China Moves to Devalue Yuan - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/china-moves-to-devalue-the-yuan-1439258401 <comment><USER2> Some likely effects from this:

1) US consumers just got a small standard of living boost. The same things they were buying before, will now cost less. It'll have little to no effect on US domestic manufacturing.

2) This will put some downward pressure on US consumer prices. Giving the Fed even less inflation concern (at least from the CPI angle).

3) The Fed is very, very unlikely to raise interest rates in September. It's practically guaranteed not to happen. Investors are likely to bet on this today, and stocks will probably climb significantly over the next few months in response to the Fed not hiking. The bet will shift from expecting a hike, to not expecting one for the remainder of 2015.

4) This will add fuel to the currency wars. The Eurozone, Japan and others will probably respond. It'll also put pressure on emerging market competitors, from Brazil to Vietnam.

5) It's going to squeeze some Chinese companies carrying debt in other currencies (Bloomberg reports that Chinese companies have $529 billion in dollar and euro based bonds and loans outstanding).

6) The dramatic capital flight out of China over the course of 2015 ($300+ billion so far), will increase.

<comment><USER3> I keep hearing about the Fed raising interest rates, or not raising interest rates, but I'm unclear what the pros vs. cons are for the Fed to raise them at a given time. Would someone mind explaining that?

Why does China devaluing the Yen have any impact on US raising interest rates or not?

<comment><USER4> A looser monetary policy (lower interest rates) is thought to stimulate the economy (more jobs) at the risk of higher inflation. A tighter policy (higher interest rates) is thought to control inflation (stable prices) at the risk of a slower economy. They post a lot of information about it, for instance:

[https://www.chicagofed.org/publications/speeches/our-dual- ma...](https://www.chicagofed.org/publications/speeches/our-dual-mandate)

China is a large portion of the global economy, so things that happen there can end up having a big impact globally.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The PRC has had a historical policy of linking the RMB to the dollar. That made sense when they were primarily reliant on exports to the US, but now that their exports are diversified and they have massive domestic demand, a float and inflation peg like we have in the US is a much more sensible policy.

The US dollar has an absurdly high valuation, so the sensible thing for the RMB (and most other currencies) is to devalue with respect to USD.

Tyler Cowen has a broader and more pessimistic view, my point is captured in his point 6: [http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/08/six...](http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/08/six- thoughts-about-the-yuan-devaluation.html)

<comment><USER6> I prefer ftalphaville's take: [http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2015/08/11/2137067/this-one- time-...](http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2015/08/11/2137067/this-one-time-at-band- camp-the-pboc-did-this-thing/)

There is a massive but officially not permitted capital outflow from China that's pushing up real estate markets around the Western world. To some extent we're paying for our imported manufactured goods from China by exporting house ownership and rent payments.

<comment><USER7> I think the Chinese billionaire effect might be real, but really the chief reason housing prices are so high is because we make it difficult to build housing. This is especially true in the most economically productive metro areas, such as New York and the Bay Area.

Even smaller cities such as DC are facing housing affordability crises. DC gained ~90K residents from 2005 to the present, but only gained ~12.5k new housing units in that time. If DC continues to grow, in the next 30 years DC will actually reach full buildout as allowed under current zoning and height restrictions. No additional units will be allowed.

<comment><USER8> Consider Toronto as a counter example. That city tore down parks to build condos. That didn't rein in prices. Now, the affluent foreigners have 3-4 condos to go along with that Maserati.

<comment><USER9> The obvious counter-argument is that home prices would have risen even faster without the construction boom.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've asked this question many times to people deeply educated and versed in economics and never got a a good answer... In a world of currency pairing (ratios) A:B:C:D:E

Assuming parity among A:B:C:D, if each country prints 1 Trillion in their respective currency, what is the net effect aside from inflation 'potential'? 100:100, 1000:1000 .. It's still 1:1. Assuming there are deflationary forces countering the inflationary force of printing, nothing changes beyond maintenance of status quo.

The more and more I look at this picture, the more it appears to be global maintenance of status quo to, in the face of destabilizing systemic forces, keep things stable via countering forces (printing)

The only thing I can see suffering here are the variables outside of the clown show :

> Natural resources

> Environment

^ (Economic system becomes disentangled with underlying condition of resources/environment)

I guess this is where the eventual selling of 'global control' of these variable comes....

A system headed to centralized control.

<comment><USER11> > Assuming there are deflationary forces countering the inflationary force of > printing, nothing changes beyond maintenance of status quo.

In the net, yes, but another way of looking at this is as a wealth transfer inside each country.

In the net, the pies remain the same size, but each individual slice is worth less and less.

The result is that as each government is playing the devaluation game to keep up, the organizations with early access to the newly printed trillions in respective currencies increase their relative percentage of the pie.

It's the status quo at the inter-country level, but it's a huge wealth transfer to the politically and financially connected at the local level.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> China is devaluing yuan for quite a while, but usually more smoothly. Will this that do the trick or there is problem in fundamentals? Like debt is growing too fast comparing to rest of the economy.

Moreover, will China start making transition from cheap labour, efficiency based economy to innovation based one. Does government is aware of that challenge or they try to execute strategy for old model, that used to work, but may not help to make that transition?

<comment> rm_-rf_slash >Moreover, will China start making transition from cheap labour, efficiency based economy to innovation based one.

This is my biggest skepticism towards China. They are simply not an aspirational brand. Who says "I buy Vietnamese so someday I can buy Chinese"? No, they say "I buy Chinese so someday I can buy European."

It doesn't matter how much of my dad's semiconductor research they steal (>10,000 hacking attempts from China EVERY DAY at an IVY LEAGUE INSTITUTION), China will never be sexy. That's why Titans like Renren and Weibo are huge in China while almost nobody outside the Middle Kingdom could give a damn. Name one luxury product that says "Made in China" without being accompanied by "Designed in California."

If the Chinese government let go of their iron grip of culture, maybe something remotely approaching cool will come out of China, but that's a can of worms they would rather keep shut.

It should be no surprise that even Hong Kongers are openly racist towards mainlanders: China has no brand.

<comment><USER13> Precisely the same thing was said about Japan. I know Japanese products don't have special cache now, but there was a time when the phrase "Jap crap" was in common circulation, and then a time afterwards where Sony took over the world.

It seems entirely plausible to me that China is working through the same historical process. Consider the possibilities of Foxcon- they already manufacture the most desirable consumer devices in the world.

<comment> rm_-rf_slash I'm not entirely convinced. Japan didn't only invade America with electronics, it came with a widely appealing culture as well. Sushi, anime, jpop, all of these things made Japan more interesting than the gadgets it made.

Foxconn does indeed produce excellent electronics, but they're largely designed elsewhere. Most Chinese-designed consumer products lack appeal outside of China.

The reason I harp on about culture is because it drives fashion. The Chinese government is so adamant about dictating culture that it stamps out the possibility for subcultures to grow and, most crucially, become popular outside the country. Just look at China's film industry. Actually, don't. I've seen what passes for Chinese film media and it could have been written by a machine, or one of those folks from 1984 who release the same book every few years with different character names.

Dissent gives rise to new culture: American blacks playing blues becomes classic rock, which becomes punk rock, and so on. A government focused on dictating culture in an age of information is like going to high school and still being dressed by your mom.

Meanwhile, peripheral - and far poorer - countries are having cultural booms as their popularity spreads around the globe. Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, heck, not to mention India, all have widely appealing cultural products. If China can't become cool, then they'll remain a factory, subject to the whims of global finance and technology.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wonder if they'll actually let it float this time. I thought when they previously devalued it to 6.20 a few years ago they claimed they'd float it but instead kept it statically pegged. Given macro-conditions, floating would probably make a lot more sense (if you agree with Tyler Cowen's perspective).

<comment><USER15> But politically, that would be relinquishing a degree of control, something they've been loath to do in general, especially in areas that are of strategic importance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> CNYEUR (euro per cny) exchange rate past 60 months:

           ++</comment><comment>-+</comment><comment>+</comment><comment>-+</comment><comment>+</comment><comment>-+</comment><comment>+--+
      0.15 +                                          **    +
           |                                           *    |
           |                                            *** |
           |                                        **      |
      0.14 +                                                +
           |                                                |
           |                                                |
           |                                        *       |
      0.13 +                                      **        +
           |                  *                   *         |
           |                 ***    * *                     |
           |             *      **   * *         *          |
           |                *     **    *** *   *           |
      0.12 +            * **       *     * **               +
           | *         *                     ***            |
           |   *                                            |
           |    **      *                                   |
      0.11 +  *   *  *                                      +
           |   *  * ***                                     |
           |       *                                        |
           ++</comment><comment>-+</comment><comment>+</comment><comment>-+</comment><comment>+</comment><comment>-+</comment><comment>+--+
            0      10     20      30     40      50     60

Against the euro, the CNY has appreciated by about 20% in the past 12 months, so any deval is as much about dollar strength (against which the CNY is semi- pegged). Europe has been devaluing through it's own QE and it buys about 20% of Chinese exports roughly. The same picture is more or less true of all the emerging markets that China exports to. Thus it's pretty much a rebalancing than anything else, and let's not forget it's only 2% (so far). Perhaps the most interesting chart is China's fiercest competitor, Japan. The yen is down more than 50% against the yuan in the past 2 years:

CNYJPY past 60 months:

         +-+</comment><comment>+</comment><comment>-+</comment><comment>-+</comment><comment>+</comment><comment>-+</comment><comment>-+--+
      20 +                                             * *  +
         |                                              * * |
         |                                         * **     |
         |                                          *       |
         |                                        *         |
      18 +                                       *          +
         |                                *                 |
         |                                      *           |
         |                               * **   *           |
      16 +                           *****   ***            +
         |                          *                       |
         |                         *                        |
         |                        *                         |
         |                        *                         |
      14 +                       *                          +
         |                                                  |
         |                *     *                           |
         |       *       * *   *                            |
         | ** ******  ***   ****                            |
      12 +   *      **  *                                   +
         +-+</comment><comment>+</comment><comment>-+</comment><comment>-+</comment><comment>+</comment><comment>-+</comment><comment>-+--+
         0     10      20      30     40      50      60

<comment><USER17> What did you use to create these charts? I like them.

<comment><USER16> R package txtplot.

<comment><USER17> Cheers! I'm actually using R as part of a SaaS app I'm building at the moment. I'm gonna use this for an easter egg. :)

<comment><USER16> It's pretty useful if you're ssh-ing into a machine to run R and you just want a quick and basic idea of some data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It was expected, let's hope they don't slip much further.

</comment><comment><USER19> Non Paywalled: [https://www.google.com/#q=http:%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Farticles%...](https://www.google.com/#q=http:%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Farticles%2Fchina- moves-to-devalue-the-yuan-1439258401)

</comment><comment><USER20> Paywall</comment>


Cyclops: a programming language written in undeciphered Greek runes - <AUTHOR> http://cyclopslang.org <comment><USER2> Wow. The Greeks did well to invent runes that hold six numbers in a tiny square box. I can't imagine the precision hammers and chisels they would need for that.

<comment><USER3> Note that they're Arabic numerals, which suggests actual alien intervention...

<comment><USER4> thanks for making me think about that show. "According to Ancient Programmer theory..."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> to nitpick, I believe those used in Linear A are not technically "runes", i.e. the runes are only the ones used in writing systems for german languages, and derived from old italic alphabets.

<comment><USER6> To be fair, I don't see the word "rune" anywhere on the linked page. I'm assuming it's an error created by the submitter.

<comment><USER5> I think it was in the text before, but it was changed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If this is how things are going to go, I guess I should break out the APL keyboard and get going.

<comment><USER8> This? [http://www.dyalog.com/uploads/images/Business/products/us_rc...](http://www.dyalog.com/uploads/images/Business/products/us_rc.jpg)

Looks like they didn't have the right unicode font for L

<comment><USER9> Quad and squad. The joys of a character-set derived by the character overstriking your original development teletype could produce.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Until someone makes a to javascript transpiler for it, I'm just not interested. :)

</comment><comment><USER8> This seems like the next logical step, really.

<comment><USER11> I can't see it really taking off until it has at least half a dozen web frameworks and a decent befunge binding layer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This one needs an appropriate virtual keyboard. Or better physical too. With stone keys.

</comment><comment><USER13> I really like the equality symbol! I guess it's nice when the symbols have symbolism.

<comment><USER14> So. A bit of semiotics by C.S. Peirce.

Peirce reckoned that there are three basic signs: icons, indices (indexes?), and symbols. An icon looks like the thing it is representing. An index points to it (like your index finger does, this is called indexicality). A symbol stands in for and is unlike the thing it represents, like 4 for |||| things.

So because equality is represented with a scales you _should_ have said, "I guess it's nice when the signs have iconicity." :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> How does it compare to emojicode?

</comment><comment><USER15> I hate to sound alarmist, but I'm seriously worried that we're reaching "peak novelty programming language". If we don't start exploring alternative uses of free time now, we're going to be in serious trouble soon.

<comment><USER16> It bothers me more that they all tend to be reskins of conventional imperative languages. It's fun when it's a joke, but a lot of non-joke languages are built the same way. We don't need new syntax for the same semantics—we need new semantics.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's closer to a functional language though--there's a break statement but no return statement

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's stupid</comment>


Reddit's tax on Amazon purchases - <AUTHOR> http://mattinouye.com/post/96983104916/reddits-tax

<comment><USER2> I agree that this is pretty much cookie stuffing, but calling it a "tax" seems to imply that this cost is passed on to the user, when it is (as the article mentions) actually a cost born by Amazon.

<comment><AUTHOR> True not the best wording. Was thinking about it more from the perspective of Reddit taxing Amazon.

If I were Amazon I'd be disappointed not because of the poor quality traffic, but because a top 100 site, with threads on every conceivable topic, can't successfully promote a site with products in thousands of verticals.</comment></comment>


A Very Hungry Black Hole Is Found, Gorging on Stars - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/17/science/hungry-black-hole.html <comment><USER2> Hypothetical question: Would we be able to detect if we were going to get sucked into a black hole?

<comment><USER3> Yes. A black hole is basically a normal star with normal gravity, but you can't see the gravity source itself. You can detect the motion of all other stuff around it: Imagine our solar system without the sun visible, the planets will still move the same (and not get 'sucked in' or 'gobbled up' etc).

Even if there is no stuff moving around the black hole, we still can detect because the intense gravity bends space and creates lensing effect, which is easily detectable with modern equipment.

That said, we can infer that it is unlikely that a black hole is in our galactic vicinity and most certainly not a monster like in this article. Which, btw, is not only 12 billion light years away, also what we see is 12 billion years ago, putting the whole scene at the beginning of our universe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > "How they grew to such mass so early after the Big Bang is a profound puzzle > for physics," the authors say in their paper.

Anyone have any details for this tidbit? Would be interested to know more.

<comment><USER5> This quasi-stellar object (QSO) is so bright that (with some mild assumptions, including that it's a single supermassive black hole and that its angular momentum is not super-extremal) its outgoing high-energy photons should collide with the electrons in star-forming gas and dust anywhere near it, pushing the electrons outwards from the QSO. In (quasi-)neutral gas, where the electrons are pushed, they drag their protons with them. If all the electron- containing matter is pushed away, how do we reconcile that this QSO [a] grew at all and [b] shines so brightly?

QSOs like this one appear to crash into the Eddington limit, which depends almost entirely on mass (more below). If we assume a "bottom-up" formation for this QSO, with early stellar-collapse black holes merging into this supermassive giant, the problem is that its observed mass is so high that it and its many smaller progenitor BHs should have blasted away all the star- forming dust and gas from their neighbourhood. You need a lot of stellar black holes to merge into this giant, so suppressing star-formation at all is a problem. Moreover, removing much of the matter from neighbourhood then mechanisms like dynamic friction fall off, making the black hole merging process too slow for the relatively short duration (locally to the QSO) between the epoch early star formation and the QSO as we observe it.

A reasonably accessible 40-slide tutorial on the Eddington limit:

[http://www-astro.physics.ox.ac.uk/~garret/teaching/lecture7-...](http://www- astro.physics.ox.ac.uk/~garret/teaching/lecture7-2012.pdf)

Note, however, slide 33, which offers up a couple of hints about how the Eddington limit can be evaded: thick low-density accretion clouds. These are expected in the "dark ages" of the early universe before there are many stars, under the standard structure formation model [1].

If we do the hard computing that slide alludes to and consider a "direct collapse" black hole as the progenitor of this QSO, rather than building it out of smaller stellar black holes, we can explore a class of such "evasions". In essence we need a starless pocket of gas to become dense enough to collapse _while relatively cold_ into a black hole of perhaps a million solar masses. Alternatively we could get perhaps ~10 such pockets to collapse into BHs of a hundred thousand solar masses each, and then rapidly merge. The first approach tends to create a later Eddington problem: such a BH will generically interfere with star formation within kiloparsecs, so its subsequent growth is checked. The second seems to require scenarios like early galaxy-galaxy mergers, where several smaller galaxies with a direct-collapse BH collide in such a way that the BHs rapidly merge. This is even harder to model, but has the advantage of bringing already-formed stars into the neighbourhood of the SMBH, so it can continue growing.

Lastly, I've found a quick non-technical overview of the problem and the direct-collapse idea in the context of the CR7 galaxy: [https://www.ras.org.uk/news-and-press/2887-astronomers- find-...](https://www.ras.org.uk/news-and-press/2887-astronomers-find- evidence-for-direct-collapse-black-hole) (and a further quick article with a pointer to work on the galaxy-galaxy merger idea [https://www.simonsfoundation.org/2017/03/17/how- supermassive...](https://www.simonsfoundation.org/2017/03/17/how-supermassive- black-holes-can-form-without-collapsing-stars/) )

\- --

[1] [http://sci.esa.int/planck/51561-the-history-of-structure- for...](http://sci.esa.int/planck/51561-the-history-of-structure-formation-in- the-universe/)

<comment><USER4> Thanks. Great stuff, appreciate the slides.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How can a black hole hunger? Doesn't its consumption mostly depend on how much matter is around it?

<comment><USER7> It's an anthropomorphization.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Discovery of the most ultra-luminous QSO using Gaia, SkyMapper and WISE" Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia (PASA)

free PDF version: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1805.04317.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1805.04317.pdf)</comment>


Why mercury is forbidden aboard airplanes - <AUTHOR> http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2004-09/amazing-rusting-aluminum <comment><USER2> Guess I'd better leave my fillings behind next time I fly.

(Side: Why is it that so many people go "ooh it's neurotoxic!" and when I mention fillings they say "oh but that's _different_ , it's a stable form of mercury mixed with {arsenic, radium, cyanide, other weird thing I don't really want embedded in my flesh}?)

<comment><USER3> Well, it's true -- mercury in an amalgam (normally with silver & tin) doesn't leach out. Most of the heavy metals that are dangerous by themselves can by alloyed or chelated to make them biologically safe.

<comment><USER2> This video from the International Academy of Oral Medicine and Toxicology - <http://iaomt.org/videos/> \- shows mercury vapour being released from a filling under such ordinary situations as drinking a hot drink, chewing, etc.

<comment><USER4> This episode of Skeptoid - <http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4036> \- discusses this very video and concludes that what we're actually seeing in the video is water vapour (since mercury vapour is much heavier than air, why is it rising in the video?).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We also should be careful with Macbook Pros especially the unibody ones...

</comment><comment><USER6> Chemistry is fascinating. I'm really not too worried about mercury being the next terrorist secret weapon. It doesn't seem flasy enough to inspire terror, maybe just a creeping unease.

</comment><comment><USER7> So if you're Al Queda, the play here seems obvious. Get as many sleeper agents in the U.S. as possible (which I'm sure they're constantly working on) and each day send a couple on a plane armed with an old thermometer. How many could you take down before people realized what was going on? And after they did, how much damage would it do to the economy when nobody flew anymore?

I sure hope I'm missing some secret reason why this wouldn't work well.

<comment><USER8> The mercury has to more or less be a special paste and be smeared in the right area. The surface tension of ordinary liquid mercury seems too high to get the alu "wet" otherwise.

I umm.. _ehem_.. went and maybe umm _tired it_ a little bit after seeing this because it sounded so darn cool. The liquid mercury I've culled from old thermostats had no discernible effect.

Edit: I tried it on a piece of aluminum angle bar. I even tried filing it a little to rough it up. Nothing. Anyone else had any success?

<comment><USER7> That article most definitely should have come with a "dont try this at home kids" at the end.

<comment><USER9> Even better, a "but if you really want to, here's the best way" just after that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> <irony>I'm glad we have a 100ml limit on liquids to be carried on airplanes</irony>

<comment><USER11> You would do a remake of "snake on a plane" with your 100ml ?

<http://www.break.com/index/burning-mercury-experiment.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is really scary stuff (and I was hoping that it would never make it on HN). I heard from an aeronautical engineer once that if one drop of mercury somehow gets let loose in an airplane that the whole plane needs to be basically taken apart (and possibly scrapped).

Mercury by itself is very toxic. There was a custodian who broke a thermometer in our office building once. That would have been ok - had she not spread it everwhere by playing with it. And, speaking from experience, as someone who broke a thermometer as a kid in his room and was _mesmerized_ by the liquid, I can't blame them. Whole building had to be detox'd - almost spaceman suit E.T. style.

<comment><USER13> This is really scary stuff (and I was hoping that it would never make it on HN) I saw this on reddit today and a few of the better comments debunked the scare mongering hype: [http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/85clw/why_mercury_i...](http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/85clw/why_mercury_is_forbidden_aboard_airplanes/c08ahms)

And yet here we are with _pop_ sci near the top of HN. I blame Jeff Atwood.

<comment><USER14> Note that the comment "debunking" the article is by the author of the article itself (or so he claims). The debunking seems to consist of repeating what is in the article: the FAA doesn't allow _large_ amounts of mercury, as is present in a professional barometer.

The scariness of the article seems to reside mostly in the comments here and choice of headline. (although the picture of the dissolving I-beam isn't particularly reassuring...)

<comment><USER15> Well the comment biohacker24 linked to wasn't really debunking it, but it was by the popsci author (supposedly).

Both of these comments (in the same thread) _do_ debunk it:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/85clw/why_mercury_i...](http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/85clw/why_mercury_is_forbidden_aboard_airplanes/c08agdw)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/85clw/why_mercury_i...](http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/85clw/why_mercury_is_forbidden_aboard_airplanes/c08agl8)

<comment><USER16> Wow. That was my first Reddit experience in a long time - I appreciate the links, because I wouldn't have come close to trawling through the conversational inanities to find the nuggets of perception buried in a shit- storm of self-flagellation.

Dear HN - I love youse guys.

<comment><USER15> Yeah the whole thread of Sherlock Holmes quotes totally threw me... I knew reddit was bad... but that bad? Wow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This effect can be beneficial. Swap the mercury for gallium and you get a neat way of producing hydrogen on demand: [http://cleantech.com/news/1205/gallium- and-aluminum-tigers-i...](http://cleantech.com/news/1205/gallium-and-aluminum- tigers-in-your-ta)

Too heavy for aviation but potentially useful for fuel cell vehicles.

</comment><comment><USER18> This makes me think of mercury as the Ice-9 of aluminum. Does anyone have videos of this reaction?

</comment><comment><USER19> So, those old-style thermometers with mercury - even that much mercury could shred an airplane?

I know knowledge is power and all that, but I almost wish I hadn't found out about this.

<comment><USER20> Honestly with the mere fact that for a flight to _count_ as a flight the pressure differential has to exceed 2 PSI. Any metal exposed to mercury (by a passenger) is likely going to weaken in a radial fashion from point of contact, which means in a pressurized cabin, it shouldn't take long before the air pressure ruptures the leak and the plane would be forced to land due to depressuring.

I doubt this would do serious harm to a plane before landing. I doubt if this would even matter in an unpressurized cargo hold because I was always told it evaporated quite quickly at low pressures.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> "The few-micron-thick layer of aluminum oxide is the only thing holding an airplane together."

Jees.

</comment><comment><USER22> Or, you know, because it's toxic?

</comment><comment><USER23> Clicking on the link to the article crashes the browser on my tmobile g1 for some reason, anyone else?</comment>


The world is becoming less welcoming to tax dodgers - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21677647-index-financial-secrecy-highlights-american-hypocrisy-mega-haven?fsrc=scn/tw/te/pe/ed/themegahaven <comment><USER2> Let's be careful with terms. Dodging is avoiding - generally thought to be a sensible activity.

'No man in the country is under the smallest obligation, moral or other, so to arrange his legal relations to his business or property as to enable the Inland Revenue to put the largest possible shovel in his stores. The Inland Revenue is not slow, and quite rightly, to take every advantage which is open to it under the Taxing Statutes for the purposes of depleting the taxpayer's pocket. And the taxpayer is in like manner entitled to be astute to prevent, so far as he honestly can, the depletion of his means by the Inland Revenue'

Lord Clyde: Ayrshire Pullman Motor Services v Inland Revenue [1929] 14 Tax Case 754, at 763,764:

<comment><USER3> Sure, everyone is happy with normal tax planning.

But some of these tax avoidance schemes are only legal because tax authorities do not have the number of staff needed to investigate and prosecute all of them. They use weird loopholes (which get closed, and which sometimes require repayment of unpaid tax) and bizarre corporate structures which only exist to avoid tax.

Tax avoidance has changed its meaning from normal tax planning to become that gray not-yet-regulated area near outright tax evasion.

<comment><USER4> _But some of these tax avoidance schemes are only legal because tax authorities do not have the number of staff needed to investigate and prosecute all of them._

There is a difference between something that is legal and something that is illegal but difficult to prove. You seem to be conflating the two issues.

 _They use weird loopholes (which get closed, and which sometimes require repayment of unpaid tax) and bizarre corporate structures which only exist to avoid tax._

If tax law were not so onerous and burdensome, there would be no incentive to crease these corporate structures and to manage business in such a way.

There is nothing legally or morally objectionable about using the rules, written by your adversary, to your own advantage.

<comment><USER5> The state is not your adversary. Taxes weren't invented to harass and punish you. This exact type of thinking is why we have this problem.

<comment><USER4> The state is occasionally my adversary and occasionally my ally. When it comes to the question of how much of the money that I earn must be surrendered to prevent me from going to jail, the state is my adversary.

Taxes are routinely used to punish and influence people. Alcohol taxes, tobacco taxes, fuel taxes, they all have the dual purpose of raising revenue and discouraging behavior that the state wishes to limit.

<comment><USER6> > _When it comes to the question of how much of the money that I earn must be > surrendered to prevent me from going to jail, the state is my adversary._

That's your choice. You could also see it as paying your dues, or even as doing your part in maintaining your society. The optimal attitude is probably somewhere between those views.

> _Taxes are routinely used to punish and influence people. Alcohol taxes, > tobacco taxes, fuel taxes, they all have the dual purpose of raising revenue > and discouraging behavior that the state wishes to limit._

Well, that's the point of having a state. It's often a good thing, especially in the examples you mentioned. One of the most important function of a state is to serve as a coordination enforcer - in situations when people, out of their self-interest, would predictably chose something that aggregated over the entire population leads to bad outcomes for everyone, the state is there to alter the incentive landscape and make sure they chose the better thing.

<comment><USER4> _You could also see it as paying your dues, or even as doing your part in maintaining your society._

My duty is only to pay the minimum amount I am legally obliged to pay. Not one cent more.

 _Well, that 's the point of having a state._

That is only one point of view.

Some people feel the purpose of the state is to protect us from ourselves. I subscribe to the belief that the purpose of the state is to protect us from each other.

Namely, if I want to knowingly ingest poison (tobacco, alcohol, heroin or even drain cleaner), it's my decision to make. If someone wants to surreptitiously lace wine with antifreeze and distribute it to others, the purpose of the state is to stop/punish them.

<comment><USER7> >>My duty is only to pay the minimum amount I am legally obliged to pay. Not one cent more.

How much you are obligated to pay is the point of contention. Ideally, everyone pays taxes proportional to the amount of benefit they get from public services, programs and infrastructure, so that those things can be maintained. The issue with tax-dodging is that it sidesteps this moral imperative by taking advantage of a legal loophole.

<comment><USER4> Taxes are not a moral matter. Taxes are a legal matter.

Governments are amoral entities. I'll clarify because the last time I said this, it was misinterpreted...

Governments pass, enforce and obey laws. It is beyond the scope of government to determine morality.

It's not legal for a group of us to say "Give us $X percentage of your income, under these rules, or else we'll send men with guns to take you away." but it's perfectly legal for a government to do it. Morality isn't the concern here, legality is.

<comment><USER7> >>Taxes are not a moral matter. Taxes are a legal matter.

Correct, but paying the appropriate amount for the services and programs you benefit from IS a moral matter. Taxes simply happen to be the avenue through which this is accomplished.

If you consume X dollars of government services and infrastructure, you should pay X dollars in taxes, regardless of whether loopholes exist through which you can pay less. Because if you pay less, you are doing two things: passing the tax burden on others, AND causing harm to the services and programs. Both of these are immoral. Therefore, not paying your fair share (note that I didn't say "legal share") is immoral.

You know how there are certain actions that aren't illegal, but are clearly against what's called "the spirit of the law"? This is one of those situations. Tax breaks are always created to encourage certain actions or facilitate certain results (e.g. Growth in a certain sector) but others figure out how to take advantage of them through creative accounting practices. That's when a tax break becomes a loophole. It's basically hacking the system.

<comment><USER4> _Both of these are immoral. Therefore, not paying your fair share (note that I didn 't say "legal share") is immoral._

Fairness is subjective. Morality is subjective. Legality is objective.

It's not "fair" that 51% of people get to decide which services to provide, how much to pay for them, under which conditions to provide them, then use force and the threat of force to compel the other 49% of people to pay for it.

I didn't ask for these services. I have no moral obligation to pay anything for them and I have no legal obligation to pay anything more than the law requires.

We don't legislate morality.

 _It 's basically hacking the system._

Agreed and it's not immoral to hack the system.

The state has every advantage. The state can write the laws. The state can interpret the laws. The state has men with guns to enforce the laws.

Even with all of these advantages over the individual, sometimes the state doesn't come out on top. That's a failure of the state, not the individual.

If you write the rules in your favor, interpret the rules in your favor and enforce the rules in your favor, it rings hollow when you cry that it wasn't fair that the little guy beat you using the rules that you wrote, interpreted and enforced.

<comment><USER7> >>Fairness is subjective. Morality is subjective.

There isn't much that is subjective about paying the appropriate amount for the services and programs you benefit from. If you disagree that you should pay $5 for a cup of coffee that costs $5, then we have some very fundamental differences and can't come to any agreements in this debate.

>>We don't legislate morality.

On the contrary. Murder is illegal because we have decided as a society that killing people without just cause is immoral.

>>I didn't ask for these services.

But you still benefit from them, either directly or indirectly. A homeless shelter benefits you even if you aren't homeless, because it takes care of the homeless and makes it a lot less likely for them to commit crimes for survival. A fire department benefits you even if your house isn't on fire, because they put out fires in neighboring buildings and prevent them from spreading to and burning down yours. You are part of a society, and taxes are required to maintain the proper operation of that society, whether you have asked for it or not.

<comment><USER4> _There isn 't much that is subjective about paying the appropriate amount for the services and programs you benefit from._

Again, you used a subjective term "Appropriate".

You are attempting to present subjective opinions as objective facts. They are not.

 _If you disagree that you should pay $5 for a cup of coffee that costs $5, then we have some very fundamental differences and can 't come to any agreements in this debate._

If I feel that $5 is too much for a cup of coffee, I am free to not buy it. To adopt the statist's mentality and apply it to commerce, one could argue that since people need jobs and Starbucks pays their employees well, it is a societal good for Starbucks locations to be profitable and therefore, everyone should have to pay for Starbucks coffee, whether they drink it or not.

I reject this notion.

 _On the contrary. Murder is illegal because we have decided as a society that killing people without just cause is immoral._

The state regulates homicide, not for moral reasons but for reasons of social stability. No prohibition on homicide would lead to mass scale killings and retaliations.

 _A fire department benefits you even if your house isn 't on fire, because they put out fires in neighboring buildings and prevent them from spreading to and burning down yours._

Where I live, fire departments are volunteer organizations that are funded by donations. I donate to them because I believe that the service they provide is worth my money.

 _You are part of a society, and taxes are required to maintain the proper operation of that society, whether you have asked for it or not._

My obligation to supply those funds is determined by the law and I'm only obliged to pay the minimum required by law.

I pay my taxes, not because I have a moral obligation to do so. I pay my taxes because I have a legal obligation to do so. In other words, if I don't the state will send men with guns to take me away.

All of the homeless shelters, fire departments and police officers in the world are worth less to me than my freedom.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Link to the underlying report, this story is based on:

[http://www.financialsecrecyindex.com/introduction/fsi-2015-r...](http://www.financialsecrecyindex.com/introduction/fsi-2015-results)

...Something I think the journalists should have done in the story, btw.

<comment><USER9> If I could give you more than one upvote I would. The raw data is always important, and the whole "we'll release the data in december" stuff is sketchy (maybe it's an intentional press embargo to drum up publicity?). It seems like the members of the organization are reputable academics, but I'll wait for the professionals to come in and perform actual analysis.

If you putz around with their servers, you can get access to their 'source' material: [http://www.financialsecrecyindex.com/database/USA.xml](http://www.financialsecrecyindex.com/database/USA.xml) insert any given country + xml, you should be fine. I have an archive I just wget'ed that I'll SCP to one of my servers in a bit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have an old book here - The International Man by Doug Casey, which was published in 1978. It lists the tax rates for several countries. For example, the income tax went up to 75% in Japan, 71% in the Netherlands, 70% in Norway, 55% in Singapore, 80% in Sweden, 83% in the UK, 70% in the US and 56% in West- Germany.

I'm wondering if maybe there might be a correlation between unreasonably high taxes and tax havens? If the tax rate is reasonable, say 20-30%, then I probably won't bother trying to evade taxes myself and I won't have much sympathy with others doing it (greedy assholes!). However, if the tax rate is like 70-80%, then yeah, putting some money in a tax haven becomes tempting and I will have much sympathy with other tax dodgers.

<comment><USER11> what makes 20-30% reasonable? Just don't say "because it feels right".

<comment><USER12> Think of marginal rates (because the top rates only apply at the higher salary ranges)

Would you like to get a $100 pay raise and get only an effective $20 pay raise? Would you bother working more for that?

People will always have a sense of fairness. And we're not talking about the very rich there (which usually pay a smaller effective rate), we're talking about people with high earnings, but usually not millionaires.

<comment><USER13> At the hundreds of millions and higher club it's all a form of dick measuring contest anyway, so yes... Those people would do what they do even if the tax rate were 99%.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The reason being? My guess is governments are finding it hard to balance their budgets since many economies are performing short of what they predicted pre-2008.

<comment><USER15> From the article "The reason for the shift is the global, austerity-era push for countries to share more information on tax arrangements. "

<comment><USER16> We live in an "austerity-era" where government budgets continually expand. Apparently a mere reduction in the rate of growth qualifies as austerity these days.

<comment><USER17> It's more about spending relative to GDP.

And when you look at income relative to GPD, the US is only just now returning to it's historical average in eighties and nineties.

[http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Doc...](http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Docid=205)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Here in Canada even the Revenue Agency dodges taxes.

[http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/federal-pension-board- used-o...](http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/federal-pension-board-used- offshore-scheme-to-skirt-foreign-taxes-1.2824959)

</comment><comment><USER19> Aren't taxes a zero sum game? If one "dodges" any amount the state must make up that revenue somewhere so the actors with finances and ability to best take advantage of the system then end up not paying their fair share?

<comment><USER20> While it is essentially a zero-sum game, there are many alternatives to "make up that revenue." Those include printing money, reducing expenditures, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I read an interesting piece the other day. It posited that the true goal of mass data collection programs like those run by the NSA and GCHQ is not to stop terrorism but to gather information and track financial transactions so that more taxes could be collected. I think the only piece of evidence supporting the supposition was the fact that the data will be kept "forever", so it wasn't the most convincing piece, but I liked the unorthodox nature of the idea. I think it was on ZeroHedge but I can't find it at the moment.

</comment><comment><USER22> "When the government is able to collect tax and seize private property without just compensation, it is an indication that the public is ripe for surrender and is consenting to enslavement and legal encroachment. A good and easily quantified indicator of harvest time is the number of public citizens who pay income tax despite an obvious lack of reciprocal or honest service from the government."

</comment><comment><USER23> Sorry to break it to you, but tax evasion will always exist.

There is a HUGE financial incentive to find alternatives and a simple example would be cryptocurrencies.

</comment><comment><USER24> I don't like taxes either... That's why i just don't pay them

<comment><USER25> You work for Uber/Airbnb, don't you :)</comment></comment>


Lyft Shifts Gears with New Driverless-Car Division - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/lyft-shifts-gears-with-new-driverless-car-division-1500649200 <comment><AUTHOR> >Lyft is opening a new office in Palo Alto, Calif., in a building once used by video-calling company Skype, and hopes that base will help it attract engineering talent, said Director of Product Taggart Matthiesen. He said the company plans to hire "hundreds" for the new division; Uber has nearly 700 working on self-driving cars in Pittsburgh alone.

This is sort of a strange admission to me that communicates, "we don't think enough of this kind of talent exists in SF but we think it exists in SV." (fwiw Uber has a SV office a 10 minute walk away at the VMWare Campus)</comment>


Bill Gates Has Regrets - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/bill-gates-coronavirus-vaccine-covid-19-11589207803 <comment><USER2> Personally, I'm a huge fan of the Gates foundation and their public health efforts. However, I recognize that not everyone shares this sentiment.

The anti-vax crowd had painted Gates as the devil, and a non-insignificant number of people just don't like him because he's wealthy. In these ways, I don't think there was anything more he really could have done. The reason that Covid has hit the United States so hard is because of a blatant culture of denial. As a country, we deny the news, we deny science. Had Gates tried to speak up more, it would have been met with denialism.

<comment><USER3> A lot of people don't like him not because he's wealthy, but because the ways he used to become wealthy.

<comment><USER4> As much as I like most of what he does nowadays I always wonder how many years of technological progress we lost due to Microsofts shenanigans.

<comment><USER5> We are loosing more due to Google every year than we ever did with Microsoft.

<comment><USER6> Why do you think so? Their business model? Google are vicious competitors for sure but they open source a ton of cutting edge stuff like jax & tensorflow. I would say they've did a great job at advancing the state of science & technology in the world.

<comment><USER7> I always wonder about Google. I know they produce Android but if they disappeared overnight, the world would carry on working, e.g everyone would switch to using another search engine. There would be less tracking (thanks Google Analytics)!

If Microsoft disappeared overnight, how many businesses (not tech businesses but real businesses, like warehouses etc. not running Macs) would need a functioning version of Windows or Win32 software to get by?? I think Microsoft has a larger effect on the world than Google by a very very large stretch.

Even in development, Microsoft's products are used far more widely. How many Google development tools are people using? I've got Android Studio but my daily dev work is Visual Studio on Windows and VS Code on Mac.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Privacy and user-friendly archive link: [http://archive.is/KdcDA](http://archive.is/KdcDA)

<comment><USER5> Archive.is is not privacy friendly: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Given how much denial there is of the threat now that it is a fait accompli, it's hard to imagine convincing a sufficient number to deal with it as an abstraction.

<comment><USER10> It might be harder for some to accept it now, given that it might hurt their preferred political outcome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sadly there are few in leadership positions willing to step up and do something today to help with a long term problem that's not obviously going to matter in the very short term.

Climate change and crumbling infrastructure are other examples of this. It's easy to just ignore it until later... until later is today. CEO focus on the next quarter over longer term impacts is another common issue with this "short term gain for long term pain" mindset.

Real leaders know how to take the flak today to tackle the hard problems of tomorrow. Sadly such leaders are rare.

A true global pandemic was never a question of if, just when. The world had several clear warning shots across the bow (SARS, Ebola, ...)

Maybe we need to give anyone seeking a leadership role the "marshmallow test" (look it up)

<comment><USER12> Real leaders also know how to conserve political capital. "Great programs" spend it often before accomplishing the goal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> A bit of a bait-y headline.

I think the crazy thing is that we are _worse_ prepared than if the virus broke out 5 or 6 years ago. If you think of the millions of dollars the Gates Foundation spent on lobbying government to be more prepared, it actively had a negative return rate.

<comment><USER14> > I think the crazy thing is that we are worse prepared than if the virus > broke out 5 or 6 years ago.

And you think this because???

<comment><USER15> Its true? It's not just the US, France was less prepared than in 2018, and in 2018 was less prepared than in 2011.

After 2005 almost every rich country was stocking on essential medical equipemnt (like masks), had backup supplylines for medical drugs and had procedure in the airport in case of a pandemic (in France notably airport checkups and quarantine + antivirals). Those procedures alone in France were enough to limit the 2009 flu strain to 300 death (although the following years mortality data analysis seems to indicate 2 thousand early deaths)

I'm not putting this on any administration, this is a global trend in western countries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I don't see how he could have done more than he did.

I think the problems are bigger, a mixture of incentive problems, and the political nonsense that comes from that as a result. Along with a newly digitally connected public that is largely uneducated, easily manipulated, and bad at critical thinking. Disinformation attacks are more effective than they used to be.

<comment><USER17> >largely uneducated

I don't think schooling is the issue. Both schooled and unschooled are falling for lies - especially when the reader is not knowledgeable in the topic.

>easily manipulated, and bad at critical thinking

I agree here and would add, once people have made up their mind on a topic, they tend to stick to that position and tune out counter evidence. And their initial position is due to luck or randomness of which position they first get exposed to.

<comment><USER16> Yeah - I think that's a fair criticism.

I'd suspect uneducated makes it worse, but that might not even be true (maybe uneducated people are more willing to change their mind? maybe they're less effective at rationalizing bullshit?).

Maybe it's less about education and more about intelligence broadly defined or less about both and more about practicing 'rationality' specifically, but that ties into critical thinking.

I could see it being either way, or likely some combination of all of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> For a second, I was hoping it is going to be about his business practices while running Microsoft...

</comment><comment><USER19> Reminds me of this scene:

[https://youtu.be/qIp_8RNNX4k?t=85](https://youtu.be/qIp_8RNNX4k?t=85)

</comment><comment><USER20> He did what he could. The people who should feel terrible are the people who didn't listen to him.

</comment><comment><USER21> Philanthropy serves many purposes but it certainly paid to wash his image. He was publicly hated, notoriously ruthless.

</comment><comment><USER22> While there are some conspiracy theories that are hard to believe, this piece raises some important questions : [https://off-guardian.org/2020/05/09/who- controls-the-british...](https://off-guardian.org/2020/05/09/who-controls-the- british-government-response-to-covid-19/)

<comment><USER15> In this paper (i continued reading after the carefully cherrypicked graph because it seems everyone cherrypick those days):

"""Instead of offering proactive and positive suggestions that will enable our immune systems to combat the disease"""

Yeah, right. You can train your immune system, this is a well known fact in every pseudo-scientific paper [0] /s

I'm not asking anyone to be an expert, but man this is 1rst year med school. I mean anybody who took biology lessons in college know about this. My sister just started a school to become dietitian (not even nutritionist) and learnt about this. How can people trust someone who write something so uninformed?

[0] [https://www.hunterandbligh.com.au/life-and-style/8-ways- to-b...](https://www.hunterandbligh.com.au/life-and-style/8-ways-to-boost- your-immune-system/)

<comment><USER22> Isn't the line following that say the same thing? That the lockdown will suppress the immunity system?

<comment><USER15> Not exactly, as you can be immunodeficient. It is still inaccurate. If lockdown was proved to prevents you from sleeping well and to cause enough nutritional deficiencies (don't have the english word, sorry), yes, maybe it could perturb the endocrine system enough ot "suppress" your immune system.

But i'm fairly sure everybody that was not eating in restaurants every lunch ate better than usual (still too much sugar but...). And fitbit data in the US seems to shows that people are sleeping better during the lockdown[0]. This argument is based on bad logic, bad science, bad everything.

Honestly, i'm not sure if overall, lockdown is better or worst for the health of everyone. Im sure some people will have a lot of positive effects (me at least), some people might suffer more negatives effects, and for other it might balance out.

From the quick search i did with sleep quality and eating habits, it seems that overall health is better. However i have two addiction doctors in my family and anecdotal data seems to suggest that for other people, it was deadly (one of the two was involved in a Covid unit until last week and just started counting deaths).

[0] [https://www.fastcompany.com/90499017/fitbit-data-shows- were-...](https://www.fastcompany.com/90499017/fitbit-data-shows-were- sleeping-better-during-the-covid-19-lockdown)

<comment><USER22> Thanks for your reply.

But I do think the point of the article isn't about the science but that Gates Foundation has a huge role to play in what the government needs to do and that there is a clear conflict of interest when they add Microsoft to be a partner in the digital identity plan.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Sigh... while journalism does need money - can somebody post non paywalled text? I'd like to read this.

<comment><USER24> Sigh…how do people expect journalism to happen if nobody pays for it?

[https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/02/14/fast- facts-...](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/02/14/fast-facts-about- the-newspaper-industrys-financial-struggles/)

Unless you want to create a BBC-esque public broadcasting and news-gathering operation. In which case, you'll still be paying, just via taxes.

(Also, right now the WSJ has a $1 for 2 months option. Which is probably a pain to cancel, but still.)

<comment><USER23> Pardon me if I'm not doing my due diligence in research...

It's called the Wall Street Journal, correct?

Didn't Wall Street just get... y'know, a few trillion un-traced doll-hairs? Perhaps... they could fund the journalism.

In all seriousness: In a civil society, what the U.S. claims to be (IIRC, somebody correct me if I'm mistaken) - Journalism should be funded by institutions. Perhaps - funded by the government, at a loss - for the sake of informing the populace. I think, in a functional civil society, that's atleast somewhat close to how things should work. I believe it may not go hand in hand with human nature though...

Thanks to all who helped for my first question though.

<comment><USER25> > Journalism should be funded by institutions. Perhaps - funded by the > government, at a loss - for the sake of informing the populace.

state run media... i think that's been tried before. maybe a couple of times.

<comment><USER26> USA used to support local independent media. Every little paper that got passed certain threshold was funded by state, as they provided essential service to local community.

But its much easier to control narrative if there are only few outlets. And now in post-truth world average Joe doesn't read anything but facebook, or some rage broadcast.

Read Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, to see why the funding has stopped.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Don't feel bad Bill. Getting non-technicals to understand risk is near impossible.

<comment><USER27> Getting 'technicals' to understand risk is also rather difficult. Perhaps one difference is that many 'technicals' (whatever group that is) might feel like they _do_ understand risk, even when they don't.

<comment><USER28> The Dunning–Kruger effect is real even among 'technicals'. I would say more but I fear I'd be overstepping how much I understood about the whole thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I see things like Gates does, because everhthing is just 0123455789 and ABDCEFGHIJ. In which music took out the HIJ. Bach turned the H into a B flat.

</comment><comment><USER30> This is what leadership looks like. Rather than just saying that I warned the world and no one listened - and thus it is not my problem, he is actually reflecting that I could have done a lot more so that the world listened.

I feel this is important to note in current day and age where the world is so polarized and blame-gaming is the name of the hour.</comment>


Effective Code Reviews - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@ivanmontiel/effective-code-reviews-e8ac466b9a2e <comment><USER2> _> Remember, code reviews aren't about nitpicking through another person's code. Use a computer to nitpick. Trust me, they are really good at it._

No, they are not good. They are good at complaining about meaningless things like braces put in an ugly way or how you named a var.

The true errors are hidden inside the logic itself.</comment>


Introducing a way to program hardware configuration in breadboard prototyping - <AUTHOR> http://www.metaboard.space/ <comment><AUTHOR> We are currently finalising design, but we have a minimum viable product. We just need funding to complete the project.

Indeed, started the project because I was tired of physically wrangling wires, specific value resistors and capacitors.

</comment><comment><USER2> I'm curious how far along the project is. Are the boards for sale?

Also curious if Metaboard was something that solved your own problems.</comment>


Ask HN: How much do you make at Google? - <AUTHOR> I don't work for Google, but I would like to.
How much do senior software engineers make? What level are you? Do you work at Mountain View HQ, or elsewhere?
I don't have much to share, but I make $130K base at a Silicon Valley startup. Options aren't worth anything (yet), but from what I've read on HN, they probably won't be worth anything anyways. (-:
Thank you in advance for sharing!
This post was inspired by an earlier post by an Amazon Employee: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11312984 <comment><USER2> I was hired straight out of school in June 2013 in mountain view as a level 3 SET at 105K salary, 15% bonus target, and $100k of stock, vesting over 4 years.

The next year, I was promoted to level 4, and got a raise to $134k salary. I also got a $35000 year end bonus, and 5k of other bonuses.

This year, as a level 5 SWE, my gross income (unless Google's stock price changes significantly) will be $323k - 176k salary, my 42k year end bonus from 2015, and $105k of stock, most of which is vesting monthly.

SF and mountain view have the same compensation, I think.

<comment><USER3> Wow! This is almost more than twice what MSFT pays. Mind to share how much you are paying for rent?

<comment><USER2> I share a 1 bedroom apartment with my girlfriend and dog, in a very new building that's a 20 minute walk to the office. Rent and utilities sums to $3900 for the two of us.

In a nice neighborhood in sf, you're not going going to pay less than 1600 for a room in a shared apartment, or for half of a one bedroom place.

<comment><USER4> That is so insane. $3900 for a 1 bed. (I know it's normal in SF; I'm saying SF is insane.)

<comment><USER5> In most markets, you can get a pretty good 1 bedroom apartment for between $900 and $1000 per month. Thus, the cost of rent in SF is around 4x the cost of rent in a normal market. You'll pay an extra $36k per year to rent in SF v. a median rental market. CA also has a much higher state tax rate than most places.

Worth keeping this in mind when you're comparing SF salaries with real-world salaries. If Google hires someone right out of school to work in SF at $100-110k, it's really like getting hired right out of school to work in a normal market at $60-70k, which isn't nearly as rare (but still pretty good for a brand new guy; in positions where I used to do hiring, we'd usually hire these somewhere between 45-55k).

I think the best way for a programmer to maximize salary is to work remotely for an SF company, getting paid an SF salary, and living in an area with a reasonable COL and (preferably) low-to-zero state income tax.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> SWE, L6, 11 years experience, hired at L4 225 base, 90k bonus, 260k stock (grant size has been going up each year).

Google gives fair increases on promo and even if initial salary was in the low end. Pretty common to get a high bump after a year if one negotiated badly.

<comment><USER7> What, pray tell, were you able to negotiate over? I tried, but it appeared to be company policy not to offer anything I was interested in. I don't know what "L4" means but the numbers you're quoting are considerably higher than the ones I remember from five years ago.

I really hate this whole "total compensation" idea that has taken over the computer industry. Just pay me, or shut up, don't wave magic money in my face along with the real stuff and pretend it's all the same.

<comment><USER8> In the case of Google stock, it's real money, not magic money. Google bonus is real money, not magic money.

Startup stock is imaginary money.

<comment><USER7> Startup stock is truly imaginary, yes, but even Google stock has the magical property that some amount of it stops existing when you leave, which everyone does eventually.

...unless they've stopped issuing stock with a vesting schedule attached since I was there, of course, but that seems improbable given the financial advantage it creates for them.

<comment><USER8> Okay, the stock in the 4-year stock grant is imaginary in the same sense that your future salary is imaginary. I mean, fine, call it imaginary if you want, but that's true of all pay.

The Google vesting schedule, AFAIK, is 1-year cliff and then quarterly vesting thereafter. Which means that, past the first year, at most 90 days of stock is money that might vanish if you leave. I agree it'd be a lot nicer if it vested daily, but it's completely silly to characterize this as imaginary. It would also be completely silly, supposing that you'd worked at Google for 17.9 months and gotten 15 months of stock vestiture, to describe the stock you get 3 days later as a "windfall".

The point of all this is that it is completely reasonable, when discussing how much Google paid a person, to sum up their base pay, plus their bonus, plus the value of the amount of stock that they vest in a year.

If you're choosing between an offer at Google, say with $110k plus 15% bonus target plus 4 years of stock currently valued at $180k (i.e. roughly $45k per annum, probably more by the time it vests), vs working at a startup offering a base pay of $150k (plus say 10% bonus target dependent on revene, and some joke amount of stock valued at some joke number), I think it's pretty obvious that purely from an expected-value-financial-benefit standpoint, you should go with El Goog. Because "total comp" is a real thing. (Not that any sane person thinks that's the most important aspect of such a choice.)

<comment><USER7> Look: I ran those numbers, I made that choice, and going to work for Google was one of the few career decisions I can clearly call a "mistake". The stock was almost entirely imaginary _for me_ because I didn't stay long enough, and I didn't stay because I had no other way to get out of the pointless, demoralizing situation I was stuck in. So, who cares what it could potentially have been worth if the world had been different? The world is what it is, and the money was, in fact, nonexistent.

This has been true of "total compensation" across my whole career: base salary is real, but stock has never amounted to anything significant. The companies whose stock is measurably worth something have turned out to be terrible places to work, and none of the startups have panned out. (Real Networks managed to be both, during the dot com bubble; the expected future value of my options peaked somewhere north of $1.5 million, before the crash, but I ultimately cleared $0. And was so glad when I walked away from that miserable experience.) So, I consider the value of stock in a "total compensation" package to be $0, and make my decisions now on base salary alone.

If it so happens in the future that stock "money" becomes real money, well, that'll be great, but I'm going to think of that like winning the lottery. It has no incentive effect.

<comment><USER9> You didn't even stay 1 year? Honestly, if your normal experience is to leave your company in less than a year, I think you have some expectation issues to address. While I know google isn't the amazing dream land the news makes it out to be (I've worked there in the past), it's really not that bad. If you've quit that quickly -- and this has happened multiple times -- you should really try to re evaluate what it is you're looking for from your career and see why these jobs aren't working out for you.

To get back to the original point, treating the stock 4 year sum on the same scale as the salary doesn't make sense (though recruiters will pitch it like that). A more honest accounting is to look at the annual number, which is directly comparable to the annual salary and will give you the true picture of how much you make per year. 180k of stock really means 45k per year of stock compensation. For a company like google that's more or less equivalent to cash compensation.

<comment><USER7> I got close, but no, I didn't stay quite a full year, and of course that's not normal! I don't think my bad experience at Google was entirely normal, either - certainly not compared to the experiences of friends who worked there before, whose glowing reports were what convinced me to give the place a serious look, or to those of friends who are happily working there still.

And yet - my Google experience was pretty much the same as the experiences I've had at other large companies. The pattern is that I go in thinking that a big company means big reach, big resources, and consequently big opportunities, so it'll be a chance to dig in, learn from the obviously smart and competent people who built whatever it is that made these companies successful, do some serious work, and level up my skill set - only to find myself stuck on some backwater project nobody cares about with managers playing musical chairs and no way to get out until I've slogged my way through some term of drudgery proving that I'm worthy of better things. Well, fuck that: life is short and I'm not here to waste it. Besides, I've never managed to work productively for very long at all without some internal motivation, and trying to slog through pointless work simply so that I can hang on in hopes of doing meaningful work at some point in the future leaves me feeling stifled, frustrated, and ultimately depressed. (Especially when the work in question is full of tedious, inefficient process that has nothing to do with the actual engineering, which was fortunately less the case at Google than elsewhere.)

At this point I can't imagine what it would take to make me consider working for a large company again.

So the risk of accepting compensation in stock appears effectively constant: you can trade the risk that the company won't go anywhere against the risk that you'll be miserable, but you can't count on any significant return.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Not at google but MSFT.

SDEII. 7 Years of coding experience full time. Base: 110k Signing bonus: $0k cash, $6k in stocks.

On H1B visa so can't quit, but as soon as I get green card, I should definitely look around. Geez, you folks are making me feel really bad.

<comment><USER10> I was complaining on the other thread that as an SDE II I'm making just about the same as an SDE I who posted there. But you, my friend, are underpaid :(

You can switch to another company on H-1B, but if you've already started the Green Card progress, it will get reset.

BTW, I was hired as an SDE I even with 6 years experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'll add my $.02 for LinkedIn. Sr Software Eng at LinkedIn in CA.

$165,000 Base

$25,000 Hiring Bonus

$300,000 Stock (25% 1st year, then quarterly for the remaining 75% over 3 years) ($300,000 at the time, now it's only about half that). 10% annual bonus.

Male. Native English Speaker.

I can also speak to a friend here all the stats are the same except he got a $35,000 moving stipend instead of a hiring bonus.

<comment><USER12> Same, but only ~3 years out of undergrad, 160k base, 15% bonus, 280k over 4 years (but this dropped by half with the latest LinkedIn stock plunge), and 40k signing. Expecting to get to staff (L4) in about a year based on feedback from my director, interested to see if it jumps or I get a stock refresher.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> 1 year prior professional SWE experience at the time of hiring, CS undergrad degree from a state university

Female, mixed ethnicity, American/native English speaker

SWE II, L3, Mountain View

$110k base, ~$45k in stock, 15% target bonus ($172k total assuming stock price stays stable and I make said bonus)

Worth noting that I tried not to give my then-current pay to the recruiter during the hiring process and was (very politely) told that they'd cancel my application if I didn't give them a number. Also tried to negotiate this offer up (asked for $120k base) and again, got told to take it or leave it.

<comment><USER2> What's your vesting schedule for that stock? If that's a 4 year grant, it seems low.

<comment><USER14> From his calculations of what he will get this year, it seems like $45k is what he would be getting this year from stocks.

<comment><USER13> *she, but otherwise this is correct. :) ~$180k total over four years, $45k is just what I would expect to get in a year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Since I've already got this throwaway and already posted my numbers:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10761173](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10761173)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, Sir/Madam! I think it's interesting that you went the tax return route.

\</comment></comment><comment>---

To save people one click:

 _I spent 5 years at Google. My AGI (as measured by the IRS) during my time there went $130K, $200K, $280K, $280K, $300K, $356K (for my last 5 months there...it also includes unexercised stock options for the last 5 years, though). The bump to $280K was upon promotion to senior SWE; the one to $200K was largely because of a generous stock refresh grant._

posted by user: _throwaway_goog_

<comment><USER16> I'm still a student so I don't know a lot about salaries, but is this kind of increase common? 130k to 280k in two years sounds extreme

<comment><USER17> It's possible; without getting into specifics of any given company's compensation policy, one common compensation scheme involves cash + equity where the equity doesn't begin to vest until some tenure has been reached with the company. Let's assume base cash comp stays more or less constant (or has a some small raise to adjust for inflation).

Now, consider an initial stock grant that is 800 shares vesting linearly and monthly but with a one year cliff. If you started in January 2015 you would have seen zero of those shares in 2015. In 2016, however, you'd see 200 shares in January plus roughly another 200 shares throughout the rest of 2016.

If you also assume that the company in question provides annual stock refreshes, that those begin vesting immediately, and that the stock is on an upward trend it becomes apparent how such a large increase is possible.

Other factors could include non-salary cash comp like bonuses, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Hired at L4 SWE, ~4 years ago, 140k, 35k signing bonus, 200 RSUs vesting over 4 years. GOOG did very well since 2012, so that helped a lot.

Salary rose to 160k on promo to L5 SWE, also got stock refreshers for 90k and 190k in years 2 and 3 (vests monthly over 4 years).

Salary jumped to 182k when I talked to manager at last appraisal that I am underpaid w.r.t. salary. Found out because I was TLMing a team of size 12, and the L5s reporting to me had higher salaries. Btw, Googlers, MRP at L5 is about 190k.

Going for promo to L6 now, and expecting a salary hike, and hopefully a good stock refresher as well.

</comment><comment><USER19> I work at a podunk Santa Clara, CA startup. 20+ years experience. Working remote from southeast U.S.A.

Tenure so far: 2.5 years

Salary: $150K

Stock: purportedly .75% of company 4 years 1-year cliff, with small follow-on grant later, don't know what recent dilution is, though I think more recent funding has been "debt" at low interest with preference

Not a regular VC situation, company funded through other means.

Outlook -- real uncertain, market has definite need, execution so far has been very mixed, company willing to re-do things the right way

</comment><comment><USER20> Google Kirkland office, L4 (SWE III), 7 years of experience.

      $150k base salary
      $25k bonus this year
      $90k/year in stock at current share price, vesting monthly

<comment><USER21> Wow, how long have you been there and what was your experience going in?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Previous Salary Discussion:

Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation (danluu.com) 730 points

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10758278](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10758278)

Also see PayScale:

[http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Employer=Google,_Inc./Sa...](http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Employer=Google,_Inc./Salary/Job/Senior- Software-Engineer)

</comment><comment><USER22> I work in Google SF. 7 years in Industry since I got my CS degree. I'm at L4 and I'm at 117 base plus 40k stock a year (30k at grant time).

<comment><USER23> That's kind of low for L4, many L3s make more than that.

<comment><USER22> Not a SWE is the catch, though my primary job responsibility is coding. Also messed up the job search and had no competing offers. Now trying to figure out if it's worth leaving Google and getting a job hopper stigma over the fact that I'm well paid but not as well paid as others.

<comment><USER23> There is no such thing as a job hopper stigma, there are many valid reasons to leave a company.

Considering the cost of living in bay area and how in demand good developers are, if a company like Google is underpaying you, it's a perfectly good reason to explore new opportunities.

<comment><USER22> Yeah, thanks for the support. I also like my job and consider the SF office a perk, but I may interview a few other places to get a feel for the market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Anyone care to share details on compensation and career progression (bumps in salary / stock) in London?

Also the bonuses quoted here sound a lot higher than the standard 15%.

</comment><comment> aprof-throwaway Just curious, anyone know what kind of package I could get at Google or equiv? Or am I too old?

I'm a 36 year old associate professor in Statistics at a top 20 international university and I also have extensive coding experience (10+ years professional experience).

I currently make around $100K salary + $80-100K consulting on side. I also bring in more than $100K a year in grant money that I use to pay RAs, etc.

Are there people with similar backgrounds that have made the leap? I'm keen to hear from them.

<comment><USER25> I used to work at google. The offer depends on the office, and what role you have. Big expensive cities pay more (sf area, seattle, nyc are the highest pay; zurich pays even more). Google's interview bar is really high, a lot of prof software engineers can't make it. Also plenty of good people don't pass the interview bar.

They have real statisticians at google, doing stats stuff, like analyzing different options and combinations and strategies for charging.

I have a phd in cs, and 20 years as a dev, including some leadership times. I made about 175-185 at google in one of those big cities, plus half that in stock each year. you get a fixed bonus of 15% of salary times a company bonus rate.

Because you have experience but you might be a specialty area, it's harder to say. I'd guess 150k plus 150k payable over 4 years in stock, maybe a hire on bonus of 25k. and the typical 15% bonus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Early engineer at a San Francisco unicorn

16 years of experience overall; 5 years with this firm

Male, H-1B from India

Title - Started out as Principal Engineer, now Sr. Engineering Manager

Current comp: 220K base, 150K/yr of (illiquid) stock

Some portion of the stock is in the form of options, some are RSUs. I took the price per share from the last funding round, deducted the strike price of the options and arrived at the dollar value.

<comment><USER27> How many people are in your org?

<comment><USER26> 12 engineers report to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Hey, Googlers. I'm interested in working at Google and I'd like to talk to someone who left Amazon/AWS to there. I put an e-mail alias in my profile for anyone interested.

</comment><comment><USER29> I don't work for Google either, but I write about and coach people on salary negotiations, so I keep an eye out for these threads (I learn a lot from them).

There's a very similar thread going for Amazon right now:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11312984](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11312984)

It's a mix of salary sharing and salary negotiation advice that could be very relevant to your bigger question of "How much do senior software engineers make [at the big tech companies]?"

Also relevant is this Salary Negotiation For Developers workshop I did last week in Orlando: [http://bit.ly/21zFG5q](http://bit.ly/21zFG5q)

As I said over there: I love these threads and I hope more of them get started. The more people know about what they're worth, the more tools they have to get paid what they're worth.

Thanks for starting this thread!

</comment><comment><USER30> Associate professor with tenure 50k euros. (Ph.D. in Maths) good ranking in Hackerrank. CS Engineer. Lisp, Clojure, Haskell, Python, Ruby, Javascript, R, numpy, machine learning. Lack of experience. Spanish working in Spain, not so young to be desirable. Able of very heavy weight lifting, steel strong, fast runner and swimmer. Dreamer, hard working, extremely lazy when required. Lovely father, loyal friend, dilettante but able to focus when reward is worthy. Irresistibly handsome at times living in a castle.

<comment><USER31> Reads like a dating profile.

Do you enjoy long walks on the beach ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> SWE III, L4, NYC

150k base, 40k signing bonus, ~27k yearly bonus, ~130k yearly stock

8 years prior experience before Google

<comment><USER33> Thank you. I'm interviewing there and was curious about this. When did you start there, and what was your initial salary, title?

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Not at Google, but VMware. MTS SWE 1.5 years out of school. Base: 120k Stock: 20K/year Bonus: 20k/year

</comment><comment><USER35> T7 engineer/TLM, > 20 years of experience, in a US premium-market Google office: roughly 280K in salary, 80K in bonus, 280K in annualized equity.

</comment><comment><USER7> In 2011/2012, I was a senior sde (or equivalent, don't remember the specific title) at the Google office in Seattle (Fremont), and my salary was $140K.

</comment><comment><USER36> Posted on the Amazon comp thread but wanted to share here too...

We went through both the Google and Amazon comp ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11312984](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11312984)) threads, and we added it all to this Google Sheet: [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11tyJW9KPcSiLZBBuf0Z1...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11tyJW9KPcSiLZBBuf0Z14Uov92EgIGjjLjh4lrmTnyk/edit?usp=sharing)

Feel free to share/add to this doc.

Here are the median comps by level for Amazon and Google, just based on the postings collected in the Google doc as of 3/22.

\--Amazon -- New grad: $141K, SDE1: $146K, SDE2: $173K, SDE3: $250K, TPM3: $220K,

\--Google-- Level 3: $170K, Level 4: $200K, Level 5: $312K, Level 6: $575K, T7: $640K, Tech Level 5: $660K

Just a few notes - Total comp includes bonus, signing bonus, relocation bonus, and stock. Bonuses and stock were all annualized straight-line. (I know this is not how Amazon stock comp is done, but we assumed this in our calcs.) Since we took postings from 2 different threads, it's possible that one person could have posted once in each thread, in which case that would show up twice in the Google doc. Also, there's a lot of variance particularly with bonuses which are lumped in, and some of the higher levels only have one data point, but you can look at the data in the Google doc if you want to dig in.

If it helps with comparison between Amazon and Google, here's how Amazon levels map to Google's (from Quora: [https://www.quora.com/How-do-Amazons- engineering-levels-map-...](https://www.quora.com/How-do-Amazons-engineering- levels-map-to-Googles)) Amazon SDE 1 - roughly a Google T3 ("I") or T4 ("II"). Amazon SDE 2 - roughly a Google T4 ("III") Amazon SDE 3 - roughly a Google T5 ("Senior") or T6 ("Staff") Amazon Principal - roughly a Google T6 or T7 ("Senior Staff") Amazon Sr. Principal - roughly a Google T8 ("Principal") or T9 ("Distinguished").

Full disclosure - we're Step ([http://www.step.com](http://www.step.com)), and we're building a platform to help engineers and product managers anonymously crowdsource personalized salary and level estimates from decision makers and hiring experts at tech companies. This thread is especially interesting to us, because it shows the need/demand for more transparency around compensation and company feedback. Right now, we're working with ~10 NYC startups that will assign personalized salary/level estimates and other feedback to anonymous profiles, but our bigger vision is that as soon as someone signs up, they'll see how each and every company values them without having to interview/talk to recruiters.

</comment><comment><USER37> Apparently this is taking off! come on people, show your colleagues what you are making!

<comment><USER38> It is more like "brag about your salary".

<comment><USER39> This is an unfair comment..

The thread is extremely useful for people both inside and outside the company.

While it may come across as a bragging, having worked at Amazon in a non tech role I can say that there was extremely little transparency on what someone should be paid at their level. As a result, there was a lot of variability in salaries at any level for a given role. People could be paid as much as 10-20% more purely because they joined a team after some change in salary policy - everyone else in the team would be at a lower salary. MBAs with 2 years work experience would be paid more than people who climbed up the company with 6 years internal experience.

Threads like this level the playing field for employees and would-be employees as they can negotiate with HR and know definitively what they should be paid.

<comment><USER38> It is not unfair in the slightest. Complaining that you earn 100k rather than 120k is, in my opinion, the height of silicon valley arrogance. You would not have accepted that salary if you did not think it was fair.

<comment><USER39> The values are irrelevant (although interesting for a nosy person).

Are you telling me that you don't think it's fair that people get paid equally for the same role / level of responsibility? Are you saying you wouldn't be pissed with your company if the guy next to you was earning 20% more than you despite your performance being comparable?

Please stop shaming people for being successful, whether by luck or skill these people are earning a lot of money but that doesn't make them any less human or any less deserving of earning equally amongst their peers.

Given that women have historically been less likely to negotiate on salary, these sorts of factual exposés are a constructive means of narrowing the gender pay gap.

At the end of the day, who cares what other people make. Whether you earn in the 0.1% bracket or only top 80% bracket, while you still earn a salary from a profit seeking company, you are seeing only a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of what the company makes. While we squabble over 20k with HR and brand each other "arrogant", the C suite are rolling around in their billions blasting hundreds of millions on moonshots like driverless cars, humanoid cars and quantum computing...

So as employees of companies we should all strive to eke out more from our employees because 99/100 you're getting paid significantly less than what you're adding to the business and they should value all of us better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Check out Comparably.com they launched recently, it gives great data on salary compensation. I'm going to negotiate my salary now :)</comment>


Go Syntax Implementation in Python - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/luoyusang2007/GoStyle <comment><USER3> Caveat: It doesn't look like the submitter is the author, and the author doesn't have any indication on project that I can see about what the intention of the repo is. Any project is fine if you're just learning or screwing around and there's nothing that says you can't put it up on github or do whatever you like. The remainder of my post here will be from the point of view that it is public on the thought that other people should find it and use it in their own code; if that is not the case, I invite the author to ignore these criticisms.

It's rarely, if ever, a good idea to program X in Y, but it's certainly not a good idea when the inner-platform implementation of X is inferior to what Y already has. The distinguishing characteristic of Go's concurrency is arguably the multi-channel select, not the syntax around starting threads. In Python, you just shouldn't program that way and do other things. The built-in Queue object is already a decent approximation of a Go channel that can't participate in "select". Go is hardly the only language with that level of easy syntax to start a thread, and wrapping something around the threading in Python is so trivial I'm sure there are literally thousands of such functions in the wild. So that's not a terribly useful change.

Python doesn't need some faked up "defer", it has "with", which in the context of Python can already do quite a lot of useful things. It's a lot more powerful and complex than defer, but defer-like behavior is easily obtained by simply not using the other bits of complexity in "with" handlers.

All of the listed todo items would be better done by learning how to use the Python primitives for them than trying to bash Go idioms into the language.

I'd suggest adding a note to the top that this shouldn't be actually used. Unfortunately it seems like anything that doesn't get such a note will get pulled into production codebases otherwise, based on what I've found in said code bases. It's helpful to your fellow programmers to label code as not being intended for production.

<comment><USER4> Adding to that, it's important to keep in mind that goroutines are not OS threads but coroutines, which are more lightweight. Providing a "go" function that starts a thread may be a footgun if someone assumes that it can be used as extensively as it is possible in Go.

<comment><USER5> That is true, and you are right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Idk, creating threads is something that should be done extremely carefully, it almost always introduces a lot of complexity and the syntax around it is probably the least of your problems.

</comment><comment><USER7> If you're after golang-style concurrency in python, I suggest looking at gevent.

It uses "greenlets" \- lightweight threads implemented in userspace - <USER2> monkey patches the standard library to do cooperative multitasking. For example, when you call socket.recv(), under the hood it will register with the event loop to be woken up when that socket is readable, then yield to allow other greenlets to run while it waits.

(note this is slightly different to golang's concurrency, which works similarly but runs multiple OS threads so multiple goroutines can run at the same time)

The equivalent to "go fn(1, 2, 3)" in gevent is "gevent.spawn(fn, 1, 2, 3)". Any callable can be spawned this way, you don't need to pre-register functions as "startable" like in OP's library.

<comment><USER5> Your opinion is great.

Actually we want to combine "threading", "gevent" and "multiprocessing" together in this package. We can offer a unified API to handle different types of concurrency in your application if your application is light-weight and is not very performance-dependent. We don't know if it is necessary.

Additionally, if you don't want a "startable" statement in your code, you can use our library in the following way: "go(fn)(arg1,arg2)". You don't have to declare that the function is startable.

Happy 2020 anyhow~

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It would be better to emulate _difer_ with _with_ context manager.

<comment><USER5> Actually we failed to do that. the "with" statement relies on "__exit__" method. It is useful but too "Python" to emulate "defer" for us.

Thanks for your opinion!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Reminder that we officially live in a post Python 2.x world. I think at this point the correct answer to the awkwardness of threads is to use async.

</comment><comment><USER10> Why not just use go?</comment>


Texas Bitcoin Conference and Hackathon - <AUTHOR> http://texasbitcoinconference.com/

<comment><USER2> Tickets cost $275.

You'd think they'd quote the price in BTC.</comment>


Sex Scandal Toppled a Silicon Valley Chief. Investors Say, So What? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/27/technology/sexual-misconduct-silicon-valley.html <comment><USER2> It's just a reality that the majority of people will ignore or overlook a personal failing of a business partner, politician, celebrity, etc... so long as they are successful.

I think that's what makes the #metoo movement so impactful. That for a specific type of failing, namely male initiated sexual assault/harrassment, your profile is proportional to your culpability.

The fact that pretty much nobody outside of SV/VC knows who Mike Cagney is, and he's really successful, and he had a consensual relationship, means this is a non-story. Nobody cares that he lied to his board.

</comment><comment><USER3> Summary:

\- Powerful man owns business and raises money to build value and employee people

\- Said Powerful man attracts female employees who flirt with him, and choose to date him

\- People are aghast that a man and woman would have a relationship

This article mentions no criminal investigation and no legal proceedings.

This is literally virtue signalling and faux moral policing.

If consenting adults get involved, and money is made and value created.... then who are we to judge them?

Before thinking I'm out of line for these comments.... think back to when YOU met YOUR partner and how that can be construed by a low-IQ reporter in this day and age.

</comment><comment><USER4> capitalism > decency. Full stop.</comment>