Warren Buffett explains the credit crisis to Charlie Rose - <AUTHOR> http://mathoda.com/archives/433 <comment><USER2> Finally a bit of economic analysis that's actually worth upmodding, unlike the "Bankruptcy is the answer" retardation.

Thank you for posting this, as off-topic as it might be.

I'm quite sure the comments will get overrun by Ron Paul supporters claiming Warrent Buffet has a vested interest in the bailout, all the banks should be liquidated, etc. Before you make that comment, please read this paragraph carefully:

 _Time is of the essence: "I mean, if Pearl Harbor came along, you could have said the planning was wrong by the military ahead of time or maybe the battleships shouldn't have all been in the harbor and all that kind of thing. … I mean, the job is Pearl Harbor. And you better not spends weeks and weeks and weeks trying to assign blame or deciding on a complete plan for fighting the whole war, you know, and letting a committee decide where the battleships should go and all of that. You better spring into action with the best people you have. … it's very important that the determination of the US Congress to do what is is needed be made evident this week and by the actions of most of the members."_

Blame, putting culprits in prison, figuring out how to stop this from happening again, all this will come. But first you have to stop the economy from free-falling into a depression. Priorities, people.

I'm not going to repost all my arguments about this, they're all already in this other thread: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=319646>

<comment><USER3> I like the oracle of Omaha as much as the next ripe-from-college-finance- student, but I can't side with the faithful teacher on this one.

Too many of us are calling this a depression where we should be calling it a correction. That's not to say corrections aren't messy -- they are -- but it's absolutely necessary if you're to return equilibrium to the markets. Til now prices have been artificially inflated by interventionist government policy. That's inefficient (it undermines the price mechanism) and it's unsustainable.

Government intervention isn't the answer. It might stave off a correction in the near-term, but it can't stop a correction in the long-run. Better for Washington to do nothing, which is to say, better to let the price mechanism do its work and restore natural equilibrium to the markets.

And please be fair: The "Bankruptcy is the answer" argument is hardly retardation (as you've put it). The article you're referring to captured the opinions of 166 economists of the Harvard/Yale/Princeton/UChicago ilk. You may not agree with it's conclusions but for God's sake man, don't call it retardation.

<comment><USER4> You can call it whatever you like, that doesn't mean a thing to the people in the bread lines.

What people seem to be failing to understand is that the "near term correction" is going to be huge, regardless of whether or not there's an even bigger one in the future. We need to get through the first one to reap the benefits of missing the next one.

Or, we can try to avoid the current concerns as much as we can, and use the time we've bought ourselves to reform our system and negate the need for that larger one down the road.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Beware of geeks:

Beware of geeks with clever computer models: "I mean they had all these types from Wall Street, you know, and they had advanced degrees, and they look very alert, and they came with these — they came with these things that said gamma and alpha and sigma and all that. And all I can say is beware of geeks, you know, bearing formulas."

<comment><USER6> It's a good quote here by Buffet, amazing one can repost in the thread like that word-for-word and cop 15+ Karma points for it. All the non-Geeks here mod this one up?

Using Buffet's analogy, why bother innovating when one can just imitate? On the extreme, the imitators resent the innovators and hate the idiots. The innovators see the imitators as an unfortunate evil.

<comment><USER4> I don't think you're quite understanding what he's saying there.

It's just a fancy way of saying the data can be made to support any opinion, so beware of something that has all this data to back it up, but still smells fishy on the surface.

<comment><USER6> I sort of know what Buffet means. It's like in the late 90's with regards to Long Term Capital Management hedge fund:

"At the beginning of 1998, the firm had equity of $4.72 billion and had borrowed over $124.5 billion with assets of around $129 billion. It had off- balance sheet derivative positions with a notional value of approximately $1.25 trillion."

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management>

Eventually most of this was lost within a few months of volatility caused by events not taken into account by its computer models, and the fund was ultimately liquidated, losing its investors much of their $1 Billion investment.

The fund used models determined by some of the smartest around including economics Nobel prize winners. This team background then enabled them to raise a lot capital, which was subsequently extremely levered.

From how I understand it, another problem of LTCM (besides for the flaw in the model not taking into account an extremely rare occurence) was due to the fund venturing into different types of trades that weren't fully thought-out once all the arbitrage opportunities ran out in the program's designated purview.

Another aspect of Buffet's hesitancy with "black box" trading can be found in this hedge fund manager's interview: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=310284>, that is, the programmers doing the modelling generally have the same type of educational backgrounds and thus the trading patterns and performance of their 'boxes' are all similar, thereby giving none a competitive advantage over the other.

At the end of the day, simplifying things, is it better to trust a brain and its computer extension or just a brain? In Buffet's case, being the equivalent in investing of grandmaster Garry Kasparov in chess, he sticks with his brain. Anyone else might want to run with the computer if they can't get shares in Berkshire Hathaway. I think LTCM were just very unlucky and a bit reckless, but could have done very well, if only they had more conservative exit points in winding up the fund.

But, the main gist of my previous comment was that it didn't add much to the thread in terms of discussion, but rather just brought a point in the article to people's attention. And just from that, I couldn't see all the mod points justified. I guess this goes back to my style of modding which is: "I'll mod this up or down, but only if it's under or over valued." ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What do Warren Buffet, Paul Graham and Hugh Hefner have in common? Each buys an undervalued asset at its undervalued price, sprinkles it with some fairy dust and then sells it at a premium once the potential has been realized. One does it with stocks and securities, the next with startup founders and their ideas, and the last with women.

<comment><USER7> Except Warren doesn't sprinkle with fairy dust - or sell.

He does however buy good businesses at discounts to their true long-term value.

<comment><USER6> I am no Buffet expert but know he is a value investor and buying distressed assets has been a way for him to obtain value. He likes to keep existing management.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, you've got the flavour right.. although... he tends to not buy distressed assets so much as assets that the market thinks are distressed.... a solid business (i.e. non-distressed) is very important to him. Maybe I'm just playing with definitions, but here's an example:

American Express was guilty of fraud, and things looked really bad for them, because their business is based on trust - surely their future bleak, thought Wall St. Their stock price tanked (this is just the opinion of the market; it may or may not correspond to reality). But Warren Buffett went down to the supermarket, and observed people: in fact, they still trusted American Express, in the operational sense that they still used it. The fraud didn't affect Amex's business at all.

So he put half his wealth (or something like that) into it, and made a killing... by buying a non-distressed asset at a distressed price.

And here, price is just another word for opinion.

Sorry to go on, I just like talking about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> patrickg-zill We know now, that the reason AIG was bailed out, is because European banks had $300 Billion or more in credit protection, and that the Euro banks are even more highly leveraged than US, Canadian, and British banks.

It was French finance minister Christine Lagarde who personally begged Paulson to keep AIG going.

See: [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_prit...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/3118994/Financial- Crisis-So-much-for-tirades-against-American-greed.html)

My personal view is not that bankruptcy is the answer; just that it will be the inevitable result.

The only question is whether a few large Wall St. firms will go bankrupt, causing pain to many other financial institutions and governments, or whether America itself will go near-bankrupt as a result of taking the losses on themselves.

And no, I don't have a lot of respect for Buffett, ever since he fought the inheritance (death) tax being repealed, which is after all double taxation, and from which his company personally benefits.

His insurance companies make billions on pricy insurance sold to small and medium sized business owners who are nearing the end of their life (you buy the insurance so that when you die, the company does not have to be liquidated in order to pay the IRS).

<comment><USER8> What double taxation, if you buy stock at 10$ and it's worth 100$ when you die that _gain_ is never taxed.

<comment> patrickg-zill I encourage you to actually know what you are talking about before posting.

If I have $1 million in cash when I die, my heirs have to pay taxes on that, even though I paid taxes on it when I originally earned it. You cannot net out the capital gains and just pay tax on that, everything is taxed.

<comment><USER9> Your heirs didn't earn that money, so they're only paying taxes once. You pay once for earning it, they pay once for "earning" it via your departure from this earth. But presumably if you have lots of money, you've already set up trusts, paid for college, given lifetime gifts, etc. so your heirs are already pretty far ahead of the average person.

Seems like a perfectly good way to encourage at least a tiny amount of wealth redistribution in a society where wealth is not very well distributed at all.

<comment><USER8> It could be setup like that but it's not. You don't pay capital gains at the time of death and the people you give it to don't pay when they receive it so only some of the money is ever taxed.

PS: The really sick thing is giving stock to a charity: "By doing so, you never have to calculate gains nor list the sale as income on your tax return. Moreover, if the stock was held more than a year (long-term gain), you get to itemize the charitable deduction at fair market value on the date of gift." (<http://invest-faq.com/cbc/tax-cap-gains-basis.html>)

To find out why this is messed up calculate what happens when you give 100$ to charity now vs buying 100$ in stock that is worth 10x a much in 20 years. I had an aunt who was audited and ended up getting close to a million back because of this stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Buffet + Rose = win

What to people think about Buffet's post-investment media presence? Is he expending trust-capital by pushing for the bailout when he has $X billion dollars freshly invested?

<comment><USER11> On the contrary, I think he's banking on the fact that many people are scared but trust his judgment because of his track record. Sure he might profit from the bailout, but he has also put up $8B and counting when everyone is worried about liquidity. He's putting his money where his mouth is.

<comment><USER7> As Clinton said on Letterman, all the people that bet against America lost. He's betting on America.

(I love that attitude and I'm not even American)

<comment><USER12> Or he's betting that he will get to run the last two rolls of the dice at the game of taking America by monopoly that he is playing, like a 11year old kid, once they have boardwalk and park place along with most of the other important ones, you can't stop the game without a temper tantrum, maybe in this case one will not be allowed to walk away from the game.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > The US government can borrow money very cheaply, and buy mortgages at fear > driven low prices, which should allow it to make a profit from the rescue, > if it buys at the market price:

Is anyone reminded of the concept of doubling down on your bet when they see this? I guess it is strictly correct although I don't like the chances of the goverment buying at market prices though.

</comment><comment><USER14> "And so you get what I call the natural progression, the three I's: the innovators, the imitators, and the idiots."

<comment><USER7> _Everybody just kind of goes along. And you look kind of silly if you disagree._

It definitely is not easy to resist conformity, Buffett claims that his ability to do this is one of the main reasons for success (he's a contrarian)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Hehe: "And all I can say is beware of geeks, you know, bearing formulas."

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm irritated by this knee-jerk anti-bailout reaction ("$700bn to the fat cats!"). Check this diagram from the BBC ([http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/45062000/gif/_45062415...](http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/45062000/gif/_45062415_wall_st_bail_plan_466_2.gif))

There is no $700bn going into some Wall Street bankers pockets. First off, $450bn of this bailout money is conditional.

Also, see that arrow pointing from the Banks to the Gov't? That's a stake in the banks being given to the taxpayers. So you're not just losing money, you're gaining an asset, and the chances are, at a very good price.

There's a chance the US Gov't could end up making a profit out of the situation when the housing market recovers, which it inevitably will. This credit bust is definitely a mess, but this doesn't mean there won't be any credit in the future. We need to think 5-10 years into the future. Things will recover, they always do.

The closest thing to this I've ever studied were the currency crises that happened in Asia in 1998 (indeed they were my savior in my final international economics exam). The big lesson I learned was that self-fulfilling prophecies can occur in the markets. If everyone loses faith in a currency, then it will crash, even if nothing has fundamentally changed.

The same thing can happen with banks. If we think some are going to fail, sell its shares, then we can help make it fail. So to counter-act that you need some pretty aggressive action, and even if it isn't perfect, people are misunderstanding that doing nothing could be much, much worse.

If this credit problem is not solved and confidence restored, then it is easy for the effects to spill over to the main economy. The worst would be for otherwise healthy firms to stop receiving credit, be forced to lay people off in a downturn, add to unemployment, and then just make the whole macro condition worse for everyone. Credit plays a vital role in smoothing out consumption and investment cycles - so the banks that facilitate this and are otherwise healthy need to be backed up.

That's started happening in the UK ([http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/financialcr...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/financialcrisis/3123736/Banks- turn-the-screw-on-businesses.html)). If unemployment rises sharply, then things will get really bad.

</comment><comment><USER17> "People should always know better. I mean people people don't get they don't get smarter about things that get as basic as greed and you can't stand to see your neighbor getting rich. You know you're smarter than he is, and he's doing these things, you know, and he's getting rich, and your spouse is getting unhappy with you because you aren't doing pretty soon you start doing it. And so you get what I call the natural progression, the three I's: the innovators, the imitators, and the idiots. And that's what happens. Everybody just kind of goes along. And you look kind of silly if you disagree."

That is the "free market" at work. And why I shake my head in disbelief at people who think/expect the free market solves problems.

</comment><comment><USER18> He seems to be making the argument:

      1. The US government can borrow money at extremely low rates
      2. Purchasing mortgage-based securities at the current market price will eventually make you a lot of money
      3. So.. the government should leverage up and buy 700 Billion worth

This sounds awfully similar to the advice given to people buying homes during the real estate bubble. "Buy the biggest house you can get a loan for.. it'll be worth more tomorrow anyway, so you can just sell it and make money!"

</comment><comment><USER19> Thanks for this post. I am glad to see that we aren't going into bankruptcy any time soon.

Warren Buffett I feel knows money better than the teacher stuck up in a office somewhere.

</comment><comment><USER20> SO do all these economy guys not believe in not intervening in economies any more?

<comment><USER21> Warren Buffett has been in favor of higher taxes and stricter regulation for about four decades. So I guess "these economy guys" isn't a very useful classification, at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> he says that only the govt can buy lots of stuff right now, private companies all need to back off.

but we saw an article here yesterday saying he just invested 8 billion in GE and something else.

contradiction?

<comment><USER23> Yep, though resolved by his reminder that he doesn't have 800 billion sitting around, and that he's one of the richest guys in the world.</comment></comment>


Google iPhone usage shocks search giant - <AUTHOR> http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/02/14/google_iphone_usage_shocks_search_giant.html

<comment><USER2> The Apple iPhone is a mobile experience.

Those of us who are fortunate to forgo its "lack" of features, understand that it can add value to part of the routine and boredom of day-to-day life.

It's actually fun to do something productive and/or kill time with it while out-and-about.

From presentation by Jared Spool UX expert:

1st generation - It's about the Technology (Big mainframe computers - had to go to specialized training at HQ to be able to use it, let alone program it. Early dotcom sites where you could theoretically buy something if you could figure it out)

2nd generation - Features (Mobile phones with streaming TV, MP3 - all thrown in, loosely coupled, none integrated, some Internet portals)

3rd generation - Experience (Craigslist, MySpace (it does what their target market wants them to - peer communication), Google is getting there... Facebook is getting there, flying sheep aside).

In Jared's opinion, the Apple iPhone leapfrogged directly to the 3rd generation - it's not a phone, it's not a portable computer - it is a great way to kill time (everywhere I go I see people trying to kill time on their mobile phones, rarely is it an iPhone).

</comment><comment><USER3> That is shockingly believable data and speaks of how terrible it is to use the internet on any phone other than an iPhone.

<comment><USER4> i am just reading this from a n95 quite pleasantly and replying with one hand which i an not sure you can do with iphone. Can anyone predict how much years is several as mentioned in an earlier post that it will outnumber? Of course its a natural direction and i dont understand why so much credit for the iphone

<comment><USER5> It's not about which phone had features X, Y, and Z first.

The iPhone is: known to focus on usability; made by Apple; has iTunes, a big screen, a great screen, a wide screen; has a PDA brother -- the iTouch; runs a version of a real operating system; and is made by the manufacturer of the most popular portable digital music players of each of the last 7 years or so. Finally, Apple is not a phone manufacturer but a designer of usable things -- people want to buy something that is made by Apple, and not a phone company. The resulting popularity, promise of an SDK, a commitment to the product line, and an exciting bridge of software and hardware gets developers on board. This gets the iPhone to the point where all of a sudden, it doesn't matter who created it--Microsoft, McDonalds, or Staples--or exactly what it's capable of: everyone else is using it, which means it's now a "standard", and a good enough reason to make that your next phone.

<comment><USER4> Actually n95 is in the hands of more than 2 million people compared to iphone that its in half of these people.

And by saying n95 I was reffering mostly to S60 Version 3 platform, which is used on more phones than N95, which means they have the same browser.

iPhone may be appealing, but overall doesnt mean that is the only way to surf the mobile web. The browsing capabilities in many phones are really worthwhile.

It's obvious this is an iPhone praising story.

"popular" it's a vogue word, doesn't mean anything if you don't say location. In Europe, phones come free or at loyaltee-fee with connection packets, which make it more accesible for people to change their phones easier. So, you stuck with a "popular" iPhone easier.

"real operating system" ?

sorry, but it rings to my ears the 3-in-1 iPhone pre-launch Steve Jobs speech

What real means anyway? Multitasking with IPv6, multimedia capabilities and UTF-16 support that is possible to write applications for? Symbian answers to these.

"standard and good enough..."

Well, you should check your numbers with Symbian penetration.

Nokia is already working on feel-touch UI which will make touching surface feel like a keyboard when necessary.

<comment><USER6> _"Actually n95 is in the hands of more than 2 million people compared to iphone that its in half of these people."_

Actually, iPhone sales totalled 4 million as of last month. So it is the n95/s60v3 that, if your 2 million number is correct, is in half the number of hands.

<comment><USER4> There were nearly 85 million devices based on S60 in 2006. Today there are 20 different phones based on S60 3rd edition.

"18.8 million converged devices (S60) shipped in Q4 compared to 11.1 this time last year * Over 11 million Nseries devices and over 2 million Eseries devices were sold in Q4 * Market share in North America dropped to 5.1% while every other region except China experienced double digit"

<http://www.nokia.com/results/results2007Q4e.pdf>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I am not shocked at all, I have to say I predicted this all along! All we were waiting for is a decent UI and a real browser and a qwerty keyboard for mobile devices.

I also predict that future mobile phones will also try to increase the screen sizes.

I also predict that Apple will repeat their same mistake by tieing their OS to their Hardware, and that googles Android OS will be the next windows of all other Mobile devices.

I also predict that it will take Apple long to realise that they could have eliminated or a least make it harder for Google's android by licensing their mobile software to other phone companies such as Nokia! And that by not doing so they lost a lot of money!

<comment><USER8> N95/iPhone is the first devices to make mobile browsing acceptable. A great lesson on supply and demand.

Demand for sucky mobile browsing: vanishingly small Demand for ok mobile browsing: really high

But GOOG, etc were surprised because although those two statements seem obvious, there's no way to measure beforehand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> A Large Scale Study of Wireless Search Behavior: Google Mobile Search <http://www.esprockets.com/papers/kamvar-baluja.chi06.pdf>

This study was presented by some Google employees at CHI'06 and some very interesting things to say about the use of mobile search. Best finding, ~20% of mobile searches are done for "Adult" content.

</comment><comment><USER10> What bothers me about Google search on the iPhone is that the native search in Safari goes to Google's desktop version. Why can't it go to their mobile version?

Seems kind of dumb, right?

</comment><comment><USER2> How many people browse News.yc on an iPhone...at the coffee shop... Or in the office bathroom stall .. Or is it just me? Since they got rid of the open wi- fi and replaced it with authentication-required, I find myself using EDGE more

</comment><comment><USER11> what really is scary is all the controls that telcos have built around accessing net with such devices.</comment>


Germany Just Introduced Data Retention. Politicians Should Be Ashamed - <AUTHOR> https://tutanota.com/blog/posts/germany-data-retention <comment><USER2> Within only two years of the Data Retention law getting passed in 2008, it was already being declared unconstitutional in 2010.

How come after almost a decade and a half the Patriot Act still hasn't reached the Supreme Court? Or the FISA Amendments Act passed in 2008? Even the new USA Freedom Act is still much worse than what the German Data Retention law allowed in 2008.

[http://www.dw.com/en/german-court-rules-data-storage-law- unc...](http://www.dw.com/en/german-court-rules-data-storage-law- unconstitutional/a-5310195)</comment>


The Chipophone: a homemade 8-bit synthesizer - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1pchpDD5EU&feature=player_embedded

<comment><AUTHOR> His website provides more info: <http://www.linusakesson.net/chipophone/index.php></comment>


Show HN: CompareThings - Measure the popularity of pretty much anything - <AUTHOR> http://comparethin.gs

<comment><USER2> Nice job; love the fluid to mobile layout. Excellent idea! I can see myself using this to pan for new project ideas. Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Meant to be fun, simple and useful, that's it ;)

Which mobile device were you using, out of curiosity?

<comment><USER2> Ah, I had just been viewing it in the browser; but I do notice these things as I'm a bit of a fan of the fluid to mobile idea. <https://www.promosity.com> <\- my startup - fluid to mobile throughout

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Great UX, clean interface, easy to use, good job!

<comment><AUTHOR> Gracias!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Awesome idea!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Juca! Hope things are well!</comment></comment>


How I made a tool to help blind people experience the internet better - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/making-the-web-more-accessible-with-ai-1fb2ed6ea2a4 <comment><USER2> _a chrome extension that allows users to right click and get a description of the scene in an image_

How many blind people use a mouse?

<comment><AUTHOR> Screen readers easily allow people whoa re visually impaired to cycle through html elements and accordingly perform normal mouse click actions on them.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Evangelist as a Service - <AUTHOR> http://my-evangelist.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been an evangelist and hired them in the past. It's hard and expensive. Then when you have an evangelist, you have to pay a bunch of money to fly them around to conferences. They burn out. And then, when you go to a conference, most of the people manning booths aren't super excited or inviting.

So I figured, why not offer evangelism as a service? Help man your booth, plan great talks, run and attend meetups, help with online evangelism. Maybe you just want to know what's going on at conferences.

It's not a replacement if you want a full-time person who truly believes in your product, but it's a way to fill out your team or hire someone to do a conference for you here or there, far cheaper than hiring someone. All feedback welcome, especially ideas on how to reach the right audience.</comment>


Rome: An experimental JavaScript toolchain - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/facebookexperimental/rome <comment><USER3> Great idea, very much welcome in the fragmented JS community.

However, I am sceptical about performance of a tool written in TypeScript/JavaScript. We've seen that tools written in compiled languages like Rust or Go can be much faster, e.g. [https://swc- project.github.io/](https://swc-project.github.io/), [https://packem.github.io/](https://packem.github.io/), [https://github.com/nathan/pax](https://github.com/nathan/pax), [https://github.com/evanw/esbuild](https://github.com/evanw/esbuild).

On the other hand, Yarn is written in JS and it is considered fast enough. Facebook has a good track record for writing well designed tools.

<comment><USER4> I'm skeptical too (I'm the author of Rome). I know it can be at least performance neutral compared to existing JavaScript tools which is the baseline for most people. However I do think that since Rome is an enclosed system, without external dependencies and pretty good TS typing, that there's some future flexibility using another wasm language that other JS tools don't have.

<comment><USER5> I was thinking tools would start replacing their typescript code with assemblyscript and build wasm modules for hot paths. Do you have any similar thoughts?

<comment><USER6> For a compiler, it's probably much more valuable to have parallelism than cherry-pick slow code. You'd have to pick a pretty big hot path for the data conversion to be worth it. JS is pretty darn fast sequentially thanks to the ridiculous effort spent on its VM implementations, and there is next to zero number-crunching in a compiler, which is the main reason people have been cherry-picking with WASM on the web so far. We're talking pretty minimal speedups, compared to giving an embarassingly parallel problem the threading it deserves.

Having written codebases that take a couple of minutes to compile, it seems like a bit of a waste to write a whole new full-stack-no-dependencies compiler in a language that can't be parallelised.

You can usually get behind a self-hosting compiler for language evolution purposes, but for JS there is zero value in having yet another project to try it out on. For a transpiler to work on itself, maybe, but Rome is a CLI tool, not a web bundle, so it will never need to exercise the most demanding features of a transpiler/bundler. JSX, minification, code splitting, async loading, legacy browser support, etc. You can innovate on those things in any other language just as easily.

At the end of the day, the only advantage is that people who want to contribute will already know the language. Is that important enough to deal with another ten years of slow JS transpilation, forcing people to run huge, un-optimised code blobs in development (real life, very annoying problem), and 800MB node processes? I don't see that changing in JS-world for a long time.

(This is snarky, but you might actually be better off without importing the unfortunate churn habits of the JS community.)

<comment><USER7> Node has three different ways of running parallel work: workers, threads, and multi-process.

<comment><USER8> Especially for threads, how well does this mesh with libraries? I'd assume that most of these are either meant to run in a single-threaded manner or async.

<comment><USER7> Does not apply since this project is being written from scratch with zero library dependencies?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's refreshing to see a JavaScript project with a mature tone and no emoji bullet lists in its readme. I'm very eager for JS culture to mature along with the tooling, and to prioritize content over sugar.

<comment><USER10> The Readme doesn't take itself too seriously. It even says the name of the project started a joke, and pokes fun at its logo. I have a suspicion that emojis just make you upset.

<comment><USER9> I use emoji when texting sometimes. I have nothing against them. I used emoji as a symbol for excessive and distracting behavior, that feels similar to how memes feel – which to me has an almost mob/cult-like quality to it.

I'm not sure what other examples to use to describe the tone I'm referring to without offending anyone. But, I'd personally be really interested in an anthropologist writing about the internet culture of JS development. Edit: hackernews unsurprisingly did not let me use an emoji at the end there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> >Rome has a logo of an ancient Greek spartan helmet. It's not very relevant since it's not Roman, but it looks cooler than a Galea.

I chuckled.

<comment><USER12> Javascript devs now transpiling history.

<comment><USER13> This is just business as usual :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It has no external dependencies but supports compiling typescript, flow, etc. Does this mean compilers for those will be re-reimplemented inside Rome? Not really looking forward to build tool-specific bugs with those languages.

<comment><USER4> It does. And it's a risk not keeping up with their pace of development. Supporting those "compilers" is just supporting their syntax, which both fortunately already have very good compliance test suites because other tools like Babel already reimplement their syntax anyway.

<comment><USER15> Interesting. Do you mean that Rome won't perform type-checking in TypeScript/Flow, it just strips their type annotations (like their respective Babel plugins do today)? If so, is the idea that people might continue to use the tsc/flow binaries in parallel with Rome (e.g. if they want to validate types in a commit hook, or for in-editor linter-style warnings)?

I've been really looking forward to this source release since reading your tweets about it. Sorry it got posted to HN before you wanted it to, but thanks for making the code public at this stage.

<comment><USER16> > is the idea that people might continue to use the tsc/flow binaries in > parallel with Rome

I think so, in the same way that people use both Babel and TypeScript (or Flow) today. TypeScript/Flow check the types, while Babel simply strips them out when compiling the code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Sounds interesting, coming from Facebook and initiated by the guy who also started Yarn and Babel, so a good chance to achieve its lofty goals.

</comment><comment><USER18> There's quite a lot of code in the packages dir - 76,000 lines of typescript.

It was all added in the first commit 45 mins ago. Why would they hide their commit history?

Also I found this funny - comments in package.json:

      "//": "Look! No deps!",
      "dependencies": {},
      "///": "Only used for static type checking",
      "devDependencies": {

<comment><USER4> > Why would they hide their commit history?

I'm the only author at the moment. The project started off years ago as a side project without any commit history, and what little history there was over the years wasn't very thorough. Prior to the open sourcing I've been working on it internally and still did pretty massive diffs that changed thousands of files, still without good history. It's something I'm working on though and will obviously need to be accountable for now that the project is public.

<comment><USER18> Thanks for the reply. It looks well organized now. I'll be keeping my eye on it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Its amazing how there can be such a long readme file and it still does not communicate what this actually does...

<comment><USER4> Considering this is just a source code dump and call for possible contributors I'm disappointed it was even posted to Hacker News. Rome is not ready at all for public consumption. I wanted it open sourced so I could work with other tooling authors and contributors.

<comment><USER20> Would you mind commenting on what it intends to be and what its value propositions would be when it's eventually ready for public consumption? An opinionated all-in-one platform?

<comment><USER21> It says so right in the readme. It's a formatter, linter, bundler, compiler(transpiler?) all in one.

<comment><USER20> I'm looking for something more specific than that. To go to such great lengths, the value propositions have to be more than just bundling a few things together. (And I did read the project philosophy section.)

<comment><USER7> If you've used Metro or Webpack before there is very little explaining to do. The existing tooling is bloated, fragmented (think 40k deps) and slow, and the experience of sewing it all together and keeping it in one piece extremely frustrating.

<comment><USER20> I have, but there's still a lot of explaining to do. E.g., what's the extensibility story? To do anything remotely useful with webpack you need to install a million loaders and plugins, but the plugin architecture also lets you do a lot that can't be done with opinionated bundlers. So, what's Rome's approach to this? Enumerating existing tooling's problems does not automatically guarantee something better.

<comment><USER22> The author has commented that this isn't yet ready for public consumption, but is instead just a call for other possible contributors to the project. So:

1\. Everything you seem to be asking for seems like it is not relevant at this point in the project's lifecycle. 2\. IMO people who _are_ capable of providing good contributions don't actually need what you are asking for. They can review the README as is, review the source code, etc.

In short, patience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I don't really understand what it does? It replaces webpack, eslint, maybe the typescript compiler... etc, and puts it all in one library? What is the benefit to end-users? To reduce the number of bugs, make it easier for people to contribute (only need to contribute to one library), and increase the speed of development?

</comment><comment><USER24> Wow, I hope this could make current JavaScript workflow more slick and simplified.

Also the readme is doing a good job for answering my doubt at a first glance - why a Corinthian helmet rather than a Roman one :)

> Rome has a logo of an ancient Greek spartan helmet. It's not very relevant > since it's not Roman, but it looks cooler than a Galea.

</comment><comment><USER25> I worry this is a start for a toolchain monopoly, I don't like the idea of all-in-one, how can a single toolchain be the best of all fields? Will it suppress innovation like jslint -> jshint -> eslint? Just because the new and better tool is not part of the toolchain!

<comment><USER8> In the Java world 99% of the code is compiled with javac.

In the .NET world 99% of the code is compiled with csc (or whatever it's called, don't remember that well)

In the C world, with one of the biggest ecosystems and a fragmented history going back half a century, 99% of the code is compiled with GCC/Clang/VS CL (of which VS CL is there just because Microsoft insists on it being there).

Similar things happen with interpreters, CPython, Yarv, etc.

Javascript should innovate at higher levels. And it should have a linker and tree shaking compiler as default for every project, everywhere, so that people can stop making silly small libs and instead can use big ones that get compiled to small code bits that are distributed by websites.

<comment><USER26> > Javascript should innovate at higher levels

Until that level takes the problem of in-browser, persistent file/blob storage seriously, the JS ecosystem will _not_ be able to truly progress, particularly when it comes to the question of linking evolving code bases with more stable libraries. But I digress. (I'm not going to "pimp" for my project now... see my comments!)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > The only way to use it is to build from source.

However, that will likely require more than 24 hours (ba-dum-tss)

</comment><comment><USER28> I am really excited for this project and hope it is opinionated enough and doesn't go down the rabbit hole of endless customisable options in a Rome.js|json|rc file. I also hope this is as painless as Go and Elm's default tooling.

</comment><comment><USER29> author's tweets about its history - [https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1108407803545214977](https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1108407803545214977)

</comment><comment><USER30> Make it run in the browser, using web workers to not block main thread. Most tooling is assumed to be used in a terminal... Make libraries instead of terminal applications, so that the tools can be used anywhere. Most people, including most developers, are not comfortable working in a terminal emulator. Even if _you_ are, you probably google for, copy/paste the commands into the terminal... terrible inneficient and unfriendly for beginners. Instead provide easy to use libraries, that can be used in monolith apps with some minor glue code.

</comment><comment> pcj-github I'm not seeing a ton a tests in this repo, did I miss them? Seems like it will be very hard project to maintain and gather community support without better test coverage.

</comment><comment><USER31> I just wish one of the key authors of this wasn't such a jerk to the yarn development team just because they disagreed with their decisions. Makes me very hesitant to want to collaborate with such people.

edit: well, looks like they took down the offending tweets, but I can link out to this discussion: [https://github.com/yarnpkg/berry/issues/766](https://github.com/yarnpkg/berry/issues/766)

<comment><USER32> Looks like a normal discussion thread. Not sure what you're pointing to here. Do you have some evidence of bad behavior? otherwise your comment is the one that looks petty IMHO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> A Facebook project written in TypeScript...interesting

<comment><USER34> Jest is written in TypeScript!

<comment><USER35> Jest support from Facebook recently has been poor lately. One of the outside maintainers took weeks to find someone at FB to even help push a release.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> The number of times I've created conflicting rules between my linter, editor, and bundler.... I'd use it just to ditch that mess.

</comment><comment><USER37> This is cool. Facebook does open source better than Google (things aren't abandoned left and right) but I'm afraid the experimental would mean it's future is unsure.

The other point is, why is Rome better than any existing tooling ? Webpack, typescript, prettier, eslint, mocha are all pretty popular and mature tools. Why would I use Rome over it ?

</comment><comment><USER38> _Rome has a logo of an ancient Greek spartan helmet. It 's not very relevant since it's not Roman, but it looks cooler than a Galea._

"Galea" links to the much cooler Roman helmet, disproving this statement. Also given that this is a build environment, perhaps an icon incorporating, I dunno, a Roman building might be appropriate?

</comment><comment><USER39> I am using Haxe, which is a complete different ecosystem, which compiles to JS. It has a fast optimizing compiler, a strict-typed language. Has features like meta programming /syntax-transformation (macros), conditional compilation, inlined calls etc. These are great tools to create high performance apps. You can find all the features on its website. It has a formatting tools and a linter, but has build-in deadcode elemination and a static analyzer so it only includes everything you use (so no need to strip it off afterwards as seen in some JS tools). Also could be a good candidate for WASM, since it compiles to C++. One thing that is great about Haxe is that is also compiles to other languages; you can reuse same code for different compiler targets. I mean, why does Rome only target JavaScript? For Haxe that's just one option.

[disclaimer, I am a big Haxe fanboy]

</comment><comment><USER40> A little curious why TyepScript was chosen instead of Facebook's own ReasonML.

<comment><USER41> I thought about the same thing, especially since people already started questioning performance here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I love the README. I wish more more projects had things like this:

> Transparency. No back-channel project management. Project conversation and > decisions will take place only on public forums such as GitHub, the Rome > Discord, and Twitter. The only exception to this is moderation decisions > which will be strictly done in private.

The whole document is full of good ideas. I still want more, but that's a league better than many "top" projects I use.

</comment><comment><USER43> This seems great. As far as I can tell, it will be take input in *Script - <USER2> it, link it, lint it, bundle it up. Finally a whole toolchain in one place.

<comment><USER44> Hold on -- this sentence could essentially describe Webpack. The only difference is that you plug your own transpiler and linter into webpack. It sounds like Rome will let you integrate external tools, so what is Rome really? A webpack that ships with a default linter and transpiler? There must be more to it than that, otherwise I don't see the value add.

<comment><USER45> Even if it has the same features as webpack, this is better because it does not have external dependencies. Webpack (webpack and webpack-cli) depends on 312 npm packages.

<comment><USER44> I'm sorry but I just can't take this viewpoint seriously. I'm going to assume you're being sarcastic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Just an observation... The batteries included model of Rome where it handles ESNext, JSX, Typescript and Flow out of the box without configuration appears to be a marked departure from the Babel preset/plugin model. Customization is all fine and good, but most people don't want to configure anything and are happy using defaults, even if it's suboptimal in some cases.

</comment><comment><USER47> The "Project Philosophy" section is just brilliant. I wish more projects consciously adopted it.

<comment><USER3> I agree. I especially like the goals about errors.

<comment><USER47> Approach to errors is what clearly distinguishes "old tech" from "new tech". Most recent tools, compilers, linkers, bundlers etc. go out of their way to provide clear human-readable errors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Is it a good opportunity to make it work in deno since everything is self- contained?

</comment><comment><USER49> > Rome is experimental and in active development. It's open for contributors > and those interested in experimental tools. It is not ready for production > usage.

This is because, unlike the historical Rome, this Rome may fall in a day.

</comment><comment><USER50> > Rome is not a collection of existing tools. All components are custom and > use no third-party dependencies.

This seems enormously (and needlessly?) ambitious. Why not just bundle up the standard tools in a ready-to-use package?

<comment><USER51> One reason could be that this tends to require a lot of fiddling. If you take the Rome approach, you can (theoretically) have the community do the necessary fiddling collectively and have it work for everyone. If they're alright with the standard it provides.

I know from experiences in the last few days that even things like standardjs and xo, despite being described as zero-config linting/fixing solutions, don't reliably work out of the box.

<comment><USER16> In addition to this, one reason the JS tools of today are relatively slow is because they all need to parse the code. Babel parses it to compile it, then ESLint parses it again to lint it, then Webpack/Rollup/Parcel parses it again to bundle it. A single tool that reuses the same AST representation for all three tasks has the ability to become a lot faster.

<comment><USER50> Yes and no. ESLint doesn't need to run at build time, and I assume that if you integrate Babel and Webpack via webpack "loaders", some amount of work is saved (just guessing though). That said, yours is the only good argument I've seen for building a monolithic solution.

<comment><USER16> > I assume that if you integrate Babel and Webpack via webpack "loaders", some > amount of work is saved (just guessing though)

The Webpack babel-loader just calls Babel with the source code, it doesn't reuse Webpack's AST: [https://github.com/babel/babel- loader/blob/master/src/index....](https://github.com/babel/babel- loader/blob/master/src/index.js#L204)

It has to do it that way, since Babel could parse some syntax that Webpack doesn't recognise (like Flow or TypeScript annotations). Webpack loaders can even take non-JS input and produce JS output (eg. "svgr" takes SVG images and produces React components) so I don't think Webpack can even assume that the input is JS at that point.

<comment><USER50> And yet when it comes time for Webpack to crawl import statements, it can do so across all different kinds of files coming in through their own loaders. So I'm wondering if Webpack gets presented with some kind of structured "imports manifest" by the loaders, in which case I think it could skip its own parsing step.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> It is interesting that even Facebook employees prefer typescript to flow when starting a project from scratch. I'd love to hear sebastian explain why he didn't use flow.

</comment><comment><USER53> I'm curious whether the Rome authors devote attention to 'compatibility' with the principles and requirements of build systems like Buck (and Bazel). Our company is in the process of migrating a large Typescript codebase to Bazel, and there's a non-negligible amount of reconfiguring and re-tooling that needs to be done that would be less necessary if key ecosystem components were designed early to be hermetic, deterministic, modular, and incremental.

Edit: Facebook wrote Buck and uses it extensively internally, so there being a desire for compatibility doesn't seem far-fetched.

<comment><USER54> Rome having no runtime dependencies seems like it would go a long way towards that goal

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Any metrics on time saved bundling a project from source with Rome versus other bundlers? Is there any minification support in Rome?

</comment><comment><USER55> The ReadMe isn't clear and I'm on my phone: what does it compile to? It just says it has a compiler.

<comment><USER56> Same here

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Why not use ReasonML for this though?

</comment><comment><USER58> Why not start with dependency-less standard lib? Then toolchain?

<comment> 52-6F-62 I've been watching [https://deno.land/](https://deno.land/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> I'm sure this will be very useful, but I'm very sad that it's from Facebook. I really don't want anything to do with that company.

<comment><USER60> That's silly.

Unlike Oracle, Facebook has embraced the OSS community adopting their tech, and hasn't wielded the patent threat ever.

<comment><USER59> Is this what you're saying: it's silly to not want anything to do with a company because another company is worse in one specific way?

<comment><USER44> No, this is what he's saying: Facebook has shown that they contribute good OSS and want people to use it with no strings attached.

His quip about Oracle was completely irrelevant to the content of his comment. In my opinion, Facebook proved themselves champions of OSS when they relaxed their license on React (which is now vanilla MIT with no stupid patent clauses).

<comment><USER59> The quality of the product is usually not the main concern in a boycott. They make some great software, but they are a detestable company.

<comment><USER44> You don't punish a naughty dog when they get something right. You punish them for the things they do wrong. People should just grow up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Why not incrementally share code with the current Facebook supported stack? Create PRs to Babel, Webpack and ESLint

<comment><USER62> > Create PRs to Babel, Webpack and ESLint

Why should anyone contribute to projects that have a completely different philosophy from what they would write? I doubt that the authors of those three projects would welcome any PR removing all dependencies of their tools with or merging all 3 tools into one.

Also, what's the problem with creating new things and fostering competition and advancing the state of our profession? Why is experimenting so frowned upon by some people here in Hacker News?

By the way, the author of Rome is also the author of Babel. So I guess he has made his share of Pull Requests.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Won't be built in a day

<comment><USER64> And not with a Greek helmet either!

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Choosing a name is hard. Facebook might have committed a small freudian slip here.

[https://www.history.com/news/8-reasons-why-rome- fell](https://www.history.com/news/8-reasons-why-rome-fell)

</comment><comment><USER66> Facebook pays for this kind of stuff? Why not spend the time incorporating a decent language instead of trying to fix the fragmented hot mess that is js

<comment><USER67> The same reason they still use PHP via Hack.

Throwing all the baby out with the bath water is something engineers consistently overvalue in business when there are other middleground trade- offs to choose from.

<comment><USER66> I suppose it depends, but throwing out node and migrating everything to Go was one of the better choices we made at Segment, before the platform grew too large.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> Claiming no dependencies while not reducing complexity (76k SLOC mono-commit with no incremental history) isn't a win. No mention of test coverage, no documentation besides the readme. No performance numbers of regression suite.

<comment><USER4> The claim of no dependencies isn't there as some grandiose statement about reduction of complexity, it's there to describe how self contained the project is and our ability to change things. I'm going to refer to a comment I already made elsewhere in this thread:

> Considering this is just a source code dump and call for possible > contributors I'm disappointed it was even posted to Hacker News. Rome is not > ready at all for public consumption. I wanted it open sourced so I could > work with other tooling authors and contributors.

Those things you are asking will come at a time when Rome is actively being marketed as a tool for users rather than an experimental project for contributors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> At this point any sensible engineering manager should be committed to prejudicially dismiss any new js tooling, preprocessor or package manager. The current trash fire state of affairs needs to be let to extinguish itself first.

</comment><comment><USER70> Uh, I found some external deps. Sorry seb!

[https://github.com/facebookexperimental/rome/blob/master/pac...](https://github.com/facebookexperimental/rome/blob/master/packages/%40romejs- web/frontend/package.json)

<comment><USER71> That appears to be for the optional web frontend...not the tool itself.

<comment><USER70> I am aware, apparently I should make more use of /s

<comment><USER67> fwiw, an /s doesn't save you from overestimating the comedic impact of your HN jokes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> You can't compile the code of scripting languages, so please stop using that term. You may be doing _something_ to the "source code", but it is _not_ compiling! And I would argue that the thing you are doing to that code is _never_ a good thing.

<comment><USER16> > You can't compile the code of scripting languages

Of course you can. Compiling is a process that takes some code as input and produces other code as output. The output code doesn't have to be at a lower level of abstraction (like assembly or machine code).

A compiler that produces code at the same level on abstraction (eg. going from TypeScript to JavaScript, or newer JS to ES3 JS) is often called a "transpiler" but a transpiler is just a type of compiler, and it's totally valid to call it such.

<comment><USER26> You can use all the fancy terms for the mangling and intentional obfuscation of crappy code that you want. Sure, you might think that minification is a valid use for such tools, but really, there is no alternative to just sitting down and writing the right code so that it may eventually become a standard thing, and so we won't need to keep reinventing the wheel over and over again.

I know of what I speak. I am in the process of turning the world of web development upside down with Linux on the Web ([https://dev.lotw.xyz/desk.os](https://dev.lotw.xyz/desk.os)).</comment></comment></comment>


HTML5 and JavaScript Game Development Competition in Just 13 KB - <AUTHOR> http://js13kgames.com/entries/2015 <comment><USER2> JS13k is a great game jam, and the only one I know that offers so many prizes to all the people that submit an entry (and even more prizes for the best entries). Great community too! You can join the Slack group here: [https://js13kgames.slack.com](https://js13kgames.slack.com)

And 13kb (zipped) is not such a low limit! Especially if you manage to generate all (or most of) your game's graphisms procedurally.

The jam starts on august 13!</comment>


Internet sites could be given 'cinema-style age ratings', UK Culture Secretary says - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/technology/technologynews/3965051/Internet-sites-could-be-given-cinema-style-age-ratings-Culture-Secretary-says.html

<comment><USER2> Did anyone else notice how Orwellian the UK has been getting lately? Not just this story in particular, but the main theme of the stories coming out about U.K.

<comment><USER3> IMHO the UK has already succeeded in taking the first major step to an Orwellian state. The populous look to the UK government for protection from _all_ evils. It fails to understand that sometimes bad things happen to innocent people and it is prepared to give away it's freedoms so it can live in a safe warm jail.

I'm no anarchist, I've voted in all elections I have been eligible to vote on. The sad fact is that the last bastion of common sense in the UK is the unelected upper chamber of landed aristocracy and rich business men. You don't know how much it pains me to say that :(

To get back on topic. How exactly am I going to get a certificate for a website, how much is it going to cost me? I run a website for heavy metal fans (newmetalarmy.com) and I've already had complaints about the stylized zombie in the logo so I guess I'll be an 18 site then! It's just another hurdle for fringe genres. There is no money to be made in heavy metal, people do it for the art form. But 'society' considers it harmful so it squashes it.

<comment><USER4> No kidding with your first point, I still can't get over this thing I saw back in October:

Transport Secretary Geoff Hoon has said the government is prepared to go "quite a long way" with civil liberties to "stop terrorists killing people".

<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7674775.stm>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Unfortunately internet sites change their content rather more frequently than the content of a particular film changes. How are they going to keep up with changes?

<comment><USER6> They'll probably come up with the bright idea of requiring excessive paperwork any time you update the site so that innovation slows down to a more "manageable" rate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Maybe the deal between the UK government and ISPs goes like this:

We don't intefere with you harvesting personal data to target advertising without users' consent (e.g. Phorm). In exchange you help us censor the web.

</comment><comment><USER8> Shouldn't the culture secretary be doing something about, say, culture?

<comment><USER9> He is Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. Web sites count as media.

<comment><USER8> All web sites are media?

For example, Ebay looks more like commerce. Does he have authority over off- line auction houses?

<comment><USER9> He has a certain amount of authority over, for example, Bid TV, which sells goods by Dutch auction. It must adhere to the same rules as other TV channels.

But over traditional auction houses? No.

<comment><USER10> If you want an example of an online dutch auction, countspin.com comes pretty close.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


TLabs: India's Y Combinator - <AUTHOR> http://www.buzzom.com/2011/07/india-gets-its-ycombinator-tlabs-from-times-internet/

<comment><USER2> What about The Morpheus? Aren't they already doing that?</comment>


Why I asked my friends to stop using WhatsApp and Telegram - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@romaub/why-i-asked-my-friends-to-stop-using-whatsapp-and-telegram-e93346b3c1f0 <comment><USER2> I'm curious to know how effective you were at converting your friends.

Last year, when Whatsapp announced they would be sharing customers mobile number data with Facebook, I urged all of my friends to switch to telegram instead of Whatsapp. the encryption is not as solid, but at the time I was more concerned about Facebook's business practices, and was already using Telegram to talk to family.

In theory, urging your friends to use a more secure protocol is the right thing to do. They all become more secure, and everybody is safer. Win win.

In practice, what happens is most of them don't bother switching, because most people just don't care, and you end up neatly cutting yourself off from everyone. This was my experience at least. Only a handful of my friends signed up to Telegram, and practically none of them uninstalled Whatsapp or even stopped using it.

One year later I'm significantly out of the loop. I've missed a number of social occassions because people forgot I don't use Whatsapp and sent out a group message to everyone on it. I've had to resort to Facebook messenger to get in touch with a number of people I used to talk to on Whatsapp.

Despite knowing what we know about the security of Whatsapp, despite their shady business practices, despite whatever anti-user mischief Whats/Face will likely try to pull next, I'm very tempted to sign back up again.</comment>


Show HN: Drug Pricing Calculator - <AUTHOR> https://www.baybridgebio.com/drug_pricing_calc.html <comment><USER2> This falls prey to a common misconception: drug companies do not price drugs in order to recoup the cost of r&d. R&d is a sunk cost, the pricing of the drug is determined by what the market will bear. Ability to cover r&d is important _before_ beginning the development project- the company needs to believe that bn it will be able to price a drug in a way that is NPV positive, but when the drug is approved, pricing is based purely off of the laws of supply and demand.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is correct. I did not make this sufficiently clear, but this model is supposed to reflect the perspective of an investor / startup deciding whether to invest in a drug development project. The model calculates price required for breakeven NPV using a discount rate of 20%, which is roughly in line with cost of capital for startups. Since most FDA approved drugs these days are developed by small companies, i thought it appropriate to use a small company's cost of capital

<comment><USER2> I see, then I guess more accurately the page doesnt fall prey to the misconception as much as accidentally perpetuates it. Maybe it would be a good idea to clarify using the tenses of the verbs and the wording that this is about the co considerations for the future pricing of the drug for a decision made before investment, and that the actual price of the drug will be dictated by supply/demand curves? If the model is presented as an investment go/no go calculator rather than price calculator, then that could make a lot of sense, and from that perspective it's a really cool model, I love how comprehensive it is! One nitpick, breakeven price and the word "breakeven" often refers to accounting profit, it might help to clarify that this is the price where you hit NPV>0, and maybe include the details of what the post patent cliff market size assumptions were (although that probably contributes very little given a 20% discount rate). It really is quite thorough!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, that is helpful feedback. I changed the first sentence to make it more clear that this reflects an investor's go / no-go model.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Elm, would you use it in production? - <AUTHOR> I'm a team of one creating apps for internal use. I want to use a tool I'll enjoy. Elm seems great but is it wise to use something so niche in production code? <comment><USER2> Having written production Elm code, and as someone who likes the language, I would not consider Elm to be production-ready.

\- Componentized design is eschewed by the community, so it's very hard to break down apps into small easily-combined pieces.

\- The learning curve for new engineers is relatively high, and drops off pretty significantly after a month or so. It might be easier if your team is already familiar with strongly typed languages, but there's quite a bit to learn to get up to speed.

\- The lack of a roadmap is the only true non-starter. Our team ran into a compiler bug, and the options were either to patch it ourselves (which is unlikely since no one on our team knows Haskell or has that much free time), or to wait an indeterminate amount of time and pray it gets patched. If you look at the release history, you'll see that updates to the language are infrequent.

I would still highly recommend Elm for a side project, just not for something that a business or team relies on.

</comment><comment><USER3> The code it generates is fine for production. Probably better than vanilla js.

However maintaining the code is a concern. It's pre version 1.0 and each release has breaking changes.

The general direction is away from supporting the whole web api, and making it harder to write your own ffi to work around this as you have to use ports as they have scrapped other methods in user space like native code.

</comment><comment><USER4> Not any more, unfortunately. Evan's approach to project management is borderline psychotic.

</comment><comment><USER5> no. too risky.</comment>


Hotel booking sites to end 'misleading' sales - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47141538 <comment><USER2> There was an interesting article recently framing the designing in of anxiety as an accessibility issue: [https://developer.paciellogroup.com/blog/2018/08/a-web-of- an...](https://developer.paciellogroup.com/blog/2018/08/a-web-of-anxiety- accessibility-for-people-with-anxiety-and-panic-disorders-part-1/) . This really made me reevaluate dark patterns as not just tedious but as actively harmful to large sets of the population. The use of AB testing is fine in and of itself, but only when the results are analysed with things like this in mind; it's all too easy to micro-iterate your way to a solution like this.

</comment><comment><USER3> My spouse and I were wanting to visit NYC last spring. A hotel + flight package for three nights was listed as $800 per person because of a last minute sale. Okay so $1600 plus maybe another 10% in tax?

Nope. By the time you're really settled on this is where you'll stay and this is when you'll fly out and return and your spouse is excited, the final price is more like $2500, not counting a daily resort fee of another $35 that will go directly to the hotel once you get there.

So from $800 a person to $2600 for two people. Yeah no thanks.

</comment><comment><USER4> It'd be great if the misleading airline prices were next; it's becoming increasingly common to price out flights only to see an increase within a few hours.

<comment><USER5> That's probably mostly due to different price categories selling out. I have the feeling that people come up with conspiracy theories about airline pricing way too quickly.

Even the "private browser window" trick seems mostly anecdotally or very specific to some airlines. I could never verify it myself.

This is a good starter: [https://youtu.be/72hlr-E7KA0](https://youtu.be/72hlr-E7KA0)</comment></comment>


A Scheme language for building web 2.0 apps - <AUTHOR> http://hop.inria.fr/ <comment><AUTHOR> especially check out the repl on the demos tab. very cool.</comment>


Show HN: Write a message to the Blockchain with JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://blockchainpie.com/blockchain-tutorial-bitcoin-message/ <comment><USER2> Thanks for an interesting sharing. And for RushWallet reference: I had a hard time of finding a good alternative to now-defunct InstaWallet.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice! Thanks for checking it out I appreciate it</comment></comment>


SaaS Vendors Should Learn The Art Of Security - Dropbox Issue - <AUTHOR> http://www.cloudave.com/link/saas-vendors-should-learn-the-art-of-security-before-they-open-shop

<comment><USER2> Uh, what?

Unless this reveals actual information about the valid account, this a sev:informational finding on any professional assessment. In other words: you probably wouldn't even list it as a vulnerability.

I'm not sure I've _ever_ seen an application that didn't have an account ID distinguisher somewhere in it. All you need is a place that generates "Permission denied" instead of "Not found".

Publicly calling out Dropbox for something that has extremely minimal real- world impact is bad form. Dropbox might care that there's a method to count accounts (I doubt it, since most of those accounts are free, so you can't work them back to financials), but it's not a matter of Internet safety and hygiene.

<comment><USER3> And it is a very badly written article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> believe it or not, this was intentional and an homage to slashdot (the concept of having low IDs that are publicly viewable), however obscure

the public link feature was actually a proof of concept and never intended to stick around :)

but anyway, having this information doesn't let you do anything but get a rough count of our users, so saying it's a security issue is a stretch. there are no public-facing forms or inputs that take these values as input

<comment><USER5> @dhouston, Thanks for the little info about the motivation behind using this approach.

However, I want to point out that I never said it is a security issue. I just said that it is not a best practice from the security point of view and it could be taken as a starting point for further poking and social engg stuff. I just want to make it clear here.

<comment><USER2> You didn't read his comment carefully. He refuted you. According to him, there's no further poking to be done. "There are no public-facing forms or inputs that take these values as inputs".

Not only that, but the title of your post was "SaaS Vendors Should Learn The Art Of Security Before They Open Shop". It's a bit late to walk the sentiment back now. Either come to the table with more information than you've shared, or take your lumps and apologize. I think you got it wrong.

<comment><USER5> I did read his comment. Since, he is not refuting the issues I (or, for that matter, the guy who did the analysis) raised, I didn't respond. You don't need to have further forms or any other input. Just the list of account numbers, educated guesses about filenames like resume.pdf or resume.doc, then digging out info from such filenames, then social engg techniques, etc. could cause enough havoc to the individual. The same line of arguments can be applied to businesses as well.

Plus, anyone who has read my post properly (than asking me to read the comments here properly) can understand that I never said that their security is weak. I only told that their approach to resource enumeration offers an easy way for hackers to get started. I am not sure if you understand the argument I am making here from a purely security point of view. But, if you are familiar, I invite you to think along these lines and see if it is a good practice to have this kind of sequential naming system.

PS: Regd you second paragraph, I don't respond to childish talk. If you restrain and talk like an adult, I am happy to discuss this issue. This is not about me or you or Dropbox people, it is about possible issues such an approach can cause and its impact on cloud computing, in general. Since, I evangelize cloud computing, I care about issues like this and try to highlight it in my blog posts. If you are open to mature discussions on this topic, feel free to drop by my blog post and we can discuss further. Otherwise, this will be my last response. Thanks for your time anyhow.

<comment><USER5> Let me put it this way. If I am a business and if I knew that there is an easy way for a hacker to reach the documents I am sharing to selected few publicly (the key point here is the EASY WAY TO GET to my account), I will be worried about sharing my documents through that service. I do agree that any publicly shared document in any service is vulnerable but the question here is the ease at which it could be found in a service.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>