Dark Patterns: dirty tricks designers use to make people do stuff - <AUTHOR> http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2010/07/08/dark-patterns-dirty-tricks-designers-use-to-make-people-do-stuff/

<comment><USER2> I have noticed one at the gas pump when I use my debit card. If you use a debit card as a credit card, they pay the CC fee, so they want you to enter a PIN.

Instead of presenting two choices: credit or debit, they ask the question "Is this a debit card?" I am using a debit card so the answer is yes, it is a debit card; but you can answer no and they will process as a credit card. It makes me think about it each time. Pretty sneaky -- I am sure it raised their debit card rate

<comment><USER3> For any non-Americans confused by this, in the USA it's common for bank-issued cards to work as both a debit and credit card. The same machine is used for both.

<comment><USER4> More precisely:

There are two protocols for running a card: "debit" and "credit". "Debit" uses a PIN, and "credit" uses a signature.

There are two types of cards, "debit card" and "credit card". "Debit card" is tied to a bank account, and "credit card" carries a balance paid off at the end of the month.

There isn't a strong connection between the two, at least in America. But when I was working full-time in retail, people would occasionally hand me their cards and say "it's a debit card". The retailer I worked at only supported the "credit" (signature) protocol, so I nodded and ignored the request.

<comment><USER5> It's also possible (common?) for there to literally be no difference (to the cardholder). My credit union's debit card is the credit/debit card like you describe, but there is no actual credit whatsoever. I can only spend the money in my account. For some reason, I always choose to run it as a credit card (mostly because I don't know my pin), which is kind of a dick move since it costs the sellers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Supermarkets (in the real world) that prevent you from comparing products on price, by putting items in different sized bundles."

At the HEB grocery stores in Texas, every price sticker includes price/ounce or price/count. I was surprised by how often buying in bulk is more expensive. Take eggs for instance, there's a 50-50 chance that eggs in the 18-pack will cost a few cents more than the eggs in the 12-pack.

<comment><USER7> Around here, I see a lot of instances where one sticker is "price/ounce", another "price/pound", and sometimes a third with "price/count" or "price/volume". I thought this was just due to inconsistent manufacturer standards; I didn't expect that it was intentional.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> HN does this to some extent:

* Only allow flagging if viewing the permalink causes less flagging

* No changing votes and small buttons causes people to think more about voting

* Little to no help keeps only the dedicated coming to the site

<comment><USER9> Oh but these are examples for making people _not_ do stuff (like not flag, vote, or even come back to the site). I don't feel like that's evil at all.

<comment><USER10> What is the difference between convincing people to do something and convincing them not to do something? Both are the same thing: Convincing people to exhibit a desired behaviour.

<comment><USER9> Looking at the headline, the theme here is "dirty tricks". Evil intent. And while I agree that you can use dirty tricks to make people _not_ do something they'd better do, I fail to see how the examples given by the GP speak of evil intent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My personal peeves along these lines: "add to cart to check price!" and not displaying shipping cost until your credit card data is entered.

That last one prevents me from buying a _lot_ of things, because it seems a downright insulting thing to do to a potential customer.

      "How much is it?"
      "$10 + X"
      "How much is X?"
      "Hand over your wallet first.  We'll return it!"

<comment><USER12> but the first one is often not avoidable. amazon does this for certain items like the new imac, but they clearly show a helpful pointer next to the "see price in cart" link.

"Why Don't We Show the Price? Some manufacturers place restrictions on how prices on their products may be communicated."

<comment><USER11> So the idiocy lies with the producers, not the sellers. It's still idiocy.

But true, that does put it outside "Dark Designs".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> the greatest one is the "import your contacts" from GMail and it invites anyone not using your service, to your service too.

</comment><comment><USER14> There is a great link buried in the comments of that blog about UI design and providing feedback to user: <http://www.danlockton.com/dwi/Lenses>

</comment><comment><USER15> i don't know if i'd classify most of these things as "dirty tricks". i would put taking actions on behalf of or as a user without their knowledge or consent as at least a level higher than a dirty trick.

</comment><comment><USER16> There's a need for some space in a web browser that is reserved for browser messages. This space has to be distinct from space that can be used to display content, otherwise the website can spoof browser notifications.

Of course, this has to be balanced with the desire to devote as much space as possible to content and have the browser get out of the way of the browsing experience. But any browser notification that's displayed _only_ in space that's otherwise content is just asking for trouble.

</comment><comment><USER17> There are fantastic comments in the linked article.

</comment><comment><USER18> This article focuses on the use of these "dark patterns" to mislead people, but the basic idea is used positively in many, many contexts.

Quality engineers use the concept of a "poka-yoke" (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poka-yoke>) to failsafe their processes and systems all the time.</comment>


IBM Watson: Building a Cognitive App with Concept Insights - <AUTHOR> http://www.primaryobjects.com/2016/02/01/ibm-watson-building-a-cognitive-app/ <comment><USER2> primaryobjects, thank you very much for a great article!! I am one of the developers for Concept Insights and I really enjoyed seeing the technology described by a 3rd party. Please let us know if you have any questions you would like answered.</comment>


Ask HN: Learning programming using Data Structures - <AUTHOR>

I've been told that the best way to learn a programming language is to implement some data structures. I am currently learning Ruby and I would really love to code some data structures like Tries, AVL etc. Are there any sites out there which outline how to go about doing this and can suggest exercises and optimizations based on the same.<p>Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks. <comment><USER2> In a sense, data structures are "primitives" when it comes to implementation. Their structures and algorithms are published, and often there are numerous examples in other languages you can use to template your own Ruby code from. There seriously aren't any tips or exercises except to just translate from pseudocode into whatever language you want.

You might be looking for something more specific - e.g. functional implementations - but there's nothing in your post to suggest that's what you want.</comment>


New flaws in 4G, 5G allow attackers to intercept calls and track phone locations - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/24/new-4g-5g-security-flaws/ <comment><USER2> I'd really love if people would stop calling everything mobile standard some number followed by a G.

There are literally no known commercial scale deployments of '5G' technology out there - its largely on paper with many technical and practical details to be worked out - and the deployments discussed even when they do go hot, will be small, literally, these are microcells, something effectively the size of a oversized wifi hotspot. What has been deployed, is effectively LTE-Advanced, with extra channel bonding and MIMO. Beyond that, the 5G standard isn't even finalized yet.

We're still solidly in the '4G' era, and we (in the US) don't even have 100% saturation for LTE coverage, much less LTE-Advanced.

<comment><USER3> As usual, it's technical jargon used for marketting purpose. That's why they don't use it responsably, and that's why geeks complain without realizing the goal is not to be right, but to make money.

<comment><USER4> But aren't 4G, 5G etc. not actually marketing terms that on a technical level only imply some broad capabilities (e.g. possible download rate > X MBit/s), while the actual standards providing those are not called 4G/5G?

<comment><USER5> > Confusion has been caused by some mobile carriers who have launched products > advertised as 4G but which according to some sources are pre-4G versions, > commonly referred to as '3.9G', which do not follow the ITU-R defined > principles for 4G standards, but today can be called 4G according to ITU-R.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4G#IMT- Advanced_requirements](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4G#IMT- Advanced_requirements)

4G is defined in an ITU paper basically. And telcos started to use it for networks that were pretty far from 4G. Then ITU simply said, that okay, sure, use that, because they don't care.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Most people consider the fact that your handset will readily talk to any base station that's on the air to be a feature. Try to imagine how things would work if you had to authenticate and authorize every station on the network. It's true that anyone who gets on the air and speaks the air protocol can screw with your phone. Those people are also violating multiple laws and regulations in the course of doing so.

<comment><USER7> I mean you can do authentication without doing it per base station... the real reason we don't have anything like this is because it's a lot of work to make this work well worldwide and because a lot of governments are not interested in making spoofing base stations harder on themselves.

<comment><USER8> Shouldn't we just fix this one layer above? Just like the internet treat the network as hostile and use strong encryption to connect to your network provider. If someone uses a stingray you use their bandwidth but they see nothing because you're running encrypted VoLTE.

<comment><USER9> It's astart but from my understanding implementing strong encryption on the layer above does little to mitigate physical location tracking issues that arise from spoofed towers.

<comment><USER10> Nothing short of removing all devices identifiers (IMSI, IMEI, etc) and using an untraceable payment system for network access (eg blinded tokens) will mitigate the location tracking ability of the carriers.

The perfect is the enemy of the good and cops do use stingrays for a reason. But targeted government surveillance is only one privacy threat, and carriers have no compunctions about bulk selling your location to the _mass_ surveillance industry.

<comment><USER11> This is about unauthorized people tracking you not carriers.

<comment><USER10> Yes, and I did recognize I was talking about a different vulnerability by saying that the perfect is the enemy of the good. But if we're talking about protocol vulnerabilities, why skip over the deep flaw of having fixed identifiers in the first place?

Heck, simply removing the IMEI so that users don't have to buy a new burner phone (/mifi) along with every burner SIM would be a vast improvement!

Really I'm just pointing out the larger context, as it's important to keep in mind. Shoring this up will make the keystone cops have to go get a warrant, but won't help versus the NSA, parallel construction, or GoogleNexis. It probably won't even make private investigators have to eat lunch in their cars again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It seems like this method requires a known phone number. And can track people based on knowing the phone number in advanced. That is quite a high bar, and very different from the standard stingray attack.

That is, older attacks allow you to collect all IMSI's in the area. Instead, this attack allows you to track a given phone-number, and retrieve the IMSI that belongs to a given phone number.

Edit: it seems like an Email address or twitter handle also works. What is needed is some way to trigger a message on the phone. That still requires knowing some identity up-front though.

<comment><USER4> > Edit: it seems like an Email address or twitter handle also works. What is > needed is some way to trigger a message on the phone. That still requires > knowing some identity up-front though.

Marginal. No barrier at all for targeted attacks (phishing, stalking, intelligence etc.).

<comment><USER12> A very large use-case for stingrays by american police was to have them running nearly continuously. Then, when a crime occurred, they would go back and examine the captured data to see who was nearby during the crime.

Such post-hoc tracking is not possible with this method.

Similarly, if all you know is "I don't trust the bearded guy who just disembarked the plane" it could be hard to get to an identity that will trigger his phone. With a traditional 'What IMSI's are in the area' capture, you just need to follow them long enough that one IMSI stands out as always being available. This attack doesn't enable that either.

<comment><USER13> > A very large use-case for stingrays by american police was to have them > running nearly continuously. Then, when a crime occurred, they would go back > and examine the captured data to see who was nearby during the crime

Do you have a link for this? It's difficult to Google

<comment><USER12> [https://theintercept.com/2016/10/18/how-chicago-police- convi...](https://theintercept.com/2016/10/18/how-chicago-police-convinced- courts-to-let-them-track-cellphones-without-a-warrant/)

The officer requested use of a "digital analyzer" to locate the new burner phones at "any time of the day or night … without geographical limitation in the State of Illinois." The request was approved.

I recall similar things happened in New York

Perhaps 'a very large use case' was too strong a phrasing though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The article mentions you need to brute-force 29 bits using an oracle. It doesn't mention this is an _active_ oracle. That is, it requires interaction with the UE (target phone).

This makes the brute-force attack quite a bit harder, as you need to be in contact with the target phone for the duration of the attack (you don't need to do the attack in one go though).

</comment><comment><USER14> Based on the paper, the title is clickbait; it does not talk about intercepting calls at all. It does mention that one of the attacks in the paper can enable "further attacks", but if call interception was one of them, I'd imagine that they'd say so explicitly.

<comment><USER15> The author of the paper, cited in the report, said, "Any person with a little knowledge of cellular paging protocols can carry out this attack... such as phone call interception, location tracking, or targeted phishing attacks."

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is nothing new, this has been a thing since SMS paging channels which was included in CDMA2000.

</comment><comment><USER17> One man's "flaw" is another TLA's "feature"... ;-)

</comment><comment><USER18> If by flaw they mean feature.

</comment><comment><USER19> [removed]

<comment><USER6> Actually that is a link to a terrible PDF-rendering web page. This is the original paper.

[http://homepage.divms.uiowa.edu/~comarhaider/publications/LT...](http://homepage.divms.uiowa.edu/~comarhaider/publications/LTE- torpedo-NDSS19.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Thanks Huawei.</comment>


5 Reasons Why IE7 is Complaining about your Javascript - <AUTHOR> http://ragrawal.wordpress.com/2007/10/25/top-5-reasons-why-ie7-is-complaining-about-your-javascript/ Ended up debugging IE7 javascript last night and this link proved useful. The culprit in my case was a trailing comma in the last line of a jquery ajax post submission.
My lesson learned? Use single line escapes for comments (//) rather than multi-line escapes (/.../), as it makes commenting out large sections of code considerably easier when/if you need to cut out sections for debugging purposes.
A truly unpleasant reminder how awful it is to develop in IE, and how backward the browser is compared to Firefox from a developer's perspective. <comment><AUTHOR> Ended up debugging IE7 javascript last night and this link proved useful. The culprit in my case was a trailing comma in the last line of a jquery ajax post submission.

My lesson learned? Use single line escapes for comments (//) rather than multi-line escapes (/ _..._ /), as it makes commenting out large sections of code considerably easier when/if you need to cut out sections for debugging purposes.

A truly unpleasant reminder how awful it is to develop in IE, and how backward the browser is compared to Firefox from a developer's perspective.

<comment><USER2> The trailing comma thing is actually very un-IE. It's rarely the most stringent, standards-compliant browser.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Static Website Hosting on AWS with Serverless - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tobilg/serverless-aws-static-websites <comment><USER2> Thanks for sharing this, I literally just set this up last week and was thinking: 1. why are there so many steps and 2. why isn't there a one liner to do this. Will be using this next time :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Please open an issue of you encounter any problems...</comment></comment>


Inequality and Risk - <AUTHOR> http://www.paulgraham.com/inequality.html <comment><USER2> While this is an older essay, this is up there with one of my favorite PG essays

This part always has particularly far-reaching consequences.

 _The problem here is not wealth, but corruption. So why not go after corruption?_

People like to assail lobbyists and the super-rich corporations that supposedly buy favorable policy, and of course, everyone then blames the rich for it. But it's not the rich that deserve the fundamental blame. It's the politicians that directly create policy, and can enforce that policy at gunpoint. No amount of money gives you legal authority to stick a gun in someone's face.

It's the government, and only the government that make the laws - not the lobbyists and not the rich. Economic power is not the same thing as political power.

Which is why transparency (which PG also speaks about) is so key.

<comment><USER3> I would suggest that instead of trying to reduce bad uses of political power via the proxy of transparency, it might be more effective to reduce the amount of political power there is at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well, there are some ways that you can make start-ups more appealing for founders without increasing the reward. In the United States, creating a startup has considerable risk and cost. Health insurance comes to mind as the largest cost. Europeans don't have to worry about this in the same way and, therefore, are able to eliminate a cost of several thousand dollars from their startup budget. They don't risk being without health coverage by creating a startup (and that does lower the risk, therefore requiring less reward). Likewise, unemployment insurance is better which makes it easier for those whose start-ups might not pan out to feel secure.

So, the government can lower the risk for founders in a meaningful way. I'm not saying that socialism is awesome or anything, just that certain social programs reduce the risk of doing a start up.

Aaron Swartz (of reddit fame) once wrote an essay on this topic arguing this point: <http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/prostartup>

The lack of a social safety net requires founders to be in a good position - good health, no dependents (spouse, kids), etc. - or get enough VC that they can afford to go in that direction.

It's clearly not the only issue - investment dollars still need to come from somewhere and this doesn't change that risk (other than lowering the amount initially needed since the VC wouldn't have to pay for things like health insurance), but personally it would go a long way for risk-averse me.

</comment><comment><USER5> Did Bill Gates really think about how much of his future wealth would be taxed when he started Microsoft? Or how about Steve Jobs when he started Apple? My guess is ego and the desire to succeed were more important.

<comment><USER6> In those two cases, probably not. What does influence a lot of founders, though, is what happens to peers who try it. Their friend starts a startup and sells it a few years later. How much better off is he economically? Does he merely get enough not to work for a few years, or does he never have to work again? Tax laws make a visible difference here. In a smaller acquisition, which most are, taxing capital gains at the rate of regular income would very often make the difference between someone having enough not to have to work again versus just enough to take a few years off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> You don't have to eliminate inequality, but if society gave people a better foundation to work with (health care, care in old age and education), I think people would be more willing to take risks AND would be less prone to corruption.

</comment><comment><USER8> We act as if most of our tax money goes to poor people. That just isn't the case. This entire argument is a lie on it's face. I don't think anyone seriously thinks we should all be equal financially, only that people deserve health care, food and shelter, even if they are "lazy" or "stupid". Guaranteeing these basic human needs wouldn't cost as much as people think. Even reducing the taxes that poor people pay would help immensely. It's a fallacy that the poor don't pay taxes, they do. There are other taxes besides income taxes, some of them even go into the same exact pool of money. Many rich end up paying _less_ taxes then poor people do, as a percentage of their income.

<comment><USER2> _only that people deserve health care, food and shelter_

Why? These aren't automatically available in nature. They require work, and the application of the mind, to acquire. Health Care is a service provided by individuals. People have a "right" to health care only inasmuch as those who are capable of delivering said health care are _willing_ to do so (that is, voluntarily).

The same goes with food gathering/storing/preparation and building manufacturing. Someone has to provide these services, and to state that because someone "deserves it" that those services must be rendered (without concern for rendering individual's agreement), well, that's the master-slave relationship.

<comment><USER9> Your point is valid, but I think it's a bit extreme to say that guaranteeing basic care makes everyone else a slave. A slave works for nothing to enrich others; a doctor loses some money caring for indigent patients but doesn't become poor while the patients become rich. There is a natural limit there.

<comment><USER2> The financial differences are irrelevant. A slave is one who works for another without choice, under threat of force.

The (American) slaves were given basic provisions for life, even some leisure time. Their fundamental problem wasn't the money or their lifestyle, it was the lack of choice. They didn't have the right to say "no, I refuse to serve you."

<comment><USER10> False dichotomy: you're either 100% free to do anything you want, or you're a slave. There's lots of middle ground, namely that making certain choices implies accepting certain constraints. Universal health care, for example, needn't _force_ doctors into providing care for certain people at gunpoint. It may imply, however, that if you choose to enter medicine that you may have to accept certain conditions.

This is already the case, actually. Working at certain emergency rooms obligates one to care for those that come through the door, regardless of whether they can pay. This hardly makes the doctors & nurses who work there slaves.

Similarly, in the US we citizens have a right to council, and if you can't afford an attorney, one is provided by the state. Does that make court appointed attorneys slaves?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I didn't understand this part:

"If you want to reduce economic inequality instead of just improving the overall standard of living, it's not enough just to raise up the poor. What if one of your newly minted engineers gets ambitious and goes on to become another Bill Gates? Economic inequality will be as bad as ever."

What about your newly minted teachers and other middle-class citizens? Does everyone who rise from poverty become super rich?

I don't understand economics well, so I can't really counter his overall argument, but this seemed a little offhanded.

<comment><USER11> part of the point is that these "super rich" that everyone likes to point fingers at are such statistical outliers that formulating economic policy around them is ridiculous. In essence you wind up with special rules for .01% of the population. How egalitarian is that?

<comment><USER12> Why so ridiculous? Those .01% often have a vastly disproportionate impact on the rest of the society, so it only makes sense to have special rules for them.

<comment><USER11> the point is that it's hypocritical from the egalitarian soapbox that the people stand on.

<comment><USER12> Not really. The .01% generally have vastly greater power and effective rights within society - ensuring that that doesn't go overboard isn't so crazy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Strongly agree with the second part: _The problem here is not wealth, but corruption_

Kind of confused by the first part. Was that about progressive tax rates or communism?

I don't know anyone who has ever declined an opportunity to make money just because the tax on the profit was too high. Does anyone have specific examples?

<comment><USER3> I used to work in manufacturing, and it was fairly common to hear people decline overtime using the reason that it would be taxed enough more that it wasn't worth it for them. Part of this might have been due to a misunderstanding of how income taxes work (everyone I knew there, including myself, had the impression that higher rates were applied to the entire amount of your income), but that doesn't alter the point in this case.</comment></comment>


The last Soviet citizen: The cosmonaut who was left behind in space - <AUTHOR> https://www.rbth.com/history/330415-last-soviet-citizen-cosmonaut <comment><USER2> If you like this, you should definitely read "Dragonfly: NASA and the crisis aboard Mir" by Bryan Burrough. It's an amazing portrait of the disintegrating immediately-ex-Soviet space program, and the disintegrating space station they were trying to keep flying.

This article mentions other countries buying seats on Mir. The book explains how this was a deliberate international effort to keep the Russian space program alive with infusions of hard cash. This was to avoid huge numbers of scientists with, effectively, high-level missile experience dispersing across the world in desperate need of money (rockets==missiles; that was the point of the whole original space race).

It's an eye-opening look at an astonishing time, and it culminates in heart- stopping descriptions of the various in-flight accidents, including the mid- space collision with a supply craft that knocked a hole in the station and nearly killed everyone aboard.

If you prefer video, the author gave an extended interview about it when it was released: [https://www.c-span.org/video/?115419-1/dragonfly-nasa- crisis...](https://www.c-span.org/video/?115419-1/dragonfly-nasa-crisis- aboard-mir)

</comment><comment><USER3> He is now a VP of the Russian principal space corporation (Energia) and in charge of the manned flight programs and cosmonaut/astronaut training. Much respected person in the space industry.

</comment><comment><USER4> Krikalev has a good article on Wikipedia on him: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Krikalev](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Krikalev)

<comment><USER5> > Krikalev holds the record of most time dilation experienced by a human

<comment><USER6> Wait, is that time dilation the reason he was the "last" soviet citizen?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Made me immediately think of Captain Korolev from the story 'Red Star, Winter Orbit' by Gibson and Sterling. I knew already, but still had to go double check that the story came first.

<comment> dane-pgp When I first heard of Krikalev's story, I wished that someone would write an alternative universe historical novel where being "the last Soviet citizen" became more significant for him.

Imagine some legal quirk in the interpretation of Article VIII of the Outer Space Treaty:

"A State Party to the Treaty on whose registry an object launched into outer space is carried shall retain jurisdiction and control over such object, and over any personnel thereof, while in outer space or on a celestial body."

where the International Court of Justice required the UN to treat the Soviet Union as still existing, with Krikalev as its only citizen (and thus government).

He could nominate himself as the Soviet representative to the UN, and exercise his country's veto, while also having to pay the country's contribution to the UN budget. Things would be even more complicated if some members of the Soviet armed forces, and ambassadors, accepted him as their rightful leader.

It would effectively be an extreme case of the odd situation regarding the status of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta.

<comment><USER8> > someone would write an alternative universe historical novel

well in Italy we took the story and made an advertisement out of it

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=gEg6G0PmHDw](https://m.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=gEg6G0PmHDw)

<comment><USER9> Hah! I'm too young to remember it, but it was frankly funny and well played.

I'm not sure I understand the final joke about America. Did they lose territory after the collapse of the Soviet Union or is it just a joke like "ah, this is so good it might as well be America"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I was a kid when this happened and I'm still surprised I've never heard this amazing story! Thanks for sharing here :)

</comment><comment><USER11> I strongly watching Out of the Present (1997) which chronicles the story.</comment>


Paradeiser – An Alternative to the Hamburger Menu - <AUTHOR> http://lucidlemon.github.io/paradeiser/

<comment><USER2> Please, don't make me resize my browser for a demo, add a screenshot.

This implementation works very nice for sites that have like 6 menu items, but the reason designers _loved_ these fricking hamburger menus is because they could stuff a shitload of content in there.

Sidenote: position:fixed still doesn't always work properly on mobile, plus a navigation bar should really be at the bottom of a page for thumb- accessibility (but that's just a matter of tweaking some css, ofcourse) Sidenote2: Why do you hide it on desktop? Mystery meat!

Good work, keep the initiatives coming!

<comment><USER3> Hey, dev here.

Well, there is a screenshot right at the greeting :)

Yes, this implementation is focusing on 3-5 pages on your website - which is mostly enough for like 90% of all common sites. And if you need more for less important stuff like Terms of Service, FAQ or anything you could imagine, there is still an overflow button, which is kinda like a hamburger menu, but at least you have a few items without clicking a second time - and you see them instantly. On a usual hamburger menu you can't even see your options without opening it, which increased my bounce rate on gaumengut.at by 80%.

I noticed that position:fixed is a bit awkward when pinch-zooming on mobile, but what are other and better alternatives? I primarily wanted to make it as easy as possible so that it's just a drop-in solution, without further code. Hence why I positioned it on the top instead of the bottom, it's easier to implement using pure css and without forcing the user to change his DOM too much.

I hide it on Desktop as I primarily wanted it to be a mobile navigation. The font size is too small for Desktops (distance to the display, mostly non retina...), but a desktop version is planned.

Thanks a lot for your feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hey look, it's a menu that's actually useful for understanding what's on the site and navigating it. Nice.

Given that, wouldn't it be better if the menu were always visible? I had to resize my browser window to be tiny to even see that it was there on the Paradeiser site (and not just in the screenshot).

<comment><USER3> Thanks a lot!

As mentioned earlier, it currently is only thought as an alternative to the hamburger menu on mobile, as most websites use different menus for desktop, and therefore it is really hard to make this `use this menu and you will be happy` menu on desktops. But we don't quite have so much room to play with on mobile screens.

In addition to that the font size really just works on high-density screens, so it would require major reworking for desktops. I planned to do that though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like this. Reminds me of this site [https://www.hamburgermenu.xyz/](https://www.hamburgermenu.xyz/)

<comment><USER3> Thanks!

I used to use hamburgler ([http://johnm.io/project/hamburgler/](http://johnm.io/project/hamburgler/)) which seems to be a clone of the website you mentioned.

I used it on gaumengut aswell, but saw an increase in the bounce rate by 80%. Therefore I needed something else :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I like this. I dislike the fact that it is always on screen. It's probably best to autohide it.

</comment><comment><USER7> Sweet name! Austrian for tomato, good choice!

<comment><USER3> thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> awesome, made my browser crash lol.

<comment><USER3> Uhm, which browser? That really shouldn't happen.

<comment><USER8> Safari and Chrome on OS X Yosemite</comment></comment></comment>


Bermuda legalized same-sex marriage a year ago. This week it abolished it - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/02/08/bermuda-legalized-same-sex-marriage-a-year-ago-this-week-it-abolished-it/?utm_term=.9cadd74d66f3 <comment><USER2> Tangential, but I thought HN might find it interesting...

The article quotes the director of the Human Rights Campaign (who you may know from their bumper stickers, a blue square with a yellow equality symbol in it), who is named Ty Cobb.

There are at least two lawyers named Ty Cobb; one represents Donald Trump [0], the other is the director [1] of the largest LGBT civil rights advocacy group.

[0]: [https://www.denverpost.com/2017/07/24/trumps-denver- lawyer-t...](https://www.denverpost.com/2017/07/24/trumps-denver-lawyer-ty- cobb/)

[1]: [http://blogs.mccombs.utexas.edu/bhp- news/2014/03/24/alumni-s...](http://blogs.mccombs.utexas.edu/bhp- news/2014/03/24/alumni-spotlight-ty-cobb-director-of-global-engagement-at-the- hrc-class-of-2003/)</comment>


Youtube - Dark Pattern? - <AUTHOR> http://imgur.com/0Sw4uYD

<comment><USER2> Yes it very much is a nasty, dark pattern. Unfortunately, they guessed correctly that they could annoy that level and still keep their users. I eventually gave up trying to get around it and clicked whatever option that would satisfy them. It was just frustrating when trying to watch YouTube videos for it to come up so often. They won.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's not new.</comment>


Ninety percent of growth in high-tech jobs happened in just 5 metro areas - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/12/9/21000162/high-tech-job-growth-concentration-brookings <comment><USER2> Tell me what I'm missing here. The colors representing the data have widely varying buckets. 6/10ths, 1/10th, 0/10ths, 4/10ths, 16/10ths. And they overlap at the boundaries. This appears to be a non-story with poorly represented data, topped with bad visualization. F-, would not view again.</comment>


Secret 'BADASS' Intelligence Program Spied on Smartphones - <AUTHOR> https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/01/26/secret-badass-spy-program

<comment><USER2> Brief summary for those in a hurry:

GHCQ and CSEC sniffed unencrypted analytics data in order to uniquely identify individuals. This capability was present at least 4 years ago. The analytics data included, among many others, Google's Admob, which remains unencrypted by default, states the article.

The slides show the same light-hearted treatment of people's privacy as in previous disclosures. Perhaps this could be explained by the agencies believing themselves to be 'good guys' targeting 'bad guys', but IMO it just reveals their naivety and/or culture of arrogance.</comment>


Chris Lattner out at Tesla - <AUTHOR> https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/06/20/lattner-tesla <comment><USER2> Go back to Apple and help champion swift from within Apple. I'm sure Apple is smart enough to just hire you to be at Apple be not elsewhere and give you the freedom to do as you please.</comment>


The Crisis of Retail - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/willbe-group/the-crisis-of-retail-ee8c9906c860 <comment><USER2> In the 60's and 70's I lived in a town which didn't have any department stores except "5 and dime" stores. To get really good stuff you could go into the city or you could go to the Sears catalog store. You could literally walk into a store and browse their catalog, order stuff from a clerk behind a counter, and wait for it to come in. There were some small items like mixers on display, but not necessarily in stock. During the holiday rush, this store would be _hopping_.

The Sears catalog store in my town was in the same small mall (think "bigger than a strip mall") as a "5 and dime" store and a supermarket. It was not the anchor store, the supermarket was.

I almost relived that last week when I bought a router from Best Buy's web site and picked it up from the nearest store. Best Buy is not the only B&M chain that has this. I could imagine that to the extent retailers survive it is in this fashion or something like it. Either about the same size as now for browsing, or smaller pick-up points.

And then of course we have drones and so on.

Keep in mind though, Amazon is showing us how to annihilate such a model by bringing up trust problems (see "commingling").

</comment><comment><USER3> Some other factors:

\- Many malls chased out the teenagers, sometimes indirectly by forcing out arcades and such that might be hangouts, and sometimes directly with bans. When they grew up, "going to the mall" was no longer even on their radar.

\- Some malls went crazy with outbuildings, to the point you'd hardly realize there was a mall amid the clutter.

\- Along that same line, a lot of people want to just dash into one store, get what they're looking for, and get out. Smaller stores in malls are generally not visible from the street.

</comment><comment><USER4> Overlooks the more basic problem that it's simply overbuilt. There are quite a few articles where CEOs point at the over-abundance of retail in general: [http://www.cbsnews.com/news/u-s-retailers-have-a- ridiculous-...](http://www.cbsnews.com/news/u-s-retailers-have-a-ridiculous- problem/)

Even as stores die, they seem to get replaced by even more stores elsewhere.

<comment><USER5> Loans are so cheap it's not surprising, what happens when interest rates stay low for too long.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What will happen to these malls that close? Will they be modified and turned into multi office buildings? Would/could enough workers support the food courts? I suppose they wouldn't need quite as much parking so more satellite office buildings? More co-working spaces? What does the future hold in your opinion?

<comment><USER7> Some get turned into massive offices like that. (Example: Rackspace)

Some will sit empty for decades and decay. (Example: the mall outside Chicago where they filmed Blues Brothers)

I think most will simply be bulldozed and rezoned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> the idea that makerspaces will replace retail seems bizarre. People go to these places to experiment, build and have fun - not to produce day-to-day objects for use. 3D printing is still far too expensive to be used for generating commodities too.

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't buy that the middle class don't have as much money anymore: while that would impact large purchases (house, car) most stuff you can buy today is pretty cheap - you can get a six plate dinner set for under 20 on Amazon and a couch for 100. A 40 inch HD tv will set you back less than 200 - when I was growing up such a tv would have cost you more like 200.

<comment><USER10> I agree about TVs and flatware, although I feel like furniture is one of those things where the reduced price has a lot of reduced quality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> [http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/retail- sales](http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/retail-sales) I'm not seeing any crisis as of yet (there's a small dip, but looking at the 10 year historical data it looks like it well within normal ranges)</comment>


Wikipedia in 2001 - <AUTHOR> http://web.archive.org/web/20010517002121/www.wikipedia.com/

<comment><USER2> I remember before February 2002 there wasn't even really a history feature, so you had to save all your edits to a text file in case someone vandalized it. The site has sure come a long way since then.

<comment><USER3> I can see a "View other revisions" link at the bottom of the page.

[http://web.archive.org/web/20010517002121/http://www.wikiped...](http://web.archive.org/web/20010517002121/http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?action=history&id=HomePage)</comment></comment>


Software Shows What Children Will Look Like In 70 Years With Accuracy - <AUTHOR> http://www.popsci.com/article/science/software-shows-what-children-will-look-70-years-unprecedented-accuracy?dom=PSC&loc=recent&lnk=4&con=software-shows-what-children-will-look-like-in-70-years-with-unprecedented-accuracy

<comment><USER2> How do they know?</comment>


Germany for First Time Sells 30-Year Bonds Offering Negative Yields - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/germany-for-first-time-sells-30-year-bonds-offering-negative-yields-11566385847?mod=rsswn <comment><USER2> For those wondering why anyone would buy such a thing, consider:

\- Many financial institutions are required to hold a certain percent of portfolio in safe assets. German bunds are among the safest in the world.

\- A holder of a bond earns a capital gain (bond goes up in price) when interest rates fall. In that sense, zero is no limit at all because there can always be a buyer willing to accept an even lower (more negative) yield.

\- Bond investors are well-aware of the two points above. When they sense that interest rates and/or inflation are headed lower, they know they can profit by buying, regardless of yield.

\- Anticipated rate of inflation matters a lot because investors seeking return through yield focus on real interest rates (nominal rate - inflation). Inflation can be negative as well (deflation). If inflation is lower (more negative) than the bond's nominal return, that's a real _positive yield_. And that positive yield is locked in for the term of the bond, which in the case of the story is 30 years.

\- The European Central Bank has repeatedly signaled its belief that zero is no barrier and that negative yields will be tolerated indefinitely. The ECB stands ready for quantitative easing (QE), in which the central bank buys bonds with money it creates from thin air. Investors know this and this compounds the incentive to pile on and buy bonds to enjoy the capital gains (and real returns if the investor believes that deflation is inevitable).

It's likely that all these factors combine to create the current environment. How long all of this can continue is anybody's guess because the situation is without precedent.

It's as if the financial crisis of 2008 was never resolved - just papered over through massive central bank purchases of treasuries and stocks (Japan's central bank owns a major fraction of the value of the Japanese stock market at this point).

<comment><USER3> >\- Many financial institutions are required to hold a certain percent of portfolio in safe assets. German bunds are among the safest in the world.

Can you explain how this can possibly beat cash? If I say to you "I'll let you pay me ten cents to hold onto your $100 bill for a while, and give you a paper showing the obligation to repay your $100" (the meaning of a negative yield bond), how can the offer to let you pay ten cents to let me hold your $100 possibly be less risky than just holding the $100?

Why would a bond with a negative yield ever be a safer asset than just holding the cash?

<comment><USER4> A lot of commentators are discussing the drawdowns of storing cash bills. However, who buys bonds by paying with physical cash bills? Most of us have a number in our bank account that reflects some sort of wealth? (Ownership of a security elsewhere or an I Owe You?) People with a salary directly deposited and big companies do not need a bank to store their physical cash bills.

I'm still trying to understand how this all happened.

<comment><USER5> The ECB charges banks -0.40% to deposit money with them. These bonds are currently yielding -0.14%. Rates are not low enough to the point where physical cash is a thought. Rough estimates are a deposit rate of -0.75% where you would make more by holding physical cash.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The best explanation I've heard for negative rates is this:

Imagine you have a million dollars worth of cars. If you want to store that in a bank, you'd pay them money to do so. Why? Because the car has no value to the bank. The only thing they can do is store it in the vault, which requires security personnel, space, climate control, etc.

Now instead you have a million dollars in cash. In the current environment, where more people want to put money into the bank than take it out, the cash also has no value to the bank. They can't loan it out again because no one wants to borrow that much. So they charge you for storing your money. This is how they make a profit. By slowly taking your balance, since they can't make money loaning it out.

A negative interest rate basically means more people want to save money than spend money. When the government offers negative rates, it's because they want people to spend money instead of save it. When a bank does it, it's because more people are putting money in than taking it out.

<comment><USER7> "It used to be a respectable thing to save money, now you're just hoarding cash!" \- @Hipster_Trader

<comment><USER8> A fun comment, but it's a really easy paradox to solve.

If you have less than 1 million dollars you should be saving money. If you have more than 10 million dollars you have too much money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I feel like I still don't understand negative yields, despite really trying to.

Negative yields means that I put in $X (or euro/whatever germany is using) and I later am guarenteed no more than $Y out of the exchange, where Y < X. I am literally guaranteed to lose money. I could just hold on to my money, "keep it under my mattress" and still make a better ROI than bonds with negative yields. Why would anybody buy these bonds?

<comment><USER10> There are dozens of answers here that explain why institutions buy sovereign debt, in general.

What those comments don't explain is why anyone would buy _this particular_ sovereign debt.

So: why would anyone buy negative-interest-rate German bonds when U.S. Treasury bonds still have positive interest rates, and are available in much higher volumes?

<comment><USER11> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interest_rate_parity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interest_rate_parity)

<comment><USER12> Yes. The difference in interest rates implies that the EURUSD exchange rate is expected to rise (slowly) in the coming decades.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is the real reason the US yield curve looks the way it does.

All other developed countries are selling negative or near zero government bonds. This has lead to huge international demand for US 30 year treasuries.

[https://tradingeconomics.com/bonds](https://tradingeconomics.com/bonds)

US treasuries are giving a greater yield than _Italy or Spain_ for reference. Of course there will be huge demand.

Central banks are no longer islands. They are part of the global economy and a part of a market just like any other. The US acting alone to raise interest rates won't work like it did in previous cycles.

<comment><USER14> Alternatively investors holding USD may believe that EUR will strengthen against USD over 30 years by more than:

0.5% + US_30year_treasury_bond_rate + risk_adjustment

A negative interest rate is fine for US investors if you think the exchange rate will shift enough in your favour to cover your costs.

<comment><USER14> Happened before: [https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-08-22/swiss-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-08-22/swiss- history-of-negative-interest-rates-is-ugly)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I understand that policy makers think that low interest rates will encourage people to put their money into investments like the equities or a business by forcing people out of saving. But, have they ever considered that they may actually be achieving the opposite? Someone who just turned 65 (like aging Europe), really really needs to save in safe assets. Negative yielding bonds don't change that need! So, instead of investing in risky assets, they may simply take the negative yield and save even harder to make up for the negative yield thus reducing spending even further and hurting the economy.

<comment><USER16> I think that's the point isn't it? To provide extra-safe assets for people who need it.

<comment><USER15> Their objective is that people won't save the money. They want people to spend the money, the sooner the better, but that goal completely contradicts what a retiree (and aging population) needs/wants to do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The most fascinating thing is here is that the German government still refuses to take this basically free money to invest in infrastructure.

<comment><USER18> I'm not saying your point isn't valid, but: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Brandenburg_Airport](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Brandenburg_Airport)

Not all German infrastructure spending turns out well.

<comment><USER17> BER is it's own special case, but the general gist I'm piecing together from media reports is that Germany has a planning problem because there are not enough government workers to plan projects.

For example, there is a budget reserved for infrastructure. The poor regions often fail to produce good enough project plans in time. The richer regions have more planners and present additional projects at the end of the year to get the left over money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm starting to entertain the idea of a massive bubble in bonds. Is inflation really never going to show again? I can't understand why anyone would want to hold a fiat currency for 30 years for no return.

Is it due to portfolio theory where the assumption is stocks and bonds yields have inverse correlation and the way to manage risk is to have a correct ratio? Due to global QE there is too much money floating without enough to invest.

What's the alternative to equities and/or bonds

<comment><USER20> > Is inflation really never going to show again?

In developed economies money is being removed nearly as fast as it's being added, in the form of going into the blackhole of low to negative yielding paper. It's removing a present ~$17 trillion of capital that could otherwise be sloshing around pressing inflation higher. That's an extraordinary amount of money that has largely been rendered non-impacting. There are only a few areas where you see any inflationary pressure in the US, such as in assets like equities and real-estate, due to the Fed rates. In that case you've got people with immense collective free capital pressing aggressively upward on prices (willing to pay a high premium to try to get a return beyond what eg treasuries are offering).

It's why Japan can never spark traditional inflation (nor achieve any growth). Their epic pile of low yield debt has sucked a lot of the loose capital out of their economy. It's a giant pile of non-productive, non-active, ineffectual capital. Instead of going toward wage pressure / competition, growth, business formation & loans, VC, productivity investments, R&D, et al.

If you could unleash $20-$30 trillion of increasingly low yielding debt back into the US economy, inflation would skyrocket and it would demand far higher rates to control inflationary pressure.

It takes several things working in tandem to result in this unusual outcome. Countries outside of the developed world - the first tier, affluent economies - have a near impossible time achieving such low or negative yields, and lack of inflationary pressure.

<comment><USER21> I still don't understand this at all. Is all this money that's being parked in almost no-yielding bonds just going to stay there forever, never to be used?

What does this say about the state of the economy or the expectations/psychology of whomever buys them?

There's either something very hard to understand that's happening to the world economy, or it's just a strange phenomenon that people pretend to understand but don't.

<comment><USER22> >Is all this money that's being parked in almost no-yielding bonds just going to stay there forever, never to be used?

The money can come back out, however it seems very difficult to see when that'll happen. That being said, if it does happen, I think we'll see a lot of inflation due to the sheer amount of money that would be pouring into the system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Where can I put my money to take advantage of this? Gold? or just US treasuries?

<comment><USER24> Gold miners. With physical gold you have to worry about storage, but gold miners solve this problem. The gold miners have run pretty hard already, but the developers (those building a new gold mine) have not yet moved that much.

<comment><USER25> Both having gold stored somewhere and gold mines assume in the event of the collapse of civilization they'd leave the assets as is.

<comment><USER24> If there is a collapse of civillzation the last thing anyone is going to be worried about is their investment returns.

Gold as an asset class does well in periods of low real interest rates. All signs suggest we are going to be in a low real interest rate environment for sometime.

One of the nice things about investing in gold miners over just gold is in trying to find the best ones. There is real alpha in this as not all gold mines and gold miners are equal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> So it is a zero coupon bond sold above par, but this doesn't mean the bank isn't making money off of it. There are a lot of technical reasons that these can be purchased (such as a tax advantaged stutus or a requirement to hold certain duration on a portfolio). I'm an expert on German bond market, but I expect the actual yield to be positive after taking into account other factors (or there being some regulatory reason). Last time I saw an article on a negative yield mortgage, there were tax resons it was actually coming out positive.

<comment><USER5> I'm looking at the bond on Bloomberg right now and it's showing a yield of -0.14% with a price of EUR104.54. All things equal, if you buy this bond right now and hold it to maturity, that will be your yield. This is an after-tax yield.

I'm not sure what bank you are referring to in the first sentence. These are bonds issued by the country.

<comment><USER26> Any after tax yield is going to be an estimate. i no longer have access to a bloomberg login, but does it give its methodology? @ 104.54, YTM would be -0.44 not taking other factors into account. There could also be technical reasons such as collateral requirements or other banking/trading requirements.

> I'm not sure what bank you are referring to in the first sentence. These are > bonds issued by the country.

The purchasing institutions, not the issuing. These mostly banks aren't just giving money away, and they don't really have costs associated with carrying base money since they can just ship cash back to the central bank for reserve credit, i assume under most conditions.

And the can always go elsewhere in the eurozone for yield, but they seem to need bunds for particular reason. not sure, i just pretty sure they aren't giving money away for no reason. they could even lay off currency risk and go for US Tsy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Do you think it's a good idea to put some savings in gold?

<comment><USER28> The stereotypical HN reader (age 20-40 tech professional) should have three to six months of salary in cash (interest-bearing savings/checking/money market account), rest in low-cost equity index funds (I use 60% VTI / 40% VXUS).

Gold is, IMO, a disaster preparedness thing you buy after purchasing a shotgun, ammunition, and a month's worth of canned food. The main use case for gold is as highly portable physical wealth - in highly messed-up situations, you retain at lease some ability to engage in limited amounts of commerce to get yourself to a more stable situation.

<comment><USER29> That's an interesting implied point. Does it make sense to hold gold on paper, if it's mostly useful in highly messed up situations where paper gold would become worthless?

<comment><USER28> Yeah, I wouldn't do that. Security costs for physical gold are already low if you have a way to securely store a shotgun, most of what you're dealing with is a wider buy/sell spread, which is pretty small overall.

The problem with "paper gold" of various sorts is that it usually winds up being a promise to give you a certain number of dollars based on the spot price of gold. This is a problem if dollars stop being of practical use.

There's still a hell of a lot of things that are better to do before buying physical gold here, of course. Bigger risk-mitigation moves are like, minor emergency preparedness, own-occupation disability insurance, term life insurance, and dumping a ton of money into the stock market for getting enough long-term price appreciation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Slightly OT but I've been trying to google this for a while and there are people reading this who will know where I can look:

If a government (pretend US if it helps) stopped collecting taxes, and instead funded the budget by printing money every year, who would be the winners and losers compared to the current system? Where can I go to learn more?

<comment><USER31> I suppose it would lead to inflation and as long as the inflation is controlled, that's doable.

Effectively, the government is being funded by all dollar holders at that point. It's a wealth tax of sorts imposed on those who hold their wealth in dollars.

The idea would be that the government is being funded by the fact that $100 today, is worth only about $90 last year, and that loss in value is what's funding the government.

<comment><USER32> This might explain why the idea is more popular on one side of the political spectrum. What's interesting though is that thus far it doesn't seem like the expected inflation has been happening in the US, despite significant deficit spending. Any idea why that might be? What I've heard is a lot of, "Current levels of deficit spending are sustainable because we're not yet seeing a resulting increase in inflation." Which makes sense. But.. what's the mechanism for that? Like, taken to an extreme, if a government did indeed stop taxing and pay for everything with deficit spending, but there _wasn 't_ inflation as a result, how would that be?

The only explanations I can think of are that 1) many other countries are also doing significant deficit spending, so all major currencies are being devalued together, and so they're not actually being devalued at all, and 2) in as much as (ie) the US currency is being devalued faster than others, there are other, strengthening factors that are counteracting this. (Such as higher interest rates.)

<comment><USER33> I'm not an expert and expect this to have flaws but here goes:

Fiat currency is backed by value (not gold, but also not nothing like some people say). It's worth what we all collectively think it's worth and that's going to depend on the underlying assets of a nation.

Lets say there are $1T dollars floating around the economy and this year the Fed wants to print another 100bn. That's totally ok (and necessary) so long as there was that much value created this year. New factories have been built, businesses created, etc. This has created more underlying value in America and so it's ok that we print some more money. Your $1 bill still holds the same amount.

That's how I look at it at least.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> If central banks weren't setting the price of credit by fiat, what would a "market" risk free rate be? Have any economists tried to answer this question?

Edit: not sure why I'm being downvoted for this...?

<comment><USER34> A fair question, and there's an argument that's been made (though I'm unable to recall precisely where I ran across it, possibly in a New Books in Economics podcast) that while interest rates might once have been considered exogenous (market-determined) they are now endogenous (central-bank determined).

Which would mean that interest rates are (more or less) what CBs want them to be, at least within the bounds defined by inflation. Which presumably they want to be kept low presently.

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you maybe thinking of what MMTers e.g. Warren Mosler assert? (E.g., Mosler calling for 0% interest rates, always.)

If you can think of source, please let me know. Sounds interesting.

Edit: It also sounds fallacious to me. Interest rates are central-bank determined because the central bank chooses to determine them. In the absence of a central bank controlling rates, there undoubtedly would still be interest rates. There ostensibly also still would be risk free rates. In some hypothetical parallel Earth, the Fed might instead choose to control the price of some other commodity, like oil. That doesn't mean that the price of oil would be "endogenous" and therefore that there's no market price. Just that the Fed had chosen to suppress that market price. Thus, as far as I can tell, it still makes sense to ask the question "what would be the market risk free rate?"

<comment><USER34> It _might_ have been John Quiggan, in this interview:

John Quiggin, "Economics in Two Lessons: Why Markets Work So Well, and Why They Can Fail So Badly" (Princeton UP, 2019).

Media: [https://traffic.megaphone.fm/LIT7223813423.mp3](https://traffic.megaphone.fm/LIT7223813423.mp3)

... and if it's not, it's still a good interview to listen to (I'm giving it a repeat). Long, but informative.

The other likely candidate was a Marketplace Radio segment a few weeks back. I'd have to go hunting for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Another reason, I've not seen mentioned, is that you think bonds will go even more negative, so you buy now, to avoid having to buy a much more negative rate later.

</comment><comment><USER36> Those of you (US) with large stock/cash positions: what are you doing to weather the (inevitable) storm? Feels like we're in the doom and gloom media phase. I suspect lots of people will start forgetting within the next 6 months in which the stock market will go sideways, until the next catalyst which is the US election cycle.

<comment><USER37> > Those of you (US) with large stock/cash positions: what are you doing to > weather the (inevitable) storm

I follow the traditional advice of doing nothing and not trying to time the market.

<comment><USER38> Yeah I get that. What about for people like me who are trying to enter the market? I'm wondering if it's worth it to wait and see, or if I should just not worry too much and invest now anyway.

<comment><USER39> Time in market beats timing the market.

<comment><USER40> True, but time in market with educated and not naive timing beats "time in market". Edit: "naive", and that I simply mean to time ETF payments with awareness and possibly technical indicators.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Like most economic and finance topics on this site, there seems to be a lot of people posting opinions/"facts" without really understanding the subject matter.

The reason why bonds are trading at negative rates in the EU are the following:

* The ECB deposit rate is -0.40%. Everything else is benchmarked against that

* The majority of the EU is either currently in a recession or rapidly heading there

* Inflation expectations are weak</comment>


Kactus: Design version control without changing tools - <AUTHOR> https://kactus.io/ <comment><USER2> "Design Version control without changing tools" ... that is, if you're on Mac OS and your tool is sketch.

<comment><USER3> Yes maybe it's pooly phrased. I was trying to convey that, as opposed to pretty much all the other version control tools for designers, Kactus doesn't force you into a workflow. It's more an additional step that comes after, just like when you code, git is a tool that you use after.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've seen multiple version control apps pass by in recent years. However they seem to focus too heavy on one particular tool. For me as a designer I'm really looking for a version control system / app which handles multiple files from multiple software applications. On a regular day I use, Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign, After Effects, Premiere Pro, and some other smaller tools as a base. If there ever could be a (local— because of the large file sizes in video) versioning system which brings them all together that would mean the world. Preferably in a nice gui application. And I know these apps have failed in the past but I think there might just be a market for it. (Instead of versioning it all in the finder / explorer myself)

<comment><USER5> Zeplin is the current darling. It's real power is in digesting designs into code to make handoff to developers easier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I seem to remember that a reason why Git wasn't popular with game dev (and why it wouldn't be with designers, besides usability) is that it handled binary diffs terribly (ie it would store the whole updated file, even if just a few bits had changed). Am I remembering correctly? If so, is that now addressed?

<comment><USER7> There are things like git lfs, but these feel like hackarounds rather than proper fixes to me. Github's tiny LFS quotas giving me frustration over ~100MB of lfs data don't help either, which I can't raise because I'm a random dude who lacks billing/admin permissions for PistonDevelopers: [https://github.com/PistonDevelopers/VisualRust/issues/302](https://github.com/PistonDevelopers/VisualRust/issues/302)

<comment><USER8> If git supported large files well you'd still have that problem; Github is just not interested in becoming an hosting provider for such files.

And while LFS is certainly a hack, being separate is actually an advantage here; PistonDevelopers could host their own LFS server while continuing to use Github for their development, whereas if it was integrated they would be forced to pay GH or move out.

That said, I prefer git-annex to LFS, since it doesn't need a custom server; you can just use a "dumb" file server (rsync, webdav, S3, etc), with all the metadata being synced over the git repo.

<comment><USER7> > Github is just not interested in becoming an hosting provider for such > files.

That's a strange claim given that they authored git lfs in the first place and run servers for it.

> That said, I prefer git-annex to LFS, since it doesn't need a custom server; > you can just use a "dumb" file server (rsync, webdav, S3, etc), with all the > metadata being synced over the git repo.

Significantly better multi-remote support as well from what I can tell, which would make transitioning or partially transitioning significantly easier. OTOH, no filters so you'll be manually spamming `git annex get` as I understand it: [http://git-annex.branchable.com/todo/smudge/](http://git- annex.branchable.com/todo/smudge/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The website looks exactly the same as that from GitHub Desktop: [https://desktop.github.com/](https://desktop.github.com/)

<comment><USER10> Saw this earlier today and the screenshots matched. Probably because they are using GitHub Desktop as a base?

github/desktop is MIT, so I'd say good idea: [https://github.com/desktop/desktop](https://github.com/desktop/desktop)

<comment><USER11> Looks like the code is at [https://github.com/kactus- io/kactus](https://github.com/kactus-io/kactus) and GitHub Desktop is their upstream.

<comment><USER10> The LICENSE file makes it explicit: [https://github.com/kactus- io/kactus/pull/24/commits/0205dc6f...](https://github.com/kactus- io/kactus/pull/24/commits/0205dc6f3144656fb225d5a45a19c1b84ed3c9ad)

<comment><USER11> The LICENSE file makes it explicit that Kactus is MIT licensed and copyright holders to at least some of the covered code include those listed. Good, that's what the license file is for when the license is MIT. It doesn't make the upstream relationship explicit though. I imagine explicit would be documenting in README or CONTRIBUTING or something like that (not at all required by the license, just informative for users and contributors).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Far ago in a space far removed from today in space and time i used svn for versioning everything. Yes it meant storing whole blobs in the folder but it worked for everything - source, documents, pictures. If one doesnt need to have versions of internals of the non-textual items then it is usually good enough. For office docs most of them support edit tracking. The only thing that was an issue was database contents but for those one can store differential logs (most mainline db supported them).

Yes its not beautiful but it is useful and it did work reliably. And best of all because of using svn and integrating TortoiseSVN into explorer (was using windows) it meant basically no new tools to learn.</comment>


A first look at records and tuples in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://2ality.com/2020/05/records-tuples-first-look.html <comment><USER2> Is the hash symbol the best? It already is used within classes to mean _private_. Syntactically for the machine parser, I assume it will work just fine for these other things. But semantically for my human brain, it is mildly incongruous. If for no reason but elegance and developer delight, I ask for a reconsideration of other punctuation.

<comment><USER3> Seems like a lot of options were/are debated: [https://github.com/tc39/proposal-record- tuple/issues/10](https://github.com/tc39/proposal-record-tuple/issues/10)

The benefit to #{}/#[] is that # is not an existing identifier character (other than private fields) in JS, and _also_ isn't an existing binary operator. Proposals to TC39 are constrained that they must as much as possible not "break" existing JS parsing of existing code. That removes a lot of possible characters because they already have valid parses. It also makes it tough to introduce new keywords beyond those ES3/ES5 set in stone as reserved, because they might be identifier names in user applications.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've always thought it was interesting to see the parallels of PHPs growth and JSs. Both seem to add a lot of popular (at the time) features. Neither can purge old APIs or "break the web".

<comment><USER5> php purges shitty ideas quite frequently. for instance, i just upgraded some

        class Foo extends Bar {
          public Foo() {
            this->Bar();
          }
        }

business since it's going away soon.

likewise, magic quotes.

</comment></comment><comment> amw-zero This is the number one feature I look for in a language now. It's hard to describe why value semantics are useful when thinking about a language as it exists today, since the language influences what we think is possible. But having records and tuples like this changes the way you write code.

The biggest example is, you don't have to think in terms of references anymore. Again it's hard to explain how much were forced to think about references and specific locations that data happens to live at, but that thinking is pervasive in how we write code (if you're using a language like JS, which most popular languages are like).

Value semantics means you can stop thinking about data-as-a-location or data- as-a-reference and finally start thinking about data-as-data. If two records have the same values, they are the same. This means you don't need to know anything about where data came from, you can construct matching data and say "are these things equal?" And they will be. This inherently reduces coupling and complexity.

</comment><comment><USER6> So from reading this it sounds like what's being asked for essentially syntactic sugar for Object.freeze(), and the function Record(obj) would be doing something along the lines of

      function Record(obj)
        let result = {};
        for (let [key, value] of obj) {
          switch (typeof value) { case "function": case "object": throw ...; }
          result[key] = obj;
        }
        Object.freeze(result);
        return result;
      }

Or similar.

Now obviously have typeof return a new type is exciting, and of questionable value, but having a "only immutable values can be in fields" guarantee could be useful.

That said, overloading # is not something I think is great, and the semantics need to be tightened up (fields in prototype chain, etc, what is the prototype of the resulting record/tuple object).

<comment> amw-zero You only looked at the conversion of an Object to a Record. That's really not the point of this. The point of introducing true records and tuples is to bring value semantics to JS for compound data types.

It seems like if you create two records with the same nested data, they will be equal when compared. This may sound small, but if you try out a language with real value semantics it changes the way you code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The Value of Values with Rich Hickey

[https://youtu.be/-6BsiVyC1kM](https://youtu.be/-6BsiVyC1kM)

</comment><comment><USER8> Why do records, tuples need new syntax?

<comment><USER9> Because if they went and made immutability the default, they'd break a lot of existing code that depends on it behaving in a mutable manner.

<comment><USER8> Duh. Thanks. Being tainted by tuples and records from other languages, the immutable bits didn't register. Sorry.

Reading the proposal (TC39) explains all. [https://github.com/tc39/proposal- record-tuple](https://github.com/tc39/proposal-record-tuple)

Paraphrasing, if I understand TC39 correctly, an immutable map is a record and an immutable array is a tuple.

Has a certain elegance. Nicely done. While I'm inclined to like TC39, I'll chew on it to be sure.

<comment><USER9> Yeah seems so. It's a shame that they can only be shallowly cast from mutable to immutable (and will even throw errors if non-primitive values are present). Seems like quite the limitation.

And yeah, I'm all for immutability as a default, but breaking so pervasive an existing API is a lot of damage.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Homework is useless and video games are good for you - <AUTHOR> http://www.gladwell.com/2005/2005_05_16_a_brain.html

<comment><USER2> What about video game-based homework?</comment>


Meet OTTO – The Hackable GIF Camera - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1598272670/meet-otto-the-hackable-gif-camera

<comment><USER2> Creator here. We've been working on this for the last 6 months. Happy to answer any questions HN has.</comment>


PHP solves problems. Oh, and you can program with it too - <AUTHOR> https://nikic.github.io/2012/06/29/PHP-solves-problems-Oh-and-you-can-program-with-it-too.html <comment><USER2> >Those people do not want to learn to program, they want to solve problem

I've come to learn that this is why some (many?) established programmers have such a visceral reaction to people using PHP, because at the root it's actually a threat to their job. If someone with little experience can quickly solve a problem with a substandard tool, what need will they have for them?

For those who are skilled though, this should not raise mental objections, for there is a nearly endless supply of problems to solve and the more easy problems solved by people on their own, the more that skilled programmers can spend their time solving more difficult ones.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> When I read "You could say that PHP is a programmer-producing language, whereas most other languages are programmer-consuming." I laughed out, it's interesting.</comment>


Ask HN: Good Asciidoc editor for OS X? - <AUTHOR> I'm working on a book, and the publisher suggested formatting it in AsciiDoc.
I'm using Asciidoc-VSCode [0], which has nice live preview but some features don't have correct previews, and I'm missing an outline view, spellcheck, etc.
What Asciidoc editor does HN recommend?
[0] https://github.com/joaompinto/asciidoctor-vscode <comment><USER2> perhaps atom + asciidoc preview plugin</comment>


How I defeated an anti-tamper APK with some Python and a homemade Smali emulator - <AUTHOR> http://www.evilsocket.net/2016/04/18/how-i-defeated-an-obfuscated-and-anti-tamper-apk-with-some-python-and-a-home-made-smali-emulator/#.VxRu3snMomQ.hackernews <comment><USER3> My highlights after reading this: 0\. Really impressive work.

1\. Great link with the Dalvik opcodes manual [http://pallergabor.uw.hu/androidblog/dalvik_opcodes.html](http://pallergabor.uw.hu/androidblog/dalvik_opcodes.html)

This came up with a google search: [https://source.android.com/devices/tech/dalvik/dalvik- byteco...](https://source.android.com/devices/tech/dalvik/dalvik- bytecode.html)

2\. If you run in to obfuscated smali filenames in the APK, a simple search replace will help you rename the files.

3\. Instead of trying to understand the proprietary encryption/decryption, just run the decryption code without understanding it.

4\. OP Created a smali emulator for this task (#3). Only supporting a small subset of dalvik instructions. Which means than for now, the emulator can be defeated using as many dalvik opcodes as possible in your encryption/decryption code. A simple check-cast for example (Throw a ClassCastException if the reference in the given register cannot be cast to the indicated type.) can break the emulator.

5\. Being written in python, relying heavily on regular expressions and without much algorithmic improvements (the opcode lookup for example is a for loop instead of a lookup table) - there's a lot to improve the emulator performance, but this is an incredible first step.

<comment><USER4> > Instead of trying to understand the proprietary encryption/decryption, just > run the decryption code without understanding it.

When I have encountered this sort of problem in the past, I would drop the encryption module into another Android app and directly call the functions. I would then run the other Android app on a phone or Android emulator. Custom emulation seems unnecessary for most cases.

<comment><USER5> shameless plug: this is basically what dex-oracle does [https://github.com/CalebFenton/dex- oracle](https://github.com/CalebFenton/dex-oracle)

It has modules which look for patterns in code. Then you can tell it to run some method from the original app to understand what the code should be. Then, you can replace the obfuscated code with whatever you computed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Seriously, it's 2016, stop it with the memes.

<comment><USER5> maybe you could make a chrome extension which blocks all forms of fun and frivolity. you could just hide images from various meme sites, maybe do some checksum comparisons?

<comment><USER6> I don't have anything against fun things, but seeing the same memes we have all seen every day for years now is not really funny.

<comment><USER5> on one hand, I completely agree with you. on the other hand, i've had to make presentations and talks and the stuff just looks so dry and boring and people respond surprisingly well to old jokes. if you don't include any sort of lulz they just sit there thinking they're learning, but if you mix in a few memes, it helps wake them up and they start to pay attention.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Reminds me of the reverse engineering of the dropbox client: [https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/woot13/woot13...](https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/woot13/woot13-kholia.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER8> It's always funny how large developers – say, Google – still try to obfuscate their code when it's so easy to reverse.

Even better, as in many legislations a derivate of manually deobfuscated code does not count as derivate of the original source, they even give up their copyright on their code, practically.

I'm surprised that this still happens. By now anyone should know that if you can run a piece of code, you can decompile, deobfuscate, and understand it. DRM and obfuscation only work to waste a week or two of the time of the person taking it apart.

<comment><USER9> > DRM and obfuscation only work to waste a week or two of the time of the > person taking it apart.

I remember reading an article featured here that the latest PC video game needed something like 6 months to be cracked and the crackers (Chinese I think) almost abandoned.

Will try to find the link.

<comment><USER10> This is true, but it's primarily due to the fact that highly skilled reversers aren't really producing cracks anymore.

<comment><USER11> If the skilled reversers stopped producing cracks, isn't that the same thing? :P

<comment><USER10> Sure, but it's still noteworthy that this isn't due to DRM suddenly becoming better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Guessing this is most likely just some commercial obfuscator - Are there not generic deobfuscators in Java or Android land?

I know several for .NET including SimpleAssemblyExplorer and De4Dot (though de4dot also includes several specific deobs).

EDIT: Looking around you might try something like [https://github.com/CalebFenton/simplify](https://github.com/CalebFenton/simplify) or [https://github.com/contra/JMD](https://github.com/contra/JMD) after converting with dex2jar or similar.

</comment><comment><USER13> They should have used JEB and save some time.

[https://www.pnfsoftware.com/](https://www.pnfsoftware.com/)

(not my product)

<comment><AUTHOR> maybe I tried and it didn't work?

<comment><USER14> Did you? :P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This stomps on motivation to develop any novell code, because for all the years of hard work you put into r&d, there will alway be a lot of people who are just waiting for something to slip through your fingers, so they can steal it and call it theirs.

<comment><USER16> Just like continuously breaking all the DRMs stopped any new movies from being produced, right?

<comment><USER17> Not blockbuster movies, no. But all the small indie games (not indie superhits your hear about!) both for iOS, Android and PC are typically have 10x, 100x more downloads on Torrents than purchases. Same goes for small label releases on Beatport, Bandcamp and Juno: they get hundreds of individual sales on those sites after the tracks are out on trackers. Don't know about movies though; but in the industries I'm familiar with, it's the little guys who get screwed mostly, not the big ones.

<comment><USER16> You just agreed with the fact that the motivation to produce new code didn't die - indie games have to be written in the first place to end up on torrent sites. Breaking the DRM and torrenting does not stop people from writing new ones.

Regarding the ratio of purchases/downloads, the argument goes back to the usual questions: 1) if the torrents didn't exist, how would the number of purchases change (i.e. are those lost sales, or were they never potential sales to begin with); and 2) what's the promotion channel for indie bands? I purchased a lot of music because I heard about it from someone who had a pirated copy. Now at least we've got Spotify discovery, Google music tailored radios, etc. working for us, but it's still not a lot.

<comment><USER17> 1) Judging by experience of many friends in game industry, the moment a non- free game appears on torrents, sales go down.

2) For the mass audience, streaming solutions (99% of that being youtube), have completely replaced piracy. However, if you noticed, I'm not talking about mass audience, it stopped buying music anyway. I'm talking about Beatport, Juno — shops especially targeted at DJs, who have very different purchasing patterns, and usually different ways of learning about music as well. A significant part of modern electronic music labels have stopped doing digital releases altogether, going vinyl-only, and piracy is one of the main reasons.

<comment><USER18> >1) Judging by experience of many friends in game industry, the moment a non- free game appears on torrents, sales go down

In the case of most games, sales are steadily decreasing over time anyway - <USER2> it'd need to be a pretty marked step down to remove the possibility that they're simply following trend. It'd be interesting trying to account for that in an analysis.

Anecdotally, I have several friends who torrent games by default - but they legitimately wouldn't buy anyway (to quote "lol at buying videogames in the year of our lord 2016").</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ignite Seattle 4: Startup Talks - <AUTHOR> http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/09/ignite_seattle_5.html At Ignite Seattle 4 we had fifteen great talks (all available on YouTube). As usual the talks were on topics that we felt geeks would appreciate. Two in particular contain sage advice for an entrepreneur. The first video is Leo Dirac's explanation of Venture Capital Term Sheets. The second is Dave McClure's talk on Startup Metrics (after the jump). Both five-minute talks were selected to do a reprise at Gnomedex. <comment><USER2> For the first video, Leo Parker Dirac's slides can be found here: <http://www.embracingchaos.com/2007/08/5-minute-primer.html></comment>