skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interest rates have been on a secular decline over the course of the last century. Different economists have described this via various terms- "savings glut" is the one I like the most (even though I don't like Krugman). Right now there is so much saved cash out there looking to be lent out that any project looking for financing can find it for cheap.

The Fed does not keep interest rates low in a vacuum. There is an auction system that determines real rates. If the Fed is not able to sell all their bonds at the target rate, they have to adjust.

In the long run, I think we will see:

1. (at risk of calling this bull market a "new normal") P/E ratios for stock will continue to climb in a secular fashion. Low returns from the alternative investment of bonds will dictate high P/E ratios.

2. Debt financing will remain cheap. Low interest rates signal cash that is desperate to find a place to park it.

3. Government debt will remain popular and affordable. This is a win for Keynesians.

4. Secular low interest rates are an indicator of a stable and mature economy, which is good. The bad part is that they signal a world where obvious available capital investment projects are missing- we seem to have picked the low hanging fruit.

5. Next recession the U.S. will hit the zero lower bound, and we will see lots of QE and/or nominal negative interest rates through some institutional mechanism.

6. Increasing government deficits look better when interest rates are low.

7. Speculative: Deficit spending can increase indefinitely if real interest rates are below 0 (aka nominal rates are below inflation). To put it in other terms: Any deficit spending is free money up until the point that it causes inflation to rise about the nominal interest rate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornell_Notes

A traditional fan favorite.

IME: note taking involves hands and a pen. Touch typing is transcription.
Many people don't have that luxury.
There was a better alternative: Lisp machines. But in today's world, there's nothing as good as Emacs/SLIME. You can get almost there by connecting another editor to Lisp with an extension that speaks SLIME's SWANK protocol (like SLIMV for vim).
Most of the risks to the economy posed by COVID19 are supply side. How is a rate cute going to help? It seems like the main consequence of this in the near term is an increase in inflation.
This assumes a return to trend, right? If stocks are temporarily depressed you can get them at a discount.

If stock prices are permanently lower as a result, though, it's certainly not good for you. And, believe it or not, this is probably the more accepted idea -- that price movements are memoryless, that we shouldn't subscribe to the gamblers fallacy (that down today means up tomorrow), and that being happy for a price drop is a form of timing the market, which is frowned upon.

I don't fully buy it, but it's worth thinking about.
> What would you call Progeria?

> Progeria is an extremely rare autosomal dominant genetic disorder in which symptoms ___resembling___ aspects of aging are manifested at a very early age.

> What about cancer?

Cancer is cancer, aging is aging.
The open-source Ghostscript [1] can convert simple PDFs to text, while keeping the layout. I doubt it will handle some of the more complicated cases outlined in the article though.

I use it quite successfully to turn my bank statements into text, which can then be further processed.

[1]: https://www.ghostscript.com/
Some context (I had no clue what the site is about):

Robinhood, a pioneer of commission-free investing, gives you more ways to make your money work harder. Robinhood, a pioneer of commission-free investing, gives you more ways to make your money work harder. It's Time to Do Money.
I'm pretty worried about this. I don't think this rate cut makes any sense. You can't stimulus away a virus.
There used to be hard plastic, reusable bottles.
We are in/at the start of an actual financial crisis, people just haven't internalized that yet.
Show HN: Interactive Poincaré section clicker for the double pendulum
Does this mean the meeting on march 18th (where there was almost a 100% chance of a rate cut going through) is not happening anymore? [0]

I can't tell if they've just not yet updated that page.

[0] https://www.cmegroup.com/trading/interest-rates/countdown-to...
Could you run the old Lightroom in a VM? Ultimately, you might have to unless you migrate or pay up.

Lightroom is inexpensive relative to other tools and everyday expenses I have. The same goes for other closed-source photography software mentioned on threads like this, to the point that I've bought some of it to experiment moving off Lightroom.

Given the propensity of photographers to splurge huge amounts on gear, and their positions on intellectual property, I don't think I'm that unusual. Perhaps within the HN crowd the philosophy is different.
It can grow larger than people realize.

As long as other countries do business in USD and keep buying US debt, the party keeps going.

With fiat, you can spend as much as the combined purchasing power of all your citizens through money printing.

When you’re the reserve currency, that pool is extended to the purchasing power of many many countries.

That’s probably why, from a strategic POV, the US must remain the largest military force and continue to police the world.

With dollar hegemony, the US might even introduce new ways (like MMT) of sipping purchasing power of participants.
The simplest answer to “why?” Is simply FIFO.

The fact that they’re trying to get people to increase trade volumes while being stuck to one very limiting tax strategy is bad.

If you’re buying stocks you want options and only having FIFO is not a good option
There is no interest without risk.

I suggest Iranian, Argentinian bonds if you really want to get that blood flowing.
They were also down yesterday during the market's rally. https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/robinhood-ou...
Store updates without any package updates also go through the standard review process now. Why can’t this aspect be automatic? Just check for abusive text and let us publish.
Live tracking of all emails candidates are sending on Super Tuesday
Australian Associated Press to Close in June
Because other brokers also offer commission free investments now.
You should probably freeze your credit card before someone spot the one screenshot you didn't know about
>- Run a jpeg to pdf tool.

ImageMagick. convert *.jpg out.pdf
Mortgage rates track more closely to 10 year Treasury notes and not by the Fed's discount rate based on my findings of late and tracking mortgages over the past few years.

The Fed funds rate doesn't really do much to near-term mortgage rates (at least it hasn't to me, as a consumer). The market dip in Treasuries (openly traded) depressed yields which drove mortgage rates much lower before the fed acted at all. Lower rates allows buyers to purchase a lot more home than they otherwise would have which has a good chance of being higher than any rise in the market price - especially for less frothy areas.

If you're talking about prices going up as institutional investors buy up property obviously disregard the above as it's a different dynamic.
US supply chains and ports under strain from coronavirus
But 'FreeBSD Ports' are not 'FreeBSD' itself.

Title was clear to me - yes, perhaps more clear as you say it though.
Are you open to doing more of this? Trying to do the same thing but I’d rather have an expert do it and focus on the app.
The WHO Report on Covid-19
It's a shame. I was rooting for Robinhood, since they really did disrupt the brokerage industry. I suspect two days in a row of this will be a death knell for them.
Robinhood has the worst customer service and security. My account got hacked, I changed the email, phone number and enabled 2FA and it got hacked again. I was trying to resolve it for a month.
I really don't see why anybody would use Robinhood instead of an actual brokerage, now that all of them are free.
First off, we shouldn't settle for shitty software, ever.

Second, now your investment might be small, if it grows, and represents a portion of your savings you might not be as delighted as today, to see them being offline during such a busy day.
invest in a new innovation that cures or mitigates covid-19, or cash and take your lumps. Money is a shared delusion; you can't force it to grow or retain value. Enjoy the net win factoring in the last 10years.
> Check your sources for that Chernobyl estimate. It comes from the European Greens

Nope. You may think to the TORCH report. This report is another one. Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the...

Some think that the UN is always right and without any bias. I don't. That's exactly my point here: there is no consensual way to assess nuke effective victims.

Don't try to confuse us by pretending that a nuke civilian program doesn't help nations trying to build a nuclear weapon. That's the root of Iran's current pertinent project, and "Many UN and US agencies warn that building more nuclear reactors unavoidably increases nuclear proliferation risks" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-use_technology#Nuclear )

Don't try to confuse use with "not so dangerous after a few hundred years" while all pertinent experts and legislation, for example in France and the US, require that a waste repository must hold it safely for 1 million years, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...
I came here to recommend magna-tiles. My son is 9 now, and he still plays with them on a regular basis, and his friends do as well when they come over. He knows what a cube looks like spread out in two dimensions, and a number of other shapes as well. They're just plain fun to play with they, make a really satisfying sound as they snap together, and it's not a big deal when your creation collapses every once in a while.

A simple microscope is amazing to a young kid as well.
Well that's not what the former ECB chairman Mario Draghi thought about it. According to him they were a success ..
See e.g. http://www.ekathimerini.com/245837/article/ekathimerini/busi...

But even mr. Draghi might agree that right now the ECB is pretty powerless, given that it's rates are already below zero.
"point gains" is a vanity metrics. Percentage matters
Only because the toolset is artificially restricted for ideological reasons.

Fiscal responses (having the government spend actual money, either on things like infrastructure it by just handing it out to the population, which will then largely spend that money as they see fit) rather than monetary policy responses (reduce rates and hope that people will borrow more) are known to work well in most cases.

The Corona virus situation is slightly different than the financial mess of 2008 because it involves actual potential supply constraints. This means that a higher rate of inflation may have to be accepted temporarily. But inflation has arguably been far too low for far too long anyway...
The anti-cancer protective effects of metformin would appear to be due to some other mechanism than reducing blood sugar levels.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6497052/
The entire point of housing policy at the local level, where it matters, is to make housing more expensive because people's wealth is in their homes and they're relying on housing prices to rise steadily. Renters have less political power.
Get this book and do some of the activities in it, there's enough that it should last for the next 5 or so years too.

https://www.amazon.com/Science-source-fascinating-projects-a...

I had a copy given to me by a teacher when I was 7, and I think with parental guidance you could do some of the activities with toddlers.
The World Health Organisation Is Now on TikTok to Bust Coronavirus Myths
Very interested to see this as I was about to work on the same thing!
This reduces the interest on your mortgage
BentoBox Hiring Engineers (NYC Startup)
Trading app Robinhood experiencing ‘major outage’ for a second day amid heavy volume market action:

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/03/trading-app-robinhood-experi...
There seem to be economic ways to help curtail it though.

- sick pay for hourly employees for next year

- backstop airlines, event planning and travel businesses in some capacity

- offer Netflix rewards for vaccines, testing methods or other applicable things

- cover cost of insurance for massive testing
I spent a couple of years in AAP's newsroom (from late 2014 to early 2016), as a project manager for a software house in Europe implementing an open-source CMS and integrating with existing systems. Many fine journalists, but the writing was already on the wall. The news of this agency's closure is a dark and bad thing on many levels.
.. or Picasso Tiles, these are made out of colorful transparent plastic,
have magnets on sides and nicely connect into fences, cubes, domes. There's starter set with a wheeled platform.

Another nice detail is combining the colors to yield another color from the set.
That's a bit revisionist in every sense.

https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2005-11/msg00888.html
Trading with < $1000 is an utter waste of your time. Interactive Brokers has a $10k lower account limit for your own good.
I dont have much to add I’m afraid (feel free to downvote me) but I’m quite intrigued of the HN reaction to this thing. The smartest people in the world (kind of) are also just scared I guess. The usual coolheaded rationalism seems for the first time skewed towards ”its bad I just know it”. I look at the numbers and still cant quite understand what they’re seeing that I dont. I guess its the fear doing it, because we really dont know, and thats just plain scary. And maybe a tinge of satisfaction to be part of this huge drama plays a part too :)
The weirdest thing about us is most likely the fact that our moon is almost exactly the same size as our sun (relative to distance).
This is unrestrained capitalism's natural progression. Just look at the Guilded Age. Capitalism increases the total size of the pie (GDP) but at the same time actively shifts its concentration more and more towards the top (those who already have ownership, instead of those who simply work). Without balancing mechanisms keeping that new wealth distributed, this is simply what you get.

After the Great Depression, and then doubly so after the rise of Communism as western countries were trying to keep their citizens from having any reason to go down that path, we had a golden age of capitalist societies that also had appetites for social investment. With nothing over the past 50 years really keeping that a priority for the rich, we've started sinking back into a pre-depression structure.

A more thorough analysis (which has been posted on HN before I think): https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-how-capitalism-needs-refo...
Radical transparency yet a lot is censored? :-) Nice concept but if the aim is to just document your ideas and travels why not just a plain blog or website? What do random screenshots bring to the table, or a list of all locations on your mobile device, that a deliberate, structured blog post can't?
To a retail investor who just wants to buy some ETFs and shares of AAPL to get their feet wet, none of these things matter, so this doesn't really answer the question.
Hardly. I've maybe had to do that 5 times in the last...10 years?

And I split my time between Arch, CentOS & OpenBSD. The vast majority of things these days are packaged in a useful way. There's also flatpak and similar now.
For those saying the Fed is running out of ammunition, study what the Bank of Japan has done.

It owns close to 80% of the Japanese ETF market currently, with no end to the expansion of balance sheet in sight.

After buying long treasuries, it's not unreasonable to imagine the Fed buying stocks, either individual issues or ETFs. The President would be for it, and it would be hard to drum up any opposition to it in congress.

Not only that, but rates on long treasuries have stayed negative for long periods of time in other countries. It's an open question how negative long treasuries can go, but the evidence suggests we're not even close to the limit.

Recessions are politically unacceptable in today's world. Buy stocks. Buy treasuries. Do so with wild abandon, because the Fed has your back. Just watch out for the moment when the whole thing jumps into reverse and no amount of market manipulation will stop the bleeding.
> That doesn't apply here.

So long as the appearance of inflation never occurs.
Thank you. Most advertising does nothing. I'm sick of people lazily assuming that people that don't vote the way they do must have been manipulated. It is a self-defeating idea in the first place.

By the way the Cambridge analytica data was incredibly similar to something that I used working for a democratic campaign in 2014 midterm elections.

Trump and brexit both won with voters due to the fact that we have for years had policies which benefited the financial and managerial classes over the working classes. These policies created a higher aggregate GDP but did so while concentrating it in the hands of the urban and managerial classes. This is a little bit more complicated than just saying they stole the election by manipulating rednecks. Which is why so many people believe it.

I continue to be astonished by how few people in the community of software engineers understand the countries they live in. If you live in London go to northern England and look around. If you live in San Francisco go inland and take a look at what it looks like when a factory shuts down.

Trump doesn't have the answers to these problems, but he was the first politician on the right to admit they exist. Sanders on the left was routinely squashed by the post Clinton DNC, which traded in supporting unions for the professional and managerial classes.
are you saying this in respect to GCC or in regards to commercial compilers, or both?
I think any age-appropriate "building blocks" toy is an excellent STEM toy.
You can't expect people to be experts in everything.
MuPDF and XPDF can do that by selecting the text with the right mouse buttom.
I haven't looked into the technical credibility of this at all [EDIT: I should have more strongly indicated my doubt here], so this isn't any sort of condemnation on my end, but I thought the Leap Day theory was interesting:

https://twitter.com/jtech63/status/1234600045787394048
I just installed a Tushy and let me tell you, it takes some getting used to. Especially when the water is very cold.
> thirteen years of beginner experience

My God. I'd love to learn more about your background. How, if you've worked in web development since 2007, consider yourself a beginner?
Analysis and disclosure of the CIA's cyber arsenal
Exactly. If this wasn't persecuted the message would be "yeah, screw people over and ruin the swiss reputation, we don't really care". Now even if the evidence isn't court-proof, or it's not possible to attach it to specific people, it still shows that things like this won't be ignored.

If I was responsible for selling rigged encryption equipment, I'd be wary that this might backfire on me - even in a decade or two.
I immediately got a browser popup from the site to install an esoteric "Kai Elvin" app (classy) but not before I got to see a thumbnail of a naked guy shaving, private bits barely covered by a bathroom sink (even more classy).
> cover cost of insurance for massive testing

how about just massive testing. no insurance necessary
The Fed is independent of the Executive except at appointment time.
Mass hysteria is making coronavirus worse than it is
What does "secular" mean to you?
A fiscal stimulus? Yes, let's go even more into debt than we already are.
For many years I had a cronjob configured to take a full screenshot once an hour during business hours on my office workstation. Nearly 20k in total, before I left that position. I still have them. It's sometimes quite amusing to scroll through the old ones and gawk at how things were and how I did things 10+ years ago.
What hypothesis are you testing?
I highly doubt anyone with a portfolio worth $1000 or less knows or cares about things like loss harvesting.
at the risk of getting into a political debate on the internet: I hadn't heard this. Do you have any sources backing up this claim?
Real Truman Show
192 PCIe Gen4 lanes in 2P platforms - looks like they're optimizing for next-gen storage bandwidth or potentially GPU / TPU integrations. This could be interesting from a company that's been busy working on their B-to-B sales, hopefully solving for problems that cloud platform providers actually have.
Disagree; you are best off if the economy is growing and doing well. Stocks being cheap is only secondary.
Who could have known that using debt to purchase back stock for the purposes of artificially increasing company value without building value would cause a crisis?
The Impact of the Coronavirus on Software Valuation Multiples
BTC.
I use Automatic Screenshotter on my work pc to capture a screenshot every 15 seconds. I currently keep about a year of screenshots.

We do a lot of consulting and I move between clients many times a day. So I keep the screenshots to be sure we are billing correctly. And also it comes in handy if there's every a question about billable hours.

I thought it would be fun to make movies out of it, but it only becomes interesting when I work on one thing for extended periods of time. I just move between windows far to often for interesting videos. But when I'm nose down developing, it's relatively neat.

edit: I'm not revealing this to the world. But I'm not afraid of higher-ups coming across this. I work pretty damn hard.
> It's as if MacOS decided to stop shipping bash by default.

They switched from tcsh to bash, so it's not out of the question.

edit: looks like tcsh is still available, but not the default.
You are right -- the GPL has been enormously important to the free software movement. I (perhaps wrongly) interpreted your post as being anti-permissive more than pro-copyleft. My apologies!
Investing under $1000, especially with commission-free trades, is a good way to learn the basics mechanics of stock trading.
Bowing to pressure from King Trump.

Edit: Trump has loudly and consistently attacked the Federal Reserve for scheming against him and trying to sabotage the economy, something completely unprecedented considering the Fed is famously intended to be independent. He ratcheted up these complaints even further since the outbreak of Convid-19. Then, the Fed takes the unusual step of cutting rates between sessions (for the first time since the start of the Great recession) despite a strong economy.

Edit #2: Now Trump has lashed out again, calling the Fed's move insufficient.
If you believe the market is overpriced you could consider investing in long term put options.
I'm going to flag this (hopefully that's the same as report)?

It's pretty irresponsible to publish this if you haven't:

a) Checked ALL the screenshots yourself

b) got permission for all the PII (names, mobile numbers) of everyone in your screenshot.

Should be removed until such time as that's established.
I'll bite. How can you tell?
> If stock prices are permanently lower

The only way that can happen is if the economy is permanently less productive. There are things that can make that happen (climate change, for example) but the corona virus is not among them. Fear of the virus is causing vastly more damage than the virus itself. The virus itself is mainly killing old, unproductive people. I don't want to minimize the severity of the problem or the emotional pain of people who have lost loved ones, but in terms of long-term economic impact the corona virus is really not a problem.