German Pirate Party overtakes Greens on latest poll - <AUTHOR> http://www.todayszaman.com/news-276991-german-pirate-party-overtakes-greens-survey-by-forsa-shows.html <comment><USER2> I'm from germany, and have voted for the pirate party in recent local elections.

I'd like to add a few things: 1\. The german system of government is very much different from the US. In the US you have by-and-large a "winner takes it all" voting system. In germany, by contrast, we have a system of proportional representation. That means, winning 10% of the popular vote nets you 10% of the seats that are on the line in your voting district. That's why we currently have 6 parties in our federal parliament ("Bundestag") - where you have only 2 parties in congress.

2\. Although this is "just" a poll it isn't meaningless. The pirate party has been steadily building up momentum in the last 2 years. They now are the 5th largest party by member count in germany. They have also scored surprisingly high wins in two recent regional elections, and are set to repeat those gains in the two upcoming elections.

3\. The pirate party runs on a platform of systemic reform. They want copyright reformed to be more compatible with the 21st century. They want a reformed educational sector with more use of modern technology in the classroom, as well as improved structures (i.e. more freedom to pursue different educational models). They also want to reform the political system at large, by having more citizen participation in political decisions. They want more public votes on specific issues, as well as more transparency (For example: ACTA was negotiated in secret and only announced to the german public once the details were finished. They pirates strongly oppose such intransparency.)

This helped them to capture the votes of young, highly educated people. Many, but by no means all, from the "informatics" sector. They have also mobilized many first time voters, and re-energized many people who had formerly abandoned voting.

4\. What's currently also helping them is the bad state of our government (the governing coalition is in disarray), their inability to answer to the challenges shaping our future, their corruption (our head of state recently had to resign in shame), their detachedness from concerns of everyday people. This greatly helps them to get the vote of people who are disaffected with the "established" parties and who are ready to give those "political youngsters" a chance.

It's by no means guaranteed, but they seem to be on the way of becoming a serious political force in germany.

<comment><USER3> I have a lot of respect for the Pirate Party and I wish they'd put up some candidates where I could vote for them, but I have one question: how will they do "more citizen participation in political decisions" and avoid policy being set by tabloid headlines, and conservative populism. The basic problems of mob rule.

<comment><USER2> Well that is a good question.

The pirate party wants several steps in enabling more citizen participation.

First, they want to make government more transparent so that the people actually have all the information needed to make informed decisions on their hands. No longer do they want to accept that crucial legislation is often negotiated behind closed doors and only announced once everything is already sewn up. Also the contracts the government has with the private sector need to be made transparent. We need proper open data portals. There's a lot of things do to in this area alone.

Second, they want more votes on specific political issues on the regional, state and federal level. Those are currently only possible in very limited form (they are non binding for the government in most cases), and not at all possible at the federal level.

Third, their longterm vision includes a concept called "Liquid democracy" where basically everyone has the opportunity to have a voice in the political process. This will be facilitated using digital means. Specifically software called "adhocracy" / "liquid feedback" is being developed for this. The pirate party in germany already uses this system for their internal decision making.

It's a carefully balanced system comprised of direct voting on issues, and delegating voting power to representatives.

See here for more info on this: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegative_Democracy>

<http://liqd.net/en/>

So i don't see the danger of inviting mob rule with the pirate party. As i see it, they want to open up the political system to more direct participation while keeping it stable enough to guarantee basic democratic freedoms (like minority protections)

<comment><USER4> "Second, they want more votes on specific political issues on the regional, state and federal level. Those are currently only possible in very limited form (they are non binding for the government in most cases), and not at all possible at the federal level."

The should really be looking at switzerland for some of this stuff. I think we handle this pretty nicly.

<comment><USER5> E.g. banning building mosques with minarets, while building Christian temples with bell towers is still allowed? Thanks, I'll pass.

<comment><USER4> Well yes this slipped threw because of the massive advertisment and fear politics. Its a flaw in the system, laws should first be checked on human rights and then blocked. I never said the swiss system is perfect.

I think if you look at the amount of bad laws produced this way compaird to how much bad laws most governments creat with there exlusion from the people its pretty clear witch fails more often.

In generall the "tyranny of the masses" is a problem in every democracy. I would trie to solve it with a very strong civil liberty laws and a court that can block laws that go against them, like they did in germany with the "Hacker tools" and Communication Storages Laws.

<comment><USER6> No, this kind of thing should be thwarted by supreme laws, ie, a Constitution, which require a super-majority to change. "Religious Freedom" could be such a constitutional right, which would make such "tyranny of the majority" more difficult (but not impossible).

<comment><USER4> Agree thats what I said (or at least meant)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Politics in Germany are really interesting these days. Even if the Pirate Party should fail in the end, the discussion it brought up is already very beneficial.

<comment><USER8> High Pirate Party Numbers = 4 more years for Angela Merkel

I welcome the German pirates for several reasons:

\- "the discussion it brought up is already very beneficial."

\- they have a high turn out of former non-voters

\- "harmless stupidity": The German pirates seem to be ambivalent as of now. For instance, they are the only left-wing party that's not in favor of female employee quotas (an idea so absurd, there's not even an english wikipedia entry <http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frauenquote>). If they dig deeper into this populist lefty anti-authoritarian theme (as it seems to be the case) the first thing they will achieve is less votes for the other left-wing parties.

And personally, I think this would be a good thing (see "female employee quotas").

<comment><USER9> How is Frauenquote different from Affirmitive Action? (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action>)

<comment><USER2> Reading the entry - it isn't. It's basically the same thing.

What is different in germany, though, is that the discussion here revolves around forcing private sector enterprises to have specific (government set) quota of women in their leadership (or else be punished by the law).

Affirmative action in the US seems to revolve more around not negatively discriminating against women when making hiring decisions, but not forcing government set quotas on companies.

I can't quite imagine the US government interfering with private enterprise in this way.

<comment><USER10> "Affirmative action in the US seems to revolve more around not negatively discriminating against women when making hiring decisions,"

Affirmative action is when two people are equally suited for a job/position/benefit, the one from the disadvantaged group (based on sex, ethnic/socioeconomic background, physical impairment, ...) gets it. In more extreme varieties, it means that the one from the disadvantaged group has less strict requirements to fulfill. In a way, a women's quota is a species of the genus affirmative action.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is good news. But I am not sure yet if I would vote for them (usually I do not vote). Their economic policy seems not mature enough or too much towards an even more socialist State. This is what is now failing us in most of the western Europe.

I would really like to see some groups against copyright/patent madness AND against public spending/over taxation madness we have been struggling with for the last decades. Unfortunately, it seems that in Europe those ideas tend to polarize between 2 'very' different groups such as left (and not even all) for the copyright thing and right (and not even all) for the taxes thing. And that's why I do not vote.

<comment><USER4> Fuck I just wrote a juge text but the link expired and I lost it.

Heres the short version:

Generally I agree and I would like to see that too.

About PP:

1\. Basic Income (BGE) is a very liberal socal policy(something I could see Friedman or Hayek support). It rases the amount of GDP on the government side but takes away a lot of the controll and bureaucracy that is there now.

2\. The want to take away alot of state power too, specially in police and military. Think about what massiv change there drug policy would make.

3\. The are the only ones that I could ever see attacking finance. Because (a) the are young (b) not infiltrated by lobbiests (yet) (c) currage to trie something diffrent (think out of the box) (d) efficent use of tools and communication (work on the buget like a opensource project would be something worth trying)

Rather have liberal statist with a social side then conservativ statist with love for police (CUD) or hardcore statist like (SPD).

<comment><USER10> "Basic Income (BGE) is a very liberal socal policy(something I could see Friedman or Hayek support)."

Actually Friedman (I assume you're talking about Milton Friedman here, since there are several prominent economists named 'Friedman' nowadays) advocated just that in 1962 in 'Capitalism and Freedom', albeit in the form of a negative income tax.

<comment><USER12> I believe Friedman supported it sort of half-heartedly, because he thought the population wouldn't stand for not having a social safety net at all, and if there was to be one, the negative income tax was less distorting and less bureaucratic than the usual mixture of rent control, food stamps, and unemployment benefits.

Hayek did support it on more philosophical grounds, because he thought it would increase individual freedom. Almost the exact opposite reasoning as some libertarians, actually. It's common for libertarians to argue that social programs should be handled by private charity, but Hayek worried that doing so leads to collectivism, because people feel bound to social cliques that provide social safety for their members (ethnic groups, churches, etc.), and fear leaving the groups lest they lose their insurance. So he would prefer there be a society-wide safety net not tied to these cliques.

I kept forgetting where he had written that, so I excerpted a quote in my mini-scrapbook here: <http://www.kmjn.org/snippets/hayek79_minimumincome.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This has nothing to do with their politics, it is simply the fact that they offer an alternative, people will vote for them because they don't feel represented by the other parties.

They are new, they are cool, they have an "anti-authoritarian" vibe, they will achieve nothing and be forgotten in a couple of years.

The funny thing is, the "Greens" are considered old, they have achieved nothing (there's still a massive oil dependency, there are still nuclear reactors, ...) and now they panic :)

Edit: the Pirates can gain traction by promising people "if we only had the power, we could do this or that" and they can increase their popularity by simply critisizing the current parties in power ("we would have it done some other way, we would have [insert popular opinion]") but in the end they will change nothing, just read up on the history of the Greens and just replace the name with Pirates

<comment><USER2> I disagree that greens did not achieve much. They have completely changed the political discourse in germany.

After 30 years of the greens being in the Bundestag, we now have the largest percentage of renewable energy in europe (>20% of our energy already comes from it), even the most conservative of parties now subscribe to quitting nuclear energy altogether (7 reactors have been shut down already, the rest is to follow until 2021) , we have the strictest environmental laws in europe, and on and on.

I would say the greens have been very successful by any measure.

<comment><USER14> > [...] we now have the largest percentage of renewable energy in europe [...]

Source? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_the_Europe...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_the_European_Union) contradicts this

<comment><USER2> Well it is certainly true that there are countries in europe that have even more renewable energy than we have.

The other countries in europe that have more renewables than we have are mostly smaller countries that don't have the population or industrial output that germany has.

The numbers in the article you cite are also terribly outdated. Some more up to date numbers can be found here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Germany#St...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Germany#Statistics)

As you can see there germany has made BIG advances in the amount of renewable energy produced, as well as its overall share of energy consumed.

My point was: * Germany was 20years ago pretty conservative about energy, relying mainly on coal, gas and nuclear.

Then the green party came into the political landscape and now * We are on the forefront of converting our highly industrous economy completely to renewable energies. No other country in europe has increased the amount of renewabled energy produced by 5x in the last 10 years alone. At this rate, we will be overtaking even the smaller countries that may have more renewables than we have now. * We are the only country of this size and economic gravitas that is fully committed to quiting nuclear. * We have very strict environmental protection laws, with environmental protection even enshrined in the national constitution , more so than in other industrous european countries (yes there's always switzerland or other small countries that are nominally "better" at this but you can not compare their impact or structure with large countries such as germany) See also: <http://www.goethe.de/ges/umw/ein/en5099932.htm> * Gas is more expensive in germany than elsewhere in europe (again there might be exceptions) because of "ecological taxing" that was proposed by the green party

So, in all what i wanted to say was: Germany has changed a great deal due to the green party in the last decades. Where once we were very conservative about ecological ideas, we are now at the forefront, if not the sole leader, in many of these areas. And that is,to a large degree, thanks to the greens because they have put those issues on the agenda again and again - and that way changed the political discourse at large.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Quite interesting is also their approach to finding positions via voting on an open online platform (which is open sourced by the way: <http://www.public- software-group.org/liquid_feedback> ) where each member can vote itself and also delegate its vote for different topics to other members.

<comment><USER16> I didn't know that. I was dreaming of a party that voted like this based on the input of all it's constituents since ten years or so. Maybe I should move to Berlin after all!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Also worth noting: the Austrian pirate party entered the polls at 7% with a sonic boom on April 7.

</comment><comment><USER18> I really wish I was in Europe now to participate more in this. If you ever wanted to get info politics (even only a little bit), now is the perfect time. Next elections into the Bundestag and four years later into the gov't. And in ten years the European commissioner for IT things will be a Pirate, harrr harrr!

<comment><USER19> When following politics I sometimes secretly wish I didn't move from Germany to Spain, where the political scenery is a tad more... predictable.

That being said, I see absolutely no reason why the Pirates should be part of the government. Germany has had almost 20 years of policy blocking and mindlessly bullying oppositions (from both sides of the political spectrum), but maybe this can actually change with the Pirates - an opposition that has no problem in granting the governing parties their successes.

<comment><USER18> Or the junior partner of a gov't coalition that actually gets things done.

How's Spain more predictable? I am sure they could use some Pirates too.

<comment><USER19> They could (well, there is an Pirate party, and it may even get above the magic 0.01% threshold...), but the major political players don't change much, and definitely not as rapidly as in Germany.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> just for remembrance (don't read the title misleadingly): this ist _just_ a poll!

edit: some more information: [http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,826540,00...](http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,826540,00.html)

</comment><comment><USER17> I wonder why the photo says "Nerz Attends". His name is Sebastian Nerz. My guess is that somebody chose the first two words from a random sentence (i.e. "Nerz attends the general assembly") and tagged the photo with that as a name.</comment>


Failure cost me $9 - <AUTHOR> http://songsasaservice.wordpress.com/2012/12/31/failure-cost-me-9/

<comment><USER2> The question is why did you get one sale? Is it possible to scale that? Maybe you need to market to the people who think like that first customer. Did you change something after the first sale?</comment>


There Will Never Be One True Programming Language - <AUTHOR> http://blackhole12.blogspot.com/2015/09/there-will-never-be-one-true.html <comment><USER2> This statement is easy to reason about: there will always be people who just won't learn lisp, forcing there to be at least two different languages! :-)</comment>


OnePlus 5's Display Is Inverted – Likely Causes Jelly Scrolling - <AUTHOR> https://www.xda-developers.com/confirmed-oneplus-5-display-upside-down-likely-reason-jelly-scrolling/ <comment><USER2> I've noticed this on my Pixel XL as well, though it's quite a bit more subtle than the video shows. Even right-side up, if I look below my finger instead of above it, the effect is noticeable.

I'm not technically qualified to say for sure, but orientation definitely appears to play a part in this. Clearly the repaint code in the display driver isn't orientation aware - at some point it has to loop through all the pixels and update them; if the screen is oriented 180 degrees, that loop should be reversed.</comment>


Y Combinator Blog - <AUTHOR> http://ycombinator.posterous.com/ <comment> onreact-com I didn't even notice there is one. Why is it that there are almost no submissions from the blog to HN?

<comment><USER2> It only covers excerpts from websites that cover YC or YC startups related stuff. These websites are usually submitted to News.YC</comment></comment>


Monetize GRE blog? - <AUTHOR> http://learnweird.com <comment><AUTHOR> My brother's girlfriend is making a blog with silly memorable stories about GRE vocabulary words. Think it could be monetized?</comment>


String Deduplication – A new feature in Java 8 Update 20 - <AUTHOR> https://blog.codecentric.de/en/2014/08/string-deduplication-new-feature-java-8-update-20-2/

<comment><USER2> Related: I'm still frustrated by Java randomly (in a minor release, none the less!) switching to copy-on-substring. If I, a random nobody, had something that had its running time increased by a factor of ~50 (simple recursive- descent-ish parser for coercing tabulated data from one format to another - just call substring to trim off the first token repeatedly), how many dev hours were required overall to fix the results of the change? And there's no simple alternative either or way to preserve the old behavior - the simplest one, rolling your own String class or wrapper, ends up being relatively slow and annoying.

And "all" of this would be solved by having a proper way of doing array slicing - for things like substring's previous worst case (something like a single character being referenced in a substring holding up a gigabyte+-sized string) Java's garbage collector could recognize that the array was only referenced through slices of part of the array, copy that section into another array (updating references to it), and free the large one.

Also, Java's lack of a way to specify that a class is immutable (and that all children classes thereof must also be) is frustrating. Because optimizations like this can and should apply to more than just strings!

<comment><USER3> Those changes are only specific to Oracle's implementation, there are lots of others to choose from.

Most of those changes don't have any relation whatsoever with the Java Language Specification or Java Virtual Machine Specification.

<comment><AUTHOR> In theory yes. In practice 99.99% of mainstream Java developers will run their code on Oracle's JVM.

<comment><USER3> I doubt only 00,01% accounts for:

\- Real time deployment scenarios

\- J2EE containers, which tend to work best with the respective vendor JVM

\- factory control JVMs

\- car infotaiment JVMs

\- smart card JVMs

\- Compilation to native code

\- Android

\- Embedded deployments like MicroEJ

\- Commercial UNIX systems

\- Mainframes

\- ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's a counterargument for this, just to be a fuddy-duddy:

One of the key activities in programming is reasoning about time and space cost, and this is a space optimization that's _nondeterministic_. It kicks in sometimes, or sometimes not at all, and happens behind the scenes at garbage collection time when it's nearly invisible. If you're sloppy, your program may have a huge asymptotic space usage, and this may paper over it. But the impl has heuristics, it may not work all the time -- even their example program needed Thread.sleep() calls! Unpredictable semantics help nobody. So I always liked explicit string interning (whatup, Lisp!).

All the same, faster is better and I'm sure this makes things faster.

Oh and can we talk about how broken it was that Java 6 and under had a fixed size pool for .intern()'d strings?

<comment><USER5> Your applications already sit upon a mountain of non-determinism.

A typical web app runs against a database with a genetic query optimizer, on top of a VM with a concurrent generational GC, sharing virtual memory with a dozen other processes, arranged in a massive pyramid of caches, which are competing for CPU time from a multi-core monstrosity of a data-flow engine.

The sooner we as programmers embrace stochastic methods, the better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This sounds extremely valuable, if just because it requires far less tuning than interning strings.

Not so long ago I had to do maintenance on a pretty large Swing application, still stuck on Java 6, that was built around displaying huge amounts of data, holding it all in memory, after retrieving it from some rather slow web services. The poor thing easily ended up using about a couple of gigs, mostly due to the many Strings it held, many of them pretty repetitive. While I tried to reduce the memory footprint, I couldn't just intern everything coming from the service: In Java 6, interned strings come from PermGen.

Using a hashmap to allocate everything would have been better than nothing, but the dataset had a whole lot of strings that didn't repeat themselves, so the hashmap would have been far bigger than we needed for the application.

What I ended up having to do what to figure out where the data was the most repetitive, and then intern only those strings.

I cut memory use by over 30%, but it took days of profiling, evaluating the data and making simple code changes to get there, as opposed to just a runtime flag. Now, I wonder how much better, or worse, it performs that the hashmap solution in cases like the one I faced: a few hundred strings repeated tens of thousands of times, and hundreds of thousands of strings with almost no repetition.

<comment><USER7> Wow,that sounds very familiar including the swing app part! Except in my case data came from database and code used StringBuffers leading to massive amounts of duplication. I had to build a COW wrapper and profile the app to find that 95% of the data was only ever read in normal use cases!

Thankfully Java tooling is fairly mature - things like MAT and OQL were of great use in finding the memory hogs and leaks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> For those interested in the same feature in plain old C, have a look at the DSO Howto, section 2.4.2 "Forever const" and the LD flags SHF_MERGE and SHF_STRING.

With a little bit of magic, C compilers and linkers are even allowed to turn (simplified example)

        const char s1[] = "some string";
        const char s2[] = "string";

into

        const char s1[] = "some string";
        const char s2[] = s1+5;

and place these constants in a read-only section shared between multiple loaded instances of the same library or program.

<comment><USER9> I think it's standard java behaviour to .intern string constants appearing in code (i.e. since they are immutable, just share them). The new thing is that the JVM is going to do this automatically for strings that _don't_ exist at compile time, IIUC.

</comment></comment><comment> dj-wonk From [http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/192](http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/192)

> Taking the above into account, the actual expected benefit ends up at around > 10% heap reduction. Note that this number is a calculated average based on a > wide range of applications. The heap reduction for a specific application > could vary significantly both up and down.

<comment><USER10> I don't think an average is useful in any way here. It will reduce the heap use by some amount, since you reduce the number of char arrays in N strings to some number less than - or equal - than N. There won't be any new arrays allocated.

But in my team alone, we have services which deal with many equal but transient strings, some services with long-living, mostly equal strings, some services with long-living, radically different strings. In some of them, I expect rather massive reductions, in others, interning probably has most of the work done already and in others, there's no application or the GC will handle the issue already.

<comment><USER11> The garbage collector needs to store its internal arrays.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Boost flyweight is pretty useful for doing this in C++

[http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_56_0/libs/flyweight/doc/inde...](http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_56_0/libs/flyweight/doc/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> We once maintained a hashmap with key and value as the instance of string to avoid duplication in a search application. Wouldn't that be more beneficial than keeping it in GC if the application uses more strings?

Edit: changed avoid deduplication to avoid duplication

<comment><USER14> Why did you want to avoid deduplication? You can't even tell it's happened as it only works on the char[] which is internal to the string. Did you find it didn't work as expected.

<comment><USER13> It was in a typeahead search application built on 20GB of names. These names have common first names and last names which were stored as different strings. With deduplication, string memory was reduced to 20%

Will benchmark that application with +UseStringDeduplication

<comment><USER14> So what was the downside of deduplication? Why did you want to avoid it?

<comment><USER13> Sorry deduplication was a typo. Corrected

<comment><USER14> Ah right. The reason they're doing it in the GC rather than in the mutator threads is that it only has an impact on strings long lived enough to be evacuated. Short lived strings don't get deduplicated, and probably don't need to be. Without the GC I don't know how you'd automatically determine that it was a good idea to deduplicate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> As a curiosity, global string cache is an old feature of R -- however strings are matched upon creation rather than detected by the GC.

<comment><USER14> The problem with that is every time you create a string you have to do the work to look it up in the cache. The benefit of the JVM's approach here is that it only bothers to deduplicate it if it is long-lived enough to be evacuated.

<comment><USER15> Sure; in R strings are copied way more frequently than created, so it pays off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Does this mean "" == ""?

<comment><USER17> No, string deduplication takes place in the internal String char array. Each String will still have it's own object.

<comment><USER18> Not according to the article:

> In fact the String Deduplication is almost like interning with the exception > that interning reuses the whole String instance, not just the char array.

<comment><USER14> I think that might mean the opposite of what you think it does.

Interning reuses whole String instances. Deduplication is like interning with the exception that it does not reuse the whole String instance, it just reuses the char array. Therefore surely deduplication does not reuse String instances.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is only specific to the Oracle JVM.</comment>


Testing HN API - <AUTHOR> This is a test. Please don't upvote. <comment><AUTHOR> Results if anyone stumbles upon this:

* When adding an item, its id, its parent id (if it has one), and the story id show up in the /updates endpoint.

* When editing a comment, the comment id and the story id show up in the /updates endpoint.

* When deleting a comment, its id and the story id show up in the /updates endpoint, but not its parent id.

* When kids order changes, their parent id and the story id show up in the /updates endpoint, but not necessarily the kids ids.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Yet another test. Edited.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Is the story included in /updates if a comment is added?

<comment><AUTHOR> Is the story included in /updates if a reply to a comment is added?

Edit: What if the comment is edited?

<comment><AUTHOR> Testing with a nested reply.

Edited the nested reply.

<comment><AUTHOR> When posting a reply, do all parents show in /updates?

<comment><AUTHOR> Retrying, as an upvote may have caused the story to show in /updates

Edit with result (also useful for a test) : only direct parent id and story id show in /updates when posting a reply. What about edits?

Result : In case of an edit, only the story id shows in /updates.

Testing deletes.

<comment><AUTHOR> When deleting a comment, only the comment id and the story id are shown in the updates, but not the direct parent.

<comment><AUTHOR> Deleted comment ids are still visible in the kids attribute of an item.

<comment><AUTHOR> Deeply nested reply.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is the reason behind the rise of cryptocurrency? - <AUTHOR> I have been following the rise of value but I am still unsure about reason behind its rise.
Most of the discussions point on crypto sub-reddits are about buying and HODL-ing. I sort of understand that people are investing hoping someone (A greater fool?) buys it from them at a higher value.Holding also discourages people from using it in exchange for goods and services. Isn't that defeating the purpose of a currency?
Also, what justifies Bitcoin's value at ~17k ?
I am interested in reading any neutral posts or articles analysing the rise of Crypto and where it is headed. <comment><USER3> There are different reasons for the rise. The main ones I see are:

1) speculation

2) attractive store of value due to the deflationary nature (note that not all cryptocurrencies are deflationary)

3) True limited supply that's mathematically guaranteed. Gold supply, for instance, is not limited in any practical sense, there are trillions of tons of it in our Galaxy, it's all a matter of technological advanvements of its extraction.

4) secure transactions that can't be reversed (though you can use escrows if you want the reverse option)

5) low transaction fees (except for bitcoin)

6) inability of anyone to stop you from moving the money in your possession. See 'paypal sucks' stories, civil forfeiture.

7) works extremely well on the internet

8) fast transaction settlement

9) works over almost any protocol, you can technically manage bitcoins with a dumb phone over SMS

10) banking for those who doesn't have access to banking

11) libertarian aspect - no government control

The Bitcoin price is justified by the free market. People want it, they are willing to pay for it. That's true of any currency value, btw, since there are no government currencies pegged to gold, it's all based on whether people believe in the currency. When they stop believing, we get Zimbabwean dollar, Venezuelan Bolivar, USSR Ruble, Argentinian peso.

<comment><USER4> Points #1 and #2 are contradictory.

A _speculative_ instrument is the opposite of a _store of value_.

A 'store of value' is like real estate - low-risk, probably low-return, but you can park your money there and in X years, it's going to mostly be there. US Bonds.

Your bank account, i.e. USD is a decent, though not great 'store of value'. Your USD is not going to go $0 overnight.

Speculative investments are there to generate return almost always involve more risk.

BTC could go to $0 tomorrow. Suppose the US Gov. makes everyone legally declare their BTC assets as assets and they are subject to taxation etc.. That might pull the plug on BTC, but worse, cause a stampede crash in a highly volatile situation. There are many reasons that a rush-to-exit could happen for BTC. So - speculation - not a 'store of value'

These other fetures of BTC may have been important early on but they are not what gives it value.

Because nobody is using BTC as a currency, almost none of those points are pragmatically relevant - yes - in theory, they need to exist to have gotten it off the ground.

<comment><USER5> They're different narratives but I think they are both in play.

If you ask a Bitcoin investor about why they invested, then they might explain it as a store of value, "digital gold", or etc. With that narrative, Bitcoin makes sense in the world, and isn't just a fad. And the erratic price is just a growing pain, it'll stabilize eventually.

But of course, the _real_ reason many people are buying BTC right now is because of the speculative nature, they want to get rich quick. If someone's investment in BTC is significantly larger than their investment in bonds, commodities, real estate, etc, then "it's a store of value" is probably not the real reason they're buying BTC.

<comment><AUTHOR> > If someone's investment in BTC is significantly larger than their investment > in bonds, commodities, real estate, etc, then "it's a store of value" is > probably not the real reason they're buying BTC.

Are there any good articles or blog posts analysing this trend?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Personally I see the three biggest factors as:

1\. Rampant speculation. Note that a relatively few "investors" hold a fairly large percentage of BTC in particular.

2\. Capital controls and wealth protection in certain countries (most notably China and Russia); and

3\. Illegal activity (including money laundering).

If I had to guess, probably in that order (from high to low). The seedy side of this (3) is obvious and (to my detriment) is why I steered clear.

Cryptos may have been envisioned as an alternative currency but it's clear they're behaving far more like an asset class and that they have some bad properties for a currency to have, most notably the deflationary aspect and the inability to manage the money supply (which some will view as a positive).

It's really anyone's guess what happens from here. Thing is though, even though an individual coin is limited in supply my personal belief is that this will even out when people realize that different coins are essentially commodities so new ICOs are what will meet demand. I'm not sure when we'll get there however.

<comment><USER7> The seedy side of crypto is 100% the reason I am staying away. One of it's biggest benefits (lack of institutional control) is also it's biggest detraction; anyone who is trying to avoid law enforcement is using it. When you purchase bitcoins, there's probably a good chance you are funding: hackers who are holding systems hostage; child pornography/prostitution rings; illegal arms and drug dealers; scammers; etc. etc.

The banking system, for all its issues, makes collecting and moving large amounts money around very difficult. We are going to quickly find out that that is a Good Thing.

I really think the debate about crypto has been poisoned with malicious intent. We all sit behind our computers thinking the people on the other end are just like us, with wonderful ideas for a technological revolution, but we have no clue what the real motives are behind its push.

<comment><USER8> This argument is not valid.

What about the drug dealers selling their stuff for cash?

I can do the same argument about fiat money. What about the tax dodgers crossing borders with suitcases full of cash that will end up in some offshore bank never to be seen again? The fact that some people use bitcoin to launder money is no different than a government paying a ransom to free a hostage in a hostile country.

`The banking system, for all its issues, makes collecting and moving large amounts money around very difficult`

That is why cryptocurrencies exist in the first place!

If I have money, that I have already paid taxes on, shouldn't I be free to do whatever I want with it without having to answer to a bank or a government like I am some kind of child that needs to be chaperoned? Why can't I use what is mine without restrictions?

Banks don't mind doing their dirty business deals behind closed doors and will deter anyone to look into their questionable business practices but for some reason, me, the average Joe who doesn't have lawyers on retainer to keep everybody at bay, I should be required to leave my money in a bank and hope that the banks are not going to lose it all like they did in 2008?

That doesn't make sense to me.

<comment><USER7> > I can do the same argument about fiat money. What about the tax dodgers > crossing borders with suitcases full of cash that will end up in some > offshore bank never to be seen again?

It's a felony to do that with more than $10,000 and if you wanted to move any serious amount of money (millions) you'd need a small truck. You risk getting robbed moving that kind of cash.

>>`The banking system, for all its issues, makes collecting and moving large amounts money around very difficult` >That is why cryptocurrencies exist in the first place!

You're missing my point; _It 's a good thing that moving large amounts of money is difficult_. I can't see any legitimate reason why someone would want to move tons of money around, just write a cheque or do a bank transfer of some sort.

If bitcoin becomes the new currency, you aren't any more free than you were under the banks, you're just beholden to a different master - the people who maintain the cryptocurrency networks.

<comment><USER9> >you aren't any more free than you were under the banks, you're just beholden to a different master - the people who maintain the cryptocurrency networks.

Exactly. Bitcoin just like fiat is backed by trust in those who run the network. Bitcoin doesn't solve many problems as a store of value right now if you trust the government not to print trillions like they did after the 2009 crisis.

If you don't trust the developers, don't trust the coin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Gold's market cap is $8 trillion.

90+% of that value is as a store of value and speculation.

Cryptocurrencies could do that job better. Even with the high fees atm for bitcoin, it's still a hell of a lot cheaper than shipping gold

<comment><AUTHOR> I have a read a few people comparing Bitcoin's store of value to that of Gold's. That analogy does make sense but they started off by calling Bitcoin a new form of currency, have we given up on that use-case?

Also, Gold fluctuates a lot less and the exchange of Gold is often not anonymous. If I am looking for a place to put my savings why would I choose an anonymous market that is highly volatile?

I understand that this logic is negated by Bitcoin's current value.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Bitcoin is worth $17k because thats how much someone will pay for it.

Right now the blockchain space is in a clear bubble. A lot of people (many uninformed) see the price rise and don't want to miss out. This drives the price higher.

At some point there will be a correction. Nobody knows the timing or size. My guess would be that this will not happen until we see the failure of a major blockchain.

With that said blockchains are a remarkably powerful new tool and if they can be sensibly scaled they will be extremely impactful. Blockchains allow for the creation of self sustaining, trustless, autonomous marketplaces. A lot of intermediaries are about to be automated away by these protocols (think about platforms like Airbnb or Uber).

Some useful parallels can be drawn with the dot com bubble. A lot of valuations were totally unjustified, but you would have done very well if you bought and held Amazon stock in 1997 (66,600%).

A more interesting question is whether Bitcoin is the Amazon or MySpace of the blockchain revolution.

I have found the following resources to be very instructive:

\- The original Bitcoin whitepaper: [https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf](https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf)

\- Mastering Bitcoin: [https://github.com/bitcoinbook/bitcoinbook](https://github.com/bitcoinbook/bitcoinbook)

\- The Ethereum wiki: [https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki](https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki)

\- The Bitcoin Core mailing list: [https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-d...](https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin- dev)

</comment><comment><USER12> >Also, what justifies Bitcoin's value at ~17k ?

Rich people in non-democratic countries worried about currency export controls and sanctions. Other methods of parking money externally (real estate, etc.) are subject to restriction and seizure.

<comment><AUTHOR> Isn't the high volatility a major drawback to this use-case?

<comment><USER13> The volatility is supposedly temporary

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> No one knows to be exact. BTW, that's "Cryptocurrencies" not Crypto.

<comment><USER15> Both terms are widely used and are correct.

<comment><USER16> While true, it would be really great (although I think its too late) if people would use the term "Cryptocurrencies" instead of "Crypto", since Crypto used to mean cryptography.

Pretty much its just like the hacker v cracker debate.

<comment><USER15> "the hacker v cracker debate" is (in my mind at least) over. There were and are many people who don't like the way the word "hacker" is used, but so what? Language changes, slang evolves. "Crypto" used to only mean one thing, now it means two. What's really the big deal about that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> My interpretation is that there are multiple factors at play on the demand side:

1\. Initially drug, and other illicit item dealing. It's hard to process payments for an illegal or risky business. Bitcoin (mostly) has no one to reject you as a customer. I would not be surprised if major smuggling networks were starting to use Bitcoin, as it's seemingly much easier and less risky than carrying huge wads of cash across borders.

2\. Circumvention of capital controls and economic sanctions. People in Argentina, Zimbabwe, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and China have, to varying degrees, a limited ability to process financial transactions with the outside world through the usual SWIFT/correspondent banking networks. Bitcoin solves this problem. The relatively high transaction costs are not too much of a barrier for these types of transactions, since they tend to be larger.

3\. Speculation. Crypto has been shooting through the roof, and people are piling on the bandwagon.

4\. Tax avoidance. Significant holders of crypto assets may want to diversify out of crypto, but can't because it will create a paper trail and trigger a form being sent to the taxman. In some cases, these people may have owed taxes in prior years which they haven't paid, and they don't know what to do. Some of them have tried to diversify their holdings by trading into altcoins or ICOs to put off the day of reckoning. IMO this factor explains a lot of the explosive demand for ICOs.

5\. "Asset Protection." Crypto provides what many believe to be an off the books/untraceable store of value. This might appeal to people being sued, people going through a divorce, or people under criminal investigation.

6\. Possible foreign government interests. Some countries, Russia in particular, resent the centrality of the U.S. in the world banking system, its ability to cripple economies by cutting off banking relationships, and the dollar's role in the world oil trade. These countries might be contributing to the hype, and perhaps even buying crypto to create legitimacy for alternatives to the U.S. dollar.

</comment><comment><USER4> "Also, what justifies Bitcoin's value at ~17k ?"

Nothing - it's a meme, a fad - a rampantly speculative one that involves money.

So many press articles touting 'BTC breaks $X' price point - it's clickbait - and also many jornos and bloggers have positions which they are not disclosing yet, though this is changing.

Because there is no way to value BTC, it's funny game. Someone on Bloomberg indicated a valuation technique which related BTC to popularity in Google searches. Which is rather interesting: BTC's value is a function of it's popularity. Which explains a lot.

ICSs are 'hot' because we've seen how much 'money people have made' in BTC and so major bets are being placed on ICOs.

They are a magnificently easy way to grab money from people who kind of think they are 'making an investment' but really their not getting much at all. An IPO with 0% dilution.

<comment><USER18> Of course Bitcoin's value is a function of its popularity - it is a network. Networks become more valuable (and more useful) the more popular they are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Like other currencies, it is all about confidence. Why do people work so hard for $USD which has no inherent value? Because it has value due to people's confidence in it. And the comes from having an entire society and tax system based on that currency.

Now with Bitcoin the confidence is coming more from speculation as to what it could be, and that indeed a "greater fool" will buy for a higher price - <USER2> with the finance casino preparing to add this game to their game floor, there is a good chance you will find such fools.

I saw today a car being advertised for sale 1 BTC. I live in a very non-tech city so word is spreading. There are limited coins and demand will increase. Newcomers will not question or care about "oh it used to be $50 for 10000 BTC why should I pay this much"

</comment><comment><USER20> Amongst some of the people I know, cryptos _currently_ provide much better investment returns than the stock market. These people have a bunch of extra money lying around, why settle for 3-10% returns when you hear stories of crypto graining thousands of percent. To them it's not about the potential or the technology, it's strictly the returns over time.

</comment><comment><USER21> I don't know what the reasons for the rise are, but I bet it's largely driven by Chinese investors/speculators rather than anything happening in the US, but I think that is reported on less because it is not very visible if you're not based there.

<comment><USER22> Except that all Chinese exchanges / ICOs got banned a couple of months ago. The US is probably that largest market, it's the home of Coinbase ... I just don't see what you are basing this assertion on.

<comment><USER23> Just guessing here, but... If I were Chinese, and I liked the idea of cryptocurrency (especially the untraceable part), and the government banned it, do you think that ban would make me _less_ interested in it? Or _more_?

<comment><USER24> Working with Chinese co-workers, I think it would make them less interested. The penalty for disobeying their government is severe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It sounds like you've already answered your question :)

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm wondering why a lot of cryptos (eth, ltc, many more) use price is going up since circa 4 days. Like something happend or is going to happen.

<comment><USER27> bitcoin futures market is making it more main stream. futures might lead to an etf which would explode the value.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> people with 10s of Giga $$ hiding in tax havens are moving it to the next hidey hole. maybe they started it, mined the first few hundred thousand coins and now they're just dumping $$ into it at regular-ish intervals for long enough that the rest of us just get used to it. maybe a bit like how the Brazilians got the Real which is an interesting story in and of itself.

</comment><comment><USER29> People behave irrationally when there's FOMO.

</comment><comment><USER30> FOMO

</comment><comment><USER31> bitcoin is like a bank account, is mostly a movement against banks and money printing, I personally, had a few months paychecks as savings in an account, after a year, I got less money, the commissions were bigger than the interest, after a few other months when I wanted to close it, I have to pay money out of pocket, for the commissions, everything that f... the banks, is welcome in my book, I'm surprised after them crashing the economy in 2008 and getting away with it, we are still their bitches and we are OK with it, fool me once, fool me twice.

</comment><comment><USER32> I think people are losing trust in govt and banks

<comment><USER33> These are reasons for Bitcoin to exist as a currency, but doesn't really explain its value as a tradable instrument. After all, plenty of people sell Bitcoin and happily send the money to their bank.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> 1 store of value 2 new economic shift 3 blockchain revolution

</comment><comment><USER35> China

</comment><comment><USER36> Russian/chinese money laundering.

<comment><USER37> Just out of curiosity and because I've become so jaded with what constitutes upvotes on HN, I scrolled to the bottom to see the most downvoted comment.

It seems like yours, which is funny because I completely agree with you.

The front page of the Wall Street Journal today was very clear, 80% of investors in Bitcoin are from Asia.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Snowden</comment>


Oscar-awarded Movie Fonts 2013 - <AUTHOR> http://www.linotype.com/en/6982/oscarawardedmoviefonts2013.html?PHPSESSID=951d21e93bf0d64e7af399a43725e0b2

<comment><USER2> It's always interesting to me to see the fonts used for movies are often quite common ones. Papyrus may be seen as the Avatar font now, but it's used a whole lot more.

I like to start from a font and then change it up from there to give some personality to a logo, while maintaining some familiarity (and piggybacking on the expertise of those font designers too).

<comment><USER3> The Papyrus typeface seems to have been coopted to reflect religious sentiment, to some extent. In other words, I've mostly seen it on some texts with some kind of religious tones --a book, a flyer, etc. Not sure how that happened.

<comment> rkuykendall-com It makes sense given that most religions are founded upon very old texts in very bad condition. Papyrus is a font designed to mimic very old / damaged manuscripts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This just drives home to me on why classic looking fonts are classic for a reason. Les Miserables added rolling gradients and shadows to Antique Roman and Django, of course, added a bit of grunge to Rockwell EB. Argo grunged up Akzidenz and added the silhouette backdrop, but aside from that, most of these fonts are pretty much as-is.

</comment><comment><USER5> Interesting breakdown, but I think it's a little font-obsessed biased e.g. "The artificial slab serif ITC Lubalin by Herb Lubalin not only embodies stability, but also emanates a very special kind of amiability. "

I'd say the reason this font was chosen had a little more to do with the fact that it looks very similar to most writing on old football jerseys. Sometimes the reason something is chosen is much simpler than we (experts in that field) want it to be.

<comment><USER6> That's interesting from a cultural perspective. Our feelings about fonts are deeply rooted in culture.

The poster they show is NOT the one I've seen. The poster I've seen has a handwriting typeface, and a diagram of a(n American) football play on it. I doubt that diagram would mean much in non-football-playing countries.

[http://www.dvdsreleasedates.com/posters/800/S/Silver- Linings...](http://www.dvdsreleasedates.com/posters/800/S/Silver-Linings- Playbook-2012-movie-poster.jpg)

But the font they replaced it with (slab serif / ITC Lubalin) has "athletic" connotations in the US - it's a classic "varsity letter" font. Does that connotation carry over outside the US though?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Jennifer Lawrence won Best Actress for her role in Silver Linings Playbook. So why does this post (and its image) only refer to the movie as "Silver Linings"?

<comment><USER8> Looks like it's known as Silver Linings in Germany: <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1045658/releaseinfo#akas>

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I wanted to submit this on DN (Designer News) but found out that it requires an invite code for registration.

</comment><comment><USER9> I dislike the word "font" used this way. It reads the same as "mp3s used in oscar winning films". A font is the thing you buy or download, a typeface is the shape of the letters.

<comment><USER10> _Font_ used to refer to a _typeface_ in a single size. 9pt Helvetica Light used to be a different font than 12pt Helvetica Light – while Helvetica Light (in any size) and Helvetica Bold (in any size) are different typefaces.

That distinction used to make sense as those different fonts with different sizes used to be physically different things.

With the advent of digital typography, that distinction doesn't make any more sense. Typefaces can be seamlessly scaled up and down, there really is no longer even a need for an extra word for a typeface of a certain size. You don't need the 12pt Helvetica Light file or the 9pt Helvetica Light file. Font and typeface became synonymous.

Now, given this history it makes sense to see _typeface_ as referring to the abstract notion of the shapes of the letters and _font_ to the technical implementation of the same, however, that distinction is hardly ever made and there is even factually no wide gulf between the two meanings. It's one and the same and if you think it's not, you are confused.

<comment><USER9> I agree there is a ton of overlap. Much like there is overlap between mp3, tracks, and song. My iPod has 1000 songs/tracks/mp3s is all correct. But saying someone is a good font designer is as silly as calling a musician a good mp3 writer.

<comment><USER10> _Font_ never referred to a specific file or just files in general. In current- day usage it's synonymous with _typeface_. That distinction is just non- sensical. It's a stupid ret-conning by annoying pedants.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Any good books on money? - <AUTHOR>

I more interested in knowing: * Fundamentals * Govt role * When new money is printed and whys<p>Thanks <comment><USER2> "What has government done to our money" by Murray Rothbard

It's available free in pdf and audio from mises.org.

[http://www.google.com/search?aq=f&sourceid=chrome&ie...](http://www.google.com/search?aq=f&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=what+has+government+done+to+our+money)

<comment><USER3> You mean other than _create it_?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World" - Niall Ferguson</comment>


Ex-Goldman Trader Aims to Bring Bitcoin to the Masses - T-A http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-30/coinbase-leads-move-to-bring-bitcoin-to-masses.html

<comment><AUTHOR> The article is an ad for Coinbase.

Coinbase might be considered more trustworthy if they had an address other than the founder's apartment and a mail drop in a sketchy area of Market St. in SF. Over half of all Bitcoin exchanges have gone bust. The "online wallet" services have an even worse record.</comment>


When non-technologists write about technology: about The Economist's "Technology in 2008" - <AUTHOR> http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/12/when-non-techno.html

<comment><USER2> As a friend of mine has pointed out to me repeatedly, the quality of the Economist's reporting has decreased substantially since they vamped up their online offerings, often pushing stories before they are ready and without the reflection that was the signature of the Economist. This piece is especially disappointing.

<comment><USER3> Jd, I'm an Economist reader because I enjoy its perspective on important political and economic issues.

What else has been slipping, do you think? Can you (or your friend) be more specific?

Thanks.

<comment><USER2> Ereldon,

The Economist has been pushing out shorter pieces on their website which generally aren't as good as the longer ones that find their way into print. It is possible the need for increased production has stretched the staff and made quality drop across the board; I'm not sure. In some ways it is symptomatic of all web media: greater quantity, shorter time to market, but generally less attached reflection and quality. I see it as akin to Americans general preference for filling their houses with many cheap things instead of fewer better things. I'm not sure if this is a function of the local culture or the capitalist system; either way one hopes to help the web evolve in a better way.

One other deficiency, IMHO, is the slipping ethical standards. One recent Economist article on Mao's management style concluded with an incredibly pessimistic couple sentences about how it doesn't really matter how many unethical things you do, so long as you aren't caught and forced to reckon before you die.

In any case, I stopped reading the Economist cover to cover about a year ago.

<comment><USER4> You have to have a strategy for reading it. Mine:

1) Editorials

2,3) US news, European news

4) Business

5) Obit

6) Science&Tech

7) Finance

8) Americas news

9) Asia news.

...) Special inserts, other various bits and pieces.

Last) Britain news.

Or something like that!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "The biggest road-hog remains spam (unsolicited e-mail), which accounts for 90% of traffic on the internet."

<http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21376597/>

"Peer-to-peer applications account for between 50 percent and 90 percent of overall Internet traffic, according to a survey this year by ipoque GmbH, a German vendor of traffic-management equipment."

In other news, 90% of internet traffic was found to be dissemination of agenda.

<comment><USER6> Actually, I have to apologize... _I_ have been using 90% of the internets. I left on my internets switch when I left the house last year. Sorry everyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The Economist is never wrong. But who is "pmarca".

<comment><USER8> ...and co-founder of Ning.

<comment><USER9> and opsware</comment></comment></comment>


Microsoft offers Apple users $650 off to trade a MacBook for a Surface - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/28/microsoft-apple/?ncid=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&utm_content=FaceBook&sr_share=facebook <comment><USER2> IMHO, this is a marketing attempt to get the word out that Surface Pro/Book are competing for the same market as the Macbook <whatever>. They could spend a lot of money on advertizing and try to reach end users, or come up with a scheme like this where they might not actually fork out too much money and let news media do the job for them. At the sortof discounts they'll actually end up giving on average, its a win for them irrespective of how many people actually make use of the offer.

(Quite clever, methinks)

<comment><USER3> Shouldn't Microsoft have made the trade in page prettier if the goal is to get the word out that "Surface Pro/Book are competing for the same market as the Macbook <whatever>"?

<comment><USER4> Sure, but Microsoft isn't exactly known for fancy marketing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> These trade-in values are laughable[1]. You are better off selling on eBay. Microsoft does sure know their Apple laptop models though

[1] [https://microsoftsurfacetrade.cexchange.com/online/home/inde...](https://microsoftsurfacetrade.cexchange.com/online/home/index.rails)

<comment><USER6> Selling something on eBay can be such a huge pain in the ass. I wouldn't be surprised if people were willing to pay for the convenience of doing it through Microsoft.

<comment><USER7> Doubly true if you're the kind of person who owns a Macbook Pro and is considering buying a Surface.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Quick clarification, it's not $650 off it's "up to" $650 off based off the Apple laptop's trade in value.

<comment><USER9> They wanted to give me US$100 for my 2008 alu MacBook. I bet they're going to flip them on fleabay!

<comment><USER7> Is there that healthy a market for second-hand computers that are nearly a decade old?

<comment><USER10> For a 2008 Macbook, $100-$200 on fleabay.

I have been looking at 2008-2009 27" iMacs, and they still go for US$700-800. Since OS X has to be built for underpowered laptops, it should still perform well on desktops for a while longer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As always, I'm creeped out by the fact that Microsoft is tracking how often everyone uses touch input. Are they tracking what app the user was interacting with? Exactly where/how they touched? What was under the touch? I'm just not comfortable sharing that information with anyone. If they were to provide a complete opt-out of all information sharing I'd definitely consider it, but until then I'm out.

This is in response to the giant quote box they have in the article on the actual blog post.

"97% of people that have a Surface Pro 4 or Surface Book use on-screen touch input regularly."

<comment><USER12> Upgrading to Windows 10 enterprise/Pro allows turning off of such creepy telemetry.

I understand they probably want to understand how users are using touch that they may not have taught yet but it should not be forced on regular Windows 10 users.

Still, on regular windows 10 home devices, tools like Spybot's anti-beacon seem to be at least somewhat effective in minimizing such calls home.

[https://www.safer-networking.org/spybot-anti-beacon/](https://www.safer- networking.org/spybot-anti-beacon/)

<comment><USER13> > Upgrading to Windows 10 enterprise/Pro allows turning off of such creepy > telemetry.

Isn't this option enterprise only? And it doesn't disable _everything_

I don't know what's the situation now but when I checked what a W10 enterprise installation leaked in a VM I was really shocked. Even after using a few tools, and the policy editor, I remember that even explorer.exe (the file manager I mean) was making network calls.

Not trying to spread FUD about MS, I'm tired of ALL telemetry, from apps to Apples. I would love to see some privacy advocating foundation or public service that released constant unbiased reports about what each OS version is collecting from you.

And, like I said before, if MS wants me to consider using Windows (outside of my daily job, that I have no other option), they should offer a PAID option with ZERO data collection. I don't care if you offer Windows for free in exchange for the user data, but I don't want any of it. And you can have my money for that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> $50.00 for a working MacBook Pro retina 13", I guess it's just a joke, even they don't believe anyone would trade a MacBook for a Surface-thing.

<comment><USER15> Really? They're offering me $400 for my 256gb / 2.4ghz late 2013 retina model. Pretty bog standard and 3 years old. That's enough to make me seriously consider it, since I've been eyeing the surface book for a bit. Mainly I need to figure out its Ubuntu compatibility now.

<comment><USER16> If you're seriously considering it, you'll get way more than $400 selling your MBP on your own.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> My question is: How is Microsoft going to dispose of these MacBooks?

My follow-up question is: How do I get in on that action?

</comment><comment><USER18> This is nothing new and Microsoft has had programs like this in place from time and time (including trading in old versions of Surface / Surface Pro).

As someone pointed out, it's just a re-branding of am existing third party "trade in" company.

Here's one for the Xbox [https://microsoftconsoletradeca.cexchange.com/online/home/in...](https://microsoftconsoletradeca.cexchange.com/online/home/index.rails)

</comment><comment><USER19> Any way I could trade my Surface Pro 3 for an old MacBook? I'm tired of MS breaking it every 2nd week with 'updates'.

<comment><USER20> Sounds like you have a lemon then and should have it replaced. I'm on a SP3 right now that I bought two years ago... since then upgraded to Win 10 and then to the Anniversary Update. Other than the battery drain issue that struck earlier this year, it's pretty much been flawless and I bang on it every day. I for one am sold on this form factor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Highlights how much Apple and Microsoft are targeting the same market with very different products, which is good for consumers.

Unfortunately consumers can also be the casualties. Less popularized "specs" would be the manufacturing and software issues that have plagued windows devices like the surfacebook being extremely buggy at launch and the del XPS 13 completely lacking drivers when launched with win 10... Apple seems to have a but better of a job at hardware and software integration.

<comment><USER22> I've had to RMA it twice, but otherwise my surface pro 3 has been the most reliable computer I've ever used. My only machine for work and play for the last 2 years, and right now it looks like a Surface will replace it.

<comment><USER23> > _I 've had to RMA it twice, but otherwise my surface pro 3 has been the most > reliable computer I've ever used._

That's... a pretty major "otherwise".

<comment><USER22> Well, my only problems were ones where I got a quick replacement. Day-to-day it simply worked well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> My answer would be "No, thanks."

Even though the new MB pro has the weird strip and lack of function keys, the OS is still better. Windows 10 has more quirks.

<comment><USER25> So put OSX on the Surface ;)

<comment><USER26> Is that even possible?

<comment><USER27> Yes just not legal (well it is sort of legal if you consider the EULA is not a law just don't advertise you are doing it).

On the other hand, OSX would be the worst OS to install on a convertible tablet/laptop - you're better off with Linux.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The trade-in value is really low. They offer UP TO $650, but most models are valued lower. Not a good deal for consumers.

</comment><comment><USER29> Some people here are complaining about the trade in value, but Microsoft's quote for my 2011 Macbook Pro was pretty close to what I could get for it on eBay.

However, I would not expect the resale value on any Surface product to be very good at all.

One of the nice things about owning Apple products is that you only pay full price for the first one -- when you replace it, you can trade in or sell the one you have for a lot more money than any non-Apple product of a similar age.

</comment><comment><USER30> Well, it looks as though they are striking while the iron is hot. There is enough disappointment by people wanting a serious unixy workstation who have been using the Mac for that purpose that if MS puts serious effort into their Windows Subsytem for Linux and pushes hard enough, they may well seriously grab developer market share from Apple.

I wonder if Apple would even notice.

<comment><USER31> It's a good question. Apple$ iPhone business alone is bigger than all of Microsoft.

<comment><USER32> Uh, isn't Apple's Iphone business most of Apple's business?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> "Up to $650". You plug in your exact model and get a value thats <= $650 based on resale value, similar to value to just selling to a service like Gazelle. Smart marketing though.

</comment><comment><USER34> They really blew a good oppportunity. The values they are offering are laughable.

</comment><comment><USER35> And by $650 you mean "up to $650"... I have a MacBook Air that was appraised at $260. Screw that...

</comment><comment><USER36> If they were serious they would make it 1000. Or even refund almost new prices. It would work. Ms in the past was very aggressive when they put their minds to getting market share. Remember when they offered web browsers for free. Bye Netscape. They offered 30pct a few years back on everything on eBay, these were compelling deals.

I do not like iPhone but sorry iPads are nicer than surface tablets. They should go hard if they really want to displace iPad. As a tablet surfaces are a little too heavy and expensive.

<comment><USER37> I was open to trade my Mid 2012 (upgraded RAM and HDD to SDD), but they offer me $350. I just bought a new charger for $80 dollars (you have to include it in the trade to be eligible)...

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Clever marketing, but very misleading and trade in values are mostly nowhere $650.

Went browsing apple.com macs after seeing all their $2k+ prices on surface books...

</comment><comment><USER39> Does it run Linux?

</comment><comment><USER40> Clearly a ploy by Microsoft to snag some decent hardware for their own staff on the cheap.

Nice try, slugheads!

</comment><comment><USER41> But, can you install Linux on it?

</comment><comment><USER42> Realized I forgot a out these day after they were presented. Perhaps because they're not even possible to buy here in Sweden...

Too bad, because they look mighty fine.

</comment><comment><USER43> I traded in my broken mackbook air for a surface pro 3. Microsoft sent someone to film me because of it. I think not a lot of people made that deal.

</comment><comment><USER44> Reminds me of Bing Rewards. They should probably refrain from offering people money to try their products because it devalues their own brand.

</comment><comment><USER45> What Apple does with purchased MacBook?

It will be funny if Apple puts ban on reselling these devices and disable their iTune accounts.

</comment><comment><USER46> If they would have actually given me $650 off I would have done it, but since they are only offering $150 for my model and I wasted my time looking into it, I feel an even stronger dislike from Microsoft than I felt before.

Nice work Microsoft marketing team. Very shortsighted.

<comment><USER47> You should channel your dislike towards Tech Crunch who wrote the headline...

<comment><USER46> I partially agree, but: 1\. Microsoft has a huge PR division and had at least some influence on this article. 2\. The entire promotion from Microsoft is meant to be click-bait because they aren't providing any value I couldn't get already. There are already resale markets for used Macbook pros that provide the same pricing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Surface is nice, But would i trade my Macbook for it, No!

</comment><comment><USER49> US only unfortunately.

</comment><comment><USER50> Damn. US only.

<comment><USER51> Agree... No love for EU users :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Title is misleading. It should be "up to $650". The trade in values are ridiculous, though and on par with pawn shop quotes.

</comment><comment><USER53> No thanks!

</comment><comment><USER54> Of course: The Surface is WORTHLESS!

That's a great deal for Microsoft.

</comment><comment><USER55> It only takes a kernel patch to gentoo for it to run linux!

</comment><comment><USER56> Desperado...</comment>


Abundant water likely to exist under 'moon rabbit,' Japanese research team says - <AUTHOR> https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/05/15/national/science-health/abundant-water-highly-likely-exist-moon-rabbit-japanese-research-team-says/ <comment><USER2> As I have been growing up and reading about space exploration the narrative had been same: the Earth is special because it has water which allows it to have life. Today it seems like the latest technologies allows us to discover that water in some form is everywhere we look. I believe that it will be the same with life. Today the only known form of life is on Earth and I can't wait to read about all the discoveries of different forms of life on other planets...

<comment><USER3> The distinction between (liquid) water and ice is pretty significant for astrobiology. I feel more like we are very quickly reaching the point where we have established that our solar system is barren of any (macroscopic) life[1]. And while we might be able to detect existence of life on other systems (by some chemical signatures), I very much doubt that we are going to see any more direct discoveries of extraterrestrial life during our lifetime simply due the vast interstellar distances involved.

[1] Sure, even micro-organisms would be a major discovery, but ultimately imho of limited interest and impact.

<comment><USER4> The difference between nothing and micro-organisms is much greater than the difference between micro-organisms and macro-organisms. The discovery of non- terrestrial-origin micro-organisms in our solar system would be massively significant.

<comment><USER5> What is it about going from nothing to micro-organisms that is so much more interesting than from micro-organisms to macro-organisms?

<comment><USER6> Because it poses new interesting questions: If extra-terrestrial life exists, do we have a common ancestor? This is the theory of panspermia. Or does life spontaneously arise when conditions are right, but with variation?

It would be particularly exciting to discover life that is similar to Earth but with an opposite chirality, or a genetic code that encodes amino acids using different base pairs.

<comment><USER7> I am willing to bet that whatever is eventually found will be remarkably similar to what we are familiar with on Earth, assuming a liquid-water environment, and the constraints that implies. Single-celled life appears to have arisen so rapidly that it predates the end of the Late Heavy Bombardment, after all.

(I'd be thrilled to be wrong about this, of course, just as I would be fascinated with any xenobiological discovery at all. But I do think the 'endless forms most beautiful' are also strongly constrained by simple physics, and thus the solutions found by an evolutionary random walk will resemble what we already know.)

<comment><USER5> This is what I suspect with microorganisms as well. Macroorganisms are much more complex and they have common features that seem very arbitrary like moving via cylindrical appendages called legs, or having faces that feature 2 eyes, a nose, and a mouth. It makes me think that it's much more likely to see something wildly different between macroorganisms on Earth and elsewhere than between microorganisms. It would be cool to see other forms of movement, other forms senses, other forms of communication, other forms of anatomy, etc.

EDIT: It also makes me wonder how different an ecosystem could be. Imagine one that did not require macroorganisms eating other macroorganisms, like ones that feed on heat or wind.

EDIT 2: Maybe mating requires 3 genders, etc. There seems to be a lot of room for variation.

<comment><USER8> There's even wild differences between macroorganisms on Earth.

Invertebrates are much more relaxed about number of eyes etc.

We can go from "humans are the optimal form!", to "well, some kind of mammal", "c'mon, it's got to be a vertebrate", then get into the Cambrian experiment, go back further to different DNA (RNA anyone), then to different metabolic pathways, then to different organic biochemistry, then to non-carbon... and why should life have a chemical basis, anyway? So chemocentric.

How can we tell when he go from too anthropocentric to too anti- anthropocentric? We have guesswork only. We're like a child rebelling against its parents.

It seems to me, that elephants, dolphins, parrots, octipuses, and even spiders could have undergone the rapid brain-size increase that happened to some apes. (We don't even know why it happened to us.) They might still do so, in a few million years.

<comment><USER9> On the other hand, some physical features have evolved multiple times independently. The eye is one key example. IMO this is a strong indication that creatures that evolved in places other than Earth probably also have something we'd recognize as eyes.

<comment><USER8> Yes, a great procedure for getting parameters.

Note that some earth creatures - deep sea and underground - have almost lost eyes. Like [blind mole rats]([https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Spalax](https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Spalax)). They have appropriately alien-like nose-antennae.

If there's light, they'll have eyes. Probably.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Had we established the first Moon base in 1988 as NASA had on its roadmap in 1970 we would know all about this ice and other aspects of the Moon as well :-).

I also agree with Tomas who opined that for a long time it was presented that water was 'rare' and somehow special. And while we can agree that the triple point is pretty narrow set of conditions that have to exist, we now know it flowed on Mars at one time, is probably currently flowing on Europa, and that ice is literally everywhere.

Time to rewrite our Science Fiction tropes.

<comment><USER11> > Had we established the first Moon base in 1988 as NASA had on its roadmap in > 1970 we would know all about this

You say that offhandedly, as if they decided not to move forward with a Moon base due to bureaucracy or because some upper management people decided to go in a different direction.

A permanent moon base in the 70s and 80s was largely impossible as far as the technology is concerned. Hell, we're approaching 2020 and we _still_ have several major hurdles before we could put a permanent base on a body or planet that is not earth. Everything from radiation to supplies are still problems that need solved. Expecting them to solve them in the late 70s or early 80s is almost laughable.

I know HN and reddit likes to think it was congress who is responsible for the shift in NASAs goals (after all, they control the purse strings so they get to dictate/approve budgets & goals), but they did so precisely because NASA told them it was impossible to establish a permanent moon base at that point in time. On top of the insane cost, what more was there to be gained that justified the immense cost? If they wanted to go to the moon and study rocks, that's what the Apollo program was for. There was only so much we could learn with the technology we had at the time. People forget, the rest of the solar system awaited exploration too, but only so much money to go around.

"But we can use the moon as a base to launch further missions out into the solar system and beyond!" It's a nice pipe dream, but getting the materials there and/or manufacturing facilities to create everything needed is cost prohibitive. Also, the logistics of doing something like that today is insane, let alone 30 years ago.

<comment><USER12> If the US had established a colony on the moon, would that colony have eventually declared independence?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I would have believed that there's some tech that allows an orbiter to detect water under the surface. It seems that such a thing doesn't exist. What's next, droping bombs to study debris and ground waves?

<comment><USER14> I don't remember if the moon was the target, but I recall there was a probe in the last 30 years or so that was deliberately crashed into something just to study the debris that was kicked up.

<comment><USER15> You might be referring to Deep Impact [0], which wasn't even quite that long ago.

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Impact_(spacecraft)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Impact_\(spacecraft\))

<comment><USER16> or LCROSS: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LCROSS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LCROSS)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wonder if these water deposits are near craters that are in permanent shadow and always below freezing. You could send a relatively small robotic setup that would melt the deep ice into water and use it to form structures on the crater. Now you have a permanent moonbase without bringing in tons of material via rockets.

<comment><USER18> ...until you try to heat it to a reasonable temperature, the walls melt, and all your atmosphere off gases in to space.

<comment><USER17> You'd have to lay insulation against the ice so you can have a warmer interior, but that's still a pretty good mass savings. You'd use ice for the heavy structural elements and then only lift the lighter stuff.

<comment><USER19> The more pressure you put on ice, the more it wants to turn into liquid. So your "heavy structural elements" can't be bearing too much weight.

<comment><USER20> On the moon, it could bear six times the mass it would bear on Earth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> If you put a fish in some heated moon water on the moon, could it swim in it and live?

<comment><USER22> Maybe for a brief time, until the water turned to vapor or if it were in a hermetically sealed container, until the water ran out of dissolved oxygen for the fish to breathe.

<comment><USER21> So for aquatic life, some of these worlds could potentially already be terraformed?

<comment><USER23> I think the fish also need food. Alge, seagrass, bugs, crustaceans etc.

<comment><USER22> Not really. For the brief time the fish will survive in an un-enclosed container of water on the Moon's surface, they'll be fine without any food. By the time they get hungry, the water will all be vaporized and they'll be dead.

<comment><USER23> Oh I was referring the comment about "terraforming" other planets/moons that have water by plopping fish into the oceans there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> if there are rocks and gravity, there is water. the gravity crushes the rocks and forces the hydrogen and oxygen out, and it forms water. So basically there is water everywhere in the universe. The "we found water" meme is just tabloid headlines recycled over and over again, much like "voyager leaves the solar system" every year -- wine is good for you, wine is bad for you, antibiotics are causing resistence, etc, etc. Go look at any Popular Science magazine from the 90s and now, the same damn narratives repeated, rephrased, and re-rinsed.

<comment><USER25> Given relative elemental frequency in the universe, and propensities to form molecules, water is likely the third most common molecule whhich exists, after molecular hydrogen and oxygen.

The second-most prevalent element, helium, doesn't form molecules (to any meaningful extent, if at all).

Methane (CH4) likely comes next.

[https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-most-common-compound-in- ou...](https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-most-common-compound-in-our-universe)</comment></comment>