Linux'izing your Windows PC into a dev machine – Part 2 - <AUTHOR> https://cepa.io/2018/02/20/linuxizing-your-windows-pc-part2/ <comment><USER2> I still don't get why a developer would want to use Windows at all when he wants to use GNU/Linux tools. I don't know how to call it, but there is a mutant inner platform effect at work (or is it mutant outer platform?) . There is a lot of unnecessary friction and important things, such as git, work a lot slower. It is far easier to run a dedicated Linux machine, and install whatever is needed with a packet manager. After becoming used to work with tmux and i3, which allow nearly all work to be done without the hands leaving the keyboard, I also find using Window's window management unbearable slow. I also cringe every time I forgot that I can't use the Windows key.

(By the way, I also don't get the affection to use dual-booting or virtual machines. Sure, if you are a poor student which which $300 is a lot of money, a VM might be worth the fuss. But in practically all other cases, it is far more effective to just set up another machine and use Samba or whatever to share some of the filesystem. Alone the time lost with Windows updates is a good reasons to quarantine Windows a bit.)

Ah, and one thing that really helps for keeping the workflow unified is just to use Emacs on Windows - that makes it needless to do the mental switch to different keyboard shortcuts every time, and allows to consistently use powerful tools such as org-mode. And vim users probably have equivalent tricks.

And apart from that, Windows is, specifically in forums and developers social media, massively advertised to to be associated with Linux. But advertising very much creates false connections, using a shell on Windows it not productive and no substitute for working with a free (as in libre) and open system which is controlled by the user. Linux is about freedom. Windows is not. Stallman might be annoying to some, but when you draw the balance, he is too damn right.

<comment><USER3> Sorry I disagree, first many people who work in IT are _forced_ to use Windows as their primary host at work. Next, even if you install a Virtual Machine it might not work as seamless as having an Unix shell natively, thus some use Cygwin. Regarding poor students, would you prefer to commute daily with multiple laptops? One for Linux one for Windows? I doubt so. Other than that, if your work is not just coding but doing _anything_ apart from code itself, word processing, spreadsheets, graphic design, cad and you still need to run something from Linux ecosystem the WSL is currently probably your best option.

<comment><USER2> > Sorry I disagree, first many people who work in IT are _forced_ to use > Windows as their primary host at work.

I would consider it a bad use of my experience to develop on Windows. The market agrees with me, experienced Linux developers are much better paid.

> Next, even if you install a Virtual Machine it might not work as seamless as > having an Unix shell natively, thus some use Cygwin.

I would not call cygwin a native Unix shell.

> Regarding poor students, would you prefer to commute daily with multiple > laptops? One for Linux one for Windows? I doubt so.

I don't use Windows for personal stuff. Apart from that, VirtualBox would still be a better solution if it was necessary to use Windows. For example, updates on a Windows machine which is rarely used can easily take hours. One does not want to have his work machine blocked for so long.

Apart from that, abandoning Windows is just a matter of leaving old habits. For me, using exclusively Linux for my personal stuff has worked excellently in the last 20 years.

> Other than that, if your work is not just coding but doing _anything_ apart > from code itself, word processing, spreadsheets, graphic design, cad and you > still need to run something from Linux ecosystem the WSL is currently > probably your best option.

Libreoffice or Softmaker office is available, but LaTeX is much better for reports and articles, and wikis and Markdown is better for documentation. MS Word is a usability nightmare. Also, I do not use spreadsheets for myself, I use Python scripts - it's more efficient, and ledger-cli for accounting stuff. Inkscape is much better than MS Visio. I am physicist and developer, I do not use CAD, but if I _had_ to use a CAD program on Windows, I would use a separate Windows machine, as explained before.

You sound like you are just used to do everything with Windows and never have considered seriously to use Linux software, I guess you don't know most of what exists there.

Also, I'd appreciate it if people would not call areas where some software vendors have managed to create a lock-in an "ecosystem". An ecosystem is a scientific concept from biology. Using that for proprietary software environments is simply marketing BS bingo.

<comment><USER4> Linux developers might be better paid _simply because there are fewer of them_. Run of the mill "enterprise" developers are on Windows and they make up the bulk of the workforce (in any country, afaik). This creates economies of scale that incentivise companies to continue standardising on Windows, because it makes it easier and cheaper to hire people.

<comment><USER2> Well, if Linux developers are better paid this will naturally increase supply. And this happens, of course.

But why should pay companies more for Linux when they can develop stuff on Windows, and pay less? Wouldn't it be dumb to use the more expensive resource, and have less gain? The reason is that Linux developers are more productive - they create more value, and the decision of companies to pay them more is all rational. Of course the detail picture is more nuanced - it makes a difference if one develops a boring PHP app, or makes complex embedded systems for sectors like HFT, defense, embedded medical devices, or similar. But chances are that a lot of the latter use Linux, too. They just don't advertise jobs on HN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Part 1 discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16351716](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16351716)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for posting this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> You can use Paragon Tools to mount HFS drives but I would advise against working on them this way; just copy and unplug one mirror at a time. I've been doing it for years and have seen a couple hiccups.

</comment><comment><USER6> Better to just drop another drive in and press f8

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm a long-time osx user. Recently I bought a used Surface Book for testing out some of the touch and stylus functionality. Also I liked the idea of having a high-quality stylus functionality for Adobe applications.

This set me on my own WSL journey which, long story short, ended with me realizing it's just not ready.

\- you're still forced to use windows apps for any gui (ie when you open atom from bash it'll launch windows atom)

\- there were numerous times when I npm i'd and it failed because some dependency was trying to do fancy things that WSL just didn't like

\- performance running builds with webpack seemed significantly worse.

\- i thought maybe windows 10 UI is up-to-par, even as a long-time mac user I thought maybe I could get down in Redmond town but... no... just no. It's the little things, the obvious things. You forget just how well thought, how precise, stable and intuitive osx's ui/ux is until you're thrown into Windows. Now, I still think windows touch and stylus integration is wonderful and I hope Apple finds a way to bring something like this to mac os. Also I understand that a mac user is naturally not going to feel at home with windows but I was on windows for probably a whole decade before I was on mac and so it's that it feels totally alien it's just... meh.

So then began my journey to finding a way to dual boot Ubuntu on the Surface Book with as close as full-support for touch/stylus/trackpad as possible. Some angel made drivers/software to enable support for the various Surface hardware on Ubuntu ([https://github.com/jakeday/linux- surface](https://github.com/jakeday/linux-surface)) and so I went through the process of getting all that together. Also I tried a few different Ubuntu desktop environments including Deepin and Pantheon (Elementary OS UI) and:

\- wow, desktop linux has come a long way and chrome on ubuntu is almost 100% how you'd expect it to perform.

\- wow jakeday got the hardware support near perfect

\- wow, desktop linux has horrible support for touch/stylus as in... near zero. Sure the inputs work but there's no intuitive UX to support the inputs and in general it feels like a hack because of this.

As a last resort I ran a osx image in vmware and unfortunately the graphics performance was not workable. The Surface Book's screen is so high resolution that you have to trick osx into scaling the UI for it which does solve the "everything's tiny" problem while keeping everything super crispy but then it seems vmware and hardware just can't keep up. OSX would likely feel super performant running native on this hardware, but via vmware- nope.

So now I still casually use the Surface Book with Windows 10 but my late 2012 macbook pro is still my workhorse and it still feels as fast and capable as the day I got it.

I have been predicting a sort of convergence of macbook and iPad (macOS and iOS) for a long time. I've always thought Apple would attempt to take it's arm chips to the macbook. I hope that however macOS evolves, alongside or in a convergence with iOS, it supports a sort of multi-modal type flexibility where you feel like you can stand up from your desk, walk away with a tablet/detachable-display/phone and seamlessly continue your session. I understand the wisdom of letting a desktop environment be a great desktop environment while letting a tablet UX be a great tablet UX but I still think the future has room for a seamless interplay and some more flexibility.</comment>


The Genes That Make Parrots into the Humans of the Bird World - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/07/science/parrots-genes-longevity.html <comment><USER2> My family got a parrot 22 years ago when I was a kid. It's a bit depressing to think that if we had gotten a dog or a cat, it would have been long dead by now.

<comment><USER3> Man, you must really not like that bird.

<comment><USER2> I meant it the other way around, in case it wasn't clear. My childhood pet is still alive, and it's depressing to think about the fact that it wouldn't be if it had been a dog.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > And they're just two of the many parrots in the world who have surprised us > with their intelligence, skills and longevity.

About said longevity, it was my understanding that parrots (most birds?) commonly get arthritis in their wings as they age. This is a fatal condition to a flying lifestyle. Given that, is their longevity in captivity really a surprise?</comment>


Previous YCNews. Unauthorized Software use (CAD?) lead to product seizure? - <AUTHOR> There was a previous post about this on Hackernews (pretty sure it was hackernews). GoogleFu is failing me. Any ideas? <comment><USER2> Perhaps "Software vendor argues that it has copyright in output of its CAD software" [https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=maw- law.com](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=maw-law.com) HN discussion [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13568366](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13568366) (149 points, 358 days ago, 113 comments)

<comment><AUTHOR> thx</comment></comment>


A Defense of Philosophy (against Paul Graham) - <AUTHOR> http://jsomers.net/pg-philosophy.html <comment><USER2> It's funny that he cites the Chinese Room paper, because that's probably one of the best examples of the kind of shoddy linguistic games that Paul pointed out.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room#Speed.2C_complexit...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room#Speed.2C_complexity_and_other_minds:_appeals_to_intuition)

<comment><USER3> The Chinese Room argument is wrong. That in itself does not make it useless.

It forces you to bite the bullet and really think about how systems must be able to give rise to intelligence, regardless of their physical makeup.

The wikipedia article that you linked has this quote: "The sheer volume of the literature that has grown up around it inspired Pat Hayes to quip that the field of cognitive science ought to be redefined as 'the ongoing research program of showing Searle's Chinese Room Argument to be false.'"

Incorrect arguments are an important step in establishing correct ones, which is a central point of jsomer's argument.

<comment><USER4> <i>The Chinese Room argument is wrong. That in itself does not make it useless.</i>

It might be useless, but it's also not optimally useful. That is, I think, a large part of the problem PG points out in his essay.

<comment><USER5> "If everything you learned in philosophy class was useless, and other classes, in addition to teaching you valuable truths, also used the same "process" as philosophy, then it'd probably be Pareto optimal to jump ship. But I don't think that's the case."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> James cites the law as a good example of drawing fine lines around difficult issues, citing the definition for amounts of LSD. If you don't know about this, 500 micrograms of LSD is a dose, but you can't see anything that small so it's normally distributed on a chunk of blotter paper weighing 1000x as much. So when the law says that possessing X amount of LSD is a felony, does that include the blotter paper? The courts have said it does. Is this a triumph of the law drawing fine lines around difficult issues, or were lawmakers just ignorant of basic measurement techniques, prosecutors greedy, and judges easily fooled?

An example consequence of this interpretation: having 0.5 oz of pot is a minor crime. But if you mix it with 10 lb of lawn trimmings, you now have 10+ lbs of material with a detectable amount of a controlled substance, and you're theoretically guilty of a major crime. This is not a law written by science majors.

Giving credit to the legal system for sorting out such a broken law is like giving credit to Vista for having a stylishly designed BSOD.

<comment><USER7> I think you're creating a straw-man here and end up proving jsomers's point.

You jump on the delicacy of the language and that's the point. jsomers doesn't argue _about_ this particular law, he was only giving an example on how pushing and pulling language can have direct pragmatic purposes and real political ramifications.

The point is that since law is mired in language, exploring language becomes an incredibly relevant task and pg's criticism seems to ignore this important function.

<comment><USER8> You say jsomers is defending analytic philosophy in this section.

Later jsomers says philosophy was bad but has reformed.

So on the one hand he defends old philosophy. And on the other he claims philosophy was bad, but is OK now because it has reformed. These defenses are incompatible.

<comment><USER9> I think the reformation to which he refers would be the advent of modern, analytic philosophy at the turn of the century through the works of Russell, Moore, Frege, and Wittgenstein. If so, the two claims are equivalent.

<comment><USER8> You're saying Wittgenstein is part of reformed philosophy, not bad philosophy?

I don't know about that:

[http://www.uweb.ucsb.edu/~luke_manning/tractatus/tractatus-j...](http://www.uweb.ucsb.edu/~luke_manning/tractatus/tractatus- jsnav.html)

1 The world is everything that is the case. * 1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things. 1.11 The world is determined by the facts, and by these being all the facts. 1.12 For the totality of facts determines both what is the case, and also all that is not the case. 1.13 The facts in logical space are the world. 1.2 The world divides into facts. 1.21 Any one can either be the case or not be the case, and everything else remain the same.

<comment><USER9> I'm saying that Wittgenstein /contributed/ to the advent of modern analytic or formal philosophy; an indisputable claim. While I have a spot in my heart for the Tractatus (if nothing else the method of truth tables in logic was co- invented within its pages, not to mention "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent"), I'm not defending it and its solipsistic position/obfuscated style per se.

<comment><USER8> How did his nonsense contribute to other people writing sense? Who was influenced by Wittgenstein then wrote sense?

<comment><USER10> I have great respect for Wittgenstein, certainly far more than for the myriad of analytical philosophers I read a long time ago who all "wrote sense" (comparatively speaking) and all of whom I've forgotten.

<comment><USER8> That's wonderful. Perhaps you, as a Wittgenstein buff, would be so kind as to explain how the Wittgenstein quote I gave above, which _at first glance_ appears to be nonsense, is in fact respectable and worthwhile thinking? I don't get it; enlighten me.

<comment><USER9> "My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright."

I think that's kinda the whole point of the Tractatus: much of philosophy (metaphysics and ethics, particularly) has no sense. Strictly speaking, they mean nothing.

Wittgenstein's early work inspired the development of modern analytic philosophy both in its use of formal methods and its claim that much of what was then considered philosophy was meaningless. The decades immediately following Wittgenstein were concerned with linguistic analysis (what the authors of these papers take fault with), while more contemporary philosophy has conceded to a kind of naturalism, appealing to the sciences.

If you place any value on modern analytic philosopher (even as a Popperian), you have to at least give Wittgenstein some historical credit even if the philosophical travesties of the logical positivists can be attributed to misinterpretations of the Tractatus.

With regards to decent philosophers with direct influence from Wittgenstein, what's your take on Kripke and Anscombe?

<comment><USER8> OK looking them up. Kripke's wikipedia entry is full of stuff about logic. I don't really have a problem with logicians. I don't think they are in the primary philosophy tradition pg was criticizing (and which I don't like). If he learned something about logic from wittgenstein, then great i guess.

Anscombe wiki has:

 _For years, I would spend time, in cafés, for example, staring at objects saying to myself: "I see a packet. But what do I really see? How can I say that I see here anything more than a yellow expanse?"_

I think that stuff is a dead end. We should solve problems we have, not question all traditions simultaneously for no particular reason.

By the way, I do think there are good philosophers, who made useful progress, but they are largely neglected. e.g. xenophanes, godwin, burke, feynman. (neglected _as philosophers_ )

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What a poor reply. Paul Graham's essay can easily be dismissed. Some examples:

1) Graham found philosophy not useful and didn't understand it. This is basically a sample size of 1. Is this a meaningful sample or just a confirmation bias (or suppressed evidence)?

2) Graham believes the early philosophers were encouraged by the progress in maths. But was there really much progress before Euclid's Elements, written around 300 BC, one of the "the most successful and influential textbooks ever written"? Sokrates lived about 150 years earlier (c. 469 BC–399 BC), Plato 50 years earlier (428/427 BC–348/347BC) -- even Aristotle lived earlier (384BC–322BC). One might as well argue that the Greek tradition in philosophy encouraged Euclid to write his elements. The Elements might also have been inspired by Aristotle's logic. But that was obviously useless, according to Graham.

3) In hindsight, it's easy to say what's, for instance, the shortest way out of a labyrinth. But one needs to go many false routes to find out. Are these useless, then? Graham obviously thinks he could spot the shortest way out, by studying "useful" goals. But who really knows? It's easy to say: "I know what's the shortest way" but most people fail when put to a test. Even Wittgenstein was first "wrong" and wrote a rather abstract -- and Graham would probably say: useless -- treatment called "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" before he was able to articulate his critic of language. Sometimes you need a ladder before you can throw it away.

4) Graham also forgets that philosophic thinking inspired or formed many other schools of thought: for instance, the study of moral philosophy by Adam Smith marked the beginning of modern economics -- indeed, a useless art --, the study of natural philosophy and that of Malthus' work (an economist and demographer) lead to the discovery of "natural selection" by Darwin -- truly useless, I guess -- , the study of the philosophy of positivism by Comte started modern sociology -- yet another useless art --, theories guiding modern scientific thinking were formulated by philosophers (Popper, etc.) -- obviously useless, too --, even Russel and Whitehead's work was basically inspired by philosophy. And these are just the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Anybody who's a little bit careful can find these examples easily. Graham, however, failed. What does this tell us about his essay?

In summery, what he wants philosophy to do -- namely concentrating on useful stuff -- is already happening, for hundreds of years. It's called science.

<comment><USER12> 1) I think you've confused logic with an experimental science.

2) I am having serious trouble figuring out how this dismisses PG's essay.

3) So this is the only item in your list that actually addresses Graham's central point at all. I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to say but I think you're circling around this idea: "Sure, pre-20th century philosophy got a lot wrong, but it was that wrongness that allowed certain modern philosophers to get stuff right. PG thinks he could've gotten through the wrongness quickly, but I think he's wrong about that."

Well, okay... but let me give some evidence against that: I independently came to the conclusion that most philosophy is bullshit before I encountered Paul Graham. I think I'm smart, but I'm also pretty sure that there have been a bunch of people in history who are just as smart as I am, and so I'm led to the conclusion that there have been people in history who realized that philosophy as it was being practiced was bullshit. Which implies that, yes, all those pre-modern philosophers _were_ wasting their time, because we didn't need their "false starts" to get to the root of the wrongness with philosophy.

4) I admit that I don't know enough about the origins of various disciplines to talk about any of the things you brought up, but, to me, the fact that philosophy helped nurture "useful" disciplines and ideas doesn't automatically imply that philosophy itself is valid or useful. _Every_ kind of thinking, even pretty dumb kinds, produces more thinking. And after more than two thousand years, it's statistically likely that some of a discipline's intellectual offspring will have merit, even if the discipline itself doesn't.

Also: "Anybody who's a little bit careful can find these examples easily. Graham, however, failed. What does this tell us about his essay?"

First: this is really incredibly obnoxious. Second: why do you think that attacking the construction or presentation of PG's argument is the same as dismissing the argument itself?

<comment><USER11> Thanks for your critical thoughts. That's holds for you as well as gambling8nt, straiberman and kragen.

I'll try to answer some of your objections.

(1) You're right that "sample of 1" is an expression found in experimental science. But how do we know that a small sample is no sufficient reason to accept a hypothese if not by using logic?

Also: Read PG's essay once more and tell me: What reasons did he present to support his hypotheses, other than merely: "I didn't understand philosophy, therefore all current philosophy is useless"? He's basically making an appeal to authority, namely his own authority. Hardly a good reason.

2) PG asserts that early philosophy was inspired by maths. But was it, really? How does PG know? In fact, both fields probably inspired each other. This is one of the examples that makes some philosophy useful -- examples that PG simply ignored.

3) Just because you agree with PG (or had a similar experience) doesn't make any of you right. However, I agree that philosophy has had a quality problem every now and then. But that doesn't render all philosophy (or its method) useless.

Also: I'm wasn't trying to say: "I think he's wrong". I say: "Where are his arguments to believe his assertions that he can find a quick way?" Even the more practical sciences have had some really strange ideas when looking at them in hindsight. If usefulness is such a good guide, why did they run into these errors?

4) Indeed, all kind of thinking produces more thinking. Homo sapiens is about 40.000 years old. Then, what did they do the first 37.000 years if mere thinking is sufficient to find the meaningful and true statements?

Finally, attacking the presentation is often the same thing as dismissing the argument. For what are his arguments? PG can point to some bad philosophy, granted. Everybody can do this for all kind of fields. I can point at some really bad software. Is therefore all software engineering useless?

PG wants us to believe his assertions that the philosophical method is inherently flawed. But he presents no arguments other than his own experience, some selected examples and that's about it.

If you want to know what's useful about philosophy, look no further than Socrates: His way to ask people critical questions about the meaning of words, the reasons why they do have the believes they have, and his way to find the differences between good and bad reasons (namely by debate) still is what philosophy is all about. We need the bad thinking to find out why it's bad. Philosophy proceeds by discussing and recording these issues.

You might call it as well critical thinking.

Our small discussion here hopefully shows why this is useful. Trying to dismiss arguments makes you a better thinker.

<comment><USER13> 1) A "small" sample is often sufficient reason to accept a statement. If I tell you that there exists a Turing machine that can solve SAT in polynomial time, all I have to do to prove it is supply one (incidentally, if you have one lying around, let me know :P ). If I tell you that ALL of something is bad, then I have an uphill battle. But if I tell you SOME of something is bad, I only have to provide a single example to be right.

Also, you may want to read PG's essay on essays (www.paulgraham.com/essay.html); his goal in writing an essay isn't to explicate every detail of a subject, it's to work through a subject to understand it--it is only tangentially that any other audience is involved. That I am convinced of the rough truth of his arguments is not solely based on what he has written, and he does not have to personally supply me with every bit of evidence to be right (although doing so would certainly make it easier for the reader).

2) I would not question the fact that Greek philosophers influenced the development of mathematics, and I expect PG would not do so, either (particularly since the Greek philosophers were typically also mathematicians, but even without that, it would seem an impossible claim to the contrary). A claim I have made, however, is that the things that the Greek philosophers wrote that could not now be seen as important in some other field currently extant, or in cognitive science--which ought to be thought of as its own field (although in many places it isn't yet)--were not themselves important to the development of mathematics or any other field. These aspects of their writing, when studied, critiqued, and emulated in modern times, are the only topic of concern to PG in his essay, or myself in this particular discussion.

3) This is a fundamental problem. Just because we disagree certainly does not make one of us right, and the only reason that at least one of us is guaranteed to be wrong about something here is because I just asserted that we disagree. An equally fundamental problem is your assumption that either PG or myself is talking about all of philosophy.

With regard to "strange" ideas, every field has had strange ideas when looking in hindsight. The fields for which those ideas are still in contention for validity are the ones with the greatest problem of lack of substance, in proportion with how many such ideas there are, and how "strange" they are (where by strange I do not mean counterintuitive, but rather running against other existing evidence).

4) Relatively little thinking. We got a lot better at it when we didn't have to spend most of our time hunting and gathering. The course of human history has been the process of freeing up more time to spend thinking; at this point, we've freed up so much that we tend to use most of it in ways we typically later label as non-productive.

You say you can do this for all fields. Can you point to some bad math for me? That you would have much greater difficulty doing this than PG or I would have for finding bad philosophy is precisely PG's point.

Is there some other form of argument that could possibly exist to support his claim other than personal experience and selected examples? I'm not sure what kind of evidence you would like to see in PG's essay, but feel it lacks. The subject matter does not lend itself to effective experimental testing, and the claim is not mathematical in nature.

PG's, and my, problem, is that modern philosophers still rarely identify the fact that the bad thinking is bad. Understanding the utility of (and the utility of understanding) effective but civil critical debate remains unquestioned. The subject matter of these debates is what is under fire here, precisely because it is typically pervaded by faulty reasoning. Even if you want to use previous bad reasoning to learn why some reasoning is bad, this doesn't mean you need to continually create more examples of bad reasoning; surely those that already exist suffice.

<comment><USER11> Well, we seem to agree on some issues: Not all philosophy is bad or useless. Some might be. So, let's say "Some philosophy is useless." PG presents a few quotes and we may conclude, he proved his point.

But did he present any useless philosophy or just badly written philosophy? Or does it just appear to be useless because we don't immediately understand it?

The latter case basically boilds down to an argument from ignorance: "We don't understand some philosophers, therefore they must be useless (or bad or false)." Many people don't understand much of contemporary maths either, but that's hardly a good reason to call it useless (or bad or false). In contrast to maths, though, many people assume to be able to understand it.

The former case is also hardly a good reason to call something useless. Kant, for instance, is bloody complicated to read (at least, for me, and I'm German). However, his arguments still make sense -- one just needs to read the literature that explains Kant's ethics and meta-physics in a more accessible manner. They were also quite useful for other philosophers.

You say you can find bad philosophy more easily than I can find bad maths. Maybe, but since this is basically an empirical question, our small sample won't be sufficient to prove anything. On a side note: It's easy to find useless maths -- in the sense of published proofs that turned out to be wrong. Since they didn't prove anything, why have they been published, at all? For examples, look at the history to prove Fermat's Last Theorem. Quite a lot of them failed or were simply wrong. What a waste of time.

However, your test to find useless philosophy also suffers from the lack of a proper definition of "useless" and "useful". Just because you can't think of any use, doens't mean you're right -- this is just another argument from ignorance.

Let's consider ethics, for instance: It is basically useless concerning empiricial results. However, it's still useful in many contemporary discussions; for instance, animal's rights, abortion, women rights, death penalty, justice, atheism, and many other issues.

Concerning your question whether some other form of argument could possibly exist to support PG's claim? Sure, from an empirical point of view: A proper definition of "useless" and a proper random sample concerning philosophical works. This would at least support the conclusion that, say, 35% of philosophy turned out to be useless.

But PG made two additional arguments:

(1) Any resulting number of useless philosophy is due to the current philosophical method that is motivated by studying the most abstract problems.

(2) A different method that starts from studying practical problems and builds up to abstract problems will result in a smaller number of useless philosophy.

To support (2), an argument from analogy would help: Study a model of the proposed method (thankfully provided by science) and establish the empirical fact that is produced a smaller percentage of useless results.

Of course, this can easily be refuted by attacking the analogy. The methods of empricial science simply doesn't translate well to issues philosophers care about; such as ethics.

To support (1), one would need to start from the premise of the current method and deduce that it will lead to a certain number of useless philosophy and that there is no other possible explanantion. I doubt that it can be done, but I may be wrong.

Just to present a counter-example: to establish the habit of presenting arguments in a more formal way could help to distiguish good and bad philosophy much easier.

However, the point is that PG -- although his intention is apperently to "work through a subject to understand it" -- fails badly. He hardly worked though and he probably still doesn't understand it. Maybe, if he would have studied philosophy more carefully he could have made better arguments for his case.

Which shows how careful one should be about certain words: From a philosophical point of view, namely, PG's work was useless, indeed.

<comment><USER13> PG presented a definition of useless that set the bar too high; I (in another comment) presented a more reasonable definition of useless which accurately applies to most of philosophy--something is useful insofar as it answers questions asked by other fields (want empirical evidence of this? consider the number of references to philosophical papers on papers from other fields, excepting those related to cognitive science, which will, I believe, probably be the last field to split off of philosophy). There, thus, is no question of whether or not I understand a philosophical work; it's utility is measured by reference of other fields, regardless of my personal attitude upon reading the work. This definition accurately fits what is typically meant by the term useful, and meaningfully explains why, for example, an incomplete proof, or a result a given person doesn't understand might be useful.

That empiricism doesn't apply well to ethics is part of PG's point; he does not believe that the philosophy of ethics is useful. From my definition, I would say that the philosophy of ethics can conceivably be useful, but rarely is in practice.

In vague support of argument one, you might try turning your other argument on its head. Philosophy and science (and, before science, engineering and early health care) developed in parallel over the course of human history; one of them primarily studied abstract problems and tried to make them more useful, one of them studied uses, and worked toward abstraction. Until the 19th century, it appears that abstract study was better for developing new fields, and concrete study was better for development of technology. After the mid-19th century, philosophy lost its firm grip on most forms of abstract study, and became (for the most part) the field that it is today; now other fields tend to be the starting point for the spawning of new fields, and tend to be better for the development of technology.

With regard to your counter-example, I will continue to present my counter- counter-example: mathematics.

Your final sentence is nicely ironic. If, as you've said earlier, you need bad philosophy in order to determine what the good philosophy is, yet PG's work is useless, then PG's work must not be bad philosophy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Well argued, although I am not well versed enough in Philosophy to make a comment about its completeness.

One of the most interesting things I find about pg's essays is that they always take such an interesting position on a problem or issue. I've always thought that there is at least one interesting counter position for all of his essays. We need to see more of these; I think it would lead to many fruitful discussions.

<comment><USER8> How is it well argued? He _concedes_ that pg is right about most philosophy in the conclusion section. He protests, protests, protests, then concedes. lol. His conceding does come with an assertion that philosophy came clean recently, but he doesn't bother giving some citations for _that_. Which philosophers admitted philosophy was mostly junk? Who came clean? What did they do to fix it?

<comment><USER14> Conceding that pg is right about most philosophy doesn't take away from his argument. If I conceded that most programs written in the last 5 years are garbage, would you conclude programming in general is also garbage?

<comment><USER8> The guy says:

"The simplest flaw in PG's account is its scope: it implicates most philosophers up to the present"

That's what he's trying to argue with, and that is PG's claim (not that _all_ philosophy is worthless). But then he simply concedes at the end, like he forgot his own thesis.

<comment><AUTHOR> PG's "most" includes more than I'm comfortable with, which is why I wrote the essay -- to defend those parts of the subject that I thought were unfairly called a waste of time.

My "most," in other words, includes less than his.

<comment><USER15> Abel, 1824. Not Galois, 1829. Your favorite joke a bout proto-emo math geeks here.

Also, while I'm sympathetic to the intent of this essay -- easy criticism of the humanities goes back to Aristophanes -- it falls flat because it reads like a philosophy paper. A philosophy paper written in defense of academic philosophy is going to lose in the gut regardless of how correct it is to the reasoning mind (this is also why we still love Aristophanes).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Paul Graham said that most philosophers have been wasting their time. Now I'll refute the statement that _all_ philosophers have been wasting their time. Also, speculation about neuroscience counts as philosophy as long as the people involved call themselves philosophers."

</comment><comment><USER16> The author mentions several ways that philosophy, and especially philosophy of the mind, have contributed to Computer Science and AI in particular. If that is the case, then why don't we see CS teams collaborating with philosophers?

He mentions that one particular philosopher of the mind generated some testable hypotheses about how the mind works. Why not, then, test them? Why don't we see many philosophers flitting back and forth between thought and action? In other words, where are the Hofstadters?

<comment><USER9> You do. Have you read any of the literature on multi-agent systems design? Or the literature on belief-revision/database updating?

There's a significant community of modern philosophers/logicians actively contributing to developments in CS. Also, check out the Philosophy department at CMU: they've got someone employed full-time to work on implementations of philosophically-inspired causal inference systems.

<comment><USER16> Thanks! I actually thought your essay was pretty interesting, but I didn't know how to include that nuance in my comment without making my comment less readable. Perhaps I am too much of a Grahamite!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Asking a philosophical question like "what does X really mean" is akin to asking "what data structure would best represent X in a program?" They could even be considered to be the same question. So philosophy is as central to programming as mathematics.

<comment><USER18> Maybe, instead, programming is as central to philosophy as mathematics is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Something both of these papers miss is that most modern disciplines have their origins in philosophy and, in moments of foundational crisis, often return to their roots. While I do find pure philosophy to often be garbage (most metaphysics, ethics, and epistemology), I think one of its most important contributions is in multi-disciplinary pursuits and its concern with foundational matters. Not to mention that so much of modern, theoretical computer science (particularly logic and type theory) have its origins in the works of philosophers.

</comment><comment><USER13> The argument in this essay relies heavily on, among other things, the idea that extraordinarily abstract mathematical discussions are similar to extraordinarily abstract discussions in philosophy or literary theory. This premise (among the others refuted throughout this post) is flawed; while some of mathematics is not yet related to any applied field, that is because applied fields develop by using the mathematics available. Furthermore, unlike the linguistic gymnastics of much of philosophy and literary criticism, the abstractions used in mathematics have meanings that can be explained concretely in simpler terms. Anything published in a mathematical paper is either incontrovertibly true, contains some equally incontrovertible flaw, or is a conjecture after such a result. That mathematics contains this level of rigor is precisely why it avoids the contention against which fields such as literary criticism and philosophy fall--namely, that of containing form without substance.

<comment><USER19> <cheap shot>And what is this substance of mathematics?</cheap shot>

Calling mathematics "incontrovertibly true" and stating that abstractions used in mathematics can be explained concretely in simpler terms are philosophical positions and the justifications for and against these positions are debated outside mathematics in philosophy. You praise the rigor of mathematics while ignoring the rigor in which philosophy searches for the justifications of assumptions for all fields of human knowledge including mathematics and science.

<comment><USER13> The substance of mathematics is figuring out what is still true when one applies the highest standard for rigor that still permits the possibility of determining things not yet known to be true.

That any philosopher might continue to debate this issue is, while sadly true, irrelevant. A logical system without modus ponens can either define modus ponens, or is clearly not extensible enough to define anything. A logical system with modus ponens is either inconsistent, or at most as general as mathematics. Thus, there can be no extensible system of truth in which mathematics is false, validating my claim that it is incontrovertible.

As to whether or not mathematics can be explained in simple terms, I will suggest that this appears to be the case empirically, since some people become mathematicians, and they all seem to use the same terminology, more or less. To prove that every mathematical result in existence can be explained simply would require that I actually explain every mathematical result simply, and that is beyond the scope of an HN comment.

Finally, philosophers do not "search for the justifications of assumptions for all fields of human knowledge including mathematics and science" with the level of rigor I specified in my comment; indeed, the entire point of this discussion is that they tend not to use any level of rigor at all. Insofar as philosophy actually does anything to "justify the assumptions" for any field, it occasionally achieves useful results; however, much of philosophy is focused solely on a continuing failure to agree on semantics.

<comment><USER19> Yet this failure to agree on semantics is in part because of the difficulty in providing solid, incontrovertible justifications for these meanings. Consider the new branches of mathematics that were [created|discovered] when Euclid's definition of a straight line were questioned.

That mathematics corresponds so well to the world we perceive is amazing. Why should this be the case? How can we be sure that mathematics and science holds for all cases which we do not observe or that they will continue to do so? Can rigorous justifications be given for these questions that do not rely on circular arguments and blind faith?

<comment><USER13> We can't guarantee anything about the world. Empirically, science seems to work, and that is all we can ever get from it. Math is true regardless of its utility in science, and we use it in science because it is convenient to do so.

There are no solid, incontrovertible definitions. Only solid incontrovertible proofs (even there, we don't generally actually know whether or not a proof is incontrovertible, because proofs are rarely verified on that level...but, within mathematics, it is at least POSSIBLE to either verify a proof on that level, or provide a verifiable flaw). Definitions are a matter of convenience.

That the semantics of mathematics sometimes change does not imply that any of its terminology are ever inherently complex in the sense that those who don't understand it, "Don't get it." Indeed, since semantics in mathematics are only ever a shorthand, every mathematical construct could conceivably be expanded into the language of logic, and every mathematician (modulo human error) would agree that the expansion was valid. This underlying agreement on meaning is precisely what is missing from fields like much of literary criticism and philosophy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I studied philosophy on the side of my computer science degree, and I have to say it's been immensely useful.

Before studying philosophy I was a green idealist, but after studying philosophy I centered on a pragmatic philosophy.

Also it enhanced my ability to argue immensely. If I have an argument with someone I can easily detect logical flaws and shady arguments in general.

Also I like to think my study of multi-modal logic systems has enhanced my ability to suggest alternatives and question assumptions (where reasonable).

In short, a philosophy degree might not be all that useful full time, but to compliment something more practical, like CS, I've found it to be valuable.

<comment><USER13> The study of mathematics is both more useful, and carries most of the same benefits (although it typically lacks the forced experience with communicative writing).

<comment><USER20> I think the statement that math is more useful then philosophy is debatable, especially at the university level.

Advanced calculus and "pure math" courses had precious few uses in the day to day grind of many jobs. Pure math might teach logic in some way, but philosophy tends to focus on argument itself, which lends itself to more obvious practical uses.

<comment><USER13> As a programmer, you don't see obvious practical use in understanding results in number theory? These have importance in a wide variety of computer applications.

What about linear algebra? Do you really think that understanding its applications in computer graphics doesn't/wouldn't improve your employability?

Certainly, if you're a janitor, having studied philosophy vs. mathematics does not significantly affect how you do your job (though it probably does affect how easy it is for you to get a different job). But mathematics--even advanced mathematics--has more and more obvious applications than philosophy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The problem with philosophy now is that students spend so much time slogging through the old incomprehensible junk. A philosophy degree (I have one) should be a separate entity from a degree studying the history of philosophy. Psych majors don't have to take classes on Phrenology.

It's very frustrating to be told to write in a concise style and then asked to read some really obfuscated nonsense.

<comment><USER9> While I agree that slogging through Aristotle and Kant is incredibly painful (and many departments definitely over-emphasis), I think it's undeniably useful for one pursuing a career or even hobby in philosophy to have some knowledge of the discipline's history. If nothing else, it demonstrates exactly what not to do and how vital clarity and a rigorous, logical methodology are.

<comment><USER3> I just think that a succinct summary of their views by a clear modern writer would have been sufficient for my purposes. For others who are more interested, it's great to have.

<comment><USER21> The problem with this idea is that the jury is still out on the interpretation of a lot of ancient texts. Anyone summarizing them will either put their own spin on them or will tediously have to expound on all the possible interpretations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> With his essay, I believe jsomers has proven PG's point.

<comment><USER23> prove it.. :-)

<comment><USER24> "Problematizing a purely syntagmatic critique of postmodern critical theory"

Plus ten style points for irony. Minus a thousand for writing that sentence at all.

<comment><USER23> A single example of something _you think_ is of poor quality does not mean everything within that field _is_ poor. This is simply lazy (and prejudiced) thinking. :-(

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The problem is that philosophy is thought to provide us with the truth. When in fact the truth of philosophy is that it shows us there is no truth. It helps us break down the illusions not create them.

</comment><comment><USER26> interesting philosophy didn't come around until hume and kant. post hume and kant hasn't been all that interesting either.

</comment><comment><USER5> I found the writing style and visual design most.. PG-esque.

</comment><comment><USER8> Claims philosophers do useful stuff but doesn't mention the best example: Karl Popper (who most philosophers don't like because he had the audacity to actually solve a philosophical problem!)

Meanwhile, fails to distance himself from Wittgenstein, and responds to pg's claim that philosophers argue semantics by defending it! (BTW Popper is one of the philosopher who does _not_ argue semantics.)

<comment><USER9> What philosophical problem did Popper actually solve? I hope very much you aren't referring to his verificationist approach to confirmation in science.

<comment><USER21> His approach was decidedly not verificationist, but falsificationist. I do share your sentiment that he didn't really solve the problem "once and for all." I think it's wrong to neglect the context of discovery. Peirce had some nice ideas about the logic of science.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> If a philosophy is valid it doesn't need a defense.

<comment><USER14> Tell that to all the significant ideas in the last several thousand years that were ridiculed and suppressed.... starting with evolution.</comment></comment>


Pig: high level language to process big datasets via Hadoop - <AUTHOR> http://www.scribd.com/doc/2027476/pig-webscale-processing-Yahoo-Research

<comment><AUTHOR> Christopher Olston from Yahoo Research presented Pig at the UCB DBMS lunch talk today. It's a framework that translates a high level processing specification into Hadoop jobs. Users only worry about providing functions for specific data parsing and computation. Pig and Hadoop do all the rest.

Here is a sample program (taken from slide 11) that joins two big datasets (Visits and Pages) to find sessions that end with the "best" page:

            Visits = load '/data/visits' as (user, url, time);
            Visits = foreach Visits generate user, Canonicalize(url), time;

             Pages = load '/data/pages' as (url, pagerank);

                VP = join Visits by url, Pages by url;
        UserVisits = group VP by user;
          Sessions = foreach UserVisits generate FindSessions(*);
      HappyEndings = filter Sessions by BestIsLast(*);

             store HappyEndings into '/data/happy_endings';

Pig is open-source. It's being "incubated" as an Apache project. More details here:

Apache Page: <http://incubator.apache.org/pig>

Subversion Repository: <http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/pig>

Powerpoint slides: <http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~olston/pig.ppt></comment>


California Is Becoming Unlivable - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/10/can-california-save-itself/601135/ <comment><USER2> I don't disagree, but this was a very narrow, and IMHO naive analysis.

PG&E is screwed because of years of graft and mismanagement. But now also because they are now (thank you) saddled with decades of deferred maintenance (technical debt) and lawsuits (thank you). But they can't raise rates and they can't generate more revenue. So the only path is cutting costs (corners) more. So... guess what isn't getting fixed anytime soon.

The "affordable" housing crisis is not a crisis, it's a bubble. Again (2007). Again (1999). It will, again probably, fix itself but at the great expense of mass foreclosures when it pops.

The fires are as much a constant as they are an effect of mismanagement and inattention to the fact that Californian's love to build sorta very super expensive suburban homes in the middle of tinder dry scrub-waste-land.

Whatever you blame on climate change, this is not it. This is building high- density in the desert with blinders on. And blaming "Climate Change" isn't going to clear the brush. Which BTW, we already pay the state, county and cities large sums of taxes and fees to do. But (see PG&E) they don't. They neglect more and more of the work to pad more and more of the bureaucrat salaries, so they in turn can barely afford to scrape by in the "overpriced" housing markets (and also afford to drive Audis/Teslas/Range Rovers, etc.).

So yes, California is becoming unlivable. And it's due to it having become ungovernable and _economically_ unsustainable.

<comment><USER3> IMO we need to repeal Prop 14 / 2010, the "Top Two Primaries" Act. I'm not saying Republicans are any better than Democrats. I'd pick neither if there was an actual choice (there isn't thanks to that law). What I am saying, the current SuperMajority has substituted "collegiality" for critical thought and imposing tough choices, and chooses instead to vote as a bloc, called by the Quarterback of their house. The Capitol is literally full of mostly empty suits. Empty until some agenda to benefit their corporate donors is in play.

Having lived through it, I can say the gridlock of the past was preferable to what we have now.

The bad part about Prop 14, it's only reversible through another ballot initiative. Without a groundswell of support to get this changed, someone is going to have to raise tens of millions to pay for the signature collection and the media campaign.

<comment><USER4>
      it's only reversible through another ballot initiative

It was a Constitutional Amendment. It can replaced by another Constitutional Amendment, which can come via the Legislature _or_ via initiative. Whichever process is used, it must be approved by popular vote, but only a simple majority.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm pretty sure I've read — quite possibly right here on HN — that with some effort and expense, it's possible to build houses that will survive wildfires, or at least have a pretty good chance of doing so. Seems like something we're going to have to do more of.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, build actual houses not made of cardboard like in the rest of the civilized world.

Paying 1.2M+ for a palework built with rotting wood in the Bay Area is simply laughable at this point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The connection they are trying to make seems tenuous.

Fires seem to be exacerbated by decades of poor utility maintenance combined with an abundance of dry and dead brush, warmer temperatures, and high winds.

None of those factors are caused by barriers to housing construction.

<comment><USER8> The wildfires threaten humans because human settlement sprawls out into the wilderness. The wilderness will always get dry and windy and sometimes sparky, but it doesn't have to have people living in it. It's a policy choice to accommodate population there vs. in cities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> California has dry weather, vegetation that can burn. When a strong wind comes, the tiniest fire can spread like crazy. This can happen anywhere in theory; it is just that the annual Santa Ana winds have met up with the dry conditions and the endless fires started by humans and the power company.

All these problems can happen anywhere, bad power company, human started fires. Who knows if new weather patterns will happen that lead to repeatable strong winds for days at a time. The polar vortex seems to be a more recent common phenomena, other weather patterns can change, this can happen anywhere.

</comment><comment><USER10> It's like NYC in the 1970s.

<comment><USER11> What were the similarities?

<comment><USER12> Nobody goes there anymore; it's too crowded.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Sounds like they've overshoot the ecological limits. Yet not a word on shutting off the immigration firehose.</comment>


How Using a Decision Journal can Help you Make Better Decisions - <AUTHOR> http://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2014/02/decision-journal/

<comment><USER2> Keeping a hand-written journal requires discipline and strong connection to your inner self. You have to be willing to have a reality check and admit when you are wrong.</comment>


Modeling in Strolch - <AUTHOR> https://strolch.li/documentation-model.html <comment><USER2> Would be more interesting if this wasn't a Java project.

<comment><AUTHOR> Why is that? What would be your language of choice?</comment></comment>


Tom Bilyeu – From the kitchen to a billion dollar food company - <AUTHOR> https://hustlecon.com/from-the-kitchen-to-a-billion-dollar-food-company/ <comment><AUTHOR> >"With manufacturing solved, they just had to figure out how to sell the bars (minor detail).

 _Tom sent a thousand hand-written letters (including Quest bars) to fitness influencers. And, as these workout warriors started flexin' their social muscles, the sales started rollin' in. Tom estimates they did close to $10 million in e-commerce revenue by year two, before ever moving into retail._

Quest grew a loyal following by giving out thousands of free protein bars.

GNC and Vitamin Shop were the first retailers to sell Quest. To gain more exposure, Quest used thousands of brand ambassadors to push the product. From Crossfit events to local health fairs, Quest tried to get in front of as many community-minded people as possible.

What makes Quest so much different than their competitors?

From day one, Tom and his team were 100% keyed in on the "why," which, in their case, was to end metabolic disease. That means when it comes to new product launches, the team sacrifices product margin to provide as much value as possible to the customer.

They're also leading the pack in customer service. No joke, Tom once received a complaint that a customer chipped a tooth on a Quest bar… so he covered their dental bill (PSA: Don't try this at home).

And what have they gotten for going the extra mile? Oh, just insane growth numbers — by year 4, they hit $105 million in sales, _all without any outside funding_."</comment>


Scaling the solar system - <AUTHOR> http://www.syfy.com/syfywire/scaling-the-solar-system <comment><USER2> Nice.

See also: [https://www.littleplanetfactory.com/collections/miscellaneou...](https://www.littleplanetfactory.com/collections/miscellaneous/products/solar- system-in-a-bottle)

I got one of those a while ago - it's gorgeous...

</comment><comment><USER3> I tried to read this article, but the drop down banner made the text jump around so much I gave it up.</comment>


Accessibility in 3D Donut Charts - <AUTHOR> https://www.a11ywithlindsey.com/blog/accessibility-d3-donut-charts <comment><USER2> Funny to bring up accessibility on a page that doesn't even load when cookies are turned off.</comment>


Building an SMS-first service for men - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@ccarella/building-an-sms-first-service-for-men-74b2bf308a76

<comment><USER2> "a personal touch"... towards the user this creates the impression that the service has human beings working hard to provide high-quality advice. Nevertheless, many requests will be answerable by a combination of natural language processing, machine learning, semantic and geo-search on openly accessible data such as OSM, and one to two minutes of random delay. Clever.</comment>


OpenGL and Direct3D crazy GUI debugger via APITrace - <AUTHOR> http://zrusin.blogspot.com/2011/04/apitrace.html <comment><USER2> Before Xbox PIX, graphics debugging involved thinking really hard about a huge state machine that lives in a separate, uninspectable memory space and is modified in hundreds of locations in your program. After PIX, graphics debugging became easier and more fun than any other system I've seen. The operation of the whole machine is laid out visually in a scrubbable timeline. All of your assumptions are easily testable. Its heaven, I tell ya.

If ApiTrace can get close to the functionality of PIX in a cross-platform, cross-API, open-source way... Its a big deal for me, at least. :)</comment>


Stepping into This Shower Feels Like Hugging a Warm Cloud - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/08/nebia/

<comment><USER2> Discussion from earlier today: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10040285](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10040285)

I swear they made this title for the "cloud to butt" plugin's users.</comment>


'Clinically no longer exists': Italian doctor claims coronavirus losing potency - <AUTHOR> https://au.news.yahoo.com/italian-doctor-claims-coronavirus-is-losing-potency-230358136.html <comment><AUTHOR> I've read the same comments made from doctors in another country. The are MDs but absolutely not scientists, as they have no resources or desire to do any research. Maybe they're seeing less severely sick people but unless the virus changed (and we would have heard) I don't see how... Unless, I understand it correctly, once the virus enters, it multiplies by itself.

<comment><USER2> "Prof. Alberto Zangrillo is Full Professor in Anesthesiology and Intensive Care at Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele and Head of Anesthesia and Intensive Care Unit of IRCCS Ospedale San Raffaele in Milan, Italy. […] According to the Scopus database, Zangrillo is among the top 10 doctors in the world for the number of publications of the last 2 years in anesthesia and intensive care."

San Raffaele is the university hospital in Milan. Did you really think that its head would not be a scientist?

<comment><AUTHOR> So he analyzed the virus genome or whatever and made that comment? Making incredible claims is a great way to be in the news

<comment><USER2> No, he measured viral load. The number of viruses in patients. As in "the number of viruses present per cm³ of air breathed out", "the number of viruses on one swab from the patient's throat" or similar. There are several ways to measure this, they correlate but are not identical.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I wonder if it has to do with changes in weather - seems possible that rising vitamin D levels would stave things off.</comment>


Lavabit founder turned over the private SSL keys as an 11 page printout - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/us/2013/10/03/you-wont-believe-what-email-provider-lavabit-did-to-avoid-giving-the-us-government-its-data/ <comment><USER2> "At approximately 1:30p.m. eDT on August 2, 2013, Mr. Levison gave the FBI a printout of what he represented to be the encryption keys needed to operate the penregister. This printout, in what appears to be 4-point type, consists of 11 pages of largely illegible characters.

Moreover, each of the five encryption keys contains 512 individual characters - or a total of 2560 characters. To make use of these keys, the FBI would have to manually input all 2560 characters, and one incorrect keystroke in this laborious process would render the FBI collection system incapable of collecting decrypted data."

<comment><USER3> > _To make use of these keys, the FBI would have to manually input all 2560 > characters..._

My reaction to that was "oh boo hoo".

When people my age were kids (get off my lawn) we used to type pages of raw hexadecimal from the back of magazines into a machine prompt. We didn't cry about it, we were just careful.

I can't find a hexadecimal example at the moment, but look at some of these TRS-80 programs (pp. 110-111, 143) which have multiple pages of data/digits to transcribe:

[http://archive.org/stream/80-programs-for-the- trs-80-1979jim...](http://archive.org/stream/80-programs-for-the- trs-80-1979jim- perrypdf/80programsforthetrs-801979jimperrypdf#page/n81/mode/2up)

Btw, the originals were often bad photocopies. So maybe not 4 point font, but certainly ambiguity in some bits.

<comment><USER4> And also... C64 programs. They were manually typed in by 10 year old kids. The programs were printed in the computer magazines (early 80s) that dealt specifically with C64's. These programs were far more than 2560 characters (in some cases).

If young, interested kids can do it, I'd hope that a nation state could figure it out.

Link: [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a5/ComputesGazett...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a5/ComputesGazetteProgramPage.jpg)

<comment><USER5> Yep, I did that when I was a teenager -- entered the machine code for an entire word processor for the C64 called SpeedScript. The good old days ;-)

<comment><USER6> Yep, I remember doing that with an Apple II back in '79 to get a simple lunar lander game. The process took more than a day, with two friends to help double check the values as we copied everything over. When it ran, and worked, we thought we were gods!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is what happens when you try to "hack" the legal system as if it was a simple, deterministic computer program (it comes up here frequently as the "FBI wasn't here"-sign-in-library hack).

When a judge orders you to do something, you have to comply with the substance of the order, not evade it by sort-of _technically_ complying while actually avoiding it.

I have all the respect in the world for Levison, he did the right thing and it takes guts. But trying to "hack" a judge's order is just silly.

<comment><USER8> I disagree. If the judge wanted an electronic copy then he or she could ask for that, which is indeed what the judge later did. Levison would have known that his initial 'compliance' wouldn't make the problem go away, but it did buy him some time while the judge figured out what to do next (or the FBI figured out that they needed to be more precise in what they were asking for). He didn't refuse to comply at any point - he complied with the original request, at which point the judge gave him fresh instructions and ordered him to comply with those or face a fine.

Consider it from another perspective - people often request data from governments or large corporations and, when ordered or pressured into providing it they often do so in the least helpful format available. They are rarely punished for this because the law doesn't really have a position on whether CSV is a better document format than PDFs of scanned printouts, or whether a 50-page printout is more useful than a CD-ROM or USB stick. Why should the rules be any different for someone like Levison?

<comment><USER9> >>He didn't refuse to comply at any point - he complied with the original request

Just like the parent said, while he kind of technically complied. But, again, it's more than obvious to everyone that it's not what was expected/demanded from him.

>>Why should the rules be any different for someone like Levison?

Because it's related to Snowden. Again, it's quite obvious to everyone, that it's a hot issue and the government might go far to solve it.

Like it was said above, while I really support and respect Levison, it's not something you should be trying to fool - it's not a computer program...

<comment><USER8> _Just like the parent said, while he kind of technically complied. But, again, it 's more than obvious to everyone that it's not what was expected/demanded from him._

No, it really isn't. This is precisely why interactions between the law and technology are often quite confusing, because there's a mismatch between what the law says and the technological reality. It wasn't obvious what the law was demanding of him because such demands are rare and judges haven't figured out a boilerplate form of words to ask for the surrender of PGP keys or SSL certificates in particular file formats yet, and so they ask in general terms for 'encryption keys', leaving much open to interpretation. The existence of such ambiguities is why lawyers earn as much money as they do.

Levison wasn't 'fooling' the law at any point - he complied with the request as presented to him. The FBI wasn't happy with that response and went back to the judge for a more tightly-worded request, backed up by a threat of fines. At no point was the legal process subverted, 'hacked' or 'fooled'.

My point is that _this is how the law works_. If a judge wants you to do something then it is incumbent upon the judge to specify clearly what that is. You can't _refuse_ without facing legal sanctions, but if the judge is vague or imprecise then you have at least some freedom to interpret the judge's instructions yourself. As I said earlier, corporate and government lawyers are experts in finding the most favourable interpretation of judicial rulings for their clients, and many legal cases revolve around reaching an interpretation of the law that is unambiguous enough to be enforceable.

 _Because it 's related to Snowden. Again, it's quite obvious to everyone, that it's a hot issue and the government might go far to solve it.

Like it was said above, while I really support and respect Levison, it's not something you should be trying to fool - it's not a computer program..._

What are you trying to say here? Sure, the government cares a lot about this case. But the judiciary and the government are not the same thing, and the law, as a matter of principle, is meant to apply equally in all cases. There are no special cases where the law should be applied differently because the case has the attention of senior government officials. You might say that I am being somewhat naive in that belief, but I think that most judges would agree that their role is as neutral arbiters of the law, not agents of the government of the day.

There is absolutely no sense in which it's possible to describe Levison's actions as incorrect. You can believe that he should have surrendered the keys in electronic format immediately, despite not being asked to do so, or you believe that he should have refused point blank to disclose them and thus disobey the judicial order, but those options are variously immoral or illegal, and the action of providing the printed copies of the keys was neither.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> THE POLICE HAVE REQUESTED ALL FILES UNDER DIRECTORY TITLE RAND.

"Dump it for them at 300 baud."

"Art! Are you sure?"

"We cleaned Rand's directory first thing. Took out everything not routine, then we added a few files. Old engineering catalogs. Maintenance schedules. Ratings of TV shows. Makes a pretty big file---" MILLIE, what is the total stored in Rand's directory?

23,567,892 BYTES

"Good Lord. Art, that will take hours to print out---"

"Yeah, that gives the cops a hobby." [1]

[1] Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Oath of Fealty. New York: Pocket Books, 1981. ISBN 0-671-82802-9, pp. 287--8.

</comment><comment><USER11> The irony would be using the same software/format for this as was used to export the PGP Source Code legally in the 1900s.

<comment><USER12> What format was that? Edit: Thanks!

<comment><USER11> [http://www.amazon.com/PGP-Internals-Philip-R- Zimmermann/dp/0...](http://www.amazon.com/PGP-Internals-Philip-R- Zimmermann/dp/0262240394)

[http://www.pgpi.org/pgpi/project/scanning/](http://www.pgpi.org/pgpi/project/scanning/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I really don't get why dude didn't respond to the requests for information with a totally straightfaced, and factual, "we do not have the technical capability to recover messages for a user using the encryption software". Not "we could possibly defeat our own system, but we don't want to." Just the "we do not have the technical capability to do that, but we're happy to turn over any other information which we can provide, pursuant to lawful order or warrant." Be polite, totally responsive, completely honest, but don't go into the "yes, we could possibly build something which would possibly do what you want, but we don't want to."

<comment><USER13> You don't get it. Emails were encrypted at rest with the user's password. This was publicly disclosed by lavabit on their site. With the SSL key material the state could decrypt the user's password from network traffic. The encrypted emails and SSL key material are obtained through the courts, SSL encrypted passwords via surveillance, bob's your uncle they can read a user's email. Lavabit wouldn't need to "build" anything and couldn't argue they didn't have the technical capability to turn over SSL keys and encrypted email data. This is why he shut down, so that user's wouldn't continue to submit their passwords over the wire using a compromised SSL key.

<comment><USER11> The only reason they got the SSL key search warrant was his aggressive noncompliance with the pen register/pen trap. I didn't realize pen register applied to non-CALEA entities (this is a PATRIOT 216 thing); if it didn't, there would have been no justification for 1) forcing his cooperation and 2) getting SSL keys from him.

With Patriot 216 pen trap, they can compel full cooperation to the same standard as a CALEA covered entity, which they knew he couldn't provide as well as their own pen trap device (at least without work; they found $2k unreasonable to implement it!), so they can get a warrant for SSL keys for their pen trap. With that they can do whatever.

There may be a solution in SSL keys which can't be exported (HSMs) into the pen trap; you'd potentially be able to require a secret compatriot offshore (or via a cutout) to assist in adding a new load balancer or front end, so you'd be technically unable to comply. They could require you generate and use new keys, but users could detect that, and you could warn of this when you first set up the system.

<comment><USER14> > The only reason they got the SSL key search warrant was his aggressive > noncompliance with the pen register/pen trap.

What does this mean? Don't they have a the legal ability to force compliance?

<comment><USER11> Yes, but it's not instant. He was asked for pen register, he wasn't 100% helpful (partially due to how the system was set up), so they went back in various ways to get what they wanted (threatening criminal or civil contempt charges, fines, and a warrant for ssl keys).

Then Ladar delayed on the warrant in a variety of ways (trying to quash a warrant, which I didn't know could be done before executing it; trying to claim it was invalid until after the pen trap was set up without it to actually observe it failing, the "little 4 points" trick.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Should have put a typo in there. Can you imagine the double/tripple/etc checking going on!?

<comment><USER16> Or use one of those Xerox copiers that randomly change numbers...

<comment><USER17> and a funky font that is difficult to OCR.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Don't do this. If it's a clean print-out it's trivial to OCR at a five nines accuracy rate.

<comment><USER19> Depending on font he used, I believe for OCR some characters might be difficult:

o01|IO

And even one wrong character makes SSL key wrong.

<comment><USER18> There's OCR systems which work on the basis of internal font consistency. They break the page into a series of single character images, and because the same character repeated is close to identical it's trivial to match them up, so you can easily build a map of characters.

You then just need a human to label each character once. With a pixel image comparison 0 looks completely different from o.

If they're using a standard font then a regular OCR (you'd only need four nines accuracy to get it 100% correct) would be fine, even with a weird font it still be easy to get that level of accuracy.

<comment><USER20> The obvious solution to this would be to cycle randomly between fonts every few characters (or keep a running total of the font used for each particular symbol, and ensure it stays below some threshold). For bonus points you could convert the key from base64/ascii to unicode or similar.

<comment><USER10> _The obvious solution to this would be to cycle randomly between fonts every few characters (or keep a running total of the font used for each particular symbol, and ensure it stays below some threshold)._

This sounds like a useful defence in general against OCR re-use of particular things you might publish. I wonder if it could be done in a manner unobtrusive to the eye, but progressively more expensive to algorithms, either in terms of memory or time. This is really a neat idea you have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Passive aggressive ftw. I would have used an excessively decorative script font and not number the pages or identify which keys. Perhaps even a typo or two, that'd buy some time.

On the size, 4 pt is generous. I remember printing an allowed note index card for high school final exams in 1 pt Times New Roman on a laser printer @ 600 dpi. At arm's length, it looked like a series of lines, but up-close the text was quite readable. Under magnification, the print quality was amazing.

<comment><USER22> He should have used "wingdings".

<comment><USER21> I like your thinking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This man is a hero. I don't know if he's a saint (he's probably not - no one is), but he's definitely a hero.

</comment><comment><USER24> Even if futile, beautiful example of civil disobedience. If only there were more people that at least tried as he did. I'm supporting his rally[1] and hope more people will.

[1] [https://rally.org/lavabit](https://rally.org/lavabit)

</comment><comment><USER25> Isn't the key this sentence: _" Wired reported the government as complaining that a Lavabit representative indicated that Lavabit had the technical capability to decrypt the information, but that Lavabit did not want to 'defeat [its] own system."_?

If they used something like Perfect Forward Secrecy, could they not legitimately have claimed to be unable to defeat their own system (as it is currently configured)?

</comment><comment><USER26> offtopic: scrolling through the printout by dragging the scrollbar handle slowly (~3 pages per sec) crashes the chrome renderer (tried on 2 win7-32 boxes)

<comment> kevin-brown On Ubuntu x64, it's sluggish (as it's loading) but doesn't crash. It took up a solid 1GB of memory though, according to Chrome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> FYI, I would guess that Attachment A starting on page 144 is a reproduction of the keys in a very small font. If that is correct, they are indeed illegible.

</comment><comment><USER28> The worst part about this is that it's not even that hard to fix. If you wanted to - you could hire a VA for $5/hour to digitize it (and hire another to QA). Total cost probably less than $100.

So intrusive AND lazy :).

</comment><comment><USER29> Technically speaking he did comply with the order. They never specified what format it should be in.

Plus companies shouldn't be required to beautify data for the government. They got what they asked for it-s up to them to figure out how to use it.

I know this is a bit sneaky this time but if they allow this to stand then soon companies will have to employ full time staff to beatify data for the government with pretty graphs and such because a database dump is incomprehensible.

It's like a kid asking you how to make a website and then complaining that HTML, CSS, JavaScript,etc is incomprehensible.

</comment><comment><USER30> lol... remember this?: [http://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2012/aug/29/apple...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2012/aug/29/apple- samsung-trucks-nickels-fake)

</comment><comment><USER31> He should have printed one character per page, and put it in a 2,560 page 3-ring binder.

<comment><USER32> * unnumbered

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Smarter would have been to copyright the keys so that giving them a copy would violate DMCA.

Take THAT!

</comment><comment><USER34> "In an attempt at dry humor"

I think that is a little better than an "attempt"...

</comment><comment><USER35> Sounds like an act of malicious obedience.

</comment><comment><USER36> shoulda put it on floppy disks, or minidisks

</comment><comment><USER37> But you can simply scan 11 pages in and run a software over it that reads all characters. There´s lots of software like that.

This would have taken the FBI 20 mins...

</comment><comment><USER38> Perfect forward secrecy, bitches.

<comment><USER39> That does nothing for future intercepts.

<comment><USER22> That is what killing your business is for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Sorry, but I'm not a fan. Either comply with the order or don't, but don't play games.

This is the same nonsense the government pulls when they want to "technically" comply with a FOIA request, but want to make life as hard as possible for the requester.

<comment><USER41> Apparently double standards are wrong when the government does it, but are OK when "we" do it.

What _I 'm_ not a fan of, however, is that Levison had claimed that he's be willing to comply with (indeed, _has_ complied with) specific warrants. He left the impression that the FBI was asking him to ruin his security _in general_.

However the court filings show that the request for the SSL priv keys came only after Levison failed to comply with... a specific warrant relating to Snowden and Snowden alone. So if Levison wasn't lying, he was definitely leaving something major out of his story.

<comment><USER42> He was probably still working on a way to compromise Snowden while leaving all of the users still secure, and the FBI was probably just impatient. But that's pure speculation on my part.

<comment><USER41> From what I can gather in the released order, the FBI didn't actually ask for Snowden's communications to be compromised anyways, they wanted the "connection information" (i.e. IP addresses, any metadata). I don't understand why Levison didn't think he could comply with that, unless it was completely impossible for him to implement.

But he never told the FBI it was technically impossible, he told them that he _would_ not (as opposed to "could not") do it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> So he did surrender the keys -- this makes his business shutdown move substantially less heroic that everyone thought.

<comment><USER44> It was ordered by a judge. What do you suggest he would do otherwise?

<comment><USER45> Delete them before he was ordered to hand them over?

<comment><USER46> He deleted his entire business before handing them over. That's even more drastic, don't you think?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Beginner dev: An app to find the right issue to make your first PR on GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/GaelS/first-contrib-app <comment><USER2> What a project, man! Awesome job! The UI is speechless!

</comment><comment> rock-n-node cool project</comment>


The Manual That Dictates Every Detail of the NYC Subway - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/the-legendary-manual-that-dictates-every-detail-of-the-1572251522 <comment><USER2> TfL have similar documents for London Underground which are a great read if you're interested in this sort of thing.

Signage: [https://www.tfl.gov.uk/cdn/static/cms/documents/lu-signs- man...](https://www.tfl.gov.uk/cdn/static/cms/documents/lu-signs-manual.pdf) Station Design: [http://www.persona.uk.com/nle/B-Core_docs/G/NLE-G1.pdf](http://www.persona.uk.com/nle/B-Core_docs/G/NLE-G1.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> Is there a properly digitized PDF available anywhere? I appreciate what [http://thestandardsmanual.com/](http://thestandardsmanual.com/) is doing here, but their hover-photo-to-zoom thing is hard to read.

<comment><USER4> Not a proper scan, but still pretty decent: [https://daringfawnyball.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/nyctaman...](https://daringfawnyball.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/nyctamanual.pdf)

via [http://blog.fawny.org/2013/02/19/nycmta1970/](http://blog.fawny.org/2013/02/19/nycmta1970/)

<comment><USER3> Nice. It looks like that PDF is made from the full-size images from [http://thestandardsmanual.com/](http://thestandardsmanual.com/). I was about to extract them myself until you pointed to this PDF. Thank you.

Did anyone else notice that ALL of the full-size images are pre-loaded with [http://thestandardsmanual.com/page.html](http://thestandardsmanual.com/page.html) ? According to Chrome's Dev. Tools that's 378 requests for 109 MB!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> FYI this is from 2014.

Since then, the OP created a Kickstarter for a reissue of the manual...I have it sitting (awkwardly) on my bookshelf. [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thestandardsmanual/full...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thestandardsmanual/full- size-reissue-of-the-nycta-graphics-standards)

</comment><comment><USER6> It's unfortunate that such a lovely document seems to have produced a terrible subway system. Having regularly taken the subway in Beijing, London, Washington D.C., Tokyo. The New York subway seems almost deliberately difficult to navigate at times. Subway signs are often misleading. Lacking in places or just outright missing. Perhaps they focused too much on the appearance without considering usability.

<comment><USER7> The core problem is that the New York subway system isn't one subway system, it's three:

Interboro Rapid Transit (IRT), which built a lot of elevated lines from the Bronx into Manhattan (all the Manhattan lines have been torn down, including the second and third avenue el, which were never replaced with the promised Second Avenue Subway)... they ran shorter, narrower train cars and their remaining lines turned into the 1234567 and Times Square Shuttle (internally, the 0)

Brooklyn-Manhattan transit (BMT), which ran a bunch of trains into Brooklyn...

and the Independent Subway System (IND), which was run by the city with BMT car standards and was responsible for the Manhattan portions of the ABCDEF trains, the G, and the Rockaway Shuttle (internally the H) and bought a few more rail lines in Brooklyn as well (the tail ends of the A and the F).

If you look up the maps, the places where the subway really looks awkwardly constructed, the stations are sprawling, the tracks are at funny angles... it's because they were competitors. Why does the 2/3 cross the L out in Brooklyn without a transfer when the stations are right on top of each other? They were run by competitors. Why do the F/A/C/G shun the other lines as they plow through downtown Brooklyn? Why do you need to walk from the 6 to the F at 63rd Street? Why can't you transfer between the Hewes Street and Broadway (G) stations if they're right on top of each other? Why can't anyone figure out how to navigate Court Street? Why, for years, was there a transfer between the BDFM and downtown 6 at Bleeker St, but not the uptown 6? (That silly little bubble in the subway map.)

To this day there is _exactly one spot_ where an IRT train shares a platform with a BMT train (Queensboro Plaza). And there are essentially two places where trains transfer between the old IND and BMT tracks (at the Manhattan Bridge, and Queens Plaza -- the third, under Central Park between the Q and the F, occasionally figures in maintenance-related detours).

The good news is that New York is lousy with subway stations, and if there's a disruption on one line, there's a very good chance you can still get where you're going on another. The bad news is that's fundamentally confusing.

<comment><USER8> You can argue much the same about London underground -- it too is a mishmash of previously competing railway lines, and has grown in complexity to include all manner of railways -- some cut-and-cover, some deep-tunnel, some overground. For the uninitiated, it is a very complex system. The problem with our system is that it has to inherit decisions made over 150 years ago in the steam age.

<comment><USER7> The London Underground does have a few advantages over New York, though -- they were able to build deep tube lines with ease because of the geology (the rock under Manhattan being much tougher to tunnel through). New York subways are almost entirely cut-and-cover, which places substantial constraints on where they run (under city streets, where you have to worry about nearby basements, and water mains and the like) and how much space there is to connect them to each other. This is also a reason they have more sharp curves that make terrible metal-on-metal squeaking sounds.

London's tube stations have a lot of space between their platforms, enough to provide a network of hallways with separate entrance and exit passageways and escalators (some of them are equipped with switchable wayfinding signs so you can have different ways out at morning and evening rush hour). New York doesn't have anything like that anywhere; you'll often have a single set of stairs from the street down to _one side_ of the tracks (with no provision for transferring to the other side at all, to say nothing of elevators). If it's a nice, modern station the tracks will be a little deeper so the station entrance serves as an overpass over the tracks, but other times the transfers will only be available by walking along another subway platform.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > "If the manual had been designed today, documents like this wouldn't exist. > They'd be nested within dense file trees, stored in data centers in > anonymous buildings in rural parts of the world, and accessed through > individual computers."

They do exist, and thanks to the internet, are more easily found than ever. Many companies post their design guidelines, even if no external parties will ever use them beyond looking at the final products:

[https://developer.nike.com/nikefuel/brand- guidelines.html](https://developer.nike.com/nikefuel/brand-guidelines.html) [http://hannahkimdesign.com/mcd_styleguide/](http://hannahkimdesign.com/mcd_styleguide/) [http://guidelines.usability.gov/](http://guidelines.usability.gov/)

And some that _are_ used by people outside of the organisation:

[http://www.google.com/design/spec/material- design/introducti...](http://www.google.com/design/spec/material- design/introduction.html) [https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/UserEx...](https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/MobileHIG/)

</comment><comment><USER10> The designer of NYC's subway map, Massimo Vignelli, has published a meta style guide "THE VIGNELLI CANON".

        This little book reveals our guidelines -
        those set by ourselves for ourselves.

It's only 49 pages and available for free on his website:

[http://www.vignelli.com/canon.pdf](http://www.vignelli.com/canon.pdf)

<comment><USER11> Thanks, I bought the paperback for $30 on amazon, had no idea it was also available for free!</comment></comment>


Tesla Logs Show That Model X Driver Hit the Accelerator - <AUTHOR> http://electrek.co/2016/06/06/tesla-model-x-crash-not-at-fault/ <comment><USER2> I'm not sure I like the idea of having just a single foot pedal. Why change what works? So people who have driven over 30-40 yrs with both a brake and a gas pedal are now supposed to use a combo of one pedal and a steering column paddle? Call me crazy but sounds like they need to redesign that.

<comment><USER3> Because it is more convenient and allows for regenerative braking. One advantage of electric cars is that the motor can act as a very powerful Dynamo and get a lot of energy back into the battery when braking and going downhill. With two paddles, this would be close to impossible or id imagine it would just feel weird.

Furthermore, your argument that it has always worked and doesn't need changing is also very weak. Why drive automatic when manual has always worked just fine? With manual driving, there is no disadvantage, the majority of people still use it in some European countries and new cars are commonly soled as manuals on purpose.

And yet many Americans drive automatic simply because it is more convenient. One paddle driving doesn't really make driving more or less secure. It is just different and people need to get used to it. Accidents like this are not something news – they have happened a lot in the past and will happen in the future (although manual cars might have an advantage here because you can't drive into a wall very fast when you are almost parked because you have to switch gears to get to a proper speed).

<comment><USER2> I was not referring to the difference between auto and manual but the fact that supposedly, I don't own one, the model x has but one foot pedal. And that being said, why remove the 2 pedal design when that has worked forever? Prius's also have regenerative braking and they kept the std. 2 foot pedal design TG.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Previous discussion on HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11848961](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11848961) "Tesla Model X autonomously crashes into building, owner claims"</comment>