2000, the Year Formerly Known as the Future - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/we-live-in-the-future/cbd6bdc6b283

<comment><USER2> There were a few y2k technologies that I'd like to get back though.

Email was nice, back when it consisted of nothing but emails from people you knew. And the occasional spam that could be knocked out by simple keyword filters.

Usenet was nice. Even with that dial-up netzero account you had access to a HN-esque level of intelligent discourse on pretty much every subject imaginable. Now we only get that with tech.

But back then you had essentially a HackerNews for rock climbing, one for chess, one for rocket science (with real rocket scientests there who would answer your questions), and ones for discussing whether an imperial star destroyer would win in a fight with the USS Enterprise.

But then Spam happened and it killed both those things. The Usenet went away in the span of a single year, to be only fractionally replaced with a series of terrible PHPBB boards that nobody could find and you certainly weren't about to meet any real rocket scientests hanging out in.

Not sure I'd trade my iPad to get all that back, but it was still pretty nice.

<comment><USER3> I think we eventually got Reddit in place of the crappy PHPBB boards.

<comment><USER4> Reddit is a nice alternative to Usenet but not really a replacement since it is centralized as opposed to Usenet's distributed nature.

As for e-mail, if you have a decent provider spam is a solved problem. It hasn't bothered me for years.

<comment><USER3> Trust me, if it didn't cost extra as a part of ISP packages nowadays, I'd be on USENET.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hmmmm it seems the author wasn't online in 2000... Online Technologies: LiveJournal, ICQ, MIRC, MSN Messenger, AOL Messenger, or starting July 1, 2000 for those who wanted to rule them all Trillian. Pretty much everything that our modern web architecture does could be replicated there. It's just easier and slicker now.

I'd normally wake up, (computer was of course running 24/7) check ICQ for messages, check on my downloads and chats on MIRC, read my friends LiveJournal posts and head off for school. If I needed a big file I would burn it to cd the night before and could simply grab the cd, for something small can always post online on my file server (don't remember what I used but remember having a semi easy solution that ran locally on my home computer). Pretty much everything we do now I could do then, just the time lag was bigger, didn't really matter to me though, you just plan ahead a bit more. If I want to hang out with someone send them an ICQ, they'll get it when they're home, etc. In the meantime I'll log onto an MMO, maybe an old school MUD, Ultima Online, or Everquest. Or maybe I'll play some CounterStrike. On my broadband internet. Yes things have advanced in the last decade, but 2000 was far from the technical wasteland that this article paints.

</comment><comment><USER6> I like the saying "the future is not evenly distributed".

October 2000: My digital camera was $500, not $5500. I used to carry it all over the place. Not everyone relies on pockets!

November 2000: I did a 4800 bps dialup call over an analog cell connection to get a map going in a pinch while parked in a rental car far from home. The hardest part was figuring out where I was so as to have a meaningful "start" address for mapquest. _That_ involved getting lucky and finding a storefront with a number visible, then looking at a yellow pages site for all of the locations of that store in the town I was in to see which one matched. That gave me a street name and now I had a starting address.

(Newark, DE, you are on my list of miserable places to navigate at night.)

Normal people would never do the 4800 bps PPP craziness with images disabled, but a $500 camera from CompUSA (remember them?) isn't that special.

</comment><comment><USER7> Beyond 2000 was a future/tech show that aired in Australia when I was a teenager. I can remember one segment showcasing a little drivable vehicle of some sort that unfolded from a suitcase and wanting one for myself.

As we neared 2000, people would joke about the show's name and its future.

The Wikipedia page for the show (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Tomorrow_(TV_series)>) suggests that it eventually suffered from budget cuts as well as competition from other sci/tech shows. But here we are more than a decade beyond 2000 and though I admittedly don't watch much TV other than food/travel/doco shows on SBS OnDemand, it saddens me that there seems to be nothing there to capture the expectant wonder for the generations to come.

So much of popular television is entranced by the bland present.

This year I preordered the MYO gesture interpreting device and backed a Kickstarter project for wireless and colour-changing light globes. Someone on Kickstarter invented an origami-like fold up kayak.

I hope the average kids of now see these things and dream of what's to come.

<comment><USER8> I watched Beyond 2000 all the time growing up in the U.S. It was a great show that really spurred on the imagination. I always got a kick out of how they said "aluminum" in Australia.

<comment><USER7> Made me wonder if there are sites for kids that introduce and explain cool new advances in technology? Safe and without off-site links so parents feel safe letting their kids browse it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What we remember as 2000 is actually closer to 2005:

* Wifi, laptops, andcell phone are ubiquitous, smart phones are just beginning to emerge.

* laptops are reasonably powerful compared to desktops.

* Streaming media works fairly well.

* Broadband internet is fast enough to stream movies at a decent quality.

* LCD screens have pretty much replaced CRTs.

* TV is no longer just 480p.

* Social networks exist.

* google maps, and mapquest exist.

* wikipedia exists.

* gmail is in beta.

* MP3 players have hard drives instead of flash chips and can store a large number of songs.

Another great way to realize how ancient 2000 was compared to now is to watch the first few seasons of the west wing.

</comment><comment><USER10> Checking out the French ideas from 1899-1910 on what 2000 would be like :

[http://publicdomainreview.org/2012/06/30/france-in-the- year-...](http://publicdomainreview.org/2012/06/30/france-in-the- year-2000-1899-1910/)

"The New-Fangled barber" isn't quite there yet, but we do have electric razors and trimmers. Then again, the electric trimmer is fairly old at this point.

"An Arial battle" and "Torpedo planes" bombers, ground attack aircraft and fighters. I'm not surprised the first use ideas for aircraft are in war.

We have "Aviation police" of sorts, except they're a combination of air traffic controllers and the FAA. And the near-collisions in "Aero-Cab station" are eerily similar to what has already happened. We also have air-mail, but "Rural Postman" with his own flying machine hasn't quite happened yet.

We don't have "intensive breeding" machines per-se, but the poultry industry is pretty automated these days.

We have drones today except they don't have a guy with a looking glass. We have "electric floor cleaners" that don't involve a maid.

Am I the only one shocked that the maid uniform has essentially stayed exactly the same (maybe with shorter skirts). I mean, look at military uniforms. The helmets in particular have changed a great deal. Same with police uniforms.

The "well trained orchestra" is basically a synthesizer. "House rolling through the countryside" is real today and we call them Dollies (<http://hmrsupplies.com>)

"At school" knowledge download is not quite what we have, but Wikipedia and Google come close. After all, almost everyone these days carries a mobile device even if they have no other electronic device on them.

"Madame at her toilet" is kinda out there, but you could say those new multi- head showers are _almost_ that.

"Battle cars" we've got 'em and they're tanks/armored cars.

"A Croquet Party" underwater is a tourist thing and even happens in backyard pools.

A "Whale bus" is basically an organic submarine that we haven't built yet, but the company Innerspace has built a dolphin sub. <http://www.seabreacher.com/dolphin>

All in all, that's quite close to what we would have had if idealized projections came forth and other disruptive technologies like automobiles didn't become as common first.

Still bitter about not having my flying car yet, damnit!

<comment><USER11> They sure were big on flight and diving back in 1900-1910, weren't they? Understandable that flight was the most futuristic technology conceivable at the time, but I was surprised to see all the underwater stuff (although in retrospect it makes sense for the same reason).

Makes me excited to think just how unbelievable 2100 will be from today's perspective. Or, with exponential growth of technology, say 2040. You really can't extrapolate, because it's the _completely_ new things that will be really revolutionary. (Is that redundant?)

<comment><USER10> Not redundant! :D

The sea was (still is?) the last frontier of exploration on our own planet, so I figure they must have thought we would have sorted out all its mysteries by now. They didn't know about deep sea smokers, tube worms or the Mariana Trench obviously, or that we'd still be flabbergasted by some of the things we find in the deep oceans today.

A part of me thinks that technolgy will soon begin retreating to the background where it belongs. As Clarke's third law states : _Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic_ Which means future tech will be tech without looking, sounding, feeling like tech... if that makes sense.

I'm picturing an oak cabinet or chest of drawers that tell me how many socks I have remaining and that there are blue ones in the laundry. Or a kitchen that looks like it belongs in the 1930s, but has a smart fridge telling me it's time to turn over the trout in its marinade because I'll be putting it in the smoker Saturday.

I think we'll see more of a return to original materials like wood, stone and steel (or modern materials that perfectly mimic it in texture and feel) all the while being "smart" (or the 2040 equivalent of what that means). We're already seeing a lot of that in our surroundings where people are becoming more nomadic with fewer possessions or multi use tools and a drive toward less "connectivity" as in people and more connectivity in gadgets.

Bottom line is that no matter how "different" we imagine ourselves to be tomorrow, there's a thread of nostalgia connecting us to yesterday. That may be stronger than alloy we can invent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> At work, you show your boss your presentation «Invent Dropbox before someone else does». You realize while presenting to your boss the idea isn't feasible because home internet connections of 56kb/s aren't fast enough to share files without hogging users' phone lines for hours at a time in the first place.

<comment><USER13> Xdrive was around: [http://web.archive.org/web/20001017113816/http://www.xdrive....](http://web.archive.org/web/20001017113816/http://www.xdrive.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> 2000 wasn't that bad for me. AIM was a decent social network (back then people used their statuses to share what was going on). Mapquest was very competent at providing directions. Pirating music was at least as easy it is today (and finding new music was pretty easy too). Yahoo news and many others like it did a great job of aggregating important news. The path to portable music was arguably pretty mature with portable mp3 cd players and minidisc. My university library let us borrow a 2 MP digital camera; sure, we couldn't afford to buy the camera, but I still have 1000s of photos from that camera, many that look fine printed at 4x6 and 8.5x11.

The true life changers from the article for me: smartphones with always-on internet (these existed in 2000, but they were overpriced and sucked), laptops + wifi, and wikipedia. Also, amazon - I do almost all my shopping online now.

</comment><comment><USER15> I don't understand the "no laptops, no wifi" people -- I had first and second generation Wavelan IEEE pc cards and HP Omnibook 5700ctx laptops since ~1998. Ricochet modems also helped (the Metricom things), although mostly I just stuck to places with ethernet available.

Yahoo mail _always_ sucked. I pretty much never used a single Yahoo product (I didn't care about Yahoo! Finance at the time, which is the only one I'd use today other than flickr)

Yes, at the time desktops with big CRTs were still superior (I think I was using a Linux box running slackware and also had access to HP-UX and AIX and Solaris machines) to laptops. Desktops still are superior for a lot of things.

<comment><USER16> I think the fair comparison though is the mainstream then vs the mainstream now. No doubt there were early adopters ahead of the curve (although the article was framing the person as one of these)

<comment><USER15> It's just weird how early adopters were so far ahead of the mainstream in the 1980s (UNIX workstations! 56k/T1/T3 WAN or 10Mbps LAN, or even FDDI!). In the 1990s, I was a teenager and had (by being smart, not particularly rich) a decent UNIX workstation (Linux) and 9600bps dialup from pretty early on, and by being at a top university and doing consulting, a laptop which would be borderline respectable today (if super heavy).

Today, a homeless guy can have a functional machine of his own, or use something at a library, and children/mainstream/etc. users can use approximately the same machines tech experts do.

It's basically range compression between what high-end people have and what the mainstream has.

<comment><USER16> Yeah very much so. I have a retina MBP, whether your a billionaire CEO or someone with a half decent wage in a tech job your probably using a very similar retina MBP. (Assuming you are after an OSX machine, not that your going to get much better power/ weight and screen quality elsewhere ATM)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I was 9 and ecstatic about getting to stay up until midnight to see the NEW MILLENNIUM. It was disappointing the next day when nothing seemed to change.

Boy did things change during high school.

</comment><comment><USER18> In 2000 (or, at least, by 2001) I had a palm v with a CDPD wireless "modem" thing. The minstrel, (I kept mis-spelling it in ways that looked like "menstrual," to the great amusement of my friends and co-workers.) It worked fine; the only problem was that the palm V only had one serial port... if I used the CDPD modem, (which doubled the thickness of the palm v,) I couldn't plug in the keyboard, meaning SSH wasn't really practical. (on-screen keyboards have never worked for me; not then, not now.)

The external keyboard for the palm V was pretty nice, though, assuming you had a flat surface. The serial port made a pretty solid connection and held the phone up at a reasonable angle; something I haven't been able to reproduce with a modern smartphone and external bluetooth keyboard. (To be clear, the bluetooth keyboards work fine; I just haven't figured out how to hold the phone at a reasonable angle while typing with both hands.)

So yeah, really? I wasn't all that less mobile then than I am now. I mean, I had a thinkpad running linux then, just like now; sure, it was slower, but it ran linux just fine. Configuring wireless, sure, was a pain in the ass then, and it's easy now, but eh.

<comment><USER19> I had a minstrel modem back then for a little while too. But I didn't have it very long before I cancelled it. I also had a phone with limited email and other online capability around 2003, and a work-provided PCMCIA cell modem around 2004, but I didn't have mobile internet again for real again until the iPhone arrived in 2007. For me, the future paid a visit in 2000 and a few times afterwards, but it wasn't here to stay until June 29, 2007.

(I didn't have to look that date up)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The thing I miss most about the year 2000 is that randomly meeting new and interesting people was literally effortless.

<comment><USER21> Can you elaborate on this? Where would you go to meet these people?

<comment><USER22> Not the op, but my guess is people weren't glued to their smartphone all the time like they seem to be these days. In '97, '98 I met a large group of folks at a diner they and I both frequented. They just started chatting with me and we hit it off and I started hanging with them.

These days, if the diner even allowed them to hang out and drink coffee for hours on end, they'd be nose deep in mobile FB or whatever zombification they prefer - rather than have "deep" and interesting in-person conversations.

<comment><USER20> Not quite what I meant but I do think that Facebook and the like endow your existing social network with an extreme and unnatural gravity that makes it harder to meet new people online (outside of a dating sites) and in person.

I had a meeting a few days ago but it took them a while to unlock the door. Ten years ago we'd all have engaged in some small talk but on this occasion everyone immediately dove into their screens.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I seem to remember that sending an arbitrarily large file to someone was far more straightforward back then. Mainstream options included ICQ and AIM (with direct connect). Slightly more esoteric was NetMeeting. Windows 98 even came with a web server and your ISP probably wasn't blocking port 80.

</comment><comment><USER23> One and a half years ago I didn't even have a smartphone (late adopter), and I printed out Google Maps directions whenever I had to go somewhere new since I didn't have a GPS. Forget all the useless apps and internet browsing while on the can... GPS and maps is the killer app for smartphones.

</comment><comment><USER24> I was born in 1971. I don't think I really started feeling like HOLY CRAP I LIVE IN THE FUTURE until 2010 when I got my first smartphone. Which is coincidentally the same year the iPad came out; when I got the second generation of that, that was a big dose of FUTURE for a couple months.

Oh, and the Raspberry Pi. Thirty-five bucks for an easily-hackable UNIX system. Ten bucks more for a wifi dongle and you can have damn near anything you can imagine connected to the net.

This is mostly the new normal now but I still look back at how different things were growing up and I'm amazed and delighted. It's... whatever the opposite of "future shock" is. Stuff has changed a lot and I'm loving it.

</comment><comment><USER25> It seems the guy made an mistake. The Rio PMP300 with its 32mb of memory was actually awesome. Every day carefully picking the 7 or 8 songs I would listen to for the rest of the day. Blur's Song #2 usually made it because it was such a short song.

</comment><comment><USER26> I met my wife in 1999 through ICQ. One year after I was busy learning about, well, how things work, if you understand what I mean. Was lucky that neve got me into trouble. Had a blazing fast 133Mhz tower that I had traded for a _car_. I learned my first bit of Python on that thing. Those were the days...

</comment><comment><USER27> I remember Y2K.

Dale Gribble was inspiring everyone to freak out in Arlen, Texas. The seniors were getting coddled because they're the first millennium class.

The Rio PMP300 is f-ing amazing since it made it much easier than my Sony MiniDisc recorder/player having to use sound breaks to copy MP3 tracks.

There was no WiFi but then again it's not like anyone had laptops to use that anyways. I had to use the powerline as my network. But I do remember writing HTML for the high school web team and thought I was amazing.

I remember not being able to send a whole album through email but then if you knew anything you would have been splitting zip/rar files or how to fake upload ratios to leech off FTPs anyways.

Yahoo was all you needed. Yahoo directory was good, Inktomi kind of sucked so everyone used AltaVista, Yahoo Mail was good, Yahoo Maps was good, Yahoo Games was good, Yahoo News was good. There were no ads but if there were there was probably some auto-clicker to let you make a paycheck out of it.

I remember having a 5 digit ICQ number, remember AOL Profile was my Facebook, AIM status messages was my Twitter, Netscape Navigator could be bought in a store like CompUSA.

I remember spending all your time on a computer, or especially the Internet Information Superhighway if anyway knew what even means meant you weren't like them. But now it's a given.

A few years ago I reflected, thinking how far out in the future I was living just by the good fortune of having grown up in Silicon Valley. I've been online for 18 years now, babies then are now legal adults, and it's been three lifetimes of watching the internet being the internet.

And compared to other industries like Hollywood which endured more than 85 years, we've barely begun.

<comment><USER28> I don't think Netscape Navigator was available for sale in CompUSA in 2000. Microsoft basically ended the Consumer Browser product line for Netscape by 1999 when they were sold to AOL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The Rio looked absolutely no more ridiculous than the early iPods. It still looks fine, just big.

</comment><comment><USER30> The article reminds me of this blog: <http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/paleofuture/>. Although lately it's featuring too many articles about the Jetsons.

</comment><comment><USER31> The _distant_ future.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvrva8NoMLM>

</comment><comment><USER32> 1997 -> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_5>

</comment><comment><USER33> Napster was created in 1999.</comment>


IPhone to stay on AT&T, practically forever - <AUTHOR> http://www.itworld.com/mobile-amp-wireless/77608/vindication-iphone-stay-att-forever <comment><USER2> _"the HSPA standard used by AT &T is more widely used than the EVDO standard used by Verizon"_

The new HTC Touch Pro 2 from Sprint gives you the best of both worlds. It has EVDO/CDMA for use in North America and the Caribbean and HSPA/GSM for worldwide use. I wonder if this is a sign of an eventual shift toward GSM for Sprint?

</comment><comment><USER3> _"The only way the iPhone-on-Verizon scenario comes about in the near future is if Apple changes tactics and makes a second, CDMA-compatible version of the iPhone."_

This is the weakness in Apple's strategy that Android can exploit, by having many models from multiple handset manufacturers. It won't last for long, though.</comment>


FiitBox – Naturally High-Protein Snacking Subscription - <AUTHOR> https://www.fiitbox.com

<comment><USER2> I get a bad ssl cert error.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> www.fiitbox.com</comment>


Untangling the Complicated, Controversial Legacy of Sigmund Freud - <AUTHOR> https://www.thecut.com/2017/09/sigmud-freud-making-of-an-illusion-book.html <comment><USER2> In the end he's just another religious leader. The problem is his religion has successfully pretended to be a science for a hundred years.

<comment><USER3> From the article:

 _"Did Freud get some things wrong?" says Lee Jaffe, the president-elect of the American Psychoanalytic Association. "Sure. But he also got many things right too." Freud's theories on unconscious mental processes, the importance of behavioral ambivalence and conflict, the origins of adult personality in childhood, mental representations as a moderator of social behavior, and stages of psychological development are all still relevant today. Freud also changed the public's understanding of sex and desire, perhaps more than anyone else, by equating female desire with male desire. And, just by placing sexual desire and perversions into a "scientific" context, Freud freed sexuality from the largely religious context that focused on its moral degeneration or inherent criminality._

The ways in which he was wrong are much more nuanced than what you're suggesting.

<comment><USER4> Freud claimed that schizophrenia was a result of ambivalent mother care, and quite a few other things that he had no reason to claim (if it was science and not religion).

He was wrong in many ways with no nuance whatsoever, but mostly, there isn't much in common between Freud and science. Which is basically what GP was saying.

Freud deserves credit for taking psychology as a field of study mainstream - and the debit for founding it on religious principles which, unfortunately, still dominate quite a bit of it. His net contribution is usually assumed to be positive, but that's not an uncontested conclusion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _" My belief is that if high schools did their job, most high-school graduates would be capable of seeing through Freud..."_

Yeah, and most MarCom, religion, and much of modern politics. Now you know why they don't work.

</comment><comment><USER6> Even today people with training in modes of therapy that are more or less theoretically divorced from Freudianism will say that "Freud is the basis of all therapy". He wasn't the first person to philosophize about the parts of the soul or the first person to offer therapy; but he was a very prolific writer and thinker early on in our attempts to bring a scientific understanding and therapeutic emphasis to what had previously been the province of religion and disinterested philosophers.

It is undeniable that he failed in many significant ways, but three basic ideas to seem to hold up:

* The transference and the counter-transference -- the patient projects on to the therapist and vice versa

* The defense mechanisms -- methods by which people seek to escape not from their situation but from their feelings about it

* The corrective emotional experience -- therapy provides a way, in part through the transference, for the patient to work through feelings that they otherwise deny themselves

Freud had many crazy ideas, too -- and both he and his successors devoted far too much time and effort to these crazy ones. Quit when you are ahead.

<comment><USER7> May we one day succeed enough to be considered by many a failure.

<comment><USER4> Various dictators and the vast majority of televangalists (e.g. Joel Osteen) come to mind. Are you sure you want to succeed that way? I don't; and while Freud's history has many redeeming features, the saying is "at least Mussolini made the trains on time"[0], so the latter might also have had redeeming features.

[0] But see [https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2016/11/the- problem-w...](https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2016/11/the-problem-with- mussolini-and-his-trains/507764/) ; likewise, it's possible that freud's positives will turn out not to be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There needs to be a distinction between Freud the clinician, whose theories have all but been entirely surpassed in the treatment of mental illness, and Freud the philosopher, who is still a major reference point in discussions of philosophy and cultural theory. Marx is still an active force in those conversations too. These discourse discuss methods of interpreting literature, art, history and culture.

The great structural thinkers of the last century, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Darwin, Nietzsche were the last philosophers that attempted schemas to describe all of history and culture as a single synthesized whole governed by definable mechanisms . Their flawed tools (the world spirit, the economy, the unconscious, biological evolution, and the will to power) are all somewhat rusty but there have been no real contenders to replace them.

<comment><USER9> > Hegel, Marx, Freud, Darwin, Nietzsche

Darwin seems very out of place there.

First, he was primarily a scientist, not a philosopher. Second, his theories are for the most part still very much dominant and accepted as true in his field - not just some overall insights and direction (as with Freud) - but the actual details. Modern biology very much believes in and is based on Darwin's theories. It's remarkable how right he still is after all this time.

<comment><USER8> This is true. But Darwin acts as a figurehead in many longstanding philosophical discussions. I'm thinking of thinkers like Herbert Spencer, who believed that the structures of darwinian evolution could be applied to cultures, religion, even the mind. When people quote "survival of the fittest" it was Spencer they are quoting, but Darwin they are referencing.

It is also possible to overstate both Darwin's correctness (Pangenesis for example was a non starter) and his novelty (The idea that humans evolved from non-human ancestors that came from the sea is as old as Anaximander -- 600 BCE).

But there is a Darwinian/Spencerian ring to way we talk about failed programming languages, coding practices, failed corporations, technologies and economies: They failed to thrive, failed to form a community to carry forward their genetics and fight against the various forces that fight against them, compete for resources etc. Darwin's ideas have sublimated into ideology...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Interesting, I'm not well read on Freud's work and the notion that he equated female sexual desire with male sexual desire isn't one I've heard before. It seems in some way (maybe just slightly) contrary to the impression I've gleaned from most summaries: that he effectively thought women were governed by subconscious sexual desires in a way that men were not. Can anyone help me out here?

On a related note, I'm very interested in his rather indirect legacy through his nephew, Edward Bernays, and insight into what Freud thought about how his nephew utilized his conclusions to lay the foundation for the PR industry.

One of the first large marketing campaigns for a tobacco company comes to mind. If I recall correctly, Bernays commissioned attractive women to smoke cigarettes in high traffic areas.

<comment><USER9> He said that everyone, men and women (and even children), were governed by subconscious sexual desires. In that respect he was pretty modern - or perhaps that thanks to his influence, we are how we are today.

But on the other hand, he did have detailed theories of male and female sexuality and how they differ. Those details (Oedpial complex, penis envy, etc.) are for the most part laughable today. But they paint an unflattering picture of both women and men, in different ways, so you do see criticism of him there.

<comment> GuB-42 Well, it is obvious that sex matters, and maybe Freud helped with the idea that sexual desire should warrant proper consideration, however I think he did more damage with his approach than he helped modern psychology.

All of his research was laughable by today's standards. Not just the details, everything. It is all misguided ideas made to look scientific. He was right on some points of course, but that's because chance make it so that even the most clueless individual can't be always wrong.

Maybe I am misguided myself but I don't know why Freud is credited so much. It looks like a lot of advances in psychology start with the refutation of one of his ideas rather than built on top of them.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, a lot of advances in psychology start with refuting one of Freud's ideas, but it's no different than modern (Enlightenment) physics starting with refuting Aristotle. It doesn't mean Aristotle wasn't a massively influential genius. In fact that Aristotle and Freud are the starting point for what came after them shows how important they were.

Freud deserves credit for revolutionizing an entire field, creating something new and coherent. Given the context of his time, he was a genius, like Aristotle was in his time.

Also, while most of Freud's details are of course pitifully ridiculous today, the basic insight that the unconscious matters, and that we can see its influence in indirect ways, is still a valid idea today. It's debated a lot, but it's a core concept we've never abandoned, so he deserves credit for that too.

<comment><USER2> It's not a valid idea, there is little to no scientific validity in the entire world of psychology. Psychologists will continue to chase their tails "proving" things with unscientific methods that will later be unproven. The fact that he was the first pseudo scientist to defraud the public in this field doesn't make him a genius any more than a carnival huckster is.

<comment><USER10> Care to elaborate on your threshold of scientifically valid then?

<comment><USER2> Repeatable experiments that don't rely on whisks of statistical credibility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Isn't Freud a case where the old line "Your work is both novel and true, unfortunately the parts that are true are not novel and the parts that are novel are not true" holds?

</comment><comment><USER12> The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker has a few chapters about Freud. It's a very interesting perspective and I highly recommend that book.

</comment><comment><USER13> "And yet, although Freudian theories are no longer a part of mainstream science, Freud is still incredibly well-known..."

This is just plain wrong.. the author does not have any sources, no evidence.. just a bold claim, opinion.

<comment><USER4> Freudian theories were never science (as we define it today) - as Popper pointed out after trying to reconcile scientific inquiry with Freud's and Adler's work - since they cannot be falsified, see e.g. [https://cogsci.stackexchange.com/questions/12451/why-did- kar...](https://cogsci.stackexchange.com/questions/12451/why-did-karl-popper- criticize-freuds-theories)

They might be part of mainstream psychology (I have read conflicting accounts), but they are definitely not part of mainstream science; very little of psychology is.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you think my math website is a waste of time? - <AUTHOR> Quick tangent: I'm trying to avoid this guy's fate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCgoxQCf5Jg
My math website, which I haven't touched in several months and I think will take about 4 years of my free time, is https://regressionbuddy.com.
There are only three posts so far (with one in review) but each post takes about two weeks to do.
The main idea of the site is that you can do a few problems on it a few times a week so that you don't forget the math you spent years learning. But also, the non-wordy appendix is the kind of quick reference that I like to use (don't have to reread through paragraphs just to get to the point).
So imagine you were to spend four years of ALL your free time on a project. Also, you are not rich or particularly intelligent. If it were a math website that thousands of people used and actually found helpful ...that wouldn't be too bad (imo). But if you spend all that time and no one finds it useful then I'm afraid that's a little bigger than just a failed project. That's more like a failed interpretation of the world around you. That's more like, well, going down the rabbit hole. No one wants to be the fool who spent 4 years on a math website that never caught on.
Whenever I google a math topic I expect to get a mix of pdf worksheets (with or without answers), 10 minute youtube videos (with or without answers), and horrendously formatted math websites. Yes, there is brilliant.org but they seem to be a typical business (social media, popup login screen, click-bait questions) and less focused on providing an easy and open reference. Plus their appendix isn't responsive and is too wordy.
So I think the site can still fill a niche. But while I am working on the site I am getting worse at math and drifting hopelessly away from my goal of learning machine learning (which I would have achieved by now if I never got distracted). I still want to learn so many things that could get put off for years if I stick with this site. <comment> p-ranav Start slowly. Don't think about spending four years of ALL your free time on this project. Think short term. 3-6 months and see where you get. Plan what you want to finish in 3-6 months and see if you are able to find the passion to finish what you planned. If you have the passion and it's coming along nicely, you may want to keep going. If, on the other hand, you're finding this work to be tedious and taking up time you could be doing something else with, then you have your answer.

Remember... if this becomes successful, your work won't stop at 4 years. It'll go on for quite a bit longer. Ask yourself if that's something you're up for. If not, keep this as a hobby project and draw your boundaries.

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER2> Oh! The first look to website - I love it.

I don't think at all, this is waste of time. It's wonderful initiative and I feel this can go long way!

All the best! Let me know, what help are you seeking for? Will share to people on my network. Also sharing this website on our blog.

Cheers</comment>


Git Tutorials for Beginners - <AUTHOR> http://sixrevisions.com/resources/git-tutorials-beginners/ <comment><USER2> A few great resources are missing from that big list at the bottom:

Git internals PDF (Scott Chacon) <http://peepcode.com/products/git-internals- pdf>

"Getting Git" screencast (Scott Chacon) <http://blip.tv/scott-chacon/git- talk-4113729>

Interactive Git cheatsheet (Andrew Peterson, NDP Software) <http://www.ndpsoftware.com/git-cheatsheet.html>

<comment><USER3> The best resource for _understanding_ git (or probably bzr/Mercurial) IMO is definitely "The Git Parable" [1]. It takes you through the steps of what you'd do to create a DVCS. This teaches you the concepts, without worrying about the commandline.

Once you understand git, the man pages, docs at kernel.org and cheatsheets are a much easier read. My go-to cheatsheet is now [2], which is actually more of a visualization of commands to use to move between git's different areas.

I must admit, I still need to Google every now and then for things that are counterintuative in git (e.g. removing a submodule) and normally end up on StackOverflow.

[1] [http://tom.preston-werner.com/2009/05/19/the-git- parable.htm...](http://tom.preston-werner.com/2009/05/19/the-git-parable.html)

[2] <http://ndpsoftware.com/git-cheatsheet.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> To me the single best resource for really building a mental model of git (and not just learning how to do a handful of 'cookbook' actions) is the git user manual: [http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/user- manual....](http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/user-manual.html)

Once I read that, I never had to look at any git intro tutorials again.

</comment><comment><USER5> What really helped me understand Git was this 2-part tutorial that uses Gitk to show how your commits and merges work.

Part 1 - [http://lostechies.com/joshuaflanagan/2010/09/03/use-gitk- to-...](http://lostechies.com/joshuaflanagan/2010/09/03/use-gitk-to- understand-git/)

Part 2 - [http://lostechies.com/joshuaflanagan/2010/09/03/use-gitk- to-...](http://lostechies.com/joshuaflanagan/2010/09/03/use-gitk-to- understand-git-merge-and-rebase/)

I'm surprised how few tutorials mention Gitk.

</comment><comment><USER6> Beyond git tutorials, I recommend _easygit_ (eg). It's a "training wheels" wrapper for git and available in Ubuntu's Package Manager.

<http://people.gnome.org/~newren/eg/>

easygit is git with sane defaults and better error messages. It uses real git commands, so you don't need to unlearn anything when graduating to git. It has extra sanity checks (like checking for unstaged changes when committing). The help messages are more verbose and use more consistent terminology than git's man pages. For example, easygit always uses the term "staged" instead of "index/staged/add/hard/soft/mixed/cached/HEAD/etc." And `eg revert` behaves the same as Perforce, SVN, and Mercurial revert.

<comment><USER7> The overloading of "checkout" to mean revert a file as well as "switch to a different branch" is for me one of the most confusing git design choices.

<comment><USER8> 1\. You're right, it's confusing when coming from a Subversion background. 2\. It makes sense when you realize that 'switching to a different branch' and 'reverting a file' are both operations that make your working copy (partly) match a branch, be it a different branch or just your current HEAD. Git is full of stuff like that. Once you get the fundamentals down it all starts to make sense.

<comment><USER9> It's a poor UI even for people like me who have never used SVN. Understanding how something works after having learned it is not a sign of a good UI, a good UI _facilitates_ easy learning by having commands do the thing you'd expect them to do, so far as that is possible.

The fact that file checkouts and branch creation shares underlying mechanics have _nothing_ to do with the UI, it'd make a lot more sense to create new branches with for instance the _git branch_ command, and checkout files with the _git checkout_ command.

Having said that, I _don't_ think the git UI is horrible at all. I found learning the basics of git rather easy, that doesn't mean the UI can't be improved on further, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> 'Pro Git' is a fine resource, but it is pretty intense for beginners. When I started, I just wanted to check something in. I've found the 'Pragmatic Guide to Git' to be the best reference for getting things done. It has a fantastic organization that sends you exactly where you need to go and lots of examples to perform the most common tasks.

</comment><comment><USER11> A similar list for Mercurial, please?

<comment><USER12> <http://hginit.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Has anyone read Apress's Pro Git by Scott Chacon? Do you recommend it?

<comment><USER14> I absolutely recommend it! It's great. Read it online from the link provided by the comment below or buy the book, what ever suits you best.

I also recommend to heavily use gitk while learning, just use it to see what happens after you do something in your test repositories. It's very enlightening.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> "di-git-ally managing love letters" [http://shakthimaan.com/downloads/glv/presentations/di-git- al...](http://shakthimaan.com/downloads/glv/presentations/di-git-ally- managing-love-letters.pdf) . I started using git reading it.

</comment><comment><USER16> <http://www.gitguys.com> is a new resource for people wanting to learn git. It has lots of diagrams that step through changes in the index, working directory, git object store, etc.

</comment><comment><USER17> I've been working through git immersion the past few days and it's definitely helped a lot. Short exercises to teach basic things.

</comment><comment><USER18> Why would anyone want 10 tutorials?

<comment><USER19> To find the one that helps them the most? Not everyone learns in the same way, and not everyone teaches in the same way. The more choices you have, the more likely you are to hit on the one that lets you really grok something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Since there is no bookmark feature, "Tag"

</comment><comment><USER21> cool</comment>


Ask HN: What's the geekiest joke you know? - <AUTHOR> So Descartes walks into a bar. The bartender says, "Can I get you a beer?" Descartes thinks it over for a minute, and finally, replies, "I think not," and poof -- disappears. <comment><USER2> Two mathematicians were having dinner in a restaurant, arguing about the average mathematical knowledge of the American public. One mathematician claimed that this average was woefully inadequate, the other maintained that it was surprisingly high.

"I'll tell you what," said the cynic, "ask that waitress a simple math question. If she gets it right, I'll pick up dinner. If not, you do." He then excused himself to visit the men's room, and the other called the waitress over.

"When my friend comes back," he told her, "I'm going to ask you a question, and I want you to respond `one third x cubed.' There's twenty bucks in it for you." She agreed.

The cynic returned from the bathroom and called the waitress over. "The food was wonderful, thank you," the mathematician started. "Incidentally, do you know what the integral of x squared is?"

The waitress looked pensive; almost pained. She looked around the room, at her feet, made gurgling noises, and finally said, "Um, one third x cubed?"

So the cynic paid the check. The waitress wheeled around, walked a few paces away, looked back at the two men, and muttered under her breath, "...plus a constant."

—<http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/old90/constant.html>

</comment><comment><USER3> Three lawyers and three engineers are traveling by train to a conference. At the station, the three lawyers each buy tickets and watch as the three engineers buy only a single ticket.

"How are three people going to travel on only one ticket?" wonders one of the lawyers. "Watch, and you'll see," replies one of the engineers.

They all board the train. The lawyers take their respective seats while all three engineers cram into a restroom and close the door behind them. Shortly after the train departs, the conductor comes around collecting tickets. He knocks on the restroom door and says, "Ticket, please." The door opens just a crack and a single arm emerges with a ticket in hand. The conductor takes it and moves on.

The lawyers see this and agree it is quite a clever idea. After the conference, the lawyers decide to copy the engineers on the return trip and save some money. When they get to the station, they buy a single ticket for the return trip. To their astonishment, the engineers don't buy a ticket at all. "How are you going to travel without a ticket?" asks one perplexed lawyer. "Watch, and you'll see," replies one of the engineers.

When they board the train the three lawyers cram into a restroom and the three engineers cram into another one nearby. The train departs. A few moments later, one of the engineers leaves his restroom and walks over to the restroom where the lawyers are hiding. He knocks on the door and says, "Ticket, please."

</comment><comment><USER4> A network engineer is sent over to Iraq due to his National Guard status being changed. Immediately after he steps off the plane, he's hit with a wave of heat and a drill sergeant pushes a gun into his hands and tells him to report to the firing range.

He gets to the firing range, grabs a magazine, puts the magazine in and lays down an impressive spray of bullets. The drill sergeant, suitably impressed grabs his binoculars, looks at the target, but sees no bullet holes.

Sensing the engineer's embarrassment, he barks at him that bullets aren't free, the US Government has gone to considerable expense to train him, feed him and supply bullets, but, take another magazine, breathe before firing, and hit that target.

The engineer breathes, fires a little more carefully and the drill sergeant seems happy. He grabs the binoculars, looks down at the target and can't believe his eyes. Not a single bullet hit the target.

The drill sergeant, notably irritated at this point starts yelling at the network engineer, telling him that his country is depending on him and he better hit the target this time, and hands him another magazine.

The network engineer taps the magazine on his helmet, blows some sand off, places it in the rifle, puts his finger over the end of the rifle, pulls the trigger and shoots the tip of his finger off. He tells the sergeant, the bullet is leaving the rifle just fine, the problem must be on the other end.

</comment><comment><USER5> Noah is escorting the animals off the Ark and next up is a pair of snakes.

 _"Go forth and multiply."_

The snakes just sit there, staring at Noah.

 _"I said go forth and multiply! What's wrong?"_

 _"We can't. We're adders!"_

PART II

Noah storms down the gangplank with an axe. He finds a large tree, chops it down, and builds a table. He goes back to the Ark, grabs the snakes, and places them on the table.

 _"Now, go forth and multiply!"_

 _"We can't! We told you, we're adders!"_

 _"With a log table, even adders can multiply!"_

(Thanks to C.L. Liu at U.Illinois for that one.)

</comment><comment><USER6> So this SEO expert walks into a bar, grill, pub, public house, Irish bar, bartender, drinks, beer, wine, liquor

</comment><comment><USER7> Programmer comes home late with lipstick on his collar and face, smelling of perfume.

Wife is glaring at him.

"Honey, I have to tell you the truth" he says. "You remember Judy from accounting? We ended up talking, getting close, one thing led to another, and I ended up sleeping with her. I'm so sorry".

Wife glares at him some more.

"I don't believe you for a second, you lying son of a bitch. You stayed late programming again, didn't you?"

</comment><comment><USER8> A hillbilly asks his son what he learned in school that day. The son responds, "Pie R squared". The angry father comes back with, "What are they teachin' you in that place? Everybody knows cornbread are squared; pie are round!"

C isn't that hard: void ( _(_ f[])())() defines f as an array of unspecified size, of pointers to functions that return pointers to functions that return void

It takes a million monkeys at typewriters to write Shakespeare, but only a dozen monkeys at computers to run Network Solutions

and my fav

I'm sorry for the double slash (Tim Berners-Lee in a Panel Discussion, WWW7, Brisbane, 1998)

U didnt mention they had to be funny :)

</comment><comment><USER9> Why do mathematicians always confuse Halloween and Christmas?

Because 31 Oct = 25 Dec.

</comment><comment><USER10> 01010111 01101000 01111001 00100000 01100100 01101001 01100100 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01100011 01101000 01101001 01100011 01101011 01100101 01101110 00100000 01100011 01110010 01101111 01110011 01110011 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01110010 01101111 01100001 01100100 00111111

<comment><USER11> 01010100011011110010000001100111011001010111010000100000011101000110111100100000011101000110100001100101001000000110111101110100011010000110010101110010001000000111001101101001011001000110010100101110

<comment><USER12> Please delete this. It's stretching the page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What's purple and commutes? An abelian grape.

What's purple and commutes and is worshipped by a limited number of people? A finitely-venerated abelian grape.

What's purple and had all of its children committed to mental hospitals? A simple grape (it has no proper, normal subgrapes).

</comment><comment><USER14> One day Heisenberg is stopped by the police. The officer walks to Heisenberg's car. Heisenberg: "Anything wrong Officer?" Officer: "Do you know what speed you were doing, Sir?" Heisenberg: "No, but I know exactly where I was."

<comment><USER15> Rene Descartes walks into a bar. He says to the bartender, "Give me a Bud light." The bartender asks, "Do you want a glass?" Descartes says, "I think not.." and promptly disappears.

<comment><USER15> Wow, I just saw that this was the original posted joke. I guess great minds think alike. Inferior minds don't read what they're responding to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> A joke of my own creation:

What's the par value of a zero-coupon bond with no maturity? Pee Dollars!

This joke didn't do very well in the last joke thread, so I'll explain it in this one. Typically, the par value of a bond is represented by the letter P. Maturity is when the bond pays out. A person with no maturity would hear "p" and think "pee", so the joke is a pun on both P and maturity. But wait, there's more! A zero coupon bond without expiration is worthless -- just like pee dollars.

</comment><comment><USER17> Let epsilon be less than zero.

</comment><comment><USER18> What goes, "Squawk! Pieces of seven! Pieces of seven!"?

A parroty error.

<comment><USER17> That joke doesn't quite work: 7 and 8 have the same (odd) parity.

Pieces of nine, on the other hand...

<comment><USER4> unless one uses gray's binary

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those that understand binary, and those that don't.

</comment><comment><USER19> How do you annoy a Lisp programmer?

(

<comment><USER20> Lol good one haha )

<comment><USER19> I'm fairly certain it's original, unless I've forgotten the source.

And yes, every single time someone has had to post a closing parenthesis. (:

<comment><USER21> I was tempted to post just a smiley in response to your post, but I wondered if that would've been a bit too subtle :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The closest thing I know to a geek joke (cuz I just can't tell jokes of any sort) is the proof about hell being exothermic:

<http://www.pinetree.net/humor/thermodynamics.html>

<comment><USER23> While we're on the subject of classic physics jokes, I give you the subtle opening of David Goodstein's _States of Matter_ :

 _Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics._

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> An engineer, a physicist and a mathematician are each given the same problem.

1\. the engineer comes in, writes a few lines of equations, does some calculations, and writes down the answer.

2\. the physicist comes in, derives some formulas, writes some equations, writes some more equations, does some calculations and finally writes down the answer.

3\. the mathematician comes in, lists some axioms, proves some theorems from the axioms, writes equations across the entire whiteboard, gets another whiteboard, fills it up with equations also, writes some final calculations and finally says, "it can be solved."

</comment><comment><USER25> The Physicist proof all odd numbers are prime: 1 is prime, 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is experimental error, 11 is prime, 13 is prime...

<comment><USER21> I worry about anyone who believes that 1 is prime :(

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_number#Primality_of_one>

<comment><USER25> It makes for a much better joke if you start at one ;-)

It is actually a pretty old joke, there are a few variations on it (one for Computer Scientists, one for Mathematicians, etc...):

<http://www.phy.ilstu.edu/~rfm/107F07/EPMjokes.html>

<comment><USER21> Oh, I recognize the joke, but I still worry about any engineers who believe that 1 is prime :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> So this SEO writer goes into a bar, pub, grill, resturant, free, meal, wine, beer, alcohol, girls, dance, sex.

</comment><comment><USER27> The English couldn't build a good computer because they couldn't figure out how to make it leak oil.

</comment><comment><USER28> A SQL query goes into a bar, walks up to two tables and asks, "Can I join you?", "yes naturally".

</comment><comment><USER29> 10 guys walked into a bar...

</comment><comment><USER30> How can you tell an extrovert programmer from an introvert programmer?

The extrovert programmer looks at YOUR shoes while he's talking to you.

</comment><comment><USER31> what kind of bus do mathematicians travel? -- rhombus.

what kind of ears do trains have? -- engineers.

</comment><comment><USER32> A man walks into a bar. He is an alcoholic and it's destroying his family.

</comment><comment><USER33> What stabs from hell's heart and subsumes most of category theory?

Khan extensions.

</comment><comment><USER8> not geek, but a great letter none the less

Dear Sir,

I am writing to thank you for bouncing my cheque with which I endeavoured to pay my plumber last month. By my calculations, three nanoseconds must have elapsed between his presenting the cheque and the arrival in my account of the funds needed to honour it. I refer, of course, to the automatic monthly deposit of my Pension, an arrangement, which, I admit, has been in place for only thirty eight years. You are to be commended for seizing that brief window of opportunity, and also for debiting my account £30 by way of penalty for the inconvenience caused to your bank.

My thankfulness springs from the manner in which this incident has caused me to rethink my errant financial ways. I noticed that whereas I personally attend to your telephone calls and letters, but when I try to contact you, I am confronted by the impersonal, overcharging, pre-recorded, faceless entity which your bank has become. From now on, I, like you, choose only to deal with a flesh-and-blood person. My mortgage and loan payments will therefore and hereafter no longer be automatic, but will arrive at your bank by cheque, addressed personally and confidentially to an employee at your bank whom you must nominate. Be aware that it is an offence under the Postal Act for any other person to open such an envelope.

Please find attached an Application Contact Status which I require your chosen employee to complete. I am sorry it runs to eight pages, but in order that I know as much about him or her as your bank knows about me, there is no alternative. Please note that all copies of his or her medical history must be countersigned by a Solicitor, and the mandatory details of his/her financial situation (income, debts, assets and liabilities) must be accompanied by documented proof. In due course, I will issue your employee with PIN number which he/she must quote in dealings with me. I regret that it cannot be shorter than 28 digits but, again, I have modelled it on the number of button presses required of me to access my account balance on your phone bank service. As they say, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Let me level the playing field even further. When you call me, press buttons as follows:

1\. To make an appointment to see me. 2\. To query a missing payment. 3\. To transfer the call to my living room in case I am there. 4\. To transfer the call to my bedroom in case I am sleeping. 5\. To transfer the call to my toilet in case I am attending to nature. 6\. To transfer the call to my mobile phone if I am not at home. 7\. To leave a message on my computer (a password to access my computer is required. A password will be communicated to you at a later date to the Authorized Contact.) 8\. To return to the main menu and to listen to options 1 through to 8. 9\. To make a general complaint or inquiry, the contact will then be put on hold, pending the attention of my automated answering service. While this may, on occasion, involve a lengthy wait, uplifting music will play for the duration of the call.

Regrettably, but again following your example, I must also levy an establishment fee to cover the setting up of this new arrangement.

May I wish you a happy, if ever so slightly less prosperous, New Year.

Your Humble Client

(Remember: This was written by a 98 year old woman; DOESN'T SHE MAKE YOU PROUD!)

<comment><USER34> The footnote at the end and urban legend status [1] make this less funny to me, though it would be nice try and enforce the letter.

[1] <http://www.snopes.com/business/bank/takethat.asp>

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Your mother is so fat, the recursive function computing her mass causes a stack overflow.

Your mother is a convenient proof that the universe is still expanding exponentially

Your mother is so fat that the coefficient of friction between her and her surroundings is greater than static, rolling, or kinetic friction.

The integral of your mom is fat plus a constant, where the constant is equal to more fat.</comment>


Top 20 Startups of All Time  - <AUTHOR> http://vergestartups.com/top-20-startups-of-all-time/

<comment><USER2> This piece might actually be a good resource for investors--it links collates so much financial information about these companies and you can clickthrough to the source.</comment>


A More Useful 404 - <AUTHOR> http://www.alistapart.com/articles/amoreuseful404 <comment><USER2> The best 404 page I ever created had a large button in the middle of the (branded) screen that said "report". Which dispatched an email to me with relevant information (referring url etc.)

I know this could have been done automatically with some scripting, but having it manual meant only 'real' users would be reporting 404's (not bots etc.) and I found users reported the 404's rather than just moving on.

You don't want your 404 to be too helpful, it's something that should be fixed (if at all possible)

<comment><USER3> > You don't want your 404 to be too helpful, it's something that should be > fixed (if at all possible)

Sure you do - It's not just a bad link that could cause a 404. Could be an old bookmark, a bad link from another site, a bad cut'n'paste, a link to deleted content, or whole bunch of other things.

A useful 404 would do things things like (1) search for content based on your url and give suggesttions and (2) allow you to conduct a search... and (3) well, probably all the other things in the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Although this isn't 404-specific, I thought Twitter would get less crap if their Fail Whale page included a flash game.

Then when they came back up everyone would brag about their scores.

<comment><USER2> Thousands of people playing your 404 Flash game (and using server resources) isn't what you want when you can barely keep your core service alive. Also, it would provide yet _another_ thing for Twitter users to complain about.

<comment><USER4> Why would flash games use "server resources?" It's just bandwidth, which has never been Twitter's problem.

Besides, you can embed it from an external site or CDN.

<comment><USER5> While on the side topic of maintenance (rather than 404) pages, digg's got the most useful one I've ever seen:

<http://flickr.com/photos/alabut/2947148797/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The article is a bit naïve in that most popular sites will get slammed by exploit-seeking bots. At my previous employer I had a setup to silently log known exploit URLs that reached the 404 handler, and blacklist the IP if more than a few showed up from any one IP address.

Also, a 301 redirect from the old location of a page to a new one goes a long way towards fixing stale SERs and bookmarks.

</comment><comment><USER7> Homestarrunner.com has a pretty good 404 page: <http://homestarrunner.com/404>

Not helpful in any way suggested by the article, but a reasonable laugh for the site.

</comment><comment><USER8> There's nothing lamer than getting a generic 404 page. At the very least, there should be a link to a site map or the home page. This is nicely thought- out. Well done.

</comment><comment><USER9> Someone should just set this up as a web service.</comment>


You can't make a silk purse from a sow's ear - <AUTHOR> http://vincentsanders.blogspot.com/2018/06/you-cant-make-silk-purse-from-sows-ear.html <comment><USER2> One way to reduce sound is to increase the distance from the sound. My equipment is on a separate floor.</comment>


Donald Trump Has a 20 Percent Chance of Becoming President - <AUTHOR> http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/donald-trump-has-a-20-percent-chance-of-becoming-president/ <comment><USER2> ... which is about the same as the Brexit "leave" vote was given [http://uk.businessinsider.com/ncp-research- shows-196-chance-...](http://uk.businessinsider.com/ncp-research- shows-196-chance-of-a-brexit-2016-5) Then leave won.</comment>


Apple's first iPhone ad – Hello (2007) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHA3mg_xuM4 <comment><USER2> Pure genius.

Just watching the ad make me want to by the phone.

<comment><USER3> Really? To be honest, it made me want to close the browser tab. Annoying, too much repetition; I got the point after hearing "hello?" two or three times. Also, I hate it when part of our cultural heritage is shamelessly used in ads.

<comment><USER4> Well, a lot of that cultural heritage was shameful hollywood crap in the first place.</comment></comment></comment>


Curative Inc. Receives FDA Authorization for Oral Fluid Covid-19 Test - <AUTHOR> https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/curative-inc-receives-fda-authorization-for-oral-fluid-covid-19-test-1029102348 <comment><AUTHOR> (I work at Curative)

The reason this is notable is that they are cheek swabs and not the quite uncomfortable nasopharyngeal swabs. The latter also require a healthcare worker to be up close to the patient, increasing their risk of exposure. Oral swabs can be done by patients and the sample handled once at the lab.</comment>


Doudou Linux – For children from 2 to 12 years old - <AUTHOR> http://www.doudoulinux.org/web/english/index.html <comment><USER4> I used to have this on a USB key for my daughter from age 2 to 5 (she is now 6).

The UX was terrible, full of inconsistencies, with different icon symbols in different positions from application to application to close windows, confirm menu choices etc.

But my daughter loved it to bits =) Some games are a lot of fun for a toddler.

And guess what, I think the struggle she experienced with the inconsistent UI may have been the best "school" she could have had for "real world" UIs.

At 6yo she is now completely autonomous navigating a Windows environment and any of the multitude of "Frankenstein" UIs I throw at her.

Might even revisit it now for the 1st grade level games I remember she couldn't play back then.

</comment><comment><USER5> I tried Doudou, and then Qimo, and finally gave up and gave my kids xubuntu.

The sad truth is that the childrens games like Childs Play are sad stale games with hopeless UIs and glaring bugs like mislabelled animals in quizzes and things.

I have lots of feedback from watching my kids learning to use and play with Doudou and Qimo; even though it is several years ago now, I think - <USER2> looking at the screenshots - that nothing much has changed :(

[http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/19500788060/my- te...](http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/19500788060/my-tech-savvy- generation)

I hope there are modern set of games produced, but I'd imagine they'd be better served over http into the browser than as native apps.

<comment><USER6> I think the another issue with most of these "for kids" environments is that they have low ceilings of mastery. You know, like the "low barrier to entry, high ceiling" principle of Smalltalk? Usually because of some misguided desire to shelter them and keep them safe.

Also, I started out on DOS at the age of six, with the left-over computer my parents had after they upgraded the server at work. It had two hard drives of a whopping 40mb! Anyway, the neighbours next door had a slightly older son who explained to me how cd, copy, mkdir, del, etc. worked and he gave me a bunch of games via floppy disks. I didn't understand everything (this was before I spoke English, so no idea what the "park" command referred to or why it was important), nor knew _why_ everything worked, or understood why some games didn't quite work when copied to the hard drive (because I didn't copy the sub folders) but I managed. Wanting to play games is a good motivator to learn any interface.

Based on Sugata Mitra's experiments, I'd say as an individual I wasn't exceptional in any way; give a group of kids a computer _without_ an artificially low ceiling and watch them go! The circumstances I was in might have been unusual at the time, but that's different.

[https://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_...](https://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves)

We shouldn't underestimate the abilities of children to figure out how computers work.

<comment><USER7> >I think the another issue with most of these "for kids" environments is that they have low ceilings of mastery

A modern GUI OS for adults has a very low ceiling of mastery. I don't know why we need to make simpler designs. When my kid was literally fourteen or fifteen months he could pick up a phone or tablet, swipe to the youtube app, press it, and then press the thumbnails from a recently viewed video and watch videos (usually Peppa Pig).

Kids don't need dumbed down displays. We already have dumbed down displays for adults. This reminds me of why the OLPC failed so badly. Even ignoring the cheap netbook competition, the interface was too 'top down' academic crap about 'how kids think' and involved a lot of shoddy assumptions on how to teach kids how to use a computer. A netbook with XP was perfectly usable by even the very young.

I was 6 or so I could use my parent's TRS-80 and was writing fun little BASIC programs with it. I think we need to give kids more credit here. They're much smarter than we think and its adult hubris to pretend they're so unintelligent and unable to figure things out on their own. Perhaps we shouldn't shy away from overly-challenging kids. The recent trends of 'soft' and 'helicopter' parenting cannot be good for the long run. I plan to be somewhat tough with my son because I don't want him to grow up into some of the people I work with who have near zero self-learning and critical thinking skills and have a 'give me fish' mentality and will actively fight against a 'teach me to fish' mentality.

<comment><USER6> > _Kids don 't need dumbed down displays. We already have dumbed down displays > for adults._

Highly relevant to this statement (which I fully agree with):

[http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesi...](http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesign/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As the parent of a 1 year old, this looks great, can the content filtering be disabled, since this is a Live CD?

I wonder if there's any evidence whatsoever for content filtering actually being useful for children's development, as opposed to just reinforcing societal squeamishness.

The example they have[1] on their page is blocking the DuckDuck go result for "sex", whose first result is the Wikipedia article.

I really can't imagine why a child who's developed enough to search for that on their own isn't ready to read about it. To the extent that the parent needs to be around to explain things to the child I don't see how that needs to be done for sex in particular, as opposed to say economics.

1\. [http://www.doudoulinux.org/web/english/documentation-7/advan...](http://www.doudoulinux.org/web/english/documentation-7/advanced- tools/article/parental-controls.html)

<comment><USER9> I'm certainly not letting my 2 year old on the Internet without me sitting next to her, so I'd want the filters disabled too. I am the filter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> From their "Translator's FAQ" (which I think is meant for volunteers to help with localization):

"How should I tell to pronounce DoudouLinux?

In French and Chinese it is pronounced "doodoolinux". However as the word "doodoo" has a weird meaning in slang American English, we recommend English- speakers to say it as if it was an English word, the way they prefer to say it. We also ask to not write "doodoolinux" at all to avoid any confusion (except here!). Of course if pronouncing the word the French way has no awful meaning in your language, please tell to use this pronunciation."

I'm not sure I understand what they mean by "say it as if it was an English word" though.

* [http://www.doudoulinux.org/web/english/contribute/translate-...](http://www.doudoulinux.org/web/english/contribute/translate-doudoulinux/article/translator-s-faq.html#1.11)

<comment><USER11> Starting out with a name that has a weird meaning in English - not a good idea. It's difficult to find a name that sounds good in all languages and has no offending meaning, but it's not impossible.

<comment><USER12> They probably started small, found a cute name in French, for their French users. (and there is nothing cuter than a doudou! try to google it!)

They even give a solution for the sensitive Americans: call it "dow dow" and forget about how is pronounced in French.

<comment><USER13> "Doudou" is French/Dutch for a child's blankie (security blanket).

<comment><USER14> I don't know about Dutch, but "Doudou" can also be used in French for "Teddy bear".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think we should define a low level learning virtual machine. Basically something like a C64 but updated to be a bit more modern. Have a virtual 4 core CPU that runs a fake machine code, have memory mapped IO so that you can put a pixel on a screen by writing a byte to memory, you can read a mouse position from a fixed memory address etc.

You could make it more advanced by using the IO. We could define things like a 3d graphics interface by defining virtual registers that take commands. Pretend hardware instead of an API.

Basically a fake blank computer for learning fun stuff on that's a bit more modern than an old spectrum of C64 but still (emulated) basic hardware and no layers or libraries...

Perhaps if it became popular people might create the actual hardware... Hmm, I might make one :P

<comment><USER6> Pico-8 is pretty much exactly what you're talking about, including having hardware for it.

[http://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php](http://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php)

[https://getchip.com/pages/pocketchip](https://getchip.com/pages/pocketchip)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Personally i don't understand why you need a 7 and under child to use a computer. And 7 year olds pick up computer just as quickly as an adult would if they used computers for the first time

<comment><USER17> Probably even quicker than an adult from my point of view. But then again, computers were much simpler in my childhood days. As an aside: It still bugs me that I don't have anymore access to this kind of fearless, joyfull learning today.

<comment><USER18> > It still bugs me that I don't have anymore access to this kind of fearless, > joyfull learning today.

What do you mean by this? Would something like Arduino not fall under that category in your view?

<comment><USER17> What I mean is: If I would pick up Arduino now I'd fail to make rapid progress.

Over the years it became harder and harder for me to just innocently interact with a new domain. I've acquired so many mental frameworks that clutter up my thinking.

If I run into a problem nowadays I'd frequently resort to reading things up (instead of joyful playing around). And this, of course, would only happen after I spend an enormous amount of time finding the best material and so on. Or I'd wonder from time to time whether Arduino actually is something for me and think about how else I could spend my time more usefully.

The reasons may sound silly but they are very real.

<comment><USER18> Nah I struggle through similar reasons. I think most people do; it's hard not to when there's practically infinite access to information. For me at least, I find it's a matter of just diving in with a slight "f*ck it" attitude - if I later find out I didn't start with the "best" material, or that something doesn't interest me as much as I thought it would, I try to just cut my losses and move on. Personally, I find that "joyful learning sensation" is more a matter of mental perspective than anything else. For what it's worth :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'd refrain from letting my infant kid (I don't have one) use a computer. I've first seen one when I was 11 (about 2000) and I'm just fine with computers now. Plus, I've been able to play outside, run around, climb trees etc. It is a question of predisposition, not how early you've started with computers.

</comment><comment><USER20> Is Edubuntu dead? No updates in over a year. [https://www.edubuntu.org](https://www.edubuntu.org)

</comment><comment><USER21> Reminds me a bit of the One Laptop Per Child project, which according to some people is a little bit defunct. They produced a distro called Sugar ([https://www.sugarlabs.org](https://www.sugarlabs.org)) that might be worth looking into.

Now tablets have largely overcome laptops as an inexpensive computing device for children.

EDIT: not defunct as people let me know. thanks for pointing this out.

<comment><USER22> > which according to some people is a little bit defunct

The blog is active. [http://blog.laptop.org/](http://blog.laptop.org/)

> Now tablets have largely overcome laptops as an inexpensive computing device > for children.

Children get exposed to horrible devices a lot. The One Laptop Per Child project gives children a device that is sturdy, energy efficient, easy to repair, and comes with full editable source code and no ties to brainwashing data thieves like Google and Facebook.

<comment><USER21> Agreed. And tablets are very opaque too, UIs hide all the internals and don't leave much to learn... as opposed to early home computers like the ZX Spectrum, which exposed people to programming right away.

<comment><USER23> True, but in this regard iPads are actually quite good when compared with the alternatives.

Granted, kids will need their parents to install them the apps, but there are quite a few to play around with programming.

For example Pythonista.

And Apple now even is investing into it with the Playgrounds, of course not out of kindness, but also to get children hooked on Swift.

Then I would put Windows tablets on second, because most of them are hybrid computers, so there are some options there.

On Android parents are stuck with AIDE or apps that feel like people bundling text input fields with an eval button over the weekend. So nothing really appropriate here and 100% in sync with your remark.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Where does this mention home schooling?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry buddy!

I am member of group called Alt India (Stands for Alternative Education in India) And focus on home schooling

I got the mail from them titled home schooler OS and i thoought to share it here. Here is the original text:

This is a homeschooler's must. Every homeschooler should have a copy - and use it!

It is the future of computing...

Download, burn a DVD, use and distribute freely without the fear - <USER3> embarrassment - of stealing software and passing it around, unethically!

It also teaches our children not to e-steal...anything! from: muriel&mario' firstname.lastname@example.com Reply-To: email@example.com

<comment><USER24> Ah, okay. Was just surprised because of the French origins of this distribution (AFAIK home schooling isn't an issue in highly secular France).

<comment> vertex-four I'm aware of a small but thriving home ed community in France - tying home education exclusively to fundamentalist religion is something that's pretty much only a US thing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh no! there is small but growing community in India too. I myself am a homeschooler and now more and more people want their kids homeschooled

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> What does the research on computer literacy (if any) say about the appropriate time to introduce these things? I don't think a five year old will be tremendously behind. UI literacy probably comes from mapping UIs to things you are familiar with in the real world. Command line literacy comes from knowing how to read, type, and organize information.

<comment><USER26> No idea about research, but my youngest first started playing with a smart phone at about 9 months. Yes, really.

After about a month he could unlock it and launch games. Soon progressed to finding YouTube videos of preschool songs for the alphabet, colours, shapes, etc. He is now 5, and can happily search google for things like mine craft hacks, which he can easily apply, and his current hobby is installing old skool operating systems on Oracle VM. His current favorite sound is the Win 95 start up sound....

He has now got a reading age of about 13, so for example he can read a broadsheet newspaper with out help, he can type anything, but is only just learning to write with a pen. But even that is now happening super quick. He started learning to write 9 months ago and had caught up with his class.

Just by my experience, I'd give them devices as soon as possible, but perhaps remember to get them writing as well.

Why didnt we take care of making sure he could also write? Frankly piss poor parenting on our part.

<comment><USER25> Thanks for the feedback. I imagine an ipad pro with the stylus could probably catch him up on that. What caused the advanced reading age in your opinion?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The home page is all about booting from CD-ROM drives but luckily it boots also from USB keys [http://www.doudoulinux.org/web/english/documentation-7/artic...](http://www.doudoulinux.org/web/english/documentation-7/article/get- doudoulinux.html)

</comment><comment><USER28> Very nice, but my 5yr old is discovering the mouse by playing Overwatch.

Such an environment is probably more required for seniors than children.

<comment><USER29> Isnt overwatch a little too violent for a 5 yo?

<comment><USER30> I don't think so, I started my son on it when he was 4. To me it doesn't seem any more violent than old Looney Tunes cartoons where people get shot in the face or blown up or anvils dropped on them. And it's adorable to watch him do Reaper's DIE DIE DIE dance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> If a kid can't figure out the default WM on a system, the default WM is doing something stupid, not the kid.

</comment><comment><USER32> I have a soon-to-be-4. Is touchscreen a must? I'm not sure he will be very good with mice or trackpads.

<comment><USER33> My son just turned 4. He doesnt seem to mind using a keyboard occasionally, though searching for the keys leads to losing his interest quickly. He still finds it amusing typing words in a text editor and seeing them appear on the screen.

Touchscreen seems to be easiest be it for playing games or navigating youtube. He uses google voice quite a bit on an Android smart phone, since he found the "mic" button.

I have a 23-inch touch monitor hooked up to an intel nuc with Win10, which he seems to like a lot. Though the educational apps in windows store are very few. I was not able to find a way to hook up an Android variant to the touch monitor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Am I the outlier here? I don't see my daughter - who is 6 - using a desktop regularly enough to need a special distro.. if she is using it, it's that we are doing it together. I would like to see her have a Linux tablet though

<comment><USER35> My kids aged 4 8 9 and 12 each use the desktop every day, for recreation and for homeschool, but they use Windows 10, they each have their own user account, and they use it for various apps, including games like Minecraft and Factorio, painting programs like Photoshop and Paint.NET, beginner programming environments like Scratch and Sublime Text (for Love2d games), and more heavy programming environments like IntelliJ and Visual Studio Express. Tablets and Linux desktop distros wouldn't really make sense for us. But maybe this is an atypical setup for children?

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> A better webpage would be nice, something on the lines of ubuntu ([https://www.ubuntu.com/](https://www.ubuntu.com/))

</comment><comment><USER37> This is stupid... Kids need to learn how to use a real computer. You'd be surprised how many high school juniors don't know a thing about computers.

<comment><USER38> > a real computer

I think this computer is about as real as they get.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> What an unfortunate name... I can only imagine telling a young kid he uses "Doo Doo Linux"

<comment><USER27> I'm not an English native speaker and I don't live in an English speaking country so I may miss something. Doo Doo sounds fine to me, very childish.

<comment><USER10> Childish is an ironic way to describe it. :) It is a term that only small children use, but almost all American children at least know what it means even if they don't say it all the time.

I just realized that it's strange that there would be a slang term only used by children, but that remained in use by generation after generation of children over a period of at a minimum 50 years but probably much longer.

I'm not a parent, but I suspect that it's a word used by American parents during potty training, hence its longevity.

<comment><USER40> Kids here are _still_ telling the exact same jokes kids were telling each other 45 years ago. Why would only adults have lasting memes?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Doudou, tu viens plus aux soirées ?

</comment><comment><USER42> my 2 year old has been navigating Android for the last year no problem.

YouTube kids is great if you have a Red account. No commercials.

He loves my work laptop and I'm probably going to get him a Chromebook Flip when he turns three.</comment>


Here's the inside of the bug that Ecuador found at their London embassy - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/bbhorne/status/352558192359788544/photo/1 <comment><USER2> the picture was really blurry, are you sure that is not big foot ?

</comment><comment><USER3> With it being 2013 and all, I was honestly expecting it to be the size of a head of a pin.

<comment><USER4> Me too. That thing was huge. The Thing (Great Seal Bug) was one of the most famous and was invented by Leon Theramin.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thing_(listening_device)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thing_\(listening_device\))

Theramin also invented the Buran system which works like laser microphones.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are some must read books for computer programmers? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Gosh, there's so many. But these come to mind:

1\. _Neuromancer_ \- William Gibson

2\. _Snow Crash_ \- Neal Stephenson

3\. _Hackers - Heroes of the Computer Revolution_ \- Steven Levy

4\. _How to Measure Anything_ \- Douglas Hubbard

5\. _Godel, Escher, Bach_ \- Douglas Hofstadter

6\. _The Pragmatic Programmer_ \- Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas

7\. _The Soul of a New Machine_ \- Tracy Kidder

8\. _Code_ \- Charles Petzold

9\. _The Shockwave Rider_ \- John Brunner

10\. _Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become Book_ \- Peter Morville

11\. _Don 't Make Me Think_ \- Steve Krug

12\. _The Design of Everyday Things_ \- Donald A. Norman

13\. _The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering_ \- Fred Brooks

14\. _Decline and Fall of the American Programmer_ \- Ed Yourdon

15\. _Cube Farm_ \- Bill Blunden

16\. _The Philip K. Dick Reader_

17\. _The Cuckoo 's Egg_ \- Clifford Stoll

18\. _The Prince_ \- Niccolò Machiavelli

19\. _The 48 Laws of Power_ \- Robert Greene

20\. _The Atrocity Archives_ \- Charles Stross

21\. _Business @ the Speed of Thought: Using a Digital Nervous System_ \- Bill Gates

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a bit of a how long is a piece of string question.

However, here are a bunch of articles regarding papers every programmer should read:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20121024173845/http://blog.objec...](https://web.archive.org/web/20121024173845/http://blog.objectmentor.com/articles/2009/02/26/10-papers- every-programmer-should-read-at-least-twice)

[http://blog.fogus.me/2011/09/08/10-technical-papers-every- pr...](http://blog.fogus.me/2011/09/08/10-technical-papers-every-programmer- should-read-at-least-twice/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Slightly off-topic but around a month back, I curated all Hacker News book related threads on a web page[1]. There have been multiple discussion related to technical books; lots of awesome recommendations.

[1]: [https://stuff.shubhamjain.co/hn-book- threads/](https://stuff.shubhamjain.co/hn-book-threads/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Some choice fiction:

Daemon, by Daniel Suarez

Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson

Gold Bug Variations, by Richard Powers

Galatea 2.2, by Richard Powers

Off to Be the Wizard, by Scott Meyer

Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline

Neuromancer, by William Gibson

The Adolescence Of P-1, by Thomas J. Ryan (from when I was just a kid)</comment>


Lord Byron: Don Juan in Hell - <AUTHOR> https://www.weeklystandard.com/algis-valiunas/lord-byron-don-juan-in-hell <comment><USER2> Some years ago I worked on 6 of the 7 volumes of The Works of Lord Byron for the Project Gutenberg editions [1], which entailed careful reading of every line. Which led to reading the Fiona McCarthy biography. Yeah, he was a shit no doubt, but he had an astounding, rarely-equalled talent as well. Verse just poured out of him. He had a high intelligence and great sensitivity to emotional nuance -- those are common enough qualities -- but was utterly unique in that, whatever he thought, he could express in perfectly-chosen words fit to exact meter and rhyme.

[1] [http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=works+of+lord+...](http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=works+of+lord+byron)

[2] [https://smile.amazon.com/Byron-Life-Legend-Fiona- MacCarthy/d...](https://smile.amazon.com/Byron-Life-Legend-Fiona- MacCarthy/dp/0374186294)

</comment><comment><USER3> Byron was a fascinating person. See [https://publicdomainreview.org/2014/10/16/the-poet-the- physi...](https://publicdomainreview.org/2014/10/16/the-poet-the-physician- and-the-birth-of-the-modern-vampire/) for the story of how the modern vampire was based on his personal physician's opinion of Byron.

</comment><comment><USER4> Also see George Bernard Shaw's _Don Juan in Hell_ (a scene from _Man and Superman_ often performed as a one-act play).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_and_Superman#Don_Juan_in_H...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_and_Superman#Don_Juan_in_Hell)

</comment><comment><USER5> I recently read that there was a surge in Lord Byron's popularity in the USA in the 1920s and 1930s. I find that so hard to believe. It must have simply vanished from American consciousness without a trace after the war (Stefan Zweig's novels are a similar case).

How many American schoolchildren in the last several decades read any Byron? Even at the university level, I never read him directly, I only heard some things about him that were mainly negative, like his sexism, or his role in insisting that a newly independent Greece revive the Ancient Greek culture that Western Europeans expected from it, when it fact Greece had been a deeply Orthodox Christian society for 1500 years and all those pagan gods and Athenian or Spartan values had long been forgotten.

<comment><USER6> For what value of "last several"? Honestly, I'm not at this point sure whether I read any Byron in high school English. I have the impression that he was very popular in the US curriculum until the modernists devalued the romantics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > I never loved nor pretended to love her—but a man is a man—& if a girl of > eighteen comes prancing to you at all hours—there is but one way.

Truer words were never spoken.

</comment><comment><USER8> I never knew Byron was such a dick until reading this. I don't find it all romantic or exciting at all, just a sad account of an untreated person with bipolar disorder.</comment>


Engineers Rule: Honda and its culture of engineering - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2006/0904/112.html

<comment><USER2> allowing smart people creative freedom seems to solve so many problems that it blows my mind its not more common.

as far as i can tell, thats the thesis behind google's 20% time. i think its even cooler that Honda encourages this behavior and that system is so intrinsic to their culture that they don't even use it as a major selling point to potential employees. just business as usual.

innovation seems to be so rarely rewarded in stiff corporate environments and thats a damn shame.

<comment><USER3> It just requires good engineers, and there is a distribution in the quality of engineers just like every other profession.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The "HP Way" used to be somewhat like this, didn't it?

</comment><comment><USER5> "Engineers have built a contraption of water heater size that strips hydrogen out of natural gas while burning the carbon to provide heat for the home."

Ok, now that's just silly. Why not just burn the methane directly in the car and skip the multiple steps?

Hydrogen is a terrible choice as a fuel, it's very hard to store, and has a poor energy to volume ratio.

I should point out they did also create a methane car, and solar electrolysis, so I'm not really complaining about them.

</comment><comment><USER6> it sounds like hyperbole, but I honestly believe there are two types of people in this world. engineers and everyone else. a smart country would put the engineers in charge and reap the windfall of profits.

<comment><USER7> Interestingly, the only country I can think of off the top of my head with an engineer "in charge" is Iran. I don't think Dr Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a great example of how a country should be run.

<comment><USER8> Angela Merkel, the chancellor in Germany is a physicist.

<comment><USER7> More of a quantum chemist, though I realize this is a distinction most people who aren't theoretical solid-state physicists are unlikely to care about.

Margaret Thatcher also had a chemistry background (though only a Bachelors, unlike Merkel's PhD).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> i wanna work at honda :(

<comment><USER10> Honda have a series of TV ads (here in the UK anyway) that don't seem to be about any one particular product. There's a chap with a moustache who sings _to dream, an impossible dream_ (don't know the actual name of the song) while operating various Honda technologies, motorbikes to hot air balloons. They seem to be investing considerably in getting the message out that they are a company where good people can do great stuff, rather than just selling things.

<comment><USER11> This is my favorite Honda ad of all time.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2VCfOC69jc>

Lots of neat innovative processes/thinking coming out of Japanese carmakers, I wonder how GM, etc. went down the unproductivity path...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This ignores the possibility that GM and Ford management have been perfectly rational in opting not to make major capital investments in their auto lines. The finance guys made A LOT of money at GM with GMAC and several big non-auto deals. It's perhaps a bit naive to spin this tale where GM would be doing very well if only they had been obsessive about engineering.

<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122669746125629365.html>

GM and Ford's apparent neglect of their US car lines makes perfect sense if you come to the conclusion that there's massive global overcapacity in car manufacturing and the unionized US workforce could never compete anyway. It's early yet to say Honda will even be a winner in the next 10 years. Every two bit country in the world is subsidizing a domestic car industry. My wild guess is it will be close to impossible to make decent profits and smart management would exit the business.

DIGITAL was another company known for technical prowess and a focus on engineering. They got eaten for lunch by the wheeler-dealers.

<comment><USER13> Honda makes money building cars in the US. Industry's with large upfront capital outlays tend to have a fairly constant and positive ROI for the most efficient participants. Because people don't spend a billion+ to enter the market if the odds of a positive ROI are poor.</comment></comment>


Hydroxychloroquine linked to increase in Covid-19 deaths, heart risks - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/05/hydroxychloroquine-linked-to-increase-in-covid-19-deaths-heart-risks/ <comment><USER2> duplicate, please check before submitting:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23273615](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23273615)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23272222](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23272222)</comment>


Chandrayaan-I Impact Probe lands on moon - <AUTHOR> http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/India/Chandrayaan-I_Impact_Probe_lands_on_moon/rssarticleshow/3714245.cms

<comment><USER2> I have never said this before, but.. w00t!

<comment><USER3> we owned other team?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wish countries were taken seriously by big G-8 nations based on, say, how much space exploration they did rather than how many nuclear weapons they have (the nuclear club).

<comment><USER5> And I wish life were a neverending frolic on a mountainside covered with bacon-flavoured daisies. But what's your point?

<comment><USER6> Can they be programmable bacon-flavoured daisies?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here's an ISRO page with more details - <http://www.isro.org/pressrelease/Nov14_2008.htm>

</comment><comment><USER8> screenshot or it didn't happen

<comment><USER9> I thought the same thing.

Where is a picture or some other direct or indirect evidence. Not only does it help prove that you did it but it's great for all the inevitable media coverage. NASA has seemed to have learned this over they years; they always come up with some graphic or image for their big releases.

After checking out the wiki article:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrayaan-1>

I found out it does have a camera. And that it's been tested:

<http://www.isro.org/pressrelease/Oct31_2008.htm>

<comment><USER8> yeh, "the orbiter has to come back around to this side of the moon before we can get a transmission of the recorded event" was the answer i got in my research of it.

pfah, a likely excuse... :D

<comment><USER7> <http://www.isro.org/pslv-c11/photos/moon_images.htm>

Something tells me we're not going to see images of the MIP and the moon at the same time since the impact would likely wipe out the camera.</comment></comment></comment></comment>