How can you tell if someone is kind? Ask how rich they are - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/10/21/how-can-you-tell-if-someone-is-kind-ask-how-rich-they-are <comment><USER3> I've tried being generous (and still donate, probably more than all my coworkers together), and I still get pissed upon by leftists. Talk about empathy.

I live in France, my parents weren't even _that_ rich, but we strive to work hard. Being motivated by good marks at school makes you bullied because you're a krelboyne. At work, as soon as colleagues learn you've been to a private high school and top college (both of which cost <$100/month and have active policies for lower income families), people come up to you and explain all the reasons why students from good schools aren't so good at work ("They don't have the grit", they say, "They aren't street-smart" – Happened to me 4 days ago again). A lot of citizen in France think it's fine to be jealous to someone because he was good at school, comes from a good background or is Christian. It would be ok if there weren't actual discrimination from people who want to offset the supposedly "easy life" you've had: The boss who bullied me in plain sight of everyone also was the only boss who had a shorter degree than I had.

I've donated _thousands_ to charities. I've volunteered for immigrants, kids of immigrants, I've volunteered in detention centers, I've volunteered in free events aimed at lower-income families, and with a team we went to help an orphanage abroad. I've given more than a thousand hours of volunteering in 5 years, in parallel to my studies and work. I never expected a "thank you". But a little consideration and respect from the leftists would do. But my life is still considered like a result of sheer luck, not a result of my hard work.

The problem isn't the poor: They do need help. The problem is the leftists who give lessons. There's a non-stop _cliche_ that, since you're rich, you're an asshole. Even if you are generous and litteraly more generous than them, they won't stop the hate. This article is one of them, generalizing about "riches are assholes".

All in all, living in France, taxes are supposed to provide support for the poor. I'm tempted to leave it at that and stop donating, because I need to focus on my life now (no gf, no kids yet). But somehow I keep donating.

<comment><USER4> I have a somewhat similar background. When I was young (<18) I used to feel guilty from time to time. I mean there is no denying that I got a head start by being in a family that could support me in school, pressure me into getting an eduction, etc.

But after a while I started noticing a pattern. The people that are into shaming me are the ones that never do anything, never get involved into anything, all they do is attack others to feel better about their lack of results. Somebody who wants to change the world for the better sees an asset in me. I am smart, educated, have financial stability, I have resources to help others and it pays to have me working by their side.

So now in my middle age I laugh at these original sin proponents. White guilt, middle class guilt, born into money, cis, heterosexual, etc, just endless emotional bullshit by drama queens who never accomplished anything. I work and produce results. They just wanna tear down everything that makes them feel weak without having anything to replace it with. The freaking internet would stop without people like me and they would have no facebook and salon to bitch on.

<comment><USER5> The internet's infrastructure is a good example of relatively rich people doing good for everybody. Our digital world is built on tech developed largely for free by people rich enough to be able to afford this unpaid labour. Nobody ever thanks them, yet they go on because work, not complaint, is the only way to make an actual difference.

Keep laughing! It's the only weapon against malevolent idiocy.

<comment><USER6> > Our digital world is built on tech developed largely for free by people rich > enough to be able to afford this unpaid labour.

Citation needed. As far as I know most Internet infrastructure was developed by government funded or commercial entities.

<comment><USER7> I think OP meant Open Source software? I still don't agree with OP's sweeping statement

<comment><USER5> Yes, should have clarified, obviously hardware wasn't built for free. Regarding the sweepiness of my statement: I feel like digital freedom would be in a much, much deeper hole if it weren't for the loads of FOSS software running our servers. Sure, there are proprietary solutions, sure some dev time gets paid, but a lot of work is being and has been done only, afaict, to make the world a better place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> When you buy a BMW, you have an extra asshole installed.

/snark

But seriously, in my early 20s I did land surveying. I found that the richer the neighborhood, the nastier the neighbors were. I've had people be rude to me because they think "something is up" when we were simply trying to document how one neighbor can buy 6 inches from another to make a legal setback for a garage. And then I've had just random people offer me coffee on a chilly morning. I'll let you guess which was the upscale and which was the working class neighborhood.

<comment><USER9> There is also a big difference between old money and new money. And hard- earned money vs. inherited money.

My dad used to deliver furniture as a side job for a local upholstery shop. Most of the clients had money, but some were rude while others (esp. the "old hard earned money" types) were extremely friendly.

<comment><USER10> I am sure it doesn't help that plenty of people say ugly things like "eat the rich." Plenty of rich folks "have dozens of friends and the fun never ends -- that is, as long as they're buying." If you know all the people around you would not hesitate to sell you out and only have any so-called respect whatsoever because you have money and power, it isn't like _you_ are getting any empathy.

That shit cuts both ways.

<comment><USER11> My sense is the kind of people who say "eat the rich" actually are rich, they're just cash poor and pretending that's the same as real poor.

In my experience actually poor people want to be rich and would rather they not be eaten when that happens. It's the kids from privileged backgrounds with self-loathing and anger issues who embrace "black bloc" politics most warmly.

I am probably biased coming from mostly urban environments lately.

<comment><USER12> Seriously wtf. Black bloc is hated by yuppie liberals the most.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Americans gave nearly $1 billion more to the approximately 3,000 victims of > the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks than they gave to victims of the South > Asian tsunami three years later, even though the latter tragedy killed more > than a quarter of a million people

Does anyone else find this conclusion unfair? I am not trying to down play what happened in Asia but American's uniting for their country isn't able to be compared to American's supporting crisis in other parts of the world. I suspect their conclusion is true but suggesting American's give less because of how much they donated to 9/11 versus a storm on the other side of the world isn't a fair comparison.

<comment><USER14> Objectively, a tragedy that killed 83 times as many people is deserving of at least the _same_ funding as a local tragedy, I would hope.

That said, locality bias is a strong thing, and to some degree what makes us human. I don't find it to be critical, merely descriptive of the way people work.

<comment><USER15> It's not about locality but about identity.

An American in San Diego is much more likely to contribute funding to aid disaster victims in New York than in Tijuana (which is only 20 miles away, but across the border).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Talk about stereotyping! This headline is no better than "how can you tell if someone is a criminal? Look at their skin colour".

Correlations in large populations do not mean that every individual shares the identified characteristics. I find it absolutely shocking that a paper at the level of the Washington Post would publish such drivel.

<comment><USER6> Socioeconomic status is an important factor in how we behave. The argument here is that people with more money are less kind because having more money makes them less kind. Unless you're making a specific argument were someones skin color is the prime factor in making someone more criminal that statement isn't factually correct. So no, it's not the same thing, but your frequent rhetorical outrage is noted.

<comment><USER17> Rich people are also taller than poor people, on average, but how silly would it be to write "How can you tell if someone is tall? Ask how rich they are."

The research is about average differences in people's empathy correlated with their education and socioeconomic status.

The headline is talking about _judging individuals_ based on their socioeconomic status.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm not sure I believe any politically convenient social science anymore.

<comment><USER19> I'd wait for a bunch of other studies that back this up, or fail to.

The trouble is that there may be loads of studies that find the opposite, but they are more likely to be stuffed in a file drawer somewhere because they contradict what we'd like to believe is true.

<comment><USER20> Yeah, the media _always_ passes on opportunities to lionize the rich and powerful. /s

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I really wonder about the methods of this study.

In my area, in the fun, dirty and gritty part of the city is where there are dive bars, vape shops and crazy little variety stores and head shops, you have to have your head on a swivel when crossing the road to not be sideswiped by some rusted out Geo or Nissan with the tailpipe being held up by a coat hanger.

On the flip side, in our most affluent immediate suburb, people give you right of way constantly. Everyone stops for pedestrians, even if they had plenty of time to go anyway. I mean they are almost religious about it.

<comment><USER22> I don't know about driving offenses, but we can quantify other harmful behaviors. The poor are far more likely than the rich to deliberately do things that harm others - rob them, engage in violence, etc.

Economic motivation for crime is a possible confounder. But we can eliminate that confounder by examining crimes with no plausible economic motive: intimate partner violence, assaulting family members, rape. Poor people engage in these crimes at 4x the rates of others.

[http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/hpnvv0812.pdf](http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/hpnvv0812.pdf)

(Another interesting fact - contra Trump - is that poor Hispanics seem far less criminal than poor whites/blacks. This also contradicts popular left wing narratives - if poverty makes poor whites/blacks beat their wives via "stressors" or other mysterious phlogiston, why are Hispanics immune?)

<comment><USER23> I think you're conflating terms here.

The left wing narrative is closer to saying that growing up poor in a given country is likely to generate heavy stressors. And I think this is correct, because growing up poor in a country implies that your family is very low status, which is all sorts of bad from all sorts of sides.

The people immigrating to your country are probably not very low status in their country, as they had enough mobility to immigrate, OR growing up low- status in their country had different effects. I don't know enough about Hispanics to say much, but I think family structure and philosophy may be factors.

There's also a difference between having no money and having a potato yard and some goats and having no money. Poor Americans often literally have nothing - no money, no food, no parents, no education, no philosophy, etc. In other places, the amount of money you have doesn't correlate so obviously, so when you immigrate, a lot of stuff sticks around, even if it's invisible in the simplistic model of money=success, especially given that immigration itself often gives you an arbitrary pay cut that may take a while to compensate.

You can move to the US, and lose your certification to be a doctor because your degree doesn't count in the US, but that doesn't make everything leading up to you becoming a doctor magically evaporate.

<comment><USER22> Your idea that poor Americans "literally have nothing" is simply incorrect. Poor Americans have obesity-inducing quantities of food, good quality housing [1] and high quality free education (teachers actually show up!!!). You could be right about "no parents, no philosophy" \- I don't have data on this.

Is it the really the left wing position, that family structure (traditional family vs single mother) and philosophy (work hard, go to church vs feel envy of the neighbors) are the secrets to success? Having a bad work ethic and feeling envy towards those with more than you will likely cause bad behavior, and that bad behavior causes bad outcomes?

But a person with a good philosophy (e.g. your doctor who lost certification) will escape poverty that they are thrust into by chance?

I'd love to know what left wing sources you are reading. To me these claims sound like something George Bush or Mitt Romney would say, and then get crucified by the media for saying.

[1] This document provides information on virtually any specific aspect of housing you want to know, sliced by income level. E.g. # rooms/person, sagging roof, plumbing issues, washer/dryer/AC/kitchen, etc. [http://www.census.gov/prod/2008pubs/h150-07.pdf](http://www.census.gov/prod/2008pubs/h150-07.pdf)

<comment><USER24> It's more accurate to say obesity-inducing qualities of food, since decades of work has gone into optimizing that. It's kinda like if you can make all food function like a very salty glazed donut, you get obesity (especially when it's large quantities of very CHEAP very salty glazed donuts: and bear in mind we also drink our very salty glazed donuts)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Alternate theory: being less empathetic makes it more likely you'll get rich

<comment><USER26> I think that's true. Rich people are often jerks.

People are nicer to you if you're a jerk (I say this from my personal experience having being both a nice guy and a jerk).

No one respects nice people.

Nice people don't get promoted, they don't get funding, they just don't get invited places.

<comment><USER27> Can you please expand on this: _People are nicer to you if you 're a jerk_?

<comment><USER26> Rich people like jerks. It's about respect - Maybe related to our animal mentality. Being a jerk is an 'alpha' male/female trait.

As much as people try to pretend that they're rational human beings, the laws of nature are still running the show. Unfortunately, we haven't yet evolved enough to view 'intelligence' as an alpha trait when it comes to social hierarchy.

<comment><USER28> And never will. How would anyone be able to judge someone else's "intelligence"? The simplest thing might be by proxy, testing how knowledgeable someone is. But knowledge is highly diverse, and I'd have a hard time to judge someones knowledge about something where I am not an expert myself.

I've more than once witnessed people impress others with their deep "knowledge" about subjects where I was in a situation to discern that they were spouting superficially informed hogwash.

It's one of the central societal problems: How can I know who's expertise I can trust unless I have that expertise myself?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Empathy does not seem to be an involuntary ability like eyesight or smell. We smell regardless of the circumstances, but empathy can be keen or absent. Empathy for someone seems to come naturally to the extent that they can be helpful or loyal to us, and it requires discipline to extend our empathy to those who are useless or opposed to us.

It is interesting that the ability for someone to be a powerful force in our lives does not naturally elicit empathy for them. It suggests that we suppress empathy when we anticipate the need to act aggressively towards someone. Empathy for our enemies could be very valuable except that it might make us hesitate to hurt or kill them. We can see this in the U.S. elections right now, when both sides encourage us to believe that the motivations of the other side's voters are either inscrutable or malevolent.

<comment><USER30> Empathy isn't a sense, it's derivative from the senses and works by analogy with one's self. When what you sense from others seems similar to what you imagine others sense from you, by analogy you imagine that they have a similar inner life to you. The more difference from how you imagine that others would sense you, the more different you imagine their inner life to be from yours. When you see them to be similar to you, but more perfect in your opinion, you imagine that their inner life is more perfected than yours. If you see them as less contrived; less put together, you see their thought process as more honest, or more grounded than yours. If you see them as dirty or sloppy, you imagine their thoughts to be more perverse or more slipshod. If their movements or speech are slower than yours, you imagine them to be more stupid or more careful than you are.

It's the search for souls in other people, required to decide whether they feel pain in the same way that you do. You can never confirm that other people have souls and feel pain, it's a leap of faith that you have to make - <USER2> Hobbes would call a covenant - a unilateral agreement that you make with others without their participation in the hope that your good faith will lead them to reciprocate.

It's best if we just assume that everyone else is just like ourselves, and reserve our distrust for people that try to tell us otherwise.

<comment><USER22> Empathy is a catch-all phrase describing two separate concepts, and the psychological literature is careful to distinguish them:

Cognitive empathy is the ability to know what others are feeling. Affective empathy is when cognitive empathy causes you to have similar feelings to others.

 _It 's best if we just assume that everyone else is just like ourselves, and reserve our distrust for people that try to tell us otherwise._

No, this is the typical mind fallacy, where we assume our mind is typical. It'll fail you wildly if you leave your local culture.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> For an interesting contrast, see _Who Really Gives? Partisanship and Charitable Giving in the United States_ , by two political scientists at MIT [1]. The results there surprised me, for example, there is a positive correlation between the states that voted for Bush in 2004 and charitable giving.

Also from the conclusion "Although previous research indicates that conservatism is a reliable proxy for identifying potential donors or donor communities, our results suggest that organizations would be better off simply targeting wealthier donors, regardless of political beliefs."

[1] [https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1100...](https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1100129/who- gives.pdf)

<comment><USER32> As this paper and others describe, the difference is almost entirely attributable to giving to religious causes, most notably the local church. I'm not going to say it's not charity to give to a thing that's a charity, but if the cause is evangelizing Christianity, then that's not the same as giving some poor kid food and education. Of course, the whole thing is confounded by the fact that the guy evangelizing is often also providing food and education, but without knowing the percentages it's hard to see if the numbers still line up when you subtract that cost.

<comment><USER33> According to a well-researched article [1], in 2010 Catholic Chartities USA spent about 85% of it's $170 billion budget on health care and colleges.

Based on what I've seen in poorer countries, my personal take is they do provide high quality education and care without much overhead. The evangelising is mostly implicit and doesn't take many resources. More than anything, it provides a soft filter for who gets those services.

[1] [http://www.economist.com/node/21560536](http://www.economist.com/node/21560536)

<comment><USER32> Ah, and local churches (the majority of the difference between red/blue states) transfer donations to CC USA? If so, that's pretty damned good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This is hardly surprising.

The rich person: "What's $5 for a tip? It's nothing, so why bother."

The poor person: "$5? That's a lot, and I can afford it, so let me give it."

Basically rich people value money less, and it doesn't occur to them that giving small amounts can still help people. And obviously it's not the custom to give large amounts as a tip.

<comment><USER23> Rich people value money _more_ , and compared to them, depending on how rich they are, effectively _everyone_ needs it more. And they know if they start giving money away to everyone that needs it more they'll run out of it pretty quickly.

Poor people don't realize the predicament they're in and give away their money because they think someone needs it more, yet they're at a very high risk of becoming someone who cannot live independently and then needs to go find another source of charity to support them. This does not scale well. I understand why it happens but it's not something we should be raising to a level of sainthood.

The need for charity is a symptom of a dysfunctional social system and people falling through the cracks. There shouldn't be any mothers earning 19k in the first place. Giving them $5 doesn't fix anything, because you know there are a few million more of them and when you really want to change things it's really not enough and you need to attack it at the higher level.

<comment><USER28> How does that apply to tipping? You eating out at millions of places every week? Also, tipping is not charity, it is recognition of work well done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> The title of this piece seems misleading to me, and an example of how many people misunderstand statistics. I haven't seen any of the studies referred to, but I'm sure they don't establish a connection between wealth and empathy as strong as the one suggested. More likely, they show that rich people, on average, tend to have less empathy than less-rich people. But surely some very rich people have great empathy and some very poor people have very little empathy. And all combinations in between, even if, on average, greater wealth tends to correlate with less empathy.

The point above, I'm sure, is obvious to most people reading HN. But certainly not to everyone, especially people with poor understanding of statistics. So it bothers me that the title seems calculated to increase the likelihood of misunderstanding. Okay, rant over.

<comment><USER23> There seems to be a glaring problem in statistics in general that large scale statistics may completely hide small group effects. I.e., if there is something that really benefits from X for 5%, but doesn't benefit from X for 95%, statistics will make it look like it doesn't benefit anybody. Yet that 5% group may absolutely be relevant. This always sits in the back of my head when I read things like: "Children are not influenced by their parents but by their peers", or "twin study proves this".

But I haven't seen this discussed much or brought up, even though it sounds a lot like what you're saying. Is this relevant? Is there a name for this? Is there some reason as to why I shouldn't worry about this that I'm missing?

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> The whole concept of tipping is broken and needs to be done away with. The restaurant in the story should be charging the customers more than $11, so that it can pay its staff properly.

<comment><USER37> Not sure why you were downvoted, but some states allow paying wait staff less than minimum wage. What most needs to change is not allowing sub-minimum wage jobs subsidized by tips.

For people who live in California, FYI, wait staff is required to be paid minimum wage, which can not have tips counted against it.

<comment><USER38> No, "some states" do not allow for paying wait staff less than minimum wage after tips. The federal minimum wage in theory enforces this. It's rather misleading to point out that they might be making less than minimum wage without tips, especially when the average hourly wage after tips is well above the average minimum wage at $11.82.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> It's only natural to feel more empathy for people in situations we've been in, but this isn't the entirety of morality. I've never been a cow but I go out of my way to avoid causing suffering to cows and other animals.

Rich people haven't necessarily experienced much hardship, so they need to have a more abstract kind of empathy, but this doesn't make them worse people. Indeed, if a rich person felt that had done enough by paying taxes, I wouldn't blame them. From a utilitarian perspective, I would rather have another person who pays $100,000 in taxes and gives $0 to charity than someone who pays $20,000 in taxes and gives $1,000 to charity.

</comment><comment><USER23> I would be suspicious of the correlation was really so straight. There are a lot of complicated factors around why one might be nice or not nice and in my experience it hasn't been anywhere near this simple.

As an example, people who had hard lives often become hard themselves, and that may make their conduct worse. People in countries where things are not going well are not exactly super duper nice. People also tend to treat different people differently, so they may be nice to one group and not nice at all to another group. People may especially be not nice to a group if they perceive that group as a threat.

A lot of the definitions here seem rather tailored. Giving large tips is not really the information I'd use to determine whether or not someone was nice, especially since this gets layered on top of social signaling in a specific culture. Generally, things like giving money, donating to charity, etc., may be viewed as shallow level contributions by the rich and they'd rather do something they perceive as more significant, such as lobbying or starting a company.

Some of this reminds me a bit of accusing meat eaters of animal cruelty. Meat eaters didn't invent it, even if they're receptors of the end product. There are some meat eaters that promote animal cruelty directly, though, and there are also systems that promote it, and those should be the subject of scorn.

I'm sure there are empathy gaps because people don't share experiences. But a person is not evil if they simply don't support those less fortunate, or if they don't understand them. That's just an empathy gap, and people are generally quite bad at relating to experiences they don't have in general, in both directions. A person needs to actually be doing bad things to be classified as bad.

</comment><comment><USER40> really? all rich people are jerks?

Any article claiming all $x are (not nice|$y) will be marked as classist|sexist|racist.

Let's talk about double-standards.

</comment><comment><USER41> Breezing through life without life changing adversity gives little opportunity for self reflection and contemplation unless one happens to be interested in problems beyond one's own.

And if the thinking of 'us and them' takes hold whether in the rich, poor or other groupings there is always dehumanization, reductionism, blame and sociopathy.

Those in adversity or have faced adversity will identify with others and may need or have received the help of other people leading to some kind of mutual empathy.

</comment><comment><USER42> Does anyone have a two sentence summary? I am not a subscriber so I'm blocked from reading the story, and clicking the "web" link doesn't help.

<comment><USER3> The article provides ~12 examples of how rich people are less generous. It proxies "rich people" with parameters such as nicer neighbourhoods. It shows that proximity to the victims creates more empathy (e.g. 9\11 victims vs Tsunami victims, or experience being a waiter, etc) and gives it as a reason for the rich people being less empathetic towards poor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I think another aspect might play a role: when you're well-off, but not obscenely rich, you're probably risk-averse. You don't want to end up in the lower-class, dependent on other peoples' charity, so you're holding your money together.

When you're already within reach of that you're more likely top end up there, but the difference isn't as stark.

</comment><comment><USER10> AKA you don't _have to be_ a callous jackass to get rich and stay rich, but it probably helps.

</comment><comment><USER44> This video presents a study on the subject: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuqGrz- Y_Lc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuqGrz-Y_Lc)

</comment><comment><USER45> I think it goes both sides: the richest and the poorest neighborhoods are the nastier. They will segregate/bully who doesn't match their lifestyle.

<comment><USER46> I might anecdotally argue that the upper-middle 'near-rich' neighborhoods are 'nastier' than the more upper class 'rich' neighborhoods-- perhaps the 'almost rich' have more insecurity than the comfortably rich. Just an observation from personal experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> What is poor? What is rich?

Is being poor when you can only get one iPhone per children... but cannot replace one when it accidentally falls down and break after 6 months?

</comment><comment><USER27> I used to be a bartender and that makes me a good tipper I think knowing what they have to go through. Also I feel like giving back.

<comment><USER48> I'm Australian, and most Aussies will tell you that Australia is a no-tipping society.

But the waiters and bartenders I've known don't beleive this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Some of the examples made me wonder if only the most empathetic poor would agree to participate in a study.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> tl;dr Wealth has a measurable effect on empathy. Individual stories and exposure to lower-income people can still compel wealthy people to be more generous in spite of this effect.

</comment><comment><USER50> Has "Rich" become the new quasi-racial slur - with studies to show that the Rich are genetically stupid, greedy and now mean.

Does the story really not link to even one "Study"? If the studies exists, are they pier reviewed?

What happened to the Washington post? Didn't they report news at one point?

<comment><USER51> The article links to multiple studies, for example:

* Social Class, Contextualism, and Empathic Accuracy: [http://pss.sagepub.com/content/21/11/1716](http://pss.sagepub.com/content/21/11/1716)

* Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior: [http://www.pnas.org/content/109/11/4086.full](http://www.pnas.org/content/109/11/4086.full)

* The Psychological Consequences of Money: [http://science.sciencemag.org/content/314/5802/1154](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/314/5802/1154)

* Social status modulates neural activity in the mentalizing network: [https://keelyamuscatell.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/muscatel...](https://keelyamuscatell.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/muscatell_2012_neuroimage.pdf) (from NeuroImage)

* Noblesse Oblige? Social Status and Economic Inequality Maintenance among Politicians: [http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....](http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0085293)

* Having Less, Giving More: The Influence of Social Class on Prosocial Behavior: [http://www.krauslab.com/SESprosocialJPSP.2010.pdf](http://www.krauslab.com/SESprosocialJPSP.2010.pdf) (from J. Pers. Soc. Psych.)

* Class and Compassion: Socioeconomic Factors Predict Responses to Suffering: [https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4MZvkUMsuJ_dmtEZUxOaFJZaFU...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4MZvkUMsuJ_dmtEZUxOaFJZaFU/view?pref=2&pli=1) (from Emotion)

I omitted the study in the Chronicle of Philanthropy from this list because I couldn't find the actual data.</comment></comment>


CEO Joe Green fired at Zuckerberg's immigration lobbying effort - <AUTHOR> http://www.fwd.us/leadershipchange

<comment><USER2> There is no mention of Zuckerberg in the source?

<comment><AUTHOR> He's prominently identified in the press and in the organization's media efforts as the Founder: [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FWD.us](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FWD.us)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to factor DL training pipelines - <AUTHOR> I'm getting to a point where I'm implementing a lot of different DL models for my research (in PyTorch) and it's obvious to me there's a lot of boiler plate (creating the data loaders, forward pass, backward pass, val (.eval) pass, collecting statistics, saving checkpoints, etc. So like a good software engineer I try to factor these "pipelines" into reusable components (a train step, a val step, etc.). The problem is every single time I feel like I have a good factorization I find some quirky model or training trick edge case (e.g. need to do something with the optimizer at some point in the training process).
Any advice on either how to factor this or some framework that does it already for me? I've looked at fastai's callback model and initially tried to roll my own version but it ends being up being so brittle with very leaky function interfaces (passing boolean flags and branching on reflection and etc).
My kingdom for a monad! <comment><USER2> I suppose the reason why PyTorch doesn't implement this boiler plate for you is due to all of these quirky edge cases :)

I think Pytorch Lightning might be worth taking a look at: [https://github.com/williamFalcon/pytorch- lightning](https://github.com/williamFalcon/pytorch-lightning)

<comment><AUTHOR> well i wasn't expecting pytorch to implement (since pytorch is a graph compiler (or something like that) and therefore low-level) i was just wondering if there was something exactly like what you've linked to. so thanks!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Master a Language in 1 Month - <AUTHOR>

Can you master a language&framework in 1 month? (Rails,Django, etC). How? <comment><USER2> I've always done best by choosing a project that I'm naturally and personally interested in, and trying to implement it in that language. Bonus points if the project is something that takes advantage of what the language is best at, or what the culture focuses on.

For instance, I recently wanted to learn Clojure, so I chose a project that involved a lot of multi-threading related to a topic I'm very interested in. It's been about a week, and I feel very comfortable in the language.

In the past I've tried learning from books, etc... but when I need to apply the knowledge, I find myself referring back to what I read entirely too much. By having a specific project I'm trying to accomplish, my learning is directed. I'm learning solutions to problems that I already understand and appreciate. This way, you understand a lot more about the reasoning behind the language, and the way it should be applied. By just reading cold, you miss that entire aspect.

</comment><comment><USER3> Define "master."

Usually, you get your start by picking a project in a domain you're intimately familiar, read an introduction/tutorial, and start implementing.

A lot of this depends on how well you understand a language's or framework's reason for existence. If you know Ruby (or something similar) and have done a lot of web development in the past, you should be able to start 'getting' Rails fairly quickly.

<comment><USER4> By most employer's definition of "master" ... NO !

As for what you produce in that first month, you'll throw it all away before the year is out. If you can avoid it, don't try to learn a new language and develop a new product with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Agreed that if your goal is not mastery you can actually learn the basics of a language and become semi-productive in a month. Anything more requires exceptional skill, or more likely much more time.

Checkout the book "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell asserts (not originally) that it takes 10,000 hours to master a subject.

See: [http://robertoyudice.com/thoughts/10000-hours-to-master- prog...](http://robertoyudice.com/thoughts/10000-hours-to-master-programming/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Judging by your question, I am assuming you're planning on mastering one of the above said frameworks. If that's the case, the answer is yes (i.e. you're going to put in a non-trivial amount of time AND effort).

Here's how I did it the last time I tried something similar: 1) Grab a decent book with plenty of sample code that builds towards a working product. This way, you get to see the moving parts and the theory. For Rails, Hartl's railstutorial.org is excellent - you build a twitter clone. Their much older book RailsSpace is pretty good too. While you're at it, checkout tryruby.org.

2) After doing 1 above, now pick a project and get building quick. Use the sample code from above and tear it apart.

3) 1 and 2 works really well if you do it with someone who is already either proficient or interested enough in going through the exercise with you.

0) Well, 1-3 would go a lot smoother if you already know another language or two, some decent background with data structures. Of course, that's not necessary, but useful nonetheless.

4) Regardless of what happens, keep plowing ahead. You will hit random errors or whatever. Keep with your schedule - "Finish chapter 4-6 today or whatever" and soon enough you can definitely finish the book in a week or two. Then the following two weeks is where you will learn the most with your own project!

42) You definitely will know enough to do something non-trivial, but again mastery depends on your case. As a friend of mine says, "anyone can learn to spit out a few words together, but writing an elegant sentence (or solution) is not that easy always... same with programming"

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER7> Flipping the question upside down: Anything you can master in a month is almost by definition trivial.

</comment><comment><USER8> In my experience, the line between "mastering" a language/framework and "becoming competent in" it isn't very distinct. Once you grok the way the syntax works, the rest is all learning library functions and new methods for things (often idioms); that happens over a long period of time no matter what.

Once I learned to program my first language, though, I could pretty reliably reach that point not long after it, unless I'm moving into a language of a completely unfamiliar paradigm (e.g. Java to Scheme).

</comment><comment><USER9> Master? No. Get moderately competent? Yes

<comment><USER4> Even becoming competent depends on the level of prior experience and knowledge. First time programmers ... not likely!</comment></comment>


A more modern Gmail app for Android - <AUTHOR> http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2014/11/a-more-modern-gmail-app-for-android.html

<comment><USER2> Very clean. A lot more stuff is "sized" consistently compared to the current Gmail on Android, which makes it look a lot more professional to me. If your interface is clean enough, you shouldn't have to break things up by changing the spacing/sizing/capital-case of the elements, like the current app does. This is a nice iteration.

I'm happy about these recent app developments but all I really want for Christmas is a marginally newer Google Finance. It's been like ten years. The webapp still uses _Flash._

<comment><USER3> I'm getting a little nervous that Google's apps are moving away from compact data presentation.

For me, the poor use of screen real estate was the showstopper for Inbox.

I realize I may have different tastes in which case I think the "Display Density" is an OK compromise (despite that the default is all that usually really matters).

<comment><USER4> Meanwhile K9 is still the best mail client on Android, works fine with any IMAP mail host.

<comment><USER5> K9's interface is still awful.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, as far as I've managed to figure out, there are no good mail clients for Android, but k9 is the least bad.

<comment><USER7> I've found the one that works best for random IMAP e-mail account is CloudMagic.

<comment><USER6> Looks like they touch upon a few of the same interface ideas as I've been playing with (including using a smarter client-server protocol than IMAP) - but as I want to host my own mail, they're out (I can't host the cloud part on my own server(s)/cloud).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's nice. I just hope the email monetization features -- Social, Promos, Purchase Intent, Ads, Buy Stuff Now -- aren't as prominent as in Inbox.

Of course, they used to let us disable them (in the desktop site). Now they're a key feature. That's progress, I guess.

<comment><USER9> _Of course, they used to let us disable them (in the desktop site). Now they 're a key feature. That's progress, I guess._

They are not mandatory in the new Gmail app. I have been using a build of 5.0 for the last few days, and it provides a normal inbox as all previous versions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I recently moved away from Gmail because of the lack of push (via EAS) on non- Android devices. When Apple (iCloud) and MS (Outlook.com) offer push via EAS it annoys me Google killed it off unless you pay.

Interestingly moving away from Gmail took me totally out of the Google world. I just switched to an iPhone from a Nexus 5 as the Nexus 6 was just too big and I have very happy using no Google account/services (outside of search).

I wanted to try Inbox and got an invite on day 1 but have not bothered to try it yet as it would mean using Gmail again.

Google bring back free EAS please!

Also it always annoyed me how on Android they have two email apps, one for Gmail and one for other Email. Crappy experience really. The Gmail app should support other providers. I know it is coming soon but it should have from day one to be honest.

<comment><USER11> Doesn't the Gmail app on iOS use a push-system for delivery? Why would you _want_ to use EAS for Gmail? Seems reasonably (and positively Apple-like) for Google to push people into the Gmail app where they control the experience and can surface first-party Gmail paradigms more readily.

Admittedly I'm an Android user with limit experience with stock iOS mail app. Is the iOS mail app really that much better than the Gmail app?

<comment><USER12> Gmail.app for iOS is incredibly sluggish (on my 5S) while Android's version on my Moto G is pretty snappy, so you're not experiencing the same thing at all.

I run both Mail.app and Gmail.app on my iPhone because I'll often get the push notification for Gmail.app, tap the notification to open the email, get frustrated and tired waiting for it to load and just go manually refresh Mail.app and see it almost instantly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't understand why Google is pushing two different email clients as the 'main' email clients for users of its phones.

<comment><USER14> I would have totally jumped to Inbox but it seems there is no way to mark an email as 'read' without having to actually open it. It's kind of flabbergasting and seems very limiting to me.

It definitely feels like a bit push for 'lock in' (not that gmail really needs that...).

If I am wrong, someone please tell me how to do so from a list view.

<comment><USER15> Also, from what I hear (I'm not allowed to use it yet), Inbox doesn't let you use labels like labels (multiple labels per message etc), but tries to enforce a "folder-like" view...

[A horrible mistake if it's true... Labels are a significant advantage of gmail over many other email clients.]

<comment><USER16> Can't an email be in multiple clusters?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If I use the IMAP feature, do all my non-gmail emails get sent to Google?

<comment><USER18> I was worried about this as well, and there seems to be no clear answer anywhere about this, but it appears not to work like the POP/IMAP fetching in Gmail.

When I added my non-Gmail account to the app, I only saw traffic direct to the IMAP server, and nothing to Google servers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> They seem to have accidentally taken the soundtrack from a guitar lesson and dropped it onto their Gmail video.

<comment><USER20> That video was extremely painful to watch because of the music.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> It looks good but with the beta availability of InBox, I am not sure if I will even try the new Gmail UI.

InBox is very nice, BTW. The web client is OK on my laptop, the iPad InBox app is nice to use, and for me the Android InBox app is such a hugely better experience than Gmail.

</comment><comment><USER22> Can you turn off conversation view yet?

Conversation view is the single worst software feature ever developed for any piece of software ever made.

Boy I wish I could turn it off in the android gmail client.

<comment><USER23> What do you not like about conversation view? As someone that's spent most of his email life with it, I'm kinda curious of the other side.

<comment><USER24> I wasn't the person that made the claim - but since I feel the same way (well, maybe not quite as strongly!)... I find I often lose track of earlier messages in a thread that I haven't yet responded to, because I reply to some other message from someone else who replied later. I also find that other people make the same mistake and as a result fail to reply to my emails to them sometimes.

I find emails much easier to deal with when the actual emails are in the list, rather than the conversations - although when displaying the message there's no reason not to show it in the context of the conversation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> So many horizontal bars. I wish that the top two bars could be unified and shortened.

The bottom bar for only three androids buttons is a huge waste, but they've painted themselves in a corner, there.

</comment><comment><USER26> I hope you will finally be able to include images in a mail (like in the desktop webapp) not just as an attached file, or maybe I just never found how to do it in the current client ?

<comment><USER26> self reply after getting the update : nope.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Can anyone confirm or deny that this new Gmail supports media queries / displays mobile emails?

</comment><comment><USER28> How can I get it? On the playstore it doesn't let me update it. Is it only for newer devices?

<comment><USER18> Like most Google apps, it's a staged rollout so you won't see it yet. It runs on at least Android 4.0+.

You can download and install the latest version from here if you don't want to wait: [http://www.apkmirror.com/apk/google- inc/gmail/gmail-5-0-1556...](http://www.apkmirror.com/apk/google- inc/gmail/gmail-5-0-1556543-apk/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Will I be able to turn conversation threading off?

</comment><comment><USER30> Meh, come back to me when you have some decent support for security. Like an easy PGP implementation

</comment><comment><USER31> why is there two apps gmail and inbox for email both developed by google?

<comment><USER32> > why is there two apps gmail and inbox for email both developed by google?

Because one of the whole points of having service-based software is that you can present different UIs on top of it for different audiences with the same backend, and this is a realization of that ability.

Because Inbox is a fairly radical change with a strongly-opinionated workflow, while Gmail is -- while still advancing -- a relatively conservative, traditional email client. Having separate apps means people who are happy with the basic Gmail app and fairly conservative (in terms of workflow) improvements it gets are free to stick with it and not abandoned, while those who have (the frequently cited) problems with classic email that Inbox is designed to address can move to it and not be held back by the traditional design of email clients.

<comment><USER31> sounds reasonable, btw remind me of wave. Having used both, I fell back onto gmail, as I still like the ordering of each individual email displayed in front of me, instead of encapsulating them into categorizes which I need to expand one by one to find the ones I am interested in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Looks like firefox-os email app on firefox phone</comment>


Yep, paid apps are dead - <AUTHOR> http://tapity.com/yep-paid-apps-are-dead/

<comment><USER2> I'd like to see a comparison of free downloads numbers over the same timeframe. Are apps as a whole being downloaded less, as people get bored of the novelty? or are free apps remaining to be downloaded as regularly?

The reason I ask is I've been surprised how many mobile websites have popups suggesting I pin them to my homepage, where before they would have said "download me in the app store".

<comment><USER3> If you pin a website to the homepage you avoid paying 30% to apple/google on any purchase. I wonder how the numbers are backing out though.</comment></comment>


It sucks to be female - <AUTHOR> http://inkpixelspaper.tumblr.com/post/42362892314

<comment><USER3> I really think the author really draws the wrong message out of this. It sucks that, because there is really no objective way to determine "merit", your position in the social graph can be more important than your talents in terms of your career. Meaning a person with some amount of social power can affect your career negatively just because they don't like you. That applies to both men and women, and it happens an awful lot to both.

Anyway, there are quite a few advantages to being a woman in Western society. If she really hated this guy, she could have just married him and then took half his stuff.

<comment><USER4> > Meaning a person with some amount of social power can affect your career > negatively just because they don't like you.

Right, but it should be based on something a little more tangible than a Twitter picture and denying sex after creepy DMs and fake client calls. This is the type of behavior that should be called out. I'm as on the fence as anyone else about naming names in these situations (because even if it is true, the fame of the accused could backfire on the victim), but this one seems pretty cut-and-dry. I personally don't know, based on her descriptions of him, who he is, but if these allegations are true and other women can come forward with similar stories, something should be said.

> If she really hated this guy, she could have just married him and then took > half his stuff.

Oh for crying out loud; damned if you do, damned if you don't. He was married and lying to her and other women about it while going around conferences sleazing on them and then badmouthing them in front of his equally celebrity- status peers when they turned him down. If this was a story about a girl who was pressured to be with someone for all the wrong reasons, I can only imagine what the comments here would be like.

<comment><USER3> I'm not defending the guy at all. My point is that this general scenario -- upset some person with a certain amount of power, who then makes your life miserable -- happens quite frequently to men as well. The title of the post is that "it sucks to be female" and I don't agree that follows from the post.

The marriage comment was mostly a joke, but it does illustrate the point that Western women enjoy a lot of "priviledge" themselves. It shouldn't need to be said, but I'll add that this doesn't make sexual harassment acceptable.

<comment><USER4> I'd be interested in seeing this list of privileges.

<comment><USER3> For starters, women live about 6 years longer than men [0], and currently make up about 67% of college graduates [1] , which is partly due to affirmative action.

I can't find a great link, but I believe it's been projected that women are or will own a greater than 50% of total wealth in the Western world in the next decade or so.

Divorce court isn't too friendly to men either.

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expec...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy)

[1] <http://www.womenmovingmillions.org/how-we-do-it/facts/>

<comment><USER4> I questioned responding to this at all because privilege is a social aspect, not a biological one. An extra six years of life isn't exactly a benefit because those extra six years aren't added to my childhood or adulthood, but at the end of my life when I'm waning. But if we're going to talk about biology, we can talk about the wonderful stuff most women have the pleasure of dealing with on a monthly basis for the majority of their lives, we can talk about childbirth and the expectation of what constitutes 'a woman' (which is really a mix of both of these things) and we can talk about how it's more likely a girl will be judged/ridiculed based on her appearance.

Your second link also says that more women graduate high school than their male counterparts, and that 70% of college Valedictorians are women. Does that have anything to do with affirmative action, which was put in place to create equality to begin with?

It's _projected_ we're going to own greater than 50% of the total wealth in the West for the first time in history? Fantastic, because we're greater than 50% of the population. I don't get this point at all.

You're reaching for statistics here, and I'm not even going to touch the divorce thing. I'll leave that for Reddit and Men's Rights, plus I'm biased because my father abandoned our family and three of my best friends growing up were equally raised by single mothers.

<comment><USER3> So would you agree that the current achievement gap between women and men in school is a social/cultural bias or privilege? Or would you argue instead that women are just smarter?

Sorry to hear about your father.

<comment><USER4> I don't want to make the statement that women are smarter as it may be more related to what each gender accomplishes with their education. Men are physically more capable at labor-intensive roles that don't necessarily need the type of education currently provided in K-12 outside of vocational schools and shop classes. That doesn't mean they're not smart, it just means they may know what they want out of life and know what it takes to do it (i.e. taking over his father's business).

I'd love to see our education system provide both academic- and career- oriented pathways that bring back apprenticeships. While I think women would still take more academic courses than their male counterparts, I believe it would really help alleviate gender-based assumptions about intelligence and capabilities.

<comment><USER3> We can agree to disagree. If you're going to put forward the view above though, you can't really complain if someone were to argue that the lack of women in tech is more due to their own interests and aptitude than it is widespread sexism and "male privilege".

I'm not arguing this subject, except to say that I don't think the OP makes a good argument that "it sucks to be female" in this industry.

<comment><USER4> Interests and aptitudes are relative to pre-determined ideas of capability and who is already in those fields, who we imagine when we think about those roles and who is therefore inspired the most by them. Women had no issue pulling their weight in manufacturing and computer engineering when we needed them to during times of crisis. Blog post after blog post show and surprise readers with images of women working on airplanes and doing technical work in factories. Somehow, even today, the idea of women not only taking these jobs, but doing so in mass numbers and enjoying the work impresses people.

I think the fact that we're having these conversations at all - <USER2> consistently so - signals that it can "suck to be a female in this industry".

<comment><USER3> To be honest, I think anyone who believes 67% of college graduates should or at least will naturally be women, will be having these conversations consistently anyway, regardless of the merit of the argument.

But I agree with your last point, in that it CAN suck to be anyone in any industry. So there's a point of agreement. :) And I'm finished with this thread.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> To the author:

 _clap_ clap*

Beautiful. It's a shame great stuff like this falls through the cracks on HN.

I really do not know what to say, except that your story was very inspiring and I wish you the best with the future. I'm sorry about your losses, and I hope you continue doing what you love and put the past behind you. The world is a better place because of your achievements.

-kunai</comment>


Turbo, an Improved Rainbow Colormap for Visualization - <AUTHOR> https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/08/turbo-improved-rainbow-colormap-for.html <comment><USER3> While arguments in the blogpost are mostly compelling (perhaps the most important to me is Jet/Turbo being far more high-contrast in the "colder" regions), I see Inferno as vastly superior still, mostly for the same reasons it was superior to Jet. All these colormaps are intended to represent one- dimensional gradient, as in "from hot to cold" and it is completely obvious when looking at Inferno. Jet & Turbo give a false impression of non-one- dimensionality. It _might_ be a matter of being used to the colormap in question, but Jet is as old and common as it gets, and it still is not self- evident to me that the dark red is hotter than the very light yellow. I mean, obviously I _know_ that, but I will tell you instantly without thinking what is the hottest and coldest regions on Inferno image, and I am significantly more likely to make a mistake when I'm tired with the Jet (and, presumably Turbo — for the same reasons).

<comment><USER4> I have to disagree.

If you want to represent a one-dimensional gradient where what is most important is "hot vs cold", i.e. the extremes, then you shouldn't be using a colormap (rainbow) in the first place, you should be using a direct gradient instead, whether grayscale or interpolated between two nearby colors (e.g. red/yellow).

Colormaps are for where highlighting _local variation_ is important -- more important than indicating whether something is closer to one extreme or another. In the examples, this means being able to distinguish the patterns of the objects. In math plots, it means helping to see the shapes of curves. In weather maps, that means judging variation within your state, even while the map ranges from Alaska to Florida.

For this, it's most important to be able to maximize contrast in local differences but also have the perceptual rate of change be roughly comparable.

Rainbows maximize contrast using hue, because our eyes can simply distinguish so much more than with just brightness. Turbo makes the rate of change more constant than Jet. And Jet/Turbo most importantly _double_ the resolution that Inferno has, going from dark-bright-dark rather than just dark-bright.

<comment><USER5> One point to keep in mind is when you have maxima and minima next to each other then Jet/Turbo is not the colormap you want, since it's very hard to distinguish dark blue and dark red.

<comment><USER6> That's a very good point, and the converse as well: Jet/Turbo is good when maxima and minima are nonadjacent, such as in continuous functions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you have any interest in this topic, I'd strongly recommend watching this presentation at SciPy 2015 where Viridis and Inferno were first presented, when the developers of Matplotlib were coming up with a new default colormap to replace Jet:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAoljeRJ3lU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAoljeRJ3lU)

I'd love to see Turbo analyzed in the same fashion.

<comment><USER8> The lightness plots midway through Google's blog post are made with CIECAM02-UCS, which is the same color space Matplotlib's video talked about using.

It looks like Turbo is just Jet, but plotted in CIECAM02-UCS (instead of Jet's HSV). It removes many disadvantages of Jet, while keeping Jet's advantage over Viridis/Inferno of making it easier to compare/contrast small differences.

The video and the blog post actually go over a lot of the same topics, like perceptual lightness and how Jet was found to lead to mistakes reading medical imaging.

I'm not sure what analysis you're looking for; the video's a good explanation of color theory, but its analysis of Viridis is mainly just "we plotted a line through CIECAM02-UCS color space and made it linear lightness". Turbo is the same, except the line is curvier and not linear lightness – and the blog post goes through the tradeoffs of that approach.

<comment><USER9> > _making it easier to compare /contrast small differences_

Unless they happen to be near the middle of the data range, at which point it becomes much harder to compare them. This makes an artificial (not from the data) visual artifact for the entire middle part of the data range.

Also visual contrast for data at one part of the data range is no longer remotely comparable to visual contrast for other parts of the data range. Finally, amount of perceived contrast is no longer proportional to differences in the data.

* * *

The specific comparisons done are misleading: they picked a test image with important low-contrast detail at one end of the data range and no important low-contrast detail near the middle of the data range, because they are promoting their color map which has very dramatic lightness contrast at the ends of the data range at the expense of almost no lightness contrast near the middle of the data range.

If you were expecting to be working with data like this frequently there are many other things you could do to improve contrast in the part of the data you are specifically interested in.

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure which test image you're talking about. This one seems to have low-contrast detail everywhere in the data range:

[https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-H-1I69V29VM/XVWeDrO7EPI/AAAAAAAAE...](https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-H-1I69V29VM/XVWeDrO7EPI/AAAAAAAAEdI/rc4kcJYaiNkTgazt-P1tJ7xCgeXBTuNFgCLcBGAs/s1600/image31.png)

[https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-6zVTINtwP60/XVWeKMWavuI/AAAAAAAAE...](https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-6zVTINtwP60/XVWeKMWavuI/AAAAAAAAEdM/VYew83Y03bI37wZDCXmqYaduNbLWAbSawCLcBGAs/s1600/image22.png)

While it's true that Turbo/Jet have low lightness contrast in the middle range, it makes up for it with hue contrast.

While there are of course ways to improve contrast in specific parts of a data range, I like Turbo for having high contrast in general, to make it less necessary to "zoom in" on a specific range, and also to have even higher contrast after zooming in.

<comment><USER9> Hue contrast is not very salient to the human visual system. But while we're at it there's also not very much hue contrast in the middle of this color scheme. It goes from light bluish green to light yellowish green.

Yes that cherry-picked image. Their original data is some kind of (log- scaled?) distance map, where half (?) of the image is in the bottom 20% of the data range.

They put a bunch of apparently important data between values of like 0.00 and 0.05, but don't have any substantial amount of important data between 0.45 and 0.55.

Their color scheme has very strong lightness contrast in the 0.0 to 0.05 range, and almost no lightness contrast in the 0.45 to 0.55 range.

If they had instead put a bunch of important low-contrast detail in the mid range, it would become nearly invisible compared to the old scheme.

If you really care about the data from 0.0 to 0.05, and don't really care about the data from 0.45 to 0.55 you can apply some function (e.g. a power function, or inverse smoothstep or something) to your data beforehand.

<comment><USER8> Don't have any substantial amount of important data between 0.45 and 0.55? The biggest tree is in that range! How is that not low-contrast detail in the mid- range?

[https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-H-1I69V29VM/XVWeDrO7EPI/AAAAAAAAE...](https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-H-1I69V29VM/XVWeDrO7EPI/AAAAAAAAEdI/rc4kcJYaiNkTgazt-P1tJ7xCgeXBTuNFgCLcBGAs/s1600/image31.png)

[https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-6zVTINtwP60/XVWeKMWavuI/AAAAAAAAE...](https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-6zVTINtwP60/XVWeKMWavuI/AAAAAAAAEdM/VYew83Y03bI37wZDCXmqYaduNbLWAbSawCLcBGAs/s1600/image22.png)

Look at the images again. 0.45 to 0.55 is green. Do the leaves on the front of the closest tree actually look harder to distinguish in Turbo than in Inferno?

It doesn't matter which function you apply to your data beforehand, it won't change that Turbo has more distinguishable steps than Viridis/Inferno. Turbo goes red-yellow-green-blue-black, Viridis goes yellow-green-black. Of course Turbo will be able to show more contrast.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Here's a JavaScript implementation of the lookup table and polynomial approximation: [https://observablehq.com/@mbostock/turbo](https://observablehq.com/@mbostock/turbo)

<comment><USER11> Thank you from this devops/sysadmin person. I didn't know about observable, it looks really useful!

<comment><USER12> Observable is awesome! Glitch.com is really swell, too, if you've not seen it! (No affiliation, I used it to teach JS / D3 last semester).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm surprised there was no mention of cubehelix [1] which has the advantage of directly mapping to grayscale.

1\. [http://www.mrao.cam.ac.uk/~dag/CUBEHELIX/](http://www.mrao.cam.ac.uk/~dag/CUBEHELIX/)

<comment><USER14> I wosh cube-helix had more saturated colors. It might be good for vizualizing, but it doesn't pop.

<comment><USER13> There are a few parameters you can adjust to get brighter colors. A nice online implementation is at >> [http://www.mrao.cam.ac.uk/~dag/CUBEHELIX/cubetry.html](http://www.mrao.cam.ac.uk/~dag/CUBEHELIX/cubetry.html)

adjusting the hue parameter up to 1.4 will give more saturated colors

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> So grateful that colorblind is a first class citizen in their development. I drive a VW and their proximity sensor uses red on green background, I think.

<comment><USER16> While color vision deficiency was considered, I wouldn't go nearly as far as saying that it was a first class citizen in the development of this colormap, which is unfortunate.

Per my reading of the blog post, they ran some images through a random color vision deficiency simulation website and decided that they looked good enough; while lightness plots are displayed for normal color vision, no such plots are shown for simulated color vision deficiency. Also, best I can tell, the simulator they used is based on a 1988 paper [1] instead of more recent and accurate techniques [2].

For an example of where color vision deficiency was actually properly considered for the development of a colormap, see Cividis [3].

[1] [https://doi.org/10.1109/38.7759](https://doi.org/10.1109/38.7759) [2] [https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2009.113](https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2009.113) [3] [https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0199239](https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0199239)

<comment><USER17> Thanks for pointing this out. I had actually read [2] and I think just assumed that's what 'the most used simulator' would be doing :\ Can you suggest a better alternative? (I can re-implement the paper, but I'd rather just use a known gold standard). Also the source image is there, in case you have a simulator you can run it through and post the results.

<comment><USER16> The method presented in Machado et al. (2009) is implemented in Colorspacious [1]. I'm generally in favor of a more quantitative approach than simply running an image through a simulator and looking at it, although as someone who is colorblind, I'm usually biased toward numbers over colors, since I'm less likely to misinterpret them.

I'm not convinced it's actually possible to create a colorblind-friendly rainbow colormap, particularly one without the shortcomings Jet presents for non-colorblind individuals. For all its faults, I find the banding in Jet to sometimes be a redeeming quality, since it makes it easier for me to match part of an image to the colorbar or other parts of the image. For example, in the image included in the blog post of the patio furniture and tree, I find that Turbo makes the tree appear deceptively close, due to my lack of differentiation in the green-orange part of the colormap; while the scene isn't shown with Jet, I suspect that the banding around yellow would make this misinterpretation less likely.

I may take a stab at analyzing the colormap for colorblind-friendliness, if I have time in the next few weeks. While the analysis in Nuñez et al. (2018) works well for sequential colormaps, I don't think it's the most appropriate for a rainbow colormap. For rainbow colormaps, I think the degree to which colors in non-adjacent parts of the colormap can be confused by colorblind individuals needs to be considered (it's the part of interpreting data presented with rainbow colormaps that causes me the most trouble). I'd have to think more about how to best construct a metric to evaluate this.

[1] [https://colorspacious.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorial.html...](https://colorspacious.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorial.html#simulating- colorblindness)

<comment><USER16> Here's an analysis of the colorblind-friendliness of Turbo and other colormaps: [https://mpetroff.net/2019/08/discernibility-of-rainbow- color...](https://mpetroff.net/2019/08/discernibility-of-rainbow-colormaps/)

<comment><USER17> Thanks for the thorough evaluation and results! I was aware of colorspacious but I (wrongfully) assumed that it would be the same result as the other simulators (why would someone use ancient literature to make a modern tool...) Will definitely use it in the future instead.

I like your idea of measuring "distances to all other colors" as a litmus test for color confusion issues. It would have been great to see the spread/standard deviation along with the average, in order to see which color was particularly problematic, rather than simply 'weak' (like Twilight).

You're right that under this rubric it's probably not possible to create a colorblind-friendly rainbow map. I was aiming for the colors to be distinguishable, but not 'equally different', which is a much higher bar.

I am also not convinced that even CIECAM02-UCS can give a meaningful answer for 'long distances'. Once hues are different, I think psychologically we give that 'difference' much more weight than the shade. For example I would guess most people would consider Red and Yellow more different than Red and an (equally dE different) darker shade of Red. So surely this would make rainbows even more problematic.

At the end of the day, Turbo was basically designed to steer Jet-lovers to a somewhat better place, so it looks like by your metric it does accomplish that. I agree that making it truly colorblind-optimal was not accomplished, and would require significant changes (if it's even possible).

<comment><USER16> Including error bands on the plots unfortunately makes them extremely busy and difficult to interpret. The regions of a colormap that are particularly problematic can be seen as dips in the weighted average (except for linear colormaps, where problematic areas are deviations from the "V" shape).

I agree that CAM02-UCS is not necessarily accurate over "long distances." I'm also not completely convinced that using color vision deficiency simulation to shift colors and then using CAM02-UCS to estimate perceptual distance is all that accurate either, but it's the best approach using currently published models. It's my understanding that modern color appearance models were developed using matching experiments, e.g., asking a subject whether or not two colors are the same; for "long distances," it would probably be better to show two color pairs and ask which pair is more similar. If you're interested in how such appearance models have been developed, I'd recommend [1], which is fairly comprehensive (but also quite long).

By my metric and others, I agree that Turbo is certainly better than Jet. For normal color vision, the metric I developed is fairly flat across the colormap for Turbo, which is close to optimal as far as rainbow colormaps are concerned.

[1] Fairchild, Mark D. Color appearance models. John Wiley & Sons, 2013.

<comment><USER17> Yes I believe that's correct. My intuition is that since these matching experiments are very local, it's perfectly possible to have 'constant' distances integrate into non-linear curves (which are no longer 'the shortest path') or simply have error build up as you take 'finite steps'. Indeed I believe that's what caused the "blue turns purple" problem in CIELAB back in the day, since it was fairly constant locally but had non-straight hue lines.

[http://www.brucelindbloom.com/index.html?UPLab.html](http://www.brucelindbloom.com/index.html?UPLab.html)

CAM02 is certainly much more uniform than LAB (hence OS's using it to print these days) but I think the problem is still fundamentally there (especially once we start talking about 'appearance' given a 'surround' and so forth).

The Fairchild book is indeed a classic and a heavy hitter as you mentioned :) I can't claim to have read it cover to cover.

Another interesting (and somewhat unconventional) book is Jan Koenderink's "Color for the Sciences".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> An interesting development, and a useful contribution to the field.

For those of you still looking for perceptually uniform colour maps, including rainbows, check out the work of Peter Kovesi [1].

Personally, I'm still on the lookout for the 'perfect' colourmap that allows me to plot line graphs with a moderate number of curves (up to, say, nine) such that they are all distinct (i.e., nicely 'spaced' in colour) but have identical lightness -- which I'm assuming is the same thing as greyscale equivalent -- so as not to emphasize any one curve over another. Of course, the curves would then be indistinguishable when printed out in greyscale, but that's not important to me.

A colleague of mine directed me to the work of Maureen Stone [2], but I get the feeling that those colours are not perceptually identical (not that I've checked...).

[1] [https://peterkovesi.com/projects/colourmaps/](https://peterkovesi.com/projects/colourmaps/) [2] [http://ksrowell.com/blog-visualizing- data/2012/02/02/optimal...](http://ksrowell.com/blog-visualizing- data/2012/02/02/optimal-colors-for-graphs/)

</comment><comment><USER19> In case the authors read HN:

 _In the case of Achromatopsia, the low and high ends are ambiguous. Since the condition affects 1 in 30,000 individuals (or 0.00003%), Turbo should be usable by 99.997% of the population._

1 in 30,000 is 0.003%, not 0.00003%.

<comment><USER20> Funny because they still got the 99.997% right

<comment><USER3> Yeah, because 0.003% is indeed 0.00003, they just put a % sign and forgot to fix the actual number.

<comment><USER20> Mystery solved

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> For video monitors displaying depth images, another obvious thing to explore is time.

Eg:

sending pulses of highlighted cross-sections backwards at constant speed

Or "tilting" depth effect, like iPhones lock screen, but automated circular tilting.

</comment><comment><USER22> Their colormap is very similar to the Sinebow [1] from 2011

[1] [https://basecase.org/env/on-rainbows](https://basecase.org/env/on- rainbows)

<comment><USER17> Sinebow is really nice and smooth, but I'd say there is a bit too much green, and the green that's there is way more saturated than the rest of the colors (perhaps save magenta). The yellow is very sad and desaturated looking. The 0.5 value is also a drab cyan, making it hard to identify. I purposefully didn't include magenta into Turbo, so it could be used as a 'marking' color. Sinebow is also cyclic, which we purposefully didn't want (so that you could tell max from min), but for a color wheel style application this is a plus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The part which describes the development of Turbo is really cool. It shows off the value of having an interactive development setup that allows for fast and intuitive iteration.

As a Googler I'm surprised to see such an interface internally. Google systems have notoriously slow compile and test speeds for simple things (because the systems are optimized for very large projects). I think the difference between 500ms compilation and 10ms compilation is actually enormous.

<comment><USER17> Indeed, it's a bit 'against the grain', but definitely possible and the advantage is obvious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is very similar to the 'rainbow' colour map already available in many places, including matplotlib [1]. For people who are looking for maps with increased dynamic range, diverging colour maps already exist. There are even ones that are made up of _two_ linear colour maps, such as twilight.

This is some ok work by the folks at google, but screams of re-inventing the wheel 'because we're a silicon valley company and we innovate'.

[1] [https://matplotlib.org/3.1.0/tutorials/colors/colormaps.html](https://matplotlib.org/3.1.0/tutorials/colors/colormaps.html)

<comment><USER25> The entire article _including the very title_ explains that this is an improved version of Rainbow, of which they are very well aware and cite very clearly, and tweak for well explained reasons.

<comment><USER24> Sorry, my comment was unclear. They are comparing against jet, which is a colourmap that uses all the colours of the rainbow. They are not using the colourmap _called_ `rainbow`, to compare against.

<comment><USER25> You are right and I was wrong. The 'rainbow' map at the matplotlib link happens to be plotted next to 'jet' and the lack of perceptual banding in comparison is clear. Looks like the Google author came up with a similar idea.

Whoever gave the name 'rainbow' to their rainbow colormap?! It's like naming a dog 'dog'.

<comment><USER24> Yeah, it's not the best name. There is also the 'Spectral' colour map that is plotted in a different section, which imo is much better suited as being a diverging colour map as yellow looks more 'neutral' than bright green.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> They should contribute it to matplotlib

</comment><comment><USER27> Off-topic, but I like how the page is almost completely empty when tracking protection is enabled in Firefox for iOS.

Seriously, Google, really?

<comment><USER28> You may want to open a Webcompat issue about that, since it'll get the attention of both Firefox and Google once it's triaged.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> turbo is nice, but visualizing depth maps using a 1D color palette is always a bad idea. Much better to add some simple shading (lambertian or ambient occlusion). Then you can still use the color palette to provide absolute depth cues, but the shading is much easier to interpret visually.

</comment><comment><USER30> Imagine if you have a non-linear function mapping to the height of the bars in a bar graph. For some input values, say, [0,25,50,75,100] we have a non-linear height function that calculates the heights of the bars, say [0px, 23px, 60px, 65px, 120px] - would you be ok with such a bar graph?

That's what Turbo or Jet or any of the perceptually non-linear colormaps are doing but on a chromatic scale. You are lying to your audience. It is beyond me that all this hoo haa about aesthetics, "highlighting differences" and other qualitative bullshit takes precedence over objective truthful representation of data. Sigh.

Turbo/Jet also doesn't care about colorblindness which Viridis, Inferno, Magma and Plasma does as part of the Matplotlib 2.0 spec.

<comment><USER31> I believe that I saw at the end of the article, some simulations of different colour blindness with Turbo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> The problem with the rainbow color map is having green in the middle; green is the highest contrast color and stands out from red and blue and so gives the impression of being "brighter", undermining the red-green-blue ordering.

Personally I _much_ prefer colormaps that contain any two primaries out of the three red/green/blue, but not all three. Chroma can be included (so mixing white and black). All the non-rainbow colormap pictures in the article can be described this way, and to my eyes the perceptual value is superior than all the rainbow-map images.

I found it a little strange that the blog post made a deal of calling out Jet for not being perceptually linear, and then announced that Turbo is not perceptually linear, just a bit smoother.

</comment><comment><USER33> For a lot of practical applciations, this seems a great option. I get the arguments for viridis/inferno etc, but the fact that on a very light or dark background, you are always losing the ability to see one end of the spectrum is annoying. I do think though, that this is an area where you really ought to be doing usability testing with real humans to measure the impact of one choice over the other (while respecting accessibility of course).

</comment><comment> d--b D3 has a scheme like this too:

[https://observablehq.com/@d3/color- schemes](https://observablehq.com/@d3/color-schemes)

<comment><USER34> "like this"? Which one of the D3 color schemes is perceptually uniform and has an hue range which is as wide as Turbos?

<comment><USER35> [https://observablehq.com/@mbostock/turbo](https://observablehq.com/@mbostock/turbo)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Subjectively, I went with plasma over other choices for my thesis (which I successfully defended yesterday!). I have used jet for many years for electrical test and measurement reports. For scientific writing, I felt there was a lot of value in colormaps that don't rely on chroma. I wish there was a jet-like colormap that used the entire color spectrum, but also was constantly increasing in brightness.

</comment><comment><USER37> You want colors to be meaningful, diverse, and stable. You also want the color map to scale gracefully (both in semantics as well as in code). Hash some meaningful value (e.g. class) to hue in HSV, and then you have your color. For distance, bucket by meter and lerp the hash-HSVs of the nearest bucket edges. Hash to color is the most flexible colormap.

</comment><comment><USER38> Ha - I did exactly this a decade ago in my Hypnocube products to avoid the tight bands on HSL color space. When animating colors along a hue cycle, the cyan and yellow would go by too fast. So I implemented piece-wise splines through the hue component, and I tune the parameter for each LED type we use to make them perceptually pleasing.

Nothing new under the sun and all...

</comment><comment><USER39> NASA have a cool 6 part series on how to use colour for visualisations here: [https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/blogs/elegantfigures/2013/...](https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/blogs/elegantfigures/2013/08/05/subtleties- of-color-part-1-of-6/)

</comment><comment><USER30> > Today we are happy to introduce Turbo, a new colormap that has the desirable > properties of Jet while also addressing some of its shortcomings, such as > false detail, banding and color blindness ambiguity.

What are the desirable properties of Jet? Why not use Viridis or Magma or any of the recent linear colormaps from matplotlib 2.0? These shortcomings were the exact reason why Viridis was created as exemplified in this brilliant talk: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAoljeRJ3lU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAoljeRJ3lU)

I don't understand the point of Turbo.

> Turbo mimics the lightness profile of Jet, going from low to high back down > to low, without banding. As such, its lightness slope is generally double > that of Viridis, allowing subtle changes to be more easily seen. This is a > valuable feature, since it greatly enhances detail when color can be used to > disambiguate the low and high ends.

Why would anyone want low-to-high-to-low colormap?

> Viridis is a linear color map that is generally recommended when false color > is needed because it is pleasant to the eye and it fixes most issues with > Jet. Inferno has the same linear properties of Viridis, but is higher > contrast, making it better for picking out detail. However, some feel that > it can be harsh on the eyes. While this isn't a concern for publishing, it > does affect people's choice when they must spend extended periods examining > visualizations.

Personal taste vs scientific accuracy - I will take the latter unless we are doing plots for marketing materials. In my view this is not substantiated reason for going off and creating a more pleasant version of Jet; Turbo is still _inaccurate_ and _deceiving_.

This is a deplorable attempt at creating a new colormap where the problem statement isn't clear in the first place.

<comment><USER9> It's too bad you were down-voted. Your skepticism is pretty reasonable.

> _What are the desirable properties of Jet?_

Pretty much the only desirable property is that it used to be the Matlab default, and therefore has been used frequently and people are familiar with it.

Taking it as a starting point for a design is quite a poor choice. The design process here is pretty much just "we took jet and applied some blur to the apparent lightness"; this is not a principled or careful method, in my opinion.

One good use for this new color map might be: "My ignorant boss keeps insisting on using the jet color map even though it is terrible. I can drop this one in and he won't notice the difference but it will be somewhat better, even if still problematical in many ways."

> _Why would anyone want low-to-high-to-low colormap?_

This is sometimes called a "diverging" color map, and can be useful when e.g. you want to make choropleth map highlighting percentage of voters for Party A vs. Party B. You can make a 1/2:1/2 split of voters light and neutrally colored, and make the color get darker but with two different hues as the proportion gets more lopsided in favor of one party or the other.

But the lightness map on each side should still be more or less linear, and the obvious visual artifact created for the balance point has some concrete meaning.

Cf. [https://www.kennethmoreland.com/color- maps/](https://www.kennethmoreland.com/color-maps/) [https://www.kennethmoreland.com/color- advice/](https://www.kennethmoreland.com/color-advice/)

<comment> yoz-y > It's too bad you were down-voted. Your skepticism is pretty reasonable.

It would be if all of the concerns were not actually addressed in the article. Nobody is taking inferno away from you, different scales are useful for different usages. Having an additional color dimension makes it easier to see gradients at a glance.

<comment><USER30> It's not about whether someone is taking away Inferno or Viridis. It's about what is effectively lying to your audience and what is accurate perceptually linear representation of the data - the latter triumphs over any aesthetic considerations. There are 4 different color maps from matplotlib 2.0 - <USER2> could use a different one if you don't like the aesthetics.

If this article had come up with an original improvement to Viridis, I'd be praising it.

Also, Turbo doesn't give a fuck about colorblind considerations whereas Inferno and Viridis does.

<comment> yoz-y > lying to your audience

I am pretty sure the scale should be always put somewhere next to the heat map so the audience can make their own judgement. A rainbow colormap gives you more depth than a single or dual hue one, I think that both have their merit depending on the data to visualize.

> Also, Turbo doesn't give a fuck about colorblind considerations whereas > Inferno and Viridis does.

There is a whole section of the article dedicated to that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Do I spy Dear Imgui used for one of the colormap control panels? Love using this for whipping together quick interfaces.

[https://github.com/ocornut/imgui](https://github.com/ocornut/imgui)

<comment><USER41> It looks like Processing to me

<comment><USER42> It's clearly dear imgui on those screenshots.

<comment><USER17> Dear ImGui indeed <3

<comment><USER43> Hi, I just hope you read this (as I'm posting after 12 days). But since this is not apparent from the Blog, what kind of license is applicable on this new 'Turbo' colormap? Can we use it in a professional application? Thanks!

<comment><USER17> Just happened to not close the tab yet :) The licence is Apache-2.0, which is permissive, similar to MIT.

<comment><USER43> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> From the blog post you have the impression the author was only allowed access to wikipedia.

</comment><comment><USER45> I used to program the same type of colormap. It is a question of correct gamma correction.

<comment><USER46> Gamma correction and monitor settings usually go criminally unnoticed. I had problems just working with designers, I can't imagine what silent mistakes it produces in color-critical applications, like medical imaging. Some monitors are a finger brush away from auto-adjusting and messing up carefully selected settings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Does someone smarter than myself see a downside of using Turbo for heatmap visualizations?

<comment><USER48> Some time ago I looked into this topic, and in my opinion the blog post misses two points: (1) Conversion to gray scale won't be good because the scale is not linear, which is important for printing, and (2) In Jet (and also, Turbo), high and low values of a measurement don't map well to colors. This is well described in the paper introducing cividis [1] (check out [2] for code).

[1]: [https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1712/1712.01662.pdf](https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1712/1712.01662.pdf) [2]: [https://github.com/marcosci/cividis](https://github.com/marcosci/cividis)

<comment><USER49> > the blog post misses two points: (1) Conversion to gray scale won't be good > [...] important for printing

Covered: "When rendered in grayscale, the coloration will be ambiguous, since some of the lower values will look identical to higher values. Consequently, Turbo is inappropriate for grayscale printing and for people with the rare case of achromatopsia."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Wouldn't a vector through CIELAB color space work too?

<comment><USER34> It's not defined as a vector through a perceptually uniform color space. They developed it manually, by tweaking parameters of a curve in sRGB until it looked good.

But if you plot it in CIELAB or CIECAM02-UCS, it's likely not a straight vector but rather a curved path. A vector would only interpolate between ~two hues (like Vidris, Inferno), whereas Turbo covers multiple hues. Have a look at the lightness profile plots in the post, it should give you a rough idea about how the vector must look in color spaces such as CIELAB.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Does this actually matter much?

I mean, we're just talking about a colour scale here right?

This sounds about as important as a debate over Helvetica Vs Times New Roman for research papers...

<comment><USER52> _Does this actually matter much?_

There are studies where doctors got to view MRI data under different color maps when screening for cancer. Using the 'right' map (which was different from their preferred choice) improved both the speed and accuracy of the diagnosis.

Basically changing color maps can radically change how you interpret the data being displayed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Mind blown, I now understand that I cannot start fathom all of the other vision systems, probably just on the property that are so alien to me that I can't even not understand them.

We could overlay very subtle queues in AR that effectively give the viewer super powers. Constructing the genie for the queues is the hard part.</comment>


DiscoRunner BASIC Interpreter and Applesoft BASIC Emulator - <AUTHOR> http://discorunner.com/download/ <comment><USER2> Very neat project - Looks like a fun, nostalgic diversion for me. Also, big ups for the Computer Chronicles footage in your video, really takes me back.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks =)</comment></comment>


Surgeon General: Radioactivity causes over 90% of smoking related lung cancer - <AUTHOR> http://www.erowid.org/plants/cannabis/cannabis_health2.shtml

<comment><USER2> I read about the radioactivity somewhere earlier but could not relate it. This gives a better insight. However, what about the other countries. Not everyone smokes American cigarettes.

</comment><comment><USER3> There is a list of sources about 3/4 of the way down.</comment>


Ask HN: What flight search tool do you use? - <AUTHOR> I fly enough to be inconvenienced by bad flight search tools, but not (yet) enough to write my own search veneer.<p>What flight search tools do you use? <comment><USER2> I am near a small airport which has a limited number of carriers, so frequently I use the carrier search sites.

For instance if I am going to North Carolina, American will send me through Philadelphia, but Delta will send me through Detroit. Delta will have to offer me a large discount to go that far out of my way.</comment>