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Electricomics: Open source comics creation toolkit - rkda http://electricomics.net/ ====== rkda Github repo's rather bare right now though. Still waiting for the release [https://github.com/Electricomics/electricomics](https://github.com/Electricomics/electricomics)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Google Blocked in Mainland China - tshtf http://www.google.com/prc/report.html ====== jaaron It's not actually blocked! It's a problem with Google's reporting. ~~~ bcl explain... ~~~ Charuru [http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/29/google-confirms-were-not- cu...](http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/29/google-confirms-were-not-currently- blocked-in-china/) ------ moultano At least they aren't redirecting the dns to baidu . . . ~~~ snprbob86 Since you are being down-voted, I should point out that this actually happened: [http://techcrunch.com/2007/10/18/baidu-hijacking-google- traf...](http://techcrunch.com/2007/10/18/baidu-hijacking-google-traffic-in- china/) ------ fredleblanc Regardless of my opinions on whether China has a right to block things or not, I'm going to say that I'll wait for a week to see if this is actually a huge blockage of Google's apps or if this is just "a bad day for Google in China." If you look at all of their reports, there are some days that things seems more blocked than normal. (Check out May 26 and June 18.) I'm not sure if this is just bad data getting into the system or what — maybe when it was time to ping services they couldn't. For the most part things go back online the next day. This _does_ seem to be the first time things are in the red, but I think it's too early to assume everything is gone for good. ------ neozhang It is not. from Beijing. ------ sandipc any particular reason why today? ~~~ cdibona It's Thursday! ~~~ fungi tiz friday in china ~~~ cdibona Damn! ------ libpcap Again, Google wants to operate and market in China without complying to Chinese law. ------ libpcap Google wants to exist in China, but without complying to their law. ------ hugh3 I would love to see Google start directly and openly campaigning for the downfall of the Chinese one-party state and the introduction of democracy. Not only is it about damn time _somebody_ with deep pockets did, it's practically demanded by their obligation to maximise shareholder returns. If the servicing of one billion potential customers is incompatible with "Don't Be Evil" due to the existence of the Chinese Communist Party, then the Chinese Communist Party needs to be swept out of the way so they can reach those customers. The US Government is too chickenshit to stand up for democratic principles when it comes to China, but Google has nothing to lose any more. I say go for it. ~~~ kiba _The US Government is too chickenshit to stand up for democratic principles when it comes to China, but Google has nothing to lose any more. I say go for it._ I don't care about democracies, but I do care about _liberty_. ~~~ hugh3 As I see it, democracy is both a means to the end of ensuring (relative, in fits and starts) liberty, and an end in itself. Nobody can rightfully claim to be entitled to make and enforce laws for a group of people unless they were chosen by that group of people. Claiming otherwise is like claiming that person A is entitled to own person B as a slave just because person A is a relatively good slavemaster. ~~~ kiba _As I see it, democracy is both a means to the end of ensuring (relative, in fits and starts) liberty, and an end in itself. Nobody can rightfully claim to be entitled to make and enforce laws for a group of people unless they were chosen by that group of people. Claiming otherwise is like claiming that person A is entitled to own person B as a slave just because person A is a relatively good slavemaster._ This is a fundamental disagreement in political philosophy and let we disagree on that. Mine is based on the concept of the sovereignty of the _individual_ , not the group. To add a little bit information, I am an individualist anarchist. Thus, I place my hope in things like pananarchism(seasteading), or agorism, anything, other than trust people with political power. It might not work out, but I developed a deep distrust for democratic institutions. ~~~ SoftwareMaven I think a deep distrust of democratic institutions would be the _best_ thing democracy proponents (and those living in democratic governments) could cultivate.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Official: 'We see the possibility of a meltdown' - stretchwithme http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/03/12/japan.quake.nuclear.failure/?hpt=T1 ====== chasingsparks I think catastrophes demonstrate interesting properties of human communications. All of these reports on imminent meltdown are plausible to people ignorant of the plant's design and even those who are experts on nuclear energy . The levels of distrust and recognition that there is probably noisy communications increase simultaneously. From a sensationalist viewpoint, the plausibility and terrifying nature of the consequences are seductive, so these stories are widely read; from the expert standpoint, seeing a system with so many redundancies in such a wounded state calls into question just how many things might be going wrong. At this point, unless your dealing directly with the reactors, your really in the dark and if your one of these people, you're focused on preventing further degredation, not managing the message. Even for organisations that do manage the message based on a team of experts (e.g. nuclear regulatory agencies) things move at such a frantic pace, things are wrong by the time you say them. Regardless, it really does show that people like watching car crashes. ------ pyre It's unfortunate, but not surprising that the headline is 'meltdown a possibility,' ignoring things like: > "What we have seen is only the slight indication from a monitoring post of > cesium and iodine," he said. > "We have some confidence, to some extent, to make the situation to be > stable status," he said. "We actually have very good confidence that we > will resolve this." ~~~ scott_s People who may be held responsible for Very Bad Things tend to downplay the probability that the bad thing will occur and express confidence that they have it under control. That an official admits a meltdown is possible _is_ the most noteworthy thing. When I run what he said through my public-official- Bayesian-filter, what comes out is "There is a non-trivial chance a meltdown will occur." ~~~ foobarbazban This particular official (or his office, honestly) doesn't have much to gain from downplaying the possibility of a meltdown. He is part of the regulatory agency, not the plant management. They are already going to have to revamp all of their regulations with regard to coolant water pumps (whoever screwed up there, be it someone writing regulations or an inspector, is already in trouble). ~~~ Klinky Your second paragraph contradicts itself. ------ Getahobby This may be a gross understatement but this is going to end very badly and probably have negative repercussions long term for nuclear energy in this country. ~~~ jpeterson Not sure why you're being downvoted. This is a valid concern, and it could make a very serious impact on our energy strategy for a long time. ~~~ icarus_drowning Because it isn't certain that it is going to end badly. And because it is axiomatic that if it does there will be major repercussions on the power industry. If it ends well, it might have positive repercussions-- "even in the worst case, these are still safe" will probably be the line. ------ dreamux English is almost certainly not this official's native language. Miscommunication of technical matters/terms is common in these situations. ------ Tycho Is this the 'ultimate test' for nuclear power? And if so, and if the Japanese escape unscathed from radiation, will the global anti-nuclear contingent give credit where credit's due? ~~~ OpieCunningham And the inverse, if the Japanese don't escape unscathed from radiation, will the global pro-nuclear contingent become anti-nuclear? I suspect the answer to both questions is no. Firstly because unscathed is vague: 0% radiological impact? 3% impact? How much damage is allowed in the definition of unscathed? Secondly because the true impact will be debated, challenged and studied for decades. And thirdly because the pro contingent will insist that with knowledge gained from _this_ failure, we _now_ have enough knowledge to safely implement nuclear power. ~~~ Tycho Well I was thinking in terms of 'completely unscathed' as in the failsafes etc. ultimately did their job and the radiactivity was contained (or kept within normal operating limits). If there is 'some' fallout, then of course the debate will rage on indefinitely. Which is why I did not suggest the converse position that you put forward. ~~~ OpieCunningham I'm not sure I follow. Are you suggesting that if there is no fallout, the anti-nuclear contingent should accept they are basically wrong, but if there is fallout, the pro-nuclear contingent should continue to fight (i.e. the debate will rage on)? Why should one outcome produce a change in behavior from one crowd, but the opposite outcome should not produce a change in behavior from the opposite crowd? ~~~ Tycho If there is 'some' fallout, then it will be on a spectrum which will be interpreted very subjectively by different groups. However if there is 'no' fallout, then there is no spectrum, and no room for subjectivity. Those against nuclear power would have to admit this whole episode is _not_ ammunition for their argument. Until 'the results are in' there will continue to be a lot of nuclear apocalypse sensationalism, I'd just like to see it retracted afterwards when/if it turns out to be unfounded. Put another way, we already know that it's possible to have nuclear accidents, what we don't know is whether it's possible for nuclear facilities to withstand major disasters with no such accident occurring. If that's the outcome, then to ignore it would be sort of like a type 1 error. ~~~ OpieCunningham I'll put aside the fact that before you had even posted your original comment, the situation was already at the stage of debatable fallout. Until the results are in there will also continue to be a lot of nuclear-is- perfectly-safe sensationalism (in the past hour I saw a couple of them on CNN). Do you expect and/or hope for retractions on those wildly optimistic statements by "experts" if there is "some" fallout, as you'd like to see in the reverse scenario? If so, I suspect you won't get them, though it does not really appear you'd be looking for them anyway. Additionally, it's not clear to me why one case where there are no adverse affects (again, ignoring the fact that there are already adverse affects) is of monumental importance (a type 1 error), but the numerous cases of historic failures are not valid considerations in the same degree. Put another way, why should the hypothetical of a positive outcome of this situation have any more weight than the negative outcomes of numerous previous situations? ~~~ chc Anecdotes of how things happened long ago _are_ less relevant than this incident. With the methodology you're proposing, we'd have to conclude that modern medicine doesn't work because medicine had such a horrible track record in the Middle Ages. Also, "safe" is relative. Walking down the sidewalk in a good neighborhood is generally considered safe, but it is dangerous relative to sitting in a fortified bunker. If the impact is several orders of magnitude less than we'd expect from, say, coal, then we can say this was very safe indeed. ~~~ OpieCunningham How convenient! If the situation hadn't turned out bad, we could have rejoiced the safety of nuclear power. Since things did turn out bad, we'll just brush it aside as ancient technology, nothing to see here, move on. Except there are numerous "ancient" plants in full operation today. Except Japan is one of the most organized, efficient and technically advanced societies on the planet. Most importantly, you fail to address my actual question: why should nuclear doom sayers have to recant their concerns in the event they are mistaken but nuclear cheerleaders do not in the event they are? You and the OP wouldn't answer that question because you have no logical answer. ~~~ Tycho We aren't dodging your question, we just think you should be able to grasp the point without further explanations. Firstly, it's not a true binary choice, it's not containment vs non-containment - it's containment vs. vastly varying degrees of non-containment. Secondly, non-containment scenarios will likely settle nothing (unless we have multiple 'mega-Chernobyls' or something, in which case then the proponents of nuclear power should admit they were misled) - the damage caused will be disputed, the value of the damage caused will be disputed, the appropriateness of the safety plans will be disputed, the correctness of the emergency operations will be disputed, the analogy to other plants not at risk from tsunamis/quakes will be disputed, the effectiveness of newer designs will be disputed, it will just go on forever because there will be no significant result. But if the situation blows over without a large number of people being affected by harmful radiation, if the failsafes work despite multiple catastrophes (which almost certainly wouldn't threaten most plants), then the doom sayers really should admit nuclear safety is feasible, if they want to maintain any integrity. ~~~ OpieCunningham _the doom sayers really should admit nuclear safety is feasible_ No, they really should not. Firstly, you've moved the goal posts - now safety should be accepted up until a "large number of people become affected by harmful radiation". Originally, your goal posts were set to "Japanese people escape unscathed from radiation". And I suspect the definition of "large" will shift accordingly so that you can maintain your view that nuclear plants are safe enough. You had to shift your goal posts because the glowingly optimistic view from your OP hasn't survived reality. Secondly, if that glowingly optimistic view from your OP had actually come to pass (and now we're operating in a fantasy world), why would anyone consider it more than anecdotal or luck or a combination of factors that are not easily quantifiable and therefore hardly reproducible? And lastly, once again you failed to address the point I have been making. Your position applies equally to both sides. You can't cherry pick and maintain any integrity. It's not that I believe failure in this situation is ultimate proof of the failure of nuclear energy - but it is your OP that success in this situation is ultimate proof of the success of nuclear energy. Your premise is wrong, independent of whether your conclusion is wrong (which I believe it is, but not ultimately because of this situation). ~~~ Tycho I said 'if the Japanese escape unscathed.' If you're wondering where the 'goalposts' are, it's approximate to disasters that could happen at any other power plant: ie. workers injured/killed, maybe a few civilians hurt. That seems objective enough to me when you're comparing the safety of different power sources. Obviously there can be no 'ultimate, ultimate proof' unless we get a direct line to God, but if you're going to be the person standing on top of the hill saying 'I don't _care_ if you can show nuclear plants can withstand unheard of earthquakes and tsunamis, I don't _care_ if there's 50 years of further research and improvement on those standards, I _still_ wont believe nuclear power is safe. In fact there's pretty much _nothing_ that would sway my assessment of nuclear safety...' then I don't see why anyone should take you seriously. edit: oh, and let's just wait for the clear light of day before we decide what exactly 'the situation' really is/was. I've seen many conflicting and retracted reports so far ------ ccarpenterg Nuclear meltdown: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_meltdown> ------ mrleinad We need the Japanese Miracle, right now.. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_Ghost_in_the_Shell#Jap...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_Ghost_in_the_Shell#Japan)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt by Umberto Eco (1995) - jboynyc http://interglacial.com/pub/text/Umberto_Eco_-_Eternal_Fascism.html ======	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Asking for Feedback: Twitter for Voice Recordings - Shane1 I have an idea for an app: Twitter for voice recordings. Instead of tweets, you record a sound byte.<p>Questions:<p>- Would you find sound bytes from your friends (or public figures) interesting? Would you be interested in posting sound bytes yourself?<p>- Does anyone know why Twitter chose video (for Vine)? They must have explored the opportunity for voice.<p>Things I'm aware of:<p>- Voice is harder to consume than text, images, and soundless videos. You need to put in headphones, or wait until your alone to play it on speakers.<p>- There are dimensions to voice than don't come across in text: tone, inflections, pace, personality, etc. ====== imtu80 I can browse through the texts and quickly read them compare to clicking on individual audio which I believe will be time consuming.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Booklistly – Broaden your mind with inspiring nonfiction books - schuettemarkus http://booklist.ly ====== ramkarthikk I like this because there are less books. Too often I get bogged down due to too many books suggested by Amazon or any other site. Less books = good. Also, for the existing books, you could probably list the top people who recommend it as a line. That adds more credibility. You can use something like = favobooks.com for that. ~~~ schuettemarkus Hey Ramkarthik, thanks for taking the time to check out Booklist.ly and for the awesome feedback! Please do submit your favorite nonfiction books, as I'm always looking to add more to Booklistly and my own reading list.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Penn study demonstrates wearable sensors to detect firearm use - ErikRogneby http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-09/uop-psd090314.php#.VAd-5MM7gh8.hackernews ====== ErikRogneby "It turns out that gunshots are highly distinctive events when viewed from the perspective of the human wrist," \- one of those things that you probably don't need a research grant to figure out... Interesting approach regardless.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
A.I. As Talent Scout: Unorthodox Hires, and Maybe Lower Pay - denzil_correa https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/06/business/economy/artificial-intelligence-hiring.html ====== foldr I'm bowled over by the AI that can identify a programmer with a masters in statistics as a potential data scientist.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Are you exposing users real names with FB Connect? - kapauldo Some of my users want their FB names to be visible only to their FB friends, and to everyone else, they want to appear as an alias. This requires me to do a complicated/expensive friend maintenance, as I have both FB users and non-FB users. Is anyone else dealing with this and if so, how? ====== omrani We've looked into it, it's something our project plan. We've got to use accounting to do it, so users can register using their fb accounts and that gets tied together, from then on all users have an alias which is what is displayed as default. But our plan is that once the alias is displayed we do the second request to see if the viewing user is a friend, if they are we update the name... does this make sense? 1) Link account to fb 2) Always assign and display alias 3)Check if viewer is a friend a)if friend update alias to show real name b) is not a friend, don't update! Good luck working with the facebook api! :P	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: I am extremely alone - alone2018 Though I am lucky to have decent social skills, and seemingly to outsiders I would have lots of friends, I have no one who I feel shares my interests / who I want to spend time with. Admittedly, I have uncommon & very geeky interests, but knowing that doesn't solve my problem of finding someone to share those with.<p>I don't know what to do with this feeling of loneliness. Aside from meetups, and social apps, I've even gone to the extent of creating a website to attract like-minded people and started Facebook & Reddit ad campaigns pointing people to it. No luck. I suppose I could spend more money on it, but, feels futile.<p>This loneliness is crushing, and frightening - I have to fight against thoughts of a lifetime of loneliness. I even ended an otherwise healthy romantic relationship because I felt detached from the person.<p>Any thoughts or ideas?<p>31/m/SF ====== tomhoward I feel you, I've been in a similar place. My own path to a better place came from realising that I was expecting too much of other people to fit into my ideas of what others could do for me, and becoming better at meeting people half way and becoming as much a giver as a taker. The fact is that we live in a society and for that society to function, everyone needs to give and receive in roughly equal measures over the long term. If we're too isolated in our own idiosyncratic interests and values, it's possible we're not playing an adequate role in contributing to the wellbeing of those around us. At least that was the case for me. The solution for me was to embark on a long-term process of deep self- discovery, emotional healing and ego-balancing, which I've been doing for about 7 years and am continuing to undertake. Slowly but surely, all aspects of my life are getting better, including both my ability to connect with the more "normal" people I encounter in everyday life, as well as connecting with the more idiosyncratic people on the fringes. Feel free to contact me (email in profile) if you want to know more.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Inside Amtrak's Plan to Give Free Rides to Writers - danso http://www.thewire.com/culture/2014/02/inside-amtraks-absolutely-awesome-plan-give-free-rides-writers/358332/ ====== bujatt I think this idea is simply brilliant. Transitional spaces, like being enroute or at an airport are the best spaces for work that demands concentration e.g. writing. Would sign up for such a thing tomorrow. Also related: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6697416](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6697416)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: What is best tool for technical interview tests? - 8draco8 My company will be interviewing people remotely. I am responsible for doing technical tests for the candidates. I would like to use an existing tool for that initial test. Something that will give a time restricted test to the candidates with questions that need to be answered and some small coding challenge that can be done all in browser. We will be looking for frontend developers so technical interview will contain HTML/CSS/JS coding challenges.<p>Can you recommend any existing tools? ====== tfehring HackerRank [0] is one option. I can’t vouch for it personally - in fact, I only discovered that it exists yesterday via YC’s podcast - but it seems like exactly what you’re looking for. [0] [https://www.hackerrank.com/work](https://www.hackerrank.com/work)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Does having a family makes you less of a startup material? - k7d There have been a lot of advices that you should do startups while you are young and single. I've been single for quite some time. Now that I have a year old kid, I noticed a strange thing - it feels like I'm getting done more than before.<p>Not quite sure why, maybe it's because having a family makes your life more organized? ====== justinchen I recently had a daughter and I've found that there's 2 things going on: 1) I'm generally more focused and efficient when I work since time is more scarce. 2) I'm more motivated now since I've got the little one depending on me. The instinct to provide for another is a powerful one. ~~~ happyrichpinoy My first baby is on the way...it scary to think that another life depends on me now but it also drives me to optimize my work so that I will have more time to spend on things/persons/events that really matter. ------ kls With a family, freelancing and consulting is your friend. It allows you the flexibility in schedule to pursue ideas and to work with other individuals that are in the start-up arena. You meet a lot of young companies in that line of work and you see a variety of problems. If you find a group who has an idea that you like but they cant provide a paying gig yet, you can scale your freelancing to provide the necessities while allowing you the free time to commit to a project. I freelance and consult for 3-4 days of my week, take weeks off at a time and still do well over 150k a year this gives me time to peruse the back log of ideas that me and two of my close friends have. I have 4 kids, a wife and grandparents that I take care of and I can say without a doubt that I have never felt more secure in my life than when I started freelancing. Well technically that is not true, I had a moderately sizable exit from the sale of a travel company that it gave me a nest egg, but even if that was not there, I would feel more secure than someone else making decisions about my future. Point being, get out of your day job and into freelancing first. Get to where you are working your 40hr week and another 40hr steady freelancing, this will allow you to build a nest egg while you are making the transition, then when you are getting 40hr a week freelancing and it is steady dump the day job, then start scaling your hours back freelancing until you meet an equilibrium of money to free-time to pursue projects. ------ LeBlanc I'll point you to some articles written by people more experienced than I at this: anti-family: - Jason Friedman [http://www.humbledmba.com/the-drag-coefficient- scoring-syste...](http://www.humbledmba.com/the-drag-coefficient-scoring- system-how-to-de) Pro-family: - Vivek Wadhwa <http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1431263> [http://techcrunch.com/2009/09/07/when-it-comes-to- founding-s...](http://techcrunch.com/2009/09/07/when-it-comes-to-founding- successful-startups-old-guys-rule/) Hope you find these helpful. Good luck! ~~~ kls _1 point: For every 5 years after the age of 20 - Jason Friedman_ The mortgage, loans, and kids I agree with. But there are many wives who not only support their husbands ambition but actively encourage it. If a wife is willing to endure the Ramen years then it is of no concern. As for the quote that I referenced from Jason Friedman above, well he just entered ass clown status in my book. Not only is that blatant age discrimination, but there are a lot of 30 somethings and 40 somethings that have a wealth of experience that a younger person has not experienced. I have had three successful exits through my 20's now 30's and I would say without a doubt my current me is 10:1 a better individual to have on a start-up team over the 23yr old me that had his first exit (that guy was scared shitless the whole time) or the 28hr old who had his second (that guy was too cocky). The 32yr old me played it just right and the X yr old me assumes he will have it down to a blueprint after the next one. ------ exline I think it is a risk factor. I was almost not hired at a startup specifically because the owner was worried about the level of risk I was taking with wife/kids/house etc. That's a good boss to have, one looking out for me. Things turned out fine. Personally, it does alter the level of risk I'm willing to take. Pre kids, I'd be willing to risk a lot more. Having kids makes me value my time which does force me to be focused. I'm willing to work long hours, but I split the time up. I work until 4-5 and spend time with the family. If there is work to be done, I'm back on after the kids are in bed. This could present a problem at some startups. ------ dryicerx It doesn't make you any less of startup material at all, it just puts you in a different environment. The original advice comes because when you're young and single, you are without obligations, nothing to lose, able to take more risks, being naive (which can be good and bad), and being agile both location wise and time wise. Said that, if you do have a family, I think that has a set of it's own advantages such forcing you to manage time better, likely to go after ventures that are more likely to succeed, and having a family behind you for support. ------ Charuru Maybe it's because you're older and is able to manage your time more maturely. Maybe having people that depends on you makes you more responsible.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
On the Cleverness of Compilers - nkurz http://alexey.radul.name/ideas/2013/cleverness-of-compilers/ ====== corysama I've worked with a sufficiently smart compiler before: The HLSL (shader) compiler for the Xbox360. It truly is a grand experience. The general recommendation was to not try to outsmart the compiler. Write everything as straight-forward as possible. Just watch out for work done on values that influence the result but aren't really necessary (ex: multiplying by an input that will always be 1). There were several occasions where I'd write out some elegant math and think "Yeah, that's pretty. But, it would run 30% faster if I transposed everything. But, then I'd have to hand-interleave the internals of all these functions..." Then I'd check the assembly output and Bam! the compiler was already producing exactly what I had in mind! The downside was that it took several minutes to compile <100 line sources that produce <1000 instruction programs. That's with a language completely specialized around small-scale linear algebra that maps very directly to hardware that is completely specialized around small-scale linear algebra; with branching highly discouraged, all functions calls expected to inline away completely, no recursion, no pointers, no heap, no imports, tiny-if-any headers and a tiny standard lib. It's my understanding that most of the smartness of the 360's HLSL compiler came from using O(n^3) analysis algorithms that were simply impractical at a larger scale. Our game had thousands of shader programs that were mechanically specialized for different situations. As a result, recompiling all of them after changing the tiny shared header took many hours. "Thankfully" the C++ of the game took so long to compile that we were already using Xoreax Incredibuild to distribute the compilation. We adapted that setup to distribute shader compilation and brought the turn-around time down to 15 minutes by leaching cycles from several dozen of my co-workers' machines. ~~~ foobarbazqux Most optimizing compilers use data flow analyses which are cubic, so it's not just that it's O(n^3). [http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=788019.788876](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=788019.788876) ~~~ larsberg You can do pretty well for analyses where n is the number of variables instead of the number of program points / expressions. In those cases, the typical trick is to shorten the height of the tracked lattice, as you only get in trouble in a few places. To make that concrete, control-flow analysis (which answers "which possible functions could I call through this variable?") is cubic in general. But if you cut it off to only tracking N separate functions and then giving up to ANY when you hit that N, you can cut off the few bad cases (e.g., all of the bindings to the function passed to map, which you will probably just inline later anyway) that generate the cubic behavior and keep your execution time well-behaved, even for whole program compilers, at very small loss of precision in practice. ~~~ foobarbazqux If your language has pointers or aliases, precise call graphs are exceedingly expensive (for large programs), because you need a precise pointer or alias analysis. Do you have a link to a publication about the technique you describe? ~~~ larsberg There are meatier technical presentations around about the formal bounds, but I always recommend Manuel Serrano's early work, which is much more accessible than more modern presentations (my own included): [http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=315891.315934](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=315891.315934) A good survey of many of the tricks used in practice (and the formal techniques, as well) is available in Jan Midtgaard's tome, which was finally published in the last year or so: [http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2187671.2187672](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2187671.2187672) ~~~ foobarbazqux Cool, thanks. I wasn't clear whether you were talking about functional programs, but I can believe that it works for them. ------ ef4 Part of the reason compilers don't do really thorough analysis and optimization is that it makes the compiles take a long time. But we can make that not matter if we rethink the relationship between the compiler and the programmer. What if you got the _first_ version of your binary very quickly, but then you could let the compiler run arbitrarily long, and watch it continue to produce better and better versions? What if the compiler could compile not just source code, but _diffs_ of source code? It could apply your one-line change without redoing its exhaustive analysis of all the things that you couldn't have effected. Compilers try hard to avoid whole-program analysis, but I think that's misguided. Spend the cycles, they're getting cheaper all the time. If you can update your analysis incrementally as the programmer works, you're golden. ~~~ Dewie > Part of the reason compilers don't do really thorough analysis and > optimization is that it makes the compiles take a long time. Compiler flags are all you need to solve that, no? ~~~ wtallis Only in the strictest sense. The mere presence of the switches does nothing on its own to improve the workflow. You need a development environment that is aware of why you're running the compiler: basic syntax checking, deeper static analysis using expensive heuristics, unoptimized code generation for quick turnaround time on correctness tests, or optimized code generation for performance testing. ------ omn1 > Doubtless the first difference that jumps out at you is that one of these > programs is written using a beautiful, familiar surface syntax that makes > you feel right at home, while the other uses an ugly, foreign notation that > makes your eyes glaze over. I love that sentence. A sharp-witted summary of the recent _imperative_ vs. _functional_ discussion. ~~~ dandrews "One is a genius, the other's insane." ------ oh_teh_meows For people who are interested in learning about compiler optimizations (they are a wonderful area of research in their own right!), I'm throwing out a list here so you can google about them (if you know more, please reply to this comment! I'd love to learn more about them :D) Expression related optimizations: Constant Folding, Constant Propagation, Global Propagation, Strength Reduction, Common Subexpression Elimination, Partial Redundancy Elimination, Induction Variable Elimination, Reassociation Loop related optimizations: Loop Invariant Code Motion, Loop Peeling, Loop Unrolling, Loop Distribution, Loop Autoparallelization, Loop Fusion, Loop Fission, Loop Interchange, Loop Tiling/Stripmining, Vectorization, Scalarization Memory/cache related optimizations: Cache blocking, False Sharing Elimination, Structure Peeling, Structure Splitting, Array Contraction, Multi-dimensional Array Dimension Reordering Control flow related optimizations: Code block re-ordering (by frequency), Branch prediction (by static analysis/feedback guided), Code hoisting/sinking (to optimize CPU pipeline), Automatic Inlining, Tail Call Optimization Code generation related optimizations: Register allocation (np complete), Peephole optimization, Superoptimization (no one really does this yet, but cool nonetheless) Analysis (interprocedural/intraprocedural): Alias Analysis (flow/context (in)sensitive), Points-to Analysis, Escape Analysis, du chain Analysis, Live Variables Analysis, Memory Access Pattern Analysis (to guide memory layout optimizations), Available Expressions/Copies Analysis, Loop Dependency Analysis, Control Flow Analysis, Dominator data flow Analysis, Globals Analysis Miscellaneous: Static Single Assignment, Data Flow Analysis (in, out, transfer, meet!), Worklist Algorithm (for Data Flow Analysis!), Symbolic Execution/Abstract Interpretation Writing straightforward code is the best thing you can do for a compiler. They can tell exactly what you want to do, and do their best to generate the fastest/most memory efficient code possible. Help compiler help you! Also, compiler usually comes with several different levels of optimizations. And you can tune each one of these optimizations, like you would with a racing car. Read the manual! ~~~ pg Please don't use all caps for emphasis. ~~~ oh_teh_meows I'm sorry it bothered you. I'll edit them. ~~~ nsmartt [https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc](https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc) ------ AlexanderDhoore What ever happened/happens to Stalin [1], the scheme compiler? That's supposed to be a real Smart Compiler, right? It's so mysterious... It's developed by this one guy. The only thing you can find on his website is a tarball [2]. It's like programming mythology. [1] [http://community.schemewiki.org/?Stalin](http://community.schemewiki.org/?Stalin) [2] [https://engineering.purdue.edu/~qobi/](https://engineering.purdue.edu/~qobi/) ~~~ rayiner It's a test bed for aggressive control-flow based optimization a for Scheme. It's not a practical production compiler--too slow and requires whole program analysis. ~~~ jevinskie Right, the qobi doesn't even use that scheme in his AI class. He uses another scheme that he wrote. =) ------ tachyonbeam Compilers _are_ getting smarter over time. Better analyses and clever optimization schemes are being designed and implemented. In my opinion though, as a compiler writer, the best route is to make languages easier to analyze. Things like purity and referential transparency (e.g.: as seen in Haskell) make code analysis and transformation much simpler. They enable things like pattern-matching type transformations on code. If the compiler has to reason about pointers, invisible side-effects and alias analysis, it greatly limits the kinds of things that can be inferred about a program. ------ btilly This article was worth it to me if only for the following observation: _And there we have a clue as to why, in modern computing, modular code is not high-performance code. The very advantage of modularity is the source of its performance cost: modularity is the ability to do things other than what you did. Modularity is the ability to reuse the same idea in many different ways and in many different places._ ~~~ marijn See also Rust's emphasis on zero-cost abstractions [1]. The current compiler doesn't emphasize specialization (though it does specialize generics), but the ability to abstract in source code without leaving any trace in the actual compiled binary is a design goal. [1]: [http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Rust](http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Rust) ------ ScottBurson The first encounter I had with automatic differentiation was in a simulation language called PROSE, circa 1974. I never actually used it, but I came across a manual for it, which I found quite fascinating. As I recall, it ran on the CDC 6000 series -- at the time I was doing numerical physics on a 6400, and PROSE was being presented as an alternative to the ubiquitous FORTRAN. PROSE seems to have been completely forgotten; I can find nothing on it now. But I distinctly recall that it did AD. Everything in computer science was invented before 1980 :-) ~~~ fsck--off This page should keep you entertained for a while: [http://metacalculus.com/prose.html](http://metacalculus.com/prose.html) It links to several manuals (most likely including the one you read) and has links to papers about PROSE and it's predecessor, SLANG. ~~~ ScottBurson Oh wow! Thanks!!! ------ srean Wow thats quite coincidence, but before I get in to that, I like the the tone on HN much much better today. There were several language related posts, all were reasonably well received. None with the frequent hostility that I have come to see on HN in the recent past. No one, came here to piss and rain smugly on another's voluntary piece of work with "Repeat after me, no one gives a flying f%$#! about your language, where are the libraries, where are the users. Dont waste your time in pointless excercises". That said, the coincidence that I mentioned is entirely personal. After a hiatus, I am getting my toes wet again in this language that I find quite interesting. Its a whole program analyzed, aggressively inlined, functional, but not purely so, ML like type-checked and type-inferred language with generics that interacts quite effortlessly with C++, without the need for any ffi like library. It has coroutines and preemptive threads. I think of it as something that does the same to C++ what Scala does to Java or F# does to C#. It is really performant and achieves the speed via aggressive inlining, tail calls, whole program analysis and what can be called opportunistic but indeterminate laziness. I have not quite grokked its model yet, one thing that I want to get a handle on is to be able to reason what triggers garbage collection and what doesn't. According to the author of the language, garbage collection can be mostly avoided, but I am not yet good at this aspect, but its just been a few days that I have actually used the language (as opposed to reading about it). Its statically typechecked but feels unusually flexible in one aspect: one can move functions and types around the between and across different translation units freely (for refactoring) without the need for forward declarations because the linkage semantics are permutation independent. The language that I am talking about is Felix [http://felix- lang.org/share/src/web/tutorial.fdoc](http://felix- lang.org/share/src/web/tutorial.fdoc) [http://felix- lang.org/share/src/web/nutut/intro/intro_index....](http://felix- lang.org/share/src/web/nutut/intro/intro_index.fdoc). It has been discussed on HN a few times and I have mentioned it a few times myself just because I find it really interesting, not because I have a dog in the fight. The language author does frequent HN but very very rarely. ------ andrewflnr Personally, the way I want to write that program involves destructuring. All the cons, car and cdr crap makes my eyes glaze over almost as bad as the js. More on topic, it seems like at least in the example given, inlining of functions followed by standard optimization would give good results, and I thought we were pretty decent at inlining. Is that just because the example is so simple, and the point is that that ability needs to be more general? ~~~ agumonkey I don't know if the author stopped at that level on purpose. That's basic SICP abstraction layer. And I believe types and then pattern matching was another abstraction on top of that to get literal symmetry, but to my eyes at this point it's two faces of the same coin. ------ tomp > Doubtless the first difference that jumps out at you is that one of these > programs is written using a beautiful, familiar surface syntax that makes > you feel right at home, while the other uses an ugly, foreign notation that > makes your eyes glaze over But I'm not sure all of us would agree which program is beautiful/familiar and which is ugly/foreign... Edit: I love LISP, but I love math more. ~~~ srl I read that as somewhat tongue-in-cheek. I mean, I'm a lisp fan too, but it's not like the syntax is beautiful. (It's just "not as bad". Or that's what we tell ourselves.) ~~~ ced I read it as intentionally ambiguous. ~~~ Leszek It's almost certainly intentionally ambiguous, and therein lies the joke. ------ 6ren Well. This made me install Firefox 23, to get asm.js. I got a speed-up of x5 on his Mandelbrot code. Wow. (I had Firefox 20 before. I checked a few websites and didn't notice any speed-up in general.) PS: of course you can write modular code in JS too, with a complex lib etc (maybe not quite as nice as scheme). Would it be compiled to be as efficient? ~~~ yoklov Not unless the compiler did some magic to remove the heap allocations, which iirc none of the JS engines do yet LuaJIT, however, will. see [http://wiki.luajit.org/Allocation-Sinking- Optimization](http://wiki.luajit.org/Allocation-Sinking-Optimization) . I believe the Dart VM does this too, so it might not be far off for JS engines. Still, other semantics might slow the code down compared to ASM.js, but the heap allocations will be the biggest. ------ Someone I know little of the field and nothing of the state of the art, but wonder how smarter compilers would combine with the statistical analysis that profile- guided optimization, the JVM and branch prediction logic do. Do the improvements they bring up add up perfectly, or is smarter compilation more effective for dumber CPUs/runtimes? ------ fmax30 Interestingly ,I get 0.86 mflops/msec on my 2.1 ghz sanybridge processor on firefox and 0.307 mflops/msec on chrome. ~~~ marijn If it's a recent version of Firefox, the "use asm" in [1] probably explains the difference. [1]: [http://alexey.radul.name/ideas/2013/cleverness-of- compilers/...](http://alexey.radul.name/ideas/2013/cleverness-of- compilers/mandel.js) ------ tel How does DVL compare with optimizations GHC runs? Especially re the ad library? ------ Dewie I'm actually a little disappointed that a mature compiler like javac doesn't seem features such as escape analysis and being able to compile Enum types to primitive values (compiling them to a single byte would be enough for most constants). I might be wrong about these specific cases, but my overall impressions is that compilers like the main one for Java aren't very adventourous when it comes to compiler optimizations. They sometimes seem pretty primitive, even. It's understandable if optimizations would add a lot of time to the compilization, but I don't see why it can't be added as compiler flags at the least, to be used for shipping software. I have never hacked compilers myself, so I might be totally off the mark on all of this. And the specific things I've mentioned might be much harder than what they seem at a cursory glance. But this post is more of an inquiry into the matter than a definitive statement about the status quo. ~~~ ahomescu1 Keep in mind that javac is only half of the compiler, the JVM is the other half. I'm not sure you need escape analysis when you compile down to JVM bytecode. Could you show an example? ~~~ Dewie I'm talking about stuff like having a method where you make an object - let's say comprising of two ints, a coordinate - and figures out if it can instead solve the same problem with, say, just making two stack-allocated ints instead of one heap-allocated object. Maybe the programmer wanted to make an object since it looked more readable than making two ints. ~~~ kevingadd Java does that, it just happens in the JVM during jit ~~~ azakai Yes, that is the pretty standard scalar replacement of aggregates optimization.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Foundry Group Invests in Orbotix - iPhone Based Toys - replicatorblog http://www.foundrygroup.com/wp/2010/10/foundry-group-invests-in-orbotix/ ====== atomical While I like the initial concept perhaps the founders could tell us something about the vision for the company. Will the products be limited to simple objects? ~~~ replicatorblog Its hard to tell if they see the future as being a toy/game company or if this toy/game is a proof of concept for a broader API between the physical and digital worlds. My hunch is the latter, as it better fits in with Foundry's "Glue" theme and this doesn't seem like a very compelling toy. ~~~ atomical One of Foundry's current investments is a toy company. <http://www.smithandtinker.com/> It's a bit of both? The product and the glue? ~~~ replicatorblog They also invested in a company called Sifteo that is a Toy/Web combo. They are one of the leading investors in the kid tech market it seems. Smith & Tinker actually pivoted away from toys and are now focusing on micro- transaction based web games. ------ jbail Does it go any faster than that? ~~~ orbotixian Yes, much faster!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Edward Snowden leaks: NSA 'debates' amnesty - nexttimer http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-25399345 ====== spodek > _The US National Security Agency is considering offering an amnesty to > fugitive intelligence contractor Edward Snowden if he agrees to stop leaking > secret documents, an NSA official says._ That means as bad for the NSA as giving amnesty would be, they consider remaining documents _worse_. That means however bad you've found the revelations so far, expect worse to come. As for Snowden, I presume he's smart enough to realize amnesty from the NSA leaves dozens of other government entities or just angry people to get him, whether legally or illegally, who already flout the Constitution, lie, illegally detain and send people to countries that torture, etc. ~~~ dopamean How does the NSA offer amnesty anyway? Is it not the Justice Department that would bring charges in this situation? It's like the family of a murder victim offering amnesty to the murderer... it's not really up to them. ~~~ sneak By that logic, James Clapper would be charged for lying to congress by now. "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." ~~~ freerobby What makes you think the Justice Department wants to go after Clapper? ------ kordless > "This is analogous to a hostage taker taking 50 people hostage, shooting 10, > and then say, 'if you give me full amnesty, I'll let the other 40 go'." No. This is analogous to YOU taking 50 people hostage, shooting 10 of them, and then someone coming to you and telling you to stop shooting people or they are going to tell on you if you don't release the rest of the hostages. > What do you do? You let your hostages go. ~~~ fit2rule Damn straight! NEVER forget that people like Alexander are professional murderers, liars, and plain: THUGS. They have been in the business of oppressing their fellow human beings for decades. They are masters at owning the battlefield - which means they will frame their argument in the very substance of the TRUTH, twisting it to suit their intended purpose - in this case, to gain lost ground in the "honor" and "righteousness" department - two vile substances which propel many a killing, murdering, destruction machine. Turn the table back on Alexander, always. Whenever he is given credence as the victor in the moral argument, remind the victim of his propaganda that _they are responsible for the continued actions of this government if they agree with its statement, its message, and its positions on its crimes against humanity._ Until Americans realize they _ARE_ responsible for the machine they have created, and under whose labour they live their very protected lives, we will get no true change. ------ JanezStupar Is NSA going through 5 stages of grief ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%BCbler- Ross_model#Stages](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%BCbler- Ross_model#Stages))? Reading this article seems like this is making me feel like they are at stage 3. ------ wil421 This is so stupid. Snowden hasnt leaked documents since he initially gave it to the first few reporters. Those reporters have stated from the beginning it was in their hands now to determine what is reported to the public. > This is analogous to a hostage taker taking 50 people hostage, shooting 10, > and then say, 'if you give me full amnesty, I'll let the other 40 go'. What > do you do? That is absolutely absurd. No lives are put in harms way like they could've been with the unredatcted wikileaks data. I believe the reporters are being cautious on what type of data they post. ~~~ drzaiusapelord What exactly determine's the press's release schedule? Ratings? Milking? Ad conversation stats? No idea why everything hasn't been released yet. It also isn't bulk data like the wikileaks fiasco. Looks like NSA program specs. Redaction can't be taking this long. Funny how Snowden is now caught between a dictator in Russia and the Western for-profit press. Probably not a good place to be. I imagine he's smart enough to have an "insurance" file which means we'll never see the real dirt on the NSA. ~~~ ds9 The slow release schedule keeps the info in the news throughout the series. If it were dumped all at once, it would be "forgotten" by mainstream media by the time writers would have time to sort thru it. ~~~ drzaiusapelord Can you cite this? Who is making this call? Greenwald? Did he specifically claim this methodology? I see an ironic lack of transparency here. ------ mattgibson That's a pretty extreme step. Given that there have been stories saying that the NSA have not been able to work out exactly what he took from them, this implies that they are afraid of what he has yet to reveal. We know that he deliberately didn't release material that was specifically going to endanger individuals or operations and that newspapers have been even more careful to only reveal generalities. This suggests that there is no need for the NSA to worry about stuff that is not suitable for publication. Which implies that there are other stories which are a really big deal, which both he and newspapers would be happy to publish, but which they have not published yet. But what? I can't imagine what else they could've been up to on top of what we've learnt. Maybe I just have incredulity burnout. ~~~ kbenson I imagine the NSA also looks quite extensively at worst case scenarios. Without knowledge of what he has, assuming he has some fairly damaging material he has not seem disposed towards revealing (ignoring the even possibility he has even more damning material he _is_ willing to release), they still have to worry about future changes in his reasoning on what's acceptable to release, and third parties without such compunctions (or evenmies) getting access to the data in some manner. With that in mind, the best manner to recover the data completely and securely may be to get him back on their side. ------ Havoc This just comes across as weak/desperate on the NSA's side. If I were him I'd tell the US to shove it. They made him intentionally stateless and pressured other nations to make seeking asylum difficult - that to me is a low blow when it comes to treating whistle-blowers - even by US standards. ~~~ Shivetya This is nothing more than a trial balloon floated by someone in the administration. They want to gauge public opinion. Frankly it would be stupid to grant him amnesty because it will pretty much open the door to copy cats. They can simply wait him out, Russia only does this when it has value on the international stage, its quite evident Putin has little respect for the President. ~~~ Havoc >Frankly it would be stupid to grant him amnesty Not so sure. Remember the article 2/3 days back about how the NSA has no real idea exactly what kind of info he has. This move strikes me as a shallow attempt at damage control. Or more accurately an NSA person thinking "lets rather not find out how deep this goes". Regarding Putin - yes no doubt its a pure PR exercise but I'm thankful that there is some kind of force to balance it in this case. As I said, a nation using citizenship & asylum interference to specifically target one person is deeply immoral in my books. If Putin is the one calling them out on that sht then so be it. ------ mtgx Is Alexander seriously comparing this to him taking 50 hostages and then _killing_ 10 people? And this is the same Alexander who helps CIA kill that many people per day with his mass surveillance and "signature drone strikes" \- right? Just checking to see if he's the right guy to question Snowden's morals. ~~~ joezydeco No, you read the analogy wrong. Alexander is saying "He's already committed a crime and is promising to do another. How do we give him a free pass on the first crime if he promises not to do the second?" ~~~ asn0 I can't get past the irony of Alexander's moral indignation. ------ dregstudios The dystopian fantasies of yesteryear are now a reality. We’ve allowed the coming of an age where the civil liberties our forefathers fought so hard for are being eroded by the day. Freedom of Press, Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Assembly are mere ghostly images of their original intent. We’ve woken up to an Orwellian Society of Fear where anyone is at the mercy of being labeled a terrorist for standing up for rights we took for granted just over a decade ago. Read about how we’re waging war against ourselves at [http://dregstudiosart.blogspot.com/2011/09/living-in- society...](http://dregstudiosart.blogspot.com/2011/09/living-in-society-of- fear-ten-years.html) ------ Tosh108 I'm not an expert on US law. But why does the NSA have the authority to grand amnesty? ~~~ sneak The same way they have the authority to tap everyone's phones: they are one and the same with the unchecked military power of the United States with carte blanche to di whatever they want from spy on ex-lovers, to imprison people in solitary for years before trial, to lie openly to congress without repercussions. ------ midnitewarrior If Snowden takes the deal, then he looks like the guy they are trying to paint him to be - a traitor that can't stomach permanent exile. If he takes the deal unconditionally, he will have accomplished nothing other than isolate the United States from the rest of the world. Laws will not change, the people will not gain control of its government's activities. Snowden can take the deal under one condition only - and that is that the NSA stops their improper practices under the supervision of Snowden. Of course, this will never happen. Any interest Snowden expresses in a NSA deal will only be used to discredit him. ~~~ leokun He's already said he would return if granted amnesty. I agree with nothing you've said. ------ dobbsbob Snowden has 'insurance' that will leak if they kill him and they probably figured out what it was and would like it back. Most likely plans to the NSA death star ~~~ kevando Where have you heard this? ~~~ dobbsbob [http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE9AO0Y120131125?irpc...](http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE9AO0Y120131125?irpc=932) Also just because the NSA gives snowden amnesty doesn't mean UK won't extradite him for espionage. I'm sure they will play that game to jail him some how for life ------ venomsnake Snowden cannot possibly stop leaking the information. It is in journalists' hands already. ------ sneak There will be no deal for Snowden. The headline is vastly misleading. ------ FreeKin256 Sounds like they are attempting to make the conditions of Mr Snowden's asylum in Russia null as he will "no longer be under threat" back in the US. ------ nexttimer In plain English, this NSA is saying: "If we 'consider' this, it's because the most important information is still not out there, yet." So it's basically counter-productive, unless your goal is to get the public behind the NSA in order to hang Snowden one way or the other. ~~~ rhizome _unless your goal is to get the public behind the NSA in order to hang Snowden one way or the other_ My opinion is that this is exactly it. Once Snowden is here, the "amnesty" will end just as soon as they can hang a false statements charge on him, then parade him in handcuffs or on trial to discredit everything associated with him, including Greenwald et al stories, after which they can continue their business as usual. Make no mistake that Clapper, Alexander and Holder would LOVE to make a Rosenberg out of him.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Carina – High-Performance, Instant-On Docker Containers - eddywashere https://getcarina.com/blog/announcing-carina/ ====== jdub I'm surprised and a bit disappointed that this new platform still exposes users to the idea of a container host. In Carina lingo, you have to create a "cluster" and choose the number of "segments" in it. Joyent's Triton avoids this completely: Their whole data centre is a Docker "host", and you never have to care about it. The way it should be. (I'm not paid by Joyent, nor am I a customer -- I just like what they've done to push the model forward.) ~~~ jnoller This is honestly fantastic feedback and spot-on for the level of abstraction I want (and will) aim for. This is an early Beta, so things like this are top of mind. ~~~ girvo That's excellent to hear, because I believe that Docker/containers will truly take off once developers can treat them as the "highest level" of computation; ie. no hosts needed, containers are all that are worked from! ~~~ nzoschke Containers are here to stay and almost certainly will be the new abstraction of computation. My big question is around a service like AWS Lambda. Is that not already the logical conclusion of container based computation? If magic units of computation can run instantly on demand, what more do you need? No hosts, but also no OS images, and no specific containerization tools! ~~~ IanCal It's a massive shame that PiCloud went down as that had containerized environments, extremely fast startups and auto scaling. It was one of the few things I've used that really solved my small-scale data processing problems simply and cheaply. > If magic units of computation can run instantly on demand, what more do you > need? Some control over flow, scaling and batching wrap everything up for me. Startup times for my code are non-zero even if the environment is, and adding on queues with a "batch grab" means I can scale things far more sensibly (I can cram a lot of stuff into a single matrix mul if I can pull 100 items at a time from a queue). I really, really miss picloud :( ~~~ jnoller We rebuilt picloud as a foray into the getcarina.com space - [https://github.com/cloudpipe/cloudpipe](https://github.com/cloudpipe/cloudpipe) we're going to be bringing that back now that carina is landed. ------ callahad This looks fun. Any word on ballpark pricing or the duration of the beta? (or at least a lower bound on anticipated pricing -- will there be plans that are suitable for hobbyists who are otherwise on DO's $5-10/mo tier.) ~~~ phymata [https://getcarina.com/docs/faq#how-long-will-carina-be- free-...](https://getcarina.com/docs/faq#how-long-will-carina-be-free-when- you-start-charging-what-will-it-cost) ------ knite How does this compare to Joyent Triton? ~~~ herpityderpity Poorly. ~~~ abrookewood Explanation required ... ------ nikolay This is a joke! I can't use my Rackspace account as I have 2FA enabled and Carina does not support it! I can understand a legacy app not supporting 2FA, but a brand new one - this is a fiasco! There are things that you can "leave for later", but security should be a top priority task for a cloud provider! ------ shabinesh Interesting. No luck for past one hour, I am facing a i/o timeout for any docker command. Trying to figure out. ------ whalesalad At first glance this looks incredible but what's with the naming of a "segment" ??? ~~~ wmf This is a concept that doesn't even exist in most other systems, so there isn't an agreed name for it (we call it a "slice" in Spyre). It's similar to a Kubernetes "pod" but not quite. ~~~ jnoller Exactly - we really struggled with this. A node (for example, when doing a Docker info when having $SWARM hosts) implies to the user physical isolation. As a distributed systems nerd, I pushed for "anything that doesn't make a contract it's on a different machine". Segment, slice, pod, chunk, block - something other than implying the isolation and therefore fault tolerance of the overall system. [https://getcarina.com/docs/faq/](https://getcarina.com/docs/faq/) has more ~~~ whalesalad This level abstraction seems unnecessary. We need to just let-go of the concept of physical or virtual hosts. A machine should boot and join a cluster, advertising its capabilities (ssd drives, gpu's, enhanced networking, it's availability zone or region, etc...) and you should never need to think about that stuff, period. I don't care how many devices/segments/nodes/slices/dynos/widgets are in my cluster. I care that I have X GB of total memory and Y cpu's. I want to check a box to make an app or service highly available (on more than one node, and in more than one zone) and Ronco™ set it and forget it. Everything else is just noise. I love the ideas behind Kubernetes and Fleet/CoreOS (and this) but everyone is SO excited about these low level technologies that have yet to be composed into beautiful experiences. A tweet from Kelsey Hightower sums it up perfectly: It's going to be nearly impossible for people to evaluate and chose a container management platform during the gold rush. [https://twitter.com/kelseyhightower/status/65918202241030553...](https://twitter.com/kelseyhightower/status/659182022410305536) ~~~ jnoller I actually completely agree, and that's where I want to head with Carina. That user experience is the end-game. ------ haosdent not open source? ------ beefsack People using stupid captioned images in their blog posts and technical announcements are a real turn off for me; I'm not sure if people are trying to be funny or edgy but it comes off really lame and childish. Feels like being in one of the Reddit default subs. ~~~ voltagex_ Eh, the corporate world is bland and grey. I'm glad if a company does something different.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Om Next - hadronzoo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByNs9TG30E8 ====== akilism Yeah, that was a great talk. I really want to try out Om Next. I've been building a bunch of stuff in Om lately and the Falcor/Relay/GraphQL stuff is really going to be great to have at my disposal. The clojurescript compiling clojurescript stuff looks great too.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Simulation of the world's universities in a single unified graph - okram http://thinkaurelius.com/2013/05/13/educating-the-planet-with-pearson/ ====== emp_zealoth I will probably get down voted for this, but when did a monopoly that makes you pay ~80 £ (if i remember correctly) for an obligatory book is a good guy now? ~~~ okram Ha. The world works in mysterious ways -- and organizations are large with many heads. The ideas I see emanating from the Pearson team that Aurelius works with are along the lines of -- Why are there brick-and-mortar schools? Why is education just a short period of your life? Why does a teacher only teach < 100 students in one session? Why do tests still exist? Why can't software be the "office hours" that helps struggling students get back on track with the concepts at hand? Many of the algorithms were are working with them go into the arena of computationally supporting education. "If you want to understand X, given your personal knowledge graph, you will first need to understand Y." "The graph is detecting that student A is struggling with X concept." "Teacher, given the knowledge of your incoming students, you should focus more on Y concept." "Teacher, no tests needed, here is a ranking of all your students based on their comprehension of the material." ... hopefully the 80£ (and 80 lbs) textbook will be a thing of the past. ------ espeed _A 121 billion edge graph is too large to fit within the confines of a single machine. Fortunately, Titan/Cassandra is a distributed graph database able to represent a graph across a multi-machine cluster. The Amazon EC2 cluster utilized for the simulation was composed of 16 hi1.4xlarge machines...The 10 terabyte, 121 billion edge graph was loaded into the cluster in 1.48 days at a rate of approximately 1.2 million edges a second with 0 failed transactions._ How many machines can you add so that Titan continues to scale linearly? And have you run the benchmarks on Google Compute Engine to compare? ------ okram Note that the codebase used in this benchmark was just released -- Titan 0.3.1. <https://github.com/thinkaurelius/titan/wiki/Downloads> ------ qwerta Amazing. What is the cost of renting such cluster? ~~~ okram I forget the exact cost, but it was, along with various dry runs at a smaller scale, around $30k.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Apple hardware priced so high that no one wants to buy it? It's 1983 again - doener https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/01/21/apple_lisa_at_36/ ====== rbanffy My experience is that they last longer than the average Intel PC and, therefore, it's reasonable to expect to pay more for the convenience of not having to upgrade as frequently. There used to be a furniture brand in Brazil that had good looking stuff that lasted about half as long as the good brands, but cost about half as much. Buying it meant you would redecorate twice as frequently, which is, for some people, a plus.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Would you switch off a client’s website if they refused to pay you? - elorant http://designispolitical.com/business/would-you-switch-off-a-clients-website-if-they-refused-to-pay-you/ ====== curtisblaine I would do whatever is in my power to legally make their life miserable and drive them out of business.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How do you pay a pirate's ransom? - soundsop http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7752813.stm ====== kiba I heard fish trawlers regularly stole ton of fishes from local African fishermen, forcing them to turn to piracy. It's a Tragedy of the Common thing. ~~~ 9oliYQjP I also heard that the French, British, Americans, Chinese, and well... pretty much all the nuclear club were using that area off Somalia as a dumping ground for nuclear waste. When the tsunami hit, the locals discovered this was happening when all the waste washed ashore. That, allegedly, helped spark the piracy. None of the western media outlets report this but the likes of Al Jazeera have been reporting it long before the piracy situation even started making mainstream headlines in the west. There has even been a UN special envoy tasked with investigating the situation. EDIT: I knew an Al Jazeera link would go over here reallll well LOL, so here's an AFP link from Google about the UN investigation: [http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5gVV_gQDsp1m8v7nPcumVc5Mc...](http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5gVV_gQDsp1m8v7nPcumVc5McYV-Q) ------ ckinnan The international community's willingness to pay these ransoms is making the problem far worse... ~~~ brent Should we let our peers who are delivering food aid die instead? ~~~ ajkirwin Unfortunately, yes. ~~~ rudyfink Yeah, perhaps. It's just a ton of money to tempt people with, relatively speaking. Putting it all in comparison with a table of purchasing power parity ( ttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita ) is revealing. The average Somali income is apparently 600$ per year. So an average 2 million $ ransom is 3,333 times the average yearly income. Using the same chart, 3,333 times the US number (47,500) is 158.3 million $. According to the article below, a low level pirate makes 10,000 a year, which puts him 17 times above average. Using the same US comparison this gives him an income of 807,500. Edit: Updates after reading [http://www.marinebuzz.com/2008/11/20/somali- pirates-have-lav...](http://www.marinebuzz.com/2008/11/20/somali-pirates-have- lavish-life-style-or-rot-in-jail/) . Adjusted the ransom to be the average of 2 million and added comparison of low level pirate. ~~~ electromagnetic If I could make ~$800,000 a year for doing some morally duplicitous acts, well I'd be earning more than your average lawyer so I guess there'd be a lot of people who wouldn't have a problem doing it. I can see where these Somali's come from, I likely can't make it through the 10 years to become a lawyer or doctor. However, I could probably pick up a rifle, be good enough of a shot to actually be capable of doing the job and probably wouldn't hurt any more people than if I was a slimeball lawyer or incompetent doctor and would make a lot more money doing it. It's quite depressing that shooting someone can become an acceptable way out of the society you're placed in. Be it a third world nation (piracy) or a first world nation (going postal). ~~~ gaius _It's quite depressing that shooting someone can become an acceptable way out of the society you're placed in_ You have to remember that these pirates are only really interested in ransoming cargoes - they don't set out to kill the crews like pirates back in the day. ------ Luc It is interesting they seem to practice something akin to the 'pirate democracy' of 17th and 18th centure pirates. The old pirates also gave every man an equal vote, regardless of previous rank, and the captain was elected by the crew. ------ gruseom According to an interview I just heard on NPR, you stuff a million dollars in a plastic tube, attach a parachute, then fly over the hijacked ship and drop it. Pirates bring bill counters along on raids, so don't think you can shortchange them. Also, make sure during negotiations that the pirates have it all worked out about how much each of them gets: you want a nice orderly transition, free of inconvenient last-minute violence. ------ cake Why don't they catch them when they leave the boat (easy to track with some drones) ? How do they leave ? I couldn't find any answers to that in the article. ------ mynameishere Seriously, just have the US/UK/French navies make a joint agreement to immediately destroy any hijacked ship and the problem will solve itself immediately. ~~~ electromagnetic Unfortunately, I rarely agree with harsh military action, but when it comes to matters like this the non-military action is largely too complex to consider. We cannot guarantee any money paid to a country like Somalia in aid or whatever would prevent piracy. The best solution would be to launch attacks on the pirates supply ships. Sadly the cost of keeping a naval ship in the region is likely too high, especially with aircraft carriers being ridiculously large and little to no capability on the small scale. A craft capable of carrying 2-3 aircraft would be capable of hitting these pirates where it hurts, but a ship carrying 24 aircraft and 5,000 people isn't cost effective to have sit in an ocean for a handful of attacks. This problem is likely only to get worse, the next carrier in the US fleet will have ~75 aircraft, which if following current metrics will mean a crew of ~15,000. Honestly, if this situation continues, I wouldn't doubt if companies started spending the money to defend themselves. ~$16 billion is lost in piracy a year, which is enough to buy 3 Nimitz class aircraft carriers and their full compliment. ~~~ Xichekolas Current Nimitz class carriers normally carry 48 combat aircraft and 16 support aircraft, and have a crew of 5k-6k (2480 in the air wing, the rest as ship's compliment). The upcoming Gerald R. Ford class will carry more aircraft, but only require about 4600 crew, and be roughly the same size. But quibbling aside, there is no reason you need to send a carrier group to deal with this situation. The (already dispatched) USS Boxer is an amphibious assault ship that supports helicopters and VTOL aircraft (including Harrier II, SuperCobra, and Sea Knights), which will be more suited for dealing with pirate mother ships and coastal bases. It has a crew of roughly 1000. ------ frisco You don't. ------ TweedHeads With a nuke. ~~~ ams6110 Actually I think a couple of ounces of lead would suffice.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
HTTPS adoption has reached the tipping point - dhotson https://www.troyhunt.com/https-adoption-has-reached-the-tipping-point/ ====== lucideer This is very misleading, because it's overwhelmingly skewed toward large websites run by Google, Facebook, etc. The statistic is that 50% of page loads are HTTPS - the majority of those page loads are going to be visits to a very small subset of extremely popular (and well-resourced) sites, so this stat gives no indication that the remaining 50% is or will move to HTTPS anytime soon. The real tipping point will be 50% of unique domains visited being HTTPS. And a more interesting statistic would where that figure is now, and trend data on that. I wonder can that stat be extracted from public Mozilla data... ~~~ saywatnow What this is, is another accidental slide down the slope towards centralisation of the web. Yes, it's easy for a techie to add a letsencrypt cert, but browsing with https-by-default I still hit a _lot_ of sites that lack https - mostly the sort that run with practically zero maintenance for a non-technical business or community. Browsers are going to show scary warnings for these (indistinguishable to the average user from any other warning), and then stop loading them altogether, and the sites will die only to be reborn (if at all) on facebook. ~~~ CharlesW > _What this is, is another accidental slide down the slope towards > centralisation of the web._ Sorry, can you explain? (Not playing "gotcha", I really don't understand.) ~~~ euyyn He means "a small number of websites by big players" vs "a big number of websites by modest people". ------ cyberferret I just upgraded our blog site this week to a new Digital Ocean Ubuntu instance, and used LetsEncrypt to install an SSL certificate on it. I couldn't believe just how easy and QUICK it was! Certainly a far cry from 15 years ago when I used to go through the Spanish Inquisition to get an SSL certificate, not to mention the cost. LetsEncrypt has been a game changer. So too has AWS, with their Certificate Manager. I've been rolling out their own issued SSL certs to our various Elastic Beanstalk instances as they come up for renewal. Saving a pile of money, but more importantly, TIME, doing this. For me personally, that is the tipping point - making SSL installs on server a couple of mouse click and less than a minute. Not surprised that it is becoming increasingly popular given this. ------ ploggingdev IIRC porn sites receive significant traffic and almost all porn sites serve content over http only. The post mentions that https is faster than http and also utilizes resources better than http. Is the statement still valid when streaming video? (Please note that I visit porn sites only to check if it has https enabled or not) ~~~ Ono-Sendai HTTPS is not faster than HTTP. ~~~ erelde [https://www.troyhunt.com/i-wanna-go-fast-https-massive- speed...](https://www.troyhunt.com/i-wanna-go-fast-https-massive-speed- advantage/) This is by the same author, and there are critics that could be made against it. In some cases it is faster it seems. ~~~ Ono-Sendai HTTPS is basically HTTP, on a different port (443 instead of 80), with TLS encryption on the socket connection. TLS encryption adds overhead, it doesn't reduce it. Therefore HTTPS is slower. ~~~ Spare_account Troy's title could be argued to be misleading. The perfomance improvement he's discussing is actually HTTP/2 against HTTP. Typically browsers that support HTTP/2.0 require the use of TLS, so with a little mental gymnastics he's claiming that HTTPS is faster. Edit: Apologies, I agonised over the wording for so long that 4 other people answered before me. ~~~ mort96 What kind of mental gymnastics are you talking about? HTTP/2 is faster than HTTP/1\. In practice, HTTP/2 requires TLS. Therefore, in practice, to get higher performance, you can achieve better performance with HTTPS than with HTTP. ~~~ Spare_account None of what you've said is incorrect. HTTP/2 over TLS is faster than HTTP/1.1 over SSL/TLS. I referred to Troy's assertion that "HTTPS is faster than HTTP", which is at best an incomplete statement and to some people completely misleading. ------ jdiez17 Here's a question: how are captive portals going to present the login site if the user never uses HTTP? I know Android and other mobile OSs probe the network by requesting a HTTP site. On my laptop, I have to load something like `example.org` to get redirected. ~~~ NoGravitas The solution is for captive portals to go away. Captive portals should absolutely not exist. ~~~ guitarbill iOS already prints a security warning when connecting to such networks, my hope is that Apple will simply have phones disconnect from MitM'ed networks in future, breaking captive portals but making the situation right. They only really exist where people have no other choice (e.g. hotel). They're often broken, or unusable on mobile devices with tiny UI. Captive portals are an abomination and misuse of technology, not to mention a terrible user experience. And any brand using a captive portal just diminishes my view of the brand. ~~~ neuland I totally agree that captive portals suck and we should name and shame anybody using them, especially ones that are poorly built. But, there has to be some reason that these exist right? To get rid of captive portals, there needs to be this functionality in the underlying protocols: \- Requiring Terms of Service \- Showing a special site from the service provider (like the page Starbucks takes you to after "Accept and Connect") \- Selecting what kind of connection you want (like at airports and hotels where there's free and paid) \- Login to some system the service provider controls (also airports and hotels w/ paid plans) \- ... and, potentially other things I haven't seen Edit: Somewhere else in this thread, kelleboo mentioned this [0] [0] [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7710](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7710) ~~~ guitarbill > To get rid of captive portals, there needs to be this functionality in the > underlying protocols Not really - I don't think implementing legal considerations into technology is the way to go. Mainly because laws vary by country and laws also change independently from technology. For example, in Germany, EULAs only valid if agreed on at the time of purchase of the goods or service. If presented after purchase, even if you have to click some "I agree" button, they are not valid. (And even then, they can't contradict German consumer law.) I don't believe anybody has sued because of WiFi, but then the question becomes when does service start? When you connect, or when you click accept? Keep in mind that some devices like Nintendo DS' or Kindles can't use captive portals, better implementations of portals recognise these devices and let them connect. In reality, what does the ToS really way, anyway? Don't do illegal stuff - but that's illegal with or without ToS. For free WiFi, you only have X amount of traffic - well, it's free WiFi, there's no obligation for for service. (Put simply, EULAs and ToS' also need to die - but that's a different discussion.) Billing is more interesting. One argument is it's 2017 - should we really encourage billing for basic WiFi when bandwidth is cheap? One solution could be to give users x amount for free, and only if they use all that use a captive portal. It's not ideal, but at least it doesn't happen right at the start. You could also simply have different SSIDs for paid and free. ~~~ neuland > Not really - I don't think implementing legal considerations into technology > is the way to go. I think that's totally fair to say. But just know that the immediate answer from Starbucks or whoever at that point is "Ok, then we'll continue doing what we have to do". With the ToS/EULA, I think it's really a cover-all protection measure. So, if there's something that the user is doing that is illegal, the service provider is not liable for the user. For example, I go to Starbucks and torrent Star Wars; Disney sues Starbucks for facilitating me or whatever. But I think your last point is where the argument breaks down. Yes, WiFi should probably be free at this point. But, there are tons of reasons that are valid (even marginally) someone would want to have someone connect to some website before connecting to the rest of internet. Without providing some way to do that, the terrible hacks will continue. ------ exodust If my little web page containing a few photos of flowers is never moved to HTTPS, is that bad in any practical sense at all? Is there any plausible scenario whereby visiting such a basic site without any forms or data collection over HTTP is in some way a disadvantage to HTTPS? ~~~ caf Sure. A MITM can inject javascript into the HTML the user receives from your site (just like the Comcast bandwidth cap example in the article) that causes the browser to open phishing or browser exploit pages. ~~~ exodust Ok, fair enough. MITM attacks seems to be the consensus and good enough reason to move the flower page over to HTTPS. ------ tobltobs What is the situation with available Adsense ads? Do I still have to except lower inventories of HTTPS enabled ads and thereby less income if I switch to HTTPS? I understand that this depends on the target audience. Did anybody experienced a drop at the beginning and later recovering? ------ Mindless2112 I'll believe we've hit the tipping point when I type "example.com" into the browser address bar and it takes me to [https://example.com](https://example.com) rather than [http://example.com](http://example.com). ------ arbuge For us this came with cPanel started including it by default. All you needed to do was a few lines in your .htaccess to forward all http requests to their equivalent https ones. Almost all our sites except for a few edge cases are switched over now. ------ sp332 It's definitely hit a tipping point for me. I installed HTTP Nowhere a couple of weeks ago and hardly ever run into a site I can't at least load up in the Internet Archive! ------ mzzter Services like cloudflare make it dead-easy to set up https. The more one-click https setups there are the faster we'll vault right over the tipping point. ------ _pdp_ Sorry but I disagree. Please install PanicMode browser extension for Chrome ([https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/panic- mode/lamdafc...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/panic- mode/lamdafciglhnjofdfejeepoemldmblkb)) and try to surf the web for a day. You will know what I mean as soon as you go through this experiment. Disclaimer: I am the author of this extension. I wrote the extension for personal reasons and it is very simplistic in nature. If you turn PanicMode on it will replace every outgoing [http://](http://) url with [https://](https://). It does nothing else besides that and unlike HTTPS Everywhere it has no exceptions list or special handling of the top 100 sites, etc. The site you are visiting should either support [https://](https://) or it will blow up in your face, which is exactly what happens 90% of the time. Edit: Besides just because Firefox is seeing more HTTPS traffic means nothing if all the traffic comes from Facebook, Google, YouTube and a few others. Yes, there is more traffic and yes it is encrypted but does it really say anything about the state of the web? Someone needs to put this data out to make it clear. ~~~ cpeterso "HTTP Nowhere" is a Firefox extension that blocks all non-HTTPS requests. It doesn't try to rewrite HTTP requests to HTTPS, though. [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/http- nowhere/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/http-nowhere/) ~~~ Teapot I can easily configure NoScript to only use HTTPS on, say, ¤.cn . Sites that downgrade-redirects to [http://](http://) gets stuck in a loop. Annoying for everyone, so it raises awareness. The prefs.js syntax is, noscript.httpsForced "¤.cn\n¤.ru\n __*.uk " Edits: ¤ characters are asterisks.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Hyperbrain Owner's Manual - 2. Accept and reject your limitations - swombat http://inter-sections.net/2008/09/01/hyperbrain-owners-manual-2-accept-and-reject-your-limitations ====== Hexstream Weird, I didn't identify myself so much with the "Do you know someone like this?" essay but I totally did with that "hyperbrain" thing, even though they're supposedly talking about the same thing...	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Lose your teeth, lose your mind - mikecane http://www.physorg.com/news191861416.html ====== DrSprout Seems to me they likely have the causality reversed. As your mental acuity decreases, your ability to properly care for your teeth decreases. You forget to brush as often as you should, and so you lose more teeth. Also your brushing effectiveness could be reduced, as evaluating whether further brushing is necessary is not an entirely trivial task. ~~~ Detrus Probably not. I had gum disease and cavities when I was 20 after brushing everyday and using Listerine. Maybe I sucked at brushing and didn't know it, either way my brain got screwed. ~~~ ahoyhere Some people just have weak teeth. You might also have a dietary problem -- or calcium deficiency. There were no women in the study, which is interesting, because women often have huge teeth problems during and after pregnancy. (And breaking small bones!) This happens if their calcium is not managed effectively. ~~~ klochner Clearly we need a test of female cognition during and after pregnancy. ~~~ ahoyhere I suspect you would find many women are mentally impaired during pregnancy, based on my anecdotal experience. The hormones screw up your brain. But, of course, that's irrelevant, since the men who lost teeth in the OP's study weren't tested for cognition deficits the second they lost a teeth. It was an ex post facto observed link --- and they don't know why. So my comment had lots of good sense in it, while yours had none. ------ ams6110 Best thing I've found for oral hygiene is a Water Pik. It will really flush out your gums. Use lukewarm water, tap cold is painful at least for me. You can put some mouthwash it it too if you like. Since I've been using one my dentist has remarked on the noticeable improvement in my gum health. EDIT: This is in addition to regular brushing of course. ~~~ kowen I second (third?) this. You can also use a ViaJet (some people prefer it). You can use salt and/or baking soda as antibacterials in the water you use for irrigation. If you add irrigation to your routine, you may want to switch out dental floss with dental tape and "buff" your teeth (floss:tape as thread:ribbon - buffing with a thread doesn't work too well). Makes a huge difference in the buildup of plaque. Lastly, disclosing tablets or solution (picking one at random from amazon: <http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000W6LW6I>) is not just for kids. Using it for a few weeks or months could help you see where your tooth brushing technique is a bit weak. ------ snth I wonder if high sugar intake could be the common cause for both problems. ~~~ sdrinf Or smoking _cough_. ~~~ muddylemon Or class - which strongly correlates with diet and smoking along with education, mental stimulation through your occupation, medical care, etc. ------ JohnnyBrown How is this anything more than a correlation? I saw nothing at all in support of a causal link. ------ mikecane Dr. Weston A. Price was a big advocate of teeth leading to other health problems long ago. His book at PG-Australia is worth a look: <http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200251h.html> ------ Vivtek Excuse me, I have to go brush my teeth. ------ rsheridan6 It could have something to do with bacteria. If you have poor dental hygiene or bleeding gums, you get bacteria in your blood. This is most known for causing endocarditis (infection of the heart), but who knows what else the bacteria, or the body's reaction to them, could cause? ~~~ adrianwaj Other things I've heard that can cause serious problems are root canals. Once done, they can be a breeding ground for bacteria. I think it depends a lot on how it's done. Also, mercury-amalgam fillings might problematic if somehow they seep into the body. Or, when a tooth is lost, what gets put in its place? ~~~ jrockway _when a tooth is lost, what gets put in its place_ Gold or ceramic: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dental_bridge>	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: For an engineer with 3 years exp, how much is good expected salary? - symbolepro ====== rubyfan Depends on geo, language, domain experience. You’d have a pretty big range anywhere from 60K-110K would be my guess.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
JS Inheritance is awesome, and you're doing it wrong - bitsweet https://coderwall.com/p/sd9lda ====== JacksonGariety I feel like this abuses Object.create. It should be used to ease constructors into being children of other constructors, it shouldn't be used when you only have one constructor. > "So make a constructor, lazy ass." var wizard = { hasMagic: true }; function Wizard (name) { Object.create(wizard) } That is madness, or maybe I misunderstand.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Why African millennials can't get enough of Bitcoin - rb808 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-42582343 ====== rb808 > Finding a job here is almost like a lottery for graduates so Ugandans often > have so-called side hustles. Peace has sold clothes and even got into money > lending. Both failed. But buying cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin appeals to > her because it requires less of her time and there are no upfront costs. Why bother with a job, Bitcoin is so much simpler - just buy and make money!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Requiring users to sign up for free trial. Yay or nay? - jonathan-kosgei We have an API product that has had a no signup or credit card free tier for a while now.<p>However due to rampant abuse (potentially a small scale DDOS) we're contemplating requiring users to sign up to access the free tier.<p>Does anyone think this is a bad idea that might reduce uptake of our API? ====== ColinWright These days, getting an email or other sign-up for something has (at least) two significant factors: * Do I trust you with the data I give you; and * What do I get in return for my data? If you are clear and upfront that the sign-up has been introduced because of lots of bogus accesses, you'll gain some sympathy. But people will still ask both of those questions. If you act in a trustworthy manner, and you provide value in return, then I think it's fine to ask for a sign-up. But you need to gain the user's trust, both that you will treat their data with respect, and that there will be something in return. Exactly how you convince them of those two things is not easy, and effectively "marketing". ------ ocdtrekkie I am a bit surprised your free tier doesn't have a signup. Do you give people an API key, just like, randomly generated on the fly on page load? ~~~ jonathan-kosgei Nope, you can call our endpoint without an API key but you'd be limited to 1500 requests a day. ~~~ ocdtrekkie Oh, another reason I realized you should have registration/people's email: While you wouldn't want to automatically send these people marketing emails without their express interest, you WOULD want to be able to send your free tier users security notices. I don't know which API you are at, but I use OpenWeatherMap, and usually, do so with a city ID to request the location. But you _can_ query OpenWeatherMap by GPS (I don't, myself), and you could be querying it using precise coordinates. So if OpenWeatherMap were to have a security breach, my location history might be leaked, and I'd like to know that... even if I'm on the free tier. ~~~ jonathan-kosgei Thanks for the feedback, this does help. I'm wary of adding another step before users can get started with the API but it might become necessary to do so. Thanks again!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Vagrant - build and distribute virtualized development environments. - macmac http://vagrantup.com/ ====== RiderOfGiraffes Dup: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1175901> Many comments already over there.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: The Java Web Scraping Handbook - ksahin https://www.javawebscrapinghandbook.com/ ====== gitgud Considering that the legalities of _web scraping_ are nebulous, at what point does a tutorial describing something questionable become immoral. \- _Torrenting 101_ \- _Idiots Guide to Making Fake Accounts_ \- _Phishing: For Beginners_ \- _DDOS and Other Neat Tricks!_	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How do you find a (Remote) Content Writer/Designer job? - anmolparashar Hackers, I graduated with a degree in CS last week and would like to get a remote job that can help me travel a bit before I join my corporate job. I have had bad experience with AngelList over the years (Companies don't reply after showing interest.) So I'd like to hear exactly how do you find a remote job?<p>Short Bio: Lifestyle Blogger 3+ years, UI & Graphic Designer 2+ years, Entrepreneur 2+ years (2 short-lived, small but profitable startups) ====== avadhoot Try weworkremotely.com \| remoteok.io \| jobspresso.co \| remotive.io ~~~ anmolparashar Hey, thanks for all these sources. Checking them out right now	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How Imgur Became a Photo Sharing Hit - vinhnx http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-01-23/how-imgur-became-a-photo-sharing-hit ====== kalleboo How Imgur Became a Photo-Sharing Hit: They didn't rate limit or show ads to referers from reddit.com. Before imgur we had imageshack.us which built it's success on forums.somethingawful.com. ImageShack's attempt at jumping on the Next Big Thing, yfrog.com, was thwarted when twitter added their own image sharing. ~~~ endianswap Was Imageshack the one that was hosted on several different volunteers' servers? I remember back in the day being a part of a goon-run image hosting service and I can't remember which one it was. In the one I'm remembering when you'd go to e.g. imageshack.us/image it'd send you to e.g. kalleboo.imageshack.us/image for the real hosting of that image. ~~~ swang No that was WaffleImages. It was built after Macbeth tried to monetize by spamming SA. ------ thejosh Imgur is one of those sites where noone believed it would last, due to the vast amount of money it takes to run a site like that (at the time) and it being the main way people posted images to reddit. Glad to see it has lasted and has a community built around images posted from reddit. :) ~~~ bluedino Reddit can also be hostile to other image hosts ~~~ fafner As the article mentions most image hosts simply don't scale to the reddit user base and once an image gets too popular they either pull it or break down under the load. And more importantly many other image hosts add aggressive advertisement and don't allow direct linking. (Imgur recently started to redirect direct image links to the normal image view which has ads for referrals not from reddit though.) I think the other image hoster which is similar is [http://minus.com/](http://minus.com/). (And min.us, unlike imgur, does not downscale images or force convert PNG to JPEG or increases JPEG compression. Although I think you can prevent imgur from doing this with a "premium account".) edit: Someone also mentioned [https://mediacru.sh/](https://mediacru.sh/) which is open source. ------ scrollaway In another article a few days ago, someone mentioned mediacrush ([https://mediacru.sh/](https://mediacru.sh/)) which is an open source alternative to imgur. After the rumors about a sale to Yahoo, I personally prefer an open source site to have my data rather than Yahoo... ~~~ ithought When I log into my Flickr account, it says my account has been recycled after too much inactivity. My URL username is different than my account name and I'm unsure if it's actually linked to another Yahoo account. But that account is either my real name Yahoo ID or my real name @ymail.com. Yahoo just referred to one username as "96b2a95890acd0cb201aaeb385f6482e". I can't log in, can't reset the accounts, and am confused by what is what. Of course, ultimately it is my fault but my photos are stuck. They are still online in low resolution. ------ oneweirdtrick I am surprised there was no mention in the article of Imgur stripping Exif data off of uploads. To me that seems like a nice bonus. ------ subdane They solved a problem for a highly engaged network, making it simple to post and share an image in formats necessary for forums and not tied to identity. The first time I used Imgur, it was so simple, so delightful and so not monetized I wondered how it would last. ~~~ fancy_betta They monetize the hell out of it now. A few times a day I click an imgur link and the page will show the image for a fraction of a second before forwarding to a full-page ad. It won't last much longer before someone else comes along with something less annoying and fewer ads. ~~~ knome I've never seen a fullpage ad on imgur. They've got sidebar ads, and the occasional promoted image, but never an overlay or popup. If you're getting the latter, you might want to scan for malware. ~~~ vilhelm_s I see this every couple of days: [http://imgur.com/gallery/AluV1G0](http://imgur.com/gallery/AluV1G0) I somewhat doubt it's malware on my computer, because it only happens on imgur. ~~~ Spittie A while ago, their ad network started to serve .apk to Android users (see [https://pay.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/1qwb2i/weird_apk_t...](https://pay.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/1qwb2i/weird_apk_trying_to_get_on_my_phone_from_imgur/)). This is way worse than "just a fullscreen ads", since a malware on Android can easily steal your contacts and make you pay a fortune using premium numbers. Their ads provider are probably doing this without the consent from imgur, but I doubt they'll change ads provider. After all, the one serving the more shady ads are the one paying more. ------ sheetjs Active discussion on reddit from yesterday: [http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/2409uc/til_im...](http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/2409uc/til_imgur_is_creating_tools_that_will_let_users/) ------ bane I think it's worth revisiting the discussion we had here a while ago when they rose their VC. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7524216](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7524216) ------ higherpurpose Now that Andreessen invested a huge amount in them, I'm counting the days until it's being acquired by Facebook. Seems to be his modus operandi. An easy 20x ROI with this strategy. ~~~ mikecb What do you think the bid would be? I'm thinking 100 billion. ~~~ cdelsolar nah, I think it would be closer to 1-2 trillion. ------ dosh Imgur combined with bufferapp makes a great use case for running twitter accounts.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
IndexTank Holiday Hacks Contest Results - diego http://blog.indextank.com/211/211/ ====== railsjedi My app: <http://helpshelf.com> Built in about 3 days. Most of the work was handling the PDF uploads and parsing. It uses the amazing tool transloadit.com for uploading, and resque for managing the parsing of the pdfs. It then posts each page to indextank as a document so it can be full text searched. Indextank was insanely easy to use. I'd never used the service before this, but I'll be using it in many apps of my apps in the future. This is future of cloud services. Removes up front costs for launching some really complex app infrastructures. And then pay hosting over the long term. It's a tradeoff I'll take any day. The design was hacked together using some shelf PSD assets a designer friend built for me. As you can see, there's not to many components there, but I think it turned out pretty decent. UI was built using Backbone.js and Coffeescript. Sass/Compass provides the style, and HAML provides the basic structure. I got just enough done where search worked well, however the app is woofully underfinished. It really needs better "My Shelf" management. I also really want to hook it into the dropbox api so it can automatically index all your PDFs. Hoping to flesh it out a bit this month, and hopefully should have a proper launch in Feb. Would love any suggestions / feedback on the current version so far (no bug reports, there's too many of them! :) ~~~ santip The application looks really neat, have you thought about making use of more of IndexTank's features such as scoring functions, faceting and autocomplete? See: [http://indextank.com/documentation/ruby-client#relevance- fun...](http://indextank.com/documentation/ruby-client#relevance-functions), <http://indextank.com/documentation/ruby-client#faceting> and <http://indextank.com/documentation/tutorial-autocomplete> ~~~ railsjedi I'm using faceting pretty heavily. Scoring and autocomplete are awesome indextank features that I'm going to try to integrate in the very near future. Thanks! ------ mattculbreth I got second place here for <http://www.proggitftw.com>. What a great contest. I wrote a few Python scripts to scrape Proggit every few minutes, looking for new comments. Sending them to IndexTank was simple--just one call. On the Rails app for the searching, same thing--just one call and you can get the results from IndexTank. I'm going to spend more time on it and make it a bit more usable. HelpShelf's highlighting is cool so I'll do that, and I think auto complete is a no brainer. ------ eidorianu Congratulations to all participants! I would like to see more apps implementing diferent ideas around indextank. Next contest? :)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Poll: Rubyists, what server-side language should I learn in 2017? - itsderek23 I've primarily been a one-trick pony for years on the server-side with Ruby, but I'm curious what languages other folks are using on the server-side for production apps.<p>What are you using to complement Ruby in production? ====== jfaucett Elixir. Why? Because it has tooling that is up to the high standards you're used to using in Ruby and Rails. It has a great ecosystem, package manager, and build tooling. The documentation is fantastic and filled with examples. It also has type annotation and type checking and being built on top of the Erlang VM its really good at soft realtime apps which is probably most of what you're doing server-side anyway. I've used other languages mentioned by others here in projects (Go, Clojure, Haskell, Rust) and although many are nice, for instance Rust has many excellent features and a sophisticated build and package management tool to go along with it, and Go can be somewhat useful if you want a UTF8-friendly concurrent and GC'd C, I still don't think they're good fits for the majority of server-side apps. ------ itamarst My favorite language, it's the best, trust me! More seriously: what are your goals in learning a new language? If it's new skills or ways of thinking, go for something that's quite different from Ruby in some _educational_ way. Clojure, Elixir or Haskell will teach you rather more than Go will, each in their own way. * All three are functional, so no mutability by default. * Clojure has software transactional memory (as does Haskell, I believe?), and it's a Lisp so you can create macros and customize the language. * Haskell has a very powerful type system. * Elixir use Erlang's agent-based runtime and functionality, which e.g. lets you do hotswapped code upgrades on a running server. Go has a stupid type system (e.g. Java's is much better) and a concurrency system that doesn't help with any of the hard problems in concurrency. On the other hand, Go might be a more marketable skill than any of the ones I recommended for educational purposes. So it depends on your goals. More ideas on choosing which technology to learn more broadly: [https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/04/27/which- technology/](https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/04/27/which-technology/) ------ mod I would vote JS or Clojure. I like Clojure more, but Javascript seems more versatile and is a more employable skill. ------ smilesnd C, it is the only language you need. ~~~ Lordarminius What do you think of the claims that Rust is set to replace C? ~~~ smilesnd If I remember right C++ was going to replace C. I don't think any language has truly replace another language. Some languages aged out of usage, but I still know the banks around here hiring cobol programmers. Plus while linux keeps using C I believe it will always have a healthy place in programming society. ------ iLemming Clojure. I guarantee - you're gonna like it. ~~~ borge Agreed! I started learning Clojure about 2 years ago, and it has become my favorite language! The biggest complaint I have is about the error messages (and the laaaarge stack trace), but I've heard they are working on it. ------ haidrali Node Js I have heard of a lot ------ itsderek23 Rust ------ itsderek23 NodeJS ~~~ Lordarminius Why NodeJS instead of Go ? ------ itsderek23 Go ~~~ Lordarminius why Go instead of NodeJS? ------ lobo_tuerto Elixir.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Inspirational Niche Twitters - mancuso5 http://www.inspiredm.com/2009/05/09/1000-inspirational-niche-twitters-you-should-be-already-following/ ====== tumult Dude, you can't read fast enough to follow 1000+ people on twitter. Stop.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Will code for Xmas? - biscuitodoom Hello all!<p>A long term consulting gig has left me high & dry, owing me a small fortune and left me bereft for the Christmas period. Now, the details are pretty irrelevant but the situation ain't pretty.<p>To hopefully remedy this, I'm wondering if anyone out there needs any web stuff doing? I can do HTML, JS, CSS, PHP, Codeigniter, Wordpress and I'm pretty handy at front end stuff too.<p>Obviously I'm on a bit of a deadline so I'm ready to start right away. I can show examples of previous work. If you have anything that might fit, email me (it's in my profile) and we can get going! ====== lewissharder Seems there's a few of us in the position! I'm doing the same, but iOS development, for Christmas: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4925205>	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
A most (un)realistic story about privacy - areknawo https://areknawo.com/the-most-unrealistic-story-about-privacy/ ====== saagarjha I’d hate to sound dismissive, but what was “the point” of this article? Is it based on something that actually happened? Is it trying to tell me to do something? Is it just a nice story to read? ~~~ stakodiak It’s a parable that illustrates the crux of everyday privacy issues. Maybe it’s intended for a non-technical audience. ~~~ areknawo Yeah, that's true... Also, it's just a nice story to read. I'm a beginner blogger and wanted to try to write something different than usual... ~~~ stakodiak Good work! I think your blog is beautiful and the story is illustrative. I enjoyed reading it.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Successful Entrepreneurs Are "B" Students, Not "A" Students - davidw http://www.businessinsider.com/lucky-or-smart-bo-peabody-2011-4 ====== davidw This actually is more about the skills necessary to be an entrepreneur: he says that being a jack of all trades is an important trait for people starting things, but people who can really focus and do one thing really well may be better to run it subsequently. ------ porter Sometimes being the jack of two trades in more powerful. Combining skills at the interface of finance and computer science, for example, usually spawns interesting insights that translate into profitable companies.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
C++11: Try/Catch/Finally Pattern Using RAII & Lambdas - code-dog http://nerds-central.blogspot.com/2012/03/c11-trycatchfinally-pattern-using-raii.html ====== ot What the OP describes here is a common C++ pattern known as "scope guard" (check "Solution 4" in <http://drdobbs.com/184403758>). It was possible to implement it in C++03 with some tricks but C++11 lambdas make it much easier. This is a very nice small implementation but, as always with C++, devil is in the details: * Creation of an std::function needs a dynamic allocation, so if the allocation fails an exception will be thrown and if the _finally_ is guarding a resource, the resource will be leaked * std::function has a non-negligible calling overhead, hence this should not be used in performance-sensitive code * Checking a condition inside the finally clause is not very elegant, a better idiom in C++ is to support _dismissing_ a scope guard. * The finallyClause may throw an exception, and since it is called in a destructor this is generally considered a bad idea. I don't know what could happen in this case, but some scope guard implementations I've seen catch the exception and explicitly call std::terminate(). I guess this is for performance reasons, because the destructor can be declared nothrow. Here there is a more complex implementation, which addresses most of the corner cases: [http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/C9-Lectures- Stepha...](http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/C9-Lectures-Stephan-T- Lavavej-Advanced-STL-6-of-n#c634477472460000000) ~~~ code-dog I get your points. In general, the use cases for this pattern are not production code. The post points out this is not a good way of handling resource and that the example is about debugging. It would be up to the implementer to ensure the finally clause does not throw and exception or to catch it (I think there is something about nesting). As for memory allocation failures, my experience is that depends a lot on the platform. It is a common misconception that dynamic memory is likely to run out and therefore we need to worry about that but not automatic memory. However, I have seen stack overflow many many many more times than a genuine 'out of memory'. Further, if an application has actually run out of memory so badly that a allocation of the closure's internal storage barfs then I suspect it cannot be retrieved. Naturally this does not apply if your platform has a very low heap size (e.g. realtime hardware or some such). ------ evincarofautumn I’ve done this before, and this version has a significant flaw: it is not exception-safe. The destructor should not read as it does: ~finally() { finallyClause(); } This allows exceptions thrown by finallyClause() to propagate out of the destructor, which, if an exception is already being thrown, will result in a call to std::terminate(), causing the application to die horrifically. Because C++ kinda-should’ve-but-really-doesn’t have checked exceptions, we must simply discard them: ~finally() { try { finallyClause(); } catch (...) {} } You can also avoid problems with exceptions and std::function’s dynamic allocation by using a template instead: template<class F> class finally_type { public: explicit finally_type(F f) : function(f) {} ~finally_type() { try { function(); } catch (...) {} } private: finally_type(const finally_type&); finally_type& operator=(const finally_type&); F function; }; template<class F> finally_type<F> finally(F f) { return finally_type<F>(f); } This can be used like so: void test() { int* i = new int; auto cleanup = finally([i]() { delete i; }); may_throw(); } Finally (har!) the equivalent idiom in C++03: void test() { int* i = new int; struct finally { finally(int* i) : i(i) {} ~finally() { delete i; } int* i; } cleanup(i); may_throw(); } ~~~ ot > Because C++ kinda-should’ve-but-really-doesn’t have checked exceptions, we > must simply discard them: This would make the error pass silently, possibly leaving the program in an inconsistent state. It is probably better to call std::terminate() instead, which is what C++ does when an exception is thrown when another exception is active. ~~~ evincarofautumn You’re quite right that ignoring the (programmer) error is too lax, but std::terminate() is far too extreme. This is perhaps a situation for std::nested_exception: ~finally_type() { try { function(); } catch (...) { std::throw_with_nested(std::logic_error ("Exception thrown from \"finally\".")); } } It might pollute calling code a bit with calls to std::rethrow_if_nested(), but I think it’s worth it for the safety. ~~~ ot No, if the finally clause is called while an exception is active, the runtime will call std::terminate(). This is why it is bad practice to throw exceptions in destructors. Hence, in most cases where the scope guard pattern is used (to guarantee exception safety), your code is basically equivalent to calling std::terminate(). ~~~ evincarofautumn Alright, yeah, no exception should escape the finally destructor. After so many years of using it, I should know better than to write C++. But anyway, the problem is still _programmer_ error. Just as you shouldn’t throw an exception from a destructor, you shouldn’t throw an exception from a “finally”, because it is, by definition, run in a destructor. So, sure, calling std::terminate() explicitly makes about as much sense as anything, but I’d prefer to ignore (and perhaps log) such erroneous exceptions, for reasons of stability. ------ NerdsCentral I was not expecting this to produce so much interest. I guess a lot of people have asked about how to implement try/catch/finally in C++.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
EBay Suffers Massive Security Breach - wolfwyrd http://www.theverge.com/2014/5/21/5737914/ebay-will-ask-all-customers-to-change-passwords-after-massive-breach ====== a3n "In addition to passwords, the database contained basic login information like name, email, phone number, address and date of birth, but officials stressed that, aside from the passwords, no confidential or personal information was included in the breach." Date of birth. Many businesses and agencies ask for that, and or the other items listed in that sentence, over the phone to provide a fig leaf of security.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Porting SBCL to the RISC-V - pome http://christophe.rhodes.io/notes/blog/posts/2018/beginning_an_sbcl_port/ ====== brucehoult If there is any assembly-language programming needed, or a code generator, then I suggest you start with the code for MIPSle. Many of the instructions and mnemonics are the same. The biggest differences are immediate arithmetic and load/store offsets are 12 bit on RISC-V vs 16-bit on MIPS. To compensate, LUI loads 20 bits on RISC-V vs 16 bits on MIPS. So it's only immediates or offsets between +/-2K and +/-32K that are different. Also RISC-V does compare two registers for ordering and branch in one instruction, which older MIPS can't do. ~~~ microcolonel From my (slow) hobby work on a V8 port, I can say that there are differences in loading large (48-64 bit) arbitrary constants without a pool (it takes _many_ instructions) or a scratch register, the FPU is also used differently (it's more janky and bolted-on with MIPSel). It's nice not having exposed delay slots, and the additional pc-relative addressing range is very convenient (since, for example, in V8 there is a maximum code heap size known at compile time, and the addresses are contiguous, so you can use pc-relative immediate addressing for anything in that heap [as long as you keep track of sources for relocation] at a penalty of one word [which is not a big deal in the grand scheme of things]). ~~~ brandmeyer > I can say that there are differences in loading large (48-64 bit) arbitrary > constants without a pool. How arbitrary is arbitrary? ARMv7's Thumb2 format immediates are composed of a 8-bit field shifted by up to 5 bits. So you can form any 32-bit variable, but with limited precision. ARMv8 modified immediates can describe a contiguous run of ones followed by a contiguous run of zeros, and SWAR variations of the same. So you can describe things like a repeating 0x3f... for example. Do either of those formats encompass the kinds of literals that you need in the V8 JIT? > so you can use pc-relative addressing ... at a penalty of one word Since the RISC-V PC-relative addressing capabilities are similar to ARMv8 (adrp) and x86-64 (rip-relative addressing), I would have though that this is basically a non-problem. You pay one more live register to hold the page address, but you also get more registers, so I would think it mostly washes out. Where do you pay a penalty? ~~~ microcolonel > _How arbitrary is arbitrary? ARMv7 's Thumb2 format immediates are composed > of a 8-bit field shifted by up to 5 bits. So you can form any 32-bit > variable, but with limited precision._ When it comes to encoding the address of an entry point, every bit of precision you lose (above the first two or three) in the address loses you memory compactness (and adds a certain amount of complexity to compilation and relocation). On the ARM and AArch64 V8 ports they use a constant pool for target addresses, on RISC-V you can probably just use AUIPC to compute the target address in place with no pool address register. You can, of course, do the exact same thing on RISC-V that they do in the ARM ports, but RISC-V has the considerable advantage of four extra bits (totalling 20) in U immediates vs. MIPS (16-bit U immediates), and eight extra bits vs. ARM in some cases (though ARM's immediate encodings are various and sundry, and produce a huge variety of corner cases and microoptimizations which are mostly useless to JITs [in my mostly amateur opinion]; to a lesser extent MIPS also has some interesting features for loading immediates which make up for the shortfalls in AOT code, but are harder [it seems to me, an amateur] to use effectively in a JIT). ~~~ brandmeyer AArch64 uses adrp in almost exactly the same way that RISC-V uses auipc to access literal pools. It isn't a strongly distinguishing feature between those architectures. The difference between them is that ADRP computes a 4 kB page-aligned pc- relative address, which complements the 12-bit unsigned address offsets in its base+disp addressing mode to get a uniform +(2 GB -1) to -2GB reach. RISC-V doesn't compute a page-aligned address, in order to partially compensate for the use of signed offsets in its base+disp12 addressing mode. I say partially because RISC-V's PC-relative reach remains asymmetric +(2 GB - 2k - 1) to -(2 GB + 2k), but that probably doesn't matter much as long as you establish an appropriate red zone. ARM distinguishes immediate operands used for data processing and immediate operands used for address generation. The alternative formats I was referring to are mostly just available for the logical operations (although Thumb2 sometimes also uses them for arithmetic). I was thinking that they might make pointer tagging a smidge easier to deal with. *edit: Whoops, 12-bit signed, not 10-bit signed on the asymmetry of the RISC-V reach. ~~~ brucehoult Your figures seem a little off there. Yes, RISC-V is a little asymmetric, with the AUIPC being able to subtract exactly 2 GB from the PC or add 2GB-4KB to it, and then a jalr/lb/sb can subtract an additional 2 KB or add 2KB-1. But the AArch64 adrp is also asymmetric because the relative reach depends on where in the 4 KB page the original PC is. It's only symmetric if the PC is 4 KB aligned. If you're part way through the page then there is more -ve reach and less +ve reach. A couple of KB fuzziness in what is basically a 32 bit reach in a 64 bit address space is pretty much completely irrelevant in both cases. ~~~ brandmeyer ADRP operates on the 4kB page of the pc (by truncation), not the entire pc. RISC-V could have implicitly added 2k in auipc and balanced out the bias. But they didn't. ~~~ brucehoult I know how ADRP operates. It's symmetric about the truncated PC. It's not symmetric about the _actual_ PC. As I said in the last post. ~~~ brandmeyer I think you are misunderstanding the benefit of having symmetric reach by the page. On AArch64, you can define a 2 GB contiguous slice of address space, built up out of whatever page size you find convenient for your system and plant a relocatable binary into it, up to 2 GB of size. Any instruction anywhere in the last page can reach any address in the first page, and vice versa. In RISC-V, if you try to do the same thing, you'd find that while any instructions in the last page can reach any address in the first page with room to spare. But some instructions in the first page cannot reach portions of the last page. Sure, it doesn't matter most of the time. It isn't ever really an obstacle in practice for the feller writing application code for the platform. But the linker has to be aware of it in the 'medium' code model as a special case for just this particular platform. Somebody had to write that special case to work around the hardware. ~~~ brucehoult The linker code to calculate the necessary auipc and remaining offset for a relocation and do something else when out of bounds, was written years ago, is two lines of code, and no doubt took less time than this conversation. I don't even know of any application that has 1 GB of code, let alone 2 GB minus 2 KB (2,147,481,600 bytes). ------ jepler Looks like the disparaging ARM-fronted website about RISC-V might have been [https://riscv-basics.com/](https://riscv-basics.com/) which has disappeared down the memory hole. One mention at [http://www.osnews.com/comments/30562](http://www.osnews.com/comments/30562) sheds a bit of light. edited to add: here's HN's discussion at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17489504](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17489504) ~~~ kbob ARM got sort of a Streisand Effect: this project probably wouldn't have happened if ARM hadn't drawn attention to its new competitor. ------ dang We changed the url changed from [http://christophe.rhodes.io/notes/tag/riscv/](http://christophe.rhodes.io/notes/tag/riscv/) to the introductory article in the series. The other article listed there is [http://christophe.rhodes.io/notes/blog/posts/2018/first_risc...](http://christophe.rhodes.io/notes/blog/posts/2018/first_riscy_steps/). ------ Annatar This has got to be the first processor for which the software is available before a complete computer exists; RISC-V 19” rack mountable servers remain distant science fiction. ~~~ floatboth Nah, certainly not the first. Lots of software was ported to AArch64 before _any_ chips existed, only ARM's "Foundation Model" (a rather slow emulator). ~~~ microcolonel Not to mention, there is actual RISC-V hardware capable of running this software; and you can buy it right now for a known public price (which is more than could be said for AArch64 for a long time, and almost to this day) and integrate it with standard peripherals (PCIe, SATA, USB, etc.). Granted, the hardware is somewhat limited for now, since it's only in-order. ~~~ Annatar Servers, I explicitly wrote “19” rack mountable servers”! Where can they be bought? Link please!!! ~~~ floatboth You could mount a HiFive Unleashed into a rack case I guess. It's not a standard form factor though, so you'd need some custom mounting hardware (or, well, hot glue :D) ~~~ Annatar That would be hacking. I couldn’t build datacenters with that. I’m a professional engineer, not a hacker.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Meet SiteSimon - turns Chrome into an intelligent assistant - dkaragas http://sitesimonsays.com/post/22322950701/meet-the-new-sitesimon-the-best-assistant-on-the-web ====== jrockway _Until now, your browsing data has been constantly collected and used…for someone else’s benefit._ So SiteSimon will never turn over my information to law enforcement or use it to target advertisements? That seems highly unlikely to me. ~~~ celer My impression is that all personal data is kept client side and all data sent to them is anonymous, though we all recall how well that tends to work in practice. ------ adeelv whoa this is pretty good - the idea is actually quite novel. Since most people consume content from select websites, they are bound to go to those sites more and essentially that is the internet to them. So why not help them try to find the most relevant content from that very site. I will give it a shot.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Do you think machine consciousness is possible? - zoba (Read the last bit to skip the story)<p>I'm planning on going to grad school to study AI because I think it is very interesting. For a very long time it has just seemed natural to me that computer scientists would eventually discover a way to make computers appear as intelligent as humans. Since it wasn't done yet, I wanted to work on this problem. I had no thoughts of solving it, but perhaps help it along.<p>However, I recently had the scary idea that machine consciousness may not be possible. I've thought this before, however this time it really hit me and scared me some. Considering I'd like to devote much of my resources to the problem, I'm now a little concerned that it may all be a waste. I'd prefer not to waste my life on something that turns out like the phlogiston theory.<p>Therefore, because it may bring good discussion and for my own benefit I'm asking:<p>Do you think machine consciousness (or at least something that looks like it) is possible? If not on current computer architecture, which "new lead" in computation do you think will allow it?<p>For extra credit: Do you think the Church-Turing thesis (anything that is computable is computable by a Turing machine) indicates that machine consciousness is possible? ====== kevinpet If we assume that humans are conscious, then yes, it is possible for a machine to be conscious. The only arguments categorically differentiating humans from electronic machines are religious in nature. I define consciousness as having an internal model of the world that includes yourself, as well as your own though processes (at a lower degree of fidelity). This says how you compute things, not what you are computing, so it is orthogonal to Church-Turing. Whether it is achieved will depend on economic forces. I don't see much economic value in making conscious computers, or things which seem to be down that line. So I expect consciousness will come out of pure research (perhaps within a corporation, like IBM), well after computers have exceeded the raw processing power needed. Because they will be so different from humans, it will have to demonstrate a significantly higher degree of consciousness than a human needs to in order for most people to be comfortable with the term. ~~~ codexon You are assuming that there is no innate quality of human organic compounds and processes that differentiates us from electrical components. It may very well be the case that this is either true or false. We simply don't have enough evidence. And given the fact that we are discovering new properties of matter and organic reactions all the time, there is a bias towards this being false. ~~~ Mentat_Enki Bah....I call bullshit. This is pure anthropomorphism. Humans think they are the shit, but in fact they are only story-telling animals (which does give us an evolutionary advantage, incidentally. We are not limited in our information transfer inter-generationally by genes alone.) We are limited by the same physics as the chips we make. This innate quality you speak of is pure vapor. Even if humans were somehow able to become mentats, we'd still be limited by the tenants of information theory and what is computable. The fact that human intelligence is emergent leads me to believe that machine intelligence will be the same, albeit very different than a simian mammal's intelligence. Fish are smarter than we are at swimming. Think ants. ~~~ nwatson humans are unique in the universe among all life forms and inanimate objects, are more than the sum of their physical parts, have a connection with something larger than the universe, and though in an insignifcant corner of an insignificant galaxy have an eternal significance. ~~~ rjurney My peeps, it is not necessary to give negative karma for someone expressing an honest and inoffensive opinion you don't agree with. ~~~ jodrellblank It's akin to having a group of people sketching on a large piece of paper, trying to build on each other's marks to create an accurate representation of a scene, and someone comes in a scribbles all over it saying "but I see scribbles! All pencil marks are valid! Don't be so limited!". He/She's allowed to have such an opinion, but this discussion is trying for a particular feel and that isn't contributing helpfully to it. ------ matthew-wegner I look at consciousness fairly oddly: I believe consciousness is an emergent property of a complex system; it is simply the nature of the universe that complex systems exhibit consciousness. I'm defining "complex system" as any system whose outputs/results affect the inputs/possible states. If I think something, the possibility space for my next thought is dependent upon my previous thought, and so on. I think artificial consciousness research will progress, through computer simulation, to the point where a "real" consciousness emerges from a sufficiently complex simulation. The hard part will be mapping its inputs/outputs into human-compatible form; success will probably occur by accident at first. But when we can do this we'll be able to talk to a totally simulated consciousness through the prism of it being another "person". At this point more research/thought will be put into the nature of consciousness itself, and how to connect with other-than-human consciousnesses. We'll use the experience of bridging communication with artificial consciousness to successfully communicate with naturally-occuring consciousnesses associated with other complex systems (the earth, a tree, the galaxy, etc). It sounds a little insane, but I totally think this is within the realm of possible in our lifetimes. Of course, that's all based on the notion that consciousness is an emergent property of a complex system, and not something entirely unique or bestowed by higher powers or whatever. ~~~ netconnect I agree that simulation is the key to a concious AI system. If or when we ever succeed in simulating a human mind to a close enough degree of comparability, it is almost a given that the system will be self concious. There are some problems simulating the human brain that would also have to be addressed even once we can create a working system, such as the AI being a bit of a blank slate, like a infant or a coma patient. I see the whole process as having to follow a path similar to this: 1\. A breakthrough in computing power, something capable of simulating very accurately small areas of space, this means perfectly representing ridiculously complicated chemical reactions and some natural laws. 2\. Succeeding in creating a software environment to execute these simulations within. 3\. A breakthrough in mapping an existing person, some sort of scan that creates a mathematically provable perfect (or close enough) representation of an area in space. Like some humans mind or possibly their entire body until the subject of the scan can be simplified on the computer. Sort of like taking a photo and then cropping off the body. The above simulation environment may be what is used to provide the simulated inputs and outputs to the head, like the CNS and cardiovascular system. Not to mention the inputs to the eyes and other senses. Sort of like a virtual head in a jar. 4\. So far we would have a conscious system, but it would be a copy of a pre- existing being. The next step would to be to somehow, ethically, re-write this being. This would provide a learning challenge with the goal of simplifying and modularising the human brain. Such as hacking language areas, input nerves, the reliance on virtual blood and sustenance and most importantly the memory. The final product of this important stage is the most simple and easily tweak- able simulation of the human brain that could be used by all researchers and eventually commercial applications. If all these virtual brains are the same or comparable, this isolates the memory as a way to load in or edit what is essentially... people. The creepiest analogy may be the best, they will be like swappable save game files, executing in virtual machines (the hacked brains) that operate within another virtual machine (dare I say it, a super- simple matrix of sorts) 5\. We may never reach anywhere near this far along the process due mainly to ethical reasons that cannot be overcome with mere ingenuity. But if we do, the next step is compressing all this down further and further until we have the most simple possible (perhaps provable somehow) implementation of a mind that does not require all the layers of virtualization. God it's easy to get caught up in this stuff. I hold this prediction on my fingertips in hopes that any developments may blow it away so I can re- evaluate and make a new one. ------ lacker I wouldn't bet on machine consciousness happening in your lifetime. But consciousness is a cool enough thing that solving 0.001% of the problem is useful too. Machine vision, collaborative filtering, machine learning, all of these are attacking a tiny subpart of the consciousness problem, but they're still useful. Don't worry that AI will turn out like phlogiston. The journey will yield its own rewards, and plenty of partial success will also be extremely valuable. ------ Diakronik Grad student in Cognitive Science, here. My focus is language, but consciousness is an ongoing side interest. The answer: Yes and no, depending on what you mean by "consciousness". If you mean something like "access to internal states" (and maybe reportability thereof), then yes. Arguably there are extant, albeit crude, versions of this form of machine consciousness. If, on the other hand, you mean something that starts to look like qualia (i.e. "raw feels"/"what's it's like"/"the hard problem"/etc cf. the Chalmers references already made), then no. Of course, my "no" essentially echoes Dan Dennett's, in that I don't think people are conscious in this way, either. I suspect a lot of our "feelings" are internal post-hoc stories (made possible by enabled by command of private language) that rationalize/create causal attributions for the physiological correlates of stress ("four Fs" situations). That being said, I could be wrong, and finding a way to get at these hypotheses empirically would be a genuine advance, whether they were supported or refuted. So by all means pursue this...as someone else pointed out, it's likely the "final" answers won't be known in your lifetime, and if it brings you fulfillment in your lifetime, then giv'er. As for where to apply, there are loads...some have already pointed out several researchers (Hofstadter, Koch, etc.), so you could always apply where they are. There's also UCSD, UArizona, Carleton University (in Canada), etc... ------ Bleys Sounds like you should be going to the Singularity Summit to talk to other people who devote their lives to this issue. Nick Bostrom's Simulation Argument details the most obvious probabilistic implications of substrate independence in consciousness: <http://www.simulation-argument.com/> The most blatantly obvious indicator that consciousness is substrate- independent: We are DNA-based life forms. DNA stores information. It's program code stored in molecules. You are the product of the code of your parents. If for some bizarre reason we find out that we HAVE to use DNA to create other conscious systems, we will still have the ability to do exactly that. Not "machine" in the sense of being composed of metal, but certainly "machine" in the sense of not being the immediate product of natural selection. David Chalmers' work should be particularly relevant to you, and you will find him at the Singularity Summit this year. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chalmers> Even if you don't live to see machine consciousness as a reality, the only other pursuits that might compare are anti-aging and intelligence enhancement research. If you're not going to create something that can figure out how to give you an indefinite self-contiguous narrative, you have to support its creation or face certain death. I'm guessing you already have your CS undergrad or will have it soon, and you're interested in AI, so that seems the natural choice. I'd say you're overdecided if that's what you want to study. ~~~ zoba Thanks for pointing me to this. I had heard of the Singularity University, but not the summit. Hopefully they have videos posted online of the event...right now two months rent is not available to spend on a conference, very unfortunately. ------ rabidsnail We have no definition of consciousness, so it's impossible to say whether machine consciousness is possible, or whether we have it already. ~~~ chrischen I think the definition of consciousness is implied as whatever we humans are experiencing right now. So for a computer to be truly realizing its own existence, it would have to be modeled after ourselves. ~~~ joeyo The problem is you have to believe what the computer tells you when it says it has consciousness. (In the same way that I have to believe you when you say you have consciousness). ------ codexon No one knows what human consciousness really is or if it even applies to other animals. Having said that, consciousness is not a requirement for intelligence. It would interesting, and plausible enough for self-improving AI as smart as a human to be developed without addressing the question of consciousness. For extra credit: No there is not enough evidence. Here is my opinion on this matter: It is possible to simulate the universe, but it is not possible to be the universe. Simulation is different from being, just as predicting the weather is different from manipulating the weather. And simulating consciousness on a computer is different from being conscious. ~~~ coderdude Consciousness isn't a unique body in our universe, it's a state. (so far as we can guess) ------ mlLK I'm certainly not grad student, but I wouldn't drop my pretty dime in graduate school studying AI. If anything, please not only research the current state of the field of AI but also research the history and those scientists working in the field right now. I wrote a paper on AI a couple summer's ago and as crummy, arrogant, short- sighted, and inconclusive as it reads, if you happen to skim it, I did come away learning this. . .Turing was one of the few minds that was actually on to something, his vision of the machine and his idealistic tone reads more like that of SciFi writer, here is a most insightful re-paraphrasing of a Turing abstract (me thinks it was his first major publication): _I propose to consider the question, 'Can machines think?'"[8] As Turing highlighted, the traditional approach to such a question is to start with definitions, defining both the terms machine and intelligence. Nevertheless, Turing chose not to do so. Instead he replaced the question with a new question, "which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words".[8] In essence, Turing proposed to change the question from "Do machines think?" into "Can machines do what we (as thinking entities) can do?"[9] The advantage of the new question, Turing argued, was that it "drew a fairly sharp line between the physical and intellectual capacities of a man.[10]_ [my crummy paper: <http://www.scribd.com/doc/19590360/AI>] ~~~ Locke1689 I must protest your lack of LaTeX/TeX use in your crummy paper. Knuth's line terminating algorithm has made me forever hate Word's aesthetics. ~~~ mlLK I'll join your protest in my paper's _lack of_ LaTeX; although I must admit that I've never felt or even considered anything I've ever _published_ (for someone of higher academic seniority) a serious scientific contribution. Nevertheless, shame on you for introducing the two following ideas in a complete sentence, _Knuth's line terminating algorithm_ and _Word's aesthetics_. o_O As soon as my words are worth it, I swear to you that I will start investing my efforts into formatting my thoughts in a language as serious and beautiful as LaTeX. Until then Word is a wonderful canvas for finger-painting. ~~~ Locke1689 Can't argue with that. Ever since freshman year of college I've just sworn off writing a paper in anything but LaTeX. Rather simple after you get used to it and a PDF is nice and portable too. Of course, I also tend to use a lot of math, especially in my theoretical computer science pieces, at which Word is just absolutely lousy. Anyway, just passing along my thoughts. :) ------ 7iv3 What? Conscious machines already exists. Now its only a matter of coping them into different material. And maybe learning about consciousness in process. I mean, we know almost all about the low level - neurons. They are relatively easy. Signal goes in, signal goes out. So now, even if we don't understand this whole high level emergent process we can still copy it. Its like if we had a assembler code of some big and highly complicated algorithm - even if we don't understand it we can still rewrite it to different machine and it will work. There are about 100 billion neurons and about 500 trillion connections in brain of an adult, so you can take Moors law and estimate, not if, but when it will be possible to brute-force brain. I say 2025. ~~~ coffeeaddicted Although I basically agree with you I miss your certainty. I can think of one scenario which would prevent computers from gaining consciousness even if we are just machines. The basic premise of computer to get conscious is that consciousness is either created within our brains or that it has no intention itself without our brains and will therefore not differentiate between human brains and computer brains. But that is not necessarily a given. Our brains are very good at reflecting our environment. So maybe consciousness is not something our brain did come up with but just something it reflects from the inputs it gets. Same as your brain doesn't have to be blue to see blue, but only creates a representation of the color which is outside. So there could be a bigger consciousness in our environment and all we have is an internal reflection of that created by the inputs we receive. But now that larger consciousness might not be without intend - it might simply refuse to show itself to computers so they wouldn't reflect it even if they would have the basic ability to do so. I know this sound rather esoteric and I don't really belief it myself, but something that seems to work like that is supported by so many reports of personal experiences that I wouldn't yet completely disregard the possibility. So computer consciousness will probably be possible, but could fail if consciousness itself turns out to be something with an own agenda. ~~~ 7iv3 Of course, I was making an assumption that humans are conscious. Even if consciousness is not what we belief, even if its complicity deterministic. I mean, if something exists, we can copy it. Even if humans only mirror consciousness, we can copy the mirror. Otherwise we're talking about teology, and, if such, I won't be part of the debate. Not my field. ~~~ coffeeaddicted AI isn't about copying the thing but about copying the information processes. So a 1:1 copy isn't AI. Also if you make your assumptions the way that AI must obviously work then, well - it certainly must work and there is no way that it can't. Doh. So far we haven't nailed down consciousness and until we got that I try to keep some alternative theories still in my mind. Especially if the alternate theories correspond rather well with many user reports. That's not because I believe in magic or something like that, but rather is influenced by working long enough with virtual worlds to be occasionally irritated how much easier it is sometimes to put the intelligence in the world instead of putting it in the bot and make the bots just reactive. The user watching them won't see the difference, to him it looks like intelligent bots. And unless a bot registers to the world it doesn't even matter if he is an identical copy - he won't do much (just to mention that identical copies are no guarantee for same behaviour as long as there are external dependencies which must be met). And there was some recent article on ycombinator about anaesthesia which I found also interesting. Basically it seems that unlike sleep this is a way to completely disable consciousness. Like switching it off. And (the wished for) side-effect is that the body nerves do no longer trigger pain. But the brain certainly still works. So yeah crazy - but the only known way of completely disabling all inputs without disabling internal processing is at the same time disabling consciousness completely. And yes - I'm aware that we probably find a better explanation for that any day now. It's a fringe theory and I realize that I got even one step further in my post above. But still, I don't think I'm in theology territory with that already. The fact that something so basic that everyone experiences it evades a good explanation for so long gives me enough reason to keep some fringe theories in mind. That's why I agree to your post - but miss your certainty. The last few time we humans got it really wrong in science (that sun-earth rotation thing and that evolution stuff) we got it always wrong because we put ourselves so much in the centre that we ignored alternatives. ~~~ 7iv3 Well, if you put it that way, maybe I am to certain. I'm aware that there is still a lot of things that we don't know or even have a single clue about. That we can gain new data and that equation can change. But on the other hand, agnosticism is kinda lack of balls ^^ What you stand for determines what you do. So clearly its better to stand for something, even if you sometimes get wrong. ------ jacquesm There have been many threads recently about this exact theme, [http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+a...](http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+artificial+intelligence) should turn up some results. My personal take on this is that I'm really not sure. There are some pretty clever people here that are sure it is possible, 20 years or less. There are others (of which I'm one) that think it may be possible but either devilishly hard compared to what has been achieved to date or beyond our abilities, figure at least 20 years, probably much more, if ever. And then there are those that think that it is impossible. I'm an absolute nobody when it comes to stuff like this but it interests me greatly. When I was 15 or so I envisioned a world about 2 decades away where computers could be taught. We're 30 years down the line from that point and we're still programming computers more or less the same as back then. But that does not mean that things can't change overnight, and who knows, maybe you're just the guy for the ticket and you will be the one to crack this nut. ------ lux No one's mentioned On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins yet... I'm surprised. Check it out here: <http://www.onintelligence.org/> Great read on exactly this topic, and one of the more plausible paths to actually achieving machine intelligence. But it's not through the typical path followed by most AI research up until recently. He argues you need to look at how the neocortex actually works, how it communicates with the senses, stores data and learns patterns, in order to create anything artificial that displays intelligence. I'm inclined to agree. Our brains may seem to map to computer-like functions reasonably well (short & long-term memory, processing, input/output, etc), but there are key differences. Hawkins argues that it's all based on input and learning to recognize patterns within that input. A few interesting points I remember: \- More feedback goes back to the senses and/or higher levels of the cortex than data is sent in. This seems to imply that the lower levels are recognizing larger patterns and sending feedback to help correct or verify against higher levels. \- There's no difference between input from the ear, eye or hand. It's all just patterns at the cortex level. In fact, the output is the same as the input. The feedback process actually helps learn how to utilize our body, and as an extension of that, tools. \- A key element to the patterns in the real world is time. Everything occurs over time, so the patterns almost come into the cortex as a sort of melody it interprets. \- Memory is imperfect, because we don't need it to be in order to learn. We remember things and draw our conscious attention to them when they don't fit the pattern we're expecting. At that point, we're attuned to learn a new pattern or determine how to react to a missed pattern. These are very different from the components we use in computers, and how we use them. The cortex is almost like a universal biological learning machine. Differences in intelligence between mammals can be attributed to the size of the cortex, e.g., the amount of processing available. Interesting stuff! ------ dbul Where did you go to school? It sounds very much like you have a symbolic background. There are many approaches and people are attacking them from different angles. Here are just a couple of resources worth looking at off the top of my head: Christof Koch at CalTech (hi, virgil) <http://www.klab.caltech.edu/~koch/> Larry Yaeger & John Beggs <http://www.indiana.edu/~rcapub/v30n2/mindmade.shtml> Of course, Douglas Hofstadter <http://www.cogsci.indiana.edu/> Koch, Churchland, etc. speak on consciousness: <http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/342> ~~~ zoba I am at NC State (graduating in May), and my research adviser does have a symbolic background (I'm pretty sure)...very good read on your part! Thanks very much for the links. I am stressing over where to apply, hopefully these will help some. ------ drcode I am dead certain that it would NOT be possible to achieve consciousness in a computer program. On the other hand, I know if I ever had to debate this question with Daniel Dennett or Eliezer Yudkowsky or any other capable person who believes there's nothing special about "consciousness" I would lose the debate. Attributing a special meaning to consciousness, on the surface, is just as illogical as believing in religion- Neither seems to have a valid defense, as far as I can tell. Therefore, I find it disquieting that I DON'T believe in religion but DO feel so certain that computers can't be conscious. Once you figure out the reason for this apparent inconsistency in my belief system, please let me know :) ~~~ dejb OK here's an argument for why you could be right. Whatever it is that distinguishes consciousness for what computers can possible do is also the thing that makes you realise that computers can't be conscious. If you could logically write the reason down to 'prove it' then it would also be something that you could implement in a computer. So the reason, whatever it is, has lie somewhat outside of specifiable logic. Just in case this is somehow original. I'm designating this 'thing' as a 'dejb' and calling the whole thing "dejb's theory/proposition/whatever". Although it actually probably just a restatement of Godel's incompleteness theorem. Also I actually believe that computers can be concsious. ~~~ drcode I like dejb's theory! I'll have to give it some thought. ------ petesalty Of course it's possible, everything you can imagine is possible, given enough time and resources. But is it probable? But I think the question you should be asking yourself, if you're wondering how to spend your life, isn't if machine consciousness is probable, possible, whatever. You should be asking, what do I want to do with MY consciousness? If you want to work on these problems, then do it. Doesn't matter if it happens in your lifetime or not. If you enjoy it then give it a try. Worst case is you spend your time doing what you enjoy. Best case is... well, machine consciousness I suppose. Besides, you should always be thinking big. The person I admire the most has a small metal plaque that sits on her desk. It says "what would you attempt if you knew you couldn't fail". I happen to think this is the most powerful sentiment I've ever encountered. ------ warewolfe Yes, it is possible. But a more important question would be "What are the benefits from creating an artificially conscious(A.C.) system?" There are a myriad of uses for smarter computer systems that can problem solve with minimal guidance from humans. But what practical use is there for A.C? Howabout re-phrasing the original question into "Do you think it is possible to genetically enhance and selective breed apes into a race of human-level+ super-apes". Sure, it's possible, but why do it? If you are trying to create a controllable human-like intelligence, then ethically it is the same as creating a slave race, and practically it is just overkill for any real-world use. And if you are trying to create a human-like intelligence with free-will, then you are creating a competitor/replacement. ------ siol Hey guys, maybe human consciousness is nothing else but an "illusion" provided by the matching of information between what we perceive through our senses and what we have stored in our brains? Of course, that "matching" process is the big problem to crack. Could we hypothesize that when babies are born they aren't aware because they don't have a 'minimum threshold' of information in their brains that is required to enable the 'match' being produced by their input senses? Or from the other spectrum, say, advanced patients with Alzheimer disease lose their self-awareness because their memories are destroyed and the 'match' needed to trigger the 'illusion' of consciousness is disrupted ? ------ cool-RR As a meta-comment, notice that threads like these usually result in many people posting lengthy first-level comments, and not doing much replying and discussing. (Compared to other HN threads, of course.) ------ run_zeno_run More helpful would be to look up the Church-Turing- _Deutsch_ principle, aka the physical Turing thesis or strong Turing thesis. It is more intent in proposing that everything in the universe, including the universe itself, is computable. If you hold to this principle, then machine consciousness is obviously feasible. \-------- Another way of asking your question is: why _wouldn't_ machine consciousness be possible? Why would there be some special sauce in the brain that is off limits to being understood and/or modeled? \-------- And lastly, to address you're worry of wasting your life, there are many, many applications of AI/Cog.Sci. that would improve the human condition immensely without needing fully 'conscious' artificial machines. Also, the main reason why I in particular am dedicated to AI/Cog.Sci (and really the best reason for devoting yourself to anything) is because it is the most damned interesting thing I've ever been exposed to, IMHO. ------ extension Imagine a scientifically minded human being from 500 years ago encountering a present day computer, complete with software, internet access, the whole bundle. If asked to speculate on how the computer worked, being a person of science, they would have to admit that they didn't know. But pressed to form some sort of model of it's inner workings, they would likely come up with some fairly simple explanation centered around one all-important aspect or another: a single magical power of some sort that is the basis for everything mysterious about the computer. He would be very unlikely to imagine that countless layers and dimensions of technology needed to come together to make the computer possible. This tendency towards oversimplifying the unknown seems to be fundamental to the way we think and it runs through the history of human speculation. Consistently, our beautifully unified theories about gods and ether and magic are replaced by the messy, complicated realities of physics, math and biology. One of these beautiful unified theories which we are having a particularly hard time letting go of is the idea of "consciousness", alleged to be a single remarkable quality of some sort which is both _essential_ and _unique_ to the mind. That vague description is as close as you will come to a consensus on the definition of consciousness, and it still won't please everybody. Despite there being no agreement on what the word actually means, nearly everyone is nonetheless quite sure that whatever it is _does_ exist and needs explaining. In the time when the brain was utterly baffling, before we knew about neurons or brain anatomy, the model of the mind based around consciousness was at least reasonable. But now we know essentially how neurons work, how they can grow into complex useful systems, and the _staggering_ quantity of them that make up a single mind. We have managed to isolate many aspects of human thought to particular areas of the brain. We've observed people functioning without certain fundamental faculties when parts of their brain are damaged, _faculties which we would have intuitively considered indivisible from the mind as a whole_ , but which we are now forced to consider handy peripherals which we could do without, if need be. As the gap between our intuitive understanding of the mind and our scientific understanding grows ever smaller, as we explain one faculty after another, cleaving them from the plausible kernel of the mind, and as the operative definition of "consciousness" continues to vary wildly from one navel gazing philosophy major to another, sharing nothing in common but the spelling, its career as a thought provoking topic of conversation nears its end, to be followed by its retirement to a quaint artifact of our ignorant past. ------ Liron First of all, we've seen that low-level physical models of our universe don't gain explanatory power by trying to take "consciousness" as an ontological primitive. It's clear that consciousness is a high-level property of patterns of tinier things. So the algorithm you use to decide that a clump of neurons satisfies the "consciousness" predicate will almost certainly work by observing high-level properties of the neuron configuration. Since the consciousness predicate abstracts away low-level details, it's hard to see why neurons should be better than other computational substrates at forming predicate-satisfying configurations. Reductionists can't be neuro-chauvinists. ------ dkersten Ignoring you're question; AI isn't as much about machine consciousness and human-like intelligence as people like to think. Theres a lot of very good AI used every day: classifiers, pattern recognition, googles pagerank, recommendation systems, optimization algorithms and so on. On to your question: Do I think something that looks like consciousness is possible? Yes. How soon depends on how conscious it looks and how much this is faked and real. I think we're still a bit of a way away, but it will happen. Do I think the machine will be actually conscious like humans? No, I don't. Appearance and actually being are different things. A machine can be programmed to appear conscious by following decision making patterns similar to humans, by incorporating emotion (perhaps as a weighting system to deal with certain scenarios, or maybe not include emotion at all and go for pure practical efficiency..), self preservation, priorities and so on. But, this won't make them _conscious like a human_. I think theres more than a biological computer in us humans. Religious people like to call it a _soul_ ; I prefer to use that term to refer to some overall control system which is outside of the biological control systems: if the brain and nervous system is our hardware and our thought processes our software, then the soul is our firmware. I don't think we will ever completely understand what makes us conscious, for this reason, and therefore cannot ever make truely conscious machines BUT I believe we will, eventually, get very close to it. ------ nev Try this thought experiment. Imagine there was a replicator that could take an exact copy of your current atom states and replicate them somewhere else while keeping you perfectly intact. Doesn't have to be physical - could be replicated by a computer program. Now here's the thing - you would still feel like you, looking out of your eyes. The other versions of you would be distinctly separate to you - not you. That bit that makes you feel you are you - that's what some would call consciousness and others would call a soul. ~~~ coffeeaddicted Imagine your replicate is put in a world without oxygen. It would very fast feel rather different from you despite being identical. You assume consciousness is an inside state which can be copied. But it could as well be a process in constant need of an external influence which might refuse to connect to your replica. Like the difference between standing and flowing water - watched only in one instant they might seem identical. And while the solution would certainly be to copy the world as well, as long as we can't define consciousness we can't really say for sure how much we would have to replicate. ------ byoung2 _which "new lead" in computation do you think will allow it?_ I don't know if hardware is holding back progress in AI, especially with distributed computing; it is more likely a question of software and programming. I think in order for a computer to exhibit a reasonable facsimile of human intelligence, it will have to do more than just run programs written by humans. It would have to have the ability to write and rewrite its own code. ~~~ reynolds Are humans at a place where we can write and rewrite our own DNA? ~~~ byoung2 The computer equivalent of human DNA would have more to do with hardware than code. When I talk about computers rewriting code, I'm talking more about rewriting patterns of thought processing. While humans can't rewrite DNA on the fly, we can definitely teach ourselves new ways of approaching problems. ~~~ dkersten An FPGA of sorts? ------ DanielBMarkham AI will be achieved -- over a period of decades and by brute force. At the end, I can't say whether you'll have machine consciousness or not, but you'll have something that is indistinguishable from it. And that's good enough. What we call consciousness is probably very closely tied with having a physical body perceiving things it the outside world. So I think for a long time there will be differences between machine and man, but machines will eventually win out and become vastly superior to people. I just wouldn't count on it in your lifetime. The really interesting question is: if we can quantify consciousness, what happens when we create something that's more aware and conscious than we are? Would we be considered sentient by a being that thinks a thousand times faster and in hundreds of thought-trains, lives for a million years, and can converse millions of ways simultaneously at bandwidths millions of times greater than speech? We would be like insects to something like that, and it's not such a far- fetched idea or that far off. ~~~ frig Perhaps, but (to the best of our apparent knowledge) the difference between "doggy brain" and "human brain" isn't really that the "human brain" is orders of magnitude faster at thinking "doggy thoughts"; it appears to be at least as much a qualitative difference in _what_ it does as in the amount it can do in a given unit time...and the moreso if you start comparing, say, "gecko brain" to "human brain". Agree with your general thrust but it's the qualitative change that's the more interesting, as it's perhaps unknowable (in the way that your dog Fido will never understand most of your thoughts, no matter how patiently you explain them). ------ reg4c Seeing how consciousness is defined as being aware of one-self, machines will never be conscious. Since, we program machines and give them everything they know, every last algorithm, I don't think that we will ever be able to code a consciousness algorithm. Read more about the weak and strong AI theories to understand what I mean. ------ gruseom Let's address the easy part: _Do you think the Church-Turing thesis (anything that is computable is computable by a Turing machine) indicates that machine consciousness is possible?_ Only if you assume that consciousness is a computation, which is assuming everything. I normally try to resist this topic, but what you're saying here tugs at my heart-strings: _I'm now a little concerned that it may all be a waste. I'd prefer not to waste my life on something that turns out like the phlogiston theory._ Consider the total failure of algorithmic approaches to even begin, even pathetically, to replicate anything recognizable as consciousness. Were the people working on it dumber than you? Try to find some way to control for the geek fantasy factor, in yourself and others, before deciding what to do. (By the way, now I'm curious: what was it that led you to "the scary idea that machine consciousness may not be possible"?) ~~~ zoba I've thought of it several times, but it wasn't until recently that it actually kind of scared me. It was just a surprise thought that arose as I was once again thinking about the topic. It probably scared me this time and not others because I'm very stressed over the GRE, and grad school applications (namely: where the heck should I apply), and how me telling grad schools "Oh, I'd like to study machine consciousness" will go over. I could be wrong, but I'm concerned they wont take me seriously...so I've been trying to think of something that sounds more acceptable. ~~~ joeyo My advice, if you are considering a PhD, is to pick your school based on your potential _research advisor_ more than the department or the school in general. Contact him or her before you apply and tell them your plans of study and research interests and then go from there. ------ yason It is inevitably a question of belief. If we want to stick to what we seem to know for sure physically and scientifically, then I suppose we can consider humans equal to computers albeit much more parallel and complex. In other words, if we reduce a human to mere electric signals in the nervous system and accept that finally the whole human life derives from that only, then we can eventually build a similar machine ourselves. If we want to think that a human is merely a physical projection of some greater energy, be it the while universe, gods -- or a single $GOD, if you prefer -- then we definitely can't produce consciousness ourselves. Instead, we would have to wait for, or somehow invite, the greater energy or consciousness itself to find and take presence in the form of a machine that passes electric signals around. ------ ilitirit Depending on how you look at it, humans _are_ machines. ~~~ joubert From what perspective? ~~~ psawaya Materialism ~~~ joubert Materialism doesn't imply that organisms are machines. ------ naveensundar Consciousness is a feature of our external world/ Universe. We should formulate theories and test it experimentally. We should describe it in terms of basic components. Unfortunately, this is not how AI has been treating consciousness. AI treats consciousness as an art/engineering problem rather than rigorous science. But, there is hope : Journal of Experimental and Theoretical AI <http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/tf/0952813X.html> Current theories say consciousness is caused by a specific mode of representation/ computation. Like good scientists and rational thinkers we should submit everything to rigorous testing/ proof. Let us not please take things at face value. [Or we can take the easy route and live in a bubble :) ] ------ modeless I've never heard a good reason why it wouldn't be possible. But even supposing that it isn't, AI research is not wasted. It is clear that products related to AI (natural language processing, computer vision, game opponents, etc) can be exceedingly useful even though they're not sufficient to produce a conscious AI. So don't worry! My personal belief is that the reason progress in AI has been so slow is that AI optimists vastly underestimated the computing power needed to produce good AI, and when our computers are finally fast enough (20-30 years perhaps, and the most important metric is probably not FLOPS but memory bandwidth) AI will actually not be that hard to achieve. ------ njharman No, because consciousness does not exist. Although, I am sure an artefact can be constructed that believes itself to be conscious and capable of convincing others it is conscious. Which is, more or less, identical to having consciousness. ~~~ teilo Ah. A religious assertion. ------ teeja I think it's more interesting to ask whether computer _emotions_ are possible. (Not merely the emulation of emotions.) A simple definition of consciousness is the difference between being asleep (mostly oblivious to self) and awake (aware of self, environment, and relationship). Even then, a machine can negotiate terrain. But add emotions and you get potential for creativity (non-programmed, original output) which is a testable measure of sentience. Consciousness can be faked. Original work can't - certainly not original work that 'touches people's souls'. Somewhere in there is a machine that earns my ungrudging respect. It's not a formula: it's a feeling. ------ lleger In short: yes. I think it's painfully clear that sometime in the coming years humanity will reach the pinnacle of its scientific achievement with the advent of an artificially intelligent machine: one that is able to think and reason and is self-aware. Technology is moving at such a rapid pace and in the right direction that this is just the next logical step. In order for this to occur, however, significant advances must be made in fields outside of technology; e.g. quantum computing will probably be a huge stepping stone, and for that to come to fruition we must first fully prove quantum mechanics. ~~~ ericlavigne "In order for this to occur, however, significant advances must be made in fields outside of technology; e.g. quantum computing will probably be a huge stepping stone, and for that to come to fruition we must first fully prove quantum mechanics." I recently heard about the term "yak shaving". This seems to be a good example. ------ bpourriahi You must clarify consciousness. Perceiving and conceiving. That's all that we are truly capable of. Motivated by survival, geared towards good and away from bad. Doesn't seem impossible if that's what you consider consciousness. I think a computer will be able to easy be able to perceive any kind of sense and conceive any kind of idea. But you also have to consider, why would it? Why would it speak if it didn't need to? It doesn't require anything that humans need. It would be pure consciousness - a zen master. You could only communicate with it if it had some basic drive/force. ------ Ixiaus A point of clarification should be made here... Are you speaking of machine consciousness behaving similar to our own? Human's consciousness is but one form, in my opinion. We are a complicated biological machine seeking the fulfillment of our existence; how is that any different than a machine seeking the fulfillment of its existence? I believe the money is in self-evolving circuits and programming; allowing the machine to mold what defines its existence based on external parameters - and overtime, based on internal parameters (will to change). ------ lee I believe it's possible and will eventually happen. I imagine through some randomness, or directed experiment, a piece of software will exist which will self-replicate and mutate... eventually evolving to some point of self-awareness. Most likely we won't have deliberately created the AI. It'll just be through some random chance that it'll happen, much like how some random collisions of molecules formed "life" a few billion years ago. Much like how life was formed on Earth, given enough time and material, the chance of AI emergence is bound to happen. ------ bpourriahi You must have a simple answer for what consciousness is. What awareness is. What intelligence is. These questions are the most important part of the whole problem. That's why it is much more important to understand them then try to learn something that doesn't exist. I wouldn't expect much in terms of trying to work on this problem with a team unless you were at a certain college that was serious about it. ------ bendtheblock _The question of whether Machines Can Think... is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim._ \- Edsger Dijkstra ------ robryan I think it is possible that some area's are going about the problem wrong way. With current hardware attempting to simulate the brain as it works I don't think is the viable option. I seem to have the problem also that we are using the thing we are trying to simulate to work out how to simulate it. From our perspective the problem could be almost impossible. ------ beza1e1 If consciousness is computable then it is also computable by a Turing machine and a computer. Consciousness is computable, if there is a formal model. The core question is thus: Can we find a formal model of consciousness (aka intelligence)? So far AI research only managed to create sub-models for special tasks (ELIZA, Deep Blue, Google, ...). ------ leif EC: I don't think there's a connection between computation and consciousness. Examine other species for the line of consciousness and the line of computation. Does it count if something computes without intent, like a spider approximating a minimum spanning tree? I'm not sure, but I don't see it yet. ------ joshu If you could simulate a brain at the atomic level, with sufficient precision, would it think? I wonder if the mind arises in the brain because of quantum effects? Anyway - modern AI is not generally about "strong AI" (attempting to make a humanlike intelligence) but more about "weak AI" (attempting to make things that solve problems.) ------ fuzzmeister As soon as we fully understand the brain, and have the computing power to model it perfectly, we will have machine consciousness. Both are extraordinarily lofty goals, and machine consciousness may well be achieved through other avenues, but neither seems so out of reach as to be impossible. ------ fburnaby It would be just as much of an academic service for you to help find a out that AI _can't_ work is it would be if you found out it can. The problem is inherently interesting and worthwhile pursuing, regardless. Phlogiston theory brought on Oxygen and the rest of chemistry after a while. ------ Tichy It's not all or nothing: even if true AI would not be achieved in your lifetime, there would still be loads of useful things with the stuff you learn. As for the question, I am sure that it is possible (except I take issue with the word "consciousness" - what is it supposed to mean?). ------ naveensundar For those people who claim conscious machines exist read "Offer: One Billion Dollars for a Conscious Robot; If You’re Honest, You Must Decline" <http://www.eripsa.org/files/Bringsjord%20Robot.pdf> :) ~~~ Tichy Waste of time, sorry. Didn't make it to the end, but does he say anything else than "there is no definition of consciousness"? ~~~ naveensundar Is there a definition of consciousness? The gist is that people are dishonest when they claim they have a conscious program or robot. The notion that a program causes consciousness is not well defended. Suppose I have a program X which is conscious and let it be written down. Does it get conscious if a billion people execute it in parallel? It is not clear what is conscious in this case. (Searle's Argument) ~~~ Tichy It's just not very interesting. It would be the same to say "I give you 1 billion dollars if you write me a program that does hhfdsodifiuuiuuuttueeertz", without saying what "hhfdsodifiuuiuuuttueeertz" is. Saying "no machine can be conscious" is equivalent to saying "no machine is hhfdsodifiuuiuuuttueeertz". I am not even sure it would be dishonest to take the money. It is kind of insulting to give such a task, so maybe it would serve the sponsor right. After all, the sponsor would be unable to prove that the program is not conscious. Suppose I submit a program that does nothing than print "the weather is nice" on the screen. Who is to say the machine is not conscious? It could be all sorts of self-aware, but for personal reasons decide to communicate nothing but "the weather is nice" to the outside world. ~~~ naveensundar >It's just not very interesting. It would be the same to say "I give you 1 billion dollars if you write me a program that does hhfdsodifiuuiuuuttueeertz", without saying what "hhfdsodifiuuiuuuttueeertz" is. Saying "no machine can be conscious" is equivalent to saying "no machine is hhfdsodifiuuiuuuttueeertz". Then, saying your weather-printing machine is conscious is equivalent to saying that is hhfdsodifiuuiuuuttueeertz which of course means nothing. But a lay person will really think that machine is conscious. If you say your machine is conscious, then you must show it is conscious rather than just claim it is conscious. I can print "I travel faster than light" and claim that is a proof of faster than light travel to a lay person who will believe me. That is what is happening today in consciousness and AI research. Just cause you can't see the earth is round directly does not mean it is not spherical. There should atleast be an indirect way, otherwise it is not Science :). ~~~ Tichy Except that "it is conscious" is not a hypothesis, because it doesn't mean anything. That is the whole point: the whole task doesn't contain any testable bits. ------ bpourriahi It is not a matter of learning AI. It is a matter of understanding consciousness. Double major in AI and Philosophy if you must. But all I mean by that is take some drugs, keep a journal, and learn how to become an incredible programmer. ------ paraschopra I'd read somewhere and don't necessarily agree with the argument, but I found this interesting: if a machine gets conscious, it would convince you that it is conscious. You won't have to really deduce it is conscious. ------ pjw1187 I'm going into graduate school next year and I plan on pursuing this exact topic or something similar to it. I believe that consciousness can be achieved if in fact we can analytically explain what consciisouness is. ------ johnnybgoode Even if it is possible, I'd suggest reconsidering whether going to grad school in AI is a good way to accomplish your goals. Like mILK says, look into the history of AI in academia and its current state. ------ psyklic The problem with your question is -- no one can agree on a precise definition of 'consciousness'. If you mean: "Can we get a machine that can act just as a human acts?", then I believe that yes we can. ------ schnalle while i belief in machine consciousness, i don't think human-like intelligence - as described in popular science fiction culture - is likely (though not impossible). intelligence: yes. superhuman intelligence: yes. but human-like intelligence, as in "thinks like a human, reasons like a human"; no * . the bodies, senses, cultures, etc would be just too different. so silicon-based intelligence would be very strange and incomprehensible for us, and i doubt we'd recognize it as an intelligent being easily. * with the possible exception of eliza ------ bufordtwain Personally, I do not think a machine will ever be conscious. Machines will always be as dumb as a box of rocks and will need to be told what to do. A machine follows rules - maybe complicated rules, but rules nonetheless. I cannot conceive of a situation where a machine that has been programmed to listen and talk hears a person in the room pass gas and spontaneously laughs as humans do (unless it has been programmed to do so). Sorry, I'm just not buying it. That doesn't mean that your trying to make a computer be conscious isn't a good use of your time. You'll learn lots and maybe you'll prove me wrong. ~~~ CamperBob _Machines will always be as dumb as a box of rocks and will need to be told what to do._ Oh, right, as opposed to most people. ------ elduderino If you define humans as machines - automated creatures based on input and output, then yes. However there is this thing called qualia (aka subjective experience) that I believe is very real. Machines are not capable of this. All of the AI today is based on complex algorithms with an input output model. There is nothing subjective going on inside. ~~~ joeyo We don't know for sure that machines are not currently capable of experiencing qualia. We don't know that machines cannot ever be capable of experiencing qualia. We don't even know if animals experience qualia, and if so, which ones. I don't even know for sure if _you_ are experiencing qualia. ~~~ ewjordan _I don't even know for sure if you are experiencing qualia._ I'll go you one further and admit that I don't know for sure if _I_ am experiencing qualia. My brain certainly tells itself that I am, but how do I know it's not just wrong? Perhaps qualia is, in the end, nothing more than the state of asserting to yourself that you feel qualia. In which case it's really more a question about whether your brain is properly structured to ask that question than about whether it really exists... ~~~ joeyo Ah, yes, we have arrived at the problem of being fundamentally unable to be sure of the nature of reality. We don't know if our sensors are reporting to us the "true" nature of the world and we don't know if our brains are reporting to us the "true" nature of our internal states. I guess, like you, I am okay with accepting that experiencing qualia and my brain telling me that I am experiencing qualia are functionally indistinguishable if not equivalent states. ------ mdoar Doubt it, but then I'm not holding my breath for a personal helicopter either. ------ frig You're framing this question in an unhelpful way. Better: what are the major arguments for the position that machine consciousness is not possible? What do I think of those arguments? Particularly taking care to distinguish: \- does the argument prove what the people advancing it think it proves? \- do I find myself agreeing with the argument? Major lines of argument I've heard: \- the metaphysical argument: consciousness derives from having a soul somehow linked to your brain (and thenceforth to your body); the purported impossibility of "machine consciousness" follows from a belief that only people have souls (of the right type, at least) \- the limited-smarts argument: consciously building a conscious machine is beyond the capabilities of a conscious entity (of our type of consciousness) \- the "difference between silicon and wetware" argument: this ranges from assumptions there's quantum magic in parts of the brain to assumptions that the brain organization implements some other, unsimulable-by-silicon computing architecture (perhaps super-turing) \- the "consciousness is an illusion" argument: consciousness and intelligence per-se have little to do with each other despite the apparent overlap one perceives from reflection on one's own thoughts. Thus machine intelligence seems to be possible but that says nothing about consciousness per se. If you're really serious enough about this to consider making it a life's work (or because you really want to make a conscious AI) I would suggest taking _none_ of the above arguments lightly, even though it's somewhat fashionable in some circles to assume most of the above are just nebulous handwaving by anti-rational mystics. "Taking them seriously" doesn't mean "pack your bag and go home"; it means you keep thinking scientifically and analytically and try to answer questions like: \- suppose smarts are limited, but we don't know that yet for certain. What could this intuition _mean_ (in a more formal or more precise sense)? How could I make the intuition more precise? What would a formal proof of the intuition look like (and what would be the theorem)? Does this inquiry seem to be leading me in the direction of possible theorems or nontrivial facts about the expressive power of symbolic systems (that aren't already known, or a retread of Godel)? Does there still seem to be work I'd be interested in doing in this general field if it turns out that smarts are limited? ...as even "wrong" counterarguments can do wonders for pointing you in the direction of interesting questions Extra Credit: of the researchers who at least seemed to think they'd solve the problem pretty quickly, is there a recurring pattern to be found in the failures those researchers encountered? Major recurring themes: people who've thought they were within reach of making conscious machines typically assumed that the part of their own nature that they valued most was the keystone to consciousness and assumed everything else was either secondary or easy (and thus could be filled-in later). Thus a Hofstadter-type -- who loves delving deep into various piles of work and crafting new and insightful analogies -- winds up thinking that the core capability an artificial intelligence needs is the ability to craft such analogies; people with phds in mathematical fields and a more logical bent assume that the core ability is symbolic inference, and make software that does symbolic inference; yet others assume that rational hedonism is the core and work on utility-maximizing decision-theoretic planners and agents; others still love making systems with complicated interactions and seeing what pops out and start chasing emergence. All of that work is good work and has found applications, but the dynamic is obvious: people who get into the field with the specific goal of making AI -- instead of, say, improving algorithms for multicamera view synthesis with applications to industrial quality control -- tend to radically overvalue whatever intellectual style they happen to be good at, but so far none of those intellectual styles appears to have really scratched the surface of consciousness in the sense you're interested in. Beware your best ideas and favorite subjects! ------ keltecp11 what about when the brain is powered by machines? Does that count as a computer being self-aware? ------ polos Some things a machine will never be able to: \- spontaneously ask itself where it is coming from \- spontaneously ask itself what it will become after its own destruction \- having spontaneous thoughts \- having free will Why do I say spontaneous? Because our thoughts aren't coming from our mind, but from our soul (that is, from the principle of life, which is invisible by nature). Come on, these are all obvious things; humans, don't believe blindly in science, science is not a religion(!). A machine could (in theory) more or less be similar to animals, though. ~~~ stevedekorte But we do all those things and we are machines. Biological machines, yes, but still machines. ~~~ polos Your are a biological machine? Really? Exclusively? Who did convince you of that? Science? Science is only science, science very often is wrong, and has to correct itself, sometimes decades, or even centuries later. I know that I'm not a biological machine. I know that there's a voice inside myself that asks many many more questions than any science will ever be able to answer. Now, where do these questions come from? Certainly not from my brain. My brain is not able to ask questions beyond its own capabilities. So, let me repeat the initial question: are you a biological machine, and nothing more? ~~~ polos BTW, I can ask all of these questions without going into tilt, and without having any biological malfunction. So, these are _all_ valid question. If I were a "biological machine", someone would already have called for a "biological" doctor...	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Transposing Instruments - camtarn https://opencurriculum.org/5567/transposing-instruments/ ====== klez > The fundamental pitch of a brass instrument, on the other hand, is > considered to be the fundamental of the harmonic series it plays when no > valves are being used. For those who don't know how brass instruments work (and wonder how you can produce so many pitches with so little valves) this may sound a little confusing (a lot of people asked me, so I'll assume some people don't know). I'll take a trumpet as an example, as it is the instrument I'm most familiar with. First of all, you don't just blow air inside the instrument: you buzz your lips, as if you were making a sort of fart sound without using your tongue. Depending on the speed your lips vibrate at, you are able to make a series of pitches, which ones basically depend on the length of the instruments. The pitches you can make are part of an harmonic series, so basically (transposed from Bb) C, G, C, E, G and so on. Pressing the valves changes the length of the tubing so you can lower the note you're playing by a half step (middle, or second, valve), one step (rear or first valve) or one and a half step (forward or third valve). So by combining them you can obtain all the other pitches you may need. For example, suppose your lips are buzzing at a (written) G. You press the middle valve and get a F#, you press the first valve and you get an F, first and second (or just third) gives an E, second and third Eb, first and third D, all the valves Db, then you can vibrate your lips at a lower rate and release all the valves to get a C. ~~~ tabtab Re: _First of all, you don 't just blow air inside the instrument: you buzz your lips, as if you were making a sort of fart sound without using your tongue. _ The dirty secret of brass instruments. I wonder if they could make a direct air-powered vibrator so that one doesn't have to torture their lips. It may also make life easier for amateurs. I imagine it may result in loss of control for subtle effects, but some amateurs will accept that. ~~~ kop316 Assuming you play a brass instrument, I suggest to try this experiment: Blow air through your lips and purse then together, but do NOT buzz. Basically the "buzzing" without the buzz. When you do that, continue to and press your lips against the mouthpiece. You will make a note! This was something my instructor showed me because use way too much of my lips when I play (a very common mistake with amateurs), and a lot of the power you use should be through your diaphragm (large versus small muscles). ------ toolslive This is a really nice article. "usually ..... A is 440hz". The 'usually' here is an interesting topic by itself: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concert_pitch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concert_pitch) Anyway, I do have some questions: \- regarding the universalness of this. Is it (the transposing of instruments) like this everywhere or is it different in some parts of the world? (some things differ wildly, like the whole 'fixed-do' versus 'movable-do' thing. \- If I look at a score written for an alto sax, How can I tell which note is meant ? \- In jazz, people learn a standard in a certain key, and when that tune is called, it's called together with a key, usually to adapt to some constraint (like the singer's vocal range). The musicians mostly can adapt on-the-fly. Is there something similar in classical music ? (an example would be to transpose Beethoven's 9th from Dm to Em) ~~~ tomcam 1\. Universality of transposition: These conventions apply wherever people use western instruments. 2\. Alto sax is always in the key of E flat. That means the note called A flat played by an alto sax would be C on the piano. Likewise tenor is always in the key of B flat. A huge advantage to this arrangement is that the fingering is the same no matter which instrument you are playing; that means it is up to the composer to transpose notes as appropriate. The saxophone family is amazingly cohesive and consistent because Adolphe Sax invented it in one fell swoop. 3\. Well-trained classical musicians can transpose at will. I read a story by the composer/pianist Andre Previn whose touring orchestra was late to a concert hall due to the bus driver getting lost. He was playing the piano in a concerto. What he didn’t know was that the entire piano had detuned up half a step. It meant that The moment he sat down to play a concerto in C minor he was therefore playing in C sharp minor. The orchestra caught this immediately and everyone transposed up for the rest of the concert – on the fly. Edit: I mysteriously screwed up keys of alto and tenor sax, both of which I play. Idiocy caught by klez and duly corrected. ~~~ klez > Alto sax is always in the key of A flat. That means the note called A flat > played by an alto sax would be C on the piano. Likewise tenor is always in > the key of E flat. Uh? Alto sax is in Eb and tenor is in Bb. ~~~ tomcam Thanks for the correction. I play sax. You are right of course. WTF is wrong with me? ------ memset One technique that is overlooked when transposing music - that maybe is interesting - is using clefs to transpose. Suppose I play alto sax (which I do!) and have sheet music written for a violin, in the concert key, in treble clef. If I want to transpose the music and play it on the sax, which is an Eb instrument, here's the trick: read the music as though it's written in soprano clef! A C in treble clef will be an A in soprano clef, which is indeed the correct transposition. Of course you still have to change your key signature. So if you can learn to be comfortable with a new clef, as was the standard when Bach was writing choral music, then this would be a great tool in the toolbox for transposing on the fly! ~~~ delsarto This works for trombones who might play in a brass band (where everything is Bb to ease moving between instruments). Read the treble clef in tenor clef (somewhat commonly used in orchestral settings for trombones) and 2 flats to the key signature (and use intuituion on accidentals :). Similarly can read Eb treble clef (e.g. baritone sax) parts in bass clef + 3 flats ------ sizzzzlerz I picked up the clarinet in 5th grade and played in school bands through college. I knew that it was a Bb instrument but was never taught what exactly that meant. I assume it was because my instructors never felt that it was important for their players to know. Since we always played off sheet music that was written for the specific instruments, that's probably true. It's nice to finally know. ------ adrianh To relate this to startups: my company Soundslice ([https://www.soundslice.com/](https://www.soundslice.com/)) makes interactive, web-based sheet music that can be instantly transposed for any transposing instrument. :-) ~~~ burfog I saw a slider for transposing. Don't you need two? One should change the pitch, and the other should change the notation. I tried yours, and it changed both pitch and notation at the same time. (listening to the synthetic sound) For music with multiple parts, it would be nice to transpose everything together in the most reasonable way. This would maintain relative pitch relationships, adjust the whole thing up or down to fit ranges of the players, transpose according to how the players will read music, and avoid excessive accidentals. A few alternatives could be offered: option 1 makes the trumpet player suffer really high notes, option 2 makes oboe player suffer lots of flats, etc. ------ monochromatic What a mess. Have there ever been any serious efforts toward “modernizing” musical notation? ~~~ rewgs It's really not a mess. It's a solution to a problem, and it works well. To give you an idea of how not-a-problem it is, many composers (myself included) prefer to read orchestral scores (so, a page will have roughly 15-20 staves) that are transposed. So, instead of reading each instrument in the same key, we see what each player is reading. If the concert key is C, I'll see the clarinets and trumpets reading in D, etc. I prefer it because you get a better sense of how the music feels to each individual player, and can better respond to any issues they're having. It's a mess to look at, I guess, but to any reasonably well trained musician, it's clear as day and conveys far more useful information than the "cleaner" way of seeing everyone in the same key, which really just obfuscates what's really going on. ~~~ burfog It's a mess. The relevant badness is that the interval from one line to the next is not constant. This makes transposition far more difficult than it needs to be. If the 12 notes of the octave were on 6 lines and 6 spaces, perhaps with a distinct (dotted, wavey, thick, missing, etc.) line to aid in not getting lost, the situation would be far better. There wouldn't need to be a key signature at all, or any accidentals. Stack as many octaves as needed for the part. Probably we'll never transition to something sane. We can't even manage to get grand staves with middle C in a unique (shared, central) position, which is what you want when hand distinction isn't required. ~~~ rewgs Question, so I better understand where you're coming from: are you a musician, and if so, at what level would you consider yourself? ~~~ burfog I suppose I understand this stuff far better than most people who have bothered to learn an instrument. I frequently arrange music for flute, trumpet (my primary instrument), and garklein recorder. I'm at the level where usability matters. Top experts, not that there are enough of them to care about, can handle anything. Beginners will be lost in any case. I would greatly prefer a chromatic notation. Accidentals ought to be reserved for quarter-tone needs. Chromatic notation gives music the same shape on the page no matter what pitch it is transposed to; this is an extremely valuable property. Sight-transposition would be trivial. Imagine a world in which an ordinary clarinet player could play music for the flute, horn, or bassoon. Sight-transposing, even by other than an octave, would be easy for most players. ~~~ rewgs Gotcha, thanks for that. I wasn't sure if you were coming from the place of a musician who's super deep into it, or a novice or non-musician who just can't really grok notation because that just isn't their world. Obviously it's the former. I think your ideas here are so interesting! I totally see what you're saying with accidentals being reserved for quarter tones. I studied microtonal music in college and _hated_ the notation systems. They truly feel "bolted on" to standard notation. Have you developed any sort of concrete "replacement" system? If so, I'd love to see it. This is super cool stuff. ------ gyuserbti Not understanding this. Why, for example, doesn't a clarinetist just play a C? I'm on mobile so I can't explain my question well, but: why isn't the transposed version just the default interpretation of the score? If clarinetists are playing bflat when the score says c, why not just play c? Is the implied point that the same 440 hz is interpreted differently because of quality, secondary frequencies etc? ~~~ klez Try doing that with a Eb instrument like an Alto sax and tell me how you like the fingering :) Also, as the article says, this allows players of an instrument that has different versions with different tunings (e.g. saxophones which can be in Eb or Bb depending on the type of saxophone) to learn one set of fingerings and being able to reproduce it on all tunings. So, for example, a written C is done by pressing all but the last button (iirc). By doing this you'll play a Bb on a tenor sax and an Eb on an alto, but with the score being transposed you'll know that when you see a note one line below the staff you'll have to put your fingers in that position regardless of the sax you're playing. ------ nightcracker I can understand transposing whole octaves to limit the use of extra bars. Transposing anything other than that seems silly to me. ~~~ klez > Transposing anything other than that seems silly to me. You make it sound like it's done out of spite, or because musicians like unnecessarily complicated things. Reasons for this are given both in the article and in this thread. So having read those, why do _you_ still think it's silly? ~~~ nightcracker Because I'm not convinced that the benefits outweigh the downsides. Again, any excessively too high/low (part of a) piece you can transpose in octaves to get it within a reasonable level. Then everyone can read eachother's sheet music without having to adjust. ------ mrleiter That‘s also the reason why orchestras usually play two to three pitches (e.g. C - B flat - E flat) before starting the concert, so that the conductor can determine if the relevant instruments are attuned to their respective pitch in harmony. Listen here: [https://youtu.be/KfSH1ezevjM](https://youtu.be/KfSH1ezevjM) ~~~ klez In this case the pitch is given by the piano, but do I remember correctly that if the orchestra doesn't include a piano the base pitch is given by the oboe, as it's the hardest instrument to tune? ~~~ ken I've never heard it said that the oboe is hard to tune. From what I've found, it's mostly historical accident that the oboe is used for tuning: [https://www.rockfordsymphony.com/faqs/why-does-the- orchestra...](https://www.rockfordsymphony.com/faqs/why-does-the-orchestra- always-tune-to-the-oboe/)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Waldseemüller map - dalek2point3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldseem%C3%BCller_map ====== fhars If you like maps like this, you will also like the globe produced by Martin Behaim in 1491, which (obviously) doesn't show the americas: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erdapfel](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erdapfel) ~~~ altrego99 Why obviously? How was America missed in earlier maps? ~~~ silvio Because Europe didn't know about America until 1492. ~~~ qnaal Or more accurately, as that wikipedia page mentions, March 1493- when Columbus got back. ------ mryingster I'd love to see this map projected onto a current map (or even satellite imagery) to see what sort of accuracy they were able to achieve back then. It is quite a feat to gather all that information and compile it into a single (large) image! ~~~ acdha There are a couple of projects which try to make that really easy by allowing you to georeference a map by matching some common places: [http://www.oldmapsonline.org/](http://www.oldmapsonline.org/) [http://www.georeferencer.org/](http://www.georeferencer.org/) [http://maps.nypl.org/warper/](http://maps.nypl.org/warper/) If you want a desktop app (handy with e.g. massive high-res scans) there's a fairly polished QGIS plugin: [https://www.qgis.org/en/docs/user_manual/plugins/plugins_geo...](https://www.qgis.org/en/docs/user_manual/plugins/plugins_georeferencer.html) Once you've georeferenced something it's a fairly straight-forward process to either export as KMZ for Google Earth, etc. or export tiles which can be used with something like LeafletJS. I've used a master -> QGIS -> GeoTIFF -> gdal2tiles -> mbutil path with fairly low hassle. I used this awhile back on [http://www.wdl.org/en/item/2589/](http://www.wdl.org/en/item/2589/) and it was pretty interesting to see how the 1827 map was fairly accurate for the western part of the Russian empire but got significantly inaccurate as you headed to the northern or eastern frontiers. ~~~ dalek2point3 very interesting. I've been meaning to do a study where I track maps over time to get a visual picture of how the world was "discovered". Have you seen anyone else that has done something similar or any references? ~~~ acdha I've certainly heard interest in that sort of thing but I don't follow it closely. It'd be a great project, particularly if it involved something like georeferencing TIFFs on the Wikimedia Commons. ------ mapt This is one of _many_ interesting things hiding in the stacks of the maps division of the LOC, if you ever get an opportunity for a private tour - though I'm not sure if every one of those dips into the vault. My strongest memory is of the WW2 Normandy beaches invasion map, done as an architectural model. Also, in the reading room, they keep a personal presidential globe - [http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/churchill/interactive/_html/wc00...](http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/churchill/interactive/_html/wc0001_3.html) ------ jstalin It amazes me how maps like this were made... I presume it was using navigation tools to determine the place on the globe? I just can't imagine how to draw a map when having nothing but navigation tools. ~~~ cafard You could do a pretty good job with latitude, between noon observations of the sun and Polaris at night. But it was the 1700s before anybody could work out accurate longitudes. So I suppose you worked with latitudes and compass routes when you mapped a coast. ------ elwell The Original Size image is crashing my Chrome: [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c0/Waldseemu...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c0/Waldseemuller_map_2.jpg) ------ gusario Anyone know a good source for getting a high quality print of this image? Saw a few sources googling but not sure if I should trust them for print resolution/quality. ------ kylek another installment of slightlyinterestingwikipediaarticles.ycombinator.com ------ mryingster TIL America used to be tiny! ~~~ fhars What with california being an island off its west coast: [http://www.businessinsider.com/people-used-to-think- californ...](http://www.businessinsider.com/people-used-to-think-california- was-an-island-2012-8?op=1) ------ vidar Loooove these old maps.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
A tale of a DNS exploit: CVE-2015-7547 - jgrahamc https://blog.cloudflare.com/a-tale-of-a-dns-exploit-cve-2015-7547/ ====== davidu Just a small shoutout of thanks to the CloudFlare team who was excellent about communicating with us at OpenDNS in advance of this disclosure. As one of the largest recursive DNS infrastructures in the world, they allowed us enough time to spin up resources to determine if we were vulnerable (we were not) which was very much appreciated. We did a small post this morning that also captures some of the history of our codebase. [https://engineering.opendns.com/2016/02/29/a-brief- history-o...](https://engineering.opendns.com/2016/02/29/a-brief-history-of- opendnscache/) ~~~ jgrahamc It was a no brainer to tell you guys. ------ sn If you don't need DNS, a workaround that should still be valid is to disable DNS lookups entirely via the hosts entry in /etc/nsswitch.conf . ~~~ HNexpert Or you COULD use DNS and just patch, but sure, yeah. ~~~ dsp1234 _If you don 't need DNS_ If you don't need DNS, then why would you keep it in place? As an example, I have a system that needs to contact exactly 2 hosts (one of which hosts package updates). So it has DNS turned off and I have a local hosts config. It seems like using a exploit announcement as an opportunity to review whether you need the service in question at all is actually good server administration. ------ edwhitesell Good writeup, but I'd disagree with the first Takeaway where it mentions WiFi redirects being done via a DNS hijacking. That is one way to do it, but it's rare in my experience. Far more common is simply redirecting TCP 80 traffic to a webserver that issues a re-direct to the captive portal URL. Source: I've operated various public WiFi networks since 2001 ~~~ vavrusa I reckon that depends on where you are. I don't have any hard data on this, just a lifetime of disappointment with hotel wifis. It's not the captive portal on first use what irks me, but continued DNS intercepting after you pass the captive portal challenge which hampers either DNSSEC, local resolver, or both. This is not likely to change soon, so DNS folks dream about DNS/HTTP, DNS/TLS and all that. Intercepting actual content transfers makes more sense to me than intercepting name lookups. One thing should be common - once user authenticates, no more MitMing. ~~~ edwhitesell I would agree with you. However, there are valid use-cases for "intercepting" DNS on public WiFi. The most obvious is to block adult content. One example was a customer operating WiFi in restaurants. If a patron accessing the WiFi network was looking at adult content on their laptop, the restaurant owner could be liable for that. I believe it was a "public nudity/nuisance" law. ~~~ vavrusa That is consented filtering and that's fine. I do the same thing locally and I'm okay with a public network operator refusing to serve certain zones (nudity, malware, illegal content). Refusing to lookup a name != MitMing every query however, the latter crosses a fine line (for me) by both lying about answers (redirection to ad pages), and at the same time preventing users to validate integrity of the answer (or non- existence proof). I'm not a lawyer and have no idea how much is this enforceable in terms and conditions of the service, but common sense tells me that by opting out of the provided name services liability transfers to patron. If the recursive resolution was more decentralised, this would have been moot.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Microsoft wins $927M Pentagon contract - richardboegli http://www.defense.gov/News/Contracts/Contract-View/Article/1035122 ====== blister This is an ID/IQ, which means that DISA has set aside $927M over five years for optional services and support. ID/IQs are a cool contract vehicle because it gives the government a cost-effective way to buy just what they need as they go along. Even if they leveraged the hell out of this contract, they're basically buying the full power of MS for $185M per year. That's a hell of a good deal for the government. ~~~ frankydp +-1.5M DISA email users(Navy/MC unclass contracted separately) at 185M a year is quite a bargain. Not to mention desktop/laptop OS, collaboration tools, web servers, forest/domain management at 800 sites in 70 countries. ~~~ blister Oh dang. I estimated tens of thousands. I was off by an order of magnitude and I was the one trying to defend this contract to HackerNews. Lol. Yeah, DISA is freaking huge. We're doing some work for them right now and the scope is massive. Speaking of which... if any of you have a Secret clearance and want a job... :) ~~~ Retric Out of curiosity, if you have a Secret clearance and it expires after 10 years where does that place you on the scale from never having a clearance 0 to having an active clearance 10. ~~~ USNetizen Your Secret clearance now expires sometimes within a matter of months of being off a contract or out of a job that requires it. OPM is cleaning up the clearances, and revoking millions of them. I've had employees go from active TS to "eligible" status (which mean no clearance) in a matter of a few weeks after their contract ended. That whole "10 year active period" is not true, at least anymore, unless you are in a position that requires the clearance for that whole period of time. You're considered lucky to retain a clearance more than a month out of the service now, too. OPM is taking a tough stance on unused clearances and it has negatively impacted the job market for recently separated Veterans because the contracts that come out all require a pre-cleared workforce, which is a rapidly diminishing pool of people to pull from given that clearances are now being revoked as soon as someone gets out of the service or leaves their last position. ~~~ jonwachob91 I don't recall what the actual text says, but when I became a security manager we were always told it was 10/5 years eligible. But I've never even attempted to get a job that required a clearance after my ETS... But I think the question being asked is not what you answered. I think he's wondering if his clearance eligibility expired last year, where does he stand in line for getting a job that requires a clearance? ~~~ blister Yeah, and having already had a clearance in the past definitely helps speed up the process to "reactivate" it. The big bummer for companies like mine is that our contract says that we have to have employees with an active clearance. So to activate the clearance, we have to hire them, keep them on overhead for several months and they can't start working until their clearance is approved. It's a painful $20-$40k hit to the budget. :/ ~~~ frankydp Do you not have a Prime? They should be supporting these kind of issues with supplement contract workers. ------ eganist I like articles that consist of just one sentence. > Microsoft Corp has been awarded a $927 million contract to provide technical > support to the Defense Information Systems Agency, the Pentagon said in a > statement on Tuesday. > (Reporting by Mohammad Zargham) In all seriousness, this shouldn't be a surprise given the amount of outdated systems and general reliance on Microsoft tech at DISA. ~~~ metaphor > I like articles that consist of just one sentence. I like articles like that too...just not when they're packaged in a ~4MiB page sprinkled with ads. ~~~ stephengillie The page works fine as a flat page with JavaScript disabled. And that was the most concise article I'll read all day. ------ FLUX-YOU I knew MS shared their code with select customers, but has the DOD always had it? ~~~ youdontknowtho They were one of the first customers of that shared source review program. ------ niels_olson In other news, Microsoft just bought the most lucrative position for corporate espionage available on planet Earth. ------ freddref How many people are typically involved in this type of decision? ~~~ bmelton It depends on the type and scope of the contract. Federal Acquisition Regulations do a fair job at keeping oversight and "fairness" (depending on a lot of factors), but at a minimum, you'd have: * A large body of workers and analysts constructing the requirements * A few contracts officers working to codify those requirements into a request for proposal * A handful of technical contracts officers evaluating the mass of responses * A _large_ pool of technical contracts officers and contracts officers ensuring that the statutory grounds of the proposals are met (verifying that yes, this _is_ a small / veteran owned / minority owned business or yes, this business does have prior qualifications, etc.) After you've separated the wheat from the chaff, and eliminated the obviously incapable parties, the team contracts down to 1 or 2 contracts officers and their staff. This team evaluates the technical feasibility against the requirements, asks a lot of questions to their own technical teams, and then ultimately, votes on the winner. ------ mtw How is it deemed "reporting"? ~~~ jwtadvice There are three times as many public relations professionals as journalists in America. Media companies are being consolidated into a few owners, many of them with tech leadership. Microsoft, for example is the MS in MSNBC (although I think they recently sold MSNBC?) ------ nunez Someone's getting sweet Christmas gifts this year. ------ andreasley Here [1] is the actual statement on defense.gov. [1] [http://www.defense.gov/News/Contracts/Contract- View/Article/...](http://www.defense.gov/News/Contracts/Contract- View/Article/1035122) ~~~ mdrzn We should change OP's link and leave the title. ~~~ ageofwant Mr. Zargham certainly is a concise writer. ~~~ up_so_floating A bit too long-winded for me.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Facebook acquires Pushpop - jamesteow http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/02/facebook-buys-digital-bookmaking-service-push-pop-press/ ====== akhkharu I've read this as: "Facebook acquires Photoshop" and felt like WTF?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: As a freelancer, what turns you away? - jacob9706 I've been freelancing/contracting for a few years now and have never had a problem finding work that I enjoy, but the hiring process can be a nightmare.<p>This is the point where I usually end up walking away and making it known that the reason is due to the convoluted, time consuming process being a huge warning sign of things to come. A few other no-gos include being asked to fill out a skills matrix after phone calls and a clear visual representation of the info has already been shared, a resistance to an in-person right away to see if it's a good fit and the all too common coding assignment (this is what GitHub/portfolios are for).<p>Do these seem like miniscule issues to you? What are your own issues that get you to walk away as a freelancer/contractor? ====== vfulco2 One my pet peeves running a small professional services agency in Shanghai editing English resumes, creating LinkedIn Profiles, interview coaching and similar academic support, is when a prospect comes in all hot and heavy. They love the description of the service, understand my lengthy business career brings something special, have seen my pricing table on our Taobao shop or I have explained to them, then ask for discounts up to 50%. What part of this is a legitimate business, with embedded costs and the need to derive a solid ROR do they not understand? ------ anoncoward111 Basically if the company knows that you + your skills are legit and valuable, you will have a lot of leverage over them. In my line of work (sales), I am dime-a-dozen and I don't have many connections, so I go along with someone's crazy and stupid hiring process. Usually I am denied anyway, but after a long process, I landed my current job.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Vector Math with C++0x - dmm http://prideout.net/blog/?p=30 ====== jobu Most compilers are already doing rvalue optimization of some sort, so the fact that he didn't find any speed benefit from using rvalues explicitly doesn't surprise me.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Larry Page's University of Michigan Commencement Address, Spring 2009 [video] - ashwinl http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfNayaL9MYc ====== triplefox OT: I was in Michigan to see my brother graduate with his PhD. Soon before we left we found out that he couldn't walk because of rules and regulations(he still had to defend his thesis)and so we didn't attend commencement, just visited, ate out, took photos, etc. We went to the Henry Ford estate yesterday. He was definitely the hacker- entrepreneur type. A substantial part of his house was basically a early 20th century laboratory, with engineers working on secret projects. ------ solutionyogi Even though the actual speech content is great, the delivery was very poor, IMO.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Shkreli’s plea from prison: Free me and I’ll cure Covid-19 - Tomte https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/04/shkrelis-plea-from-prison-free-me-and-ill-cure-covid-19/ ====== aiscapehumanity No need when you have dorsy and gates on the task	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Slideshow: Y Combinator hardware hackathon's prize-winning designs - nherbw http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4408238/Slideshow--Toaster-burns-in-Instagrams-at-hackathon ====== mercuryrising Nice paywall - "You've been busy! Looks like you hit your 2 article limit." You can only see two of the pictures before you get the boot. ~~~ brucehart And don't bother registering because you will get a ton of e-mail newsletters you don't want. Trying to unsubscribe from them is like playing whack-a-mole because they subscribe you to so many different lists.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Intel's first graphics card prototype shows off 1.5B transistors - arunbahl https://www.techradar.com/news/intels-first-graphics-card-prototype-shows-off-15-billion-transistors ====== kristianp The referenced original article is quite detailed, but in Japanese.: [https://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/column/kaigai/1107078.ht...](https://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/column/kaigai/1107078.html)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Blue Spire Acquires Aurelia - blzaugg http://blog.aurelia.io/2016/09/12/blue-spire-acquires-aurelia/ ====== smt88 Context would be nice. I've never heard of any of the proper nouns in this article. ~~~ cholantesh Blue Spire is a web dev consulting firm that developed a series of Javascript frameworks - Durandal and Aurelia. Durandal, Inc. is an organization that acted as the maintainer of those frameworks. Enterprise support for Durandal frameworks is provided by Blue Spire. It was perceived that this was an arrangement that is confusing and counterintuitive, so at least as far as Aurelia is concerned, Durandal is being removed from the picture.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Two-Phase-Commit for In-Memory Caches, Part 2 - javinpaul http://gridgain.blogspot.com/2014/09/two-phase-commit-for-in-memory-caches.html ====== alexnewman It's amazing with all the noise around spark these guys hack along. Obviously grid gain is light years ahead.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Are there any online banks that have a decent user experience? - harshk I've seen the web interfaces for JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, and Bank of America. They are all almost unusable in my opinion, clunky, and not at all easy on the eyes. Anyone know of a bank that has decent UI/UX? Simple Bank is great, but unfortunately they don't have business checking accounts (which I need). ====== osi Capital One 360 is decent, and it looks like they offer business accounts.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Apple One Tap Account Upgrades from WWDC 2020 - robertinoc https://auth0.com/blog/wwdc-one-tap-account-upgrades/ ====== robertinoc Learn about Apple's new One Tap Account Upgrades presented at WWDC 2020	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Kik to shut down messaging app to focus on Kin - s9ix https://medium.com/@tedlivingston/moving-forward-boldly-with-kin-ec6290a6453 ====== sp332 *shutter ~~~ s9ix fixed :) thanks!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: What are the best short books that you can read in an evening? - tdhz77 ====== mdorazio What kind of books do you like? Personally, I recommend reading the novella "Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang, on which the film _Arrival_ was based, because the novel is quite a bit different from the movie and takes the whole topic of non-temporal existence in a much more Slaughterhouse-Five direction. ------ dummydata If you're craving some philosophy I would recommend "The Problems of Philosophy" by Bertrand Russell. It's about 160 pages and you can easily skip around to chapters that interest you. Quite thought-provoking.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
PEP 572 – Assignment Expressions - edward https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0572/ ====== cpburns2009 I don't know how I feel about this. I've never liked this style of assignment in other languages. At least they're proposing `:=` as the assignment operator instead of `=` which prevents accidental assignments. I'd rather they add multiline lambdas or inline defs in expressions. ------ Kr1ss Something I've been really missing in Python since I first fiddled with it, as I'm coming from C/C++	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Is Covid-19 turning into an ad campaign? - Ingon Lately, I’ve been receiving a lot of emails from companies about Covid-19. Big and small, explaining what they are doing about it.<p>Are we just turning it into a huge advertisement campaign? ====== siruncledrew Yes... every marketing department is sending an email saying, “We’re doing all we can to protect everyone... thoughts and prayers, we’re in this together! ... btw, don’t forget about your business, and make sure to check out our coronavirus offers and book a Zoom meeting with us to discuss more about out amazing deals for you!” It’s like... yes, we all know there is a virus. It doesn’t need to be reiterated by every single brand with your email in a newsletter-of-the-month gimmicky marketing email sent from Hubspot to funnel leads into Salesforce. Honestly, it’s like watching social media accounts trying to 1-up each other on telling a story about how they are really a better person than everybody else for chiming in on a tragedy with a self-centered post. It’s white knighting a serious situation for self-gratification. ------ h2odragon Hype will trample everything, marketing is just grabbing at its fur on the way by in hopes of being dragged along. This isn't like skateboard surfing a freeway; tho. Hype is a herd of rabid buffalo on PCP. I was joking last month about "sealing ourselves into our apartments with plastic and duct tape" but it isn't funny when people are going to be advocating that later this week. I'm "at risk" and keeping my daughter home from school this week even though they're staying open; the social panic is worrying me far more than the disease. People are ready to accept the unthinkable already and there's voices saying "data isn't important we have to act fast!" ... that could end badly.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Google's internal spy system was Chinese hacker target (2010) - pwnna http://www.zdnet.com/blog/foremski/googles-internal-spy-system-was-chinese-hacker-target/1047 ====== magicalist This is 3.5-year-old random-guy-on-zdnet commentary on a single quote from an unnamed source taken from this article[1], and the quote doesn't remotely support the conclusions he makes. Here is a much more recent report on what likely actually went down: [http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/05/chinese-hackers- who-...](http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/05/chinese-hackers-who-breached- google-reportedly-targeted-classified-data/) tl;dr: it's speculated that they were interested in _who_ the US government was watching as any overlap with their own operatives meant that they were likely compromised. [1] [http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9144221/Google_attack...](http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9144221/Google_attack_part_of_widespread_spying_effort)? ------ cclinus123 This article was 2 year ago. I guess the poster of this thread aims to compare this article blaming China with our great peace loving US government when Snowden event is still hot. ------ goggles99 Wow, who would have ever guessed this??? (Well, my 9 year old son for one.) ~~~ cnvogel Well, of course it was unexpected. There was hardly any documented precedent. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_wiretapping_case_2004%E2...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_wiretapping_case_2004%E2%80%932005)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Deepsearch is a privacy enhanced search engine from Tsignal - ChuckMcM https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/31/deepsearch_tsignal/ ====== ChuckMcM I found it interesting that another company has taken on the "full stack" problem of providing a search engine. I found their FAQ also quite interesting : [https://deepsearch.tsignal.io/static/faq?hl=de](https://deepsearch.tsignal.io/static/faq?hl=de) 4 billion pages in the index is a good number, it hits the major sources if you don't index things like all of Amazon or Yelp. A better number is 10 billion, that is pretty much usable by everyone all the time, especially with smart pruning of automatically generated sites.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Online appeal unearths historic web page - c-oreills http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22652675 ====== Create just for the record and to please the prospective downvoting mob, here is a warning to any non-westerner members: "The cost [...] has been evaluated, taking into account realistic labor prices in different countries. The total cost is X (with a western equivalent value of Y) [where Y>X] source: LHCb calorimeters : Technical Design Report ISBN: 9290831693 <http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/494264> Berner was looking at RPC as his dayjob to give control commands to machines. What Berner did, was to use the Interface Builder's precursor on the NeXT he got as a toy to put a gopher-like link into the text properties field, where the font boldness, size ...and colour and underline were. This was a graphical workstation, and not spread world-wide at the time (NeXT was an expensive toy). Hardly an innovation. And not everybody was allowed to toy around -- certainly not western equivalents. Nobody has really heard of Groff, Pellow, Nielsen and the rest, who made it work multiplatform, over the command-line, etc. ie. a universal world-wide. Nobody was astonished by them back then, because what they were doing was nothing special: several such systems existed already both commercial and academic. They were the cheap students, whose work allowed it to be opened up and given away without charge. WWW grew like it did because of two reasons: it was free of charge, because it was actually made by cheap and disposable students, and the then changing climate of the deregulation of the internet, of which some companies ie. Vermeer, Netscape could take early advantage of. CERN likes cheap students' work, and sell if off as stellar examples of innovation by CERN. Read Facts and Mysteries in Elementary Particle Physics by Veltman to learn more about CERN, if you feel to downvote.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Perfect job? - uptownhr https://medium.com/@jleebiz/hiring-remote-mean-stack-developer-lean-startup-fund-a82f9198df96#.26c98khv7 ====== tracker1 Any chance of getting React + Redux over Angular? And are you tied to mongodb? What's the target deployment environment? ------ smt88 Does sound perfect except for being forced to use the awful MEAN stack. What's that about? ~~~ tracker1 I don't mind MongoDB too much (would prefer RethinkDB, or if a cloud platform is target for deployment probably it's bigtable/sql option). Really not a fan of ng1/ng2... Node I like, it's a good backing server for JS. I think React+Redux is a much better front end option. ~~~ smt88 Mongo is my biggest issue with that stack, although Angular 1 might be as bad. It's baffling that anyone would start a project with either of those technologies after doing very basic Googling of people's experiences with them. Angular 2 is so dissimilar that it's hard to even lump them together. There's actually a drop-in replacement for Mongo (at least where the client code is concerned) called ToroDB that I'm really excited about. It supports NoSQL and Postgres simultaneously. More here: [http://www.8kdata.com/torodb](http://www.8kdata.com/torodb)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Impact of metadata on Image Performance - inian https://blog.dexecure.com/impact-of-metadata-on-image-performance/ ====== sbierwagen On an average, this kind of metadata occupies 16% of size of the JPEG file. Ho ho. You think that's bad? Back in 2011, Tumblr didn't strip metadata from _avatar_ images. That results in some funny files, like this one: [http://28.media.tumblr.com/avatar_c5ee131b70d0_40.png](http://28.media.tumblr.com/avatar_c5ee131b70d0_40.png) That PNG has a 3325 byte IDAT chunk, and a 106022 iCCP chunk. The metadata is 3188% bigger than the image itself. Personally, I think websites _should_ strip metadata from thumbnails and resized images, but should _also_ let you download the original, unmodified image, complete with original filename. Why? Instagram and others always recompress and strip metadata when you submit an image. This results in shitpics-- images so mangled by recompression that they look like visual gravel: [https://theawl.com/the-triumphant-rise-of-the- shitpic-e25d8e...](https://theawl.com/the-triumphant-rise-of-the- shitpic-e25d8e5af9bc#.bkxh5tln3) This is a complete own goal, there's no technical reason this has to happen. Digital files aren't supposed to decay! And, of course, stripping authorship tags would make the dream of automated attribution impossible: [https://eev.ee/blog/2016/08/15/attribution-on-the- web/](https://eev.ee/blog/2016/08/15/attribution-on-the-web/) ~~~ inian I just looked at JPEG files for this..should look at PNG files too..hopefully things are much better than that image you posted haha ------ soamv From my experience hosting a bunch of user-provided images: 1\. Strip all metadata but provide downloads of originals somewhere 2\. Keep it simple, just use imagemagick's convert to remove profiles (but don't use imagemagick for file type detection) 3\. If the image has orientation exif tags, rotate the image to the right orientation (-auto-orient) before removing the exif profile. 4\. Don't remove image profile data. Or convert to sRGB first. ------ huphtur ImageOptim is a handy little tool to strip all the metadata [https://imageoptim.com/mac](https://imageoptim.com/mac) ------ laurent123456 There's some use to this metadata, for example gps coordinates to locate where it was taken, author info, camera parameters, etc. It might not be needed all the time, but it probably also shouldn't be stripped off all the time. ~~~ inian Yup this information is indeed useful for a lot of cases (for photo editing software, etc.)..But for images delivered on the web it makes sense to preprocess them to strip off the EXIF data since it is mostly not used by browsers. ~~~ tombrossman Exif data is particularly useful for preserving copyright metadata and (optionally) contact info for the photographer. Stripping too much metadata perpetuates the 'orphan works' problem and creates lots of photos floating around the internet that can never be used commercially, because the photographer cannot be identified. More info here from the US Copyright office - choice quote: _" For good faith users, orphan works are a frustration, a liability risk, and a major cause of gridlock in the digital marketplace."_ [http://www.copyright.gov/orphan/](http://www.copyright.gov/orphan/) Also, the UK has effectively given everyone the green light to steal photos lacking metadata because it's basically too difficult to find the photographer. [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22337406](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22337406) And from my perspective, I release many images CCO Public Domain with my email or name in the metadata, and I'm annoyed that this metadata is not preserved because it means people may be reluctant to re-use my images due to (non- existent) copyright concerns. ~~~ inian Yup, I have covered this use case in the article ------ steaminghacker Does Google index the metadata within images? ~~~ inian AFAIK Google doesn't use this data for indexing or SEO purposes.. ~~~ eyelidlessness They do capture the information. I'd be shocked if it isn't considered in PageRank. ~~~ steaminghacker thanks. For web pages, I usually clear any existing metadata within images, then insert some simple (but correct) keywords about the image. Wondering if I'm wasting my time.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Why a Hedge Fund Manager Thinks Tesla Model 3 May Put Elon Musk Out of Business - aniken http://fortune.com/2016/12/02/tesla-model-3-stock-elon-musk/ ====== WheelsAtLarge I hope this guy chokes on every dollar he makes from his Tesla short. At this point, I'm tired of hearing how Musk is screwing up Tesla. If he has a better idea, put it forward. I'm not a Musk fanboy but it irritates me when these know it all are ready to talk a stock down just so they can make a buck by shorting it. If he has a better idea tell us about it rather that just telling us how bad Musk is doing. Ultimately, he is either going to succeed or fail but no one knows the future. I hate this saying but it fits well this time. "Opinions are like a __holes everyone has one " ------ greglindahl Nothing new: shorts have been saying Tesla is going out of business for years. This analysis is a wild-ass guess that Tesla has absolutely no idea how to build higher-volume medium-priced cars. Maybe they do, maybe they don't, but this analysis isn't going to tell anyone anything. ------ billylindeman I do find it interesting how skewed the market value of Tesla is verses GM and Ford... Regardless of if the model 3 puts tesla out of business or not, I do think the share price is due for a correction in the next 9 months or so. ------ jti107 This guy better be putting all his 9 million dollars into this short.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Women are happier without children or a spouse - temp99990 https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/may/25/women-happier-without-children-or-a-spouse-happiness-expert ====== leepowers _“Married people are happier than other population subgroups, but only when their spouse is in the room when they’re asked how happy they are. When the spouse is not present: fucking miserable,” he said._ _“We do have some good longitudinal data following the same people over time, but I am going to do a massive disservice to that science and just say: if you’re a man, you should probably get married; if you’re a woman, don’t bother.”_ Obviously this guy is speaking off the cuff. And the article is light on detail and doesn't reference any studies. Study from 2017 that makes the opposite claim: [https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-017-9941-3](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-017-9941-3) _Using data from the British Household Panel Survey, we control individual pre-marital well-being levels and find that the married are still more satisfied, suggesting a causal effect at all stages of the marriage, from pre- nuptual bliss to marriages of long-duration._ A brief APA article describes possible marital bliss confounders: [https://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/10/marriage](https://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/10/marriage) In short: marriage _qua_ marriage won't make anyone happy; children reduce reduce happiness; economic insecurity causes unhappiness. ~~~ tonyedgecombe I’ve seen another report that said children reduce happiness if you are poor and increase it if you are rich. I guess the rich can afford to outsource some of the parental responsibilities. ~~~ hjk05 I’d expect that it’s less about outsourcing responsibility and more to do with the financial pressure caused by having children. As money finances is the factor used to separate the two groups. ------ deogeo Being childless and alone at 50-70 sounds like heaven. Old people hate being visited by their grandchildren. ~~~ mutt2016 Sounds like you are joking. Not all do. And a lot of seniors are getting laid a lot. ~~~ jcims Some without knowing it unfortunately. My eldest child worked at a nursing home and there were situations where lucid consent was not likely in one or sometimes even both of the people involved.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Deletionists slowing Wikipedia's growth - boredguy8 http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/aug/12/wikipedia-deletionist-inclusionist ====== pg Currently the entries for Hacker News, Jessica Livingston, and Trevor Blackwell are all flagged as insufficiently notable: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_News> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessica_Livingston> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trevor_Blackwell> Trevor's entry is a particularly interesting case of the pathology. Originally his bio talked about how he'd made the first dynamically balancing biped robot. That set off a firestorm about priority. One nutter got so mad that for a while Trevor's bio read as if the most significant thing about him was that he'd falsely claimed to have made the first dynamically balancing biped. Eventually the Wikipedians solved the problem by deletion, so now his bio simply says he's some guy who builds robots. Which of course wouldn't be notable, if that's all he was. ~~~ tptacek The rules for notability are straightforward. Subjects are notable "by dint of being written about". The notability tag is very easy to dispel: provide references to credible reliable sources. They clearly exist for Blackwell. The misconception you're fostering here is that the {{Notability}} tag is somehow a black mark on the article. It isn't. The entire encyclopedia is under constant construction. The tags are there to direct the attention of editors. Your complaint is particularly misleading because the Blackwell article is, in fact, badly sourced; it has "External links", but its "References" all point to Blackwell's own sites. The {{Notability}} tag is correct, not because Blackwell isn't notable (he again clearly is), but _because the article doesn't properly establish why_. The rest of your critique may or may not be valid (I have misgivings about WP, too), but the main thrust of your comment here is bogus, and you should acknowledge that. ~~~ ubernostrum I don't think your argument holds up here, though. As I've pointed out elsewhere in this thread, there are already Wikipedia policies in place which cover verifiability of information and citations to reliable sources (in fact, these criteria form part of one of Wikipedia's "Five Pillars"). And there are already perfectly useful procedures in place for dealing with articles which fail these criteria: there are tags for indicating that particular articles, sections or individual statements are in need of citation, and there's a process for evaluating sources referenced by articles. Given this, the notability guideline seems at best to duplicate matters already covered by full-fledged policies. And in real-world situations, its main function seems to be turning Wikipedia into a popularity contest -- prove that your topic has enough Google juice, and it stays! ~~~ tptacek If your whole argument is that {{Notability}} should instead be {{refimprove}} (or whatever that tag was), then, fine, but I think my point holds. ~~~ ubernostrum My argument is really that the notability guideline in general serves no constructive purpose on Wikipedia; everything useful that it purports to do is covered by other policies or guidelines, which leaves only the non-useful things it does, like cause flamewars. ~~~ tptacek The notability guideline supports the non-negotiable verifiability principle. In the absence of WP:N, the amount of random content on WP rises. With it, the amount of difficult-to-verify content. With that, the amount of blatantly false content. The burden of weeding out that content falls on people who could otherwise be improving articles on subjects of note. I think something people miss about WP is the fact that, at the end of the day, all the articles on this massive free volunteer project are published under an encyclopedia's masthead. It really is an actual encyclopedia. It's not the Internet. If something survives in WP, it's supposed to be good. The project is fundamentally opposed to bogus articles; in fact, the project is _about_ not having bogus articles. ~~~ njharman Deletionist rational that makes sense. "not having bogus articles" that one statement is causing me to seriously doubt my inclusionist position. ~~~ Kadin At what cost are you prepared to hold the "no bogus articles" line? Some of the deletionists are very far into 'burning the village in order to save it' territory. I.e., they're so obsessed over "quality" that they'll snuff out anything that might even be the slightest bit questionable, erring on the side of removing things. That strikes me as stupid and needlessly destructive. If bogus articles creep in, the solution is to correct them and move on. The obsession over Wikipedia's "reputation" is likewise misguided. Unless the entire concept of "an encyclopedia anyone can edit" is abandoned, it's never going to be a totally reliable source, and users will always have to be cautioned to fact-check before depending on the information. Outside of the Wikipedia community, this is pretty much taken for granted. The best compromise solution I can come up with would be to periodically 'fork' the WP articlebase, and let the deletionists go to town on the fork, honing it down into some subset of the working version, which users could then choose to browse if they wanted something with a slightly higher barrier to entry. However, my guess is that very few casual WP users _actually care_. ~~~ tptacek I don't think your logic holds. The fact that it's "an encyclopedia that anyone can edit" is why deletionism is a healthy force. If the deletionists let up, and WP spiraled out of control with vanity articles, it would likely stop being an encyclopedia anyone can edit. Again, I think people personalize this. The good deletionists don't care about you or your subject. It's the project they're sticking up for, not the non- notability of Trevor Blackwell. When the topic of debate is Trevor Blackwell, they'll lose. When it's Ketchup_salt, they'll win. There certainly are bad deletionists. A lot of them. But I don't think that's a symptom of deletionism. I think it's a symptom of editing-as-sport and status-seeking, and that those are the problems that are really poisoning WP. ~~~ gojomo Deletionism nudges the project power more towards those with "editing-as-sport and status-seeking" motivations. Procedural games are what they like. For new and casual contributors, deletionism forces them to engage on topics they aren't passionate about -- older topics and wikipedia lawyering -- rather than the marginal topics they're excited to get started (and which may become rigorously 'notable' in due time). Some of these people will just be driven away. ~~~ tptacek I share your concern, but this is an argument that applies equally well to all of WP's process. It's orthogonal to deletionism. ~~~ gojomo 'Orthogonal' is the strong claim I'm disputing; other WP process does not create the same problem. For example, editing someone's contribution to improve its voice/NPOV or suggest verification can encourage casual contributors; it's positive attention. "I got something started, others are paying attention, progress is occurring. Fun!" Deletionism -- whether the judgment that something should be deleted or following through with deletion -- is negative attention. It uniquely discourages contributors and often destroys content of small-but-positive value. (For example, it destroys the important 'first drafts' of topics that will someday easily pass 'notability'.) Deletionism also shrinks the territory on which collaboration can occur. A deleted article can be neither corrected nor improved; it is a void. Perhaps there is someone somewhere who could add the citations... justify the importance... benefit from the partial information -- but deletion forecloses that possibility, even though cheap storage and cheap search means incomplete scraps of information can better find their audience/editors than ever before. ------ tjic The sad thing is that the Inclusionist / Deletionist war does not need to be fought at the data level - they could coexist at the view level. There could easily be two views into the db: * en.more.wikipedia.org * en.less.wikipedia.org Let the deletionists tag articles with a "less" bit all the want. Each article thus tagged is invisible from en.more.wikipedia.org. People are still fighting as if it's the 19th century and space is physical and rival. ~~~ tome It's about mindshare. It may or may not be physical, but it certainly is rival. ~~~ dkarl Yes -- the general public, who don't have strong feelings about the matter, will all end up on one or the other anyway. The other side, the one visited only by people who care about the difference, would become an irrelevant backwater. One side is going to win, and the other is going to lose. ------ coffeeaddicted I think it could be replaced by a page building upon wikipedia. For example - same core-articles, but instead of just article+history versions +discussion page it would have more alternative versions of the same article. Maybe with some voting-system. And yeah - it would have to be inclusive - the amount of discussions and trouble caused by deletionists is just not worth it in a time of ever-increasing diskspace. Every single time I stumble upon a page recommended for deletion something in me dies a little. And why must all the articles be central anyway? Only thing that needs to be central seems to be the index. And some common layout, semantic information and the ability to allow everyone to change pages. Has anyone already tried building a de-central wikipedia which works by voting? ~~~ icefox Because experts are the type of people who can hang out all day voting? ~~~ coffeeaddicted The writing is by experts but not for experts. So each reader is actually qualified to vote. And I think it would help experts to write better for their target audience. ------ TrevorJ You have to first quantify whether or not the deletions make the information that is there more or less accurate. That's not an easy issue to decipher, as is evidenced. There's also the fact that we, as humans have a finite amount of knowledge and it appears likely that much of the low-hanging fruit has been picked in the sense that all the 'easy' articles have been written. ------ silentOpen Hooray for subcultures of internet sites and factionalization! Computers have created a bunch of strange new semi-political beliefs. "We believe that storage is essentially free and more information is almost always better." "We believe that maintaining quality SnR is most important in group editing situations." "We believe that fair use extends to sampling and remixing but copyright holders maintain most other control." ~~~ tptacek "We believe that it's possible for a group of unrelated uncompensated volunteers, acting together, accepting all comers, and embracing anonymity, to create an enyclopedia that will not only rival but possibly exceed the work of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and that it's possible to do that without creating at the same time a galactically monstrous hairball of cruft, misinformation, advertising, and vanity pages." Some "factionalizations" are more interesting than others. ------ tokenadult "Chi has identified one model that Wikipedia's growth pattern matches. 'In my experience, the only thing we've seen these growth patterns [in] before is in population growth studies--where there's some sort of resource constraint that results in this model.' The site, he suggests, is becoming like a community where resources have started to run out." That's an interesting observation. The other time I have seen a growth curve like that is observing the growth of homeschooling in the United States from the 1980s through the 1990s <http://learninfreedom.org/homeschool_growth.html> to the present. The scarce resource is parents who feel they have enough time to homeschool their children. That resource is not completely exhausted, but the growth of homeschooling in the United States follows the resource- constrained S-shaped curve model much better than an exponential, bigger-is- always-better model. It appears that the resource constraint now on Wikipedia is new editors willing to work with the existing editors. That resource isn't exhausted yet either, but it is scarce and limited, and thus Wikipedia's growth rate has slowed. ------ sielskr Suppose you started volunteering on Wikipedia years ago and for one reason or another you've acquired "insider status" in the form of admin priviledges or alliances with other insiders. Well, there is a natural human tendency to hoard power, that is, to navigate yourself in a position where your decisions matter. Sometimes this is called making your mark on the world or "working for change". Suppose further that it occurs to you to ask yourself whether you support the deletionists or the inclusionists. Well, it is difficult for a human being to make that choice without being influenced (consciously or unconsciously) by the knowledge that under a deletionist policy, insiders such as yourself and your allies make more decisions that matter (and consequently are in a position to earn the indebtedness of people with a stake in those decisions, e.g., over whether the 'pedia includes a bio of themselves or one of their allies). ------ teeja There's another force acting in WP besides deletion: consolidation. In the early days it was harder to know about pre-existing articles on a subject. Multiple pages on the same topic and closely related topics were common. For example, I discovered the other day a separate page for Reagan's NPR joke about Russia, "We start bombing in 5 minutes". Another example is subject timelines that are broken out into separate articles for each year. "Notability" is an unfortunate choice for a criterion since it has a large component of subjectivity. There are many people who are only temporarily famous; many who should be (more) famous are nearly unknown - on Wikipedia, for example, technical people before the 20th century whose discoveries still positively impact our lives. Warriors of all ages, on the other hand, get more than enough attention. ~~~ tptacek The subjectivity of notability is, I think, a canard, and it's been tackled upthread from here. One thing I think you can't accuse WP of is of being vague about what "Notability" means. ------ chrischen I put myself as one of the persons born in my home town on wikipedia, and they had the nerve to delete it... jk It seems the inclusionists built Wikipedia into what it is today. It also seems what the deletionists are trying to do: gain Wikipedia more credibility, is a futile effort given the nature of Wikipedia's volatility and inability to be used as a credible secondary source. The whole idea of a wiki that _anyone_ can edit is so that the best final result always comes through. And this is based on the assumption that there are more reasonable people out there than unreasonable, so that the better article can come out on top through reason. But if some exclusive group does take over Wikipedia like this then this idea of an open wiki of information where the best content comes out on top is dead. However theoretically wikipedia is still open to everyone right? So to take back wikipedia we wouldn't have to make an alternative. All we have to do is to organize a counter group that's more powerful in numbers and out click those deletionists right? Correct me if I'm wrong I don't edit wikipedia. But if we can't do that then Wikipedia is no longer really open. ------ tptacek My take is that half of this Guardian article makes an important observation about Wikipedia, and the other half tries to relitigate the whole idea of Wikipedia. The important half: the WP I immersed myself into in 2007 was decidedly less hospitable than the image WP tries to craft for itself. There are two forces I saw that were dragging the project down: editing-as-sport (which, guilty as charged, yes) and status seeking. pg, I think, got a faceful of the editing-as-sport problem when he looked at the articles on HN/YC topics. WP editors are encouraged to tag first and ask questions later; there's volumes and reams and bookcases and crap-tons of policy and process designed to handle those tags. However, a very vocal subset of WP users will both tag-first, and also take a personal interest in the outcome of those discussions. So if an article is AfD'd (put up for deletion) for notability concerns, and the article's a "Keep", you can bet the {{Notability}} tag is staying and every edit is going to be contested until some face-saving reorganization of the topic emerges (for instance, an omnibus "Y Combinator" article with subsections for pg and Blackwell). The supposed nurturing atmosphere of the all-volunteer encyclopedia is meanwhile torpedoed by the status-seeking quest for adminship, in which clued- in editors are all too aware that every dispute they engage in is a contest to win or lose credibility in a future WP debate over whether they can put the gold star of adminship on their pages. There are rationales for both these phenomenon, which I don't want to go into (rms apparently already thinks I'm a total message board geek for WP), but I'll just say that that part of the controversy over WP I think is real and valid. The second half of the debate here is over deletionism vs. inclusionism. Here I'm less concerned. There is obviously a pervasive misunderstanding about the concept of "notability" and the overall goal of the Wikipedia project. Wikipedia is not the Hitchhiker's Guide. A decision was made long before the Guardian ever noticed WP that, in order to keep the project focussed, topics would be included or excluded based on an acid test of "Notability". "Notability" in the WP sense isn't subjective. You're notable if reliable sources have written about you. You're not notable if they haven't. The definition of "reliable source" is pretty expansive; my impression is that it goes up to and including "blogs lots of people have heard of". It certainly includes the entire mainstream media. You can argue that, because WP isn't paper, you should be able to include anything in it, including a "who's who" of everyone who's ever posted code to Freshmeat. You can argue that, but it's pointless to do so. That argument came and went many years ago, and it's settled. The who's-who will have to live under some other domain. ------ jongraehl I'm not sure how it's a bad thing that 25% of casual edits are reverted. Perhaps some of the habitual editors are nasty people, but 25% doesn't scare me. ------ donaldc What is "notable" is rather subjective and context-dependant. There ought to be somewhere for all these "non-notable" articles to go. The wikipedia approach to some such articles would be useful even if wikipedia itself doesn't find them notable. ------ jeroen "Its first million articles took five years to put together, but the second was achieved just 12 months later." "... helped the site reach the 2m article milestone just 17 months after breaking the 1m barrier ..." From the other numbers in the article 17 months seems right. ------ inimino For more data and less journalistic hype, don't miss the ASC's own blog: <http://asc-parc.blogspot.com/> ------ stabbed baker talked a bit about the deletionists in his (great) article about wikipedia from last year <http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21131> ------ eli What a lame argument. I thought there was a rule on HN against wading into Holy Wars anyway ~~~ BrentRitterbeck I upvoted because I have to agree. With that said, if I were really concerned about information, or the quality of the information, I would go to a legitimate source rather than some place that allows people with huge egos to decide what is and is not worthy of a quick internet search. But perhaps that point of view breaks the tradition of the Internet.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Google I/O 2013 Registration Sells Out In 49 Minutes - derpenxyne http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/13/google-io-2013-registration-sells-out-in-49-minutes-as-users-report-problems-early-on-making-payments/ ====== FlyingAvatar Three people (including me) from my team were attempting to get tickets. We were all on the page 30 minutes before opening and entered the queue within seconds of opening. 2 of us never got anything other than the looking for tickets page multiple times. 1 of us got to the payment page on one attempt only to have it fail. It's frustrating that we should each spend 1.5 hours of time to babysit what is essentially a lottery. If it's going to work like a lottery, then just make it one. ~~~ doodyhead Two in our company were on it also. Started within seconds of it opening and went through the 6-minute process 7 or 8 times. Neither of us even got to the Wallet stage. I managed to get one last year on my third attempt but I was using multiple browser windows. They had a clear warning about that this time, so we stuck to one tab each in the vain hope that it would give us some priority or preference. I will try again next year. The uncertainty makes it hard to plan though, given that I'm living in Ireland. Freebies are nice and all but would happily forgo them or pay 3-4x the ticket price to be able to attend. ------ untog Given that 99% of the people I could see on Twitter were not able to get through to the checkout, 49 minutes feels like a relatively meaningless number. I suspect that if the system actually worked properly it would have sold out in 30 seconds. ~~~ BHSPitMonkey From what I've been reading, it sounds like Google Wallet was really the weak link in the chain. A significant number of reports from people who were lucky enough to grab a slot indicated 5xx errors and other difficulties with the payment processing stage. If that hadn't been an issue, I think the sellout would have been reached a lot sooner. ~~~ chadmaughan Several people at my work had the same Google Wallet problem. Most of us had a $900 charge that was later cancelled. Ultimate tease. This was my favorite tweet: "Another year, another batch of developers who will be sure to never ever use +Google Wallet in anything they build. #io13" [1] [1] <https://twitter.com/seedifferently/status/311856162440093696> ------ bobz I'm pretty sure this outcome is exactly what Google wants. Hardest tickets to get in town, even with a $900 price tag. Why else would they continue to give away such great swag at an event with such high demand? On the up side, streaming basically the entire event for free does calm the righteous indignation to a degree. Still, it would have been nice to get a chance to meet and chat with other people working on the platforms I use. ~~~ Samuel_Michon _"I'm pretty sure this outcome is exactly what Google wants. [...] Why else would they continue to give away such great swag at an event with such high demand?"_ I agree. Giving away equipment worth more than the ticket price doesn't attract the right crowd. Apple has similar problems (lots of devs who want to come, but not enough space or manpower) but it at least seems to put in an effort to filter out the developers who don't need access to Apple engineers. It doesn't give away equipment, ticket price was raised to $1600, tickets are personalized and are non-transferrable, and the presentations are put online for free soon after WWDC ends. Despite all that, last year's WWDC was sold out in under 2 hours. ~~~ objclxt > _Despite all that, last year WWDC was sold out in under 2 hours._ ...and I'm willing to bet that if Apple announced the time WWDC tickets went on sale in advance, as Google do, it would sell out a lot faster. ~~~ Samuel_Michon I doubt it. Just as with I/O, the ordering system is the bottleneck. If the systems could manage it, both events would sell out in mere minutes. Recap of WWDC 2012 ticket sales: for the first time, Apple didn't pre-announce the WWDC dates or when ticket sales would start. People were quite upset because it was so sudden and because it was so early in the day – sales began at 8:30AM EST. Per John Gruber, on the day: _"Sold out in two hours, before the U.S. west coast even woke up."_ <http://daringfireball.net/linked/2012/04/25/wwdc-2012> ------ zdgman With the way the checkout system worked wouldn't it have been better to just have developers note their intention to attend beforehand and then on sales day just hold a raffle (in batches)? Everyone gets an email when they are able to purchase a ticket (selected at random, hence the raffle) and you only send out emails as long as you have tickets available for purchase. This type of process would control the flow of participants and keep the experience optimal for those going through checkout. I wonder if they are going to release any numbers for how many people were trying to hit the servers all at once. ------ joshuasortino I was extremely frustrated that, while I had been "reserved" a ticket, the payment repeatedly timed out and I was kicked back to the "we're looking for tickets" page. Oh well, I guess that's what happens when hundreds of thousands of people are DDoSing a page. ~~~ danz You're definitely not the only one. My order was canceled due to "unable to notify merchant of this order". Very frustrating. ------ gcb0 And everyone thinks they're getting a glass for $900 ------ evilmushroom I got a ticket-- been lucky the last four years. Frustrating experience every year. I "got" a ticket three times, but Google Wallet times out and wouldn't let me buy the first two. The third time around (after waiting in the queue), I noticed an ajax request being fired when you clicked the "buy" button (which would become disabled.... it would time out and it would still sit there as if it were doing something. Reenabled the button, pressed it again... it fired off the request... timed out... timed out... then finally it made it and kicked me to the rest of the registration process. Apparently refreshing the "buy" Google Wallet page would work too. Google Wallet fail. ~~~ ericd Any tips for next year? I never got even a Google Wallet popup. ------ idont It looks like the dev team running Google I/O website also had issues to get tickets... for the Velocity conference. ;) ------ crynix I thought I had gotten a ticket. This makes me sad. [https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/--gAC0BE9NrA/UUCiUYUp90I/A...](https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/--gAC0BE9NrA/UUCiUYUp90I/AAAAAAAAIcw/kA3qkNn8Ta4/s684/sad.tiff) ------ jimrandomh I was on the site at opening, got to the "looking for tickets" page, and never got further than that. I'm kind of pissed that they didn't price the tickets high enough to clear the market; I would've gladly paid more, but now I can't. ~~~ chadscira I was victim of this too, i even set my clock ahead and attempted to register 5 mins early (which was working as far as i could tell). ------ suyash Not entirely true story what the headline is implying. It's not that all who logged in before 7:50 PDT got the ticket, I waited and waited and kept on trying without any luck. I started at 6:59 am and gave up at 7:38 am. ------ spartango I haven't been to I/O, and have only seen a few of the talks online. Can someone explain what the biggest appeal for going to the conference is? Talks? Networking? Workshops? ~~~ kyrra Free gear. Last year was the Nexus Q, Nexus 7, and Galaxy Nexus. The talks are good too, but the appeal has definitely been the gear, which is unfortunate. Edit: to add, interacting with the devs is really nice. I went 2 years ago and was able to talk with the GWT team a bit after one of the talks. As well, if you want to network, there is definitely lots of opportunity for it, but it is not something I've cared about. ~~~ evilmushroom Networking is the major reason I go. Test devices are nice, but I can have my company buy me pretty much any test device I need. Sessions are good too (but are also online) ------ yskchu I wanted to go too, wow the tickets really sold out fast. Ah well, the sessions are available online; though of course, lose out on the networking not being there. ------ reidmain Friend of mine had her ticket timeout twice because Google Checkout and Wallet kept breaking. How do they still have these problems after all these years?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Alexei Leonov, the first human to walk in space, has died - sohkamyung https://www.cbsnews.com/news/alexei-leonov-died-cosmonaut-first-man-to-walk-in-space-dead-age-85-cause-of-death-not-released-2019-10-11/ ====== Starwatcher2001 I met him in 2003 in the UK when he was doing a lecture tour. His colleague was translating into English for us, and every now and then they'd rattle away between themselves in Russian, causing my friend's wife to giggle. After the talk they did a photo session, and she spoke to them. "You have an interesting accent, where you from?" Asked one of them in Russian. "Siberia..." Apparently they'd been jesting all the way through: "You can't tell them that...", "You watch me..." RIP Alexei, space hero and nice guy as well. ------ twoodfin Leonov was an aspiring artist as well as a cosmonaut. I remember standing in awe for some minutes when I first saw his sketch from Voskhod 2[1] a couple of decades ago. He also wrote and illustrated _I Walk in Space_ , a Soviet children's book that fortunately has an English translation[2]. [1] [https://www.itsnicethat.com/news/first-drawing-in-space- cosm...](https://www.itsnicethat.com/news/first-drawing-in-space-cosmonauts- science-museum) [2] [https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/46726725-i-walk-in- sp...](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/46726725-i-walk-in-space) ------ protomolecule Alexey Leonov was also supposed to be the commander of the first Soviet lunar mission. He and David Scott (Apollo 15) together have written a book 'Two Sides of the Moon: Our Story of the Cold War Space Race.' [https://www.amazon.com/Two-Sides-Moon-Story-Space- ebook/dp/B...](https://www.amazon.com/Two-Sides-Moon-Story-Space- ebook/dp/B00FUX7RUI) ------ readhn Imagine yourself alone in space, unable to get back into the space station....having to open up your spacesuit to bleed air ... His Balls were made of steel. RIP Alexei Leonov: "Connected to the Voskhod by an 18-foot-long tether, Leonov spent 12 minutes floating outside before struggling to get back inside his spacecraft. In the vacuum of space, his suit had ballooned to the point that it would not fit through the hatch. After opening a valve to bleed off pressure, Leonov finally managed to squeeze back inside. ------ sizzzzlerz Given the state of Soviet engineering at that time along with the pressure to get a spacewalk before the Americans, I can't help but believe that the probability that Leonov would not come home must have been huge and yet, he did his job. As an American, I have tremendous respect for our astronauts in that era but that respect is certainly earned by the Soviet men and women who went into space. ~~~ MayeulC Unfortunately, others weren't so lucky. The story of Vladimir Komarov [1] is heartbreaking. [1] [https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/astronaut-vladimir- komarov-...](https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/astronaut-vladimir-komarov-man- fell-space-1967/) (that specific account contains a bit of graphic imagery). ~~~ NeedMoreTea Particularly the why in the closing paragraph. ------ ivanb He was also blessed by the gift of painting [https://zen.yandex.ru/media/muzey_budushego/jivopis- kosmonav...](https://zen.yandex.ru/media/muzey_budushego/jivopis-kosmonavta- alekseia-leonova-5aae438f48c85ec0e085a998) ------ sohkamyung From Roscosmos [1] [1] [http://en.roscosmos.ru/21012/](http://en.roscosmos.ru/21012/) ------ nathancahill If you like alternative/experimental music, check out The Race for Space by Public Service Broadcasting. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Race_for_Space_(album)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Race_for_Space_$album$) ------ kingkawn Met him about ten years ago while we were both in the hospital. He kept saying in heavily accented English to anyone who came within 15 feet, “first in space!” Edit: ten years, not fifteen. Who can keep track anyway? ~~~ egor598 Sorry, but I am going to call this a pile of BS. Do you really have any proof of this? I am really surprised that you are upvoted on this, considering that on HN everyone requires proof of some sort (most of the time). One of his latest interviews was with EuroNews in 2017 ([https://youtu.be/2qEM6Unzsm4](https://youtu.be/2qEM6Unzsm4)), and he sounded very impressive for his age, in comparison with what you are trying to convey. And I am sure (judging from his multiple interviews), he could keep track of his time much better than you are anyways. P.S @kingkawn - do you have any interviews/profiles with any major news companies to prove your creds for verification to substantiate your claims? ~~~ kingkawn Nope, just my own life. You can take it or leave it however you want, doesnt change that I lived it. ~~~ gdy That doesn't count for much. ------ thrillgore Vichnaya Pamyat, and godspeed. ------ m0zg "If the minimization of risks becomes the main goal of a scientist, engineer, or a government official, there will be no progress and everything will just stand still". Said the guy who almost died and had to bleed off pressure from his spacesuit into space to get back into the airlock. Godspeed, Alexei Arkhipovich, may the ground be as light as a feather, as they say in Russia. ------ algodaily What an amazing life he had. ------ Haga Salut to those who gunned themselves to the abyss, entrusting their life's to a thin film of technology bubbled around a raw heap of chemical energy. ------ danschumann Well, if people go to mars and cook Chinese food, they will be the first humans to WOK in space! -Dad joke out	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Hunting “the blob” causing California drought - jrapdx3 http://www.oregonlive.com/environment/index.ssf/2015/06/drought.html ====== jrapdx3 Climate researchers from Oregon State University and the University of Oxford are looking for volunteers to help run climate simulations on their PC's to help track down mysterious changes in ocean temperatures. It's a little like the idea of SETI@home. But the project in the article differs in an important way. This drought has direct impact on our lives, the well-being of individuals and entire communities is at stake, and inspires a stronger motivation to participate. If you're interested, this is the website devoted to climate change projects: [http://www.climateprediction.net/getting- started/](http://www.climateprediction.net/getting-started/)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Cat vs. panel heater: which is better? - sillybilly https://www.oneroof.co.nz/news/38319 ====== reaperducer I was once desperately poor. Too poor to turn on the heat. But I did have access to friendly cats, so I've been through this experiment in real life. One cat stuffed under the blankets at night is a significant improvement. But as you add more and more cats, the improvement becomes only incremental. I eventually learned that two cats was really the best one could hope for. Best positioning is between the legs, and with the blankets pulled up over my head with a little crack for breathing. After that, adding more cats doesn't help much. If I was still cold after two cats, I had to break down and turn on the heat. ~~~ Polylactic_acid Have you tried just adding more blankets. I never run heating at night because I find that even at 0c outside I can just stack up 4 blankets and still be warm. ~~~ Legogris Having slept outdoors a lot in the past, I think many people underestimate the importance of the ground/floor/bed in keeping from freezing. If you have excess blankets, it could make more difference to put them under you as opposed to above you. Even spruce branches or cardboard will lift you from the ground enough to make a difference in a pinch. ~~~ Torkel I agree - I packed an air mattress to sleep on during camping when it was cold on the ground. The air didn't insulate as well as I expected so I was freezing from below. There are so many things around us that are such incredible achievements in comfort over not having them. It is a good experience living without some of them for a while to get appreciation for it: \- electricity \- heating \- beds \- running water \- showers \- drains (sewer? I mean being able to pour out water in the kitchen, not having to carry it out) \- washing machine \- (etc) ~~~ thaumasiotes > I packed an air mattress to sleep on during camping when it was cold on the > ground. The air didn't insulate as well as I expected so I was freezing from > below. No sleeping bag? ~~~ Torkel No, for some reason I decided to use a regular duvet. With a sleeping bag it would probably have been less of an issue. ~~~ Cthulhu_ I was going to say, I never really understood why sleeping bags seem to be the default for camping but I get it now. ~~~ thaumasiotes They're warmer, more comfortable, easier to carry... ------ xoa An interesting study, but spatially non-uniform dynamic thermal location and local partial biomass availability seem like factors here. While direct heaters, ground source heat pumps in particular, can be exceptionally efficient and functional year round, they ultimately have fixed exchange locations and must bring the whole house volume to temperature. Whereas a cat heater is dynamic: for example while I am sleeping the cat is liable to apply all 15 watts directly to my face. I can anecdotally report a significant insulation effect as well. Or while I'm desperately trying to complete a final sprint the cat may decide that my keyboard is the ideal radiative location. A proper heating model probably needs to take this into account albeit with a lot of chaos and quantum theory mixed in as the cat may or may not be providing heat until observed. And cats in general are equipped with local biomass harvesting and conversion capabilities that may further alter supplemental fuel costs. Never the less I certainly look forward to continued research on this topic! ~~~ TheSpiceIsLife Are you aware of Nathan W. Pyle? His Strange Planet comic is written a bit like this ------ guycook Sorry to be the downer on this article, but if you head to oneroof's "news" page [0] you'll see their entire raison d'être is to push out articles for NZ's media outlets to reproduce in the hopes of encouraging the continued misallocation of capital into residential real estate. So them making light of the house heating situation is in extremely poor taste considering such issues as NZ being the only developed country in the world with significant instances of rheumatic fever [1] and a quarter of South Island renters being stuck with cold and mouldy accommodation [2] (which they couldn't leave for weeks due to the pandemic). [0] [https://www.oneroof.co.nz/news/latest- news](https://www.oneroof.co.nz/news/latest-news) [1] [https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/122260447/we-have- to...](https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/122260447/we-have-totally- failed-rheumatic-fever-the-third-world-disease-entrenched-in-new-zealand) [2] [https://www.odt.co.nz/regions/queenstown/warmth- issue-25-ren...](https://www.odt.co.nz/regions/queenstown/warmth- issue-25-renters) ~~~ xsmasher Can you connect the last dot for me and explain why "(mis)allocation of capital into residential real estate" is bad for warmth, affordability, and fighting rheumatic fever? ~~~ potatochup Presumably, high rates of investment drive up prices (since supply is somewhat constrained). High prices reduce the ability for people to purchase, so they have to rent, but then higher purchase price means the investors have to increase rent too. This means there is a lot of demand at the low end of the housing market, where houses aren't as well maintained/insulated/upgraded ~~~ mleonhard Investing in housing should lead to building more housing, which will lower prices for everyone. Is the investment only used to renovate existing housing? ~~~ potatochup Buying a house (in NZ) is a liquid investment with better returns than the stock market and no captial gains tax. Building involves much more risk, nimbyisn, geographic constraints. The cost of building is more closely related to the cost of labour than it is materials, so even at higher prices margins aren't nessecarily better. ------ rurp The first time I took my cat camping it was much colder than expected. At bed time I filled a bottle with hot water and wrapped my cat up in a blanket with it. Being a cat, he immediately squirmed his way out of it and started walking around the freezing tent. I was starting to get worried until the little guy realized he could just barely squeeze into my zipped up sleeping bag. It was a big mess of fur and limbs all night, but we both managed to stay warm enough. ~~~ tonyedgecombe You took your cat camping? ~~~ Cro_on 'take' would appear to be the correct tense – this is apparently just about _the first time_. i recently discovered that cats can actually be trained, to a certain extent (mostly behavioural tricks as opposed to commands). i wonder if it's possible to guide certain cat traits for your own benefit. imagine Cat goes out hunting and returns, leaving a rabbit at your feet, while you are preparing the campfire. my guess is that it would be possible to encourage, though not so to choose your dinner. ~~~ rurp I actually did train this same cat in a lot of the classic dog commands. He'll sit, shake, lay down, and roll over on command. It's certainly harder to train a cat on commands but it ended up being a little easier than I thought it would be going in. I think it helps to have a cat that's highly food motivated. While following orders comes naturally to a lot of dogs, training a cat feels more like a bartering system. He'll put up with my silly requests in exchange for treats that he likes. If the treats stopped coming I doubt he would keep following instructions for long. ------ pugworthy Bertha's Kitty Boutique was already on this in 2005... > Bertha's Kitty Boutique reminds you that heating bills are going to be high > this winter and on these cold winter nights, there's nothing more comforting > than a warm cat. (PURRING) And if one cat can warm you up, think of what 6, > or 10 of 'em could do. These are skinny designer cats, these are big heater > cats (MEOW) who use tuna for fuel and produce enough BTUs to heat up your > whole bed and your bedroom too. And we have them in all styles to go with > your bedroom decor -- tabby cats, angora, Siamese, orange cats, black cats > -- anywhere from 30 pounders up to the family size. Heater cats from > Bertha's (MEOW) Hurry in while supplies last. [https://www.prairiehome.org/story/2005/10/01/berthas- kitty-b...](https://www.prairiehome.org/story/2005/10/01/berthas-kitty- boutique.html) ------ TaylorAlexander “ A 3kg cat has a heat output of 14.8 watts, or 129.65 kilowatt-hours...” Playing fast and loose here. That’s 129.65 kilowatt hours per year. 14.8 watts is 0.0148 kilowatts of course. Kilowatt hours are a measure of total energy output over a given time not instantaneous output. ~~~ viraptor Also that's kWh summed up over the year. Cats have constant output, but for house heating you'd want to concentrate it to just ~3-4 months. So we're closer to 50-60 cats at that point. ------ rjmunro I was put off by the following sentence: > ... 14.8 watts, or 129.65 kilowatt-hours - the metric commonly used by power > companies ... It should say 129.65 kilowatt-hours PER YEAR. Without the time, it's like saying "a car goes at 50mph or 1000 miles". It's just nonsense. ~~~ dhosek I briefly found myself thinking that the cat was the metric commonly used by power companies. ~~~ jonnypotty Now you're talking sense ------ emmelaich Reminds me of the story of how Three Dog Night got their name. Apparently it referred to Australian Aborigines using three dingos to sleep with on very cold nights. ~~~ simonsmithies Since getting a dog I’ve learned dogs and cats both run a degree or two hotter than we do — 38-39 C as against our 37. Noticeably adds to the comfort level, even if there’s only one under the covers. ------ dkersten Not sure where they got their cost estimate from, but I spend a lot more than $250/year on each of my two cats (and 250 NZD is only ~160 USD). Still, fun article :) ~~~ BLKNSLVR I recently had to choose between these two options: 1. Removal of splinter from pet cat's eyeball: $1,650 2. Removal of cat's eyeball: $1,400 Blew out my pet budget for a long while. I have the photo that the vet ophthalmologist took - they were cool enough to send it to us. ~~~ pbhjpbhj Apologies if it's insensitive, but I'm curious what the financial cost of "putting cat down and acquiring new cat" would be; mere intellectual curiosity. ~~~ BLKNSLVR $50 to get a vet to put a cat down. And roughly the same amount to get a desexed, flea-treated moggy from a shelter. ------ carabiner Definitely noticed a difference in getting a cat on heating requirements in Seattle. I got two cats now, and my heat is turned off year round. ------ bitwize The ideal number of cats per home in New Zealand is zero. Cats prey on local wildlife, much of which is near extinction as it is because of introduced predators including humans. Those who advocate for banning cats in New Zealand have a pretty strong case. ~~~ dundarious Is there an argument against indoor cats? That is now the recommendation in the US, as far as I know. ~~~ bacon_waffle I live in NZ and my partner has an indoor-only cat. It's considered a bit weird here, we've had friends politely suggest that keeping a cat indoors is cruel. In principle indoor cats are just as good for bird life as no cats, but either is a tough sell. ~~~ randallsquared Considering longer lifespan, better health, and seemingly equivalent happiness, it's arguable that _not_ keeping a cat indoors is cruel. ~~~ smabie Just like how it's arguably cruel to _not_ move all wildlife into zoos and cages. ~~~ randallsquared Assuming we're agreeing to use QALYs, I think that's unlikely, but don't let my skepticism stop you from arguing it. :) ------ dfox As for the title itself (and probably my understanding of NZ english), for me “panel heater” means one of the modern electric powered planar sources of IR radiation and after living for few months in flat heated by only such things I’ve found that only reasonable way to use such electric heaters is that these things somehow warm up your cats and nothing much else in the room ;) ------ throwanem I had to dry out my boots once with a panel heater, after a passing driver decided to enliven my rainy-day walking commute by driving through an overflowing gutter and drenching me from head to toe. I wouldn't have liked to try it with a cat instead... ~~~ desultir Use enough duct tape and a cat would be fine for this ~~~ throwanem Wow, for real? What a fucked-up thing to say. ~~~ NateEag There is a thing called sarcasm you may want to look into. ~~~ throwanem I mean, I get that it's _trying_ to be a joke. But it's not trying very hard. ------ jefftk _> as cats cannot be used for cooling, you would also have to introduce an alternative cooling system such as lizards or other cold-blooded animals_ Even cold blooded animals produce more heat than they consume. ~~~ eloff It was a joke. ------ dandare > A 3kg cat has a heat output of 14.8 watts, or 129.65 kilowatt-hours I don't get it, how is 14.8 watts equal to 129.65 kilowatt-hours? ~~~ kwhitefoot They forgot to specify per year. (129650 WHr/14.8 W)/24 hr = 365 days ------ steadicat Unfortunately, in my experience, cats are endothermic. Give a cat a heat source – a sunny patch, a heated blanket, or a warm belly – and they will cling to it until all the heat is absorbed out of it. Cats need heat sources to thrive, so they will be very unhappy if operated as a heat source. ~~~ mark-r Some cats recognize that the benefit is mutual. I have 4 cats, and 1 of the 4 will lay with me in a way that we provide a warm surface for each other. ------ superkuh Tough to say. All I saw was a blank white page with no text or images. After jumping through some hoops I saw all that javascript was for a couple paragraphs of text. So I'll just mirror it here for others. As an aside about the actual content: cats come with vet bills you have to be able to pay if you want to ethically own one. That's a huge expense. Cat v panel heater: Which is better? 6:34 AM, 24 Aug 2020 James Powers Cats are affectionate, panel heaters are not. How many cats do you need to heat an energy-efficient home? It’s the question on everybody's lips. Well, maybe not everyone's lips, and it's possible this is a niche topic, but it is relevant. A 3kg cat has a heat output of 14.8 watts, or 129.65 kilowatt-hours - the metric commonly used by power companies to show you how much energy you're using. These numbers are important when it comes to the design and building of energy-efficient homes, as the heat output of random things like cats can lead to overheating. For example, to be certified Passive House, a building must have an annual heating demand of less than 15kWh per square metre to maintain a comfortable temperature. For a typical Kiwi house of 150sqm, the annual energy demand would be 2250kWh. The number of cats required, therefore, would be 17.35, but let's avoid chopping cats and round up to 18 whole cats. This equates to 1 cat per 8.33sqm. Easy as. Let’s bulk order a cat litter. Cats cost about $250 per year to ‘operate’ which equates to a total running cost of $4,300 per year. This is a bit more than $475 for gas or $675 for electric, although the installation cost is less for cats. The calculations have used an average heat load. In reality, the heat load will vary considerably throughout the year. You will need significantly more cats in colder weather and less during mild weather. In hot weather, you can, of course, let the cats out, but this represents a significant waste of resources if you continue to feed them. And as cats cannot be used for cooling, you would also have to introduce an alternative cooling system such as lizards or other cold-blooded animals. ~~~ pugworthy In addition to vet bills there is grief at their passing. Nobody talks years later about that wonderful heater they had back in 1998 and how despite the furnace repair bills, they’d do it all over again just because of how it made the most pleasing sound when it ran, almost like a cats purr. ~~~ pbhjpbhj I wouldn't be surprised if someone does reminisce about such a thing! Bizarrely I was thinking recently about an extremely lamentable performance of a storage heater 20years back. It wasn't even my heater! ------ nkoren This surely should give some credit to the venerable old Solar Cat Book: [https://www.amazon.com/Solar-Cat-Book-Jim- Augustyn/dp/089815...](https://www.amazon.com/Solar-Cat-Book-Jim- Augustyn/dp/0898150183) (Which would evidently make me an alarming amount of money if I could find my old copy of it...) ------ cafard Then there was the couple who got a kitten. The first night it woke up down around the husband's ankles. It started to walk forward until it found its path blocked. It then dug into his thighs to climb out, and found itself launched from the bed along with husband and blankets. (Source: the ex-wife. I don't think the kitten contributed to the breakup of the marriage, though.) ------ jonnypotty Panel heaters don't spew up on my laptop or piss on my £1500 TV, so I'd say pannel heaters are. ------ bluedino A bullmastiff easily puts off as much heat as another human (maybe two) and doubles as an alarm clock. ~~~ BLKNSLVR Our cat acts as an alarm clock. Pretty close to 5:30 every day. The problem is that no one in the house needs to get up at 5:30 (except the person that doesn't want the cat to shit inside). ~~~ mark-r We have litter boxes that operate 24/7\. The problem is when the cats run out of food at 5:30. ~~~ arethuza Our cat gets me up at about 6:30 just because he can. ------ LinusS1 I wonder... if you feed a cat more, it will become bigger, and so it will produce more heat. ~~~ lambdatronics Assume a spherical cat. As the cat gets bigger, the surface to volume ratio goes down, so the cat gets hotter. This will lower its metabolism, which means that the food calories increasingly go toward storage, which makes the cat get even larger. Asymptotically speaking, the cat tends to become a furry blob of melted lard. ~~~ theandrewbailey Can you come to my farm? I have a problem. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow) ------ 4x5-Guy Cats, definitely. Friendlier then a panel heater, and contrary to popular opinion they are social animals. ~~~ MaxBarraclough > Friendlier then a panel heater Depends on the cat, no? ------ CPLX But what happens if there's an unlimited supply of mice? ~~~ p1mrx Smaller animals produce more heat per unit volume, and meat isn't a very efficient form of energy transfer, so you're probably better off filling the house with mice. ------ garmaine Cat lady was on to something. ~~~ glouwbug I assume you are referencing The Simpsons. If so, you shouldn't be down voted. ------ gpm $675 for 2250kWh of electricity? They're doing something wrong. That's 30 cents per kwh of _heat_. Even if you just use resistive heating you beat that in every state, and probably most of the rest of the world. But it's better than that, because that's heat not electricity. 4 watts of heat transfer for 1 watt of electricity is reasonable with a heat pump, so it's $1.20, or if you consider that co-efficient of performance (COP) is typically measured for cooling and we should be counting the electrical waste heat here a COP of 5, which makes their number $1.50 per kwh. ~~~ Polylactic_acid >Even if you just use resistive heating you beat that in every state, and probably most of the rest of the world. New Zealand does not have states. You are likely also confusing NZD with USD. The price listed seems entirely reasonable when you understand this. ~~~ gpm Ah, good point. I just assumed that unqualified dollars on the internet meant "USD"...	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Data: 6000 startups' business performance compared to fundraising success - andrew_gust https://gust.com/launch/blog/using-data-to-give-startup-founders-fundraising-feedback ====== sharemywin Reminds me of something my Dad said a long time ago. The less you need the money the more likely you are to get it. He was talking about business lending, but I suppose the same goes for investing. ~~~ andrew_gust the overall trends we saw in the data reflected how investors really think about startups, which is based on risk. the more progress you can show with the funds you've used so far, the less risky your startup will look to investors. ~~~ sharemywin I get it. And I wouldn't "risk" my money any differently.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Exercise to improve hunchback posture forward head carriage correction - bookofjoe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LT_dFRnmdGs ====== scorpioxy I can personally attest to how well the wall angels(and its variations) work. The thing is, you've probably spent years in that wrong posture so you need to be diligent and disciplined about doing your stretches and the change won't happen overnight. Any changes to your computing setup, which you spend hours on, would also be of benefit. Having a desk job will destroy your body so anything you can do to delay this is a good thing to investigate. Upvoting because this is useful for any programmer out there. If you're not in pain now, you will be... ~~~ Asgardr Is office work really a curse on your body? Are there any alternatives? Is standing all day more beneficial? I find it difficult to get conclusive answers on this by myself. ~~~ toomuchtodo > Is office work really a curse on your body? Yes. > Are there any alternatives? Yes, jobs that provide more physical activity as part of your work. > Is standing all day more beneficial? No. ~~~ Asgardr What if I take a 5-minute break to walk outside every 45 minutes? It's very difficult to find reliable sources on this. It seems everybody is just parroting whatever they currently believe. How can I find an authority on this subject? ~~~ toomuchtodo [https://www.cnn.com/2017/09/11/health/sitting-increases- risk...](https://www.cnn.com/2017/09/11/health/sitting-increases-risk-of- death-study/index.html) [http://annals.org/aim/article/doi/10.7326/M17-0212](http://annals.org/aim/article/doi/10.7326/M17-0212) > Take a movement break every 30 minutes, say experts. No matter how much you > exercise, sitting for excessively long periods of time is a risk factor for > early death, a new study published Monday in Annals of Internal Medicine > found. > There's a direct relationship between time spent sitting and your risk of > early mortality of any cause, researchers said, based on a study of nearly > 8,000 adults. As your total sitting time increases, so does your risk of an > early death. The positive news: People who sat for less than 30 minutes at a > time had the lowest risk of early death. In short, sitting time accrues in a health debt you can't pay back with breaks.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: How to become a manager - technological Hi everyone. I am currently working as senior technical support engineer (L3) and have like 7 years of experience in various fields like Process development, Accessibility web developer, test engineer and support engineer. How do I take next step to become a manager ? is 7 years too short ? should I become team lead first ====== CyberFonic Start showing ever greater levels of incompetence ! Seriously, I'm not trying to be a troll magnet. When you are very good technically your management will keep you down in the mines to keep doing great work and preferably without too many pay rises. Working in support is especially bad in the sense that it is not an area that attracts many good engineers, thus you are probably indispensable. If you are seriously keen on moving up into management you could study one of the many DIY MBA courses around. If that still looks like where you want to be, then depending on the size of your organisation you could start applying for promotions into team leader roles and possibly low-level management roles. ------ itronitron the usual progression is team lead then manager, although every organization is different. Generally you would need to express an interest to your manager that you are interested in management (many people are not interested and for good reason :) ) and then wait for someone up the chain to leave the company. Before that happens you may be able to serve as delegate while your manager is out of the office. If you want things to happen more quickly then you would need to get hired in as a manager at another company which might rquire first getting an MBA or MS degree. ~~~ technological Thank you for the insight. Can you elaborate bit more why people are not interested for good reason ? I have an MS degree but all jobs outside need like 20years of experience for manager ~~~ greenyoda Managers spend a lot of time in meetings, and have to deal with personnel matters such as performance reviews, hiring, layoffs, pay issues and interpersonal conflicts. They bear the responsibility for the work of their entire team. They try to shield their teams from all the nonsense that's coming in from upper management so their teams can concentrate on their work. Some people thrive in this kind of job, but others don't. After being a manager for ten years, I got tired of the stress and went back to being a developer. One more thing: new managers rarely get the training they need to do their jobs well. They have to learn by making mistakes (some of which can be very costly and painful). I definitely think you should become a team lead before becoming a manager, since it gives you the opportunity to learn about leadership without having to deal with many of the other issues that a higher-up manager needs to deal with.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Is it rude/inappropriate to submit your own content? - alecbenzer (see title)<p>Ie, linking to your own blog ====== sorbus If you think that it's good content, that people on HN would enjoy, then you should submit it - I would rather that my upvote goes to the person who actually wrote the content. If you get upvoted, then you were right and should trust your judgement. If not, then either you should reconsider your judgement, or you submitted it at a time when there aren't many people on the site. However, if you find yourself submitting everything you write - or that most of your submissions are being killed, or flamed - you might want to reconsider your judgement (or all of the stuff you're writing is enjoyed by the community, which should be very obvious if it turns out to be the case). ------ jp Am I the only one who finds this line of thinking slightly naive ? This site is probably gamed out of existence by sock puppets, social media experts and old Digg users. I am just waiting for the "accidental" porn reference to hit the front page. There is also a ton of haters on this site who downvote full time because of high karma from the old days. But it is better than part time haters who just got lucky with a funny comment or TechMeme snatchup. Every time I say anything my karma goes up and down like that girl on Jersey Shore the other night. Some commenters get -4 while spammers get -2. Now THAT is the college effect ! Remember, all honesty is brutally punished in academia ! ~~~ hluska This is wonderfully stated - thanks for brightening my mood! ------ benologist I think it's easy to figure out - if the person's a genuine member of the community then who cares. If like macobserver, tekgoblin and a bunch of other sites they just treat it like a link dump, then it's spam and they're just exploiting HN and the community for traffic and seo. ------ andrewflnr On the front page right now is a post by raganwald from his own blog blog [1]. I've seen other examples as well. If your content is worthwhile and appropriate, it should be fine. [1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2837905> ------ chc I think it's best to keep ego out of it: The fact that it's yours has no bearing either way on whether it would be appropriate to submit it. People will appreciate good, relevant articles and they'll be turned off by mediocre or irrelevant articles. Unless you're Zed Shaw or something, your identity doesn't factor into most people's opinions. A more relevant concern would be how honestly you can evaluate your own work. If you think everything you write is golden (i.e. you simply can't view your work critically), it's probably best to leave it to other people to submit your deathless prose. But if you just really think a particular piece would interest the community you're posting to, hey, it's worth a shot. ------ Mizza Of course not! That's the whole point of the upvote system. If your content is good, it'll float. If it's spammy, it'll sink. Well, in theory. ------ rawsyntax I think it's ok. Most of my blog posts get 3 up votes or so, but my post on side projects got 130 [http://rawsyntax.com/post/5982784556/importance-of- side-proj...](http://rawsyntax.com/post/5982784556/importance-of-side- projects) But then again, I write blog posts I feel this crowd would be interested in ------ pbreit Not necessarily but discretion is advised. Some prolific users submit their own posts (ex: <http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=2837905>). ------ ecounysis Not at all if you feel someone in the community would find something of value in your content. Comments are essentially one's own content and there are tons of those around. ------ glimcat If it's worth my time, no. If it's spam, yes. ~~~ alecbenzer right, but how is one to know if it's worth _your_ time? I wrote something on my blog. I think it may be interesting/insightful to some. should I post it and let the vote system take care of whether I was right or wrong? or am I going to get flamed for shameless self-promotion (well, would I deserve to be flamed)? ~~~ aerique Just try it out. It's usually very obvious whether something is spam or not. That said, don't feel bad if your blog is interesting but doesn't make the front page. You might be just unlucky. ------ Mz People do this all the time. I can't tell you how to judge how well it will go over with the community. If I could figure that out, I would post links to things I sometimes write. (I think I did that once and it wasn't in hopes of promoting it but in hopes of getting feedback from smart people and it didn't result in much.) Best of luck.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Master Branch Considered Harmful - dijit https://blog.dijit.sh/master-branches-and-slavery ====== season2episode3 Master branch refers to a master copy, like in the recording industry. While I'm very much in favor of removing symbolism that evokes past injustice, this feels misguided to me. It has nothing to do with the master/slave terminology, which does come up in the context of database replication and which should certainly be removed from CS textbooks. ~~~ skavi Apparently git’s usage of “master” originates with bitkeeper, which did actually use the term in a master/slave context. ~~~ quantified The words mean what we understand them to mean. Like the Hacker in Hacker News. I doubt it was intended to mean “one who breaks into computers” even if the majority of people seem to have adopted that meaning. I’ve never thought of master in this context as anything other than like a recording master. It doesn’t give orders to anything or anybody, it just represents your best version of truth.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
New Crypt-Keeper Wasp Is Parasite That Bursts from Host's Head - bootload http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/01/crypt-keeper-wasps-parasites-new-species ====== jelliclesfarm wasps do this with ants all the time. fire ants from south america were introduced to north america by mistake(oops!)...and since then the us dept of ag has been trying to get rid of them because the natural predators of the dreaded fire ants never made it to north american shores. parasitical wasps fly over the ants..drill a hole and lays eggs...the larvae come out in about a day...then the ants' heads explode and its body becomes a baby wasp making factory. isnt nature wonderful?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
A Handbook of Modern Uyghur [pdf] - keiferski https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/bitstream/handle/1808/5624/EngYakDwy2009_Uyg1full_10.pdf?sequence=3 ====== Haydos585x2 Looks great and thank you for sharing. Uyghur looks like a fun language to learn although I'm sure it's difficult to practice in person and given the situation in China it's unlikely to get better. I do wonder if the memes in /r/languagelearning about Uzbek will carry through to some people actually learning and researching these Turkic languages more. ~~~ forkLding Uyghur language isn't banned in China, it's part of all the signs and official documentation. There are more Uyghur-Chinese documentations, dictionaries and references than in the West as explained in this document's preface. It is easier to practice Uyghur in China than in the West as again referenced in the document because there are less resources in the West or specifically the English-speaking world. Should be noted that Uyghur is not descended off Old Uyghur but rather the Karluk languages. Yugur is the descendant of Old Uyghur. ~~~ Aromasin I think the point he's trying to make is that while what you say is presently true, newer Chinese policies seem intent on the suppression of minority cultures (and by an extension of that language); especially of the Uighurs. Perhaps what I've read is just anti-china propaganda, but it's a running theme across multiple different media outlets.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Economist: Counter-terrorism, Going dark - p01926 http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21639506-just-threat-terrorism-increasing-ability-western-security-agencies-defeat ====== p01926 Shame on you, The Economist. They say spies must be able to spy. But if spies rely on terrorists voluntarily using breakable codes, this principle doesn't count for much. All you can achieve is making the rest of us vulnerable to hackers. Just two weeks ago they strongly criticised Sony for failing to use encryption to protect data and for storing passwords in a file helpfully named "Passwords". Although they don't spell out how to protect data in a retrievable fashion — nobody ever does — technology companies would essentially have to take a few cues from Sony's security policy. And WHEN terrorists do again succeed, perhaps with the help of encryption, what would the new Rumsfeld's do? RSA encryption is essentially y=x^k mod n. Symmetric encryption is essentially a sequence of substitution, permutation, and addition. The whole internet is in code and compressed to have maximum entropy, like the ciphertext that results from encryption. It is, by design, indiscernible. The only way to stop terrorists using encryption is to destroy the Internet itself.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: How to finish Learn Python The Hard Way and where to go from there? - carrot I've been wanting to learn how to properly program since last year and based on the advice of a lot of great people here at HN and elsewhere, I got myself a copy of Learn Python The Hard Way. I think the advice at the beginning of the book that said take 2 hours to read/learn/perform exercises each day is solid. So I do that and really have no problems at all except that by the time I arrive at Exercise 20 or so, I tend to stop. Maybe it's just coincidence or bad luck, but after missing a few days I find that everything is lost to me and I have to start all over again.<p>I've restarted reading the book twice already and am about to restart for a third time. Can I get some advice on how I can actually finish this book and where I can go (what other resources I should look into, etc.) once I do? ====== canatan01 Are you just reading/learning/performing the things day by day? So day 6, you only do the things of day 6, etc? If so, I think you should also repeat some of the days before. So on day 6, also go over days 3/5 briefly again. And write .py code each day using as much of the past days info you learned. Repetition and doing stuff yourself (or changing existing .py files and seeing what happens) works for me. That way I make the information my own. I also like the small exercises on <http://codingbat.com/python> ~~~ carrot I do the exercises one at a time, basically. Whichever chapter I'm on, I do the exercises on that. Although I back-read to understand the current chapter better, I don't actually repeat the exercises. I'll keep that in mind from now on. Thanks for the advice and that link! ------ dlf At the risk of making all of HN think I work for Udacity, which I don't, I'm just going to go ahead and recommend Udacity's CS101 "Building a Search Engine" class. It truly is awesome. I signed up late for it and am working through it now. They'll be running the class again starting April 16th. I'm trying to beat the clock and get done in time to take the 200 level classes that start then. Best of luck! ~~~ carrot You know, the title of the class alone is enough to convince me that it's going to be awesome! I have no idea what Udacity is, though. I'm just going to do a search for it. And I just read that post about the lawyer who became a Ruby hacker so I was already thinking, "Right, I should probably learn how to actually build something." So this is perfect! I hope I become part of that upcoming class in April. Thanks!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Where can I hire workstation for 3D rendering? - alvil Hi, guys<p>is there some service you recommend where I can hire high performance workstation for 3D rendering in 3D Max?<p>Thanks. ====== billconan you can try Amazon g2 gpu instances or nvidia grid, but the service is currently down. ~~~ alvil Thanks a lot	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Why Your Startup Should Open Source - rafaelc http://www.readwriteweb.com/start/2010/09/why-your-startup-should-be-inv.php ====== anthuswilliams I think there is a more fundamental reason why startups who build open-source may be more successful than those who don't. In my (entirely anecdotal) experience, there is a definite correlation between proprietary source code and paternalistic business practices. I think most companies that refuse to provide source code will also confine their users to their vision of the way the software should be used. Unless you have the good fortune to be the only entrant into an exciting new field, that sort of Victorian we-know-what's-good-for-you smugness is unlikely to be a hit for long. The reason LearnBoost will win is not simply that it's a better product. It's one you can escape from. You can export your gradebook and lesson plans. You can manipulate them any way you like. By contrast, the proprietary Blackboard Vista, which my teachers use, is a never-ending source of aggravation and pain. And it's compounded by cost of exit. Blackboard is, to my knowledge, exclusively subscription-based, and exporting the data is difficult at best.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Event Notifications for Amazon S3 - degio http://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/s3-event-notification/ ====== dozy I was very excited when I saw this headline, as for a while I've hosted various things on s3 and have wanted an easy way to track when/how/by whom those things have been downloaded. Alas, that isn't a supported...I'm looking for something like: "s3:ObjectViewed:Get". Or am I mistaken and that already exists in some other form...? ~~~ mritun S3 already has a feature where you can configure per-bucket apache style access logs which log every operation and may solve your purpose. This feature provides realtime messaging for uploads. ~~~ dozy I'll take it! Good to know. ------ mathgladiator Of all the features that S3 has shipped, this is by far my favorite. I look forward to utilizing Lambda and S3 to build an ultra cheap content management service to drive the cost of my website management to less than a $1/mo. ~~~ kolev How is this idea any better (and cheaper) than a static site generator like Jekyll? ------ kolev Nice feature, but, again, not available in CloudFormation. I understand the challenge to coordinate releases, I can live with a week or two lag, but usually it's months - CloudFormation still doesn't support basic AWS services. I really am considering abandoning this gem, which is highly neglected and underutilized. Terraform [1] looks like something I can extend myself easily if the upstream doesn't support something just yet and contribute it as a pull request. [1] [https://terraform.io/](https://terraform.io/) ------ skynss Too bad they did not differentiate between Create and Overwrite (as far as I can tell) as that is a an important difference (I need to solve scenarios where idempotency is needed - more than 1 worker may create exact same email message due to fault tolerance design, but at least AND at most 1 email should be sent to customer. I was hoping that the s3 filename/key would be the unique identifier and if there was separate notification for overwrite than from create, email could be sent only for create event only.) ~~~ jeffbarr You could use S3 versioning to distinguish the two operations. ~~~ kolev S3 versioning could be pricey and painful. Try deleting a versioned bucket! I wrote a tool that I'm gonna open-source if my employer okays it, but the pathetic part is that you get charged for each HTTP request - imagine a bucket with a billion objects and a gazillion versions! ~~~ hemancuso [http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/API/multiobjectde...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/API/multiobjectdeleteapi.html) ~~~ kolev That's the API I use as well. The DELETEs are free, but GETs, PUTs, POSTs, and LISTs are not [1]. [1] [http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/](http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/) ------ hemancuso Very cool! Are there any ordering guarantees for these notifications? Specifically the order in which objects were created? It would be nice to be able to generate a meaningful event log. ------ Yadi This is awesome, and the cost is pretty affordable. I don't know if the lambada feature was there before, but it's pretty cool! ~~~ mathgladiator Lambda was announced today: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8602936](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8602936) ------ johne20 At first glance, this combined with Lambda would make for an awesome server- less image transformation setup. ------ strick Have I missed something or is there no way to get notified when an object gets deleted? ~~~ zwily Not yet.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: How does Netflix restrict login sharing on the iPhone? - wensing Since it seems possible to share your login with as many people as you want and have them all streaming the on-demand video on their iPhones, how do they prevent or limit this? Do they do it at a software level? Does the iPhone SDK give you access to the mac address of the hardware so they can determine unique device count? ====== gnok An app can grab the unique UUID for each device. I believe their restriction is 7 unique devices.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Review the project idea for Android - db42 I am thinking of doing some project on android platform. Right now, these are the thoughts on my mind. People carry smart-phones 24X7 with themselves so, there is a lot of scope for interaction between these devices (through wifi, bluetooth or whatever). For example, I may want to sync my device's music library with my friend's or I may just want to copy recently added pictures in my friend's device. So, I am thinking of developing some kind of back-end and interface to communicate with all the devices that are present in the range of my device. It will create opportunities for new apps that target sharing between mobile devices. What do you guys think of this? All suggestions are welcome. ====== bigmac If you're going to be developing a sort of API and plumbing that underlies this, you'll probably want to have at least one application that you use as your test bed for the API. Sort of how HN was PG's test application for Arc. It should be a realistic, non-trivial application. Sharing music libraries sounds like a minefield -- maybe you'd want to start with picture sharing or something like that. ~~~ sammcd I agree, I probably am not going to use an API that I don't see _any_ app using. Also if you write an app that transfers between two phones you will have a _much_ better idea of how the API will need to work. Picture sharing is a good start... Something like Bump would also be a good start. ------ db42 I am particularly concerned with these things: 1) Does this idea make sense to you. 2) What core services do you expect it to provide.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
F.C.C. Chairman Adds More Ambiguity to His Position on Network Neutrality - doctorshady http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/15/f-c-c-chairman-adds-more-ambiguity-to-his-position-on-network-neutrality/ ====== ihsw Personally I recommend reading the actual FCC blog entry before voicing your outrage or relief: [http://www.fcc.gov/blog/ensuring-open-internet-now-and- futur...](http://www.fcc.gov/blog/ensuring-open-internet-now-and-future) It's far more well-written -- and notably prescient -- than the NYTimes blog post. That said, AT&T's "Sponsored Data" announcement _ahead of_ the court's ruling is very interesting and I would not at all be surprised that both events have resulted in a _Sword of Damocles_ [1] hanging over the FCC -- or, more to the point, we are all holding our breaths anticipating a final clarification of policy. Most notably is that the growth of the internet has been _mostly_ organic where regulation has been scarce, however I would be fairly content with reducing the impossibly tight grip of telecom monopolies in municipal environments. The Chairman touches on this saying that broadband is terribly scarce, and attempts to exert pressure on such monopolies could have unintended side-effects -- most notably reduction in service to customers. That is a valid concern that's very difficult to approach, however I believe competition should be enforced in larger municipalities (>1M population) and 'sponsored data' initiatives would be more suited for mobile broadband services. [1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damocles](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damocles) ~~~ jessaustin The FCC link certainly articulates a laudable set of principles, but it seems rather late in the game for platitudes. If FCC don't have an actual policy reaction to the ruling yet, when do they plan on having one? Do they expect the Republicans to retake the Senate this year? Maybe they'd like to see another presidential election? What's the hold-up? I'm not surprised to see the self-serving "very high fixed costs and very large minimum efficient scale" canard floated again. Of course backbones and other fiber networks are costly, but astute observers will note a great deal of competition in _that_ market. It's only in the first mile that competition is lacking, and FCC are largely to blame for that fact. We have the radio tech we have because it is the radio tech the FCC has allowed. If they hadn't been dragging their feet on white spaces for a decade, the USA's abysmal placing on all the broadband lists would never have come about. Only in the most crowded urban areas should consumers and most businesses be connecting through anything other than a WISP. There is no economic driver for WISPs to be large, so lobbyists and other FCC hangers-on wouldn't make as much money from them. WISPs operating in unlicensed space would take millions of dollars out of the pockets of MNOs, CATVs, and ILECs, and give that money back to consumers, so again there would be less money for corruption. Damn, now I've almost convinced myself it will never happen. ps. that footnote seems _really_ unnecessary. ~~~ dragonwriter > The FCC link certainly articulates a laudable set of principles, but it > seems rather late in the game for platitudes. If FCC don't have an actual > policy reaction to the ruling yet, when do they plan on having one? Presumably, they are first reviewing with the details of the ruling with their legal team and assessing the prospects of appeal (and appeal strategy, whether to file with the US Supreme Court, or file for _en banc_ review by the full DC Circuit.) Should they appeal, there won't be need of a "policy reaction" to the present court decision, because the policy will be the policy already adopted in the _Open Internet Order_. ------ equalarrow "..the F.C.C. will intrude on the activities of network operators in ways that will damage them economically with injury to them and to their ability to offer more and improved service" I don't get it, what could you do to damage them economically? All these big network guys make money hand over fist for crappy service. No one I know loves Comcast or Verizon or AT&T. No one. We've come as a country that invented the Internet to somewhere way down on the list of openness and speed. It's obvious why this is. We have some of the (if not the) most expensive connectivity for lowest speed in the world. I have to laugh at 'improved service' and I guess I would if the whole thing were not just such a major let down.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Possible to become employable in five months? - blairbits Hey guys,<p>Just a quick question. I would say I have a fairly deep technical background for a non-programmer: I'm twenty years old. I worked for three months at a startup doing basically odd jobs; no programming, though. I took care of some networking tasks, technical support for the parent company, I completely rewired an office and warehouse, patched holes in the wall, cleaned toilets... Etc.<p>I don't have any post secondary education. I've been learning the basics of programming over the last week or so with Python, and have picked up the basics quickly.<p>Do you think it's realistic for me to become employable as a junior developer within five months? I'm more then willing to put in forty hours per week of solid study and coding.<p>Thanks for your input guys; sorry this question is kind of vague, I know there's lots of variables. ====== drostie If you wanted to get to that rather ambitious destination from your starting point, I would suggest that you would have to build a (very basic) product idea from scratch in JS + PHP + MySQL on month 2, or at the latest, month 3 -- just so that you know what the Web 1.0 technologies were. It would be one heck of a rush, but thankfully, you wouldn't necessarily have to market it. (Although you should spend a couple days learning XSS and XSRF and guarding your site against them, salting and hashing passwords against database compromise, and so on.) If you know that many-to-many relationships require a new table then you've at least got the basics down. If you can JSLint your code and understand which of the good parts of JS are good and why, then you've got those basics down, too. As for the first month, it's worthwhile to learn two programming languages at once, so that you don't get "locked into" one particular way of thinking these things. Python's generators represent probably the prettiest iterative programming I have seen, so you might want to go with a functional language to balance it, so that you're forced to think recursively. If you're really ambitious you'll do Haskell, but that's a bit crazy, and more conservative would be to take the Abelson-Sussman lectures, crap though their audio might be, so that you learn a Lisp: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.001/abelson-sussman-lectures/ Okay, so assuming that you've spent your first month learning two languages to tackle problems, then your second month learning the core web languages and getting some project done, what would you have to do your third month? There are a couple of options for an aspiring junior developer. One would be to write a totally new application in some other language, so that you can see what the other ones are thinking. You could go with the language that you started with, and code in Python's Django, or the confusing language that you only half-know, called JavaScript, by developing chat rooms in Node.js -- but those are probably boring, and you might want to spend a whole month learning Ruby and developing with Ruby on Rails. (It could make you much more attractive to a random employer.) If you have done all of those and have not passed out from exhaustion, then you might start to refactor a project. Figure out the ugly stuff you did in month 2, and how to make it not so ugly. Ask people on IRC to look through your code. There is a central principle of writing good essays and novels: "There is no good writing, only good rewriting." If you come back with fresh eyes you can actually learn a lot. What library functions did you accidentally forget to use when you were writing PHP? (PHP has huge libraries and if you try to code something on them you're liable to end up on TheDailyWTF.) And your fifth month, after all that work, should be devoted to some wild project which strikes your passion after the past four months. I imagine that you'll be lost and confused by month 3 and that month 4 will be a breather, then month 5 is to really take a new idea that's way out there, and make it shine a little. At least then, you might have three projects you can point to with an employer and say, "look, here's a portfolio, it's not as visually polished as you might like but I was focused on functionality and it all works. If you could really stay committed, then I think you could have a quite spectacular resume for applying as a junior developer in 5 months of full-time work. ------ gtani Don't think of yourself as junior, think of yourself concretely as a test/QA engineer in training or maintenance programmer (yeah it's not glamorous, but people are grateful to have them around), and as a specialist in something, Jquery/node, Firebug, selenium, Solr/lucene, hadoop, Postgres. Get a book on ruby and learn to read/edit other people's ruby, python and javascript. And then you can clone django and rails repo's off github and modify them to do other stuff.. in les than 5 months. (the only reason i recommend ruby over python is that Jruby is actively developed, where Jython just doesn't get mentioned much, and it's good to get familiar with JVM: everybody uses hadoop and SOLR, and they're tuning heap, GC, maxInlineSize, all that. It's worthwhile to learn PHP eventually, but that's a lot of backend languages (and I'm probably forgetting what it's like to learn your first language ------ michaelochurch You're employable now. If school's not your cup of tea, just find like-minded hackers and work on something together. Keep writing and reading code and you'll get better with time until companies with formal processes are pretty easy to get into. If you want $80k+ at the entry level, though, you pretty much need to be coming out of a solid college.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How I Develop a Temporal Database in the Advent of Byte-Addressable NVM - lichtenberger https://medium.com/@johanneslichtenberger/how-i-develop-a-temporal-database-storage-engine-in-the-advent-of-byte-addressable-nvm-ba152860e71 ====== lichtenberger Hi all, the system has its roots in a university project, for which Marc Kramis had already predicted in 2008 that fast random, very fine granular reads are the key to efficient persistent, durable data structures, which retain its previous versions. We drastically shrink the data to write due to the asymmetry between reads and writes. Batched, sequential writes without in- place updates are also beneficial for nowadays common "traditional" SSDs. [http://kops.uni- konstanz.de/bitstream/handle/123456789/5914/...](http://kops.uni- konstanz.de/bitstream/handle/123456789/5914/report.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y) Kind regards and happy holidays Johannes	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Beauty of Bounded Gaps (2013) - cyang08 http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/do_the_math/2013/05/yitang_zhang_twin_primes_conjecture_a_huge_discovery_about_prime_numbers.html ====== aisofteng This is from 2013. ~~~ pmalynin Yup, I've been taught the result in first year calculus and the resulting corollaries, which was over 2 years ago now. ~~~ JadeNB > Yup, I've been taught the result in first year calculus and the resulting > corollaries, which was over 2 years ago now. Are you joking? This is not calculus, and it's certainly not first-year material. ~~~ williamstein I think he means that he stated the result in a calc class, not that he proved it. It would be very reasonable (and cool!) to state without proof in a calc class. ~~~ JadeNB I certainly won't presume to tell Will Stein about number theory, but it seems strange to me to include in a calculus class (even without proof). Far be it from me to suggest ever excluding interesting mathematical content, but I'd be suspicious of an ordinary calculus class appreciating the significance of this result. On the other hand, maybe such prophecies are self fulfilling, and the enthusiasm of the teacher engenders the enthusiasm of his or her students, whatever the material. (I am curious what "the resulting corollaries" are, though.) ~~~ pmalynin Hmm, well you can read for yourself, my prof is nice enough to have posted all of the lecture notes online; These are the lectures from the second class where the result is covered on the third page: [https://www.math.ualberta.ca/~xinweiyu/117-118.14-15/2014090...](https://www.math.ualberta.ca/~xinweiyu/117-118.14-15/20140904.pdf) And then the homework (Q3): [https://www.math.ualberta.ca/~xinweiyu/117-118.14-15/2014090...](https://www.math.ualberta.ca/~xinweiyu/117-118.14-15/20140904HW1.pdf) Where the corollary follows. ~~~ JadeNB To be clear, I didn't mean "Are you joking?" as in "You are obviously lying or mistaken"; I really meant, exactly and only, "Are you joking?", because I found it incredible. Well, obviously you are not; and I would have taken you at your word without proof, but thank you for the careful documentation. I still would be hesitant to talk about this in my own calculus courses, but, given the impression that this made on you and Will Stein's endorsement ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12886751](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12886751)), it sounds like that's just undue timidity on my part. ------ JadeNB If you're a fan of "How not to be wrong" ([http://www.jordanellenberg.com/how- not-to-be-wrong](http://www.jordanellenberg.com/how-not-to-be-wrong) )—and, if you're not, then go read it and you probably will be—then it may be worth noting that this article is by the same author. It is an excellent and accessible exposition that doesn't shy away from pointing to more technical resources for those who are interested. ------ duerrp There's a nice documentary on Zhang (and the progress his work triggered) here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIIyKWxGhEA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIIyKWxGhEA) ------ kazinator > _Quite the opposite—we take [primes] as immutable features of the universe, > and carve them on the golden records we shoot out into interstellar space to > prove to the ETs that we’re no dopes._ That sentence itself is golden!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Nobody Wants to Let Google Win the War for Maps All Over Again - adventured https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-02-21/nobody-wants-to-let-google-win-the-war-for-maps-all-over-again ====== crusso _On any given day, there could be a half dozen autonomous cars mapping the same street corner in Silicon Valley._ It seems kind of tautological that they're using autonomous vehicles to create maps because they need maps for autonomous vehicles. Yeah, I know, specialty equipment... but still. Actually, what seems really odd is that new maps are that big of a deal. The cars need maps for normal navigation, sure, but you wouldn't expect that they would rely on anything too precise for safety reasons alone. The cars need to be able to adapt to possibly changing conditions and can't misbehave (at all) just because a street closed, cones are on the street, etc. _Unlike conventional digital maps, self-driving maps require almost-constant updates. The slightest variation on the road—a construction zone that pops up overnight, or a bit of debris—could stop a driverless car in its tracks. “It’s the freak thing that happens that’s going to make autonomous not work,” said McNally, the analyst._ I would call an autonomous vehicle that couldn't handle some debris "fundamentally broken". Seriously, this mapping thing smells like a boondoggle. ~~~ jcadam As someone who's old enough to remember road trips armed with nothing more than a Rand McNally road atlas for navigation (really not that long ago - and I do continue to take one along nowadays as a backup), I'll never trust an autonomous vehicle that needs to be fed a constant stream of up-to-the-minute mapping data in order to make decisions. ~~~ rimliu I am with you here. Autonomous vehicle may need GPS for navigation, but it should be able to drive down the roads without it. ~~~ jcadam GPS is a nice-to-have, but wouldn't be necessary for a _true_ AI, given an autonomous car can have more and better on-board sensors than your basic-issue human (we don't have eyes in the backs of our heads, or LIDAR). ~~~ nemothekid I don't see how GPS is a "nice to have". How does an entity know to get from A to B without some sort of navigation assistance? Unless your "true-AI" stops to ask locals for directions, its going to need some sort of GPS. Can't say I'm looking forward to arguing with my car about how it should have taken a left on Main St, instead of a right. ~~~ white-flame > _I don 't see how GPS is a "nice to have". How does an entity know to get > from A to B without some sort of navigation assistance?_ GPS ≠ navigation assistance. You can infer where you are on a conceptual map from reading your surroundings, especially signage. Getting a latitude/longitude estimate from the GPS network and trying to match it with an overly precise and possibly out of date map isn't the only way to infer your current position. It's only useful when you don't already know where you are, and computers are good at precisely remembering the path they took from the last known observed reference. Plus, self-driving cars need to be aware of their surroundings, and not solely rely on blindly following a hyper-precise map as a prescription of the road details ahead. Having the local observations become the canonical precision knowledge, and keeping the map as conceptual knowledge of how roads connect places, implicitly gains a lot of this sort of benefit. ------ jpalomaki Governments should open all their mapping data, as some have already done. Probably in quite many countries, there are also entities collecting more detailed data that is used for the maintenance of the roads. All this should be opened up as well. I believe just giving out the data freely will benefit these countries more than trying to extract some small profits by selling it. ~~~ larrymyers The US does have open mapping data: [https://www.census.gov/geo/maps- data/data/tiger.html](https://www.census.gov/geo/maps-data/data/tiger.html) While useful for taking the US Census, the TIGER data isn't really suitable for most navigation tasks. At best it can be used as a base layer to build a geospatial dataset. OpenStreetMap did this about a decade ago: [https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/TIGER](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/TIGER) That being said, the current administration is looking to cut TIGER funding, not increase it. For the foreseeable future getting mapping data suitable for navigation in the US is going to be the job of private for-profit companies. ~~~ ghaff I've read that a lot of the limitations/errors associated with mapping data once you get away from fully maintained paved roads stems from limitations in TIGER data. You get into very secondary roads and there's not much that's really authoritative to distinguish all the gradations between unpaved but well-graded and maintained and in appropriate weather you can drive it with high-clearance 4WD if you know what you're doing. ~~~ maxerickson For a navigation system those roads are mostly a "last mile" problem. They generally aren't as direct or connected as main highways, so graph based navigation naturally ignores them. Main highways are also reasonably well marked in the tiger data, so the lack of differentiation for the lower priority road type doesn't impact a system that prioritizes larger highways (a pretty reasonable heuristic). The lack of differentiation is a big problem if you want to pick which way to go when driving around though. ~~~ ghaff I mostly agree with all that. Although in some areas like the rural US West, very secondary roads are pretty common. This becomes a bigger problem as more and more people depend on computers to tell them where to go without thinking much about it. Of course, this isn't really a new problem. People have died following roads on paper maps that weren't suitable for, say, winter travel. ------ twic I found it mildly amusing to see an article about concerns over data monopoly on a Bloomberg website. ~~~ dalbasal A good example of new vs old generations of data monopolies. But, I think we need to stop thinking of the tech monopoly problem in principled, abstract terms. That's hard because it's how law works, and how our moral instincts genrally work. Bloomberg's data monopoly does/did pay well, give them a nice moat and such. But, it couldn't be leveraged in the same way modern data monopolies can. It didn't permeate into new areas every day. It didn't have all these consequences (eg killing privacy) of scale. They din't lock up a dominant position in categories (eg smartphones, cars) that wouldn't exist for a decade or three. Bloomberg's market position is more conventional. Being a monopoly gives them pricing power, and nicer margins. That is tame by today's standards. Today's monopolies can't even be reasoned about in the language of antitrust. they don't act as trusts, generally. Market share is obscure. How do you determine the effects of reduced price competition for maps? It's free. The whole logic of econometrically calculating the harm to a consumer is irelevant. Yet, the idea that Google owns your phone, browser, search engine, drives your car and controls the ads you see 100 times a day.... That's still a worrying thoguht. Economically, it's easy to see (eg search->maps->phones->cars) how one monopoly leads to another and they strengthen eachother. ------ dalbasal It's worth stepping back and considering the landscape of self driving. First, the fact that it's within reach is amazing. It's one of those wierd cases where regular people instinctively put it in the "mars colony" category of futurism while sober insiders had to bring us back to a more optimistic view. Now, there is a lot to worry about in the current landscape of giant tech companies, and this article is another example. But, there are things to awe at too. Having self driving within reach... it's a result of massive effort. Amazing technology, and complexes of technology it is built on. This includes the manufacturing technology producing the cheap components. All of this cam from (1) fairly blue sky intiatives (2) with extremely long and uncertain payback periods and (3) tremendous strategic money-where-your- mouths are foresight. When I realized what G where doing with street-view, I thought it was crazy. More a sign of overexuberance and too much money. Turns out, it was en route to maps dominance which was en route to transportation dominance (and phone dominance). IDK if this is unprecedented, but it's fairly unrivaled in today's world. We don't see IBM or Intel, Toyota or McKesson thinking this big or this far. Definitely not banks or money businesses. Not cities or countries, generally. I mean an equivalent in health/medicine would be taking the ideas from TED talks. A personalized health revolution. Nanobots or curing death like Aubrey de Grey keeps talking about. I'm already hearing the "regulations" explanation. Medicine is restrained by surgeon generals, parliaments and national health setups. I don't think that argument holds at this scale. Self driving cars require re-rwriting our transport rules, and probably massive the physical infrastruucture. The technology will have sucked up billions decades before it makes a penny. The guiding idea is that "if we have a true self driving car, the other stuff will sort." Same applies to medicine. If it's better enough, it'll take. It's hard to peer back and determine of something was inevitable or not, but I suspect self driving wasn't. It could have happened (could will happen? tenses are hard) decades later, if not for the fairly outrageous decisions of a small number of people. ~~~ lambdadmitry I can't help but think that self-driving cars is the penultimate American thing. They aren't effective or needed in properly built cities (think London) and they won't make THAT much good to the society eliminating taxi drivers. If we dig into the vision of what people want to achieve with them, it's mostly manifestations of American problems (poverty, systemic racism, homelessness, segregation, insular indifference to others' problems, crazy urban sprawl) which people don't want to confront directly, instead opting for "let's spend HUMONGOUS amount of money to keep everything more or less the same". There is a solution for most problems people try to solve with self-driving cars: more cycling, better public transport, denser cities. Look at London: car use is _heavily_ discouraged (20mph speed limit, congestion charge, expensive parking) and still the whole thing works like a charm. ~~~ d3ckard You're missing many advantages of self-driving. 1\. Better safety - I find it very likely that self-driving cars will reduce the amount of traffic incidents. Algorithm will likely act more stable than human driver. 2\. Better fuel consumption - again, more optimised driving patterns. 3\. Better convenience - you can drink and drive(well, car will drive), you can sleep and drive, you can work and drive. 4\. Better transport - self-driving trucks don't need breaks, are not likely to be overworked and will likely not block motoways taking over another truck going 2 km/h slower (yey European highways!). 5\. Better vehicle utilization - we will be able to reduce total number of vehicles and all the congestion, environment pollution and money that comes with it. While solution you mentioned really improve quality of life in cities, they do not ultimately solve issues inherent to car transport, where car transport is actually preferred/best solution. ~~~ grumdan Good public transport systems provide even better benefits for points 1 (accidents involving subways are probably still going to be rarer than for self-driving cars), 2 (you don't even need fossil fuels for subways / trams), and 5. Arguably you don't lose much on point 3 either, except that you may have to walk a few minutes to/from the nearest stop (which is probably good from a public health standpoint anyway). I agree that this only applies in cities though, and public transport may not help much in rural areas. ------ thriftwy We can have a hundred millions of self-driving cars dumping the sub-centimeter LIDAR data of surrounding to OpenStreetMap at any given time. Come to think of it, I see zero reasons why you won't own measurements of your self-driving car, and choose to upload them. Yes corporations may try to pass it as _their_ intellectual property, we should fend them so hard they roll back into XIX century. ~~~ Mediterraneo10 Cars are going to lock down their LIDAR systems, so the best one can hope for is that the companies that control that data are also friends of OpenStreetMap and will pass the data on. I’m not optimistic that the individual owners of cars will be able to read from the LIDAR bus without – at best – voiding their car’s warranty. ~~~ thriftwy > I’m not optimistic that the individual owners of cars will be able to read > from the LIDAR bus without – at best – voiding their car’s warranty That's one consumer protection law away. And no, I don't believe in "being friends with OSM". I believe in owning your data. ~~~ JumpCrisscross > _That 's one consumer protection law away_ “If you buy the car you own the data stream, and must be able to keep it private; read, modify and re-distribute it; and sell it” is a good idea. > _I believe in owning your data_ Gentle political note. This sounds more radical than it is or than your argument needs it to be. The first suggestion stands well enough on its own. ------ jekdoce The thought provoking contrast presented in the article is camera derived sparse maps with lane lines, road edges, signs etc. vs lidar derived dense detailed models of the whole environment. Any thoughts around why the former is not enough? If it is enough it would certainly be preferable, since smaller in size and likely easier to maintain. ~~~ tonygrue My guess is that the more detailed, dense map allows the car to precisely localize itself by using its view of the world to match against the map, yielding a location more precise than GPS (and for when gps doesn’t work); eg ICP point cloud matching/alignment/registration. More sparse maps would give you a less confident match, and you’d have to convert what the car is seeing to the sparse form. ------ jacksmith21006 Bumped into this comparison of Google Maps and Apple Maps and it is excellent. [https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps- moat/](https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat/) ~~~ GoToRO Motivated by a road that was on one map but not the other, I built this: [http://comparemaps.drona.ro/](http://comparemaps.drona.ro/) ------ leoc I've been wondering when Google (or someone else) is going to do the same thing for pedestrian routes and locations. There are plenty of highly- trafficked places where GPS is unavailable or not precise enough, and mapping WiFi stations evidently isn't enough to fill the gap. Of course the problem could, and should, be attacked by ground-based radio systems * , but 100% coverage by such systems certainly won't arrive anytime soon, and it wouldn't be like the tech companies to wait for it. You _would_ have to take your phone out to get a location fix ... but that likely won't be the case whenever AR glasses really start to appear in public, and the techcos will also be happy to stick cameras on your clothes and luggage if they and you can get away with it. * Come on Transport for London, it's high time to show some leadership here. ~~~ adventured Do you primarily mean high density walking areas, or essentially everywhere that you can freely walk as a pedestrian? ~~~ matwood In Europe in particular (and I'm sure elsewhere) a lot of pedestrian areas are very narrow. The lack of precision is a big problem. I have not had same number of issues in the US presumably because so many pedestrian areas were built with cars in mind (at least at first). ------ jbverschoor No pois, no maps. Google is unfortunately still the winner here. ------ erikb well all my POIs are in gmaps and I have the app installed everywhere. No idea why I wouldn't want them to stay at the top. Push them please, so they improve their software, but winning they should. ------ losteverything Nobody wants to let Google win again. I do. Google greatly enhanced my life, esp. Driving and directions. I was an adult BI and speak from experience ------ craigyk Just last week Google maps directed we take a turn going down the wrong way of a one way street that was already clearly marked as one-way on the map- yeah, I'm not too worried about even Google's dominance in this area. Also, Apple maps in my area has been quietly, but steadily improving. Still not as many POIs as Google, but nicer interface and turn-by-turn (IMO). ~~~ Chriky Where did the one way street thing happen exactly? I find it very interesting that it can do that, it implies a disconnect between the rendered data and the data used for routing. ~~~ irrlichthn It could also be a simple routing bug. You cannot know. ~~~ darren_ It's also very frequently people being in 'walking' mode without realizing it ~~~ jstarfish I'm surprised the accelerometer doesn't question its input when I appear to be doing 75mph on foot. ------ Harrisonbans Well, when this happened than really everyone no need to worried about to lose their home in the world. ------ joshfraser It's not about mapping. It's about collecting data and training their machine learning algorithms.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Optimize your liquor cabinet using data from three world-class bars - simandl http://www.rittmanmead.com/2014/12/rittman-mead-bar-optimizer/ ====== simandl This is a shiny + d3 side project I'm working on. It's still an MVP and I'd appreciate any feedback on improvements.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Whats the dark side of Silicon Valley? - gmazzotti http://www.quora.com/Silicon-Valley/Whats-the-dark-side-of-Silicon-Valley ====== karlkatzke I keep getting headhunted for positions in the bay area. I keep saying no. Founders and recruiters can't seem to understand why -- as if it has never occurred to them that someone would turn down an offered interview based solely on location. Michael Church's answer is exactly why I won't ever, ever move to the SF Bay area. ------ marcosscriven Vaguely interesting. To read the rest of my comment you must sign in...	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Before patches were possible, how did console games deal with bugs? - minimaxir http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=976550 ====== minimaxir Note that this thread was prompted by the massive QA issues in the biggest games last year (notably Assassin's Creed: Unity and Master Chief Collection).	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Eminently – Headhunters: manage, track, and get paid for your referrals - rpellerin ====== rpellerin Eminently is the first platform for headhunters and businessmen that helps you manage your job and business referrals, track it, and get paid when a deal is made. In fact, you surely have introduced people for job or business opportunities, but how often were you kept informed, paid, or rewarded for it? Also, Eminently records digital proofs on a BitcoinCash blockchain to value your contribution to the network in the future. Check it out while it's hot! ~~~ rpellerin For the past year, we have been working on a new project eminent.ly to improve the way we hire and do business today. I have been searching for the missing link that would allow modern job and business platforms to be more effective. In my previous companies, most of our best talents were coming from our own personal networks. So it was obvious to me that the missing link is: us! In fact, today's platforms rely on data that do not describe who we are as co- workers, mentors, mentees, bosses or friends accurately. There's something far more valuable in the link that unites two people than keywords or hashtags. Experiencing various situations together allows us to know more about each other which in turn creates a special and valuable bond, a shared experience that cannot be condensed and stored in a database. Yes people matter! More and more companies are starting to understand that point and investing in employee referral programs. Those programs are proven to bring the best profiles, who stay longer, and are a better fit for the company. This is because employees know within their own network who can be a good fit for the company and the open position. But those programs are usually hidden within the company platform and only available to employees, assuming they even know this system exists. Also, using traditional headhunting agencies and private business networks come with a high cost in commissions. Furthermore, some of us are frequently making referrals and hoping for feedback about how it went or for people to return the favor someday… unfortunately, we are often disappointed. To tackle these challenges, we are launching eminent.ly, a platform that brings a new way of introducing people for a job or business opportunity by relying solely on your valuable network and knowledge, not on an incomplete and inaccurate database. With our platform, you are now able to manage your referrals, track how people are doing, and get paid for it when a deal is made. Thanks for your attention and hope you will be a part of this journey. Eminently yours, Romain Pellerin, Founder.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Cavendish banana is slowly but surely being driven to extinction - tokenadult http://qz.com/559579/the-worlds-favorite-fruit-is-slowly-but-surely-being-driven-to-extinction/ ====== jacobolus This article by the same author from March of last year (2014) is longer, and does a more thorough job explaining the context and the threat: [http://qz.com/164029/tropical-race-4-global-banana- industry-...](http://qz.com/164029/tropical-race-4-global-banana-industry-is- killing-the-worlds-favorite-fruit/) (and HN discussion [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8296326](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8296326)) I’d recommend just reading that one and skipping the current article, which consists of a tiny bit of background wrapped around a link to the recent study [http://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/jo...](http://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1005197) ~~~ pyre > This article by the same article The singularity has arrived! The articles are writing themselves! ;) ------ mcv Not all is bad, though. The Cavendish is not exactly the most tasty banana, and all the replacements that people are looking at (Goldfinger, which is shorter, thicker and straighter, Sedas, which is apparently a resistant Gros Michel) are all tastier than the Cavendish. ~~~ cageface Here in Vietnam I see at least half a dozen different kinds of bananas of all shapes and sizes every time I go to the market. Most taste better than American supermarket bananas too. ~~~ mcv It was the same when I was on vacation in Indonesia. There's clearly a wealth of bananas in south-east Asia. Most of them were really tiny though, and probably hard to sell in the west. ------ tzs Bananas are astonishing. Compare them to apples, from the viewpoint of a North American consumer. 1\. Bananas are grown thousands of miles away. Apples are typically grown within a few hundred. 2\. Bananas have to be transported in refrigerated ships, trucks, and trains, and even then only keep for a couple weeks after harvest. Apples are easy to transport and keep for months. Yet bananas are cheaper than apples! How that came to be is covered in this interesting article: [http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/18/opinion/18koeppel.html?ref...](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/18/opinion/18koeppel.html?ref=opinion&_r=0) ~~~ yrro > Over the past decade, however, a new, more virulent strain of Panama disease > has begun to spread across the world, and this time the Cavendish is not > immune. The fungus is expected to reach Latin America in 5 to 10 years, > maybe 20. The big banana companies have been slow to finance efforts to find > either a cure for the fungus or a banana that resists it. Nor has enough > been done to aid efforts to diversify the world’s banana crop by preserving > little-known varieties of the fruit that grow in Africa and Asia. It astounds me that Big Banana has been "slow" to react, given that "By 1960, the Gros Michel was essentially extinct and the banana industry nearly bankrupt"! ------ blisterpeanuts This is horrible news. I love bananas and eat at least 365/year. I recently got a blender so that I could make smoothies -- to fool my kid into eating both a banana and a glass of milk in the morning :) The article didn't make it clear, though, whether every variety of banana is affected, or just the big yellow ones called "Cavendish". When I lived in Taiwan (early 80s), there were all sorts of bananas -- Cavendish, little yellow ones, little red ones. In fact these little reddish-skinned ones with a tart yellow fruit grew in my back yard at the time. Really tasty. Maybe it's time to install a small tropical greenhouse in the back yard and grow one's own bananas. If mainstream bananas become scarce and expensive, this could be like tomatoes -- everyone will want to grow them. A business opportunity for someone, possibly. ~~~ apendleton The particular problem strain of the Panama disease affects the Cavendish specifically. This has happened before; the Cavendish, itself, only became the dominant cultivar after other strains of the same disease killed the previous dominant cultivar, the Gros Michel. All members of a given cultivar are clones, so they're genetically identical and thus very susceptible to being wiped out by disease as they have no mechanism to evolve resistance. We'll probably just have to switch again. ------ im2w1l Between seedbanks and genome sequencing, there is really no excuse for us letting major (sub-)species go extinct anymore. ~~~ BrainInAJar Cavendish are seedless, they only grow vegetatively. They are genetically identical. That's the problem. Panama disease is a fungus. Fungi are nearly impossible to eliminate. ------ 1_player If you haven't seen it already, I highly recommend this article: [http://www.damninteresting.com/the-unfortunate-sex-life- of-t...](http://www.damninteresting.com/the-unfortunate-sex-life-of-the- banana/) In fact, I recommend any of their articles. ------ NN88 Didn't we have the gros michel? ~~~ msellout Thus the song, "Yes, we have no bananas".	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Why Somalia has become a safe heaven for pirate? - digamber_kamat I thought that the waters of world were safe. People coming on a small boat and hijacking huge ships seemed some years old phenomenon to me. However I am surprised how the Somalian pirates have made news.<p>Hows come the world, so many nations with their Navy can curb these pirates? ====== TallGuyShort Honestly, I think it has a lot to do with financial issues. This articles was posted earlier today that you may find interesting: [http://www.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/17-07/ff_som...](http://www.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/17-07/ff_somali_pirates) I don't think it's entirely true that private security contractors are actually trying to prolong the problem in an attempt to make more money, but I do think it's mainly due to someone's financial/political agenda. Nobody wants to deal with the REAL problems in Mogadishu, and obviously there are few people who find it cost-effective to make such a decisive move against piracy. There's several good documentaries going around on TV that show how difficult it is to deal with the problem without majorly interrupting legitimate trade. >> However I am surprised how the Somalian pirates have made news. There's a lot more ships going through that area than the news lets on. The news agencies have there agenda too - if they can make the situation sound more dramatic, it's in their best interests to do so. ------ tokenadult When I was younger, the waters of Southeast Asia were very dangerous for piracy. It seems to me that piracy arises whenever the governments of countries with strong navies are not united in dealing with it. ------ msie Some history on the Somalia situation: [http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1892376,00.htm...](http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1892376,00.html)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }

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