v64

> My first "programming" experience was with mIRC scripts. I even wrote an IRC client using mIRC sockets at some point, and a dummy webserver / SMTP client.

Same here! The mIRC scripting language was incredibly rich, and the ability to create native Windows dialogs with it was a powerful tool.

Back in the 90s, a friend and I reverse engineered the protocol behind a popular program used to play Magic the Gathering online called Apprentice. The protocol was insecure and allowed users to cheat by controlling the outcome of coin flips and other elements of the game. The purpose of the research was to prove definitively that the client could be manipulated, in order to resolve some cheating accusations that had been thrown around.

I set out to write a program that would hook into Apprentice through the Win32 API and allow you to change the program's output, while my friend created an mIRC man-in-the-middle server that you could configure through a dialog box to connect to Apprentice and modify incoming and outgoing protocol messages.

My project never shipped and his reached widespread availability, eventually leading to the development of better clients [1]. The fact that he was able to get so much out of mIRC script (dialog boxes, sockets, event handling, etc) and was able to make it simple for others to use was impressive.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apprentice_(software)#Backwash

> Maybe people could train to read easily that font - they didn't have much of alternatives. That would mean readability is rather conditional. I'd like to know.

I feel like comprehension of the underlying language will aid readability. If it were written in English, despite the illegibility, I'd be able to read it easier by having a general sense of what the words are supposed to be from context.

> He’s telling beginners that because you’re trying you must have good taste

That's not how I read the quote. I read it as him saying, you can't know whether or not you have good taste without first producing a lot of bad work, and that producing bad work is not necessarily a sign that you have bad taste.

If anything, those who judge themselves harshly are demonstrating good taste because they can see the flaws in their work compared to the works of others. It's those that don't feel any sense of criticism toward their own work that lack good taste, but they wouldn't feel this quote applies to them in the first place, because they wouldn't feel that their work is disappointing. They would instead be blaming others for not recognizing their superior work.

I don't think we're in disagreement.

You asked: Of all the people who read that quote and nod along thinking, “yes this is me” how many are actually right?

Of those people who think "yes this is me" as beginners, those who stick with it and move beyond the stage of beginner by fighting their way through their creative difficulties will be the ones who actually did have good creative taste and were right. Those who reach creative roadblocks and blame the cause on external circumstances are not among those with good creative taste.

Every expert started out as a beginner.

> Of all the people who read that quote and nod along thinking, “yes this is me” how many are actually right?

Those who actually fight their way through their creative difficulties as the quote suggests, as opposed to those who read the quote and think "yup, no one recognizes my good taste, screw em".

To be fair, even Aaron Franklin's bad barbeque is some of the best BBQ you'll ever have.

I have a MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Mid 2014) and Mojave runs very well on it. I have no plans to upgrade to Catalina.

I agree with you, but I disagree that the solution for it is "You can only invest in these ventures if you have X net worth". Having more money does not necessarily imply one is less foolish, and it disqualifies those who are capable of properly evaluating an opportunity but are not high net worth individuals.

> Unregulated securities are often a synonym for "scams" that is why you have to be a qualified investor.

That's the point though, scams are scams whether they're run by a loan shark or Bernie Madoff. Anyone should be allowed to invest their capital in any legitimate venture they see fit, and anything that meets the legal definition of a scam should be shut down and barred from taking money from anyone.

It's quite patronizing that the government takes the stance of "If you don't have X amount of money, you're not wise enough to tell the difference between a scam, a foolish business venture, and a legitimately risky business venture. Better leave that to the experts (and their commissions)."

Just wanna say I like this method of obfuscating your email. Wish HN would build something like this into the site.

> We can't really say that any individual point in time is "the" bottom, but it's obvious just looking at pricing data that we are at "a" bottom.

I don't know if we can even say that. It's entirely plausible that the market continues to move down for months or years as the economic reality starts to become clearer. When the actual bottom is put in, March 2020 might look like "the end of the top", not "the start of the bottom".

In my city, those meals are currently available for curbside pickup for students.

This was my initial reaction, but it seems that he came to this conclusion after analyzing the numbers in other countries as well.

> He analyzed 78 countries with more than 50 reported cases of COVID-19 every day and sees “signs of recovery.” He’s not looking at cumulative cases, but the number of new cases every day — and the percentage growth in that number from one day to the next.

> Levitt acknowledges that his figures are messy, and that the official case counts in many areas are too low because testing is spotty. But even with incomplete data, “a consistent decline means there’s some factor at work that is not just noise in the numbers,” he said.

> Or I could have just been doing it wrong, there wasn't exactly a training class when visiting countries in which they are common.

Haha exactly, that's the difficulty! You're taught these toilet habits at a young age and it's not something that adults discuss, so if you grew up in a culture without a bidet, it comes across as a baffling fixture.

Yes, this is how I feel about it as well, but apparently it's a norm. Individuals will have their own unshared bidet towel in the bathroom that they'll use afterwards.

At the risk of sounding naive, help me figure out what I'm missing then. I had the opportunity to use a built in style bidet when I visited Japan, and after a few days of trying, I could not figure out how to clean myself with it. There was always some residue left that had to be toilet papered off.

Are you expected to use your hand to clean like you would in the shower? Because that's never been made clear to me and what I've read online says to just let the water splash on you then dry it off with a towel, which doesn't seem sanitary at all to me.

Edit: Reading through the thread has been helpful. I've always had bidets pitched to me as a toilet paper replacement, but the comments here indicate it's something to be used after wiping, not in lieu of.

That only works on people who aren't shameless and are willing to reevaluate their own behavior based on external criticism. Sometimes you have to pick your battles.

I agree with you generally, but believe this is a case where the two events have to occur one after the other.

Putting UBI on the table today without already having a reformed regulatory framework in place from day one will result in a failed project, IMO. Opponents of UBI will use this to say that UBI is broken, instead of pointing to the real problem, that regulation is broken.

> Instead, the companies are simply taking on debt and keeping it on their balance sheet.

Yes, my example is an admitted oversimplification. I was directly answering the question "why would a company use debt to finance a buy back?", not "why would a company use debt to finance a buy back and then leave that debt on their balance sheet for an extended period of time?"

Although I suspect the answer to that question is that they didn't want to leave profit on the table and wanted to continue riding out the bull run, then got caught by the fastest bear market in history and weren't able to get out at a profit. Or that they believed they could eventually service the debt without having to reissue shares at all and ran out of time because of the crash.

> while at the same time assuming that the company can purchase and sell all the shares at a set price

For large cap companies that trade tens of millions of shares a day, you can figure out how much you can buy without moving the market. For less liquid stocks, you can also spread the buys out over a period of time to aim toward an average buy-in price.

The phenomenon you describe is called slippage [1], and those entering and exiting large positions are aware of it.

> it seems awkward to assume both that the volume purchased by the company significantly increases the price of the stock

I'm not implying that the reason why the stock price goes up is because the company is buying shares. The purchase may be done based on quarterly/yearly projections showing X% growth can be expected in the stock price in the future.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippage_(finance)

Let's say a company trades at $100 and that they can get a loan of $1m for 2% interest (total payment due: $1m in principal plus $20k in interest.)

They use the loan to buy 10,000 shares at $100. The company does so anticipating the price of the shares will go up. Let's say the price is now $150. They sell the shares and get back $1.5m. They return the $1.02m owed for the loan and pocket the rest as profit.

If you believe the growth of your company's stock price will exceed the interest rate, you can make a profit using debt to finance a buy back.

> That we shouldn't implement something because we currently don't have regulations for it? Why would we? We haven't implemented it. I mean with that kind of attitude we can't get anything done.

I think before implementing UBI, we have to address the broader issue of anticompetitive behavior in American business, due largely to decades of ill-advised deregulation, coupled with regulatory bodies who refuse to prevent anticompetitive mergers. Once we have undone the damage of deregulation, then I believe it's prudent to start putting UBI proposals on the table, but not before. Otherwise we risk making the situation worse for consumers and better for rent seekers.

In America, this is the problem that has to be addressed before we can consider rolling out projects like UBI. I agree with you that regulations have to exist for this to work, and we simply don't have the regulations in place right now to enable it widely.

It's part of the COVID-19 Emergency Amendment Act of 2020 [1] that was passed today.

[1] http://www.icontact-archive.com/archive?c=653228&f=109&s=277...

> A person that couldn't afford a car can now. I person with a $1k beater car can now buy a $5k car.

Wouldn't car dealers raise their prices some value up to $1k because they know anyone coming in that month to buy a car also just received a $1k check from the government?

> Someone that was living paycheck to paycheck can now take a breath, buy a TV and a Netflix subscription.

Netflix may raise their prices knowing everyone has a little extra cash to spend, and that people would rather pay a dollar or two more than cancel.

If your streaming subscriptions, phone bill, and everything else goes up incrementally because companies begin to factor UBI income into their pricing, then without making any lifestyle changes, you'll see that overtime you're spending an extra $1k a month due to higher prices (of course it won't work out exactly like that, but the point is that some portion of your $1k UBI will go toward paying for things you were already buying, but that are now more expensive as a result of UBI-aware pricing.)

If you believe that companies won't act that way or that other market forces (such as increased competition) will renormalize prices, I can see the argument, but I don't buy it personally.

> The thing is people would still shop around for the lowest price. The vendor with the lowest price gets the business.

But we know economically this isn't necessarily true. Some industries are more monopolized than others. Some people aren't in areas where they have good alternative shopping choices. Goods like toilet paper have many different price points and it hasn't been a race to the bottom among the brands to become the cheapest toilet paper. "You get what you pay for" is still a common rule of thumb. Veblen goods would also rise in price.

It's my opinion that UBI would give businesses an opportunity to raise prices in certain sectors, but I concede it wouldn't be universal inflation across the board.

My understanding is that if it's known that every American adult collects $1000 in addition to their regular income, prices will rise in an attempt to capture some of that known financial excess, so that the net result isn't that everyone gets an extra $1000 in discretionary income, but that everyone ends up paying that extra $1000 back in inflated prices.

Similar logic to how raising tariffs doesn't hurt companies as much as they hurt customers because the cost is passed on (speaking from an American perspective, not considering tax systems like VAT).

The fear is that in order to reach feature parity, they'll cripple macOS, not enhance iPadOS

IIRC, Linux has also deviated from the Single UNIX Specification/POSIX in some respects that would make it fail certification even if they tried.