Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - <AUTHOR> http://www.herecomeseverybody.org/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html

<comment><USER2> >So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, "Okay, we're going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever." That wasn't her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years."

Odd, I had a moment like this about a year ago or so…

I had just recently revamped an organizational website and made it more interactive, more user-participatory, and had made a remark to an office assistant on how great it was that new "editors" were jumping in and adding all this content, citing one in particular. Her response was the same as the TV person Shirky described - "it must be nice to have all that free time"…

Irony being that unlike me (that I rarely watch TV and basically live on the net, work time and a good bit of off time too…), most of these folks can rattle about endlessly all the TV programs they watch and how much they love their DVR…

<comment><USER3> My least favourite phrase in the English language has to be "they must have too much time on their hands" in response to something creative but niche (re- creating Star Wars in animated ASCII art, for example). My usual response these days is "at least they weren't just watching TV".

<comment><USER4> This is so true. A very quick story - last year when I was coming up to leave University I decided to make leaving presents for my housemates as we were all about to part ways. So using my fairly basic Photoshop skills I created some digital photo collages, very simple but very effective, then went out and got some cheap frames and printed them out. When I gave them out later that evening they absolutely adored them, they were very cool. They also said I must have had far too much time on my hands to have done these, to which I replied 'I did it while you all watched Happy Gilmore'.

This notion that contributing or creating something is seen as a waste of time really gets to me. Personally, I get far greater satisfaction spending my time this way than watching the mind-rotting junk that finds its way onto the television, yet this is seen as the normal way for us to spend our time. The worst part was I felt I had to watch it just so I could spend time with my friends. I really hope there is a shift in thought upon us.

(I am so sorry Adam, for the record I love that film. I don't care if it contradicts my comment, that film rocks.)

<comment><USER5> I like your last remark. Especially because it doesn't contradict your comment as much as you think. Shirky said: "People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share". He probably means to say that people like to share what they produce, but (at least) in case of TV people also like to share what they consume. Having seen the same movie/show/etc. makes us feel 'connected'. In that sense 'traditional media' actually hit two of his three points, not one.

<comment><USER5> No, wait, that's not entirely right :) The traditional media of course don't enable the 'sharing' through them. Still, I think there is a lot of (social) value in watching TV in the sense it 'gives you something to talk about' (to say without nice words ;)

<comment><USER6> Yes. This is why I grudgingly approve of the idea of a 'canon' of great (or maybe just popular) works. The actual quality of the work isn't so important - but shared culture both acts as social lubricant and provides a higher-level language to discuss your lives. That's true whether you're quoting Buffy or Faust.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We should remember that not all time is interchangeable; just because you're up to spending 4 hours zonked out watching TV in bed does not mean you are up for spending 4 hours doing useful cognitive work. Maybe you're tired, hung over, sick, not feeling it, etc. However, even given this caveat, the author's point still stands. Because even if 4 hours of TV watching only translates to 1 hour of useful creative work and 3 hours of blah, that's still a huge amount of cognitive surplus.

But I think that it is like exercise - just because you watch TV for 4 hours, doesn't mean you could have jogged or rode a bike for 4 hours straight instead; your body isn't up to it. Why isn't it up to it? Because you're used to watching TV. So even if we only get a very poor 4:1 conversion rate at first, as we exercise our minds or bodies at doing other things besides TV, as a society we'll improve that exchange rate.

<comment><USER8> Along this line: when people say, "I would <x>, but I don't have the time" (where <x> is some creative, interesting thing), usually one can substitute the word "energy" for "time" in their statement, and learn a lot more about them: they are essentially asserting that they are too energy depleted to <x>.

<comment><USER9> I think when people say they "want to do <x>, but don't have time" it really translates to: "I _feel like I should_ do <x>, but I don't really want to."

Exercise is the classic example.

<comment><USER10> Right, that's common behavior. And "I don't have the time" can also just be a polite excuse to get out of doing something unpleasant. When something is truly important people find a way to make it happen, regardless of how little time they have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "We should remember that not all time is interchangeable; just because you're up to spending 4 hours zonked out watching TV in bed does not mean you are up for spending 4 hours doing useful cognitive work." --phaedrus

This statement is somewhat wrong. I gave up T.V. about 3 years ago and this may have been true at first, but as you go on you realize that when you feel tired you are usually just bored, and need to do something. If you are really tired then go to sleep, don't stay awake forcing yourself to be entertained (gorging when you eat?)

It isn't Just T.V. that is bad. Anything that updates is bad since you come back over and over looking for a new fix of "something new"; I've found this activity extremely draining on your ability to go out and do new things; you drop into a mode of wanting to do to a mode of just wanting things to come to you to entertain you. This means that the internet is almost as bad as T.V. (if not worse, more content to surf around) Think of all the things that are currently popular : myspace, youtube, stumble, facebook..etc.. Almost exactly like T.V. People go to those sites to zone out and have information handed to them. The same goes for email, people keep checking their mailboxes hoping to have a new nugget of joy that will keep them busy for a few more minutes.

I started off With No T.V. (cold turkey), I used Movies to supplement the cravings, then I started cutting back on movies, not because I was trying to cut back on them, but because I just don't find them interesting any more. Next I cut out all forms of gossip and news from the internet. Pretty much anything that you read that can make you angry from either a) "how stupid" the person writing it is, or b) how anything like "that" could ever happen, you just need to cut it out; why do you want to work yourself up? This would include sites like slashdot.org, digg, reddit..etc. After cutting these sites out, my over all mood has become much better; those sites just contain thoughts that do you know good what so ever. (How did I read this to be posting on it? Someone sent me the link. Which is a great system; if something is worth knowing, someone will tell you.) After giving up most every news site (they are all tripe that just spread gossip and violence.) I started reading just "creative" blogs (make magazine for example.) Recently I have found that It doesn't matter what you read, since you'll end up just going back to be "entertained". Why is this bad? Because you switch off, you might think to yourself that you'll get inspired by reading inspiring blogs, but you won't. What you'll find out if you are paying attention is that most blogs are just recycled content over and over; there are very few original ideas out there.

After giving up almost all forms of "updating" sources. I have found that I no longer have enough time in a day to do all the stuff I want to get done. If I feel too tired even to read a book (not usable energy as someone stated.) then I go to bed.

There are millions of things to do out there, you just need to find them.

One other mistake I made was when trying to learn a lot of new things I would bounce around between them, which isn't bad, but I found that when I got stuck learning something new, I would switch over to doing something else, which is bad. So If you plan on learning new things, set a time for yourself. If you start an activity stay with it for at least 1 hour (or whatever) to make sure that if you hit a wall you work your way over it instead of moving on to something else. Also, I have found that keep a journal of all the things you learn to be very useful. Whenever you have some free time, you can read through the past things you have learned to refresh your memory.

You can respond to this comment all you want, but as stated i've pretty much given up this type of entrainment (blogs) altogether and I'm just here because someone sent me the link; I wrote this in hopes that it may help some people that are moving down this path already. If you think this was all dumb crap (maybe it is, life systems change over your life.) , well then don't use it. If you have any questions: firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER12> I think poepping's comments here are the most accurate so far (everyone else has been great also!). I myself replied to the author of the original piece with a tidbit that poepping elaborates on further. I said, "I would just add that I suspect many of my college-age and young-professional friends and colleagues spend significant percentages their cognitive surplus on not just the standard funny-media but the news. NPR, cnn.com, many news aggregate websites, etc. This seems a little more insidious than gin and sitcoms since they actually think they're benefiting in some way. I'm afraid I believe that they are not only wasting their cognitive surplus, but are also being loaded up with expert-vetted beliefs that they ingest with as little thought as with anything else."

Gin and sitcoms are only the beginning, we aren't through deploying all of our cognitive surplus yet, by far. I love hacker news, but I think I need to follow through with this understanding :D.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't understand why Shirky used the phrase cognitive surplus as opposed to time surplus. After all, free time could be spent productively doing cognitive work, but it could also be spent productively performing routinized labor. Most of the top wikipedia editors rack up their massive edit counts from correcting spelling mistakes and wikifying content, not writing original articles.

</comment><comment><USER14> Free time is not just a recent thing. Back in our hunter-gatherer days, many of us had tons of free time. Even as agriculturalists, it was common for people to have to devote zero time to work for months on end. At times like this, young people could sing, dance, and play music for over 12 hours a day. There were places in Ireland that were like this in living memory.

<comment><USER15> I disagree. Leisure time for the masses is a recent development. If one observes modern small farmers and seasonal agricultural laborers, reads history on peasants, pre and industrial laborers then one should take away the observation that these people work and worked all day long most if not all their lives. Even for hunter gatherers, they spend most of their time half- starved scratching for food.

<comment><USER16> Hunter gatherers actually had plenty of food and leisure time and were much better nourished than their agricultural compatriots. Jared Diamond wrote a good article summarizing their lifestyle: <http://www.awok.org/worst-mistake/>

Seasonal farmers in Europe and Russia spent half the year doing nothing. Even if they had to work their asses off during the growing season, they had nothing BUT leisure time during the winter. <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/opinion/25robb.html>

<comment><USER17> If hunter-gatherers had such great lives, you have to ask why they took up agriculture. Presumably it made their lives better or they wouldn't have done it.

I think one problem with pre-agricultural life was that it was so unpredictable. You had plenty of food, until you didn't.

Another downside was what hunter-gatherers had to do to their parents when they got too old to travel, and to children born too close together.

<comment><USER14> There is a well known study of Native American cultures in the Mississippi valley where we have access to skeletal remains over many hundreds of years. We can see the health of individuals decline as they made their switch to corn agriculture from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. In fact, there are considerable increases in disease and a shortening of lifespan. The reason why the agricultural lifestyle won-out was because it was capable of supporting larger populations with ruling theocratic elites who could then organize manpower for military and other purposes. Hunter-gatherers, despite being healthier individually, couldn't compete.

<comment><USER17> _The reason why the agricultural lifestyle won-out was because it was capable of supporting larger populations_

Think what that implies. If the hunter-gatherer mode of life couldn't support a large population, how was that limit enforced? It had to be by people dying.

But that wasn't what I was asking anyway. I wasn't asking why agriculture won, but why it started. The first agriculturists must have switched from being hunter gatherers. Why, if life wasn't better?

(I realize the switch was a matter of degree, so consider the preceding question as an abbreviation for asking why about each degree of switch.)

<comment><USER18> I would think that it would have been more gradual than that. Some people in the community probably started growing the plants that they usually went out and gathered, since it was easier. Maybe during a time when they weren't moving as much. Or maybe they migrated between different areas depending on the season, so they planted, say, berries at all the different sites. I think it would have started more like that. Then because there was more food available from this, more people started doing it, and eventually it won out over migrating all the time or even staying in one place and hunting and gathering.

<comment><USER14> The wild rice gathering practice of current-day Native Americans in Minnesota is a great example of incremental drift into agriculture. They go back to the same patches in the water brush rice into their canoes with paddles, inadvertently spreading the seeds of new rice plants in the process. It's easy to imagine how this could've turned into rice agriculture over time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> These are the kinds of articles and thoughts that really make me cherish Hacker News.

</comment><comment><USER20> IMHO, this was definitely one of the best key note of the entire Web2.0 conference.

<comment><USER21> Agreed, did you talk to him at Speed Q&A at Web2Open?

<http://www.socialtext.net/web2open/index.cgi?speed_q_a>

That was my favorite part of the conference.

Thanks again to Tony for putting it together, being able to talk to these people in an intimate setting was amazing.

-Andreas

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> >The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year... One per cent of that is 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I think he messed the maths up

1 wikipedia = 100 Million hours (from earlier in the article)

Annual TV watching = 1,000,000 Million hours

1% of annual TV watching = 10,000 Million Hours = 100 wikipedia's

Correct me if I'm wrong.

<comment><USER23> >The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

He switched context from discussing the US-only consumption to total global television consumption. It seems worth thinking about the implications of this change even if the numbers are inaccurate.

<comment><USER22> Yes I agree it is useful to consider the rest of the world. However that was not the cause for the discrepancy and the numbers are still out by a factor of 100. If you think that 1% of global surplus attention could annually create 10000 wikipedias instead of 100 then you are likely to reach some very different conclusions. Maybe he switched context from 1% to 100% - that would make sense.

<comment><USER23> You're completely right. To convince myself:

      trillion = 10**12
      wikipedia = 10**8

      surplus = trillion
      applied_surplus = surplus * 0.01
      print applied_surplus / wikipedia

which leaves us with only 100 wikipedias, as your numbers claimed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Is it me, or does this guy speak like Paul Graham writes?

</comment><comment><USER25> Well I agree with him, and I don't ever watch TV, but... interactive media seem to be better at sucking people in than TV. And they're getting better all the time. This is starting to scare me, nobody else?

And there's an exceptionally thoughtful Reddit thread on the topic: <http://reddit.com/info/6h7ph/comments/c03u0jv>

</comment><comment><USER26> Where do anti-depressants come in?

<comment><USER27> Since many of the most popular anti-depressants don't actually do anything, I guess TV has to play a role as well.

[http://www.newscientist.com/channel/health/dn13375-prozac- do...](http://www.newscientist.com/channel/health/dn13375-prozac-does-not- work-in-majority-of-depressed-patients.html)

Maybe we need more gin carts.

<comment><USER26> >Since many of the most popular anti-depressants don't actually do anything

I of course have only read the mainstream summary of the study, but I think the study must say that anti-depressants usually don't cure depression. But I can assure you that messing with serotonin reuptake makes people happier.

<comment><USER27> One might assume my previous post was made in jest, based on the flippant closing comment. But without a smiley, who can tell? ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> What about _good_ movies that make you think?

<comment><USER29> I don't think the author was claiming we should or would stop watching purely passive media. His statement was more that, on the whole, time spent passively receiving is cognitive surplus. If the floodgates are opened even a bit (1 hour in 100), the resulting output will be immense.

And this is only the beginning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> "all you do is play on that computer!" _goes back to watching TV_

Yeah, because your time watching entertainment tonight is better spent than my time researching for economics.

I fucking hate old people.

<comment><USER31> I thought those first two lines were pretty good. It's probably that last one that brought on the downmods.

<comment><USER30> By old people I mean people that criticize any paradigm they aren't familiar with. You don't have to be old to do this, but old people are more likely to do it. I could have used the term neophobe I suppose.

OTOH, the thought of old people down modding me makes me lol.</comment></comment></comment>


The Incompatible Food Triad - <AUTHOR> https://www.georgehart.com/triad.html <comment><AUTHOR> This brought back memories of CAP theorem[1] and Zooko's triangle[2], but this time with flavors.

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

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooko%27s_triangle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooko%27s_triangle)</comment>


Marco Arment on Dropbox: Don't use it for anything valuable - <AUTHOR> http://blog.varonis.com/marco-arment-on-dropbox-dont-use-it-for-anything-valuable/ <comment><USER2> If you think Dropbox is bad, what about the recent preview of Office 2013 that stores _all business documents in the cloud by default_? (I haven't been able to find any mention of client-side encryption.)

Non-US governments should seriously consider anything from sales bans to education in order to protect their citizens' privacy and business secrets.

<comment><USER3> You mean the preview that isn't licensed for production use? That Microsoft warns you away from using for anything useful? That preview?

<comment><USER4> Isn't the point that the released version is expected to behave the same way?

<comment><USER3> If you buy the cloud version, you get the cloud stuff. There will be a standalone version that works like it's always worked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I find this kind of odd. I wouldn't store anything valuable on my own systems either unless I held the encryption key.

When it comes to accidental data loss, I trust cloud services a lot more than my own little server. Ditto as far as security is concerned (in that I assume neither of them are safe from being compromised).

If you encrypt it yourself, Dropbox is an excellent place to store anything valuable. Just make sure it's not the _only_ place you store it.

<comment><USER6> _> Just make sure it's not the only place you store it._

This is the main problem for me. I'd love to have my working files (say photoshop files) in dropbox so I could access them on any mac I use, but I don't trust it to hold the master file. All it takes is for it to be flattened in one place and I lose layers everywhere.

Does anyone know of products that clone files to Dropbox? Almost like TimeMachine with dropbox as the target?

<comment><USER7> I use <http://sugarsync.com> personally which provides versioning and also lets you arbitrarily sync directories, not just the 'dropbox' one.

<comment><USER8> Nice to see a sync solution that lets me sync arbitrary folders. I was thinking of building a layer on top of dropbox for myself, but this works great. Thanks for the recommendation!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder if Marco hosts his own email? Email's the place where embarassing/sensitive information is most commonly stored, not the FS.

<comment><USER10> Email was designed to be explicitly private, where file sharing, well its file sharing.

<comment><USER11> I wish. Mail is designed to be not private at all. It is transferred unencrypted through the internet unless you as user take care of upper level encryption.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't see any reason to be shocked about marcos statement about dropbox.

Dropbox has the only advantage to be the first cloud-storage provider who get's the job done right. It's not Dropbox's security that made it so popular, it's just the way how simple it is to setup. Create an account, download the client, insert credentials and BAM you're ready to go.

There is also an alternative to Dropbox called "Sparkleshare" (<http://sparkleshare.org/>) it's nearly equal to dropbox's functionality (except the webinterface). The only reason why i'm not using it (yet) is the fact that they use there own IRC server to keep your data in sync (some kind of sync-messaging between your client machines).

So if you're having real security concerns, you can use sparkleshare and use your own IRC server ([https://github.com/hbons/SparkleShare/wiki/Notification- serv...](https://github.com/hbons/SparkleShare/wiki/Notification-service)). Rent a small/slowish VPS with enough hdd space for your needs, run sparkleshare on it and you have your own dropbox. :)

<comment><USER13> That's fine if you're storing only small files, but sparkleshare is based on git and absolutely chokes on large files. So photos, home movies, and the like which live happily on Dropbox are a disaster on Sparkleshare. The main reason seems to be that it wants to buffer the entire file in RAM during the sync, which rapidly kills most consumer-grade machines.

<comment><USER12> Oh, afaik, isn't Dropbox also based on Git?

"home movies" - i see what you did there!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _"Anything that is really sensitive or extremely valuable or needs to be kept very secret, I wouldn't store on anybody else's servers. That, to me, seems ridiculous unless I held the encryption keys like with the online backup service that I use."_

He doesn't say anything specific about Dropbox that couldn't be applied to other cloud-storage locations.

<comment><USER15> Several cloud storage vendors including SpiderOak, Wuala, and Tarsnap do encryption client side, encrypting the data before it leaves your machine and only decrypting it back on your machine. In the SpiderOak case, all we see server side are sequentially numbered containers of encrypted data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Am I the only one who doesn't own any valuable data?

<comment><USER17> No.

Not owning valuable stuff is nice, too. Losing everything you own because of a basement fire is an eye opening experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Unencrypted data is the main reason I am trying to move away from Dropbox to Spideroak that at least claims to encrypt stuff without knowing the key (cannot verify that as their client is closed source). The setup of Spideroak seems a bit more complicated compared to Dropbox though.

</comment><comment><USER19> I just throw sensitive stuff inside a truecrypt volume. Dropbox works pretty well for that, as long as you don't leave the volume open on one pc and then log into it from the next. Even then you just have a second copy you have to reconcile with the first.

<comment><USER20> I do this too. The only problem I have is that, for my larger sensitive folders, any small change will result in Dropbox having to sync the whole (often multiple gig) volume. Which is only really annoying if you're trying to access these things through a slow connection.

<comment><USER21> I use encfs instead because it encrypts at the individual file level, so there is no need to sync an entire volume. Additionally the volume can be mounted on multiple computers simultaneously without causing sync conflicts.

[http://www.packetslave.com/2011/04/21/dropbox-encryption- w-e...](http://www.packetslave.com/2011/04/21/dropbox-encryption-w-encfs-on- macos-x/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> While I agree, this is kind of a no-brainier. Dropbox is a great service, especially for keeping settings and such in sync, but anything that needs to be kept private shouldrpbably be kept...private.

</comment><comment><USER23> Why not just encrypt your data with your own keys as well ( <https://www.boxcryptor.com/> )

<comment><USER24> I've been doing that for Dropbox, indeed, since the last security scandal, many months ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Can we please get a good cloud storage provider from Europe? I'm getting really tired of American companies snooping on our data at will, or the US Government snooping on it at will as well, without even a Court order, just because they passed a law that says they can do that, or sometimes even illegally.

<comment><USER14> Or maybe one hosted on one of the Pacific islands which is supposed to be a privacy and tax haven?

<comment><USER26> I'd be concerned that it would be relatively easy for someone to bribe a government/police/datacenter official to physically get at the servers located in a developing country that held my data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Nobody stops people to use a stackable encrypted filesystem such as EncFS or eCryptfs over Dropbox. This "cloud security snafu" thing is getting old.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, but out of 25,000,000 users, how many of them know what encryption is, nevermind EncFS? The important point is that it's generally a good idea to treat anything you don't control as nearly public.

<comment><USER28> How many of those users care or need to know what encryption is? The argument appears to be that users treat Dropbox like a private store when it isn't, and somehow that's Dropbox' fault.

<comment><USER27> Their privacy policy contains some interesting stuff about your actual privacy: "Compliance with Laws and Law Enforcement Requests; Protection of Dropbox's Rights". Also, the "Security Overview" page explains that the files are encrypted by themselves after they are uploaded, plus the fact that they manage the encryption keys. Combine that with the previous statement. Dropbox is responsible for what they say. It isn't responsible for what the user understands, or the fact that people don't properly read/understand ToS'es.

People that care about their privacy, take measures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Is there a more secure cloud drive option for sensitive data out there that is as convenient as Dropbox or Google drive etc?

<comment><USER30> I use TrueCrypt to create encrypted files containing the sensitive data I want on the cloud. TrueCrypt is free and quick to install, so I can pretty easily access the files from any computer if I need to.

<comment><USER18> While this (and other things mentioned like EncFS) is a solution, it integrates badly with user experience. I cannot access my data via web interface or smartphone app and I value this very much.

It is a bit complicated, but you _can_ create smartphone application and web interface for the data encrypted on a server.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Value to you doesn't equate to value to someone else

</comment><comment><USER32> I guess Marco Arment doesn't use iCloud either?!

</comment><comment><USER33> So what online backup service does Marco use?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think he said he uses Backblaze (on a different episode), but don't quote me. It's either that or CrashPlan.

<comment><USER34> With Crashplan you can also host your own server (setting that up myself); it's an annoying piece of Java, but we had a spare 40TB box or two lying around.</comment></comment></comment>


Doctored Obama photos to get white people to support conservative politics - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/05/13/how-psychologists-used-these-doctored-obama-photos-to-get-white-people-to-support-conservative-politics/ <comment><AUTHOR> This proves what we already know about many white folks and Obama.

<comment><AUTHOR> Someone downvoted me!

Hey I am white too. However, I don't have a shred of conservatism and I am pretty sure my racial bias is minimal, if at all.

<comment><USER2> Or, could be that people are just sick of dupes. This was already on the front page when you duped it. The original had 3 upvotes already.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11694303](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11694303)</comment></comment></comment>


Weird-Looking Freak Saves Apollo 14 (1971) - <AUTHOR> https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/don-eyles-extra-weird-looking-freak-saves-apollo-14-40737/ <comment><USER2> Don is still around, and is still awesome! His memory for events around that time is surprisingly sharp, for it being 50 years ago.

He's been an invaluable resource for us at the VirtualAGC project [1]. He provided over half (!) of the AGC programs we've made available, including LM software for Apollo 5, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, and 15-17, plus several other ground development programs. He also was the source of a majority of the schematics that we used in the AGC restoration [2] -- I can say with 100% confidence that it wouldn't have been possible to get that computer working again without his help.

He's got a book out now, Sunburst and Luminary [3], that is very good and goes into a lot of technical detail on the LM software, without getting too much into the weeds. I highly recommend it if you're interested in that sort of thing!

[1] [http://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/](http://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KSahAoOLdU&list=PL-_93BVApb...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KSahAoOLdU&list=PL-_93BVApb59FWrLZfdlisi_x7-Ut_-w7)

[3] [https://www.sunburstandluminary.com/SLhome.html](https://www.sunburstandluminary.com/SLhome.html)

<comment><USER3> Mike, thanks a lot for working on the restoration project! It was amazing to watch your progress and the ingenious tools and solutions you guys came up with. It also sparked my interest in AGC-related things and while I at first expected it to be a somewhat simple and elegant machine (easier to formally verify) I quickly realized it too like almost any engineering project was subject to reality/deadline-driven compromises everywhere (looking at you memory architecture). However, it is a machine which still 'fits in your head' compared to the historical achievement. We probably won't be able to do that kind of thing with the more recently developed, more complex systems we're going to use for the next steps in space exploration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > What NASA needs most, he says, is some imaginative PR... The astronauts he > has met could provide reams of picturesque copy; they are hard-drinking, > fast-living, generally "wild and weird."

The editor of Rolling Stone was certainly paying attention! It sounds like they sent Tom Wolfe to cover Apollo just a short time after publishing this. His book, The Right Stuff, would cement the image of those first American astronauts in just this "wild and weird" frame.

<comment><USER5> The author was also a minor player in new journalism circles. He wrote "boys on the bus", an account of working with Hunter S Thompson to cover the 1972 presidential campaign.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great article. I was curious about the game mentioned towards the bottom:

> At M.I.T. next door to Draper, some of the undergraduates play a game called > "Space War." To play "Space War," you need a television screen, a computer, > and a working knowledge of Newtonian physics. The TV screen shows a planet > surrounded by spaceships. Each player fires torpedos from his spaceship, > aiming them according to the laws of orbital dynamics. The torpedos must > destroy either another spaceship or the planet. The game is enhanced by > programming the computer to include such factors as time warps, so that a > spaceship can disappear "for years."

Thanks to the magic of the internet, I found a few versions of the game (actually called "Spacewar!"[0]), both the original[1] without time-warp and the more advanced version described in the article which includes it[2]. However contrary to the article's description it seems only the ships follow Newtonian physics, the projectiles always travel in a straight line, and I wasn't able to blow up the star or planet you're orbiting, though perhaps a version with these features exists and I simply wasn't able to find it. Interestingly, the circular layout isn't just for the game, the screen of the PDP-1[3] Which ran it was circular because it was originally a radar screen!

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacewar%21](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacewar%21)

[1]: [https://spacewar.oversigma.com/](https://spacewar.oversigma.com/)

[2]: [https://www.masswerk.at/spacewar/](https://www.masswerk.at/spacewar/)

[3]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-1)

<comment><USER7> The Living Computer Museum in Seattle had a Spacewar tournament a couple years ago, which I believe also ran on restored hardware.

<comment><USER8> I visited the LCM a couple of weeks ago and Spacewar was running then, it may be a permanent exhibit now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Don Eyles has a web site, where there's an interesting article called "Tales From the Lunar Module Guidance Computer":

[https://doneyles.com/LM/Tales.html](https://doneyles.com/LM/Tales.html)

<comment><USER10> I was a little surprised to see his home address there.

But that website made me happy. It evokes memories of a simpler era on the web.

<comment><USER11> He's got a space at an artists' cooperative which is divided up into live/work spaces for a few dozen professional artists (including Don himself, who's now a professional fine art photographer). So the address is public already in a whole bunch of other places.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > "It's possible to envision a time when there are professors of the > literature of computer programming. Maybe some programmers will be minor > poets of the 20th Century. The trouble is that programs are written in a > language there's no audience for. It's like Nabokov's book about Gogol where > at the end he says that if you really want to know anything about Gogol, > there's no way around it, you gotta learn Russian. It's sort of > discouraging."

Today computer languages are mostly easier to learn than a totally new human language I guess.

I still thought this one was quote-worthy.

Also: is it just me or was writing in some ways better before?

<comment><USER13> Way easier. It is hardly noteworthy for a programmer to know a half dozen programming languages well, but a person who knows a half dozen human languages well is.

<comment><USER14> I think the main determining factor here is vocabulary. Modern programming langs have fairly small #s of reserved words, and when you add the standard library on top of that, you essentially have all the 'vocab' you need to use the language well. This is because (a) a large part of programming is the act of creating new vocab via writing new APIs/libraries/functions, and (b) the time pressure is significantly lessened; there's no issue with consulting docs for the interfaces you forget.

Meanwhile, human languages are essentially unusable without a fairly extensive vocabulary, and importantly a vocabulary that has to be memorized and available at a moment's notice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There's mention of him in this article regarding the source code (printed on white and green paper). He wrote about 2000 lines for the Lunar Module.

I often wonder how many lines of Javascript I load every day just to browse the web and watch images fade in and out and animate etc. and all the megabytes of framework garbage I load just to display some content. By comparison, it's depressing.

</comment><comment><USER16> My favorite part:

> _"Look," he says, "they're devoting three billion dollars a year to > curiosity that might yield good results in the long run, and eighty billion > a year to the Defense budget — to killing. I'd be for a bigger space budget > as long as the money came from the Defense budget. That's the one to cut._

Wish we had more people talking this way these days. Instead, they're militarizing space.

<comment><USER17> We do have more people talking this way. The other people aren't listening.

Society might benefit from peaceful pursuits in the long run (and individuals will in the present), but people with piles of money will make bigger piles of money from war in the short run.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is the first time in many many months I've read an article from begin to end, in one sitting. And then I looked the date it was written: 1971.

We don't have shorter attention spans. We simply cannot handle the utter crap that passes by articles today.

<comment><USER19> Perhaps the articles from 1971 that get reposted today represent the top 1% of articles from then, making articles from then seem so much better than now?

<comment><USER20> My experience looking at, say, the front-page (or more likely these days, inside-page briefings section) of a newspaper, today vs. say 1970, or at an issue of a leading magazine, is that writing and editorial standards have changed, largely for the worse.

Newspapers are an easier direct comparison, and though I don't have a specific example to show (a selection, say, of front pages from the same day of the month across a span of decades would be useful -- 12 issues a year, enough to show trends, but not so many as to drown them out -- would be a good demonstration), but I've done periodic research and am struck.

There are always gradual changes, but a tipping point toward commercialisation and sheer crassness emerged strongly in the 1990s.

For magazines, the larger problem is that so many simply aren't what they once were, notably leading US news weeklies. It might be better to consider a set of political magazines -- _New Republic_ , _National Review_ , _The Economist_. Possibly _Atlantic_ , _Harpers Weekly_ , and _The New Yorker_.

And perhaps _Rolling Stone_ as well.

There's some survivor's bias, yes. But there's also been a palpable shift.

<comment><USER21> In Australia, our independent public broadcaster reads like a clickbait rag. I routinely find basic spelling, grammar and punctuation errors in newspapers. That's not how I used to remember the news.

<comment><USER20> I've seen sharp declines in the BBC and NPR myself. ABC (Australia) is decidely mixed, I'll grant you that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> So what happened to the optimism for the "consciousness III society"?

Maybe it was naive but It's a shame we don't have that same forward looking feeling today.

<comment><USER23> The climate happened, I think. Difficult to maintain optimism on the ultimate destiny of consciousness when the science is telling you there's an extinction event on your doorstep.

<comment><USER24> Living through the Cold War brought us a constant and very close awareness of the potential for a nuclear extinction event so I don't think it's climate change. If anything it was scarier then because there was a sense that extinction could come simply from a single random error in a highly complex socio-technical system.

I'm of the opinion that much of the change in our culture was driven by a concerted pushback on the part of the "straights" to reassert the primacy of their worldview. The threat felt by those in power by the rise of the civil rights, anti-war and nascent environmentalist movement was a direct threat to business as usual. So, through things like the Moral Majority and the efforts of Thatcher and Reagan, we have adopted a worldview that for decades has told us that happiness and satisfaction comes only through the pursuit of financial success and conventional career paths.

<comment><USER25> > there was a sense that extinction could come simply from a single random > error

Agreed, I was there and watched the "Duck and Cover" films in school. That only stopped when leaders realized that surviving the initial blast was one thing, and surviving a month later for most urbanites was unlikely.

> So, through things like the Moral Majority and the efforts of Thatcher and > Reagan ... happiness and satisfaction comes only through the pursuit of > financial success

I don't see a coherent argument here.

You can ignore Thatcher, since she was the head of a bankrupted, hapless country (Britain had food rationing for 9 years after WW2.)

Reagan was one of the most powerful leaders in world history. He wanted a strong America, both domestically and overseas. Can't really argue with that. We don't like people who utter words like "Evil Empire" [see Prof. Victor Davis Hanson], but somebody has to say it. Just be glad Reagan was on our side.

<comment><USER26> Whose side was Reagan on? He certainly wasn't on the side of a lot of gays, blacks, or the other minorities his administration threw in jail, poisoned, or just let die through inaction.

<comment><USER27> That's just nonsense.

Re. gays, Mr. Reagan signed into law federal outlays of $5.73 billion for AIDS research and treatment and he opposed California Proposition 6, which would have fired public-school teachers for advocating homosexuality.

Re. blacks, his administration did push hard for tough-on-crime measures — measures which were _supported_ by black groups in the 80s. They may or may not have been wise in retrospect, but they were a well-intended attempt to support black communities and black people.

<comment><USER28> Where does $5.73 billion come from? I searched and found figures in the hundreds of millions [1] along with other evidence of the Reagan administrations indifference to AIDS [2]

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/1985/09/18/us/reagan-defends- financi...](https://www.nytimes.com/1985/09/18/us/reagan-defends-financing- for-aids.html)

[2] [https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/11/reagan- administratio...](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/11/reagan- administration-response-to-aids-crisis)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> How do we bring back the national enthusiasm for space again? Enthusiasm that spans across politics.

Maybe I'm out of touch, it seems to take a lot longer to get things done and get something flying into space than it used to. I don't think we can be world leaders with projects like the SLS that never get off the ground anywhere near the expected date. Seems like we used to take more risks or have less bureaucracy or ???

<comment><USER30> > Seems like we used to take more risks or have less bureaucracy or ???

More like we had a Cold War to win via technological showmanship.

Today's world has more important, more fundamental political problems to solve (not that we're doing a good job on those either, but regardless). At the same time:

> it seems to take a lot longer to get things done and get something flying > into space than it used to

It's never been easier to "get something flying into space" thanks to, surprisingly, private industry. Walking on the moon may be a different story, but significant progress has been made getting both objects and people into space.

<comment><USER29> Looking at Wikipedia, maybe its just about money.

"Apollo ran from 1961 to 1972, with the first crewed flight in 1968" \- $25.4 billion (1973)

"The Space Launch System (SLS) is a US super heavy-lift expendable launch vehicle, which has been under development since its announcement in 2011. It is the primary launch vehicle of NASA's deep space exploration plans,[12][13] including the planned crewed lunar flights of the Artemis program and a possible follow-on human mission to Mars.[14][15][16] SLS replaces the Constellation program's Ares V launch vehicle of 2005, which never left the development phase." \- For fiscal years 2011 through 2018, the SLS program had expended funding totaling $13.999 billion in nominal dollars.

In 7 years Apollo had crewed flight. In 7 years SLS isn't even off the ground, and that is after the previous project never finished.

So, how do we gain public support for funding these missions? Honestly, while 'war' may be an answer its not a good one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> It's so funny to see an article from 1971 is on the same page as news (and ads) from 2020. If this were a printed newspaper, people would be very confused!

<comment><USER32> Historical material is particularly welcome on HN. When an article shows up that's old, has never been discussed here, and strikes chords with the community, that's the best!

<comment><USER31> Hopefully it didn't sound like I was complaining! ... I also love that Saturdays and Sundays have a broader scope of topics making it to the front page. I do appreciate having the date shown though ... I've read a couple articles and thought "that seems pretty passe" before I realized I was reading older materials.

<comment><USER32> It didn't sound like you were complaining at all! I just felt like exuberating.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Don Eyles breaks down his conversations with Apollo astronauts in this TEDx talk. Really great anecdotes: [https://tedxbeaconstreet.com/videos/conversations-with- the-a...](https://tedxbeaconstreet.com/videos/conversations-with-the-apollo- astronauts/)

"What we had in common was a spirit of exploration." @17:10

</comment><comment><USER34> Man the culture has changed a lot since the 70s.

Great article.

</comment><comment><USER35> A recent discussion of straights and freaks:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21670128](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21670128)

</comment><comment><USER36> >>> "They passed a resolution with a lot of whereases and things in my honor. I was introduced to Monsignor somebody-or-other. I was stoned out of my mind."

1971\. What can I say :-)

</comment><comment><USER37> Does "weird-looking freak" really just mean "has long hair?"

</comment><comment><USER38> What a fantastic article!

</comment><comment><USER39> that ride to the moon seems to have been quite a rough one - at each mission it needed some hero who had to save the mission...

<comment><USER40> Ultimately, that's what made them stop: somebody (or most likely, three somebodies) was going to get killed.

<comment><USER17> Three somebodies did get killed. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Good article. No picture, though.

</comment><comment><USER42> > Weird-Looking Freak

Where's the picture?

<comment><USER9> There are a couple of pictures of Don Eyles and his colleagues from that period at the bottom of this page on Don's web site:

[https://doneyles.com/LM/Tales.html](https://doneyles.com/LM/Tales.html)

It looks like in those days, having long hair was what made you a "weird- looking freak".

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> > Eyles and some of his fellow Consciousness IIIers regard computer > programming as a fine craft that might some day be elevated to the status of > an art. "It's possible to envision a time when there are professors of the > literature of computer programming. Maybe some programmers will be minor > poets of the 20th Century. The trouble is that programs are written in a > language there's no audience for. It's like Nabokov's book about Gogol where > at the end he says that if you really want to know anything about Gogol, > there's no way around it, you gotta learn Russian. It's sort of > discouraging."

As I read this, I was aware that there is a steaming pile of JavaScript a single Alt-Tab away on my laptop. I think there's a profound lesson here - buried in the path between these dreams of programmers in the 70s and today's reality.

This was a really good read. Gave me something to think about.

<comment><USER44> Whytheluckystiff wrote some Ruby code that can only be described as good poetry (including at least one project used in production in some places, the Camping web framework) circa 2005. I'm sure some people write poetry-level code today (obviously the folks at shadertoy.com, but they're writing in a classical style, and I'm sure someone's writing code poetry that could not have been written before 2020).

<comment><USER44> Oh and obviously TeX will always be considered classic 20th century code literature.

And probably git too, especially as it's very useful and almost forces the casual user to appreciate the poetry of its data structures.

<comment><USER45> > And probably git too

Not sure about this, given the fact that this exists::

[https://git-man-page-generator.lokaltog.net/](https://git-man-page- generator.lokaltog.net/)

<comment><USER44> I recommend reading the first commit in the git git repo

<comment><USER46> Would you mind posting it? Or at least a link? I'm not sure where the original repo is and github doesn't allow sorting commits by date.

<comment><USER44> sure: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8650483](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8650483)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Title correction: there should be an exclamation point after "extra". As in "extra! extra! read all about it", not "extra weird–looking freak". Although it did make me laugh :)

<comment><USER32> HN's software should probably replace non-trailing exclamation points with something rather than nothing.

I took the Extra bit out of the title for now, since it isn't needed and I suppose might confuse younger readers.

<comment><USER48> What does this "Extra!" bit mean?

<comment><USER49> When breaking news came out a newspaper would sometimes publish an extra edition to go out in the afternoon. The paperboys would stereotypically say, "Extra! Extra! Read all about it!"

<comment><USER32> At some point paperboys will need to be explained also, and some time after that, newspapers.

<comment><USER49> You see, we had things called computers, which were like an interface between you and the network...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> > Weird-Looking Freak Yet fails to show a picture of the weird looking freak?

<comment><USER17> He was physically described pretty well in the article.

As for "weird" and "freak," you should probably load the 1971 context for full understanding.

<comment><USER51> What is the 1971 context, for this millenial's benefit?

<comment><USER17> Being different was itself weird back then, while it's almost normal now. Being long haired and stoned and consciousness oriented, among short haired short sleeved pocket protected engineering units was especially weird.

"Freak" would have been the title editor's attempt to put a particular image of hippiness into a reader's head, justified or not. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freak_scene](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freak_scene)

<comment><USER52> Heh, that article is interesting with how much it references Zappa. I am not his biggest fan, but whenever I hear the word Freak, I think of his song "Hungry Freaks, Daddy".

<comment><USER53> I'm not the only one who, ever since I opened this article, has been hearing the lines:

The rising tide

Of the left-behinds

Of the Great Society

(too too too too too tee!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> I'm not sute if I'll get much sympathy but I would SO much rather get a synopsis with maybe a couple bullet points and some relevant pictures (or graphs!) than an article.

Let articles die. I just want to know what happened. I don't want to read the history or a flowery introduction. They just hide the point. This is why I believe reddit2 will use either an AI or the emergent intelligence of thousands of redditors to distill articles down to a short synopsis.

I do not think reading the whole article is a sign of intelligence. If I want to read something that's going to take 30-40 minutes it will be a lot more planned out than just stumbling upon an interesting headline.

I really think the article format has had its day but it will take a while for people to admit they don't like reading long flowery opinionated journal entries.

<comment><USER55> And we should replace all of our meals with Soylent!

<comment><USER54> It's intellectual junk food at best.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are some good web development related IRC channels? - <AUTHOR>

Mainly for HTML, CSS, HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript (presentation/view). <comment><AUTHOR> For anyone reading this: I was able to find the following:

##reddit-webdesign ##javascript #html5</comment>


Oolong Engine is an iPad / iPhone / iPod touch Engine - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/oolongengine/ <comment><USER2> Help me understand something--why is it the tendency for game/gfx engines to become all-encompassing?

All the major game engines on the platform have support for

* 3d audio

* physics of some kind

* networking

* touch input

* accelerometer apis

Many of them have their own languages (Unity), UI subsystems, and require you to architecture everything in ridiculous ways that are non-standard on the platform.

As somebody coming from a "normal software" iOS development background, this presents me with a huge learning curve to get up-to-speed on these things. I already know how to do touch events and accelerometer handling. Apple is introducing kickass APIs for game networking and such. All I want is to draw pretty 3D things to the screen and occasionally animate them; _maybe_ some basic collision detection.

<comment><USER3> The reason for this all-encompassing effort, I believe, is that it gives the Developer everything they need to get started and get rolling .. while at the same time giving the _Artist_ everything they need to get started as well. It doesn't matter what engine you use, if you've got Art assets that don't jive with what your engine expects, then you've got a massive, extraordinary headache, as a Developer.

Also, the point of having yet another accelerometer/input suite is platform compatability .. these engines aren't very useful if they restrict you to a single platform, so they go for as many platforms as possible .. well all of these platforms have to have a common input method, and thats why the engines have to account for it - so that a developer can target the Engine, not the Platform, and benefit from having all these other target architectures available to them ..

Disclaimer: I've built my own 3D engine for use on Android/iPhone/Plaszma/Linux-AngstromOE environments ..

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's probably noteworthy that Wolfgang was Rockstar's graphics lead for quite a while and is the editor of the ShaderX books, and Erwin is the simulation lead for Sony Computer Entertainment. Pretty strong pedigree.

</comment><comment><USER5> What's with the fad of naming everything after tea?

<comment><USER6> Because its unique, but not _too_ unique. That's the naming suite spot.

Just be thankful the trend isn't burrito flavors.

<comment><USER7> Or pornstars. Although there's something to be said for the idea of Ubuntu 26.04 "Randy Ron Jeremy"</comment></comment></comment>


Connecting the legs with a spring improves human running economy - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2019-10-mechanical-simple-hack-fun-efficiency.html <comment><AUTHOR> Paper:

[https://jeb.biologists.org/content/222/17/jeb202895](https://jeb.biologists.org/content/222/17/jeb202895)

</comment><comment><USER2> Where are the pictures and videos? A missed opportunity.</comment>


Ask HN: How do I re-educate myself? - <AUTHOR> I have a PG degree in CS (systems), and a fairly good knowledge of most of the basic concepts in systems and distributed systems.
I am highly interested in systems and distributed systems but I find my education is lacking.  I have identified this to be mostly a problem of ignorance - I do not know of many of the interesting systems projects in the research area, of the problems faced and how they were solved.
Consequently, I am unable to contrast and compare different methods of solving problems, etc.
I'm not only missing the more basic advanced knowledge (e.g. the more advanced data structures) but the deeper "domain" knowledge that comes with systems.
However, I have tried plugging this gap by reading books, papers,etc but I don't find myself getting a lot out of them - sure I can understand them, etc but there is no creativity that follows (e.g. new ideas or application of ideas to the problems I have).  Soon I forget about the papers, ideas etc.  Considering the time and effort it takes to properly understand an academic work (for me at least), the whole effort becomes very heavy, draining and often pointless.
I find I have this problem even with stuff that I'm really familiar with.  For example, I know the average time complexity of quicksort but I'll be damned if I can implement it without looking it up.  I know an algorithm called "heap sort" exists but that's about it - I can look it up in wikipedia NOW but I'll forget it in 6 months.
I want to educate myself to have a really sound and broad baseknowledge that I can build on and use to become better at what I do.  I want to do this in the evenings and weekends, and in what I'm looking for is a way to "classically" educate myself from the ground up so that I don't have little bits and pieces of unrelated "facts" in my head that are of no practical use to me and that I continually refresh but rather a good foundation of ideas, base abstractions, properties etc that I can build on. I have often been struck by the fact that if I properly retained and understood 20% of everything I read, I would be a much better computer scientist.
I know that knowledge acquisition is a personal thing so I'm asking more about the techniques that one can use to acquire this knowledge without getting bogged down. <comment><USER3> From what you write it would seem to me that you are trying to approach the problem from a purely theoretical point of view. That's fine, but you can read papers and books until the cows come home, at the end of the day the only way to really educate yourself is to apply your knowledge.

In short, go do something, stop reading! Before long, because you are trying to actually get something done you'll find that you are reading again, but this time you are reading with a clear purpose, some problem that you need to solve. And you'll be reading about technologies that are relevant to you, not just about whatever somehow made it on your reading list.

Those are the lessons that stay learned, and then, after doing that for a while you may find that learning by doing is far more rewarding and far faster than learning for its own sake.

<comment><USER4> Agreed and beautifully put, but perhaps I can expand a little.

Gaining applied knowledge is not a spectator sport. I can say this both from personal experience (at least in math and CS) and from being told it by people far wiser than I am.

In math, I always try to figure out a valid proof before reading it, and it helps me understand it much better than just reading. In programming, I will read the example first, but then I try to implement it and modify it. No matter how well I think I understand it on first reading, I learn a great deal in trying to implement and play with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is how the great management guru Dr. Ram Charan used to develop mastery:

 _"In the lulls between customers, Charan studied. Using a system of his own devising, he condensed onto a single unlined page the essence of what he had learned that day in each subject. (Today he provides similar one-page summaries for his CEO clients.) "Am I going to get good grades?" he would ask himself, knowing there was only one right answer. "Am I the master of this subject?" He knew from Sanskrit teachings that "fear, anger, laziness - <USER2> are the downfalls of human beings"; that peace of mind alone is worth striving for; that dedication and mastery are their own rewards._

More at: [http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/...](http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/04/30/8405482/index3.htm)

<comment><USER6> That was a wonderful article. Thank you for sharing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Have you ever learned something truly? That you didn't forget? If the answer is yes, try to think about the environment that helped you do it and emulate it. Unless it requires socializing with people or something that is uneasy to do on your own, it should be doable.

E.g. if you found that a particular type of class in college helped you a lot, say, a laboratory where you had to hand in code weekly, then you could "assign" yourself a task that you'd like to do, just in a laboratory fashion.

Sometimes you might think this is hard for a newbie to do, since you don't know what you don't know, etc. For some things you can look up a relevant course at a "good" university/program and see what its curriculum is, what the reading material is, what kind of tasks get assigned etc.

</comment><comment><USER8> To remember something you have to constantly use that information. The basic information from your youth stays with you because you were tested on it daily and practiced it for years. Also the young brain soaked up information better before than it does now.

To learn new information you'll have to do recite it often OR put it into practice often. So make sure it's subjects that you enjoy or can force yourself to use/memorize.

I can still recite the first few lines of Ulysses by Alfred Lord Tennyson since I memorized it for recitation years and years ago. I practiced for hours and hours.

</comment><comment><USER9> If you want to remember details of things you don't use in everyday life, I'd recommend that you try Supermemo. There is also a lot of resources about learning on the Supermemo site.

<http://www.supermemo.com/articles/power.htm>

<comment><USER10> That's a very good idea. I recently downloaded the free and open source cousin of supermemo, pnemosyne. <http://www.mnemosyne-proj.org/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sometime back I found myself in a slightly similar situation. I felt like I had forgotten many things I had learned in my masters (CS), and I also felt that many new technologies have come about and I do not know enough about them.

I organized my learning goals as another masters in CS, and have started doing the first course (web technologies). For each course I plan to identify open courseware and other resources and blog as I learn stuff. I am hoping my blog will help me establish a learning trail, which might be an alternate for the credentials of a paper certificate.

Check it out - <http://opencs.wikidot.com>

</comment><comment><USER11> Echo what everyone else is saying here -- you won't truly grasp anything until you apply it as a solution to a problem you care about. That's how self- teaching always works best for me. It's the difference between driving around aimlessly and driving to a specific point on the map.

Imagine something like API documentation. What's going to make you an expert in that API? Reading through the API docs end to end or acually building some projects?

More importantly, which is more fun? Solving your problems activates feelings of reward, which is important positive reinforcement when you're learning something new. There's very little learned without fun.

</comment><comment><USER12> >there is no creativity that follows

You are likely lacking in enthusiasm or other deep interest in any area. I find even casual reading _outside_ the field tends to spark ideas in areas that I am interested in. Try to find some problem that you find deeply interesting and think about it while reading or, as jaquesm says, choose and actually work on a specific problem.

</comment><comment><USER13> If you are interested in practical application of your knowledge, I would suggest you to build a mid scale real life distributed system on AWS. You would need to spend around 100$ per month though.

Currently I am trying to analyze a huge public data set using AWS, it is cheap at same time powerful enough to do practical work.

</comment><comment><USER14> Find person(s) who need help w/ distributed systems. Figure out the problems they need to solve. Discover what interests you. Work towards learning how to solve those intersting problems. Stay in touch with the people you meet and get known as the guy who they need.

</comment><comment><USER15> Getting my masters in mathematics was a task as practical as a carpenter's job. I would actually use everything I learned in some way, for example trying to generalize it. Perhaps that approach could help you remember, too.

</comment><comment><USER16> Unfortunately <http://www.khanacademy.org/> doesn't touch computer science, but I love to watch to review math and physics.

</comment><comment><USER17> Take a long holiday.</comment>


Galaxy may be full of 'Earths,' alien life - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/space/02/25/galaxy.planets.kepler/index.html <comment><USER2> What's the answer to the Fermi paradox then? Why hasn't one of those thousands of intelligent races colonized the galaxy? It would take a blink of an eye in galactic timescales.</comment>


Ask HN: I found a vulnerability in Dell XPS BIOS, what should I do? - <AUTHOR> I found a way to "brick" any XPS laptop BIOS with zero data loss or corruption. It will be unable to boot, access BIOS or boot menu. You can repair it without hardware replacement as long as you know where the problem comes from.<p>Should I build a minimalist PoC before reporting it? Who do I contact to report it? <comment><USER2> All vulnerabilities affecting Dell, Dell EMC and RSA products should be reported via email to the Dell Product Security Incident Response Team (Dell PSIRT) at firstname.lastname@example.com.

For more information, please see: [https://www.dell.com/support/contents/us/en/04/article/produ...](https://www.dell.com/support/contents/us/en/04/article/product- support/self-support-knowledgebase/security-antivirus/alerts- vulnerabilities/dell-vulnerability-response-policy)

<comment><AUTHOR> I just read that today after the technical support told me they had "no service for this kind of request". I'll build a PoC and try my luck there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> [https://www.dell.com/support/incidents- online](https://www.dell.com/support/incidents-online)

[https://bugcrowd.com/dell](https://bugcrowd.com/dell)

<comment><AUTHOR> Seems like the Bugcrowd link is only for their web services.

I sent them a ticket.</comment></comment>


If you think O2 headers are bad, check this out. - <AUTHOR> http://www.kiteandcode.com/post/16459436941/if-you-think-o2-headers-are-bad-check-this-out <comment><USER2> So the complaint is that no one tells the world about the insecurity of text messages. And the blame is laid on a network provider.

This is wrong. First of all I think it's a bad idea to jump on the (valid!) privacy complaint against O2 in the UK with this unrelated thing. Second, as many pointed out already: This is not a problem of any carrier.

So your peers are surprised if you send a text message from their mum's number? Sure, understandable and maybe that needs to be fixed. But your carrier is not responsible for that in my world, just as yahoo/google etc. cannot protect you from most spoofs in the mail world.

And - gasp! - you can do similar things with a call (ever noticed that Skype offers to call 'from your number'?).

If the article wouldn't hijack a real issue _and_ wouldn't blame the wrong target, then I think there's a valid point somewhere in there: We, the technical crowd, should find a way to educate people around us about inherent trust issues. But that should be a constructive project, not mud slinging.

<comment><USER3> Google and others can and do try to protect users from spoofing - in my opinion, every communication service provider should try to prevent their users from being misled by impersonators.

I'm not sure educating all users about the spoofability or otherwise of all existing communication systems is the way forward as a tech community - there's more we can do in terms of bolstering existing security and trying to validate/flag existing messages.

I've never enabled the ability to 'call from my number' for any services, so I would expect that others would be unable to spoof mine.

<comment><USER2> Google tries - but cannot. Ultimately it can only do the same dance that it does with spam. Learn, improve, tweak - and never succeed.

I think a general project to explain encryption/signing would be awesome. I'd _love_ to send mails to my bank, to the government etc. and have them be legally binding. I'm sure it could help against quite some amount of spam as well, if you understand that an address isn't to be trusted by default.

I .. don't get that last part. How do you think is the process of being able to authorize a 'from' number? Technically gazillion of services could probably do it. It's inherently simple if you are well-connected. Skype certainly doesn't need to ask you first and have a kind of exchange with you and your carrier that 'unlocks' their ability to use your number in an outgoing call. It's a policy that protects them from abuse (i.e. they care, because of legal implications and because of possible business impact if they'd abuse it). [1]

They don't need to get your ok though, if they don't want to.

1: This is based on a limited experience in my past, where I had (legal) access to an asterisk server with a nice trunk connection to a mobile carrier in DE. I certainly don't have extensive telecom knowledge, but got a glimpse at least.

<comment><AUTHOR> Google tries - that is a good thing!

The networks do not. Check this tweet from the mobile network 3: <https://twitter.com/threeuksupport/status/162101700595957760>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is not the fault of any one network; it's a fact of life when it comes to SMS. You can have all kinds of fun, whether it's messages that appear to be from you, your friend, or 11 characters of your choice, an SMS that will only display without being stored, or even a voicemail notification.

There's a nice guide to the format here:

<http://www.dreamfabric.com/sms/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. But they do not care at all. That is my complaint.

<comment><USER5> To fix it, you'd have to reinvent the protocol.

That's like reinventing email. Well good luck with that ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> My lack of knowledge on this subject is evident here I am afraid. Is there not a way the networks could, like Google, try and detect spam or spoof messages?

<comment><USER5> Yes it can with reasonable accuracy, but it's a whack-a-mole game, because there is no standard, many attempts have been gamed successfully by spammers, not all email servers are configured to use the latest "practices" (since this gets expensive) and not all email clients are configured to use the latest practices because that would trigger many false positives.

I just did an experiment.

Using my local Postfix email server with the default settings, I just sent an email from firstname.lastname@example.com to my GMail account. It arrived in my Inbox just fine. And I'm sure that if I sent this to dozens of people, then GMail would have flagged it, but it chose not to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As the tweet pointed out, this has been possible for years. You can also send emails from whoever you want.

<comment><AUTHOR> I know. But that does not mean the networks should not try to stop it.

<comment><USER7> Stop it how exactly? It's the same thing as with phone calls. Unless we migrate to some technology which involves signed, verifiable sources, there's nothing they can do about things like that. Once your telco approves that you can send out any number as source, you can send out any number as your source - they're the highest authority atm. Everything that happens between telcos on the wire is trusted since telcos trust each other.

There are valid use cases for that too of course - setting your presented id as the number of your company's reception, having a single number for incoming connections (or a group) but using multiple lines for calling out, etc.

You can probably ensure the account sending the traffic is closed since it's likely to break multiple local laws, but on the receiving side, there's nothing left to do.

<comment><USER3> I would have expected that the networks cross-reference the device an SMS was sent from (IMEI?) with the sender phone number claimed in the message. I don't think that's unreasonable, but Richard seems to have found that this basic check isn't being performed here.

Are you so keen to see a system remain with this insecurity just because you have a fundamental belief that perfect security isn't possible? Most if not all security is a case of shades of gray, and there's clearly a lot that could be improved here by the network.

<comment><USER7> Why do you assume that SMS messages come only from phones having an IMEI? Not only IMEI can be changed at will and is not connected to the phone number, you can send messages from a service which has legitimate reason to send the message as you. That's possible by design.

It's not that I believe that perfect security isn't possible. I believe that this issue cannot be fixed in any reasonable way without redoing most of how the current system works. I did some telephony-related work and I don't see any way this kind of limitation can be put on top of our current networks (both regarding sms and phone number spoofing).

<comment><USER3> I'd imagine that most users only send SMS messages from their phones, not third party services.

If the default was that users _couldn't_ send from other services/devices, then that majority of users wouldn't be vulnerable to the spoofing, and those who opt-in to allow third-party sending would at least be aware somewhat of the implications.

Unless I misunderstand the underlying technology?

<comment><USER7> Companies would have to create a central authority saying what source numbers are allowed to be used in what way. Everyone would have to check this database before sending the message from their direct customer. Everyone would have to keep it up to date. Procedures for handing over control and allowing third- party modifications would have to be created. And when I say everyone, I mean every single provider in the world, not just ones in your country - there's nothing preventing people from Germany from sending "from number" +1.....

And there's still an issue of how to authorise the third parties. If some bank says multiple sources can use its number for sending messages, how do you identify them?

Still - it would take only a single provider ignoring this to break the whole scheme. It's a bit similar to spam really.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is just silly. Anyone who has industry experience knows that it's trivially possible to spoof SMS phone numbers. Just like with email, it's possible to make the system more secure but given the margins associated with SMS, not likely.

For a clear example, imagine that I'm roaming in Zimbabwe with my UK cellphone. I send an SMS through the Zimbabwe carrier. It (eventually) arrives to the UK recipient network, ready to be delivered. That network could do some form of verification, but as they only get the final billing tally a few days or weeks later from the Zimbabwe ISP, they don't have enough information to do so.

It would not make any sense for the carriers to do SMS verification. And given that emails are far easier to get people to click on links to phishing and malware sites, spoofing SMSs has limited value.

Also, did you know that I could phone you and claim to be someone else?

<comment><AUTHOR> _Anyone who has industry experience knows that it's trivially possible to spoof SMS phone numbers._

Exactly. My point is that the general public do not know. That is bad.

What do you think?

<comment><USER9> It simply isn't possible to prevent this, and your blog post just skates over that and blames the networks.

All they could do is raise awareness, which realistically won't do a whole lot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The SMS service that I use to send messages has an option to send an SMS 'from' any number I choose and it works nicely.

I can send messages 'from' anyone I want - and we actually use this feature to facilitate a user to easily get replies to her messages sent directly to her phone.

<comment><AUTHOR> What service are you running?

<comment><USER10> <http://www.fastsms.co.uk/>

<comment><AUTHOR> You should police your service better. Not impressed.

<comment><USER10> I don't run that service.

I actually just use their API and do my best to ensure that you can't spoof someone's number (you verify your phone number with me before I can send an SMS as you).

<comment><AUTHOR> I asked for your service that you were running that needed to do what you do. Thanks for the down-votes.

<comment><USER10> hehe, I just wanted to clarify my stand there.

About downvotes - well, I don't even have the ability to downvote (atleast all I can see is just an upvote triangle) - so, not me!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just so you know, this is what Orange had to say about the site <http://www.hoaxmail.co.uk>:

Hi Richard

Although I can understand why you may be concerned over the potential misuse of the below site, this is a third-party service which is independent of Orange and we would have no control over its existence.

If you have received an offensive or questionable message from this service, you can report this to them for investigation via <http://www.hoaxmail.co.uk/help/faq.php?ref=H13> .

I hope this helps!

Darren Orange Helpers

</comment><comment><USER11> With this technique, replies go to the correct sender number sent not the spoofer, right?

<comment><AUTHOR> Correct. But that can often make the pranks even better. Especially if you send simultaneously from two people to one-another.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Sorry but this is a null issue, I have Text message APIs that allow me to specify the sender ID. I understand your app is sexy in that it works off the phone but anyone with a few pounds can do this.

Text message spoofing is easy, CLI spoofing is the "cool" thing todo, and if you can spoof the Passert ID then you are gold

</comment><comment><USER13> There is lots of people saying that filtering SMS would be impractical for carriers. Could you explain why that is? Wouldn't it be relatively trivial to check if the number in the SMS header matches the number of the SIM card sending the message?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> To be clear, I am well-aware this is not a new issue. However, in the context of the Leveson enquiry into phone "hacking" and O2's recent blunder, I think it is a great time to revisit this issue.</comment>


'High likelihood of human civilisation coming to end' by 2050, report finds - <AUTHOR> https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change-global-warming-end-human-civilisation-research-a8943531.html <comment><USER2> I hate this kind of headlines. There's very little chance that civilization will "end" by 2050: the two world wars barely made any dent on "human civilization".

This kind of rhetoric only sets up an impossible bar and serves to invite the anti-rhetoric that is "Of course it will be fine, because humanity will not end!"

<comment><USER3> two world wars couldn't impact the ability of agriculture to feed 7+ billion people

<comment><USER4> Well, I guess then that depends on what you mean by "civilization" ending. If the food runs out, humans will continue to exist, but probably not in a way that we would consider to be particularly civilized by modern standards. If 3.5 billion people need to turn against the other 3.5 billion to survive, it's pretty likely that they will.

<comment><USER3> civilization ending means the end of large-scale, complex human societies built around the specialization of labor

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It seems to me that most of the recent wave of climate change alarmist articles take it for granted that a mean temperature increase of +4°C or more would result in a collapse of the functioning of Earth's ecosystems/render the planet uninhabitable/cause in a runaway effect where more carbon is released and the planet heats until it turns into Mercury or Arrakis. However, based on our best knowledge [1], it seems that during the Cretaceous period and for a while after, temperatures were well in excess of this (~+10°C or more?), but the global ecosystem was closer to being tropical and extremely fertile than to being barren, and there was no runaway warming. What is the argument that this isn't going to happen in our current iteration of climate change? If there is none, is it safe to dismiss any documents that claim or imply an uninhabitable Earth as a consequence of climate change as primarily ideological rather than scientific?

(I'd be much more willing to entertain arguments that a rapid transition to a Cretaceous-style planet would be a political catastrophe for the "global south"/equatorial countries that are already struggling with drought, but then I'd need to see reasoning why we should expect any threat to human civilisation as a whole rather than "just" a massive humanitarian crisis through which the residents of the currently-temperate northern hemisphere can just sit back on their pile of futuristic weaponry and laugh.)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/m...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/media/File:All_palaeotemps.svg)

<comment><USER6> I think the claim that Earth is going to turn into Venus or Arrakis is absurd - I haven't heard anyone argue that, but I have heard the claim that it will cause a mass extinction on a geologic scale that could affect humans and our 'pets' as well.

I don't know if it is accurate and based on good science, but I believe that the argument revolves around the _timescale_ that the change is occurring compared to natural climate shifts: that the temperature is increasing so fast there is not enough time for plants and animals to evolve, or even for ecosystems to gradually migrate their locales. For example, one reason you can't simply replace farms with land in, say, the Canadian shield is the lack of good topsoil. According to [1] it takes at least 100 years to form an inch of topsoil in wet, hot climates, and the process is much slower in cold or dry climates. Thus if we render our existing farmland unfit for our existing crops in timescales measured in tens of years, we would have to rely on _manually_ bringing a literal continent's worth of soil north - whatever process was at work during the Cretaceous cannot be relied on to solve this particular problem.

[1] [https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail/wa/soils/?c...](https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail/wa/soils/?cid=nrcs144p2_036333)

<comment><USER5> Right, but it's not like nothing would grow on it if you took good Canadian topsoil into the tropics, is it? I assume that even if there is a substantial difference that renders soil that is conducive to plant growth in one climate less suitable for it in another, the correction of this difference should not take the same amount of time as it takes for the "correct topsoil for the climate" to form from nothing, and in fact probably should be much faster.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For those who haven't read the article, the prediction is based solely on climate change, not on other factors (predicting up to 3 degrees centigrade increase in mean temps globally by 2050 in comparison to pre-industrial levels, which as far as I know is on the extreme side of most predictions). It is also from Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration, which obviously is probably slightly biased toward alarmism regarding climate change.

To me as a pragmatist, climate change is a foregone conclusion at this point and we should be exploring ways to cope with it and engineer around it.

</comment><comment><USER8> As mentioned for a few other articles, it may be worth correlating CO2 levels to the Milankovitch cycles relative to our current orbit. NASA track this, though I don't have a graph link handy. Depending on our current phase, the oceans may be about to release a lot of CO2.

</comment><comment><USER9> $8-20 trillion would be the cost for BeCSS to return CO2 to pre-industrial levels. This is less than the cost of the endless wars. It's doable, but it won't happen without extreme public pressure or the violent overthrow of the vampiric, corporate, inverted totalitarian cabal.

</comment><comment><USER10> Maybe they should say "Western Civilization coming to end", it would be correct. But the rest of the world will be fine

</comment><comment><USER11> To quote Mark Twain, "Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated."</comment>


We can't send mail more than 500 miles - <AUTHOR> http://ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html <comment><AUTHOR> faq: [http://ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail- faq.html](http://ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html)</comment>