth on export during the glory days of the Shenzhen special economic zone which began in 1980.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_reform_in_the_People%2...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_reform_in_the_People%27s_Republic_of_China)

</comment><comment><USER17> Ha. The bit about Poland reminds me about what my dad used to do. He would drive a van delivering things to Germany/Netherlands/UK and bring it back full of second hand things to sell in Poland - usually at 4-5x the value, because after the fall of communism people would buy literally anything in any quantity. Good times.

</comment><comment><USER18> good article, thanks. What are the prices usually like on these wholesale markets, can you give some examples to get a sense of what the retail margins could be like?

Then shipping - containers? Costs? I have a feeling a lot of Chinese ebay retailers (the ones who ship from the UK, probably have a warehouse here) don't pay import duty/taxes - how do they get around it?

<comment><USER7> 30-60% depending on the product. Some stuff carries a much higher margin but requires extremely high volume purchasing and sales like phone cases for example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is exactly like alibaba in physical form.

<comment><USER4> If you follow Jack Ma, this kind of market place online was also his vision when creating Alibaba.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looking at this blog I feel a little reminded of Ultima Online. Everybody's out there doing their own little business.

</comment><comment><USER20> Very skeptical of any article that begins with "The truth behind..." Also, a little annoyed by the authors misused of "underground" here -- these malls are not underground at all, and are often far more popular than the 'real' shops.

<comment><USER7> Hi, Sorry your not happy with this blog.

I was trying to give a real straight forward look at these markets.

The markets I'm talking about are underground in both senses of the word, if you look at the first pic you will see you actually have to go underground to get inside.

Maybe were talking about different places as there are certainly touristy malls similar to this but they are a waste of time for business use.

Thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> "Like this guy below who has travelled here to buy two hundred 32" lcd tv's his boss needs for the hotel bed rooms in his latest development because there is no place where they come from to buy such things. Many times I have shown them the price in the UK on my ipad and they have been close to jumping on a plane to make a call into an Argos store."

This seems like a problem that will be solved by Bitcoin. The reason people like this can't just buy 32" LCD TV's from Amazon or Overstock right now is becausue of the payment fraud risk. Bitcoin removes that.

<comment><USER22> Why won't direct wire transfer solve the payment problem? With a sizable order of 200 TV, the cost of wire transfer is miniscule. Unless you don't want the order to be traceable.

<comment><USER23> After doing some electronic goods trading with China, I can say that the main issue is to make sure that what you receive is what you paid for.

Specs have a way of changing without you being informed. Consistency of quality is pretty random as well.

So you have to make sure you inspect the goods before you take them. Also, almost all manufacturers and distributors will make you pay before at the latest at the time the goods are departing. No 60 day or 120 days credit here.

You get the cash, you get the goods, most of the time.

If you're a larger trading company, you can have the support needed to inspect and ensure that the goods are up-to-spec.

Then there is Alibaba. Small quantities for direct sellers are usually OK (although quality varies greatly). At least you have buyer protection and the sellers are very careful about maintaining their reputation so they are usually prompt and efficient.

Finding a factory for something you want to manufacture (or for large orders) can be fraught with issues, the first of which is that I'm yet to find a factory that can honestly tell me they can't do something; whatever you ask, you'll get a "yes". If you have no production experience, you're in for a ride.

<comment><USER7> Excellent comment Renaud, you know what your talking about.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How does Google know police shooting target's name? - <AUTHOR> A close friend of mine was recently the target of a fatal police shooting (justified), but his name was never released to the press. However, when I search for his name, the news articles talking about his death are at the top. This seems like a real problem.<p>EDIT: and exact string match doesn't bring up the AMP pages that report on it. There are no strings in the article pages themselves that mention the name. <comment><USER2> I'm not sure exactly, but I suspect it goes something like this:

An algorithm they are using are finding a match in some category(ies) for you that other people have already searched or it might be an AI trained model. Like there are people you know or close to your network, that searched for the same thing and they clicked the specific link.

Now use a curl in a vpn in a different network and you get totally different results.

<comment><AUTHOR> This was my first thought as well, but it turns out not to be the case. Using curl in a VPN turns out roughly the same results. I suppose it's possible that enough people have found out and sought out the relevant news that the engine is making the association though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> When you do an exact match search by putting the name in quotes, does it bring anything? It should bring up content that contains the name and even highlight it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, and these articles don't show up. There are no strings that point directly to his name in the AMP pages that report on it.

<comment><USER3> In this case could it be matching against a cached, earlier publication where the name was (accidentally) published before being edited out in the version you are seeing now?

<comment><AUTHOR> I suppose it's possible, but I haven't seen any traces of it yet. I'll look through archive.org, but it's all regional news in Canada.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What's the real problem in this case?

<comment><AUTHOR> What do you mean? It sort of negates the implicit discretion that one would hope for by redacting the name of someone involved. Seems kind of akin to Facebook revealing the sexual identity of someone who hasn't revealed that to certain people.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is Objective-C Now Dead? - <AUTHOR>

With the advent of Swift, will Apple quit developing Objective-C and faze it out all together over the next few years? Or will it be split off somehow and given further development? <comment><USER2> The runtime is the the same, so there is no immediate need for it to die, but it will die slowly.

Kids may not remember this but you used to be able to access the Cocoa frameworks with Java...

</comment><comment><USER3> I think it will take a while. Right now I can StackOverflow my entire project, and it will be a little while before I can do that with Swift.

Seriously though, a lot of developers will try and keep it around as long as possible because of existing codebases. I bet that even includes developers at Apple.

<comment><USER4> As an iOS developer with several apps in the store and maintaining an enterprise app, I have no interest in Swift. The syntax seems like a step backwards; people complain about javascript constantly, and yet this is like a javascript mask on top of objective-c. Perhaps when it gains some popularity and people figure out what it's good for, and if it's sticking around, I'll learn it. For now I'll stick with objective-c, especially since it took like 3 years to become proficient with it.

<comment><USER5> Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't know many people that complain about the syntax of JS. Usually the complaints are about the many poor design decisions (due, no doubt, to the fact that the language was designed in only 10 days). So I don't think there's anything wrong having a syntax that looks similar to JS.

Also, though I haven't actually looked very much into Swift yet, from what I've seen, I disagree that Swift is just a syntactical mask on top of Obj-C. It looks to me to be following a similar approach to Rust and Go, in that it combines features of many different languages, object oriented and functional alike.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> No. Languages take a while to die. C is still around. There are millions of apps written in Obj-C. It will take a while for Swift to get to that level of popularity.

<comment><USER7>
      "No. Languages take a while to die. C is still around."

That is unfortunate. You can't compare a language supported by mostly one company as Objective-C against one of the most important languages around.

C is widely used and a not dead, not even wounded language. Thousand of companies use it every day in core systems, embedded systems...

I am really wondering why you have suggested C being dead or on his way to die...</comment></comment>


"Stateless" sync using version vectors - <AUTHOR> http://archagon.net/blog/2018/09/03/good-spirits-persisting-data-statelessly/ <comment><USER2> I solved a similar problem in my to-do app by just having a journal of diffs per each device. To "sync" you just upload your device's journal to a shared file store (say, Dropbox) and then download all the other devices' journals. You merge all the diffs to get the "latest" state of the database. Conflict resolution is last write wins, but at the individual property level (two devices can update a to-do task and update different properties).

This actually works perfectly fine for my needs because a single user is not likely to be modifying two tasks across two devices at the same time. It may actually work for this project as well (since it's single user). You can check out the code here: [https://github.com/allenu/slouchdb](https://github.com/allenu/slouchdb)

<comment><USER3> "Conflict resolution is last write wins, but at the individual property level (two devices can update a to-do task and update different properties)."

Depending on your use case property by property conflict resolution works great but it can also go horrible wrong with some data. Do you have timestamps on each property?

<comment><USER4> I would assume every diff has a timestamp. And since you can diff properties separately then it works correctly.

I would be curious about another scenario: what about several devices generating a new password for a website? Or instead - creating a note with the same name?

The one that is going to be saved is the last one - that is true. But it implies there's some transparent data loss in the background (you could still get those from the log, of course).

How do you deal with those "soft" conflicts in the UI? Is there any learning curve for the user to accept that any changes could be rolled back? How do you display that so that the user wouldn't assume the data was lost?

<comment><USER5> With respect to the notes of the same name - you can key the items with a generated id and "namespace" the keys with a journal specific id to avoid conflicts. In this way two notes having the same name is 'ok' as they have different keys.

It would help to have a user guided merge feature that can be manually triggered by combining items (not just on conflict)

<comment><USER2> This is exactly what I'm doing with my solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If I'm imagining this correctly, it's a lot like a Redux application flow, but with partially ordered Actions and a last-write-wins conflict resolution. I need to take a deeper look at the CRDT explorations link, but is this close to a fair analogy?</comment>


Android Gains on Apple in Mobile Web Use (quantcast source) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.quantcast.com/quantcast/2010/09/august-2010-mobile-os-share.html

<comment><USER2> Don't tell Steve jobs...</comment>


US proposes barring tech companies from offering financial services - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/15/us-proposes-barring-tech-companies-from-offering-financial-services.html <comment><USER3> Isn't a banking license mandatory for a company that offers financial services? And if so, why does it matter what else a company does as long as it lives up to regulations?

If it's problematic that a licensed tech company is offering financial services, isn't there something wrong with the requirements for acquiring this license?

Seems to me that if Facebook lives up to the regulations, it should be allowed to acquire a banking license. And if there's something problematic about this, the requirements for acquiring a banking license should be changed, and applied to everyone.

<comment><USER4> Perhaps we should start thinking about separation of powers such as modern democracy(eg separation of church and state).

While not directly comparable, it's imo a good place to start. Advertising companies perhaps shouldn't also be selling products (what's to stop them pushing their own product vs someone else's), social media vs banking (a SM can push their Bank, or similar service though we'll, that would be advertising wouldn't it).

This isn't a terribly well fleshed out thought, but hopefully a conversation starter.

<comment><USER5> This conversation has been going on for a little while already. Elizabeth Warren directly addresses proprietary markets (i.e. participating in you own) in her plan to break up big tech companies[0]. Her argument essentially boils down to either participating in someone else's marketplace to sell goods, or running your own marketplace without being able to transact within it, but preventing the ability to run and participate within a single market.

0: [https://medium.com/@teamwarren/heres-how-we-can-break-up- big...](https://medium.com/@teamwarren/heres-how-we-can-break-up-big- tech-9ad9e0da324c)

<comment><USER6> Which means steam couldn't be created now, which is a little disappointing

<comment><USER5> Not true, theoretically they'd just have to sell their own products on another marketplace.

<comment><USER7> Or offer them at a discount with little to no advertising, which is basically what they did with Orange Box.

<comment><USER8> Or split into steam-the-platform-the-company and valve-the-games-company - <USER2> if that happens I predict half life 3 really will follow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In today's age, can we make the distinction between a tech company and a non- tech company? How many B2B digital services does JP Morgan Chase offer, how many consumer-facing digital services? Does that make them a tech company as well as a financial institution?

I think this may be a knee-jerk reaction to the rise in crypto-currency adoption, and Facebook's launch of Libra.

Rethinking it, this could also be taking aim at Amazon.

<comment><USER10> My favorite (ridiculous) quote about the blurring of what exactly is a tech company:

 _"Moxy...will be a technology company that just happens to fly airplanes"_

[https://www.dallasnews.com/business/airlines/2018/09/21/moxy...](https://www.dallasnews.com/business/airlines/2018/09/21/moxy- jetblue-airways-founder-will-tech-company-just-happens-fly-airplanes)

<comment><USER11> UPS: we are a tech company masquerading as a shipping company.

<comment><USER12> From even the small scale that I use to work at - routing field service workers (cable installers, propane deliveries, alarm company installers, etc) efficiently is a "hard problem". On the scale that UPS operates it takes a lot f technology.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The title is incorrect.

"A large platform utility may not establish, maintain, or operate a digital asset that is intended to be widely used as medium of exchange, unit of account, store of value, or any other similar function, as defined by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System,"

Its specifically targeted at currencies (libra and perhaps things like xbox points?). Not all financial services.

<comment><USER14> A closer to correct tile would be "US proposes barring tech companies from offering currencies"

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I work in FinTech and I love this idea. Banks and other Financial institutions have incredibly strict data compliance and personal privacy laws that preclude them from using customer data the same way the current large tech companies do (facebook and google specifically). The laws limit both the type of advertising including the language and representations/disclaimers, as well as the scope in which their "sales history" can be used or distributed to other vendors/firms/partners.

This type of service flies directly in the face of the Google and Facebook's business models, there is absolutely a good reason to fear how these advertising giants will abuse customer financial data. These services MUST be kept separate for the health of society.

On a personal note, Facebook was just used to overthrow the democratic process in the US and the UK, possibly in other nations as well. They certainly need to demonstrate the ability to control their existing products before they are given even greater responsibility.

I love what David Marcus is doing and the idea of a crypto currency can do the world a lot of good. But not in Facebooks hands or in the hands of any other advertising giant.

<comment><USER16> Not long ago Facebook was praised especially in "White" countries media on how Facebook was helping establish "democracy" in "third-world" or "non-white" countries. Tired of this 'not in my backyard' mentality' of US polity.

<comment><USER17> You're assuming that the same people are doing the praising and complaining. In my experience, the people who don't like Facebook, don't like what they are doing anywhere. The people who like Facebook, who I assume are mainly those with a financial interest, are pretty happy about Facebook in general.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The financial services industry sees an existential threat. So they respond with lobbyists.

<comment><USER19> financial services industry? try the governments of the world. a currency outside of their control that is supported by a well known agency, in this case its obviously facebook, would be just another nail in the coffin for them.

look, government, namely the politicians, all truly upset that the facebooks, google, and more, of the world, give anyone the opportunity to get a message out. decades ago the politicians could reliably count on the press of their nations to always pony up.

they have lost control of the message mostly, they are trying to claw it back under the guise of protecting privacy , elections, children, and puppies. they damn well will get in front of any attempt which could affect their control over any means of wealth transfer. even regulated and taxed they would lose manipulation of currency to implement policy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> So then would financial services companies not be allowed to offer tech services?

And what, precisely, is a tech company? How is that unambiguously defined?

<comment><USER21> From TFA

> The draft legislation, "Keep Big Tech Out Of Finance Act," describes a large > technology firm as a company mainly offering an online platform service with > at least $25 billion in annual revenue.

<comment><USER22> Like Paypal?

<comment><USER23> There isn't a definition provided for platform utility in this bills text, but the first mention I saw of the "platform utilities" term was from Warren, which was referring to select category of companies with this definition:

      Companies with an annual global revenue of $25 billion or
      more and that offer to the public an online marketplace, an
      exchange, or a platform for connecting third parties would be
      designated as "platform utilities."

It looks like PayPal is at around 13B in yearly revenue so they would 100% not be included for revenue bar alone, but not completely sure how I would read if they fit into the category based on the rest of the definition.

<comment><USER24> A limit of $25 billion in global revenue? This reads like legislation drafted by large banks to secure their moat against newcomers with enough heft to actually make a dent in their market share. I don't think this will facilitate competition or protect the consumer in any meaningful way.

<comment><USER25> $25B is the point that Warren has been targeting for a few months now, not just for banking-related services. She says that at $25B, the company is sufficiently large that they control a significant portion of whatever industry they are as well as the economy and people's lives. The goal is to target companies with too much influence and reign them in with regulations and/or breakup. Again, this number is being used for _any_ industry, not just banking and tech (though tech does seem to be the focus at the moment).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Banks are going to love this. It's called regulatory capture: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture)

Less threat of competition just means their margins get to stay high. I'd rather be looking for ways financial regulations can encourage more players to enter the market.

</comment><comment><USER27> > "Such a sweeping proposal would likely spark opposition from Republican > members of the house who are keen on innovation"

Is this true? I would assume Republicans are more interested in protecting big bank interests

<comment><USER28> There are a lot of republicans: don't paint them with a wide brush. Republicans are in favor of small government - (less so now that they have power). The large number who believe small government even when in power are not in favor of big banks which have mostly got by exploiting government regulations that republicans oppose.

Remember though, the above is the generalization of one significant group of republicans. There are many different (overlapping) groups with different beliefs.

<comment><USER29> > The large number who believe small government even when in power

I believe you are talking fiction here. They don't institute small government when in power because the campaign rhetoric about small government that they use to get elected is completely infeasible. Add to that that there are usually many forms of spending which would be controversial to their campaign rhetoric were it logically consistent, but they like.

<comment><USER28> Don't confuse the rank and file voters for those elected. There is a lot of frustration. Politics is complex.

<comment><USER29> You said "when in power".

I humbly suggest I have been watching this trend for decades and am not confused about this disparity. The voters you are talking about by and large get suckered in by infeasible promises. Sometimes the elected officials are true believers who only fail once the reality of the situation sets in. Other times it's active deception.

<comment><USER28> Sigh...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I understand the sentiment but have no idea how this could be carried out. What happens to gift cards? What happens to in game digital currencies, what happens to ad accounts, what happens to AWS credits.

<comment><USER31> They can fine tune the law as much as they want

<comment><USER22> If they'd make a simple HIPAA-like law that just criminalizes outright the sharing of personal data for commercial purposes, we wouldn't have to worry about fine tuning to catch privacy corner cases. No one even tries to wiggle or weasel out of HIPAA violations because the law is simple and none of the big shot hospital CEO's want to spend any time in prison. All the hospital employees are well aware of what will happen if they violate a patient's privacy as well. We need that same thing for all personal data, not just our medical data.

Perfect example of politicians giving us truckloads of junk we never asked for, like this "Keep Big Tech out of Toilet Paper Printing" or whatever, while at the same time giving us absolutely no part of what we do want, privacy protection.

<comment><USER32> > If they'd make a simple HIPAA-like law

So, I've been working fairly intimately with HIPAA for close to 20 years, and I have to ask: on what planet can a law both be "simple" and "HIPAA-like", even if you are only talking about the original 1996 Act and not all the subsequent additions?

> No one even tries to wiggle or weasel out of HIPAA violations

Yes, they do (well, for privacy violations, not, say, the Administrative Simplification side, but only because that side isn't enforced with any seriousness so they don't need to bother.) That's why we got things like HITECH to make that harder.

<comment><USER22> Look man, I've worked intimately with HIPAA for a long time too. (Full disclosure, I've taken medical imaging companies public before. My SO runs a swath of hospitals down in Texas.) The reality is, dealing with the FDA side of things was about 15000 times more complicated for us than HIPAA compliance. I'm pretty sure anyone who's ever shipped a medical diagnostic product would call HIPAA compliance simple compared to what the FDA puts their products through. The regulatory affairs people at most medical companies are FDA compliance experts that know how to comply with HIPAA, rather than HIPAA experts that some how penetrate the FDA requirements. There's a reason for that.

<comment><USER32> > The reality is, dealing with the FDA side of things was about 15000 times > more complicated for us than HIPAA compliance.

[...]

> The regulatory affairs people at most medical companies are FDA compliance > experts that know how to comply with HIPAA, rather than HIPAA experts that > some how penetrate the FDA requirements.

Well, yeah, the _Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996_ is centrally a law regulating _insurance provision_ whose rules and regulations most significantly impact _payers_ ; the parts impacting providers (while there is some compliance effort required, particularly regarding privacy and security) were actually designed to _reduce_ the burden on providers; the privacy/security elements of HIPAA were included to mollify fears about the incentivizing and standardization of electronic billing transactions, they aren't the central focus of HIPAA though they are the part that (now that the "number of the beast" fearmongering has faded) remains in the public consciousness.

EDIT: And even then, the HIPAA privacy rules aren't all that simple; if you want simple privacy rules, the rules for privacy of federally-funded drug and alcohol treatment patient data are _much_ simpler, and also stronger privacy protections.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> > "A large platform utility may not establish, maintain, or operate a digital > asset that is intended to be widely used as medium of exchange, unit of > account, store of value, or any other similar function, as defined by the > Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System,"

Define large, platform, and utility please?

They do define large as 25bil.

This definition has serious issues if nothing else.

<comment><USER34> Isn't it normal to be vague when writing laws in a "common law" system like the US? I thought the practice was defended with the notion that judges will have to interpret the spirit of the law, having some flexibility with unforeseen cases. It has its pros and cons, but it seems to be an explicit design decision in the system of laws.

<comment><USER35> not a lawyer, but there is 'vague allowing room for interpretation' and 'so vague it cant be interpreted'

<comment><USER36> Well, this isn't that. The interpretation may vary slightly, but there are definitely established meanings for "platform" and "utility" for a judge to work from (though "platform" might be only the plain-English meaning, "utilities" such as power and water companies are a regulated category which can be used for reference if nothing else).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> So you simply start a different company unrelated to the tech company. Similar to the tarrifs.. Apple gets an excempt because it cannot get their parts anywhere else; because they are Apple-specific parts, manufactured there.

Governments need to take a look outside their bubble and see that they are loosing power to global companies.

<comment><USER21> > Governments need to take a look outside their bubble and see that they are > loosing power to global companies.

Look, I know Hanlon's razor and all, but thinking that there's no complicity between the US government and US companies (you say global, I say US because FAMGA, in this case) is wishful thinking.

<comment><USER38> > FAMGA

GAFAM rolls off the tong a little better and what the french use (pretty funny article about them on the french wikipedia [0])

[0]: [https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAFAM](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAFAM)

<comment><USER21> I'm Italian, so neither really sound weird to me :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I find these laws that make BS criteria like "Above X billing" to be a grotesque violation of the rule of law.

Clearly they want to apply rules to a specific company, but it would be too crude to say "FANG" and create criteria that apply only to the "FANGS".

</comment><comment><USER40> I wish the Constitution prevented laws from discriminating on the basis of size or industry, the law should only be able to determine what conduct is or is not permitted.

<comment><USER41> How would you deal with antitrust?

<comment><USER40> Don't require being a monopoly as a condition, just regulate anticompetitive behavior. For instance, I think it is a flaw that Microsoft is prevented from bundling a browser on Windows while Apple gets off Scott-free for much more egregious behavior on iOS.

<comment><USER42> This makes so much sense if it's actually possible. It also means we can keep useful companies like Amazon around while keeping them in check.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I'm curious where they draw the line for "company offering financial services". Even if Facebook falls into the big online tech bracket, they explicitly wanted Libra to be a separate entity. In the extreme case, they could hand over Libra completely to other companies and deeply integrate as a payment system/wallet for Libra that they have "no control" over.

<comment><USER21> From TFA

"A large platform utility may not establish, maintain, or operate a digital asset that is intended to be widely used as medium of exchange, unit of account, store of value, or any other similar function, as defined by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System," it proposes.

<comment><USER24> So it's specifically targeted against Libra.

<comment><USER43> I don't understand it this way. Facebook is the platform and it can organise Libra in a way that it doesn't actually operate or maintain the cryptocurrency itself.

I'm assuming that implementing a wallet is not part of operating the currency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Absolutely. The US needs to protect the banks and Visa

</comment><comment><USER45> While I don't want Libra at all... the framing of this is pretty absurd and overly broad, having not read the proposed legislation.

That said, given the path that technology as a sector has taken to censor and deplatform people based on their political alignment, I'm not sure I'm really supportive of any potential currency exchange that does not stay out of any discussions of legally protected speech. I don't agree with most of those that would be cast out, but potentially not being able to pay for housing, utilities, bills, taxes or buy food is a pretty big deal.

</comment><comment><USER46> I would be okay with them adding some oversight for online mortgage brokers. I was recently shopping to refi my home and it is dark and shady shopping for a mortgage online. Even the bigger name brokers like Loan Depot, Better, Amerisave, Rocket Mortgage were pushing documents through stages that they had no right to and were attempting to have me sign my wife's name. It wasn't just one-off, it seems to be the standard operating procedure for them.

</comment><comment><USER47> Huh? It seems every second company that has a website now tries to be a financial middleman, _not_ even counting the cryptocoins. Open an account with McBank to pay for your burger! Oy, we now have a bazillion of customers' dollars on our hands, that we get to hold for five minutes each. Better invest them in the meantime, I guess.

Anyway, the quotes in the articles are so vague that they have no chance or regulating anything.

<comment><USER48> Retail has been doing this for a long time. Every single retail store seens to have their own credit card.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Sears, the original amazon, offered many financial services.

Sears -> Discover (founded) H&R Block (located in stores) Dean Witter (acquired) Allstate (founded)

</comment><comment><USER50> In the interest of discussing the actual proposal and not the headline of this article, here is a link to the draft:

[https://www.scribd.com/document/417056845/Keep-Big-Tech- out-...](https://www.scribd.com/document/417056845/Keep-Big-Tech-out-of- Finance-Act-Discussion-Draft)

</comment><comment><USER51> Robinhood is a tech company which offers financial services. What does this bill even mean?

</comment><comment><USER52> If Facebook's Libra is successful, it would benefit every American tremendously by strengthening the American Dollar. Up until now the USA's main export has been the American Dollar.

</comment><comment><USER53> it seems that the US financial regulations are 1 big mess of patches. (For an uninformed outsider like me). For example are onion futures are made illegal, The Pattern day trading rule seems strange, gift cards etc. it seems problematic that there is a need for creating very specific regulations when it's about financial services. This seems way too specific to be able to uphold and cause uncertainty for startups. It is not possible to create a more broad regulations?

</comment><comment><USER54> They would finally be able to take care of Paypal.

</comment><comment><USER55> Would $1M per day be a large enough penalty to discourage Facebook from pursuing Libra?

For comparison, MasterCard's annual revenue is $12.5B.

</comment><comment><USER56> Consumers should decide whether they use the banking services of tech companies, not politicians or regulators.

</comment><comment><USER57> I wonder what the specific worry is? Anti-trust? How is this different than being a different payment network?

</comment><comment><USER58> Where does Bloomberg fall in this? They're a tech company, but they're also a financial company.

<comment><USER59> But their revenues are less than $25B, which is the arbitrary limit set in this proposal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> It's easy to ridicule this post, as this comment section demonstrates, but there's a point hidden behind the apparent ignorance insofar as cnbc has reported it.

Startup culture has demonstrated that they are uninterested in following and very interested in subverting long standing regulations that exist for good reasons.

It's not clear how to solve this problem, and there's a certain quasilibertarian bias that legitimizes it, as the federal register is incomprehensibly large, such that only long established networks of expensive lawyers can wrangle it, which stifles innovation.

The difficult part, however, is making the case that innovation ought to happen in this space anyway.

<comment><USER56> >>subverting long standing regulations that exist for good reasons.

Do you have evidence that they exist for good reason? It seems to be central economic planning, based on the delusional idea that cookie-cutter rules designed to regiment every class of interactions will preempt misbehavior and promote socially beneficial behaviour.

The opportunties for special interests to stifle competition with regulations are replete, so there are many explanations for regulations existing besides their being in the public interest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> let's keep financial services in the hands of Wall Street, where everyone is very reputable and well-intentioned

<comment><USER62> Wall Street just takes advantage of any financial advantage they can get their fingers on no matter the casualties.

Tech companies like Google or Facebook are actively trying to shape your opinion. Must have been an ingenious move they made to look worse than Wall Street in a few years.

edit: The unpersoning they have committed isn't a viable strategy in the financial industry. Even if players like Mastercard have fallen into that trap. But I wouldn't trust them with a penny.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> quite a few large investment banks have the refrain that they are technology companies first. will this impact them?

</comment><comment><USER64> Would this also affect Visa and MasterCard?

<comment><USER65> I have met engineers from Visa and American Express and they are as knowledgable as their counterparts in the said "tech companies" and do work on bleeding edge tech.

In other words, the proposition to bar tech companies from offering financial services is a joke. How can you tell what a tech company is? Every company uses tech in some way shape or form.

<comment><USER66> This ^</comment></comment></comment>


Every line of code is always documented - <AUTHOR> http://mislav.uniqpath.com/2014/02/hidden-documentation/ <comment><USER2> You really shouldn't have to be relying on history for all of that context. It should definitely have been a function simply called 'triggerLayout()'. Then the exact and best method for triggering layout could be put in that function and used throughout the project where necessary, and easily updated if a better method of triggering layout comes along.

Code like this is extremely brittle with or without that git history, don't rely on it like a crutch as it makes the code obscure, and updating a line somewhere may leave other similar lines updated or not. If you wanted to update the triggerLayout function, you would have to go through the git commit log for every .clientLeft line to see if that one was or wasn't used for triggering layout...

<comment><USER3> "Code happens". In reality, there's code that should have been commented all the time and even in the best codebases. I don't think there's a coder in the world who hasn't had a time when he's looked back on a piece of code and just thought "what?". If you get in the habit of keeping a well documented git history, it's an invaluable resource. I find on top of these benefits, having to explain what changes I made also helps me make smaller and easier to understand commits, which also helps with summarizing releases, finding commits where bugs were fixed or introduced, and so much more. A well documented git history is the closest thing to a time machine you can get.

Should these things happen? No. Do they happen? All the freaking time.

<comment><USER2> What? No, it's got nothing to do with commenting. It's to do with basic code design: put your stuff in functions. A line like that should have been in a function to start with, and it should have been caught during a code review or as common sense by the committer before he even committed.

<comment><USER4> Agreed. Maybe it's in some insane tight loop where you don't want a function call - in which case you comment it. My rule is that if there's something I have to put in the code that's out of the ordinary, I comment to explain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is probably not a popular view, but I don't really understand why comments are viewed by some people as a bad thing. I agree that useless, redundant comments are not helpful. But that doesn't mean all comments are useless. I don't agree that well-written code never needs comments either. Reading the code tells you _what_ it does. It doesn't always tell you _why_ it's there.

Digging through version control comments seems to me a last-ditch effort to figure out what some code is doing. If the project had any significant history you could be digging through hundreds of commit messages. Why not just put a 1-liner comment above that line and save every subsequent developer the hassle of wondering what the heck that seemingly useless line does..?

<comment><USER6> > This is probably not a popular view, but I don't really understand why > comments are viewed by some people as a bad thing.

Probably the same people think that well-written code does not need comments at all. That may be so, but well-written code is hard to come by. While this rock-star macho attitude is aplenty.

<comment><USER7> And to be perfectly honest, well written code might not stay well written as project circumstances change. Thus, documentation that can be updated often makes life easier going forward.

<comment><USER8> And even worse, sometimes code can't be well-written once you start interfacing with third party software with quirky shenanigans. We got quite some comments flying around such as "In case you are wondering: yes, this call is necessary, or this and that situation will propagate through these two libraries and break with this obscure, unhelpful error message. If you ever change this, look at those documentation files for unobvious, scary testcases to look at".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> But why would you only comment this in the git history?

Why on earth wouldn't you place this explanation _in a comment preceding the line of code itself_?

One of the best things I ever learned in programming is that you shouldn't write code to be executed -- you should write code to be read and understood by _other people_.

It's going to take me forever to read your file and understand what's going on if I have to do a git blame on every other line.

Just use short _purpose-based_ commit messages (fixes a bug where..., so now...), and then put the actual _why_ behind the implementation in the source code comments itself!

<comment> j-kidd In my opinion, the full explanation is too long to be put as code comment, but is just right as the commit message. The best way is to keep the commit message, but add a short comment like:

        // Hack to trigger layout change in latest Mozilla

Then, whoever interested in the hack can read the full explanation from the commit message.

Basically, for simple code with unclear purpose, I'd go with short comment in the code plus full explanation in the commit message. For hard-to-read code with complicated logic, I'd go with long comment in the code. Or refactoring.

Ticket description, commit message, code comment, and the code itself are all necessary to keep the codebase "documented".

<comment><USER9> I'm genuinely curious -- what is the thinking behind "too long to be put as code comment"? I've never heard that before.

It's not like we're conserving paper. And syntax highlighters helpfully give comments different colors so you can skip over them while reading.

Personally, I've never once wished that a particular piece of code were _less_ commented, but there are hundreds if not thousands of times I've wished that there was _more_ explanation, or any at all.

<comment><USER10> Long comments get out of date quickly because it isn't clear how the comments relate to the code on a quick scan. In this case, you want a quick note as to why the code is there. You can add external references if needed.

You don't want to make someone who is editing code stop to think about how it affects the comments.

<comment><USER11> >You don't want to make someone who is editing code stop to think about how it affects the comments.

What's the point of comments then if your general rule is that it should be fine to edit code without changing the comments?

<comment><USER10> > What's the point of comments then if your general rule is that it should be > fine to edit code without changing the comments?

Not without changing the comments. Without stopping to ponder how two paragraphs of comments fit into the code changes. The comments (aside from API documentation) should annotate the code, not the other way around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It sounds like "this.get(0).clientLeft" should have been a single-line function named something like triggerLayoutInMozillaAndFirefoxToFixAnimateForNewDomElement, or if you don't like massive function names, a comment that says that.

Spelunking through commit history shouldn't be necessary learn the intentions behind those kinds of actions.

<comment><USER3> It doesn't matter if it should have been commented or not. The reality is it wasn't. If you get in the habit of explaining your changes in git messages, every line change will have documentation, or at least an owner so you can ask them about it.

If you do need to go git spelunking to figure out what's going on, you'd have to be insane to not add a comment afterwards.

Either way, "shoulda coulda woulda". If the code doesn't have a comment, it doesn't have a comment. These things happen, and you can't change the past. But with git, you can relive it.

<comment><USER13> Reality could also have been: the commit message wasn't as helpful. Or the message would have been but the file was moved, copied, the indentation level changed, or any number of things that destroys the connection to the original comment. The article sounds like it advocated treating the commit message as the primary means of documentation - which is hardly a good practice. Meaningful identifiers/function names, and comments for non-obvious code should come first. If someone prioritizes elaborate commit messages and a clean history _before_ good code, the techniques outlined in the article might be useful, for sure. But it says: "A project's history is its most valuable documentation." \- which is, frankly, not true for most projects. And if it is true, it's a bug, not a feature.

<comment><USER3> I did not interpret the article as being git should be a primary source of documentation at all. I have a hard time seeing which part of the article implies that. I think he's just pointing out how it's another tool you can use.

<comment><USER14> From the article:

 _A project's history is its most valuable documentation._ (...) _The quality of this documentation, however, relies heavily on the diligence of the people involved while writing commit messages._

Requiring such diligence when writing commit messages, while at the same time allowing the same people to write opaque code as shown in the example, would be absurd.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This would only seem to work for relatively fine grained commits or projects in maintenance mode.

Apart from that, to rigorously apply it would break the author's own advice or common sense source control practise - suppose I make 4 changes in separate files to fix a bug. Do I check them in separately so that I can put my pseudo code comments into the revision history? Now I have broken the atomicity of my revision history. If I check them in all together do I type a whole essay into the revision history about why each change was made in each file? It'll quickly all fall apart.

It also relies on the reader _recognizing_ that they need to be curious about the code here. What it if didn't look so curious? It could easily get cleaned up or modified without a comment to alert the reader.

For people and projects in specific contexts it can work but there are plenty of situations where this is a terrible idea.

<comment><USER16> Totally agree with the "might me good for maintenance mode" sentiment. I'm working on a pre-1.0 project. I'm thinking about the few commits where I was first implementing localStorage caching. Tons of files were effected on each commit. If there was a particularly tricky line in there (there were several), how would I have specified it in a commit? That'd be extremely hard to read when compared to the alternative of _putting the comment above the code_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I agree with the author that historical information about how a codebase has evolved is important. I would also argue that code comments are not always the best place for this historical information (if you don't know about the deep past of a bit of code, then why would you want to see a code comment describing some change to it?).

I suggest we take a step back and ask if modern version control is the best way to store historical information. Modern version control systems (git, mercurial, etc.) were built within the last decade or so but they were built with the same constraints as the original version control systems of the 1980's. They are optimized to be disk efficient (and don't get me started about their command line interfaces). This is crazy!

We should store much more about the programming process than the data gathered if and when a developer chooses to commit. We should record it all- every keystroke. No human generated source of data is ever going to fill up our hard drives or the cloud. Don't optimize for the disk!

This data can be used to replay programming sessions so that others can learn exactly how the code evolved. Developers could then comment on the evolution of their code. Think of this as a modern commit message. I am working on a project that attempts to do this:

[http://www.storytellersoftware.com](http://www.storytellersoftware.com)

<comment><USER18> I don't see it as optimizing for disk, I see it as optimizing for time, by presenting relevant events vis-à-vis showing every irrelevant detail. Much like a movie or novel doesn't usually show its characters going to the bathroom, neither should my coworkers have to sift through my misspellings, dumb decisions and irrelevant debugging.

I agree that we could benefit from saving more (e.g. relevant exploratory sessions, though those tend to happen in the REPL, not in the code editor), but I disagree with an indiscriminate approach.

<comment><USER19> Storyteller has ways to filter out your misspellings, dumb decisions, and irrelevant debugging.

While the process for filtering out dumb decisions and irrelevant debugging is a little convoluted at present, filtering out misspellings is really easy if they're made within X seconds (where X is defined by you). Because Storyteller currently only supports IDEs (specifically Eclipse, hopefully with support for Visual Studio soon) you should be able to notice those quickly.

As for processing out dumb decisions, you don't really know they're dumb until after you've made them, and someone new to a part of the project might also have the same idea you had when made those decisions, and seeing that you made them, hopefully coupled with some comments on what went wrong with those choices could push them in a different direction, or help them fill in a piece you were missing. Watching those past decisions could also help you in the future when you come back to some code and can't remember what you did before or why.

Exploratory sessions only happen in REPLs when the language has a REPL. Considering that Storyteller's written in Java, has support only for an IDE that was initially built for Java, and has been written by a bunch of college students and one professor at a college where most CS courses use C++ or Java, REPLs aren't really things most of us use (I want to change that, but there's only so much you can do through an extracurricular organization).

Plus, we're developers. Why store only some data when you can store _ALL THE DATA_!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > var one = "foo"

      , two = "bar"

      , three = "baz"

Agree with the author that this is easier to change, and in JS it will keep you from accidentally leaving a trailing comma. That being said, I find it to be very unreadable(which is where most your time will be spent) and most text editors/IDE's make it a burden to work with.

<comment><USER21> While I agree with making code editable in single lines as much as possible, I think this is a particularly bad example. I do prefer the comma first style for arrays and objects, but not for variable declarations. I used to use this exact style a couple years ago, but now I prefer to explicitly declare every variable with `var` to prevent any possible, syntactically correct, error that would result in a global variable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Checking the history is much slower than a comment right there in the code. Repeat this a thousand times and you've lost precious time hunting for information.

</comment><comment><USER23> Great article! Mislav definitely knows his git.

What he didn't point out though is that he was actually the one that contributed that code in the first place.

[https://github.com/madrobby/zepto/pull/586](https://github.com/madrobby/zepto/pull/586)

[https://github.com/madrobby/zepto/commit/3d92f20966aa02dee82...](https://github.com/madrobby/zepto/commit/3d92f20966aa02dee8249daaefc5f8b6623e00de)

As others have commented, long explanations like this have no place in commit messages. Comments should always be used to explain what you're doing and why you're doing it. Commit messages should simply summarize what you did.

A better commit message would have simply been:

fix animate() for elements just added to DOM

See included comments for explanation.

</comment><comment><USER24> It's a good example of a place where a comment should have been added. The user got lucky because the line's last commit happens to contain the meaningful explanation. He could also have stumbled along a formatting change, variable name change, file rename. The spelunking becomes harder than just reading the comment that could have been on top of that line.

</comment><comment><USER25> Here's me doing the HN thing and analyzing the code sample rather than the article itself. Sorry in advance.

But if you're going to do this trick and you use a code compiler of any sort, you'll need to assign the value of that clientLeft somewhere. Otherwise your compiler will notice it not doing anything and helpfully optimize it away. So your users in production will see your layout bug and you'll never be able to reproduce it in development.

JavaScript is awesome.

As to the article itself, I'd prefer to see a comment on a line as wacky as this one. It's one well-intentioned lop away from vanishing from that git blame entirely, and then six hours of debugging and research away from finding its way back into place.

Trying to sift through file history to understand what's going on is hard enough on code I wrote myself only a year ago. I wouldn't want to rely on it as the only way of digging into a large shared code base. Yikes.

<comment><USER8> > But if you're going to do this trick and you use a code compiler of any > sort, you'll need to assign the value of that clientLeft somewhere. > Otherwise your compiler will notice it not doing anything and helpfully > optimize it away. So your users in production will see your layout bug and > you'll never be able to reproduce it in development.

This optimization is only possible if the compiler is able to deduce this as a useless function call. In order to do that, the compiler has to deduce (i) that the result is not used, and (ii) that the function has no side effects. (ii) can be very, very hard to deduce.

<comment><USER25> I don't disagree. But I post this because it actually happened to me. Googles closure compiler to be specific. The only way to make it happy was to actually assign the value to the window scope, where it couldn't know whether the value was ever used.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> You live in a world of wonder and magic. If someone puts that code (without comments) probably, the same person won't give such a detailed commit message. Good luck in wonderland.

</comment><comment><USER27> It would be useful to make commit comments on code as you make changes that can be used by SCMs and IDEs. See the history of a method change by change complete with the relevant comments. And from an SCM, click on a comment and select from a list of code changes.

And you avoid having to write your comments when you commit. You'd do it in the code when you are more focused on the change.

Even better would be detecting when you are changing code and prompting for the comment or let you select from recent comments.

Then on the SCM side when you commit, each comment could be handled as a separate commit.

Any IDEs already doing some or all?

</comment><comment><USER3> This is exactly why I'm such a bastard when it comes to git history. A clean history isn't something that just gets filed and disappears forever. Unfortunately, lots of people think it's ok to use a message like "fixed stuff". Don't even try that in my codebase though.

<comment><USER28> Or totally empty commit messages.

<comment> j-kidd Here: [http://trac.imagemagick.org/log/](http://trac.imagemagick.org/log/)

<comment><USER19> That pains me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Mostly a good article. I would put more emphasis on using history/annotate ("blame") for timeline and _summary_ information, and using the inline comments for _detail_ information.

Others have mentioned the "no comments" culture. To them I say: each file/class and each function/method/subroutine should have a summary comment, so I can know to skip over the irrelevant modules when I am looking for how to do something. I don't want 80 to 100 character identifiers (getMatrixResultButNotCornerCaseANorCornerCaseB or some such ridiculous name), but I do want a bit more summary than the name, contained within a statement of purpose comment.

</comment><comment><USER30> When I'm evaluating a project on GitHub, one of the first things I do is walk through the commit history. The info in there is invaluable IMO for getting up to speed on a codebase fast.

</comment><comment><USER31> Sometimes it happens that code is moved between repositories in a way that doesn't preserve each single commit.

DVCSs are designed to overcome this problem, and there are bridges between various DVCSs, but sadly this still happens.

So, while mastering '<yourvcs> blame' is certainly useful, you shouldn't rely too much on it, and write readable and well documented code.

</comment><comment><USER32> For fun I just created a Sublime Text 2 plugin that lets you bring up the git blame->show for selected line(s) of code with a simple shortcut (cmd+shift+m on Mac, alt+shift+m on Linux/Windows): [https://github.com/cbumgard/GitCommitMsg](https://github.com/cbumgard/GitCommitMsg)

</comment><comment><USER33> Every line of code is always documented (if it's in a VCS and the commit message is good)

</comment><comment><USER34> Interesting concept. Coincidentally, I wrote a gem recently that serves the same function as the git-overwritten script at the end: [https://github.com/ilyakava/stefon](https://github.com/ilyakava/stefon)

gem install stefon

</comment><comment><USER35> Extending code review to commit messages is a big help.

If I can't understand from the commit message, what the change is trying to achieve, I won't even look at the code. Instead I'll ask to clarify the commit message first.

</comment><comment><USER36> I wish my current coworkers wrote any comment in there commit message...

<comment><USER37> I wish management allowed comments. Commits are work item number and title or work item only. Comments in code are actively removed.

<comment><USER29> Fascinating: they care enough to consider such things, but they have made an insane decision.

Good luck there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Perforce time lapse view is similarly amazing.

</comment><comment><USER39> "is it safe to change or remove that call in the future?"

If you remove the line you should end up with a failing test.

<comment><USER40> Good luck writing a test that makes sure that the CSS animations get properly triggered on select browsers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> good work. not enough people who use source control really seem to know what its for...

whilst i'm a big fan of making code good enough to read - and learning to read code properly - its easier to not have to do both

</comment><comment><USER42> Is this Javascript? Why is there no semicolon?

<comment><USER29> Despite advice to the contrary, Javascript is a line oriented language and you only _need_ the semicolon if you intend to stack a second statement on the same line (kind of like colons in BASIC)

Yeah, I know that's blasphemy, but it's also true: Javascript works just fine WITHOUT all the extra semicolons. The semicolons are only needed in the minds of those who have been misled to believe that they are. One should learn what JS thinks are complete statements -- where to wrap longer statements without causing an error -- as Javascript WILL end statements without semicolons. Better to just never use semicolons in the first place.

And this is all off-topic...</comment></comment>


WebLisp.net - An Online Interpreter for the WebLisp Programming Language - <AUTHOR> http://weblisp.net/ <comment><USER2> See also Parenscript -- <http://common-lisp.net/project/parenscript/> \-- which is a CL library that generates Javascript source code from s-exps.

</comment><comment><USER3> There doesn't seem to be any xml / html generation libraries and they call it weblisp?

<comment><USER4> I could be entirely "off the mark" here but I think it is a javascript lisp interperter which clearly has hooks into the dom directly. So it's more of a nifty client side tool. I think the potential for writing some cool games with this + canvas is huge. But really just writing games with js+canvas is huge, this would just make it feel a little nicer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> this is really cool - the canvas integration is superb. Does anyone know what direction this is meant to be heading?</comment>


Sorry AirBnB Hipsters, I'll Take Health and Safety Over the Cult of Disruption - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/25/fawlty-logic/ <comment><USER2> FUD. I'll summarize for you below. I call it FUD since the author never provides any sources or anything to actually back up what he writes.

"don't want to be burned alive by faulty wiring"

"lack of fire exits or basic electrical safety"

"hell of noise and violence and shady goings"

"don't want to be robbed, or scammed or murdered"

"credit card and not have that card cloned"

"drug-addled European backpackers armed with camping stoves"

"used by gangsters and slum lords to drive families from their apartments"

"fleece tourists into spending their vacations under unsafe roofs"

<comment><USER3> You're skipping the one very good and valid point he makes in the article, which is that the bill actually has an exemption which pretty much permits services like AirBnB to exist, if not thrive. Basically, short term rentals are acceptable as long as the owner is present... this means less competition for your average AirBnB user.

Given this exemption, it makes me question why exactly AirBnB was so up in arms about this, especially with their rhetoric being centered on protecting the little guy. That being said, I love the service, though if I had more cash I'd take a hotel every time.

<comment><USER2> Also this: "absent owners can lend their rooms, but are banned from taking money".

This means people that go on vacation cannot take in renters.

(Sorry, your point was a bit lost in all the FUD that was in that article.)

<comment><USER4> but apartment swaps are allowed

<comment><USER2> I think the chances of people doing an apartment 'swap' for their out of town/country vacation is pretty slim.

2 people going in the exact opposite direction and wanting to living in the other person's home. Seems slim chance to me unless those people knew each other in advance.

add - bluesmoon, learn something everyday. Though I think not all everybody wants to open their own apt for swap and instead would rather rent someone's for a week or 2.

<comment><USER4> It actually happens fairly often on couchsurfing. Couple A from New York wants to spend July in San Francisco and swaps with Couple B from San Francisco who wants to spend July in New York. I've seen it happen with entire families too.

Less likely to work internationally, but domestically, it happens. It's the key exchange that's the hard part, but the safest is to leave the key with a neighbour and then call them from the other side to give them the okay.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You know you've made it when you become material for linkbait.

<comment><USER6> Yep - I think Paul Carr's schtick since he started there has just been to take the most outrageous position possible to try and shock, awe, and offend his way to page views. It's probably working to some extent, but at the end of the day there isn't any substance to it - it's just a cheap trick.

<comment><USER7> I think he means AirBnB...

<comment><USER8> Why is parent being downvoted? PG says "material for linkbait" not "the author of linkbait": it's a mildly obtuse compliment for AirBnB. The grandparent misreads this, and someone helps him understand better, and gets slammed for it? C'mon, people.

<comment><USER9> Barmstrong was making a legitimate comment about troll tech journalists, in a legitimate place (i.e. following its mention), which Projectileboy seems to have grossly misinterpreted.

Both PG's comment and Barmstrong's make sense and flow to me; the "yep" signifying agreement with the AirBnB complement before extending commentary on the linkbait aspect: an addendum if you will. I don't see why, or how, Barmstrong's reply to PG would be read in the manner Projectileboy objects to - perhaps the dash could lead to such a reading but it's fairly difficult to arrive at.

<comment><USER7> Holy cow, guys... I just thought (perhaps mistakenly) that the commenter had missed the connection to AirBnB. Not a big deal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> let me paraphrase the article: "GET OFF MY LAWN YOU PUNK KIDS"

full disclosure: the startup I work at uses AirBNB when we bring in potential new hires, unless they insist on a hotel. We have never had anything but the absolute best experience, and I haven't spoken to anyone who has used it that didn't become an evangelist for it. But I guess paranoia and hypothetical boogy men trumps empirical data over at tech-crunch.

<comment><USER11> I wonder how you phrase the offer.

If I were planning to interview with a company and they suggested I use the service, I would get the impression the company is cheap beyond practicality, and find a way to politely back out of the interview.

<comment><USER12> I would think the same.

There's obviously a market for people who don't mind sleeping with strangers but I'm definitely not in it. I'm way too paranoid that I would get robbed.

The credit card cloning example from the original article would probably be my biggest fear. I'd be checking my credit card purchases multiple times a day for weeks I'm sure. While actually there I'm sure I would put my wallet, phone and anything else that's valuable in a bag and sleep on top of it. It wouldn't be a very relaxing night's sleep just before an interview.

On the other hand, hostels tend to be cheaper than AirBnB and I have no problems sleeping there.

<comment><USER13> You're scared of getting robbed by a middle-class condo owner, but you'll happily share a hostel room with 6 traveling youths?

<comment><USER12> Most hostels have dorm and private room options. I just get the private room. It's more expensive than the dorm but way less expensive than a hotel. I've never slept in a hostel that only offered dorm rooms.

I'm just as paranoid about the dorm option.

<comment><USER14> Just curious, is this true mostly in a certain region or all over the world? Also, what kind of price different should I be expecting between the dorm and the private room?

<comment><USER12> I'm not sure, I've mostly only stayed in hostels in Canada. The last one I stayed at in Ottawa had rooms for 25$/night in the dorm or 60$/night for a private single bed room.

<http://www.ottawahostel.com/>

<comment><USER15> In most of Europe it seems ~20 euros/night for a dorm bed is about the standard.

I'm used hostels (& couch surfing) quite a lot and never really had problems, but I guess it depends on the region you are traveling in.

Tallanvor's approach seems unnecessarily paranoid to me, but I don't know where he travels too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm sorry, but his claims seem to apply to a lot of hostels but not to any of the airbnb homes I've been to. Public health concerns, egregious conditions, credit card fraud ... If things like this happened in an airbnb home, they'd get a bad rating and a bad comment explaining what went on, effectively ruining the rest of their business. Also, payments happen through airbnb so that also gets rid of a lot of problems and ripoff issues. There is a world of difference between the hostels / illegal hotels mentioned and airbnb.

<comment><USER17> For hostels, there are sites like hostelbookers.com and hostelworld.com, and reviews matter a lot with those sites. If you choose only top reviewed places, you will get good service for sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> You're just as likely to have unsafe wiring in your leased apartment as w/an AirBnB situation. Same goes for most of the stuff he said.

The article doesn't make any sense to me.

</comment><comment><USER19> _Disclosure: I like hotels a lot – and I've spent much of my life in them. Both of my parents are career-long hoteliers, first managing large corporate chain units and now owning their own hotel in the UK._

Why would you even bother taking the opinion of such a biased source seriously?

<comment><USER20> Well, for one, because it's an _opinion_... He's overly dramatic in his post and he doesn't present a lot of facts, but I think he's entitled to his opinion, especially as long as he's honest about his bias...

<comment><USER21> "Opinions are like assholes, everybody's got one"; and this one really stinks. EDIT- "this one" refers to the original article, not the parent comment; sorry for any confusion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Even by the standards of Techcrunch, this is a particularly egregious exercise in begging the question.

</comment><comment><USER23> "Sorry AirBnB Hipsters, I'll Take Health and Safety Over the Cult of Disruption"

And you were free to do that already, why force everyone else? (what is that again hotel lobby?)

</comment><comment><USER24> _Because I don't want to be burned alive by faulty wiring. Because I don't want to be robbed, or scammed or murdered. Because I want to pay by credit card and not have that card cloned. Because I want legal recourse if something goes wrong._

That government licensing will protect you from these better than the market is an untested assumption.

<comment><USER25> _That government licensing will protect you from these better than the market is an untested assumption._

Actually, that isn't true.

Many building code laws (and by extension hotel laws requiring fire escape access etc) were enacted because of large scale urban fires (eg [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_fire_safety_legislat...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_fire_safety_legislation_in_the_United_Kingdom#England), <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Baltimore_Fire#Legacy>).

In general, building codes and related safety regulations for hotels have strong scientific and engineering testing behind them.

It's true that these regulations are often imperfect. But it is also true that they have been tested and proven to be better than the absence of them.

<comment><USER26> Sometime, the government just take the regulation code from private sources, such as Underwriter Labs. In fact, UL sets the standard from building code, household checmical, and fire-fighting equipments, and more.

However, safety, like anything else is a _tradeoff_. There is no such thing as a perfectly safe building. Even if you were to make it totally safe, it would be too expensive to use or construct.

You want safety? Just how much are you willing to pay?

<comment><USER25> Exactly - I couldn't have said it better myself.

Given that safety costs, it is usually appropriate that government regulates the minimum acceptable standard.

Beyond that, the market decides (see some active safety features in cars etc)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> <http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/21/airbnb-brian-chesky/>

Airbnb's founder is _himself_ living on Airbnb for the next coupla months (or even indefinitely - though he doesn't say). If that isn't a plus for dependability, I don't know what is.

Edit: here's the first blog post - <http://blog.airbnb.com/living-on-airbnb-0>

</comment><comment><USER28> I wasn't aware that the law has an exemption for short-term lets if the owner is present -- which is almost all AirBnB lets that I've seen, isn't it?

<comment><USER29> > which is almost all AirBnB lets that I've seen, isn't it?

That's more Couchsurfing's territory. There are plenty of shares on AirBnB, but whole apartments and even buildings are commonly listed too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I agree with the author, but he definitely could have gone about his argument a bit more civilly.

As an example of the type of people that would/will abuse AirBnB and similar services I submit this article describing my last landlord: <http://www.tenant.net/Other_Areas/Massachusetts/jaffe.html> . It is dated 1994, but they are still up to the same tricks 16 years later (I lived in one of their houses for the last year). I can't imagine the field day they would have if they knew about AirBnB and the like.

</comment><comment><USER4> FWIW, the bill still allows couchsurfing where exchange of money is strictly prohibited by the terms of service.

</comment><comment><USER31> You go right ahead and do that - great thing about a free market, it makes room for everyone.

</comment><comment><USER32> Wow...talk about a flamebait article. This one was so bad that I finally went ahead and actually added an entry in /etc/hosts for techcrunch.com pointing to 127.0.0.1, something I had been "threatening" to do for a while.

</comment><comment><USER33> first response, why is the main character from "Up in the Air" writing blog posts.

second response, Techcrunch has become the Fox News of technology blogs.

</comment><comment><USER34> Is this guy for real? I understand the need for minimum safety standards but the ban against AirBnB and their ilk goes a bit far.

</comment><comment><USER35> i find it hard to take this angry rant seriously.

if it were much more calm, with rational arguments and justifications, i might actually agree, or at least agree to disagree.

</comment><comment><USER36> What the heck is NSFW about this?

<comment><USER37> The techcrunch section is called NSFW, it is a weekly writeup about something or other.</comment></comment>


Clojure/West 2014 videos on YouTube - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/playlist?feature=c4-feed-u&list=PLZdCLR02grLp__wRg5OTavVj4wefg69hM

<comment><AUTHOR> Really pleased to see these up so quickly. I was very jealous of all of the people tweeting from Clojure/West and was expecting to have to wait a month or two for the videos to show up gradually on InfoQ. The ClojureScript stuff in particular is moving so quickly right now that waiting a couple of months might make some of the content invalid, at least in terms of library specifics.</comment>


Follow button ruins ecosystems? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.kornar.com/?p=36 <comment><USER2> i actually don't agree with this, becuase i think a lot of apps have some sort of reputation, like youtube has views and likes, its the same with the followers number!! they need to be thier to make twitter, instagram and picplz succesfull!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> im not trying to put to disrepute the success of followers its been proven it works i am merely suggesting that the concentration based on it has significant consequences</comment>


I'd like my dev friends to submit their apps to the Google Apps Marketplace - <AUTHOR> http://thesethings.posterous.com/web-developers-get-your-existing-app-into-the

<comment><AUTHOR> (I don't work for Google or anything. I just think that Google didn't do the clearest job of explaining the opportunity.)</comment>


Genesis Capital Crypto Lending Firm Reports $870M in New Originations in Q3 - <AUTHOR> http://www.koinsbook.com/xinwen/blockchain/2861.html <comment><USER2> Who actually uses services like this, honestly?

Most people I know with significant wealth and knowledge of crypto keep their money as far away from anything crypto as possible.

</comment><comment><USER3> This site is just horrid on mobile. Unusable. Maybe investigate getbootstrap.com.</comment>


Apple Says Apps Must Now Disclose Odds for Loot Boxes - <AUTHOR> https://kotaku.com/apple-says-itunes-apps-must-now-disclose-odds-for-loot-1821497923 <comment><USER2> This is nothing but lip service. The problem with loot boxes isn't that there are unfair odds - most companies use consistent odds for their loot boxes. There are some shady practices where the odds change on a per-player basis, but that's really beside the point. Apple is willing to "fix" this because it has zero effect on their bottom line.

The real problem is that players are getting _tricked_ into installing a "free" game but later sucked into gambling once they're invested and addicted. Showing the odds somewhere in the app doesn't change this deceptive and unethical practice.

What they should really do is force apps to disclose the maximum amount a player can spend, front-and-center in the app store. And then also display other statistics - like the ARPU and ARPPU (average revenue per user, and average revenue per paying user). And then allow us to filter apps based on that criteria. If it were visible enough, and filterable enough, we'd see the developer landscape change to make games that are better for players.

<comment><USER3> > What they should really do is force apps to disclose the maximum amount a > player can spend, front-and-center in the app store. And then also display > other statistics - like the ARPU and ARPPU (average revenue per user, and > average revenue per paying user). And then allow us to filter apps based on > that criteria.

Yes, yes, yes, yes.

I recently quit Hearthstone once I realized that the game was slowly sucking me into paying more. It's a great game. But they obfuscate the true cost of playing.

In that digital card game, players want specific cards to build a specific deck. But the manner in which you acquire specific cards is expensive, and the expense is heavily obfuscated. I doubt that most players understand the real cost of playing.

To get a card, you need to buy a card pack. Card packs have 5 random cards (with a rather complex algorithm behind what cards are in a pack). These cards can be duplicates, which you could transform into "dust" (a kind of currency) to buy the card you actually want. The true cost of buying a specific card that you might want depends on a bunch of factors, such as how many duplicates you already have.

In Hearthstone and other "free to play" games, the true cost of playing is nebulous. The game acquires players partly by advertising that playing is free. However, in reality they are likely among the most expensive games you could play.

The cost of acquiring a complete set of all cards in a Hearthstone expansion is around $400 [1]. Which is insane. In order to play competitively, you probably need half that -- which is still around $200.

If the costs were clearly and honestly labeled, players wouldn't play. So they aren't.

I hope the industry self-regulates, like they did with the ESRB and censorship. I hate the direction the industry has taken here.

1\. [https://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2017/04/14/it- costs-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2017/04/14/it- costs-400-for-a-full-ungoro-expansion-card-set-in-hearthstone/#47580e0644fe)

<comment><USER4> To be fair, Hearthstone is one of the better value games! It is still a "collectible" card game, from a very reputable company, with a lot of expected longevity -- based on a huge universe. You get to use your cards against other players, etc They also give you fairly consistent means of getting free cards.

There are so many Gacha style games that are WAY more of a rip off than that. They get you sucked into the game, then the only way to progress is to become a whale. It is awful

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure that "Hearthstone is less predatory" is a _fair_ argument. The criticism against Hearthstone is still valid, even if there are other offenders.

<comment><USER4> I see hearthstone cards as more of an expansion pack per say, its also got a long established history in the physical space (games like Magic, etc)

There are huge tournaments every month, a huge twitch scene, etc

Its a legit game and most people know what they are getting into.

DBZ Dokkan battle on the other hand....

<comment><USER6> ???

Tournaments or a huge Twitch scene don't make it legit or not. They tell us something about a game's size or impact.

Small (indie) games can be loads of fun. I had more fun with a simple game like Airmash [1] than I ever had in WoW because that game is fair, and you need skill. You can't grind towards an advantage. If you did, you can lose it very quickly. Evens playing field.

Blizzard games, with the exception of Starcraft II, are made for carebears with too much time who want to feel good beating players who put less time in the game not by becoming better (as games used to work) but by getting better gear/equipment/cards/characters. A dog eat dog world, essentially. I've learned and adapted to find _that_ evil.

[1] [https://airma.sh/](https://airma.sh/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> China enacted a law in May which requires games selling loot boxes to reveal the odds.[1] This new Apple policy will help their compliance. I don't recall a "do you have loot boxes with unpublished odds" check box anywhere in my iOS app information, so it seems that Apple needed to do something to filter offenders from appearing in the Chinese app store.

[1] [https://zhugeex.com/2016/12/chinas-new-online-gaming- regulat...](https://zhugeex.com/2016/12/chinas-new-online-gaming-regulations/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting. Is Apple doing this primarily to appease the Chinese government or they care about us consumers?

<comment><USER8> The fact that this policy applies to every App Store and not just the Chinese one should answer your question.

<comment><USER9> Enforcing it globally is probably just easier, especially since other countries may end up passing similar laws.

Honestly any transparency in this area is probably a nice win, even if this isn't as good as banning the things are fixing a lot of the other scummy practices out there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> People don't care about odds, or the odds on the back of lotto tickets would reduce gambling.

Even if you do know the odds, do you even know the cost of the loot box? Say the loot box cost 500 murp points, and you can buy 25 merp points for $1 or 700 merp points for $9 or 10000 merp points for $80, and the odds of your loot box are 1:100 for having a rare item - what is your EV to spend to get the rare item?

<comment><USER11> Uh, people do. Hardcore lotto players know which scratch offs have the best payouts and know the most efficient betting strategies for most games. Some of them even track the outstanding jackpot winners available. Look at what people buy when you're in a gas station.

Disclosure would probably reduce the temptation to offer really shitty odds.

<comment><USER12> But these games are aimed at children and teenagers, not hardcore lotto players. They probably won't do the math.

<comment><USER6> True, but as a parent, if its disclosed in App Store, you can do the math for the kid and decide if you want them to play the game or forbid it and offer an alternative, more fair game.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Good.

Now add a distinction between IAPs for consumables vs features vs content.

</comment><comment><USER14> I have trouble biting my tongue about the games mentioned so I will just say: Ethically, those games are, arguably, predatory shit. They use psychology to vampire money out of you via your dopamine receptors and they bring shame to all gaming by even being termed "games." (And don't get me started on the casino industry rebranding gambling as "gaming.")

As soon as any game I ever come into contact with starts to "well, you can wait an hour OR have it get finished right now with 1 doohickey!", immediate delete.

What is frustrating is that this toxic mechanic has been applied to franchises I have previously loved such as Simpsons and Star Trek.

</comment><comment><USER15> > Loot boxes [...] are virtual grab bags that can give players a host

> of items ranging from common to rare. [...] you can buy these loot

> boxes [...] for real money, which has led some players to classify

> them as gambling—a label that the Entertainment Software Rating

> Board doesn't acknowledge.

Is the ESRB using some strange definition of gambling that the rest of us are unaware of? This seems like the textbook definition.

<comment><USER16> It it only gambling if you can take in-game items and convert them using game facilities back to cash.

In other words, what you describe may appear as a form of payment for consideration to win, but if you aren't really winning anything that can't be classifed as gambling.

This is why most game sales specifically mention they cannot be converted to cash and are for digital items only.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This makes it very obvious that buying loot boxes is, in fact, a form of gambling. We'll see how long that lasts in jurisdictions with tight gambling laws (i.e. Germany)

<comment><USER18> Germany does not ban trading card games (Pokemon, Magic the gathering, Yu-Gi- Oh! etc), which are real world examples of loot boxes.

The difference is you can trade rare X with someone else for money, but the company is not going to pay you when you get rare X.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I hope that the appearance of odds will make it clear that these loot boxes are just a form of gambling, and as such they should not be allowed for under-18s. In most countries, it is an offence to target gambling at minors, and you must do reasonable checks to prevent them from playing.

The threat of losing a large proportion of their customers would hopefully dissuade some companies from including gambling in their games.

</comment><comment><USER20> I do think it's only fair for these games to disclose odds but I don't think it will lead to any change. Casinos also disclose odds and they're clearly in favor of the house, but people still go in droves!

The bottom line is this new micro payment business model is here to stay, and hopefully people give money to the games that do it well and avoid paying the games that are simply exploitative.

</comment><comment><USER21> I stopped playing Clash Royale despite finding it a wonderful game because it's essentially pay to win. I would love to play a game similar to that one where the odds aren't stacked against the poorest of the players. Where you can play against players who have the same character choices as you.

<comment><USER22> That's the appeal of MOBAs like League of Legends, where all characters are equal and real-world money is only used to buy cosmetics.

In the mobile market, Arena of Valor just released in the US and it's surprisingly polished, gives a lot of heroes for free, and isn't aggressive about monetization. (in contrast, Vainglory, an earlier mobile MOBA, is _very_ aggressive about getting you to spend money, including locking a lot of content behind lootboxes)

<comment><USER23> All characters in league of legends are not equal, its less blatantly pay to win than some games, but to argue its only cosmetic is ridiculous.

<comment><USER24> All characters can be unlocked with in game currency. So a poor player can play any character she likes. Just not all of them

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's still legal gambling targeting kids. It's heinous.

<comment><USER26> In my sphere, it's actually adults that play these games the most. My kids love physical loot boxes (like blind bags and card booster packs), but they aren't really interested in the digital stuff.

I was just thinking about this this morning, because I think of them as targeting kids too, but the real junkies I know are grownups.

<comment><USER27> It's equally true because children tend not to have any good whale properties - disposable income near-nil, no credit card, etc. The kickback against accidental purchases has pretty much killed off that corner of the market, so there's no real reason to keep trying to get blood from the stone.</comment></comment></comment>