Compressionism: A Theory of Mind Based on Data Compression [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1419/paper0045.pdf <comment><USER2> Jurgen Schmidhuber has similar ideas - "History of science is the history of compression progress" [https://youtu.be/3FIo6evmweo?t=1537](https://youtu.be/3FIo6evmweo?t=1537)

and (quoted in the paper)

[http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html](http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> The Arbital entry on Unforeseen Maximums[0] is more pessimistic:

"Juergen Schmidhuber of IDSIA, during the 2009 Singularity Summit, gave a talk proposing that the best and most moral utility function for an AI was the gain in compression of sensory data over time. Schmidhuber gave examples of valuable behaviors he thought this would motivate, like doing science and understanding the universe, or the construction of art and highly aesthetic objects.

Yudkowsky in Q&A suggested that this utility function would instead motivate the construction of external objects that would internally generate random cryptographic secrets, encrypt highly regular streams of 1s and 0s, and then reveal the cryptographic secrets to the AI."

[0] [https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/unforeseen_maximum/](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/unforeseen_maximum/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I wrote finished a short story this year that explores some of these ideas heavy-handedly. It is placed in a Universal Library setting, a continuation of Borges' Library of Babel. In a sense it is both for and against the idea of compression as a way to gaining knowledge, attempting to make a greyer area out of it.

"Unlike the entirety of the Library, incomprehensible due to its sheer vastness, the book itself was much smaller. Any single one could easily be read hundreds of times over during the lifespan of a librarian. Therefore, the book's gibberish nature did not come of its own accord but simply sprouted out of its relation to us and our lack of knowledge concerning the Library as a whole. In other words, for any book to make any sense to any librarian, it must have recognizable patterns, like those in language. And since every possible book that could exist did, most of them were simply random, nonsensical strings of characters. Leaving the librarians themselves to search for the language or sets of languages that could bring meaning to them (them:themselves or them:the books no one was sure). This was reflected — maybe the same sort of reflection Tanner was searching for — in the various languages the librarians did know and use; the ever-evolving nature of them, incorporating and condensing larger and larger swaths of ideas that then needed to be condensed even further into shorter acronyms for quicker reference."

[https://firstname.lastname@example.com/a-return-to-the-library- of...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com/a-return-to-the-library-of-babel- cb8f479f6000)

<comment><USER4> Your link is dead, here's the Web Archive:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20200623192321/https://medium.co...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200623192321/https://email@example.com/a-return- to-the-library-of-babel-cb8f479f6000)

<comment><USER3> I killed it a few days after this post as I am working on submitting for publishing. Which is to say, I am a glutton for punishment and rejection, haha. However, thank you for looking up the archive link. If you do read it please email me with notes you may have. Any input good or bad would warmly received.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Prediction and compression as a way to encode data cheaply is a reasonable idea. It's really cheap to encode something that the predictor expected next. This is essentially what GPT-2 and GPT-3 are doing.

The author seems to be missing some implications of that. One is that a predictor/compressor has a bias towards what it has compressed before. We know that humans tend to over-generalize, and that that's a survival trait. Something like this might be the mechanism behind that.

<comment><USER6> Over-generalizing means that you will compress worse, as does under- generalizing. Can't use the mere fact that "compression is going on", you have to look into utility, costs, etc.

<comment><USER7> How? "All _X_ people behave in _Y_ ways" is an over-generalization and seems to compress very well.

<comment><USER6> You need to encode the delta between your model and what you observe, and that delta will be expensive to encode if your model over-generalizes.

<comment><USER7> Thanks, your comment made understand a tiny little bit more of the machine learning lingo. I think. :-D

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Another useful concept of memory organization is what's called a "schema":

> A schema is any pattern of relationships among data stored in memory. It is > any set of nodes and links between them in the spider web of memory that > hang together so strongly that they can be retrieved and used more or less > as a single unit. [1]

When thinking about something we naturally bring togheter plenty of related information, thus this "compression" described in the papper must somehow be capable of aggregating these relationships into the data as well prior to compressing it.

[1] Richards J. Heuer Jr. Psychology of Intelligence Analysis. Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1999.

<comment><USER9> Well I think that the compression part would be storing some type of abstract subgraph that could then be referenced or re-used for similar situations rather than being duplicated.

<comment><USER10> If neurons that fire together wire together. Can we assume there's a shared subprocess and this is just a type of compression?

</comment></comment></comment><comment> greyface- Related short story: Kolmogorov's AI

[https://www.devever.net/~hl/fi/kolmogorov](https://www.devever.net/~hl/fi/kolmogorov)

</comment><comment><USER11> When I see passages like that quoted below, I wonder if the authors are falling for the economist's fallacy, assuming that objective, quantifiable, repeatable measures are _ipso facto_ measuring what they want to measure. I have not seen anything in this paper persuading me that understanding is a consequence of compression, rather than vice-versa.

 _A weakness of the Turing test (Turing, 1950) is that a program might pass the test simply by exploiting weaknesses in human psychology. If a given system passes the test we cannot be sure if it was because of the quality of the responses or the gullibility of the judge. In contrast, Hutter's compression test is more reliable. The more that data is compressed, the harder it becomes to compress it further (Chaitin, 2006). Because there is no way to cheat by using a simple heuristic, data compression presents a reliably hard standard. We argue that this process of identifying deep patterns through compression is what people mean when they attribute both 'intelligence' and 'consciousness'._

</comment><comment><USER12> Compression is important to processes going on in the mind, but I don't think its a central concept to understand how the mind words. Compression is relevant inasmuch as our brains perform lossy compression to capture the relevant regularity in our sense data. But this is only the start of the analysis; it doesn't explain anything useful about our cognitive architecture. The problem is strong compression trades space requirements for computational requirements. But going all-in on compression is optimizing for the wrong thing in the context of a bag-of-neurons computational model.

von Neumann architectures are good at fast and precise state transitions. A bag-of-neurons is good at leveraging relationships to minimize computational requirements. Thus a plausible cognitive architecture for the mind should emphasize relationships rather than computation. A good cognitive architecture is one where relationships in the data are maximally revealed by the architecture, thus minimizing the computational burden to access and utilize the relationship. This explains why the visual system takes up so much volume of the brain. 3-dimensional sense data is packed with interrelationships and these relationships need support from the cognitive architecture to be utilized. The compression view is only useful to a point--after that the constraints on the bag-of-neurons model become dominant and must drive the architecture search.

When it comes to phenomenal consciousness, the question then becomes: is there anything it is like to be a process whose topological structure maximally captures external and internal state relationships? My intuition tells me the answer is yes. One functional requirement of a human brain is that it `believes` it is the author of its decisions. To manifest this `belief` requires a self-representation of itself distinct from the environment, i.e. a target of the attribution of authorship. Facts of this self-representation entail what it is like to be this topological structure.

</comment><comment><USER13> Compression only cares about representing a set of data, while the brain also needs to account for future experiences. Thus brain representations need to also include information that is useless in the present but could be useful in the future. Compression is definitely a part of the story but not the whole.

</comment><comment><USER14> When I see a citation to Integrated Information Theory I usually hit back two or three times.

<comment><USER15> The axioms of it don't look terribly different than that of the Buddhist functional model:

[https://www.researchgate.net/publication/315940922_Mapping_t...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/315940922_Mapping_the_Mind_A_Model_Based_on_Theravada_Buddhist_Texts_and_Practices)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This seems like a reasonable next step after considering the failure of Totoni's IIT. IIT has the "problem" that a diode is a little conscious; the authors embrace and extend this "problematic" viewpoint to cover the informal popular idea that compression is knowledge.

Their view on the Hard Problem is not new. They say that the main trick to the Hard Problem is compressing information about a "self" which is repeatedly re- quantified. However, they then must rely on some notion of human individuality in order to explain why qualia are subjective.

The only problems I have with this approach are the normal criticisms of panpsychic approaches: It's hard to observe, there's few useful predictions, rocks are a little conscious, etc. However, rocks _are_ a little conscious, or at least a little alive, thanks to lithophile bacteria which form microscopic filaments threading through the rock; this wasn't known in Berkeley's time!

<comment><USER17> That doesn't mean rocks are conscious, it means the things that live on rocks are conscious - an interesting idea that appears to scale well.

There is no CS solution to the hard problem, because the hard problem is not about information, or behaviour, or data compression, or rocks. It's about subjectivity, and there isn't even a working definition of what subjectivity is, never mind any experiment that can be done to confirm that it exists.

Subjectivity is _essentially metaphysical_ in the sense that it's outside of science.

It's impossible to make a testable statement about any phenomenon of any kind that isn't filtered through human perception and all the layers of human cognitive processing.

In a very real sense it's objectivity that's the illusion. Try to make a statement about anything whatsoever that is truly independent of collective human sense perception and human mental processes and see how far you get.

Whatever you think you're doing in science or math, you're looking out through a distorted window whose properties you're not aware of, and trying to correlate your observations with others looking out through windows with similar distortions.

The best you'll get is an interesting list of distortions which everyone agrees on. Even if they have predictive power, that doesn't make them truly objective - it just makes them a spiky median of collective experience instead of an outlier of individual experience.

<comment><USER16> I agree with your direction, but have qualms with your points.

Suppose for absurdity I replay my original argument, but with humans, and you reply "that doesn't mean humans are conscious; it means that the things which are housed within skulls are conscious". I understand the nuance you're introducing, but don't think that it helps. Part of the difficulty of the Combination Problem is that the boundary of conscious control extends beyond the nexus of thought. I'll accept that rocks are just the substrate, but integrated circuits are just carefully cooked rocks; substrate-vs- consciousness thinking might be wrong.

I agree with you that _science_ is done empirically, and thus doesn't experience objectivity. However, _maths_ is quite formal, and in the past century we managed to achieve "formal formality" with category theory. We now can talk of certain objects as existing universally; in their context, not only do they exist, but they _uniquely_ exist. For example, `1+1=2`, which is to say that there's an equivalence between any pair of objects selected one by one, and any pair taken both at a time; for any particular counting context, there's only one natural numbers object.

I am not quite as pessimistic as you regarding the quality of the conclusions that we reach. Rather than saying that our filters make us subjective, I would simply say that the _experiences_ of humanity are essentially human. There's an anthropic bias because humans can't experience anything that isn't human; we can't think truly alien ideas or build truly alien artifacts. Everything we think is non-human is actually human. This doesn't prevent us from drawing conclusions, but it does forbid objectivity.

<comment><USER18> > I'll accept that rocks are just the substrate, but integrated circuits are > just carefully cooked rocks; substrate-vs-consciousness thinking might be > wrong

It's a side point, but I think the important difference is that a rock can exist even without bacteria (imagine the rock is somewhere close to the earth's core, just below the temperature that would melt it into lava), while the bacteria on the rock could also exist independently of the rock (they could be blown by the wind and moved to a different rock, for example). So it makes sense to discuss the amount of consciousness in the (sterile) rock itself, and in the (floating) bacteria as well, though of course the system of rock+bacteria can have its own amount of consciousness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Sounds plausible, but I'm biased as it agrees with my theory for the origin of consciousness: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23475069](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23475069)

</comment><comment><USER20> This is very interesting and reminds me of something I read 4 years ago. I had wondered about data compression related to brain research after I had read this blog: [https://probablydance.com/2016/04/30/neural-networks-are- imp...](https://probablydance.com/2016/04/30/neural-networks-are-impressively- good-at-compression/)

</comment><comment><USER21> Ever since I learned about autoencoders, I've been saying compression is at the heart of intelligence.

</comment><comment><USER10> True that all thought is abstraction. But not necessarily compression? Hypostatic abstraction would expand the data as would building any kind of new relations? Neuro modulators are brain-wide. We can also change our perception.

</comment><comment><USER22> (2015)

<comment><USER23> The full citation seems to be Maguire, Phil, Mulhall, Oisín, Maguire, Rebecca and Taylor, Jessica (2015) _Compressionism: A Theory of Mind Based on Data Compression._ Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Cognitive Science. pp. 294-299. ISSN 1613-0073. It's annoying that there is no date or publication information in the PDF itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Is it vegan to pirate WinRar?</comment>


The effect of music on programming - <AUTHOR> http://desertstorms.net/zombienations/?p=122

<comment><USER2> I find techno (more trance actually) is great when coding in the zone (or getting there). I find C&C music (Frank Klepacki) is also great provided I'm in the right mindset to code (it might put me off if I'm not ready)

However, in the design phase I usually want something a bit different, and haven't quite pinned down what's best. Usually something epic or particularly interesting is good for inspiration.

I find this same dualism when writing normally.</comment>


The Most Gender-Switched Names in the U.S. - <AUTHOR> https://flowingdata.com/2019/08/28/gender-switched-names/ <comment><USER2> First, this is a great and original (AFAIK) post. Kudos to the author!

Second, I actually find the most interesting fact to be completely unmentioned by the author: that in the first chart (greatest absolute changes), of the 30 biggest swaps, only _two_ were female->male, while the other _28_ (over 90%!) were male->female.

It's a remarkable fact -- makes me think of how it's historically been much more acceptable for women to adopt men's styles of clothing, but much less accepted for men to adopt's women's styles of clothing. And with names being equally "fashionable", this fits the same trend.

This also explains what I'd observed but never articulated about late 19th- and early 20th-century fiction: how come so many men have what are to me "women's names"?

Utterly fascinating.

<comment><USER3> > It's a remarkable fact -- makes me think of how it's historically been much > more acceptable for women to adopt men's styles of clothing, but much less > accepted for men to adopt's women's styles of clothing.

This is still the case today. I feel like the two are entirely unrelated, actually. If anything, we've seen the opposite phenomenon happen in every market. Buffalo Wild Wings commercials that cater to masculinity, Dr Pepper marketing towards men who typically don't drink diet soda, hair salons that play sports, scents that smell like trees, etc.

<comment><USER4> How interesting because from my perspective (a woman) I feel like I'm seeing significantly _fewer_ products that are marketed to/cater to traditional notions of femininity and instead there seems to be a trend towards inclusivity.

Tom Ford, Bvlgari, Calvin Klein, and Chanel all have uni-sex fragrances now. Chanel's is called "Boy" and CK's is very inclusively named "all". And there's a _huge_ trend in high-end cosmetics that makeup has no gender. CoverGirl even has a "CoverBoy" spokesmodel now.

And of course, any company that dares to "pink it and shrink it" will feel the wrath of Ellen and r/pointlesslygendered.

<comment><USER5> The feminist movement managed to make femininity almost a swear word. Fascinating and very sad. As a male, I was always turned off by unisex products. I wonder how much profit these big companies make with this new marketing strategy. Is it really profitable, or are they just changing their products to avoid public shitstorms, hoping that the shitstorm avoided would have been even worse?

<comment><USER6> Your musings here are legitimate, so long as you recognize your feelings as a single datapoint and don't mistake them for a general trend, or extrapolate them to the wider population.

As a counterpoint, I don't know of any friends or close acquaintances who would consider feminism or femininity a dirty word. To me, it's a fairly straightforward proposition:

Q: Are you pro- women having equal rights to men w.r.t. social structures, family responsibilities, economic opportunities, etc.?

A: Yes?

Q: And are you willing to take a second look at your social and professional conduct to make sure it doesn't put your female peers in difficult, awkward or uncomfortable positions?

A: Sure, why wouldn't I.

Hooray! you might be a feminist, it's not that hard.

Also, personally don't see what's wrong with unisex products, and I think it may be possible companies might possibly occasionally find the odd not-shitty cause they can back because their employees collectively believe in the positive message and that also aligns well with their goals, and not solely because of a small group of cynical PR managers running focus groups.

<comment><USER7> That's a naive look at feminism. Unfortunately nowadays many other ideologies jump on the feminism bandwagon. It's rare to see someone who is feminist without being also anti-law enforcement, anti-white men, anti-capitalist.

<comment><USER8> The post to which you replied seems to address your concerns:

"Your musings here are legitimate, so long as you recognize your feelings as a single datapoint and don't mistake them for a general trend, or extrapolate them to the wider population."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "My name is Sue! How do you do? Now you're gonna die!"

I wonder if there was any fluctuation in "Sue" after Johnny Cash's recording of Shel Silverstein "A Boy Named Sue" spent three weeks at #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1969 (second only to the Stone's "Honky Tonk Woman"). He even performed it in the East Room of the White House by request of Richard Nixon on April 17, 1970!

Johnny Cash - A Boy Named Sue (from Man in Black: Live in Denmark):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJ3tFPTUhAE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJ3tFPTUhAE)

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

[https://www.songfacts.com/facts/johnny-cash/a-boy-named- sue](https://www.songfacts.com/facts/johnny-cash/a-boy-named-sue)

>Bailey from Moses Lake, Wa: Did you guys know that this song has some historical significance. There was a court case in 1925 called the Scopes Monkey Trial (having to do with the teaching of evelution in public schools). The original prosecutors in the case were two brothers named Herbert E. Hicks and Sue K. Hicks. They were both friends of Scope. Anyway, Sue got his name because it was his mother's name and she died giving birth to him. The rumor has it that Johnny Cash or Shel Silverstein or whoever wrote the song thought that the fact that there was a boy named Sue was funny, and then wrote a song about it. So the boy that was named Sue actually had some significance. Yup and that's my bit to put in.

>-Thank you AP U.S. History!! Bailey Wa.

<comment><USER10> There's a german cover version: Ein Mädchen namens Gerd (A girl called Gerd).

in 1971 Little Murders (based on the 1966 play) was released (includes a great speech by Donald Southerland) in which the father is named Carol Newquist and constantly says it's a man's name.

<comment><USER11> Maybe also inspired by a real example?

Gerd is a women's name in Norway, and I would think in other Nordic countries, since it's after a giant-goddess with the same name (the wife of Frey). So there would have been a lot of girls named Gerd around at the time.

Of famous people, I can only remember the actor Dana Ashbrook, who played Bobby Briggs in Twin Peaks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The fact that the name "Yuri" is on this list is interesting because "Yuri" is both a masculine Slavic name and a feminine Japanese name. The rapid switch could be due to the growth or decline of one of these names, where the two usages of Yuri are distinct (from different languages), as opposed to one name whose associated gender changed.

<comment><USER13> Similar for Angel, which probably includes Ángel. I would consider them the same name. Even with the shared meaning, the pronunciation is different enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I find the Krishna name interesting. Krishna is a male Hindu deity. However, it seems a lot of people were naming their girls Krishna. Now, it is a boy's name again.

My speculation for the cause of this is that Hare Krishna became popular among certain US groups in the 1970's and a lot of them named their daughters Krishna. Then, in more recent times, there has been a lot more immigration from India into the US, and these families name their boys Krishna.

<comment><USER15> Perhaps in the 70s people also stuck to the general trend of female names ending with a vowel while make names typically ended with a consonant. Immigration from cultures such as India where this isn't the trend might indeed be responsible for it waning.

<comment><USER16> In latin countries male names end in o, and girls names end in a.

<comment><USER17> Not universally true. Consider a male name like Luca

<comment><USER18> Or Andrea.

<comment><USER19> Same as Lucas

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Kenyatta: Interesting name whose origin (by Wikipedia) is skewed. It mentions individuals born in 21st century and completely ignores the 1st person to literally hold that name: Kenya's first president, Jomo Kenyatta, born in early 1890's. It wasn't a traditional African name, but he bestowed it upon himself in his early 20's. Among the Maasai community, it referred to a traditional belt and Jomo, whilst living amongst the Maasai always had such a belt. The name fascinated him and he adopted it, altering the spelling to include 'Kenya' since he'd political ambitions

</comment><comment><USER21> Somehow the results seem dissatisfying.

This really feels like it should be measuring the area under the curve, at the very least. Measuring "peak to peak" seems silly.

<comment><USER22> I like the graphic presentation but think it would have been better to just show the number of male and female usages of each name over time, so we'd have a double curve with two colors. Showing only the difference you can't see if a name got more or less popular for both genders equally.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> As a Casey (last name), I've been intrigued by the transitions over time. It would be interesting to map this to major events.

For example, the #2 name "Jackie" switched from a heavily boys name to a heavily girls name about 1/3 of the way through the data set which would be around 1960. Also in 1960, JFK was elected and his wife was "Jackie" Kennedy. She became First Lady and a fashion icon immediately.

<comment><USER24> Hi (distant) cousin. My paternal Grandma's maiden name was Casey, she named her son Casey, and I have the middle name of Casey. In 3 generations it had a spot in all 3 names and both genders.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> It predates the US, but the name switch that has astonished me the most is "Anne" which was unambiguously masculine and is now so unambiguously feminine that it looks strange to see it used for a male in a historical context.

<comment><USER26> Different language families. It is/was feminine in the Latin world, and masculine, related to germanic Arne, in some pockets of Western Europe [Frisia, Scotland, France].

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

<comment><USER27> I was thinking the same thing wrt to Jean (french) vs English Jean. Or Ariel (Hebrew).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I wonder if you ignored spelling what the results would be? ex: kodi, codi, cody, etc. all grouped together.

<comment><USER29> Not sure how helpful that data would be, considering you'd get groupings like Aaron/Erin, which are very gender-aligned names.

<comment><USER30> I know more males called Erin than females. It's a common Irish first name that has nothing to do with the name Aaron, it literally means Ireland.

<comment><USER29> The article is about the United States.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> > This [plot # 2] view wasn't very useful

I disagree. It shows that far more gender-neutral or boy names become significantly more popular as girl names, compared to the other way around. That's pretty interesting.

This conforms to the idea that a boy with a girl's name (or other girlish attribute) is bad, whereas a girl with a boy's name (or other boyish attribute) is not as bad, or is even good.

<comment><USER32> This happens to many things. Once something becomes female dominated, men steer clear. Clothing and fashion is another example. Heck even some sports are like that!

<comment><USER4> Like programming in the 40s & 50s?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I don't know whether it's a problem with my browser or the website, but the font rendering is really bad for this site.

<comment><USER34> Ubuntu Linux, I see the same on Chrome and Firefox.

The heights are wonky. Specifically for d, r, and u, and w.

Seems to work fine on other platforms.

<comment><USER35> The site is using a webfont "protection" technique that was mentioned in a comment here a couple months ago, see [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20708371](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20708371). It's a terrible idea.

<comment><USER36> Huh. I helped implement something similar on the site I work on, but for entirely user focused needs, without realising that it would be potentially problematic in certain renderers. Will have to check today, thanks for the heads up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I've never heard of, let alone met people with, many of these names. Kenyatta, Jael, Gentry, Aven, Daylin.

<comment><USER20> Just for your information : Kenya's 1st and current (4th) presidents are named Kenyatta. But they're the source of that name, anyway.

<comment><USER38> That's a last name though, not a first name.

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

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

<comment><USER20> If you are the first man to use a name, it matters less where you decide to put it, first or last.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> What's weird is that we don't get any sense of popularity, and a lot of the names here are not very popular spellings.

I suspect popularity would yield pretty different insights, especially if you could see more "sounds like" patterns.

For example, my name: Tristan, isn't on the list, but Tristyn is. Tristan is _much_ more common.

I found this site that also provides some insight that I think is the same SSA data, that's relatively easy to play with: [http://www.ourbabynamer.com/Tristan-name- popularity.html](http://www.ourbabynamer.com/Tristan-name-popularity.html)

Ratios of boys:girls in 2018:

\- Tristan 84:1 3833 total \- Tristyn 2:1 99 total

Similarly:

\- Austyn: 342 total, 1:3 b:g ratio \- Austin: 4778 total, 36:1 ratio

It's still interesting, and fun to dive into the different ways you can look at it. It's like, the more "uncommon" the mispelling, the more people are willing to switch gender, perhaps?

<comment><USER40> I think that in your examples "Austyn" and "Tristyn", the POINT of the "y" replacing "i" is to signal that the name is feminine. Namely, you're having a girl but want to name her Austin, but not have her be assumed to be male. Therefore, roughly 40% of the time you choose Austyn with a "y" (if my calculations from your ratio are right; 85 girls Austyn, 129 girls Austin).

<comment><USER39> Could be, but I don't think it holds that consistently in the U.S., which is where this data is from. I'd still guess the less common the spelling, the more likely it's gender neutral, regardless of "gender flags":

More popular, strongly feminine: [http://www.ourbabynamer.com/Sydney-name- popularity.html](http://www.ourbabynamer.com/Sydney-name-popularity.html)

Less popular, and used to be very popular male name, now mostly female: [http://www.ourbabynamer.com/Sidney-name- popularity.html](http://www.ourbabynamer.com/Sidney-name-popularity.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The prom king and queen at my high school had the first names Tracey and Tracy respectively. Paris is an interesting case as it is featured in Romeo and Juliet as a male name but seems to be mostly a female name now, at least in its Parris variant.

<comment><USER41> Long before Shalespeare, Paris is also a male in ancient Greek mythology. (No relation to the name of the city of Paris BTW.)

<comment><USER42> Meanwhile, to the Greeks, Troy was a city, but to us, a Chad.

<comment><USER43> I noticed that a lot of these unisex and gender-switching names are geographical in some way. Sydney, Chelsea, Austyn, Brighton, Raleigh, Milan. Also Native American tribes, like Lakota and Cree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I was just thinking about this the other night... my waitress's name was Leslie and I remember hearing that it had been predominantly a male name. Maybe that's not accurate, I didn't see it in the list. Regardless, it's interesting (but not surprising, really) to me that shifting masculine to feminine is way more common than vice versa. I wonder how universal that is across cultures.

<comment><USER45> It might depend on the spelling. In the UK, Leslie is a boy's name and Lesley is a girl's name, same pronunciation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I actually think the first chart is most telling. Since they are ordered by popularity, the names which had a visible male presence (Kelly, Kim, Riley, Avery) are what I would call 'switched'. Most people would have identified those as masculine at one point. Many of the others are too obscure to most Americans, so they would not have a preconceived gender attachment.

</comment><comment><USER46> As a man named "Lyndsy", this is interesting :)

I know much of the story of my name. I'm named after my great-grandfather, with first and middle names reversed. His middle name was "Lindsey", after his grandmother's maiden name. (... and back and back and back ...)

I named my eldest daughter Lynzy, to continue the tradition. I've apologized for her having to go through life with a "boy's name" :)

<comment><USER47> > I named my eldest daughter Lynzy, to continue the tradition.

And that's why I always ask patients how to spell their name, no matter how common it sounds...

<comment><USER46> Yep. I wouldn't have done that, but my own name varies from the historical spelling as well.

<comment><USER48> My wife is a Linsey; she jokes that her parents "couldn't afford the D".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> So what caused that very short spike in "Jaime" as a girls name? Looks like it might have occurred right around 1960.

<comment><USER50> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaime_Sommers_(The_Bionic_Wo...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaime_Sommers_\(The_Bionic_Woman\))

And this data suggests the spike is around the date of that show: [https://www.babycenter.com/baby-names- jaime-8765.htm](https://www.babycenter.com/baby-names-jaime-8765.htm)

<comment><USER51> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Lee_Curtis](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Lee_Curtis) also

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Something about US first names is always puzzling to me because there is a much larger space of names than what there is in Europe for example. Not even talking about exotic ones only. Names like "Justice" are pretty much unheard of in Europe.

<comment><USER43> What surprises me about American first names is how many sound like surnames to me: Harrison and Taylor are the two most famous examples, but I'm sure there are more.

<comment><USER53> That's because many of them are surnames. Parts of the US (namely the South) had/have a tradition of naming boys with their mothers' maiden names.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> At the risk of turning an innocent topic into a political discussion, I wonder how much of this trend can be explained by societal privilege. Ie, parents (consciously or subconsciously) want their daughters to benefit from appearing male (at least on paper) and so give them ambiguous or masculine names. And of course, the same parents would do the exact opposite for their sons, by not selecting any name that might be ambiguous in any way.

<comment><USER55> I disagree, I just think it's far easier for femininity to coop masculine concepts than the reverse. Just in my personal view, it can be seen as "cute" for a girl to have a masculine name which sort of juxtaposes their femininity against a previously masculine name.

Also in my experience, there is a lot more at stake for a young boy with a "girl's" name than for a young girl with a "boy's" name. Feel free to contradict me if you have the opposite experience. But I feel that boys would be teased much harder, and their masculinity would be called into question throughout their life simply based on their name.

<comment><USER56> I feel like you're agreeing with the previous poster: "masculinity would be called into question throughout their life", and "far easier for femininity to coop[t] masculine concepts than the reverse." That's exactly what the previous poster said.

(Check out the story of Steve Shirley for a computer-world related example.)

<comment><USER57> are we looking at the same post?

GP: girls can benefit from some aspects of male privilege (the parts where only a name is given) by taking a male name

parent: masculinity is more rigid in its ostracizing of feminine ideas

<comment><USER58> Those are facets of the same thing, one is just more narrow than the other. They certainly don't contradict each other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> I love how the article goes through a thought process while analyzing the data, and not just showing the final iteration (as many research papers tend to do).

</comment><comment><USER60> The Anglosphere is weird if you come from a culture with strongly established gendered name standards.</comment>


Ask HN: Are three years enough time to provide modified GPL'd source code? - <AUTHOR>

TL;DR Asked ZyXEL about my 3 year old router firmware source code and they gave me the finger.
Long story: Recently I asked ZyXEL to release the firmware source code of ZyXEL P-660HNU-F1 router which contains GPL'd software. I used the company online form to do this: http://www.zyxel.com/us/en/form/gpl_oss_form.shtml
I asked for the source code of the latest version of the firmware which is: 3.10(VBH.0)C0 This version is from Oct 9, 2011 which is more than 3 years old.
ZyXEL response was this:
Dear Sir/Madam:
Thank you for choosing ZyXEL products, and Sorry for inform you below messages. According to GPLv2 license terms (below black frame ) and ZyXEL policy that we will keep each firmware's Open Source Code at least three years. However, we released 3.10(VBH.0)C0 over three years , so we don't have open source code can provide for you.
Sorry for any inconvenience.
From my understanding, according to GPLv2 and GPLv3, you have to provide the source code if asked for at least 3 years since the last binary release.
The point is, are three years time enough to provide modifications from GPL´d code? They still provide the firmware, I don´t know if they still support the router. But I think that the GPL license should be updated in this regards. Source code should be provided over the Internet and as long as they provide the binary, they should provide the source code as well. And no body releases source code on a physical support...
Am I right? <comment><USER2> The 3 year is at the point of distribution, so each time they distribute the software to a person (ie, at the point of someone purchasing the router), they got give a written offer that is valid for 3 year from that point in time.

So saying that they released the software 3 years ago doesn't mean anything for staying in compliance with the license. It has to be 3 years since the router was sold to you.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right, I´m going to answer back. Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> Got a ftp link to download the firmware source code, it´s suuuper slow, but it´s working.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> GPL gives ZyXEL the _option_ of giving you, the customer, " _a written offer, valid for at least three years_ " to deliver the source code (option b in section 3 of the GPL). Did you get such an offer with your router? If not, then ZyXEL cannot have chosen this option which GPL gave them, and must, in theory, either not be in compliance with the license or have given the source code _with_ the router (option a). (Option c is only for noncommercial distribution.) If you _do_ have such an offer, is it still valid?

</comment><comment><USER4> To me, three years does not seem completely unreasonable. Sure they could do better, and may be a judge might decide they should. But if you want businesses to adopt GPL, then treating your situation as unfortunate but not malicious might be the better play in the long run.

If you aren't willing to lawyer up, then let it go or just Google up the software from elsewhere. Life will be better.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nothing in Google appears for this particular firmware/router. But I guess I can find the source code for recent/similar ZyXEL routers firmware.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I agree that the GPL is a little weak.

Notably, when it was first conceived, memories were much smaller, and it was difficult to ask embedding the sources in the same memory as the binary.

But nowadays, this could be a requirement, even bypassing the internet distribution requirement.

Nowadays, physical devices could have all their design files and source code embedded into them and easily accessible for ulterior maintainance.

</comment><comment><USER6> Where does this 3 years rule come from? IANAL but I never saw that in the text.

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old- licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html](http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old- licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html)

Section 3 b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,</comment></comment>


Reinventing the FPGA Programming Wheel - <AUTHOR> https://www.nextplatform.com/2017/11/30/reinventing-fpga-programming-wheel/ <comment><USER2> > _"The FPGA community has to figure out a way to be able to build on legacy, > on work that has come before rather than having to throw everything away and > start fresh with a new generation."_

What I said about the same sentiment a month ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15574074](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15574074)

</comment><comment><USER3> FPGAs are usually a better situational substitute for an ASIC than a CPU. Relative strengths of FPGAs:

* Complete control over pin assignments.

* Complete control over PLLs and clocks.

* Complete control over transitioning clock domains, and other timing characteristics, skew, etc.

* Convenient SoC features: DSP multipliers, SRAM, on chip flash memory, ADCs, etc. and the ability to run a soft core CPU on chip as a convenience and/or to give it direct access to various clock domains.

* All hardware features including all listed above are in-system programmable.

FPGAs are excellent glue, and the smaller sizes of MAX-10 (or equivalent) are cheap and have a small footprint. If you're doing hardware design that uses CPUs, adding an FPGA can vastly improve the flexibility of your design. They are great for interfacing to other dedicated chips. They also make good DSP chips, but if they strictly only did that they wouldn't be nearly as useful.

</comment><comment><USER4> Would it ever be possible to program an fpga to run your HTTP server? So you'd have hardware that was specially designed for your program. Deploying code would just be about reprogramming the FPGA.

<comment><USER5> It's not a good idea to think of "programming" an FPGA to do anything. You're creating dedicated hardware. You tell a CPU what to do, while you tell an FPGA what to _be_.

When you're faced with a problem and you catch yourself thinking, "I wish I had an ASIC for this," your problem may be a good candidate for FPGA implementation. If what you're itching for is a faster CPU, or one that costs less or uses less power, then it probably isn't.

FPGAs are vital for interfacing to high-bandwidth custom hardware -- at least for those who don't have ASIC budgets -- and they're also useful for certain types of "embarrassingly parallel" problems that GPUs aren't well-suited for, especially where precision timing requirements and low latency are involved.

So, while you wouldn't typically resort to FPGAs when you're implementing an ordinary HTTP server, you might want to use them to build a dedicated TCP/IP offload engine, packet filter, or even a specialized memory controller. They are never going to be mainstream parts, even to the extent GPUs are. If and when you need an FPGA in your project, you'll know it.

<comment><USER6> > You tell a CPU what to do, while you tell an FPGA what to be.

That is the shortest and best description for the difference I've ever read. Kudos. From now on I'll use it to answer questions about FPGAs for accelerating.

I used to tell people that you don't design algorithms but a network of operations and pipelines where you stream your data through.

<comment><USER7> It's a very common trope by FPGA enthusiasts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you're writing totally generic "hardware as a service" RTL, it's hard to imagine that you're saving $ relative to regular old fashioned CPUs.

</comment><comment><USER9> FPGAs just aren't that useful for most applications. (I like FPGAs, they're cool and they're fun, but they're niche for a reason.)</comment>


Haters Gonna Hate: The Argument Against Fanboys - <AUTHOR> http://blog.travisbloom.me/post/7435495743 <comment><USER2> What I don't understand about fanbois is how most of them have no skin in the game. It's OK to argue passionately about the merits of iOS if you designed and implemented it. It's a little weird when all you've done is paid $599 for a phone that uses it.

Define yourself by what you do, not what you've bought.

<comment><USER3> In what sense does a person who has just paid an engineer $599 for something "have no skin in the game"? Seems to me they have just anted up $599 worth of skin. Indeed, unless they return their new phone within a short period or the thing breaks under warranty, they're holding the bag. If they decide three months later that the phone sucks, it's not the engineer that feels sad. The engineer has made a profit.

There's an old saying about paying, pipers, and tunes that seems appropriate here.

<comment><USER2> Let's say the average iPhone user makes $100,000 a year. That means the $599 iPhone is about 0.599% of that person's income. If they work 40 hours a week, out of a total of 168 hours in a week, that means they spent 0.143% of their year working to get the phone. But the person who designed the phone spent 100% of their working _on_ the phone.

So the average user spent less time on the phone, and they didn't design the phone, they just gave AT&T a tiny bit of their money once a month.

<comment><USER4> Your analysis is silly. The iPhone is a status symbol, just like a BMW or Grey Goose. There are going to always be dumbasses identifying personally with these things in a vain search for self-esteem. In reality these people are a tiny minority with an age distribution skewing well under the age of full frontal-lobe development, but they make enough noise in forums that you'd think the fate of the world hinges on this bullshit.

<comment><USER5> Where you're wrong is in assuming this affliction is only with dumb people or a minority. We're status-seeking creatures, it affects us all. Of course to degrees, but it's not as if educated techies don't get into pointless flame wars all the time.

jrockway: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases>

<comment><USER4> Dumbass doesn't necessarily mean dumb. Lord knows i've participated in my fair share of flame wars, but I've grown more resistant to it as I've aged.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Can we purge the word "fanboy" from our collective lexicon?

I don't think I've seen a single discussion enriched by its use. It's just a catch-all insult, like the "fag" of the twenty-first-century tech scene.

(Don't even get me started on "fanboi")

<comment><USER7> Really? To me it pretty plainly sounds like a term reserved for people who are dogmatic adorers. Zealots if you will. That's a very specific meaning, and not catch-all at all.

<comment><USER8> Use the term zealot then, or something even milder (like "supporter"). The problem with a term like fanboy in a serious discussion is that it is heavily derogatory, and derogatory terms typically shut down debate.

<comment><USER5> Typically whenever people start throwing insults around, the debate has already shut down and people are just scoring points from the audience. The use of the zealot/fanboy insult is just to point that out to the audience in case they missed it, since someone can still be completely polite yet still a fanboy unwilling or unable to spout anything but their own set of talking points. So shutting down a discussion isn't necessarily due to the person who cast the first insult, and sometimes there wasn't one to start with.

It's the people who insist on being polite that you have to watch out for; you can be a lot meaner, with polite speech, than with derogatory speech.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I feel that gadgets can be a proxy for people to feel superior to each other like with cars, sports teams, and purses. I don't know what people hope to get out of arguing about it other than entertainment perhaps.

<comment><USER10> Skillful marketing encourages people to define themselves by the things they buy. Apple in particular is very good at this.

<comment><USER11> How does Apple encourage people to define themselves by the things they buy?

<comment><USER10> The "I'm a Mac" ads are probably the most glaringly obvious case. The iPod dancer ads are another example of marketing that revolves around selling an image and lifestyle. Everybody does this kind of thing, Apple just does it better than most.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Cap Theorem - <AUTHOR> https://distsys.substack.com/p/the-cap-theorem <comment><USER2> Very accessible summary of CAP.

The implications of this for cryptocurrencies are perhaps surprising to some:

[https://pjkundert.svbtle.com/holochain-currency-vs-global- co...](https://pjkundert.svbtle.com/holochain-currency-vs-global-consensus)</comment>


Way to Go: For humans between 5 and 105 - <AUTHOR> http://a-way-to-go.com/ <comment> josh-wrale This reminds me of the movie "Dead Man", which is a good thing I'd say.</comment>


Should i make this site for browsing pictures(auto scroller)? - <AUTHOR> http://phpspace.comule.com I'm looking for feedback THIS IS NOT A COMPLETE WEBSITE. It's just hosted on a free host, save/share and other buttons don't work.
Here is a sceenshot in case you break the (free) hosting:  http://i.imgur.com/vpIeG.png
The basic idea is that you have automatic scrolling of images and you can select a speed 1-5. <comment><AUTHOR> I'm looking for feedback THIS IS NOT A COMPLETE WEBSITE. It's just hosted on a free host, save/share and other button don't work.

Here is a sceenshot in case you break the (free) hosting:

<http://i.imgur.com/vpIeG.png>

The basic idea is that you have automatic scrolling of images and you can select a speed 1-5.</comment>


Texas schools punish students who refuse to be tracked with microchips - <AUTHOR> http://rt.com/usa/news/texas-school-id-hernandez-033/ <comment><USER2> Super simple: put the ID card in a microwave for a few 5-10 second bursts to disable the RFID circuitry. Every time you need to use the card just say "it doesn't work for me", and when they issue you a new card do it over and over. You "don't know" why it happens, but this makes it as much of a hassle for them as it is for you.

<comment><USER3> Or wrap it in tin foil for a poor-man's farady cage. You could do slightly better with one of those passport RFID shields if that didn't cut it. Whenever they want you to present it, happily do so and then put it back in its cage

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's important to note - the students aren't being "chipped" - instead, they are required to carry identification cards that have microchips in them.

I guess the ick factor comes down to how you feel about living in a surveillance society, and what you think forcing students to accept this type of continuous monitoring will do to them.

Students, in general, have fewer rights in a school, and are subject to search without due cause, so, from a legal perspective, not much leg to stand on.

I guess I'm kind of nonplussed about all this as I've carried an identification card/chip in every job I've worked at in Silicon Valley since 1996. The benefit has been 24x7 access to the office and all of it's equipments, servers, routers, whenever I wanted to go do work at the cost of the company knowing when I entered the building without tailgating someone (I've never worked at a company that required chipping out).

The RFID "distance" monitoring would be somewhat more annoying (if that's a function of this school system) - I'm not sure I'd be too keen on someone knowing my precise physical location on campus at all times, and being able to get a report on that - so I can see the resistance to that.

<comment><USER5> The problem is that they are required by law to go to the school, so it's not optional for them. In a job situation, you have the option of not working there.

<comment><USER6> On that same note people shouldn't allow their employees to have abusive practices. Carrying a keycard to get into a building is one thing, having a RFID scanner that logs every time I enter the kitchen or bathroom is another.

<comment><USER7> There are companies that do that, specially in tele marketing, call centers etc where they also track your time. Everytime you enter the kitchen, take a break, the time stops.. It starts when you are back at your desk.

<comment><USER8> Is that actually even legal? I think our labor laws might have a huge hole because they don't actually define what constitutes working time. Is there caselaw on the issue?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Obvious really. Kids aren't coming to school? Chip them and punish them if they don't carry their card or aren't where they're supposed to be. Much better than thinking about the long term and figuring out, oh I don't know, why they're not coming to school and fixing that.

There was an educator from the US speaking at a conference I was at last week, and it honestly felt like stealing her passport and return tickets so she couldn't go home would be a kind thing to do.

<comment><USER10> "stealing her passport and return tickets so she couldn't go home would be a kind thing to do."

A kind thing to do for her or for the students?

<comment><USER9> A kind thing for her :P Her sessions were excellent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Russia Today is an unreliable source to start with, and quoting worldNet Daily - famous mainly for conspiracy theories about Obama not being a Us citizen and for having a political opinion column by Chuck Norris - renders the story even less credible. Besides, even if it is all absolutely legit...

 _Hernandez said in an interview with Salon that subjecting herself to constant monitoring through an RFID chip is like being branded with the "mark of the beast" – a reference to the Bible's apocalyptic Book of Revelations._

...why should I give a hoot about people with such crackpot religious beliefs? We pander enough to this sort of nonsense already, and if the student finds it that objectionable maybe she should go to a private school instead. I am not a fan of the surveillance society, but given the staggeringly high truancy, dropout and incidence of gun crime on American high school campuses, trackable student IDs are low on the list of things to worry about.

<comment><USER12> I instantly question hardcore when I see the story is from RT, personally.

<comment><USER13> [http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/09/rfid-chip- student-m...](http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/09/rfid-chip-student- monitoring/)

As a Texan, I think it is ridiculous to spend millions on a technology "solution" just to get more funding. Why would you want kids in class that don't want to be there? Money would be better spent on actually educating the kids that do attend than tracking kids that don't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I guess nobody has told kids about what adults do with their grocery store loyalty cards: randomly trade them with other people so the data becomes less useful.

Also, which RFID technology are they using? The readers look like Octopus card readers. (Which is FeLiCa-based.) I doubt the claim that the cards are "always broadcasting" and that designing a practical remote RFID reader is much more difficult than "parents" imagine. But even the federal government put some privacy provisions into the RFID passports, so you'd think that the same courtesy could be extended to high school students too.

<comment><USER15> Trading loyalty cards with an acquaintance, when combined with credit card payment information, yields relationship data. That's just giving them _more_ information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I really dislike how Americans seem to treat children as chattel.

</comment><comment><USER17> What, aren't the teachers able to determine who's present anymore? How large are the classes in this school?

All the other potential use-cases such as payment for lunch, logging onto computer systems, identification etc sounds useful. Tracking attendance sounds very misguided though. I didn't go to class a lot and whenever I did show up I caused a ruckus (yea yea, I know... but back then I thought it was hilarious). I don't think anyone's situation would have improved if somebody made me tag in and out of classrooms or globally punished me...

<comment><USER18> What's even more misguided is that using it for attendance is going to enable skipping class not enforce it. There's nothing preventing Student A from carrying both his ID and Student B's while Student B skips class. Not only will Student B succeed in skipping class, they get get an alibi as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Little Brother anyone? I've always told people that book is hyperbolic but good anyway; seems like that might not be the case :/

</comment><comment><USER20> This seems ripe for a good hack, maybe harvest ID fingerprints via war driving and stationary scanners and then post the creepiest mapping mashups the law allows?

Bonus points if the scanning is pulled off with drones flying in public airspace.

<comment><USER20> The school district's FAQ [1] seems a bit glib regarding the anonymity of the cards:

 _Q.1 Could someone manufacture a copy of a WGA RFID reader and use it to intercept information transmitted by student RFID tags?

A.1 WGA has approached this as an issue of system architecture. By ensuring that the "smart" ID contains no information of interest to anyone, WGA has simultaneously removed any motive for cloning its reader and removed any problem if someone does clone its reader._

[1] <http://www.nisd.net/studentlocator/faq>

<comment><USER21> _By ensuring that the "smart" ID contains no information of interest to anyone_

Surely that would involve making it not work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> _Hernandez said in an interview with Salon that subjecting herself to constant monitoring through an RFID chip is like being branded with the "mark of the beast" – a reference to the Bible's apocalyptic Book of Revelations._

This sounds like the root cause of the protests. Students and parents aren't complaining about the idea of just having to carry an ID card like a license. They are complaining about the RFID aspect of the card. They just have some superstitious fear of technology. There was a similar panic by crackpots when barcodes came out because barcodes were also thought to be the "Mark of the Beast"

 _"Using this information along with an RFID reader means a predator could use this information to determine if the student is at home and then track them wherever they go. These chips are always broadcasting so anyone with a reader can track them anywhere,"_

Anyone want to bet those same students have Google Latitude, Twitter+geolocation, or some similar app on their smartphones?

</comment><comment><USER23> I really hate this concept. If the education so poor that students REALLY don't want to be there, is the solution to make school become even more like a prison?

The whole education sphere really needs a large revolution. I'm not sure of the answer, but I bet there is a startup waiting to happen here.

<comment><USER8> No, there is not a startup business waiting to happen and make profits off the provision of a universal public good to people without much money.

<comment><USER23> I'm not so sure this is true, although it is the standard thought of public education as a public good.

I seem to remember homeschooling being a rare thing when I was younger, but now it's at 2..9%(0). I heard a story the other day about a service that allows teachers to sell their curriculum (1), so there is definitely a sphere here that's available. I think that, although RT is horribly biased, the premise that _coercing_ children to stay in class isn't a net positive for society in any sense; instead, make education a good that children _want_, and we'll likely see the entire provision system improve.

Forcing consumption of the same good on people is surely going to be net negative for society, even if that good is deemed by society to be important.

\--- (0) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling_in_the_United_Sta...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling_in_the_United_States) (1) [http://www.kansascity.com/2012/10/11/3862033/teachers- make-m...](http://www.kansascity.com/2012/10/11/3862033/teachers-make-money- selling-materials.html)

<comment><USER8> I'm actually 100% against compulsory schooling, but we do need to acknowledge that homeschooling is a phenomenon of those either so wealthy they can hire specialists or keep a parent out of the workplace.

<comment><USER23> Unless a neighbor can homeschool ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Since it is so easy to game card-based check-ins, I'm sure the teachers still have to verify attendance. Also, if a student's card isn't working, they have to be able to count that student as in attendance. I wonder how much time this actually saves.

There has been quite a bit of push-back to the use of RFID specifically. My college used magstripe cards. They're not quite as robust, but they do need physical contact to read the information. It seems like a fair trade-off considering that these are a) kids and b) they are legally required to be at school (and by extension, school policies carry some force of law).

<comment><USER21> Also, there is a serious issue with the security of radio tags in general as they are so susceptible to cloning and spoofing - <http://cq.cx/proxmark3.pl>

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> > to stem the rampant truancy devastating the school's funding

So truancy is a part of lack of funding? There's something wrong with that picture. Texas needs to fix that issue before trying to act all fascist on their students.

</comment><comment><USER26> All of the Orwellian fear of big data in this thread needs to go away. I can't wait for the day when I don't have to watch 50 shitty ads for stuff I don't need whenever I watch a sporting event or something; present me with ads as I desire the product.

Shitty ads- the ultimate market failure

</comment><comment><USER27> How is this tracking? It's an rfid tag with the serial number on it so that they can scan it to bring up the person in their computer system to do things like pay for lunch, vote in student elections, and scan them when entering a classroom for attendance. I seriously don't understand how this is an evil tracking microchip. Most companies already use these for building access, so I don't see why using it for simple things at school is insane; it isn't a GPS chip, it just gives a serial number when scanned... this isn't some kind of dangerous chip.

<comment><USER28> The article explains that someone (a member of Texans for Accountable Government) filed a FOIA request and got the addresses of all the students. From that a little wardriving will give you recognizable RFID tags so you can at least tell if the child is in the home, or in any given location.

Is that unlikely? Yes, very.

You know what I think is more unlikely? Someone actually sneaking into in a case where this ID card would keep them out. I can't imagine a single reason students couldn't just punch a number to do all of those things, and save the school system money that could be better spent on any number of things.

<comment><USER27> Did her FOIA request involve the serial numbers of the IDs? Or just a request for all the students in the school? The article doesn't specify. RT is a hugely biased news source that tries anything to get bad press on the US, so I don't trust it as a reliable source.

<comment><USER28> If you have someone's address and an RFID reader, and they have an RFID chip, then what do you need the RFID serial number for? If you're already reading, then just go to their house and scan. If you get multiple, then go again during the day when you expect them to be at school.

That will get the vast majority.

And yes, I totally get that RT has no problem pushing bullshit; I agree. Doesn't mean we should discount it completely. We could miss a chance to improve.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Couldn't they just give the cards to students with truancy problems?

<comment><USER5> I think they need the cards to identify who those students are.

<comment><USER29> But if refusing to wear them is an option with few consequences (or, more specifically, few consequences a delinquent student would care about) then do the ID tags really accomplish that goal? Consider that the alternative is simply having the teachers do a $0 roll call before each class.

Indeed, ID cards seem like they might make identification more difficult, as they would allow unscrupulous students to trade tags and make it seem that their friends were in places that they were not.

<comment><USER30> _$0 roll call before each class._

That's about a $10 roll call, even if you assume the children's time and education is valueless. (Assumption: you can complete it in only 10% of the instructional time per day, teachers have a fully loaded cost of approximately $100 an hour.) The school would, quite literally, spend thousands of dollars _a day_ on roll calls.

<comment><USER31> You think roll call takes 5 minutes? If students have assigned seating, checking attendance takes <30 seconds.

When you choose an appropriate data structure, the efficient algorithm (distributed seat finding + visual glance) is simple to implement :-)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Spideroak debuts Crypton, framework for end-to-end encrypted cloud applications - <AUTHOR> https://crypton.io/ <comment><USER2> Interesting project, but if this page is for developers, I think there should be less text and more code in it. If the idea is to make it dead simple to host opaque content, the second paragraph should say "it's this simple!" with a 10 line code sample for this project's hello world equivalent (a simple backup service, for instance).

And if this is supposed to be a generic framework, I think the FAQ should jump straight to the problems inherent in this type of generic solution. For instance "How do we give you sorted results to queries if everything is encrypted?"

<comment><USER3> Great question!

The fast and very technical answer is that you get search results on encrypted data by making liberal use of the cheap containers to automatically save indexes as the data is modified. But note how our timeline includes the Object Database having advanced features (save triggers, derived objects like indexes) that do this for you. (Full text search and similar features.)

Note also that we built this in about 3 weeks so it's minimal, but will grow fast. See the timeline section on the site.

For code examples, look in the GitHub checkout under client/examples. For understanding the server's data structures, look at server/lib/stores/postgresql/setup.sql.

Thanks for your interest!

<comment><USER4> I'd like to see some way to combine public-key crypto (receiving and encrypting incoming unencrypted mail, received over starttls) with periodic mail indexes built on the client, so you could search a server-hosted encrypted mailbox.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is interesting, but I think they make some incorrect assumptions. For instance, people won't use Evernote for most stuff, and then a more-secure app for specific things -- they'll either use Evernote and accept the security weakness, for everything, or find something marginally less easy to use or more expensive, but much more secure, and use that for everything. The issue is exactly how much less easy to use vs. how much more secure, and how much users care about each.

</comment><comment><USER5> The only problem here is that because the Javascript is delivered by the server which is supposedly offering privacy from itself, nothing is stopping the developers from simply changing the Javascript and stripping away the encryption through either capturing keys or not applying it in the first place.

see: <http://www.matasano.com/articles/javascript-cryptography/>

<comment><USER6> Javascript replacement is a problem with every single scheme that relies on the browser being an active participant.

I know this because I designed such a scheme and it was hilariously, fantastically broken.

<comment><USER7> Do you think this can be remedied by moving the code out of the web container?

Cryptocat moved away from delivering its crypto code over JS to a browser plugin: [http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2012/07/30/cryptocat-...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2012/07/30/cryptocat- increases-security-in-move-away-from-javascript-encryption/)

Do you think a dedicated native client would work? Something like a lightweight site-specific browser with Crypton libs. The same way you can appify sites with Chrome.

<comment><USER6> > _Do you think this can be remedied by moving the code out of the web > container?_

That's what I did in my own design. My protocol's purpose is different from cryptocat's, but the problem that in-browser javascript is untrustworthy is the same.

I designed my protocol so that it needn't be embedded in the browser at all -- or for that matter, piggybacked on HTTP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hello -- cofounder of SpiderOak here. We're at a launch event during RSA so responses will be slow, but I'll check back here later. Thanks for your interest!

<comment><USER8> I didn't quite understand what was unique about the application of crypto in your product. I had assumed from the headline it was a productized homomorphic encryption, but at least at first glance I'm thinking it is more a productized implementation of a key-value store with records encrypted client side. Is that correct?

<comment><USER3> Close. It's not a key value store, but rather an object database (with design goals similar to ZODB[1])

You can use an Object DB like a key value store, but there's a much richer feature set available.

You can also share objects securely with other users of the application for building multi user collaborative apps.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zope_Object_Database>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Upfront, I'll say that I'm not a particularly good crypto person.

For my honours project I developed a scheme for tracking users as they visited websites, with a design goal that _I_ , with the tracking servers, can identify users -- but that _publishers_ cannot. Or at least, they can't by intercepting anything sent as part of the tracking protocol.

I relied in part on javascript running in a browser. That doesn't work. It seems that so far the Crypton team are going to spend about 50% of their time explaining yes-it's-javascript-no-it's-not-all-in-the-browser.

Anyhow, any time you have code running the browser, it's unsafe against a malicious publisher. Your first instinct is "I'll serve my js files over HTTPS", which is lovely, except that in the browser execution everything can be found, introspected and _replaced_ by javascript sent by the publisher.

This particular problem totally breaks the design I came up with. I didn't realise it at the time. Luckily there's no requirement to submit a secure protocol to get good marks, so I got a degree anyhow.

Subsequently I rewrote the tracking protocol multiple times, each time sending it for review by A Well Known Crypto Expert You've Heard Of. Each time he would pick holes in it. This went on for about 3 months. After this long process I managed to arrive back at a protocol that meets my original goals: track users without revealing to publishers who they are (unless the user wants their identity to be revealed). It's currently sitting in Geneva somewhere, waiting for a patent examiner to take a look.

Edit: Wait, that sounds kinda threatening out of context. It's not meant to be. Crypton has a _very_ different use case in mind from me.

<comment><USER9> I get the feeling this is more of an example client written in js. Look more to the server and its API rather than how client implementations are served.

<comment><USER6> I've spelunked the code a bit, but I am having trouble determining what is running where (JS is not really my bag). Even the stuff in the client/src subdirectory has server-like parts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My wish is for something like this to be provided as a service. I want to be able to write a collaborative, multi-user web app without having to run any servers and without having any access to my users' data. The way desktop apps used to be, except I want my users to be able to share data with each other easily. I also would like my users to have flexibility to choose between data providers (or even run their own), so their data is never held hostage.

<comment><USER11> Hey, I'm one of the developers working on the project. The possibility of "Crypton as a Service" is something we've been thinking about since we started working on this. It's coming soon, but we've been busy getting the fundamentals out - watch for the client SDK which will hook up to a SpiderOak- hosted Crypton server.

For a good (though hastily assembled) example of a client-side demo, check out [https://github.com/SpiderOak/crypton/tree/master/client/exam...](https://github.com/SpiderOak/crypton/tree/master/client/examples/diary)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Something I thought I'd understood, but now clearly don't: Does Spideroak roll its own cryptography code, or does it leverage an existing, accepted, and open library?

<comment><USER3> The crypto specs for the SpiderOak backup/sync product are here: <https://spideroak.com/engineering_matters>

Crypton is an entirely new project in early stages. It's not production. It hasn't had any security review. We only started it a few weeks ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why do so few projects use SJCL? Whenever I see a project like this I always have my fingers crossed that they will be using sjcl but it never pans out.

<comment><USER11> We evaluated several libraries (all JS crypto libraries we could find actually - there aren't many) and CryptoJS suited our needs the best. Specifically, it includes PBKDF2 and CFB mode for AES which SJCL doesn't have right now.

We have encountered subtle problems with the CryptoJS API, and we plan on giving back and writing a JS crypto library using the lessons we've learned from this project.

<comment><USER13> What is wrong with sjcl's PBKDF2?

[https://github.com/bitwiseshiftleft/sjcl/blob/master/core/pb...](https://github.com/bitwiseshiftleft/sjcl/blob/master/core/pbkdf2.js)

It looks like there will be no CFB in sjcl:

<https://github.com/bitwiseshiftleft/sjcl/issues/7>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> How does this relate or compare to homomorphic encryption technologies?

<comment><USER15> It actually has a chance of working.

<comment><USER16> What makes you say homomorphic encryption doesn't have a chance of working? I grant you that it will be at least 15 years before a commercially viable homomorphic encryption product is released, but to say it has no chance of working is silly. My research advisor likes to tell a story of his friend going to see Rivest give some of the first lectures on RSA circa 1977. All the systems people in the room laughed at the naivete of this young cryptographer and his hope that such an absurdly slow encryption method would gain widespread adoption.

<comment><USER15> I suspect Crypton is for people writing apps now, not 15 years from now. Who knows what moral panic we'll be getting worked up about in 2025?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I looked through the doc a bit but didn't see an answer.

Can someone explain the key management strategy? Is there any key escrow? What happens if someone loses their computer / mobile device?

<comment><USER18> We form a hierarchy of keys to unlock the various data contexts in the system. At the lowest level, we store keys for payload data on the server, encrypted to the user's public RSA key (and in the case of shared data, the public keys of any other users who have access to read the payload).

Each user's private RSA key is stored on the server, encrypted to an outer- level key that only ever exists in memory. This outer-level key is derived from the user's password using PBKDF2. This arrangement means that when a user loses their computer, or simply wants to access data from another device, their password is all they need to know to decrypt the whole chain.

We also use a zero-knowledge proof to establish that the user knows their password before sending the ciphertext of their keychain to their client, or otherwise access the system.</comment></comment>


Bob Ross's Strange Afterlife - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/04/fashion/mens-style/bob-ross-the-joy-of-painting.html <comment><USER2> I wasn't raised in the states, so the first time I watched Bob Ross was when twitch hosted the marathon. The painting process felt so surreal - I was witnessing an act of creation, the birth of a painting from blank canvas, yet at the same time I was the painter, deconstructing the painting in to mechanical techniques. I guess there is something unique about Bob Ross.

On a side note, in some sense coding is like painting, other than the fact that mistakes in programs are certainly not happy.

<comment><USER3> The craziest thing about his work is that it looks like nonsense for a few strokes and then suddenly _pop_ it turns into a mountain or river or something.

My understanding is he was self taught, and his technique is mostly his, it's fantastic that he decided to teach it to anybody willing to tune in.

<comment><USER4> The technique isn't mostly his, the article explains this

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's the final episode after the initial run on twitch.tv, along with chat reaction.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pHNhQGcXxs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pHNhQGcXxs)

</comment><comment><USER6> Another great posthumous reference to Ross is the character based on him in this episode / scene from Boondocks:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dhn_TAbvSH8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dhn_TAbvSH8)

</comment><comment><USER7> NYT and/or Wired and/or HuffPo writes an article about every retro Internet fad. This is how the Internet works. Since its globally connected, fads get much larger much faster than fads of the pre-Internet age.</comment>


The return of Client side windows (2009) - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2009/06/12/the-return-of-client-side-windows/

<comment><USER2> Interesting, but ... why?</comment>


Tau.js ( τ = 2π ) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/feisty/tau

<comment><USER2> I will be the one:

Why? :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Tau helps to simplify many formulas commonly employed when developing games and other graphical apps.

See The Tau Manifesto[1] for a better explanation.

[1] [http://tauday.com/tau-manifesto](http://tauday.com/tau-manifesto)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Trackett - Simple Amazon price tracking - <AUTHOR> http://trackett.com

<comment><USER2> I can't find a way to click through to Amazon. That's losing you affiliate revenue and annoying me as a visitor. Might be worth doing!

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, yes. It's the title of the product. I'll do that when I get back from work. Thank you for your feedback! (SSH keys are at home. Damn and blast!)</comment></comment>


Microsoft Flight Simulator maps entire globe with AI - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-53811956 <comment><USER2> Before anyone gets excited and goes to buy the game outright:

First: Please consider trying out the game via the Xbox Game Pass for PC program instead. $5/month, $1 for the first month instead of buying it outright. Do remember to cancel. Thank me later.

Second: The whole download/install experience is a trip. You need to download about ~90 GB of data (no problem!). However, the downloader is abysmal. It's not optimized for throughput at all, each (often small) file is individually downloaded and then uncompressed in sequence. Is this 1997? My favorite bug: if you minimize the download window it starts using 100% of the GPU. This is kind of indicative of what you'll experience later on - that special kind of randomness that stems from developer incompetence. Most people (including me) seem to need to restart the whole thing a couple of times. Loads of people are simply stuck at the download step.

Third: Loading times with this game are insane. It can take a minute or two (with a very fast 6-core CPU, 1 Gbit/s network connection, M.2 SSD, etc) to load the main menu, because it seems to download the scenery for the stuff that is vaguely visible in the background scenery every time. Then another minute or two for actually getting started with your flight. And when going back from flight mode to the main menu: yeah, another 1-2 mins.

Fourth: When you actually get to start the aircraft:

\- There are loads of bugs that cause insane FPS drops/frameskips.

\- There currently seems to exist an issue that causes FPS slowdowns _when the Azure-based geometry servers are slow_. Did they do blocking networking in the same thread as the rendering? :) No idea, but the propblem is for for real. The typical FPS is higher when fewer people are playing. All of those gorgeous youtube videos you've seen from before the launch? Yeah, those are no longer representative. Also, I think most of them have been carefully edited. There are just way too many random FPS and frame skipping bugs abound. It's a mess.

I recommend looking at a recorded live stream (from recent days) to get a better understanding of the simulation performance.

(I've spent maybe 6 hours with MSFS2020 so far.)

Fifth: This is a very complicated application. There is no documentation.

Sixth: I'm running on a GTX 1070 with 8 GB of video memory, so sadly I can only run this at 1080p. When everything is working perfectly it's kinda smooth - about 40 fps. Most of the time though, something is causing a severe FPS slowdown, so closer to 5-10 fps. It's all kind of random. It seems like most of these issues are bugs, rather than the hardware meeting actual limitations. Changing the display quality (ultra/high/etc doesn't really impact these random variations in FPS much.)

Seventh: The in-game credits start with this sequence: DESIGN, UI DEVELOPMENT, PROGRAMMING. Maybe I'm being overly sensitive here, but to me this order could sort of explain why this disaster shipped in its current form.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. So many insane bugs.

Most infuriating of all: The constant social media spam about how this is fantastic. Talk of framerate issue issues/slowdowns/bugs is constantly downvoted e.g. on reddit.

Anyone thinking about getting this game should first read through [https://www.reddit.com/r/MicrosoftFlightSim/comments/ic3o90/...](https://www.reddit.com/r/MicrosoftFlightSim/comments/ic3o90/bugs_issues_megathread/?sort=new)

Of course there are also many positive aspects of this app/game. I just wanted to bring attention to what I think should have been showstopper issues.

<comment><USER3> According to many long-time flight simmers, the performance of this title is about the same as previous ones, with the addition of 10x improved graphics. So that's why they don't care and you're getting downvoted on Reddit.

PS: It's a next gen game built for the future in mind, GTX 1070 is basically outdated. Expect to require a 3xxx series graphics card for good performance.

<comment><USER2> This game has been marketed to a much, much wider crowd with a massive online media campaign. So it needs to work. It doesn't.

(Also 3xxx series cards aren't released yet.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> With some hilarious results:

[https://i.imgur.com/hpNfPtZ.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/hpNfPtZ.jpg)

Notice the little porches added by the AI. It's actually impressive how good the 3D models turned out.

<comment><USER5> What is the explanation of what happened there?

<comment><USER6> It can be OpenStreetMap again (like the obelisk).

There's a tag for museum aircraft, 'historic=aircraft', but the tiles rendered for openstreetmap.org don't show it, so people add a tag saying it's also a building.

It's only a theory, I haven't correlated a picture from the game with matching data.

Here's an example from the USS Intrepid: [https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/277980026](https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/277980026)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Lots of folks here saying "it's impressive but..."

The game was probably released faster than what one would expect from a super polished title, but the game is still extraordinary. The visuals are superb, the detail is spectacular (I can see my real house with our pool as I fly over), the mechanics are incredible for a base flight simulator (lots of stuff you'd normally pay extra via addons for), and the game has been out less than a week.

They're going to make the game better, and if you're into flight simulators it's a super easy purchase.

I went into this week with high expectations and my expectations were greatly exceeded.

<comment> saiya-jin > if you're into flight simulators

I think this will be a problem a bit - apart from initial WOW effect, not that many people are into civilian flying. Its way too complex for casual gamers and learning curve is almost vertical, you need ultra-expensive hardware (how many want to spend 1000s in covid times?) and to be honest, non-combat realistic flight sims are really not for everybody, I would say not for most gamers.

People rave about details, but plenty of places look on similar level as if I would take google earth's built in flight sim - I am talking about what I've seen around Mont Blanc, not exactly a remote place. Yes, few more nicer buildings and slightly more detail, but that's hardly enough for non-geeks.

Sorry to sound so pessimistic, it is a fantastic game in its own tiny little niche and I am sure most issues will be resolved over time, I just think nowadays that niche is pretty small and won't expand that much because its not something that's easy to grasp and have fun quickly.

<comment><USER8> I will agree that it's definitely a niche and not everybody likes it, that said you really don't need thousands of dollars of gear to enjoy it. The breadth of controller support is actually one of the most incredible aspects of the game to me - Basically everything is supported including an Xbox One controller. I've actually used the gamepad a little bit and it was a perfectly enjoyable experience. I think you would get more out of it with some more specialised gear. For less than 100 bucks you can get a perfectly good joystick and yoke combo that will give you quite a bit of depth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This game has been a ton of fun for me. The load times are annoying, but it runs well for me most of the time on my two-years-ago-it-was-high-end PC (6th gen i7, 1080 not-TI, m.2 drive, 16Gb RAM). I managed to find my 10 year old flight stick from when I played FSX and thats been great as apparently this game has caused a flight stick shortage. I would recommend people try it out, I have not encountered any game-breaking bugs (except for maybe the rudder control being weird but that could be the aforementioned flight stick). My recommendation is lower the sensitivity way, way down. I have mine at -60% on all axes. Medium graphics look pretty good too.

</comment><comment><USER10> The results are super iffy, if your area matches the designed solution it's great otherwise you are in for the weird version of the place. Which seems par for the course with these AI based solutions. There's some obvious funny issues that have cropped up in the media but in general the results are mediocre from the perspective of actually representing places you know. Iceland for example has a loooooot of trees and the height data is just bizarre in a lot of cases.

It is however much better than anything that has previously existed and as long as you squint a bit and accept the flaws it's great fun.

</comment><comment><USER11> I don't have Flight Simulator, but someone on Facebook posted a screenshot of a friend's house in a suburban area in Florida, and I duplicated the image in Google Earth. It's just one data point, but here's what I noticed.

\- The water looks better in Flight Simulator. A large pond has ripples and reflections in Flight Simulator but it's just flat in Google Earth.

\- Trees and houses look better in Google Earth. Flight Simulator put trees in the middle of a house and in the middle of a street, and they seem a bit more crumply.

\- Neither one gets palm trees right. On a major road with palm trees next to it, Flight Simulator turned them into green stalagmites and Google Earth didn't model them at all, leaving them as flat shadows on the ground.

It seems like if you like good-looking water or clouds (which Google Earth barely has) then Flight Simulator would be better, and obviously clouds are important for flight simulation. But if you just want to see the sights, Google Earth is pretty good and Flight Simulator isn't necessarily going to model things better.

<comment><USER3> Half the point is the delay of gratification. If you want to see the different islands of Hawaii, there will be some downtime while you're cruising. The tension starts building once you get closer and closer, until you finally get to see the absolutely epic view.

Comparing Google Earth vs Flight Sim is the same as watching 3D images of hiking trail end points vs actually walking through the trail.

<comment><USER11> I guess, but in practice, wouldn't you speed up the simulation for the boring parts? Can't you put the plane wherever you want and start flying?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> How long would it take to model out the entire world in reasonable detail? Something similar to open world games such as GTA V?

<comment><USER13> It'd be kind of amazing if GTA 6 was using this kind of tech to create its open world environment when it releases.

Sadly though, I expect it will need to have a free to play mode with micro transactions to support the ongoing investment into keeping the infrastructure up for delivering the open world imaging.

<comment><USER14> Considering GTA V has made literally billions of dollars I doubt they'll need any free to play mode.

<comment><USER15> "Making lots of money" does not seem to suppress companies from trying to make more money. See, Apple and App Store.

<comment><USER16> I think their point was that GTA 5 was not free-to-play and still made billions. It could be sold at full price up until 6 releases and then 6 could be sold at full price for years and people will still be interested.

<comment> jon-wood GTA 5 has an interesting revenue model, the game itself has to be bought, and you can play all the single player with just that. Once you get into multiplayer it's much of a free to play model, with the usual choice of grinding through to acquire resources or just paying real money for in game money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Can I ask a different question, putting the scenery apart, is it a decent flight sim?

<comment><USER12> It's probably the best flight sim to date. I see huge potential for addons to leverage the map data. Perhaps an arcade mode to make it more accessible to casual gamers.

<comment><USER18> Overall maybe, but I'd say the jury's out on the flight model vs X-Plane, and it (currently) doesn't model airliner systems quite to the level of the payware X-plane airbuses or the Zibo boeing. It really crushes X-Plane on weather currently.

<comment><USER19> X-Plane's flight model is unquestionably better.

<comment><USER20> I think that is very questionable.

X-Plane handles some edge cases better for sure, like stall/spin.

The _feel_ of MSFS is much much much more real... like how there's always a little bit of turbulence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The cities they picked to hand model are bizarre as hell. Major ones like London and Paris are missing but completely unknown ones are in.

<comment><USER22> London and Paris have fairly uninteresting airspaces from an aviation standpoint. Flat, not many airports. If sightseeing is your thing, there are better ways.

I wonder if it's based on usage from previous versions of Flight Simulator.

<comment><USER23> I'd say the approaches into Heathrow (as least on westerlies) are pretty iconic, being that they tend to turn final over central London.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I wish this game launched with xCloud. I understand that simulation enthusiast won't be interested in that but for many people like me who don't want to worry about streaming and storing all that world data, as well as people not having enough resources to run the game it would be the perfect opportunity to try game streaming.

<comment><USER25> I think, it's down to the Xbox version not being available yet. I'm sure once it's out, it'll be available through xCloud.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I feel like Microsoft needs to take this a step further and just put the simulation on the server too.

Considering their current global footprint (latency) and the fact that the game already requires a massive amount of always-on bandwidth, it would seem like this is a less painful conversation in this case.

</comment><comment><USER27> I've been watching a few unboxing videos on youtube where MS has sent influencers a box with the Deluxe Premium Ed (comes with 10 DVDs for install) with full HOTAS controls.

(Even after the install there's a 19g download update.)

I wonder if everyone who gets one has a system with the specs to run it?

<comment><USER28> I have an 8 year old workstation as a gaming PC, with a 3GB GTX 1060, and a 2.5" HDD as a data drive, and it works fine for me on medium graphics at 1080p.

<comment><USER27> Yeah, I'd only seen a spec list from a guy playing max setting on 4K.

But he was on a brand new stupid level hardware PC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> To be honest, I expected the AI to be a lot better and nuanced. It's good enough but does not catch a lot of things who should be obvious based on satellite and street view data. I think the google data would be a better source than bing but I understand the issue there.

</comment><comment><USER30> I think this is a quite impressive piece of tech, especially the AI generated landscape, flora and fauna. Of course there is always a gap to 100% accuracy, this is the case with every AI model I know, no matter what domain. I wonder how they measure accuracy here?

</comment><comment><USER31> Microsoft Flight Simulator's (69,99€) AI is so good they'll charge you not to use it!

The Deluxe Edition (89,99€) includes everything from Microsoft Flight Simulator plus 5 additional highly accurate planes with unique flight models and 5 additional handcrafted international airports.

The Premium Deluxe Edition (119,99€) includes everything from the Microsoft Flight Simulator Deluxe edition plus 5 additional highly accurate planes with unique flight models and 5 additional handcrafted international airports.

<comment><USER8> Or, you can pay $1 and use it for one month via xbox game pass for PC, or $5 if you've already used the $1 offer in the past.

I'd strongly recommend this if you're not very sure you'll like the game.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I wish I had a PC powerful enough to run it. It sounds amazing looking at all the memes.

</comment><comment><USER33> I think they must be release a map/navigation app by using this data.

<comment><USER10> It's based on Bing so it already exists.</comment></comment>