Ask HN: What has been your biggest mistake? - <AUTHOR> I'm keen to learn from failure, and what better way than to learn from the mistakes of others. :)<p>What are some of the biggest mistakes you've made.. and what have you learnt? <comment><USER2> 1\. Not majoring in computer science the _first_ time I quit my physics major. If you like something, don't stay away from it for silly reasons (like thinking that school will make you un-like it).

2\. Not knowing the difference between profitability and traction when I was looking at startups to work for. I spent 2 years at a relatively low-growth startup because I thought that its profits meant it was successful, when I could've learned much more at a higher-growth yet unprofitable startup.

3\. Letting ideas sit too long. I had the idea for <http://www.whatshallidonow.net/> about a week before I started implementing it, but was busy with job apps. In the meantime, <http://nowdothis.com/> launched, and now they have all the momentum.

4\. Spending too much time on super-ambitious projects and ignoring the low- hanging fruit.

<comment><USER3> You do realise that nowdothis has a better gui than yours, right? Given the two services, I'd pick theirs.

<comment><USER4> they've got amazing simplicity, and done client-side so instant response (remembers you with cookies, but seems to be no server storage). But you have to do the tasks in strict order, and you have to finish it before moving on (you can't just "make progress").

whatshallidonow changes the order. it has a "made progress" button. it would be nice if it had a button "skip - I don't want to do this one right now!". (tho you can achieve that effect by reloading, ctrl-r).

finally, the dothisnow guy gave a shoutout to our guy nostrademons here (and also to yetanothersimilarsite) <http://nowdothis.tumblr.com/post/44066616/synchronicity>

_now they have all the momentum._

"Your greatest competitor is non-usage."

That quote is not just encouraging, it's also literally true (unless your market is >50% saturated). Plus, no two products are ever identical (whatshallidonow is a slightly different idea), and no two users are either: some like yours. However, I agree there are benefits to being first, #1, etc (and it's more exciting).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I applied for a job at Lycos around 1997. I passed the simple phone interviews and they scheduled an in-person interview. My wife did not want to make the move it would take so I cancelled the interview. We still live in San Diego, I feel if I was up in a more exciting environment I could have done better.

I instead joined this one startup of sorts, worked literally 15+ hour days including Saturdays. Unfortunately it hit a rough patch and they could only afford one programmer and I wasn't it. So the other guy now is making around 15k a month now. They hired me back but I make about a 3rd of that. The system generates about 50k a month in free cash flow and I built all of the fundamentals of the system.

</comment><comment><USER6> .Getting a degree. Honestly, I didn't need it. Contentious subject I know, but from the Hacker perspective, I have always relied on self learning in concentrated bursts to get me through - want a thorough understanding of TCP/IP? Spend 3 weekends going through the documentation and then playing around. Not 6 months in rigidly structured classes with no leeway for progression above and beyond what is in the curriculum. I could have got a job that paid my pocket money, whilst learning more and coming out with less debt. "but would this have paid off?" I hear everyone say. My degree or time in education has absolutely no standing of where I am now, apart from the fact that I feel I could have been here by early twenties instead of mid twenties

<comment><AUTHOR> I can understand this sentiment, but from my experience a lot of the value from doing a degree isn't from what you learn in class.

For me, the biggest value came from meeting other like minded people and being exposed to brand new concepts.

There's also value in learning how to finish things. I can understand that people drop out (for many reasons) and that's fine, but I think it's important to learn how to finish things off.

Although, knowing when to bail is probably also just as important. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think the mistakes that can be classified as the 'biggest', are typically the ones made in personal relationships. Those are the things that probably cannot be mended/replaced with any other 'equivalents'.

In terms of career/work etc, i really do not think one needs to worry much or brood over past decisions, we all got plenty of time (hopefully) to work everything out as we want it to.

This quote sums up a lot of things nicely:

      The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one. -- Elbert Hubbard

</comment><comment><USER8> Not sleeping with more women. When I was younger, women were more plentiful (and looking for relationships) but I spent most of my time in front of computers.

Today, computers are more plentiful and most of the nice women I meet are already married or in long term relationships.

<comment><USER9> I could understand if your regret were not dating, but is your only regret a lack of sex? The "nice women" would be averse to marrying you if your number got too high. From the perspective of a marriage-worthy woman, it's fine to be a virgin till 23-25, and the ideal number for a 30-year-old male is probably 1-6.

How old are you? It seems that the odds get better for a guy until age 35. When you're 20, the age range of women you'll be able to date is very limited: approximately 18-21. When you're 35, it's 23-40. Gender ratios also improve (from a male perspective) dramatically as you age, with noticeable effects in dating. I'm 25 and loving it; I definitely don't miss being an acne-pwned, insecure 19-year-old.

Also, if you're looking for marriage-worthy women, have you considered moving abroad? The only reason I still live in the US is that New York is very, very international. I would not be able to stand it if the only women available for dating were white, suburban Americans.

<comment><USER10> Wow, what a difference in perspective. I couldn't imagine wanting to marry a woman who even cared about the number of women I've slept with. My wife and I were both very "friendly" before we met each other and neither of us has ever even bothered to ask the other how many people we've slept with. It simply doesn't matter to me.

I wonder what your criteria for "marriage-worthy woman" is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Thinking other people are dumb. Even if it were true, it has yet to get me anywhere.

<comment><USER12> I could not agree more on this point. It seems like this comes up all too often in design discussions, and it is difficult to get around in a productive manner.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I used to have regrets. For much of my early 20s, I thought not having tried to make music professionally was a mistake. Then, later, I worked at Macrovision and saw the music business up-close and was very glad not to be part of it! Similarly, for a couple of years after my PhD I regretted not staying in academia. Working for a startup has completely cured me of that regret.

I guess I've learned that something you believe to be a mistake today can turn out to have been a smart move given a year or two's hindsight.

</comment><comment><USER14> Not getting it in writing. It doesn't have to be a long drawn out contract, just a short email explaining what the agreement is. Even amongst friends, you will never regret having an email stating your agreement.

<comment><USER15> Trusting the level of integrity, gratification posed by founders/managers and slogging my ass for their success. Reminds me of Austin Wiltshire's blog on New hire Cannon fodder.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> startup-wise:

1\. working as employee #6 at a startup in boston instead of google in 2001.

2\. working as employee #6 at a startup in SF instead of youtube in 2005.

whoops!

<comment><USER17> I feel for you, dude...I hope there's no number 3 next time someone asks you this question.

<comment><USER18> I hope he doesn't decide to go anywhere again as employee #6. I am not normally superstitious, but I would avoid that like the plague going forward.

'Oh you currently have 5 employees? That is too bad...' :)

<comment><USER17> Totally. It wouldn't be pure superstition either; a 6th employee commands a certain amount of stock, a certain amount of wages, and is hired at a certain stage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Not saying "no" enough. Trying to do too much, and doing none of it well.

So work on a small task you can complete rather than trying to tackle a giant problem you'll never finish.

</comment><comment><USER20> I spent a year after college goofing off, and not in the good way either. When I finally woke up (literally, pretty much) and realized a whole year had passed by I had lost a lot of momentum. Otherwise I would definitely have completed my master's (or at least worked on something useful). I blame social security.

But at least I came through - I had friends that time who are dead now (one overdosed on heroin, one crashed a stolen car while a fugitive from prison).

</comment><comment><USER21> My PhD. Sure I learnt lots of great stuff and met some great people - but I could've done all that with a master's.

<comment><USER22> What did you get a PhD in?

<comment><USER21> Human Computer Interaction. Specifically, I wrote about using participatory and user centred design for implementing ubiquitous computing systems in non- office environments (in order to improve HCI).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Spending the first half of my twenties working my guts out for a big corporation where my efforts went largely unnoticed outside of my immediate sphere. I'm certain that if I put that time into a start-up I would be much better off today -- even if it failed.

<comment><USER2> I'm kinda curious - is there anyone who _doesn't_ regret their twenties? We've got three posts regretting working for the _wrong_ startup (mine, menloparkbum, and gscott), one working for a big company (yours), one going to grad school (timcederman), one getting a degree (jobeyonekenobi), and one doing nothing (johnyzee). So apparently working for a small company is bad, working for a big company is bad, not working is bad, and getting educated is bad. What _should_ one be doing?

<comment><USER24> start a band, buy a bike and travel, get arrested for something stupid, have fun.

<comment><USER2> I know some folks that did that and regretted it. Well, maybe not the travel part, but I've got various friends that have started bands/gotten arrested/had fun and kinda wish they hadn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Graduated with BA in comp.sci at 19 y.o. (not a mistake), then immediately took job doing web support stuff with big (non-tech) company.

In retrospect, I would have loved to look at more options (like starting my own company), but a) I honestly wasn't even aware of the y-combinator sorts of opportunities, b) I was engaged to be married, and felt pressure to be 'stable', and c) didn't think there was anything interesting in my area (and didn't want to leave).

So now (at 22) I'm working on a solo startup solo, in bits and pieces on the side. I just don't want to be like all the 30-year people surrounding me. Or the 10 year people. Or even the cynical, tired person I see myself becoming, all too rapidly ;). Must... not... give... in...

</comment><comment><USER26> #1 with a bullet: listening to the hype.

</comment><comment><USER27> I was a National Merit Finalist, honors student, and such. I didn't go out and get scholarships for college. I stayed in-state instead of going out for my own adventure. When I got to college, I didn't know what I was doing with myself and bombed pretty badly. I wasted a lot of time and effort. I didn't drop out to figure things out though. I took out a lot of student loans, and didn't even finish undergrad first time around.

I think a lot of my problem was not biting the bullet and making the hard choices after that first mistake. Instead, I dug myself deeper every time. I'm still paying the loans, but once I figured out what I really wanted, it was not so hard to work to get it.

</comment><comment><USER28> 1) Granting people respect just because they are older than I am.

2) Not moving to San Francisco sooner.

<comment><USER29> I only respect three things:

* Competence

* Knowledge

* Experience

In that order. In fact, I only really respect the first one, but I've found that the other two can be very strong indicators of the first, and it's generally a bad bet to assume that someone who's clearly more experienced and/or knowledgeable than you on a topic is not also more competent (at least in some way).

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I didn't have the guts to ask this one girl out.

<comment><USER30> I did and she basically spit in my face...

<comment><USER24> I envy you my friend.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Not listening to my own ideas.

</comment><comment><USER32> Not playing football in 6th grade. I would have been a completely different person, I believe.

<comment><USER16> Football meaning soccer or american gridiron? I played the latter and the injuries I took affect me to this day. Back in the day, nobody mentioned the 100% injury rate - i.e. anyone who plays football will eventually get hurt bad enough they can't play. Thus, as I type this from bed, because one of my slipped discs has acted up, I have the opposite opinion - playing football was one of the biggest mistakes I've ever made.

<comment><USER11> Almost every sport has a 100% injury rate where you eventually get hurt bad enough you can't play anymore. The trick is choosing a sport where the most common injuries prevent you from playing the sport but don't prevent you from walking. A good percentage of swimmers eventually develop shoulder injuries, but (AFAIK) that doesn't prevent you from doing anything except swimming.

<comment><USER33> maybe the 100% rate is true, but not 100% career-ending injuries.

Most people quit playing a given sport seriously because they have to choose between that and making money.

I swam for 4 years in college and I only know 1 person who had a career ending shoulder injury, and that one because it was misdiagnosed for a year.

OTOH everyone I know who played football at any level has at least a minor nagging injury.

<comment><USER18> I have played hockey for many years and know quite a few people who have done the same. I can't think of anyone with a long term injury.

I suppose it is reflected in 'old timer beer leagues'. There are a few 50 year old guys on my team right now, and they can play fine they are just slower. Sames holds for baseball.

Even though football isn't that popular here - most of the guys I know that did play with hopes of making it big in the US college system ended up injured.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Focusing on quality rather than volume.

</comment><comment><USER35> Talking about regrets and mistakes s a funny thing. There is an implied hypothetical there -- like, "If I had made a different choice, I would be a in a better place."

Take, for example, my (admittedly foolish) decision to drop out of the University after a year and go to community college part-time for a year. It should have been a bust, but I ended up meeting my wife (who was working on her generals) there. I met another great friend on my second run at the University. Now my wife and this friend are my co-founders for my startup... both of whom I possibly would've never known if I hadn't gone to the community college.

Now, I'm not saying that there is no such thing as bad choices, or that I have no regrets about things I've done -- I think it's natural for us to regret things that we perceive as mistakes. But I'm pretty happy right now in spite of any problems that I might have, and as far as choices contribute to our happiness, mine have worked out well. It's hard for me to describe choices that have made me happy as "mistakes".

</comment><comment><USER36> Not launching soon enough and waiting until the product was "perfect".

</comment><comment><USER37> I think this is in terms of startup mistakes, seeing as how "life mistakes" could start an entirely new forum all together.

Here are my top 3:

1\. Wasting money on a legal entity. If you're not making money, you cannot be sued. Wait until you make money or have someone willing to give you money before you waste money on protecting yourself.

2\. Bad business partners. Judge your partners not by how much you like them but if they'll complement your skillz, add value to the team, and are dedicated to the project.

3\. Not saying no. It's a personal problem, I'm a really nice guy, it's hard for me to say no sometimes, but it's necessary. It's not personal, it's business.

<comment><USER26> Your #1 item is dangerously wrong. If you're not making money you can still be sued for personal assets (house, car, etc); and if you don't have those, you can be sued for debt.

<comment><USER38> I'm baffled as to how he could actually believe that. Also, the cost of forming an LLC to insulate yourself against that is trivial.

<comment><USER37> You cannot get sued for having a site that isnt charging anything because youre not giving any legal consideration. Without legal consideration, there is no contract between you and your user base. Thus, while you technically can still be sued, having that case go anywhere is very unlikely.

Of course if youre doing something legally grey like youtube or file sharing, then perhaps you should incorporate. But without any assets in the company, the corporate liability will most likely be pierced in court.

As for a LLC. Its nice but you should really do a ccorp if youre serious about business, and changing from a LLC to a ccorp is a pain in the butt. Or so I hear.

To go further, I challenge you to show me a single case of a company being sued that wasnt doing something legally grey and not making any money.

<comment><USER26> Applying your litmus test means that no OSS company has ever been (or will ever be) sued for patent infringement.

It is difficult to have a corporate veil pierced on the basis of assets held alone, and there are specific conditions in place in every state that must be met in order to pierce the corporate veil. Which you've actually argued for yourself in your claim that a C Corp is the entity that you want to use in order to protect yourself from liability, because that is the basis of most of the corporate law in the US.

I just think you're advocating gambling with your personal assets when you could just as easily spend $1000 to $1500 to have a professional set up your corporation and have some level of protection. Additionally, you could throw in a few hundred bucks and insure the new corporation against liabilities. The last time I purchased a policy, it cost me something like $300 a year to carry a $2,000,000 liability policy.

I bet most people starting a startup have spent more than that on the laptop they use.

[Edit: Maybe there is a lawyer who reads YC who can clarify all this stuff for us]

<comment><USER37> Icey: Do you know ANY open source foundation that has been SUCCESSFULLY sued for damages? Give me ONE example.

At the end of the day. It's financial decision. Think of ALL the startups ever created for the web, the amount of money/time to understand to create the limited liability shelter, and how many of these examples of these shoe-string startups (those without funding or serious traction) actually get successfully sued for damages.

The odds are, very very very very very small. And ok, while my personal advice might not be for everyone. I am currently almost broke, so for me, it makes no difference if they come after my personal assets because I can just file ch. 7, as opposed to the amount of capital and money and upkeep that comes with any form of limited liability.

If you think I'm wrong, digg me down, but note how no one has (1) shown a counter example or (2) has given advice from the standpoint of a seasoned lawyer.

<comment><USER26> I'm not a historian, nor am I a legal expert, that's far outside my realm of expertise. However, just because I can't personally name an example of that happening doesn't mean that it "cannot" happen.

I was merely pointing out that the advice you were dispensing was risky and negligent. That is still the case; I'm afraid the burden of proof is on you, as you're the one making spurious claims.

"Cannot" is a world of difference from "not likely to".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> 1\. too much cocaine. really, it makes you feel like you can conquer anything and anyone, but it is totally not worth it. 2\. learning any Windows based programming languages. seriously, what a waste of time.

</comment><comment><USER40> havent dared to make enough mistakes yet

<comment><AUTHOR> Be brave! I wanna hear some horror stories! :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Listening too seriously to others. People like to give "advice" from their perspective and because such advice is through their own lens of reality it might be true for them, but not for you.

</comment><comment><USER42> Compromising the long-term product vision for short-term gains.

</comment><comment><USER43> Biggest Regret: Waiting too long.

Examples: I wish I learned to program sooner. I wish I started playing basketball sooner. Etc...

I _still_ find myself doing this, although less now than before.

</comment><comment><USER44> Quitting work in the physics lab at the University of Florida my freshman year and then switching from a physics and mathematics major to a finance major.

</comment><comment><USER45> My worst mistakes were in doing what was expected of me, rather than what I wanted to do.

</comment><comment><USER46> Wow, interesting topic. Some months ago, I started a little (non commercial) website that would do exactly this: ask people what they regret and record it for others.

<http://www.regrett.com>

</comment><comment><USER12> Not focusing on ideas that interested me, but rather ones that interested others.

</comment><comment><USER47> try to hold on as much equity as you can

</comment><comment><USER48> Not having looked for a scholarship to get me to a real university. Now I'm stuck here. I'm in my 4th year (1 more to go), if I transferred I'd be in 2.5 or something.

</comment><comment><USER49> Not focusing on a single product. We moved into a related sphere because our technology applied, but doing it part-time we ended up shortchanging both.

</comment><comment><USER50> Given up to early.

</comment><comment><USER51> Not quitting sooner the startup where I had to learn J2EE.

</comment><comment><USER52> Majoring in finance.

</comment><comment><USER53> afraid of making mistakes .

</comment><comment><USER54> Most of the below!!! (except playing football and doing physics!!)

<comment><USER55> Sorry to downvote you, but there are no mistakes below your comment. It was a mistake to think HN comments are statically positioned. :)

<comment><USER54> i still dont understand the how downvoting actually works here... i found i just got downvoted on a different thread for no apparent reason.... what the? oh well such is life :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm good at rolling with the punches, so I haven't yet been smashed by a big mistake, although I've made plenty. I usually recover from those, and come back bigger and badder.

I have, however, lost a lot to the petty time-wasters and energy drains that eventually lead to missing opportunities for growth.</comment>


Git from the Bottom Up - <AUTHOR> https://jwiegley.github.io/git-from-the-bottom-up/ <comment><USER2> Excellent write up.</comment>


Ask HN: What job would you offer a person w/experience but now fails interviews? - <AUTHOR> This question can apply to any theoretical situation with a person that describes the above. Their past experience is mostly relevant to the jobs they interview for. But for some reason, despite demonstrating knowledge to prove their experience, they cannot pass anymore interviews.<p>Suppose you were able to fill in a paid job for them immediately. That job is whatever you choose. If you had a chance to choose a job for a person that describes the above, what kind of job would it be, and why? <comment><USER2> Finding a single, definitive measurement for arbitrary amounts of string.

<comment><AUTHOR> Could you elaborate on this? Would it involve devising a new unit of measurement? Your reply reminds me of this page: [http://wiki.c2.com/?HowLongIsaPieceOfString](http://wiki.c2.com/?HowLongIsaPieceOfString)</comment></comment>


Snapchat Raises $175 Million from Fidelity at Same $16 Billion Valuation - <AUTHOR> http://recode.net/2016/03/03/snapchat-raises-175-million-from-fidelity-at-same-16-billion-valuation/ <comment><USER2> Someone needs to really value snapchat from a technology perspective, not intersecting MAUs with youtube, twitter and facebook.</comment>


Moz: //Gfx Newsletter #46 - <AUTHOR> https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/2019/07/05/moz-gfx-newsletter-46/ <comment><USER2> The pathfinder article linked partway down was on HN last month as well: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20038645](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20038645)</comment>


Ask HN: Is there room for a non-profit computer science degree provider? - <AUTHOR> I was reading over in the "What did you work on in 2017" thread and noticed quite a number of people are working on bootcamp style engineering curriculums. That led me to wonder again about something I've thought of before:
Why isn't there a bootcamp that provides a bachelors level computer science degree?
I realize that most bootcamps are focused on providing people with the skills needed to get a job quickly, getting a bachelors level degree is a different market. But I would imagine there are people who would like that level of degree.
I also realize that a bachelors level degree has a number of requirements that aren't purely comp sci requirements. I don't see that as a problem. Why not have a full curriculum? I think that is possible.
Also, why does a comp sci degree have to cost so much? In fact, if you're willing to put in the effort to learn and grow why can't it be free? This may be a very US centric view. I know other countries have different ways of paying for college educations. But here in the US it's going to cost you tens of thousands of dollars at minimum. Does it have to be that way?
So I guess my question is, why can't there be a free or low cost, not for profit, accredited bachelors level computer science degree?
What am I missing? <comment><USER2> Most public and even private universities are non profit. The American system is very service-heavy (smaller class sizes, lots of hand holding), while what you want is the German system, where your education is almost free but all they give you is have a lecture with a huge audience and one or two graded tests per semester. This is also kind of the opposite of a boot camp, which is an accelerated program that relies on lots of support.

<comment><USER3> What if we go the MOOC route with very, very frequent clicker type quizzes with detailed explanations that help students assess where they are and also severely cut down on the interaction between the student and the instructor? Any student feedback will be public and the instructor shall use it to improve the course, quizzes, and projects for all?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Because a degree isn't worth the paper it's printed on unless it comes from an accredited institution - and that takes $$$.

<comment><USER5> Perhaps accreditation should be separated from education.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > So I guess my question is, why can't there be a free or low cost, not for > profit, accredited bachelors level computer science degree?

I've looked into this topic somewhat, and basically it boils down to dense regulation by governments and an oligopoly on "accreditation" by a few institutions that has risen out of this. However, the costs are not insurmountable to obtain accreditation, but the process itself is rather arduous and not quite as inexpensive as this article ([https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2015/10/22/real- costs-a...](https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2015/10/22/real-costs- accreditation-and-processs-value-essay)) leads you to believe, still perhaps 40-60k a year are the costs you would be looking at for accreditation alone, and you haven't even started to pay your faculty or administrators to work with the institution to maintain standards, etc.

However, in order to be accredited you need to meet each and every requirement and suggestion made by these institutions. I have no idea how pliable they would be to alternative plans of learning and anything non-standard - my guess is not very, but I could be mistaken.

> But here in the US it's going to cost you tens of thousands of dollars at > minimum. Does it have to be that way?

It doesn't. There is nothing inherent in the process of "gaining the knowledge and skills of a BA in Computer Science" that needs to costs anywhere near thousands of dollars - except in opportunity costs perhaps. Its just that the US system, through misaligned Government policy, has created an environment in which it is very difficult for an entrepreneur to just come in and "open up a new learning institution", so new and alternative models don't get tried out and aren't allowed to freely compete in order to weed out inefficiences and allow for the best to rise to the top.

</comment><comment><USER7> There is a low cost, accredited (in the US) BSc, or 2 year associates degree, in Computer Science that can be taken by online remote students anywhere in the world [https://www.uopeople.edu/programs/](https://www.uopeople.edu/programs/)

The only formal entrance req are the ability to read/write English, and a high school diploma. Exams are $100 each, and there's 40 exams over a 4 year period plus whatever costs for taking them proctored through ProctorU or some other local service, or somebody that agrees to be your proctor who isn't related to you. Credits can be transferred to NYU or Berkeley. Example of some of the courses: [https://www.uopeople.edu/prepare-for-university/computer- sci...](https://www.uopeople.edu/prepare-for-university/computer-science- courses-prepare-university/)

There's also also wgu.edu which is non-profit and offers online degrees, not as inexpensive as UofPeople. Open University in the UK also offers remote CS BSc (and Statistics BSc) but it's around $2.5k/year GBP for part-time. Arizona State also has an online BSc in software engineering but it's reg tuition costs, so $15k+ per year.

</comment><comment><USER8> There's room. But the problem you'll find is the constant problem with raising funds and keeping staff. People have their own motivations for working at a place but the bottom line is that they must feel like they are earning enough to keep them satisfied. It varies by person. But if the workplace can't compete in pay and benefits then people move to where they can find that.

Also, it's expensive to run a quality business and you'll find that you will need to charge students about what they are paying now. You might give them a better quality education but ultimately it costs a lot of money to keep staff and the other business needs. So either you charge what it costs or you do fundraising. Also, even if you keep the costs low, students what to attend and pay for a school that will eventually give them the education that will give them the skill to get a top paying job. You need to build a reputation that will eventually create a school people want to attend.

So basically you have to have a benefactor that will pay and carry you through the expenses and the time to build a reputation. It's a very hard to do.

</comment><comment><USER9> The average student loan debt in the US is about $30k. That's a little less than the price of the average new car sold in the US in 2017, and it's quite a bit less than the first year of salary for a graduate with a CS degree.

You can get a good education that prepares you for a high-paying career for less than the price of a Toyota Camry with leather seats. That seems to me like a fantastic deal.

<comment><USER10> There's a pretty big difference between "average student loan debt" and "the cost of an education". The former doesn't include costs that were paid without going into debt, nor does it include debt that has been partially paid off after graduation.

Don't forget to factor in the opportunity cost of not working a full-time job for four years.

<comment><USER11> Lots of non education expenses get rolled into student loan debt. I've known people to take out max student loan debt and buy CDs or invest it in rental property.

Some people take out excess student loan debt because they don't want to cramp their lifestyle of a nice car and eating out everyday.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't see the need for a degree if you have the skills. People who have the grit to bootstrap their CS education and complete it will do so. They don't need the support of a bootcamp or an accredited institution.

In my work in trying to teach CS to refugees and underprivileged, underrepresented people, I've been discouraged. As of now, I believe that there is a very small subset of people who can really "get it" and make a difference. I think even I am not one who can, but through my hard work and determination, I've been able to eek out a pretty good income.

You can bring a horse to water, but you can't force it to drink. These kids want to be doctors, flight attendants, sports stars. Sure, they'll come sit in class because their parents are making them (because they see the value in what we're offering... free CS education with professional and industry support) They'd rather hang out with their friends than secure the keys needed to break the poverty cycle.

<comment><USER13> >These kids

they're children. there's something tragically wrong with the world that we expect children to be so jaded that they'd rather be career climbing than "hang out with their friends". i say this as someone who occasionally wishes he did do that (hung out less and studied more) and did come relative poverty but my point still stands.

<comment><USER14> > they're children

At some point, children need to start maturing and thinking of themselves as adults. When they go off to college at 18, they're old enough to legally vote, drive, hold a job, get married or join the military. They still have a bit of growing up to do, but they're no longer children.

I spent a lot of time hanging out with friends in college, but I (and a lot of other people I knew) also worked hard at my classes (CS degree) and held down part-time jobs. My family wasn't rich, and I was old enough to realize that I'd have to support myself when I graduated.

I think we're doing young adults a disservice by thinking of them as "children".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Why isn't there a bootcamp that provides a bachelors level computer science > degree?

Because meeting government rules for private, for-profit degree granting institutions and accreditation requirements for degree granting institutions requires a lot of expenditure and, for accreditation, time that get-rich-quick bootcamp operators aren't interested in.

> So I guess my question is, why can't there be a free or low cost, not for > profit, accredited bachelors level computer science degree?

The vast majority of US colleges and universities are either private nonprofits or public institutions.

<comment><USER11> Whether the bootcamp people are greedy or not doesn't factor in.

Getting national accreditation for a coding bootcamp would be like getting a PhD in biology to be a dog groomer. Not only is it overkill, it wouldn't really teach you to do your job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> There already is, it's just not widely known, and they don't spend much money on advertising, probably to keep the fees down: University of London International program (distance learning) BS in Computing and Information Systems Total Cost of 3 year degree: $8000 [https://london.ac.uk/courses/computing-and-information- syste...](https://london.ac.uk/courses/computing-and-information-systems#fees)

<comment><USER17> That is not CS.

<comment><USER16> Did you actually look at the course listings? The final year includes courses in NLP, AI, Neural Networks, Data Compression, Computer Security. Sounds pretty "computer science" to me...

<comment><USER17> I did not, but do you expect the people reviewing your resume/credentials to look at the course listings? There's a reason job listings specifically ask for a CS degree. It's not necessarily a good reason, but it needs to be acknowledged. I don't have one, BTW, hence why I'm interested in an online course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> SUNY (State University of New York) now offers full tuition coverage for NY residents.

[https://www.ny.gov/programs/tuition-free-degree-program- exce...](https://www.ny.gov/programs/tuition-free-degree-program-excelsior- scholarship)

</comment><comment><USER19> Of all the degrees that could be free, one that near guarantees you one of the highest paying professional careers immediately upon graduation is not exactly a bad investment.

</comment><comment><USER20> Almost all US universities are non-profit.

</comment><comment><USER21> Personally I'd be ecstatic if they could do a remote CS degree, non-profit or no.

</comment><comment><USER22> San Jose State University</comment>


"Houston, we've had a problem" - new interactive of the Apollo 13 mission - <AUTHOR> http://apollo13.spacelog.org/02:07:55:35/#show-selection

<comment><USER2> Wow, this is powerful stuff. The radio bravado is high, and the situation is dictated in heavy engineer-speak, but you can read between the lines and sense the empathy and frustration from Houston.

I would love to get an in-depth technical explanation of the requests and procedures -- how all this stuff works and insights into the troubleshooting process.

<comment><USER3> The glossary is useful for deciphering some of the obscure acronyms.

<http://apollo13.spacelog.org/glossary/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That's pretty different from what I remember in the movie. Oh, Hollywood :)

</comment><comment><USER5> Surprisingly long gaps between the radio transmissions...</comment>


Donkey – A computer game included with early versions of PC DOS - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/coding-horror/donkey.bas/blob/master/donkey.bas <comment><USER3> Playable here: [http://www.pcjs.org/devices/pcx86/machine/5150/cga/64kb/donk...](http://www.pcjs.org/devices/pcx86/machine/5150/cga/64kb/donkey/)

"The above simulation is configured for a clock speed of 4.77Mhz, with 64Kb of RAM and a CGA display, using the original IBM PC Model 5150 ROM BIOS and CGA font ROM. This configuration also includes a predefined state, with PC-DOS 1.0 already booted and DONKEY.BAS ready to run.

And now that PCx86 automatically saves all your changes (subject to the limits of your browser's local storage), you can even close the browser in the middle of a game of DONKEY, and the next time you load this page, your progress (and the donkey) will be perfectly restored."

<comment><USER4> I'm disappointed that my iPhone can't drive the car because Apple didn't put directional keys on the onscreen keyboard.

<comment><USER5> spacebar works (it's the only key needed).

<comment><USER6> The "any" key also works, as well as the onscreen keys (e.g. F1)

It's not surprising that this simulation of a 36 year old 4.77Mhz desktop runs fine in javascript on my 1.3GHz quadcore $40 phone... but in a way, it is.

<comment><USER7> This makes me wonder how accurate the timing is. I've been looking at the Gameboy Link Cable, which seems to need very low latency. Are we there yet, in the browser?

<comment><USER8> It doesn't necessarily need accurate timing under emulation. The emulator is god: it can play with time as it likes.

<comment><USER7> More interesting to me is to connect a real Gameboy to an emulator, probably with the BGB protocol - [http://bgb.bircd.org/bgblink.html](http://bgb.bircd.org/bgblink.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why are people complaining that the game is bad? Really? Can we see what you wrote in 1982? Games like this were quickly hacked together to show the capabilities of the machine. It was done in BASIC for owner's of those machines to play with. If this was a commercial product, it would be written in assembly.

If anything, this was likely a demo of Microsoft BASIC, let's not forget that Bill Gate's first product was not an OS, but rather a BASIC interpreter written in 1975 for the Altair 8800, written in assembly on paper tape, without the actual hardware! This was written a good 5-7 years later.

While some may not like Bill Gates, he was probably a better programmer than most of you in his youth and this was before the Internet where it's now easy to get access to books, screencasts and lots of sample code via github. Give the man his respect.

<comment><USER10> This was the progenitor of other such classics as gorilla.bas. I liked that it was "poorly" written, as it made it accessible - and I made the leap from c64/amiga/acorn to ms-dos because I knew there was at least one language (basic) on there that I could use.

Promptly after switching I learned c and never looked back, but there's a lot to be said for what these early open-source (ykwim) games unlocked.

Hell, I started coding because I wanted to play games, and could only do so by copying them into a micro from a magazine (storage media was prohibited) - <USER2> fairly promptly wanted to cheat - and before I even really realised, was writing my own games and finding holes in the micro's interpreter that could cause entertaining crashes (I still fondly remember the look of panic on the geography (that was the nearest thing to computers, I guess?) teacher's face on coming into a lab (air raid shelter) full of vdus displaying a garbled mess).

So yeah, "bad" code can be great to learn from at an early level.

Comment complete, please proceed to downvote.

<comment><USER11> Holy nested parenthetical expressions, Batman!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Andy Hertzfeld recollects how Macintosh team dissected the new IBM PC and what they thought of donkey.bas:

[http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...](http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Donkey.txt)

<comment><USER13> Wow, that's a salty article!

<comment><USER14> I don't think salty is the right word. Salt implies some kind of frustration and I don't think that's accurate here.

I'd call it an honest, judgmental article.

<comment><USER9> salty is slang for "envious"

<comment> o0-0o "Throwing salt" can also be used to mean "casting dispersions", as it were. I think the article tosses a bunch of salt towards Bill Gates, but who knows what the motivation was. I'm guess when properly confused, you might just throw some salt for luck, and end up looking salty yourself. :)

Edit: I'm talking about the author throwing salt, not any of the posters here.

<comment><USER15> I have to do this! I believe you mean "casting aspersions."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Here's a wiki link[0] for anyone else that didn't know what they were looking at.

0: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DONKEY.BAS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DONKEY.BAS)

<comment><USER17> > "We were surprised to see that the comments at the top of the game proudly > proclaimed the authors: Bill Gates and Neil Konzen."

This is odd that these comments aren't in the github source code, is it missing something? Why does it starts at line 940?

      940 REM The IBM Personal Computer Donkey
      950 REM Version 1.10 (C)Copyright IBM Corp 1981, 1982
      960 REM Licensed Material - Program Property of IBM

<comment><USER18> The line numbers in BASIC were arbitrary. People often started at higher numbers and jumped by 10 in case they had to put code or comments before or between lines.

<comment><USER19> Could line numbers be out of order? Like, if I did this:

        10 PRINT "1"
        30 PRINT "2"
        20 GOTO 10

What would print out? Just a bunch of "1"s or "12"s?

<comment><USER20> It gets run in the correct order. Think of each line as a command that stores the instruction immediately at that line number. You could actually "re-type" a line later by reusing the same line number but replacing it with new contents.

<comment><USER21> "Correct" order is ambiguous to someone asking that question in the first place.

<comment><USER19> It sounds like he's saying the "line number" is just the index to a tokenized list (i.e. line 15 is at `lines[15]') where unused lines are just nops. So my "program" would be tokenized and the lines stored like:

        char** lines = malloc(...);
        lines[10] = &line1;
        lines[30] = &line2;
        lines[20] = &line3;

Then when executing, it starts at `lines[0]', sees nops, gets to `lines[10]' and runs it, sees more nops, gets to `lines[20]' and jumps to `lines[10]'. All the while ignoring `lines[21]' and up.

<comment><USER22> Usually in 8-bit BASICs the lines would be stored consecutively (not in separate malloced segments) with each line starting with its line number. Yes, this meant that GOTO required a search. Memory was a really central design constraint on these systems. I don't know how closely MS's BASICA on the PC followed this model, but the PC's starting configuration had 16k bytes of RAM.

<comment> david-given Here's a description of the file format used by BBC Basic:

[http://xania.org/200711/bbc-basic-v-format](http://xania.org/200711/bbc- basic-v-format)

That's Basic V, which was the variant used on the ARM-based Archimedes, but it's the same file format as the 6502 machine Basics.

Note that the line numbers used by GOTO and GOSUB were specially flagged --- this was so the RENUMBER command could find them. It also meant that computed gotos _weren 't_ renumbered...

(Of course, BBC Basic had proper named procedures and functions with local variables, but all self-respecting Basics had to support GOTO and GOSUB.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I never played or even saw Donkey. Too young.

But I learned to program by playing and modifying Microsoft Nibbles -- which is still my favourite snake game. And possibly my favourite Microsoft product.

And QBasic is still the only IDE that I ever really _liked_. Although there are some newer ones that I _respect_.

<comment><USER24> Same here, and GORILLAS.BAS too. QBASIC was brilliant.

There's something about an immersive fullscreen coding tool with offline documentation built in.

The other environments I've really loved were Lisp in Emacs and Java in IDEA...

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Context here (Jeff Atwood's blog post dated 2007): [https://blog.codinghorror.com/bill-gates-and-donkey- bas/](https://blog.codinghorror.com/bill-gates-and-donkey-bas/)

<comment><USER26> I love that right rear view mirror attached to the left front wheel! ;-)

<comment><USER27> Now I want to see what Donkey .NET is like ^^

<comment><USER28> I believe this is the link: [http://download.microsoft.com/download/4/b/4/4b400bf9-f71d-4...](http://download.microsoft.com/download/4/b/4/4b400bf9-f71d-4269-9338-63ac52856e91/Donkey.exe)

Found from some rather more shady-looking sites, but it points back to download.microsoft.com, so I suppose it's legit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> My father bought the first family computer, an IBM PCjr, when I was 4 or 5. Donkey.BAS made a huge impact on me, although its easy to overlook as a crap game these days. Sure, there were "better" games that I played on that system: my older brother purchased Sierra's Black Cauldron–which I played the shit out of. My uncle wanted me to grow up to be a pilot, so MS Flight Simulator was in order, too. Jordan Mechner's Karateka is still, to this day, mind blowing to me. And lest we forget some Broderbund and Microprose classics.

But donkey.BAS was, which all those other things weren't, is my _first_, real introduction to programming. I was too young at the time to really recognize the value in being able to not only consume, but read the code, change it, learn from it. Unlike more polished games, I learned way more about programming from changing, breaking, and subverting donkey.bas than anything else on the PCjr. Sure, it wasn't _the best_, but it was the first time that someone pulled back the curtain and I was afforded a glimpse at what was possible, and what computers could _do_. Between that, pouring through the "Hands On Basic" book[0], and typing in basic programs COMPUTE magazine, I'm not sure that I'd be a programmer today, as hyperbolous as that sounds...

And some overly nostalgic part of me kind of misses doing PEEKs and POKEs in physical memory and the summer I spent learning binary math because I didn't understand the relationship between the AH and AL registers of my 286 years later. Then I go back to writing CRUD applications in whatever javascript library is the flavor of the month.

I just hope that kids today have the same access to shitty, but accessible, chunks of code to help inspire them and show them what the machines they interact with everyday are really capable of.

[0]: [http://www.brutman.com/BasementCleanout/IBM_Hands- On_BASIC/H...](http://www.brutman.com/BasementCleanout/IBM_Hands- On_BASIC/Hands-On_BASIC_front.jpg)

<comment><USER30> Ha! I was 9 or 10 when my dad bought us a PC jr. It was awesome. Having the code samples like Donkey.bas was what really allowed you to experiment, see what was possible, and write longer programs. There was no online documentation then.

There's a lot of shitty but accessible examples now, and a lot more ways to get them easily. If anything, it's harder now to pick a platform/device/language because there are so many choices. My kids won't put down their iPhone games long enough to read code examples, even though they talk about wanting to program.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This reminds me about my time writing games in Basic on my calculator during math class. I suck at math because of this, but at least I'm an ok programmer.

<comment><USER32> Yes! TI Basic on my Texas Instruments graphics calculator was how I spent downtime during math class.

So much so, I remember writing program for solving quadratic equations.

They were supposed to clear the calculators memory during exmas, but the exam invigilators had no idea what calculators could do, so they didn't.

I'd like to think it wasn't cheating... as writing quadratic solver in TI basic is harder than solving simple quadratic equations. And I did do them all by hand anyway in the exams...

<comment><USER33> I have the same story, but my first program was for solving systems of equations using a variety of methods and showing its work each step of the way. Same as you, I learned the material far more thoroughly than had I studied it in a conventional way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ah_1HDf_tSU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ah_1HDf_tSU)

</comment><comment><USER35> People forget that the intention of some programming demos is to explain some concepts simply. The intended audience of that code wasn't some expert programmer - it was for those who wanted to see how things worked so that they could see how the game sucked and once they learned enough they could improve upon it.

For expert BASIC code see Nibbles.BAS:

[http://stanislavs.org/OldPages/stanislavs/src/nibbles.bas](http://stanislavs.org/OldPages/stanislavs/src/nibbles.bas)

<comment><USER36> true enough, and I agree, it was just a demo hacked together, but i think the difference you are seeing is both a consequence of nibbles requiring qbasic, and nibbles being developed nearly 10 years later after basic has become quite popular.

<comment><USER35> There are plenty of magazines on Archive.org where one could also find GW- BASIC or BASICA code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Relevant to the mention of 4 AM: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORYKKNoRcDc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORYKKNoRcDc)

</comment><comment><USER38> 36 years ago they wrote every popular iPhone game ever.

</comment><comment><USER39> "2 lanes ought to be enough for anybody"

</comment><comment><USER40> GORILLAS.BAS for the win

<comment><USER41> My 386 didn't have a color graphics adapter, which required using a program called "Phix" \- a terminate-stay-resident that emulated VGA on monochrome. Sadly this completely broke QBASIC (the editor was just a black screen), so I had to reboot the machine (to remove the TSR) in order to hack on GORILLAS.BAS. Compilation times nowadays are still longer than that rigmarole.

<comment><USER42> But it should have some kind of display adapter, what was it, Hercules? I didn't know of any 386-class computers that didn't carry EGA or higher.

<comment><USER41> Hercules definitely rings a bell. The Wikipedia page[1] actually explains how the TSR [probably] worked, which seems to not be much as the Hercules seems to be quite elegantly designed.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_Graphics_Card#CGA_Emu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_Graphics_Card#CGA_Emulation)

<comment><USER42> Well I clearly remember using an _Hercules emulator_ with my SuperVGA card so that it could run some old DOS games, so the other way around also worked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> How old was gates when he wrote this thing??

<comment><USER44> Ah, programmers. I love how we can show the logic behind 3 correct ages for Bill when he wrote this :)

<comment><USER45> However, since only one age value can be actually correct in this case, the use of logic looks less like a feature of the programmer's mind and more like a bug.

<comment><USER46> One of them is a case of GIGO, using "36 years ago" as input when the correct value is 35. Fixing that reduces it to two values, and the discrepancy is down to day versus year granularity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> This reminds me of the first computer games I ever wrote. I remember being able to get something so satisfying together in BASIC, with graphics, user input, and sounds. Then I remember moving to C and asking how I could draw a simple line, only to be told that it would require a few pages of boilerplate to set up, and that all my programs should just be text prompts.

</comment><comment><USER48> Is anyone else impressed that it's only 131 lines long?? I have to do more work to set up a plain empty window and OpenGL when I create my games these days!

</comment><comment><USER49> Wow, This is actually one of the first games I remember playing. I was probably 4 or 5 and visiting my Dad at work. To keep me busy their IT guy showed me this game. I think it was also the only time I played it.

Shortly after that we got a PC at home and it came with a demo copy of EGA Golf which I think only had Pebble Beach. Sound quality was similar.

</comment><comment><USER50> The first code I ever wrote was modifying this in a few different ways on my parent's IBM XT to say inappropriate things and change the game dynamics.

</comment><comment><USER51> You could say the frustration of interaction is already apparent. The fact I cannot cut in right after a cow is so lame yet so familiar as a Windows user of the 90s.

<comment><USER52> It might be because it is a donkey.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> 36 years ago? That would mean 1980, but the code says "1981, 1982" in its copyright info.

</comment><comment><USER54> It's pretty short

</comment><comment><USER55> This has as much interaction as many mobile mega hits.

</comment><comment><USER56> Try hitting the donkey with the side of the car :)

</comment><comment><USER57> imagine how many hours do you need to spend studying basic to be able to write that

</comment><comment><USER58> [https://robhagemans.github.io/pcbasic/](https://robhagemans.github.io/pcbasic/) is a GPL3-licensed implementation of the BASIC language this game is written in. PC-BASIC is written in Python. Supposedly it can run this game, although I haven't tried it.

A couple of interesting features of the game (quotidian to those of us around at the time, but...)

1\. The "PLAY" statement is barely used; the sounds are mostly done with the SOUND statement, maybe in part because they are being generated randomly. In fact it seems to be used only to verify that the program is being run on a BASIC interpreter that supports "advanced" features like DRAW.

2\. The "DRAW" statement, which has its own mini-language similar to that of the "PLAY" statement. Later these were dubbed "Graphics Macro Language" and "Music Macro Language", even though neither one allows you to define macros. This is used to include vector graphics of the donkey and the racecar in the program, in the subroutines on lines 1940 and 1780, respectively. But the interpretive rendering of these vector graphics (and especially the flood fills, lines 1900 and 2010) was too slow to want to do it every frame; instead it's done at program startup (into an on-screen buffer, since that's the only way to do it in GW-BASIC or BASICA; you can see the painting happen briefly before the game starts) and stored in the arrays CAR% and DNK% with GET statements, later to be PUT onto the screen in the right place each frame. There's a bit of sloppiness there: CAR% is DIMmed right there in the subroutine on line 1910, while DNK% is DIMmed up at the top on line 1470. (And the sprites for the halves of the donkey and car are dimmed there too, along with a planned sprite called Q% which is never used.)

3\. There's actually an additional sprite, B%, which isn't set up with a GET statement; it's filled in "by hand" to a simple fill pattern on lines 1510–1530. My memory was saying that the data format of this array was undocumented, but it does seem to be documented in [http://www.antonis.de/qbebooks/gwbasman/](http://www.antonis.de/qbebooks/gwbasman/), which I'm pretty sure is the actual GW-BASIC manual from Microsoft. Anyway, B% is a vertical line that's getting XORed into the framebuffer (the default PUT raster op was to XOR into the framebuffer, violating patent 4,197,590 if you use it for a cursor) to make the stripes down the middle of the road "move".

4\. See how AND is being used as a bitwise operator? That's why true was -1 in MBASIC.

I think there are some important lessons in GW-BASIC/BASICA about how to design user interfaces for end-user programming, and the DRAW and PLAY statements in particular. Also, I can't have been the only person who never figured out how to use the vi-like line editor in BASIC-80 but who edited existing code all the time in Z-BASIC/GW-BASIC/BASICA because I could just use the arrow keys.

<comment><USER59> PC-BASIC is a great re-implementation of GWBASIC. I tried it on some of my old gems from the late 80s and they still worked. :)

<comment><USER58> Are you going to put them on Github?

<comment><USER59> Sorry, that would be deeply embarrassing. I was 10-12. :)

<comment><USER58> Use a nym! Just be sure to generate a separate ssh key for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Could we fix the title?

<comment><USER61> (I agree.)

If you see a submission with a very bad title in the front page, you can ask the mods to change it with an email to firstname.lastname@example.com

It's usually faster to use the email because sometimes the comments are unnoticed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> So 3 decades ago the autopilot could already keep the car in the current lane but was not able to avoid the unicorn^W donkey? Drivers need to remain engaged and aware!</comment>


Danish bank launches negative interest rate mortgage - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/aug/13/danish-bank-launches-worlds-first-negative-interest-rate-mortgage <comment><USER2> This is all the more surprising given that inflation in Denmark is running ~1%/year.

That means the bank is absorbing a real loss of 1.5%/year on the deal.

Meanwhile, the housing market is roaring:

[https://tradingeconomics.com/denmark/housing- index](https://tradingeconomics.com/denmark/housing-index)

It would be one thing to see negative rates in a declining property market and/or in a deflationary environment.

However, negative rate mortgages are happening in what looks like a normal economy with low inflation and red-hot housing market.

Somebody is very wrong about one or more of the following:

\- the future direction of the housing market

\- the future direction of interest rates

\- the future direction of inflation

Edit:

Google translate sheds some light. It appears that the Danish equivalent of "points' clouds the picture:

> Total repayments before tax DKK 277,392 (on a DKK 250,000 loan) - of which > total interest and contributions DKK 8,264 changes in the exchange rate will > affect the size of the amount paid out.

[https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u...](https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.jyskebank.dk%2Fbolig%2Fnyheder%2Frealkredit- med-negativ-rente)

Low, but not negative.

<comment><USER3> Some background: In Denmark, mortgages for housing are handled by special real-estate lenders (realkreditinstitutter) who issue bonds and handles defaults.

These bonds are considered to be very stable, about the same quality as state bonds, as the lenders will only lend up to 80% of the value of the house (an ordinary bank loan must be used for the remaining fraction) so can usually recover most of the money through a forced sale. Also there's a fee on top of the bond rate to absorb the losses as far as I understand. The fee depends on the security percentage, so if the lender only has a security in the top 60-80% part of the value of the house, the fee is much higher, see the tables here:

[https://www.mybanker.dk/sammenlign/bolig/bidragssatser/](https://www.mybanker.dk/sammenlign/bolig/bidragssatser/)

The Danish central bank has had negative interest rates for some time, and these real-estate bond rates have also been falling.

When taking out a mortgage, you can either opt for a fixed rate for up to 30 years, or variable-rate bonds where the interest is redetermined periodically, e.g. once a year. The variable-rate bonds have been negative for some years now. The news here is that the rates have been falling even more lately, and that you can now get the negative rate fixed for up to ten years.

In any case, it's the bond investors who are losing money, not the real-estate lenders who apply a fee on top, both as a rate and a fixed fee when applying for the loan.

The rates are so low that I think that if you're in the low-risk category, you might end up with a small negative total rate. Of course, the fixed fees when obtaining the loan may eat that.

<comment><USER4> >These bonds are considered to be very stable, about the same quality as state bonds

>can usually recover most of the money through a forced sale

This exact line of thinking is what led to the US real estate crash in 2008/2009

<comment><USER5> It's a gross simplification, but with the volume that is Danish housing vs demand for said housing the risk is very low.

One of many issues leading into the 2008 crash was how Us mortgages were bundled, rated AAA, then resold as an investment tool. However, the ratings were falsely boosted to promote investment and when the underlying junk mortgages fell through and demand fell off a cliff with the rest of the economy there was no way to flip foreclosed housing to make up losses.

In this case, Danish mortgages are not bundled, rated falsely positive, and not sold as an investment tool like in 2008. Current US auto loans may be much more similar than these Danish loans.

<comment><USER6> > In this case, Danish mortgages are not bundled, rated falsely positive, and > not sold as an investment tool like in 2008.

Danish loans are definitely securitized and sold as investment tools. They are a classic interest rate risk hedge.

It's been a while since I was adjacent to them but the bigger difference in Danish mortgage backed securities were a) no governmental guarantee on them b) less protections for the borrowers than in the US c) no derivatives d) much smaller market & e) much longer history.

So credit risk, which is what ratings agencies nominally judge is likely not a problem.

Interest rate risk is though, but given its more straight forward, it's what investors are looking for exposure to & there is low leverage it's unlikely to cause systemic collapse.

<comment><USER7> low leverage in proportion to the total asset value

But what's that total asset value if interest rates are 10% (vs -1%)?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not really. "As a result, oddities now abound. Danish lender Jyske Bank last week issued a 10-year mortgage bond at an interest rate of minus 0.5 per cent, meaning homeowners are being paid to borrow."

In fact the providers of the capital will pay the bank for those mortgage- backed bonds (they get a negative yield). The bank will get some spread from the client, who will also pay.

[https://www.google.ch/amp/s/amp.ft.com/content/820e3aac- ba1a...](https://www.google.ch/amp/s/amp.ft.com/content/820e3aac- ba1a-11e9-8a88-aa6628ac896c)

<comment><USER9> Don't forget the mortage runs for 30 years and after 10 years, you are forced to pay the rate at that moment... so in the end, it will be ok :)

<comment><USER10> There no rule that the mortgage will run for 30 years. It's just what most people choose. But there's nothing stopping anyone from paying back the entire mortgage in 10 years.

<comment><USER11> I can't find all the fine details on this loan, but there are definitely loans that stop you from prepayment, or at least have a penalty associated with them. These penalties can be pretty large and definitely are a reason not to pay back the entire mortgage before 10 years. In this exceptional case I'm assuming there is a prepayment penalty for a large portion of that 10 year fixed rate period.

<comment><USER12> Those prepayment fines are basically what the bank is losing out on you. If you have a 3% mortgage and the current rate is 2%, then the bank would lose out 1% for the current mortgage period. That's the penalty.

<comment><USER11> That is not how the penalties are worded at all. Penalties are usually in the form of a percentage of a number of months' interest. I understand the fine is because the bank makes money on loans by being able to rely on them being a fixed long term, and the cancellation affects that, but it's not just the bank passing on that percentage loss directly.

<comment><USER12> Perhaps it's a country thing. Here in the Netherlands that is how the banks calculate the prepayment fine. You are allowed to pay off 10% to 20% of the original sum per year but over that amount you pay a "boeterente" (interest- fine). It's equal to the amount of money the bank loses by loaning your money to someone else over the remainder of the fixed period (10/20/30 years).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It seems like a (cynical?) way to turn today's overpriced real estate assets into a stream of payments. Someone purchasing a home for DKK 300K with no interest may think they're getting a deal, until they try to resell that home and find out they cannot sell it for more than DKK 240K.

<comment><USER14> That would imply we're getting into a weird deflationary regime where money shrinks under negative interest rates, yet still buys more in the future!

<comment><USER15> The idea of injecting money into the economy by lowering interest rates works but people usually only get loans for houses or cars. No one buys their groceries with loans so they are ineffective at increasing prices in consumer goods and thereby lowering interest rates does not affect inflation despite the massive cash injection.

<comment><USER16> > No one buys their groceries with loans

Many people do. Credit Cards and Credit lines.

<comment><USER17> Nobody in Europe does.

But I wonder if credit cards will follow suit and offer negative rates. Somehow I doubt it, though.

<comment><USER18> _Nobody in Europe does._

Bullshit. It's not as popular as in the US, but it's not like credit cards are unheard of here.

<comment><USER19> At least in Italy, Spain and Germany people mostly use debit cards, and usually not for groceries, but for online purchases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Buying a house means taking over a payment and tax liability, it's not just about owning and controlling an asset. Confidence in the financial system is apparently so low that someone is willing to pay you fictitious money now in return of fewer actual cash in the future.

<comment><USER21> What am I missing here? why are they doing this? There has to be some other gain somewhere else.

<comment><USER22> It's fixed for 10 years. So yes, it's underperforming right now, but the fact that the yield curve has inverted gives them good reason to believe that there's going to be a recession in the next 10 years, so actually this is a relatively good return compared to losing money in the stock market or losing even more by buying the 10 year govenrment bond which right now is paying -0.58%.

<comment><USER21> why can't they just sit on the money? Wouldn't that perform better?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Not the world's first at all. [https://tradingeconomics.com/switzerland/interest- rate](https://tradingeconomics.com/switzerland/interest-rate)

Switzerland has been negative for years.

Negative interest rates mean only 1 thing. The central bank is 100% confident that they are on the brink of deflationary spiral; much like Greece or Japan.

This is all connected:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20615403](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20615403)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20654624](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20654624)

[https://tradingeconomics.com/canada/households-debt-to- incom...](https://tradingeconomics.com/canada/households-debt-to-income)

When you are above 100% disposable debt to income. It means you must stop spending or your debt continues to increase. 170% is worse than the USA's financial crisis. Other countries like Australia are up around 200%.

We have reached a long term debt cycle. We are about to have one of the worst recessions in a very long time OR depression.

<comment><USER24> > The central bank is 100% confident that they are on the brink of > deflationary spiral; much like Greece or Japan.

Is this a good thing for people who hold cash assets? Meaning, would you be able to buy say a $40,000 car for $20,000 in case this happens?

<comment><USER23> That's the problem in Japan. That $40,000 car will be say $38,000 next year; so why would you buy it now?

The problem is that when people do that, it means people arent spending money resulting in more deflation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Just listened to this Bloomberg podcast, where they interviewed Viktor Shvets on the meaning/implications/future of negative interest rates: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2019-08-09/what- negativ...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2019-08-09/what-negative- interest-rates-mean-for-the-world-podcast)

> He argues that undermining the 'time value' of money–or the principle that > money available now is worth more than money in the future because you can > use it to earn additional money–won't lead to economic growth. In fact, he > says, negative rates are going to end up leading to a rethink of modern > capitalism and political society once people realize they have big > consequences.

<comment><USER14> Isn't that also why economists think excessive inflation is bad? Because it undermines the "time value of money"?

So to avoid inflation, instead of printing money, we lower interest rates.

But once interest rates go below 0, that also undermines the time value of money.

Oops.

<comment><USER26> Lower rates cause _increased_ inflation. Rates are lowered by increasing the price of bonds, by buying them, e.g. "printing money".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Is this good or bad? I don't understand how this can happen unless money itself loses nearly all value (i.e. storing the paper isn't even worth it, like in Germany after WWI). Can someone explain further?

<comment><USER28> It doesn't mean the paper is worthless. On the contrary, the paper is more valuable than many other investment means. You are effectively paying a bank to guard your money with a negative rate, which makes sense. Guarding and protecting currency is not an easy task for an individual or business.

Negative interest rates are supposed to spur investment elsewhere. However, negative rates have not led to the desired economic expansion in places like Japan that have had them for years.

Inflation is very low in Denmark, near a deflation point, which is generally considered bad. The bank is trying to spur inflation with these negative rates.

<comment><USER29> It will be interesting to see what happens if the US ends up with negative interest rates. Japanese and EU banks won't have assets they can buy to get yield from, nor will the US.

One could consider something like a Gold ETF where a percentage of the gold is sold every year to pay for the cost of storage as a negative interest rate cash alternative. You lose money every year too, but central banks can't print it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Negative interest rate will increase house asset prices as you will get money to loan. When there will be inflation due to outside forces a lot of home owners will have loans under water. The banks will be saved and there will be new regulation promising never again. Until the next bank crisis for different reason and so on.

<comment><USER31> I think you get the effect wrong.

Notice that these are fixed rate loans:

>0-year deal at -0.5%, while another Danish bank, Nordea, says it will begin offering 20-year fixed-rate deals at 0% and a 30-year mortgage at 0.5%.

Increasing inflation would help those who have taken fixed rate mortgage loan because the real value of their loan will decrease faster.

<comment><USER30> Thanks insightful comment. Increasing inflation will help pay of the loan as it will get lower through inflation.

I personally think central banks have not understood that lower interest rates decreases inflation rate. Ie normally and historically central bank would try to increase inflation by lowering interest rate and thus how many have jobs. But jobs are now done automatically by software robots and that get cheaper by lower interest rate to invest in. But central banks thinks lower interest rate will increase inflation.

<comment><USER31> The problem is not that lowering the interest rate has stopped increasing inflation, it's that central banks can't lower real rates enough. They are facing so called zero lower bound problem: [https://www.investopedia.com/terms/z/zero- bound.asp](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/z/zero-bound.asp) This is called liquidity trap.

You can set the interest rate little bit below zero, but you can't go significantly below zeor or banks just start storing cash in vaults (it becomes economically viable to physically store vast amounts of cash). You can actually think these zero or negative rate mortgages as bank's way to store capital.

I don't think the root cause is financial or monetary policy. Developed countries are aging and their economic dynamics is fundamentally changing and they become prone to having secular stagnation. Japan led the way, Europe and the US will follow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Why doesn't the danish govt just print more money? Although part of the eu, they opt out of the monetary policy and still use the kroner. OTOH, how much of the eu debt does Denmark own— and vice versa. If they affect the kroner- euro exchange rate then they could lose money if it moves the wrong way.

<comment><USER33> This situation (negative interest rate) occurs because there is a capital surplus.

This happens because investors a wary of putting too much of their capital in stocks. Nobody knows what Trumps trade wars will lead to, so that's a significant risk factor for stocks.

Consequently, investors look for other places to put their money until the uncertainties gets cleared up. Preferably somewhere _safe_ \- meaning not necessarily in a bank as banks can fold. Danish real-estate bonds fits that: The Danish real-estate market is generally considered sound.

Furthermore, Denmark has a declared policy of closely following the Euro. The DKK has to be within a narrow band of 2.25% (IRRC) of the Euro. Having followed this policy ever since the EMS disbanded, investors generally trust this commitment.

Which means that until Trump cleans up the disturbance he has created, investors will flee stocks and look for safe bonds, to the extent that lenders/investors will actually _pay_ for safe investments.

While attractive for lenders, it is a sign that something is very wrong with the economy. In a healthy climate money would flow to the stock market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Can someone explain simply how they make money doing this?

Or how the institutional investors they mention make money?

<comment><USER35> Ill try.. danish morgages are based on bonds, just like government bonds, but realestate instaed. So the issuer just takes a small cut, dosent matter for them if rates are 10% or negatve 1%, (they take about 0,6%).

Now who buys the bonds then and "loose" money? Mostly institions, pensionfunds, corporations and normal investors. They take on theese investors, because they have to.. rates in banks are even lower (even more negativ), and deposits are only insured for about 100.000euro. These bonds, while negative, are more secure, and less negative.

<comment><USER36> Why don't they buy gold or some other asset that does not lose money like this?

<comment><USER37> People keep missing the rate. The effective annual rate of the loan is 2% because you don't get the full amount payed out/ the principle is higher than the loaned amount.

This is effectively saying that someone is willing to loan you 1mil, and pay you negative interest on a loan of 1.1mil as long as you pay a fixed payback per month. So end of line you still payed more than you got, but every month instead of paying a bit more than your fixed payback, it's slightly lower. Bank still makes money selling you the loan, investors still get more money back than they invest. Only thing noteworthy is that some of the math that used to be related to the fixed monthly positive interest is now covered by the upfront rate of getting the loan.

<comment><USER8> > investors still get more money back than they invest

No, they don't. That's the point. The reference rate is negative because the investors are buying bonds which will lose money.

<comment><USER37> They are buying at a conversion rate. So they buy for instance a 100k bond for 95k, since the the time is fixed and payments are forced, you end up guaranteed a 2.1% net interest even though the running interest on the principle from month to month is fixed.

<comment><USER8> It seems clear that the bond holders will not be getting any positive coupon and they are guaranteed to lose money. That's why this is in the news and we're talking about it.

As far as I understand the issuer cannot just sell the the bonds at 105% or whatever to account for the loss upfront with the price converging to 100% in 10 years (because these are callable bonds) and apparently they have some technical problems to implement negative coupons: "The negative callable bond is creating some technical difficulties. Jyske said it will initially be registered as a floating-rate bond until the systems of VP Securities, Denmark's central securities depository, are adapted to handle negative coupons for fixed-rate bonds."

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-05/first-10-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-05/first-10-year- notes-at-negative-coupons-hit-covered-bond-market)

In case you think negative yields cannot happen, it is definitely possible. Many government and corporate bonds in Europe are trading at a price which is above the value of the nominal plus all the remaining coupons.

Germany has issued last month zero-coupon bonds which were sold above par and they are trading now at 106.87 euros (and the only thing you will get back if you hold them to maturity is 100 euros in 2029).

[https://www.deutsche-finanzagentur.de/en/fact-sheet/sheet- de...](https://www.deutsche-finanzagentur.de/en/fact-sheet/sheet- detail/productdata/sheet/DE0001102473/)

<comment><USER8> > they are guaranteed to lose money

To be fair, I imagine it could still happen that these bonds have zero or positive yield if they are bought at more than a 5% discount, but in that case why would the issuer bother offering negative coupons in the first place?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Here's the actual bank source, in Danish: [https://www.jyskebank.dk/bolig/nyheder/realkredit-med- negati...](https://www.jyskebank.dk/bolig/nyheder/realkredit-med-negativ- rente)

</comment><comment><USER39> Danish mortgage bonds are effectively guaranteed by the Danish state and there are only a few actual government bonds in circulation. The interest rates go below 0 because investors don't trust banks with their money.

<comment><USER40> _"The interest rates go below 0 because investors don 't trust banks with their money."_

If investors didn't trust banks, they would demand high interest rates when borrowing banks their money, just as they demand higher interest from those who want to make smaller down-payments on houses, or on credit card debts.

Looking at [https://www.investing.com/rates-bonds/european-government- bo...](https://www.investing.com/rates-bonds/european-government-bonds), many European countries (even Spain and, short-term, Italy) can borrow money from the market at negative interest rates.

That must mean those borrowing them money must be confident they will get that money back (not that surprising, given that the ECB keeps printing money)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Woo!! Give me one of those negative interest mortgages here in the US for my house - I'll gladly pay some points for it.

What a world we live in.

</comment><comment><USER42> The effective interest seems to be above 0% though. The linked FAQ shows calculations where the total amount paid back is more than the total loan amount. Plus some talk about some kind of exchange rate(?) seems like this could be even riskier than normal?

<comment><USER37> The "Exchange rate" is the kurs(Danish) when the loan is for instance at kurs95 that means you only get 95% of the loaned amount. Effectively the investor gets a bigger principal than was actually loaned. Depending on invester pressure the kurs goes up, but It's typically close at 100, and a lower rate loan is then opened up, since investing in a kurs100+ loan means taking an emidiate hit on the principal owed, which is bad for investors even if interests pay back the gap over time.

And true, even with negative rate this loans kurs plus fixed costs still mean you are still paying the bank more than they are loaning you.

<comment><USER43> > Effectively the investor gets a bigger principal than was actually loaned.

This difference between the amount loaned and the amount paid back over the life of the loan is commonly referred to as "interest".

It really feels like they're just playing semantic games here. Any proper comparison of APRs would include both components. A true "negative interest rate mortgage" would be one where the bank pays _you_ to borrow money, with the total amount borrowed being greater than the total amount paid back to the bank.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> what does that mean for poor people, does someone know? Can someone explain?

<comment><USER45> Poor people are screwed up regardless -- if rates are high, they can't afford payments, if rates are low, prices rise and they still can't afford payments. Not to mention getting downpayment.

Workaround: don't be poor.

<comment><USER46> Do rising prices spur the construction of more homes in Denmark?

<comment><USER47> Seems pretty steady:

[https://i.imgur.com/wF6PCnU.png](https://i.imgur.com/wF6PCnU.png)

2019 is not over yet, so maybe it's a little higher this year.

This is only for "parcelhuse", which wikipedia defines as: "Single-family detached home".

<comment><USER46> Homes come in a lot of shapes and sizes though - in Italy where I lived for a number of years, it's pretty common for people to live in a flat in a 4/6/8/whatever unit building, either as owners or renters.

Depending on where demand is, I'd expect more of that sort of thing too, if it's allowed. In the US, it is forbidden to build those kinds of homes in large areas of our cities.

<comment><USER47> [https://i.imgur.com/2iCJllW.png](https://i.imgur.com/2iCJllW.png)

Here is the graph for multistorey apartment buildings. I'm not smart enough to interpret what this means. In the big city I live in in Denmark, most new apartment buildings are luxury apartments and expensive as hell, so I don't think they are a result of rising house prices.

<comment><USER46> In general, new construction is expensive, but if you cut off that supply, people with money just bid up prices on older housing.

Looks like the graph kicked up in response to something... that's good, I guess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> this is pretty awesome. hopefully it spreads across europe

<comment><USER49> this isn't free money

<comment><USER35> It actually is.. any morgage below infation, is free money..

<comment><USER49> You really think a for-profit bank would give more than it takes?

<comment><USER33> The bank takes it's share in the form of fees. The negative rate is simply because the money market sees negative rates on the 5-10 year horizon. The bank simply passes the rate of the money market on to the consumer:

> Høegh said Jyske Bank is able to go into money markets and borrow from > institutional investors at a negative rate, and is simply passing this on to > its customers.

Negative bond rates happen when there is a surplus of capital looking for "safe havens". Some investors are willing to _pay_ to have money placed safely for a number of years. The Danish real-estate bonds are regarded as a very safe haven.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> North European countries are a template of success. And this is just another example of it.

</comment><comment><USER51> We need to see more of this so we can transfer wealth from the rich to the poor more effectively and get them to invest in the economy.

<comment><USER37> More money is loaned to the rich than is to the poor. So this is giving more money to the rich than it does to the poor.</comment></comment>


Google AI Challenge Results - <AUTHOR> http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/contest/rankings.php

<comment><USER2> More info here:

<http://quotenil.com/Google-AI-Challange-2010-Results.html>

</comment><comment><USER3> So, 27 out of the top 30 were were written in C++, including all the top 10.

What's the lesson from this?

<comment><USER4> I don't think there is a good lesson about C++ directly. As far as I know, the way the contest was designed success would be pretty much programming language independent. I.e. you could easily port the code from C++ to Python and the result would be the exact same (aside from the 1 second limit per move).

If I had to guess, I'd say that this is because AI experts use C++ a lot. AI can be very computationally intensive and having close control over memory can be useful. I remember a prof who did NLP saying this exact thing.</comment></comment>


This is probably the worst US flood storm ever, and I'll never be the same - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/08/this-is-probably-the-worst-us-flood-storm-ever-and-ill-never-be-the-same/?amp=1 <comment><USER2> "This is probably the worst US flood storm ever..."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1900_Galveston_hurricane](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1900_Galveston_hurricane)

8.000+ dead, 30,000+ left homeless.

<comment><USER3> Galveston seems to catch a lot of bad luck...

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

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

At least the death tolls seem to be trending lower...</comment></comment>


One Tweet and 2300 bots to fake a stolen election - <AUTHOR> https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/newselection2020/close-election-in-kentucky-was-ripe-for-twitter-and-an-omen-for-2020/ar-BBWyujk <comment><AUTHOR> Is this what it's going to be like for elections everywhere in the future? How could it be protected against? Can it?

</comment><comment><USER2> When Obama was running in 2008 and 2012, I saw bots all over the place promoting him and pushing out negative views on his competitors.

In addition to this, his campaign spammed users through Facebook and used personal information against the Facebook ToS, not unlike Cambridge Analytica.

I saw countless articles calling him a tech genius and that this was the future of campaigning.

It's sad that it only gets attention when done to help Republicans as if they are the only ones engaging in this behavior and that the Democrats can get away with it with impunity.

I don't necessarily like Trump, but I'm glad he won. If a Hillary was in office, these would all be brushed off as conspiracy theories and our elections would continue to get affected.</comment>


I rode in a Model S with Tesla's v7 Beta Autopilot – Here's how it works - <AUTHOR> http://electrek.co/2015/09/28/i-rode-in-a-model-s-equipped-with-teslas-beta-autopilot-heres-how-it-works-part-1/ <comment><USER2> This seems like a pretty terrible idea. As a driver, it is almost impossible for me to understand the complex implementation details of a "partial" autopilot. The car will stop in this situation, but not in this. It reads this kind of signs and not that kind of signs. Autopilot has to be an all or nothing proposition. Either I am in charge or the autopilot. Incidentally, the _perception_ of who is in charge will be crucial for any legal action arising from an accident involving the autopilot. I can imagine the case now:

Driver: "I thought it would stop" Tesla: "You should have read the manual, we do not detect this sort of hazard and you did not listen to the warning to take the wheel."</comment>


If AI's So Smart, Why Can't It Grasp Cause and Effect? - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/ai-smart-cant-grasp-cause-effect/ <comment><USER2> Usual ML models take static slices of data and process them. Human brain, on the order hand, used to work with dynamic data, even within a single perceptual frame, and timing of events is a major variable there. No surprise that those ML models or what they call AIs are so bad at causality: they operate in different mode.</comment>


Ask HN: Do I really hear my CPU/GPU or am I getting crazy? - <AUTHOR> When I drag a really big layer in Photoshop a high pitch sound comes from my Macbook. When I stop dragging the layer, it stops. I have SSD and you can clearly hear that sound when there is no fans running. Is it possible to hear your CPU/GPU? <comment><USER2> You are probably hearing "coil whine", where parts of the power supply circuits are vibrating and creating noise. If it only happens under very specific load, you can get the effect of only doing it while doing something specific. Displays also can make noise depending on what it is displayed, which probably is a similar mechanism.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Back in the 80s I could "hear" the CPU of my old 8 bit micro by turning the sound volume up to maximum. I assume that I was hearing some sort of interference, as that system also used to mess with nearby televisions.

</comment><comment><USER4> You're not crazy, it's called "coil whine":

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HP73edpQwgc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HP73edpQwgc)

</comment><comment><USER5> No.

<comment><AUTHOR> OK.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> How do you know fans not running?

<comment><USER7> If it's the new Macbook, it doesn't have any fans.</comment></comment>


The Brits have it right: forget Happy Holidays, just wish people Merry Christmas - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/22/better-to-say-merry-christmas-or-happy-holidays

<comment><USER2> "Even at the Guardian, when we put up our Christmas tree in the New York office, the first thing one of our interns said was, "Where's the menorah?"

Well this year, if was after the first week of December, it would have been weird to still have a menorah up. Not much unlike having a Christmas tree in mid-January.

<comment><USER3> You know, I'm areligious and I say Merry Christmas more than Christians do. It's like they're afraid to offend someone. To me it's memories of childhood and a season of feelgoodness. My atheist father still put up a christmas tree and bought us toys for christmas. I don't know what the avoidance is all about. It's like me going to Asia and some Chinese feeling that they would not want to offend me by wishing me a Chinese New Year, or something. Just odd.

<comment><USER4> If you don't know, have you considered asking?

<comment><USER3> No, it's been more of an observation than an annoyance. But it seems like (nominal) Christians are too self-conscious about that. I mean, if I were in China or Taiwan and one of their countryfolk thought that I'd be offended at them wishing me well for one of their holidays, etc., I'd feel offended that they'd think I were so sensitive or plain square.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> its a fun tradition just enjoy it or ignore it. I don't think anyone ever wished someone merry christmas in order to offend them.

as for people who avoid 'christmas' because of materialism, even if christmas was called something else, corporations would still try to get you to buy their crap.

</comment><comment><USER5> dressing up for halloween, carnival and so many other things people do all over the world have religious origins but people are not offended by them.

</comment><comment><USER4> I see no reason why I should support a materialist bacchanalia of blood red and evergreen worshiping a pagan monstrosity trafficking in impish minions to tempt and subvert good Christian hearts from the simple truth of salvation and redemption.

"Sparkle"? Clearly an underhanded subterfuge intended to surreptitiously convert honest Protestants into dirty Papists, holding a mass claiming to be for our Lord and Savior Jesus H. Christ, when it is really an annual call to summon the sparkling Devil himself: Edward Cullen.

</comment><comment><USER6> I am sick of political correctness in all of its forms. The truth is the truth, and if you're offended by it, the problem isn't how I said it, the problem is that you need to get over yourself.

As for Christmas, I don't give two shits what we call it, but can we just decide to call it something and move the fuck on, please?</comment>


This piece of bread charts youth unemployment in Spain - <AUTHOR> http://data-cuisine.net/data-dishes/unemployed-pan-con-tomate/

<comment><USER2> "Pan con tomate" is a popular breakfast here in Spain, so good choice here. Now you only need to think where to put the 25% black economy that plagues our country, where most of our young people are actually working.

I suggest some black olive paté.</comment>