The Limits of Language - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/life/classes/2015/09/take_a_wittgenstein_class_he_explains_the_problems_of_translating_language.html

<comment><USER2> If you're interested in language, I highly recommend 'The Search for the Perfect Language'[1] by Umberto Ecco. Highly readable and incredibly interesting history of those wanting to extend the capabilities of language.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Search-Perfect-Language-Making- Europe/...](http://www.amazon.com/Search-Perfect-Language-Making- Europe/dp/0631205101)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm just reading Wittgenstein's works. He had also said "If you want to know whether a person is religious, don't ask them, but observe how they behave."

<comment><USER4> That's a very odd observation, because religious people as a population show _very_ slight deviations from non-religious people. It is extremely difficult to tell by observation whether or not someone is religious, beyond church/temple/mosque attendance, which is equivalent to asking them.

Does he reference any data that would give his suggestion non-negligible plausibility?

<comment><USER3> I've read the quote in the book "Wittgenstein's poker". After a bit of searching, I've found the following link: [https://hengstmengel.wordpress.com/2010/02/22/philosophy- to-...](https://hengstmengel.wordpress.com/2010/02/22/philosophy-to-the-glory- of-god-wittgenstein-on-god-religion-and-theology/)

I believe the explanation you're looking for is under 3.1.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > _The shift to online communication, textual interactions separated from > accompanying physical practices, has had a persistent and egregious warping > effect on language_

The phone was the first change. To this day I hate speaking to people on a phone because if I don't see their eyes and body posture I have a very hard time understanding what they mean.

Usually, in a normal, face to face conversation, I have a rough idea of what someone is going to say next, which eases the cognitive burden of the conversation.

But somehow that doesn't really work over the phone, so I have to wait for people to say things, parse what they're saying, run it against various possible interpretations, and then think of an answer. It's exhausting, (not to mention error prone).

Edit -- conversation is like a dance, (or a game of chess). There are rules, within the rules, an infinite number of moves, and a limited number of "usual" moves. You normally just follow the usual moves, and sometimes you invent a new one, or place a usual move in an unusual context.

To me, talking over the phone is like trying to dance over the phone by describing to the other person what you're doing. It's not impossible, just extremely difficult.

<comment><USER6> It would seem then, that as humans, we are forcing ourselves to be less contextual on our talk and more uniform. This is precisely how cell phone talk becomes more understandable, is by meaning the same things when you talk much more consistently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > _The French equivalents for here and there are ici and là respectively. But > if I point to a pen and say, "The pen is here," the French equivalent is not > "Le stylo est ici," but "Le stylo est là." In French, là is always used to > refer to a specific place or position, while in English here or there can > both work._

Well... it depends.

If both speakers are in front of a pen and one points to the pen she'll say "le stylo est là" \-- that part's true.

But if you're in another part of a big house and someone yells "where is the pen", and the pen is with you in this remote room, you can yell back "le stylo est ici", meaning "it's here with me".</comment>


Epsilon email address megaleak hands customers' customers to spammers - <AUTHOR> http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/04/04/epsilon-email-address-megaleak-hands-customers-customers-to-spammers/ <comment><USER2> Here's what The College Board said:

Subject: NOTIFICATION FROM THE COLLEGE BOARD

We have been informed by Epsilon, the vendor that sends email to you on our behalf, that your e-mail address may have been exposed by unauthorized entry into their system.

Epsilon has assured us that the only information that may have been obtained was your first and last name and e-mail address. REST ASSURED THAT THIS VENDOR DID NOT HAVE ACCESS TO OTHER MORE SENSITIVE INFORMATION SUCH AS SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER OR CREDIT CARD DATA.

Please note, it is possible you may receive spam e-mail messages as a result. We want to urge you to be cautious when opening links or attachments from unknown third parties.

In keeping with standard security practices, the College Board will never ask you to provide or confirm any information, including credit card numbers, unless you are on a secure College Board site.

Epsilon has reported this incident to, and is working with, the appropriate authorities.

We regret this has taken place and apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you. We take your privacy very seriously, and we will continue to work diligently to protect your personal information.

Sincerely,

The College Board</comment>


Do Cloud Operating Systems Deserve To Be Called "Operating Systems" - <AUTHOR> http://www.osattack.com/cloud-computing/do-cloud-operating-systems-deserve-to-be-called-operating-systems/

<comment><AUTHOR> any thoughts?</comment>


Real-Time Collaboration Issues and Solutions - <AUTHOR> https://blog.codeanywhere.com/real-time-collaboration-issues-and-solutions/

<comment><USER2> Operational transformation very useful, but it has some drawbacks if you want to do more complicated things with text. Most OT implementations can only get one step out of sync with the server. Client complexity goes _way_ up if you want to do more than that. Also, transformations can only be simple inserts and deletes. These two limitations combine to make it difficult or impossible to search-and-replace, re-indent, or sort lines alphabetically. To do arbitrary transformations of text (or anything) collaboratively, you need different algorithms. Neil Fraser has written extensively on this topic, and suggests an alternative sync strategy.[1]

Disclosure: I'm one of the founders of Floobits[2]. Since native text editors let you do all kinds of crazy stuff with text, we use an algorithm similar to the one described by Neil Fraser.

1\. [https://neil.fraser.name/writing/sync/](https://neil.fraser.name/writing/sync/)

2\. [https://floobits.com/](https://floobits.com/)

<comment><USER3> I have never heard of an OT implementation with the limitation you state (only being able to keep a single difference), as OT is designed to make that easy to solve: the client can take each new operation it is making and append it to a "difference" buffer, and then transform the difference buffer (which moves contents in its workin copy) by the results from the server when the server acks it's transform. It then can immediately flush this buffer to the server as a new synchronization request. This reuses the exact same logic as any other transform, so it adds almost no code to the client.

As for the limitation that OT only supports inserts and deletes: OT supports anything that can be transformed. If you build an operation "indent area" and then provide a way to partially order that operation against all the other operations (such as "range operation, sort by first position, reverse second, and break ties by operation") you can transform it by moving the position boundaries for inserts and deletes, and when it applies and itself creates a ton of spaces in its interior, that is how it transforms the rest of the operations in the queue. Wave had a number of interesting transforms designed to help it edit structured documents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a really nice explanation, thanks for taking the time to post it. We've got our own real time collaborative editor going with code-mirror at [https://www.overleaf.com](https://www.overleaf.com) (formerly writeLaTeX), and have experienced many of the same issues!

What are you next plans for it? Be good to have a chat sometime in the new year if you're interested :)

<comment><USER5> FYI, the image on the front-page of overleaf.com still has the writeLATEX logo in it.

<comment><USER4> Thanks - yes, we've still got a few things to finish up on the relaunch (we got the technical stuff out of the way first, now have things like that screenshot to go through and update!)</comment></comment></comment>


Immune to Critics, Secret-Spilling Wikileaks Plans to Save Journalism ... and the World - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2008/07/wikileaks <comment><USER2> Finally, a sign that some of Brin's 'no privacy for anyone' really does apply to the powerful, as well.</comment>


The Upside to Building Products for Developers - <AUTHOR> http://benplesser.wordpress.com/2013/10/16/the-joys-of-building-products-for-coders/

<comment><USER2> I have yet to pass the willing-to-pay barrier, but my experience launching Cursive has really echoed his first two points. Developers really appreciate attention to detail in a product and my experience working with the beta testers has been that most of them are willing to spend a lot of time helping find and fix bugs and are generally a really friendly and accommodating bunch. Plus I'm scratching my own itch all day - it doesn't get better than that.

</comment><comment><USER3> What percentage of your motivation for writing this post was a desire to talk about making products for coders in general and what percentage was wanting people to check out your site?

[http://www.enginehere.com](http://www.enginehere.com)

Be honest :)

<comment><USER4> Why is it necessary to break the motivation into percentages? Who cares! He's got an interesting product, and wrote about it in a blog post.

If I were answering, I'd say I was 100% motivated to talk about making a product for coders, and 100% motivated to get people to check out the site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> OP, u still have not answered me. Why C# search is failing on u r site?

</comment><comment><USER5> Filter by C# tag fails!

Why do all new sites fail at this? Is # a stopword in your basic search functionality?

<comment><AUTHOR> If it makes you feel better csharp, I can tell you that there are very few C# topics thus far!</comment></comment>


4D Toys: a box of four-dimensional toys - <AUTHOR> http://marctenbosch.com/news/2017/06/4d-toys-a-box-of-four-dimensional-toys/ <comment><USER2> This looks fantastic. If I had a VR device I would get this immediately. I've always had a fascination with trying to grok higher dimensions. I think it's just about impossible to have an intuitive understanding of it - 3D spacial reasoning is in our wiring through both nature and experience.

You know the theory of how language shapes your thinking? For example, in societies where there is no separate word for orange and red, they have extreme trouble telling the difference between them. In some native tribe where they use cardinal directions (North, South) - not relative (Left, Right) - they have an almost supernatural ability to know which direction they are without needing any other cues (sunlight, stars).

Point being - would being able to completely think in four dimensions have an impact on how you understand the world?

<comment><USER3> Often when I see something about 4d it uses this same analogy: a 2d being seeing a crosssection of a 3d world, in 2d. However, the video is in 2d, and it's able to show 3d in a much better/more clear way, clearly, cause when it's showing that example it's got a cutout of the "3d" view (which is still 2d!).

Why can't we do the same thing with 4d? Why does the object just disappear when it bounces into the 4th dimension, can't we maybe see a projection of it onto the 3rd dimension?

<comment><USER4> Maybe they could do something like a fog? That is, if the object was farther away in the 4th dimension, it would appear less distinct or more fuzzy/blurry, like being in the fog.

<comment><AUTHOR> Miegakure did something similar where it showed a shadow of the 3D space immediately adjacent to the currently visible slice. I think he since removed that, so I expect he must have experimented with something similar in 4D Toys and decided against it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm curious how this would look if the 4D space was projected onto the 3D space instead of taking a cross-section, much like we already project 3D space onto 2D space (your display), to create "3d" graphics.

<comment><USER6> Isn't that what the traditional 3d visualization of a hypercube is? e.g. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercube#/media/File%3AHype...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercube#/media/File%3AHypercube.svg)

<comment><USER7> Isn't that a 2d projection of the 3d projection of 4d space?

It gets weird because our eyes see almost in 2d, and even with VR, there is a 2d feed to each eye that gets combined to add slight 3d depth perception. So really we would be projecting a 4d world onto two 2d plains that our visual cortex would try to merge to add slight depth perception.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you make a Kickstarter to 4D print them, I would support it for my kids. I think for kids, it's more important to play with real-world physical objects rather than their virtual computer representation.

<comment><USER8> Is this satire?

<comment><USER4> It's a joke - I don't actually have kids. And I mean the 2nd sentence seriously. Also, quick googling reveals that 4D printers haven't been invented yet, so presumably one would need a KS for those first.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I considered linking to the game's site at [http://4dtoys.com/](http://4dtoys.com/) , but this blog post introducing it has more design details that I think will interest HN.

</comment><comment><USER9> This looks like fun, going to try this out over the weekend.

This is the same person who made this game (that also looks like good fun): [http://miegakure.com/](http://miegakure.com/) that I remember reading about some years ago but never got a chance to play with

<comment><USER10> The game isn't out yet.

<comment><USER11> Yes it is.

<comment><USER12> Ah, miegakure is not out yet, sorry!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As a person who studied knot theory and sitting through other peoples presentations about higher dimensional knots this looks like a neat treat! After hearing about the concept I bought the game and tried it out. I like how you replace actual physical actions to objects in 4 dimentions. Usually this is projected on the time axis but with this interface it makes it much more fun to play with it instead of having basically a generic slider.

<comment><USER14> Higher dimensional knots? I thought one of the first things you learned in knot theory was that knots are only possible in three dimensions?

<comment><USER13> Yea so you consider a two dimentional sphere embedded in a four dimentional ball. So it's a S^2 that is knotted in R^4.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The video explaining it is really well made, but for some reason I still can't grasp the 4th dimension. Perhaps it's one of those things that you only need to know they exist at the theoretical level.

<comment><USER16> Same here. I understand perfectly everything that was said in the video but I still don't understand how the fourth dimension quite works.

However, having only heard of hypercubes and not hyperspheres before I decided to see if there was anything useful about them online and I found this video that I just started watching and already 1 min 50 sec into the video something very interesting was said;

> Everybody knows what the sphere is. I'm thinking of a hollow sphere so like > a basketball right. That's a two-dimensional surface living in a three- > dimensional space. The hypersphere is generalized one dimension up, so in > four dimensions you have this three-dimensional space called the 3-sphere or > the hypersphere.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krmV1hDybuU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krmV1hDybuU)

Already this is telling me something that I have not heard before, and which I find much more helpful than talking about what a shape looks like from the perspective of someone living one dimension further down. That being said it was still useful having that explained as well, which is what Flatland: The Movie (2007) was about as well. Just this fact I quoted above was even more useful IMO.

<comment><USER16> Another quote from the video I linked in parent comment.

6:19

> As complex numbers are to real numbers, quaternions are to complex numbers. > It's like a way to build up even further. [...] Real numbers are one- > dimensional. Complex numbers are two-dimensional. [...] For three dimensions > there is no natural number system, but for four dimensions there is and it > looks like this.

<comment><USER17> That's really misleading. The complex numbers are not a two-dimensional Euclidean space directly, but are a space of transformations (scaling & rotation) on two-dimensional Euclidean vectors, where 1 represents the identity transformation, and _i_ represents a quarter turn anticlockwise.

In a similar way, the quaternions are the space of transformations (scaling & rotation) of three-dimensional vectors. (It's a little more complicated because 3-dimensional rotations are not commutative, and must be combined by sandwiching, so there are 2 choices of quaternion corresponding to every scale and orientation in 3-dimensional space. For an introduction see [http://geocalc.clas.asu.edu/pdf/OerstedMedalLecture.pdf](http://geocalc.clas.asu.edu/pdf/OerstedMedalLecture.pdf))

<comment><USER16> >The complex numbers are not a two-dimensional Euclidean space directly, but are a space of transformations (scaling & rotation) on two-dimensional Euclidean vectors, where 1 represents the identity transformation, and i represents a quarter turn anticlockwise.

You might be right, I don't know. Could you explain a bit more how you mean?

<comment><USER17> Complex numbers have multiplication defined on them. If you multiply two complex numbers, you get another complex number. (They compose via multiplication in exactly the same way as scaling & rotation operators on 2-dimensional vectors.)

If you just have 2-dimensional vectors, there's no obviously well-defined way to multiply two vectors and get out another vector.

In other words, both 2-dimensional vectors and complex numbers are made up of 2 coordinates, but they don't have the same mathematical structure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Reminded of this Carl Sagan video that I watched as a kid. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTL02N9EHzU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTL02N9EHzU)

<comment><USER19> These videos are such a treasure. All these years and nobody came even close (new Cosmos is ok, but not that profound).

This is how you make a nation great. You can do whatever you want with the economy, but without proper education you still have a nation of.. people.. who choose their president.. based on their beliefs and understanding of the world.

<comment><USER18> Shows the relative importance of a great presenter too. The props he uses are laughably cheap, yet he does a better job getting the point across than vastly more expensive productions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Now is a good moment to reread Lewis Padgett's Mimsy were the Borogoves, specially if your children start playing with those toys.

<comment><USER21> [http://jabberwockland.blogspot.com/2007/03/mimsy-were- borogo...](http://jabberwockland.blogspot.com/2007/03/mimsy-were-borogoves-by- lewis-padgett.html)

My favorite short story of that era. Still have not watched the movie out of sheer fear they didn't get it and I don't want it wrecked. (Still have no idea how that even made it out...)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Love the idea! Unfortunately it's not compatible with iOS plus-sized screens :(

<comment><USER23> I'm hitting the same problem -- the app only renders to a smaller rectangle of the whole screen rooted at the bottom-left (when held sideways), but touch events _are_ scaled to the whole screen. I could probably live with the smaller view, but it's very hard to accurately manipulate the objects when it thinks I'm touching further left than I actually am.

<comment><USER24> Same issue here. Has anyone reached out to the developer?

<comment><USER12> I am aware of the issue and fixing right now!

<comment><USER25> This app is very cool. Do you have a plan to add projection mode in addition to crosssection?

<comment><USER12> Something like that, yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Related: (iOS only) [http://www.fourthdimensionapp.com](http://www.fourthdimensionapp.com) If you email me at temp6 at traipse.com I will send you a promo code for a free copy.

</comment><comment><USER27> This is very cool. It reminds me of the classic geometry novel Flatland. If you like thinking about dimensionality I highly recommend it...

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

<comment><USER28> The game this engine is for, Miegakure, is inspired by flatland.

</comment></comment><comment> gene-h Now it's a cool toy, but there might be more practical applications for a 4D rigid body physics engine. Some materials design approaches[0] involve iterating through shape space to determine what shape a particle should be to get it to assemble into a desired structure. A 4D physics engine might be useful for this shape space iteration, as movement through shape space could be accomplished by moving a 4d rigid body along the 4th axis.

[0][http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acsnano.5b04181](http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acsnano.5b04181)

</comment><comment><USER29> What annoys me most: "thing disappear" I don't recall 3D -> 2D mapping making things disappear, just surfaces hiding other surfaces. But this might not work in 4D?

With the 2D->3D they are taking cross-section, I really don't like these. Just throw it all on there ! This would also mean you project your 4D world on a 3D camera, you project on a 2D surface to display.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVo2igbFSPE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVo2igbFSPE) <= this method is "saner" imo.

<comment><USER10> That's if you do a "projection", like light rays from a 3D object focused onto a screen. This is more like taking a 3D slice of a 4D object. If you think of taking a 2D slice of a 3D object, you can see how objects disappear when they move out of the plane that you're drawing.

<comment><USER30> If you sliced a tesseract then presumably you'd encase it in the knife and a square, with no depth (the depth is in the 4th dimension that we're not experiencing), would appear?

Hypercubes have always been a difficult one for me to intuit, basically I have no 4th dimensional intuition. When I think of a 4D hypersphere all I can get is a simple sphere. I don't have any intuition as to whether that's wrong, it seems in a way it should be a sphere with infinite spheres on it's surface - from analogy with the tesseract - but from analogy of constructing a sphere from a circle it should be a case of rotating the sphere around itself perpendicular to the extra dimension?

<comment><USER31> It might help if you consider spheres as a _surface_.

3D spheres are a 2D surface wrapped into a 3D space, likewise, hyperspheres would be a 3D surface wrapped into a 4D space. There's no "infinite spheres on its surface", I think the "rotation" is a better analogy.

Take a line rotated around an orthogonal axis and you have a circle, a circle rotated around an axis orthogonal to the other two is a sphere, a sphere rotated around another orthogonal axis is a hypersphere.

<comment><USER30> Are all spheres hyperspheres? When you rotate in the 4th, or higher ordinal, dimensions don't you get the same shape?

<comment><USER31> I guess it would depend on whether you consider all circles to be spheres (or all spheres circles)?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Easily the hardest part of learning about string theory for me (via reading "The Elegant Universe" [1]) was grasping the idea of multiple other dimensions.

The book tried it's best to explain it by exploring a world starting with 1D and evolving to 3D, but it's still quite difficult to visualize, especially ones shaped like a "Calabi–Yau manifold" [2].

The one good thing I got out of learning about Calabi-Yau manifolds (and randomly reading another layman story involving Yau's clash with the guy who solved Poincaré conjecture) was a new interest in learning more about math and a getting a laymans grasp of topology. Although I later learned manifolds are quite an advanced subset of topology.

I enjoyed the linked video, I was looking for a way to better understand 4+D in a way I could wrap my head around and an interactive game makes a lot of sense.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Elegant-Universe-Superstrings- Dimensi...](https://www.amazon.com/Elegant-Universe-Superstrings-Dimensions- Ultimate/dp/039333810X/)

[2] [https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Calabi%E2%80%93Yau_manifold](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Calabi%E2%80%93Yau_manifold)

</comment><comment><USER33> This is so cool, but its driving me crazy. I was wondering if someone could provide me with more resources that help intuit about 4d space. For example, in Miegekure, he walks through the 4th dimension to get to the other side of the wall, but thats assuming that no part of the wall extends into the forth dimension (aside from rubble). What would happen if he switched back to the normal 3 dimensions in the middle of the wall. In miegekure everything is kind of discretized (grassy area to desert area), but in reality that would be continuous. What would that actually look like, for example, the area right next to the wall? How would this work at a subatomic level, would electrons be traveling in and out of the 4th dimension? Could this explain things like action at a distance or black holes? How does the explain shared surfaces in the 4th dimension? I can't even answer a basic question like, if I were sitting in an easy chair and started looking down the 4th dimension what would happen. Since it has to share one cross section of the easy chair would it have to be simply a fatter or skinnier easy chair? But that is true for any cross section of the chair correct? The easy chair is the 3d cross section of the 4d object then what (would/could) the 3d cross section exchanging one of our spatial dimensions for the hidden one look like? How does gravity work in those 3 dimensions (2 of our spatial dimensions + 1 of the hidden dimension). Supposing the world was like this, wouldn't it be obvious if any object was extending into the 4th dimension thus we can stand to reason our world must be strictly 3 dimensional? If there were 4 dimensions since we can't see or interact with it, does it stand to reason that the spatial extent of any object doesn't extend into the 4th dimension? For example, since the three dimensional projection of a hypersphere changes diameter, does that mean the 4d dimensional analogues of earth are just different size earths? I also notice that in one of the miegekure videos the windmill in the new 3d space is like a cross section of the windmill but extending for a distance, Im guessing this is a product of the way the 4th dimension is discretized but Im wondering, what would that really look like if the game weren't made that way?

<comment><USER34> I found this Matt Parker lecture provided some good tools for getting your head around the fact that extra dimensions really do let you go around things, not through: [https://youtu.be/1wAaI_6b9JE?t=2299](https://youtu.be/1wAaI_6b9JE?t=2299)

(the whole thing is worth watching, but the bit about higher dimensional visualization starts there)

<comment><USER35> I'll save people the effort and point out that the only relevant things (to the given questions) the entertaining video shows are a proper klein bottle and the nature of projection into 3D. In 4D, klein bottles don't self- intersect, just as mobius strips don't self-intersect.

It does not cover the question of putting oneself inside a wall or how to go around 4d objects, and the projections show detail that a 4d person would not see.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> It's a shame it's only for iOS and Vive. I wonder how difficult it would be to make an open source desktop/browser version? Even if it's a lot simpler, it would be neat to feel what it'd be like to play around in 4 dimensions.

<comment><AUTHOR> 4D Toys is now available for non-VR PC, I just noticed this tweet from the author: [https://twitter.com/marctenbosch/status/871073480573202432](https://twitter.com/marctenbosch/status/871073480573202432)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> One of the first things I thought of when I got a vive is building an app to let one intuitively navigate and understand four dimensional space. I never had the time or talent to hack something together though so I'm glad this exists.

Something similar but less polished can be found here: [http://www.albert- hwang.com/blog/2016/6/what-does-vr-reveal-...](http://www.albert- hwang.com/blog/2016/6/what-does-vr-reveal-about-the-4th-dimension)

</comment><comment><USER35> This and Miegekure show cross-sections or projections of a 4d space that are common but that show details that could not possibly be seen by functional 4D eyes. Are there any attempts out there at showing a 3D representation of what 4D eyes could see? (For example, if you have a solid 4D cube, you can only see the outside of it, but the cross-section shows parts of the inside, as happens you take 2D cross-sections of a 3D cube)

</comment><comment><USER38> There are several 4D games, but the one I found gave me the best grasp of the 4D world is this one [1], a puzzle in which you manipulate a hypercube. You first play in 2D and 3D before going to 4D. You end up with an intuitive understanding of 4D.

[1] [http://harmen.vanderwal.eu/hypercube/](http://harmen.vanderwal.eu/hypercube/)

</comment><comment><USER39> Odd. I just bought this on my wife's iPad. It opens, drops some shapes and then repeats. If you touch the screen it instantly crashes

<comment><USER39> I'm guessing there's a missing/incorrect OS/functionality check somewhere cause she's on iOS 8.2. Upgrading now and will report back. Also grabbed the crash-logs and will email them through.

<comment><USER40> I'm seeing the same thing. It looks like the app is calling -[UITraitCollection forceTouchCapability], which isn't available on iOS 8.

<comment><USER12> A new build is being reviewed by Apple!

<comment><USER40> Awesome, thank you for the super fast response!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Does anyone have any resources on orthographically projecting 4D objects to 3D or 2D spaces? I'm curious if it looks better than taking a cross-section.

It seems like it should work similarly; deform a 4-frustum into a 4-cube and drop one or two of the axes. I guess the number of axes you can drop depends on the symmetry of the frustum...

<comment><USER41> I tried googling "orthographically projecting 4D objects to 3D" to see if I'd strike gold and, boom: [http://eusebeia.dyndns.org/4d/vis/vis](http://eusebeia.dyndns.org/4d/vis/vis)

Edit: In particular, this page shows a good summary of how the "slices" shown in the game relate to the hypercube projection you're familiar with. [http://eusebeia.dyndns.org/4d/vis/09-interp-1#Interpreting_4...](http://eusebeia.dyndns.org/4d/vis/09-interp-1#Interpreting_4D_Projections_1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> [https://translate.google.fr/translate?sl=fr&tl=en&js=y&prev=...](https://translate.google.fr/translate?sl=fr&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=fr&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Festhetopies.ihp.fr%2Findex.html&edit- text=&act=url)

</comment><comment><USER43> I wonder if, after playing many hours with this game, the brain will suddenly "grasp" the concept of 4d.

<comment><USER25> I think it will. I'm aware of two somewhat related experiments: upside-down vision and magnetic field vision. In first experiment, participant wore vertical flipping glasses for a week. He was walking, eating, cycling and so on, never taking glasses off. At the end of experiment he was pretty good at it and it seemed natural. When glasses were finally off, he felt very discomfortable for some time. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_adaptation#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_adaptation#History) \-- one of these experiments.

In the second experiment participant wore belt (iirc) that signaled north pole location to his skin. After wearing it for a long time, that feeling turned completely into new sense of magnetic field. You simply know where "north" is, anytime. After taking it off, he responded that it was pretty stressful, like you lose one of your senses or limbs. Experiment group was concerned to that they stopped these experiments. (no link found, but seen on HN)

All this shows that our brain is probably not specific to available senses/setting and can "grasp" any concept, if exposed to it for a long time, but both in and out may take a hard time.

<comment><USER44> Check the following links for information on such a belt. It's a spin-off from research on "sensory substitution" at a german university (in Osnabrück).

[http://www.feelspace.de/navibelt/](http://www.feelspace.de/navibelt/) [http://www.feelspace.de/research/](http://www.feelspace.de/research/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I can't get this to run on iOS. Is it supposed to work? It just sits at the splash page playing a slightly interactive animation over and over. There's an arrow that I tried tapping and dragging and nothing happens.

<comment><USER46> Same thing happened to me, I think I fixed by swiping left

<comment><USER45> I'm seriously swiping as hard as I can in every direction.

<comment><USER12> Are you on an iPhone 6+ or 7+? If so, a new build is being reviewed by Apple.

<comment><USER45> Yep. For a minute there I was worried this was some Myst-like intelligence test that I was failing.

Looking forward to the be build.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I'm surprised that Flatland[0] wasn't mentioned in this

[0][http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/201](http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/201)

<comment><USER4> They actually do mention Flatland at 4dtoys.com.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> it would be interesting to see multiple views at the same time, like how when we try to represent 3d shapes in 2d (think mechanical design drawing, archetictural drawings, etc)

</comment><comment><USER49> Might be useful for figuring out how to battle cthulu

</comment><comment><USER50> I'm immensely interested in the prospect of higher spatial dimensions. Is it even possible to prove/disprove their existence from our 3D existence, and have there been any notable attempts to do so?

</comment><comment><USER51> Why a box and not a hyperbox?

</comment><comment><USER52> Damn, it's so cool!

</comment><comment><USER53> He's going to make some coin from this.</comment>


Acoustic Tractor Beam - <AUTHOR> http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.112.174302

<comment><USER2> The paper, "Acoustic Tractor Beam" is also available here:

[http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/364597/1/Demore- TractorBeam%20R2%...](http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/364597/1/Demore- TractorBeam%20R2%20-%20Accepted.pdf)

And a slightly different version here:

[https://pdf.yt/d/8p03rq6HgDU1r-zs](https://pdf.yt/d/8p03rq6HgDU1r-zs)</comment>


What's new in Android 4.3 - <AUTHOR> http://developer.android.com/about/versions/jelly-bean.html <comment><USER2> This is more developer related, but one of the biggest news is a backwards compatible ActionBar in the official support library. All that's left to say is a big, enormous thank you to Jake Wharton for keeping us all sane until now.

Edit: The video about the ActionBarCompat is available: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TGgYqfJnyc#at=20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TGgYqfJnyc#at=20)

Seems largely identical to ABS in its implementation, which makes sense.

<comment><USER3> Absolutely ActionBarCompat is the best addition to 4.3. Thanks for the video link.

<comment><USER4> Um, its worth nothing that ActionBarCompat is not an addition to 4.3. Its an addition to the support library. If you include the support library in your project and you can use features from 4.3, such as fragments, and the action bar all the way back to android 1.6. The support library is a backport of modern functionality.

This is part of googles approach to addressing fragmentation on the Android platform.

<comment><USER5> Small correction, the support library which has ActionBarCompat only goes back to 2.1 (each version has a number representing the API version it supports, in this case v7)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> >You can access notifications through new APIs that let you register a notification listener service and with permission of the user, receive notifications as they are displayed in the status bar...You'll be able to launch any intents attached to the notification or its actions, as well as dismiss it from the system, allowing your app to provide a complete user interface to notifications.

wow. that should have some interesting possibilities.

<comment><USER7> Hello smartwatches!

<comment><USER8> And Google Glass

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Nexus 7 should receive the update today, other devices in the coming week"

[http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/24/android-4-3-will-be- availab...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/24/android-4-3-will-be-available- for-nexus-7-nexus-4-nexus-10-and-galaxy-nexus/)

<comment><USER10> Maybe they changed it since your comment, it now says ". All of these devices will receive the over-the-air update today."

Seems highly unlikely to me. I haven't gotten the update on my Galaxy Nexus yet.

<comment><USER11> 'Recieve' there means that the OTA is out and being deployed to some devices, not that it's been rolled out and made available to everyone. If you want the update sooner, you can download the factory images and flash it. (which have already been released).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> On the "actual user-facing feature" front:

 _Android 4.3 adds built-in support for Bluetooth AVRCP 1.3... In addition to exposing playback controls on the remote devices connected over Bluetooth, apps can now transmit metadata such as track name, composer, and other types of media metadata._

I've been waiting for that for car audio (iOS already supports it).

</comment><comment><USER13> So 4.3 fixes neither the ad-hoc WiFi issue #82 nor the audio latency issue #3434. I will continue to pass as those are the deal breakers for me.

It's amazing – these two have been pending for more than 4 years. Google hasn't cared to even comment on the former while thousands of users beg them to: [https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=82](https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=82)

<comment><USER14> It would appear that both were assigned on Friday, so that is a good sign.

<comment><USER15> You mean 'on Wednesday last month'?

I'm not invested in either of these bugs, I don't think I care about them/their result, but I think you failed to parse the month in that tracker?

<comment><USER14> Oh, yep. Saw Jun, read Jul. Still fairly recent, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Not to start a flame war here...but what is the likelihood that newer devices still on 4.1 will be bumped to 4.3, on the reasoning that third-parties waited until 4.3 to make the upgrade? Or does it become increasingly unlikely that any upgrade will happen?

I have a Sprint HTC One...which was released in 4.2's latter days but still had 4.1...wondering if an upgrade will ever happen

<comment><USER14> That seems to be largely a carrier issue, and unfortunately the best solution seems to be to root the device and install/update stock Android manually.

This is why Google is moving a lot of Android's functionality into applications, which can be updated easily via the Google Play Store.

<comment><USER4> I should also put a shout out to the compatibility library and google play services - these mean app developers are not tied to having to code against the latest version of android to use new features.

Essentially all Android updates do now is to change some of the core OS plumbing. The big changes from 4.1 to 4.2 were rendering speedups. 4.3 seems to be new versions of the bluetooth stack and open GL.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> There seems to be a significant push for more video/entertainment/proprietary content related stuff. Anyone familiar with this?

"Modular DRM framework

To meet the needs of the next generation of media services, Android 4.3 introduces a modular DRM framework that enables media application developers to more easily integrate DRM into their own streaming protocols, such as MPEG DASH (Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP, ISO/IEC 23009-1)."

Wonder if I'll finally see Amazon Instant Video on vanilla-android... probably not.

<comment><USER18> Thing is, Amazon Instant is already on Google TV. So I don't think there is any technical reason for them to not implement it.

<comment><USER19> Amazon Instant on Google TV is just a shortcut to launching Chrome pointed at the Amazon site where the videos play in Flash. It's not a real Android app, not on my box at least.

<comment><USER20> Amazon Instant on some Google TV devices is the real Amazon Instant app. However, the devices supported by Amazon Instant are all ones that offered DRM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > The /system partition is now mounted nosuid for zygote-spawned processes, > preventing Android applications from executing setuid programs. This reduces > root attack surface and likelihood of potential security vulnerabilities.

Well, that sounds great. It's almost like they're trying even harder to prevent people from having control over their device.

<comment><USER22> It's also like they're trying to reduce root attack surface and potential security vulnerabilities.

<comment><USER23> I believe current Fedora is also setuid free, possibly other distros, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> TL;DR: not much.

It's smoother, which is a great thing. But in terms of actual features, the only one I'm looking forward to is being able to use Wi-Fi positioning while I've turned off the ability to connect to Wi-Fi. That is to say, I'm not very excited about this release.

<comment><USER24> There are lots of things in the new version, but just because your random wish isn't there it's "not much"? Give me a break. Besides, you can already do that with DroidWall or any other firewall in the play store.

<comment><USER18> _but just because your random wish isn 't there it's "not much"?_

Er, where did I say that? My "random wish" was one of the new features they announced that I am glad they included.

There are plenty of new features in 4.3, but they're all developer-centric. Absolutely nothing wrong with that, of course, but it means it isn't so exciting for many people. Especially as few people can afford to target these new features right now, given that their potential market of 4.3 users is tiny.

<comment><USER25> Future Android updates probably won't be as exciting because Google is migrating most of their system apps to Play. In the past, a system update might have brought new features to Maps, or to Google Search, while now those are updated on a more frequent (and less buzzworthy) schedule.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The nice thing about restricted profiles is that it should allow us to create a really simple 'Kid mode'.

<comment><USER27> Yes, especially limiting in-app-purchases seems like a very useful feature for letting kids use your tablet without worrying too much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Bluetooth Smart Support is a big deal.

It's going to make it easier for hardware devs to develop Bluetooth apps.

<comment><USER29> One such piece of hardware being Fitbit, which only presently supports some Samsung devices (since Samsung apparently got tired of waiting and hacked in their own support). Perhaps we'll finally get full Fitbit support on Android devices running 4.3.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> As an owner of Nexus 4, the only feature I'm looking for is a reduced battery usage :) They provide optimizations for the location API, but I suspect that the more prominent _performance_ features will end up draining battery even faster :)

<comment><USER31> Some of the performance changes for handling graphics should help with battery life since they will be more efficient in using the CPU and GPU. Some of the Android engineers covered this at I/O 2013: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQZFaec9NpA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQZFaec9NpA)

<comment><USER32> I too have been waiting impatiently for Google to fix the audio latency. Great to see behind the scenes of how the Android engineers are tackling this issue. Surprised this is primarily a Linux scheduling issue and of course priority inversion. Between "fast path" and matching buffers/sample rate, looks like we're almost there. Great watch! Thanks for posting that link.

Any android developers working on audio should check out: [https://code.google.com/p/high-performance- audio/](https://code.google.com/p/high-performance-audio/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Still no low latency audio? I wonder if Android will ever be a useful device for serious musicians.

<comment><USER11> This is something which is being worked on, but it's a complex problem and takes time to improve. Android 4.3 has halved the audio latency on the Nexus 7 (2012) and Nexus 4. See here: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3kfEeMZ65c](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3kfEeMZ65c)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> > Wi-Fi scan-only mode is a new platform optimization that lets users keep Wi- > Fi scan on without connecting to a Wi-Fi network, to improve location > accuracy while conserving battery.

Out of all the features this is the one I am most excited about.

</comment><comment><USER35> From my time working with SELinux on the desktop I'm curious to see what they do with it eventually, now running it in permissive audit mode doesn't do much at all.

I'm wondering if the plan is to eventually have each app ship with a policy file (doubt it)? Use a targeted policy to only confine certain apps chosen by the user with corresponding policies and run everything else unconfined (minimizes breakage)? Run the entire dalvik vm in a separate confined domain? Just leave it there as an option for enterprise and government customers who would really take advantage of flexible interface for writing access policies?

</comment><comment><USER36> I missed it in the presentation. Did they say when this will ship to Nexus 4?

<comment><USER37> Rolling out today, is what I read on The Verge. However, that doesn't mean you'll get it today; rollouts are usually so slow that you can wait weeks.

<comment><USER14> The Check Now button in About Phone seems to be something of a placebo button, as well. In the past I've got around this by going to Settings->Apps->Google Services and clearing the cache and killing the process. That will force an actual check by pressing the Check Now button.

Of course, if your phone isn't scheduled to receive it yet then you'll still come up bupkis, like I have thus far.

<comment><USER11> I don't think anyone has gotten the OTA update yet. Once someone has, the zip will get posted and then we can all update from that. Or, you can flash the factory image which is out now but you'll lose your data on the phone.

<comment><USER38> Just checked for the update on my N4 and got it immediately. I'm in SE Asia, if that makes any difference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Is Google lacking imagination? This is the third version with the same name.

I'm missing the times when every release was a new sweet thing.

<comment><USER40> I suspect it's part of their strategy for deflecting from the "fragmentation" issue - "what version of Android does your phone run? Jelly Bean? Snap!"

I also reckon that they will start releasing bits of the OS via the Play Store, bypassing the manufacturers and carriers (as they are already doing with the standard keyboard).

<comment><USER31> They do that with Google Play Serivces ([https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.gms)) already. The things 4.3 has w.r.t. bluetooth, opengl es support, etc. are probably really difficult to ship independently.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> It seems that only Nexus devices are getting the update today, and not the Samsung/HTC Play Edition phones. It will be interesting to see when those two devices get the update; in the meantime, not all Play devices are made equal?

</comment><comment><USER42> Did they say when the source code will drop?

<comment><USER43> It's there. [https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/...](https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/android-4.3_r2.1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I'm new to the Android world and this is the first update I've seen. When should I expect an update pushed to my phone? What does it depend on? I have the Galaxy S4 so I assume Samsung has to make some modifications to the version to support some stuff?

<comment><USER45> The image is modified heavily by Samsung. Besides their custom UI, they need to write/integrate custom drivers for the hardware in the phone. As for time, it could be a few months before it's updated.

This is the advantage of Nexus phones, as Google ensures that the manufacturer has a release ready, and that previous phones are updated (within reason).

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Running CyanogenMod nightly, because it's the closest I can get to open source: I love getting updates in the form of git SHA-1s every few days.

I wonder if upstream Android will ever take to a rolling-release approach.

</comment><comment><USER47> Nice to see they're working on rendering-performance. I bought the prev Nexus 7 but returned it some days later. The jittery scrolling and constant microlag drove me crazy.

</comment><comment><USER48> One more reason to have a Nexus device is to take advantage of these updates right away.

</comment><comment><USER49> Does anyone know if there will be images for the Nexus Experience S4 and HTC One?

<comment><USER11> There surely will, they said in the announcement that updates for GPE devices are coming 'very soon'.

<comment><USER49> Ah, I'm so conflicted... Do I keep Sense and the IR blaster/Zoe, or do I get stock with all the improvements and saner UI?...

<comment><USER50> Reposting a dead reply to your comment:

> There are already patches for the IR blaster in CM10.1 (or 10.2 now). You > have to cherrypick them though, as of two weeks ago they weren't merged yet.

<comment><USER49> Oh, thanks! I imagine CM is pretty much stock, no? It might even have PDroid patches, I'll have to look. I wonder how stable it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> New master key?</comment>


Microsoft Adds DNS-over-HTTPS Support for Windows 10 Insiders - <AUTHOR> https://threatpost.com/microsoft-dns-over-https-windows-10/155746/ <comment><USER2> How can one verify that DoH was successfully activated?</comment>


How to cope with excessively long retrospective meetings - <AUTHOR> We've been doing Kanban for some time and the retrospective meetings are taking at least 1-2 hours. Adding that to the validation/general overview meetings, I'm at the point that the entire morning is spent doing not-so-useful meetings.
At the end I feel my brain is completely drained.
How should I cope with such horrendously long meetings? <comment><USER2> Take a break after a meeting to recover a bit. Don't feel obliged to stay as productive as on the days that don't have meetings. If you are demanded to be as productive on the days with meetings, then you can just explain that your attentional resources are limited and the demand is excessive.

After all, you are paid for the time spent on meetings, so it's not you, but the business is the entity which should bother about productiveness of your time.</comment>


Giving away my kindle eBook, a YA SciFi novel about AI – Blue Screen - <AUTHOR> https://www.amazon.com/Kyle-Benzle-ebook/dp/B084GHLYSX/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= <comment><AUTHOR> Peter Gustafson wants to save the world. In the year 2984, Peter is an average kid with a secret; he's a well-behaved tenth-grader by day but cryptographic entrepreneur and hacker by night. When the electricity mysteriously goes out in his hometown, Peter takes it upon himself to investigate. The adventure leads the young hacker to a large transmitting station and into a battle of wits with the greatest AI ever created. The machine requires a human to help "throw the switch" and give it full control so engineered the power outage as a test to lure its latest recruit, Peter Gustafson.</comment>


So how do we get out of this mess? - <AUTHOR>

So we just found out, our government has been lying straight to our faces all this time. And all the big tech giants too (Mark Zuckerberg, Sergej Brin, etc.).
And so now, we're all thinking: "Ok, let's just have them promise us or 'commit' to the dismantling of this huge surveillance apparatus. And we're good."
But then we understand that we will never ever again be able to trust them (neither the government nor the tech giants). Why?
1. They all have no problem continuously lying straight to our faces, this is now proven. 2. The blueprints for such surveillance systems are now there, the tech is now there, the know-how is now there, and even experience is now there. How can you get rid of all this so there won't be any more abuse? You just can't.
So what's the solution to prevent our "representatives" from destroying democracy?
I don't know if there IS one, but I'm asking myself these days if all this not "simply" tells us that a central government in this form is logically just not responsible anymore. That it will allways become corrupted, sooner or later.
I remember one political analyst suggesting quite some time ago that the US will subdivide itself into several smaller zones. What do you think? <comment><USER2> The populace responds to fear. Shift the fear of terrorists to fear of the government by making use of propaganda.

<comment><USER3> Fear, I believe, is a core component why American (and generally any) people want to shut their doors and not hear any of this scary stuff. More often than not, myself included.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> History has shown us repeatedly that concentration of power and resources is the root of all evil. Let the world be a collection of thousands of small states with maximum autonomy to each to govern itself. We used to have this exact configuration in past but that resulted in frequent battles between states. That was again an attempt to grow big and concentrate power. Part of the reason was that the arangement was not created rather it grew out of the natural evolution. So as we re-create such an arangement, we can take measures like creating loose federations of multiple levels with UN-like institution at each level. With autonomous small states, the true democracy can be realized quite easily.

However, this decentralization has to be done not only for government but also for economy, because concentration of power by any means – be it money or military will ultimately force concentration of other powers.

"My notion of democracy is that under it the weakest shall have the same opportunities as the strongest… No country in the world today shows any but patronizing regard for the weak… Western democracy, as it functions today, is diluted fascism… True democracy cannot be worked by twenty men sitting at the center. It has to be worked from below, by the people of every village." \- MK. Gandhi

</comment><comment><USER5> > That it will allways become corrupted, sooner or later.

Systems of governance will always fail. This is just the way things are.

The very best one can do is what was done in Philadelphia in 1787: design a flexible system of checks and balances.

It will not last forever. It will last for a good while. Such a system may allow for a peaceful revolution into whatever sucessor form of governance happens.

I suggest one valid successor to American representative democracy is anarcho- capitalism.

Consider: if government is going to fail us in novel and horrid ways perhaps the solution is to remove the concept of government.

<comment><USER6> You suggest anarcho-capitalism, but consider this: Currently, we have a state- capitalist society.I say state capitalist because every company that was 'bailed out' is effectively a state institution. There's an important distinction between the free market and capitalism. Free market socialism can exist as well as state capitalism.

The only entity in our current system powerful enough to, say, prevent corporations from overfishing any fishery to destruction is the government. Similarly, government issued and enforced carbon credits are the only thing preventing (or attempting to prevent) even more drastic pollution. The list goes on.

The main reason we need government right now is to put a check on corporate power (although sometimes it doesn't seem that way, I admit). And the main reason we need a check on corporate power is because of the profit motive and the concentration of wealth towards the upper ranks of any corporation.

Instead of anarcho-capitalism, how about anarcho-syndicalism or anarcho- socialism? In a socialist society, the capital (ie the means of production) is owned by the workers rather than the rich boss sitting in his office.

Even more so, in a capitalist society, you need some entity in place to protect your capital (land, factories, slaves, etc) from being used by someone else, even if you're not using them (and even if you 'own' so much that you're limiting others' very ability to survive). There are 2 ways to do this: 1) Look to legislation enforcing capital ownership and a state-run police force. And 2) establish a police force / military of your own, under your own control.

The first is what we have now, and the second would quickly collapse into a military ictatorship or oligarchy.

The way I see it (from the above reasoning), there's plenty of reason to think that "anarcho-capitalism" is an inherently contradictory statement.

tl;dr: I agree with the anarcho- half of your suggestion, but not capitalism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> \- start using encryption, download and use gnupg. \- set up your own servers on your own computers. \- start up your own (with neighbors) ISP, not connected to a central ISP, but to other neighbors' and other town's ISPs.

You have the technology, and you have the freedom to use it, then use it! In some countries, we don't have the freedom to establish long distance (or even cross the road) communications without going the a government approved telco or ISP...

</comment><comment><USER8> Stop relying on their technology. Start from scratch with a DYI hardware movement. While the kids all learn to code, they don't have the resources, time, patience, or energy to become electrical engineers. We do.

<comment><USER9> Could you expand on this? I'm an EE but I don't see the practicality of building all your own hardware. As it is it is difficult enough to build economical hardware to sell to others, let alone build one off personal hardware. What power am I holding here?...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Encrypt everything.

<comment><USER11> But that's only a short-term solution.

Because _de_ cription is only a matter of the amount of resources you through behind, and:

1) Those resources become cheaper by the day

2) Technology, by definition, improves with exponential progression

3) A big central government has all the money it takes (from us, obviously)

<comment><USER12> I am not so sure: First Technology, doesn't improve with exponential progression _by definition_. This is just an empirical observation. Processors' frequency has stalled already. You can still increase the number of cores/processors/machines, but the amount of computation you can process surely doesn't scale linearly with the number of processing units (because of various overheads).

Secondly, because the number of people and the data they have to store also increase exponentially. Maybe they can decrypt someone's data but they cannot decrypt everyone's data. So if we _all_ use encryption, they are pretty much lost because they won't know what to decrypt.

So I would say that encryption is pretty safe, but very impractical.

edit: To kimlelly, ok if AI is "short term" then I cannot disagree :) But, then is there a solution at all?

<comment><USER11> What I mean by "exponential progression by definition" is this:

We use technology to produce better technology.

That's the cycle that will go on as long as we exist.

It's by definition of exponential acceleration. In a few years, we will be creating technology based on real artificial intelligence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Peer-to-peer software, rather than server based software.

</comment><comment><USER14> if you knew the truth you'd shit yourself...

</comment><comment><USER15> Own the physical medium.

Study systems, including how they segregate and specialize. Realize this generalizes across all sorts of different environments, from biology to information to technology.

Compartmentalize.

P.S.

I mean this from the individual's perspective, per the original question.

After posting, I realize these terms can also and do also apply to the "other side". Pick up any espionage thriller novel, and you're likely to quickly encounter them.

So... They are universal. They work for both sides.

As an individual interested in having an accountable government, I'd argue for their limitation for "that side". Transparency, audit trails, accountability.

That however does not obviate the need to cope with the status quo.</comment>


Show HN: Deepsteg – a superior, open-source suite of steganalysis tools - <AUTHOR> http://www.deepsteg.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> We are looking for contributors at the moment. Deepsteg is based off of a package called aletheia.

We are not just a project; we are a movement. We want to expose criminals who use steganography to hide messages within images and other media.</comment>


Hack or not: picking sports and cashing out (legally) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.sportschimp.com/post/33424765380/its-grey <comment><USER3> I can't tell from their website what exactly they do. Do you have to buy in for real money to win real money? Or do you play with play money that they allow you to cash out for real money if you get enough of it?

Either way, this is certainly illegal in at least 6 US states. Believe it or not, you can't have games of chance with cash prizes even if entry is free in some states. Nobody ever gets prosecuted for doing that though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Matt, it is the latter. I looked up your website and would love to chat more if you are up to it.

<comment><USER3> Sure. I am the founder of a YC company that originally did a Fantasy Sports for money product. While not an attorney, I did spend tens of thousands on them and learned a lot about applicable law.

My advice of course is to do the same if you haven't already. I'll be happy to give you my impressions but I'm no substitute for a lawyer who understands the ins and outs of your product. I can at least recommend a good one in the field of gaming law.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I love this stuff! I used to be in this whole jazz, with a website I co- founded named CentSports that was along the same lines as this, and I would love to chat if y'all have time! Really awesome stuff guys(gals) ! Skype: "JustBivIt" Email: firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Can't believe I'm meeting all sorts of cool guys in this thread - <USER2> something in your mailbox soon. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Guys, I have absolutely no idea what this service is. I know it has something to do with sports, and is your unique take on it to supposedly keep it legal, but when you are doing something that isnt straight forward you need to explain what it is if you want people to try it out. You really need a "how it works" page, because going to the site says absolutely nothing. Also, have a link to tell people what B$ are and actually write out "bitcoins" [is that what B$ are?].

//EDIT: Just saw that B$ are banana bucks. How do people get these and what happens when they "cash out?" I watched your "intro" video [which wasnt very prominent on your homepage] and still dont really have answers to most of the questions I raised

As far as the legality, I really wouldnt be so sure about your 3 prong test, ESPECIALLY if you dont have a lot of money to fight the DOJ. Will they come after you? Depends on how big you get and how well you hide, but if they do come after you, you cant just say "Sorry, we thought it was legal" and shutdown the site and expect them to stop going after you.

When you say, "Furthermore users can't wager or bet on teams, they simply pick which team they support in a match." What does this mean? Why would a user "pick" a team? What happens if they pick a team and that team wins? What happens if they pick a team and that team loses?

<comment><USER6> From the article: _If you have a grand or more in Banana Bucks (or B$, our virtual currency)..._

\---

The only model they could legally work is:

 _Allow people to gamble with real money if it's legal where the person lives, and force them to use fake money if they live where gambling is illegal._

Even if Americans have to leave the country to receive their payouts, American courts will still likely find this site in violation of anti-gambling laws.

<comment><USER5> yea, the us gov't has made it pretty clear that what matters is where the customers are located, so while they dont care if an american gambles online from canada, an american cant gamble from america and then go to canada to get his money.

<comment><USER7> To clarify. There is no buy in. In no point of the game do you actually use your credit card, cash, sheep's wool or any form of a tradable commodity to buy-in.

<comment><USER5> how do customers get banana bucks? what happens when they cashout banana bucks?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You don't have to pay to participate? So what? Casinos have free versions too you know. Or are they insinuating that you can win $s without investing any B$s?

As a sidenote, claiming that there is no wagering, is also false. Chosing and supporting a team does involve wagering, only the wager is static and proportionate to the participants. Then there is a formula that adds up and/or devides wagers to the participants.

</comment><comment><USER9> Love what you guys are doing. I admit that I'm curious about how you plan to build a revenue model that can supplement that kind of outflow, but I'm sure you guys are thinking about it.

Thanks for the Betable shoutout as well :)

<comment><AUTHOR> We'll chat soon, David.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> As a developer interested in this space (and as a gambler at heart), am disappointed that I need a Facebook account to even check this app out.

That said, I like the idea and love that you are willing to take some risks in these gray areas. I'm rooting for you. Now let me in!

</comment><comment><USER11> Yeahhhh, good luck with that defence when the man comes knocking.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> And Tumblr seems to be down. Thank you Murphy.

</comment><comment><USER12> Its a grey area but at least someone's trying something. Sports Betting won't stay illegal for long.

</comment><comment><USER13> I love this sports betting app...its soo much fun</comment>


The ultimate guide to image optimization - <AUTHOR> https://www.proteusthemes.com/blog/ultimate-guide-image-optimization-wordpress/ <comment><AUTHOR> Full disclaimer: guide's co-author here and proteusthemes.com business owner.

I know some people here will rage that this is not "PRO" stuff. At the same time, I see so many people who call themselves web professionals, failing to do the most basic things regarding the image optimization. A full week of work went into writing this article and the entire research. It is, to my knowledge, one of the most comprehensive solutions.

In a week since we've published it over 7k viewed the article and we're getting a great feedback. And we've already iterated it a little bit from the feedback we've received.

Thanks, I am here to discuss things further :)

</comment><comment><USER2> I would also consider riot for image compression: [http://luci.criosweb.ro/riot/](http://luci.criosweb.ro/riot/)

<comment><AUTHOR> We focused in the online tools only, because otherwise you have to split by OS etc.

And in the desktop tools you usually have more control over the quality which makes it impossible to compare to each other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Why do they only mention opaque web services, not the many different tools you can use yourself and that those web services probably use anyway?

<comment><AUTHOR> What exactly do you have in mind? I am not sure if I understand your question? What exactly do you use yourself?

<comment><USER3> pngcrush, guetzli etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> We focused in the online tools only, because otherwise you have to split by OS etc.

And in the desktop tools you usually have more control over the quality which makes it impossible to compare to each other.

btw I tried guetzli a while ago, it was a joke. Lots of hype, much worse results compared to tinypng for example. And it took minutes to process 2 mpix image on MBP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very detailed guide for a beginner such as myself. Thank you!

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh thanks, great to hear you find it valuable!</comment></comment>


The State of Ruby ORM - <AUTHOR> http://solnic.eu/2011/11/29/the-state-of-ruby-orm.html <comment><USER3> The thing that really grates me is that Datamapper (the ORM) is that all their examples tightly couples the models to the database in direct contravention of the data mapper pattern that gives it its name.

After all the entire point of data-mapper is that your objects don't know the details about how they're stored.

<comment><USER4> look at it as hints. It's not actually tightly coupled, as m of that stuff is optional sugar that allows for better optimization.

<comment><USER3> That "sugar" is in the wrong place for a project that names itself after a pattern intended to keep the models and storage separate. If Datamapper actually tried to implement the datamapper pattern, you would've put it in separate mapper classes, not littered around the models.

<comment><USER4> Fair point. Why don't you create a gist with an example of what the model + hint declarations would look like in separate classes. I'm not convinced that this distinction matters, but I'm sure the DM developers would respectfully take a close look at your insights. They are a really great group, very helpful on IRC, etc.

<comment><USER3> I would if I had time. Or they could just read the chapter of Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture that they took the name from - it's the chapter right after Active Record :) Page 165. Martin Fowler went into a decent amount of depth in describing the pattern. His site also has a decent summary available for free.

I don't think this is exactly is lack of awareness on their part, though - <USER2> someone else has pointed out, Datamapper actually implements the Active Record pattern. Structurally the two are very different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> His example

User.where(:active => true).kind_of?(Enumerable)

What's the issue here? If you change it to

User.where(:active => true).all.kind_of?(Enumerable)

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I'm not sure I understand that either. The whole point is that with the first example it is NOT an Enumerable yet. You are building, what is essentially, a query object and until you access something that query will not be executed at which point it will be an Enumerable as you point to with the "all" method.

<comment><USER7> I guess TFAA would like the query under construction to be Enumerable, and Enumerating it to serialize it without needing the `all` indirection. Something similar to LINQ.

In fact, some of Enumerable's messages could even be used to further build the query (e.g. `Enumerable#drop(Integer)` simply bumps the query's offset)

<comment><USER6> That makes some sense to me, but technically that object at that point is not an "Enumerable" so you are essentially faking it knowing that it would be once executed.

Is there some significant benefit to it returning true for Enumerable that I'm just missing?

<comment><USER7> > That makes some sense to me, but technically that object at that point is > not an "Enumerable"

Why not? An enumerable is anything that can be enumerated, the query object holds the potential of being enumerated, it's just an actual underlying query away but that's of no relevance to the interface. The only reason why it's not "technically Enumerable" at that point is... that it does not implement Enumerable's interface.

> so you are essentially faking it knowing that it would be once executed.

Why would you be faking anything? Is LINQ faking anything when it produces IEnumerable<T> after each "operation"?

> Is there some significant benefit to it returning true for Enumerable that > I'm just missing?

Interface simplicity? Workflow simplicity? I see no reason for it not to? Get rid of the useless `all` method?

<comment><USER8> Strictly speaking, you're not actually enumerating for a lot of the potential use-cases of enumerable methods.

For example, say #reject were implemented:

        User.where(admin: true).reject(office: current_user.office)

There are two ways to implement this: One by literally iterating over the result set and filtering it; and Two by adding a projection to the query builder.

In the second case, it is small-e enumerable, but not strictly Enumerable, since Enumerable very explicitly defines each method in terms of #each. That doesn't make sense for a query builder.

It could implement Enumerable and override every single method, but the point a few people are making here and in the post comments is that checking kind_of?(Enumerable) is non-idiomatic. Including modules for semantic meaning is appealing to programmers from certain backgrounds for completely understandable reasons, but simply checking for the presence of the method needed is more clear -- ie. respond_to?(:each) is the intended solution.

TL;DR: Modules aren't Interfaces.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Three years ago the state was much worse, so I ended up writing my own ORM, which tries to address some of the issues pointed out here.

My primary need was to be able to map the same models to different schemas, including very badly designed legacy ones, so the mapper layer had to be clearly separated from the model and very hackable. Also, the query syntax had to be powerful enough to avoid SQL whenever possible, so that the same queries could be applied to different environments.

Right now it implements Units Of Work and Identity Mappers; it has deep querying and multilevel strategic loading (not limited to one level as with DataMapper); functions and aggregates; and many other features, wrapped in a familiar easy syntax.

If someone wants to try it, I'd love to hear some feedback: it's at <https://github.com/me/spider>.

</comment><comment><USER10> I find Datamapper's codebase quite easy to follow. It uses a modular architecture, separating different concerns in different modules, which can be hard to follow if you are new to Ruby.

About the raw SQL: Sequel excels at this. And you can combine easily both.

I found the post interesting, but would have loved to see more examples to the arguments. Specially in the frameworks the author gives so much praise.

</comment><comment><USER11> interesting topic, lame explanation</comment>


Docker Orchestrations Compared - <AUTHOR> http://wearables.sys-con.com/node/4065127?utm_content=bufferbb3e0&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer <comment><USER2> I agree that container orchestrations seem very young. I'd like to see an abstraction at a higher level and be able to define I'd like these machines to run these containers and scale when under load in this specific way.

The platform should take care of all the difficult parts of getting containers talking, provisioning servers and setting up load balancers etc.

That is the dream of docker I think and after setting up swarm they are closest but it still feels both too close the underlying infrastructure (terraform etc.) or not clear how to automate the discovery and so on.</comment>


RealAudio is the real deal (1995) - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/1995/07/realaudio-is-the-real-deal/ <comment><USER2> And indeed it was. This specific product was a harbinger of things to come.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's interesting to revisit the press and get a temperature on the expectations (dare I say "hype") around RealAudio. It really was something else in the offering when I first encountered the web as a teen in the mid 90s.</comment></comment>


Poverty isn't a lack of character. It's a lack of cash - <AUTHOR> https://www.ted.com/talks/rutger_bregman_poverty_isn_t_a_lack_of_character_it_s_a_lack_of_cash <comment><USER2> Poverty is also a lack of basic human rights. Poverty causes people to live in places where their safety isn't guaranteed, and go to school where their development isn't fostered.

<comment><USER3> Poverty also induces poor people into a sad state of mind where irrational decisions become the status quo. It's a mental prison.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Divorce doesn't indicate a lack of commitment. It results from incompatibility."

"Poor scholarship isn't a lack of effort. It is bad grades."

"Incest is not a sexual perversion. It is an alternative sexuality."

This (except for the last) is the way the Left thinks.

The fact of the matter is that some poverty IS due to a lack of character. Bad grades are often the result of a lack of effort. Incest is an alternative sexuality -- that IS perverted.

You can't just define away short comings. I am all for compassion and mitigating circumstances, but not for dishonesty.</comment>


Techmeme vs Hacker News - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/03/techmeme-vs-hacker-news.html

<comment><USER5> >And not one story about Apple or Facebook in the top 20 right now.

It isn't always that way. Some days we have three stories on the front page about Facebook (the day before yesterday) and I don't think a single day goes by where some Apple story doesn't creep its way in. There's an Apple-related story on the front page right now and two on the second page. It's gotten better over the last year though. It used to be that 3-4 (or more) articles about Apple and Facebook were on the front page at any given time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Is that necessarily a bad thing though? To be fair, Apple, Facebook, and Google have had by far the largest impact on consumer technology in the last decade. Obviously, they're newsworthy and interesting.

To me, a good measure for whether an article should be on HN or not is whether people can learn something useful from either the article or the discussion surrounding the article. I think we can all learn from their strategies and actions, and the conversations surrounding articles about Facebook or Google are usually filled with insightful comments (maybe not so much with Apple articles).

<comment><USER5> Apple, Facebook, and Google are discussed everywhere, all the time, on all tech news venues ad nauseum. That is why I personally don't care for their appearances on HN. You are right though, often the commentary is outstanding compared to what you would find elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hmm, I dunno.

Apples to oranges for me. I look at HN as a place where techies discuss topics that interest them, vs Techmeme which lists tech stories in the media, sans discussion.

<comment><USER7> Excellent comment: apples being techmeme right now and oranges being the natural hn color

<comment><USER8> Speaking of pedantry, here's my obligatory response where I say Apples and Oranges can in fact be compared [http://improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume1/v1i3/air-1-...](http://improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume1/v1i3/air-1-3-apples.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> False dichotomy. They're both aggregators per se, but one top-down curates breaking news (and reactions to it, which is why a story may take up so much space), the other uses voting to optimize news of any age to the interest level of a community.

I don't disagree with Fred's conclusion - that Techmeme is hard to take sometimes - but that seems more a reflection of the quasi-autistic and frequently hysterical focus of the tech media these days.

</comment><comment><USER10> Two very different entities. Techmeme is about the news and that's it. Hacker News is about the community and how we as developers and designers think about the news. Hacker News is more about the community. Like today a random post about Windows 1.0 to 7's journey led to donations for the guy behind Trumpet Winsock. Very few communities have such a strong positive energy in them like HN. I have learnt so many cool things here and I am just 20 days old on HN.

</comment><comment><USER11> I never heard of Techmeme to be honest, but I rely a lot HN for everything related to geek and technology. So I believe HN is doing a damn good job. Congrats to everyone of you.

</comment><comment><USER12> Like many HN posts, I found the comments even more insightful than the article:

"TM: What has happened. HN: What will happen." - William Mougayar

"Hacker news is great...Huge time-sink liability though." - <USER2>

"I find the comments more interesting sometimes than the actual article that is being linked to" - <USER3>

"Techmeme is a popularity contest, HackerNews is curation. Curation in my experience wins easily." - Larry M.

"I have really fallen in love with HackerNews lately, finding its eclectic mix of articles fascinating. I have been participating a lot there because it doesn't just pull in the same old standard fair I find everywhere else. I also often find, multiple perspectives, whether in stories or in the comments." - Elia Freedman

"...the commenters on HN leave a lot to be desired. With a room full of geeks, you pretty much get what you'd expect -- some insights, but a lot of pedantry." - <USER4>

"Hacker News is so great I only let myself go there once a day. And I might have to cut back on that too..." - Nate Kidwell

"Hacker News looks like a place where you can soak your brain for hours, if you have the time." - James Harradence

<comment><USER13> From Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic: "All of our stories that do well on Hacker News share one thing: they are written. By written, I mean that someone took the time and effort to examine individual sentences, to think about word choices, to create transitions between grafs, to describe things precisely. You know, writing! But a lot of what gets posted in the tech blogosphere doesn't fit this definition of writing. It's more in the tradition of the wire services, where speed rules over creativity. That the Hacker News community both recognizes and rewards pieces that are written makes me love it."

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> _"... doesn't the fact that Techmeme drives traffic cause the echo chamber - and how do you change that? ..."_

Spin in any article is like spraying _"Cheez Whiz®"_ on a plate load of _"Water Crackers"_ then claiming the discovery of the _"new"_ Brie. [0][1] To the cheese connoisseur, you know something is wrong straight away. Instead of the soft white gooey cheese melting out the sides of the light chewy rind, we get an orange blob expertly sprayed on a cracker.

The echo chamber effect is dampened by the HN readers who are connoisseur's of hacker related information. [2] Spin is detected at both submission and reader level. A pre-spun article might escape submission, but the average HN taste is attuned to poor substitutes.

[0] Cheez Whiz® ~ <http://www.kraftbrands.com/CheezWhiz/>

[1] Carr's Crackers ~ <http://www.carrscrackers.com/history.shtml>

[2] Submarine ~ <http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html>

</comment><comment><USER15> Has anybody looked at the correlations between the stories on TechMeme and HN? My guess is that because of HN's broader scope more of the TechMeme links wind up on HN than the other way around. But it would be interesting to see data related to that ... and also see whether one routinely proceeds the other.

<comment><USER16> I don't know about that but Techmeme clearly takes HN into account. I've noticed many times where an article makes it to Techmeme without any other blogs linking to it. Every time that's happened I've found the article on the top of the HN page.

<comment><USER15> interesting data point, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'd sat Hacker News competes more with Quora than Techmene - especiually the ASK HN section.

<comment><USER18> That's interesting. I was thinking last night whether it would benefit HN to be structured more like Quora. Naturally in some discussions I would love to see it, however in others perhaps not. HN places focus on good comments more than anything, while Quora on good answers with a bit less emphasis on commenting. A blend somehow I believe to be the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> TechMeme's got huge gender biases, and this helps contribute to the echo chamber effect that Fred's talking about. In September 2010 I wrote about a case where even though 65% of the articles on a subject were written by women, TechMeme's version had on 16.5% by women. <http://www.talesfromthe.net/jon/?p=1618#comment-88992>

<comment><USER19> Argh, blocked at work. How was the 65% rate determined? And was TechMeme's 16.5% rate compared to any other sites?

If that's all explained in your article, then I'll just read it later :)

<comment><USER15> Thanks to jokermatt999 for the cut-and-paste.

Yes, later in that thread there's data from Google and Bing -- both in the 45-50% range.

EDIT: Also, here's the link to the Susan Herring et. al. paper I mentioned "Women and Children Last: The Discursive Construction of Weblogs" <http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/women_and_children.html>

<comment><USER20> Wait, 65% of the stories you linked to were written by women, while only 45%-50% of stories at large were written by women? Have you tried to examine the roots of your gender bias?

<comment><USER15> You've misunderstood.

There were 47 stories. 31 (65%) were by women.

TechMeme highlighted 6. 1 was by women, 16%.

Google's front page had 4/9 women. (44%) Bing's front page had 5/10. (50%)

<comment><USER21> If I'm reading joker's summary of your argument correctly, you're saying that techmeme disproportionately covers blogs about tech news instead of blogs people write about their own lives or about generalized, uncontroversial knowledge; which makes it biased against women?

The biasing in this case seems almost an epiphenomenon; TC tries to focus on certain views of certain subjects and succeeds; whether those views are disproportionately written by men has little to do with anything.

<comment><USER15> You are not reading it correctly. I'm saying that there were 47 stories _on this topic_ , of which 31 were by women. Techmeme featured 6 stories on this topic, of which only 1 was by women. Whether or not a view was written by a man strongly is strongly correlated with whether or not Techmeme features it.

<comment><USER21> I didn't see you addressing the actual point I raised, which was that Techmeme looks for certain topics, covered from a certain stance. Just like Encyclopaedia Britannica demands articles inhabiting the Classic Stance[1], Techmeme demands its own stance.

But saying this is a gender problem is like saying that because doctors are more likely male than nurses are, and get paid more than nurses, we should have fewer doctors and more nurses.

[1] <http://classicprose.com/csx.html>

<comment><USER15> The data shows that Techmeme's choices of topics and perspectives result in an overwhelming majority of stories by guys even in situations when more women than men are writing about it. Why don't you see that as a gender bias?

I don't know the data on Britannica authors. If there are more guys then women, then there's gender bias, and Classic Stance may or may not be a contributor. But in any case, I don't see what that has to do with Techmeme situation. Ditto with whether or not there's gender bias in the medical profession.

<comment><USER19> I understood it exactly as khafra did. I suppose we are confused about this line (which khafra was referring to):

 _TechMeme's technology is a natural for filter blogs, so it's unsurprising that this leads to underrepresentation of women and youth._

This quote makes it sound like women and children write more personal and knowledge stuff, which TechMeme naturally overlooks. Further, it straight up says that this tendency is "unsurprising".

So we are wondering what this has to do with gender bias or why it's surprising that a technology would miss things that it is designed to miss.

But you said he was not reading the summary correctly, so obviously something is not clear here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I don't visit TM, mainly because I follow a large swathe of tech publications on Twitter, and that's how I get my breaking tech stories - so have no real need for aggregation on stories I've already read.

Whereas I've found HN to be much more useful for the smaller, less known publications, personal blogs and company articles which I wouldn't pick up on with my traditional web browsing method.

</comment><comment><USER23> I've never actually been to techmeme, so I went there. That's one ugly website.

This should be taken as constructive criticism: if the first thing that pops into a new user's head is "wow, that's ugly", it's probably time for a redesign.

</comment><comment><USER24> I didn't notice a lack of diversity in Techmeme. I consider the site to be very useful, and while they push the big companies stories above the fold, there are still a lot of interesting links to other news or opinions.

<comment><USER25> Yes, but they often cover minutia to death. I unsubscribed when I got 4 stories about rumors of a white iPhone in my feed reader.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The greatest difference b/w HN and Techmeme? It is the great quality of conversation between all you intelligent people out here.

What does Techmeme have? Just some Tweets?

</comment><comment><USER27> Flagged linkbait.</comment>


Difference Between Fault Tolerance, High Availability, Disaster Recovery (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://www.pbenson.net/2014/02/the-difference-between-fault-tolerance-high-availability-disaster-recovery <comment><USER2> When I was working in this area during relatively early days, the difference was sometimes expressed this way:

* Fault tolerance: near-infinite MTBF

* High availability: near-zero MTTR

With HA there _is_ a blip. It might not be visible to an application because of retries, but it is visible outside of the HA system/component to some degree.

Special bonus thought: as a guide to designing or implementing an HA/FT system, I always found it helpful to think in terms of what happens to system reliability as size increases. In a traditional system, system reliability goes down because of dependencies between nodes/components. In some systems this degradation is even worse than you'd think because it's tied to the number of connections - O(n^2) rather than O(n). In an HA system, system reliability should go _up_ because of nodes being able to cover for each other.

The key question was always: if X fails, what other part of the system can make up for (not just survive) it? If it's a whole node, what other node(s) can take its workload? If it's a disk, where is another copy of the data? If it's a network, how else can nodes communicate or at least synchronize? That last was interesting but because it led to things like serial lines or pinging through shared disks as a last-resort way to convey cluster state. Fun times.

<comment><USER3> MTBF: Mean time between failures

MTTR: Mean time to repair

<comment><USER4> I've only heard "mean time to _recovery_ " in the context of sofware, though Wikipedia does imply "mean time to repair" is also valid for software.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like these analogies a lot. I regularly have to explain to my clients the difference between the backup system, the disaster recovery system, and the file server replication system. None of them is the same as any other, and each component has different levels of redundancy going down the stack (RAID, HA for the virtual machine, shared storage between hosts, etc) and it's no easy task to explain that yes, while component X is redundant, it does not meet the definition of "highly available" or "backed up." So I appreciate any explanation like this article that attempts to simplify and illustrate any of these definitions.

</comment><comment><USER6> In that plane analogy, assuming the plane's design load capacity requires all 4 engines to be fully functioning, a fully loaded plane suffering a failure of 1 out of 4 engines is dealing with a "degradation scenario".

It will have to jettison some amount of load (proportional to loss of one engine) to save the rest of the load or it risks losing the entire plane.

This is a fault-tolerant system with degradation possibilities.

If this degradation possibility isn't acceptable, then the plane's design load has to be reduced. Plane will carry only so much load that can be safely flown with minimum surviving engines (say, 3 out of 4, or 2 out of 4 or even 1 out of 4).

When the plane is operating in this configuration with redundant online engines, there are interesting challenges w.r.t efficiency of the engines. These 4 engines will now have to be at their best efficiency when loaded only 2/3 or 1/2 or 1/4 of their load capacity. Because that is expected to be their normal operating condition. And they should be able to operate under higher load condition (which may not be efficient, and stressful) for a sustained duration that is desired for the plane to land safely.

Obviously, the plane that has to operate with spare engine capacity is more expensive. It is worth deploying such a solution only if the cargo being carried is more expensive even when adjusted by the probability of occurrence of this scenario.

These exact same trade-off scenarios exist for design of distributed software systems that have to tolerate machine component failures.</comment>


Ask HN: How soon before relocating should I send off job applications? - <AUTHOR>

I'm relocating to Toronto in July and already have written cover letters for jobs I'm interested in (web development jobs, mostly at agencies).  I feel like two months is a bit of a stretch and I could be forgotten or ignored.  However, I would like to have a job lined up as quickly as possible once I get there.  Are there any standards for this when it comes to tech jobs? <comment><USER2> Suggest changing your approach. Proactively reach out to the top agencies in the market. Target the Senior Executive or Manager that you can help. Engage them in a peer-level conversation, "I'm coming to Toronto, I was interested in learning more about you, let's talk."</comment>


What It Was Like to Report on Feminism for Playboy in 1969 - <AUTHOR> https://pictorial.jezebel.com/up-against-the-centerfold-what-it-was-like-to-report-o-1762716355 <comment><USER2> Why is this here?</comment>


Ask HN: What's your personal victory theme? - <AUTHOR>

For the milestone of my life (which is to realize my big project), I will play this theme in my head: New World - Judge Dredd OST (Alan Silvestri) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXI1Vrn7uvc#t=8m30s<p>This is the movie (together with Robocop 3, my default Robocop) I think most influenced me as a kid. <comment><USER2> I'm going with something from Star Wars:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4SCSGRVAQE>

</comment><comment><USER3> Brahms hungarian dances <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_Dances_(Brahms)>

(now you can hear it in HTML 5!)

</comment><comment><USER4> "Gonna Fly Now" , from Rocky.

<comment><USER5> Upvoted. Theme always gets me pumped up.</comment></comment>