Soaring Student Debt Prompts Calls for Relief - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/soaring-student-debt-prompts-calls-for-relief-1473759003?mod=pls_whats_news_us_business_f <comment><USER4> Am I the only one who hates the notion of being forced to pay for other people's bad financial decisions?

I made the choice to go to a slightly less prestigious school so I wouldn't have to go into debt for college. I also worked all through college to pay for my expenses.

Should I now be punished for that decision? Why should we make people's financial mistakes consequence-free?

I think the government should get out of the student loan industry entirely: stop subsidizing them and making interest rates a political issue. Let the market signal which degrees are valuable and which aren't. But also make them dischargeable in bankruptcy. At least then there would be a _consequence_ for people deciding to take out expensive loans for education.

<comment><USER5> You may be right that it's a poor financial decision, but I still hope to one day live in a country where people can pursue education in any subject matter (not just STEM/other money makers) for the pure purpose of educational fulfillment. That can only be done with a system that helps pay for education instead of letting the market decide which degrees are most valuable in terms of pure capitalistic measures

<comment><USER6> Let me know when you find the hole in the ground that is shooting money up into the air that enables us to have luxuries like this.

Frankly, we have thousands of other problems, highlighted by basic health care, that we should probably prioritize first.

<comment> white-flame Note that this is literal in some cases. Norway, being one of the major neo- socialist successes, is also a major oil exporter in the region. They have holes in the ground shooting money up that help enable social programs.

<comment><USER7> >neo-socialist

This isn't a word and Norway isn't socialist.

<comment><USER8> It has a Wikipedia page, a Wiktionary page, and copious references to it by well known publications.

<comment><USER7> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neosocialism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neosocialism)

Clearly the two "well known" publications (the most preeminent Marxist journals) listed in that wikipedia article and the fact that the wikipedia article's definition of neo socialism has absolutely nothing to do with Norways economic model point to the fact that the parent comment definitely didn't make up that word out of thin air.

Norway is not socialist, neosocialist, or whatever dumb made up "socialism" you people try to come up with.

Also something having a wiki page on any website and being used in a couple of journals does not make something a term/word. It only indicates that someone wants it to be a term/word.

<comment><USER9> It's interesting that Norway is ranked first on the democracy index, yet most Americans view it's policies as 'socialist'.

<comment><USER7> The democracy index is bs and most Americans don't even know what the word socialist means. So what is your point because you just stated two completely unrelated facts to what is currently being discussed.

<comment><USER9> My point was that some core values of democracy (equality and justice) are incorrectly perceived as 'socialist' in current American linguistic usage. If this were corrected, it is much more likely that American's would support a more democratic, Norwegian governance model.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Part of the problem is that the last few generations have been told the same thing: blue collar jobs aren't "good" jobs. You need to go to college so you can get a "good" job sitting at a desk because those other jobs are below you. If you take one of those blue collar jobs then you've failed and aren't "achieving your potential".

The grand irony in all of this is that the people who did go on to become plumbers, electricians, mechanics, roofers, HVAC specialists, etc, are all the ones that are currently in huge demand. And over the next 20 - 30 years they're the ones that aren't going to be automated (well ... mechanics may become less relevant with electric cars rising in popularity). As much as I'd love to automate remodeling my kitchen I'm not holding my breath on seeing it happen any time soon.

<comment><USER11> They aren't good jobs. The average salary for plumbers is around $50-55k or so, right around the median for the US. Ok, but certainly not good. For roofers and mechanics, you're significantly below the median around $35k, basically in poverty especially if you have a family. I don't think encouraging people away from education is the problem when salaries are this low (poverty levels).

<comment><USER12> Hah, i bet its way higher. Anyone that owns their own business like that is probably fudging their income numbers and writing off as much as they can. I wouldn't be surprised if the income was 2-20x higher for established self employed people.

<comment><USER11> The owners are a minor percentage of the workers in these fields and therefore what they make is irrelevant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> IMO, a large chunk of this would be resolved if federal loans where limited based on tuition not just need. If a school charges more than ~20k/year then students can't apply for federal loans and private loans become dischargeable.

Note: Some schools still charage less than 10k/year. [http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/the-short- list...](http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/the-short-list- college/articles/2015/09/09/10-private-colleges-and-universities-with-highest- lowest-sticker-prices)

Instead, schools have a huge incentive to raise tuition endlessly and family's are stuck playing a zero sum reputation game.

<comment><USER14> Who sets those limits and how are they enforced over time? What if colleges find other ways to charge you money (accomodation, usage fees for equipment etc).

<comment><USER15> It'll be a never-ending cat and mouse game deciding those limits. I'd say artificially skewing the market is unsustainable and shouldn't be done.

<comment><USER13> Government backed loans already skew the market. Stopping them is an option.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If this happens, do I get benefits on the debt I've already paid off? I would be pretty pissed if I didn't. I worked my ass off to pay my loans.

<comment><USER17> My wife and I worked and sacrificed to pay our student loans off. Struggle builds character, appreciation, and gratitude.

<comment><USER18> Same here! However, there is a line to draw on how much debt to put on someone. I know people who have tuition payments cutting into their living wages, affecting their ability to have even the basic necessities. There is nothing good about this unnecessary suffering, having to worry if you will still be able to afford a meal or a roof over your head.

<comment><USER4> > However, there is a line to draw on how much debt to put on someone.

Yes, people should decide how much debt they want to take on.

There are vast differences in the value of different degrees (cost and earnings). It's people's responsibility to educate themselves. The rest of us shouldn't have to subsidize someone's terrible decision to go into debt for a degree in basket-weaving.

<comment><USER19> Should we be expecting the average 17-year old to be make sound financial decisions? Especially given how much money is involved.

<comment><USER4> Yes, we should. The average college freshman is 18 years old.

If you're old enough to drive a car, join the army, or be charged as an adult, you're old enough to realize that paying tens of thousands of dollars for a degree in musical theater isn't a great idea.

It's not rocket science. There are tons of resources online to help you figure out which degrees and schools are good value.

<comment><USER19> Yes, I agree it would be great if all 17/18 year-olds were able to sift through the marketing BS of school PR departments and the societal pressures to go to college, but it's increasingly obvious that they aren't making good decisions. I'm not convinced free college is the best solution either, but it seems you don't have much empathy for those without the same perception ability as you. I thought I was making the right decision, but now I'm stuck with 2k/mo for 8 years. I'm a bit bitter, yes...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Many generations before now either had access to very low or free tuitions from public universities, or fairly low tuitions (relative to future earnings) for private schools. Society subsidized those costs because it was an excellent investment on future economic growth.

Somehow we got twisted into this track of thought that everything must be individually accounted, and student became individually loaded with the debt of their education. And because students as a group are in a poor bargaining position for tuitions - the inflation of education costs skyrocketed. I think they are the only life cost that gives healthcare a run for it's money in it's ability to exceed (by multiples) both the growth in the economy, let alone the growth in personal incomes. This cannot continue.

Plans to give student aid to income below a certain threshold will only serve to further cause tuition inflation. It is a case where individual allocation of cost/debts is much less efficient and harmful to our economy than social allocation of the cost. I think we need to go back to funding public universities out of direct state and federal budgets so that public institutions can offer low or no tuitions. This way, gov't organizations with the budget leverage, with much better visibility and oversight can keep costs down at public universities. Low public university costs will also help cap the excesses of private tuitions via market competition.

Unwinding the current mess of student debt is also a huge issue, but should be undertaken too (but I'll leave that to some other time...)

<comment><USER21> It really requires a rethinking of the need for college, how college should work, and how it should be paid for.

Most undergraduates have no real need to obtain a gold-plated degree. Undergraduate education in nearly all fields is well-understood and can be delivered adequately at low cost. This is why foreign countries that aren't wealthy still produce excellent undergrads. Only in the US do we believe you really can't get educated unless you went to an expensive and/or elite school.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Am I the only one that thinks this is actually fairly simple? Change the rules to allow the loans to be discharged by standard bankruptcy and limit the percentage of federal backing.

All of the sudden the banks will actually care about doing due diligence and the likelihood of being paid back, instead of throwing money at everyone knowing they have a federal taxpayer backstop.

You want a loan for $60k to major in electrical engineering at NC State? Approved. You want us to loan you $225k to major in Sociology at Sarah Lawrence University? Denied.

\-- note - not to disparage anyone who went to Sarah Lawrence University. Chosen purely because it was listed as the most expensive private school

<comment><USER23> Yup and another benefit is it will not set as many of our youth into debt just when they are enjoying freedom for the first time in their life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> It's such a weight off of the shoulders to have paid my wife and my student loans off a few months ago. Instead of the 20 or 30yr plan we put every extra dollar towards it and paid it off in 3.5 years. It feels fantastic! It's bizarre that student debt has become the norm and students who have potentially low-earning majors such as History are still given similar amounts of money from banks as a CS major.

<comment><USER25> > It's bizarre that student debt has become the norm and students who have > potentially low-earning majors such as History are still given similar > amounts of money from banks as a CS major.

Not so bizarre when you consider that student loans are very difficult to get discharged via bankruptcy. The loan issuers don't need to worry so much about whether you'll be able to pay it back or not, because it's more a question of "when" than "if".

<comment><USER24> Yeah that's a very good point. Interesting how they aren't easily discharged via bankruptcy. I may have to do some research on how exactly that got put in place and who was behind it...

<comment><USER26> It got put into place because they are high risk loans given out to people that have nothing to secure them with.

If you could discharge them in bankruptcy, no one would offer them because huge percentages of people would go ahead and do so.

<comment><USER27> Thereby naturally solving the problem. Schools won't be able to raise their prices to pay for non academic garbage like stadiums and fancy buildings, they won't have to compete with other schools accepting as many kids as possible to make as much money as possible to keep up with the Joneses with their newest toys.

And society can have a discussion again on how much it values educating its populace.

<comment><USER26> I think you have to have that discussion before you stop offering student loans. Nothing else would create the political room needed to do it...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Having deliberately attended the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities rather than an expensive private college, and having paid for it with a combination of savings, work, and some loans which I paid off immediately after graduating, I find the idea of loan relief morally reprehensible.

Some ideas to improve the "situation on the ground":

\- reduce the demand for college education

\- reduce the cost of attending college by providing better material support for students in the form of affordable room and board.

\- reduce the cost of attending college by providing better public funding (by an order of magnitude) for public universities, state schools, and community colleges for students of proven ability (3rd/4th year students).

\- fail students who are wasting their money more quickly and aggressively.

\- make it easier to attend college part-time while working or while raising kids (the idea of intensive four-year study with "Summer Breaks" is absurd in the modern non-agrarian economy)

\- publish clear metrics on loan-repayment/income prospects after achieving a 4-year degree of <type> from <institution> with <gpa/perf metrics/etc> and use these to gate loans (it is probably rational to take out loans to get a philosophy degree from Harvard, it is probably not rational to take out loans to get a philosophy degree from a random state school in Minnesota.

\- regulate predatory loan-lending even more aggressively.

\- offer insurance as part of loans to allow students to hedge against catastrophic life/economic problems.

If you are a dead average intellect with dead average work-ethic and ambitions, I see absolutely no reason to support your post-secondary education beyond a year or so. That's throwing damp logs on a dead fire.

If you're a dead average intellect with dead average work-ethic and ambitions and you take out tens of thousands of dollars in loans gambling on a future that doesn't exist, I see no reason to treat you any differently than someone who gambles and loses in the market.

<comment><USER29> I also went to the University of Minnesota...same story. That being said - <USER2> you remember those ads on daytime TV for ITT Technical Institute? Well it turns out that they shut that school down last month, for basically being a fraud school. The people who went to that school still owe federal debt. So, it's more complicated than that. Also, by saying, "dead average intellect and dead average work ethic," I think you're building a construct, which doesn't really exist. There are all sorts of reasons why people may have chosen a place like ITTTI - desperation, a family to support, lack of a proper background information on what education can do, lack of information, etc. You and I are lucky. Also, if you were presumably white, let's keep in mind that there is a massive educational gap in the Twin Cities...the largest in the nation. So we can get on our moral John Lockeian high horse about how responsible we are, talk about property rights, etc, but there have been many injustices perpetrated in all sorts of directions in the past, and we have a duty as members of society to improve that society, by whatever means make the most sense.

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

<comment><USER28> I think you're absolutely right. I was trying to craft my suggestions in such a way that we discourage fraudulent lending and provide (publicly, not privately) insurance against not being able to pay future education debts because of circumstances outside our control.

I want to increase the odds that someone who is willing and able can work their way to where they want to be, and decrease the odds that fortune dictates who wins and who loses.

(I vehemently support leveling the funding playing field for primary and secondary public schools in Minnesota and dramatically increasing funding for schools in poorer neighborhoods; also providing credits for child care, preschool, public transportation, and safer streets. What I object to is the idea that someone should go to Macalester College, get a degree in Psychology with a C+ average, then complain because they aren't handed a job with a wage high enough to cover $100k in student loans).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The only recent grads (within 5 years) with student debt in my circles who could afford and have bought a house recently are:

1\. Doctor & Finance couple with combined income $400,000+/year 2\. Pharmacist & Finance couple with combined income $200,000+/year 3\. Science Research & Quant(finance) couple with combined income $300,000+/year

Interestingly - all have finance or medical field/science exposure..

The rest are renting forever paying of debt with no plans to buy soon (we are in hot real estate area).

I dont see who will support real estate prices going forward.

<comment><USER31> While I agree with your sentiment in general, do you really think it's normal to be in a house 5 years after graduating? That's still "first steps of my career" phase. Completely unheard of even when I was growing up where I'm from - you would have been seen as doing _very_ well to own a home in your mid/late-20's.

<comment><USER32> Anyone have actual stats on homeownership vs. age? Here's one I was able to dig up, maybe someone's got something better. This seems to say that 21% of people under 25 own a house, and 32% of 25-29's own a house.

[http://thereformedbroker.com/wp- content/uploads/2015/03/Scre...](http://thereformedbroker.com/wp- content/uploads/2015/03/Screen-Shot-2015-03-11-at-12.02.42-PM.png)

<comment><USER33> That can't be right. Perhaps it includes people who live in a house owned by their family?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> You walked uphill through snow to get to your current position, with grit and determination and those freeloaders, who majored in THEATER or LITERATURE, spending their college days socializing while you studied for difficult engineering exams shouldn't be allowed to escape without paying for their crime of living in a country with a broken higher education system.

Eerily similar narrative to any other welfare debate in the US.

</comment><comment><USER35> How about colleges and universities stop price gauging the population? Or, eliminate student loans, so the population will not be able to afford their ridiculous rates and force the cost down.

<comment><USER36> >eliminate student loans

This will do nothing more than favor the rich and further suppress the poor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I'd like to see something similar to the risk retention rule that was supposed to be put in place for mortgages by Dodd-Frank.* Colleges should only get 80 or 90 cents on the dollar from student loans and have to wait for the rest until the loans are repaid (if at all). Perhaps a sliding scale could be used depending on the amount borrowed, with more expensive schools bearing more of the risk.

* I say supposed to be because the rule was swallowed by an exception during the regulatory process and now only plays a minor role.

</comment><comment><USER26> The typical _new graduate_ owes less than $40,000.

The great majority of student debt holders owe less than $30,000.

I'd like to see more direct funding for schools and a shift of federal support to competitive grants, but those aren't huge numbers when you look at a degree bringing in hundreds of thousands of extra dollars over a career.

Grants aren't as egalitarian as giving anyone who wants it a loan, but they can be expected to distort the market less (because schools have to compete for people who don't get them).

<comment><USER20> They may not seem that large, but I suspect that compounding interest effects and the fact that the debt is there very early in peoples lifetimes make them very heavily weighted in terms of the effects on lives and economies.

<comment><USER26> The interest compounding on a $30,000-40,000 loan wouldn't really be a student loan issue, it would be a job issue.

The interest on the loan sizes I've mentioned is typically going to be less than $4000 a year, so if they pay $6000 a year the loan will go away quite quickly. That's a substantial amount of after tax income for a lot of jobs, but students should be looking at the debt in those sort of terms, that it is going to be one of their main payments for a while.

<comment><USER20> Not the interest of the student loan, the 'interest' of the opportunity cost of paying $4000-$6000 year instead of some other use (eg personal or retirement savings, or saving for a house). There is a huge forward cost in their financial quality of life because of these early debt payments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> If there is going to be any "debt relief", it should be accomplished by taxing the schools & administrations that have immensely benefitted over the past 60 years from the massive subsidies granted to higher ed.

This just shows how incredibly stupid the right wing is in the US. They could be using this as a cudgel to punish their intellectual opponents in the universities (entirely justified, since their claims to be increasing the human capital of their students in an economically productive way were evidently false), and simultaneously break down a barrier used to exclude a large number of their constituents (non-college-educated whites) from white collar employment.

Instead it looks like they might be setting up to cut another check and further solidify the role of colleges as ideologically hostile gatekeepers to decent employment.

</comment><comment><USER39> I'm not sure why it has to be forgiveness. They should be be able to file for bankruptcy just the same as if it was some other bad investment. All investments should come with risks and rewards and be "priced" appropriately.

This will have a _drastic_ affect on the interest rate of student loans, but perhaps a turn towards normal will be good for us. As of right now the government gaurantees it 100% -- which is to say YOU guarantee it!

</comment><comment><USER40> Why is shelling out six figures to go to college even a thing? Any of the knowledge obtainable through a college course is available free on the internet. Is it having the accountability of grades and adult supervision? 60k/yr/student seems like a lot of mark up for repackaging knowledge which is free in a format consumable by the average high school grad. This this is a market waiting to get disrupted.

<comment><USER41> Leaving aside whether degrees add value or not, the perception is that they do and it absolves hiring managers some responsibility.

If you work for a big company and you have an ivy league grad and a guy from a conference you met who seems promising do you:

a) hire the ivy guy and if he is crap mumble about youth today b) hire the random guy who screws up and everyone blames you ?

Both get hired at low wages as starters, you might save a bit on the random person but not _that_ much. Plus if he is good he'll want a rise.

Large corporations are about sitting nice and still and not messing up.

I'm not sure it's the market, it's the consumers of the product in our world where managing perception in large companies which often have monopolies is more important that cranking stuff out. Not always, but often.

<comment><USER40> Option 3, (which may not be a option at F500 Co) is bring him on as a contractor and if he performs convert him to perm.

A college degree is this decades version of "nobody got fired for buying IBM"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I wish we could switch to a system like Australia. Graduates take on no debt but have to pay a few extra percentage points of taxes after.

</comment><comment><USER43> I'm reminded of the U of C's Aims of Education Address when this discussion comes up.

EG: [https://aims.uchicago.edu/node/83](https://aims.uchicago.edu/node/83)

I tend to think that many things that are now in college degree programs are actually things that should be in trade programs - we've turned everything into a degree, and in the process, stopped realizing what the value of a degree is and/or what the purpose of a theory driven/liberal arts education is.

(TL:DR if you don't end up reading the link - to think, to create the ability to teach yourself, to encounter new ideas and figure out which ones are hot air and which ones are not. To learn how to create good new ideas for yourself! To become a better human being and citizen in order to better participate in this world)

If we separated out the trade school aspect, well, it becomes very hard to value an education in the traditional degree/liberal arts sense - and it becomes easier to tell what's the value of that immediate trade school diploma by market forces. In that, then the government could apply a limit on loans to what is very knowable (market forces) and apply some other metric because of the public good gained by aiming towards education in general

<comment><USER44> Was there in person for that address (was that 10 years ago...). In my view if you go to college today and don't get a real liberal education (distribution requirements!) then you have waisted your time and probably your money.

<comment><USER43> you're lucky. My year didn't have nearly as entertaining a speech.

I still think his points hold (as do many of the speeches points, most of which in some ways are similar).

However, attaching liberal education to everything may or may not be a good idea - and with the trade-ism of college, liberal education is sort of conceptually odd

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> With a year left on my massive loan, I can not wait. I can't imagine students these days coming out, and not having the luxury of being picked up right out of school to a well paying job. And god forbid they chose a less "desirable" concentration.

</comment><comment><USER46> Thanks to the new health care laws, states must (or will be) spending more money on Medicaid which takes money away from public higher education. As it is, the boomer generation is funding a far lower proportion of the state public universities than their parents' generation did for them, which is really unfair.

It is because of increased Medicaid costs and also because boomers aren't financing the proportion of state higher education that their parents did that many of today's young have higher student debt than it the past.

Doctors don't haven't to incur debt in medical school if they spend four years in the military as doctors.

<comment><USER47> That first point i'm not sure if it is true or not: My understanding was that the federal government was going to pay most of the money. Besides, if we as voters thought a little more and demanded better funding for schools - <USER3> say, cutting money spent on unwanted or unneeded military equipment - we could get it.

Your option for doctors to not incur medical debt is very hopeful. First, I doubt the military has enough positions for all the doctors to fill, and I doubt all doctors would be fit enough to qualify for military service. On top of that, that is 4-6 years longer before they can actually practice.

There should be a way that is much better than sending potential doctors and surgeons off to war. For instance, forgive loans to folks that work in general family practice for 7 or 8 years, less if they move and practice in an area that is in a high demand (poverty stricken area) - with the disclaimer that they must take all forms of government backed insurance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Since when did HN turn into an objectivist hellhole? It's like Ayn Rand herself is trying to convince me to harm others for my own benefit.

</comment><comment><USER49> Ah yes, the old "let's attempt to solve a problem by introducing more of what caused the problem in the first place" solution.

</comment><comment><USER50> Armchair marxist opinion: forgive the students debt, make the administrators pay more taxes.

In all seriousness, though, there is a real sense in which students who go to college are being scammed, in this sense I pity them. Their money isn't going to better professors, who are still paid a pittance for a lifetime of devotion to their field, even in the sciences. It's going to the administrators, whose motives are not actually education, but gaming the already broken system of academia.

In my eyes, this makes the case for socialized higher-ed even stronger. A system which incurs financial ills so great is , by definition, a market failure, one so vast that it begs the question why it is a market in the first place. It'd be much more prudent to pay for students educations if they show potential for success in the first place, rather than financing many of my college peers who now work in coffee shops as compensation for their $200k Anthropology degree. No system built on craftily selling economically useless degrees as an "investment in one's future" will actually provide any benefit to society.

So what's to be done? First, Provide students with scholarships, or the like, to schools which limit administrative expenditures or those whose administrative expenses pale in comparison to the money they spend on qualified professors. Second, disqualify schools which do not produce a threshold percentage of net-gain employees - if a school has a track record of pumping out angsty coffee shop Lit majors, it has no business in taking taxpayer dollars. Last, provide outlets for students who aren't destined for a career in the sciences. Maybe trade schools that offer classes in academics alongside chances to become electricians or plumbers, both careers face workforce due to people's obsession with reading hundred-year-old books instead of doing something meaningful with their time.

Rant complete

</comment><comment> tuna-piano Who should pay for college?

Should it be the individual receiving the education (either at present, or in the future in the form of loans), or other people? Should people who don't go to college be forced to pay for education of those who do?

Should we further tell students not to care what price colleges charge them? If we forgive debt, we're telling students to go to a school regardless of the costs, and telling schools to charge whatever they want.

We're then forcing non-college-educated plumbers to pay (through the tax system) for the engineers college education.

This seems like a terrible idea.

I also see a huge problem with lumping all education together. There are some colleges, degrees and people where college can be considered a wise investment. That is, the expected value of the degree is more than the cost. There are other times when it appears college is a consumption expense, like just buying a four year vacation or a luxury car.

When someone graduates college with the same productive capacity they had before college, but now with debt, that's sad to me. Working at $10 an hour in a coffee shop isn't that bad. Working at $10 an hour with $50k in debt is very bad. Many times people were just 18 year olds who were handed a blank check (loan) for college, and didn't know better. But there was no checks or balances on this ignorant 18 year old, as the lenders dont care that the student was not increasing their productive capacity.

What we need is a system with no lender guarantees, with potential for percent of income repayment (earning equity), and have it be unsecured like other forms of debt. This will make lenders function properly, and only give loans to those who it believes are improving their human potential at college- and for whom college isn't the equivalent as buying a $100k luxury car.

</comment><comment><USER51> There are a few things that the government could do to help, without blanket loan forgiveness:

1\. Allow people to pay off their loans with pre-tax dollars, just like 401k investments.

2\. Cap interest rates. The high rates are a big problem for people with large balances. The interest rates are a little lower now than the used to be -- 6.8% was standard for Federal loans for many years, and private loans are even higher.

3\. Limit the amount that can be borrowed in the first place. Colleges have been raising tuition because they know students will be able to get the money. Apparently there are already limits, but I know people with over $100k in debt for a bachelor's degree, so clearly the limits aren't low enough. Limit what students will borrow, and you limit what they can pay -- tuition increases will become a lot harder to justify.

4\. Make it easier to discharge loans in bankruptcy. This will also reduce lending, which is actually a good thing.

</comment><comment><USER52> America's student loan policy for the last 20 years: Reward bad decisions, punish hard work and responsibility.

<comment><USER38> America's general policy for the last 80 years on any particular issue you can name.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Society has an over emphasis on going to college. So much education is available for free in the Internet age.

s/college/youtube/g

Also, bring back the apprenticeships. Why not let someone learn for free or even get paid a small amount? It's so much better than them going into debt.

College is such a racket.

</comment><comment><USER30> My call is that we will have a student debt relief fund when enough government folks get scared (within 5 years my guess). So basically the printing press will turn on and we will bail out students. Watch out for all the controversy that's going to come with this bail out.

</comment><comment><USER38> The two proposals they explicitly call out, allowing employers to subsidize the debt, and allowing farmers to write off their debts, are the exact kind of special carve-outs that caused the damn problem in the first place (the genesis being the non-dischargability & government guarantee of education debts, which was an enormous give-away to the higher ed sector).

This is eerily reminiscent of the pre-revolution French or late Soviet Union trying to keep their spinning plates of state obligations, onerous taxes, and corrupt subsidies aloft.

</comment><comment><USER54> I'm going to be so pissed off if a whole generation of students gets their students loans forgiven two decades after I paid mine off.

<comment><USER55> So, let's see, if you were a black person in 1863 who'd been enslaved but bought your freedom prior to the Emacipation Proclamation, you'd resent the Emancipation Proclamation since from then on other wouldn't have to buy their freedom?

<comment><USER54> Wow, did you seriously just compare your student loan debts that you entered into freely and of your own will to slavery?

<comment><USER55> Nope!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> I got a 2-year degree from a community college and then went to a cheaper university for CS. I would recommend it, especially if your grades are not the best or you don't have a ton of money.

My wife, on the other hand, is in another boat. She is studying vet med and has a pile of debt, and will likely be paying off her loans for most of her career.

</comment><comment><USER57> This should be framed as call to increase tax on everyone for student debt relief. I wonder if people will be happy then.

</comment><comment><USER58> They should probably make general core classes free, but make students pay for anything specialized and solely related to their major. This would strike a balance between having an educated population, and having education focus on subjects that are in-demand and beneficial to society.

</comment><comment><USER59> The solution seems simple: a few years of public service (infrastructure repair, maintaining parks, teaching in inner-city schools, military, etc.) in exchange for loan forgiveness.

Our taxes are the dues we pay to live in a civil society, but civic responsibility doesn't end there.

</comment><comment><USER60> College is just all sorts of disgusting in the US right now. I support relief, but I'm sure that we're going to have to see a massive crash in the system before anything happens.

I managed to go to a small public university after the tuition hike but _before_ the Great Fees Gouging. I'd probably have escaped with $5,000 less in debt if I had started with my state's (Georgia's Hope) merit based scholarship instead of having to build up 10 semester hours totally on Federal UnSubsidized Loans the first year.

At that point, used Ebay books could run you well past $1,000 a semester. Hope only gave you a $150 for books. Hope also did not cover fees. Those _started_ at about $800 every semester when I enrolled. My 4th year, they had hit well past $2,500 per semester. Included in that was $150 to build a new student recreation center that I would never use since it wasn't even being built yet.

The amount of hustle I had to do just to escape that school with minimal debt was insane. My overloaded schedule (because semester hours past 12 didn't increase your tuition or fees) meant I needed a job that let me do study or homework while working. So typical service jobs off-campus were out of the question. My year basically was applying for summer retail jobs, lying my face off during the interview that I was going to stay on past the summer, and then of course quitting. I'm basically black-listed from several retailers for quitting for this reason. Christmas was always easier because those jobs are naturally seasonal.

During school, I'd tutor various core classes under the table. At my university, this was considered quasi-against-the-rules. Tutors were supposed to go through the Student Support Center. They'd pay you hourly minimum wage and set you up with other students for free. Tutors who were students caught not going this route were usually sanctioned by the university and threatened with all sorts of administrative punishments.

Naturally, this was unacceptable to tutors, so we all snuck around advertising by word of mouth and meeting off campus. I mean, when I can easily pull $100 a session as the only person willing to try to cram Plato into your brain, why would I go through the SSC? Calculus was a bit harder because there was more competition, so that usually ran about $60 to start. Once I had kids getting their B's and telling their friends, I was able to pull $100. I ran a group rate for a Fraternity that was a flat $350 a month.

I lived off campus, because rent on a 3 bedroom, 2 bath was $950/month plus utilities. Speaking of hustle, keeping those bedrooms stocked with roommates was it's own drama. Kicking roommates who fell behind was even worse. The lease was in my name, because most places I went to rent a room were on 6 month leases and headed home every summer. I wanted something more permanent since I was staying in town year round.

All said, I managed to escape with just over $30,000 in debt. That's tuition, fees, and about $10,000 a year to supplement all my other income. I hit a job immediately and started burning it down as fast as possible. I landed a better job with nice, $10,000 yearly bonuses and finished murdering it.

This was right as the next big wave of inflation hit higher education. Now? I went back and poked some of my social circle in that town. Getting out without $60,000 in debt is basically impossible. If you live outside of a 10 mile radius of the campus, you are _required to live in the dorms_ your Freshman year. Literally every course uses some sort of book with an online component. To access that component, you have to buy the book new to get a code. The university regularly charges current students fees to raise money for buildings that won't be built for 5 years. They recently charged a parking fee, and then made all lots _on campus_ hourly paid parking. The lot that parking fee is for? It's about a 4 minute walk off campus. Good luck if your class is on the other side of the campus.

Part time students are actually charged the exact same fees, but are not allowed access to several benefits of of the campus. This is disguised as "discounts" for full time students at on campus food vendors, a higher co-pay for health services (physical and mental), and being barred from the free tutors (that no one can use because we won't work for them) Student Resource Center.

The problem isn't just the loans, it's a deep cultural problem in the administration of these universities. University presidents down to the department chairs are held to metrics that lead to perverse incentives. They must milk students of every dollar possible so they feed the enrollment machine. This leads to admitting students that probably shouldn't be admitted. This leads them to dumb down courses to graduate students who have no business having a degree to feed the graduation rate.

TL;DR: The US higher education system is abusive and terrible. Avoid at all costs.

<comment><USER61> A good read, and I agree on your points. Like you, I worked my way through undergrad (including a period in the national guard and active army), and escaped with only a few thousand in debt thanks to that. Masters and PhD were free, but that's not too unusual in my area (applied math).

I'm teaching one class as a part-time instructor now back at my old university (basically for beer money on top of the day job), and it's blowing my mind how much more flashy the campus is. And naturally, how ridiculously expensive it is after only 10 years. The focus on "student life" facilities strikes me as an odd set of priorities considering how long hiring and pay raise freezes for faculty seem to last.

The mandatory online book thing is pretty insidious. We're required to use it by the department, and I can see how there is a kernel of a good idea there. It basically helps you run gigantic course sections while grading all homework for you, but while simultaneously killing the secondary textbook market (which is pretty evil). Worse, they are clearly implemented by the lowest bidder and break every web standard you could imagine.

Basically, with increased class sizes and mandatory online content, every core course is slowly turning into a weird online hybrid class. I think this is decreasing the difference between a traditional education and a MOOC bit by bit, which is eventually going to give a lot of universities a bit of an identity and marketing crisis.

Pearson, Wiley, Mcgraw-Hill et. al. are the entities that I would most like to see disappear when the college bubble pops. Free open-source community maintained textbooks seem like the obvious way forward to my software developer brain.

On the bright side, I do enjoy actual lecturing. It's a lot more fun when you can do it with few or no stakes, since I don't have to rely on it for a living. I'm literally on the exact opposite of the spectrum from a tenured professor, but I weirdly feel like I have to same level of freedom.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> I would prefer an approach(I am a US citizen) in which if we are going to call college loans financial aid than every student should upon graduation get a 10% more money but in small business grant form so that they can form a small business.

</comment><comment> mark-r So did all this free-flowing money actually result in more college grads, or did it just allow the colleges to jack up their prices due to supply/demand? How supply constrained is the market?

</comment><comment><USER63> I'm really torn on this for the same reason I'm torn on what to do with the people in jail for marijuana offenses:

On the one hand, yes what's happening is wrong. On the other hand, you CHOSE to go into debt knowing that you would have to repay it after you graduated. Just like people who CHOSE to deal marijuana KNEW it is illegal.

Disagreeing with the law doesn't entitle you to break it. Similarly, disagreeing with your loan terms doesn't entitle you to not pay them.

I CHOSE to go to a cheap state school to avoid this fiasco. Now others who didn't choose prudently get "relief"?

At one point do we just say, hey, you made shitty choices, sorry. Where is that line? I'm not saying we shouldn't do something, just offering up a different point of view.

<comment><USER64> You are correct. Disagreeing with the law _obligates_ you to break it. Or at least it does according to Thoreau, Jefferson, Gandhi, ML King Jr, et al.

But the difference between a law and a promissory note is that the legislature didn't get your explicit approval before passing the law. The promissory note has your signature on it, under a promise that you made to pay a certain amount at a certain time in exchange for valuable consideration.

The note is a contract, and you can make any contract you like. But we do have rules for the types of contracts that the state will help to enforce. The parties to the contract have to be competent, and the contract can't force anyone to do anything illegal, and everybody has to understand what they are agreeing to. If it was, indeed, a "shitty choice" to take a loan that you couldn't reasonably pay back, there may be an argument there that the contract was lopsided and unconscionable from the start, and being forced to repay it on the original terms would be rewarding bad behavior on the part of the lender.

Defaulting on a loan because you now disagree with the terms is less ethical than dealing weed because you disagree with cannabis prohibition. You should really support clemency for nonviolent drug offenses before considering forgiveness of student loan debts. One is a matter of being forced to live under the (somewhat arbitrary and capricious) edicts of the powerful, and the other is about breaking promises after already realizing the benefits from making them.

<comment><USER65> This is kind of bullshit.

The problem is assuming that borrowers are fiscally competent. We know this to be false, even among home buyers. 18 year olds, who have every adult that they trust telling them they must go to college and take these loans, don't stand a chance.

The loan industry not only knows this, but they optimize the system to capitalize on it. I don't think the student was represented when laws were passed to prevent discharges in bankruptcy.

A professional loan officer just has to fool some kid one time, and closing that 15 minute deal often destroys that kid's entire adult life.

We provide Donald Fucking Trump more protections from financial disasters than well-meaning students who have never had a loan or investment in their life.

Coincidentally, he is one of the many who are exploiting this system, with Trump University existing for little other purpose than siphoning this taxpayer-guaranteed free money.

Then when the cards inevitably collapse, half of the population eats up the propaganda about "personal responsibility".

Personal Responsibility would be not taking idiotic risks and getting the government to pay for it.

I can assure you that approximately zero students took out loans thinking they wouldn't be able to repay them. But we know the lenders knew better, because they won't give out these loans without a cosigner and/or a government guarantee.

<comment><USER64> You might also be able to argue that debts that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy represent a form of indentured servitude. And that is illegal now in the US, thanks to the 13th Amendment.

In fact, indentures were a better deal, because the indenturee was guaranteed to have the job necessary to fulfill the contract. Student loan issuers don't have to accept work in lieu of cash.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Allow student loans to be dischargeable in bankruptcy (don't forgive them all) and for all future public college & university students, let them go tuition- free...

</comment><comment><USER67> How do all the foreign nationals afford it? In engineering, the majority are Asian paying full tuition.

</comment><comment><USER68> Why doesn't competition bring down the prices of university degrees?

<comment><USER69> Can they compete with prestige?

<comment><USER68> Why can't a new college have prestige?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This will impact every other aspect of our consumption economy...home sales and even car sales will be impacted as working adults have to dedicate more and more earning potential to paying off student loans...far in excess of any real economic value these degrees have provided.

I hate to get all "Zero Hedge", but this really does stink of some conspiracy to turn the middle class into lifelong renters instead of owners. The independence the middle class once had by achieving a debt-free existence and owning their own residence is being wiped out, and as a result, the middle class itself will effectively be destroyed.

<comment><USER70> It doesn't need a conspiracy - macroeconomic forces and demographics are more than enough. On a societal and generational scale, it's basically impossible to make things now and have them be valuable in the future. Roads crumble, machines break down, inventions become obsolete, and in general what you did thirty years ago is of no particular value today. The one small exception to this is deciding to pump oil out of the ground later instead of today.

So if saving real goods and services doesn't work, what does? You can make things now, and sell them to people for dollars or some equivalent promise of future goods and services. Then you can later redeem these for the stuff you need later.

Oh, and did I mention the generational stuff? Small family sizes and aging Baby Boomers means that there's huge pressure to turn today's resources into promises to give people stuff later. Hence, debt.

I'd actually prefer if a conspiracy was responsible for this. Economic forces make a lot more people work a lot harder to push back against changes. Price controls are a great case in point for this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> Can't read the article without signing in or subscribing.

<comment><USER72> You can Google the headline of any WSJ article, click the result, and it'll let you through.

<comment><USER71> That works, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> As you are paying off your loans remember the high price of your education helped pay for not just a fancy diploma but also:

Shiny new buildings, Hotel-like dorms, Professors making 400k, Administrators making 700k, a moped for every football player ...

<comment> Ar-Curunir Lol in which world do professors get paid 400k? Even at Berkeley CS mis career pay is roughly 150k. Administrators have ballooned.

Also our dorms are pretty shit.

<comment><USER73> Business school professors even at Michigan make 200-600k. I know one of them.

<comment><USER74> How much do European history professors get paid?

Better yet, how many professors get hired as non-adjuncts?

<comment><USER73> Not sure, but I know a full professor in Philosophy at a top public University that makes 70k

<comment><USER74> For the amount of education, and filters you have to go through to get to that point, that doesn't sound like a lot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> Situation: Government guarantees student loans and forbids issuing of loans based on likelihood they'll be bad back.

Problem: Schools charge max loan value. Students can't pay them back.

Solution: Give away free money.

All the government has to do is nothing. Just stop doing things. Stop being involved. The problem will fix itself overnight if they did literally nothing.

Le sigh.

<comment><USER20> The education market won't fix itself because students are not in a sufficiently secure bargaining position where they (collectively) can make an informed decision that corrects the market.

<comment><USER75> What?

How is the education loan market any different than the automobile or home loan market with respect bargaining position and ability to make an informed decision?

Loan issuers are forced to issue loans without regard to the likelihood those loans will be paid back. Someone seeking a computer science degree from Stanford is treated the same as someone getting an English degree from a 4th tier state school. That's utterly insane.

<comment><USER20> Well with a car, if it always breaks down, you'll likely buy more cars through your lifetime, and the quality of the product has a feedback loop on the performance of the company. With a house, same thing. Worst case, if it's bad, sell it replace it with something else.

But with education, students have likely never bought a car, or a house, and don't have much background or life experience at this point in their lives and you want them to make a one-time, long-term, investment decision in a non- fungible asset?

Most students only make the decision once and whatever you learn about the school or career not meeting expectations isn't ever applied again. Worse, you don't find out first hand what quality your education really was until after leaving the college. Worst, the decision isn't really couched in terms of a ROI type investment decision (maybe thats changing), but that's certainly not the only factor at play in student school decision.

That's not a good basis for balancing a market.

> Loan issuers are forced to issue loans without regard to the likelihood > those loans will be paid back. Private loan issuers aren't forced to do > anything. They can always leave the market and invest elsewhere if they cant > figure out how the serve the market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> The comments,,, so,,, ignorant. As if, all in one place, all the reasons I needed to stop reading social commentary in HN comments. The ignorance, the abundance of it, the diversity of it, Trump would be unable to stop himself from jizzing over the cornucopia of bigotry. Trump bigotry jizz, everywhere.

</comment><comment><USER77> As a college graduate, I'd be ok with student loan relief as long as it's funded by a tax on college graduates (and it has to be preceded by something preventing this occurring in the future, like making student loan debt dischargeable under certain circumstances)

Seems twisted to tax the rest of the country who decided not to or weren't able to participate in college in the first place

<comment><USER65> As someone who has never spent a dime on student loans, I would be happy to help bail out graduates with my tax dollars. What do I care? I've been paying for the trillions dollar war for 15 years now, so paying for something this would be a breath of fresh air.

You folks are getting screwed.</comment></comment>


Hardening SSH with 2FA - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/lizthegrey/9c21673f33186a9cc775464afbdce820 <comment><USER2> I've thought about doing something like this several times, but the proposition of using any tools/libraries/pam modules/etc not installed by default, custom pam/sshd configs, and generally anything "outside of the box" sort of scares me.

I've used 2FA for SSH at $lastjobatmegacorp, however all that infrastructure was supported by a team of people dedicated to such things. How finicky would setting this up for myself be in practice? (Am I being paranoid for NOT wanting to go the extra mile to ensure that I actually have access to my systems when I need it the most?)

<comment><USER3> I wrote a blog post on this recently, using only open-source tools that don't come from big corps. To have TOTP second factor on Debian (like) systems you need only libpam-oath module on the server, and perhaps an open-source app like FreeOTP (RedHat) on a smartphone.

I'm afraid to link it here because the traffic might kill my puny box.

<comment><USER4> > _I 'm afraid to link it here because the traffic might kill my puny box._

So what if it does?

Presumably it isn't a "critical" host so the worst that could happen is, what, no one can read what your blog posts for a little while? Eventually, the traffic will go away and things will go back to normal, yeah?

I assume that (part of) the reason for writing your blog post was so that others could read it. Yet, by not posting the link, you are ensuring that we don't -- even though pretty much all of us in this comment thread are the target audience.

Alternatively, as someone else mentioned, there are things like the Internet Archive.

(FWIW, several years ago, a page on my blog was linked by The Atlantic one morning and shortly thereafter it also hit the front page of (IIRC) both Reddit and HN. The only way I figured out that "something was up" was due to the huge number of "new follower" notifications I was getting from Twitter as I was driving to work. At the time, I was running WordPress on a little VPS with 1 CPU core and 768 MB of RAM and it handled the ~115,000 page views just fine that day -- although I did have caching and such in place. YMMV.)

<comment><USER3> You make many valid points there.

Here's the link, let's see what happens:

Caveat lector: This is a "beginner" guide targeted at Raspberry Pi users, ignore the Pi related parts.

I intend to publish a second part about using keys instead of passwords.

[https://2byt.es/post/totp/](https://2byt.es/post/totp/)

The blog content is open source on GitHub so feel free to raise issues if necessary.

<comment><USER5> Nice walk-through. Re:bandwidth worries, for this crowd, you probably just link to: [https://github.com/2bytes/website/blob/master/content/post/t...](https://github.com/2bytes/website/blob/master/content/post/totp.md)

I doubt hn will take down github...

<comment><USER3> I had considered that, but as someone else else pointed out, what have I got to lose if it's taken down?

At least with links to my blog I can use the access logs for an idea of which articles people find interesting (I don't do other metrics/analytics due to my philosophy).

At the moment I'm trying to build a new box to host this on but it seems Caddy has broken source builds (again) and I need plugins for my Git hooks and Hugo build.

Searching around for an alternative.

Edit: and thanks for the compliment.

<comment><USER6> Caddy's source builds are still working; just took a couple hours for me to figure out and update the instructions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a crutch, backwards approach. Just use smart cards goddammit, that's what they were made for!

[https://github.com/philipWendland/IsoApplet/wiki](https://github.com/philipWendland/IsoApplet/wiki)

<comment><USER8> Wait, really? They still make these? People still use them? How secure are they really compared to USB tokens like a Yubikey? How do you interface with one of these?

<comment><USER9> > Wait, really? They still make these? People still use them?

Mandated by the US government so yes, lots of people use them.

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

<comment><USER10> Yeah, and that's just the DoD, even the US Forest Service mandates the use of a smartcard to log in to their VPN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Development infrastructure like Jenkins has no business being on the internet, so my preferred "second factor" is a VPN, secured with machine specific certificates that offer only VPN connectivity, but not SSH or anything else. This means even if a developer's Git or SSH key is floating around your infrastructure no one without VPN access can get at it, and if a developer loses a laptop there's a good chance you'll hear about that in time to revoke that machine's VPN certificate before anyone has a chance to use it.

<comment><USER12> Exactly. This is what I employ as one of the safeguards as well. All important resources accessible only to via a jumpbox, and jumbox itself is only accessible in a VPN.

<comment><USER13> My fear is that if the VPN connection is severed, you're locked out of your environment.

I typically have a public bastion and just shut it down. In AWS you aren't paying for it if it's turned off and you have an "escape hatch" if you need it.

If someone manages to launch another instance or start the stopped one then they would have access, but that's another can of worms.

<comment><USER11> With AWS, in an emergency you can always use the console to provision access of some sort: SSH bastion with a public IP, second VPN, etc. This definitely implies that explicit 2FA is needed for console access, but I'm pretty comfortable with using smartphones for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have two dozen co-located servers to log into. So far I've resisted the idea of setting up a bastion host, because that seems like a way to lock myself out of SSH access if that machine dies. I'm also not sure of the rationale for having a bastion host, other than "big companies do it". How do other non- cloud people handle this access vs. security tradeoff?

I'm also curious what people's preferred fallback method is for preserving access to machines if you lose access to your yubikey(s), assuming you keep your private SSH key stored on one.

<comment><USER15> > I'm also not sure of the rationale for having a bastion host

It's a central place where you can do your logging, which many enterprises must do for compliance reasons.

<comment><USER16> Really? Do any compliance standards specifically require this? Or is the specific control defined in the organization itself that requires this?

I've found many compliance standards to be pretty open-ended and function- driven, rather than prescribing specific standards. Client contracts.... they may be a different beast, and often require specific promises by vendors.

<comment><USER15> I'm pretty sure that at least some of the German financial regulations require that you can audit administrative actions on systems that are relevant for the financial transactions.

Now, you could try to implement that on the systems themselves, but how do you establish a mechanism that logs actions of an administrative user, and at the same time cannot be disabled by the same administrative user?

So instead you use a shell control box as a bastion, and regular administration of the target hosts don't have root access to the shell control box, so they cannot circumvent logging.

I haven't yet any standards that explicitly demand bastions, but it seems to be one of the standard implementations that have proven to pass audits, and so it's a pretty low-risk implementation of the logging requirements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If you're using a Vault system, it's also relatively easy and well documented to use Vault for this process. There's two components, which is the OTP configuration of Vault itself:

[https://www.vaultproject.io/docs/secrets/ssh/one-time-ssh- pa...](https://www.vaultproject.io/docs/secrets/ssh/one-time-ssh- passwords.html)

You also have to configure the servers to support Vault, using their PAM integration:

[https://github.com/hashicorp/vault-ssh- helper](https://github.com/hashicorp/vault-ssh-helper)

</comment><comment><USER18> You can get 2FA over ssh by requiring both key based and password based authentication. That is, you need both your private key and your account password to log in (in addition to your private key passphrase).

</comment><comment><USER19> There are scenarios where 2FA makes no sense for me. These are local password managers and SSH keys.

Rethink this again: If your ssh key is compromised then you have a problem overall. For my point of view there is no real security gain in 2FA ssh key logins because your private key itself is already a secret! Only thing which is important is to set a good passphrase for your ssh key.

However I can think of one exception of 2FA on top of ssh keys which might be useful: 2FA for gaining root access or sudo commands. This might be okay but the attack vector in this scenario would be that someone can see your keystrokes or clipboard (then they most likely also have your ssh private key if they can do that).

<comment><USER20> As long as you have a passphrase and don't actually circumvent it (by e.g. an agent) you basically already have 2FA (you need access to the key (on your laptop/pc) and you need access to the passphrase (in your head)). But physical 2FA (like smartphone based ones or smartcard based ones) are nice because you can remove them from your computer or destroy them. You can't "destroy" a passphrase, so passphrase and sshkey are not really "independent".

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> How does this compare to Teleport:

[https://github.com/gravitational/teleport](https://github.com/gravitational/teleport)

</comment><comment><USER22> Once just for fun I setup HAProxy in TCP mode and depending on the host name would direct the SSH to the correct host. But I had some nice ACLs so that if they weren't in the ACL they would be sent to a honeypot.

<comment><USER23> How did HAProxy know the host name?

<comment><USER24> SNI [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication)

<comment><USER25> SSH does not use TLS, and does not have the TLS extension SNI.

<comment><USER26> It can be tunnelled over TLS using openssl

<comment><USER25> That is true (and relatively easy to do with OpenSSH's ProxyCommand) but that was not the implication of the statement that HAProxy was being used in TCP mode to direct incoming TCP sockets to the correct backend SSH server based on the hostname using any SSH client that understands the SSH protocol.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> How does this compare to just putting a passphrase on your ssh credentials?

<comment><USER28> That helps against someone stealing your computer, but not if someone hacks it and manages to get a trojan running - it'll just keylog your passphrase.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I hadn't come across sekey before. It's sort of like a built-in Yubikey on my mac. I like the idea.

</comment><comment><USER30> disclaimer: not a security expert of any kind. Also apologies in advance for hijacking the thread.

I loosely remember reading on HN that wireguard could be a replacement for ssh. Is that still the case? When do you think we'd be switching away from ssh to wire guard?

<comment><USER31> SSH is a service to log in securely to get CLI access. WireGuard is an efficient VPN with low attack surface. SSH can be used to run X programs, as proxy, or VPN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Just going to throw out there that the company I work at (JumpCloud) is a directory service that makes it super easy to setup 2FA with your SSH. Literally a couple checkboxes, and you can mandate that your whole staff has 2FA setup.

</comment><comment><USER33> I work at [https://saaspass.com/](https://saaspass.com/) which offers setting up 2FA on SSH in a super easy way

</comment><comment><USER34> 2FA works great until you lose your phone.

<comment><USER35> Or your telco gets social engineered.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h That works on SMS, but not totp</comment></comment></comment>


Sikuli: Write scripts using GUI buttons and screenshots - <AUTHOR> http://www.sikuli.org/

<comment><USER2> While this might not be news to some it's new to me. I don't normally use macros, but I'll certainly keep this in mind if the need ever comes up.

</comment><comment><USER3> We used this to automate UI tests on an iOS app a couple of years ago (before they added the UI automation stuff). Seemed to work pretty well, though it was a fair bit of work to get it set up.

</comment><comment><USER4> i made a fishing bot for wow using sikuli a while back - it was rudimentary but since fishing in wow is mostly just clicking the bobber, it worked pretty well. i'd let it go overnight and would wake up to bags full of fish every morning.

</comment><comment><USER5> Sikuli is great. We use it to click on the "Sync Branch" button on GitHub app window every minute on our dashboard screen. Seeing a live stream of commits is very motivational.

The only problem is that the Sikuli scripts can stop working easily when you resize the window or restart the computer. Something changes on the screenshot so it stops finding the button.

</comment><comment><USER6> Like already mentioned, not new. I used to this to QA-test and bot Farmville- style flash games when I was working on that (~3-4 yrs ago).

It's particularly good for situations where you know what you're expecting to see, but you don't know when or where it will appear.

</comment><comment><USER7> I recall trying to use this in 2003 to automatically click on some car website to collect points so I could get a free flatscreen TV.

I ended up using AppleScript when Sikuli didn't work to automatically click the mouse every X number of seconds and only ended up with a free T-shirt. :(

</comment><comment><USER8> I wrote a blog post about Sikuli a long while ago: <http://randomtype.ca/blog/a-look-at-sikuli/>

</comment><comment><USER9> Fellow Chinese hackers should know the author, vgod, as he is pretty vocal in certain online Chinese communities.

</comment><comment><USER10> Not exactly news, I've been using it for years. Very useful for automating things like cutting and pasting from pdf's.

I'd really like to see someone hook it up to SPAUN.

What's SPAUN? I'll let the Doctor explain [http://drwho.virtadpt.net/archive/2012/12/09/large-scale- neu...](http://drwho.virtadpt.net/archive/2012/12/09/large-scale- neurosimulation)

<http://nengo.ca/build-a-brain/spaunvideos>

<comment><USER11> +1. Sikuli was a dream find a few months ago when I had to upload 100s of images for a rater survey to a locked-down LimeSurvey instance (no ftp allowed). 20 minutes and I had a functioning script that pushed all of the upload buttons and paste the next filename in sequence.</comment></comment>


Google Is Saved! YouTube Money Machine Mints $1 CPMs - <AUTHOR> http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/4/google_s_youtube_money_machine_1_75_cpms

<comment><USER2> that seems to be on purpose because of the potential of violating copyright or until they find a good way to generate more money or until YouTube grows so big that will be an unevitable source for video (oh yes it's already that)

no revenue, no money to pay them in case you get sued.

which is why YouTube LLC still exists independently.

</comment><comment><USER3> Unfortunately the estimated cost for the infrastructure was about 1$CPM

[http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/04/30/did-youtube-just- raise-...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/04/30/did-youtube-just-raise- another-25-million/) 35M daily videos watched = 1000M monthly videos watched monthly infrastructure cost was estimated to be 1M USD

Which means at 1$ CPM you are barely breaking even. And that is without any revenue sharing costs.

Perhaps Google had better economy of scale but I doubt its an order of magnitude better.

<comment><USER4> In 2008, I'm impressed with any online video company barely breaking even. I figure today's ventures are just attempts to build a brand in anticipation of when costs come down and profitability is realistic.

<comment><USER3> I just reran the numbers a bit through S3 calculator and came up with 780K per month at that traffic level, so costs are already dropping but still not a very big profit margin, and that is assuming you can put ads on all your videos and you get to keep the entire 1$ CPM.

And if someone puts any ads on my family birthday videos I'll be irked.

<comment><USER5> I assume Google can do this cheaper than your S3 calculations. Amazon still needs to make a profit on the hosting so I assume their actual cost of providing the service is much lower. I'm not sure exactly how much lower since I don't know Amazon's margins. Anyone care to take a guess?

<comment><USER3> Not entirely sure Amazon makes a profit on S3. They might be offering it at a price lower than cost too, to establish themselves trusting costs to go down.

<comment><USER6> Or profiting from the storage and selling bandwidth at or near cost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Various Facebook ad neworks offer CPMs in the range of about 1-10 cents.

Now, you aren't dealing with nearly the bandwidth costs...

</comment><comment><USER8> I think people got this all wrong.

The money-making potential of videos should be compared with televisions, not clicks.

One hour of YouTube time should eventually make about the same amount of money than one hour of TV, that's the future and that's its potential. The cost, of course, will be lower.

To achieve this, YouTube may need enterprise sales etc. But these are just means, the primary goal is still to get people spend time on online video.

<comment><USER9> How is the cost lower, for comparable quality content? It seems to me that YouTube has higher costs per viewer than conventional TV, and that production quality must be at least as good as regular TV to attract the same ad revenue.

<comment><USER10> I have to agree here on cost...broadcast television effectively gets its bandwidth for free. Then again, with peering deals, Google is probably getting it for pretty close to free.

What changes is the competitive landscape--when there are a billion videos to choose from, as opposed to 20 or 50 or even 100 found on broadcast or cable or satellite, the eyeballs on any one drop. Obviously the aggregator is the natural place to sell the ads (bully for Google), but the ability to focus efforts on "blockbuster" shows is a bit different. I worked in television for several years right out of college, and blockbusters are a major part of the operating budget of a TV station because it's a limited commodity--if you want to advertise during Lost, you've only got one company to buy from and there's only a couple dozen slots for sale. Cheaper spots are actually often more effective (since you can run them a lot more and get a single viewer to see your ad multiple times), but there's still magical thinking in TV advertising and advertisers like to reach the blockbuster audience. When the blockbuster no longer exists (as seems likely in a future of a billion+ possible videos), monetization will shake out differently. But advertising isn't going away, so something will happen and it'll all work out somehow.</comment></comment></comment>


Compile-time assertions in Go - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/5q9jza/compiletime_assertions_in_go/dcxtw5q/ <comment><AUTHOR> Slightly tweaked to allow using len():

        type Hash [16]byte
        const _ = uint(len(Hash{}) - md5.Size)

[https://play.golang.org/p/qH6DkOcvSC](https://play.golang.org/p/qH6DkOcvSC)</comment>


Tell HN: Free Domains - <AUTHOR> I would LOVE to apply for the next round of YC driven by the community. Unfortunately, I can not due to family obligations.
However, I can HELP! I am the founder of OpenDomain - we are "Open Source for domains".  We would love to contribute a domain to a startup.
If you want a Big Data startup, you can use NoSQL.Com.  Or if you want to disrupt hollywood, try www.Free.TV (Justin Kan once called me to get this domain but ended up going with Justin.TV)
We have contributed dozens of domains to open source - including Drupal.Com, EcmaScript.Org, and OsCon.com - I would love to help your next startup! <comment><USER2> Hi great offer, how did you get these domains in the first place?

<comment><AUTHOR> All the good domains are already taken, so I usually have to aquire them from someone squating. I pay for this out of my own pocket as my way of contributing to open source

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "To use any of these domains, please contact us here" \- link doesn't work when I click "here".

</comment><comment><USER4> We took "Apply HN" out of the title since that's the bat signal for actually applying to the community.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you please put it back in? I want people to be able to use these domains to promote open source. Some of these domains cost more than my car but we have NEVER sold a domain - we give them for free to charities and open source groups for free.

<comment><USER4> I would if users hadn't complained to us, but they did, so it seems like not a good idea. If it weren't such a new thing and the patterns were well- established, we'd probably say why not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is the list of domains you can offer viewable somewhere?

<comment><AUTHOR> Go to OpenDomain.org</comment></comment>


Comprehensive Tutorial on Time Series Modelling and Forecasting - <AUTHOR> https://kanoki.org/2020/04/30/time-series-analysis-and-forecasting-with-arima-python/ <comment><USER3> Everyone repeat after me: "we need a baseline model".

You should always try some "dumb" models first. You'd be surprised how hard is to beat (of course depends on your KPIs) a historical average model with a more sophisticated method.

<comment><USER4> But how am I going to get that VC money if I don't say "deep learning"?

<comment><USER5> I mean...you can always appeal to "old school" AI. Just dig in to the old papers and use their words. Latent semantic analysis (LSA) is an example of a hard to beat baseline model for text:

 _"By inducing global knowledge indirectly from co-occurrence data in a large body of representative text, LSA acquired knowledge about the full vocabulary of English at a comparable rate to schoolchildren."_ ([http://www.stat.cmu.edu/~cshalizi/350/2008/readings/Landauer...](http://www.stat.cmu.edu/~cshalizi/350/2008/readings/Landauer- Dumais.pdf))

<comment><USER6> Modern methods for deriving word embeddings easily beat LSA.

<comment><USER5> Hard to beat in terms of effort vs. quality of the outcome is more accurately what I meant (it's two lines of code in scikit-learn [ _CountVectorizer() + TruncatedSVD()_ ] to go from raw text to document/word embeddings, and the result is often "good enough" depending on what you're trying to do). See the results on pg. 6 (note LSI==LSA): [http://proceedings.mlr.press/v37/kusnerb15.pdf](http://proceedings.mlr.press/v37/kusnerb15.pdf)

Also, at least based on papers I've read recently, BERT doesn't work that well for producing word embeddings compared to word2vec and GloVe (which can be formulated as matrix factorization methods, like LSA). See table on pg. 6: [https://papers.nips.cc/paper/9031-spherical-text- embedding.p...](https://papers.nips.cc/paper/9031-spherical-text- embedding.pdf)

Point being: mastering the old models gives you a solid foundation to build from.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> To my amateur eyes, normally the method for dealing with 'time series' is really just finding ways to turn a non-stationary distribution into a stationary distribution, where you can then apply classic statistical methods on them. So you're just finding ways to factor out the time component in the data so you can use the standard non-time sensitive regression models on the transformed data.

It seems like it's very challenging to either have time as a first-class component in the model or somehow treat the data points as not independent. Indeed most models require independence so often it seems like we try to force the data to look that way by smoothing and transformations. You can assume this anytime an algorithm is asking you to provide 'Stationarity'. It just seems like trying to look for the keys (prediction) where the streetlight is (model distributions with nice calculation properties).

<comment><USER8> The problem with time is that it is (typically) not a causal variable. If you are modeling the price of a stock for example, time is certainly not what is causing to go up or down! Yes it is true, that the price at time t+1 is highly correlated with the price at time t, but extrapolating outwards must require a more sophisticated model that includes the real causal variables.

<comment><USER7> so then, discounting making time itself a causal variable, it seems like using methods that rely on stationary distributions still treat the data, after pre- processing, as i.i.d, rather than predicting values from their correlated history.

I'm interested in methods that don't "subtract" simple "trends" and "seasonality" from the data (which may work for bog-standard templates such as sales data but not what I'm interested in), and rather responds to sequential relationships in the data itself, that exploits exactly the correlations you describe directly.

<comment><USER9> > I'm interested in methods that don't "subtract" simple "trends" and > "seasonality"

a 2nd order difference equation can model a single harmonic frequency - <USER2> is, if your data is a pure sine and sampled at regular intervals, then

        x_n =~ a x_n-1 + b x_n-2

can model any frequency with the proper a and b values (machine precision limits apply in real world scenarios, of course); That is, if your data looks like a sine wave with a yearly period, you still need no more than one sample per minute and 2nd order model to filter it out.

It's likely not a perfect sinewave, so you'd need a lot more - but if you are incredibly lucky and your periodic underlying admits a (relatively) sparse harmonic decomposition, and the signal riding on it has (very) low amplitude compared to the periodic signal, you can model very long periods implicitly by just having enough recent samples.

<comment><USER7> very interesting, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For the interested, here is an overview into neural forecasting from the folks at Amazon research:

Neural forecasting: Introduction and literature overview

[https://arxiv.org/pdf/2004.10240.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2004.10240.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER11> Is there any other good resource on time series modeling and forecasting other than exponential smoothing and variants of ARIMA? Pretty much every tutotial on the web is on exponential smoothing and ARIMA or some lazy LSTM tutorials.

<comment><USER12> Some good free textbooks are Rob Hyndman's online book [https://otexts.com/fpp2/](https://otexts.com/fpp2/) and Brockwell and Davis' old textbook [https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-29854-2](https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-29854-2). They focus much on ARIMA and exponential smoothers, because most time series data are pretty small sized (a few dozens to at most a few thousand samples), so there's really not that much else that can do.

Most of Hyndman's textbook approaches (mostly ARIMA and various exponential smoothers) are implemented in his 'forecast' R package.

ARIMA and exponential smoothers tend to be a bit hard to get working well on daily data (they come from the era where most data was monthly or quarterly). A modern take on classical frequency domain Fourier regression is Facebook Prophet ([https://facebook.github.io/prophet/](https://facebook.github.io/prophet/)) which tends to work pretty well if you have a few years of daily data( [https://facebook.github.io/prophet/](https://facebook.github.io/prophet/) )

<comment><USER13> FPP is great, but limited to the simplest possible timeseries: a single number recorded at evenly-spaced intervals.

Anyone know of good resources for multivariate, multimodal, irregular timeseries forecasting? I know some great practical tools and tutorials (prophet, fast.ai), but I'd love to inject some statistical knowledge like FPP offers.

<comment><USER12> Mostly from my own knowledge/experience:

\- Multi-variate: text book treatments tend to focus mainly on Vector Auto Regression (VAR) models. Unrestricted VARs scale very badly in vector dimension, so the often end up in some regularized form (dimension reduced by PCA or Bayesian priors). Lütkepohl's textbook is the standard reference.

VAR type models in my view not very practical for most business time series. You should probably not waste too much time on them unless you're really into macro-economic forecasting, in which case you're wasting your time anyway :). VAR forecast accuracy in macro-economics is not great to put it mildly, but we have nothing really better).

An alternative to VARs for multivariate time series are state space models, which are described mostly in Durbin&Koopman and Andrew Harvey's time series textbooks. These model types was recently popularized in tech circles by Google's CausalImpact R package (though that package I think only implements the univariate model).

\- Multi-model: if you need to model some generic non-Gaussian time series process some slow generic simulation method (MCMC, particle filtering). I can't recommend any good reference since I haven't kept up with the literature for about 15 years. I only remember a bunch of dense journal papers from that era (e.g. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_filter#Bibliography](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_filter#Bibliography))

\- Irregular: if the irregularity is mild (filling up a relatively small number of gaps/missing data), you can do LOESS, smoothing splines, Kalman filtering, which should all get you pretty similar results. If your time series are extremely irregular, probably no generic method will do well and you probably need to invest some days/weeks/months into a fairly problem/data- specific method (probably some heavily tuned smoothing spline)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The readers interested in this article are probably able to give me good advice. I've been collecting stats daily on myself for the past year (weight, activity, calories consumed, sleep hours, etc) and I would love to be able to explore and extract interesting trends and relationships from the data.

Is there an easy tool where I can just drop in all the data and it presents me with some sort of dashboard? I would love it if the tool could identify and present interesting relationships (i.e. weight and calories consumed are strongly correlated)

Does anyone know if something like that exists? Or should I start rolling my own using python/pandas?

<comment><USER15> [https://github.com/arielf/weight-loss](https://github.com/arielf/weight-loss)

<comment><USER14> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Currently learning gluonTS, SEEMS GOOD

<comment><USER17> Adding link in case others are intested!

[https://gluon-ts.mxnet.io/](https://gluon-ts.mxnet.io/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> What would be some good graduate programs (I'm thinking Master's level) in the US that specialize in time series modeling and forecasting? Any available online?

<comment><USER19> Penn State has a bunch of their graduate stats courses online [1]. I worked through some of their time series class [2] and found it to be pretty good quality.

[1] [https://online.stat.psu.edu/statprogram/](https://online.stat.psu.edu/statprogram/) [2] [https://online.stat.psu.edu/statprogram/stat510](https://online.stat.psu.edu/statprogram/stat510)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Your page has a bigger focus on Google ads than the subject matter itself.

</comment><comment><USER21> coincidentally, i posted this not too long ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23045207](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23045207)

</comment><comment><USER22> Last time using it is 1981. Still relevant today in ML era?

<comment><USER23> Yes.</comment></comment>


Identity and Access Management in the AWS Management Console - <AUTHOR> http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/05/identity-and-access-management-console-support.html <comment><USER2> This is great news! Managing users and groups from the command line tools was a bit of a PITA.</comment>


My Favorite Bug - <AUTHOR> http://secretsofconsulting.blogspot.com/2009/02/my-favorite-bug.html <comment><USER2> For me, there are two types of bugs: bugs that can teach you something and random bugs. I love the first type - these are bugs that make me read and learn something.</comment>


Bitcoin Boon - <AUTHOR> http://blog.alexsmith.io/?p=23 <comment><USER2> I personally feel this is another BTC holder trying to raise the value of his investment by attracting more attention to Bitcoin and crypto currencies.

<comment><USER3> the ~1,000,000,000 usd worth of bitcoin transactions ([https://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction- volume-...](https://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-volume-usd)) that happened today alone should be evidence enough that you would have to be stupid or ignorant to think you can move the price of bitcoin with a blog post like that

<comment><USER4> um it wasn't a billion it was 147 million.

<comment><AUTHOR> (S)He's talking about an intraday total, not a single transaction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The bitcoin mania is starting to freak me out. Maybe it feels fleeting and manic because it's truly indicative of a powerful change, but it also seems so desperate.

<comment><AUTHOR> I felt the same way for a long time. I first became interested in bitcoin about a year ago. Eventually you will accept it. This is the future, it just makes too much sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Recent volatility is almost entirely related to external market factors > [sic: externalaties] and not underlying changes in valuation

You can't separate out causes of volatility like that. A crash because of a massive bitcoin theft is no different than a crash for any other reason. The long term success of bitcoin depends on the perception of value, and if people believe bitcoin is liable to crash for _any_ reason it will hurt it's chances.

Moreover it's not even true that the bitcoin market is just reacting to trading-related issues. For example the congressional hearing had substantial effect.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is true. That is a gross over-simplification. I'll work in some edits here, thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> Made an edit here, perhaps not the best but... Please let me know if you would like credit and I'll toss a back link in!

<comment><USER6> No need. Like most people I just post on hn to make myself feel smarter. _ahem_ I mean to make the world better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I am really not convinced of the argument that bitcoin will help in third world countries. There are so many places in the world that neither have internet nor computers, how should they use bitcoins? I'm also convinced that those people will not just "believe" in some "invisible" money. They will always prefer real money or goods to trade, not some virtual number on the internets.

<comment><AUTHOR> Bitcoin isn't "invisible" money. It's money that is secured by cryptography. A printed bitcoin wallet, a $1 bill and a $100 bill all have the same inherent value. Almost a third of the "developing world" has internet access [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage)]. Even if individuals lack access there's no reason bitcoin can't be made accessible to them through public access points.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> _" Richard Branson announced that Virgin Galactic will accept bitcoin"_

Everybody missed another big news about another company... you can buy plane tickets with Bitcoin! Online air travel agency, cheapair.com, announced today they accept Bitcoin: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6784265](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6784265)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is also cool, and probably a lot more practical!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> IMO it's not a real currency until the value gets a bit stable. Currently it's all over the place.

<comment><AUTHOR> Are Sudanese Pounds and Iranian Rials real currencies in your mind? Agree 100% that bitcoin is not currently comparable to any first world currency.

<comment><USER9> Could not find your pounds. [http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=USD&to=IRR&view=5Y](http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=USD&to=IRR&view=5Y) they did do something nasty in 2013... But it's _just_ double. With bitcoin we are talking factor 10 and atm is increasing in value exponentially. But all of them are currencies really, I'm just scared :)

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://www.xe.com/currency/sdg-sudanese- pound](http://www.xe.com/currency/sdg-sudanese-pound)

Bitcoin isn't perfect yet, just saying it is getting close to becoming a suitable replacement for the "worst" money in the world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> THERE ARE NOW in this moment many bankers thinking in bunkers mmm some thing very big is going

</comment><comment><USER10> tHIS is the true money some ancient text inform about other very different culture before we are in slavery

</comment><comment><USER11> How could anyone actually use bitcoins to buy anything? With this volatility, how can you settle on a price for actual merchandise or services?

<comment><USER12> > The assumption is that bitcoins must be sold immediately to cover operating > expenses. If the shopkeeper's back-end expenses were transacted in bitcoins > as well, then the exchange rate would be irrelevant. Larger adoption of > Bitcoin would make prices sticky. Future volatility is expected to decrease, > as the size and depth of the market grows.

> In the meantime, many merchants simply regularly pull the latest market > rates from the exchanges and automatically update the prices on their > websites. Also you might be able to buy a put option in order to sell at a > fixed rate for a given amount of time. This would protect you from drops in > price and simplify your operations for that time period.

[https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Myths#Shopkeepers_can.27t_serious...](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Myths#Shopkeepers_can.27t_seriously_set_prices_in_bitcoins_because_of_the_volatile_exchange_rate)

<comment><AUTHOR> Couldn't agree more. Mass adoption would absolutely stabilize prices. Even without mass adoption merchants can exchange similar to foreign atm transactions.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Only funny Images from Reddit - my mid-week project - <AUTHOR> http://imgonly.info

<comment><AUTHOR> This was my ruby on rails mid-week project coded in two evenings. It just grabs imgurl.com links from the Reddit RSS, chaches the thumbnail locally and displays a grid of links. Simple Stupid Fun.

</comment><comment><USER2> 1\. No, that's not why I visit Reddit.

2\. In any case, this is HN, not Reddit.

3\. Images only? Oh dear, this is just going to be a site full of cat photos / American newsreaders showing their boobs / etc, isn't it?

Lucky for you I click through to read the comment instead of flagging the link.

4\. Oh, you're showing us something you did in a couple of nights? That's different then. Well done, have a karma point.</comment>


Burn Note - <AUTHOR> https://burnnote.com/

<comment><USER2> And we believe that the notes are 'burned' because ? ...

That isn't a snark, it's a real challenge. If you create a service which caters to 'burn after reading' levels of confidentiality, then one would assume that such a service would attract valuable 'secret' information which the owner of the service, if not legit, might exploit. While that does not seem to be the case here, its a fundamental challenge of building services 'in the cloud' that one is asked to trust with valuable data.

</comment><comment><USER3> while the "spyglass" idea is nice, i'd prefer having at least some kind of client encryption in order to avoid the trust issue mentioned by ChuckMcM.

ZeroBin (<http://sebsauvage.net/paste/>) did an excellent job regarding that topic imo.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's a great idea but I would be very open and transparent about the deletion policy for the notes.</comment>