FOSSFactory: Social Collaborative OpenSource Development & Funding Community - <AUTHOR> http://arabcrunch.com/2010/08/fossfactory-social-collaborative-open-source-development-funding-community.html <comment><AUTHOR> Does anyone knows of other community based projects offering open-source development platform with payments to contributors ?</comment>


Phone and email records to be stored in new spy plan - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/internet/9090617/Phone-and-email-records-to-be-stored-in-new-spy-plan.html <comment><USER2> All i can say is good luck, this is a great big waste of storage!</comment>


No, Psy's 'Gangnam Style' Did Not Break YouTube Video Counter - <AUTHOR> http://variety.com/2014/digital/news/no-psys-gangnam-style-did-not-break-youtube-video-counter-1201371888/

<comment><USER2> Since when did the internet start lying to us?</comment>


How we run Spark and Sqoop in production - <AUTHOR> https://www.thumbtack.com/engineering/building-thumbtacks-data-infrastructure-part-ll/ <comment><USER2> Any good alternatives for Sqoop? I feel that an ETL tool _just_ for HDFS is too limiting and leads to further fragmentation on the data pipeline.

<comment><USER3> Using Sqoop from something like Luigi as the ETL manager is a pretty great workflow - [https://github.com/spotify/luigi](https://github.com/spotify/luigi)

You can define dependencies between jobs based on output file which allows you to re-run only part of your pipeline

<comment><USER4> Thats a great idea - but could you elaborate on the scheduling of jobs on Luigi - it does not have a scheduler like AirFlow - how do you schedule Luigi tasks ?

<comment><USER3> Check out this Foursquare talk that goes through how we used to do scheduling -- basically you make jobs dependent on a date - [http://www.slideshare.net/OpenAnayticsMeetup/luigi- presentat...](http://www.slideshare.net/OpenAnayticsMeetup/luigi- presentation-17-23199897)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Their earlier post about rebuilding their data infrastructure is more interesting imho: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11474284](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11474284)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> hey all, feel free to reach out to me either on this thread, or directly at nate[at]thumbtack.com if I can answer any questions!

<comment><USER6> I had to connect to a US VPN to access the jobs page. Is that intentional?

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for flagging, I'll look into it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Thanks for sharing with all scripts. Great help.

</comment><comment><USER8> Speaking of Spark, has anyone used it with Go? Is such a thing even possible?

</comment><comment><USER9> Thumbtack is great for lazy consumers. But word on the street is they contribute to too much price pressure on the market, therefore drive the overall quality of services down. Good work Thumbtack! You have figured out a convenient way to sacrifice long term value in favor of short term profit.</comment>


How bad is internet censorship in India? - <AUTHOR> When I open some websites, it is redirected to a webpage with just the following message :
"Your requested URL has been blocked as per the directions received from Department of Telecommunications, Government of India. Please contact administrator for more information."
Sadly, the webpage for which I'm getting this message is : http://hugo.pereira.free.fr/index.php which is a harmless site whichjust maintains a list of open source softwares.
The warning message appears to come from an IP (220.127.116.11) which belongs to the ISP Bharti Airtel. This IP seems to be running "Netsweeper filtering service". A casual google search about this filtering software suggested that it is mainly used by authoritarian governments previously.
I'm wondering why such websites are being blocked? What other websites are being blocked? Why is there no transparency of the policy by which content is blocked? <comment><USER2> I can access this page from a Indian VPN server

My server is at [https://www.e2enetworks.com](https://www.e2enetworks.com)</comment>


Tossing Algebraic Flowers Down the Great Divide (1997) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~goguen/pps/tcs97.pdf <comment><USER2> Goguen, so prolific! the ADJ group, OBJ, Maude, CafeOBJ, Clear, The Semiotic Zoo, Sheaves, Institutions. I understand maybe 5% of this stuff. Why has Goguen's work not sparked more research? Especially with the emphases on Algebraic Specification and Category theory? Is Goguen still ahead of his time?

</comment><comment><USER3> "Computers are the only significant commodity to ever get progressively cheaper as they get better, throughout their entire history".

It seems to me like most things get cheaper as they get better. At least anything that benefits from improvements to a manufacturing process, economies of scale and iterated design... which is most mass manufactured goods.

<comment><USER4> I think it's just rare that there's ever a gap as big as there has been with computers between the first prototype and the current consumer grade equipment.

Ignoring for a moment the per cycle efficiency increase (which is non-trivial and adds a couple orders of magnitude extra), a modern CPU is ~500,000 times faster than ENIAC was, which was itself a ~1,000 times faster than other computing solutions at the time, at a cost of $6,500,000 to $100.

So per dollar, you're getting 32 _billion_ times the computer. It's actually more like a _trillion_ times the computer if you count in per-instruction efficiency gains.

Yeah, we get _better_ at most things, but almost no other thing have we gotten so much explosively better at it than computers.

You can argue clothes, screws, cars, shoes, whatever are better now than they used to be. Maybe they are. But they're not a _billion_ times better per dollar. I suspect that most of them strain to be a _thousand_ times better per dollar.

<comment><USER5> What about cars? Or planes?

<comment><USER6> One of the first consumer cars is considered to be the Benz Patent-Motorwagen [1].

Adjusted price: $3,998

Maximum speed: 10 mph

The improvements in performance and price are not even those seen in computers.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benz_Patent- Motorwagen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benz_Patent-Motorwagen)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google Calendar - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/calendar/b/0/render <comment><USER2> What is it that you wish to portray by posting this link?</comment>


Google +1 is failing, miserably  - <AUTHOR> http://gerger.co/yalimslodge/2011/08/12/1-for-google-1/

<comment><USER2> Comparing the Tweet, +1 and Facebook buttons next to each other, I can easily see how people just don't understand what +1 means. The button graphic has a colored ribbon at the top with the label '+1'. Next to it, I see the number of the total clicks. However, there is no explanation what it means. Compare that to the Facebook button. It says "Recommend", and "60 people recommended this".

'Recommend' is a clear call to action. '+1' requires a lot of interpretation and prior knowledge. It's the same issue G+ faces with huddles, sparks, hangouts and circles. By not adopting everyday language, features become mysterious.

<comment><USER3> Isn't that a little post rational? It took people quit some time to get the whole idea of tweet.

<comment><USER4> I think that's true to some extent, but at least with a tweet the user is also commenting/providing some context for their audience. One of the issues with +1 is that it's not always clear to users how the +1 will be interpreted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I honestly thought +1 _not_ appearing in the stream was a feature. A feature I liked. After all if they want to share it they can share it. It's the same thing about games not appearing in the stream -- I honestly don't give two shakes if you need two more friends to visit your farm in order to get the golden shovel, I'm not interested. I like how it's segregated to it's own tab, IMO the only improvement they could make is adding an option to toggle whether you see your friend's +1s and game 'trophies' in the stream or not.

<comment><USER6> I agree. I also get it from a position angle- if everybody else is doing A, we'll do !A. Of course, the risk is that people may prefer A.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't think looking at one site is enough to judge whether Google +1 is failing or not.

With a site like msnbc, I can't help but picture an older less tech savvy crowd. A crowd that wouldn't know what google +1 is, let alone have an email other than an @aol.com.

If you look at other sites, Techcrunch for example. The primary mode of sharing there is Twitter, and suprisingly linkedin with facebook really lagging behind. That doesn't mean facebook likes are failing.

<comment><AUTHOR> All valid points. This demographic is the exact demographic I wanted to look at though. Most of the world is not tech savvy.

<comment><USER8> Only tech savvy people are allowed to use Google Plus. You can't just sign up. Calling a service in closed beta "failed" because it has a small number of users is totally irrational to the point of being an obvious troll.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What benefit do I get from +1'ing something? It doesn't go in my stream, it doesn't affect anything that I know of... Why would I do it?

It's like they implemented it without have any idea why the customer would use it... They were just copying other people... Badly.

And while we're on the topic of sharing, why doesn't Google Reader send shared items to G+ yet? It has sent it to Buzz for quite a long time, and Buzz isn't even popular.

<comment><USER10> The benefit is that it (allegedly) improves your search results. If someone in your social circle +1'd something, it affects your search results.

<comment><USER11> If that's the case then I wonder if my search results will end up populated solely by witticisms and novelties. In my experience so far +1 seems mainly used as a polite nod or chuckle, because its primary effect is that it's visible to the person who said the thing you approve of. Something like del.icio.us seems much more likely to identify timeless great content worth sharing -- it's a bookmark to come back to rather than a nod of social approval.

If you were designing a search algorithm it does not seem like you want want to give much weight to an embedded easy approval button (reddit, digg, +1, like, etc.) compared to something that requires more investment of someone's time and thought, like making a del.icio.us bookmark. I mean, half the time you have to go try to remember what your password was, then have them send you a password reset mail, then re-login -- now that's a bookmark I care about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Yes, after 5 years of running Google+, they still don't have 750 million users. :-(

</comment><comment> mike-cardwell I'd guess that the fact that Facebook has hundreds of times more users at the moment has something to do with it as well.

<comment><USER13> 997 > 100 * 6, 330 > 100 * 1, 7000 > 100 * 63

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, thank you. :-) I also would like to mention again that you don't have to be on Google+ to use +1.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> +1 has been around for like 5 minutes and already I see it on almost all of the sites that I visit daily. I'd say that's a good start.

It's too early to say if it has failed or succeeded, though. I do wish people would be a bit more patient... But looking at the stock market, people obviously are short-termists.

</comment><comment><USER15> In my circles which contain 800+ people, Jason Calcanis is the most prolific (and only) poster. It's essentially the Jason Calcanis feed until more people start posting things.

</comment><comment><USER16> Really??? The author of this post is comparing the number of Facebook likes (750 million active users) to the number of Google +1s (some 25 million users) from a small sample of Internet articles...

People really need to stop mentioning how Google+ does not have this or that feature. It's not open to the public at large because it's not a finished product yet!

<comment><AUTHOR> You don't need to be on Google+ to +1 anything. All you need is a Google account. Most people think +1 and Google+ are related which is not true. But this is what happens if a company build two products with the same name.

<comment><USER16> You are right but I am guessing well over 90% of the +1s are coming from Google+ users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This article seems to boil down to the idea that because plus isn't a 1:1 copy of the mental model and concepts of facebook and twitter, it has to be a failure.

It builds on a bad assumption right out the gate, that automatically reposting trash you happen to perform a lightweight operation on is what it means to be "social" online. That only happens because facebook is pandering to marketers. I wish I still had the email where facebook described to marketers the change from "Become a fan" to "like". The change was to make it so that the action that got people to spam their friends became more lightweight.

The author compares it to tweeting. Really? Last I knew on the twitter you slammed a link into the text field, just like people do on plus when they actually want to share the link.

Ultimately, a lower number of bullshit reposted from MSNBC.com showing up in my stream than my feed is a WIN for me.

</comment><comment><USER18> Does Google+ have to be a sucess? Everbody is a user, it just sits there up in the top of your gmail, reader, docs. There is no effort to start using it, so Google can just sit and wait for it to become a natural part of the Google apps exerience.

</comment><comment><USER19> I guess you could say +1 is still a relatively new feature. It appears that it's something Google just released without a clear end goal in mind of how to integrate it across all of their social networks.

I'm hoping that they have something new and different in mind with how they integrate +1's into Google+. It's slightly annoying as a user to be presented with so many share/like buttons on a post. As it was mentioned in the blog post, what's the incentive for a user to choose the +1 button. There needs to be a benefit beyond just making the +1 viewable in your Google+ stream.

</comment><comment><USER20> +1 in Google+ is even weirder, because you can't see a list of your +1'd G+ content _anywhere_. It's just brownie points for the poster.

</comment><comment><USER21> I +1'd this just to make sure I could: <http://dl.dropbox.com/u/221414/tmp/plus_one.png>

</comment><comment><USER22> I guess they need to make the +1's appear in the stream, too, to make ppl care about them. I was hoping there is another way, though.

</comment><comment><USER23> I was all ready to jump in -- under my real name, even -- until they started shitcanning (entire) user accounts. I am already too dependent upon my pre- existing Google account/services; I can't afford the risk.

A bit of irony in that.

<comment><USER24> This isn't true though. Unless you have some egregious terms of service violation, your account will only lose access to Google+. For example, not using your real name could get you banned from G+, but the rest of your Google account will still be usable and accessible.

<comment><USER23> Anecdotal, but I'm put in mind of one new user's experience where they accidentally "sent/addressed" (keep in mind, I have no direct experience with Plus) a message/post to all of their circle contacts or somesuch. IIRC, the message basically just said "Hey, I'm on Plus now". I don't recall whether the broad addressing was mistakenly made or the implications of the broad addressing not understood. Either way, that one message was allegedly enough to get the person's Google account suspended.

Um, no thanks.

P.S. I concede that the original article is specifically about the "+1" feature. However, I -- perhaps mistakenly -- view this all as part of Google Plus.

<comment><USER24> Honestly, that story sounds really vague and I can't see _anything_ in it that would even be remotely responsible for an account suspension. What do you think they got in trouble for? Sending a message to too many people? That certainly isn't a bannable offense, especially since there is a public posting option.

<comment><USER23> As I recall, it was a specific, first-hand account. And the author was initially as puzzled as you are. What happened? Why?

It's one of several stories/anecdotes I've run across. Unfortunately, I haven't kept a list of links to those.

En masse, they've caused me enough concern to not "push the button". In good part, if something does go amiss, you're pretty well stuck, unless you have a big enough megaphone to garner sufficient publicity and/or enough of the "right" connections to garner some love from fellow geeks.

Maybe I and others are being gamed by opposing forces. I'm not at a point where I care to find out the hard way whether that's the case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> "i'd +1 that" sounds better than "i'd like that".

</comment><comment><USER26> Google doesn't get social... that's all. They demand everyone that applies for a job knows algorithms, but they fail to understand that to nail social, they need to hire people with a different type of intelligence: emotional and psychological. People who know what makes other people tick. We human beings crave attention, impressing others, and thinking we're special. We don't give a damn about placing people in Circles - that's a problem you solve once you give what people crave, not a problem that convinces people to join your social network.

Google does need computer scientists but the company has enough of them. This isn't a knock against Google employees, but the vast majority of their employees know how to scale search engines, or write efficient code, or write the next generation NLP parser, but to get social right, those things are unimportant.

To create a great social network requires less technical expertise, and more getting the little things right. Think about LinkedIn: You can't help but tweak with your skills and experience so it looks impressive to you, and to others (even if they aren't recruiters). Think about how much people care about filling in their Facebook profile, and making it look good. Now look at Google+. It's TOO clean. It's TOO private. That's a great recipe for a search engine. A horrible recipe for a social network.

<comment><USER25> If google doesn't get social, who developed Google+? Too clean? I find the page very easy on the eyes and easy to use. Too private? I have put way more info in public (intentionally) on Google+ than Facebook. They make it easy. You are just making general statements and assumptions we have heard all over the internet, meanwhile, Google+ continues to delight its users.

I will say: Google finally gets social. It is called Google+

<comment><USER27> Google copied a bunch of technical features from other networks (Facebook mainly) that do get social. But as the parent points out, they don't truly get social because there is a complexity that confuses me let alone my mom in using Google Plus.

<comment><USER25> What complexity do you refer to? Facebook has groups, it just has a crappy UX for it. Google's Circles are way better, easy, and kinda fun to setup with a slick UI. Once they are setup, it is easy to filter your content based on circles. Circles make a ton of sense to me (and a lot of other people, too). I can finally share all my information in one place, with different groups and view those groups in context in my stream. No one is forcing anyone to use Google+ though. Users have a choice and we shall see where the cards fall over the next year.

<comment><USER27> I agree, but you are talking about technical features again. The interface for circles is slick, it allows new technical fun. I think this is why Google+ is pretty popular with the tech crowd. But now, one month on, even though 60% of my Facebook friends join G+, none of them are using it. My feed is littered with celebrities that overpost because circles are great for limiting who you share with, but poor for limiting what you view. (Google doesn't let you say: show me every circle but X, and if you choose to view a specific circle it will always reset to all)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> On a related topic, why is google going after the "like" game anyway? They have better data than the stupid likes they can use to direct advertising. And +1 is a "meh" name. It would be more intuitive if they used a star, like gmail does, instead. Star it, save it in your bookmarks and tell your friends.

<comment><AUTHOR> They wanna be Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Apple, Microsoft and Yahoo (just to be on the safe side). Is there a line of business in software that they have not dived into?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> +1 is failing miserably, as opposed to author's sense of perspective?

<comment><AUTHOR> Could you elaborate a little more about your point please?

<comment><USER30> He's trying to say that by stating that a brand new service that is, by most measures, doing fairly well is "failing miserably", you've lost your sense of perspective.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am not talking about Google+ though. I am talking about +1.

<comment><USER31> Fair enough. The submission title does say google+ though. Additionally, I think strong statements like 'failing miserably' require strong evidence. This seemed more like (weak) anecdotal evidence and opinion to me.

<comment><USER32> There is a space between 'Google' and '+1' in his title.

<comment><USER31> Oops, you're right. Somehow skimmed over that on my phone. Apologies. Still I think the actual blog title is a little bit less sensationalist than the submission.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


5.3-magnitude earthquake hits Japan's Fukushima - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/-5-3-magnitude-earthquake-hits-japan-s-fukushima-184440374.html

<comment><USER2> A lot of folks are probably wondering "why the heck would they put a nuclear power plant there?".

If you look at the distribution of Japan's nuclear power plants, they actually tried to put them in the safest areas: [http://www.oecd- nea.org/press/2011/NEWS-02.html](http://www.oecd- nea.org/press/2011/NEWS-02.html)

Where there are nuclear power plants along Japan's eastern coast (close to the subduction zones), they're mostly in the north.

Japan has two subduction zones. The Japan Trench in the north, where the Pacific plate subducts, and the Nankai Trough in the south where the Philippine Sea Plate subducts.

These two subduction zones are very different. They're on opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of earthquake behavior.

Before the Tohoku earthquake in 2011, we had never observed a magnitude 9 earthquake on a subduction zone like the Japan Trench in the north of Japan. (The Japan Trench usually has frequent magnitude 7's. Damaging but not devestating.) All of the previous magnitude 9's were on subduction zones similar to the Nankai Trough in southern Japan.

Furthermore, southern Japan has a 1300 year written historical record of large earthquakes and tsunamis occuring every ~200 years (they're not regular, but that's another story). The last two were in 1944 and 1946. In contrast, northern Japan has just as long of a record, but no records of very large earthquakes and tsunamis. (There's some sedimentological evidence of a very large tsunami in northern Japan ~2000 years ago, but prior to this, we assumed that it must have originated somewhere else.)

Therefore, southern Japan has the highest hazard for large tsunamis, and northern Japan has a much lower risk. Northern Japan's risk is now higher than we thought it was, but southern Japan is still more likely to have the next big tsunami.

Notice that there are very few nuclear power plans on the east coast of southern Japan. Instead they're on the west coast, away from the main tsunami hazard. That's why.

At any rate, the Tohoku earthquake really turned what we thought we know about very, very large earthquakes on its head.

<comment><USER3> Folks might be wondering that, but they might be wondering with a different emphasis:

"why the heck would they put a _nuclear power plant_ there?"

Not sure what their power options were at the time it was built though.

<comment><USER4> Japan has very few natural energy resources which is the main reason they embraced nuclear power in a big way. Otherwise, they would have to import many more tons of hydrocarbons.

<comment><USER5> _" Japan has very few natural energy resources"_

Except that the place is _covered_ in geothermal hotspots.

I don't know if any are sufficiently large to reduce the need for nuclear, but Japan is a country where the greatest natural energy resource appears (to an outsider) to be dedicated to providing really nice baths.

<comment><USER2> Actually, it's not as covered as you might think.

Japan's relatively cold (in geothermal terms) due to its tectonic position. (It's counter-intuitive, but forearcs have relatively low geothermal gradients for such tectonically active areas.)

The main areas of geothermal potential are localized around the volcanic arc. Most of this land is inside of national parks.

Compare this to areas like Iceland or most of the African rift, where you have a very high regional geothermal gradient. Anywhere you can find deep permeability, you'll have potential for geothermal power generation.

Japan certainly has a lot of geothermal potential, and hasn't utilized most of it yet, but it's not as simple as it seems at first glance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow, really? These questions are like criticism of people who live in flood zones. Yeah, we should all avoid water like the plague. We don't need it to drink or grow crops or foster basic transportation. Have you ever looked at a map of "disasters"? You cannot escape them. It is a case of pick your poison. Which type of risk scares you less?

Japan is a densely populated, urbanized, modern country. It requires substantial electricity. That electricity has to come from somewhere.

<comment><USER7> Nuclear disasters like the one at Fukushima affect the entire globe, not only Japan. If the country is geographically unfit for nuclear plants, then no nuclear plants should be built there, period. Otherwise the entire region's safety is compromised, not just Japan's.

<comment><USER8> Financial disasters like the one in the US in 2008 affect the entire globe, not only the US. If the country is morally unfit for advanced banking, then no advanced banking should occur there, period. ... ?

<comment><USER9> Non-US banks, countries, and individuals choose to do banking with the US and form a "marketplace."

Non-Japanese have no say whatsoever in Japan's nuclear industry. They only suffer the "externalities."

<comment><USER10> Japanese have no say in CO2 emissions by any other country, including ones relying on coal plants. Yet they suffer from the externalities of it.

Tragedy of commons. WWI -> League of Nations, WWII -> UN ... How about establishing a world government without WWIII this time. Though what the frak i'm talking about if we can't even stop a government from butchering tens of thousands of their own people (like Sudan, Siria)

<comment><USER11> WTO?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant)

> Diablo Canyon Power Plant is an electricity-generating nuclear power plant > at Avila Beach in San Luis Obispo County, California.

> It was built directly over a geological fault line, and is located near a > second fault.

<comment><USER13> It's also built 80 feet above sea level.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Match this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NRC_regions_and_plant_loc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NRC_regions_and_plant_locations_2008.jpg)

With this: [http://strangesounds.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/US- FAULT...](http://strangesounds.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/US-FAULT- LINES.jpg)

(for those who miss the significance: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Madrid_Seismic_Zone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Madrid_Seismic_Zone)

"The zone had four of the largest North American earthquakes in recorded history, with moment magnitudes estimated to be as large as 8.0," )

<comment><USER2> ...Grumble, grumble... "Fault lines"...

This has absolutely noting to do with your very astute point, but I really wish the term "fault line" hadn't somehow wound up in popular culture.

Faults are never lines. They're irregular surfaces that sometimes form lines at their intersection with the earth's surface (they also sometimes form circles or don't intersect the surface at all).

...Okay, I'll stop ranting about things that only geologists care about...

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> "The region lies on the "Ring of Fire" — an arc of earthquake and volcanic zones that stretches around the Pacific Rim. About 90 percent of the world's quakes occur in the region." \--

Who had the brilliant idea to build a nuclear power plant there... :\

<comment><USER2> To be fair, it's not like Japan has much of a choice. Nuclear really is their best option. Japan has only a couple of coal mines, and they've deliberately tried to avoid being entirely dependent on China for coal imports. This limits the use of coal power plants (not to mention environmental consequences). They have limited area, which limits hydropower options (though the steep topography partly makes up for that). Wind and solar are limited in their utility for "baseline" power.

The US has nuclear power plants on the "ring of fire" as well, for whatever it's worth (e.g. Diablo Canyon in CA, and I think there's one in Washington, as well).

<comment> grey-area Wave power would be a good alternative to explore.

<comment><USER2> Good point!

It has many of the same problems as wind and solar, though. They're great as a significant part of the energy input, but you still need something else for times when there's no wind/waves/sun.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It is now also home to a bunch of (already) leaky, radioactive, coolant water containers. Earthquakes are not going to improve their situation.

</comment><comment><USER17> tough neighborhood, is all I can say [http://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/science/japan- sits...](http://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/science/japan-sits-atop- deadliest-section-of-ring-of-fire/article572438/)</comment>


Ask HN: How to prosper under negative interest rates? - <AUTHOR> The US Fed is at 0% interest rates and there is increasing speculation they might go to negative interest rates. There are already other central banks around the world in negative interest rate territory.
How do you prosper under a situation like that? What would you do or plan to do?
For example, should I stop saving? Should I put my savings elsewhere? Should I take out loans to buy up assets? Should I build businesses and raise venture capital for them?
I was brought up to work diligently, not take on debt, and save - a simple approach to building wealth - but I'm concerned that will put me at a disadvantage under an economic system with negative rates. <comment><USER2> You have to look at real rates, not nominal rates. The only markets that have negative nominal rates are battling deflation (which the US is not) or have serious liquidity concerns at the moment. The Fed is unlikely to go negative as they face a very different beast.

Here's a quick example. Let's say you're in a deflationary environment: in 1 year, your money actually buys you _more_ than it did last year, let's say for instance, 2% more. Under this weird environment, you would actually be willing to pay someone to hold your money for a year, because you know in a years time, it will buy you 2% more (effectively a 2% return). So, since you don't want to store that money under your mattress, how much will you pay someone? Let's say you pay your bank 0.5% for holding your money (i.e. negative rate). So in a years time, you get 99.5% of your money back from the bank, but it buys you 2% more "stuff" so really, compared to today, you're getting 101.5% (roughly) of your money back, which is the same as a 1.5% interest rate. This is called the "real" interest rate, and it's the only one that matters.

<comment><USER3> but we're not having deflation. With fewer and fewer people working, there's less and less supply with even larger demand, now that they're printing money like never before. As a result, we're going to get really really serious inflation of over 2%, 3%, maybe even more than 3%.

It doesn't sound like much because we've become innured to it. But, it's really bad. Just think, you earned 100K in 1 year and 1 year later it's only worth 97K. That's a tax of 3K just for holding on to your money, on top of all the taxes that already exist (Govt spending is 40% of GDP ~ and that's just nationwide.)

After just 20 years of 3% inflation, your money is worth half of what it was when you earned it. What's the point of government if they can't even provide a stable currency? Is the expectation that everyone must now buy equities and real estate? Are we to go back to bartering?

<comment><USER4> 1) Once again, inflation does not work that way. If it did, it would have been out of control in 2009. Instead, it was near zero. The same thing is happening right now.

2) The idea that 2-3% inflation is "really really serious" is completely absurd. I'm guessing you're young because historical US inflation prior to the ridiculous post-2009 financial situation had long periods of being well above 3% and the sky didn't fall. Inflation above what we've seen in the last decade is not necessarily a bad thing.

<comment><USER5> Anyone else have a hard time believing the official inflation numbers? Housing, food, restaurants, electricity, hotels,... anything I can think of that I buy regularly all seems significantly more expensive than it did 10 years ago - much higher than the official numbers would lead me to expect.

<comment><USER6> This is my experience as well ... and healthcare and education costs have also gone up much faster than the stated rate of inflation. There are a few areas --- like consumer electronics and maybe food --- where this isn't the case or prices have actually gone down, but only a very few.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So the time value of money is more or less zero now and loan rates depend much more on default risk than any opportunity cost in loaning the money. To an economist, the implications of that might be big, but to a regular person, it's really a small shift in possibilities.

A savings account at 0% doesn't build wealth, but it didn't really do that 3 months ago at 1.5%. Personal loans at 9% aren't much better than loans at 11%.

If you're not planning on making a career out of doing something finance- related, I'd say there isn't much to do differently.

My one recommendation would be to hedge a little against the possibility of asset bubbles. I'm not saying bet on them (I don't know if they'll happen, nor can I predict the future and time them). Rather, I'm saying try not to be in a bad spot if they happen, because easy money definitely increases the chance we could see one. As an example, everyone in this life needs a roof over their head, so if you don't own anything real estate related, a bubble in real estate prices is a risk. A homeowner who plans to stay in their house 20 more years doesn't have to care about annual changes in the real estate market...but a renter does. So own your home if it makes sense for your situation, or consider having money in REITs, or own a rental property. Don't over-extend yourself, but try to avoid needing a tulip and not having one in 1636.

Likewise, if you are relying on investments to retire, and are many years away from doing so, make sure a significant portion is in boring sp500/total stock market etfs. If your time horizon is long enough, not being able to buy stocks at a decent price is a bigger threat to your retirement than a short term drop, so make sure you have some amount of money in the market while the market isn't at all time highs.

As always, it depends on your situation and I'm not qualified to tell you what to do with your finances.

<comment><USER8> I just sold a home days before the pandemic hit, and consider myself very lucky.

But now I have cash and I'm nervous inflation might start becoming a real problem.

I'm also worried that dense American cities are going to have a huge drop in property values, desirability, and an increase in crime. I am seeing this right now, and a lot of sentiment from people with money is to never come back.

It's a tough call. Is this a good time to buy property if there's a crash in six months?

Will there really be asset inflation of properties if there's a commercial default explosion about to happen (hurting banks), if a lot of people are unemployed, and if cities become a little less popular? Crime is spiking in NYC right now and it's not really a priority to report it.

<comment><USER9> As a regular critic of many things and ideas American, I have to point out that in the long run, you've never been better off betting against America.

<comment><USER10> I would love to see you take this and short the SP500, really put your money where your mouth is. Value is relative, and relative to the rest of the world the US is going to fare quite well. So good luck to you!

<comment><USER11> I think you are misunderstanding what he said. He's saying you have never gotten better off by betting against the United States in the long run, not that now is the time to bet against the United States.

<comment><USER12> I read the sentence two time to get what he was saying. Figured it out based on his first part of the sentence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> In all markets, and generally as a life strategy, there is a "winner" method and a "survivor" method.

If you play to win, you are most likely following accepted best practices to maximize gains - in your career, socially, economically, and so on. You optimize to "cut the fat" regularly, stay with the trends and try to be the front-runner in everything. In this market, playing only as a winner amounts to taking on huge amounts of risk, because there's high volatility and little accepted wisdom or trends to follow. Any move that uses leverage could be the one that makes you wash out - and in the same way, being gregariously social to keep up appearances during a pandemic may kill you.

The "survivor" method is what it sounds like: playing to not lose. They are not just aiming for low numeric risk factors, though; the point is to have second, third etc. lines of defenses against black swans. Survivors will tend to look for overlooked niches and early diversification. They amass unlikely hoards while keeping their heads down, which leaves them isolated a lot of the time.

In general the optimal position for every market is where winner strategies intersect with survivor strategies: Find something that is relatively stable that nobody is talking about and move your money closer to it. Then when the business cycle picks up your portfolio magically turns into something positioned to capitalize.

Of course, the essential problem is that if nobody is talking about it, how are you going to discover it? If you wait until it hits the news, that's probably too late.

But business formation or repurposing presents another option. Down cycles are opportunities to start the next trend yourself, because the air is clear and you don't have heavy competition. When a market is competitive, everyone spends on sales and marketing to be the loudest voice. When it's quiet, "build it and they will come" becomes a great deal more plausible and you can really focus on product.

</comment><comment><USER14> You don't build wealth by saving. You do it by investing using leverage. The system subsidises debt and risk-taking (within limits) by inflation and the structure of the tax system. You need to let go of the idea that it is immoral.

Buy a house and when you can buy a bigger house. Put your money in the growth part of the stock market (technology ... big names like Apple and Amazon is good).

Use your income to take on more debt; do not save cash as it will be taken from your via inflation, tax or now negative interest.

<comment><USER15> > You don't build wealth by saving. You do it by investing using leverage.

For some reason, this sounds like "you don't build wealth by saving. You do it by lottery and scratchcards!"

<comment><USER16> That's because you don't understand finance.

Leverage is the easiest way to make a larger percentage on your money, as long as it's used prudently.

Borrowing money to buy real estate and then collect income is a very common way to leverage your money. Over time that builds real wealth. My friend has bought 5 properties and is renting them all out. When he retires, the properties will have been paid for, and the rental money will act like his pension until he dies.

<comment><USER17> Which is great in a rising market, but will ruin him when the market falls (which it looks like it's about to do).

Leverage works both ways, it will amplify both gains and losses.

<comment><USER18> Leverage does not work the same way for real estate. There is no margin call like there is with stock. Even if you are upside down on the mortgage in many cases you are still cashflow positive and can ride it out. And if you are not, even in recourse states in practice the losses are not amplified and a strategic default, deed in lieu, or short sale are still possible.

<comment><USER17> Utterly not true outside the US. I've seen lots of people in negative equity, unable to afford the mortgage and unable to sell (the mortgage liability doesn't go away if you sell the property. If the mortgage is bigger than the current house price, selling doesn't help). People with multiple properties and multiple mortgages are in worse trouble. It's very easy to go bankrupt in this situation, I've seen it happen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> >> I was brought up to work diligently, not take on debt, and save

It absolutely will put you at a huge disadvantage, through no fault of your own. The whole point is to transfer money from savers to debtors.

And, there's no getting away from it, unless you take on large risks. The govt is pushing for more and more inflation. We've already had high inflation for the last couple of years of over 2%, and they're still pushing for more inflation. The only way to protect your money is to get into real assets like real estate and equities. Yes, that entails a lot of risk.

<comment><USER19> That makes a case for non-centrally-manipulated assets like gold or crypto

<comment><USER20> Because neither of those have a history of volatility or risk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > I was brought up to work diligently, not take on debt, and save - a simple > approach to building wealth

This basically doesn't build wealth, it builds a pile of money which you can draw down in the future. Not nothing and good to have at the base of a pension, but once you've gone beyond the basics it doesn't do much. It's mere deferred consumption, it's not _making_ anything.

Now you have to face three problems:

\- there are people out there with many orders of magnitude more money than you. They don't know what to do with it either. This is why rates are so low.

\- the risk/reward tradeoff is real. Real estate and equities are popular but both can fall off a cliff suddenly. To successfully invest in either you need to be able to wait out the bad years without cashflow problems.

\- we're in a period of massive uncertainty. It's a pretty bad time to start a business .. unless you have a clever plan for the pandemic.

If you can buy distressed property or businesses at the "end" of the pandemic, and the pandemic ends and the economy returns to the old normal, you could do very well. If.

<comment><USER17> This is a really good time to start a business. Established competition will be struggling because their spending is based on "normal" business but their revenues got hit. When the lockdown stops there's going to be a spending surge (because everyone has been forced to save for months).

<comment><USER19> Yeah , plus what else is there to do? This is a once in lifetime opportunity to risk your time

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Disclaimer: There are plenty of people who know more than I do about economics... There are also plenty of people who know significantly less.

My understanding is that situations like this are solved by printing money. (Yup, good ol' inflation.) We (the US) will probably have to; the value of the dollar is skyrocketing compared to other currencies, which makes it hard for us (the US) to conduct business internationally.

What does this mean? Now is a great time to take on debt, or to shift debts to pay off debts more slowly. (For example, pay off your car loan with a home equity line of credit.) Why? In periods of high inflation, the real value of your loan's monthly payment goes down very quickly.

Why do I think we're going to have high inflation? A lesson from the depression is that forcing people to pay their debts during deflation kills an economy: Wages go down, so a higher percentage of a paycheck goes to debts, which then cuts demand for services, which further lowers wages.

</comment><comment><USER23> My opinion: Creating value is still worthwhile - no matter what is going on with the currency, it's still used for exchange. So if you're creating value you'll be fine. A friendly reminder: value is determined by the customer.

For myself, I am betting that tangible assets that provide value would be preferable to assets that just sit there. Value investing and prudent real- estate are where I'll be concentrating my efforts if I have spare money.

<comment><USER24> Yup that is the key. Don't spend too much mental energy on the markets unless you think you found your niche. Invest and do some swing trading and spend most of your mental energy on learning how to create value.

The most immediate value creation for most of us is to just become better developers and better understanders of the requirements of whatever we're developing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm not a financial planner or financial services professional of any kind, so take anything I say with a grain of salt.

1) should I stop saving?

No. negative interest rates won't go _that_ negative. Even if your bank is earning -1% interest, it still makes sense to be saving.

2) Should I put my savings elsewhere?

Probably. ETFs or index funds with wide stock market exposure are a good idea (good examples are SPY, VOO, VO, VFINX... and many others). You make money by buying stocks when the market is low and selling when the market is high. Long term, it will _probably_ go up as it always has. That said, it's very hard to time the market, so the best strategy is to put your money in over time. One good way to do this is to take a set amount of money from each paycheck and invest it every pay period, regardless of what the market is at. If you have a bunch of money sitting in savings right now, maybe divide it into 52 parts (or 104 or 156 or even 208 depending on your risk tolerance and/or thoughts on how long this market decline will last) and invest that amount each week.

3) Should I take out loans to buy up assets?

Probably not. No one is gonna give you an unsecured loan at a good enough rate that will make this worthwhile. And a secured loan will be against something like a house, which you probably don't want to risk losing. This is almost never a good idea.

One big exception might be buying a home. When the dust settles, the real estate market might take a big hit in which case taking out a loan (i.e. a mortgage) to buy a home might be a good idea.

4) Should I build businesses and raise venture capital for them?

Depends on the business. Venture capital money is going to tighten up a lot. People just aren't going to be throwing around money during a recession in the way that they did 6 months ago. But if you can stomach it, this is probably as good a time as ever to build a business that can get to profitability quickly. The only caveat is that it might be a risky time to quit a job with a stable income. Typically, it's easy to take for granted that if your business fails you can just get a job. Right now, that seems less certain.

<comment><USER26> > That said, it's very hard to time the market, so the best strategy is to put > your money in over time. One good way to do this is to take a set amount of > money from each paycheck and invest it every pay period, regardless of what > the market is at. If you have a bunch of money sitting in savings right now, > maybe divide it into 52 parts (or 104 or 156 or even 208 depending on your > risk tolerance and/or thoughts on how long this market decline will last) > and invest that amount each week.

It seems counterintuitive but dollar-cost averaging is really just another way of timing the market. The only way to avoid the downfalls of market timing is to invest everything you want to invest, as soon as you can. Dollar-cost averaging typically loses compared to that strategy.

See: [http://valueaveraging.ca/research/Analysis_Dollar_Cost_Avera...](http://valueaveraging.ca/research/Analysis_Dollar_Cost_Averaging.pdf)

<comment><USER27> Is timing the market always wrong though? I don't feel like I made a bad deal selling one month ago and now re-entering DCA. It was obvious that the US market was not correctly pricing this pandemic. I think there is a middle ground between day trading and never touching anything.

<comment><USER26> It's always wrong if you take luck out of the equation. With DCA, the problem is all the cash you have sitting around NOT invested while in the process of executing the strategy is really just money that you are betting against the market with.

For example, maybe there will be a downturn for the next 2 months but what about the 7 months following that? They could all be green for all we know, and all that money would be sitting around being lost to inflation. Also consider this: on average, missing just the best 10 trading days of each year would cut your returns in half, historically. We have already had several huge single-day rallies even in this downturn, and people who divested for that period may have made their losses even worse by doing that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> A negative interest rate is a penalty for not putting liquid capital to productive investment, regardless of wether such opportunities are at hand. To some extent, so is inflation.

Negative rates don't mean alternatives become better investment strategies. It just moves goal posts to encourage more risk taking in the economy.

Housing looks like the best alternative investment strategy. There are funds that focus on solid rental markets, owning their housing complexes for example.

<comment><USER2> > A negative interest rate is a penalty for not putting liquid capital to > productive investment

This is not true, and is massively dependent on many other prevailing economic forces.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> CTRL+F and nobody mentioned Austrian Economics, the Mises Institute, gold, bitcoin, sound/hard money... wow. People are really delusional and still completely under the thumb of Keynes' wrong economic "policies".

Wake up people. Coronavirus or not, the world has been in a state of decay since after WWI and it snowballed in the 70's when the last of the gold standard was severed.

People advising that 2/3 % inflation is "not only not bad, but a sign that the economy is doing great" have absolutely no idea what they are talking about.

For those who are a minimum curious, I really advise you to read two fenomenal books

\- What has government done to our money? - Rothbard, Murray N.

\- Democracy: The God that failed - Hans-Hermann Hoppe

To the OP: government's great plan is to eliminate cash or render cash useless. Everything will more to digital cash where they can effectively do negative interest rates. What can you do to protect yourself? Put most of your money in Bitcoin and Gold. These are the only hard money in existence.

</comment><comment><USER30> Prospering and risk-aversion don't go well together. At best, diligent work will get you ordinary prosperity of a system which generally rises over time. Diligent work is not as rare as people often imagine, and diligent workers fare averagely well. Unfortunately, the variance from that average seems increasingly precarious, as a few do exceptionally well and many slip below it.

Doing better than average comes with risk. If you're even asking this question, you can afford risk. Few would even think to "build [multiple] businesses", much less start with the assumption of access to venture capital.

So if you want risk aversion, you can do the same thing you've always done: put your money in a broad index fund and trust that the markets will recover well before you retire. The fact that they've always done so eventually is not proof that they will this time, but nobody can give you advice for the black swan event of markets failing perfectly. In that case you'll have worse things to worry about than your 401k.

If you want to take a risk from the Fed giving out free money... well, those negative interest rates aren't available to consumers. For example, mortgage rates are actually going up because so many see this as a signal to refinance. That money is mostly going to the bond market, because it's the last line of defense for the government. From there it goes to the stock market, where it's going to sustain an unsustainable boom. (Despite what I said earlier, the market as a whole is almost certainly overpriced, and even the earlier fall didn't fully correct it.)

Basically, the Fed free money isn't for you. It's about the government and a few financial firms, and your 401k's tiny piece of that. All you can do is muddle along the same way you always did. Go ahead and start a business or buy somebody else's, if you've got the free cash -- and it sounds like you do. You'll probably lose it, because most fail. But that's how one does better than average.

</comment><comment><USER31> It's blowing my mind that I just did a ctrl-F for "compound interest" in this thread and got zero hits. It's not even part of the discussion any more.

<comment><USER21> Why? Perhaps we're just assuming we all know how it works. Or, at 2% to -0.5%, it really doesn't make a big difference.

<comment><USER32> If you have 200k and add 20k for 30 years plus compounded interest at 2% you'll have 1,189,861.13 at the end.

<comment><USER21> And (to return to the original post), how much do you have at compounding of 0% or -0.5%?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Lot of concepts here.

1) 0% may feel like a threshold, but it's not that quantitatively different from the sub 2% interest rate environment we've been living in for many years from a wealth generation standpoint.

2) Should you stop saving? If you mean should you be generating more cash that you spend, the answer is that's probably a good idea unless you have a pressing cash need now. If by saving you mean putting your money in a Savings Account, then yeah there are probably better uses of your capital since most pay effectively 0% interest.

3) So where should you put it? This depends a lot on your tolerance for risk, and your forecast for how quickly you might need the cash. If you need it soon and/or have a low appetite for risk, then go for safer, less volatile assets like treasuries or CDs. If you have a bit of time and risk tolerance, stocks have pulled back considerably so buying in at depressed prices and waiting for the recovery might be a good idea. Real estate is probably similar depending on where you live. If you really want to swing for the fences, go ahead and start a business, although ultimately there are a million factors that will determine your success before the interest rate environment will.

4) Should you take out debt to buy even more assets than you could with my own cash? Maybe, this all depends on your risk tolerance. If your investment decisions are good, you will reap even more returns. But if they are are bad, you will have to pay back the debt after incurring losses. So it just pushes your outcomes towards the extremes. You probably should not do this solely because interest rates are low.

A final note-- your approach to wealth generation shouldn't change based on interest rates. I think your upbringing is mostly correct, if you work diligently and spend less than you make, you will be on a road to building wealth.

The question is what to invest your free cash flow in, and the answer is almost always: all of these options. Diversifying is the best way to minimize unsystemic investment risk.

The question is then: how do you allocate your capital between risky and safe assets? That depends on the interest rates, your near to medium term cash requirements, your risk tolerance, and your age. That said, a rule of thumb is to do (100 - age)% in riskier investments, and your age% in safer investments.

</comment><comment><USER34> Maybe donate to charity to help people who have lost a lot more than their investment returns...

</comment><comment><USER35> > Should I put my savings elsewhere?

Sure. Consider donating to a food bank, or an effort to provide medical equipment, or some other charity you care about.

<comment><USER36> Is that what you're doing?

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> If you live in the US you could buy Series I Savings Bonds from the government. They have a fixed rate which is set when you buy them (currently very low) but they also return an additional rate that varies over time based on inflation. (There are also mutual funds out there like e.g. the Vanguard Inflation Protected Securities fund that are supposed to guard against inflation too.)

In the long term, I would assume these will not give you anywhere near as good returns as other higher-risk investment options, but they might work for you depending on what you're looking for.

</comment><comment><USER38> for a science fiction take: the economy is in negative inflation in Frederik Pohl's _The Other End of Time_. There is a scene where some astronauts are on their way home from a day of preparation, and as part of their routine convert their paychecks into cash and browse various sidewalk tables full of collectibles and antiques on the way home, converting their cash into miscellaneous items that would cling to or appreciate in value.

this book was pre-web, and the scene a very minor scene of one relevance to the larger plot, but I still think about it a lot

<comment><USER39> Wait, if there's negative inflation, wouldn't you want to hang onto your cash? Sounds more like hyperinflation.

<comment><USER38> ugh. I think you're right. Sorry, it's been about fifteen years since I read it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> There's a whole spectrum of risk from buying U.S. Treasurys to trading on margin. You don't have to go to either extreme. And you can buy multiple things and come up with a portfolio that has the right risk profile for your risk appetite and this current environment.

Once the dust settles, you can invest in all sorts of safe-ish type vehicles that aren't Treasurys and still clip a coupon. High-dividend stocks such as utilities are one example, but a financial advisor can help you pick the right investment for your portfolio.

</comment><comment><USER41> Remember that regardless of positive or negative, it's only a fraction of a percentage and not likely to last very long. A transient -0.0025 is very different from a long term -2.5

</comment><comment><USER42> > I was brought up to work diligently, not take on debt, and save - a simple > approach to building wealth

This is a lie told to the lower class to have them work like slaves. That's not how wealth is generated anywhere on earth. Wealth is created by "luck" ( finding oil, discoveries, stealing/confiscating, etc ) or using capital ( inherit it, borrow it, steal it, whatever ) to hire others to generate value and give those "others" as small a piece of the generated value as possible ( without the others turning on you ) and keeping the rest for yourself ( aka wealth ).

Imagine you and your 3 brothers make 10 pizza pies. If you can get them to take 1 pie each and you keep 7 pies, you just generated wealth. Congratulations.

> but I'm concerned that will put me at a disadvantage under an economic > system with negative rates.

If you have to ask "How to prosper under negative interest rates?", then you are already disadvantaged and nothing is likely to change that. Negative interest rates, positive interest rates, it really doesn't matter for the average joe. Why not just live your life instead of worrying about things outside of your control? Ultimately, it all balances out. Sure, your savings account might not pay decent interest, but your mortgage or student loan interests will be lower.

</comment><comment><USER43> Somewhat of a tangent but negative interest rates are associated with currency deflation.

Does anyone know of any prominent economists who argue that deflation may be a good thing? I know the overwhelming consensus is that you want something like 2% or 3% inflation to ensure market growth but I'm always interested in alternative perspectives, particularly because personally I'm not convinced that you necessarily want (or need) perpetual growth.

</comment><comment><USER44> Here's what I'm looking at...

Since interest rates will be low, it could be a good buying opportunity for investment property. There is always risk here and with a rent strike looming there is potential for even more. I was already in the market for investment property so I've been following various markets (zillow lets you export a ton of data about historic property values and projections). Prices haven't fallen yet, but back in 2008 there were a number of years where it was a buyer's market. The stimulus bill that just passed also drops the limit on real estate depreciation, which is a potentially massive windfall for real estate investors.

Not that it takes advantage of negative interest rates, but stocks are "on sale" right now and with today being the last day of Q1 and the viral apex on the horizon, more bad news is likely on the way... so there might be an even better opportunity to buy some previously top performing stocks in the coming months. I made about 60% between October and February and plan to buy back in soon with much better positions.

I'm very interested to hear what others are thinking about doing or if they have feedback about what I'm thinking.

<comment> 1-more > I was already in the market for investment property

I talked about buying a condo with my brother and renting it out but at the end of the day I'm just not comfortable just taking someone else's income because I happen to have the money on hand to make a down payment. It seems so predatory.

<comment><USER45> How is it predatory? The person who is renting likely does not have the ability to purchase and you adding another rental to the market drives rental prices down and provides another rental option (albeit insignificantly) thereby helping said renter.

<comment> 1-more At the end I get a condo and the renter gets nothing, that's just so backwards to me.

<comment><USER46> They get shelter.

<comment> 1-more Even taking as given that they should have to pay for shelter beyond the cost of maintenance, all that could all exist without me getting to skim in the middle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> > I was brought up to work diligently, not take on debt, and save

Just keep doing that. Let's talk a worst case. Say coronavirus lasts 18 months and negative interest rates last that long afterwards too. That's three years of negative rates. If it's in the 1-2% range, That's about 3-6% lost by keeping it in cash. So your worst case is 3-6% lost.

Compare that to not working diligently, taking on too much debt, or not saving enough, your worst case of 3-6% is a drop in the bucket. We're likely to do much better than that worst case.

I would, however add an item to your list which might be implicit. Invest your long term savings once you have more than a solid emergency buffer. Find a robo-advisor if you want to keep it simple. In 30 years it'll have grown a ton.

</comment><comment><USER48> Great question. Probably it's a good moment to think about what we are doing and how to improve it or change it. We are traversing an historical moment in several fronts and we need to learn and go forward. Not only one answer, not only one recommendation.

General advise, don't stop saving. If you already have a regular habit to save part of your income and you can afford that, continue as far you can. Look for the long term.

Take time to analyze your current status and organize your decisions based in your goals and try to take advantage of the current configuration, but don't do the contrary and don't take decisions only based in current situation.

</comment><comment><USER49> Thinking about the same and doing a deep dive in real estate actually (not thinking of investing through funds but rather doing buy-to-let). Any solid resources / strategies recommended for a complete beginner?

</comment><comment><USER50> The easiest and least exciting answer is to buy treasuries now as rates have not hit rock bottom and if the crystal ball said interest rates were lower in the future, bonds bought now would raise in value just like in normal times. Someone bought a 50 year government bond in Austria I think and the interest rate moved a smidge and the value of his bond went up a whopping 50%

I was laughing when greek debt was issued with sky high interest rates. Since it was back stopped by the ECB some saw it as a no lose scenario. I wonder what happened to those bonds. They aren't in default afaik.

<comment><USER51> > _" Someone bought a 50 year government bond in Austria I think and the > interest rate moved a smidge and the value of his bond went up a whopping > 50%"_

This can go the other way too. If interest rates rise a smidge, the value of these bonds can plummet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> For the most part, the standard strategy still works fine; spend less than you earn, keep an emergency fund, invest in low-fee stock/bond funds like the ones recommended here [https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Three- fund_portfolio](https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Three-fund_portfolio).

As real interest rates go lower, the cost of capital goes down. That would make some capital intensive businesses possible/profitable that wouldn't be otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER53> > I was brought up to work diligently, not take on debt, and save - a simple > approach to building wealth - but I'm concerned that will put me at a > disadvantage under an economic system with negative rates.

Interesting take. Why would you be at a disadvantage and to whom would this be in relation to? I think it's fair to say that in the very long term inflation, etc will erode the value of your cash, but I imagine that there is still value in saving. I'm not sure these rates will last forever anyway.

<comment><USER54> I'm going to oversimplify here, but negative interest rates effectively mean you pay the bank to store your money. So on top of inflation, you're losing real money. For someone who saves, negative interest rates mean savers end up with less money at the end of each year, and since OP indicated their preference to saving, that puts them at a disadvantage.

Negative interest rates also that you get paid for taking out debt, which is a tremendous opportunity to buy something that costs $100 for less than $100, but because OP indicated their aversion to taking on debt, this puts them at a disadvantage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Curious to hear other people's thoughts but don't think you can look at negative rates in a vacuum, but rather also have a view on inflation as well as asset prices (housing, equities, etc)

E.g. in a world of negative interest rates and 0% inflation just holding physical cash solves most of your problem - however that does not solve your problem in a world of positive inflation and negative rates - then you need to be able to make up the difference on asset price gains...

</comment><comment><USER56> Low interest rates mean that you need more risks for the same return. It means investing a portion of your savings in emerging market bounds, corporate bounds, stocks, real estate.

This of course is not as straightforward as putting your money in a saving account. But it is also not as complicated as you might expect. You need to decide what risks you are comfortable with. How do you view the world and the markets in 5-10-20 years and do your research.

</comment><comment><USER57> I would never advise anyone to do that yet with a substantial amount of their wealth, but: take a look at MakerDAO's DAI. It is a stable crypto token that uses a basket of ethereum-based tokens to keep its value locked to the US Dollar.

It also provides a system where DAI holders can lock their assets and receive 2%/year. So, if your concern is just to get a positive savings rate, you could take a look at it.

</comment><comment><USER58> I recommend you to read the book `intelligent investor` by Ben Graham.

If you don't have the time, read chapter 8 and 20, as Warren Buffett has recommended it. It might not teach you how to prosper [under negative interest rate] but I think it will give you something to work on and provide you with a good framework in investing.

I'm not a financial advisor so I cannot give you advice but I think investing in yourself is a sound advice.

<comment><USER59> Much as I like that book and want it to be true - some argue that Value investing is as useful as Technical Analysis - which puts it at just a bit more reliable than Chicken Bone divination.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> If you have a deflation and negative rates then you should hold to your money because year after year everything around you is getting cheaper. So delay consumption. Hold the cash. You will get better deal next year.

If you have and inflation and negative rates then this is just a temporary anomaly in monetary policy. Don't hold the cash. Borrow at fixed rate and invest risk free.

</comment><comment><USER61> This is one take —- 0% or negative interest rates are a signal that future consumption is more expensive than current consumption.

For example, all my furniture is ~10 years old from Ikea. I've always wanted nicer things. The fence in the back needs some repairs. Maybe I should finally hire a contractor to fix it.

</comment><comment><USER62> Looking into "averaging down" or "tranching in" and go into SPX. Unless you know how to thoroughly invest in companies, you're betting on the US economy recovering at some point. Statistically significantly higher returns than any other option out there.

</comment><comment><USER63> I'm a fan of investing in myself when inflation is high or rates are low. Education, or opportunities.

Also a good time to shop for a credit card with a better rate.

</comment><comment><USER64> Chinese bonds? Yields were not bad as of late

</comment><comment><USER65> The thing about prospering under negative interest rates is that Epstein didn't kill himself.

</comment><comment><USER66> Why does 0% interest rate mean that it's hard to prosper?

</comment><comment><USER67> Create value.

</comment><comment><USER68> Good question. I'd like to hear people's thoughts too.</comment>


Don't Ask Customers What They'll Pay. Tell Them. - <AUTHOR> http://blog.spark59.com/2012/dont-ask-customers-what-theyll-pay-tell-them/

<comment><USER2> Also related is that you should aim for 3 tiers of product at 3 tiers of pricing. What will generally happen is people realise the bottom one tells the world they are cheap and skimping on product, and the top one tells the world they spend too much money and are getting too much product, so the middle one seems the right fit.

An apocryphal story about this is Wendys having 3 burgers with 1, 2 and 3 patties respectively. Not many people were buying the 3 patty version so they decided to get rid of it. The sales of the 2 patty version then declined because consumers had been using the existence of the 3 patty burger to justify purchasing the 2 patty one.

You'll notice that the iPad, iPod Touch and iPhone all come in 3 different different memory capacities. I can't find any sales figures by model, but I'll bet the middle ones are what sells the most.

This "3" approach also means you can still sell to the lower and higher end customers so you don't have to get your pricing perfect.

Edit: two additional links about this

[http://www.asymco.com/2010/10/07/the-cognitive-illusion- that...](http://www.asymco.com/2010/10/07/the-cognitive-illusion-that-is- iphone-n-1/) (perception of alternatives)

[http://www.wiglafjournal.com/pricing/2004/07/framing-the- pri...](http://www.wiglafjournal.com/pricing/2004/07/framing-the-price- practice/) ("price framing")

<comment><USER3> Do you think this theory also applies to 1 month, 3 month or 12 month subscription options to services?

<comment><USER2> It applies whenever you are spending money - you consider the alternatives, but humans do not do so rationally. By how you frame your 3 options, you can push people to buy the one you want. Here is an other example from Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist, showing three options:

[http://danariely.com/the-books/excerpted-from- chapter-1-%E2%...](http://danariely.com/the-books/excerpted-from- chapter-1-%E2%80%93-the-truth-about-relativity-2/)

<comment><USER4> Warning: On-Swipe link.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I agree with this post - asking customers what they'll pay isn't always the best way to price your product.

However, if you do ever find yourself asking a customer what they would hypothetically pay for your product, never ask them "What would you pay for a solution like this?"

Instead, ask them "What do you think a 'fair and reasonable' price would be for this product?" It's a variation on the "what would you pay" question that tends to get a much more thoughtful, honest response.

Just a tip for HN from someone who has been in consumer insights and research for 10 years and has done hundreds of customer interviews around new products and pricing...

</comment><comment><USER6> I would have used wine, rather than water, to illustrate Principle #1. At least with water, people generally agree that it's all the same and the $2 bottle is a ripoff. But with wine, you often hear about things like blind taste tests, where the cheap wines often come out ahead.

But it's more complex than that. People who buy wine may have other motives and will want a more expensive wine for whatever reason (special occasions, showing off, etc.). What's more is that one's experience of something like food depends on how you feel about the food. And price contributes to how you feel.

In other words, you might rerun the same taste test you did blindly before and have people pick the expensive wine the next time. So quality is complex: there may be both real and imaginary parts and which item people will pay more for depends on how it gets compared to the alternatives. And that's not even getting into things like branding, where people feel a certain way about a brand and that contributes to their enjoyment (or lack of enjoyment) of a product, etc.

<comment><USER7> I'd disagree and say with wine you'd have to explain a lot more (as you did). We know from the existing bottled water market (in the U.S.) that a viable market exists at both $0.50 and $2.00. $2 might be a ripoff to you but it's what some customers always purchase which leads to Principle 2.

<comment><USER6> I live in Arizona. I don't know of anyone buying $2-$3 water because of the quality, mostly we buy it due to convenience. In short, because it's 116 F and they want water _right now_.

Sure, maybe there's Evian or whatever, but at least for me, it's well outside of my normal experience. Most of the expensive water we buy is pure convenience, because we'll buy from the guy with $2 water instead of $3 without thinking, given the chance and all the common brands are blurred together (Evian is really the only one that sticks out).

So... yeah. I'll agree that it's a proper example, it's just not something where quality is a major consideration, at least in these parts. YMMV.

<comment><USER8> I live in Arizona also, and I know people who would swear on a stack bibles that <insert brand> tastes better. Despite repeatedly explaining to them that it is filtered tap water, and showing it to them on the label where it says "filtered tap water" , they insist. In any convenience store there are multiple brands of water at multiple price points, each with their own fans. weird.

Discount Tire also uses the good-better-best philosophy, with the middle choice being most popular.

<comment><USER6> I guess we just have very different experiences.

I'm used to all water being exactly the same price in a given location and to only noticing when they jack up the price for captive audiences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This theoretically true statement "There is no reasonable economic justification for a customer to offer anything but a low-ball figure. " can, in practice, be irrelevant.

So unless you are a savant, following the OP's advice in _enterprise_ sales can result in you leaving hundreds of thousands of dollars on the table. Because customers (especially at the early stage) often have a perceived value for something that is far more than you realized, or they have a budget, and their price is the budget. Steve Blank has great examples of these situations throughout his career.

The OP's advice makes sense for consumer sales (and I think he should clarify this).

This book gives a rounded and intelligent set of tools that work in almost all situations — and will make you rethink the thoughts you thunk about pricing: [http://www.amazon.com/Winning-Profit-Game-Smarter- Branding/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Winning-Profit-Game-Smarter- Branding/dp/0071434720)

</comment><comment><USER10> Way too few startups use price anchoring strategies when _presenting_ their prices - the iPad intro is definitely not the first, but possibly the most well-executed anchoring I've ever seen. If your product is disruptive in the sense that it potentially can replace a more expensive existing solution, you should simply point out the math - the higher the original number, the better, as even the higher price points you've been thinking up for your product will seem small. Interestingly, anchoring can also work outside of mere price comparisons. That is, sometimes it's enough to just _present high numbers_ to effectively prime customers towards higher price points. The most famous example is Kahnemann's classical experiment on using subjects' (obviously random) social security numbers for anchoring:

"...an audience is first asked to write the last two digits of their social security number and consider whether they would pay this number of dollars for items whose value they did not know, such as wine, chocolate and computer equipment. They were then asked to bid for these items, with the result that the audience members with higher two-digit numbers would submit bids that were between 60 percent and 120 percent higher than those with the lower social security numbers, which had become their anchor." <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring>

<comment><USER7> Yes, but this kind of anchoring is "artificially" manipulative. It's possible you convince a customer to accept a higher price at first, but pretty soon buyer's remorse will set in and you're screwed.

I do believe you want to pick "valid" anchors and sometimes be more selective (as-in the iPad case) but the comparison has to stick.

<comment><USER11> >buyer's remorse will set in

Not necessarily. Take our case of the iPad. It came out at a time when netbooks had created a new low for computer pricing. The iPad lacked a keyboard, a proper/large HDD, had a processor that was even slower, ran a smartphone OS that couldn't even multi-task properly, and had a screen resolution right out of 1995. The 'logical' price for this would have been $200-300; pretty much the only hardware that was not a cost reduction on a netbook was the (low cost) touch layer. Yet it had excellent customer satisfaction. They created perceived value- lacking USB, storage expansion and replaceable battery were all practical disadvantages-- but these weren't things that created desire like the buttery-smooth operation provided by the GPU and capacitive touch, the large viewing angle from the IPS screen, the sleekness from having just one button etc, and the light and slimness gained by forgoing so many features available in even a netbook.

And it's not just something like apple does. Think of a tech 'consultant', or a fashionable web-design company. Chances are you see their prices and think 'WTF are they smoking'..I could have better than that done for me for 10x less. but their clients, i bet are pretty happy. Because of the value they offer-- some perceived, some reality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What about the humble indie bundle or kickstarter? Asking the customer what they want to pay has never been more popular.

<comment><USER7> The context here is for products where one would sell a product or service directly to customers e.g. SaaS, enterprise. Crowd-sourcing is a different model. So are multi-sided and marketplace models.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't agree with this–or maybe I do. It's hard to tell without knowing what he means by "testing your price with customers".

I think asking customers "what would you expect to pay for this?" should be part of your initial usability or beta test with potential customers. 2 Reasons for this: (a) your target market has certain price expectations for products and (b) you might "tell them" what to pay and still be too low.

I just did this with a new product we launched. My lowest plan was priced at $9/month. We did a usability test with our target market and ask them (at the end) what they expected to pay for a product like this. Only 1 person said a number lower than $20/month–and they went as high as $100/month.

<comment><USER14> "I just did this with a new product we launched. My lowest plan was priced at $9/month. We did a usability test with our target market and ask them (at the end) what they expected to pay for a product like this. Only 1 person said a number lower than $20/month–and they went as high as $100/month."

However, that doesn't imply that they WOULD pay that for a product. The conclusion they might draw (validly or otherwise) could be "I'd expect to pay a lot more for this product, so I won't even consider it an option - it's out of my range."

I might expect to pay $1,000 for a table for 4 at one of Gordon Ramsay's restaurants. I might be pleasantly surprised to find the average bill around $600. That doesn't mean I'll pay $600 for that, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> There's another way of looking at pricing that comes up more and more in my thoughts on starting a new business/product. I've been calling it "pricing in reverse". I'll blog about it soon in more detail, but the gist is...

As a new startup or business, it's likely you have no audience, no fans, and no customers. You are going to have to go get them. One method, that can be very effective to get them if you do it right is online advertising through pay-per-click ads on places like Google/Facebook/LinkedIn.

Assuming you pick some niche with X searches, those ads are Y per click. And the per unit revenue of my product is Z.

Making bold but average assumptions about your conversion rates you can say something like let's assume 1% of searchers click on my ads. So my ad cost is going to be searches * CPC * 0.01.

Assuming I can get a 1.5% conversion ratio the revenue I'll bring in is searches * 0.01 * 0.015 * Z.

So:

Revenue(searches * 0.01 * 0.015 * Z) - Ad Cost(searches * 0.01 * CPC) = profit.

Set profit to zero and solve for Z. Get searches and CPC from the Google adwords tool.

You'll now know your product NEEDS to cost Z to break even doing pay per click ad campaigns.

Sometimes this is going to be an eye opener for you. You'll realize that you probably need to charge a ton more and so maybe your product needs to have a much more powerful feature set to warrant that higher price.

This example and thinking was inspired from Tim Ferris' Muse Math:

<http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/bonus/pdf/musemath.pdf>

<comment><USER16> Cost plus pricing. You should definitely know you numbers like the customer acquisition cost etc. I agree with you there. But relying on the cost to come up with the price point usually leaves money on the table. Price based on the value for the customer, not your cost.

<comment><USER17> Just make sure to find out these numbers, so you font go into a market where value is _below_ cost.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> If you want far better information on pricing, the following old (2004) article by Joel Spolsky is excellent.

[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckies.html)

</comment><comment><USER19> The video embedded in the article is great. Steve jobs literally gets the crowd to cheer for "unbelievably low price" point of the ipad at 499. Brilliant

<comment><USER7> The brilliance is picked an externally accredited source (pundits) for a product twice in price. Another alternative was positioning the iPad as a better (bigger iPhone) but that obviously would not have worked as well.

<comment><USER11> Its fascinating. These 'pundits', lets remember (beside the question of whether it was even accurate or significant-- enough pundits and someone will have said anything), we didn't know what the iPad was going to be. The possibility that it would be a powerful, fully-fledged OSX running computer was considered very real (remember the slamming people gave it as just a big iPhone).. if the question had been 'what do you think we will charge for our iPod touch with a bigger screen', not even the most hardcore apple pundit would have said '<$1k'.

Then he lingers on this issue-- talking about how much they have accomplished for the price-- almost making a value proposition for it at $999. After about a minute of $999 up on the screen he announces that '[apple] have met our cost goals'. I think this phrasing is very interesting-- he doesn't say 'we have beaten our goals', 'met our aggressive goals' or 'achieved a low cost'-- nothing to remove from the perception that it could be $999. At the point at which your expectation is highest that he is going to announce that the goal they met was a $999 ipad, and he has built tension, they dramatically drop in the real price.

Even the fact that they managed to manipulate their audience is in turn a suggestive indicator that this is great value, a shock, at this price. This can have a big effect when you consider that the press are not immune from this manipulation-- who then present this device as highly desirable and of great value.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Nice, I totally agree with the fact that pricing of product is an art to attract the customer before your product is being released.

<comment><USER21> That reminds me of a story I read years ago (pre-consumer-internet days), where a particular Office suite was priced at $99, but didn't sell well. They then released a "professional" version, sold it for $399, and it flew off the shelves. If I remember right, I think it was something by Borland. (Exact details are a bit fuzzy).</comment></comment>


Google Software Construction Toolkit Released - <AUTHOR> http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2009/02/software-construction-toolkit-released.html <comment><USER2> Cool. Why isn't this something they integrate directly with SCons? Just credit etc.?

<comment><USER3> It's more high level than SCons, for example they generate Visual Studio project files.

<comment><USER2> Quoting from the SCons feature list:

" _Built-in support for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET and past Visual Studio versions, including generation of .dsp, .dsw, .sln and .vcproj files._ "

Maybe this is just a documentation issue, but the mission seems the same as SCons and I can't get any sense of the diff over SCons itself.

I can't get into the source code right now, but I guess that's the next step.

This person puts it in a more inflammatory way but maybe someone will respond here:

[http://groups.google.com/group/swtoolkit/browse_thread/threa...](http://groups.google.com/group/swtoolkit/browse_thread/thread/4c394ea013c36da9)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ugh. It's not as if SCons is a particularly great build tool.

<comment><USER5> Could you elaborate on its shortcomings?</comment></comment>


An Optimising BF Compiler - <AUTHOR> http://www.wilfred.me.uk/blog/2015/08/29/an-optimising-bf-compiler/ <comment><USER2> Awesome! Inspired by a flash of lightning, I wrote a genetic algorithm to generate brainfuck over the past two weeks.

It has gotten so far that it generates brainfuck programs that output any number you desire. No input processing though ;(

Here are five different (20-char) brainfuck programs that print 1337.. Note my brainfuck interpreter doesn't output characters, it adds the byte at the current pointer to the output. I suppose that's not _real_ brainfuck...

        -.[.>++<+.>]-.><+.[+
        ++->]-.[+.-.-<++]-->
        -[...<[+].++>-.>+]<+
        [+++...+.[-[.->.[]][
        >->-[..<.->-.<<.+.]+

Now I want to either rewrite it in c (it's currently in js) for the performance increase alone. I might attempt writing an interpreter on my fpga...

<comment><USER3> Have you seen this work?

[http://www.primaryobjects.com/CMS/Article163](http://www.primaryobjects.com/CMS/Article163)

<comment><USER2> Yep, I have. Pretty cool stuff

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Neat! One of the projects that I wrote when learning Rust was a BrainFuck interpreter and JIT for x86_64[1]. Interestingly, my JIT appears to be run some programs (e.g., mandelbrot.bf[2]) significantly faster than the versions compiled by bfc. That's despite including the optimization and code generation overhead in the timings of my JIT, but excluding them from bfc.

[1]: [https://github.com/bdash/brainrust](https://github.com/bdash/brainrust) [2]: [https://github.com/bdash/brainrust/blob/master/examples/mand...](https://github.com/bdash/brainrust/blob/master/examples/mandelbrot.bf)</comment>


The Internet Toaster (2000) - <AUTHOR> https://www.livinginternet.com/i/ia_myths_toast.htm <comment><USER2> Made me think of this classic: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/418](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/418)

</comment><comment><USER3> Sounds like this is a definitive beginning of "The Internet of Things."

<comment><USER4> I think Cambridge University's Trojan Room coffee pot probably wins - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot)

<comment><USER3> 1989 seems to predate that and the coffee pot wasn't internet connected, it simply sat in front of a camera.

<comment><USER4> Please excuse me, I had a brain fart.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Heh, sounds like you could possibly cause the bread to catch on fire.

</comment><comment><USER6> What a golden opportunity to show off my "feedback toaster" project :) [https://feedbacktoaster.com/](https://feedbacktoaster.com/)

You put your website in and it gets roasted.

</comment><comment><USER2> Such a simpler time.

</comment><comment><USER7> Of course it runs NetBSD.</comment>


An Open Letter to Sal Khan - <AUTHOR> http://www.mathalicious.com/2011/05/29/an-open-letter-to-sal-khan/

<comment><USER2> Unjust.

The Khan video fails to clearly distinguish definitions and derived results, so his formulae are effectively God-given from a student's perspective.

However, the writer's attack on this video is wrong as well. Presenting slope from the "rate of change" definition _before_ _defining_ the slope of a straight line is nonsensical. Questions of axis rescaling are important but inessential to the basic definition. Trying to discuss these points in order to connect to the "real world" (the theme of the site?) before the basic definition is given can only confuse and give a false sense of understanding.

This isn't to advocate a purely formal exposition, either: there are various points of view (Euclidean, Cartesian ...) and reconciling them is probably above the level of this lecture, but one should _not_ define a straight line as "a graph of a function with constant derivative".

Ultimately this seems like a rather forced argument presumably designed to distinguish the poster's "real-world-focused" materials.

</pedantic>

</comment><comment><USER3> I really enjoyed reading that letter. His point boils down to "You can teach how in a clear way, but you're not teaching the 'why'". I had never thought about that before, but it seems obvious now.

Charlie Munger speaks of taking the big ideas from various disciplines and building a latticework of mental models so that you can use all your knowledge to solve problems. A Khan Academy devotee will learn lots of math and science, and other things, but will he or she understand how it relates to real life, and how to apply those ideas to other disciplines?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Are these videos helping to develop "mathematical thinking" ?</comment>


You're Only a Beginner Once - <AUTHOR> http://simpleprogrammer.com/2012/11/25/youre-only-a-beginner-once/

<comment><USER2> Wow!, Can I conclude that the you are beginner only when you are child?</comment>


Show HN: Get serverless Q&A out of Slack groups and back on the web - <AUTHOR> https://serverless.help <comment><AUTHOR> My colleague shortj and I put this together. Basically a public repo of serverless questions and answers. Don't see your question? Submit to the form and we'll answer it. Or you can update the repo directly with your own Q&A: [https://github.com/trek10inc/serverless.help](https://github.com/trek10inc/serverless.help)</comment>