Contractor had included GPL code, so Microsoft decides to publish its own source - <AUTHOR> http://lawandlifesiliconvalley.com/blog/?p=306

<comment><USER2> Weird how it gets spun as a 'danger of open source'.

It's simply being careless. If they have a review process and it did not catch this it can't be much of a review.

The really worrying thing here is not that a chunk of gpl'd code made it into the distribution but that apparently subcontractors can put chunks of code in to microsofts main distributions without proper oversight.

<comment><USER3> I would not say this is "spun." Furthermore, from his bio, "I am the General Counsel, pro bono, of the Open Source Initiative."

My reaction to the HN title was "wow, imagine if someone came on the Windows team and 'accidentally' included GPLed code..." ;)

<comment><USER4> Then they would simply remove the GPL code and push out an update. The GPL does not compel the release of source code - if they accidentally distribute a product that does not comply with the requirements of the included GPL software then they simply lose the right to distribute the GPL software at the copyright holder's discretion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Microsoft could have quite legitimately just yanked the app until they could rewrite it without the GPL code. The contractor would be toast (probably had an indemnification clause), MS wouldn't have been on the hook for that much even if the copyright holders of the GPL code sued for infringement, as it wasn't willful.

The GPL absolutely does not force them to do so. It cannot, as it is simply a copyright license. The GPL actually terminated as soon as MS distributed the code, since they weren't following it's rules.

I don't know if they have a formal agreement with the copyright owner, or if they're just following what is an accepted practice in opening the source, but technically GPL v2 cannot be "reactivated" on its own.

<comment><USER6> Hmm, so I can give away copies of MS Office so long as I stop when someone points out it's copyright violation?

<comment><USER7> You would probably have to pay damages; see the ongoing drama of RIAA v. The Public for an example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Don't tell anyone, but I really want to try this technique on Android. Cut-n- paste some GPL3 code from somewhere, get it accepted, wait for the binary using the code to be released, and then you can get root on your phone simply by sending a nastygram (as the GPL3 prohibits devices from locking out the user without their consent).

No more wasting time finding a security hole!

(Perhaps this has already been done!)

<comment><USER9> Such a trick only works if the code doesn't matter. For something as important as Android, Google would just remove the offending code. Also, all code coming into important projects like Android has to have someone to vouch for it, so perhaps Google could shift the blame to the submitter (who would have had to remove the GPLv3 notice before submitting the code).

<comment><USER8> Doesn't matter who they blame. Once the GPL3 code is in your hand, on the phone, they are stuck. Removing the code is fine, just like how they fix security holes that let you get root.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Microsoft decides to publish its own source

"Decides"? The very gpl license forces them to do so, this headline basically says "Microsoft decides to respect the law". Nothing to see here.

<comment><USER7> Microsoft had four options:

1\. Stop distributing the utility

2\. Publish the utility's source code under the GPL

3\. Arrange a separate licensing agreement with the owner of the GPL'd code

4\. Remove the infringing code from their utility

Nothing about the GPL "forces" the infringer to divulge their code -- that's simply one available option.

<comment><USER10> > Nothing about the GPL "forces" the infringer to divulge their code -- that's > simply one available option.

Wrong, as soon as you publish your app publically, you are forced to give the whole source code of that version of the app to anyone who downloaded the binary.

<comment><USER11> No, as soon as you publish your infringing app, your license to distribute the app is terminated. You are not forced to provide your source code, but you are forbidden from further distribution of the GPL part, even if you then publish your own source code as GPL.

If I remember well, in the GPL version 3 there is a mechanism so that if you publish an infringing app but then correct the infringement by publishing the whole source as GPL within a certain number of days, your license to distribute the app is not terminated.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The dev.to search engine is actually pretty damn useful - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/ben/the-devto-search-engine-is-actually-pretty-damn-useful-1ic <comment><USER2> You can't call your own search engine "actually pretty damn useful." That's cheating.</comment>


Mother Jailed For Trying to Put Children Into Better School - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/2011/01/28/133306180/Mother-Jailed-For-School-Fraud-Flares-Controversy <comment><USER2> Misleading title.

The original title was better: "Mother Jailed For School Fraud, Flares Controversy"

Or: Ohio mother Kelley Williams-Bolar was convicted of lying about her residency to get her daughters into a better school district

<comment><USER3> Agree. Lying = fraud = uncool.

<comment><USER4> The situation could have been handled in a more compassionate way than jail. How many wealthy white collar criminals get away with far more fraud (and for strictly selfish reasons to boot) and never see the inside of jail cell?

Given the HUGE disparity between the have and the have-not school districts, one can appreciate the mother's point of view.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> School districts in New Jersey aggressively police residency, using detective at times, though I don't know that it has ever come to the point of a criminal case there. My impression, from an article or two in the NY Times years ago, is that this is not usually a racial matter there.

A more accurate headline might be "Mother Jailed for Providing False Affidavits in Effort to Put Children in Better School."

<comment><USER6> That seems kind of odd to me, here in Hawaii they split the school districts up on each island (the island I'm on has 9). The school I would normally have to attend is terrible, but over here you can simply apply for an exemption, which they almost always grant, and go to almost any school on the island. Are you not allowed to do that in states such as New Jersey?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is why America remains segregated. Rich neighbourhoods send all their children to the same schools, poor neighbourhoods send their children to the same school.

Children should be assigned to schools out of their living zone - then there will be incentive to make all schools nice, and it will break the cycle of poverty.

<comment><USER8> There have been court-ordered busing programs within large American cities to try to deal with racial segregation in particular, though not without controversy. (Riots in Boston in the 1970s, for instance.) However, these are going out of style, and even when in style were usually confined to a single school district (generally, that means a single town or city), in part for legal reasons (Milliken v. Bradley). And they were only intended to address racial segregation, not economic issues.

And there's pretty clearly an effect. There's a large house price premium for schools in a "good" school districts. Here are some (2006, but still relevant) numbers for school districts in Silicon Valley: [http://www.cupertinoschoolscores.com/News/Home_Buyers_Pay_Pr...](http://www.cupertinoschoolscores.com/News/Home_Buyers_Pay_Premium.htm)</comment></comment>


Valve's Approach to Playtesting: The Application of Empiricism (PDF) - <AUTHOR> http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2009/GDC2009_ValvesApproachToPlaytesting.pdf

<comment><USER2> Valve hired a PhD in Psychology to figure out how to make their games more fun? Wow.

</comment><comment><USER3> This looks like it came from the slides of some talk. Is there a video available?</comment>


The case against human rights law - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/news/2014/dec/04/-sp-case-against-human-rights <comment><USER2> I have mixed feelings about this article.

It's quite long, and it uses that length to highlight the problems a universal set of human rights has. He makes some good points about the problems, but nothing that anyone with some familiarity with the area won't already know.

Fine.

Then in the final section, where one might expect some kind of alternative to be proposed he starts talking about development aid, and how that hasn't worked either, and he points out that small-scale, less ambitious projects are often more successful. I think few would disagree with the general thrust of his argument here.

In the very final couple of paragraphs he attempts to say that because large scale aid programs don't work then human rights treaties are "an act of hubris".

I don't think he makes this case very well at all.

Finally - and my biggest criticism - is that he doesn't attempt to provide alternatives to the idea of respect for human rights as a source of moral imperative and authority.

If human rights have failed then that leaves only two main sources of authority: raw power (in the military and economic senses) and religion. I don't find that an acceptable framework to reason with when trying to decipher "good" and "bad".

<comment><USER3> > _In the very final couple of paragraphs he attempts to say that because > large scale aid programs don 't work then human rights treaties are "an act > of hubris"._

The author explained why large scale aid programs don't work - because large scale programs treat foreign cultures like they are western cultures, or aspire to be. Every culture's idea of "human rights" is different. For example, Europe believes the freedom of speech does not extend to libel or defamation. America does. Islamic states don't think freedom of speech extends towards religions.

I agree with the article, and I would go one step further. There is no such thing as human rights. They are just wishful ideals humanity invented.

<comment><USER4> If you base your world view on religion and absolute moral values you may believe that there are real rights but besides that I would assume that most people agree that rights are just human conventions.

<comment><USER5> Interestingly, HN seems to have a large number of people at the intersection of athiesm and absolute moral rights.

<comment><USER6> I believe these are one and the same at the bottom of it all...

When humanity is the ultimate authority and life is finite, rights become of paramount importance. When we start to assume justice or reward in a life to come (or reward in the perfect communist state to come if we just make some sacrifices now...), or we assume a higher unfathomable plan behind every event, or when we start to think that the individual is less important than the congregation, human rights tend to go right out the window. A casual glance back through history seems to show this to be the case.

<comment><USER7> Sure, I mean, the Cultural Revolution, Soviet Dekulakization, the Khmer Rouge genocide... it's a good thing those were areligious genocides. Think of how much worse they could have been.

<comment><USER6> Did you maybe miss an important point in my comment? Communism in those forms is another type of idealistic extremism willing to sacrifice the individual for the "higher purpose". And no surprise... the new religion preaching about the life to come behaves in the same brutal way.

My opinion? There is nothing higher than the individual. No time more important than now. Just my opinion.

<comment><USER7> A rare appearance of the No False Scotsman fallacy.

<comment><USER6> Not a "true Scottsman" fallacy at all.

Organized group brutality appears when the individual becomes less important. If this is because of social ideology, or because of a religion that is in fact a social ideology, the effects are the same.

When these are discarded, the value of the individual re-appears.

<comment><USER7> No, not a "true Scotsman" fallacy. The opposite fallacy: everyone is a Scotsman.

<comment><USER6> Not everyone.

Just those who wear kilts and play bagpipes and come from Scotland. Even if one has red hair and one has black hair.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> By the way, just found out that the author Eric Posner is the son of Richard Posner, a federal judge who recently said that NSA should have unlimited access to our digital data [1]. People don't always share the political views of their parents, but two Posners coming out against rights in the same week gives me the impression that this family isn't particularly fond of our rights.

[1] [http://www.computerworld.com/article/2855206/give-nsa- unlimi...](http://www.computerworld.com/article/2855206/give-nsa-unlimited- access-to-digital-data-says-federal-judge.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> To me, human rights is the primary goal of a true democracy. Elections serve mainly as a controlling factor in shaping the institutions necessary to guarantee these rights. The article somewhat neglects that human rights have to be defended not only against the government, but also against individuals and groups of individuals. A right to property is not worth a lot if you have to stop your neighbor from taking your stuff by shooting him.

But there can only ever be a compromise between these rights. Institutions need taxes to work, but taxes mean taking money away from citizens, violating their rights. A justice system needs to be able to punish offenders. Industry must be regulated to avoid unnecessary deaths and suffering. These balance and compromises are more complicated than any moral high ground.

</comment><comment><USER10> As well as being vague, human rights prioritize actions of the government over those of ordinary people - the high murder rate in America is not a human rights violation (what right could be more true than the right to not be killed?) but the relatively less severe execution rate of political prisoners in many other countries is a human rights violation. I live in a country with poor human rights but very good safety against violent crime. I'd much rather be here than in America where I won't be arrested for complaining about the government but I'm likely to be robbed or threatened with a gun if I walk down the wrong street at night. Different harm caused by different groups but one is a human rights violation and the other is not despite both being ultimately under the control of the government.

The effect of this is America can say "we have good human rights, we don't torture political prisoners" and an authoritarian country can say "We have good security, our people don't kill each other". The latter is usually more directly helpful to more people, but the former has somehow become seen as superior.

<comment><USER8> The reason government actions are often prioritized is that 1) governments have the power to violate human rights more deliberately, systematically, and effectively than most ordinary people, and 2) most people are utterly incapable of defending themselves against governments.

A random thug can violate your rights as much as a government can, but he's probably not doing it systematically, and it's usually much easier for you to protect yourself from his actions. A shotgun will keep random thugs away from your home, but it will do nothing to deter a SWAT team.

Human rights were designed to prevent systematic abuses that victims cannot possibly protect themselves from, such as Hitler's persecution of ethnic minorities. The UDHR of 1948 was a direct response to the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany. The framework of human rights was never intended to protect ordinary people from one another: that's what the police is for.

<comment><USER10> If it's only systematic abuses, then the rogue police torturings in Brazil that the article described would count as "crime" and not be human rights violations. I think it's a grey area between the government allowing it to happen and actively doing it. Is a policeman breaking his rules really worse than a powerful gang? The latter may do more systematic harm and be more inescapable.

<comment><USER4> If you violate national law, it is a crime, otherwise it is a human rights violation. If you violate national law but the law is not enforced, you end up in the grey area. I this case I would say if the state actively looks away it is a human rights violation, if the state is just overwhelmed it remains a crime. This of course again leaves a smaller gray are around looking away because you are overwhelmed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "[before 2001] The United States was a traditional leader in human rights and one of the few countries that has used its power to advance human rights in other nations"

Sure, what about the political and military support for the (very brutal) dictatorships in latin-america in the 70s and 80s?

</comment><comment><USER8> Sorry for the wall of text, but this article exemplifies a lot of things that are wrong with contemporary Western political theory.

> _Given that all governments have limited budgets, protecting one human right > might prevent a government from protecting another._

That's not an excuse to dismantle human rights, only a reason to talk _more_ about how to define and balance competing rights.

Just because it is impossible to protect every right all the time doesn't mean that the rights are not valuable. To take a familiar example, consider the CAP theorem. It is impossible to achieve consistency, availability, and partition tolerance at the same time. But that doesn't mean that we should ditch any or all of them as a goal. We just make do with as much consistency as we can achieve, as much availability as our budget allows, etc. according to our specific needs. As our hardware and software improve, we'll get even better at balancing those three, though we'll never reach perfection.

There's a tendency for philosophically minded people to try and come up with a single, internally consistent set of interpretations and set it up as eternal truth. But politics doesn't work like that. In politics as in database design, you always tinker with this and that, adapt to new material constraints, and make different compromises as you go along.

> _If a government advances one group of rights, while neglecting others, how > does one tell whether it complies with the treaties the best it can or > cynically evades them?_

Philosophically, yeah, that might be a pesky distinction. But in practice, it's often easy to tell when a government is evading its responsibilities instead of trying the damnedest to make do with what's available here and now. Because most governments in evasion mode don't even try to test the alternative.

In the early 1990s, Lee Kuan Yew, the long-time leader of Singapore, made waves in the political philosophy community by arguing against human rights. Naive philosophers took Lee's arguments at face value and tried to construct all sort of elaborate theories in an attempt to respond. After only a few years, however, it became clear that Lee was only trying to justify his own dictatorial rule.

> _China cites "the right to development" to explain why the Chinese > government gives priority to economic growth over political liberalisation._

Just because somebody invokes some right to justify violating some other right doesn't mean that anyone else needs to take them seriously. I'll take China seriously when they can present compelling evidence that "the right to development" is truly, fundamentally, utterly incompatible with the right to criticize the Communist Party. Until then, what they're saying is worth less than cattle manure. (See? They're not even trying.)

Trading human rights against one another is something we should do as a last resort when we really, seriously can't have both after years of trying hard. It's not something that we should accept by default.

> _international human rights law does not require western countries to change > their behaviour, while (in principle) it requires massive changes in the > behaviour of most non-western countries_

Unless you've been living under a rock, it seems that Western countries must change their behavior just as much as others do. Torture and mass surveillance in the United States! Censorship in various EU member states, oh my! No country even comes close to respecting all human rights, and the fact that some score better doesn't mean that the rules are unfair to others.

On the other hand, as a citizen and resident of a very non-Western country, I fully agree that the behavior of my country must undergo "massive changes". Seriously, fuck this authoritarian, chauvinistic, intolerant culture. If it needs to be changed beyond recognition in order for the people of this country to enjoy some human rights, by all means change it. Good riddance, I won't miss it.

> _With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that the human rights treaties > were not so much an act of idealism as an act of hubris..._

With the benefit of hindsight, what I can see is that political theorists are too easily swayed by temporary turns of economic fortune. Do you know what finally made googly-eyed Western philosophers realize that Lee Kuan Yew's criticism of human rights was a load of bullshit? It wasn't any profound philosophical realization, it was the Asian financial crisis of 1997. As soon as the Singaporean economy crashed, nobody gave a damn about what the leader of Singapore had to say about human rights. His economy crashed, so he must be wrong, right? Duh.

Western political theorists are getting nervous these days because China is growing fast. But I wonder what all those professors would say if the Chinese economy crashed tomorrow. Likewise, Western scholars are getting nervous because most of them are good ol' progressives who don't like the U.S. meddling in the Middle East (so far so good), but somehow feel like they need to support their opinions with favorable depictions of those poor, victimized Middle Eastern communities. But wait, you don't need to glorify the victim in order to condemn the aggressor! Go to Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia and ask the women whether they like being oppressed. They're Arabs, so they can't be too hungry for Western-style human rights, right? riiiight?

The recent surge of doubt about human rights among Western scholars is, at best, little more than an extension of white guilt, and at worst, playing into the self-serving rhetoric of rich dictators in China and other developing countries. It does a disservice to the countless non-Western, non-white activists who are risking their lives this very moment to bring free speech, due process, gender equality, and other basic human rights to their own neighbors.

<comment><USER12> Well said. It's not a wall of text, it's an eloquent response.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> John Gray making a similar case: [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25505393](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25505393)

</comment><comment><USER14> What you call human rights is just using force(violence) to make people behave the way you want them to. A democracy is a tyranny of the majority.</comment>


Steve Jobs hired a career juggler to teach programming to developers - <AUTHOR> https://www.cake.co/conversations/w3j7jDp/that-time-steve-jobs-hired-a-career-juggler-to-teach-programming-to-developers <comment><USER3> I particularly like the advice on how to hire:

> 1\. You want to find people with mastery, true depth.

> 2\. The problem is, that isn't enough. You need people who had failed and > recovered. The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure > avoidance.

> 3\. Breadth, meaning curiosity about things beyond what you're deep in.

> 4\. Collaboration. Not a synonym for cooperation, but the ability to magnify > others.

As a separate aside, I didn't realize Apple invested _that_ much in training.

<comment><USER4> I think I have 1, 2, 3 no problems after 35+ years of programming -- I still love it, I still learn stuff, and I'm shockingly experienced in a rather large amount of subfields.

The problems is #4. 1,2,3 are 'easy' given time and someone who's dedicated and actually LOVES that job.

#4 requites _two_ (at least). In my 35y career I can count on the fingers of one hands the time where I really, REALLY "clicked" with someone and we both ran away with it. Needless to say, in all the cases, we still are on each other xmas card list, regardless of time/space.

But that's the scary bit, to really, REALLY "collaborate" you need someone who's already pretty much 'there' on the 1,2,3 listed there, and the chance of meeting someone like that is low. I don't say it's 'rare', I say it's 'low' and if you factor other things like personality, lifestyle and so on, it makes it actually 'rare'...

I _treasure_ the people I can collaborate with, because it's magic. It's like, as a musician, when you jam and the band just 'gels' and stuff starts happening, it gives you a little shiver in the spine area that is unique.

But hell, it's rare.

<comment><USER5> Maybe the true measure of having #4 is being someone who can magnify others who don't already possess all these traits.

<comment><USER6> I'm no master, but IME #4 involves a kind of "playing dumb" until the people involved sync up. Kind of like tutoring, but for your working style, and in the practice of bedside manner (which is already rare in general). #4 also necessarily involves a sublimation of ego, the likelihood of which among masters of #1,2,3 is left as an exercise for the reader.

<comment><USER7> I think 1-4 are ordered the way they are by priority.

That makes me extremely uncomfortable because I feel like in my career I've been a master in the reverse order, 4-1.

This could explain the unusual paths that I've taken, but I still feel like I'm a long way from reaching my full potential while still in my mid-30s.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Yeah, I remember Randy. After we got enough complaints about the classes he was delivering we assigned technical people to sit in every class with him. I'm sorry, but I've developed curriculum and taught technical classes - <USER2> those were some of the worst classes I've ever seen. Everybody was confused, and the instruction was really just a show from a juggler who had memorized a bunch of facts from the doc. Yes, he got great reviews - but students had no idea how much they didn't learn. I think I was the only technical staff there with a real Training background - so nobody understood the obvious - successful training involves skill transfer. Students left after hearing lots and lots of facts about NeXTStep and OOP, but without any real teaching happening. Sadly, this is a lot like most current training, since most companies don't hire people who can actually decompose complex topics and make them teachable and create sequenced labs which can develop real skills. Companies equate presentations with Training.

But that was a long time ago. Hopefully he has worked with real Trainers since then, and figured out how to get beyond the pure showmanship.

<comment><USER9> >how to get beyond the pure showmanship.

That was the lesson.

Put on a show, and people will spend money.

Real life example- Cousin got a Macbook Air for Christmas, was shocked to see it had 0 USB ports.

She was uninformed and bought a product she didnt want. This is Apple's target demographic.

<comment><USER10> There are two USB-C ports. If she returned it due to a pure hatred of dongles, I would be surprised.

<comment><USER11> "What do you mean, I need to plug it in? It's portable, I don't want that dongle sticking out."

This old joke still has it's place:

[https://www.boredpanda.com/car-computer-support-humor-jon- pa...](https://www.boredpanda.com/car-computer-support-humor-jon- parise/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The lesson of juggling is this:

A juggler has to often fail thousands of times before he is capable of learning a trick. While some people can pick up the three ball cascade easily, it's rare to find one that can do a 9 ball cascade, because of the years of practice it takes to build up to just being able to attempt it.

We don't want people to experience failure, but the sad fact is that we need it to grow. 5 years ago I was a typical software engineer who was fired because my boss didn't like me. Now I fly across the country and work with companies helping them with their SaaS issues.

<comment><USER13> As a coincidence, today I was feeling down, looking over every major failure I had experienced in my life. This comment cheered me up!

I'm glad that you have found independence, bosses who pick on employees over personal traits aren't worth it :) Hoping I can do something similar one day.

<comment><USER12> Thanks for the comment. Failures are just really inflection points in your life, and that's really all that they are. The key thing is to keep perspective. Everyone fails, and at some point, and you have to pick yourself up and dust yourself off.

The major benefit out of that debacle, is that I used to live in fear about being fired. Now I don't. And there's a tremendous amount of freedom that brings.

As my wife says, I have this uncanny ability to always land on my feet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Great! Now let's add a juggling performance to whiteboard interviews.

<comment><USER15> Plate Spinning is another excellent skill for software developers to be able to demonstrate live at job interviews.

The trick to successfully managing a lot of projects at the same time, as well as spinning plates, is to only try to spin one up at a time. Once it's up and spinning, you can hop back and forth between spinning projects as needed to give them a little more energy and balance. But it's much more difficult to start several of them spinning at once!

Erich Brenn "Plate Spinning" on The Ed Sullivan Show:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zhoos1oY404](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zhoos1oY404)

It also helps to show how you can recover from errors gracefully:

Charlie Callas Spinning Plates:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FK4nh5I0jpE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FK4nh5I0jpE)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> All things aside, I found the concept of Cake to be really fitting for these types of posts/conversations. Whomever made it and got traction for it -- good job!

<comment><USER17> The author of this post (Chris MacAskill) is the co-founder and CEO of Cake. I was kind of wondering how it's possible to have this kind of insightful post on such a niche platform and figured out it was the founder himself feeding it. He seems to post quite a lot if you look at his profile.

<comment><USER18> Remember Victoria Taylor, Reddit famous for being in charge of AMAs? She joined Cake a couple weeks ago to get conversations going with fascinating people there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance.

Can anyone expand on this? So far my biggest failure has been unmaintainable spaghetti code.)

<comment><USER20> You don't get from zero to one by making a perfect plan and then following it. You get there by making a workable plan, starting on it, then re-evaluating constantly and updating the plan as circumstances change and new information becomes available. It's a constant process of error recovery and responding to circumstance in order to keep the end goal attainable.

The code equivalent would be refactoring as you go to keep your code maintainable at all times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> My daughter (13) is a juggler. I am not. I'll just leave this here.

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

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

</comment><comment><USER22> Should developers also teach juggling to professional jugglers?

</comment><comment><USER23> > Susan Kare, the first artist hired in the computer industry

Citation? This seems like an unbelievable claim. At the very least, PARC must have had an artist on the payroll.

<comment><USER24> Why must they have? Part of what distinguished the Mac GUI from PARC's is the former's refinement, elegance, and whimsy, contributed in large part by Kare.

<comment><USER25> Yet they did, in the person of David Em: [https://ohiostate.pressbooks.pub/graphicshistory/chapter/9-6...](https://ohiostate.pressbooks.pub/graphicshistory/chapter/9-6-david- em/)

<comment><USER18> Good find. I wonder if Andy Hertzfeld said one of the first and I misquoted him.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I developed the curriculum for and then taught the first Pixar University course for newly hired Technical Directors (10 weeks, full time, from day 1 when you started). That was probably around the Summer of 1996 as the studio was growing rapidly to staff up for A Bugs Life. Randy joined some short time after to help grow PU from the 2 new-hire courses (technical and animation) into the much broader curriculum that it has grown into over the subsequent 20 years. I was a close friend of Randy's then, and still consider him one. He is an amazing person in many ways. And when my wife and I got married in 2001, he was the master of ceremonies at our wedding. :-)

</comment><comment><USER15> Randy Nelson is awesome and brilliant! He deeply understands programming, teaching, performance and entertainment, and is really great to work with and learn from. I was very lucky that we worked together on ScriptX at Kaleida Labs, where he was in charge of training developers to program ScriptX. Yes, of course, he would actually juggle in class!

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

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

[https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/lang/scriptx/scriptx...](https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/lang/scriptx/scriptx.html)

This old poorly compressed ScriptX propaganda video is embarrassingly cheesy, but it shows John Wainwright (who went on to wrote MaxScript for 3D Studio Max) and Randy Nelson explaining dynamic composition by juggling objects, at 6:28! I love his lucid explanation and delightful motivation of object oriented programming.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fbWCHXl5W8&t=6m28s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fbWCHXl5W8&t=6m28s)

Here's an article "ScriptX and the World Wide Web" that I wrote around 1995 describing the possibilities of integrating ScriptX with the World Wide Web -- kinda like what kids these days call "AJAX":

>"Link Globally, Interact Locally"

[https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/lang/scriptx/scriptx...](https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/lang/scriptx/scriptx- www.html)

My job was writing code, documentation and white papers to demonstrate ScriptX programming and capabilities for developers, which Randy would explain in class. Dynamic composition of interactive downloadable multimedia objects was something that Java just couldn't do at the time, so I develop some demos to illustrate what the point of all that was, and to prove the possibilities of distributing interactive multimedia objects via the web in 1995.

One demo of dynamic plug-together composition of downloadable objects that I developed was the "ScriptX Pizza Demo". It distributed separate pizza crusts and topping objects in ScriptX Bento "title containers" that you could download and plug together into an interactive pizza. To demonstrate interactive behavior, you could drag the individual toppings around on the crust, and it featured spinning "eyeball" pizza toppings (inspired by Jeremy Huxtable's "NeWS Big Brother", which was also the inspiration of xeyes, of course.)

>ScriptX Pizza Demo

>The ScriptX Pizza Demo, at "[http://www.kaleida.com/official/pizza"](http://www.kaleida.com/official/pizza"), lets you construct a pizza by plugging together ScriptX objects from several title containers delivered via the World Wide Web. First you select a pizza crust in one title container, then you can select any number of pizza toppings in separate title containers. They're dynamically loaded into the KMP and locally composed in a window, that you can interact with by dragging the toppings around on the crust. There's even a "big brother" spinning eyeball topping, that animates as you move your cursor around the screen!

>This demonstrates network distribution of cross platform code and media, with local interactivity, direct manipulation, animation, dynamic binding, and plugging together objects from different containers.

>There is an extension to ScriptX on the Mac that enables it to ask NetScape to open any URL, so ScriptX can cause NetScape to display a web page, load another title container, and even send messages to interactive web services (like submitting an order for a pizza).

>ScriptX Web developers will go far beyond mere pizza toppings, publishing innovative interactive experiences on the network, no longer limited to the static text, graphics, and forms of HTML.

>Benefits of ScriptX to Web Developers

>As a general purpose object-oriented multimedia scripting language, ScriptX has many uses for web developers. It can import and export various file formats, index, search and manipulate multimedia databases, automatically generate HTML from macros and templates, draw and composite images and produce corresponding image maps, and serve as an open ended programmable hypermedia synthesizer.

You could think of it as a simpler but network distributed componentized version of PizzaTool, which I developed earlier at Sun:

[https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-story-of-sun- microsystems...](https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-story-of-sun-microsystems- pizzatool-2a7992b4c797)

Here's the documentation for the ScriptX web module, which let you use ScriptX as a server-side scripting engine via WebStar, in conjunction with a client- side scripting engine as a Netscape helper app, to dynamically (and pre-) generate html and title containers for users to download, plug together, and play with in the ScriptX Kaleida Media Player helper app.

Having the same scripting language on both the client and server (like JavaScript in the browser + node on the server), and dynamically generating and downloading interactive persistent objects and HTML, are all pretty common and boring clichés now, but it was exciting and needed to be explained and demonstrated with a working proof-of-concept in 1995:

[https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/lang/scriptx/web.htm...](https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/lang/scriptx/web.html)

>This is the documentation for the ScriptX Web module. The Web module is a toolkit for integrating ScriptX with World Wide Web browsers, generating HTML, and implementing interactive services and distributed multimedia authoring tools.

Here's an illustrated transcript and video of a live improvisational ScriptX demo that I gave at the 1995 Apple World Wide Developers Conference -- you can see how Randy inspired me to improvise crazy live performance art by the seat of my pants!

[https://medium.com/@donhopkins/1995-apple-world-wide- develop...](https://medium.com/@donhopkins/1995-apple-world-wide-developers- conference-kaleida-labs-scriptx-demo-64271dd65570)

>To make any sense of this, you should realize that it's live improvisational performance programming art. The graphical and audio artwork are just ugly placeholder "programmer art". The references to "great content" are laughably ironic!

ScriptX may have failed in the market and lost out to Python, Java and JavaScript, and Steve Jobs finally said "No" to it, but I sure learned a lot and recovered from the mistakes, I continue applying the lessons to later work, and I had great fun working with Randy Nelson!

[https://medium.com/@donhopkins/focusing-is-about-saying- no-s...](https://medium.com/@donhopkins/focusing-is-about-saying-no-steve- jobs-wwdc-97-ff0174c171d0)

>"Focusing is about saying no." -Steve Jobs, WWDC '97. As sad as it was, Steve Jobs was right to "put a bullet in OpenDoc's head". Jobs explained (and performed) his side of the story in this fascinating and classic WWDC'97 video: "Focusing is about saying no."

<comment><USER27> Oh hey, I'd forgotten you wrote pizzatool! Do you wish ScriptX had been free software?

<comment><USER15> Oh, of course I wish Apple and IBM had made it free!

But it included Apple's "crown jewels", the QuickTime player source code, and they were't going to give that away in 1995. Apple were even trepidatious about IBM having access to that source code.

Besides having proprietary decoders, it could also do some things you can't even do well with the Flash player or html video component today: like smoothly playing videos and music backwards!

Ever since the music industry switched from vinyl to CD, listening to demonic backmasking in Devil Music like the Beatles and Led Zeppelin's promotion of Satanism became much less convenient. ScriptX solved that important problem elegantly with its synchronized clock system, but today's HTML video player still hasn't, alas.

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

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BDh_j5qAJ4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BDh_j5qAJ4)

Here's a description of ScriptX's clock system:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18350511](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18350511)

>Kaleida Lab's ScriptX (a multimedia programing language kinda like Dylan with classes) had built-in support for hierarchal clocks within the container (in the sense of "window" not "vm") hierarchy. The same way every window or node has a 2D or 3D transformation matrix, each clock has a time scale and offset relative to its parent, so anything that consumes time (like a QuickTime player, or a simulation) runs at the scaled and offset time that it inherits from through its parent containers. And you can move and scale each container around in time as necessary, to pause movies or simulations.) You could even set the scale to a negative number, and it played QuickTime movies backwards! (That was pretty cool in 1995 -- try playing a movie backwards in the web browser today!)

Is it possible to play HTML5 video in reverse?

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5277293/is-it- possible-t...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5277293/is-it-possible-to- play-html5-video-in-reverse)

Kinda, but it's not smooth enough to sing along while dancing backwards and worshiping Satan to:

[https://codepen.io/adrianparr/pen/qmCek](https://codepen.io/adrianparr/pen/qmCek)

<comment><USER27> Yeah, I remember het AVI porn in the early 1990s where time alternated between forward and backward, thus providing an infinite video in only a few frames. (Probably it would have been more realistic with a sinusoidal rather than triangle-wave temporal waveform.)

I think there's a lot of space for experimentation here, generating video as an arbitrary three-dimensional slice of a potentially higher-dimensional space — like how horse-race photo-finish cameras map one vertical spatial dimension and one temporal dimension into two spatial dimensions for the photo, or how Julia-set animations map two of the dimensions of the four-dimensional Julibrot onto screen space while mapping a smooth path through the other two dimensions onto time. I've gotten some stunning still images by taking even fixed horizontal or vertical slices through video, but you could also do things like delay one side of the picture more than the other, or foreshadow future action by curving part of the frame into a timelike angle through the source material. It might be difficult to record a source video with more than one temporal dimension _with a camera_ , but you can certainly do it with ray- tracing or other rendering techniques.

Presumably if you want to play a video backward with a modern codec, you need to buffer up decoded P-frames in memory from at least the previous I-frame — much like iterating backwards over the lines in a file, except that each "character" is a megabyte or two of YUV pixels. Should be totally feasible on a modern cellphone, even for aggressive modern formats that only have I-frames every few seconds… but it would be nothing short of a miracle in 1995! I guess MPEG-2 didn't exist yet, so maybe MPEG-1 with N=18, M=2 was the worst case you'd need to handle at that point? That should only require a 10-P-and-I- frame buffer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Here's Randy in action demoing OOP in NeXTSTEP Interface Builder (1:17 in):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fr82oJHUCzw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fr82oJHUCzw)

<comment><USER29> Brings back memories.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I only looked because of my fondness for this video that uses juggling to good effect to teach math in an entertaining way:

[https://youtu.be/GNKFSpJIBO0](https://youtu.be/GNKFSpJIBO0)

</comment><comment><USER31> Absolutely makes sense if it doesn't make sense to you you should look for pictures of Claude Shannon juggling on the unicycle, if you want to learn to juggle or ride a unicycle pee free to contact me to get your toys and your lessons. www.flowjuggle.com

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm getting a 301 on cake.co

(Firefox 64 on Fedora from India)

<comment><USER33> [https://www.cake.co](https://www.cake.co)? http/https cake.co gives a 301 to www from California but that's about it.

I assume you wouldn't post about it if the 301 didn't have a location, but you don't mention it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Steve Jobs also tried to cure his cancer with acupuncture and woo.

<comment><USER9> I don't see Apple as anything other than a successful marketing company.

Their software and hardware are not better than their competitors. At best, they are on-par with the best.

Not surprising given the enormous cost. Easy-Cheap-Good. Pick 2. Easy and Good.

Should anyone praise Apple for anything outside their marketing department?

<comment><USER34> It's hard to argue that they have not made some of the most important inventions of the past 100 years: \- A personal computer that people could afford (Apple II) \- Nice GUIs, window based operating system, etc for the masses (Macintosh) \- Best designed MP3 player (iPod) \- the first smartphone that people liked (iPhone)

Yes, a lot of these were inspired by prior work but iPhone still brought critical (often 10x) advances to each one—lowering the cost of the Apple II, designing a touch screen interface that worked, etc.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: If tech cares about diversity, where's the discussion about civil rights - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> If you're looking for discussion between empathetic folks, this ain't the place. Discussions like that tend to be flagged for being too political, or they get ratholed in reinventing the wheel from idealistic first principles.</comment>


VMWare offers pure open-source Kubernetes, no chaser - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/vmware-offers-pure-open-source-kubernetes-no-chaser/ <comment><AUTHOR> Quote FTA:

      So, no matter how your company plans
      to deploy Kubernetes, VMware wants
      to be there.  VMware could have
      treated Kubernetes as a threat.
      After all, VMware made its billions
      on the older virtual machine (VM)
      technology. VMware isn't doing that.

I was surprised they'd be bold enough to make such a statement outright. I'm keen to learn how this strategy pans out.</comment>


Google Chrome doesn't want you to visit google.com securely - <AUTHOR> http://devcentral.f5.com/weblogs/Joe/archive/2008/09/05/google-chrome-doesnt-want-you-to-visit-google.com-securely.aspx <comment><USER2> The author is clueless about how SSL works. Barring the newer TLS extensions (RFC 3546), you can only have one virtual hostname per IP address when using SSL. So if the same host IP respondes to www.foo.com and www.bar.com, you'll only be able to get a SSL certificate for one.

The same things happens if you go to e.g. <https://paypal.com>

You can get around that to some degree with wildcard SSL certificates, so you can have *.bar.com served from the same IP. The newer EV certs can't have wildcards however.

<comment><USER3> Doesn't matter how clueless he is, perception=reality when it comes to users.

<comment><USER4> Typical users aren't clever enough to be this stupid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This one seems like another traffic bait, Chrome has nothing to do with the HTTPS setup of google.com.

</comment><comment><USER6> Actually it seems like he's identified a bug with chrome and redirects. Going to <https://google.com> in firefox results in a 302 redirect to <http://google.com>.</comment>


Elon Musk gave assistant 2-week test when she asked for raise, and she failed - <AUTHOR> http://boingboing.net/2017/08/09/elon-musk-gave-assistant-2-wee.html <comment><USER2> The question to actually ask is, does he still do all of this stuff himself?

If the answer is no then he failed, not her. If the answer is yes, then he still failed, not her. He failed in the simple fact that for 12 years he did not value what she was doing for him, in his stead.

<comment><USER3> He probably just started looking at his Outlook calendar directly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Probably this is the reason why he is so paranoid about AI. With the tools & stuff & robos & what not, people are getting useless.

</comment><comment><USER3> That's awesome.</comment>


Petition Asks Siri and Alexa to Flip the Script on Sexual Harassment - <AUTHOR> https://venturebeat.com/2017/12/08/petition-asks-siri-and-alexa-to-flip-the-script-on-sexual-harassment/ <comment><AUTHOR> Can you sexually harass a machine or software? I'm not sure treating them like people is such a good road to go down. We're not even talking replicants, just dumb apps.

</comment><comment><USER2> But but having Ok google read out definitions from urban dictionary is hilarious. I recommend asking google what an angry dragon is.</comment>


Ask HN: How would governments respond to Covid-19 under a Bitcoin standard? - <AUTHOR> This is purely a hypothetical question. If we were living under a Bitcoin standard, how would the governments around the world try to tackle the economic crisis due to COVID-19? Would governments, corporations, and individuals need savings beforehand? Since printing money would not be an option, what other solutions could be used? <comment><USER2> I think under a Bitcoin standard the crisis would be much smaller as there would be much less debt and frivolity. companies would have savings as they should instead of buying back stock counting on a government bailout. Nic Carter wrote a great article with very persuasive arguments here [https://www.coindesk.com/corporate-america-knows-the- bailout...](https://www.coindesk.com/corporate-america-knows-the-bailout-is- baked-in)</comment>


Decoding the Brain – should electronics mimic biology? - <AUTHOR> http://semiengineering.com/decoding-the-brain/ <comment><AUTHOR> How will decoding the brain of a fruit fly help us build better computers? Lou Scheffer says we have a long way to go before electronics catches up with image recognition, but other do not think it is the right approach.</comment>


China has had a telescope on the moon for the past two years - <AUTHOR> https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn28323-china-has-had-a-telescope-on-the-moon-for-the-past-two-years/ <comment><AUTHOR> mirror:

[https://google.com/search?q=cache:https://www.newscientist.c...](https://google.com/search?q=cache:https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn28323-china- has-had-a-telescope-on-the-moon-for-the-past-two-years/)</comment>


How To Pick A Good Domain Name - <AUTHOR> http://www.socialbias.com/how-to-pick-a-good-domain-name/ <comment><USER2> I am going through this process at the minute and some of the techniques I have used are:

1) _Putting your name into a common phrase:_

Because I am doing a start-up which involves searching and finding information, I imagine using a name in the following phrases:

"Just _______ it"; "_______ search it"; "_______ it"; "Look on ______"; "Have you searched _______?"; "Have you looked on _______?"; "It's on ________"; "Just use ________"; "I use ________"; "Powered by _______";

2) _Only use words that have two or three syllables:_

Names like Google and Amazon work because they only have two to three syllables, making them more memorable and punchier. Having more syllables soon makes the name forgettable and easily misspelt; having one syllable lacks emphasis.

3) _Pick a name that has no direct relevance to your business and from which the focus of your business cannot be guessed; but do base it on something that sounds remotely real or familiar_ :

This is for a number of reasons. First, it allows you to easily move out of your current business area and into different ones; e.g. if Amazon called itself 'The Bookstore' then their ability to sell CD's, household appliances and web services might have been hampered because people will think that a bookstore won't be able to sell web services very well. Second, having a name that is too obviously related to the type of business your in makes it harder to get a trade mark (at least in the UK it does). Another example would be the mobile phone net work Orange because 'Orange' has nothing to do with phones, just like 'Amazon' has nothing to do with books, but both make people think "Amazon/Orange? What do they do?". Third, basing it on something that is remotely real or familiar adds a bit if credibility and doesn't immediately alienate people - Amazon is a river and forest, Orange is a colour and Google is a real number. Even names like Zoho trigger an association to something real since it sounds similar to Soho, which is a place in London.

4) _Don't use names that can be easily mispronounced:_

Mispronounced names can lead to misunderstanding and misspelling, which, in turn, can lead to frustration for the user. If you do pick a name that can be easily mispronounced, just misspell it intentionally in order to force the reader to pronounce it properly, e.g. is 'reileigh' supposed pronounced ree- lee, ree-lay, ray-lee, ray-lay - which ever it is, spell it phonetically. If you have to tell people how to say your name, then it's probably not a good name.

I think that's all for now. And no, I haven't found a good name yet!

</comment><comment><USER3> On Michael's final point: "And most importantly, once you've picked your name, NEVER FREAKING CHANGE IT"

I have personal experience with this. I joined a startup called TradeAccess. They changed the name and re-branded to Ozro. They closed their doors summer of 2001.

I won't say the name change was the cause of demise, but I can't say it did any good either.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, even though you can set up redirects, the dilution on the brand you've spent so much time building is quite substantial. I went through this on a site I was managing, and it wasn't only a huge distraction, it took the brand in a direction I didn't necessarily agree with.

I'd guess that sticking with a decent name is better than changing to a marginally better one, as your experience suggests...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> On 6 "No unintended meanings" I knew someone who had a t-shirt with "hug therapist" on it.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'd say number 4 "Keyword Value - a domain with a great keyword in it can be extremely beneficial for SEO purposes" is most important since people are probably becoming more comfortable typing in a company name at google instead of their domain name. I no longer bother with the address bar.

</comment><comment><USER2> A whole new world has just opened: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=190581>

</comment><comment><USER5> I honestly expected to click this link and see a ton of information any bozo could figure out after a Google search but this was worth it.

</comment><comment><USER6> Two tools - flickr storm and a thesaurus. There are still lots of great domain ideas out there.

<comment><USER7> Do you care to offer your services to help other startups pick cool domain names? I find this to be difficult.

<comment><USER6> Well, picking a domain name is a sort of brainstorming session kind of thing. If you want, I'll help you brainstorm, but then you gotta pay my normal consulting fee :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I apologize in advance if anyone here owns eatbabies.com -- I didn't mean to insult you.</comment>


Bernanke Says U.S. Economy Faces a 'Wile E. Coyote' Moment in 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-07/bernanke-says-u-s-economy-faces-wile-e-coyote-moment-in-2020 <comment><USER2> The combination of tax repatriation, tax cuts, and large-scale deficit spending (fiscal expansion) late in the economic cycle (recessions typically happen every 8 years or so, and the current expansion has been going on for ~10 yrs now) while the Federal reserve is raising interest rates (monetary 'contraction') is more or less unprecedented (we've never seen it happen in modern times in the US or any other large developed economy).

The risk is that fiscal policy is pouring more fuel on the fire at the precise time when the economy typically starts slowing, further inflating asset bubbles and making the Fed's job (to avoid inflation and keep employment high) much potentially harder and making it more likely a misstep will happen.

Popping bubbles or slowing their formation is inherently a tricky proposition (just look at the run-up in stocks from early 2017 until now); move too aggressively and you risk sparking a liquidity crisis and plunging your economy directly into recession; move too slowly and you end up with an even larger bubble later on to deal with.

This is tricky in normal times, but doing so while the other wing of government is actively stimulating the economy makes it _much_ harder to gauge the impact of monetary policy and withdraw Fed support in a prudent and measured way.

<comment><USER3> The so called business cycle is created by the FED itself. Left uncontrolled, the market will disconnect from reality and create bubbles that can destroy the economy, as it did in 1929. The unrecognized work of the FED is to increase the interest rates periodically to force these bubbles to pop and create a minor recession before they can collapse the economy. The real risk of this cycle is that the FED has already lost the opportunity to contain a major bubble which is already forming in the stock market.

<comment><USER4> Business cycles have been around longer than the FED and in countries where it doesn't operate. Hence it probably didn't create them all. The FED tries to moderate the cycles I guess.

<comment><USER5> The "Tulip Bubble" of 1630's is arguably the first speculative bubble. No FED back then. Maybe the FED affects the timing and depth of the business cycle, but probably cannot prevent all "bubbles"...Unless, maybe you give the FED a clue-stick to use on stupid investors.

<comment><USER6> The historical view of tulip speculation has changed a lot in the last 20 years, but popular conception has not caught up.

In a nutshell, it is now believed by several researchers to have been a very narrow phenomenon with minimal impact to the national economy. Per Wikipedia

"While Mackay's account held that a wide array of society was involved in the tulip trade, Goldgar's study of archived contracts found that even at its peak the trade in tulips was conducted almost exclusively by merchants and skilled craftsmen who were wealthy, but not members of the nobility.[44] Any economic fallout from the bubble was very limited."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania#Modern_views](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania#Modern_views)

Taken at face value, this suggests that the tulip "bubble" was dramatically different from either the dotcom or the mortgage bubble, which had wide ranging participation and damage. One could argue that the latter two would have been impossible without the Fed.

<comment><USER5> Economies ran slower in those days so it's hard to compare. But the principle of hype and me-too-ism was present in the Tulip incident even if it didn't spill over to other economic areas. Whether human nature breaks big gizmos or small gizmos, it's still human nature at play. The FED did not make people pay way too much for silly dot-coms.

But bubbles continued. I wonder if one can make a case that pre-FED bubbles were notably smaller than post-FED bubbles, factoring in the fact that the nature of modern economies may magnify bubbles. In other words, if there is a continuous upward slope to the size of bubbles from the 1600's up to now, then it would appear FED made no significant difference. But if there is a spike or jump when FED formed, it could mean they magnify them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _"The economy is already at full employment."_

I'm not sure that's _actually_ true. Yes, the govt. reported "official" unemployment number is 3.8% or whatever. BUT... that comes with a couple of big, big caveats:

1\. Those numbers by definition don't include job-seekers who have left the market and quit being job-seekers. IOW, people who became so despondent that they gave up. But, there's nothing specific that stops these people (or some portion of them) from re-entering the job market to fill demand.

2\. These numbers don't reflect _underemployment_ where someone has "a job" but the job doesn't require the skills the individual actually possesses and pays significantly less than they would expect to earn in a "normal" position.

3\. Wage growth is still very low, which suggests that the economy is not being hamstrung (yet) by lack of available workers. At some point, if demand exceeds supply by enough, you're inevitably going to see wage growth. A significant jump in wages would, IMO, be the best sign that there's an actual gap between labor supply and labor demand.

Note that I'm not saying that Bernanke's theory is wrong, but this one little point jumped out to be as something that's at least somewhat questionable.

<comment><USER8> But problems 1 and 2 are the same for the official unemployment metric in times past as well.

1\. If the person has stopped looking for a job, their likelihood of resuming their job-seeking is pretty low. That's especially true for the unusually large aging baby-boomer population who are taking an early retirement rather than seeking re-employment.

2\. While that's clearly another indicator of the strength of the job market, it is hard to argue that no job is better than a job which isn't ideal for skill/pay reasons. If you have a suggestion on how to accurately measure this that'd be great.

Who knew that a single number was insufficient to measure something as complex as employment? Yeah, we need to look at the larger picture, but it's hard to say we have exceptionally low unemployment AND that this is a good time for a stimulus.

<comment><USER7> _But problems 1 and 2 are the same for the official unemployment metric in times past as well._

Absolutely. Don't get me wrong... I'm not arguing for or against any specific policy in the post above, or making any particular claim regarding Bernanke's argument. I just wanted to point out that saying "we're at full employment" is _at least a little bit_ questionable as an assertion, at least if we take "full employment" to represent a situation where lack of available labor represents a threat to the economy, vis-a-vis other policy issues.

Maybe I'm just picking nits with this observation, but that jumped out me for some reason, when I was reading the article.

<comment><USER9> But "full employment" is widely considered to be a sub 5.0% unemployment rate.

> at least if we take "full employment" to represent a situation where lack of > available labor represents a threat to the economy, vis-a-vis other policy > issues.

I believe that there are officially fewer unemployed people than there are open jobs in the US [1]. Not sure if that's the kind of "threat" you're looking for, but it qualifies, as a risk at least.

[1] [http://money.cnn.com/2017/06/06/news/economy/us-job- openings...](http://money.cnn.com/2017/06/06/news/economy/us-job- openings-6-million/index.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> 2020: policies put in place under this administration will come home to roost during the next administration, which will get the blame.

This lag between economic policy and outcomes is a big reason the US has such a disingenuous public debate. Getting what you can in the short term, while being deceptive about long term effects, has become a good strategy. [1]

[1] [https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/12/18/opinion/republicans- ta...](https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/12/18/opinion/republicans-tax-cuts- rich.html) "The essence of this strategy is to take tax policy out of the hands of experts and entrust it to activists. These campaigns do not usually have much credibility with card-carrying economists. "

<comment><USER11> " 2020: policies put in place under this administration will come home to roost during the next administration, which will get the blame."

That has often been the case. Bush suffered through Clinton's internet bubble. then Obama suffered through Bush's real estate bubble. Trump now benefits from Obama's policies. We'll see what happens after Trump.

<comment><USER12> Trump benefits from Obama's policies by reversing them.

<comment><USER13> It's startling what the growth on my 401k has done since November 2016. Essentially flat for years before, then immediately jumping, once the election results were in. Q1 2018 was a bit sluggish, but it's back on that tragectory again.

Even outside the market, people are hiring again, companies are making investments, it's a hell of a turn around.

<comment><USER14> "People are hiring again", any data to back this up? BLS seems to disagree:

\- The United States added almost 3 million jobs in 2014, 2.7 million in 2015 and 2.2 million in 2016.

\- The U.S. economy added 2 million jobs in 2017

[http://money.cnn.com/2018/01/05/news/economy/december-2017-j...](http://money.cnn.com/2018/01/05/news/economy/december-2017-jobs- report/index.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Ben Bernanke's point in his recent memoir is that central banks can only do so much.

At the end of the day, monetary policy is not social change, moral evolution, or political coalition building. These things happen outside the Central Banking system and are just as important for a functioning economy.

I know this sounds controversial, but at this point quite frankly the deficit does not matter. There is so much debt in the world, we are likely heading towards a global debt write-off.

It doesn't help that China has essentially been spewing entirely fictitious accounting numbers for the last 20 years. It's not even about padding an extra 10-15% anymore. There are journal articles out there claiming that Alibaba, a company as big as Oracle, is making up _whole cloth_ 95% of it's accounting statements. Ridiculous...

<comment><USER16> > global debt write-off

This would also be a global abolition of the private pension system, FYI.

People keep talking about debt write-off, but interest rates are bouncing off the lower bound. These are difficult to reconcile.

<comment><USER17> Well... the low interest rates mean that we can borrow large amounts and be able to afford the interest payments. "Large amounts", as in, more than we can comfortably pay back the principle on. But we're doing OK because the rates are low.

One day the rates will (probably) rise. At that point, it will be more painful even to pay the interest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I have a question about the federal funds rate that I haven't ever had a good explanation for. It is: To what extent is the fed funds rate set to match market demand, and to what extent is it controlled completely independently of market demands? If anyone has a good answer, I would appreciate it a lot.

To flesh out my question a little further, let's say that the fed decides one day to change the fed funds rate from 1.75% to 2%. They put the bonds up for auction and find out that they were only able to auction off the allotment of bonds at an effective rate of 1.8%. Is this typical? Or is it usually the case that the bond buyers will quickly hoover up whatever rate they are given?

Maybe a more formal way to put it- is the elasticity of demand for these bonds low enough for the fed to have complete control over the fed funds rate such that they can set any interest rate they desire?

<comment><USER19> The fed rate commonly publicized isn't a bond rate. It's like the rate on a personal checking account. It can vary at the fed's desire. See [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_funds_rate](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_funds_rate).

Changing that rate does cause impacts on the rest of interest rates (e.g. bonds), though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Remember that economists have predicted 15 of the last 7 recessions. Hold on to your hats.

<comment><USER21> > predicted 15 of the last 7 recessions

Did you mean to say 17 instead of 7?

<comment><USER22> I don't think so. He's basically saying there is always somebody saying the economy will collapse and there are always people saying the economy is going to be stronger than ever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> My inner skeptic asks: What is Bernanke's record on predictions that he has made in the past?

He said that subprime was "contained" in 2008, IIRC.

The Mises Institute (an avowed hater of the Fed) has this, for example: [https://mises.org/library/ben-bernanke-was-incredibly- uncann...](https://mises.org/library/ben-bernanke-was-incredibly-uncannily- wrong)

<comment><USER11> Yes, in 2008 he didn't see the problems right in his face. He was supposed to be a great scholar of the Great Depression but seemed to have learned nothing from it. Maybe he has learned from his own crisis...

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> It's quite an old trick in the book for any administration, whichever color it has, to try to push the can down the road until it gets re-elected. After that, it's buyer beware.

Something to consider is that in times like these money are flowing in the wrong direction, instead of going from developed countries (US, EU, JP) to developing countries with better return rates (Emerging markets) it is the other way around, going into developed countries estates, bonds and stocks even with low returns which look already overvalued. That would normally read that there is way more liquidity than actual growth and the valuations are not accurate.

<comment><USER25> With recent earnings, the stock market isn't very inflated. We have a long way to go until "bubbled-up"

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The Fed has been used as a stop gap to fix incompetent/malicious policies driven by political actors. The reality is that central banks can only do so much, and Congress and others are leading the nation off a cliff to pursue short term political goals.

Beating the other team in the short term is seen as more important than the long term health of the nation. You can see this play out in the tax cut, deficit spending and many other examples.

> Who cares if the world explodes in 6 years? I need to be reelected in 2.

</comment><comment><USER27> This is just another reminder to always have emergency funds in your bank account, not tied into the markets. Allows you to weather the storm, until things correct themselves.

<comment><USER28> How does savings in a bank account help you weather inflation?

<comment><USER29> The poster's sentiment is correct is saying that it's a good idea to have low- risk resources available as a safety net. However I'd say having physical things like items you know you'll need in the future, or food storage, would be more valuable than having cash. Inflation wouldn't hurt the value of a computer or food you already own. In the other hand, I would imagine investing in gold would be a good idea as well.

<comment><USER30> I always think of it in disaster tiers.

Market slowdown, you'll want your bonds.

Recession, you'll want your cash.

Depression, you'll want gold and barterable goods.

Economic collapse or apocalypse, you'll want food, medicine, and alcohol (possibly the most barterable good, also delicious).

In any case anybody reading this in a major city faces non zero likelihood of disaster (take your pick for your city, hurricane, earthquake, tornado, terrorist attack, war) and should be stockpiling 3 liters of water per person in the house per day you want to be able to survive on your own, alongside 2k calories of food, trash bags, etc. I say have a stocked liquor cabinet as well because my experience in Backcountry many week hikes has taught me you can get nearly anything in return for good liquor :)

I've also heard strong arguments for the stockpiling of pornography and certain chemicals that are valuable in tbe production of medicine or just used as general reagents, don't know too much about chemical stockpiling though.

Careful for the prepper rabbit hole, it runs so very deep ;)

<comment><USER16> Yeah, there's a very deep end it's possible to go off.

However after this winter's experience where two feet of snow ran the supermarkets out of fresh food, I'm going to keep slightly more food and folding money on hand.

But remember these are long-term processes. Ultimately your connections and community will become important in economic collapses, because they're usually very slow-motion.

<comment><USER30> Regarding that, I highly recommend "a Paradise in hell."

It analyzes the citizen responses to several catastrophic disasters. Turns out, people don't turn into ravaging wolves in a disaster, they immediately begin to help their neighbor, with no regard to race color Creed etc. It's when the national guard comes in that issues start arising...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> When I read articles like this I wish I had a better grounding in economics, I guess specifically macroeconomics? Is there a well-known, digestible textbook?

<comment><USER7> _Basic Economics_ \- Thomas Sowell [https://www.amazon.com/Basic-Economics- Common-Sense-Economy/...](https://www.amazon.com/Basic-Economics-Common-Sense- Economy/dp/0465002609)

<comment><USER32> ^ Not this one. Mankiw is already ideological enough, Sowell and Hazlitt should be stayed far away from. The real answer to the above commenter is that you can't, not really. You can put a lot of work into understanding Mankiw and then you go to econ grad school and learn all the caveats and how much of it is basically wrong. Economists themselves barely understand the economy and they spent years and decades getting to 'barely.' A layman is basically incapable.

In that sense maybe I'm wrong and maybe Sowell is the good choice, just decide your ideological viewpoint on the economy now, read enough to defend your viewpoints to other laymen and let that be that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> For those interested in the full context in which the comment was made, a video of the event is available here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnXLEaAJqno](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnXLEaAJqno)

I was in attendance and it is worth noting that Bernanke did not take any questions from the audience (apparently unexpected by some of the staffers) and that he did not remain for any of the (illuminating in my opinion) panel discussion that followed.

Suggest that people pay attention to the remarks of Mr. Warsh, who in my opinion actually should have gotten the nod to be Fed Chair -- though I understand completely why that would have been untenable for many.

Last thing I'll add: some of what is said openly during Congressional testimonies, these fora, and the like is knowingly contradicted in private conversations.

</comment><comment><USER34> It's a fascinating time in the markets. You've got all these different forces pulling in different directions. Quantitative tightening, fear of trade war, tax cuts, continuing buybacks, lots of accumulated debt, the rise of high- frequency traders and their tendency to remove liquidity at the hint of any change in fundamentals, strong earnings, low employment, high asset prices. It doesn't surprise me that ^SPX is swinging between 2600 and 2800 with all of these conflicting signals.

</comment><comment><USER35> The language here is interesting. "Wile E Coyote moment" in the abstract looks and feels like a bubble, but he doesn't use the term bubble.

So a sharp correction? But isn't that what a bubble does? Why not just say we're in bubble fueled by artificial growth caused by numerous government subsidies.

<comment><USER36> I guess for some very broad definition of bubble.

Consider, e.g., real estate prices in a relatively stable area after that area is plunged into a long-running war. Prices will sharply correct, but talking about a "peace bubble" is a bit disingenuous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> This is consistent with what I've heard. Seems no one expects a recession until at least 2020 or 2021. Be ready.

<comment><USER30> Conveniently, my finances should be in order for a house purchase around then.

<comment><USER38> Don't downvote. The best time to invest is during a recession. Everyone should be saving money today for the next one, then buy.

<comment><USER37> Indeed, for some buying during a recession is the only shot they have at home ownership. Prices are only going up now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I wish the money printing game ended. The longer it goes the rougher the finale will be, globally. 1.5 T USD will push inflation globally.

<comment><USER40> What's wrong with inflation?

<comment><USER41> In basic terms, inflation is the loss of purchasing power due to an increase of the monetary supply faster than economic growth. In plain English, this is where more currency is chasing the same number of goods and services.

This means your unit of currency buys less over time. What is 'wrong' with this is that inflation is a transfer of wealth—some people even go so far as calling it theft or a 'stealth tax.'

This is because the purchasing power that you had in your unit of currency isn't 'lost', it is actually transferred to the institutions creating the money. If you had $1 worth of pennies in your pocket, and inflation was 1%, it is like an invisible hand reaching into your pocket and stealing a penny. Do that a hundred times and you can 'create' $1, but by the time this is done, you will find that your $1 can only by 99 cents worth of goods and services now. In a fiat based, fractional reserve system that we have today in the West, the institutions that are reaching into your pocket (AKA creating money) are central banks and commercial banks.

For example, say the Fed (the central bank for the US) creates an initial $10m of reserve currency, this is then used by commercial banks to 'create' an additional $90m through loans from that $10m reserve. It is therefore commercial banks, not central banks, that predominantly create currency in society—and depending on growth and circulation (economists call this velocity) in the real economy, creates inflation. You see if the creation and circulation of money was perfectly in line with the growth of the economy than there would be no inflation. The real problem is that the growth in monetary supply has far outstripped the growth of Western economies. Indeed there is a compounding effect of inflation.

But yeah, I can understand that this material may seem unbelievable... I have included a URL to a YouTube video where a Bank of England (the central bank of the UK) representative actually says in no uncertain terms that commercial banks create most of the money in the economy.

The important passages are:

"...banks create additional broad money whenever they make a loan"

"Now, while this is nothing new, it's sometimes overlooked as the main way in which money is created and it runs contrary to the view sometimes put forward that banks can only lend out deposits that they already have."

"In fact, loans create deposits, not the other way around."

Source: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvRAqR2pAgw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvRAqR2pAgw)

I've tried my best to quickly find Fed resources but these facts seem to be obfuscated or not officially made available.

For further information see the following:

Werner, R.A. (2014). Can banks individually create money out of nothing: [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105752191...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1057521914001070)

McLeary, M., Radia, A., & Thomas, R. (2014). Money creation in the modern economy: [https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-...](https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly- bulletin/2014/money-creation-in-the-modern- economy.pdf?la=en&hash=9A8788FD44A62D8BB927123544205CE476E01654)

<comment><USER42> _> if the creation and circulation of money was perfectly in line with the growth of the economy than there would be no inflation._

While this is technically true (at least for some interpretations of "inflation"), it's important to realize that the wealth transfer effect you describe _still_ occurs in this case. The only way it would not occur is if the newly created money was distributed exactly in accordance with the current allocation of money: in other words, if the economy grows by 1 percent, every current holder of a dollar gets a penny. But of course that's not how money creation is actually done.

<comment><USER41> Yes absolutely thank you for pointing the wealth transfer effect printing money has even when monetary supply is such so that inflation is zero.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I'll keep this thread bookmarked for when 2020 ends and nothing happens.

<comment><USER44> I'll keep this comment bookmarked...

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Ok, say you believe this is going to happen. What the hell can you really do?

<comment><USER46> You can bet on the market going down. Just go to your banker and tell him to do it. The question is just, do you believe it?

<comment><USER17> "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."

Be very careful betting on the market going down. You not only have to be right, you have to be right soon enough.

<comment><USER46> I hate that statement. Because people who say it claim they were right based on it, when they were clearly wrong and just trying to excuse their failure.

Saying 'at some point in the future prices might be lower' without a time attached to it is an intellectually empty statement.

<comment><USER47> The thing to understand about shorting is that your losses have no upper bounds. You short a stock at $100 and it goes up to $1,000, you now OWE $900. Here's [0] a story of a guy going to bed with $30k in his ETrade and waking up to a $106k debt call.

[0] [https://www.marketwatch.com/story/help-my-short-position- got...](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/help-my-short-position-got-crushed- and-now-i-owe-e-trade-10644556-2015-11-19)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> This is one area where I think the US system shows the power of separation of concerns.

Trump would love lower interest rates but the Fed, tends to run itself without much political influence. These people are all "adults" and very accomplished and knowledgeable.

They set the FED rate and everyone else falls along. They have been actively raising rates, with more rate hikes expected in this year to cool inflation, and the economy by extension.

At the very least the US will have some wiggle room to lower rates when the economy slows down again.

<comment><USER49> > At the very least the US will have some wiggle room to lower rates when the > economy slows down again.

While true, one of the lessons from 2008-9, and part of Bernanke's point, is that monetary policy alone can't always accomplish the task. If we use up all the extra fuel in the run-up to a rough patch, we risk not having enough to get us out of the rut ahead.

<comment><USER46> Yeah and he is wrong and telling a false history.

Go back to 2008 and look at their policy and meeting. The fact is that they were talking about HIGH INFLATION in the meeting in late 2008.

They did not lower interest rates to zero and had a policy of sterilization (selling bonds to buy troubled housing assets, instead of buying the troubled with new money).

The did not even deliberately end this policy, the market forced them because they were running out of T-Bonds. Later the called this 'QE1' but it was not really QE, it was them preserving a minim of T-Bonds (and that's their own account).

While they did go on to do QE1/QE2 they also payed interest on reserves to prevent that money from creating more inflation. And this was very deliberate policy, they explicitly said 'We are doing this to prevent the money from going out'.

The fact is that while nominal income collapsed in 2008 the Fed did nothing while the economy collapsed, like Nero in Rome.

How can you claim that a bank that can print infinite amounts of money could not do anything against this:

[https://oregoneconomicanalysis.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/n...](https://oregoneconomicanalysis.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/ngdp_trend1.jpg)

Friedman, Bernanke and many others have written about how the central bank could do much at the zero bound and other countries like Switzerland showed that this is true.

The Fed failed as a institutional because they didn't plan for 0% interest, not because its impossible to do anything.</comment></comment></comment>