Sen. Ron Wyden places a "hold" on the Protect IP Act - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/05/sen-ron-wyden-to-place-a-hold-on-the-protect-ip-act.ars <comment><USER2> OK, I'm now a fan. I was up in Oregon for grad school during the Senate campaign between Wyden and Smith. I lean libertarian/fiscal-conservative, so was rooting for Smith against the awkward, liberal Wyden. Funny to think about the consequences had my wishes come true: Wyden is taking a well-thought-out, brave and effective position here and I'm reasonably sure that, had my wishes come true, Smith would not have done the same. _Go Wyden!_

Separately and ironically, after bitching about "single-issue voters" and "litmus tests" involving abortion, it seems I'm now exhibiting the same traits with respect to the intarwebs.

<comment><USER3> I find myself in a situation where my political-economic philosophies and my individual/corporate rights philosophies have put me in a situation where I feel like my candidate pool is an empty set.

If I favor the first, I'm more beholden to my corporate overlords.

If I favor the second, the country's spiral towards bankruptcy will speed up.

If I find an independent who feels as I do, my vote will be effectively wasted.

Nothing quite like feeling completely disenfranchised.

<comment><USER4> "If I favor the first, I'm more beholden to my corporate overlords.

If I favor the second, the country's spiral towards bankruptcy will speed up."

Didn't the "spiral towards bankruptcy" really put the pedal to the metal when Reagan doubled-down on nukes, pushed lower top-line tax rates, and doubled the national debt and deficit at once?

And, for the record, both parties are beholden to corporate overlords. Just a matter of degree. I fall in the "commerce with regulations and _literally_ promote the general welfare" side of the fence, and so I fall in the democratic camp.

<comment><USER3> You are, of course, correct. When I ponder these things holistically, I do tend to think about the parties in terms of what they say their goals are (which, even if everything else about them turns my stomach, the Tea Party has at least raised dichotomy to a level of real discussion).

When it actually comes time to vote, those holistic views are chucked in favor of what the candidates are actually saying. In that context, there has rarely been a group not in the second category.

It also explains why my voting for the last few elections has tended to lean more towards Democrats, even though I have so many philosophical issues with the party.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't know if his views on this issue completely line up with the prevailing sentiment here, but this is the second time in recent memory that Sen Wyden has acted to bail out the internet as we know it in the US. If the issue is important to you consider taking a minute to contact his office to express your opinion or even donate something to his campaign.

Contact form: <http://wyden.senate.gov/contact/> Campaign: <http://www.standtallforamerica.com/contribute/>

For all their flaws, politicians are much more likely to pay attention to issues when they know an engaged audience is watching.

<comment><USER2> Dude!, thanks for posting the links. Never would have thought to support him beyond writing a comment (yay, faith in politics...) But I just wrote my first note of thanks to a politician. Tried to donate $50, but they don't take AmEx...

<comment><USER6> I wrote him also, and I hope everyone who has a few minutes will take that time to thank Senator Wyden for his efforts to protect our freedoms from overreaching legislature.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hopefully if this gets blocked they'll do something about DHS arbitrarily seizing domain names.

<comment><USER8> The underlying issue there is 'civil forfeiture' in general. My view is that this practice is unconstitutional for any sort of property, and it's causing a lot of problems with the motivation of individuals in law enforcement. Automobiles, cash, and real estate have been being seized with no due process, no warrant and even no arrest for years. Domain names are just a new twist in that story.

<comment><USER9> _The underlying issue there is 'civil forfeiture' in general. My view is that this practice is unconstitutional for any sort of property,_

But property -- cars, domain names, cash, etc. -- is not human, and therefore is not protected by our Bill of Rights. Your domain name does not have the right to a trial, and so, when it is accused of being an accessory in a crime (e.g., the domain name was a person who set up the meeting between the customer and the purveyor of stolen IP), the government is within its authority to detain it and keep it locked up for as long as is deemed necessary.

(Not that I buy this bizarre logic, but that's the rationale for asset forfeiture.)

<comment><USER8> The 4th amendment regards "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizure". That appears to cover seizure of property fairly well, though I suppose the key word is 'unreasonable'. It's also unclear how this is applied to civil matters vs. criminal. Though forfeiture is usually hand-in-hand with criminal charges, they claim it's a civil matter.

The 5th amendment says citizens shall not be "deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." In the US, police can currently take your car, money, or other possessions without even placing you under arrest. This seems to me to violate the spirit of this amendment as well as the 4th.

<comment><USER9> Things are never easy, when you start to break things down to the atomic level.

For example, if my wife were to commit a crime, they'd take her away from me without giving _me_ any kind of hearing to protect my interests in her. And believe me, my interest in her is much stronger than in any domain name, or a car.

The only difference in this hypothetical is that she, being human, gets to have her own hearing. But with inanimate objects (or intangibles), there's not even an obligation to give the object a hearing.

Disclaimer once again: I disagree with my own logic here, I'm just trying to play devil's advocate, illustrating the course that an argument _might_ take.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Previous HN love for Wyden: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1922405>

(the links posted by mschwar99 below displayed as 'visited' in my browser, so I had to check it out on searchyc.com!)

</comment><comment><USER11> Ron Wyden is one of the few politicians who understands the Web and one of the few folks in Oregon who has understood the potential of Web startups for more than a decade. I'm always proud to send this guy back to Washington. And I'll keep doing it as long as he stands up to bills like this.

</comment><comment><USER12> is it ok to ask where are they selling it ? lol</comment>


Deep image reconstruction from human brain activity (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/12/28/240317 <comment><AUTHOR> More information on this thread: [https://twitter.com/ykamit/status/1039672289413844993](https://twitter.com/ykamit/status/1039672289413844993)

<comment><USER2> Thanks for this!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Acknowledging that I know nothing about psychology or neuroscience...

It's interesting that they were not able to extract good images from the test when they just asked the subjects to _imagine_ the pictures. I speculate that is because the vast majority of people are able to recognize images of things, but not produce those images.

For a simple example, see this article about people trying to draw a bicycle. Before clicking, try to draw a 2D representation of a bicycle -- the wheels, the frame, pedals, handlebars, etc. You'd be surprised how difficult it is. [https://road.cc/content/blog/90885-science-cycology-can- you-...](https://road.cc/content/blog/90885-science-cycology-can-you-draw- bicycle)

I would be _very_ interested to see them repeat the experiment on e.g. artists who specialize in photorealism, or asking an expert on a very particular thing to imagine that particular thing (e.g. ask a violinist to imagine a violin). I wonder if that would yield more recognizable results than asking a random grad student to visualize a lion's face.

<comment><USER4> there is also evidence this ability to conjure imagery in our minds simply does not exist for some: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia)

which leads me to wonder if the capability exists on a spectrum and is stronger or weaker in some. A stronger capability might correlate to a stronger 'signal' ...?

<comment><USER5> Do people actually _see_ images of things in their head?

I can close my eyes and think of something, but I won't perceive anything more than a linear description of it.

At best, I can use these visual descriptions to draw an outline in my head, but it instantly fades out if I don't continuously re-draw it.

Kind of like this: [https://i.imgur.com/0zuPIPV.gifv](https://i.imgur.com/0zuPIPV.gifv)

<comment><USER6> Supposedly, most people do. There was an article on hn about "aphantasia" (the lack of mental imagery) not to long ago, but I can't seem to find it now. Google turns up quite a few hits though.

I can't help but be a little sceptical of the concept though. I believe there's probably a spectrum but maybe not as wide is claimed. Based on the comment sections of basically any article on the subect, I wonder if there isn't something like imposter syndrome going on. Where the _majority_ of people dont think they have as sharp mental imagery as the average person.

<comment><USER7> Aphantasia is definitely real. My inner visual world has always consisted of the view of the inside of my eyelids. Thinking for me is an almost purely verbal process, in an inner voice that I don't percieve as sound in any way. I can navigate in my mind, and describe accurately places I've been, but there's never an image, only a kind of spatial perception, combined with knowledge (of materials, colors etc.)

I thought this was how everyone's mind worked, until I met my ex, who is on the opposite end of the scale. She described her inner world as sometimes more vivid and detailed than the real world. I thought she was almost unique in this, until I started asking other people and realised that most people see images in their mind, of varying detail and vividness. Some can easily project onto their visual input and, for example, put a moustache or wings on someone. I've also come to learn that many people hear their own voice when they think (and many, non-schizophrenic, people hear other voices too), and can also imagine smells and tastes.

My episodic memory is affected by my aphantasia, as well as my people recognition skills. I can find it hard to recognise someone if they've changed their hair, grown a beard or changed their appearance in some other way.

I do dream though, vivid dreams, and am quite good at recalling them. But again the memory of the dreams, like other memories, is not visual.

I'm quite fascinated with this subject, and have some thoughts of picking up where I left off on my psychology master to be able to study it more. It'd be interesting to see if there are correlates in big-5 personality, iq, mental health etc.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For those who don't see it, the full paper is linked on the right side (PDF):

[https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2017/12/28/240...](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2017/12/28/240317.full.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER9> The code and data for these amazing results have been generously made available here:

[https://github.com/KamitaniLab/DeepImageReconstruction](https://github.com/KamitaniLab/DeepImageReconstruction)

The code is well-commented Python and a pleasure to read.

<comment><USER10> Very impressive! I was quite skeptical until I read your comment. Now I'm just a little skeptical.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This looks awesome, but the methodology and experimental setup look pretty complicated and just on that basis alone it seems like there'd be some risk of bias or overfitting to creep into the analysis... I'm not criticizing the researchers or the experimental design, it's just a danger in any complicated study like this.

Bottom line, I'm definitely interested in this paper, but want to wait and see if others can replicate the results before getting overly excited.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is impressive, and certainly technology like this will probably find lots of very good uses, but I can't help imagining(!) dystopian societies where "thoughtcrime" can actually be monitored and "made actionable".

A world in which "you have nothing to hide" turns into "you have nothing you _can_ hide" is immensely disturbing.

<comment><USER13> Google already knows what you will be thinking about in the next minutes; no fMRI needed.

I bet they will soon replace the search bar by just a button.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Question: does this setup allow to decode images from the brains of _different_ people than the one(s) it was trained for? How well does that work compared to using the same person?

<comment><USER13> Also interesting to know how performance differs between e.g. twins, people in the same family, people of different cultures, occupations, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Reminds me of this project from 2011: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsjDnYxJ0bo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsjDnYxJ0bo)

If I were a billionaire, one of the projects I'd do would be to apply this sort of technology at scale, upon volunteers who were witness to poorly recorded historic events. WWII, Beatles concerts, JFK assassination, 9/11... all of them have been recorded from angles/perspectives that exist only in peoples' memories, and the longer we wait, the more of those memories will be lost.

<comment><USER15> You're vastly overestimating the human brain's ability to accurately recall first hand accounts. It's actually kind of shocking how bad eyewitnesses are at remembering details.

<comment><USER16> Isn't it a Russian saying - "He lies like an eyewitness"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> When we build neural networks to decode our own neural networks...

<comment> a-dub neuroscientists have been using "ai" for basically ever. except to them it's not "ai," it's just mathematical tools for data analysis.

<comment><USER17> Never mentioned AI. Simply noting that the mathematical tool used here is inspired by the brain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> From the paper:

> We used the Caffe implementation (Jia et al., 2014) of the VGG19 deep neural > network (DNN) model (Simonyan & Zisserman, 2015; available from > [https://github.com/BVLC/caffe/wiki/Model](https://github.com/BVLC/caffe/wiki/Model) > \- Zoo) . All visual images were resized to 224 × 224 pixels to compute > outputs by the VGG19 model . The VGG19 model consisted of a total of sixteen > convolutional layers and three fully connected layers.

They used a VGG-19 network for the feature detection, so in my basic understanding the results of this could already be improved by switching to a ResNet.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not necessarily. While ResNets are optimized for the task of achieving the best image classification accuracy, it is no guarantee that the features extracted from it will transfer well to other tasks such as this one, especially when the task is to generate images. In fact, it has been shown that pre-trained VGG networks are a lot more useful than pre-trained ResNet for other tasks other than image classification, such as style transfer.

<comment><USER18> Very interesting. For my curiosity I did some searching on VGG vs ResNet.

* ResNets were better at feature extraction for image clustering [0]

* One of the trade-offs of ResNets seems to be their relative complexity to VGG [1]

* It surprises me that ResNets aren't significantly faster to train based on the large reduction of FLOPs (from the ResNet paper VGG-19 had 19.6 billion FLOPs vs ResNet-34 with 3.6 billion FLOPs) - I think people just train deeper ResNets e.g. ResNet-50

[0]: [https://medium.com/@franky07724_57962/using-keras-pre- traine...](https://medium.com/@franky07724_57962/using-keras-pre-trained- models-for-feature-extraction-in-image-clustering-a142c6cdf5b1)

[1]: [https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/6e6mlf/d_i...](https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/6e6mlf/d_is_vgg_common_in_newer_research_or_is_resnet/)

<comment><AUTHOR> You might enjoy this recent article on Distill:

[https://distill.pub/2018/differentiable- parameterizations/#s...](https://distill.pub/2018/differentiable- parameterizations/#section-styletransfer)

They discuss VGG vs non-VGG architectures in the context of style transfer in Section 2, which was interesting to me.

<comment><USER18> Excellent, digging down into that leads to this Reddit post [0]

> One thing they noticed was that using features from a pretrained ImageNet > VGG-16/19 CNN from 2014 (4 years ago), like the original Gatys paper did, > worked much better than anything else; indeed, almost any set of 4-5 layers > in VGG would provide great features for the style transfer optimization to > target (as long as they were spread out and weren't exclusively bottom or > top layers), while using more modern resnets (resnet-50) or GoogLeNet > Inception v1 didn't work - it was hard to find sets of layers that would > work at all and when they did, the quality of the style transfer was not as > good. Interestingly, this appeared to be true of VGG CNNs trained on the MIT > Places scene recognition database too, suggesting there's something > architectural going on which is not database specific or peculiar to those > two trained models. And their attempt at an upscaling CNN modeled on Johnson > et al 2016's VGG-16 for CIFAR-100 worked well too.

[0]: [https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/7rrrk3/d_e...](https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/7rrrk3/d_eat_your_vggtables_or_why_does_neural_style/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It would be interesting to do this experiment with people who had high abilities in drawing lifelike pieces.

</comment><comment><USER20> If you actually look at the images they are not very impressive especially if you know about retinotopy in the visual cortex. This means that there is a mapping between coordinates on the retina and coordinates in visual cortex. I'm not convinced this is doing much other than picking up on this long established fact to produce very vaguely similar images. Seriously look at how different the input image and the generated image are!

I guess it makes sense that HN is skeptical about results more closely related to the community's expertise but it's a pretty crazy leap from being able to reconstruct something vaguely similar to what a person is currently seeing vs. trying to read someone's mind. I still have seen very little evidence that such a thing could at all be possible with FMRI. The spatial and temporal resolution are just far too low. The more everyone is impressed with results like this the more we delay the hard work of developing tools that actually have a shot at doing something like that.

</comment><comment><USER21> Next: All you need to do to make the next billion $ movie is your imagination, literally (and a 100m$ helium cooled MRI machine, and 25$ worth of AWS credits).

<comment><USER22> MRI is crazy expensive, but you only really need $4M for the scanner, so doable for indie rom-come as well as blockbusters!

<comment><USER23> MRI market is very small and regulated as of today. Wider adoption of reasonably simpler devices would change everything, just recall how crazy expensive computers were in 1950s.

Among useful applications I would imagine, for example, the fast image-based information retrieval - e.g. useful for recommendation systems (in other words - Netflix could invest in a 'imagine anything and we find you a movie like that').

<comment><USER22> Maybe, but I think if it happens at all, it's going to use some other form of neuroimaging. MRI needs a lot of power, a shielded room, strong magnetic fields (which are both annoying and dangerous). Many of these are physical constraints rather than just...where the market happens to be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Hmm. Do different humans produce relatively the same brain images for a given scene? If not, I'd imagine training this would be a real PITA.

<comment><USER10> fMRI data is very noisy, and that's reflected in the generated images. They're not at all recognizable, unless they're sampled from a very small class like simple geometric shapes. I doubt it's possible to do much better, with fMRI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Blog post that has some info on the new GAN-based mind reading ideas from last year (including this one):

[https://www.mindcodec.com/using-gans-brain- reading/](https://www.mindcodec.com/using-gans-brain-reading/)

</comment><comment><USER26> Does the 50GB of data include the MRI measurements from both during training and testing?

</comment><comment><USER27> Wouldn't that training set be valuable!

</comment><comment><USER28> But how do I ice a data angel?

</comment><comment><USER29> Wow, I'm calling a hoax. They produce images of dubious value, and for whatever reason, contaminate the results by mutating them with the Deep Dream stylization.

This is as bad as the dead salmon results.

EDIT: You can flag all you want, but look at this playback of the reconstruction:

[https://video.twimg.com/tweet_video/DSrWxhSVQAE2Xix.mp4](https://video.twimg.com/tweet_video/DSrWxhSVQAE2Xix.mp4)

There's nothing useful happening here.

<comment><USER8> The code and data is here:

[https://github.com/KamitaniLab/DeepImageReconstruction](https://github.com/KamitaniLab/DeepImageReconstruction)

Not a hoax.

Your comparison to Deep Dream is quite apt, for good reason that you clearly don't realize-

Deep Dream is an attempt to "enhance patterns in images via algorithmic pareidolia"\- Pareidolia being a "psychological phenomenon in which the mind responds to a stimulus". So yes, this project is affected by a real life "deep dream".</comment></comment>


Guide to getting started in Machine Learning - <AUTHOR> http://abeautifulwww.com/2009/10/11/guide-to-getting-started-in-machine-learning/

<comment><USER2> Andrew Ng's course notes are 90% of the way to being a textbook, and are an incredible resource, especially if you're going to watch the lectures.

<http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs229/materials.html>

<comment><USER3> I also recommend Andrew Moore's tutorials on Datamining, which is quite related to ML. Found them on HN a few days ago, printed the slides and started reading them. So now I'm just passing it on :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> God, whatever you do please don't start by picking a few datasets at UCI ML site and using R packages to play with the data.

An ideal approach will be to:

\- Pick any programming language and start off with plain regression. It may look simple but this will become fantastic base going forward

\- Generate a synthetic data set and apply your freshly written regression on it

\- Expand your toolkit to include test and training data set generation and calculation of ROC curves and confusion tables

\- Add logistic regression, regularizers and other advanced regression models to the toolkit

\- Use a real world dataset and develop multiple different models. And pick the best model (choosing the right model itself is a big task in itself)

\- Then try coding Neural Networks, SVM, etc.

<comment><USER5> Agree with you Paras!

Shubhendu here by the way! :)

I was taken aback a little by the suggestion to use the UCI repository with R for beginning ML.

I would agree with your approach, I learnt all my basics from Andrew Ng's course and his course more or less follows what you said. :)

<comment><USER5> And I prefer the book by Bishop, It strikes a fine balance between the maths and the ideas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I would add:

Programming Collective Intelligence (O'reilly) <http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529321>

[http://ianma.wordpress.com/2009/07/19/machine-learning- for-b...](http://ianma.wordpress.com/2009/07/19/machine-learning-for- beginners/)

Practical Artificial Intelligence Programming in Java <http://www.markwatson.com/opencontent/>

<comment><USER7> "Programming Collective Intelligence" is very short on theory. It's good for getting your feet wet and for getting over your fear of something new and difficult, but otherwise without proper comprehension of the phenomenons involved in those algorithms, you're not going to get very far.

<comment><USER6> Yes, it is short and basic in theory, but I it is very practical. In my case I learn best trying and applying concepts in practice. That is why I found the book very useful. Also I accompanied my learning with some other books (i.e. Machine Learning from Tom Mitchell) and academic papers that filled the theory gap. As a started point to teach the basics of ML and to encourage to go and learn more, I think PCI is very good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nice to see a link to online courses. I've been studying Bishop's book in my spare time.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm curious what you guys use ML for

<comment><USER4> MATLAB

<comment><USER9> I was wondering more about like regression of customer data, creating recommendation engines, or something along those lines.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What kind of subjects do you (a HN user) expect? - <AUTHOR>

Can anyone tell me what this animal (hn) is all about? I don't get what audience is targeted. Sometimes I find the educational stuff very informative - other times I see hopeless BBC-kinda of news about a war, which usually adds no value to me personally.. I don't get why we at hn should deal with world politics. <comment><USER2> From <http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

      On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find
                interesting ... anything that gratifies
                one's intellectual curiosity.

That pretty much covers it. Stuff that you're complaining about either contains something that some hackers might find intellectually curious, or sinks without trace.

Consider some of the other stuff an opportunity to learn both about stuff outside your current direct interests and experience, and about your fellow readers/contributors at HN. I've encountered stuff I wouldn't normally find, and some of it has been interesting.

Take the opportunity.

</comment><comment><USER3> I like science and technology. Science and technology impacts society and therefore politics, politics impacts science and technology.

Stem cell research in the US for example is a clear example of politics affecting science, for that matter most drugs policies in the world are an example where politics ignores the science.

So I want to know about politics to see how it will interact with science and technology.

It would be nice to live in a little cocoon where we only saw things that we liked and all that messy RL stuff would just go away. But it wont go away, so I want to know about it.

</comment><comment><USER4> I think just like the rest of life, it is what you make of it.

If something sounds interesting to you, great. If it doesn't, it doesn't mean that one article is a flaming pile of shit, it just means it's not your cup of tea.

Vote up what you like, and show the community what you want to see more of. Seems pretty simple to me!

</comment><comment><USER5> All Erlang all the time.</comment>


GMailTeX/GmailChatTeX: LaTeX plugins for GMail and GChat - <AUTHOR> http://alexeev.org/gmailtex.html

<comment><AUTHOR> We grad students have been searching for this for ages, and I've found these plugins to be very robust so far. Here's a direct link to the GChat script: <http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/98930>

Points to remember:

# Chats must be popped-out

# You press F8 to render the TeX in emails, either composing or receiving

# "Auto-mode" means that TeX is rendered in real time as you compose.

</comment><comment><USER2> Could this be turned into a plugin for Google Docs as well? It'd be handy to have a cloud-based LaTeX tool, as an alternative to a local-machine install.

<comment><USER3> Maybe check: LaTeX Lab is an open source implementation of a web based LaTeX editor for Google Docs.

<http://code.google.com/p/latex-lab/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In case you were wondering, the receiver of the email needs to have this installed as well:

"GmailTeX does not modify any of your emails on the Google server, or the emails that you send out. It only changes the presentation in your browser. The recepients of your emails also need GmailTeX or other typesetting system to view the math."</comment>


GitHub Is Sinking - <AUTHOR> https://yarmo.eu/post/github-sinking <comment><USER2> I use and like github, but I can't help but be reminded of when Microsoft bought Hotmail and decided to switch it all to Windows-based servers...

</comment><comment><USER3> Seems like an advert for Gitea which isn't necessarily bad... didn't know there was an alternative to Github written in Go.

Is there a comprehensive list of Github alternatives out there?

<comment><USER4> IMO, in terms of features, the only practical alternative to Github is Gitlab.

<comment><USER3> Not that the stack behind the scenes should directly affect the overall quality of the product but I find it interesting that both GitHub and GitLab are build on Ruby/Rails -- is this a coincidence or is there something about Rails that makes this kind of project easier to write?</comment></comment></comment>


The "Talk" - <AUTHOR> https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-talk-3 <comment><USER2> So, I have a question. I found the 'article'... well comic, surprisingly easy to read and I think I learned something. However, my knowledge of quantum computing has mostly been based on articles that the comic was poking fun at. I've not had any formal education. So my question is, was this indeed a good educational comic, or does it just have a different set of problems from other articles on quantum computing?

<comment><USER3> I don't know what a bunch of words like "event" and "amplitude" (of... what?) mean in context, to the point that I was able to nod along but didn't actually understand any of it.

<comment><USER4> It's hard to answer your question without giving a course in QM, but this is a good place to share a pet peeve about this. For some deeply unfortunate reason, "amplitude" can refer to:

(1) The (complex) coefficient of a component of a state vector.

(2) If we treat that number c as re^(iθ), then _r_ is sometimes called c's "amplitude" (though it's more often called the "norm" or the "modulus").

(3) Some authors even use it to refer to θ ("The argument is sometimes also known as the phase or, more rarely and more confusingly, the amplitude" [1])

Luckily, in quantum mechanics, they almost always mean (1). That's the usage here.

[1] [http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ComplexArgument.html](http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ComplexArgument.html)

<comment><USER5> Wait, why do they call it amplitude when it's the rotational component? What is the reasoning to call this amplitude?

<comment><USER4> I don't know, because they hate us?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Apparently this was a collaboration with Scott Aaronson:

> Drawn with great humility and thanks to one of my favorite people. Scott did > all of the real work, and I threw in some dirty jokes. So, hey, a pretty > good deal all around.

<comment><USER7> Scott Aaronson is credited as the first author at the top of the comic. It's the first panel.

<comment><USER6> Sure, but that does not include the rest of the information of the comment I quoted

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For those unaware, there's an extra "hidden secret" panel of the comic if you click the Red Button below the comic. :)

<comment><USER9> Is that a dig at Randall Munroe? Went back to click, pleasantly amused.

<comment><USER10> I think they are friends. I seem to remember Munroe mentioning Weinersmith in something online a few years back.

<comment><USER11> I mean, he even drew a guest comic for XKCD: [https://xkcd.com/826/](https://xkcd.com/826/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Accidentally clicked on an ad on the site at the bottom, trying to close it. It sent me to one of those, sites that hijacks the vibrate of your phone, and a back button that does nothing.

If the creator of the comic is here -- please pick a more ethical ad provider.

<comment><USER13> That sounds like a failure of your web browser as much as anything. How on Earth is your phone vibrating without you granting a site notification permission? And recent versions of Chrome limit the degree to which history.pushState() can hijack your back button.

<comment><USER12> Um, what? Did you look into this before posting? Here's a link that lets you toggle vibration, with code examples......

[https://googlechrome.github.io/samples/vibration/](https://googlechrome.github.io/samples/vibration/)

<comment><USER13> No, I didn't know about that api. Thanks for the link. I stand by the statement that it's a browser failure, though, as IMO that should be restricted by a permission and/or user action, but it appears to require neither.

<comment><USER12> You might be right (though wrong on every specific point), but your comments are unhelpful, irrelevant, and distracting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This inspired me to submit [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21380480](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21380480) . It's a fairly short (34 page) introduction to QM from a mathematical POV, emphasizing QM as a generalization of classical probability.

</comment><comment><USER15> > "Quantum computing and consciousness are both weird and therefore > equivalent."

Throwing shade at Roger Penrose there... (I recognized it because that has always been my precise take on all his books.)

<comment><USER16> Hahaha yeah that was the icing in the cake. I 'm sorry but you hear that argument so often it 's worthy of making fun of.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> For anyone who's curious about what quantum computing actually is, I recommend Quantum Computing for the Very Curious [1]. Most articles online either get it wrong in the "free parallelism for everybody!" way that the comic warns about, or just scratches the surface and vaguely indicates that that's not what's going on (like the comic itself does). QCVC was what made me finally feel like I actually had a little foothold in QC land in the sense of slightly understanding what people do when they do quantum computing. It's pretty long but a pretty easy read.

[1] [https://quantum.country/qcvc](https://quantum.country/qcvc)

</comment><comment><USER18> I can't recommend SMBC enough. It's clever, insightful and just plain funny.

The Superman one always gets me: [https://www.smbc- comics.com/comic/2011-07-13](https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-07-13)

Do you have any favorites?

</comment><comment><USER19> (Note that this was posted December 14, 2016)

</comment><comment><USER20> Little known fact. Weinersmith. I went to high school with Kelly Smith who married Zach Weiner. They created Weinersmith.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm not ashamed to admit this was entirely new to me. I've been listening to the wrong people.

</comment><comment><USER22> So how do you formulate a useful problem such that a quantum computer will have the amplitudes interfere to create the answer? Can the low number of Q-bit computers available factor small integers, for instance?

<comment><USER23> That's a good question! And one we're still working on, though some books have been written.

This question describes about half the field of quantum computing, so it isn't something I can answer in a post this size.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I, just like the comic says, read a few of those blogs that say QC is like operations done in parallel and I really believed that.

Are there some good links out there for someone to understand the concept in a bit more depth.

</comment><comment><USER25> As a SE, what is a problem quantum computers would be ideal to solve over a more traditional computer (CPU/gpu/fpga/etc)?

Please challenge my current assumptions

      - Would not be Turing complete
      - More qubits are needed for practical applications
      - Practical application in cracking crypto

I know if I fully understood the how, I might be able to answer the above, but would love some expert opinions.

<comment><USER26> I'm not qualified to answer, but just wanted to let you know that I found this post hard to parse. The last point is a constraint and not an assumption, but the others are. The second point is not a property of a problem, but the others are. They also all have different moods. And I don't know what "SE" is in this context.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> What about entaglement?

<comment><USER28> Um... ask your father.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Is this the article the author mentions? [https://aeon.co/essays/materialism- alone-cannot-explain-the-...](https://aeon.co/essays/materialism-alone-cannot- explain-the-riddle-of-consciousness)

</comment><comment><USER30> I have been fascinated how once we figure out the relationship between quantum mechanics and relativity, we will be Gods. Is it just a matter of misinterpretation? Is there no spooky action at distance?

<comment><USER31> > once we figure out the relationship between quantum mechanics and > relativity, we will be Gods.

Huh?

<comment><USER32> I feel like the author of that comment looks at it kind of like the discovery of the electron: once we learn how to control it, we can achieve things that were never possible before.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This was surprisingly educational and incredibly approachable.

</comment><comment> kyle-rb Another recent SMBC was about the Elitzur Vaidman bomb tester, which I had never heard of before, and after staring at Wikipedia for a while, I have a somewhat better understanding of what quantum interference means, and sort of proved to myself that all this quantum stuff is actually real/has potential useful applications.

[https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/duuude](https://www.smbc- comics.com/comic/duuude)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elitzur%E2%80%93Vaidman_bomb_t...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elitzur%E2%80%93Vaidman_bomb_tester)

</comment><comment><USER34> How he managed to make quantum mechanics so ...titillating was quite a feat.

</comment><comment><USER35> Neat! This is like programming with monads

</comment><comment><USER36> I remember looking up stuff on quantum computing a few years back. At the time a lot of the YouTube videos were by maths professors, and they were all very good and didn't skip on the complex maths (although I got the gist, a lot went over my head, but I knew I could probably get it if I reviewed all my polar/complex notation and maths).

Some videos used some of the simulators that could simulate a few qbits. I remember that as you added qbits, the amount of ram you needed grew massively (exponentially?). Everything that could be done with a quantum machine could be done with a classical machine, it would just have larger space or time requirements.

I feel like this comic tries to get across a lot of the higher level concepts without using the stupid analogies used in a lot of pop science articles. It's not necessary for understanding the actual maths, but it does help with larger concepts. It's honestly something I'd expect from PhD comics. I stopped reading both SMBC and PhD a while back; need to catch up on my RSS feeds :)

</comment><comment><USER37> > Popular Scientism

Heh.

</comment><comment><USER38> Great comic! How I visualize this stuff is really simple, and so far it doesn't seem to be wrong...

Imagine 2 tennis balls floating in space, each spinning in some direction at some speed.

The quantum amplitude is the extent to which they are matched, or opposed, when you break down the inertia of each into vectors. In fact I'm pretty sure their measurements are very limited in the extent to which they can measure these things to infinite precision. (Duh)

Is this another case of obfuscation by academics? This is truly not complicated. It's even kinda fun. I think we all have a little fear of being mentally outgunned, and fear does what it's always done to creative thought. Dominated it.

<comment><USER39> I'm wondering what you mean by "doesn't seem to be wrong" \-- are you doing any calculations? I'm not able to follow exactly what you mean by the quantum amplitude coming from a pair of tennis balls.

My understanding of the spin of a particle is that it turns out, roughly speaking, your spinning tennis ball needs to keep track of a vector along the axis of rotation. This has something to do with the unit vectors in 2D Hilbert space having a correspondence to the group SU(2) (where remembering only the axis is the classical case of SO(3)). Somehow, if you were to take your quantum spinning tennis ball and, by some mechanism (magnetic fields?), slowly rotate its axis by 360 degrees, its spin becomes negative of what it originally was and it can destructively interfere with a tennis ball in the original state. Is this the sort of thing the pair of tennis balls is meant to deal with?

Something I really don't understand is how angular momentum is meant to work... I would have thought it's a Lie algebra thing, but SU(2) and SO(3) have isomorphic Lie algebras.

Disclosure: I don't know any quantum mechanics, just some math.

<comment><USER38> Very cool, I had not seen Lie algebras before. More fuel for the organic AI ;-). Your description sounds perfectly accurate; uberdelicate electromagnetic manipulation would be the first logical approach. ...Actually Gizmodo just did an article on "Sycamore" a few days ago! Great read. \- Perhaps after the microwave pulses they can get even higher resolution by shining very bright images on it.?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> That's just what I need, someone to lecture me patronizingly on a field like quantum computing which has absolutely zero practical utility at this point.

If I was going to become some kind of researcher in the field, this is still the last thing I would want. Since I'm not a quantum computing researcher, it doesn't matter to me.

Before someone in the thread happily starts on their own condescending lecture, yes, I DO know that IF quantum computing becomes useful that it will massively change computing.

<comment><USER41> Lots of folks take joy in understanding things.

Perhaps if you toss out your bowl of cornflakes and pour it again, that funny taste will go away.</comment></comment>


Jimmy Carter's Costly Patent Mistake - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303293604579252662325112076

<comment><USER2> The article might be a bit of interesting history, but the title is incredible bullshit. I understand that the US right loves kicking Jimmy Carter around, but framing it as if JC actually said, "Hey, I've got an idea," is ridiculous.

This is the same writer whose recent column on the NSA the EFF just called "misleading and error-filled": [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/wall- street-journal-co...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/wall-street- journal-columnist-gordon-crovitz-repeatedly-gets-his-facts-wrong-about)

The court he's referring to: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Court_of_Appeals_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Court_of_Appeals_for_the_Federal_Circuit)

That was created by an act passed April 2, 1982: [http://www.fjc.gov/history/home.nsf/page/landmark_22.html](http://www.fjc.gov/history/home.nsf/page/landmark_22.html)

Which means it was the 97th Congress: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/97th_United_States_Congress](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/97th_United_States_Congress)

So the Senate was Republican and the house was Democratic, with the bill being signed by Ronald Reagan, who also, I'm sure, appointed any new judges. But yeah, it's all Jimmy Carter's fault. Totally.

Lord knows what else the guy got wrong, so I'm stopping there.

</comment><comment><USER3> Argh, paywall.

<comment><USER4> Defeat the paywall:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=Jimmy+Carter%27s+Costly+Pate...](https://www.google.com/search?q=Jimmy+Carter%27s+Costly+Patent+Mistake)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to manage number of phone calls without seeming rude? - <AUTHOR> I've managed to get my email workload generally under control with a fair few techniques - mainly putting aside chunks of time to deal with it.
However, increasingly, I'm drowning in phone calls that are not productive and could have been dealt with in a one line email.
Unfortunately, many of these people are older (who seem not to worry about phoning people a lot) and are my more important clients & customers. I've tried muting my cell, but they'll just call our switchboard instead and ask to speak urgently to me.
In an ideal world I just want to change my voicemail to "Don't call me, email/sms/skype me" but I think it gives off the wrong impression. <comment><USER2> So you want people to e-mail you more, but don't want to seem brash by just saying so in your voicemail. Right idea!

I think the computer networking concepts of "quality of service" and "latency" are relevant: Train your callers that they'll get lower latency, and more reliable communication, by e-mailing you. A VM message like the following might do the trick, without seeming so hostile: "I'm often away from my phone, and it sometimes takes me 2-3 days to get back to voicemail. For faster service, please e-mail me at email@example.com. <BEEP>"

<comment><USER3> "Hi, Martinald! I really need to speak to you urgently! Please call me ASAP, this is very important!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Since you have a switchboard have them ask 'he's in a meeting can I take a message', have them email the message to you, then you can respond back to your staff and them and have them return the call. You could also setup a block of time the following morning to return calls but I think training an assistant to handle them would free up more time for you.

</comment><comment><USER5> Try this. Keep a log for one week of why they are calling. Then find a way for them to self serve the top 3 reasons for calling. Product info. Update your FAQ. Order status. Provide a web update or email update. Project Status. Provide a weekly update in advance.

Focus on making their lives more efficient and your efficiency will surely follow.

</comment><comment><USER6> _Unfortunately, many of these people are older (who seem not to worry about phoning people a lot) and are my more important clients & customers_

If it were me, I would assume that their motives for calling aren't as simple as "Need X thing that is business related". I would wonder if they need something like more sense of contact and I would try to arrange to call them before they called me. Them feeling like you are reaching out and can be gotten ahold of may cut back on this. People do things for all kinds of reasons that aren't "logical."

Sometimes, briefly touching base earlier rather than later is a time saver.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've been there. Here's what worked for me:

1\. Answer emails very quickly. (Within a few minutes)

2\. Return phone calls very slowly. (Never pick up, call back many hours later).

Eventually, any "rational actor" who is trying to reach you will email instead.

<comment><USER8> A client may just find another provider and still be a rational actor. There are contexts in which lack of responsiveness to phone calls is viable and contexts in which it is not. For example the caller calls the callee's boss when they cannot get service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Respond to phone calls with emails. This will move the conversation to your preferred channel.

That said, if your employer's business is based on providing clients with phone access, then that's what why they pay you.

</comment><comment><USER9> > many of these people are older (who seem not to worry about phoning people a > lot) and are my more important clients & customers.

Do you value the 'relationship' with your clients? Client Management may be the most critical, least appreciated parts of the job. They need to hear your voice. And in turn, you'll gain new insights into their world. Yes, factor the phone time into chunks during your day. Consider a mid-day window & end of business day window for calls.</comment>


How the elderly lose their rights - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/09/how-the-elderly-lose-their-rights <comment><USER2> The conversation on this one earlier this week was excellent:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15393270](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15393270)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hah! I missed that entirely. Thanks for the pointer.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Pleasingly, Parks has since been charged with literally hundreds of felonies: [https://www.reviewjournal.com/crime/grand-jury-indicts- nevad...](https://www.reviewjournal.com/crime/grand-jury-indicts-nevada- guardian-on-more-than-200-charges/)

<comment><USER3> That is very pleasing indeed, thanks for sharing!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You know, it's a real bad plan to pull a con that you can't stop from working on you. Someday, everybody lucky enough gets old...</comment>


Did Sophos Free A-V for Mac kill my Time Machine backups? - <AUTHOR> http://recoveringphysicist.com/17/did-sophos-free-a-v-for-mac-kill-my-time-machine-backups <comment><USER2> Hi, just thought I would leave a comment. I have a 17" Macbook Pro at my office and it backs up to a Time Capsule there. I read last week that Sophos had a new AV and figured, what the heck, it's free. I'm not really too worried about viruses because I'm pretty careful but I thought it wasn't a bad idea to be cautious. I installed it on my computer and then promptly forgot about it.

Over the next day I actually did notice that my backups seemed to be running a little slow but just put it off to a slow wireless connection. The next day I came into the office and noticed that my Time Capsule was blinking. I checked on my computer and it said that there wasn't enough room on the back up disk. I had a decent amount of space on it so I wondered why it wasn't fitting, when I checked I found out it was trying to do a complete backup instead of an incremental. The reason? My 14 month backup was now corrupted and inaccessible, that is why it was trying to do a brand new back up.

I'm really glad you wrote that article because I probably wouldn't have seen any connection. I just figured something happened to my Time Capsule but that was confusing because it has been working perfect for so long!

Thanks again, Jeff

</comment><comment><USER3> Jeff -- thanks for posting, yours is the only other case I've heard of. I let Sophos know. Yours is interesting because the data loss happened without any human involvement. Also interesting because you _may_ have a better chance of figuring out what happened: if you haven't uninstalled Sophos, there may be logs that shed some light. Also, your Time Capsule may contain more remaining clues than mine does. Would you please get in touch via my blog [ <http://recoveringphysicist.com> ]? Thanks.</comment>


Widely accepted mathematical results that were later shown to be wrong? - <AUTHOR> https://mathoverflow.net/questions/35468/widely-accepted-mathematical-results-that-were-later-shown-to-be-wrong <comment><USER2> I think most folk just don't see scientific theories in the right way. Any theory, even the most basic and self-evident one, should be be understood as "the best current explanation to a question" instead of the absolute truth. That's how we can keep moving forward and making better theories.

<comment><USER3> Mathematical results aren't the same as scientific theories.

Note also that the word "theory" isn't used in the question.

<comment><USER2> Yes, mathematicians go use proofs and logical deductions instead of experimentation. But the idea still holds, whatever conclusion they reach should be taken as the best current answer instead of absolute immutable god- given truth.

<comment><USER4> I'd be interested to know how much experience you have of advanced math.

<comment><USER2> If you think I'm wrong feel free to correct me, I'm quite willing to learn from different points of view. Badly veiled ad hominems on the other hand do not seem productive.

<comment><USER4> It's genuinely not intended to be an _ad hominem,_ because it's genuinely not an attack. I'm trying to place your comment in a context, because without a context I can't really make sense of it.

Quoting:

> _mathematicians go use proofs and logical deductions instead of > experimentation._

I don't understand this - what is the word "go" doing in there?

And mathematicians don't "use proofs and logical deductions instead of experimentation" because that implies there's a choice. There is no choice - if you want to say that in Euclidean Geometry, a right-angled triangle is always such that the square of the length of the hypotenuse is the sum of the squares of the lengths of the other two sides, that's not something that can ever be verified with experiments. Similarly, a prime of the form _4k+1_ for _k_ a non-negative integer is always the sum of two integer squares. You can verify small cases, but you can't know that it's always true based on experiments.

So there's no real choice. Even so, I think most mathematicians would wonder exactly what it is that you are saying - it's really not clear to me, for one. That's why I wanted to know the context, and how much experience you have of these things, so I can try to interpret what you've said, and work out what you might mean by it.

Context matters.

<comment><USER2> Instead of experimentation in contrast to the normal scientific method other fields use was comparison I was trying to make. I never implied choice or lack thereof. As far for the syntactical error I do apologies as English is not my first language and I sure that was the basis for your confusion.

<comment><USER4> > _... English is not my first language ..._

I am always in awe of anyone who engages in complex conversations in a language other than their first. In that I commend you.

You said:

> _Any theory, even the most basic and self-evident one, should be be > understood as "the best current explanation to a question" instead of the > absolute truth._

That's absolutely true in science. But as was pointed out, the linked article is not about science, it's about mathematics.

Editing lightly - please correct me if I'm mis-representing you:

> _... mathematicians use proofs and logical deductions instead of > experimentation._

Yes.

> _But the idea still holds, whatever conclusion they reach should be taken as > the best current answer instead of absolute immutable god-given truth._

I think nearly every mathematician would agree that (a) There is a lot of mathematics that is a human construction; (b) There are mistakes, although not many; (c) There is a fundamental difference in the nature of the uncertainty in mathematical proofs as compared with scientific theories; (d) Most of mathematics is not "God-Given Truth", but it is not just "the best current answer."

This is why I wanted to know how much experience you have of advanced mathematics, I wanted to know where you are in this spectrum.

And I'm still not really sure of what point you're trying to make. It's obvious that mathematical proofs are fundamentally different from scientific theories, so you must be saying something else, perhaps something deeper. I just don't know what it is.

Perhaps I never will.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why flying 'Internet drones' over Africa is a dumb, libertarian fantasy - <AUTHOR> http://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/digital-culture/why-flying-internet-drones-over-africa-is-a-dumb-libertarian-fantasy/article17371996/ <comment><USER2> Why can't it just be a "dumb" fantasy? Why does it have to be a dumb _libertarian_ fantasy? I don't see anything particularly libertarian about it. If anything, the existing infrastructure there is a vaguely libertarian thing, the product of their own self determination, and the Google-ish meddling is merely run of the mill capitalistic scheming.

A great article otherwise though.

<comment><USER3> Libertarian bashing seems to be fashionable lately. Which is funny because most people in power are not libertarians.

<comment><USER4> _Which is funny because most people in power are not libertarians_

I didn't know someone had to be in government before their ideology could be considered silly.

 _Libertarian bashing seems to be fashionable lately._

Of course it is. Many of the libertarian voices I hear these days are off the rails. Some, but not all, of my politics are libertarian but in the last few years I stopped saying as much because I don't want to get lumped in with the loons. There is a lot of untenable wishful utopian thinking seen as axiomatic going around these days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How is this nonsense even being upvoted here?

Who seriously thinks Google and Facebook bringing the Internet to the whole of Africa isn't a good thing for Africans? The only things I'd be worried about in this case is

1) Google/Facebook enabling mass surveillance of Africans, against Africans' will, but there would be nothing they can do about it except "stop using the Internet", in their case, since they wouldn't be able to control them (at least that's what the author is insinuating, too)

2) They serve a very restricted version of the 'Internet', where they heavily promote their own services

But in case 1) the majority of the African countries already decided to implement deep packet inspection at the ISP level at that last ITU meeting, and other such technologies to enable mass surveillance of Africas, and in case 2), I can't imagine they would do that, because their services would become a lot less useful, too.

As for stuff like providing competition to their local carriers - come on. Most ISP's and carriers can't cover the whole Africa and they won't do it anytime soon anyway in the traditional way. Either they do this sort of stuff themselves in the future, or others do it before them. One way or the other, it's much easier to bring Internet to the whole of Africa this way, from the sky.

<comment><USER6> Why do you not think it's likely that Facebook or Google would heavily promote their own services? That's exactly what AOL provided when you accessed the 'internet' through an AOL dialup account. If these projects are intended to be profitable, then they'll be heavily taking advantage of the captive audience that's using them.

<comment><USER7> >That's exactly what AOL provided when you accessed the 'internet' through an AOL dialup account.

And where is AOL now?

<comment><USER8> I understand your point but AOL still makes money off of dial-up subscriptions. According to this article they make the majority of their profit from their approximately 3 million dial-up subscribers.

[http://www.techspot.com/news/51589-aol-dial-up-users- account...](http://www.techspot.com/news/51589-aol-dial-up-users-account- for-70-of-profit-posts-first-gains-in-8-years.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > First: I don't trust people in Silicon Valley to tell me what's happening > elsewhere in California, let alone what's happening (or should be happening) > in Africa.

But the first paragraph mentions the ubiquity in Africa of California-born Whatsapp, which isn't even that popular in Silicon Valley and California?

Oh, and Android.

</comment><comment><USER10> When I think of libertarians, I think "people who want to spend their own money to bring Internet access to Africa." Yup.

<comment><USER11> ... with the stated intent of fostering freer markets outside of government regulation, and bringing these tools to people outside the scope of regulation, oversight, and tax burden. these points are what the article is about, if you actually had taken the time to read it.

and anyway, libertarians _do_ believe in charity, just not government-coerced charity.

<comment><USER12> You don't have to be libertarian to be sceptical of the benevolence of _African_ governments.

<comment><USER13> This blanket characterization of an entire continent's people and leadership strikes me as borderline racist.

Yes, there are corrupt governments in some African countries, and yes, there is a history of corruption in many of these countries. But to group all of Africa's governments together and judge them with such prejudice is hardly just.

<comment><USER12> Sorry, " _many_ African governments".

The African governments effective and non-corrupt enough to provide basic 21st century amenities like internet access are, practically by definition, not the African governments that we are talking about. What need do those countries have with drone-internet if they already have widespread uncensored internet access?

When we talk about drone internet for Africa, we are talking about drone internet for African countries that have _at best_ benevolent _but ineffective or resourceless_ governments.

As far as I can tell from wikipedia, there are only three African countries where significant internet access is present: Morocco, South Africa, and Egypt. Egypt however has a recent history of internet censorship/blackout and an uncertain future for internet censorship.

<comment><USER14> > _The African governments effective and non-corrupt enough to provide basic > 21st century amenities like internet access are, practically by definition, > not the African governments that we are talking about. What need do those > countries have with drone-internet if they already have widespread > uncensored internet access?_

You know, you can have a government that's not corruct and still don't have "basic 21st century amenities like internet access". Actually your own people might not even care about such "basic amenities".

Sometimes the corruption comes from people outside pushing such amenities down your throat.

<comment><USER12> > "at best benevolent but ineffective _or resourceless_ "

Really though, what is the point of routing your humanitarian efforts through an ineffective government? Unless the resourceless government is the target of your humanitarian aid _(as opposed to the people that the government claims as their own, but is unable to care for)_ , why bring a loser on to the team?

African governments are either corrupt, ineffective, resourceless, or have provided uncensored internet access to their population. If it is the later, then this sort of aid is not necessary. If it is any of the former, there is little reason to involve those governments unless absolutely necessary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If the drone technology succeeds, it will succeed as technology rather than as charity. Describing the projecting as bringing something to Africa is indeed dumb but this is a comment on the hype, not the project itself.

Just consider, wireless tech is inherently more efficient over time than wired tech for a huge variety of applications. Wireless phones are replacing wired phones in the Western world and given sufficient advances, it seems logical wireless will replace the Internet duopolies and monopolies in the Western world.

It seems just as logical for wireless transmission points to replace wired transmission points. Hence mobile, wireless drones seem a logical step. Africa is a logical place for this, not because of the great needs of the po' Africans but because the infrastructure is not fully developed, because transmission points are especially expensive there and because the market is fairly open.

We know that Google and Facebook are companies that make their money giving stuff to the consumer for free. So these companies offering drone-based Internet to Africa sounds like a logical business step - if/once the tech is ready and working well. And of course these companies us the litany of "we're hear to help the poor benighted Africans" but that's for the consumption of the Western public who can't imagine Africans as paying consumers.

Altogether, I'm by no means uncritical of the present unbridled advanced of every sort of tech but ordinary African cellphone providers are far, far back on my list of folks whose suffering I might cry over. Plus I'd expect that given an African demonstration, the drone tech would let a figurative Google drone army surround Comcast's Dark Tower and figuratively burn it to the ground using affordable rates.

</comment><comment><USER16> "In Ghana, well-resourced foreign providers came in, did the gritty work of building up infrastructure [...] and genuinely tried hard to win customers from other providers."

Basically: the free market provided Internet access, but libertarians are stupid.

<comment><USER11> those foreign providers provided a service with government regulation, oversight, and pay taxes. the proposed google and facebook solutions do none of those things.

<comment><USER17> How is this better for people than a company that just moves packets around?

I mean, government regulation and oversight are presumably means to an end, rather than goals in themselves, so tell me: in this case, what advantage do they offer? If we were talking about, say, emissions regulations for a factory, or worker safety regulations, or something like that, then I could see the case for it. But for this? Man, I just want my packets to go from one place to another.

<comment><USER18> Packet-moving still comes with a lot of potential issues and possibility for malfeasance, though. Just look at Net Neutrality. Or NSA surveillance.

<comment><USER19> "Net Neutrality" is still at this point essentially a hypothetical problem. It's people hyperventilating over how companies _might_ conceivably act, even though the companies have essentially no actual financial incentive to act that way (and to the extent that they do, it'd be pro-consumer to let them do it).

"NSA surveillance" is the sort of problem that comes from giving government _too much_ power and money; doing an end-run around governments probably _reduces_ the potential for invasion of privacy - it means you have one fewer actors trying to deliberately undermine reasonable security standards.

Any other candidates?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Hmmm, he's been to Ghana. Clearly he's an expert on the situation in Africa, because that country is _so_ typical.

<comment><USER18> How is it not? Certainly, one can't overgeneralize about such a huge continent. But it's neither South Africa, nor is it Somalia.

<comment><USER20> Much closer to the former than the latter, according to the Failed States Index Rankings:

[http://ffp.statesindex.org/rankings](http://ffp.statesindex.org/rankings)

On that list, Somalia is ranked 1, while Ghana and South Africa are 110 and 113 respectively. (For comparison, Finland is the champ at 178.) Certainly there are other ways to compare nations, and Ghana is not a perfect society. However, Ghana is exceptional among African nations, and it is a measure of the cluelessness of TFA that this fact isn't mentioned.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This article definitely makes some good points addressing the paternalist and potentially disconnected attitudes that foreign companies have towards Africa. But it doesn't bring up enough examples of local African companies, individuals, or initiatives that are pushing for their own solutions to Google's (and it seems, Facebook's) plans. He mentions CCHub, but that's about the only name.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm sure everyone in Africa who is suspicious of the west will be enraptured at the idea of permanently ceding rights to their sovereign airspace, having drones permanently circling over them, easily monitoring all their communications and maybe taking photographs too.

Everybody in Africa trusts us implicitly, and why shouldn't they?

<comment><USER17> You're aware of satellites, right?

<comment><USER14> You are aware they are way above national airspace that matters, right?

<comment><USER22> High-altitude balloons are above the airspace that matters -- the service ceiling of the country's surface-to-air missiles.

Seriously though, there's no recognized boundary for sovereign airspace:

[http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA436627](http://www.dtic.mil/cgi- bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA436627)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Spot on. The entire idea is bullshit. In the more prosperous its not an issue. e.g. MTN alone has 1000+ LTE towers here. And in the less prosperous area people care about having safe drinking water not Facebook.

Nobody is really speaking out against it though. If google wants to throw some balloons in the air let them - its their risk.

<comment><USER5> You say that, but I've seen it before in my own poor country - people would rather buy expensive smartphones than better food.

This technology _matters_ to people. The Internet _matters_ to people, more than you think. Because it's not just a technology, it's a way to _connect people_. That's why it _can_ be more important than safe drinking water or food to a lot of people. It's not just a matter of "gadget vs staying alive". There are other fundamental issues at stake here.

There is also research that shows that the more technologically advanced an area is, the richer it becomes - which means jobs, infrastructure, _and_ food and clean water for people. So don't dismiss it so easily.

Technology through phones and Internet is also helping people have more democratic states, which is also a pretty critical issue in Africa. People can talk to each other and inform themselves better. They can organize and protest. They can chase away the dictators this way. So who are you to say that clean water is definitely more important to them than technology?

<comment><USER24> Would you say communications infrastructure is the best way to help poor developing nations?

<comment><USER25> Seems reasonable, the more information people have the more they are able to leverage the resources that they have available.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> * What's this Freudian obsession with tax-avoiding libertarians?

* How exactly do you avoid paying taxes on something that's _free_?

<comment><USER17> I don't think that this, or Google's balloon project, are supposed to be free. Cheap, sure -- they have competitors on the ground. But for something like this to stay aloft, they'll need to charge enough money to at least have a plausible chance of recovering their operating expenses at some point.

<comment><USER22> The author claims they would be free at a couple points in the article.

On re-reading, that's precisely one of his complaints: providing a free service deprives governments of tax revenue.

        "Carriers, some of them foreign but some of them local,
        have been in many of these markets for years, providing
        for a fee services that companies such as Google and
        Facebook now want to provide for free. And they are big
        local employers (in Ghana, I was told Vodafone was the
        largest private employer), as well as taxpayers.

        [...] Essentially, these companies are trying to reap
        the reward of encouraging more people to use their
        services, such as WhatsApp, without doing the messy
        work that carriers and handset makers such as Nokia and
        Samsung do; that is, actually setting up businesses on
        the ground, paying taxes that help fund development and
        social services, employing and training that nation's
        citizens, not to mention building real relationships."

<comment><USER17> Then let me amend my statement: I have not heard any mention of this being free _from a credible source._ And yes, I've looked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm pretty sure the "Internet access" idea is just a pleasant cover story for whatever other aerospace/UAV research projects Google and Facebook want to invest in.

<comment><USER17> Don't be so sure. If this turns out to be a cost-competitive way to get internet access over the last mile (or last several miles) to customers, then there's some real money to be made.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Spreading mind numbing american media is libertarian?

<comment><USER17> Are you implying that increased internet access would somehow reduce the diversity of media people are exposed to? That has not been my experience.</comment></comment>


The New Rules of College Sex (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://www.phillymag.com/articles/the-new-rules-of-college-sex/?all=1

<comment><USER2> _TL;DR_ I give up -- so if Diane started out, as the article says, by "pre- gaming" i.e. drinking a few shots before the party, _and_ overtly initiating the sexual aspect of their interaction by grabbing Jack's crotch, why is it that _Jack_ is presumed to be the one who created a "hostile environment"?

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow, this is disgusting.

Make up a fictional scenario as the base against which to measure laws' efficacy?

The fact is, not raping someone is pretty easy. It's not difficult to gauge what someone is comfortable with and, if you can't gauge it, simply ask them. They'll actually appreciate it. If they don't, then you dodged a bullet.

<comment><USER4> In an ideal world this would be the case. In my experience, and that of many guys I know, it is not so clear.

I'll have to choose my words carefully. 'Not raping someone is pretty easy' in itself is correct. The rest of the paragraph, in my opinion, is simplifying the situation too much.

> It's not difficult to gauge what someone is comfortable with

Yes, it is. I am pretty good at reading body language. Better than most, I'd say. No worse, at least. And yet I and many of my friends have experienced a number of situations where a girl seemed 'comfortable' but later ended up expressing that she wasn't entirely. This seems to happen too often and with too many different types of people to be just an anomaly, in my view.

> and, if you can't gauge it, simply ask them.

That assumes that you have a suspicion and that there's no downside to that. It's really, _really_ awkward to constantly ask a girl if whatever you're engaged in 'is okay' if it all seems okay. Not only can it actively curb any positive sexual energy in the situation, it's a bit odd to have to do this to begin with.

> They'll actually appreciate it. If they don't, then you dodged a bullet.

I think every single one of my female friends has, in moments of unguarded conversation, expressed a dislike of a guy constantly asking 'approval', and a strong fantasy about a guy 'taking charge'.

Now, that said, a number of my friends (including myself) have 'dodged bullets' with girls who seemed completely up for sex, but after repeated inquiry 'weren't really that into it'. The bullet that we dodged was the girl feeling shit about it the next day (at the very least). None of us want to be the guy that makes a girl feel violated (or at least shit about what happened), but on the other hand we also want to engage in sex and are actively taught that girls like us to take initiative and charge. It's a difficult issue.

My optimal solution is just err on the side of caution, and, as you say, 'just ask', and ask all the time. I wish it wasn't necessary, but it seems that in the current sexual landscape there are still many more cases were a woman feels like she was pushed too far, compared to men (although I have actually had this experience). So in that sense I agree with your approach.

But it's not as simple as you make it out to be. Sexuality and male-female interaction rarely is.

<comment><USER3> I agree with everything that you're saying, but my concern is making these constant half-excuses and concluding it with "but yeah you do have to ask."

The beginning and end of the story is that if you're unsure, you have to ask. It may be a little awkward, it may not get her riled up/keep the momentum, but these arguments can be used against MOST responsible decision-making processes. "I don't want to stop at this yellow light because I'm so in the moment!" "I should double-check what that person ordered so I don't cook the wrong thing." Awkward-fuck-up-the-moment things are generally good ideas. In the case of sexual interaction, the stakes are far, far, far too high to make half-excuses.

I think that's also a huge misapplication of the "taking charge" fantasy which is, as you say, very common. Toeing the line between forced and forceful is something that requires trust. If you're uncertain about what you're doing, then you probably don't have the requisite trust built yet. Avoid it.

I agree with your conclusion and your arguments, but I'm very very hesitant to make any arguments or caveats that may weaken the case of caution for those kind of on the fence on the topic.

<comment><USER4> > I agree with your conclusion and your arguments, but I'm very very hesitant > to make any arguments or caveats that may weaken the case of caution for > those kind of on the fence on the topic.

Excellent point. I did not mean my post as a bunch excuses, but I do see that even if I don't, others might, and that this might be reason enough to avoid nuance.

What I forgot to mention though, is that everything I said pretty much exclusively applies to casual sex. Pointing out the complications in that scenario might prompt others to realize the risks involved (not even considering legal issues), and communicate more clearly.

I think too many people, especially college-age, forget that sex didn't just magically become 'casual'. We're in a strange period in time where many sexual 'rules' are upended, and the resulting confusion should not be treated too 'casually'. Many conversations I've had with both men _and_ women indicate that there are a lot of misconceptions, and that there can be a lot of pain involved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A great law hack, should I say?

<comment><USER6> More like a new low in the "fight abuse with abuse" society.</comment></comment>