Foxconn Weighs $7B U.S. Display Plant - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-22/foxconn-weighs-7-billion-u-s-factory-with-apple-nikkei-says <comment><USER2> Link to orginal, more complete article: [http://asia.nikkei.com/Business/AC/Foxconn-considers-7bn- US-...](http://asia.nikkei.com/Business/AC/Foxconn-considers-7bn-US-display- facility-with-Apple?page=2)

>"In the future they may be paying some $500 more for [U.S.] products, but those do not necessarily work better than a $300 phone," he said, after urging U.S. authorities to provide concessions on land and electricity to facilitate Foxconn's manufacturing operations.

>Despite such U.S. investment, China remains a key market and the primary manufacturing base for Apple and Foxconn, and neither company is leaving anytime soon.

>"Yes, we will continue to add to our investments in China," Gou told reporters. "China is the world's biggest market, and why should we turn down the biggest market?"

>Meanwhile, although Apple's sales in the greater China region declined 30% year-on-year through the end of the September quarter, chief executive Tim Cook remained optimistic about the Chinese market.

This is another piece in the puzzle. For Apple, defending North American market is essential. Starting manufacturing in US might be admitting that it has lost Chinese and Asian markets.

Is China the biggest market as Gou told? For many consumer products and electronics China is the biggest or becoming the biggest market. Surprisingly many products are released first China only.

[http://money.cnn.com/2015/10/14/news/economy/china-middle- cl...](http://money.cnn.com/2015/10/14/news/economy/china-middle-class- growing/)

>China's middle class is now the biggest in the world, and growing much faster than America's, according to research by Credit Suisse. There are 109 million Chinese with wealth of between $50,000 and $500,000.

<comment><USER3> Why do you think they would exclusively manufacture components in the US?

<comment><USER2> If they partner in massive $7 billion high volume display factory that mostly produces display's for Apple, it's unlikely that they go trough the effort to replicate all that special tooling and quality management for other markets.

<comment><USER4> It likely won't be for Apple exclusively and it's certainly not the only source of displays for Apple. Several suppliers are investing in OLED production in order to meet Apple's supply requirements.

<comment><USER2> There is trade-off between redundant supply and cutting edge design.

If Apple pushes for all-glass design and fully adopts OLED it it may have to choose between the technological edge and diversified supply-chain.

Sharp (owned by Foxconn) is good candidate and this joint investment speculation supports it. Having joint operation would mean that Apple can be more involved in the process process.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The purchasing power arbitrage is disappearing as Chinese wages increase, the yuan appreciates, and real American wages stagnate or decrease together with the dollar.

I think this, along with augmented production systems requiring fewer workers, is why this factory is being contemplated.

<comment><AUTHOR> Real American wages increase with the dollar, not decrease.

The dollar climb has boosted American purchasing power dramatically. That is especially important for a nation that imports as much as the US does.

Americans can buy more with their wages than they could prior to the dollar climb. That covers nearly every economy the US imports from, as the dollar has gained against essentially every currency on the planet. Simultaneously, real wage growth has been outpacing inflation for years now and is set to continue to climb at an accelerating pace due to a dramatic decrease in labor slack in the last five years.

<comment><USER6>
      Real American wages increase with the dollar

I don't follow. I can see how the wage earners' _buying power_ for _imports_ improves with the dollar's rise against corresponding foreign currencies, but not a generalized wage increase.

<comment><USER7> In general, an increasing dollar does not have effects on the real price of domestic goods, but decreases the real price of imports. Because that is no change and increased purchasing, it results in a real increase in purchasing power which is therefore an increase in real wages. You can buy a larger basket of goods because the imports cost less.

<comment><USER8> A strong dollar also reduces export, so how does this pan out net-net?

<comment><USER7> Just saw this, but American consumers are more sensitive to import prices than export, because consumers generally do not directly receive the proceeds of exports.

Net-net, it'd be hard to say what happens long term in the economy because that has a lot to do with long-term changes in the macro environment, if economic growth remains strong consumers will continue to make out better, if the strong dollar ultimate hurts the economy (and that isn't impossible), a weakening economy hurts consumers more than the stronger dollar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This might be a good prize to offer Trump in exchange for allowing Apple's untaxed offshore profits to be repatriated at a discount rate.

<comment><USER10> Foxconn is building it, not Apple. If Trump wants to encourage it, he's going to have to back all his anti-trade policy with China.

<comment><USER9> The first words of the article are

> Foxconn Technology Group Chairman Terry Gou told reporters in Taipei the > company is considering a joint investment with Apple Inc. for a display > manufacturing facility in the U.S.

I think that provides enough of a kernel of truthiness for Trump to declare "Apple is building a $7b factory, it's going to be yuge!".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > questioning whether U.S. consumers will be willing to pay much higher prices > for equipment of equal quality

There's also the threat of substantially increased tariffs that could make a panel manufactured by a <$3/hour worker cost as much or more than a panel manufactured by a >$10/hour American worker.

<comment><USER12> Just keep in mind that you will not find $10 workers in a mass factory setting. After you bring in labor unions + healthcare + workers comp + misc. addionals, it easily brings u.s based factory workers to $18+. This does not include the fact that you have to train people and have a plethora of workers to support this (hr, trainers, etc.)

While everyone in the U.S. I think would agree that securing jobs for Americans would be great, you just can't bend the math enough to make it economical.

<comment><USER13> > While everyone in the U.S. I think would agree that securing jobs for > Americans would be great, you just can't bend the math enough to make it > economical.

I'm not so sure in this particular case.

People who buy Apple products are (usually) already choosing a more expensive product based on fashion and image. I can see Apple increasing the price a bit and having a big marketing campaign about being "Made in the USA."

In general though, I don't know how it's expected to work. Ironically, I think a lot of the people making the biggest fuss about bringing back manufacturing jobs will be the ones least able to buy the products once the prices skyrocket.

<comment><USER14> No. People like my parents buy iPhone because it works and because it's a serious phone. Nobody associates iPhone with status. It's a ubiquitous commodity device.

<comment><USER13> Are you seriously claiming Apple products aren't significantly higher priced than similar alternatives?

I don't even know why I'm replying here if you really don't know your parents could have bought an Android device that also works and is also a "serious phone" for half the price.

<comment><USER14> Nope. Don't think I made that claim anywhere. What Android device could they have bought for half the price?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The original article is much more informative. Note is has multiple pages.

[http://asia.nikkei.com/Business/AC/Foxconn-considers-7bn- US-...](http://asia.nikkei.com/Business/AC/Foxconn-considers-7bn-US-display- facility-with-Apple)

</comment><comment><USER16> I wonder what Trump's concessions would be for this plant. He criticized apple directly in his campaign, and this plant would be a big win for him.

<comment><USER15> That's a good question but it's not necessarily something Trump controls directly (nor should he), it is more likely up to the local government/state where the plant is located who could work on incentivizes. That's what happened with the Carrier deal in Indiana largely because that was Pence's state and he could help directly.

This is how it happens in China too. The article mentions that a Chinese city would help invest $8.7 billion, rather than the central state.

> On Dec. 30, Gou announced that Osaka-based subsidiary Sakai Display Products > and the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou would jointly invest 61 billion > yuan ($8.77 billion) in an advanced panel facility.

And Pennsylvania trade office is working with Foxconn on another plant.

> In addition to the proposed display facility, Gou said Foxconn plans a new > molding facility in the U.S., with the state of Pennsylvania a possible site > following investment discussions with local officials. A representative from > the Pennsylvania trade office attended Foxconn's party Sunday.

It's typically not the exec branches job to set up those deals. But it is great that Trump is willing to get on the phone to help get the deals done, that's seems unprecedented in recent years.

Most likely Trump would be focusing on the trade policy more generally or working with congress to reduce federal regulations. The Dept of Commerce could help promote the idea of operating in America. As well as via the Treasury Dept to simplify the tax code. And Congress to reduce taxation. Again this would apply to all companies, or whole industries, and (most likely) not give any individual companies special benefits in return for opening up shop.

<comment><USER17> I think we need "free trade zones" like they have in some asian countries. If you have a mfg business in the zone, you pay zero or reduced taxes on your produced goods and inventory. Maybe throw in some subsides to help comply with regulations as well. These zones can be spread all throughout the country in economically depressed regions.

These programs should be open to all companies, not just the Teslas and tbe Apples of the world. Governors and Presidents should not intervene on behalf of a single company. That isn't capitalism.

<comment><USER15> I'm more in favor of a federalist approach instead of specialized city states. Basically less federal oversight and more state oversight (besides maybe environmental stuff which crosses state lines, or give money to other states based on your carbon output). That way if you want to live in a euro-style social services high tax area you can move to Washington. Or if you want mixed go to New York. Market oriented people can go to Texas - for example. States can set up voluntary cross border zones so the regulations and taxation is more consistent for industries that are more disparate. Cross state trade wouldn't be regulated and federal law can focused on national security, foreign trade, currency, and tax collection.

That way if something does work better (like ending the drug war) in one state, there will be a ton of data to reference and eventually good ideas will be adopted by other states.

States like California are big enough to be their own small countries anyway.

This was basically the idea when the US was founded but the federal government has only grown and every 4yrs the presidency becomes more important and given responsibility for everything. So no wonder the exec branch is growing in power - the citizens keep expecting them to be responsible for everything. It'd also protect against Donald Trump's from happening, the whims of one man should never be so influential.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> How long before those jobs are done by robots?

[https://www.engadget.com/2016/05/25/foxconn- replaces-60000-h...](https://www.engadget.com/2016/05/25/foxconn- replaces-60000-humans-workers-with-robots/)

</comment><comment> norea-armozel This part of the article I find amusing: Gou told reporters according to Reuters. "There is such a plan, but it is not a promise. It is a wish."

So much for Trump's claim that the 50 billion investment is a guarantee. This is why I despise anyone who aids him in making up stuff. It gives false hope when we need to buckle down and realign our economy and government.

</comment><comment><USER19> Taiwanese companies such as Foxconn with extensive operations on the mainland may be particularly vulnerable if the Trump government insists on making the one China policy a bargaining chip in trade negotiations. We'll see how it all plays out, but the worst case would obviously impact Apple and a few other US tech companies.

</comment><comment><USER20> According to the article, this plant would employ 30k-50k people. The secondary effects of these jobs would be equally massive. While I would prefer an American company operating the plant, merely employing this many people would be a serious boon.

<comment><USER21> But Foxcon is pushing very hard on replacing most of its workers with robots. The numbers will probably be more like 3k-5K, not 30k-50k. And they will be high-tech jobs that most of those millions of unemployed factory workers in our country couldn't qualify for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I do not understand why such a company would not go for central European company where it would get the price for quality ratio much better than in the US. I know that building a factory by Foxconn is probably a way to pay building tax, but the question is if that outweighs revenue.

<comment><USER23> Central Europe, unlike _central_ America, does not have Trump as its champion.

<comment><USER22> It's sad that YN gets extremely political lately. "Trump" is a bad word here lately...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> But, uh, I thought manufacturing jobs were never coming back stateside. So strange...

<comment><USER25> Maybe most of the jobs in the factory will be performed by robots and not humans.

<comment><USER26> Also, why ship the panels half way around the world for assembly? Part of China's glory is having manufacturing for everything close by.</comment></comment></comment>


Automation Adoption: The Real DevOps Fear, An Annecdote - <AUTHOR> http://www.lyricalsoftware.com/blog/automation-fear-and-the-enteprise-barrier/

<comment><AUTHOR> It's funny, for years I focused purely on the technical, or at the very least the technical reason for something. But the more I do this, the longer I'm in it, the more I realize that very little is technology.

It's really all about the human factors - and mostly the emotional ones.</comment>


Ask HN: How the hell do angel and VC investments work? - <AUTHOR>

I have been trying to understand how investments work for startups. There is a plethora of information explaining it all, but it all assumes I know part of how it works or am familiar with the jargon. After just reading about convertible notes, I still would have no idea what was ripping me off or why.<p>Can anyone give a simple, made-for-developers explanation of how it all works, or give some links to guides that do the same? I assume the investment market changes, so what could I expect to see if I was raising funds for my company right now? <comment><USER2> I went through an angel round and a Series A myself. I will focus on a first time entrepreneur's case and use realistic numbers.

1) You have and idea. You make as much progress as you can before trying to raise.

2) Ideally, you network with some angel investors / micro VC's before you start talking about your round.

3) You incorporate your company. You will issue an arbitrary number of shares for the co-founders (typically 10M+) and you allocate some shares as an option pool (typically 10-20%). Option pool will be used to give shares to employees, advisors, consultants and board members.

4) You decide that you have made enough progress to raise a round (doing this too early will be bad for you)

5) You talk to a lot of angel investors and early stage VC funds. Angel investor is somebody who invests his/her own money, VC is a person who invests other people's money. That's the only real difference.

6) If somebody is interested, you start talking about the terms. Now you really have to learn the jargon.

Let's assume you will do a traditional priced round. You will negotiate a pre- money valuation (typically $2-10M for first time entrepreneurs). Let's say an investor proposes you $1M with a $4M pre money valuation (means your post- money valuation is $5M) and you had initially issued 10M total shares. Each of your shares will be worth $4M/10M = $0.25. Your company will issue $1M/0.24 = 4M new shares for your investors. So you don't actually sell shares, you just issue new shares which will reduce your ownership percentage of the company(by 20% in this case). This deal could be done with a single investor (usually a VC) or a group of investors who are each putting smaller chunks.

There's another format called "Convertible Note/Debt". It has become popular in silicon valley. Instead of negotiating a pre-money valuation, you negotiate for a discount rate (let's say 25%) and an annual interest rate (let's say 8%). In this case you don't immediately issue shares to investors. Instead you promise to give them shares when you do your next priced round (Series A) with the valuation that those investors pay / (1+discount rate) / (1+interest rate). For example if you get a pre-money valuation of $20M a year after the convertible note, your angel investors will get shares worth $1M _(1+0.25)_ (1+0.08) = $1.35M from the $20M pre-money valuation. That will be $1.35 / ($20M / 10M) = 675K shares.

The most common format these days is a convertible note with a cap on the valuation. Typically the cap is negotiated just like a valuation. If you get a valuation higher than the cap in your Series A, angel investors will get shares from the cap you agreed on instead of the full price.

7) Typically, the investors give you a term sheet. When the negotiations are over, they go through a due diligence period. They will ask for some docs to check there was any BS in your pitch. In a seed round, this is usually very lightweight.

<comment><USER3> Regarding item 3, are you sure 10M+ shares is typical, and if so, why? I recall a story of serious trouble as a result of issuing this many shares with regards to tax implications down the line.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here is a super-short version:

1) You have an idea

2) You do some work to prove the viability of this idea, generally in some proportion to the complexity of implementing the idea (eg: if the idea is a webapp, you write some code, maybe get a beta site going. If the idea is a new fab process to build a 1 micron 1000-core supercomputer, then you tend to do more research than actual real-world implementation)

3) You convince someone that your idea is worth $X(XXX(XXX(XXX)))

4) You form a legal corporation and issue shares of stock (typically 100,000,000 or so).

5) You now have a pool of shares (100,000,000) and an agreed upon valuation for the company (let's say that valuation is $100,000,000 to make the math easy). Each share is then worth $1.

6) You sell some number of those shares to one or more investors. Now you (you being the corporation) have money to implement your idea and bring it to fruition.

Again, grand simplification, but that is the general outline.

<comment><USER5> So if the startup fails, the stock simply becomes worthless and the Investors wasted their money?

<comment><USER6> Yes. But you try your best not to fail (i.e., don't buy jumbo jets with your Series A), so that your investors don't blame you. Maybe next time around, they'll invest in your team again!

Or, they can convince a big company to acqui-hire your company. Say, Monopo- soft purchases your company for $50,000,000. Then your investors can recoup a portion of their original investment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You may find David Weekly's "Introduction to Stock and Options for tech entrepreneurs/startup employees" interesting.

[http://www.scribd.com/doc/55945011/An-Introduction-to- Stock-...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/55945011/An-Introduction-to-Stock- Options-for-the-Tech-Entrepreneur-or-Startup-Employee)

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm not recommending this site or principle but he does do great job of explaining the intricacies of startup legal issues and investing. <http://startuplawyer.com/category/convertible-notes></comment>


Ask HN: Business/initial-idea guy seeks technical founder; what's the process? - <AUTHOR> A non tech friend of mine spoke to me about his idea for a startup, and he needs help with the technical side of things. He's never run a business and has no technical experience. His idea has legs in principle but needs a lot of development (both from a business plan and technical perspective). I have great technical contacts plus I can help guide the process of building his idea up. If I was so inclined we could take his idea and build it out without him. I'm not that way inclined at all and want to make sure he's a part of the process, but I'm not sure how much value he will bring outside of the initial idea. I'm hesitant to just open up my contacts up without knowing how to best play this out; in everybody's interest.
What should I do?
Edit: This leads to another question- what's the best way to lay the right legal foundations to a founder relationship? <comment><USER2> _" He needs help with the technical side of things. He's never run a business and has no technical experience."_

No, he needs help with the technical _and business_ side of things. In other words, he has nothing to contribute except his idea, which other people will work to bring to market - but he'll expect to get a big cut of the cash. So I agree with the other commenter who said "run away".

</comment><comment><USER3> Run away.</comment>


Ask HN: Why is it easier to make money by being evil? - <AUTHOR>

So, why is it easier for a company to be evil?
Example 1: Why is it easier for a company to make money by tracking their customers and selling their data to the highest bidder then it is to make money ANY other way?
Example 2: Why is it easier to sell software which tracks employees in a Orwellian style central management control system then it is to sell software which empowers employees to do what they think is best?
It seems like it is much easier to make money by doing evil things then it is by doing good.  Why is this? <comment><USER2> For any problem with optimal solution k, a superset of that problem formed by relaxing the rule set will have an optimal solution at least as efficient as k.

It comes up in AI a few times.

</comment><comment><USER3> Capitalism and currency as a concept have no understanding of ethics, morals or good vs. bad built into them.

The responsibility of enforcing and encouraging ethical behavior is on the shoulders of the government and broader society. For example, if we take that selling people's personal information is "evil" as a given, it would not be a profitable practice if literally everyone did not accept it as a fair practice or the government could theoretically censor it completely. There would be no money to be made because potential buyers would distance themselves from it.

To take it to the extreme, for example, if our culture valued something as blatantly evil and extreme as cannibalism and the government had no laws against such actions, there would unfortunately be money to be made on selling human tritip as gruesome as that is.

The point is that the trend you notice of companies profiting from "evil" actions (I agree with this) is more a reflection of the current status of society, our value system, and the government than it is of capitalism or business. If we all were purely "good", the nature of what is profitable would be quite different.

</comment><comment><USER4> I would argue that being "evil" is less important than being completely single-minded.

Why, for example, does Google track its customers? To show them more relevant search results and ads.

From Google's perspective why is that a "good" thing? Because more relevant content means the customer is more engaged.

Why is engagement important? An engaged customer is going to spend longer on your site/services than an unengaged one.

So what can we take away from this? Google is completely single-minded about keeping customers using its products and customer engagement is a cornerstone in that strategy which in turn leads to things which one might consider "evil."

Good and evil are all a matter of perspective. The problem with morals is that they get in the way of being single-minded. If you WANT your business to succeed but are too moral to fire that under-performing employee then you might at best set your business back or at worst fail entirely.

</comment><comment><USER5> Example 1: I'm assuming you mean users (instead of customers, since normally your customers are buying something from you and that's how you make money). If your users aren't buying things from you directly, appeals for donations and affiliate programs aren't as steady a stream of income as selling tracking data.

Example 2: I think this speaks to corporate management philosophy more than anything. If management philosophy of large corporations shifts towards empowering their employees and away from quantifying employee's productivity contributions, then it will be easier to sell software which empowers employees to do what they think is best.

inb4 capitalism

</comment><comment><USER6> It has to do with keeping customers, learning about them, and selling goods/services to them over and over.

The other side of the coin is the aim to maximize profitability (collect and sell data). Take the humanity out of the equation and look at the business plan thru the lens of a logical, emotionless strategy. I am not saying that is good or bad, but it certainly is logical, no denying that.

</comment><comment><USER7> Wait, what? It's way easier to make money by selling a product or service than it is by 'tracking customers and selling data.'

An individual's data is worth next-to-nothing. You have to accumulate _huge_ audiences and keep the costs of whatever you're giving away ridiculously low to make that sort of business worthwhile - and both of those are really really hard.

</comment><comment><USER8> Define 'evil', and then define 'easier'.

</comment><comment><USER9> It is easiest to make money by being amoral.

This is distinctly a different approach from being immoral.

 _Caveat Emptor_ is neither evil nor consistent with the golden rule.

</comment><comment><USER10> Asymmetrical Information.</comment>


How to Save Emails to Pocket - <AUTHOR> https://rasulkireev.com/emails-to-pocket <comment><AUTHOR> Hey all,

Just made a quick post on adding emails to Pocket. This is somehow not a native Pocket feature, so I found a quick workaround.

Using publishthis.email you can simply turn any email into a webpage and then save to Pocket.

This will make it extremely easy to make notes on any email course and useful newsletters.

Please let me know if you have any feedback on the post, design or whatever. Would love to improve :)</comment>


New AI tools help writers be more clear, concise and inclusive - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.microsoft.com/ai/microsoft-365-ai-tools/?_lrsc=374045a0-d65b-45da-a9dc-5a17eaed57a7 <comment><USER2> Wow great! Now s/w will not only be able to fuck up my spelling, but also my meaning!</comment>


50-Cent Microscope That Folds Like Origami [video] - <AUTHOR> https://engineering.stanford.edu/research-profile/manu-prakashs-50-cent-microscope-folds-origami

<comment><USER2> In general, I believe the premise of this is a bit off. You often see that people from the west try to design "low-cost" devices for developing countries by introducing paradigm-shifting changes to the design. But this rarely seems to succeed. Just think of all the low cost computing device projects for Africa and India.

What won out in the end? Ultra-Low-Cost smartphones, basically offering the same functionality as the western counterparts but with cost drastically reduced by being based on completely domestic chinese designs and Android.

In this case, the problem is rather the education required to use the microscope and interpret the results. A professional will probably manage to finance a $50-$100 microscope, either second hand or as a knock-off, regardless of being in a third world country.

The paper microscope is a great toy or educational device though.

</comment><comment><USER2> Very cool! Any more detailed information about its construction? I bet they would also be interesting to a different audience - as toy.

Edit: Found this [http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1403/1403.1211.pdf](http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1403/1403.1211.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> Unfortunately they try to patent it. Let's see how much the patent license will add to the 50 cent and how monopolistic they will act. Le Sigh.

[http://www.google.com/patents/WO2013120091A1](http://www.google.com/patents/WO2013120091A1)

<comment><USER2> Ca 0.50$ is actually only the Material cost. This number does not include cost for manufacturing, development, distribution, quality control, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Previous discussion here : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7377213](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7377213)

</comment><comment> ezequiel-garzon I wonder how soon this will be developed in large quantities. Funding from places like Bill Gates' foundation is almost certain, but there seems to be a lag, as the TED talk is from June 2012, while the arXiv paper [1] as well as the linked post from March 2014. Maybe hitting the 50¢ mark would require lots of units?

[1] [http://arxiv.org/abs/1403.1211](http://arxiv.org/abs/1403.1211)

</comment><comment><USER5> Is diagnosis really a problem for health care in the developing world? I would imagine that in places like sub-Saharan Africa, they have a pretty good idea of what the symptoms of malaria look like, and they don't need microscopes so much as they need medicine.

</comment><comment><USER6> Manu Prakash discussing this on TED: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8cF5QPPmWU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8cF5QPPmWU)

<comment><USER7> He describes the lens as being 'manufactured directly from paper'. I'd like to understand what this means. I'm guessing that the Origami technique is what gives the lens its 3D structure, but at least you'll need some highly transparent material to form it, right? Do they have plastic or even glass glued into there?

<comment><USER2> Its a micro glass lens as described here:

[http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1403/1403.1211.pdf](http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1403/1403.1211.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wow, great article!

</comment><comment><USER9> This looks really great! I would love to get my hands on one.

<comment><USER10> They're sending out 10,000 free microscopes in a beta-test shortly: [http://www.foldscope.com/10ksignup](http://www.foldscope.com/10ksignup)</comment></comment>


MXE: Windows cross-compile environment for Unix - <AUTHOR> http://mxe.cc <comment><USER3> Fedora has been doing this since 2008: [https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MinGW](https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MinGW)

Apparently there are now 222 cross-compiled Windows packages: [https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/packages/mingw-%2A/](https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/packages/mingw-%2A/)

(Disclaimer: I was involved with this project at the beginning, but I've not used it for a while)

</comment><comment><USER4> This is potentially very useful. Especially because it comes "batteries included" by cross compiling some important cross-platform libraries.

My experience with C and C++ is that, as great as the differences between Windows and Unix APIs are, the real friction comes from the differences in compilers and toolchains.

There is much good to be said about Visual Studio. But if you are interested in cross-platform, it is probably a lot easier to maintain a single Unix-based build system as long as you have an easy way to test the products under Windows.

<comment><USER5> The problem with cross-compiling is that one always requires the complete set of libraries to target, which in the end at least for desktop and server systems is much more convenient to have a VM instance for it than a cross- compiler.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I did not see anywhere on [http://mxe.cc](http://mxe.cc) that said it compiled Windows binaries?

<comment><USER4> You are right, the authors are carrying on the grand web tradition of making whole sites about how great "Foo" without ever saying _what_ Foo is.

But it is difficult to imagine what is compiled by the MingGW toolchain other than Windows binaries.

Arguably the table entries "i686-w64-mingw32" and "x86_64-w64-mingw32" also explicitly name Windows, in a very cryptic, GNU-specific way.

<comment><USER7> If anyone wants to improve the website, open an issue on [https://github.com/mxe/mxe](https://github.com/mxe/mxe) or raise a pull against the gh-pages branch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Related, here is a one-click-install OS X to Linux cross compiler, based on musl libc and its Makefiles.

[https://github.com/FiloSottile/homebrew-musl- cross](https://github.com/FiloSottile/homebrew-musl-cross)

$ brew install FiloSottile/musl-cross/musl-cross

<comment><USER9> nice, I hope it gets merged into mainline :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> At first I thought this was about the research chemical designer drug that was very popular but recently completely disappeared due to a ban in china

<comment><USER11> Corporate WebSense agrees with you and blocks my access for that reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Has anyone looked at the screenshot section? Is that Windows 98 and a photo from a CRT screen? Looks like a pretty old page.

<comment><USER13> Wow. To be honest, that's what most "Windows screenshots" look like for non- Windows projects. For some reason people have an aversion to newer versions of Windows and Aero is usually disabled for screenshots. Similar thing is when people call GUI like here: [http://i.stack.imgur.com/Qdbsi.png](http://i.stack.imgur.com/Qdbsi.png) "windows native"

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I am using MXE happily for a couple of years already (some projects I've cross-compiled are here: [http://richelbilderbeek.nl/CppMxe.htm](http://richelbilderbeek.nl/CppMxe.htm) ). IMHO it is awesome! Before MXE, I had a Windows computer with the only purpose to compile my code on. Life is better now.

</comment><comment><USER15> How is that better than just installing the MinGW cross-compiler (and setting PKG_CONFIG_PATH) on my own?

</comment><comment><USER16> How are pthreads supported on Windows?

<comment><USER17> mingw-w64 comes with a pthreads implementation that works on top of the Windows API: [https://github.com/mirror/mingw-w64/tree/master/mingw-w64-li...](https://github.com/mirror/mingw-w64/tree/master/mingw-w64-libraries/winpthreads/src)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Any similar projects aimed at compiling Linux binaries on non-Linux Unix? (Excluding qemu, etc.)

Some non-Linux Unix have Linux emulation and can translate a subset of Linux syscalls. Perhaps it could be in a chroot with all the needed Linux libraries and utils.

But I am curious if there have been existing projects aimed at this goal.

</comment><comment><USER19> Now, if we could only get OSX C/C++ programs to compile/use libraries,frameworks on Linux... then we could have one build VM for them all.

</comment><comment><USER20> If you're on Gentoo, sys-devel/crossdev is useful for creating cross- compilers.

</comment><comment><USER21> I've used this 5 years ago, back when it was called mingw-cross-env - <USER2> worked great.

</comment><comment><USER22> I use MXE to build libsoundio releases for Windows. It works wonderfully.

</comment><comment><USER23> GNU Octave is using it for its windows binaries.

</comment><comment><USER24> Um, you need screenshots for a cross-compiler? :)

<comment><USER25> Any excuse to show off that sweet Titanic98 wallpaper!</comment></comment>


Reach Out and Touch Faith - <AUTHOR> https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/reach-out-and-touch-faith <comment><USER2> i think these relics and the likes can make one see the side of the argument that the Church has a lot of idolatry going while the Church applies a lot of theological argument trying to explain the difference between their practices and the idolatry. Looks like Luther wasn't much impressed by it :)

Reminded about talking to some people in Mexico who explained to me that from some point of view there is not that much difference between the human sacrifice as was practiced by say Aztecs there and the human sacrifice performed upon Jesus.

<comment><USER3> For the most part, as in this case, it seems like idolatry tends to emerge from the bottom up rather than being decreed from the top down.

The Pope and Cardinals would really prefer it if people would pray to a nice abstract God in a nice abstract sort of way, but superstitious common people really want to be able to have a nice neat physical object that they can entreat for the safe return of car keys and the like, and these two streams reach an uneasy compromise at the local priest's level.

<comment><USER4> I am Polish. In 1984 young priest had been kidnapped, tortured and murdered by communist political police. The Church made him beatified and a martyr in 2010. [^1]

Additionally they have exhumated his body and cut pieces for reliquaries.

Recently retired bishop of Cracov[^2] and former personal sectretary of Polish Pope Jan Paul II keeps a vial with blood of Jan Paul II (taken from his body on a deathbed) and used that as source of influence.

It all happens in XXI century and by people who are the top of hierarchy of Catholic Church in Poland. So this idolatory is deeply rooted at highest level of hierachy.

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerzy_Popiełuszko](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerzy_Popiełuszko)

[2] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanisław_Dziwisz](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanisław_Dziwisz)

<comment><USER5> Symbolism is a powerful thing, isn't it? It holds all the power in our lives, bestowing meaning upon one thing and withholding it from another.

I certainly don't mean to justify modern organized religion, but it seems without a strong sense of symbolism and a bit of superstition to hold it in place, it's hard to get anyone to subscribe to your cause.

We see this kind of dramatic rhetoric everywhere we turn as people vie for our attention and support, irrespective of the organization. How are we supposed to protect the masses from such a profound system of control without engaging in symbolic gestures ourselves?

<comment><USER2> symbolism is the wine symbolizing the blood of Christ or say wearing a cross symbolizing the Crucifixion.

A piece of wood or a nail which were supposedly taken from the real Crusifixion - this is pure idolatry. Ditto for the blood of a former Pope, pieces of body, etc.

<comment><USER6> Catholicism does not believe that the wine is a symbol. The wine is believed to be the actual blood. This is known as transubstantiation.

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

<comment><USER5> My step-grandmother spilled some wine on the alter once at the end of mass and was enthralled by how, in her eyes, it stained the way blood would and not wine. She took that as a sign. People see what they want to see, I guess.

<comment><USER7> Not to knock your grandmother, but that sounds a bit on the superstitious side, though probably motivated by reverence for the Precious Blood, i.e. the consecrated wine.

The Catholic belief is that all the observable properties of the bread and wine remain (the "accidents", philosophical term; in modern terms, its chemical properties and so on) while the "substance" (another philosophical term — think essence, what it truly is objectively) has been changed into the sacred humanity of Jesus Christ. Since his humanity is forever united to his divinity from the time his human nature was conceived in his mother's womb, the "whole Jesus," God himself, is present under what are only the appearances of bread and wine following the consecration.

In a hymn[+] attributed to St. Thomas Aquinas, it is explained in this way:

"Hidden God, devoutly I adore Thee, truly present underneath these veils... Not to sight, or taste, or touch be credit, hearing only do we trust secure; I believe, for God the Son has said it — Word of truth that ever shall endure. On the cross was veiled Thy Godhead's splendor, here Thy manhood lies hidden too; unto both alike my faith I render."

The "God has said it" phrase is in reference to the bread of life discourse in the Gospel of John, chapter 6, as well the Last Supper accounts in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

[+] [http://www.preces- latinae.org/thesaurus/Hymni/AdoroTe.html](http://www.preces- latinae.org/thesaurus/Hymni/AdoroTe.html)

<comment><USER5> I guess you couldn't tell, but I'm knocking her pretty hard. It's more than a bit superstitious. It's religious.

I'm very familiar with the Catholic belief system, I was an unwilling participant in the Catholic church for my entire childhood and have members of the clergy in my family.

She wouldn't accept that the wine and bread are believed to remain the same chemically (a cop-out to evade criticism from modern science), and pushing it any further would have invited a punishment or beating, so I let her have it.

Like I said, people see what they want to see. As Eckhart Tolle puts it, "Man made God in his own image."

<comment><USER7> Religion is a virtue, classically speaking:

"The moral virtue by which a person is disposed to render to God the worship and service he deserves. It is sometimes identified with the virtue of justice toward God, whose rights are rooted in his complete dominion over all creation. Religion is also a composite of all the virtues that arise from a human being's relationship to God as the author of his or her being, even as love is a cluster of all the virtues arising from human response to God as the destiny of his or her being. Religion thus corresponds to the practice of piety toward God as Creator of the universe. (Etym. probably Latin religare, to tie , fasten, bind, or relegere, to gather up, treat with care.)"

[http://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/dictionary/in...](http://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/dictionary/index.cfm?id=36024)

The virtue proper is in many respects the very opposite of superstition; like any virtue, it must be cultivated in a personal and deliberate manner and is ultimately a matter of interior orientation.

I'm sorry for your bad experiences and your feeling forced to participate in the Catholic Faith. Many Catholics I know, from very young to very old, love Christ and His Church, and I know more than several who have sacrificed much to become Catholic. I'm not trying to convince you of anything, but just keep in mind that your personal experiences may not encompass the whole reality of the Church.

<comment><USER5> You think I haven't heard that one before?

I was consistently top of the class in my religious studies and by no coincidence the only one who didn't identify as a Christian.

My understanding of the Catholic faith, Abrahamic religions in general, and their pagan origins, stems from a historic and analytic approach to theology and my personal experiences simply reaffirm what I understand the Catholic Church to be. A system of control that operates via moral gatekeeping, social defamation, and historically threats of violence.

The Church was the embodiment of anti-science dogma for centuries, the bastion of bloody wars of conquest, and is responsible for destroying the lives of countless individuals to remain in power and stave off any changes to the socioeconomic status quo.

The Church you think you support and the Church as it is are two separate things, and you cannot see the forest for the trees when you are in the thick of it.

This isn't the kind of discussion the mods like on HN and I don't wish to be chastised, so let's not discuss further.

<comment><USER7> I hope you did not get the impression my previous reply had an air of chastisement; and if you did, then I'm sorry, as I did not intend it that way, nor did I have any intention of chastising you in future replies.

You're right, HN is not the place for an extended discussion of these matters. In a polite way, I would note that I believe some of the latent assertions in your previous reply are not factual, based on my own studies of the Church's history, including the bright spots as well the ugly sores. I wish you all the best, and if you'd ever like to discuss any of the points further, feel free to send me an email.

<comment><USER5> I meant I don't want to be chastised by the mods, is all.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to stop requests to ajax.Googleapis.com and load jQuery locally? - <AUTHOR>

I use RequestPolicy and I noticed tons of websites make requests to ajax.googleapis.com to fetch jQuery. With the recent revelations about Google handing over information to the NSA, I've become slightly worried about making so many requests to Google even when not visiting Google.<p>It looks like the file is being cached, but it's still making a request. Is there a way to load jQuery locally or force the browser to use the cached jQuery file instead of requiring to make a request to Google? <comment><USER2> Use a userscript to like tampermonkey for chrome or greasemonkey for firefox to swap out the urls for local ones.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll try and see if that works, thanks.</comment></comment>


The pension gap - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-pension-crisis-davis-deal/ <comment><USER2> _" More than 200,000 civil servants became eligible to retire at 55 — and in many cases collect more than half their highest salary for life. California Highway Patrol officers could retire at 50 and receive as much as 90% of their peak pay for as long as they lived."_

It is simply not possible economically to support these type of benefits. Look no further than the Greece or Italian austerity crisis to see how these type of government payments will play out.

<comment><USER3> It's the same in every country: Some historical group's advantage can't be removed because they are enough people to get leverage against any opponent. There's a need for a new advance in democracy, because it has almost- bankrupted a few countries now (including Greece). Perhaps the separation of powers in our democracies (executive, judicial and law-makers) isn't enough. Maybe we should add a 4th weight, which translates hard limits from nature into limits that politics can't cross: "You can't allow a global warming", "You can't increase debt beyond 4%", "You can't let people work dramatically less for 5 decades (like in Greece), unless you justify it with an incredible progress in NGP/GDP/technology" or "You can't have discrepancies between public and private sectors". Somehow I'm happy Europe provides a bit of pushback against my country (France) because God knows how much debt our politics would otherwise subscribe.

<comment><USER4> How about we weight people's vote by an estimate of how long they've got left to live? After all, the longer into the future you'll live, the more seriously you have to take it.

<comment><USER5> I see several thoughts about that interesting proposal(offhand and only related to USA):

1) Those that have participated in government/military have less say than when they served. This could be a positive, but I feel some objection to a POW (my grandfather for instance) having less say than someone who didn't serve. 2) Do _really_ we want the least experienced citizens having the most say? The US already has age limits for certain offices so that sort of reduces my concerns about this, but... 3) Phase in plan? Currently voting is dominated by older voters. I don't see those people rushing to their polling places to vote to have the value of their vote lessened. Could be interesting to see the reasoning that happens for people to vote for or against it from a game theory perspective.

Still, I am interested.

<comment><USER6> > 2) Do _really_ we want the least experienced citizens having the most say?

That's the first thing that I thought of, but then I realized that I have a pretty dim view of the 'experience' of most older people that I know. They are woefully unable to use computers, and on account of their 'trust' in things like fake news they seem incredibly unprepared to deal with our current reality and are just as susceptible - if not moreso - to populism. And while this is a bold claim I'm not quite prepared to defend, they seem quite a bit more selfish and materialistic than the twenty-somethings I spend much of my time with.

Maybe in times of rapid change like ours, 'experience' doesn't mean as much as it once did.

Plus, it goes both ways. If we should defer to those with more experience, it's only fair that they should take better care of their offspring.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Well, part of that deal is delayed pay, because the public sector pays a great deal less. Without this, you're going to get menial and do-littles in public service. ... Which the more I think about it, perhaps is the reason why they want to, so the Republicans can look at their bad performance and cut funds further. (Don't get me wrong, Democrats seems to like throwing money down holes for populous programs, which have their own set of regressive issues. I'm much for UBI, and scientific testing of laws and programs to determine if the benefit is actually helping. If not, eliminate and move it to help more, better.)

If you cut funds by what you can, and then blame them for bad performance, you can "punish them" with less money, getting even worse. Wash, rinse, repeat, until that program is effectively dead. We're seeing it in the schools right now, with "No Child Left Behind" and the similar takes across the country with it. Inner city schools have bad performance, primarily because of bad home life, poverty, lack of food and resources... But because they do bad for tests, they get less funds.

I always think, what would our system look like if we adequately funded our programs? Would the BMV be such a cesspool? Not hardly. Would dealing with government office be peachy? Well, no. But they would have quick serving times and adequate material and time response in larger issues. Instead, what I hear is "They're bad, so lets cut funding." which exasperates the problem by now cutting personnel, time, and physical resources.

<comment><USER8> I am not sure public sector work pays less than equivalent private sector work on the whole.

I don't know for certain either way. My unsubstantiated belief was that it was higher and sometimes significantly so especially taking into account benefits, vacation time, and overtime policies.

So citation needed.

<comment><USER7> Admittedly, I found hundreds of resources.

Half of them said that "Private Makes More". The other half said "Public Makes More". The ones that said that Private makes more, usually added in commentary about Right-to-Work states, and discussed unions, whereas "Public Makes More" discussed the excesses and governmental waste, and evils of taxes. I'm sure you can see a trend of biases here. Attacking Private was Democrats and Left leaning orgs. Attacking Public was Republicans and Right leaning orgs.

The best, most impartial was from a reddit posting ([https://www.reddit.com/r/engineering/comments/314v7b/does_pr...](https://www.reddit.com/r/engineering/comments/314v7b/does_private_sector_work_still_generally_pay_more/) ) asking specifically about engineering pay between public and private. Of course, by the very definition they are anecdotal. But they seemed to try to answer "What is better monetarily and compensation-wise, rather than bringing in socio-politics in its stead.

<comment><USER9> The third possibility that is curiously rarely considered by so called 'market' advocates is that it might be a competitive market and both groups are offered more or less equally attractive compensation packages.

<comment><USER7> I would think a way to discern this, is that absolute cash in hand, private makes more. Public, if you add in the non-cash benefits, makes more. The argument however, of what I was making, is that if attrition destroys the understood contract of the non-cash benefits, Public would make significantly less and be less able to attract good talent. We are already seeing that with regards to K-12 teaching profession in many states.

I was asked to cite sources; kindly at that after respectful disagreement. After some searching, determined that answering that was going to be extremely partisan, and refused to answer the question at hand of "citation needed". And your suggested answer seems to be what the hordes on reddit kind of, not really, sort of agreed to.

In the end, even on reddit, it was back and forth 50% one way, and the other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There are problems in NY State and Illinois as well. Illinois has been in some sort of legislative standoff between the Republican Govenor who is trying to rein in pension costs and the Democratic legislature.

NY State if I recall, has some sort of constitutional amendment that creates huge pension liabilities for taxpayers.

These huge pension liabilities as well as increasing Medicaid costs means that students attending public universities in California, Illinois, and NY State have to pay higher and higher amounts of tuition, in effect subsidizing the pension funds and Medicaid.

<comment><USER11> It's happening everywhere, and not just at the state level. This is also occurring at the city level, see Dallas[1]. They didn't have enough money to pay out scared people that are all trying to withdraw now, though they have implemented stop gaps[2].

1 - [http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/business/dealbook/dallas-p...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/business/dealbook/dallas- pension-debt-threat-of-bankruptcy.html)

2 - [http://www.dallasnews.com/news/dallas-city- hall/2016/12/08/d...](http://www.dallasnews.com/news/dallas-city- hall/2016/12/08/dallas-police-fire-pension-board-ends-run-bank- stops-154m-withdrawals)

<comment><USER10> From [1]: "This month, Moody's reported that Dallas was struggling with more pension debt, relative to its resources, than any major American city except Chicago."

Chicago is even worse off than Dallas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> At the same time, many public California institutions are outsourcing their IT and other infrastructure costs while laying off workers because of budgetary pressure. Just another case of the baby boomers destroying future generations for their own personal gain. Pension funds are basically pyramid schemes and are economically doomed.

<comment><USER13> An example from just this week at UCSF:

[http://ww2.kqed.org/news/2016/12/14/ucsf-losing-some-it- staf...](http://ww2.kqed.org/news/2016/12/14/ucsf-losing-some-it-staff-to- outsourcing/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Ah, the rooster always comes home to roost. Well funded public sector unions and their pocket politicians robbed the state coffers blind. Will we see anyone hang to pay for this thievery? Not likely. I simply expect higher taxes in the future. This state will never learn until there's no more money left to take from its citizens.

<comment><USER15> > robbed the state coffers blind

State coffers filled with their neighbors' money.

Public union negotiations are always against the non-union taxpayers, which are not well represented since the politician "representative" is bought by the union. Public sector unions are the embodiment of moral hazard.

<comment><USER16> I don't understand why state/federal employees are allowed to unionize at all, let alone why they have such strong ones. Are government employees actually in danger of abuse or is it just because they can?

<comment><USER17> Why wouldn't they be allowed to unionize? In America you have a right to a union.

<comment><USER18> Because their employer can't go bankrupt if they happen to bargain themselves an impossible deal.

<comment><USER19> Of course they can. Every city, county, state, individual and corporate entity in the US can go bankrupt. The federal government can't, technically, but it can default,

<comment><USER18> States and the federal government cannot meaningfully go bankrupt. The problem is described in the article. While cities and counties can technically go bankrupt, they will externalize the costs and take on debt burdens at taxpayers' expense before they do so, to an extent that private companies are not allowed to. There have been just 9 city and county bankruptcies in the United States since 2008. Only 6 of them resulted in debt shedding, representing less than $30B in debt. That's 0.06 percent of total municipalities that could theoretically go bankrupt. In that time, tens of thousands of business entities and hundreds of publicly traded companies, representing trillions of USD of capitalization, have gone bankrupt. The overall ratio of public:private sector economy in the US is roughly 1:2.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Surely it was someone's job to project these future costs when putting such promises into employment contracts. And I would also presume that these future cost calculations should result in some amount of planning to understand what the minimal amount of tax revenue or investment would have to be to support the future obligation.

However, even if that happens, how do employees prevent politicians from mucking about with those plans so that they can receive the retirement benefits that helped convince them to take jobs? These fears are why someone must have encouraged Congress to muck about in the USPS budgets wrt retirement accounts.

The only solution I see is mandating that (gov't) employers pay, during an employee's employment, into a retirement account such that politicians and bosses can't touch the money, and only the employee can do anything with it during retirement.

<comment><USER21> Your proposal is essentially what we have in Australia with superannuation. Employers pay a minimum of 9.5% of pre-tax salary into the retirement accounts, and then can't touch it.

<comment><USER22> And this is the same system that the public sector uses (grandfathered exceptions exists, of course).

Of course once your super fund runs out, and it will very likely run out, you're back on the tax-funded age pension.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> >Asked to study differing scenarios for the financial markets, Seeling told the CalPERS board that if the pension fund's investments grew at about half the projected rate of 8.25% per year on average, the consequences would be "fairly catastrophic."

8.25% per year? No one averages 8% per year growth. That's not even an optimistic projection, just a stupid one.

<comment><USER24> A stupid, but widely believed projection. In the years before the .com crash many people really believed that "This time is different."

<comment><USER25> Many people believed the housing crash wouldn't happen, many people often believe incredibly naive things. This should not excuse them. There were people among them trying to be voices of reason, they ignored them -- as they always do.

It doesn't matter that it was a terrible idea. The people who voted in favor got the poll bump they wanted and everyone is gone by the time the bill comes due.

Burn this pattern into your brain, it has happened hundreds of times and will happen hundreds more. Every single time people will exclaim "We couldn't have known!" That is simply misdirection, they didn't even TRY to know.

<comment><USER24> Yes, there are many stupid but widely believed projections.

.com boom is not a regular boom. It will rise forever!

Housing prices will always rise!

Ad-tech will grow boundlessly!

In my opinion one of the greatest tragedies of these cycles is that many people desperately want to believe they hype about "This time it's different", and they can find plenty of "experts" to tell them what they want to hear. Regular people who could have had a solid place in the middle class are thrown into chaos because they lack financial savvy.

Is it stupid to expose yourself to a level of risk that can cause this? I think so. However, it seems like we provide more and more opportunities for unsavvy people to do severe and long-term damage to themselves and their families.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> If you want to blame someone, blame the accountants. Pension funds' liabilities are long-term and inflation linked. If they had invested fully in inflation-indexed bonds (as the Bank of England pension scheme does), they would mostly be alright now. But pension fund accounting allowed them other options.

During the 1990s and 2000s, pension funds underfunded their liabilities, assuming they'd be able to make up the difference from gains in equities, property and other high-yielding assets. In the process they created quite a few hedge fund billionaires and funded the venture-capital tech boom. Many of those investments subsequently turned sour.

But their most significant error was to assume that bond yields would stay high. Today's low yields mean that they can't discount their future liabilities as heavily. The icing on the cake has been a moderate increase in longevity, which has been enough to tip the whole industry into crisis.

<comment><USER27> _During the 1990s and 2000s, pension funds underfunded their liabilities, assuming they 'd be able to make up the difference from gains in equities, property and other high-yielding asset_

Not in the UK - if a company is deemed to be overpaying, according to the Revenue, they pay tax penalties. The Revenue don't care that the value of investments can go down as well as up, their pensions are paid from taxation...

<comment><USER26> BHS and a number of others took contribution holidays in the 90's, on the back of a stock market boom. It's those that I was referring to.

<comment><USER27> They had no choice, because of the rules I mentioned. The Revenue deemed their pensions "over-funded".

<comment><USER26> If you've got a link explaining the tax rules I'd be interested to see it. Seems to me like companies should prudently fund their pension obligations before minimising their tax bill.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Why would you _ever_ pass legislation which is entirely dependent on the stock market performing well?

</comment><comment><USER28> I'll just throw for the opposing side and point out that "Gov. Pete Wilson, took $1.6 billion from CalPERS accounts in 1991 to help close a state budget gap". A random internet calculator tells me that investing in the S&P 500 with reinvested dividents since July, 1991 has had a 844% return. I wonder impact $1.3 trillion would have on the CalPERS shortfall (edit: this would only be $13 billion).

<comment><USER29> Your math is off by a couple orders of magnitude :)

<comment><USER28> Ouch! I feel the fool.

Revised thoughts. It would only be 10 billion, which would equal two years of payouts for the entire pension.

<comment><USER30> obligatory XKCD: [https://xkcd.com/947/](https://xkcd.com/947/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> In the private sector there's a balance: First, union and management are adversarial, since management's pay is often partly/wholly in stock/options or otherwise tied to the company's financial performance. Second, if the union pushes too far then the whole enterprise will sink.

But in the public sector, neither of these things are true. Unions and management can collude to fleece the taxpayers, since management's tenure is tied to votes, not financial performance. Additionally there'll be increased taxes, a federal bailout, or some other steps taken to allow the government of California to continue to operate no matter how much their pension obligations rise.

IMHO public sector unions should be illegal.

</comment><comment><USER32> US government pension funds (state, city, etc.) are basically doomed universally.[0] Tax payers cannot stomach having to pay more for less services so that a small fraction of society can retire much earlier and with cushier benefits than the vast majority. As happened in Detroit, benefits will be cut in order to prevent catastrophe. It's both the morally right solution and realistically the only solution.

[0] [http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/18/business/dealbook/study- fi...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/18/business/dealbook/study-finds-public- pension-promises-exceed-ability-to-pay.html)

<comment><USER17> The alternative interpretation is that politicians and the people who elect them (meaning all of us) tend to be short sighted and underfund pensions for public workers. Many of those public workers are willing to work for less pay because of the pension, so in effect we are defrauding them. Detroit is an odd example to use as there we are dealing with a severe population crash, that's not the situation in California.

<comment><USER32> Public workers don't settle for less pay than private sector workers, that is an often repeated talking point that simply isn't true.[0] A garbage man, janitor, administrator, etc. working for the government isn't going to magically make more salary by quitting and going to the private sector. Top level employees can make more in the private sector, but the average worker cannot. Public employees make more money, are very difficult to fire, and have far more benefits than most workers.

[0] [https://www.downsizinggovernment.org/federal-worker- pay](https://www.downsizinggovernment.org/federal-worker-pay)

<comment><USER17> "Other studies based on comparisons between similar federal and private workers find either no wage gap or a federal wage advantage. A 2012 Congressional Budget Office (CBO) study found that, for comparable workers, federal wages were similar to private wages overall, with just a small two percent advantage for federal workers" Looking at that report it looks like from a bachelors on up public sector workers get less compensation then private.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> The amount of mismanagement and lack of foresight on both sides of the aisle is disgusting.

</comment><comment><USER34> I tried to read this article on an Android mobile and it started playing a podcast even though I hate podcasts and have limited bandwidth.

<comment><USER35> For shame that the LA times doesn't know you don't like podcasts ;)

<comment><USER34> Traditional media outlets are desperate to save themselves but instead of trying to serve customers what they want they are indulging in tech dodads and hypermedia push assaults. LA Times won't be around much longer by their own projections. Attempting to force feed people content they don't want might be a factor in that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I finished reading this book earlier this month - [http://www.retirementheist.com/](http://www.retirementheist.com/) pension funds work if they are managed responsibly!

</comment><comment><USER37> Every time I read calPERS, I think scalper.

Anyway, just goes to show that its not just big corporations that are greedy.

Any reform will be difficult without adjustments to the promised pensions. With an economic slow down coming in 2017-2018, the gap isn't going to get smaller.

</comment><comment><USER38> _" One of the few voices of restraint back in 1999 belonged to Ronald Seeling, then CalPERS' chief actuary. Asked to study differing scenarios for the financial markets, Seeling told the CalPERS board that if the pension fund's investments grew at about half the projected rate of 8.25% per year on average, the consequences would be "fairly catastrophic."_

Who decided on the projected rate of 8.25%, in the first place? Wouldn't that have been the work of the CalPERS' chief actuary, Ronald Seeling?

The root cause of the problem was the actuarial assumption of an 8.25% rate of return. This is what allowed the new Defined Benefits to appear to be "free," and that is what enabled the board and politicians to ram this through.

Assuming an "average case scenario" of consistent 8.25% annual return on a pension investment portfolio is subjectively irresponsible, even in 1999. But more egregious is the fact that the actuarial profession failed miserably to recognise that the Defined Benefit was a financial guarantee similar to a put option, which means that the value of the put option should have been explicitly calculated - which would have been done by projecting scenarios using the "risk-neutral" rate of return (i.e. the yield on US government bonds) instead of the "real-world" rate (i.e. the super-optimistic assumption of 8.25% annual returns).

The article goes on to explain that the Chief Actuary ran 3 different scenarios: a "pessimistic" scenario of 4.4% returns, "average" scenario of 8.25% and "optimistic scenario" of 12.1%. This is the crux of the problem, and it is not the first time that such actuarial calculations have blown up a pension plan like this. The right thing to do would be to calculate a single "scenario" using the risk-neutral rate, which would have been lower than 4.4% in 1999 and today it would be closer to 0% ... That would have correctly valued the economic cost of pension benefit as a multi-billion dollar expense that no politician would be able to so easily ram through the legislative process.

 _" Lou Correa, then a freshman Democrat who carried the bill in the Assembly, said he fell victim to inexperience. He remembers seeing actuarial reports and assuming he'd "kicked the tires" and asked the right questions. Correa, now running for Congress in Orange County's 46th district, said he should have sought independent financial advice."_

I think Correa was reasonable in assuming that actuarial reports, signed by the Chief Actuary of CalPERS, would have properly "kicked the tires." That is what the actuarial profession is supposed to do. Just like if an engineer signs off on the construction of major transportation bridge, we can reasonably expect that that the bridge won't be be designed with fundamentally incorrect physics calculations.

<comment><USER17> Agreed. If I knew someone who was investing for retirement on the assumption of an 8.25% growth I'd be worried about them. The fact that a government agency did it is scary.

<comment><USER39> From what I recall, 8% returns might have been correct in 1999.

<comment><USER38> See above, the problem does not lie in the subjective question of whether or not 8% return is a reasonable assumption for an investor. The problem lies in how the actuarial liability was (mis)accounted for - specifically, the value of the guarantee was accounted by assigning it _zero_ cost - which is completely incorrect.

It is as if an incompetent real estate appraiser were to assign zero value the Golden Gate Bridge, and then your local politician legally transferred ownership of the bridge to some friends for free because the appraisal assigned zero value to the bridge. And then those friends started charging tolls on the bridge, and pocketing the money for themselves. That would normally be considered fraud or embezzlement.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Realtime Dns Tool w/ IPv6 Support - <AUTHOR> https://www.misk.com/tools/ - Queries all common dns records together (A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, TXT, SRV) - Reverse DNS and FCrDNS - Specific nameserver support - IPv4 + IPv6 <comment><USER2> Your claim of "IPv6 support" is inaccurate:

      - There are no AAAA records on {www,ns1,ns2,smtp}.misk.com
      - It cannot query other name servers using IPv6:
        https://www.misk.com/tools/#dns/ipv6-only.tlund.se

<comment><AUTHOR> >> It cannot query other name servers using IPv6

Thanks for pointing that use case out. I'll get support for resolving IPv6 Only hostnames added in.

      Existing IPv6 Support:
      AAAA Lookup - https://www.misk.com/tools/#dns/arin.net
      IPv6 Reverse Dns & FCrDNS - https://www.misk.com/tools/#dns/2001:500:4:13::80
      IPv6 Traceroute - https://www.misk.com/tools/#traceroute/2001:500:4:13::80
      IPv6 Whois - https://www.misk.com/tools/#whois/2001:500:4:13::80</comment></comment>


How to Fix the Username System (with Hacker News Responses) - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2016/04/23/how-to-fix-the-username-system/ <comment><USER2> Cross-pollinating from Reddit: The system is often broken by design, because social-media companies (e.g. Twitter) have an incentive to break it. Creating artificial scarcity in their name-space is a way to extort/attract users (especially brands and celebrities.)

A truly "fixed" username system means abandoning that "gatekeeper of the one true name" business-model, and decoupling identity from names.</comment>


927 People Own Half Of The Bitcoins - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/927-people-own-half-of-the-bitcoins-2013-12?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+clusterstock+%28ClusterStock%29&utm_content=Netvibes <comment><USER2> Most of the addresses of the bitcoin rich list belong to bitcoin companies. Not necessarily individuals.

The article fails to compare this with gold distribution, for example, to create some context.

Nevertheless, at some point those large holders will cash out to buy companies or property and, in the long run, the currency will become better distributed than say the dollar, because of the lack of easing that goes directly to the wealthy and big bankers pockets.

<comment><USER3> In an ideal world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Same goes for money.

Bitcoin is not a solution to wealth sharing or any other real world problem.</comment>


Bitcoin Isn't Tulips, It's Open Source Money - <AUTHOR> https://blog.evercoin.com/bitcoin-isnt-tulips-it-s-open-source-money-67e2286ff142 <comment><USER2> As somebody who has held cryptocurrency for years and codes Solidity, never before have I seen a dumber market than this. Every time valid criticisms come forward, they're met with articles like this. The articles are usually convincing to people with limited understanding of economics or technology, so they keep quiet. "Open source money" and "blockchain is the future" sound like very convincing arguments to justify these ludicrous sums of money. What they neglect to address is that...

A) Bitcoin is congested with transactions and takes hours to process some of them

B) Bitcoin fees are through the roof, it sometimes costs as much as 25% of the value of a transaction to send it

C) The upgrades to fix these problems are extremely slow - scaling hasn't been solved for years, because different parties keep fighting for control over the currency codebase and shooting down each others' attempts to upgrade it

D) Bitcoin is still, objectively, centralized. Almost all of the miners are based in industrial regions like China, and belong to a small monopoly of mining pools. All of the exchanges are centralized, and are well-known for losing clients' money. The big banks are replaced by big whales, who will do anything in their power to manipulate markets for their gain.

E) Bitcoin addresses the technology perspective of sending money, but doesn't address any of the macroeconomic problems that arise from a deflationary, uncontrolled currency.

F) Bitcoin is not actually anonymous. Data science techniques can parse the blockchain and see sending patterns between different accounts. They map these patterns to various identities. If those identities can be mapped to a real person, say, when they cash out of an exchange, then it's known exactly how much Bitcoin they have.

If someone could write an article addressing these facts, rather than throwing out slogans like 'open source money', that would be nice.

<comment><USER3> I could go down the list and agree and disagree with some of your comments, but how does that address the article? Despite being a trite statement, and despite it's flaws, bitcoin _is_ open source money.

<comment><USER4> Bottles of wine are money.

But they are not currency. Currency is what you settle your tax bills in. And ultimately you need to get hold of some at some point.

<comment><USER3> Ok, but how does that make the statement wrong? Gimp is open source photo editing, and many people have criticisms against it compared to photo shop, but it's still open source photo editing.

<comment><USER5> Aitrean pointed out the irrelevance of that fact 25 minutes ago, in response to your original post.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> at no point in this article is a value proposition actually defined. "Open Source Money" is a nice soundbite, but unless you can define what that actually means and how it will benefit mankind, it's as useful as "facebook for cats". I'm in the anti-cryptocurrency camp (despite having read the satoshi paper and comfortably understanding the algorithms behind bitcoin) because I've seen it morph into the exact thing it was meant to oppose - financial speculation and paper-shuffling by rich investors purely for the sake of profit. It's somewhat ironically hilarious that ICOs are now a thing given the anti-corporate/anti-banking message of the bitcoin genesis block.

Right now I see no value to cryptocurrencies besides black market transactions and hacking around with financial instruments in a very closed system. I'm open to the idea that I'm missing the whole point, but I've not yet seen a compelling argument for that.

<comment><USER7> > I see no value to cryptocurrencies besides black market transactions and > hacking around with financial instruments

It costs a small fortune to send money internationally not to mention the friction of needing to have a bank account - almost 40% of the people on the planet do not have one[1]. Something _like_ Bitcoin et al (not necessarily BTC itself!), where you can get an address immediately that can send and receive a balance from anywhere & anyone in the world without impediment has the potential to be huge. I appreciate I am being a bit starry-eyed here but I can see a real value to it _globally_ if such a vision can continue.

That's not to condone what might now be happening with institutional investors and Wall St getting in on the action in a big way, or the state of the tech (transaction fees at present, verification delays, snake oil ICOs). The core concept of a currency like this _is_ valuable societally IMO. It might not be bitcoin in the end but the idea, like the internet and publishing, is a powerful one.

[1] [http://www.worldbank.org/en/programs/globalfindex](http://www.worldbank.org/en/programs/globalfindex)

<comment><USER8> It's pretty cheap to send money internationally in a lot of places, and pretty quick too.

The oft-touted benefit of BTC is not that new or appealing to the whole world. In fact a lot of the selling points I see boil down to flaws in the US banking system, and skewed views of how the rest of the world operates.

<comment><USER7> From my own recent experience, I had to spend £10 to send €6, pay conversion fees and it took 2 days to go through. [https://estimatefee.com/](https://estimatefee.com/) suggests right now for a 2-hour confirmation a cost of around $3 via BTC. (Natwest in the UK to an account in the EU).

<comment><USER8> I didn't pay much more than that to transfer about £20k from Australia to the UK a couple of years back. I think I paid about £12...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "If anyone is dissatisfied with Bitcoin, it's possible to fork it and add value. If a developer made Bitcoin 100x faster and just as secure, you can be sure that everyone would use the faster one."

It is rather ironic that the author should say this at a time when the Bitcoin community has recently been at war with itself, and is still divided and without a solution, over a proposal to adopt a fix for the urgent problem of transaction rate -- so ironic, that I checked the dateline, and it is current.

</comment><comment><USER9> Never quite explains what is meant by open source money. And cryptocurrency evangelists in this vein alwayd seen to assume money can be decoupled from the underlying economies it flows through and the individuas and institutions that make use of it.

Here's a hint though. The statement "if Bitcoin can't deliver those things, another cryptocurrency will do that" isn't something anyone wants to hear about their money. No one wants a massive or sudden devaluation because a rival currency supports a shinier newer feature. When that happens people don't just get upset. When that happens, social contracts get broken and we rediscover why Hobbes wrote his book, and why the hardest currencies usually belong to countries able to back up their fiat with more than words or market forces.

So take note, this should be axiomatic to anyone thinking about currencies "at scale": the demand for a currency will be inversely correlated with its volatility.

Research the historic role of clipped coins, and consider the impact of receiving coins that can be clipped after receipt. And dont stop there, thats the beginning.

</comment><comment><USER10> ...that a small number of people printed for themselves and now hold in massive quantitites.

Wealth distribution is bad enough with the currencies we already had. A true bitcoin takeoff would be an order of magnitude worse.

<comment><USER11> Thank you for raising this point. Do we really want to make people insanely rich just because they were stupid enough to convert their money to BTC? It's frustrating to watch people getting rich making the wrong move. Why do we think their next move will be anymore brilliant than luckily holding BTC?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Perhaps if the author had researched the tulip episode, the article would be different.

The massive price rises were in _futures_ not actual prices. There is lots of academic work around this which is spectaculally interesting.

Second, to say that bitcoin has "intrinsic value" is the same rubbish thats applied to gold. Value is _always_ subjective.

The noise about competition for "fiat currency" is just that, noise. At best its equivalent to a bond, worse coffee futures.

Exchanges are perfectly able to do fractional reserve banking, so bitcoin is very much a fiat currency. Its basically what bitcoin exchanges do

<comment><USER13> I fully subscribe to the subjective theory of value. There are other theories which might be good approximations in specific scenarios, but fundamentally, value is subjective. But following that reasoning I believe that if enough people agree on a new means of value storage or value exchange, critical mass can be achieved where the new medium is fully adopted while the old one is abandoned. I think the same thing happened when we transitioned from gold to fiat, and it happened largely under the direction governments around the world. As long as we all agree on it, a new medium can be adopted.

Now, will Bitcoin replace fiat? That would be difficult, and I think people have different perspectives and motives for adopting Bitcoin. I suppose that is why there are so many heated debates where people don't agree on the valuation. Actually, if you look at the world, people have opposing views on many topics, including on how our economies are run and on how we do monetary policy. Just accounting for that chunk of people that want a hedge or alternative to the mainstream system can explain at least a part of the valuation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> We don't just need open source money, what we really need is open source government.

<comment><USER15> Separation of currency and state.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Perhaps not Tulips, but definitely akin to the Somali Shilling.

</comment><comment><USER16> I think these arguments are coming from wishful thinking. In my view block chain as technology is useful and most of the institution will copy it to roll out their own version soon.

And bitcoin is nowhere near being considered "open source money" because if it was then we should not be measuring it with respect to USD.

Most of these articles comes from folks who think technology can fix the social and political issues.

</comment><comment><USER17> Tulips were open source too.

<comment><USER18> But they were not scarse neither hard to mine

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> OK, let's accept, for the sake of argument, that Bitcoin-as-open-source-money is a valid analogy. How does the history of open-source things disabuse the notion that what is happening now is a speculative bubble? Where else can you find an example where the benefits of open source have led to this sort of explosive growth in valuations?

</comment><comment><USER19> Until a material percentage of non-speculative transactions are done via bitcoin, it's not money. Who in their right mind would spend a bitcoin today when it could jump in value by 25% in a week? It's purely a speculative vehicle right now, and won't stop until it stabilizes in price where people can trust it.

</comment><comment><USER20> "My goal in posting this is not to convince the fiat fundamentalists, it's to arm believers with an argument that at least makes sense."

Wow. Never thought I'd see religious faith arguments on the front page of HN

</comment><comment><USER21> Tulips aren't bitcoins, It's tangible beauty!

</comment><comment><USER22> Buy X says person with X.

</comment><comment><USER23> No, it's a new Pyramid Scheme. Make sure you get your money out first.

</comment><comment><USER24> Bitcoin isn't tulips, because tulips can decorate your property. Bitcoins are absolutely devoid of any value, thus with the limit being zero on the Bitcoin equation, the ultimate market cap for all Bitcoins will be zero.

Money for the past 10,000 years has just been commodities. Commodities with a useful value. The commodities which became money were ones which made good currencies. They were portable, uniform, durable and divisible. Gold is a commodity which fits these attributes. Eventually people began trading promissory notes redeemable for gold.

This was the situation until 1971. Then Nixon closed the exchange window and said the Treasury Department was not exchanging the dollars for the 8000 tons of gold it stores in Fort Knox and elsewhere. Almost nothing happened to the dollar in the days after - the dollar price of bread and the like stayed stable. Did some great transformation happen? No. If the market had paniced, the gold window would have been opened again. No magic spell was cast in 1971. The 8000 tons of gold in Fort Knox etc. still back the dollar implicitly.

If not - why does the government spend so much money guarding Fort Knox etc.? Why is it hoarding all this gold, if it does not back the dollar?

Bitcoin does not have 8000 tons of gold implicitly backing it. It has nothing backing it.

There is a little question mark that exists. Obviously Fort Knox's gold backs the dollar implicitly. But for some politicians and such, it is beneficial if they wave their hands and say some magic spell has made the dollar valuable without that gold. As if they had a magic printing press that could just run off sheets of hundred dollar bills 24/7 that had value. This is not the case, and is untrue, but creates a question mark from this little fib. This question mark is where Bitcoin draws its suckers in. If the government has a magic hundred dollar bill machine, maybe they can make one as well. The problem is the government has no such machine, they just have some politicians and such who claim they do. What the government does have, among other things, is 8000 tons of gold which it would exchange for dollars in 1971, and could easily do again. Bitcoin has no such backing. In fact, we don't even know who started Bitcoin. At least with Charles Ponzi's international reply coupons, you knew the name of who was behind the scam. With Bitcoin, the scammers are anonymous.

I just read a Times article about the probable insolvency of Bitfinex, the umpteenth Bitcoin company with such problems. Charlie Munger says Bitcoins are rat poison, and he has surely seen many such scams in his 93 years.

Also, reading this blog post with its railing against the government and the establishment reminds me of the pitches for some MLM scams I have been dragged to. When someone tells you they're giving a run for its money the "government's fiat monopoly on money", watch your wallet.

</comment><comment><USER25> Yeah, those silly, silly dutch, still selling millions of tulips since 1637, employing more than 250.000 people in the flower market and exporting plants for a value of around 10 billion euro each year...

Maybe not a very good example of an economic failure

<comment><USER26> That's a silly argument. The real estate crisis was still a _crisis_ despite the fact that real estate is still successfully sold afterwards.

<comment><USER25> And the question to answer here is: Can the bitcoin survive to a big crisis and be still sucessful when prices fall and stabilise?

European aquaculture for example has suffered several similar (aptly named) bubbles and later recovered from them. The history of tulip's trade and market is also far from being finished yet. Nobody measures aviation success anymore based on Hindenburg event.

In the long term many strange markets manage to survive even if the actors change</comment></comment></comment>


Ramsey Parties - <AUTHOR> http://zufallstee.blogspot.com/2011/10/ramsey-parties.html

<comment><USER2> The elegance of Ramsey's proof of R(3,3) was what turned me on to Combinatorics and Graph Theory.

<comment><USER3> Cool.

But, a minor correction: Frank Ramsey merely proved (in 1930) a theorem equivalent to the statement that Ramsey numbers are well-defined. The study of the values of particular Ramsey numbers seems to have been started in 1955 by Robert Greenwood and Andrew Gleason, and I believe they are the first ones to note that R(3,3)=6.

Disclaimer: Combinatorics is my field. History of mathematics is not. And corrections are welcome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> He lost me at "As a computer scientist, I am of course highly familiar with the local party scene."

</comment><comment><USER5> I thought this would be a drinking game to play while watching Kitchen Nightmares.</comment>


Stay-at-home mom uses coupons/rebates to consistently get ~75% off groceries - <AUTHOR> http://couponsavingssahm.blogspot.com/

<comment><USER2> I see enough razors to shave a small army, and enough food to feed a large ant farm.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why would you need that much scotch tape? Scrap booking?</comment>


Computer scientist responds to SEC requiring Python - <AUTHOR> http://www.sec.gov/comments/s7-08-10/s70810-9.htm

<comment><USER2> I have to give it to the SEC though for even requiring such model. My dream is every financial product (from credit cards to CDOs) to come with the model and as standardized inputs as possible. People could then make websites like: WillIDefault.com that would show the risk you're taking - including the conditionals of the contract.

</comment><comment><USER3> You could satisfy his objections by saying:

Use only the x.x version of python, only these (x) approved libraries are allowed, and you must publish any data you use.

True, he is only pointing out that the SEC requirement has a flaw, but it seems easily fixable to me.

<comment><USER4> He addressed this by saying that requiring a version would leave you unable to fix bugs when they were found, which could then be exploited.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Summarized as: due to one largely theoretical and two solvable potential issues with a widely understood, proven, and practical language, I propose we adopt an imaginary, non-existent language with a programming model foreign to most.

"no standard specification of the Python language" - given the existence of at least 4 implementations of the language (cpython, ironpython, jython, pypy), it's hard to seriously argue that the language is poorly specified.

Purely functional - you'd be hard pressed to find 1 in 10 good programmers who'd be productive in a purely functional language.

</comment><comment><USER6> For more background and previous discussions see:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1272541>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1578133>

</comment><comment><USER7> Wow, a "computer scientist with a background in the formal specification of programming languages" thinks that the SEC should be "using a formally- specified pure functional programming language".

Yes, and when I worked at GM, I thought everyone should buy GM cars. Go figure.

</comment><comment><USER8> A strange thing about the SEC proposal is all these structured deals _are already_ structured with programming languages. They are usually proprietary languages used to run scenarios and evaluate deal structures. These could simply be made public. It would be a more enforceable standard than having two sets of code.

I agree with the author of the article that a functional programming language like haskell would be a nicer way to go than python, but we should always remember that the real governing documents--the prospectus, and the more important but more obscure trust deed--are written in legal language. The math only covers part of the semantics of a financial transaction.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is a pretty interesting proposal, and I must say, on first impression I think that implementing a Python-base solution would be a massive improvement to our current state of affairs, to a solution that might be the best 'good enough' solution implementable soon.

</comment><comment><USER10> "you should listen to a bunch of academics, and use Erlang for securities, which will lead to less tricky programs from financial engineers."

The article purports roughly this with sincerity.</comment>


AI and the current understanding of deep nets - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.princeton.edu/imabandit <comment><USER2> Title: On the spirit of NIPS 2015 and OpenAI</comment>


Is your browser safe against tracking? Use Panopticlick to find out - <AUTHOR> http://linuxbsdos.com/2015/12/17/is-your-browser-safe-against-tracking-use-panopticlick-to-find-out/ <comment><USER2> Awesome idea; easy enough UI to make it actually usable for theoretically interested but practically clueless end-users. Thank you!

> [from linked resource] Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among > the 6,171,480 tested so far.

Very current OSX on a very current FF (minus any flash) - I seriously doubt that.

Any way to verify results (source to read, or, much better, some abstract text that explains those numbers)?

<comment><USER3> Since its old perhaps you stand out with your new things in their database. Although this has changed skins since the last time I saw it. Perhaps it has a new database too.</comment></comment>