US emissions fell 2.1% in 2019 - <AUTHOR> https://rhg.com/research/preliminary-us-emissions-2019/ <comment><USER2> This is largely because we are replacing coal plants with fracked natural gas plants, which we are doing because fracked gas is cheap and plentiful.

Fracked gas is way better from an air pollution point of view and a little better from a direct carbon emission point of view. But when you consider the methane leaks from wellheads and pipelines and facilities it is roughly as bad as coal for climate. This is overall not a good story for climate as we lock in gas plants for decades.

Renewables and nuclear deployments did not factor in much to this decrease.

<comment><USER3> Natural gas is not at all "roughly as bad as coal for climate". There is a lot of research indicating this, so I will just point to one article:

[https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/natural-gas- re...](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/natural-gas-really- better-coal-180949739/)

Natural gas isn't the ultimate solution, of course, but it's a mistake to treat it the same as coal.

<comment><USER2> The subtitle in the article you link is exactly my point. At the moment, we are just now getting better at tracking methane leaks. No one knows for sure how much is leaked from the infrastructure. It may easily be just as bad or worse than coal, and is absolutely "roughly" as bad as coal.

[https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/12/climate/texas...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/12/climate/texas- methane-super-emitters.html)

Take the average IPCC meta-analysis numbers [1] at face value: 820 gCO2-eq/kWh for coal, 490 for gas. Those are both extraordinarily high. This is because they both combust carbon in the presence of oxygen to form energy and CO2. They're both very high-carbon fuel sources. If we are trying to reduce carbon emissions, we need to build things that do not combine C + O2 to make CO2 + energy. Options with less than 50g CO2-eq/kWh (in decreasing order of emissions) include solar (41), geothermal (38), hydro (24), tidal (17), nuclear (12), and wind (11).

[1] [https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...](https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5_annex- iii.pdf)

Given this situation it makes no sense to switch from coal to gas for the sake of the climate. Both endpoints have wholly unacceptably high carbon. If you build a bunch of $2B shiny new gas facilities, as we are doing today, utilities will want to run them for decades. And gas companies are portraying themselves as climate heros, and people are believing them because emissions are going down (again, towards an unacceptable final destination). To me it seems crazy.

<comment><USER4> The perfect is the enemy of the good.

Natural gas is roughly half as bad as coal, and it's an easy win, compared to the alternatives. It's also better in terms of particulates.

If we sit around waiting for reduction of energy use and increase in renewables to save us, we are screwed. Gotta take what we can get for now, and continue fighting for even better solutions.

<comment><USER2> > The perfect is the enemy of the good.

In this case, high-carbon (coal and gas) is the enemy of low-carbon (wind/solar/tidal/hydro/nuclear/geo).

I said this in another thread, but switching from terrible to awful is not something we should take as what we can get. The starting point and the end point are unacceptable in a coal to gas transition. No point celebrating that.

For example, fracked gas is so cheap that it's starting to cause near zero- carbon nuclear plants to close early. Unlike gas, nuclear plants are actually low carbon (12 gCO2-eq/kWe vs. 490 for gas). Thus, fracked gas being cheap and not considered the high-carbon fuel it is is preventing us from reaching our climate goals.

This is really serious stuff.

<comment><USER5> What you say makes perfect sense but when you transpose to the real world the story changes. See how the most vocal and powerful climate activists work day and night to stifle nuclear energy as a perfectly good solution to fight climate change, by far the best solution out there to reduce emissions. Maybe gas is the second best solution to reduce emissions while we develop other solutions in the meantime.

<comment><USER4> > See how the most vocal and powerful climate activists work day and night to > stifle nuclear energy as a perfectly good solution to fight climate change

I don't think that conforms with reality. Off the top of my head, I looked up McKibben and Greta, and both see a role for nuclear power in decarbonization.

The bigger issue is that it's not prioritized because it'd split the environmental movement, but that's a far cry from "work day and night to stifle nuclear energy."

<comment><USER6> Greta is irrelevant in the US, which is what we are talking about. In the US you need to look at people like AOC and other GND advocates. You'll find a stark lack of support for nuclear.

<comment><USER7> Check out this tool created by MIT to see how big of an impact nuclear power has on CO2 emissions. [https://en- roads.climateinteractive.org/scenario.html?v=2.7....](https://en- roads.climateinteractive.org/scenario.html?v=2.7.6) (hint, it ain't much).

The enthusiasm behind nuclear as a climate solution seems pretty misplaced. With heavy subsidies, it can play a tiny tiny tiny role in solving the problem.

<comment><USER2> That seems to assume that it's physically impossible to make cost effective, widely popular nuclear power plant that can be built quickly.

In the USA, more than half of the carbon-free electricity comes from 100 GW if nuclear. Globally it has prevented more than 70 GT of carbon emissions. Is there any other low carbon energy source that has approached this yet? I don't think so. Maybe hydro, but it's somewhat hard to wholesale expand.

<comment><USER8> > That seems to assume that it's physically impossible to make cost effective, > widely popular nuclear power plant that can be built quickly.

That is the experience so far. As well as waste that must be stored for generations. Not a lot of waste but even a little bit of some thing that must be stored for more than 10,000 years is a impossible prospect

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This article is very short but (some) early commenters appear not to have read it, and most subthreads at this moment started from them. Here are some of the important points from the article:

> This was due to a decrease in coal plants

> Further, renewables were up 6% in 2019

> Emissions rose from buildings [2.2%], industry [0.6%], and other parts of > the economy

I'm supposed to take delivery of solar panels at my house today. It shouldn't be long before they're operational. I'm so excited!

To people in general, what improvements are _you_ making (not your country, but you personally)? Not something you've always done - what's your latest new eco-project, big or small?

<comment><USER10> For those interested in exploring solar, Google has a tool which provides some specific metrics around your home's roof based on satellite photos:

[https://www.google.com/get/sunroof](https://www.google.com/get/sunroof)

<comment><USER11> Genuine question: why should we put solar panels on our roofs versus investing in a solar coop or buying solar power directly? I would think the latter options would be more cost-effective/efficient (it's more efficient to service one solar farm than the equivalent number of panels on roofs scattered across a community, etc).

<comment><USER12> At least in California, PG&E charges a disproportionate amount as "delivery cost" even if the energy comes from a cheaper and greener alternative coop. For me more than half my total cost is PG&E fees and I am subscribed to a CC Coop.

With your own solar (I don't have yet), the idea is that you can transition more of your usage to electric (say change water heater from gas to electric) without paying a cut to someone else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> " This was due to a decrease in coal plants, which resulted in an emissions drop of 190 million metric tons"

Yep, coal is one of the biggest problems.

[https://h4labs.org/ive-got-another-stupid-idea-to-deal- with-...](https://h4labs.org/ive-got-another-stupid-idea-to-deal-with-climate- change/)

<comment><USER14> Coal is abundant and cheap and well suited to day and night base load power. The emissions are awful but there is no suitable replacement right now which fits those criteria (nuclear falls down on the cheap point). Sure, we can keep burning natural gas like it's going out of style but at some point demand is going to push up supply again.

Until grid level storage is well proven (and not geographically constrained like pumped hydro) that is the reality.

<comment><USER15> That's why you put a price on carbon emissions. The free market isn't going to solve it. There's an abundance of clean energy out there (e.g. Ontario sells the U.S. massive amounts of electricity at a loss), the problem is that coal's price doesn't reflect the damage it does to the planet.

<comment><USER16> I am not opposed to this, but I am curious how a government would arrive at a "price" of carbon emissions. How is the tax rate decided upon? Is it a political game of just enough to make renewable energy more attractive? Or is it as high as we can make it? It just seems like it would have no basis in reality.

<comment><USER17> >I am not opposed to this, but I am curious how a government would arrive at a "price" of carbon emissions

The conventional approach right now is that you have a limited number of CO2 certificates that give a company the right to pollute. The number of CO2 certificates is reduced every year to meet a defined goal like avoid warming beyond 1.5°C. Companies are handed a certain amount of certificates depending on their size (prone to corruption). If they don't have enough certificates they must buy additional certificates. If they have too many they can sell them for a profit. Supply and demand determine the price.

The problem is that too many certificates are being handed out until now the price in the EU market was in the single digits and shot up to 25€ per ton. Because people are allergic to revenue neutral carbon taxes that are offset by redistributing the tax income the latest approach is to simply set a minimum price for CO2 certificates. People think they understand taxes but they certainly don't understand CO2 certificates. The end result is that there will be very limited redistribution.

<comment><USER18> > Companies are handed a certain amount of certificates depending on their > size (prone to corruption).

Seems like it would make sense to replace the "hand them out based on size" step (I've heard "based on historical emissions" before as well) with "auction them off to the highest bidder".

This isn't revenue neutral, but you could make it so by then simply cutting some tax (personal income tax, most likely) until it is, if that's the goal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> How much of this is due to the fact that we're exporting pollution in the form of plant outsourcing to countries willing to absorb those externalities (China)?

<comment><USER20> What do you mean by "exporting pollution in the form of plant outsourcing"?

<comment><USER21> seems pretty clear to me: you used to manufacture X in the US, now you import X from the US. The pollution that X used to generate in the US is off the US's emissions sheet.

<comment><USER20> The _entire_ world has made China its manufacturing hub. I advise you to go to Germany and walk into a hardware store, just inventory the number of items that are made in China. Or Australia, Switzerland, Canada, pick your favorite nation.

Furthermore, US has been importing X for over 20 years. It is not like US started importing last year.

This argument makes no sense. See the top comment - the reason is decrease in Coal plants.

<comment><USER22> "Other people are also outsourcing emissions" is an irrelevant point, especially in an article about how the U.S. emissions have fallen in the last year and when the conversation is about _why_.

That the U.S. started 20 (ish) years ago is a pertinent point, especially as the article points out that the preceding year saw U.S. emissions increase.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is a nice win, but it's a drop in the bucket compared to China's increase and they already own 1/3 of total emissions.

Source: [https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/china/](https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/china/)

<comment><USER24> Per capita greenhouse emissions in the US are still more than double than emissions in China.

<comment><USER23> While unfortunate, this is sort of irrelevant in terms of actual climate effects.

<comment><USER24> It matters as our populations increase.

<comment><USER25> US is almost down to 0.5% pop growth so that's helpful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I wonder if 2020 is the year that global emissions start to fall. In some sense, that's too little too late, but I still think it would be a victory. It's really up to China, who was mostly recently estimated to peak in 2022, but who knows really

<comment><USER27> Will be interesting to see, the last time there was a decline was during the 2008 GFC. As we continue moving to decouple GDP from CO2 emissions eventually we can have a drop without an economic disaster to do it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I agree with the view that we'll see a rapid change when new renewables are cheaper than continued operation of existing fossil fuel plants. However, where is that threshold? We're seeing solar and wind with LCoE as low as $0.03/kWh. How much further do we have to go?

<comment><USER22> I don't think we need to get cheaper, rather that we need to continue to scale up production of PV/wind and batteries. Even with current cost of batteries we can eliminate 100% of coal while saving money; doing so will reduce energy costs enough to eliminate fuel oil, which in turn will reduce the cost enough to eliminate gas.

<comment><USER28> Batteries, while very efficient, have some pretty harsh scaling problems, and are very expensive for the tail end of availability needs. There are plenty of energy storage options that are comparably inefficient but scale much easier (such as hydrogen storage or thermal storage), but lower energy production costs can mitigate the expense of inefficiency.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> It surprises me that emissions from the transportation industry seem to be _increasing_ despite mainstreaming of EVs.

I understand EVs are not a prefect solution because they just pass the emissions to the power plants, but considering the documented improvements in our power infrastructure, I thought that would have at least a slight knock-on effect for transportation. I figure the rate should at least be _decreasing_ , even if it's very slow.

Is it just too soon to see the impact of EVs? Is it related the rise in delivered goods? Is there just more travel within the US in general?

<comment><USER30> FWIW, "Surging SUV demand is canceling out the environmental benefit from electric cars"

[https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/17/surging-suv-demand-is- cancel...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/17/surging-suv-demand-is-canceling- out-the-environmental-benefit-from-electric-cars.html)

<comment><USER29> I reckon that most of the demand for SUVs is driven by interior space, carying capacity, and 4WD. I bet there's opportunity in the market for an affordable EV that offers those features. The Model X is cool, but it isn't "affordable" like the Model 3.

<comment><USER25> Kia Niro EV seems pretty legit to cover those factors. Also Rav4 and Subaru Crosstrek hybrids. Ford Escape and Rav4 PHEV is coming this year. (Rav4 Prime looks dope)

Another aspect of SUVs is just the feeling of sitting "high", it's hard to let go of after you've tasted it. And personally, I think sedans are harder on my back after long drives. Also I'd speculate that SUVs kinda replace the mini- vans of previous generations since now we're having less kids (and maybe they're being less social?).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> If net importing was up then it means we've "outsourced" our polluting.

Also, the type of emissions matters, with some pollutants being more greenhouse-y than others.

</comment><comment><USER32> It's a a start, it's excellent news. I wonder if the people of America can significantly beat this figure in 2020?

<comment><USER30> I guess this can be considered excellent news by current standards. In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king after all.

According to the latest UN emissions gap report we need to reduce global emissions by 7.6% every year starting now to meet Paris agreement. And given US position in the world, it should probably do more than global average.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I wonder how much of that is a result of the fairly mild fall/winter we've had so far.

</comment><comment><USER34> we need more Nuclear power to drop emissions faster and by bigger % while allowing energy production and consumption to increase at the same time

<comment><USER2> To qualify your statement I'll claim that nuclear is the only low-carbon energy source we know that can run 24/7 in a wide variety of locations. Hydro can run all night too, but is geographically limited.

This matters because filling in gaps of intermittency requires the production and maintenance of "nonproductive" equipment (like batteries) which takes energy to make, install, maintain, recycle at a scale that may challenge the energy return on investment in many renewable situations.

<comment><USER35> On the scale of a large solar power plant, pumped water storage has superior durability and much easier maintainability than batteries. Besides, the water that's pumped up hill can actually be "productive", e.g. suppling water to a city or to farms

<comment><USER2> Yes, but pumped storage requires a certain geography, takes up vast amounts of land, and may cause serious biogenic methane emissions.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5023102/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5023102/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Emissions are dropping but what about carbon sinks? Are we doing anything to plant more trees?

<comment><USER37> We are making some progress. Here's a couple projects to check out:

[https://www.fastcompany.com/90329982/these-tree-planting- dro...](https://www.fastcompany.com/90329982/these-tree-planting-drones-are- firing-seed-missiles-to-restore-the-worlds-forests)

[https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/21/carbon-engineering- co2-captu...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/21/carbon-engineering-co2-capture- backed-by-bill-gates-oil-companies.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> What about carbon sinks, are we planting more trees?

</comment><comment><USER38> How is China doing?

</comment><comment><USER39> great!!! lets keep it up!!!

</comment><comment><USER40> Url changed from [https://electrek.co/2020/01/08/us-emissions- drop-2019/](https://electrek.co/2020/01/08/us-emissions-drop-2019/), which points to this.

</comment><comment><USER41> Because we're all idiots and waited too long, we need to cut emissions by 15% annually, not 2%. 2% does not even offset the increase in US emissions in 2018. 2% is a disaster.

<comment><USER42> We don't need to do anything. We're responsible for only 15% of worldwide emissions, but nearly all of the new green energy tech and research.

If anything I expect us to increase in CO2 while we retrofit buildings with better technology, build clean power generation and grid tech, and continue in our research.

There are nations that need to drastically cut CO2 but it's not the United States.

<comment><USER43> > We're responsible for only 15% of worldwide emissions, but nearly all of the > new green energy tech and research.

That's like trying to sell someone a $10 carrot by saying it's 50% off, or an over-weight person thinking it's okay that they're eating a bag of chips because they went to the gym.

<comment><USER44> It's more like an overweight person looking around at the 70% of morbidly obese people in the population, and saying "Meh, few chips won't hurt".

They're wrong...but not nearly as wrong as everyone else.

<comment><USER45> The world population is 7.8 billion people. The US population is ~330 million people. So the US has ~4% of the world population.

The US pollution being "only" about 15% of the world pollution wouldn't be something I'd pat myself on the back, if I'd be American ;-)

<comment><USER46> Fair, but the US also produces 15% of the world's GDP [1]

[1] [https://www.statista.com/statistics/270267/united-states- sha...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/270267/united-states-share-of- global-gross-domestic-product-gdp/)

<comment><USER47> I get this point and am mostly in agreement with the intent. However, the US is also more of a service economy, which would lead me to believe we should tend to have lower emissions/productivity compared to other countries that mostly produce goods instead.

So I am curious if there's a way to associate emissions to different categories of productivity and see if we're more wasteful, on average, when it comes to specific parts of our GDP (e.g. using personal automobiles).

I'm not saying this in the self-hating way that I think is trendy for people in the US, but I am curious in the way that, if we want to improve, we could focus on specific parts of the economy that are more wasteful than others. (Driving would be an obvious one, hence the example.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Never thought I'd see natural gas shills on HN.

</comment><comment><USER49> Congrats.

But its still a long way to go to even approach OECD average:

[https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per- capita](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita)

</comment><comment><USER50> It's as if the Paris Climate Accord was a bullshit piece of paper that didn't really do anything and cost the US money that could be better deployed right here in the US. The only way to address emissions is by making alternatives not only economically viable, but economically _advantageous_. I think we're at the point in the curve where you won't really even need carbon taxes or additional regulation for the "greener" alternatives to hockey stick. As the prices drop it eventually won't make any sense to use anything else. I'd like nuclear to be a prominent part of this solution in the interest of reducing CO2 emissions faster though.</comment>


Assumptions: Your language is making an assumption about your work - <AUTHOR> http://langnostic.blogspot.com/2012/05/assumptions.html <comment><USER2> After reading the occasional article on HN about the different merits and warts of Erlang, all I can say is that I really can't wait for one of my projects to actually need it. As it is, I just have no application for it.</comment>


Show HN: Thisemotiondoesnotexist – The Link Between Faces and Emotions - <AUTHOR> http://thisemotiondoesnotexist.com <comment><AUTHOR> I am a PhD student who researches the perception of emotional facial expressions. I am working on a statistical method which can utilize high- dimensional data for psychological research. Here's an app which illustrates this with face tracking data and emotion ratings: It lets you generate dynamic facial expressions at random or by setting emotion dimensions manually.

More information is available from the web app.

<comment><USER2> Very impressive, I was thinking at first that you used deep learning. According to the website, you discarded this approach because of the lack of interpretability in deep learning.

Although it seems to me that high dimensional data, while not being black box, are very hard to interpret as well. Could you give an illustration of the interpretation process you are using?

I am also curious about the construction of your training dataset. Did you used some existing pre-labelled reference data or did you build it by hand?

Thanks

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Sure, I'll explain a bit. The method directly projects the inputs to a small number of latent variables, which are ordered in terms of explained covariance. So you'll know that the first one explains most of the covariance between data sets. Thus, the inputs 'connected' to it are most relevant to the relation between the two sets of data. On the other hand, the latter latent variables are of minor relevance and probably capture mostly noise (so random covariance). Here's where statistical testing of the identified latent variables comes in handy as a metric of what is signal and what is noise (and therefore should not be interpreted).

A nice side effect is that, because there are only a few latent variables, you can manipulate each of them individually and observe the effects on the inputs. In the case of facial expressions it's quite graphic.

The data set is custom-made.</comment></comment></comment>


The Lack of Intelligence About Artificial Intelligence - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveandriole/2017/05/15/the-lack-of-intelligence-about-artificial-intelligence/#7616e6985ebd <comment><USER2> Why Machine Won't Think...

(ref: [1] Jammer, Max "The Conceptual Development of Quantum Mechanics" McGraw-Hill (1966) pp 178-179

[2] Persig, Robert "Lila: An Inquiry in Morals" Bantam (1991) Chapter 11

... In [1], Jammer quotes from Principles of Psychology ... The Stream of Thought, like a bird's life, seems to be mde of an alternation of flights and perchings. The rhythm of language expresses this, where every thought is expressed in a sentence, and every sentence closed by a period. The resting- places are usually occupied by sensorial imaginations of some sort, whose peculiarity is that they can be held before the mind for an indefinite time, and contemplated without chainging; the places of flight are filled with thoughts of relations, static or dynamic, that for the most part obtain between the matters contemplated in the periods of comparative rest... The rush of the thought is so headlong that it almost always brings us up at the conclusion before we can arrest it. Or if our purpose is nimble enough and we do arrest it, it ceases forthwith to be itself... The attempt at introspective analysis in these cases is in fact like seizing a spinning top to catch its motion, or trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks.

.... in [2] Persig writes about "Dynamic Quality"... But Dynamic Quality is not structured and yet it is not chaotic. It is value that cannot be contained by static patterns. ... Science values static patterns. Its business is to search for them. When nonconformity appears it is considered an interruption of the normal rather than the presence of the normal. A deviation from a normal static pattern is something to be explained and if possible controlled. The reality science explains is that `reality' which follows mechanisms and programs. That other worthless stuff which doesn't follow mechanisms and programs we don't pay any attention to. ... A thing doesn't exist because we have never observed it. The reason we have never observed it is because we have never looked for it. And the reason we have never looked for it is that it is unimportant, it has no value and we have other better things to do. ... but 'spur of the moment' decisions... that directed the progress of evolution are, in fact, Dynamic Quality itself. Dynamic Quality, the source of all things, the pre-intelectual cutting edge of reality, always appears as 'spur of the moment'. Where else could it appear? ... Mechansims are the enemy of life. The more static and unyielding the mechanisms are, the more life works to evade them and overcome them

What current AI and machine learning is doing is capturing the "things that don't change", recognizing the resting places, finding the common elements of the flow of information. As such, it will not see the flight between the static points. Neural nets compute the function that extracts the 'static reality' from a flow of patterns. As such they are only able to represent the resting places, not the flight between the resting places. They only attack half the problem of thought. Given two neural nets, what is the dynamic relationship between them? What it the intuition that connects them? Is there an imaginative story to connect one to another? Is there a "rationalization machine" that can make up a connection between them?

Persig says "One can imagine how an infant in the womb acquires awareness of simple distinctions such as pressure and sound, and then at birth acquires more complex ones light and warmth and hunger. ... We could call them stimuli but the baby doesn't identify them as that. From the baby's point of view, something, he knows not what, compels attention. This generalized 'something' Whitehead's 'dim apprehension' is Dynamic Quality. When he is a few months old the baby studies his hand or a rattle, not knowing it is a hand or a rattle... If the baby ignores this force of Dynamic Quality it can be speculated that he will become mentally retarded, but if he is normally attentitive to Dynamic Quality he will soon begin to notice differences and then correlations between the differences and then repetitive patterns of the correlations. But it is not until the baby is several months old that he will begin to really understand enough about that enormously complex correlation of senatations and boundaries and desires called an object to be able to reach for one. This object will not be a primary experience. It will be a complex pattern of static values derived from primary experience.

Is thinking possible without this primary experience, this 'Dynamic Quality', this flight between resting places? Neural nets can recognize a resting place, capturing what Persig calls 'Static Quality' but how do we model the flight? Does this require senses?

The closest I can come to this question would be to think about a NN that focuses on changes. It would be comprised of many sub-nets that would recognize static parts of a scene. For example, a collection of NNs, each of which recognize static things in a room scene such as tables and books. But the 'main NN' would look for changes, e.g. the bee that just entered the room. Not knowing what a bee is, not knowing what it means to fly, but knowing the 'primary experience' of change of position, how do we dynamically construct a new NN that recognizes this 'bee thing' when it sees another one, having only seen one? How is this new 'bee NN' added to the collection of 'static NNs' behind the 'main NN' so that it 'knows about bees'? Besides change of position, there are other primary values such as size, color, sound, etc. Can we construct a new 'static NN' from 'primary NNs' that recognize these primary 'sensations'?

How do you build a Neural Network to recognize 'size'?

'Pressure' is a primary sensation, requiring a sense organ. But 'size' is not primary, though it is primitive (aka non-specific) and derivable from something like images. We recognize cats from images but how to we use images to recognize 'size'?</comment>


Message from Anonymous to American Congress (SOPA) - <AUTHOR> http://vanpeh.de/archives/527

<comment><USER2> Granted, it's for a good cause, but I find this a bit corny at times _(you can't arrest an idea. You can't kill an idea, and you can't stop an idea)_ and borderline childish/embarrassing _(If you pass this bill, you will pay for it. We are Anonymous. We are Legion.)_

What's the purpose of this? Is this going to impress anyone in congress?

<comment><USER3> Yeah, it sounds like a threat written by an angst-ridden 16 year old. I know, because when I was a dumbass 16 year old, I took myself _way_ to seriously and wrote the same kind of pointless drivel.

<comment><AUTHOR> It sounded to me like a old cheap scifi...perhaps written by 16-year-olds.</comment></comment></comment>


Mastermind Codebreaker Challenge - <AUTHOR> http://mastermind.rubikloud.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> This was intended as a sort of fun screening puzzle for my company at an upcoming career fair, but I figured the HN crowd might get a kick out of this type of puzzle too.

<comment><USER2> First, this is a solved problem.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastermind_%28board_game%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastermind_%28board_game%29)

tl;dr answer: Check every possible move. For each possible move, each possible response partitions the remaining guesses. Find the move that, with the worst possible response, has the fewest possible remaining guesses. That is an almost-optimal greedy algorithm.

Second, as a senior candidate I now pass on pre-interview screening tests and assignments. I'm not spending a couple hours doing your challenge for the chance of MAYBE getting an interview. A pre-interview test only works for a recent grad or someone who's desperate.

Who are you and why is your job so special, that I should invest several hours of time for the chance of maybe speaking with you?

<comment><USER3> Pretty much this.

Recent grads aside, screening is stupid and hipster edgy "only the best" companies tend to do this kind of stuff. Unless the company legitimately does cutting edge work (quant trading firm, Google, etc) there's is absolutely no need for this.

On topic though, the problem is an interesting exercise in AI. Could be fun.

<comment><USER4> From experience - there is absolute need for this.

People often lie on their resumes. A while ago when I was hiring, I would throw 90% of the resumes I got because they weren't what I was looking for (one way or the other), but of the 10% that were left, many were simply lies - I didn't keep stats, but phone screens weeded out most of the fakes, though some slipped through and were only weeded in person.

People who say "screening is unneeded" have never likely tried to hire, or have access to a pool of honest-resume talent that most of us do not (which I find highly unlikely).

<comment><USER2> But it also looks awful from the viewpoint of the competent candidate who already has a job. Everyone wants you to spend 1-10 hours doing THEIR pre- screening test, before you even meet them or talk with them. I don't have the free time to do all of them.

Also, giving me a pre-screening test is insulting and shows you didn't read my resume. Based on my education, various honors, and experience, wouldn't it be at least worth your while to talk with me before making me take your stupid test?

<comment><USER4> > Everyone wants you to spend 1-10 hours doing THEIR pre-screening test, > before you even meet them or talk with them. I don't have the free time to > do all of them.

And you shouldn't. Or at least, you should do them prioritized in the order of where you want to work.

> Based on my education, various honors, and experience, wouldn't it be at > least worth your while to talk with me before making me take your stupid > test?

Unfortunately, a significant percentage of resumes are inaccurate (to put it lightly; "outright lies" is a better description), so you might have equally asked "Based on the color of my eyes, wouldn't it ...."

Pre-screening is better for everyone. If you came to my office for an interview, or if I interviewed you by phone, I would do something that would (should) take comparable amount of time. Wouldn't you like to save the commute?

Personally, I try to hire by reference-from-someone-I-know rather than blindly. It is about 100 times more effective (in time spent; I don't think I'm exaggerating).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Golden Cart Effect - <AUTHOR> http://sallye.posterous.com/the-golden-cart-effect

<comment><USER2> It might help focus the discussion if you quoted some specific thing I've written about business guys that you disagree with. You may find if you look that your impression of my attitude towards them doesn't correspond to what I've written.

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed. I think it's highly improbable that you undervalue business guys. That is not my claim. My claim is that simplistic readings of your more subtle points (done by some in the News.YC community) about business result in the type of attitude I described. I'll edit this comment with examples in a few minutes.

Perhaps one of the more relevant essays is "What Business Can Learn From Open Source". The average workplace is accurately described as torture, however only a small percentage of business people (the ones in charge) are responsible for perpetuating such a stupid waste of resources. Not all or even half of business people are like this. You certainly don't claim this is so, but News.YC does exhibit an anti-business bias. There was a really good comment thread from the perspective of a business person posted recently about this, but I can't seem to find it. There's a really interesting larger discussion here, but I feel the lack of assembling evidence on my part is constraining.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I must admit, the "aversion towards business people" critique of HN is not my experience - I'm a business coach, and for me C+ was a grade I got once in Phys Ed.

I enjoy the start-up culture, and especially the tech focus of our community, but if you guys didn't love business like I do then I would have grown bored 340-something days ago.

<comment><USER4> He might be referring to applicants into YC. YC generally doesn't accept startups with all business guys and no tech founders, though it readily accepts startups with all tech guys and no business founders.

At the very beginning, you've gotta build. As for knowing what to build, the assertion has been that hackers can learn that. They don't need to have it filtered by a business guy.

I'm guessing that's where he gets his impression from. But then again, until he points to specifics, I'm just guessing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> In short, function over form. What function (value) can a founder bring to the startup? If the function serves its role well and did it well enough, the founder can (earn the right to) exercise some form. Like arrogance or anti- suit attitude.</comment>


The NYTimes is down, again. - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/08/28/216384015/click-here-for-the-new-york-times-while-its-being-hacked

<comment><USER2> Odd to say about NPR but isn't this just blogspam? I can't flag otherwise I would.</comment>


Xerox scanners/photocopiers randomly alter numbers in scanned documents - <AUTHOR> http://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres_are_switching_written_numbers_when_scanning <comment><USER2> From 2013-08-02

<comment><USER3> OP, please add the year to your title.</comment></comment>


Afrikan countries need to rethink e-government platforms - <AUTHOR> https://www.iafrikan.com/2019/01/25/afrikan-countries-need-to-rethink-e-government-platforms/ <comment><USER2> (deleted)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmmm...did you read the article? There is credit which reads "This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license." as TC permits republishing.</comment></comment>


Favorite Unix Commands - <AUTHOR> http://clippy.in/b/YJLM9W <comment><USER2> It took me a moment to figure out what was going on there (with the whole clippy thing). The bulk of this list is the top commands from commandlinefu which has been on HN before [0], [1].

You can even go meta and install a command to let you search commandlinefu [2].

[0] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=527486>

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3843373>

[2] <http://samirahmed.github.com/fu/>

<comment><USER3> I have a suspicion that it's actually a kind of targeted example-advertisement for the clippy thingo ;) and did somewhat work for me actually, I do now feel interested in learning more about the site

<comment><USER4> On my mobile device, it was nearly unusable...

<comment><USER5> Maximized on a 1080p monitor it was irritating with far too many internal scroll bars.

Great list of commands though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Many years ago, before I ever used Linux in any serious fashion, I often used a password that ended with '!!'. One day I was playing around with setting up MySQL and was having a very hard time with something that seemed super simple. I don't remember exactly how I figured it out, I think I accidentally type my password at the wrong time in the command line and observed some odd behavior and, after hours, finally tracked it to the '!!' command. I decided to try a different root password for MySQL and it was smooth sailing from there. A few months later I was transferring a domain away from a small DNS hosting provider. After a week or so of waiting support told me they were having a hard time with my account and couldn't do what they needed to do to initiate the transfer. I don't have the support emails, must have been my old hotmail account, but something they said suggested they might be trying to run commands on my account with my password (I knew they stored it in plain text since it was in several emails from them and I knew they were Linux servers) and it reminded me about the '!!' issue I had with MySQL. I changed my password and they were able to move forward. I wish I had dug deeper into the issues at the time they occurred.

</comment><comment><USER7> Check fasd, it will blow your mind, be prepared! :) Fasd (pronounced similar to "fast") is a command-line productivity booster.

I've been using this for a while, and trust me, its changed my command line workflow, and I wish, this should come as inbuilt for all POSIX shells!

Here is how it works -

If you use your shell to navigate and launch applications, fasd can help you do it more efficiently. With fasd, you can open files regardless of which directory you are in. Just with a few key strings, fasd can find a "frecent" file or directory and open it with command you specify. Below are some hypothetical situations, where you can type in the command on the left and fasd will "expand" your command into the right side. Pretty magic, huh?

      v def conf       =>     vim /some/awkward/path/to/type/default.conf
      j abc            =>     cd /hell/of/a/awkward/path/to/get/to/abcdef
      m movie          =>     mplayer /whatever/whatever/whatever/awesome_movie.mp4
      o eng paper      =>     xdg-open /you/dont/remember/where/english_paper.pdf
      vim `f rc lo`    =>     vim /etc/rc.local
      vim `f rc conf`  =>     vim /etc/rc.conf

Fasd offers quick access to files and directories for POSIX shells. It is inspired by tools like autojump, z and v. Fasd keeps track of files and directories you have accessed, so that you can quickly reference them in the command line.

The name fasd comes from the default suggested aliases f(files), a(files/directories), s(show/search/select), d(directories).

Fasd ranks files and directories by "frecency," that is, by both "frequency" and "recency." The term "frecency" was first coined by Mozilla and used in Firefox.

Here is the Link - <https://github.com/clvv/fasd>

</comment><comment><USER8> I forgot about the DNS querying of wikipedia. Probably could've used that to entertain myself on my flights over the holidays since I'm pretty sure gogo inflight passes DNS through.

Anyway, I'm a big fan of piping things into xargs. xxd is a terminal-based hex editor. It can convert both to and from hex to binary. I also use 'pgrep -lf 'partial_program_name' a lot in place of 'ps aux | grep partial_program_name'. 'pkill -9 partial_program_name' searches for and kills all processes matching the string.

<comment><USER9> If they allow DNS out you can use their Internet for free via iodine: <http://code.kryo.se/iodine/>

I run an iodine server for myself, you can get free Internet at quite a few loginpage WiFi routers with it in airports, cafes etc.

<comment><USER10> ssssssh ! When proxying over DNS becomes mainstream, it'll be shutdown !!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Handy addition to the "mount | column -t" trick:

You can use this within Vim to pretty-format text tables, initialization of variables, etc. Just highlight the lines in question in visual line mode (V) and type

        !column -t<CR>

to pipe the lines through the column command.

</comment><comment><USER12> Ctrl+l is my most used command. I need a clean terminal

<comment><USER13> Same here; and love that it doesn't clear the command line you're currently typing.

Does anyone know if there's a key command for clearing the scroll buffer?

<comment><USER10> Does anybody know if there is a command for creating an infinite stream of the character "y" + carriage return ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> a few nice ones here too, <http://www.pixelbeat.org/cmdline.html>, <http://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/linux_commands.html>

always worth looking at these types of lists imo, whilst some of the commands mightn't really fit into your workflow or seem useful immediately, they're often exactly the snippets of information that can save hours at a later stage..

</comment><comment><USER15> I have this in my .bashrc:

function lc() { if [[ "$#" -gt 1 ]]; then for DIR in "$@"; do echo -n "$DIR - " ; ls -AU1 $DIR | wc -l ; done ; else ls -AU1 "$@" | wc -l ; fi; }

So, "lc /dir" will count the number of files in /dir and "lc /dir/*" will count the files in subdirectories of /dir. This is useful if you're working in an environment where you may have thousands of files in a directory, and a regular "ls -l" will lock your terminal while it eats your entire scrollback buffer.

<comment><USER16> Here's an idea: always pipe ls throug a pager! If it's less than a page, it would just print the results (you have to set some flags on less that I don't remember). If it's more, then press d or /term-to-search :)

<comment><USER17>
       less -F

Won't page if less than one screenful. zsh users can also do:

        < filename

(less than character)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> grep -r . "some random debug message" (searches for the passage recursively in all files from the directory it was executed, the main reason I like developing in linux more than windows)

<comment><USER19> If you are searching inside code specifically, you may like 'ack'. It does the same thing grep does, except it has preset 'excludes', is recursive by default, and the output is a bit prettier.

<comment><USER20> Or even 'ag' (the silver searcher). Like ack, but "better". <https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher>

<comment><USER17> "better" or just faster since its written in C ?

It is _not_ a drop-in replacement for ack. e.g. there are some basic usages it does not support -- iirc counts (ag -c pattern).

<comment><USER19> Eh, faster is faster, does it matter why?

<comment><USER17> The part about written in C was just added on. My point was "better or faster". If you say "faster is better" I'll have to agree :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I have never understood the love for `sudo !!`. I think `ctrl+pa sudo ` is faster, explicit, and more versatile.

<comment><USER22> I disagree. I think typing one more command "sudo !!" is much easier and straight-forward than doing

1\. Ctrl+p. Go to the previous line in bash history.

2\. Ctrl+a. Go to the beginning of the new line.

3\. Type "sudo ". While you're typing your whole commandline shifts around as well.

The latter mixes history commands, navigation commands and also modifies a previous command instead of just typing a new 7-letter command. It's also more in terms of keystrokes (though just barely).

<comment> why-el You know writing out their function does not make them longer. ;) I agree with the parent because my left pinky is always on capsLock (my ctrl; I swapped caps with ctrl) so a ctrol ap is far easier than to go to shift + 1 twice(to type !). Again, this can be different in other keyboards/setups.

<comment><USER22> I just wanted to illustrate the increased complexity and different domains of the commands.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Alt Sys Rq o - useful if you need to shut down a system and your kvm is not working.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key>

<comment><USER24> It's probably a good idea to tErminate, kIll, Sync, and remoUnt-ro before hitting Off or reBoot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm a fan of using cut or sed or awk and ending it with:

      | sort | uniq -c | sort -n -r | head

to get a nice top 10 whatevers in the whoosit

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Please comment if you have a favorite not on this list.

<comment><USER26>
        alias lsd="ls -ltrF | grep ^d"

Helps me quickly list only directories. Any better alternatives ?

<comment><USER27> Using `find` is nice to get just directories:

$ find . -type d -maxdepth 1

<comment><USER28> ls -al | grep ^d

<comment><USER29> (Fails if a directory has a linefeed in its name followed by a 'd'. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> On zsh, "print -rC2" for printing some listing in 2 column format. The number of columns (C) can be specified. (print is a builtin).

zsh's file globbing is awesome. Some simple ones:

        *(.)  - only files
        *(/)  - only dirs
        *(.m0) - files modified today
        *(.om[1,15]) - 15 recently modified files

</comment><comment><USER30> faucet 80 --in cat

This is useful for creating a connection for receiving the input of what you get...

e.g. running

faucet 80 --in cat

and later

curl <http://127.0.0.1:80>

will deliver to you console :

GET / HTTP/1.1 User-Agent: curl/7.21.4 (i686-pc-linux-gnu) libcurl/7.21.4 OpenSSL/0.9.8n zlib/1.2.5 libidn/1.19 Host: 127.0.0.1:900 Accept: _/_

<comment><USER31> Just some additional information:

Faucet is part of "netpipes", which is available for most Unixoid operating systems. I guess it was inspiration to build "netcat". But netcat was a absolute terrible hack of a program, so "socat" (socket-cat?) was born.

<http://www.dest-unreach.org/socat/>

In case you need the functionality of bash's /dev/tcp [1] and you are pondering to install netcat or netpipes, do yourself a favor and just go for socat, it's insanely more powerful, read the manpage, read the examples!

<http://www.dest-unreach.org/socat/doc/socat.html#EXAMPLES>

\--

[1] but debian and ubuntu have decided to compile without it... <https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/bash/+bug/215034>

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> One of my favorite aliases that wasn't listed.

alias easy_search="curl -s <http://pypi.python.org/simple/> | perl -ne 'print if s/<[^>]+>//g && $.>1'|grep"

</comment><comment><USER10> I like the wikipedia DNS text lookup - I work in a "firewalled" environment where the unices are only allowed DNS queries. If only wikipedia could provide central switchboard numbers in their text fields as well ...

</comment><comment><USER33> Single user mode on an HPUX machine was, I think, the most useful to me.

(<http://www.unixhub.com/docs/hpux/hpux_boot.html>)

I wish I still had that machine, but I do not.

<comment><USER34> I love playing with OSes and HPUX was one of the ones I didn't get to play with (not to mention Irix and AIX).

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> What a ridiculous fixed header. It's taking up 2/3 of my phone's screen.

<comment><USER36> Try turning your phone into the portrait orientation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Here's my list, a very compact plaintext file: <http://mmb.pcb.ub.es/~carlesfe/unix/tricks.txt>

</comment><comment><USER38> Not really a unix command, but a vi command that has been really useful, specially if you do lots of editing protected files and want to keep your custom vim configuration:

!sudo tee %

<comment><USER29> What vi mode is that entered in?

<comment><USER39> Normal mode (:help :! for more information on this command).

<comment><USER29> What benefit does

        :!sudo tee %

have over doing it at the command line other than filling in the current filename for you? I suspect the original poster meant something like "gg!Gsudo tee %".

<comment><USER40> :w !sudo tee %

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I find this site handy for clever commands: <http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/browse>

</comment><comment><USER42> I like those un- commands for easier archive extracting, e.g.:

alias unbz2='tar xvjf' alias untar='tar xvfz'

<comment><USER43> I use _atool_ (<http://www.nongnu.org/atool/>), which is packaged in Debian and Ubuntu (and I am sure in other distributions as well). It supports all the formats I have encountered so far (tar, tar.gz, zip, rar, bz2 and others).

It provides a few commands, two of which I use the most:

        als - list files in an archive
        aunpack - exatract files from an archive

The best part is _aunpack_ extracts files into a subdirectory (I hate polluting the current directory with files from a new archive which wasn't properly packaged to include a directory), and it does it only when necessary. Before I found it, I always used to create a temp directory, cd to it, unpack into it, and possibly move files around etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> mount -t overlayfs -o lowerdir=$HOME,upperdir=/tmp/tmpHOME overlayfs $HOME

<comment><USER19> What is the purpose of this?

<comment><USER44> Very useful, if you want to make a checkpoint (possibly for /), break things and then get back to the original state.

If you'd do that for / , your own system would start behaving, like a system booted from LiveCD. And, after reboot, would return to the origanal state.

Overlayfs is pretty cool actually. Allows you to overlay a _lower_ directory with some other _upper_ directory and mount the result somewhere. All the changes that you are making in the mounted directory would be visible to you, and would be stored in the _upper_ directory.

In the example above, after running this command, content of your $HOME would stop changing. But you still will be able to change it, with all the changed content going into tmpHome.

<comment><USER19> Ah, very clever. I figured it would make changes to $HOME temporary but couldn't immediately think of why you would do that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Great post! I think "lsof" should be there along with "netstat".

</comment><comment><USER46> There's a typo: The command is spelled "apropos" (not apropo).

<comment><AUTHOR> Corrected this typo. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I think I might've just saved days of my life....thank you!

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad it helped you! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> that's the original

<http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/browse/sort-by-votes>

</comment><comment><USER49> esc-#, comments the current line

ctrl-\, kills current process even xtail

xtail, tails dirs

tweaks in .inputrc to have up and down arrow do backward history search, like in ipython.

</comment><comment><USER50> sudo !!

Instant favorite

<comment><USER51> I often alias `sudo` to `fucking` to help vent my frustrations

        $ rm -rf somedir
        rm: somedir/: Permission denied
        $ fucking !!

<comment><USER43> I have been known to use _sudo_ when it is not appropriate to use the f-word ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Remove trash Emacs leaves lying around:

$ find . -name \\*~ -delete

</comment><comment><USER53> alias cd5='pushd .; cd ../../../../..'

This lets me cd five directories at a time, and if I want to go back, I do a "popd"

</comment><comment><USER54> in ksh set -o vi so I can use the vi editor to navigate the command line history.

</comment><comment><USER55> grep -r . "Some random debug msg"</comment>


Uniqlo cut 90% of staff at one warehouse by replacing them with robots - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1419418/uniqlo-cut-90-of-staff-at-one-warehouse-by-replacing-them-with-robots/ <comment><USER2> Modern societies are going to have a very real problem to grapple with as this replacement goes from newsworthy to the norm. This could result in significant worker displacement with massive bottom-line ROI for companies in the next decade or two, particularly as minimum wages rise.

I'm not of the opinion that this automation will create an equal number of jobs for the ones they replace. Even if they do, it is unlikely those new positions will employ the same degree of skilled worker.

Assuming a net unskilled job reduction due to automation in a couple of decades, what happens as this becomes pervasive in a society?

<comment><USER3> The source of the problem is simple. Real societal value is generated through this activity, but it is reaped entirely by Uniqlo and its stakeholders.

Yes, consumers are also a stakeholder, but your typical consumer will receive very little or no direct benefit from this change. Eventually, yes, the profits will be reinvested, but the impact will be so diluted as to be a noticeable. Some small fraction of it will probably also go to tax evasion, being expatriated or sequestered by wealthy upper management.

Meanwhile, a whole lot of people are suddenly out of work, imposing significant negative externalities on them and their families. This could conceivably ruin a marriage, or turn a good parent into a raging alcoholic. It may well be that the negative gain to society (in the form of laying off so many employees) has severe follow-on effects, and in terms of net welfare this could do more harm than good.

The effects of leaving the workers out of the profit-sharing is more than just a matter of equity. Without redistribution of the welfare created by automation, it's perfectly conceivable that the net welfare gain is negative due to the negative second-order effects outweighing the positive second-order effects.

This is the stuff they don't teach you in Econ 101, but it's how things really work.

<comment><USER4> The other thing they don't teach you in Econ 101 is that treating corporations as obligated to keep and preserve jobs prevents them from creating societal value, and treating workers as entitled to a job disincentivises the invention of new methods of creating societal value. It causes stagnation of the economy.

<comment><USER5> And what is Econ 201's solution to pervasive unemployment, or lack of spending power due to underemployment? Is that also classified as "societal value"?

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure if you have noticed, but unemployment is at a multi decade low.

We are not seeing pervasive unemployment, we are seeing the opposite. A situation where there are too many jobs, and not enough workers to fill them

So econ 201 would say that there isn't any societial problem right now.

<comment><USER7> Then why are wages so stagnant?

<comment><AUTHOR> Because wages are a small part of the total compensation package - leaving out bonuses, health, dental, vision insurance policies, 401k (with matching), employee stock purchase plans, stock options or stock units awards, access to food and on-site services, company cars, etc.

They're also not stagnant [https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/wage- growth](https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/wage-growth)

<comment><USER8> If my employer's group health insurance is considered part of my compensation, should I not be glad that health care costs are rising, since that drives up my total compensation?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I love uniqlo doubling down on tech.

One thing I found really interesting is that inside the labels are small rfid (I think?) chips. At the cashier, the person just folds them nicely, puts the pile of cloth on a metal pad and the system tells you how many items and how much it is. No manual code scanning!! The first time I noticed that I felt like a kid again discovering something magical.

The next step was to have person-less cashiers with the same system which works great too. So a completely autonomous store was just the next logical way to go.

<comment><USER10> Do those tags stay on the clothes afterward? Or are those external to the clothes?

<comment><USER9> The staff told me it's inside the price label so I'm guessing it stays on

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have wondered at what point will job cuts start affecting the overall supply demand equation as more and more people get out of work and will have less spending capacity. Who will buy more 'stuff' and how? We don't know at what rate the jobs will be replaced, if at all. What will be the equilibrium point then?

<comment><USER12> If everything will be automated then "time with a human" will be really expensive. Why work 8h/day when you can buy everything with very little money (automation)? You will work 1h/day and ask a full salary for it.

The only problem are changes that come too fast and people have no time to adapt. Exactly what startups try to do, to disrupt stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Well, Parkinsons law seems to be intact so we will all work in middle management in a few decades, all responsible for requesting service level agreements from each others legal department AIs.

</comment><comment><USER14> How about instead of selling robots to companies to replace their laborers, we sell robots to the workers to do their jobs. You keep getting paid as long as you keep your robot running.

<comment><USER15> Are the workers putting up the capital to purchase the robots?

<comment><USER14> There would probably need to be rental services/financing options for those who can't afford to buy one outright.

<comment><USER16> Uber and others offer leases to drivers now. I'm sure the same could apply.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I worked in a warehouse for a summer in school because the hours fit around my other job and the pay was little higher than some other options (retail). But the Teamsters union ran the show and it was so political that I went back to the food/beverage service business.

All that said, it's too bad that warehouse work isn't going to be an option for many people. There are fewer and fewer jobs for a lot of people.

Note: I support Unions and wish we had more. That union, however....

<comment><USER18> > That union, however....

Exactly. All unions become "that union" when given enough power and influence.

<comment><USER19> That's a gross generalisation and I would strongly disagree, this boogeyman of the evil union gets trotted out every time in tech forums like hackernews.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> There will be a great deal more demand in the healthcare sector all over the developed world in the coming decades. Japan is leading the way with the oldest demographics among large economies. Its demographics leads Western Europe by a decade or so and perhaps a couple more for the US.

We should start training people for jobs like homecare assistance, nursing home care, etc and developing institutions and solutions for funding them. An apprenticeship program complemented by some classes might work better than college for these jobs.

The jobs do require some skills but they are skills most people can acquire with good training. The latent demand is enormous and the work is potentially more fulfilling than moving stuff around a warehouse.

<comment><USER21> By the time they're trained up the robots will have taken their jobs too.

[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/06/japan- robots-w...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/06/japan-robots-will- care-for-80-of-elderly-by-2020) [https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-5014079/15-000-ro...](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-5014079/15-000-robot- look-elderly-Southend-care-home.html)

I love technology, but honestly I find this terrifying. People aren't just going to be unemployed, they're going to be unemployable.

This how workers must have felt during the first industrial revolution, I'd say we're in the second one now.

<comment><USER20> Home assistance and nursing assistant jobs require competence in a large number of highly varied tasks and many require human-style intelligence which is among the hardest to automate from our experience with AI research. (See Moravec's Paradox.)

It will be at least a couple decades, likely longer, until we can really automate those jobs _cost effectively_ , which gives us time to reconfigure socio-economic systems to suit the burgeoning new industrial revolution.

Check out the following predictions by a noted roboticist and former director of MIT's CSAIL

[https://rodneybrooks.com/my-dated-predictions/](https://rodneybrooks.com/my- dated-predictions/)

Example from the page:

Dexterous robot hands generally available. NET (Not Earlier Than) 2030

It will take at least a decade and often longer for a hardware product to become affordable to the masses. So we are talking about 2040 or later when most of home caring jobs will be at risk.

Even then, the need for human interaction will still be there so it is unclear if most elderly would not want human services if it is accessible to them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Surfacing it from the POV of retailer's reality. Uniqlo's net profits(2) at ~ 20% are higher than what is mentioned below for American Retailers (2)

From: [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/08/12/the-pay-is- too...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/08/12/the-pay-is-too-damn-low)

In 1960, the country's biggest employer, General Motors, was also its most profitable company and one of its best-paying. It had high profit margins and real pricing power, even as it was paying its workers union wages. And it was not alone: firms like Ford, Standard Oil, and Bethlehem Steel employed huge numbers of well-paid workers while earning big profits. Today, the country's biggest employers are retailers and fast-food chains, almost all of which have built their businesses on low pay—they've striven to keep wages down and unions out—and low prices.

This complicates things, in part because of the nature of these businesses. They make plenty of money, but most have slim profit margins: Walmart and Target earn between three and four cents on the dollar;

(2) [https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/07/12/business/corpor...](https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/07/12/business/corporate- business/fast-retailing-net-profit-23-5-brisk-uniqlo-sales-u-s-china-trade- spat-impacts-limited-cfo/)

</comment><comment><USER23> I've heard the argument that this situation is unique to japan due to their aging population and low birthrate.

They don't have cheap teenagers to exploit at minimum wages which is why automation is even financially worth it. The amount they are spending ($887 million) can hire 60,000 years of labor at $15,000/yr.

<comment><USER24> The point is, it's introduced there because it's profitable even if the robots suck but are more productive as a human. The experiences gained, though, will lead to the robots becoming cheaper and cheaper until the robots are on par with Western wages, and then hell will break loose.

Japanese society right now is paying the R&D and the western countries, especially the US, will suck up all the profits.

The one question that remains, though: who will buy all the products when large swaths of the population don't have a job to feed themselves?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The Question is if Robots should pay income tax? Robots replaced humans that paid tax. The society still needs income.

Tax wise do you replace the replaced workers with zero tax robots or do you tax robot workers?

When a company do not pay tax or pay lower tax they do not pay for schools and roads. That is not cool. We still need roads and schools to build a future society.

Ie the bigger question is that of income distribution. Do you give all the money gained from the robots to the very few percentage who owns the store? What if a majority of worlds work are automated by robots.

How do you tax for the global warming that the store new low cost labor produces? In other words as products starts to almost cost zero to consume but we are having global warming. How do we price so that we do not over consume cheap meaningless stuff?

<comment><USER26> The money saved gets taxed twice: as corporate income and then when distributed to shareholders again as individual income. It likely gets taxed at a higher rate, actually, because the income tax rate of the workers this replaces is probably very low but the rate of the company + the individual could easily be 60%.

<comment><USER19> Could you break down how you get to "easily" 60%?

<comment><USER26> If the money is passed back in dividends instead of share buybacks, it's taxed as income. The people who are receiving this income are probably quite wealthy. Let's lowball it and say that they were making $200,000 per year before receiving the dividends. I live in Louisiana, so I'll use a Louisiana income tax calculator [0]. At $200,000 per year, the marginal tax rate is 39.4%. The whole income is not taxed at this level, but any income you earn past $200,000 (e.g. dividends) is.

Uniqlo is a Japanese retailer, so they would be paying Japanese corporate tax rates. I can't pretend to be an expert in Japanese corporate tax, so my estimate of their marginal tax rate is just going to be their profit divided by their tax paid for the latest financial year I can find. We can find these data from their 2017 financial statements [1]. In 2017 they paid $584,025,000 in income taxes out of a total of $1,751,484,000 income before taxes. This gives us almost exactly a 1/3 marginal rate (33.345%).

Combining the personal and corporate tax rates gives us 1 - (2/3 * (1-.394)) = 59.6% tax rate. I may have underestimated the easily part, but in most states income tax would be slightly higher than in Louisiana, which would push us over the 60% threshold.

For comparison, an average worker in a warehouse might be making $30,000 per year. At that income, the total tax burden is $5,578 = 18.59%.

[0]: [https://smartasset.com/taxes/louisiana-paycheck- calculator](https://smartasset.com/taxes/louisiana-paycheck-calculator) [1]: [https://www.fastretailing.com/eng/ir/library/pdf/ar2017_en_1...](https://www.fastretailing.com/eng/ir/library/pdf/ar2017_en_17.pdf)

<comment><USER19> That's a very close eyeball to 60% actually! I was more surprised that it would be taxed as normal income not at the lower capital gains tax (in your example 15% instead of 39.4%), you seem more knowledgable though.

<comment><USER26> It turns out that you are right most of the time on the dividends and as it turns out I was wrong. The distinction seems to be that if you hold the stock for a long time, then dividends count as capital gains. If you hold it for a short time, it's taxed as income [0].

[0]: [https://smartasset.com/taxes/dividend-tax- rate](https://smartasset.com/taxes/dividend-tax-rate)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Technology is not stoppable and if jobs are going to be lost they will be. Ultimately all tech has been absorbed into society.

But many also cynically use 'threats' of technology to scaremonger and try to keep wages low. This is incredibly exploitative. For instance this story itself is thin on details and talks up 90% without mentioning the actual numbers or details of the automation. Amazon bought Kiva and while the robots are used they continue to hire aggressively.

If McDonalds or anyone else can use robots efficiently today they will. No company is employing workers out of goodwill but because they need them. If one must worry current trends show the environment may create far more disruption than automation.

</comment><comment><USER28> Actually sad since manual laborers are wonderful robots. It's just that they get pricier ever since.

Things that make them less advantageous to robots are (e.g):

\- the used up demographic dividend of China (with no real replacement in sight)

\- western population decline

\- western population aging

\- west's much better off population, uninterested in manual labor (at least as mid/long term job)

\- rising minimum wages

\- rising costs of employment

\- tightening immigration laws

etc.

</comment><comment><USER29> This article needs a lot more detail before it can even _begin_ to be used as an indicator of impending rapid mass technological unemployment.

The huge, mostly mechanical system pictured in the Japan News article doesn't visually differ much from AS/RS systems that have been developing for fifty years. And according to the linked Reuters article, Uniqlo doesn't appear to be benefiting from AI or breakthrough tech, but is merely attempting to deploy automated warehouses, a relatively old technology, globally.

Barring new details, this article doesn't describe the beginning of an avalanche of robot workers, but an established $XXm custom build process entered into by the latest company with sufficient scale, margins, capital, etc to make it worth the investment.

</comment><comment><USER30> Japan has always embraced automation, is a staple in robotics and overall could prove to be a good model to have instead of the constant fear mongering about automation in the west. It's not like this sort of change hasn't happend before; it's just that now we have the internet which amplifies our fears (and there's also lots more of us on the planet).

<comment><USER31> I remember I read an article about how in Japan, they see robots as their friend, as something innate with spirit because in Shinto everything has a spirit, so they embrace them much more easily. Whereas we in the west see robots as our enemy, something to compete against.

<comment><USER24> Japanese companies generally have a better employee relationship. Granted, some parts of it are exploitative, but at least workers are treated like family and not like exchangeable cogs like in Western cutthroat capitalism. There's respect and decency shown, whereas in the US it is common and legal to be fired on the spot, in some states even for no reason.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> It would be good to see some actual figures here, how many staff were replaced? It says it's a new warehouse, so why would there have been staff in the first place ? The trouble with percentages is they can easily be misinterpreted.

Having spent my fair share of time in Japan, I'd bet there are still plenty of people working st that warehouse and around the clock.

</comment><comment><USER33> I will remind the doomsayers in this thread that someone _getting_ a job is not mainstream news.

You should not treat humans as machines that are only capable of performing a single task. We are not left to the dustbin of history if replaced by machinery.

Humankind's desires and creativity seems to be limitless which gives me optimism when thinking about the future.

</comment><comment><USER34> For those who are making a big deal out of this here, please disregard any factories that use machines.

Just because the machines were there first doesn't make it different, they could have hired workers in place of the machines.

</comment><comment><USER35> This will likely be the new norm as the technology gets cheaper and cheaper.

</comment><comment><USER36> Any word about their severance packages? That's what determines if I keep shopping there. Salary for a reasonable job search period and I can't hold it against them.

</comment><comment><USER37> How are people going to pay for things if they're not earning income? Who are the customers going to be if not employees of organisations?

</comment><comment><USER38> It's OK, the staff will just find new jobs as electronics engineers and machine learning researchers. /s

<comment><USER39> Strictly playing devil's advocate, but is the lifelong employment of their staff uniqlo's problem?

If you found a cheaper supplier of milk, would you feel obligated to reimburse your milk man? (may be a misplaced cultural reference, but in the UK 20+ years ago a chap delivering you milk to your door every morning on a rolling contract basis was the norm - generally they do other stuff now)

<comment><USER40> When I read a story like this, I'm not faulting a Uniqlo for choosing progress. It's logical and extremely profitable. I think the alarm is precisely because of how much sense it makes.

Enough incremental progress has been made for us to arrive at this threshold, after which a company like Uniqlo can lay off 90% of their workforce by investing an amount which is, if I'm not mistaken[0], considerably less than what they profit in one year.

That's not incremental. It's unprecedented.

[0] [https://www.fastretailing.com/eng/ir/financial/summary.html](https://www.fastretailing.com/eng/ir/financial/summary.html)

<comment><USER39> Absolutely, if I were in a position where my job were easily automated I would be terrified.

I suspect the majority of HN readers are in a less precarious position, so we have the privilege of a little detachment in our horror at the prospect of huge swathes of automation.

What to do though? There is very little we can do to stymie the inevitable unemplocalyspe without ripping up society's rulebook altogether.

I fear unionization may have been the answer 30+ years ago but that particular horse has well and truly bolted. Universal basic income failed in Finland as far as I can remember (I could be wrong on all counts there, it's still early!), and let's be honest - any government legislation would just lead to a global race-to-the-bottom as nations prostitute their labour laws to attract companies priced out of traditional locations by taxation and fines. Trade tariffs would only drive companies to diversify into new markets and if consumer demand was there, a thriving grey market would emerge...

Perhaps 'hand packed' will just join 'organic' 'sustainable' and 'free range' as desirable things to have on your packaging? Check out these hand-picked shoes!

Uniqlo are an interesting example, they compete primarily on price anyway (Heck, I'm wearing a pair of their cheapo selvage jeans) so they will absolutely push this as far as they can.

Well worth keeping an eye on them over the next couple of years to see how it plays out - will likely form the template.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Seems like folding the clothes and placing them onto displays might be the hardest task to automate.

</comment><comment><USER42> Automation has never been more prevalent, and total employment has never been higher.

</comment><comment><USER43> You do not need to be a socialist to understand there is something inherently going badly wrong for the masses here.

<comment><USER44> Wouldn't a socialist be happy that the laborers are no longer being exploited?

<comment><USER43> The masses still need to eat or are we just letting them starve?

<comment><USER44> Socialists generally tend to favor starvation, I believe.

<comment><USER24> I'm a socialist and yet I believe that neither Stalin's Gulags nor Mao's mass hunger deaths are something that should be repeated. Authoritarian socialism has been proven to not work, what the world desperately needs is liberal/libertarian socialism.

We can learn from history - ok, those who openly fly the Nazi flag not, but majority of society can see the problems like homelessness, drug epidemics and exploding rents.

<comment><USER45> Libertarian socialism? So a minimal govt that owns all the means of production?

My head just exploded.

<comment><USER46> The word libertarianism originally referred to a socialist school of thought[0].

> _Traditionally, libertarianism was a term for a form of left-wing politics; > such left-libertarian ideologies seek to abolish capitalism and private > ownership of the means of production, or else to restrict their purview or > effects, in favor of common or cooperative ownership and management, viewing > private property as a barrier to freedom and liberty. In the United States, > modern right-libertarian ideologies, such as minarchism and anarcho- > capitalism, co-opted the term in the mid-20th century to instead advocate > laissez-faire capitalism and strong private property rights, such as in > land, infrastructure, and natural resources._

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> It's not just cutting out jobs that it is a problem, it's also the over-supply of clothing and 'fast-fashion' which is creating extra garbage. Auto-mating these things and making it cheaper and easier to move clothes around is only beneficial to those at the top of the capitalism chain - it's not particularly great for the planet.

<comment><USER47> The people buying those clothes are doing so because they see value out of doing it, so it's beneficial so them as well.

Your point about externalities is still valid, though.</comment></comment>


Bug Out: Troubleshooting Software Delays on London's Crossrail Project - <AUTHOR> https://rail.nridigital.com/future_rail_dec19/bug_out_troubleshooting_software_delays_on_london_s_crossrail_project <comment><AUTHOR> By the sounds of it they didn't appreciate the complexity of the software problem.

Perhaps with hindsight how could this problem been avoided before time, or flagged up as a key issue.

It seems the delivery of large infrastructure projects is a dark art, a civilisation that can deliver that without huge issues has a distinct advantage.

A large amount of the science in project management, as I understand it, stemmed from Britain not wanting to repeat delayed and overrun projects from several decades ago.

I doubt those lessons were forgotten, but did they just reveal deeper issues?

<comment> zig-zag It seems to me that when project management and politics mix the words rock and hard place are appropriate.

In the case of Crossrail the original management team also ignored the on- train software because the trains were bought directly by TfL and it was treated as someone else's problem.

When the delays to construction started to happen Crossrail management started to squeeze the later parts of the project and because the software testing was someone else's problem that was squeezed the most. They probably did not understand how critical it was to the whole project either.

The CBTC signalling system (Siemens Trainguard MT) has been in use elsewhere but it may be that some features have never been properly tested because they were not needed in other locations.

I don't know if the autoreverse feature is used elewhere. Does anyone else know if they use it in Hong Kong?

<comment> vertex-four A large part of the problem, at least a few months ago, seemed to revolve around failures when switching between signalling systems.

<comment><USER2> There have been a lot of problems with the physical layers too. In the Heathrow tunnels there need to be multiple signalling systems operating simultaneously and apparently the radio signals have to be on very close frequencies. This in turn requires quite advanced signal processing software in the trains to clean things up and ensure reliable communication.

The political problems are more straightforward. It's a repeat of the TSB problem. Non engineers often cannot psychologically accept that a project has an unknowable deadline and cost, so try to force people to estimate and then stick to their estimates, reality be damned. Crossrail's former management was so delusional, so psychologically unable to tell politicians and the public the truth, that they actually started shutting down the project a few months before construction was due to complete, e.g. by letting go of their external/internal communications teams. When Mark Wild took over he found he couldn't even update the project website or email all the contractors because the people who managed that had been let go - although many stations still hadn't even been built yet! Further delays occurred because contracts started expiring and scarce construction teams got reallocated to other projects in the capital. The entire effort was set up on the assumption that they could estimate project time and budget a decade in advance!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Haskell Cheatsheet - <AUTHOR> http://cheatsheet.codeslower.com/ <comment><USER2> I think much of what this cheatsheet covers really did not give me any problems when I was first learning Haskell. Most of the syntax is well- designed and intuitive: for example, list comprehensions are just like set- builder notation from math and pattern matching does exactly what it looks like. (As an aside, I think this is a good example of why syntax _does_ matter. I learned Haskell at the same time as Scheme, with no prior functional programming experience. Haskell's pattern matching syntax made understanding complex recursion _far_ easier than Scheme's if and cond statements.)

Much of these difficulties are also ameliorated with a good text editor (Emacs). With good syntax highlighting and indentation, it's easy to write syntactically valid code. It also _really_ helps to be able to easily load and run GHCi.

<comment><USER3> I think haskell has more orthogonal language features than, say, java, where everything holds together pretty well but you can't un-congeal features and use by themselves.

Besides GHCi this is my reference shelf

\- <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~ns441/files/thips.pdf>

\- <http://acm.wustl.edu/functional/hs-breads.php>

___________

\- <http://www.haskell.org/hoogle/>

\- <http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Typeclassopedia>

\- Prelude source and [http://www.haskell.org/onlinereport/haskell2010/haskellch9.h...](http://www.haskell.org/onlinereport/haskell2010/haskellch9.html#x16-1710009)

_______________

\- 2010, 98 reports (which are very readable, unstiff/undry docs

\- use google to search stackoverflow/questions/tagged/haskell

\- <http://ezyang.com/haskell.html>

____________

Books: Hudak's "School of Music" (tho I'm not sure how interesting it is unless you know how to read/play music), and the 3 books by Hutton, Thompson, and Bird. It has been remarked that the "gentle Intro" is actually kind of harsh, the Hutton and Thompson books really are gentle intro's:

<http://www.haskell.org/tutorial/>

[http://haskell.cs.yale.edu/euterpea-2/haskell-school-of- musi...](http://haskell.cs.yale.edu/euterpea-2/haskell-school-of-music/)

[http://www.amazon.com/Pearls-Functional-Algorithm-Design- Ric...](http://www.amazon.com/Pearls-Functional-Algorithm-Design- Richard/dp/0521513383)

<comment><USER3> <http://strictlypositive.org/slicing-jpgs/>

[http://www.fing.edu.uy/inco/cursos/proggen/Transparencias/Po...](http://www.fing.edu.uy/inco/cursos/proggen/Transparencias/PolitipicasHaskellX2.pdf)

(on about the 17th google page for "haskell cheat"

___________________

also symbolhound works pretty well for searching stackoverflow for symbolic operator/function names, e.g. haskell <$>

<http://symbolhound.com/?q=haskell+%3C%24%3E>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not directly related to this cheatsheet, but I was reminded by the section on operators: you can combine multiple binary operators to get something a lot like ternary operators. E.g., in ghci:

      Prelude GOA> let True ? x = \_ -> x ; False ? _ = \f -> f
      Prelude GOA> True ? 4 $ 5
      4
      Prelude GOA> False ? 4 $ 5
      5
      Prelude GOA> False ? 4 $ True ? 3 $ 7
      3
      Prelude GOA> False ? 4 $ False ? 3 $ 7
      7

Pretty neat, I think.

<comment><USER5> Wow, GOA, that's a flashback. 2004??

<comment><USER4> Is it now the mark of the n00b, or something? Or just your own involvement is old?

<comment><USER6> FTR, I started playing with Haskell early 2012 and I have no idea what GOA is. All I ever see at my prompt is ghci.

If this is what GOA is, it actually sounds incredibly useful: <http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/GHC/GHCi#GHCi_on_Acid>. Looking up docs/source for modules? Enumerating typeclass instances? Yes please.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I love the idea of a cheatsheet for Haskell, but I'd like to point out that the things covered by the cheatsheet are also the things I had the least trouble with starting out.

Things like the syntax of pattern-matching and datatypes I'd repeatedly Google for until I remembered, but relatively speaking it wasn't a huge time sink. The things that I did burn time on were things like getting types right inside monads, various other type-theory things, and cabal quirks.

I hope this cheatsheet helps people get started with Haskell, but my gut feeling is that the bigger hurdles will need another cheatsheet.

<comment><USER8> On a higher level, there's Typeclassopedia <http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Typeclassopedia>.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> _n + k_ patterns should probably not be mentioned. They are considered ugly/bad, are removed from the newest standard and support for them is behind a pragma in GHC (NPlusKPatterns) and other compilers.

[http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell- prime/wiki/RemoveNPl...](http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell- prime/wiki/RemoveNPlusK) [http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell- prime/wiki/NoNPlusKP...](http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell- prime/wiki/NoNPlusKPatterns)

</comment><comment><USER10> Is it a Cheatsheet if it has 14 pages? Serious question, English is not my mothertongue.

<comment><USER11> No, this is more of a quick reference.

Cheatsheets should be as short as possible, avoiding long explanations. For example, comments might be described as "comments: line: -- ; block (nestable): {- -}"

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I would like to have some of the common language extensions, and what they do too. I can never remember the syntax for GDATs...

<comment><USER13> Start with the spelling. :)

      data GADT a where
           Constructor0 :: Field a -> Field b -> GADT (a, b)
           Constructor1 :: ...
           ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Anata ha Nihongo wo hanashimasuka?

You should probably change this to something like 「日本語版はこちら」 (Japanese version here), and not write it in the Latin alphabet.

<comment><USER15> My Japanese is really, really rusty, but isn't "anata" considered disrespectful?

Also, I thought the accepted transliteration was "wa", not "ha", but don't quote me on that.

<comment><USER14> Yes, it's best to avoid the use of "anata", which is why I removed it. Also, it's just phrased really poorly in general - it feels like a literal translation from English, which rarely works with Japanese. And it is indeed "wa", not "ha". It's often mistakenly written as "ha" because the hiragana used for the particle "wa" (は) is read as "ha" in other contexts. I would also say that it should be "o", not "wo", since it's pronounced "o".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Although it touches on 'do' syntax, I think it could use a little more on monads, which is really the crux of haskell programming. (>>=) and return, and an example or two. Maybe something on lifting.

<comment><USER2> Monads are important, but I don't think it's fair to call them the "crux" of Haskell programming. For some reason, monads are over-dramatized and get far more attention than other great Haskell features and abstractions, possibly making Haskell's already unfair reputation as difficult and academic even worse.

<comment><USER17> _Monads are important, but I don't think it's fair to call them the "crux" of Haskell programming_

That may be overstating things a little, I agree. On the other hand, a programming language that can't model ordering of events along some sort of timeline isn't useful for many practical applications, and monads have so far proven to be the most effective way of introducing those concepts into Haskell's naturally timeless environment. They're also absurdly overcomplicated for modelling simple but not trivial cases, relative to just writing the code in the order you want things to happen in an imperative language. So if the goal is to get more people to use Haskell to write useful software, I would expect a lot of emphasis on monads and related concepts.

<comment><USER18> > relative to just writing the code in the order you want things to happen in > an imperative language

When you write them in the order you want, you're implicitly chaining them with a primitive chain operator that's built-into the language.

In Haskell, this is exactly what "do" notation does. So in what sense is it "overcomplicated"?

Example, Python:

      def func(x, y, z):
        foo(x())
        otherFunc(lambda : y.hello(z))

Haskell:

      func x y z = do
        foo =<< x
        otherFunc (hello y z)

The syntax is slightly more verbose for chaining actions as arguments (foo), but more concise when passing around first-class actions (hello).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> i remember Haskell in college... _shudder_</comment>


ICCV 2015 Papers on the Web - <AUTHOR> http://www.cvpapers.com/iccv2015.html <comment><USER2> Thanks for posting this</comment>


.htaccess for Word Press - <AUTHOR>

Do you have any good resources to understand how to best configure .htaccess files for WordPress? Knowing that the .htaccess is highly configurable AND I come from a Microsoft background. <comment><USER2> Why not leave the defaults until you are directed otherwise? Wordpress and some plugins will either require write access to .htaccess so they can make changes or give you the text to copy-paste yourself.

Things like your URL structure can be changed inside of Wordpress Admin. Many seem to recommend avoiding using dates in the URL if you are concerned about good content appearing stale after a few weeks.</comment>


Harvesting the sun's energy with antennas - <AUTHOR> https://inlportal.inl.gov/portal/server.pt?open=514&objID=1269&mode=2&featurestory=DA_101047 <comment><USER2> Again, only a few year away...

They say that nanoantennas can absorb 80% of energy, but it's only infrared energy, so real efficiency compared to silicon cells we'll have to see when they release it.

<comment><USER3> Not just that; it is also difficult to convert the adsorbed energy into usable electricity, and that for sure will cut down the efficiency of the process. The 80% claim for antennas to the 20% of silicon is really comparing apple to oranges.</comment></comment>