What boredom does to you - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/53/monsters/what-boredom-does-to-you?utm_source=frontpage&utm_medium=mview&utm_campaign=what-boredom-does-to-you <comment><USER2> "Imagine a world where we didn't get bored"

I feel this is the world we live in since 2007. Everything you can imagine is available right in your hand, taking away every possible space for boredom in your head.

For every creative person this is suicide. I find this part of the article utterly important: "People who are bored think more creatively than those who aren't.".

I explicitly take time off every day where I can get bored.

<comment><USER3> > For every creative person this is suicide.

One of my greater recent personal concerns has been why my 'new ideas' bin remains empty for so much longer than it used to. Several culprits exist, but it's clear that constantly having a way to amuse or inform myself with a wide variety of fresh, new entertainment or factual minutiae to "fill in the cracks" of my day is a major perpetrator. I just remarked yesterday how I don't hardly mind standing in line any more.

Back when I worked on a production line (with the shortest breaks allowed by law), I would fill napkins with all kinds of scribbles for at least half of my break time. A similar thing happened with text files in a very different setting, when my duties consisted of waiting for a phone to occasionally ring.

The big question is how to properly cultivate the type of boredom that leads to this creative mental state. Neither of those situations I mentioned are ones I would choose to experience again.

<comment><USER4> Go to a coffee shop with no one and no phone except for a notebook with a pen.

Take a drive anywhere with no set destination.

Use public transit alone also would work .

Go to a library and read a book that you may or may not like.

Go to an art museum and look at one painting .

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not sure we have the same definition of boredom: I can't be bored when left to my own thoughts without external stimuli (which is precious time, you need to allow yourself to have time to "do nothing", otherwise you're only ever reacting to events), on the contrary.

The only time I can experience the brain-dead zombie state that is boredom is when I have to pay attention to a mind-numbingly inefficient task I am powerless to improve, like passively listening for hours to an auditorium university lecture that makes the mind rebel against the inefficiency (despite I love learning, but using other means).

Frustration seems more like one that stimulates creativity as it motivates to find workarounds or new directions.

</comment><comment><USER6> Reminds me of John Cleese's way to put it: [https://writenotion.wordpress.com/2014/07/17/open-mode-vs- cl...](https://writenotion.wordpress.com/2014/07/17/open-mode-vs-closed-mode- creativity-explored-by-john-cleese/)

</comment><comment><USER7> I think this is really about what drives thought: some external stimuli, or something internal (seemingly random, but not necessarily). I realize that I, like most people, may be addicted to being "fed".

Even in the bathroom, many of us are accustomed to reading news, watching youtube, etc. It's only when really cut off from TV, internet, etc. that the mind decompresses and starts generating ideas again. (This is not strictly true, as some reactionary thoughts are ideas - solutions to problems presented by external information.)

Also, the thought of people not knowing what a phone book is made me realize I'm old. What a strange feeling.

<comment><USER8> Phone books are those things that show up every year to fill the extra dumpsters that are put out right at the same time. A beautiful example of exactly how capitalism works in our society. A corporation full of useless sacks of greedy, envious adipose tissue clutch tightly to unwisely made 'perpetual' contracts cities granted a century ago or more, riling with hisses, claws, teeth, and litigation any time their nest is disturbed and cities try to make their product an 'opt in' system or get rid of it entirely. Supply and demand be damned, they have their precious and they'll spit and scrap with anyone who dares to approach their warren.

Occasionally you'll see a media distribution company executive pass along the outskirts of their habitat, cribbing notes on tactics that will be needed in their own coming days.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, that's not capitalism. That's government being bad.

<comment><USER8> You are sort-of right. It's not 'capitalism on paper' but 'capitalism in reality'. It's what you get when you implement it with real human beings as opposed to conjectured hypothetical actors in a model. I did specifically say 'as practiced in our society.' It was meant as an example of how 'providing the best product for the best price' is used as an excuse only exactly so long as it lines the pockets of those parroting it. The moment that changes and their product is unnecessary, they squeal like babies stuck with a pin and suddenly they need protecting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "When it came to brilliance, Steve Jobs was the master."

Come on guys, really? I feel like they gushingly name-dropped Steve Jobs in the title of this article's page for no other reason than to rank higher in search results, considering they barely mention him in the article.

<comment><USER11> The <title> is even "Why Steve Jobs believed in boredom" even though the article heading is "What boredom does to you".

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is totally anecdotal, but I want to post it here. In 4th, 5th, and 6th grade, the math curriculum was extremely boring. Lots and lots of repetitive basic operations. Day after day.

But all around the edge of the room was optional extra-credit work. Different teachers had different things. One had worksheets. One had piles and piles of Games magazines. One had puzzles.

There was a huge contrast between my mindset when doing boring pencil problems and my mindset when doing fun logic puzzles. But those mindsets would often overlap. I'd be constantly looking for patterns in the math problems (to avoid boredom). And some of the games magazine brain puzzlers could only be solved with repetitive trial-and-error grunt work.

My gut sense is that when it comes to teaching and learning, boredom is not a thing to be avoided, but a thing to be harnessed.

I'll have to read this Bored and Brilliant book and see if it has any evidence to support or contradict that belief.

</comment><comment><USER13> _" Every emotion has a purpose—an evolutionary benefit"_

Stopped here. (Got bored!). This just isn't true. Boredom might just be evolutionarily neutral. Or it might be negative but outweighed by other features of our species which compensate for its negative effects. Or it might just not have enough of an effect on mating rates to be selected for at all. You're doing biology wrong.

<comment><USER14> So for something to have an evolutionary effect (whether positive or negative), it must affect mating rates? I'm trying to clarify what the definition is here, because I seemed to have made a habit of rationalizing every aspect of human behavior with an evolutionary explanation (is this a known fallacy, btw?). E.g., feeling sad is evolutionarily useful because it teaches you to avoid things that cause you to be sad, and encourages you to seek out behavior to dispel the sadness, e.g. socializing, which seems evolutionary useful. You can do this with pretty much any emotion. Is that the wrong way to look at it?

<comment><USER13> The biggest danger in evolutionary thinking is "just-so" rationalization of the present state of things where we take the way things are and assume they are the way they are because they were evolutionarily efficient, and then construct a story that explains why some particular trait is particularly adaptive. Once you dive into the weirdness of biology and the madness of evo- devo, one of the first things that strikes you is how _weird_ biology is and how many strange compromises bodies make as a consequence of selective pressures, and how many "spandrels" or side-effects there are. Boredom might be a spandrel, a decorative side-effect, of intelligence, which is probably the chief evolutionary advantage of human beings. Anyway, the wrong thing to do is to take some trait and reason back based on the assumption that it was evolutionarily adaptive. That's basically evidence-free speculation. Or fiction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> As for the notion that emotions have evolutionary significance, that's a realisation I'd stumbled across and wondered if anyone else had done so.

Charles Darwin. Wrote a damned book on the subject. And somehow I'd been entirely unaware of the fact until a few months ago.

[https://archive.org/details/expressionofemo00darw](https://archive.org/details/expressionofemo00darw)

</comment><comment><USER16> My kids NEVER say their bored. My instant reply the last 10 years has been, "God made boredom so that kids can learn to be creative." "So stay bored or get creative."

Also my kids never say "That's not fair" because my instant responce to that one is "Life isn't fair and might as well learn that now." If anyone asks what's fair "Sport should be fair and elections and well ..."

<comment><USER8> For boredom that's a good reply, but for fairness it's not so much. Humans are profoundly social creatures and our inherent need for fairness is extremely strong. People are willing to die and kill for fairness alone. A perception of fairness determines how much damage a negative situation causes. It significantly alters our ability to feel empathy in many situations. Often (and this is common with kids due to their inexperience) an unfair situation just seems unfair because of a lack of full understanding of the situation. Explaining it so that they can see it would actually be unfair for them to get their way can be helpful. Attempting to fight their inherent desire for fairness is... either not helpful or harmful. In the best case, they'll rebel against you. In the worst case, they give up and accept learned helplessness.

<comment><USER16> I find that the very concept of fairness in life to be a four-letter word that comes from a victim's attitude. When I hear people talk and they use the word fair it really is their way of swearing at life and how they are without the things they need to live successfully. I hardly ever hear it used for defense of others, but of a negative thought about what they were given.

So my philosophy of dealing with lack of understanding is to help them to concentrate on facts. To concentrate on doing whats right not whats fair nor easy. :)

> In the best case, they'll rebel against you. In the worst case, they give up > and accept learned helplessness.

Nah my two oldest, foster kids I adopted, both graduated college this May. It wasn't fair when my son, their brother died of bone caner when he was 12. It wasn't fair when my 12 year old's bio dad took a baseball bat to their biological mother's head the same year my son was diagnosed.

They learned that they have to work twice as hard because life isn't fair. It isn't fair that my oldest son is pulled over 8-12 times a year for DWB. It isn't fair that kids outside our city get two or three times the educational funding for their public school. The inherent fairness is from humans' selfishness streak usually and doing what is right in the moment is hard. My other kids are also pretty darn tenacious. I kind of see the White Evangelicals (Which I guess I am one of them) feel they are the most discriminated population when it's the opposite.

At least my two cents :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The first experiment described hinges on the premise that reading from the phone book is more boring than copying numbers from the phone book in writing? What?? The control experiment for "not boring" is copying numbers by hand!?

</comment><comment><USER18> When I was reading about mind-wandering in the article, I couldn't help but think of my meditation practice. I do it for about an hour each day, mostly because it does bring about new solutions and ideas for work and personal life. Certainly, there are some specific things like posture, chanting, breathing, etc. that differ but for the most part it seems to just be a disciplined way to give my mind the time to wander...

Question for the meditators out there, is your practice just time for mind- wandering?

<comment><USER19> When I meditate, I just focus on the act of breathing, and actually try to keep my mind from wandering. This flexes the be-in-the-now (awareness) muscle such that I have improved attention afterwards. I like this because then I become so much more attentive to the many little triggers of emotions I don't want to experience. I also might be more creative, but not sure yet.

<comment><USER18> Nice! I should try to focus on my breath at least for some of my meditation. I forgot about that style. I've been meditating on my own for too long probably.

There's another thing that I do that I found supportive, but perhaps again this is deviating from meditation. I count my breaths to keep track of how many minutes for each meditation that I do and I associate each number that I count with a feeling, memory, or emotion that I want to affirm in my life. It's kind of the opposite of mind-wandering, more like planting or reminding yourself of good thoughts. For example, #9 I think about what it feels like to be grateful even for a seemingly difficult circumstance, it's never going to be quite like this again and what unique aspects of it are actually good.

thanks for sharing!

<comment><USER19> Great idea about the numbers and associating good memories with them, gotta try that :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> be happy you are allowed to be bored sometimes. most of the world population has no time for this luxury. think about it!

</comment><comment><USER21> Some small etymology: The word annoy comes from the French word ennui which means to bore.

</comment><comment><USER22> Mann's Maxim: _People who are bored think more creatively than those who aren 't._

... added to [http://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup](http://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup) ;)

</comment><comment><USER23> For myself boredom is the best motivator. I tend to desperately devise a solution to never have to encounter that boring task again.

<comment><USER24>
        Laziness is the father of Efficiency.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> If anyone is interested in boredom, here is a book that I found useful.

Peter Toohey. _Boredom: A Lively History_

</comment><comment><USER26> The researcher didn't test MacGyver (the original one)...</comment>


Unconventional CSS: Free-flowing collage [BIG] - <AUTHOR> http://leafboat.org/

<comment><USER2> I was hoping to refresh the page and have it change entirely.

It didn't, and my hopes & dreams were once again crushed.</comment>


Ask HN: Does a supervisor/university matter for a Masters in CS - <AUTHOR>

So I am in a bit of a peculiar situation and thought I might ask. A few years back, I made a career change to get into CS and ended up doing a diploma. While on the diploma I got a full-time job as a coder. Now, I don't want to quit my job and I'd like to do a Master's degree (towards ML\NLP). I have a supervisor but he is not very well known in the field. Neither is the university. However he is willing to accept me as a part-time student for a thesis project. Is this a good approach or should I consider other options (such as doing course-based masters) ? <comment><USER2> A CS degree doesn't fully train you to be a coder, and coder training doesn't prep you for an advanced CS degree. The Java/C++/Python they taught in my undergrad CS courses, along with the homework assignments that took 30+ hours to do, are only about 30% of the level of stuff you'll be expected to do in a high-paying job. Most of the stuff I learned was on my own...I had expected a college CS curriculum (an Ivy nonetheless) to touch on the stuff I had self- learned but they never did.

Funny story for what it's worth: When I was in undergrad, a few friends and I launched an API service...We needed some extra help...so we put out a part- time programming internship on nearby Craigslist Manhattan (hoping to get some smart college kids since there are many colleges nearby). We actually got a resume and cover letter from our not-so-nice CS T.A. who had graduated with a masters....from a year ago.

Keep your job.

</comment><comment><USER3> What is your end goal? If it's to be a professor, then maybe it matters a little. But the quality of your work/research matters quite a bit too.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, maybe sometime in the distant future. But for now it would be to find a better job.

<comment><USER3> If it's just to find a better job, then I wouldn't worry too much about the prestige factor. You will get a better job through quality of work and the ability to prove it. The prestige factors plays more into jobs in academics. Don't get me wrong, a degree from a top notch school can make a difference in finding work, but not as much as your ability to code and display your ability.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Supervisor has no meaning. University name matters if it is famous or the same one your prospective hiring manager went to.

<comment><USER5> I can agree to this. We hired someone, and we didn't know the university, looked it up and seemed fine. I got a lot of job offers myself a couple of years ago from simply applying to jobs in the same city as I went to uni in. Everyone there knew the uni and knew that it was plenty good enough.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Please, review my startup Strawlink (online job screening process) - <AUTHOR>

Hello entrepreneurs,
I would like to ask you guys to review our recently launched project Strawlink - it is a Web service for the online candidate screening process. Our target auditory is mostly small business owners (who need to hire people) and professional recruiters (who hire people all the time).
What exactly Strawlink does can be explained very simple - we facilitate the screening process. Most of you, who were looking for a job, probably went through this process like hundred times! The reason is simple - especially nowadays, when companies receive hundreds (some receive thousands ;-) applicants for single job -- and employer needs to identify top talent fast and easy. And this is what screening is what -- you certainly cannot waste time for "face" interviewing everybody. And Strawlink is for screening of your job applicants.
We tried our scoring mechanism in different companies worldwide, internally, and because it worked out very well we decided to make it as a separate product. This is how Strawlink was born.
Please, all the feedback is very welcome.
You can register here -- http://www.strawlink.com/referrer/hackernews Currently we will credit accounts of all new registrations, so you would not need to spend any money while trying us out.
I would really love to hear opinions from potential candidates (what do you like and what you don't like if you will be screened with us?) and from small business owners who hire people (what would you like to improve? do you want other pricing plan? anything else?).
Thank you! <comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for this valuable feedback! Want also to mention that if any of you will be hiring, or will need some help with screening -- use us! Register now (<http://www.strawlink.com/referrer/hackernews>) and you'll get your accounts credited right away. We will be turning off the new registration credits soon, but I want to say that if any of you will need Strawlink and will not have money to spend -- let me know -- email@example.com I will do my best to help. As I mentioned before - Strawlink's goal is to help facilitate the screening process, and if we will learn how to do it better -- all of us will benefit. Everybody who create new jobs opportunities, and everybody who is looking for a job.

Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER2> It looks very nice, and I could see it being useful.

However, on the front page, I found myself really wanting to click on the words that you have randomly made bold in the text. I don't know why, and it may just be me.

I specifically tried clicking on the word "screening", hoping to get your definition of the word. Screening can mean a lot of things to me. Our screening process contains technical interviewing as well as verifying information that the applicant has on their resume.

I also think you should make your "Product Tour" link far more prominent; or change it so that the main image is clickable and takes you to the tour.

<comment><AUTHOR> As for the Product Tour -- we'll try to "light" it up a little bit, so it will stand out on the page. Thanks for the advice!

As for the screening -- we've been talking to many recruiters, and usually they used the term "screening" as a process before the initial and face-to- face interviews. This is the step when it's only required to separate unqualified candidates from others. People just tend to submit resume even if they clearly are not a fit (by different research papers it states that more than 80% meet less than half of job requirements).

You may be referring to "criminal/drug screening" or "pre-employment screening" processes, which are more like verifying the information provided by the candidate.

But it's good you brought it to our attention -- we'll figure out how to put some "hint" about what we are actually mean by "screening" on Strawlink.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> From the product tour, this looks like a well-executed product which definitely can bring value to recruiters. Two things stand out to me: 1) charge more per contact or consider a different model, the value you are providing is definitely above $1 per qualified contact 2) please look into getting a copywriter to rewrite your website copy - currently the text gives a distinctive non-native feel

<comment><AUTHOR> 1) just answered it below (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=560420>) 2) that's our priority, and we really need somebody, but being busy with the development/support we still have this problem

anybody want to help? or suggest somebody?

and thank you, I appreciate your feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Charge more so you don't have to make it up on volume.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, we figured out that $1 is pretty right price for the value we provide. We have more features in mind, and we are thinking about something like premium membership charge to enable them, so we can make some profit from there also.

But we do not want to raise the price. At the end, it's the service to _help_ people when they are hiring. We are targeting every single, even 1-2 people, company. When they need, say, Ruby or Java developer for their own particular needs, they want to be able not to waste time (they have business to run!) but simply to figure out the most important moments about all candidates. It may be years of experience, how well they know the language, which frameworks and databases did they use and how long, etc. Crawling through cover letters, resumes, etc. definitely can do the job, but it is nor time effective, neither money wise.

Thanks for the review!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are you doing in order to live longer and healthier? - <AUTHOR> I'm interested especially in non-standard interventions. For example, repurposed medication that you're taking, while also doing regular blood work in order to monitor its effectiveness. <comment><USER2> I can understand wanting to live a healthier life ... the best advice I can give is to maintain a healthy weight as it impacts so many other facets of your life. My second piece of advice is to get a dog that needs to be walked 2-4 miles a day - it is the absolute end of excuses.

I'm not sure why you'd want to live longer - I'm hoping to go out like my grandfather did. He was never sick a day in his life but had a massive heart- attack in his sleep and never woke up. Living longer might be a side-effect of living healthier and that's fine by me. But living longer while being decimated by the common diseases of those over 80 is not for me.

</comment><comment><USER3> per day @ : -Wake up slowly with easy sounds ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIN27TRgUBI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIN27TRgUBI)) -Take Mg ([https://www.pipingrock.com/magnesium/magnesium- glycinate-665...](https://www.pipingrock.com/magnesium/magnesium- glycinate-665-mg-120-capsules-40504)) \+ Zinc ([https://www.pipingrock.com/zinc/zinc-picolinate-high- absorpt...](https://www.pipingrock.com/zinc/zinc-picolinate-high-absorption- zinc-50-mg-180-capsules-8612)) supplements @ noon after lunch (dont take Oxide versions arent absorbable) -Stop coffee, replace it with herbs (ref - [https://www.docdroid.net/FABYUMY](https://www.docdroid.net/FABYUMY)) w/ 1 tsp real honey, Im doing 3 cups / day. -Walking ~10km -Morning & Before bed use : CBD ([https://www.enecta.com/products/3-cbd- oil-1](https://www.enecta.com/products/3-cbd-oil-1)) or Propolis ([https://www.healthline.com/health/propolis-an-ancient- healer](https://www.healthline.com/health/propolis-an-ancient-healer)), sold on pharmacies better find a beekeeper to buy it direct. or Avena ([https://www.avogel.ca/en/herbal- remedies/avenaforce.php](https://www.avogel.ca/en/herbal- remedies/avenaforce.php)) , only one product / day dont mix it.

-Yoga Vinyasa, twice / week ([https://bit.ly/2V8c6ei](https://bit.ly/2V8c6ei)) -wash your body with natural showergel & shampoo

\+ following the instructions (3h read) @ [https://bit.ly/2yh4Qnv](https://bit.ly/2yh4Qnv)

\--

all the best!</comment>


Interactive visualization of Operational Transformation  (collaborative editing) - <AUTHOR> http://ot.substance.io/visualization/

<comment><USER2> Take a look at commutative replicated data types (crdt) as a little known alternative to OT: <https://github.com/dominictarr/crdt>

</comment><comment><USER3> I see the operations of the users but they are not applied by the server. Is there a button or something that makes the server apply ops?

<comment><USER4> click on the arrows</comment></comment>


We Need to Map the Ocean Floor - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/blog/why-we-need-to-map-the-ocean-floor <comment><USER3> I used to operate multibeam sonar system on an oceanographic research ship. Getting good data from those kinds of systems is an interesting challenge.

The speed of sound in water is proportional to temperature and conductivity — which are approximately dynamic functions of water column depth and temperature (and time depending on the properties of the region you are in — the tenperature can change a lot over short time scales). You need to measure to measure these properties in order to obtain a sufficiently accurate sound speed profile to be able to trace the path taken by acoustic energy projected from the transceiver, off the sea floor and back to the transceiver. Inaccurate sound velocity quickly becomes one of the largest error terms in measurement accuracy. We computed sound speed profiles as often as we reasonably could — sometimes the science objective involved measuring these properties and we'd use data from those measurements but sometimes we were just transiting along and would draw from a supply of expendable bathy thermographs that we could use to make sound speed profiles periodically (but certainly not often enough to maintain accurate calibration all the time.)

The ship is moving and the orientation of the array needs to be accurately calibrated — shipboard MRUs are expensive and imperfect.

The water column is rising and falling and vertical position measurement accuracy is very low from systems like gps compared to horizontal measurement accuracy.

The ship is pitching and with many ship designs this can create bubbles which can be swept beneath the ship — a small amount of bubbles close to the transceiver head can absolutely overwhelm the noise budget of these systems.

I'd be curious to know how much data from ship mounted sonar systems are actually useable for large scale high resolution mapping. I believe the best teams that build high resolution global sea floor maps rely on satellite gravimetric measurements for baselines — and use very sophisticated algorithms to fuse shipboard datasets with the global gravimetry — which im guessing probably have to throw away huge amounts of information from the higher resolution shipboard systems ...

<comment><USER4> Does multibeam sonar function well in the presence of temperature/salinity stratification layers in the water column?

I don't have the first clue about sonar, but as someone who crunches data for environmental assessments, stratification occasionally plays hell with a lot of chemical & biological models.

<comment><USER3> Those layers are why you need to measure the sound speed profile -- speed of sound as a function of depth. The variation in sound speed in the water column affects not only the travel time of acoustic energy -- but also the path -- (snell's law).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A quick summary:

Only 6% of the ocean floor has been mapped. People at the Seabed 2030 project plan to map the ocean floor in high res by 2030.

Reasons to do this include navigation safety, ability to lay fiber optic wire and pipelines, because we don't know what's there, weather forecasts since water/temperature flows along ocean floor contours affect atmospheric flows, tsunami predictions, we could find sea wrecks.

<comment><USER6> I hadn't thought about the possibility of sunken ships and sea wrecks until you mentioned it. I wonder how many mysteries this sea-floor mapping endeavor will put to rest? If they can put even one big mystery (something like finding Malaysia Airlines Flight 370) to bed, they'd get a lot of great publicity.

<comment><USER5> Yeah on the one hand it's cool possibility for historians and stuff, on the other it kind of ruins the adventurous scuba diver studying old maps and stuff searching for lost treasure.

<comment><USER7> Firstly, who still does this? Nobody I know in the scuba diving community "[studies] old maps and stuff searching for lost treasure". That'd be a good way to not have a dive plan and end up in trouble.

Secondly, no scuba diver is about to dive on the ocean floor. Maybe you're thinking of deep sea divers, who dive in a submarine or other deep sea vessel?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here are "high frequency" sonar images of the Japanese WWII aircraft carrier Akagi, sunk in the Battle of Midway. They were supposedly taken by an AUV.

Low-resolution sonar: [https://www.gannett- cdn.com/presto/2019/10/21/USAT/ecaf19d4-...](https://www.gannett- cdn.com/presto/2019/10/21/USAT/ecaf19d4-e0ae-4380-84c6-f412e1026e02-AP_Battle_of_Midway_Sunken_Warships_4.JPG)

Enhanced with a manual pass: [https://www.gannett- cdn.com/presto/2019/10/21/USAT/0a89e2ce-...](https://www.gannett- cdn.com/presto/2019/10/21/USAT/0a89e2ce-a059-4bae-88ce-65e180a296b0-AP_Battle_of_Midway_Sunken_Warships.JPG)

Best guess they used the Remus 6000 to find the ship. It looks like a torpedo.

      - 3.8 meters long
      - 9 km/h speed
      - 22 hour 'charge'
      - 6000 meter max. diving depth
      - EdgeTech 2205 sidescan array (best guess)

The WWII ship is about 250 meters long, so the broad image captures about ... 1.5-2 km? Anyhow, take all that and apply it to roughly 360 million square kilometers (161 for the Pacific). Ignoring an average current here and marine traffic and conditions, just going by ideal specs, that's an imaging speed of about 13 - 18 square km per hour. It would take something like two - <USER2> thousand years to cover the oceans.

Logistical support alone for this AUV is incredible: crew of 20, four two thousand horsepower diesel engines eating 54 gallons of diesel per hour each at low throttle. Like 216 - 283 gallons of diesel per hour on average, and not counting electric generators on that vessel. The engines have to be overhauled every 4,000 hours. In other words, this effort would be a massive undertaking under current conditions, and there's not enough diesel on the planet to make it happen.

<comment><USER9> We're working on a cheaper way to do it:

[https://www.saildrone.com/news/autonomous-vehicles-cost- effe...](https://www.saildrone.com/news/autonomous-vehicles-cost-effective- global-ocean-mapping-bathymetry)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> There is no way that the nuclear submarine fleets of the world's countries haven't mapped a significant portion of the seabed since the 1980s when the advanced techniques were invented.

I don't see why that data should be held classified, at least make this project a little bit easier.

<comment><USER11> > I don't see why that data should be held classified, at least make this > project a little bit easier.

Really, you don't see why the military would want to keep the strategic advantage of keeping what they know about the sea floor secret?

<comment><USER12> I think it should be all be declassified for the public good, but I can understand why they would want to keep it classified: by revealing where they've mapped, they reveal where they've been. Quality variations in different parts of the map could also reveal where they spend more time, or at what depths. But I'm skeptical that it really matters.

<comment><USER13> Or they awoke eldritch leviathans who now command them.

<comment><USER14> Nothing is Beyond Their Reach

<comment><USER13> Reference to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA-247](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA-247)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does this scanning with sonar harm whales? I'm surprised they are not mentioned in the article.

<comment><USER16> I believe that the sonar they are talking about here is much "quieter" and directional than the type which they is harming sea life. The "harmful" type is either the intense omni directional sonar used to locate other ships, and the extremely loud sounds used by the petroleum industry to map subsurface deposits of oil and gas.

Reference: [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/science/oceans-whales- noi...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/science/oceans-whales-noise- offshore-drilling.html)

<comment><USER17> Indeed. It's also possible to further minimize harm by not transmitting when marine mammals can be seen or heard nearby.

<comment><USER18> With the speed of sound and its characteristic attenuation in the sea water and marine mammals' general stealthiness this is just not possible.

Not possible, period.

<comment><USER17> Interesting conjecture! I have seen whales with my eyes and heard them on sonar, and disagree with you.

Note that minimizing harm and preventing it are different things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This will most benefit the deep sea mining industry.

[http://nautil.us/blog/we-are-about-to-start-mining- hydrother...](http://nautil.us/blog/we-are-about-to-start-mining-hydrothermal- vents-on-the-ocean-floor)

[http://www.nautilusminerals.com/IRM/content/default.aspx](http://www.nautilusminerals.com/IRM/content/default.aspx)

[https://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/industrial- robots/seabedm...](https://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/industrial- robots/seabedmining-robots-will-dig-for-gold-in-hydrothermal-vents)

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm surprised no one has mentioned the XPrize foundation: [https://oceandiscovery.xprize.org/prizes/ocean- discovery](https://oceandiscovery.xprize.org/prizes/ocean-discovery)

> As part of its post-prize impact work, XPRIZE announced a partnership with > Seabed 2030, a collaborative project between The Nippon Foundation and The > General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans (GEBCO) to inspire the complete > mapping of the world's ocean by 2030 and to compile all bathymetric data > into the freely-available GEBCO Ocean Map.

</comment><comment><USER13> Just gotta say, nothing quite drives home the point of how much _water_ there is on Earth, like even a short oceanic flight and looking out the window.

Imagining you could dive into any spot at any time kinda gives the feeling of having an entire alien planet to explore.

Our always-connected society gives us the illusion that we've discovered everything there is to discover, but apparently most of the world is uninhabited (by humans) and as this says, many parts aren't even mapped.

</comment><comment><USER21> Doesn't the ocean floor change often due to currents? Sediment consistently is moved from point A to point B similar to sand dunes? Even if this is related to just 'bedrock' or whatever more solid mass is down there, doesn't that get impacted by the faults a lot? Or is that around just the fault lines?

</comment><comment><USER22> It's probably a lot like trying to document the internet. Once you've begun you have to start over because of how much will have changed.

</comment><comment><USER23> Raising money for such a project should be easy. What investors would not want to partake in a treasure hunt?

</comment><comment><USER24> Not until we finish raking the forest floors.</comment>


Aircraft-carriers are under threat from modern missiles - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/11/14/aircraft-carriers-are-under-threat-from-modern-missiles <comment><USER2> Carriers obsoleted battleships 80 years ago because the carrier's weapons were able to out-range and destroy the battleships before the battleships could get close enough to use their guns which could only shoot about 20 miles.

Modern missiles can out-range and kill carriers which can't get close enough to use their planes which only have several hundred miles of range.

         Q. What do you call ANY surface ship in today's world?
         A. A slow, expensive target.

         Q. What do you call a complete Carrier Strike Force?
         A. A BUNCH of slow, expensive targets.</comment>


Nature ambient sounds - <AUTHOR> http://wetwilly.fr/?rain

<comment><USER2> Amazing animation transitions on the buttons!

If you like this site you should also check out [http://www.calm.com](http://www.calm.com), which in addition to various ambient and nature sound/videos has guided meditation sessions.

<comment><USER3> I believe metaballs[1] were used. Very impressive application of concept.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would recommend [http://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/](http://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/) for all noise related needs.

This website allows you to customize every noise to your liking and the selection of soundscapes is HUGE.

<comment><AUTHOR> For relaxation, try [http://www.ambicular.com](http://www.ambicular.com)

<comment><USER4> Pretty great, but I can't seem to turn back from the level of customization allowed by myNoise. You can load a soundscape, mute individual noises, increase other, allow the soundscape to animate and evolve over time, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You might want to compare against many other, similar sites. This one has a very noticeable fade out/fade in when it repeats itself.

It hasn't moved me away from [http://rain.today](http://rain.today) .

<comment><AUTHOR> But for ocean there's no alternative )

<comment><USER5> Except, of course, for [http://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/windSeaRainNoiseGenerator.p...](http://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/windSeaRainNoiseGenerator.php) , [http://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/oceanNoiseGenerator.php](http://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/oceanNoiseGenerator.php) , [http://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/squeakingSailboatSoundscape...](http://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/squeakingSailboatSoundscapeGenerator.php) , [http://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/deepOceanSoundscapeGenerato...](http://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/deepOceanSoundscapeGenerator.php) , and [http://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/finWhaleUnderwaterSoundscap...](http://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/finWhaleUnderwaterSoundscapeGenerator.php) .

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This site makes my laptop fan come on and stay on for as long as it is loaded. Nice sounds though; it's inspiring me to look for other sites with similar sounds but with lower CPU usage.

<comment><USER7> Just consider the laptop fan additional ambient sound!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've been using noisli[0] to cut off the ambient noise. The two look strikingly similar.

[0] - [http://www.noisli.com/](http://www.noisli.com/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Aside from the spelling mistake in the posting - this is a quite beautiful site!

</comment><comment><USER10> This is really cool but a few aren't working for me on ff & chrome... evening bonfire and in the city are silent. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

</comment><comment><USER11> is it me? .. or am i the only that finds this a bit sad that we now have to virtualize..nature.</comment>


The Collapse of Complex Business Models - <AUTHOR> http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2010/04/the-collapse-of-complex-business-models/ <comment><USER3> In passing, it contains a great description of why "creative destruction" is not merely an interesting sidebar to our economy, but a critical element to our continued success. Which is more disruptive, "creative destruction" or "societal collapse"?

Efforts to politically block creative destruction out of economy should be fought as if it were the matter of life or death that it is.

<comment><USER4> People often confuse creative destruction with societal collapse.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure what you're getting at exactly, but I would suggest that such people need to brush up on their definitions. Creative destruction is when an obsolete industry or practice is allowed to fail. Some people lose jobs, and find other ones later. It hurts.

Societal collapse is when we all starve to death because we are all critically dependent on modern industrial agriculture. It _kills_.

There's a difference. Preventing creative destruction is choosing to avoid pain now with death not-too-far-from-now. I am not being metaphorical. The article cites examples where just that happened; all those collapses were accompanied by carrying-capacity reductions, which is a rather dry technical way of saying "lots of people died".

A society full of people who don't get this distinction is a rather scary prospect, but alas, more people now than ever before get this and it's still probably nowhere near enough.

(Questions about whether our society is facing just such an inflection point right now left as an exercise for the reader, as well as what "pain-avoidance" measures are currently floating around that might qualify.)

<comment><USER5> Really, I though creative destruction would be something more like, letting GM fall apart, so that several new companies could buy the pieces, cheap, and _creatively_ make new and innovative automobiles.

<comment><USER3> Yes. That's actually an important observation about the process; just because a billion-dollar-practice (called "GM") has keeled over dead doesn't mean that the economy automatically takes a billion-dollar hit. First, the billion dollar value clearly wasn't there in the first place (and acting as if it is is dangerous to the economy; the current economic crisis in a nutshell is "bad valuations"), and second, assets remain in existence that can be reused by more effective entities.

But people are hurt, jobs are lost (even if only temporarily and ideally with more recovered in the end), and there's still displacement that occurs. It's just that it's vital to understand that the alternative is far, far worse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you're interested in this, you should check out The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen. He walks you through how large companies (most of his examples are from the hard drive industry) are often _structurally_ incapable of embracing the revolutionary change which will inevitably overtake them.

[http://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary- Busin...](http://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Business- Essentials/dp/0060521996) (not an affiliate link)

<comment><USER7> Seconded. The Innovator's Dilemma is a classic, and remarkably free of the usual business press BS.

It's particularly interesting today, as we're waiting to see who will survive the transition to SSD. Five years ago, who would have thought Intel would be king of the hill?

<comment><USER8> They must have read that book.

<comment><USER9> I've heard that Andy Grove is a huge fan of the book. Forbes had a cover with Grove and Christensen and the sentence: "Andy Grove's big thinker: Clayton Christensen tells how to survive disruptive technologies"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Mancur Olson made a similar point in his 1984 book _The Rise and Decline of Nations_. His argument is that as time goes on, special interests and entrenched bureaucracies take what was a simpler system and load it up with exceptions and complexity. The more complex they become, the less capable of collective action they become, leading to overall paralysis.

This is an extension of his argument from his Nobel Prize–winning 1971 book _The Logic of Collective Action_.

<comment><USER9> Olson didn't win the Nobel Prize. You're thinking of Elinor Ostrom's book "Governing the Commons", which extended Olson's work considerably, and which led to Ostrom's prize.

Thanks for the tip on Olson's 1984 book, which I'd never heard of. Curiously enough, while reading Shirky's article, my mind kept turning to Olson and Ostrom, and their work on collective action.

<comment><USER10> Right you are. I've read both, and knew that Ostrom got hers recently, but thought that Olson had received one as well. Oh well, still a tremendously influential book.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think _Avatar_ , and other popular films like it, make the best counterpoint to this article.

It seems obvious to me that as more and more users find more content online, there will be a "thinning of the herd". Some shows and networks will simply fail to find a way to adapt to the new market; others will survive, or even thrive. It's not really happening yet because traditional television viewership still eclipses its online counterparts, but it's coming.

Anybody could have downloaded and watched Avatar while it was still in theaters; yet, people paid to see it because it offered a unique in-theater experience. Other movies get expensively produced only to get meager box office results. They don't offer a modern theater experience, and customers aren't motivated to do anything other than download it or wait for the DVD. There must be at least a few entertainment executives that realize this, and it's likely to affect what they're willing to produce.

<comment><USER12> I don't think it's a counterpoint. Avatar relies on a whole infrastructure to amortize its costs, specialisms that make it feasible to create. But that infrastructure wasn't built to make Avatar. It gets by on regular fare - <USER2> the profitability of that regular fare is fading.

<comment><USER11> Well, much of what made Avatar special was actually built just to make Avatar; that's what Cameron does. But I get your point.

It's complicated, though, because while the budgets for movies continues to climb, the individual production costs continues to go down. Businesses like Industrial Light & Magic keep building blockbuster special-effects laden movies, and the techniques that they use to accomplish that become a less expensive foundation for future projects.

So, so far, I don't see that the profitability there is fading. Pixar is certainly doing fine, and I suspect that Cameron can pretty much work on whatever he wants after this.

And, as the technology continues to progress, the need for other aspects of costly production will go down: movies will require less actor time, fewer cuts, fewer sets, less props, fewer models...

<comment><USER13> My thoughts concur. To restate it in my own words:

As digital technology becomes more complex it tends to commoditize.

You can see the phenomenon across both software and hardware. For example, in music:

The Fairlight and Synclavier were monumentally expensive(priced in six-digits during the late 70s thru early 80s), being the earliest commercial computer- based synthesizers. By the late 80s multiple options existed to get similar functionality at a fraction of the cost(new hardware synths, MIDI, and 16-bit computers). And in the two decades after that, computer-based solutions grew better and started dominating. Now you can do all your synthesis, sampling, and processing "in the box" - and solutions with more flexibility than anything in the 80s are available for free. If you want to produce professionally and do things as quickly and reliably as possible, you can splash out for the cutting-edge commercial software, but it absolutely isn't necessary for amateur use. The most expensive stuff now is the analog bits: the guitars and microphones and monitors and preamps. But for a fraction of the old Synclavier's cost, you can now bury yourself in the top-of-the-line equipment of 2010. Apart from a few artisan works and rare vintage pieces, there's almost no "multi-millionare" grade equipment left to buy. Music-making doesn't need capital anymore, just talent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Charlie Bit My Finger" is a specious example. It's a 56s clip like one you'd see on America's Funniest Home Videos, a program filled with viewer-submitted content and a counterargument to "By Moms, For Moms." Two questions raised here: How does "Charlie" stack up against American Idol, Dancing With The Stars, and the Superbowl in terms of total viewer- _hours_? More important, how many of us are willing to sit through 1.5h movies with "Charlie" production values?

<comment><USER15> I'm not going to claim that you've missed the point since I can't speak neither for the article or for you, but my take on his argument and example was different.

It's not that Charlie is just straight off replacing Dancing with the Stars. No one is saying that people will spend the same amount of time they do watching TV now watching crappy youtube clips. It's that maybe, there just isn't a market for the kind of entertainment Dancing with the Stars represents - it's just becoming too expensive. I'm not sure that's true, but I do think the market for traditional TV/entertainment in general is shrinking. That, I think, is the core argument: That maybe, there is no way to answer the question "so, how do we continue making this much money?" without letting people down. Perhaps there is no way for these big organisations to make all their money doing what they do. Perhaps people like the guy who posted "Charlie bit my finger" will find some way of monetizing that, in small scales. Perhaps not.

The thing that people don't like to hear is that things change. So maybe the days of entertainment are over, maybe no one can work in show business, maybe copying that floppy really killed the radio star - yes, maybe. That's what progress does - new opportunities grow from the corpses of old businesses.

<comment><USER8> Maybe, perhaps, possibly, or maybe, perhaps, possibly not. Without data, it's all just speculation.

"It's that maybe, there just isn't a market for the kind of entertainment Dancing with the Stars represents."

The irony there is that Dancing with the Stars represents an extremely successful attempt on the part of television networks to cut costs and increase profits. "Reality TV" costs far less to produce than dramas or sit- coms with real actors and directors, but remain perplexingly successful at attracting viewers and profits.

What I find more interesting is the remaining opportunities for dis- intermediation. I went back and forth between the TV and the computer for the NCAA basketball tournament games. The online version allowed you to pick any game at any time, including previous games. Why should watching an NCAA basketball game take me to the channel of the local CBS affiliate on my cable system, instead of ncaa.com? Why are there bidding wars to carry the Superbowl, instead of the Superbowl being broadcast at nfl.com and the NFL taking all the revenue for themselves?

I'm curious if there are still any reasons for networks to intermediate between content producers and consumers, or if it is just an anachronism we have not yet moved past.

<comment><USER15> Oh, absolutely.. it's impossible to predict the future. But yes, looking at the current data the whole argument seems to fall apart: As far as I know, the movie industry is doing better and better each year, and I think the same is true for TV. Reality TV shows certainly represent successful change.

I agree that the middlemen are the ones that _should_ be in trouble, just like in the music industry. If successful TV and music can be produced without studios or actually distributing anything physically, the result should be a more direct system. It could be that the change is happening while at the same time the whole entertainment market is growing hugely (more and more people living comfortable lives, devices that make it easy to grab entertainment time where available), so that even failing businesses are growing, just slower than the whole market is expanding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> this is most visible in 20th century architecture, think of gradual elimination of everything external, ornamental, unnecessarily complex in order to scale.

A long way to simplicity: from Gothic cathedrals to Woolworth building to WTC

<comment><USER17> Is it happening in the computing devices world as well? Is the move to the iPhone/iPad a shift to simplicity?

It's interesting to note that your architectural example and Apple's devices are similar - the iPhone, to outward appearances, is quite simple to use. The innards however, are probably just as complex as any other modern operating system.

<comment><USER18> The interface and outward appearance is simple, but the internals most certainly are not. There are still hundreds of components from dozens of manufacturers combined to make a physical product. In the case of the iPhone there's one of the largest mobile operating systems on there.

Computer chips are getting more and more complex as well, now with more levels of caching and inter-core communication.

I think we have a long way to go before we get simpler computers, but that does cause us to wonder if we will get to the point that they are just too complex.

<comment><USER19> > In the case of the iPhone there's one of the largest mobile operating > systems on there.

Still, it's a lot simpler than a desktop computer - fewer parts, no moving ones... Splines' idea makes a lot of sense.

<comment><USER20> I think that he meant complex in terms of inner structure, not user interface. Many of the previous mobile operating systems were pretty complex (from a user interface level) even though they only had a limited number of tasks you could do with them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> See also: _The Collapse of Complex Computer Programs_ , at [http://reprog.wordpress.com/2010/04/01/the-collapse-of- compl...](http://reprog.wordpress.com/2010/04/01/the-collapse-of-complex- computer-programs/)

<comment><USER22> Nice post, Mike.

The software complexity realm is a bit more enduring compared to other industries. Complexity here survives better and lasts longer probably because the demand for software in general is so huge that even the ugliest dinosaur can live a long and happy life: think Microsoft, Oracle - still the richest companies despite overwhelming complexity of their software and the process itself. The death of Netscape, I think, can possibly be explained by the incredibly poor quality _on top of_ complexity. (Which is a hint as to when to expect the death of Microsoft and Oracle.)

<comment><USER23> I think it's more enduring because complexity is recognised as the core problem of software development , and a lot of smart people work on this problem.

Also it's much easier to change a complex piece of software than a complex organization.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> From the article: _Against that background, though, they were worried about a much more practical matter: When, they asked, would online video generate enough money to cover their current costs?_ ("They" are the network broadcasters.)

Sounds from the article like the correct answer is "never", or at least "not until after your organization is dead", though the author didn't come right out and say it.

</comment><comment><USER19> The question then is not whether to run to the mountains, but when to run to the mountains.

</comment><comment><USER25> This is very true for public companies.

If the correct solution (say, maximum profits over the next 100 years) for newscorp is to become 1/3 its current size, it probably can't do this. As a public company it would probably collapse completely instead. The best it can do is keep taking chances on growth even if they are less rational then alternatives.

</comment><comment><USER26> If a society has a complexity threshold, why is ours so much higher than, say, the Romans'? Perhaps scientific and technological development keep pushing the threshold higher, or mitigate the effects of smaller collapses.

Or maybe societies just collapse with some set probability, and we've been lucky so far.

<comment><USER13> Technology is definitely a factor in allowing more complexity.

We didn't have the idea of "total war" until the 1850s and the Crimean War - nations in prior eras didn't have the resources to conscript the bulk of their fighting-able population, equip them, transport them, supply them, and command them. Industrialization allowed for en-mass conscription, the railroad made transportation and supply chains efficient, and the telegraph and refined clockwork made it possible to run a war on an intricate schedule.

Today our big change is in information technology, allowing the government to enact more powerful policies with less overhead. If we can do this right, we'll enjoy both the smallest and most efficient governments in history.

<comment><USER27> Has any government ever gotten smaller without a revolution/foreign takeover? Honest question.

<comment><USER23> doesn't the trend to outsourcing many governmental services makes governments simpler?

<comment><USER26> The government has to outsource in a governmenty way. So in the US, they're not allowed to unfairly favor one company over another (at least there are rules trying to prevent it). This makes the steak and strippers kind of selling illegal, and employees of contracting companies are legally required to go through training on how not to bribe officials. Companies have to re- compete for contracts they've already won. Then you have subcontracting, which leads to situations where your boss works for a different company than you and isn't allowed to know your salary.

Maybe it makes things simpler for the government itself, but probably not to the extent that it could.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is one of the few blogs which I always feel smarter for having read.

</comment><comment><USER29> Current business models reach their complexity specifically because of the technologies and social pressures they've evolved into - it may be that the only way to adapt to new technological paradigms is to start completely over.

A critical rupture from the status quo seems necessary. Right now, what we're doing is trying to attach a rocket engine to a canvas-and-balsa biplane when we really should be designing around the engine instead. And the design for that only superficially resembles the Kitty Hawk glider.

</comment><comment><USER30> really good insight into the media industry, I've worked more on the inside of it under IAC, and I totally see this expectation that people will pay these media mogels for content -- I also worked at Joost, on the relative outside, trying to provide media in new ways, and the inability for the current generation of content owners to adapt is still staggering.

Even look at the recent moves of content owners and Hulu, trying to add pay- per-view charges, instead of being advertising supported. They have made a 'good' platform for viewing the content, even owned by one of the old players, NBC, but they are still looking to force the choice upon the consumer, rather than adapting their cost structures.

</comment><comment><USER31> In some ways that seems to be what Clayton Christensen talk about in his "Innovators Dilemma" although he speaks of products development.

This is in many ways what the "good enough" paradigm is all about.

</comment><comment><USER32> To anyone who found the themes here interesting, I'd recommend Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.

</comment><comment><USER4> The government is like a train going full speed to their doom as chaos is introduced into their system. When they die, they often explode spectacularly, like a violent revolution in China.

<comment><USER33> If the USA didn't have a functioning democracy at the time of the industrial revolution, there would have been a Marxist uprising here as well.</comment></comment>


American Guns Are Fueling U.K. Crime - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/12/world/europe/handguns-smuggling-murder-us-uk.html <comment><USER2> Heh, they almost immediately say most of the guns come from the E.U.

Why don't we just ban gangs?

<comment><USER3> Because coming up with a legal definition of a 'gang' is tricky without criminalising a lot of innocent people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wish people would stop focusing on crime as something to stop after the fact and focus on preventative measures.

There wouldn't be demand for illegal firearms without gangs.

Why do people join gangs? Probably because of a lack of career and education opportunities, and family problems because of a lack of career and education opportunities.

Of course, I'm only guessing. I'm sure some very smart people know exactly why people join gangs.

I think the entire reason the UK voted for Brexit and the US "voted" for Trump is because of increasing wealth disparity and decreasing standard of living for the bottom half of the ladder. People want to "shake things up" when they're backed into a corner like this.

Until governments start thinking about working for making the life of the common person better, crime and gangs is what they'll get.

<comment><USER5> It's a shame you got downvoted, because we know that treating violent crime as a public health issue works.

Here's a UK link that talks about serious violent crime that happens in public spaces: [https://www.local.gov.uk/taking-public-health-approach- tackl...](https://www.local.gov.uk/taking-public-health-approach-tackling- serious-violent-crime-case-studies)

There's quite a lot in there and it's hard to pull out anything that feels powerful enough to describe the work. But there are lots of examples of people and organisations who are slowly, gently, making a difference.

<comment><USER4> That's exactly what I was trying to get at.

And of course, it doesn't mean that we _shouldn't_ try to stop smuggling. It's just that we might find that it's less effective and/or cost effective than treating the underlying causes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If the UK allowed its citizens to bear arms, then the headline could be American Guns are _Reducing_ UK Crime...

<comment><USER7> Lol sure, as we all know giving a firearm to everyone works perfectly in the US.</comment></comment>


IPv6 performance [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://ripe71.ripe.net/wp-content/uploads/presentations/39-2015-11-19-v6-performance.pdf <comment><USER2> The conclusion :

"If you can establish a connection, then IPv4 and IPv6 appear to have comparable RTT measurements across most of the Internet. But the odds of establishing a connection are now weighted in favour of IPv6! The IPv4 network looks to have become a whole lot worse for connection establishment"</comment>


Justin.TV launches an iPhone live video broadcasting app - <AUTHOR> http://blog.justin.tv/go-live-with-justin-tv-for-iphone-2-0/

<comment><AUTHOR> I had the privilege of leading the team that created this app, and wrote a fair amount of the code myself. If you have any questions about the app, its development, or just anything at all relating to justin.tv on the iPhone, please feel free to ask.

<comment><USER2> What iDevices support this (video 'broadcasting')?

What H.264 encoding is used (profile, level)?

What bitrate do you aim for? Is it different for 3G vs 802.11g/n?

What framerate/resolution?

Thanks for the opportunity to ask!

<comment><AUTHOR> _What iDevices support this (video 'broadcasting')?_

iPhone 4 and 3GS. The iPhone 3G didn't have a hardware video encoder, if I recall correctly, so we disabled broadcasting on it and anything lower (though viewing works just fine!).

I _think_ we also tested on the latest iPod Touch and found everything worked. I'd have to check my notes to be certain though (sorry, not in front of my work laptop, looking after my 1-month-old daughter right now!).

 _What H.264 encoding is used (profile, level)?_

Would definitely have to check my notes for this. I'll follow up.

 _What bitrate do you aim for? Is it different for 3G vs 802.11g/n?_

The OS gives us a limited degree of control on this one. We get to specify the bitrate as "high", "medium" or "low" and it appears to be completely undocumented what each one maps to, if they're the same for each device, etc. In practice it looks like "low" is always around 80-120kbps, "medium" is about 800kbps-1.5mbps and "high" is somewhere north of 4mbps. We use "low" and "medium" depending on how much actual network bandwidth we think is available.

 _What framerate/resolution?_

Resolution depends on the camera - we don't modify it away from the native resolution. So far, either 480x360 or 192x144 depending on device and selected camera.

Same is basically true for framerate. So far every camera I've tested has given us 26fps.

<comment><USER3> > we don't modify it away from the native resolution ... 480x360 or 192x144

The iPhone 4's camera is 1280 × 720 though . . .?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, sorry - I should have said those resolutions are what comes out of the hardware video encoder, rather than the camera.

<comment><USER2> Is 480x360 a hardware imposed limit, or was that your guy's decision?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does/Could this app locate or detect a user is at a particular event?

If Justin.tv could sort by event, other users could watch events like outsidelands music festival and flip through all the different view angles of the concert.

I understand event based results can be found by searching, but the idea of a collection of event streams intrigues me. Just an idea..

<comment><USER2> This is a really cool idea!

Especially, if you have justin.tv sponsor an event, and get the majority of users to download the app and start broadcasting.

The app should be able to send approx. GPS position, and the server can create an event "channel" with all the related streams (based on GPS).

App should have a location-disable option too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is another step closer a device I have been thinking about for many years. Imagine having a silent witness to any incident one gets involved in where it is one person or group's word against another. This device would record audio/video/time/location and send that data, real time, to a remote server that can timestamp and saved it. Police brutality, a bar fight, war crimes, an auto accident? Even if the cameras/phones are confiscated, stolen, or destroyed, the truth has already been set free and there is no way to cover it up.

</comment><comment><USER6> Isn't broadcasting live video expressly forbidden by AT&T's 3G TOS?

<comment><USER7> justin.tv didn't sign the AT&T TOS.

<comment><USER6> Actually, since they are US-based iPhone developers, they did, but that's not even the issue. Users of the app would be breaking the TOS.

I don't know about you, but as a consumer I don't like it when companies insert BS clauses they have no intention of enforcing (or worse, selectively enforcing) in their TOS. Not that anyone here needs more convincing that AT&T sucks...

<comment><USER7> Shoot first, ask questions later.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Reason They Hate Nuclear Is Because It Means We Don't Need Renewables - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/02/14/the-real-reason-they-hate-nuclear-is-because-it-means-we-dont-need-renewables <comment><USER2> I work in the energy industry and find these kinds of articles frustrating. Rather than arguing the facts, they paint a caricature of "the other side."

Many environmentalists, particularly those focused on greenhouse gasses are very supportive of nuclear energy. The strongest argument against nuclear is not environmental. It is economic.

New nuclear plants take over a decade to bring online, last 40+ years, and cost $20 billion plus. In an industry moving towards distributed generation and decentralization this is out of place. We can't predict our energy needs 50 years in advance.

Furthermore, nuclear plant construction tend to run 100%+ over budget and those costs are passed onto the ratepayers rather than borne the utilities.

The levelized cost of wind and solar is already cheaper than nuclear. They can be brought online in months rather than years, they can be deployed at whatever scale is needed and we can use market forces to do so.

What's not to love?

However, as many informed environmentalists will point out, it will be almost impossible to get to zero carbon emissions in the next 50 years without nuclear power.

The truth is far more interesting and much less confrontational than these kinds of articles lead you to believe.

<comment><USER3> >> The levelized cost of wind and solar is already cheaper than nuclear. They can be brought online in months rather than years, they can be deployed at whatever scale is needed and we can use market forces to do so.

I'm not personally aware of any place where this is actually true.

Even assuming you are not building out wind and solar on the scale of a country like germany you still need comparable subsidies to incentivize power producers to build new renewable energy sources; to say nothing of the grid management cost. You can quibble with exactly how large the subsidy is and, to be fair; unless you are employed by a consulting comapany you will never have access to the internal accounting figures that actually value the marginal cost of electricity produced by variable renewable sources compared to conventional sources but the subsidy is almost certainly not less than 15-17% of the wholesale price. Given that this subsidy is guaranteed by law to extend far into the future it simply defies imagination to assume that the levelized cost is somehow comparable at all.

I see this kind of argument a lot and a fair number of times someone claims they work in the energy industry or at a think tank with renewable energy or something. If that is the case I find it strange that they can't name actual examples where wind/solar don't require subsidies. It's usually just a link to a Lezard report with strange CoC assumptions.

<comment><USER4> You need to be careful not to compare existing, written-off power plants with new plants. What's compared is what would happen if you start a tender for a new generation capacity - what generation capacity would then win.

Regarding your questions: subsidies have fallen over the years, and we're beginning to see the first projects without direct subsidies:

[https://www.vox.com/2018/5/30/17408602/solar-wind-energy- ren...](https://www.vox.com/2018/5/30/17408602/solar-wind-energy-renewable- subsidy-europe)

And yes, it's true that running a grid is much more complicated than just LCoE.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Nuclear energy is the most certain future source" -John McCarthy

FAQ:

[http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/nuclear-faq.html](http://www- formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/nuclear-faq.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> This is a slanted screed by a guy who publishes nothing but nuclear-shilling and attacks on renewable technology[1]. I don't know why anyone would read it, except to catalog the cherry-picking, omissions, and outright falsehoods. It is basically an example of the Brandolini Principle.[0]

So, to make the ad-hominem explicit, consider the source.

[0] [https://twitter.com/ziobrando/status/289635060758507521?lang...](https://twitter.com/ziobrando/status/289635060758507521?lang=en)

[1] [https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/#641ea3afb...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/#641ea3afb1b8)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> "Even if nuclear power were clean, safe, economic, assured of ample fuel, and socially benign," said the god head of renewables, Amory Lovins, in 1977, "it would still be unattractive because of the political implications of the kind of energy economy it would lock us into."

Namely, the status quo. Cheaper energy will tend to pacify the masses. If you want big changes to the power structure, pacific masses are a bug.

And ecologically, wealthier people with time on their hands playing with their nuclear powered electric ATVs and boats and whatnot will occupy and damage more ecosystems. They'll consume more of all sorts of resources.

The increase in human energy use by itself, clean or not, works against many popular ecological and political goals.

</comment><comment><USER7> He's right, environmentalists don't want solutions, only perpetual problems. It's why I can't take any of them too seriously.

They like to say stuff about how we need to fight for our lives over climate change, after that group set nuclear power generation behind by multiple decades at this point.

They like to complain about how it's too risky, when their public fear mongering have effectively left us with a fleet of reactors for the 1960's and 1970's that have outlived their planned lives. And the NRC has no choice but to extend their operating licenses until it becomes too expensive for the utilities to maintain. So they get shut down.

Wouldn't be surprised to find out that the lot of these talking heads have had their palms greased by the renewable industry.

Eff them all.

<comment><USER8> Yikes. Talk about ignoring externalities. The energy industry is still run by oil and gas, not renewables, not nuclear. We've made a lot of progress but to think that Nuclear is a better solution than renewables is not an automatically won debate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Despite rigorous engineering, you still get:

Fukushima Daiichi

Chernobyl

Three Mile Island

Enrico Fermi Unit 1

SL-1

Sodium Reactor Experiment

Windscale

via [https://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-power/nuclear-power- accidents...](https://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-power/nuclear-power- accidents/history-nuclear-accidents#.XGYa3KSIYlQ)

<comment><USER6> You are omitting the whole next layer, which is all the plants that were run in "risk-enhancing mode" but just by chance didn't have a catastrophic accident. Davis-Besse's corroded pressure vessel head, which was covered up for 6 years before being reported, is a good example.

<comment><USER9> My bad. Thanks for bringing that up.

Also, we're just now getting to see spent fuel at Fukushima?

[http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201902140041.html](http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201902140041.html)

Just because we can doesn't mean we should. Yes, total clickbait, but still.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Nuclear energy would at least stop additional solar waste from accumulating. So that would be a big plus.

</comment><comment><USER11> I don't think so.

The problem with the watermelons (green outside, red inside), is that they're a runaway psyops from the cold war time KGB. It's basically a headless chicken that keeps running in the courtyard.

More interesting would be the reason why nuclear power has not been more developed BEFORE renewables could be considered. And the reason is:

1- civil nuclear power has been developed using uranium instead of thorium since this produces plutonium as by-product, which is useful to build nuclear weapon.

2- we want to prevent nuclear weapon proliferation, therefore we have to prevent proliferation of uranium-based civil nuclear power.

The solution is to start to develop thorium-based civil nuclear power. This doesn't lead to military-use or ecologically problematic by-products, so it can be used everywhere on the planet.

<comment><USER12> > 1- civil nuclear power has been developed using uranium instead of thorium > since this produces plutonium as by-product, which is useful to build > nuclear weapon.

All of the plutonium production for weapons was done in special purpose reactors at Hanford, WA. It takes a pretty specialized process to extract the plutonium from the fuel slugs. And btw most used nuclear fuel in the US is still sitting in tanks next to the power plants that they were used in.

We also stopped producing plutonium a fairly long time ago because we have more than enough for all the weapons we could ever conceivably want to produce.

The reason we have the reactors we do is probably more to do with the US navy than anything.

<comment><USER13> The reason you don't try to make bombs from power reactor plutonium: The long fuel cycle of power reactors produces too much Pu240 and Pu242. It's dang near impossible to get a nuclear explosion if there's much of those isotopes; their high spontaneous fission rate makes the bomb "fizzle" before the core can be sufficiently compressed.

Those who pretend to believe that industrial civilization can be run on "sunny days when the wind is blowing" energy are engaged in arithmetic denialism.</comment></comment></comment>


Computer Musings by Professor Donald E. Knuth - <AUTHOR> http://scpd.stanford.edu/knuth/index.jsp

<comment><USER2> I was really looking forward to watching some of these during my lunch break. I followed the links, picked one I thought I'd enjoy, clicked the link ...

"Install Microsoft Silverlight"

With a heavy heart I close the tab in the browser on my Linux box.

</comment><comment>==

 _Added in edit:_

Thanks for the suggestions. The problem isn't so much that it's Moonlight, _per se,_ it's more that I have to go through a bloody great clog dance to find the resources, download, install, then find the video, see if it plays, and so on.

I was looking forward to a break during lunch to see something interesting, and instead I was going to be sucked into what amounts to system administration yet again.

That's why I was so disappointed. Mostly, anyway.

<comment><USER3> While I still share the sentiment, it works just fine on Linux and Firefox with a recent version of Moonlight (<http://www.go-mono.com/moonlight/>).

<comment><USER2> That certainly eased the pain - thank you. Still took 15 minutes to sort out, but now tomorrow I can watch a video.

Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Of all places on the Internet it was _really_ odd to see Standford's site requiring Silverlight to watch its content. WTH, how could something like this happen?

<comment><USER5> Stanford is Stanford, and Knuth is Knuth, in part because both know what issues are important.

Silverlight is reasonable and has market share. Since their goal is to get distribution....

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd strongly recommend these, if you are interested in these kinds of things. I look forward eagerly to watching the annual Christmas Tree lecture every year (this year on on Bayesian trees and BDDs, to be held December 8, probably posted online a few days later).

One year Knuth offhandedly mentioned a question I had posed in an email a few days earlier (regarding TAOCP), which was a big thrill, and indicates that despite the warning that email may take 6 months to reach him, it is often much quicker.

<comment><USER7> Computing Bayesian network probabilities using BDDs sounds interesting. Are there any references for this, or do I have to wait in suspense for the lecture? :)

<comment><USER6> I don't know of any off-hand, but there must be; Knuth is usually collating the work of others.

The abstract for the lecture is here: <http://www-cs- faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/musings.html></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Bosconian (1981), in 3-D - <AUTHOR> http://nolannicholson.com/bosco-3d/ <comment><USER2> Great! I would love to see more classic games in the browser. The controls really throw me off though--do enough people really prefer inverted vertical controls for it to be the default in so many games? UP to go down, DOWN to go up?

<comment><USER3> It made sense to me. I guess it's how you interpret the controls of an actual aircraft and how they map to keyboard controls. In aircraft controls it's "pull back" to increase altitude (up) and "push forward" to decrease altitude (down).

I imagine it this way, each direction key maps to a part of the topside of the aircraft

\- up: front/nose of aircraft, pressing up pushes pressure on the nose which would make it tilt downward, hence going down or losing altitude

\- down: back of aircraft, pressing down pushes pressure on the backside of the aircraft which would make it tilt upward, hence going up or gaining altitude

same for left and right

<comment><USER4> Yeah, it's funny. For anything involving controlling an aircraft or spacecraft I prefer aircraft style controls (i.e., pull back for UP, and push forward for DOWN).

For FPS I prefer the opposite: forward is look up, back is look down, with very few exceptions. I'm not really sure why this would be but it throws me completely if I try to play most FPS (and even some six-axis games) with aircraft style controls.

Felt very natural with Bosconian 3D though.

<comment><USER5> Your own descriptions suggest the underlying reason for this - e.g. 'pull up' \- the controller maps to the orientation of the thing you are controlling vs 'forward is look up' \- the controller maps to where you want to look.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is such a great 3D version, very faithful to the original game. Awesome work.

</comment><comment><USER7> I am really digging the code. Clean, modern, vanilla js! The amount of polish in this game is very appreciated!

I see that the assets were made in blender. I hadn't thought to use pixel-art textures with low-poly in that way. It looks fantastic, especially with the low-res rendering.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks - I really appreciate it!

I got a lot of inspiration for the model style (and a helpful making-of timelapse) from @librorumque on Twitter: [https://twitter.com/librorumque/status/1205080756508352512](https://twitter.com/librorumque/status/1205080756508352512)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> On Brave, pressing SPACE just destroys the ship?

<comment><USER9> Same on firefox

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Kind of boggles the mind that we've had video games for over 40 years.

</comment><comment><USER11> Nice work! I really like the art style. It captures the minimalism of the original, while not resorting to voxels or a "hipster flat low poly" look.

</comment><comment><USER12> Sadly, I just get a black screen with a white rectangle in the lower-left corner. Chromium 81.

<comment><USER12> It may be something to do with audio, see Chromium's console: [https://drive.google.com/open?id=1gpEX5mTiDO7hkJEkOzqhbSBnbW...](https://drive.google.com/open?id=1gpEX5mTiDO7hkJEkOzqhbSBnbWQaVnrM)

Does the entire web page depend on audio working?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Nice work! Is this first made in blender and then exported JS HTML5?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! The models were made in Blender, but the engine was made from scratch in vanilla JS using WebGL. The code is public: [https://github.com/NolanNicholson/bosco-3d](https://github.com/NolanNicholson/bosco-3d)</comment></comment>


Brazil's billion-dollar gym experiment - <AUTHOR> http://mosaicscience.com/story/brazils-billion-dollar-gym-experiment <comment><USER2> As a lot of things here in Brazil, this looks like not very thought through.

 _" When you consider the fact that Brazilian diets are commonly high in fat – meat is often eaten for all three meals of the day – it's no surprise that hypertension, diabetes, cancer, obesity and cardiovascular disease are on the rise."_

What about all the serious recent research showing little correlation between fat in diet and all the diseases? EDIT: also, I would add that meat is often eaten in upper classes meals. Meat is a luxury for the better part of our population.

Actually, I believe that there is research showing that physical activities has, at the most, an indirect effect on obesity. Although I can't cite any study here.

Another strange passage:

 _" What really convinces politicians and funders is evidence. "_

Not sure this is true, in Brazil or any other democracy. What really convinces politicians are projects that generate good publicity. Which this one proved it can.

Said that, I think this is indeed a good project and it is a good thing that it is running. But I am inclined to say that the answer to _" Can a grand vision of 4,000 free public gyms overcome inequality and fight Brazil's health crisis? "_ is no.

<comment><USER3> I don't know where you live, but here in RS meat is definitely not a luxury.

And I speak as poor person that knows people that gain less than $500 per month.

<comment><USER4> The RS has historically had more plentiful meat, thus the popularity of churrasco here. Also, while I'm not very well travelled, I've had people from the rest of the country react with shocked gasps when I mentioned that I drink tap water at home, turns out the situation is quite different in the northern areas. As someone once told me: "a relative travelled to the RS once, he told me it is almost like a different country."

</comment></comment></comment><comment> rational-future Wow, what's up with all the negative comments on HN?

Brazil has $2.5 trillion annual GDP, according to the World Bank it spends 9.3% on health. That's over $200B. Even if this project costs $1B annually, IMHO spending .5% on effective preventation is a great idea.

</comment><comment><USER5> 1\. More than 10 per cent of Brazilians live on just two US dollars a day, despite the fact that the country ranks fifth in the world for its number of billionaires.

2\. I'm for anything that helps the poor.

3\. In America, I'm not asking for a gym membership, but it would be nice to have Public restrooms? Yes--just a restroom. "No--we have no restroom!" "The closest restroom is in that hotel, but you have to sneak in the back door" "Why do the Homeless defecate in the pristine park?" "Mom--did you bring your Detrol--there will probally be no restrooms." Yea--It's a problem. And I don't want to hear if you build it, they will come. Exactly who will come--99% of the people will be there because they need to use the toilet, and wash their hands.

<comment><USER6> WalMart. Everywhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I know that exercise doesn't make that much of a dent in the overall obesity epidemic by itself, but I wonder how much of just exercising influences one's diet. For instance, if I run 3 miles today, am I more or less likely to eat a salad for dinner? Or a pizza? Am I more likely to watch my diet if I'm exercising, or am I more likely to splurge? Is there a trend in either direction?

If exercise influences diet positively, then this is absolutely worth it. If it doesn't affect diet at all or if it affects diet negatively, then that's another story. While exercise is great in and of itself, it doesn't solve an obesity epidemic. Even people who exercise every day can have cardiac problems if they don't eat well.

</comment><comment><USER8> Nice idea, and I wish them well, but I suspect it will take more than a free gym for every 50,000 people to put a significant dent in Brazil's inequality and health problems.

<comment><USER9> Indeed; a reminder that crony capitalism is not isolated to the US.

<comment><USER10> what most people miss is that this term applies to about every government known to man. Oh sure many countries would never call their government capitalist but they sure do the same thing, politicians and private or appointed owners of production work together to protect their status usually with little concern for others.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm a Brazilian and I've seem near my home those 'open gyms' coming up in the latest years.

I never see any instructor, but there is this square just across the street of my house that got some 'gym equipment' for everyone to use.

It's a lovely idea, but (IMHO) this move solely doesn't do much towards better health results. It's nice to bundle some equipment to do better workout where we already exercise, but in the end I feel like it would be more efective to make more of those areas. There is really few good places to workout around here or take a long walk for instance.

I would _love_ to move around in the city in a bicycle. But there is almost no bicycle path, and facing the transit with buses passing centimeters to you is just for the brave.

<comment><USER12> I live in Porto Alegre and it has some bycicle path... but to be really useful it would have to cover _most_ of the way between A and B.

(Also its very obvious that flat and colder cities are much better for cycling-as-transportation... you can ride in your office clothes)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why not try it out on one city before spending a billion on the whole country? Too many large scale leaders insist on the grand "I'm sure it will work" idea before bothering to try it out on the small scale first.

</comment><comment><USER14> I used to study at the church mentioned in the article when I was a kid, they had a school too. I used to live at the mentioned neighborhood too.

</comment><comment><USER15> I wonder how much India is investing in health and fitness. Hope we do something similar seeing the current fitness levels of the Indian youth.

</comment><comment><USER16> I don't get what's new about this. From what I've been told (never been to Brazil), they always had free public gyms:

[http://timclayton.photoshelter.com/image/I0000dmFBPB1xZuQ](http://timclayton.photoshelter.com/image/I0000dmFBPB1xZuQ)

[http://timclayton.photoshelter.com/image/I0000cCIgGINK7MA](http://timclayton.photoshelter.com/image/I0000cCIgGINK7MA)

[http://timclayton.photoshelter.com/image/I0000DVoSvWJxumY](http://timclayton.photoshelter.com/image/I0000DVoSvWJxumY)

Is the novelty the presence of free lady classes?

</comment><comment><USER17> So would you all have happily paid for all those fat people's gyms? If they want to exercise they could put some walking/running to their daily programme. You only need a pair of legs to do so. But slackers always find excuses, and bureaucrats always find ways to spend the money of the economically illiterate with the smart and naive minds, as it seems.</comment>


Surviving a Submerging Car: Keep a Hammer in Your Car - <AUTHOR> http://www.flhsmv.gov/fhp/videos/WorstNightmare.htm <comment><USER2> >> It sounds very frightening, but the fact is this rarely ever happens.

Nevertheless, let's put up a web page to tell people how to survive this thing that very rarely happens. If you keep a hammer in your car where it is easily accessible it's probably more likely it will kill you when it is flung about the cabin in one of the more common collision/accident scenarios.

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe one can keep it under the seat, or in the car seat pocket, or even slightly tie it on the side. I agree it should not be loose in the glove compartment.</comment></comment>


Any Ideas HN? Know This Man? Can You Tell Him Who He Is? - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129668438 If there is any community who can think of the perfect hack to solve this man's problem, it's this group. <comment><USER2> I would go with an FMRI, while showing photos of symbols from different areas - unique street signs, fast food restaurants, anything identifiable and strictly regional. Start with a broader scope to get a calibrated reading of his recognition - show signs and brands from across Asia, Europe and the Americas, and narrow things down gradually as recognition happens.

Once this is narrowed down to a region of the country (i.e., if the In-N-Out logo triggers a strong hunger response, you could narrow things down to the west coast), start working with landmarks, TV station logos, commonly used community areas like highway exits, streets, and eventually houses. I wouldn't be surprised if they could pinpoint an exact address using this method.

<comment><USER3> He already said he had memories of Denver and another city, so that should narrow things down.

<comment><USER2> Imagine you're doing a sector-by-sector scan of a massive, corrupted hard drive taken from a crime scene, trying to find out who the owner of the drive was. It makes no sense to do a rigorous analysis of the first possible file fragment that turns up - the odds are, it's just some random data file that could be found in any system. How many people have memories of Denver, yet have never been there in person? How many people have been to Denver, with no records remaining of their visit?

There is no reason to believe this man ever had anything to do with Denver, especially given the reliability of his "memories" thus far. How could someone be named "benjaman", yet not turn up in any written records, anywhere?

I have very vivid, intense memories of Las Vegas, that are tied to emotional experiences I have not had elsewhere. I spent only a week there, and paid for everything in cash. Would it be useful to start the search there?

The only reason the method I suggested would work, is because it relies entirely on weighted statistical analysis of what region-specific symbols this man has been exposed to. You can't fake strong recognition - it reflects changes to neural structure over long periods of time, and has a very low probability of false positives.

<comment><USER3> If you look more into it, on Wikipedia for instance is stated

"Kyle has memories of Indianapolis as a child, including the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument, the Woolworth's on the Circle, and the Indiana Theater showing movies in Cinerama. He remembers Crown Hill Cemetery, though not its name; the Scottish Rite Cathedral; and the White River when "it was mostly just a dumping ground." He also remembers grilled cheese sandwiches for a quarter and glasses of milk for a nickel at the Indiana State Fair. Kyle also has memories of the area around the University of Colorado at Boulder. He has detailed memories of the subscription the library has to Restaurants & Institutions. He also remembers the Round the Corner Restaurant on the Hill, and the Flatirons and The Fox Theater near the Boulder campus.[8] This places Kyle in the Denver-Boulder area in the late 1970s to early 1980s.[6] In an interview with Channel 7 News in Denver, Kyle reported having memories of the controversy surrounding the construction of mass transit in Denver, at a time when the city still had no financing to proceed. Although the mass transit system in Denver went into operation in 1994, public debate over the construction of the system dates back to about 1980, consistent with the time period of the other memories that Kyle has about Denver and Boulder.[9]"

So actually yes, there is reason to believe he has connections to Denver and Indianapolis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "He was bounced around to hospitals and homeless shelters for nine months, unable to see more than a few feet in front of him, until a charity raised enough money to have his eyes fixed"

Something is seriously wrong with the system.

</comment><comment><USER5> Is there any reason to believe that the story he tells is true? Storybook retrograde amnesia is actually exceedingly uncommon; more commonly, this is used deceitfully. My first instinct, coming from the hospital setting, would be not to believe his story. I would then perform a battery of tests for retrograde amnesia (tests with which I am not familiar since this is outside of my primary interest).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> If there is any community who can think of the perfect hack to solve this man's problem, it's this group.

Long story short, he suffers from amnesia, cannot remember who he is. They're trying a bunch of really interesting new technology, but have not found out in over 6 years time.</comment>


Ask HN: Have You Used TopTal (Independent Contractors / Devs/ Devops) Recently? - <AUTHOR> No, I don't work for them but the model looks very interest to me as a freelancer and I'd consider working for something like this.  However...
I found this old thread:  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10107448 and there's a lot of negativity (2015).
But it's an old thread, relatively speaking.  Today, is this a great way to get consistent side gigs?  Or is it primarily for global devs in lower-cost jurisdictions and isn't for those of us who live in expensive spots?  Is it exploitative?
Are there alternatives to Toptal for those of us in expensive locales? <comment><USER2> Try the "old fashioned way": Meeting people (also known as sales).

Many business owners are uncomfortable with giving free reign of important IP to people that live really far away. I sympathize, its an especially bad idea with contractors that live in places where IP law is un-enforced. Check out some meetups with other developers, and just let them know that you're looking for gigs. I've never met a dev that wasn't hit up frequently by contacts about projects. If thats not your cup of tea look for overflow work from agencies or venture studios.</comment>