Muse: designing a studio for ideas - <AUTHOR> https://www.inkandswitch.com/muse-studio-for-ideas.html <comment><USER2> Starting to feel the fact Apple decided tablets should be siloed from traditional computing is really just starting to hurt development in these areas.

There is some great work here but also you see things like the web clipper, it's already accepting that research web browsing is best done on a computer so then because of the tablet silo they need to create custom tech and run servers just to get the content from two devices next to each other. If Apple had a tablet Macbook you'd just be dragging and dropping from the browser to Muse.

When Microsoft launched their Surface line, I and many others joked that is was the wrong direction but as the years pass it's starting to feel more and more absurd to me that my tablet workspace and my workstation workspace are two incompatible operating systems.

If Apple hadn't been so strict and had a laptop line similar to the Surface as well as the iPad, does anyone seriously think anyone would be pursuing software like this in the locked down tablet OS when they could be doing both streams of work on the one device instead.

<comment><USER3> I agree with your thoughts on siloing being a poor decision by Apple, but I see nothing here that couldn't already be done all on device using existing APIs.

Apple already added drag & drop between apps, you can drag text/images from safari straight into notes (or any app that implements drag/drop.) The web clipper could be implemented as a safari extension and work in a nearly identical way.

<comment><USER4> Agree with this comment.

It also (superficially) appears they haven't studied deeper (more academic, research or UX driven) prior art. It's easy to beat Preview or PDF Expert. Harder to surpass the more innovative examples.

In particular, there's a lot of depth in Liquid Text:

[https://www.liquidtext.net](https://www.liquidtext.net)

But also a couple of the infinite canvas note anything apps, especially ones that also bring in audio recording or other 'mixed media' while covering swaths of the thinking outlined here.

Finally, there's an irony that all the video embeds on this article are disabled on my iPad Pro. Do they even iPad?

<comment><USER5> They mention Liquid Text being an inspiration

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am in completely favour of spatial solutions, but sooner or later you hit the problem that the graph of associations don't map well to 2D unless you denormalize it (like in databases). Which just means if you want to reference an item in multiple places you have to duplicate them and you loose the link between them.

The solution for Muse would be to not put the item in the drawer but the whole area around it as well. Then when you paste it back somewhere you create a wormhole in the space that shows the original place now in a different context. This way you can keep the intuitive zooming and panning and see duplicated areas that update properly.

To be fair there are already some ways they try to solve this with their point style wormholes or the "expand and edit content on the drawer" interaction, but I think they should fully embrace that thought space is not linear.

<comment><AUTHOR> MindScope on iOS allows an item to be duplicated in different trees, enabling multiple entry points to the children of that item.

EccoPro (20+ year old Windows app, still functional) also allows an item (and children) to appear in multiple categories/folders.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> My simple(r), free, no ads, alternative: Idea Growr [https://ideagrowr.com](https://ideagrowr.com)

Focus is mostly on the first stage of capturing all your ideas, and growing them using question sets. I've partnered with my employer to turn IdeaGrowr into a more rounded app, with accounts, etc.

If you're interested, I'm writing about the progress over here: [https://medium.com/idea-growr](https://medium.com/idea-growr)

I'll have to look into Muse more, but it seems very tablet focused. It seems more focused on the stage where you have the idea and are working out the details, research, etc. Can you use it to quickly jot down an idea in the middle of the night?

I like the 'draw on pictures' part. I use the Concepts app for iPad for that.

<comment><AUTHOR> On Android, the NoteLynx outliner app allows an item to have multiple parents. It's good for cross-linking notes in multiple contexts.

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.astrodean....](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.astrodean.notelynxpro&hl=en_US)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Incredible work on this article! Its the dream mixture of a non linear idea processor like prezi for presentations mixed with the perfect webclipped + pdf + notebook! I am awe of the thoroughness of this concept.

How long have you been working on this work of art?

</comment><comment><USER9> Reminds me of Microsoft's old Courier concept (remember that?)

</comment><comment><USER10> Great article and slick UX! Is any of this Open Source?

<comment><AUTHOR> Some of their preceding work is open-source, including Capstone, a stylus- enabled ChromeOS app, [https://www.inkandswitch.com/capstone- manuscript.html](https://www.inkandswitch.com/capstone-manuscript.html)</comment></comment>


This Is Not Your Daddy's OS - <AUTHOR> http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=1023

<comment><USER3> If you are afraid that today's crop of programmers don't understand the basics, then there are Open Source Tools that let you do something about this:

Short summary video: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtXvUoPx4Qs>

Google Tech Talk: <http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7654043762021156507>

You implement a virtual CPU starting from NAND, then an OO language and an Operating System. This sort of comprehensive information should be an essential part of any programmer's "mental furniture." The nice thing, is that the only prerequisite is that you know hot to program in the first place.

<comment><USER4> I love the gratuitous glasses removal at the beginning of that first video.

<comment><USER3> Maybe we should put James Bond theme music in back of the vid?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> People simply confuse "operating system" with "platform" because in the past the platform has always been tied to the OS. Not any more.

When people say "the browser is the new OS" they don't really mean "OS", they mean "platform". Emacs is also a platform (though not a very popular one)

I believe the browser is _the_ most important platform, but it still requires a real OS to run on.

Also, his rant kind of reminded me of this: <http://xkcd.com/378/>

<comment><USER5> I clicked that link expecting it to be <http://xkcd.com/435/>, picturing an EE making a similar rant.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the link, Daniel. Excellent bulletin board material - for the far right hand limit of my bulletin board.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Personally, I think this is a very dated position to take.

All computer language save exactly what the processor reads is completely synthetic, a fantasy that we all mutually support to make our lives easier. We've seen machines based off of a variety of underpinnings that directly model languages above them, so even that underlying representation is somewhat fluid and subject to interpretation.

I agree that sometimes people forget about how much infrastructure surrounds them, but I also think that people working in lower levels of the code sometimes forget that their job is ultimately to make it so no one else every has to do what they are doing. Ideally, every layer completely fades away into the previous layer and you end up with a unified front which we call a runtime environment.

So maybe this complaint is like a Matryoshka Doll. As he hacks on his OS-level code in assembly and lectures people about how they shouldn't take his work for granted or steal his names, a lower level software or hardware engineer is saying exactly the same thing about his post.

<comment><AUTHOR> If the age of a position negatively impacts its correctness, we should re- examine Newton's Laws :)

I guess that most anything is 'somewhat fluid and subject to interpretation', but I still find it difficult to understand how a software engineer can conflate the idea of an OS (which essentially manages computer resources) with a browser.

<comment><USER7> "Dated" doesn't mean old, it means old-fashioned or somewhat anachronistic by modern standards.

All he's really talking about is a "runtime environment" when he says OS. What we consider the bare bones of a modern OS is, by standards set 30 years ago, irreparably full of excess and waste. Even if you look back 10 years features have been added which were once impractical. The feature creep all software experiences means that over time, what's considered the "bottom" of the software hierarchy is constantly reaching up to the top.

And it gets really complex when you start talking about emulation. Is an OS suddenly not an OS when it's run in software emulation? What about virtualization? If the resources it manages are fictions, does that change what it is? And then you get into insular environments that certainly could be made to run on bare metal environments if you wanted to, like Lisp and Smalltalk. Where do they sit?

Maybe "Operating System" is a misnomer, but it's not far from the truth from the perspective of a web programmer deploying applications to a target over the network.

<comment><AUTHOR> You have some interesting points. But just because something runs on bare metal doesn't make it an OS (many Amiga video games tossed the OS for example). An OS running in s/w emulation is still an OS. It manages resources for the apps, it doesn't matter what lies beneath - same goes for virtualization.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think his thought process relates to the same people who think you should know everything.... I will never know exactly how a microprocessor works - <USER2> that doesn't impede my programming skills, I might not know electricity works (down to the electron) but I still use it everyday.

If you spent all your time trying to know everything about anything - you will know a little about a lot, instead I think I would rather be a specialist.

<comment><USER9> "I will never know exactly how a microprocessor works - but that doesn't impede my programming skills"

 _Yes_ _it_ _does_.

To pick just a single example: if you don't understand how your CPUs cache architecture works, and how it interacts with hardware paging (and ultimately swapping), you aren't qualified to do performance analysis _at_ _all_. But you will anyway, and you will get it wrong, and you will forever be wondering why your MySQL database doesn't scale properly. Or why adding a bunch of RAM to the box didn't work the way you expected. Or you'll write dumb "optimized" code with local copies of things that could be computed, and fail to understand the benchmarks showing why it doesn't work.

As a programmer, you are a user of a tool. If you want to be an effective user of that tool, you need to have some understanding of how it works. No, you don't need to be a fully trained ASIC design architect, or semiconductor process engineer, or solid state physicist. But yes: you should understand how a circuit works, and what the parts of your computer are, and how they interact.

And your statement that "specialists" can get by without knowing "a little about a lot" just confuses me. Every talented "specialist" I've ever known has an encyclopedic knowlege of all sorts of things outside their specialty. A better word for a "specialist" that only knows their specialty is probably just "worker", or "lackey".

<comment><USER10> You can do a lot of useful performance analysis with only a profiler and trial-and-error. Also sometimes mathematics seems to help.

<comment><USER11> You can only really get the lowhanging fruit that way. There are so many different methods of optimization that you have to know where to start. You have to have a good model of the underlying system. Otherwise you won't understand why boxed integers are inherently slow. Or why an array of tuples can be much slower than a tuple of arrays.

Modern languages completely abstract from fundamental things like indirection. Consequently, it becomes almost impossible to accurately estimate the performance of algorithms in high level programming languages.

Waiting for people with experience optimizing prolog programs to disagree with me...

<comment><USER10> Optimizing Haskell seemed to require quite deep knowledge about the way the compiler worked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Awesome rant, however the movement to have the OS 'browser based' is more about the old <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_PC> idea than it is about web 2.0/ajax or xml.

It's like a movie sequel with different actors and a crappy writer.</comment>


Groupon Sales Force Cracks Under Pressure - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444900304577581661236440948.html

<comment><USER2> Is there a non-paywall version?

<comment><USER3> <https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Top+Hat+Monocle+groupon+sales>

[http://www.businessinsider.com/groupon-top-hat-monocle- legal...](http://www.businessinsider.com/groupon-top-hat-monocle-legal- warning-2012-7)</comment></comment>


Apple's Worst Security Breach: 114,000 iPad Owners Exposed - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/apples-worst-security-breach-114000-ipad-owners-exposed-2010-6

<comment><USER2> I like how "Apple's Worst Security Breach" ends up being a privacy issue with AT&T's website.

Quality "reporting" from Gawker, as usual.

</comment><comment><USER3> pg/any moderator, possible to change the title on this? heck, even I panicked when I saw the title.

also, WTF? they're sending back email addresses, etc on simple GET requests? with no device verification? who the heck writes their software?</comment>


Red Hat to remove contentious terms like 'master' and 'slave' from its source - <AUTHOR> https://techxplore.com/news/2020-06-red-hat-contentious-terms-master.html <comment><USER2> Possibly unpopular comment:

I think that master/slave correctly describes the relationship between constructs, and should remain unchanged. It is adequately separated from any sort of human relationship, and doesn't in any way glorify human slavery; in fact it actively separates the machine relationships from human ones. We can look at the relationships between these constructs, and see how far removed it is from any relationship in modern society.

<comment><USER3> > _I think that master /slave correctly describes the relationship between > constructs_

But it's not the only way to describe it. There are other ways to describe it without using contentious terms.

<comment><USER4> The terms have racial undertones which are more pronounced than they ought to be due to the current political environment.

The master/slave term is an accurate metaphor for the technology, and we can infer that no racial discrimination is intended by its usage.

We have to assume people who are performing intelligent work are capable of nuance and discretion.

And for people working on serious problems in science and technology, in order for them to progress effectively, they need to be insulated from silly little identity politics intrusions like this.

<comment><USER3> >We have to assume people who are performing intelligent work are capable of nuance and discretion

Which is why myself and many others in the industry would not see a problem using different terms. I know I don't need to explain this to you, but we're in a constantly evolving industry subject to rapid change. It's something we're all accustom to so one more minor change, especially one that's inconsequential to the industry as a whole but significant to the people it affects, shouldn't be a point of contention. Our industry has always been focused on the future and part of that innovation is being able to let go of our fleeting past and keep moving forward.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a bad precedent. We are seeing companies pre-emptively capitulate to social media outrage from spheres completely outside their own domain.

This is not an act from humanist principles. This is just addressing surface level, visible things that are in no way racist or offensive - until a political environment coerces you to believe it is.

Unfortunately, capitulation is good for business.

But in the long-term this will be incredibly damaging to the principles of free speech, open discourse, science, and the advancement of technology.

In what way is it good for tech companies, research institutes, academic institutions to bend to the forceful compliance of mid-20s liberal arts students who have yet to undertake any real responsibility in society, who have yet to enter into any domain of societal consequence?</comment>


Bricking a Mars probe, before Curiosity (2012) - <AUTHOR> https://gregsramblings.com/2012/08/11/bricking-mars-probe-viking-curiosity/

<comment><USER2> _an over-the-air software update was broadcast to the Viking 1 lander to correct a battery charging issue. The update had an error in it and accidentally overwrote the wrong bits resulting in a bricked lander._

That problem has been (partially) solved even in devices here on Earth: there's a small amount of memory which is either much more difficult or impossible to modify, and that holds "recovery mode" code which is responsible for the basic operations including updating the main application code. This is known as the bootloader, boot block, or boot ROM. It's designed to be simple and thus nearly bug-free as possible.

<comment><USER3> It seems that the architecture of Viking was such the bootloader would have needed to perform gimbal control of the antenna. That isn't super simple. My guess is it would have needed to know what time it was, along with a control loop and astronomical algorithms for a vector to Earth.

I wonder if they had a way to test this software update on the ground before they sent it.

<comment><USER4> Martin Marietta built what they called the "Proof Test Capsule", which was a similar to the pair that flew and was used for ground-based system integration testing. According to these [2] notes there was a separate analog/digital computer that simulated the descent from orbit to surface.

Edit: The report referenced in [2] is available for download at [3]. Starting at page 184 there is a description of the Viking Test Language, which appears to have been used for scripting tests to be run against the flight hardware/software. And this was back in 1977.

[1] [http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?s=bf5c742cc7bc7...](http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?s=bf5c742cc7bc7c3192119a4a0a3d7f76&showtopic=7324&view=findpost&p=184472)

[2] [http://www.retrotechnology.com/memship/viking_software.txt](http://www.retrotechnology.com/memship/viking_software.txt)

[3] [http://www.dtic.mil/get-tr-doc/pdf?AD=ADA040770](http://www.dtic.mil/get- tr-doc/pdf?AD=ADA040770)

<comment><USER3> This is very interesting. And how little things have changed between 1977 and 2015 (from [3]):

"Originally it had been planned to slowly take STE programmers off of the Viking Project. By the time the STE was moved to KSC for operational test support, there were to be no programmers left. As matters turned out, the number of programmers assigned to STE peaked during this period. This was only partially due to the problems with maintaining the H-632. New requirements for software functions constantly arose, both in Denver and at KSC. Two new programs were written at the Cape to assure that Flight loads would be correct."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here is a fix to the link rot in the article. "Galileo's Rocky Road to Jupiter"

[1] [http://appel.nasa.gov/2011/05/13/galileos-rocky-road-to- jupi...](http://appel.nasa.gov/2011/05/13/galileos-rocky-road-to-jupiter/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Ahah yes when I worked in the space industry and something failed we had a good time.... wait we didn't. Bosses were angry and the responsibles were sacked.

<comment><USER7> Sacking someone for making a mistake[1] is often more about petty revenge than any desire to improve things. It's a stupid policy. Someone who's made an error and learned from it is less likely to make it again than someone who hasn't made the error in the first place. This is the exact reason why experienced people are better qualified to do jobs than new people. Experience is valuable.

[1] By that I mean an actual, hard-to-foresee mistake that no one else caught rather than just incompetence or lack of ability. It's safe to assume that people without ability don't get in to decision making positions at NASA though.</comment></comment>


Ketamine blocks bursting in the lateral habenula to rapidly relieve depression - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25509 <comment><USER2> I know it's anecdotal, but I've been receiving ketamine at a local clinic for a few years for chronic depression and a spinal injury. It has proven too be the most effective treatment I've had for treating depression. As another poster said, it is short lived (around two months) But the release from depression, and back pain is life changing for me.

To go with the article, it is incredibly fast acting. Like same day results, I don't know if it's placebo or the ketamine but I'm happy with it as it gave me life back.

<comment><USER3> You get this done at a clinic- what's the effects like? I've heard terms like "K-hole" for heavy off-prescription users getting zonked by the stuff. I'm assuming you're taking a light dose? Can you drive yourself home?

<comment><USER4> I generally leave my clinic about half an hour after my infusion ends, but I'm taking the subway. If I were going to drive I'd probably hang out for 60-90 minutes. The dissociative and psychotomimetic effects wear off pretty quickly. But this depends on dose... my doc used to use higher doses before there was as much research around what works, and back then it would sometimes take a few hours before I felt back to normal in terms of cognitive and motor skills.

<comment><USER2> I'm in the opposite boat, the dose I receive is fairly high and I'm unable to even stand for around 20 minutes after it ends. There's no way I can drive the day of. As for the events, the feeling of dissociation takes around a day to fade for me. I also have a high deal of cognitive impairment from it, or detachment in my thoughts?

<comment><USER5> Is enjoyable?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ketamine was both the best and most depressing depression treatment option I've ever tried.

Within a couple of weeks after having had the initial round of six treatments in two weeks, I was the most functional and productive human being I've _ever_ been - things that used to be impossible or utterly agonizing to complete were as trivial as they "should" be, I was enjoying life, it was great.

After a couple of months of periodic booster treatments, over the course of a week, I felt it completely drain out of me, and no variance or repetition of ketamine treatments has been able to reproduce it since. (We spent months varying dosage levels, frequency, and trying a few OTC things that the doctor had seen synergize ketamine response in people before, to no avail.)

It was...possibly the single worst experience of my life, feeling that slip away, and now having recent crystal-clear memories of how much that fog had been complicating my life.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's so exciting that there is now a putative mechanism for this! Ketamine is such a curious drug, and this effect of it is one of the most interesting of all. Knowing the target will allow more focused therapies and possibly a greater understanding of depression in general.

</comment><comment><USER8> Isn't regular Ketamine use especially bad for the bladder? I recall reading multiple anecdotes from the Erowid ketamine vaults where people lost their bladders due to recreational Ketamine use.

<comment><USER9> It is in the way that alcohol use is bad for one's liver- the cases where it results in bladder issues are those of abuse where doses massively larger than the therapeutic psychiatric dose are used on an ongoing basis.

"A young adult male taking 1 g of ketamine could expect 85% of the drug to be excreted in the urine within 24 hours, and taking into account the average voiding rate of 6 × 300 mL per day, a urine concentration in excess of 1 mmol/L is theoretically possible, suggesting the scale of in vitro toxicity reported [in the study] and by others in cancer cell lines is relevant clinically,"

For reference, the dosages this is referring to are generally .5mg/kg, which of course is comparatively small

<comment><USER10> Back of the envelope... 175 lb ~= 80 kg, which means a single medical dose of 40 mg, with effects lasting weeks to months, compared to abuse-levels of 1g per day!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Obligatory working scihub link: [http://sci- hub.tw/https://www.nature.com/articles/nature2550...](http://sci- hub.tw/https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25509)

</comment><comment><USER12> I have been looking into Ketamine as there is a clinic which administers Ketamine therapy in my area. The disappointing thing is that it looks like the effects are short lived, and one may need "booster" treatments every 4 weeks, at $400 a shot, for years and possibly forever. I hope with this understanding, we come up with something more permanent.

<comment><USER13> curious: are you based in the US? Would it not be covered by insurance? $400/shot is a lot for Ketamine.

<comment><USER14> Ketamine is a generic drug and dirt cheap. I just checked and it's under $10 for a vial with enough to use in surgery, not even this setting.

The $400 must be the clinic charge. I'm not sure what administration looks like, but a regular doctor's visit is $100-$150 and if the patient needs to stay for a longer period of time until it's safe to release them, $400 doesn't seem that far off of what you'd expect.

<comment><USER15> That's on the low end. I've looked into it and seen prices on the order of $1000-1500 per treatment. If you filter those out, many metro areas simply have no provider that charges what would seem to be a justifiable price. Abusive pricing is a big problem for this product it seems. Several advocacy sites that I saw that maintain provider lists make note of this.

<comment><USER16> Is it abusive pricing or are they covering for potential legal issues, etc? It would be great to hear from a clinician with first-hand experience.

<comment><USER17> _Is it abusive pricing..._

Medical clinic in USA? Signs point to "yes".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> From Wikipedia[1]:

>The habenula receives input from the brain via the stria medullaris thalami and outputs to many midbrain areas involved in releasing neurotransmitters, such as dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin.

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

</comment><comment><USER19> This really, really works. I experimented for years with it after reading about trials. I'd be happy to answer questions.

<comment><USER12> Where did you get it, and how did you administer it?

<comment><USER19> Ketamine is available both as a veterinary medicine and is used as an emergency anesthetic (usually for setting broken bones) because it doesn't require an anesthesiologist.

Where I obtained it-- Darknet. I used veterinary needles to do an IM injection. There are also analogues that can be snorted.

<comment><USER12> How is the darknet these days? I used SR when it was around. Is it still that easy?

<comment><USER19> I wouldn't recommend it at this moment. The powers that be did a pretty good job of knocking a lot of vendors offline-- then the runup in bitcoin made exit scams attractive while simultaneously making it cost a fortune to tumble/transfer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> i did some work around ketamine a few years ago and many physicians i spoke with said it was incredibly helpful for their patients. however there are many others who have said it doesnt work for many of their patients. there are many studies that suggest it works and a lot of other unpublished data suggesting maybe it isnt as great

the mechanism of action is also poorly understood, and while this article may certainly be an important mechanism, ketamine is a "dirty" drug with many potentially active components that act in ways we dont understand

ketamine is also a drug that has been fda approved for anesthesia for years. to properly study its effects in depression would require large clinical studies. however, the drug is off patent, and no company will fund this work

other companies have developed "new" drugs that are structurally similar to ketamine, but different enough to patent. in 2015 allergan bought a company called naurex that had a few phase 2 drugs that acted on the NMDA receptor (the main receptor that ketamine is thought to act on, though there are others -- hence it being a "dirty" drug) but with some chemical modifications aimed at getting the antidepressant effects of ketamine without the "bad" dissociative effects. however, several docs i spoke with said that there isnt sufficient evidence that their chemical only gets the "good" effects, and it may actually be less effective than ketamine because they removed some of the chemical structure that moderated depression. the real reason they used a new chemical was so they could patent it

J&J has another similar product, called esketamine, is an enantiomer of ketamine (imagine ketamine occurred in two forms, a left hand and a right hand one. esketamine is just the left hand version without the right hand). they also deliver it intranasally (while the approved ketamine formulation is IV). both of these tactics help extend patent life or exclusivity. they published phase 2 data last december that looked pretty good

these companies will probably aggressively market their drugs as "better" than ketamine because they have "improved" the chemistry, although there are no data to definitively state this. many anesthesiologists currently offer ketamine treatment for depression, though it is not widely reimbursed or offered. i believe some groups reimburse for it though. it can be expensive because you need to be supervised when you take it, so you have to pay for the time of a medical professional to monitor you.

as others have noted though, the effects wear off basically right after you stop taking the drug. some people are studying a protocol where you "jolt" someone into a non-depressed state with ketamine, and then stop ketamine treatment and start treating them with CBT or another form of therapy. jury is still out on whether this works though seems promising

<comment><USER21> The dirty argument is not a great one, though, because most illnesses (especially depression) cause changes to a number of networks, and not just one particular receptor subtype or subunit of that receptor subtype. I agree that more mechanistic studies (and more clinical studies) need to be done anyways, but having multiple action sites isn't necessarily a bad thing.

As far as the "jolt" and continued therapy with CBT - this is how treating MDD is generally supposed to be done. Policy issues making it difficult aside, the CBT + antidepressant combo is empirically more effective than drugs alone ([https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3918025/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3918025/) \- there are more but this is a meta-analysis so it captures a lot of data).

<comment><USER20> I agree, I meant to say that the "dirty" drug is more effective. If we just isolate one mechanism of action (like NMDA receptor antagonism) and make a specific drug for that, you lose all the other off target effects that could be beneficial

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Some alternatives for improving depression: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15455259](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15455259)

</comment><comment><USER23> Reminder that the FDA seems to fast track the wrong drug:

They gave "breakthrough designation" ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_therapy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_therapy) ) to Esketamine under pressure from Johnson & Johnson:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esketamine#Depression](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esketamine#Depression)

Although Arketamine seems like it has a lot more responsibility for the antidepressant effect of racemic ketamine:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arketamine#Novel_antidepressan...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arketamine#Novel_antidepressant)

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

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24316345](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24316345) (2013)

[http://www.cpn.or.kr/journal/view.html?doi=10.9758/cpn.2014....](http://www.cpn.or.kr/journal/view.html?doi=10.9758/cpn.2014.12.1.72) (2014)

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26327690](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26327690) (2015)

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4910398/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4910398/) (2016)

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5487269/#__sec4...](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5487269/#__sec4title) (2017)

That isn't to say Esketamine doesn't have an antidepressant effect. In light of the fact that Esketamine makes you Trip Balls(tm) while Arketamine doesn't, I like to think of it this way:

You can likely get an antidepressant effect out of Esketamine in the same way that you can get an antidepressant effect out of psychdelics like LSD-25 & Psilocin. However, like those, it could possibly also make depression worse, and unlike Arketamine doesn't seem to represent anything awfully novel. It however also makes me suspect that like with other racemic drugs like Amphetamine, a shifted ratio preparation might make for a better drug overall than isolating the stereoisomers. For example, Adderall contains 75% dexamphetamine, 25% levoamphetamine, in the form of various amphetamine salts (wheras racemic amphetamine contains 50% of each, typically as a single salt.).

[Semi-related: I still don't comprehend why pharmaceutical companies have yet to create a combination preparation of Lisdexamfetamine with something like Lislevoamfetamine, - which I haven't seen synthesized but I don't see anything speaking against it -, in a ratio akin to the one seen in Adderall. The rational behind that ratio seems sound, albeit I'd perhaps go for an 80/20 split instead of a 75/25 split...]

</comment><comment><USER24> This is actually one of two papers published by the lab in Nature. The papers together go much further than just describing the mechanism of action of ketamine and propose a potential mechanism for a cause of depression.

Kir4.1 paper: [https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25752](https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25752)

<comment><USER25> This is really great. I'm excited to read these fully unpaywalled later. I'm interested to see how they'll test this in humans PET or fMRI scanning perhaps possibly before/after depressed patients taking antidepressants/therapy/ketamine/etc...</comment></comment>


A Tour of Python's Data Visualization Landscape, Including Ggplot and Altair - <AUTHOR> https://dansaber.wordpress.com/2016/10/02/a-dramatic-tour-through-pythons-data-visualization-landscape-including-ggplot-and-altair/ <comment><USER2> Starting out with R and later moving more into Python I absolutely hate the seemingly unnecessary complexity of matplotlib. Honerable mention is also bokeh - [http://bokeh.pydata.org/en/latest/](http://bokeh.pydata.org/en/latest/) which does a nice job.

<comment><USER3> As someone who has never used R, but uses matplotlib frequently, could you give some examples where matplotlib is comparatively more complex? I'm genuinely curious. Also, have your tried seaborn [1]? It's a matplotlib wrapper for making some common statistical plots less tiresome.

[1]: [https://seaborn.github.io/](https://seaborn.github.io/)

<comment><USER4> [https://cran.rstudio.com/web/packages/dplyr/vignettes/introd...](https://cran.rstudio.com/web/packages/dplyr/vignettes/introduction.html)

In R we have a neat Library that really shows the simplicity of called dplyr. If you just look at this little vignette I think you will see the simplicity we are moving in as a language.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is interesting. I have to say that for all the power that Python has in the scientific community, and scientific computation in particular, visualization has a long way to go. There are charts I made 5 years ago in C++ using a framework called ROOT that was much prettier. ROOT was only maintained by a couple of people at the time. This was particle physics.

Example:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROOT#/media/File:CMS_ROOT_plot...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROOT#/media/File:CMS_ROOT_plot.png)

<comment><USER6> I use both frequently. The real thing I like about root is the ability to interactively change the style of the plot itself by opening it in the editor. Saves a lot of time, better than having change one line of code and recompile just because a label is off by a few pixels

<comment><USER7> In the past I've used Inkscape to hand-massage some mpl plots exported to svg before including them in a document. Works well enough if needed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _matplotlib: The 800-pound gorilla — and like most 800-pound gorillas, this one should probably be avoided unless you genuinely need its power..._

Hmm, I never even considered that matplotlib was some sort of high-end powertool. At least not when using the old-fashioned MATLABish API. If the advantage of the competition is that they are supposed to be easier to use, then I will stick with matplotlib.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, that's an odd comment to make. I can't really imagine using anything else but matplotlib. I'm a scientist and need fine control over most access of my plots, though the interface for it I admit is a bit cumbersome.

<comment><USER9> The comment is perfectly reasonable: you need an 800 pound gorilla, but many people don't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> By far the easiest way I've found to plot data from pandas dataframes is plotly with the cufflinks wrapper[0]. For anything that isn't easy using cufflinks, I have started learning R only because of ggplot2.

I see a lot of comments saying matplotlib is easy to use. It isn't. If you have to write a for loop to iterate over your data to make a bar chart where you define the x and y by hand, that's not as easy as it should be. If you have to write a library to use your library, it's overkill for most plotting. For that kind of power, I'd do it in javascript with d3js so I get css for the styling and a much easier path to interactivity.

[0] [https://plot.ly/ipython-notebooks/cufflinks/](https://plot.ly/ipython- notebooks/cufflinks/)

</comment><comment><USER11> You missed this: Custom visualizations for Jupyter

[http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/vidalab/vida- notebook/blo...](http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/vidalab/vida- notebook/blob/master/visualizations.ipynb)

Disclaimer: I work at vida.io.

</comment><comment><USER12> My go-to library, not mentioned in this post, is plot.ly in offline mode for easy things. Matplotlib for custom plots where I want fine-grain control and extra stuff such as using my own shapefiles.

</comment><comment><USER13> I don't know if it qualifies here, but there's the orange python package that help to have a pretty advanced standalone dataviz solution

[http://orange.biolab.si/](http://orange.biolab.si/)

</comment><comment><USER14> If you are not yet strongly attached to a graphing solution I'd like to suggest gnuplot. It can be used with Python through a thin library, by commanding it through a pipe, or simply by writing your numbers into a file that is read by a gnuplot script.

It's better suited to scientific-style graphs than such things as bar- or pie- charts, but it can be cajoled into making those, too.

There is some advantage to decoupling your visualization task from the rest of your computation.

[https://lwn.net/Articles/628537/](https://lwn.net/Articles/628537/)

</comment><comment><USER15> These are all nice for static visualizations. But the only thing I have found that can stream lots of data on the fly is PyQtGraph. Doesn't look the prettiest, but is very powerful and fast. Although I wish it was more intuitive to setup sometimes, it can be tricky to tell when to use Qt stuff or the plotting libraries as they are pretty closely coupled.

[http://www.pyqtgraph.org/](http://www.pyqtgraph.org/)

<comment><USER16> I believe bokeh can handle streaming data quite well. I remember at least one demo of various spectrogram and related plots updated live from the microphone on the presenter's laptop. It seemed impressive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Nice article comparing the "easy to plot". I've missed something comparing the quality of the generated plots. I don't have a lot of experience using the libraries, but I've used matplotlib and was impressed with the low quality of the defaults. I've thought we all would live by now in Tufte's wonderland, but the graphic defaults aren't very good.

Do you have any suggestion on a lib that generates high quality images?

</comment><comment><USER18> while obsolete, I still prefer working with PyQwt - [http://pyqwt.sourceforge.net](http://pyqwt.sourceforge.net)

</comment><comment><USER19> Theres a few things missing in this comparison:

How do you go about plotting things that aren't in a data frame? And how do you customise your plots?

</comment><comment><USER20> Bad news: Seaborn's documentation appears to be gone. The author and/or Stanford appears to have removed public access.

[http://stanford.edu/~mwaskom/software/seaborn/generated/seab...](http://stanford.edu/~mwaskom/software/seaborn/generated/seaborn.lmplot.html)

<comment><USER21> Looks like it moved to [https://seaborn.github.io/](https://seaborn.github.io/) , though there's no redirect in place

<comment><USER22> It is mentioned as an issue on the github page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> What is the best python tool to plot a million points in the same figure?

I'd love to see a quick comparison post like this for millions of points.

Would it be easier to plot with JavaScript? I have the two options.

<comment><USER24> The real question to ask is "Why am I plotting a million points?"

Unless you're making a 1000' x 1000' display representing our understanding of remote galaxies, chances are there's a few conceptual simplifications that can be taken before rendering the visualization.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Its always been difficult to connect the Python visualization to Frontend - Altair looks like it support Vega-lite Json Output which helps in frontend - rendering...

</comment><comment><USER26> I know the article focused on 2D, but it's worth mentioning www.vtk.org for 3D. C++ native, with excellent Python bindings.

</comment><comment><USER27> Better than any of these: R plotting with rpy2.</comment>


Think about Equity - <AUTHOR> http://foundersatwork.posthaven.com/think-about-equity <comment><USER2> Simple and probably obvious to many but I was quite old until I learned this. Depending on who your parents are, many kids have no clue this is even possible, getting a job and a salary is the only thing they know (and I knew growing up) so it is important to tell your kids about this sort of thing, I've told my oldest already and he's 3.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you grew up true middle income or poor in the US it is extremely hard to value equity as an adult. Then, if you manage join a company that offers equity, it can be a mental struggle to buy your options even though you have plenty of cash on hand.</comment>


Displaying Japanese and English Text on the Web - <AUTHOR> http://www.nobadmemories.com/blog/2017/04/better-together-displaying-japanese-and-english-text-on-the-web/ <comment><USER2> The advice about utf-8 encoding is a bit incomplete. While adding <meta charset="utf-8" /> is a good idea, it's also important to make sure that the webserver isn't sending an http Content-Type header that's something other than utf-8.

In HTML5, the browser is supposed to not sniff the document for a meta charset if the server headers specify a charset in the Content-type.

<comment><USER3> I've been scraping some Japanese sites lately and this has been a minor annoyance. Content-Type rarely has the encoding and Requests doesn't default to UTF-8 so you get mojibake for EUC-JP and UTF-8 unless you intervene.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Am I the only one on Linux that has Firefox able to display any characters correctly (e.g. in this case the Japanese chars, arabic/russian chars on some other pages, etc...), but Chrome not being able to at all? (it's since months that I scan websites while writing a prototype sw and it's always been like this when I did some random checks in the browsers)

<comment><USER5> I had these issues on Fedora, especially around emoji. Firefox was fine but Chrome was not. I ended having to play around with some font settings to force chrome to use noto fonts.

<comment><USER6> The reason Firefox displays emoji while Chrome doesn't is probably because Firefox actually ships with fonts for them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I remember in the book "Remote: Office Not Required" by Jason Fried and David Heinmeier Hansson, they mentioned finding internationalization issues early on because globally distributed remote teams naturally dogfood for international audiences. This struck me as one of their key selling points for remote work.

<comment><USER8> You also, of course, need a company that is receptive to this as a goal. I usually run my computer in whatever language I'm trying to learn at the moment, and I've had more than one company dismiss i18n issues I've discovered as "well, we're not going to sell in _that_ country any time soon!" (i.e., "get back to making the demo look pretty").

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I had a lot of problems making Japanese text on ichi.moe display correctly. I'm using lang="ja" instead of lang="ja-jp" though, it seems to work and is shorter. The main problem with Japanese characters displayed in Chinese font (which happens when lang property is not set explicitly) is that some characters are barely recognizable as the same character. Compare 誤 in a Chinese font and a Japanese font. [1] Yep, this is the same character according to Unicode. Imagine if Latin letter g, Cyrillic г and Greek 𝛾 had the same Unicode codepoint.

[1] [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%AA%A4](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%AA%A4)

<comment><USER10> Can you explain more about the 誤 example you provided?

When you say it's barely recognizable, do you mean simplified vs traditional? Because to me (as a native Chinese speaker) the Japanese and traditional look almost identical. I can't comment on traditional vs simplified because I can read both.

If it's simplified vs traditional, I wonder why OS/browser prefers to render the character in simplified form (I assume the Chinese font you are using has both styles).

<comment><USER11> > the Japanese and traditional look almost identical

They have different radicals on the lower right. Unless there's some reason to consider the two radicals equivalent (there isn't in JP, I wouldn't know about CN) they're different characters.

<comment><USER12> Still it's the same character. Enjoy the 16 others variants: [http://dict.variants.moe.edu.tw/variants/rbt/word_attribute....](http://dict.variants.moe.edu.tw/variants/rbt/word_attribute.rbt?quote_code=QTAzODM4LTAxMA)

<comment><USER11> They are considered variants of each other for linguistic reasons, but that's not what GP was talking about. GP suggested the characters _look_ almost identical, and I'm pointing out that they clearly don't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Unicode's Han unification makes this more difficult than it needs to be. Now that Unicode has more than 16 bits worth of characters anyway, it looks very much like a mistake.

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

<comment><USER14> One can kind of understand why they did it. A lot of glyphs _are_ the same from one language to another. If the codepoint for Chinese "大" were different from that for the Japanese "大" were different from that for the Korean "大", that would generate some complaints. OTOH, a Unicode that includes _both_ "学" and "學" certainly has enough room for several versions of "道". I suspect this will eventually be fixed, but as a series of one-off additional codepoints, not as a giant duplication for each of C, J, K, and V. Some of the problem seems to have been that while the Chinese Unicode experts realized they wanted to write both "学" and "學" in the same document, the Korean experts never considered the possibility of including Chinese or Japanese text in a primarily Korean document. I think by this point they've realized it, though, so it will be fixed eventually.

<comment><USER3> The consortium always expected implementations to use higher level markup to specify language specific variants.

<comment><USER13> That's impossible in some cases. How am I supposed to list a directory with a mix of Chinese and Japanese filenames? Most filesystems don't have a filename language attribute.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Noto fonts are fantastic for multilingual documents, but beware that the CJK versions weigh multiple megabytes each. Loading them as a webfont will eat up a lot of data, not to mention cause a noticeable delay. This is unavoidable when there are 10,000+ characters to encode.

My Korean company website loads a subset of Noto Sans, but uses the system default sans-serif if it is accessed with a mobile device. Fortunately most Koreans don't use Hanja (Kanji/Hanzi) anymore, so visual consistency is not an issue.

</comment><comment><USER16> Interestingly, Google very quietly shuttered the Google Translate for web plugin that made it possible to autotranslate sites.

The Web Speech API already exists for Speech Recognition and Speech Synthesis, so hopefully they add a translation API directly to Chrome. Can't call it an _inter_net if it doesn't easily support multiple languages!

<comment><USER17> You need a plugin? I thought you just past the URL into translate.google.com

[https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=ja&tl=en&u=htt...](https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=ja&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.yahoo.co.jp%2F)

Seems pretty straight forward to make a plugin that generates those URLs if you want one.

<comment><USER16> It's not "allowed", i.e. if I want to have GTranslate by default on my site regardless of what browser someone is on, I can't do that anymore.

Their translator can also be accessed via API, but again not "allowed." It's not a huge issue since they don't do much other than try to 503 you, but it's still "illegal."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > Spoilers: Google has an interesting solution in the works.

This appears to be a reference to Google's universal Noto font set, released in 2014:

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

</comment><comment><USER19> Mixed-language webpages is an interesting problem I hadn't thought about.

<comment><USER20> It's a fascinating problem, if you're into that kind of problem solving.

I recently had to build a large site that was English, Spanish, and Chinese. Which was fun considering that some of the audience was es-mx, some was es-es, and some were es-419.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Does all this apply for Mandarin / Taiwanese as well?

</comment><comment><USER20> _For PCs, cursive falls back to Comic Sans_

Eep!

<comment><USER22> That has to be awesome when viewing historical documents. On the other hand, kids will have a much easier time reading the Constitution in Comic Sans instead of the original cursive.</comment></comment>


Anyone notice the changes to the Google logo? - <AUTHOR>

Original:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/30/Googlelogo.png Changed: http://www.google.com/images/logos/ps_logo2.png <comment><USER2> I don't see it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I probably should have explained it. The newer logo is a little darker, more pronounced bevel, and darker/less spread out shadow.</comment></comment>


Economic analysis of religion: The Invisible Hand of God - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/id/2206116/ <comment><USER2> This is a good analysis of one specific example of the more general point that religious pluralism in a country tends to result in more active participation in religion. American evangelical Christians are sometimes puzzled by why European Christians seem to have so little involvement with their faith, but that's readily understandable in the context of state-supported churches (that is, churches that people subsidize with their taxes) that often have huge nominal market share in each country. American churches have to work harder to keep support, and they do more to appeal to and motivate their members.

</comment><comment><USER3> interesting comparison between church and corporation. Some difference, though:

1) church leaders, the CEOs, are often poorly paid+.

2) The church's revenue source is the members, but its staffing source is also often the members: you can't just serve and profit, you actually have to train your next generation of staff from the members/customers.

3) A customer can receive the same level of service without paying, for as many years as they want.

4) A customer doesn't actually get more or better services by paying more -- they get more by showing up more, for free.

5) Most churches advertise to the poorest rather than the richest portion of our population. If you are thinking that taking money from the poor is easier than the rich, you are kidding yourself.

You may be thinking "Yeah but, some churches are the exact opposite of what you described up there". Yes, I agree with you. Try to remember that just cuz some A's are B's, not A's are B's.

+I'm talking about the average church: you don't take up preaching for big bucks(work for a large corp), you start your own following or religion (startup) for that.</comment>


As Criminal Laws Proliferate, More Are Ensnared - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703749504576172714184601654.html?mod=WSJ_hp_LEFTTopStories <comment><USER2> "Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed?" said Dr. Ferris. "We want them broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against - then you'll know that this is not the age for beautiful gestures. We're after power and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick, and you'd better get wise to it. There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted - and you create a nation of law-breakers - and then you cash in on guilt. Now, that's the system, Mr. Rearden, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with."

\- Ayn Rand

<comment><USER3> I don't find that to be the most plausible mechanism for the proliferation of laws at all. More likely, it's an emergent property of the legal system in a democratic context that can probably be explained in terms of game theory. At any legislative junction, there's a cost or benefit associated with enacting or not enacting a law. Take the arrowhead removal example from the article. You're a lawmaker and you're faced with the problem of people pilfering Native American artifacts, and this law is presented to you. Which side are you going to be on? The side of desecration? Or the side of preservation? Boom. Another law. At each juncture, there's a good reason to pass another law.

What emerges from this is a jumble of laws. Each local decision is made in response to an immediate concern, and cannot take the jumble-of-laws problem into account. You're only adding one law, after all, and it's benefit is clear.

"Well, what about repealing some?," you may ask. Well, what's the "game" when it comes to repealing them? Even if each law got on the books for--heh-- objectively bad reasons, those reasons were still "good" in that they contained a political benefit. Often, repealing them would have the unacceptable adverse consequence of giving up that benifit. You wanna be the guy to repeal the broken sex offender registry laws and be perceived as on the side of rapists and pedophiles? How bout the U.S.A P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act and be perceived as being "on the side of the terrorists"? What now, hotshot?!

None of the above requires a conspiracy, as your post intimates. Those effects emerge as unintended consequences from the dynamics of a system. The even more infuriating thing about that quote in this context is that it ignores the corrective power of a democracy in crisis. There eventually does come a point where people wise up and rise up on specific issues. Prohibition, slavery, and civil rights come to mind. Revolutions, as they say, are impossible until they happen, and then they were inevitable.

Finally, the mechanism of control in your Rand quote is just ludicrous. How would one "cash in on guilt" in a system that is as patently absurd as the one you cite? Nobody would feel guilt about breaking those laws. The arrowhead collectors didn't "feel guilt." Quite the opposite, it seems. They paid the bill and openly talk about how absurd it is. The only way one could use a system like the one you outline would be to _actually lock everyone up_. It's just not practical, and it's not even the kind of control your example seems to advocate. Ostensibly, the controllers in your _fictional_ example want people to behave a certain way out of fear of being locked up, not to actually have to lock them up for misbehaving.

Try to critically scratch the surface of word-butchered fanboy fictional allegories that comprise Ayn Rand's work before posting them here verbatim as if they actually have any bearing on the real world. The real issue here, and one from which your post serves as a distraction, is the evisceration of the _mens rea_ requirement for a finding of guilt.

<comment><USER4> I think it's a perfectly apposite quote. No, the proliferation of laws is not there as the result of an evil conspiracy to make everyone guilty of something. But sometimes you can clearly illustrate harmful side effects in fiction by postulating evil conspiracies that do things for the sake of the harmful side effects.

Nobody knows the law anymore. Everyone is guilty of something. If the police want to arrest you, they can find some charge or another. Who has power in a world like that? Why, the person who decides whether or not to prosecute _you_ for a law that thousands or millions of other people are breaking.

<comment><USER5> _Nobody knows the law anymore. Everyone is guilty of something._

This argument is reductio ad absurdum. The corpus of law bearing significant consequences for violators [1][2] is sufficiently small as to be almost intuitively understood by any reasonably educated person.

As a general rule, you're not going to be confronted by the full weight and force of the state for violating the jaywalking statute. Were you to be targeted for arrest for such a minor violation, it would be transparent to knowledgeable observers that you were specifically targeted and surveilled until a reason was found to arrest you.

[1] By significant, I mean incarceration and/or crippling financial penalties. And note that the cost of defending oneself is categorically not a penalty. [2] This, of course, only applies to societies ruled by law, as opposed to those ruled by individual persons or groups

<comment><USER6> I'm too tired to find the reference, but some woman recently got sentenced to serve 90 days (thereabouts) incarceration for planting a garden in her front lawn in contradiction to local ordinances. Of course this is a prime example of civil disobedience, as she intentionally flaunted this absurd law, challenged it as best she could in court, then paid the price of losing.

The point is, you can be tossed into the clink for just about _anything_ if you are brazen enough to openly challenge the law and don't prevail. Judges don't care much for the proles challenging the state.

<comment><USER7> She wasn't sentenced. The charges were dropped either because the city didn't want the negative publicity or because the case would not have held up.

[http://moneyland.time.com/2011/07/15/charges-dropped- against...](http://moneyland.time.com/2011/07/15/charges-dropped-against- woman-for-front-yard-vegetable-garden/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> 'Current law provides a range of options to protect society, he says. "It would be horrible if they started repealing laws and taking those options away."'

That's the most disturbing line in the piece to me. Laws used to frustrate, oppress, or even enslave a citizenry are always written under the guise of offering 'options for protection'. Why do we need to wiretap private citizens? To keep private citizens safe of course.

Then, there's laws written to keep large companies like Exxon or WalMart from polluting the environment or mistreating their workers, but prosecutors can't get convictions against their herculean legal teams, so they end up convicting small businesses and private citizens because they're easier targets.

The problem with these laws is not that they criminalize non-criminals, its that the actual criminals aren't impeded by them at all.

<comment><USER9> > 'Current law provides a range of options to protect society, he says. "It > would be horrible if they started repealing laws and taking those options > away."'

This quote also disturbed me, but for a slightly different reason: The prosecutor who is speaking is implying that the large number of laws give him a lot of options, i.e., he is (almost) free to persecute on whim. If there were fewer laws, he would be more constrained, have fewer options.

The whole point of written law is to prevent government from prosecuting on whim. A written law forces government to use objective standards. Yet when there are so many laws that everyone is guilty, the effect is the same as when there are no laws: prosecutions are conducted on whim (aka police and prosecutorial "discretion".)

<comment><USER10> This old saying comes to mind:

      If you give me six lines written by the most honest man,
      I will find something in them to hang him.
      -- Cardinal de Richelieu

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> And once you're in jail...

> With just 5 percent of the world's population, the US currently holds 25 > percent of the world's prisoners. In 2008, over 2.3 million Americans were > in prison or jail, with one of every 48 working-age men behind bars

> Prior to the 1970s, private corporations were prohibited from using prison > labor as a result of the chain gang and convict leasing scandals. But in > 1979, Congress began a process of deregulation to restore private sector > involvement in prison industries to its former status, provided certain > conditions of the labor market were met. Over the last 30 years, at least 37 > states have enacted laws permitting the use of convict labor by private > enterprise, with an average pay of $0.93 to $4.73 per day.

> Subsequently, the nation's prison industry – prison labor programs producing > goods or services sold to other government agencies or to the private sector > -- now employs more people than any Fortune 500 company (besides General > Motors), and generates about $2.4 billion in revenue annually.

[http://www.alternet.org/world/151732/21st- century_slaves%3A_...](http://www.alternet.org/world/151732/21st- century_slaves%3A_how_corporations_exploit_prison_labor/)

</comment><comment><USER12> People complain about activist judges but I think a bigger problem is activist prosecuters who look to stretch the law to include targets that were not intended by the law. The biggest example of this that I can think of is the anti-hacking laws that are being made to charge people of simply using a web browser.

<comment><USER13> I found the article weird in that respect. None of these laws seem particularly odious -- the ones that seem unjust could have been avoided by prosecuters using their discretion.

Also, I'm amused by an article about injustices in the criminal system where everyone pictured is a well-off white man.

<comment><USER14> > Also, I'm amused by an article about injustices in the criminal system where > everyone pictured is a well-off white man.

That is by design, since the stereotype for "middle class" is the well-off white man, and this article is attempting to motivate the middle class. Revolutions only happen when a critical mass of the middle class switches sides.

<comment><USER9> You're implying that the Wall Street Journal, the businessman's newspaper, is trying to foment revolution. Things must be bad indeed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Exactly the reasoning behind never speaking to police as detailed in these 2 videos a while back:

<http://boingboing.net/2008/07/28/law-prof-and-cop-agr.html>

The risk of self-incrimination is incredibly high since no person can even be aware of all of the laws that exist and may be violated.

<comment><USER16> great vids. the often overlooked flip-side is that cops Don't Like uncooperative people, so you could save yourself a pricey court appearance by cooperating when innocent.

<comment><USER17> You can assert your rights simply and clearly.

It takes a certain amount of cahones, but you'll generally find that the cops will respect it.

A pricey court appearance beats a conviction in my book.

[http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/430/v...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/430/very-tough-love)

<comment><USER16> True story: traffic cop pulls me over, turns out im doing something wrong and he could have me towed. cop asks to search my car for drugs and weapons. "Do I have the right to refuse this search?" Cop responds that I do, but heavily implies that he will have me towed if I refuse. I consented, he found no drugs or guns, I was allowed to drive away.

<comment><USER17> True story: I was driving home after a long day out with friends (hiking with some, dinner with another). Started feeling very sleepy, pulled off the freeway to take a nap. Woke with a flashlight in my face and highway patrol knocking on my window.

Exited the car, locking it. Identified myself and presented ID. Refused consent to search the vehicle: "I don't consent to any search". Officer implied strongly that he could get a warrant (it's around midnight). "You do what you've got to do, I don't consent to a search".

Got breathalyzed (I could have refused this but that would have required a trip for a blood draw), which was clean (hadn't consumed any alcohol for hours). Eventually allowed to go on my way.

Later realized I had a couple of prescription painkiller pills given by a friend (for severe pain I was experiencing at the time) which probably wouldn't have been a good thing to turn up in a search. The This American Life drug court segment relates a story that could have been very similar to mine.

You have rights. But only if you assert them.

<comment><USER18> And it is up to each individual to elect when to assert them. That's another one of our rights.

<comment><USER17> Given the premise of the original article, electing not to assert your rights isn't particularly safe.

Note that when I did assert my rights, I really didn't have any reason for doing so other than that they are my rights. It was literally a couple of years later that I made the association between the stop and the possibility that I may have been carrying what were technically illegal drugs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Thanks to the State of California, virtually every private university president and trustee is now a criminal, too.

[http://www.quora.com/Aaron-Greenspan/The-California-Law- That...](http://www.quora.com/Aaron-Greenspan/The-California-Law-That-Should- Send-The-President-and-Fellows-of-Harvard-College-and-Every-Private- University-To)

<comment><USER20> Meh, every single person in the US is already a felon. We all possess schedule I drugs in our bodies[1], and there is plenty of legal precedent saying that you can be convicted of narcotics possession for drugs that are in your body.

[1] DMT, 5-MeO-DMT, Anandamide, etc.

<comment><USER21> That's a great critique of the CSA, but it's not really legally relevant. No court would convict for possession of endogenous DMT, and then that would be the precedent.

Or to put it more simply, you're innocent until proven guilty. Felon means conviction.

<comment><USER22> You're quibbling. I mean, I understand that _legally_ , one has to obtain a conviction to refer to someone as a felon, but practically, that's not the case, not with activist DAs floating around, trying to make a name for themselves as "tough on crime".

<comment><USER21> Yeah, that's a fair point. But what I was getting at is that no one has ever been convicted for endogenous possession, and no one ever will, so in this case my point stands.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> _Roscoe Howard, the former U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, argues that the system "isn't broken."_

The US, the "Land of the Free", has a per capita prison population that it 5-10 times greater than any of it's first-world colleagues. The system _is_ broken.

<comment><USER18> There could be other interpretations to that, besides "we are less free!"

Could one not argue that an increase in prison inmates is the unavoidable consequence of increasing freedoms? It seems counter intuitive, but perhaps the more freedoms one has, the more readily one encroaches on freedoms one does not have?

<comment><USER23> People aren't all that different, and generally want the same things. Besides, the US isn't that much freer than its first-world contemporaries. For example, although we in Australia don't have constitutionally-protected freedom of speech, the Press Freedom Index puts us as having more freedom of public speech than in the US, and both of us are well below most of the northern European states.

<http://en.rsf.org/press-freedom-index-2010,1034.html>

The word "freedom" occurs _much_ more frequently in American political discourse, but that does not mean that Americans are automatically freer than anywhere else. I find it hard to believe that those extra freedoms that Americans do have (which most don't seem to exercise in day-to-day life) is sufficient to cause a fivefold increase in per capita prison population.

<comment><USER18> Another possible explanation that occurs to me today: the punishments in America are greater. The guy who bombed Oslo and killed 80-some kids in Norway is allegedly facing a max of something like 25 years. He'd get multiple life sentences in America.

<comment><USER24> According to BBC radio this morning it is 21 years although I believe this can be extended for 5 years at a time if they believe he still faces a danger to society.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is why deregulation is important. I think a perfect government has a slightly liberal congress, with an extremely conservative judicial branch. I'd rather be judged using the original meaning of the constitution rather than some activist judge's interpretation of "the spirit of the constitution that applies today".

</comment><comment><USER26> What really disappoints me is that we apparently have people who have been trusted with enormous power by the citizenry (the prosecutors) who seem wholly incapable of taking a step back and asking themselves, "is this discretionary action I'm about to take to prosecute these people going to make the world better or worse?" and then acting reasonably.

</comment><comment><USER27> It is cute to point out the guys getting busted for searching for arrowheads, but upwards of 85% of the people in prison in the US are black or hispanic. I'd guess that an even larger percentage are poor. This process is not without a target.

<comment><USER9> A criminal defense lawyer once told me that he was convinced that certain police officers had a personal mission to make sure that every black boy in certain neighborhoods has a criminal record by the time he is an adult.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> "And now bills were passed, not only for national objects but for individual cases, and laws were most numerous when the commonwealth was most corrupt." —Tacitus, Annals Book III, 27

</comment><comment><USER29> Of course there should be a law against taking artifacts from archaeologic sites and laws against disturbing the sites by digging. These sites should be posted though, much the same private land is posted "no hunting". Instead of throwing the law out, require that the onus be on the site owner to inform people that the site is, in fact, protected.

</comment><comment><USER30> Copyright and drug laws are the two largest offenders in this respect. Check out the recent moves the the US Congress to make _linking_ to the 'wrong' site a felony (the '10 Strikes' legislation).

Once they've criminalized being a common person, then the government can exercise discretion and selection to eliminate people they does not like, for any reason.

</comment><comment><USER31> Given the source of the story this is more about reducing corporate regulations than supporting personal rights.

</comment><comment><USER32> I have no problem whatsoever with a law that criminalizes stealing arrowheads, or other artifacts, from archaeological sites. I have no problem with laws that prohibit poisoning water, dumping chemicals, killing endangered species, or other environmental crimes. So, if this is proliferation, please sign me up for more. I know that these things were not crimes fifty years ago, but we are better off now for having these laws. Sure, there are some stupid ones, like the Smokey Bear thing, but come on--has anyone been charged with that law?

<comment><USER33> The laws are poorly written if they don't differentiate between criminal intent versus perfectly reasonable ignorance.

<comment><USER2> ...versus perfectly reasonable behavior.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> "There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law- abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted and you create a nation of law-breakers." -- Ayn Rand

<comment><USER3> I'm probably going overboard by responding to both the Rand fanboy quotes, but here goes.

 _There's no way to rule innocent men._

Yes, there is, to the extent that that rule is legitimate. Usually, just powers arise from the consent of the governed. For example, sane people pay taxes because they understand that they have need of the canonical services of roads, fire service, police, the military, and the like.

 _The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals._

This typical Rand drivel sounds good on the surface, but either doesn't actually mean anything or is outright wrong. If it just means that "enforcement only comes in to play when an infraction is suspected," then it's a tautology. If it means that the government doesn't also do things like establish air traffic control, a consistent system of laws for the roads, and establish bright lines like ages of consent and whatnot, then it's clearly just wrong. On a factual level. A lie or an omission. Unworthy of a "philosopher."

 _One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws._

In very few systems, and especially in the instant case of the American legal system, does "[o]ne" declare anything to be a crime. I often wonder where Randians actually live, or what their connection to political reality is. Have they not taken even a grade-school level class in civics? Oh, I'm just a bill on Capitol Hill, anyone?

 _But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted and you create a nation of law-breakers._

And the whole thing collapses on itself, ironically, in a fit of internal logical inconsistency coming from the Prophetess of Logic herself, Ayn Rand. Laws "pass" in a democratic system. Again, "[o]ne" cannot even do it. One can only decree. "Passing" is a democratic concept pertaining to the outcome of a vote. It seems like a nitpick, I know, but remember who was cited. This is Ayn "A is A" Rand, who thinks that all of human nature can be derived from the laws of logic, one of which she exclusively calls out, the Law of Non- Contradiction.

Finally, this it's "impossible for men to live without breaking laws" thing is really really weird when compared against reality. There are tons of laws on the books that just go unenforced because law enforcement and the judicial system possess the very reasoning powers that Rand so often wants to remove from them. Remember when Taggart shot the guard near the end of _Atlas Shrugged_? Rand justified that for the reader by dehumanizing the guard as an unthinking automaton. Well, why aren't these unthinking automatons enforcing laws about the size of switch with which you can beat your wife? Why aren't they enforcing the laws in Washington state that make it literally impossible to get a motorcycle endorsement? (You have to take the class to get the endorsement, but you need the endorsement to take the class.) Because they're not unthinking automatons. And the very fact that they aren't allows the other glaring contradiction to this impossible-to-live-legally trope: precisely those impossible-to-follow laws exist, and they don't get enforced for _pragmatic_ reasons. Perhaps this is the real reason for Rand's oft-stated hatred for pragmatism; It's actual effects wholly invalidate her stupid little "philosophy".

<comment><USER35> > Yes, there is, to the extent that that rule is legitimate. Usually, just > powers arise from the consent of the governed. For example, sane people pay > taxes because they understand that they have need of the canonical services > of roads, fire service, police, the military, and the like.

It is Randians who think that civilization is the only free lunch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Good to see Mr. Murdoch's paper pushing a healthy respect for the law.

</comment><comment><USER37> Welcome to the USA, land of the free...

</comment><comment><USER38> _The Andersons are two of the hundreds of thousands of Americans to be charged and convicted in recent decades under federal criminal laws—as opposed to state or local laws—as the federal justice system has dramatically expanded its authority and reach._

"Who could have predicted that breaking into people's voicemail was going to cause such a fuss?"

</comment><comment><USER39> Is this Hacker News? I suppose it might be tied to our theme by the story of the inventor.

I think it's a shame that the US federal government has ballooned the way it has, and I believe it's a slap in the face of the Constitution. Discarding the concept of mens rea while maintaining more than 250,000 pages of regulation is malicious, and anyone supporting this movement is not someone who should be in political power.

<comment><USER40> What I don't understand (as a non-US-citizen, mind you) is how the fact that these are federal laws is relevant at all. It sounds to me like the problem is the number of obscure laws, the vagueness of the offenses, and the lack of mens rea requirement.

Surely it would be just as bad if these were state laws (for the citizens of that state, anyway)? Or are there for some reason no state laws of that kind? If so, what could be the reason?

<comment><USER41> IANAL but it's bad for citizens because it gives federal courts wider purview on what they'll prosecute for and how they punish for it; needless to say, if your case is getting pushed to federal courts you're fucked, especially when you're being charged under statutes you've never heard of rather than state laws which you may or may not know.

<comment><USER40> Not "needless to say" at all. Why are you more fucked in a federal court than in a state court? Why would you be more likely to have never heard of a given federal statue than a given state law?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The sane intuition behind 0.999... ≠ 1 - <AUTHOR> http://foobuzz.github.io/9999999999999999999999999999999999999999/ <comment><USER2> I would suggest OP to take a look at Dedekind's construction of reals using his namesake "cuts". Definitely worth enjoying if this article is any indication in that direction.</comment>


Don't Waste Your 20s at Google or McKinsey - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140727232741-15381-don-t-waste-your-20s-at-google-or-mckinsey

<comment><USER2> I disagree slightly about working at a services company like McKinsey. Much of what he writes is true, of course. However, life is about trade-offs and one of the benefits of a services company is broad exposure to many clients facing many problems. This CAN prove valuable later, for those who wish to strike out on their own by building a useful product or service.

<comment><AUTHOR> As an old service company employer adviced me, you should not waist more than 3 years at a service company , you never learn anything after that periode , you will just waist your time, better move on and build something useful in small companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If you end up starting a successful company this will in retrospect look like a brilliant move. But since most startups fail you may find that you are totally unhireable. There is a small window of opportunity to get these kind of companies on your CV and to learn from brilliant mentors. You can always go start a startup afterwards.

</comment><comment><USER4> Completely agree. I learned a lot more working at a startup for the last few years after working at google for about 3 years.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it really depends on the nature of your work at big firms</comment></comment>


Procedural Worlds from Simple Tiles (2017) - <AUTHOR> http://ijdykeman.github.io/ml/2017/10/12/wang-tile-procedural-generation.html <comment><USER2> Really interesting, but I think anyone interested in this would do well to check out [0]. It takes the article's second algorithm somewhat further, considering all the output tiles to start out as uncollapsed wave functions, and then going through and trying to collapse them in such a way as to obey local constraints (matching at their borders) and large-scale constraints (having each tile occur in the output at a frequency similar to some frequency defined by the inputs).

Also on the notational side, [0]'s approach of using a plain graphic as an input, and inferring the desired tiles and tile frequencies from it, is maybe more approachable than that of TFA. (Though in either case, if you hack on it I suspect you'll eventually wind up doing something ad-hoc..)

[https://github.com/mxgmn/WaveFunctionCollapse](https://github.com/mxgmn/WaveFunctionCollapse)

<comment><USER3> The other fun thing with WFC is that you can wrap the constraints on the edges (ex. matching the right edge of the rightmost tiles to the left edge of the leftmost tiles), which allows you to easily make tiling patterns.

You can also start matching tiles and edges for more than just colours... for example, you can have 3-dimensional tiles, or you can even match edges of tiles using time as a dimension, like I did here: [https://twitter.com/MattRix/status/979020989181890560](https://twitter.com/MattRix/status/979020989181890560)

<comment><USER2> That's awesome! Is the code open somewhere?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The best part is probably that this system is so simple that it allows for many extensions, customizations or new rules and variations. You could solve this on prolog, for example, defining tiles as 4 numbers (one for each side), and what you effectively get is a distribution of tiles, that you can later "paint" as you want. You could later add even softer constraints, like density or others.

</comment><comment><USER5> This reminds me of one of my favorite technical blog posts [0], which shows a different approach to achieve a similar goal.

[0] [http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2014/12/21/rooms-and- mazes...](http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2014/12/21/rooms-and-mazes/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Neat, yes, but when you do procedural generation from local information only, you often get artificial looking "dungeons".

Though, it does make me curious about what extending this to use a "hierarchical" tileset might do. For example, start with large tiles that define a probability distribution. Tile those. Use that to initialize the probability distribution for the smaller tile generation.

</comment><comment><USER7> Very interesting. I wonder how much inspiration this drew from carcassonne.

<comment><USER8> I just played Carcassonne last night and immediately thought of it when I started reading the piece. I am not sure how the game designers built the game to almost always ensure there was a valid configuration, in my play-throughs I think I have only hit that situation once.

<comment><USER9> After looking up a couple images -- that game appears to use Wang tiles. They're also sometimes used for terrain textures in video games to make seamless mosaics with less obvious repetition.

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

<comment><USER10> While they could be drawn similarly to how Wang tiles are drawn, they definitely lack the aperiodicity property of Wang tiles. (Eg there are tiles with all four edges the same, hence you could tile the plain with nothing but that tile.) Of course the other distinction is that you only use each tile once in Carcassonne, unlike a set of Wang tiles.

<comment><USER11> It doesn't look like aperiodicity is a required property of Wang tiles. Just the cool ones. :)

<comment><USER10> I suppose you're right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What about using Metropolis sampling?

</comment><comment><USER13> Maybe something for the demo scene.</comment>


Ask HN:Facebook "Like" button hiding content on a non Facebook site? - <AUTHOR>

Do you know if its possible to have a Facebook "Like" button hiding content on a non facebook site?
Eg we know it's possible to hide content on our fbml frames within Facebook eg www.Facebook.com/LiveBaseballChat but what i want to know is it possible to block the view of someone seeing non Facebook content unless they like a related page?
Eg can I have an image "hiding" the video or chat iframe on the www.LiveCourtChat.com page unless someone clicks a "Like" button for the www.Facebook.com/LiveCourtChat page?
Cheers,
Dean <comment><USER2> This is definitely possible through a content locking gateway. I'm programatically retarded, but if it's not urgent, I'll have my programming friend write something up for you.

But, yes, this can definitely be done.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> no rush, surprised no one has done it before/ seems like a basic idea? thats why i assumed it wasnt possible.</comment>