Ask HN: Discrete Mathematics Help - <AUTHOR> I am starting human computer interaction/CS degree next year, and I'm worried about Discrete Math.
I didn't put much effort in HS towards math, and scored accordingly.
This is the only math course in the degree, I have no experience in the matter and want to know if this is especially challenging or if I'll be fine if I try?
There's also ~6 months  till I actually start, what would be the best use of my time in learning  the fundamentals?
Thanks <comment><USER2> Don't worry. If I were only taking one course in mathematics, this would be the one. Not because it is the most interesting math, or the most beautiful, but it gives you the most bang for the buck, followed by, maybe, the probability/statistic domains and then abstract algebra (basically the Latin of mathematics).

Discrete Mathematics is basically counting and algorithms, both of which you already know how to do, even if you didn't know it.

If you don't want to waste your time, follow these simple rules:

-Work out (don't copy answers) ALL assigned problems, including extra credit problems.

-If you spend more than 30 mins stuck on something, stop and re-read. In maths, you cannot skim. It all necessarily builds on previous work. That is the nature of the beast and there is no getting around it. If after re-reading you are still stuck, go get help. Do not continue to stare at the problem. 80% of the time you'll simply reinforce your confusion and frustration. Do not go online for help either. That is, more often than not, an endless rabbit hole where the vast majority of material will have nothing to do with your problem.

-Just refer to the assigned book, and if that isn't enough, maybe one supplementary book on the subject, as recommended by a grad student specializing in that area of math and that also (super important) thinks like you. (You'll actually need to talk and interact with them to determine this.)

-Unless you are already acing the material, NEVER miss class. Math professors are infinitely more likely to assist a student they see in class. I think that is because most people have an aversion to the subject that they think is the greatest thing in the world. So dissing the subject makes them pretty irate.

-If your answer doesn't match the books, initially it's easy to think the book has a mistake. The sooner you can squash this impulse the better. Go back and write out your work step by step, in the most exacting detail. If you are still not matching the book, go to office hours and have the professor look at your work. They will be able to see where you went wrong almost at a glance. Plus, you'll look like a badass for doing math like math is supposed to be done. The alternative is to look like an ass emphatically arguing that the book has an error, and then when the professor spends 10 mins walking you through the problem till they can extract where you went wrong, you'll be embarrassed and the professor will be irritated.

So. That sounds like a lot of work, but, unless you're a math wiz, that's actually the easy way. There are two alternatives. One, randomly go through the material only when you think it's important and make a frustrating mess out of the whole exercise. Or, two, do the minimum amount of work required to get a C. Math professors often make getting an A difficult but doable, a B imminently doable, a C super-doable just so they don't have to hassle with that group of students which would otherwise make their life a living hell if she were to give them a D or F. You generally have to work your ass off to get an A+ or F, especially in the 101/201 level classes.

If you take only one thing away from reading this, let it be, discrete math is actually a super useful, almost indispensable tool for the CS tool-chest.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very much appreciate the response! Thank you, very useful.

Once last thing to annoy you with, I have 6 months until I begin the course and I'd like to be as prepared as possible. Do you have any suggestions?

<comment><USER2> No problemo!

Personally, if I had to do it again, I'd purchase a used copy of "Discrete Mathermatics with Graph Theory, 3rd Edition" by Edgar Goodaire and Michael Paramenter and then download the instructors solution manual. Then work through the book. This only works if you have the discipline to work out the problem before checking your work. If you don't, you can sabotage yourself. You'll gain false confidence in what you know and move on before you actually understand what you just did. Then on test day you'll have no clue what to do and it all backfires.

Learning math is super personal though. Do what works for you. Try a couple different approaches. And work around other people doing or that have done the math you're learning. One of the most under appreciated aspects of mathematics, in my opinion at least, is learning to "do" mathematics, as opposed to learning the structures, axioms, definitions, theorems, algorithms, etc. that compose the corpus of mathematics. Doing or practicing mathematics around others that are doing the same allows you to learn that super important aspect much faster than practicing on ones one, where you only learn after making costly and frustratingly discouraging mistakes. And sometimes, even then you might not learn from that.

<comment><USER3> Both your comments here are pure gold. Thanks for taking the time to be so helpful.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was hesitant to post the question, but s/he has reaffirmed my belief in the good of humanity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It sounds like your high school experience is a reflection of attitude not ability.

While it is currently possible to have a career in computing with just discreet math, my observation is that many of the most interesting problems and work in computing are more readily understood in mathematical terms...that's sort of the nature of any technical discipline: I've read Einstein wished he knew more math.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Any other suggestions outside of Discrete Mathematics that I should be learning? Outside of the prescribed courses.

<comment><USER4> Everything. One mathematical form description is often isomorphic with another form, and the new form may make the problem easier to solve. Any math you learn may provide useful insight and there's a whole career in which to learn.</comment></comment></comment>


They Are Scribd - <AUTHOR> http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2008/07/they-are-scribd.html

<comment><USER2> Did they really get 21 million users in May! That's crazy - it's competitive with Digg.

Compete shows them in the low millions though...

</comment><comment><USER3> latimes showing some ycombinator love of late. good write up, captures the unique side of this cool company. sounds like a fun place to work.

</comment><comment><USER4> Has anyone done a good comparison of Scribd vs PDF taking into account things like latency and browsing over a slow connection? I never even think about the time it takes to download a PDF on my DSL line but I can imagine that Scribd might be better at letting you see just the first page of a document over a bad connection.

</comment><comment><USER5> i love scribd, more for the comunity (groups, friends, comments, related docs, etc) than for the ipaper itself.

but i'm afraid that if the site become too popular they will be teased by copyright, and ruin the whole site (for my personal usage).

</comment><comment><USER6> _The selling point: No more downloading; you can view everything in your browser._

Huh? What have I been doing up till now?

<comment><USER7> Your browser contains an entire copy of the Internet. Haven't you noticed the immense amount of RAM Firefox and IE take up nowadays?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hmm... I tried to look at some of the popular documents, but they come up empty (gray background only). Can anyone else confirm they see the same thing?

<comment><USER9> I noted the same thing on FireFox 3, but camino worked just fine.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Ivan and Eric,

Does the document re-appear when you change the zoom level? If so, this is a known issue and a fix should be deployed soon.

In any case please feel free to email me if you ever discover a bug we may not be be aware of (ed at scribd.com). Thanks, guys!

<comment><USER9> Thanks. Works now in FF3 - so I can't really be of much help.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Argument Pyramid - <AUTHOR> http://blog.createdebate.com/2008/04/07/writing-strong-arguments/

<comment><USER2> Usually a pyramid graphic indicates that the lower levels are necessary to achieve the higher levels. This is also the point of the Maslows pyramid which he references.

This graphic seem to indicate that "name calling" is necessary footwork to refute the central point in an argument. Perhaps that is the point, but I'm pretty sure that was not what pg originally meant!

<comment><USER3> You are an ass hat.

(Apologies, I just so rarely get to name call in a way that is supported in graph format)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> CreateDebate is an interesting site.

It's great to seem people working on ways to do online communication and debate better. And visual communication is definitely one tool that can help reduce misunderstandings that can make disagreements turn ugly. I was really taken with the idea of building an online community to support more thoughtful and structured debate.

In this, the results are less than one might hope:

<http://www.createdebate.com/debate/show/The_Great_Debate></comment>


Network Analytics Using an Open Source Python Package - <AUTHOR> https://www.nfstream.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> Comminuty feedbacks and contributions are welcome.

<comment><USER2> waiting for a Youtube tutorial.</comment></comment>


Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain - <AUTHOR> http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/08/ray_kurzweil_does_not_understa.php <comment><USER2> I'm a life-long programmer who presently works in software, but I studied biology in college... mostly because I wanted to learn about learning by studying how living systems do it.

Biological systems are nothing like anything we would ever engineer, and to understand them we must remove our "anthropocentric engineer goggles" and look at them for what they are. Analogies between biological systems and computers, software, machines, etc. are _very loose_ analogies meant to illustrate a point. Never take these analogies too seriously.

DNA is not a program-- it is a molecule, and one that may very well do things at the quantum level that are biologically important.

The brain is not a neural network. It is an interconnected colony of living cells of a variety of types, and it has been shown that all types of cells in the brain are involved in cognition.

We are nowhere near anything with the parallelism or information density of the brain. Getting close would take an advancement in computer technology of the magnitude of the transition from vacuum tubes in individual boxes to a 32nm Core i7. Nature has had billions of years, and it is way ahead of us. There's a nascent field called quantum biology that suggests that the brain may very well be a quantum computer, so maybe quantum computers are the vacuum tubes->ICs scale transition I am speaking of.

I think it's now possible with a big rack of multi-core machines in an MPI cluster to approach the capabilities of a fruit fly's brain.

Cells are not machines. I don't think we have the language to really describe what they are perfectly, but the closest I can come is "stochastic quantum probability field device." A bacterial flagellum is not a "motor," it is a quantum-scale chemo-electro-motive... well... our language breaks down. Like Feynman said, don't tell stories. Just speak literally and then use math.

Actually, come to think of it, there's one engineering analogy that might work for biology. Biology is quantum-scale nanotechnology. Yeah, that's pretty close.

(On a related tangent, I've found that many engineers are sympathetic to intelligent design type arguments against evolution. This is because they try to think about biology like engineers and take these machine analogies literally. It just doesn't work like that.)

<comment><USER3> _Getting close would take an advancement in computer technology of the magnitude of the transition from vacuum tubes in individual boxes to a 32nm Core i7._

...so about 35 years? ;)

<comment><USER2> Maybe, though I am concerned about processing power stagnating.

Advancement is governed by economics as well as technical capability. There must be _demand_ for new technology, or a field stagnates. Witness aviation as an example... utterly stagnant outside of military niche applications.

People seem to no longer want faster and faster computers, and the market seems to be moving toward lighter-weight lower-power portable devices like netbooks, the iPad, etc. Those have _slower_ CPUs than current-generation desktops. I suppose the extreme gamer and server/datacenter markets are still driving performance, but for how long?

One problem is that programmers are not using the capabilities of current- generation processors, partly because the dominant OS (cough Windows cough) makes it horrifically painful to deploy desktop apps. This drives all development to the web and turns desktops into thin clients. In the end this kills demand for performance outside the datacenter market.

<comment><USER4> You are correct for consumer electronics. But commercial and scientific computing are driving increases computational power and density that do not seem to be letting up. In the 4 years I have worked in hosting the amount of server you can get in a 4u box has gone from 8 2.5GHz cores to 24 2.5GHz cores and from 32GB to 256GB. The storage requirements and compute requirements for applications are also increasing substantially.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Myers is attacking Kurzweil on the assumption that Kurzweil is actually proposing that the brain's structure should be reverse-engineesed from DNA, which would be intractably hard. Only Kurzweil isn't saying this anywhere. Instead, he seems to be using DNA as a measure for the amount of irreducible complexity that needs to go into a system that will end up with the complexity of a human brain.

Basically, we have no idea where we will get the AI source code we can actually do something with, but we have some reason to believe that the most concise version of the source code won't contain more data than the human genome.

The rough intuition might be if we wanted to simulate brain in the caricatured reverse-engineer-the-DNA way, we'd need an impossible computer that could simulate years worth of exact quantum-level physics in a cubic meter of space, but the human DNA and basic cellular machinery for hosting it would be the only seriously difficult bits to stick in there, the rest would just be simple chemicals and the impossibly detailed physics simulation.

I guess the analogy then is that we make the AI source code (which we don't know how to write yet), which is supposed to end up at most around the length of a human DNA, but which can run sensibly in existing hardware. Then, deterministic processing entirely unlike the immensely difficult-to-compute protein folding from DNA will make this code instantiate a working AI somewhere at the level of a newborn human baby, in the same way as the genome initiates protein-folding based processes that makes a single cell grow into a human baby given little more than nutrients and shelter from the external physical environment.

So it doesn't seem like a really strong statement of overoptimism. It's basically just saying that the human brain doesn't seem to require a mystifyingly immense amount of initial information to form, but instead something that can be quantified and very roughly compared with already existing software projects. I'd still guess it might take a little more than the ten years to come up with any sensible code with hope of growing into an AI though.

<comment><USER6> The argument Myers is making is that while the DNA might be the _input_ to the system, the total amount of data in the system is that input plus the rules around how that input is interpreted/works. Those rules (for example around protein folding) are currently encoded in biological systems as the laws of physics, more or less, but they're insanely complicated and currently unknown.

So the point is that perhaps if you had a system that simulated all of the laws of physics exactly correctly such that proteins folded and interacted exactly right, only _then_ could you get away with an amount of input equivalent to the amount of information encoded in the part of our DNA related to the brain.

Actually encoding _those_ rules is probably the harder part of the problem, and could easily take several orders of magnitude more work. (10x? 1,000,000x? Who even knows).

<comment><USER7> 1) An estimate of complexity is what it is - an estimate of complexity. It's _not_ a claim that the way to achieve AI is to figure out the details of the particular encoding that nature ended up using, so the precise nature of those rules is not something we care about.

2) While it's true that those runtime rules (which we can kind of consider as the "interpreter" for our DNA) are extremely complex, this has almost zero bearing on the informational content in our DNA that is put towards creating the "intelligence algorithm", whatever that is. Sure, there's probably a bit of extra compression based on the fact that the physics allows some actions to be "built in", but unless you believe that DNA is physically optimized to make intelligent computer construction very concise, the logical content of these computations is probably explicitly "written" in.

And it's hard to believe that DNA is somehow specifically optimized for intelligence, because it was first used in completely unintelligent creatures and appears in exactly the same form now.

Now, it _may_ be the case that DNA's physics are tailor-made to efficiently code for useful _physical_ structures. But intelligence is a level of abstraction above that, and we're all but guaranteed that very little compressibility exists in the "language" for such higher level constructs.

What would an argument be without a strained analogy: if you're writing a complex web application, the size of your application is roughly independent (within an order of magnitude, for sure) of the architecture that it will ultimately run on (where by "size of application" I mean the size of everything that it takes to run it, interpreters, frameworks, etc.). Sure, the binary size might be slightly different depending on whether you're writing it for ARM, PPC, x86, etc., but not hugely different.

We would be _extremely_ surprised if on three platforms your executable weighed in at 10 mb and on a fourth (which had a few different machine level instructions) it compiled down to 10 kb - the only way we could imagine that happening is if someone somehow "cheated" and embedded large parts of your actual application logic into the processor, adding specialized Ruby on Rails instructions to the machine code, or something like that. :)

Encoding and dynamics details may make differences in compressibility, but past an order of magnitude, you're really talking about "cheating", and it's an Occam's Razor problem to assume that nature optimized in such a way for intelligence...

<comment><USER6> I think the article's original point (and mine as well) was that considering the size of the code (i.e. the DNA) as a measure of the complexity of the task is totally disingenuous when you don't have (to use your analogy) the web server, the libraries you're calling, the parser/compiler/linker for the language, the operating system for the server along with its drivers/TCP stack/etc., the processor it runs on, the mother board, or the storage. In order to turn 10,000 lines of code into a web application, you need millions of lines of code (and Verilog or whathaveyou) in terms of infrastructure.

The problem for AI is not just encoding the DNA, as it were, it's in building all those other pieces around it. Estimating the complexity of building a software brain based on the amount of information in DNA is like estimating the complexity of building a web application using 1950's hardware. "It's only 10,000 lines of code! How hard can that be? All we have to do is write the code, plus the frameworks, programming language, and operating system, plus do all the hardware design."

<comment><USER7> _It's only 10,000 lines of code! How hard can that be? All we have to do is write the code, plus the frameworks, programming language, and operating system, plus do all the hardware design._

Except that DNA doesn't even come _close_ to being a high level language, since the low level details were not specifically designed for compressibility of the code (in fact, the low level details, the "bare metal ops", are pretty much fixed by the for-all-intents-and-purposes random laws of physics, which means we shouldn't assume that they enable any particularly high compressibility ratios for _anything_ ).

So a more apt comparison would be if we saw an assembly language program in some strange incomprehensible assembly language and said "It's only 10,000 lines of operations on the bare metal! Now all we have to do is figure out how the hell the system this runs on works, and how we can translate that code into a more sensible (and probably _vastly_ more compact) form."

...which might even be a _harder_ problem, to be fair.

Kurzweil's essentially proposed evidence of existence of an algorithm of length N that does whatever it is we mean by intelligence. Which is fine, and I think is probably correct (IMO, even his estimate about the minimal amount of code it would take is probably too high, though that's another story).

But he's overlooking the fact that the mere existence of such a compact algorithm doesn't help us find it at all, and I think a lot of the complaints others have made about his statements are more aimed at that leap of logic, not the existence claim itself. I completely agree that even brain scanning tech might not help us simulate the important bits very well, even if we did have access to that tech and computers fast enough to run the sims.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's a psychological principle that I've forgotten the name of that observes that by setting the stage correctly you can cause people to accept assumptions without even thinking about it by framing the debate correctly.

This conversation here on HN is a great example of that. Simply by the way the article is written, it is being taken nearly as fact by most participants that a human-scale AI simulation must work by physically simulating the brain. This may ultimately be true but there is no _a priori_ reason to believe it. The brain may implement something that can be simulated "close enough" by a much simpler computation system.

Chaos is chaotic, obviously, but the human brain is a pretty fuzzy system too. It can't be too pathologically chaotic; people speak as if getting the 15th decimal place wrong will blow up the system but the brain simply can not be that sensitive or the removal of a single neuron would break our brains. Our brain state must be at least metastable to work at all. Removing a neuron or getting something wrong in the 15th decimal place may result in some small change of behavior three years later vs. not removing it or getting it right, but our brain states are already so fuzzy and noisy that's not going to be the stopper.

The stopper will be to see whether or not there is a higher-level simulation that can be run that is less complex that simulating the physics entirely. The secondary question is whether we can make something that we would call _human- intelligent_ even if it turns out we can never "upload our brains" without critical data lossage occurring. That would be something as intelligent as us that is nevertheless fundamentally incompatible with human biology, with neither able to simulate or understand the other. I can make coherent arguments either way, as can many people, but by framing the question as physical simulation this has not been one of the more intelligent debates on the topic we've seen here. Physical simulation is one possible path, and not even the most likely or interesting, to AI and brain upload.

<comment><USER9> No, people are talking that way because it's obvious to the participants that no one knows how to do the higher level simulation. And there is no hope of anyone figuring it out any time soon.

So people figure why not "run the program" that already exists, and that's what this conversation is about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This rant unfortunately fails to clearly demonstrate how Kurzweil errs. It goes on about complexity and emergence, but why would complex interactions not emerge from a computer simulation just as they do in the real biochemical system?

Nevertheless, my gut feeling, too, is that Kurzweil is mistaken. I can't quite put a finger on it yet, but at least one problem I see is this: Kurzweil seems to suggest that the observation that the genome consists in only 50MB of data (after compression) somehow gives us an upper bound to the complexity of the system. I'd however suspect it rather gives us a lower bound: factor in all the epigenetics, external interactions, the not necessarily simple rule set provided by physical chemistry (this is not in the genome, obviously), etc etc, and the problem may be quite a bit larger.

Take for example the way we currently believe gene transcription promoter networks to work. The combinatorial nature of those interactions means that even though the underlying data is "only" a few megabytes, the system you end up simulating gets very big very quickly.

<comment><USER11> _why would complex interactions not emerge from a computer simulation_

One answer is "They will, and surprisingly quickly. But they will be a completely different set of complex interactions than are observed in the real world, because of some roundoff error in the binary representation of the _N_ th digit of some apparently unimportant constant. Unfortunately, because the system is complex, you'll probably spend the rest of your career trying to track down that error, and fail."

Another answer is: They would, if the simulation was comprehensive enough. Unfortunately, phase space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. Seriously: Your mind reels when confronted with the number of different molecular interactions going on inside the "simplest" single-celled prokaryote, so you abstract it away, almost as a reflex, to stop yourself from going mad. Then you abstract away the first-order abstraction. Then you keep going. Soon you begin to imagine that you can model an entire collection of a trillion organisms, just as a naive programmer imagines that they can rewrite Windows in three days if only they use a powerful enough language. It's a mere matter of programming!

<comment><USER10> As for the first answer: we all have to learn to deal with roundoff error. That's not by principle an obstacle.

The other answer contains an implicit assumption that's not obviously correct: you suggest that complexity only arises when you enumerate every possible dimension of phase space. But physical simulations have been very successful at reproducing complex behaviour from simple rules, without taking into account every particle's state vector.

Finally, did you really try to equate my statement to the statement that Windows could be written in three days? ...

<comment><USER11> No, I'm poking fun at Kurzweil's 2020 deadline, not at you. You appear to have been wise enough not to specify a deadline...

As for this statement:

 _physical simulations have been very successful at reproducing complex behaviour from simple rules_

Absolutely, but it doesn't follow that _every_ complex behavior can be reproduced from simple rules. To overgeneralize from success in one field is the occupational illness of futurists. It's certainly a key problem for Singularitarians, who tend to get so enthusiastic about Moore's Law that they forget that most of the world has nothing to do with microelectronics.

<comment><USER10> Haha, well I guess the fact that for a moment I felt that was condescending mostly says a lot about me ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> His last comment,

 _The media will not end their infatuation with this pseudo-scientific dingbat_

chimes with the large majority of bold scientific claims that appear in the press. For example, not that long ago the press jumped on Craig Venter's (<http://bit.ly/uEC5>) 'artificial cell' (<http://bit.ly/c27AL5>), hailing it as the beginning of man-made organisms and making bold predictions about the future of life itself, riling up environmental groups no end. (I'm not saying that wasn't a great acheivement. But all his team _really_ did was take out one DNA tape and put back an identical, if newer version. Bread and yoghurt manufacturers have been doing a smaller version of that for a long time. Not exactly playing God.)

It would be nice if there was a scientific-bullshit detector that made sure the press didn't go crazy over wild claims. Proposal for a startup, anyone? :)

<comment><USER13> _The media will not end their infatuation with this pseudo-scientific dingbat_

This is one reason that many, many times on HN when there is a link to a blog post about some news story on a science discovery, I post the link to Peter Norvig's article on how to evaluate research,

<http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html>

as it seems to be that most readers need more practice in critical reading of statements about science. PZ is one of the few bloggers who knows most of those points already, but he frequently writes about other people who forget them, so here in this thread too I'll remind HN readers about Norvig's advice on how to read about science.

<comment><USER12> @tokenadult that's some good shit. :)

This is _slightly_ off-topic, but here goes anyway. I've long had an issue with the huge disparity between what humanities/arts people (including the large majority of the press) know about science, and what scientists know about the arts and humanities. Most scientists I know are more than able to hold their own in a conversation about, say, a good book, but 99% of everyone else I've ever met doesn't know/want to know the second law of thermodynamics.

I'm not pointing fingers here, I just think there's a serious lack of communication between arts and sciences. I think it's partly this lack of general scientific knowledge that makes the humanities/arts dominated world of the press believe pretty much anything a scientist says. And then, to make a good story into a great one, it's blown out of proportion. Ho hum.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm not so sure about the simulation, but Ray's right that the brain cannot be more complex than the data that specifies it, speaking information- theoretically. A biologist probably wouldn't get this, because he has too much knowledge of how difficult and complex the actual translation is. It's a mathematical idea, like non-constructive proofs, which freak out sensible folk - and rightfully so. ( _EDIT_ no offence intended, they freak me out too)

The only other source of information is the non-genomic environment - extra- nucleur DNA like mitochondria, and the womb (which is arguably already specified in the genome, unless mother nature has done a Ken Thompson <http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html> at some point.)

But it's weird to claim that 50% of our genome encodes the brain. Really? Perhaps it's just that 50% is required by the brain, much of it being foundational to the whole organism (like standard libraries.)

<comment><USER15> > I'm not so sure about the simulation, but Ray's right that the brain cannot > be more complex than the data that specifies it

Which would be true if the DNA specification for that particular part of the body was the only part of what specifies the brain. Myers is pointing out that assertion is patently false. The environment of developing creature and the interactions between cell types and their environment (and themselves) is a giant information content multiplier, and the DNA need not explicitly specify any of this information for it to exist and be relevant.

Bringing this to a familiar compsci example; imagine software for creating neural net recognizers. You can look at the source code for a net and say, "This will take N inputs and produce N outputs" You can look at a finished classifier and say, "Ah, I see what this does! It tells the airbags in this car when to deploy!" But that's as far as you can go without the training data that was used to train the classifier. This is a doubly good example because it's often very difficult to determine HOW a complex neural net is doing what it does, but it's fairly easy to explain how to train one to do that task.

<comment><USER16> Is this sort of like having a pre-processor and system code to get a program loaded, linked and running?

<comment><USER15> Perhaps, only the pre-processor would be in a feedback loop with the early parts stages of the program life-cycle. Typically the linker and pre-processor are one way operations. In a developing organism, the environment feeds back on the cells developing and triggers new responses which causes new environmental changes which causes new feedback.

Biology is full of bizarre examples of when this process goes awry and our bodies have bizarre features. Dawkins's example of the Laryngeal nerve that makes a crazy loop down into the mammalian chest cavity is the classic example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "he seems to have the tech media convinced that he's a genius"

Looks like he understands the brain just fine, to me...

</comment><comment><USER18> About Ray Kurzweil ~ "He's actually just another Deepak Chopra for the computer science cognoscenti."

<comment><USER11> I really understand where this article is coming from. Spend a decade in a biology laboratory working day and night just to figure out a tiny subset of the role of _one_ simple protein, and you'll find that pseudoscientific handwaving no longer sounds like a pleasant breeze, but like the grating of sharpened fingernails on a chalkboard.

(For physicists the equivalent torture is a movie, which goes by the name of "What the Bleep...", that came out a few years ago. OMFG if you want to drive me into a towering rage just show me ten minutes of that film. It's like watching someone make spitballs out of the manuscript of the _Eroica_ symphony.)

<comment><USER19> Wow - that "What the Bleep..." does look _remarkably_ bad.

The trailer is Poe's Law in action: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7dhztBnpxg>

I guess you don't want to watch that again? ;-)

<comment><USER11> It is deadly dangerous for me to watch a clip from that film. It could inspire dozens of hours of rage-filled but closely-argued physics lectures. Given the slightest provocation, I will go all xkcd.com/386 on its ass and my actual career will die of neglect.

Now, I need to go calm myself by fixing some bugs before I start to throw things. ;)

<comment><USER19> For what it's worth, I was having a conversation with my son (he's 11) about the key differences between scientific and religious beliefs - I think I'll use that film as an example of how it can sometimes be difficult to tell the difference - especially when people present what are essentially religious beliefs using terminology derived from science.

(NB I remember reading some Erich von Däniken books when I was 9 or 10 and getting awfully excited - I was quite upset when I found that people could just make stuff up and present it as science).

<comment><USER11> That's the extra-infuriating thing. In _theory_ , I'm completely down with the project of using parables based on science to convey religious ideas. Religion is built out of the raw materials that the world gives you. If we live in a world full of science and technology, we should expect our parables and our myths and our stories to be filled with science and technology.

(Cue a chorus line of _Doctor Who_ cosplayers.)

So, in theory, I could have been okay with _What the Bleep_. In practice, however, it is just horribly grating -- way more grating than any SF, even the dumbest SF.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> My programmer's understanding of the argument is this:

Even if you could reduce the brain to some sort of bytecode, an interpreter is still necessary to run that bytecode. For instance, a python program might be a few bytes, but the interpreter is still a few megabytes. Yet both are necessary to run the program. Who knows how large a brain bytecode interpreter is going to be, but probably very large.

<comment><USER21> But you don't need to write the whole interpreter to _understand_ how that small python program works.

<comment><USER22> Assuming you have the documentation, or assuming that you can extrapolate from a program in a language that you already know.

If one knows python and is given a program in APL, then likely an insurmountable barrier has been reached. If you don't have the docs the describe the language, the one can try to infer the language by running experiments on variations of the stored program. However one needs access to the processor in order to run different experiments and get different results to be able understand how the programming language works.

We don't have CPU in a form that we can experiment with ("brains in a vat"). We have a 50Mb string in APL*2, a mostly unknown language for a mostly unknown processor.

The other part is that this is not a program but a meta-program -- meaning there are multiple levels of indirection. The DNA does not directly specify the brain, but instead specifies rules for components that would eventually arrive at an assembly (guided by a rich context of voluminous other inputs over an extended period of time) that constitutes a brain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Hard to take this criticism seriously when it starts off with so many ad hominems.

I haven't read Kurzweil's specific claims, but I'd guess he's claiming we can simulate brain function by 2020. We can already simulate simple organisms and neural networks. You can already accomplish quite a bit of complex emergent behavior with those.

Simulating the _entire_ brain would require an enormous amount of processing (though surely feasible some day, if not 10 years, how about 20), but most likely we'd make some trade-offs and sacrifices and still get a close approximation (like we do with virtually every simulation).

Of course simulating a brain and simulating a human are not the same thing. You can't really avoid having to simulate the entire body and its interactions with the environment.

And of course we wouldn't suddenly "understand" the brain just by simulating it. It would still be the same complex system, it's just we'd be able to inspect it more closely. Such a simulation would at least help us understand a good bit more about the brain's role in our cognition and actions.

And yeah, who knows, maybe in 20 years we could have some kick-ass AI in counterstrike.

</comment><comment><USER24> Kurzweil is a brilliant scientist. Calling him a Deepak Chopra is just stupid. He's out of his depth is all.

Also, I wouldn't bet against him building an AI that for all intents and purposes appears to be conscious. Full-human simulation is another thing, but with that we are all out of our depth, and it's pretty likely that a conscious computer would be quite capable of understanding it better than us.

<comment><USER25> "Calling him a Deepak Chopra is just stupid"

That's not much of an argument. He plays on the standard things that all religions play on: the promise of some form of immortality, which instinctively plays on the fear of death; claims that the near future will be radically different than the present; etc. His extrapolations of exponential growth are not entirely unfounded but he applies the same logic to everything that suits his fancy without taking into account that science and technology have made large but halting steps forward throughout history, and the fundamentals of scientific insight and discovery haven't changed. He talks and sounds like an evangelical to me. No doubt he is a brilliant scientist but that doesn't warrant the cult of personality that has grown up around him, which I perceive as a dangerous thing contrary to the aims of science.

<comment><USER24> I agree that cults of personality are bad things. But dismissing someone as an evangelist and overrated isn't much of an argument either. It trivializes his very real and important accomplishments, and conveniently allows you to dismiss all of his ideas without looking at them on their individual merits. In short, ad hominem, and unwarranted.

Kurzweil has several functioning products that would have fallen into the mess you dismiss as nonsense two decades ago. Is he wrong on a lot of things? Yes. But so is any other engineer looking for things that haven't been done before. Even if Kurzweil has a spell where he does nothing of any merit for a decade (which has yet to happen) I'll still confidently say you're foolish to rule him out as a crank. He's earned his right to dream aloud.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Actually the information needed for replicating brain is not just limited to the information encoded in DNA. Physics plays a great deal of role in all molecular biology and from physical interactions arise cell-cell interactions which then give rise to complicated organs that you have in the body. (And, of course, all these arose during billions of years of evolution which is encoded not only in DNA but environment also.)

So if you were to simulate the brain, modeling DNA will be A tiny part of it. Encoding the deepest of physics world (yes, quantum effects play many roles in DNA) AND then having enough computational power to model interactions of those particles in real time IS A REALLY BIG DEAL.

</comment><comment><USER27> > The design of the brain is in the genome.

Given how much computation takes to "decompress" information about what a protein is built of into 3d layout of that protein (vide folding@home), statement that you could "decode" half of the genome into working simulated system is bold to say the least.

Trouble with simulating human 1 to 1 is not with how complex human itself is but with how complex, bizzare and computationally powerful is physical hardware on which program "be human" runs.

</comment><comment><USER28> I too have my doubts about reverse engineering the brain. As I see it regardless of whether the Singularity arises or not this century will achieve a rate of progress which is incomparable to anything we have ever seen before. To get this in perspective just consider that in the nineteenth century more technological breakthroughs were made than in all of the nine centuries preceding it. Then in the first twenty years of the twentieth century, we saw more advancement than in all of the nineteenth century combined. In this century we will achieve 1000 times more than we achieved in the whole 20th century which was itself a period of progress never before seen. Whether we reverse engineer the brain or not the merging of human and machine intelligence is an inevitability because you only need to look at how attached we are to our iPhones and Blackberry's to realise that we will ultimately be unable to resist moving increased processing capability directly inside the body. The consequence of that is massively increased capability whatever way you look at it.

</comment><comment><USER29> Kurzweil is reported as equating 25MB of compressed DNA to 1 million lines of source code, which seems several times too low: if I compress the comment- stripped source to one of my own projects, it compresses down to 8 bytes per line of code as defined by sloccount. If we suppose compressed DNA has similar real info rate to my gzip-compressed source, then 25MB corresponds to 3 million SLOC, not 1. If you include blank lines and comments, then more like 5 million.

For another take, <http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/linux-kernel-cost.html> puts the Linux kernel source at 4 million lines. Can you compile a 25MB kernel? Compressed? (How much of it is 'introns', anyway? This might not be the best example.)

(Not going to touch the argument about applicability. It does seem to me that whenever Kurzweil glosses over details, the closer look always appears less utopian. There are other writers about these ideas who I can read without having to check every assertion, like Anders Sandberg.)

</comment><comment><USER30> Myers is wrong, because he overcomplicates. Kurzweil is also wrong, because he oversimplifies (I'm taking Myers's version of argument at face value; I actually suppose the argument was more sophisticated than that).

Firstly where Myers is wrong: the human brain ultimately comes forth from a bunch of information roughly equal to 1 million lines of code. If you could reproduce those 1 million lines and set them loose, allowing them to construct a human being (nothing else: what else could they construct?) and letting that human being live in our world, you would have 'created' intelligence. It's as simple as that and attacking that abstraction is completely the wrong approach to pointing out the problem with Kurzweil's argument.

So, then the two points where Kurzweil is wrong:

1) it's not just any million lines of code. It has to be exactly the million lines of code in our genome, give or take some bits. Considering the enormously complex interactions between these bits of code, this is worse than reverse engineering the largest codebase of spaghetti code you could possiblt imagine. The simple example that Myers gives is enough to show this.

2) The million lines of code cannot just be executed anywhere. It encodes for the construction of a human from raw material and the subsequent operation of that human. Give it different materials or a different living environment and something entirely different, in most variations nothing remotely capable of 'life', appears. And even if you could make it build something from electronic components: slight differences in the perceptive systems can create huge differences in the brain and the concepts in the brain. A machine with a finite pixelized array of visual light receptors would build a completely different conceptual model of the world. Reverse engineering the genome is not only extremely hard: it is very unlikely to produce the result you want.

<comment><USER31> Myers isn't trying to argue that the million lines of code aren't there or aren't important. He's trying to argue that those million lines of code have to run on hardware which is poorly understood at best, and that trying to reverse-engineer the hardware is several orders of magnitude more difficult than trying to understand the original programming. The hardware components don't follow the law of superposition, either, so we can't just look at each element in isolation. The entire thing has to be understood.

Imagine going back to ancient Roman/Greek/Etruscan/&c times and handing them a ream of paper filled with the hexadecimal representation of an x86 application compiled for a Windows environment, and then showed them what it looked like when running. "Hey, look, now you can play videos and music!" Now imagine it was several orders of magnitude more difficult than that, and you're beginning to get the idea.

"If you could reproduce those 1 million lines and set them loose, allowing them to construct a human being..." The exact point he was making was that there's a lot of handwaved complexity in this statement, and that the abstraction "understand human being program, run code" is abstract to the point where it no longer accurately reflects the reality of the situation.

<comment><USER30>
      He's trying to argue that those million lines of code have
      to run on hardware which is poorly understood at best

He may be trying to argue that, but that isn't the central thesis of what he _is_ arguing. His central thesis is that

      [The brain's] design is not encoded in the genome

and that's just patently false. There's only one single blueprint for the brain and that's the genome. That the ways in which the blueprint is being read, interpreted and carried out are not in the genome does not detract from the fact that the genome is the blueprint. His arguments support the thesis that a blueprint is not enough. The objections to Kurzweil that I list are a summary/rephrasing of the arguments Myers provides. But he starts out by saying "No, that isn't the blueprint" and none of the arguments support that thesis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The main thing Kurzweil has missed is the even though we something like the 'source code' for a human brain, we don't have the compiler.

If you're taking the (pretty weak) 'source code' analogy further, the compiler is... A host human embryonic cell, running on a womb in a mother.

So thinking about the problem that way is a non-starter for obvious chicken/egg reasons.

</comment><comment><USER33> Just from the description in the Wikipedia this is how I read Ray.

He is excellent in marketing, in sales, in networking & as an overall promoter. All qualities we hackers need to cultivate as long as we control ourselves & avoid pitching any vapor-ware.

Some examples of him promoting his product or himself. 1\. At 17, appeared on the CBS television program I've Got a Secret - showed off software that composed piano music 2\. International Science Fair, first prize for the same. 3\. Recognized by the Westinghouse Talent Search 4\. Personally congratulated by President Lyndon B. Johnson during a White House ceremony. ... Incredibly, it goes on and on. Very fascinating, if read with the heart of an entrepreneur. His whole life seems to be a chain of fantastic promotions.

</comment><comment><USER34> The article has a point that Ray Kurzweil's claims are nonsense, but lets not focus on his claims on genome-to-protein-to-brain cells mechanism. What's rather more important is how the brain does what it does and how that compares with today's computers.

There are 50 to 100 billion neurons in the human brain and the power of the brain comes from the fact that you can create many orders of magnitude more neural circuit combinations with those neurons. Each cell may be part of many circuits, and learning involves the forming of these circuits. Now, lets compare that phenomenal power with the power of the computer. It becomes especially laughable when you say its 50MB worth of information.

</comment><comment><USER5> Incidentally, Larry Page used the exact same argument back in 2007:

 _My theory is that, if you look in your own programming, your DNA, it's about 600 Megabytes compressed… so it's smaller than any modern operating system. Smaller than Linux, or Windows, or anything like that, your whole operating system. That includes booting up your brain, right, by definition. And so, your program algorithms probably aren't that complicated, it's probably more about the overall computation. That's my guess._

([http://pimm.wordpress.com/2007/02/20/googles-larry-page- at-t...](http://pimm.wordpress.com/2007/02/20/googles-larry-page-at-the-aaas- meeting-entrepreneurship-in-science/))

</comment><comment><USER35> If you want to read some hard science fiction about how AI might be developed and how an AI might think, I'd highly recommend the in-progress series Life Artificial: <http://lifeartificial.com/>

</comment><comment><USER36> This is like saying that the entire universe can be simulated by using a fundamental theory of physics as source code.

It's (to some extent) _true_ , and potentially interesting philosophically -- but completely meaningless from an engineering perspective.

</comment><comment><USER37> Kurzweil denies the accusation strongly: [http://www.kurzweilai.net/ray- kurzweil-responds-to-ray-kurzw...](http://www.kurzweilai.net/ray-kurzweil- responds-to-ray-kurzweil-does-not-understand-the-brain)

</comment><comment><USER38> Hmmm. _Sejnowski says he agrees with Kurzweil's assessment that about a million lines of code may be enough to simulate the human brain._ A million lines of code is hardly enough to run a _car_ , for goodness sake.

</comment><comment><USER39> I don't find these criticisms convincing. We haven't solved the protein folding problem? So solve it. Is there some reason to believe it won't ever be solved? If you had a sufficiently accurate simulation of a cell or organism (which we don't, but we might someday), you could do experiments on it much cheaper and faster than in a lab.

I do agree that there's no freakin' way this will be done in ten years, or in the 62-year-old Ray Kurzweil's lifetime, or mine.

<comment><USER40> There is Nobel-prize winning theory that shows that you won't ever truly solve this problem by studying the underlying atomic physics:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Prigogine#Dissipative_stru...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Prigogine#Dissipative_structures_theory)

<comment><USER39> I'm ignorant of this theory, but reading the link I don't see that it shows that protein folding can't be modeled.

<comment><USER40> You'd have to read the papers cited below to get the meat of the theory but the gist of it is that you can't model proteins by looking one level down, i.e. by studying only the properties of the atoms that make them up. Proteins have emergent behaviors not entirely predictable from the behaviors of their constituent atoms.

Many still believe in the reductionist idea that a perfect understanding of physics would lead to a perfect understanding of chemistry and then biology. This is not the case.

<comment><USER41> _Proteins have emergent behaviors not entirely predictable from the behaviors of their constituent atoms._

Define "emergent". I can believe that a protein's behavior is extremely sensitive to the initial configuration of its atoms and that as a practical matter we can't (currently?) get detailed enough measurements to predict exactly what's going to happen. But without exceptionally compelling evidence I'm not going to believe that there are _different_ physical laws for proteins than for their atoms.

<comment><USER40> I suggest you read Prigogine's book if you're really interested but his work demonstrates that the problem isn't having detailed enough information about state, it's the irreversibility of time, which makes physics fundamentally non-deterministic.

<comment><USER42> What has irreversibility got to do with it? There are cellular automata that are irreversible but obviously deterministic.

<comment><USER40> It has to do with entropy and thermodynamics and the fact that living systems are so far removed from thermodynamic equilibrium that they generate unpredictable, emergent behaviors.

The math behind is pretty gnarly but if you want to understand it I recommend his book: [http://www.amazon.com/End-Certainty-Ilya- Prigogine/dp/068483...](http://www.amazon.com/End-Certainty-Ilya- Prigogine/dp/0684837056) .

A CA is not a good model for this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> PZ Myers does not understand Ray Kurzweil.

<comment><USER44> This is what I got from it too. Ray is not an idiot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Ultimately the criticism of hard AI that sticks is that its enthusiasts are using a faulty "brain as computer" metaphor as the basis for their theories. The brain and digital computers do NOT work the same (the brain is not digital) and assuming they are, and that therefore clever-enough computer models can replicate the brain, seems to put very intelligent / brilliant CS people at risk of banging their head against a wall for decades.

More generally its fun to imagine things like this but also good to realize real world limits as we live in a finite world with limitations such as living 700 years not being at all likely (or desirable, IMHO).

</comment><comment><USER46> I heard an interview with him, and it wasn't very insightful. He says that everything will get smaller and faster with varying detail or on specific subjects. That's not very insightful.

<comment><USER47> I've heard him give the same talk at several different conferences, several of them unrelated (Entrepreneurship conferences, Blackberry conferences, etc.) Talk about exponential progress, Singularity U, mind uploading, and his belief he'll survive to be 700 years old. He's a bag of fantastic claims and an excellent speaker, and it embodies a lot of the best hopes of technology of the present age, as well as our collective insecurity that we've come so far and yet seem to have improved on the world so little.

But it's grating to see that he's getting so much media attention for such blatant disregard of the human condition. No consideration what a post- sentient-AI world would accomplish. No regard for what happens when people live to be 700 years old and population growth doesn't slow. His ideas are like genetically engineering society with no regard to the collateral damage it'd cause to the societal environment. I don't dislike Kurzweil for being an optimist, I dislike him for being arrogant.

<comment><USER48> > and population growth doesn't slow.

Population growth _is_ slowing. Dramatically. There's tons of evidence that as women are educated, they will have fewer children. And women are starting to get better educations all around the world. There's absolutely no doubt that population growth will slow (slash, is already slowing down) a bunch in the coming decades.

Second, I'm confused about the 700 number. Where does that come from? Does he think that in the next 30 years, we will be able to extend life so much that he can keep on living? Why does that stop at 700?! Doesn't he think that some time in the _next 700 years_ we'd be able to find a way to live longer than 700?

Frankly, I doubt there's much difference between finding a way to live to 700 and finding a way to live until the end of time.

<comment><USER49> Maybe he's planning to start bull fighting at the age of 690 and base jumping at the age of 695.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> We eventually learned to fly, too... but not by sticking feathers up our butts, as Kurzweil is advocating.

</comment><comment><USER44> Everyone is an expert on AI and the human brain today I see.

</comment><comment><USER51> Synopsis: Kurzweil is underestimating the brain. Myers is underestimating technology.

</comment><comment><USER52> Kurzweil has written enough by now that anyone hearing his interviews should be able to put his ideas in the context of his predictions about the Singularity. I have always thought Kurzweil hedges his bets quite well, and he makes it quite clear that the capabilities about which he writes depend on future gains in computing power. Kurzweil is only human, of course, and it is well known that he is trying to extend his own life so that he will be here for the Singularity. He very much wants the things he predicts to happen in his lifetime, but I don't hear or read him as asserting that that will absolutely be the case. Myers' unnecessary "refutation" (and insulting) of Kurzweil reminds me of the reactions to the Segway. Kamen predicted that it would revolutionize transportation; naysayers then piled on, ridiculing him and saying that the Segway wouldn't work for commuting long distances on American super highways. Well, no, but that's not what he meant by revolutionizing transportation. I'm sure Myers is probably good at what he does, and he is very much concerned with the now and the practical. We need people like him, and we also need visionaries like Kurzweil and Kamen who look ahead decades or centuries.</comment>


Show HN: Wbs – Watch, build, and (re)start Go net/http server - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/achiku/wbs <comment><AUTHOR> This tool is yet another auto-rebuild-reloader for go net/http. I had been using fresh, but development of this tool got really inactive from middle of the last year. So, I decided to rewrite from the ground up, adding more flexibility by using toml configuration file, making it possible to use gb or gom to biuld binary, adding bunch of tests, and keeping code structure simple so that it will be easy to contribute.

This tool was built by just spending 5 hours of my weekend, and not really sophisticated at this stage, so pull-requests and issue reports are all very welcomed :)</comment>


Man Who Drove into Pedestrians in Sunnyvale CA Was Targeting Muslims - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/26/us/crash-sunnyvale-muslims.html <comment><AUTHOR> It's shocking that this kind of hate crime happened in Silicon Valley, one of the most racially diverse places in the US.

<comment><USER2> The driver in question is black.</comment></comment>


OTI and Others File Stingray Complaint Against the Baltimore City Police - <AUTHOR> https://www.newamerica.org/oti/press-releases/oti-and-others-file-stingray-complaint-against-baltimore-city-police-department/ <comment><AUTHOR> _Today, New America's Open Technology Institute (OTI), Color Of Change, and Center for Media Justice filed a complaint at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) against the Baltimore City Police Department (BPD) for its extensive and racially-biased use of fake cellular towers known as "cell site simulators" ("CS simulators," sometimes called "Stingrays"), which it uses to locate and track cellphones. The complaint alleges that BPD's use of these devices violates the Communications Act._

 _...BPD's use of these devices interferes with the cellular network, including with emergency calling services. Worse, these harms fall disproportionately on Black neighborhoods where BPD disproportionately exercises its enforcement authority in a racially biased way._</comment>


Medal Gets Missing Medical Records to Your Doctor - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/14/no-more-drug-interactions/ <comment><USER2> This article piqued my interest about the founder's educational background, and it sure is odd, considering all the wording in the press and her own descriptions of her background. 4 years 4 months in medical school (according to LinkedIn), dropped out as a "third year candidate" and describes her attendance as both 2011-2016 in her list of schools and from 2011-2015 in her list of employers.

Did she periodically take a hiatus from school to found other companies? Was she in school part-time? I certainly don't fault anyone for dropping out of a grad school program, but completing two years of medical school (if that's the case) is a far cry from "practically a doctor," like the article describes.

<comment><USER3> Hello,

I entered medical school in 2011 on the traditional path (very much full- time). During my third year, after I had passed the Step 1 board exams and had started treating patients, I became familiar with the benefits and limitations of our patient management and diagnostic software.

At that time I put in for my first leave of absence, while I remained an enrolled student. I moved to San Francisco and began exploring the technology development. I planned to return for the completion of my medical degree, however with the recent success of Medal, I've opted to remain in San Francisco.

During my time away, I collaborated with the business school and other in- degree and cross curriculum programs; my program shuffled my electives so that I was completing them part-time while away. Core medical rotations cannot be completed part time, and I still had four left.

Hope this answers your question.

Warmly, Lonnie

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> These guys know what's up. It's good to see security experts like d.k. getting involved. _advisory i 'm trying to help them out_

</comment><comment><USER5> How does Medal cope with HIPAA requirements and limitations?

Where is Medal based? (I assume Boston, but the web page has no location info.)

<comment><USER3> Medal is both HIPAA compliant and security-forward.

Medal works with one of the authors of HIPAA to ensure that we meet all current legislation and a security expert to ensure that we meet the highest standards of trusted data management. Furthermore, Medal goes above and beyond to create an environment of transparency (for example, we rewrite our releases in plain language).

Medal is based in San Francisco, but we perform installations nationwide.

If you would like to discuss an installation, please contact us at firstname.lastname@example.com

You can learn more about our team, advisors, and represenation and our prior work here:

[http://www.getmedal.com/team.html](http://www.getmedal.com/team.html) [http://www.getmedal.com/press.html](http://www.getmedal.com/press.html)

A few highlights of initiatives led & founded by Medal's team, legal representation, and advisors in the past:

Co-wrote Department of Health & Human Services National Interoperability Survey [http://www.goo.gl/K22VO3](http://www.goo.gl/K22VO3)

Architected SHRINE, [Harvard Research Interchange, 70+ institutions, over 6 million patients] [http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....](http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0055811)

Co-wrote HIPAA [http://s3.gi.org/nataffairs/hipaa.pdf](http://s3.gi.org/nataffairs/hipaa.pdf)

Worked with Microsoft to repair a critical flaw in DNS [http://www.wired.com/2008/07/kaminsky-on- how/](http://www.wired.com/2008/07/kaminsky-on-how/)

Founded Open.Med [https://open.med.harvard.edu/](https://open.med.harvard.edu/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Seems to be an important step to better medical informations. Wish you success!

</comment><comment><USER7> Whoo! Medal is great!</comment>


Cachet HQ is dropping native Heroku support - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cachethq.io/dropping-native-heroku-support/ <comment><USER2> I was thinking about this with an open source project of mine too - I put in the deploy button because it really streamlines deploying self-hosted apps, but "free half day hosting" makes it so much less attractive.

I can't imagine working within the limitations of the free plan for stuff I build, if I have to do that somewhere else I will do it all somewhere else of course.

<comment><AUTHOR> It truly is a tough call for me. Without the ease of Heroku deployment, Cachet wouldn't be nearly as popular. But by leaving it in, I'm providing a degraded experience.

A status page needs to be available all of the time, not half of the day. What use is that?

I'm sure the free tier has it's uses, as Heroku suggest, experiments, basic apps etc.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Moving to Seattle - <AUTHOR>

Hi hackers, I will be moving to Seattle soon. If I work just right south of Lake Union,  what the decent place to live there? My budget would be in the 1000 - 1500 range. I'm concerned about: - Commute - Friendly neighborhoods (I don't have kid but married) - Rent amount<p>Thanks <comment><USER2> I live just south of Lake Union (2200 Westlake building). There are several condos around that have some rentals available. They'll be a much higher quality building than an apartment of similar price.

If you want more of a social thing, then an apartment may be better. There's a building that's pretty popular called Rollin Street Flats that has a good scene.

Stuff's expensive around here, especially with Amazon moving in. Unfortunately you're not going to find a great place for under $2k.

Belltown is also pretty close and has good night life. Easy bicycling distance. There's a relatively decent complex called 2900 on First that should be in your price range.

Craigslist is a good place to look if you decide to go the condo rental route.

Good luck, and welcome to Seattle!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your helpful advice, mate. If am not really into night life so living right in Seattle wouldn't be my priority. It sounds like Belltown is a decent neighborhood based on your description.

<comment><USER2> Belltown actually is kinda sketchy at night these days. South Lake Union has a much safer, 'yuppie' feel to it. For something a bit quieter you might consider east of the lake. There are also some nice neighborhoods (not sure of prices) closer to the university that would still be a nice short commute.</comment></comment></comment>


First viral marketing campaign brought down San Fran Craigslist server in an hr - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/5832261/someone-please-be-roommates-with-this-kick-ass-guy-from-craigslist

<comment><AUTHOR> Friend of mine did this on his lunch break. He actually is moving out to SF from Alabama for a marketing job. He's already received over 10,000 email responses offering a wide variety of things over the past 24 hours.</comment>


AirBnBWhileBlack hashtag highlights potential racial bias on rental app - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/05/airbnbwhileblack-hashtag-highlights-potential-racial-bias-rental-app <comment><USER3> Maybe these landlords have historically had issues with certain groups and prefer not to rent to them. They own the property and ultimately it's their choice.

'OMG racism' is getting tired to read about.

<comment><USER4> > Maybe these landlords have historically had issues with [black people] and > prefer not to rent to them.

Yeah... that's called racism: the belief that all members of a race possess characteristics specific to that race.

> They own the property and ultimately it's their choice.

Yes it is their choice to either accept candidates regardless of race or delist their property and cease renting if they wish to be discriminatory in their rental practices.

<comment><USER5> > Yes it is their choice to either accept candidates regardless of race or > delist their property and cease renting if they wish to be discriminatory in > their rental practices.

You aren't agreeing with him, you're saying the exact opposite. It is the property owner's choice to be discriminatory to who they rent to - <USER2> racism or otherwise.

<comment><USER6> > It is the property owner's choice to be discriminatory to who they rent to - > through racism or otherwise

Uh, no it's not. The Fair Housing Act prohibits discrimination in housing on the basis of:

\- Race or color

\- National origin

\- Religion

\- Sex

\- Familial status (families with children)

\- Disability

> You aren't agreeing with him, you're saying the exact opposite

He never intended to agree with him. He's saying that if you want to rent your property you must be willing to rent it to anyone regardless or race, etc.

<comment><USER5> Ah yeah, you're right. Need to brush up on my understanding of rental laws.

From AirBNB: "Many countries, including the U.S., have laws preventing discrimination on the basis of race, religion, national origin, disability, sex, sexual orientation, or age. In the U.S., anti-discrimination laws apply to discrimination by any inn, hotel, motel, or other establishment that provides lodging to guests. The two main federal laws in this area are the Fair Housing Act (Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968) (FHA) and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)."

Note that these protections do not apply if the landlord is living in the building (under 4 units).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Witnesses yell 'he can't hear you' as Oklahoma City cops fatally shoot deaf man - <AUTHOR> http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-oklahoma-city-police-shooting-20170920-story.html <comment><USER2> Maybe cops should go 3 months without pay if they discharge their weapon regardless of if they are in the right or not. so they have a vested interest in keeping us alive. since 9 times out of 10 they DO NOT get convicted. I understand its a callous way to handle it. But if it cost a cop 15-20k to shoot at someone and the possibility of going to jail if they truly were in the wrong, maybe they would more hesitation at firing a weapon.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is why I posted this - for problem solvers like our community to consider detergents for this kind of shoot first mentality.

I think taking further, right to the entity giving the officer his authority, is something to think about. We could make it mandatory for them to prove they were validated in shooting someone. If the officer did not, punish him. If the organization failed to properly train him, punish leadership and force them to pay restitution.

I think the military industrial complex and political factors encourage the militant, shoot first mentality. To change that, like you said, we need to give them something tangible to lose.</comment></comment>


Association between polygenic risk scores for ADHD and cognitive outcomes - <AUTHOR> http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2016/09/28/ije.dyw216.full <comment><USER2> I'm always curious when research like this comes out, as it flies in the face of my (admittedly anecdotal) evidence. I myself am diagnosed with ADHD-PI (Primarily Inattentive). I've also been part of a few hacker groups over the years, and they had/have the best and brightest minds I have ever witnessed. They have an uncanny intuition and ability to traverse complex problem spaces, much faster than most people. There is also an unusually high concentration of people with ADHD in these groups (along with some other mental 'inflictions'). My best guess is anywhere from 20-30% of them have ADHD to some degree, sample size is about 30.

Most of these people do fairly well in life. Their skills are extremely valuable and prized. They also almost always (95-99%) did not do very well in school. There are a couple of explanations:

1\. Studies like these simply track educational achievements, which do not necessarily correlate with success in life.

2\. I only ever see/meet the success stories, each of which there is a much larger amount of failures for.

3\. There are multiple conditions that are all erroneously grouped under the moniker of ADHD. Most, if not all, of the successful ADHD people I know lean more towards the inattentive side of things.

4\. Some combination of the above theories.

<comment><USER3> I think for every batch of successful people with ADHD, there are others still finding their way. I have ADD and my brother has ADHD. I'm super quiet, observant, and methodical at times. He's very energetic, passionate, "never give up" kind of personality. It's interesting to see the similarities and differences between us. I'm not sure if it's related to the mental disorder or just hereditary or shared personalities from growing up together, but we both didn't do well in school as our parents would hope. He was definitely a troublemaker and I was just..in my own world I suppose. I'd like to think I'm "successful". I have a steady job and able to pay the bills while affording the thrills of life. I'm extremely grateful. My brother, on the other hand, lives with my parents, working 60 hours a week and has no health benefits or paid time off. Perhaps it's part of "growing up" and I just got lucky. I'd like to think that him and I look at the world from a different lens from others but I don't think it's affording us any sort of life hacks that make us successful or brilliant.

<comment> angry-hacker I agree. It's just like the myth of gay people (usually being told by conservatives) running the world and being the wealthiest, because watch these famous gay people and Tim Cook. Ignoring the population as whole, many in very bad situations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was once diagnosed with ADHD myself as a child. I have been unmedicated for 8 years now and been quite successful career wise, and academically. Though I do wonder if I could do better had I not had ADHD.

its not fair to conduct these studies solely on educational outcomes because educational outcomes in the west largely depend on how well you conform to the mean societal expectation of a successful archetype. many people have unique educational styles (ADHDers included). I myself personally learned more from the internet and reading books than I ever did in school.

I suspect successful engineers, start up CEOs, hacker types have higher prevalences of "learning disorders", ADHD, etc. Many did poorly in school, though many also excelled. I also suspect the same demographics are true of musicians and other artists.

The MAJOR caveat here, is that while these groups probably have higher prevalences, and these fields are more or less supportive of people with these issues, very few ADHDers can break into these fields and the average ADHDer probably will perform worse in life than the average person without.

Mostly conjecture, based on my own anecdotal evidence, but worth consideration.

</comment><comment><USER5> Dodgy data.

In the UK/IE system GCSEs morphed between 1990 and 2010 with exams replaced by coursework - which is quicksand for ADHD types. This is a coursework cohort from 2007-2008.

Now and before 1990, GCSEs at 16yo are memory tests in an exam hall almost designed for hyperfocus. It is relatively easier for a ADHDer to "wing it".

What would be more interesting, is to see how many fell down on mainly course- work assessment versus mainly exam assessment. Also, comparison between 16yo GCSE results and 18yo A level results.

[Disclaimer: ADHD PhD who failed A Levels]

</comment><comment><USER6> Can someone summarize this for me? ;)

</comment><comment><USER7> Hi. I'm 10. I have ADHD and ODD. I'm smart but frustrate easily and call people stupid. But If I can escape the anxiety I am nice. Advice?

<comment><USER8> Assuming you're not trolling, it's impressive that you're 10 and on HN. I think modern culture, in a bad way, encourages people to take their inclinations to the extreme. If you have ADHD, you're not just someone with that particular medical condition, you're "an impatient genius who has no tolerance for BS or stupidity." That's not to say you think of yourself as such, just that people are rewarded for acting consistently with a memefied Hollywood stereotype of themselves. This in turn influences and reinforces behavior.

Focus on how you can utilize your mental makeup to shape your life rather than bend others. Reduction of zero-sum dog eat dog thinking would help ameliorate any social aspect of your anxiety. I didn't have much to go off of from your post but I hope that helps.

<comment><USER9> I'd say it's not so much as _impressive_ as it is _fortunate_ ( _providential_ , even) for someone with a certain kind of mind: I would definitely have benefited if I'd found HN a few years earlier than I did (rather than Reddit, ha).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Has GWAS become a reliable means of identifying causal variants? How have the methods evolved over the last five years? What are the big success stories?

<comment><USER11> I work a bit in the field - GWAS is still not identifying causal variants, only linked variants.

There are tons and tons and tons of publications that keep on getting published on running similar datasets with the same methods (PCA, regression or MLM, done) and then reporting the associated SNPs. In humans these papers are getting huge with massive datasets, like this one: [http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/05/27/019885](http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/05/27/019885)

There was also this interesting paper which relied on a very specific configuration of a human population, you cannot do that with for example Brits: [http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/11/12/031518](http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/11/12/031518)

By its very nature GWAS cannot prove a causal relationship, I'm now hoping that CRISPR-Cas9 can provide for that - use GWAS to find candidate SNPs, use CRISPR to introduce those SNPs in an unaffected population, measure phenotype changes. Of course with sequencing getting so cheap you can start with SNP calling and get a much more comprehensive picture by looking at large scale insertions and deletions by just looking at the whole genome, like this paper for 10,000 (!!!) humans: [http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/07/01/061663](http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/07/01/061663)

<comment><USER10> Thanks. Are the GWAS's the primary justification for the sequencing efforts generating the data they're analyzing?

<comment><USER11> I'd say the primary motivation for the sequencing efforts is that we're hitting the limits at what we can detect using SNPs. We now know of many inversions, deletions, insertions which are linked to phenotypes, and often you don't have a SNP positioned close enough to detect a signal. It's just easier and more comprehensive to align the genomic reads directly to detect these rearrangements than it is to look for a null signal in the SNP dataset.

<comment><USER10> What do you do with those associations, once you've found them? Are they helping to elucidate the biology of the phenotype?

<comment><USER11> There are many things you can do with the association, here's a non-exhaustive list:

\- do the SNPs cause changes in a gene of interest? are the changes synonymous (cause base change, but the protein amino acid is identical since several codons code for the same amino acid, but this can cause problems in mRNA folding)? Are the changes non-synonymous (cause base change, and a different amino acid)? How strong are the non-synonymous changes? It could be that you get a shorter protein because a SNP introduced an early STOP codon, or changes a hydrophile to a hydrophobe amino acid, etc. From there you can check whether this change influences the phenotype by introducing this changed protein into another individual to see whether the phenotype is reproduced, this rarely works in more complex species as you don't have a single gene -> single phenotype cause

\- you can use the ratio of synonymous/non-synonymous SNPs to approximate selection: genes under positive selection show more non-synonymous changes, these are usually genes involved in resistance who have to keep up with fungal/viral invaders, or venom genes, etc., genes under negative selection show more synonymous changes, these are usually housekeeping genes or other single copy genes that are important

\- are the SNPs closely upstream or downstream from a gene of interest? It's still a bit hard to find binding sites for transcription factors (esp. outside of model species), so the SNP could be in a binding site where the whole transcription apparatus binds - do we see different transcription level for this gene in other individuals without the SNP?

\- after DNA folding, is the SNP close to an interesting gene? Only with new HiC data can we test this, SNPs that were >10,000 base pairs away are after folding right next to the gene

\- is the SNP in Linkage Disequilibrium with something interesting? In other words, is the SNP inherited together with something interesting? This could point towards selection

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _Conclusions: ADHD diagnosis risk alleles impact on functional outcomes in two generations (mother and child) and likely have intergenerational environmental effects._

So, ADHD is frequently heredity based on certain genes?

Why oh why oh whyyyyyyyy must academics write like this still?? (I know the answer, doesn't stop me from complaining)

<comment><USER13> Because that's not what that sentence means.

Jargon in academia is definitely overused, but in this case the terminology they're using has specific meanings, that this is meant to communicate to people within the field, that are lost or obscured when you attempt to simplify them.

<comment><USER14> So what does it mean? If GP's interpretation is incorrect then I'm also baffled. And I'd really like to know because I have ADHD...

<comment><USER15> They found a correlation between ADHD and low IQ/test scores.

I had shitty marks in HS too, didn't go to college and am highly successful

<comment><USER16> As someone with ADHD who had shitty marks in HS, is probably going to drop out of college, and wants to be successful -- can you give any insight on how you got where you are?

<comment><USER15> Brush up on your social skills, hacking computers are nowhere near as valuable as hacking people.

Be CEO of something, dress sharp, get fit. How you look, act, and dress is your UI most hackers have a really shitty UI. Get a good logo, great cards and a good website / brochures. Pay others to make these things, use fivver, put everything out to bid, some people are really cheap, don't be afraid to hire people undercharging for their services. Tip them so you get prioritized.

Sell something repeatable, anything you can pay someone else to do, pay them. Get a lawyer, a good accountant, create your own contracts, run any serious changes by them.

Make sure you have quotes from your subcontractors, double it. Triple it. 10x it. Charge that to your clients. The more you charge the better you are.

Basically be the fucking man. Don't apologize for it.

Read everything by Robert Cialdini. It's a hacking guide to the masses. Read how to win friends and influence people it's a guide to hacking individuals.

Realize everyone is winging it and actors are doctors when they wear lab coats, lawyers when they wear suits and bikers when they wear leather. It's not hard to pass for anything wearing the right clothes.

Don't be afraid to bill $500 for something you paid $24 for. Never tell people how much something cost you or where you sourced it from.

Be really nice and highly complimentary to people.

<comment><USER16> Appreciated.

I had passed off Cialdini's books for dirty salesman tactics, but I'll get to it now.

<comment><USER15> Thinking of successful people as dirty is the first thing to get out of your head. Don't be a hater. I did for years it got me nowhere.

A pretty much universally reviled dirty salesman is the President of the United States and most of the people who hate him are not.

Cialdini was also Obamas Comms guy so people you might like also use him.

The question is do you want to not use cialdinis tactics or do you want to be President, both are honorable choices.

Many people who don't want to use his tactics will be your employees.

Also read / listen to Thomas Sowells basic economics and understand the short and long term debt cycle.

<comment><USER16> I understand.

I've picked up all the books you recommended and I'll get through them tomorrow.

Is business at that level all about working people?

<comment><USER15> Yes and no, it's about understanding their needs and providing a solution while also charging enough to pay for everything and future expansion. Also at the same time you need to cut costs to deliver efficient solutions in the future.

If you price everything based on living in a dorm, underpaying yourself, etc your business would fail.

If I didn't charge $500 for something with $24 in direct costs I wouldn't have time to meet with clients, go to networking events, pay for my time for all these things, pay for insurance, pay for nice clothes, pay my trainer, etc, etc, etc.

Initially it's best to think of things as massively over charging because it's way too complicated to actually figure out what things are really costing you. Plan for future expansion, etc.

But yes at a higher level people are going to try to get you to undercut yourself, if you give into the idea that you are over charging you'll end up being taken advantage of. So initially you need to be very strong in your boundaries until you have full time staff to do a proper analysis.

If you roll up in a Mercedes and a nice suit people take you much more seriously than in a beat up Toyota and some rags, you'll also project more confidence, people are buying you, not your product.

Also with all this stuff learn body language, slow down how fast you talk, slow down how you walk, do everything as if it's just a sure thing that's going to happen

<comment><USER16> I'll implement this advice.

I've picked up _The Silent Language of Leaders_ and _What Every Body is Saying_ for body language, and another for persuasion: _The Like Switch._

Would you recommend learning how to shake hands/assert dominance like Trump, or is that something that might start being fazed out?

Also, when you get "fuck you money," will toning down on the theatrics hurt you in a major way, even if you've already shown you can be a BSD and preform?

<comment><USER15> Dominance isn't being phased out, it goes back to the great apes.

I dunno, I think if anything fuck you money will make me up the antics</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Send Your Stories Instead of Resumes to Your Client - <AUTHOR> http://www.recroup.com/

<comment><USER2> 1\. Croup is a disease. The name is DOA. 2\. Good idea to integrate with Smarterer rather than trying to roll your own skills verification platform. However, I think the whole badges angle distracts & detracts from your core story. I'd drop it and go for the "better résumé" angle, at least until Smarterer is widely accepted by hiring companies. 3\. Get a native English speaker to give your site & app a once-over. An hour of copy editing by a competent writer will go a long way toward helping establish professionalism.

<comment><USER3> Unfamiliar with Smarterer, I went there and tried a sample question: [http://imgur.com/puk2Bav](http://imgur.com/puk2Bav)

wat

<comment><USER4> Actually if the form does not have a method="POST" in it, then the form will be submitted as a get request (with url parameters). Think the search form on google.com, it does a GET with query string args. Forms do not necessarily equal post methods.

Since the answers do not include $_POST, $_GET is the right answer (although arguably, to make the question clearer, one could specify the method it's not strictly necessary in this question).

(disclosure: I'm the co-founder of Smarterer)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting concept. Not going to sign-up though without seeing some samples first or at least a demo/video etc.

</comment><comment><USER6> A little feedback:

Does "recroup" have a capital "R" or not? It's inconsistent.

In the first paragraph, the first two lines look like headings, so lose the period at the end: it looks odd.

"we know every job seeker is different. We built" \-- The tenses are jarring there, you should rephrase that (maybe it's OK in the US).

"a profile that showcase" \-- that should be "showcases"

"its your Career Launchpad" \-- Ouch! You mean "it's".

If you're aiming to present a professional appearance, you really need to fix these little typos and errors.

<comment><USER3> There seems to be a mistake in almost every paragraph...

"How it works?" \- either "How does it work?" or "How it works"

"one profile that gives complete picture"

"a resume doesn't do justice with the capabilities of a Job Seeker"

"Signin to find out more"

"Drop us a mail if you want to know anything about us or have queries or feedback. Please feel free to do so."

Lots more awkward English and random capitalization, sentences that would benefit from a comma, etc. Definitely have a native English speaker edit this.

It could be a good idea though. I like the idea of portfolio sites for graphic designers (like [http://carbonmade.com/](http://carbonmade.com/)) and this could be something that would fulfill more of a development bent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is there like a demo "story" we can check out?

<comment><USER8> Yeah I'd also like to see a demo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Explain the name? Right now I hear "Get Croup Again!" when I hear "Recroup". I hear the pun on 'regroup' (although don't understand how it relates to resumes and job seeking)...

<comment><USER8> Or recoup haha.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> As a manager who has hired people before, I don't see how this could replace a traditional resume. Resumes allow for me to quickly evaluate a candidate. I really don't care what my potential candidate's social media history is or any other arbitrary information (badges are nice, but as a recruiter I wouldn't know the scale nor why I should care). I do think something better than a resume is worth looking into, but the execution has to be right.

</comment><comment><USER11> What I'd really like to see is the output of a resume without having to sign up for something. I'm also not sold on the gray, does it come in different colors?

I've seen this thing before as well ([http://www.workfolio.com/](http://www.workfolio.com/)), how is this different & better?

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't have a resume. I got employed to do marketing/customer aquisition for a tech firm on the basis of my blog, where I primarily wrote about local political issues.

Everybody should blog! A resume has unnecessary limitations.

</comment><comment><USER13> As a designer, this is how I got my current day job(not using recroup). I didn't send a resume, I designed a book that walked the employer through my accomplishments.

<comment><USER14> Are you a software designer or another type of designer? If a software designer, are you more into the graphics? I've always appreciated how people in creative "non-technical" fields - or those who straddle the creative and techie worlds - present their work history/portfolio in ways that tech folks generally don't/can't. I'm a miserable failure at getting beyond the standard resume/work sample model.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> After visiting and signing up, I'm still unclear as to how these challenges help me tell my story?

I loved the initial pitch, after that, I was lost.

</comment><comment><USER16> How boring is to be a project manager these days... you can't even find "challenges" for you in the challenges section.

</comment><comment><USER17> Homonym misuse on the homepage. On a resume that means it goes in the garbage instantly, and these people are supposed to represent others professionally?!?

Skipped.

<comment><USER18> Interesting that you pick up that but not that the main sentence on the first thing you see misses an "a".

"12 seconds is the time that recruiter spends on a resume!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Can you people critique the concept more than the grammar?

<comment><USER20> The concept is not well demonstrated due to a lack of demo and vague wording throughout. When the critique focuses on grammar and presentation, that in itself should be a strong hint that more is needed for this to be a viable concept.

In addition, the grammar is fairly critical to making a good impression - especially when creating a service that claims it will help you impress employers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> > At recroup, we know every job seeker is different.

Every recruiter is also different. Every time someone gives suggestions on how to write a resume or apply for a job or things you should do, the advice can be contradicted by someone else in the same position at another company.

Hell, even spelling mistakes! I've known people who don't care (they are bad spellers themselves).

So, while I appreciate the goal, every recruiter is different. The best thing I can suggest is that when you apply, however you do it, do it the way you want. Make it represent you. Changing your style might get you the job if you match the expectations of the recruiter, but it might not be the type of job you want.

<comment><USER22> _Hell, even spelling mistakes! I 've known people who don't care (they are bad spellers themselves)._

Well... but it's never bad advice to try to submit perfect spelling. And it can be bad advice to not care about spelling. It's like the spelling version of Pascal's Wager.

<comment><USER21> You'd think that, until you meet that individual who insists a commonly misspelled word is spelled incorrectly despite being spelled correctly. =)

<comment><USER22> Interesting, never came across this, and never contemplated it. I suppose I'd just throw them a dictionary URL, but do it politely. The worst-case is that they refuse to change their mind. That'd be a signal to me that I don't want to deal with this person. One of my top bad sign signals is when someone isn't willing to change their position when proven wrong. Correlated with many, many bad things.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


ISA Super VGA Card Project - <AUTHOR> http://www.malinov.com/Home/sergeys-projects/isa-supervga <comment><USER2> Nice. I always feel so old when i mention ISA cards and no one remembers them. like pretty much everyone in that era i had a soundblaster 16 and my first network card, a 10Base T card that used good old Co-Ax, T Pieces and Terminators. Those were the days!</comment>