"If the news is that important, it will find me" - <AUTHOR> http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2008/03/27/if-the-news-is-important-it-will-find-me/

<comment><USER2> I thought this was going to be a post about how reading news sites is a waste of time.

That said, I'm not sure this is the best viewpoint to have. It fails when everyone holds this viewpoint, because if everyone expects the news to find him, there will be no news. Someone has to actually be out there seeing what is going on and reporting on it.

Another problem is that if you've ever played telephone (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers>), you know how information can get distorted as it gets passed along. A non-trivial issue I've seen in this US election is that non-news-seeking individuals hear from someone that Obama is Muslim (never mind that they also have incorrect notions of what being a Muslim means based on various pieces of "information" that has "found them"), and that affects their decision (note that I'm not actually an Obama supporter).

In other words, I think the post promotes something that may turn out to be a dangerous practice which could eventually result in an echo chamber of news which fails to reflect many of the things that are actually happening. It takes true investigative reporting to uncover real conspiracies and dangerous secrets. Would anyone who believes, "If the news is that important, it will find me," be willing to do that?

<comment><USER3> I wouldn't call your first point a problem. There are plenty of voracious newshounds out there that are collectively scraping all available news sites clean and originating these link posts and chain emails. That's why the phenomenon exists.

As for the echo chamber, this problem is nothing new. Traditional media copy ideas from each other with less self-examination than the blogosphere, which is unabashedly divided into two camps carefully scrutinizing each other for any inaccuracy to pounce on, and they (Reuters and AP especially) frequently screw up stories that are outside the core competencies of the vast majority of journalists, like science.

It's the responsibility of Obama and his supporters to dispel misconceptions about him, as it ever was, and I'm sure he and they know full well how to do it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wish, but in reality, I don't know many people with the same interests as me. I am sure that if anything important to anyone would happen, I would probably learn about it (like World War 3 starting or something), but other than that?

Example off the top of my head: I don't think anybody I know would have told me about the Netflix Challenge yet.

<comment><USER5> Are you working on the Netflix Challenge? If not, why is it actually important that you know about it?

After I started asking myself questions like that, the amount of news I "needed" on a daily basis significantly decreased.

<comment><USER4> Toying around with it - certainly not expecting to win any money. Sure, "need" can be defined in all sorts of ways, not only with respect to news. Perhaps it would be most efficient to live like a reclusive monk?

<comment><USER5> Well, I found that I was spending hours a day on reddit, slashdot, and N.YC before I realized that most of the "news" I was getting had no direct or indirect impact on my life. Now, I mostly just read the headlines on the other sites. This is the only one that I often read articles on, much less comment about.

It was a huge time sink for me to be concerned about things that don't matter. :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A review of SARS-CoV-2 and the testis - <AUTHOR> https://www.rbmojournal.com/article/S1472-6483(20)30388-6/fulltext <comment><AUTHOR> Note for moderators. The original title was too long. I could not shorten it coherently, so I just cut off the intro. Here is the full title if you would like to add it:

Testicular pain as an unusual presentation of COVID-19: a brief review of SARS-CoV-2 and the testis</comment>


Inside the Network18 takeover - <AUTHOR> http://www.livemint.com/Companies/rqT2Oi8fwv4XVjJcHzlcVN/Inside-the-Network18-takeover.html

<comment><USER2> That is an interesting story, thank you. It reads like a television drama and could probably be turned into an engaging suspense movie. I sometimes wonder whether there should be more forced independence for media companies, but then I remember things like News Corp, which isn't exactly a shining star of journalistic integrity, and GE owning NBC (prior to the sale to Comcast), which afaik didn't ever run into any conflict of interest problems between the parent company and what hit the airwaves.

<comment><USER3> "And when the 12th largest company in the world controls the most awesome goddamn propaganda force in the whole godless world, who knows what shit will be peddled for truth on this network?"

'Howard Beale' from Network(1976).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Debt is the key in the story. You cannot spend the money if you don't have it.

<comment><USER5> Unless you issue it.

<comment><USER6> And back that business model up with an army.

<comment><USER5> If I don't pay my taxes, then it's not the army I'm going to be fearing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For those of us who are not familiar with the Indian political and business background of this story and the characters, can someone summarize?

Some parts translate pretty clearly to a naive reader - high-growth startup accrues too much debt in acquisitions and expansion, some of the new ventures lose money, takes on a high-profile investor and restructures to stabilize, investor takes over the company and kicks out the founder. Others are less so - references to Reliance's place in the political sphere, something about gas prices(?) which I presume Reliance has something to do with, a new political movement that is apparently supported by some of the people in the story but not others.

<comment><USER8> A lot happened in India around the recently concluded elections. This resulted in the loss of the ruling party, Congress, It lost so bad it could not form an opposition in the house. The winner, BJP, won with unprecedented margin (at least in the last few decades)

One of the major reason for the downfall was growing discontent, anger among the people against corruption, crime and inflation etc.

A new political party which calls itself, Aam Admi(Common Man)Party, started by Arvind Kejriwal, emerged by raising its voice against corruption. Multi- billion dollar scams were exposed frequently.

The party projected itself as anti-corruption and targeted Congress, and several businesses. It raised fund through people and media propagated their message. It continued to expose and openly question government expenses. They targeted Reliance, the largest business conglomerate, several times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> One would tend to question certain events when lots of people that mint has spoken to, do not want to be named.

<comment><USER10> When the boss in question is Ambani, one would understand why nobody wants to be identified.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> First it mentions that Reliance did not want board members to quit. But then everyone quits!

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't think this is the right forum to post it (though I agree that the article raises some very pertinent questions)

<comment><AUTHOR> why is it not for this forum ?

<comment><USER12> Because it ultimately is a story of a corporate takeover. It is not as if they didn't had the control earlier. Reliance was a significant stakeholder of the company earlier too.

<comment><AUTHOR> So again. Why is it not a story here? Either you did not read the article or you did not understand the inner currents, politics and business strategies involved. Read again.

<comment><USER12> Seriously? Posting this story in isolation presents an image that a downfall of media has begun, when in reality it is just a change of face.

I have read the story, and I very well understand the movement under the surface.

A comprehensive article about the continuous degradation on electronic media would have been suitable as it would have provided a complete image, instead of this, where it gives a peephole view to a very large problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "Never let your inferiors do you a favor. It'll be extremely costly." \--Mencken

</comment><comment><USER14> Rajeep Sardesai standing by the spirit of journalism? That's a laugh.</comment>


What We Know The X-37B Was Up To During Its 780 Days In Space - <AUTHOR> https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/30699/here-what-we-know-the-shadowy-x-37b-was-up-to-during-its-record-720-days-in-space <comment><USER2> > We also know that the previous OTV-4 mission involved the test of Aerojet > Rocketdyne's XR-5A Hall-effect thruster, a type of electric propulsion > system that offers greater efficiency for satellites and spacecraft > maneuvering in orbit. This was officially in support of the Advanced > Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) satellite program, but the technology could > be valuable for other space-based systems, as you can read about more here. > In August 2018, during OTV-5, the X-37B modified its orbit using an > unspecified onboard propulsion system.

If I had to guess, they're experimenting with novel, relatively untested ion and hall effect type thruster systems that have very low thrust in newtons or kilonewtons, but very high specific impulse. Before putting things like that on billion dollar geostationary military communications satellites (or LEO/MEO radar imaging satellites, or billion dollar NRO satellites), they'd want to qualify them in space.

Maybe the spaceplane design that can return a used thruster was a happy coincidence between two different programs, allowing them to do a destructive teardown on a thruster that's been used for two years, to better determine its possible failure modes.

Things in the same general category as this, but with new and radical designs.

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

Extremely high specific impulse thrusters can result in satellites with much longer operating lives, for the same weight (in kilograms) of pressurized fuel tank storage, and same volume. Either from LEO things that can accelerate themselves periodically to maintain orbit, counteracting the effects of drag, or for geostationary satellites, keeping position longer than a nominal 12-15 year life span.

<comment><USER3> I bet somewhere on this planet there is now emprical evidence to the efficacy or lack thereof of emdrive and/or other reactionless thruster designs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It has to be an extremely high value mission because it means they were unable to use the craft for any additional launches during the 780 days.

<comment><USER3> Good point. I wonder if this partially challenges the theory that the X-37B has satellite recovery in its repertoire.

<comment><USER5> All this mission shows is that there was something the US Air Force wanted to do that warranted two years of flight time ahead of any other project, even recovering or stealing a satellite.

<comment><USER6> Have people stolen satellites from orbit?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It would be funny if its sole purpose was just trolling competing defense agencies around the world into endlessly speculating about its capabilities when in fact it would just turn around and around and around.</comment>


GlassPhone - <AUTHOR> http://tilmanhornig.info/projects/507.html <comment><USER2> Ummm.. can someone please explain share I just saw? There's no description about what this is. Atleast on mobile.

<comment><USER3> This looks to be an art piece about smart phones.

It seems to be the standard criticism of smart phones today; but it's in pretentious art form.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Reminds me of the personal devices in The Expanse, except without the odd side modules.

</comment><comment><USER5> tl;dr a series of satirical photos of people holding a piece of glass milled in the shape of a conventional, contemporary cellphone. For a longer video equivalent, see motherboard's youtube video review of a display phone [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CurrggRdaUY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CurrggRdaUY)

In these situations, I'm reminded of Bret Victor's criticism of planar interaction [http://worrydream.com/#!/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionD...](http://worrydream.com/#!/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesign) . Unfortunately, until we are closer to programmable matter or an economic powerglove [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAeViKt45eA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAeViKt45eA) I doubt we will escape the local maxima of variety we can offer via a touchscreen

</comment><comment><USER6> Friendly warning: NSFW.

If your company cares about that sort of thing, maybe open this at home.

<comment><USER7> Not safe for what?

Sure there is part of a painting of a naked lady, but is it art?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleeping_Venus_(Giorgione)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleeping_Venus_\(Giorgione\))

Then there is a man's nipple plus, shock/horror, some people smoking. I imagine it is the latter that'll be horrifying you.

If I was tyrant-employer I would be sacking people for obsessively looking at their phones all day, rather than inadvertently looking at a nipple or two.

<comment><USER8> It's doubtful that anyone would fire an employee looking at fine art. The more realistic issue is that some coworker might be walking by and catch a 0.5 second glimpse, think they saw something that they didn't, maybe turn it into a bigger thing or at least start a conversation or two about it, and months later maybe a boss is less inclined to give a big raise or promotion, because there's a sliver of a worry that this person might be problematic.

It's never as black-and-white as "boss walks by and fires person looking at art."</comment></comment></comment>


NetBSD: a new version of the CDDL dtrace and ZFS code - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/NetBSD/src/commit/bae129c5e36fe3b2ded1e036fc2f6f12430f55e0 <comment><USER2> This makes NetBSD the 6th OpenZFS platform, after Illumos, FreeBSD, Linux, Mac OS X and OSv. The 7th if you include the under development Windows port:

[https://github.com/openzfsonwindows/ZFSin](https://github.com/openzfsonwindows/ZFSin)

<comment><USER3> This is an update, ZFS was first included in NetBSD in 2009.

<comment><USER4> But has never been stable. The root device vops look-up would cause kernel panics. Never worked out why. There has been some new efforts to make it useable though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >this version is based on FreeBSD svn r315983"

For anyone interested, I believe these are the relevant CDDL dtrace/zfs components from that revision of FreeBSD, from early 2017: [https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/sys/cddl/?pathrev=31598...](https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/sys/cddl/?pathrev=315983)

</comment><comment><USER6> Nice! Good job Netbsd!</comment>


Zen room for Vim: Focsuing only on the essential - <AUTHOR> http://amix.dk/blog/post/19744

<comment><USER2> While I credit HN for accuracy in representing Amir's title, fixing that annoying typo would be a Good Thing.

<comment><USER3> It is also mistyped in the quoted link on the github's readme page at [https://github.com/amix/vim-zenroom](https://github.com/amix/vim-zenroom), which has another letter inversion:

 _Pelase read more here zenroom for Vim: Focsuing only on the essential._

I suspect dyslexia is at work here, not simply a typo... :)

<comment><USER4> No dyslexia :-), it was simply a copy and paste gone wrong and I wrote that in a hurry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Reminds me of LiteDFM: [https://github.com/bilalq/lite- dfm](https://github.com/bilalq/lite-dfm)

I've been using it for a while now, love it.

<comment><USER6> Hey! I'm the author of LiteDFM, and I'm glad to hear you like it.

There are actually quite a few plugins that have sprung up to bring similar functionality to Vim. From what I have seen, there are two main approaches:

* Surrounding your window with hidden scratch windows to introduce "margins" around your working area

* Making use of natural offsetting mechanisms such as hidden line number columns and foldcolumns to offset text from the left.

The former gives proper centering, but typically makes vsplits troublesome. The latter (which is the approach I took), allows for a better out-of-the-box experience with vsplits (at the expense of perfect centering). I often work with a file open with LiteDFM active and the TagBar window open on the right.

The main reason I wrote my own plugin was out of frustration with most existing implementations. They usually didn't play nice with a vimrc that looked any different from the plugin author's. I had conflicts with colorschemes, plugins, etc...

My current workflow is to use LiteDFM when reading/editing code, and to use Goyo.vim ([https://github.com/junegunn/goyo.vim](https://github.com/junegunn/goyo.vim)) when working with markdown files. It's a plugin that uses the scratch window padding approach, but it's the only one I've tried that doesn't have compatibility issues with other plugins.

I am interested in seeing how ZenRoom works out. I'll give it a try and see.

<comment><USER7> Thank you for LiteDFM :)

I just tried out the LiteDFM / Goyo combo and it is just what I was after. Worked out of the box for me and my mature vimrc.

<comment><USER6> Happy to hear it works well for you! I tried to make it as respectful as possible towards a user's vimrc settings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am fine with Vim in full screen mode through iTerm - The difference seems to be bigger margins, but I don't see much benefit in this.

<comment><USER9> my thought exactly, why not just buy a smaller screen and get on with code?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have just published [https://github.com/amix/vim- zenroom2](https://github.com/amix/vim-zenroom2) \- - it's based on goyo.vim and seems to work better. Thanks bilalq for the tip :-)

<comment><USER6> Looks pretty cool! Seems to do a lot more for GUI Vim than terminal Vim right now though. It would be cool to see some cterm color values added to it.

I also love how goyo takes callbacks. It really makes interoperation a lot more elegant.

<comment><USER4> The terminal isn't that well supported right now. I only use the terminal version on servers or when editing configs. Not when writing code/documentation.

Would love if someone improved this ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I also wrote a very basic one of these as a Vundle: [https://github.com/jamestomasino/vim- writeroom](https://github.com/jamestomasino/vim-writeroom)

</comment><comment><USER11> I like to cut noise out from my code, but I've never understood "distraction free" modes in code editors.

If you're trying to be productive, you should be regularly checking the results of your code changes (i.e. watching test results in a terminal or a browser window); full-screen modes like this only seem to make it more jarring when I switch out of them...

<comment><USER6> The real utility of such modes comes when you're trying to read code. At such moments, you want to get rid of all the things that would normally be of great use. Things like line numbers, status bars, gitgutters, etc...

Aside from reading code, such modes are also great for working with markdown files. With them, you really only care about content.

The forcing fullscreen thing is definitely not for everyone though, I agree. I think such plugins would do well to have fullscreening be a configurable behavior. Even my own distraction-free plugin is guilty of forcing fullscreen onto GUI Vim users (I never really notice, since I myself use terminal vim).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I might give this a go, but I've never had great success with distraction-free modes. I tend to work better with as much information as possible - tmux, with vim (multiple tabs) and repl panes, as well as browser open for docs or seeing output if working on a web project. Generally I'll also use something like python-mode and have my code get shoved through a bunch of linters on save.

<comment><USER2> The ability to toggle quickly between modes can be useful.

I've been doing more writing of late, and find I'm switching terminal clients (from rxvt to either the GNOME or XFCE terminals) for longer edit sessions -- the ability to scale up font sizes is helpful, as is the full-screen zoom of the more recent terminals. Centering text would be icing on the cake.

Switching back to windowed mode is just an F11 key away for when I need to reference notes or style/syntax guides (mostly coding in LaTeX).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Not for me. I usually have 3-4 vim tabs open at the same time. I don't think I need zen, I need a way to see more on the screen!

<comment><USER14> Try tmux. You'll likely be happier with panes and without tabs. Plus you can focus on a single pane when you want some zen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Can you use relativenumber with this, which is required for efficient vim use?

<comment><USER16> I tried 'relativenumber' for a few days. I threw it away as too annoying. Considering the topic here I find it especially amusing that 'rnu' should come up—this is all about _focus_ , and it was the distraction that it was that I hated about 'rnu'.

If you were looking at relative line numbers and typing 8j, you can just as well look at line numbers and type 372gg when you have 'nu' set.

<comment><USER17> The key to rnu is having a toggle bound. Once I had that it never annoyed because 90% of the time I want an absolute number I just jump to it. For the rest of the times I just toggle.

<comment><USER16> I tried that too. Far too annoying, when you could just use 372gg.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Breaches of Unsecured Protected Health Information - <AUTHOR> https://ocrportal.hhs.gov/ocr/breach/breach_report.jsf <comment><USER2> Electronic health records have been way oversold. Expecting every little medical office to have industrial-grade data protection makes them far more of a liability than they are worth.

At best mostly subjective observations, at worst full of outright errors, they're largely useless from a health care perspective let alone for research purposes.

<comment><USER3> In my (relatively limited) experience, most small medical offices pay for cloud-based EHRs on a subscription basis for this exact reason. Have you observed differently?

With regards to the usefulness of medical records, I don't know enough on the topic to address that point.

<comment><USER4> > In my (relatively limited) experience, most small medical offices pay for > cloud-based EHRs on a subscription basis for this exact reason

That mostly increases the size of the bucket without much in terms of guarantees of the maintainers of that bucket getting it right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Since you're looking for ugly lists

FDA disbarred investigators

[https://www.fda.gov/ICECI/EnforcementActions/FDADebarmentLis...](https://www.fda.gov/ICECI/EnforcementActions/FDADebarmentList/default.htm)

FDA compliance proceedings

[https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/SDA/sdNavigation.cfm?...](https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/SDA/sdNavigation.cfm?sd=clinicalinvestigatorsdisqualificationproceedings&previewMode=true&displayAll=true)

</comment><comment><USER6> There's some kind of database called MIB that sells all your medical information like a credit report. I haven't figured out how to opt out of it or where exactly they get the data so I can opt out of it before they even send it. It's some kind of horrific atrocity. Please somebody expose this to everyone: [https://www.mib.com/request_your_record.html](https://www.mib.com/request_your_record.html)

<comment><USER7> >a member company cannot search MIB or report information to MIB without the applicant's knowledge and authorization.

Sounds like you consented...

<comment><USER8> Maybe. It's up to the member company to obtain the consent and report as such to MIB.

I just started shopping for term life insurance recently and have an application that was emailed to me by a local agent. It looks very much like this one ([http://www.adkissoninsurance.com/forms/grangelifeapp.pdf](http://www.adkissoninsurance.com/forms/grangelifeapp.pdf)), EXCEPT someone has removed the Notice of Information Practices at the top

Page 5 contains the authorization details.

Here's what page 5 looks like on my application - [https://imgur.com/a/zk9ZQ](https://imgur.com/a/zk9ZQ) (also Grange)

This is from a top tier life insurance provider, who knows what kind of shenanigans are going on out in the wild.

Edit: Just sent an email to my agent asking for a copy of that Notice of Information Practices doc, we'll see what happens lol.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder how many of these are encrypted systems. I see a lot of "theft" and "loss" on that list. I know if I were to lose a system that had PHI on it I would be required to report the breach even if the system had full disk encryption. I'd bet many or most of these are similar.

<comment><USER10> > _if I were to lose a system that had PHI on it I would be required to report > the breach even if the system had full disk encryption_

According to the Texas Medical Association[0],

> there are only two reasons a lost device may not have to be reported as a > breach under the HIPAA Breach Notification Rule: (1) no PHI was on the > device, or (2) the PHI is unusable - encrypted with FIPS 140-2 encryption

[0] [https://www.texmed.org/HIPAALostLaptop/](https://www.texmed.org/HIPAALostLaptop/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > As required by section 13402(e)(4) of the HITECH Act, the Secretary must > post a list of breaches of unsecured protected health information affecting > 500 or more individuals.

Well, I'm glad this random webpage is broadcasted into the internet and therefore everyone is properly informed about these breaches.

This is the same as Google providing that page somewhere deep in the account settings where you can view what data they have on you. It's beneficial for them to provide this, because 99.99% of users will never find it anyways. And those that are concerned can be calmed down by it.

</comment><comment><USER12> I care less about health info privacy than identity. When I was a kid, hospital admissions were published in the daily paper. Nobody thought much of it.

The number of people interested in your health is tiny. The number of people interested in your money, and motivated to try to take it from you, is much higher.

<comment><USER13> Enjoy: Your medical record is worth more to hackers than your credit card

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cybersecurity- hospitals/y...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cybersecurity- hospitals/your-medical-record-is-worth-more-to-hackers-than-your-credit-card- idUSKCN0HJ21I20140924)

<comment><USER12> > names, birth dates, policy numbers, diagnosis codes and billing information

In other words, identity information.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hint: Don't press "Archive" or you wont't be able to sleep at night. Crazy how many breaches have occurred.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it's interesting that while there are a ton of breaches, we only know about them because HHS requires breach reporting when it affects over 500 patients. How often is this happening in other industries where such regulations don't exist?

<comment><USER5> This is the thing. HIPAA is really a gold standard in data security legislation. As terrible as it is (e.g. the fax machine loophole, which is surely put there for lawyers), at least there's something punitive. And other things can be tied to it: grants, FDA can disbar them from collaborating in drug development, etc.

Imagine breach notifications for a company like Facebook. FCC could disbar you from transmitting data over mobile networks.

<comment><USER15> In California that's been the law for over a decade. Arguably, California's breach disclosure law is the reason we know about the vast majority of large breaches we hear about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The NYS Office of Mental Health appears to have been breached.

</comment><comment><USER17> HIPAA should burn these companies/organizations. Should.

<comment><USER5> And then what? Where does the population go for care? Better to have a track record on long-standing organizations that play whack-a-mole.

<comment><USER17> A doubt the penalties for violating HIPPA are going to put any of these out of business. I said 'burn', not 'destroy'.

<comment><USER18> > _HIPPA_

HIPAA</comment></comment></comment></comment>


If php were british: - <AUTHOR> http://www.addedbytes.com/blog/if-php-were-british/?foolhn

<comment><AUTHOR> My favorite part:

would_you_mind { // Code here } actually_i_do_mind (Exception £e) { // Politely move on cheerio('Message'); }

Clearly this is not a programming language for canadians... (they are too kind to throw this kind of an exception)</comment>


7 core principles from Pixar - <AUTHOR> http://www.creativityincbook.com/7-core-principles/

<comment><USER2> Thanks for posting this. I am a big fan of Ed Catmull's ideas about running a creative company, but didn't know there was a book in the works.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's an ugly website but this is the best book about running creative teams/companies I've read in many, many years.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's great to hear. I just started reading it last night and really like it so far.</comment></comment>


Hiring Software Engineers - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@kwindla/hiring-software-engineers-98498cf6f2a#.gxpe5vinr <comment><USER2> "Paying for travel is a lot cheaper than paying a recruiter to find you candidates. And, while I'm the biggest believer in the value of video conferencing that you're ever likely to find, there's no substitute for an all-day, in person, interaction with everyone on your team."

I was interviewing at an SV company recently and was told I would be flown in for the final interview. Instead, when the final interview arrived they arranged a 3 hour Skype interview and had me do coding challenges inside Google Docs. It was the worst interview I've ever had to do, I couldn't get any sense of the office environment, and trying to write up a piece of code in Google Docs was just plain terrible.

</comment><comment><USER3> FYI: this is a dup of the also-recently-posted: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11551187](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11551187)

</comment><comment><USER4> At some companies, divulging performance or personal issues about an ex- employee could land you in a lot of trouble. Be sure you're clear to talk about previous employees freely.

If a company goes around and bad-mouths every employee that leaves the organization it could potentially have legal consequences.</comment>


I is="the walrus" - <AUTHOR> https://bkardell.com/blog/TheWalrus.html <comment><USER2> Whew, I found this piece to be quite confusing to read, requiring lots of knowledge of discussions and unrelated trivia that I hadn't come across before. Maybe the author should try to explain his examples a bit more in detail for the rest of us next time.

<comment><USER3> Yes, you need to know what is _is_. I didn't but found the second last explanation here helpful: [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27434431/what- is-html-is...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27434431/what-is-html-is- attribute)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As always, depending on what the definition of "is" is.

</comment><comment><USER5> Title needs to be reworked please.

</comment><comment><USER6> The title is offensive. Flagged.

<comment><USER7> Why? English is not my first language, I only got the Beatles reference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I criticized the reversal on "is" just yesterday, so that was awkward [1]. Since this is on the internet, I must defend my position. I believe it is a major blow to the usefulness of Custom Elements simply because developers will not follow the advice and do this:

      <x-radio>
        <input type="radio"/>
      </x-radio>

They will instead dump that nested HTML structure into the Shadow DOM and present a single element, because that is how they always imagined it and that is how it works in other "taglib" implementations.

      <x-radio/>

This is bad for usability and accessibility and interoperability and so on, but it is really their problem. The "is" attribute would come in handy, of course, if it was still on the drawing board.

      <input type="radio" is="x-radio">

Well, it is of course also the users problem, since they are the first to notice usability problems. Our developers have for example still not fixed our links:

      Go to the front page

But anyways: The real problem comes when they realize that this approach is problematic and go down the "composition" road as suggested in the article, because it is not possible to reason about DOM structure in modern day frameworks where the Custom Element is eventually bound to be used; and that is both the premise and the promise of Web Components, that they "compose" well with other frameworks. In order for the `x-radio` implementation to get an angle on the `input` element, either to style it or validate it, it must make use of overengineering to navigate the quantum soup of DOM updates that "incremental rendering" and suspect techniques have stirred up.

1\. Find it via `querySelector` when the Custom Element is attached, to see if the framework has rendered it already, and

2\. Setup a MutationObserver to anticipate that it might be added later and/or replaced spontanously at any point in time

One should of course never assign a reference `this._input` to the input, since there is no guarantee that it still exists (on the page) when you need it. Of course, the component author doesn't know about this, since it doesn't pose the same problem when you "use the platform" and don't rely on frameworks. But eventually he will learn that the only way to keep your component safe is to render it in the Shadow DOM, and that is indeed why it exist, but now we are back where we started. Form elements really don't work in the Shadow DOM (`document.activeElement` is always null, for example, so someone is bound to steal your focus) and you will eventually begin to remember that this was never a problem React components or Angular directives, which even support the same syntax:

      <x-radio>
        <input type="radio"/>
      </x-radio>

They even support the "is" syntax!

      <input type="radio" x-radio/>

In fact, with only one single, top level MutationObserver plus one initial TreeWalker I can implement ad-hoc support for the "is" syntax to style and validate the input as soon as it is found on the page, either declaratively in the markup or when React decides to inject it. I would not be using Custom Elements, but it will work nonetheless without any of these theoretical problems or paradoxes, or I can use something like Sentinel.js to implement it [2]. And that is really a shame, because I would like to use Custom Elements and I am otherwise usually found in the supporting role for this specification.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15797228#15798459](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15797228#15798459)

[2] [https://www.npmjs.com/package/sentinel- js](https://www.npmjs.com/package/sentinel-js)

</comment><comment><USER6> The title is nonsensical.

<comment><USER9> Well, yes, it is. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_the_Walrus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_the_Walrus)

<comment><USER6> I get the reference. It simply has no relevance to the topic, and gives people no reason to read the piece.

In fact, it actively detracts from the piece, by forcing people to focus on _it_ instead of the supposed content.

It's like clickbait, only less successful.

<comment><USER10> No relevance to the topic? The title is: `<i is="the walrus">`, the topic is the usage and implementation of the `is=""` HTML attribute which is mentioned in the second sentence of the article. The lede isn't exactly buried

<comment><USER6> No, the title is 'I is="the walrus"', which lacks the angle brackets and, therefore, any hint it has anything to do with HTML.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


EPA Science Panel Considering Guidelines That Upend Basic Air Pollution Science - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2019/03/28/707166015/epa-science-panel-considering-guidelines-that-upend-basic-air-pollution-science <comment><USER2> Just a reminder example on why air pollution matters -- "Air pollution causes huge reduction in intelligence" \--[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/aug/27/air- poll...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/aug/27/air-pollution- causes-huge-reduction-in-intelligence-study-reveals)

Here's a google-scholar search if you really want to dive deep- [https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C33&q=air...](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C33&q=air+pollution+iq+china&btnG=)

Read some of THOSE articles and you'll encounter interesting tidbits like "The evidence was also sufficient for the association between pre- or postnatal exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and autism spectrum disorder, and limited evidence was encountered between nitrogen oxides and autism spectrum disorder."

</comment><comment><USER3> Seems like the simple solution would be to fill the homes and offices of the 7 advisory members with the level of particulate contamination they feel is safe. Let them eat their own dog food.

It's easy to declare something safe that _others_ are exposed to when your own wealth and position means you and your family won't face it.

</comment><comment><USER4> _At a public meeting Thursday that ran nearly two hours long, multiple members of that committee, including Chair Tony Cox and Steven Packham of the Utah Division of Air Quality, said they do not agree that breathing air polluted with soot can lead to an early death._

I wonder if they smoke, and overall how healthy they are...

<comment><USER5> I wonder who's lining their pockets

<comment><USER6> It may not even be money. There are a lot of ideologues out there who will do the job for free.

<comment><USER7> I think it is important to remember that elected representatives are analogous to legal counsel—- they are duty bound to do everything they can to advocate for the wishes of their clients or constituents. The constituents who elect public servants do not make their decisions lightly (perhaps the economy of a certain district would benefit from more liberalized industrial emission regulations). It doesn't matter if the public servants believe what they say, they know they have to advocate these policies to best serve their constituents.

<comment><USER6> The question is who they view as their constituents. Often it's not the voters but only a very small subset. In modern Washington politics they will also put the priorities of their party above the voters.

<comment><USER7> Public servants (in the USA, regardless of party) who do not have the support of a majority their (voting) constituents seldom keep their jobs past the next election.

<comment><USER6> You still can misinform the majority of the constituents to stay in line with the interests of the small number of the people you really listen to. I would argue this is happening with health care, tax cuts and a lot of subsidies.

<comment><USER8> That's pretty much all politics, for the history of mankind.

Nothing new there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> On the one hand, I want strong air pollution control policies. Death or no, I don't like to see smog in this SLC valley.

On the other hand, I don't want an distorted views on evidence. We know what we know and if we aren't sure, we should say so. It's not good to misinterpret data no matter how righteous your goals are.

<comment><USER10> Particulate inhalation is currently one of the leading causes of death of women in third world countries (due to smoke from cooking).

Also, there was this thing called black lung disease the UK had a problem with during the industrial revolution...

There has been scientific consensus on this for centuries, if not millenia.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Who's paying Cox? I can almost taste the tinge of corporate interest.

<comment><USER12> Isn't the federal government paying him enough these days?

<comment><USER13> Step 1: Be a shill for large corporate interests. Step 2: Be appointed to a powerful government oversight board and spew FUD intended limit oversight of large corporate interests. Step 3: (Profit) Return to industry after your stint in government to an even larger payday for services rendered.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I find this a bit surprising.

Is anyone familiar with the literature on this, and able to point to a relevant review article?

Also, am I right in thinking that some of the diesel car emission concerns related to Nox, rather than particulate emissions?

<comment><USER15> They are raising FUD about the research. One of the guys has a PhD in medical psychology and appears to be a right wing nut. There is a nice quote in the article:

"It's kind of like the same issues that came up with tobacco denial of health effects or denial of climate change health effects," Frey says. "There's a very small community that have scientific credentials but are moving outside their area of expertise to try to raise doubt after doubt after doubt on issues where they really don't have the strongest competence."

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> A lot of the fake research recently uncovered at Duke University was related to studies of the effects of pollution, ozone, and particulates.

</comment><comment><USER17> It is clear that they don't want to know the inconvenient truth. Even a pendantic spinned "technically gains from reducing soot are overestimated because other unrelated causes would kill most before the other problems would even develop".

It would be far more promising and interesting if say throughly trained athleted or the right rare gene combinations could autorepair lungs without medical intervention to ensure no lasting damage or significant cancer risk. Humans have lived in deserts for millenia so that would be a niche adaptive trait too even if not reproductively overwhelmingly relevant. Of course that would imvolve actual science.</comment>


Ask HN: Strategy to have programmer code crypto trading algo without stealing? - <AUTHOR> As the question states, I am seeking a clever way of having a programmer code my crypto trading algo without stealing it - perhaps dividing the project into 2-3 parts, done by different programmers, having those parts communicate and then execute trades? <comment><USER2> So what u wan't to do is the folowing: Have one guy do all the code for you, but demand that he sends u all the resulting source Code

Now take this Sourcecode to a Codereview (your have to pay that) at a Company that has a Reputation to lose. They wil tell u if the code is fine or backdored</comment>


Announcing dedicated servers for Browserling  - <AUTHOR> http://www.catonmat.net/blog/announcing-dedicated-servers-for-browserling/ It looks like the awesome service Browserling just got dedicated servers! From the post, "We're super excited to announce dedicated plans for Browserling. With a dedicated Browserling plan you get your own Windows server with all the browsers pre-installed, plus you can install any software that you want, any browser plugins you want, and do absolutely anything you wish with it as you also get full administrator rights to your server." <comment><USER2> This is great - now I can test all the browsers PLUS the plugins. The only problem - $250 a month! For that much cabbage, I can get a very powerful server or several VPS and test everything myself.

<comment><USER3> Well it's more oriented for people or corproations who don't really want to maintain another server or VPS themselves. We take care of that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Free is not a bad pricepoint for me to check if IE6 is rendering my page at all. For companies that need to check this sort of thing before launching, $250 doesn't sound too bad either. Nice work!</comment>


Free Data Science Books - <AUTHOR> http://www.learndatasci.com/free-books/ <comment><USER2> Although, there is no denying that this is a valuable resource but I have started to get turned off by a list of n books to learn something - they can be valuable but it is undeniable that they can also be overwhelming and perplex someone about how to get started. I believe technical books should be used to complement your knowledge of the field not to get started in it. For eg, "Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja" will be very valuable because I already have experience in JS and it will help me understand some of the caveats that I might have overlooked. The best way has always been to get start implement something regarding the subject and try to dive into everything you uncover.

A blog post submitted here mentioned the same sentiment [1] -

> I can't fully explain how immensely unmotivating it is to be given a huge > list of resources without any context. It's akin to a teacher handing you a > stack of textbooks and saying "read all of these". I struggled with this > approach when I was in school. If I had started learning data science this > way, I never would have kept going.

[1]: [https://www.dataquest.io/blog/how-to-actually-learn-data- sci...](https://www.dataquest.io/blog/how-to-actually-learn-data-science/)

<comment><USER3> Second the dataquest post. Information without structure can be overwhelming, and its important to know what the optimal ways to learn something are. Arguably this is why formal schooling was created - to provide a framework for learning...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> At least "Python for Data Analysis" is a pirate copy. Wonder how many others are too. But as long as you make money from affiliate links you don't care, right?

<comment><AUTHOR> What makes it seem like Python for Data Analysis is a pirated copy? I figured since it was hosted from Canisius College it would be legally distributed.

I don't want to host pirated content, so if it is I will remove it.

<comment><USER4> The book is not listed at [http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/](http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/)

Also the PDF has a link to a notorious ebook pirate platform on every page. If you really believe content on college pages is legal, you must be very naive. I've never seen a naive webmaster that uses domain privacy though.

<comment><USER5> Personally I wasn't surprised to see (possibly) pirated content on an .edu site with a ~username URL, as the ~ suggested a student's page, where unauthorised content might pop up to share with classmates and stay up undetected by the college.

What surprised me is that the owner of the Canisius page appears to be teaching staff rather than a student. The other books hosted there seem to be legitimately freely available, however, so I'm guessing that was also a naive mistake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you're a beginner, you're probably going to be too overwhelmed by the options. I often find emailing/asking a few different professors/researchers/students in the field you want to learn for suggestions more productive.

That's not to say this isn't helpful. This is from my own personal experience.

<comment><USER7> Also get plugged into a local meetup/user group. They are popping up everywhere. Here are some examples of R user groups. [http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/local-r- groups.html](http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/local-r-groups.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I would also add [http://mmds.org/](http://mmds.org/) in the list. Link to the book is '[http://infolab.stanford.edu/~ullman/mmds/book.pdf](http://infolab.stanford.edu/~ullman/mmds/book.pdf).

<comment><USER6> It's there. "Mining of Massive Datasets"

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is anybody aware of good books/resources on machine learning/data science in Matlab?

My SO has been trying to learn ML to further her work for a couple months now, and has had a hard time with it. She quite intelligent, but isn't a terribly experienced programmer (she's been writing Matlab for a couple years now, but mostly in a scientific setting)... Either way, I suspect part of the problem is that most of the explanations usually are in a language unfamiliar to her, and expect her to learn or translate it in addition to the concepts.

<comment><USER10> Andrew Ng, the man behind the excellent ML course on coursera, has an introduction to Deep Learning using Matlab.

[1]: Wiki with code, exercises and explanation

[2]: Video lecture one with a recap on back-propagation

[3]: Video lecture two on Sparse Auto Encoders

[4]: Handouts

In terms of books, _Bayesian Reasoning and Machine Learning_ [5] is Matlab based. So is the _Handbook of Monte Carlo methods_ [6].

[1]: [http://ufldl.stanford.edu/wiki/index.php/UFLDL_Tutorial](http://ufldl.stanford.edu/wiki/index.php/UFLDL_Tutorial)

[2]: [http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs294a/video1.html](http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs294a/video1.html)

[3]: [http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs294a/video2.html](http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs294a/video2.html)

[4]: [http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs294a/handouts.html](http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs294a/handouts.html)

[5]: [http://web4.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/D.Barber/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=...](http://web4.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/D.Barber/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Brml.HomePage)

[6]: [http://www.maths.uq.edu.au/~kroese/montecarlohandbook/](http://www.maths.uq.edu.au/~kroese/montecarlohandbook/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I noticed something last night while watching the Djokovic US Open quarter- final. It featured an "IBM Insights" segment which claimed to have mined 8 years worth of Majors competitions to generate stats. And one interesting result it was able to produce went something like this: if Djokovic is able to return only 25% of his opponents serves, then in 85% of past matches it has resulted in victory for him. The implication being that such is the strength of his defensive game.

While this is no doubt really interesting, I find I am getting diminishing returns from outputting stats like this from big dumps of past historical data. What I would like to be able to show is a live heat graph style stats tracker, where each point in the match updates my belief net about who is winning, or playing better. Of course, the final outcome may be upended by some fluke occurrence such as a Hail Mary pass in the final seconds which is what makes sports interesting, but nonetheless I think a live tracker would say a lot more than the actual score of the match.

So, I am wondering if anyone has specific resources for real time online data mining? At web scale for high throughput data streams. And I agree with shubmajain above, libraries and repos are preferable to books and academic journals ;)

<comment><USER12> I don't understand that IBM Insights note about Djokovic. Can you explain more?

<comment><USER13> Without doing the math - Djokovic is such a strong player that even if he's only returning a quarter of your serves, meaning you're 3/4's of the way to winning your set (I don't tennis, sorry if I'm getting the terms wrong), he's still probably going to beat you.

<comment><USER14> Well, that's a close explanation, except I think you're confusing set and match. For men's tennis, it takes 3 sets to win the match, with the potential of playing 5 sets.

I'm actually not sure that the math is true, though. (Or I really don't understand what the stat is saying.) Let's say that it actually is for every 4 serves, you win 3, Djokovic wins 1. That number gives you every game (winning the game game-point-15), to give you every set. I don't see how Djokovic ever wins a game, let alone the set or match.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Great resources.

I would add these great ebooks on Cloud Computing and AWS Certifications:

 __The Cloud Computing Job Market __

With this eBook you will learn how Cloud Computing is changing the IT industry and creating a complete set of new roles for companies and businesses worldwide. Information and data to start your cloud computing career.

Link [0] [https://cloudacademy.com/ebooks/cloud-computing-job- market-3...](https://cloudacademy.com/ebooks/cloud-computing-job-market-3/)

 __A Guide to AWS Certification Exams __

Introduction to the full range of Amazon Web Services certification exams: learn what, why, and how to pass just the right exam for you.

Link [1] [https://cloudacademy.com/ebooks/guide-aws-certification- exam...](https://cloudacademy.com/ebooks/guide-aws-certification-exams-2/)

 __AWS Solutions Architect Certification __

Study guide to Amazon Web Service 's Solutions Architect certification exam: tips and suggestions on how, what, and where to learn.

Link [2] [https://cloudacademy.com/ebooks/aws-solutions-architect- cert...](https://cloudacademy.com/ebooks/aws-solutions-architect- certification-1/)

</comment><comment><USER16> Honest question: is ML/DS something you can just pick up and be hired[0]? May be I'm ignorant, but I'd think employers would look for a degree in some related field to actually consider you for a position doing it.

[0] As in how you can pick up web hacking, do a few websites and create a reputation and get hired that way without a formal degree.

<comment><USER17> There was a thread on here a month or two ago about this. In general, it was noted that it's best (for both employment as well as just getting stuff done) to have a deep understanding of a particular area of ML rather than a general understanding of many areas. Usually those with a deep understanding have focused on it in school. But the latter group of generalists is a much larger group in the software industry, since most of us did not go to school for this specifically.

</comment></comment><comment> geoff-codes Suggest putting this in a repo somewhere, in the vein of:

[https://github.com/vhf/free-programming- books/blob/master/fr...](https://github.com/vhf/free-programming- books/blob/master/free-programming-books.md)

[https://github.com/ligurio/free-software-testing- books/blob/...](https://github.com/ligurio/free-software-testing- books/blob/master/free-software-testing-books.md)

etc.

</comment><comment><USER18> Any specific recommendations from anyone?

<comment><USER19> The Elements of Statistical Learning together with the online course ([http://www.r-bloggers.com/in-depth-introduction-to- machine-l...](http://www.r-bloggers.com/in-depth-introduction-to-machine- learning-in-15-hours-of-expert-videos/)) makes for a great introduction.

EDIT: Oops I should have said "An Introduction to Statistical Learning with Applications in R" rather than The Elements of Statistical Learning. The Elements book goes into way too much depth to be a good introduction to the subject.

<comment><USER20> Similarly, An Introduction to Statistical Learning With Applications in R is like a practical version of (or companion to) Elements. I very much enjoyed it.

<comment><USER21> And the Stanford version of the same class linked above for ISLR is, in my opinion, better:

[https://lagunita.stanford.edu/courses/HumanitiesandScience/S...](https://lagunita.stanford.edu/courses/HumanitiesandScience/StatLearning/Winter2015/about)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> "Mining of Massive Datasets" by Leskovec, Rajaraman and Ullman is very good.

Although the post gives a link to the Amazon page of the book, PDFs of the chapters are free to download at the official book web site[1].

[1] [http://www.mmds.org/](http://www.mmds.org/)

</comment><comment><USER23> I really like this kind of stuff.

It's my opinion that our educational process is a bit too heavy on algorithms and languages while being a bit too light on data structures.

I like to brush up on this subject matter from time to time just to keep myself sharp.

</comment><comment><USER24> Anyone recommend any of the R books listed or know of any great R books for purchase?

<comment><USER7> My favorite intro to R book is The Art of R Programming by Norman Matloff [http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Programming-Statistical- Softwa...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Programming-Statistical- Software/dp/1593273843)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Nice books collection. Thanks :)

<comment><AUTHOR> :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Why are you hijacking my scroll speed...

Your "smooth-scroll" library is completely breaking my touchpad scroll with an Acer c720 Chromebook. One slight movement (which should be a few pixels scroll) is moving me over half-way down the screen. Makes your site unusable with this touchpad as accidental scrolling sometimes happens and moves the screen a whole page away, especially when trying to right click open links because the gestures are similar.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm. Interesting. I just implemented the smooth scroll yesterday so I will definitely check that out. Thanks for the input.

<comment><USER27> Smooth scrolling is already implemented correctly in the browser. Your implementation is just a hack that hijacks the normal behaviour a user is accustomed to and just gives back a version that just feels wrong to interact with, even without performance issues.</comment></comment></comment>


Psyball makes your amateur sports team always complete - <AUTHOR> http://about.psyball.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> We've just done it. Now your team can be auto-completed with people from public Internet. Just try to arrange your next match with friends using Psyball and I vouch, you'll never stop. If you've got no team yet, publish your Join Request and Psyball will be watching your area to find the match. Try it on www.psyball.com. NB: Any criticism is pretty much appreciated.

</comment><comment><USER2> Um... I selected the default of Fairfield, California, and the map it gives says: "Within 8,190 km from Krachi, Ghana"</comment>


Ask YC: Do you support OpenID? - <AUTHOR>

Do you already support or plan to support OpenID relaying party in your application? <comment><USER2> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=97625>

</comment><comment><USER3> I am planning to implement some sort of open standard for a social network - however mine is targeted towards kids so will have to see how OpenID will help or hinder our protection mechanisms.

</comment><comment><USER4> No, and I don't like the idea of having one point of failure for my entire web identity.

<comment><USER5> You've already got a single point of failure; your email address.</comment></comment>


Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus with Honeycomb AND Phone? - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/30/samsung-announces-the-dual-core-galaxy-tab-7-0-plus/

<comment><AUTHOR> The tablet spec seems to be Honeycomb / Android 3.2, but the screenshot clearly shows the icon of the phone app - and the first Galaxy Tab (7 inch too) was a phone. What do you guys think, will the next Galaxy Tab come with phone functionality again?</comment>


Hacking Homelessness - <AUTHOR> http://www.well.com/user/xanthian/public/homeless/jail.txt

<comment><USER2> other than the fact that the homeless guy in question is a programmer, the article in question does not seem to be related to 'hacking'. I went in looking for details on - how to find free space to sleep in, tips on avoiding the police/getting out of jail easily, finding _healthy_ food etc...

The article focuses on other aspects that are important, but is not hacking.

<comment><AUTHOR> There are hints of it, how to deal with authority, even where to be homeless (CSU campus good). Also, if you are interested you would start to explore the directory tree this doc is in and see even more details.

It seems to me that homelessness IS a hack on the regular system. And the way he writes about what happens is informed by his intelligence and his programmer background. To me, the idea of a homeless guy running sims to develop his solution to efficient routing of a traveling salesman while not having a place to plug in his laptop which is his own is pretty hacky.

Maybe this article isn't EVERYTHING you would want in a clever and enjoyable read from a homeless programmer, but it may be the best out there in this genre. This was not a New York Times reporter playing a homeless person, this is the real thing. BTW, I worked with this guy briefly, so I know he is the real thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The article complains a lot about how the homeless are treated, but I don't think he is very representative of the homeless population in general. Maybe in Fresno, but in Austin, many of the homeless you see out on the streets are alcoholics or trying to make a living without working. One woman I knew who worked with the homeless said that most of them are trying to avoid responsibility, and a guy I know who used to give out sack lunches to the homeless near campus eventually stopped because after talking to them he realized they weren't just unlucky, they'd chosen that lifestyle. I assume that those who don't want to be homeless have a tendency to go to the ARCH, which has training programs and long-term residency.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would consider that this guy, being actually homeless, is at least as valuable a source on homelessness as a woman you knew who worked with them.

I suspect that more generally than being alcoholics, these are people who are mentally ill to some extent. I liked this essay (and others from this writer) because this is a homeless guy I could identify with. I could read his stuff and not think this was some situation which could never come close to happening to me or someone I would care about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not a surprise. I've lost my faith in humanity, belief in goodness of anything, and trust into anything outside my own head long time ago.

"A previous arrest in which a policeman tried to _force_ my arm back there despite my protests caused me injury and pain, and the policeman's supervisor six months of paperwork, all of which I attempted to explain to a shouting, tugging, and threatening Corporal Underwood to limited avail. "

Just proves how strangely fucked up our world is.

<comment><AUTHOR> I loved that even in the midst of being hassled by the police, he gives the one policeman incredible credit for his approach to other humans. There is beauty everywhere.</comment></comment>


Google is sexy now (Tom Anderson) - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/112063946124358686266/posts/ZYS1fJQVkx2 <comment><USER2> Oh awesome, fake breasts. Way to attract the other 50%. And there are complaints that g+ is male-dominated? This disappoints me.

My internal dialogue: "Great, now I'm either going to keep my opinion to myself and move along, or speak out and be perceived as a hardlining feminist". Goddamn, do I hate unthinking misogyny sometimes, I'm completely sick of it and it's totally acceptable in a male-dominated forum where so many other forms of isms have been classified as inadmissable. Reading the comments was even more disturbing, as the scrolling arrays of men commenting on the +00+ interspersed with only a few disapprovals from the women strong enough to speak out about this in the public forum.

<comment><USER3> > _Reading the comments was even more disturbing, as the scrolling arrays of > men commenting on the +00+ interspersed with only a few disapprovals from > the women strong enough to speak out about this in the public forum._

There were quite a few women who commented and did not complain about the picture.

> _Corina Newby - Google has always been sexy :)_

> _Lisa Bimmerz - Well, that's one way to spell "Google"! lol_

> _Corinne Maloney - I wouldn't consider myself a techie, but I've loved > google since I started using it! :)_

> _Frederika Katuuk - this is sexy..lol_

Some did complain, however:

> _Diana McQueen - Wow. That a disgusting sexist image. If that's officially > from Google, I'm terrible disappointed in them. There should be two women in > lab coats standing next to a chiseled guy in a thong. Then maybe._

Of course, the image is disgusting but "a chiseled guy in a thong" would be okay...

I'm all in favor of making software engineering a friendly place for women, but this is not the way to do it. This is a post that someone made on their personal Google+ site. It was not a statement from Google. It was not a Google employee. It was not a conference speech. It was a guy who posted a sexy picture to accompany his thoughts on making Google "sexy". Would it be okay if he _had_ also posted a picture of a guy in a thong?

Trying to tell guys that they can never enjoy sexy images is not the way to fix the gender inequality in the software field. That just breeds resentment.

<comment><USER4> _There were quite a few women who commented and did not complain about the picture._

This comes up all the time when people call out sexism and it is not a valid rebuttal.

Just because someone is a woman does not mean they are an expert in recognizing sexism. Women tend to have more experience with sexism than men, but many deny some or all kinds of sexism, many block it out (often a useful and necessary defense mechanism), many have not spent much time learning about sexism, and many are purveyors of sexism themselves.

In addition, the more sexist the subculture, the more it tends to A) attract women who are more sexist, and B) filter out women who are more adversely affected by sexism/lack strong sexism defense mechanisms.

 _"But [my wife/my girlfriend/group of women X] didn't think it was sexist"_ doesn't necessarily say anything conclusive about whether it is actually sexist. If you are looking for an expert opinion, seek out the opinion of someone who has spent time learning about how sexism works. Your wife/girlfriend/group of women X may or may not be in that category. There are more women than men in that group, but having a vagina does not gain you instant entry.

<comment><USER3> > _This comes up all the time when people call out sexism and it is not a > valid rebuttal._

It's a perfectly valid rebuttal to someone who tries to make claims about women as a whole. Marquis made a comment about "disapprovals from the women strong enough to speak out". The implication there is that all women are offended and only the strong ones dare to speak out. Clearly it is not true that all women were offended. Many (most?) of the women who commented did not complain, and several commented positively about the picture.

> _"But [my wife/my girlfriend/group of women X] didn't think it was sexist" > doesn't necessarily say anything conclusive about whether it is actually > sexist. If you are looking for an expert opinion, seek out the opinion of > someone who has spent time learning about how sexism works. Your > wife/girlfriend/group of women X may or may not be in that category. There > are more women than men in that group, but having a vagina does not gain you > instant entry._

This is a candy-coated way of saying that we must listen to those most zealous about sexism. We can't listen to the average woman or the opinion of most women. No, we have to listen to those obsessed with finding sexism, even if that means they find it in places it doesn't really exist.

Why must _sexy_ always be synonymous with _sexist_? These are two different things. Lack of sexism does not imply a lack of sexual interest (nor vice versa).

<comment><USER4> _we have to listen to those obsessed with finding sexism_

There are people who have cancer, people who treat cancer, and people who do cancer research, and there is a time and a place to listen to each. The same for sexism. If you're mindful of this you'll be fine.

<comment><USER3> When the people you're listening to are "finding" cancer everywhere they look, one might be wise to start listening to someone else.

<comment><USER5> Or consider that your privilege has blinded you and sexism/patriarchy/kyriarchy _is_ awfully damn pervasive.

<comment><USER3> Come now, these aren't exclusive possibilities. There certainly is a lot of sexism in society. That doesn't change the fact that some people will find sexism where it is not actually present.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Google+ is not sexy. No one thinks Facebook is sexy. My mom doesn't think it's sexy. My mom doesn't think the electrical company is sexy either. Neither does my sister, or my girlfriend, or my roommate. They are all tools for communication and some are better than others.

I think most of this Google+ noise is just fanboys who are glad to have something new. I'm all for competition but Google+, to me, is not very impressive at all.

I'll use whatever tool those people I mentioned above are using... because that's all that really matters.

</comment><comment><USER7> The woman in the photo commented, _Steph L Davis - +Tom Anderson Tom - I'm sad you used this pic :(_

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm glad that Tom won't be one of my co-workers at Google.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2807796>

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm not really sure what the word "sexy" has to do with a giant multinational corporation.

Is this creep speak for "Google is receiving more positive esteem from random members of society due to its recent emphasis on slight aesthetic improvements across its product line?"

</comment><comment><USER10> Excellent article. I've also noticed that Google+ is giving Google new life, and it's like they're starting over. They're redesigning all their products and services with the Google+ style, and hopefully Android 4.0 will get a bit of this style this fall, and they're going to integrate Google+ across all their services.

Because of Google+, they're starting to become a "media darling" once again, and they look better even if the eyes of some bloggers that love Apple. I think we'll see a more positive tone overall on the web about Google from now on.</comment>


Goofram: Combining Google and Wolfram Searches - <AUTHOR> http://www.goofram.com/

<comment><USER2> This is interesting, because it shows Google getting a MUCH better answer for a question that came up in an HN thread yesterday: how long does it take a radio signal to travel to Mars at maximum distance from earth?</comment>


Learning to Superoptimize Programs - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.01787 <comment><USER2> This work should be read in context of prior work, STOKE: [http://stoke.stanford.edu/](http://stoke.stanford.edu/)

This work outperforms STOKE, and STOKE outperformed existing methods including GCC, LLVM, ICC, traditional superoptimization, expert human, etc. That's why comparison with existing methods are omitted.

This work is also limited to Hacker's Delight and automatically generated programs, but so was STOKE. But STOKE readily extended to computational kernels in libm, BLAS, OpenSSL, ray tracer, computational fluid dynamics, etc. You can read about them on the link above. The next step would be applying the improvements to other STOKE tasks and more.

STOKE is an open source.

<comment><USER3> That sounds pretty awesome. So, are these only instruction-level optimizations or is there a good toolkit for doing it SSA level as well? My idea being combining it with formal, equivalence checks in certified compilers so we get optimizations plus ensure correctness given original version was correct via certified transform. Certified to v1 -> superoptimize to v2 -> certified checker (v1, v2) -> rinse repeat.

<comment><USER4> souper: [https://github.com/google/souper](https://github.com/google/souper)

<comment><USER3> Hell yeah! Appreciate it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article uses a very contrived data set (bit manipulation), and also a "synthetically generated dataset", which would never occur in real life applications. This means that the results are unreliable and need to be repeated on something more realisic, or at least on programs that are uses by peole in some context (spec2000, spec2006). Moreover, the authors never compare the performance with that of llvm or gcc on different levels of optimisations, or at least do not mention any of that.

<comment><USER6> The authors of the original Stochastic superoptimization paper performed some comparison with the outputs of gcc. You can find their results in this paper: [https://raw.githubusercontent.com/StanfordPL/stoke/develop/d...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/StanfordPL/stoke/develop/docs/papers/cacm16.pdf)

This is on the same type of dataset, as admittedly, these methods still don't scale all that well to extremely large programs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Where is the source? It's not science until you can reproduce their result.

<comment><USER8> Probably here soon

[http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~tvg/code.php](http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~tvg/code.php)

You might also say that it's not science until it's been peer reviewed and this is a preprint from 2 weeks ago…

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Even if this was useful, it presumes the ability to prove a application correct while modifying it. This would only be doable in very limited circumstances not general purpose applications.

<comment> psi-squared (edited to add: Note that superoptimization isn't something you do to a whole program, it's more a thing you do to speed-critical sections of a larger program, ideally on the order of a few dozen instructions at most. That alone makes things a lot more tractable)

(edit 2: I've read the relevant papers now, and have corrected some of the stuff below. Corrections are in italics.)

 _The paper says that this system is built on top of STOKE, which uses the following verification method:_

* Generate a random set of test cases

* Each intermediate code block gets instrumented and run on the host processor

* The intermediate code block are given a cost depending on how different their results are from those of the original block _on the current test set_ , as well as an estimate of the running time

* _If we get a code block which is correct on all the current test cases, we ask a theorem prover whether it 's equivalent to the original one._ If it isn't, the theorem prover spits out a test case which proves they're different, and we add that to the test set for future iterations.

Finally, the fastest few provably-correct results are output, where they can be further tested in a full run of the original program they were taken from.

The main room for error here is in the theorem proving step, which requires knowing the full semantics of the host's machine code. But it feels like that part should be share-able between different projects, as it's pretty much independent of the search method used.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This technique is only as good as the objective function. In most real world scenarios there is no canonical objective function, nor a comprehensive test suite exercising all branches of the code.

<comment><USER2> While your point about objective function is correct, optimizing compilers still manage just fine with imperfect objective function, and superoptimizers do better. So "as good as objective function" is good enough.

This work proves functional equivalence, so no test suite is necessary.

<comment><USER10> > optimizing compilers still manage just fine with imperfect objective > function,

Imperfect or not, optimizing compilers do not require an objective function at all. The majority of computer programs do not have an objective function.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As someone not well versed in compilers, this approach seems bizarre.

1\. Given some chunk of a program, we should know ahead of time which I/O preserving transformations are available to us, because math.

2\. Random search isn't going to find you some kind of Godel-esque situation where the optimized instructions are equivalent to the un-optimized ones in an unprovable way, _especially_ when one of your steps is "prove equivalence."

So my question would be: why don't they just randomly apply I/O preserving transformations to the problem, skip the "output similarity" step, skip the theorem proving step, and just optimize against whatever actual performance benchmark they used?

<comment><USER2> Because we "should", but actually don't, know ahead of time what semantic preserving transformations are available. The entire point is to discover them.

If you find this bizarre, consider that your semantic preserving transformations should be able to do examples in Figure 12 and 13 of [http://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/publications/papers/asplos...](http://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/publications/papers/asplos13.pdf)

<comment><USER11> But it seems to me that the fact that they _have a theorem prover at all_ means they _do_ know ahead of time what semantic preserving transformations are available.

<comment><USER12> No. They have a verificator that can show that two (sub-)programs (more accurately; that an applied transformation preserves semantics) are semantically identical. This is a bit like a P-verificator for the solution to a NP-hard problem using a certificate. It can only help you prove that the solution is right, not find new solutions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> TL;DNR how it differs from usual performance optimization?

<comment><USER14> It is entirely automated, it can be thought of kind of like googles alphago. A neural net is used to guide monte carlo search, though it is working on the space of programs and optimizing running time. Instead of using known rules, it can learn its own optimization rules for software.

<comment><USER15> Note that this uses Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling rather than the Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) of AlphaGo, although the latter might also be interesting to try.

I suppose one disadvantage of naive MCTS is that if it made a supoptimal decision near the root, correcting that mistake would require relearning the rest of the program from scratch.

Maybe there could be some bidirectional variant of MCTS, where you search from both the beginning and the end of the program and join the two fragments in the middle. If the two trees work independently, can they still learn to find the optimal solution?</comment></comment></comment>


On Mother's Day, My Mom Asked Me to Help End Her Life - <AUTHOR> http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a44491/assisted-suicide-mothers-day/ <comment><USER3> _The Netherlands has the most liberal requirements—depression alone is considered a sufficient justification_

To offer additional explanation here: the Dutch euthanasia legislation doesn't explicitly enumerate allowed conditions for termination, it merely requires the patient to be experiencing irremediable suffering.

While that may qualify as "most liberal" for the patient, I'm not convinced our legislation is really that progressive: the legislation merely shields a practitioner from homicide charges _iff proper procedure is observed_. But "proper procedure" cannot be vetted or signed-off before the act; a criminal investigation will always be opened (as it is required for all non-natural deaths), but will be dropped if a medical ethics board agrees (post facto!) with the practitioner's decision.

From the NVVE site (Dutch Society for Voluntary Termination) [1], a practitioner must:

      - be convinced the patient's decision is voluntary and well-informed
      - be convinced the patient is experiencing irremediable suffering
        (literally "indefinite and unbearable suffering")
      - inform the patient about their situation and prognosis
      - agree with the patient that no acceptable alternatives exist
      - collect at least one second opinion (from a non-treating phycisian)
        that agrees with all the above
      - perform the procedure according to medical standards

[1] [https://www.nvve.nl/wat-euthanasie/zorgvuldige- uitvoering](https://www.nvve.nl/wat-euthanasie/zorgvuldige-uitvoering)

<comment><USER4> This is kind of baffling to me -- the "approval" process is only performed _after the patient is dead_?

<comment><USER5> Approval really is the wrong word. The (legal) action towards the doctor for assisting in an unnatural death are shelved, if and only if the requirements are met. Clearing someone of wrongdoing is not the same as approving ones actions.

It is an interesting subject, really close to ones personal belief system. A recent documentary, which showed several cases of euthanasia in NL based on 'indefinite and unbearable suffering' of the mind (f.e. one lady was tired of her life at 90+ years), probably confirms opinions on both sides of the debate the same way.

For me, having witnessed two deaths by euthanasia (AIDS) and one without (cancer), I would grant any human the chance to plan their moment of death, even if the suffering is mental.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't understand why helping people who want to die is illegal in most countries. It's unfathomable why some people are against that. If I become deeply sick when I am of age I will probably also want to decide when I want to die and not die slowly and painfully.

People who are against letting people choose their own death is having a selfish and evil stance, there is no way to excuse that.

<comment><USER7> Because then your kids could forge a signature on a fake letter to get your inheritance money.

Because then companies that happen to profit from your death have an incentive to convince you that you should die, using manipulative advertising and marketing.

Because then people who are highly depressed might kill themselves with assistance from a doctor, when an alternate route could cure them.

Because then the doctor might forge evidence showing that you wanted to be killed and it could be hard for the police to track down. Maybe they only use the attack against certain high-reward targets.

Because then somebody who is impulsive might agree to be killed when he would've regretted it later if he were still alive.

I tend to be in favor of this for people who legitimately want to die, but there's something to be said for the simplicity of "The autopsy showed poison, so we have a murder case." I could be convinced to make it illegal if somebody found some really plausible attacks that could be used against me; and could be convinced to make it legal if we found and required a scientific test with a legally-enforcable chain-of-custody that proved I was in my right mind when I asked to be killed.

<comment><USER8> Those are all valid points. But oddly enough none of them seems to be a problem in Switzerland, where assisted suicide is legal since the 40s (as mentioned in the article).

On a sidenote: You can write a "Patientenverfügung" (loosely transelated: a patient's will), in which you stipulate that you don't want to be kept alive artificially in case of grave illnes.

This is respected by hospitals and doctors. Case in point was my mother, who had terminal cancer. The doctors gave her morphine to ease the pain and otherwise didn't do anything to prolong her suffering.

She died in a dignified manner.

<comment><USER9> >Because then somebody who is impulsive might agree to be killed when he would've regretted it later if he were still alive.

We wouldn't always know in such cases, and there's often no way to know what a dead person would have thought years later if they would have lived.

<comment><USER10> That's not quite true. There are people who attempt suicide and survive. Many (though by no means all) express regret afterwards.

<comment><USER9> That's an excellent point. Obviously we do know sometimes.

But GP's point was that we don't observe bad consequences from the laws in Switzerland, all I'm saying is that it wouldn't show up when someone commits suicide.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Beautiful story. I have several friends in the Netherlands whose parents (terminally ill, i.e. MLS, cancer) opted for euthanasia. They were all happy with the process and the outcome.

Unless advances in immunotherapy significantly change the outlook, I'd rather move back to my home country for a dignified death on my own terms.

I've seen too many cases where several rounds of chemo extended life by just a few months under dismal circumstances for the patient and their family. Lives revolved around hospital visits while -- depending on the type/stage/location of cancer -- chances of recovery are slim to none. False hope and misery. Bankruptcy. Why bother?

</comment><comment><USER12> While I personally, regardless my health would never end my life...

...anyone that believes they would be able to deal level of suffering, mindlessness, toll on friends & family, etc. - should try experiencing it for themselves to see if they would be able to deal with it and provide aid to those they've forced to live on.

Everyone should have the right to die, to believe otherwise is inhuman.

</comment><comment><USER13> Some days, I wonder if I'll get lucky and manage to go the next day without thinking about the enormity of death. Yesterday, I was wrong.

<comment><USER14> Here's a way of thinking about it that might make it a little lighter. First, you have to understand that the version of you at this moment is different from the version of you yesterday. You don't feel what you felt yesterday. All that is left are memories, which are somehow engraved in your brain. The part of you that survives is purely physical. So in a sense, dying and living are the same thing: you die at every femtosecond of living. Dying is not special. You (as anyone else) have been doing it for many years now.

If this doesn't work for you, then consider the following. We are all living beings, and sometimes some of us die, and sometimes new beings are born. But who says that those living beings aren't just one big living being? Our brains tell us so. But this view is only an artifact of the brain. If our brains were all interconnected more strongly, then I bet our brains would view us as one living being. So what you can take from this is that dying is just like losing a few brain cells. This is also something that you have been doing for years (in fact billions of years). So in this view, you never die until, of course, the universe ends.

<comment><USER13> > you die at every femtosecond of living

This is an interesting theory that has its roots in solipsism: the belief the world vanishes the moment you close your eyes. The fact of the matter is that it (and solipsism) just don't seem to be _true_ , not even to solipsists. If you truly believed you were dying at every second, you'd act in all sorts of ways against your long term survival, but here you are posting on the internet.

Even if we take the position as true, it seems entirely reasonable to perceive the end of the "chain" of "yous" to be a tragic event.

> But who says that those living beings aren't just one big living being? Our > brains tell us so.

Well, our brains, as well as the general evidence we see in the world around us. _If_ we were one giant interconnected entity, dying would probably be very different. However, there's very little reason to assume that as a given - <USER2> can't talk to my dead relatives through any of my living ones.

I think this argument is perhaps more simply stated as "you were never a large part of the human race, so your death will not matter in a large way either" which is quite true, in fact. My counterpoint would be that the death of the individual rightly remains terrifying to that individual. If I were the human race, I would correctly not concern myself with the death of a few of my brain cells (and I do not, regarding my own real brain cells), but I would regard the death of the human race (myself) as truly important.

If anyone's interested, I've written about some of these kinds of arguments I've heard before: [http://vincentwoo.com/2011/04/30/arguing-for- immortality/](http://vincentwoo.com/2011/04/30/arguing-for-immortality/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The doctor's response to the question if he'd recommend her mother to go through cancer treatment reminded me a lot of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3313570](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3313570) [How Doctors Die]... why is the standard answer still to make people suffer for extending their life just a few months or years?

<comment><USER16> > The doctor's response to the question if he'd recommend her mother to go > through cancer treatment reminded me a lot of > [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3313570](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3313570) > [How Doctors Die]...

Of Atul Gawande's "Being Mortal" as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Though I can't think of anything strongly against Switzerland at the moment, this is another reason for me to despise governments and law... where one can't even aid someone in ending their unnecessary, completely pointless suffering without getting their life ruined? Yet states often reserve the hypocritical "right" to execute the death penalty. A sad read, worth it.

<comment><USER18> That contradiction doesn't exist in Europe, only Belarus has the death penalty.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Lets flip the coin for a moment. Supposing you had a 30 year old family member who wanted to die. The choice she gives you is, i'll hang myself or jump in front of a moving car.. or you can let me die with my family surrounding me peacefully. Would you do it?

Note there is no mention of why she wants to die. If there is a cure or it can be fixed will you go along with it?

<comment><USER20> That seems like a rather unlikely scenario. People don't just decide they want to die on a whim. And it's not like in countries with legalized euthanasia you can just go to a doctor tomorrow morning, declare you're not feeling so well, and you'll be scheduled for termination later that afternoon.

I for one would not assist in any suicide without knowing why someone wants to die, and given that my country has a process that allows for legal euthanasia, I'm not sure why your hypothetical family member would ask me to commit this crime rather than going through official channels, especially since we are apparently so estranged that I was completely unaware of her struggles and death wish until this request. The best I can do in your scenario is warn the authorities of the suicide risk, and recommend that she does not throw herself in front of a car or train, because it's so extremely inconsiderate towards the driver and/or passengers, and is that really the way you wish to go / be remembered?

Oh, and perhaps recommend that if for whatever reason she does find the opportunity to kill herself, don't try to poison yourself unless you really know what you're doing. Killing yourself with an overdose of painkillers sounds like a really good idea at first, but it's likely that hanging yourself or cutting your wrists doesn't seem like such a bad way to go in hindsight, when you're dying of liver failure over the next few days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> beautifully written.. I cried a little bit.

</comment><comment><USER22> Saddens me that we still cannot find solutions to bring them back to healthy. Instead of spending too much time on how law can understand it, we should find way to remove hurdles for medicine to progress.

</comment><comment><USER23> This was a really well written piece. Always enjoy reading these on HN.

</comment><comment><USER24> Somebody should talk to the OP's mother about cryonics.

<comment><USER25> Why? They haven't even proven human revival is possible. Until they do it is nothing more than vaporware. More of a scam. And this statement... "We believe that the damage caused by current cryopreservation is limited and can someday be repaired in the future." I don't really care what you believe when selling a scientific solution. What is proven? Why do you believe that? Good marketing? Actual data that shows it is limited?

But hey, by the time they fail to prove it correct you'll be dead and have no recourse or care. Thanks for the money.

<comment><USER24> If you're waiting for revival to be shown then your missing the point. The whole idea is to halt decay while there are problems that can't be solved yet. It's an ambulance ride to the future.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> If you don't have the right to opt-out, then you are not a customer, or citizen, or devotee. You are the product being sold.</comment>


Ask HN: Should we have links in HN profiles now? - <AUTHOR>

I value HN for the discussion as much as the articles - actually, I value the discussion more than the articles. HN has its issues, but overall the quality of discourse in the comments is higher than any other online community I'm part of.
When I read particularly interesting comments, I often look at the author's profile. When they have a blog or github repo listed, or twitter feed, I often look at those links to find out more about their work. I can't count how many times I've copy and pasted links from someone's profile to a new tab.
Is there any good reasons we don't allow links on user profile pages? HN has been undergoing some recent UI changes recently, and I wonder if this issue has been reconsidered at all. <comment><USER3> URL are already allowed in HN profiles, the only problem is that they're not surrounded by the '' tag. Crawlers wouldn't have a problem if it did if it's accompanied with the rel='nofollow' [https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en)

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you suggesting HN include rel='nofollow' for URLs in user profiles?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In the age of equal access, how does one discern meaningful connections on a free platform?

Imagine if every time someone wrote a comment on Facebook, Instagram they had to answer a simple math question before it's posted. A lot less online bullying will happen and the poster's mind will be sharpened.

With the lack of linked content in HN profiles, you're 100% sure the person who visits any given link you have via the Right Click or Copy/Paste is a meaningful connection that has gone out of their way.

My suggestion - Build a Chrome plugin to scrape the page to discover content that passes a link litmus and programatically link it on the fly.

</comment><comment><USER5> Personally I think a lot of the value in HN is its simplicity. I don't see clickable links to be worth the benefit, especially given the spam it would attract (yes, even with nofollow, spammers will target profile links).

<comment><USER6> I think the worse problem would be users adding a ton of spam links to their own profiles.

That said, I think it should be allowed. You should be able to add whatever basic markdown you want (text, formatting, images, links.) Perhaps, similar to what sarciszewski mentions below, you could have part of your profile be visible only to logged users, which should theoretically make crawling not an issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not to undermine the point, because I do agree, but 'select - right click - <USER2> to address' is marginally quicker, unless you're keyboard shortcutting with 'ctrl-c, ctrl-l, ctrl-v'...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, that will work slightly better for urls that are on their own line where I can triple-click and select the url. But many links are not on their own line, and I have to use the mouse to select the link.

I forget if there's a valid reason not to have links. Was it about minimizing spam?

<comment><USER8> Even if it is, I would like to see an option for authenticated users to be able to turn on links in others' profiles. Google won't see them as hyperlinks so the incentive to spam won't be there.

I think I'll email the HN admins and point them here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In what ways would this improve:

      1. Behavior?
      2. Comments?
      3. Stories?

<comment><AUTHOR> > Comments

There's certainly a base element of comments that should be independent of who you're replying to - you should reply to the comment, not the person. But one of the joys of HN is getting to interact with really interesting people. When you know a person's background, you can reply to them a little more fully.

This plays out all the time around well-known HN members. When people reply to patio11's comments, for example, you can often see that some people know who he is and some don't. Sure, we know him to a large degree from his comments, but we also know him from the work he does.

I'd love to be able to click on links in profiles because it would make it a little easier to check out people's work. I only visit profiles of people who make interesting comments; interesting comments tend to be made by people who are unlikely to include spam links in their profiles -> I'm not too worried about spammy links in profiles.

But I don't run HN, and I trust them to make decisions like this with the best interests of the community in mind.

<comment><USER9> My gut feeling is that slowing the process down may be beneficial. It's hard to think of cases where speeding up the 'whois' improves interaction. It's easy to think of cases where it clearly won't.

From a moderation standpoint, my gut tells me that allowing outbound links in profiles makes creating bot and spam accounts more attractive.</comment></comment></comment>