Choke Point of a Nation: The High Cost of an Aging River Lock - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/23/business/economy/desperately-plugging-holes-in-an-87-year-old-dam.html?_r=0 <comment><USER2> It seems to me that the US struggles not with spending levels on infrastructure, but with correct allocation. There's not enough focus on high throughput, high value trunks, because we throw far too much money at the environmental and cultural scourge that is the many-laned, unlimited access 45 mph roads frequently punctuated with stop lights.

It's true that there's that ASCE report from a few years back that decries how woefully underfunded our infrastructure is. But it also shows absurd things, like that we need to spend an extra 4.3 trillion on surface roads to save 3 trillion in potentially lost GDP over the next 25 years. The next most troublesome category of infrastructure from a funding gap perspective seems to be wastewater (~75% unfunded, but far smaller), which also stems from our failure to keep people in sufficiently dense development patterns.

Going back to the issue at hand, with the inland waterway: the same report puts the economic cost of underfunding waterways at half that of underfunding surface roads. But the underfunding for waterways is 2 orders of magnitude lower than that for surface roads... American infrastructure policy is akin to a dog perishing in a house fire because it's too busy chasing its own tail to step out the open front door.

I highly encourage people to think about page 5 of this ASCE report ([http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/wp- content/uploads/2...](http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/wp- content/uploads/2016/05/2016-FTA-Report-Close-the-Gap.pdf)) and ponder the disparities.

<comment><USER3> ASCE is hardly a disinterested party here. More infrastructure projects means more money and influence for ASCE.

<comment><USER2> To some extent I'm sure that's true, but I'm guessing that this report relies less on that, and more on mindless calculations of "could this be improved/built up/repaired?" while failing to step back and realize we're chasing an impossible end. It's what happens when people apply their codes and manuals, thinking that those things are purely factual, as if such a thing could ever be free of value judgments that need to be periodically reevaluated (in this case, the values are probably vehicle speed and throughout.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Meanwhile, the old locks and dams are costing the country $640 million a year in delays and closures, according to the Army corps....Even with a tax credit, though, companies building roads or locks would want a return on their investment — most likely in the form of toll collection, said Mike Toohey, president of the Waterways Council, an advocacy group for the river shipping industry. His industry is "not in favor of a toll," he said. Still, he is optimistic that spending on inland waterways will increase under a new administration."

What baffles me is the total dismissal of a private infratructure project which charges tolls. This would seem to be a perfect project for user-pays funding: the project offers a service with a specific, discrete in time and place, easily calculated value which is extremely large to the user who are supposedly suffering severely under the status quo. My only guess is that the lobbyist affiliation here is the whole story: the industries think they can get full taxpayer subsidies for the costs without having to pay much or any of it, and it's worth waiting for a government solution.

<comment><USER5> I suspect that if there are multiple river shipping companies but one monopoly lock operator, all of the economic surplus in the river transport industry will be captured by that monopoly operator.

Perhaps the solution is for the river shipping industry to form a co-op to build, own and operate the necessary infrastructure.

<comment><USER6> Good idea! The more people we get to buy into the cooperative the better it will be! If we get everybody to participate we can just call it "government".

<comment><USER7> Except that government is universal, whereas a river cooperative would only affect the parties directly involved. Thus you could scale things up without getting to government-scale.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't get why the US is so bad at infrastructure.

All other first-world countries have entrenched bureaucracies, and pork-barrel spending, and environmental reviews, and zoning, and NIMBY lawsuits, just like the US does. However, those other countries manage to get infrastructure built and maintained anyway. So, given that they face the same challenges the US does, why does the US do so much worse, even though the US has so much more money? Where is the distinction?

<comment><USER9> Extreme polarization and obstructionism that turns infrastructure spending into wedge issues (especially around trains)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> To compare capacity, this is only about 22 freight trains per day. (assuming 100 cars per train)

Why are we doing this again? Trains are way more versatile. We can switch trains onto tracks that go all over the place, not just where we have rivers.

Trains can't cross the ocean, but barges don't either. Trains do however carry containerized freight, which is easily loaded into container ships. This is another win for trains.

<comment><USER11> [http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/19/us/19dam.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/19/us/19dam.html)

30% less fuel usage than trains.

<comment><USER12> I missed where the article mentions the efficiency figure. Can you point me to it? I read it and looked for "30", "rail", "train", "fuel", "efficiency", etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Companies that use this infrastructure should be paying the costs of maintaining it. If this system were privately owned, not maintaining it would mean lost revenue. With the government doing it, there isn't such a clear and direct incentive to spend the money.

Well, I don't think the river is going to be privatized any time soon, so government should change how it obtains revenues for this maintenance. It should be charging fees sufficient to do the required maintenance.

In fact, it should be charging fees that raise the most revenue. That also means keeping fees low enough to keep the traffic it has.

It seems like this is too much to expect from legislative bodies to fine tune. Perhaps the states involved should create an entity that they own to manage these issues, just as New York and New Jersey have down with the Port Authority. Each state would own a percentage based on how much of the Ohio River runs through their state and other relevant considerations. And get a corresponding share of proceeds, if any.

<comment><USER14> The problem is that any 'fee' is subject to political economy. The government may begin by charging the monopoly rent, but will soon grant exceptions to favored groups. After that, the government will raise fees on disfavored groups, and redirect revenue to 'where it is most urgently needed'. The locks will then fall into disrepair, users will find other alternatives, and by the time the government goes on another infrastructure-repairing frenzy, it will be much too late.

<comment><USER13> Yes, its still going to be government.

I'd rather resources be managed privately but I just don't river traffic being managed privately in this country. Even if a private company managed it by contract, there would be the inevitable kickbacks to the pols making the decision.

Which is why I also advocate reducing the concentration of power our system has created. Specifically, I'd like to see proportional representation replace winner-take-all elections, even in the executive branch.

<comment><USER14> The issue with proportional representation is that it may reduce the concentration of power amongst the parties, but it will make political parties more important than individual representatives, and promote a hyper-partisan attitude. When turning out 'your side' is more important than convincing the median voter, the parties will focus on their bases, and the candidates will be dependent on the party, which means there will be less room for compromise. This is not so important in multi-party parliamentary democracies such as Italy which have a history of 'minority governments', but will make the executive branch of the USA even more partisan.

<comment><USER15> > The issue with proportional representation is that it may reduce the > concentration of power amongst the parties, but it will make political > parties more important than individual representatives, and promote a hyper- > partisan attitude.

What you say is arguably a valid concern for one particular method of achieving proportional representation (the Party List Proportional method), but there is no clear reason it would be for other methods of promoting proportionality (such as multimember districts with candidate-centered elections using Single Transferrable Vote.)

> When turning out 'your side' is more important than convincing the median > voter, the parties will focus on their bases,

That's already exactly the case with the US system, where elections are won more by turnout and less by conversions. The duopoly naturally produced by FPTP makes efforts to depress turnout of the other sides likely voters (whether by targeted propaganda or actual suppression) a strong tactic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Can someone ELI5 please how can infrastructure project exceed budget 4x and plan by 20 years? Was the plan a deliberate fraud or are the estimation methods in terestrial engineering even more imature than in software engineering?

<comment><USER11> They used an experimental technique, for one thing.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/19/us/19dam.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/19/us/19dam.html)

[http://www.circleofblue.org/2014/world/despite-delays- billio...](http://www.circleofblue.org/2014/world/despite-delays-billions- overruns-olmsted-locks-dam-project-rolls/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wonder if this was one of those "shovel ready" projects.

[http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/15/obama- lesson-s...](http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/15/obama-lesson- shovel-ready-not-so-ready/)

<comment><USER18> The replacements locks, Olmsted Locks and Dam, began construction in December 1995. They're due to come online in 2018.

[http://www.lrl.usace.army.mil/Missions/Civil- Works/Navigatio...](http://www.lrl.usace.army.mil/Missions/Civil- Works/Navigation/Locks-and-Dams/Olmsted-Locks-and-Dam/) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olmsted_Locks_and_Dam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olmsted_Locks_and_Dam)

At $3B and 20 years in the making, maybe they're just a little more complex than a shovel.

<comment><USER19> And it seems a little difficult to blame Obama for the slow progress of a project that began about the same time he was filing papers for his candidacy as an Illinois senator.

<comment><USER20> Hasn't stopped people in the past so I guess why stop now.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How Google et al. drove the web from plaintext to HTTPS - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/https-or-bust-chromes-plan-to-label-sites-as-not-secure/ <comment><USER2> This is good to see.</comment>


Open Problems in Robotics - <AUTHOR> https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2020/07/29/open-problems-in-robotics/ <comment><USER2> >> I really have no idea what "computer scientists" in current year get up to. Seems like it should be what they're doing! I guess they'd rather pay theorists to tell them new architectures aren't worth doing, than pay people to innovate.

I liked the article. But the reason we have shit solutions for the problems the article lists is because they are really hard to attack with our current technology and knowledge. Who's going to develop a new science of computation? If it's so easy to do - why doesn't the author do it?

The article is right. We're stuck at a primitive stage of computer science where pointless dithering like GPT-3 is causing huge hype because it remotely resembles something that our computers can't do.

But we're stuck anyway. Bashing computer scientists for being mere humans won't change that.

</comment><comment><USER3> animals move using muscles which exert force by contraction and typically come in pairs so a limb or equivalent moves by coordinated contractions ... to me this is an open problem which deserves more attention</comment>


China appears to be accelerating development of a super-heavy lift rocket - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/09/china-appears-to-be-accelerating-development-of-a-super-heavy-lift-rocket/ <comment><USER2> That's the first I have heard of SLS being ready as early as 2021. I wonder, when it comes online will NASA stop using SpaceX & ULA for space station supply/people missions?

<comment><USER3> There's no real reason to stop using SpaceX and ULA unless they're going to start sending MUCH more to the ISS than those rockets can handle. SLS is really expensive per launch.

<comment><USER4> Both the BFR and the New Armstrong, based on what is currently known about them, will be able to lift something better than the ISS (e.g. a Bigelow habitat) to orbit in a single launch for considerably less than either ISS or SLS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I find it interesting how rocket development speed seems to have slowed down. It took the US a little more than 10 years to go from barely being able to launch any rocket to the Saturn V. With all the experience we have now it still takes more than 10 years to develop a new heavy lift rocket. Considering that usually everything is late this rocket will probably fly after 2030.

<comment><USER6> The space race was a one-time oddity. During it's peek NASA used nearly 4.5% of the federal budget[1]. The Soviets poured so much into it, it practically bankrupt them. The military wanted better ICBMs, the government wanted to win the race. No one ever dreamed of making it profitable.

SpaceX for comparison only relieved about 100m a year[2], or 0.0026% of the federal budget. Boeing and other groups have similar funding for their space programs. They also, as a commercial company, must be profitable (or try) which isn't as easy as it sounds.

Rocket development is slower even with better modern tooling because we just don't put any money into it anymore.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA) [2] [https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-annual-budget-of- SpaceX](https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-annual-budget-of-SpaceX)

<comment><USER7> As someone who grew up in the 70s and 80s, I still yearn wistfully for the space race's unity and determination of purpose.

It's hardly appropriate for HN, but I wonder how differently the world would look if NASA had received a much larger budget. Probably taken from the US Military's allocation, how much would the loss of half of the US Navy have affected world politics and conflicts? Or what would the USA look like without the Iraq war of 2003 onward?

(I'm trying to be as neutral as possible in my language here, I don't want to start a flamewar about US and geopolitics!)

I doubt we'd have gotten further into space as some of us would like, but I do think we'd have already proven that asteroid mining can work, and some people would be living multi-year tenures on the Moon. Whether we'd have bootstrapped our way to mining and using nuclear materials in space is doubtful, but certainly possible. (in other words, building nuclear rockets that have never been close to Earth's biosphere, which would open up large parts of the Solar System for human exploration)

<comment><USER8> The economics of asteroid mining is terrible. Look at the % of world GDP spent on non organic non earth specific mining aka no coal, marble, etc and it's really cheap.

Now figure final prices would need to be cheaper for space mining to take off. Even recycling electronics filled with high value atoms is difficult to profit from.

<comment><USER9> Gold's price collapsing when a meaningfully rich asteroid source can be mined seems likely.

<comment><USER10> This would be a good thing. It's a wonderful metal, just useless when it's worth so much. Silver would be awesome to crash too, since it's more conductive than copper.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Disco – A plug-and-play secure protocol and a cryptographic library in Golang - <AUTHOR> http://www.discocrypto.com/#/ <comment><USER2> This is interesting.

David Wong is a cryptographer at NCC Crypto. I like David. I added that because I know he's reading this.

Noise is Trevor Perrin's transport protocol framework (it's a "framework" because it's parameterized, and defines several different protocols with different cryptographic tradeoffs). Noise is used by Signal, and the WireGuard VPN uses a variant protocol inspired by it.

Strobe is Mike Hamburg's framework for building encrypted transports out of a sponge function --- sponges are the cryptographic kernels of newer hashes like Keccak. I think it works in a similar fashion to Keccak's promise of getting an entire cryptosystem out of a single crypto primitive, which is something David likes a lot.

In a sense, you'd have Noise doing the handshake and key establishment, and Strobe doing the actual encryption. Noise + Strobe = Disco. Cute.

What's the CSS framework this is done it? It's very clean.

 _(Corrections: it 's WhatsApp that uses Noise, not Signal; Wireguard uses a variant of Noise directly)._

<comment><USER3> >Noise is used by Signal

Are you sure?

<comment><USER2> Yeah, see correction: I got WhatsApp and Signal confused. (WhatsApp uses Signal Protocol and Noise).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Am I understanding this correctly that the main value proposition here is further simplification of Noise protocol by replacing the existing symmetric parts with parts from STROBE protocol?

While its good to push the envelope further, I'm not sure how much practical impact this will have (compared to vanilla Noise). Especially if some of the gained simplicity is countered by sheer novelty of this construction.

<comment><USER2> The way I'm thinking about it is that it's an instantiation of Noise where, except for the curves, _all_ the crypto primitives are derived from Keccak.

Apart from just being a cool thing to design, Hamburg's rationale for STROBE was for microcontroller environments, where being able to derive everything from a single sponge function saves on text space.

If you don't have that very specific problem, there's not really a good reason to use STROBE (or Disco) --- it's subtantially slower than "vanilla" Noise, which uses primitives either designed to be fast on modern hardware (Chapoly) or that have hardware acceleration (AES-GCM).

<comment><USER5> > ... except for the curves, all the crypto primitives are derived from > Keccak.

This sounds intriguing. Could you share some keywords helpful in searching for more precise descriptions of deriving various crypto primitives from Keccak? I can image generating keys using hash functions but not the primitives themselves.

Quick search yielded only this: [https://csrc.nist.gov/CSRC/media/Presentations/FIPS-202-and-...](https://csrc.nist.gov/CSRC/media/Presentations/FIPS-202-and- Keccak-Derived-Functions/images-media/day1_research_200-250pt1.pdf)

<comment><USER2> Search for [hamburg strobe], read the STROBE paper, and follow the links. :)

<comment><USER5> Excellent, thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> More details here:

[https://www.cryptologie.net/article/432/disco/](https://www.cryptologie.net/article/432/disco/)

</comment><comment><USER7> "In other words, you can use libdisco to securely connect peers together," \- any idea as to best practise in terms of using Golang library for next step: connecting the peers through firewalls..etc.? Bittorrent clients have become masters when it comes to automating UDP protocol use along with selective hole punching of firewalls on Win/OSX but they are complex beasts to learn from!

<comment><USER8> I'd say it depends on required speed and use cases. See libp2p's ifaces for swarm, routing, etc. Heck, you could use Tor, make onion services for your peers, and add the names to Bittorrent's mainline DHT for discovery (of course Tor is slower...a price you pay for anonymity)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I can't comment on the protocol itself, but including an interactive quiz directing the user to a documentation page is a brilliant idea.

</comment><comment><USER10> Looking forward to a review from tptacek.

<comment><USER2> David knows more about this stuff than I do, for whatever that's worth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Congratulations on the release David; I will be watching this one closely!

</comment><comment><USER12> > libdisco is experimental. It has not been thoroughly reviewed and relies on > an unstable specification. It should not be used in production.

Have you seen production lately?

</comment><comment><USER13> He broke rule #1: don't implement your own crypto

<comment><USER11> No this doesn't apply because David is a cryptographer. Clue. He is exactly the kind of cat I want to be writing crypto.</comment></comment>


FBI says hackers hit key services in three US cities - <AUTHOR> http://svhp.wordpress.com/2011/12/14/fbi-says-hackers-hit-key-services-in-three-us-cities/ <comment><USER2> the text is a straight copy from <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16157883></comment>


Enabling the real-time web with LiveDirectory.org (an early release) - <AUTHOR> http://livedirectory.org/

<comment><AUTHOR> I built LiveDirectory.org as a first attempt at providing a real and practical way for anybody to publish and manage their own content so that application developers can easily build real-time, event-driven web applications.

LiveDirectory aims to implement a WebHook style system, but with a real and practical application that is designed to be used, and be useful.

LiveDirectory is currently at a very early stage of development, but I am most interested to see what the HackerNews community think of the general idea...

</comment><comment><USER2> Isn't this PubSubHubbub, but not? What differentiates your protocol from PuSH?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the question!

I think that PubSubHubbub is mainly for integration with feeds (RSS, ATOM etc) - correct me if I'm wrong! So the PubSubHubbub is somewhat restricted. So I would say the difference between PubSubHubbub and LiveDirectory is that with LiveDirectory the data that is passed around is JSON, which means that:

1). It can be almost limitless in its structure (using combinations of objects, arrays, string, numbers and booleans) - RSS & Atom have very fixed data structures, so if you want to represent some other data structure, for example a client list, your latest special offers or your company office addresses you're out of luck.

2). JSON data is often far easier to parse and process than XML, so the callback notifications are much more 'developer friendly'.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for clarifying your intent, but I think the original commenter is right, there seems to be little here so far that PuSH cannot do.

In fact there have been recent proposals for PuSH to gain JSON message formats (I believe superfeedr is now providing JSON data as well).

That said, there certainly seems to be room for more PuSH hubs, perhaps that is a direction you can take LiveDirectory.

References:

PubSubHubBub JSON Draft: <http://martin.atkins.me.uk/specs/pubsubhubbub-json>

SuperFeedr JSON: <http://blog.superfeedr.com/json-pubsubhubbub-notification/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the extra-reading, I will definately take a look at those.

However, I will add that the whole 'pubsubhubbub' thing is very unfriendly (including the silly name) for the people that would be it's most valuable users, ie the people that are generating interesting, novel and valuable online content...

...So in addition to the fact that LiveDirectory is already up and running and working with JSON as the data language, it also aims to make life as easy as possible for BOTH the content publishers AND application developers.

Actually, I see think that LiveDirectory is only an intermediate step until website generally get more 'interactive'. What would be cool is to have a standard like:

<http://somewebsite.com/services.json> (or services.xml)

whereby the 'services.json' file would describe what 'actions' and 'data' is available programatically ('search', 'subscribe', 'contact details', 'product catalog' etc).

ch, I really appreciate the feedback, this is exactly why I posted this on HN! Please don't think of my response as being in anyway aggressive or defensive :-)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The word BITCOIN is a registered trademark in the UK for clothing and food - <AUTHOR> https://trademarks.ipo.gov.uk/ipo-tmcase/page/Results/1/UK00003279106 <comment><AUTHOR> I thought people on HN might be interested to see that the word BITCOIN is now a registered trademark in the UK for clothing, food, drink, and alcoholic drinks.

It's a recently granted trademark, and it's being actively enforced.

[https://imgur.com/a/JTBZKui](https://imgur.com/a/JTBZKui)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/8m286u/advic...](https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/8m286u/advice_regarding_this_trademark_infringement/)</comment>


Show HN: SHA1 Checksum Large Files with HTML5 Typed Arrays and Web Workers - <AUTHOR> http://antimatter15.github.com/js-typed-array-sha1/

<comment><USER2> Cool concept and a great usage of WebWorkers. I can see this being useful to verify the integrity of files uploaded via an HTML form - get the SHA1 client- side and verify it against a SHA1 server-side.

Unfortunately this implementation is way too slow for large files. In Chrome 15 OSX running a Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz an ~650MB file takes about 9.3 minutes to calculate the resultant SHA. Using openssl the hash generation takes ~8 seconds. (Bearing in mind that it's not fair to compare an interpreted script against a compiled program.)

<comment><USER3> I think this is a _fair_ comparison and the truth (that many cannot swallow) is that Javascript is simply too slow for non-trivial computations. All these talks about Javascript finally catching up in speed to native, and now a slightly non-trivial algorithm and Javascript falls flat in its face. I got similar result to pygorex in my run, and the Javascript implementation is indeed 60X slower than native.

Now compare that to HashSum, a a Silverlight-based implementation of the SHA-1 (I verified that it generates the same result), I clocked it and it is 20X faster than the Javascript implementation, and ~3X slower than native. Try it at <http://www.hashsum.com> (I wrote it; Silverlight required; sorry about the ad/layout, it was an "exercise" a while back).

So HTML5/Javascript is the future, and the future does not include Flash/Silverlight. Perhaps. But this experiment shows that Javascript is clearly way too slow compared to native or plugin. You could argue that the plugin-based scenario is going out of favor. Politics, competition, distribution, etc, are all valid reasons. But "Javascript is now just as fast" isn't one, because it is not. Those who are gung-ho about how fast Javascript is needs to write their own SHA-1 implementation that _beats_ <http://www.hashsum.com> ... or at least not be blown away by it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In worker.js :

//Firefox doesn't support FileReader inside WebWorkers

I noticed that Firefox has FileReaderSync available only from Web Workers. <https://developer.mozilla.org/en/DOM/FileReaderSync>

Per spec (<http://dev.w3.org/2006/webapi/FileAPI/#readingOnThreads>) web workers can use both. The use cases I have will work fine with the sync interface, but I wonder why Firefox chose not to provide the async option in workers.

</comment><comment><USER5> OK, this is pretty cool :-)

If you don't mind my asking, what's the license on this, if I'd like to use this in one of my projects?

</comment><comment><USER6> Wow, this is awesome. I prefer using a desktop program for multiple checking, but this is very nice looking. Thanks for the resource.</comment>


Guy commits his genome to Github, smartass forks and issues a pull request - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/msporny/dna/pull/1 <comment><USER2> You know... what would be interesting is if he convinced his parents to submit their data and then he had his data as a merge commit.

<comment><USER3> git blame

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> that's not a smartarse, that's quite genuinely funny (ymmv)

<comment><USER5> Is it funny because it's funny, or is it funny because this will probably happen (in all seriousness) for real one day?

(rhetorical musing question)

<comment><USER6> it's funny because I bet this is how the Eugenics Wars/World War III started in Star Trek.

<comment><USER7> wow; that's a blast from the past but that war was middle-asian, wasn't it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sometimes I do not understand HN. There is the original post of the guy that posted his DNA on github.com (with the link of course) and a decent discussion on

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2211334>

(5 hours ago)

and still this post is the most upvoted

<comment><USER9> Well the original is the blog entry, this is the actual pull request. Plus, this title is a lot funnier. What do you expect late on a Saturday night?

<comment><USER10> I don't read HN much, but I thought that in theory that's something you would expect of reddit and not HN? Isn't HN supposed to be above that kind of stuff?

<comment><USER9> You could make the argument that HN would be more interested in the code as opposed to the blog talking about it...

<comment><USER11> Which is odd because starting from the blog you get the author's take on it AND a link to the code. It's not like you just get one or the other. I would think HN would (should?) be more interested in the whole story and not just a link to a codebase whenever possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If only we could truly activate _noprocrast mode_ in our genetic code by simply changing 3 base pairs...

Imagine how much money the people who discovered it would end up making!

<comment><USER13> I thought they found that the ability to delay gratitude is largely genetic? That's still a long way from identifying the particular gene responsible (or even knowing that there _is_ a particular gene, and it's not a combination of a large number of unrelated genes), but it does make it plausible that this will be possible one day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't see why Github couldn't be used to version track actual genomes of engineered small organisms... It would be great, you could curate changes that are 'virtual', changes that have been made, tested, and validated.

</comment><comment><USER15> "Eyelids now close in proper way. Fixes issue #42." I find humor in this.

</comment><comment><USER16> Maybe "genome" should be replaced by "a part of his genome".

For more information about the raw format used by 23 and Me: <http://www.snpedia.com/index.php/23andMe>

</comment><comment><USER17> shame, I did this a few weeks ago: <http://github.com/orta/dna>

<comment><USER2> I would say you dodged a bullet. This guy's repo is fast becoming a gag: <https://github.com/msporny/dna/network/members>

Also, he explicitly released it under the Creative Commons Public Domain License. Incidentally, I wonder if that has any patent implications? Does having genomes in the public domain prevent pharma companies from patenting their "discoveries"?

<comment><USER18> Aren't you not supposed to be able to patent facts? Seems like your DNA structure should be classified as a fact.

<comment><USER19> see the BRCA1/2 (myriad) debacle. horrible mess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This guy made real changes to the genome: <https://github.com/cariaso/dna>

ie: removed increased risk of coronary artery disease at rs1333049

Pretty awesome

</comment><comment><USER21> ignorance is bliss, i had to look this up since i use mercurial.

<http://help.github.com/pull-requests/>

makes sense now, pretty funny comment about the nipple.

<comment><USER22> GitHub and Mercurial aren't mutually exclusive; hg-git works pretty well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This just blew my mind - mostly because it could totally happen some day.

</comment><comment><USER24> I find those commits to be more fun (because they seem to be real thing): <https://github.com/cariaso/dna/commits/>

</comment><comment><USER25> There's a huge difference between releasing his fully sequenced dna and the data from a genotyping chip.... I went to the github site expecting to see several large fasta files for each chromosome.

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm sure he's not worried about Facebook privacy.

</comment><comment><USER27> <insert joke about natural selection>

<comment><USER28> with proper TDD (tests representing the environment) it should be possible to generate random commits and only commit them when they pass the test suite.

<comment><USER2> What do you do when there are serious ethical considerations with running your test suite?

<comment><USER28> I would say it should make us realize we are no more than mere simulations in some huge computer about to have the power cable pulled by god's boss before he tells him to get back to work. (scifi book idea )

<comment><USER9> I'm pretty sure that was the plot of a fairly well know scifi book _cough_ hhgttg _cough_. Except it wasn't God's boss that pulls the cable - Earth was demolished to make way for an intergalactic bypass.

<comment><USER29> That's kind of a stretch of an interpretation, don't you think? I always thought that the Earth was still physical in the way that we usually think of it, and humans were just part of its physical operation rather than being simulations.

<comment><USER30> Yeah, us being the substrate rather than the software is a bit of an unusual take on it, even now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Funny, now!

In the future, common practice.

</comment><comment><USER32> Literally laughing outloud at this.</comment>


London Redis Meetup on 26 May 2010 - <AUTHOR> http://playnice.ly/blog/2010/05/19/join-us-at-the-first-london-redis-meetup-on-26-may-2010/

<comment><USER2> Sounds like a great idea - the curated.by team will be around. We're also looking for a backend developer to join our team!

<comment><AUTHOR> Great! It will be good to see you there. Are you using Redis on curated.by?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: My first public-data app is up - what should be next? (NextBus.ca) - <AUTHOR>

The city of Calgary has recently published their public data catalogue. As a fun project I came up with NextBus.ca - it gives commuters the next bus times for a given stop.
After the implementation, I came across a similar service from city's transit website and another local company with a native iPhone app (under development).
Should I stop at that? Should I keep plugging and find ways to monetize? <comment><USER2> They finally published the data without onerous licensing? About time.</comment>


Automating Betfair - a blog about Gambling and Technology - <AUTHOR> http://automatingbetfair.blogspot.com/

<comment><USER2> To make sure I understand this, BetFair is a simple betting platform. People make bets, and other people take those bets. What he proposes to do is play both sides of an event, and hope that some takes both of them. That way, regardless of the outcome, he turns a small profit.If I understand this right, he's basically just doing arbitrage on the betting market.

<comment><AUTHOR> He explores various strategies for using Betfair other than arbitrage, outlined here [[http://automatingbetfair.blogspot.com/2010/02/four- trading-s...](http://automatingbetfair.blogspot.com/2010/02/four-trading- strategies.html)]

He also notes that simple arbitrage opportunities have long been exhausted [[http://automatingbetfair.blogspot.com/2010/02/betfair- bots-a...](http://automatingbetfair.blogspot.com/2010/02/betfair-bots-and- opportunity-out-there.html)]

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Pretty interesting reading (my group at MS did automated market making.)

Did this make anyone else cringe?

> In addition: an SQLite database, sitting in a Dropbox directory, can be used > by different instances and computers in different locations, running atop > different platforms.

<comment><USER4> Ha. The disaster alarms were ringing loudly in my head. Josh- I assume MS means Morgan Stanley, not Microsoft. If so, do you think all the sorts of problems we see financial organizations taking advantage of could be applied to gambling markets. That is, does Miller's contention that finance would not exist without transaction costs apply equally to gambling? If so, is gambling just another form of an options market? And finally, should gambling be treated like any other market with buy and sell prices (like commodities or bonds)?

<comment><USER3> So, I haven't thought about your premise at all. So this is off the cuff.

I think that gambling about real-world events (election outcomes etc) can be a kind of futures market and are a valid kind of market. I'd want to be able to hedge against elections and so on.

Manufactured events (horse racing?) and raw probability (die rolls) are probably not valid markets, IMO.

Personally, I think that the problems we see because of financial organizations misbehaving are due to regulatory issues rather than structural issues.

<comment><USER4> Oh, I definitely wasn't passing judgment on financial firms. By "problems", I meant reducing transaction costs by bundling and/or securitizing. I was more referring to the general problem being that capital markets are not perfect (in the economic sense).

The real question is how one would actually perform a hedge in a gambling market. I guess, what it comes down to, is 1) are there hedging opportunities and 2) if not, why not?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Arbitrage opportunities exist in most markets, and while they may be seen as a drain on the system - ultimately they have the net effect of keeping markets sensible.

THere's no free ride.... if people are making a killing on some arbitrage gap (whether on the global economic markets, or betfair, or multiple offshore gambling sites) - the market will eventually correct for it as the arbitrage activity becomes part of the market.

There's no free ride.</comment>


Ask HN: Creating my own USB-C hub? - <AUTHOR> I've never done any hardware stuff before. Been a software developer for years now. I see all of these neat thunderbolt / usb-c devices that will have many ports all through the one cable. I can't find anything online about this.<p>How would I go about creating my own thunderbolt / usb c hub? <comment><USER2> Creating a safe & reliable USB hub actually is quite a bit of engineering if you have never done it before. It isn't as simple as just splitting the wires into multiple outlets.

If you are wanting to learn I could see it as a fun project but it will cost you many times what it would just to buy one from Amazon.</comment>


China cracks down on religion, crosses burned at Christian churches - <AUTHOR> http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-09-25/crosses-burned-in-china-religion-crackdown/10301956 <comment><USER3> It's simple. They cannot allow any ideology to subvert the party (CCP) ideology. They don't hate religion for the sake of hating religion. They don't hate FG/FD, Christians or Muslims (or Buddhists for that matter) for being who they are. They do hate and will remove anything which may subvert the supremacy of the state. Simple as that.

<comment><USER4> They want the communist party to be the primarly religion. Just like in the Soviet states where religion were systematically eliminated in favor of state religion[1]:

> USSR became the first state to have as one objective of its official > ideology the elimination of existing religion, and the prevention of future > implanting of religious belief, with the goal of establishing state atheism > (gosateizm).

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

<comment><USER5> Seems very similar to the reign of terror during the French Revolution though?

<comment><USER4> Whats your point?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It appears that China's government doesn't like _organized_ Christianity, or any organized religion. It doesn't really matter what you personally believe. What matters though is anything that can influence people emotionally and philosophically, which basically means having control (thus power) over peoples' emotional and rational states of mind. Any place of congregation is potentially doing just that.

It's worrisome to see though that China has decided to go that extremely rigorous way, like burning crosses publicly and the like. Wow.

<comment><USER7> China in particular has a good reason to be weary of organized Christianity ever since a guy claiming to be the younger brother of Jesus started a civil war that killed at least 20-30 million people: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiping_Rebellion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiping_Rebellion)

<comment><USER8> Yet China had good reason to be impressed by Marxism, also a Western import, because it killed 45 million. In that sense, I understand why Marxism would be more impressive than Christianity to a people who never had freedom. It won and killed more people.

<comment><USER9> That's funny since China has never been Marxist in it history.

<comment><USER8> no true scotsman?

perhaps another 45 million would have done it.

<comment><USER10> Please stop using HN primarily for ideological battle. This is in the site guidelines, and we ban accounts that do it.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In 1538, the chief minister Thomas Cromwell pursued an extensive campaign against what was termed "idolatry" by the followers of the old religion, culminating in September with the dismantling of the shrine of St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury. As a consequence, the king was excommunicated by Pope Paul III on 17 December of the same year.[84] In 1540, Henry sanctioned the complete destruction of shrines to saints. In 1542, England's remaining monasteries were all dissolved, and their property transferred to the Crown. Abbots and priors lost their seats in the House of Lords; only archbishops and bishops remained. Consequently, the Lords Spiritual—as members of the clergy with seats in the House of Lords were known—were for the first time outnumbered by the Lords Temporal. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_VIII_of_England#Shrines_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_VIII_of_England#Shrines_destroyed_and_monasteries_dissolved)

</comment><comment><USER12> I sometimes wonder why do they want to protect the state by cracking down churches instead of using religion, a powerful tool of control, to their advantage. It would take more time to build a Chinese branch of Christianity (and others) but be a lot more efficient.

<comment><USER13> There are 3 state sponsored churches in China. The trouble is they don't experience much growth compared to the underground churches.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three- Self_Patriotic_Movement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three- Self_Patriotic_Movement) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Christian_Council](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Christian_Council) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Patriotic_Catholic_Ass...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Patriotic_Catholic_Association)

<comment><USER14> Like those purchased-startup-turned-department in big corporations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Do we have any other sources for this? The article seems quite inflammatory.

</comment><comment><USER16> For a counter point, I saw a huge group of people happily doing yoga out in a square the other day. Also this was shared in the open across domestic electronic media. This would have been unthinkable around the Fulun Gong period. It looks to me like things are opening up slowly but surely. What was the quote? "Religion is poison". Well, yeah. I'll take yoga over millenial cultists any day. But it'd be nice to see something like Taipei's desperately underappreciated _Museum of World Religions_ [0] here in the mainland, to celebrate the human journey and common perspective rather than denominational religion per se.

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

</comment><comment><USER17> I think it's one thing to remove the religious symbol, and a complete other thing to burn it publicly before removing it.

The later seems to indicate that this symbol is "hated" by the people who are removing it (government in this case).

I can "kinda" understand that they don't want religious symbols in public.

But the fact that they shame and uses fear against the people is what shock me the most about this.

</comment><comment><USER18> Group of politicians fighting other politicians reported by website aligned with a third batch of politicians.

Being critiqued without much rigour by the otherwise logical community here.

It's like reading a netmums forum debating p2p file sharing architecture based on a story about pornography they heard.

<comment><USER10> That's possible, because it's not a topic the majority of this community has detailed knowledge or personal experience of. Still, it would be better to provide substantive correction than to post a shallow dismissal, which the site guidelines ask you not to do.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER19> Shallow article, shallow dismissal.

The forum you moderate has been teetering towards nationalist "othering" of China ever since the Google thing was floated. 90% of the people hurling invective clearly know nothing about the country.

It's not "boo China" vs "yay China", it's "boo China" vs "try to understand China".

<comment><USER10> You're talking about macro social/political trends. Obviously HN can't be immune from those. Perhaps you've noticed us trying to moderate it—in the literal sense of that word—as best we can. That's hard to do and we have few resources to do it with. So if you care about HN, could you please avoid harming it further by kicking at a situation that's fragile and getting worse? Instead, assuming you know more, you could contribute some of what you know. If you'd do that in a non-inflammatory way, it could be helpful. Calling names just strengthens the ignorance you're complaining about, which makes you partly responsible for it. (Not to pick on you personally; we all do this.)

Even if you don't care, we need you to follow the site guidelines if you want to keep commenting here. They say: "Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." ([https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)) This comment and others haven't been meeting that bar, so please do better.

I would not call this article shallow. It's full of details. Better questions to raise would be whether it has been corroborated (as pftburger did: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18227679](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18227679)), and what relevant information it may omit. It also seems legit to wonder why so many such articles have been appearing lately, though because there isn't much evidence one can point to, there probably isn't a non-flamey discussion to be had there.

Even when an article is shallow, a shallow dismissal still breaks the guidelines. Commenters owe better not to the article, but to the community they're participating in.

p.s. You've mischaracterized my line about booyay by misquoting it ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18214633](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18214633)). Those phrases are not objective descriptions—they're how each side feels to the opposite side (hence the 'fuck you' bit), which explains why they react so badly to each other.

<comment><USER19> Thanks for the response.

If I misremembered your exact quote, please consider it a charitable misquote.

<comment><USER10> Appreciated!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Christianity in China has always been under threat. The Eastern Church in China thrived upon arrival for awhile until the 9th/10th centuries when it died out publicly. It became underground, now trying to resurface it seems like history is repeating itself.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'd be happy if in the west we just stopped the state from financially subsidising religions - though I could imagine the uproar against any formal proposal to do so.

<comment><USER22> Even though sponsoring still happens (think: renovating buildings; assisting communities to build their own churches/temples/whatever), State and Church are seperated in France: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1905_French_law_on_the_Separat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1905_French_law_on_the_Separation_of_the_Churches_and_the_State)

<comment><USER21> That's really interesting, thank you.

Property taxes - along with local council rates - are an area that religions obtain significant financial benefit from the state (definitely in AU, and I believe UK and US also).

It seems to be one of those things that fits the category 'this is how it's always been done', so it's tremendously difficult to initiate any policy change.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I cannot believe this is happening in todays China. Even if the gov doesnt like the christianity how is it significant that they cant just ignore it?

<comment><USER24> The Romans ignored, ridiculed and fought Christianity and then they converted to it.

<comment><USER25> After killing martyr after martyr after martyr, the Romans saw in this belief something useful that they could control.

Before converting to it, they standardized it and shaped it to their convenience in the First Council of Nicaea. They also decided which books made it into the bible, and which ones were "apocryphal".

The Bishop of Rome became the Pope, and after the fall of the Roman empire, the Vatican still exerted a tremendous control: the pope could excommunicate anyone, including kings.

<comment><USER26> "They also decided which books made it into the bible, and which ones were "apocryphal"

That's a bit far fetched claim. Apocryphal books are apocryphal for a reason, they didn't make into the canon as they couldn't have been written by witnesses of what happened at the beginning of our era - <USER2> geographical places are wrong, mentioned historical events and people are messed up, language is wrong, etc.

<comment><USER27> You're not actually discrediting the claim that they 'decided which books made it into the bible, and which ones were "apocryphal"', only offering a rationale for doing so.

It remains true that they decided which parts of existing and accepted Christian doctrine were true and which parts were no longer true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This seems off-topic, but I don't have the ability to flag.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER3> It's not unusual for news about these kinds of issues make it to HN. (be it Maynmar, Khashoggy, etc.)

<comment><USER28> It seems quite obviously political to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Communism countries always fear relegion 'cause want only 'clean hands' of his citizens for their shitty ideology.

<comment><USER10> Please keep generic ideological flamewar off HN. It never goes anywhere new, and it always goes somewhere nasty. And this comment gets it off to a really bad start.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> a little extreme but they are moving in the right direction. religion restricts the growth of knowledge.

<comment><USER8> wow. the chinese internet propaganda warriors are all over this thread.

<comment><USER10> This breaks the site guidelines, and we ban accounts that do it repeatedly, so please don't do it again. Specifically: "Please don't impute astroturfing or shillage. That degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about it, email us and we'll look at the data." [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

The comment was also lazy, since a glance at the history of the account refutes it. Not that they've been great comments, but someone who has been posting about Python, web apps, organic batteries, web assembly, and carbonated soda for over a year is obviously a regular Hacker News user.

Edit: it looks like you've been using primarily for ideological battle. That's also a bannable abuse of the site, stated in the guidelines as explained by [https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...](https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=by:dang%20primarily%20line). So please stop doing that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> At a recent funeral I was shocked and disgusted at how the preist manipulated the emotions of my relatives. That a nation state shares my suspicion is something positive in my view.

I am not opposed to spirituality. I think organized religion subverts people from their own quest.

<comment><USER32> Preventing people from doing some of what they want is actually an important function of society. I made my peace with religions after reading Darwin's Cathedral by David Sloan Wilson. To me it explained very well how religions were a tool for organizing ever larger societies. We wouldn't be where we are as humanity if we hadn't had the power of religion.

There is no society without religion. That is, every society needs tenets that all members share.

Now we should ask ourselves what religion is adequate for today's world.

<comment><USER33> There is one defining characteristic of religion: The acceptance of unsubstantiated claims as actual fact, i.e., faith. Please explain how that is something that society needs.

Redefining religion to encompass any kind of shared values is a cheap trick to legitimize the destructive nature of dogma and of teaching people that accepting nonsense as fact is a virtue by pretending that a secular state is a religion--which is just absurd.

<comment><USER32> Every society needs common beliefs to function. These beliefs are arbitrary in the sense that there are other beliefs that would work just as well.

All secular states have a flag used for ceremonial purposes for example. It's supposed to create a feeling of unity. Just like religious symbols do. Sure we can talk about matters of degree. Not all societies have an all-seeing god, for example.

<comment><USER33> > Every society needs common beliefs to function. These beliefs are arbitrary > in the sense that there are other beliefs that would work just as well.

First of all, you are confusing two very distinct concepts here under the label "belief", just as religions usually do. One is "stuff you think you know about how the world works", the other is "how you think certain things should be done".

Your "beliefs" as to how certain things should be done are arbitrary to a degree.

If your "beliefs" about how the world works are arbitrary, then your epistemology is heavily broken, in particular it is probably lacking falsifiability. Things you let go close to the surface of the earth either fall down or they don't. If you believe the latter, you are just wrong. This is the concept of "belief" that I was talking about above: Religions make unsubstantiated claims about how the world works and indoctrinate people into accepting that nonsense as factual knowledge about the world, claiming that doing so (what they then call "faith", another such misleading equivocation) is a virtue.

Now, you need common beliefs about how the world works for the simple reason that if two people have contradicting beliefs about how the world works, at least one of them is wrong, and being wrong about how the world works is not conducive to controlling your environment. In that sense, it is much less confusing to simply say that a society needs accurate beliefs about how the world works--which necessarily will be common.

As for common beliefs about how certain things should be done: Well, yes, you need that, too, and while those can be arbitrary to a degree, it isn't all that much of a degree, because most of how things should be done is a consequence of how the world works, and if it isn't, you are, again, wrong.

> All secular states have a flag used for ceremonial purposes for example. > It's supposed to create a feeling of unity. Just like religious symbols do.

So? Are there any unsubstantiated claims in the existence of a national flag? Why do you mention this?!

Religions do lots of stuff that non-religions do, which is exactly why those things are not defining characteristics of religions.

> Not all societies have an all-seeing god, for example.

Which is indeed an example of an unsubstantiated claim that religions sell as factual. And a claim that secular states do very well without. Which is precisely why it is absurd to pretend that secular states are religions.

<comment><USER32> While I can agree that my definition of religion is very broad, I have trouble to see where to draw the line. I'd say this is an unsubstantiated claim:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Does that sentence define how the world works? Or does it define how we want to live? Or does it kinda both? The point I'm trying to make here is that religion should be understood as a system of government. And that we would do well to understand even secular governments under the same terms. Not as a guide, but for clarity.

I don't pretend secular governments to be religions. I simply define them as such and then see what fits and what doesn't. It's very illuminating to me. The superstitions are not very interesting in that regard. I think they get too much credit.

Insisting that religions are defined by their superstitions misses a large part of what they are and why they exist.

<comment><USER33> > "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, > that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that > among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

> Does that sentence define how the world works? Or does it define how we want > to live? Or does it kinda both?

Well, the part about being created by a creator is an unsubstantiated claim about how the world works--and also completely unnecessary. That is, unless you want to appeal to people who have already been indoctrinated into thinking bad of you if you don't accept such unsubstantiated claims.

The function of that sentence otherwise is simply to declare how the signatories think their state(s) should be governed.

> The point I'm trying to make here is that religion should be understood as a > system of government.

Well, but if you understand religion as a system of government, that doesn't make all systems of government religions, does it? Otherwise, you are just using "religion" as a synonym for "system of government", which is at best pointless (because we already have the term "system of government") and at worst extremely confusing (because most people will understand "religion" to mean something very different than "system of government").

> And that we would do well to understand even secular governments under the > same terms. Not as a guide, but for clarity.

Aren't you just saying that it is insightful to compare religions to other systems of government? Well, yeah, sure. But in order to make an insightful comparison between trains and planes you don't have to define trains to be a "kind of plane, just without flight".

> I don't pretend secular governments to be religions. I simply define them as > such and then see what fits and what doesn't.

But that is how you do pretend they are religions. While you are free to define terms however you want, if you just implicitly use definitions that deviate from common understanding, you are misleading your audience.

> The superstitions are not very interesting in that regard. I think they get > too much credit.

Are you saying that superstitions (and the epistemology that supports them) have no significant influence on how religious people behave as compared to non-religous people?

> Insisting that religions are defined by their superstitions misses a large > part of what they are and why they exist.

So, what would be an example of what religions are and why they exist that is not superstition and also doesn't apply to non-religions (because, if it applies to non-religions, it's not a defining characteristic specific to religions)?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Did you start and give up on learning Haskell or Purescript? - <AUTHOR> Did you try to learn Haskell or a similar language, but decided to give up? If so, any particular reason? <comment><USER2> No, I kept going and I'm pretty happy that I decided to stick with it</comment>


Yahoo Wants to Blind the Competition With Science - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/08/yahoo-science/

<comment><USER2> hacking != science

Yahoo needs to compete on product, not algorithms.

Yahoo Mail did nothing while Gmail made continuous progress towards a great product and earned market share.

Yahoo did nothing while Twitter grew into a monster. Yahoo could have crushed Twitter if they had simply adapted or expanded YIM while Twitter's servers were flailing.

Advertising is the one area Yahoo has retained some leadership (rightmedia), but they aren't blinding the competition with that science.

Yahoo needs creativity. It needs product vision. It needs to stop resting on prior accomplishments and start building if it wants to recapture the attention of consumers.

Science should be a supporting character to creativity.

</comment><comment><USER3> For those who were confused (as I was), Prabhakar Raghavan wasn't the one who recently died, it was his co-author in Randomized Algorithms, Rajeev Motwani.

BTW, I highly recommend their book. In it is all the evidence of the genesis of Google.

</comment><comment><USER4> Whenever I hear "pure science" I think of this:

<http://www.vonnegutweb.com/catscradle/cats_nytimes.html>

</comment><comment><USER5> From the article : "But what problems are left to be solved?"

To ensure that Web companies (like Yahoo!) are keeping their API open, accessible and active.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1611718>

</comment><comment><USER6> That's some prompt paid advertisement to reply to PG.

I hope they take it seriously though.

<comment><USER7> I see no reason to believe it's paid - do you?</comment></comment>


Twitter Health Metrics Proposal Submission - <AUTHOR> https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/company/2018/twitter-health-metrics-proposal-submission.html <comment><USER2> For context on what's happened at Twitter, see Jack's tweet storm [https://twitter.com/jack/status/969234275420655616](https://twitter.com/jack/status/969234275420655616)</comment>


Firestone Stopped Ebola in Its Tracks - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/blogs/goatsandsoda/2014/10/06/354054915/firestone-did-what-governments-have-not-stopped-ebola-in-its-tracks/ <comment><USER2> Honestly what it really boils down to is resources and money ("resource" can also be described as "money" therefore really money and money).

Up until very recently there were simply not enough hazmat suits, not enough burn-able bedding, not enough people (who wants to work with Ebola?), not enough disinfectant, and heck even clean water in SOME areas.

Then you have to consider how damn hot it is there, so a $5 hazmat suit may not cut it (this article covers that). Now you're dealing with suits costing tens of times more than that for basic AC, just to allow the people in them to work longer shifts.

You also have a lot of local population pushback. The hazmat suits scare people, and all locals see is Ebola patients go into treatment and die. There is a lot of suspicion that Westerners are getting people sick to kill them, so they hide away family members until they get infectious.

What can be done? Money, and resources. It isn't a magic bullet but if you train a metric ton of local people and give them everything they could possibly need it would at least slow the spread if not reverse it entirely...

PS - This article is exactly WHY I am not legitimately concerned about a wide- spread infection in the Western world. We are simply too rich, we have or can acquire the resources, and even your average Joe Smith on the street can Google how to protect themselves from Ebola exposure.

<comment><USER3> >This article is exactly WHY I am not legitimately concerned about a wide- spread infection in the Western world.

Leaving aside the moral argument of preventing huge numbers of innocent people from dying Ebola if we can, there are two reason we in the west should be concerned:

1\. There is a serious risk that Ebola will mutate to become more infectious. It is very unlikely to become airborne (this is about as likely as pigs becoming airborne), but it could relatively easily mutate to slow down its kill speed. At the moment Ebola kills so quickly that there is little time for a patient to spread it to other people. Ebola is under huge selection pressure to slow down the disease progression in humans. We could see a strain arise that takes a month to kill you where you are asymptotically infectious for a couple of weeks. Model this sort of virus and things look far less rosy for us in the west. The more people we let Ebola infect the more likely that such a strain will arise.

2\. Once the number of cases get very large (25,000 a day by Jan 2015 according to the CDC) this is going to start disrupting international trade as countries close their borders. We already saw the sort of recession that can result from disruptions to trade when this happened in the GFC and the Asian crisis in the 90s. With interest rates at or near zero in most countries there is not much that can be done to buffer us economically.

<comment><USER4> >> There is a serious risk that Ebola will mutate to become more infectious.

Not likely. Survival of the fittest for a virus usually means allowing the host to live longer - in other words LESS lethal. It is not likely to become airborne, and if it did it would not be ebola any more. The symptoms of most diseases are not an accident, they are tied to the means of transmission: Colds make you cough and sneeze. Flu makes you cough, sneeze, barf and sweat. Rabies makes you crazy and want to bite. STDs some think may make people horny. Ebola makes you barf, shit, bleed, sweat.

The one scary thing is I once read that a single gene make Ebola hemoragic, and if that were to transfer to a flu, that would be very deadly. But it would also be less virulent due to that same deadliness and so would be selected against as our response to related flu vidii would wipe it out.

None of that is helpful short term, but this notion of the virus getting more horrible than it already is, I don't think so.

<comment><USER5> The GP said "more infectious", not "more lethal".

Your comment is violently agreeing with his point.

<comment><USER4> My point was that more infections would mean less lethal in this case.

<comment><USER6> Which is a confusing way of putting it because being less lethal would make it kill more people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Donation pages for Médecins Sans Frontières:

[http://www.msf.org.uk/make-a-donation](http://www.msf.org.uk/make-a-donation)

[https://donate.doctorswithoutborders.org/](https://donate.doctorswithoutborders.org/)

Send MSF money and we will see more successes like this.

Ebola can be beaten, but only if the resources are there.

</comment><comment><USER3> All this story tells us is that what we have known since the mid 70s that if you can get and keep patients in a proper infection control facility that you can stop Ebola.

The problem we have right now is that we don't have anywhere near enough functioning infection control facilities in the affect countries and we are not doing anywhere near enough to put them in place. The scale required is beyond anything ever attempted outside of a war setting.

</comment><comment><USER8> "They grabbed a bunch of hazmat suits for dealing with chemical spills at the rubber factory and gave them to the hospital staff. The suits worked just as well for Ebola cases."

I suppose having a rubber factory nearby helped a lot. Not to diminish their managerial achievement, but I imagine getting proper equipment might be a major obstacle in other parts of the country.

</comment><comment><USER9> I think a "corporate micro-city" might be the solution for poverty in the 3rd world. I think a joint venture with google, facebook, apple, and 1st world governments etc to build a "hong kong/singapore styled city" next to a 3rd world capital could be the catalyst for transforming the country. I don't think providing internet access is enough. You need to break the cycle of poverty from birth to college. And you need a vehicle/brand that the 1st world can invest in/trust. I think you can avoid the obvious pitfalls by creating multiple independent neighboring "corporate mirco-cities" so there is competition for residents.

<comment><USER4> >> I think a "corporate micro-city" might be the solution for poverty in the 3rd world.

Funny, I was thinking it contributes to the problem. It clearly creates inequality which can be seen in this article. The company simply doing the minimum to exploit the resources in the area with no spill-over into the larger region. It would be more helpful to the locals if they were vertically integrated right there - producing tires. That would require building more infrastructure and more manufacturing capability and such. But no, they just want to grow the rubber there and keep the higher value stuff elsewhere.

To clarify, I'm not saying "companies=bad" just that companies only have self- interest and are not inherently good for the broader region they inhabit. This is abundantly clear from TFA which I don't think is the message they wanted us to take away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> All I can do is scratch my head, wondering what the reporter _isn 't_ saying. Just what is it that Firestone is doing differently? It sure appears to be working, so it would be great to replicate if possible.

Marbel is a company town of 80,000 ... a city more or less owned and run by Firestone, benevolently it appears, for nearly a century.

Perhaps they're better at guarding and enforcing their border ... effectively keeping themselves mostly isolated from disease vectors coming in.

Perhaps that helps them avoid being outnumbered by the sick and, more importantly, the ignorant [1]. After all, it's easy to keep an eye on those exposed when they're comparatively few and you have reliable information ... which comes from having a literate, educated population you've been working with for decades.

Perhaps it's also easier to get honest [2], voluntary compliance when you're a close-knit community and the infected are usually coming from the outside (and, again, are few in number).

It sure is interesting that while Firestone has hazmat suits intended for dealing with chemical spills, that infected nurse in Spain [3] says the blame goes to her Level 2 biosafety suit since it wasn't the preferred Level 4. Please correct me if I'm wrong ... I get the sense Firestone's suits aren't comparable to Level 4.

Contrast this to the success (lack thereof) of the CDC, WHO, RSF, and other aid organizations. Sadly, they're either overwhelmed or incompetant. So what's needed is more Firestones, really? That's interesting.

\-----

[1] Yes, ignorance is massively lethal. See this story from August, of a mob who decided it would be fun to ransack and rob and already-overwhelmed Ebola clinic, stealing everything and taking it home ... all while taking Ebola home with them.

[http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2014/08/16/man- without-a...](http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2014/08/16/man-without-a- country/)

[2] As opposed to the diplomat who deceived his way into continuing on to a meeting of regional leaders ... thereby effectively causing the outbreak in Nigeria. And as opposed to the CDC today handing out fliers in airports and expecting voluntary compliance, in a sense informing travelers of how to lie in order to get into the USA where the good hospitals are.

[3] [http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2014/10/07/paradigm- shif...](http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2014/10/07/paradigm-shift/)

<comment><USER11> > It sure is interesting that while Firestone has hazmat suits intended for > dealing with chemical spills, that infected nurse in Spain [3] says the > blame goes to her Level 2 biosafety suit since it wasn't the preferred Level > 4. Please correct me if I'm wrong ... I get the sense Firestone's suits > aren't comparable to Level 4.

As unfortunate as it is, it's more likely that the Spanish nurse was infected while removing her PPE.

Removing contaminated PPE is a non-trivial process. It requires practice, strict attention to detail, and ideally an equally trained buddy watching you while you're doing it. From what I've read, it sounds like they were just given 10 minutes of training.

Which isn't to say that better equipment and a proper decon shower wouldn't have helped. But the training is just as important as the equipment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> " _Forty-eight were treated in the hospital and 18 survived._ "

That's an interesting point on the actual lethality of the disease under more modern treatment conditions. Still, 60% is only slightly less scary than 90%.

</comment><comment><USER13> Wow, a company that can handle a thing like this in stride has to make a good product. I will look at them next time I need tires.

<comment><USER14> Wow, someone that understands capitalism. :)

<comment><USER12> Or is simply vulnerable to good marketing campaigns.

It's been a while since I used Firestone tires, but I'll bet anyone quite a lot that their product development and quality control have very little to do with their human resources practices in the third world. (Even though I think they sound really good, too.)

<comment><USER14> It's a marketing campaign that ends up helping people and the real world.

They have that money to spare because their customers think their products are desirable.

It seems to me you're trying to detract from what happened here by trying to argue that their products aren't _that_ good? I'm not sure what you're implying, but I'll repeat, they've only been able to help, even as a marketing ploy, because they have accumulated profits - proof that their customers value what they produce.

The quality of their product, in the eyes of their customers, has everything to do with their ability to pull off this stunt.

<comment><USER12> I'm not trying to detract from anything they've done, and their products are fine, as far as I know.

What I'm saying is that there is no correlation between their success in dealing with an infectious disease in the area around one of their facilities and the quality of their consumer products.

<comment><USER14> The quality of their products (in the eyes of their consumers) is what enabled them to have all this money sitting around, that came from profits, to help deal with this situation.

I see some correlation there, no?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nigeria has ended Ebola too. But its proximity to the main infections could mean reoccurence.

</comment><comment><USER16> Amazing what happens when western money has an interest in Africa.

</comment><comment><USER17> Anyone is free to use this Ebola awareness poster I made [http://bit.ly/1vF1COO](http://bit.ly/1vF1COO)

<comment><USER18> Also, the UCSC ebola portal is worth a look: [https://genome.ucsc.edu/ebolaPortal](https://genome.ucsc.edu/ebolaPortal)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Yep. Ebola is just not a very scary disease. Its incubation period is short and reliable, it doesn't become infectious until symptoms display, it's not particularly infectious in the first place, and its transmission mechanisms are downright pedestrian. 90% of the first world can make themselves completely safe by googling "Ebola Safety". The other 10% are homeless or hippies and will either get similarly informative pamphlets or are living in communes and won't infect the rest of us. And even if all of that fails, we have the industry to literally _give_ every American a hazmat suit. Ebola may become a _crisis_ , but it will not become a _pandemic_.

<comment><USER20> Let me respond point by point.

> Ebola is just not a very scary disease.

Ebola is a frightening disease. On a psychological point, I feel like the shock of the symptoms itself is lessened due to the fact that most of the infected have dark skin. End-stage Ebola leads to the patient bleeding everywhere. Not only is the patient bleeding from obvious places like the eyes, nose, mouth, ears, penis, vagina, rectum, the whole body becomes covered with bloody petechiae ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasculitis#mediaviewer/File:Vas...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasculitis#mediaviewer/File:Vasculitis.JPG)). On lighter skin, the patient's agony is really apparent. Their bedsheets will be dripping with blood and their eyes swell up and turn a deep maroon color.

> Its incubation period is short and reliable, it doesn't become infectious > until symptoms display,

Yep.

> it's not particularly infectious in the first place

I feel like that's a point that doesn't have nearly enough information. Previous outbreaks have generally been limited the virus burning its way through a small population before it can hit a major population center. Healthcare workers who are currently treating Ebola patients (who should know proper protocol), are being infected at a rate far higher than expected. ([http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/ebola/25-august-2014/en/](http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/ebola/25-august-2014/en/))

> its transmission mechanisms are downright pedestrian

I'll grant you that transmission by fluid is generally fairly easy to contain. However, when the patient is draining all of their bodily fluids out onto the floor, cleaning and containment becomes far harder. Not only that, there have been several incidents (at least before this current Mar 2014 outbreak) of patients infecting health workers by coughing and aerosolizing blood droplets into the mouth, nose, and eyes of their caregivers.

> 90% of the first world can make themselves completely safe by googling > "Ebola Safety"

I don't think it's that simple. Currently, the CDC holds training sessions for:

"Currently licensed by a recognized professional agency to provide clinical care in some jurisdiction (e.g., hold a medical license to provide care in a state in the United States) and have recent (current or within the past 2 years) relevant experience providing direct care to patients. Participants should be licensed medical doctors (MD, DO, MBBS degrees), licensed nurses (RN, BSN, LPN, etc.), or other licensed clinical care providers (e.g., paramedics, physician assistants, and other clinical providers)."

These training sessions solely concern biohazard safety and last for three full days. Given that the target audience has already has extensive medical training, three full days of lecture, procedure, equipment, and technical training seems far above and beyond what we should expect from a normal citizen. Let me also point out that even with training and equipment, healthcare providers are still getting sick. ([http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/hcp/safety-training- course/inde...](http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/hcp/safety-training- course/index.html?s_cid=cs_1344))

> The other 10% are homeless or hippies and will either get similarly > informative pamphlets or are living in communes and won't infect the rest of > us.

I don't even know where you get that 10% from. It's also facetious to state that people "living in communes" "won't infect the rest of us"...do people in communes live in outer space?

> And even if all of that fails, we have the industry to literally give every > American a hazmat suit.

I'd like to see how you arrived at that conclusion.

> Ebola may become a crisis, but it will not become a pandemic.

I agree. Ebola may not become a pandemic, but it will still cause great suffering to a large amount of people. I'll also grant that until it becomes a real problem in western countries, no one will really make a move as generally, western pharma ignore diseases which don't hold the promise of profit (see schisto). However, there is a very real chance that we can help and reduce the spread of the suffering by taking violent action _now_.

This goes without saying, but the one thing that anybody can do is to donate to Doctors Without Borders or any other institution trying to quell the crisis.

[http://www.msf.org/donate](http://www.msf.org/donate)

<comment><USER3> You make a lot of very good points. The only things I disagree with you on is your final point.

>This goes without saying, but the one thing that anybody can do is to donate to Doctors Without Borders or any other institution trying to quell the crisis.

The scale of the outbreak is now beyond what MSF or any NGO can handle. Only the military can now command the resources needed to get things under control. All donating to MSF is doing is delaying the point in which we activate the military.

<comment><USER7> On your last point. MSF are not just fighting Ebola on the ground, they are also putting pressure on governments. Sending them money helps them have the resources to do both jobs more effectively. Sure, we should be putting pressure on our governments to do more ourselves, but I do not think that there is an inverse relationship between funding MSF and the speed of government response, when MSF are one of the groups trying to increase the rate of government response.

<comment><USER3> I suspect donations are not going to have any impact on the effectiveness of MSF's lobbying efforts (i.e. I don't think MSF's lobbying for military intervention by the west is money constrained). I am more than happy to be corrected on this if anyone has any data.

What I am hoping by my comment is breaking people out of the thinking that this can be solved by donations to NGO's like MSF. I believe it is far too big now for any NGO to deal with no matter how well resourced. If we can only get on top of the outbreak by military action lets stop messing around and start lobbying for this directly - every day we delay is only making the problem bigger and harder.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Paradox of Source Code Secrecy (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3409578 <comment><USER2> The gist:

IP law lets software have the best-of-both-worlds. Source code is patentable & protected by copyright, but is also a trade-secret (because it's not publicly disclosed).

This is problematic when these black-box algorithms are used to assist in the processing of legal cases.

\-----

My 2 cents:

\- The overall concern that our lives are being governed by the invisible hand of black-box abstractions really resonates with me. Richard Stallman has been warning us about this for a while [0], and I've personally started considering my role in this as a software engineer [1], although I don't have any actionable advice yet.

\- I don't feel as strongly that all of this code should be open-source. I think it might be sufficient to just strictly define a series of tests -- measure the inputs & outputs, describe the requirements... that kind of thing.

It's inherently difficult whenever there's a constantly-evolving ML model behind the curtain. It reminds me of the issues with using AI in the aviation industry, for instance [2]. As I recall from my undergraduate classes, aviation control systems have been unable to use "fuzzy" logic to pilot planes due to strict deterministic testing requirements.

[0] [https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more- impor...](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more- important.html)

[1] [https://gazzini.com/essays/posts/tools/](https://gazzini.com/essays/posts/tools/)

[2] [https://www.nlr.org/areas-of-change/introduction-non- determi...](https://www.nlr.org/areas-of-change/introduction-non- deterministic-approaches-nda-artificial-intelligence-self-learning-aviation- systems/)

<comment><USER3> For actionable advice, I believe that the government should make it a first choice priority to use and improve open source software. Open software is digital infrastructure and critical in the success of our society.

<comment><USER4> I largely agree with this. I have suggested in the past that the mission of the US Digital Corps be amended to include the development and maintenance of infrastructure critical software in a transparent way.

Imagine for example if the software used in voting machines was managed by such a system. Always published, always analyzable, maintained and authenticated by people whose job is only to make sure it does what it is supposed to do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >Today, the government relies on machine learning and AI in predictive policing analysis, family court delinquency proceedings, parole decisions, and DNA and forensic science techniques, among other areas, producing a fundamental conflict between civil rights and automated decisionmaking.

Most of the methods used for this are basically large matrices with no human understandable way to represent them. Getting the values would only let you recalculate the results, not discover why the results were produced.

<comment><USER6> Climate models and recent epidemiological modelling (outliers in terms of their effect on public policy making) are far simpler than say the ML this article seems to suggest. But you don't need a human-understandable representation to understand their limitations.

<comment><USER7> Climate models don't use ML, similarly, most sensible epidemiological modelling doesn't.

ML is, afaik, considered too much of "curve fitter" to actually simulate or analyze anything novel instead of rehashing of past events, making it useless in cases like this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In my view, the fundamental problem is that software doesn't fit neatly into either the patent or the copyright regimes.

Patents are not supposed to cover abstract ideas. In reality, all software is abstract.

Copyrights are supposed to cover an expression of an idea. It is not meant to cover inventions or functional devices.

Patent terms are relatively short, 20 years from filing, because technology needs to advance. It's great that you invented a drug to cure cancer, but you shouldn't be able to own it forever.

Copyright terms are functionally infinite (currently the life of the author plus 70 years, or 120 years for corporate works, but likely to be extended going forward).

It doesn't make sense that software is most similar to inventions protected by patent, but gets the essentially infinite term of protection of copyright.

I would propose that Congress pass a law limiting the term of copyright protection for software (object code, source code, or otherwise) to 20 years from date of creation. That puts it in a middle ground between patent/copyright, where it should be.

Trade secret is fine as it is.

</comment><comment><USER9> For those not using Javascript (SSRN uses third party scripts), link to PDF: [https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=5550640311191050...](https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=555064031119105004095090069123012096018036019060022069010066122091125090029069004088027107042044056060004120006096108020007111107084089093088002103070121101024110091077082121019107094019001015013087122096098070066086118083116112093099022075122123026&EXT=pdf)

</comment><comment><USER10> Putting aside the topic of how easy is it to understand a trained ML model, I really hope we won't end up in a SEO-like situation.

<comment><USER11> > Putting aside the topic of how easy is it to understand a trained ML model,

I wouldn't say it's _easy_ to understand a trained ML model. If you don't have access to it, it's a black box that can be hard to penetrate. But if you _do_ have access to it, it's fairly easy to figure out how to _trick_ it into doing what you want.

Example scenario: in a dystopian 2030 America, judges are replaced by ML models where you just input a bunch of parameters and the model spits out the judgment. Soon:

Divorced Husband: "Why do you keep calling the non-emergency police line to concern troll?"

Divorced Wife: "So the ML judge will give me custody of the kids"

(number of calls to police as an input to ML model is being gamed to alter outcome in one party's favor)

<comment><USER12> You've just invented a new service industry: AILegal, a combination of legal expertise to play the human side, and ML expertise to play the machine side.

Probably available by subscription for a monthly fee that corresponds to the probability of a positive result.

<comment><USER13> The court system will likely retain the use of human judges. More likely this would be used as a cheaper means of arbitration.</comment></comment></comment></comment>