The only thing that can stop this asteroid is your liberal arts degree - <AUTHOR> http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2010/4/22lacher.html

<comment><USER2> As someone with a philosophy degree and many years of formal training in classical music, I give this piece a hearty thumbs up.

While the author clearly values the liberal arts (um, it's McSweeney's), there's something to be said for actually getting things done in the world. A lot, actually.

What the author is parodying is less the degree itself but more the miles wide and inches deep approach to education and life that many intelligent people are fond of taking.

I've been guilty of this, and satire is usually born of familiarity, so I assume the author has been as well. The point is, recognize that pursuit of education as amusement and status symbol is a hobby done for you and none other, and if you want to make some kind of impact outside of your own head, you're going to either have to get deeper and more focused or get more pragmatic.

<comment><USER3> As someone with a computer science degree and several years working experience in software development, I feel an urge to play devil's advocate here.

In terms of "getting things done in the world," how is making iPhone fart apps any more of a contribution than, say, publishing a screed in a tabloid? I'm trying not to set up a straw man here, so I'm deliberately choosing lowest common denominator activities.

I don't think it's fair for us technical folk to rest on our laurels simply because we have mastery over some very specific kind of knowledge that has a great deal of useful applications. We have to get out there and get real things done, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The term liberal arts denotes a curriculum that imparts general knowledge and develops the student's rational thought and intellectual capabilities, unlike the professional, vocational, technical curricula emphasizing specialization. The contemporary liberal arts comprise studying literature, languages, philosophy, history, mathematics, and science. In classical antiquity, the liberal arts denoted the education proper to a free man (Latin: liberus, "free"), unlike the education proper to a slave.

<comment><USER5> The modern liberal arts student avoids math and science like the plague.

<comment><USER6> In practice, the belief that a liberal arts education has equal value to a BS degree is anti-science.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The less polite original title: " _The Only Thing That Can Stop This Asteroid Is Your Liberal Arts Degree_ ".

Unfair since plenty of those with liberal arts degrees contribute to society in a way we geeks value, but still amusing.

<comment><USER8> There are a fair number of geeks who were liberal arts majors in their earlier years. It's not a crippling setback. In fact it can be an asset when you need to communicate densely abstract technical topics to those of a decidedly nontechnical background.

I've met a fair number of philosophy and language majors who are programmers, web designers or system administrators. And a number of them have much greater mental flexibility than someone who got a four year CS degree for the job prospects but have never demonstrated any great degree of intellectual curiosity.

<comment><USER9> Some "technical" content comes from those backgrounds as well, which sometimes turns out to be useful. I'm in AI, and people sometimes run into pitfalls that a stronger background in some other area would've let them see much further ahead of time. Sometimes a solution that seems like it might work is one that you'd immediately spot holes in (or at least likely points of difficulty) if you were familiar with philosophical logic, or semantics of language, or something else of that sort.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Don't you understand? We're not really learning how to critique The Bell Jar from a absurdorealist point of view, we're learning how to use our minds!

</comment><comment><USER11> The irony is that usually there are no asteroids headed for earth, so it is debatable how useful the astronauts and nuclear warhead constructors are.

<comment><USER12> Keep in mind we seldom really need them, but, when we do, we need them really, really bad.

<comment><USER13> Actually, by most accounts we did fine without them for 200,000 years.

<comment><USER12> We did just fine without them for a good couple dozen million years.

It's just that we won't be able to do without them forever ;-)

In fact, I like to tall my son the dinosaurs only died because they had neither rockets nor nukes.

<comment><USER11> You realize that Armageddon was just a Hollywood movie, right? :-) I am not sure if the same thing would be feasible in the real world, with current technology.

Nor am I convinced that we will eventually be able to escape our dieing sun, but I keep my fingers crossed.

<comment><USER12> Unless we have a good couple years of advanced notice so we can gently push it in another direction, nukes are the best option. If you spread the thing wide enough, less of it will hit you. If the pieces are small enough, chances are few of them will do any damage.

It won't do much good if the thing is the size of a state, but mountain-sized rocks seem manageable this way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> How I'd answer if I had a liberal arts degree: "If I make up a hypothetical situation where you wouldn't fit in, does it prove you're worthless?"

</comment><comment><USER15> Just to confirm... the typo in the title of this submission _is_ on purpose, right?

<comment><USER16> what typo?

<comment><USER17> Asteriod is the typo in the submission. Either that or there is some joke I am not getting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Ah, Grinnell, alma mater of Robert Noyce.

Actually, I'm not sure what the point is. The fantasies with which underemployed recent BAs make the 40 hours pass? A take-off on the brand of thriller in which Joe Normal gets sucked into international (or interplanetary) intrigue and danger? Revenge for the balderdash the author was forced to write last year?

But wasn't the lead in _The Eiger Sanction_ an art history professor who did CIA hits in the off-season to support his Picasso habit? Yeah, Clint Eastwood's a bit long in the tooth, but I'd back him against Bruce Willis for asteroid destruction any day of the week. (Cf. _Space Cowboys_<liberal arts mode>, another profound exploration of the human spirit</liberal arts mode>.)

</comment><comment><USER19> I'd just like to point out that Harvey Mudd College is a liberal arts college. As is Pomona College, where I got my (BA) degree in Computer Science.

So, yeah, the post is funny, but some of us have both a liberal arts degree and an ability to do utilitarian things.

</comment><comment><USER20> There's a flaw in assuming that an undergraduate liberal arts education is terminal. For instance, "between 1986 and 1995, more people earning PhD degrees in the earth sciences graduated from Carleton (50) than any other four-year college."

And that's from a tiny liberal arts school with a total population of ~2,000 students.

<comment><USER21> There's a lot of fuzziness about what "liberal arts" actually means. To me it means something like a general education including both sciences and the humanities. In this sense there's nothing the least surprising about getting a liberal arts education and a degree in the earth sciences. But I see it in a lot of contexts where it seems to mean fluffy humanities and only fluffy humanities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The real issue is the separation of Arts from Science. The best artists are scientists and the best scientists are artists. Was Da Vinci any more into liberal arts than science.

Anyone who specialises in a single viewpoint and is unable to compromise probably isn't a candidate for saving the earth.

</comment><comment><USER23> Way too many people taking this far too seriously as an attack on liberal arts. It's just absurd humor and could be flipped for equally funny effect - some movie astronaut/action hero in a tense meeting of academics who all consider his input weirdly vital.

<comment><USER24> Of course it's joke, but when I tried to think of situation that would be analogical in importance and where astronaut/engineer would be so much worse fit than liberal arts, I couldn't.

That probably just tells my imagination is limited.

But not everybody has to be able to save the world when it comes to that. Singers and writers are useful, and they wouldn't fit in to asteroid scenario, neither.

<comment><USER23> Or loads of "geeks" who know barely more than a layman about astrophysics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> What are the odds of actually stopping an asteroid? I suspect that asteroids small enough to be escaped by evacuation wouldn't be detected soon enough, and I highly doubt if we could do anything to divert or destroy a larger asteroid.

</comment><comment><USER26> This is total bs. The ONLY thing that can stop an astroid is Bruce Willis. And aerosmith.

</comment><comment><USER27> The same joke over and over.

<comment><USER28> It's still true.

<comment><USER27> What's true about it? That, within certain contrived scenarios involving existential threats to humankind, humanities knowledge becomes useless?

Science and technology are important, and deserve more respect and funding than they get in this society, but not to the detriment of all else.

<comment><USER29> I think the standard (and weak) joke about the uselessness of humanities degrees is to some extent a red herring. The real subject of satire here are technophilic power fantasies, such as _The Core_, _Impact_, _Asteroid_, etc., etc.

<comment><USER23> The real red herring is the idea that this is satire with a message and not just _a joke_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Do we really need physicists? What have they done apart from give us ever increasing ways of destroying ourselves. Has quantum theory brought happiness to the world? Love? Peace? Has it helped you feel more connected to your neighbours, to the person on the bus or tube? Has it had any meaningful positive effect at all on the human condition?

Or is it and its ilk of science degrees merely a relentless march to the day that the whole world disappears in one of two ways, self-annihilation or self- exile in VR?

And even if we survive somehow, what about once the relentless march of science is over, when there are no more secrets to uncover? What next? Is that the end of meaningful life as this author thinks?

Or is there perhaps something more to life than finding the next equation? Perhaps we will put aside the toys of technology and start reflecting on ourselves.

Maybe by doing a liberal arts degree.

<comment><USER31> Pretty much everyone I love is alive and healthy today because of science. I myself am alive and healthy today because of science.

<comment><USER32> Hell, you can even start pointing at _particular_ bits of science. For example, there would be mass famine without the Haber-Bosch process for ammonia synthesis.

<comment><USER33> Of course, without this process producing a lot of available nitrogen to use in making explosives during the first half of the 20th century we would probably also have avoided two world wars. Occasional famines and a lower upper-limit on human population or millions dead from guns and bombs... interesting set of choices.

<comment><USER34> Number of people people killed in major wars in the 20th century (moderately pessimistic estimate): 100,000,000

Number of people in the 20th century saved from starvation by green revolution: 1,000,000,000

Average life expectancy in 1900: 35 years

Average life expectancy in 2000: 65 years

Sources: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_and_disasters_by_d...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_and_disasters_by_death_toll) <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug>

Net 900,000,000 lives saved? I'll take that deal any day.

<comment><USER33> You don't get to claim the entirety of the green revolution here, and most of those 1 billion would not have been born in the first place if the Harber- Bosch process did not exist. If we are going to go to that particular level of sophistry then I would add the four generations of descendants from WWI deaths and three generations of WWII/Stalin-induced famines/Great Leap forward deaths, etc. Playing alternate history speculation is interesting, but trying to project any particular distance beyond the immediate point in question is a fools errand.

<comment><USER34> No, 1 billion already-alive humans would have starved to death if not for the green revolution. Malnutrition plays a role in over half of all deaths _today_. It was even more commonplace before fertilizers and high-yield crop strains.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias>

<comment><USER2> The irony of this is incredible. You're reaching to label this as an example of confirmation bias. What's the term for trying to make data fit a preconceived idea, again?

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Few things are more tedious than reading science majors endlessly, smugly belittle arts subjects. "Oh ho ho, something I don't understand and haven't done and probably couldn't do, they must be idiots, let's constantly mock them". I saw quite enough of that on slashdot so was very disappointed to see this sort of bilge get so many upvotes here. Thankfully some of the comments, at least, show a more nuanced grasp of reality.

<comment><USER37> While studying engineering, I took lots of upper-level classes in history, philosophy, polysci, etc. I aced those classes without much effort. To really "learn to think", you have to push yourself to think about more complex and abstract ideas. Advanced math pushes your brain to its limits. Most liberal arts fields have very low levels of complexity. In most cases, it's just read & regurgitate. In adv. classes you might follow a few levels of indirection. This is trivial for scientists, but difficult for most others.

<comment><USER36> > In most cases, it's just read & regurgitate.

You embody what I am talking about so perfectly here I can only assume this was a clever piece of satire.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to best make use of a weekend SF trip? - <AUTHOR> I'm trying to move from Texas and am spending my 24th birthday there to check out the area.
Edit: I'm currently a programmer analyst doing web dev/process documentation at a private non-tech company. I have a bachelor's degree in accounting. This trip is about 2 months out and don't know or have any leads as to where I'll be working once I get there.
I'm not a party person, I don't  drink, I hardly watch movies/Netflix or play video games. I mostly spend my extra time working on my side project. I skateboard for exercise a few times a week.
I've checked meetup.com for tech events during the weekend that I'll be there but didn't see anything quite down my alley. <comment><USER2> we would need so much more info than this to give you helpful information.

For instance, when you move do you already know where you'll be working? What kind of work do you do? (I assume engineer, but could be wrong) What kind of things do you enjoy doing (outdoors, drinking, museums, nerd-core, fancy food, sports, etc)

General Tips:

\- North Beach has some nice bars and restaurants for a chill night. (I would avoid the touristy parts near the piers though)

\- Mission district has some world famous burritos and you may want to check Dolores Park

\- Polk st has decent night life if you want to drink/party

\- If you're gonna work in tech you'll likely be in SOMA or Financial District so take a stroll around market street and then down the embarcadero to the stadium

\- A lot of people tend to go to the piers in the north of the city for seafood. If you want to do that, I'd advise going to Hog Island in the ferry building instead.

\- Checkout Meetup.com and look for any meetups happening that weekend so you can perhaps meet some locals and get a feel for the community you'd want to be involved in</comment>


Show HN: Hipstafridge – Blockchain powered smart refrigerator - <AUTHOR> http://hipstafridge.me <comment><USER2> The whitepaper is legit. It actually delivers on its promise.

</comment><comment><USER3> I foresee liability problems for them when their fridge notifies customers of having expired goods in their fridge without actually blocking access to those goods. They either have to forego on these notifications altogether and become a common cooler or they have to take steps to block access to expired goods. Once they implement blocking functionality they could have their affiliates in the health insurance industries offer reduced premiums (or non-raised premiums after devices like these have become mandated by law) in return for allowing the insurer to order product-blocks to their customers. This scheme could be expanded even further by selling temporary unblocking licenses for parties or other festive occasions.

I see a bright future ahead of me, a brave new world is coming into being.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds good.

The unblocking probably should be done only by certified technicians (Hipstafridge Certified Technician, HCT).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is April fools right? The white paper is literally just a white piece of paper.

<comment><USER5> The whitepaper works for me. What browser are you using?

<comment><USER6> It's blank for me --

0\. In Firefox.

1\. In Chrome.

2\. In a saved pdf, viewed with Preview.app.

<comment><USER7> Perhaps it's taking the whole whitepaper thing to its logical conclusion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > FridgeCoin's

You meant to say "FridgeCoins"

Also just having a react component is not very creative. Try including smart contracts.

</comment><comment><USER9> Dis gon' moon soon.

</comment><comment><USER10> Already bought $1000 worth of FridgeCoins.

<comment><USER11> when is the ICO?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> this is a troll level 1^10^10^10

look at the amount of details & care that went into this...

nearly got me until the doge customer review!

</comment><comment><USER12> Suck it, Jin Yang!

</comment><comment><USER13> Damn. I just kickstarted my cloud powered smart refrigerator but I guess cloud is sooooo 2017.</comment>


Are social networks a replacement for religion? - <AUTHOR>

Whatever you may think of religion, it is a way for people to associate only with others who share a similar worldview.
In places where religion is lacking (e.g., Silicon Valley), one might expect heavy use of social networks as a replacement.
Is this generally the case? <comment><USER2> Religion is a lot more than a social group. You have a social following and gathering around a central idea with very little differences in points of view all to embellish values and ideas that one who belongs to that group feels are true.

You find something very very different with social networks even ones that are gathered around central ideas.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, religion is more than a social group, but aren't both used to make people whom you associate with more in line with your worldview?

For example, you might use either to increase the probability that you associate with honest people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Facebook is not a value system!

<comment><AUTHOR> Don't friends often share values?</comment></comment>


Looking for a really good UX designer - <AUTHOR>

Are you a rockstar UX designer? If so I am looking for you for my next project. Deadline is extremely flexible and you can be located anywhere. Shoot me an email. <comment><USER2> "rockstar"? :(

<comment><AUTHOR> it was just a way of saying..not really a rockstart..contact me if you are good</comment></comment>


The United States of Entrepreneurs - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13216037

<comment><USER2> Things the US can do

\- kill Sarbanes-Oxley (and other burdensome regulations but this is #1 priority) \- introduce a Hong Kong style tax system

I have no familiarity with how to combat "patent trolls", but something should be done there.

Its not enough to just be #1.</comment>


Internal report warns Beijing faces Tiananmen-like global backlash over virus - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-china-sentiment-ex/exclusive-internal-chinese-report-warns-beijing-faces-tiananmen-like-global-backlash-over-virus-idUSKBN22G19C <comment><USER3> I think Tiananmen-like would mean it was based on human rights concerns - <USER2> would be Tiananmen-level.</comment>


Ask HN: Why not send an email instead of SMS for 2 factor? - <AUTHOR>

When I'm logging onto a site on my phone, and I get a 2-factor SMS, it's great... the code just shows up at the top and I can type it right it.
But most of the time I'm getting a 2-factor text, I'm at my desktop. I think an emailed code would serve much the same security benefit and potentially be more convenient.
You could even let the user chose if they wanted to receive it via email or text each time they're challenged. <comment><USER3> It doesn't share the same security benefit. "Prove you can access an email address" is sufficient to reset someone's password, which collapses your 2FA into single-factor authentication. That is problematic because people lose Gmail accounts _all the time_ , typically because users, in aggregate, suck at password management. For every 100k accounts PasteBin'ed due to insecure practices at a random startup or web bulletin board, another 500 or 1000 gmail accounts get compromised.

</comment><comment><USER4> SMS is preferred as the technology is fairly decoupled from internet services, for example it's more than likely that a number of people have exactly the same password for service XYZ, as they do for their eMail service. So it's not really providing that much more security than single factor, just another hoop for the hacker to jump through.

Even if your not stupid enough to use the same password for both services, you might still be susceptible to key loggers, malware etc... meaning again that SMS would be a better option.

It's fairly easy to forge an SMS originating number to make a text message look like it's from someone else, however 2-factor generally is sending (terminating) a text message to a known number, this is much more secure.

It's almost impossible to intercept a terminating SMS, this is down to how SMS are routed over mobile networks and the SIM card registration process. Basically you would need the private encryption keys of the mobile operator to clone the SIM card and create a fake registration for that number, or 'root/admin' access to the current network that subscriber is on.

</comment><comment><USER5> What if somebody has compromised your email account and want's to take over your bank account. They do a password reset and the 2F is sent to the same address that is compromised. Not very safe.

Same thing can happen with a phone but, usually, when someone has their phone stolen, it gets quickly reported and disabled. When your email is compromised, you may not know about it and even if you do, how long will it take to disable the account or recover it?

</comment><comment><USER6> Pro-Tip: Neither are secure.

Using Email or SMS are equally bad and frankly its actually easier to send a fake SMS. That said, its contextual and SMS is usually faster, especially if you use gmail/etc.

Without an actual OTP or TOTP token, its basically just window dressing. And to be completely real, I'd worry more about an exploit of the site's code than any sort of 2FA issue.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, and at least email has a decent 'from' field which might even have some authentication behind it. So it seems like it might be a good place to get the 2FA...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you're in to bitcoin mining at all, you see something like this a lot - <USER2> to sign in, and email authentication/confirmation when you want to transfer coins. I also built a site a while ago that used email as 2FA, it worked just fine.

Honestly, I think it's not being used because it's not sexy.</comment>


Dear Tumblr: Banning "Adult Content" Will Harm Sex-Positive Communities - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/12/dear-tumblr-banning-adult-content-wont-make-your-site-better-it-will-harm-sex <comment><USER2> The reason they banned porn, is not because of some sudden guilt about porn. It's because, apparently, there had been a lot of child porn that was getting published. Tumblr seems like it doesn't have the resources to fight off child porn, and AI is too dumb to know what is underage or not. So now they are just banning all porn. That's why Apple banned their app from the app store recently.

The bad thing is that, this will absolutely kill the platform. Porn and porn gifs have always been popular on Tumblr for as far as I can remember. I'm not a Tumblr user, but this is just a fact anyone that has ever even casually browsed it knows.

<comment><USER3> You don't need an AI to fight child porn, the FBI publishes a huge database of hashes that make it very easy to fight it, and if I remember the Tumblr reponse to the Apple ban correctly, they've been using it for a while.

That being said, I also believe the apple ban wasn't explicitly because of cp, but also because an app known for NSFW conflicts with their "image", in the same manner ad companies also refuse to associate with it, but couldn't use that as the reason due to the PR backlash Tumblr is getting now

<comment><USER4> I don't think it's that kind of child pornography. It's more the self produced, coming of age, scantily clad variety that is non-trivial to moderate.

The most offensive to modern sensibilities (and advertisers) isn't the naked people, but the gore, self harm, and extreme fetish communities.

<comment><USER5> Can you imagine the irreparable harm caused to society by teenagers taking half naked selfies?

<comment><USER6> I don't have to imagine, I can read a news article from several years ago about how a teenager did just this from//to//in an Arab country and it made global headlines because exactly that.

<comment><USER7> So is the issue the teen or the Arab country?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Yes, the exact guidelines are going to be vague, that's a _good_ thing. It might just show they understand that it should be okay to allow art and breastfeeding and other forms of nudity that aren't explicitly pornographic.

I feel like this article isn't making good faith arguments. Every single sentence is trying to tear down Tumblr's announcement word by word without attempting to understand their position, making the worst case assumption about their intent rather than assuming reason, and Tumblr's position seems to be completely reasonable. Tumblr isn't for porn anymore, just like most other web sites on the planet.

Plus, if they lost a spot on the Apple App Store due to porn, then the title isn't true, removing the porn and getting back on the App Store will definitely make their situation better.

<comment><USER9> "I feel like this article isn't making good faith arguments."

The EFF is an advocacy organization. It definitely "advocates", and does not generally make "rational" arguments. If you always like everything they do, you may have a hard time seeing this, but if you've ever seen them speak about something you are either ambivalent about (probably a lot of people on this matter today) or even outright disagree with them on (as I have), it becomes clear.

I'm not particularly trying to be critical of them here. They advocate; it's what they say they do, it's what they are set up to do, and they're generally in a space that nobody else is even close to advocating for. But I do think it's important to understand them for what they are.

<comment><USER10> I don't have an opinion either way about the EFF especially, but I disagree that being an advocacy organization means you don't / can't make rational arguments. I think rational arguments should be expected of everyone; if you're part of an advocacy organization then presumably you think the arguments in favor of that organization's positions are winning, and so you should present those arguments.

Not every position needs to be advocated for.

<comment><USER11> I generally feel it hurts an advocacy group's credibility when they advocate for something without a rational argument. (And it's not just the EFF that do this.)

It's an interesting dynamic in the role of advocacy...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> So when is someone going to start a Sex-Positive Blogging Platform? These communities have always been marginalized by generic hosters - why not make one dedicated to the content?

Ohhh, right..... the advertisers.

<comment><USER13> Fetlife.com

it already exists (plus other features, granted).

<comment><USER12> It's not a blogging platform, it's a badly implemented Facebook clone. It's also private, making it difficult to collaborate or spread content, and has terrible search functionality. The only thing you can do is look at their global viral content feed and hope something that isn't just bondage or idiotic rants pops up. It also trends strongly towards kink, and white heteronormative sex, which excludes a huge portion of the Tumblr lgbtq+ spectrum.

<comment><USER13> I apologize in advance for the wall of text but I felt compelled to dispel a serious misunderstandings of the Kink community and by extension Fetlife from your comment here (though I think getting into the idiosyncrasies of the kinky community and lifestyle might be a wee bit too far off the rails/topic for the discussion of tumblr providing a platform for those interested in adult content).

Sure, while Fetlife might not be a "blogging" platform like Tumblr or WordPress is, the functionality of the site as a _community_ shouldn't be dismissed as a viable alternative for tumblr refugees just because it isn't dedicated to periodical columns the way WordPress is even while the platform has a versatile and quite heavily used blogging _feature_.

 _It also trends strongly towards kink_

Yes. It does. That's the point. They advertise it as such or try to convince you of anything otherwise. . They don't sell you anything else. That's entirely who the community was built for, it's the entire purpose of the site.

The very first thing you see when you go to the website is:

 _FetLife is the Social Network for the BDSM, Fetish & Kinky Community._

So yes. That's exactly the point of the site. But I also made sure to add, that among other things, the site is a pretty good and welcoming community for artists of many types: painters, drawers, photographers, writers, it can be many things to many people who want to trade in, and interact with 'adult content' despite the headline viewers see before even logging in or creating an account of their own.

But again, as I said in another comment in this subthread: kink != sex and to be earnest in discussing the affair, it's probably helpful to divorce one from the idea that kinky material == sexy material. Some people find pleasure-and it doesn't have to be _sexual_ pleasure, it could entirely be psychosomatic in controlling what another says and does as a dom or domme. Conflating the two only sets back the entire discussion IMO.

Further, this part has me raising an eyebrow and sorry if I've missed your point but:

 _and white heteronormative sex, which excludes a huge portion of the Tumblr lgbtq+ spectrum._

How?

Not to be a contrarian on the subject, but as a person of color, my own experiences with the site can be surmised the way a lot of people surmise their experiences with many sites like reddit, twitter, et al: pick the communities/subgroups you want to interact with, ignore those you don't.

So how does Fetlife as a platform "trend towards" white heteronormative sex? Just curious because the platform, best I can tell over the last five years as an active member allows the user to choose what groups they involve themselves with, and what people they involve themselves with and which groups they don't. If you're a person of color, looking to interact with polyamorous people who enjoy rope play, there's a good chance a group exists for it, and if not there is nothing stopping you from creating that.

If you're a white person who wants to interact with non-poly people and are looking for just plain-jane sex with other white people, there are groups for _that_ too.

Best I can tell, Fetlife enables you as a user to find and interact with all sorts of individuals who fit your specific theme/motif of "pleasure" however you define it, and places no limitations on those who exist outside of however we decide to define "normative" on a given day.

Is it possible the experience you speak of has less to do with the platform and more the groups you've chosen to subscribe to and the people you've chosen to interact with?

<comment><USER12> Saying that Fetlife is an adequate safe haven for the Tumblr lgbtq+ diaspora is like saying a punk record store is a safe haven for all the musicians in a city. Sure, technically speaking, the punks may welcome the musicians. But maybe those musicians don't _want_ to sit around with a bunch of crust punks, pretending to like their trite immature lyrics and three-chord symphonies. Maybe they'd like a space built to make them all feel comfortable and independent, and not shoved into somebody else's space.

Kink isn't sex, but guess what there is a _lot_ of on Fetlife? _SEX._ Look at the trending page. It's all bondage, stupid rants, and sex/nudes. That is literally all that is on the page right now.

It's white and heteronomative because, again, look at the viral feed. It's all white people having straight sex. I know of maybe 3 regular-old gay men on the whole site. The gay leather community, which literally invented BDSM, is bearly represented at all. And if there are pictures of women, or just any woman with an account, they get inundated by men trying to have sex with them.

Back to Tumblr - if I want to find furry-related content on Tumblr, I just search for "furries" and bam - gifs/jpgs, short posts, memes, everything the Tumblr community wants. I can also search Google and plenty of content comes up.

Now, if I want to find furry content on Fetlife, I have to log in, search for "furries", and individually weed through 602 discussion groups, looking at every individual's profiles, because no posts come up on the search page. No posts. No gifs/jpgs. No. Memes. It would take _hours_ to find the same content.

This is not what Tumblr users want. Fetlife will not work for them.

<comment><USER13> _I know of maybe 3 regular-old gay men on the whole site._

"regular-old gay"??? Would you care to articulate what this even means? What is 'regular' gay? Is there a 'regularity' of being gay or are you applying YOUR presumptions of sexual orientation to a group of people you've never met?

I feel like this probably says much more about how you're using the site than you (probably) intend to give off, and further belies what your associations with the LGBT and kink communities are even to begin with describing things so lackadaisically and I'm not sure I'm inclined or convinced by anything you're really countering with as to what the Fetlife community even is.

It seems limited, surface-level, and full of projections that reduce a spectrum of experiences, desires and wishes for the site down to some personal hangups that really aren't worth discussing here.

And if this comment seems inflammatory to you, then I'll point back to the very beginning of my apoplectic response to your "regular-old gay" comment as an example of exactly how it feels.

\---

Anyhow, that aside I'm leaving the discussion to rest with this: Fetlife isn't a 1:1 replacement for EVERY disaffected Tumblr user out there, but it is a good alternative for some, has good features for some, and can be a good and enjoyable community for others.

 _The gay leather community, which literally invented BDSM, is bearly represented at all._

This is patently false to the point of almost being humorous, but also and even so, the Kink world is several times larger than the "gay leather community". It's mdae up of more people with more varied interests than whatever outmoded idea of Kink you have from the 80's.

I probably did a poor job phrasing that from the start, here-admittedly, or getting the point across that it has features some may find attractive to use for the type of content they want to publish, but to be honest I find your particular characterization in response as a counterpoint to be missing a lot of nuance of the platform, and one that dismisses and completely _erases_ entire social-groups who use the site successfully to create their own local communities, groups and networks based on a few cherrypicked features.

*

If you'd like, I would be MORE than willing to share with you some of the groups and events on the site that (1) aren't about "white heteronormative sex" or (2) full of stupid rants, because contrary to what you're putting out here: they are NOT that hard to find, they are NOT that hard to join, and they are ABSOLUTELY welcoming to all sorts of flavors, identities and orientations. I really suggest you take a much closer look at the site than someone who made an account ten minutes ago and decided their mind is made up

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I understand why Verizon doesn't want to be in the porn business, but shouldn't this have come up during due diligence? Hasn't tumblr been porn- riddled since its inception?

</comment><comment><USER15> There is nothing wrong with sex. There is nothing wrong with nudity.

<comment><USER8> Tumblr didn't say there's something wrong with sex and nudity. They only said there's now something wrong with posting pictures of sex & nudity on Tumblr, like most of the millions of other forums online that aren't focused primarily on porn.

<comment><USER16> Pornography has been a significant part of tumblr for a long time, and the community that has evolved around it is protesting being removed from their platform of choice. The fact that there are millions of other forums where this isn't a significant component is an argument TO allow pornography, not to remove it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> They know. This is a move to extract value from a problematic platform. It was never about the users except as a growth metric to valuate, and sell, which they did. The life cycle is complete, and the remains are being butchered for sale. As much as I love liberal boobies, its still a walled garden you chose to play in.

</comment><comment><USER18> Seems like they've tried to roll their own machine learning classifier as well because I've seen some comically bad screenshots of banned content. For example, a picture of someone's finger got banned as sexually explicit.

Should have just used AWS or Google Cloud AI APIs

<comment><USER19> Those never have false positives?

<comment><USER18> Not as bad as I've seen from Tumblr. It's moving towards meme territory with how bad some of the bans are

 _Update_ It has in fact become a meme, example

[https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1437369-tumblr#comments](https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1437369-tumblr#comments)

<comment><USER20> Translation for non-millenials: It's become a joke.

<comment><USER21> A meme is basically a joke template that becomes popular. Then they get remixed, and the remix gets popular. Before you know it someone's asking "where did that cosmic brain meme image come from?" and you find out it's from a stock video.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> First I'm told that YouTube won't pay me for my 400 videos because my subscriber count is too low.

Now I'm told my porn Tumblr with 5,000 posts and 45,000 subscribers will be made private (i.e. deactivated).

The internet is dying, man.

Sad.

</comment><comment><USER23> A suggestion:

\- Verizon/Oath could make a reasonable exit and get some of their investment back

\- Users could continue using Tumblr

\- Tumblr could continue to exist

if Verizon/Oath sold it to Mindgeek or a similar adult focused company.

<comment><USER24> Who's going to sign off on a "reasonable exit" that realizes millions of dollars in losses? Better to drive the value all the way to zero while looking like you're trying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> There's a much simpler explanation: after regular movies porn costs boatload of money to distribute for free. Tumblr like consumers of porn refuse to pull out their credit card to pay for it, Tumblr producers of porn refuse to pull out their credit card to pay for delivery and advertisers are having a hard time justifying advertising on porn sites.

Kill the porn => make tumblr cheap to run => make money off the ads => profit

<comment><USER26> I _swear_ I'm not trying to be a sassy arse about this, but when people talk about the "porn" on tumblr, I seriously thought this was about a crackdown of pictures and videos stolen from porn studios and reuploaded to tumblr the way people upload popular songs and music videos to YouTube and the subsequent copyright issues that come from that.

So when I saw so many people talking about "I get all my porn" from tumblr, my immediate response is ".....seriously?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Horny people have no rights. Horny people are NOT protected under the constitution.

</comment><comment><USER28> >Sex-Positive Communities

TIL

<comment><USER29> LOL me too

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> There are a growing number of censorship and free speech issues facing the internet- this is not one of them. This society is heading to the toilet if a mainstream website used by children cannot decide that they don't want to host porn on their product. Why is this even controversial?

<comment><USER31> To be fair, most of the arguments (at least that I've seen, could be non- representative) aren't against big C "Censorship" in the way that this comment implies. It's not an argument as to whether or not Oath/Verizon/Tumblr CAN remove the content and be within their right to do so, it's that it's a poor idea from either a business or a community based point of view (often both). While they are able to manage their community in any way they seem fit, it's that the users of the platform are coming out (and I have absolutely zero data to say whether it's a vast majority or vocal minority) to say that they disagree with the decision that is being made. When phrased in the way that you did, you seem to imply the black-and-white view of "Porn is obviously bad, why shouldn't Tumblr remove it" though ignoring most of the discussion and nuanced views that make a discussion like this worth having.

<comment><USER32> > you seem to imply the black-and-white view of "Porn is obviously bad, why > shouldn't Tumblr remove it" though ignoring most of the discussion and > nuanced views that make a discussion like this worth having

You've effectively changed what he said. He said something much simpler: there are children that use Tumblr; because there are children that use Tumblr, removing porn from Tumblr should not be controversial.

A "nuanced" reply would assess the risk of exposing children to the fascinations of various alternative communities that _do not_ dabble in child porn. I don't see "Porn is obviously bad", but I do see exposing children to porn is obviously bad.

<comment><USER5> It is even simpler, he literally just made a "will somebody please think of the children" argument. Which is so that inane it doesn't even need a serious reply.

<comment><USER33> Do you have kids?

As a parent, the idea of exposing my kids to the internet is frightening. There are so many paths by which they can get exposed to stuff they shouldn't be exposed to. I, personally, think that attempts to make more of the internet child friendly are good. The internet as it exists today is like walking down the Main Street of some town, except that people surprise you by randomly jumping out from behind mailboxes and shrubs and engaging in hardcore sex on the sidewalk. It's insane.

<comment><USER34> If you're worried about your kids being exposed to that stuff, set up internet filtering in your home. It's pretty effective these days, and you'll actually get way closer to the result you want with that approach than with trying to change the internet.

<comment><USER33> My kids are young, so it's not something we've had to seriously get into yet. Honestly curious, though: how does filtering handle sites like Reddit or YouTube where all requests are via https, which makes the specific content on the page not visible to filtering which takes place at the network connection level?

<comment><USER5> Install a local root CA so you can MITM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Social data and data sharing really needs to be standardized around common protocols. I could see a better future wherein:

1\. There's a core layer made up of an immutable ledger of encrypted social data (content users publish and relationships between users) and a series of protocols to use and manipulate that data. This layer is non-discriminatory and anything can be published.

2\. The future "Facebook"s, "Tumblr"s create frontends that use (1)s data in interesting ways by consent of the user. These frontends can blacklist certain content depending on what their goals are. Depending on country of operation, these classes of services additionally act as legal gatekeepers for what is legal or non-legal content.

<comment><USER36> why would you want an immutable ledger? Just make it peer-to-peer and encrypted. The whole world doesn't need to store a copy of someone's PMs or even their public posts.

<comment><USER37> Some people just really like applying blockchains to problems that blockchains have no business "solving".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Glad I cancelled subscription and donations to eff. This blind devotion to 'free speech' is what led the tech industry to empower InfoWars and their ilk. The world is complex.

<comment><USER39> infowars came from radio not the internet,it still has a substantial following there

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> When did the EFF turn into a porn advocacy group? Doesn't seem to really fit with what their core mission is supposed to be. And we should remember that what likely led to this was that there was a large amount of child porn being posted to the website. Advertisers probably didn't like that very much, and I imagine Verizon isn't interested in running a porn site anyways.

<comment><USER41> Then they shouldn't have bought a porn site.

<comment><USER42> They bought Yahoo. Tumblr came with it.</comment></comment></comment>


Hurricane Florence represents a grave threat to the East Coast - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/09/hurricane-florence-represents-a-grave-threat-to-the-east-coast/ <comment><USER2> Has there ever been a hurricane that wasn't a 'grave threat' to the area it was forecasted to hit? (hint: no)

<comment><USER3> Exactly. As you'd expect from a weather forecast, it's mostly conjecture anyways.</comment></comment>


The NSA's Cryptographic Capabilities - <AUTHOR> http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/09/the_nsas_crypto_1.html <comment><USER2> After the new revelations every site who's using SSL should be using Perfect Forward Secrecy with it, too. Right now, only a few known companies like Google (only for the search engine probably), DuckDuckGo, and Ixquick/Startpage are using it.

Considering NSA is collecting as many keys as possible, let's at least make their job exponentially harder by encrypting every session and every message with a new key with PFS. It's the _least_ these companies can do, if they're serious about their users' privacy.

Also, as Bruce is saying - use 3072 bit or even 4096 bit RSA keys (or better alternatives) and AES-256 as soon as possible (hopefully within a year).

<comment><USER3> Whilst it makes perfect sense, it's an exercise in frustration. An asymmetric key is usually used to protect a shared symmetric key. Generating a strong asymmetric key on a phone, for example, takes bloody ages. As ever, strong security comes at the expense of usability.

<comment><USER2> PFS only adds 15 percent overhead, and the new ARMv8 architecture will be up to 10x faster for AES.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The idea that we can break public key encryption and go back to shared secrets doesn't solve the problem for which public key encryption is the answer, namely sharing the secrets. Schneier's piece would be a little more helpful if this were considered. Going back to simple shared secrets means that one cannot securely engage in something like ecommerce, and so breaking public key encryption would totally break the way we use encryption today.

</comment><comment><USER5> _Certainly the fact that the NSA is pushing elliptic-curve cryptography is some indication that it can break them more easily._

There are valid and sane reasons to dismiss RSA. Keys are becoming larger and larger for example.

What Bruce doesn't say is that the NSA made modifications to DES S-Boxes so that it can RESIST differential cryptanalysis better.

But overall I agree, I think the _" Also, we are investing in groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities to defeat adversarial cryptography and exploit internet traffic."_ is just vulgarization for the people voting budget.

It doesn't matter if you break the crypto or the implementation as long as you provide intelligence.

<comment><USER6> " _What Bruce doesn 't say is that the NSA made modifications to DES S-Boxes so that it can RESIST differential cryptanalysis better._"

That was then. Back then, the NSA's clear mission was to help prevent the Soviets from winning, and that included protecting our communications (still part of their remit). Now ... it's not so clear.

BTW, according to Wikipedia IBM independently discovered differential cryptography and kept that secret at the NSA's request, so IBM was potentially in a position to understand the NSA's requested changes, or just plain worked with it on them.

There were a bunch of things that the NSA might have though mitigated the danger so it was an acceptable tradeoff to the very real threat of Soviet spying on US businesses (see e.g. [http://nsarchive.wordpress.com/2013/04/26/agent-farewell- and...](http://nsarchive.wordpress.com/2013/04/26/agent-farewell-and-the- siberian-pipeline-explosion/)):

They limited the key size to 56 bits (according to Wikipedia a compromise between 48 and 64 ... where else have we heard of that sort of thing: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asynchronous_Transfer_Mode#Cel...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asynchronous_Transfer_Mode#Cell_size)).

It was intended for hardware implementations, and perhaps they didn't do a good job of factoring in Moore's law, which then was only a decade old and had a lot more skeptics. And microprocessors were still quite new.

There was a strong export control regime back then, and to the extent DES was implemented in hardware it was more effective.

Getting back to adversaries, official and unofficial, to the extend they aren't nation states, or not very wealthy and technically sophisticated ones, the tradeoffs are significantly different today. We can be very sure they're not worried about al-Qaeda brute forcing a secretly weakened algorithm as long as it's not too weak (i.e. requires a lot more than a handful of machines with GPUs or FPGAs).

Same might be true for various nation states as long as they don't get patronage by the Russians or Chinese Communists, and we might have an idea of the capabilities of the latter two frenemies (I sure hope we do!).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> On a different note, considering the popular myth that government by default is incompetent, this is a remarkable degree of competence, surpassing even the private sector.

<comment><USER8> A brute with a mallet can cause a lot of damage. And yet he is not master fencer.

NSA have a lot of brute force behind their backs. They have a rubber stamping court, are allowed to read existing laws as a weak guidelines, almost unlimited budget and the lucky fact that the majority of the world's IT IP is located in the hands of american companies.

It will be hard to not produce results with all that.

Governments usually are competent in their own way. What they usually lack is subtlety and elegance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > I think it extraordinarily unlikely that the NSA has built a quantum > computer capable of performing the magnitude of calculation necessary to do > this, but it's possible.

.

I think, that from the very first moment a quantum computer could be built (given an extraordinary amount of resources) NSA set this to their highest priority, and tried to do so, given what this system could provide them, so I am pretty sure that by now they have already some prototype working and growing.

Or do you think they're saving money? Or not trying to draw all possible funds to this cause considering how much appeal its computations could exercise for exampe for US foreign economy?

</comment><comment><USER10> One point that is made more often is: "It's very probable that the NSA has newer techniques that remain undiscovered in academia."

How does one go around maintaining such an omerta?

Most cryptographic math is not that hard that it requires a team to remember. So anyone working in this field at NSA could (if true) become professor by working out that math in academia after his/her career at NSA. Or is there such strong commitment to secrecy that not one former NSA cryptographer would try to follow that route?

<comment><USER11> Compare it to ASDICs.

The Brits invented Sonar in 1916, and the Admiralty kept it secret for long enough that when World War 2 broke out, they had it fitted on 5 types of ships as part of an integrated anti-submarine suite; they were the only ones that had this operational capability.

If you were a scientist who worked on that project, and in 1920 you published "On Quartz-Based Range Detection In Water", you would have definitely gone to jail.

(Or, of course, the Enigma cracking -- but that's not really the best example; it wasn't a long-maintained operational advantage consisting of abilities the rest of the world didn't have, but rather an emergency skunk-works that got jump-started by the Poles; it did, however, have a pretty good record of secrecy after the fact!)</comment></comment>


ASK HN: How would you do project planning for a YCombinator news clone? - <AUTHOR> I have started project planning a clone of ycombinator and I am running into a problem. This is my first large web app. The other web apps I have built we're toy projects to learn API's and frameworks.
I am going with a MVC design pattern. For this project I've set down for the first time and written out all of the features of the website. Then I began to document each models structure. I've written out all of the properties for the models. Next I will start designing the views.
The question I have is what kind of model structure would you use? I have 3 models the user, the submissions and the comments.
Each model seems so huge though.
I've studied iOS design and I feel that it would be easier and it makes more since to design and build things the way iOS apps work. For example, in an iOS app, if a user clicks on a submission in iOS, the submission detail view would be populated from the model data of the clicked submission.
However from my understanding of websites, building each site from the model data each time a link is clicked would be a huge waste of server resources. Also when web crawlers build links each site needs to be server side rendered. So the server must store 100s and 1000s of sites.
Can you please recommend any further reading on the subject of web app structure and project planning? <comment><USER2> Less on the app structure, but more specific to hackernews: the source code is open [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14371189](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14371189), more pointers in [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14371821](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14371821)

The source code of [https://lobste.rs/](https://lobste.rs/) is also open source and from a feature point-of-view pretty similar. [https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters](https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters)

> building each site from the model data each time a link is clicked would be > a huge waste of server resources

It's typically still done. Forums are 90+% read, little write and caching the rendering output gives a huge boost.</comment>


Google's PageRank patent has expired - <AUTHOR> https://patents.google.com/patent/US6285999B1/en <comment><USER2> Myth: PageRank was the secret to Google's success

It wasn't really that simple. For a brief while, perhaps it made a difference, but within perhaps a span of 6 months, every decent search engine implemented page rank in one form or another. It is a cute story for the muggles to focus on. In reality search was already then about balancing a large number of signals into a decent ranking formula. It was much, much harder than just applying some magic algorithm and I think the people who built Google search back in those days deserve a lot more credit. But that wasn't really a sexy story, I guess.

To a much greater degree than any algorithm or formula: Google's ability to execute, and to do so in cultural sympathy with the web, was more important. Much has been said about Google's Not Invented Here, but this made all the difference in the early days: you had to get things to where you could iterate and innovate fast.

And I say that admiringly as someone who worked for one of their competitors at the time. I used to be jealous of Google because they were managed by people who were part of the Internet. Our management was alien to the Internet (and our business model was to power search for portals mainly run by horrible, stupid people in suits).

Google was the only search engine that was properly in tune with its audience: focusing on the user.

(Disclosure: I worked for FAST, then Yahoo, then Google until I quit Google in 2009)

<comment><USER3> Google's success was due to marketing and the opportunity to do so at massive scale (wide reach of and frequent media coverage). Even PageRank's mention was marketing, though the world at large had no idea what it meant.

Most latched on to Google due to marketing surrounding and due to their IPO. Many heard and understood: money, billions, billionaire, slides and bicycles, etc.

After, continued marketing kept it all going. Powerful illusion. Google is the embodiment of candy coated BS. Even now, they mainly continue due to continually marketing themselves as greatness..

..and paying for Chrome, Android, and first placement on iPhones.

They even had internal studies showing that while they are pervasive (most use at least one of their products), there isn't any stickiness. That is, if some other search engine had first placement on iPhones, the majority would be using that one. It's like the site that previously appeared when searching for a definition (dictionary.com?): while many used it and did so frequently, they often didn't even realize where they were.

The world (and internet, even) at large is very different from the handful who think themselves aligned with the masses (ie, source of revenue). It's even funnier, as most thinking anyone cared about PageRank don't buy anything. No spending = you don't exist. Anything else is a coincidental nod, stupidity, or coincidence.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, this is completely wrong. I watched Google grow up having worked in the area and they didn't have any marketing at the beginning. They first became the best search engine many years before they started adding ads and well before their IPO.

<comment><USER3> Being the best search engine was irrelevant to their rise. It's just a thing that happened to also (supposedly) be there.

Supposedly, as its ranking algorithm was so heavily gamed by 2007 (already risen; popularity incentivized effort to game) it was a complete joke. Powerful illusion again, as they just covered it up and moved on. Also, internal tests from around 2009-2010 showed Bing was seen by users as producing better-quality results.

Not only did they not have much marketing at the beginning, they also didn't have many users.

<comment><USER2> No, you are entirely wrong. There's no part of your "analysis" that has any relation to reality. I don't understand why you keep insisting.

(I worked for two of Google's competitors in the years where they grew from a student project to a huge business. I had the opportunity to take a peek of the code of two other competitors. Many of my former colleagues helped build Bing. I also worked at Google for a few years. I was there so I would know something about it)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Every once and then I remember that you can actually patent algorithms. Terror ensues, and a general feeling of frustration and helplesness. Then I try to forget this fact slowly, just to be able to continue living in this crazy world.

As a mathematician, i see algorithms as examples of theorems, and the idea to "patent" a theorem, a mathematical truth, is so foreign!

<comment><USER6> > i see algorithms as examples of theorems, and the idea to "patent" a > theorem, a mathematical truth, is so foreign!

I'm not defending the patenting of algorithms [1], but what is protected by algorithm patents is _not_ their mathematical truth -- quite the opposite, in fact, as I'll explain -- just as what is protected by mechanical patents is not some physical truth.

You are free to publish a patented algorithm (provided you don't copy your text verbatim from a copyrighted source), teach it, study it, etc. to spread that truth and expand it. What you're not allowed to do without permission from the patent owner is to _implement it and run it on a computer_ ; i.e. what is protected is not a truth but a certain human action. This is the same for mechanical inventions, which could be equally said to be "physical truths": a mechanism built in this way would, according to the laws of physics, behave in that particular way etc. Similarly, you are allowed to publish and study that physical truth -- what you're not allowed to do is to _build_ it.

Again, I'm not saying whether this is right or wrong, only pointing out that it is not _truth_ that's protected by patents, but _application_. In fact, one of the original motivations for patent protection is precisely to encourage people to not keep doscovered truths secret by promising them that profitable _applications_ would be reserved to them for some period of time. So patents were designed to help _spread_ truth in exchange for protecting applications. That this is what patents are _intended_ to do is a fact.

It's fine to object to patents -- there are good arguments both in favor and against -- but completely misunderstanding what patents are and what it is that they protect is not one of them.

[1]: I'm not in principle against that, either, except that in practice few patented algorithms rise to the level of inventiveness that patents are intended to protect.

<comment><USER7> Does this imply that the PageRank algorithm I wrote for a uni assignment is actually illegal? Or does this fall under "studying it"? Note that I'm from Europe.

<comment><USER8> Only if you made/used it commercially and also that Google did not decide you can use it

("What rights does a patent provide? A patent owner has the right to decide who may – or may not – use the patented invention for the period in which the invention is protected. In other words, patent protection means that the invention cannot be commercially made, used, distributed, imported, or sold by others without the patent owner's consent.")

And being out of the country, the US patent doesn't apply to you

("Is a patent valid in every country? Patents are territorial rights. In general, the exclusive rights are only applicable in the country or region in which a patent has been filed and granted, in accordance with the law of that country or region.")

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There's a lot of discussion I see about PageRank for CS purposes, so I'd like to give a slightly different perspective most people haven't heard about.

A colleague of mine at CalTech recently used the PageRank Algorithm to model the evolution of in-vivo neural networks [0, page 8]. The concept is pretty good for modeling extensions of simple Hebbian learning and explaining some of the ensemble dynamics (at least in the hippocampus). If you're interested in further reading, there's more work on attractor states in biological learning and associative memory (some of which is cited in the paper).

Brief overview: there's debate on whether brain network dynamics are stable or unstable. In networks related to learning and over the timespan of weeks, this experiment observed that ensemble-level dynamic change during learning __but __some neurons are remarkably stable in how /when they fire. You can rank stability with methods like PageRank, suggesting that connectivity implies importance (and perhaps stability).

[0] [https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2019/03/07/559...](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2019/03/07/559104.full.pdf)

<comment><USER10> Are you sure it is PageRank specifically? These fof maps were used and investigated as far back as the early 1900s.

Search for "the page rank book" for a deeper analysis.

<comment><USER9> He used a customized version of the PageRank algorithm that comes with MATLAB. The paper is pretty dense with other interesting observations. I think one of the novel contributions is experimental evidence that centrality is important to learning distinct sequences of behaviors.

Consider three behaviors: moving right on a linear track, turning around, and moving left. A reinforcement signal could be sugar water. If you place sugar water at the right end of the track the mouse learns the sequence of moving right, drinking, turning around, and moving left to leave. Now, in the hippocampus different ensembles of time and place neurons are correlated with each distinct activity. The inter-ensemble connectivity has to be learned, as the sequence of actions become correlated not just in behavior but in the brain as well. The neurons that most strongly inhabit inter-ensemble connectivity, tend to be those 'stable' and 'important' anchor neurons.

Yes, it has been studied before that some neurons are more important than others. But the critical extension here is to long-term stability and learning on an unprecedented time-scale and quantity of simultaneously recorded neurons. The actual microscope itself, is a significant technological advancement in how it stays robust to long- and short-term motion artifacts and was custom designed and built by the first-author.

There's also the experiment done on dynamics after traumatic damage to the neural circuits encoding a learned behavior (this is one of the specialty of the Lois group). But that starts deviating from the observation I wanted to make relating to the thread.

The conclusion: "Overall, our findings suggest a model where the patterns of activity of individual neurons gradually change over time while the activity of groups of synchronously active neurons ensures the persistence of representations."

Seems fairly innocuous, but I'm almost certain it will be controversial to some parties.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For extra context: back then you would manually submit your site to yahoo and dmoz to end up in their results. They saw themselves as directories.

Google was all about crawling and building up the biggest dataset going.

Both approaches were victim to keyword stuffing (lots of keywords at the bottom of the page and if you were lucky it was in a marquee tag).

Pagerank was a pretty decent extra value with a relevance score to promote trust worthy sites. However there were similar techniques like hubs and authorities from kleinberg.

On a side note his old research students / postdocs ended up leading key initiatives at FB newsfeed and Pinterest discovery.

<comment><USER12> Altavista and others beside were already crawling the web.

Yahoo and Dmoz were curated but Google definitely wasn't the first crawler.

As for the approaches being victim to keyword stuffing: that was because the algorithms used were exclusively 'on page' without assigning a value to links.

<comment><USER13> Yahoo's content was mostly US based if i remember correctly. The reason i switched to Google from Altavista was because of the reduced ads and clean look on the page. The results where about the same back then.

<comment><USER14> IIRC speed played a huge role too in part because of the cleaner page, but also in part because of whatever voodoo they used to deliver results.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> To my knowledge, PR has long been succeeded by more sophisticated models. At one time, perhaps even now, Google had a team of mathematicians constantly tuning its ranking algorithm.

PR itself might be the foundation, but it definitely wouldn't be enough to build another Google scale system.

<comment><USER16> Links are still the single most important factor for ranking, though. I mean, there's a lot of other stuff going on, and the content/information extraction has advanced massively since the early days, but PR (or a similar concept) seems to still be the biggest part of determining how relevant a page is.

<comment><USER15> Atleast the future is not links. With the move towards reactive js based clients, restful api based services, links hardly have the requisite data for indexing. Even page content is extremely fickle to index.

Google must be having a js engine as part of its web indexing process.

<comment><USER16> They do, and have been using it for quite some time. Not only will they execute JS, they will also do AJAX requests and index the content that is returned.

Since the overwhelming majority of the web is still static, I believe links will be fine for the foreseeable future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's a unique milestone to see something so integral to the development of the internet as we now interact with it become expired. It's also telling that we might need to rethink the duration of the patent system as a whole because so much can change within 20 years.

<comment><USER18> It just makes me feel old, like the internet is last generation's stuff now.

<comment><USER19> It is. Aside from looking up information and ordering things, the net is almost completely useless to me now. Nothing is discoverable any more.

<comment><USER20> The Internet does not feel much like a wild place where you might encounter anything anymore.

On the other hand, reality itself is much faster paced because of the Internet.

You can go into the world see, try, learn, experience, be hurt, recover and do it all again at a rate never before possible.

So real discovery, discovery of what it is to be alive is more accessible than ever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> But it is no longer that useful anyway. It is probably of more value to Google as a legend for recruiting purpose other than an important technological asset or advantage.

</comment><comment><USER22> Cue all the whiteboard interviewers: "implement the page rank algorithm, please."

<comment><USER23> Followed by "what is the time and space complexity?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> tangent: if anyone wants to read a good non-fiction book about the history of steam, invention, the patent system, etc -- i can recommend William Rosen's book "The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention"

</comment><comment><USER25> It's too broad to say all algorithms should not be patentable. Amazon's one click buy and page rank are obvious to "those skilled in the arts" but there are plenty of algorithms that should be patentable. The problem is that the uspto doesn't properly get an expert consensus on obviousness.

</comment><comment><USER26> I bet the purpose of this patent was to check the investor box of "yes we have a patent," they've never had enforce it, and competitors were not really discouraged by it. Thoughts?

<comment><USER27> Patents can be defensive. Someone else could had patented it and used it against them. Also (subjective opinion), they were kids: They thought patenting it was important, like they thought asking Yahoo for a mere $1M to buy it was a great deal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Slightly off topic, but has anyone seen a drop in traffic even with the same rankings? Too many of the keywords I used to rank for now have featured snippets. These snippets basically mean that any result after #2 get little to no traffic

It used to be that beyond page 1 was a waste, but I reckon now if you're not #1 or the featured snippet, you don't really stand to gain much in terms of traffic

</comment><comment><USER29> Would be a difficult patent to enforce against a competitor since it would be difficult to tell if a backend is actually implementing this but I suppose it's in their interest to still file for it.

</comment><comment><USER30> Pretty amazing that you can patent an idea as simple as multiplying a matrix by itself N times.

<comment><USER31> I realize that not everyone understands how patents work but this is ridiculous. The patent claims don't mention matrices. Any implementation (like matrices) is merely an embodiment (you can implement the patent without matrices).

And even if that weren't true, the foundation of the patent system is applying existing techniques to new applications. The background section of the patent clearly details how this technique has been used in other applications.

I don't dispute that a lot of patents are trash but this is possibly the most important patent of the last 30 years. That doesn't mean it invented computers, mathematics and the internet, it just put some already good ideas together. That is what invention is.

<comment><USER32> I realize that not everyone understands how matrices work, but this is ridiculous. The abstract of the patent:

"... the rank of a document is calculated from a constant representing the probability that a browser through the database will randomly jump to the document."

And the specific claim is:

"Looked at another way, the importance of a page is directly related to the steady-state probability that a random web surfer ends up at the page after following a large number of links."

This _explicitly_ describes a Markov Chain, which is naturally represented by a matrix. A variety of versions of the linear equation are explicitly given in the patent.

To claim you can implement the patent without matrices is, for all intents and purposes, wrong. You can implement the same equations in a variety of ways, but they are still matrix equations.

They patented the idea to apply random walks to ranking webpages. That's arguably reasonably novel, though Wikipedia lists a number of predecessors. But it was also an inevitable invention, because there is a large number of people familiar with Random Walks/Markov Processes, they are routinely taught to undergrads, and are used to model and analyse a vast number of processes [1].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_chain#Applications](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_chain#Applications)

<comment><USER31> What you quoted is not what the patent "claims". The claims are the numbered points in the section "Claims". They are the only legally enforced section of a patent and they are written in a very specific language. Everything else is background or embodiment and has little to no legal value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Page Rank, Map Reduce... those infamous tools that once game changing. But now, I think there are many better ones, just less well known

</comment><comment><USER34> Is there any page rank library launched on Github? Can exgooglers make such libraries and raise themsleves to open source fame?

<comment><USER35> It's been done many times, and it's easy to implement for small graphs.

Example: [https://networkx.github.io/documentation/networkx-1.10/refer...](https://networkx.github.io/documentation/networkx-1.10/reference/generated/networkx.algorithms.link_analysis.pagerank_alg.pagerank.html)

<comment><USER36> As mentioned, the difficulty with PageRank isn't the implementation, but scaling it to billions of webpages. Doing so would require either extensive knowledge of systems or approximation methods.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> White page that would lod fast when everyone had 56kb was key

</comment><comment><USER38> They should have put some round ears on it...

</comment><comment><USER39> Maybe they should revert back to PR to yield better Search results

<comment><USER40> The Google results started going bad for me around when project humming bird came along. We need a distributed open data alternative that can be tweaked for your proferences transparently.

And we also need to start paying for the internet. The malvertising model we have now is unsustainable and crippling the network in favour of Facebook and Google.

<comment><USER2> What's stopping you from doing it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> So what now? Someone copies PageRank?

<comment><USER42> Nothing. Everybody freely has copied PageRank already. It has became one of the basic teaching material in graph theory.

For example, NetworkX, a popular graph library in Python, implements PageRank. [1]

[1] [https://networkx.github.io/documentation/networkx-1.10/refer...](https://networkx.github.io/documentation/networkx-1.10/reference/generated/networkx.algorithms.link_analysis.pagerank_alg.pagerank.html)

<comment><USER43> How does that work in the real world - do google simply not care, or it's "fair use" somehow?

<comment><USER44> The patent is only for web search, so other applications dont infringe the patent.

<comment><USER45> First sentence of the abstract of the patent:

"A method assigns importance ranks to nodes in a linked database, such as any database of documents containing citations, the world wide web or any other hypermedia database."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> " _Please don 't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something._"

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

Edit: bad call. Detached from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20067782](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20067782) and marked off-topic.

<comment><USER30> Sorry dang, I respect your moderation a lot but I have to disagree here that my comment is a shallow dismissal that can't teach anyone anything.

PageRank really is a very simple idea based on elementary linear algebra, a fact many people might not have known. Thus my comment could inspire a curious person to go read more about how PageRank works instead of fearing that there is a Ph.D worth of prerequisites.

Furthermore, it is a relevant comment on the US patent system.

By the way, I think PageRank is an _incredibly_ important development in the history of technology, and took a fair bit of ingenuity to think up. I'm not dismissive of it at all. But it is also very _simple_ , which doesn't contradict any of the above. And I don't think it should be patentable, just like I don't think other simple and intuitive applications of matrix multiplication (like the chain rule from calculus, for example) should be patentable either.

<comment><USER46> I'm persuaded. Sorry!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Here's the raw truth that no one in the valley will admit.

It's about two things:

1\. Execution.

2\. Luck.

... but it's mostly execution.

If you have a BRILLIANT idea but can't execute you're dead.

There are tons of companies in the history books as examples.

BUT... if you can EXECUTE, you can take a shitty idea, abandon it, pivot, measure, and focus BACK on a good idea. Then when you have a good idea you can keep executing it forward.

The rest of luck but this can be worked on as luck is often timing + being prepared.

<comment><USER48> I strongly disagree that execution matters more than luck. I ask myself would I rather be good or lucky, and I will always choose luck. Because no matter how good you are, if luck isn't on your side you're going to lose. You might be the better programmer, but you still didn't get the job. You might have the better proposal, but you still lost the bid. You might be the better candidate, but you still lost the election. You might have a better product, but your company still failed. You might eat right and exercise, but you still got cancer.

I see this regularly play out when founders who found success on their first startups attempt to repeat it, only to fail miserably. Granted, there are a handful who manage to duplicate their success, but I know that some of these are simply due to who you know from their first success (you could argue that's better execution, but the number of unicorns I know that wouldn't exist if it weren't for a lucky break from an investor previously befriended makes me think otherwise). I do not mean to belittle the hard work and brilliance of many successful founders, only to emphasize that luck was absolutely critical in nearly every success story.

Obviously it's better to have both, but pretending that you can outmaneuver the universe is an act of hubris. I think people pontificating that execution matters more than luck are too arrogant to realize how lucky they are, or want to believe it matters more because it's reassuring to believe that we are in control of our destinies.

There are things you can do to increase your exposure to luck, but it's ultimately something beyond your control. The world isn't meritocratic.

<comment><USER49> To get lucky is something different from being a person who "has luck". The latter doesn't exist. Unless you believe in supernatural things.

Everyone has the same chance to get lucky. You can position yourself to optimize your chances. The question remains if you have the necessary abilities to take advantage of it.

<comment><USER48> Luck is random. Nobody has luck, but the guy who won the lottery got lucky.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Because they dont need it anymore.

</comment><comment><USER51> Back to keywords in meta and h1 then ? /s

<comment><USER52> That's still table stakes for SEO. Although not sure being in <h1> matters, but doesn't do any harm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> For better or worse, pagerank destroyed the value of inbound links and by extension it killed the web. Now Google, not links determine how your page is found and while I'm sure links still have some value that is only one of a very large number of inputs. I believe it is impossible to come up with some way of ranking web results that does not in the end lead to a destruction of the metric that one uses to rank with, if the metric initially gives great results. Spammers will figure it out and will drown out the signal with noise.

<comment><USER27> a bit exaggerated, but sadly there's a core of truth to it.</comment></comment>


Talk on org mode for emacs - outliner, gtd system - <AUTHOR> http://emacs.wordpress.com/2008/07/17/org-from-the-horses-mouth/ <comment><USER2> Looks interesting, but has anyone got a text version of the same information that won't consume 46 minutes of my life?

<comment><USER3> I was sold at about 5:30. Basically just type M-x org-mode to begin.

If you want to create a document with a hierarchical structure: Use * to denote a heading. Use two asterisks to denote a sub heading etc. Press tab at a heading to collapse it and its sub headings so that it just shows the heading. Press tab again to uncollapse. Use M-<up arrow> to swap an item with the one above it.

To create tables: Use vertical bars to define a table. Use the meta key and the arrow keys to swap columns and rows.

Contains features for creating flexible todo lists, spreadsheets.

etc etc. Very simple to use. Very powerful. Export to HTML very simply. Export to other formats.

Basically you don't have to learn very much at all to get a lot of use out of it. <http://orgmode.org/manual/index.html></comment></comment>


New laser ultrasound technique can remotely image the inside of a person - happy-go-lucky https://news.mit.edu/2019/first-laser-ultrasound-images-humans-1219 <comment><AUTHOR> Even after minutes my mind is still blown by the idea that there _exists_ a _proof of concept_ device for a _remote sound generation - laser microphone - ultrasound imaging technique_. Maybe we will actually live to see something like Star Trek tricorders.

<comment><USER2> The lasers aren't generating the sound waves per se, your body is. The laser heats up your body, causing things to expand, then the laser is turned off, causing things to contract. It's the expanding and contracting of your body that is creating the sound waves. These sound waves are then detected by something stuck to your body that converts the wave into an electrical signal.

This is different than ultrasound, which generates its own sound waves that are then reflected by the body back to the device.

It's novel, but it doesn't solve the problem of being "non-invasive"; you still need a sensor stuck to the body to pick up the sound waves.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's using a laser to read the reflections contact-free.

>The researchers tested this idea with a laser setup, using one pulsed laser set at 1,550 nanometers to generate sound waves, and a second continuous laser, tuned to the same wavelength, to remotely detect reflected sound waves.

<comment><USER3> How does it help to have the sensing laser at the same wave length as the pulsing laser, if the pulsing laser is triggering sound waves which have a different wavelength?

<comment><USER4> If they had two lasers of similar frequencies they would get interference beats/aliases in the data. If they use the exact same frequency (eg by splitting the source) it shouldn't show up. Should allow for less stable/expensive laser sources too.

<comment><USER5> > If they had two lasers of similar frequencies they would get interference > beats/aliases in the data.

1\. They _did_ use different frequencies- 1540 nm and 1550 nm.

2\. The measuring was done with doppler interferometry, so beats would not impact measurements. The sensor is only responding to the difference between two signals, not the intensity.

3\. 10 nm wavelength shift is a much larger difference than anything they'd be measuring, so the only thing that would actually even "show up" (as noise) would be light at the same wavelength as the measuring laser. Any constant noise at the same wavelength as the measuring laser will be filtered out. Only slight frequency deviations would come through- like the kind from vibrations shaking the laser.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Mary Lou Jepson's 'OpenWater' work is a similar project where light + computation is rapidly advancing the options for deep, real-time medical imaging:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k879MFfB_3Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k879MFfB_3Q)

<comment><USER7> The two are very different. Openwater, as per their patent filings, uses ultrasound to change the refractive index of tissue and/or phase shift and use an inverse distortion matrix to undo scattering. I've yet to see a real result on dynamically changing tissue. By contrast, this uses light to generate ultrasound waves, basically photoacoustic tomography.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This sounds a lot like optical coherence tomography (OCT), which is essentially laser-based "ultrasound" used to image the inside of retinal tissue. (It's not actually ultrasound, it's entirely optical but uses similar principles.)

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

It's already a common diagnostic tool used for patients who are at risk for glaucoma. By creating a 3D cross section of the eye's retinal structures, it lets physicians detect early damage from the disorder, hopefully before any vision loss.

<comment><USER9> Thanks for linking to that. I had this done a while back but didn't know what it was called or how it worked. If only all imaging techniques were as fast and pleasant this one. It was over in seconds. Although I suppose the small size of retinas likely play a part in that as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> How is this different from photoacoustic tomography?

<comment><USER11> I'm sure this is a serious question but I lol'd when I read it. I'm going to use that line at a party or a meeting some time to sound smart.

<comment><USER12> Or you could assume he's more experienced than you in that field and not be offensive?

<comment><USER13> You could also notice that it was clearly a light-hearted joke and not be so quick to take offense.

<comment><USER11> Definitely no offense meant. It just sounded so smart that you could say it in context or out of context and most people wouldn't know what you're talking about but would probably assume you are experienced in whatever field.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Paper (Open Access): [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41377-019-0229-8](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41377-019-0229-8)

</comment><comment><USER14> Conventional ultrasound transducer arrays aren't cheap. Could this solve the cost issue, e.g. for developing countries?

<comment><USER7> I believe so. I'm a bit surprised that microring resonator based optical ultrasound detector arrays haven't already been used.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > one laser remotely generates sound waves that bounce through the body...

This is oddly related to what I was just watching. It was a SciShow episode that discussed how phonons which can be generated (come from??) sound waves. The phonons may be affected by gravity in the reverse way than all other matter and may even repel matter.

Phonons it seems are not just sound. The MIT website explains "phonon is just a fancy word for a particle of heat."

Anyway it seemed somewhat related especially "The resulting mechanical vibrations generate sound waves that travel back up". But I guess the researchers in the article may not have meant the sound waves literally go up.

[http://news.mit.edu/2010/explained- phonons-0706](http://news.mit.edu/2010/explained-phonons-0706)

</comment><comment><USER16> Would this work over larger distances - e.g. remote sensing from space?

<comment><USER17> I doubt it just because there would be so much noise.

<comment><USER18> I saw a thing about the Voyager 1 probe, and how they communicate with it using two satelite dishes - one pointed at Voyager, and one pointed in the direction of but very slightly off of Voyager. Since both have the same background noise but only one dish has the transmissions from Voyager in it, you essentially subtract the non-Voyager dish's input from the other one and are left with the clean (or at least a lot cleaner) signal from Voyager.

Perhaps something similar could be done to reduce noise, using an empty patch of ground nearby the target.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Cool! Sounds really impressive!

</comment><comment><USER20> I truly wish Gene Roddenberry could be alive today to see how far we have come.

<comment><USER21> But what's the use case?

<comment><USER22> Is there a single true technological innovation (not some weekend or IoT gadget) that doesn't end up with a use case, sooner or later?

<comment><USER23> Technology is the application of scientific knowledge, so you've got a tautology there. That said: Capacitance Electronic Disc.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Paul Krugman: 50 Percent Chance Global Economy Will Enter Recession - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/09/paul-krugman-50-percent-chance-global-recession_n_955507.html

<comment><USER2> That still doesn't mean that the US can't exit a recession even if Europe or China enter one (maybe it's our turn for good news). Also entrepreneurs should keep in mind that a recession is always an opportunity.</comment>