The Scientist and Engineer's Guide to Digital Signal Processing (1999) - <AUTHOR> https://www.analog.com/en/education/education-library/scientist_engineers_guide.html <comment><USER2> Easier access to (I think) the same content here: [http://www.dspguide.com/pdfbook.htm](http://www.dspguide.com/pdfbook.htm)

</comment><comment><USER3> Boy this brings back memories. When I was at school this was my bible. I graduated my embedded systems programming study, with my field of study being DSP. Soon after I started my changed careers pretty fast, but I still look back on DSP with much love. I'm still fun at parties, though. E.g. when somebody criticizes the CD, being worse than analogue LP's. Also when people invest top dollar in speaker cables, while the single most area to invest is being overlooked. Fixing the DA clock-source results is far better music quality, then any speaker cable will ever can.

<comment><USER4> >Fixing the DA clock-source results is far better music quality, then any speaker cable will ever can.

I read this as a having a decent quality DAC inline between the source and listening device will do more than expensive speaker wire?

<comment><USER5> Yes, I think that's what is being said. A lot of the usb hifi dacs have their own clock for this exact reason

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> When I first studied this book, and other related bits of Engineering Maths, I remember being completely marveled by Laplace and Z transform methods. I could learn to manipulate them and use them to solve equations, it felt like black magic for a very long time even having working through all of the basic derivations.

A book that did a lot to bring my understanding around was Complex Variables and the Laplace Transform for Engineers by LePage. It's more-or-less a pretty thorough introduction to complex analysis, but developed in the context of linear systems and transfer functions. I would absolutely recommend it as a sequel to this book.

<comment><USER7> I feel similarly about using root locus diagrams in control theory with Laplace transforms. I'm just beginning the DSP part of my EE degree.

<comment><USER8> Ha!

The first time I did root locus diagrams in Linear Systems (or whatever the course was called), we did everything by hand and I _hated_ it.

10 years after graduation I was in a certificate class for Mechatronics and we had Matlab. The difference was night and day. Suddenly I could play with root locations and see the effect immediately without having to do half an hour of tedious hand calculation. It's amazing how much your attitude improves when the work becomes "fun."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've been wanting to learn more about DSP, and this looks like a good free resource, but the examples in BASIC are just so hard to read, between the line numbers and SHOUTY CASE.

While I suppose it would be a good exercise to translate the examples into the language of my choice, are there any good resources on DSP that use a more reasonable language for the examples? And I'd prefer to avoid proprietary languages like Matlab.

<comment><USER10> The skills learnt should be transferrable to Octave which is Matlab compatible.

<comment><USER9> This book uses BASIC, which I just find quite unreadable.

I don't know of what other resources are available, but I do know I've seen some that use Matlab. I've never played with Octave much, so I don't know how compatible it is; can you just directly copy Matlab code, or do you need to do translations?

Anyhow, if there's a book that uses Matlab rather than BASIC, and could be used in Octave, that might be more readable. I would find C, C++, Python, or Rust more familiar, though.

<comment><USER11> _I 've never played with Octave much, so I don't know how compatible it is; can you just directly copy Matlab code, or do you need to do translations?_

I'm not an expert, but I believe Octave is pretty compatible, at least with the core language. I think there are some "extra" features and libraries that don't exist in Octave, but it should be fine for many scenarios. FWIW, the earlier version of Andrew Ng's machine learning class on Coursera was Matlab / Octave based, and students using Octave were able to do everything required there with no problems.

You can find some more detailed comparison here:

[https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/MATLAB_Programming/Differences...](https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/MATLAB_Programming/Differences_between_Octave_and_MATLAB)

<comment><USER12> In my experience one can pretty much just copy and paste, and most things work (though likely not 100%). There are two ways in which Octave still falls short: (1) Matlab is faster, as it has (I believe) JIT compilation whereas Octave doesn't; and (2) all things related to plotting & graphing are still better in Matlab IMO, though that may be changing. This may not be important for learning DSP, but does matter in day to day scientific work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As an EE who flunked his DSP graduate course,Can't recommend this book enough to grok DSP basics. And it's Free!As a good programming practice I intend to translate the codes from BASIC( pseudocode) to Python(NumPY fun).

<comment><USER14> No offense intended, but ... that isn't the most glowing recommendation.

I read it as "This book is great, really helped me understand the concepts. In fact, it helped so much I failed the class."

<comment><USER15> I think he meant he read it after he failed the class which didn' give him a proper understanding of the material while this book did the opposite.

So that sounds pretty encouraging.

<comment><USER16> That is my take too.

BASIC is fine. I won't language quibble on a nice free resource.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> A Godsend! I really appreciated the separation of the s-plane as rectangular and the z-plane as polar. It is astonishing the depth to which we can analyze the frequency harmonics of a signal.

;-)

</comment><comment><USER18> Can not recommend the book enough. I read the entire book in PDF format first. Then went out and bought a hard copy.

I work at ADI now, which is kind of weird to see the OP's link.

<comment><USER19> Ex-ADIer here, we had a couple of copies kicking around in our office. Shortly after I joined I asked my team lead what an FFT is, he explained "it's a way to transform a signal from the time domain to the frequency domain..." and when he saw that my eyes had glazed over he pointed to this book and said "read that". It's really readable and an excellent intro to DSP

<comment><USER20> From the blog quoted above: "Advanced DSP can certainly get complicated with quadrature processing, Hilbert transforms, and cascaded infinite impulse response filters, but this series on DSP isn't going to get that complicated."

Gulp. I'm new to DSP, so I'm obviously not going to jump into "quadrature processing," but what would you say are the basic mathematical prerequisites for getting into this kind of thing? What sort of math should you know before you even start?

<comment><USER19> I'm afraid I don't know that info - I worked with the compiler toolchain and associated libraries so strictly speaking it _probably_ wasn't even necessary to know the basics of signal processing. However it gets -complicated- interesting enough to be challenging, and whatever the _next_ steps are this will at least put the necessary groundwork in place :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This has been a favorite for nearly 20 years.

</comment><comment><USER22> I need something like this for Music Theory.

<comment><USER23> Highly recommended: [http://sites.music.columbia.edu/cmc/MusicAndComputers/](http://sites.music.columbia.edu/cmc/MusicAndComputers/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> also, there is canonical green-tea-press book 'think dsp' available here: [http://greenteapress.com/wp/think-dsp/](http://greenteapress.com/wp/think- dsp/)

which covers the basics in python.

</comment><comment><USER25> Does anyone have any suggestions for a book specific to audio synthesis DSP?

<comment><USER26> This one's pretty good for audio DSP in general, including some fairly detailed material on synthesis:

[https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/audio-programming- book](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/audio-programming-book)

Most of the code is C (and some C++). The first two chapters are a C tutorial, followed by audio-specific C programming. If you already know C you may want to skip the first couple of chapters.

If you're going to buy it I'd recommend a hard copy, as the DVD includes a lot of stuff that isn't in the Kindle version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This book contains some wrong and oversimplified statements, the explanation of the sampling theorem is awkward and suggests that the author has not fully understood it himself.

Example of wrong claims: "The heart of digital noise generation is the random number generator." Not true, many digital noise generators use LFSR.

"Just as analog filters are designed using the Laplace transform, recursive digital filters are developed with a parallel technique called the z-transform." Hello no, there are gazillion ways to design filters - analog or digital - without those transforms.

"The frequency domain becomes attractive whenever the complexity of the Fourier Transform is less than the complexity of the convolution. This isn't a matter of which you like better; it is a matter of which you hate less."

Clearly I hate both domains less than this book. It might serve as an introduction to DSP, but please remain suspicious, if some claim herein seems oversimplified, it probably is.

<comment><USER28> I don't understand your issue with his statement on PRNGs... LFSRs are functionally pseudorandom number generators in this context, so you haven't invalidated his statement.</comment></comment>


Building a professional design tool on the web [Figma] - <AUTHOR> https://www.figma.com/blog/building-a-professional-design-tool-on-the-web/ <comment><USER2> This is a decent writeup. And kudos to Figma for releasing IndirectBuffer as open source. Currently lots of dark arts around offloading compute to gpu and asm.js, but I think as browsers expose APIs such as SharedArrayBuffer and WebGPU some of the chaos should abate.

Am interested in similar gains for high performance browser networking. Some experiments with wasm in linux kernel show safe bypass is a possibility ;)

[https://github.com/wasmerio/kernel-wasm](https://github.com/wasmerio/kernel- wasm)</comment>


Introducing Elm to a JavaScript Web App - <AUTHOR> http://noredinktech.tumblr.com/post/126978281075/walkthrough-introducing-elm-to-a-js-web-app

<comment><USER2> Elm

Pros:

\- All the Joys of functional programming .

\- Once you satisfy the compiler you can be fairly sure that code will just work.

\- FRP saves you from callback hell.

\- Fairly easy Javascript Integration via Ports( also see con on this)

\- Time traveling debugger ( see con about this)

\- Active mailing list.

\- Automatic package versioning which more or less works for the most part

\- Pure render function ( popularized by ReactJS), makes writing/debugging UI's trivial and painless.

\- "Concurrent" FRP

Cons:

\- Javascript integration is very and tedious. You have to declare all your ports in main which breaks abstractions. There is "secret" way of integration via Native modules but this will break if compiler changes ( which does quite often ).

\- Debugger/reactor won't work if you have ports, basically all non trivial apps.

\- All the ui components have to be reimplemented since stuff like jqueryui/webcomponents don't work ( react suffers from this also)

\- No support for isomorphic apps, its a client side only tech.

\- Can't do code splitting. Compiler generates one big blob of js.

\- Constantly changing terminology ( eg: mailbox)

\- IDE's/code editors are on the same level as dynamic languages i.e no code completion, refactoring ect.

<comment><USER3> I think PureScript[0] is a great contender:

\- It generates beautiful javascript code

\- It can separate PureScript modules into nodejs modules

\- It has an even stronger type system than elm . For example, typeclasses

\- has great interop with javascript

\- Because it can compile to node.js modules, and can use node.js libraries, it's actually possible to write a Universal app (I tend to avoid isomorphic, as it means something totall different in pure functional programming languages like PureScript. ([https://github.com/paf31/purescript- isomorphisms)](https://github.com/paf31/purescript-isomorphisms\))).

One issue I have had so far is that once your project gets big, the compile times are pretty annoying. But apart from that; a great language!

[0] -[http://www.purescript.org/](http://www.purescript.org/)

<comment><AUTHOR> How big are we talking about for the compile times?

Is there any in-depth recent comparison of elm and purescript somewhere? I found some links from almost a year ago but I assume it changed a lot since then.

<comment><USER4> The largest all-PureScript application I know of is SlamData[0], which takes about 12s for a rebuild, but SlamData uses a _lot_ of modules. For smaller projects it's much less. It's not great, but performance is one of three main goals for the current milestone. There is an alternative front-end called psc- compile[1] which reduces the incremental build times considerably. I hope to be able to integrate it soon.

      [0] slamdata.com
      [1] github.com/bitc/purescript/tree/psc-compile/psc-compile

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have used Elm for a couple projects recently and the main benefit is it forces you to program in a maintainable and correct fashion. The community is active and tries to find the right patterns to use without compromising these core principles. I think the potential of a language like this for testable UI's could revolutionize and simplify client side development if it gains enough momentum.

</comment><comment><USER6> How would one compare Elm to ClojureScript? I've been learning Clojure for web development and I really enjoy it. Where does Elm fit into the picture?

<comment><USER7> This may just give you more questions but you might be interested in this: [https://github.com/Day8/re-frame](https://github.com/Day8/re-frame)

The readme.md is wonderful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for that link, I'm planning to learn elm this week and while I really don't like lips syntax clojurescript seems to be a big player too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My personal impression is that the language infrastructure is not mature enough. As of version 2.0 you cant install Elm on Linux platform from npm because of broken repo link or something (it is known bug but looks like no one cares to fix it). But even you managed to install it, Elm itself does not work behind corporate firewall because it rely on Haskell HTTP library which suck (they fixed this bug in the library but please wait for another Elm release for this to work).

The language looks very interesting and promising, I am very pissed by the fact that I had no chance to try it in our latest project because of those miserable bugs.

</comment><comment><USER9> That's really sweet, I have never checked out elm before. I've been contemplating going to TypeScript as it has a good amount of es6 support now, I'll look more at elm though.

I fear something like this though will make it more difficult to hire and on board new people. I'm currently trying to hire 3 senior/very experienced JS developers and that's hard enough.

<comment><USER10> I would jump at the chance. Also be sure to look into Purescript.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> That switch statement and type declaration look beautiful in [0] and seems like what we try to achieve with babel + flow + jsx... spaghetti

[0]: [https://github.com/evancz/elm- todomvc/blob/master/Todo.elm](https://github.com/evancz/elm- todomvc/blob/master/Todo.elm)

<comment><USER12> That's Haskell for you ^

I'm excited that Elm could bring front end web developers to Haskell.

<comment><USER13> That's Standard ML for you ^

I'm excited that Haskell could bring more developers to ML-family languages.

<comment><USER12> I'm sure we could keep going, but the point I'm making is that Elm is very close to Haskell, and if you like Elm you will definitely like Haskell. I don't know if the same can be said about going from Haskell to Standard ML because I haven't... yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I thought this was going to be the Elm email client in a JavaScript app. I'm getting old.

Elm (lang) looks interesting though.

</comment><comment><USER15> If you're interested in bringing functional/reactive style code to an existing application, you might also be interested in splint.js: [https://github.com/adzerk-oss/splint.js](https://github.com/adzerk- oss/splint.js)

I wrote a blog post about it recently: [http://adzerk.com/blog/2015/06/splint- functional-first-aid-j...](http://adzerk.com/blog/2015/06/splint-functional- first-aid-jquery/)

In a nutshell, it's a jQuery-friendly packaging of the ClojureScript runtime and the Javelin cell library, usable in existing applications. You basically write ClojureScript in JavaScript syntax.

<comment><USER16> >You basically write ClojureScript in JavaScript syntax.

Why?

<comment><USER15> Legacy code remains accessible to cheaper contractors, expense of overhauling build/deploy in sunsetting legacy app not justifiable. Gives us the ability to direct most of our effort toward the (Hoplon) all-Clojure/Script replacement.

<comment><USER16> I suppose that's one reason. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Dan Abramov's Redux (Flux'ish implementation) takes a lot of ideas from Elm - [https://github.com/rackt/redux](https://github.com/rackt/redux)</comment>


What's going on with Google robotics? - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/whats-going-on-with-google-robotics-2015-11 <comment><USER2> I've seen this movie before.

Andy is a visionary.

He left Apple to found Danger which was one of the "genesis" products that led to the smartphone era. (1)

He made the next huge leap with Android and almost failed until Google showed up to help him fully execute his vision under their stewardship.

After Android became a very mature business in its own right what to do with the visionary founder?

The article states that "Page is interested in robots" \- can you imagine if Larry Page came to you and said "Hey how about you literally build robots all day. You could be Tony Stark and here's $100m to get you started. We'll change the world!"

It's a hard to turn down offer, Rubin accepted and tried to recapture the magic pursuing somebody else's vision.

But it's damn tough to be a founder / visionary under somebody else's thumb, especially when you're set for life financially.

That's a story that never works out, but is played out again and again in technical acquisitions as big organizations attempt to find a place for founders.

(1) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danger_(company)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danger_\(company\))

(2) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Google)

<comment><USER3> Innovation seems to work best under threat of poverty. Because it tends to push founders to build things with a least some near-term practicality that is of economic value to some party.

If you have $100m in the bank then the only primal motivation for a goal "of creating consumer robot technology by 2020" is articles like this one by BusinessInsider questioning what value has been created.

The arbitrary deadline set at the beginning (2020) could be another motivation, but that could probably be pushed back and the project refinanced because hey innovation is hard.

<comment><USER4> I'd say "promise of future status and material rewards" rather than "threat of poverty". The threat of poverty strongly induces very risk adverse behavior. One of the necessary conditions for a country to produce a silicon valley is that they have sufficient material wealth that poverty isn't a risk.

But yes, once you have the money and the fame, you probably won't be as driven.

<comment><USER5> I can't comment on how it works for companies as a whole, but it has been shown that individuals are more strongly motivated by the desire to avoid a loss than the desire to gain something.

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

<comment><USER4> I'm familiar with loss aversion, and it's really not relevant here. (Maybe it would be if you could fall in status by not innovating, etc.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Google's robot effort is scattered. They have two good humanoid projects, Schaft, which is a spinoff of Tokyo University, and Boston Dynamics, which is a spinoff of MIT. They're still located near Tokyo and Boston; they haven't been brought together. BD probably has better control and Schaft has better actuators for human-sized robots, and I'd expected a new machine with the best of the two technologies by now. Not happening.

If they try to move those groups to Mountain View, they'll probably lose most of the people, especially on the BD side, where the team is older. Raibert, the Boston Dynamics CEO, is at retirement age. Boston Dynamics will need new leadership soon.

Google could put Anthony Levandowski in charge. He's been with the Google self-driving car effort, and he's an original thinker. He's the one who built a self-driving motorcycle in 2003.

They need an intermediate goal, a minimum viable product, if you will. Outside of industrial robots and vacuum cleaners, no autonomous robotic product makes money. Except for self-driving cars, none look likely to do so in the near future. The most promising near term applications are military, and Google doesn't want to do those.

<comment><USER7> Seeing the work of these brilliant roboticists disappear inside google without even a consumer product to show is sad. But the thought of them building robots for military is just scary.

<comment><USER8> As opposed to languishing inside a small company that is strained for resources?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> At the risk of derailing the post, I have a relevant question for the Hacker News hivemind: how would someone like me get this job? (i.e. Andy Rubin's former position)

I've got a Ph.D. in autonomous robotics from the best place in Australia to have earned one. I started a consumer robotics company that exploded rapidly in a cloud of useful lessons learned. I then moved into product development consulting in order to understand the full product development lifecycle. And I'm now also the CTO of a small startup building an OS for if-this-then-that (and more) control of hardware and software devices, initially targeting Escape Room developers.

On the other hand, I'm only 31, and given how long I spent in academia, my paid employment experience is only about five years, including a 20-month post-doc.

My experience isn't all that atypical. I've met plenty of equally ambitious and credentialled people, most of them entrepreneurs too. Imagining that this sort of role is the ideal end-game for people like me, what should we do now/next/later?

I spend a lot of time looking at the history of people I admire and might want to emulate, and in almost all cases there seems to be a launching point where they make an enormous leap into an amazing role. I can't help but assume someone noticed them and plucked them out of obscurity (e.g. I'd not heard of Danger, or even Android before it was acquired) and into a high-level role. So the big question then - how to get noticed? Paraphrasing Bill Watterson, how do I find the right place to hang-out so that I'm already there when the right time comes along?

<comment><USER10> Go build a consumer robotics startup that takes off and embarrasses Google, and then they will either buy you and put you in charge of their robotics efforts, or exit the market. Either way, you win.

Big companies respond better to threats than to talent. Make 'em irrelevant and they'll want you; if you try to make them want you, you'll just make yourself irrelevant.

<comment><USER9> Well said. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think Business Insider misses the point. There will be many robots on the market in the coming times. Diversifying your portfolio does make sense. Also, Google does have focus in the sense that they make consumer products.

If I would work there, I'd create several robots for consumers:

* robots that can carry stuff, and yes, that means also staircases (one of my interns is doing that right now)

* robots that can clean floors properly, vacuuming, scrubbing, but also cleaning themselves! (we're doing this professionally)

* robots that can clean windows, might be quadcopters (we're not that far, we're just spraying paint for now)

Regretfully, robots are difficult to sell, so that's why I'm currently creating a revenue stream around indoor localization (which is what we solve all the time for autonomous robots). However, as Google they have plenty of time (5 years) and resources, so they can built awesome stuff.

Business Insider is just impatient.

</comment><comment><USER12> Man I feel pretty bad for Boston Dynamics. They went from having a bright and glowing future with Government/Military contracts to being dimmed down by Google. They really seem like a company that shouldn't be tamed.

<comment><USER13> It is hugely disappointing to see what, likely, is them getting run into the ground. It almost seems self-serving that Rubin would buy all these companies, who would have been competitors for his new incubator, shackle them to Google and then leave them in the lurch to go do his own thing.

<comment><USER14> This is also what I think is going on here. Google wealthy enough to buy robot companies that might compete with its internal offerings.

The same way Google looked at internal OpenMoko efforts and decided to just buy Android. Now the problem is Android is tied to company that gets all of its revenue through advertising. I just saw an article about how typical Android apps query location thousands of times a day to sell to advertisers. Google will never implement an Apple-like "Enable location" prompt. This is their bread and butter.

This is also why I think a Google robot will fail. It'll be too tied to advertising revenues and other privacy affecting services. People will be wary about the "spying" robot in their home and businesses and will opt for a competitors product.

<comment><USER15> Google has added an "Enable location" prompt in Android 6 (aka Marshmallow).

<comment><USER14> I have Marshmallow on my 6P and have never seen it. Is this on by default for end users? Or so well hidden option that guarantees no one will ever use it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > "The technology pieces we have are incredible," says one member of Google's > robots team. "We just have to commit to a particular direction to go in and > focus."

A more positive framing of this would be that they're doing development bottom-up: develop good pieces first, then figure out what to assemble them into later. Given that Google hasn't been in robotics very long, and that their goal is to launch a consumer robot "before 2020", this strategy seems reasonable.

</comment><comment><USER17> The same thing that has plagued Google for years: institutional ADD.

<comment><USER18> Unfortunately, it's an extremely fine line between trying to avoid such a thing and crushing creativity entirely.

<comment><USER3> This is under the assumption that fostering that type of creativity internally is a valuable model in the first place.

It's possible they would be better off financing a VC/acquisition arm than hiring another 5k employees to be creative 'intrapeneuers'. Or some other model not yet popularized (such as the Valve decentralized approach or some shared ownership scheme).

<comment><USER6> It takes money to do things in robotics. It took $125 million in DARPA funding to get to Big Dog. It took entire CS departments at big name schools with tech support from auto companies (Stanford's VW was made computer-drivable for them by VW) to win the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005.

You can't do this on YCombinator-scale peanuts. That's what academic robotics looked like for decades, and progress was very, very slow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > as it tries to meet a goal of creating consumer robot technology by 2020

Wouldn't a self-driving car qualify as a "robot"?

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm confused. Why would anyone expect that an advertising company would actually have a clue what they want to do with robotics? I think the main idea with acquisitions in robotics space was to keep Andy around, and to create yet another PR bubble, much like with Glass or autonomous cars. But then Andy left and it turned out that shit's hard. Whoop dee do. Time to switch to some other distraction.

<comment><USER21> Crazy! It would be like a PayPal founder believing he'd have a clue about how to build an electric car, or a rocket ship.

<comment><USER20> No, it would be like expecting PayPal to build a spaceship or an electric car.

<comment><USER21> I see -- it would be like if the same parent company thought it could successfully run, say, GEICO, Dairy Queen, and Fruit of the Loom.

<comment><USER20> You're reaching, but I'll oblige. It'd be like Berkshire Hathaway told Dairy Queen or GEICO to build a commercially viable robot.

Google basically runs two things profitably: Ads and Android (the latter in part because of ads). Neither of which makes anything hardware related. All phones are made by other companies, and when they tried to run one, they were losing $700M/yr.

<comment><USER21> Come on. That's like saying Apple only runs one thing profitably, consumer electronics. YouTube is wildly different from Google Fiber which is nothing like the Play store, which is nothing like web search.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What Is the Most Creative Swag You've Picked Up at a Trade Show - <AUTHOR> We're exhibiting at the ATX Automation Technology Trade Show in LA in a few weeks and need some swag to give away. What was the last SWAG you've picked up at a trade show that you remember thinking, "Oh, that's pretty cool!". <comment><USER2> Travel batteries for charging phones. Not necessarily all that cool anymore but highly useful nonetheless. I've accumulated about half a dozen of these bad boys, and I give them away to friends and colleagues. It's kind of viral.</comment>


Responses to Reader Feedback - <AUTHOR> https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/05/08/feedback/ <comment><USER2> Reminds me of The Server™ at my last job, built in a hurry using Node.js 0.something to talk to IoT devices in people's homes. It was amazing how well it scaled once we had time to refactor and test everything thoroughly. Everything was encrypted and checksummed, we were able to upgrade and downgrade between any two versions, firmware was verified against a public key on the devices, and it was generally what I always thought IoT could be. Now if only someone open sources the whole deal we could be in for an IoT revolution…

</comment><comment><USER3> The blog post is a little "ranty", but it does have a lot of valid points, especially with regard to keeping things simple (where they can be).

(Also for context, it is related to his earlier post [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23107945](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23107945))</comment>


Pharo at Beta Nine - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/concerning-pharo/pharo-beta-nine-59ee972d321a <comment><USER2> Nice applications using Pharo Smalltalk!

Pharo is an amazing environment and it is good to see companies deploying commercial web services using it. I mostly use Pharo for NLP.

edit: I just realized that the author of this article is the author of several Pharo libraries that I depend on. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER3> Silly question, maybe I just can't find the correct keywords to search. Are there any Smalltalks that allow coding/interaction from a text-based console? Maybe line-oriented commands with $EDITOR used for coding? I've wanted to play with these languages for years, but as a blind developer, their inaccessible GUIs thwart me. I'm also a bit confused how they interact with VCSs. Perhaps the answer is obvious when you've played with these environments for a few minutes, but I can't even reach that point. :)

<comment><USER4> Historically, Smalltalk was used to explore the GUI design space, so a non-GUI Smalltalk is somewhere between anachronistic and oxymoronic.

GNU Smalltalk has an Emacs interface:

[http://www.gnu.org/software/smalltalk/manual/html_node/Emacs...](http://www.gnu.org/software/smalltalk/manual/html_node/Emacs.html)

I don't know how accessible Emacs is to you, but it should at least be textual.

GNU Smalltalk also has a REPL:

[http://www.gnu.org/software/smalltalk/manual/html_node/Getti...](http://www.gnu.org/software/smalltalk/manual/html_node/Getting- started.html#Getting-started)

Now, how does a traditional Smalltalk interact with a VCS? Poorly. Smalltalk was all about image-based persistence, with textual source code _not_ being the primary artifact. Philosophically, it was designed to be an environment, and take over the system from soup to nuts.

GNU Smalltalk, predictably, goes its own way, and allows people to load textual source code files from the command line. It also has a more complicated packaging system:

[http://smalltalk.gnu.org/wiki/creating-and-distributing- pack...](http://smalltalk.gnu.org/wiki/creating-and-distributing-packages)

<comment><USER5> Pharo (and others) can interact without many problems with any file-format VCS using "filetree" (an file based export source format). There are many of us using it for projects more or less complex (one of them the Pharo VM: [https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-vm](https://github.com/pharo- project/pharo-vm)). So, while we can improve in that area, we are not agnostic :)

Now, you can do scripting with Pharo too, but using console to edit it is so alien for us that we cannot even understand why someone would want to drop a complete development environment (with some really nice tools), just to use a text editor...

<comment><USER4> Because the text editor _is_ the nicest development environment. It's been customized by _me_ to _my_ workflow, and your not understanding that says horrible things about how well you understand how programmers work.

Frankly, the fact you don't get this means I can't use your product. It promises to be painful to work in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> >The customer does not care what technology is used to build a product.

That is not universally true. For example, the American military used to require the use of Ada. This is no longer the case but I doubt they would buy software built with Pharo.

In the same way big corporations often insist on Java, or at least a JVM-based solution.

<comment><USER5> that's because they buy development, not products. I've worked in some big corporations who enforced Java internally, but they do not care about products they also use (best example is office tools, but I've seen many "business oriented" products developed in other languages: i.e. first versions of rational suite -yes, I'm old- were made also in smalltalk and nobody ever cared about, etc. etc. etc.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I see people here mentioned GNU Smalltalk. The last time Smalltalk was posted here, some more seasoned people talked me into looking at Smalltalk again.

Now, I am getting more and more into Emacs. I like SBCL a lot, and I have played with it more. But Smalltalk also has an appeal, with similar ideas in live persistence coding. However, I am more comfortable with GNU Smalltalk.

Problem is Pharo has the powerful CogVM. How performant is GNU Smalltalk in relation to Pharo. If I wanted to run the same Seaside infrastructure as these dudes (there is a fork of Seaside included in GNU Smalltalk from the start), would it collapse under loads Pharo's CogVM can handle?

This is just out of curiosity. Obviously this is armchair engineering 101, but I would be interested to know more about this. There is such little interest in Smalltalk at scale it is hard to find this info with limited searching.

<comment><USER8> Don't use Gnu Smalltalk, it is a huge disservice to Smalltalk. The main selling point of Pharo/Squeak is that it is a live interactive developing experience. You don't get that with GNU Smalltalk.

<comment><USER7> Does that really answer my question?

There is talk here of Shampoo, which allows Emacs to do many of the things you suggest within a textual environment like Emacs.

I understand you have your preference (and I know your name comes up with Pharo on the net; I have seen it before and I can tell you are active in the community, so I say this out of respect), but I just wanted to try something I am more comfortable with to ease my transition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As much as I like live-coding languages/runtimes (lisp, smalltalk, goal, etc.), i've been hearing how the system admins, site reliability engineers, package maintainers, etc. would hate them because there is no reproducible environment for example. They much better restart the whole app, process, os, etc.

<comment><USER5> quite the opposite: you can think on a pharo application as your own virtual system (think docker, but at the level of the development environment). For a sysadmin installing and running an app is as easy as saying:

curl get.pharo.org | bash

./pharo Pharo.image config URL PROJECT VERSION

./pharo Pharo.image http --start 8080

then they can reproduce last line as much as they want:

./pharo Pharo.image http --start 8081

./pharo Pharo.image http --start 8082

etc.

<comment><USER9> I don't want to sound picky, but "curl get.pharo.org | bash" is not acceptable for production - First security, and second reproducability, also availability, but I see - this could've been an internally set (intranet) site where this would be accepted.

But my point was that if someone has started "./pharo Pharo.image .." on a production service and modified it live, then it'll be a problem (what if you haven't saved, or your changes were not propagated yet to the source version control system?) - also how this would propagate changes to other slave machines running it there too?

But it's pretty cool and advanced when developing the system. I'm now stuck a bit with Java/GWT, and I'm glad that there is SuperDevMode which incrementally compiles java->javascript (and few other things). Still its far away from Ctrl+X+E on your block in Lisp.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Can anybody here point me to some documentation on the Squeak/Cog/Pharo etc image file format? "read the source" is pretty useless when the source is scattered around various Monticello repositories, which never seem to work for me thanks to the Smalltalk community's epic linkrot.

</comment><comment><USER11> If you want to give back to Pharo in a way that counts, fund improvements to the UI. The font rendering is bad right now and HiDPI screens are not even supported. This makes for a terrible first impression.</comment>


True Link (YC S13) is launching an investment division - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/why-true-link-is-launching-an-investment-division-today-1bd30aff34a4 <comment><USER2> The glide path shown here [1] seems to advise being ~90% in cash at age 61 and then ramping up risk until you're ~90% in equities by age 86. What's the logic behind that?

[1] [https://cdn- images-1.medium.com/max/600/1*TnBmuHLdCi1VGwBMS7...](https://cdn- images-1.medium.com/max/600/1*TnBmuHLdCi1VGwBMS72s1Q.png)

<comment><USER3> I don't know this particular company's methodology but, in a nutshell, usually they consider a number of glide paths and then run Monte Carlo simulations for each, then choose the best performing one. The goal is to minimize the probability of running out of money before dying, assuming the retiree withdraws a constant amount every year. Some studies concluded that a rising- equity path performs better.

Of course it's more complicated than that. There's a lot of assumptions embedded in those simulations: life expectancy, bonds and stocks returns, etc. See below for more info.

 _The Case for Increasing Stock Exposure in Retirement_ [https://www.aier.org/research/case-increasing-stock- exposure...](https://www.aier.org/research/case-increasing-stock-exposure- retirement)

 _Reducing Retirement Risk with a Rising Equity Glide Path_ [https://www.onefpa.org/journal/Pages/Reducing%20Retirement%2...](https://www.onefpa.org/journal/Pages/Reducing%20Retirement%20Risk%20with%20a%20Rising%20Equity%20Glide%20Path.aspx)

<comment><USER4> That's interesting, because increasing the percentage of equities over time is literally the opposite of what most other investment advice sources preach. Thanks for the links. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've long been interested in an investment company that had a variable cut that was directly based on the customers' preferences. Ultimately you'd want the managers incentives based on the fees to be exactly aligned with the customers' needs, which means that different fee structures are needed for different kinds of customers.

Basically the hedge fund fee structure extended. So someone who wanted more risk would give a higher cut of fees for higher gains and a lower cut of fees for lower gains, and vice versa. The average expected value to the manager should be a constant percentage of assets, but the distribution changes for each customer.

One cool thing that naturally falls out of this idea is negative fees: if someone is risk averse enough, then the incentives require the manager to lose money if the customer loses, which causes the manager to be risk averse as well for those funds.

(I have more detailed thoughts on this that this margin is too small to contain; feel free to email me for some disorganized elaboration on the above.)

<comment><USER6> The place this ends up sticky is that a manager with multiple clients can jointly maximize fees – e.g. instead of properly hedging a bet within each client's portfolio, you can put the bet in one client's portfolio and the hedge in another's. If risk preferences are divergent enough the manager can basically be making one-way bets – and frankly the point of this is it could be socially efficient for two of your clients to bet against each other, that's the _point_ , but for almost any nonlinear compensation structure you dream up (even just sharing a little bit in upside, like venture) you can figure out that the manager maximizes his/her own risk adjusted return by playing clients off against each other or creating scenarios that sometimes throw a client under the bus.

To be clear, a flat fee is the ULTIMATE one-way bet… but making the one-way bet simple rather than complex means that it doesn't incentivize one type of behavior over another, you get the one-way bet even without throwing a client under the bus. And maybe at the end of the day your broker or advisor is a good human and, barring any incentive to the contrary, will do his/her best for the client. Kind of a crazy bet, but…

<comment><USER5> >frankly the point of this is it could be socially efficient for two of your clients to bet against each other

So I did think of your scenario, and actually one worse (directly moving money from clients who don't value the next marginal dollar as much as clients who do). A couple of points I thought of in response:

1\. Require clients funds to be transparent, so no moving money around after the allocation decisions have been made (this protects more against my problem than yours)

2\. Assume the manager's utility is linear in money, in which case hedging their own fees doesn't make sense. If it's not linear in money, then this all becomes more complicated. I got to the point of saying something like "get a model for client utility and for manager utility of various amounts of money, then set the fee to align incentives". If the manager's utility is linear, then fees should be proportional to utility the client gained. If not, it becomes more complicated and perhaps gaming like you describe is inevitable, this is ultimately a math question for which I haven't modelled everything out and so don't know. You may be able to still define a fee structure that gives a proportional increase of utility to the manager for an increase of utility to the client, but I don't know for sure how that would work for multiple clients.

3\. If fees represent utility, and utility is maximized, then wouldn't it be good anyway? (Kind of the point you made in the part I quoted.)

4\. Another point to keep in mind is how various kinds of returns are expected to attract or repel customers, which factors into manager utility in a sort of "side-channel". If that's significant enough, it might make the whole incentives not work.

There are a lot of interesting math questions that go into this. I don't have too many answers, but I feel like I have a good grasp of the questions.

Some other points I see in my notes on this:

1\. it could be that various kinds of existing funds already cover most of what investors really want, and this won't be enough of an improvement to justify the overhead. Investors who want a small chance of a large win go to hedge funds, investors who want the whole market buy index funds, etc, could be there's no room for innovation there

2\. incentive structures need to be very specified, won't just be a fee for various amounts but need to take time dimension into account

3\. For that matter, utility is time-sensitive, so we need a complex model just to determine utility, and maybe quizzing investors on utility won't actually get the "truth"

I like to think of this as a combination of the insights behind insurance and hedge funds, basically skewed utility curves.

I'd love to talk further if you're interested. I ended up starting a retail startup instead of working on this idea because it's easier to break into, but I'd be thrilled if someone turned it into a real company or incorporated it into an existing one, and you guys seem to be capable of doing something like that.

<comment><USER6> Love to help you out on this if I can. The other thing to note is that because of the fear of double dealing there's a lot of stuff on the regulatory side about what kind of fees you can charge – my sense is, even saying, "any quarter in which you lose money, I'll just waive my fee" is illegal (perhaps because it would push the advisor to focus on preventing loss rather than tracking the market). But it's something that to a typical retail investor seems incredibly obvious – why do you get paid for losing me money?? – and I'm kind of sympathetic to, like I'm happy to share the pain in a down market (and to retain the customer). And saying "I actually have to charge a fee in a down market because it's in your best interest for me not to try too hard to avoid bad quarters…" well… there's only so much game theory your typical retail client wants to be doing sitting there in your office.

My gmail address is the same as my HN name. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's a big challenge for RIAs trying to do right by their clients and offer appropriate glide path investment portfolios:

 _The products and potential returns that honest legit RIAs discuss with potential clients will always be unappealing compared what competitor, dishonest RIAs (who are willing to exaggerate) will be offering._

One lesson from the election: it's hard to convince people of a reality they don't want to hear and warn them of others who are promising wildly optimistic scenarios are not being totally honest with them. Potential investors want to believe exaggerated talk of huge returns by dishonest RIAS and honest RIAs lose clients because of this.

<comment><USER6> RRG YES

<comment><USER7> RRG?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How is this better than a Vanguard Target Retirement fund?

<comment><USER6> Great question. It's a lot like a target date fund, but you actually want your fund a lot more personalized. E.g. a man or a woman both 70 years old today would be in the same 2015 target date fund, but she's going to live longer and so has a longer time horizon and should be one or two percent more in equities maybe. But this also varies based on whether you have equity in your home as a cushion, have long term care insurance (which pushes financial needs sooner), are married (especially to someone older or younger), have a separate tax- advantaged account (that should be spent later, typically, meaning you actually have a very short horizon on your non-tax-advantaged account), etc.

The point is, you'd be surprised how different two people are in terms of investment needs even if they retired the same year.

As an aside, we model our investment model most closely after target date funds and annuities. Annuities offer a guarantee (subject to to the insurance company's solvency) but high fees and low flexibility, while target date funds offer good market participation and low fees but don't have the guarantee component. We include a similar blend of securities as a target date fund might, but also include an annuity component for the guarantee.</comment></comment>


Things I Learned Reading the Same Book 100 Times Over 10 Years - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/the-mission/100-things-i-learned-reading-the-same-book-100-time-over-10-years-6891cc6eef6f <comment><USER2> >At some point after I read the Hays translation, I picked up another translation of Marcus — probably one by George Long or A. S. L. Farquharson, that was free online. I was immediately struck by how the beautiful, lyrical book I loved had become dense and unreadable. It struck me that if I had cheaped out and tried to get for free what I'd bought instead, my entire life might have turned out differently. Books are investments. Be glad to put in your money.

This might explain why I didn't like the book when I read it. It was dense, complex and bored me to death. I will try to buy this version and give it another chance.

</comment><comment><USER3> The wisdom of it is so relevant. It is amazing that almost everything we believe that we need to live a good life has been so clearly articulated 2000 years ago (and earlier) consistently by people across a wide range of cultures. But we still struggle to do it :) and there are huge markets for people to package up the same ideas and sell them to us over and over again - or opportunities for lunatics to temporarily sell alternate ideas that lead us into tragic historical cul-de-sacs

</comment><comment><USER4> Definitely looks like this is a book I'll pick up for myself soon.

Anyone else able to comment on their experience reading it, or recommend a specific edition/translation?

<comment><USER5> A non-religious friend of mine recommended it to me, presenting it as a new kind of secular philosophy, and I was deeply unimpressed by it.

The book itself is rambling and hard to read. There is constant repetition of the concepts, paragraph by paragraph and chapter by chapter he says the same things over and over again. Despite being described as secular, Marcus Aurelius leans pretty heavily on 'the gods' as an answer to why some of these things he says matter. (E.g. do not be mad at nature when bad things like disasters happen, nature was made by ''the gods'' and is therefore good. Instead look within yourself ... etc.) An emperor instructing peasants to mostly just suck it up also came off as somewhat entitled. Overall I was surprised at how the person who recommended it to me could dismiss Christianity as nonsensical and inconsistent, when much of Meditations is Christian morals (Do not cheat, do not steal, do not lie, be humble, be grateful to those around you, do not be sexually promiscuous, etc.) with Christ replaced by references to unnamed deities and an appeal to some sort of innate human strength or spirit.

There's definitely wisdom in there but the book overall didn't resonate much with me. I would recommend trying to find a free & legal translation online and reading some of it, and then purchasing the author's translation if you're still interested. I did not read the recommended translation either, so maybe I will buy it and see what I think.

<comment><USER6> This advice goes directly against the advice in the article, which specifically calls out not looking for free translations, as they are apparently "dense and unreadable".

<comment><USER5> GP asked for opinions and advice and I gave them, make of it what you will.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to handle keybindings in Atom - <AUTHOR> https://silvestarbistrovic.from.hr/en/articles/how-to-handle-keybindings-in-atom/ <comment><USER2> Test

<comment><AUTHOR> It worked.</comment></comment>


Diary of a Fire Lookout (2008) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theparisreview.org/letters-essays/5853/diary-of-a-fire-lookout-philip-connors <comment><USER2> I am surprised that nothing has been said (or much anyway) in light of the current wildfires situations, about how maybe 3 years ago spending on public parks was slashed. Surely it stands to reason that with less feet on the ground, there are going to be more fires taking off, that could have otherwise been stopped.

</comment><comment><USER3> The linked article is a recent account by Philip Connors. I rather expected it to be a 2008-era article about one of the most famous fire lookouts in literature: Gary Snyder who worked as a fire lookout in the 1950s and found the job congruent with the interest in Zen and contemplation that distinguished him as a member of the Beats.

<comment><USER4> Perhaps more famous - Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels.

<comment><USER3> But of course Jack only went there because (as fictionalized in _The Dharma Bums_ ) Gary had told him it was a cool experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [https://outline.com/p7La5C](https://outline.com/p7La5C)

For any reader of Edward Abbey, this essay is delightfully pretentious and soft. I actually assumed it was semi-ironic until I looked up the author. If you found it interesting, and prefer a bit more grit, consider reading Edward Abbey's essay Fire Lookout. And if you are at all fond of cheesy romance, Abbey's [mediocre, on-topic] novel Black Sun. For the very brave, you might try spending a summer of your own up on the tower, it's still a thing in the American West, not as many operating towers as there used to be (because technology), but a job that doesn't require much special training. If you look hard you'll find a tower with serviceable LTE - please post back if you try the digital monk thing on a fire tower!

</comment><comment><USER6> The author wrote a book "Fire Season" about his period in a tower.

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9341909-fire- season](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9341909-fire-season)

</comment><comment><USER7> Is there a non-subscriber version available elsewhere?</comment>


Nearly 25% of Americans are going into debt to pay for necessities like food - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/23/nearly-25-percent-of-americans-are-going-into-debt-trying-to-pay-for-necessities.html <comment><USER2> "American have an average of $6,506 in credit card debt, according to a new Experian report out this week."

Although credit reporting agencies have a funny way of calculating debt, which is used for your credit score as well. It's just your current balance, even if you pay it off every month and aren't in "debt". It's hard to tell from the report how they are calculating debt, but I bet it is the amount of money on the credit line waiting to be repaid, even if it isn't costing interest.

Plus, if you wait until the statement due date (which is basically a free extension of the loan, so a good idea, as long as you have automated bill pay that will make sure it makes it right under the deadline), this means that number is likely your past statement plus whatever your current purchases are. You don't control when the credit companies look at your balances, and for mine I was surprised that they were basically reporting 2x my normal revolving credit card usage over the month. I use my credit card for everything if possible, since I get 2% cash back on my Fidelity card (which is great, BTW), as well as great fraud protection and the ability to automatically get an electronic record of every transaction.

The real question is how much of the accounts are delinquent. In the linked report ([https://www.experianplc.com/media/news/2019/state-of- credit-...](https://www.experianplc.com/media/news/2019/state-of-credit- examines-credit-scores-decade-after-financial-crisis/)) 6.7% of people are 90 days late on their payment.

<comment><USER3> > The real question is how much of the accounts are delinquent

Wouldn't how many people are carrying a balance each month (and thus paying interest, implying they very likely can't afford to pay off the balance each month even if they wanted to) be a better measure? The average worker in the US barely nets $6,500 in three months, they're definitely not charging and paying that much off every month.

<comment><USER2> Sure, you could look at that, but just because you carry a $6,500 balance isn't too terrible as long as you are paying it off. If you're just paying the minimum payments and not charging anything new, it could take many years to pay off that debt. The number might also look very similar for many years, even though you are paying it off. I think that's why people who can't even pay the minimum or aren't paying is a truer sign of economic distress. If you aren't paying off your credit card, it's likely you aren't paying off other debts as well, things like rent or mortgage - or will be soon if things don't improve.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> No shit. Why buy gas, food and other line items that don't change much month to month in cash if you get cashback and rewards points for putting it on a card?

If you have the self discipline to not spend more than you make putting everything on a card and paying it down to 0 every month makes a lot of sense.

Sure you could screw up and wind up making monthly payments if you spend more than you make but that's not fundamentally any different than if you bought all the essentials in cash then put the rest on credit.

The article is intentionally misleading by talking about people "paying for things" with credit cards and then talking about credit card debt (no mention of how much gets paid back before the end of the month) implying that the month to month balance people are carrying is a result of necessities rather than large purchases.

This entire article is one large assertion followed by flimsy support after another.

<comment><USER5> Are they considering all credit as debt? I don't think credit that gets its full balance payed on time is debt. Once you pay interest on a balance it becomes debt.

<comment><USER6> Your definitions don't match conventional understanding.

<comment><USER7> They absolutely do. An interest-free loan that you know you will pay off on time is only "debt" academically. It's just shuffling money between accounts, effectively. After each credit card purchase, in theory, you could log in to your online banking and pay off the balance immediately with cash you have on hand in another account. You could do that even before the purchase transitions from pending to posted to your account. Basically, you're not __in debt __.

You're "in debt" when your liabilities exceed your assets. You have negative equity, and so these debts are claims against your future income.

That's what "in debt" means, in a nutshell: your future income belongs to someone else.

If we are going to write a story about how some population segment is "in debt", but we label everyone as "in debt" if they have any credit card balance, that is blatantly dishonest.

<comment><USER8> You are 'in debt' to the credit card company. They're 'in credit' to you. That's why they're called a 'credit' card company. When you spend your credit you're creating debt. When you pay your card off you're paying off debt.

<comment><USER7> "In debt to X" is not "in debt"; it's not how language works.

"In debt" is a loaded phrase which means that the interests against you exceed your assets. It's a common term, for which the more formal word is "deficit".

That's the interesting thing if you want a story on lots of people being in some kind of financial strain.

A temporary loan purely for transactional or cash flow convenience does not represent any sort of financial strain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> How many of the 25% have a smart phone released in the last 12 months and premium cable? Go to bars every week? A statistic like the headline is meaningless without a lot more qualification.

Some people are simply irresponsible and bad with money. It should be quantified.

<comment><USER10> People also use cards to accumulate points, and credit cards are easier to fight against fraudulent purchases vs debit cards. So it's not even a fair measure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Basic necessities and healthcare costs may be sending some people into debt, > but more people point to spending on non-essential items like clothing and > entertainment as the main culprit. In CNBC Make It's survey, 32% of people > said their discretionary spending was the No. 1 cause of their current > credit card debt.

> Another 9% say the majority of their debt comes from paying for travel. > Americans spend an average of $483 a month on non-essentials such as dining > out, entertainment, luxury items and vacations, Schwab's 2019 Modern Wealth > report found.

I wonder how this compares to past generations, and if it's more true now, I wonder what the cause is. More aggressive advertising? Propping up one's mental health in the face of a stressful socio-political climate (its effects greatly amplified by social media)? FOMO (also amplified by social media)?

<comment><USER12> Isn't it more likely that economic inequality is the primary cause?

[https://i.imgur.com/2kfyBPt.png](https://i.imgur.com/2kfyBPt.png)

<comment><USER13> I suspect rising income inequality and increasing housing costs are the primary drivers of CC debt.

You generally can't pay rent with a CC and if rent goes up but income doesn't, then I could see people using CC to make ends meet.

Of course for some, overconsumption is the culprit, but I doubt it is for most people.

<comment><USER11> In the article, it says for 32%, discretionary spending was the primary cause. That's all I was talking about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Using debt to pay for basic routine monthly expenses makes a lot of sense in my mind. There are extra consumer protections when you do this, and benefits from credit providers to do it that can add up. I use debt to pay for all my expenses except for my mortgage payments, which is just servicing of another big debt.

</comment><comment><USER14> >In CNBC Make It's survey, 32% of people said their discretionary spending was the No. 1 cause of their current credit card debt.

I'm never so glad to be an introverted technophile as when I find out how much my coworkers spend on amusement. They spend $200 a month on cable and Pay-Per- View while I watch Youtube and Netflix. They pay $65 for videogames and spend thousands of dollars a year on vacations. They sink hundreds of dollars into Candy Crush and Pokemon Go. They get the newest Galaxy Note every year despite only using their phone for Facebook and texting.

If you're a casual consumer in the 21st century companies and culture will eat you alive.

<comment><USER11> > They spend $200 a month on cable and Pay-Per-View while I watch Youtube and > Netflix. They pay $65 for videogames and spend thousands of dollars a year > on vacations.

What do these things have to do with being an introvert?

My strategy is, instead of budgeting or being as austere as I can, I set a mental threshold for how much fun or peace of mind or happiness a dollar is worth to me. If something is above that threshold, I spend money on it. If it's below that threshold, I don't. If I'm spending too much money, then instead of making a budget, I raise my mental threshold.

I'll spend money to have my lunch delivered because the saved time and mental energy is worth it to me personally. I will not spend money on a car that does anything more than get me around and run AC, because I'm not someone who gets great enjoyment from the car I drive. I _am_ into gadgets and will spend money on the latest tech - even if I don't strictly need it - because I get proportional enjoyment out of it. I won't shop recreationally on Amazon for things I only kind-of want, even if they're very cheap or on sale. Etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> People generally underestimate their food budget. You go "into debt" buying food because you didn't expect it to cost so damn much. But the real problem is rent (also mentioned in the article, but not the headline), which erases up to 2/3 of our income. Without much headroom, it's easy for costs to blow way past limits.

The article also relies on those with debt to assess the cause of their credit card debt, but those with debt are rarely financially literate.

>In CNBC Make It's survey, 32% of people said their discretionary spending was the No. 1 cause of their current credit card debt.

</comment><comment><USER16> I make less than 20k a year. Somehow I am able to eat healthy food while living in one of the more expensive metro areas. I have no debt, and even have a little extra at the end of the year to speculate with sometimes. Luck I suppose. It would still be cool to have a full time job, but we can't all have those, apparently.

<comment><USER17> Do you have roommates? Do you own a car? Do you have a child?

<comment><USER16> Roommates. No car. No kids.

<comment><USER8> When an American says they have roommates, do they literally mean they share a bedroom with another adult they're not romantically involved with? Or does 'room' mean the whole apartment?

<comment><USER16> Shared kitchen and bathroom. It's not ideal, but it's also not worth paying twice as much in rent for exclusive use of those two rooms that I only need for an hour a day or less.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "In CNBC Make It's survey, 32% of people said their discretionary spending was the No. 1 cause of their current credit card debt."

This is maddening. There's no helping people who don't want help (or lack the smarts to recognize the source of the problem.)

</comment><comment><USER19> People are often not very apt at admitting their own mistakes. A self reported study like this probably isn't entirely accurate. You would have to analyze each of their expenses, such as what car are they driving, the size of their apartment, what they spend on entertainment, etc etc, in order to have a truly accurate account.

<comment><USER20> Why is this an increasing issue, since credit cards have been around for decades? The article states "Middle-class life is now 30% more expensive than it was 20 years ago.". I think this may be the major contributing factor to this.

<comment><USER21> Likely explanation: Costs of living went up, wages did not.</comment></comment></comment>


Apple's iOS unaffected by malware; Android exploits surge by 76% - <AUTHOR> http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/08/24/apples_ios_unaffected_by_malware_as_android_exploits_surge_76.html

<comment><USER2> I like the installation options on a mac: you have the official app store, but you don't have to use it.

In theory, Android could also offer different marketplaces, one where the apps are carefully reviewed, and another where anything goes. Keeps the choices, but also supports safe downloading to those who want to be careful. (Ok, Android already _does_ have multiple app stores, but I don't think of any particular one as "the official reviewed marketplace," which is what I'm after.)

</comment><comment><USER3> So it went from 25 to 44 over the last quarter? .00017% malware. Still, no- good if one app gains popularity before it gets noticed. And this will only get worse.

I'd like to see a secure app store from Goog. It'd be easy to grow as they could start with the most popular apps from the current marketplace. Eventually phase out the open marketplace and let users sideload apps if they want to risk it (plus, they could still make "but we're _open!_" claims).

</comment><comment><USER4> There are definitely downsides to iOS apps not having access to each others' filespace, but the security benefits this brings really are great.

<comment><USER5> AFAIK, Android apps can store data in either the private data store where it can be accessed via intents published by the app or on the public data store, which is usually the SD card.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> So, the ability to root an iOS device via an exploit doesn't count as malware? Interesting.

<comment><USER7> Is an exploit "malware"? No.

Could an exploit be used to install malware? Yes.

So, no, it doesn't count.

iOS definitely isn't without security issues, but it doesn't have the same malware issues that plague Android.

<comment><USER8> "plague" is a stretch.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: If you were to start a new company in Jan 2020 what would it be? - <AUTHOR> <comment><AUTHOR> My pick would be:

\- Social Media Platform for local ecosystems : Most people have gotten off FB; Insta, Snap don't fulfill all utilities of Facebook; opportunity to enter

\- Airpods app stack : More than a third of US has Airpods plugged in most of their waking day; can reimagine music listening, social, search

\- Cloud OS : Stadia made a lot of noise, US households have enough bandwidth; infinite memory and process can allow reimagining native apps for a desktop. Maybe even mobile.

<comment><USER2> > Most people have gotten off FB

Uh citation needed? Just because your average HN commenter hates Zuck/FB and thinks targeted ads are the spawn of the devil doesn't mean it's hemorrhaging users.

> More than a third of US has Airpods plugged in most of their waking day

Where are you getting this data. If I were to hazard a guess you're in college and you're thinking your dorm life == the world. AirPods Pro sales have been high and Apple's doubling down on their production but you CAN'T develop apps for them. Not sure how it's even a startup idea.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Most people have gotten off FB

Here's some data from the beginning of 2019: [https://www.marketplace.org/2019/03/06/exclusive-look- number...](https://www.marketplace.org/2019/03/06/exclusive-look-numbers- showing-users-leaving-facebook-by-the-millions/)

Behaviorally, none of my friends claim to be using FB regularly anymore, posts from friends have reduced, engagement - likes and comments on posts have reduced tremendously.

Which is expected of negative network effects.

> More than a third of US has Airpods plugged in most of their waking day

Quick Google Search shows 15, 35 and 65mn pieces sold in 2017, 2018 and 2019 respectively.

<comment><USER2> You literally stated "most people have gotten off of FB." Your citation shows it shrinking by < 10% for gen z and millennials, stagnating for gen x, and increasing for boomers. It's similar in my circle of friends but you can't discount the billions that still do use FB daily worldwide.

You stated more than a third of the US has Airpods plugged in most of their waking days. And again, I say this as a guy who owns a pair and sees them in the workplace all the time. < 50% of my team has them.

But 1. they don't wear them all the time. I'd wager < 3 hours per person. Mostly during commute and gym. 2. I'd say wireless headphone usage is increasing in general, I don't see why you have to exclude non Airpod users? 3. Most importantly, you can't build apps on a platform that doesn't support apps!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Local service business. Probably an upholstery shop. Something high-skilled, long-lasting, with proven demand, and low global competition.

</comment><comment><USER4> A farm that focused on community supported agriculture, education, and utilized permaculture design principles.

</comment><comment><USER5> It depends on what are your goals?</comment>


Why The U.S. Economy Is Dying And Is Simply Not Going To Recover - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/20-reasons-why-the-us-economy-is-dying-and-is-simply-not-going-to-recover-2010-2#the-second-wave-of-foreclosures-1

<comment><USER2> > _"For decades, our leaders in Washington pushed us towards "a global > economy" and told us it would be so good for us. But there is a flip side. > Now workers in the U.S. must compete with workers all over the world, and > our greedy corporations are free to pursue the cheapest labor available > anywhere on the globe."_

Bias much? For one thing, outsourcing would've happened whether we liked it or not. For another, having worked in manufacturing for a bit, corporations by and large aren't laughing their way to the bank by outsourcing American manufacturing jobs overseas - the cost of their goods drop proportionally with labour savings, in the mid-to-long haul anyhow.

I like how we're blaming this on everyone but ourselves - the outsourcing of manufacturing to cheap nations has allowed us to develop a rampant, disgusting consumer culture that has an almost fetishist obsession with cheap, shoddy goods. _WE_ did that to ourselves. Believe me, if there was any significant demand in this country for expensive, well-made products we can bring a great number of manufacturing jobs back... but I suspect the Wal-Mart mentality is here to stay, and there's no one to blame for this but ourselves.

<comment><USER3> This is a common myth. US is still the largest manufacturer in the world.

[http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/CompanyFocus/...](http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/CompanyFocus/the- myth-of-us-industrys-demise.aspx)

<comment><USER4> By volume, yes, but perhaps that's not the best metric. See [http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displaystory.cfm?sto...](http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15641021) for a more meaningful comparison, although I agree that rumors of the manufacturing sector's demise have been greatly exaggerated.

<comment><USER5> I'm having trouble finding the chart, but we're also the largest in terms of percentage of GDP. That's a measurement I strongly prefer.

<comment><USER6> According to CIA World Factbook, you're not the largest in terms of percentage of GDP. At least Germany, Japan, Italy and even Switzerland rank better in that metric.

All of these single-metric comparisons are flawed. E.g. the world largest manufacturer? In comparison to what? Germany, a country with a labor force that is over 3 times smaller than the labor force in the US?

<https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Trite self-contradictory chicken-little-ism. Corporations are greedy! Globalization is bad! OMG socializm! Will you LOOK at that debt (notice how it flattens in the 1990s and then goes stratospheric starting in 200)?! But it's all the Democrats' fault (even though we had a GOP White house, House, and Senate from 2000-2006)!

Normally I'd do a more substantive rebuttal, but after looking at the front page of businessinsider.com, it seems pretty plain that it's the investment equivalent of a supermarket tabloid. Although the article touches on many real economic problems it does so in a very shallow fashion, tossing worst-case scenarios together almost at random.

<comment><USER7> Really? One of the forbes links says this:

      based on credit default swap spreads there is a 3.1%
      chance of a U.S. default in the next five years,
      according to CMA, a London credit information specialist

[http://www.forbes.com/2010/01/20/united-states- debt-10-busin...](http://www.forbes.com/2010/01/20/united-states- debt-10-business-wall-street-united-states-debt.html?feed=rss_popstories)

That's pretty bad. Also, I didn't notice any contradictions. Maybe your hyperbolic remarks are true. Maybe Corporations are greedy -- they do have a fiduciary responsibility to increase shareholder wealth. Maybe Globalism is bad -- think global act local right? Globalization is the opposite of that! Also, I think the article said it was pretty much the _leaders_ fault, what with a pic of GWB on one of the pages, or did you read that one?

 _it seems pretty plain that it's the investment equivalent of a supermarket tabloid_

Is that ad hominem? Which statements the article includes aren't true?

<comment><USER4> There's a reason I qualified and contextualized my opinion. I did not allege falsehood but rather complained of shallow and incoherent presentation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I detest this new format of business "articles" which basically just tries to bait you into loading as many pages as possible (for ad revenue) whilst engaging in the cheapest link bait possible - 20 reasons why the U.S. economy is dying? Seriously? Why not 10, 50? It's tabloid-worthy, basically.

Every good graph I have already seen elsewhere and with much better explanation. They basically lump together every statistic they can get their hands on and spin it into a story, without any stringent analysis.

Please, read good reporting by The Economist, or articles linked on realclearmarkets.com or any kind of financial blog. The real experts on finance and economics are not to be found among any major off- or online publication anymore.

</comment><comment><USER9> _"The United States of America is very quickly becoming a socialist welfare state."_

The mindless stretching of the term socialism is getting a bit grating, you think?

<comment><USER7> I think semantic arguments are getting old. You took one sentence off one slide out of 21 and have devalued the conversation to a complaint about the use of a word.

Do you have something substantive to say or some facts to dispute what the article said?

<comment><USER9> You can scan my profile to see the substance of my posts in general.

Whatever you may think of it, my "small" distinction post here has gotten a lot more karma than the long analyses I usually post.

The slide show altogether had little substance; a few interesting statistics, some standard rhetoric and a come-on for a product.

Still, the craven misuse of the term "socialist" is doing more than a little damage to the body politic. If Obama _was_ a socialist trying to change the nature of American society, that _would_ worth debating. But he isn't, so the repetition of such a claim works according to the "big lie principle" (ironically articulated by Joseph Stalin) - if you take a simple falsehood, even one the most informed people know is false, and repeat it enough times, you get can serious traction. This method of operating is worth noting and so _this_ "semantic" distinction _is_ important to make.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hmm, I think I detect a little anti-Obama bias.

<comment><USER10> It's definitely biased, some of those charts are extremely misleading, especially the later ones. I like the one which shows when Democrats take control of Congress.

<comment><USER7> How are they misleading? The chart on 19 was from the Federal Reserve. Are the number wrong?

I don't really think there is much difference between republicans and democrats, so I don't really care which party is to blame, they are all the ruling class and make decisions to benefit those by whom they are surrounded -- I don't blame them for it. All human beings make decisions the same way.

But still I don't see how they are misleading. Is there something factually wrong with them?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Conclusion

"When a nation practices evil, there is no way that it is going to be blessed in the long run."

<comment><USER12> Yep, that's the point where the alarmist and biased article descends into superstitious doom-mongering. It's a pity, the topic deserves a better treatment than this. How about submitting a better link to replace it?</comment></comment>


Why Ideas are Important - <AUTHOR> http://wanttt.com/posts/topic/why-ideas-are-important

<comment><USER2> I sit on the side of Idea are Important, but Execution is King. Ideas come from people who see things differently, people who want to solve a problem, etc. But who anyone actually doing anything about it. Idea is just a thought, come and go...</comment>


Show HN: Pay with life – converts prices to time it takes you to earn the money - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pay-with-life/fmpbkddacnibdlnffgbjelegfcgnhdcm?hl=en-US <comment><AUTHOR> Hi all,

Inspired to minimise my expenditures and be more aware of my spending habits I wrote a small chrome extension.

"Pay with life" extension replaces any prices in the online stores with amount of time it would take me to earn that money. As an example, if I earn 42m per hour and pay no taxes, then a pair of new shoes that costs 42m on ebay would cost 1 hour of my time. If I do, however, pay approx %30 in taxes, the 42m shoes would cost me more than 1 hour.

This extension currently supports US dollars, GB pounds and euros. Please note that some prices might still not be converted properly.

Play around with it and let me know your thoughts! I do look forward to all the feedback ;)

<comment><USER2> Curious way to look at it! Do you find it helps you in preventing spending?

For me a big mental change was switching to pre-paid goal/checking-accounts for everything I need, and having big long term, aggressive goals. I do this with Simple "bank" _(though I hope to find a more feature rich app to do it in the future)_. This helps me consistently feel "broke as hell", which has proved to be quite effective to saving. Furthermore, I plan all purchases weeks in advance and budget for everything, food, luxury, bills, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> I must admit that I have never applied such an approach to saving my money but it's something that I would definitely try. Thank you for sharing.

I haven't used this extension for a prolonged time yet so I cannot really say if it would prevent spending.

I have made, however, the following observations: \- For me, being a professional, most learning materials (books, courses, etc.) cost minutes of my life but I get infinite(?) value. I am happy to buy these things without a second thought now (before, I would enter analysis/paralysis mode deciding whether I need it and wasting more time on indecision) \- My dream car is approximately 10 years away of hard work (suddenly it seems to be more achievable) \- If I was a low wage worker (or student/apprentice), even the cheapest items would steal a lot of time from my life

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> IMO this is the _only_ way to look at expenses -- the time "expense" is missed most of the time. One spends $20 on somethings, it's only 20, so what...

No it's not just $20 -- it's $20 PLUS the time you need to endure to earn that $20. And this time is what really counts -- the seconds, minutes, hour(s) you give away for that $20 whatever - the time you won't get back -- EVER!!!

For me, the only way to look at things is through time. Time is my most precious asset and it took me way too many years to figure this out and to re- set my mindset. It's where all the "passive income" stuff comes from -- from having something to endure time for your account, so you don't have to.

IMO this should be must-have on every browser, every (web)store right next to price: "$20 or approx. 2h of your life"

<comment><AUTHOR> That is exactly the same view I have about the stuff I buy. My concern is, however, about younger people who might not fully comprehend that time is the most valuable asset we, humans, have. I hope this idea could grow into something bigger that would educate people about value of time vs value of money.

I have better understanding of money/time relationship after reading "The Millionaire Fastlane" by M.J. DeMarco which I highly recommend.

Thank you for your kind words. I remember some time ago there was an innovative solution to inform consumers of empty calories in chocolate bars. It was proposed to add a label on packaging about the time it would take a person to exercise in order to burn those calories. My point is - the day when these labels are back will be the day when an extension like this might be considered to be included in browsers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great extension, albeit a little depressing! Similar to 'In Time' too [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1637688/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1637688/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. I had some doubts putting it under "Fun" category in Chrome Web Store.

I recommend you to take it for a test ride - install it and try it on Bugatti cars, private jets, mansions or anything really. Essentially, see how much you can sacrifice of your life to get your dream come true. I hope you find it less depressing :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Tried this on coinmarketcap.com and it broke horribly.

You've got some bugs to work out but this is a very fun and useful idea.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for spotting! Finding currency on a page has proven to be the most challenging part of this work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What if you earn a salary? Only half joking.

On a salary you're never not off the clock. It makes the time/money conversion less clear. It's not like you can say: I would buy a new TV, but I'll take a week off of work instead.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's an interesting point, thank you for spotting this. I believe there are many ways you can play around with this extension and draw your own conclusions.

In your particular example, it made me realise that if we were to pay for items with our time we would need some sort of anchor (something to compare to). Perhaps, I would thing along the lines: "Oh, I would need to work 2 weeks to get this Super UHD. Or, I could just work for 1 week and get this simpler UHD. That would save one week of my life. Perhaps I could go on a short holidays? Yeah... let's go for the simpler version".</comment></comment>


The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Spectral Graph Theory: A Confluence [video] - <AUTHOR> https://simons.berkeley.edu/events/openlectures2014-fall-4 <comment><USER2> What are the practical uses for this? I thought it was going to be about PageRank.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is it just me or would this not drastically speed up calculation of the weights for neural nets?

<comment><USER4> Well the Ax=b part is quite general as long as A has a special structure (diagonally dominant).

Good luck coding it though, I'm still looking for an implementation of a low stretch spanning tree (needed in order for the solver to be really lineaR)

<comment><AUTHOR> "Using Petal-Decompositions to Build a Low Stretch Spanning Tree" ([http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/163400/spanning- full1.pdf](http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/163400/spanning-full1.pdf)):

      Stretch: O(log n log log n)
      Time:    O(m log n log log n)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Site for recent CS grads (jobs)? - <AUTHOR>

I've been looking through job boards for the past two weeks and most of the positions available are only for senior developers - especially startup postings. <comment><USER2> I'm a few years out of being a recent CS grad and I'm assuming you have checked the normal ones like dice.com . I'm posting to encourage you to apply to any job that you find interesting, even ones for senior developers and particularly those at startups. You probably won't get the job/pay in those senior listings, but if you are a first class programmer and can prove it then the companies that are looking for developer's may have work for you, especially if they can get you at a discount. My startup (not a founder, just my employer) recently filled such a position with a new college graduate partly due to cost considerations. If you're not a first rate programmer, you should learn this and build a portfolio to prove it. That could be just an SVN repository you put code fragments into and send out as a URL in your cover letter. If you need any further resources on this, I can provide some for you.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is the only method that's worked for me: 1\. Comb the job boards for interesting looking positions. Don't worry about being qualified yet. 2\. Find the name and location of the hiring manager. 3\. Write a personalized cover letter to that manager and tell them that you're interested. If you're not qualified for the position as advertised, tell them that you'd be interested in something similar. Sell yourself to them. 4\. (This one's important) SNAIL MAIL your resume and cover letter in an 8.5 x 11 envelope.

The last one will make you stand out and tell them that you're really interested and not just spamming them.</comment>


CodeToGo-write and run code on your iOS device C, Java, Ryby, SQL + 40 more  - <AUTHOR> http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/codetogo/id382677229?mt=8

<comment><USER2> I wonder why an internet connection is required to run the code ...

<comment><AUTHOR> How would you like to use all the compilers without installing them? CodeToGo uses ideoneAPI (ideone.com).

<comment><USER2> Hmm I hope that doesn't mean all my code is publicly available somewhere.</comment></comment></comment>


Girl, Interrupted: Who Was Sappho? - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/16/girl-interrupted

<comment><USER2> My sister, a summa cum laude classics major gratuate from Princeton, analyzed and translated previously unknown fragments of Sappho as her senior thesis.

Her advisor stole her research wholesale, down to her direct phrasing and mistakes, and published it under his name.

Princeton's administration blew her off completely despite pretty overwhelming evidence he had plagiarized the research wholesale. Certainly more than enough evidence that any student would have been suspended or expelled for the same conduct.

It was very saddening.

<comment><USER3> Maybe write to the journal it was published in, and ask them to issue a retraction? If it was published as a thesis, it seems there should be a paper trail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The new fragments were publicly discussed for several months at [https://newsappho.wordpress.com/](https://newsappho.wordpress.com/) and many scholars harshly criticized the lack of detailed information about the provenance of the papyrus, e.g. [https://newsappho.wordpress.com/2014/01/29/discussing-the- tw...](https://newsappho.wordpress.com/2014/01/29/discussing-the-two-new- sappho-poems/comment-page-1/#comment-38)</comment>