Don't touch my clipboard - <AUTHOR> https://alexanderell.is/posts/taking-over-my-clipboard/ <comment><USER2> It's not just a browser thing. Apple Books does this with their e-books, which is _infuriating_ if you're working with a coding book and just want to copy- paste stuff into your editor/terminal. You get something like:

        "ghci> putStrLn (pretty 10 value)"

        Excerpt From: Bryan O'Sullivan, John Goerzen, and Donald Bruce Stewart. "Real World Haskell." Apple Books.

When you only copied:

        ghci> putStrLn (pretty 10 value)

Note that the quotes around your actual selection aren't even the ASCII quote character; you get horrid unicode quotes that are easy to miss if you're just trying to run a bit of code in your REPL. This isn't even a DRM ebook, so it's not like Apple is being compelled by contract to insert a citation. It's awful, user-hostile behavior that removes one of the main advantages of digital-vs-hardcopy coding books (copy/paste), and AFAIK there's no config that lets you disable it.

<comment><USER3> Wonder if an author will rename themself sudo rm -rf / with the proper escape codes.

<comment><USER4> Bobby wants his tables back!

<comment><USER5> Legend has it that all data related to little Bobby Tables has been lost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The wrongest thing about this, from my perspective, is that my browser fires off a js 'copy' event when I press control-c. There are times when I've found it helpful that a browser can copy text to my clipboard when I click a button, but I can't think of a single time when I want a site to react to my attempt to copy text off if it.

Is there any way to configure my user agent (Firefox) not to do this? A hack is ok.

<comment><USER7> I think the wrongest thing is that this is a clear attack vector... make a site with helpful Linux shortcuts, then replace every copy with "curl malicious script and run it, plus a newline to make it run immediately"

<comment><USER8> > plus a newline to make it run immediately

I already mentioned this in another comment, but everyone should enable bracket paste mode in their shell to defend against this.

[https://cirw.in/blog/bracketed-paste](https://cirw.in/blog/bracketed-paste)

<comment><USER9> I always just type "#" first before pasting... That way it is just a comment I can inspect before running

<comment><USER10> Here, paste this into your terminal:

        echo "hello"
        echo "lol" ; sudo sl -rf /

(In case it's not obvious, the # trick will not help you.)

<comment><USER11> So... don't paste it in my terminal?

<comment><USER10> heh, yes. Admittedly, immediately after posting, I did change it from 'rm', which would not be a good idea to run, to 'sl', which ... well, try it (or `man sl`), it's fun.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The last sentence of the article is the absolute best:

> Ironically, a little reverse searching reveals that this code was copied > verbatim without attribution from this StackOverflow post (see "Manipulating > the selection" from the top answer). Maybe copy/paste isn't so bad?

</comment><comment><USER13> This happened to me recently and it was pretty embarassing - I copied a two paragraph snippet from a psychology paper and the website put an ad for CBD oil in my clipboard above the paragraphs.

The segment I copied was just long enough that it overflowed my chat window so I had no idea the insertion was even there and I sent it as-is.

The recipient called me about two minutes later and said "hey, I think you've been hacked - you just sent me a CBD oil advertisement."

So yeah, I'd love to see user agents address this. If I push a copy button (like github's clone repo button) then fine, I'm at the mercy of their javascript. But if I copy via ctrl-C or a right click menu, it should not not let the page interfere.

<comment><USER14> That's kind of hilarious actually.

This highlights the tension between the document-web and the app-web. What if the page is an image editor, word processor, spreadsheet? These app-web pages need custom logic for copy and paste. Unfortunately, bad actors (like what you found) ensure browsers cannot implement this stuff properly, because every feature is now a way to shove a new ad in.

<comment><USER15> >"the tension between the document-web and the app-web"

This is a huge factor in debates about things like the merits of CSS-in-JS, or the tradeoffs in "JAMstack" architecture. Pick any polarizing facet of web development and odds are you'll find this tension at the heart of the opposing perspectives.

<comment> frosted-flakes And it's not black/white either. It's a spectrum. There are plain HTML documents on one hand, and highly dynamic applications like Figma or Google Sheets on the other hand, but in between are interactive documents and anything you can think of.

So these features are here to stay.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This hijacking "feature" that's been a part of news and other proprietary content sites for more than a decade now:

[https://moz.com/ugc/copymagicpaste-a-script-and- easytousegui...](https://moz.com/ugc/copymagicpaste-a-script-and- easytouseguide-to-customize-the-copyevent-on-your-website)

Anecdotally speaking, I've seen it a lot less these days; mostly, I see it when copy-pasting from my Kindle app. I've rarely ever seen it for a site this general-purpose (and trivial) though

<comment><USER17> It's been around for so long a clipboard-jacking-as-a-service company, Tynt ([https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/tynt](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/tynt)), launched, lived and exited.

If telling people not to do this was going to be enough to solve the problem, we wouldn't still be talking about it. The browser vendors really need to shut it off once and for all.

<comment><USER18> And they have 100-250 employees?!

<comment><USER19> I'm sure most of it was just keeping wit the latest JS standard

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I can read & write a language that I don't have a keyboard for (I use a standard US 101 key layout), so I work around this by cut & pasting single characters around to fix up the missing accent characters. Usually even a partially fixed word is enough for the spell checker to kick in and correct the rest, making this surprisingly fast.

The thing that annoyed me recently is that if I cut & paste a single character in Google Mail, it'll "helpfully" surround it with spaces when pasted. Other applications like Firefox or MS Word don't have this behaviour.

I just tested it, and the GMail behaviour is wonderfully inconsistent:

Copying from GMail to to plain text (e.g.: a text editor) will result in a single character.

Copying from plain text into GMail will result in no superfluous spaces.

Copying from GMail to GMail or to any "rich text" editor will add the extra spaces.

So basically I'm copying plain-text, but GMail is abusing rich-text formatting to add "magic" behaviour someone at Google assumed is beneficial, but is just confusing and arbitrary.

PS: Similarly, GMail's spell checker now "fights" with the Firefox spellchecker and the result is that neither wins and obvious typos aren't resolved unless I turn checking off and back on a couple of times.

<comment><USER21> > I work around this by cut & pasting single characters around to fix up the > missing accent characters.

Let me save you some time in the future. You did not identify the OS and language/script you have trouble with, so my answer has to be kinda generic.

First have a look whether your OS keyboard settings or a third party provides an en_US-101 compatible logical layout that adds more accented characters (typically accessed with right Alt¹) or extra modifier keys² (in addition to acute, grave, tilde), then install it and memorise the characters you need. Oftentimes, this is easy because it's mnemonic, e.g.

        AltGr+l → ł
        AltGr+d → ð
        AltGr+o → ø
        dead_tilde N → Ñ
        dead_double_acute o → ő
        dead_circumflex dead_hook O → Ổ

If that's not sufficient or too cumbersome, look into compose key³. That system is user extensible, more powerful because it provides not just accented characters, and to the most part has better mnemonics; e.g.:

        compose U G → Ğ
        compose " y → ÿ
        compose a e → æ
        compose t , → ț
        compose v z → ž
        compose I . → İ
        compose u o → ů
        compose c | → ¢
        compose . . → …

¹ [http://enwp.org/AltGr_key](http://enwp.org/AltGr_key) ² [http://enwp.org/Dead_key](http://enwp.org/Dead_key) ³ [http://enwp.org/Compose_key](http://enwp.org/Compose_key)

<comment><USER22> It seems strange that compose u o → ů is u-with-circle-on-top, but compose U G → Ğ is G-with-u-on-top, since it means it's sometimes modifier-first and sometimes base-first.

(FWIW I use the compose key! Just not those particular characters, my set is incidentally consistent :-))

<comment><USER21> Order does not matter with compose, that also makes it more user friendly than dead keys.

The modifiers' proper names are "ring above" and "breve".

<comment><USER22> Whoa, thanks! I've used the compose key for a long time (I'm an amateur Polish speaker who also occasionally writes French) and I never realized it was order-insensitive!

<comment><USER23> It's oder-sensitive under X11 but many of the the default combinations are duplicated with the reverse order.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Furthermore don't touch my ability to paste into web forms. Some banks do this, and I have no idea why (some incredibly misguided idea of security?). I disabled the ability for websites to disable pasting using Firefox's about:config, but 99.9% of users won't know they can do this.

<comment><USER25> > I disabled the ability for websites to disable pasting using Firefox's > about:config, but 99.9% of users won't know they can do this.

Have you encountered any unintended consequences from disabling this?

<comment><USER26> The consequences of dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled;false mostly results in errors of functionality with WordPress, Google Docs, and Facebook (but I suspect FB has other motivations/reasons for this). You might encounter errors with other WYSIWYG editors, but for the most part, it's a nice optional feature to have control over.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Just want to share that there's also good reasons for employing this technique.

Eg if you select text in Slack that has emojis or formatting, it tries to put plain-text into the clipboard that would _produce_ said emojis and formatting when pasted back into Slack. This is great, and every chat app does does formatted stuff should do this.

I'd hate it if browser vendors would attempt to block this and as a result, break that kind of functionality too.

<comment><USER28> Except that your example is only "great" because Slack is reimplementing text input- _another_ thing that maybe should just be handled by the system.

Is it great that Slack also has its own autocorrect and doesn't know about the system autocorrect?

<comment><USER27> I'm not sure how autocorrect is related.

How would you let text input with emojis and formatting and code blocks be "handled by the system"? I agree that on most platforms, emojis are a solved problem (although the UX could be better), but the rest isn't.

Sure, like all chat apps, what Slack does is a workaround around system limitations. But the limitations are there, and they need the "copy" event to make their hack work end to end.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I agree and share the frustration.

A stock Apple application "Books" does something similar as well. When copying text -- using keyboard shortcut or the context menu rendered as soon as you lift your mouse (another tragedy) -- your clipboard will look something like the following (2 lines):

"<what you actually wanted to copy>"

Excerpt From: <Author>. "<Title>." Apple Books.

That gets written to your clipboard; quotes and everything.

<comment><USER30> as does the kindle app. it's come in handy once for me (in a comment to a hn post, ironically), but usually it's a nuisance.

<comment><USER31> I loved it when I used Windows and OneNote (it would add metadata when I pasted to OneNote but not otherwise.)

<comment><USER32> I think the windows clipboard can hold that as metadata. OneNote had a setting that I could enable so that when I pasted from Edge into OneNote the url was appended, but the url wouldn't show up if I pasted into another rich text editor like Word (or OneNote without the setting enabled).

Using org mode now, and there's probably a way to do it with emacs lisp, but... I'll never get around to it.

<comment><USER33> The Windows clipboard has a model where the clipboard contains an abstract 'data object' which exposes a list of supported formats, then you request formats individually. So a given piece of data could expose (not literally this, but the equivalent) text/plain, text/html, image/png, $my_custom_format and then when an application requests a given format it's generated on demand.

This mostly gets used for scenarios where you're pasting into notepad vs into word - the latter will get rich text if it requests it, while the former is just going to request plain text and get it. When copying text or images or HTML out of typical apps, the clipboard actually ends up having 6 or more different formats in it that all represent the same source content.

The 'generate on demand' means that it's theoretically possible to sync clipboard operations over the network transparently for stuff like Synergy, which is pretty cool - no need to copy that big bitmap over unless software on the other machine actually asks for it. I had some custom clipboard sync software I wrote that did this automatically (with a progress indicator for big data like desktop screenshots) in a couple thousand lines of C# and it was pretty satisfying to use.

<comment><USER34> This is how X11's modern clipboard APIs (CLIPBOARD, PRIMARY and so on) are defined as well, I assume that Apple's approach is similar.

If I had to guess I'd assume either X11 invented it, or a research lab prototype had it and X11 copied that then was copied by every modern OS

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Seriously... I want to know the business/legal logic behind adding copyright messages to the clipboard when copying. This has happened for a long time with news sites, Apple Books, etc.

 _No user ever_ has _ever_ wanted that.

So what lawyers, where, ever demanded it, and why? Short snippets fall under fair use _anyways_... and even if it didn't such a message doesn't prevent anything (you just delete it after pasting)... and it you were oblivious to how copyrights worked before, this isn't going to teach you.

So it's UX annoyance but _why?_ Not only does it _not_ provide an obvious legal benefit to any party, I don't even see how it's legally covering anyone's ass? Like, I know how under trademark law companies have to warn people against using their trademark generically or else they can lose it -- so as dumb as it is to get an e-mail from Adobe asking you not to use "Photoshop" as a verb in your press release, I get it. But copyright... _doesn 't work like that._

So how/why did this become a thing? I just don't understand the legal rationale here.

<comment><USER36> Attorney here! (Not legal advice; consult a licensed attorney in your jurisdiction.)

I am skeptical that this is a copyright issue that raised an attorney's attention. It's far more likely IMO that this was a contractual obligation imposed by the publisher.

I have no insider knowledge as to whether this is actually true, but it's quite probable that in exchange for allowing Apple Books to republish their content, the publisher required Apple to append this attribution when copying content into the clipboard. In theory, preserving such an attribution might cause more copies to be sold.

Also, contrary to your assertion, not every short snippet qualifies for a Fair Use defense; there's a four-factor test that courts apply, and the length is just one of those factors. But again, I think this less to do with copyright and more to do with a business arrangement.

<comment><USER37> _I have no insider knowledge_

I don't either, with the added bonus of a complete lack of legal training but this clipboard thing has been a part of commercial e-reader apps for so long, if your (very plausible-sounding) theory is right, it's been boilerplate in such contracts for many years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This isn't just the web, there's a fundamental leakiness to the Mac's clipboard. I was horrified to realise that apps were being alerted to what was on the clipboard when I copied a a public key from some website and MacGPG (or whichever GPG app it was, they change) popped its head up and told me (something like) "Hi, you've copied a public key, would you like to save it in your keyring?"

Does this mean that any currently running app (or maybe not even currently running, perhaps there's an event system) can see my clipboard?

My feeling about this is unprintable.

I started planning a clipboard app that doesn't allow this but I'm busy and I'd prefer this wasn't something I need to fix in the first place.

<comment><USER39> I believe that the clipboard on windows and in x-server work the same way. Programs can also read most files including files that contain private keys.

<comment><USER38> I really care about security and lament that most people don't, but maybe they've the right idea and I'm just wasting my time. There are simply too many holes to plug :/

<comment><USER40> How do you want the clipboard to work then?

To my mind, the whole point is to provide a way to move information within and between applications.

<comment><USER41> Here's a stab at defining a function:

The clipboard should act _at an only at user direction_ to copy content from one application or context to another.

The clipboard should not, nor should applications be able to, alter the copied content from the visibly-selected content.

Applications, _other than when clearly and unambiguously directed by the user_ be able to access or read clipboard contents.

I'd suggest additionally that it should be possible to examine _and edit_ within the clipboard context itself what was copied.

This creates a few obvious issues, one of which is that commandline and programmatic tools for interacting with the clipboard ... won't function as transparently as they do now. A fact which would affect me directly as I make heavy use of these (xclip in Linux, pbcopy / pbpaste in MacOS, termux- clipboard-set and termux-clipboard-get in Termux/Android). I think I'd be reasonably comfortable with a confirmation dialog appearing in such cases, or having those applications specifically exempted (convenient, though some risk).

The problem of programmatic interfaces to the clipboard is another matter, and those are ... probably a complex issue.

Note that when working _entirely_ within the shell, the issue largely disappears as the inter-process commmunications method is largely pipelines, files, or the shell environment (variables) themselves. With some exceptions, such as gpm(8) (a cut-and-paste utility and mouse server for virtual consols, in Linux).

Though there's also behaviour of the X11/Xorg or Wayland clipboards.

<comment><USER42> > The clipboard should not, nor should applications be able to, alter the > copied content from the visibly-selected content.

This might feel intuitively right, but it severly limits the usefulness of the clipboard.

 _It then becomes a basic plain text clipboard_

Try opening an rich text editor (e.g. [https://quilljs.com/playground/](https://quilljs.com/playground/)) and selecting two words of which one is bold. Hit Ctrl+C. What is now on the clipboard? What happens when you paste? You have your formatting preserved. The editor has intercepted the copy command and stored data _only it knows how to create and parse_. The same would happen in a diagram editor (a selected shape would perhaps be stored as some json representation), or an image editor.

The problem is that the clipboard as an established concept already means "area where programs write their custom formatted data and where any app can read the same data upon paste".

Restricting it might be a good idea in some cases, but it's the user expectation so it's what apps (including browsers) need to do as the default. This unfortunately means that abusing it as in the article will be possible. There is no way for the browser to know whether the changed content was formatting tags (good) or trashing the selection by adding a copyright (bad).

<comment><USER41> If you want to pass rich text or spreadsheet cell formulae, _display those before selecting_. Which puts the onus on the application to provide that functionality.

That preserves the functionality, respects the "copy visibly-selected content" directive, _and_ makes clear just what is being saved to the clipboard, making sneak attacks more difficult.

Argument that the clipboard behaves in a way _that is demonstrably prone to malicious attack_ is simply argument from tradition. Yes, that's how things have been done. We're discovering that how things have been done leads to strongly negative consequences.

<comment><USER42> Not sure I follow, how should the argument display the rich text (markup/formatting instructions) before the selection?

The displayed/selected content might be

Foo _Bar_

but the content I want on the clipboard could be

Foo <i>Bar</i>

but I never want to see the markup, only the formatted text. I don't want to make a two step function where I need to reveal a textual description of the content and select that. The markup might be a base64 encoded piece of binary gibberish in the case of a visual diagram for example.

<comment><USER41> That would be unsupported functionality.

You cannot _both_ have transparent copy capability _and_ copy hidden content without revealing it.

Copying visual content would be subject to different requirements and limitations. But for text: what you see is what you get. If you're copying glyphs alone, those are what are copied. If you want formatting, you'll need to have the source application reveal that.

<comment><USER42> It could be an option that is revealed after a warning. "This page wants to use the javascript 'copy' event to place transformed data on the clipboard. If you accept it would place [data shown] on the clipboard, otherwise it would place [raw text] on the clipboard". What do you want to do? copy text? copy data? [ ]remember my choice for this site.

Here, data shown would probably be some info about the data rather than the data itself. It could be a 2mb base64 bitmap...

However, perhaps a better alternative would be to offer both "copy text" and "copy" where the former just copies selected glyphs as plaintext while copy fires the js event allowing the transform.

The important thing to remember is that webpages in 2020 must work like users expect desktop applications to work, and interact with desktop applications (e.g. copy rich content from webpage to desktop must be a default enabled feature or the user will consider the browser broken). For this reason, I don't think it's a viable solution to disable the js event by default (i.e. to hook Ctrl+C to the "copy text" function).

<comment><USER41> How would you institute that _in the clipboard logic_ and independently of the app?

Because we're no longer operating in a world in which apps or processes are trusted or trustable. Maybe the ones you write, maybe if you're really lucky the ones that come with your fully-vetted Linux distro.

But not npm installs, not proprietary binaries, not website logic, and most especially not the crap that's distributed on mobile app stores.

Your OS, you've got to trust. Which means that the logic's in the clipboard.

And how can the clipboard know that the application is attempting to change contents such that the clipboard won't receive what it is that you see?

That's a key reason I see this as something that 1) has to be in the clipboard logic and 2) has to exclude applications entirely from the copy process. The clipboard should be acting on, say, the graphics render layer directly, outside the application's scope.

<comment><USER42> The clipboard can't tell whether the content is "right" nor can the copying be done by the OS/clipboard itself.

In general the application is the only thing that knows what is selected (e.g objects in a cad program) and the OS has no idea of how to serialize these into the clipboard.

Even a text editor has to tell the OS what is selected and the OS can only trust the app to tell the truth.

The only way to "verify it" is to show the copied content to the user (e.g in a notification after the copy). Obviously for anything but plaintext this verification doesn't help (I can't tell serialized cad objects from something else - it's just gibberish). I can however verify that it's not a script that will erase all my files when pasted into a shell (btw executing on paste is s a horrible behavior by a shell. Pasted data must be treated as untrusted and verified before acted on. Immediate shell execution breaks that).

<comment><USER41> This is getting beyond my paygrade, though it in part depends on the OS dispaly system.

There are some concepts -- and I very barely grasp this -- such as Display Postscript, not in present use AFAIU, which might offer such capabilities within the windowing system.

That is, with DPS the display itself would have awareness of both the underlying text _and_ the formatting directives.

Whether that's even remotely similar to existing graphical systems, I've no idea.

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

<comment><USER42> In the most general case (and more commonly than it ever was) each app is just a rectangular area where it renders using gpu hardware with. This used to be how games rendered but now even shells and text editors are getting there. If one has to manage this case too then basically the only places one can copy from are in the compositor (images ie screenshots) or from apps. Even when text drawing is passed through the OS (or platform libs e.g GDI on windows) it's difficult to imagine APIs where the OS would know what is "selected", ie what should be passed to the clipboard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Most importantly, [https://emdash.fan/](https://emdash.fan/) is the best emdash site on the internet.

<comment><USER44> My go-to site for copying special symbols is Wikipedia, which is, of course, well-behaved:

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

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

Precomposed Latin characters [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_precomposed_Latin_char...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_precomposed_Latin_characters_in_Unicode)

Currency symbols [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_symbol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_symbol)

Japanese typographic symbols [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Japanese_typographic_s...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Japanese_typographic_symbols)

etc.

<comment><USER45> MS Word will autocorrect two hyphens into either an en dash or an em dash based on what it believes you were trying to type.

So this: "em--dash" becomes this: "em—dash" while this: "en -- dash" becomes this: "en – dash"

<comment><USER46> En dashes are for ranges and sometimes for compound modifiers, like "billiard- ball–size hail" or "New York City–based attorney." Not sure who advised MS Word to turn two dashes into an en dash, ever, but it's not correct. Whether an em dash has spaces around it is a matter of style.

<comment><USER45> Word will only change it if you've used two hyphens, it won't autocorrect the examples you have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> On a related note, I find it interesting how modern US-ANSI layout keyboards (even the International version [1]) still has such a limited set of characters.

We have ¼, ½, and ¾, but not en (–) and em (—) dashes; and I get that (') and (") are leftovers from typewriters and ASCII, but wouldn't it be nice to have proper 6-9 ('…') and 66-99 ("…") quotation marks?

Then again, you often see Europeans online misusing acute (´) and grave ( `) accents as apostrophes (writing don´t or don`t, instead of don't or don't). So perhaps the availability of more similar looking keys would just lead to even more misuse?

[1]: [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/KB_US- In...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/KB_US- International.svg)

<comment><USER48> See [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22357897](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22357897) .

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I chuckled when I saw the copyright. What exactly are they copyrighting? Lorem ipsum? The bloody emdash itself?

Even I exercised more caution when I was 12 and learning HTML, arbitrarily applying copyright to things I didn't own.

</comment><comment><USER49> IE (but not Edge, not surprisingly...) actually has a built-in feature which was probably specifically designed to target such things:

[https://i.stack.imgur.com/855az.png](https://i.stack.imgur.com/855az.png)

Selecting "prompt" will result in this:

[https://i.stack.imgur.com/jvDUh.png](https://i.stack.imgur.com/jvDUh.png)

I set it to Prompt for trusted sites, and Disabled for all others.

<comment><USER42> Reading the clipboard is a security risk. Reading the clipboard without having a user initiated paste seems like it shouldn't ever be possible (not suere whether that is what the option does).

In this case, what I'd like as a user option is to be able to say "Don't copy via app-specific code", i.e. "don't run the js event to let the page populate the clipboard, instead inspect the selection and if there is a text selection then copy that as plaintext, else copy nothing".

An alternative "prompt when the app tries to subscribe to the copy event" could also work. If I select a shape in an online diagram editor and the app says "can I please put my app-specific markup on the clipboard" then I say yes, because I understand there is now way copy paste works otherwise. And on a page when I have text selected, I can say no, and I get the default plaintext copy.

Some apps have this as 2 different functions for a formatted copy/paste vs. raw text copy paste. If browsers had a "copy text" context menu item that copied the raw selection without invoking the js 'copy' event, that would work too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> My favorite demo on this subject:

[https://github.com/dxa4481/Pastejacking](https://github.com/dxa4481/Pastejacking)

<comment><USER51> Actually my terminal emulator (xfce4-terminal) added a preview + confirmation dialog a few months ago for copy-pastes including newlines (i.e. which will execute a command instantly). I thought that it was to avoid accidental mistakes, but it makes even more sense that it is to avoid this.

<comment><USER8> > copy-pastes including newlines (i.e. which will execute a command instantly)

You should enable bracketed paste mode in your shell. IMO it's much better UX than a confirmation dialog.

[https://cirw.in/blog/bracketed-paste](https://cirw.in/blog/bracketed-paste)

<comment><USER51> Curiously, I never heard of this despite being a Linux user for quite a long time. I'll give it a try.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> There used to be a time when we could hope that browsers would put users first and disable dark patterns like these.

Now, there are so many advertisers that use Tynt and related services to muck with copy/paste that it wouldn't surprise me if the major browsers are incentivized to leave this alone and let users suffer.

<comment><USER53> > _disable dark patterns like these_

Clipboard access isn't guaranteed to be a dark pattern, though. It's an API that the browser supports.

I dislike clipboard access 99% of the time, but it's actually useful in a few UIs (like copying keys in AWS). Should it really be up to the browser to determine that an API is always a dark pattern?

Honestly, most of the worst dark patterns of the web are enabled by regular <div>, <button>, and <img> elements -- which is to say, they're not something the browser can unilaterally decide are "evil".

<comment><USER7> Is it really useful in AWS? Why is it needed?

<comment><USER53> In certain situations, you have to copy and paste a bunch of settings over and over again. It saves you a few clicks and keyboard taps each time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> It's fine. This is just stupidity dressed as on-purpose bad UX. Yes, I consider whoever makes that decision ("Yeah, we should totally make it not do what the user wanted it to do!") utterly stupid, and a sad presence in the gene pool.

There are file management apps, graphic design apps (figma), etc., that use both the clipboard and the <c-c> / <c-p> binds to work. Neither blocking the bind of <c-c> events, nor of the clipboard are going to happen.

We all have different needs and different pains. Sure, around here, we care about user experience, privacy, performance and optimizations, but let's not forget that we're in a bubble. The regular less-powered users are just as important as us, and their needs may outweight ours.

I wish there was truly open browser that was not crap, there isn't. I wish better privacy controls were available out-of-the box. I wish there could be a _feature matrix backed by a default profile_ so that I can only give access to the clipboard / other APIs manually, but with a prompt on access attempt. I wish so much.

If I don't like my job runner, or my window manager, or even my password manager, I can go ahead and try with at least moderate success to make my own. Browsers are made by large groups of competent (most of them) polyglots, that work countless hours, willing to drill through the shit that has accumulated over the years into what we call the web. I don't have what's required to make my own browser.

<comment><USER55> Your stuff is my opinions too. It is difficult. WWW is a mess. There are other protocols and file formats which be used, which can sometimes be better depending on what you are doing, such as IRC, NNTP, Gopher, Telnet, SSH, etc. (And if that isn't good enough, you can make available something with multiple interfaces, in case some users prefer the web interface and some don't like it.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> There's a Safari extension called StopTheMadness that prevents this sort of thing. I just tested it on this page, and it does indeed stop this particular nonsense.

</comment><comment><USER57> I've been using a simple Javascript whitelist/blocker for the last 4 years or so (a dead-simple Safari content blocker for iOS and Mac I wrote myself; syncs over iCloud just to give me something to do) and I honestly don't know how anyone can stand the wide-open web without something similar.

Using the web with free Javascript privileges is an utterly appalling experience. I can't stand it for more than 5 seconds.

<comment><USER58> I recently switched back to Chrome on mobile because I NEED the ability to blacklist JavaScript from abusive sites. Hacker News links, in particular, are infuriating without it.

I haven't found a way to do this in any of the Firefox versions available for Android.

My block list is mostly well known news sites.

<comment><USER50> Ublock origin works on mobile, and you can reuse your settings from desktop.

<comment><USER59> uBlock Origin even works on Firefox Preview Nightly, which I'm really loving. Way faster than normal Firefox on my old Nexus 6. Makes the phone feel several years younger.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> I had the exact same reaction to this site a few days ago.

[https://twitter.com/cjamcl/status/1228501692682924032](https://twitter.com/cjamcl/status/1228501692682924032)

</comment><comment><USER21> Related:

[http://kb.mozillazine.org/Granting_JavaScript_access_to_the_...](http://kb.mozillazine.org/Granting_JavaScript_access_to_the_clipboard)

[https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/don-t-fuck-with- pas...](https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/don-t-fuck-with-paste/)

</comment><comment><USER61> I used to work for a big ad-tech company(the company is sold and closed now). I was a guy who developed a tool with this functionality. As a publisher, you can add a text with a link(plus tracking code) to every copied peace of text from your webpage. Something like: "Read more at: [https://example.com/my- article/#<tracking_code>"](https://example.com/my-article/#<tracking_code>")

It's not about copyright. As a website owner, you can disable this behavior, but by default, it was enabled. The main purpose of this functionality was to track shares(for example if you copy text and send it to your friend in skype). As i remember it was one of the most popular & important features in the whole toolkit.

In a nutshell, it's about 200 lines of battle-tested javascript-code that worked perfectly fine in almost any browser(dunno about now it was around 3 years ago).

Personally, i hate this behavior.

</comment><comment><USER62> Credit where credit's due, the mentioned website (The Punctuation Guide) works very well with JS disabled, and the problem with text copying is gone. I use [https://github.com/meetDeveloper/Quick-JS- Switcher](https://github.com/meetDeveloper/Quick-JS-Switcher)

</comment><comment><USER63> Really, the web just gets more and more vile towards users.

Sure, highly technical folk are capable of working around this all -- but the vast majority of people do not have a browser that is _working for them_:

\- You have little to no control over what content you are seeing. Instead, it is chosen for you.

\- A large number of videos (not even including movies and shows) are geographically blocked. You cannot access them.

\- Developers are actively trying to prevent: Saving images[1][2][3], selecting text[4][5], browsing on a mobile phone[6][7], and a whole slew of other normal user actions I don't care to cite: preventing users from going back, manipulating their browser history, asking for notification and geolocation permissions, displaying full-screen modals that block content access, scroll-jacking, click-jacking, and more.

But don't worry! It's not all doom and gloom, websites like Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, banks, and more are heavily pushing their users away from the web to mobile applications where you have ZERO choice.

And we're going to maintain this backwards-compatible stack of completely volatile pieces of anti-patterns until that migration to "apps" is complete, and you can no longer distinguish between the app on your phone monitoring everything you do or the site running 5 different layers of VMs and doing the same -- albeit a bit slower.

[1] [https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/122922/discoura...](https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/122922/discouraging- users-from-copying-images-off-a-website)

[2] [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21110130/protect- image-d...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21110130/protect-image- download/48855148)

[3] [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35897974/how-to- prevent-...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35897974/how-to-prevent- image-from-copying)

[4] [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16805684/javascript- disa...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16805684/javascript-disable-text- select)

[5] [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8365272/disable- copying-...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8365272/disable-copying-on-a- website)

[6] [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10177456/how-to- disable-...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10177456/how-to-disable- access-to-website-for-mobile)

[7] [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22618724/how-to- disable-...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22618724/how-to-disable-my- website-from-being-viewed-on-mobile-devices)

<comment><USER64> I think browsers need to implement options to block most of the bad behaviors you describe, and bundle it all up into a "this site is an app" permission that is off by default. Pages that are fundamentally just documents dressed up with fancy navigation features don't need all those anti-features and it's the browser's duty to spare the user the annoyance, but Google Docs does need most of those APIs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> You're giving sites permission to do this when you browse the web with browser that automatically executes whatever code it is sent. They're not forcing you, you're going there and you're asking for it and doing it yourself.

There's an easy solution. Stop. Don't run JS by default.

<comment><USER66> OP is simply asking for a compromise, a better solution that yours. Instead of avoiding JS altogether, don't give it access to things it should never have access / no business mucking around

<comment><USER67> There's a tension here, though. Having access to things like this is the whole point of having JS in the first place. The web is just full of assholes, so you experience the abuse as often - or even more often - than the proper use of JS.

Not sure how to approach it. JS whitelist is a stopgap solution, but not a particularly convenient one, and it doesn't always work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> The author sadly didn't touch on e.g. zero-width spaces ([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero- width_space](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-width_space)) to fingerprint anything copy pasted.

</comment><comment><USER69> Upvoted for the emdash (—) shortcut: Shift+Option+Minus

</comment><comment><USER70> I had to implement an in-house version of this way back on eHow before it was pretty easy. Cross browser issues made it pretty tricky - which is probably why a couple companies that just did this spawned from it.

It's all so silly and doesn't increase site visits in any meaningful way.

Sidenote: I'm glad javascript in browsers is a lot more standard so you don't have to get stupidly hacky.

</comment><comment><USER71> Just wait until they place an ad in your clipboard

<comment><USER67> This already is an ad. They're betting on you pasting what you copied straight into a communicator.

</comment></comment><comment> onion-soup What's with ultra-grey font colors? It's not 2010 anymore, give your text some contrast ffs, you are killing my eyes

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about that. I had been using some default styles that came with the Hugo theme I'm using, but I absolutely see what you mean. Updated text throughout the site to have better contrast. Hope that helps!

<comment> onion-soup Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I mostly do not enable document scripts. But, does any browser have a setting to disable the ability for document scripts to affect selections? (They also mention smooth scrolling. I don't like that either, nor replacing standard widgets with their own or adding additional worthless animations.)

</comment><comment><USER72> There's an extension that stops this and it's called Don't F __k with Paste

</comment><comment><USER73> I wish clipboards worked like emacs yank buffers. Then you wouldn't have this problem.

</comment><comment><USER74> It's not just an annoyance. Think of copying shell commands...

</comment><comment><USER75> Awesome post! many times i copied some stuff and they appended links and advertising contents into it ^^ so annoying, especially in those listing sites like quotes or similar.

</comment><comment><USER76> Hindering someone from grabbing an emdash with copy-scripts is pretty petty. Edit: Anyway, reminds me when I used to troll my buddies with the ANSI.SYS hack.

</comment><comment><USER77> There is a special place in my hatebook for websites which disable copy, this website just earned the top place

</comment><comment><USER78> Firefox makes life easier:

      Ctrl+Alt+R

Also, uMatrix with js disabled by default works well, too.

</comment><comment><USER31> This is bad UX if nothing else.

For an example of what I think wad good UX: In Windows, it used to be that pasting into a text editor would give you the original text while pasting into OneNote would magically give you the text with a link back to the source below.

I used to love that and for what I know it still works, I just don't use Windows and OneNote that much anymore.

</comment><comment><USER79> "ghci> putStrLn (pretty 10 value)"

        Excerpt From: Bryan O'Sullivan,

</comment><comment><USER80> Also special place in hell for pages that disables paste on their inputs.

</comment><comment><USER81> Is there a chrome plugin that prevents this?

<comment><USER82> In lieu of a plugin, I always paste into a plain text editor and copy the stuff I _actually_ want from there. I've always done this, not because of dark-patterny stuff, but just fonts and having bad aim with my cursor when I copy.</comment></comment>


Fallout series giveaway on GOG - <AUTHOR> http://www.gog.com/promo/fallout_series_giveaway_winter_promo_2013 <comment><USER2> Back in the late '90s, the first two _Fallout_ games acted as my gateway drug to `traditional' RPGs. The lack of classes, SPECIAL's flexibility, and the sci-fi setting got me over the RPG learning curve, after which I was able to dive in and enjoy some amazing games. Even today, they may look dated, but they're still great fun to play.</comment>


Facebook, In 2016? Let Us Get Serious - <AUTHOR> http://statspotting.com/facebook-let-us-get-serious/ <comment><USER2> > Let us just move our social data to some P2P stuff built on Ether or some > other blockchain or something.

I agree it is silly what we seem to value these days. Companies I imagine will enable what humans value the most -- connectivity -- and exploit what we don't seem to care about much, or have forgotten -- privacy.

There are privacy-oriented social networks, like Ello[1], and I just recently learned of a P2P messaging network, Bitmessage[2], and an email layer on top of it[3].

[1] [https://ello.co/wtf/policies/privacy- policy/](https://ello.co/wtf/policies/privacy-policy/) [2] [https://bitmessage.org/wiki/Main_Page](https://bitmessage.org/wiki/Main_Page) [3] [https://bitmessage.ch/](https://bitmessage.ch/)</comment>


Chromium 85 - <AUTHOR> https://blog.chromium.org/2020/07/chrome-85-upload-streaming-human.html?m=1 <comment><AUTHOR> The blog covering the changes is older but M85 has been stabilized yesterday.

The most compact way of seeing exhaustively the changes is to look at: [https://www.chromestatus.com/features/schedule](https://www.chromestatus.com/features/schedule)

The number of added features on chromium 85 vs Firefox 80 really show the huge, increasing feature gap.. And Firefox 80 work was anterior to the lay offs!

(disclaimer: I'm aware that now Firefox has a shorter release schedules than chromium but even merging the last 2 ( and even the last 5!) releases changelogs doesn't quite close the gap. I guess that Microsoft is behind this noticeable increase in chromium changes/improvments)</comment>


Show HN: I made a minimalistic website to make exercise at work easier - <AUTHOR> https://www.overstellar.se/random-exercise <comment><USER2> I had a similar idea for years now, just without the animation of the exercise. Did it come out of one of the frustrations I had with exercise, which was all of that monotonous counting? Kudos to you for following through with it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Yes, a big reason to why I designed the site was to remove some of the monotonous nature of exercising, and also to reduce as much resistance as possible (that's why I wanted to use autoplaying gifs) It is also a response to all these trendy "7-minute workout" apps, I think it's dangerous to give people the idea that you can just exercise 7 minutes and then sit on your ass the rest of the day.</comment></comment>


Lessons learned building an ML trading system - <AUTHOR> https://www.tradientblog.com/2019/11/lessons-learned-building-an-ml-trading-system-that-turned-5k-into-200k/ <comment><USER3> After having spent an insane amount of time in late 2017/2018 building an HFT bot for Binance I can say this is a pretty solid article.

In our case we were doing triangle trading between BTC/ETH/USDT pairs and had our buys/sell delay down to 3-7ms. At one point moving 0.3-0.7% of Binance's daily volume.

Few notes:

* Finding an objective point of truth for value when all of the currencies are floating is hard but vital to success. This was the hardest problem we encountered. We tried taking the realtime average of BTC and ETH across all exchanges, we tried tying it to the shortest route to USD, and several other routes... but ultimately this is where we ended up "losing" most of our alpha.

* Order books are seemingly simple but the devil is in the details. This especially matters for paper trading.

* Efficiently using API limits at exchanges is an optimization problem in and of itself.

* Our model was relatively simple but we focused on speed and edge cases. For instance Binance would rotate IPs on their load balancers and we'd constantly check the latency between each open SSL connection and use the fastest. Further we wouldn't decode the buy response to plaintext we'd just read the raw stream.

After several epic months our entire project fell apart after a cryptic phone call about "institutional access" that didn't follow the 1s websocket update. The access was quiet expensive and we said no to it and shortly after all of our strategies went to crap.

Best we could tell someone was front running us due to an artificial delay for our account (delay between trades went to ~20ms up from our prior steady speed of 3-7ms) and/or a bunch of the trades in the orderbook were bogus.

Frustrated we tried our strategy on another account and the delay dropped again to our normal range and was profitable again (the orderbooks were slightly different between bots!).

It was in that moment we realized playing in unregulated markets is not fun or something we wanted to continue to do. Intermediary risk was something we didn't account for.

Further we realized that there will always been a better resourced or more dedicated team willing to fight you for your alpha.

After months of effort and a ton of fun we decided it was best we went back and focused on a problem where we could build a long term competitive advantage.

Edit: typos and formatting

<comment><USER4> What's the value of HFT? If exchanges were required to add a random delay to very trade to work against high frequency traders, would anything of value be lost?

<comment><AUTHOR> Many HFT systems provide liquidity. If there is no liquidity, retail investors like you or me cannot buy or sell.

Just imagine you want to exchange a currency because you go traveling and the exchange tells you "Sorry, nothing available right now, gotta come back in a few weeks". That's what would happen if there is no liquidity.

<comment><USER5> I always had questions about the liquidity on offer though seeing participants flee the market in black swan events. HFT liquidity could be illusionary - <USER2> only there when its not quite required similar to how the bank "only offers you a loan when you don't need one". Of course this is exactly the point when liquidity is required; normally there's sufficient liquidity in normal times from market participants. Its easy to offer liquidity in normal times; harder to do so when no one else wants to offer it.

<comment><USER6> Offering liquidity is not equivalent to offering free money. The offer comes at a cost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I spent the last year working fulltime on a system similar to the one described here. I trade the top ~20 cryptos on binance. I use deep learning models (combination of temporal, causal convnets and RNNs) with heavy data augmentation. I built my own tooling for data collection, training, backtesting and live deployment. Having a data engineer background coming into this was hugely helpful: most of my time was spent manipulating data in some way (and not playing around with the models). One of the most demanding parts was estimating spread/slippage costs and including it into the loss function.

Most of what the author talked about, I learned the hard way.

I'm now at the point where I ran some tests (trading small amounts) live on binance and the results are positive: I do manage to make small profits, but more importantly, the recorded live trades reflect very closely the backtest trades (for a given period). I'm currently scaling up my model and adding better monitoring / reporting / CI.

I'd be happy to chat with anyone having done similar projects or willing to exchange ideas.

<comment><USER8> I'd love to hear more about what kind of data augmentation you're doing. A friend of mine recently got a GAN to work for timeseries which is really interesting.

I've done a lot of work in the space and would love to chat - just emailed you :)

<comment><USER9> Indeed GANs are showing very promising results. There's a series of blog posts from Fernando de Meer which discuss this topic in a very approachable way. [https://quantdare.com/generating-financial-series-with- gener...](https://quantdare.com/generating-financial-series-with-generative- adversarial-networks/)

<comment><USER8> Very cool, thanks for the link!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This post is an exemplar of the crucial relationship between domain-specific knowledge and ML competency in the ML space. The bulk of the post is detailing the tricky ins and outs of trading, and overall the author gives the impression that they're broadly knowledgeable about stock markets.

Contrast this post with those you see with ML hobbyists who delve into medicine or fake-news and produce useless results testament to their lack of domain-specific competency.

<comment><USER11> Domain knowledge is essential to almost any project that aims for eventual commercial success, it is quite rare than an outsider will come into a field, apply some ML and make a killing.

<comment><USER12> RenTec

(Yes, I know they do much more than ML, but still)

<comment><USER13> That is not what Simons did to make Renaissance Technologies successful. Simons cultivated domain knowledge long before he started a hedge fund, because he had an interest in trading and gambling even as a professor. He also hired people with financial experience.

The historical record overlooks the people he hired who knew a thing or two about trading, while fixating on the team of NLP scientists he hired from IBM. Likewise Simons wasn't initially successful in the very, very early years. It wasn't until the late 80s that the Medallion firm really came into its own.

<comment><USER12> Yes, I understand that the "financial naiveness" so to speak of RenTec is overplayed in the media, but my point is that superior domain knowledge wasn't what enables Medallion to win. And to be fair, most of the early years were before systematized quant trading.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Great post! Very refreshing to hear about a) the honest level of effort involved in this type of endeavor, b) the amount of nonsense trading advice out there.

Maybe in a future post you could discuss the security and banking side of this in more detail? In the 6ish years I've played around with crypto trading (and I really mean play, nothing close to your level), I've had 2 exchanges hacked and lose all customer funds, another 2 had major security breaches causing days of downtime but recovered, and one site seized by the FBI.

Then there are the horror stories of banks freezing your account when you move funds in and out of exchanges. Luckily That hasn't happened to me.

I bet you have some good stories and perspective on that side of it, I would love to hear it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here. Honestly, I don't have a good answer. I spread my capital across enough exchanges so that if one runs away with it gets hacked it doesn't ruin me. It's just a risk I'm taking.

I'm also not trading much capital. Because the system is more on the HFT side, the actively traded capital isn't that high, and I don't care about losing it. Any profit I try to get out of the exchanges regularly. I wouldn't feel comfortable leaving large sums on those exchanges.

<comment><USER15> Apart from Binance who else you trust? (of course overall no crypto exchange can be really trusted) I assume you trade alts vs (BTC or USDT).

Also, when you said "market neutral", did you mean you also short (only few pairs have margin on Binance and it appeared recently).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I enjoyed reading this but here is a cautionary review of a project in the same field:

[https://towardsdatascience.com/what-happened-when-i-tried- ma...](https://towardsdatascience.com/what-happened-when-i-tried-market- prediction-with-machine-learning-4108610b3422)

Discussed here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21624907](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21624907)

<comment><USER8> The only caution I took away from that post is that it's very easy to make mistakes applying ML to financial markets if you don't know what you're doing.

There looks like a lot of overfitting the validation set going on in that post.

It's also a mistake to conclude that "there was no subtle underlying pattern" just because the author couldn't find one.

Throwing XGBoost at a bunch of technical indicators isn't gonna cut it but I have had some solid real-world success (as have several people I know) applying ensembles of deep learning models (with regime switching based on model residuals) to profit from "subtle underlying patterns".

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm impressed with this system, but I'm even more impressed with the author's writing style. I'd love to see more technical posts written with this level of clarity.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much :) I'd love to write more, I just need to figure out a good next topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> > For example, instead of defining a tick as 1 second, we could define it as > 1.0 BTC traded...

Interestingly Benoit Mandelbrot talks about this in "the (mis)behaviour of markets" and explicitly calls it "market time"

</comment><comment> d--b Is anyone else suspicious about the results?

Claiming a 4000% return while staying market neutral seems a little too good to be true.

First: those levels are insanely high, so the algo must be taking some absurd risks and have the worst sharpe ratio, or getting pretty close to being 100% accurate.

Second: if you can scale this across markets, and assuming the same return, that investment will turn into 12 billions in 4 years. I doubt that you'd write a blog post about it if you had found such a gold mine.

<comment><USER19> Naively using linear scaling on financial models provides zero guidance to how the model would actually perform... Scaling financial models is an _extremely_ hard problem.

See RenTech limiting the size of their Medallion fund because it was getting too large to scale....

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is this the author?

I would love to know how this fared recently in the large sell-off.

What he says about some markets possibly being predicable rings true to me. But the article was far from convincing that the BTC market is actually predicable.

The natural assumption should be that the author was in the right place at the right time. Although he went through great lengths, I'm not convinced this is anything other than luck.

<comment><USER21> Through hypothesis testing you can estimate the probability that this was due to luck is very low. Assuming that a monkey would have a 50% chance of profiting on a day, the chance of going a month without a losing day is less than 1 in a billion.

<comment><USER22> How many monkey bots are flipping the coin daily? Selection bias just needs one.

I very much look forward to the author's follow up post at the end of 2020 to see if another 5k turns into 200.

<comment><USER21> You have to make some basic assumptions to do any statistical inference, because if you don't then literally anything can be explained by luck. For example, even if the author did a follow-up post (which I'd love to see as well!) every year for 30 years and made money every time, it could still be "selection bias".

The number of monkeys required to match the author's results over a 12-month period is well over the number of atoms in the universe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > The biggest edge probably comes from the effort put into building the > infrastructure.

I feel like this should be in bold, but either way, I love reading that in these posts. In every way, from research to confirm your models are correct, to be able to trust real time trades, you need a solid architecture. This thought isn't only for trading remember, where it's the same in tons of solutions to problems. If comment readers have other examples, I'd love to hear them in responses.

</comment><comment><USER24> I've played with writing bots before and this post hits on so many of the edge cases I personally ran into. I have never heard it this well explained before. Brilliant.

</comment><comment><USER25> Fascinating post. There's just so much to digest here. Well, there goes the rest of my day!

</comment><comment><USER26> It's interesting they suggest the higher the timeframe, the noisier the time series, when to my understanding the opposite is typically found -- the lower timeframes exhibit a more random walk and the higher timeframes exhibit trending behavior.

</comment><comment><USER27> Can someone comment on how taxes are handled when automated trades are made like this? It's something that seems wholly absent from the cost calculations.

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here. Personally, I just don't. I tried doing it but it was too complicated. So I end up just hiring a tax accountant specializing in crypto, send them all the data I have, and pay a few $k. In case something goes wrong, it's their fault and they take the risk.

<comment><USER28> Not sure what country you're in, but that's not the way tax accountants work in mine. You're still liable for mistakes/problems they make here :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> It is a big loss of your time and nobody will give you back that one. I suggest you to use your time in non zero-sum games, something that can create value for you and society. Now that you have some saving you can definitely afford it. The next best thing of not doing it is to quit doing it now.

Disclaimer: I built a similar system in the past, took some gains and then realised the above. I then quitted to build a company.

<comment><USER30> I have been working on such a system and it is NOT a huge loss of your time. I've learned so much things in the past year, in market microstructure, in networking (infrastructure, protocols), cloud computing, cloud management (docker swarm, kubernetes), linux kernel bypass, distributed systems, data base, and I've read hundreds of papers on neural networks, gaussian processes, etc... If you are wondering if you should get into this, it is one of the best learning experience you will ever have.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> It must be said that it is a lot easier to make money in a stock market that has had low volatility and no significant, prolonged dip in the last 5+ years. My own long-term investments have earned 20% return over the last 5 years with zero trading. I realize that this article is specifically about crypto, but trends in all markets is generally up across the board.

</comment><comment><USER32> As someone who just finished a BSc in computer science and started a MSc in Financial Technology and Computing this post is really interesting to me, keep 'em coming :D!

</comment><comment><USER33> This is a really good post, thanks for sharing it. Algorithmic trading systems vary a lot and every shop have their own way of doing things.

</comment><comment><USER34> Can this same strategy be leveraged on zero-fee stock exchanges? Why is crypto the target here?

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here. Perhaps if you already have existing HFT infrastructure and connections to efficiently trade on such exchanges. But such infra costs millions. If you don't have this, you're probably at too large of a disadvantage to find any alpha.

At least that's my understanding based on conversations I've had, I've never traded equities.

<comment><USER35> In a little more detail ...

To be competitive in US equities HFT, you need an FGPA with 40GbE ports hosted in a server (which needs to power and cool the FPGA, and deal with the less latency-sensitive bits of your system). You'll need some storage as well.

That server needs to be co-located with your target exchange(s) matching engines, and connected via 40GbE. You might additionally want remote market data via mm-wave microwave.

You can probably put together a basic but competitive hardware setup for $70k or so, if you ignore redundancy, and you only need to trade a single market. More realistically, you'll need at least two, plus shared storage, and probably more depending on what markets you intend to trade on.

Then you have monthly costs: colocation for the server(s) ($5k-ish+), port fees for the order entry ($500-ish), port fees for market data ($500-ish), physical connectivity fees ($20k-ish) , cross connect fees for the connectivity ($500-ish), wireless connectivity fees, you might need roof access (more fees), market data fees (per exchange), memberships, and trading costs.

I haven't done this for a while, but it easily adds up to $100k per month or more.

So you need to be making quite a bit to pay off your infra, before you start thinking about profit. And your model will age pretty fast, so you'll want to be working on a few possible replacements concurrently.

It's a tough business.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot for the detail. I've always wondered what the actual costs look like.

<comment><USER35> Thanks for posting Nick's article!

I chased up some actual details from NASDAQ as an example:

[http://www.nasdaqtrader.com/Trader.aspx?id=PriceListTrading2](http://www.nasdaqtrader.com/Trader.aspx?id=PriceListTrading2)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Only way to beat is go long, super long, longer the better. Machines doesn't go long

</comment><comment><USER37> And in the end, what value was created?

"Liquidity in the BTC market"?

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here. Actually, the system is mostly taking liquidity from the market so it's not even doing that :) Perhaps, "opportunity for others to create more liquidity"

Jokes aside, it's actually something I am thinking about a lot. Such systems don't create value, but they extremely intellectually interesting and I've learned a lot. You can say the same for many other projects, for example academic research in many fields. Most of it is just noise to promote the author and does not create value in the world. But it's intellectually interesting, so people work on it.

Other people write compilers for fun to learn something new without creating value. I don't think this is fundamentally different.

<comment><USER38> > But it's intellectually interesting, so people work on it.

No. It's a financially sound way to use time, so people work on it. Anything can be intellectually interesting.

What kind of academic research does not create value? And if so, maybe it deserves to be criticized the same way.

<comment><USER39> > What kind of academic research does not create value? And if so, maybe it > deserves to be criticized the same way.

I have friends that study social behavior of ants. Is there any way to apply that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> [https://archive.vn/iI8H1](https://archive.vn/iI8H1)</comment>


Thanks for your interest in Google I/O, but ... is now sold out.  - <AUTHOR> https://www.google-io.com/

<comment><USER2> Twitter says they sold out in 59 minutes but it seems like it must have been closer to 20 minutes.

</comment><comment><USER3> The registration form was still live when I just clicked on it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, and when you submit it the response message is that they're sold out. I wish they'd simply post a SOLD OUT page instead, to spare would-be attendees that little humiliation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow, that was fast. It's like buying concert tickets.</comment>


MacBook Battery Time Remaining - <AUTHOR> https://kaspars.net/blog/electronics/macbook-battery-remaining <comment><USER2> The time remaining indicator was really useful. It was more than accurate enough. It allowed me to see at a glance if I had enough charge to finish the movie, if it would last for the rest of the train ride, etc. If I saw that the battery wouldn't last as long as I had expected, closing Slack would fix it.

The problem with the time remaining indicator was that people started reporting the displayed time as actual run time. I read a couple of blog posts where people claimed that the battery life time of the Macbooks was reduced, based on the estimates they saw in the battery menu. They didn't actually time the run time of their Macbooks, presumably because that would take 5-10 hours, or longer if you want to repeat the measurement. So Apple is claiming that these people are wrong, the indicator was inaccurate, and they removed it.

Of course, the problem is that most likely battery life actually is lower. The battery of the new MacBook Pro is significantly smaller than the predecessor's, but the components don't use significantly less power. With the increasing popularity of Electron based apps, average power consumption is probably even increasing.

For the user, this is a huge loss. We've learned to live with the battery time estimate, and we know that the time remaining isn't absolute; just like we know that the remaining range displayed on the dashboard of most recent cars depends heavily on the driving style.

Fortunately, there are 3rd party tools that display the estimate Apple removed -- I downloaded Coconut Battery. But I wish we wouldn't have to rely on 3rd party tools for such basic functionality. Macs used to come with "batteries included".

<comment><USER3> > Of course, the problem is that most likely battery life actually is lower. > The battery of the new MacBook Pro is significantly smaller than the > predecessor's, but the components don't use significantly less power

Exactly. Apple has always designed their devices to a battery life target. But as "wireless web" and "movie playback" both depend on use cases that get more and more optimized as Apple improve their software, they get more and more disconnected from the reality of pro users. How about a "editing a Swift Playground" battery life estimation? Or Photoshop? What Pro user spends all their day browsing the web and watching movies? Those make sense for the regular MacBook, not the Pro.

<comment><USER4> It's natural that Apple designs a battery target for one usage. It's totally ok to tell '10hrs watching a movie', with actual figures being lower when doing other activities. PC competitors never ever hit the target, even for movie-watching, so we were perfectly happy to have 10 actual hours for one usecase.

Of course I don't get what customers gain from .07 nineteenth of an inch less of thickness. Next version Apple will provide a thinner macbook, with no battery, and the power supply will come from an NFC table...

<comment><USER5> > PC competitors never ever hit the target

Start looking at proper business models maybe.

<comment><USER6> For example: [https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp- content/uploads/2016/11/Revie...](https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp- content/uploads/2016/11/Review-chart-template-final-full-width-3.013-2.png)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Excuse me?!

That's how it worked for years and everyone knew that, and still it was useful to estimate the current workload of your machine.

Why all of the sudden something that worked for years isn't viable anymore coincidentally when people started complaining about new MBP's shitty battery life? Nobody's buying it.

<comment><USER8> Also the news today reports "Apple Working with Consumer Reports on Macbook Pro Battery Issue" [1]

Reading between the lines:

"Apple Pressures Consumer Reports to Change its Story"

You don't need to "work with" Consumer Reports to fix the issue. Just fix it.

Why "work with"? Does Consumer Reports have engineers that will help Apple understand the problem? Is Consumer Reports an isolated incident that just needs some tech support to help them understand the computer? Smacks of whitewashing to me.

[1] [https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-working-with-consumer- report...](https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-working-with-consumer-reports-on- macbook-pro-battery-issue/)

<comment><USER9> Imagine for a moment that you thought you'd made a good device. Now imagine that a respected organization did their own testing and said they couldn't recommend it.

Would you want to work with them to understand why you came to opposing conclusions?

There's no real chance of bullying, as CR buys the products they test, and has decades of experience with huge companies not loving their reviews.

<comment><USER10> Consumer Reports already sent Apple their logs on the test machines before the review. CR had already made a good faith effort to find the source of the opposing conclusions. However:

> _In his tweet, Schiller linked to a story from iMore that says Consumer > Reports was just going for a pre-Christmas headline and should have done > more testing._

Apple is trying to bully/influence the public reception to CR's review. Gruber has spent more time dissing the CR review (and distracting from Gurman's expose on the Mac troubles which he hasn't linked to on DF)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Having used and trusted the "time remaining" calculation in Macs for years, it's very hard not to be suspicious of the timing here. A series of less-than- stellar reports of battery life in the new MacBook Pros, and then all of a sudden the indicator is inaccurate? Nope, not buying it.

</comment><comment><USER12> I know why apple hasn't, but I'd kill for a $1500 macbook stuffed into a macbook pro case, and all of that spare space taken up by battery.

Give me a core-m, 8GB RAM, a high res display, and a massive battery.

<comment><USER10> All these years I've wanted a lightweight 15" (or 17") MacBook/Air but Apple insists on segmenting the larger laptops at more expensive prices. Apple won't even offer a 15" MBP without the dGPUs now.

Apple should simply offer two lines of laptop:

11"/13"/15" MacBooks optimized for thinness

13"/15"/17" MacBook Pros optimized for power

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is this really news to anyone? Of course it's hard to estimate, the same goes for MPG/miles until empty in a petrol or diesel car.

That doesn't make the measurement of current estimate useless. It's still a useful tool. Users understand if they close windows in their browsers, or shut down Battlefield 958 that will prolong their battery life and that if they turn up screen brightness that will cost them battery life.

Apple chose the lazy way out of this problem. The estimate was not any more inaccurate than it ever was in the past (at least I haven't seen any evidence that it was), and user's aren't any dumber. Apple just didn't like the press and made a stupid change to try to correct that issue. Lame.

</comment><comment><USER14> Love that Apple keeps adding "features" like this. Not even SlimBatteryMonitor still works thanks to this update.

What a time to be alive, watching Apple choke on their own arrogance.

Their one shot at a big comeback is the iPhone 10th anniversary edition. If it is as much of a smash hit as Robert Scoble keeps heralding then Apple will be golden for another decade.

<comment><USER15> This hilarious Scoble piece?

[https://virtualrealitypop.com/im-inside-tim-cook-s-head- but-...](https://virtualrealitypop.com/im-inside-tim-cook-s-head-but-i-really- wonder-what-s-going-on-inside-mark-zuckerberg-s-head-5babf01c5713)

I wonder what he has been smoking.

I love this sentence:

"You pop it into a headset which has eye sensors on it, which enables the next iPhone to have a higher apparent frame rate and polygon count than a PC with a Nvidia 1080 card in it."

<comment><USER16> That's quite an insult to pot. Robert Scoble is just an idiot.

<comment><USER17> Definitely not pot. Probably bath salts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Bring on the machine learning battery gauges?

<comment><USER18> if it runs on the GPU it will have to take its own power draw into account

<comment><USER19> > if it runs on the GPU

It will struggle to function at all seen as no Apple machine ships with a decent CUDA card.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Have they never heard of averages?

Just show time remaining based on last 5 minutes, 1 hour, 5 hours, and all data.

Or does apple not like that kind of "complexity" and wants just a single number?

<comment><USER21> Average makes bad estimations for non linear phenomenon. And nothing can be done about it.

Math 101.

And what could be better? Well, nothing we don't have the math for that problem in the first place. If we had, we could predict weather accurately with a time window bigger than 24hours...

24 hours is the accuracy weather forecasts are having since decades even with Moore laws multiplying the power of processors...

Even by throwing more money and engineers at them some problems cannot be solved.

The only way to average non linear phenomenon is to scale the problem to an extra large population or make prediction on ultra short time.

Actually I guess that if users were seeing there battery lifetime sucked dramatically every time they use WiFi, or GPU it would create an adverse effect on computer users of making them anxious (human beings are weird animals) and some of them would use less their computers.

Imagine if SUV were showing an estimation of mileage dropping sharply when you make a big acceleration? People would stop accelerating like mad men, hence it would kill the SUV/sport car market. You don't want to kill a really good and rational economy, do you?

Sellers don't want you to be economical in your use of anything, else it kills the market as sure as a pair of crocs lasts for years.

We live in an era where consumers and producers want to use moar resources, moar energy and feel good about it, not anxious.

Does the planet have limited resources, is it irresponsible?

No! Let's throw more money and engineers at a problem and we surely can solve it.

I guess immortality and super powers are just around the corner. lol.

<comment><USER22> >> Imagine if SUV were showing an estimation of mileage dropping sharply when you make a big acceleration?

That's how it works with any vehicle that has a real-time MPG readout

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Oh, easy - we're just holding our macboocks wrong, that's messing with battery estimates.

</comment><comment><USER24> Exactly. It's like a car manufacturer saying how many miles to the gallon you're going to get, without knowing that you're a terrible driver who never gets out of 2nd gear ;)</comment>


Maintaining readable code in Kotlin projects with type aliasing - <AUTHOR> https://okkotlin.com/typealias/ <comment><AUTHOR> I was wondering how many people here on HN use type aliasing in their codebase.

Kotlin, Swift or any other language.</comment>


How One Entrepreneur Sold $100 Million In Businesses – with Marc Ostrofsky - <AUTHOR> http://www.domainsherpa.com/marc-ostrofsky-getrichclick-interview/

<comment><USER2> Wow. This is a really inspirational story. I think I should focus a little more on arbitrage. :)</comment>


Coinbase Is Now Selling Over $1M USD Of Bitcoin Per Month - <AUTHOR> http://blog.coinbase.com/post/42587245753/coinbase-is-now-selling-over-1m-usd-of-bitcoin-per <comment> unix-dude I think bitcoin is an extremely interesting concept, and the economics around it are equally interesting. I bought a tiny amount when the prices were around the $11 mark, and its insane to think of the price-shift. I made a couple bucks off the price shift, but now I'm honestly thinking that the price will fall back down. Despite serving the needs of many SR/SatoshiDice people, I dont think they're quite at the point of being honestly valued at $21 each.

I think the fact that the price jump happened in (basically) a 12 hour period, coupled with the fact that bitcoin is traded as an investment very often makes me believe this is an artificial price jump. I'm no economics guru, but it just seems like common sense to me. Tons of people see a short burst and panic buy, this allows the sellers to ask consistently higher prices as many people panic buy (Lets face it, many, maybe the majority, including myself, in the bitcoin game, are amateurs when it comes to currency trading).

Anyway, it'll be interesting to see where this goes, and I'll almost definetly be buying when/if the price falls to ~$12/$15, which really seems much more appropriate in my opinion.

<comment><USER2> The problem with all fiat currencies is they have no inherent value; it is all in the eye of the beholder. So what is an "appropriate" price is quite difficult to determine. Most currencies are driven by being effective monopolies wherever they are issued, so the market price remains somewhat stable. Even so, many professional economists have opined that the exchange rates even between major currencies are way too volatile.

This is, among other things, because there is a whole lot of loose money floating around that can easily jump between currencies. We are probably going to see a lot more of this in the Bitcoin world, which I expect has a lot more volatility ahead of it -- somewhat ironically in this case, as the increased liquidity promotes volatility, since it becomes an instrument of pure speculation that was previously too difficult for professional traders to deal in.

In any case, I also had the intuition around the $11-12 mark that bitcoin was a good investment, since the major hurdles around the security issues were probably ironed out, but didn't invest anything -- probably because deep down I'm a value investor and don't see a lot of value in driving speculation in something that doesn't have inherent value (despite the many interesting technical aspects to Bitcoin).

<comment><USER3> To say Bitcoin has no inherent value is not quite accurate. The inherent value of the Bitcoin comes from the electricity required to power the computational cycles to "create" it.

<comment><USER4> Cost does not equal value.

And it goes the other way around anyway. Higher prices lead to more people mining.

<comment><USER5> Correct. The problem being the use of the word inherent to describe value. There is no such thing as inherent value unless you are describing a use and not the price someone would be willing to pay for something. For example, wood can be used to fuel a fire but that doesn't tell us anything about its' inherent value in exchange. That it has inherent value on these terms is obvious enough. For me it has almost none because I don't have a stove to safely burn it. Others feel differently.

<comment><USER4> You have to take a more general sort of view to things. To the median person making use of the value, how much are they getting out? How many people would find value?

For example not everyone likes shiny things but gold is also compact, protective, conducting, nonreacting, testable, etc.

Wood has a thousand and one uses but it's a bad currency because in addition to being bulky it's easy to make more wood. But in certain circumstances it would work fine.

There is barely any use people can get out of bags of sand, so it wouldn't work as a currency. Salt looks similar but used to be hard to get and is important to food and living, made a great currency.

Bitcoins by themselves don't have value. You could make a hundred knockoff block chains and they wouldn't do you any good. The bitcoin network as an entity that you can trust is where anything useful is actually derived from.

<comment><USER6> Just because some things have intrinsic value and have been used as a currency doesn't imply that something that doesn't have intrinsic value and is a currency can't be trusted.

You have to take a look at society's motivations, situation and psychological makeup, and from there you can make a prediction as to whether a currency can be trusted or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For everyone out there who wants to pay bitcoins using PayPal I found a hack that worked (be aware: this might take sevwral hours the first time.)

Buy Linden Dollars - Take them out in bitcoins. Simple but takes hours of waiting the first time to get verified etc the first time.

<comment><USER8> Paypal is always super expensive... I really recommend using cash at an ATM with Bitme:

<http://howdoyoubuybitcoins.com/from/bitme/>

<comment><USER7> Available in Scandinavia? Europe?

<comment><USER8> There are other options available for people in Europe:

<http://howdoyoubuybitcoins.com/in/europe/>

Hope it helps!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think it would be better to call bitcoin for what it is: entertainment for grown ups.

Whether you use it get drugs, gamble, bet or speculate on some other place doesn't matter. It has become a game on its own right just like UO, WoW or EVE ... You can view it as game of a currency instead of currency of a game. It has intrinsic entertainment value, thus a commodity that can be priced in real currency.

Nobody bats an eye when a mmorpg makes millions in revenues, nobody bats an eye when a gamer builds a four grands rig. Why should we care about bitcoin replacing real money now or ever? It is not like governments will readily hand over monetary control to its citizens anyway.

</comment><comment><USER10> So I just bought 2 bitcoins on Coinbase (my first purchase congrats to me!) but it's been pending for 5 days and says it will clear today.

My question, is how can they lock in the price 5 days ago for me. Are they selling me the coins 5 days ago and buying it on the market today? It seems like there would be a lot of risk in doing that.

<comment><USER11> They buy your bitcoins immediately with their own funds, then when your money clears 5 days later they get reimbursed by you.

<comment><USER12> That means they have a net exposure to the bitcoin price (possibly quite a large one). From their point of view that's not all that desirable.

<comment><USER13> Except that, with the price rising, they're making money from that "exposure" on average.

And they obviously believe the price will keep going up, because they're a bitcoin business, and believe in bitcoin. If the price stops going up, their company will fail anyway.

And finally, perhaps you noticed that coinbase is processing thousands of bitcoin purchases now. So I'd say, with all that data, it's not actually that risky for them. If the price starts going down, they'll know it first, because they'll be the ones making the purchases. :P

<comment><USER14> The exchange rate has no effect on Silk Road. People will still want to buy BTC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Any word on when they'll support purchasing from a UK bank account? Most of the other options are a bit more convoluted than the straight-forward system Coinbase seems to use.

<comment><USER16> I hate to "me too", but "me too".

I'd love to be able to use coinbase but I'm UK only. I'm unlikely to get involved with Bitcoin until something like Coinbase allows UK bank accounts.

(having said all that I'm going to be buying very small quantities of Bicoin.)

<comment><USER17> You might want to check out localbitcoins.com - our online buying process is pretty fluid, and we have lots of sellers selling for UK bank transfer.

<https://localbitcoins.com/location/GB/London/>

<comment><USER18> Second these guys, managed to find a seller and complete the transaction in under ten mins! Although was only a small amount.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Crazy to think BTC have doubled in price since August. I wonder how many people are just buying up BTC and waiting

<comment><USER20> It isn't that surprising to me, considering the payout for miners was halved a month or two ago.

<comment><USER4> Do you really think the price would change very much if the miner payout was raised or dropped by a factor of ten? Over half the bitcoins have already been mined; expecting the price to be based on the trickle of new ones is unrealistic.

<comment><USER20> It may change eventually, and the exchange rate does fluctuate dramatically sometimes, but it has been shown in the past that the market value of bitcoins tends to stabilize around the electricity cost of mining.

<comment><USER21> Does this mean the total value of all bitcoins is similar to the cost of the electricity used for mining them? If so, isn't it worrying that so much electricity has been used because of bitcoin? I have often wondered if a currency could be constructed such that the mining would solve real computational problems, thereby doubling the value produced per energy consumed.

<comment><USER20> _isn't it worrying that so much electricity has been used because of bitcoin_

I don't like it either, but you can't control what people do with their resources.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm curious about the wording. Is "bought or sold $1M" equivalent to saying $500k changed hands?

<comment><USER23> You don't need to buy or sell from just other Coinbase users. It can be anyone. Coinbase doesn't have a huge market share yet, so it's even less likely.

I think a fair way to read it is that $1M worth of transactions occurred of which Coinbase made some money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> But not to me :(

 _"Unfortunately, we have decided to cancel this order because it appears to be high risk. We do not send out any bitcoins on high risk transactions, and your bank account will not be charged."_

I have no idea why I was flagged as "high risk", I'd be interested to know.

<comment><USER25> >I have no idea why I was flagged as "high risk", I'd be interested to know.

Email their customer service and they'll whitelist your account.

Of course they won't tell you why their automatic risk algorithm flagged you. But they will be helpful and make sure that you aren't flagged again.

Their customer service is seriously top notch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> In 2012 the bitcoin supply increased 33% In 2013 the supply will increase roughly 13%

In another 4 years when the reward halves again it will decrease to 4% inflation. At this point it will be harder than most government currencies.

(Gold inflates about 1.5% per year)

</comment><comment><USER27> But where are the bitcoins going? Are people actually spending over $1M of bitcoins on something else than buying back dollars?

<comment><USER28> silk road

<comment><USER25> Negative.

Silk Road only accounts for about 3.4% of Bitcoin's total monthly transactions. (about $6mil right now)

Bitcoinstore.com, BitPay's 3000 business clients, the dozens of casino/gambling sites processing millions of USD equivalent every month, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Notice how their success is measured in USD.

<comment><USER30> That's because it's the unit of value that the article's reader is most likely familiar with. When you go on vacation you're most likely constantly converting prices in the local currency to the currency you're familiar with - that doesn't mean the local currency is worthless (if that's what you were implying).

After I moved from UK to US, it was months before I stopped doing the mental arithmetic from USD to GBP.

<comment><USER31> When you move from the US to the UK you have to stop doing it immediately or you'll drive yourself insane.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This is awesome! Any idea what size of the market this is?

<comment><USER33> About 0.5% I think. Plenty of room to grow. And Bitcoin should grow a lot more, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Wonder how much of that is being spent on the Silk Road?

<comment><USER35> Or the other vice, SatoshiDice[1].

[1]: <http://satoshidice.com/>

<comment><USER36> Drugs, gambling...get hookers in there, and you'll have a legit currency. ;)

No, seriously, once a currency gets to the point hookers accept it, it's indisputable that it's real.

<comment><USER37> If you wanted to make the 'Uber of prostitution', you'd probably find Bitcoin helpful.

<comment><USER36> If someone did make an "Uber of prostitution," and avoided being shut down/eaten by the law/established interests, they'd probably become rich.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you have used coinbase, please write a review of it for us!

<http://howdoyoubuybitcoins.com/from/coinbase/>

If you want to deposit cash at a Chase ATM, you can do so with BitMe:

<http://howdoyoubuybitcoins.com/from/bitme/>

..and if you don't live in the united states, we have guides for you too: <http://howdoyoubuybitcoins.com/in/>

<comment><USER38> Can you explain how the BitMe Chase ATM deposit method works? Their website doesn't say a lot (just to make a deposit in their Chase account and save the receipt.)

<comment><USER8> You go to their website, and say how much you want to deposit (lets say $100). They will give you a final deposit amount that is pretty similar, but different (e.g. $99.86), which allows them to identify your deposit. Once the deposit is made, they verify it, and if there are any problems, they will request your receipt.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Congrats! Do you have any idea how this connected to the general BTC trends / versus specific to Coinbase?

</comment><comment><USER40> Congrats!

</comment><comment><USER41> Do they have any plans to lift the 10 bitcoin per day purchase limit?

<comment><USER8> They already did! You just need to buy a bitcoin, and wait 30 days. Coinbase does this to limit fraud.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Heck yea brian! killing it

</comment><comment><USER43> Be careful with coinbase When they were trying to raise money as part of the founders club, they broke a few regulations: they originally were supposed to raise their set limit within 8 weeks and when they missed it they extended the time by 2 weeks and when they missed THAT they extended the timeline by 4 more weeks. At the end they only made their target by a last minute injection from may have been an insider. On top of that, they have NO policy on refunds for acts of god, hacking, or the government .

<comment><USER43> I just realize that my comment came across wrong. I am very interested in Bitcoin - I just want coinbase to come clean before I put my money and trust in them

<comment><USER44> Hopefully it's just growing pains. But transparency is critical for running a Bitcoin operation these days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I think Bit Coin is a fad... it will be replaced. Canada's 'Mint Chip' is catching up quickly and it is a superior product/currency.

<comment><USER46> How is MintChip a replacement for bitcoin? It isn't as anonympous and it isn't decentralized. It seems like they go for two entirely different goals.

<comment><USER25> I'm rooting for Bitcoin.

But FYI MintChip transactions are anonymous.

It is a digital form of cash.</comment></comment></comment>